The Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes Of All Time.

Didja hear me and my pal Earl today on Shokus Internet Radio? Never mind us. Did you hear Doug Young, our super-secret surprise guest? Doug was, of course, one of the mainstays of Hanna-Barbera cartoon voicing in the late fifties and early sixties, and his performance as Doggie Daddy, beloved pa of Augie Doggie, is still one of my all-time favorite bits of animation voice acting. He was doing a voice not unlike Jimmie Durante but, as my co-guest Earl Kress remarked today on the show, it was a Durante with great warmth and charm. Those H-B cartoons didn't have a lot going for them in the animation department so the joys, if any, had to come primarily from the scripts and voice work. The scripts were by the great Michael Maltese and with Daws Butler as Augie and Doug as Augie's Dear Old Dad, the material couldn't have been in better hands.

Doug did other voices for H-B, including that of Hokey Wolf's sidekick, Dingaling. We chatted with him around the top of the second hour of Stu's Show…and that show reruns once a day for the next week on Shokus Internet Radio. We also discussed why some shows are or are not available on DVD, working with Jay Ward, the history of Total Television and Filmation…and not that many other topics. The two hours raced by like Speedy Gonzales after a bad burrito.

Want to hear the replay? Go to the schedule here, adjust it to correspond to your time zone and then look for the episode of Stu's Show with us. Most of the next seven days, it repeats from 4 PM to 6 PM Pacific Time. I'm sorry there's no way to just go there and download it but that's not how Internet Radio works. To hear us, you have to log in to Shokus Internet Radio at the proper time, which you can do on this page.

We had a good time chatting with our host Stuart Shotak and with our phone-in surprise guest, Doug Young. It was also nice to hear from several of you who called in during the program. There's actually a lot of fun stuff on Shokus Internet Radio so you might want to give a listen even when I'm not on. Next week, for instance, Stu is welcoming game show host Jack Narz to the program. I'll be listening to that one.

This is your final notice. Evanier and Kress. Stu's Show. Shokus Internet Radio. Today from 4 PM to 6 PM West Coast Time. Answering questions. Taking your calls. Talking all about cartoons. With a special surprise guest from the world of cartoon voicing. Listen by going to this site and selecting the Internet browser of your choice.

I'm not telling you people again.

Here's one of those commercials I saw so often as a kid that I could sing the tune in my sleep. It's for the Milton Bradley game, Mystery Date. I never played it — it was a "girl" game, obviously — but I gather it was some sort of card game where the young ladies would try to match up points and if you won, you "won" a theoretical blind date with a guy whose photo would then be revealed. He might be a dreamboat or he might be the slob and if you got a night on the town with the latter, the other players could then mock you and be glad it wasn't them. Someplace in there was a terrible, cautionary lesson for young women about something.

I think it's also amusing that the photo of the horrible date is not of a guy who's obese and wild-eyed and holding a live chicken. It's a picture of the same kind of handsome male model, only not dressed well. It's like in the romance comics where you had these stories of the two young ladies: One is viewed as gorgeous and the guys are mud-wrestling to see who'll get to ask her out. The other is so homely that she couldn't get a date if she owned the company that made ketchup. And the two women, of course, look pretty much the same except that the unattractive one is wearing glasses.

Apparently, whatever company now owns Milton Bradley (is it Hasbro?) has recently tried selling an updated version of this game that includes a toy cellphone with recorded calls from the Mystery Dates. I think it oughta come with a little cardboard Chris Hansen who surprises the Mystery Date on Dateline NBC and gets him arrested as a sexual predator.

Here's that commercial…

This article asks the eternal question, "When will the Disney people agree to put Song of the South out on DVD?" What I keep hearing from within that curious organization is that everyone who has to agree has agreed that it will cause little or no problem to put out that fine film but that they keep kicking it down the road a little farther. It's one thing to decide to do something and another to actually commit to a date and do it.

One does get the feeling that the idea is to float a few pieces in the press like this one to gauge any possible negative reaction. In the past, I'm told, there really hasn't been any. It gets into the media that Disney may soon release Song of the South and no one complains or speaks of dressing up like Tar Babies and picketing The Magic Kingdom or anything. If there are none to this latest round of rumors, they'll probably start talking seriously about a release schedule. And once they have one, they'll start talking about actually following through on it. And once they decide to actually follow through on it, they'll schedule a whole bunch of meetings to decide what kind of special treatment will be necessary. And at some point — and maybe sooner than all this suggests — they'll actually do it…and no one will be upset except for someone, somewhere who'll see it as a good opportunity to get a lot of personal publicity.

Thanks to Ray Arthur for calling my attention to this news item, and to others for which I haven't thanked him.

I found this via the fine website of radio kingpin Paul Harris. It's a list someone compiled of performers who've been "banned" from appearing on Saturday Night Live ever again.

I put the word "banned" in quotes because I don't think that's the right word when what's really at work here is that Lorne Michaels says, "Let's not have that person on again." He probably says that — or would, if asked about certain folks — about a lot of performers because they didn't particularly impress him as outstanding or (more often) because their careers have simply cooled. Most guest hosts and musical guests don't do the show more than once. I mean, Louise Lasser is on the list because the episode she hosted was famously a disaster due to some personal problems she was having that week. But even if she'd been ultra-professional and the show had come out fine, she probably would never have been on the show again. For that matter, when was the last time you saw Louise Lasser on anything?

There have been plenty of performers who were great on SNL who stand as much chance of being on again as does Ms. Lasser. They aren't asking George Carlin, Robert Klein or Candace Bergen to host again, either…and won't unless those people suddenly become somewhat younger and the stars of a current hit movie.

More correctly, this is a list of known cases where there was some friction or perceived misbehavior that supersedes any assessment of the performer's future worth as a contributor to the entertainment content of the program. Also notable are the cases where a segment of a show is being withheld from reruns because of what someone did. It's an interesting list but it should be called something like "Performers Who Pissed Off Lorne Michaels."

I'm more than a wee bit interested in the soon-to-be-released Richard Gere movie, The Hoax, which is the story of Clifford Irving and his infamous bogus Howard Hughes autobiography. Just before he went to prison for the crime, Irving wrote a book which purported to be the true account of his crime. Since his crime was passing off a fake book as legit, a lot of people were skeptical that the "true account" was true. If you read it, it sure felt honest…self-serving in many ways perhaps, but honest. Other sources suggested Irving's confession wasn't much more accurate than his phony book. As an outside observer weighing it all, I tended to think Irving was probably closer to candid than his detractors wanted to admit…which isn't to say he didn't spin at every possible opportunity to minimize his less admirable actions.

I read almost everything I could find about Irving and Hughes, individually and collectively, and for a time tried to convince a couple of motion picture producers to option the Irving confession book and pay me to adapt it into a screenplay. Before the film Melvin and Howard came out, all I heard was "Hughes is dead…no one's interested in him." After that movie came out and did rather well, what I heard was, "Melvin and Howard exhausted the market for a film about Hughes." As we all know, once someone puts out a successful film, no one in Hollywood would ever think of making something in the same vein.

Advance reports on the Gere movie (like this one) make it sound like great liberties have been taken with the truth. If that's so, I'm curious as to why…because the true story — or at least the version Irving told in his tell-all — struck me as eminently filmable without embellishment or alteration. Just looking at the plot points that are beyond dispute, you have a pretty fascinating tale that's all the more compelling because you sit there realizing, "This actually happened! And this and this!" Over on Irving's website, he's posted this statement which basically says he hasn't seen the film but already doubts its accuracy. People may suspect this dispute is all a way to gin up interest in the film but I doubt it. For one thing, I think this is the kind of story that's only of interest if you believe it hasn't been exaggerated or faked in any way. It would be like knowing a TV magic show contained camera trickery.

This might be a good spot to stop and embed the trailer for the movie. It's three minutes…

You can find out a little more about it at the website for the film. Also, elsewhere on Clifford Irving's site, you can download and read for free, a few chapters from the bogus Autobiography of Howard Hughes. You can also download on the honor system (on your honor to send him money) a copy of the whole book.

Irving notes that the hardcover edition of The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, which came out in 1999, is now rare and sells through some dealers for $160. I bought it when it first came out for about a tenth of that and frankly didn't find it as interesting as his account of how he and co-conspirator Richard Suskind flim-flammed the publisher with it. I also found myself wondering how so many people had believed it was real…but then again, I knew it was a fraud before I read it. I'd like to think I wouldn't have been fooled but of course, that's easy to say.

The "confession" book was originally called What Really Happened and was later reissued (with a few deletions) as The Hoax. It's now out again in a new paperback edition with a photo cover of Richard Gere from the movie. You can order it from Amazon here. I don't guarantee its veracity but it's a pretty easy, engrossing read. I hope the movie's that enjoyable.

Need a job? You might be able to get one here if you're blue enough.

This is to remind you once more that tomorrow, my pal Earl Kress and I will be back on Stu's Show, the keystone program on Shokus Internet Radio, which is part of the vast Live365 network. We'll be blabbing about TV animation for two hours, beginning at 4 PM Pacific Time. The show is live and you can call in and ask questions or you can call in and answer host Stuart Shostak's trivia questions. Or you can just listen to us yak.

But now here's the big announcement! We'll have a special, surprise guest on the program. Who is it? Earl and I are keeping it a secret and not just from you. We haven't even told Stu yet who it is…and we won't until after we're on the air. He loves game shows. We're going to make him guess who it is.

Our surprise guest, who'll be joining us via phone for a little while, is a great cartoon voice performer. Way back in the late fifties and on into the early sixties, this person did voices on a number of classic cartoon shows that you've probably heard. In fact, one of my all-time favorite cartoon characters was voiced by this person. What's more, this is a voice performer who to my knowledge has never been interviewed about those days in any public forum, so this will be a "first."

You can listen to the show tomorrow afternoon by going to this website and selecting an audio browser. (Note: If you log in just before the show starts at 4PM Pacific, there's a slight chance that you'll get bumped off when the show starts. If that happens, just log right back in and it shouldn't happen again. There's some sort of glitch in the Live365 software that occasionally does that when a station switches from pre-recorded programming to live.)

Hope you'll tune in. If you love old TV cartoons, you'll very much enjoy "meeting" our surprise guest star.

This Thursday evening — and again, early next Monday morning — Turner Classic Movies is running They Shoot Horses, Don't They? This was the 1969 feature directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin and Gig Young in a downer tale about old time marathon dances. Depressing? No more than watching small, helpless animals die. But the film was oddly entertaining in its way.

I saw it twice when it first came out, both times at the Picwood Theater in West Los Angeles. The first viewing was with a bunch of guys I knew, one of whom I discovered that afternoon had a dread fear of the cinema device known as the Flash Forward. He believed that films should be structured in a linear, chronological manner with one event after another. He could occasionally tolerate a flashback because, after all, in real life we sometimes talk about things that occurred in the past. But we do not have a clear glimpse of the future and this fellow hated it when a movie did.

They Shoot Horses contains a couple of Flash Forwards. When the first one came on the screen, we all felt our friend freeze and shudder. Softly, we could all hear him mutter, "Oh, dear God…no. Not Flash Forwards!" The second time, he rocked in his seat as if slammed in the face and after that, he sat there whimpering until the next one. When the third Flash Forward occurred, that was all he could take. He jumped to his feet and screamed out, "No, no! Not Flash Forwards! NOT FLASH FORWARDS!!!" And he began squeezing past everyone's feet, trying to get to the aisle with the same urgency as if the theater was ablaze. Everyone told him to shut the hell up but there was no stopping the guy. In fact, he couldn't understand how the rest of us were sitting there so peacefully, pretending to be enjoying a movie that contained the unspeakable horror of Flash Forwards.

When he reached the aisle, he sprinted up and out of the theater. Being true friends, we decided to just forget about him and enjoy the film, which we did. After it was over, we found him sitting in the lobby with half a box of Milk Duds, still shivering and murmuring to himself, "Flash Forwards…brrr…"

A few days later, walking in Westwood, I ran into a young lady I'd known casually in high school and lusted after from afar. This was early 1970, as I recall…seven months or so after we'd both graduated and gone our separate ways. We got to talking and as I attempted to angle the conversation around to the topic of perhaps dating, she noticed a bus go by with an ad on it for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Unknowingly making my job easy, she said, "You know, I really want to see that movie. Have you seen it?" I said no — not the biggest lie a male ever told a female, but a lie nonetheless. When I suggested we view it together the following Saturday evening, she agreed and even offered to drive since I didn't. (I started to ask her, "You aren't bothered by Flash Forwards, are you?" but didn't just in case she was and that would cause her to cancel.)

As dates went it was among the worst of my life, starting with the moment she picked me up and I asked her how she was feeling. She began a non-stop monologue about how she hated her mother, loathed her father, wanted to see her brothers and sisters all killed in a fiery car crash, thought her boss at work should be in prison, was deep in debt, hadn't slept in weeks, thought all men were evil and was experiencing menstrual problems that were agonizing to her and everyone around her. This went on all the way to dinner, throughout the meal and up until the moment the movie began. The graphic descriptions of her cramps and bleeding were expertly timed to coincide with the arrival of our entrees at the restaurant. I didn't eat a lot.

Finally, we made it to the Picwood and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? The people exiting from the previous showing looked depressed because, well, the film just had that effect on the normal person. Having listened to Sunshine Sally for the previous hour and a half, I was thoroughly dejected on the way in and I recall thinking, "Boy, I'm really going to be cheery by the time this is over." But an odd thing happened when the movie started. My lady friend loved it. The cynicism and pessimism didn't bother her one bit…and neither did the Flash Forwards. She just sat there, enjoying the hell out of the movie. The more miserable the people were on the screen, the more she liked it. In the first scene where one of the main characters dies (I won't tell you which one in case you haven't seen it), she had a big grin on her face and she emitted a small but audible cheer. The worse things got for the people on the screen, the more she liked it.

I was so amazed at my date's reaction that I hardly watched the film at all. At the end, she was happier than when she'd gone in and I had to ask her why. The answer was along the lines of, "It cheers me up to see people whose lives are so much worse off than mine." She told me that sometimes, she liked to page through the newspaper, savoring all the stories about people who'd died in horrible accidents. I guess I can understand that…but not really. This was not exactly schadenfreude. It was some sort of even more perverse enjoyment of the misery of others.

After that, she drove me home, parking a few doors away so, I guess, we could engage in a bit of physical contact without the chance that my parents would look out the window and see us. I think that's what she had in mind but for the only time in my adolescent life, I wasn't interested in any of that. I didn't know if she'd have a bad time if she liked it or a good time if she didn't. Matter of fact, I felt like I needed to end that date a.s.a.p. and did. There was no second date.

I haven't seen They Shoot Horses, Don't They? since then. I've set my TiVo and I'm going to watch it in the next week or so, but first I'm going to try to get myself in the same frame of mind as that lady. She obviously enjoyed it a lot more than I did. You will too if you watch it from her point of view. Especially if you don't mind Flash Forwards.

This is the finale from the revival of A Chorus Line currently playing on Broadway.

It seems like a pretty good performance of the number but I dunno…I'm planning my next New York trip at the moment and deciding what I want to see. Somehow, A Chorus Line ain't making my list. I liked the show the first time I saw it…and the second time and the third time. Around the fifth, it started to feel like a parody of itself…and of course, the movie version ruined it further. So I can't summon up the interest just now, though I will admit this is a pretty snazzy version of the closing song…

Various comic book news sites (Newsarama, for example) are reporting that artist Marshall Rogers has passed away — at the age of 57 from as-yet unknown causes. I have nothing to add to what is being posted elsewhere. Condolences to his friends and family.

I've been telling you people about the Monster Crows that I've been seeing in my area lately. Some of those birds must be three or four hundred pounds and every so often, I see them cracking open a Mazda the same way normal-sized birds break into peanuts. Here, thanks to my pal Dana Gabbard, is an article about the crows. It doesn't mention anything about how huge they're getting but I understand that's because no one wants to alarm the population.

The L.A. Times has a report on last Saturday's memorial service for Richard Jeni. I almost attended this but I'm on a deadline and had to choose between this one or the Sunday memorial for Ron Carey.

At the Carey memorial, a couple of folks were talking about the Jeni memorial, complaining that at least one speaker treated the event like an Open Mike audition of his stand-up act. That is (sadly) a not-uncommon occurrence at show biz memorial services. There always seems to be at least one person at the lectern who forgets about the deceased and talks at length about themselves. As you might expect, it's never the Biggies who do this. It's the folks for whom it's a rare treat to be in front of an audience…especially an audience that contains someone who might give them a big career break. You wish someone would tell them that no one has ever been "discovered" at a funeral.

Someone else was saying the true tragedy of Richard Jeni is that death-by-depression is always curable. I don't think that's so, even with properly administered medication. I'm thinking now of a couple of acquaintances who took their own lives…but those lives were in such disrepair that being depressed was perfectly understandable and maybe even not the least of their problems. The sad, stunning thing about Jeni is that apparently his life wasn't in bad shape. One reader of this site wrote me to suggest that Jeni had cause for gloom; that he wasn't as successful as a Leno or Letterman or Seinfeld and that most of his upcoming bookings were at grindhouse comedy clubs in hick towns. I don't think that's a true picture…and even it was, the man had still attained a stature that most comedians would envy. Based on the success of his recent cable specials, he certainly had offers and opportunities for even better things.

Still, you never know quite what others want out of their lives. I certainly know people who've set impossible goals for themselves, almost to the extent of ensuring their own inability to reach them. Was Jeni that kind of guy? I have no idea and the folks who knew him well don't seem to, either. I suspect that's why a lot of them went to that memorial service…to see if they could get a clue or two towards solving that riddle.

At the end of every episode of the old game show, What's My Line?, there was the famous Mystery Guest segment for which the panel would don blindfolds and attempt to guess the identity of some celebrity. Over the years, hundreds of stars from the world of show business and sports signed in, then attempted to disguise their famous voices while answering the panelists' questions.

The big achievement, of course, was that the show managed to get someone every week. It was done live for most of its existence so it was not possible to delay if someone didn't show or showed up late or even showed up drunk. The producers were quite prepared for this to happen and they had two emergency plans if they were suddenly caught without a Mystery Guest at the crucial moment. One was for the show's Executive Producers, Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, to go on as Mystery Guests. The other was for the show's host, John Daly, to pretend to be a Mystery Guest.

In the show's eighteen year history, they came close a number of times to using the first of these fallback plans. At least twice, Goodson and Todman were backstage, waiting to "enter and sign in, please" when the actual Mystery Guest made a last second appearance. (Goodson and Todman did go on as Mystery Guests a couple of times for anniversary episodes but these were planned, not because someone hadn't shown up.) The idea of Daly as Mystery Guest occurred to a lot of people over the years and it was constantly suggested to the program staff. They agreed it would be funny but wanted to save it for the night when it might be needed.

When it came time to select a Mystery Guest for the final broadcast on September 3, 1967, someone realized there was no point in saving the idea for the future. The show had no future. It was also, obviously, appropriate for the last show. So Daly pretended to be a Mystery Guest, attempting to stump a panel that consisted of Martin Gabel, Arlene Francis, Steve Allen and Bennett Cerf. Let's see how he did…