Another great act of the past! It's Johnny Puleo and the Harmonica Rascals. I used to see these guys on all the variety shows of the fifties and I never quite understood what they were doing…but the music was pleasant enough and the act was silly, so that was reason enough to watch.

The history, as I understand it, is that there was an act called Borrah Minevitch and His Harmonica Rascals, and that Puleo was one of the many musicians auditioned and hired over the years by Mr. Minevitch. In the late forties when Minevitch retired, he handed the act over to the diminutive Puleo. At some point, there was a trademark dispute over the name and the group became The Harmonica Gang. Ed Sullivan especially liked them and was known to call them in at the last moment if he thought the show that week needed their kind of energy.

Puleo retired in the late sixties and the group disbanded. He made a brief cameo appearance in an episode of SCTV in 1982, a year before he passed away. Here he is with his troupe on a Milton Berle telecast of the early fifties…

You may recall that we groused about how, after releasing all the seasons of M*A*S*H as individual DVD sets, the folks at Fox Home Video were creating a maddening situation for devout fans of that series. Concurrent with the last release, they also issued the Martinis and Medicine Collection, which included all eleven seasons plus three discs worth of bonus material. So if you'd already shelled out serious cash for the first ten seasons — and if as a die-hard lover of M*A*S*H, you wanted everything — you had to buy a set that mostly included copies of shows you'd already purchased…and at a higher per-disc price. This is all part of the "Make You Buy It Twice" mindset that pervades too much marketing of DVDs these days…and also comic books, non-comic books and other types of entertainment that have loyal followings.

We were ticked off about that. Now we see that Fox is putting out the bonus materials as a standalone set so you can get it without buying the whole $150+ complete set.

So, do we think this is a step in the right direction? Well, it would be if they'd announced it before some people shelled out money for the fancy set. Somewhere out there, there are M*A*S*H fans who purchased seasons 1-10 at the individual price and then, to get the extra stuff, bought the Martinis and Medicine set…and now they're finding out they didn't have to buy the first ten seasons a second time to get the bonus material. I didn't do that but if I had, I'd be pretty angry about it.

Robert Spina writes…

As a longtime reader of your work, I demand…demand, I say…that you amend the last sentence of your 8:32 PM blog posting to include the words: "a Gabor sister." The entire piece is meaningless without them.

Okay, you've intimidated me sufficiently. I'll change it.

Have you watched the cable/tabloid news shows in the last day or so? They're all covering the Anna Nicole Smith story but, more than ever before with an Enquirer-type event of this sort, they all look real embarrassed about it. Larry King last night acted like he was doing a show about it at gunpoint. You can always tell when King is really uninterested in a guest or subject because most of what he asks will end with, "What do you make of this?" That's another way of saying, "I don't care enough about this to formulate an actual question so you figure out what to say about it."

Adding to the problem, of course, is that everything we know about Anna Nicole Smith and her untimely demise could be effectively summarized in about six minutes, and there don't seem to be a lot of available guests who knew her well. With all those hours to fill, this one's really running on fumes.

My friend Earl Kress just made a good point in a phone conversation. People are likening Anna Nicole to other celebs who died too young — Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn (of course), and a few others. But all those people did things that people liked. Marilyn was in some good movies. Anna Nicole Smith was most famous for marrying a rich old guy and for turning up at public events, drunk or otherwise incoherent.

Still to come: The "Anna Nicole was murdered" scenarios, followed by attempts to link this story up with other tabloid faves. You just know that right now, they're working late in the offices of Star trying to figure out how they can get Anna Nicole and O.J. into the same headline. Or maybe Anna Nicole and Jon Benet or Monica Lewinsky. We're going to be hearing about this until…well, until an even juicier story comes along. This one has a lot of the right elements — money, sex, huge breasts, mysterious parentage, court battles, public drunkeness, a maybe-orphan, a Gabor sister, etc. — so the next one's going to have to be even tawdrier. It's hard to imagine how but I know they won't disappoint us.

Another of the great artists of Archie Comics, Joe Edwards, has left us. Details are a bit sketchy but Mr. Edwards had been in poor health for some time. He died this morning at the age of 85.

Edwards was an amazingly prolific artist. After education at Rome Academy and something called the Hastings Animation School, he began drawing comic books in the late thirties, about the time the medium was first established. He worked at first for the Demby Studios shop, then did funny animals for Dell and Timely. He began working for MLJ (which was later known as Archie Comics) in 1942, initially doing several funny animal strips, including Squoimy the Woim, Cubby the Bear and Bumbie the Bee-tective. All three of these appeared as short features in the first issue of Archie Comics.

He continued to do funny animals for a time for Archie but as more and more of their line became the teen comics, his work gravitated in that direction. In 1947, he created a feature about a precocious youngster named Li'l Jinx who appeared in the company's books, primarily as a back-up feature but occasionally in her own title, well into the seventies. He reportedly drew on his own experiences as a parent when he wrote Li'l Jinx. (Jinx, like Edwards' own son, was born on Halloween.)

Li'l Jinx has sometimes been dismissed as a female rip-off of Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace by folks who are unaware that Edwards' strip predated Ketcham's by four years. On the other hand, Edwards also did another kid strip for Archie called Shrimpy that sure looks like he was instructed to ape Charles Schulz's Peanuts.

Edwards produced thousands of pages for Archie featuring the whole gang — Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, etc. — through at least 1987, usually writing, pencilling and inking the work all by himself. Most were filler gag pages because the editors there had learned that they could always count on Joe to give them something funny in a short format. His work appeared often in Archie's Joke Book, Archie's Madhouse and in pin-up gags sprinkled throughout all the company's titles.

I never met Mr. Edwards but I always enjoyed his work, especially on Li'l Jinx. If anyone reading this has any more information on the man, please let me know so I can direct people towards it.

Clive James writes an appreciation of one of my favorite TV performers, Dick Cavett. It's a shame that it's been so long since television has found a place for Cavett. When you see some of the graceless, cloying hosts on cable these days, you wonder if it's his choice or everyone else's that there's no current Dick Cavett Show.

Mr. Cavett, by the way, is however now writing some sort of blog or column about the language of politics (or maybe it's the politics of language) for The New York Times. But it's in their online "pay" section, to which I no longer subscribe so I haven't seen it yet. Someone let me know if it's any good, which it probably is.

Joe Conason details one of the Bush administration moves that would have Republicans drawing up impeachment resolutions if a Democrat tried it. In fact, even some Republicans aren't going along with this one. It's a new policy, slipped into the renewal of the Patriot Act, that allows the White House to fire any career prosecutor who's investigating, say, a Bush ally and replace him with a political stooge.

Senator Arlen Specter is apparently the guy who slipped it into the bill, and his excuse is that one of his staffers did it without his knowledge. Isn't this just about the lamest thing a representative could say? "I didn't know what was in the legislation I sponsored." If your career gets to the point where you have to hide behind alibis like that, shouldn't you do the honorable thing and leave Congress for a job at a carnival, letting people throw balls at you in a Dunk-the-Ex-Senator tank?

The Conason article in on Salon, which will probably make you watch a commercial if you're not a subscriber. But if you feel like getting angry about the way your government's run today, it's worth it.

Back when Joe Barbera passed away, I posted the following anecdote about him…

One day, Barbera was in a network meeting proposing idea after idea for specials, tossing out jokes and concepts and ideas with machine-gun precision. Finally, as the hour grew late, the network guy said, "Okay, we'll buy two hours," and Barbera quickly left. That's how you sell. When they say yes, you get the hell out before they have time to think it over and take it back. So J.B. got the hell out and an hour or two later, the guys from the network called over to H-B and said, "Uh, this is embarrassing and we are going to honor the commitment — but there were so many ideas flying around that room. Just what was it we agreed to buy?" And of course, the punch line was that Barbera wasn't sure, either.

A reader of this site named Joe Wilson, who I assume is not the one wed to Valerie Plame, wrote to ask if I knew what the two shows were that resulted from that pitch session. I do. They were two live-action super-hero comedy specials that ran on NBC in 1979. They were done while I was working for the studio but I had nothing to do with them except that Mr. B., aware that I knew a little about the comics, occasionally stopped me in the hall to say, "Wait'll you see the costumes." I did glimpse the gent in the Hawkman suit one day as he posed for photos in the parking lot and it was pretty darn impressive, at least in person.

Actually, some of the casting was rather amusing. Howie Morris (under tons of make-up) was an inspired choice to play Dr. Sivana, the arch-nemesis of Captain Marvel…and I thought it was funny that Charlie Callas so closely resembled the Green Lantern villain, Sinestro, but without any make-up. The performance of Frank Gorshin, re-creating his role as The Riddler, affords a very nice example of what actors sometimes call "subtext." In this case, the subtext of what Gorshin did would be something like, "Just give me my check and get me out of this mess." And that's my friend Jeff Altman playing The Weather Wizard and Gary Owens doing the narration.

The first of the two specials had the super-villains running around, trying to kill the super-heroes, and it first aired on January 18. 1979. Here we have ten minutes from that special, which is probably all you need to see…

The second special, which was shot at the same time as the first, aired a week later…on January 25, 1979. It was hosted by Ed McMahon in a "roast" format, not unlike what Dean Martin was then doing. It's at least weirder than the previous entry so that may make it more enjoyable to some, I don't know. This excerpt gives you a little more than seven minutes from that show, but the first two minutes are substantially the same as the above clip…

These shows make the rounds in bootleg videos but pristine file copies probably still exist somewhere in the Time-Warner vaults. If you ever hear that they're putting them out on DVD, you'll know that absolutely everything else in the Time-Warner vaults that could possibly be released on home video is already out and they got desperate for New Product.

I pay most of my bills online and I pay some of my mother's, as well, charging them to her credit card. I always pay them in full and many weeks ago, I paid what was then her most recent phone bill.

Turns out, the phone company computers made a mistake. The bill was for $57.31 but when I logged into her account (which I set up) on their website and clicked "pay in full," it charged $57.23 to her card.

Other bills were subsequently paid at the correct amount but for some reason, they did not reflect the eight cent discrepancy. Then the other day, my mother got one of those lovely paper statements that told her she was horribly delinquent with her phone bill, and if the unpaid balance was not paid in full immediately, someone was going to come to her home in the middle of the night and rip out her phone and she'd never get another one as long as she lived. Or threats to that effect.

This is over eight cents.

Now, I don't believe they'd actually shut down her phone over that. Not over eight cents. Not with a customer who's in her eighties and has paid her phone bill promptly at that address for around half a century. Not when it was their mistake. I clicked "pay in full" and it's not my fault it wasn't the right amount.

But you never know with a phone company. And when she has medical problems, as she sometimes does, not having a working phone can be life-threatening. (I also got her one of those "I've fallen and I can't get up" buttons. It wasn't the brand that advertised with that slogan — I found them to be hideously overpriced compared to their competitors — but it works the same way and it depends on a working telephone connection.) Plus, just getting that notice upset her. So I promptly logged into the website to pay the eight cents.

Problem: The website won't accept a payment for less than a dollar.

Solution: I charged a dollar to her Visa card…and now, instead of her owing them eight cents, they owe her ninety-two. I figured we could even it all out on the next bill.

Immediate Effect: Her e-mailbox (which goes to me) is suddenly full of offers for "pre-approved" credit cards, many of them linked to her phone company. She never got them before but apparently, the fact that she overpaid her phone bill, even by under a buck, has made a big impression on her credit rating or the desirability of having her as a customer or something like that.

Not a big deal. I can add those messages to my Spam filter and never have to deal with them…but I wanted to share this discovery with you. Someone reading this weblog is probably having trouble qualifying for a credit card. If it's you, it's probably because you insist on paying your phone company only what you owe them. Send them ninety-two cents extra and see if they don't love you then. If you give 'em a couple of bucks, they'll probably offer you free cable.

Some people in this world are famous. Some people are famous for being famous. And Anna Nicole Smith was one of those who are famous for being famous for being famous.

Jack Valenti — or as Robin Williams used to call him on the Oscars, Jack "Boom-Boom" Valenti — offers an interesting viewpoint on politics, one that I think is not without merit.

There are many sad things about the death today of Anna Nicole Smith. One of them is that we're now in for a bunch of really crappy movies about the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith.

It's been a while since I linked to one of these Fleischer Superman cartoons. We had the first one in the series back here and the second back here. This was the third entry and it was entitled "Billion Dollar Limited." It was released to theaters on January 9, 1942 and seems to have the voices of Bud Collyer as Superman and Joan Alexander as Lois Lane. Here you go…

In the credits, you'll notice the name of Myron Waldman. Mr. Waldman, who passed away at the age of 97, spent his life working in animation, bringing us some of the most memorable characters ever drawn on film. Last Saturday, I was among the speakers at an event called The Afternoon of Remembrance, which is an annual salute to folks in the animation community who've passed away in the previous year. Mr. Waldman was touchingly remembered by his sons, Robert and Steven Waldman. All the speeches that day were brief but theirs was probably the most memorable and there's a video of it, with not the best sound quality alas, over on this page of the ASIFA blog.

Folks are writing to remind me of a couple of other animation voices that Jim Backus performed in his career. He was in a Disney short called Plutopia that was made in 1951 and while doing the Magoo cartoons for U.P.A., he also appeared in a couple of that studio's non-Magoo cartoons. I still find his employment record in the field rather unusual. From the forties through the sixties, the "talent pool" for cartoon voicing in Hollywood was pretty small and anyone who was good enough to get repeat work from one studio was routinely working for many studios. Paul Frees reportedly once remarked that Mel Blanc's exclusive contract with Warner Brothers was a good thing for other voice actors…because if Mel hadn't had that deal, he would have had all the jobs in town.

They don't seem to be anywhere on the Internet but there are some hysterical audio recordings floating about of Mr. Backus doing his Mr. Magoo recordings. Reportedly, his deal called for pretty low money but Jerry Hausner, who directed the sessions, had it in his budget to take Backus out before and fill him with liquor. If you factored that in, Backus was apparently pretty expensive talent. Sometimes, Hausner overfilled and his star would require dozens of takes, venturing deep into filthy terrain. The joke around U.P.A. was that if business ever got bad, they could stop making cartoons and just release the voice session tapes as "party records." They'd have made a fortune.

For a while, the official Jim Backus filling station seems to have been a restaurant called The Smoke House that's still in business over in Burbank, right across from Warner Brothers. Someone should write an article about the role this place has played in the history of comic books and animation. U.P.A. was right next door and many other animation studios were close enough that it became a major lunch spot and watering hole for cartoonists. In fact, the editors from Western Publishing (Dell Comics, Gold Key) would frequently lunch there because some of the artists drawing their comics were working days at the studios and editorial business could be transacted there — scripts or checks handed out, artwork turned in, etc. — over a meal. Also of course, everyone liked the food there…especially the garlic bread, which is still quite wonderful.

Hanna-Barbera was not far away and when I was working there, I'd lunch at least once a week at the Smoke House. I always ran into other folks in the cartoon business there — often, Bill Hanna or Walter Lantz — and sometimes saw Jim Backus. He wasn't doing Magoos at the time but he'd be at the bar, tossing back a cocktail and joking with everyone. You'd hear the distinctive laugh of the Nearsighted One cackling throughout the restaurant and I always meant to go over, buy him a beverage and just thank him for being Jim Backus. Somehow, I never felt it was the right moment. Years later, when we started Garfield and Friends, I tried to hire him for a voice job but his agent said the man's health was just not up to it. Another one of the many "waited too long" experiences that we all have and regret so.

Stan Sakai has done one hundred issues of Usagi Yojimbo…and that's just for Dark Horse, its current publisher. There were other issues and other publishers before that. In an era where a year or two is considered a long run on a comic, Stan has almost single-handedly written, drawn and lettered all those tales of his long-eared warrior, roaming about the world of 17th century Japan, and this is cause for celebration.

A hundred issues would be an impressive achievement even if the comic sucked. That it's one of the best books of its day is a happy bonus. When people ask me what comic book these days I'd recommend, the first one I always recommend is Usagi Yojimbo.

To celebrate the milestone, Stan got a major assist for #100. A bunch of his friends pitched in to create a "roast" of Stan and his bunny. The dais includes Frank Miller, Jeff Smith, Sergio Aragonés, Guy Davis, Jamie S. Rich, Andi Watson, Rick Geary, Scott Shaw!, Yours Truly and Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson, as well as Stan himself. It's on sale now and while I haven't seen a copy yet, I have seen most of the contributions. It's fun, it's silly and it's almost as entertaining as an issue created wholly by Stan without us clowns displacing him in his own book.