Your chance to own a true artifact of The Lord.

In the last years of his life, Stan Laurel spent a lot of his time answering fan mail. This website is attempting to collect them all so that they can be shared with the world. Fascinating stuff.

Tom Spurgeon has a long, probably definitive obit up for Jay Kennedy, who died last Thursday on a vacation accident. Jay was a historian of underground comics and, more lucratively, an editor of newspaper comic strips for King Features Syndicate. I never met the man but he was well-respected by everyone who knew him and a lot of good people are still stunned at the loss.

Sit back, click and enjoy a great old vaudeville/burlesque sketch. Years ago, I met a professor-type who was trying to research the origin of this one. What he found was about nineteen different comedians had nineteen different stories about how they wrote it and how everyone stole it from them. At some point though, it became part of the more-or-less public domain repertoire that comedians working in revues then drew from. There were a lot of comics doing this material, often in their own, personalized versions — some of which they copyrighted — on stages the world over. Later on film and television, Abbott and Costello had their interpretation and the Three Stooges had theirs, and there were a couple of other folks who did it now and then, sometimes changing the "trigger word."

You'll understand what I mean when you see it…and you'll probably remember the bit. Here are the Stooges doing what they did best: Beating the crap out of one of their own…

George W. Bush gave a speech this morning on where we currently stand with Iraq. Fred Kaplan has the summary and it ain't pretty.

This morning, Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow was asked about Alberto Gonzales and he said, "We hope he stays." Since all these guys serve at (to use the cliché) "the pleasure of the president," doesn't it come down to he stays if Bush wants him and he goes if Bush doesn't? Rarely does a presidential appointee depart over the objections of the Chief Exec and every single story ever written about Gonzales, incuding those written by his supporters, has stressed his unwavering loyalty to George W. Bush. So what is this nonsense about "hoping" he stays?

The Disney DVD folks have issued a new, 2-disc version of Walt's animated Peter Pan. Here's an Amazon link to purchase it and here's why you might not want to. A number of animation websites (like this one) have erupted in discussion of the transfer which some say is not what it should be. I saw a bit of it in a store the other day and it looked wrong to me, but I (at first) figured the shop's TV was misadjusted or something. I mean, if ever there's a film restoration that you'd figure the issuers would get right, it's something like this, and it gets back to our oft-discussed topic. You know the one: How studios will put out a wonderful, complete, everything-a-collector-could-ask-for DVD of some movie…and then they convene a staff meeting to discuss how they can put out another version later on that the same people will feel they must also purchase.

One way, some have learned, is a better transfer. In fact, last time we discussed this, a friend in the business wrote to me and said the following about a movie (not Peter Pan) that his company was selling on DVD…

When we put [the movie] out, there was some talk of using the old transfer for the DVD. This was a transfer done some time ago, I think for when the film first came out on Beta. No, no, the boss said. We need a new, deluxe transfer. He was right. The studio spent a lot of money and had a beautiful transfer done. They restored many faded or damaged frames and it really looked superb. But when it came time to put the DVD out, they used the old transfer even thought the new one was all done and paid for. At first, I thought it was an incredible, horrible mistake. What lunkhead had used the wrong transfer? I found out later it was intentional. At the last minute, someone decided to save the good transfer for the next release in a few years. It was your old "let's make them buy it again" theory.

In other words, the image quality is supposed to get better and better from release to release, not the other way around. It's more than the right thing to do from the standpoint of honoring the work and respecting the consumer. It's just good marketing.

I'm not casting my lot completely with those who say the new version of Peter Pan is a bad transfer. Not yet, anyway. I've only seen about two minutes of it on someone else's set…but it was enough to send up a warning flag. The maddening part of this, of course, is that I'll probably buy the thing anyway, just for the special features. If the image quality is as bad as some say, I'll probably sit there watching the film, thinking to myself that in this version, the pirates win. I may lead an expedition to track down the guy who's responsible and make him admit he's a codfish.

Here's a great clip but it requires a little explanation. In the early days of talking pictures, the studios had a problem. It was pretty simple to sell silent films to foreign countries that didn't speak English. You just had to change the title cards. But when sound came in, the technology to dub movies into other languages was not there, and the producers didn't want to lose all that overseas revenue. The solution at some studios was, amazingly, to film some movies multiple times with multiple casts speaking multiple languages.

Our example today is of Laurel and Hardy, who did a number of these. They didn't do it with all their early talkies but they did it with some. They'd shoot the movie in English and then, using the same sets, they'd go back and do the film again in Spanish, German, Italian and/or French, depending on market conditions at the moment. A few of the same supporting actors could be used but for the most part, they'd bring in bilingual actors to take over the other roles. One interesting example is that Boris Karloff, who apparently spoke pretty decent French, was in the French version of their feature, Pardon Us. In it, he played a part that someone else played when the same film had been made in English.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were monolingual so they had to fake it. Obviously, pantomime scenes were no problem and it was sometimes possible to use what they'd filmed for the earlier version in the foreign version. But when it came time for dialogue, their lines were written out phonetically on blackboards just off-camera and a coach taught them how to pronounce words and where to put a certain emphasis or gesture. I've heard mixed things from people who understand these other languages as to how well Stan and Ollie came across. They did this for a while…until dubbing became practical.

Foreign versions of their pictures are of special interest to us Laurel and Hardy buffs for obvious reasons but also because many contain material that was never in the English editions. Some films ran longer overseas and in several cases when The Boys were making shorts for the American market, they'd be making patchwork features for foreign countries — several U.S. shorts stitched together via the addition of new scenes to connect the storylines. Our clip is from the Spanish film, Los Calaveras, which combined two shorts — Laughing Gravy and Be Big — into a feature. (There was also a French version of the same thing called Les Carottiers.)

So here's five minutes of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy speaking Spanish. And remember: This is not them being dubbed. This is them reading Spanish dialogue off a chalkboard…

Years ago, my Aunt Dot used to say to me, "You have something in common with every person in the world. Before you criticize them, you should stop and figure out what it is you have in common with that person."

I've been very critical of Alberto Gonzales. In terms of upholding the Rule of Law, he has the most important job in our country and I've long felt that all he does is to warp it, trample it and misinterpret it to try and support the view that anything the current (and only the current) occupant of the Oval Office and his crew does is legal, constitutional and proper. George W. Bush could stick up a liquor store and Gonzales would argue it was within the president's power to do so.

But I tried to do what my Aunt suggested. I sat down and tried to figure out what I have in common with this man. I'll admit it took a while but I think I've got it. I think I know what I have in common with this man. Within two weeks, neither one of us will be the Attorney General of the United States.

The trial of Phil Spector starts tomorrow. He's accused of murdering a young actress named Lana Clarkson. I gather the case comes down to the fact that (a) Spector is a known looney and alcoholic who was drinking that night and has a history of irrational actions, some involving firearms and (b) there's testimony that at the murder scene, Spector said he'd shot her accidentally. Those are pretty damning facts. Against this, his attorneys intend to argue that Clarkson obviously committed suicide in the home of this rich guy she'd just met, and that the two men who say Spector said what he said cannot be believed because…well, uh, we all know that when someone dies at your home, the first police officer on the scene and your chauffeur always try to pin it on you.

Obviously, that's a pretty shaky defense but Spector has brought in a heavyweight legal team and there's a reason those guys get paid as much as they do. Also, O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake have done much to destroy the concept of the Open-and-Shut Case, especially against celebrities. True, they were able to argue that they weren't there when the murders were committed and Spector can't…but he has more money than either and that's gotta be worth something.

It all sounds like a courtroom drama I really, really don't want to follow. I met Lana Clarkson a few times when she was dating a friend of mine. She seemed very nice and very smart, and I'm positive I won't be watching when Spector's lawyers start killing her all over, trying to sell the idea that her career was in ruins and that she was suicidal. I didn't know her well enough to say with any authority that the latter wasn't the case but it sure doesn't jibe with the Lana I saw. What I am sure of is that almost everyone who acts for a living has those periods when the prospects of future work look as remote as hers might have at certain points…and that that's almost never a reason for picking up a gun and exiting stage left.

One of the fascinating (some might say "maddening") things about show business is that on Tuesday at 2:00, it can feel like no one will ever again let you within fifty yards of a camera or audience and that you stand a better chance of tap-dancing to Jupiter than of getting another acting gig. And then at 2:30, you get a call for an audition, they see you at 5:00 and Thursday morning, you're in make-up and a movie. That doesn't happen as often as you might like but it happens often enough that you have to go a long time — certainly longer than Lana had — before you believe it's all over. Lack of roles alone is rarely a motive for putting yourself in the Variety obituary column. In fact, it may be the opposite. You want to wait until that obit's going to be a little longer.

I think what I'm trying to say here is that while anyone could be irrational to the point of suicide, I'm suspicious of the simple explanation like, "She decided to kill herself because she hadn't had an acting job in a while." That always sounds to me like something a beginning screenwriter comes up with after they take one of those courses that teaches you to give every character a simple, one-line motivation for everything they do. In real life, it's never that uncomplicated. Richard Jeni had plenty of bookings lined up and offers.

I'm thinking I need to do something to affect the outcome of this trial and I don't mean what happens in the courtroom. I can't do anything about that. But I can do something to limit the damage that this trial does to me. I can not follow it. This may be rough — as you can see from a few posts back here, I still have a Pavlovian interest in the O.J. case — but I'm going to do my best. If this isn't the last mention of Phil Spector on this site until the verdict is read, we'll all know I've failed.

I can't link you to Frank Rich's weekend column in The New York Times but I can quote the first paragraph…

Tomorrow night is the fourth anniversary of President Bush's prime-time address declaring the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the broad sweep of history, four years is a nanosecond, but in America, where memories are congenitally short, it's an eternity. That's why a revisionist history of the White House's rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same "bad intelligence" before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion's aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. "If only I had known then what I know now …" has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration's case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.

The rest of the piece is a list of things prominent people have said about the war that now seem to be foolish, disingenuous, unrealistic or just plain lies. They're all the kinds of statements that no one can now argue were wise or valid, so they have to defend them as good faith judgments by people who through no fault of their own were misled or misinformed, and of course you can't fault someone for believing faulty information and acting on it. Even if the person is Dick Cheney and acting on that faulty info has tripled the value of Halliburton stock.

Lately, it seems to be all the rage to ask politicians if they think homosexuality is immoral. I'd like to see them all asked how they feel about people getting wealthy from a war that's killing people left and right, and driving the U.S. into a financial Grand Canyon. Anything about that make you at all uncomfortable?

The wise and sage Earl Kress announces, surely to the disappointment of many, that The Banana Splits Adventure Hour is off the list of old Hanna-Barbera shows that will be coming out on DVD in the near future. The source material, sez Earl, is simply in too bad a shape for a good DVD to be produced without a lot of time and moola. Better they yank it from the release schedule than put out an inferior product.

I was never a huge fan of that show. Liked the theme song, liked some of the blackouts, liked hearing Daws Butler and Paul Winchell and Allan Melvin doing voices. Never quite sparked to the individual features in the show, nor did I understand the mix of comedy and adventure. But some folks loved it and I think anything that some folks loved ought to be available on DVD…though they should wait 'til they can do it right.

Here's another Garfield cartoon I wrote. I called it, for reasons that will become obvious if you watch, "The Creature That Lived in the Refrigerator Behind the Mayonnaise, Next to the Ketchup and To The Left of the Cole Slaw."

As always in these, Lorenzo Music was the voice of Garfield, Thom Huge was the voice of Jon and Gregg Berger — whom you saw recently in a video clip here — was the voice of Odie. The Police Sergeant was also voiced by Gregg and there's an odd thing there. In the Ink and Paint Department at the studio, there was a lady who took it upon herself to make sure that we didn't have a show where a disproportionate percentage of the human beings were Caucasian. That was a commendable goal but she was kind of arbitrary about who she decided should get minority status. Every so often, she'd just decide to make some supporting character black even though the artist who designed that character hadn't had that in mind and the voice track had already been recorded with, say, an Irish accent…or at least a voice which certainly didn't suggest a non-white race. Sometimes, the producer or I caught it. Sometimes, we didn't. The Police Sergeant in this cartoon is an example of a "didn't." (She also sometimes missed noticing the other way and a character we intended as black came out about as Afro-American as Audrey Hepburn.)

The voice of the Police Sergeant's assistant Jones was done by Jim Davis, creator of Garfield. The voice of Shmidlap was done by Thom Huge, and the little girl's scream at the end was done by my friend, B-Movie Babe Jewel Shepard, who was helping me out in the studio that day. Jewel has screamed in a lot of movies, so I decided to have her scream in one of my cartoons. Here's that cartoon…

Are you following the latest twist in the O.J. Simpson book deal? It's kind of odd. A court has ruled that Simpson's rights in that If I Did It book must be auctioned off with the proceeds going to help pay down the $33.5 million judgment that the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown won against him. He's paid almost nothing on the amount which, with interest, is now more like $38 mill. The Goldman family, which adamantly opposed publication of the book when it was first announced, has now done a one-eighty and they want the book published.

I'm sure there are those who think the difference now is one of sheer greed, and I think that's unfair. Even if money is the primary reason for the change, the families are entitled to some compensation for all they've been through, and some bucks on a judgment that they won. But there's a big question here that's going unasked and unanswered. The other night on Larry King Live, Fred Goldman was asked what's changed and he answered as follows…

Well, I think what changed is very simply the fact that we know more about it now than we did then and we believe that there's perhaps good reason to see it back out in print. Everybody that's read it, my attorneys specifically, believe that it's tantamount to a confession.

And then King said that Judith Regan, who was involved in packaging the book, told him she believes it's the total truth. He then asked Goldman, "How do you react to that?" and Goldman replied…

Well, frankly, from the bits and pieces that I've heard about it, I would tend to agree. He never contradicted the timeline or any of the evidence in the criminal trial. If nothing else, he almost validated it all.

This was one of those moments that reminded me why I've pretty much given up watching Larry King. They happen often on that show. A guest says something that cries out for a follow-up query and King, because he does no research (not only does none but practically brags about it) doesn't ask the obvious question. In this case, it would have been something like…

Fred, all the reports from people who've read Simpson's account of the murders in his book say the same thing. They say the text talks of an accomplice named Charlie who was present when the killings were committed, who urged Simpson to stop and who may have disposed of the murder weapon and other evidence. Do you think there really was a Charlie? And if not, why do you agree that the book is the total truth and why would you then want it published?

…or words to that effect. I suspect Goldman would have said no, that's the one part he doesn't believe but he thinks the rest is a confession and that there's a value to having that portion in print. But it would have been nice if there'd been a real interviewer there to pose that question.

Well, I guess it's an honor. It's something.

The current issue of Mad, the one just coming out, is #476. The first MAD work by Sergio Aragonés appeared in #76, which was the January, 1963 issue. He missed one issue so this new one represents the 400th time his artistry has appeared in America's most popular humor magazine.

This is not the record. Mike Slaubaugh maintains lists of these things and if we consult the relevant tote board for this category, we see that Al Jaffee has had work in 427 issues. Tied for third are Dick DeBartolo and Mort Drucker, each of whom has been in 391 issues. Since Drucker is not in every issue lately and DeBartolo is, Dick will probably have third place to himself as of next month. (In fifth place, we see Dave Berg with 386 appearances but he's not likely to challenge anyone, having died in 2002.)

In the meantime, I am locked in about a ninety-way tie for 237th place, having contributed two pieces to the magazine. This is so much more impressive than that guy on Jeopardy! yesterday. He only managed to create a three-way tie.

On another list of his, Mike notes that DeBartolo holds the record for the most consecutive issues of MAD with 374, followed by Sergio with 365. Sergio had no work in MAD #111 because…well, his recollection is that the post office lost what he mailed in for that issue. Personally, I'd like to believe it was something more embarrassing so when people ask me, I always make up something that involves a morals charge, a stay in prison and maybe a couple of farm animals.

You may also be interested in this list of Mike's that charts circulation figures over the years. This looks pretty dreadful for MAD but there aren't a lot of other magazines where the list wouldn't tell a similar story.

Getting back to Sergio for a moment. His first appearance in MAD was with a batch of astronaut cartoons but he instantly became known for the tiny cartoons in the margins of the pages — the ones that look like this…

Before he came along, MAD had text gags in those spaces. They called the feature "Marginal Thinking" and the jokes sometimes took the form of a little lecture by a character named Marginal Marvin. The lines were written by the editorial staff and it was quite a drain on their time and creativity.

Sergio is, as we all know, an extremely fast cartoonist. He wanted to sell a lot of work to MAD but there was a limit as to how much they could buy from him without firing all their other artists. Since his English then was severely limited, he didn't get the text gags in the margins and thought that maybe he could replace them with his drawings, thereby creating more space for his work in the magazine. The editors liked the suggestion since it got them out of filling those spaces themselves, but they thought of it as a brief respite. Surely, they believed, the new kid from Mexico wouldn't be able to come up with gags like that for every issue and they'd have to go back to the text gags. Four hundred issues later, he's still filling those spots and Marginal Marvin still can't catch a break.