I've received two dozen e-mails about the Superman Broadway show and only 23 of them have reminded or asked me about the TV version that ran on ABC in 1975 as a late night special. ABC was then airing this odd anthology series opposite Johnny Carson called ABC's Wide World of Entertainment. One week a month, it was The Dick Cavett Show. One week a month, it was Jack Paar Tonite, featuring Mr. Paar's ill-considered return to the talk show business. And the other weeks, it was odd specials and pilots and shows that made you scratch your head and wonder what, if anything, was on someone's mind.

Their version of It's a Bird…It's a Plane…It's Superman! featured David Wilson as Superman/Clark Kent, Lesley Warren as Lois Lane, Kenneth Mars as Max Mencken (the Jack Cassidy role), David Wayne as the mad scientist, Loretta Swit as the lady who got to sing, "You've Got Possibilities" and Allen Ludden, the host of Password, as Perry White. A gent named Romeo Muller, who otherwise wrote most of the Rankin-Bass TV specials, adapted the script and made it campier and more politically correct. (The Flying Lings, who were crooked Chinese stereotype bad guys in the original became Mafioso types with Al Molinaro playing their leader.) Videotapes of this one are making the rounds but trust me. You don't want to see it.

Now, then. I asked if anyone could name a successful Broadway musical where all the protagonists are pretty much unchanged at the end. Brad Walker thought of one — You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown — so it's possible. It's just not likely. Brad also wrote the following to me…

I never saw it on stage but I did get the Original Cast album out of the library. The standout number, as you say, is "You've Got Possibilities" sung by the pre-Alice Linda Lavin. But I do have affection for "We Don't Matter At All," if only because I've come across the attitude so often: "Baby, you and I / We're just about as special / As a walnut or a fly / We don't matter at all." Existential angst has never been so bouncy.

One song that never made it into the album was, "Everything's Easy When You Know How." The gossip columnist and the mad scientist recruit a team of Chinese acrobats as henchmen. The acrobats are anxious to get back at Superman because no one will pay to watch acrobats fly when they can see Superman fly for nothing. (I'd move to Gotham.) Judging by their few lines in other numbers, the Chinese acrobats are severely stereotyped which accounts for their number being cut. When the show was broadcast on TV the acrobats were replaced by mafiosi, including Al Molinaro. I met Mr. Molinaro not long after that and he expressed surprise at the non-Midas touch of the Birdie creators.

Speaking of the TV show…they upped the camp value, took out Lois's spunk, replaced the gossip columnist with an ex-jock sportwriter (not Steve Lombard, but might as well have been) — none of which helped. The only addition I liked was when Superman is at his lowest, he gets his faith rekindled by a couple of youngsters named Jerry and Joe.

A few years ago, they released a new album with previously cut songs, like the dreary "A Woman Alone" (which was replaced by the more hopeful "What I've Always Wanted"), And then there was "Dot Dot Dot," a faux Winchell column set to music. Cassidy's character, Max Mencken, is a pencil-thin caricature of Winchell. "Dot Dot Dot" was dropped in tryouts, I imagine, because it skewed the proceedings even more Max-ward. I wish they had left in "Didjuhseeit?", a paean to fanboys: "Didjuhseeit? / Didjuhseeit? / Boy, he really is the Man of Steel! / Didjuhseeit? / Didjuhseeit? / Now I can tell that he really is for real!"

I heard from a couple of folks who saw the show on Broadway and enjoyed it. Here's a message from Steve Winer…

I saw the original show too, and I remember having a great time. Then again, I was twelve and probably one of a handful of audience members with an equal interest in comic books and musicals.

Don't underestimate the power of that original cast. Linda Lavin, young and fresh off The Mad Show, was charming and funny, and Jack Cassidy was, as always, a scene stealer in the best sense of the term.

I do remember finding the villain story a bit lame, but on the whole it was a fun show that might just have fallen in a strange crack between possible audiences — too hip for kids, not hip enough for adults. Then again, people are still performing it and talking about it forty years later, and that's not a bad legacy for a flop.

No, not bad at all. And I'm sure Jack Cassidy was wonderful in it. He was a terrific performer in everything he did, even if he was completely out of his mind. It's sad that he was never in a really big hit because he sure deserved one.

Lastly: I mentioned that Lee Adams and Charles Strouse had also done the songs for Annie. I was half right. Strouse did the music but the lyrics were by Martin Charnin. Sorry.

The above photo from the Macy's Parade preparations ran in this morning's New York Times. I know just how that man feels.

You'd think that today, Art Buchwald would be giving thanks just for being alive to give thanks. But instead, he has something sillier to offer us.

Here, in honor of Thanksgiving, is Jerky Turkey, a 1945 cartoon directed by the great Tex Avery. I linked to this one once before but that's now a dead link…so here it is again. If you'd like the background info on the film, it's all over at the original posting. Have a nice Turkey Day…and if you don't want to cook today, learn a lesson from this cartoon: Never, under any circumstances, eat at Joe's. This film will show you why…

I'm starting to feel sorry for Michael Richards.

The first time I heard about the incident at the Laugh Factory, I figured that he'd done something stupid on stage and that he was receiving the appropriate quantity of grief for it. I still think he did something stupid but I think the grief is expanding, all out of proportion. People are lumping him in with O.J. Simpson, drawing some sort of equivalency because they were both in the news on the same day. No doubt both were irrational with anger when they committed their sins…but stabbing two human beings to death strikes me as a wee bit worse than offending many more in a comedy club. Some of the offended have now engaged Gloria Allred to represent them in what seems like a pretty naked attempt to wring some dollars out of Mr. Richards. I would guess someone has looked up how much he made off his years on Seinfeld and guessed what percentage of the DVD moola is going to him, and figured he can afford to write a large check.

Allred is an attorney who has occasionally championed good and noble causes…but her prime motive always seems to be to get on TV and to try and shame someone into paying off her client(s). It's Justice, not in a court of law but by Press Conference. As I understand it, she isn't threatening — yet — to sue Richards, perhaps because she hasn't figured out yet what to sue him for. But she was on the news this afternoon demanding that Richards meet with her and her clients in the presence of a retired judge who would be hired to determine a sum of cash that the Seinfeld star should fork over by way of apology. In his appearance the other night on the Letterman show, Richards spoke of trying to control certain rages within him. I'm guessing that when he heard about Allred's demand, there was a lot more rage to control.

I'm even getting mad at her. Because of this woman, I'm sitting here, sympathizing with a man who got on a stage the other night and spewed racist crap to the point of making the audience walk out on him. The best possible interpretation you can make of Richards's rant is that he was high on something, enormously unprofessional and quite inept at handling his audience and his anger. That's the best. The worst would have something to do with having some sort of serious emotional problem and/or actually being a racist swine. Since I wasn't there and I don't know the guy, I'm not qualified to say that the worst applies. But he was certainly a jerk on stage and the proper penalty for that is for the public to stop paying to see you on stage. Anything beyond that strikes me as cruel and unusual punishment.

Reader Tom Wolper writes with an interesting question about the whole Michael Richards matter…

I understand the public interest about Richards's response to hecklers attracts attention because it touches nerves about race. But there is a secondary issue which I am curious about and nobody is discussing. Since you have friends in standup and I'm sure many of your blog readers appreciate standup comedy, I'd like to know what you think or newsfromme readers think about an audience member recording a live performance, editing it, and posting it publicly. i don't have any Improv stubs handy so I don't know if recording is explicitly prohibited in writing. On a pro sports ticket stub I see: "…and by use of this ticket agrees the holder will not transmit or aid in transmitting any description, account,
picture or reproduction of the Baseball Game to which this ticket admits him."

Are comics, in general, worried about bootlegs of their performances and are they worried about edgy or blue material being edited by an audience member to remove context, then being posted on the Internet?

Yes, comics are worried about bootlegs of their performance…and for just about every possible reason. Theft of material is a biggie. Back when I was hanging around The Comedy Store a lot, you practically took your life in your hands if you pulled out a note pad to jot down a phone number. A bouncer-type might come over to you and demand to see what you'd written because they knew the comics would get ticked off if they weren't policing that kind of thing. I've seen performers on stage stop in the middle of a set because they thought someone had a tape recorder.

So they're worried about that, they're worried about plain, old-fashioned bootlegging…and now, in the era of YouTube, I'm sure they're worried about material being posted on the 'net to make them look bad. If they weren't before the Richards controversy, they are now. In the past, some clubs have been rather lax about posting rules or printing them on tickets but this may cause them to get somewhat more strict, not only in terms of proclaiming the policy but enforcing it, as well. We may even see public venues that make you check any cellphones that has a camera. The folks who recorded the Michael Richards clip and posted it were probably breaking some Laugh Factory rule — and possibly a larger issue of copyright — but I doubt anyone is going to go after them about it.

The managers of The Laugh Factory, by the way, have posted this statement on their website saying, among other things, that Richards is no longer welcome on their stage. I'm not quite sure what the point would have been of having Richards apologize to Saturday night's audience for offending Friday night's audience but, hey, there are a lot of things in this world I don't understand. I think I'd be more impressed if The Laugh Factory apologized for the parking situation up there on a Friday night. If you've ever tried it, you know why things could get volatile in that room.

It amazes me — and maybe it shouldn't by now — that the "talking heads" discussing the Iraq War on our teevees can make predictions and then aren't held to any standard of results. You can be proven dead wrong about everything and still get a lot of air time. You can also still hold public office and even get a medal from George W. Bush…but that's a different problem. You'd just think that with all the people in this country who'd love to get on C-Span and the news channels to give their views, those who achieve that exalted position would be shoved aside if they're consistently off. I mean, you wouldn't keep going to a doctor whose track record was as bad as William Kristol's…but somehow, there's always a place for him on the Sunday morning news programs.

One guy who's gotten all or almost all of it right about Iraq is Scott Ritter, who is invariably identified as a "former weapons inspector." When Bush apologists say, of the fact that no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq, "Everyone got that wrong," they're omitting Ritter, who was among the few who got it right. You'd think there'd be more interest in what he has to say now about Iran…not that he or anyone is infallible but come on. If two guys predict all the football scores and one guy gets most of 'em right and the other gets most of 'em wrong, who are you going to listen to for next weekend? Here's a link to a video interview with Ritter talking about Iran.

The Wall Street Journal has assembled some data and some confusing charts to see how the various major pollsters did in forecasting the Senate races just concluded. Answer: Not too well. Some of them were wildly off with their predictions, which we should all keep in mind the next time those same pollsters are telling us who's going to win.

We need a cartoon here, I think. This weblog doesn't feel right without a cartoon on it once in a while. This is A Day at the Zoo, a Warner Brothers cartoon directed by Tex Avery and released on March 11, 1939. There are no credits on this print but if there were, they'd say that the animation was done by Rollin Hamilton and that the story was by Robert Clampett and Melvin Millar. Clampett was already directing his own cartoons by this time and I have no idea why he received story credit on a Tex Avery cartoon. Voices were by Mel Blanc and Dave Weber, with Gil Warren as the narrator. Dave Weber, who also went by the name of Danny Webb, was the guy they usually called in when they needed a celebrity voice impersonation in those days.

That's about all you need to know right now. Enjoy the cartoon.

December 6 at 7 PM, Roy Disney will be speaking and signing a new DVD over at the Barnes & Noble store in The Grove here in Los Angeles. Make a note to drop by and hear him.

December 9 at 6 PM, Rachael Ray will be speaking and signing a new cookbook over at the Barnes & Noble store in The Grove here in Los Angeles. Make a note to stay away from The Grove.

Danny Fingeroth, who knows a thing or three about super-heroes, writes the following about the musical, It's a Bird…It's a Plane…It's Superman!…

I saw the show in 1966 at a Wednesday matinee and remember being disappointed that it didn't actually seem to be about Superman. Jack Cassidy played a character who wasn't part of the Superman supporting cast from the comics or the TV series, yet he was very much the star and the center of attention. That could be why the show wasn't successful. Whatever you may have thought about, say, the Batman TV show, it was very much about Batman and/or his villains, not about a guy who wasn't any part of the character's core mythology or well-known supporting cast.

Yeah, that's another thing wrong with it. No Lex Luthor, no Jimmy Olsen…and I think Perry White only has about three lines. Jack Cassidy was then a big deal on Broadway and it may be that since he was available, they were more interested in building the show around him than the relative unknown who'd be playing Superman. It throws the show even more off balance when it's done without a major star in the role because then there's really no reason to devote so much attention to that character.

By the way, everyone: Bob Holiday, who played Superman in that show, has a website that contains almost no information about the original show. He doesn't even have a plug up for his book on the experience, Superman on Broadway, which may or may not even be available these days. But if you do go to Mr. Holiday's site, check out the video clips of him teaching Steve Allen how to fly on the game show, I've Got a Secret. And thanks for the message, Danny.

This is Keith Olbermann's "Special Comment" last night on the lessons of Vietnam…

By the way, Greg Eckler sent me the following last night…

I hope you'll let us know about the ratings. It's a fortuitous booking coincidence on par with Hugh Grant on Leno in 1994, which happened to be the night Leno surged into first place never to look back.

I have suggested to incredulous friends that Leno could still take the night because Jay is just that dominating, plus the story just broke and plenty of people don't even know about it or that Richards is on the show.

Let us know if Jay can make a game of it. If it's even close, it will reinforce what a destroyer Leno has become.

Well, it's interesting. I think people charting such things sometimes place too much emphasis on that night when Jay Leno had the scandal-plagued Hugh Grant on as a guest. True, that was when Leno began outrating Letterman…but all Grant did was move up the date. Jay had been gaining and Dave had been dropping before that. Great ratings for one night do not change things all that much, especially with shows that are known quantities and which most of the public has already sampled. In the many years since, Letterman has had the occasional night when he had something spectacular to get tune-in — the nights he came back from illnesses, the first time he had on Hillary Clinton, Oprah's return to his guest chair, etc. All it ever meant was one night he'd be up and the next night, the numbers would be right back where they were before…sometimes, even a bit lower.

Last week, Letterman had an extremely good week against Leno. Maybe it was Impressionists Week that did it but that, coupled with a strong CBS Monday night lineup, caused Dave to tie Jay on Monday. (Monday is usually Letterman's strongest night of the week.) Last night, Leno got a 4.4, which is about what he always gets on a Monday. Dave got a 5.3, which is about a point more than he usually gets on a Monday…so he got some extra tune-in without taking anyone away from The Tonight Show. That's kind of the way it works these days. When Letterman's numbers are up it generally doesn't mean he's luring anyone away from Leno. It means that the folks who like Dave's show are watching it three times a week instead of two or are staying tuned for the whole hour instead of going to bed at Midnight. Or something like that.

Will the Michael Richards apology change the dynamic of late night? No, because that's just one night. But Dave's doing a little better anyway, and he might be on a solid upswing. He still has a long way to go before he can put a dent in Leno's track record…and since Jay's announced he's leaving soon, I'm not sure any of that matters as much as it once did. Not that it ever mattered a lot.

In case you haven't heard, Michael Richards put in a remote appearance on last night's Late Show With David Letterman. A few nights before at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood, his stand-up act degenerated into a racist tirade. A lot of people walked out on him…I suspect not so much because he was up there yelling the "n" word as because he seemed to be offering some sort of "anger management" breakdown instead of entertainment. It might all have just been one bad set in a comedy club but someone captured much of it with a cell phone camera and it made it onto the Internet. Here's a clip of what Richards said last night when he appeared via satellite with Dave…

I don't know Michael Richards at all. Maybe he is a racist at heart or maybe he's a comedian who had one too many of something and then did a very bad job of ripping off an outta-date Lenny Bruce bit that wasn't all that funny when Lenny did it. Either way, I suspect he did himself more harm than good with the apology. Then again, the man is not exactly ever hired because he projects a calming image of stability so I doubt it will cost him a lot of work. I do think he deserves some credit for not announcing that he'd been molested as a child and then promptly checking into rehab. Perhaps that's next.

It's a Bird…It's a Plane…It's Superman! — a Broadway musical based on you-know-who — opened on March 29, 1966 at the Alvin Theater in New York. As shows go, it seemed to have everything necessary. It was based on a popular property and at the time, America seemed hungry for that kind of thing. The Batman TV show had debuted only two months earlier and it was still an immense fad, with "POW! ZAP! BAM!" appearing everywhere you looked. But there were more reasons beyond that to figure Superman's musical would be as powerful and invulnerable as its title character.

There were songs by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, who had provided the scores for Golden Boy and Bye Bye Birdie, so they kinda knew what they were doing. Its producer-director, Harold Prince, was one of the top producers in Manhattan and he was beginning to enjoy similar success as a director. The cast was strong — Tony nominations would go to three of its actors, including Jack Cassidy who had top billing and who was a pretty big star at the time, hitting all the talk shows to plug his new gig. All but one of the reviews were positive. Some were raves and the only negative one — from Douglas Watts in The New York Post — sounded pretty elitist. Mr. Watts admitted he had no fondness or even knowledge of Superman in any form…and who's going to listen to someone like that? So all in all, it sounded like a hit.

Not so. The show closed the following June 16 and posted a total loss of its investor's money. At $600,000 it was then one of the most expensive musicals ever produced, and therefore its biggest flop.

I didn't see the show in New York, of course, but was always curious as to wha' happened? How could a show with so much going for it not run longer than it did? Last night, I saw a concert-style production of the show…and while it's not utterly fair to judge the material by a version done with no sets, few costumes and sparse rehearsals, I think I came to the following conclusion: It isn't a very good show.

Which is not to say I didn't have a good time last night. This was another production of the Musical Theater Guild, which is a rep company of gifted performers that puts on these down-'n'-dirty staged readings as they did recently with Li'l Abner and Merrily We Roll Along The cast, toplined by Damon Kirsche (who did such a fine job playing Abner for them), worked wonders with what I came to feel was not particularly bulletproof material.

You ever see a production of this show? You might have, because it's had a much longer life in terms of local groups putting it up than is usual with a play that only lasted 129 performances on Broadway. Usually only something Sondheim can close that quickly and still be seen again…and then there was Mack and Mabel, which keeps coming back because people love the Jerry Herman score. Superman doesn't have a great score. There's only one song — "You've Got Possibilities" — which had any life outside of the show, and the book is quite silly. Like a lot of adaptations of comic books into other forms, the authors seem to have struggled with whether they respected the underlying material or felt they could do naught but mock it. The storyline has something to do with a gossip columnist (the role Cassidy played on Broadway) trying to expose Superman's secret identity…and with a mad scientist who, having been denied a Nobel Peace Prize he thought he'd earned, decides to use psychiatric scheming to bring down Superman's confidence and therefore destroy his powers. In just a minute or so of psychobabble, Superman is convinced he can't fly and he no longer does…until at the end, he has to in order to rescue Lois Lane. It all makes for a pretty campy, unsatisfying Man of Steel.

(Another problem the storyline has: At the end, everything is pretty much the way it was at the beginning, and that's never good. Just looking at the two big hit musicals based on comic strips, you have Li'l Abner, which ends with Abner marrying Daisy Mae, and Annie — also with an Adams/Strouse score — which ends with Annie getting a family and no longer being the Little Orphan. But at the close of Superman, we're right back where we started: No one knows Clark is Superman, Lois is still in a frustrating love affair with the guy in blue, etc. Can you name another hit musical where the lives of the protagonists are unaltered at the final curtain? I can't.)

Seems to me this show is performed occasionally these days because people love the character and a musical based on him looks like it'll be fun to stage, fun to see. The version last night was fun to see but only because the cast was having a good time, playing broad and not worrying too much if they mucked with the material and ad-libbed. I was sitting behind my friend Marv Wolfman, who actually saw the original in '66, and he said he had a very good time last night, but not because of the show itself. That's a pretty good summation of the evening.

One last thing I'll mention. An article I read some time ago said that the original show lost that $600,000 for one investor but didn't say who that investor was. I've always wondered if it was either DC Comics or one of the firm's owners at the time. DC funded some of the adaptations of its properties, such as the George Reeves Superman TV show so it would not have been uncharacteristic for them to put up the bucks. I asked Irwin Donenfeld, whose father founded the company and he said no…but Irwin told me a number of things that I decided were not true, and he might not have known. This isn't an obsessive mystery with me but it's something that arouses my Comic Historian curiosity. DC was sold not long after and maybe the sale was motivated in part by someone's desire to replenish their personal fortune after taking a bath on Broadway. Might have happened that way.