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.

I usually don't crib an entire posting from another weblog but this one by Ezra Klein over on Tapped is too well-put not to quote in full…

As Kevin Drum points out, the Iraqi people overwhelmingly want us to leave. They do not believe our presence stabilizes or protects and, as a result, they support attacks on our troops. All the better to get us the hell out.

The question, of course, is why we don't. What's the compelling national interest in occupying a country that deplores our presence? That murders our soldiers? That depletes our treasury? That shows no sign, hint, or hope of molding itself to our desires?

There is none. Instead, we remain in Iraq because the current Administration is afraid to put a loss on the board. We remain in Iraq to avoid a blow to our national self-esteem. So long as we've boots, guns, and grunts in their country, there's always the chance that a stretch of good weather and the tranquil vibes unleashed by the global orgasm for peace will calm the region down, and we'll be able to dart out in a moment of relative optimism and goodwill, reputation intact. To leave now, conversely, would be to admit defeat. And no one making the decisions — not the elected officials protecting their legacy nor the colonels seeking promotion — will be the one to codify our humiliation. That's understandable on an individual level, but in the aggregate, it means we're not merely asking men to die for a mistake, we're asking them to perish to protect our ego.

I not only think this neatly summarizes the reality of the situation, I think it's fast becoming a national consensus. Or will.

I haven't linked to a good animated cereal commercial for a while so how about this one? It's a vintage spot for Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes. The late, great Thurl Ravenscroft provides the voice of Tony and his little nephew (son?) is voiced by Hal Smith, who is probably best remembered today for his role as Otis the Town Drunk on The Andy Griffith Show. Here you go…

So the O.J. Simpson "If I Did It (nudge nudge, wink wink)" specials and book are cancelled. Not surprising. I am curious, of course, to know if the same kind of money is still going to him or his kids or wherever it was going. Also, is the book cancelled or is Harper-Collins merely washing its hands of it? One assumes that there'll be some publisher out there eager to publish…or that at the very least, copies of the text will leak onto Ye Olde Internet.

Assuming the money is still being paid, I don't know that this is "good news" or (at least) as good as it would have been for the shows and book to appear and then be shunned and ignored. But there is something nice in the fact that it'll be quite some time before any respectable company thinks of getting into business with Simpson.

And was there really a "confession" involved in any of this? Did Simpson confess or was that something Judith Regan and her associates exaggerated in order to hype an ambiguous, highly speculative account of the murders? You have to wonder if the reason they cancelled the whole, sordid ball of wax was that someone in Rupert Murdoch's office looked over the shows and read the book and said, "We're selling this as Simpson's confession. If it was that, we'd go ahead with it…but it isn't enough of a confession to get us off the moral hook."

The Cartoon Network folks have set up a nice little webpage called Saturday Morning Forever which features classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons, most of which (I can't help but point out) never — or almost never — ran on Saturday morning. But there are some real goodies over there from the early days of H-B. This link will take you directly to a classic Quick Draw McGraw cartoon where you can thrill to the exploits of El Kabong as written by the great Michael Maltese and voiced by the incomparable Daws Butler and Don Messick.

The page loads slowly and you may have to sit through an ad or two. But hey, it's a free cartoon. How often do you get that these days? I mean, besides on my webpage. Thanks to Robert Spina for the tip.

Jerome Robbins was one of the great directors in the history of musical theater. Even people who had good and sufficient reason to detest him as a human being admired his prowess as a director. In 1989, as one of his final contributions to his art, he supervised the creation of Jerome Robbins' Broadway, a show comprised of scenes from his many shows.

It made for quite a wonderful evening in the theater and I always wondered why it didn't have a longer run — only 633 performances in New York, plus a touring company that I saw in L.A. At the time, Las Vegas was experimenting with the importation of Broadway hits and I thought it would be an ideal show for that town. It was full of familiar material — some of it a bit sexy — and it could be cut to almost any length by dropping this or that number. Perhaps there was a large nut involved in obtaining all the rights. In his autobiography, Arthur Laurents — who wrote the books for Gypsy and West Side Story — told of Robbins, with whom he did not get along when those shows were produced, having to come to him years later and humbly ask for permission to include scenes from them in the compilation. No doubt some of the authors took the opportunity to settle old personal issues with Robbins, but some probably demanded hefty sums.

Our clip today is a five minute sampler from Jerome Robbins' Broadway, which had a pretty good cast. If you look fast, you'll see Jason Alexander playing Pseudolus in the "Comedy Tonight" number from A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum and I think that's Charlotte D'Amboise as Peter Pan. I'm not sure why this little montage was assembled but I'm glad someone put it together.

In addition to listening to the Bob Keeshan interview today, I've also been amusing my ears with Shokus Internet Radio, which is the new online station being set up by my friend Stuart Shostak. I mentioned this the other day here but that was before I'd spent some time listening to some of the "test" shows he has playing in rotation, in advance of the station's official launch. Stu has a couple of goodies there, especially The Soundtrack Show, which oughta interest the kind of person who comes to this website.

I'm fairly new to the world of Internet Radio and I'm fascinated by it. There are channels that play rock or folk songs of showtunes or classical jazz…but there are also "niche" channels, like several that only play music heard at Disney theme parks or old Jack Benny radio shows or things like that. So I've been sitting here today, working on a script but with various Internet radio stations — mostly Stuart's but also a few others — on Live365, a network I'd never explored before. There's some very pleasant listening to be found there. You can tell that some of the stations are "programmed" by people who really know and are passionate about the material they present.

The only downside is one you'll all understand. Usually, I work with the TV on. So every time the phone rings today, instead of muting the sound on the Internet radio channel, I reach for my TiVo remote and hit "pause." Which doesn't do a damned thing.

Speaking of Kid Show Hosts, as we've been doing here…

A great way to waste hours on the Internet is to watch the oral history interviews of the Archive of American Television. This Academy-run project is interrogating significant folks in the world of broadcasting and from time to time, they put some of the videos up on Google News so we can all enjoy them instead of getting our work done.

There's a great one up now: Seven parts which comprise a 3-and-a-half hour interview with Bob "Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan. It was recorded in 1999, five years before he passed away. I'm about halfway through it and his perspective is quite interesting. I got to spend some time with Mr. Keeshan when we worked together on a show and I found him to be a thoughtful and serious gentleman with a genuine concern about the impact of television on kids. We had a few friendly debates about rather trivial aspects of the whole situation…and let me tell you: It ain't easy arguing with Captain Kangaroo. I mean, come on. Even out of costume, he's Captain Kangaroo. I was terrified of offending him and not just because I was afraid Mr. Moose would drop ping-pong balls on me if I did.

Despite that, I felt he paid great attention to what I said and gave it proper consideration. At one point, he said — and I wish I could remember the exact words but this is close — "I hope you understand that I respect your viewpoint. At times, I fear I have the tendency to come across to adults as if I'm treating them like children…when in my mind, the opposite is true. I always believe I'm talking to children like they're adults." The secret of his success may lie somewhere in that belief.

I don't know that historians of kids' TV have ever properly assessed his impact beyond the confines of that one little long-running show on CBS. I believe he did a lot to make broadcasters everywhere conscious that that they had a responsibility beyond the sale of Cocoa Krispies; that in entertaining younger audiences, they had to be constructive as opposed to exploitive. More importantly perhaps, he made parents aware that they had a right and a duty to expect that. Having been a kid when he went on the air, I was somewhat conscious of what changed in my daily programming, not always to my liking or (I now think) benefit. It was years later that I began to realize how much of that change was due to the industry's reaction — and in some cases, overreaction — to the success of Captain Kangaroo. I expect that in later parts of the online interview, he'll be talking about that. I certainly hope so.

Seymour Hersh (who's generally been right) says that the C.I.A. (which hasn't) has concluded that Iran is far from developing a nuclear weapon capability. Dick Cheney (who really hasn't been right) may not let that dissuade him from wanting to invade with all those extra troops that John McCain says we should send to Iraq and which we don't have in the first place.

Every time I've worked on a flop TV show — and I've had ample experience at that, thank you — there comes a moment when you know it's over. And then there comes a moment when you know it's really over. And then there comes a moment when you know it's really, really over.

The last of these stages is usually denoted by some person — the last guy you'd figure to do this, the guy who always thought we had a hit — going around, telling everyone, "I never thought this would work." It meant that things were going so badly that even he was trying to distance himself from the show…trying to make people think it was someone else who thought it was a great idea.

Odd how I was reminded of that this morning when I read that Henry Kissinger is saying that in his opinion, a military victory in Iraq is no longer possible.

Looks like it's really, really over. Which, alas, doesn't mean they're going to stop dying over there.

Here's a short flashback to the days when I wrote variety shows for people who didn't speak English very well. The Bay City Rollers Show was actually on NBC for quite a number of years, stuck away in an early Saturday morning time slot that only existed in some cities and didn't count in the ratings. It was a case of "We have to put something on at that hour so we might as well stick this thing there."

The show was actually a condensed version of a show called The Krofft Superstar Hour, which was produced for NBC's Saturday morning schedule in 1978. The whole A.M. line-up was a disaster that year. Even before all 13 hours we'd taped had aired, NBC was juggling around shows and replacing some of them. The 13 hours of The Krofft Superstar Hour were cut down to 13 half-hours of The Bay City Rollers Show and, like I said, it was on for quite some time. They reran those suckers for four years, I think.

It was actually a fun show to do if you could get past the fact that the most of the Rollers had such natural thick Scottish accents that American audiences could never have understood them. A dialogue coach named Jonathan Lucas worked wonders with the lads but by their own admission, they weren't equipped to host a show of this sort. It was kind of like: Forget about comedic delivery. Let's be happy if they just get the words out clean. This was the first of many shows I wrote where we had to settle for intelligibility.

When I signed on to do the series, it was going to star ABBA and I never did find out how that deal fell apart. We wound up with the Rollers who were then in the process of disbanding the group but they reassembled for one last gig. They were all great guys individually but one of them was at war — personal and legal — with the others so there was a lot of tension on the set and every so often, rehearsals would stop while they all went in the back and threats of bodily harm were exchanged. During one taping, I was doing the audience warmup. Someone came over to me and whispered, "You'll have to stall" and told me that backstage, one of the Rollers had one of his bandmates in a headlock. Amazingly, ten minutes later they were all on stage, miming to their record of "Saturday Night."

This clip someone assembled contains the opening title and the closing credits, plus some bits in between that I don't think I wrote. The voiceover you'll hear is by our pal, Lennie Weinrib, whose memorial service was recently the subject of many bytes of weblog posting here.

Last evening, the new Comic Relief special aired "live" from Las Vegas on HBO and simultaneously on TBS. I'm not sure if it was live on HBO but it was on a delay of ten seconds (or thereabouts) on TBS so someone there could bleep out the dirty words. I feel sorry for the guy who had to do that. With some acts, it meant cutting out every fifth word or so. I didn't see Dane Cook's routine on TBS but it must have sounded like one of those 16mm movies we saw in high school…the ones with so many splices that the narrator was leaping from sentence to sentence without verbs or adjectives or sometimes even nouns.

Is there any point to bleeping something like this? I understand there are people who hear a naughty word and are shocked, outraged, offended, etc. Were any of those people watching the expurgated version? Were they enjoying it? Was there any reason to watch it there except that you aren't spending the money for HBO?

I don't plan on writing much more about the O.J. Simpson book and TV interviews but I thought I ought to link to this. It's the article Judith Regan, the publisher-producer of this spectacle, wrote about why she did it. I'm afraid I don't buy the suggestion that her own past victimhood justifies anything or is even relevant to what she does now.

I'm also skeptical about the part where she says that she didn't pay Simpson; that she contracted through a third party and was told the money would go to his children. The dollar figure involved would have to be substantial. (If it wasn't, she would have said that in order to deflect criticism.) The amount has been rumored as 3.5 million but let's say it's only a third of that. You don't pay a million dollars for anything without making sure the money is going to buy you what you want, which in this case would mean that Simpson — the guy whose services you're buying — agrees that it's compensation.

Here's what I wonder. I wonder if there's any substantial number of people in this country who really believe Simpson didn't commit the murders. A poll in 2004 found that 77% of us thought he was guilty, but I've always suspected that some people said he was innocent simply because their distrust of police (the Los Angeles ones, in particular) was greater or more relevant to their lives than any suspicion of O.J. Simpson. I'll bet it's more like 85% that thinks he did it…and the 15% includes folks who didn't follow the trial and/or are the kind of person who's naturally drawn to the unpopular opinion in any controversy. I have one friend who, if you told him 98% of America believes something, would immediately throw in with the 2%…before he even heard what the topic was. How many of those who think he didn't do it are in that category?

The above photo is the entire voice cast of Cool McCool (a series that, many of my correspondents assure me, is just as good as I remember it was). Left to right, that's Bob McFadden, Chuck McCann and Carol Corbett. James H. Burns sent me the following message about Ms. Corbett and I thought it oughta be posted here…

You gave short shrift — no make that no shrift! — to the lady voice artist, on Cool McCool, Carol Corbett. For those of who grew up in New York in the sixties, Carol was one of the great practitioners of local kids' television.

Corbett hosted a lunchtime program in the mid-sixties on the former WPIX/Channel 11, presenting Hercules and then other cartoons. Wearing an artist's smock, she would draw at an easel, present other crafts, and also do skits with puppets.

Corbett was part of that last great infusion of New York childrens' show hosts, most of whom disappeared from the airwaves, with no explanation, by 1968. Working in the studios at the Daily News building, Corbett joined the incredible WPIX afternoon roster of Chuck McCann, Officer Joe Bolton, Beachcomber Bill Biery, and Captain Jack McCarthy in the era when Sandy Becker, Soupy Sales and Paul Winchell (the last, in national syndication), were being seen on Metromedia Channel 5. There were episodes of Corbett's series when Office Joe (who hosted The Three Stooges) and I believe McCann, would pop over, to Carol's show…

What made Corbett memorable was her genuine winsomeness, a charm that has made her audience recall the twinkle in hey eyes, and her smile, forty years later. For many kids, outside of their immediate family, she was the first good looking woman, they came into contact with, on a daily basis. What makes Corbett's background even more interesting is that she was featured on a couple of the comedy albums of the era, including, I believe, one of the Vaughn Meader efforts. Nor did she just disappear into that void where so many local performers seemed to vanish. In 1968, she had a role in the Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway thriller, The Thomas Crown Affair.

Corbett also made the unusual crossover from cartoon show-host to "educational TV" when the local CBS flagship hired her, in 1971, for The Patchwork Family. Another generation of New Yorkers remembers Carol hanging out with a puppet named Rags (operated by Carey Antebi, who had been with Jim Henson's Muppet crew), and in some segments — remarkably! — film historian, John Canemaker. (In another strange bit of trivia, one of the kids on the show was a young actress named Joanna Pang, who, five years later, would be a student sidekick for Filmation's The Mighty Isis.)

When WPIX produced a fortieth anniversary special some years back — worth catching alone, if possible, for some terrific material by Chuck McCann — Corbett still looked like a million bucks. And, happily, hadn't lost the smile that had once joined so many of us.

Carol Corbett and Bob McFadden were on a number of the Bob Booker-George Foster comedy albums produced in the sixties and seventies, including one of my favorites — Jack E. Leonard's Scream On Someone You Love Today! (It's out on CD. Here's an Amazon link if you want to buy a copy.) But other than that, I didn't know much about Carol Corbett…so thanks, James, for cluing me in. It's amazing the affection some of us still retain for the kids' show hosts of our youth, and sad that the generation after us has no one comparable to remember.

Here's a short article in Salon (which means you may have to watch an ad in order to read it and it may not be worth your time) that theorizes on O.J. Simpson's psychological reasons for the forthcoming "if I did it" shows and book. As I mentioned here with regard to analyzing Presidents of these United States, I have a very limited belief in the building of psychiatric profiles on total strangers based on a few of their public utterances or deeds. It's interesting to read of the possible motives someone might have to be doing what Simpson is doing but they're still just hunches by some doctor-types who never met the guy and are guessing, largely so some reporter can build a story. O.J. himself may not even know why he's doing it.

Since I'm as unqualified to judge this as anyone else, I will. I think you have a guy here who based his entire post-football life on celebrity. His line of work was being O.J. and you don't even have to make the distinction as to whether he needed the fame to feed his ego or because it paid well. He needed compensation in both areas. The trial cost him his riches and the subsequent shunning cost him his fans and, therefore, the only way he knows to replenish his personal fortune. As one project after another fell apart or bombed, it proved that there's just no market out there for O.J. Simpson. So he figures he's got nothing to lose…might as well try this.

In his line of work, after all, you kind of need to be making money to make money. No one went for his book and movie proposals because it didn't seem that there were any significant sums of currency to be made by being in business with O.J. Simpson…certainly not enough to compensate a financier for the condemnation they'd endure for it. Whether or not Simpson personally makes a lot of cash from this new semi-confession, someone might do quite well and that might prompt others to be more willing to help him get the O.J. business going again. At the very least, he oughta make something off it.

I am reminded of something I was once told by Vince McMahon, the wrestling entrepreneur. I was producing a show on which he had an Exec Producer title and we got to talking about his empire and the performers who worked for him. At the time, Mr. T was still something of a TV superstar but was occasionally popping up in the ring, teaming up with Hulk Hogan to thrash bad guys who were still bad guys. If only to make conversation, I asked McMahon how he was able to persuade Mr. T, who then seemed to have a real acting career of sorts, to get into the wrestling biz. Vince looked at me like I'd just asked him the stupidest question in the history of Mankind (an accomplishment of which I am more than capable) and said the following very calmly, the way you'd talk to a child with a severe learning disability. He said, "In the history of Professional Wrestling, no one has ever done anything for any reason except money."

In other words, forget about deep emotional justifications and personal guilts and desires to please dead relatives and all that. People sometimes do something just because they think there's a buck in it. Maybe that's all that's happening with Simpson.