In 1929, MGM began shooting a big, expensive color musical starring Lawrence Tibbett, a performer of grand, operatic presence. The film was entitled The Rogue Song and it was well into production when the studio's ranking genius, Irving Thalberg, decided it was in dire need of corrective surgery. Lionel Barrymore was directing and doing a fine job of proving that a great actor could also be a leaden, uninspired director. The movie lacked many things but what it really lacked was comedy. At the same time, the marketing folks were fretting its commercial appeal, especially overseas where Tibbet was largely unknown. Thalberg decided that both problems could be solved with two additions to the cast — one named Laurel and the other named Hardy.

Not long before, MGM had borrowed Laurel and Hardy from their native habitat — the Hal Roach Studios — to appear in an all-star feature, The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Their presence in that had enlivened the proceedings and been singled out by critics. In light of that, a deal was brokered whereby Roach would again loan their services to Metro…and this time, Hal Roach himself would come along to direct and consult. New scenes were scripted to add the additional characters to the continuity and others were deleted to make room. In one interview years later, Laurel said that Tibbett had actually completed his scenes and returned home to New York when he was summoned to return to Hollywood for additional shooting.

The Rogue Song was released in early 1930 to decent reviews (Tibbett got an Oscar nomination for Best Actor) and a decent box office response, especially overseas. It was not a smash hit but the consensus seems to be that it did a lot better with Laurel and Hardy than it would have without. In some cities, they were billed as its stars even though their total footage count did not warrant that.

How was the film? I dunno. I haven't seen it and neither has anyone else for more than half a century. It is a lost film.

A few pieces of it have turned up here and its sound track exists there but there are no complete prints. Laurel and Hardy fans have fantasized about locating one, not because they expect a masterpiece but because, well, it's a lost film…one of the few gaps in the Stan and Ollie library. Also, apart from one public service short they made in the forties, it was their only appearance before a movie camera loaded with color film. It's hard to remember this since some of their movies have been colorized…but they were all in black-and-white. All except for Tree in a Test Tube (the public service film) and The Rogue Song.

Our clip today is of a bit less than three minutes of The Rogue Song. This may whet your appetite to wish the rest would someday be located or it may make you say "eh" and decide that nothing wonderful has been lost. There isn't much of Laurel and Hardy in these three minutes and one suspects their scenes were shot some time after the surrounding footage. But as we say here at news from me, a little Laurel and Hardy is better than no Laurel and Hardy.

A lot of people say they want to know what's going on in Iraq. I'm not convinced some of them do. I think a lot of people (the loud ones, mainly) want to know just enough to support their pre-existing view of the Bush administration. That which does not must be ignored or written off as propaganda or bad/biased reporting.

There are times I think the best way to know what's going on — assuming you really do — is to ignore all the pundits. Ignore the guys on the left who tell you what you should think. Ignore the folks on the right who tell you what you should think. Even — gasp, choke — ignore me. Just look at official documents and give them whatever weight common logic tells you they're worth.

A few days ago, the Department of Defense issued a 63-page report on how things are going in Iraq. I think it's reasonable to assume that the Pentagon is not going to make things sound worse than they are over there. If anything, they will err on the side of spinning events to make things look rosier.

Here is a link to an Adobe PDF of the report. I just went through the whole thing — and while I won't claim I understood every nuance and detail, large chunks of it are perfectly clear…and most of them are not encouraging. Civilian deaths are increasing and spreading over a wider area. Increasingly, citizens are giving their support to insurgent and militia groups that are providing security where the national police forces have failed, and homelessness and displacement have taken a sharp rise. Economic conditions are bad and confidence is low. And this is not some critic of the Bush administration saying all this. This is the Pentagon.

But like I said: Don't listen to me. Read it for yourself. And don't ignore the good news that's in there, either.

The things I do for you people. The other day, I bought a roll of "five flavor" Lifesavers candy…the first roll I've bought in (I'm guessing) 46 years. They were a nickel the last time I purchased one. Now, they're 69 cents and the rolls are just as hard to open as they were then, and I think the Lifesavers themselves are slightly smaller.

Orange does, indeed, seem to be back and the other four flavors are pineapple, raspberry, cherry and watermelon. This is not to suggest they all taste like the corresponding fruits. As one reader of this site, Rob Staeger, wrote me when we were discussing Hostess Orange Cupcakes, "When I was in college, my friends and I realized that they didn't taste like oranges at all. We came to the only logical conclusion: They tasted like the color orange, not the fruit." (The above photo does not seem to be of the current flavor line-up.)

So how do Orange Lifesavers taste these days? I'm afraid I'm not the one to ask. Ever since my Gastric Bypass Surgery, my sweet tooth has gone sour. One of the unexpected changes in my body is that I've lost about 80% of my taste for sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup, especially the latter. Things taste sweet but it's a joyless sweet. Recently, just as an experiment, I tried a few of my favorite cookies and I'm sure they still taste the same to most folks…but it was just a mild pleasure to me, barely worth the effort.

This does not displease me. Losing the fun of sugar is not a bad trade-off for dropping all that poundage. In fact, I'm not sure that a lack of fondness for sugar isn't a very good thing in itself. It's certainly not something I would have imagined I could ever have…but I gave up Pepsi-Cola and other sugary, bubbly soft drinks back in February with surprising ease. In fact, I'll tell you when I did it. It was those four days when I was hospitalized for Cellulitis. I drank no soda in the hospital and didn't miss it. I already knew I'd probably be having the Gastric Bypass Surgery before the year was out, and that it required the abandonment of carbonated beverages and caffeine. So I decided to see if I could keep the soda abstinence going and I haven't popped a pop-top on a pop since.

Which really amazes me. Once upon a time, I went through a six-pack per day and got severe headaches when I tried to withdraw. I didn't think I could give up Pepsi any more than I could give up exhaling. Guess I don't know me as well as I thought I did.

Since the surgery, I can and do eat sugar but it has to be in moderation. If I ingest too much, I am liable to endure an attack they call "dumping." Symptoms include such fun things as bloating, nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, weakness, sweating, and rapid heartbeat. I have never experienced this but I have read articles (like this one) from people who have and it sounds like one of those experiences you don't need to ever experience.

But I wasn't afraid to try a Lifesaver. One Lifesaver only contains 10 calories and 2 grams of sugar and I guess it momentarily reminded me of being a kid and getting my bi-annual (birthday and Christmas) gift of Lifesavers from Uncle Nate. 46 years from now, I'll have to try another one. Hope they still have the orange then.

Over on his weblog, my buddy Earl Kress mentions one of my favorite Hanna-Barbera characters…Chopper the Bulldog from the Yakky Doodle cartoons. It got me to wondering how many people know that Chopper was sorta, kinda inspired by the great western actor, Chill Wills.

In 1961 when the Yogi Bear show was in production (with the Yakky cartoons as a segment), Mr. Wills was in the news, at least in Hollywood. The year before, he'd had a showy role in the John Wayne movie, The Alamo, and there was talk of him winning an Academy Award for his performance. Much of this talk came from Chill Wills, who took out a series of costly ads in the Hollywood trade papers, first to tout himself for a nomination and then, after he was nominated, to ask people to vote for him.

In later years, it would become fairly standard to see the pages of Variety and Hollywood Reporter crammed with ads urging members of the Academy to vote this way or that way. At the time though, it wasn't such a well-established industry custom…and even later when it was, the ads would usually not be so personal. Today, there will be pages aplenty suggesting you vote for Nicolas Cage but those pleas are not purchased by Nicolas Cage or signed by him.

The Wills ads struck many as excessive and offensive. In one, he said that the producers of The Alamo were praying as hard for Chill Wills to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar as the defenders of the actual Alamo had prayed for their lives before battle. Others were worse, though late in the campaign he seems to have realized he was alienating voters and toned it down. After the balloting closed, he took out a full pager that said, "Win, lose or draw, you're all my cousins." This prompted a response ad from Groucho Marx who wrote, "Dear Chill Wills…Am happy to be your cousin but I voted for Sal Mineo." When the envelope was opened, it turned out that most people had voted for their cousin, Peter Ustinov, for his role in Spartacus, and it became industry legend that Chill had put a chill on his own chances with his trade ads. (Twelve years later, the same would be said of the campaign mounted on behalf of Diana Ross for her performance in Lady Sings the Blues.)

So one day in the midst of the voting in '61, Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and their creative team are working on their newest show. They'd decided to build a cartoon around a little duck character who'd appeared occasionally in their earlier cartoons. He'd been called Itty Bitty Buddy (or Iddy Biddy Buddy) when he'd appeared in earlier H-B cartoons and a slightly different version of the duck had popped up in the Tom & Jerry cartoons that Bill and Joe had directed for MGM. They'd named his newest identity Yakky Doodle Duck and now needed a strong supporting character to play off him. They found a direction for that character when…

Well, if we believe something Barbera once told me — and I'm not saying I do — the phone rang and it was Chill Wills, calling to ask J.B. to vote for him. Joe told me he promised Wills he would, got off the phone and thought, "Gee, what a great voice…and that manner. That's just what our duck needs." Before the day was out, Chopper the Bulldog was born.

Cute story…and maybe it's even true. Or maybe Joe just noticed one of Chill's ads in Variety and that provided the inspiration. A lot of Hanna-Barbera characters started with some reference point to a comedian or character actor — Jimmy Durante for Doggie Daddy, Bert Lahr for Snagglepuss, Joe E. Brown for Peter Potamus, etc. Either way, Chill Wills inspired Chopper.

Since an Academy Award Nominee wasn't about to do voicework for what Hanna-Barbera paid, an actor with a similar vocal quality had to be found. Joe Barbera looked as far as Channel Five on his TV, hiring the local Bozo the Clown, the gravelly-voiced Vance Colvig, Jr. Vance was a second-generation Bozo. His father was Vance "Pinto" Colvig, the first Bozo on records and on local TV. Below is a photo from the 1989 Al Yankovic movie, UHF. That's Vance…and I'm sorry I couldn't find a better photo of him.

(Finding the voice of Yakky Doodle was a little harder. For that, Barbera had to go all the way over to Channel Thirteen…to an afternoon kids' show called Cartooneroony, hosted by "Uncle" Jimmy Weldon and his duck puppet, Webster Webfoot. Weldon did a great duck voice for Webster and it also became the voice of Yakky.)

And that's about all I have to contribute to the subject of Chopper the Bulldog. Yeah, I know: A lot more than you wanted to know. But that's what the Internet is for.

[UPDATE: Jim Engel just sent me an e-mail asking me if the Chopper characterization wasn't based on the Wallace Beery role in the movie, The Champ. He's right and I meant to mention that. But the character started with the Chill Wills voice, the same way The Jetsons started out to be based on The Life of Riley and turned somewhat into Blondie along the way. So I guess I did have more to contribute.]

Jerry Lewis is doing his 41st Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon this weekend. The entire network telecast from Las Vegas is 21 and a half hours but some cities only run portions of it and some let their local segments lengthen the broadcast. In Los Angeles, for instance, the entire show will run 23 hours on KCAL Channel 9…I think. My TiVo is somewhat confused because the schedule has the festivities broken into four separate parts. The first and third are called The 2006 Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon while the second and fourth are called The 2006 Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon (Cont'd). If you want to record the whole thing, you need to mark all four sections.

Thanks to my little satellite whatzis, I can also watch on it WGN in Chicago. They're running fifteen hours of it, then they go away for a baseball game. The Pittsburgh Pirates and the Chicago Cubs are currently locked into a life-and-death struggle for last place in the National League Central Division and you don't want to miss that. After they duke it out, the station will cut back to Jer for around two and a half hours.

Wanna know about guests? The following is from a press release…

MDA National Chairman and Telethon star Jerry Lewis, joined by anchor Ed McMahon and co-hosts, Jann Carl, Tom Bergeron, Norm Crosby, Billy Gilman, Larry King, Tony Orlando and Bob Zany. This year's on-air talent includes Celine Dion, Paul Anka, Goo Goo Dolls, Lee Greenwood, Dave Matthews Band, Joshua Bell, Jo Dee Messina, Daddy Yankee, Cheap Trick, Rita Rudner, Neil Patrick Harris, Ray Romano, William Shatner, Donald Trump, Sean Hayes, Lance Burton, Clint Holmes, Louie Anderson, George Wallace, Julie Roberts, Maureen McGovern, George Clinton, Village People, the casts of Phantom of the Opera, Shout, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, The Color Purple and The Wedding Singer and more.

Not bad…but still a far cry from the days when Sinatra would come on to sing and would bring along his friend, Dean Martin. I linked to a fuzzy and brief clip of that moment here but we now have access to a longer version that includes more of the performances before and after. Here's Part One, which you may or many not want to skip. It's Frank singing before bringing Dino on and it runs a little over eight minutes…

And now, here's Part Two, in which Sinatra brings Dean onto the stage and the audience goes understandably crazy. This part runs a little under ten minutes…

Finally, here's Part Three, which is mostly Dean Martin carrying on for four minutes. I suspect an alien from another planet could watch this and find it hard to believe the man ever made a living as a professional entertainer…but I still enjoy watching Dean even when he's phoning it in from the wrong area code. There will be nothing like this on this year's telethon but there will be Shatner. That's something.

A new Fantastic Four cartoon show is about to debut. I have no idea if it'll be any good but its press releases are a little screwy. Here's an excerpt from one of them…

The original 1967 animated action-adventure series, THE FANTASTIC FOUR, premiered on ABC with 19 half-hour episodes produced by Hanna-Barbera in association with Marvel Comics. The complex characters were conceived by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who then enlisted the help of Hanna-Barbera to create a half-hour broadcast network series. It was faithful to the source, featuring plots and characters straight from the original comics series and complete with character designs from the late acclaimed artist Alex Toth.

Itemizing the bad phraseology may be unnecessary for readers of this site but just in case: The Fantastic Four property was indeed created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby…but it was created in 1961 with Kirby handling the character designs and no Hanna-Barbera involvement. Years later, a cartoon show was produced by H-B, which is when Mr. Toth's design work was done in '67 as he distilled the Kirby models down for animation purposes, not as part of the creation of the characters. Also, there were twenty episodes (not 19) produced.

I never know what to make of things like this. Even if they handed the job of writing the press release to someone who knew nothing about the comic book or its first animated version, you could find all this info with about two minutes of Googling. The show is financed by a French studio and produced over there so I'm guessing the problem is that the press release was authored in that language and then someone did a bad translation job. Makes you wonder if wars don't sometimes get fought because of mistakes of this sort.

Today is the eightieth birthday of one of the world's great comic artists, Gene Colan.

Gene is one of those guys who was so prolific in comics that we all took him for granted. I have the theory that if he'd only drawn a couple dozen stories in the sixties and then disappeared, fans would still be haunting the newsstands with glazed eyes, wondering aloud, "When is he coming back?" Instead, Gene just did good, solid work from when he got into the field (around 1944) until…gosh, he's still drawing the occasional story so I guess it's 62 years and counting.

For about the first ten years of that incredible career, his work was okay but unremarkable. Some time around '54 — I think it was on a Tuesday — he seems to have suddenly decided to stop drawing the way everyone else was drawing (in order to please editors) and to start drawing like himself (to please himself). That was when the Gene Colan we know and love was really born. By the late fifties, he had a style that was all his own…and one reason it was all his own was that most other artists didn't draw well enough to replicate it. He seized control of dark and light in his panels, working in and out of shadow and posing his people so that even when what they were saying or doing was a yawn, you were at least mesmerized by the way they were lit. Dull scripts — and he was handed hundreds — sparked to life and his people actually breathed, right there before your eyes on the cheaply-printed comic book page.

In the mid-sixties, he began applying all this to Marvel Super-Hero comics, becoming the first guy in the place to break significantly with the Jack Kirby template…yet he still managed to do what Jack did: Make everything he drew interesting. He worked on almost every franchise in the place but most notably on Iron Man, Sub-Mariner, Daredevil, Dr. Strange and (later and perhaps best), Tomb of Dracula. His delicate pencil work was inked by just about everyone who came within a block of the Marvel offices but most didn't understand the unique approach he was taking, working not in line and not in tone but in some middle ground of his own invention. I loved the work at the time but later, as I become more familiar with his pencil art, I came to realize how we only got 40%-60% of what he put into his pages. His best inkers — the Tom Palmers, the Frank Giacoias, etc. — managed to retain maybe 75%. Even Gene, on those rare occasions when they'd let him ink his own work, could only manage to keep 90%. He really was and is an incredible craftsman in graphite, and it's unfortunate that he did so much of his art at a time when comic book printing techniques were unworthy of him.

I've been fortunate to work with Gene on one or two occasions and would drop everything to do it again. Stan Lee wasn't kidding when he dubbed the guy "Gentleman Gene" because Colan truly is a gentleman, along with being a gentle man. He was never loud. He was never flashy. Those who worked with him rarely heard him complain. He just hunkered down and drew comics about as well as they can be drawn.

If you're a fan, drop by The Official Gene Colan Website. There, you can read a bio and interviews and see many examples of Gene at his best. You can also see the wonderful sketches he's now doing and if you're smart, order one…and there's also an e-mail link there if you'd like to drop Gene a note and wish him a happy birthday. Or even eighty more.

I always loved these expensive promos that networks used to do to "sell" you on their new fall season. The idea always seemed to be to embed the notion — which I doubt any sentient human being ever bought — that there was something so wonderful and hip and crowd-pleasing about their schedule that you should just leave your dial tuned to their station all year. I'm sorry they so rarely make these spots these days. You always got a catchy jingle — to the point where many of them would reverberate in your skull, long after the shows they were trying to sell had been cancelled. And as in this one, you often got the spectacle of the season's stars participating, smiling like they really want to be a part of it all. Here's what ABC did in 1978 along those lines.

We are experiencing e-mail problems at this time. A few of your messages to me may have bounced. A few more may still bounce. Some might not bounce but might not get through. All will be fixed eventually. Sorry.

As I said last night here, I don't consider Johnny Carson's remarks in that clip to be racist.

What are racist remarks? Well, these kinda qualify, wouldn't you say?

It's starting to look like one other Senator, in addition to Ted Stevens, placed a "secret hold" on that bill to make government spending more accountable. It's not confirmed yet but Robert Byrd may have also done the deed. For what it's worth, my opinion of Byrd is not as low as my opinion of Stevens…but it's close.

Over at Cartoon Brew, they're reporting the death of veteran cartoonist Ed Benedict at the age of 94. Which would mean he was almost born in the same year as the cave people he drew so well for The Flintstones. Ed was mainly a designer for animation and he is generally given credit for the early Hanna-Barbera shows including Ruff 'n' Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and those cave people. (There are or were a few old-timers around who felt that others, like Dick Bickenbach, did more on those shows than is sometimes acknowledged. I'm agnostic on the issue but I thought it should be acknowledged.)

In any case, Benedict was certainly a terrific cartoonist…the kind whose very presence on a project could set the style for everyone else around him. He was especially effective in the fifties as studios were moving away from the ornate Disney look and wrestling with the new, minimalist U.P.A. look for animation. Benedict could work in either style but he was especially good at bridging the gap, managing to simplify the animation in a way that increased the expression and personality instead of diminishing it. Just drawing with fewer lines is simple. Anyone can do it. It takes the kind of talent Ed Benedict had to use fewer lines but to make them count for so much.

The Cartoon Brew obit and attendant links will tell you more about Ed Benedict than I ever could. I never met the man but I sure met and loved the drawings.

Back on August 21, George W. Bush held a press conference that…well, let's put it this way. You have your people out there who think the man is a terrible president and that there's something wrong with him in terms of being able to think or communicate. And you have your people who think he's a great leader and that he's fully in command of everything he's saying and doing. Both groups seem to think that this particular press conference inarguably proves their case. If you'd like to watch it, you can decide for yourself.

At the time it occurred, I couldn't link to it because the only place I could find the whole thing was the C-Span website, which seems to receive its tech support from Larry the Cable Guy. But Steve Billnitzer, a loyal reader of this site, figured out how to view it despite Larry's best efforts.

This link should work in most browsers. You'll need to have Real Player installed to view the clip, which runs a bit less than an hour. You'd think, in this era of Google Video and You Tube and ifilm that someone would establish an online source for all the major political speeches and press conferences. Yeah, you'd think that.

By the way: That's an rtsp link, those letters standing for Real Time Streaming Protocol. In theory, your browser is supposed to connect to an rtsp link and allow you to view the clip but not to download it…and in many cases, you don't want to download it to your harddisk because those files can be very large. But if you come across an rtsp link and you want to download it, it's a cinch with Net Transport, a file downloader that can download almost anything and run manage several download links at the same time. You can download a trial version of the program at the Net Transport website. Sometimes what you happen to do is open a media file in Windows Media Player or Real Player's standalone player, look on the Properties or Clip Info page and get the exact web address from which the media file is coming, then paste that address into Net Transport.

See what wonderful stuff you can learn from this site? I'm feeling so helpful today that I think I'm going to put up another ad to encourage tipping. My PayPal account is low and I need to buy some real odd junk this week.

Here's our last clip from The Night of 100 Stars, at least for now. It's in two parts which total around 11 and a half minutes.

Here's some trivia for you. Star #4 wrote the tune he's conducting. Star #10 went to junior high school with me. You may notice an odd similarity between Star #17 and Star #18. And you're about to see the lousiest part that Maureen Stapleton ever had in her whole career, as well as Joe Namath in a moment almost as embarrassing as when he modelled panty hose or when he was drunk and trying to kiss a lady reporter…

Okay, that's Part One. Now, click and watch Part Two…

To the surprise of absolutely no one, it turns out that "The Masked Senator" who's held up a bi-partisan bill to make government spending more transparent is Ted Stevens of Alaska. He was unmasked by bi-partisan detective work done on a thing called the Internet which, as I understand it, is a series of tubes.

So no one's surprised it's Stevens. What's amazing is his stated reason for doing what he did. Ted Stevens is the guy who fought for and got $453 million to build a bridge in his home state…a bridge that would only be of use to a very small group of people.

So then along comes this bill to establish a database of government spending so that our elected officials will be more accountable as to how they spend our money. The bill has wide support from both sides of the aisle and the database is only supposed to cost $15 million. So why does Stevens try to stop it? Because he's afraid it will cost too much.

You have to feel sorry for people who have to write political satire these days. How do you stay ahead of stuff like that?