Everyone has seen this commercial in which The Flintstones sell Winston cigarettes, thereby answering the question of what made cavemen extinct. Obviously, it was lung cancer or some form of respiratory disease. (It may also have had something to do with overeating. Before I had my surgery, my dietician warned me that you should never order a plate of ribs large enough to tip over your car. Wise advice, indeed.)

Not everyone has seen the other commercials the Flintstones did for Winston so let's rectify that. Here's one. Alan Reed does the voice of Fred while the sales guy is performed by character actor Herb Vigran, who occasionally dabbled in cartoon voicing. Most of you will remember Mr. Vigran for his appearances on the George Reeves Superman series and/or from his membership in the Jack Webb stock company on Dragnet. Here we go…

As noted here — and sent to me by many of you, thanks — the British arm of Turner Broadcasting (i.e., Time-Warner) is excising scenes that "glamourize smoking" from vintage shorts. This, they say, is in response to one complaint about scenes in two cartoons.

Let me type that again and boldface two words: This, they say, is in response to one complaint about scenes in two cartoons.

But of course, that can't be true. You don't start chopping up your old cartoons in response to one complaint about two scenes. You do it because someone high in the company says to someone else high in the company, "You know, one of these days, we may have a problem with this." For some reason, when they make these decisions, they like to make it sound like they had no choice in the matter; that they gave in to public pressure, even when that pressure was close to non-existent. It's an excuse to take an action that is probably more economic than idealistic…and to make it sound like an act of social responsibility.

Which brings us to one of the little lies of the animation business. For years, studio heads have wailed about imposed censorship and insisted that their films could be better if only those danged Standards and Practices people would butt out and the pressure groups would back off. In many cases, that's absolutely true.

But it's also true that to protect the future marketability of their wares, some producers are way too willing, even eager to launder their shows and cut out anything that might be controversial. I wish they'd get a little more courageous…or at least consider that it would also be a demonstration of integrity to preserve works of art in their original form. If I were the guy in charge and the issue of cartoon characters smoking came to my attention, I think I'd try to find a more creative solution. And I'd start by waiting until it actually was a problem before I started fixing it at all.

In honor of this silly move, we dedicate today's video link…and probably tomorrow's, as well.

Frank Rich writes that the one big trick in the G.O.P. playbook — the assertion that you'd better vote Republican or terrorists will come by and kill you — ain't working so well anymore.

I can't find a working link to it online yet but anyone who's interested in the future of the world and the Iraq War ought to watch the press conference that George W. Bush held this morning. He was uncommonly flustered and defensive, giving nervous and desperate answers to what were mostly softball queries. I've asked tougher questions on Cartoon Voice panels. Throughout, Bush reminded me of a losing gambler in denial…the kind who says, "If I keep using my system, eventually the cards have to go my way." Well, no, they don't.

Earlier, I quoted the line that suggested we'll be in Iraq as long as he's in office. As a couple of you noted in e-mail, that's the kind of defeatist attitude that Republicans label "doom and gloom" when it comes out of a Democratic mouth. One of those correspondents, Tom Nawrocki, wrote me…

What's amazing about Bush's pledge to stay in Iraq for the remainder of his presidency is that he seems to be ruling out any possibility that we could actually win the war there over the rest of his term. Now I have no idea what it would mean to "win," but I'm surprised (and rather alarmed) that Bush doesn't have any sort of plan to win, either. He seems content to simply fight and fight and fight in perpetuity.

Yeah. It must be tough to still be at least an official supporter of this man. I have a theory that around half of those who claim they support Bush are inwardly revulsed when they have to say that. In any case, backing the guy seems to require that you maintain the jury is still out as to whether there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11…and then along comes Bush, in an appearance like the one this morning, saying that there was no link and no one in his administration ever said there was. Or you'd like to suggest that some reports of ancient, non-working weapons of minor destruction over there are proof that Bush didn't lie, nor was he wrong to say that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. And then you have Bush sawing the legs off your position, admitting this morning that there were no WMD. All that plus the man's stammering and inability to state his position in clear, declarative sentences must have his believers cringing. He sure isn't making their job easy.

You're about to see a Kellogg's Raisin Bran commercial starring those famed rockers, Mr. Jinks, Pixie and Dixie. They dress up as The Beatles for it and toss in some "Yeah yeah yeah"s…but whoever wrote the jingle seems to be referencing "California Sun" by The Rivieras. Daws Butler provides the voice of Jinks and Dixie. Don Messick makes sounds for Pixie and the announcer. It might not make you run out and buy bran but it's a fun way to spend a minute…

A quote this morning from George W. Bush…

The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve the objectives and dreams, which is a democratic society. That's the strategy. The tactics — now — either you say yes it's important we stay there and get it done or we leave. We're not leaving so long as I'm the president. That would be a huge mistake. It would send an unbelievably, you know, terrible signal to reformers across the region. It would say we've abandoned our desire to change the conditions that create terror.

We're not leaving so long as he's the president. For those of you not near a calendar, that means — in the absence of impeachment — 882 days from now.

It's that time again. Around once a year, either the L.A. Times, the Hollywood Reporter or Variety will run pretty much the same article about the plight of the Animation Writer, a breed that occasionally includes Yours Truly. The pieces can all be summarized pretty much as follows: Writers who work on live-action shows that fall under the Writers Guild minimum basic agreement receive residuals and much better deals, as well as certain important protections such as health insurance and credit arbitration. Most folks who write animation are up the creek, sans paddle. Some of them are covered by no union whatsoever. Others are covered by Local 839 which, we used to say, was worse than no union whatsoever. Under its current leadership, 839 has gotten much better but it's still unable to serve the unique needs of its writer members.

This year, it's the L.A. Times doing the honors and here's the article in question. While generally accurate, I often feel these do our cause more harm than good. As even the reporter admits, there are deals in animation that pay residuals. There have always been such deals here and there, and because of in-roads by the Writers Guild, there are now more than ever before. Still, for some reason, the articles are never headlined with that encouraging development. Instead, we're subjected on this annoying annual basis to the press telling us how Animation Writers don't get residuals…and in some instances, making it true or truer.

Here's a story that illustrates the point. In 1985, I wrote about a half-dozen scripts for CBS Storybreak, a Saturday morning animated anthology on Guess Which Network. I had a little clout there at the time — Dungeons and Dragons was doing well — so my agent said to them, "Either Evanier gets residuals or he doesn't do it." That's what agents are for, after all…to say such things. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. This time, it did. The CBS guys gave in and it was written into my contract that I'd receive — and I quote: "Residuals at Writers Guild scale." Remember that phrase.

The shows I wrote ran. They ran a second time and as per the contract, CBS paid me the same rerun fee they would have paid if the show had been a live-action show produced under the WGA contract. The shows ran a third time and, again, CBS paid what the WGA said you paid a writer for a third run. The shows ran again and again and again…and each time, I received a check. The amounts diminished but they kept on coming, just as we'd agreed.

Around about the time of the tenth runs, one of the articles I'm discussing here ran in Variety. It went on and on about how Animation Writers don't receive residuals and it even quoted a high official in the Writers Guild lamenting that injustice. A staff weasel over at CBS read Variety that day and got an idea. The next time I was due a payment, I instead received a letter from CBS Business Affairs. It cited the article and noted that according to the high official, Writers Guild scale for an animation script was zero. Ergo, no check enclosed for Mark.

My agent at the time was the legendary (to his clients) Stu Robinson. Stu exploded and phoned the weasel, threatening lawsuits and bodily harm. The weasel, being a weasel, gave in and sent me money. The amounts were by now pretty trivial; certainly not worth going to court over. More relevant was that Stu also represented writers and producers on some of the top CBS prime-time shows. So he wasn't the kind of guy it was cost-effective to piss off.

Financial negotiations in show business are largely a matter of precedents. How much they pay you for a job has almost everything to do with how much others have been paid for comparable gigs. If you keep saying, "Animation Writers don't get residuals," you're telling the industry that's the norm, that's standard. In truth, more cartoon scripters than ever are sharing in the ongoing value of the shows they write, and I don't know why the WGA isn't trumpeting that fact from the highest of the Hollywood Hills.

The Times article is, unfortunately, right about the coming war over DVD money. I think this town is heading for The Mother of All Strikes as the guilds demand a better deal for home video and the studios pursue their wish-dream of sharing nuttin' with nobody. Some observers are saying, as the Times piece suggests, that union jurisdiction over cartoon writing could become an issue in upcoming negotiations. Maybe…but it's the smaller war, the one that'll be easier to drop or postpone if the WGA is going to the mat over compensation for DVDs, cable and pay-per-view. Which is why it's even more important than ever that we who write cartoons make it clear that "no residuals" is not a given.

For years, comic book artists have handed around faded Xeroxes of a page called "Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work." This was said to be a cheat sheet that the late, great artist Wally Wood had compiled for himself and his legion of assistants. Also known as "Wood's Lazy Layouts," it was said to be his repertoire of tricks to use in composing comic book panels, especially when the artist found himself stuck with long, talky scenes.

Turns out that, though Wood himself designed the components of this page, it was actually assembled by one of his assistants, Larry Hama, after Wood's death. This story is told on this page by Joel Johnson who — lucky man — is now in possession of the original paste-up of Wood roughs. But he's also a generous man because he shares some good scans of the material with us. Artists who have copied and recopied their bad stats for years can now rejoice in a fresh, first-generation copy of the page.

Whether it's a good idea for a comic artist to resort to these tricks is, of course, arguable. Wally Wood could get away with repeating compositions but few artists are Wally Wood. It would be interesting to see — here's a homework assignment for someone — if one could find panels in Wood's work (especially the stories that were largely unassisted) to correspond to each panel in the Lazy Layouts chart. And it would also be interesting to see if you could do it with the work of artists like Alex Toth, Jack Kirby and Joe Kubert, who've been famously praised for not repeating panel compositions.

Ed Alexander, who's been quoted before in this weblog, sends the following…

Y'know, I'm not sure that the penalties Mel Gibson will be undergoing aren't more onerous than you make them out to be. No matter what amount the judge might have fined him, there'd be no hardship meeting it, so the penalty couldn't really be financially commensurate with other folks who'd been found guilty of the same thing. As odd as it sounds, I have a feeling that the loss of regard and esteem with which a large percentage of the public held him in is more of a penalty than any fiduciary penalty that he judge might have placed on him.

That said, I wouldn't have minded if probation, loss of license and amount of actual community service he had to perform weren't greater (making an anti-DUI PSA doesn't really take much energy since someone else will write it for him and the crew will film it) but I'm not sure that jail time would be any more appropriate in this case than it would be for anyone else who was stopped and caught during a first offense. Since prisons have essentially become rape factories, I think that a victimless crime should be punished through other venues if there's a damn good chance that would result in there being no repeat offense. I tend to think that the real reason I'm offended by his behavior that evening was more for the offensively intolerant behavior than for the DUI, and I think that the court of public perception is a more appropriate venue for meting out punishment than a court of law. Hopefully that sentence will be appropriate to the offense.

Ed, I'm going to disagree with almost every sentence of the above. First off, I don't think drunk driving is a "victimless crime" — or to the extent it is, it's victimless out of dumb luck, not because of anything the drunk driver did. If someone goes out on his porch and starts firing live ammo around indiscriminately, he might not kill anyone. His actions might be victimless. That guy still oughta be locked up, even if there's zero chance of him doing it again.

Secondly, I'm not qualified to judge whether there could be a repeat offense of Mr. Gibson's inebritated actions…but this was not the first time the man's been pulled over for driving under the influence.

I'll agree with the part about the court of public opinion but only with regard to the reported anti-Semetic remarks. There are laws against getting behind the wheel while plastered and they ought to be enforced with more severity, if only as an example to the next guy who's inclined to break them.

There's a tendency among people who are rich, powerful, famous or some combination of those attributes to think that the law doesn't apply to them in quite the same way it applies to the poor, the powerless, the unknown. They assume many in authority will look the other way and if someone doesn't, a well-coiffed, high-fee lawyer can always put things right. I don't know if Mel Gibson is in this category but the fact that he will get away with no serious impairment to his life will surely heighten others' sense that if they get caught with a bit too much alcohol in their veins, the punishment won't be too severe.

It would be interesting for some reporter to dig into records and find similar cases where a driver with Gibson's history has been pulled over for a similar infraction. Have miscreants without his clout or cash received comparable sentences? If not, something is wrong. If so, something is still wrong but it's a different something.

Marvel is working some sort of deal where reprints of old comic books will be inserted into Sunday newspaper sections around the country. I gather the idea is that the newspapers get them for free and can tout them as a selling point, and Marvel's costs are paid for by the new advertising they sell in the comics. Even if they lose a few bucks on the deal, it's probably good promotion for their characters. On the other hand, it'll probably make the regular comics, which cost $2.99 and up, seem even more overpriced.

I couldn't help but be amused by the item that ran today in the Register-Guard, a newspaper that comes out of Eugene, Oregon. Here's one paragraph…

The first in the Spider-Man collectible series, "Amazing Fantasy: Introducing Spider Man," is dated Aug. 15, 1962, and features the art of celebrated cartoonist Stan Lee. It chronicles the transformation of bookworm Peter Parker into the web-spinning wonder in the blue and red tights.

Someone please explain to these people that Stan Lee is not a cartoonist and that the comic in question was primarily drawn by Steve Ditko, not by Stan Lee. Also, it's a reprint of Amazing Fantasy #15. which was cover-dated August of '62. It's not dated "August 15, 1962."

While I'm on the topic: Can anyone supply me with copies of these reprints? They come free in the Sunday sections so if your local newspaper carries them, it oughta be easy to round up a few of 'em from the neighbors.

Here's seven and a half minutes of one of my favorite movies, only in Spanish.

The thing I'd like to point out in this clip from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is the scene with Buster Keaton and the lack of English won't matter. In the full version of the movie as it was originally released, Mr. Keaton had a somewhat larger part, including a phone conversation scene with Spencer Tracy. When the film was cut down (as explained here), that scene was tossed. That's right: Someone actually threw away the only scene ever filmed featuring America's greatest dramatic actor and America's greatest comedic actor.

Okay: One of America's greatest dramatic actors and one of America's greatest comedic actors. Fine. Should we argue?

Anyway, everything that's left of his performance in the film is all in this clip and it's very brief. Still, I submit it's evidence of why Buster Keaton was one of America's greatest comedic actors. He is given absolutely nothing to work with and somehow, he makes it funny. Every single time I've seen this movie with an audience — must be twenty times or more — Keaton has gotten huge laughs, just through his body movements.

This is possible because he is not stunt-doubled in a scene where they might have decided to substitute a double. (And it's just a coincidence, by the way, that I'm discussing this and Mr. Keaton's one-time stuntman died recently. I planned to link to this clip and to write about this before I knew that.)

Keaton was 67 or 68 years old when this was filmed — not as agile as he once was — and of course, he was Buster Keaton. Nothing puts a damper on a funny movie better than having a comedy legend killed or injured on the set. Since Keaton was not going to be far from cars that were going to be crashing into one another, someone probably said, "Hey, we'd better put a stuntman in for him," just as — and you sure can tell from the cut — they put in stuntfolks for all the other stars.

And I'm guessing the director, Stanley Kramer, said no. There is no way any stuntman was going to move like Buster Keaton…no way any stuntman was going to get any laugh, let alone a big one, running around the way Buster did. I'd wager Kramer decided to take the risk of putting Keaton close to harm's way, surely after discussing it with the man. From all accounts, Keaton — even in his last year of life — never shrank from taking a fall or smashing into a wall or anything for the good of the scene, and I'm sure he'd not only have agreed but insisted.

The rest of the clip is cars chasing around Southern California. The first scenes start with the cabs coming down to Pacific Coast Highway via a road in Santa Monica called the California Incline. It's one of the few locations in the movie that's still pretty much identifiable if you go there today. The amusement park you can briefly glimpse was a place called (at different times) The Pike or Nu Pike down in Long Beach. The scenes with Keaton were done at Channel Islands Harbor and the shots before and after are on Malibu Road and Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.

Anyway, enjoy it. Or better still, get the whole movie and enjoy it more in English.

Mick Dillon, who had the great honor of stunt-doubling stars the likes of Buster Keaton and Ringo Starr, is dead at age 80. He doubled for Ringo in the movie Help! and for Buster in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. This obit says that he was the only man who ever stood in for Keaton but that's not true. In the movie College, Buster was unable to do a scene that called for him to pole vault into an upper window so an actual track star was brought in to perform the feat. There are also reports that on Keaton's MGM talkies, the studio wouldn't permit him to tackle some of the more dangerous feats so doubles were quietly used.

In any case, Mr. Dillon had plenty to proud of in the stuntman's profession…and an array of injuries that he somehow managed to survive. (He fractured his skull for a scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. You can read about it and others in the obit.)

Another chapter of Peter Sanderson's report on this year's Comic-Con International.

…but a semi-important one. Yesterday, I went and bought myself a new PDA. That was the package Costco somehow managed to get to me about eleven minutes after I ordered it. The PDA is equipped with a wireless Internet capability.

So now the question before us is: Can I wirelessly post to this here weblog from the thing? Can I, if you'll pardon the techie jargon, configure the frammistat to interface with the doo-hickey?

If you're reading this, I can.

Three years of probation…loses his license for ninety days…

But the real punishment has got to be the $1200 fine. Six minutes' income shot to hell.

Oh, well. He's probably lucky that he didn't kill someone while driving drunk. The judge might have given him a stern scolding.