I get a lot of e-mail from folks who want to get into doing voices for cartoons. I'm always a little baffled by these inquiries. Somehow, the person found my website but though they claim to be passionate about breaking into the business and doing whatever it takes to make that happen, they never seem to have bothered to read the material I put up about how to do this. They just hit the e-mail link and write to ask me to tell them how to make their dreams come true. I usually direct them to this page which they could probably have found in ten seconds by going to Google and searching for almost any phrase similar to "break into cartoon voice work."

It's frustrating because some of the messages are so eager and sincere, and I wish I could give these folks a firmer route into a highly competitive profession. Fortunately, I can now offer a real good piece of advice…easily the best I could give to anyone who's interested in working in voiceover.

On May 9 at the Learning Annex in Los Angeles, my buddy Paul Doherty is conducting a class in how to break into the business. Paul is the head of the Los Angeles Division of Cunningham, Escott, Slevin & Doherty, which is one of the top agencies for folks who announce, narrate and act with their voices. I can't think of anyone who knows more about the field. If I was anywhere near Southern California and trying to launch a career in that area, I'd go to Paul's class and do absolutely everything he said. I'm serious about this.

George Tuska, who's been drawing comic books almost as long as there have been comic books, was born 90 years ago today in Hartford, Connecticut. His first comic art job was in 1939 assisting on the Scorchy Smith newspaper strip and soon after, he went to work for the Eisner-Iger Shop (that's Will Eisner) where he worked alongside artists like Lou Fine, Bob Powell and Nick Cardy, and soon proved himself as bold and skilled as anyone in the field. He drew super-heroes (including Captain Marvel) before going off to fight World War II…and it was upon his return that he really began to shine. Before long, one of the top-selling comics in the country was Crime Does Not Pay, and Tuska was the book's "star" artist — the one others tried to imitate.

He later returned to the Scorchy Smith newspaper feature, this time as lead artist, and drew the Buck Rogers strip for a time. In the sixties, he was a mainstay of the Marvel line, especially on Iron Man, X-Men and Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. For DC, he drew Challengers of the Unknown, Teen Titans and many other comics and he was among the illustrators on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents for Tower. Lately, in semi-retirement, he's been doing commissions which show he's still got it.

Stan Lee dubbed him "Gorgeous George" Tuska for good reason. He could have also called him "Gentleman George" and "Gallant George," for he is a charming, delightful man. I don't think you're on the Internet, George…but please, someone tell him that a lot of us here on the World Wide Web are delighted to wish him a happy ninetieth.

A cartoonist friend of mine is writing an article about his experiences back in the sixties trying to sell gag cartoons to some of the crummier men's magazines of the day. He would like to know the name of the publishing house responsible for Dude, Escapade, Gent, Caper, something called Gags and Dolls, and a magazine called either Army Laughs or Army Laffs. Can anyone drop me a line and help this person?

I don't think I'm going out this weekend to catch United 93, the new film dramatization of the events that occurred on 9/11 aboard United Flight 93. This is despite the fact that I keep hearing that the movie is expertly made and done with total respect and as much taste as anyone could bring to an account of such a horrible event.

When it was first announced, it sounded like something I'd want to see, that perhaps I should see. I've certainly read enough about the events of that day and seen at least a half-dozen documentaries with actual footage. But now that it's about to open at a theater near me, I think I'll wait for either the DVD or a showing on HBO. That's if I even watch it at all.

It figures to be an emotional experience. In this world, you can't always control when you have your emotional experiences but to the extent you can, I think you should. If I watch United 93 at home via DVD or TiVo, I can start it when I want, stop it when I want, pause it when I want. If I go to a theater, all of that will be out of my control. It's bad enough that it will be out of my power to change what happens on screen. Flight 93 will crash and kill everyone aboard whether I remain in my seat to see it or not…and I guess that's what I'm afraid of: That feeling of powerlessness. At home with remote close at hand, I'll feel a tiny bit in command, maybe not of the fate of that plane and the people aboard but certainly of myself.

You may call it cowardice. I call it not subjecting myself needlessly to things that may be unpleasant. It's the same reason I don't go on roller coasters or hang-glide or listen to The Howard Stern Show any more.

Some movies, of course, you want to watch on a big screen and/or with an audience. This one, I'm thinking I'd rather watch without anyone else around, or at least only with people I feel close to. That's if I watch it at all…and I'm thinking I might. Still, the problem with seeing it in a public place is that it's a public place. I don't want to deal with the grief of the lady sitting in front of me, the kids sitting behind me, the people on either side. I want to be able to cry or to get angry…and I may even feel like yelling at the screen. A good comedy should be shared with others and their laughter can make it a more enjoyable occurrence. But some tragedies — especially the kind you can't do a damn thing about — are best experienced alone.

This year's Comic-Con International in San Diego starts in 85 days. Might be a good time to start looking for a parking place down there.

Our friends at TiVo are quietly rolling out a new model — the Series 2 TiVo DT. This is not the new, improved Series 3 model that's been announced for later this year and which will shock everyone if we actually see it before New Year's Eve. The Series 3 will handle HD-TV. The big difference in the new Series 2 model is that "DT" stands for dual tuner. That means you can theoretically record two shows at once.

Here's why that may not be as wonderful as it sounds. To record two shows, you need two video sources and with this machine, neither one can be a plain, old-fashioned roof antenna and one must be analog cable without a cable box or descrambler. You could have a satellite feed or a digital (or analog) cable signal with premium channels for one…but the other would have to be basic analog cable, meaning you can't record HBO and Cinemax at the same time.

The new model comes initially in an 80-hour configuration with a 180-hour version to follow at some unspecified time. The first ones are supposed to be available already over at the TiVo website but I sure couldn't find them there. If you can't either, they're supposed to be at your local retailers on May 1. List price is $249 but there seem to be some $150 rebate deals available. Alas, that's not the main expenditure. Since lifetime service is no longer available for standalone TiVos, you'll have to pay as you go, which is $12.95 a month if you own one TiVo and an additional $6.95 per month for every other one you own. In addition, most people will probably have to shell out extra to their local cable company to get an analog cable signal as their second input and that will run them at least another ten bucks a month.

None of this sounds all that useful to me, though I suppose it will brighten the television experience for some folks. Overall, it's a disappointment. Most of the time, TiVo is wonderful but it does tend to let us down once in a while.

And here we have the Evian commercial with the naked babies doing water ballet to the song "Bye Bye Baby" from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Notice if you will that every single one of these kids displays more talent than Henny Youngman did in yesterday's video link.

Several folks have reminded me that Howard Hughes is said to have granted permission for the filming of Diamonds Are Forever on property he owned in exchange for, among other considerations, either a 16mm print of the finished movie or (accounts vary) 16mm prints of all the James Bond movies. So he presumably saw Diamonds. We just don't know what he thought of the way the character based on him was portrayed.

Y'know, I find it amazing that the filmmakers got permission. They had to submit the proposal to Hughes' underlings, all of whom were notorious for being terrified of what "the old man" would think about something. Hughes was already somewhat irrational by that time, especially about his privacy and image. This was the period where Hughes would hear that some journalist was readying a book or article about him and he'd call one of his lawyers and say, in effect, "Stop publication or you're fired." If I'd been a Hughes aide at the time, I'd have looked at the script, saw that it included a Hughes-like figure and thought, "Even if the boss okays this, he might hate the finished film and sack everyone who didn't stop it. There's nothing in it for him (or me) so I'd better stop it." But somehow, that isn't what happened.

The arrangement presumably was to allow some filming at the Landmark Hotel. As far as I know, the hotels where the movie was shot were Circus Circus, the Riviera, the International and the Landmark. Of these, the only one Hughes ever owned was the Landmark. (He also at times owned the Desert Inn, the Sands, Castaways, the Frontier and the Silver Slipper. The only one still standing is the Frontier and no one's betting on it being around for long.) The "Whyte House" — the hotel in the film owned by the Hughes doppelgänger, Willard Whyte — was played by the International, which Hughes never owned and which is now called the Las Vegas Hilton.

Scott Blacksher writes with regard to that story I related of Hughes buying TV station KLAS and phoning in to tell them what late movies he wanted to watch each night…

I've spoken to a couple of life-long residents of Las Vegas about things they remember. The funniest story was about how Howard Hughes kept falling asleep while the TV station ran Ice Station Zebra. Whenever Hughes dozed off and reawoke he'd have his people call KLAS-8 to put the movie on the last scene he remembered watching. It wasn't unusual for Vegas to watch the same segment of a movie more than once.

Talk about Video on Demand. I recall talking to one Vegas resident who recalled those days as rather exciting. Every night, he'd turn on KLAS and find some great, surprise movie run uncut and without commercial interruption. This was before home video or HBO so unexpurgated movies on your TV was a big deal. (I remember when we first got cable TV at our house — the legendary Theta Cable with its "Z Channel" — we'd watch anything. It must have been like the early days of talking pictures.)

A website called popcereal likes to scan old Gold Key comics and offer them for your downloading pleasure. They're currently featuring The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan #1 from 1972 and I'm going to suggest two reasons why you should not download it. One is that the way they have it set up, it'll take you an awfully long time. Secondly, it's not a very good comic…and I oughta know. I wrote it.

It was, in fact, the first comic book script of mine to see print in this country. Previously, I'd written lots of comics published overseas and about a dozen scripts for Gold Key. As you may know, comics are not always published in the order they're written and if you're working on a book that's in no danger of cancellation, it's not uncommon to try and get way ahead. The first things I did for Gold Key were Disney comics that didn't come out until more than a year after I wrote them.

The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan was a TV show that Hanna-Barbera produced for the CBS Saturday morning season that commenced in September of '72. As I later learned when I worked for H-B, there was always at least one "trouble" show that Joe Barbera would sell to one of the networks and then no one, including Joe, could figure out what to do with. Some years, they had way more than one. Chan Clan was about Charlie Chan and his ten (ten!) children solving mysteries that usually involved figuring out how some "impossible" crime had been committed — a kind of plot that was concurrently being featured on the prime-time show Banacek starring George Peppard. Banacek as a series debuted the same week that the Chan Clan debuted but the TV-Movie pilot for Banacek had aired the previous March when H-B was developing Chan Clan, and that's where someone got the idea.

I didn't work on the H-B TV show but heard about it from some who did. Between juggling all those regular characters and making that kind of gimmicky mystery work each week, the writers had a terrible time. One of them was an actor-writer named Jamie Farr who was struggling with a script when he got the call to run over to the Twentieth-Century Fox studio, put on a dress and make what was intended as a one-time appearance on a new show called M*A*S*H. I always figured that he was glad to do that because it meant he didn't have to write The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan.

Another problem the show had was with the voice cast. The wonderful actor Keye Luke was signed to play Charlie Chan and then the original idea was to cast all Chinese (or at least, Asian) actors in the other roles. This gave Bill Hanna a fit because it meant hiring performers who were not experienced in voice acting, which usually means long and expensive recording sessions and employing folks who can't "double" (i.e., do multiple roles). With Keye Luke, ten kids and someone to bark for the Chans' dog, that meant twelve regular actors each episode plus two or three more to play the villains, witnesses and other roles in each episode. That's two or three times as many bodies to pay as your average H-B show…and it was actually worse than that. There may well have been good young voice actors around of Asian extraction but the H-B casting people didn't find many. Several members of the cast had to be replaced…in some cases, quietly by Caucasian actors. Among the latter was a then-unknown child actress named Jodie Foster.

So the show was in trouble before it even debuted. Gold Key was then doing the comics based on H-B properties and had first refusal on the new ones. When they were offered The Chan Clan, they refused. The editor there, Chase Craig, was in close touch with writers and artists who worked at H-B and he'd heard about the problems the show was having and how those working on it didn't have much hope for its success. But the studio put some kind of pressure on Gold Key and one day, Chase was ordered to hurriedly get a first issue written and drawn. I got the assignment because I was, he felt, his fastest writer…and I also happened to walk into the office that day.

The show was still a few months from debuting on TV. Chase handed me a pile of storyboards and told me to read them all to get a feel for the property but to write an adaptation of one in particular. I don't think this was an episode by Jamie Farr and his then-partner, Eddie Carroll. My recollection, which may be faulty, is that Norman Maurer wrote it. Anyway, I was assigned to adapt it and later on if the comic continued, there would be original stories conceived fresh for the comics. As Chase explained to me, he preferred to launch a new H-B book in this manner. The studio had approval rights and the people there could get pointlessly picky about the material…but they rarely bothered looking at any issue after the first few. Therefore, it simplified the procedure to do the first issue as an adaptation and maybe the second. They couldn't very well complain that a plot taken from the show was inappropriate.

I wrote the script in one day, as I recall. It was drawn by a wonderful artist named Warren Tufts who is probably best known for his long-ago newspaper strip, Casey Ruggles. Tufts was much admired as an adventure artist but he was a slow, meticulous worker who never felt that the financial rewards matched the hours he put into his art. In the late sixties, he began telling everyone that his goal was to "become Ernie Bushmiller," Bushmiller being the guy who drew Nancy. This was a little like Sir Laurence Olivier announcing that since there was no money in doing Ibsen, he wanted to join the Three Stooges. Warren more or less made good on his goal. He later drew the Pink Panther comic books for several years with a Bushmiller simplicity. Chan Clan represented a transitional period between his adventure work and his more cartoony endeavors. He also dabbled in acting, filmmaking and even the building of airplanes. A few years later, he was killed while test-flying a plane that he built in his garage.

Tufts accepted the assignment without seeing the property because he figured it would go fast. When you drew a Hanna-Barbera comic book, you got a packet of model sheets with key poses of the characters and you could usually trace a lot of drawings right off the model sheets. Wherever possible in Chan Clan, Warren did that. But the comic had so many characters in it and they had to be in so many poses that weren't in the model packet that Warren hated the job…though he did stick with it for all four issues of the comic book. I was luckier: I only did the first issue before Chase decided my services were needed more on Bugs Bunny.

The first time I met Tufts was up in the Gold Key offices, not long after he'd drawn this story. He was just leaving as I arrived and someone introduced us. I told him how much I loved his drawing…and Warren made a curt remark about how he'd hated drawing my script. I said something like, "Gee, I'm sorry you felt that way" and then he left and I went in for my meeting. A half-hour later as I was leaving, Warren was waiting for me in the foyer. He'd gotten to his car, realized I'd probably taken his remarks the wrong way and returned to apologize and clarify. What he'd hated, he explained, was the Amazing Chan Clan and all the characters he'd had to draw for — he felt — insufficient pay. My script was fine, he said…and we wound up going downstairs to the Hamburger Hamlet for a long, late lunch. He was a fascinating man, very passionate about his work, and I guess I'm now happy we had that little misunderstanding because it led to my one chance to spend any amount of time with him. Thereafter when I encountered him, our conversations were brief. He always had to get home and put in more hours on a plane he was building.

Like I said, don't bother downloading the comic. It'll take you forever and you won't see either Tufts or me at our best. But having it online got me to thinking about what went into it. And I also recall the day when I was up in the office and someone handed me a printed copy — the first comic book script of mine to make it to print in English. You never forget your first time…even if it's The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan.

The late Henny Youngman (who I wrote about here) was a funny guy. I tell you he was a funny guy because you'll have no way of knowing this from today's video link. This is a soundie that Youngman made in 1943. Soundies, in case you don't already know, were kind of the music videos of their day. They were short films that were exhibited mainly in little juke box devices that were marketed in candy stores, bars, restaurants and other such establishments.

Youngman became something of a success on Kate Smith's radio show in the late thirties but he had his heart set on movie stardom. As the story is told, when he got an offer to go to Hollywood and make some films, he wanted to grab it but his contract on The Kate Smith Show prevented it. He begged…and the producers said they'd release him only if he helped them find a suitable replacement. He looked around and recommended an act that was then trying to work its way out of burlesque — two comics named Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Kate Smith's producers were skeptical but Youngman convinced them Abbott and Costello could work clean and work on radio…and Henny won his freedom. Of course, it didn't work out the way he'd planned. Just a few years later, Abbott and Costello were the hottest comedians in the movie business and Henny's film career never went anywhere. Today's clip pretty much explains why.

As mentioned here before, a bill looming before Congress would give communications companies like AT&T and Verizon an increased role in the control of the Internet. Earlier today, I spent some time trying to decipher just what this means. It sure feels like a dangerous change but a lot of folks opposing it are unable to explain just why it will be bad.

Which doesn't mean they're wrong. These days, it is not uncommon for lawmakers and elected officials to cobble up proposals that sound harmless or even beneficial…and they are until you get down to the particulars. George W. Bush has frequently attempted to drum up support for a plan like the privatizing of Social Security while remaining deliberately vague on the specifics. Lack of details is a perfectly valid reason to oppose a proposal…and of course, a seemingly-innocent change can be Step One in a scheme where we'll absolutely hate Steps Two through Ten and wish we hadn't accepted the first phase.

From what I can gather, the most immediate danger is that there will be nothing stopping the big Internet service providers from deciding to manipulate access for their subscribers…for instance, a company like Verizon might decide to block certain websites that espoused views they didn't want people reading. Or down the line, they could start blocking ads for their competition.

Will these and other abuses occur? I dunno. But it seems to me that there is a value to establishing loud and clear that when we go on the Internet, we expect equal access to all sites. Our supplier should just connect us and get out of the way.

I don't particularly believe in online petitions but there's one at Save the Internet, along with more details and facts. Yesterday afternoon, I phoned the office of my Congressguy, Henry Waxman, and told whoever answered the phone that I hoped my representative would represent my feelings on this matter. Whether or not the pending legislation would damage the World Wide Web may be arguable but this much is not: We now have total freedom. Any changes that matter can only result in less.

As I've mentioned before on this site (here and here and here) a group called the Musical Theatre Guild does staged readings of great old musicals several times a year and does a very fine job with them. These are not easy to do. There are no sets, a bit of basic costuming and very little time for rehearsals…all to present a show that was designed to be presented with vastly more budget and prep time. That they can do it at all is impressive…and sometimes, the results are just as entertaining as a more elaborate, polished version would have been.

Last night, MTG presented one of my favorite shows, Li'l Abner. The Alex Theater was packed with my friends and we all seemed to enjoy the show tremendously. They did it without sets (not even a statue of Jubilation T. Cornpone) and a cast of 21, which is about twelve actors shy of the Broadway configuration. Still, it worked just fine. Damon Kirsche was great in the title role, Melissa Fahn was an adorable Daisy Mae, Joe Hart stopped the show as Marryin' Sam and then Michael Kostroff stopped it again as General Bullmoose. Eydie Alyson was a terrific Mammy Yokum and…well, take it from me: Everyone was good. It's really a funny show and the cast got darn near every laugh in the script by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank. (If you'd like to read up on the history of the show, I wrote about it here and about the movie version here.)

This is a show that needs to be revived for Broadway. A few years ago, I was talking about this with Elliott Caplin, who was Al Capp's brother and the manager of his estate. There was a deal looming to bring the show back — it's never had a real revival — and I was going to be involved in revamping the material. Elliott warned me that the deal might fall through and he knew this because it was about the eleventh deal in twenty years to revive the show and they'd all fallen through. I don't recall if this one fell apart before or after Elliott died but it definitely fell apart. Some day though, someone will do it and I sure hope they do it right. They could have learned a lot about how to do that by seeing what the Musical Theater Guild did last night.

There are two more performances, by the way. One is April 30 at the Scherr Forum in Thousand Oaks. The other is May 8 at the Carpenter Center in Long Beach. I'm almost tempted to go again.

About eleven seconds after I posted the previous item, Del Williams wrote…

What was the name of the movie Howard Hughes liked to watch over and over when he was living in Vegas? I remember there was one that was his favorite but I can't for the life of me recall what it was.

It was Ice Station Zebra, the 1968 movie that starred Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine and Patrick McGoohan. According to one report, Hughes would run it at least three times a week and would occasionally get on a kick of watching his 16mm print over and over, back to back, several times a day. He had a Graflex projector with an add-on sound system that allowed him to crank the volume up to almost deafening levels because of his poor hearing. He had a whole library of films that he ran over and over including The Sting and the James Bond films that starred Sean Connery. It is not known if he had any particular reaction to Diamonds Are Forever, which was set in Vegas and featured Jimmy Dean as a Hughes-like billionaire.

The story I love about Hughes' movie watching is that he got hooked on the late night movies being run on KLAS, which was the local CBS affiliate. Just as he'd ordered his staff to have Swanson change the contents of their TV dinners, he sometimes told them to call the station and have them run a particular movie he wanted to see. To make it easier for this to happen, he soon bought the station…and thereafter, he didn't need the 16mm projector much. He'd have his crew phone the station and tell them what movie Mr. Hughes wanted to see next…and that's what would be broadcast to all of Vegas without advance announcement or commercial interruption. Once in a while, he got bored with a movie and he'd have them stop a film in the middle and start a different one. This is very similar to what NBC recently did with Celebrity Cooking Showdown.

One of the technicians who worked at the station later told the story of getting a call late one night informing him that Mr. Hughes wanted to see an episode of Sugarfoot, the old western series starring Will Hutchins. The technician replied that he'd be glad to thread one up but the station didn't have any reels of Sugarfoot in its library. The voice on the other end of the line said, "We'll get you one." A few hours later, a print of Sugarfoot arrived. It had been flown in from Los Angeles by one of the airlines that Hughes owned, probably on an otherwise-empty plane since there were then no scheduled LAX-LAS flights after Midnight. Back before the VCR was popular, home video could be kind of expensive.

From someone named Jason comes this message that I had to share with you all…

As an ex-employee of Ben and Jerry's (I was a former tour guide at the original factory in Waterbury), I can tell you why Vermonty Python is only available in pints: variety. In order to have the most flavors available at a given time, Ben and Jerry's makes some flavors pint exclusives, like Karamel Sutra and Vermonty Python, and some flavors scoop shop exclusives, like Bananas on the Rum. This way, they can keep making some of the less popular flavors that are on the cusp of going to the Flavor Graveyard™. Another reason is convenience. Vanilla Caramel Fudge is only available in pints because it was such a mess in the scoop shops (yes I also worked in a scoop shop, I was almost a lifer) due to the fact that the fudge and caramel pooled to the bottom of the 2.5 gallon tub, leaving a tasty, goopy soup. Hope that sheds some light on the subject.

It does…and it reminds me that I've never told my favorite Howard Hughes story here. It goes back to the period when Hughes was living on the top floor of the Desert Inn in Vegas. That's the hotel that tried to evict him so he bought the place.

Hughes was living in a darkened bedroom with coverings over all the windows. He would spend all day either fiddling with paperwork that never meant anything or watching television. A small, well-paid staff would wait on him, which usually amounted to bringing him fast food or TV dinners. Hughes would see a commercial for Arby's roast beef sandwiches and he'd say, "I want to eat that," so his handlers would fetch him Arby's for all his meals for a week or two. Then he'd see an ad for Swanson's TV dinners and he'd say, "Get me that," and that would be his meal of choice for a few weeks…and so on.

There was a brief crisis when Hughes tried the Swanson's entrees. He preferred the turkey over the chicken, but the turkey came with peach cobbler, which Hughes didn't like. He liked the apple cobbler included in the chicken dinners…so he ordered his staff to call Swanson's and tell them to switch the cobblers. The "Mormon Mafia" (as his employees were called) pretended to do this but what they'd really do is buy one of each dinner and swap the dessert when they served Mr. Hughes his Swanson's turkey dinner.

That's how one of the world's richest men dined for years — Arby's, KFC, Bird's Eye, etc. In the meantime, all the folks who waited on him were feasting at the most expensive Vegas restaurants…on expense accounts.

But that's not the story I wanted to tell. The one I want to tell — and as far as I know, it's true — began one day when Hughes saw a commercial for Baskin-Robbins and decided to try some ice cream. An employee was dispatched to the local 31 Flavors to bring back 31 scoops — one of each current variety. Hughes sampled them all and chose Banana Nut as his favorite. Thereafter, no matter what he had as a meal, he'd be served a scoop of Banana Nut for dessert.

This went on until one day when a staffer noticed their supply was running low. A runner was sent to buy more but he reported back that Baskin-Robbins had rotated the flavor off its current list. Someone called the ice cream manufacturer and asked when it would be back. The answer was, "Some time next year." None of Hughes' employees wanted to go in and tell the old man that they couldn't bring him the Banana Nut ice cream he loved…so they asked the company if they could make up a special batch for Mr. Hughes. The Baskin-Robbins people said they'd be glad to, but the minimum order was a thousand gallons.

Again, no one wanted to bring bad news to the billionaire…so they ordered the thousand gallons. They also rented refrigerated trucks to transport the order from the Baskin-Robbins plant in Southern California to Vegas, and ordered the kitchen manager at the Desert Inn to find space in their refrigerators for a thousand gallons of ice cream. This required several days of work and the purchase and installation of several new freezers.

The caravan of trucks arrived just in time. The day it all got there was the day they served Mr. Hughes the last remaining scoop of Banana Nut ice cream from the old supply. He finished it off and announced, "That was great but it's time for a change. From now on, I want French Vanilla."

What we have here is a clip from The Tonight Show for January 23, 1974. Johnny Carson's guests that night included Jack Benny, Mel Blanc, Maria Muldaur, Dr. Irwin Maxwell Stillman and Jim Henson…and this is Henson's spot with Kermit the Frog. You can see a bit of Benny at the end.

It's really world-class puppeteering. Henson was not a ventriloquist but he manipulated Kermit so well and gave him so much personality that you never really notice that Jim's lips are moving. (Although I always suspected that he grew the beard and mustache, which he did not have when he first began appearing on television, because they helped hide his mouth.) It's also quite charming that Kermit forgets the lyrics to his signature song…