If you're a fan of the 1986 movie of Little Shop of Horrors, you'll want to take the 35 minutes (!) to watch this video essay/documentary about its infamous alternate/original ending. I agree with the gent who made this video, Zack Paslay, that neither of the two endings fits precisely onto the film. I could argue for or against either of them. Still, with either affixed, it's a great and fascinating movie…

A website called Pioneer Scoop has an article up about the 1997 movie George of the Jungle which starred Brendan Fraser as the title character. Through the miracle of cut-and-paste, I shall now reproduce the text of this article…

George of the Jungle is a 1997 American live-action comedy film produced by Walt Disney Pictures. It is loosely based on the animated television series of the same name from 1967, with additional input from Jymn Magon and Mark Evanier who were both involved in the original television show. The film stars Brendan Fraser, Christopher Walken, Leslie Mann and Thomas Haden Church.

I have no idea about Jymn Magon but I know that I did not have input into — nor did I even see — the 1997 movie, George of the Jungle. Perhaps the confusion flows from the fact that my partner/best buddy Sergio Aragonés contributed some visual gags for the film and together, we did a short George of the Jungle comic story for a Disney magazine. But no, I didn't work on it nor see it.

I also was not involved in the original television show from 1967 except as an avid watcher who was in junior high school at the time. I think Jymn is a little older than I am but I'm also pretty sure he wasn't in animation (or California) when that wonderful series was produced.

In 1984, Jay Ward and Bill Scott wanted me to write a revival of George — and also of Rocky & Bullwinkle.  They were sure they were close to deals to do both but then Bill died the following year and for that and several other reasons, none of their plans finalized. As a freelance writer, I only have about two bazillion stories about this kind of thing happening in my career so even then, I was unsurprised.

There was a revival George of the Jungle cartoon show from Canada which did its first season in 2007 and its second in 2016. I don't know if Jymn was involved in either but again, I didn't work on the show or ever watch it. I call this all to you attention because it's so rare that you can't trust something you read on the Internet.

And now, this word from our sponsor…

Folks are writing to ask me what I think about rumors that the NBC network will soon stop programming its 10 PM to 11 PM time slot and turn that time back to local stations to fill. One finds all sorts of speculation around that many of those stations would expand their 11 PM newscasts to an hour and move 'em to 10 PM with network programming resuming at 11 PM. That way, The Tonight Show could get a half-hour jump on its competition. Other configurations are possible.

What do I think? I think I have no inside information on how likely this is or what it would mean. I also think it's been discussed before. NBC has long had a real problem filling that 10 PM hour with shows that anyone wanted to watch. The disastrous Jay Leno Show that went in there briefly in 2009 was in part a capitulation: "We know we're going to lose with whatever we put there so let's put on something that's cheap to produce."

That was one reason for the experiment. The other was to keep Leno from going to ABC or Fox, doing a late night show for them and putting them in the late night talk show business the way Letterman put CBS into the late night talk show business. In any case, it didn't work.  And one of the reasons they put Jay back on The Tonight Show was that Jay had long demonstrated an ability to win the 11:35 time slot no matter what NBC had on at 10, whereas Conan O'Brien almost instantly could not. For Jimmy Fallon's first few years hosting The Tonight Show, he could…but lately, he can't either.

There is no question that ABC, NBC and CBS are going to change a lot in the coming years. You can't keep losing audience share as they all have and not make some major adjustments. NBC giving up that hour would be a big move, especially since they might not ever be able to get it back.

If I were in charge, I'd try more programming like The Jay Leno Show before I gave up. It might even have succeeded then if NBC had let Jay do his Tonight Show in that time slot and call it something else.  But in a clumsy effort to "protect" Conan's Tonight Show, they put all sorts of crippling restrictions on Jay, like he couldn't have a desk, he couldn't have a second guest and he had to do signature pieces like "Headlines" at the end of the program instead of up front where they belonged.

But maybe NBC's situation is so grave, we're past that as an option. I really don't know. I don't pay a lot of attention to NBC these days, no matter what they put on. And maybe there are so many people like me, they have no alternative. The question may not be if they'll give up that hour but when.

The Supreme Court recently struck down a law in New York that prohibited the carrying of guns. A new law has been passed which places restrictions on the carrying of guns within the area known as Times Square. This has led to a new discussion as to exactly where Times Square starts and ends.

I have no opinion on this question. If you showed me a picture of certain buildings and landmarks, I'd say, "Yep, that's Times Square." The TKTS booth, the statue of George M. Cohan and the tower from which they drop the ball on New Year's Eve are definitely in Times Square, no doubt about it. But obviously, certain streets and blocks are more arguable. Here's an article about the debate.

As Ben Franklin says in the musical 1776, "Every map maker in the world is waiting for your answer."

Here's six minutes of the stage show You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown…in Japanese. This is a translation of the version that played on Broadway in 1999 (but not for long) which revised the original script from 1967 when it played Off-Broadway…

I've received about twenty messages like this today…

Mark,

This is IMPORTANT.

We told you that President Trump wants to BROADCAST YOUR NAME LIVE during his Pennsylvania Rally tomorrow for THE WORLD TO SEE.

This will be a moment that you will NEVER FORGET. This is your final offer.

All you have to do is contribute $50 or more IMMEDIATELY to have your name proudly displayed LIVE during President Trump's PENNSYLVANIA Rally. >>

Get Your Name Displayed Live During President Trump's Rally – Contribute Now >>>

Team Trump

If you donate $100, he'll strip to the waist and have someone tattoo your name on the love handle of your choice.

So how do we think this is going to work? Will he have his own cameras and some sort of superimposed crawl on the screen? Will Fox News then take this feed and put it on the air? I thought he just gave speeches which TV networks covered. I'm not going to watch but if anyone does, lemme know how he displays donors' names live. I may try this as part of my own fund-raising drive.

As soon as I post this message, this blog will have 30,203 posts on it. I have posted 214 "encore" reruns so as soon as I put up eleven more new posts, there will be 30,000 unique posts on this blog. I think this calls for a celebration, don't you? Well, it calls for something…

Since I started this thing in December of 2000, I have turned down all outside offers to "monetize." Usually, they've been proposals to move the whole thing to some huge website to attract readers there so they might be sold all manner of merch. All such offers promised I would retain complete editorial control of what I did but when I asked, "What if I write about how some item you're selling is a piece of junk?", I never got a satisfactory answer. Come to think of it, I never got an answer.

So here I remain under no umbrella but my own. I accept no paid advertising unless you count the Amazon links. They used to pay for my outta-pocket expenses at maintaining the blog but in the last few years, those costs have gone way, way up and the income from the links and donations have gone way, way down. I just paid my hosting company in advance for the next twelve months and because my software here is getting old, I'm going to need to find someone to rewrite the code for this blog.

I wrote it myself when I first adopted this design but it took forever and a month. Since then, I've forgotten most of what I learned then and even if I remembered it all, there have since been all sorts of advances in technology that are far beyond my comprehension. I'll probably need to find someone I can pay to do the upgrade rewrite. So I've decided to run a little telethon for the month of September. I want to see if I can get enough donations this month to cover the entire operating costs of newsfromme.com for the next twelve…but I'll settle, as we all usually have to do in life, for what I can get.

If you have enjoyed this blog for however long you've been reading it, try and send me some loot. Ten or twenty bucks would be nice but please…if it makes a difference in your life, don't. This blog will not go away if I get bupkis.

From December 6, 1983: Johnny Carson gets a visit from Red Skelton and you can tell how much these two men admired each other. One of Red's big laughs will make more sense if you know that earlier in the program, Ed McMahon was talking about receiving a Christmas Card from the White House and Johnny was acting hurt because he hadn't gotten one…

Republicans are upset that President Biden referred to them as embracing "semi-fascism," just as some Democrats complained about the "semi" part. William Saletan explains why he thinks the "f" word is applicable.

And Jim Swift discusses where most Republicans are going to land on the abortion issue…that is, if they want to get elected.

One of my favorite movies — if I ever make up a "Top 50," it'll be on it — is the 1975 Dog Day Afternoon. It was directed by Sidney Lumet and it starred Al Pacino, back when Al Pacino didn't sound like an impressionist doing Al Pacino. When I started going with my lovely friend Amber, she asked me to show her some of the movies I liked and this was among the first we watched together. It immediately became a favorite of hers, as well.

The fine blog of Mr. Paul Harris just led me to a fine, long article by Daniel Edward Rosen about the movie and about the true crime story on which it was based. If you're a fan of this movie, let this link lead you to that article.

Wow.  It sure hasn't been a good couple of weeks for Donald Trump, has it?  It seems like just a few weeks ago — because it was — that friends of mine were wailing that he wasn't facing any legal consequences for his misdeeds and the law was going to let him get away with everything and get re-elected eleven more times and that his big plan for the U.S. was to burn down all the blue states for the insurance money…

…and while a few won't be satisfied until he's sharing a cell with a couple of serial killers, it ain't looking good for D.J.T. and a lot of folks who used to defend his every deed are busy shivering in fetal positions under their desks. Karl Rove looks like a man who has seen the future of the Republican Party and decided it's going to involve a lot of "Donald Who? Never heard of the guy."

And of course, Sarah Palin lost her Congressional bid and, also of course, her supporters are claiming it was rigged. I have this feeling sometimes that we're never going to see any election in the future end with "I congratulate my opponent and I offer my support. I was beaten fair and square." Democrats, Republicans…it won't matter. Everyone's going to sound like an old acquaintance of mine who couldn't lose a hand of poker without claiming someone cheated.

Lastly for now: I can't believe there are people who can look at the weather news lately and still deny that this world needs to do something about Climate Change. What's it going to take? Raining frogs?

I don't know about you but I'd love to see My Fair Lady in Japanese…especially the song, "Why Can't the English Teach Their Children How to Speak?"

I get an awful lot of requests to plug/advertise/promote products and events here, many of them from strangers asking — or once in a while, ordering me — to write about what they're selling at the moment. I got one a couple weeks ago that did an artful job of phrasing what was basically "Hey, I know you never heard of me and you haven't read my book which isn't out yet but tell all your followers that it's sensational and they should advance-order it."

I also got one once from a fellow who "reminded me" I'd met him at DragonCon and promised him that when his new self-published comic was out, I'd give him a big plug on my blog. And I'd keep that promise if I'd ever been to DragonCon.

Here are three endeavors I am totally unhesitant to endorse and recommend…

My pal Jim Korkis has been working on his book about Disney's Peter Pan since Captain Hook had two good hands. I haven't read this yet but Korkis writing about Disney History is like John Steinbeck writing about migrant agricultural laborers…and yes, I know that's a lousy analogy but it's the best I can do this morning. Sorry. Anyway, Jim is very good and there is much to know about his subject and I'll bet he knows all there is to know and he's put it in this book.

Order a copy of Off to Never Land: 70 Years of Disney's Peter Pan here. If he doesn't send me a free one, I'm going to use that link myself and buy it.

Jim Henson's first TV show was Sam & Friends, which aired twice daily on WRC TV in Washington, D.C. from 1955 to 1961. No one has really done a deep dive into its history until my buddy Craig Shemin decided it had to be done. Craig, who years later worked for Mr. Henson's company, began finding info and interviewing people and unearthing old kinescopes and putting together this much-needed volume. This book, I have read and while I'm always cautious about applying the word "definitive" to anything, I find it hard to believe we'll ever see a more thorough, accurate work on the topic. He even got a foreword out of Frank Oz.

This one will be officially released on September 24th, which happens to be Jim Henson's birthday and there will be an event at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York on that day. If you're in New York, try to get to it. If you're not, here's a link to order your copy of a book which every Henson/Muppets fan must read.

And lastly but certainly not leastly: For years now, my friend Frank Ferrante has been appearing around the globe as Groucho Marx (the show is still playing on PBS stations) but also as Caesar, a flamboyant and self-loving host in various productions of Teatro Zinzanni, which is an immersive dinner/theatrical production that appears in selected cities in the United States. In this case, "immersive" means you dine with the show taking place all around your table, above your table and sometimes — literally — on your table. Some have called it a Cirque du Soleil for folks who want to eat gourmet food while they watch incredible performers.

In a maneuver I don't pretend to understand, Teatro Zinzanni has now split into two separate companies with the classic T.Z. soon to reopen in Seattle and San Francisco. Meanwhile, its performing space in Chicago is soon to be occupied by "Luminaire," the first production of the new company, Cabaret ZaZou. The first show opens September 7 with Frank breaking in a new character, Fortissimo, as its host. I'm not flying anywhere these days but when I do, I'm probably going to start by flying to Chicago to see this thing. Details are here.

Nick Stuart wrote to ask…

Since you know a lot about what artists worked on what specific comics, I'm writing to you to ask a question about the art credits on The Amazing Spider-Man comic in the late 60s and early 70s during a time where it seemed like help was being brought in for John Romita. Artists Romita, John Buscema and Jim Mooney are credited with titles like "innovator" "illustrator" and similar credits that leave it vague as to how the art duties were split up. I was just wondering if you had any knowledge about how the comics were drawn. Did Romita provide layouts for Buscema to finish and Mooney to ink? Did Buscema and Mooney split things up from a layouts/finishes perspective that Romita then made alterations to? Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

In some ways, Nick, you are trying to know the unknowable. A lot of folks trying to understand how their favorite comics were created try to break it down to something like "Artist A laid out the pages, Artist B finished those layouts in pencil, Artist C inked." Well, maybe. But every possible division of labor could happen on a comic and sometimes, the Who Did What varied from page to page. And when you see credits like "innovator" or "designer," that's probably a matter of whoever wrote the credits being deliberately vague. We do that often on Groo the Wanderer to explain what I do by not explaining.

Credits do not always tell the whole story. For example, before the issues of Spider-Man you mention, there were many which gave sole credit to John Romita for the art and some which listed "Mickey Demeo" (a pseudonym for Mike Esposito) as inker. But almost all of them were inked by both Romita and Esposito. In some cases, John would give certain pages to Mike to ink..and in most cases, the inked pages would go back to John and he'd do retouching or additional inking.

And any issue might have had some background inks by Tony Mortellaro, who worked in the office at a drawing table that was at times, right next to John Romita.

John Romita — and we're talking John Romita Senior here — was unlike many of his contemporaries who drew for Marvel. He worked in the office and was paid a salary to be there. At the time in question, Marie Severin and Herb Trimpe were also on staff but they didn't do as much of what I'm describing as Romita did.

On a given issue of Spider-Man in this period, he could lay it all out, lay out certain pages, tight-pencil certain pages or certain panels, even ink some figures or panels — and then pass it on to someone else like Heck, Mooney, Buscema or Esposito to do more work on those pages. Then they went back to John and he might redraw whatever he thought needed redrawing. Other artists who worked for Marvel at the time like Jack Kirby, Gene Colan, John and Sal Buscema, Don Heck (etc.) did not see the pages at every step of production, nor were they paid to retouch or fix that which they might have felt needed retouching or fixing. Kirby plotted and drew a comic in pencil, turned it in and usually never saw that story until he got a copy of the printed book.

So the correct definition of what Romita did on those issues is "Whatever he felt was needed at whatever stage of production he felt like doing it." And it almost always varied not only from issue to issue but from page to page. There was a very nice period on the book when the credits said Gil Kane was penciling and Romita was inking…but Romita was always involved in the plotting and he almost always erased a lot of what Kane penciled and redrew whole panels.

One other thing I want to mention on this whole matter of art retouching in comics — a practice that was much more common in comics than it is today. A lot of fans when they see evidence of retouch work in a comic assume it means the artist screwed-up and his work had to be fixed. That was not always the case. Redraws might be done because the editor or writer decided to change something about the story. Romita redrew a lot of those Gil Kane panels because though Gil had drawn what he was told to draw, Stan Lee in composing the dialogue for the story, decided he wanted something else in a given panel.

Or something was damaged. Marie Severin used to tell a story about how she had to do major art fixes in a story by another artist because someone in the office spilled a bottle of ink on a job.

And also — and I know this will come as a shock to some of you — editors can be wrong. Everyone I know in comics who ever did art "corrections" at the orders of an editor has told me of times they felt they were "fixing" art which needed no fixing or even that they were making it worse.

At Marvel, Stan Lee was always very nervous about covers and trying to find something — anything! — they could change that might make a cover 1% better. Sol Brodsky, who actually had to execute some of those alterations, called them, "Gratuitous changes." At DC in the sixties and seventies, I thought the Production Department loved tampering with the freelancers' work just because they could. I had the same problem on some TV shows I worked on…someone in power making an unnecessary or even detrimental edit in the show just so they could say, "I saved it!"

Fixes are sometimes necessary but they're sometimes made just because someone wants to be The Boss. Or sometimes, they're just wrong. I've sometimes looked back on a comic book I edited and seen something and thought, "Gee, I should have left that alone."

Here's a little mini-doc on the five most expensive original musicals ever to be presented on Broadway. According to this, they are — going from the fifth most-expensive to the first — Frozen, Shrek, King Kong, The Lion King and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Of these, only Lion King (still running with no indications it might close soon) has been deemed a huge hit. Frozen reportedly did well enough to recoup its investment before closing due to The Pandemic. It and Shrek probably were and/or are very successful in national tours.

The Lion King is the only one of these five shows I saw. In fact, I saw it in Manhattan just after it opened and I saw it on tour in Los Angeles and I didn't much like it either time. Obviously, this is a minority viewpoint. Have I ever told the story here of what I went through to see it in New York? If I haven't, maybe I will one of these days.

I'm not entirely clear what the lesson is to be learned from the failures except for the obvious one: It is possible to spend so much on something that it can't possibly be worth it. That pretty much applies to everything in life.

There might be a lesson about trying to replicate movie graphics and special effects on stage being a foolish gamble. I didn't like the Broadway version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (aka Willy Wonka) either. Then again, I loved Beauty and the Beast and I really loved the transfer of Xanadu from flop movie to modest Broadway success.

Draw your own conclusions. In the meantime, I still want to know what's become of that enormous puppet that was built for King Kong…