I think Stephen Colbert's one of the ten-or-so funniest people to grace my Sony Trinitron this century. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is probably my current favorite show and he's probably the best thing on it apart from Stewart…so you figure a whole half hour of the guy has gotta be great, right? Well, I'm still assuming it will be and that the first outing of The Colbert Report was an okay first step. I mean, someone's going to figure out that Colbert's snotty screen personality needs more "normality" to play against. Out there alone, he's like Costello with no Abbott, and the whole show plays at the same snide attitude without interruption. The correspondents on The Daily Show are funny because they have Mr. Stewart there to play straight and to represent our amazement at the bizarre things they say and do. On last night's first Colbert Report, it was the other way around: Because he's the host, Colbert's odd style becomes the norm and his guest, Stone Phillips, was the guy who was out of sync with the rest of the world. Not as humorous that way.

Based on the promos, I was expecting The Colbert Report to be more of a parody of The O'Reilly Factor and other shows where the host sells a worldview and berates all who challenge it. Perhaps that's what they have in mind. (Bill O'Reilly, by the way, is Jon Stewart's guest tonight.) I wouldn't judge a show of this kind by its first episodes. After all, it took a long time for The Daily Show to become The Daily Show. Still, I have to admit I was a little disappointed by how much of the first Colbert Report was just Colbert arching that eyebrow towards Camera One. I hope this won't be another in the long list of shows that prove some people are just better as Second Bananas.

The American Society of Magazine Editors has picked forty magazine covers that they say are the "top covers" of the last four decades. I'm not sure what the criteria are. Got the most attention? Sold the most issues? Some of the covers seem to be special because of the concepts, some because of the art direction and some just because they were on important issues. Here are the choices.

I somehow missed the news item when former Saturday Night Live cast member Charles Rocket was found dead on October 7 but I saw the reports today that his death has been ruled a suicide. What a sad ending for a man who — and this compounds the sadness — will probably only be remembered for being on SNL during a season everyone hated and for uttering the "f" word on live TV. This article provides a long and compassionate view of the man.

UPDATE: The above link doesn't seem to be working all the time. Here's a link to a newsgroup posting that reproduces the text.

A few weeks ago, we were discussing whether the upcoming movie of The Producers (the Broadway version) would be one of those rare adaptations to include the entire score of the stage production. Turns out, not. "Where Did We Go Right?" was dropped. "The King of Broadway" was filmed but is missing from the prints of the film currently being previewed here and there. It will presumably be on the DVD and I'll be curious to see whether there's any indication of why it was cut because I think it's one of the better songs in the show. It also means that Nathan Lane has only one solo in the film — "Betrayed."

There are two new numbers — "You'll Find Your Happiness in Rio" and "There's Nothing Like a Show on Broadway." The latter is sung over the closing credits.

I'm looking forward to this film with mixed anticipation. Loved the movie, loved the show on stage…but fear that when the show on stage becomes a movie, it will be impossible to not compare it more directly to the movie. And that's a tough standard to live up to.

We still don't know who, if anyone, is going to get indicted in the Valerie Plame/CIA matter. But the revelations lately sure seem to be making the case that The New York Times (Judy Miller, in particular) was in bed with the Bush administration and getting special access in exchange for reporting Iraq-related news the way the White House wanted it reported. Anyone besides me remember when newspapers couldn't be bought off that way?

In the meantime, Frank Rich's weekend Times column is apparently available for free there for a limited time. Go give it a read before it disappears behind the barricade.

UPDATE, three minutes later: Whoops! They seem to have moved it to the pay section even as I was posting the above. But you can still read it here.

A few years ago, when one of the channels I was then receiving on my teevee began rerunning old Man From U.N.C.L.E.s, I watched a few and experienced a mild but undeniable shock. I'd seen those shows when they first aired and they hadn't been as cheap and shoddy-looking then as they were now. Back when Napoleon Solo first hit NBC, his environment had the expanse and grandeur of the best James Bond flicks. These reruns had obviously been refilmed since to lower their production values — or at least, that's how it felt to me. They were still entertaining in their way — I was never a huge fan of the thing — but I remembered them as being more lavish and with fewer scenes that now look to me as having been shot in someone's tool shed with a security-cam.

There may be a couple of reasons for this change besides sheer, overrating nostalgia. One is that I now watch TV on a larger, sharper screen than I had then. Another is that having toiled some years in the TV business, I'm a little more conscious of what's costly to do on-screen and what isn't.

Lately, my TiVo keeps snaring old episodes of Hawaii Five-O, which is a show I intermittently enjoyed as a youth. I watched it avidly for a time, then got bored with the endless repetition I summarized in this article. As I watch them now, I'm struck by something I hadn't fully realized before, which is how truly awful most of the acting is…and I don't mean "awful" in the way that any TV show filmed in 4-5 days is likely to contain some line readings that would set Lee Strasberg to rotating inside his crypt. I mean that apart from the occasional guest appearance by a William Devane or someone in that category — and leaving aside James MacArthur, who was always good — that show employed some astoundingly poor actors.

In fact, I'd wager a high percentage of them weren't even actors in the sense of ever making a living at it elsewhere. Filming in Hawaii, the producers probably ran through all the good thespians in town quickly and rather than pay to fly someone in from Hollywood for a bit part, they started tapping local amateurs. What I really had not noticed when I first watched these shows — which means either they did a good job of it or I wasn't too perceptive then — is how many incidental actors are looped, and not by themselves. There was an episode on the other day which called for three or four young, beautiful women of Hawaiian extraction to loll about in bikinis. Each had a few lines of dialogue and each was overdubbed by, I suspect, the same professional voiceover actress. Obviously, with a short production schedule and a limited talent pool from which to draw, the producers couldn't find decent actresses with both the proper physiology and thespian skills. They probably didn't even try; just said, "Cast 'em for their looks and we'll loop 'em later."

An amazing number of the bit parts, I now realize, were dubbed…and some of those that weren't probably should have been. But it also was done with large roles. A few weeks ago, I caught one episode — it was one of the ones where Hume Cronyn played his recurring character — where some handsome gent of Asian ethnicity played a boss who controlled the rackets on Oahu. The actor had a hefty amount of dialogue and every word of it was supplied by voice legend Paul Frees, probably at some little studio here in Los Angeles.

At times, I wish Paul had dubbed Jack Lord and given him that fey Inspector Fenwick voice from the Dudley Do-Right cartoons. I understand why someone thought Mr. Lord was a star as he does have that insistent, intense air about him — but, boy, is he a dreadful actor. Pat Paulsen had more range of character and emotion…and maybe still has. I just watched one that guest-starred William Shatner and between him and Lord, it's a wonder there was any undevoured scenery left in Hawaii when filming was done. And yet, the odd thing is it worked. Like a trained horse, Jack Lord could do just what they needed him to do when they needed it. I can't think of any performers currently anchoring a TV series who are that limited…but then I also can't think of a current TV show that has it down to a formula in quite the way Hawaii Five-O had it, either. Maybe there's a connection.

What I'm curious about — and maybe there's someone still around who knows the answer to this — is to what extent the dubbing of inadequate actors was part of the standard production schedule. Some episodes, there are several looped parts. Some episodes, there seem to be none…and that's when you get those real terrible two-line performances that I'm sure would have been dubbed if they were going to the trouble of bringing professionals in to replace anyone's dialogue that week. It's almost like in mid-filming, they had to decide, "Are we going to spring for loopers this episode?" And finally someone's performance would be so unacceptable that they'd have to spring for a dubbing session, call in people like Paul Frees. June Foray recalls that she did a couple of them…so if you're watching and you see some native girls who sound like Rocky the Flying Squirrel, your ears aren't deceiving you.

And I really hope that the guy in charge of hiring the voice dubbers was named Dan Something. I'm imagining that they're in the middle of an episode and some untrained actor gives a performance that evokes the "Springtime for Hitler" look in everyone else on the set, and Dan runs up to the director. "Do you think we need to hire Paul Frees again?" he asks the director. And the director turns to him and says, "Book him, Danno."

This is from Curt Alliaume…

There were three different series of paperbacks from Holt, Rinehart, and Winston/Henry Holt:

1. The series shown on your site, with a trim size of about 5" x 8" and uncoated paper covers. For what it's worth, some or most also appear to have been printed on a fairly cheap text stock, which yellowed fairly easily. There were also at least a couple of books (probably of Sunday strips only) printed in an oblong format (trim size more like 8" x 5-1/2"). It appears HRW reissued the books in the early '70s on slightly better text stock with new, more modern covers on coated stock (cheaper than the uncoated covers).

2. In the mid-'70s, HRW reissued all the old books in a larger 7" x 10" format, incorporating about 1-1/2 books in each of the books in the new trim size, and issuing new books at that size as well. Text stock was a good white stock, not likely to yellow. About 24 books were issued of this size through 1984, the last under the Henry Holt imprint after the company was sold.

3. In 1993 or so, the books were again split up, some issued under new titles, and confusingly some under the same titles as the '70s books, even if they didn't include the same strips. Trim size was again 5" x 8", but the paper was a good white stock — however, the internal pages don't look great, because I believe the new books were shot from tear sheets of the '70s books, rather than scanned from original strips. (Also, 7" x 10" is now an uneconomical trim size to print and bind.) These are hard to come by because they weren't printed in huge numbers. When I was director of production at Holt in 1999, we discussed briefly what to do about the books, but decided they just weren't selling in great numbers to justify another reissue. I think Topper/Pharos Books (owned by Schulz's syndicator and distributed by St. Martin's Press, where I worked for most of 1985-2000) discovered that as well. Schulz's sales were down because there was so much product. He was with a few other publishers (such as HarperCollins) until 2000.

I do admit to having the idea of getting all of the strips, including the ones that hadn't been printed before, and proposing it to Holt – I'm glad Fantagraphics was able to do the job right.

So am I…and I hope the three illos I selected correspond accurately to the three series you itemize.

Too much product may have been part of the problem but I suspect a big reason that Mr. Schulz's reprint collections stopped selling was because the folks putting out the books kept changing formats and recycling the same strips in different volumes. There were also those small paperback collections from Fawcett that featured some of the strips from the Holt Rinehart books. It got very confusing to figure out which Peanuts books to buy and which to skip if you just wanted one copy of each strip with no dupes. In many companies, there's often been a tendency to divide the potential market into two categories — die-hard collectors and casual readers. The die-hards, it is thought, aren't large enough in number to warrant catering to their concerns…and they'll probably buy it, anyway. So you cater to the casuals (who don't care about completeness) and forget that there's a middle category in there. There are people who'd like to buy the series and build a little library to read and to have on a shelf in their homes.

At some point in the seventies, it got to be impossible to figure out which newly-released Peanuts books contained strips that had never been reprinted before and which were repackagings of earlier reprint books. I think there were a few that were a combo. At some point in there, I — a devout Schulz fan — threw up my hands, went "AUGGHH!" and stopped trying. I can only imagine how many of the less fanatical readers they lost. Anyway, thanks for the info, Curt. Very helpful.

Kim Thompson gives us a little preview of the fifth volume in the Complete Peanuts series. He also writes to me…

I too collected the Holt, Rinehart books religiously as a teenager and ended up with at least the first 20 –most of those original copies are still sitting under "S" in the Fantagraphics library, in fact– and to be honest, if my house was burning down and I had to choose between the HR books and the new Fanta books I might very well pick the HR ones myself, even though they omit part of the opening Sunday panel and are missing a bunch of strips, etc. I think all Peanuts fans my age and older have a permanent sentimental attachment to those books.

The matter of which strips were "killed" by Schulz or anyone else for later reproduction is endlessly intriguing. Based on the fact that (as we've found out) there are significant holes in both United Feature Syndicate and the Schulz Estate's files of proofs, it's possible that some of the missing strips are missing simply because they didn't have any copies of them when they were putting together the HR books. (I particularly suspect this is the case when an entire week's worth of perfectly good strips were never reprinted.) As for the others…

I recently picked out several examples from our upoming fifth volume — strips that have never, so far as I (and, more importantly, my cadre of Peanuts experts) know, been collected since their ephemeral appearance in daily newspapers around the world nearly 50 years ago — and offered a few educated guesses as to why that might be.

Those are the ones posted at the above link and it gets me to wondering: Does anyone have any solid info on how the Holt, Rinehart books sold? And more interestingly, how did they impact the syndication of Peanuts? I know there have been cases where a top-selling reprint collection prompted a lot of editors to say, "Hey, that strip's popular. We'd better pick it up for our paper." That was a big factor in the success of Garfield and Dilbert, and I think maybe with Doonesbury, as well. Also, both Charles Schulz and Lee Mendelson told me how the popularity of A Charlie Brown Christmas (which Mendelson produced) had an astronomical impact on the merchandising of the characters. Does anyone know if the rise of Peanuts to 2600+ newspaper clients was slow and steady or if it spiked because of the books and/or TV special?

This is what our next strike will be about. Unless, of course, we just fold like we did with home video. You remember when certain parties, some of whom now deny it, assured us there was never going to be "significant revenue" from selling movies — and especially old TV shows — to watch at home.

Now, here's how you write an eBay listing.

Several folks have sent links that work for them to view the videos I mentioned on the C-Span website. Unfortunately, these links seem to only work for specific browsers…and not even all the time. C-Span has their video clips on an "RTSP" protocol (Real Time Streaming Protocol) which is almost a guarantee that visitors will have trouble, plus they link to some of them in a pop-up window that doesn't want to pop up, at least in any of my browsers. I can download the files but not watch them online…which I find is happening with more and more websites that get fancy with pop-ups and JavaScript and other bells 'n' whistles.

In the meantime, a few of my correspondents have argued that the chat Bush had with those soldiers was not exactly "scripted." No, in a literal sense it wasn't — though when deputy assistant defense secretary Allison Barber rehearsed the troops beforehand, that was a word she used. My complaints were not that everything was controlled to the point where everyone knew in advance what everyone was supposed to say. You kinda expect that to happen with any president and especially with this one. It's that it was done so poorly and almost in a manner so as to insult our intelligence. We know George Bush (or, again, any president) can have his aides pick out ten or twelve soldiers who are on his side and will stay "on-message" and say just what the administration wants to represent as the truth. But doing it the way they did and doing it so ineptly deserves a certain amount of ridicule. Bush hammering away at a home for Katrina victims the other day on The Today Show was another phony stunt. I dunno…I have this idea that anyone else could have driven those nails as well or better, and Bush could have used the hour or two in some way that would have helped those people more. I kind of expect him, as the most powerful man in the world, to do something my handyman couldn't do.

I keep thinking about something Jon Stewart said on a recent Daily Show, which is that this president refuses to answer questions from adults as if they are adults. The answer to everything lately seems to be, "Shut up…I know what I'm doing." That's hard to believe when they don't even know how to stage a simple media event involving a satellite link.

ASIFA is the international animated film society and its various branches do great things to honor and preserve good animation and even some of the less-good variety. The Hollywood wing is presently establishing an archive that deserves your attention if not your support. Stephen Worth is the main mover-and-shaker behind this most worthwhile endeavor and he's started a weblog to tell us all how it's going.

For some reason, the C-Span website won't let me link directly to video files but there are two over there that are worth a look-see. If you fish around there, you might find them.

One is George W. Bush's 15 minute live chat this morning with a number of our soldiers in Iraq. If Bush doesn't get rid of whoever organized this thing then it's official: It's impossible to screw up so badly in this White House as to get fired. The White House Chef could probably burn down the kitchen and not endanger his job, pension or Medal of Freedom.

The whole idea of the teleconference was wrongheaded from the start. Bush is terrible in ad-lib, chatty situations and no matter how tightly one scripts and rehearses a live, overseas remote, there are going to be moments that require a little quick thinking and improvisation. There were more than usual in this one due to technical screw-ups. I once did a TV show with a host who wasn't the swiftest in such situations and it wasn't a big deal to have cue cards poised to cover all contingencies. (First rule of Live TV: When things go obviously wrong, you admit it and don't insult the audience's intelligence by pretending it's how you meant for things to go.)

This "media event" was carefully rehearsed and loosely-scripted and someone — maybe the same someone who erred by suggesting the format in the first place — compounded the disaster. They allowed the media to see and tape the rehearsals where the troops were told what would be discussed in seeming spontaneity. I would love to hear the explanation of why they allowed this to be seen. It made Bush look like a marionette who walks in and does what his own handlers don't trust him to do without careful preparation. We all know that much of what we see on television that's represented as unplanned is meticulously prearranged. Most producers, however, know enough not to show the world just how prearranged.

How awful was it all? I felt sorry for George W. Bush. That's how awful it all was.

The other video worth a look is the press briefing that Scott McClellan engaged in later, denying to reporters who'd see the rehearsal that the event was rehearsed. I don't know why anyone with an ounce of self-respect would ever want to be a presidential press secretary. At some point in every administration, your boss is caught picking his nose, there's videotape of him picking his nose, and you're sent out to deny that he picked his nose and to suggest that there's something seriously wrong with a reporter who thinks so. For the last few years, the White House Press Corps has taken polite dictation and asked questions that don't even measure up to the softball standard. Wiffleball is more like it…or Nerf. I dunno if they're just lazy or if, as I suspect, there's some fear there of feeding the rage of those who scream "Liberal Media" every time there's something on the news they don't like. But every so often lately, there's been some Scott McClellan tap-dance that is so far from provable reality that even the guy from Fox News has to go, "Come on."

It's fascinating to watch McClellan at work. The only problem with the Harriet Miers nomination is not, as some of us thought, that a lot of prominent Conservative voices think she's not qualified or demonstrably committed to their worldview. It's that the press is refusing to talk about her experience and qualifications. Come on.

So here's the premise: Any time the news is bad for George W. Bush, federal officials up the Terror Alert Level and say they have evidence of "credible threats." This is intended to distract us and to perhaps scare a certain kind of person into being more loyal to the White House occupant.

Do you buy that premise? I don't know that I do, but I also don't believe it's inconceivable. In my lifetime, I've never seen a presidency that I was sure wouldn't do something like that, and the timing of recent alerts is making it more difficult to disbelieve about this presidency. I'm especially conflicted because I just watched a strong case made for the premise by Keith Olbermann this afternoon on his Countdown show on MSNBC. He didn't convince me completely but…well, he went through a list of ten instances where something occurred that the White House probably wanted off the front pages and then, by apparent coincidence, terror alerts (which were not followed by terror attacks) bumped the bad news over to Page A-17 where nobody sees it.

You can see Olbermann's presentation at this site. It's a bit over 13 minutes so don't click 'til you're comfy. And you can read a weblog posting that he made about it here. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to the interview that Olbermann did immediately after on the program. He talked with Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson and it was a very refreshing and rare instance of a TV news/commentary host giving airtime to an opposition viewpoint and discussing matters with him like a gentleman. I think I respected Olbermann's view a bit more because he allowed Hutchinson to deny it and didn't try to shout him down or put him on the defensive.

If you're as unsure about this as I am, you might want to watch and/or read Mr. Olbermann's editorial. We link…you decide.

I promised a week or two ago to post more about "official" comic book fan clubs but then I got distracted by a bevy of great comic actors dying on us. There will be several more posts beyond this one about the Merry Marvel Marching Society, which Marvel Comics threw at us around the close of 1964. For a buck, you got a membership card (seen here), a button, a welcome letter, some stickers, a button, a memo pad and — best of all — the "Voices of Marvel" plastic record in which Stan Lee and most of those then creating Marvel Comics welcomed you to the club. I'll write about the rest of the kit later but that record was and still is wonderful. One of the first times I interviewed Jack Kirby, I asked him about it…

ME: That record seems so weird. Was it recorded in the office like it sounds?

KIRBY: No, it was in a recording studio. We rehearsed in the office. Stan treated it like he was producing the Academy Awards. He had this script he'd written. He'd written it and rewritten it and rewritten it and as we were recording it, he kept rewriting it. We all went into the office, more people than there was room for. When you weren't rehearsing your part, you had to go out in the hall and wait. No work was done that day on comics. It was all about the record. We rehearsed all morning. We were supposed to go to lunch and then over to the recording studio, which was over on 55th Street or 56th. I forget where it was. But when lunchtime came, Stan said, "No, no, we're not ready," so most of us skipped lunch and stayed there to rehearse more. Then we took cabs over to the recording studio and we were supposed to be in and out in an hour or two but we were there well into the evening. I don't know how many takes we did.

ME: On the record, Steve Ditko isn't heard. They say he slipped out the window. I assume he just refused to be part of it.

KIRBY: Steve was much smarter than we were about those things.

ME: Have you listened to the record lately?

KIRBY: No, and if you try and play it for me, you'll be out the window with Ditko.

It was quite a relic of that era in comics. In 1967, they put out a "new, improved" Merry Marvel Marching Society kit with a different pin and a different membership card and other different items…and a different record. This one, alas, didn't feature more Abbott/Costello banter betwixt Lee and Kirby. It just had the theme songs — opening and closing — from the Marvel Super Heroes TV cartoon show that had recently debuted.

As you may have guessed by now, we're going to let you hear both of these classic recordings. Marvelite Maximus Doug Pratt has transferred them to MP3s and he says it's okay if I post links for you all. You can hear the "Voices of Marvel" recording by clicking here…

And you can hear the second record (entitled "Scream Along With Marvel") by clicking here…