A couple of folks suggested that, in the spirit of the holiday, I put up a pointer to this article I wrote about Mel Tormé. So there it is. Hope you enjoy it.

Thanks to a Christmas Eve e-mail from the all-knowing Rick Scheckman, I corrected a minor factual error in the preceding post.

Also, several folks have written me to note that while Fields never played Scrooge, impressionist Rich Little did play Fields playing Scrooge. Chris Smigliano offers the following recollection…

It was a cable TV special, late seventies/early eighties, if i remember, called Rich Little's Christmas Carol. It wasn't a concert performance. It was a fully setted and costumed presentation, the idea being that Little would play about every major role in the story and each character would be based on a "celebrity," which basically meant there were a lot of back of the head shots as the camera cut back and forth between Little and a stand-in when his characters "interacted." The video tape editor for this special must have gone nuts after all the cutting and resplicing this thing required!

So it was Fields as Scrooge, Paul Lynde as Bob Crachit, Truman Capote as Tiny Tim, Johnny Carson as Scrooge's nephew Fred, Groucho Marx as Fezziwig and Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau as the Ghost of Christmas future. Sadly, memory fails me on the rest of the cast, but I'm sure Jimmy Stewart and Richard Nixon were somewhere in the mix.

Yes, I remember that now, and I just looked it up. Edith Bunker was Bob Cratchit's wife and the three ghosts were Bogart, Peter Falk as Columbo, and Sellers as Clouseau. Nixon was cast as Jacob Marley and instead of chains, he was burdened down by tapes, which was still a more-or-less topical reference in 1978. I recall the whole show as a joke that didn't sustain for the hour. Anyway, thanks to everyone who wrote and I'm going to take the rest of Christmas Eve off from weblogging. Have a nice holiday, everyone!

There have now been over 72,500 adaptations of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, with most of the film and television versions getting rerun during a holiday viewing season that extends from just before Columbus Day 'til well after the Winter Solstice. The other night on The Tonight Show, Jay Leno and Billy Bob Thornton were agreeing that the best was the one with Alastair Sim as Scrooge, followed closely by George C. Scott in the TV Movie. Wrong both times. As should be clear to anyone who doesn't have razzleberry dressing for brains, the best (and oddly, one of the most faithful) was the one that starred the myopic Quincy Magoo. Watched it again the other day and, boy, it holds up, cheapo animation and all. The only better interpretation I can imagine is one that never happened and, sadly, never will.

Years ago, a lady named Carlotta Monti told me that her boy friend had longed to play Ebenezer. His name was W.C. Fields and she said it was a pet project of his, though I've never seen it mentioned in any books about him. The way Ms. Monti told it, he had this idea not long after playing Micawber in the film version of David Copperfield. Unfortunately, by the time he got around to acting on it, the 1938 film of A Christmas Carol with Reginald Owen was already in the works, and the studio (Universal, I guess) told him, "We can't have two versions out so close to one another. Let's wait a while." So they did but alas, by the time sufficient years had passed, Fields's health wasn't sound enough for them to star him in a movie. So he didn't get to do it and we didn't get to see it, and his lady friend thought this was a major shame. "He would have been wonderful," she told me. Then she added, "Of course, he did want to change the ending…"

It really is the perfect Christmas story. Years ago, there was a vice-president at one of the networks who couldn't imagine a holiday show based on anything else. He kept calling me in to discuss ideas for animated Xmas specials based on pre-existing properties and no matter what I pitched, he'd shake his head and say, "What if [name of grouchiest character in the series] was like Scrooge, and three ghosts visited him on Christmas Eve?" This happened over and over until I made the mistake of saying I thought the idea had been overdone, whereupon he began calling on other, less sacrilegious writers.

It was probably just as well. Before he gave up on me, we did develop a couple of Christmas Carol knock-offs that never got produced, and I kept running into another problem. Someone had taught this exec that the lead in a story always had to be "likable." So when I pitched out a story where the Scrooge doppelganger was acting miserly and mean, he would stop me and ask, "Why do we care about this person? I wouldn't watch someone like that." I'd patiently explain that the story was about a rotten man who turns good; ergo, we had to establish his rottenness at the beginning. "I understand that," the man said. "But couldn't we let people know that deep down, he isn't really a bad guy?" No wonder those scripts never went anywhere.

Anyway, I just wanted to suggest that maybe we've had quite enough versions of A Christmas Carol. We've seen it with Magoo. We've seen it with Flintstones. The Six Million Dollar Man did it with Ray Walston as Scrooge. The Jetsons did it with Mr. Spacely as Scrooge. The Muppets did it with Michael Caine as Scrooge. WKRP in Cincinnati did it with Mr. Carlson as Scrooge. Disney even did it with Uncle Scrooge as Scrooge. We've seen every possible version short of A Christmas Carol as performed by guinea pigs.

Oh, wait. That's been done, too. (Thanks to Rephah Berg for the link.)

You see a lot of silly animations on the Internet but occasionally one really impresses you. Last year on my other site, I recommended you take the time to visit this Christmas cartoon, and it's still one of the cleverest things I've seen. Try clicking the deers off and on in different patterns.

And this year, they have the sequel! Go have a look.

These are offered up by a web company called ICQ but I have no idea who actually devised and created these wonderful little animations. I searched the 'net to find that info and couldn't locate that information. I captured the Shockwave files to disk and dismantled them, figuring that the artistan(s) might have secreted a signature within. If they did, I couldn't find it. So I dunno who should get the credit but hey, if you're out there, nice job!

Governor George Pataki of New York has granted a posthumous pardon to Lenny Bruce for saying naughty words on stage. Here's the news report.

I was never much of a fan of the Dennis the Menace newspaper strip by Hank Ketcham. It was nicely drawn but there was something about its attitude towards children that struck me as needlessly condescending. At times, it was almost like Dennis was not a kid but a pet in need of better housebreaking. This attitude extended to the TV show with Jay North but only occasionally to the comic books, which are among the most overlooked of great comics. Ketcham didn't write or draw the comics (nor his strip's Sunday pages) and they were generally the work of writer Fred Toole and artist Al Wiseman. (That's Fred above with the mustache; Al's the guy in the photo at right.) The stories were very clever and some were long enough that you could make a case for them as among the first graphic novels. In an article on his weblog, Fred Hembeck explains what he loved about them. I'm not sure he's right in identifying Owen Fitzgerald as the Dennis artist whose work he once didn't like, but otherwise he pretty well summarizes my thoughts. (Hembeck is a darn good cartoonist, himself. Browse around his site and see for yourself.)

Starting in a week or so, Comedy Central loses their package of Saturday Night Live reruns to the E! network. As a last hurrah, the former is airing what they're billing as "The 50 Greatest SNL Episodes" in five 10-hour blocks, one block per day starting tomorrow. It probably won't be the fifty best since E! already has custody of the first five seasons, and Comedy Central doesn't have the last few years, either. So I guess it's actually the fifty best of the years 1980-2001, as ostensibly determined by this online ballot at the Comedy Central website. (The voting seems to be closed now, judging by the fact that the voting function on that site is no longer operative.)

So what will Comedy Central be running? So far, they seem to be keeping it a secret but I wouldn't mind seeing some of the episodes they haven't rerun in a long time. The shows done during the absence of Lorne Michaels have rarely been seen the last few years. For some reason, both Comedy Central and the NBC All Night rerun (early on Sunday A.M.) have occasionally announced an episode from those seasons and instead aired one from the Michaels years. It was like they tried to sneak one in and got caught before they could broadcast it. They've also given the shortest of shrift to shows from 1986-1993, airing only a couple of selected ones over and over.

No word yet on which ones E! is going to run, but the channel seems so fixated on who's hot this week, you suspect they'll concentrate on the ones spotlighting current stars. I hope not because there was some really good work on episodes featuring people who don't have a big, heavily-promoted movie or CD coming out next week.

The eBay auction of my pilot script and bible for Dungeons and Dragons is rolling along. Up over a hundred bucks now with several days yet to run. Let's see how high this thing will go…

Here's Robert Scheer with one side of an issue that has me genuinely on the fence. Increasingly, government officials are leaking stories to reporters that turn out to be either not quite true or not at all true. The leak is calculated to advance the official's agenda and may even be a crime…but the ethics of journalism are supposed to protect the leaker: The reporter is honor-bound not to reveal who told him or her what they printed, in effect covering for someone who may have broken the law. There seems to me little doubt that someone in the government, figuring they could hide behind that shield, planted phony stories about Wen Ho Lee, the scientist who was locked away in solitary confinement for nine months and hit with all sorts of espionage charges that later evaporated. The stories were obviously intended to scare the accused into some sort of plea bargain and confession to a crime for which there was otherwise insufficient evidence. Should the reporters who printed those stories be compelled to reveal their source? One doesn't want to see that kind of sleazy trial-by-phony-leak tactic go unpunished but one also doesn't want to see the mechanism put in place to uncover legit news sources. So I dunno…

Same thing with the Valerie Plame leak. Someone may have broken the law by "outing" a C.I.A. operative but if so, that someone can never be caught as long as the reporter who received and published the leak can claim First Amendment protection. I see both sides of the argument in this one. Anonymous leakers and sources have helped the press uncover enormous amounts of wrongdoing and scandal…but they have also created a lot of it, as well.

There has always been a certain conflict between the two positions. Back during the Impeachment Festivities, it seemed pretty evident that Ken Starr's office was leaking anti-Clinton info to reporters in probable violation of the law. Reporters who were printing those stories were also reporting that others were charging Starr with such leaks, and then they were publishing Starr's denials. This made for an odd situation. If Starr was not leaking, then reporters who knew the charges to be false were publishing them without comment. If he was leaking, then reporters were publishing his denials, knowing full well they were lies. Either way, someone was wrong and the reporters knew who it was and weren't telling.

Going back a few more scandals: During Watergate (and before that, the Pentagon Papers), we heard a lot about the right of reporters to protect their sources but also more discussion of the need to weigh that right against possible abuse. The Wen Ho Lee case sure feels to me like a definite abuse. Before it, I felt that nothing should ever force a member of the working press to divulge a source. Now, I'm not so sure.

Another great voice has been silenced. Les Tremayne starred in many memorable radio programs, including The Falcon and The Thin Man before becoming one of those "works all the time" character actors in motion pictures and television. His listing in the Internet Movie Database is woefully incomplete but even it will give you some idea of how many times you saw and heard this man. Comic fans will probably best identify him for his role as Mentor on the 1974-75 Saturday morning series, Shazam! and he also was heard on many cartoon shows. He was the Voice of Christmas Present in Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, the voice of Churchy LaFemme and other characters on The Pogo Birthday Special, and the villain in dozens of Hanna-Barbera shows. Here's a link to an obit and I thank Tommy Raiko for calling it to my attention.

Justin Foster (a reader of this site) informs me that Thurl Ravenscroft's narration on the Disneyland Railroad has been replaced by another voice. I will never ride it again.

Eric Idle has finished his "Greedy Bastard Tour" which means (sadly) that he's finished his online tour diary. I dunno how long they'll leave it up over on this web page but I suggest you go enjoy it now, while you still can. A wonderful read it is…and certain installments, especially the last few, will give you a good idea of why it's unlikely we will ever again see the surviving Monty Python guys reunite for much of anything.

By the way: Carol Cleveland, who played women for Python whenever they needed a real one, now has her own website.

Quite a few folks have e-mailed me links to obits like this one for Harold von Braunhut, the man who invented and marketed the "Amazing Sea Monkeys." Most of the pieces spoke admiringly of his ability to merchandise odd items, and I suppose that's worthy of a salute. But I wonder how many children were traumatized at an early age because they sent their allowances off to order the Amazing Sea Monkeys and learned that advertising does not always convey the exact truth. The Amazing Sea Monkeys were not monkeys and they did not come from the sea. Worse, they did not become goofy little families with hair ribbons and blonde hair and happy (or even any) faces as seen in the ads. (If you'd like to see what a real "Sea Monkey" looks like, go to this site.) Mr. von Braunhut's x-ray specs also did not let you see through walls or clothing, either.

As a matter of fact, if you put on the x-ray specs, you still couldn't see the joyous expressions of the Sea Monkeys, which were about half the size of ants, if that large. Neither purchase gave you more than about three minutes of semi-enjoyment, followed by an overwhelming feeling of having been taken, plus one or more parents saying, "Let this be a valuable lesson to you." That was about all the Sea Monkeys were good for, except that for a time, the Denny's restaurant chain was breading and deep-frying them and serving five on a plate with cole slaw as their Fisherman's Seafood Platter. You know, they weren't bad that way.

I had a pretty good time watching The Haunted Mansion, the new movie based on the Disneyland attraction of the same name. I liked that the special effects blended so seamlessly with reality. I liked that the film started slow and gave you the chance to get to know the people before zombies began chasing them. I liked that Eddie Murphy played a reasonably intelligent person and didn't turn into Mantan Moreland when the ghosts began flying. Come to think of it, I liked that the subtle racial aspects of the plot were never even mentioned.

I especially liked that there was a plot — a fairly solid one, given that the film was based on just about nothing, and that films that are heavy in visual effects often skip over that teensy aspect of moviemaking. (Quick summary: Murphy and his wife, played by Marsha Thomason, are realtors who get the chance to broker a huge, mega-commission mansion. They and their kids get trapped inside for a night along with a spooky butler, the master of the house who thinks Murphy's wife is his long lost love, and a mess of ghosts, one of whom is Wallace Shawn. If I tell you any more than that, I'll kill it for you.)

Let's see…what else did I like? I liked the fact that in the end credits, long after everyone had left and the ushers were sweeping up popcorn boxes around me, I saw the filmmakers make special recognition of the late Paul Frees and the still-with-us Thurl Ravenscroft. Paul, of course, was the narrator of the Disneyland ride, and the opening lines of the film are uttered by Corey Burton, flawlessly imitating Paul. Thurl Ravenscroft is one of Hollywood's great vocalists, best known for providing the voice of Tony the Tiger, and for singing "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," in the Chuck Jones animation of How the Grinch Stole You-Know-What. Thurl, who will be honored with a special trophy at the Annie Awards in February, was the bass voice on hundreds of records and film soundtracks during his career. This website chronicles a small percentage of his amazing body of work.

Thurl is heard all over Disneyland — on the Disneyland Railroad, in the Pirates of the Carribean, everywhere. In the Haunted Mansion, Thurl is heard as the main voice in the song, "Grim, Grinning Ghosts," and his face is seen on one of the singing busts. (The busts are in the movie, by the way. In fact, they provide a couple of the best moments.)

I don't have a lot more to say about the film because, like I said, you'll enjoy it more if you go in, not knowing what to expect. But it's been a while since I saw a movie so filled with special effects that made me forget I was looking at special effects.

Phil Sears is an autograph collector who specializes in genuine signatures of Walt Disney. Over at his website, he's posted a long, handwritten letter by Walt. It was penned in 1923 and it's to the parents of the little girl who played Alice in his semi-animated films. It's an interesting look into the mind of Mr. Disney and you can see it here.