I recently posted a guide to the running times of the various versions of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. With the help of my buddy Earl Kress, I'm slowly assembling a F.A.Q. about the movie — but since several of you have written to ask which version you should buy, I thought I'd quote this section that Earl wrote…

The laserdisc does indeed have the Overture, Entr'acte and Exit Music, while the DVD only has the Entr'acte and the Exit Music. Why did they leave off the Overture? Your guess is as good as mine and probably equally as dopey as the person that made the decision.

But worst of all, the color timing on the DVD is horrendous. I saw Mad World once in 70mm Cinerama in 1964 and many more times in 35mm. I vividly remember the opening title card as being a color I'll call "yellow ochre." It's often used as the color of sky in animated cartoons, although I have no idea how that convention started. The color on the "restored" laserdisc is pretty close to what I remember. The color on the DVD is red — fingernail polish, blood, Mickey Mouse shorts red! In fact, the background color is supposed to change several times during the title sequence, which it does on the laserdisc. It just sits there being red on the DVD.

The other problem with the DVD is the aspect ratio is not as wide as it is on the laserdisc. Titles that fit on my screen on the laser, are off the screen on the DVD. Basically, except to have a copy of the 154 minute version, the DVD is worthless.

Count me among those that think that the 154 minutes is the real movie, since it looks like the reconstruction is doomed. Still, I'd at least like to see a properly color-corrected, in the right aspect ratio DVD with the Overture, Entr'acte, Exit Music AND Intermission Police Calls.

And by the way, what the hell is the Smiler Grogan case?

Didn't you hear about the time someone robbed the payroll at the Tuna Cannery of $350,000? It was in all the papers. Rumor has it the thief buried the money somewhere in Santa Rosita State Park under a big waterfall. Or maybe it was a windmill. Or a woodpecker. Or…

I'm watching Democrats who want to be president participating in this "America Rocks the Vote" forum. The premise is that it's a town hall meeting in front of "young people." At this moment, any of these folks could get my support if they could formulate an answer without using the term "young people" as if they were talking about some other species. Bonus points if they can avoid acting like that other species has some massive inferiority complex and needs to be reassured that their views matter.

If you judge the candidates strictly on what they say, Al Sharpton is the one uttering the most quotable, non-hackneyed things…though he just forgot himself and repeated a joke he used five minutes ago. Since Sharpton has about the same chance of winning as I do, it's not great for the Democrats that he's stealing some spotlight and making the stiff guys look stiffer. Hope he's this funny when he hosts Saturday Night Live.

So far, the only spark of life among those with a shot at the title came when John Kerry began talking about his military history and the things he's done in Congress to oppose certain invasions, locate P.O.W.s, expose the Ollie Norths, etc. I doubt you can win the White House by running against past wars but it was nice to hear a note of passion amidst the same ol' catch phrases.

Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick return to The Producers for 112 performances. And they'll probably be sold-out by the time you read this.

Over at the Playboy website — which, yes, we know you only surf to for the articles — there's a horny interview with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Read it if you dare.

Before I forget, I wanted to recommend…well, any issue of Roy Thomas's magazine of comic book history, Alter Ego, but especially the one I just received. Dr. Michael J. Vassallo is a dentist by day, and the world's foremost authority on Atlas Comics by night. (For the uninformed: Before Marvel Comics was Marvel Comics, the company went by many names but most folks referred to it as Timely Comics in the forties and Atlas in the fifties.) For this issue of Alter Ego, Dr. Michael has assembled an outstanding history of the career of Joe Maneely, a great and amazingly-prolific artist who worked tirelessly for Atlas for many years, much to the delight of editor Stan Lee. Stan has called Maneely his favorite illustrator of the time and cited him, rightly, as a guy who could draw anything: super-heroes, war, westerns, funny duck comics, you-name-it. Maneely was very fast and very good, and comic historians have been known to speculate — as Vassallo does in this article — on what might have happened, had Maneely not perished in a grisly train accident in 1958 at age 32.

Had that not happened, he would presumably have been working for Stan in the early sixties when Jack Kirby was also there and they began reintroducing and reinventing the super-hero comic with The Fantastic Four. In an upcoming issue of The Jack Kirby Collector, I'll add in my speculations for whatever they're worth. But right now, I want to commend this Alter Ego to you. It's really a terrific, well-researched article — one of many that have turned up in that magazine.

Is the Bush administration rewarding political donors with big Iraq-connected contracts? The article says yes. This article says no. They report, you decide.

My pal Aaron Barnhart provides a profile of the Fox News Liberal, Alan Colmes…or as Al Franken likes to call him, Alan Colmes.

Is the economy really on a rebound? I'll believe that when more people start using Paypal to donate money to this site.

Here's an article by Bill Carter on the relative ratings of Leno and Letterman. This one should be read the way you read any political report, with the spokesperson for each side madly spinning their weaknesses as strengths and blaming others for their own shortcomings. And keep in mind that neither show is in any jeopardy of being cancelled. This is, for the folks who put the shows together, all about ego. And for the networks, it's all about trying to make profitable shows even more profitable.

Michael Moore provides the foreword for the new collection of Aaron McGruder's comic strip, Boondocks. I think both men take their arguments way too far so it's a good match. And not a bad foreword.

A few weeks ago, a lot of sites (including this one) quoted Simpsons creator Matt Groening with a story about Fox News threatening to sue his show for an animated parody that, Fox reportedly felt, might be confused with a real newscast. According to this article, Matt now says he was kidding.

One of our funnier stand-up comedians, Margaret Cho, has her own weblog. Very entertaining. Read it and read back a few weeks while you're at it.

So how is that The Producers, once the hottest ticket in the history of Broadway, is not what it used to be? Here's an article entitled, "The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Blockbuster." (New York Times registration required)

Late Saturday nights (i.e., Sunday mornings), NBC airs a "classic" episode of Saturday Night Live in most cities. Unlike the reruns on Comedy Central and E!, these "NBC Up All Night" reruns are not cut down to an hour, so they include all the segments that are cut when that is done. Like the off-network reruns, they have usually avoided the years when SNL was not produced by Lorne Michaels. For a time, they were selected mainly from the Phil Hartman-Dana Carvey years with an occasional pick from the first cast. The last six-or-so months, they've all been recent enough to include shows with Will Farrell and Cheri Oteri. Neglected in all this were some decent and occasionally fine shows from the years when Mr. Michaels was away — shows that featured Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Martin Short and other very fine performers. For some reason, NBC has occasionally announced a rerun from one of those seasons, then aired a Lorne-produced episode instead.

Until last night. The listings said that the 11/1 rerun would be the 11/3/84 show hosted by Michael McKean, and that the 11/8 rerun will be the 11/10/84 show, which was hosted by George Carlin — both from non-Lorne years. I set the TiVo for last night but fully expected to wake up this morn and find an episode with Darrell Hammond. Instead, they ran the Carlin one, the one announced for next week. I'm watching it now and you know what? It's not bad. Some of the sketches are funny and there's that "time capsule" interest of jokes about how Walter Mondale just lost the election and such. The cast includes Crystal, Guest, Short, Harry Shearer, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Gary Kroeger, Mary Gross, Jim Belushi, Rich Hall and Pamela Stephenson. At the moment, Shearer is doing an uncanny impression of Alan Thicke interviewing Short as his aged songwriter character, Irving Cohen.

I dunno what they'll be running next week. The official NBC release says it's the episode they ran this morning. TiVo says it's a recent one with Rachel Dratch, Jimmy Fallon, etc. If you're interested in the less-remembered eras of SNL, you might want to record it. There's no telling what will actually air.

I royally screwed up my explanation of the Three Mouseketeers comic book earlier and I can't explain why because I know this stuff. I don't know my federal tax I.D. number or how to find the volume of a cone, but I know stuff like this. So ignore what I wrote earlier and replace that knowledge in your cranium with what follows…

A strip called "The Three Mouseketeers" initially appeared in Funny Stuff, which was a comic book published by All-American, which was kind of a sister company to DC Comics. Sheldon Mayer was the editor at All-American and he apparently created these Three Mouseketeers, but he only drew one or two stories of them. This strip was set in swashbuckling days and apart from their punny title, these three mice had nothing to do with the ones that came along later. DC later bought out and absorbed the All-American line, and Sheldon Mayer moved over and worked for them for the rest of his life.

In the mid-fifties, when sales were down and DC couldn't figure out what to publish, they decided to have Mayer create, write and draw two kid-oriented comics. Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace was getting popular as a newspaper strip and in comic books so they asked Mayer to come up with something in a similar vein. Using his own kids for inspiration, Mayer concocted Sugar & Spike, which many today consider one of the twenty-or-so best comic books ever done.

The other mandate was to use the old title of "The Three Mouseketeers," apparently to tie in vaguely with the then-popular Mickey Mouse Club on TV. Mayer didn't want to do a "period" strip so he came up with three mice — Fatsy, Patsy and Minus — eluding cats in a contemporary setting. The two comics debuted at the same time in 1956 and for a time, Mayer managed to do both but it was just too much work. As Sugar & Spike was the more personal of the two, he kept it and handed off The Three Mouseketeers to others — although in this interview, Mayer's daughter says she thinks her father had more fun with the mouse strip.

It has been reported that Mayer wrote some of the Three Mouseketeers comic stories after he handed the artwork over to Rube Grossman, a veteran New York animator who drew a lot of cartoony comic books for DC over the years. I don't know that that's so. Sy Reit, who wrote most of the scripts told me that whatever ones he didn't write were written by Grossman, and that as far as he knows, Mayer never wrote any after he stopped drawing that book. So make of that what you will.

(By the way, die-hard Sheldon Mayer fans know this but in case you don't: Sugar & Spike was cancelled in 1971. Sales were poor and so was Mayer's eyesight. There was still a huge demand for Mayer's toddlers overseas, where the work was reprinted and reprinted, time and again. So when his cataracts were treated to the point where he could draw again, he did a number of stories that were intended only for foreign publication. Some of them later turned up in a digest DC published but most of them have never been seen in America.)

Everything else I said in the earlier piece was correct, especially the part about Three Mouseketeers plummeting in sales when Mayer left it. My apologies for the screw-up and my thanks to Bob Heer and Steven Rowe, each of whom dropped me a nice note to whomp me upside the head about it.