Years ago, before the Internet was the place to be, some of us communicated via computer bulletin boards — the kind you accessed by plugging your 2400 baud modem into your phone line. I operated a couple of different Bulletin Board Systems that catered mainly to writers. This was great because I made a lot of friends and the services did a lot of good for a lot of people. It was occasionally bad because if you get a batch of writers together, even online, egos and feuds erupt. On a computer forum, there are always a few who will start posting messages that some individual — who may or may not be participating in or even aware of the B.B.S. — is a liar, a thief, a plagiarist, a drug user, a sexual deviant, etc. This kind of thing happened a number of times with different players and different accusations of perversion and/or unethical, possibly criminal activity. Usually, the "flame" messages were posted late at night, often on Friday or Saturdays, and it took me a while to realize that many were probably posted under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Almost invariably, I — as the sober operator of the system — wound up in the middle of the fray. In theory, I was just supplying the hardware and configuring the software…but if Writer #1 slandered Writer #2, Writer #2 would usually direct some or even all of his outrage at me. Often, Writer #2 threatened to sue me or slug me. Once, the insulted writer was also a producer who announced he would do everything in his power to destroy my career because his had been attacked on a system run on a computer that I owned. In all of these cases, by the way, you could count on Writer #1 — the one who composed the offending message — not coming to my defense, not offering to help out in any way. He posted the message but it was my problem.

No lawsuits were ever filed but when I set up and briefly ran a system for the Writers Guild, suits were often threatened and I found myself consulting with a number of lawyers. I kept asking them if one could really be sued if one operated a public computer-based forum on which someone felt they'd been defamed. The response I got was invariably double-talk. For some reason, most attorneys were unwilling to admit what I finally realized was the truth; that it was a new area of law with very few precedents, and that no one had any idea how some court might rule on the inevitable test cases.

Now, more than two decades later, the Internet is a way of life and the laws of libel or slander (I'm not even sure which it is on the 'net) have yet to fully shake down. As this article by John W. Dean makes clear, the law is still thrashing it out. That it's still going back and forth convinces me I was wise to get out of the B.B.S. business when I did.

That's right: Another update. We have moved the Cartoon Voice Panel from 3:30 Saturday afternoon to 4:00! That's 4:00 PM, Saturday afternoon, July 19 in Room 6B. We've also added Kathy Garver to the gathering. You may know Kathy from her role as Cissy on the TV classic, Family Affair, but she's also an accomplished performer of animation voices, including roles on Spider-Man and Super-Friends. (While we're on the subject, here's a link to her web page.)

The change allows me time to host another panel that day…and yes, I know I'm doing five in a row but I couldn't turn this one down. It's an hour with three of the most important figures in the history of science fiction…fantasy master Ray Bradbury, historian/editor Forrest J Ackerman, and agent/editor Julius Schwartz. I'll tell you a little more about this one in a day or three, but you might want to jot it down now on your calendar. It's from 3:00 to 4:00 the same afternoon but in Room 6A.

Here's the current list of the panels I'm doing at the convention.

I was unable to find that great website devoted to The Music Man but a reader of this site did. Here's the link and while you're there, check out the memos from the director, the production budget and some audio files of Meredith Willson and his spouse performing the score. (Thanks, Lee!)

At least, this one's recommended if you're interested in reports that the Bush administration cited an obviously-erroneous intelligence report in justifying the need to invade Iraq. Here's an article by the gent who was dispatched to investigate that claim before it was made.

The other day, I recommended that if you wanted to squander at least a half-hour of your life, you could go over to the Garfield website and play a walkaround adventure game. It's called Garfield's Scary Scavenger Hunt and it's very clever but not so involved that you'll spend the rest of your life glued to the keyboard trying to solve it. (Anyone here remember a computer game called Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time? Several comic books I wrote would have had a few more issues had it not been for that game.)

Anyway, the Garfield game is winnable and it isn't a bad way to introduce kids to the concept of computer gaming. But I'm also aware that sometimes even the most brilliant of us can get trapped in these things, unable to figure out how to win but also unable to stop thinking about it until we do. So I've written out the solution — a "walkthrough" that will tell you what you have to do to win so you can get on with your life. If you need a copy, drop me an e-mail.

Daniel Frank (whose weblog I hope you visit when you leave here) writes to ask, "So what was the surprise at the curtain call of The Music Man?" (This is the Broadway revival from 2000 he's asking about.) Well, it wasn't all that huge a deal. The cast members marched out in snazzy band uniforms, almost all of them carrying trombones, and played a lusty but amateurish version of "76 You-Know-Whats." It had a certain fun charm to it, but I don't think it lived up to the promises of something unprecedented.

The curtain call of The Music Man is traditionally a real audience-pleaser. To his dying day, composer Meredith Willson used to insist that there had never been a production of the show anywhere at any time where the audience did not break into rhythmic clapping with the playing of "76 Trombones" as the cast took its bows. One suspects that at least once in all the skillions of performances of the show in everything from Broadway theaters to elementary school auditoriums, there might have been one where the audience was too busy walking out or demanding refunds or something…but perhaps Mr. Willson never encountered this. Or maybe he just saw only the good in them. The story goes that he took in the show hundreds of times as staged by various theatrical companies and community colleges and such, and that he sent every single one of them a telegram that said, "That was the finest production of The Music Man I have ever seen." Perhaps they all were.

Anyway, when the show gets staged at a school that has a marching band, it is not at all unusual for someone to get the bright idea to have the band march through the hall as part of the finale. So what they did on Broadway wasn't all that revolutionary.

Incidentally, I can't find it at the moment but there used to be a wonderful website which featured a bevy of production memos about the making of the movie of The Music Man. One which I found intriguing was from the director, Morton Da Costa, saying he'd decided that the role of Marcellus should be played by Stubby Kaye. We of course all loved Buddy Hackett in the role but I sure don't think Stubby would have been bad. Jack L. Warner, of course, once had his heart set on Frank Sinatra as Professor Harold Hill but finally bowed to pressure from darn near everyone on the planet and hired Robert Preston. If he'd wound up with Sinatra and Hackett, he might as well have gotten Shirley MacLaine to play Marion, Joey Bishop to be the Mayor and moved the whole thing to Vegas. As they said when they changed the family in Come Blow Your Horn from Jewish to Italian so they could cast Frank, "It's a small change."

Oh — and while I was looking (to no avail) for the site with the Da Costa memos, I came across this wonderful offering. It's a compendium of obscure names and terms that turn up in the text of The Music Man, along with explanations of what they all mean. They even note, as many of us comic book historians have, that the line in "Ya Got Trouble" about kids reading Cap'n Billy's Whiz Bang is an anachronism since The Music Man is set in 1912 and Cap'n Billy didn't start whizzing or banging until 1919.

Jerry Kupcinet has some nice memories of the departed Mr. Hackett.

In the spirit of what I said earlier about George M. Cohan, here's Frank Rich on the kind of phony, exploitive actions that are too often passed off as patriotism in this country.

Just added the illustrious Joe Alaskey to the Cartoon Voice Panel, which is currently scheduled for 3:30 on Saturday afternoon. I say "currently" because we may wind up moving it a half hour later. Details here in a day or three.

Joe is currently the voice of Daffy Duck and many of the great Warner Brothers characters once voiced by the immortal Mel Blanc. I'm going to try to get him to do some of his non-Mel voices for us, as well. He's one of the best in the business and I'm thrilled he'll be joining our little vocal gangbang.

One of the panels I'm really looking forward to at the Comic-Con International in San Diego is the one we're doing at 10:30 on Saturday morning (July 19) in Room 8. It's on the history of Western Publishing Company, which produced the contents of Dell Comics (until around 1962) and Gold Key Comics (thereafter). If you're baffled — as so many seem to be — about the history of this unique company, this article that I wrote will explain a teensy bit of it to you and you can learn a little more at the panel. Actually, I'm hoping this will be the first of several annual panels on the topic, as there are a couple of folks I'd love to interview about Western but they're unable to make it this year. But we'll have plenty to discuss without them. We'll have Paul Norris and Mike Royer, both of whom did tons of comics for Western Publishing's West Coast office (as did I) and we'll have Len Wein and Frank Bolle, both of whom worked for the company's East Coast office. And we'll have collector/historian Maggie Thompson and I'm hoping for a few more last-minute additions.

If we all do our job, you'll get the beginnings of a portrait of an amazing company — one that often thought more like printers than publishers, and more like book publishers than comic book publishers. I am a big believer in the philosophy that the company does not create the comic; people do. In the field, we too often speak of "DC did this" or "Marvel did this," when it would be vastly more accurate to speak of specific human beings working for those companies doing such things…people who change from time to time. I recently read an as-yet-unpublished article by someone analyzing Marvel's business strategies over the last half-century as if that plan all came from one mind with one philosophy of publishing. (Marvel has rarely had one mindset at a given time, let alone over an extended period, and quite a few folks who've gotten into positions of power there have been of the mind that their predecessors were complete idiots who were mismanaging the firm into oblivion.)

All that said, there is a rough continuity of thought behind how Western operated — or at least, some prevailing views that ran very much counter to what the boys at DC, Marvel or other companies were then thinking. So we'll talk about that. And we'll talk about Carl Barks and Disney Comics in general. And Magnus, Robot Fighter. And Tarzan and Korak. And Star Trek. And Little Lulu and John Stanley and Oscar LeBeck and Chase Craig and Harvey Eisenberg and Dr. Solar and Walt Kelly and Roger Armstrong and Pete Alvarado and Hanna-Barbera comics and Dan Spiegle and Woody Woodpecker and Russ Manning and Paul S. Newman and Gaylord DuBois and Wally Green and all those movie and TV adaptations and…

Boy, this is sounding like it's going to have to be a couple of annual panels. Be there for the first of them.

Watched Yankee Doodle Dandy last evening for maybe the eightieth time. I have it on Laserdisc so I could have watched it whenever I thought of it…but Turner Classic Movies was running it so I had TiVo grab a copy — and don't you sometimes feel dumb watching a free telecast of a movie for which you paid good money? Anyway, I did enjoy it. I think I had trouble appreciating this movie back in the seventies because I'd read a couple of biographies of George M. Cohan, and a series of letters that George S. Kaufman had written to a friend about his many troubles with Cohan. They all made Cohan sound like a pretty nasty man who waved the flag to mask selfish goals. That's a personal peeve of mine — shallow, self-interests disguised as patriotism — so I was disinclined to view Mr. Cohan in a favorable light.

I was also acutely aware of how little the movie resembled his actual life. One does not expect a Hollywood bio-film to reflect reality 100% or even 80% but this one was so far down the accuracy scale that it seemed like its makers had said, "Well, we can't tell the truth about this bastard so let's make up something." He wasn't even born on the Fourth of July, you know.

So why have I seen it so many times? I think it's because I like it a wee bit more with each viewing, which doesn't happen with many pictures. Jimmy Cagney is so darn good in it — acting, as well as singing and dancing — that he forces you to love the guy he's playing, and I care less and less each time that it isn't the real Cohan. Cagney just eclipses the real guy to the point where if you today mention George M. Cohan to people and they happen to recognize the name, they think of Cagney. In Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand may have supplanted the genuine Fannie Brice, but that would be the only other time I can think of that happening; of the real star being obliterated by the person playing them. Obviously, some of that has to do with the general unavailability of real Cohan or Brice performances but not completely. Those have been the only two times (unless you can think of another) where the person playing a supposedly-great star was a lot more talented — and a bigger star — than the person they were portraying.

Cohan himself did make a few movie appearances, by the way. Given his success on the stage, you have to figure that something just plain didn't translate. Either film didn't capture any trace of his talent or it had atrophied by the time he reached Hollywood. But like a few other (allegedly) great stage performers in early film, he sure doesn't come off as a star of any magical ability. If I were him, I'd much rather people think I was Jimmy Cagney.

The best-known Bushman in the world — actually, the only known Bushman in the world — has died. N!xau was the star of a very wonderful movie called The Gods Must be Crazy. Here's a link to an obit.

Are classic movies being altered (and even ruined) when transferred to digital format and "restored?" Some people in this article think so.

I enjoy watching Whose Line Is It Anyway? I don't think the improv is as unplanned as they make it out to be…especially whatever Drew Carey does at the end. But I find most of the performers to be very good at what they do. And no one's funnier than Colin Mochrie, subject of this website.

The Thing or the Hulk? I don't know and I don't care. But Frank Rich thinks he knows who's stronger than the Hulk: Harry Potter.