You know, just when Americans are nervous and worried that our elected leaders don't have a clue how to prevent the world from erupting into nuclear holocaust, it's comforting to see someone in Congress come up with a mature, truly effective way to deal with a tense diplomatic situation. And if we really want to punish the French for disagreeing with George Bush, we could make more jokes about them not bathing, and maybe even throw up an embargo on Jerry Lewis movies. That'll show 'em.
Jim Korkis sends the following to add to his earlier comments about the Mickey Mouse costume at Disneyland. It's long, but I think it's worth the space…
I checked my notes at the office this morning and here is a brief background on Disney costume characters. I was wrong about Mickey's puffy shoes. They came in 1963 not 1968 but up until that time, he was in just regular-sized black shoes.
In 1955, Mickey became the official host at Disneyland but since Walt had financial challenges, he couldn't afford to build character costumes. He borrowed them from John Harris's Ice Capades which was then touring with a segment of "Peter Pan." (Ice Capades had featured a Disney segment since 1948 with "Snow White.") That's why the costumes look so horrendous. They were made for ice skating so needed to be light and have a lot of vision.
In 1961, Animator Bill Justice (who did lots of animation on Donald Duck and Chip 'n' Dale) was brought in to design the costuming and make them more in proportion and to look more like the animated characters. Bill did the parade costume designs for characters like the marching soldiers from Babes in Toyland and the reindeer with the tongues hanging out as well as many others from 1961-1979. Bill designed 130 character costumes over the years.
Bill designed the first good Donald costume. He found a guy who was 4'6" and photographed him from all angles, blew up photos to full size, put tracing paper over the photos and designed the Donald Duck costume. The guy saw all the work involved and wanted $200 each time he put costume on, so they got someone else. That's one of the reasons characters are now designated by height rather than by a particular performer.
The early sixties showed a brief revision of some costumes for characters like Mickey who became shorter, fatter and with a tremendously oversized head. That lasted less than a year and settled into the "look" we know today, although for a while, Mickey wore a top hat and a huge bow tie ribbon around his neck and later just a huge bow tie to again try and play with the concept of size. Mickey got the puffy shoes in 1963 and Minnie got a satin dress in 1973. For the 50th anniversary in 1978, Minnie got the polka dot dress.
Over the years, many experiments were done with the character costumes. Disney briefly experimented with air conditioning on advice from the Kennedy Space Center but it added weight and couldn't be hidden in the odd shape and design of most characters. They experimented with tape players inside the costumes — Br'er Bear singing "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah," Mickey with approximately six phrases — "How are you?" and "What's your name?" for instance. But characters have to be international and the limit of phrases also limited interaction. In 1996, they experimented with new tiny video cameras as small as a ball point pen. The cast member wore glasses to show the camera's view on the lens.
Abby Disney, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, once told me this story about an experience she had as a child at Disneyland: "Just outside the employee's parking lot, there was a little cafeteria for the employees. I looked over and saw Mickey having a cup of coffee with Snow White. His head was on the table and he was smoking a big cigar. He was very short and old and had this gravelly deep voice. He came over to my grandmother and gave her a big hug. "Edna! Edna! Glad to see ya!" That's how I remember Mickey Mouse. He's emblazoned on my brain that way."
Great story and info, Jim. There's probably a whole book to be written about those costumes. The cast members I've encountered all have had incredible tales to tell, plus I don't think many people know about the programs where Disney exec-types dress in the costumes and wander the park for a little while on the theory it will give them some new understanding of what Disney is all about. Someone will do that book.
In 1984, an unemployed air conditioning mechanic and ice cream truck driver named Michael Larsen won a staggering amount of cash on the CBS daytime game show, Press Your Luck. But it wasn't luck: He'd figured out a way to beat the show's high-tech game board. Ordinarily, a single game of PYL was completed in enough time to air one per half-hour and whoever won went home with (usually) cash and prizes in the mid-to-high four figures.
Not so with Mr. Larsen. He racked up more than a hundred grand, and his game ran so long that the producers had to figure out how to break it up into two half-hours. (Larsen did his voodoo during the show's final round, and the show's rules had not allowed for commercial breaks during a round because no one ever expected it to be necessary. The producer-director, Bill Carruthers, hastily rigged up freeze-frames and had host Peter Tomarken tape some explanations and introductions.) CBS was embarrassed by the whole incident and tried to downplay the whole thing.
My tapes of the Larsen episodes have long been a "video fave" of visitors, most of whom find it amazing and real in a way that no so-called "reality show" ever seems to be. This Sunday and Monday, Game Show Network is airing those two episodes as part of a two-hour documentary that includes interviews with folks who worked on the show. (Larsen passed away in 1999. Bill Carruthers, sadly, passed away a week ago, but had been interviewed for the special before that happened.) Game Show Network is hyping it as a great "scandal" — which it really isn't — but it should still be worth watching.
However, I have a suggestion! If you aren't familiar with the way Press Your Luck is played, it will all have less meaning for you. The game is a bit complicated and I think you need to see a couple of "normal" games before you can fully appreciate the magic of this abnormal one. Game Show Network runs an old episode every morning, seven days a week. It's on at 8:30 AM on my satellite dish but it may be different on your set. If you're going to tune in and see the special — Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal — on Sunday or Monday night, I suggest you first watch one or two where the contestants don't break the bank.
Bill Carruthers, by the way, was a very important person in television history. He directed TV shows for the likes of Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs, helmed the Emmy Awards for 14 years, directed events like the famous Frank Sinatra prime-time concert, and even aided presidents. A staunch Republican, he directed TV spots and consulted with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and George Bush, and declined offers from several of them to work in the White House. Even more important than that, he was Soupy Sales's first director. The one time I met Mr. Carruthers, we talked about Michael Larsen and about Soupy…and didn't breathe a word about those other, relatively unimportant guys.
If you missed the first Clinton/Dole debate on 60 Minutes, you can see it online by clicking here. If that link doesn't work, go to the CBS news website, look for the 60 Minutes page and you oughta find it. But don't spend a lot of time on this. I usually find both men to be interesting speakers, and you'd figure they could offer some viewpoints and insights we don't hear from everyone else. But they came across as stilted and dull, and had nothing new to offer. Maybe it was opening night jitters.
One note about What's My Line? and the death of Fred Allen. This one comes from Elie Harriett, former music teacher, current jazz aficionado, and lifelong Groo fan. (Well, two out of three and all that…) Elie is writing about the episode which aired one day after Mr. Allen passed away while not walking a dog…
The last guest of the evening was a very young Toshiko Akiyoshi: one of the most celebrated female jazz composers in the past forty years. She and her husband: Tonight Show Band's (Doc Severinsen's era) tenor saxophonist Lew Tabackin formed a jazz group in the 1970's which gained worldwide recognition for Ms. Akiyoshi for her style of merging traditional Japanese musical ideas with modern American jazz. She has numerous compositions and arrangements to her name, several albums have been released with her band, and there are a couple of solo piano albums out. If I am not mistaken, within the past couple years she also received a major award by the City of New York for improving the general quality of life for New Yorkers with her music (sorry, the name of the award escapes me at the moment).
I especially enjoyed watching her on the show sign her name in Japanese and see a shyness about her that inevitably went away over the years though constant performance.
I did a search and found this bio of her, which says she received New York City's Liberty Award. I'm not sure what that is but she sure has come a long way from being the "extra" What's My Line? contestant — the one who only gets on if the show's running short. Thanks, Elie.
More on that Disney photo. My longtime pal Jim Korkis, who works as an instructor down at Walt Disney World, informs me that the picture posted earlier was the last "official" photo of Walt taken before his death. This, Jim says, is why it's so prominently displayed down in the "One Man's Dream" attraction down in his neck of the woods at Disney/MGM Studios. He further notes that in the pic, Mickey has four fingers and a thumb — the style of glove he wore back then. The Mouse also wore regular-size black shoes back then, the big yellow ones coming along later, closer to the character's 40th birthday. Thanks, Jim.
Terry Jones of Monty Python fame keeps writing rather funny political commentaries for the The Observer. Here's his latest.
A man was convicted of first-degree murder. A considerable amount of new evidence shows that several of the witnesses against him lied due to the prosecution coaching or paying them to do so. Some people still want to execute the man. This kind of thing is happening way too often for it not to rebound against the Death Penalty. Matter of fact, I think people who support the State's supposed right to terminate lives should be lobbying the hardest to eliminate these apparent miscarriages. For some reason though, a lot of them treat evidence of an unjust conviction as some sort of bothersome technicality that shouldn't get in the way of a good execution.
The episode of What's My Line? with Fred Allen's last appearance did indeed air the other morning — or at least, most of it aired. As Len Wein pointed out to me, the print Game Show Network ran was devoid of its Mystery Guest spot and padded out with around seven thousand commercials. This kind of thing occasionally happens on their Black & White Overnight shows, as some of the old kinescopes are incomplete. In this case, the Mystery Guest was Dinah Shore and we don't know what became of that footage.
Meanwhile, the final word (I assume) on the matter of Fred Allen not having a dog was sent to me by "Booksteve." He writes…
Not to stretch this out even further but, according to Robert Taylor's 1989 Fred Allen bio, Broadway columnist Leonard Lyons was one of the folks who happened on Allen after his attack and made the assumption (apparently in his column) that Fred had been walking a dog. The book points out that this was erroneously reported as fact ever after by researchers who didn't realize Fred Allen's dislike of the canine species and presumed Lyons knew what he was talking about. Apparently Gil Fates was citing Lyons or one of these other sources.
Leonard Lyons had a pretty bad track record when it came to knowing what he was talking about, as did most of the Broadway columnists of the time. His column was called "The Lyons Den" but many referred to it as "The Liar's Den." In any case, there's the original source of my erroneous impression, and we can now move on to less important topics — like war in Iraq, war in Korea, Michael Jackson's voodoo curses…
That Disney check I posted here brought a lot of e-mail about Walt, so I thought I'd post my favorite photo of the man. I never met Mr. Disney but over the years, I had the pleasure to hear him discussed by many close associates, including Floyd Gottfredson (who drew the Mickey Mouse newspaper strip for several dozen years) and Al Levitt (a blacklisted writer who wrote screenplays for Disney under a pen name). All spoke warmly of Walt, and described a man quite unlike the reactionary, mercenary executive that has sometimes been described, usually by folks with little or no first-hand intimacy. I have therefore never really believed the negative portraits. I think they have more to do with some folks' emotional problems in dealing with "father figures," and perhaps with some of the company's business practices, especially post-Walt.
Someone wrote me to ask if the story was true about Disney wearing a conspicuous Goldwater button while receiving the Medal of Freedom from then-President Lyndon Johnson. The main Internet debunker of urban legends says it's not so, and I note that at the time of the ceremony, Walt was employing Al Levitt to write films like The Misadventures of Merlin Jones and The Monkey's Uncle. Insulting the President that way doesn't seem likely for a man who would concurrently employ a writer who'd been accused of being a Communist. There are a lot of stories about Mr. Disney that I suspect are not exactly true. He wasn't frozen, he could draw (at least a little), he didn't pre-film lectures to his staff to be shown at five-year intervals after his death, etc.
Like so many things that have borne the Disney name, Walt was larger than life, and a good subject for fantasy and legend. He was also a mass of contradictions: An artist who largely gave up drawing; a businessman who did some pretty uncommercial things; an adult who not only indulged his inner child but built the kid an 85-acre amusement park. Fifteen months ago, I sat in an audience full-to-overflowing of grown-ups who felt a professional and personal connection with a man most of them had never met, almost begging for insights from those who had. I suspect that long after Mickey and Donald have faded from memory, the world will still remember Walt. And they'll still be making up stories about him.
Speaking of Floyd Gottfredson, as I was just a minute ago, here's a link to a tribute site where you can read some fine articles and see many samples of his work.
Want to learn all about your neighborhood? You can find out all sorts of data, courtesy of the 2000 census, by clicking here and entering your address.
Long before the term "supermodel" was coined, Katy Keene was one. She first appeared in Wilbur Comics #5, cover-dated Summer of '45, and published by the Archie people. Katy may have spent her days modeling glamorous gowns, but she had the same kind of familiar comic adventures: Troubles with boy friends, rivalries with girl friends, and even a bratty younger sister. The publishers saw instantly that it all appealed to the same folks who purchased the Archie titles, and they kept the lovely Ms. Keene around for decades, both as a back-up feature in those books and — beginning in 1949 — also in her own title. One thing that convinced them of Katy's popularity was an enduring and unprecedented avalanche of mail.
Cartoonist Bill Woggon, who created Katy and her adventures, had the idea of asking readers to submit their own fashion designs for his leading lady to wear, and every story was footnoted with little captions: "Katy's swimsuit designed by Becky Lou Freebish of Jerkwater, Alabama," or whatever. In truth, Woggon — and the many fine artists who assisted him over the years — usually had to embellish and improve the readers' submissions, but he at least tried to incorporate their concepts. When other companies began imitating the same gimmick, the usual procedure was to cheat. The artists would draw whatever they wanted and then some secretary would wade through the mail and assign reader credits whenever some kid's sketch seemed vaguely close — or if none did, they'd make up phony names. Woggon never did that.
Katy's comic book lasted until 1961. Apart from a few reprints, she didn't get star billing again until her book was revived in 1983 — reprints of Woggon's work, then new stories by a fine Katy fan named John Lucas — and it lasted until 1990. She still has devout fans out there who collect old Katy Keene comics, which are not always the easiest thing to find in complete form. You see, most issues also included cut-out paper dolls, and many readers cut them out.
All of this, unfortunately, is leading up to an obit for Bill Woggon, who passed away March 2 at the age of 92. Woggon was a charming man who devoted much of his life to cartooning, and who injected a personal touch into a kind of comic that was too often produced by anonymous assembly lines. He was an enormous friend and teacher to many artists who assisted him, including Floyd Norman, Bill Ziegler and Barbara Rausch. In his later years, he was delighted by the vast number of adults in both fields who told him he was an inspiration that had led them into cartooning, fashion design and even — in at least a few cases — modeling, itself. He will be missed but his work will not be forgotten.
The two most recognizable voices in the world of movie trailers today are Don LaFontaine and Hal Douglas. There are other guys who narrate movie trailers but a majority of them are "doing" LaFontaine or Douglas, at least to some extent. There are also other voiceover guys who profess to be combining the two.
LaFontaine is the guy you associate with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Terminator II commercials. Here's a link to a demo of his work, and you'll need the dreaded RealPlayer installed to hear it.
And you can not only hear Hal Douglas but actually see him at work. He's on-camera for the trailer for the Jerry Seinfeld documentary, Comedian. Here's a link to a site where — assuming you have Apple QuickTime installed — you can view said trailer, which is very funny. (Thanks to Marc Wielage for the referral.)
Polls like this one are saying that if the next presidential election were held today, by a slim margin, registered American voters would vote for an unnamed Democrat over George W. Bush. This is good news for the Democrats but, given their track record, they'll probably blow it by eventually naming someone. Then watch their advantage plummet.
It's bothered me for a few days that I erroneously recalled that Fred Allen died while walking his dog. It probably isn't worth two thoughts, but I was sure I'd read that somewhere. Turns out, I did. The producer of What's My Line?, Gil Fates, wrote a book about the history of that show. In it, he says Allen was walking a dog when he suffered the fatal heart attack. This is apparently wrong, but at least I can stop wondering why I thought that.
I had great fun writing the Garfield TV cartoons for many years. Here's your chance to write the Garfield comic strip. Over at the cat's website, they've installed Garfield's Comic Creator, an online tool that allows you to put together your own Garfield strip. Mix and match characters and backgrounds and props, and type in your own dialogue. (And to answer an oft-asked question: No, I don't know when any of the Garfield cartoons will be issued on DVD in this country. The producer seems to be in a state of perpetual negotiation for this to happen.)
I agree completely with this article by Roger Ebert on the Pledge of Allegiance.
I have to make time to say a few words about a very funny man named George Miller. I just got two simultaneous e-mails from stand-up comedians telling me that George (one of their own) passed away yesterday, presumably from the leukemia he had been fighting for some time now. I did not know George well but back when I was hanging around the Comedy Store, I saw him achieve two truly amazing distinctions. One was that when he went on, all the other comedians would stop and listen. Even in the back, where they talk incessantly about their own careers, they'd shut up and watch George. And the other astounding thing was that they all liked him, personally.
His act was low-key and totally his own. The material was not screamingly funny but it was unique. He'd start slow and just when people were starting to wonder, "Who is this clown and where's the men's room?" he'd wallop them with a punch-line, not just out of left field but clear outside the stadium, out somewhere in the parking lot. His pace didn't work all that well on television — though Mr. Letterman loved him and had him on often. But in a club, when he didn't have to get a laugh every X seconds, he did just fine.
George had been ill for many months, and the rumor mill says that his medical bills were covered by one or more of his more successful friends. I can believe that because, like I said, everyone liked him. They liked his act but they liked George more.
I'm swamped with no time to write anything tonight, so here's a little oddment — a 1949 check actually signed by Walt Disney to move $600 into some special account. I used to know a little something about handwriting analysis but I've forgotten every bit of it. Still, doesn't that look like the signature of someone who would be highly creative and determined to make his name very famous? The man almost wrote his name like it was going to be a company trademark.
Just something to think about. Back to deadlines…