If I had one of those new-fangled Broadway Time Machines that can whisk you back to another era to see any production, I think I'd use mine to see the original My Fair Lady.  Obviously, there are a lot of dandy choices but there always seemed to be something magical…almost legendary about the Lerner-Loewe adaptation of Mr. Shaw's Pygmalion.  It opened at the Mark Hellinger on March 15, 1956, which was a Thursday.  The following Sunday, as is often the custom, the cast used its day off to record the cast album.  Little did they suspect they were recording what would be the most-played, best-selling cast album in the history of mankind.  And what's interesting is that it didn't sell as many as it might have because Columbia, the company that released it, decided to compete with themselves and put out a second one. The first album was in monaural recording, which was "state-of-the-art" that week.

Two years later, when the London company opened, they did a new album with the same songs, same arrangement and pretty much the same cast — Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Stanley Holloway, etc.

The only difference was that this one was in stereo.  Columbia assumed they could then phase out the mono version but buyers would have none of that.  Even though the new one had the same lead performers, there were minor variations, especially in Mr. Harrison's performance, and we liked our My Fair Lady to sound exactly — right down to the very syllable — the way it was supposed to sound.

I say "we" because my parents played that first album.  And played it and played it and played it and played it and played it and how many times must I type that before you grasp the concept that they played it a lot?  It is so ingrained in my psyche that, when I watched Harrison perform the same songs in the movie — or when I saw him live on his farewell tour — I sat there and thought, "He's pausing in the wrong place…that line oughta go faster…why did he emphasize a different word?"  (The farewell tour, which he did at age 78, was sad in a way.  I mean, it was nice that he made what must have been Huge Bucks, and it was wonderful that we all got to say, "I saw Rex Harrison do My Fair Lady."  But he was forgetting lines and fumbling about, and the standing ovation at the close was more for his body of work than for anything he'd done that evening.)

My affection for the first cast album is so intense that I couldn't even listen to the CD of the recent London version with Jonathan Pryce.  Bought it, put it in the CD player, pressed "play"…and the new arrangements sounded so utterly wrong to me, I had to hit "stop."  I mean, I assume this incarnation is fine in its own way but certain tunes are the musical equivalent of Comfort Food.  You don't want someone "improving" your mother's recipe for beef stew and I don't want someone fiddling with my My Fair Lady.  Variations and updates are tolerable and even welcome in some places and not in others.

Fortunately, the original My Fair Lady cast album was released a few years ago on CD.  What's more, a better CD release comes out May 28, the same day as the new Li'l Abner CD.  This version of M.F.L. has been remastered for allegedly better sound and includes a few bonus tracks: An interview with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, as well as a chat between Lerner, the album's producer and lead performers.  You can order this CD from Amazon-dot-com (and give us a few dimes) by clicking right about here.  And in a day or so, when I get some time, I think I'll post some recollections of the first musical I ever saw in a for-real theater.  It was the first national touring company of My Fair Lady with a gent named Michael Evans in the role of Higgins.  I was around eight at the time and I sat there the whole time thinking, "That doesn't sound like the record."

See?  Even then, I was stubborn about my favorites.

Dave Berg, a mainstay of MAD Magazine since 1957, passed away last night following several months of severe illness.  His series, "The Lighter Side of…" debuted in the magazine in 1961 and immediately became popular enough to appear in every issue, as long as Dave's health allowed him to produce it.  That meant every issue, up until just a few years ago.  It made him famous, but it was by no means all he did in comics.  Dave was born in Brooklyn in 1920, the son of a bookbinder who had once studied to become a rabbi.  A smidgen of each area seems have been passed on to young David.  He later "made" (i.e., wrote and drew) books and approached most of his work with a devout, almost Rabbinical sense of morality.  He even took to lecturing — first, his colleagues and then students on college campuses — about the Talmud.

A child prodigy, Berg won art scholarships when just a boy and got into comic books about the time comic books began appearing.  His earliest efforts were for Will Eisner's studio.  Eisner hired him to ink backgrounds and, within weeks, Berg was writing and drawing his own stories.  One — Death Patrol — drew great praise, including a fan letter from a kid named Wally Wood.  Later, when folks were calling Wood one of the great comic artists, he would cite that strip and Berg's work as a major influence.

Working at Eisner's, Berg became friendly with other artists, including young Al Jaffee, who introduced him to a circle that included Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder and others who (along with Wood) would later form the nucleus of MAD.  Dave worked in other comics, including a long stint on the original Captain Marvel and a mess of Archie knock-offs for Stan Lee's outfit, which would later be known as Marvel.  In 1956, when recession hit the comic field, Berg tried to get work with Kurtzman, who had left MAD to start a new humor magazine called Trump.  Kurtzman told Berg he didn't need his services but suggested that MAD might.  MAD did.

Thereafter, Dave Berg appeared in over 360 issues of MAD and also wrote and drew around a dozen paperback books.  His strips featured "slice of life" jokes, many of them culled from interviewing friends and family, getting their true-life experiences on the current topic.  As a result, his work was filled with caricatures of his friends and family, with Berg himself constantly appearing as a character named Roger Kaputnik.  Some found his work corny; others deemed it filled with clever insight.  Whichever, it was clearly popular with MAD readers for a very long time and we'll miss both Dave Berg and Mr. Kaputnik.

I dunno how long it'll be online for viewing but an auction of Howdy Doody memorabilia has just been conducted by an auctioneer named Leland's.  It included many of the original puppets used on the show, plus scripts, props and other goodies.  From what I can piece together, Leland's is the auction house of choice for all the folks who worked on the series, and has been selling items for most of them, including the late Buffalo Bob Smith, himself.  This current offering seems to include items owned by many Howdy contributors, including writer Eddie Kean and the first Clarabelle, Bob "Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan.  I was never a huge fan of the Howdy Doody program…though I suspect I would have been, had I been born a year or so earlier.

Despite this, it's kinda sad to see Phineas T. Bluster, Flub-a-Dub and all the rest up on the auction block.  You can see just how sad — and how much they went for — by clicking here.  But you might want to hurry because it probably won't be online for long.

There's a wonderful resource called The Internet Movie Database but odd errors keep popping up in its listings.  They claim that someone named Edward Paulsen did voices on Garfield and Friends.  As you know, I wrote on every episode of that series and voice-directed most and I don't know who Edward Paulsen is.  I do know who Gene Wilder is and I know that he did not do a guest appearance on the show, in spite of what they claim.  Not that we wouldn't have loved to have had him.  (We did have one of this co-stars from The Producers, Kenneth Mars, in an episode.  He was playing a German scientist and, as an in-joke, I named his lab assistants Bialystock and Bloom, but the names got cut when some dialogue had to be trimmed for time.)

Speaking of Harpo, as we keep doing: He made two LP albums of harp music in his lifetime, and both have been reissued on one CD.  It features liner notes by my friend Joseph Laredo and it's available only from Collectors' Choice Music, an online company that offers all sorts of neat reissues.  They also have Shelley Berman's first two classic albums, Soupy Sales doing The Mouse and a number of other goodies.  This is not one of those links that kicks back money to this site for your purchases so don't spend a lot over there.  (Not everything on their site is exclusive to them but enough things are that you'll probably want to pick up a few goodies.)

Is George W. Bush in trouble with these new revelations that the government had some sort of advance word that Osama's boys might start hijacking planes?  Of course.  And if it were President Al Gore, we'd be hearing exactly the same arguments, only Democrats would be saying what Republicans are now saying and vice-versa.  What's more, we're going to be hearing this kind of thing for months to come, with new revelations being spun accordingly.  Get used to it.

The thing I think is most interesting — not encouraging; just interesting — is the establishment of a solid and militant anti-Bush faction in this country.  All presidents have their detractors, of course, but until the rise of the anti-Clinton people, a group that perhaps never exceeded 20% of the population never had such buying power and clout.  (I am speaking here of people who hate absolutely everything the hated president does and believe every negative allegation against him…not merely those citizens who'd prefer some other guy in the job.)

The anti-Clinton faction was never as loud as its noise would indicate but they bought a lot of "Bill and Hillary are the devil" books, so publishers cranked them out.  They bolstered the careers of certain pundits who trashed the Clintons, with or without benefit of accuracy, so we heard a lot from Clinton-bashing pundits.  In some areas, they gave goodly sums of moola to Republicans who promised to bring the First Family to justice.  It was a very healthy industry in many ways and they had plenty of topics to scream about: Whitewater, Vince Foster, charges of sexual impropriety, fund-raising scandals, etc.

Bush still has his stratospheric approval rating…just as, let's note, Clinton did at the height of Impeachment-Mania.  But now, like Clinton, he's developed that group, no greater than 20% of Americans, that loathe him, believe he has committed vast criminal actions, etc.  Books by Michael Moore and David Brock ride high on the Best Seller Lists so there will be more.  (There's always more of whatever's high on the Best Seller Lists.)  The anti-Bush people may never swell their ranks significantly higher but between this and Enron and the Florida vote and several others, they now have enough topics, enough charges of wrongdoing against G.W.B., that they will not be silenced.  As with Clinton-bashing, there's just too much money in it.

We all love The Mary Tyler Moore Show, don't we?  Of course, we do.  Well, I'm going to be a grouch here and make two tiny criticisms of this usually-sacred endeavor.  The first, actually, is about the gala reunion special that ran last Monday evening.  I'm afraid I heard a bit too much about "we were a family," as if it's a singular sensation for the cast of a successful show to care about one another.  Though there are exceptions, it's more the rule than not.  I've even worked on unsuccessful shows where everyone bonded and remained close.  (On a hit show, everyone bonds because they're together for so long and growing wealthy together.  On a flop, people often bond because they're going through a war together.)  I mean, I'm glad that Mary loves Ed and Ed loves Mary and that they both love Gavin and Gavin, on-camera and off, has always loved Mary, etc.

But I think I've gotten a little tired of seeing these people hug.  Moreover, in loyalty to my vocation, I'd have liked to have seen a little more attention paid to the people who wrote that show, too.  Weren't they a part of the "family?"

My second gripe may seem trivial, especially now.  But on a website like this, you write about what's on your mind and every time I catch a rerun of that series, it strikes me as unrealistic that everyone in the cast has so much affection for Ted Baxter.  He really was a moron at times and I keep waiting for the episode where one of them smacks him in the mouth.  Or tells him, "Ted, you just did something enormously rude and inconsiderate to the people around you."  I once mentioned this to Lorenzo Music, who worked on the series, and he said, "I think everyone may have confused Ted Baxter with Ted Knight, whom we loved."  (I worked once with Ted Knight and I think he may have gotten a bit confused that way, himself.)

The inconsistency I'm pointing up here was best illustrated in an episode that is rerunning this Saturday on TV Land.  Here's the official précis…

Ted's Moment of Glory
Ted auditions to host a game show in New York.  The WJM-TV News staff doesn't take him seriously until he gets the job and they realize that their pompous anchorman is really going to leave.

If you remember that episode, you'll remember that, in the end, Lou Grant talks Ted out of taking the big salary game show job.  He tells him he's part of a noble profession: "You're a newsman, Ted.  You don't want to be a quizzzzmaster."  And the happy ending is that Ted decides not to leave WJM.

Well, I don't buy it.  I don't buy that Ted would stay.  I don't buy that Lou Grant would want him to stay.  I don't buy that it was in anyone's best interests for him to stay.  Lou is an old-line news guy who takes the craft seriously.  For years, he's been saddled with a cluck for an anchorman and while he's initially thrilled to have the opportunity to bring in someone who knows what he's reading, he somehow decides he'll miss Ted Baxter and must talk him out of leaving.  And, like I said, I don't buy it.

Ted Baxter, as depicted on the series, should have been a quizzzzmaster.  He never showed the slightest aptitude for news broadcasting, nor any real desire to learn it.  All he wanted was fame and money, and the WJM job meant a lot less of both…and not even any real security.  Being the laughingstock anchorman at the lowest-rated local news outlet in the city?  How long could that reasonably be expected to last?  Yes, I know, in the last episode everyone but Ted was fired, but that was the joke; that all the people who shouldn't have been fired were and the admitted incompetent wasn't.  At any given moment before that, Ted Baxter was lucky to have any career, much less one that gave him the cash and attention he so dearly loved.

None of that makes him evil.  Just makes him something of a jerk, which was fine.  He did a lot of jerky things.  But in a show where the human interaction was otherwise so honest and indicative of how real people act, the fact that Ted "Good Night and Good Newt" Baxter was loved and easily forgiven his jerkiness still seems an anomaly to me.  And it seems so wrong that, in that episode, Lou Grant talks him out of fame and fortune.  (He may also have talked him out of something almost as good.  The game show Ted is to host has Dian Parkinson as its model.  This is the lady who was then working The Price is Right and banging Bob Barker between Plinko games…)

Anyway, that episode reruns Saturday, like I said.  Just in case you want to watch and see if it seems to you as wrong as it seems to me.

1. There's a bottle of Clorox or Drano or some toxic liquid on stage. The host picks it up and drinks it.
2. Someone — the star, a band member, the announcer — says they're going to do something amazing and then there's an obvious switch to a stuntman who performs the feat. (Variation: The old "Super Dave Osborne" gag of substituting the person for a dummy which is maimed, run over by a car, thrown off the roof, etc.)
3. Fat guys in the crew with their shirts off.
4. 80% of all jokes where the premise is that Bill Clinton is horny, George W. Bush is stupid, Al Gore is boring, Dick Cheney is having hourly heart attacks, Janet Reno is a man or Gary Condit is guilty.
5. Sending a staff or audience member to a nearby store to buy something silly and/or just be real annoying.
6. Look who's holding the cue cards!
7. The announcer is (a) in drag, (b) constantly being molested by a stalker or (c) secretly doing something perverse in his dressing room or backstage.
8. Hey, let's stop people on the street and ask them questions we know they won't be able to answer! (Or play a game we know they won't be able to win.)
9. Going door-to-door and getting people to either dress up funny or welcome us like guests into their lives.
10. And now, here's a has-been celebrity who will do any stupid thing we think up, just to get on the show…

Trio, the Canadian TV channel that is mainly available via satellite dish, is running a Broadway salute this month with things like the recent PBS taping of Fosse and the concert version of Sweeney Todd.  The most interesting, TiVo-worthy program is Broadway Legends, hosted by Matthew Broderick and featuring short interviews with the likes of S. Sondheim, N. Lane, N. Simon, J. Robards and many others.  But the thing to really keep an eye out for is that, between shows, they sometimes run a little 4-minute featurette — an expanded version of the "Come Back to Broadway" commercial that was done last year to try and counteract the dip in theatre-going that followed 9/11.  It's every star then playing in New York, congregated in Times Square, singing a rousing rendition of "New York, New York," and it's just a delight to watch.

We hear a lot about how actors are paid (or overpaid) enormous salaries.  Here, as a beacon of light, are some interesting stats from a report just released by the Screen Actors Guild…

23% of SAG members did not work during 1996-2000 and that 36% have worked less than five days in those five years.  At the Hollywood branch, 26,331 of 63,745 members (41.3%) worked at least 30 days in 1996-2000, while another 2,217 (3.5%) had qualified for 10 years of pension and health benefits and another 2,011 (3.2%) had worked 10 or more days in 2000.  Stats for all 117,135 SAG members showed 38.7% had worked 30 days, while another 3.4% qualified for 10 years of P&H and another 2.9% had worked 10 days in 2000.

Now, these numbers are a bit misleading because the Screen Actors Guild roster includes a number of people who consider themselves primarily writers or directors or something else.  They may not have worked under the SAG contract during a given period because they were tidily-employed in another capacity…or were acting on the stage or even on a TV show covered by AFTRA  Still, we have here some sobering figures to anyone who thinks acting is an easy way to Big Bucks.  Not if you don't work for five years, it isn't.

Here's something that's been floating around on the Internet for years.  It's an excerpt from an old B.B.C. documentary…thirty seconds of Harpo Marx discussing a silly moment from his career.  If you've heard it before, fine.  If not…well, how often does one get to hear the voice of Harpo Marx?  This is the man who, at his farewell live performance, walked up to the microphone and proclaimed to the audience, "Now, as I was about to say in 1918…"  Actually, the usually-silent Mr. Marx spoke in a few documentary-type shorts and appeared in a number of stage performances of The Man Who Came to Dinner.  (Co-authors George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart took turns playing Sheridan Whiteside, while Harpo played…well, the character based on Harpo.)

It has also been rumored that he spoke during a long-lost appearance on the daytime TV show, Art Linkletter's House Party.  Linkletter has reportedly told inquiring Marx fans that he doesn't recall this but won't say for sure it did not happen.  So maybe it did, maybe it didn't and maybe (my hunch:) it was some other, similar show.

Anyway, for now, the way to hear Harpo is to click below…

Let's go to the mail.  I'm not sure who sent me this…

Read your comments [over at TVBarn] about Jay and Dave both being in a rut and I agree completely. Enough already with how stupid people in the street are when you stick them in front of a camera. But the thing I miss are the new stand-up comics. Johnny introduced dozens (including Jay and Dave) and launched careers. Who have Jay and Dave introduced?

Not many…but here, I'll defend the guys. First off, Carson got his rep as a presenter of new stand-ups before 1980 when he cut the show from 90 to 60 minutes. The trim meant room for 1 or 2 fewer guests per night and therefore, less room for new comics. Secondly, when Johnny was showcasing stand-up comedians, he had one of the very few franchises in all of television that did that. His bookers were notorious for scouting the clubs, spotting promising comedians and telling them, "Keep working at it. If you continue to improve, we may book you with Johnny in a year or so." Both Letterman and Leno were told that at the Comedy Store, once upon a time. Today, a promising stand-up at the Store is pounced upon by many. By the time he or she could be "ready" for The Tonight Show, they've already done a half-hour Comedy Central Presents, spots on B.E.T., perhaps a Showtime special, etc. Comics today don't need the late night venues as they once did. They have too many other avenues.

Johnny's last few years, not many comedians got their Big Break on his program and, with the ones who did like Stephen Wright, there was a slight reversal of the process. Instead of waiting obediently for The Tonight Show to pronounce a comedian ready, the comedian would already have an agent and probably a manager who would negotiate with The Tonight Show: "Okay, he'll hold off doing any other shows until he does Johnny's if you guarantee him a proper showcase." A fellow named Jim McCawley — a nice but intense gent who worked for Carson — was the scout and negotiator in such situations. I knew him casually and watched him, over the years, lose a bit of his kingmaking status. Around '78, he'd walk into the Comedy Store and comedians would lick his loafers clean. If he said — and he did — "I think you may be ready for Johnny in six months…that is, if you don't do any other shows in the meantime," the comic swore to fend off Merv Griffin's bookers with a meat-ax.

But things changed. Once, all the comics wanted to debut with Johnny because all the recent success stories in comedy involved making your debut there. Before long though, you had guys like Andy Kaufman, Dennis Miller, Eddie Murphy, Sam Kinison and others who were doing quite well without a Carson christening. Around 1987, I saw McCawley in action at the Improv and, while he still wielded great power, the balance of it was not quite so lopsided. He had to convince comics (and their reps) that it was still their best option to allow The Tonight Show to introduce them to America. Some decided otherwise while others opted for Johnny simply because he was Johnny.

Lastly — and this may be Dave's and Jay's fault to some extent — I don't think their shows are as conducive to new stand-ups as Johnny's was, even in his hour-long days. Carson had a certain stature as Elder Statesman of comedy and, when he said, "Here's a bright new comic," the studio audience paid attention and tried to help out the newbie. When Dave or Jay book a stand-up…first of all, the spot is rushed. Secondly, the folks out front seem to think, "Huh? We have to listen to someone other than Dave [or Jay] for four minutes?" A comic I know who did Letterman once said that his spot got about a third the laughs it should have because the studio audience was so full of Dave fans who were all watching Dave, not him, while he was performing. His next time on, instead of working "in one," he sat in the guest's chair and did his material, chatting with Letterman. That worked better, he felt, because Dave was involved and the audience wasn't resenting him from taking the spotlight off their boy.

I'd like to see the late night shows bring us more great new comedians. But I'm afraid all the worthy ones now have sitcom development deals, long before Dave or Jay can get to them.

This site was down for much of last night due to a one-two punch.  My cable modem's company had an outage that disconnected most of their Los Angeles customers from the Internet for about ten hours.  At the same time, the separate company that hosts this website was switching over to new servers.  So I couldn't get on-line to update this site and even if I had been able to, it wasn't there.

Everything seems to be operational at the moment but, for an hour or so there last night, I was really baffled, trying to figure out if the problem was that the cable modem wasn't working or if it was because my hosting company was malfunctioning.  First, I thought it was one, then the other…then the first cause, again, back and forth.  It took a while to figure out that both were malfunctioning at the same time.  Ah, the wonders of the Computer Age…

I love photos of Zero Mostel.  Has there ever been an actor with a more expressive face?  Caricature artists love that puss.  Mort Drucker and Al Hirschfeld — probably the two greatest practitioners of the art ever — both told me that Mostel was a particular favorite to draw.  (I purchased the original art to a story in MAD Magazine called "Antenna on the Roof" in which Mr. Drucker elegantly captured the likeness of the gent.  Looks like he had a lot of fun drawing it.)

This photo is from the movie version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a less-than-wonderful interpretation of the great play by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart.  Mr. Gelbart once described it as, "The most painful experience…like being run over by a truck that then backed-up so it could run you over again."  That it is at all viewable is largely because Mostel was always worth watching…quite an achievement in a film where three other great clowns — Phil Silvers, Jack Gilford and Buster Keaton — aren't worth watching.  Keaton did a lot of dreadful low-budget "comedies" (I'm using the world loosely) in the sixties and got more laughs in any one of them than he does in this high-budget one.

Among the things that went wrong with this one…

• The film is way overproduced.  On stage, it was the only major musical ever to have only one set…and not a very fancy one, at that.  In the movie, they tried to show us Ancient Rome in all its cluttered glory.
• Any time you're discarding Stephen Sondheim songs, something is wrong.  Very wrong.
• Phil Silvers was cast as Marcus Lycus, a comparatively small part.  They then proceeded to try and build up that role, which meant tossing out several important plot complications to make room for needless plot complications.
• The director, Richard Lester, had become famous for a strange kind of cinematography and editing rhythm in which you are always conscious of the camera, and no attempt is made at seamless continuity.  This style, which was so much fun in a few earlier movies like A Hard Day's Night, was already wearing out its welcome by the time Forum was filmed, and it was especially at odds with the material.  In too many scenes, it is the film editor (or Lester) controlling the timing, not the comedians.
• Lester (and the producer, Melvin Frank) also wanted to "open up" the film and include a big chariot race and elements of spectacle.  That meant further corruptions of the plot to find reasons for such scenes…which, of course, were unnecessary distractions.

And there are about 11 dozen other things wrong with it, which brings us to this question.  TV is on a kick of remaking musicals.  Matthew Broderick and Kristin Chenoweth are appearing in a new version of The Music Man, which not one human being on this planet thought was poorly done the first time it was put on film.  When will they start redoing some of the ones that could actually be improved in a new version?  Forum would be a great place to start.

By the way: Turner Classic Movies is running the film with Zero next Sunday.  If you watch, watch only for him.

John Mayo has posted a good report on last year's Comic-Con International, full of terrific photos and facts.  You can read it by clicking here.