With Broadway shuttered during The Pandemic, we've had a lot of amazing videos of folks who might otherwise be on stages but have to settle for singing show tunes on the web. Here's a great collection of folks including Gavin Creel, Nikki Renée Daniels, Norm Lewis, Amanda Castro, Jenn Gambatese, Jo Lampert, and Heath Saunders performing tunes from recent and classic musicals…
As you may have seen the other day, I tweeted "I will not feel the Pandemic is truly over until I feel safe going into a Hometown Buffet." It got a lot of forwards but it also got a response from my friend Marv Wolfman who tweeted — and others retweeted — "There never was a time when going to a Hometown Buffet was safe." I have several things to say to that…
First: Marv, you and I have eaten together in restaurants way less safe than Hometown Buffet. Secondly: It's a joke. "Hometown Buffet" fits into the joke. Certain proper names fit into certain jokes better than others.
I actually didn't mind Hometown Buffets that much…though I must admit to not being in one for well over fifteen years. A long time ago, I felt safer in a buffet — any buffet — than I did in many order-off-a-menu restaurants. When you have as many food allergies as I do, you like seeing your food before you commit to it.
It's one of the things I used to like about Vegas…though I liked the buffets there more before '06 when I had my gastric bypass. Back then, you could stuff yourself and feel you were getting closer to "even" with the casino. After the surgery though, I couldn't eat enough to make most buffets cost-effective and a year or so later, my sweet tooth disappeared and I gave up pies, cakes, cookies, cute little creme puffs, ice cream, etc., further limiting my consumption.
So I largely gave up buffets because I didn't want to pay $40 for the eight bucks worth of food I could consume. But before that, a Hometown Buffet was fine for my purposes, especially if they had someone carving a freshly-roasted turkey. Yeah, most of the vegetables were canned and the fried shrimp were frozen and tasted like they were 90% breading wrapped around one stale Goldfish cracker. Yes, some of the food in the steam tables seemed to have been there since the invention of the steamship.
But if you find yourself dining in cheapo restaurants due to lack of funds or options, you learn there are some things they just can't ruin. Working on studio lots that sometimes had no commissary (or one as bad as some of them are), I learned that the catering truck could usually make a decent grilled cheese sandwich. So that and a bag o' chips was an acceptable lunch. And if a buffet was carving a freshly-roasted turkey and they had mashed potatoes, I was fine. I'm not saying no one ever ruined those items but it's not easy.
So that's my admittedly-feeble defense of Hometown Buffets or places like Hometown Buffets. And it brings me to the other thing that I heard in response on Twitter and in my e-mails: Is the Hometown Buffet chain — which includes brand names like Old Country Buffet and others — still in business?
I dunno. And after about twenty minutes today searching the Internet, I'm still not sure. They don't seem to have a website, they did declare bankruptcy and a lot of their outlets closed on account of The Pandemic. But a lot of chains have gone through bankruptcy — and were doing so before the lockdowns — and there's a difference between closing for the duration and closing forever. A lot of the former are now reopening.
Are those kinds of buffets gone for good? A lot of the ones in Vegas — more than were expected — are reopening. What's more they're raising the prices because people seem willing to pay it. And they're going back to the serve-yourself model where you walk up, pick up the same spoon fifty customers before you used and put pasta from a large serving tray onto your plate.
But I'm not sure about Hometown Buffets and Golden Corrals and their clones. If you find out for-certain, lemme know and I'll pass it on. I just wanted to say that if Hometown Buffet is gone for good, it wasn't as bad as some folks who pounced on my Tweet said it was. And if such places do come back, you probably won't see me in them unless I'm stranded where that's my only option and they carve real turkey.
Yesterday, I recorded the last of the three panels I'm contributing to this year's Comic-Con@Home. It will be online along with many other panels during Comic-Con@Home, which runs July 23-25. I did three of these for last year's Comic-Con@Home and three more earlier this year for WonderCon@Home. I'm hoping that will be the end of panels having to be done online because we can't do them at an actual convention in a building full of live human beings.
This panel I did yesterday was Cartoon Voices with four of the best voice performers in the field: Candi Milo, Wally Wingert, Jenny Yokobori and Zeno Robinson. Those were great picks if I do say so myself and I was real happy with how this one came out.
Actually, I've been real happy with all of these, some of which I did on my own and some in conjunction with WonderCon or Comic-Con. If you haven't checked them out, there are seven of them over in this section…and some fun videos not about Cartoon Voices, as well.
Around the same dates at Comic-Con@Home, the first issue of the Groo Meets Tarzan mini-series will be out. I'm going to ask if some of you will help me with something that may seem trivial to you but it matters to me.
The correct credits on this series for writing and drawing go like this: Written by Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier; Illustrated by Sergio Aragonés and Thomas Yeates. I'm seeing a lot of folks online saying I wrote it and that it was drawn by Sergio and Thomas. That's right about the drawing, wrong about the writing. If you see such an error someplace, please tell the appropriate person to fix it.
Also, if you see someone say that Groo the Wanderer was created by Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier, please tell them that it was just Sergio Aragonés. I understand this is an innocent mistake and I don't think it bothers Sergio. But it bothers me. I have lost vast amounts of respect for people in "The Arts" (TV, movies, comics, etc.) because they either took credit for something they didn't do or didn't correct someone who unknowingly gave them credit for the work of someone else. I don't want to do that to someone else even if I didn't do it. Thanks.
Columnist William Saletan gets linked-to here often because he comes up with novel "I never thought of it that way" ways to look at current problems. Click on his name and read the novel way he has of looking at the decision not to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
I'm not saying you'll agree. I'm not even saying I agree. But sometimes, considering something from a different vantage point gives you some iota of an inkling of a smidgen of new perspective on the matter. Sometimes.
Meanwhile, a lady named Eve Peyser wrote an article that confirms my decision to avoid Las Vegas. She was uncomfortable, while there's still a Pandemic in this country, moving through a crowd of drunken partiers. So am I — and I was, even before any of us heard the word "coronavirus."
By the way: I'll bet the unidentified spot where she encountered that mob was on the south side of Harrah's and the place she describes as "one of the Strip's seedier casinos" was Casino Royale. Been there, done that. And I don't think I'll be in that vicinity again for a long time. We're probably talking years here, people.
This is about the perfect time of year for this one. The Happenings were a group that mainly took songs that had been recorded by others and put their own spin and harmony on them. "See You in September" was recorded by The Tempos back in 1959. Bob Miranda, who seems to have been the most prominent member of The Happenings described it as "a great song and kind of a bad record." So they did their version in 1966 and it quickly went to Number One on the charts. KHJ played it an awful lot, especially in the Summer…
And in case you're interested, here's the version recorded by The Tempos. Yeah, good song…kind of a bad record…
And if you're really interested, there are other versions of the song online by artists including Julie Budd, Terry Robins and the Playboys, The Symbols, The Chiffons, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Shelley Fabares, Mike Clifford, The Lettermen, The Mike Curb Congregation, The Quotations, Dino Villanueva, Debby Boone, Santo & Johnny and Billy K. and the Seamen.
The Happenings' version is the best in my opinion, followed closely by the recording by The Lettermen which sounds almost identical. The most energetic is probably the one by The Quotations. Do not try to listen to all of them or you'll be begging me to post more versions of the Flintstones theme.
As with recent Comic-Con Internationals and WonderCons, they're not having Comic-Con International this July in San Diego. Whatever they do have will be online and as usual, I'm preparing three online panels that will be on the convention website on the days when Comic-Con would have happened…July 23-25. In fact, I'm recording the third of three today.
There's a panel with Sergio Aragonés, Thomas Yeates and myself discussing the new Groo Meets Tarzan mini-series that will be coming out about the same time that Comic-Con@Home occurs. There's a Jack Kirby Tribute Panel with Paul Levitz and Walt Simonson. And there's a Cartoon Voices Panel that I'll tell you about later because I have to get ready to record it in an hour.
The Jack Kirby Panel has already been recorded and it will be of great interest to Kirby fans 'n' scholars. It focuses mainly on Jack's New Gods series for DC and we discuss what actually happened there and how the series actually sold. Some of what you may have heard — or thought you heard — about those comics is not true. It'll be online in about six weeks.
The Comic-Con Special Edition announced for Thanksgiving Weekend looks increasingly certain to take place but they still have a helluva lot of planning work to do on it. I'll tell you more about it as soon as I know more about it. I don't know much more than is in this paragraph.
As long as COVID-19 has been in the news, there has been this "lab-leak" theory making the rounds. It says that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan and that it was accidentally or perhaps deliberately allowed to escape into the wild. We're hearing a lot more lately about this interesting theory and we ought to know if it's true or not — and if it isn't, then just where did this damned thing come from?
But as Kevin Drum reminds us, there was absolutely no evidence to support this theory when it was first suggested…and there's still absolutely no evidence. That doesn't mean there isn't any truth to it but we oughta remember that there's zero evidence.
If you follow John Oliver's online and on-HBO exploits, watch this…
Magician Curt Miller does a card trick for…well, just about every role John Cleese ever played on television or in a movie…
I met Len Wein on Monday, June 29, 1970 in the DC offices. We were introduced in a hallway just outside an office shared by two DC editors — Dick Giordano and Julius Schwartz. Len had just returned from lunch with Dick and I had just returned from lunch with Julie. Len and I became instant friends and remained friends until he passed away in September of 2017 at the age of 69.
69 is way, way too early to go…and I'm not just saying that because I'm 69. Len had way too much living and loving and laughing and writing yet to do. And I can't tell you how many things have happened since September of 2017 that I wish I'd been able to call him and talk about. At times, we were incapable of even looking at each other without laughing, often with no clear concept of what we were laughing about.
Len would have been 73 today. I usually don't note dates like this on this blog because there'd be too many of them…people I wish were still around. But I saw a lot of posts on Facebook about Len today and they got me thinking about him and…well, there you are.
Since August of 1988, NBC has had a third talk show following The Tonight Show and Late Night. It's usually been called something with "Later" in the title and it just came to an end. My old pal Aaron Barnhart will tell you the whole story if you'll click on his name.
The other day here, I posted a link to a video of Red Skelton doing a monologue on The Ed Sullivan Show. Here's a message I received from James Curtis…
A bit of trivia about the Red Skelton monologue.
I was in the audience the night this segment was recorded at Television City. It was on a Monday, which, as you know, was the usual night of the Skelton dress rehearsal. No orchestra, just a piano, but otherwise the whole show, apart from the musical numbers and credits. My friend and I had tickets for Jonathan Winters, but then one of the pages appeared with tickets for the Skelton show. I asked who the guest stars were, and he said, "Boris Karloff and Vincent Price." That was all I had to hear.
We got great aisle seats — third or fourth row — with two seats taped off directly behind us. Just before the start of the show, the tape was removed and down the aisle came Ed Sullivan and another man. As Sullivan sat down, I felt his hands on my shoulders and they gave me a squeeze. I turned around and asked him for his autograph, and he asked for my birthday. I said November 16th and he wrote "Hello Jim, and a happy November 16 to you, young fellow." Nice man; I still have it.
I later came to understand that if you wanted Red on your show, you had to come to him. So after the monologue, during which Sullivan emerged from the audience for a little on-stage banter, a replica of Ed's New York set was brought in, new linoleum was laid, Sullivan made the introduction, and out came Red as we see in the clip. I understand the whole episode is on a home video set, and I should probably pick it up for a quick glimpse of my 14 year-old self.
Then James added…
P.S. One thing that stuck with me about that night was that Boris Karloff was obviously quite frail — he died in London about five months later — and that he performed the rehearsal in a wheelchair pushed by a little man wearing a rubber Frankenstein mask. Despite this, he knew his part cold, and although Vincent Price and Skelton were glued to their respective cue cards, Karloff never glanced at his once. And when I watched the air show — which was taped the following night — Karloff did the whole thing on his feet. It was a remarkable show of stamina and professionalism at the very end of a distinguished career, and it later turned out to be a valuable thing for me to have witnessed.
I have seen that kind of professionalism now and then. I'm not sure if there are as many comparable tales of non-performers rising to those kinds of challenges but there does seem to be something about being in front of an audience that brings it out in performers.
Skelton seems to have been one of those stars who had his own odd ways of doing things and you either played by his rules or you didn't play with him. I would guess that Ed Sullivan and/or CBS decided that it would be mutually beneficial to both Ed's show and Red's to have that little crossover and they engineered that. It may not have been that Red insisted they come to him. It might have been that CBS wanted it to happen and Red couldn't fly to New York, do Ed's show and get back without disrupting the taping schedule of his own program.
But maybe Red did insist they come to him. He was on odd guy. Those "dirty hour" rehearsals he insisted on doing for his show cost a lot of time and money but if you wanted The Red Skelton Hour to get taped Tuesday night, you had to let him do that.
As I probably knew once upon a time, the Muppet I identified as a "Cookie Monster prototype" in this video has a name. He's the Beautiful Day Monster, seen above with the late Mr. Hooper. The Beautiful Day Monster is called The Beautiful Day Monster because in one Muppet routine, he ruined a little girl's beautiful day.
He appeared in all sorts of sketches they did, including many on Sesame Street under different names. Sometimes, they reconfigured his appearance a little with add-ons or maybe interchangeable parts. It's kind of like the way the Law and Order TV show used to use Danny Burstein.
Darren Foulds wrote in to note that The B.D.M. in the "Windy" video is, as I certainly recognized, "voiced by Frank Oz, the same as classic Cookie. Beautiful Day and Cookie were designed and built together for a snack food commercial in 1966 that never aired. The Muppet who became Cookie Monster became one of the more famous Muppets while Beautiful Day Monster never quite reached the same level of fame."
I guess it's similar to being one of those cast members on Saturday Night Live who never got a movie deal. Poor Beautiful Day Monster.
This is a monologue by Red Skelton on The Ed Sullivan Show for September 29, 1968. Mr. Skelton broke just about every rule of comedy starting with the one about how a comedian should never laugh at his own jokes…and he was clearly outta his ever-lovin' mind. But there was something so delightful about the man that I love watching him.
In the sixties, I went to one taping of his CBS show and a year or so later, I got into one of his infamous "dirty hour" sessions at CBS. These were supposed to be full dress rehearsals for the show he'd tape a day or two later but by and large, it was just Red telling dirty jokes for an hour.
I further got to hear Red tell dirty jokes when I visited a store in Westwood called Bel-Air Camera. I wrote all about these encounters in this article. The encounters with Red in the camera shop were in 1969 and 1970 so he was about the same age he is in this video…