The TV show M*A*S*H debuted on CBS in September of 1972. While it wasn't the biggest of hits at first, it did well enough that a few months later, CBS apparently wanted another series that was not unlike it. Not long before, Paramount had released the movie version of Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 and, as with most such deals, there was a clause in there allowing the studio to bring forth a TV version.

So here we have the 1973 unsold pilot for a weekly Catch-22 TV series. Richard Dreyfuss, who was not yet a movie star of note, played the role Alan Arkin had played in the film. Hal Dresner, who had written a couple of first-season M*A*S*H episodes did the teleplay. Richard Quine directed and the cast also included Dana Elcar, Nicholas Hammond (who would soon star in the first live-action Spider-Man TV show) and my buddy Frank Welker. Frank pretty much gave up on-camera performing a few years later to become the most-often-heard cartoon voice actor in the history of mankind.

I can see why this did not become a regular series and if you watch it, you'll probably come up with even more reasons. One though is one of the worst "sweetening" jobs I've ever heard on a TV show. There's a way to do canned laughter that isn't constantly reminding you that it's not genuine. They didn't get that kind…

A couple of folks have written to ask why I'm not outraged that Gone With the Wind is being withdrawn from someplace in reaction to something having to do with Black Lives Matter. I love the history and majesty of film (and other art forms) as much as anyone but I can't summon up any dudgeon, high or otherwise, about this or about how Disney won't release Song of the South or Warner Brothers won't put out fancy Blu-rays of cartoons with racial stereotypes. None of this stuff has ceased to exist. It is at worst, mildly inconvenient to view and sometimes, the copies are not pristine.

You want to see Gone With the Wind or show it to someone? You can rent it on Amazon for $3.99 or better still, buy a copy. Then they can never take it away from you.

I cannot right now think of a single movie that I would like to see but can't. If I come up with one, it's probably unavailable because there's been so little interest in it (i.e., so little financial incentive) that whoever has a copy has it deep in some vault 'cause there ain't no money in hauling it out. Before home video — which wasn't that long ago — it was difficult to see a lot of movies. Now, it's difficult to think of one you can't see. I think we have bigger problems in this world to think about.

Please stop sending me requests to plug your Kickstarter project or anything else crowd-funded. I know what you're doing is wonderful and that you have the talent and integrity to bring it to fruition and that it will be super-sensational and will change my life for the better. I also know that since 2013, I have backed and paid money to eleven Kickstarter campaigns and six more via other crowd-funding websites..and of the seventeen projects, I've received eight.

Some of those eight were quite good and they arrived fairly close to when they were supposed to be delivered and what I received was pretty much what was promised. But eight out of seventeen is not an acceptable percentage. One took my money in 2013 and another in 2015 and all I've received to date for that loot are some periodic e-mails detailing their problems and promising that the project is close to completion.

This has led to me becoming disinclined to ever order anything else that is crowd-funded; not unless it's the endeavor of someone I know really, really, really well. Just knowing them really, really well is not sufficient.

One item I backed but never received was apparently actually produced. It was a book and it didn't come and didn't come and didn't come…and then one day, I noticed someone on some web forum saying they enjoyed their copy. So I wrote to the gent who produced it and he wrote back that yes, he got it published and he sent them out to everyone and if I didn't get mine, well, that was just too bad. It was my fault, he said, for not letting him know I hadn't received it before he sold out of all his copies.

I still can't figure out how I was supposed to figure out it was published and everyone else was getting their copies. Such are the mysteries of crowdfunding.

KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles was the first commercially licensed television station in the western United States. It went on the air in 1947 as an enterprise of Paramount Pictures and an awful lot of programs originated from its studios.

In 1987, the station produced a 40-year retrospective called KTLA at 40 and the clip below is an excerpt from that special. Stan Freberg — who as you'll hear started his TV career with a show on KTLA — hosted this segment about programming for kids, not just at KTLA but on other local stations as well. In separate clips here, you'll meet Jimmy Weldon, who hosted cartoons on Channel 13 and Vance Colvig, who played Bozo the Clown on Channel 5. No mention is made that Vance's father Pinto was the actor who first played Bozo, nor is it mentioned that on the Hanna-Barbera Yakky Doodle cartoons, Weldon supplied the voice of Yakky and Vance Colvig was the voice of his bulldog pal Chopper.

I kinda grew up, to the extent I grew up at all, on those guys plus Skipper Frank, Engineer Bill, Sheriff John, Tom Hatten and other kids' show hosts on local television, seen here in some of the few pieces of video that have survived of these babysitters. I also grew up to a great extent on Stan Freberg and Daws Butler…

If you pay a lot (or even any) attention to political polls, read Nathaniel Rakich on how to read the things.

While I've got you here, let me clear something up: I said in this post that "the Rasmussen Poll, which usually favors Republicans, had Trump twelve points behind." Actually, the Rasmussen Poll has Trump five points behind. It's pollster Scott Rasmussen who has Trump twelve points behind.

Scott Rasmussen founded the Rasmussen Poll in 2003, left the company in 2013 and now does his own independent polling. The company he founded still bears his name but it ain't his poll any longer. I am hardly the first or even the thousandth person to make reference to "the Rasmussen Poll" without being aware there are two of them.

Hey, take a few minutes and enjoy this interview with Jon Stewart. He has a new movie coming out so I suppose we'll see a lot of him the next few weeks. We could do with more Jon Stewart. Here's an excerpt…

It's the wildest thing. I've never seen anybody who can say in the same breath, as the president does, "I am in charge, only I can fix this, and I take no responsibility." You cannot process that. So what you have to process is the actual process: How do masks help? Do they help? You have to really explain it to people, but we allow the mask-wearing to be reduced to its symbolic meaning. Things like masks can't just become another avatar of political representation. That's where we go wrong.

As you can see in the previous dispatch, I expected to awake this morning to news of something maddening and pernicious done by that awful guy in the White House. Instead, we have the news that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination in the workplace against LGBTQ employees. What's more, it comes at a time when the Trump administration has been trying to remove all such protections…

…and, what's even more, it was a 6-3 decision with Chief Justice Roberts siding with the majority as did Neil Gorsuch, who authored the opinion. Neil Gorsuch was a Trump appointee, remember. And the working premise was that a Trump appointee would be lockstep-loyal to Trump and to right-wing causes. Donald has to be seething, especially with the pending SCOTUS decision about whether he has to turn over his tax records.

Has there been a presidential tweet yet calling Gorsuch a back-stabbing traitor? Trump is totally transactional. If he does something for you, you owe him absolute fealty.

Okay. That's all the news I'm going to look at for a while. A script awaits.

Here's another clip from Robin and the 7 Hoods. This is Bing Crosby's big number, "Mr. Booze." And I remember thinking even at age twelve that Peter Falk (who I'd recently discovered in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) had stolen this movie from allegedly-bigger stars. Here, he and Victor Buono upstage Crosby, Frank, Dino and Sammy…

A lot of folks are making something out of Donald Trump, during his speech at West Point, having trouble walking down a ramp and having a teensy bit of trouble taking a sip from a glass of water. There was much wrong with that speech, starting with the fact that those cadets were summoned to be there in person when anyone else would have let them "attend" online and not risk disease. There was also nothing said about Trump's current difficulties with the military in which these cadets will serve.

Having trouble walking down a ramp? Big deal. I'm younger than he is and I have trouble walking down some ramps.

In other news, Trump demanded a retraction and apology from CNN because of a poll they released showing him fourteen points behind Joe Biden. Given that no retraction or apology could possibly come from such demands, was it a good idea to make that charge and call more attention to it? All the major polls show Biden with a lead well beyond the margin of error and with some surprisingly-close numbers in some states that ought to be easy wins for any Republican. Even the Rasmussen Poll, which usually favors Republicans, had Trump twelve points behind Joe B. Of course, much can happen.

I'm now segueing back to scripts I need to write. Let's see how far I can get into the work week before Trump does something to yank my attention away from my profession. With my luck, it'll be tomorrow morning before The Today Show is over.

Here's the number "Style" from the 1964 movie, Robin and the 7 Hoods. I remember seeing this film with my parents at the Crest Theater in Westwood when I was twelve years old. I remember my folks and others saying that Frank Sinatra was the greatest musical performer alive and I recall after the film thinking, "Well, I guess that wasn't a good example of his greatness. One of these days, I'm sure I'll see him do something that will show me why people think that."

Years later, a devout Sinatra fan told me to not hold this film against his idol. It was shot right after John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Frank, he said, was still despondent about that. And then during the production, Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped and though he was ultimately freed unharmed, the whole ordeal was so agonizing that Frank (Senior) wanted to abort the film but was eventually convinced to finish it.

Okay, those are probably decent excuses for not giving a top-rate performance but I'm still waiting for that video or film clip or recording that will convince me Francis Albert Sinatra deserved his reputation. I like Dean and Bing more in every way, though Bing doesn't show why he deserved his rep in this number either. But the songwriters — Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen — do.

Ten years ago, a stage musical based on Robin and the 7 Hoods was in tryouts at the Old Globe in San Diego and said to be headed for Broadway. I haven't seen any sign of that, either — but here's probably the best number in the movie…

• Take down the statues of everyone who fought for the Confederacy except Jubilation T. Cornpone.

There was an altogether appropriate outpouring of praise and respect for Denny O'Neil all across the Internet yesterday. It made me think, as so many passings do, how many good and smart people I've met in the comic book industry. It's most of them. It's why at a comic convention, I may know less than 5% of the people in the hall but I still feel among friends.

Pardon the strained segue here but you know when I don't these days? When I'm around people not wearing masks. Are they making some sort of political statement? If they are, it seems like a crazy one given the apparent links lately between a city "opening up" and having the number of reported cases of COVID-19 increase. Even if you believe there's no cause-and-effect relationship there, I'd think you'd wear a mask just in case you're wrong. That's one of the problems with politics these days: Too many people who won't consider the possibility that they're wrong.

Yeah, it's weird to be in a public place these days with so many people wearing masks and trying to maintain their distance. To me, it's even weirder to be among people who think…I don't know…"This whole virus thing is a hoax"…or "I'm so damned healthy I won't get it and I don't care if I carry it to someone else"…or "The president says it's over"…or whatever. I'm torn between wanting to ask these people what the hell they're thinking and not wanting to be anywhere near them.

I miss crowds. Unlike some people, I don't mind them as long as there's a place I can go to get away from them. When I go to Las Vegas alone, as I sometimes do (or did), I like that I can work or sleep in my room and feel utterly isolated…and then I can just hop in an elevator and within two minutes, be surrounded by mostly-happy people. And when I have enough of that, I can escape back to the solitude of my room just as easily. Right now, there's no place where I can be among mostly-happy people at all, let alone a crowd where I feel safe.

This will end. We're all just waiting this thing out…and that's another thing I think when I see unmasked folks in the shopping center: They might be making themselves feel better by acting like it's over but it isn't and they're more likely prolonging it. It's frustrating to be in the tunnel and not know how long it is, how far you'll have to travel to see that light at the end. But you just have to keep going because there really isn't a good alternative. Wish there was.

Denny O'Neil, one of the outstanding comic book writers of his generation, has died at the age of 81. He died at home of natural causes, we're hearing, and those who knew of his recent health problems are not surprised. I spoke to him about four months ago and he was talking then about not having much time left. I'll tell you in a moment what I called him to talk about because it might interest you.

Denny had been a reporter writing about comic books in the sixties and then he moved on to become a writer of comic books in the sixties. He always said he owed his new career to two people — Roy Thomas, who suggested Denny try out for a writing job at Marvel (which he got) and Dick Giordano, who was then the editor at Charlton. When the work for Marvel dried out, Dick kept Denny busy writing for Charlton — sometimes under the name Sergius O'Shaugnessy — and then when Dick moved over to DC, he took Denny with him. Before long, Denny was the main writer of Batman and a little later, of Superman. He wrote most of DC's main books at one time or another and often worked as an editor there.

His scripts for Charlton had been way better than Charlton deserved for the low rates they paid. His scripts for DC were way better than the higher rates DC paid. He had a way of infusing old strips with fresh approaches. A lot of people credited him for bringing "relevance" to comics, crafting stories about current events and issues, most visibly in the acclaimed Green Lantern-Green Arrow series he did with artist Neal Adams. I thought it was a matter of Denny just trying to move comics a little more into the real world at a time in the early seventies when most comics could have been set in the forties without making much difference.

Green Lantern-Green Arrow was, as noted, critically acclaimed. I was more impressed with what he did with Batman, and not just the stories he wrote of that hero that were drawn by Adams. You could tell that a lot of the other writers of the Caped Crusader were at least starting with Denny's Batman and building on what he'd done. I was also really impressed with a run he did later on Iron Man for Marvel. Denny had never been coy about discussing his own problems with "substance abuse" and while it was risky to explore those themes in Iron Man, it made for one of the most personal runs of a comic of its kind.

Actually, I was impressed with just about everything Denny did and the few times I got to work with him in an editor/writer relationship, I found him to be as good at editing as he was at writing, which was very good indeed. He was also a very conscientious writer, willing to mentor others and help out in any righteous cause. Several times when Jack Kirby got into his famous battles with comic book publishers, Denny was among the first to call me and ask if he could help in any way. A fairly small part of his career was built on continuing characters that Jack had launched or help launch but that didn't matter to Denny. He respected Jack greatly and if he could help, he would help.

I always enjoyed talking to the man. I always learned something. Recently, I wrote the foreword for a set of books that'll be out in August and I'm going to try to tell this so it doesn't sound like a plug. It's a reissue of the Marvel Mini-Books that were put out in the sixties — little tiny comics like this one…

The books carried no credits and while I could identify the artists from their handiwork, I wanted to identify the writers so I did some detective work. At one point, I realized Denny had a staff job at Marvel at the time they were done. He was writing Millie the Model so I figured he might have written the Millie the Model mini-book and called to ask him. It turned out he hadn't written the Millie one but he did vividly recall writing the Captain America one depicted above.

In fact, he said it was the first super-hero comic he ever wrote and he told me he did it in about two hours and loved writing it and that as far as he knew, I was now the only human being in the world who knew he'd done that.  I was going to save that "scoop" to be divulged in the foreword but it seems more appropriate to give it up here.

I said, "Then you never autographed a copy?"  He said, "Never.  No one knows I did it."  And then he offered, assuming he could find a pen with a fine-enough point, to sign the copy in the new replica set to me when it comes out and never sign another one for anybody.  "You'll have the only autographed copy that ever exists," he promised.  I'm sorry that's not going to happen, not because I wanted the collector's item but because I don't get to talk with Denny anymore.  He was one of the brightest, nicest guys I've met in comics and maybe one of the most important writers the field has ever had.

This year marks forty (40) years that I've been a member of The Academy of Magical Arts, a society for magicians and aficionados of what they do.  Maybe you've heard of our clubhouse — The Magic Castle, a big mansion up in the hills of Hollywood full of magical artifacts and history and when it's open, fine performers and fine dining. It's closed now for obvious reasons.

When I first joined, it had one wonderment that's no longer there…Dai Vernon. "The Professor," as everyone called him was born in 1894 and devoted his life to magic. He performed it, he invented it, he studied it, he lived it. He billed himself as "The Man Who Fooled Houdini" because he did. Almost every major figure in magic in America (and a few other countries), knew Dai, leaned from Dai and craved his approval.

We lost him in 1992. The last thirty years of his life were spent at the Castle, making himself available to anyone who wanted to meet him, hear his stories, get advice on their magic and, if possible, get a little of that approval. He'd usually be found on a certain love seat in the front parlor. The Magic Castle was filled with exhibits and history and shows and acts from all over the world…but there was no better way to spend your time there than sitting with The Professor as he held court. I was occasionally in his audience.

Here he is on a TV show probably from the early eighties, performing a trick that's even older than he was — the cups and balls. If you're familiar with this feat, the way he does it might strike you as the standard way to do it. That's because the way Dai Vernon did a trick became the standard way. Everyone else who has done the cups 'n' balls since — which is like 90% of everyone who ever took up magic — starts with the way he did it and puts their own spin on it. Here's how he did it…

So it's Day 92. I'm still allowing very few people into my home and they either wear a mask or I know how much they've been isolating in their lives and I'm satisfied it's safe for us to isolate together for a while. I go out rarely and only for a good reason. Walking for exercise is a good reason and when I walk somewhere, I wear a mask. When I drive somewhere, I wear a mask from the moment I leave my car until the moment I'm back in my car.

In the two latter situations, I carry a little man-purse that contains an extra mask, a small vial of hand sanitizer, rubber gloves and a few paper towels.

I have no intention at the moment of changing any of this. I am unconvinced it's safe to "reopen" or to gather again in public places or to assume my chances of getting the virus are now down around the same level as my chances of getting hit by a meteor. I'd love to find out I'm wrong and that it's a lot safer than I think but I would still not take chances.

I am following what is said by Dr. Anthony Fauci and others of similar expertise and credentials but I am not altering my conduct except as approved by my personal physician. I believe it is brain-dead stupid to place any value on "health information" that comes from non-doctors and especially from politicians. I understand the president thinks we've turned the corner, the virus is going away and that it's safe now to cram into buildings and stadiums with others, especially when you're gathering to cheer Donald Trump. But this is a president who believes that convincing your followers that you've achieved something is just as good as actually doing it.

I am not spending a lot of time watching the news except for the weather and televised car chases. I am not spending any time trying to change the mind of anyone whose political views differ from mine though I might try it if I ever meet anyone who is willing to change their political views. When I do peek at the news, I like the way the Black Lives Matter campaign is winning over people, some of whom I did not think were winnable.

My health is fine. My mental attitude is pretty good. I'm getting work done. I have plenty of toilet paper, paper towels, hand sanitizer, Kleenex-type tissue, soap, bottled water, my favorite pantry items and several apps that can be used to have meals delivered. Life is pretty good here and I hope you can say the same.