From Saturday Night Live in 1992: Jerry Seinfeld, Dana Carvey, Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider all more or less parody Jerry Seinfeld…

A small celebration of some folks who work behind-the-scenes at late night talk shows. It's kind of amazing how hard some of these folks work and how little credit they get for what are sometimes vital contributions to what gets on the air.

Here is a look at the music of Sesame Street and over here, we have an article about sound effects for Sesame Street, especially in the song "Rubber Duckie."

Several of you have written me to note that the statue of Rocky and Bullwinkle — which used to be in front of Jay Ward's animation studio on Sunset Boulevard — is returning to the Strip after a long absence and much time spent in storage. As explained here, the West Hollywood City Council has voted to give it a permanent home, which I assume will be as permanent as anything in Hollywood can be.

It's on a triangle of land where Sunset Boulevard crosses Holloway. I went to Google Maps and found the spot which you can see here. It's across from where Tower Records used to be and not too far from its original spot. I think they made a good choice. Congrats to all the folks who rallied for it…and if I'd known about it, I would have been at the hearing with you. Special thanks to Alison Martino of Vintage Los Angeles for continuing her great crusade to put a lot of things in this city back the way they should be or to not change them in the first place.

The statue has a special meaning to me. I wrote about it back here.

We have two questions to answer here, one of which leads pretty seamlessly to the next. First up is this one from Al Grasshoff…

I saw an old ad about a company named Cannon Films announcing they were making a Spider-Man movie. This is years ago. Did this movie ever come out?

It was never made and if it had been made, it might not have been about the Spider-Man we know and love. What in hindsight was probably a very bad deal for Marvel stemmed from the fact that until fairly recently, Marvel was generally desperate to sell the movie rights (and at times, the TV rights to certain properties) to anyone who seemed like they'd actually get a film made or a TV show on TV. This was true regardless of who owned the company or ran it at any given moment, dating back to 1944 when then-owner Martin Goodman gave Republic Pictures the right to make a Captain America movie serial (which they produced) for either zero dollars or a token amount that wasn't much more.

Goodman got much the same terms for those Marvel Super-Heroes cartoons made in the sixties. The thinking (if you can call it that) was that the films would enhance the merchandising value of the characters — more toys, t-shirts, etc. In the sixties, Goodman also was out to sell the whole friggin' company and he felt that a Marvel-based TV series, even if it wasn't lucrative for the company, would seriously up the sales price of the whole firm.

He may have been right about that. In any case, subsequent owners tried the same strategy. In 1985, the movie rights to Spider-Man were acquired — for "next to nothing," Stan Lee told me — by a low-budget/lower-prestige company called Cannon Films. This was probably a very dumb move on Marvel's part because even if Cannon had made a Spider-Man movie, it wouldn't have been very impressive and might not even have been about the character we all know as Spider-Man.

I'm serious. At one point, they decided to just use the name and they developed a screenplay about a guy (not Peter Parker) who turns into an actual giant spider the way David Hedison turned into a fly in the movie, The Fly. That idea was finally abandoned and they tried to put the comic book Spider-Man on the screen…but that hadn't happened by the time the company went bankrupt in 1988. This led to all sorts of lawsuits and court battles over its assets and for over a decade, when a lot of studios wanted to, no one could make a Spider-Man movie.

Which brings me to a question that my old pal Joe Brancatelli sent me…

So how does Sony have the rights to Spider-Man films and not Disney, which owns Marvel? Can you write us a primer explaining it all? Signed — Confused ex-comics fan in New York…

Real simple. After many legal proceedings and fights, Marvel reclaimed the movie rights to Spider-Man in 1999 — a period when Marvel was in a lot of financial trouble. To raise fast cash, they turned around and sold said rights to Sony for, if we are to believe the press reports, $7 million. Further revenue was raised by also selling the movie rights to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four to 20th Century Fox.

So the answer to your question, Joe, is that that Spider-Man deal is still in force. Since Marvel got into the business of making movies themselves, all sorts of co-production deals have been arranged like the one in 2015 which allowed Spider-Man to turn up in some Disney/Marvel-produced movies…but Disney and Sony are always renegotiating or talking about renegotiating or calling the deal off or not calling the deal off and…who knows? By the time I post this message in five minutes, it could all be different.

But Sony has the rights to Spider-Man because Marvel sold them…a move that many regret. They also regretted the sale of the X-Men and Fantastic Four to Fox but those rights have come back in-house since earlier this year, Disney bought the film and TV assets held by what is now called 21st Century Fox.

One of these days, Sony will buy Disney or (more likely) Disney will buy Sony and all the Marvel movie rights will be in one place. I expect some fans of the movies will rejoice but to me, it will be small comfort. Whichever company acquires the other will essentially own the world and all of us in it. There's no telling what kind of crossovers they'll devise for us.

That's the great comedy writer Larry Siegel, the way he might like to be remembered: Surrounded by Laker Girls. A three-time Emmy winner (seven-time nominee), Larry wrote for — and this is a very partial list — That Was the Week That Was, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, The Carol Burnett Show, Good Times, That's My Mama, Chico and the Man, CPO Sharkey, Playboy and a helluva lot of stuff for MAD magazine.

In fact, he was one of MAD's most prolific contributors. His first published byline appears to have been in MAD #46 (April, 1959) but Larry said he had work in there earlier. He and his frequent partner Stan Hart (another longtime MAD writer) also worked on The Mad Show, which was a successful off-Broadway production, and on some of the various attempts to turn MAD into a TV show. No matter how busy he got in television, Larry always found time to write for MAD and was the author of some of their most memorable movie and TV parodies.

Before MAD, he was a writer for Harvey Kurtzman's magazine Humbug and he worked with Kurtzman on other enterprises, including Little Annie Fanny for Playboy. He had previously worked for Playboy in its sales department and graduated from there to writing humorous pieces for the magazine.

Larry was born in 1925 and he received a Purple Heart and a fistful of other medals for his military service in World War II. He died yesterday at the age of 93 following a long struggle with Parkinson's Disease. He was a very funny man who wrote an awful lot of things that made people laugh. It's always bad to lose people who know how to do that, especially when they did it as well as Larry Siegel.

• Sean Spicer is going to be on Dancing With The Stars. He's not going to actually dance. He's going to lie and say he did dance and that the press is lying if they said he didn't.

Alton Brown is back with his fine cooking program, Good Eats, this time in an online version. I like watching this guy because I think he uses television very well and I always learn something about something. Often, the lesson is that I don't know enough about cooking to cook whatever he's cooking, or don't have the time or patience or kitchen space or utensils or spice rack. In this first installment of his new series, he makes one of my favorite dishes — chicken parmesan — and pretty well ensures that I will never try to make it at home.

Which is fine with me…honest. I'm not a very good cook and I will never do enough of it to become a very good cook. Every time I toy with the idea of cooking something, I watch some online video, see an experienced chef make it and am disabused of the foolish thought that I can do that. That, to me, is what cooking programs are for. I'm going to follow Alton Brown's new show and I hope real soon he makes potato latkes because I have this idea in the back of my head that I could do that and I need to be shown how wrong I am. Here's why I won't even attempt chicken parm…

What's all this about Trump buying Greenland? Matt Yglesias explains but the bottom line is that Greenland is not for sale, Trump is not going to buy it and he sure wouldn't want to make it one of the United States. There's more chance of you buying Massachusetts.

We have here a kind of glossary/guide to the cultural references in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. For some reason, it makes no reference to the one that most delighted me, which was the inclusion of Seymour, a local horror movie host who was on KHJ TV and later on KTLA. I knew "Seymour" — his real name was Larry Vincent — and visited his set and even wrote some lines he used on his program.

Here's a link to an article I wrote about him back in 1999. The photo above is one I took on his set at KTLA around 1973 or so. For a long time, it was the clearest photo you could find of him on the Internet so lots of folks borrowed it for their websites and remembrances. I'm glad the guy is still remembered because he was the best I ever saw at what he did. His intros and interjections even got me to watch movies like The Mummy's Curse and Man-Made Monster which today, I wouldn't sit through if you paid me $500 and fed me Souplantation Tomato Soup throughout.

• Apparently, winning the title of President of the United States wasn't enough for Donald Trump. He's now actively campaigning for the office of Jesus Christ.

First one of these in like six months and I should have posted this earlier today. Very busy today…and some of you can help. Please stop sending me e-mails arguing either that the new Tarantino film is either the absolute greatest movie ever made or the absolute worst. I cannot be convinced it is either of those things. I'd try to connect each of those arguing one position with someone else arguing the other but, like matter meeting anti-matter, I fear an explosion that would rock the universe.

If you want to tell me something, tell me why it matters so much to you that I — a blogger with minimal influence on anything — totally agrees with you about this movie. And I promise you this: If you can ever manage to get every single other person on this planet to agree with your view of this film, I will throw in with you all. I will vote to make it unanimous.

Until then, leave me alone on this. I have a long-standing policy: The length of time you spend arguing about a movie should never exceed the running time of said movie. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (which I believe is how you should spell it, ellipsis and all) is two hours and forty-five minutes. I am currently at about 2:41. In one sense, it's great that a movie arouses so much interest and discussion…but I can only take about another four minutes of it and I prefer to spend it praising whoever did the redress of the Bruin and Village Theaters in Westwood. You have no idea how many movies I saw in those places when they looked like that.

Normal posting should resume here in a couple of days when the current workload abates, the sixth volume of The Complete Pogo is off to the printers, and my cleaning lady comes and I no longer have to wash one dish in order to eat one dish of anything.

The Daily Show has assembled 21 minutes of Donald Trump saying…well, let's put it this way: If you were a Trump fan and a Democratic opponent said any of these things, you'd say this was incontrovertible proof that the Democrat was an idiot and unfit to trim hedges, let alone be President…

• Jeffrey Epstein signed a new will just two days before he was found dead. Isn't this the plot of every single Ellery Queen novel?

As noted here, Donald Trump cannot understand why there's this poll out from Fox News that shows him losing to Biden, Sanders, Warren and even Harris. He said, "I don't know what's happening with Fox."

It's fascinating that among the possibilities that apparently didn't occur to him was that the Fox News pollsters conducted a poll by the same methods they've always used and the poll yielded those results. He seems to have assumed that since Fox has been generally favorable to him, they would rig their poll to show him clobbering the other candidates…or at least should suppress the results of a poll that showed him losing.

This may tell us a lot about the way this man views politics. The news is just a tool to manipulate public opinion and it's dishonest if it doesn't do that in service of Trump. If and when he runs a news network or newspaper, that's how it would work.

And if/when on Election Night 2020, Fox News reports that Donald Trump lost, he'll be able to understand why CBS, NBC, ABC and all the newspapers he hates would say such a thing…

…but why, oh why would Fox?