Matt Taibbi is suspicious of reports that it's verified that Russian sources hacked the computers of the Democratic hierarchy to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. He thinks it's quite possible it happened but cautions against believing it unquestioningly. Probably good advice. And yes, I know it's not as important a matter as Peter Potamus but few things are.

Mike Tiefenbacher, who knows a heckuva lot about stuff I know a heckuva lot about sent me this after message after he read what I posted about that most vital of topics, Peter Potamus…

I never saw this post the first time around, but I would have noted three things then if I had:

1) The show was always called The Peter Potamus Show. That "Magic Balloon" thing came from a line of dialogue from a Magilla Gorilla cartoon where he's watching what he calls "Peter Potamus & His Magic Flying Balloon," in what I assume was meant as a joke. There were never any opening titles with that name, and no one I know has even turned up any promotional materials that use the name — and in fact, it doesn't even make any sense since his boat with balloon attached is a scientific, mechanical machine, and isn't magical in any way. So Earl was wrong, for once, and he was just perpetuating one of those online errors we all love so much.

As proof of this, Scott Shaw! asked Jerry Eisenberg, who created the show, and he confirmed that the series — in parallel to all the prior H-B three-cartoon series which preceded it plus Ruff & Reddy (not to mention the other Ideal series, The Magilla Gorilla Show) — it was always The Peter Potamus Show and never anything else. Not having seen every print ad promoting the show, it's possible that one of them did use those words (but you'd have to show it to me) — but in any case it's probably as bogus a name-assignment as the name the internet has pinned on the Touche-Wally-Lippy trio of cartoons (The New Hanna-Barbera Show), which never had a series name because it wasn't designed as a show of its own (rather to be inserted in hosted, live kids shows), even if almost every station aired them that way.

Tellingly, when stations assigned their own title to the show, it was either The Wally Gator Show, The Touche Turtle Show (which it was called in Milwaukee), or The Lippy and Hardy Show, even though each cartoon had its own opening and closing which only used the characters' names, because that's how these syndicated Hanna-Barbera shows were expected to be titled. (In fact, The Atom Ant Show and The Secret Squirrel Show were the last to be so titled, even despite the fact that NBC sandwiched the two together as one show. It's what was expected.)

2) The two aforementioned series did indeed swap characters, both in fact and in their credits, and there were appropriate changes made to all the openings and closings. But the changeover didn't occur immediately after ABC picked them up, and both shows had the original line-ups until they didn't (at some point I can't testify to). So that explains the credits with the Ideal logos, but leaves room for the credit character swaps you (and I) remember.

(Sometime around this change, a similar credit alteration also happened to The Huckleberry Hound Show when they removed the Kellogg's characters in favor of the characters who were on the then-revised line-up of Huck, Hokey and Ding, and Yakky Doodle; Pixie & Dixie had switched to The Yogi Bear Show, but that show's openings and closings didn't feature the supporting cast so there was no revision needed there).

3) The closing goodbye from The Peter Potamus Show was the sole time I ever heard anyone refer to Breezly as "Breezly Bear." In every other instance, it was Breezly Bruin. "Bruin," of course, wouldn't have scanned in this tune, so maybe it was done on purpose, or maybe it was because the cartoons' opening titles only ever said "Breezly and Sneezly," and Joe or whoever wrote the lyrics thought that was really his name. Had they gone with Breezly Bruin, neither "Ricochet" or "Ricochet Rabbit" would have worked in their lyrics.

One thing you're wrong about, though: there isn't anything too trivial to be mentioned in a blog, especially when it had to do with classic-era Hanna-Barbera.

I have a hunch "Peter Potamus and His Magic Flying Balloon" was a name used at some point — maybe even for only a few hours — early in the development process. A lot of H-B shows went through dozens of names, some of which no one could remember from day to day. Remember that Joe Barbera was the master of the Sliding Pitch, meaning that when he went into a client to sell a show, he would keep changing the idea on the fly, modifying it to appease the body language and expressions of whoever he was pitching to. I once watched in awe as Joe described one idea for a new show to CBS execs and when they didn't seem to be liking it, effortlessly turned it into a completely different idea with misdirection that would have fooled Slydini.

The Magilla Gorilla Show debuted eighteen months before Peter Potamus. Maybe the week they recorded that Magilla cartoon with the mention, the Peter Potamus project was actually called Peter Potamus and His Magic Flying Balloon by someone around the studio.

For some reason, a lot of people seem to think those two shows went on the air at the same time. They didn't — and the year of Magilla was one in which Daws Butler was on the "outs" with Hanna-Barbera — a quarrel over money and how much of it Daws should get when he voiced a star character. He did a little "day player" work for the studio during that period but after having initially cast him to voice Magilla Gorilla, they replaced him with Allan Melvin and didn't have Daws play any regular characters on that series. By the time The Peter Potamus Show got into production, his agent had patched things up so Daws played recurring characters on that show. Then there was another dispute and he wasn't on much of anything for H-B for quite some time after.

The cartoons of Wally Gator, Touche Turtle and Lippy & Hardy aired in Los Angeles on Channel 13 in a show called The Touche Turtle Show and later The Beachcomber Bill Show with a live host named Bill the Beachcomber, played by Bill Biery. He had a little set that looked like a beach shack and he'd banter between cartoons with Wally, Touche and Lippy. Some puppeteer (I don't know who) did pretty good impressions of those characters as he operated pretty-good puppets of them. I wondered at the time — and still do not know — if Hanna-Barbera was somehow involved in the design and manufacture of those puppets, making them available with the cartoons to local stations. Mr. Biery soon migrated to WPIX in New York where he showed the same cartoons but henceforth worked with original puppets.

He was another one of those kid show hosts whose jobs went away. I'd like to see Donald Trump try to bring those back.

Josh Marshall has an interesting theory about why Donald Trump is so hysterical in insisting that the Russian computer hacking not be investigated. It's not that Trump knows it's true. It's that he can't be sure that it isn't.

My pal Kliph Nesteroff just posted a link to this to Twitter. It's an old Saturday Night Live sketch from January 11, 1997 with Norm MacDonald, Mark McKinney and Kevin Spacey spoofing what David Letterman's show had turned into by then. Wanna know why Leno started beating Letterman? I think this hits on some of the main reasons. Kliph says Stephen Colbert contributed to the writing of it, by the way…

Eric Levitz says Donald Trump is mad that Barack Obama is acting like he's still President of the United States of America. The nerve of that guy for thinking his term doesn't end until some time in January!

We haven't heard much lately about building that wall on the Mexican border. I have the feeling Trump's family is going to build a golf course down there and then Donald will tell everyone that's what he always meant by "building a wall."

In the meantime though, we're hearing a lot about repealing Obamacare. It's working pretty well…but those who predicted it would never work have to kill it before it works even better. Trump promised to replace it with "something terrific" but in six years, no one has come close to devising anything better and the uncertainty caused by repealing it without a replacement in place will throw the marketplace — and therefore the lives of those who rely on it — into chaos. Jonathan Chait has more.

And another problem looming for health care is that Trump's nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services wants to bring "balance billing" to Medicare. What is "balance billing?" It's kind of a way to make sure that Medicare doesn't cover as much as it used to and that sick people have to dig into their savings to pay what it no longer covers. Ryan Cooper explains.

Trump's promises to bring back jobs to America may hit a snag. People seem to think those jobs went overseas but an awful lot of them never left the country. They just went to robots who do those jobs for less.

Lastly for now: As we've mentioned here, Trump financial advisor Larry Kudlow has a pretty bad track record when it comes to being right about anything. As Steve Benen notes, Kudlow's new bit of wisdom is that it's great that Trump is surrounding himself with so many rich people because — and this is a quote — "Wealthy folks have no need to steal or engage in corruption." That isn't even true of all the wealthy people in the room when Kudlow meets alone with the president-elect.

Well, that's a kick in the gut. As you've probably heard, a day after her daughter Carrie Fisher died, Debbie Reynolds has passed away. I have no idea how one tragedy might be connected to the other and neither do you. We just sense that one led to the other.

I have absolutely no stories about Ms. Reynolds. I loved her in Singin' in the Rain but so did everyone. I admired how hard and often she worked, not just at performing but in her attempts to build a Hollywood museum. I met her a few times at the mansion I mentioned in this message. Nothing memorable was said either by her or me. I just thought she was a classy lady who had the beauty and talent to be a star for a very long time.

This is an amended version of a post which ran here on 9/18/07. It adds in another video and some other info…

In 1964, Hanna-Barbera produced two cartoon series for the Ideal Toy folks. One was The Magilla Gorilla Show and each half-hour featured a cartoon of Magilla, a cartoon of Ricochet Rabbit and a cartoon of Punkin Puss & Mushmouse. The other series was…well, there's some argument as to what it was called. I remember it always being called The Peter Potamus Show. My friend Earl Kress said it was originally titled Peter Potamus and his Magic Balloon and that it was later changed to The Peter Potamus Show.

Whatever it was called, each 30-minute episode featured a cartoon of Peter Potamus, a cartoon of Yippee, Yappee and Yahooey (aka The Goofy Guards) and a cartoon of Breezly & Sneezly, who were a polar bear and a seal.

Okay, you got all that? Good because this is going to get complicated — and I guess I need to post one of these…

Ideal Toys was going to place the shows on various local stations around the country. Because different kinds of deals would be made here and there, it might be necessary to offer the local station an extra minute of commercial time. Ideal wanted the shows constructed so that one minute in each show could be easily dropped.

To do this, H-B produced two little "curtain call" minutes, one for each series. In each, all the heroes in the show would come out and dance around and say goodbye. When Magilla Gorilla and Peter Potamus debuted in Los Angeles, the same "curtain call" minute for each was aired each week and they were, in some ways, the best minute in each show. Each featured a catchy little tune and better than your average H-B animation. Here's the one from The Peter Potamus Show as it originally appeared…

The shows ran in syndication for one year and then the Ideal deal expired. Soon after, Hanna-Barbera sold the shows to ABC to run on Saturday morning. For reasons unknown though, they decided to switch two segments: Ricochet Rabbit would move from The Magilla Gorilla Show to what was now definitely called The Peter Potamus Show. The Breezly & Sneezly cartoons would move from Peter's show to Magilla's.

This meant that some changes had to be made. For one thing, the Ideal Toys logo had to be taken out of the openings and closings.

The opening to The Magilla Gorilla Show had Ricochet and his sidekick Droopalong in it. I vaguely recall that it was reanimated to replace Ricochet and Droopalong with Breezly and Sneezly but every time I see it now, it has Ricochet and his partner in it…and that's not the syndicated opening because the Ideal plugs have been replaced. So maybe they didn't change that and I just imagined it.

The opening to The Peter Potamus Show didn't have any other characters in it so it could remain unchanged. For some reason though, they dropped the lyrics to the opening and also the closing, leaving a music bed that was not arranged to be heard without lyrics.

But then the "curtain calls" in both shows now had the wrong characters. Again, I have a vague memory that they reanimated that minute in the Magilla Gorilla Show to replace Breezly and Sneezly with Ricochet and Droopalong and again, I might have imagined it. But for the Peter Potamus curtain call, they definitely redid what had to be redone to replace Breezly and Sneezly with Ricochet and Droopalong.

If you watched it just a moment ago you'll recall that in it, Sneezly, being a seal, was balancing Peter on his nose. They took out Sneezly and had Ricochet Rabbit just balance Mr. Potamus on his head. In fact, everywhere Sneezly appeared, they redrew him into Ricochet, and wherever Breezly Bear appeared, they redrew him into Droopalong.

All well and good…but Breezly Bear had also been mentioned in the song and to save a few bucks, H-B decided not to bring in singers and redo the whole tune. So what they did instead was to dub in the voices of some men yelling "Ricochet." They couldn't say "Ricochet Rabbit" because it had to be the same number of syllables as "Breezly Bear." Here's the second version. It wouldn't surprise me if one of those male voices yelling "Ricochet" is Bill Hanna. Anything to save a buck…

Well, I haven't had to write an obit in — what is it? About ten hours? Good. Let's see if I can make it to 2017 without having to do another one.

I keep hearing folks saying that more people they know — as actual friends or just famous people they know of — are dying these days and I wonder if that's so. I mean, every week, someone who's in my address book passes away but I think that's a result of how large my address book is. It's at like 2100 names.

You've all heard someone say that as you get older, more and more of your friends pass away…since the older you are, the older your friends are. Maybe that's so…but as I get older, the list of people I've met gets larger and larger.

Also, I think news coverage these days in all areas gets more expansive. Bill Everett, the creator of the comic book character The Sub-Mariner and the co-creator of Daredevil died in 1973. There was absolutely no news coverage in the mainstream press and precious little in publications about comics. When Will Eisner, the creator of The Spirit died in 2005, it was a major news story in every major newspaper the day it happened. I think there's been a similar expansion in all areas of The Arts. So maybe there aren't more deaths. Maybe we're just hearing about more of the ones that do occur.

And that's about all the time 'n' space I feel like devoting to this topic right now. No more obits this year, okay?

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I Shoulda Known Department: I've received lotsa e-mails demanding that I tell the story of how it is that Carrie Fisher and I went skinny-dipping when I was ten years old and she was six. Honest, folks…there's no real intriguing tale there.

Back when I was under the age of about twelve, I kept finding myself playing with girls, more so than with boys. For some reason, if we were in swimsuits, one or more of the girls would often suggest we take off those swimsuits for at least a few minutes. I later tried to figure out why this kept happening. Well, actually I tried to figure out why they didn't do this after I was about twelve. I came to the conclusion that I just happened to meet a lot of girls who were either curious to see what prepubescent male genitalia looked like and/or wanted to kinda dare themselves to be naked in front of a boy, any boy.

Now then. My mother's best friend was the sister of a man named Harry Karl, who ran the nation's largest privately held retail shoe chain, Karl Shoes. From 1960 until 1973, Mr. Karl was married to the wonderful actress Debbie Reynolds, mother of Carrie Fisher. So my mother's friend was related to Carrie. I think that makes her a step-aunt or something of the sort.

My mother's friend lived in a huge mansion with a spectacular swimming pool and we were often there for parties and to use the pool. One afternoon, there was a brunch with several families present including ours and the Karls. A bunch of us kids were in the pool when our adult supervision, who was not very responsible, had to leave us alone for a few minutes. I think it was four girls and me.

One of the other girls (not Carrie) dared us all to take off our swimsuits and we all did and that's really all there is to the story. I'm sorry, for your sake and mine, that there isn't more to it. The girls at the time were sorry there wasn't more to it, too.

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About five dozen readers of this site e-mailed me in response to my query about how to turn old Wordstar files into new Word files. Some of you were very helpful and I appreciate all the messages. I've suddenly gotten quite busy so I'm putting the whole Wordstar matter on hold until my "to do" list shrinks a bit and a few of you may hear from me then.

I really like the folks who read this blog…all except the guy who keeps writing to tell me that Donald Trump got the biggest landslide victory ever and Barack Obama had the counting rigged to hide that fact. Personally, I think that if Obama was going to go to the trouble to rig the count, he could at least have given us a president most people like.

Just in case you haven't had quite enough obits this year, longtime MAD contributor Don Edwing (aka "Duck" Edwing) died yesterday at the age of 82. A native of Brooklyn, Don began drawing at an early age and entered the ranks of professional cartoonists at the old (for a new cartoonist) age of 26. He sold his first work to MAD two years later and his first work for them appeared in MAD #70, which oddly enough was the first issue I purchased.

He didn't do much for them the last decade or so but did make a cameo appearance in MAD #515 which came out in 2010. So that's a span of 48 years. Not bad.

There were a few decades there where his work appeared in almost every issue, some of it without credit. In addition to the material that had his name on it — some of which he wrote, some of which he drew — he also contributed cover ideas, wrote for Don Martin's cartoons and for "Spy Vs. Spy," and did "punch-up" improving others' contributions. Also, he wrote and/or drew by my count, thirteen MAD paperbacks.

He was a genial, funny man much loved by his peers. MAD artist Tom Richmond has more about the guy and I don't know why he was called "Duck" but he was and that's all there may be to that.

Sorry to hear about the death of Carrie Fisher. Not being much of a Star Wars fan, I admired her more for her other activities, which included some very witty and honest writing. She struck me as an extremely bright woman who was miscast — though I'm sure to great financial advantage — doing the "eye candy" part of Princess Leia's role. Not that she wasn't cute doing it but I used to cringe years later when I came across Internet messages complaining she didn't look like she did in the first movie. It was as if (a) that was all she was good for and (b) she should have had the decency to not age.

I'm sorry I don't have a lot of great personal anecdotes about her but I only met her twice. The first time, we were skinny-dipping together. Don't get too excited about that concept. I was ten years old and she was six.

The next time was around 45 years later. It was at a bachelor party for my friend, Paul Dini. Some entertainment had been arranged — a couple of attractive young women were going to perform burlesque dances in the classic tradition, meaning they had expensive, elaborate costumes and they'd be dancing to prerecorded music and removing very few of their garments.

The first dancer was introduced. The door into the room opened and in came…Carrie Fisher and Tracey Ullman? Huh? The male audience was quite puzzled but here's what had happened —

The party was in the back room of a fancy Beverly Hills restaurant. There was no other place for the dancers to change so they had done so in the ladies' room. Ms. Fisher and Ms. Ullman had been dining in the front part of the restaurant and they'd gone to the loo in tandem and seen the performers there, getting into their ornate outfits. They had peppered the young ladies with questions about their wardrobe and artistry and then, fascinated with it all, decided to crash the bachelor party to see the performances. So they were slipping in ahead of the ecdysiasts.

Once in the room, Carrie looked over in my direction, yelled "Mark!" and came running my way with arms extended as if about to engage in some serious hugging. I thought for a split-second, "She recognizes me from when I was ten?"

Then I remembered I was sitting next to Mark Hamill. Oh, yeah. She would know him.

After the show, Mark introduced me to her and we talked a little about skinny-dipping (she kinda remembered it) and for some reason, about a then-recent offer she'd turned down to appear at some fan convention. I remember asking her if she sold her book, Postcards from the Edge, at these events. It's a very good book, by the way.

She said, "Sometimes, but they just buy it for the autograph. I don't think very many of them read it." If you admired her at all, you might want to get a copy and read it — and that probably goes for any of her books. You'll have a lot more reasons to admire her if you do.

Well, if you're doing anything less exciting than going to Hef's in your jammies, you can liven up the segue to 2017 by watching Stu's Show!

That's right…I said watching! Ordinarily, Stu's Show comes to you via Internet Radio (i.e., a podcast) on Wednesdays and it's audio only. Well, New Year's Eve, Stu and his lovely spouse Jeanine are taking over Ronnie Paul's late night TV show that comes out of Fresno, California…with the consent and participation of Ronnie, of course. They're bringing in celebrity* guests, games, prizes, classic TV clips, discussion about the world of entertainment and doing it for six hours!

(*The Truth in Labelling Law requires that I clarify the use of the word "celebrity" by noting that I am one of them. I'll be on via Skype from my home because ain't no way I'm driving to Fresno for this or anything. If you want to catch my segment, I'll be on shortly after Midnight, West Coast time.)

Before they get to me, your hosts will be welcoming, among other folks, Jimmy Garrett from The Lucy Show and other programs, Beverly Washburn from Star Trek and other programs, Jeannie Russell from Dennis the Menace, TV historian Steve Beverly and animation authority Jerry Beck. And it'll all be coming to you live from Fresno!

Where can you see this? Well, if you live in Fresno, it'll be on TV there. If you live anywhere else and have a Roku TV, you may be able to watch it on your Roku TV…and of course, it'll be streaming live on the Internet. One of several online sources will be a window I'll have open on this site and another will be on the Stu's Show website, where you can already find additional details. Check back before then for more information…because let's be honest. You ain't getting a last-minute invite from Hef.

The Associated Press has issued a partial (I'm sure) list of things that Donald Trump criticized Hillary Clinton for doing but has done himself.

This is not new to politics. Increasingly over the last few decades (and probably before), there's been a lot of "When your candidate does this, it's an outrage that proves them unfit for public office but when our candidate does it, it's no big deal." It just wasn't quite this blatant before.

George S. Irving has taken his final bow at the age of 94. I never met Mr. Irving but I admired him from afar. As this obit reminds us, he had a long and glorious career as an actor. It was mostly on the stage but he was also on TV and he seemed to be in the cast of about two-thirds of all the cartoons that recorded voices in New York from the sixties on. If you ever watched Underdog, you'd know his voice.

He basically worked as a professional actor from 1942 until 2015. It's stunning when you can do anything professionally for 73 years. Acting for all that time might not be as difficult as being a goaltender in the National Hockey League for 73 years but it's not all that much easier.

Okay, I'm going to embed one of my favorite videos of the thousands I've posted here. I reposted it last year around this time but it's worth more than an annual viewing. This is Mr. Irving re-creating a number he performed in a 1976 Broadway show that, alas, closed rapidly. It was called So Long, 174th Street but in hindsight, people took to calling it Enter Laughing, which was the name of the novel by Carl Reiner upon which it was based.

All you need to know is the show (and novel and movie) concerned David Kolowitz, a young man in 1938 who dreams of becoming a huge star in Hollywood. Robert Morse played the role on the stage. Mr. Irving played his butler in a fantasy sequence, imagining what that stardom might be like. Here is the late, great George S. Irving being great at 88…

Every office I've called this morning is closed today so I think I will be too after I post this and maybe a video link.

I hope you had a nice Christmas. Actually, these days, I find it more realistic to say I hope you didn't have a painful, emotional-in-a-bad-way Christmas. Despite what Andy Williams used to sing, I don't think this is The Most Wonderful Time of the Year for most people. There may be parties for hosting and marshmallows for toasting, but there's also a lot of family problems bubbling to the surface, folks who are depressed because they're alone, others who are depressed because they're not alone, and financial problems because Christmas can be damned expensive.

Hope that wasn't your holiday and that if it was, you're past it for another year. Now you can put your whole attention towards being glad 2016 is almost over and hoping 2017 is better. Given that even my Trump-voting friends think he'll create enormous problems and partisan divides, I ain't all that optimistic.

Last night around 7 PM, I found myself in a restaurant ordering a "to go" order to take to a sick friend. The restaurant was packed and if I'd asked for a table, I might be getting seated right about now. It was so crowded in there that when the hostess said my order would take at least 30 minutes, I told her I'd be back in twenty and was going for a walk.

This was not in the nicest part of town but I felt safe. There were people on the street who looked like they'd be a lot easier and more lucrative to mug than me. One of them approached me and asked if I could spare a buck or two for food. As I fished around in my pocket for some cash, the gentleman said "I hope next year is better," which of course everyone hopes. I said, "It can't help but be," which of course is not true but you say it anyway. I was just handing the guy a few singles when suddenly, one firework exploded in the sky.

Only one. You've all seen those big displays where they fire off dozens and dozens, one right after another, the pace quickening until at last they start overlapping. Well, from some location a mile or so away, someone set off just one of those, followed by no others.

We waited about a minute to see if more would follow and when none did, I said to him, "Guess we'll have to settle for that." He said, "Don't worry. There'll be more fireworks in 2017." I said something about how we could count on that, one way or the other and —

Oh, shit. Steve Stoliar just e-mailed me that George S. Irving has died. Guess I have to post an obit there about him. I think I know what the video link's going to be.

Is there any way we can move up the end of 2016 a few days? It's getting so those montages shouldn't be "Those Who Left Us" but rather "Those We Have Left."

John Swansburg thinks the 1966 animated version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas was superior to the book on which it was based. I like the special a lot and I think that if you had to turn the book into a cartoon of that length, you couldn't have done a better job of it…but better than the book? I don't think so.

Reportedly, Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel wasn't happy with the finished product, even though he participated in the adaptation by writing song lyrics. He was also listed as producer along with director Chuck Jones though that credit could have meant almost any level of involvement. I never met the Good Doctor but folks who did have told of him complaining about all the stuff that was added and how his designs morphed somewhat into Chuck Jones designs.

I think both those things are inevitable when you commit so short a book to a half-hour timeslot and hand creative control to a director as immersed in his own style as Chuck Jones. No matter what Jones did the last few decades of his life, everyone looked a little like Wile E. Coyote.

The resultant special won great accolades and awards and demands for its rerunning every year for a long time. It probably even sold a lot more copies of the book. But better than that book? Like I said: I don't think so.