Robert Rowe sent me this question about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World…

Some Internet search results say Bob Hope was unable to appear in the film because a studio he was under contract to forbid it. Is that also your understanding?

I could give you a short answer but I don't do that when I can give a long, wandering answer. What I know about this and how I know it is buried deep within the following. But first, I need to post another one of these…

Now then: In 1980, I left (on good terms and not forever), my long-term employment with Sid and Marty Krofft. I turned down writing their new series, Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters and took a job on a non-Krofft series done at a different studio. I wasn't away from them for long. They decided, not because of me, to tape the Mandrell show at the studio where I was now working and moved into offices just down the hall from mine. Suddenly, I was writing on my new gig and also helping out unofficially on the Mandrell series…all this while also story-editing and writing Richie Rich cartoons for Hanna-Barbera and whatever I was then doing in comics.

So one day, Marty Krofft walks into my office and says, "Mark, I need you to help me out with something. Can you come with me?" Marty was a hard guy to say "no" to and saying "yes" had usually turned out to be the right answer. So I went with him and as we walked, he explained that they had a guest star who was there that moment to tape a spot with Barbara Mandrell and also one for another show the Kroffts were producing concurrently — a series of syndicated specials for the Oral Roberts Foundation.

Things were running behind on the stage where both shows were taping and this guest star was waiting in his dressing room, getting impatient. Marty said, "I need you to baby-sit him for a half-hour or so…just keep him company." But he didn't tell me what star I was going to be baby-sitting.

Then he took me into the dressing room and said, "Bob, this is my head writer, Mark Evanier. He's one of your biggest fans and he knows absolutely everything you've ever done." I shook hands with the star and he said, "Great! If the writing business doesn't work out, he can make a good living as a blackmailer."

And then Marty left me there with Bob Hope.

This was not the first time someone had done this to me. Marty did it to me once with Jerry Lewis and another time with Sid Caesar. And both Marty and my friend Susan Buckner did it to me on separate occasions with Milton Berle. Oh — and a producer I worked with named Bonny Dore did it to me with Dick Clark and later, Dick did it to me with Henny Youngman and James Coburn and I could probably think of other instances.

I wound up talking with Mr. Hope for about twenty minutes — about his movies, about his co-stars, about whatever came to mind. I told him how I used to sneak in to watch him tape his specials at NBC Burbank.  Every time Hope got a line wrong, he'd yell at his cue card guy, Barney McNulty, like it was Barney's fault.  When I mentioned that, he said to me, "We paid Barney real well to take the blame because I never learned how to read."  Then he told me some affectionate stories about Barney.

I asked him about the Bob Hope comic book that DC Comics published for eighteen years and he told me he had a complete collection and someday, might get around to reading one of them. And of course, I asked him about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and why he wasn't in it. His reply went roughly like this…

Yeah, they really wanted me in it. Stanley Kramer must've called me a half-dozen times and I wanted to do it. All my friends were in it. The trouble was I was under contract to a movie studio at the time. I owed them a picture and I kept turning down these terrible scripts they sent me and they were getting impatient. So when I went to them and asked if I could do a bit part in Stanley's picture, they said, "Not until you commit to a start date on that picture you owe us" and I wasn't about to say yes to one of those lousy scripts.

I also asked him if he had any idea what he would have done in the film if he had been in it. He had no idea. I'm fairly certain it would have been a quick cameo that would have been written expressly for him. He would not have played a part that someone else played in the movie.

That was all I got out of him and his answer raised some questions I was not prepared to ask at that moment. Mad World began filming on April 26, 1962. At the time, Hope was filming Critic's Choice for Warner Brothers and then the next film he made was Call Me Bwana, which began filming in September of that year. Call Me Bwana was made for a company called Danjaq that made a lot of the early James Bond films and released its movies through United Artists — the same company that released It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

I can't quite figure this out. Why would Hope sign to do a picture with Danjaq if they didn't have a script he wanted to do? Or if the company he owed a picture to was United Artists, why wouldn't they let him do a cameo in a film they were distributing? At the time he officially committed to Call Me Bwana, Mad World was still in production…so I don't get it. Maybe Hope was committed to yet another company, they refused his request to do Mad World and later that deal was canceled…but then he still would have had time to do a day on Mad World before he started.  Or maybe…

Never mind.  I give up. This might be a time to fall back on the simplest explanation which would be that what Hope told me wasn't the truth or at least the whole truth…but that's what he said and he apparently said it to others who asked.  Make of it what you will. People do sometimes make up simple explanations when they don't want to give you the complicated or embarrassing real one.  I suspect some contractual commitment prevented him doing the cameo but it's a lot more complicated than we could imagine from afar.

Lastly, before someone writes to ask what Bob Hope was like in our somewhat-brief encounter:  He was very much like the way Dave Thomas played him in "Play It Again, Bob." That was (in my opinion) the most brilliant of the many brilliant sketches on the old SCTV show and it really nailed the Hope I met. A very clever writer I knew named Jeffrey Barron — who wrote for SCTV and also for Hope — told me he worked on the sketch but he was not a credited writer on the program at that time. Someone familiar with the off-stage Hope had to have written it.

I'll post a link to the sketch here for you but first, I need to insert one of these…

That said, I've embedded the entire episode of SCTV below but the link is configured so on most browsers, it should start playing with the sketch in question. "Play It Again, Bob" is in two parts with a commercial break in the middle but stick with it through that. And if you want to watch the entire episode, move the little slider back to the beginning. Thanks to Robert Rowe for jogging me into telling a story I've never told here before. Amazingly, I still have some…

Just got an e-mail from someone eager to hear my "take" on this morning's Supreme Court decision which Trump backers are hailing as some sort of "Get Out of Jail Free" card for their boy. My "take" is that I'd like to hear more analysis from legal scholars who've had more than twenty minutes to read the decision and it would be nice if they'd kind of "peer review" each other before going on CNN.

For future reference: My "take" will always be not to panic over political matters, especially this year. I think even Joe Biden in a coma would be a better president than Donald Trump and I think there's plenty of time for the roller coaster that is Politics to go up and down and up and down and up and down (etc.) a few steep hills. We are in very-much-uncharted territory with this election. Very few precedents apply. A great many scenarios are possible. It all changed a lot the day Trump was convicted of 34 felonies. It all changed a lot the night Joe Biden seemed lost at the first debate. There will be more moments when it all changes a lot.

And if/when you read political views on this site, always remember what I do for a living. I do not practice law. I do not mingle with Heads of state or important legislators or functionaries in the political world. The next items on my "to do" list are to compose a letters page for the Groo the Wanderer comic book and then to decide what script the actors are going to read on the Cartoon Voices panels at this year's Comic-Con International.

John Oliver and his crew are taking a few weeks off by they've left us a gift. The entirety of Season 3 has been uploaded to YouTube. Go watch 'em. Download if you know how.

Here's the third episode of the mid-seventies revival of Laugh-In without the show's original hosts, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, or any host at all. This one guest stars Frank Sinatra and it originally aired Wednesday, November 2, 1977. The guy you'll see hanging out in some scenes with Frank is "Jilly" Rizzo, a Sinatra crony who was the proprietor of Jilly's Saloon, a popular place in New York. They guy you'll see with the bushy black mustache is Sergio Aragonés, an Evanier crony who draws a popular comic book…

From Steve Aldred comes this question…

I do have a question for you that I hope you can answer, it relates in a way to the question a few weeks back about Joe Kubert's covers for Jack Kirby's final Kamandi issues after he returned to Marvel. When Jack Kirby came back to Marvel in the mid 70's he was soon doing a lot of covers for them across most of their superhero titles.

Was this simply to let the wider Marvel readership know that Kirby was back at the company or was there another reason for it? As with Kubert's Kamandi covers, I never thought that they were the best of Kirby's work especially where he had been asked to draw some of the newer characters that he was obviously not familiar with.

Marvel had Jack doing covers because the folks in charge then — and this would have included Stan — felt that Jack was their best choice for the job. Simple as that. He did not design most of them. In most cases, he was given a sketch that had been generated in the office and approved there…something drawn by Marie Severin, Dave Cockrum, Al Milgrom or one of about a half-dozen others. When a cover featured characters that Jack didn't know, they'd send him reference — or at least, they were supposed to. He told me that often, the reference material was insufficient or missing altogether. And they were almost never for stories he knew.

I agree with you that these were not the best Kirby work. My admiration for Jack's skills is huge but I don't think he drew many memorable covers after about late 1967 when Marvel increasingly began giving him roughs by other artists. This was not long after Carmine Infantino took over as the guy in charge of covers at DC. Previously, each DC editor had supervised the designs for his or her comics, usually working with the artist who would do the finished art or at least, the pencils for the finished art.

There was some panic at DC around 1966 when Marvel was gaining in sales. Most of the folks in power at DC then thought the Marvel books were badly-written and badly-drawn — or at least, nowhere as good as the concurrent DC product. They had to come up with an explanation for why readers were increasingly opting for Marvel over DC and Infantino supplied one they could accept: Marvel's covers, he said, were simply more exciting.

DC's too often had the hero standing around uttering word balloons that described the premise of the story. Marvel's had the heroes in action. Here are two covers that were on newsstands in February of 1965. Which one do you think would attract more buyers?

That was why Infantino was brought into Management and assigned to design or at least supervise all their covers. In response, Marvel began having more and more covers designed in the office — this at a time when Kirby for personal reasons was trying to cut back his trips into town to the office.

So more and more, Marvel covers started with Stan Lee working with an in-house artist — most often then, Marie Severin — to generate a sketch that would be finished (usually) by someone else. As good an artist as Jack was, I don't think you got the best out of him by having him draw a cover that someone else had laid out…especially a cover for a story he hadn't read and in which he had no emotional involvement.

What he handed in was always workmanlike and professional but he just didn't have the same level of inspiration even when it was for a comic where he'd written and drawn the insides. Even in those cases, he usually drew the cover long after he'd finished the story and it had left his mind. Jack was always about the story he was doing now.

Also, I think that at the time — and this had nothing to do with Jack — comic book covers from most publishers were getting too cluttered with word balloons and blurbs and story titles and logos that distracted from the art instead of enhancing it. I don't recall many exciting covers by anyone in the mid-to-late seventies, a topic we've discussed at those "Cover Story" panels I moderate at comic conventions. As my amigo Sergio Aragonés has said, "If you need to put a lot of words on a cover, it's not a very good cover."

But I agree with you: I don't think Jack's covers during the period we're discussing were him at his best.

How do I feel about rules that The Ten Commandments must be posted in every classroom? Seems to me like this would be a good time to remember the words of one Mr. George Carlin…

If you're still interested in fact-checking of last Thursday's debate, one of the best fib-exposing websites — factcheck.org — has this pretty good report. And they also fact-checked the other "debate" last Thursday, which was the shadow version by independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

There are an awful lot of online discussions 'n' debates as to whether Joe Biden should step aside and let someone else be the Democratic nominee. I also see a wide range of articles and arguments as to how possible — legally or practically — it would be to make that switch. Not that I have any say in the matter but I'm on the fence because I lack a couple of pieces of vital information. One big one would be how often he's like the guy we saw on the debate stage in Georgia on Thursday night and how often he's like the guy we saw in North Carolina on Friday.

I think it would also be worth seeing some poll numbers over the next week or two before deciding. We may think Biden's numbers will take a big plunge because of his debate performance but we also thought Trump's would if he was convicted of 34 felonies or if it came out that he'd cheated on his wife with a porn star. If nothing else, we should be learning that these days, the poll numbers do not always do what a person might expect.

For those of us who think it is vital that Donald Trump never again resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I think it comes down to this: If we're prepared to trust Joe Biden with being President for the next four years, we oughta trust him to do the right thing as to staying in the race or stepping aside. One of the reasons I've supported him is because I think he's the kind of man who would put The Country ahead of his personal concerns. Unlike his opponent.

There was a speech given today in North Carolina. Watch at least a few minutes of it and then I have a question to ask…

Where the fuck was this guy last night?

I never met the man but I had the privilege to see Martin Mull perform here and there, now and then. I recall him popping up as an unbilled opening act at times for someone I went to see…and he was usually better than the someone I had gone to see. He was laid-back, calming, very much audience-friendly and extremely funny. In one appearance — at the Ice House in Pasadena, I think — there were some folks in the crowd who'd come to see just him, not the headliner, and had brought along Martin Mull albums to get them signed.

That was the first time I knew he'd done record albums and I rushed out and bought them. They were very good and quite original. Someone had a real good idea when they cast him for the show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and then brought him back to play his twin brother for Fernwood Tonight.

In 1997 when actor-announcer Bob Ridgely died, I attended what was easily the most hilarious memorial service I've ever been to. Mel Brooks spoke. Thom Sharp spoke. Chuck McCann spoke. A long list of hilarious people spoke. Martin Mull stole the event with the funniest speech I've ever heard at one of those events. If they have a memorial service for him, I hope one of his friends gets up there and plagiarizes that speech. I think he would have loved that.

This A.M., I awoke to the present challenge, which is how to get on with the work I must do and the problems I must solve without devoting too much of my energy and grey matter to a problem I cannot even vaguely affect. The news makes Armchair Advisers out of all of us. I have a friend who works at a plant back east that bottles energy drinks and he spends a lot of every day thinking about how to fix the situation in Gaza. Cynically, I'm not sure there is a solution and realistically, I don't think that if there is, he's going to be the person to formulate it and put it into place.

I can dope out what I'd do if I were Joe Biden or a close adviser to Joe Biden but all I can really do with any idea I have is post it here on my blog where, so far, I haven't even achieved the first step in the abolition of cole slaw. I can also remind myself that if I were Joe Biden or a close adviser to Joe Biden, I'd have a lot more information (tons of it) that might help me shape my thinking. For one thing, I'd have a good answer to the question, "How often is he like that?" If the answer to that question is "Most of the time, lately," it's a very different problem from if the answer is "Never. He was sharp as an X-Acto knife Wednesday evening."

I read a number of interesting articles this morning including this one by David Kurtz. Here's a piece of it that I thought I'd share with you…

For their part, many partisans tend to observe debates and campaigns like sports fans, rooting for outcomes over which they have little or no control. I don't recommend that approach for your mental health, but it also sucks up an enormous amount of human and emotional capital, like spending all day on the sofa watching sports on TV instead of getting out and exercising yourself. The partisan-as-sports-fan risks becoming more deeply invested in their preferred outcomes and the roller coaster of emotions along the way than in the underlying cause.

I've never been able to get into sports. Once upon a time, I cared if the Dodgers won but only because it made my father so happy. I (of course) noted how unhappy it made him when they didn't and it didn't strike me as a fair trade-off. Maybe if he'd had money on the games and got a big payoff when they won, okay. But I don't care who wins the World Series or the Super Bowl because I don't get anything — monetary or otherwise — out of it. I don't even get the satisfaction of pretending I had something to do with the victory.

Following politics is a little different — who wins can affect my life and the lives of others around me — but I still don't have anything meaningful to do with the victories. I vote…that's about it. In the 2020 Presidential Election, the Biden/Harris ticket got 81,282,632 votes. Without mine, they would have gotten 81,282,631. Maybe, giving myself way more credit than I deserve, I also did the cheerleading that helped get a dozen other folks to go out and vote. Don't get me wrong: I'm still going to do everything I can to prevent Donald Trump from getting a second term and turning the United States into a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Trump Organization, an American privately-owned conglomerate owned by Donald Trump who is, in turn, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the highest bidder.

But I think right now, the most meaningful contribution I can make aside from donating cash is to trust that Biden and the people around him will do the right thing. I dunno if that will involve Joe Biden stepping up or stepping down. But I do know I have things to do where I can make more of a difference. I think I'll go do one of them.

They're popping up all over. Here's one from PBS. Here's one from NBC. Here's one from CNN. Here's one from the Associated Press. Here's one from The New York Times. Here's one from ABC. Here's one from USA Today.

There's an awful lot of duplication in them.

Obviously not a good night for Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. He gave much aid 'n' comfort to those who want to argue that he's too old to have a second term and he failed to counter a flood of outright lies from his opponent. (Here's a quick, incomplete fact check.) It disappoints me that The Truth doesn't matter to so many people in this country. There were moments in what I watched where I wish they had a rule that Gavin Newsom could tag in for Biden.

Like everyone else who's projecting what this will mean for the actual election, I have no idea what this will mean for the actual election. I've floated before on this blog and with friends the notion that we may not see one or both of those guys on the November ballot. I've never thought it was likely…just possible. It seems a fraction more possible now.

I'm not watching the first debate between the two old guys running for President of the United States. At least, I'm not watching it live. One of the great things about the Internet (and VCRs and streaming services and some other innovations) is that we're no longer slaves to our televisions. We don't have to be in front of them at 6:00 sharp to watch a program that starts at 6:00 sharp. We can watch it later or the next day or years from now. I have a lady friend who was not born in time to live through the news coverage of the Assassination of John F. Kennedy so one night, we sat here and watched it together, kinda pretending it was "real time" when it wasn't.

I'm not expecting a knockout punch tonight on the debate stage or even anything that makes it impossible for either side to claim an inarguable victory. Trump especially, if you beat him soundly in tic-tac-toe, would still claim it was rigged and he won. But I'll watch it later — maybe — when I feel like watching it if I feel like watching it. I have work to do and besides, MeTV Toons is running Bugs Bunny cartoons and what's happening on that screen is much more realistic.

The fine folks who run Comic-Con International today announced…

Jo Duffy, Ralph Newman to Receive 2024 Bill Finger Award

Jo Duffy and Ralph Newman are this year's recipients of the 2024 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. The selection, made by a blue-ribbon committee chaired by writer-historian Mark Evanier, was unanimous.

"Since 2005, we have been honoring writers whose work in the comic book industry has not, we feel, received the attention and recognition that their work deserved," Evanier noted. "This year's posthumous recipient wrote hundreds if not thousands of comic book scripts without, as far as we can tell, ever getting his name on any of them. That's about as unrecognized as you can be."

Jo Duffy has written comics including Power Man and Iron Fist, Catwoman, Batman, Wolverine, Fallen Angels, Nestrobber, Glory, Crystar, Elvira, Defenders, Punisher, and Star Wars, as well as the English-language edition of Akira. She has written short stories, essays, the comic book biography of Saint Francis, and an adaptation of Kipling's Jungle Book, and is the co-writer of two Puppet Master movies. She was managing editor of Epic magazine and an editor at Marvel comics, handling such titles as Elektra, Daredevil, Dreadstar, Groo, Doctor Strange, Hulk, and ROM. She co-edited Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein.

Ralph Newman (1914–1989) was born in Michigan and spent his professional life doing advertising cartooning and then magazine cartooning. His first sale in the latter field was to Amazing Stories, and he later worked as an "idea man" for other magazine cartoonists and as a story-and-gag man for Paul Terry's Terrytoons animation studio. This led to him writing comic books for Timely Comics (now Marvel) featuring Terrytoons characters such as Gandy Goose and Sourpuss throughout the 1940s; when the license shifted to the St. John's publishing company in the 1950s, Newman shifted with them. It is not known precisely when he also began working for the Harvey company, but its longtime editor Sid Jacobson called him the most prolific writer the firm ever had. During his years there, Newman probably wrote for every character who had any kind of longevity, including Casper the Friendly Ghost, Wendy the Good Little Witch, Sad Sack, Little Audrey, Little Lotta, Richie Rich, Spooky, Little Dot, Hot Stuff, The Ghostly Trio, and many more — all without credit. If you read Harvey comics during the company's peak years, you couldn't help but read stories written by Ralph Newman. He left us in 1989.

The Bill Finger Award was created in 2005 at the instigation of the great comic book artist and cartoonist Jerry Robinson. It was his way of preserving the memory of his friend and colleague, the late Bill Finger. Evanier explains, "At the time, Mr. Finger rarely received credit as co-creator of Batman and of the entire, voluminous mythos and supporting cast that surrounded the Caped Crusader. Gloriously, the name of Bill Finger now appears on Batman movies and comic books. That doesn't stop us from continuing to hand out awards bearing his name to other writers who, in the opinion of the committee, have not received sufficient reward or attention for what they have contributed to comics."

In addition to Evanier, the selection committee consists of Charles Kochman (executive editor at Harry N. Abrams, book publisher), comic book writer Kurt Busiek, artist/historian Jim Amash, cartoonist Scott Shaw!, and writer/editor Marv Wolfman.

The major sponsor for the 2024 awards is DC Comics; supporting sponsors are Heritage Auctions and Maggie Thompson.

The Finger Award falls under the auspices of Comic-Con International: San Diego and is administered by Jackie Estrada. The awards will be presented during the Eisner Awards ceremony at this summer's Comic-Con International on Friday, July 26.