The Late Show With…

I pretty much agree with my pal Paul Harris about The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Last night's was a bit weak and the John McCain interview contained everything I don't like about politicians coming on shows like this. But overall, I think Colbert is already better than anyone else currently doing a late night show…

…and I'll go farther than that: I think he's showing the potential to be better than anyone who's ever done a late night show. That's right: Better than Johnny or Dave or Dick or Jay or any of those folks.

I am not predicting anything about ratings because these days, who knows? But the guy is funny and charming and he's as good an ad-libber as any of them. They need to sand off a few more rough edges and he needs to relax more and they still haven't quite figured how the bandleader fits into the proceedings. But the host himself is terrific and he's actually talking to his guests most of the time instead of setting them up for pre-planned speeches.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips!

When Chick-Fil-A came to be viewed as a company supporting right-wing causes, a lot of people urged the boycotting of the business…and Mike Huckabee ran rallies in support of it and denounced the boycotts as "economic terrorism."

Well now, Frito-Lay has an alliance with the It-Gets-Better Project, which helps kids cope with anti-gay bullying. Guess who is now calling on all Christians to boycott Frito-Lay products.

Vital Orange Cat News

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As some of you may know, I was the Supervising Producer of The Garfield Show, which is seen all over the globe. I'm still not sure what a Supervising Producer supervises but I wrote a lot of the series and directed the voices and did various producer-like chores. We did…well, I'm not sure if I should say four or five seasons. Seasons 1-4 consisted of approximately 26 half-hours each. "Season 5," as they called it, was four 11-minute episodes that could also be described as one four-part story.

The 78 half-hours that comprised Seasons 1-3 have been running for many years in the United States on Cartoon Network and/or Boomerang. Both channels are owned by the same company and they've sometimes run them on one or the other or for a while on both, usually four half-hours a day, seven days a week. They have run these over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

They do quite well in the ratings, which is why they run them over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Though they've had Season 4 and "Season 5" sitting on the shelf for a long time, they haven't aired them because Seasons 1-3 do so well as they run them over and over and over, etc. 4 and 5 have been broadcast all over the world; just not in the U.S. of A.

Right now, the shows from Seasons 1-3 air on Boomerang Monday through Friday at 10 AM, 10:30 AM, 10 PM and 10:30 PM. On the weekends, Boomerang has them at 2 PM, 2:30 PM, 10 PM and 10 PM. These are all Eastern Times I'm giving you.

And starting tonight, there's an additional half-hour every Tuesday night which will be airing the never-before Season 4 and (I think, later on, "Season" 5). This half-hour airs on Boomerang at 8:30 PM Eastern and then the same episodes air at 11:30 PM. Now, here's where it gets complicated…

Each half-hour of The Garfield Show contains two 11-minute episodes. Some of the 11-minute episodes in Season 4 are standalone 11-minute stories and some of them are 11-minute chapters of five-part stories. Tonight, for example, they're airing Part 1 and Part 2 of the five-part story, "The Lion Queen." Next Tuesday, you get Part 3 and Part 4 and then the following Tuesday, you get Part 5 of "The Lion Queen" and…well, I'm not sure. Maybe one of the standalone episodes or maybe Part 1 of another five-parter.

This is not the way I'd have chosen to air the shows but I do want to recommend them to you anyway. These episodes feature some of the best CGI animation I've ever seen on television and I was real happy with how the stories came out. (There are also songs; I wrote the English lyrics for tunes written by others in France.) "The Lion Queen" also has a superb voice cast: Frank Welker, Gregg Berger, Wally Wingert, Jason Marsden, Julie Payne, Fred Tatasciore, Phil LaMarr, Misty Lee, Laraine Newman and Stan Freberg.

I'm not comfy plugging my own work so this is as much as I'll say now. I hope you enjoy them and I hope one of these days soon, they run all five parts of a five-parter, one right after the other. I really like them that way.

Pumping Up

This is from May 9, 2010. I happened to read it again today and thought you might enjoy it again…

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Yesterday afternoon, I went to Costco for lunch and had a nice feast of Costco dim sum. That's what I call the copious free samples you can get there, wandering from aisle to aisle, taking little noshes from ladies in hairnets. The teriyaki chicken bites were so good, I doubled around for seconds, hoping the hairnet lady wouldn't recognize me and yell, "Hey, one to a customer, sport!" I could eat very well at Costco for free if I could just figure how to get out of that place without spending $300 on a lifetime supply of baking soda.

Then I replenished my car — thirsty from the long shlep to and from Riverside — with Costco gas…and got to thinking. We used to buy gas in this country based, at least in part, on the premise that one brand was better than another. I had the idea, and I'm not sure where I got it, that my old Buick Skylark ran well with Shell or 76, not so well with Chevron or Texaco. To this day, I'll sometimes bypass Chevron for Shell…and I don't even have that car anymore, nor any reason to suspect my current auto cares.

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Of course, that preference is only exercised when the two brands are close to the same price. I'm wondering what percentage of Americans take anything else into account except price and maybe which station is easiest to get in and out of. A distant third might be the business practices of the company. I forget which outrage it was — the Valdez spill, maybe — but I stopped buying Exxon a long time ago. I've only purchased Exxon gas once since then. It was a time when I was in a strange and desolate area, the needle was hovering around "E" and the Exxon station looked like the only option for miles. So I bought there but I still felt like I was reneging on a sacred vow.

Oil companies used to advertise heavily that their brand was better for your car…their gas had certain additives that let it run cleaner, longer, happier. They still do a little of that advertising but my sense now is that some don't advertise much, and those that do put the main emphasis on saying, not exactly in these words, that their company isn't destroying the planet quite as rapidly as others. BP, it always seemed to me, sold nothing much beyond the same gas and the notion that they were somehow greener than their competition. (The station near me used to actually give away flower seeds.) I would imagine that a lot of the money they'll wind up spending on the clean-up of the Gulf Coast will be diverted into an attempted clean-up of their reputation.

As I was pumping my vehicle full of Costco gas, I realized I had no idea what kind of gas it was, where it comes from, how good it might be for my car. Since I don't think Costco owns any oil wells, they must buy it from other companies…probably whoever will give them the best deal that month. It could be Exxon for all I know but I prefer to think it's just Costco gas. It's cheap and that's all that really matters.

My father would have loved Costco gas. In fact, he would have just plain loved Costco. He was a very generous man. If I asked for something, I got it. This was, of course, because I was prudent enough to never ask for anything he couldn't afford…but the point is that he didn't balk. "My son wants it? Fine." That was the attitude. Same deal if my mother wanted anything. But beyond that, he was very frugal, sometimes illogically so. I guess that was the case with a lot of folks who grew up in the Great Depression (the last one) and never in their later lives got near any standard of affluence.

I'm recalling when gas was around 29.9. This was in the sixties. 29.9 was a common price but out in Venice, about a seven mile drive from our house, there was a station that was always a penny cheaper. If gas was 29.9 down the street from us, it was 28.9 at this one place in Venice. My father used to drive out there — make a special trip — just to fill the tank on his old Oldsmobile Cutlass.

I guess I thought I was helping when I pointed out how silly this was. The car held 20 gallons…and of course, he didn't wait 'til it was bone dry to fill up. He went when it was down to about a quarter-full, so the most he could save was around fifteen cents. From that, you had to subtract the cost of the gasoline consumed by driving out to Venice and back. I figured it out once and he was getting 13-15 miles to the gallon so deduct a penny. He was spending about ninety minutes, the length of the journey, to save fourteen cents. If you factored in wear and tear on the car, maybe twelve.

My father was not paid well at his job but his time was worth a lot more than eight cents per hour. Heck, he paid a kid down the block two bucks an hour to mow our lawn. But he could somehow not get over the idea that it was worth 90 minutes of his life to drive to the station in Venice. He kept telling me that if he paid 29.9, he was being played for a sucker.

I learned many things from my father, mostly having to do with common decency and compassion and honesty and avoiding pointless angers and tensions. And then there were those lessons I learned by observing him and making up my own mind to not follow some example. His kind of False Economy was one of the these. There are expenditures I don't make because I'd feel like a sucker but they're for a lot more than fourteen cents…or even the present-day equivalent adjusted for inflation. As a freelance writer for (now) going on 41 years, I've learned to value my time as well as my money. I feel like I'm doing right by both when I go to Costco…getting good prices but also stocking-up on supplies so as to save myself frequent trips to the market.

As I said, my father would have loved the chain. Similar stores were around when he passed away and I don't know why he never went to one. Come to think of it, I don't know why I'm writing about my father on Mother's Day…or why Costco made me think of him when I was there, in part, to buy crates of things my mother needs. Maybe it was because he was always buying her what she needed and now I have that responsibility. In any event, remind me on Father's Day to write about my mother. Just to balance things out.

The Quality of Mercy

California is about to become the fifth state in the U.S. to allow terminally ill patients to legally end their lives using doctor-prescribed drugs. For reasons I've mentioned here before, I think this is a good thing. My mother, who died three years ago yesterday, would probably have availed herself of such drugs if her health had gotten any worse without being fatal. She was miserable the last few months and had no hope of getting "better enough" to do anything she wanted to do. All she had ahead was more pain and more hospital stays and more guilt about how much of my time and energy she was consuming. I didn't mind the time and energy but she minded it a lot and it added to her pain. This exit strategy should be available to all.

Today's Video Link

I'm still kinda annoyed/horrified over that Congressional hearing over Planned Parenthood I watched last week. It really was a festival of Republicans firing loaded (and sometimes factually-challenged) accusations at the organization's president and then doing everything possible to not let her answer.

I know there are people out there who think such tactics are understandable and even laudable. They've gotten it into their heads that to eliminate Planned Parenthood is to eliminate abortion and that lying about the institution is the lesser evil. But if you want to make that comparison, you need to also factor in the number of women who will suffer or even die without Planned Parenthood. Seth Meyers has more on that hearing…

From the E-Mailbag…

Andreas Eriksson saw this posting of a Marx Brothers impersonation in Sweden and sent me this…

It's not often that something Swedish pops up on your website, so why not add some extra info when I can:

That guy playing Groucho is actor Ola Forssmed. The play is a loose adaptation of Animal Crackers, so Forssmed is actually playing Captain Spaulding (Kapten Spoling in the Swedish translation). "Harpo" is seen briefly in the background, he is played by Eva Rydberg (yes, a woman) who also is the manager of the summer theatre where this show was performed in 2007. Chico was also in the show, played by Kim Sulocki.

The show is available on DVD, but not with English subtitles.

That's a shame because several folks wrote to ask if any translations were available and just how the Brothers Marx survived being imported into another language and culture. We already established that the real Groucho is not as funny in Spanish and we once had a video link — I think it's defunct now — that proved the same for German. But when someone is writing for the brothers in another country, what must that be like?

Harpo presumably can survive anything, even a sex change. Chico, I guess, would be simple but for the malaprops. I mean, I assume it's just as easy for a Swedish guy to do a bad Italian accent as it is for a Jewish guy in this country. But Groucho has to be a translator's nightmare. Does anyone out there have more insight into this? And is there a more thankless role for an actor than playing Zeppo in Swedish?

Humor In A Hurry

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If you're anywhere near Los Angeles, this is for you: The new season of Instaplay starts Saturday evening, October 17. What the heck, you may want to know, is Instaplay? Instaplay is an improv troupe — the best I've ever seen and I've seen a lot of improv troupes. They take a suggestion of a title from the live audience and then proceed to make up an entire musical comedy based on that title. The cast consists of George McGrath, Deanna Oliver, Jonathan Stark, Cheri Steinkellner and Navaris Darson, all performing under the expert direction of Bill Steinkellner and singing to the improvised music of Mari Falcone.

They don't do these very often and the theater is very small. So if you're thinking of going, get tickets soon. As you can see, they're very cheap and you get way, way more than you pay for.

TV Funnies – Part 5

These are the last of the fake Gold Key TV comics I whipped up back in 2004. These two ran here April 15 and as you can see, by now I was making them as silly as possible. I don't recall if anyone wrote in to ask where they could secure a copy of the Ed Sullivan Show comic but someone may have. Believe nothing you read below — especially the part about writing in to tell me which other ones you'd like to read about…

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I still have no idea what possessed Western Publishing to put out comic books based on The Ed Sullivan Show and 60 Minutes. A variety show and a news show?

I can almost see the Sullivan comic as they seem to have been interested in Topo Gigio, the little Italian mouse that appeared routinely on Ed's Sunday night variety show. But why did they think the comic book buying public would be interested in a strip about, as the cover says, "Jew Comedian Myron Cohen"? It's six very boring pages of Mr. Cohen just standing there, telling jokes about his relatives. Even at that, it's more entertaining than the three-page story about the plate spinner, the four-page trained seal act or the attempt to re-create in comic book form, a musical number by "British pop singing star Shani Wallis." The Beatles, who are advertised on the cover, appear in only a single-page gag that is really only about Ringo. (His drum set gets lost just before showtime so he winds up playing on the stomach of a tortoise.) Each strip is "introduced" by Ed Sullivan and either the letterer kept screwing up or someone thought it would capture Ed's personality to misspell the names of the acts he's introducing. The art for the comic was produced by the studio of Alberto Giolitti, who was best known for his work on Gold Key's Star Trek comic and Turok, Son of Stone. Giolitti worked in Italy so perhaps they felt he could best capture the essence of Topo Gigio…but he makes Myron Cohen look like a pterodactyl and in the one panel where Ed introduces "sports legend Billie Jean King" in the audience, she looks like George Takei. A very weird comic, indeed.

Even odder is the 60 Minutes comic, the interior of which resembles Gold Key comic books like Twilight Zone, Ripley's Believe It or Not and Boris Karloff's Tales of Mystery but with Mike Wallace and Morley Safer acting as hosts. They narrate allegedly-true crime tales which in the one issue were all written by Leo Dorfman. The three stories were illustrated by Jack Sparling, Jose Delbo and John Celardo.  The most interesting (and least believable) is the first one in which Mike Wallace takes a film crew into an old mansion that is supposedly haunted.  The other two are equally difficult to believe and the only redeeming feature of the comic is the one-pager in the back in which Andy Rooney (drawn by Winslow Mortimer) editorializes on how annoying it is to see TV shows turned into comic books.  The comic that precedes his page proves that pretty conclusively.

That's all I have now.  There are other great Gold Key adaptations and maybe I'll get to some of them one of these days.  If I've missed your favorite, please write and tell me.

Oops!

I just accidentally posted a post that wasn't finished and wasn't supposed to be here for a few days. I deleted it from the board. If you saw it, please delete it from your mind and don't tell anyone what it said.

The Top 20 Voice Actors: Gary Owens

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This is an entry to Mark Evanier's list of the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968. For more on this list, read this. To see all the listings posted to date, click here.

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Gary Owens

Most Famous Role: Space Ghost.

Other Notable Roles: Roger Ramjet, Blue Falcon, Powdered Toast Man and the Narrator/Announcer on an awful lot of shows.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Just about everything but he was most notably a popular disc jockey, an on-camera personality, an off-camera announcer and a guy who did thousands of commercials, film and TV trailers and promos, and even a game show host.  His most memorable job in front of the cameras was as the announcer on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.

Why He's On This List: There are countless guys out there with All-American, testosterone-flavored male voices but very few who can underscore all that macho with a great sense of humor or, in the case of a show like Space Ghost, a convincing sense of drama.  And most of those other guys wind up sounding alike, whereas Gary was so distinctive that his inflections became a direction that other vocal talents would receive from their directors: "Can you give it a little more Gary Owens?"

Fun Fact: Gary started out to be a cartoonist but his voice seemed to be too valuable for that profession.  So he got into reading the news for radio and when programming directors discovered how witty he was, he became a d.j.  He was remarkably successful at it but still retained a strong love of cartoons, animations and old comic books. He was one of those kids who had Superman #1 and Batman #1 and all those early issues which would later be worth zillions but his mother threw them out. In this case, it was because Gary was a sickly kid — his parents were once told he wouldn't survive into his teens — and the smell of old pulp paper was actually having an adverse impact on his health — so out the comics went. In the seventies when comic book publishers began reprinting old comics on good paper, Gary happily bought every volume.

This Explain A Lot About The Internet…

Re-read the item I posted yesterday about two phony comic book covers I created and then ask yourself why over twenty people have e-mailed me with comments and questions that make it clear that they thought the books I described as "fake Gold Key comics" were real. I got two or three of these each time before but…

Today's Video Link

I watched James Corden again Friday night. It was a rerun of a special episode he did a few months ago saluting YouTube…and one thing that was kind of interesting (I'm not saying this was a mistake) was that they did it with the presumption that everyone watching was a huge fan of YouTube and knew well all of the most-watched videos there. If you didn't you were outta luck…and while I do watch a lot of YouTube, I was about 60% out of luck.

But I did like moments, including this opening song that I presume was written by Corden's producer, David Javerbaum. When I come across a piece of special musical material I really like these days, it usually turns out to have been written by David Javerbaum. You can usually spot him because he does very clever rhymes and brings in a surprise cameo performer about two-thirds of the way through. So I assume this is him.

This little video was shot all over the lot at CBS Television City at Beverly and Fairfax in Los Angeles. The scene where two people fall with big milk canisters was done in an alley where — assuming I'm looking at what I think I'm looking at — CBS used to store unwanted pieces of scenery and large props for a while until they amassed enough to haul away. I used to drive through here and see all these retired or upgraded games from The Price is Right out there, some rotting from the rain.

I kept imagining getting a van, driving through there when no one was looking and picking one up. I thought it might be cool to have the Any Number game in my living room…and it would have been, though I never acted on my little whim. Hey, let's watch Corden sing about YouTube…

Recommended Reading

A lot of folks are hammering Jeb! Bush for his quoted response to the shootings in Oregon — "Stuff happens!" And when I heard the statement trimmed down to not much more than that, I thought it sounded clumsy and tactless. But Jonathan Chait, who sure isn't a fan of Jeb!, thinks the candidate is being taken out of a more sensitive context.

Incidentally, my response to the mass shooting is pretty much the same as it was for the last mass shooting and the one before that and the one before that (etc.) I don't have anything but the obvious to say but I'll try to come up with something for the next mass shooting. Or the one after that or the one after that or the one after that (etc.)…