This is an audio recording of a 2003 panel that ASIFA, the animation society, held to discuss the late, great Daws Butler. I have no idea why I wasn't there for it because I loved the guy and am still fascinated by him and his work. On the dais were June Foray and three voice actors who studied with Daws…Corey Burton, Joe Bevilacqua and Nancy Cartwright. Other students, including Earl Kress, chime in with their comments. As I've told many aspiring voice actors, it's too bad you can't study with Daws, but you can study Daws. He was the best — and a nicer, more generous-with-his-time-and-talents man you never knew…

It's the anniversary of Watergate with all sorts of rebroadcasts of that fun event. I've set my TiVo to record most of them, including a Dick Cavett special on PBS which I'm told is quite wonderful. C-Span is also rebroadcasting much of the hearings.

My friend Roger still refers to it as the time Democrats, for partisan reasons, drove a Republican president out of office. I think it's obviously a case of Republicans driving the guy out, lest he cripple the party for years to come. Keeping Nixon in the job was the gift that kept on giving to Democrats. They kept investigating the guy and finding more and more, winning over more of the nation. Why would they have wanted that to end, especially since it meant setting up a new president who could run as an incumbent in 1976?

It was Republicans who panicked because the issue of what had to be done about Richard M. Nixon was splitting their base. If I'd been a Republican congressperson or senator, I'd have been terrified of casting an ultimate vote on impeachment. If I'd voted with Nixon, I'd have lost half the Republican vote, as about half of all Republicans had decided Nixon was guilty of criminal actions and/or had become such a liability to the party that it was time to get rid of him. And if I'd voted against Nixon, I'd have lost the other half. The other half would have backed him if he'd started robbing liquor stores.

You cannot get elected in this country if you split your base…which is why a delegation of G.O.P. leaders went to the White House and told Nixon that Republicans in Congress would not stand allied behind him. Barry Goldwater, the man with the best credentials as a Republican, said he'd probably even vote against Nixon on at least one article of impeachment. Nixon knew that if he could no longer portray the whole investigation as a political witch hunt by the Dems, it was over. And so it was over.

I wonder how many of those calling for (or at least refusing to rule out) the impeachment of the current guy believe that would happen. I think most of them just know there are short-term advantages to telling certain constituents that they'll save America from the evil boogeyman they've made Obama out to be. But there are still people out there who think Obama committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors just by being elected and they're still trying to figure out how to make that sound more like actionable charges. I'm going to watch all those Nixon specials with that in mind.

In case you haven't guessed, it's another Mushroom Soup Monday here at newsfromme.com, meaning I'm busy writing cheese dip and/or lasagna jokes and haven't the time to update my blog with as much content as usual. Even this message is more than most people post on their blogs some weeks (hell, some months) so I feel not a dram of guilt. We will be back tomorrow in full force, probably with another long "family" remembrance. This one involved my Uncle Aaron and one of those warehouses full of old mannequins that you see in suspense movies. 'Til then…

My buddy Paul Harris discusses his encounters with Ted Nugent. I don't know Mr. Nugent and I'm not sure I've ever heard and/or enjoyed his music…but it strikes me that he has some bizarre views about guns and race and politics and — and the "and" is the big part — has discovered that voicing them is very, very good for business. I guess this puts him ahead of the people who only seem to be saying such things because it's good for business.

Sad to hear of the death of TV writer Rick Mittleman last Wednesday. Rick, who was 84, was walking his dog in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles and was killed in a traffic accident involving an S.U.V. One of his colleagues, Jack Mendelsohn, just told me about it and he was really depressed…as am I.

Rick was one of the most prolific TV writers of his day, able to write comedies, dramas, adventure shows…he even wrote for The Flintstones. His was one of those names I knew from credits on all my favorite programs, including The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Odd Couple, Get Smart, M*A*S*H, The Red Skelton Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, That Girl and so many others. In the late sixties, when I was sneaking up on a career in TV writing, I went to a bookstore in Hollywood to buy some produced scripts to use as models. I was amazed at how many of those scripts were by Rick Mittleman.

I met Rick through our mutual work with the Writers Guild of America. In the late seventies, the WGA was trying to find a way to wrest jurisdiction of animation writers from Local 839, the Animation Union. For long, circuitous reasons we who wrote cartoons were in a union that represented artists with whom we did not have much in common. 839 wanted to maintain jurisdiction over us because we paid the highest rate of dues and the withholding of our services was a good weapon if and when that union had to threaten to strike.

Taking a body of employees out of one union and allowing them to join another is called Craft Severance…and the tricky thing about that is that you can't file for it when there's a contract in place. Once the union signs its new contract with Management, there's this thing called a "contract bar" that guarantees the employees represented will not leave the bargaining unit.

Rick had written both live-action (under the WGA) and animation (under 839) and he knew how badly the Animation Union represented the needs of its writer members. The Union still has control of writers at some studios and it does a better job of representing them now. But back then, the gent who was 839's Business Agent and negotiator was unabashedly hostile to writers. He even told some of us that if it had been up to him, he would have lowered our pay. Even after Rick stopped writing animation and had no self-interest, he campaigned to try and get us out of that union and therefore away from that Business Agent.

In 1979, it was necessary for the Animation Union to go on strike. It was Rick who realized that while we were on strike, no contract bar was in place. I don't recall if he was on the WGA Board of Directors then — he was, from time to time — but he got them to quickly file a lawsuit demanding Craft Severance. At the time, I was writing both animation and live-action so I was selected as the writer in whose name the suit would be filed, which was fine with me.

The suit did not succeed. Craft severance is very difficult to achieve and it's even harder when…the National Labor Relations Board is full of Republican appointees, as it was then so soon after Nixon. Also, management — in this case, the studios like Disney and Hanna-Barbera — was working closely with the union to keep us in the union. That should give you some idea of how poorly the union represented our concerns then. 839 wasn't just in bed with the producers, it was gleefully subservient in a committed S&M relationship. (And I will remind you again that this is no longer the case under its current Business Agent, who is a good guy.)

Before we reached that outcome, we spent a lot of time in hearing rooms at the N.L.R.B. and what struck me was that Rick was in there, devoting his time and fighting along with the rest of us. He was not writing animation at the time and was so successful in live-action that he could easily have avoided that kind of work the rest of his life. It was a matter of principle and justice to him…and that's when I realized that in addition to being a fine, fine writer, Rick Mittleman was also a fine, fine gentleman.

Stephen Colbert, not in character, gives advice to teenage girls. I'm not sure why Stephen Colbert's advice to teenage girls is any better than that of a random male of his age chosen off the street but he is quite famous. And he does say some things you might find interesting…

It looks like plans to expand the Convention Center in San Diego may have hit a little snag. I'll bet they find a way to work around this.

If you find yourself in one of those debates about whether the con will stay in San Diego, this may be of some interest. It's a list of every event that has inhabited that convention center for the last eighteen months and the estimated attendance. Comic-Con International is pegged at a turnout of 130,000 both times it's listed but what struck me was that nothing else was even close. I think the largest event after us is something called the Rock N Roll Marathon Health & Fitness Expo, which had 60,000 attendees — less than half of what Comic-Con draws — in each of its two stagings. Almost everything else is under 15,000.

So why are they talking about expanding that convention center? For us. They don't need the added room to attract the Western Car Wash Show and its 2,000 folks who are in, I suppose, the car-washing business. They need it, or feel they need it, to keep Comic-Con in San Diego.

(I wonder if, when you pay to attend the Western Car Wash Show, you can also purchase a car deodorizer, a giant-size Mountain Dew and a bag of Funyuns.)

Meanwhile: Several folks (starting with John Heaton) have written to inform me that the photo I posted of the Cookie Monster Imperial Stormtrooper was taken by a Flickr user called mooshuu. Here are a lot of his or her other photos of the convention.

Jamie Coville has posted a nice array of photos from the con and audio recordings of panels, including a couple of mine. The Bill Finger panels will be of particular interest to some.

Lastly: I am in charge of three of the most popular events at Comic-Con each year — Quick Draw!, the Saturday Cartoon Voices panel and the Sunday Cartoon Voices panel. For some odd reason, there's a debate going on over at one message board about who selects the people who appear on these panels. Simple answer: I do. I may consult with others but it's always been my decision.

The decisions are made at least six weeks before the convention and sometimes well before that. The convention program guide, after all, has to go to press long before the con commences. Still, this year, I had a lot of people who contacted me in the week before the con and either asked to be on one of these panels or, in one case, told me they were going to be on it. That was an interesting conversation but I managed to convince him that, no, he couldn't just insist on participating.

Then I had a couple of folks who showed up just before each of my two big events on Saturday — and I mean like two minutes before — and tried to talk their way into spots on the stage. I don't know what they were thinking. I do know what I was thinking and it wasn't flattering.

I actually do not need applicants for Quick Draw! I have more than a half-dozen people I've promised the third seat to, and one of them will do it next year and another will do it the year after and so on. Also, the Cartoon Voices panels for next year may be already close to full. I hate saying no to people so I'm posting this in the hope that fewer people will ask me, thereby forcing me to say no. Which, like I said, I hate doing.

Woody Allen's first-ever podcast interview! It's 35 minutes and it's mostly about his new movie…

Lenar Whitney, a Louisiana state representative running for Congress, has a video up in which she declares "Global warming is a hoax." You can see it at this page where you can also see the Politifact people explain, point by point, why she's wrong.

You know, I used to take a view of Global Warming that went roughly like this: "I hope the scientists who say it's so are all wrong but I don't think we can afford to take that chance and we need to act as if it's true." I thought that was a good way to look at it. I was acknowledging that I'm not a climate scientist or anything of the sort but that I believed the consensus among such folks was so overwhelming that we had to assume it was so. Sometimes in discussions, I'd parenthetically add that a lot of things that have been proposed to combat Global Warming — mostly involving limiting pollutants — seem like good ideas anyway.

Well, no one else thought this was a good way to look it. The debate has gotten so polarized that you kind of have to say, "Yes, Global Warming is real" or "No, Global Warming is a hoax" and there's no room for nuance…so I've given up nuance. Yeah, I think it's real. And I haven't heard anyone who feels otherwise for a reason deeper than that they hate the notion that Al Gore and "The Liberals" might be right.

On Saturday on my way to Quick Draw!, I passed this gent dressed in a Cookie Monster/Star Wars mash-up and thought he was very funny. Then on my way up the escalator to the top floor, I suddenly thought it would be funny to bring him into Quick Draw! and have the panel draw other variations on that mash-up. So I ran back downstairs, found him and invited him to come up for the event later. He never showed up so we did the premise anyway…and he missed out on all that attention, plus I'd sent my assistant out to get him a cookie.

Several folks sent me this photo of him which is apparently on several different sites at the moment. I don't know where it originated so I can't ask permission from the photographer but if it's you, please let me know if it's okay to leave it up here and let me give you credit.

Then on Sunday when I walked into one of my panel rooms, there was the real Cookie Monster. But I've already told that story.

Sunday was my favorite day of the con. As I mentioned, it started with the Jack Kirby Tribute Panel and then we had what was probably the best Cartoon Voices panel we ever did…including the last-ever performance of that "Snow White" script that panel attendees are sick of. Here's a decent video of the panel which featured, left to right, Gregg Berger, Vanessa Marshall, Fred Tatasciore, Debra Wilson, Robin Atkin Downes and surprise (to him) guest, Bill Farmer…

Then we did a panel called Cover Story: Art of the Cover. It's an annual thing I host in which artists discuss designing covers for comic books and this time, we had Amanda Conner, Fiona Staples, Mark Brooks, Jae Lee and Stan Sakai. A lot of folks seem to love the "shop talk" aspect of it. (Note to Self: Next year, either get the con to make this panel longer or have one less artist on it so we can go even more in-depth.)

My final panel of the convention was one called The Business of Cartoon Voices. Let me tell you two quick stories as to how this panel came about…

QUICK STORY #1: Many moons ago, I hosted the first-ever panel at Comic-Con with cartoon voice actors. Now, they're all over the place but back in whatever year that was, I got the con to give me a small room and I got a bunch of such people to come down and demonstrate their craft. Within a few years, we were turning away so many attendees that they moved us into the biggest room they had and because of how easily we filled that hall, we added a second Cartoon Voice panel — one on Saturday, one on Sunday.

For a while, we took questions from the audience but I finally decided not to do that. The questions were almost all about how to get into the profession and they warranted longer, more detailed answers than time allowed. The questioners also had a tendency to audition as they were asking their questions and it was obvious that most of the audience didn't want to hear that. People would start walking out the moment I said, "Let's take some questions from the audience." So I decided to stop saying that and to think maybe there should be a separate panel focusing on how to get into the business.

QUICK STORY #2 and this may not be so quick: There are an awful lot of people out there, mostly young, who want a career in voicing cartoons. By "an awful lot," I mean way more than the business can handle. Even if every one of them had the skills of a Daws Butler or June Foray, there could not possibly be enough work for them all. It's simple math. Not everyone who wants to pitch for the Dodgers will get that opportunity either.

Since there are so many people who want in, there's a thriving industry out there to coach and teach these folks. In Los Angeles alone, there are somewhere between 100 and 300 classes or private coaches and many of them are very, very good. But some are not. Some are, to put it bluntly, ripping off eager wanna-bes and promising them that which can never be. If a teacher has any integrity at all, it begins with not accepting money from folks with no flair for the profession.

The late Daws Butler was, I think, the best teacher of voiceover skills ever. (He was also, I am prepared to argue, the best practitioner ever of his art but if you wanted to say it was Mel Blanc or Paul Frees or Frank Welker or someone else in that phylum, I wouldn't quarrel.) The very first thing Daws did was to turn down students who he believed lacked promise. You could not get into his class with money…and if he did allow you in, he did not take an excessive amount of it from you.

I keep hearing of cases where someone has done the opposite and that's why my friend, the also-late Earl Kress and I started this panel called The Business of Cartoon Voices. Earl was a student of Daws and he shared my anger at such cases. Here's a recent one…

A troubled woman, about my age, approached me at WonderCon and said she was desperate for advice. Her daughter, who's about 25, is studying with a Voice Coach. Her daughter dreams of being a Cartoon Voice performer and has no other dream in life. The mother, who loves her daughter, is shelling out large sums of cash to a Voice Coach who promises the young lady will have a luscious and lucrative career.

This has been going on for around eighteen months without the slightest hint of a job. When the mother asks, "Shouldn't she be getting auditions or an agent by now?" the V.C. says more lessons (i.e., more payments) are still necessary. The woman told me the amounts of the checks she has written and I was shocked. They pretty much amount to her life's savings. She said, "I don't know if I should keep paying him or find another teacher or what." She is clearly motivated by nothing more or less than to help her daughter achieve her dream.

Much of the money she has paid out has been to make "demo" recordings of her daughter's work — the kind of recordings to which agents and casting directors listen. She gave me the most recent one and her phone number and I went home, listened and called her. While I hate to say that anyone could not possibly have a career in a dreamed-of field, I will say that Daws Butler would never have taken this woman's money in the first place.

This kind of predatory exploitation of burgeoning talent bothers the heck outta me. Earl and I talked about it years ago and we decided to start this panel to educate beginners and because we wouldn't feel good if we didn't do something like this. So I bring in agents (this year, Sandie Schnarr of AVO and Cathey Lizzio of CESD) and actors (this year, Gregg Berger, Vanessa Marshall and Bill Farmer) and we give the audience the basics. Some people have paid thousands of dollars just to learn what we dispense for free in ninety minutes. Sandie and Cathey are, by the way, two of the best voiceover agents in the business.

No, there's no audio or video of the panel available but in the coming weeks, I'm going to take some space on this blog to summarize what was said. For now, let me just say: If you want to get into voiceover work, be real careful about who you give your money to. There are great coaches and teachers out there. (Bill Farmer is one and Bob Bergen is another.)

So that was Sunday and that was Comic-Con 2014. I'll have more to say about the convention in the coming weeks. In fact, I'll probably be writing about it until it's time to prep for next year's…which, by the way, is earlier in the month than usual. Comic-Con International 2015 will convene on July 8 and run through July 12. It's barely worth my time to unpack.

Work is soon to start on a massive expansion of the convention center in San Diego. Assuming Comic-Con remains there after the current contract expires, which is what I assume, it will allow even more people to attend and for those who do attend to not be as crowded. However, according to this article, there could be some inconvenience before the expansion is completed.

By the way: I may be alone in this but this year, though there were theoretically as many admissions as ever, the hall did not feel as crowded to me as it usually does. Now, granted…

1. I am 6'3" and rather wide and I walk with great purpose and a GUEST badge on my chest. So even with my imperfect knees, I may still have an easier time getting around that hall than others.
2. I'm upstairs a lot doing panels. I didn't even set foot in the main hall on Sunday. And…
3. I have the good sense to stay away from some of the more congested areas, especially those relating to gaming and videogames. There's a reason it's impossible to get through those aisles and this is it: They want it that way. The gaming exhibitors want everyone in the business to see that their product is so hot and awesome that their booth is mobbed all day…and they design their exhibitions and plan giveaways with that in mind. It would not surprise me if booth managers have been fired because it was possible to get through the aisles around their display. Don't venture over there and then complain to me that it's impossible to move. That's like going to a Gallagher concert and whining that you got watermelon juice all over your pants.

I have more to say about Sunday at the con and about the con in general. I'll try to finish up the report later tonight.

Two days ago, comic "Professor" Irwin Corey hit the age of 100, thereby making him about as old as a lot of people thought he was, thirty years ago. I wish some of his funnier talk show appearances were still available for viewing. He was always hysterical even though he had a tendency to make a shambles of any show foolish enough to invite him on. I remember Mike Douglas just sitting there, unable to ad-lib or even comprehend what was becoming of his program…but the audience was laughing too hard to call a halt to any of it. That's probably why no one's had him on since Mike Douglas went off.

Corey still gets around, performing occasionally and giving interviews. When he isn't doing that, he's been known to walk the streets of New York, panhandling like a common beggar…but he takes all the money he collects and donates it to worthwhile charities. Nice to know that at his age, he can afford to do that. Here's a little preview of a birthday party for him that has since occurred. Funny man.

Mr. Sondheim's "Instructions to the Audience"…

As Mark Joseph Stern explains, the folks arguing against Gay Marriage have pretty much run out of any argument beyond, "We don't like the whole idea of it." Which is not something that can or should fly with the courts. In fact, it's the same argument I'd have to use if I ever launched a campaign to ban cole slaw. I may still try it.

Trust Dick Morris with their retirement income.

That this man still has an audience (and an occasional place on Fox News and other Conservative media outlets) is stunning. When I write here that right-wingers are being gouged by pundits who get rich telling them what they want to hear…this is the kind of thing I have in mind.