Yet another sketch from British TV comedy show Sez Les with its star, Les Dawson, and special guest John Cleese…

Both Democrats and Republicans are trying to gain some political yardage by blaming air crashes on a President of the opposite party. Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post points out how absurd this blaming is on both sides.

For no visible reason, Vanity Fair has posted an article about the relationship between Groucho Marx and the controversial lady who largely controlled his life in his last years, Erin Fleming. I have no idea why they saw a need to dredge this story up again and it feels like — and I'm sure this is not the case — this piece was written a decade or two ago and someone at the office found it in the files, realized they never published it and threw it up on the website.

I visited Groucho at his home once during the Erin days and also was present when in her company, he visited the set of a TV show I was writing. Because of those limited interactions, people ask me for my view on the Groucho/Erin situation. My answer is simple: She did some good things for him, she did some bad things to him, and if you want to know more than that, read my pal Steve Stoliar's book. Steve was hired by Erin to assist Groucho and was on the premises for much of those final years. Even before I met him though, I knew he was in a better position than anyone to report on what transpired and had reported it accurately and without self-interest.

I will say that the mercurial Ms. Fleming struck me as one of those people unable to cope with the vagaries of a show business career. To have even a chance at one, you have to grasp and deal with how unpredictable it can be; how you can do everything right (you think) and still not get what you want while someone else doing everything wrong (you think) gets everything you want. The Vanity Fair article more or less charts Erin's slow but certain detachment from reality as she discovers that taking care of an aging comedy legend just might not have been a pathway to fame and/or fortune. Groucho could be pretty unpredictable too.

Somewhere in there, you have to ask yourself what he would have done without her and most speculations along those lines do not lead to better Golden Years for the man. So I dunno. If you want to pursue this line of thought, read Raised Eyebrows by Steve Stoliar. You can buy it on Amazon or save a few bucks and get it autographed by the author over on his webpage. Then you can weigh the good things against the bad and become as maddeningly ambivalent as everyone else is on this matter.

This is a message from my pal Jerry Beck, following up on this post about how the TV networks used to decide what shows to cancel on their Saturday morning schedules, which ones to renew and which ones to revamp. Here's Jerry…

Great answer, Mark — informed as always by your inside knowledge of the industry and your personal role as a producer and writer for that daypart.

My answer about there being "new" programming each year on Saturday morning (the "one season thing") was always based on my observation as a viewer – and being 3000 miles away from the Hollywood cartoon factories. I actually think we are saying the same thing — though you added more insight from your end.

This all first occurred to me the year CBS put on Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space (in 1972). I didn’t think about it that much at the time, other than "why would they change the series format so drastically?" The following years brought forth the likes of a re-titled The Think-Pink Panther Show (1975), and the expanded Tarzan and the Super 7 (1978), as well as various Saturday renewals (though each year under a new name) of The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, Superfriends and The Archies.

Bottom line: Putting a new title on a popular series made sense for Saturday morning marketing — especially in those annual centerspread advertisements in Marvel, DC, Archie and Harvey comic books. There were a few exceptions to the rule — a popular show was occasionally renewed for a second season under its original name, but usually with a smaller order of new episodes (six?) for that second year. Star Trek: The Animated Series is one of those that comes to mind.

Of course, Garfield and Friends was a major exception to everything I said here.

I probably need to explain why Garfield and Friends was a major exception before I get a ton of e-mails asking me why and how it was. That show went into production with a two-season guarantee, which was very rare for Saturday morning. They ordered two seasons of thirteen episodes each and they also gave us more lead time than a new series usually got. Our producers could make this deal for a number of reasons, the main one being the extraordinary popularity of the character in his prime-time specials, the sale of his books and other merchandise…and the fact that Jim Davis and Lee Mendelson (two of our exec producers) said in effect, "Either we get this deal or we don't do the show."

Most cartoon studios couldn't say that — or if they did, they were bluffing. I don't think Hanna-Barbera ever said to an offer, "No, that's not enough money to do the show properly" or "No, that idea you want us to animate is a terrible idea for show."

When you had a studio that was set up to produce one or more weekly shows, you had this massive overhead of a building and a business and all the people you have on staff, many of whom have contracts and can't be laid-off if you don't sell a show or two one year. More than once, a studio was in the position that if they didn't sell X number of shows — sometimes even just one — they'd have to close down. It would be like trying to maintain a big restaurant when you don't have a single customer for a year.

But Jim and Lee had no studio. They had a relationship with Film Roman which was then a small operation doing mostly prime-time specials including the Garfield specials. Film Roman could have easily survived if the show didn't sell or didn't sell that year. When it did, they expanded their operation, hiring on new people and eventually moving to a larger building in order to produce it. It also mattered that Lee Mendelson had that long, mutually-prosperous relationship with CBS over the Peanuts specials and other prime-time productions.

So they got the deal and they gave me a two-year contract to do the twenty-six half-hours. When we went on the air, the ratings were so strong and the show reran so well that CBS came back and said, "Can we make it an hour?" So the second season, instead of being thirteen half-hours was thirteen hours…and as we were finishing those, they gave us an order for Season #3 and shortly after that, for #4. No one ever came to us and asked, "Can we freshen this by putting it into outer space or adding in Baby Garfield or anything?" We wound up producing 121 half-hours of what was basically the same, unfreshened series…and it could have gone on for longer but with the annual raises built into the contracts, it got too expensive for the network. And there were a few other reasons.

Thanks for the message, Jerry, and I'll tell everyone reading this that, first of all, you'll be appearing on March 8 here in Los Angeles on a program called "The Genius of Jay Ward: Rocky, Bullwinkle, Rarities and More." It's free and it's in connection with U.C.L.A. and ASIFA and details about it can be found here.

And I'll also tell them that you'll be at WonderCon Anaheim and that one of the many things you'll be doing there is appearing on a panel on the history of Hanna-Barbera with our friend Greg Ehrbar and me. That'll be on Friday right after a panel I'm hosting on "How to Write for Animation." I'll be posting a schedule of all the panels I'm doing there when we get closer to the convention.

And lastly, I'll also tell everyone that Jerry and I are part of the committee that is arranging for a memorial/celebration of life for our dear friend Mike Schlesinger who left us on January 9. We think we have a time and place for it and will be announcing it soon. It should be a great event all about a great guy.

Another sketch from British TV comedy show Sez Les with its star, Les Dawson, and special guest John Cleese…

Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post goes over what the occupant of the Oval Office has recently said about Ukraine and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He then compares it to the truth. Even Mike Pence ain't buying it.

Rob Baker writes…

As I've followed a Facebook group called "TV Cartoons that Time Forgot," where I believe Jerry Beck is a moderator, as folks continued discussing so many old Saturday Morning cartoons, one thing finally stood out to me: That such a huge number of SatAM cartoons only lasted one season!

So I mentioned this on one post (which now seems to have surpassed over 200,000 followers, while inexplicably showing fewer posts being made to it?), that one-season thing. Yes there've been occasional exceptions to this within the 60s and 70s (such as Fat Albert) but for the most part, even popular cartoons re-branded every year so we had the New Scooby Doo Movies, Archie's Funhouse, etc. So Jerry Beck, I recall, weighed in and stated that it was because for Saturday Morning, everything had to be "new." That made some sense! I remember the exciting promos being run, the CBS "Cartooniverse" etc., and for kids, that may have once been extremely vital, to keep them excited over all the new stuff happening.

But I find not really anything to research that spells it out any more clearly nor definitively. I know that as we got into the 80s, many cartoons did run many seasons, the Chipmunks, the Smurfs, The Garfield, you know. So that must've also been seen as a vast policy change, though I remember some diversity still existed like Alf Tales versus a spinoff of sorts which dealt with the Alf characters acting out classic stories; same with Alvin Goes to the Movies; a few things like that.

I'd love to know what all you know, if anything, about that. I've told this Beck answer to a few people, as it seems unfair in the long run that Hong Kong Phooey only ever had 16 episodes all said, which were run ad nauseum while we kids still ate it up anyway. It's strange that there were SO many Hanna-Barbera shows and none of them seemed to last worth a darn, like why did they even bother if they kept getting cancelled? So it's clearly part of some strategy. That's what I'd like to learn about and maybe have your site to offer up as a great answer to that!

Simplified question, if you like: So many Saturday Morning Cartoons only lasted one season in the early years, which seems strange because some of them were really popular. Were they just cancelled or is there a better explanation for why they were treated this way?

You may be reading more into Jerry's answer than he intended but here's my answer: It had a lot to do with two problems that the programmers faced when they were buying shows to run on Saturday morning back in the days when CBS, NBC and ABC ran shows for kids then…problems which didn't exist for the folks down the hall programming live-action shows for prime time.

One was the lead time necessary for animation. The new shows that were ordered for the season beginning in September usually had to be ordered by around the end of February. The other problem was that the way the math worked on the budgets, you — I'm making you the programming person in this explanation — had to order a year of shows at a time. You ordered thirteen episodes that would each run four times to fill out 52 weeks.

The guys in the prime-time division could order thirteen episodes of a new sitcom. They could order six. And as those shows were shot, they could visit the sets and watch the filming or look at rough cuts of episodes in progress. They could look at the first few episodes of Happy Days and say, "Hey, let's give that Fonzie character more screen time"…and Fonzie would have more screen time in the episode shot the following week.

Or they could order thirteen of a new show called Three's Company (this is just one example of many) and then after the first few aired and got good ratings, they could quickly order more episodes so Show #14 could air the week after Show #13 and be followed immediately by Show #15 and Show #16 and so on. You couldn't get new episodes of an animated series that quickly…and the way things were budgeted, you really couldn't buy Show #14 until the following season. You had to run that first batch of thirteen over and over.

So let's say, Mr. Programmer, that you order thirteen episodes of a new show we'll call Stinky-Poo. You buy it in February to be delivered beginning in September…and while you can read scripts and look at storyboards and attend voice recording sessions, you really don't know what you've got until they deliver the first episode of that show in September. And if Stinky-Poo turns out to be stinky-poo, guess what: There's nothing you can do to fix it.

And furthermore, there are twelve more coming down that assembly line and they're probably going to stink too. I can't think of any Saturday morning cartoon that got a lot better as it went along. Once in a while, you can bail on a show. Your network can kick in the money to take a new show off the air before it's run four times…but you can't do that too often and you can only really replace it with a rerun, not a different new show.

As I mentioned in another post here, the test of a show was not how good the ratings were the first time you aired the thirteen. Lots of shows did well when they were new but when they began airing reruns, the kids decided to watch the reruns of something else. A hit show was one that held its audience in reruns or perhaps even went up in the ratings.

So beginning in September, you air those thirteen episodes of Stinky-Poo…and maybe you slip in a rerun on Week #9 or Week #10 to stretch out the supply of never-before-run episodes. Or maybe you slip in reruns because the studio is having trouble meeting air dates and Show #13 won't be done by Week #13. But at some point around November or December, you're into all-reruns and you can start looking at ratings and trying to determine if the show has developed a loyal-enough viewership to stay with it for another year you need to purchase way in advance.

Around November or December, you have to be seriously thinking about what you're going to renew for another season and what you're not going to renew. Because around February, you have to commit to the schedule you're going to start airing the following September. If Stinky-Poo has collapsed in the ratings, that makes it simple. You cancel it. If its ratings have been good and the numbers are holding strong or even improving, you pick the show up for Season #2.

Ah, but what if it's in the middle, which is where most shows wind up? It's not a tremendous hit but it's also not a complete failure. There's something there the kids like. So what do you do then? The answer often was this: You freshen. You split the difference between an all-new show and another year of the exact same program. That's when you might decide to do The Stinky-Poo Movies or Stinky-Poo's Funhouse or maybe introduce Stinky-Poo Junior into the show. It also tells the audience that it's not the same thirteen Stinky-Poo episodes that they had committed to memory by the third rerun.

A lot of shows fail for the same reason a lot of restaurants fail or a lot of movies fail: They just don't click with the customers. Some shows succeed because they do but there aren't enough of those so you have to do something. So you take that car which runs fine but it isn't as attractive as it might be and you slap a new coat of paint on it. You could get some good mileage out of it then. Hey, how about Stinky-Poo's Superstar Cosmic Space Adventure Fairy Tales? That might get us a pickup for thirteen more.

Sez Les was a British sketch comedy show that ran from 1969 to 1976 and starred comic Les Dawson and a batch of funny people. John Cleese was occasionally among those funny people and here's one of the sketches with Mr. Dawson and Mr. Cleese. Not the best video quality, I'm sorry to say, but I can't do anything about that…

Dana S. wrote to ask…

What was the name of the bit that Carson would do on The Tonight Show? Some guy would send him an 8 or 16mm reel of film that had a bunch of little skits on them. They'd have a title, then the guy would act out what the title was about. Example: "How to annoy Your Neighbors." Then there would be a movie of a guy I don't think he ever showed his face) sitting on a sawhorse with his legs dangling in two metal trash cans, swing them around making a lot of noise. There'd be several of these per reel. I can't remember what he called them.

The guy was a filmmaker named Len Cella and he called his little films "Moron Movies." Carson ran them on his show for a while and then they wound up on TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes, a series Carson's company did in partnership with Dick Clark's company. They were called "Silly Cinemas" over there. Here's an example from when they had the former name…

Our friend Gary Sassaman is back with another installment of Tales From My Spinner Rack…another penetrating look at comics of his (and my) youth. This time, he takes a look at a short-lived line of romance comics that Marvel tried in the late sixties.

They had great artwork but — and this is me giving my opinion, not necessarily Gary's — they also had the same kind of sappy, shallow scripts that had pretty much destroyed the genre by then. Marvel — actually, a handful of people who wrote and drew their comics — had once revolutionized super-hero comics to great success, injecting more action and personality. But they didn't apply that approach to love comics…as proven by the fact that the books sold poorly.

Worse, their response to the weak sales was not to make the comics more modern but less. They, like DC when their romance line was dying, took old stories from the fifties and early sixties and reprinted them with sloppily-retouched hair styles and wardrobe. It's like someone said, "Gee, this stuff isn't selling because it's out-of-date. Let's try making it more out-of-date!"

I'm not sure the Comics Code, which was then in antiquated force, would have permitted really modern, realistic romance stories but I can't imagine a worse approach than what both companies did. And I'm thinking I shouldn't hijack this intro for Gary's fine video with my views.

Speaking of Gary: On Saturday afternoon at WonderCon next month, he'll be presenting a live edition of Tales From My Spinner Rack focusing on The Fantastic Four and I'll be his guest discussing what Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did with that trend-setting comic in the sixties. I'll be doing other panels at WonderCon but again, this is an intro to Gary's video so I'll just shut up and embed…

Gary Kroeger, who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live in the Ebersol years, reports on his experiences at the big anniversary special/party.

Some "MAGA" folks are outraged at how Tom Hanks portrayed one of their kind on the show. It did strike me that the moment was a little gratuitous and unfair to some…but so is the way MAGA members usually caricature Liberals or other folks they see as The Enemy. Seems like kind of a wash to me.

What I find interesting about it is that so many of the complaints about it included the usual Trump dismissal that the magazine that criticizes him is so unpopular, it's going out of business or the TV show that mocks him is failing in the ratings. That insult is usually just plain wrong. That magazine's doing fine, the TV show's ratings are up, etc. I must have seen a half-dozen people saying something like, "This is why Saturday Night Live's ratings are abysmal"…and they aren't. The show does fine and that 50th Anniversary Special was NBC's most-watched prime-time entertainment telecast in five years.

We're hearing that a fine artist and a fine gentleman, Jim Silke, has passed. No cause is yet known but he was 93. Jim's long career moved from trying to draw comics to work as a graphic designer, then back to comics, particularly of the "glamour" variety. Much of his graphic design work was on record albums for Capitol Records and he was a multiple Grammy Award nominee and one-time winner in the category of "Best Recording Package." The time he won, it was for this record…

I took Stan Freberg to a WonderCon in San Francisco one year and Jim asked me if I'd introduce him to Stan. Jim had worked on several of Stan's records for Capitol and they'd never met. It was a very pleasant meeting for both men with lots of compliments exchanged.

Later in life, Jim pursued his personal muse and drew many comics — that's why he was at WonderCon — and became a close and treasured friend to many in the field. Dave Stevens never felt his work was complete until he'd shown it to Jim and received a thumbs-up, and once I saw them spent twenty minutes discussing the way Dave had drawn Bettie Page's foot. The two of them were the experts at drawing the lovely Ms. Page.

Jim was liked and respected by everyone who knew him. Here are a few of the comics he did…

I put up that video earlier of all the folks who'd been cast members on Saturday Night Live and I plumb forgot the point I was going to make: It would have been nice if they'd run something like that during the show. It was only two minutes.

I also forgot to say that I think it's inexcusable that in a show that long, they couldn't find more than — what was it? Thirty seconds? — to salute the writers. And yes, I know there have been a lot of them. I'm not saying they should all have been named but they could have acknowledged that there were a lot of them…and that a lot of what you laughed at on the show came from them.

I also should have mentioned the classiest moment in the whole show…

Hey, you remember earlier today, I showed you a photo taken by the guy fulfilling my Costco order? The one who told me they were all out of eggs? Well, when he delivered the order an hour or so later, it contained two dozen Kirkland Signature Free Range Large Eggs (USDA Grade A) for which he charged me $8.41. The Ralphs Market near me — which is usually the cheapest full-service market in the area — wants $7.99 for one dozen of those. That's if they even have them. Another reason we love Costco.

HBO has resumed releasing to YouTube each episode of — or at least the main story of — Last Week Tonight with John Oliver right when it debuts. Last year, they were delaying them for a few days but Mr. Oliver reportedly objected…so here it is. This is his first show back after a hiatus and it's all, beginning to end, about what the Trump Administration is doing. I find myself torn between wanting to watch John Oliver (because I think he's hilarious and usually on-target) and not wanting to watch a lot about Trump (because he continually distracts me from problems I can actually do something about).

I elected to watch this and it's pretty solid and pretty aggravating and you can decide for yourself how much of your life you want to devote to thinking about the runaway incompetence, greed and cruelty now emanating from the White House…