On the Dana Gould Hour podcast, I told the story of how I discovered, long after we'd begun dating, that my girl friend was related to one of my favorite performers, Spike Jones. Here's Spike and his orchestra in the movie, Thank Your Lucky Stars.

When I worked at Hanna-Barbera in the late seventies, I enjoyed talking with a film editor there named Earl Bennett, who had once been a featured musician in Spike's band under the name "Sir Frederick Gas." One thing he talked about was how, when they did a scene like this in a movie, the audio was all pre-recorded and they had to mime playing to it. This was not an easy thing for some musicians to do but it worked because Spike had such precise timing, Watch…

I dunno how many readers of this blog will be interested in this but I figure there must be at least one…

Between 1934 and 1959, The Three Stooges made 190 short comedies for Columbia Pictures. Those were years when short comedies slowly went out of fashion in movie theaters. Laurel and Hardy, for example, stopped making them and switched over to features only in 1935 and the last short Our Gang comedy was in 1944. The Stooges kept at it by not increasing what was spent to make them. That meant they had to make them faster and cheaper each year.

One way the producers accomplished this was to reuse footage from earlier Stooges films. A lot of their shorts were simply a matter of taking an earlier film, shooting some new scenes to edit into it and giving it a new title. When I visited Larry Fine in his last years of life, I asked him a lot about this practice. He said it was made possible because "Columbia never threw anything away." They still had the old sets and the old costumes. Once in a while, they could even bring back a supporting actor from an old short to be in scenes for the new version.

In 1947, Curly Howard was replaced by his brother Shemp in the act. That made it difficult to pull footage from earlier films but it was sometimes done. Eventually, they made films with Shemp that pulled footage from earlier shorts with Shemp. For instance, Flagpole Jitters (1956) contains footage from Hokus Pokus (1949). Larry said that some of these shorts built around older films were, in effect, made in one day. That's all the time it took to film the new scenes.

If you have the slightest interest in comparing an original film with its later partial remake, I'll make it easy for you. Here's Malice in the Palace, which Larry, Moe and Shemp made in 1949…

Then in 1956, they remade it as Rumpus in the Harem.,,but there was a bit of a problem. Shemp Howard died in late 1955. When he died, the Stooges had four more films to make on their current contract. This was one of them and you'll see plenty of Shemp in the old footage. In the new footage, an actor named Joe Palma — now better known as "Fake Shemp" — stood in for him, hiding his face as much as possible.

I must admit that as a kid watching these films on TV, I didn't notice the substitutions. I recognized the reuse of old footage but didn't notice that Shemp wasn't Shemp in some scenes…

After they made the four films with Joe Palma impersonating Shemp, Columbia assessed the marketplace and decided there were still some dimes to be made with Stooge shorts. They signed Joe Besser to be the third third Stooge and made sixteen more films. Some of them reused footage from earlier shorts and if you look closely, you can get quick glimpses of Curly or Shemp in a few long shots.

The last Stooges short released — not the last one made — was Sappy Bullfighters (1959), a remake of What's the Matador? (1942). If you sit up real close to the set or monitor and turn up the volume, you can see and hear a teensy bit of Curly in it.

Seth Meyers has fun with yesterday's senate hearing…

By now, I'm sure you all know about the mess yesterday when Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt, during a Senate judiciary hearing, accused former special counsel Jack Smith of perjury. Smith said he hadn't been in Atlanta on February 3, 2024 and it turned out he wasn't. Smith was in Maryland that day.

I just wanted to say here that the accusation — which Senator Schmitt still seems to be standing by — is emblematic of all the bullshit that Trump defenders have been offering up. And it has me again using this line that I use so much about people who think that never admitting you're wrong is the same thing as always being right. Hey, did you know that the American economy has never been better and we've now won the Iran War like two dozen times?

And I should note here that badges for the 2027 WonderCon Anaheim are now on sale. This is kind of the junior version of Comic-Con in San Diego, run by the same folks at or around the end of March each year. If you can't score admission to Comic-Con or are just afraid of the crowds, costs and its overwhelming nature, WonderCon might be more to your liking.

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is appearing before a Senate committee and Republican members trying to put him on trial for special prosecuting you-know-who. Here's Senator Cory Booker saying that which should be said…

Here's Dora's World, a half-hour TV special from 1974. It stars Dora Hall and — in a bevy of cameos — Dave Barry, Harry Hickox, Milton Frome, Pete Barbutti, Stubby Kaye, Sid Melton, Sammy Shore, Nick Navarro, Scatman Crothers, Roy Stuart, Pat Priest, Ronald Del Barrio and Aaron Ross. If you're anywhere near my age bracket, you know who eight or nine of those people were.

But if you don't know who Dora Hall was…well, you should. I could write a long post here telling you but I'll save time and quote from a 2001 post from the popular blog, newsfromme.com…

Dora Hall was a sweet little woman who, in her seventies, starred in a flurry of syndicated TV specials in the early seventies, surrounded by guest stars.  Since I'd never heard of her, I assumed she was a British star whose fame had not previously reached this continent and that these specials were being made for, primarily, overseas consumption.  And it turned out I was wrong.  Ms. Hall was not a star in England or anywhere.  She'd had a very minor performing career in this country and had devoted most of her life to being a good wife to a man named Leo Hulseman.  Now, Mr. Hulseman, as it turned out was the President of the Solo Cup Company, maker of plastic and paper cups, and he had so much money that he figured he could buy his spouse a couple of variety shows.

And he did.  At a reported cost of $400,000 per show, Mr. Hulseman made his dear wife a TV star.  He had previously made her a recording artist.  Hundreds of thousands of Dora Hall albums and singles were recorded and given away when one purchased Solo Cups.  Now, he surrounded her with mid-range guest stars (Rich Little, Roosevelt Grier, etc.) and allowed her to be a TV star.

So here's one of those specials she starred in because her husband loved her. There have been worse reasons to be on television…

You may have seen this before but I hadn't. It's a video that takes footage from It's A Wonderful Life, Dirty Dancing, Don't Knock The Rock, Gold Diggers Of 1935, Good News, Dames, Babes On Broadway, Panama Hattie, Follow The Fleet, Bye Bye Birdie, Lady Of Burlesque, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Show Boat, I Love Melvin, Meet Me After The Show, Down To Earth, Viva Las Vegas, A Date With Judy, Footloose, Moon Over Miami, Hello Dolly, The Gold Rush, Flower Drum Song, Mary Poppins, West Side Story, The Kid From Brooklyn, Les Girls, Easter Parade, Guys & Dolls, Royal Wedding, 42nd Street, Sweet Charity, White Nights, The Affairs Of Dobie Gillis, Three Little Words, Let's Be Happy, Blue Skies, Singin' In The Rain, Lullaby Of Broadway, The Seven Little Foys, Broadway Melody Of 1940, Tea For Two, Call Me Madam, Sun Valley Serenade, Words And Music, It's Always Fair Weather, The Band Wagon, Alexander's Ragtime Band, Down Argentine Way, Les Demoiselles De Rochefort, Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance, On The Town, The Little Princess, Stormy Weather, Hit The Deck, Excuse My Dust, Pennies From Heaven, The Great American Broadcast, Damn Yankees, Broadway Melody Of 1938, You're My Everything, Look For The Silver Lining, Sensations Of 1945, White Christmas, Lovely To Look At, Deep In My Heart, A Damsel In Distress, There's No Business Like Show Business, You'll Never Get Rich, The Barkleys Of Broadway, Evergreen, Honolulu, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Hollywood Canteen, The Belle Of New York, Star!, Broadway Rhythm, The Gang's All Here, Anchors Aweigh, Breakin' and a few others, all set to the song, "Footloose"…

Damn Yankees is coming back to Broadway next year, considerably rethought and rewritten.  It's one of those shows that seems to invite not doing it the way it was originally done.  I saw the 1994 revival — which changed a lot — especially after Jerry Lewis joined the cast — several times.  I don't recall anyone complaining about the alterations the way they'd be outraged if someone brought back Sunday in the Park With George and made the male lead a computer programmer. But you can do that with Damn Yankees.

Julianne Hough will play Lola, Austin Scott will play Joe Hardy and Neil Patrick Harris will play Applegate, the Ray Walston role. Everything will be updated to this century so instead of the Washington Senators being the hapless team taking on the almighty Yankees, it'll be the Baltimore Orioles and the team will be racially diverse. This all sounds kinda interesting to me. And the press releases make no mention of it but I have a hunch Mr. Harris will bring some magic tricks to his role. I'm going to have to get back there and see this thing.

Robert Rowe wants to know — hey, that rhymes — "Following up on your MAD magazine post, were economics the main reason the magazine had machine lettering instead of hiring letterers?" My answer? Nope. In fact, typeset lettering then was much more expensive than paying a hand-letterer and required a lot more effort by the production department.

When MAD switched from a ten-cent comic book to a twenty-five cent magazine, they went aiming for a little older audience and Harvey Kurtzman was interested in distancing MAD from its comic book brethren. There was a lot of text in the revamped MAD and in Harvey's mind, typeset lettering had more of an air of sophistication.

When Al Feldstein took over as editor from Kurtzman, he scaled back the amount of text in the magazine a bit but didn't revert to hand-lettering in word balloons. It was a reversal of sorts of the way the two men had approached the ten-cent comics they had previously done for the company. Feldstein liked what was called "Leroy lettering." It was done by hand but it looked like it was done by a machine.

Leroy lettering involved using a series of technical pens, a stylus and a number of templates. I could write a long paragraph here explaining how it worked but this video will do the job quicker and better…

It might not look quicker or better in the video but there were people who became very proficient with the tools and could letter a page of comics in about the same time it took someone using just a pen and a straightedge. The EC comics and some for other publishers were Leroy-lettered by a gent named Jim Wroten and his wife. Some in comics like Feldstein preferred it because it was kind of a middle ground between hand-lettering and typesetting. The device was invented largely to be used for architectural renderings.

Kurtzman didn't like it so for the comics he edited for EC, he had his hand-lettered, mostly by Ben Oda, a man who in his lifetime lettered an estimated seventy-three squadrillion comic books and comic strips. (I may be off by a squadrillion or two.)

One thing I found interesting: In Kurtzman's EC books, the big story titles were part of Oda's lettering duties. In Feldstein's, either the artist or Feldstein lettered them at first, then he had Oda do some of them on stories otherwise Leroy-lettered.

So in MAD, Feldstein kept typeset lettering in comic-type contexts and he and his production department perfected the choice of font and how the type would be broken between lines. Feldstein himself "specked" a lot of the type on his typewriter to tell the typographer where to place everything. A lot of the MAD imitations attempted to imitate the way MAD did it but since they didn't have someone spending as much time on it as MAD did, it never came out as neatly.

And of course, like just about everything else in this world, it was later made easier by computer.

In the last year or so, I've become buddies with one of my favorite stand-up comedians, Dana Gould.  If you're not a huge fan of this man, go watch this hour of him performing and you'll become one.

Among the many things he does is a bi-monthly podcast, The Dana Gould Hour, which never runs just an hour.  The latest installment of it runs around two hours and 50 minutes and about the last half of it has me as a guest.  You might enjoy the first part in which Dana chats with filmmaker Mike Mendez, who just made a documentary about Bruce Dern.  Then Dana tells a story about Sammy Davis Jr., which is why Sammy's on the "cover."

Then I come in around 1:34.  In the conversation — which we recorded a few weeks ago — we talk about me working with Sid and Marty Krofft (as did Dana) and about Jack Kirby.  Hope you like it.

Just in case the latest Randy Rainbow video made you eager to see an unparodied version of the musical Oklahoma!, here's the 1999 London West End production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! starring Wolverine Hugh Jackman…

Fred Kaplan summarizes what is known about Trump's little party for Chinese President Xi Jinping. I'll summarize what Fred says: Very little of substance was achieved. Here's the most interesting (to me) part of the article…

Trump thinks he can gain favors by tapping personal friendships, then compounds the mistake by believing that certain leaders — especially authoritarians whose power he admires and envies — are his friends. (This is why Trump thought, at the start of his term, that ending the war in Ukraine would be easy; he thought Putin would end it as a personal favor.)

But read the whole piece — here's the link again — and see what you think.

In the sixties, one of my heroes — Stan Freberg — masterminded a big advertising campaign for Chun King Chow Mein. Here's a little promo they made to alert retailers it was on the way…

If you want to start at the beginning of this long, meandering memory piece, click here.

As I've mentioned, I used to be real good at forgery…imitating the handwriting and occasionally the drawing of others. There are a number of skills I've lost and not just because of age. In 1979 or thereabouts, I switched from writing on a typewriter to writing on what we then called a word processor. That was about all my first personal computer could do.

Before long, I was working on computers that could do more and more…as were we all. I still kinda marvel at how many things I used to do by hand that I now do on my computer, my iPhone, my iPads, etc. If you're old enough to remember when we didn't have all those things, you probably marvel at what a huge role they play in your day-to-day existence. Believe it or not, I'm using a computer right this very minute and you're using some form of one to read this.

One result of all this technology is that my handwriting — which used to be oh-so-neat — is now terrible. So is my ability to draw and to letter. For years, I would do most of the display lettering and lettering corrections on the comic books I worked on. See these comic book covers?

These are two comic books I worked on and in addition to whatever I did as a writer, I also designed and lettered the title logos — where it says SERGIO ARAGONES' GROO THE WANDERER on one and THE DNAGENTS on the other.  I also lettered story titles and some sound effects inside and did some corrections or changes to what the credited letterer did inside — and not necessarily because that letterer made an error.  Sometimes, just before a comic goes to press, you decide you want to change some of the copy.

I could do that back then — on paper with a pen and ink and a few other tools.  Today, I could not do any of that — or if I did, I'd be doing it on a computer with Adobe Something.  My hand lettering now looks like it was done by someone who was sitting on a washing machine while it was in the spin cycle.  I'm just not as good at making a pen or pencil do what I want it to do.

Here is a truncated version of a story I told on this blog back in 2013…

My father's best buddy for a time was a fellow named Leo Young who worked in the same office. Leo was a great guy.

He had an 85-year-old father in a nursing home in Florida. Every week, Leo would write a brief letter in longhand to his father and get one back. That was how they stayed in touch. Then Leo died from a sudden heart attack. He was around 60 and I don't recall my father ever being as upset over anything as he was over the death of his friend Leo.

His widow Ann consulted with her father-in-law's doctors and it was decided not to inform him of Leo's passing. He was close to death himself and I guess the thinking was, "Why put him through that grief?" The problem, of course, was those weekly letters from his son.  If they stopped coming, he'd know something was wrong.  I had an odd skill that was the answer to that problem.

So after Leo died, the letters to his father didn't have to stop.   Each week, Ann Young would ghost-write a letter from Leo to his father and I would recopy it in Leo's handwriting, then she'd send it off. The father lived another six months or so and when he finally departed, he never knew that his son had predeceased him.

I only used my forgery skills to be helpful. When I was working on the TV show Welcome Back, Kotter, John Travolta came into rehearsal one day with a box of 500 eight-by-ten glossy photos that he had to sign for the company that was handling his voluminous fan mail. He took half and I took half and I'm pretty sure no recipient could tell the difference. Neither John nor I could.

I did that kind of thing a number of times for people though I never did it for Kirby. Today though, I couldn't do it for anyone…or at least couldn't do it as well or as rapidly. I'm just not as good at it as I used to be. And my drawing has suffered the same way…because it really wasn't drawing. It was just copying what real artists could do.

In an earlier chapter of this essay, I mentioned how a fellow named Richard Turner was the guy who really made me confront the fact that I could never be a really good magician. I had been approaching that admission when I saw other great masters of sleight-of-hand but Richard was the one who was kind of the "last straw."

Similarly, I had been feeling the same way about drawing when I saw Jack Kirby drawing…or Sergio Aragonés — or Dan Spiegle or Scott Shaw! or Will Meugniot or several others. But I'll tell you about the artist who really caused me to say to myself, "Who am I kidding?" It happened while I was working at Hanna-Barbera in the late seventies. There was an artist working there whose skills I found amazing — an artist whose work I'd followed in comic books for years.

I loved some (not all) of what he did in comic books and wondered why someone could be as good as he was when he was good and as bad as he was when he was bad. One day, I watched him drawing and the reason became obvious to me…as obvious as the fact that I could never do what he could do and really had no business acting like what I did was worthy of the word "artwork."

I'll tell you about him in the next installment of this series. He was one of the most miscast and misused talents the business ever had and his name was Mike Sekowsky.