Hard to believe but The Daily Show has been around for thirty — count 'em, thirty — years.  I believe folks will someday look back on it and consider it, especially when Jon Stewart was on it, the most important TV show of its day.  And it also manages to be damn funny most of the time.  Funny is no small achievement when you're dealing with what are often pretty sad or disturbing stories.  Here's a brief overview of those thirty years…

 I get requests to repost this from to time.  Being at Comic-Con is as good a reason as any.  This is from  October 16, 2014…

I have a script that needs to get done by tomorrow morning and somehow, instead of writing it, I'm writing this piece about how to deal with deadlines. There's a famous quote from the great playwright George S. Kaufman that was uttered when a producer asked him if he could have a certain script done by Tuesday. Kaufman asked him, "Do you want it Tuesday or do you want it good?"

There's a point in there but it's not the one that some writers want to extract from it. That quote is used to justify lateness and it's employed as such by folks who forget that Kaufman did operate under deadlines and did meet them. He had to. An awful lot of his best work was produced on the road when a play was in tryouts and wasn't working. Kaufman and his collaborator (whichever one it was at the moment) would hole up in his hotel room, write an entire scene by dawn and then rehearse and stage it in the morning. That was probably the most grueling deadline-meeting you could have in his profession.

Others have said that what you have to do is to make it as good as you can by Tuesday. That's one of the things you need to learn to do as a professional writer. And what that involves usually is not seizing on any of the eighty thousand reasons you can come up with not to write and not to finish by Tuesday. There's always one. Sometimes if you're sharp, you can use all eighty thousand.

I have a couple of writer friends who sometimes need to be scolded a bit in this regard. Recently, one wrote me to detail all the things that were happening in his life that were preventing him from finishing his novel by the deadline. Actually, this was about his fourth deadline on this alleged book. He blew the first one so they gave him another. Then he didn't get it done by that date so they gave him an extension…and so on. I would ordinarily be more tactful and friendly in my response but this friend's recent antics seem to demand something more like this…

Stop explaining to me how it's everyone's fault but yours that you're not going to finish your book by the latest in a long series of deadlines. I'm surprised you haven't found some way yet to blame Vladimir Putin, Tony the Tiger, me and Edward Everett Horton. If you took all that effort you're putting into blaming others and applied it to the book, you'd be autographing printed copies by now.

Yes, yes…I know this person distracted you and that person put you in a mood where you couldn't write and some other person didn't get your computer fixed on time and on and on. There is always a reason to not get one's work done and you're seizing on every one of them. You probably won't get anything done before Thanksgiving because you have to decide which dinner to attend…so it'll be the Pilgrims' fault your book isn't finished.

Look, I'll say this simply: Get the book done. A writer who can't get his or her work finished is like a plumber who can never fix a leak. You're kind of useless. 20% of your excuses are probably valid but we all have those things happen to us and still, we get to the last page and type "The End." The other 80% are you looking for excuses not to write or, at least, not hand in anything.

Remember our friend [Name Redacted]? She never got anything finished which is why she's now in another line of work. I understood why she couldn't finish her work and it wasn't all those problems, not unlike yours, which she claimed to have. It was because she was terrified to finish the script and hand it in. She was terrified of the moment that the editor would call up and say, "I have some real problems with his." Or she was terrified of it getting published and then getting bad reviews or not selling or something. As long as she didn't finish, she was putting off those catastrophes.

I'd be sympathetic if this happened once in a while. It happens once in a while to everyone. But you have developed this dogged determination to not accept the responsibility for what you're doing…or more significantly, not doing. I like you and your writing too much to go along with this. Finish the script or give up and go apply for a job at Subway making sandwiches.

In case you haven't figured it out, this is me being supportive. I'm always supportive. If you decide it's time to go work at Subway, I'll have a foot-long meatball on Italian bread with provolone cheese. Toasted. And a bag of Baked Lays.

At last report, the novel wasn't finished yet but I think I got him from Chapter 8 to Chapter 9. He was almost to 10 before his sister came into town to visit for six weeks. And as we all know, you can't possibly be expected to do your job when your sister is in town. Since I have no sister, I'm going to go finish my script.

That's my buddy Leonard Maltin and me right after we spent an hour talking about famous comedians and cartoonists we had the pleasure to meet. He told about meeting Smith and Dale. I told about meeting Bud Abbott. He told about meeting Otto Soglow and Rube Goldberg. I told about meeting Harold Lloyd. If shameless name-dropping makes you tingle, you would have had a very good time.

Alas, Room 9 at the convention center only seats 280 and a lot more than that wanted in, not just for this panel but also for three others I did in there today. We need to work bigger rooms. My apologies to those who couldn't get in.

Here's this one more time. Some online schedules haven't been updated with changes. Where they differ from this list, this list is the correct one…

I am becoming a huge fan of most of the current Daily Show correspondents — and especially Desi Lydic…

I'm putting some reruns up here while I'm busy doing thousands of panels at Comic-Con. This one first ran here in December of 2016 and I selected it for reuse because I still, from time to time, get this question…

In 1970, I had…well, not a hand but about half a knuckle in the launching of the Mister Miracle comic book by Jack Kirby. Some time ago, a reader of this site named Joe Wainright wrote to ask me about the coloring of that hero's costume and lately, I've seen a couple of different websites where folks discuss it or misunderstand what happened. So here's the story but first, here's Joe's e-mail to me…

I don't understand why Mister Miracle's costume was one color on the cover of Mister Miracle #1 and a different color inside and from then on, but then he was totally uncolored on the cover of #3. Later, I saw Kirby's original design of the character and the coloring of that was completely different. Didn't Kirby himself do that coloring? Why was it changed? I also read that you designed the final coloring. Can you clear this up?

I'll try. First, we start with the yellow costume above. In either late 1968 or early 1969, Jack was becoming increasingly unhappy with the way he was being treated at Marvel, specifically that he was receiving no financial compensation or credit for his serious contributions to the stories and to the creation of ongoing characters. To try and address this problem, he took some time and created a whole bunch of new characters. A lot of his presentation pieces for them are around. Jack drew them, inked some of them himself and engaged his friend and fellow Marvel artist Don Heck to ink some of them. Jack colored them all.

At the time, Jack was receiving quiet inquiries from other publishers — not all of them then in the comic book business — about maybe creating a new line of comics for them. So Jack did these drawings as part of a two-part plan. Part One was that he'd show them to the folks at Marvel and say something like, "Hey, look! I've got a bunch of ideas or new characters and I'll be glad to sell them to you but I have to have a much different working arrangement with you than I've had in the past!"

Part Two was that if he didn't get that better deal from them, he might use the drawings to make that better deal with another publisher.

Well, Part One didn't work. The people then in charge at Marvel would not discuss any changes in "the deal." They wanted the new ideas but they wanted them on the old terms so that never happened. Part Two did not succeed with the new publishers who'd courted Jack. They either didn't have the necessary funds and infrastructure to get into comics or only wanted to get into comics if they could buy material on the same terms as Marvel.

But the drawings were a key factor in DC hiring Jack away from Marvel in early 1969 and most of the characters from the presentations would wind up in the books he initially did for DC. It's important to understand that Jack did not consider either the designs or his plans for the characters firm. They were concepts he would rearrange and reconfigure into what he did for DC. For example, he had the idea for this epic continuity that he initially called "The New Gods" but he wasn't set on which of the characters he'd created and which additional ones he would create would figure into "The New Gods" and which of the characters he'd concocted would appear in standalone series that were unconnected to "The New Gods."

Mister Miracle and The Black Racer were at one point unconnected to the epic in Jack's mind but he later decided to fold Mister Miracle into "The New Gods" and the guy in charge at DC who hired Jack, Carmine Infantino, urged him to put The Black Racer into that world. Eventually too, "The New Gods" went from being the umbrella title of all the books in that epic continuity to being the title of one of those comics and — seemingly from out of nowhere — "The Fourth World" became the umbrella title.

When Jack did the drawing of the guy in the yellow suit, that may have been the visual for Mister Miracle or — and I think this is more likely — that may have been the visual for some other idea he had and he later decided to use it, sans gun, for his idea for Mister Miracle, the Super Escape Artist. Jack was always rearranging ideas in his mind and marrying this one to that one. Mister Miracle did not arrive at his final form until Jack finally wrote and drew the first issue of this comic…and even then, the hero continued to evolve.

Kirby finished that first issue and sent it back to the DC offices in New York. He did not send them the drawing with the yellow outfit to use as a guide because that wasn't the finished version of the character he now had in his mind. He planned to later work out color schemes for Mister Miracle and all the other characters in the new books he was creating for DC but the folks at the firm said something like, "Oh, don't bother. We'll handle those here."

DC had a Production Department and they were very proud of it. A man named Sol Harrison headed it up and the coloring was supervised by a man named Jack Adler. Both had been in their jobs a long time. Both were considered to be very good at those jobs. Both of them felt (as did others in the office) that the coloring done at DC was the best in the business and that the coloring over at Marvel was really lousy. Neither one was a particular fan of anything at Marvel, including Jack's artwork and the way other artists incorporated elements of his style.

Infantino, who was running DC then, kept asking Jack for suggestions on how to improve the DC line. When Jack suggested that they look at Marvel books to see how comics should be colored, he made instant enemies of the Production Department. Jack just plain thought that Marvel coloring — especially as done by Marie Severin and Stan Goldberg — was superior, at least for the kind of thing he did. Around the DC offices, that was heresy.

It would not be inaccurate to say that for the length of Jack's stay at DC, he never liked the way his work was colored and the persons doing or overseeing that coloring weren't too fond of the Kirby work they were coloring. This was probably not unrelated to the many changes they found it necessary to do to Jack's work there.

Anyway, Jack didn't fight them on most of what they did but when they sent him an example of how they were coloring Mister Miracle's costume, he felt that had to be changed. That was the purple design you see at the top of this post in the right-hand image. I was working for Jack then, teamed with a fine fellow named Steve Sherman. Jack asked us to come up with a new color scheme for the hero and he did a quickie drawing of him. We Xeroxed it about a dozen times and Steve colored half of them different ways and I colored the other half with different ideas.

Neither of us recalls which of us came up with the one Jack selected but he picked one and shipped it back to New York, just days before Mister Miracle #1 was ready to go to press. He probably picked the one he thought was acceptable and the least different from what New York had done. It wasn't that much of a change but Jack felt it was necessary.

The issue had already been colored and color-separated and they'd probably made the printing plates by then…but Infantino agreed to go with what Jack wanted and they spent whatever it cost to change the color scheme on the cover. They said it was too late to replace the purple costume on the inside but I suspect they just didn't want to spend the money.

As of the second issue, the red costume was used and nowadays when they reprint #1, they adjust the colors on it as they did in the image you see at left in the second pair of images, a few paragraphs above this one.

As for why Mister Miracle was completely colorless on the cover of #3…I have no idea. At the time, Jack asked and he got all sorts of double talk that he took to mean no one there knew why, either. He told us, "It looks like their infallible Production Department screwed up."

Christopher Cook wrote…

I remember seeing The Jetsons on at night; I was six when it premiered. We had color TV. Dad worked in the electronics department at Sears so he got the family a set.

I also read that ABC still didn't have color capabilities yet so they had The Jetsons (and The Flintstones) transmitted to them in color from NBC and ABC would relay them to their affiliates. We were in the San Diego market and this posed a secondary issue. The ABC station there was XETV/channel 6 and it was licensed to Tijuana, Mexico. As such, they could not have shows sent from ABC so they either had shows recorded "bicycled" to them from an ABC station (likely KABC in Los Angeles) or they were transmitted from another ABC station (again likely KABC) which XETV beamed to households.

That sounds like a lot of work just to get a show on the air that I wanted to see. It's still a very vivid memory for me, watching the first episode of The Jetsons. I remember a certain joy at recognizing a few of the voice actors and a certain frustration that the end credits went by so fast. I wanted to study them and see which names I could recognize from other Hanna-Barbera shows.

Watching TV was very different back in the days before VCRs or DVRs or anything that let you record the show and watch it when you wanted to watch it and as many times as you wanted to watch it and even still-frame moments. Back then, you got one shot at it.

I have a story I've told…somewhere…about helping get George O'Hanlon hired to reprise his role as George Jetson in the revival of the series. I could have sworn I've told it on this blog but I can't find it anywhere. When I get back from Comic-Con, I'll search my files to see where I could have told it and if I can't find that I did, I'll write it up and post it here. Basically, they initially didn't cast Mr. O'Hanlon to do his own voice because they thought he was dead…and because of Leonard Maltin and me, they found out otherwise.

Several of you have sent me the link to this news story saying that there may be good news in the offing about the Cinerama Theater in Hollywood. It may soon be reopening after way too long a closure. It's the theater that was literally build to show my favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and — no offense to other theaters — it was always the best place to see that movie.  So I hope it opens and I hope that's among the first things they show in it.

And several of you have also written to ask me what I think of a new book that just came out by James Curtis.  It's called Comedy is a Grim Business: The Making of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. And what I think of it is that I haven't gotten a copy of it yet but Mr. Curtis does real good books and I'm pretty sure this will be up there with his others. If you want to get a copy of it, here's an Amazon link.

Rob Salkowitz reports on the financial/business end of Comic-Con International. He says it's in better monetary shape than it's been in a long time but, of course, there are problems with, among other matters, hotel accommodations and the limitations of the San Diego Convention Center.

The article raises the much-discussed question of whether the convention will ever move out of San Diego. I stand by my prediction it won't, at least not in my lifetime. I can't believe the city of San Diego would ever be stupid enough to allow that to happen.

September 23, 2012 marked fifty years since the debut of what, at the age I was fifty years before that, one of my favorite TV shows. So on 9/23/12, I posted this piece on this blog. And I'm reposting it today because I have loads of stuff to do today before I head for Comic-Con…

Fifty years ago tonight, The Jetsons debuted on ABC. It has been a long time since I looked forward to any TV show the way I used to look forward to them when I was ten. Some of that is youthful enthusiasm. Some of it is that my world has grown a lot larger since so no broadcast — including those of programs I write — is that important to my life. And of course, some of it is the technology of VCRs and TiVo which has made the when of seeing a show insignificant. If I wanted to experience the first telecast of a new Hanna-Barbera series, I had to be there at the appointed hour. If I wasn't…well, who knows when or if there'd be another opportunity?

"There" in this case was not in front of the family TV at home. It could have been but The Jetsons was the first series on ABC to be broadcast in color and we didn't have a color TV set. Not everyone did then…but Mrs. Hollingsworth did.

Mrs. Hollingsworth was an elderly widow who lived five doors down from us with a cat and no one else. She was a sweet little old lady, at least towards me, but she had some odd ideas. One I remember discussing with her a few times was her belief that actors on TV had to be a lot like the characters they played. She didn't believe that Vincent Price (to pick but one example she'd cite) was really a mad scientist who tortured women in his castle…but he simply couldn't play such parts if he wasn't at heart an evil, cruel human being. Those articles that said he was a lovely, gentle man had to be lies. Years later when I worked with the lovely, gentle Vincent Price, I told him about Mrs. Hollingsworth and he chuckled and said, "There are more people out there who think like that than you imagine."

TV was about all she had in her life so she'd spent the then-extravagant sum of few hundred extra to have a color set. It seemed like a luxury in 1960 since not a lot of TV programming was even broadcast in color so most of what she watched on that set was in black-and-white. She agreed to let me come down to her home that evening to watch The Jetsons there.

Since she lived alone, she didn't eat well. Whenever we had a holiday dinner at our home — Thanksgiving, Christmas, Rosh Hashanah, someone's birthday (we celebrated everything) — my mother would make up an extra plate and I'd walk it down to Mrs. Hollingsworth. There was no official holiday the night The Jetsons debuted but it seemed appropriate to eat like there was one. My mother made us a brisket and potato pancakes and when I hiked down to Mrs. Hollingsworth's at 6:30, I took her dinner.

The show started at 7 PM and I could have left at 6:55 and made it with time to spare but I wanted to be there early. Just in case. I had a little drawing pad and pencil with me because one of the important things to me about cartoon characters, especially Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters, was that I had to learn to draw them. This mattered so much that I couldn't wait for the probable Jetsons comic book that would be along sooner or later. I had to whip out a few sketches during the show…and indeed, I had Elroy mastered by the first commercial. I still draw him about that well.

I remember being thrilled by the opening shot of the Jetsons' space cruiser bursting onto the screen, then being slightly disappointed that unlike previous H-B shows, it didn't have a singable theme song with rhyming lyrics. I remember recognizing the voice of Daws Butler as (his boy) Elroy and wondering who those other people were. I remember loving the program and wondering how Mrs. Hollingsworth could sit in the next room eating brisket and latkes when she could have been in there with me watching The Greatest TV Show Ever. It was that for me that evening. I loved The Flintstones and other H-B shows but I really loved The Jetsons.

And I remember wondering if they'd ever make an episode in which the Flintstones met the Jetsons. I do not remember thinking, "Gee, maybe fifteen or sixteen years from now, I'll be writing the Flintstones comic book and I'll be able to make that happen." I wasn't that prescient.

Most of all, I remember thinking the show was so wonderful it would last forever. It did and it didn't. Competition from Mr. Disney on NBC drove George, Jane, Judy, Elroy and Astro out of production after one season but the reruns resurfaced on daytime TV and the comic book lived on and the characters endured. Around 1984 when I was working at Hanna-Barbera, one of the execs there called me in and told me they were about to launch a Jetsons revival and Mr. Barbera, knowing of my enthusiasm for the series, wanted me to be the Story Editor and main writer.

I started to scream yes but I'd worked for H-B a while by then. I'd learned it was prudent to not lead with your heart and that you needed to get all the details in advance. (Another writer there advised, "Always get a pre-nup before you fall in love.") The details turned out to include at least two deal-killers for me. One was that they were doing the show for syndication on a shoestring budget. At Hanna-Barbera, they could destroy anything by cutting corners…and they were talking about script fees around a half of the barely-acceptable amounts paid on the Richie Rich series I was then story-editing.

I felt a strong affinity for Bill and Joe but it did not extend to doing charity work for them. And if they paid what they said they were going to pay, they'd get scripts that would require a lot of rewriting…probably by poorly-paid me.

The other problem was that they said they were not out to replicate the old series. The idea was to "modernize" The Jetsons. I asked if that was really necessary, "modernizing" a show set in the future. Someone thought it was. They wanted new supporting characters and a new "look" for that world and edgier humor and lots of alterations I didn't want to make. When I asked the exec about voices, they said they'd be all new. "Most of the original actors are dead," he told me. That was not true. None of them were. He then added, "…and the ones who aren't are too expensive." That was true of Mel Blanc and maybe Daws. Either way, they didn't want to bother with the 1960 cast, which meant they didn't want to bother with the 1960 show I loved…just use its rep and skeleton to build something new.

I thought about the offer for an evening, then passed. As it turned out, they soon realized they didn't want something new. They wanted to make another 41 episodes to add to the original 24 and create a 65-episode package they could strip and syndicate forever. So they'd all blend more-or-less together, they wound up spending a tad more on the animation and scripts (though not enough more), hiring the original voices and making the stories more faithful to the 1960 season. They eventually did not 41 more but 51 more…and I was glad I didn't work on any of them.

It seems to have been a decent revival but this was one childhood fave where I'm glad I kept my distance. If I'd gotten involved, I suspect this article today would have been about all the fights I'd had, many of them with Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. It's much more fun to be writing about sitting in Mrs. Hollingsworth's den, watching a cartoon show in actual color and just loving every damn thing about it except the theme song. Which I eventually came to also love.

I usually don't embed videos in the vertical/cell phone format but this one by Noah Sunday-Lefkowitz is too good to not make an exception. This gent just loves to sing about Disney theme parks…

Half a dozen of you had the idea to check on the current state of the World News Newsstand by using an online map/photo program while others just wrote me to say that for some time now, it's been closed tighter than…well, you can make up your own silly analogy. Given how disinterested the world is these days about things printed on paper, I'm not surprised. But gee, it was a helluva place before we had ourselves an Internet.

It's the time o' year when I have to finish up all the work I need to do before I can go to Comic-Con while also prepping for my panels at Comic-Con. So don't expect a lot of content on this page in the following week.

My schedule seems to have settled down. If you want to take a look at what I think is the final version of it, click on the banner below. I am on or moderating sixteen panels, down from a high of nineteen last year. I have no idea what I'll do with all that free time…

This morning, I awoke to an e-mail from someone I don't know. This person has a new comic book coming out and wanted to know if there was any way to schedule a panel to promote it at Comic-Con. The answer to that is not "no." It's more like "You're about three months late!"

I stand behind my weather forecast for San Diego: A high of 78° during the day, a low of 70° at night. There are few jobs in this world easier than predicting the weather in San Diego.

Changing the subject: Correspondents are telling me all sorts of different things about the status of the newsstand on Cahuenga Boulevard just south of Hollywood Boulevard: It's open. It's closed for good. It did close but it reopened. It's open in a diminished capacity. I may just have to go by there someday and check it out for myself. Here's a better short video showing how it figured into that Buster Keaton film. (Thank you, all who sent it.)

I'm a fan of Cantor Azi Schwartz and the shows he puts on at the Park Avenue Synagogue. Any time I arise to a day of writing for television, I want my iPhone to wake me up with this video…

So here's what John Grady wants to know…

I just watched the old Merrie Melodies, Backwoods Bunny (1959). Lots of Mel Blanc, of course but also lots of Daws Butler, who was not credited. Were they friends?

"Friends" might be too strong a word. Something like "colleagues" might be more proper. They worked together often, respected each other's talents and competed often for the same jobs. In '59, Daws was getting a lot of attention because he was on Ruff 'n' Reddy, Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw, plus he was heard on some of the Jay Ward cartoons. The new Hanna-Barbera shows were getting plenty of media attention and Daws was mentioned and interviewed a lot. So the public was learning that there was someone else in the world besides Mel Blanc who could speak for animated cartoon characters.

Maybe "friendly rivals" is the term we need here. Mel was, in a nice way, pretty protective of his reputation and, of course, he also had an on-camera presence on Jack Benny's shows, a lot of talk shows and occasional other appearances. Daws usually turned down offers to act on-camera. So they kind of nicely co-existed and always spoke well of each other. The one time I had a long conversation with Mel, he referred to Daws as "my only rival."

But I doubt they ever went to dinner together or went camping together or anything like that. Daws was one of the nicest, most wonderful human beings it has ever been my privilege to know and he was wholly non-competitive, often recommending other actors for jobs. I didn't know Mel as well but the only complaints I ever heard about him from other actors were about his deal with Warner Brothers that prevented others from receiving screen credit when they co-starred. And I don't think that was a big deal for most of them. Voiceover actors do a lot of non-credited work.

Daws didn't like not getting credit but he also kind of liked the anonymity of being a "star" who didn't get recognized in public. Mel got a lot of fame due to a series of commercials he did for the American Express card. Here's one…

Daws was offered the same deal but he declined it. He wasn't as into self-promotion as Mel…and that's probably part of the reason they got along well.