As we've mentioned, the Wondercon occurs next weekend (April 19-21) in Oakland, California. Details can be found here. And if you're around that weekend, you might want to drop by the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. They're now situated in new digs, with walls lined with rare and lovely comic book pages and strip originals. A retrospective of Calvin & Hobbes is just closing and a big exhibit of Spider-Man art is being unveiled.
Friday evening, April 19, they're hosting a "rent party" and the place will be crawling with great cartoonists and — who knows? — they may even let me in. But Spider-Man artists John Romita, Sr. and John Romita, Jr. will both be present to cut the ribbon (er, webbing) on the new showing, and there'll be other folks and food and music and you can find out all about it at the museum's website. Even if you can't make it to this event, the museum deserves your support. It's a great place to visit and see how good comic art can look when it's properly framed and displayed with a little sense of class.
In 1977, the original cast 'n' crew of Saturday Night Live attempted to do a prime-time episode, and to do it live from New Orleans in the midst of Mardi Gras. It was a fiasco, about which many of those involved later said, "How in the name of God did we think that was possible?" Here's a link to an article that describes a little of what went wrong.
More than a year ago, a late-night high-speed chase ended on my front lawn. It was two members of the Beverly Hills Police Department pursuing a fellow of Vietnamese extraction who'd been out drinking. He was under the legal definition of drunkenness but he was also on probation for a previous drunk driving conviction and one condition of that probation was that he never imbibe even a drop of alcohol when operating a moving vehicle. The B.H.P.D. pulled him over for busted headlamps and, when they did, he panicked and took off, clocking somewhere between 70 and 80 mph on residential streets.
This is an incredibly dumb thing to do, even at two in the morning. I asked one of the officers what the odds are of someone actually getting away in such a situation. He said, "The only way it ever happens is if we hit someone — and even then, we had this guy's license number so someone would have nabbed him. His chance of getting totally away was close to zero." The chase ended with the car smashing into a wall around my house, as I reported in this news item last March.
In the thirteen months since, the hole has remained in my wall as I waited for the Wheels of Justice to deliver unto me just and proper recompense. Those are some slow wheels, I tell you. The fellow pled "Not Guilty" to about a half dozen charges that pretty much boiled down to "Driving Under the Influence of Incredible Stupidity." I asked the Deputy District Attorney, who was handling the case, on what basis the driver could possibly claim innocence. He replied, "I'm dying to hear this one, myself." Then he added that suspects sometimes do that, hoping for the million-to-one chance that the court docket will be so clogged with important cases that someone will offer a plea bargain.
No one did, and the driver was sentenced to a few weeks of jail time, a few months of CalTrans work and three more years of probation. Oh, yeah — and he had until today to pay me the $4300 it'll cost to undo the damage. This afternoon, on or about the last possible minute, he delivered a certified check to the Deputy District Attorney…whose name, by the way, is Peter Geisness. Mr. Geisness was everything you'd want in a situation like this — cooperative, responsive, responsible…and he ever dropped the check off here this evening, on his way home from the courthouse. He and his fellow Deputy D.A., Teresa DeCastro, did a fine job for me. I dunno if either of them will ever happen upon this website but if they do, they'll see my thanks posted here. Boy, am I glad that, apart from a load of construction work, this is over.
Here's a very early "Set your TiVo" alert. One of the times I chatted with Milton Berle, someone (not me) brought up the subject of him stealing material from other comics. He semi-exploded on the topic, saying it was just an act, a fictional flaw he'd milked for laughs the way Jack Benny had allowed the world to think he was cheap. He stole jokes when he started out, Berle said, but everyone did, and they stole them from each other. ("The guy I stole a gag from stole it from someone else and he stole it from someone else…") Once he became an established pro, he claimed, he never knowingly stole anything from anyone. This view does not seem to have been shared by any of his friends and peers, but let's leave that aside for now.
That day we spoke, he denounced the charge as a smear on the part of jealous, less successful comedians and noted that, when you're Mr. Television, the number one comic on TV, every other comedian is, by definition, a "less successful comedian." The one he singled out as most often spreading the slur was Bert Lahr and he said approximately the following to me. (This is my memory; not a recorded quote.)
I did a movie called Always Leave Them Laughing and it was my movie. It was at the peak of my stardom so I owned a hunk of it and I had every kind of script and cast approval you could possibly have. I had final cut and I even directed part of the movie because the director took ill. It was about a younger comic, played by me, who steals an older comedian's act and his wife. You see, I wasn't afraid to play a joke stealer because I knew it was just a character. It wasn't me. Anyway, it was my idea to cast Lahr as the older comic. I thought he'd be great in the part and he was. He was a terrific comedian and actor. However, after the film came out, Lahr was suddenly telling everyone that I tried to cut him out of the picture, that I ruined his best scenes. Bert's son wrote a book about him [Notes on a Cowardly Lion] in which he repeated these charges. They're bull but don't take my word for it. Read the book. See what Lahr said about the movie and what he says I did. Then watch the movie. It's on The Late, Late Show every ten minutes. You'll see that Lahr is terrific in that movie. Yeah, one or two of his scenes hit the cutting room floor. Ten or fifteen of mine got cut. Scenes get cut out of every movie. But you watch the movie and see if Lahr isn't great and if I'm not supporting him in every scene we have together, letting him be great. He's got this great dying scene and I could have horned in on it, had them cut away to my reactions more and stuck in a lot of dialogue for my character but I didn't. Because it was Bert's scene and it worked best to let it be his scene. But like I said, don't take my word for it. Read the book, watch the movie and if you believe I tried to hurt his performance, then all the things they say about me must be true. I will stake my reputation on that.
That's almost exactly what Mr. Berle said, and "I will stake my reputation on that" is verbatim. But he was wrong that Always Leave Them Laughing is on TV every ten minutes. It airs almost never and I haven't had the chance to catch it since that day, which was close to twenty years ago. It is, however, airing on Turner Classic Movies on April 25…so let's all tune in and see if all the things they say about Berle must be true.
I get a great many e-mails asking me to write about other great cartoon voice actors besides the ones covered here. Alas, I don't really know enough about some — like Paul Frees, to name one — to do their careers justice. Or take Allen Swift, for instance. For a few decades, Swift was to New York-based animation what Mel Blanc was to Hollywood. He lent his voice to a staggering percentage of all cartoons that were recorded in Manhattan, did loads of commercials and kids' records and even had a couple of good runs in live children's television. He was a vital part of The Howdy Doody Show, and some called him the man who saved the show…twice.
Swift was not a part of the original cast but, just before Christmas of 1952, most of the actors quit or were fired (pick one), leaving all those puppet characters without voices. Swift came in and did an uncanny job matching the sounds of Flubadub, Mr. Bluster and others — all except Howdy himself, whose voice was pre-recorded by the show's host, "Buffalo" Bob Smith. Later on, when Smith had a heart attack and was off the show for months, Swift saved the day again, learning how to replicate Howdy's voice. This enabled the title character to appear with the various guest hosts who filled in while the Buffalo recuperated.
Later on, Swift gained a young, loyal following hosting Popeye cartoons from 1956 to 1960 on WPIX, channel 11, in New York. The photo above is him in his "Captain Allen" character, as cribbed off the cover of a kids' record he made at the time. Of the many TV cartoons he did, he is probably best remembered for playing Odie Cologne (the skunk) and Itchy Brother on King Leonardo, most of the villains (including Simon Bar-Sinister) on Underdog, and Tooter Turtle in cartoons that ran on both those shows. Mr. Swift is still (happily) with us, occasionally doing a voiceover or playing an on-camera role. He had a small part in Safe Men, a barely-released feature of a couple years back, for instance.
And his genes are well represented on the Broadway stage. His son is Lewis J. Stadlen, one of the funniest stage actors of our generation. Stadlen rose to prominence playing Groucho Marx in Minnie's Boys and A Day In Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine. More recently, he played opposite Nathan Lane in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and The Man Who Came to Dinner, and was in the short-lived Neil Simon comedy, 45 Seconds From Broadway. (Stadlen has a long history with Neil Simon. Years ago, he also played one of those Hispanic flight attendants in Simon's female version of The Odd Couple that we mentioned here a week or two ago and before that, he played the nephew in the original production of The Sunshine Boys.)
He is said to be the leading contender to play Max Bialystock in the about-to-start-touring company of The Producers. I'm not sure anyone could ever top Mr. Lane in the role but I'd sure like to see Allen Swift's kid try it.
Milton Caniff, Will Elder and Walt Kelly. In that order.
We hereby plug and recommend a lovely little book entitled A Gallery of Rogues: Cartoonists' Self-Caricatures. It's a whole buncha pictures of the world's greatest cartoonists drawing themselves, as collected by the late Mark Cohen. Mark was a much-trusted artists' agent — a description that is too often an oxymoron. But he was a good guy with a true love of silly pictures and the people who create them. For his own collection, he amassed self-portraits and they were compiled into this hardcover book, with interesting and informative bio-text by R.C. Harvey. You can, in fact, order a copy from R.C. Harvey's website and if you ask politely, he may even sign it and draw his own caricature in the front of the book, as he did in mine. Even if he doesn't, this is the kind of volume that has a very special, labor-o'-love feeling about it, so I hope they sell a lot of copies.
Matter of fact, I'll sell one for them right now: Attention, Gary Grossmann: Yes, there's a self-portrait of Sergio in this book and, yes, there's a drawing of Groo in that self-portrait. There. I just moved one copy…and maybe more if any of you have a little taste, good sense and thirty bucks. If this thing weren't great, would I be writing a plug for it at 4:30 in the morning? Of course not.
Members of the Screen Actors Guild are currently voting on a proposal that would allow Talent Agents to become more involved in the producers' end of TV and movies. This is an abominably bad idea for reasons which are well-articulated in a letter from Richard Dreyfuss that's posted over at www.actorsrights.org. While you're there, you can find loads of other reasons why this should be voted down. Let's hope it will be.
Back in 1965, one of those cartoon studios that is no longer around produced 39 half-hours of a silly, hip, cheaply-animated series called Roger Ramjet. Like the Jay Ward cartoons (which they vaguely resembled), the shows made up for the factory-second animation with superior voice work and very funny, very hip scripts. The latter — and some of the former — were provided by the comedy writing team of Gene Moss and Jim Thurman, while the lead role was essayed by the unparalleled Gary Owens. Gary (seen above, at right) is easily one of the funniest, nicest men in the teevee/radio business.
Two DVDs of Roger Ramjet episodes have just been released. If you ever saw the show, no further recommendation is necessary. If you never had the pleasure, believe me — it's a pleasure. The shows move like gangbusters, paced in a manner that reminds one of another Owens enterprise, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, of which it was said, "If you don't like a joke, just wait. Another will be along in twenty seconds." Moss and Thurman had a wickedly wonderful sense of humor which also manifested itself in a hilarious local kids' show they did for L.A. television called Shrimpenstein. (One of these days, I'll have to write a long piece for someplace on Shrimpenstein but I can't resist quoting one thing here. It was a live show with Moss playing a character not unlike what Boris Karloff would have done if he'd had Soupy Sales's job. It was on Channel 9 here opposite Roger Ramjet on Channel 11. One afternoon, a Shrimpenstein sketch became hopelessly fouled-up. A prop didn't work and so they had no ending. Moss sighed, turned to camera and said, "While we try to fix this, kids, why don't you turn over to Channel 11 and watch Roger Ramjet? It's a lot funnier than anything you're going to see here today.")
Having the two programs opposite one another was agonizing for me since, in those cro-magnon, pre-VCR days, I had to pick which to watch. Figuring that since Roger Ramjet was animated, it would get rerun, I usually opted for Shrimpenstein — a sound strategy but, alas, it meant I didn't get to see all the exploits of the fearless Mr. Ramjet. I remember some of what's on these new DVDs but some of it is new to me. Please buy these so they'll make more and I'll eventually be able to see all the episodes of one of the cleverest cartoon shows ever done for TV.
You can find out more about Roger Ramjet over at www.rogerramjet.com. You can also order the DVDs (or the primitive VHS releases) on-line from Amazon, either over at that site or by clicking on the Amazon box farther down on this page. Either way, you'll get to see a lot of very funny cartoons that you've probably never seen before. And how often we do get that opportunity?
I love this kind of thing: Matt Frondorf put a 35mm camera (the kind that takes film) in his car and aimed it out the window. Then he connected its shutter release to the odometer on his car. The first photo he took was of the Statue of Liberty.
He then drove west in as straight a line as possible with his camera rigged to take one photo every time the odometer ticked off another mile. 3,300 miles and 3,300 photos later, the last picture was of the Golden Gate Bridge. You can see all 3,300 pictures at this website. (Thanks to my buddy Daniel Will-Harris for calling my attention to this one. Daniel's website is a great place to visit if you're interested in fonts or web graphics or even rodents.)
Conan O'Brien has recently been having a lot of fun exhibiting figurines obtained from a Catholic products catalogue. The line — and these were meant seriously; that's why they're so funny — depicts Jesus participating with kids in various sporting activities. There's baseball, basketball, hockey, etc. — even Tae Kwon Do which, Mr. O'Brien notes, is an example of Jesus counseling children to settle their differences via hand-to-hand combat. Anyway, if you're interested in obtaining any of these, here is a link to the website for the company that sells them.
(You'll have to hunt around the site a bit. They have them segregated by sports, so the Jesus Playing Soccer figure is not on the same page as the Jesus Goes Golfing statue.)
Recommended Reading: Michael Kinsley's latest syndicated column — which you can read by clicking here — makes some intriguing points about human cloning and the politics surrounding the concept. I have no idea how I feel about the topic but this piece sets me to thinking…always a dangerous activity.
Time to reminisce about another food product of my childhood…and I'm being very liberal with my definition of a "food product" by applying it to Flav-R Straws. They were, of course, another plot by the chemical geniuses of Corporate America to turn kids' milk some odd color. In this case, the options were pink and a pale beige, though they somehow claimed these had something to do with "strawberry," "chocolate" and other "flavors."
A Flav-R Straw was an ordinary drinking straw with a flexible section — so you could bend it towards your mouth instead of moving your head two inches — and an odd, semi-toxic filament. Nestled inside each straw was a piece of porous material — a paper product, I suspect, though it could have been a sliver of animal skin, for all I know. The tiny strip was impregnated with the alleged flavor — that is to say, alleged chocolate or alleged strawberry or alleged whatever — and a whole load of Industrial Strength Food Coloring in brown or red variety.
The premise was that you'd stick one of these suckers in a glass of milk and then, as you sucked upon it, the pristine, white moo juice would pass through the filter and take on the hue and taste of it. And as you repeatedly dipped the straw, the remaining milk in the glass would be similarly transformed. My recollection is that it really didn't work that way or that well. For one thing, to get the milk through the blockade at all, you had to suck so hard, you practically developed a compound hernia in your cheek muscles. For another, even the small amount of milk that made it through was only faintly tinted or altered in any way. You could transfer a bit more "flav-r" to the milk by rapidly dipping the straw into the glass and withdrawing it, over and over for about an hour, but this felt silly and it still turned the liquid only slightly off-white.
Most kids just gave up and removed the Flav-R strip from the straw and tried sucking directly on it. Employed that way, it would yield a bitter taste but, at least, it turned your tongue brown so that had some value. Still, Flav-R Straws were a colossal disappointment…and, now that I think of it, that had a value, as well. We all have to learn in life that some things just don't work as advertised. Better we should learn it on something as silly and low-cost as Flav-R Straws. It fosters a kind of Consumer Skepticism that can be very handy, later in life. Then again, so can learning to suck real hard.
One last remembrance of Flav-R Straws: One time when we were both straining to get milk through ours, the girl who lived down the street from me asked what would happen if you tried to use a Flav-R Straw in a glass of Coca-Cola. I told her she would instantly die. She decided not to chance it.
Interest in the upcoming Evening With Stan Freberg (hosted by moi) is running high…so high that it's been moved to a larger venue! We will probably fill this one up too, so act now or don't come whining to me, whiner that you are, that you couldn't get a seat. We're going to run a bunch of cartoons that Stan did voices for…for Warner Brothers, Republic, UPA, maybe MGM and a few off-brands — and I should explain that these are being chosen (by Jerry Beck of Cartoon Research) more for their historical importance and rarity than their entertainment value. Some will be very entertaining indeed but one or two may stink a little. No matter. The idea here is to hypnotically regress Mr. Freberg (a la Bridey Hammerschlaugen) and force him to tell us what he can recall about his days as a voice actor, from the early forties, until today. Matter of fact, one of the offerings will be Little Go Beep, a rather recent WB theatrical short which features the voice of Guess Who. So a good time should be had by all. Here's our "ad" again with updated info:
Just added a few new panelists to the events I'm hosting at WonderCon. You'll see their names in a day or three when I re-post my schedule. Also, concurrent with WonderCon in the same hotel and operated by the same management is a thing called ProCon, which is a series of seminars for folks who write and draw comic books. On Sunday afternoon, assuming the calendar works out, I'll be babbling on for an hour or so about how not to get screwed over when you're hired to create something…kind of a spin-off from our articles here about Unfinanced Entrepreneurs. I hope to be joined in this discussion by another writer if he's willing, but I have enough painful anecdotes to go it alone, if need be. Don't we all?
