We've been averaging a little over 1200 hits a day here at POVonline. Ergo, some time in the next day or so, the little counter at the bottom of this page will lap 150,000. It's about 10,000 behind reality due to a lapse when I changed counter services. Anyway, thank you all for spreading the word about this silly site and I wish I didn't have all these paying jobs preventing me from spending more time on this.
The last part of the preceding sentence is a lie. But not completely.
If you're heading for New Orleans or the big tourist cities in Nevada or Florida, you might be interested in a piece of free software called Travelaxe, which you can download from www.travelaxe.com. You tell Travelaxe where and when you want to go to one of these places and it searches the websites from a number of travel services. Then it displays all the prices it finds for hotel rooms in that city on that date so you can pick one to your liking. I just ran a test on hotel prices in Las Vegas and was amazed at the wide variation in prices. For example, on the test dates I picked arbitrarily (two off-peak nights in June), a service called TripReservations wants $495 for the Luxor, whereas Las Vegas Travel Bureau quotes $150. Conversely, for the same two dates at the Monte Carlo, L.V.T.B. wants $172 while TripReservations wants $154.
Even if you're not heading for Vegas, this presents a good object lesson in how prices can vary wildly from site to site. Each of the 16 travel sites surveyed in this quickie test was the cheapest for some hotel and the most expensive for some other hotel. (To further point up how unpredictable the rates are, remember that the Luxor and the Monte Carlo are sister hotels.)
The Internet is loaded with bargains if you know where to look. The other day, I was about to order a little over $200 worth of office supplies from the Staples website when it suddenly occurred to me to look for discount coupons. I did a quick Google search for "staples discount" and, in ten seconds, found a coupon code for $40 off my order. Forty bucks for ten seconds of work is pretty good, even if you're Bill Gates.
This isn't exactly an obit since he passed away in 1984 but I'm going to write a few words about a terrific comic artist named Don Newton. I miss Don Newton. I miss the man and I miss his splendid drawing, which adorned a lot of comics published by DC and Charlton and a few Marvels from around '74 until his sudden, shocking demise. (He was 49 and had always looked like he was in the peak of health.) Before that, and even while getting professional work, he turned up in countless fanzines because Don loved to draw comics. He worked as an art teacher by day and drew for nothing at night, hoping someone would discover him. When someone did, he happily embarked on his career of choice and did splendid work, most notably on The Phantom for Charlton and Batman for DC.
We collaborated on one short Blackhawk tale for DC and talked of doing more stories together, for he was my kind of artist — the kind who's steadfastly dedicated to telling the story and willing to work as long and hard as necessary to tell it properly. You can see more of that dedication on display at a website that has been set up by a fan of Don's work. It's www.donnewton.com and it's a nice reminder of a nice man. He left us way too soon…which, of course, is not so nice.
Well, Dave Berg has been dead for another day without most comic book news sites paying any attention. In the next day or so, DC Comics will have its press release out and the mainstream media will start issuing obits, so we may see a little more coverage on web pages that purport to cover the field. And then again, we may not. Several webmasters wrote to me on the topic, most of whom seem to have studied Missing the Point with Ari Fleischer. One said there's no problem here because his site can always post a link to the obit I post…something he has, by the way, not done in the last 24 hours with regard to Mr. Berg. Another merely offered to post my obits on his site. Both, of course, failed to grasp the concept that — and I'll say this again, this time in boldface and caps — I DO NOT WANT TO BE THE ONLY PERSON COVERING THIS KIND OF THING. I think it's too important to be up to any one person, especially if I'm that one person. I especially don't like the fact that reporting on the death of an industry veteran is of so little importance to some that they figure they can just hope someone else does something.
Rick Veitch, who runs www.comicon.com, was one of the few web guys to write to me and express the feeling that more should be done. Significantly, Rick has one of the few sites that does some actual reporting and digging…though he is of course limited by finances and the fact that he has a busy career as a comic artist. It seems to me that there are a lot of folks out there who care about the history of comics enough to want to write about them for little or no money. If nothing else, they could at least make a little noise about this problem. Quite a few people wrote to me to say, "Thank you for reporting the death of Dave Berg." I'd have preferred they take that time to write to one of the news sites and ask, "How come you're covering new X-Men costume designs instead of the death of Dave Berg?"
The Banana Splits Adventure Hour was a 60 minute series that Hanna-Barbera produced for two seasons, starting in 1968. A lot of folks think it was produced by my old bosses, Sid and Marty Krofft but this is not so. The Krofft company built the costumes for H-B and, when the series was a modest success, it prompted one Krofft brother to say to the other, "Hey, we should have produced a show instead of helping someone else have a hit." The following season, the first Krofft series — H.R. Pufnstuf — made its debut. I was never a huge fan of The Banana Splits — either the group or their series. The characters themselves seemed shallow, even for late-60's Hanna-Barbera and their show was a bit of a hodge-podge, featuring short segments of serials that H-B had been unable to sell as standalone shows.
Barbera told me he considered the series a failure because of its short run but also since the idea was to spin the various components off into separate programs and none graduated. Still, I have to admit that the costumed characters had — and perhaps, still have — great appeal. In 1970, I was snookered into helping put on a charity event for the Marine Corps "Toys for Tots" program, and H-B loaned us the services of the Banana Splits. This meant that a man from the studio brought the costumes over to our event for a few hours and I had to find four people of specified heights to wear them. I drafted four teen-age friends into service and they had a great time, dancing about and shaking mitts with kids…and generally being worshipped by children of all ages. The costumes were, they said, stifling hot and uncomfy, and the friend playing Drooper wound up with a big gash on his chin from the way its head rested on his. Nevertheless, it was fun for the guys, in part because the Splits were an enormous hit — moreso than any other celebrities in attendance. (We also had the Three Stooges there — Moe, Larry and Curly Joe — and no one paid any attention to them when the Banana Splits were frolicking about.)
Another bit of evidence of the characters' appeal is that someone has put together an exhaustive website devoted to the show. You can find it over at www.thebananasplits.com. If you visit there, take a look at some of the line art of the characters. The work with the rougher, brush line is that of the late Jack Manning, a wonderful cartoonist (no relation to Russ) who did loads of work for Gold Key Comics, as well as for H-B and other animation studios. Jack did a lot of promotional and publicity art for Hanna-Barbera in the seventies and early eighties and someday, I hope to get around to an article of some sort about him. Someday.
Dave Berg was a major figure in the history of comic books and cartooning but you'd never know it from the comic book news sites on the Internet. I posted an obit here more than 55 hours ago. I just did a quick search to see who else had picked up on the story and done any independent reporting and couldn't find a bloody thing. It's all over the newsgroups because I posted the info on several and other folks carried it over to other forums, including a website message board or two.
Since it's a world wide web we live in, I may well have missed some site that mobilized to give the late Mr. Berg his due but it would be a teensy exception. I couldn't locate one little news item anywhere that didn't merely quote and/or link to my announcement. Not all sites can be expected to cover something like this, of course. Some do not strive to present the latest news or update themselves on a daily basis. But many do and I found several that reported on this weekend's grosses for the Spider-Man movie but had nary a mention of Dave. Of course, you can put that together in five minutes by quoting the AP or Variety news items. Finding someone who can write up a little bio of Dave Berg might take fifteen minutes.
If I sound snide about this, the tone is somewhat intentional. Last August, when Chuck Cuidera passed away, I got into a debate in one of the newsgroups with a fellow named Pat O'Neill, who writes for a couple of different comic news publications. Pat had half a hundred excuses for why it's too difficult to report obits on the veterans of the comic book industry in a timely manner. Not one of them made a lick o' sense to me, one of the few people in the field who actually bothers to do it. (Nine months later, I have yet to see a single obit online about Cuidera that was not extracted from what I wrote about him. At least, a couple of print ones finally turned up and featured a little of their own research.)
Dave Berg's death will not go unreported. MAD has issued a press release which everyone should be quoting in the next few days. I'm pretty sure we can expect the mainstream press to cover his passing and for all that material to find its way onto the online sites, probably buried well below the preview of the costume from the forthcoming Daredevil movie. But for those writers and artists who were a little less famous than Mr. Berg, very little is said. Robert Kanigher and Tom Sutton recently left us and some sites that purport to cover the comic field could scarcely have given them less attention…and what was there was only there because some fan posted it on a message board.
During my back-and-forth with O'Neill, someone else chimed in to ask me what I expected or wanted. My reply was along the lines of, "I'd like to not be the only person covering this kind of thing." Even if other reporters might not hear immediately about someone's death, once it's widely reported on the Internet (which Berg's has been, for more than two days now) any halfway-decent writer could plug the name of the deceased into a couple of search engines, make one or two calls or write one or two e-mails and put together some coverage with very little legwork. But they don't.
So I emphasize: I would like to not be only person covering this kind of thing. If you care about it, how about politely — or even impolitely — suggesting something to the various Internet sites that promise to bring you the latest news from the world of comics? Suggest they rearrange their priorities a bit. I'm starting to really dislike the realization that if I don't drop everything in my life and whip up some sort of an obit, it either won't get reported or those who claim to cover the field will take their own sweet time about it. This is high on the long list of things that are too important to be entrusted to the likes of me.
If you have a fast Internet connection (because the file involved is huge) and a yearning (or need) to relive 9/11/01, there's a rather stunning video montage at this website.
Say, whatever happened to Buck Henry?
If I had one of those new-fangled Broadway Time Machines that can whisk you back to another era to see any production, I think I'd use mine to see the original My Fair Lady. Obviously, there are a lot of dandy choices but there always seemed to be something magical…almost legendary about the Lerner-Loewe adaptation of Mr. Shaw's Pygmalion. It opened at the Mark Hellinger on March 15, 1956, which was a Thursday. The following Sunday, as is often the custom, the cast used its day off to record the cast album. Little did they suspect they were recording what would be the most-played, best-selling cast album in the history of mankind. And what's interesting is that it didn't sell as many as it might have because Columbia, the company that released it, decided to compete with themselves and put out a second one. The first album was in monaural recording, which was "state-of-the-art" that week.
Two years later, when the London company opened, they did a new album with the same songs, same arrangement and pretty much the same cast — Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Stanley Holloway, etc.
The only difference was that this one was in stereo. Columbia assumed they could then phase out the mono version but buyers would have none of that. Even though the new one had the same lead performers, there were minor variations, especially in Mr. Harrison's performance, and we liked our My Fair Lady to sound exactly — right down to the very syllable — the way it was supposed to sound.
I say "we" because my parents played that first album. And played it and played it and played it and played it and played it and how many times must I type that before you grasp the concept that they played it a lot? It is so ingrained in my psyche that, when I watched Harrison perform the same songs in the movie — or when I saw him live on his farewell tour — I sat there and thought, "He's pausing in the wrong place…that line oughta go faster…why did he emphasize a different word?" (The farewell tour, which he did at age 78, was sad in a way. I mean, it was nice that he made what must have been Huge Bucks, and it was wonderful that we all got to say, "I saw Rex Harrison do My Fair Lady." But he was forgetting lines and fumbling about, and the standing ovation at the close was more for his body of work than for anything he'd done that evening.)
My affection for the first cast album is so intense that I couldn't even listen to the CD of the recent London version with Jonathan Pryce. Bought it, put it in the CD player, pressed "play"…and the new arrangements sounded so utterly wrong to me, I had to hit "stop." I mean, I assume this incarnation is fine in its own way but certain tunes are the musical equivalent of Comfort Food. You don't want someone "improving" your mother's recipe for beef stew and I don't want someone fiddling with my My Fair Lady. Variations and updates are tolerable and even welcome in some places and not in others.
Fortunately, the original My Fair Lady cast album was released a few years ago on CD. What's more, a better CD release comes out May 28, the same day as the new Li'l Abner CD. This version of M.F.L. has been remastered for allegedly better sound and includes a few bonus tracks: An interview with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, as well as a chat between Lerner, the album's producer and lead performers. You can order this CD from Amazon-dot-com (and give us a few dimes) by clicking right about here. And in a day or so, when I get some time, I think I'll post some recollections of the first musical I ever saw in a for-real theater. It was the first national touring company of My Fair Lady with a gent named Michael Evans in the role of Higgins. I was around eight at the time and I sat there the whole time thinking, "That doesn't sound like the record."
See? Even then, I was stubborn about my favorites.
Dave Berg, a mainstay of MAD Magazine since 1957, passed away last night following several months of severe illness. His series, "The Lighter Side of…" debuted in the magazine in 1961 and immediately became popular enough to appear in every issue, as long as Dave's health allowed him to produce it. That meant every issue, up until just a few years ago. It made him famous, but it was by no means all he did in comics. Dave was born in Brooklyn in 1920, the son of a bookbinder who had once studied to become a rabbi. A smidgen of each area seems have been passed on to young David. He later "made" (i.e., wrote and drew) books and approached most of his work with a devout, almost Rabbinical sense of morality. He even took to lecturing — first, his colleagues and then students on college campuses — about the Talmud.
A child prodigy, Berg won art scholarships when just a boy and got into comic books about the time comic books began appearing. His earliest efforts were for Will Eisner's studio. Eisner hired him to ink backgrounds and, within weeks, Berg was writing and drawing his own stories. One — Death Patrol — drew great praise, including a fan letter from a kid named Wally Wood. Later, when folks were calling Wood one of the great comic artists, he would cite that strip and Berg's work as a major influence.
Working at Eisner's, Berg became friendly with other artists, including young Al Jaffee, who introduced him to a circle that included Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder and others who (along with Wood) would later form the nucleus of MAD. Dave worked in other comics, including a long stint on the original Captain Marvel and a mess of Archie knock-offs for Stan Lee's outfit, which would later be known as Marvel. In 1956, when recession hit the comic field, Berg tried to get work with Kurtzman, who had left MAD to start a new humor magazine called Trump. Kurtzman told Berg he didn't need his services but suggested that MAD might. MAD did.
Thereafter, Dave Berg appeared in over 360 issues of MAD and also wrote and drew around a dozen paperback books. His strips featured "slice of life" jokes, many of them culled from interviewing friends and family, getting their true-life experiences on the current topic. As a result, his work was filled with caricatures of his friends and family, with Berg himself constantly appearing as a character named Roger Kaputnik. Some found his work corny; others deemed it filled with clever insight. Whichever, it was clearly popular with MAD readers for a very long time and we'll miss both Dave Berg and Mr. Kaputnik.
I dunno how long it'll be online for viewing but an auction of Howdy Doody memorabilia has just been conducted by an auctioneer named Leland's. It included many of the original puppets used on the show, plus scripts, props and other goodies. From what I can piece together, Leland's is the auction house of choice for all the folks who worked on the series, and has been selling items for most of them, including the late Buffalo Bob Smith, himself. This current offering seems to include items owned by many Howdy contributors, including writer Eddie Kean and the first Clarabelle, Bob "Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan. I was never a huge fan of the Howdy Doody program…though I suspect I would have been, had I been born a year or so earlier.
Despite this, it's kinda sad to see Phineas T. Bluster, Flub-a-Dub and all the rest up on the auction block. You can see just how sad — and how much they went for — by clicking here. But you might want to hurry because it probably won't be online for long.
There's a wonderful resource called The Internet Movie Database but odd errors keep popping up in its listings. They claim that someone named Edward Paulsen did voices on Garfield and Friends. As you know, I wrote on every episode of that series and voice-directed most and I don't know who Edward Paulsen is. I do know who Gene Wilder is and I know that he did not do a guest appearance on the show, in spite of what they claim. Not that we wouldn't have loved to have had him. (We did have one of this co-stars from The Producers, Kenneth Mars, in an episode. He was playing a German scientist and, as an in-joke, I named his lab assistants Bialystock and Bloom, but the names got cut when some dialogue had to be trimmed for time.)
Speaking of Harpo, as we keep doing: He made two LP albums of harp music in his lifetime, and both have been reissued on one CD. It features liner notes by my friend Joseph Laredo and it's available only from Collectors' Choice Music, an online company that offers all sorts of neat reissues. They also have Shelley Berman's first two classic albums, Soupy Sales doing The Mouse and a number of other goodies. This is not one of those links that kicks back money to this site for your purchases so don't spend a lot over there. (Not everything on their site is exclusive to them but enough things are that you'll probably want to pick up a few goodies.)
Is George W. Bush in trouble with these new revelations that the government had some sort of advance word that Osama's boys might start hijacking planes? Of course. And if it were President Al Gore, we'd be hearing exactly the same arguments, only Democrats would be saying what Republicans are now saying and vice-versa. What's more, we're going to be hearing this kind of thing for months to come, with new revelations being spun accordingly. Get used to it.
The thing I think is most interesting — not encouraging; just interesting — is the establishment of a solid and militant anti-Bush faction in this country. All presidents have their detractors, of course, but until the rise of the anti-Clinton people, a group that perhaps never exceeded 20% of the population never had such buying power and clout. (I am speaking here of people who hate absolutely everything the hated president does and believe every negative allegation against him…not merely those citizens who'd prefer some other guy in the job.)
The anti-Clinton faction was never as loud as its noise would indicate but they bought a lot of "Bill and Hillary are the devil" books, so publishers cranked them out. They bolstered the careers of certain pundits who trashed the Clintons, with or without benefit of accuracy, so we heard a lot from Clinton-bashing pundits. In some areas, they gave goodly sums of moola to Republicans who promised to bring the First Family to justice. It was a very healthy industry in many ways and they had plenty of topics to scream about: Whitewater, Vince Foster, charges of sexual impropriety, fund-raising scandals, etc.
Bush still has his stratospheric approval rating…just as, let's note, Clinton did at the height of Impeachment-Mania. But now, like Clinton, he's developed that group, no greater than 20% of Americans, that loathe him, believe he has committed vast criminal actions, etc. Books by Michael Moore and David Brock ride high on the Best Seller Lists so there will be more. (There's always more of whatever's high on the Best Seller Lists.) The anti-Bush people may never swell their ranks significantly higher but between this and Enron and the Florida vote and several others, they now have enough topics, enough charges of wrongdoing against G.W.B., that they will not be silenced. As with Clinton-bashing, there's just too much money in it.
We all love The Mary Tyler Moore Show, don't we? Of course, we do. Well, I'm going to be a grouch here and make two tiny criticisms of this usually-sacred endeavor. The first, actually, is about the gala reunion special that ran last Monday evening. I'm afraid I heard a bit too much about "we were a family," as if it's a singular sensation for the cast of a successful show to care about one another. Though there are exceptions, it's more the rule than not. I've even worked on unsuccessful shows where everyone bonded and remained close. (On a hit show, everyone bonds because they're together for so long and growing wealthy together. On a flop, people often bond because they're going through a war together.) I mean, I'm glad that Mary loves Ed and Ed loves Mary and that they both love Gavin and Gavin, on-camera and off, has always loved Mary, etc.
But I think I've gotten a little tired of seeing these people hug. Moreover, in loyalty to my vocation, I'd have liked to have seen a little more attention paid to the people who wrote that show, too. Weren't they a part of the "family?"
My second gripe may seem trivial, especially now. But on a website like this, you write about what's on your mind and every time I catch a rerun of that series, it strikes me as unrealistic that everyone in the cast has so much affection for Ted Baxter. He really was a moron at times and I keep waiting for the episode where one of them smacks him in the mouth. Or tells him, "Ted, you just did something enormously rude and inconsiderate to the people around you." I once mentioned this to Lorenzo Music, who worked on the series, and he said, "I think everyone may have confused Ted Baxter with Ted Knight, whom we loved." (I worked once with Ted Knight and I think he may have gotten a bit confused that way, himself.)
The inconsistency I'm pointing up here was best illustrated in an episode that is rerunning this Saturday on TV Land. Here's the official précis…
Ted's Moment of Glory
Ted auditions to host a game show in New York. The WJM-TV News staff doesn't take him seriously until he gets the job and they realize that their pompous anchorman is really going to leave.
If you remember that episode, you'll remember that, in the end, Lou Grant talks Ted out of taking the big salary game show job. He tells him he's part of a noble profession: "You're a newsman, Ted. You don't want to be a quizzzzmaster." And the happy ending is that Ted decides not to leave WJM.
Well, I don't buy it. I don't buy that Ted would stay. I don't buy that Lou Grant would want him to stay. I don't buy that it was in anyone's best interests for him to stay. Lou is an old-line news guy who takes the craft seriously. For years, he's been saddled with a cluck for an anchorman and while he's initially thrilled to have the opportunity to bring in someone who knows what he's reading, he somehow decides he'll miss Ted Baxter and must talk him out of leaving. And, like I said, I don't buy it.
Ted Baxter, as depicted on the series, should have been a quizzzzmaster. He never showed the slightest aptitude for news broadcasting, nor any real desire to learn it. All he wanted was fame and money, and the WJM job meant a lot less of both…and not even any real security. Being the laughingstock anchorman at the lowest-rated local news outlet in the city? How long could that reasonably be expected to last? Yes, I know, in the last episode everyone but Ted was fired, but that was the joke; that all the people who shouldn't have been fired were and the admitted incompetent wasn't. At any given moment before that, Ted Baxter was lucky to have any career, much less one that gave him the cash and attention he so dearly loved.
None of that makes him evil. Just makes him something of a jerk, which was fine. He did a lot of jerky things. But in a show where the human interaction was otherwise so honest and indicative of how real people act, the fact that Ted "Good Night and Good Newt" Baxter was loved and easily forgiven his jerkiness still seems an anomaly to me. And it seems so wrong that, in that episode, Lou Grant talks him out of fame and fortune. (He may also have talked him out of something almost as good. The game show Ted is to host has Dian Parkinson as its model. This is the lady who was then working The Price is Right and banging Bob Barker between Plinko games…)
Anyway, that episode reruns Saturday, like I said. Just in case you want to watch and see if it seems to you as wrong as it seems to me.