Monthly Archives: July 2002

E-mail buddy Cory Strode writes:

I was a huge [Dennis] Miller fan, and love most of what he does, but this year the show just hasn't been as good as in year's past. He's lost that sharp edge and was really harping on older topics…it's time to let O.J., Bill Clinton and the like go.  Sadly, the last two times I saw him perform here in Minneapolis (a year apart) he did pretty much the same stand-up…you have talked in columns past about how comedians have a "solid 45" of old material they know works and use it if they feel the act not doing as well as they would like.  Sadly, Miller did his solid 45 with very few variations, which is bad for a comedian who is best known for his quick wit and topical humor.

I pretty much agree with the above.  Dennis Miller has no greater admirer than Yours Truly.  He genuinely brought a fresh, witty approach to stand-up at a time when too many guys were up there asking, "What's the deal with these people who work at 7-Eleven stores?"  I've had people tell me Dennis Miller jokes without identifying the source and I said, "That sounds like something Dennis Miller would come up with."  How many other comics of his generation have a distinctive style not just of delivery but of writing?

But I agree, that style does not lend itself to much repetition.  I could (and did) hear Sam Kinison do the bit about world hunger a dozen times and always enjoy it…but when Miller repeats something, it just sounds like old material.  I saw him live only once.  It was at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas with Rita Rudner as his opening act.  This is maybe seven years ago.  She was very funny but when Mr. Miller took stage, the show was darn near over.  He didn't do one line that I hadn't heard from him before and, even if I hadn't known the jokes, most of them were about "current events" that had long since been retired as topics from most other comics' acts.  Worse, he did the whole set with an attitude that suggested he had the limo double-parked and couldn't wait to get his check and get the hell outta there.  I felt like yelling back to the stage, "Hey, Cha-Cha!  We didn't fork over half a C-note apiece for the ducats to see some clown whose energy level makes Perry Como look like Roberto Benigni on crack."

Still, you know what?  I like him so much, I was willing to write that one off as a bad night.

I'll even forgive him his last month or three of Dennis Miller Live, which have not been up to standard, making one suspect he knew the end was nigh.  There was a lot of crankiness there without a punch line attached.  Except when he's really, really liked his guest, he's been acting like the limo is triple-parked and blocking oncoming traffic…

And I still like the guy.  I'll miss that show and would love to see it land somewhere else because, when he was enjoying it, so was I…and I think it was the perfect vehicle for him.  Even if that show doesn't survive in some format, I'm sure he'll turn up in something else and be terrific in it.  At least, until he loses interest…

According to a press release I just received, NBC has purchased the right to rerun the 1962 Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol later this year.  Also according to that press release, June Foray is in the voice cast of that holiday special, which is not true.  But, assuming the rest of it's accurate, this is an interesting move.  The animated adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol was always, I felt, one of the two most entertaining cartoon specials ever produced for TV, the other being A Charlie Brown Christmas.  The Magoo affair succeeds despite rather dreadful animation…poor even by the standards of limited television animation.  Matter of fact, the special's previous owner was at one point considering whether it might have more marketability if they went back and, using the exact same audio track, did all new design and animation.  He (the late Henry Saperstein) never did…but when he told me he was contemplating the cost-benefit ratio, I said, "You're not going to touch the script, voices or songs, I trust" and he said, "Oh, God, no.  You couldn't improve on any of that."

He was right.  Jim Backus, Jack Cassidy, Paul Frees and the others are terrific, even if none of them was June Foray.  And the score by Jule Styne (whose name is misspelled in that press release) and Bob Merrill is first-rate…one of the few times an animated TV special has thought to go out and engage top Broadway composers.

Someone at Classic Media (new proprietors of the nearsighted Quincy Magoo) pulled off a deft move in arranging this.  The special has been out on tape and rerun on low-profile cable channels for years, and you wouldn't think it would go back to network.  I'm guessing someone at NBC was a big fan on it as a kid, plus Classic Media was probably willing to give it to them cheap to get Magoo back in the public eye.  Even if they let NBC run it for nothing, it would be a wise deal for them and, of course, for NBC.

I don't think a lot of people realize how prime-time network animated specials have virtually gone the way of the passenger pigeon.  Disney does a few for ABC but they're mostly a matter of that company producing something they can market in many venues, one of which is ABC prime-time.  And there are a few more Peanuts specials in the pipeline, which ABC is doing because they think it's sound marketing to marry one of their Winnie the Pooh specials with a Charlie Brown show to fill an hour slot.  But there are very few specials of any kind being produced these days for ABC, NBC and CBS, and even fewer of the animated variety.

Few people seem to have noticed this.  Every few months, I'm approached by someone who has a property — a comic strip or a character from some other venue — they hope to adapt for animation.  They often speak of the weekly series they see as inevitable and then toss off, "And we might be willing to warm up by doing four animated specials a year for one of the major networks."  I'm not sure the major networks, collectively, are producing four new animated specials a year of all the available and proven properties put together…and even at the peak of such production, you had to have a helluva track record to get more than one a year.  Managing one for a new character would be an incredible achievement…though that could change.  The few that are airing have done pretty well and if Magoo continues the trend, that could bode well for more production.

One hopes we'll see Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol via a good, newly color-corrected print and that, assuming it's in an hour slot, the edits to allow more commercial time will be done more judiciously than has usually been the case.  The best Merrill-Styne song (the ballad, the name of which I do not know) usually hits the floor first, often followed by Magoo's opening "Broadway" song.  A friend of mine swears he once saw it with the one of the three ghosts eliminated, though I find that unlikely.

In any event, I think it's a terrific show.  It's also a pretty terrific adaptation of Mr. Dickens' story…in many ways, more faithful than some of the more serious, live-action attempts.

In the category of "Movies I Kinda Liked Even If Nobody Else Seems To," we have the 1974 remake of The Front Page, directed by Billy Wilder and starring the two guys in the picture above.  No, it's not as wonderful as the 1931 version with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien, and it especially isn't as wonderful as the 1940 version, which was entitled His Girl Friday, which put Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in the leads.  A lot of critics hated the '74 incarnation and legend has it that when Carol Burnett — who plays the heart-of-gold hooker — found herself on an airplane with The Front Page as the in-flight movie, she got up, commandeered the P.A. system and apologized to all aboard for contributing to such a stinker.  (She's actually the worst thing in it, and I say that as someone who usually loves Carol Burnett.  But she's miscast and her role is burdened with awkward expository dialogue and an over-the-top window-jumping scene.)

Still, no film with Lemmon and Matthau is without interest and there are quite a few terrific character actors aboard to support them, including Vincent Gardenia, Martin Balsam, Charles Durning, David Wayne and Herb Edelman.  Even when those guys are drowning, it's fun to watch them swim.  Austin Pendleton pretty much steals all his scenes in the role of a nervous leftist sentenced to swing…and gee, Susan Sarandon sure is pretty.

Anyway, I watched the DVD the other night and found myself enjoying the proceedings despite the overacting, a few curious anachronisms and a resolution that depends too much on a coincidence.  Maybe it's that's wonderful command that Lemmon and Matthau seem to possess.  Everything they say, everything they do seems convincing.  They did a few later films that not even their chemistry could salvage but this, I decided, was not one of them.  Wilder said that he felt he'd been "done in" (his term) by such obvious casting.  Jack and Walter were so perfect for the parts, he said, that he never stopped to think whether the movie itself was a good idea. It probably wasn't in terms of serving the underlying material…but I don't care.  I just love watching those guys.

Time to recall another toy from my childhood: I was never particularly into toy guns but around the time I was eight, Mattel brought out what momentarily seemed like a Must-Own.  It was the Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun…a tiny toy derringer built into a belt buckle.  The premise here was that you were caught unarmed by the bad guys.  "Put your hands up," they'd command and, since they had more conventional Mattel cap pistols (like the lethal Fanner 50 model) trained on you, you'd comply…and it would look like you were done-for.  But!  What they didn't realize was that you, shrewd lawman that you were, were wearing your Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun belt buckle.  Just as they were about to pull their triggers, you would stick your tummy out and spring the control on the obverse side of the buckle.  Suddenly, the derringer would pop out and fire at whoever was standing in front of you!  What a secret weapon.

Of course, in real life, it didn't work precisely the way it did in the commercials.  Few toys of my childhood ever did.  First off, if you exhaled too much — or sometimes, for no reason at all — the derringer would spring out and fire before you were ready.  The answer to this was that there was a little lock on the bottom of the buckle.  Just before you were ready to fire, you had to take the lock off…which, of course, telegraphed to the bad guys that you were up to something and they would kill you before you could.

Another problem was that, in the commercial, the good guy would pop the buckle and shoot one bad guy, then snatch the derringer off the buckle lever and use it to fire several more shots, felling the other villains.  This looked neat in the commercial but once you got your Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun, you discovered that it could only fire one shot before you had to stop and reload.

This took about five minutes.  Mattel Shootin' Shell guns worked with a three-part ammo.  One part was a plastic bullet — this was the part that actually fired.  The derringer came with ten of these and after you shot people, you had to run around and find your plastic bullets so you could reuse them.  Often, you couldn't, so you had to run out and buy another pack of plastic bullets.

You would insert one plastic bullet into a metal casing with a little spring in it.  The derringer buckle came with two.  Then, you'd take a page of Mattel's special caps — little round, green ones on a sheet of peel-off labels.  You'd apply one cap to the back end of the bullet casing and you'd have a complete bullet you could insert into the gun and fire.

It was all a clumsy, awkward assembly and half the time, the cap would not explode so the plastic part of the bullet would be launched with an unexciting thud.

I remember having a semi-wonderful time with my Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun for about three days, or until I'd acted out the big ambush scene with all five of my friends.  Then I stuck it in the back of my closet and got out my Chutes-'n'-Ladders board game.  It didn't make a loud bang but at least it didn't force me to crawl around in the grass looking for my plastic bullets.  Paladin — the guy on Have Gun, Will Travel — never had to do that.

The E! Network has been running hour versions of the first five seasons of Saturday Night Live — shows I haven't seen in quite some time.  I recall liking the series a lot when it first debuted, even though I felt a lot of its "innovation" involved putting on TV, the kind of sketches that groups like Second City, The Committee, The Groundlings and various National Lampoon troupes had been doing for years.  (And, if we believe certain members of those teams, sometimes the exact same material.)  I thought SNL was fascinating to watch, often not because of what they were doing but just to see what they'd do next.  At the same time, there was a certain smugness about the show, and an occasional nastiness, that made it difficult to completely embrace.  I suppose I liked individual performers and sketches more than I liked the show as a whole.

Over the Fourth of July holiday, I watched about a half-dozen episodes from the first five years and found myself enjoying them very much.  Like most reruns, the shows looked chintzier than I remembered and, even with a half-hour lopped out of these shows, some had some deadly dull sketches.  Still, I'd forgotten how good most of the cast members were and how sharp most of the writing was.  The famed episode hosted by Richard Pryor had me laughing out loud, and even some of the "nasty" jokes didn't seem as arrogant as I'd recalled.  I was also amazed how many sketches I did not remember.  The running bits — things like the Coneheads and the Greek Diner and Emily Litella — stick in our mind and it's easy to remember the show as just those routines.

One thing which I think hurt my memories of this show is that it was syndicated many years ago in a half-hour version.  Some shows just don't work in short doses.  (Laugh-In was spectacularly ineffective when they syndicated it that way.)  I suspect that when they edited those 30-minute programs, they concentrated on the recurring sketches and dumped a lot of the one-shot bits.  If so, it would explain why the show seemed so repetitive when I watched those reruns and why so many of the non-series sketches seemed new to me this week.

E! runs the shows in no discernible pattern.  They've been running one a night, Monday through Friday, but they seem to be moving to a 2-a-day schedule this week with episodes hosted by Elliott Gould, Buck Henry, Julian Bond, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin (3 different), Lily Tomlin and Rick Nelson.  I'm watching to see if they're going to air the ones hosted by Milton Berle and Louise Lasser.  These were the two that Lorne Michaels felt were so awful that he decreed they would never be rerun.  But at least 30 minutes of the Lasser one made it into the syndication package of half-hour episodes…so perhaps he's softened on his pledge.