Monthly Archives: September 2002

Another person I knew was smart has proven themselves to be even smarter than I thought.  That's right.  It's another rave review of Comic Books and Other Necessities of Life.  This one comes from the brilliant Alan David Doane over at Comic Book Galaxy.  Check it out.

I notice that the website for A&E Video does not give a specific running time for the Courageous Cat DVD set.  It just says "720+ minutes."  This means that nobody there could stand to watch the whole thing, either.  (Note, if you will, that it's cheaper to order it via our Amazon link than it is from its maker.)

Jim Backus and Victor Mature were filming Androcles and the Lion, a film which required them to appear in the full regalia of Roman soldiers. One day, during a break in filming, Mature told Backus, "I have to run an errand. Want to go for a ride with me?" It was too much trouble to change out of their costumes so they didn't. They got into Mature's car, drove off the lot and made a quick trip to a business that Mature owned about a mile away.

On the way back to the studio, Mature insisted they stop off at a neighborhood bar for a quick drink. Backus protested that they were still in costume but Mature said, "Aah, they won't care in this place."

The two men walked in and the bartender stared at them in amazement. After a few seconds, Mature asked him, "What's the matter? Don't you serve servicemen?"

Lyn Nofziger was a biggie in the administrations and campaigns of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.  (He's the guy who took command the day Reagan was shot, Al Haig was sweating buckets and the TV news channels began broadcasting erroneous reports that the President was undergoing open heart surgery.)  I disagree with about 95% of his worldview but find it interesting and enlightening to visit his website, which you can do by clicking here.  Currently, he's dumping on the Clintons, John McCain and Bill Simon.  Once you get there, click on the button that says "musings."

In 1960, Bob Kane created a cat/mouse version of his other famous concoction, Batman and Robin.  130 short cartoons were produced of Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse.  (The voices for almost everyone on the show are usually credited in animation history books to Bob McFadden.  This is wrong.  They were done by Dal McKennon.)  You can now own all 130 episodes as a boxed set of four DVDs from the Arts & Entertainment Network's home video division.  In fact, if you click right here, you can order the set from Amazon and give this website a small cut of the purchase price.

My sense of decency compels me to add that I'm not sure why you'd want to do this.  Courageous Cat was an okay, low budget show and it does have a certain nostalgia value for some of us.  But it was low in wit or differentiation of plotlines.  There's something like ten hours of Courageous Cat on these DVDs and I doubt I could make it through more than around 30 minutes without running screaming up the boulevard.  But if you loved the show and are going to buy the set, buy it through our link so we get the money.  If enough of you do, it will convince me to reconsider my opinion of it.  It's about the only thing that will.

Currently playing in both New York and Los Angeles is a show called Puppetry of the Penis.  It consists, as I understand it, of two men who come out on stage nude and proceed to twist and adorn their genitalia into unusual images, all of which are projected on a large screen.  My initial reaction when I heard this was that someone sat down one day and said, "Hmm…what kind of production can we create that we're absolutely guaranteed Mark Evanier won't want to see?"  And if that was the thinking, they can relax: I don't.  But I did laugh out loud when I saw the following casting notice posted over on the Backstage website…

PUPPETRY OF THE PENIS
Open auditions for Aspiring Penis Puppeteers.  Must have own equipment.

Like I said, I have no interest in seeing this show.  One reason is that, when I was a kid, my friend Carl kept performing it.  Every time we used either of our Magnajectors, he'd wait until I turned away for a moment, unzip his fly and project his johnson on the wall and announce it was Pinky the Elephant.  I'm not sure if he thought this was just a great joke (if so, he was wrong) or if he had the idea that, once he started dating, he'd take his Magnajector along and try to impress the ladies.  Alas, even at the highest magnification, Pinky wasn't too impressive.

This weekend, the blurbs say, "O.J. Simpson tells his side on The E! True Hollywood Story."  Is there a less true Hollywood story than O.J. Simpson's?

I don't think I ever had a toy I enjoyed more than the Magnajector.  It was a simple opaque projector made of rather attractive Bakelite.  Inside was a light bulb and a mirror.  You plugged in your Magnajector and whatever you put it on top of was projected on the wall.

Somewhere around age nine, I used mine to make a series of cartoons starring a dog character I named Daniel Bone.  Actually, "cartoons" is way overstating things since even crude animation was not possible.  They were more like unlettered comic books projected one panel at a time, with me doing the voices live for whatever friends or parents I could drag into a dark room.  Later, I learned I could trace drawings with it, and a friend of mine named Carl invented a usage for his that I'll divulge in a moment.  But I recently came across a picture of a Magnajector and couldn't resist sharing it with you.

The debate goes on over whether or not the U.S. should declare war on Iraq.  I haven't made up my mind and may not for some time.  I think good points were made in this article about why we shouldn't (yet) by John Kerry, and this article on why we should (now) by George Shultz.

Those of you interested in animation, stop reading this page and hustle over to www.frankandollie.com, which is the new domain of Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.  They are, as you know, the last two of Disney's fabled "Nine Old Men" — two lifelong friends who have worked on more great animated films than a lot of folks will ever see.  Their site has animation tips, biographical info and even a new, on-line cartoon that they've been creating.  It's…uh, unusual.  But I think for two guys in their age bracket to embrace the Internet and get a website up and running is terrific so I'll not quibble.

Younger cartoonists have websites, too.  I just this minute found out that Scott Shaw! has a website up showing lots of his fine work.  It's at www.shawcartoons.com and if he'd told me about it, I would have plugged it sooner.

Forgot to mention that the Heads Up on that episode of Password was courtesy of my buddy, Rick Scheckman, a fully-tenured member of the staff (and, on occasion, the cast) of The Late Show with David Letterman.  Thanks, Shecky.

The comedian Lewis Black has a joke which I'll probably get wrong here but it's a good joke.  It'll survive my mistelling.  It has to do with a half-time show at a football game that he found himself watching — one of those relentless celebrations of patriotism and flag-waving and America's fruited plains.  "After two or three hours of this," he says, "I was actually sick of freedom."

I'm afraid I'm starting to feel something similar regarding tributes to the fallen heroes of 9/11 and resurrections of national grief.  I feel as bad about what happened that day as anyone.  I also have the greatest respect for firemen and other emergency workers and, unlike many who sing their praises, I think the least we can do is to pay these people better.  But all the remembrances and memorials and slow-motion montages are starting to ring very phony to me, especially when accompanied by someone making a profit or wrapping themselves in the tattered flag.  Even some of the well-intentioned ones are already starting to feel like overkill and we have almost a week of this to go.

What I think I'd like to see is someone — anyone, but preferably a person of some prominence — get up and say, "Hey, things haven't changed as much as we thought they would.  We're a much more resilient people than even we knew."  I'd also like to see more folks complain that, for all the outpouring of woe and a national consensus to do whatever was necessary to prevent another 9/11, we are still slow and stingy bastards when it comes to spending a little more money on airport security or firefighters' salaries.  Most of all, I think I'd like to see the nation experience a mass revulsion at those who have tried to exploit the tragedy to sell cheap merchandise or cheaper political causes.

I'm not holding my breath…

An indeterminate number of years ago today, an unsuspecting woman in Spain gave birth to a baby cartoonist.  His name was Sergio Aragonés and he grew up to be the most honored drawer of funny pictures in the business.  I think he now has every single award for cartooning that he could possibly win, including the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award and an induction into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame.  None of this, of course, is as important as the fact that he's my best friend, at least among human beings capable of sprouting facial hair; that, as he demonstrated over Labor Day Weekend for some of us, he cooks a great Paella; and that as smart as he is, he still can't figure out my magic tricks.  If I could just get him to pay me when we work together, he'd be perfect.

Thursday night / Friday morning on the Game Show Network, they're scheduled to run an episode of Password with cartoonists Mort Walker and Al Capp.  It originally aired 5/20/65.  (And did you see that To Tell the Truth the other night with Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel as one of the contestants?)

And I don't know what I'm doing up at 6 AM, either.  Good night.

Once upon a time, Jackie Mason was a very funny performer who also had a gift for getting into silly public spats.  Based on what I've seen of him lately, he seems to have gotten worse at the first skill and better at the second.  You'd think a guy who was once ordained as a rabbi would do a little better job of anger management.  His latest tiff has to do with a comedian who was supposed to open for him at a Chicago gig.  Then the comedian was cancelled, ostensibly only because he was self-identified as a Palestinian.  Mason claims it was the decision of the club, Zanies, struggling to avert a massive protest and keep the doors open.

My friend Jay Zilber has spent a little time studying all the press accounts of the squabble and come to some interesting and, I think, largely correct deductions.  Basically, as Jay says here, everyone involved misbehaved and the press accounts have taken a complicated story and reduced it to a simple, inaccurate summary.  The Palestinian comic, Ray Hanania, seems to be way too interested in promoting his dismissal for publicity purposes.  On the other hand, Jackie Mason's side botched this up and, at least on Crossfire, Mason was insulting people for interpreting the situation exactly the way his own publicist originally tried to spin it.  Jay reveals many details I did not hear or read about before, most notably that Hanania was not merely Mason's one-shot opening act but was actually booked as the (solo) headliner at the comedy club for the whole weekend, and was only cancelled as Mason's opener.  That changes the picture…a lot.

The one place I might disagree with Jay is when he says, "Mason — having obviously never been blindsided by a publicity stunt like this — elicits a small amount of sympathy from me."  Not from me.  I think Jackie Mason has spent most of his career working the other side of this racket, rushing to the press to claim victimization (and, often, discrimination) every time he's suffered any kind of setback anywhere.  He may not have had it done to him before but he certainly knows the drill.

For some time the funniest "person" on TV has been Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, as performed by Bob Smigel for Late Night With Conan O'Brien.  The other night at the MTV Music Video Awards, Triumph was attempting to interview music star Eminem when things got ugly.  For some reason, Eminem didn't want to be interviewed by a snotty puppet and…well, I'm not sure what happened.  But a friend who works on Mr. O'Brien's show says they're running the tape on tonight's show (the one that airs Thursday morn at 12:35 AM in most markets) and that it's the funniest thing he's ever seen.  So you might want to see.  If you miss it, it'll rerun the following day on Comedy Central.

Which reminds me: Video recorders, be they VHS or TiVo, have an option to record a show that airs Monday through Friday.  When will someone include an option to record Tuesday through Saturday?  Lots of shows that air in the early morning, like Conan O'Brien and Last Call and Craig Kilborn's program actually air Tuesday through Saturday, as will Jimmy Kimmel's forthcoming show.  On the websites for these shows, they all list their upcoming broadcasts in terms of Monday through Friday but you can't program a VCR to believe that an airing that starts at 1:30 AM Tuesday is a Monday show.

The following is from the Bloomberg News Service.  The Disney folks had a big meeting in New York to unveil the ABC schedule to advertisers.  Jimmy Kimmel, who's taking over the late night slot after Nightline, took the stage…

"I could be the best thing to happen to this network since Mike Ovitz joined the Disney empire and took all your money," Kimmel said, referring to the $140 million severance pay Disney gave its former president after ousting him in 1996, 15 months into the job.

Disney Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner, 60, seated in the seventh row, stretched his long legs into the aisle and didn't crack a smile.

Seems like all the prominent Republicans and right-wing newspapers are giving up on Bill Simon, G.O.P. candidate for governor.  This will mean four more years of Gray Davis…a fact I blame wholly on Simon.  If Davis were running unopposed, he'd lose.

Does Bush need Congressional approval before he declares war on Iraq?  Again, from a practical standpoint, no one may be able to stop him, law or no law.  But to the extent the law matters, it's explained well (I think) by John Dean and here's the link to see him explain it.

Happy birthday week to my friend of 30-some-odd years, Master Cartoonist Scott Shaw!  You can see his fine handiwork in recent Simpsons comic books, and read his daily explorations of bizarre funnybooks over at his page at Comic Book Resources.  Merry week and many more!

I am embarrassed to be informed by (so far) Kevin Greenlee, Jim Hill, Mark Mayerson and Michael Goldberg that the "Bye Bye Baby" number in the Evian commercial is originally from the show Gentleman Prefer Blondes.  Why am I embarrassed?  Because, as noted here, I saw this show performed about six months ago.  Well, I knew I knew it from somewhere.  Jim thinks the choral arrangement in the commercial is a direct lift from the movie with Marilyn Monroe, which I don't seem to have in my collection.