Monthly Archives: March 2003

A couple of years ago, sci-fi legend Forrest J Ackerman went to court against publisher Ray Ferry.  The two had worked together to revive Famous Monsters of Filmland, the magazine Ackerman edited for Warren Publishing in and around the sixties.  The new venture ended in bitterness.  Ackerman quit or was fired, depending on which version you believe, and Ferry claimed ownership of the publication and various trademarks (like Ackerman's nickname, "Dr. Acula") and assets.  As explained here, Ackerman won the suit in 2000 and if we are to believe the press release he recently issued, he has now won the appeal.

Forry (aka Dr. Acula, aka Mr. Sci-Fi) has had a few rocky years lately.  Less than a year ago, all the newsfolks who cover science-fiction were reporting that he was hospitalized and expected to check out before he checked out.  Soon after, he proved all those reports wrong and not only got out but presided over the sale of most of his infamous collection of horror and science-fiction memorabilia.  He is now living in a small bungalow not far from the site of the old Ackermansion, welcoming visitors, working on memoirs and still going out to attend conventions and do cameos in movies.  The Mummy hasn't come back from the dead half as many times…

One other oddment from the Michael Larson sweep on Press Your Luck:  As the man was racking up cash, the program's scorekeepers got rather flustered.  After his 17th spin, Larson was at $40,601.  On his 18th, he hit a thousand-dollar space and they upped his total to $42,601.  The error wasn't caught at the time, and apparently Larson collected his grand total of $110,237 even though he actually won $109,237.  This does not mean the producers never noticed it.  They probably caught the mistake later but decided they didn't want to risk hearing more from Larson or his lawyers.

Tony Blair offers what is essentially the rebuttal to Robin Cook's speech.  You can read it here.

I probably don't need to say this but I vacillate between whether I should post political/war stuff on this page or leave that to the experts and confine myself to trivia.  I keep changing my mind and probably always will — so don't expect consistency in that regard.  I post what's on my mind…and my mind, like yours, cycles through periods of not wanting to focus on what's going on in the world and other periods where it must.  That's how it's got to be.

G. W. Bush maintains that no second U.N. resolution is necessary.  Other nations believe it is.  How did grown men who represent whole nations wind up in such disagreement?  Joshua Micah Marshall has an explanation.

And for those of you who don't have RealPlayer (which can be a very intrusive program if you don't watch out), here's a link to a text version of the Robin Cook speech.  But hearing it is even better.

Have you got eleven minutes?  More important, have you got RealPlayer installed?  I just watched and would like to share with you the 11-minute resignation speech delivered by Robin Cook, the British government's highly respected leader in parliament.  He quit yesterday to protest Prime Minister Tony Blair's position stance on Iraq.

I have, as visitors to this website well know, next-to-no respect for the folks in Washington on either side of the aisle.  In fact, I tend to take the position that those who seem to have more integrity are merely the ones who haven't gotten around yet to disappointing me.  Maybe I'm so desperate for sincerity that I've fallen for a reasonable facsimile, but Mr. Cook impressed me.  I don't know that I believe everything he says in this speech (there's your link to the video clip) but I believe our political system would work so much better if its participants could deal in this sort of rhetoric.

Give it a look.  It starts slow, and some of you may disagree with his position.  But it's always worth seeing an argument stated with such eloquence and sincerity.

Speaking of Brits and Iraq, a funny essay called "Other Axis of Evil Wannabees" is making the e-mail rounds, generally identified as the work of John Cleese.  Apparently, it is not by Mr. Cleese but comes from the SatireWire website.  Here's a link to their posting of the piece.

Is there a Superman curse? A number of "news" stories currently moving about the wires are asking if actors are now shunning the role because of what it's done to those who've accepted it.  And I guess it's a good story — but even if one believes in curses, this one doesn't measure up too well.  Yes, George Reeves died a shocking, unexpected death…but Mr. Reeves was (a) drinking heavily to ease the pains from an auto accident and (b) fooling around with a mobster's lady.  Either or both can make you pretty dead pretty fast, as has been proven by a number of folks who never flew around in a cape.  Yes, Christopher Reeve suffered a paralyzing accident but — and I don't mean to make light of it — these things do happen among other folks who jump horses.

The first film Superman, Kirk Alyn, also died — though 49 years after he last put on the Superman suit.  Kind of a slow-acting curse.  Bud Collyer, who voiced the character on radio and cartoons also died a few decades after he stopped portraying the Man of Steel.  (Actually, he had returned to the role after a 20 year absence and voiced a few more cartoons.  I guess one could stretch and say he got cocky, defied the curse…and it finally got him.  But that's a bit of a reach.)

Some have suggested that it isn't that The Superman Curse takes your life; it's that it does something equally-awful to those in show business: It destroys your career.  There might be something to this but if so, it probably has more to do with the fact that portraying a cartoon character — wearing a garish costume on screen that overshadows its wearer — has never been a major boost for anyone's career.  It may not hurt but it sure doesn't help.  Years after The Wizard of Oz, Bert Lahr reportedly said, "Everyone told me it was one of the greatest performances in the history of film, but it was kind of like, 'We'll call you the next time we need a guy in a lion suit!'"

Thus, Kirk Alyn's post-Superman career was pretty much the same as dozens of other actors his age who'd starred in cheap serials and B-Movies.  Kirk was a charming gent who was a fixture at comic conventions until his death in 1999.  But I'm afraid I don't recall anyone suggesting that a great actor had been stifled.  Bud Collyer was enormously successful as a game show host.  George Reeves, despite urban legends to the contrary, had offers of work as both a writer and a director at the time of his death.  Christopher Reeve certainly had a lot more success as a film actor after Superman than before.  And as for the more recent wearers of the costume, it's too early to tell.

What I'm getting at (and what I was trying to say when quoted in this article over at E!Online) is that all these careers pretty much went as might have been expected without playing the guy from Krypton.  If any, the role helped — though not much.  And if a lot of actors are turning it down now, as has been reported, it's probably not because they think it'll kill them or their careers.  It's that the stardom of leading men these days gets judged from movie to movie, and playing that part can seem like a lose-lose situation.  If the film's a flop, everyone will say the star has no following and that he isn't hot anymore.  But if it's a hit, the star won't get much credit.  Everyone will say it's because people love Superman.

All right, everyone say it with me in unison: "Boy, I hope George W. Bush knows what he's doing."

Disney Comics are coming back.  Here's a link, thanks to Ken Plume, to a good interview with Steve Geppi about the marketplace and how mice and ducks may fit into it.

Well, I hope those of you who caught Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal based on my endless hyping thought it was worth the build-up.  (If you didn't see it, Game Show Network is running it several more times.)  The folks who put the documentary together did a good job, I thought, of telling the story and I really appreciated the fact that, though they interrupted the action for annotations, they pretty much allowed the videotape to speak for itself.

This morning, though I had nothing whatsoever to do with the program, I found myself on two different radio shows discussing it.  One host asked me why, in the era of "All Reality Shows, All The Time," I found this ancient bit of reality interesting.  I think the answer is that, first of all, it's your basic David/Goliath story.  Who could not like a story where a little guy came in and outsmarted a big-time TV network?  Secondly, today's Reality Shows are really Controlled-Reality Shows.  The producers may not know who's going to remain on the island after everyone else gets voted off…but they know someone will be.  They do not wind up standing around with their mouths open, muttering, "We never imagined that would happen."  Michael Larson, who went on Press Your Luck and won $110,000 (plus change) had just that impact on everyone.

Even supposedly-spontaneous TV shows aren't that spontaneous.  If Mssrs. Leno, Letterman, O'Brien, Kilborn, Kimmel and Maher are on for another fifty years, we'll never see any of their shows spin as wildly out of control as Press Your Luck did for about an hour there.  You will never see the stars, producers, directors and crew as clueless as to what's occurring on their own programs as the PYL staff was on account of Michael Larson.  Some execs at CBS almost didn't air the shows, ostensibly because they didn't want to revive memories of the quiz show scandals of the fifties.  Watching the Game Show Network airing last night, it dawned on me: They weren't really worried about that.  They were just uncomfortable that, for one brief moment there, they lost control.

Changing subjects, but only slightly: Watching Press Your Luck might give you a hankering to test yourself against its cleverly-configured game board.  There was a computer "home game" marketed briefly back in the eighties but it wasn't too good.  A devout fan of the show — a gent I do not know at all — cobbled up an authorized homemade version for the PC that works rather well, at least on my computer.  I don't guarantee it will work on yours, so proceed — as they say — with caution and at your own risk.  It does not contain the question rounds, but you don't care about them anyway.  Here's the link to the site where you can download it.  You'll need an unzipping utility and no, I don't know of a Press Your Luck for the Mac.  Oh — and don't complain to me if it doesn't work or ask for my help.  I have nothing to do with it.

• The U.S. Needs To Open Itself To The World by Brian Eno, Time
• No Liberal Exchange Policy by George F. Will, Washington Post
• An Open Letter to Nader Voters by Charles Taylor, Salon
• The Glorious Bush Program: Sign Me Up! by Molly Ivins, Creators Syndicate
• Truth Be Told by Peter Beinart, New Republic
• Anti-French Frustrations by William F. Buckley Jr., National Review

Here's an early "mark your calendar" notice for those of you in the Southern California area…

As is well known by anyone I'd ever want to associate with, Stan Freberg is one of America's great wits and satirists, and he has also been one of our great cartoon voice actors for close to sixty (60!) years.  His achievements in this last area will be celebrated and examined at an A.S.I.F.A. event on April 24th.  (A.S.I.F.A. is the Association Internationale du Film D'Animation — in plain English, the International Animation Society.  Click here to exit stage left to their website.)

What we're going to do — that's right; I'm the host of this thing — is to show a number of old cartoons for which Stan did voice work.  Some will be well-known classics like The Three Little Bops (above) but most will be obscure stuff which Stan may not remember well…or, in a few cases, never even saw in finished form.  Then I will relentlessly grill him and maybe we'll try whips and chains or sodium pentathol.  One way or another, we'll get him to remember something about the work and tell us.  The film program, which is being assembled by the inestimable Jerry Beck of Cartoon Research, will be chosen more for history than entertainment — Jerry promises at least one stinkeroo — but it should be fun, nonetheless.

That's Wednesday evening, April 24.  Check here or at the A.S.I.F.A. site for further details, including the location, which has yet to be firmed up.  But it'll be open to the public and you'll get to meet Stan and see a lot of weird cartoons he did and get to hear what, if anything, he remembers about them.  And if we're nice, maybe he'll do a little Pete Puma for us.

We keep hearing that judgments in medical malpractice suits need to be limited because insurance premiums are driving doctors out of business or out of certain areas.  The case for this seems anecdotal and weak to me, and I'm inclined to suspect that Ralph Nader is right; that we could solve the problem better by limiting how much profit the insurance companies can make.  (Actually, we will probably solve it some day with some form of national health care, but that will be a long time in coming.)  In any case, the issue is currently being tackled by that greatest of all medicos, Rex Morgan, M.D.  Here's a link to a site where you can read the comic strip.  And here's a link to a letter that appeared the other day in the Washington Post telling why the case being presented in the strip is bogus.

HBO Family is running the Li'l Abner movie (the good one, the one based on the Broadway play) on Monday night and again on March 27.  I mention this because, since it's not out on DVD and the VHS tape is long out-o'-print, some of you might like to record it.  But I also mention it because it's an excuse to run some pictures of Julie Newmar, which always increases donations to this site, hint hint.  As you may know, we have articles posted about this movie and about the stage musical from whence it came.  You can read them here and here.  We are also glad that HBO Family is running it because it's the perfect movie to introduce kids to the idea of musicals — hummable songs, colorful characters, energetic dances, a plot that even a resident of Dogpatch could follow.  Recently-announced plans to revive the show for Broadway seem to have evaporated.  But one of these days, someone will do it and it'll probably be a very big hit.  Even if that version won't (sadly) have Julie Newmar.

My occasional employers, Sid and Marty Krofft, have built some incredible things: Costumes, puppets, even an entire amusement park.  Every so often, they downsize their warehouse a bit and sell off a few items which are snatched up by folks who grew up on the likes of H.R. Pufnstuf and Lidsville.  One such auction is being held tomorrow, conducted by the Butterfields people.  Here's a direct link to the listings in case you want to bid on one of Hoodoo's old top hats…or just want to window-shop.