Monthly Archives: May 2003

Over the years, Paul Terry's cartoon studio produced hundreds of what they called Terrytoons — first for theatrical release and later, after Terry sold out and retired, for television. With the possible exception of Columbia, no animation company of the period managed quite as poor a track record. There were occasional joys to be found in the adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle but you don't exactly see film historians lining up to praise the work; not the way they salute Warner Brothers, Disney or even MGM cartoons.

Maybe the best thing to ever come out of the operation was a TV cartoon produced on the lowest-possible budget. How low was the budget for Tom Terrific, which ran from 1957 to 1959 on the Captain Kangaroo show? Well, the music was done by one guy with an accordion, backgrounds were practically non-existent, and the entire voice cast was a man named Lionel Wilson. He performed the roles of Tom, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog, mad scientist Isotope Feeny, chief badguy Crabby Appleton and everyone else. It was a pretty good show and obviously, Mr. Wilson was one of the main reasons it was so entertaining. I never crossed paths with him but he appeared on other cartoon shows, including The Mighty Heroes and the recent Courage the Cowardly Dog, and always did fine work. Sad to see his obituary in tomorrow morning's New York Times but it's nice they noticed.

(More info on Tom Terrific, Terrytoons, and the world of animation can be found over at the website of Gene Deitch, the animation producer-director who was running Terrytoons during Tom's era. There's also an amazing treasure trove there for fans of John Lee Hooker. Mr. Deitch has also posted a book he wrote about animation over at this website. It's full of info on his career — before, during and after Terrytoons — including production breakdowns on Tom Terrific.)

It's been a long time since The Smothers Brothers played Los Angeles. How long has it been? Their publicist tells me that Tommy thinks their last L.A. gig was the infamous time at the Troubador when John Lennon got himself thrown out of the place for being too rowdy. That is not likely to occur at their upcoming local appearance but, assuming they're as good as the last time I saw them perform, the audience will still enjoy the evening. Tom and Dick are in that select list of comedians who have been around for years, never failing to make the customers laugh, perhaps being taken a bit for granted since they've been such a part of our lives…and by now, you're probably wondering what upcoming local appearance I'm talking about.

Well, they're playing the Comedy Store up on Sunset from June 3 to June 5 — their first L.A. stand in at least twenty years and a rare opportunity to see two masters at work. When I saw them a few years ago at the Orleans in Las Vegas, I was sitting next to some redneck from the midwest who spent the pre-show moments grumbling that he didn't expect to like these Smothers guys because he'd heard they were left-wing punks. He announced to everyone around that he was only there because the ticket had been comped and that if he didn't like the show, he was going to walk out on it and get back to the crap tables. They won him over almost from the opening number…and at the end, he was among the first up for the standing ovation. Get your reservations now for the Comedy Store and you'll see why.

Augie DeBlieck Jr. does a column on comics over at Comic Book Resources — which is safe to visit now, by the way. They got rid of the most annoying pop-up ad in the history of the Internet. Augie's column is here and he also has a weblog you can reach here. Anyway, Augie writes to me to say…

One minor correction: Computer lettering is largely done with Adobe Illustrator, and not Photoshop. Illustrator is a vector-based graphics program and does a much better job with resizing and moving letters around as need be. (Larry Young at AiT/PlanetLar uses Quark, but that's due to his publishing background. If it works for him, who's to argue?)

The more contentious debate these days isn't between computer and hand-lettering, but between mixed-case and all-caps lettering. Marvel's reasons for adopting it are rather spotty, but they've thrown their lot behind mixed-case completely. The results are mixed, to say the least In a few cases, mixed-case lettering has worked. (Understanding Comics and From Hell come to mind.) But across the board at Marvel, or even DC? Perish the thought.

He's right about the software, and I should add that some PC users report good results with another vector illustration program called Xara-X, which is good for a lot of things. Almost all the graphics you see on this website were built in Xara-X. Augie is also right about the debate between mixed-case and all caps. I don't know why upper-and-lower case lettering looks so wrong on most comic art but it does.

Here's an interesting blog entry by my friend Andy Ihnatko. He has a short but good observation about The Dick Van Dyke Show.

I would add that not only is Mr. Van Dyke maybe the best physical comedian to ever work television but he has another skill that I think stands out. Watch sometime when he's making a phone call and we don't hear or see who's on the other end. It's just Dick Van Dyke pretending to be talking to someone who isn't there but boy, is he ever convincing.

As I discussed in this article elsewhere on this website, comic book lettering is increasingly being done by computer and not by hand. DC Comics is presently setting up an in-house department that may wind up lettering all their books there and via Photoshop.

The debate on whether computer lettering is better than or even as good as hand lettering is becoming largely moot. For good or ill — and I think it's a little of both — computer lettering has won. Discussing a return to hand lettering is about as practical as arguing that the motion picture industry should ditch sound and go back to making silent pictures. There will be hand lettering in comics in the future (we're going to keep doing Groo that way), just as there are moments in movies when no one talks. But neither will ever be the norm again.

The leaders in the computer lettering field are Richard Starkings and the guys over at Comicraft. You can go to their Balloon Tales website and find out all sorts of valuable information on how it's done and how to do it, plus they have a major "how to" book coming out next month. Then you can go to this website and purchase some of their delightful fonts. You can also obtain some fine fonts (some of them, free!) and tutelage over at Nate Piekos' Blambot Studios.

As I said, I have mixed feelings about the move away from hand-lettering. I think everyone in comics does, and they'd be only more mixed if there were more great practitioners of the art around. But I think we have to face the fact that computer lettering is no longer a new way of doing it. It's the way.

Here's the first article I've seen in which any reporter has done any digging into the story of the possible preservation of the Hanna-Barbera building at 3400 Cahuenga. It's certainly the first to reveal — assuming this is true — that the building is owned by the real estate developer, William McGregor. Mr. McGregor is talking about putting various kinds of malls and businesses up there, some of which would involve tearing down the structure wherein Dynomutt was birthed. The ownership is significant because if McGregor were assembling a proposal on behalf of other owners — say, Universal or some arm of Time-Warner — it would be a very different issue.

The news story however glosses over the fact that the first H-B shows — the ones that are most beloved and the ones which pioneered television animation — were done at another facility down on La Brea. The building on Cahuenga is not where Bill and Joe did the original Yogi Bear and Flintstones cartoons, as the article implies.

I sympathize with Mr. Barbera's desire to see the place survive and not be replaced by a big Public Storage complex. However, I still think the best answer would be for him to get Time-Warner to buy it — they certainly have divisions they could house there — and not make it a financial burden of the city.

Richard Cohen writes a very good column on how the press, including the newspaper for which he works, may have misrepresented the whole Jessica Lynch story. I think a lot of newspapers need to run admissions of this sort…but won't.

Here's a fun website. It's called Who Would Buy That? and it's full of links to odd things that folks are auctioning off on the Internet, mainly on eBay. It will lead you to pages like this one — where they're trying to sell that ungodly station wagon that the Griswalds had in National Lampoon's Vacation.

I thought the vote was over regarding the addition of those grey lines to this page. But I just got this from Cory Strode…

Fox News has found a bunch of new votes from Florida, and it seems that over 500 votes from soldiers have come in with no postmark voting to get rid of the lines.

Amazingly, within 30 seconds of Fox reporting this, MSNBC announced that there were 1000 votes that hadn't been counted, and that many of them were from injured war veterans who had written on flags to send in because liberals who tend to lisp a lot were hiding the ballots from them. Within 30 seconds after that, paid protesters from the "Lines make Baby Jesus cry and prove you aren't a patriot" converged on your backyard and are demanding that you count the new votes and then stop the count immediately. More on this story as it develops.

Let's hope not. Funny as this is, even though I said the voting was closed, they're still coming in. It's up to around 500 to 5 in favor of the lines. I guess some people read this page from oldest to newest and voted against the lines before they read that it was a dead issue.

By the way: The easiest way to read this website is to start at the top of the current page and read down. At the bottom of each page, there's a right arrow that will take you to the next-oldest posting. So keep reading down and clicking right arrows until you go, "Hey! I've read this before!" Then, stop.

We're about to see media ownership further deregulated to the point where a company like Time-Warner or Clear Channel could wind up owning everything. Most people — across a surprisingly-wide spectrum of public opinion — do not want this to happen. But it's probably going to happen anyway. Here's Eric Boehlert's expert coverage over on Salon. If you have to endure some ads to read this, do so. It's important…and maddening.

Nick Cardy got out of comics some time in the seventies, which was a shame. On strips like Aquaman and Teen Titans and especially Bat Lash, he'd shown himself to be one heck of a fine illustrator. Fortunately for all of us, Nick included, he was lured back into the comic art community in the nineties. They got him out here for a San Diego Convention, and it was a truly memorable experience — for Nick's fans, who lined up for miles to meet him, as well as for Nick. He turned out to be not just a terrific artist but a terrific guy…and now he has a terrific website. Go see, go see.

It is now possible to pre-order the forthcoming DVD of the first season of Rocky & Bullwinkle, which is scheduled for release in the middle of August. The listing over at Amazon says it's 4 discs, not 3, and as you can see from the cover at left, the official name of the DVD is Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends, so I guess that means they're including Mr. Peabody and the Fractured Fairy Tales and such. There's nothing in the listing about the DVD coming packaged with a puppet, and I'm wondering if that isn't an error by the websites that have so far reported on this release. The later Bullwinkle Show on NBC was hosted by a Bullwinkle puppet, and it wouldn't surprise me if what someone meant was that the DVD includes some of the segments featuring that puppet.

Then again, it wouldn't surprise me if the package did or did not include a puppet. I'm not easily surprised. Anyway, we also don't know what they consider the "first season," but it probably doesn't matter. You're going to buy this no matter what's on it. Click here to get your order in now.

The Rockies have crumbled, Gibraltar just tumbled and William Safire is right about something.

Take note of this. It could be the last time.

My often-hard-to-please pal Jerry Beck is raving over the work that is being done to restore the pre-1948 Warner Brothers cartoons. And he's positively ecstatic over a restoration of the oft-seen-but-not-like-this Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor. Here's a link to his comments, and my assurance that Jerry would not be saying such things if he did not really mean them.

Well, not exactly. Garry Trudeau is taking the operation which has existed at www.doonesbury.com and moving it under the umbrella of Slate — which in turn is under the umbrella of MSN. Here, he tells us why that is and how nothing really will change.