Monthly Archives: November 2003

Michael Moore provides the foreword for the new collection of Aaron McGruder's comic strip, Boondocks. I think both men take their arguments way too far so it's a good match. And not a bad foreword.

A few weeks ago, a lot of sites (including this one) quoted Simpsons creator Matt Groening with a story about Fox News threatening to sue his show for an animated parody that, Fox reportedly felt, might be confused with a real newscast. According to this article, Matt now says he was kidding.

One of our funnier stand-up comedians, Margaret Cho, has her own weblog. Very entertaining. Read it and read back a few weeks while you're at it.

So how is that The Producers, once the hottest ticket in the history of Broadway, is not what it used to be? Here's an article entitled, "The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Blockbuster." (New York Times registration required)

Late Saturday nights (i.e., Sunday mornings), NBC airs a "classic" episode of Saturday Night Live in most cities. Unlike the reruns on Comedy Central and E!, these "NBC Up All Night" reruns are not cut down to an hour, so they include all the segments that are cut when that is done. Like the off-network reruns, they have usually avoided the years when SNL was not produced by Lorne Michaels. For a time, they were selected mainly from the Phil Hartman-Dana Carvey years with an occasional pick from the first cast. The last six-or-so months, they've all been recent enough to include shows with Will Farrell and Cheri Oteri. Neglected in all this were some decent and occasionally fine shows from the years when Mr. Michaels was away — shows that featured Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Martin Short and other very fine performers. For some reason, NBC has occasionally announced a rerun from one of those seasons, then aired a Lorne-produced episode instead.

Until last night. The listings said that the 11/1 rerun would be the 11/3/84 show hosted by Michael McKean, and that the 11/8 rerun will be the 11/10/84 show, which was hosted by George Carlin — both from non-Lorne years. I set the TiVo for last night but fully expected to wake up this morn and find an episode with Darrell Hammond. Instead, they ran the Carlin one, the one announced for next week. I'm watching it now and you know what? It's not bad. Some of the sketches are funny and there's that "time capsule" interest of jokes about how Walter Mondale just lost the election and such. The cast includes Crystal, Guest, Short, Harry Shearer, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Gary Kroeger, Mary Gross, Jim Belushi, Rich Hall and Pamela Stephenson. At the moment, Shearer is doing an uncanny impression of Alan Thicke interviewing Short as his aged songwriter character, Irving Cohen.

I dunno what they'll be running next week. The official NBC release says it's the episode they ran this morning. TiVo says it's a recent one with Rachel Dratch, Jimmy Fallon, etc. If you're interested in the less-remembered eras of SNL, you might want to record it. There's no telling what will actually air.

I royally screwed up my explanation of the Three Mouseketeers comic book earlier and I can't explain why because I know this stuff. I don't know my federal tax I.D. number or how to find the volume of a cone, but I know stuff like this. So ignore what I wrote earlier and replace that knowledge in your cranium with what follows…

A strip called "The Three Mouseketeers" initially appeared in Funny Stuff, which was a comic book published by All-American, which was kind of a sister company to DC Comics. Sheldon Mayer was the editor at All-American and he apparently created these Three Mouseketeers, but he only drew one or two stories of them. This strip was set in swashbuckling days and apart from their punny title, these three mice had nothing to do with the ones that came along later. DC later bought out and absorbed the All-American line, and Sheldon Mayer moved over and worked for them for the rest of his life.

In the mid-fifties, when sales were down and DC couldn't figure out what to publish, they decided to have Mayer create, write and draw two kid-oriented comics. Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace was getting popular as a newspaper strip and in comic books so they asked Mayer to come up with something in a similar vein. Using his own kids for inspiration, Mayer concocted Sugar & Spike, which many today consider one of the twenty-or-so best comic books ever done.

The other mandate was to use the old title of "The Three Mouseketeers," apparently to tie in vaguely with the then-popular Mickey Mouse Club on TV. Mayer didn't want to do a "period" strip so he came up with three mice — Fatsy, Patsy and Minus — eluding cats in a contemporary setting. The two comics debuted at the same time in 1956 and for a time, Mayer managed to do both but it was just too much work. As Sugar & Spike was the more personal of the two, he kept it and handed off The Three Mouseketeers to others — although in this interview, Mayer's daughter says she thinks her father had more fun with the mouse strip.

It has been reported that Mayer wrote some of the Three Mouseketeers comic stories after he handed the artwork over to Rube Grossman, a veteran New York animator who drew a lot of cartoony comic books for DC over the years. I don't know that that's so. Sy Reit, who wrote most of the scripts told me that whatever ones he didn't write were written by Grossman, and that as far as he knows, Mayer never wrote any after he stopped drawing that book. So make of that what you will.

(By the way, die-hard Sheldon Mayer fans know this but in case you don't: Sugar & Spike was cancelled in 1971. Sales were poor and so was Mayer's eyesight. There was still a huge demand for Mayer's toddlers overseas, where the work was reprinted and reprinted, time and again. So when his cataracts were treated to the point where he could draw again, he did a number of stories that were intended only for foreign publication. Some of them later turned up in a digest DC published but most of them have never been seen in America.)

Everything else I said in the earlier piece was correct, especially the part about Three Mouseketeers plummeting in sales when Mayer left it. My apologies for the screw-up and my thanks to Bob Heer and Steven Rowe, each of whom dropped me a nice note to whomp me upside the head about it.

The New York Times has a long article on the situation in Iraq…and really all you need to know is its title, which is "Blueprint for a Mess." But if you want to know more than that, here's a link to it for those of you who've signed up for the Times' free subscription and here's a link for those of you who haven't. (I'm giving both because they'll both expire soon but one might be around longer than the other.)

Sometimes, a news story is just so stupid, you aren't sure you aren't reading The Onion. Case in point.

Sidney Blumenthal on how the Bush administration did and didn't anticipate their problems in post-war Iraq.