Monthly Archives: August 2004

Michael Kinsley discusses the attitudes of Laura and George W. Bush on stem-cell research. Kinsley suffers from Parkinson's Disease so his viewpoint is of special interest.

A number of folks have written to ask me if I've heard anything about any of the many comic book artists and cartoonists who live down in Florida. Gene and Adrienne Colan escaped damage from Hurricane Charley…and I haven't heard about any of the others. If you have, drop me a note so I can share it with others.

It's been a long time since I mentioned Game Show Network's Black-and-White Overnight bloc. That's because it hasn't been all that interesting. On weeknights, they've been running old episodes of Password (which I find generally boring) and old episodes of What's My Line? (which they've run many times before). On weekends, it's Beat the Clock (which I find unwatchable) and more What's My Line? But things will soon be changing.

The week of September 20, Password gets bumped for a week of Winner Take All, a long-forgotten show which is most notable for the fact that it was the first TV game show hosted by Bill Cullen. (They're running two episodes hosted by New York radio personality Barry Gray, then three with Cullen.) At the end of that week, September 24, they'll be up to the last network episode of What's My Line? This was one where host John Daly signed in as the Mystery Guest.

September 25, the weekend What's My Line? reruns will be replaced by Play Your Hunch, a long-running show which was hosted for most of its run by Merv Griffin. Based on what I remember of it as a child and the few I've seen since, this was a pretty good show.

On September 27, Game Show Network will begin offering cable companies a West Coast satellite transmission of its programming. At the moment, it looks like this will not be available on Dish or DirecTV. Also on that date, the Black-and-White Overnight time will shift to an hour earlier. This will screw up those of us on this side of the country who TiVo Letterman from 11:35 to 12:37.

So what's going to replace What's My Line? on weeknights as of September 27? I don't know yet. Rumor has it we may get another run of I've Got a Secret or To Tell the Truth, both of which have aired before on GSN.

But enjoy the current What's My Line? reruns while you can. The one that's on tomorrow morning should be the 9/4/66 episode with Buddy Hackett on the panel and Joey Bishop as the Mystery Guest. Sunday morning's is from the following week with Warren Beatty as Mystery Guest. This was the first episode of the show broadcast in color but apparently only black-and-white kinescopes of the prime-time What's My Line? survive. In a week or two, I'll give you a Head's Up when they rerun the one with Judy Garland as Mystery Guest, which has a lot of history in it.

Here's a question that a number of folks have sent me…

We've been enjoying our new Garfield and Friends DVDs. However, one thing baffles us. U.S. Acres seems to have turned into Orson's Farm. Do you know how or why this happened?

Yes. When Jim Davis did the U.S. Acres newspaper strip (on which the cartoons were based), the strip was distributed in certain other nations as Orson's Farm. The "U.S.A." pun didn't translate and even in some English-speaking countries, they wanted to change it to not remind readers that it was a foreign feature. When we did the cartoons, each title card was filmed twice, once with each name, so that when the shows were distributed overseas, they could air with the same name the strip had in each country. The DVD set was made off a set of negatives that had Orson's Farm title cards.

And to answer another oft-asked question: The second set of Garfield and Friends DVD is scheduled for December and the third for May of 2005. The second will not have any special features and I don't yet know about the ones to follow.

I'm watching CNN coverage of Hurricane Charley as it slams into the much-maligned state of Florida. I worry for my friends down there and I feel sorry for everyone in the path of this monster. I wish we spent less time in this country sniping at one another and fighting, and more time working together to minimize the destruction from this kind of disaster.

And not that it's in the same category but I wish TV news would get over the notion that you have to send reporters to stand out in the wind and rain to report that it's windy and raining. It's not "on the scene" news coverage. It's cheap theatrics.

Debuting this Sunday on the Travel Channel: The Marvel Super Heroes' Guide to New York City. Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Joe Simon, John Romita and other great creators of Marvel Comics participate in a tour of Manhattan. The emphasis, as I understand it, is on locations where great scenes from comic book stories were set. It airs at 8:00 PM and again at 11:00 PM on my satellite dish. Check your local listings.

Fred Kaplan discusses the mess we're in in Iraq and how there may be no solution. I would like to believe he's wrong but suspect he is not. Please, someone…point me to an article that is more than Bush-Cheney puffery and offers a more optimistic appraisal.

Gail Sheehy discusses what Donald Rumsfeld did the morning of 9/11. Between now and Election Day, I think we're going to hear a lot more about this, and about what Bush did (or didn't do) that morn.

Here's a New York Times double feature: This article reports the shocking news that one-third of Bush's tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1% of income. Could have knocked me over with a feather.

Then, keeping that in mind, you might want to read Paul Krugman as he claims that Bush is trying to shift the tax burden from those who make money through investments to those who make money by working. Someday in this country, someone will come along who will believe in tax cuts across the board that do not slash the burden of one group at the expense of another.

Had a nice evening at Vince Waldron's monthly "Totally Looped" show up in Hollywood. Here's how this works: Vince, who is an award-winning writer-director-producer, assembles a troupe of talented actors skilled in improvisational comedy. Then he shows film clips that these folks have not seen. Then they have to do live dubbing, ad-libbing dialogue for the clips to make them address a topic that the live audience has suggested. The troupe last night consisted of (I hope I don't leave anyone out) Dan Castellaneta, Rick Kuhlman, Deb Lacusta, Rick Overton, Angela V. Shelton, Danny Mann and Edie McClurg.

If I may digress slightly — and since it's my weblog, no power on Earth can stop me — the Art of Improv Comedy has sustained some body blows in the last few decades. About the time performers started going from Saturday Night Live to huge movie careers, a lot of actors who didn't really have the chops for improv, or even a lot of interest in it, decided that was the new route to film stardom. Suddenly, improv classes were flooded with applicants…and that wasn't, in and of itself, a bad thing. Improv training is a good thing for actors even if they intend to spend the rest of their careers working off scripts. It trains them to hold onto the character they're playing and how to react to others in a scene and, most of all, how to listen. If you're doing an improvised scene, you'd better listen.

Not every actor can improvise. Some of the most honored actors of all time, starting with Sir Laurence Olivier and working down from there, could not. Others should simply not try. In the late eighties, I went to a number of alleged improv shows which were not really improv and/or not really good. The former were playing the old Morey Amsterdam game. If someone challenged Morey to tell a joke about a kangaroo, he often came back with this one…

So one day at the zoo, the kangaroo goes crazy. He screams and then he leaps out of his cage and runs off. The zoo keeper runs up to a lady standing by the cage and asks, "What happened?" The lady says, "I don't know. I just tickled him with my umbrella and he jumped up and ran off, that's all." So the zoo keeper says, "Well, you'd better tickle me 'cause I'm the one who's got to go catch him."

That's not a great joke but it was great for Morey's purpose because you could plug in any animal. If they wanted an ocelot joke, the lady tickled an ocelot with her umbrella. If someone asked for a platypus joke, the lady tickled a platypus. A lot of what gets passed off as improv comedy these days is like that: Fill in the blanks. So it's nice to see the crew Mr. Waldron has assembled. They're genuine improv performers, operating sans template. I especially love the little rambling introductions that Dan Castelleneta stammers out for the clips. Not only do we not know where he's going with them, it's obvious that Dan doesn't really know, either. That's the beauty of improv and the fact that he's very funny is an added bonus.

I would single out the other performers individually but I have a problem. As they dub the clips, they're sitting there in the dark doing rapid voice changes so it's not always easy to tell who's talking. Afterwards when we were mingling, I wanted to compliment whoever came up with a couple of specific lines but I wasn't sure which one to praise. My sense was that these people are all really good. There were some tech problems with the projector during the show, with some clips ending in premature blackouts. Being good improv performers, the players just worked it into the scenes and kept on going. The s.r.o. audience was delighted.

The next "Totally Looped" show is September 9 and details are at this website. I'll remind you when we get closer to that date but if you're near Hollywood (they're in the theater right next to the Improv on Melrose) you might want to jot it down now. They don't do these shows often enough.

P.S. At the end of the show, Edie McClurg announced that Dan C. just won his third Emmy for his voiceover performances on The Simpsons. Good pick.

Last year, I purchased (online) a couple of Vornado portable heaters from Costco. Today, I received an e-mail from Costco telling me that the models I'd received were the subject of a recall — something about them having a tendency to burst into flames or some other technicality like that. The message told me how to get my heaters replaced or repaired at no cost to me. (If you have Vornado heaters, go to their website and check out the details.) Maybe this happens all the time but it's new to me, and I was impressed with Costco making the effort to alert its customers.

Actually, I make jokes about their vastness and the fact that you can't buy a small anything there. But the more I go to Costco or order online and the more I read about how they run their business, the more impressed I am.

Also: If you live in Los Angeles, you might want to check out Restaurant Watch, a free site that monitors the Hygiene Inspection Violations in our local restaurants. You can build a little online database of the places you dine and you'll see the results of inspections and you can even be e-mailed when the places on your list are reinspected. What I found out is that I've been laboring under a delusion. I'd assumed that the expensive, ritzy-looking eateries I frequent would be among the cleanest and that the "dives" with cheap food would be questionable. Turns out, on my list, it's the other way around. One of my favorite "slightly expensive" place to eat — a place I dined last week, in fact — just got a score of 70 to barely earn a "C." That is very low. (There's nothing lower than a "C." 69 or below, they post the number instead of a letter, and those establishments usually scurry to correct flaws and get re-evaluated. Either that or they get closed down.) On the other hand, the two Sizzlers I occasionally visit both scored in the nineties for an "A," as did many places I wouldn't have expected.

By the way: If you do sign up there, don't read the details of those inspections. Even the ones that get the top grades have something wrong back in the kitchen. You don't really want to know what's in your frankfurters, either.

My buddy Bruce Reznick sends me this link to a conversation with Richard Pryor. A bunch of stand-up comics ask him questions, one of which is pretty stupid.

Alan Keyes sings a chorus of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" for news cameras. Somehow, I think it's going to take more than that for him to get the gay vote.

Paul "Mousie" Garner, who died last Sunday at age 95, was a veteran performer, starting back in the halcyon days of vaudeville. He was never much of a star but he was a nice man who loved to talk about the business and especially about his affiliation with the Three Stooges. Back when it was Moe, Larry and Shemp performing on stage with Ted Healy, Mousie was the pinch-hitter, filling in when Shemp was out. Several decades later, whenever the Stooges were down a member, there would be talk of Mousie rejoining the troupe…and at one point, "Curly" Joe DeRita briefly toured with Garner and another comic, billing themselves as "The New Three Stooges."

All of that gave Mousie the right, I suppose, to bill himself as part of the famous act and since he outlived the others and was so accessible, he was the go-to guy when any Stooge chronicler needed someone to interview. He actually did more than serve as a standby Stooge, but not a lot more. The times I chatted with him at autograph shows, we talked about his association with Spike Jones and also with Olsen and Johnson, who sent him out in the touring company of their Broadway smash, Hellzapoppin'. He would say that he planned to "semi-retire" from show business when he hit his hundredth birthday. I'm not sure what that meant since he sure didn't seem to be working the last few decades…but it's still a shame he didn't make it to retirement age.