Monthly Archives: March 2005

I will not be running in the Los Angeles Marathon this Sunday. There are many reasons for this but a good one is that on the marathon website, it says that Tylenol 8 Hour is — and I quote — "The Official Pain Reliever of the Los Angeles Marathon." I don't participate in anything that requires an Official Pain Reliever. This is why I stopped working for Disney.

Late Saturday night (aka early Sunday morning), NBC is rerunning the full, 90-minute version of the third-ever episode of Saturday Night Live. Actually, as you'll note from the above ticket, it was still called NBC's Saturday Night at the time. I believe this was the last episode before they changed the name.

This is the one hosted by Rob Reiner who, it is said, freaked out after a disastrous dress rehearsal and almost walked off the show. It was good he didn't because things miraculously came together for the live broadcast. It was not only a decent episode but it represented a giant step forward in the program finding its format and identity.

The first week was a jumble of disparate segments with occasional appearances by host George Carlin. The second week, Paul Simon hosted and it turned into a long Paul Simon special, including a reunion concert with Art Garfunkel. The third week, with Reiner, it actually began to look like a sketch comedy show.

There are some nice moments in there. Andy Kaufman does his "Pop Goes the Weasel" routine. John Belushi does his Joe Cocker impression. Near the end, there's a brilliant film by Albert Brooks in which he attempts to perform open-heart surgery on someone.

The Brooks film was the subject of much upset. He was contracted to produce films of a certain length and that week, he handed in one that was more than double the agreed-upon running time. No one at SNL questioned its cleverness but already, they were beginning to sense that long film pieces did not work on a live show, and members of the cast and writing staff resented that Brooks was usurping so much of their screen time.

There was a strong push to chop it down or even dump it but the host, Mr. Reiner, was one of Brooks's closest friends and he insisted it air without cuts…which it did. The whole matter pretty much soured the relationship between the show and Brooks, and one might note that after he delivered the remaining films on his contract, he disappeared from Saturday Night Live forever. He never appeared on it again, and has gone largely unmentioned in the various histories and retrospectives.

Anyway, you might want to catch the episode…or at least, Brooks trying to become a surgeon. It's buried at the end, right after a spot with the Muppets. Their "Land of Gorch" segments, though done live in the studio, were otherwise in the same category as the Brooks efforts — another good idea at the outset that didn't fit as the show found its form. As it did, everyone wanted to dump everything besides the host spots, the musical guests and the sketches. (John Belushi reportedly lobbied to dump the hosts and everything else that didn't feature John Belushi.)

I always thought it was a shame Jim Henson didn't do more with Gorch. The bits didn't fit into SNL but the characters were funny and oddly appealing. I'm guessing there was some contractual problem where he had to share revenues with NBC and/or Lorne Michaels, so he opted to invest his time and energy in projects he could own outright.

One other thing I should have mentioned about Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. If you want to research them on the Internet, it may help to remember that though they were two of the most important creators in comic book history, an amazing number of comic book fans and scholars cannot spell their names. Sometimes, it's Siegal. Sometimes, it's Schuster. Often, it's Siegal and Schuster, and there have been other permutations. I have a magazine here somewhere that says that Superman was created by Simon and Schuster.

Think I'm exaggerating? Take a look at this Google search.

This probably shouldn't bother me as much as it does…but I lived through the period when DC Comics pretended Jerry and Joe had never existed…when they even published histories of the character without mentioning their names. I recall vividly sitting in the Writers Guild Theater for an early screening of the 1978 Superman movie, which gave them their first on-screen "Created by" credit after Time-Warner management came to its senses and gave them that, plus pensions. I didn't particularly like the film but that moment in the credits — when their names came up and a huge cheer erupted from the audience — was one of the most thrilling moments I can recall spending in a movie house. Considering what it took to get those names on their creation, it seems like we oughta make an effort to spell them correctly.

(The story of how Jerry and Joe waged that battle, and how master cartoonist Jerry Robinson acted as their representative, is told in the new book by Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow, which I reviewed/plugged here.)

Spent all afternoon at the dentist having old, cracking fillings drilled out and replaced with new ones. This is about as much fun as…well, as spending all afternoon at the dentist having old, cracking fillings drilled out and replaced with new ones.

Came home to find the entire neighborhood was without electricity. I called up the Department of Water and Power to inquire if anyone had reported it (someone had) and to inquire as to when it might be restored. The lady on the phone gave me an answer that roughly translated to "Sometime between now and the next time the Red Sox are in the World Series." Her tone of voice seemed to favor the latter so I spent the next few hours trying to find a flashlight without dead batteries and wagering whether the power would be on before the Novocain wore off. The Novocain beat the electricity by about an hour. I'm going to hurriedly post a few things before it goes off again…

As a few of you may know, the families of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster have taken legal action to reclaim the copyright to Superman and certain allied characters. I think this is the most important news story to hit the comic book industry in decades but most of the sites that report on the business take the Jeff Gannon approach to news and just print press releases, so they're a lot more interested in who's signed a long-term contract to ink Iron Man. In fairness, some fans are more interested in that, too…but I think it's Big News. The business was largely founded on the success of Superman, and many companies thrived on the concept that you could lock up the rights to someone's idea, boot them out and then make all the money there was to be made off it. Because some decent folks at Time-Warner and DC Comics came to power, Siegel and Shuster did not live out their declining years in poverty and humiliation.

The two men received a respectable pension, and Jerry was at great peace the last time I saw him, which was only a few weeks before he passed away in 1996. Nevertheless, if he can see what's going on, I'm sure he's cheering on his widow and children as they pursue legal avenues that were not open to him for most of his lifetime.

As I said, a lot of the comic book community has not heard about this legal action, and some of what has circulated is in the Erroneous Rumor category. Some more of it has taken the form of panicked fans, worrying that Superman will be plucked out of the DC Universe, rupturing the precious continuity of the Legion of Super-Heroes or otherwise disrupting their collections. (It is highly unlikely that Superman will ever not be a Time-Warner property. The squabble is pretty much about how the super-millions of bucks the character grosses will be rewarded, and whether the saga of Siegel and Shuster will have a happier, albeit posthumous, ending.)

One of the few places where you can get solid info is the news site, Newsarama, where Matt Brady has been going beyond cut-and-pasting press handouts and filing stories like this one. Some of it's a bit complicated but Matt's presentation seems to be both fair and accurate, and I wanted to call your attention to it. Keep your eye on his site for further developments.

Starting March 18, TV Land will be airing two hours of SCTV every Friday night. A year or so ago, this would have come as glorious news…and it's still not bad news, I suppose. But now that many of those shows are readily available on DVD, it's like, "Oh, that's nice."

If it is bad news, it's only because some of us would like to see the many TV channels we receive resurrect some old shows that are not otherwise available. I remember that when I got my DirecTV satellite dish, I thought I was in for more of a feast than I got. I figured that with all the channels I could now receive, surely one of them would be running old Sgt. Bilko episodes…or Car 54, Where Are You? It turned out they were all running The Andy Griffith Show and M*A*S*H, sometimes many times a day, instead of more obscure shows that I think I'd like to see again.

You never know. Sometimes, you see something again after many years…and the main fascination is to wonder what you ever saw in the program and if maybe they've refilmed them since then. So while I think I'd like to see certain old favorite shows again, maybe not. I recently watched some old episodes of Hennessy, The Good Guys, Calvin and the Colonel, and a few others I'd once enjoyed. In each case, there was a small "nostalgia rush" and the fun of seeing how well my memory stacked up against what it was remembering. Beyond that though, there has usually been a slight letdown. I felt more like a distant spectator of those shows than I did, back when I used to look forward to them.

But then, maybe that's me and not the shows. As I get older, I find that TV is more and more something I watch while I do something else. I'm running last night's What's My Line? rerun right now as I write this, and I'm watching with about 20% of my concentration. That's just enough to scan for things that are worthy of my full attention and if one of those pops up on the screen, I'll stop writing this and watch for real. This is one of the luxuries of the TiVo. I can easily record things to watch when I feel like it, and I can watch them with this kind of divided attentiveness because I can always rewind if need be.

I wish we had available to us, a wider array of old TV shows — and old movies, for that matter. But I'm not sure I'd watch most of them with more than about a fifth of my attention.

Frank Rich on Hunter S. Thompson and how the press could use someone like him these days.

I haven't mentioned GSN's Black-and-White Overnight bloc lately. They've been running old episodes of What's My Line? for the eight-jillionth time and Beat the Clock and The Name's the Same for what I believe are the first reruns ever. I find Beat the Clock to be largely unwatchable. I thought the show was stupid when I was six years old and nothing has changed since then. The Name's the Same is not without interest, however, largely because of its panel which over the years included Carl Reiner, Abe Burrows, Gene Rayburn, Meredith Willson, Joan Alexander and — in episodes reaired recently — comedian Arnold Stang and the creator of Droodles, Roger Price.

Mr. Price, who passed away in 1990, was a comedy writer of some renown in the fifties. He did the foreword for The Mad Reader, the first paperback collection of Harvey Kurtzman's MAD comics. Later on, Price edited a short-lived, little-known (but very funny) humor magazine called Grump, and co-created with Leonard Stern the party game, "Mad Libs." He was also a cartoonist of sorts, doing his "Droodles" on TV shows, books and even for a time, a syndicated newspaper strip. The Droodle at above left is entitled, "A ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch" and the one at above right is "Man playing trombone in a phone booth." Well, what else would you call them?

The Name's the Same was a never-quite-successful attempt by game show mavens Goodson and Todman to replicate their own What's My Line? but with odd names instead of occupations. The show came and went and came back again and changed rules and hosts and panelists but never achieved the stature of the original. Robert Q. Lewis was the moderator for much of its run and he managed to be everything you wouldn't want in a game show host. He was cold, he was bad at ad-libbing and he was very bad at (or perhaps uninterested in) setting up the panelists to be funny. As a result, the show depended heavily on "gambits" for its humor. "Gambit" was the behind-the-scenes term for a question that was planted with the panel so they would "inadvertently" ask something very funny. The other night, for example, they had to guess what was in a box that, we knew, contained baby clothes. One of the lady panelists asked, "Is this something a woman might get as a wedding present?" The audience howled but it was pretty obvious the exchange was planned. Some weeks, the show did this to excess.

Lewis was replaced as host by Dennis James, who was even worse, and other emcees were tried. Coming up in about ten days or so on GSN should be a run of episodes that were hosted by Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding. They just about closed out the show's run because, I guess, someone figured that if two of the funniest men ever on TV and radio couldn't make the program work, no one could. Anyway, I've never seen the Bob & Ray episodes so I'm looking forward to them.

We don't yet know what GSN will put in the slot when their inventory of The Name's the Same runs out in seven or eight weeks. Odds are it will be another run of either the I've Got a Secret or To Tell the Truth libraries. I'd like something that hasn't been rerun but I'll settle for either of those again. Anything…just so long as it isn't increased airings of Beat the Clock.

Jay Leno may be called as a witness in the Michael Jackson Circus Trial. His lawyers are trying to make sure the gag order affecting those involved in the trial doesn't impact his ability to mine the subject for monologue jokes. Here's the story.

Jeffrey Toobin writes in The New Yorker (which means the link goes away in a few days) about Republican options for using the "nuclear option" to ram legislation through the Senate.

I love how I can just ask a question on this weblog and, nine times outta ten, someone will e-mail me the answer within the hour.

The fine cartoonist, Nate Butler — who I haven't seen since we had lunch at the WonderCon — writes to note that in one edition of the National Cartoonists Society album, Al Smith wrote and even hand-lettered his biography. It says in there that he was born on March 21…so that's a pretty good source of info. Thanks, Nate. Next lunch is on you.

My ol' pal Don Markstein notes my birthday over on his Toonopedia site (thanks, Don) and adds in a page about DNAgents, the comic I co-created with Will Meugniot.

And Don has a question. Once upon a time, there was a cartoonist named Al Smith. He drew the Mutt and Jeff newspaper strip for a measly 48 years. Some sources say that Mr. Smith was born on March 2 while others say March 21. Don would like to set the record straight. Does anyone reading this have any definitive info? Write him or write me if you do.

Those of you who live in Southern California and have been concerned about further rainfall can breathe easier. I've just arranged to have a new roof put on my leaky garage. Once I get it on there, which will be some time next week, there will be very little chance of more precipitation…not unless I do something dumb and get the car washed.

I'm also getting a new door for the garage. It's a two-car garage and I have this metal door on there now, with a wooden frame all the way around it. A rod from the Genie automatic garage door opener is connected to the top of the wooden frame and when you push the button, that rod is pushed or pulled by the motor to open or close the door. The other night when I pushed the button, the rod pulled on the frame and instead of opening the door, it split the frame in two, causing the whole door to buckle and flap out of shape. This is not a good thing.

Applying the strength of ten men, which I have, I managed to get the door all the way open and to move my main driving-around car to the street. Then, applying the strength of ten more men (which I also have), I managed to get the door closed, which is how it will stay until the garage door people come by to install its replacement. This all costs money, so I'll soon be inaugurating the Garage Sale feature on this site. I decided to start it a few months ago, but I didn't figure I'd be using that income to pay for my garage.

Thanks to all of you who've sent Happy Birthday wishes. I'm spending most of today on a script so posting here should be light for a while, but I do appreciate the e-mails. If someone wants to send me a new garage, that would be nice, too.

Here's a video of two excerpts from the memorial service for Graham Chapman, the deceased member of Monty Python. [CAUTION: Contains language.]

And I should have mentioned that that neat page on the Oswald the Rabbit cartoons is the work of David Gerstein and Pietro Shakarian. Individually and collectively, David and Pietro have been responsible for digging up much valuable info on classic animation and have selflessly put it up on the web for all. The Classic Felix the Cat Page is one example. The Columbia Crow's Nest is another.