Monthly Archives: June 2005

Here's a gloomy assessment of the situation in Iraq…from a Republican senator.

Tommy Donovan, who's obviously smarter than I am, figured out a way to do a direct link to the Mo Rocca report from Metropolis. Here it is.

Comic book publisher and collector Bruce Hamilton passed away early this morning following a prolonged illness. I'm afraid I don't have a lot more in the way of details but just losing Bruce comes as very sad news. Bruce was a great patron and promoter of classic comic artists, most notably Carl Barks, and was involved in most of the major, high quality reprintings of Barks works the last few years. Obviously, what made Carl's work so popular was its basic quality, but Bruce did a lot to make sure that it was kept in print and that high standards were maintained, and that financial rewards trickled back to Carl in his retirement years. Bruce had several publishing imprints, including Gladstone Comics, Another Rainbow and Hamilton Comics, but they all showed enormous love and respect for the material they issued, and I always enjoyed the time I spent with him talking comics. One hopes that tradition will continue.

The other night, Jay Leno sent Tonight Show correspondent Mo Rocca to Metropolis, Illinois for the 2005 Superman celebration. Posted now on the show's site is the segment, which includes interviews with Noel Neill, John Schneider and Superman museum curator Jim Hambrick. Unfortunately, the way the NBC website is configured, there seems to be no way me for to give you a direct link to the video. So if you want to see it, you'll have to go to this page and find it yourself.

Incidentally, you'll note that in addition to not being willing to provide direct links, the folks who run that website also think the gentleman's name is Mo Rocco. Unless he's changed it lately, it's still Mo Rocca.

Last year, the year before and the year before, the fine folks at TwoMorrows Books published fine collections of my silly articles. The first volume was Comic Books and Other Necessities of Life. The second was Wertham Was Right. And the third was Superheroes in my Pants.

There is no new volume this year. I've been too busy to assemble one. However, you can still purchase those three. In fact, if you've never bought any of them, you can get a bargain: All three are now available in a bundle for thirty-four bucks, which is almost like getting one free but not exactly. Go here to do this…and consider yourself fortunate. If you just need one, you can find a link to purchase it on Amazon and if you don't need any…well, what can I say?

Mark "Deep Throat" Felt has reportedly closed a book and movie deal to tell his tale…what he remembers of it, anyway. Since his identity became known, one of my correspondents has bombarded me with messages, trying to convince me that Felt is not and never was a man of any honor. My pen-pal seems to think this announcement proves it, and others are touting it as evidence of Felt's bad motives. I'm more than a little amazed at the leap.

First off, Mark Felt has now become the absolute last major Watergate figure to sell a book about his role in that scandal. They all wrote books. They all tried for movie deals and many got them. If exploiting Watergate for profit was a crime, a lot of those guys would be returned to prison, and G. Gordon Liddy would have to give back his entire career since then.

Secondly, I fail to see how someone's actions in 2005 — and this is assuming they're his actions and not his family's — reflects on his motives in 1971. Is the premise here that Felt met with Woodward in that garage only because he was thinking, "Oh, boy. Maybe years from now when I'm old and can't recall anything, I can get a deal to write a book about this"?

Some of the attacks on Felt's arguable heroism have been hysterical, and some contradicted their own points by trying to simultaneously dismiss him as a figure of little importance and blame him for subverting the entire Nixon presidency. I think the record will show that a lot of people brought down the Nixon presidency, starting with Nixon. He was accused of using the C.I.A. to stop an investigation that might lead to him or his aides…and, lo and behold, there was a tape recording of him giving the order to have the C.I.A. stop an investigation that might lead to him or his aides. When that came out, even the loyalest Republicans deserted Nixon and he got the message and resigned. I don't see how any of that was because of anything Mark Felt did that might have been unethical…including making a book deal 34 years later.

The folks putting together the forthcoming DVD set of The Yogi Bear Show are trying to make it as complete as possible, including getting the right credits on all the cartoons. This is, of course, admirable and to be encouraged. Alas, there are two for which they need our help. There was a Yakky Doodle cartoon called "Happy Birthdaze" and a Snagglepuss cartoon called "Royal Rodent." All the prints of those two cartoons in the Turner/WB/Cartoon Network vaults have truncated opening credits. Each lacks the title card that identifies the animator, writer, etc.

If you have an old print of either cartoon (and we're probably looking for someone with a 16mm copy here), can you check it and see if it has that information? We do not need to borrow the cartoons. We need you to tell us what the title cards say. Drop me a note if you can do this. Thanks.

My favorite segment lately on The Daily Show: Host Jon Stewart takes A Relatively Closer Look at the use of Hitler in our political rhetoric. (If that link doesn't work, go to the Comedy Central homepage and look around for the clip that mentions Hitler.)

David Thiel is the Program Director at WILL-TV, a Public Broadcasting System station in Urbana, IL. He writes the following in reponse to my comments the other day…

Just read this morning's political rant. There's some truth in what you write, and I'm sure that most of us in the public broadcasting system would prefer not to have our funding subject to the whims of politicians. However, simply declaring that we should be freed from the government doesn't address the central problem, which is a chronically underfunded U.S. public broadcasting system.

While the money provided by the federal government through CPB is not the majority source of our funding — in truth, individual viewer/listeners contributions far exceed tax dollars — it is a relatively stable source which the system leverages to attract money from states, universities, foundations and businesses. A loss of federal funding would be devastating, particularly to smaller, rural stations. Furthermore, due to difficulties in attracting national corporate underwriting — including a soft advertising market and corporate America's newfound reluctance to support public institutions — several signature PBS series are in danger of coming to an end. CPB money — funnelled through local stations' dues to PBS–is helping to keep them on life support.

My own station is in a mid-size market, but we are facing a number of financial pressures, including a sluggish state economy and a budget-busting, federally-mandated transition to digital broadcasting. We've made a number of cuts in response, but we're getting to the point where we may not be able to absorb a loss such as you propose without making large-scale reductions in the services we provide to our local communities.

While I'm sure that you are sincere in your reasoning for doing away with federal funding for public broadcasting, most of those declaring that government has no business funding the arts aren't doing so on philosophical grounds. They simply want us to no longer exist, and defunding CPB is a good place to start.

Saying that we should do without federal funding isn't enough. There needs to be broad, public support for an alternative source of income. One of the ideas being mooted is a trust fund, but even that would require a great deal of start-up money. In the long run, that might be the best answer. In the short run, it's vital to ensure that CPB continues to exist. Those who agree should contact their members of Congress immediately, as the full House will be voting on this matter very soon.

As I hope I made clear, I'd like PBS to exist. I'd also like to see the government spend more money on education, medical care for the disadvantaged and a few dozen other things that I think are more important than Reading Rainbow and more legitimate applications of tax dolllars. I'm not wishing for the demise of Sesame Street. The happy ending to this for me would be that enough private individuals and public corporations would support the institution that it never had to ask Congress for another dime.

Having said that, I guess I should confess that I stopped subscribing to our local PBS outlet, KCET, a number of years ago. I paid my dues for a decade or two but the sheer quantity of mail asking me to renew early or up my donation had become truly staggering and annoying. I don't mind junk mail in and of itself, since it takes a whopping ten seconds to toss it in the wastebasket. But I was genuinely starting to feel like every time I sent KCET fifty dollars, they spent sixty trying to get more out of me. I kinda wanted my money to go for programming, not badgering me.

I finally wrote to whoever signed one of the many pleas and said, "Hey, I'll make a deal with you. I'll support KCET indefinitely at the $100 level if you'll never again send me any solicitations apart from my annual renewal notice." I got back a letter that said, in effect, "We can't do that. We've found this approach to be very effective." Well, it wasn't with me. For a time, I was also getting phone calls from them, and I have a policy not to buy anything from any salesman who calls me like that.

Obviously, I know little about what it takes to amass the funds necessary to keep PBS up and operating. Back in the days before HBO and Showtime, I believe that some people had trouble with the whole concept of paying for television programming. I wonder, now that so much of America does pay for premium channels or cable or pay-per-view, if it's easier or harder to get them to consider sending money to a TV channel. I also wonder if anyone has done a feasibility study on making PBS into at least a partial "pay" system like HBO, perhaps with the kids' programs available to all. I actually think I'd have a lot less problem supporting Public Broadcasting if that just meant another monthly fee like I pay for The Sundance Channel and Cinemax. I'd sure pay to get rid of Pledge Breaks and direct-mail solicitations. I'm not sure I want to pay to have them send me near-daily renewal notices…or, worse, to put Tucker Carlson on the air.

Anyway, David, thank you for the message. I believe in what you do, even if I'd like to see some different ways found to pay for it.

Congress is moving to sharply reduce — and perhaps, eventually eliminate — funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In other words, less funds for Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow and other programs that are paid for, at least in part, by your taxes.

I'll probably find myself on the opposite side to many of my friends on this, but I don't think this is a bad thing. The motives behind the cuts may be nasty — an ongoing Conservative drive to silence reporting that does not, by default, skew in their favor — but that doesn't mean there aren't good reasons for the cuts. I've always been uncomfy with the notion that "funding for the arts" is a legitimate function of government. I want there to be arts, of course, just as I want there to be a lot of things that I don't think should be underwritten with tax dollars.

But I also want the arts to be free of political pressure and I don't know that that's ever possible when they're underwritten with public money. I recall tuning in C-Span one day years ago and seeing Jesse Helms and an equally-insufferable Democrat debating the merits of some piece of statuary which had been paid for with federal funding. Helms thought it was obscene, the Democrat thought it wasn't, and my reaction was that these two men should not be having this discussion on the floor of the Senate. "The arts" should not be at the mercy of any politician's tastes or value system, and the sooner they're freed from that, the better.

I love seeing movies at the Motion Picture Academy down on Wilshire. Some say it's the best movie theater in the country, at least in a tech sense…and if it isn't, it's darn close. Everything I see there reminds me of that "special" quality of film that you can never get at home watching a DVD, no matter how big a plasma screen you purchase. It's a special treat with a movie as visually rich and fascinating as last evening's presentation, Bambi.

The star of the evening…well, there were two stars. One was Ollie Johnston, the last of Disney's "Nine Old Men," who was one of main animators of the film. When they rolled Ollie out (he's 93 and in a wheelchair) for the post-screening panel discussion, the standing ovation from the audience was as touching as anything the Disney crew ever produced.

The other star was the print, itself. An amazing digital restoration was recently done and it's now available on DVD. But to appreciate how remarkable it is, I suspect you have to see it the way we did tonight — on a big screen, and preceded by a brief presentation of "before and after" examples. At the end of the film, when newly-added credits appeared for those who had done the restoration, there was a huge burst of applause for those folks, many of whom were present. We all hear bad things about the current management of Disney, but this preservation and refurbishment must have cost a bloody fortune. True, it will probably turn out to cost-effective but a lot of studios would have tried to strike a new print off an old negative, clean up a little dirt and release it as a "full restoration." Someone deserves credit for not going that route. (Here's an article that will tell you a little bit about what they did.)

So the film looked and sounded beautiful, and the introductions and panel discussion — hosted by good buddy, Leonard Maltin — were perfect. Joining Ollie Johnston were current-day animator Andreas Deja, and two Bambi voice actors — Peter Behn, who at age 4 voiced Thumper, and Cammie King, who wasn't much older when she recorded the voice of Faline. Ms. King drew a noticeable ooh from the audience when she mentioned that Bambi was one of two movies she worked on, the other being Gone With the Wind. I see by the Internet Movie Database that she was also in Blondie Meets the Boss, and I guess I can understand why you might leave that one off your résumé. Still, I wonder how many actors can say that 66.6% of their film roles were in movies that are widely regarded as classics. (Also present and applauded, though he declined to participate in the panel, was Tyrus Wong, who art-directed the film's extraordinary backgrounds.)

With all this wonderment, I hate to inject a "but" into this report but, as you know, we bloggers are always under oath when we post. I have to admit that there is something about Bambi that I do not love, and I'm not sure I can explain what it is. There's a stretch of film there — from just before Bambi's mother is killed through to near the end — where I feel unpleasantly manipulated. And though the whole movie is only 70 minutes, it always seems way too long to me.

Perhaps it's some form of sense memory. I first saw Bambi when I was five years old. It was the 1957 reissue and I remember my father driving my mother and me to the theater in Westwood, dropping us off and picking us up after. It was either the Village Theater or the Bruin — then, as now, right across the street from one another. I had been carefully briefed beforehand that there were sad moments in Bambi. I think newspaper articles of the day actually cautioned parents to prepare very young children for the mother dying and the forest fire. Anyway, none of that upset me but I do recall that the movie was, like most movies are when you're that age, about eleven hours long, and I really didn't like a lot of what was occurring on that screen.

There are some movies that bring out a sense of Unconditional Surrender in me. I just want to tell the filmmakers, "Okay, I'm yours. Play with my feelings. Take me on an emotional roller coaster and I'll follow you anywhere." Somehow, Bambi has never quite moved me to that point. It comes close, especially in the early scenes with Thumper, and I can certainly have a good time admiring the sheer artistry. I just feel like more of a distant spectator with Bambi than I do with Snow White or Pinocchio or Dumbo or any of the other early classic Disney animated features. Maybe in a few days, I'll have more thoughts and I can do a better job of explaining why this is. In any case, even if you buy the DVD, should you get the chance to see this version on a big screen, do not miss that opportunity.

Over at IGN, Fred Hembeck is ripping the lid off one of the best-kept secrets of The Marvel Age of Comics. While he was publishing the vintage Lee-Kirby Fantastic Four and other comic book masterworks, the firm's owner, Martin Goodman, was also putting out a line of ultra-cheap men's magazines. For some of them, he had the comic division whip up a low-budget strip not unlike Playboy's Little Annie Fanny. Various installments were written by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Ernie Hart, and drawn by Wally Wood, Al Hartley, Jim Mooney and Bill Ward. All but Mr. Ward were concurrently doing work for the comics. The strip was timid in execution (Pussycat kept most of her clothes on) and kind of satirical in an Al Capp sorta way, and Hembeck will tell you all about this curio, and he'll probably inspire some writer to bring her back and put her in The Avengers.

Fred Kaplan parses the Downing Street Memo for us.

Over at The Onion, Billy West talks about cartoon voice work — an area at which he excels. Billy complains, and rightly so, that a lot of producers would rather pay zillions of dollars to a "celebrity" voice who'll give a mediocre performance than to hire a reasonably-priced specialist who might not have the reputation but has a lot more talent. He's absolutely right. And the maddening thing about that is that many of those producers will tell you, off the record, "Yeah, the no-name voice actor would have done a much better job but the celebrity adds a note of importance to the project."

Billy notes one of the unethical practices in this area. Some less-than-scrupulous producers will bring in a guy like him or Maurice LaMarche or Rob Paulsen — any good voice actor — to audition. And then they won't hire them but they'll take that audition tape, play it for the star they do hire and say, "Try to read the copy like this guy did." This is a slight variation on a scam that a couple of studios were working years ago, when having voice tracks recorded in Canada was even more financially advantageous than it is now. They'd audition for a new TV show in Hollywood, calling actors back again and again, just as if they intended to hire some of them to work on the series. And then, once they'd selected the proper voices from all those created by the L.A.-based actors, they would not hire those people. Instead, they'd take the audition tapes up to a studio in Vancouver or Toronto, bring in Canadian actors and say, "We need you to match these voices." What a lovely practice.

Gore Vidal on how democracy is supposed to work.