Monthly Archives: September 2005

All the other obits for Bob Denver will probably show you a picture from Gilligan's Island and make passing mention of his earlier role as Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. And he was good on both shows, especially the latter. It was as the TV-scrubbed beatnik Krebs, who went into shock at sound of the word "work" that many of us first saw him and realized what a good actor he was.

But I decided to post a photo from his first post-Gilligan series, The Good Guys, a little-remembered gem that ran two seasons — went on in '68 and went off in early '70 — and has rarely been rerun since. It starred Denver as a cab driver who was life-long friends with the operator of a diner. The friend was played by Herb Edelman, a great character actor, and his wife was played by Joyce Van Patten. (The same year The Good Guys went on, Edelman filmed the movie version of The Odd Couple, re-creating the role of Murray the Cop he'd originated on Broadway. The one time I met him years later, he said he loved The Good Guys and his one regret about it, apart from its short run, was that it prevented him from playing Murray on the Odd Couple TV show with Klugman and Randall.)

Anyway, someone oughta rerun The Good Guys because it was a pretty good show. It was filmed in front of a live audience on Stage 2 at CBS Studio Center, which was the same stage that had previously held that island on which Gilligan was stranded. It had been converted to an audience stage (Gilligan was filmed without one) but Denver always told people he recognized it because there was still sand in every crevice. One hopes they got it all out by the time The Mary Tyler Moore Show took up residence in there. Here, courtesy of the management of the forthcoming website, oldtvtickets.com, is a ticket from The Good Guys…

Denver's career after that was a flurry of unsold pilots and short-lived shows (anyone remember Dusty's Trail?). The one time I met him was when he did the first of two unsuccessful attempts to revive the old Dobie Gillis show. In 1978, my then-employer Jimmie Komack got the job of producing Whatever Happened to Dobie Gillis?, which was one such pilot. The show's creator, Max Shulman, had written a very funny script in tandem with Eric Cohen and on the strength of it, most of the old cast committed…though Denver, we heard around the office, was an expensive participant. Working from the premise that the continued success of Gilligan's Island had made him a TV superstar — or maybe just from the idea that you couldn't revive Dobie without Maynard — he demanded and got star billing, even above Dwayne Hickman who played Dobie, and enough money that Komack spent the whole time stalking around the office, grousing that Denver had committed grand larceny. As I recall, Denver also insisted that he would not dye his white hair, and Jimmie thought that for what they were paying him, he should have been willing to tint it aquamarine and tie it in braids.

I had nothing to do with the pilot other than to be around and watch in horror as Komack decided he was going to "reinvent" the show, and that he was eminently qualified to do this because he had never been a fan of the old series. He got rid of Shulman and that script, commissioned a new one that contained none of the old charm, and produced a revamp that absolutely no one liked. Hickman was rightly furious that Dobie had been devalued. Denver was angry about that, plus the fact that his "return" to prime-time sitcoms was such a fiasco. About the change of scripts, he kept saying, "Bait and switch, bait and switch." He'd never have signed on, he said, if they'd offered him the script that he and the others ultimately had to perform.

I remember two conversations with him — one, before the troubles began, when he was genuinely thrilled to talk to someone who knew him as something other than Little Buddy on the Island. We talked about The Good Guys and about a recent stage production he'd starred in, which I wish I'd seen, playing the Woody Allen role in Play It Again, Sam. He had done some other plays, he said, and people seemed so surprised to see him depart as much as he often did from his TV personnas. An approximate quote would be, "After Dobie, people thought all I could play was Maynard. And after Gilligan, people thought all I could play was Gilligan. Maybe if this thing [the Dobie revival] goes, I'll be back to people only thinking I can be Maynard again." Later, after rehearsals commenced, he wasn't worried about that happening.

The other conversation was in the midst of the arguing and unhappiness. I was eating alone in the commissary and he came over with a tray and asked if he could sit with me…and did I realize what a disaster the new Dobie pilot was turning out to be? I told him I hadn't read it and had nothing to do with it, but that I thought tossing away a Max Shulman script for Dobie Gillis was like…well, I forget what I said. Make up an analogy. Anyway, he went on and on about how television had changed, how it was run by people who didn't know anything, and how it was no longer his game. I think he had already moved away from Hollywood to West Virginia but if he hadn't, this was one of the things that prompted the relocation. It certainly convinced him that his days in the mainstream of television were over.

Thereafter, it was all guest appearances, lectures and autograph shows for Bob, plus I always heard he was very happy doing a radio program from his home state. I was never a huge fan of Gilligan's Island but I think it's great that its ongoing popularity in syndication gave him a fame he could ride for the rest of his life. Because he was good on the screen and he sure seemed to me like a nice man…at least when he wasn't threatening to murder Jimmie Komack.

Another Blondie mention I missed: Monday's installment of The Duplex. Thanks to Alex Krislov for letting me know.

In other news: Today's Dilbert doesn't mention Blondie in either of its two versions. Apparently, the joke Scott Adams wanted to do was one that some editors might not want to run so the strip was distributed with two punchlines. Here's a link to one version and here's a link to the other. You can decide for yourself which is the more "sensitive" last panel.

And here we have three DVD sets that no fancier of Monty Python should be without. At Last The 1948 Show was a British series broadcast in 1967 which starred John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor. It was an obvious antecedent of Python and some of it was very funny. Alas, most of the thirteen shows produced have either been lost or exist in not-the-greatest video. A few whole episodes survive as do a lot of bits and pieces of different episodes. According to someone who knows more about this stuff than I do, a number of scattered sketches have been assembled to form the five episodes that are on this DVD. So the material is fuzzy and the shows aren't the way they were originally aired…but it's still those four guys working near the peak of their game so it's funny enough for me. (The "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch, later used occasionally by Python, is present and worth the price, all by its lonesome. That's the one with the old guys sitting around saying things like, "We used to dream of living in a corridor…")

Shortly after Cleese and Chapman finished that show, the BBC began airing a very hip kids' show — hip in the way Soupy Sales was hip over here — that attracted something of an adult following. It starred Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, David Jason and Denise Coffey, and it was also a precusor of Python, even foreshadowing certain sketches and characters. It was called Do Not Adjust Your Set and the DVD release has about two hours of that material, some of which is also very funny. (Terry Gilliam is credited with animation but there isn't much on the episodes included.) Shortly after both this and the 1948 program went off, two guys from one and three guys from the other got together, added in the animator, and you had a very fine Flying Circus, indeed.

Lastly, after Python, Michael Palin and Terry Jones went off to do an odd but sometimes brilliant series called Ripping Yarns, and all nine episodes are on this set which also includes commentary tracks, outtakes and other special features. The show, it is said, did not do well when it first made the rounds, failing to please audiences expecting another Monty Python show. If you expect that, you'll probably be disappointed, too. If you can wrap your mind around the notion of Palin and Jones doing something different, you might enjoy it a lot. I eventually did.

Haven't found any Blondie crossovers today, but D.D. Degg caught another one I missed yesterday. It was in a strip called Through Thick and Thin which, I have to admit, I hadn't heard of before.

In the Blondie strip itself, the Bumsteads are embarking on a vacation and along the way, they'll apparently run into a few more characters from other strips. I'm guessing that if any other strips do anything, they'll do it on Thursday, which is the actual anniversary of the Blondie feature.

Our friend and hero Stan Freberg will be making a couple of appearances in England later this month. On September 19, he'll be the subject of a show for BBC4 Radio which will emanate from The Comedy Store over there. Here's the info if you're there and want to attend. When I find out how to listen in on the Internet, I'll let you know.

The best bit of commentary I have seen so far on what's happened in and to the Gulf Coast comes from Keith Olbermann. Here's a link to a transcript of it and here, to whet your appetite, is the first part…

Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater…"

Well, there's your problem right there.

If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government's response to a crisis, this was it.

The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might've saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could've brought last Monday and Tuesday — like the President, whose statements have looked like they're being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.

But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by the head of what is ironically called The Department of Homeland Security: Louisiana is a city…

Politician after politician — Republican and Democrat alike — has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the "I-Me" switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were, congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.

Go read the whole thing. As soon as I find a good video link to Mr. Olbermann's comments, I'll post it, too.

[UPDATE: Found one! Here's a video link.]

A correspondent wrote to me, apparently misunderstanding something I'd written here, that he too wanted to hear no more about Hurricane Katrina. What I meant was that those of us who've done all we can (donations, mostly) cannot continuously think about it and nothing else. We have to — to use a phrase I've never liked — get on with our lives. But we also can't make like nothing happened down there. There's a lot to fix and in our own microscopic ways, we can and must apply some pressure to those who are in a position to fix it.

We had also better get used to hearing about the Gulf Coast devastation because there's a lot more bad news to come, starting with an ongoing body count that will probably be rising for many months. It wasn't long after the towers fell on 9/11 that the world had some sense that around 3,000 lives were lost. This tote's going to mount in continous and sickening increments for a long time as they find bodies in houses and drained communities, and as people who were ill or injured succumb. The Mayor of New Orleans is saying it may hit 10,000 and I'm not sure how he can possibly know that now…but no one's rising to claim he's way off.

And then we're going to have hearings about what went wrong. Actually, one assumes there will be hearings about what went wrong but we may first have to go through the hearings to determine whether we should have hearings about what went wrong. If we do, we're going to hear a lot of reports like this one, excerpted from an online account by NBC newsguy Brian Williams…

In a strange way, the most outrageous news pictures of this day may be those of progress: The palettes of food and water that have just been dropped at selected landing zones in the downtown area of New Orleans. It's an outrage because all of those elements existed before people died for lack of them: There was water, there was food, and there were choppers to drop both. Why no one was able to combine them in an air drop is a cruel and criminal mystery of this dark chapter in our recent history. The words "failure of imagination" come to mind. The concept of an air drop of supplies was one we apparently introduced to the director of FEMA during a live interview on Nightly News on Thursday evening. He responded by saying that he'd been unaware of the thousands gathered at the Convention Center. Later that evening an incredulous Ted Koppel on ABC was left with no choice but to ask if the FEMA director was watching the same television coverage as the rest of the nation.

In fact, read Williams's entire report. I'm sure there's a lot to disaster relief that the experts know and we don't. But even interrogating the so-called experts, Williams can't figure out why things weren't done that any of us could have thought of. (The "director of FEMA" he mentions is Michael Brown, the guy who was fired from running horse shows and then our government put him in charge of disaster preparations. I'm not sure if Mr. Brown is going to take all of the blame or none of it, but either option would be grossly unfair.)

The hearings may be more explosive than most because, I suspect, Americans are going to be madder at this than they have been about 9/11 or Iraq. The 9/11 deaths do not seem to have been preventable and there have been few assertions of human error or negligence by those "first-responders." Besides, many of the rescuers on 9/11 were victims themselves, and it all occurred before we realized we had to do more to prepare for such disasters. This hurricane is an indicator that a lot, maybe even most of that Homeland Security appropriation went for pork and the illusion of better preparation for disaster. You get the feeling we spent $30 billion just to have some rude people make us take our shoes off at the airport? Don't you wish we'd spent about 2% of that on the levees in Louisiana?

Meanwhile, the Iraq deaths are occurring out of sight, out of mind, and a lot of people think they're for a good cause. The hurricane deaths — which if that mayor's right, could top 9/11 and Iraq combined — were for no good purpose and it's going to be argued that a lot of them were preventable and due to negligence…and there are even a few class and race cards in that deck. Does anyone think they won't be played? What's more, it all happened right here in the U.S. of A., live on our TV screens, and was covered by reporters on the scene, many of whom were furious at what they witnessed. If someone tries to argue that everything that could have been done was done, it's going to be interesting to see how Brian Williams and Ted Koppel, to name but two, will report it.

Mentioned today in Pluggers. Thanks to Jim Davis — no, not that one, a different one — for calling it to my attention.

By the way: Call me dense but I just checked the Pluggers website and learned what that panel is all about. I never really pondered what a "plugger" was and if I had, I'd probably have assumed it was a guest on a talk show or someone with a lot of electrical equipment. Turns out, it's a person who plugs along, getting through life and not giving up. Not a bad thing to be in these times…or to keep in mind on Labor Day.

Okay, I'm gonna plug some shows I worked on. The folks at Fox Home Video are in the home stretch of releasing all 121 half-hours of Garfield and Friends on DVD. Needless to say, you want to own all five volumes but just in case you're going to pick and choose, here are some of the highlights of each, plus Amazon links…

• Volume 1 features guest voice work by Larry Storch, Chuck McCann, Lennie Weinrib, Stan Freberg, Dick Beals, Pat Buttram, Robin Leach and some other fine people. (There's a story about the Robin Leach episode over here and I swear, it's true. I have witnesses.) My three favorite episodes on this set are "Garfield Goes Hawaiian," "The Lasagna Zone" and "Magic Mutt."
• Volume 2 includes voices by Chick Hearn, Frank Buxton, Jesse White, Shep Menken, Carl Ballantine, Stan Freberg, Kenneth Mars and others. This set includes "Invasion of the Big Robots," which is the one where Garfield makes a wrong turn and finds himself in an episode of a show that looks a lot like The Transformers. We hired Transformers artists to do some of the graphics and Neil Ross, the voice of Slag and Springer from that show, to do the extra voices and the whole thing went waaaay over budget. Also on this set is "Video Airlines," which is one of the ones people keep asking me about. It's the one where Jon and Garfield go to see the movie, "Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage II."
• Volume 3 contains episodes with guest voices by Jonathan Winters, Jack Riley, Marvin Kaplan, Paul Winchell, Rod Roddy, Pat Buttram and others I'm forgetting. The "budget buster" in this set was "Mistakes Will Happen," which was the episode where we tried to see how many errors we could make in one cartoon. We actually had to redo some scenes because the animators screwed up and did them right. Also on this set is a U.S. Acres cartoon called "Big Bad Buddy Bird," which is the one where I got the Standards and Practices department of another network (not CBS, which aired the series) mad at me because I criticized the silly "pro-social" values they had been forcing us to put into cartoons.
• Volume 4 includes guest voices by Victoria Jackson, Paul Winchell, John Moschitta, June Foray, Jewel Shepard, Bill Kirchenbauer, Don Knotts, Buddy Hackett, Carl Ballantine and others I'm leaving out. This is the volume that includes "Picnic Panic," which is the episode with the ant song that everyone asks me about. (I wrote the lyrics and Ed Bogas wrote the music and did the voices of the ants.) This set also includes "The Garfield Rap," the animation for which was so complicated that the guy in charge of budgets at the studio glared at me every time I went in for a month.
• Volume 5 is scheduled for release on December 6 but you can order now. When you get it, you'll find the rest of the episodes — and by the way, the ones on Volumes 4 and 5 and a few on Volume 3 have never been syndicated since their original network airings. This last volume includes guest performances by, among others, Shelley Berman, Brinke Stevens, Bill Saluga, Mark Hamill, Imogene Coca, Eddie "The Old Philosopher" Lawrence, Arnold Stang, George Foreman, Kevin Meaney, Tracy Scoggins, Rip Taylor, Harvey Korman and John Byner. There's a sequel to the "ant" episode and one where we parodied Barney the Dinosaur (voiced by Stan Freberg) and got an angry letter from that character's proprietors. It also has "The Man Who Hated Cats," which is my all-time favorite episode — a mini-musical with the great George Hearn in the title role.

In addition to the guest voices, all of the sets feature the superb vocal acting of the late, wonderful Lorenzo Music as the title cat, plus Thom Huge as Jon, Gregg Berger as Odie and hundreds of other people and animals, and the talents of Frank Welker, the also late and wonderful Howie Morris, Julie Payne, sometimes Gary Owens and Desiree Goyette, and other folks not mentioned here. There are no special features apart from some ads, including some for the live-action/CGI Garfield feature…and by the way, a sequel to that film is in the works and no, I'm not working on it.

I might also point out that Amazon has these tremendous package deals if you look around a bit. For instance, Volumes 1 and 2 bought separately cost $31.98 each. Purchased in a bundle, they go for $63.96, which saves you…well, let me call up the calculator since I've forgotten how to add and I'll do the math on that for you. Aha! I see that if you order both at once, you save…absolutely nothing. Well, I guess you have to click one less time so that's something. Anyway, if you order any, I hope you like 'em. This show was the most fun I've had in close to 30 years of writing animation.

Blondie mentions in B.C., Curtis and in Cathy.

I suspect that's about the end of the mentions in other strips. If so, it's a bit puzzling why some strips participated and so many — including ones depicted in Blondie — did not. There was one Blondie strip (this one) featuring Frank and Ernest but I didn't see any Blondie mention in that strip. Dilbert turned up in Blondie but not vice-versa. Some of the press reports said that Zippy the Pinhead would be there but they were apparently wrong. Even a lot of strips from the same syndicate, King Features, didn't opt in although a few more will appear in Blondie before the week is out. Given that Blondie is one of the most widely-circulated strips in the world, you'd think that a lot of cartoonists would see it as a great opportunity to get their characters seen on comic pages that don't normally include them.

If you're not tired of reading about Hurricane Katrina — and I could sure understand if you were — you might want to take a look at Brendan Loy's weblog for the days leading up to the storm's assault on the Gulf Coast. I don't know Mr. Loy but it says he's a second-year law student at Notre Dame with a bit of amateur expertise on weather. He tracked Katrina on his blog and it's interesting to read how it developed. Start with this message and work your way up.

Tim Russert, who ordinarily is about as tough on the Bush administration as I am on members of my immediate family, is among the newsfolks who seem angered by how little has been done for the injured and displaced in the Gulf Coast. Today on Meet the Press, he interrogated the Homeland Security Chief, Michael Chertoff, who's out there spinning his little heart out, saying things like, "There will be time later to assess blame." That's what I always say when I'm worried about being blamed, too.

And actually, it's true in a way. A lot of the finger-pointing is unconstructive and a waste of energy that might go into saving people who are still stranded, still dying, still without a place to live. But some of it helps. Some of it is a matter of reminding the people in charge that they are in charge and that we're expecting them to act now.

Mr. Chertoff seems to be in a closely-contested race with Michael Brown, Director of FEMA, to see who can sound more clueless about the relief operations. On Thursday night, Brown told reporters that his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Which I guess means no one at his agency owns a TV set or has access to the Internet. (I don't mean to sound outraged about this…well, maybe I do. I just kinda think the head of FEMA shouldn't be finding out about this kind of thing a day or so after Larry King.) The following day, Brown told TV cameras, "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day." The New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote, in response to this, "Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President."

Brown's credentials for his position seem to be that he needed a job and was friends with the manager of the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign. The fact that he had no experience in disaster management — he came off a position as the chief rules enforcer of the Arabian Horse Association — seems to not have troubled anyone.

I'm sorry. I know one of the fruits of political victory is that you get to reward your cronies with well-paid, do-very-little jobs, and that everyone does this. But you're supposed to do it with the ambassadorship to Luxembourg…not with running a department of emergency preparedness. It's especially appalling that they didn't bring in someone with expertise after 9/11 when everyone in America, as one, agreed we needed to beef up that area.

Getting back to Tim Russert and Michael Chertoff: Russert was pretty tough on the guy, at least by Russert standards, and Chertoff sure didn't impress me as being on top of the situation, except maybe in a P.R. sense. Here's a link to one video excerpt from the interview and here's a link to another.

And if you have the time and can stand some heartbreak, here's a link to Russert's interview with Aaron Broussard, who is the president of Jefferson Parish, which is just south of New Orleans. Very sad. I don't know whether everything that can possibly be done is being done…but if so, then everything that can possibly be done is not nearly enough.

David Brooks doesn't think much of the crisis management for Hurricane Katrina and tries to put it into a larger context. I don't agree with everything in this piece but I think it's an interesting way to look at it.

Back in the sixties in a comic called House of Mystery, a kid named Robby Reed used to use a weird little dial device to turn himself into a wide array of different super-guys. The strip was called "Dial H for Hero" and it's inspired a neat website called Dial B for Blog. I don't know who assembles it but he or she has a wicked sense of humor, a fine collection of old comics and a good scanner. They're presently celebrating their 100th "issue" and if you're interested in old comics, you could have a lot of fun going through earlier postings. I did.