Monthly Archives: December 2005

As ballyhooed here, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a show last week on which Stan Freberg was interviewed…and he even performed a bit, too. For the next few days, you can hear it on this page. Do not dawdle.

Seems like it's bad luck for me to say I won't be posting for a while. Whenever I do it, I have to rush back here to post an obit for some veteran comic book creator…

Comic historian Jim Amash informs me of the death, about three weeks ago, of Bill Fraccio, whose work was all over Charlton and Dell Comics in the sixties. Almost all of it was done in tandem with his friend, Tony Tallarico. They were teamed so often that it's sometimes difficult to identify which stories were pencilled by Fraccio and which ones were solo work by Tallarico. I think (but cannot swear) that Fraccio drew the above covers but he may have only done the interiors. Tallarico was the senior partner in the combo. Most of the time, editors gave him the work and he called in Fraccio to help.

Fans know them best for their stints drawing Charlton's short-lived super-hero line of Blue Beetle and Son of Vulcan around 1965 and an odd batch of monster super-heroes — like the Super Frankenstein seen above — shortly after. In the late sixties, they collaborated on dozens of stories for Warren's Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella that were credited to "Tony Williamson" and later to "Tony Willamsune." (Reportedly, artist Al Williamson — who had recently quit working for Warren — objected to the company making it look like "Williamson" was still working for them.)

I never met Mr. Fraccio but Jim Amash says he was a very jolly man and that he loved to draw.

There may not be many postings here for the next day or two as I attend to some pressing matters. But I will return to you soon…and with the announcement of a new website I set up a few days ago. (If you've been paying attention, you may know its address already. I'll post it here before the week is out.)

After our spate of postings about comic book characters on stamps, many folks wrote to remind me that we could have Groo stamps or Crypt Keeper stamps or even Jack Kirby stamps. All we have to do is use a service like Photo Stamps, which can put any picture on a sticker that the U.S. post office will accept as postage. But you know what's wrong for me with this and all those lovely commemorative stamps? It's that since the invention of e-mail, I send very few letters to anyone I care about. I'd say that of the last fifty times I stuck a stamp on a letter, fewer than five were letters. The rest were bills…and between electronic bill paying and the ones my Business Manager handles, I don't even send out many of them. I don't send out Christmas Cards, either. Ultimately, jazzy stamps may be fun to collect but I don't need them for any other purpose.

Which reminds me: Thanks to Joe Dante, director of some of my favorite movies for sending me a DVD of his recent episode of the Showtime Masters of Horror series. My TiVo hiccuped and missed the first airing. Quite a few folks have told me it's wonderful, so I look forward to watching it after I get through this busy period. Joe says he reads this site every day…so this is an easier way to thank him than to write a letter. And besides, I'm out of stamps.

I did catch a little of TV Land's latest clip show, which is a five-part series counting down what they call The 100 Most Unexpected TV Moments. Here's the whole list and like all of these shows, one can quibble a lot with the selections. But it does make for a hundred interesting clips and that's reason enough to watch. (Also online are extended versions of some of the interviews with the featured players.)

Okay, I'm outta here. Back at full power in a day or so. And if I owe you e-mail — and I probably do — please forgive me.

This was taken on my back step about twenty minutes ago. Cute little fellow, isn't he? And he's not, as someone wrote me the last time I posted one of these, "the ugliest giant rat in the world." There's something kind of adorable about the possums that come to claim sloppy seconds on the local cats' dinners. The possums move slowly and quietly, and they flee in fear at the slightest noise. I feel sorry for one when I see it eat the last remaining nugget of food and begin looking around, wondering if there could possibly be any more. But of course, there's no way I can go out and pour more Friskies into the dish for it. The second I clicked the latch on the door, the possum would sprint for the next zip code. So instead I watch it waddle off sadly, obviously feeling sorry for itself.

At least, I think they come here for the food. Maybe they just come to get their pictures on the website.

As mentioned here the other day, BBC Radio 4 is running a half-hour show tomorrow on our favorite satirist, Stan Freberg. Here are the details and as you'll see, it says it runs from 18:30 to 19:00. According to my Anglo conversions, that's 10:30 AM Pacific Time 'til 11:00. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Many BBC radio programmes are archived for a week or so on their website after broadcast but this may not be among them. So if you want to hear or record it, you'll either have to tune in live or find someone else who recorded it. I'm set up to do so — assuming I have the time right — but this is not always foolproof, and I'm just the fool to prove it.

The DVD of the recent Fantastic Four movie is due out soon — tomorrow, I think. Some of you may have heard that it includes a documentary on the life and times of Jack Kirby, with interviews of all sorts of his folks, myself included. Well, it doesn't. Not the version coming out this week. The film company decided to hold it for a "deluxe" DVD edition that will include other special features and come out next Spring or thereabouts. This is all part of the ongoing sinister plot to get you to buy all your movies twice. So if the documentary matters to you — I haven't seen it, by the way — you might want to wait.

The Johnny Carson website, which sells DVDs of his old shows, has some neat free stuff available for the downloading. You can listen to "podcasts" (a fancy term for MP3 files) of some old Carson monologues on this page. And you can watch video clips of Carnac the Magnificent on this page. Make sure you if you go to the latter, you at least watch the infamous "Sis Boom Bah" clip — a joke reportedly written by the late Pat McCormick. There are also some neat video clips on this page.

The one thing I don't like about the site is that it has some of its history askew. A page called The History of the Tonight Show includes the following paragraph…

"Tonight!" was originally hosted by Steve Allen in 1954. Allens regular side-kick was Ernie Kovacs. Kovacs became known as "the first commercial tonight show tv television artist." Ernie Kovacs alternated hosting the show with Steve Allen. However, it was Steve Allen who established many of the standards of late night television, introducing the desk and couch and an emphasis on conversations with guests.

There's a lot of stuff wrong with the above paragraph. Steve Allen first hosted Tonight as a local show in New York beginning in July of 1953. The show went on the NBC network on September 27, 1954. (You can view an excerpt from that first broadcast on this page.) Ernie Kovacs was not his regular sidekick. Allen had a lot of regular performers on the show, including announcer Gene Rayburn who might be called his regular sidekick, but Kovacs only appeared with Allen a handful of times. In late 1956, Allen cut back and Ernie Kovacs began hosting the Monday and Tuesday night editions much as Johnny turned Monday nights over to Joan Rivers and then to Jay Leno. Neither of them were Johnny's "sidekick."

I have no idea by what criteria Ernie Kovacs would be called "the first commercial tonight show tv artist." And while Allen did do conversation with guests, that was not a big feature of his Tonight show, which included a lot of stunts, games, sketches and musical performances. If anyone, it was Jack Paar who established the emphasis on conversation.

Also, Carol Wayne was not the original "Matinee Lady." Many actresses — including some big stars who were otherwise guesting on the show — played Art Fern's bimbo assistant before Ms. Wayne got the steady job.

But other than that, it's a great website and I recommend their DVDs. I also really like the guest search feature on the site even if it isn't complete. If you do some browsing, you may note what I mentioned here a few weeks ago, which is that Johnny had a knack for sensing when some guest had run out of things to say or otherwise been on too many times. If you search for a lot of recurring Carson guests, you'll see how many a star would appear every month or two for a few years and then, all of a sudden, not be invited back for a long time. Look up Jaye P. Morgan or Stan Kann and watch it all come to a halt.

Eugene Volokh makes a point that's long been a gripe of mine: The assumption that it means something when a person is "nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize." I'm not sure it even means a lot when someone actually wins one…or at least it hasn't since Henry Kissinger did. But just being nominated for the Nobel is not like being nominated for an Oscar or an Emmy. It means one person out of hundreds of thousands has put the name up for consideration.

It's fascinating to me how the TiVo, which not so long ago looked to be teetering on the verge of extinction along with Aleutian Geese, Northern Spotted Owls and Congressmen who've dealt with Jack Abramoff, has made a partial clawback to viability. TiVo is still announcing as good news things like the fact that they didn't lose as many millions of dollars last quarter as they did the quarter before. But they're also announcing a mess of new features and business relationships that show that the keystone Personal Video Recorder is still in there, punching away against all those new machines people are getting from their local cable companies.

Very shortly, those of us with Series 2 TiVos hooked up to the Internet will have some special pages viewable on our TiVo screens like the Fandango site to check local movie showtimes and purchase tickets or the Yahoo pages for local weather and traffic. Here's a link to a page on the TiVo site which lists the forthcoming features. Obviously, this is redundant for those of us with computers but I somehow like the idea of my TiVo making progress. As long as they keep adding features, I feel like they're still in business.

The feature I'd really like to see TiVo introduce — and I don't know why they haven't — is a piece of software you could have on your computer that would enable you to choose shows to be recorded. You can program your TiVo online but not on your own computer. What I have in mind is software that would download the entire program schedule and allow you to search it or even program it with simple macros — i.e., "Show me all episodes of Saturday Night Live that are on later than 6 PM and which list Dana Carvey but not John Goodman." Or "Automatically record The Late, Late Show any night Late Night with Conan O'Brien is a rerun." Or it could perhaps even build a database of what you've recorded in the past and note if you recorded this week's CSI: Barstow rerun the last time it aired. Something like that. It seems to me this would be very easy for them to do.

The other day, I linked to Forbes Magazine's list of the fifteen richest characters in fiction. An e-mail today from a gentleman with Forbes informs me that I accidentally linked to their 2002 list. He provided this link to the 2005 Forbes Fictional 15 and notes that "the complaint about Richie Rich and Uncle Scrooge still holds true."

Thursday night, Letterman got his fourth-largest tune-in ever when he had Oprah Winfrey on — a 10.1 rating and a 24 share, meaning that 24% of all sets in use at the time were tuned to his show. Leno, by contrast, had a 4.6/11, which is roughly what he always gets on a Thursday.

Last night, as predicted here, things went right back to normal. Leno had a 4.5/10. Letterman had a 3.6/8, meaning that he got about a third of his Thursday tune-in. 3.6 is about routine for The Late Show on a Friday.

Yes, once again, it's time to play the game that's sweeping the nation…There's No Such Website! Below are descriptions of five websites and links to all five of them. Four of these websites actually exist on the 'net and when you click on the link, you'll go there. One of these websites is a figment of our imagination and the link will tell you so. So now…for the Maytag dishwasher, the 2005 Honda Civic, the case of Rice-a-Roni (did you know it's the San Francisco treat?), the all-expenses-paid vacation for five days and two nights in Mazatlan, and the autographed picture of your sister, pick out the phony website! You have ten seconds…

• Jeeper's Beepers – WAV files of over two thousand different automobile horns, collected from all over the world. Experience what it's like to get stalled at a green light in Zurich.
• The Balloonhat Experience – Photo gallery of people all over the world wearing hats made by twisting colorful balloons together. What clown made these?
• Modern Moist Towelette Collecting – For people who collect Wash-and-Dry wetnaps and other moist towelettes sealed in foil packets. A very refreshing website, especially after eating spareribs.
• Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers – A website devoted to guys who know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em and who bear a striking resemblance to the guy who used to have all those great rotisserie chicken restaurants.
• I Found a Duck – Researchers in Europe are releasing hundreds of plastic ducks into the wild and tracking their migrating habits. See how far they travel.

Over on Salon, there's a rave review for the new "coffee table edition" (which means it's about the size and price of a coffee table) of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland. And here's an Amazon link so you can order a copy, just as I have.

One of my favorite comedians, Robert Klein, has a new HBO Special that debuts tomorrow night. It's his eighth and I've yet to see one that wasn't well worth watching. So my TiVo's set.

Mr. Klein discussed it this afternoon on The Paul Harris Show, a fine program heard on KMOX radio in St. Louis. You can listen to the conversation here.

Which reminds me: Every time I host something, someone with even less expertise than I have asks me for tips on being a good interviewer. The only way I've ever learned whatever I've learned is by studying people who do it well. One of those who's shown me how it should be done is Paul Harris.

Gary Emenitove writes…

I don't think that repetition on Letterman (or Leno, for that matter) is a bad thing. I cite the Master — Johnny Carson — where I, and presumably millions of others, looked forward to Carnak, Art Fern, and other bits. They were predictable (recall the moment where he paused just before "…THE FORK IN THE ROAD!") and they were cornerstones of a segment of The Tonight Show of that era. Just how is "Will It Float?" any different? The point is not whether something floats (just as the point with the Tea Time Movies were not the brief movie snippets themselves). The thing I look forward to is the production of it — the theme song for the segment, the hula-hoop and grinder girls, the sound effects, the interplay between Dave and Paul. Sure, it's predictable. And that's precisely why I do like it.

Well, the big difference between Dave's "Will It Float?" and Johnny's Tea Time Movies is that Johnny only did Tea Time Movies three or four times a year. Dave seems to do "Will It Float?" three or four times a week.

A certain amount of repetition is not a bad thing, and it's great to develop recurring segments that viewers look forward to. Carson, however, had a terrific instinct for when something (or in the case of guests, someone) was appearing too often. That even included his own appearances. Johnny took his many nights off, in part on the premise that America would tire of him if he did five shows a week.

I get the feeling that a lot of TV shows these days that are done in front of a live audience don't know the difference between entertaining the warm bodies in the seats and entertaining the folks sitting at home. Live audiences are a different breed. They go in, wanting to see all the recurring bits. They want to hear all the catch-phrases. Basically, they want to see in person all the routines and show elements they know well from watching at home…and of course, they're usually bigger fans of the program than the average viewer. A lot of sitcoms — including at least one I worked on — have suffered from playing to that dynamic for cheap applause. Even those same people wouldn't want to see all that stuff if they were sitting at home.

Letterman plays to a studio audience of Dave worshippers. At times, that audience is even pre-screened with a trivia test to make sure they're steady watchers and know all the running gags. It's nice that he wants to reward his loyal viewers but I think he'd have a better show if he had some people out there who didn't love every single thing he does, especially if they've already seen it eight hundred times. I sure like him better when he's doing things he's never done before.