Monthly Archives: February 2006

This is scary. A new model of the Toyota Prius, available only in Japan at the moment, has a feature that will automatically parallel park the car for you. It involves a rear-mounted camera and some sort of on-board computer that figures out when the wheel should be turned and how much. Here's a video that displays this feature in action.

I'm watching tonight's Larry King Live, which is an hour with Ed McMahon plugging his book on Johnny Carson. As explained here, I didn't care for the book but this interview is pretty good and you might want to catch one of the reruns tonight. It was obviously taped ahead because almost every time Ed starts to tell a story — and sometimes, even before he starts telling one — the producers cut to an appropriate clip or photo. But what really makes it work is that Bob Costas is the guest host, reminding us that he's the best interviewer working in television these days.

The Los Angeles Daily News runs an obit for ventriloquist Rickie Layne.

I'm obviously not a fan of George W. Bush but the latest controversy — this thing about outsourcing the operation of several U.S. ports to an Arabian company — seems like errant criticism. One can make a good argument that we shouldn't be handing a job this sensitive over to an outside supplier at all…that it should be done by the United States government. But none of the folks yelling at Bush today seem to be making that case. They weren't bothered when it was a British company that was running the six U.S. ports…but now that the company's being acquired by a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates, all Hades is breaking loose.

Bush didn't help himself with the way he let this be announced. Donald Rumsfeld was put in the embarrassing position today of telling reporters he'd just heard about the deal over the weekend, even though it was approved unanimously on February 13 by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, of which he is a member. And someone has to tell George W. that since his approval ratings started occasionally hitting 39%, even some loyal Republicans won't rubber-stamp everything he wants to do.

But really, what's the problem here? Is the company qualified to handle the job? If they are, they should be allowed to do it. And if they aren't, they shouldn't have the job, no matter what country is involved. I think Bush is getting a bit of a bum rap on this one.

Jane Mayer tells us how an attempt to change U.S. policies on torture failed.

People keep writing me to ask when a certain favorite TV show of the past will get released on DVD. The answer is that every show that was around long enough to now fill out a DVD set is probably on some company's "we'll get around to this eventually" list. A gentleman who packages such things for one of the major DVD houses told me recently that there's a bit of a glut on the market and there may be some slowdown. There also may be some drop in the budgets for special features ("Some people are starting to say it's not cost-effective") but no one is suggesting that there isn't still money to be made packaging runs of old shows. Here, with his permission, is an excerpt from a recent e-mail to me…

We still have clearance problems with a couple of shows that we want to put out. Mostly, it's a matter of music rights but there are a few shows tied up in disputes over who owns the home video rights. The point is we're even working on solving those because we want to put everything out we can. It's mostly now a question of when. When would be a good time to release this? Some months, there are just too many DVD sets out and your product can get lost or you'll wind up competing with yourself to have too many sets out. In some cases, there's reason to believe a certain show might get more attention down the line, like if there's a movie coming out based on it. We also have shows we want to put out, and we will put out, but we're having trouble locating negatives or good complete prints of a few episodes. All we have readily available are syndication prints that are missing a few minutes in each show. We don't want to use those unless we have to.

Coming out May 2 is the first season of That Girl, complete with audio commentaries and a documentary featuring Marlo Thomas and series co-creator Bill Persky. I recall the first season of that show being quite enjoyable, especially in the way Ted Bessell would play sexual frustration and how unbelievably sour Lew Parker was as That Girl's father. From our friends at Shout Factory.

On May 9, Paramount is bringing out the much-awaited DVD of the show variously called Sgt. Bilko, The Phil Silvers Show and You'll Never Get Rich — by any name, one of the best comedies ever done for television. Alas, this is one of the shows that has had clearance problems so they can't just release season by season. Instead, they've picked 21 episodes that they could clear, plus they have the never-aired pilot (which has Jack Warden playing Henshaw, the character played in the series by Allan Melvin) and a staggering number of special features, rare clips, commentary tracks, etc. This sounds like a must-get, and we can hope that if it sells well enough, that might give Paramount the financial incentive to try and mop up those clearance issues and do real season-by-season sets. You can advance order this one here.

There's already a one-DVD sampler release of a few old F Troop episodes and I guess it must have sold well since Warner Home Video is putting out the entire first season of the show on June 6. One hopes it will sell well enough for a quick release of the second and final season. (There were only two, and only the second was in color.) Always liked F Troop — one of the few sitcoms that ever made me laugh out loud.

What's nice about these three releases is that they're all of shows I can't watch just by turning on my TV. I mean, the Andy Griffith Show and M*A*S*H DVD sets are nice but my satellite dish gets two episodes of Andy Griffith per day, each of which run twice, and six episodes of M*A*S*H, four of which air twice — plus every so often, some channel airs a marathon. One time, my "TiVo Suggestions" feature got carried away and recorded 40+ episodes of I Love Lucy over one weekend. (I think my TiVo has a thing for Vivian Vance.) So buying a complete season of that show isn't that big a deal.

One of my few disappointments when I got DirecTV and the eight zillion channels that come with it was that about four zillion were running The Jeffersons. I was expecting lots of shows I wasn't previously able to see and all I got was six chances a day to watch Weezie and George yell at each other. I mentioned here a few months ago that I didn't understand why someone hasn't launched a couple of networks that run some of the hundreds of old TV shows that are not currently on TV Land. No one in the business seems to have a theory as to why this hasn't been attempted, especially now that the DVD market has prompted many studios to go into their vaults and do restoration work on their old shows. Dom DeLuise's Lotsa Luck is out on DVD. So is Good Morning, World. So is Nowhere Man and Have Gun, Will Travel and even Mister Peepers. None of these shows are currently rerun on TV channels as far as I know. If people are willing to shell out good money to own all of them, don't you think someone would watch them once a day for free?

Over on Tom Spurgeon's fine site, The Comics Reporter, I explained (in this letter) about a bordered cover format that Marvel tried out in 1971. Tom asked about it, I answered…and I also explained about a cover border format that MAD Magazine test-marketed in the seventies. Folks are now writing me, asking where they can see an example of this MAD experiment so I thought I'd post the above.

Someone at MAD got the idea that it might boost sales to establish a decorative border format on their covers. Someone else, I guess, wasn't convinced this was a wise idea…so several issues were printed both ways. Some percentage of the press run had the yellow border on the cover, the rest didn't, and sales were charted. After a while, the bordered covers went away, never to be seen again. Which should give you some idea of how the test turned out.

One part of Disneyland that most people have never seen is the apartment built for Walt's private use. But you can take an online tour of it here.

It's now been nine days since ventriloquist Rickie Layne died. The New York Sun ran a nice, detailed obit last Thursday but otherwise, I haven't seen a word anywhere on the 'net about it, apart from what I posted here last Tuesday. I assume the obituaries will be along sooner or later but I don't think this is how news reporting is supposed to work.

This weblog post by Glenn Greenwald makes a pretty clear statement of what's wrong with Bush's Iraq policy.

This Wednesday evening, PBS stations around the country are debuting Monty Python's Personal Best, a series of six one-hour specials composed of classic sketches from the original BBC Monty Python's Flying Circus. When I first heard about these, I thought it was just another way of repackaging that old material and therefore something I could miss. I love Python but I have the complete run on DVD and…well, let's just say there are some things I love but have seen too many times.

Turns out though that these specials may be worth catching. According to this article on the Python website, "Each show features a rich collection of Monty Python clips as well as new sketch material written and performed by the indvidual Pythons." Each of the five surviving performers hosts his own show and apparently they did actually pick their favorite sketches, not necessarily featuring themselves. (The Fish-Slapping Dance, which is just Palin and Cleese, is in all six shows.) They all pitched in to handle the episode spotlighting their late comrade, Graham Chapman, which is nice. But I have the feeling you could get a more entertaining show if they all just sat around and told anecdotes about him.

PBS is going to start rerunning the original Python episodes in April for the benefit, I guess, of those who love Python but not enough to buy the DVDs. It was back in 1974, of course, that PBS originally introduced Python to America…though not everywhere. For some reason, our local PBS affiliate, KCET, didn't start running them until the following year…so for a time, Monty Python had a special kind of cult following in this town. A small group of us knew their work from the records, from our trips to other cities and from the movie, And Now For Something Completely Different, which opened and closed in L.A. without a lot of attention long before KCET broadcast Python across Southern California. When they did come along though, they were an immediate hit. Almost right away, if you said "Nudge, nudge" in any public place, there'd be someone around who got the reference.

A KCET exec told me back in the seventies that Python was the third-best thing to ever happen to PBS fundraising. Reminding parents to support Sesame Street was the number one money-getter and second was to rerun the 1973 production of Steambath, which had Valerie Perrine naked for about ten seconds. Python got people to give cash, in part because Terry Jones taped a number of brilliant little pitches that KCET would run as part of their pledge breaks. They had Jones tied to a chair, looking like he'd been worked over by a couple of gorillas, pleading with us to donate or he'd endure further punishment. The exec told me that every time they ran them, they got a lot of pledges but they also got a few calls from people saying it was shameful that someone was beating up that nice man with the British accent. "We figure that's our target audience," he said. "The kind of viewer who really needs educational television."

U.S. rules shield industries from lawsuits

That's the Bush administration for you: Always watching out for the overdog.

It's been a while since I mentioned the old, black-and-white game show reruns that GSN airs in the wee, small hours of the morning. They have another five or so weeks of Beat the Clock, which can't end too soon for me. Every so often, I tune one in for about two minutes and marvel at the fact that the series was ever on the air. When those run out in early April, GSN will begin rerunning I've Got a Secret again, but not all of them. For reasons at which we can only guess, this time through, they'll be skipping all the episodes that were prominently sponsored by Winston cigarettes. That's an awful lot of shows to bypass but there will still be some good ones to catch again.

In the meantime, the reruns of What's My Line? are currently up to early 1962. The one that airs tonight (i.e., Monday morning) should be one with Olivia DeHaviland as the Mystery Guest. Tuesday morning, there are two Mystery Guests — Sargent Shriver (then the head of the Peace Corps) and Van Cliburn.

Deal or No Deal returns to NBC primetime with new episodes for a week commencing February 27, and then will join the weekly lineup on Monday nights. On March 3, GSN kicks off a two-day festival of old game show episodes featuring folks who won Academy Awards or hosted the ceremony often. Looks like some good things in there. Here's the schedule.

I was in the hospital when it was announced that Universal and Disney had concluded a deal that would send sportscaster Al Michaels to NBC while Disney would reacquire title to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. For those of you unfamiliar with the history or confused by some of the newspaper accounts, I'll run through it for you as briskly as possible…

In 1927, Walt Disney's business was making animated cartoons of Oswald which were distributed by Universal Pictures. A gent named Charlie Mintz was the money man and go-between. When the cartoons became successful, Walt went to New York to attempt to negotiate a new contract with Mintz at a higher fee. Instead, Mintz offered him a worse deal. What's more, Mintz informed him that he had quietly signed contracts with most of Walt's key artists — pretty much everyone except Ub Iwerks — and that Universal owned Oswald. If Walt did not accept the new terms, Mintz would set up a new studio with those artists and make the Oswald cartoons without him.

Walt did not accept the new terms. He headed back to Hollywood and, legend has it, created his replacement character on the train home. Soon, the Charles Mintz Studio was making Oswald cartoons while Walt and Ub launched the new Disney star, Mickey Mouse. It is said that Walt never quite got over the shock of losing Oswald and he also learned a valuable business lesson. Thereafter, he refused all deals that might have diluted or endangered his title to studio creations, including The Mouse. Eventually, of course, Mickey was the hottest cartoon character of all time, dwarfing the popularity of Oswald, so there was some nice revenge there. Walt got a little more when Universal later dumped Mintz and handed Oswald over to Walter Lantz…and now, with the swap for Al Michaels, the justice is more or less complete.

What interests me here is that Oswald the Rabbit has a current value in spite of over fifty years of the character's owner being utterly indifferent about the bunny. The character's popularity declined throughout the thirties and in spite of a couple of complete redesigns. In 1943, Lantz stopped making Oswald cartoons altogether, preferring to focus on his other stars, including Andy Panda and Woody Woodpecker. Around this time, Lantz acquired ownership of Oswald but decades later, he sold his entire studio to Universal so they got him back. They didn't do anything with him, either. He was just a character in their merchandising catalog. When toy companies came to license Woody for some piece of merchandise, Oswald usually got tossed into the deal for nothing.

The old Oswald cartoons were rarely shown on television so for a decade or two, the only exposure the character got was in the pages of Dell Comics produced by Western Publishing. Lantz had a close relationship with Western and basically told them they could do anything they wanted with the rabbit and he would adjust his merchandising model sheets to match. As a result, he went through several more redesigns, eventually becoming a rather serious father type with two nephews, Floyd and Lloyd. It was pretty much the same relationship Mickey Mouse had with Morty and Ferdy, or that Donald Duck had with Huey, Dewey and Louie, also in Western Publishing/Dell Comics. In fact, quite a few of the scripts for the Oswald comics were revamped Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck scripts. None of the writers were too enthused over working with Oswald, so the editors would commission extra Mickey and Donald scripts and then change the names and (if necessary) the number of nephews. It was always one of their lowest-selling books.

Oswald pretty much disappeared even from the comic books in the sixties. Western had decided to give up on him before 11/22/63 but after that date, the notoriety of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald reinforced the decision. One of the editors there told me years later, "All the character was was a good name, and suddenly that name wasn't as good as before." Lantz occasionally asked Western to stick an Oswald story in the Woody Woodpecker comic book just for trademark reasons and to demonstrate that the character was still active. After Woody's comic book ended in the seventies, they didn't even have that.

So it's amazing that Oswald still has a following today. It's mostly in Japan where merchandise that harks back to the original Disney design is extremely popular…but somehow Oswald has endured and proven commercial enough that Disney wanted him back. Talk about your lucky rabbits.

Here's an article on why the current economy ain't so good despite certain indicators. And this isn't some Democrat or Liberal saying this. It's Pat Buchanan.