Monthly Archives: March 2006

Gregg Easterbrook on the mess that is our space program. At one point, regarding the money we're pouring into the space shuttle and space station proposals, he writes…

At this point, the shuttle exists almost solely to service the space station, while the station exists almost solely to give the space shuttle a destination to fly to.

I think that's right. Not all that long ago, if you raised the question of why we were doing some of the things we were doing in space exploration, you got back the reply that you were mired in the past and didn't have a vision of the future. Maybe it's becoming a-okay to ask some of these questions now.

Is it possible to learn science from the Marvel Super-Heroes? Someone thinks it is. [L.A. Times, you might have to register.]

Hey, you know what movie isn't available on DVD and oughta be? Skidoo.

You heard me. Skidoo. The 1968 movie directed by Otto Preminger in a misguided attempt to connect with the youth/hippie movement.

Have you ever seen it? No? Well, it ought to be out on DVD so you can experience it at least once…and I won't even claim that it's good or bad. It's too weird to be good or bad. Depending on your mood, you might view it with the "Springtime for Hitler" look or just delight in the fact that Mr. Preminger was so totally out of control. I have this mental image of him giving orders on the set and sounding like that dictator in Woody Allen's Bananas who wants all underwear worn on the outside. You know…the one George W. Bush is starting to emulate.

Reportedly, in mid-shooting, Preminger realized things weren't going well so he called in several writers — including our old pal Stanley Ralph Ross, who worked on that Wonder Woman pilot I linked to here — to try and fix things. It was hopeless. In fact, Stanley later said that the attempt to course-correct in the middle of production probably made things less coherent. He also told me that he attended one screening where the projectionist got the reels in the wrong order and it really didn't make much of a difference.

There's an amazing cast that includes Peter Lawford, Mickey Rooney, Frank Gorshin, Frankie Avalon and Burgess Meredith. Jackie Gleason takes LSD and does a freak-out scene that would have been considered hokey on Dragnet. Groucho Marx was cast in the role of God and I guess he figured he could never top that so he never made another movie. I mean, there's something to be said for a film in which the most restrained, believable performance is given by Carol Channing.

Bootleg DVDs abound but there hasn't been an official release. So how's about it, Paramount Home Video? Your studio made Skidoo even if nobody there will admit it. You probably have the rights to put it out. If not, you can get them. It's not like anyone else will bid against you.

How can you resist a movie that brought in Sammy Davis Jr. and Dr. Timothy Leary just to appear in its trailer? And if you think I'm making any of this up or exaggerating, just click on the video link below.

Skidoo. It's time.

I mentioned here recently that I enjoy dining at Souplantation, which is a chain of soup 'n' salad restaurants. (In some states, the chain is called Sweet Tomatoes but it's pretty much the same place.) I especially like their Creamy Tomato Soup, which they've been featuring for the month of March. It's scheduled to leave the rotation this weekend so if you haven't tried it, you'd better hurry.

If you have tried it and you like it as much as I do, do us both a favor. Call the Sweet Tomatoes company and tell them. The toll-free phone number of their Customer Service department is (888) 374-8358 and there's supposed to be someone there to take your calls 24 hours, seven days a week.

Tell them you and everyone you know loves the Creamy Tomato Soup and will go back many times and spend much money at their establishments if only they will add it to their permanent line-up. Someone there will ask you which of their restaurants you went to and when, and they may ask for your name and phone number.

And if you like a good tomato soup, get to a Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes soon. Officially, they change their non-permanent menu items every two weeks and the Classic Creamy Tomato is scheduled to go away on Friday. But many outlets won't start putting the new specials out until Monday so you might be able to get my fave on Saturday or Sunday. (Call first to ask and if they say they don't have it, say something like, "Then I'm never coming in your rotten business establishment again, you clod!" Maybe then they'll get the message.) Here's a page that shows you the fifteen states in which they're located. I was going to suggest that if you live outside the area, you plan a quick trip…but that would be really overselling this soup. On the other hand, I've crossed state lines for far sillier — though less moral — purposes.

Most politicians I like disappoint me sooner or later. The last year or so, John McCain has joined their ranks. Some of the reasons why (and why the man will have a hard time becoming president) are summarized in this article by E.J. Dionne.

While you're at it, read this weblog post about how McCain, who once denounced Jerry Falwell as a bigot, is now his bosom buddy. I don't think Falwell is the one who's changed.

Good news for us fans of Keith Olbermann.

There was also the 1982 prime-time animated series that Hanna-Barbera did for NBC called Jokebook…a show that almost no one saw. When I get finished with that script that's due, I'll write a little piece here about it. I didn't work on it but I was at H-B when it was done (the working title was Joe Barbera's Jokebook and they were serious about calling it that on the air) and it was a very sad project that could have been wonderful and wasn't.

And if I remember, I'll also write about the 1968 H-B series, The New Adventures of Huck Finn, which was a series with live actors running around an animated world. That was another show that nobody saw but I thought it was rather well done for what it was.

Back to the script…

Eleven of you have written since last night to say that I forgot one prime-time network animated show that came between the cancellation of The Flintstones (it went off in '66) and the debut of The Simpsons (it went on in '89) and you pointed to Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home, which aired from 1972 to 1974. Well, you're right and you're wrong. Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home was a Hanna-Barbera production which starred Tom Bosley as the voice of a working class guy. The show was created by the team of Harvey Bullock and R.S. Allen, who wrote some wonderful things both for animation and live, and the show was largely styled by the great magazine cartoonist, Marty Murphy. The advance publicity made it sound like it would replicate All in the Family as much as The Flintstones had echoed The Honeymooners but that wasn't particularly evident in the show when it got on the air.

It was not, however, really a prime-time network show. It was syndicated. In the early seventies, the F.C.C. instituted its Prime Time Access Rule, which forced networks to cut back on their evening programming, effectively returning a half-hour each night to local stations. This caused a flood of syndicated shows to be created for those time slots and Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home was one of them. Most of the NBC affiliates bought it and ran it Tuesday evenings at 7:30 so it may have looked like a network show…but it wasn't.

But I'll tell you what was. The messages about Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home reminded me that Hanna-Barbera produced ten episodes of a show called Where's Huddles? that ran on CBS in 1970 as a summer replacement (remember summer replacements?) for half of The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour (remember Glen Campbell? For that matter, remember Goodtime Hours?). This one was about football players and it starred the voice of Cliff Norton as Huddles, who for some reason looked but did not sound an awful lot like Walter Matthau. Mel Blanc did the voice of his buddy Bubba, and they had a kind of Fred-and-Barney relationship. This was probably quite intentional on Joe Barbera's part. Blanc, of course, was the voice of Barney Rubble and Cliff Norton had once been up for the role of Fred.

(Here's a quick trivial aside of the kind for which this weblog is famous: Throughout the development of The Flintstones, Hanna and Barbera were highly sensitive about getting close to The Honeymooners without getting too close. The original pilot had Daws Butler doing the voices of Fred and Barney, and June Foray as Wilma, and both Daws and June did the same impressions of Jackie Gleason, Art Carney and Audrey Meadows that they'd done for the Warner Brothers cartoon series, "The Honeymousers," which had been done with Mr. Gleason's blessing. It's just a theory, but probably a good one, that Daws and June were replaced because H-B was worried that the use of them would make it too easy for Gleason to take legal action. Anyway, Cliff Norton auditioned for both Fred and Barney, and I'm just wondering if they thought to call him in — and maybe if they ultimately rejected him — because his name recalled Carney's character on The Honeymooners, Ed Norton. Did they perhaps want him for Barney — he would have been great in the part — because Hanna said to Barbera, "We can't hire a guy named Norton to play a character we may have to swear in court was not inspired, even unconsciously, by a character named Norton"? Maybe, maybe not. I once startled Mr. Barbera by asking him if the name "Barney Rubble" was a conscious in-joke because it rhymed with "Carney Double." He did a Tex Avery-style double-take and swore to me that no one had ever brought that up before…but allowed as how it may have been a subliminal confession.)

Sorry, where was I? Oh, right: Where's Huddles? Well, that one was a pretty quick flop but it was a prime-time network animated show so I should have mentioned it. And now, I should get back to a script that's due.

Well, things don't seem to be going so well for Stan "The Man" Lee. First, he lost $225,000 and was reduced to working as a mailman. Then, I saved his life when he threw himself in front of my car. Now, he's selling his car.

What next? Pawning his no-prize collection for no-money? Renting Irving Forbush out for stud fees? My God, he could even be reduced to writing comic books.

If you're in the Los Angeles area, you ought to know about the Writer's Bloc. It's a group that sets up events where one interesting person interviews another…with the latter usually being a writer. At one of their events, I saw John Cleese interview William Goldman. At others, I've seen Rob Reiner interview Al Franken, George Schlatter interview Jerry Lewis, Harry Shearer interview George Carlin, Bruce Wagner interview Eric Idle, and I think there have been others — equally wonderful — I'm forgetting.

On Monday evening, April 3, director Bob Weide ("Curb Your Enthusiasm") will be interviewing Mort Sahl. I dunno if I'll be able to make it but you might want to. Mr. Sahl is one of the most important comedians of his generation…the man who made it okay to be on stage and presume the audience knows something. For information and reservations, visit this website. You'll be glad you did.

Some of the videos I've been linking to here are ones I figured everyone has seen…but I'm getting e-mails that tell me otherwise. So here's a real commercial in which Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble sell Winston cigarettes. A lot of folks have forgotten (or perhaps never knew) that when The Flintstones first went on the air on September 30, 1960, it was ballyhooed as "an adult cartoon." I'm not sure what that meant in 1960…maybe that the leads weren't talking animals. Or maybe it just meant that the ads were targeted at grown-ups.

It aired Friday nights on ABC. That season, ABC opened the evening at 7:30 with Matty's Funday Funnies, a Mattel-sponsored series that recycled old Paramount cartoons like "Herman and Katnip." Then the 8:00 show was a series with no kid appeal at all — Harrigan and Son, a talky sitcom starring Pat O'Brien as a feisty old lawyer who was joined in his firm by his offspring. This then led into The Flintstones at 8:30, which was followed by 77 Sunset Strip, The Detectives and a great comedy/drama called The Law and Mr. Jones which starred James Whitmore.

Obviously, if you were a programmer looking to keep an audience around from show to show, you would have gone from Matty's Funday Funnies to The Flintstones and then to Harrigan and Son and the cop shows. But ABC obviously didn't figure that the kids who watched the 7:30 cartoon show would be interested in the Hanna-Barbera sitcom…or maybe it was the Winston people who felt that way, which is why they agreed to sponsor it. Either way, it wasn't long before someone decided The Flintstones had kid appeal. At first, they didn't move it. The following season, it was still at 8:30 on Fridays but its lead-in was The Hathaways, a sitcom that starred Jack Weston and Peggy Cass as a married couple raising the Marquis Chimps. Eventually, the Modern Stone Age Family was moved to Thursday nights at 7:30, by which time the tobacco commercials were gone and Fred and Wilma instead did commercials for Welch's grape juice and One-a-Day Multi-Vitamins. (That's how it is in life: One day, you're selling vitamins. The next day, you are one.)

In 1961, ABC had Top Cat and Calvin and the Colonel in 8:30 time slots on different nights, in both cases making no attempt to program a lead-in or lead-out with children in mind. (The program on before Top Cat was The Steve Allen Show.) Both series were considered failures and thereafter, networks put their prime-time cartoon shows in the earliest time slot they had. The Bullwinkle Show was on at 7:00, which is when prime-time network programming commenced on Sundays. The Jetsons, The Alvin Show, The Bugs Bunny Show and Jonny Quest all aired at 7:30, which is when prime-time started on other nights. (Only exception: The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo aired Saturday nights at 8:00 but it followed Flipper, which was a show for the very young.).

Prime-time cartoon shows went away after that and didn't reappear until the very end of 1989 when The Simpsons debuted. You could probably make a good case that it was the most "adult" cartoon show ever done, and that it held more appear for adults than many live-action shows of its day. Still, Fox did not buck the tradition: They put it in the earliest time slot they had, which was 8:00.

Anyway, here are Fred and Barney trying to get you to smoke. I believe this is what killed off the Cro-Magnon race.

Here, recommended to me by Shmuel Ross, is an interesting article about the immigration question. I think it's right that there's something wrong with a set of laws that remain on the books but are only enforced inconsistently and arbitrarily.

One thing I'd change in it is the line about how undocumented workers "do the work that Americans won't." As Krugman and others have been noting, they do the work that Americans won't do for that salary. And I guess with that should go the recognition that it isn't just the take home pay…it's also the working conditions.

Item before last, we asked if anyone could identify the woman in the photo with Phil Silvers. Several of you wrote me to say it's Polly Bergen. I think you're all wrong.

Charlene Ryan Aragonés (wife of some cartoonist) just phoned to say she thinks it's Julie Wilson. I think Charlene is right.

Several people in the last hour or so have sent me links to speeches George W. Bush has given recently about the immigration situation. I would like to retract where I just said "I sometimes find myself semi-agreeing with" the man. Or at least, I'd like to emphasize the exceptions noted in that statement.

Who is that woman in the photo with Phil Silvers? Obviously, it's from an episode of Sgt. Bilko (aka You'll Never Get Rich, aka The Phil Silvers Show). But who is she?

A friend of mine needs to know. Drop me a note if you do.