Monthly Archives: March 2006

I linked to this once before but it's worth another peek. It's a trailer featuring five men who do voiceovers for movie trailers. They are Don LaFontaine, John Leader, Nick Tate, Mark Elliot and Al Chalk. (Oh — and there's a sixth trailer guy in this video…a brief phone call from Hal Douglas, who starred in our video link for yesterday.)

So enjoy it. And can someone identify for me the music heard in the background as John Leader is introduced? It's one of those "I know that tune but cannot place it" things.

Here's a piece by Donald Rumsfeld on the current state of things in Iraq. Boy, would I like to believe this is all true.

If you've recently sent me the kind of e-mail that warrants a reply, you probably haven't received one. This is because I suddenly got deluged and busy at the same time. It's not because I'm snubbing you. I simply got a couple hundred messages in the last week and I'm not able to answer 'em as fast as they're arriving. I'll do what I can to get through the folder but I also have some deadlines to meet so some of your messages will languish a bit longer. Sorry.

It's about time I posted another one of those…and this time, it's harder. Many of you were able to pick out the phony website when it was one out of five choices. How will you do if you have nine real websites and only one spurious one? Well, let's see. You have to pick six of them before you get an offer from The Banker to buy your case and…oh, wait. That's a different game. This is There's No Such Website!

[NOTE: The links below to the real websites point to real websites. A site may be down or it may be so flooded with hits because of my linkage that you can't get to it. That does not mean it's the phony website. The link below to the phony website goes to a page on my site that tells you you've selected the phony website.]

• The Museum of Coathangers – They hold your clothes. They mate in the closet when you're not looking. If you lock your keys in your car, you may even use one to get in. They're coathangers and someone has compiled a collection of their history.
• Egg-Coddlers.com – They hold your eggs for coddling purposes. They…well, they don't really do anything else but if you need to have an egg coddled, they're indispensable. Here's a website devoted to them.
• The Airsickness Bag Virtual Museum – Here's a collection that will make you sick. It's a gallery of those lovely bags they put in front of every seat in an airplane to remind you that it may not be a smooth ride.
• Things My Girl Friend and I Have Argued About – Mil Millington and his companion Margaret sure argue about a lot of interesting things. One wonders if they argue about him putting these topics on a website and in a book.
• Modern Mummification – You have nothing better to do today. Why not have yourself or a loved one mummified? It's one of those things you'll have forever.
• I Hate Clowns – Do you hate clowns? Do you have nightmares about being surrounded by clowns? Then here's a website where you'll find people who feel the way you do. Includes online games where you get to punch and slap clowns.
• I Hate Mimes – Do you hate mimes? Do you have nightmares about being surrounded by mimes? Then here's a website where you'll find people who feel the way you do. Includes online games where you get to punch and slap mimes.
• AsnerCam – Two years ago, actor Ed Asner walked into a luggage repair shop in Culver City, California operated by Phil Willson. He never picked up the suitcase he left there and ever since, Phil's had a web camera trained on the door awaiting the return of Lou Grant.
• Celebrities Yawning – Do celebrities bore you? Cause you to yawn? Well, here's a gallery of photos of famous people yawning. [CAUTION: Looking at this website may cause you to yawn.]
• Watch Me Eat a Hot Dog – Want to watch people eating hot dogs? Then this is the site for you. [CAUTION: Looking at this website may cause you to want to eat a hot dog.]

This time around, thank Tony Isabella, Mike Dow, Bill Stiteler and Edward Douglas for all the suggestions of fake-sounding websites that aren't fake.

Back in this post, I reported that the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas had stopped accepting reservations for after April 15 and that a prominent demolition company had told a reporter that it was studying how to blow up the place. Things seem to have changed. The company that owns it was just acquired by another company, and they're now saying they need more time to plan what they're going to do. Reservations are now being taken for the rest of the year. What do you want to bet they keep it open until just after next year's Super Bowl? And that not a lot of money is spent on upkeep between now and then?

We all love voiceover actors, especially the select group of men (and one or two women) who have "trailer voices." These are the announcers who deliver a certain sound that is considered desirable for movie trailers. At the moment, the two most recognizable ones probably belong to Don LaFontaine and Hal Douglas. Don is based in Los Angeles and Hal is in New York, though they both do work for clients on both coasts. If you don't know what they sound like, here's a link to an MP3 demo recording of Don LaFontaine…

And here's a link to an MP3 demo of the work of Hal Douglas…

Tomorrow, I'll link to a video with Don and some other announcers in it. For now, here's a trailer that was done a couple years ago for the Jerry Seinfeld feature, Comedian. It contains not one second of the movie. Instead, it shows a voiceover guy (played by Hal Douglas) trying to record the trailer for the movie…

Tomorrow night (actually, Sunday morning) GSN's Black and White Overnight bloc will run two color episodes of What's My Line? One is from 1969, the other is from 1974 and on both, the Mystery Guest is Maureen Stapleton, who passed away a few days ago.

Then later Sunday, the channel is running a salute to the late Peter Tomarken. It consists of eighteen consecutive episodes of Press Your Luck, the first of which originally aired January 3, 1985. The marathon runs on GSN from 9 AM (Eastern time) to 6 PM.

James H. Burns writes…

It's possible this is Hollywood-urban legend, but it's in all of the TV Batman histories — and Adam West once confirmed it to me, personally — (Which might only mean, of course, as must always be taken into consideration when divining the lore of anything, that he had read the same stories…)

It's reported that just a few weeks after ABC cancelled the series, NBC called Twentieth-Century Fox, figuring that the show, weaker ratings or not, might be a nice fit for their 1968 Fall lineup. But the studio had already destroyed the sets and there was no way anyone wanted to pick up the tab for reconstruction…

Well then, NBC couldn't have wanted it very badly.

I have no first-hand info on what happened with Batman but these discussions are not uncommon, and their meaning is often inflated by those involved with the cancelled series. It takes a bit of the shame and failure out of the cancellation to say, "We almost got another year." What would be uncommon would be if NBC actually got to the point of making a genuine dollar offer.

My guess would be that what happened with Batman was that someone at NBC called Fox and said, if only to be sociable, "Just in case we have a hole to fill in our schedule, what would it run us for another season?" Fox already had 120 episodes of the show and was probably eager to get them into syndication so they could reap the benefit of past deficit-financing investments. Perhaps the sets had already been destroyed but as I recall, the Bat Cave was the biggie and it hadn't been too costly to build in the first place. I'd be more inclined to believe that even if there was some discussion, NBC wasn't all that serious about picking it up and Fox wasn't all that interested in keeping it going.

You may remember some time ago here, we were highly amused by the fact that Costco was selling original Picasso art. Well, it turns out they may not have been selling original Picasso art. Questions have been raised about the authenticity of the pieces and you can read all about the maybe-scandal at this link.

If you want to see the tribute to Al Jaffee on The Colbert Report last Monday, go here.

As mentioned here more often than its significance warrants, TiVo is discontinuing their lifetime service price. It was announced that last Wednesday was the cut-off date to sign up…but my spies inform me that the TiVo website is still processing orders. We know not how long this will last but one website claims the new cut-off date is April 15. I'm guessing they got a flood of last minute subscriptions and are enjoying the sudden cash flow.

Can anyone suggest a great website that lists all DVD releases by date, including the previous few months? I see lots of sites that will tell me what's coming out next week or the week after from the major distributors…but what if I want to look up what came out six weeks ago? And if I'd like to see some of the more obscure releases, too?

I didn't catch Neal Adams last night on the Coast to Coast radio show but I'm hearing today from several folks who did. They tell me that the conversation included some references to my old employer and friend Jack Kirby, and that a caller claimed that during World War II, Jack was a spy and that he spoke German and…

Well, I'm not sure exactly what the claim was. But don't believe it. Not true.

A bill has been introduced into Congress which would basically let the government eavesdrop on anyone at any time for any reason if the president thought it was necessary for "national security." There presently are no restrictions on who can be spied upon as long as the executive branch can demonstrate to a judicial oversight entity, either before or after the fact, that there's a reason for it. I don't know why this isn't enough for some people, even George W. Bush, but obviously it isn't.

My natural suspicion — which I admit is unsupported by any evidence so far — is that the White House has spied on a lot of Americans who are utterly unconnected to terrorist activity and for whom no judge would ever authorize surveillance. It might be as treacherous as Karl Rove wanting to tap the phones of political opponents or it might be overzealous or inept aides. This administration has certainly had an amazing history of bad aim and hitting the wrong targets. In any case, I suspect there'd be a full-blown, Nixon-like scandal if we ever knew whose phone calls have been monitored…so the Bush people need this kind of blanket "he can do anything he wants" law to avoid that.

Unfortunately, a lot of Americans have this attitude that we have to give the president every possible weapon he claims he needs to protect us or we'll all die. They've been led to believe (wrongly, as far as I can tell) that the existing arrangement stops the president's staff from listening in on calls to and from Al Qeada, or might stop it, or might somehow block something that would prevent another 9/11. I don't know why they think this…or even why they think, if the Bush administration did have such information, it would know what to do with it. The National Weather Service told them almost exactly what Hurricane Katrina would do to the Gulf Coast and we all saw how the Department of Homeland Security snapped into action on that one.

These folks are so terrified that they want to gut the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, authorize the president to spy on anyone he wants without accountability, and even make it retroactive to absolve him for what he did before the enactment of the law they're proposing. They aren't the majority but they may be hysterical enough to ram this one through the legislative process, threatening that anyone who opposes it is pro-terrorist or not serious about fighting them. (And by the way, why isn't that charge being hurled at all the Republicans who just defeated a proposal to spend more on port security?) Personally, I don't think any president should have that much unsupervised power and this one certainly hasn't earned that kind of trust.

For more on this new proposal, read this blog post by Glenn Greenwald. And then imagine what the Republicans would be saying if a Democratic president wanted the power that this bill would instill in our Chief Exec. I think we'd already be well past the stage where folks would be worried about losing the argument just because they introduced a Hitler analogy.

Might as well link to this one, too. Earlier this week, I subjected you to the excrutiating demo film that Batman TV producer William Dozier whipped up for a proposed Wonder Woman series. In 1967, the Batman crew made a seven minute short to spotlight Yvonne Craig as Batgirl.

There seems to be some question as to why this film was made. What I always heard was that the Batman show's ratings were down and ABC was considering cancellation of one or both half hours that ran each week. Trying to convince the network that the show still had life in it, Dozier went to New York and huddled with the DC Comics staff to discuss adding some new element to the world of the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder. What they came up with was the idea of introducing a new Batgirl character into the comic. Dozier then proposed to ABC that Batgirl could be added to the show and that this would make it worthy of renewal. The network folks were skeptical so the demo was made to show them how Batgirl could energize things, and how good Dozier's choice, Yvonne Craig, would be in the role. (Actress and former Miss America Mary Ann Mobley was reportedly set for the part before Dozier changed his mind. Ms. Mobley had a bad couple of years there, having just come equally close to the title role on The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.)

The Batgirl demo is a lot better than the Wonder Woman demo…but then, it would kind of have to be. It's really no better or no worse than what the Batman show had become…and there's some faint praise. The anemic villain in the demo, Killer Moth, was the antagonist in the issue of Detective Comics that introduced Batgirl. He suffered two back-to-back humiliations: Beaten by a girl and then he never got to actually appear on the series.

The short accomplished half its intended goal: ABC renewed Batman, though for once a week instead of twice, for what turned out to be the last season. Batgirl was cute but she did not alter the gimmick and formula of the show with which audiences had grown weary. Few hit programs ever wore out their welcome with the American audience as rapidly as Batman and though Ms. Craig's clinging tights brought a brief bump to the Nielsens, things settled back down pretty rapidly. The show seemed less interesting when it aired once a week, sans cliffhanger, and it also felt cluttered with the new character. The cancellation notice came halfway through its third season, in part because the studio behind it — Twentieth-Century Fox — wanted it that way. Airing once a week, Batman brought in half the revenue it had when it was on twice a week…but each episode cost a lot more than when they were making two at a time. Budget-slashing, of course, also didn't help things that final year…plus, it had stopped being the "hot" show on which big stars wanted to guest. The long-rumored Guest Villain appearance by Frank Sinatra might have boosted the numbers but it never happened.

Some histories say that Dozier's intention with what you're about to see (if you click) was to sell ABC on the idea of a spin-off Batgirl show. While the producer may have fantasized about another Bat-series, it doesn't seem likely that he thought it seemed likely; not with Batman ratings trending downward as they were. I think it was just an attempt to keep a sinking series afloat…and it did manage that, though not for long.