I hope you're enjoying these. Today, we link to a one minute commercial for a company called EDS. This is a great commercial in the sense that it's well-shot and funny and memorable. It may be a bad commercial because I have no idea what they're selling or who they think they're selling it to. But now, experience the tale of the Cat Herders…
Last night, David Letterman's show with Howard Stern discussing the lawsuit CBS has filed against him got a 4.2 rating whereas Jay Leno, with no big guests, got a 4.9. That's got to be disappointing for the Letterman people, especially since Monday is usually one of their strongest nights. Perhaps it was because CBS barely mentioned Stern in the promos for the show but I don't think that was it. I think it was because America doesn't care about outrageously wealthy people and companies suing each other.
Stern has a problem. It's one that we'd all love to have but it is a problem: His money has become too conspicuous. Johnny Carson used to wince when guests remarked on how much money he had. It was fine to make fun of his suits or his monologue bombing or even his many divorces. But when they mentioned that he was the highest-paid performer in television, they made it that much harder for him to keep audiences liking him, as opposed to resenting him, and laughing at remarks about the things that annoy us all. It was funny for a while there when Johnny was kvetching about how he'd gotten stuck with a DeLorean automobile that didn't run and which no one wanted to buy. It was a little less funny if you remembered that Johnny was making enough money to buy five new cars a week.
The last time I heard Howard Stern on the radio, he was complaining about all the potholes in New York City streets. Once upon a time, this kind of talk was articulating the gripes and concerns of his listeners. But now there's been so much written about his contracts and deals that there must be people thinking, "Poor Howard…has to ride over a few potholes on his way to get paid a few million dollars a week for talking airhead strippers into taking their clothes off for him." At some point, a multi-millionaire complaining about little things sounds very much like Marie Antoinette or Leona Helmsley. People who can't afford to pay off their Visa cards sit there muttering, "What are you bitching about?" A lot of people, I gather, listen to Stern because they think, "He's one of us." Well, he won't be "one of us" for long if people keep getting reminded that he makes more money in one day than they'll see in five years.
This is for those of you interested in comic book history: Run, do not walk, to this link where Ken Quattro has written the definitive article on the long-defunct comic book company, St. John. Actually, that's faint praise since there have been so few articles about the firm so let me ratchet up the compliment a bit: It's a terrific, well-researched article on a publisher about which little has been known. Unlike a great many outfits that vanished and left no remnants behind, St. John published titles which other companies grabbed onto, and material which others later reprinted. The work for them by Joe Kubert and Norman Maurer alone guaranteed a high standard for the firm and many other titles lived up to that standard.
There's a lot of wonderful "scholarship" (I'm using that word loosely) being done these days about comic book history — much of it, alas, begun after too many of the participants have passed away. I'm sure glad someone decided to research St. John, and Ken did a first-rate job of it.
Let's all thank Marty Golia for sending me this link to an NPR story about Allan Sherman.
Here at news from me, one of our recurring complaints about network television is when they lie about start and stop times. If you TiVoed Deal or No Deal last night, you lost the last three or four minutes of the show. It was supposed to run from 8:00 to 8:59 but it actually ended around 9:03. This was not a huge loss since they were in the middle of a game. But if they'd been at the end, it might have been like sitting through an entire murder mystery and then getting robbed of the scene that tells you whodunnit.
I'm still a little fuzzy on why they think this helps their ratings. Let's say you're watching Deal or No Deal on NBC. It's followed by The Apprentice but you'd planned to switch over to Fox after Deal or No Deal and watch 24. When you do, because of the overage, you find you've missed the first few minutes of 24. Is the idea here that you'll go, "Shucks. Well, I don't want to watch this now so I might as well switch back to NBC and watch The Apprentice"? Do people actually think that way and switch back? Especially since in the process, they've probably also missed the first minute or so of The Apprentice"?
Or are they presuming you won't even switch at all; that you'll get to the end of Deal or No Deal, look at your watch and realize 24 has already started so you might as well stay put? I don't recall ever watching TV with an eye on the clock. I figure that when one show ends, the next ones are just beginning. Is the idea here to eventually disabuse America of that presumption? If so, to what end?
Is there evidence that this fudging of start and end times works? I'm trying to think what kind of testing or surveys a network could conduct to determine if this helps or hurts them. It seems pretty obvious it can only piss off folks who TiVo or tape a show for later viewing. How might it help the ratings enough with those who watch live to more than make up for that?
I asked one network person a few months ago and got back a shrug and an "I dunno." It may be that it's all anecdotal; that there's no proof it helps but it's been tried and some ratings are good, so someone sees a connection. Television programming is the most inexact of sciences, and there have been plenty of seemingly-successful strategies that turned out to be silly superstitions. This one may rank up there with rubbing a rabbit's foot, kissing a horseshoe or even hiring Tom Arnold to star in a new sitcom.
Here's a fuzzy video clip of Peter Tomarken from Press Your Luck. What happened on this episode was that a wrong answer was given to a question about Warner Brothers cartoon characters. The producers realized the mistake during the taping and since the game had run short and they had time to fill, they arranged for a phone call from Mel Blanc to correct the record. Let's go to the videotape…
More details are emerging about the plane crash this morning that claimed the lives of Press Your Luck host Peter Tomarken and his wife. The plane was on a mission for Angel Flight West, a non-profit organization which provides free air transportation for people with medical needs. The Tomarkens were on their way to San Diego to pick up a man who needed to get to UCLA Medical Center.
This article in USA Today says that Tomarken was piloting the plane. Some of the other news stories (like this one) have muddy language that suggests that a third person, whose body has not yet been found, was the pilot. In any case, the plane was registered to Tomarken and he and his wife were on board.
So not only did the Tomarkens die, they appear to have died while performing a volunteer act of charity. Which of course just makes a sad event even sadder.
Helen Thomas says that the press has been way too timid in dealing with the Bush administration. She's right.
Game show host Peter Tomarken and his wife Kathleen were killed this morning when a small airplane crashed just off the Pacific Coast, apparently due to engine trouble. Here's an article with the few other details that are currently available. Mr. Tomarken was 63 years old.
He had a background in magazines (he was an editor at Women's Wear Daily and Business Week, among others) which led him into advertising. Soon, he went from producing commercials to appearing in them and that led him into the world of game show hosting. He was best known from Press Your Luck, a popular CBS game show from 1983 to 1986 which still reruns on GSN. He also presided over Hit Man, Bargain Hunters, Wipeout and several other quiz programs, and did occasional acting jobs, usually as a TV news reporter. For a time, he was the host of a show on The Playboy Channel and a frequent emcee of infomercials. I thought he was always a classy and clever presence on my television, and the one time we met made me believe he was that way in real life, as well. He had a wicked sense of humor and would probably appreciate all remarks about him hitting the Ultimate Whammy today.
Today's video link is to a demo film, a little under five minutes in length, that was made in 1967 to try and sell a Wonder Woman TV show to ABC. Its producer, William Dozier, already had a hit on that network with the Adam West Batman series and he locked up a number of other comic book (or comic book-ish) properties to see if he could make lightning strike again. He couldn't. Not with this effort, not with a half-hour Dick Tracy pilot he produced, not with several others that never got anywhere near a camera lens. The only other show he was able to sell was The Green Hornet and it didn't last long.
The short Wonder Woman demo was written by Stanley Ralph Ross and the team of Larry Siegel and Stan Hart. That's right: It took three men to write this.
Stanley was concurrently writing many episodes of Batman. He later claimed — and I'm not sure I believe him — that he hated the idea that Dozier had of making Wonder Woman into a broad sitcom about a drab lady who imagines herself as the more beautiful, exciting Wonder Woman. On the other hand, eight years later, after ABC had commissioned and passed on another Wonder Woman pilot (the one starring Cathy Lee Crosby), they bought a very faithful adaptation of the comic book, the pilot of which was written by…Stanley Ralph Ross. Stanley developed the Lynda Carter version and claimed it was the way he'd wanted to handle the property all along. So maybe he did.
Stan Hart and Larry Siegel were a fairly new comedy writing team at the time. Shortly after this project, they were hired for The Carol Burnett Show, where they worked for many years and won many awards. They also wrote a lot for (and may still occasionally appear in) MAD Magazine.
In what you'll see if you're brave enough to click on the link below, Diana Prince is played by a woman named Ellie Wood Walker, who had few credits and who, I guess, was television's idea of an unattractive woman. On TV, it's okay for a lady to play someone who can't get a man as long as she's pretty enough. Portraying her alter-ego — the beautiful version of W.W. — was Linda Harrison, who was then the actress cast in every role at Twentieth-Century Fox that called for someone stunning but didn't have much dialogue. The same year, she played "Miss Stardust" in A Guide for the Married Man. The year after, she was Nova in Planet of the Apes. And the year after that, they stuck her in my favorite trashy TV melodrama of the sixties, Bracken's World where, amazingly, she was allowed to talk. She did fine.
Her nagging mother was Maudie Prickett, who managed to turn up at one time or another in just about every sitcom in the sixties. Narration was supplied by William Dozier himself, filling the same job he'd hired himself for on the Batman show.
Why didn't his version of Wonder Woman sell? Well, watch it and see. What's usually the case when a network commissions a brief demo film instead of a full pilot is either (a) they have so much faith in the premise and creative team that they don't feel the need to waste the time or money…or (b) they have so little faith in the project that, though they've been pressured into giving it a try before the cameras, they don't want to waste the time or money. Guess which was the case this time.
In July of '76, the satellite Viking Orbiter 1 sent back photos from the surface of the planet Mars, one of which seemed to suggest a face. This article by Richard C. Hoagland notes that in 1958, in a comic book called Race for the Moon, Jack Kirby drew a story called "The Face on Mars" that bears more than a slight similarity to what the satellite photographed eighteen years later. This is not the first time this kind of thing has been noticed in Jack's work and they're probably all coincidences…but they sure remind me of the many times Jack was unquestionably ahead of his time.
Yesterday, I posted that the name of Howard Stern had mysteriously disappeared from David Letterman's guest list for Monday night. Earlier today, I posted that I was told that Stern would be on.
What seems to have happened here is that the CBS website had Vin Diesel up as the main guest for Monday. This was wrong or outdated, but it caused several Internet sources to think that a change had been made and they adjusted their listings accordingly. But nothing had changed. The website was just wrong.
The CBS website has now been updated to reflect that Mr. Stern is on with Letterman on Monday night. So apparently, he was never off. It was just a false alarm.
Over at the Chicago Tribune, they have a nice profile on "local boy" Tom Dreesen. Tom's a great stand-up comedian and one of the nicest, most ethical guys I've ever encountered in the business. You'll have to register to read the article, which was pointed out to me by Bruce Reznick.
I am hearing from one source that Howard Stern will be on with Letterman tomorrow night. His name has vanished from some online program listings but that may not be accurate.
I mentioned these before (back here) but we now have cover art and Amazon links for two forthcoming DVDs collecting Laurel and Hardy movies. As Laurel and Hardy movies are just about my favorite things on film, I'm quite happy about this and want to see them do well so there'll be more releases. Neither of these sets really includes their finest efforts and we'd sure like to see those make it to good DVD releases soon.
Coming out in May: TCM Archives – The Laurel and Hardy Collection, a set that includes The Devil's Brother, Bonnie Scotland and some extras, including trailers, excerpts from other features, a documentary on short films, and commentary tracks by Leonard Maltin and Dick Bann. The Devil's Brother is the best thing on either of these DVD sets…a very fine period comedy with our heroes getting involved with a dashing highwayman.
And coming out any day now: The Laurel and Hardy Giftset, a collection that includes Great Guns, Jitterbugs and The Big Noise, plus trailers, some short promotional films, and commentary tracks by Randy Skretvedt. I'm not sure why this is a "giftset" and the three films are from the later, declining period of Stan and Ollie when they made films for Twentieth-Century Fox. But even weak Laurel and Hardy is better than no Laurel and Hardy so I'm getting this one, too. (There will be a Volume Two later this year with their other three films for Fox — The Dancing Masters, The Bullfighters and A-Haunting We Will Go. The ones on the first volume are better.)
As usual, Amazon is offering a package deal where you can buy both sets together and save, save, save.
So here's the big question: One of these DVDs is from Warner Home Video. The other is from Fox Home Video. Is it just a coincidence that the designers at both studios picked almost the same type font, out of thousands and thousands of possible choices, for the names of Laurel and Hardy on the two covers? I'm assuming it is since I can't think of any reason for them to have coordinated such a thing…and if they did, the fonts would be exactly the same, wouldn't they?