Monthly Archives: July 2006

Here's a classic commercial for Parkay Margarine. The man on-screen is Vic Tayback, who is best known for his role on the long-running sitcom, Alice. The voice from the little margarine tub is Michael Bell, who will be among the participants in a Cartoon Voice Panel I'm hosting one week from today (on July 22) at the Comic-Con International in San Diego at 2 PM. Mr. Bell has had an impressive career as an on-camera actor but we don't care about that. We care about his countless voiceover jobs over the years. He was Plastic Man. He was Opus on the Bloom County cartoon special. He was about eight Transformers and four or five G.I. Joes. He was many a Smurf. And as you can hear below, he was a tub of margarine. He'll tell you all about it at the con.

I've written several times on this page (here, for instance) about the local, live re-creation of the old What's My Line? game show. Last evening, the folks behind it did their final show — at least for a while — at the Game Show Congress that's currently in progress at the Hilton out in Burbank. I was there for it and so were quite a few readers of this weblog…and we all had an enormously good time.

Hosting the proceedings — and doing a damn fine job of it, I might add — was J. Keith van Straaten, who kept things rolling along with great, professional expertise. Someone ought to snatch this guy up and give him a televised game show to host because he's really good. Assisting him as prize model, and getting some enormous laughs, was the lovely Teresa Ganzel, Johnny Carson's one-time Matinee Lady.

The four members of the panel were as follows: There was Stuart Shostak, a friend of mine who among his many endeavors does warm-ups for TV tapings. There was Sarah Purcell, who is probably best known for the years when she was a host of Real People on NBC. There was comedian Frank Nicotero, who hosted the game show, Street Smarts. And there was Betsy Palmer.

Ah, yes…Betsy Palmer. The lovely panelist from the original I've Got A Secret. She was beautiful and funny on that show and she's still, at age eighty or thereabouts, both those things. As a game player, she didn't advance the ball very far down field but the audience loved everything she said. A guy behind me was just sitting there, muttering to his companion, "That's Betsy Palmer."

The first contestant was one of the models from the current version of The Price is Right. The panel had to guess (and they didn't) that her "other" job is that she runs a chain of tanning salons. The second contestant was a woman who'd appeared on the original What's My Line? with her then-occupation of Girdle Tester. The third contestant was a gent who played the musical saw…which he did for us after the panel failed to guess his line of work. And then came the Mystery Guest…

It was Shirley Jones, star of The Partridge Family, The Music Man, Elmer Gantry and so many other movies and TV shows. The audience, of course, loved her. They especially loved when the blindfolded Betsy Palmer, having established that the Mystery Guest had done a lot of things over the years, blurted out, "Gee, you're old." The panel failed to guess who it was (Stuart Shostak looked like he wanted to commit Hara-Kiri for having dishonored his expertise in the area of vintage TV) and after they unmasked, J. Keith conducted a great interview with Ms. Jones and her hubby, Marty Ingels.

I wish you could have seen it, especially if you're the kind of person who thinks game shows are dumb or can't be wildly entertaining. It was all real and spontaneous in a way that no current "reality show" ever is. In fact, if you never got to see J. Keith's What's My Line? Live, you missed out on a wonderful bit of theater. I hope they do more someday.

As we mentioned back here, a Hollywood landmark building — the current home of the Old Spaghetti Factory — is soon to be demolished and replaced by a combination of condos and retail outlets. It's not the only one. According to this article, similar fates await the CBS Sunset-Gower TV studio, the Hollywood Palladium and the structure that was once the Earl Carroll Theater and is currently the Hollywood home of Nickelodeon.

I love old Hollywood and old buildings but I sometimes find it hard to work up a great sense of loss about such structures. Or at least, I don't have enough to think that my tax dollars should go to keep them intact and/or that the present owners should be pressured to forgo what they think is the most profitable use of their property. That CBS complex has a grand and glorious history…and that's pretty much why it's obsolete. It was built to house radio programs of the kind Jack Benny once did and was later retooled for the needs of early television. For years, the local CBS affiliate did its local shows and news from there but there are no more local shows and they finally decided it wasn't even practical for news any longer and that operation moved out. Part of me would like the place to remain there in perpetuity so that when I drive by with outta-town friends, I can point and say, "See? That's where they did The Burns and Allen Show." But I don't think that's reason enough.

The Nickelodeon Theater is probably even less practical. Just in my lifetime, that building has been a half dozen things, passed from owner to owner like a Christmas fruit cake. I remember when the one-time Earl Carroll Theater was all painted up in psychedelic decor and renamed the Aquarius to house the Los Angeles company of the rock musical, Hair. (The current Nickelodeon decor is even more garish.) It was remodelled back to a more sedate theater after that for musicals like Ain't Misbehavin'. Chevy Chase did his short-lived talk show there and it was the place where anyone who had to produce an awards telecast on a low budget would go.

Or if they were really tight on bucks, they'd go across the street to the Palladium. It opened on September 23, 1940 with a performance by Frank Sinatra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra…and last time I was in there, it didn't look like it had been cleaned since then. No, that's a cheap joke. But it's fair to say that the day is long past when the Palladium would host events like The Emmy Awards or top-name rock concerts. I think it mostly subsists these days as a location for movie shoots, and if/when it goes away, I won't miss it a whole lot.

There are old buildings and parts of Hollywood that ought to be saved for reasons of heritage and history. But of the four venues named in the above article as soon to be razed, the one I think I'll miss the most is the Old Spaghetti Factory. At least, it's the only one that I might have had a reason to go into…though now that I've pretty much given up pasta, even that's not likely.

Army Archerd remembers Red Buttons. A very nice piece of writing.

From the 1943 movie, Stage Door Canteen, we have six minutes with Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd…with a cameo appearance at the end by Gracie Fields.

Only a few more days 'til many of us head for San Diego and the Comic-Con International. The weather forecast calls for daytime highs around 80° and nighttime lows around 72°. Pack accordingly.

Hey, remember I said that Red Buttons was brilliant performing at Stan Freberg's anniversary party? Well, I think that's the same party Harry Shearer is talking about in this piece.

Last Saturday, I gave a rave review 'n' recommendation to Zero Hour, the new one-man show in which actor-playwright Jim Brochu portrays the late, great Zero Mostel. Now, you might say, "Yeah, sure you praised it, Evanier…but you're a longtime friend of this Brochu guy. How can we trust you on this?" Fair question. And the answer is that you should go read what the Los Angeles Times reviewer had to say about it…which you can do by clicking here.

Fred Kaplan on the lack of leadership skills exhibited by George W. Bush.

Our acute shortage of older comedians grows ever worse with the passing of Red Buttons, who died this morning at the age of 87.

If you never got to see Red in person, you missed a wonderful experience. I was fortunate to be present perhaps a half-dozen times at local events — once at a tribute to his former writer, Larry Gelbart; another time at Stan Freberg's anniversary party — when Red got up and launched into a monologue that, as the saying goes, brought the house down. He performed with a devilish twinkle and a spot-on sense of timing, always pausing the precise number of micro-seconds before delivering a punch line. The guy was just plain funny.

For many years, he was a frequent performer at roasts where he employed his "Never got a dinner" routine to great success. He was very fussy about that material. He had piles of lines but he always wanted fresh ones. When I worked with him on a variety show in the seventies, he said he'd do the bit if we, the writing staff, wrote some new material for it. I think we wrote around a hundred jokes to get the five or six he thought were up to his standards…and we didn't mind it at all. Because Red knew what worked for him and you had to admire the devotion to delivering the best possible routine.

Most of the obits (like this one) will probably emphasize Red's 1957 Academy Award for his work in Sayonara — and the man was a very fine actor. I thought he was especially good in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? But there are plenty of great dramatic actors around. We're running out of great old comedians…and at an alarming pace.

An author-friend of mine is writing a book with and about a rather famous celebrity. In discussing his formative years, the celebrity recalled a comic book strip he followed when he was young, and the author-friend has asked me to try and identify it. Here's how the celebrity described his childhood fave…

I've always had, I guess, what most people would think of as the kindest reading of it, a much wider concept of what a family is than most people have. I remember I got busted for reading a comic book. It was my favorite comic book with a flashlight under my blanket, about a group of various orphaned kids who had somehow found each other and all joined together to live on a ranch together and survive and they came under, there was some adult who took over the father figure part and the mother figure, and I remember thinking that that was all how it should be.

The celeb was born in 1941 and lived at home until around 1959 or 1960. His comic book reading years therefore might have been as early as, say, 1948 or as late as the mid-fifties. He recalls the feature in question as one that never earned its own book and appeared instead in an anthology comic or as a back-up strip.

I'm stumped. It doesn't sound like the Simon-Kirby Boys Ranch to me and while I can think of a couple of other candidates, not one of them fits exactly. Anyone else got an idea?

It's a blooper reel from the original Dick Van Dyke Show. What more do you need to know?

Well, the embedded videos don't seem to be the problem so I've put them back. For reasons I cannot fathom, a number of people are reporting that connecting to this website causes their computer to lock up. Nothing has changed in our configuration so I'm at a loss as to what's causing it. If anyone has an idea of what's causing it, please let me know.

The other day, I stopped in at a small shopping center and made a few purchases at an Office Depot. On my way out, I witnessed a curious scene: A couple in their thirties (I'm guessing) walked up to the door and looked puzzled, like they were not expecting to find an Office Depot there. They looked around, then they asked an employee near the entrance where the Chinese restaurant was. The employee said there was no Chinese restaurant in the shopping center. The couple was even more puzzled but they staggered away and headed back for their car.

I didn't think much of it until earlier today when I was driving by that same shopping center. I chanced to notice that the way the buildings were configured, one of them cast a thick, black shadow across the large Office Depot sign, which was not lit. With a large part of that sign in darkness, it looked roughly like this…

And I thought: I wonder if that couple thought they'd spotted a new restaurant called the Rice Pot.

A number of folks — and I think they're all on Macs — have written to tell me they've been having trouble accessing this page for the last day or three. I haven't changed a thing so I'm guessing it has something to do with the embedded video links. I've just taken a few of them out to see if it makes a difference. If you're a person who was having trouble getting to this page lately and now you can, drop me a note and let me know. And tell me what kind of computer and browser you're using and whether you're having trouble accessing Cartoon Brew. Thanks.