Monthly Archives: August 2006

Veteran actor (and cartoon voice actor) Tony Jay died last Sunday following micro-surgery to remove a non-cancerous tumor from his lungs. His age is unknown but it is believed he was born in the mid-thirties.

Tony was an unusual player in the pool of voice talent. A former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, he was the possessor of a magnificent baritone voice that he put to good use in countless commercials and cartoon shows. He was heard in hundreds of animated shows, features and video games, usually playing villains. The list includes Mighty Max, Tale Spin, Reboot, Buzz Lightyear, Bruno the Kid and the 1995 Fantastic Four cartoon series, for which he supplied the voice of Galactus. His standout role was probably that of the evil Judge Frollo (seen above) in the Disney Studios' version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Tony also had a very busy on-camera career that included roles in movies (including Love and Death and Twins) and television programs (including Lois and Clark, Twin Peaks and Beauty and the Beast) but his greatest pride was in his numerous stage appearances.

I only knew Tony casually, meeting him twice under what were probably unfortunate circumstances. A few years ago in an interview, he was quoted as making some rather ungracious remarks about his fellow voice actors. I don't recall the specific lines but the essence of them — which Tony suggested was yanked out of the intended context — was that he was a real actor and the others voicing cartoons were in some lower sphere of talent. Both times I encountered him, I was in the company of another voice actor who'd taken umbrage at the quote and testy words were exchanged…though, I must say, in magnificent tones. Neither moment was, alas, a propitious one for getting to know Tony Jay.

You can get to know more about him — and hear some samples of what the man could do before a microphone — at his website. An obit notice appears on this page.

Did the suspect being held in Thailand confess to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey? Well, you can take your choice…

Bloomberg: American John Mark Karr admitted killing JonBenet Ramsey, a 6-year-old girl found slain in her family's basement almost a decade ago, Thai police said.

Associated Press: An American suspect arrested in connection with the death of 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey denied any connection to her murder when he was detained at his downtown Bangkok apartment Wednesday, police said. The suspect was identified as John Mark Karr, according to Lt. Gen. Suwat Tumrongsiskul, who heads the country's immigration police. Karr denied involvement in the slayings, another police official said.

So what do we think the story is here? I'm not asking whether the guy killed the little girl. I'm asking about the discrepancy in the news reports on whether or not he's confessed. Did one reporter get one story from one source within the police department while a different reporter heard the opposite from another source? Does the difference lie with the fact that the second story is quoting someone in the "immigration police," whereas the first account is from a different police department? Something's wrong here and I'm curious as to what it is.

Here's a clever idea. You can send someone an ad for the movie, Snakes on a Plane, which will arrive in the form of a personalized message from Samuel L. Jackson. Click on this link to go to the page, fill in some info and you're off! Thanks to Carolyn Kelly for the tip.

One of the most in-demand voiceover artists in the business is a gent named Maurice LaMarche. You may have heard him bust up the joint on one of the Cartoon Voice panels I moderated at the Comic-Con International in San Diego last month. Or you may have heard him on The Critic or on Futurama or even on Pinky and the Brain, where he provided the voice of The Brain, which I always thought was like Vincent Price doing an impression of Orson Welles. Actually, the guy's all over the place.

Anyway, Mo (as everyone calls him) is appallingly talented and the fine journalist/webguy Ken Plume has done a very long, very interesting interview with the guy. For those of you interested in how the world of voiceover works, I highly recommend all parts of it except the ones where Mo talks about how he isn't up there with the top guys. If he says that one more time, we're going to have him arrested for perjury. Sheesh.

I don't think the Post cereal people still make Crispy Critters but when I was a kid, they did…and their commercials featured Linus the Lionhearted, whose voice was supplied by producer-gangster Sheldon Leonard. Linus had his own cartoon show for a while (we showed you the opening here) and this is one of his catchier commercial jobs. Get ready to hum the Orange Moose song to yourself for the next few days.

The Hungarian government is conducting an online poll to select the name for a new bridge spanning the Danube River. If you've been watching The Colbert Report, you've seen Stephen Colbert asking his viewers to vote for it to be named after him.

It started with an announcement near the end of this segment (that's a link to a video) and it's gone on from there. Wanna help?

This is the link to the page on which you can cast your ballot…and I'll warn you in advance that the site is very slow and sometimes doesn't load at all. You'll want to scroll down to "Stephen Colbert híd" and select that option, then scroll down to the bottom and click on "Elküld" to submit your vote.

It's actually a hassle but, hey, it may be the most important vote you cast this year. Or at least, the only one that's accurately counted.

So…I haven't been watching cable news today. But on past occasions when I did, I heard an awful lot of talking heads telling us that there was little doubt that one or both of the JonBenet Ramsey's parents had killed their daughter. At times, it was along the lines of, "If you think any other scenario was possible, you're an idiot."

Today, in light of the arrest of someone else for the crime, I'm sure all those pundits and experts are retracting and apologizing, right?

Fans of the What's My Line? reruns on GSN, do not despair. We may not have lost 'em for good.

Fred Kaplan on a growing problem in our various wars on terror: Lack of funds.

Many moons ago, I wrote a couple episodes of Superman: The Animated Series. I'm asked all about them in this interview over on Toon Zone.

Cracked Magazine is back. You may not have even known it was gone…or maybe you thought it was gone long ago. But the longest-running MAD imitation is returning to newsstands after a two-year hiatus and an ownership change. The new version promises edgier material and "star" writers, including some from hit TV programs such as The Daily Show. This article tells a little bit about the return and then over on the Cracked website, they have a preview of the first issue under the new regime, which I believe is starting its numbering over with #1. (The last issue before the layoff was #357.)

Will the new version fly? I dunno. One does get the feeling that the day of the humor magazine is past; that the target audience can get all the irreverence it wants (plus porn) for free on the Internet. Sales on MAD are not what they once were, even though that publication's sharper than it's been in years. I'm guessing that the new owners of Cracked are expecting to drop a lot of bucks on newsstand sales and are just publishing as a loss leader. They're more likely out to hype a brand name that can be used in other venues, the way MAD became a TV show and the name of National Lampoon has been used to sell movies of variable merit. There hasn't been a National Lampoon magazine published since 1998 but its logo apparently still conveys some sales boost to teen-targeted comedy.

So maybe the new Cracked will succeed, at least in that way. Its name certainly seems to be lucky. Cracked started in 1958, when it was supervised by Sol Brodsky, who was later a key player in the Marvel Comics revolution of the sixties. The current management is trying something which was never really attempted either by Brodsky or his successors. They're trying to establish an identity for their publication…an identity that has nothing to do with MAD.

For much of its existence, Cracked was kind of a minor league or farm team MAD. Several key MAD artists, including Will Elder and Jack Davis, worked for it while in exile from the home of Alfred E. Neuman and other illustrators — like Angelo Torres, Bill Wray and Tom Richmond — worked for Cracked until they were deemed good enough for MAD. Several key MAD writers sold their MAD rejects there and one of MAD's most prolific writers, Lou Silverstone, edited Cracked for a number of years. In '87, Cracked got a huge boost by grabbing onto "MAD's maddest artist" Don Martin when he quit in a dispute with MAD's publisher and longtime MAD associate editor Jerry DeFuccio also found a home at Cracked when he was let go.

In other words, Cracked has consistently defined itself in terms of MAD, featuring talent that either had been in MAD or wanted to be in MAD, and aping the look and feel of the competition. The new management is trying to build something different and I hope it works. You'll know it has when we start seeing Cracked movies or a Cracked radio network or a Cracked TV show. Because sad to say, just being a humor magazine that succeeds as a humor magazine is no longer enough. There's no money in it.

Oh, boy! It's six minutes of the Quisp and Quake cereal commercials produced by Jay Ward and (probably, mostly) written by Bill Scott. The voice of Quake is done by William Conrad, who was the narrator on the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons but who's better known for his TV roles starring in Cannon, Jake and the Fatman and Nero Wolfe, among others. The voice of Quisp was done by Daws Butler, who was also Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Snaggle…oh, just go read my articles about Daws if you haven't already. And the other voices in these spots (and everything else Ward's studio produced) were supplied by Paul Frees, June Foray and Bill Scott.

It's a shame you couldn't do an ad campaign like this today. First off, thirty second spots are the norm and with a cereal, that's barely enough time to mention the product and do the disclaimer about it being a part of a good breakfast. And of course, there's no more Jay Ward operation and not many people who can be that funny. Nor are there many sponsors that would let someone entertain like that instead of laying on a hard sell.

Anyway, enjoy some commercials that were often better than the shows in which they appeared.

George F. Will discusses the British terrorist bust and what it may mean to us. One of the things he thinks it means is that John Kerry was right when he said that although the war on terror will be "occasionally military," it is "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world." Of course, when Kerry said that, no Conservative — not even Mr. Will — would view it as anything other than some sort of admission of weakness.

Joe Darby is the man who blew the whistle on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. He has come forward to tell his story and it's well worth your attention. I'll let you read the descriptions of torture for yourself but here's one section that's startling in another way. It comes after Darby has reported multiple abuses of law and morality to his superiors…

So I knew if I wanted to go back to my civilian life, if I wanted to integrate back home, nobody could know what I'd done. They'd never forgive me. And I was assured by the army that nobody would know. I would remain anonymous.

Well, it didn't work out that way. About a month after Graner and the rest of them left Abu Ghraib, we were up in Camp Anaconda, and I was sitting with ten other guys from my platoon in the dining facility. It's a big facility, packed with like 400 other soldiers, and I'm sitting there eating when Donald Rumsfeld comes on during the damned congressional hearings. It was like something out of a movie. I'm sitting there, and right next to me there's a TV, and Rumsfeld is on it when he drops my damned name. Almost nobody in my unit knew what I'd done until he dropped my damned name. On national TV. I was sitting midbite when he said it, and I was like, Oh, my God. And the guys at the table just stopped eating and looked at me.

So they promised his name would remain secret and then Rumsfeld went before Congress — on international TV — and volunteered the name of the informant. Lovely. Do we think this was a screw-up or a punishment? Neither is particularly admirable.

This made me laugh out loud so I had to share it here. It sounds a lot like a certain Monty Python sketch…

Welsh-speaking cyclists have been left baffled — and possibly concerned for their health — after a bizarre translation mix-up.

The temporary sign, placed in front of the roadworks at Barons Court roundabout between Penarth and Cardiff, correctly says "cyclists dismount" in English, but says "llid y bledren dymchwelyd" in Welsh.

Owain Sgiv, an officer for the Welsh language campaign group Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, explained: "Roughly translated, 'llid y bledren dymchwelyd' means 'bladder disease has returned.'"