Monthly Archives: September 2006

I have to get this post up before I go to bed. Otherwise, I'll get up in the morning and find seven thousand messages in my inbox saying what ten or eleven have so far: "Hey, Evanier! Don't you know that Warner Home Video is bringing out a DVD of the two Kirk Alyn Superman serials on November 28?"

No, I didn't know…and when I searched Amazon earlier to see if it was out on DVD, I somehow missed the relevant page. Here's a link to it in case you'd like to get in an advance order. Before you click, just remember: Between the two serials, you'll be getting thirty chapters that run a total of 518 minutes. There's some wonderful material in there, especially in the interplay 'twixt Alyn and Noel "Lois Lane" Neill…but it's 518 minutes. That's more than eight and a half hours of Superman serial.

If I were Warner Home Video, I'd make it like one of those restaurant deals where they serve you a twelve pound hamburger and it's free if you can eat the whole thing in one sitting.

Jerry Beck, co-Brewmaster of Cartoon Brew, informs me that Turner Classic Movies will be running the Kirk Alyn Superman serial in a few weeks. It's fifteen chapters long and they'll be running five on Saturday, October 28, five more on the following Saturday and the last five on the Saturday after that. I'll try and remember to remind you when we get closer to the date.

Matthew Yglesias discusses the torture that is now being committed on our behalf. He makes an interesting point. This administration has blamed a number of wrong moves on faulty intelligence. A lot of that faulty intelligence was obtained by torture.

Here's the history on this one: The Marx Brothers made their Broadway debut in a 1924 revue called I'll Say She Is. The show was never filmed or recorded and much about it is lost. In fact, I'm not even sure anyone alive can explain the title. (In interviews, even when he was lucid, Groucho couldn't.) One of the big comedy scenes was the opener, which involved the four brothers going to a talent agent to audition. The sketch had rhymed dialogue and in it, each of them did an impression of Joe Frisco, a famous stuttering comedian of the day who was also known for his distinctive style of dancing. (The entire script for I'll Say She Is has been pieced together from various sources and is available on this website.)

Got all that? Good. Now, flash forward to 1931 when the Brothers Marx were making movies for Paramount and the studio was staging a big publicity campaign to promote its wares. This involved producing a documentary called The House That Shadows Built, detailing the (then) brief history of the studio and showing clips from upcoming films. It was considered desirable to include a preview of the next Marx movie, Monkey Business. Problem: Filming had not yet commenced on Monkey Business so there was no clip. Solution: Make one.

Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo went onto a Paramount soundstage one day and filmed a scene that could be passed off as an excerpt from their upcoming feature. It was the talent agent sketch from I'll Say She Is with a couple of modifications. One was that since Joe Frisco was not a major Paramount star and Maurice Chevalier was, the impressions were changed from Frisco to Frenchman. In doing this, they created the only recorded remnant, such as it is, from I'll Say She Is. Take a look…

The filmed bit was included in the infomercial, then discarded. Neither the footage nor the routine was used in Monkey Business, although — perhaps to justify the bogus preview scene — there was a point in the storyline where the brothers all did Chevalier impressions in order to get past a customs agent. We'll discuss that scene here tomorrow.

Washington Monthly, which is a pretty Liberal magazine, is featuring articles by several prominent Conservatives in its new issue. They're in there, of course, because they think George W. Bush is a disaster for their political label and/or America and are willing to say so. It's one thing for Democrats and known Liberals to criticize this administration. The swing votes in this country can dismiss them as Democrats and known Liberals. What's amazing is that you could now put together a pretty damning critique of Bush-Cheney just by quoting established Conservative pundits and elected Republicans.

Tonight on Mr. Leno's show, Diane Lane was promoting her new movie, Hollywoodland, and she said something about George Reeves being the first Superman. She wasn't intending to slight the other gents who played the character before Reeves but she did get me to thinking about the late Kirk Alyn.

Kirk was an actor who had a fairly unspectacular career, primarily in the forties and primarily in serials. He played Superman in the 1948 serial of that character and again in a 1950 sequel. In 1952, he portrayed another comic book hero, Blackhawk, in one of the last serials made…and when the serials went away, so did the jobs for Kirk Alyn. Thereafter, it was mostly bit parts and not a lot of them. At some point, he simply gave up and moved to Arizona.

But that was not the end of Mr. Alyn's celebrity. In a way, he was ahead of his time.

These days, when you go to a comic convention, you're as likely to see famous TV and movie actors as you are to see folks who write and draw comics. There's a thriving autographed photo industry out there. A lot of celebs who aren't working at the moment — and even some who are — are now descending on cons to sell eight-by-ten glossies and — in some cases — autobiographies, many of them self-published. I won't cite any names but check out the guest lists for upcoming fan gatherings. You might see some pretty big stars there…and Kirk Alyn sort of pioneered the practice.

He was the first actor I can recall ever turning up at a comic book convention. At almost every West Coast con for years, you could find him sitting behind a table, selling autographed pix and his self-published autobiography, A Job for Superman. Easily approachable, he would talk to anyone for hours, answering what I gathered were around ten questions, over and over, usually including the painful one: "Why did George Reeves do the TV show instead of you?" Usually immaculate in suit and tie, he looked like a movie star, even if it had been a long time since he'd been one.

I don't recall when he first appeared on the convention circuit…around '73 or so, I'd guess. But at the time, almost no one in the fan community had seen him on film. He was the first film Superman, we all knew, but his two serials were long unseen and unavailable. Around '78 or so — I'm really guessing at these years — someone came up with a 16mm print of an edited version of the first Superman serial. I remember a wonderful evening at a small, local con where they screened it and I played emcee, interrogating Kirk before and after, and even during reel changes.

He had a wonderful twinkle in his eyes that evening. It was just about the first time in close to a quarter of a century that an audience had seen him starring in something, and it was an audience of folks who'd become his friends. The film was long and filled with laughingly-awful dialogue, amateurish supporting actors and the cheapest-possible sets and special effects…but Kirk was good in it and at the end, he received a much-deserved standing ovation — as much for sharing his history with us as for his performance. That evening and the subsequent availability of his Superman films completed his super-stardom in our circle. The next day, he told me that con-goers were treating him with more respect. No one had been disrespectful before but now, they'd seen him actually be Superman and it made a difference.

His two Superman serials — Superman and Atom Man Vs. Superman — came out on VHS some time ago to scant notice, which is not surprising. Each is over four hours long and like most serials, there's a lot of repetition and recapping and padding. You've got to really love that kind of material to make it all the way through. But like everything else that's ever been on film, it will someday be available on DVD and when it is, you might want to take a peek. I don't know that you'll enjoy it but I like the idea of people remembering who Kirk Alyn was. (He passed away in 1999 at the age of 89.)

'Til then, there's another way to remember Kirk. If you go to a comic convention and see some past or present-day actor selling photos of himself, think about Kirk Alyn for a second or two. He invented that.

Nothing I've seen or read lately has made me more pessimistic about the Iraq War than this article in The Washington Post. It's by William Kristol and Rich Lowry, two of the most outspoken "neo-con" voices in favor of that invasion. They have quietly, however, shifted their argument. The old version was that our cause was so right and our power so grand that we could achieve everything we wanted to in Iraq with Donald Rumsfeld's "leaner, meaner" U.S. fighting force. Now, they're saying we can triumph if only George W. Bush and his boys will send in more troops.

Nowhere in the piece do Kristol and Lowry address the fact that many generals have stated we simply don't have more troops, or that to send more into Iraq will cripple our efforts elsewhere. That is not a small detail, easy to skip over. In fact, my cynical side wonders if maybe the authors know full well that no significant reinforcement of troops can or will be sent in; that they're just laying the groundwork for the Official Excuse as to why their precious Iraq War didn't end the way they told us it would.

Not so long ago, Lowry was one of the leading non-administration voices telling us America was undeniably succeeding in its every goal there. He doesn't seem to be saying that now. He seems to be getting ready to write a lot of sentences that begin with, "Well, we could have won if…"

It's amazing that "new" footage of the World Trade Center disaster should emerge five years later but some has. A couple who lived 500 yards from Ground Zero shot home video that day and has now released their footage on the Internet. It runs about fifteen minutes and is very chilling because…well, because you hear a family watching the tragedy, wondering what's happening and commenting as they see it unfold before their eyes, practically in their back yard. Here is a link to it and I'll warn you that some of it is pretty graphic and that the connection may be overloaded at times. Thanks to Alan Light for being the first of many to let me know about it.

Also: Keith Olbermann did a long (almost nine minutes) and angry commentary on his show last night. He excoriated the Bush administration for many things related to 9/11 but mostly for the fact that Ground Zero is still, five years later, devoid of either a memorial or any new building. The piece was well-written, well-delivered and presented with a passion and clarity of purpose that I think we all, regardless of our political orientation, wish we heard occasionally from our leaders. I'm not sure I agree with his central thesis, however. A physical memorial to those who died on 9/11 seems almost trivial and unequal to our loss on that day…and to rebuild on that site strikes me as a lot more complicated than the White House just deciding someone should. I wonder how many companies would lease space in a new World Trade Center — even if it wasn't called that — and how many people would be willing to go to work every day in one. Here's a link to Olbermann's "special comment" on YouTube and in case you'd like to view it with his lips in sync, here's a link to it on the MSNBC site.

This is real quick but you'll want to watch it. How often do you get to hear Harpo Marx talk?

If you need more Marx in your day, here are links to two video clips that I cannot embed on this page. This link will take you to a performance Groucho did of the song, "Show Me a Rose." This link will take you to a duet Groucho did with Jackie Gleason. They perform a variation of the famous routine done by the legendary comedy team of Gallagher and Shean, initially in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1922. Al Shean from that duo was an uncle of the Marx Brothers, which I thought was worthy of mention even though I don't know if it connects in any way to the clip.

Watch or TiVo tonight's Tonight Show With Jay Leno…most notably the segments with James Woods. The first part is a moving discussion of his brother's recent death. The second is about 9/11. Then Charlie Rose comes out and further discusses that awful day and the heroism he witnessed.

Okay, I give up. I've watched about thirty more video clips relating to 9/11 — many of them suggested by folks who'd read the previous message here — and I couldn't find one that seemed appropriate to have up on this site today. Worse, some of them were depressing to no good purpose and I have things I have to do this afternoon. So no video clip today. I'll make it up to you with the ones I have lined up the rest of this week. Hope you folks like the Marx Brothers.

I may not be watching much news today, either. At some point years ago, I became acutely conscious that on the anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, most of the televised remembrances were not about the tragedy but of the press discussing its performance in covering that tragedy. Looking back at the news footage of 11/22/63 is important, of course, but there's one way of presenting and configuring it that says "Here's what happened that day" and another that says, "Look how we — i.e., folks in our profession — rose to the challenge of that day." Makes you want to yell at the screen, "It's not about you!"

Some of the 9/11/01 remembrances today strike me as skewing in that direction. The rest seems to be about the upcoming elections and how Republicans and Democrats can influence how 9/11 is viewed, the better to garner votes. Last night, I saw a few minutes — I think on Fox News, what a surprise — about the heroism of George W. Bush on that day. Yeah, right. I watched longer than I should have but I was kinda waiting to see if it would include the part where he runs out and single-handedly captures Osama.

Roughly 3,000 people died on September 11 for no good, human reason. Countless others were injured and/or had their lives forever harmed in a myriad of ways…physically, emotionally, financially, etc. (I think there's an unfortunate tendency to talk about the number of dead as if that's the sole measure of damage that occurred.) I don't think we should look back at it all in a way that just makes us afraid it'll happen again. We usually do the wrong thing when we operate out of fear. But there's got to be a more constructive thing we can do with that memory than exploit it for short-term benefits.

I probably won't be posting much, if anything, the rest of the day. I don't feel I have anything positive to offer and it feels creepy to be posting here about anything else. And besides, like I said, I have things to do. I hope you do, as well.

As you know if you hang around this page, I try to pick out interesting video clips to link to, usually one per day. This takes less time than you'd think but last night, as I went searching for something to post tomorrow, it took an unusually long time. I felt that on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I ought to put up something that said something important about that day.

There are thousands of video clips on the Internet about the September 11 tragedies. Many of them are long, intense lectures by people who believe they've proven (but haven't) that the "official" version of what occurred that day is a sham. The twin towers could not possibly have collapsed the way we were told they'd collapsed…and of course, no plane hit the Pentagon. Of all that, they are sure. I am a big believer in the expectation that the government will shamelessly lie to us — any regime of the government and especially the current one — but in this case, I have seen no evidence that makes me suspicious that what most people think happened that day is not pretty much what happened that day.

So I won't be linking to any of those videos and besides, they're all real long and extremely boring.

There are also thousands of "tribute" videos people have made…some clumsily titled as "tributes to 9/11" by folks who don't mean to celebrate what occurred on that day. Most consist of stills and video clips edited against a properly somber record…often "Only Time" by Enya. (The first one I recall seeing online a little less than five years ago was this one. It's still quite moving and whoever assembled it did a helluva job.)

I watched a few of them last night and found myself getting alternately sad and angry. The sad part needs no explanation but perhaps the angry part does. The more I am reminded of the pain of that day, the more I resent the folks who've tried to manipulate its memory. No event in my lifetime (I'm 54) brought Americans together the way our shared suffering brought us together that day. It is appalling not only that this unity has been lost but that the emotions of 9/11 have been reconfigured to demonize one another. The worst kind of partisans have claimed 9/11 as a club to use against the other side. The same thing has happened with the Iraq War: If you don't see things my way and vote for my side, you must be objectively pro-terrorist, plus you hate America and pray for our troops to be killed.

That dung has always bothered me, but it never quite bothered me as much as it did last night when I was watching footage of the burning towers, still shots of innocent human beings plunging to their deaths and the pained agony of onlookers and family members. I kept thinking, "How did we get from this to where we are now?" I finally had to stop watching 9/11 videos and cleanse my video palate with stuff like this.

So I haven't picked out a video for tomorrow. If you have any nominations, let me have them…though I can't guarantee I'll be able to watch them all. It really depresses me that, as I read about this Path to 9/11 movie on ABC, some people seem to be trying to note the five year anniversary of that awful disaster by seeing how much blame they can pin on their political opponents.

Yesterday, we brought you the opening to the 1963 Casper cartoon show. Here's the ending, which is a bit sad until the last few bars of music. It's nowhere near as sad as the closing credits of the Linus the Lionhearted Show but it's still a bit depressing. Then again, the whole Casper franchise is about a dead child so maybe depressing is appropriate.

Something dawned on me as I watched this. The premise of the Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons was always that poor little Casper just wanted to have a friend…but he didn't fit in with the ghosts and witches of his world, and he scared away almost everyone he encountered in "our" world. Usually, at the end of each cartoon, he'd find someone who liked being around him…and then the next cartoon, he'd be right back to moping about, trying to find someone who wouldn't spot him, do a bad Tex Avery "take" and run screaming into the background painting.

Okay, that was the premise when they made a couple of theatrical cartoons per year. When he got into the comic books, he started making friends left and right: Wendy, Spooky, Nightmare, etc. Someone at Harvey Comics — and I have to presume this was a conscious thought — decided that the idea of Casper scaring away all potential friends would get monotonous. It would also make for a pretty depressing comic book…so they pulled that idea way back. Casper in the comics sometimes scared people but mostly, the stories were about a kid who was different from all the rest. Since we all feel different from everyone else when we're kids, there was a nice bit of reader identification going on there. My friends who had older siblings (I was an only child) all identified madly with the way Casper was picked on by The Ghostly Trio…and of course, adding in all those friends as a supporting cast created plot possibilities, to say nothing of spin-off comics.

All in all, it was a nice bit of retooling an animated property for the comic book page. And it sure was successful for a couple of decades there.

Before we roll the clip, I should mention: I said when I posted the opening that Norma McMillan was the voice of Davey on the kids' show, Davey and Goliath. Anthony Tollin reminds me that she was a voice of Davey and that Dick Beals — who's mentioned more often on this site than Donald Rumsfeld — was the original voice. Dick Beals would also make a much better Secretary of Defense than Donald Rumsfeld but that's beside the point.

According to a CNN poll taken a week or so ago, 43% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

According to a Senate report released Friday, Hussein was not involved at all. This report seems to have settled the question once and for all, at least insofar as our leaders and prominent pundits are concerned. Partisans on both sides are arguing as to whether the Iraq invasion was predicated or sold on that misperception, and who should have known better…but I don't see anyone important out there insisting that the report is wrong and that Hussein was involved.

So here's what I'm wondering about. Two things, really.

I'm wondering what the number will be like, next time some pollster asks people if they think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. I'm assuming the number will drop but is it going to drop to 5% or 10%? Or is it going to drop to 39% or 40%? I'm guessing a small decrease, not much greater than the margin of error.

And I'm wondering about the people who thought or still think Hussein was involved. I'm wondering on what they based that conclusion. These are just people off the street with no access to Hussein or Al Qaeda documents or anything of the sort. They get their information from watching TV, listening to the radio, reading newspapers and magazines and websites, and chatting with friends who get their info from the same sources.

Are these people working backwards from the fact that we proclaimed Saddam was the devil and we invaded Iraq? Is it that he suddenly became the worst villain in the world to the U.S. so it stood to reason that he must have been involved in the worst crime? Is it that Cheney and Company insinuated — and to an extent they now deny, spoke outright of a Hussein-9/11 connection? Is it that some folks are getting so paranoid that they just assume that all the various parties in all the nations that hate the U.S. must automatically be in cahoots with one another? (I've only run into one person who believes Saddam was involved in 9/11 and he fervently insists that the Russians, the Nazis, both Koreas, the Mafia, Fidel Castro and eight shooters on the grassy knoll were also in on the deal…which, by the way, was a series of well-planned controlled demolitions from within.)

I mean this question with more seriousness than my phrasing here probably suggests. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting John F. Kennedy and if you asked me, I could cite several books and arguments of logic that convinced me. I may be wrong but I didn't arrive at this view because God whispered it to me or because I consulted a Magic Eightball or I read it off a Ouija board. It came from somewhere.

So where did the belief that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 come from? And if it came from the public statements of Bush and Cheney, how do those people feel now that those men are running around insisting, "We never said there was a connection"?

Mark is still having some e-mail problems. I don't think anything you send is getting lost but there may now be a delay before it gets to me. The crack tech crew here at news from me — which consists solely of me — is laboring diligently to solve the problem so that I can get your mail quickly and not answer it, instead of getting it hours later and not answering it.

Also: This website may be offline for some time — maybe an hour or so — on Monday night as my hosting company does major equipment upgrades and such. Don't panic. Don't go into convulsions. Just find something else to read on the Internet until we become available again. I hear there are other sites.