Monthly Archives: October 2006

As the posting times indicate, I haven't been to bed yet. I've been up working on a script and I think I've hit the stage where everything I think of sounds acceptable. So maybe it's time to pack it in for the night.

I want to thank everyone for their suggestions of video poker machines I can buy for my mother. One person not only suggested one on eBay, he sent me a donation equal to the purchase price. I'll report back if it turns out to be a good choice. (I can report, in answer to a good many queries, that I seem to have found a terrific electric shaver. It's the Panasonic Model ES8077S and I dunno if it'll work on your face but it sure works on mine.)

Okay, time to hit the sack. Good night, Blogosphere!

This is Keith Olbermann's latest "Special Comment." The topic is the new Military Commissions Act that Bush just signed, which gives him powers that no Chief Executive in the United States should ever have. I don't know why he focuses so much of his outrage on George W. Bush and directs none of it to the legislators who voted for the bill…but I think he's right that we have now lost something very precious and very American. We have given more power — unchecked power, no less — to an administration that has proven itself unworthy to wield the power it already has. Here's the video…

Sergio Aragonés will be a guest at the November 5 Los Angeles Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention down at the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. He will be joining his fellow MAD cartoonist, master caricaturist Tom Richmond, who'll be doing caricatures of folks there all day for a modest fee. I think I'm going to be there too, and David Carradine is also a featured guest. More details over at this here website.

Time to order the Dungeons & Dragons DVD set…that is, if you remember the popular Saturday morning series that ran on CBS from 1983 to 1985. As explained over here, I developed the show for television and then others took over and built it into a pretty decent fantasy series. It still has a pretty rabid following and I would imagine this set will sell quite well.

The five disc set contains all 27 episodes plus a mess of bonus features, including commentary tracks and interviews and even a radio-play style dramatization of a script written by my pal Michael Reaves that was never produced but which would have been the final, wrap-up episode. The set will be out December 5 but you can order it now by clicking here.

What was the first cartoon produced for television? There are a couple of contenders for that honor…shows that told stories via drawings that were not exactly animated. But the first one with at least a little animation (and as you'll see, I do mean little) was Crusader Rabbit. In 1948, Jay Ward teamed with animator Alex Anderson and just a few other people to produce a show for NBC. The show was done in black-and-white and there were ten storylines broken up into 195 four minute cartoons.

In 1957, following some ugly custody battles over the property, another series was done. This one was in color and involved neither Anderson nor Ward. Slightly more cash was spent on the animation of 200 cartoons that formed 13 storylines. (This material was also edited into thirteen longform episodes that nobody but me seems to ever have seen on TV.) If you have any memory at all of Crusader Rabbit, you probably remember the color episodes, and you probably remember them as looking better than they actually did.

Both batches of episodes were probably more entertaining than they should have been, given their budgets. But the writing was strong and the voice work was good, and the artists produced drawings that were nice, even if they didn't move much. Here's the first episode of the first series. That's Lucille Bliss supplying the voice of Crusader, Vern Louden as Ragland T. Tiger, and Roy Whaley as the narrator.

Before you click on this link, be warned: A loud video plays automatically on the page, which is over at a site called Celebrity Week. There are a number of items on the page but I wanted to call your attention to two of them…

The first one explains that the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas is now offering on its room service and coffee shop menus, a hamburger that sells for $6,000. That's right: Six grand. So you may be wondering how this burger is different from, say, the six dollar burger at Carl's Jr? Answer: It isn't different at all. It's a Carl's Jr six dollar burger with a big markup. If you order one — and I know you…you're probably booking your flight to Sin City this very moment, drooling at the chance to pay $6000 for a six dollar burger — they send someone to a nearby Carl's Jr to pick one up and then they serve it to you with a complimentary bottle of 24 year-old French Bordeaux.

Are they nuts? Nope. It's just for publicity for them and for Carl's Jr. And to be fair, it also comes with fries.

The other item worth a peek is the story of what Steve Wynn did the other day. He accidentally poked a hole in a painting by Pablo Picasso painting that was worth — and we know this because he was about to sell it for this amount — $139 million. Let's all say the following in unison: "Boy, I'm glad I didn't do that."

I've been predicting for some time that The Mother of All Strikes is going to hit the TV and movie industries when the current guild contracts are up for renegotiation. This is a large part of what it's going to be about.

In the above photo, I don't know who the guy on the right is but I can sure identify the guy on the left. It's the (sadly) late Lennie Weinrib, who passed away last June. Lennie was a writer and a director and a wonderful comic actor…but in the picture you see him doing what he did most often, which was voiceover work. He spoke for many, many cartoon characters and I'm not sure what you'd say H.R. Pufnstuf was — puppet? costumed character? — but Lennie supplied his voice and wrote the original series, as well. He was in so many movies and TV shows and commercials that it's tough to describe who and what he was. I tried to do it here but some topics simply defy my limited vocabulary. Most topics, actually but never mind that now.

Lennie was living in Chile when he passed away. His loving family down there — wife Sonia and daughters Grace and Heidi — had what I'm sure was a proper and perfect funeral service for him in Chile…but of course, so many folks in Los Angeles who loved him were unable to be there for it. We need closure and we need an opportunity to say bye-bye so we're having a memorial service for him here next week.

It's Thursday evening, October 26, and we welcome anyone who knew him and even those who didn't but just loved his work. It's in Studio City starting around 6:30 and it will not be a maudlin affair at all. We've got actors coming and cartoon voices and brothers named Krofft and people who were in the legendary Billy Barnes revues with him and we've even got Billy Barnes and all sorts of people who knew and worked with Lennie. We'll all be telling stories and showing film clips and partaking of a dinner buffet that we think he would have loved, in part because Sid Krofft will look at it and go, "You're not going to eat that, are you?"

His other daughter, Linda — who lives in Los Angeles — arranged most of this and will also be among the speakers. Linda is a talented voice actress herself, and I'm thinking there must have been some sort of talent acids in Lennie's chromosomes. Grace is a successful painter and Heidi has become a popular singer down in Chile, having recently reached the finals of a Chilean TV show not unlike our American Idol.

I'd really love to pack his memorial service with fans and friends, just in case Lennie's watching. If you're interested in attending, drop me a note and I'll send you the rest of the details. And please…if you know someone who knew Lennie, direct them to this website. The guy knew so many people in so many walks of life that we're having genuine trouble tracking them all down so we can invite them.

There's a definite art to drawing cartoon characters properly…that is to say to get them "on model" and looking like they're supposed to look. When I labored at Hanna-Barbera, I had an ongoing war with various departments there, usually with managers who'd hire the cheapest guy they could get to draw Yogi Bear for a piece of merchandise. Often, the cheapest guy didn't draw a Yogi who looked anything like Yogi but that seemed to be a minor factor, unnoticed by the guy who did the hiring.

So I love artists who can not only draw characters but get them on-target right. And I really, really love the guys who can do it and go a step beyond the model sheets — which, after all, are designed to simplify the characters down so that almost anyone in the studio can handle them. A great talent like Scott Shaw! or Scott Jeralds or Phil Ortiz or Bill Morrison…well, I shouldn't have started naming names because I'm going to omit some friends of mine and make them sore at me. Anyway, a great talent can get the characters "on model" and add extra life and expression to them beyond the norm. Another guy who's definitely in that category is Patrick Owsley, who did the covers for the DVDs of Tennessee Tuxedo and Go-Go Gophers. (Those are clickable links to buy them at Amazon if you're so inclined. By the way, note that the Go-Go Gophers DVD advertises "21 Rocky Episodes" on the front. They don't mean Rocky the Flying Squirrel. He is nowhere on this DVD and we can only wonder how many people buy it thinking he is.)

Patrick has started his own weblog so you can see some of his other fine work. I have nothing to add other than that I wish everyone who has to hire someone to draw a great cartoon character of the past would hire someone as good as Patrick or the other guys I've mentioned or should have mentioned. Because it's really painful for some of us to see our faves rendered by people who don't know what they look like.

Brian Lowry, writing for Variety, assesses the late night TV situation insofar as it relates to Jay Leno's status. I think he's right that Leno holds all the cards but won't do anything to undermine NBC. I think he's right (I know he's right) that there are folks high up at the network wishing they weren't contractually obligated to either replace Jay with Conan O'Brien or give Conan a huge check. I doubt they'll renege on the switchover or that Leno would stay if it looked at all like something unethical had been done.

This may be one of those situations where speculation from a distance is fruitless because we don't know all the details. Apparently, O'Brien's contract specifies a huge penalty payment if he doesn't take over The Tonight Show. But is there a clause that would allow NBC to delay it under certain circumstances or for certain lesser sums? Would that huge penalty payment contractually obligate him to continue at 12:35 or would he be free to take the check and go to Fox? Does Lorne Michaels still have some sort of contractual arrangement to be involved in NBC late night on weeknights as he once did? Has NBC secretly been talking to Jon Stewart or someone else who'd matter in this situation? More to the point, is Leno — who admits to having the attention-span of a gerbil — even all that interested in staying in a talk show situation or does he have some other project he'd prefer? We don't know a lot of things that might impact how this all plays out.

A friend of mine in the business, back during the Leno/Letterman nastiness, had an idea of how to divide up the baby. Put The Tonight Show back to 90 minutes. Make it all-new, six nights a week with no reruns at 11:35. Have Jay and one staff do the show from Los Angeles on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights. Have Dave and another staff do the show from New York on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights. Follow it every night with some permutation of Late Night or the show Carson Daly's doing now, then run a Tonight Show rerun from two weeks back but with the hosts reversed. (If Jay hosted the earlier live Tonight Show, you run a Dave rerun and vice-versa.) I wonder if anyone at NBC is thinking about something like this for 2009.

The longtime cartoon editor for Playboy Magazine, Michelle Urry, has died. This article tells more about her than I can, and I'd call your attention to the parts about how important she was to the field of gag cartooning. Ms. Urry (her last name was pronounced "your-e") was a stern taskmaster to some, but on her watch, Playboy was one of the two most important venues — The New Yorker being the other — for cartoonists who wanted to draw and sell panel cartoons. Other markets folded and new entries onto the newsstand eschewed that form…but Michelle continued to buy, as noted in the article, a million dollars worth of cartoons each year.

I only had a few brief encounters with Ms. Urry over the years. She would sometimes phone me with historical-type questions about comics and cartoonists, and twice I was summoned to her presence for meetings about maybe writing an ongoing strip for Playboy — once, after Harvey Kurtzman passed, concerning "Little Annie Fanny." It was easy to see that she approached her job with great dedication and no thought whatsoever that it was "only cartoons" and didn't matter. It did matter…to her. You may have heard that some men have claimed to read Playboy "only for the articles." That's a fib so they don't let on what they're really interested in. They read it for the cartoons.

Steve Ditko, the co-creator of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, is one of the field's great artists. He's also one of its most mysterious and when comic fans find out I've met him — even though that was some time ago — I'm often peppered with questions: What's he like? Does he have weird fingers like the people he draws? Does he wear an iron mask around his studio? Questions like that. The questioners are inevitably disappointed when I report that, at least the few times I was around him, Mr. Ditko seemed perfectly normal, though a little angry about the business. (And I should mention that just about everyone who has ever worked in comics, especially in the old days, is or was at least a little angry about the business from time to time. Some are/were exceedingly angry and with good reason.)

Anyway, all that is a preamble to mentioning here that someone is selling a copy of Steve Ditko's high school yearbook on eBay. Here's the listing. Ditko is a very private person who doesn't give interviews — at least, knowingly. One somewhat slimy person in the field has phoned him a few times, caught him in a chatty mood and had a conversation…and this slimy person taped those calls and has circulated copies here and there. Ditko demands his privacy, as of course is his right, so I don't know what he'd make of this. Probably wouldn't like it much.

Reporting yesterday on the death of Christopher Glenn, I said I was unable to find a video I could embed here of one of his "In the News" segments. Well, what I couldn't do, Joey Helleny did. He sent me the link to the clip below and I'm afraid it's on a rather frivolous topic. One of the things I liked so much about Mr. Glenn's little segments that ran betwixt cartoons on CBS Saturday mornings was how he'd take a pretty heavy subject — say, a war or a complex U.N. clash — and distill it down to simple sentences. What we could use today is —

Wait. Let's watch this video first and then I'll rattle on about what we could use today. Here's an "In the News" segment about cherry blossoms…and stick with it after the end if you want to see an old McDonald's commercial…

Now then. What we could use today is someone who could do something that might be called "News for Dummies" with the same non-emotional attention to the basics. There's a reporter named Jeff Stein who's been going around Washington lately, quizzing Senators, Congressfolks and other movers and shakers as to whether they know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. As he writes here, an amazing percentage of them do not…and these are the people who have some responsibility to oversee our efforts in Iraq. You can imagine how informed your average American must then be on this matter.

If I were running CNN or MSNBC or Fox News right now, I'd put on a show that would just summarize the basics of what's going on in the world, explaining this kind of thing. I don't know if I'd market it for kids but if I did, I'd make it clear in the promos that adults could certainly tune in and learn a thing or three. Given the way the news business has evolved, the hard part might be finding someone to run it. But whoever I got, I know the first thing I'd do after I hired them. I'd make them study every tape I could find of Christopher Glenn.

There were, as we all know, 45 half-hour episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus produced for the BBC between 1969 and 1974. If you're the kind of person who enjoys this website, I have a feeling you've seen them all. You may even, like me, have purchased the DVD sets of all 45 episodes. (If you did and you thought, "Now I have them all and I never need to buy them again"…well, you should know better than that by now. I'm told by several sources that a new complete set is in the works…and it'll not only be in hi-def but it'll be more complete than the previous complete set. Just think of it as yet another salvo in the W.W.C.T.G.Y.T.B.N.C.O.S.Y.A.O (the World Wide Conspiracy To Get You To Buy New Copies Of Stuff You Already Own).

Anyway, if and when there's another set, it may or may not contain the sketch that is today's video link. It's kind of a "lost" bit from the Python TV show. As near as I can piece together the sequence of events, it goes like this…

This routine was the opening sketch of Episode #38. It was in the show as it was originally broadcast both in the U.K. and here in the States. At some point, the BBC cut it out of a rebroadcast, reportedly because it depicted Prime Minister Edward Heath in a tutu. The rebroadcast was just before an election and it seemed inappropriate just then. Alas, no one ever thought to restore it and later, when copies of the show were made for worldwide syndication purposes, they were made from the tape that was missing the sketch. There seems to be some question as to whether a pristine copy of it even exists today so maybe it won't be on any forthcoming complete sets.

I e-mailed Python authority Kim "Howard" Johnson to ask if he could tell me anything more about the sketch you're about to see. He notes that "It's interesting that this isn't a 'censored' sketch, but one that was cut and never restored again due to BBC error." He also wrote the following which I thought was too intriguing not to pass on here…

One frightening fact: if Python had begun 2 or 3 years earlier than it did (in October 1969), it would have been in black and white, and therefore, never saved by the BBC, which didn't want to waste the videotape on silly comedy shows (which is why most of Spike Milligan's shows are long gone). And I would have gone into another line of work…

A frightening thought, indeed…not that Kim would have needed to find an honest job but that Monty Python's Flying Circus might have been lost to us. Let's give thanks that they still exist and let's savor this little nugget that hasn't been seen much. And while you're at it, thank Eric Gimlin who suggested this clip to me.

Kenneth F. Thomas sends a question that I thought was worth answering here…

As far as your search engine tells me, I don't think you've ever expressed an opinion on the relationship between the death of Leon Klinghoffer and the rationale for the Iraq war. As you no doubt know, U.S. forces under Bush in 2003 captured Abu Abbas, the head of the P.L.F. terrorist group responsible for Klinghoffer's murder on the Achille Lauro. Abbas escaped arrest for the crime in Italy using an Iraqi passport and was sheltered by Saddam Hussein for many years after that. Christopher Hitchens among others has used this point to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein did indeed make alliances with terrorist groups, one of the major reasons for the war. I'll stop short of asking what you think Kirby might have thought about the Iraq war, but if you have a moment to share your thinking on the subject seen from this perspective, I would appreciate it.

For those of you puzzled by the connection between Leon Klinghoffer (the elderly, wheelchair-confined gentleman killed aboard the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985) and the great comic book creator, Jack Kirby…Jack and Leon were childhood pals who'd remained in contact. They and their spouses had dined together not long before the Klinghoffers' tragic vacation. As you might expect, his friend's death enraged and depressed Jack, especially because it happened during a time of great personal stress in his life: During his celebrated battle with Marvel Comics over the return of his original artwork. Jack's wife Roz later told me that the murder of "Albie" — that was Klinghoffer's childhood name — had a deep impact on Jack, and in an upcoming article somewhere, I'll try to discuss what that impact seems to have involved. It's too long a discourse to go into here and it's not what you asked about, anyway.

I won't speculate on how Jack would have viewed the Iraq War except to say that he was an early opponent of the Vietnam conflict and that around 1971, he told me — with a certain amount of pride, I sensed — that he'd never voted Republican in his life. Does that mean he'd be as against the current war as some of us are? Who knows? People do change over the years. I have one friend who went from Rabid Democrat to Mad Dog Republican in about a decade and a half — and Jack was often unpredicable.

As for me: It's frustrating for some of us that the "selling" of this war has also included the notion that you have to buy the entire package. There can be good aspects in a situation that is largely disastrous and one can also agree with the goals but decide that too high a price is being paid to achieve them. The friend I described in the previous paragraph argues with me as if I have to either back Bush 100% on everything or I'm effectively wishing that Saddam Hussein was back in power and that whatever terrorists have been killed or caught were free to plot another 9/11.

Deposing Saddam seemed like a commendable goal but the loss of lives (American and those of the people we're ostensibly liberating) and resources sure seems like a bad trade-off. When it's claimed that what we're doing over there is increasing the world's supply of terrorists, not depleting it, it really sounds like a terrible idea. Like an ever-increasing majority of citizens, I've come to the belief that we're going to look back on the Iraq War as an enterprise that killed a horrifying number of human beings just to replace one dreadful situation in Iraq with another. Not everything that has happened in the War on Terror has been a disaster, and catching Abu Abbas was certainly, in and of itself, a good thing. But history will not suggest it was worth the lives of thousands of American soldiers and countless Iraqis, plus all the ancillary destruction and grief that comes with those deaths, just to make more of the world wish we were all dead and to catch the guy Jack Kirby used to play handball with.