Monthly Archives: February 2007

I've been swamped the last few days with calls and projects and more calls and deadlines and work on the Kirby book. I know there have been a lot of postings here but I'll give away a trade secret here and admit that many of them were pre-written and tossed up here to relieve the guilt I feel when I log in and see I haven't updated lately. But a couple of posts were fresh, and there should have been one more about the late Peter Ellenshaw, who passed away on Tuesday. A few years ago, I attended a great evening at the Academy where Mr. Ellenshaw discussed his work and clips were shown. It was stunning. I don't think I'd even begun to appreciate his artistry before that because I hadn't realized the extent of what he did.

Mr. Ellenshaw specialized in matte paintings…paintings that are incorporated into the visuals of a movie, adding details that do not exist in real life. He did it so well that often, you weren't aware that the beautiful image on your screen was primarily an Ellenshaw matte painting. Truly amazing.

So I should have written something earlier. But I couldn't have written anything better than this post, which appeared over at Jim Hill Media.

If in a room of comic strip historians, you proclaimed that Walt Kelly's Pogo was the best newspaper comic of all time, no one would call the sanitarium to come cart you away. Not everyone would agree, of course. Some would argue that Pogo was the second best or the third…but few would place it outside the Top Ten and no one would think you'd lost your taste or marbles. Mr. Kelly was a genius not only at drawing wonderful, mesmerizing critters but at putting them in fascinating situations and filling their word balloons with plain, old-fashioned brilliance. The "We have met the enemy…" line is his most quoted but he was that good, that sharp almost every week…for around 9,687 strips, daily and Sunday.

(Don't take those numbers as exact. For one thing, I did the math and mine is always a bit questionable. For another, I used the dates that the original Pogo strip ran and Kelly didn't do the last few years, owing to his having passed away.)

If you want a precise count, here's what you'll have to do. Fantagraphics Books, the folks who bring you those superb Peanuts reprints, are soon to bring you Pogo with the same loving care and format. Buy the books — there'll be twelve (or so) volumes in hardcover in the coming years — and when they get to the end, count up the strips. It'll be somewhere over 9,000 and they'll all be jes' wonderful with the presentation they deserve. Walt's daughter Carolyn is keeping an eye on everything and protecting the family jewels.

Here's the official announcement. Above is the not-final cover for the first one, expertly art-directed by Jeff "Bone" Smith. We are all quite happy about this.

Stephen Colbert is now a flavor of ice cream.

It's a little more than two weeks until WonderCon convenes in San Francisco. Wondercon is run by the same folks who run the mammoth Comic-Con International in San Diego but WonderCon is a normal-sized convention. Which is not to say it won't seem crowded, especially on Saturday. But there's plenty to do, plenty to see, plenty to buy, etc., in an environment that won't overwhelm you the way San Diego does. I've been to a lot of these and always had a good time.

I'm a Special Guest Person (or whatever they call us) and unlike last year, when I found myself unexpectedly in a hospital bed when I should have been at Wondercon, I plan to actually be there. I'll be doing what I tend to do at these things…moderating panels. You can come and hear me interview great comic book artists like Nick Cardy and Gene Colan. You can come hear me chatting with Al Feldstein, the man who gave us Tales from the Crypt and other EC Comics, plus he was the editor of MAD Magazine for a few centuries. I'll be doing a panel with Sergio Aragonés, and then we have a panel with Sergio and Al discussing their days together at MAD. I'll also be…well, here. Let me just link you to my schedule. This page tells you about the events I'll be hosting.

And if for some inexplicable reason, you might be inclined to go to some of the programming I'm not hosting, this page lists the whole schedule. (Okay, I'll grudgingly admit: There are a few events on there not involving me that do look rather enjoyable.)

After he stopped making wonderful theatrical cartoons, director Tex Avery made funny animated commercials for a while. This is one of a long series he did for Raid, house and garden bug killer. Raid hunts bugs down like radar and kills them dead. And what's more, Raid won't oil-stain draperies or furniture. Not only that but outdoors, Raid won't harm plants. Isn't it wonderful?

The voice of the smaller bug is Mel Blanc, the voice of the larger bug is Paul Frees, and I'm guessing it took them a long time to record this spot. Maybe three minutes. I believe the announcer is William Schallert, who somehow managed to be on every TV show made in the sixties at one time or another. I don't know why they didn't just have Paul or Mel do all three parts but I guess they had a little cash to throw around on these. When I worked with Tex years later, he told me he made three times as much money doing a 30 second spot like this as he had for directing all seven minutes of Little Rural Riding Hood or Bad Luck Blackie or any of those great cartoons.

Here's the spot…

One of the more interesting gambles when you go to Las Vegas occurs not in the casino but at the hotel check-in desk. Not everyone knows about this and not everyone tries it but those who try it think it's a better wager than doubling-down on 11 when the dealer's showing a six.

When checking in, you have a twenty dollar bill at the ready. You let the desk clerk see it and you say, with a casual manner and an air of nonchalance, "Uh, any complimentary upgrades available?" Translation: "If I give you this twenty, will you give me a better room for the same price?"

There are, of course, variations. Some flash more than twenty. Some try to get by with less. Many think the way it works — or works best — is to fork over the gratuity and then ask. If you do this and the answer is "no," the clerk may or may not feel it's sporting to return the cash, which is where the real gamble occurs. If you don't fork it over regardless, then the gamble is that you'll be embarrassed and perhaps feel like a hick tourist with no juice. In Vegas, it's okay to lose your money but you don't want to lose the illusion that you're important.

Does it get results? Sometimes. Conventional wisdom is that it's more likely to work with male clerks than female — I have no idea why — and that your best chance is when you check in late in the day because that's when they have a good idea as to how many rooms may go vacant that night and what class of rooms. Also, of course, if you're there on a crowded weekend or during a big convention, you may feel privileged just to get the room you booked, never mind any improvement.

My own experiences suggest that it will often yield better accommodations if (a) the town is not jammed and (b) the clerk seems friendly and in a chatty mood. It also helps to bring it up before he goes through the whole procedure of assigning you that crummy room next to the glopeta-glopeta ice machine that you'd rather not have if you can help it. And it doesn't hurt to act like you're used to getting upgrades this way and that you're kind of a regular visitor to the hotel…you know, the kind of guy who might be about to go drop a couple thou at a craps table.

If you want to know more about this form of institutionalized bribery, there's a website that's wholly devoted to how and where it's succeeded and how often. I don't know how much stock to put in the reports there but I know that like everything else in that town, the $20 Bill Trick pays off…sometimes. What I've never been able to find out — and now that I'm admitting it here, I'm sure someone will write and tell me — is how the hotels feel about it and if the employee keeps all or part of the money. Management knows this goes on and I can't imagine why they'd let the guy behind the front desk make all that extra cash.

Among the perks of having a weblog is that if people keep asking you the same question over and over, you can answer it on your weblog and thereafter tell them, "Oh, I addressed that matter on my blog. Just go do a search for it." This is why over the next week or three or nine, I will be serializing the story of how the cartoon character of Scrappy Doo came to be, and what all I had to do with the birthing process.

People ask me if I knew at the time I was contributing to the creation of a such a hated thing as Scrappy Doo. No, I didn't and no, I still don't. I am aware that there are some folks out there who, given the choice of seeing the execution of Osama bin Laden or Scrappy Doo, would opt for Scrappy and wonder why you even had to ask. Such people are, I believe, a fairly recent faction, and I don't think they're as widespread as their noise level would indicate. I recall Scrappy being wildly popular the first few years he was on the scene. He certainly bolstered Scooby's ratings and kept the series on a good 2-3 years longer than it would have lasted without him.

Scrappy debuted on the Scooby Doo program in 1979 as a "new element." Scooby had been on the air for some time by then and the narrow formula of the series had become repetitive to the point where ABC was considering cancellation. One of the very real concerns was whether the writers could come up with the thirteen requisite ghost premises to do another thirteen episodes. Let me tell you how you sold a script to the Scooby Doo series in those days.

You'd go to the producer or the story editor and say something like, "How about a ghost who's an aardvark and he's been haunting ant farms?"

The producer or story editor would consult a list of all the episodes produced to date, and there was about a 95% chance he'd look up from it and say, "Did it in Season Four" or whatever season it had been in. Sometimes, they'd say, "Did it in Seasons Two, Four, Five and I have one in the works right now, same idea." But if you lucked into something in the 5% category, you had an assignment…even if you didn't have a clue who the aardvark would be when he took off his mask or why he was haunting ant farms. Didn't matter. You or someone else could figure that stuff out later. You'd done the hard part.

In setting the schedule for that year, it had come down to a decision between renewing Scooby or picking up a new series — the pilot script for which I'd written — from another studio. Joe Barbera called me in and said, approximately, "If this doesn't work, Scooby's dead. We have this new character that I came up with…" And he showed me sketches of Scrappy Doo, explaining that this was Scooby's nephew. We would add him to the show and this would make things just "fresh" enough, while still keeping the winning Scooby formula intact, that ABC would order thirteen more episodes. And thirteen more for the season after that, and then there would be the season after that…

I was not then on staff at Hanna-Barbera. Quite a few writers were and most of them had taken a shot in the previous months at writing scenes or an entire episode to establish Scrappy. The folks at network liked very little of what they'd done and were not about to green-light Scooby for another year; not without a finished teleplay that would show how Scrappy functioned, how he talked, where the comedy in the show would be with him around, etc. J.B. wanted me to write that episode. Even though it was competing with that other pilot I'd written, I said I'd do it. It was always very difficult to say no to Mr. Barbera.

The next thing that occurred was an unusually ugly negotiation between my agent and the gent in charge of Business Affairs for Hanna-Barbera. The latter took the position that this was not a pilot; that it was just another episode of Scooby Doo, so it should pay the same mediocre fee as all other episodes. My agent took the position that this was a pilot because (a) it was introducing a new character and something of a new format and (b) the network would or would not order episodes based on my script. I would also be going through several weeks of network meetings and extra rewrites, something that did not usually transpire on your average episode. Therefore, he concluded, it was a pilot and better pay was appropriate. The Biz Guy said no. My agent said, "In that case, Mark isn't doing it."

The Biz Guy said fine, Mark isn't doing it…or anything else for the studio, ever again. This was followed by the sound effect of the phone being slammed down. Then the Business Affairs guy called me at home and informed me that my days of writing for Hanna-Barbera were over. In fact, I should not bother trying to set foot in the studio again as I would be turned away. I pointed out to him that Scooby or no Scooby, I was still the editor of their comic book division. He said, "We'll see about that" and hung up.

Sure enough, I was banned from the studio for a good eighteen minutes, which is how long it was before Mr. Barbera phoned. He instructed me to — and I will clean up his language here a tad — "pay no attention to that damn idiot in Business Affairs." Before the sun set that evening, I had a deal to write the script that would introduce Scrappy Doo. The pay was sufficient (barely, of course) and there would be a small bonus if the show was picked up. The next day, I was to meet Mr. B. at the Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood so we could brainstorm ideas over lunch.

This concludes Part One of The Birth of Scrappy Doo. Stay tuned to this weblog for the next exciting chapter, one of these days. Whenever I get around to it. Maybe in the next week or so.

Eric Boehlert on the non-scandal, based on nothing, where Republicans stopped talking about the War in Iraq and Global Warming and Terrorism and instead decided the big issue was Nancy Pelosi requesting luxury air travel, which she did not do. One fears that as long as Democrats have any power at all, even as little as they now possess, we're going to be in for stuff like this.

We have here the trailer for The Beach Girls and the Monster, a 1965 movie that was shot in about six days for less than what some producers now spend for six minutes of filming. It was originally released as Monster From The Surf but I guess that title didn't make it clear that there were girls in bikinis in it. Since that was about the only thing the film had to offer, it's probably wise that they renamed it.

The trailer is entertaining enough just from the sheer campiness but there are a number of things about this film that will interest the kind of person who visits this site. One is the narration, which was done by Art Gilmore, who did voiceovers for something like two-thirds of all the movie trailers made in Hollywood in the sixties. Doesn't he sound way too enthusiastic to be selling us what is probably the worst movie he ever had to sell us? Moviegoers of that era learned, or should have learned, that the more excited Art Gilmore was, the likelier the film was to suck Raisinets. He's almost giddy about this one.

Secondly: You see those two cops on the beach? Well, I think the one on the left is Clyde Adler, who was the foil for Soupy Sales then and the voice of White Fang and Black Tooth and Pookie and all those guys at the door. He doesn't cream anyone with a pie but I think that's Clyde.

Thirdly: Another great local kids show host of the sixties and a fine actor and cartoon voice person is Walker Edmiston. Walker is one of those guys who was on every damn TV show of the fifties, sixties and seventies at one time or another, and when he wasn't on screen, he was often dubbing the voices of actors who were. I worked with him on some of the Sid and Marty Krofft shows and he's a wonderful, wonderful man. In the fifties and sixties, he hosted brilliant shows in Los Angeles with his puppets, one of which was Kingsley the Lion. You don't really see Walker in the trailer but he had a large, particularly embarrassing role in the movie and even wrote its title song from when it was called Monster in the Surf. You do see a few moments of Kingsley singing that tune…to the lion's eternal shame.

And lastly, I have a story about this picture…not a happy one, I'm afraid. It was directed by a man named Jon Hall, who also starred in it. Mr. Hall was once a film star of some magnitude but by the time he made this, he was really touching bottom. In fact, I think it was the last thing he did. (He took his own life in 1979.)

Around 1971, Hall was broke and owed Uncle Sam a lot more money in back taxes than he would ever be able to pay. It became the sad duty of one Internal Revenue Agent to try and work out some sort of settlement deal. The agent kept negotiating payment plans that would let Hall off the hook for much of the debt but the way the I.R.S. worked (and probably still does), the agent then had to get his superiors to bless any settlement…and in this case, they wouldn't. They kept sending the agent back to demand more payment from Hall and it eventually came down to a complete seizure of Mr. Hall's assets, including the negative and all his rights to The Beach Girls and the Monster.

How do I know this? Because the I.R.S. agent was a man named Bernard Evanier. My father.

As I've explained elsewhere, my father hated his job and one of the reasons he hated it was cases like this one. He'd work out a payment plan to let Hall off by paying ten cents on the dollar over an extended period, which seemed reasonable given the man's financial condition. Then he'd go to his bosses for their approval and they'd say, "No, get more out of him and get it now." These were the same bosses who were then completely tearing up the tax bills of very wealthy, solvent men who were friends of President Richard M. Nixon.

It was a great deal for those friends. If you'd given $50,000 to Nixon's re-election campaign, you could get out of two million dollars or more of delinquent taxes. A few months ago when I met John W. Dean, I thanked him for his role in exposing these shenanigans. My father, by the way, did not even like the whole idea of taxes but he felt that if we had to have them, a guy making $20 million a year should at least pay as much as a divorced mother with a large family to feed.

I'm a little fuzzy on how the Jon Hall case was finally resolved but I know that Mr. Hall finally got off the hook with the Revenuers. He even called my father — who was retired by then — and thanked him for being compassionate and understanding about it, which would not surprise anyone who knew my father. I'm pretty sure the I.R.S. auctioned off the rights Hall had in The Beach Girls and the Monster but I don't know what they got for them. If it was more than twenty bucks, someone overpaid. Watch the trailer and you'll see why.

This came out last December but I just now saw it. It's a short but pretty accurate profile of my occasional employer, Sid Krofft, and an announcement about his latest project. The quote from his brother Marty in the next to last paragraph is a great description of Sid.

This website has some pictures of the new venture before it opened. And this site has a report on opening night.

So I've been thinking of getting one of those cellular cards for your laptop that will allow you to access the Internet from everywhere, even when you're nowhere near a T-Mobile Hot Spot. I asked here about them.

I was still thinking about it when I came across an interesting news item. According to this piece in today's L.A. Times, "Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa today pledged to blanket all of Los Angeles with free or very cheap wireless Internet service by 2009." Hmm…maybe I oughta wait and…

Hold on! What am I thinking? What that means is we might (might!) have something that will sorta, kinda work but not well by 2113. Forget I said anything.

And this won't matter to most of you but could they have made a bigger mess of Santa Monica Boulevard between around Wilshire and the 405? I go there now and I feel like I'm driving through a friggin' M.C. Escher print with little roads off to the side that lead to larger but still little roads that you have to get onto and get off of to go anywhere there, except that getting off them means merging back into the big road at points where no one will ever let you in…

Hope they're not putting the guy who designed that in charge of the city-wide Wi-Fi Service. If you think getting on a wireless network is difficult, go down to Santa Monica Blvd. and Ensley and try to get to Johnnie's Pizzeria. That's difficult.

Fred Kaplan explains the agreement that the Bush administration just made with North Korea to roll back its nuclear capability. Rough summary: After years of decrying the pact that Bill Clinton and his representatives negotiated, the Bush folks finally went out and made the same deal.

Judging from that most accurate barometer of the American mood — my e-mail — I'm not the only fan of the obscure comedy team of Olsen and Johnson. Many of you are hankering for their movies to become more legally available on DVD in this country and many of you possess and enjoy bootlegs or imports. Some of you have region-free DVD players and so have ordered the new British release of Hellzapoppin', the cover of which is seen above left. A few of you even own the local, obscure VHS release depicted next to it.

As Joe Dante and others have reminded me, some of their films have more complicated legal situations than the norm because they were based, as least nominally, on their Broadway shows. Often, when studios acquired the underlying rights in the days before TV exhibition, the contracts were for limited periods that expired. That was the thing that kept the Marx Brothers movie, Animal Crackers, unavailable for years. It was based on a play and Paramount had only purchased the rights to the play — or maybe it was to the songs in the play — for a few decades, not in perpetuity. A whole new deal had to be worked out to liberate the film from the estates and the lawyers, which meant that someone had to think there was enough of a demand to make it worth the expense.

In the case of Hellzapoppin', there seems to have been an added complication because of the 1977 stage revival. The legendary producer Alexander Cohen thought Broadway would welcome a new version and purchased the rights to mount one, even though just about all he was purchasing was the title. He then signed the legendary Jerry Lewis to star in it and the result was one of the legendary troubled productions that toured but never made it to the Great White Way. (A "troubled production" is hard to define but when the producer and star are making daily death threats towards one another, you have one.) Anyway, the deal Cohen made apparently kept the film off American TV for some time.

But such details are renegotiated all the time, especially now when there's a buck to be made on home video. Someone's made a deal to put some of the Olsen-Johnson body o' work out in some forms and venues. They can and probably will make one to put out DVDs in the Land of the Free here. One of these days.

I'll link to anything with the great voice actor Daws Butler in it. He was such a wonderful performer and such a wonderful man. I used to have a little late night ritual for whenever I was sitting here at the computer, trying to break away from work and go beddy-bye. This was only for the nights when no lady would be joining me. I'd begin flipping around the TV dial and the rule was that I wouldn't turn in until I'd heard Daws.

I started doing it a few years after he passed away, which was in 1988. At one point, there were three channels that programmed old cartoons, mostly Hanna-Barbera, for much of the night so it rarely took long. I'd catch him playing Huckleberry Hound or Quick Draw McGraw or Elroy Jetson or Mr. Jinks…or sometimes, it would be a Jay Ward cartoon or even something older — from MGM or Warner Brothers. After I heard him for a minute or two, I'd say, "Good night, Daws" and turn off the TV and leave my office and go to sleep.

I couldn't do that when I had a date over. She'd think it was just too weird. I don't know why I'm telling you this. You probably think it's just too weird. But there was something so comforting about his sound. It always reminded me of a good time (when I was a kid watching cartoons and listening to the records he did with Stan Freberg) and a good friend (later, when I got to know him).

This is a commercial in which he plays Snagglepuss. The other voice in there is from his frequent co-star, June Foray, who reminds me of the same two things but is still happily with us.

Daws actually gets a screen credit at the end of some of these Cocoa Krispies ads…the result of a legal action that Bert Lahr took or perhaps just threatened. Snagglepuss didn't actually sound that much like Lahr. It was one of Daws's many "inspired" voices, meaning that the voice was inspired by a celeb but was not an actual impersonation. Hokey Wolf didn't sound like Phil Silvers. Hokey sounded like what people think Phil Silvers sounded like. Same with Yogi Bear and Art Carney or Peter Potamus and Joe E. Brown or many others. Anyway, some folks apparently thought it was Bert Lahr doing these commercials or Mr. Lahr was afraid they would, so he called a lawyer. I don't know if he got money but Daws got a credit. It was kind of a reverse disclaimer — a way of proclaiming, at least to those who could read fast, that it was not Bert Lahr.

I knew it was not Bert Lahr when I was ten but I guess they had to do that for the grown-ups who didn't know about important stuff…like who was the voice of Snagglepuss. Anyway, here's Snag selling the cereal that then had him on the box. And now that I've heard that voice, I can exit stage left and go to bed. Good night, Daws.

I'm getting e-mails from bird lovers and experts responding to my message of earlier this morning about how the crows in my neighborhood are getting frighteningly large. Several folks want to know if maybe these are ravens, instead.

No, they are crows. Huge crows. Crows of awesome, worrisome height and girth. Crows that if they get much larger will be able to grab up a full-sized man in their beaks and snap him in two like a Rold-Gold pretzel stick. Crows that could crush the roof of your car if they were to merely alight on it. I don't even want to think about what might happen if you parked under a crow that big. One good dump and they'd have to send in St. Bernards to find you.

And every time I see the crows, they're bigger than they were the last time I saw them. Soon, they will be the size of Graf Zeppelins and then, by God, maybe you people will listen to me.

I am not a paranoid person. I don't spend much time worrying about natural disasters or the economy or terrorism or even the adminstration of George W. Bush, who's making all those things worse by the moment. I rarely imagine doom lies ahead. Just look at some of the jobs I've taken voluntarily when a more apprehensive man might have imagined what could happen.

But I tell you: I'm deeply, deeply worried about the crows. And also by the fact that people love Dancing With the Stars. Somehow, that threatens our well-being, too.