Monthly Archives: April 2007

I have a couple of boxes in the next room labelled "MAD imitations," meaning magazines that attempted to replicate the success of (and usually, most of the contents of) MAD Magazine. There have been an awful lot of them, most of which lasted three or less issues. I probably have at least a dozen that ran a grand total of one issue. Even back when MAD was up to a circulation over 2.6 million, the knock-offs couldn't muster enough sales to stick around for long.

Unless you count National Lampoon — and I sure wouldn't — only two managed to stick around for any length of time. Sick lasted for twenty years, though the last five or so were kind of rough…lots of reprints and then it was sold to Charlton, the rock bottom of the business, for its last hurrah. Cracked began in 1958 and published regularly until around 2000 when its issuance became erratic…then it stopped altogether. Soon, it was sold to new owners who revamped it, started publishing again — and quickly stopped. So the batting average for MAD simulations is pretty low. It's probably been just a few years shy of a half-century since anyone started one that ever showed a profit.

Which brings us to the latest in the long, grand tradition. The first issue of Gag! came out in 2004. Did you know about it? I didn't. Another first issue has just been issued but I don't think it's on conventional newsstands. It seems to be sold in comic shops and at the magazine's website. I haven't seen a copy yet so this is not a recommendation…but I'm somehow impressed with the sheer fact that anyone is trying it again. One of these days, it's going to work.

When rehearsals started for the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady, Julie Andrews was awful, at least in the portions where Liza was the unscrubbed flower girl. She was reportedly able to play the later scenes where Ms. Doolittle has become a refined lady of apparent breeding but she just couldn't master the character in the early scenes. It was so bad that her co-star, Rex Harrison, threatened to stop coming to rehearsal. He didn't see why he should waste his time rehearsing with an actress who obviously had to be fired and replaced.

In a "last chance" desperation move, director Moss Hart gave everyone but Julie a few days off from rehearsal and went into an intense, one-on-one tutoring session with her. It was brutal, it was exhausting…but it worked. Hart pasted the role on her, doing the opposite of what Henry Higgins did in the play — turning the gentlewoman into a street urchin. In some accounts, Hart's spouse, Kitty Carlisle, assisted in the marathon lessons that enabled her not only to play the part but to make it one of the stage's most memorable performances.

Here's concert footage of Julie Andrews performing a number of that show and telling a small, funnier version of that story. It runs five minutes.

This is funny. A few years ago, I purchased the book, Here's Morgan!, via Amazon. This is the autobiography of humorist Henry Morgan. Most of you know Morgan from his years as a panelist on the game show, I've Got a Secret. But he also did some very fine and clever programs on both radio and TV. Much of the humor in the early issues of MAD was inspired by Henry Morgan.

Anyway, I just received this e-mail from Amazon…

We've noticed that customers who have expressed interest in "Here's Morgan!" by Henry Morgan have also ordered "Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign" by Stephan Talty. For this reason, you might like to know that Stephan Talty's "Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign" is now available. You can order your copy for just $18.96 ($5.99 off the list price) by following the link below.

In other words: Since you were interested in Henry Morgan, the radio humorist, we assume you're interested in Sir Henry Morgan, the seventeenth century pirate. This is the same expert use of computers that causes our National Security people to arrest and torture the wrong person because they have the same name as the right person.

Vince Waldron suggested — and he's right — that this column by Rosa Brooks says all the salient things that the Christopher Hitchens column says about the Virginia Tech shooting, and says it with more understanding.

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher seems to have inherited Bob Dornan's old job of being the looniest guy in the House of Representatives. The other day, at a meeting of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, he was trotting out the old line about how anyone who disagrees with his positions must hate America. At one point when the audience moaned at one of the sillier things he said, he told them, "Well, I hope it's your families, I hope it's your families that suffer the consequences." At one point, he said the following…

…we are at war, and we've got to make sure that we do not let go fifty terrorists who will go out and plant a bomb in London and kill 20,000 people in order to protect that one person who we arrested accidentally because his name was the same.

I don't fully disagree with this position…but the problem is that we don't just arrest the wrong people. Sometimes, we arrest and torture the wrong people. I don't think we should be torturing anyone. I have yet to hear an argument that it accomplishes anything positive at all, let alone anything that justifies losing the moral high ground. But if there is a reason to torture, it probably won't apply to torturing the wrong person.

Should we tolerate torturing the wrong person just because they have the same name as the right person? I don't know…but I do know it's an easy position to take if your name is Dana Rohrabacher. Somehow, I don't think he'd feel quite the same way if his name was Bob Johnson or Joe Smith.

This is one you may not want to click on but you should be made aware it's there. Roger Ebert, out of the hospital and awaiting still more surgery, has written an article about why, though his illness has made him look quite bad, he is not going to hide out. The man is unable to speak and a section of his mandible has been removed…but he is still planning on attending his upcoming film festival. The piece is accompanied by photos of the guy that will break your heart even though he's happily giving the "thumbs up" sign, which I guess is now more of an affirmation of positive thinking than a movie review.

Okay, I've given you sufficient warning. If you still want to read the article, it's here.

Christopher Hitchens rarely makes me feel that he is writing out of conviction and not, say, to cultivate a certain Angry Gadfly reputation. Every so often though, his nasty screeds say something that I think ought to be said, if only so it can be considered. This essay, which is about the national mourning of the Virginia Tech massacre, is one such entry.

Jack Kirby was involved in a number of odd projects in his life, especially in the eighties when he was more or less out of conventional comic books. One was a motion picture proposal called The Lord of Light, based on Roger Zelazny's book of the same name. For it, he did a pile of concept sketches as well as some designs for a proposed theme park related to the proposed movie. Above is one drawing of what the theme park might have looked like. (The odd part is that as wild and untethered to reality as Jack's imagination was, it might have been fairly simple to build buildings that looked like his did. His world had balance and mass and structure.)

The film never got made but it was apparently helpful in the freeing of six Americans who were trapped in Iran. This article tells the whole bizarre story.

Ed McMahon, you may be interested to know, has been intermittently touring the U.S. with a one-man show called "Tonight Show Memories." Here, we have a link to a piece about him in Chicago with it, including a video interview. Thanks to Jeff Abraham for the tip.

Wanna hear a radio show discussing animation history? Better still, wanna hear one that doesn't feature me (although I may call in and be part of the discussion)? Well, two eminent cartoon scholars will be the guests this Wednesday on Stu's Show, which is heard only on Shokus Internet Radio. Each week, my pal Stu Shostak welcomes either someone prominent in entertainment history or me to his microphones and this Wednesday, he has two terrific guests.

One is Jerry Beck, who's one of the brewmasters of Cartoon Brew, maybe the best animation weblog on the 'net. Any time you see a great DVD collection of cartoons these days, the odds are good that it exists and is as good as it is because Jerry talked the appropriate folks into doing it and doing it right. He's too humble to say this so I will.

The other is Keith Scott, who's one of the top announcers and voiceover guys in Australia, along with being the world class expert on animation voice history and on the Jay Ward studio. Keith not only knows everything there is to know about Bullwinkle J. Moose, he is Bullwinkle J. Moose. After the passing of the character's original voice, Bill Scott, Keith (no relation) took over the role and now they fly him in from Down Under when they need the eminent moose to speak. It's an uncanny replica…as I'm sure you'll hear for yourself if you tune in Stu's Show.

I suggest you do this on Wednesday. An awful lot of folks who've listened to Stu on my recommendation have told me they really enjoyed it. The show airs on the Internet for two hours, beginning at 4 PM on the West Coast, which is 7 PM on the East Coast. To hear it, click over to Shokus Internet Radio, select an audio browser and then listen. The show repeats at that time for several days after but you'll enjoy it more if you listen live. Trust Mark on this.

Here's five minutes from a 1950 Burns & Allen TV show. It's a dance spot featuring George Burns, someone named Harrison Muller…and the legendary Bob Fosse. Mr. Muller was a Broadway dancer at the time and his son (of the same name) has achieved some success as a star in action movies. For some reason, I just like watching Fosse dance, even though this isn't Fosse-style dancing. George ain't so bad, either.

The 2008 Presidential Race…as explained by the eminent scholar of such things, Yogi Berra.

For reasons that escape me, I'm booked for a batch of comic-type conventions in the next few months…

• June 2 and 3, I'll be at the Super-Con, which used to be in Oakland, California but is now in San Jose. They have a pretty good lineup of guests so we may have some interesting panels and program items. I'll tell you all about them when things get firmed up.
• July 5 through 8, the lovely Carolyn Kelly and the lovely I (to say nothing of the lovely Rob Paulsen) will be Guests of Honor at Anthrocon, which is an annual convention in Pittsburgh to celebrate funny animals and the anthropomorphic arts. Again, there will be panels and talks. I'll talk about the silly cartoons I write. Carolyn will talk about the work of her father, Walt Kelly, on Pogo…which was only, like, the best newspaper strip ever. And I imagine Rob will talk about doing some of the best cartoon voice work done today.
• And then of course, July 26-29, we and everyone who could get a hotel room will be at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. Usually, I go there and run twelve or thirteen panels. This year, they've made me a Guest of Honor so I guess I'm going to go there and run twelve or thirteen panels. It's way too early to say what they might be but they'd better be good. If they aren't, there's a good chance no one will show up for the convention.

If you can make it to any of these, please come by and say howdy. I get a lot of e-mail here but I somehow don't believe people are reading this website until they tell me in person.

Also, if you see me, look around. You may just spot John Lithgow lurking close by. (As a couple of you have written to me, it could be worse. I could be stalked by Robert Blake.)

One of my big peeves, apart from John Lithgow following me around, is that so many people who purport to care about comic book history don't seem to know how to spell the names of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman. These are important men with not-difficult names but just take a moment and Google some aberrant spellings. You'll find countless hits for Siegal and Shuster, Seigel and Schuster, Seigle and Shusster, etc. Sometimes, they get one wrong, sometimes both. This probably bugs me more than it should.

Well, here's a bit of comic book history. Above left is an ad that appeared in New Comics #11, which came out in 1936 from the company we now know as DC Comics. It's a promo for a new book the company was then launching called Detective Comics. That's the cover of #1, which was drawn by Vince Sullivan, the book's associate editor. The ad touts the folks who created the interior of that historic publication — Tom Hickey, Sven Elven, Bill Patrick, Creig Flessel (who recently celebrated his 94th birthday), Seigel & Shuster [sic], Homer Fleming and Alger. Not listed is Fred Schwab, who also did a story in that first issue.

That's right. In what may be the first ad to ever mention Jerry and Joe, Jerry's name was misspelled. So maybe it's a time-honored tradition.

As some of you may recall, I've had some concern about the size of the crows in my neighborhood lately. They're now about the size of Lincoln Continentals.

But I have something new to worry about. I think I'm being stalked. What's more, I think I'm being stalked by John Lithgow.

Today, I went into a Bristol Farms market and as I was waiting to check out, I noticed that the man standing behind me in line was John Lithgow. This is the third time in thirty days I've encountered Mr. Lithgow. The first, which I didn't tell you about, was in a restaurant almost a month ago. He acted like he was there to eat with someone else but I wasn't fooled. He was there to keep an eye on me.

The second time was at the Billy Connelly performance mentioned here. Again, Lithgow feigned like he was there for some innocent reason like seeing the show…and he had me almost convinced. He's that good an actor. I was prepared to just consider the two run-ins a coincidence.

But today at Bristol Farms, I caught on. There he was with his little basket, pretending to be out grocery shopping, supposedly more interested in his purchases than he was in me. Nice try, Lithgow, but I'm on to you. I don't know what you're up to but it won't work.

Stay tuned to this weblog for more sightings of John Lithgow. And don't think there won't be plenty.