Monthly Archives: May 2007

Cracked Magazine picks "The 20 Best 'That Guys' of All Time." Actually, it seems like a list of mainly current character actors who are known better for their faces than their names, but it's not a bad list. Go take a look.

Speaking of events where you'll find the likes of me: This weekend, I will be a guest-type person at the Super-Con in San Jose, California…a fact I have yet to mention to one person without hearing a "Do you know the way?" joke. I will be hosting a panel on the great Filipino comic artists with four of them and I'll be doing a two-man panel — actually, a two-Mark panel — with Mark Waid all about comic book writing. We will mainly be advancing the theory that you really can't write a decent comic if your name isn't Mark. And that's not my claim. I learned it from Mark Verheiden.

All the details on this spectacular event can be extracted from this website and if you can make it, please do. When I'm not doing panels, I'll be wandering around with the usual stupid look on my face, so if you see me or that look, feel free to say hello. Also while I'm there, I'm going to find some peace of mind in San Jose. Wo oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh ohhh…

The other day, I posted an item about an upcoming one-night-only tribute to Mort Sahl. Here's the website and as you can see, the roster of scheduled performers is truly impressive…

Larry King will be the host. This is only possible because I didn't kill him Tuesday evening…although I came close. (I still have the suspender prints on my bumpers.) The rest of the list consists of Albert Brooks, Jay Leno, Drew Carey, Bill Maher, Shelley Berman, David Steinberg, Richard Lewis, Paula Poundstone, Jonathan Winters, David Brenner, Kevin Nealon, Jack Riley and a taped appearance by Woody Allen. I'm told there will also be at least two other very special performers whose names cannot yet be mentioned…and I'm guessing that Mort's going to say a word or two, as well.

The event will not be televised. It will not even be recorded. So I'll be there.

Our friends over at the Old TV Tickets website have been enormously irresponsible lately, shirking their update duties. Finally though, they've gotten around to posting something new over there — some tickets from Here's Lucy, the third of Lucille Ball's four TV sitcoms. And it's about friggin' time.

I continue to be amazed how many folks in the news-gathering business can get caught making up "facts" and then think they can tough it out and save face without admitting error. Today's case in point: Lou Dobbs.

It's another one of those great commercials for Cap'n Crunch cereals, done back in the day they were produced by Jay Ward's studio and featured the voice of the brilliant Daws Butler as the salty cereal salesman.

Did you hear Earl Kress and me today on Stu's Show on Shokus Internet Radio? Well, if you did, you didn't hear much of us. Shortly after the show began, tech problems forced us off the air. Or off the web or whatever the correct term is for an Internet radio program.

We went ahead and recorded the show and it will air in full tomorrow at 4 PM Pacific/7 PM Eastern and then it repeats many more times in the coming week. Check out the schedule on this page.

If and when you tune in, you can hear Earl and me chat with host Stu Shostak about cartoons of the sixties and other related topics. Stu, by the way, failed to guess the identity of our Mystery Guest, who was Frank Buxton, voice of Batfink and the writer, producer and/or director of many fine unanimated shows like Happy Days and The Odd Couple. We had a short but sweet conversation by phone with Frank around the mid-point of the two-hour program.

To listen to Shokus Internet Radio, go to this page and select a browser. It's free and you might enjoy listening to whatever's on as you work at your computer. Even if what's on at the moment isn't Earl and me.

Everyone's trying to determine the precise odds of Al Gore becoming a candidate for the White House in '08. They're acting like Gore knows exactly what he's going to do and maybe, if you analyze his every word and also study his manner of dress and his body weight, you can get some clue as to what that plan is.

Why is it so inconceivable that Gore's "plan" is to stay out of it for now, study the situation as it exists in 4-6 months and then decide? I mean, isn't the likely truth that the guy intends to look at the polls and the competition and maybe some personal factors then and see how feasible it is? A lot of things just might change between now and then, and he's got plenty to do and ways to keep his name before the public without becoming an announced candidate.

I'm a big believer in Planning Ahead when it makes sense. It doesn't always. Right this minute, you can decide to have Chinese Food on August 9 but why? You don't know what kind of craving you may be having then…or if you'll find a better restaurant between now and then or if you'll wind up getting invited to a big Chinese dinner on August 8 or a thousand other scenarios which could alter things. I've suffered from not being prepared for certain decisions and not giving them sufficient consideration in advance. But I've also suffered from planning something before I knew all the circumstances of that decision. At the very least, I've wasted a lot of time deciding something…and then everything changed and I had to start deciding all over again.

I have no idea what's on Al Gore's mind. Maybe he is tentatively committed to a certain strategy, but it seems to me that if it were to definitely not run, he'd get that idea off the table more explicitly than he has. Because then, if he decided he did want to run in 2012, he wouldn't be thought of as a guy who lost in 2000 and lost again in '08. I think he's just waiting to see and that all this attempted mind-reading is a case of trying to gin up a news story where there isn't one…at least not yet.

The New York Times once had a deserved reputation for accuracy. That is no longer so. One reason is the flawed Iraq reporting by Judith Miller. Another is the long string of stories written or co-written by a reporter named Jeff Gerth…stories which turned out to be largely untrue. Eric Boehlert goes over some of these.

This is a commercial for an animation gallery but it's also four minutes of Mel Blanc telling how he created the voices of the classic Warner Brothers characters.

Well, actually, these are what I call the "talk show" versions of how those voices came to be, as opposed to the actual stories. Mel was a great self-promoter, and I don't mean that at all in a bad way. The man raised his craft to a high level and also a visible one, doing interviews and appearing on television to remind people that actors spoke for cartoon characters. With the possible exception of Jim Backus, Mel was the only "celebrity" known for that job in the forties, fifties and even into the sixties.

During that time, there was little or no scholarship about cartoons…no books wherein one could learn the history of the Warner Brothers studio, for instance, nor was there anyone else on the interview circuit talking about it. The nature of talk shows and interviews causes people who are asked the same questions over and over to develop short, funny responses that they repeat over and over, usually to the delight of interviewers and audiences. When Mel went on with Johnny Carson, what was expected of him was not a precise history of the development of Porky's voice. What was desired was a brief and humorous anecdote…so he developed one about deciding that a pig's grunt might be similar to a human stutter. For years, there was no one around to point out that Mel did not invent the idea of Porky stuttering; that Mel was the second voice of Porky Pig and that the first guy had given him a stuttering voice which Mel started by replicating and eventually making his own. (Porky's first voice was done by a man named Joe Dougherty. He was hired because he was an actual stutterer, meaning that the cartoon's directors and gag men were the ones who decided the pig should have a speech impediment.)

In the late sixties and since, there have been people around who've researched the history of the cartoons, and some of Mel's colleagues from those days also were getting interviewed…so Mel, being a smart guy, didn't push the "talk show" anecdotes in every venue. He recognized when he was in front of an audience that expected the real story and knew the difference, and there are some wonderful interviews around where he goes into great and accurate depth about how he did what he did. This is not one of those interviews but it's entertaining, anyway. Everything Mel did was entertaining…

Comedy legend Mort Sahl will be honored on June 28 at the Wadsworth Theater in West Los Angeles with a special one-night benefit/tribute, the line-up for which sounds like a veritable Who's Who of comedy. I haven't seen any official list anywhere but the names that have been mentioned include Richard Lewis, Kevin Nealon, Paula Poundstone, Jonathan Winters, George Carlin, Albert Brooks, Shelley Berman, Jay Leno, Bill Maher, David Steinberg, Jack Riley and Robin Williams, along with taped tributes by Woody Allen, Sydney Pollack and Clint Eastwood. I'm guessing Clint will be the funny one.

I also haven't seen any official announcement of where one obtains tickets but I found them for sale on Ticketmaster and they ain't cheap. On the other hand, if most of those people are there, it might well be worth it.

Here's the final nag to catch me and my comrade Earl Kress as we guest today on Stu's Show, the star program on Shokus Internet Radio, which is part of the awesome Live365 network of web-based broadcasting. Our genial host Stuart Shostak will be chatting with us about cartoon shows of the sixties, and we'll be taking your phone calls and Stu will ask some lame trivia question which you can call in to answer and win a pretty nice prize. Matter of fact, I might just sneak out during the program so I can call in on my cell phone and win the prize.

And speaking of answering questions! Last time Earl and I were on, we had a Mystery Guest! During the show, we called Doug Young, the veteran cartoon voice actor you know best as the voice of Doggie Daddy on the Quick Draw McGraw cartoon series. We not only called Doug on the program and chatted with him but we made it into a game show: We had our host Stu guess who the Mystery Guest would be. It took him eight questions but he got it.

This afternoon, we put Stuart to the test again! During the show, we will be phoning a great performer from the world of animation voicing…and I'll give you (and Stu) the hint that this person has also distinguished him- or herself in other areas, as well. At the beginning of the show, Earl and I will challenge our host to guess, game show style, who we'll be phoning. Then later on, we'll phone this person for a brief interview.

Who will it be? You'll have to tune in to find out. You can do this by going to this website at 4PM Pacific (7 PM Eastern) and selecting an audio browser. That will enable you to listen to Shokus Internet Radio…something you oughta do every hour of the day, not just when Mark and Earl are on. It's free and there are a lot of weird and wonderful things to be heard on Stuart's station. We'll be on for two hours and I hope you'll log in and listen.

We are now 58 days from the start of this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. Scary, huh? We're still a few weeks from announcing all the peachy panels and events I'll be hosting there but you can figure on a return of Quick Draw!, a couple of Cartoon Voice panels, spotlights on some of the Golden Age comic guests, the annual Jack Kirby Tribute Panel, a Groo panel, the Golden/Silver Age Panel…and since I'm for some reason a Guest of Honor, there may even be a spotlight panel on me. I hope they don't expect me to interview myself.

If you've never attended one of these gatherings before — or even if you have — I recommend taking the time to read Tom Spurgeon's excellent list of tips and suggestions for the con. I did a small one up which is posted here but Tom's is much better, even if it is for 2006. You should also read his recently-posted update.

I would echo and update one thing Tom mentions: He suggests that if you're stuck for a room, you take a gander at Travelaxe. I concur…and I'd mention that Travelaxe has been redesigned. It used to be a piece of free software that you could download to your PC (no Mac version, sorry) and then it would search various travel sites for the best deal. You can still do it that way but they now have an online version that involves no downloading of software. It may not find you a reasonably-priced room within fifty miles of the Comic-Con but it's handy for all sorts of hotel needs elsewhere, all year.

A year and a half ago in Beverly Hills, I saved the life of Stan Lee when he walked in front of my car and I braked to a stop in time to not hit him. I told you about that here.

About an hour ago in Beverly Hills, I was driving along and a man talking on a cell phone stepped out onto the street where he shouldn't have…and I did a fast brake manuever and avoided hitting him. I thought for a second it was Stan again. The man's posture and silhouette reminded me of Stan and this was about half a block from Stan's office…

…but it wasn't Stan. It was, I swear to God, Larry King.

On this blog, we've occasionally made mention of two friends — Jim Brochu and Steve Schalchlin. Jim and Steve live together and perform in musical theater and collaborated on a hit play about the relationship between two gay men who live together and perform in musical theater, and I don't want to leap to conclusions but I'm starting to get the faint suspicion that Jim and Steve might actually be gay. It's just a suspicion at this point.

Between them, Jim and Steve know every human being who has ever performed in a play or musical and shown the slightest bit of talent. They knew the late, already-missed Charles Nelson Reilly and back in 2000, when they went to dinner at his home, Steve took along his omnipresent video diary camera. Here's three minutes of that visit. It may give you a bit of an idea what C.N.R. was like. It might even cause you to suspect that he also was…well, never mind.