Monthly Archives: May 2007

A large chunk of Griffith Park is aflame at the moment. No homes are threatened. No one has been injured (yet) besides someone the news reporters were calling an "arson suspect" an hour ago, but he now seems to have turned into a "person of interest." The park has been evacuated and they're talking about what to do about all the animals up in the L.A. Zoo, just in case. Awful news.

It looked even scarier about an hour ago when I was trapped in a traffic snarl on Los Feliz Boulevard. Between the park evacuees and the emergency vehicles and the people stopping to look, cars were moving at about the speed of a tortoise on valium. The view from my car looked a lot like the above news photo and I don't have to tell you how much more chilling that can be in person.

Hundreds of fire fighters are on the scene. Most of them seem to be giving interviews to local news crews. There also seem to be around thirty helicopters up there. Two are doing water drops and the other twenty-eight are getting live shots of those water drops.

Well, at least that's how it seems.

The other day here, I wrote about the Rodney King Riots of fifteen years ago in L.A. I just remembered one moment from it that I will always treasure. The fires had all been knocked down. The riot was, for all intents and purposes, over though we weren't yet certain it wouldn't erupt again.

There was a hillside and one of the newsmen in a chopper showed it to us and said that fire fighters, most of whom had been putting out conflagrations for a day or two without sleep, were laying out tarps and lying down to nap. Back in the studio, the anchorman said to him, "We can't see them…can you swoop down and give us a better look?" The copter reporter said, as respectfully as he could, "We could…but we're afraid that if we go any lower, the sound of our copter will wake them up. And if anyone deserves a rest, it's these guys."

The anchorman hastily withdrew his request and the copter went no lower. I liked that. I love news coverage but I also like the idea of them getting out of the way of people who have work to do in a time of crisis. Or even naps to take after it's over.

I'm not embedding a video today. Instead, if you can spare twenty minutes, I'm going to send you to another site to watch something I can't embed here. It's a clip from last Friday's episode of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS — an interview with Jerry Miller.

Jerry Miller was the 200th person freed from prison by a program called The Innocence Project. Basically, it's a concern that uses DNA testing to identify people who've been wrongly convicted. Mr. Miller spent twenty-five years behind bars for a crime that he didn't commit. It's an extraordinary story…not that an innocent man went to prison. That, sadly, is not all that unusual. What's extraordinary is Miller's attitude and his lack of anger about the whole ordeal.

Here's the link. Go watch Moyers interview Jerry Miller.

A few years ago, I broke the filthy, disgusting habit that is the New York Times crossword puzzle. With the newly-freed time I suddenly gained from this, I began leaving my house and sometimes even earning a living. But I couldn't resist having a go at this one, the clues for which were authored by the famed crossword enthusiast, William Jefferson Clinton. I was especially amused by 116 Down. The clue is "A party I don't attend" and the answer is three letters, starting with "G" and ending with "P." Hmm…GAP? GYP?

Tonight, the American version of Deal or No Deal airs its 100th episode. I was intrigued by this program when it first went on the air. Many of my friends dismissed it as a mindless game show. "You don't have to know anything," they said…and they were right for the most part. But I still found it intriguing for the situations its presented, and I liked the way Howie Mandel handled the proceedings.

My interest in it came and went, and some time around Show #50, it really plunged. I still have the TiVo set to grab episodes but I rarely watch much more than the first three and last five minutes of any game. When the big numbers are eliminated early, I don't even watch that much. There have been a lot of those games — probably more than the producers like — and I guess that when they keep touting a potential million dollar win, you get spoiled. All the padding and stalling and dramatic music really wear on you when the most the player can win is a measly $25,000. (On an episode last night, a lady opened all the large amounts long before the end. She ultimately won a dollar, setting a new record "low.")

I've also come to find the value system of the show to be occasionally vapid. I have no trouble with what some see as the "greed" aspect of it. I don't view it that way. As in any negotiation or any investment, there's a time to get out and a time to stay in, and success hinges on finding that sweet spot between too early and too late. That's one of the things that's compelling about the show. A friend of mine, commenting on last night's big $1 winner said, "She should have quit while she was ahead." Yeah, but she was "ahead" after the first offer. That's not what the game is about.

What I do find silly is the idea that you pick, say, Case #8…and then it's a sign of courage or something admirable to keep saying, "I'm absolutely certain the million dollars is in my case." Uh, why? It's one thing to have confidence in your new invention or your new screenplay or your new strategy. I'm not sure it's always admirable to have blind faith in something like that but at least it's faith in your skill or talent or cleverness or informed judgment. I don't get the point of having faith in your random choice.

But then I've never believed there's a lot of value in blind optimism. The few times I watched Fear Factor, I was repulsed way before they got to the part where the contestants eat fried mule anus. At the beginning, six contestants are all saying over and over, "I will win, I will win, failure in not an option." Well, it's not only an option…it's the future for five of them. Five of them are going to lose. I'm all for positive thinking but I've never felt there was any value to believing your victory is predestined. I've always found that if you're aware of the possibility of failure and realistic about its probability, you can do more to avoid it.

Deal or No Deal also has an odd admiration for the taking of risks. In fact, they seem to have instructed the "advisors" — the friends who come along to coach the contestant and root them on to financial victory — to keep saying, "Remember…you're a risk-taker!" Contestants are picked to be on the show because they're not wealthy or successful, and winning a hundred grand or more would truly change their lives. So if they're "risk-takers," taking risks hasn't gotten them very far in the past. More to the point, if there's a skill to playing Deal or No Deal, it comes from knowing when not to be a "risk-taker." There are points where picking another case represents very little possible loss so you go on…and then there are points where one wrong selection and you're going home with chump change. So you stop.

In spite of all this, there's still something I find mesmerizing about the game especially when — as the American version hasn't in its first 99 shows — it gets down to a choice between the top prize and a far lower one. (I think the only time any U.S. player had only two cases left and one held a million, the other was $750,000…so there wasn't a whole heap of suspense there.) The show however is produced in local versions all over the world…including a Canadian version hosted by Howie Mandel!

The following clip is from the British version, where the host (or "presenter," as they call him) is a man named Noel Edmonds. The show differs a bit from the American version in that there are no lovely models. They bring in 22 contestants and each selects a case at random. Then one of those people is chosen to play the game and pick the other cases, one by one. It'll all become clear in the clip but the main thing you need to know is that the folks opening the cases in lieu of the models are contestants who weren't selected to play this round. Also, of course, the top prize is in pounds — it's £250,000. Last time I looked, the British pound was worth a hair under two bucks in American money so 250,000 of them is the equivalent of a little under a half million clams U.S. If that seems horribly lower than the usual top prize in this country of a million dollars, remember that on the American show, the top prize is in one out of 26 cases, not 22, so the odds are a little different.

But enough of this. Here's what happened on the British Deal or No Deal in January of this year…

You think people hated George Tenet before? Wait'll they read the article by Tim Shorrock over at Salon. I'll quote just a little so you can see what the new scandal is…

While the swirl of publicity around his book has focused on his long debated role in allowing flawed intelligence to launch the war in Iraq, nobody is talking about his lucrative connection to that conflict ever since he resigned from the CIA in June 2004. In fact, Tenet has been earning substantial income by working for corporations that provide the U.S. government with technology, equipment and personnel used for the war in Iraq as well as the broader war on terror.

When Tenet hit the talk-show circuit last week to defend his stewardship of the CIA and his role in the run-up to the war, he did not mention that he is a director and advisor to four corporations that earn millions of dollars in revenue from contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense. Nor is it ever mentioned in his book. But according to public records, Tenet has received at least $2.3 million from those corporations in stock and other compensation.

In the past week, people who ordinarily can't agree what month of the year it is have been united in their distaste for Mr. Tenet. I'm not sure if all of them can get worked up over the issue of war profiteering. It seems to be the kind of issue that should inspire outrage and doesn't. But this sure won't help Tenet's image.

Didn't see it.

The other day, I was telling a friend of mine about a memorable show that ran on Los Angeles TV in the late sixties. It was called Groovy and it was an afternoon "teen dance party" show on KHJ, Channel 9. What made it unique from dozens of other knock-offs of American Bandstand (and many such shows that preceded that one) was that when it debuted, Groovy was done from the beach in Santa Monica.

The following is not any sort of official history. It's what I remember and some of it may be incorrect. I'm putting it up here mainly to see if I can jar any other memories (or photos or — dare I dream? — videos) loose. I recall the show premiering around March of '67 and ping-ponging back and forth between the 4 PM-5 PM time slot and 5 PM-6 PM, Monday through Friday. I believe it was done live when it started and then, for reasons that will become obvious as I tell you more about it, its producers began taping it an hour or so before it was broadcast. Once or twice, it got "rained out" and a slapdash broadcast was assembled in the KHJ studios over on Melrose.

The show went through several versions but its first and most notable period was when it was done from the beach and hosted by the gent seen in the above photo. His name was Michael Blodgett and he had a nice little acting career, which included the unforgettable Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (from which that is a still) before he moved on to considerable success as a novelist. He was a pretty good host on the Groovy show but I suspect even he would admit that he wasn't the main appeal of the show. The main appeal was young ladies in very tiny bikinis — and by "young," I mean sometimes fifteen or sixteen years of age, if that old.

Much of the show was, of course, teens dancing to records. There was one real musical act each day…usually a group that would come on to pantomime/lip sync to their current record, which made for an odd sight. There would be these musicians acting like they were playing on the beach…with their amps and electric guitars plugged into absolutely nothing. Most records of that era ended with the track fading out and I guess the acoustics out there weren't great insofar as hearing the playback was concerned. As a song drew to its close, you could see the performers become unsure if it was through so they'd keep "playing" and then one guy would stop and maybe another. And then you could tell someone had yelled, "It's not over! Keep playing!" And they'd scurry back into mime mode. Very odd stuff.

But the real "treat" — the reason thousands of depraved Southern California males tuned in — was the daily Bikini Contest. Blodgett would do short interviews with five or six young ladies selected not for their loquaciousness but for the elegance of their figures and the brevity of their swimwear. You got the idea that whoever was picking the contestants was rating them by subtracting their I.Q.s from their bust measurements. Blodgett would ask each where she went to school, what she liked to study and if she had any hobbies, and the lasses would giggle through their replies. Then each would parade down a little runway to show off her physique to hoots and hollers from the crowd. That day's musical act would be the judges and they'd select the victor. Usually, whichever lady looked the sluttiest would win passes to Gazarri's on the Strip or the Cinnamon Cinder or some other local dance club.

Other things I remember about the show: The cameras were always panning the crowds who were there to watch the proceedings. At least once per show, someone would either flash or moon or give the finger. (This, I assume, is why they stopped broadcasting live.) At the very least, you'd see an awful lot of young teens smoking and/or brandishing bottles of liquor. One person who worked on the show told me that they got very few complaints about the flashing or the mooning or even the 14 year old girls popping out of their microscopic bathing suits…but there were constant objections to the smoking and drinking.

I also remember a corollary to something I'd already formulated by then, which was the Cheap Movie Swimming Pool Scene Rule. That's the rule that says if you're watching a cheap or even medium-budget movie and there's a scene by a swimming pool, someone is going to fall or be pushed in with all their clothes on. There was no pool on Groovy but there was an ocean…so at least once per show, someone who wasn't dressed for it would get carried out against their will and thrown in the water. You can just imagine the hilarity of that.

I have a few other memories — including the story of a girl from my high school and her travails in the Bikini Contest — but I'll save them for a follow-up posting which, I hope, will contain additional info that someone reading this will send in. One thing I'm really not clear on is how long the Blodgett/Beach era of Groovy lasted. I do remember tuning in one Monday and discovering that with no advance notice, it had turned into a different show. Groovy was suddenly shot indoors at KHJ with all the dancing teens fully clothed. This version — which was quite ordinary and therefore inferior to The Lloyd Thaxton Show. a dance party series over on Channel 13 — was hosted by local deejay Sam Riddle. Later, Riddle was replaced by another local radio guy, Robert W. Morgan. By then, it was well on its way to becoming one of those shows that is watched by so few people that when it's cancelled, no one notices.

So does anyone have any stills or footage from the beach/Blodgett version of Groovy? Does anyone else at least remember it? Come on. Someone must have been in Los Angeles in the late sixties and watching TV besides me.

I'm close to giving up on The Washington Post, which has become quite a different newspaper from what it was in the days of Woodward and Bernstein…and I don't mean that it was usually Liberal back then. I mean that it was usually correct. The current editors have a pro-Bush slant, which is of course their right. I read a lot of news that comes out of that viewpoint. But like Fox News, they occasionally get so enthusiastic that it impacts the accuracy of their reporting. On May 3, they ran a story that…well, here. I'll quote the first paragraph…

Democrats Back Down On Iraq Timetable
Compromise Bill in Works After Veto Override Fails

By Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 3, 2007; Page A01

President Bush and congressional leaders began negotiating a second war funding bill yesterday, with Democrats offering the first major concession: an agreement to drop their demand for a timeline to bring troops home from Iraq.

Note that this was a Page One report and it's pretty explicit. Congressional leaders, it says, are negotiating with Bush and have withdrawn their insistence on a timeline to end the war. Today, they issued the following correction and it is now — in smaller type — the preface to the online version of the article…

A May 3 Page One article about negotiations between President Bush and congressional Democrats over a war spending bill said the Democrats offered the first major concession by dropping their demand that the bill it include a deadline to bring troops home from Iraq. While Democrats are no longer pushing a firm date for troop withdrawals, party leaders did not specifically make that concession during a Wednesday meeting with Bush at the White House.

Translation: We said they offered it but they really didn't offer it. So the entire premise of our headline story was at best misleading and at worst, completely false.

Before you click, you ought to know that this runs a little under 68 minutes. It's a live interview and "town hall" meeting that John McCain did last Friday at the headquarters of Google up in Northern California. The questions are a little out of the ordinary, which is good, and it's a much more interesting chat than you'd get if McCain was just being interviewed by a Chris Matthews or Larry King.

There are some good comments in there, though I think McCain gets (and takes) too much credit for "straight talk," especially when he seems to be so fervently back-pedalling from certain past positions that might now cost him votes among the so-called Religious Right. He's asked about reconciling his once calling Jerry Falwell an "agent of intolerance" with his willingness to go to Falwell's university, speak and be photographed alongside the man. McCain responds that he met with Falwell and they settled their differences…

…to which a lot of us have to say, "Huh?" Jerry Falwell is the same person he always was, saying the same things, pushing the same agenda. If he was an "agent of intolerance" then, he's an "agent of intolerance" now. I don't think McCain is saying that a private conversation convinced him that he was wrong about Falwell, is he? So what changed?

Shortly after that, an audience questioner asks McCain a multi-part question about atheism. McCain gives him a quick, semi-responsive answer — that a McCain administration would never fault people for whatever they believed — and moves on a bit too rapidly. He also gives a pretty disingenuous (I think) reply to a fair question about who's "won" the Iraq War if we've lost. Frankly, I think it poisons the whole public debate about the Iraq War to try and reduce it to a matter of winning and losing.

Your reaction to this video may differ from mine but mine was that I liked McCain for the first part of it…up until around the third or fourth audience question when he struck me as getting fitfully evasive and more apt to give glib dismissals of tough queries. He also seemed a bit too interested in showing the audience how funny he could be. Anyway, it's a revealing discussion and you might want to take the time to watch some or all of it. Thanks to Tom Galloway, who was somewhere there in the audience, for letting me know about it.

The gloriously bogus rock group Spinal Tap will reunite for a performance at Wembley Stadium in London. It's all part of the Live Earth concerts scheduled worldwide for July 7 to increase awareness of Global Warming or Global Climate Change or whatever we're now calling the fact that our weather seems to be harming us. To promote this, Tap and its documentarian have prepared a 15 minute video that you can watch online. Well, maybe you can. Since it's on an MSN site, I suspect some Mac users will have trouble watching it but they, like us, can go to this page and try.

For a month or three now, Dick Cavett has been writing an enjoyable column for The New York Times which I'm not linking to because you have to be a Times Select subscriber to read it. Either that or have a friend who is and sends it to you on occasion. I'm in the latter category.

The other day, Cavett wrote about an incident that occurred at a taping of his ABC show in 1971. A guest actually passed away in front of the cameras. Here's an excerpt from that column…

When I'm doing an appearance somewhere and taking questions from the audience, I can always count on: "Tell about the guy who died on your show!" I generally say, "I will, and I promise you that in a few moments you will be laughing." (That gets a laugh.) I go on: "First, who would be the logical person to drop dead on a television show? A health expert." (Laugh.) I go on to explain that he was Jerome I. Rodale, the publisher of (among other things) Today's Health Magazine. (Laugh.) The irony gets thicker.

He'd been on the cover of The New York Times Magazine that Sunday, and we needed one more guest. He was a slight man, and looked like Leon Trotsky with the little goatee.

He was extremely funny for half an hour, talking about health foods, and as a friendly gesture he offered me some of his special asparagus, boiled in urine. I think I said, "Anybody's we know?" while making a mental note to have him back.

I brought out the next guest, Pete Hamill, whose column ran in The New York Post. Rodale moved "down one" to the couch. As Pete and I began to chat, Mr. Rodale suddenly made a snoring sound. Comics would sometimes do that, which got a laugh while another comic was talking, pretending boredom. His head tilted to the side as Pete, in close-up as it happened, whispered audibly, "This looks bad."

The audience laughed at that. I didn't, because I knew Rodale was dead.
I've never met Dick Cavett but if I did, I'd lay the following addendum on him because he might find it amusing. On the chance that he may Google himself some day and come to this site, here it is…

That episode, for obvious reasons, never aired. A rerun was hastily selected and it happened to be a rerun where the featured guest was Jack Benny, who was then still very much among the living.

So that day in '71, I'm watching the afternoon movie on Channel 7, the ABC outlet in Los Angeles. One of those little teasers comes up during a commercial break and a local newsguy comes on and says, "Famous guest dies during taping of Dick Cavett Show. Details on the news at five."

Don't you just love when they do things like that? Give you a little bit of important information but not enough to let you know what's really going on? Anyway, this is followed by another commercial for something, and then there's an ABC network promo. You see a slide with a logo for The Dick Cavett Show as an announcer says, "Join Dick Cavett and his special guest Jack Benny, tonight."

Immediate assumption: Jack Benny is the famous guest who died during the taping of the show.

It takes me a few seconds to realize it probably isn't so. If it had been Jack Benny, that would have been the headline; that Jack Benny was dead, not that some unidentified guest died while chatting with Mr. Cavett. But it takes a moment before that occurs to me and of course, I have to wonder if others are leaping to the same immediate and erroneous deduction.

Sure enough, a minute later, the local newsman is back on ABC, interrupting the movie to say, "Uh, just to clarify…the guest who died at the Dick Cavett Show taping today was not Jack Benny. So you can stop calling the station…"

Speaking of Hanna-Barbera shows: A lot of you have seen this but I'll bet some of you haven't. It's the opening to Ruff & Reddy, the first cartoon show produced by that studio. It ran on NBC on Saturday mornings beginning in December of 1957, a few months before I turned six. Still, I remember getting up to watch it every week.

The show had a host named Jimmy Blaine who'd run a couple of episodes of Ruff & Reddy and then, in between them, he'd offer up an old Columbia theatrical cartoon, often one featuring The Fox and the Crow. Between the animated features, Mr. Blaine interacted with a couple of bird puppets — Rhubarb the Parrot and Jose the Toucan. They were operated by puppeteer Rufus Rose, who was the main puppeter on Howdy Doody, which was also a part of NBC's programming for kids. After a few years, the show with Mr. Blaine went off but Ruff & Reddy came back later in another series, this time hosted by Captain Bob Cottle.

I never cared much for either Blaine or Cap'n Bob but I liked Ruff & Reddy…though I liked Hanna-Barbera's next few shows a lot more. It's a shame we aren't likely to see their first series out on DVD for a long time. There were 156 of the four minute Ruff & Reddy cartoons and they'd fit nicely on two DVD sets. In fact, they'd probably fare better there than they have anywhere else.

These were serialized stories and those don't work so well on a cable channel like Boomerang or Cartoon Network, especially the way those channels have usually run them on the rare occasions when they've run them. They were used as fillers. I don't think kids today ("those kids today") will really spark to the notion of following a serialized storyline. That's why no one makes serialized cartoons and why the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, as wonderful as we all know them to be, don't do well on TV. But you really can't build an audience for a serialized cartoon show that doesn't air in a regularly scheduled time slot. A serial might, however, work just fine on a DVD. It's a pity that Warner Home Video will probably have to be right down to the bottom of its barrel before we get The Complete Ruff & Reddy. So for now, just enjoy the opening titles…

This is the third of an as-yet-undetermined number of parts. I'm serializing the tale of how Scrappy Doo became a part of the Scooby Doo cartoon show and I'm owning up as to what I had to do with that. If you haven't read Part One or Part Two you might want to do so before venturing into what follows, which is our third chapter…

Everyone in sync? Good. So I'd just written the script which convinced ABC to pick Scooby Doo up for its ninety-eighth (or whatever number it was) season. I was asked to story-edit the show but I'd accepted a job to serve as head writer for a couple of variety specials for Sid and Marty Krofft and had to pass. I still, however, had to do another rewrite on my Scooby script to address a few comments that folks at Hanna-Barbera and ABC had before it could be produced…and you'd think that would be simple. I mean, they all loved the script and it had gotten the show renewed for another year. So how many problems could it have?

As it turned out, plenty. Ordinarily, when you wrote a script for H-B, you got "notes" from one person at the network and maybe (and maybe not) someone at Hanna-Barbera. But this was a pilot, even if they'd denied as much when negotiating my fee. A pilot pays more because more people have input and they're always more concerned about teensy details. So I got notes. Boy, did I get notes. Johannes Brahms once wrote a piece called Ein Deutsches Requiem that runs seventy minutes in performance. It had fewer notes than I got.

Joe Barbera read the script, told me it was wonderful but he gave me notes in such volume that I found myself wondering how many I'd get if he hadn't liked it. The person who ran the studio's day to day operations gave me a set of notes that topped Barbera's in breadth and volume. The head of the story department gave me a pile of comments…and then there was a set from the fellow who was line-producing the Scooby Doo show and yet another from the team of writers who'd signed on to story-edit the series after I passed. That's five sets of comments and we hadn't even gotten to the network where the real power was wielded.

I got three sets from ABC — from different programming execs there — and another from the Standards and Practices Lady. I ignored the S&P Lady because…well, I always ignored her notes. But even then, I had eight sets and they could not be humanly reconciled. One set said, "Let's lose the joke at the top of page 19." Another said, "Love the joke at the top of page 19." Yet another said, "Hey, could we make that joke on the top of page 19 a running gag and do it a few more times?" Being a mystery, the story involved three suspects and one set of notes suggested switching whodunnit from Suspect A to Suspect B, while another set of notes thought all clues pointed to C. It went that way all through all the notes. I suspected the eight of them had gotten together and divided up my script in a devious plot to drive me insane. ("Okay, you'll hate the scene in the cave and I'll love it and Joe will tell him to change it to a Chinese restaurant…")

For maybe a week, I struggled with rounding off this odd trapezium my script had become. Finally, I went to the person I just mentioned who ran operations, laid eight sets of notes on this person's desk and said, "Pick any two." I was immediately told, "Throw out everyone's comments except Mr. B's" — "B" for Barbera — "and Squire's." Squire Rushnell was the Vice-President of Children's Programming at ABC, the guy who everyone said loved it when the new characters were inspired by Warner Brothers cartoons and voiced by Mel Blanc.

I went home, did a rewrite to please Joe and Squire, and the next day the script was marked "final."

A week or so later, I was in the Hanna-Barbera Xerox Room and I happened to see my script being mass-copied for distribution. I peeked to see if any rewrites had been done since it had left me and there didn't seem to be any. In fact, the script hadn't even been retyped. They were copying the printout I'd handed in, the one from my word processor.

But someone had typed a new title page and instead of saying, "Written by Mark Evanier," it now had my name plus that of another writer in the studio. In fact, the other writer was the son of an executive at the Hanna-Barbera studio.

Three minutes later, title page in hand, I barged into the office of that executive and you can pretty much imagine what I said. He explained that his son had been among the many writers who'd worked on Scrappy Doo before I'd been hired. He felt his son deserved some credit for all the hours he'd put in on the project. I said, "He may have put in many hours but he didn't put them in on this script. I wrote this script and you put his name on my work." The exec apologized and ordered the title pages reprinted…and I had yet another example to cite of how writers get abused when they work on projects not covered by the Writers Guild of America. That kind of thing would never have happened on a WGA show…or if it had, the Guild would have handled it in a jif.

Okay, so we had a script. Now, Scrappy needed a voice. In our next installment, whenever it appears, I'll tell you about the actor they selected as being the perfect voice of Scrappy Doo. And then I'll tell you about the actor they replaced him with. And the actor they replaced the second guy with. And the one who replaced the third guy. And the fourth guy and the fifth guy and so on. Scrappy's still quite some distance from being born.

If anyone ever asks you to explain what "timing" means in comedy, don't waste your time with words. Just show them this clip of Jack Benny and Mel Blanc. The other day, I sat for a video interview that will appear on the fifth DVD volume of The Golden Age of Looney Tunes and I made the point that Mel wasn't just a guy with a lot of voices. He was a very gifted, skilled comic actor. You had to be to play opposite Benny, Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope and all the other people he worked with on radio.

Even the bit in which he played the little Mexican guy opposite Benny, of which this is an abridged version, demonstrates superior acting. He doesn't have a wide variety of dialogue but what makes the bit work is not just Benny's expressions but Blanc's lack of any. He is perfectly deadpan throughout, making his character (the pun is unavoidable) an absolute blank and directing all attention to Mr. Benny. The routine wouldn't have been funny if you saw the slightest smirk or sign of life on Mel's part. As you'll see, Blanc knew how to do that. He didn't know how to play the bass but he knew how to get a laugh…