Monthly Archives: June 2007

This is another segment from the local (Los Angeles) TV show, Two on the Town, with a profile of some then-popular voiceover announcers. Included are Danny Dark, who cartoon buffs will recognize as the voice of Superman on the Super Friends series. That was the least of his many credits. Also, you'll meet Bill Whitman and Ernie Anderson. In fact, you'll see a good example of how famously cranky Ernie could be. The guy had a great voice but a pretty bad attitude, and to hire him was to put up with that. (I did once…and only once.)

Near the end, you'll see Gene Moss, who had a pretty nice career in voiceover but who will always be remembered, by those of us who were around when you could see him do it, for hosting Shrimpenstein on Channel 9 here in the sixties. We wrote about him and that show back here and that old post still brings the occasional e-mail from folks who were prowling the Internet, searching for info on a favorite program of their childhoods.

The L.A. Times has a nice obit up for Roger Armstrong.

A little over a year ago in this post, we pointed you (with great skepticism) to a press release for a forthcoming musical based on the Jerry Lewis movie, The Nutty Professor. Mr. Lewis was to direct said musical and Jerry, the article said, wanted to have a tryout run of it at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego this month, meaning June of '07.

It's not playing there now, nor is it scheduled in the next year. In fact, even with all the theater and show biz news I read, I haven't seen one word about any Nutty Professor musical since the initial announcement. And I have a hunch nobody else has, either…

Two on the Town was a local TV show in the eighties hosted by Steve Edwards — who's still a fixture of Los Angeles television — and Melody Rogers. Here's a spot from 1982 on Rocky and Bullwinkle, complete with nice voice demos by Bill Scott, June Foray and William Conrad. I think this may be the only time I've ever seen footage of Mr. Conrad reading copy in character as the narrator of the Rocky cartoons.

Contrary to the impression conveyed in this segment, the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons had been out of production for some time by '82. What was more relevant was that Jay Ward had scaled back the size and ambition of his studio, partly due to network disinterest but partly due to his own desire not to work as hard. Bill Scott wanted to do more and did a lot of interviews that he thought might generate enthusiasm out there to do more with the characters, and it wouldn't surprise me if this piece came about because Bill called up Two on the Town and suggested it. Alas, the moose and squirrel never made much of a comeback, at least while Bill was still with us.

Thanks to Shane Shellenbarger for letting me know about this.

The debates this year have had a lot of "raise your hand" questions — like "Raise your hand if you believe in evolution" or "Raise your hand if you agree that the U.S. should use military force to stop genocide in Darfur." Here's the "raise your hand" question I'd like to see asked of both the Democratic and Republican candidates…

Raise your hand if there's a candidate on this stage who you would not enthusiastically endorse and support if they won the nomination of your party.

No, I don't think it would be fair, either. But it sure might make things interesting.

Part of me would like to see the Democratic presidential nomination go to Hillary Clinton and the Republican nomination to Rudy Giuliani.

I don't really want either of them to win. I'm not even of the mind that either would make a good president. I just think it would be great to have a debate where she was wearing one of her pants suits and he was wearing one of his dresses.

Glenn Greenwald on how George W. Bush believes he is immersed in a war of Good versus Evil, and since he represents the Good, any damn thing he thinks he should do is therefore presumed to be Good.

One of the superstars of Los Angeles radio and TV in the fifties was a very funny, witty man named Jim Hawthorne, who hosted a wide array of programs in both venues. His work is treasured today by many who followed him back then, back when he was often mentioned in sentences that included the names of Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen. Mr. Allen was a special fan of Hawthorne's work and sometimes credited him for inspiring certain bits that turned up on The Tonight Show during its Allen years.

Hawthorne's radio style, which you'll see him employing to less advantage on TV in today's presentation, involved a steady stream of odd audio clips interrupting him or sometimes acting as punctuation marks to his monologues. I don't think he invented this but an awful lot of radio personalities picked it up from him and used the idea on their shows. They also used a lot of his comedy material. He was like Bob and Ray on the East Coast, doing great comedy for a local audience…so radio guys in other cities felt it was relatively safe to pilfer his routines and jokes.

Hawthorne had various TV shows, including one where he just gave the weather report. He also had a brief film career, mostly in the form of an early and unsuccessful attempt to make a new star comedy team out of him and Joe Besser. But mostly, he did radio and he did it very well…or so I remember. Vaguely. I'm just barely old enough to have experienced his later work.

Our clip today is not him at his best. It's a piece of a TV pilot he did in the early seventies, for some reason foregoing most of the visual humor of his earlier TV shows to do what is basically a televised version of his radio format. Still, it may be the only Hawthorne clip you'll ever see since, as he laments on his website (yes, he's still around), almost none of his radio or TV work still exists today…which may be the reason more people haven't heard of him. Here's Hawthorne…

Today's Bitch 'n' Moan™ is software you need that — automatically and without so much as an "If you don't mind…" — installs software you don't want. We all need Adobe Reader on our little computers to read all those PDF files that people send us or which we encounter on Ye Olde Internet. We want to upgrade to the latest Adobe Reader, which is version 8, because as we all know in this world, if you don't have the current version of something, you might as well be Fred Friggin' Flintstone, using a pointy-billed bird to play your phonograph records.

So we need Adobe Reader 8. What we don't need — or at least what I don't need — is something called Adobe Photoshop Album, which is now the eighty-third piece of software this year that has forced its way onto my harddisk and demanded that I let it index all the photos on my computer and build me a library. Everyone wants to build me a library. I'm not sure anyone will ever build George W. Bush a library. That would be contingent on the guy ever reading a book. But half the software made on this planet wants to build me a library.

Thank you, Adobe Photoshop Album, but I don't need you to build me a library of my photos. I have a library of my photos. I didn't install you on my computer, either. You came magically when I upgraded to Adobe Reader 8 and then you were rude enough to install a couple of entries in my start-up group so that whenever I turn on my computer, you're loaded and there in my tray where I don't want you. This is all awfully presumptious of you, which is why I just took you out and uninstalled you and next time, maybe you'll wait for a damn invitation before you move in and set yourself up on my Seagate.

This concludes today's edition of Bitch 'n' Moan™. Bitch 'n' Moan™ is brought to you by the makers of Midol for Men — the only medicine that can alleviate cramping, bloating and that general feeling of crabiness that males get when they have their periods.

The great master of sound effects, Ray Erlenborn, has passed away at the age of 92. He was one of those rare individuals that took a craft and made it into an art. You can read all about him in this obit.

I'm sorry to say that I wasn't able to get away last Friday to the memorial service for the great artist/cartoonist, Roger Armstrong. I'm excusing myself by thinking that if Roger had the kind of deadlines I've been juggling, he wouldn't have made it to a memorial service for me…but that's just a rationale to lessen my guilt. I should have been there.

Let me direct you to three online remembrances of this wonderful man. They're from Mike Barrier, Tom Richmond and Charles Filius. And let me direct you to Roger's website where you can see some of his magnificent paintings. He was a great talent and a great guy.

We have a great one for you today, folks…a half hour from a 1963 episode of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. This is the earliest large chunk of the show I've ever seen. It's so old that Henny Youngman is the big guest…and his material is relatively fresh.

Do you have Real Player installed on your computer so you can play Real Player audio files? If not, ignore the rest of this message.

Still with me? Fine. You know what I'd like to hear, people? I'd like to hear a modern barbershop quartet singing the theme song to The Flintstones. But where would I find such a thing?

Ah, maybe here.

The group is called The Rounders. If you'd like to order a CD of their singing that includes this track, you can find it somewhere on this page.

The Pew Research Center does polling on a number of subjects. One is to determine how well-informed people are. Every so often, they send their pollsters forth to administer a simple test of knowledge and report on the results. Their most recent project yielded this sorry testimony to our national knowledge.

Ah, but how would you have done in this survey? That's the real question. Why don't you take the test and find out?

Seymour Hersh interviews Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who believes that senior officers and White House officials ordered the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and have lied in denying this.