Monthly Archives: June 2007

Author-historian Michael Barrier recently published — that is to say, his publisher recently published — an exhaustive biography of Walt Disney entitled The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. I have a copy but haven't yet had the time to do more than flip through it, just as I've only had time to read a few sections of Neal Gabler's recently-issued Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. So that's the answer to those of you who've written me to ask which of the two you should buy and/or believe. You'll have to wait 'til I find time to thoroughly digest them both…which at my current rate should be about the time they unfreeze Walt. And no, neither book is foolish enough to believe the old myth about Walt being frozen. If I had to pick one based on authors' rep and the seriousness with which they approached their investigations, I'd go with Barrier.

Obviously, the books cover the factual recital of Disney's life pretty much the same way but differ in a number of accounts. One intriguing one is the story of Walt receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson on September 14, 1964, back when the Presidential Medal of Freedom meant something — i.e., back before Bush gave one to George Tenet. The story as told by Gabler, Richard Schickel (in his seriously flawed but interesting book, The Disney Version) and others is that Disney insisted on wearing a Goldwater button on his lapel to tweak or otherwise rattle L.B.J. As he's explaining partway down his weblog page at the moment, Barrier doesn't think it happened.

I don't, either. I mean, it's possible…but I've heard so many spurious Tales of Walt that it's generally necessary to ratchet up my already-formidable skepticism whenever he's involved. Even knowing that Disney was a staunch Republican and that he presumably voted for Goldwater, this one sure sounds bogus. First off, there's a long history of people — including many less gracious than Walt is said to have been — swallowing their personal dislike of a president and accepting such awards without insulting the bestower. One also does not want to despoil a moment meant to honor one, if you can follow that sentence.

It not only would have been rude, it would have been foolish…and few ever applied either of those descriptions to Walt Disney. At the time the ceremony took place, Johnson had a solid double-digit lead on Goldwater and newspapers were wondering if the latter would even carry his home state. Disney, who had business interests all across the nation and abroad, knew then and there it would be four more years of L.B.J. in the White House. Why antagonize someone that powerful for a private insult? Doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?

Which of course doesn't mean it didn't happen. I'd just like to see a photo that shows this alleged Goldwater button before I believe it. Even then, I'd tend to think it had to be a clumsy joke on Walt's part…and a dangerous one. Throughout the Vietnam War, Johnson refused to mine Haiphong Harbor. A button like that might have caused him to float bombs in the waters of Jungleland.

Back in this item, I linked you to a great 1964 Coca-Cola commercial with a musical performance by one of my favorite groups of that era, the Limeliters. A lot of you liked that commercial, too…so here's another one, probably from the following year. This doesn't have as much of the Limeliters as the other one. In fact, I'm not 100% certain this isn't some other group imitating the Limeliters. But even if it is, it's a good little spot…

Floyd Norman remembers a fine cartoonist-writer named Fred Lucky. Fred was one of the good guys. So is Floyd.

The fine cartoonist Stan Sakai offers us what we've all wanted for some time now: A photo of Sergio Aragonés on a Segway.

Also on his weblog — here, in fact — Stan complains rightly about something that more and more artists are rightly complaining about. They do a free autograph drawing for an alleged fan at a convention…and it's for sale on eBay before the week is out. In this case, Stan did a lovely sketch for someone who, I suppose, swore it would be a treasured keepsake…and Stan personalized it to the guy, which you'd think would make it easier to keep, harder to sell. What the guy did was to add some clumsy lines to the art, in effect changing the drawing, in order to cover over the personalization so he could sell it. See that black scribble above Stan's name in the drawing? I guess it's supposed to simulate grass…but Stan didn't put it there. Someone else did to cover over the personalization.

Above is a sketch that Sergio did at the same convention. It was offered on eBay by the same seller. What he did in this case was to crop the top of the drawing. Sergio put in a thought balloon with the name of the person who requested the piece and the seller cut it off.

This is crummy. Sergio, Stan and other professionals do not go to conventions to give people things they can turn around and sell. Another artist in a similar situation wrote me the following in a recent e-mail…

I don't know what to do about this. I like doing little sketches for my fans. The guys selling the sketches on eBay are not fans, or at least not the kind of fans I want to do sketches for. I can only do a limited number at a convention and when I'm doing a drawing for the eBay whore, I'm not doing one for someone who will treasure it and frame it and appreciate it.

I think people also don't realize that I draw for a living and that I often pay my own way to a convention. I don't always expect to make a lot of money selling sketches and art at a con but I'd like to make back what it cost me to get there. I lost money going to the last few cons and some of that was because of my generosity and doing free sketches. Even if I make money, I'd like it to go to something like The Hero Initiative or the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund instead of some eBay seller who fibbed to me to get me to do him a freebee. My wife would like the money to go to paying down our Visa bill.

So I don't know what to do. I'm torn between wanting to be nice to my fans and feeling used by the eBay whores. It's not a good feeling.

No, I'll bet it isn't…and I don't have a real answer to it except to charge everyone at least a few bucks for sketches…and if you feel mercenary about pocketing the cash, give it to The Hero Initiative or the C.B.L.D.F. or some other worthy cause. Even that only goes so far and some artists who've tried it have decided that still doesn't filter out the undeserving. Sergio and Stan are among the many who are opting to simply not do free sketches any longer…or at least to do them more sparingly. It's still kind of a lose/lose situation, especially for the fans who, but for the pirates, would go home with a lovely momento of the convention and a little piece of a favorite cartoonist.

Ken Levine, who knows his stuff, blogs about how the finale of The Sopranos might have gone if it had been on one of the major networks. He left out that they would have tried to get everyone who was ever a regular on the show to make at least a surprise cameo appearance in the last episode…and they would have shown them making those surprise cameos in all the promos.

The above photo is a frame from a Betty Boop cartoon and I'm using it as an attention-getting device for this item: Animation scholar and all-around fun guy Jerry Beck will be the guest later today on Stu's Show, which is heard on Shokus Internet Radio from 4 PM to 6 PM on the West Coast…and therefore from 7 PM to 9 PM on the East Coast. Jerry will be chatting live with your affable host, Stuart Shostak, about cartoon history and about upcoming DVDs. A lot of people write to ask me when so-and-so is coming out on home video. If you have one of these questions about anything animated, call in and ask Jerry. He'll probably know and he may even be the guy who's hammering the DVD company to do a quality job on it.

You can listen to this show or to anything on Shokus Internet Radio by going to this link and clicking on an audio browser. If you haven't sampled radio-on-the-web yet, you're missing out on something wonderful and free. As you work on your computer, writing or playing games or surfing for porn — whatever you do — you can also be listening to a station like Shokus and having a very good time.

So listen in. Call in. I'll be doing both later today.

I never saw The Wedding Singer. Never saw the Adam Sandler movie. Never saw the Broadway show based on it. But I did see this number from the latter on the 2006 Tony Awards and when I did, I thought, "Boy, that's going to sell a lot of tickets." Apparently, it did. The show opened on April 27, 2006 to not-wonderful reviews and probably would have closed rather swiftly…but it got a big boost from the Tonys, which were on June 11. It didn't win any awards that night, even though it was nominated for thirteen, including Best Musical. But this one number was so powerful that it caused a surge in ticket-buying and the show was able to last out the year. It closed on December 31 after 285 performances and I don't think it's had many (if any) productions since then.

There's no real point here other than that I think this is a great number. If the whole show had been this good, it would probably still be running.

Several of you have written me to suggest that maybe the review of Al Gore's book was written from an early, uncorrected proof that didn't include the endnotes. That's possible, though if that were the case and I were the Washington Post, I think my correction would have noted that. It's a more reasonable — though not wholly forgiveable — explanation of why the reviewer got things so wrong. There's a big difference between the reviewer's assertion as to why there were no footnotes (because Gore couldn't back up his claimed facts with sourcing) and there being no footnotes because the publisher left them out of a review copy. If indeed, that's what happened.

In fairness to the reviewer, there are many Lincoln scholars who believe that the purported Lincoln quote that Gore cited is spurious, and it may well be. I guess my real problem here is something that I think I've alluded to in the past. It's the old "gotcha" game where we don't like what someone is saying so we seize upon one factual error and do the old "Well, if we can't believe him about this…" routine to try and invalidate all the other things he says.

It's a favored trick of crooked lawyers when they know a witness is burying their client. During his Watergate testimony, John W. Dean got hundreds of dates, names, places, etc. so provably correct that the Republicans on the committee were frantic to find some way to impeach his testimony. Then he confused the name of one Washington hotel where he'd had a breakfast meeting with another Washington hotel…and it was suddenly proof (to his detractors, at least) that his word could not be trusted on anything. In that case, it didn't work. Dean even had a logical explanation for why he'd confused the names. But they sure tried.

Everyone gets the occasional fact wrong. There are some folks and publications who get them wrong so often — or so inexplicably — that it's right and proper to write them off as generally unreliable. But it's dishonest to use one or two errors to impugn someone that way, especially when you're making your own mistakes.

Last Sunday, the Washington Post ran a scathing review of Al Gore's new book. The review was written by Andrew Ferguson. Here's a link to the whole review and here's the first paragraph of it…

You can't really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, "The Assault on Reason." It's a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I'd love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.

The Post has now added a "slight" correction to the online version of the review. And I'll put it in smaller type because they did…

Andrew Ferguson's June 10 Outlook article, "What Al Wishes Abe Said," said that former vice president Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" does not contain footnotes. The book contains 20 pages of endnotes.

The correction is not only insufficient because it's in a smaller font but also because it didn't mention that those endnotes include the source of the Lincoln quote.

In other words: The reviewer started right off by attacking Gore's book for not including footnotes that told us things like where he got a certain quote from Abraham Lincoln…but the book does include twenty pages of endnotes that tell us things like where he got that certain quote from Abraham Lincoln.

This kind of thing really baffles me, and I don't mean this as any kind of defense of Gore's book, which I have not read. I just don't get how an allegedly real newspaper like The Washington Post continues to print things that would have gotten me flunked in my high school Journalism class.

Did the reviewer just plain not read Gore's book thoroughly enough to notice those twenty pages of endnotes? That would call his powers of perception into a wee bit of question. Or maybe he noticed them and thought to himself, "Hmm…too bad he included those endnotes because now I can't attack him for not backing up his arguments with facts. Oh, wait! I know! I'll ignore the twenty pages of endnotes and attack him for not including footnotes!"

And remember, this is a review lambasting Al Gore for making silly, illogical arguments.

A little while ago, I posted a link to a video of Ray Stevens, a performer I'd always kinda liked. As I mentioned, his most recent record was a thing called "The New Battle of New Orleans," which I haven't heard.

A couple of folks have written me in the last hour to say that they have, and that it's wingnut claptrap with a racist edge. The lyrics to the song, which are posted over here, sure lead one to that viewpoint. It's amazing that someone could be from that area and write a song about Hurricane Katrina with zero sympathy for the victims.

Very disappointing. Like I said, I'd kinda liked Ray Stevens. I think I like him a little less now.

We promised you more Groo and more Groo is what you're gonna get. The Groo 25th Anniversary Special comes out in August and then the following month, you get the first issue in a new, four-issue mini-series called Groo: Hell on Earth. The drawing above is the cover of the first issue, which goes on sale September 19. Here's what the ad solicitation for this issue says…

Groo is back…and oddly enough, that may not be the biggest disaster looming over the world. It seems to be getting hotter everywhere…that is, in those places where it isn't getting colder than ever before. The usual suspects — Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier — bring you the first chapter of what will eventually be four issues. That is, if the planet in the comic survives that long!

I have nothing to add to that except to say that it feels good to be Grooing again. There will be a special Groo Panel this year at the Comic-Con International in San Diego…one of (at the moment) fourteen panels I'm doing there. Details will be along soon.

Hey, you remember Ray Stevens? That's right: The guy who recorded all those weird, semi-country songs and a couple of more mainstream ones. Ray seems to be pretty much retired now, having spent the last decade or two doing shows in and around Branson, but he sold an amazing number of records in his lifetime. And CDs. And music video tapes. When people talk of the most successful musical performers of the last twenty or thirty years, he seems to be unjustly off the radar. If someone did the math though, they'd probably find him in the Top Fifty, maybe the Top Twenty of the best-selling recording artists. (Not long ago, a reporter called to ask me what the best-selling comedy record of all time was. I wasn't certain but I told him that if one counted Mr. Stevens' tune, "The Streak," as a comedy record, that might well be it.)

If you doubt what I'm telling you, take a look at this discography and see how many records and CDs and tapes this man has had. You don't have a list like that unless you're selling a helluva lot of product.

Here's Ray in a recent performance — on a benefit to raise cash for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Around the same time, he also recorded a new song about the tragedy called "The New Battle of New Orleans," which I haven't heard. As far as I know, these are the last two things he's done.

We know not how many people tuned in last night to watch The Sopranos have a lovely dinner out…but The 61st Annual Tony Awards telecast did a little better than 200-300 viewers. They had 6.24 million of 'em, down a bit from the previous year's 7.79 million and even a bit below the 2005 show, which was seen by 6.5 million. Given how no particular play or musical this year created much buzz out there, I'm guessing some are surprised/relieved that the totals weren't a lot lower.

It's interesting how the dynamic has changed. Not so long ago, each year's Tonyfest was surrounded by press speculations and rumors that CBS would dump what was then a two-hour annual broadcast. Some even voiced the view that the whole show was so cramped in two hours that it should up and move over to PBS, and there were those compromise years when the first hour of it was on PBS, and then the "real show" was the two hours on CBS. At some point, perhaps because overall network shares had fallen and the Tony numbers didn't seem quite as bad, CBS decided to just take the whole thing at three hours as an open-ended commitment…and since then, there's been no talk of the Tonys being moved to The Weather Channel or anything of the sort. But really, the ratings haven't substantially improved. It's the sets that got smaller.

Once upon a time in comic books, a good-selling comic sold over 200,000 copies. A book I wrote was once considered an embarrassing flop for All Concerned because it came in around 170,000. Then came a day when anything over 100,000 was great…and now, if you can move 20,000 copies of a comic, some publishers turn cartwheels. Same with TV. I did shows that were considered disasters because they were "only" watched by an audience that today would put you near the top of the Top Ten.

Moral of the story? If you have a failure and you can wait long enough, eventually expectations will catch up with you. Or down with you, I suppose.

Actually, the Tony Awards ceremony wasn't quite as unspectacular as I'd expected, though I still can't imagine much of America was interested…and not just because they were wagering on who'd get whacked over on HBO. The opening number was terrific…which, of course, it would be. It was the beginning and end of A Chorus Line. Can't do much better than that.

I find these "hostless" shows a bit impersonal and I'm really losing my patience with "presenter banter," where two people come out and talk about what the award means. There were some nice moments, such as the tribute to John Kander, and a few actual surprises in the awards. If you scan theatrical websites, you'll find every last expert fearlessly forecasting that Raul Esparza would win Best Actor in a Musical for his work in the revival of Company. But it went instead to David Hyde Pierce for Curtains. (Here's a link to nineteen predictors' predictions. Everyone got most of them right but no one got 'em all and no one had Pierce.)

Mostly though, it comes down to the samplings of the current fare on Broadway, and I always find myself wondering, "Does this make me want to see the show?" I don't think any of them did, and the Mary Poppins number — gratuitously fiddling with the songs from the movie and darkening the whole tone — made me want to stay far, far away. I'm curious about Spring Awakening but not because of the number presented on the telecast. I'd also like to see Frost/Nixon because of the subject matter and word of mouth about it. Raul Esparza's performance of "Being Alive" from Company was thrilling, and I'll probably go if that show's still running next time I'm in New York…but Company is a show where I usually enjoy the parts but not the whole.

What else should I mention? The award telecast seemed a little less gay than usual to me. That's neither good nor bad as far as I'm concerned but it might matter to somebody. There were too many thanks to agents and lawyers and I guess I should just get used to that. The show seemed to cry out for a truly funny presenter. Eddie Izzard was pretty good but where was Nathan Lane? Mel Brooks? Eric Idle? And I can't be the only person who noticed that the band played people on and off with dozens of songs from great musicals of the past…but the repertoire of such tunes only seems to include one song from the last thirty or so years — "Always Look on the Bright Side" from Spamalot. (And yes, I know it's really from a movie. I just wonder if anything from the last few decades will ever be regarded as a standard.)

I think that's everything. I'll report on the ratings later today. I'm guessing between two and three hundred viewers…and that's including Canada.

Penn and Teller explain the seven basic moves of Sleight of Hand magic…