Monthly Archives: August 2007

Warren Stubli just sent me a good add-on to my previous message…

Just read your post about draft and why there hasn't been one, yet. Good point and pretty much right except it isn't just the draft in general they are afraid of being known for. In our modern age of equality, a draft today would include both males and females. And there is not one of them in Washington who wants to known for the first draft of some constituent's daughter.

Yeah…and another thing is that any new system of conscription would include some sort of rules as to who didn't have to serve…for health reasons or because of financial hardship or conscientious objector status or other perhaps-valid reasons. And immediately, you'd have the folks who are against reinstating the draft saying that the rules had been slanted to exempt wealthy white guys or the kids of Senators or disciples of some religions and not others. I don't know that it's humanly possible to draw up those rules in a way that will be completely fair.

They certainly weren't fair when I was draft-eligible but there was a momentum then…and frankly, people weren't that sensitive to issues of discrimination. I think it would be much more difficult today to put together those rules and have them accepted. We can't even elect a president without folks charging (with some justification) that the system has been rigged.

Fred Kaplan runs the numbers on whether — or how soon — a military draft might be necessary in this country. My own gut feeling is that regardless of the necessity, and assuming there isn't another 9/11 or larger disaster, there's no elected official alive who wants it said that he's the one who brought back the draft. So until they find a way to reinistate it without anyone taking responsibility for it, it won't happen.

It's amazing how the dynamic has changed on this. I was eminently draftable as I approached an age where I might get shipped off to Vietnam. At the time, there was a very real, very loud sentiment from some members of the right wing of this country that it was my duty as an American, that it builds character, that there was something wrong (cowardly, selfish or gay) with any male who had the slightest reticence about military service. If you were my age, you got that a lot…from, of course, people who were not going to get drafted. One friend of mine called them the "You Should Be Willing To Die For Me" crowd.

One wonders how much of that we'd be hearing today if the Iraq War could be blamed wholly or even primarily on Democrats. We seem to be at around a 68% disapproval of the war in this country. What would it be like if a large percentage of those dying over there were draftees who didn't want to be in the military in the first place? I'm guessing over 80% disapproval and even that may be low.

Floyd Norman — one of the dwindling folks in the animation business who actually worked with Walt — discusses the place of "mavericks" at the Disney Studio. It always amazes me how all big entertainment companies think nothing of throwing away tens of millions of dollars to agents and packagers on aborted projects…but it's a waste of money to let creative people experiment and try to come up with something new.

We mentioned here one week ago that we'd heard that comedian Stanley Myron Handelman had passed away. It's taken until today for anything to show up about it in the press but the L.A. Times has an obituary.

As many of you know, comic strips get smaller and smaller with each passing year. This webpage has a good overview of how the Sunday Funnies have shrunk. And I'm going to quote here from an e-mail I received recently from Russell Myers, who has been drawing the superb comic strip Broom-Hilda since 1970…

In Tulsa in the 1940's and 50's the Sunday comic section was sixteen pages. Each page measured 14.5 inches by 21.5, or 311.75 square inches. Prince Valiant was a full page, Tracy, Annie, Blondie, and others were a half page. The smallest were one third page.

Today's Tulsa Sunday section is four pages. Each page measures 12 by 21, 252 square inches.

In those old sections a half page comic was approximately 13 by 10, 130 square inches. Today in the Tulsa paper, Broom-Hilda is 5.5 x 5.5. That's 30.25 square inches, less that one fourth the size of, say, Blondie of a half century ago. If you try to draw anything much more complicated than talking heads and torsos you can barely see it.

Not everything changes for the better, huh?

No, some things sure don't. And I won't waste anyone's time by trying to pretend that a campaign of any sort would reverse this trend. Strips are just going to get smaller and smaller and there doesn't seem to be anything that anyone can do about it.

Four baby pandas have been born in China. Let's go to the videotape. (You may have to watch a brief commercial first before you can view the clip.)

See that duck? That's Webster Webfoot, who was a star of local kids' TV in Los Angeles during the sixties. He was usually seen in the company of the man in the photo, "Uncle" Jimmy Weldon. I remember watching Tex Avery cartoons and Felix the Cat adventures on Channel 13 when I was a mere lad. As I later found out, Uncle Jimmy was one of the true pioneers of hosting shows for younger audiences.

I won't attempt to go through his history here. Why? Because he can tell the story much better than I can…and he'll be telling it later today on Stu's Show, hosted by the Johnny Carson of Internet Radio, Stuart Shostak. Each week, Stu welcomes someone important from the world of television onto his program for interviewing purposes. That is, if he can find someone important. When he can't, he has me on. But he finds great guests often enough that you're probably sick of seeing me tell you to tune in.

I'll be listening today from 4 PM to 6 PM Pacific Time on Shokus Internet Radio. The show is live so if you live on the East Coast, for instance, you need to tune in at 7 PM your time. Also please understand that this is not a podcast. You can't download this show and listen to it at your leisure. It's Internet Radio, which means it's like a radio station…you listen when it's on. If you can't be at your computer when it's on, you can catch one of the many reruns during the week but it's more fun if you listen live. (You can even call in and ask Jimmy a question.) The whole broadcast schedule is over on this page. Adjust the little time doo-hickey at the bottom to reflect your time zone.

Stu and Uncle Jimmy will be joined in the plush Shokus Internet Radio studio by my colleague, animation writer-historian Earl Kress. Earl will mostly be quizzing Weldon on his days voicing the cute duck, Yakky Doodle, on the Yogi Bear show, and on Jimmy's other work as an animation voice actor. And maybe they'll even chat about Jimmy's other career, which is as a motivational speaker. You can find out a lot about Uncle Jimmy over at his website.

Anyway, tune in. Call in. If you grew up in Los Angeles or one of the other cities where Uncle Jimmy and Webster did shows, you'll have the special thrill of hearing a fixture of local teevee. If you aren't familiar with Webster Webfoot…well, how often do you get to hear a man who talks like a duck? I mean, besides when you watch almost anyone on C-Span.

To access Shokus Internet Radio, go to this page and select an audio browser. And you don't have to wait 'til Stu's Show is on. If you go there right now, you may hear something else you'll like.

Today, we have the opening to the 1962 "Supermarionation" TV series, Fireball XL5. Even better, we have the closing credits with the show's super-cool theme song. I really liked this show at the time, and also Supercar, which came from the same producers, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Later, their shows got more sophisticated and turned more towards human action. I'm not sure if it was that or my age but I lost interest in them. I enjoyed watching this little clip though, and I thought some of you might, also.

Over on his website, Mike Barrier has posted brief but informative interviews with three men who supplied voices for Disney cartoons — Clarence Nash, Billy Bletcher and Jimmy MacDonald. When I get a chance here, I'm going to post stories about (a) a show I went to when I was nine at which Mr. Nash performed and (b) the sad story of how I tried to hire Billy Bletcher for a cartoon voice job but he died before we could record him. But never mind that now. Go read the interviews with those gentlemen.

I don't like being solicited. If you come to my door unasked or call my phone without an invite, I don't care what you're hawking. No sale. Even if it's something I need at a price I can't get anywhere else.

I especially don't like being solicited to subscribe to theatrical seasons. I go to a lot of plays but I've given up subscribing to the whole season of any company. It always comes down to me having tickets for some night I can't go and/or a play that I've paid for but really don't want to attend. It's like the Kellogg's Variety Pak. I bought the thing for the little boxes of Frosted Flakes and Sugar Smacks but I got stuck with the little box of Shredded Wheat which I couldn't stand.

And I really, really don't like being solicited to subscribe to the theatrical season of a theater company that I couldn't attend if I wanted to. This afternoon, I got a phone call asking me to sign up for the coming season of the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera Company. This is because when I was in Pittsburgh last month for the first time in my life, I bought tickets to one play.

I live in Los Angeles and have no plans to go back to Pittsburgh at all, let alone four times in the next year. I'm sure the Pittsburgh CLO will have a fine season but I will be, if Mapquest is accurate, 2441.05 miles from the theater.

Come on, people. Look at the area code before you dial it. You're wasting your time and worse, you're wasting mine.

Boy, are some of you going to love this. Alan Light was the founder of what is now the Comics Buyer's Guide and he used to be all over every comic book convention with his camera. He recently came across a huge stash of photos that he took at the 1982 San Diego Comic Con, back in the days before it was called the Comic-Con International.

The picture above is of the great writer-artist of Disney ducks, Carl Barks, posing with Burne Hogarth, who was probably best known for drawing the Tarzan newspaper strip. But that's just a sample. Alan has posted a ton of these great photos…even a few with me in them. I think I'm about eleven in those shots which is odd because I was thirty years old in 1982. But don't let that concern you. Go take a look.

People on both Liberal and Conservative websites seem to be discussing this piece by David Frum on what Karl Rove meant to the Bush administration and our nation. I have to wonder if people don't give Rove too much credit for devious planning. It may be that he was as brilliant and ruthless as some pundits make him out to be. It could also be that a lot of things have happened in our world lately that no one could have predicted or can explain…but since they worked out for George W. Bush, and no political analyst ever wants to say "I can't explain this," it's easier to attribute them to clever Rovian strategy.

You might want to bookmark this link. It's Comedy Central's page for their Indecision 2008 and it's full of stuff from the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert shows, including the latest video clips.

Okay, here's my Buffalo Bob Smith story. It took place at the Licensing Show in New York in the early nineties, and I guess it helps make the point if I explain what happens at those events. The Licensing Show is a place where companies exhibit, either because they own great properties (famous characters, copyrighted designs, etc.) that someone might want to put on a t-shirt or lunch box, or because they license the rights to put great properties on those t-shirts or lunch boxes, or because they broker deals to make that happen…

Well, anyway, just understand that this is a convention about the marketing and licensing of identifiable properties and that most of those present are involved in some way with licensing. There are exhibits all over and many of the booths are filled with celebrities and freebees, the better to attract wanderers to the displays.

This particular year, Buffalo Bob Smith — star of the legendary Howdy Doody kids' show — was there to promote a new wave of Howdy Doody licensing from King Features Syndicate. He was appearing in the King Features booth and when I heard this, I decided to amble over and see if I could meet him. That was until I saw the line. It looked like about a three hour wait to meet Buffalo Bob, get one of the autographed photos he was signing and shake his hand. The line, filled wholly with folks in the proper age bracket to have watched Howdy Doody when they were eight, snaked through the entire hall, down past booths where you could get your photo with W.W.F. wrestlers or Playboy models or some suffocating person in a giant Snoopy costume.

The length of the queue caused me to pass. I mean, with a line like that, how much time could you possibly get to talk to the guy? Twenty seconds? So I took a look at him — older but still handsome in his Buffalo Bob jacket with the leather fringe — and I continued walking.

Later on as I walked past, the line was still just as long, if not longer, but I heard someone call my name. It was a friend who worked for King Features. She welcomed me into their exhibit space and we chatted for a while. Then she said, "Would you like to meet Buffalo Bob?" I said sure but there was that long line…

"You don't need to stand in line," she said and she led me over to Buffalo Bob. We came up behind him and she interrupted his signing to do introductions. He threw down his pen, turned around and got up to shake my hand, then we talked for two minutes or maybe three, I, of course, said all the geeky stuff everyone said to him about watching him when I was a kid and being happy to see him mobbed by fans, etc. And all the time I was saying such things, I was eyeing the line of people who'd been waiting half the afternoon for thirty seconds with him. Eyes were glaring at me with raw hatred and I could hear them all thinking, "Who's this rude clown who thinks he's so much better than us that he doesn't have to wait in line?" Well, of course. If I'd been there for 3+ hours, I'd sure have resented the hell out of me.

It made me nervous so I said to Mr. Smith, "Listen, I'd love to talk to you longer but you have all these people here waiting to meet you…"

He ignored that and went on talking to me about whatever we'd been discussing. The lady who introduced us had told him I did the Garfield cartoon show, and he was telling me how much Garfield merchandise he was seeing everywhere. Again, I said, "I shouldn't monopolize you like this. These people have been waiting all afternoon for your autograph…"

And I will never forget this — and so help, me this is verbatim: Buffalo Bob Smith, the King of Doodyville himself, pulled me to one side and he whispered to me, "You don't understand…my job is to keep the line as long as possible."

Each year at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, I get to preside over a game that people love. It's called Quick Draw!, and no matter how big a room they give us, we always seem to fill it.

Up front each year are three cartoonists seated at projectors that enable everyone in the house to see whatever they draw. One cartoonist is always Sergio Aragonés, my long-time collaborator and the man some call the Fastest Cartoonist on the planet. Another is always Scott Shaw!, my long-time friend and occasional collaborator and a man who does the impossible by keeping up with Sergio. The third slot rotates from year to year. At the most recent con, it was filled — and filled well — by Mike Kazaleh, an animator and comic book artist who proved he was good enough to play alongside Sergio and Scott.

I am out in the audience with a cordless microphone, getting suggestions and running little games that challenge the cartoonists to think on their feet, only with a pen. It's been described as Whose Line Is It Anyway? but with cartoonists. If you've seen it, you know how funny and amazing it all can be. If you haven't seen it…well, we have a little sampler here for you. Someone, quite without my permission, put two video clips up on YouTube of the one a few weeks ago. The video is shaky and the audio isn't grand — you'll hear people seated near the camera better than you hear me running the proceedings — but it may give you a bit of an idea of how it all works.

In the first clip, we're playing Secret Words, which is one of the improv-cartooning games I invented. I select someone out of the audience. In this case, it's the noted author Len Wein, who was there because I asked him to be. We show three words to the cartoonists and to the audience. Everyone in the place knows the three words but Len. The cartoonists then have to do drawings that will cause Len to guess what the words are, one at a time.

Here's the clip, which runs a bit over five minutes. I'm the one playing Game Show Host. Sergio is drawing on the large screen at left. Scott is drawing on the middle screen. Mike is on the screen at far right. Len is the guy guessing. Let's all click and watch…

…and that's how you play Secret Words. Now, this next game runs a lot longer. It's called Sergio Scenario and in it, I keep throwing ideas at Sergio and he must add each one to a drawing. The idea is to try and stump him…which I've yet to accomplish in more than a dozen attempts. The scene keeps getting more and more complicated and he somehow finds a way to include each new element, no matter how outrageous. This clip runs a little over thirteen minutes and it starts after we'd already done about five minutes. It started with me asking Sergio to draw our character, Groo the Wanderer, attacking someone…and then I had him add some bank robbers…and then I said to make it a blood bank, so he drew Dracula into the tableau…and you'll see how it grew from there. If you ever get to a convention where we're doing this, come see it in person because it's even more amazing than this clip would have you believe.