Here we have a pleasant little commercial for the Kellogg's cereals, showing us that the characters on their boxes get up every morning and eat the cereals that they appear upon. The legendary Thurl Ravenscroft provides the voice of Tony the Tiger (as always) and that's him doing the voiceover in the middle, presumably as Tony.
Monthly Archives: February 2008
Next Weekend
We're less than a week from Wondercon, an always-fun comic/media convention held annually in San Francisco. I'll be packing an umbrella because it looks like I'll need it but otherwise, a good time should be had by all, especially if they attend any of the panels I'll be hosting. Click here for a full list of them…and you should be able to find the full schedule over at the convention website, along with details on where the con is, how to get yourself in, etc.
Hey, someone reading this can do me a favor. On Sunday afternoon, I'm moderating a panel called The Art of the Cover, which we've done before with different people and which is always interesting. What we do on it is to bring in a number of artists who've created great covers for comic books and then we project some of those covers on a big screen and everyone discusses what's so great about them. The last couple times we've done it, attendees have called it one of the most educational panels they've ever seen for folks who care about drawing and about how comics come to be.
This year, we have Jim Lee, Tim Sale, Darwyn Cooke and Terry Dodson on the dais, and I need to pick out seven great covers by each and find good-sized JPEGs of them. If you are a fan of one of these fine artists, how about sending me a couple? You can just send the issue numbers but if you really want to help, send one or more clear JPEGs (at least 500 pixels high) to this special address: (That's an encoded address. If it doesn't work in your browser, just send to covers "at sign" newsfromme.com.) You'll save me the task of searching and you probably have better taste than I do, anyway.
I'll be around the con all three days, sometimes doing panels, sometimes signing my new book on Jack Kirby in the autograph area or at the booth for a fine retailer, Comic Relief, and I think they have me at the Dark Horse booth for an hour or two at some point. Say hello if you see me. I'm not nearly as busy as I try to pretend I am.
What's Up, Doc?
My pal Anthony Tollin reminds me that today is the 75th "birthday" of Doc Savage, it being that many years since the publication of the character's first issue. It was on February 17, 1933 that the great pulp hero debuted, the creation of writer Lester Dent. Hiding under the pen name of Kenneth Robeson, Dent wrote most of the 181 Doc Savage novels that appeared in the original run.
I recognize the importance of the character in the development of the "super hero" (some call him the first) and I also note that a lot of my friends love to read and re-read Doc Savage novels. That's a nice way of easing into the fact that I somehow never managed to warm to the Good Doctor. I tried…lord, how I tried. I read a Doc Savage novel and didn't like it, and when I told a friend who loved the books, he told me, "You picked the wrong one. That's the one nobody likes" and he recommended another of the books.
I got that one, read it, didn't like it either…and when I told another friend who was a Doc Savage fan, he said, "Oh, I wish you'd asked me. You picked the rotten one." He designated another of the books as the one I should read and…well, I guess you see where this is going. I think I read five or six of the books and each one was the wrong one. (Don't bother writing to tell me which one I should read. It's like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown by now. I have too many non-Doc Savage books that I might like and haven't the time to read.)
All that said, I will recommend Anthony's reprint series of Doc Savage and Shadow pulps. They're handsomely assembled with the perfect art direction and historical material…and so many people love this work, there's a good chance you will, too. Click here for more info.
Wrong Number
This afternoon, I was up at U.C.L.A., giving that speech I told you about. On my way in, I happened to notice a pay phone that was seriously out of order — someone had actually cracked the handset into two pieces — and I snapped a pic with the ol' cameraphone. Somehow, the image amused me.
As I was leaving, I passed the pay phone again and a young lady was standing there, staring at it as if she expected it to soon heal to the point where she could use it to phone her mother or something. I said to her, "This is just a hunch but I don't think it's working."
"I know," she said. "I was just remembering a conversation with my boy friend that felt like that."
WGA Stuff
I received my ballot today to vote on the new Writers Guild contract. Members had the opportunity to support "pro" and "con" statements to urge ratification or rejection of the offer and no one submitted a "con." So that should give you some idea of the chance of this thing not passing. I'll guess 93%.
Today's Video Link
I was a fan of the sixties musical group, The Turtles. Always liked them and the fact that they performed with a kind of "We can't believe we're getting paid to do this" attitude. For a year or two there, they seemed to turn up on every TV show and I was amused that they were always moving their lips and miming to pre-recorded tracks…and not even trying too hard to pretend they were singing live. In this clip, you see them wandering about with no regard to where the microphones are…and I think they even switch off a few times as to which voice each band member is assuming is his. It's like everyone but the lead singer was told, "If you feel like it, move your lips approximately in time to some voice, not necessarily yours."
This clip is from the Smothers Brothers' show on CBS in '67. It's the title song from the movie, A Guide for the Married Man, and no bouncier tune was ever recorded during that era. The Turtles had nothing to do with its composition. Leslie Bricusse wrote the intricate lyrics and John Williams did the music.
Give it a look…and then if you didn't see it when I linked to it last October, go watch this clip of the same two guys you'll see singing the main parts in the clip below. It's them, many years later, explaining the quaint legal problems that dogged the group during its brief but wondrous heyday…
How I Spent Friday
My chum Earl Kress and I went out to the Hollywood Collectors Show yesterday. In case you've never been to one of these, it's a large ballroom where celebrities of various celebrity sit behind tables and sell autographed photos, signed books and other items that their fans might crave. There are also dealers selling movie and TV memorabilia.
The big lines were for Ernest Borgnine, Carol Channing, Jonathan Winters, George Kennedy and especially for Peter Falk. Earl and I had a nice time talking with, among others, Bill Mumy, Gary Owens, Michael Hoey, Beverly Washburn, Bernie Kopell, Bruce Kimmel and Mackenzie Phillips. Mike Hoey gave me a copy of his new book, a bit of which I read last night and enjoyed tremendously. You'll be reading more about it here when I find the time to finish.
We went to lunch with Chuck McCann, who had as many fans around as anyone. A lady was sitting at the table next to us in the restaurant and she kept saying over and over out loud, "I can't believe I'm having lunch with Chuck McCann!" Chuck went over and kissed her hand…and you've never seen a happier woman.
The show continues today out in Burbank. If you get out there, take cash. You'll probably find a lot of fun things you want to purchase…and people you've always wanted to meet.
Today's Political Musing
It seems to me that in every presidential election, every candidate picks a "theme song" — some popular tune with a lyric that conveys hope and better days ahead — to be played at rallies and when the candidate is approaching or leaving the podium…
…and no one at the campaign ever bothers to check with the song's composer to see if that's okay with them. You'd think they'd do that just to avoid the awkwardness that comes when the composer makes a statement like this one. Which happens all the time.
Recommended Reading
Anyone who's interested in how the Writers Guild strike ended when it did and succeeded to the extent it succeeded should read the post by Howard Gould over on the Artful Writer website.
Briefly Noted…
Steve Gerber obit in the Los Angeles Times.
Today's Video Link
As I mentioned, I'm lecturing up at U.C.L.A. on Saturday (here are the details) about Li'l Abner. I'll be talking a little about the strip, a lot about the Broadway show and a little about the 1959 movie based on the Broadway show. I won't spend much time on the Li'l Abner animated cartoons…and I bet it'll surprise a lot of people to know that there even were Li'l Abner animated cartoons. They're among the most obscure cartoon shorts ever made, to the point where a lot of well-versed cartoon scholars have never seen one.
There were five of them: Sadie Hawkins Day, Amoozin' But Confoozin', A Pee-kool-yar Sit-chee-ay-shun, Porkuliar Piggy and Kickapoo Juice…all produced by the Columbia Cartoon Studio in or around 1944. The films made by that studio are rarely shown these days even though some of them were pretty good. Then again, a lot of them weren't much better than the Li'l Abner shorts, which were low on budgets and pretty much devoid of the wit that was so prevalent in Al Capp's newspaper strip. The folks who made these cartoons seem to have thought that Mammy Yokum was just Popeye in drag. (One of the directors was even Dave Fleischer, one of the men responsible for the classic Popeye shorts.)
The five cartoons have occasionally been available on videotape and have recently been in a syndicated package of Columbia cartoons that haven't been sold to any U.S. markets. Some of the prints that are around aren't very good and some are even "traced" cartoons. If you don't know what those are, I'll explain in the next paragraph. If you do know, you can skip it.
Over the years, there have occasionally been old black-and-white cartoons about which some studio head or other exec said, often wrongly, "You know, if these were in color, we could sell them to television." Back in the days before computer "colorization," this was done by having artists trace the entire black-and-white cartoon back onto paper…and then these drawings were colored and photographed like new animation. Usually, the work went to the lowest-paid artists overseas and the results looked it.
The Abner cartoons were made in color but at one point a few decades ago, the negatives were missing and no color prints were available…so black-and-white prints were traced into color, and when these made the rounds, they further diminished the reputation of these cartoons. Small wonder that most animation buffs know little about them. (Even the voice credits on these are mysterious. Frank Graham, who was in an awful lot of cartoons of the forties, is in these but I can't identify the other players.)
Here's two-fifths of the complete run of Li'l Abner cartoons. The first of these is Sadie Hawkins Day and it was released May 4, 1944…
And this one, which is a black-and-white print of what was originally a Technicolor cartoon, is Kickapoo Juice, which was released on January 12, 1945. It was the last one in the series…and I think it's pretty easy to see why these didn't catch on with the public…
When You Get A Moment…
Recommended Reading
Marc Norman with a "how the Writers Guild triumphed" article.
Set the TiVo!
I haven't seen either of these shows but I have my TiVo set for them…
On Monday, The History Channel debuts History of the Joke, a two hour special about comedy hosted by Lewis Black and featuring a whole mess of funny people including George Carlin, Robert Klein, Penn & Teller, Kathy Griffin, Shelley Berman and Dave Attell. Consult whatever you consult for the correct time.
Then on Wednesday, most PBS channels will be debuting the Great Performances presentation of Company, the musical by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim. They videotaped the recent Broadway revival and you can see a video preview — most of the opening number, in fact — over on this page.
Today's Political Thought
Congress should not pass a bill granting the telephone companies retroactive immunity for FISA-related surveillance on Americans. In fact, we should never forgive the phone companies for anything. I'm especially against granting them retroactive immunity for their repair guys not showing up when they're supposed to.