Monthly Archives: June 2009

So what's the secret ingredient in KFC's new grilled chicken? Apparently, it's beef.

I somehow forgot to mention here how great The Colbert Report was this past week…but if you were watching, you already know that. It was a huge deal for Stephen Colbert to haul his whole show over to Iraq but it was worth it. Very funny, clever shows…especially the first two. I especially appreciated the way he connected with the troops without altering his basic act. What with shaving his head and taping remotes in which he experienced some of what they experience, he showed he was willing to play their game, not just to expect them to play audience to his. And yet he still managed to be the same Stephen Colbert with his all-knowing cluelessness. If you missed his broadcasts, do yourself a favor. Go over to this website and watch 'em.

Last night in the Late Night Ratings, Letterman had a 3.5 and O'Brien had a 3.0. By contrast on the same night last year, Letterman had a 2.8 and Leno had a 3.8.

So that doesn't look good for Conan O'Brien but it's not as bad as it seems. He's doing much better with the coveted younger demographic…the one that advertisers pay the megabucks to reach. So what we may be in for here is that Dave will wind up with the more popular show while Conan will wind up with the more profitable one. Given that NBC seems willing to settle for that at 10 PM in prime time, that might mean Conan will hang in there for a while. I do not think, as some are speculating, that meetings are currently being held at NBC to figure out how to dump the Irish kid with the funny hair and get the guy with the chin back in control of The Tonight Show.

Hey, last night Dave had Regis Philbin on and introduced him by saying Regis now holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for the most number of hours logged in front of a TV camera. I assume that's true, in which case he would have taken the title away from the previous leader in that category. Wanna guess who that was? Mull that one over and then click here to get the answer.

Broadway seems to be doing well. Usually each year, a day or two after the Tony Awards, several shows announce they'll be closing. It generally means that ticket sales were lousy before the awards but they held on, hoping in vain that exposure on the telecast would spark a boost at the box office.

This year, only the revival of Guys & Dolls seems to be throwing in the terrycloth. It ends this weekend but its producers have announced that it will live on in a national tour being planned for 2010-2011. Unless they go out and lasso a few incredible stars — which they did not do for Broadway — I doubt this will happen. You don't mount a tour for a show that received tepid reviews and only lasted 113 performances in New York.

I didn't see this production and kinda wish I had. It's often said in the theater that Guys & Dolls is a bulletproof show; that no matter what you do with it, it always works. This incarnation apparently didn't. It might have been interesting to see it and try to figure out why.

My pal Leonard Maltin has been busily assembling a collection I've wanted to see on DVD for some time: The Zorro series produced by the Disney Studios from 1957 to 1959. Actually, it'll be two collections, each a six disc set covering one of the two seasons. There were 39 half-hour episodes in each season, and then four hour-long episodes were produced for the main Disney TV show, Walt Disney Presents. All of these will be included in the two boxed sets, which are scheduled to come out in November of this year.

I haven't seen these shows in a very long time but I remember liking them tremendously. They were lavishly produced with elaborate stunt work. It is said Mr. Disney spent a lot more than any other producer of the day spent on a half-hour series and I can believe that. It was smartly written and well-cast, with Guy Williams properly dashing as the title character and Henry Calvin stealing scenes as the bumbling Sgt. Garcia. I can't wait to see if it's all as good as I remember. If they're even half as good, I'm going to enjoy them a lot.

I think I'm also going to enjoy the special features that are being assembled, including interviews and rare footage. I'm among those interviewed but my participation and relevance is marginal. They asked me in to describe a precious childhood memory…seeing Zorro and Guy Williams appearing live at a Disney event at the Hollywood Bowl. I think I was six at the time and as they say in Gigi, I remember it well.

And hey, here's a bit of the kind of trivia that folks who come to this site will enjoy. What does Zorro have in common with Yogi Bear?

Give up? Whenever Don "Zorro" Diego sang on the show, his singing voice was dubbed by a gentleman named Bill Lee. Mr. Lee was an illustrious studio singer of the day, heard in hundreds of commercials and records and in most of the Disney films produced back then. (He was one of the vocalists in the Zorro theme song.) He also provided the singing voice of Yogi in Hey There, It's Yogi Bear.

Anyway, the special features on the DVDs will tell you a lot more important info than that. I'm looking forward to them and will post an Amazon link when we get closer to their issuance.

We are approaching the deadline to vote in the Eisner Comics Industry Awards. If you work in the field, either creating comics or selling 'em, you're probably eligible to vote for the best work done in the previous year. This you can do online here. The deadline is Monday.

By the way: I'm up for two of them, a fact I don't think I've mentioned here. Sergio and I were nominated in the category of Best Limited Series for Groo: Hell on Earth. And my Kirby: King of Comics is up for Best Comics-Related Book. If you didn't like either, you'll probably find plenty of worthy nominations to vote for.

For a long time, the argument against government-sponsored health care was that…well, you know. It's the government so it has to be worse and inefficient and it can't possibly be as good as what free enterprise can offer.

Suddenly now, the argument against a "public option" in health care is that hundreds of thousands of people would prefer it so they'd transfer away from private insurers and cost Aetna and Blue Shield and the others a lot of business. In other words, the problem with government-run health care is that it would probably be better. And we can't have that.

The great mystery novelist Raymond Chandler wrote the screenplay for the 1944 movie Double Indemnity, which was directed by Billy Wilder and which starred Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. We all know that.

But did you know that Mr. Chandler had a brief silent cameo role in the movie? I didn't. But some eagle-eyed folks noticed it.

The other day here, we linked to a video of clips from the print of Li'l Abner that runs on Turner Classic Movies. As any fool can plainly see, it's improperly cropped so you see a lot of stuff — like boom microphones and the tops of backdrops — that you aren't supposed to see.

I'm pleased to report that several dedicated TCM staffers keep an eye on this site and every time I've complained about something on their fine network, it gets fixed, a.s.a.p. Sure enough: Tom Brown, V.P. of Original Productions at TCM writes to inform me that they've arranged for Paramount to make a new master in 4×3 letterbox format with a matte covering that which should not be on the screen. Now, that's service!

Tom told me to let him know if I'd spotted anything else that needs tweaking. This isn't exactly a tweak…but it's been quite a while since they reran Role Model, which is an original special they did. It's an hour-long conversation that Alec Baldwin conducted with Gene Wilder and it's one of the best interviews I've ever seen about an actor's work.

I'm not asking for me. I still have it on my TiVo and I rewatch it every month or three…but I'd like to be able to recommend it to folks who read this blog and haven't seen it. Mr. Wilder is an extraordinary man.

Hey, remember I said that I thought Conan O'Brien would eventually have some weak ratings that would cause reporters to write stories that suggested NBC had made a huge mistake displacing Jay Leno? Well, it look like we'll be seeing those articles a lot sooner than I expected. Like maybe in the next week or so.

I have to say I'm not enjoying his shows all that much and that my TiVo's fast forward button is being employed a lot. One of the problems, I think, is that Topic #1 seems to be the fact that Conan O'Brien is hosting The Tonight Show and Conan doesn't seem to have much more to talk about beyond that.

Last night, I was chatting with Hank Bradford, who was Johnny Carson's head writer for many of Mr. Carson's golden years. Hank knows as much about that kind of comedy as anyone alive and he made an interesting point. He said, approximately, "All these guys [Conan, Dave, Jay, etc.] all go on and on about how much they admired Johnny and follow in his footsteps…but they all think they can do that kind of a show without an Ed McMahon. Johnny knew how much it adds to have someone to talk to, someone who can function as a good straight man. He would never have done his show without Ed."

Conan has Andy Richter over at the podium doing a small part of Ed's old job. Come on…let's get him over to the couch. He's already on the payroll.