Monthly Archives: July 2009

About the time Oliver Stone's film JFK came out, I was in a group that was listening to Roger Ebert hold court outside a screening of another movie. Ebert was discussing the Stone film however, and stridently voicing an opinion with which I happen to disagree; that there was a conspiracy, as yet uncracked, and that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As if to prove his case with utter finality, Mr. Ebert asked, "Can you name one respected researcher or journalist who believes Oswald alone killed Kennedy?" From back in the crowd, several voices (one of them, mine) yelled, "Walter Cronkite."

There were quite a few other names that could have been hurled, including folks who'd spent years studying the case…but no names that would have had quite the same impact. It caused a brief silence in the conversation, a look from Ebert like he'd just been flattened and then a rapid change to a new topic. No one could argue that Walter Cronkite wasn't a respected journalist.

Whether he should have been or not, I dunno. That "most trusted man in America" bit was an advertising slogan, not something we all voted on. He may well have been the most trusted because everyone heard he was the most trusted. If he was, he at least never seemed undeserving. In times of crisis — and there were too many on his watch — he was a soothing, steady presence on our TV sets: No melodrama, no sensationalism…just the news, delivered in masculine, fatherly calm. It's hard to say if he or anyone could do that in today's more competitive, tabloid-influenced news industry but he deserves credit for doing it then and doing it so well.

And he was also a huge fan of the comic strip, Peanuts. That counts for a lot with me, too.

We're in for weeks, maybe months of obits and practically every one will reference his famous sign-off line, "And that's the way it is." I'd like to append, sadly, "…and will never be again."

So you may have heard that the popular animated series Futurama is going back into production for new episodes. This is so. You may also have heard that the entire voice act is being replaced. This is almost certainly not so, though the production company has announced that they'd welcome submissions of voice demos by folks who think they can do the characters. Allow me to explain…

What this all means is that members of the voice cast (Billy West, Maurice LaMarche and others) are asking for certain amounts of money higher than Fox wishes to pay. Fox no doubt thinks (or for the purposes of negotiation, is taking the position) that the amounts are insane and astronomical. This is unlikely. All these actors have wise and experienced agents who know how profitable Futurama has been in the past and how much loot it will likely gross in the future, and what would be a fair price for its vocal stars.

The company does not want to replace those actors. Those actors helped make the show popular enough that it's still a viable commodity. Moreover, the company looks to wind up with a huge library of Futurama episodes — the old ones plus the new ones — which can rerun together for all eternity and be packaged together in mega-DVD sets. They want the same actors so Philip J. Fry will still be the same Philip J. Fry and so on.

They want those actors and have, in fact, arranged to have most of them at a panel at the Comic-Con in San Diego a week from tomorrow. But they'd like those actors for less money because that will mean more money for the company. That is why they're soliciting replacements, not because they want replacements but because they want to plant the seed of fret; to make the actors and their reps wonder if maybe, just maybe, Fox is crazy enough to actually replace the whole cast with cheaper folks so they'd better grab the latest of what have probably been several final offers.

It's hard to believe Fox could be lunkheaded enough to change casts, especially given the way they're going about it. If they really did want to replace everyone, the way to do it would be to quietly talk with the top voice agents about the top voice talent. Imagine if you had to replace Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock…and imagine you weren't even looking to introduce a new character in his stead. You had to find a new guy to play Jack Donaghy, for God's sake. You wouldn't make a big, public show of it and invite guys who work at Target Stores to make and send in auditions. You'd realize Baldwin can't be replaced like that, if at all. He's too integral a part of why that show is making you Godzilla-sized piles of cash, and that it's foolish to risk the franchise with someone else in the role. Just as it would be foolish to lose Billy West as Fry if there was any possible way to make a deal with him. When it comes down to money in this town, there almost always is.

If you're an aspiring cartoon voice actor who thinks "This is my break," think something else. They'll get thousands of submissions and it's unlikely that anyone with hiring capacity will ever listen to any of them. This is, like I said, not the way to really find a replacement. It's just a showy means of intimidating the actors and their agents…a way which costs the studio nothing. They don't even have to book time in a recording studio or have producers sit and listen to auditions. The whole idea is to be able to say to Billy West's agent, "Hey, we've got three thousand demos from guys who can imitate your boy's voice." But I know Billy's agent. He's been at this a long time and he knows how to not be intimidated and to arrive at a reasonable deal.

That's how these things end up, 96% of the time. What happens in 2% of such cases is that someone gets their ego in a tizzy and forgets that the goal is to make a deal, not to make the other guy bleed. So the bargaining explodes and everybody loses.

The other 2% of the time, it works the same way it works when a friend of yours says, "Don't pay those high garage prices. I got a guy who can fix your car cheap." So you get it fixed cheap and you honestly think you're saving money…all the way until the moment you try to shift gears while going up a slight incline and your axle shatters and your tires roll away. That's pretty much how it would go if they dumped the cast of Futurama. Which is why they won't do that.

A number of cartoonists and comic strip fans have mailed me (via paper mail, which amazingly still exists), a page that shows the actual size of newspaper comic strips over the years…how they've gotten smaller and smaller. There's no effective way for me to reproduce it here but it's quite amazing, seeing how they've diminished in size and therefore stature. If there's a person out there today who could do what Winsor McCay did in Little Nemo or what Walt Kelly did in Pogo, it almost wouldn't matter. The canvas is just too tiny to hold much of a painting.

Obviously, most newspapers are in trouble and they're condensing everything, not just the funnies. Obviously too, more and more will be folding up or trying to morph into some sort of web-only presence…and some of those that endure will dump comics in order to become leaner and meaner. I'm not even sure what kind of argument could be made as to why they shouldn't do this. I feel it's wrong but I can't explain why.

To some extent, the contraction of newspaper comics snowballed out of anyone's control. Over the years, economy drives and paper shortages occasionally caused papers to print their strips a notch smaller. This led to cartoonists simplifying their work, using fewer and bolder lines and making their lettering larger. And this, in turn, led to more newspapers deciding they could print the strips even smaller. Right now, if you put me in charge of a comic strip page and I took the bold step of taking strips back to their old size…well, some of those strips wouldn't look that wonderful. They aren't being drawn for that format.

I have no answer for this. I don't think anyone does. Garry Trudeau, who for contractual reasons has been less affected than some, made a good comment this week in Doonesbury. But the downsizing continues. It's made me not want to read any strips in the newspaper. If I read them on a website, I can at least enlarge the image to a more dignified, readable size.

Every year, I recommend all the events I'm involved in at Comic-Con but there's always one I want to super-recommend and underscore. This year, it's the first-ever appearance at any convention of the great Stan Freberg, accompanied by his superb spouse/partner, Hunter Freberg. I've gushed over Stan elsewhere on this site for years so I'll show a little restraint here. If there's such a thing as a Comic Genius, it's this guy.

He started as a cartoon voice actor and was heard in many a Warner Brothers cartoon…usually unbilled, thanks to Mel Blanc's contract. He was in movies like Lady and the Tramp, and he and Daws Butler were the first Beany and Cecil on the original Time for Beany puppet show. If he'd stopped there, he'd still be a fascinating guy…but Freberg was just getting started.

He began making funny records. There's been a handful of best-selling comedy records and Stan was responsible for about half of them. What's more, his have endured. They're still funny and most are still, in some form, in print. He also starred in the last real network comedy radio show in the classic tradition. Again, if he'd stopped there…

Then it was into advertising. In agencies, he became an adjective. Sponsors would say, "I want a Freberg campaign." That didn't necessarily mean hiring him, though many did. It meant any campaign that was outrageously funny and very, very smart. Or the star of a show would say, "I don't want any Freberg commercials during my show." That meant, "I don't want the ads to be funnier than the show."

The man's had other jobs: Author. Actor. More cartoon voices. Lecturer. But you get the idea. This is a very special guy and obviously, one of my personal heroes. And he and Hunter are coming to the convention.

So you want to do two things. You want to attend "Two Funny Frebergs" a spotlight panel on Friday at 3:30 in Room 6A. I'm going to introduce them and get out of the way so you can hear them talk and show some examples of Stan's fine work.

And then at some point during the con, preferably before that, you want to get over to Table AA-01 in Artist's Alley. That's where Stan and Hunter will be hanging out for much of the four days and you can purchase CDs and photos and get his signature on them. If you miss this chance to meet the man and get an autographed something, you'll regret it…because he doesn't do this often. Like, never before.

People attend these conventions for all different reasons but a biggie is the chance to meet a legend…to get a souvenir and/or to tell them how much their work has meant to you. If you're at all a fan o' Freberg, don't miss this opportunity.

The movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy have grossed more than $6 billion in box office receipts, DVD sales and other merchandising. Wow. Wouldn't you love to have a piece of that? Say, 7.5% or so? Well, maybe not. (Thanks to Tom Hegeman for the link.)

I used to like Ben Stein. I found him humorous and enjoyed his game show. Friends of mine would belittle him and I'd say, "Hey, we need all the funny Conservatives we can get." It didn't even bother me that he was a shameless Nixon apologist, that he doesn't believe in evolution or that I once saw him be pretty darned rude to a sales clerk in a Good Guys electronics shop. Heck, I'd even overlook his track record as an alleged economics authority which, in the early days of the current crisis, consisted of an unbroken string of dead-wrong predictions.

But — I know…you could smell the "but" coming — at some point, he seems to have decided that if he's getting paid enough, he'll do a commercial for anything.

Did you have an Atari 2600? At the time (early eighties), it seemed like the most sophisticated video game festival you could ever desire…such a quantum leap up from Pong. I had one. In fact, I'm pretty sure I still have it, though if you pointed a rifle at me, I couldn't tell you where it is. But somewhere in this house (or more likely, one of my storage units), there's a box containing an Atari 2600, the controllers for it and about fifty game cartridges. It may no longer work and I'll probably never hook it up again to find out. But it was just too neat a little device to throw it away now.

The most-played was Adventure in which you got to assume the role of a little square that navigated a maze-like kingdom, trying to elude two dragons who looked like seahorses. You had to search for a glowing chalice and it helped if you could use the sword (which looked like an arrow) and a magic bridge…and it helped to avoid the bat which could every so often fly in and swap some item for whatever you were holding.

I'm boring myself just describing it but trust me: It was addictive and fun. It won't be when you play it online at this site but it was then. For some reason.

Okay, listen up. June Foray's autobiography will be making its debut at the Comic-Con International next week. Earl Kress and I helped her with it and Leonard Maltin did the foreword but forget about us. This is June Foray…the First Lady of Cartoon Voices. The voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel. The voice of Natasha and Granny and Nell Fenwick and Jokey Smurf and more commercials and other cartoons than you could ever imagine. It's a book about her, Chuck Jones, Stan Freberg, Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, Jay Ward, Bill Scott and a whole golden era of animation and kids' records and entertainment.

If you've ever loved anything June has done, you want this book, which is lavishly illustrated with photos from her private files. And you especially want to buy it at the Comic-Con because June will be there to sign it for you.

It will only be available at the booth of the Van Eaton Gallery, which is space 501. They'll be the only ones in the hall who have it. June will be there from 5 PM to 6 PM on Friday, 4 PM to 6 PM on Saturday and 1 PM to 2 PM on Sunday. She may be there other times, as well but that's the schedule. They'll have signed copies at other hours but she might not be there to personalize them to you.

They may also run out. The book printed yesterday and the printer will only be able to get a certain number there in time. So when they're gone, they're gone 'til after the con when more arrive. (But do yourself a favor and pick up Darryl Van Citters' new book on the making of Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol, which Van Eaton will also have. Looks great.)

June, by the way, will also be appearing on a special spotlight panel on Saturday at 2:30 PM in room 5AB. The room's not nearly big enough to hold all her fans so get there early. She'll be interviewed by Earl and me, and she'll participate in a special cartoon script reading with a couple of other talented voice actors.

In a week or so here, I hope to be able to post info on how you can order a signed copy of June's book over the Internet. But if you can't wait, remember: Van Eaton Gallery. Space 501. Must visit.

A few years ago, I heard Al Franken speak at an event. Actually, he was interviewed by Rob Reiner but it was the same thing. I came away from the hall convinced not only that Franken's political aspirations were serious but that voters could do a lot worse than put a guy like him into office…and usually have. In his Saturday Night Live days, he had a rep in the industry as a smartass punk and a lot of people disliked him. A lot of people dislike him now but for different reasons, having more to do with his politics. He seems to have outgrown the frat boy smarminess and the times I've seen him lately, he's been gentlemanly and surprisingly cordial to and about his detractors.

So I'm kinda happy to see him be a Senator, even in a squeaker, and I find it hard to believe that Norm Coleman thought he was doing anything other than to delay the inevitable. I followed the recount and I not only never saw that Coleman had a case, I never saw him take a position that was not a reversal of a previous position. It was kind of like, "The election should be voided because the ballots were pink." And then when the authorities refused to overturn things for that reason, it was, "The election should be voided because the ballots were not pink." The argument that he "stole" the election seems predicated on the assumption that voters could not possibly have elected someone like Al Franken…or maybe that since recounts sometimes yield a different outcome, the one you don't like must, by definition, be bogus.

I watched Franken today as he joined the dinner theater, playing to the cameras while pretending to question Judge Sotomayor. The man seems to have learned that if you're a politician, you can never miss a chance to mention your family, growing up in your home state and how long you've been married. That all seems to carry more weight with some voters than anything you might actually do in office.

Franken picked up on Sotomayor's earlier comment to someone that she decided she wanted to be a prosecutor after watching the old Perry Mason show. Al Franken the Comedy Writer would have used that to ask, "Why? Because you enjoy losing every week?" That's how you structure a joke off that…but it might have made the nominee look silly or stumped her for an answer. So Al Franken the Senator instead brought up their mutual love of Perry Mason, noted how the prosecutor always lost and then said something about how it was a testimony to her character and determination that she wasn't dissuaded by that example. Or something like that. I do recall noting that he didn't go for the joke at her expense. I thought that was kinda interesting.