Monthly Archives: December 2010

The new Yogi Bear movie is not getting great reviews, a fact that appears to delight many on animation-related forums. I haven't seen it and probably won't, at least in a theater. There are two reasons for this, one being that it's in 3-D and some part of my brain looks at a 3-D movie and declares, "It's nap time!" I oughta get a full set-up here in my home, not for pleasure but for any night when I have insomnia. The only trouble is that it puts me into the kind of snooze that usually comes accompanied by a headache — the kind that feels like instead of attending their own temples, Jews are inside yours and are pounding to get out.

So right there is reason enough not to buy a ticket. Another is that I love Yogi Bear…and while some would think that's a reason to race to the theater, it's really not because I don't love that Yogi Bear. I love the one that was animated for pocket change, debuted just when I was the perfect age and spoke with the masterful tones of Daws Butler. That this one isn't that one doesn't mean that this one is necessarily bad; just that the affection doesn't automatically transfer. I mean, a lot of us love Batman but that doesn't mean we like every interpretation, every incarnation, every time someone draws their version or dons a facsimile of the costume. In some ways, it's the opposite: We come to every Batman comic or adaptation with certain expectations, expecting those in charge to clear a high bar. We also, of course, have opinions of what's right and wrong for the character. That's the price the creators of the new comic or movie or whatever-it-is pay for not baking from scratch. We can't blank out the past ones and just judge some new one wholly on its own merits.

I've received a few e-mails from Yogi-loving constituents who are waiting for me to eviscerate this movie I'm not going to see. Unlike some of them, I don't think it's a crime that Time-Warner wanted to resurrect the character. Yogi was a commodity when Hanna-Barbera made the original cartoons and he's a commodity now. Certainly, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were never reticent to alter him, exploit him, retool him, misuse him or do whatever it took to wring more bucks out of the franchise. They might have grumbled over choices in this or any other reboot but does anyone think they would have stopped it? The Bill and Joe I worked for never said no to anything like that…and if they wouldn't, I don't see why I should leap to protect my childhood fave.

Is it a bad movie? Unworthy of the name of Yogi Bear? I dunno. If it is, I suppose my attitude is that of the fellow who was told that a terrible film had been made of his favorite book. "They destroyed it," a friend told him. "No," he replied pointing to a bookcase. "My favorite book is right over there on the shelf, exactly the same as it ever was." I have a DVD set of the original Yogi Bear cartoons — the ones that gave me so many hours of pleasure and inspiration — and they ain't changed.

Ezra Klein on what's wrong with the tax cut deal…the one that no one really likes. His analysis sounds frighteningly accurate to me. No one is getting the solution they think will actually improve the economy. They're just getting a bill that can be passed.

Fred Kaplan reads the new White House report on Afghanistan…and doesn't like what he sees.

I liked a lot of the movies for which the late Mr. Edwards was responsible…and hey, I not only liked the movie of Victor/Victoria, I even liked the Broadway musical they made of it. I also really, really liked the first few films in which Peter Sellers played Inspector Clouseau…and it really is an achievement to create a character like that, one that becomes a "franchise" leading to movie after movie. When I got into the entertainment business, a wise producer told me the following and I think he was right…

The dream of every Head of Development is to have a franchise like that. It's like owning a major star. So at any given moment, they always have at least one project in development that was pitched to them as "The American Clouseau." They almost never get past the script stage because that's a lot harder to do than it looks.

You could probably look back at a lot of movies and TV shows that did get made and realize that was what was on someone's mind. When I saw The Nude Bomb, that none-too-successful attempt to revive Get Smart as a feature film vehicle some years back, I could practically hear someone saying, "Hey, you know who's really the American Clouseau? Maxwell Smart."

Edwards' movies are, I find, worth revisiting. I really disliked The Great Race when it first came out…but I was a kid at the time and years later, watching it again, I can't find anything to dislike. On the other hand, I recently watched S.O.B., a film I liked upon its initial release, and didn't enjoy much beyond Richard Mulligan's incredible performance. Maybe the next time around…

And then there's the Pink Panther. I mean the cartoon character, not the movie. The movie is fine but the animated figure designed for the main title has truly endured. It was all created in the DePatie-Freleng cartoon studio and years ago, I heard someone who acted like he was there at the time tell the following story…

It was a big deal for the studio. They were offered the opportunity to do this main title and they thought that if they could ace it, it would really put them on the map. What they had to do was design a pink panther that Blake Edwards would like. They got a bunch of artists and had them design pink panthers…hundreds of them. Fat pink panthers. Skinny pink panthers. Short pink panthers. Musclebound pink panthers. Dashing pink panthers. Stupid looking pink panthers…

Night and day, they churned out these drawings until they finally had…it must have been a thousand of them. They had this conference room with cork walls and they pinned drawings up on every inch of space. Friz Freleng said, "There's got to be one in here that Edwards will approve."

Then Mr. Edwards comes in. Everyone is very nervous because a lot is riding on this. They have hundreds of other drawings in folders in case he doesn't like any of the zillions they have on the walls.

Edwards walks in, glances around, points to one drawing on the far wall and says, "That one." And that was it.

Great story, right? Sadly, I don't think it's true. I later found out that the person who told me the story wasn't there at the time, wasn't as he led us to believe, a witness. He didn't go to work for the studio until years later when they were producing a steady diet of Pink Panther shorts. And I later heard Freleng tell how the design had been selected and it was a somewhat different tale.

What made the anecdote credible for me was, in part, the decisiveness of Blake Edwards' movies. Even if you didn't love a given film, it was obviously made by someone who knew exactly what he wanted to do and how to achieve it. Someone once said of another accomplished director, "Nothing gets into his pictures by accident." I felt that was true of the Clouseau films, of 10, of Victor/Victoria, of all the rest. I'm sorry there won't be any more of them because the guy really did know how to make movies.

Google's newest computer does away with the Caps Lock key. This will remove one level of early warning detection of a particularly cretinous e-mail.

Number eleven in a series…

Several folks have informed me that the word "Chanukah" is indeed edited out of the Yogi Bear DVD I mentioned.

To clarify: I never got an official explanation. When it was done, Hanna-Barbera said, "We had nothing to do with it. The network did it." And the person I dealt with at CBS said, "We didn't do it. Someone at Hanna-Barbera must have done it." I later found out that someone at CBS had ordered the deletion but that doesn't mean H-B didn't agree. It was always my experience when I was working at H-B in those days that the studio rushed to comply with Standards and Practices notes. Many times, I talked the Censor People out of some change they wanted made in a show…and sometimes, it was not difficult at all. But then I'd find out that Bill Hanna had made the alteration anyway.

Can you imagine, by the way, the fuss that would be made today if some network bleeped "Christmas" out of a show? Or worse, if they just bleeped the first syllable? Bill O'Reilly and the Fox "News" Network would seize on that one incident as incontrovertible proof of The War on Christmas and the machinations of the Anti-Christian Coalition. As it is, they have to settle for finding some elementary school pageant somewhere and a teacher who asked the kids to say "Season's Greetings" instead of "Merry Christmas."

Paul Levitz signed his new book last evening at the Taschen Store in Beverly Hills and my friends Len Wein, Marv Wolfman and I were asked to be there for…well, I'm not sure just why we were there but we all had an awfully good time. Some guy named Stan Lee put in an appearance, as well…which pissed off Batman no end. He was parked out front with an actual Batmobile and he was the most incredible super-hero around until Stan showed up. (In the photo above, Batman's the one standing between Stan and Paul.)

They had a long line of folks waiting to buy Paul's book and get it signed…and there were even a few people who'd bought it elsewhere and hauled it into the store for an autograph. If I owned a wheelbarrow, I might have brought my copy along but Paul says that for me, he'll do a housecall.

Not much else to report but since I took the picture, I wanted to use it here. And also I wanted to remind you again that if you're at all interested in DC Comics or in giving your mailman a hernia, you'll want to order a copy of 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking by Paul Levitz. It's a very big book that does justice to a very big topic.

I have finally found a super-hero that I would really like to be. I would like to be Panda-Man.

Certain things you read in the newspaper or on news websites just leap out at you. You want to just stare at them for a little while and let the information seep in to see how it connects with your view of reality. Here's one I just spotted…

Actor Rip Torn pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges stemming from his Jan. 29 arrest inside a Connecticut bank, where he was found drunk, with a loaded gun, having broken into the place thinking it was his own home. In exchange, he won't go to jail.

Yeah. Sure. That all makes sense, I guess.

The Virginia judge who ruled against the mandate part of Health Care Reform has a number of ties to the Republican party and even to the state attorney general who filed the suit itself. A pretty good case could be made that Federal District Judge Henry Hudson should have erred on the side of recusal.

Steve Benen wrote a blog post similar to (though better than) one I was thinking of writing…about how if a Democrat had done this, Fox News would explode with outrage and talk of how the judge should be recalled or impeached or just dragged from his chambers and beaten with hockey sticks. Since Republicans got the ruling they wanted, hardly a word of this conflict of interest is mentioned on their side of the media. No one is even saying, "Obviously, this is a wise and correct ruling and it's unfortunate that it came from a judge who could be accused by some of impropriety."

That was one of the galling things about the whole Bush-Gore vote count. No one was at all uncomfy with how their side won. It was kind of like, "We got the outcome we wanted so everything that got us here must have been inarguably legit." You also never hear anyone say, when a judge rules to their liking, that the law really doesn't say what he says it says. Tomorrow, if the Supreme Court ruled that guys with lots of comic books don't have to pay taxes, a lot of my friends and I would say, "Yeah, sure! That's implicit in the Constitution!"

Warner Home Video has just released a DVD of Yogi Bear's All-Star Comedy Christmas Caper, a prime-time special produced in 1982 and written by me in, believe it or not, two and a half days. If I'd had a month, I'd have taken a month. I had two and a half days.

A year or two earlier, Hanna-Barbera had signed with CBS to produce a half-hour prime-time Yogi Bear special for Christmas of '81. This was a very big deal for the studio and for Yogi. The show was to feature a large batch of early H-B characters like Quick Draw McGraw, Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss and others, plus an appearance by Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. It was to be called what it wound up being called. Beyond that, no one had any idea what it would be about.

A script was written. The network hated it. Another script was then written. Mr. Barbera hated it. Yet another script was then written. The network and Mr. Barbera both hated it. There was now insufficient time to get the show written again and produced for its scheduled December airdate so the decision was made to postpone 'til December of '82.

More writing ensued but no useable script emerged, at least in the view of Mr. B. and the folks at the network. As July arrived, H-B once again suggested postponing the special until the following year. Someone at CBS said, "No…either we do it for this year or the deal's off." Arguments ensued. Meetings were held. On a very hot day in the first week in July, I was summoned to the office of Joe Barbera and asked how fast I could write a script. I'd have to work fast because every day I took was a day the animators wouldn't have and there was already a genuine fear that they could not get it done in time. To make matters even more precarious, the Animation Union was probably going to go on strike as of July 31. The animation would be done in Australia so the strike wouldn't affect that…but all the storyboarding and character design were to be done in-house and they'd have to be completed by 7/31 — a little more than three weeks off.

I got the script done in, like I said, two and a half days and it was recorded by a real all-star lineup of cartoon voice actors. Daws Butler played Yogi, Snagglepuss, Huckleberry Hound, Augie Doggie, Hokey Wolf, Snooper, Blabber, Dixie the Mouse, Mr. Jinks and Wally Gator. Don Messick played Boo Boo, Ranger Smith and Pixie the Mouse. Henry Corden and Mel Blanc played Fred and Barney. Allan Melvin played Magilla Gorilla. Jimmy Weldon played Yakky Doodle. John Stephenson played Doggie Daddy. And all those folks played other roles, as did Hal Smith, Janet Waldo and Georgi Irene. Steve Lumley directed and most of the storyboard was done at the very last minute (after the first board guy botched it up and was fired) by a great veteran director named Alex Lovy. I am still amazed the show was done on time.

Well, actually it wasn't. A couple of scenes were never finished and some animation errors stayed in because there literally wasn't time to redo them. But it did air as scheduled on 12/21/82 and if you knew how impossible and unlikely that was, you'd be real impressed.

Being so close to the trees, I make no claim as to how funny it is…but the DVD is probably worth buying for a special feature that's included — Yogi Bear's Birthday Party, a 1961 syndicated special that few cartoon fans have probably seen. If you'd like to order a copy from Amazon, here's a link.

I haven't seen one yet so I don't know if it contains the bleep. This is a bit of TV history. Cartoon shows are censored all the time but this was the first time (I believe) that they actually bleeped a word of dialogue. What's more amazing is that the word wasn't a naughty one from George Carlin's infamous list. The word they bleeped was "Chanukah."

I am not kidding. I wrote a line where Snagglepuss said, "Merry Christmas! Season's Greetings! Happy Chanukah even!" Everyone who had to approve the script — which was a whole lot of people — approved it and it was recorded that way and the animation was done accordingly.

In December when the last minute edits were being done, someone at CBS decided that the reference to Chanukah had to go. I do not know precisely why. At the time, and later when I wrote one article about this, I didn't know even if it had been done at CBS or if someone at Hanna-Barbera had been responsible…but then a friend at the network showed me a memo he'd dug out of the files. It merely said that CBS was insisting on the deletion, no explanation given. Anyway, there was no time to redub the line so they just bleeped the word and it sounded like an audio flaw. It has been absent whenever Cartoon Network or Boomerang have aired the show so it may have been removed from the master and is therefore absent from this DVD. Or maybe they did their transfer from an uncircumcised copy, I don't know. I'll let you know once I hear from someone or get a copy myself.

This may involve me finding some nice, considerate person at Warner Home Video who'll send me a couple of free ones. I know some of them read this site. Ahem.