Scot's was a small chain of McDonald's knock-offs and we used to go to the one located on the Southwest corner of Pico Boulevard and Westwood — land that now contains a Barnes & Noble. Their mascot, who I believe only existed as one piece of line art, was a sexy lady wearing kilts and doing a dance. They had a huge drawing of her towering over the main building.
One suspects the lady and the chain's name was because someone thought, "Hmm…maybe people go to McDonald's because they think it's Scottish." Or perhaps the thought process was that people weren't that familiar yet with McDonald's — this was before that company's big advertising blitz — and that they'd go to Scot's, thinking it was the place they had in mind. Either way, there was nothing else at Scot's that had anything to do with Scotland unless it was that the food was cheap and there's a stereotype of Scottish folks as excessively frugal.
The menu was pretty much what McDonald's then had plus a few extra items such as pizza. When they finally closed down, the structure at Pico and Westwood went through a year or three of name and ownership changes. For a while, it was Pride's, then something else, then something else. They finally cleared the land and built a Lone Ranger Restaurant there. It didn't last long, either.
I've never been able to find a good photo of Scot's. The best I've been able to come up with is this aerial photo of the corner of Pico and Westwood. The little free-standing structure on the left is Scot's.
We told you yesterday the Amazon price of that great Mickey Mouse book wouldn't be five bucks for long. This morning, it was 17 smackers and now it's $19.95. It's still worth it.
I typoed in the previous message and have now fixed the error. Broadway legend David Burns died around eight years after he won the Tony Award for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum not, as Davy Jones said, a few months. Burns was one of those performers who literally died on- (or almost on-) stage. He was in Philadelphia with the tryout of the Kander-Ebb musical 70 Girls 70 when he was stricken with a heart attack.
In-between that and Forum, he did a few things of note. He originated and played the role of Horace Vandergelder opposite Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! and he appeared in Arthur Miller's play, The Price…and won an Emmy for the TV presentation of it. Before Forum, he appeared in the original The Man Who Came to Dinner, Pal Joey, Oklahoma!, Out of This World, A Hole in the Head and Do Re Mi. That is not a complete list. For instance, I also left out his other Tony award-winning role: He originated the part of Mayor Shinn in The Music Man. It really is one of the most amazing careers of any actor, past or present. Since he didn't spend much of that career before TV or movie cameras, he's not as well known today as he oughta be but those who knew him (or just saw him perform) still talk fondly of the guy.
That's him at left in the above photo, taken years ago on a Manhattan street corner. The kid on the right is my friend Jim Brochu, who was mentored by Burns and was very close to him. I've mentioned Jim here before many times. He's the guy with the great show where he plays Zero Mostel and creates for you an imaginary (but hilarious and moving) evening with that much-loved actor. Through March 11, he's Zeroing in at the Bathurst St. Theatre in Toronto. For details on that and other places he'll be, check out this website.
Shelly Goldstein's not the only friend of this blog who had a memorable encounter with Davy Jones. Will Harris writes about his, also focusing on the late Mr. Jones's role on Broadway in Oliver! Will even links to a video of Davy as The Artful Dodger way back when. Well worth clicking to read and view.
In the piece, Davy says that the New York producer of Oliver!, David Merrick, advertised the show by quoting rave reviews by folks who happened to have the same names as prominent Broadway critics. I'm wondering if this is so. Merrick had famously done that a year or so earlier when another show of his, Subways Are For Sleeping, opened to negative reviews. He found people in New York with the same names as the critics, invited them to the show and when they liked it, advertised their opinions with their names and also photos attached. Only one newspaper ran the ad for one edition until someone at that paper noticed something. Richard Watts, the critic at The New York Post, was white but "his" quote did not mention the Post and the photo of him was of a black guy. The ad was pulled after the one printing, Merrick was condemned up and down Broadway for his trickery…and he loved the publicity. Did Merrick try something of the sort again with the well-respected Oliver!? Or was Davy, as I suspect, conflating separate incidents?
Also in the piece Jones says…
…I remember going to the Tony Awards, and they said, "And the winner for Best Supporting Actor, David…" And I leaned forward in my seat…and they said somebody else's name. But I'm glad it wasn't me that won, 'cause that guy died six months later. It could've been me!
The category was actually Best Featured Actor in a Musical and the other David was David Burns for his work in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. But David Burns didn't die six months later. It was more like eight years. Just a minor point.
In 1966, with super-heroes becoming big on TV thanks to the Batman show with Adam West, Marvel Comics managed to get a cartoon seres made and syndicated featuring five of their then-popular super-hero comic characters — Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America and Sub-Mariner. The show was originally sold to local stations with Spider-Man instead of Sub-Mariner but then its producer, Steve Krantz, discovered there was network interest in Spider-Man for a Saturday morning cartoon show. Spider-Man was quickly removed from this venture and packaged into his own presentation. The Sub-Mariner was then substituted in his place.
For the most part, the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon series used the actual stories and artwork that had been written and drawn for the pages of Marvel Comics. Never mind that the folks who'd drawn those comics hadn't designed their pages and panels for animation. What Grantray-Lawrence (the studio charged with "animating" the show) had in mind was some of the most limited limited-animation ever done for TV, producing the shows in record time and for a fraction of what was spent on other shows. Every possible corner was cut. While the show was produced mainly in Los Angeles, the Thor segments were farmed out to the then-almost-outta-business Paramount cartoon studio in New York and the music and voices were done for cut-rate prices in Canada. (One of the actors was John Vernon, who would soon gain fame as Dean Wormer in the movie, National Lampoon's Animal House.)
The artists who had drawn the Marvel Comics were not happy to see their work used on a TV show like that. Jack Kirby complained mightily. Steve Ditko appears to have decided to leave the company at about the time the material he'd drawn for Spider-Man was announced as part of the project. Marvel Comics owner Martin Goodman insisted to the artists via his intermediaries that he could not pay for the wider use of the art they'd done because he was receiving next-to-nothing for the rights to produce this series. This apparently was true. Goodman had let the license go for a small token payment because, he figured, the wider exposure of the characters would generate vast amounts of merchandising. At the time, Goodman was less interested in selling comic books than he was in selling his company and it seems to have worked out as he'd hoped. The show and a few others that were done around that time did indeed raise the licensing profile of those properties. That, plus an expanded publishing program raised the selling price of his firm when he sought and fielded offers the following year.
The last decade or so, the cartoons that made up the Marvel Super-Heroes show have been widely circulated on YouTube and bootleg CDs but no one seemed to have a decent copy of the opening or closing of the show. We have semi-decent copies for you today. Once you click, the opening will play in the player below and it will be followed by the closing, including the credits.
The credits are kinda interesting. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Don Heck and Gene Colan all get a mention. Ditko does not, though he drew around half of the Hulk stories that were adapted and a few of the Iron Mans. A few other artists (and all the inkers) who drew comics that were used are also unmentioned.
The Grantray-Lawrence crew included a lot of Hollywood-based artists (and a few New York guys at Paramount) who'd drawn or would draw comic books at one time or another, some of them for Marvel. In there, you'll see the names of, among others, Doug Wildey, Mike Arens, Mike Royer, Kay Wright, Otto Feuer, Reuben Timmons, Doug Crane, Sparky Moore, Herb Hazelton and Ken Landau, whose name was spelled wrong. Wildey, Royer, Hazelton, Moore and Arens did a lot of art for Sub-Mariner cartoons that had to be written and drawn from scratch. At the time, not enough Sub-Mariner stories had been published in the comics so they had to go that route. Some of those Sub-Mariner cartoons were storyboarded by Jerry Grandenetti, who at the time was the artist of the Sub-Mariner stories in Marvel's Tales to Astonish comic.
I thought it was an awful show and so did the fellow who hosted the cartoons when they were run on KHJ here in Los Angeles. He was Gene Moss on the legendary kids' show, Shrimpenstein, and he used to introduce them as "Another Marvel Mediocrity" or by saying, "Here's another one of those cartoons where nothing ever moves." But it helped Goodman get the price he wanted for his company — a sale he later regretted, I'm told. And it had a bouncy closing theme song. Here's that opening and closing with some Captain America scenes between…
