Monthly Archives: August 2012

Republicans in many states are pushing for laws to combat Voter Fraud…which would make you think it must be a problem of some concern. According to Kevin Drum, it isn't. The kind of fraud they're trying to prevent is just about non-existent in this country. So what are they trying to get rid of, then? It couldn't be the kind of legal voters who tend to vote Democratic, could it?

Voice Guy Rob Paulsen (heckuva guy, heckuva talent) hosts a weekly podcast called Talking Toons. You can hear past episodes over at this here website.

Most weeks, it's just Rob talking with someone else in the world of voiceover…and that's entertaining enough. But some weeks, he takes the show to the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club up at Universal CityWalk and he does it in front of a live audience.

He'll be doing that on Friday evening, August 17 at 8 PM and his guests will be the Emmy-Winning (!!!) voice legend June Foray and another person. I'm the other person. Tickets are now on sale for a measly twenty bucks…and by the way, that's a nice room with decent food 'n' refreshment available. More details are available at that link…where I'm amused to find myself now listed among the stand-up comedians who work that club. Hope no one tries to heckle me. They wouldn't dare heckle June…

This is what my friend Wally Wingert's home would look like if he had a little more money. I'm disappointed there's no giant penny.

Jack Lemmon presents an honorary Academy Award to Groucho. A little montage of scenes from Marx Brothers movies has been excised but otherwise it's what happened at the Oscars in 1974…

So…just what was it that Mitt Romney said overseas that caused so many to think he shouldn't be saying anything overseas? I've got just the guy to explain it…Fred Kaplan.

Frustrated with YouTube videos that freeze-up when you try to watch them online? Then stop trying to watch them online.

There are no less than eight jillion utilities that enable you to download YouTube videos with one click. When you see a video you want to watch, perform that click and let the video download to some directory or folder on your computer. Then later when it's all there, watch it. You won't have to wait while more of the file gets downloaded because it's already all downloaded. Plus, you'll have it on your computer to keep if you like and watch again sometime.

I browse Ye Olde Internet with Mozilla Firefox as my browser of choice. I have Video DownloadHelper installed as an extension and it does a fine job of grabbing clips for later viewing. There are others. (RealPlayer is supposed to be pretty good for any browser.) Your time is too valuable to spend waiting for videos to resume when the connection is slow and things freeze up.

The satirical gent above is Stan Freberg, a hero of mine who practically invented the funny commercial. Before that, he was a million-selling performer of brilliant comedy records and he was a puppeteer on the original Time for Beany TV show, voicing Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent and Dishonest John. And before that, he was a fine voice actor heard in hundreds of films including Lady and the Tramp and countless Warner Brothers cartoons.

He's also a busy actor. He was also in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

He still does voices, by the way. He made a surprise appearance — to a thunderous standing ovation — at one of our Cartoon Voices panels at Comic-Con this year. You can see that thrilling moment in the video here. The whole thing's pretty good but if you just want to see Stan, move the slider in to around the 56 minute mark and watch from there.

I believe Stan has been doing cartoon voices longer than any human being alive and like I said, he's still doing it. He's scheduled to record for me doing a role on The Garfield Show which works on Tuesday. (Tuesday, by the way, is his birthday. I'll have something to say about that here then.)

Wanna meet this man? Wanna get his autograph on a photo or the great new CD he's recorded with his wonderful wife, Hunter? Well, the two of them will be among the guests signin' and sellin' at the Hollywood Show in Burbank this weekend. Henry Winkler will be there. Tab Hunter will there. Trini Lopez will be there. Voice actors Gregg Berger and Joe Alaskey (also both working on The Garfield Show on Tuesday) will be there. Dozens of celebs will be there. Shove all the non-voice actors aside to get to Stan and Hunter, and make sure you wish Freberg a happy birthday. Details on the event are here.

Carl Reiner discusses his scenes in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

What Mr. Reiner neglects to mention is that the dangerous scene he describes — where the plane allegedly flew so close to him that he could touch it — is not in the finished film. With one possible exception, all of Reiner's scenes in the movie were shot on a soundstage with the airplane no closer to him than on a rear-screen projection. There's one distant shot at the actual airfield that might be Reiner or it might be a stunt double and the airplane does not come near this person.

Which is not to say Carl Reiner was fibbing. Apparently, he had to do some scenes over because of film being damaged in the processing stage. I've never been able to quite get to the bottom of what happened here. It sounds like they filmed a more elaborate scene on location with an actual control tower at an airfield being buzzed by the plane and with Reiner and Ford and perhaps others actually up on the tower, alternating with stunt doubles.

There's an existing still of Reiner and Paul Ford that shows Ford dangling from the tower in a set-up that's not in the film. It looks like something that was built on a soundstage to do closeups of them for insertion into the location footage. Then (I'm speculating here) most of the location footage was lost so they used only a small bit of it in conjunction with scenes done in the control tower set on the soundstage. Or something. Anyway, here's Carl Reiner. Maybe someone who sees him can ask him to elaborate…

If you watched yesterday's video of Dick Sinclair's Polka Parade, you may have recognized the young gent doing live commercials for Farmer John Sausage. Yes, that was Tom Kennedy, who later became a top game show host. Also, I should mention that Dick Sinclair's Polka Parade was sometimes called Dick Sinclair's Polka Party when it popped up in various forms over the years. I know not why.

I am told there are but a few openings left in the class I'm teaching this Sunday for the Women in Animation group — and by the way, you do not have to be a woman to sign up for it. It's all about how to get work (and how not to get work) in Cartoon Voiceovers and how to do the work (and how not to do the work). Details on the class are here.

The dates of Comic-Con International next year are July 18-21. No, I don't know when memberships or hotel rooms will be available. I'll do my best to let you know in advance but don't count on me for this. We still, by the way, don't know where or when the 2013 WonderCon will be. I'm hoping for that town where Tony Bennett left his heart.

Here's another (brief) rave review for The Nutty Professor, which is trying-out in Nashville. The first one I linked to was from the website Broadway World and it was from a reviewer who, to put it nicely, likes an awful lot of things, especially if they contain strenuous dance routines. I'm told the New York Times sent a critic who'll soon be reporting on the production. At some point, the show will get a non-rave review and we'll probably see Jerry call a press conference to denounce the sick, troubled individual who just had to go piss on the dreams and hard work of the show's beloved cast and crew.

Obama biographer David Maraniss discusses the silly twisting of facts that Obama detractors have engaged in to claim that the president was Kenyan-born or Muslim-sworn.

Leonard Maltin writes of the late Tony Martin. That man had a helluva career.

Hey, here's something I'll bet most folks don't know. You may recall Mr. Martin in the Marx Brothers movie, The Big Store. He sang a song called "The Tenement Symphony," a treacly ode to mixed ethnicities and the glories of squalid living.

In the final shooting script of Blazing Saddles, there was a scene where Bart (Cleavon Little) goes back to visit the guys on the work crew. They all crowd around him and marvel at the sight of a black man as sheriff. All that is in the finished movie.

What isn't is that suddenly, Tony Martin appears. He's dressed in a tux with a cowboy hat and he says — this is from memory, I don't know where my copy of the script is — "Don't you all see what this means? A tin star on a black man's chest. This is a tremendous step forward for all of us, whatever our heritage, working side by side to bring all of America together in a grand symphony of brotherhood."

And then he begins performing "The Tenement Symphony" with a full orchestra and gets about sixteen bars into it before the work crew boss comes in and shoots him or shoos him off or something.

The first time I met Mel Brooks, I asked him about the scene. He said it had never been filmed because they were unable to clear the rights to the song. In a way, I'm glad. If they had, my friends and I — knowing the number from the Marx Brothers movie and finding it hilarious even in that context — would still be in the floor of the Avco Theater in Westwood, laughing.

As Eliot Spitzer notes, Mitt Romney's tax proposal is pretty simple: Lower 'em on people with incomes over $200,000 and raise them on people with incomes under $200,000. And I'll bet you there'll be people who can't turn loose of the idea that Democrats raise taxes while Republicans lower them…and won't believe this proposal will do what all the non-partisan analysts say it'll do.

If you look back on this blog since its inception, you'll see frequent mentions of my pal, Bruce Reznick. I've known Bruce since high school (that was some time back in the previous century) and we had two things in common. One was that we were both younger than most of our classmates, having skipped a few grades. I'd skipped two and Bruce had, I think, skipped about eleven. He was the brightest guy I knew and has since gone on to a profession befitting someone who's a lot smarter than I am. Or you are, most likely.

The other thing we had in common was a fondness for good comedy writing as practiced by folks like…oh, like Bruce's father. I think I was the only kid at University High who was impressed that his dad was Sidney Reznick, one of the best in the business. (I also went to school for a time with Clyde Beatty, Junior. I was the only one of his peers who knew what Clyde Beatty, Senior was famous for.)

Sidney Reznick was one of the men who made others funny. Among those he made funny (or at least funnier) were Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, Steve Allen, Phil Silvers, Ed Wynn, Jackie Gleason, Henry Morgan…the list goes on and on. He even once put words into the mouth of Hubert Humphrey. I always enjoyed it when Bruce was in town and we could take his old man out to a deli and hear anecdotes. He was a delightful wit and he just left us a few days shy of what would have been his 93rd birthday. Here's a link to an obituary in Hollywood Reporter and here's my thank you to Bruce for sharing him with me.