Monthly Archives: April 2013

Did you see — of course you did — Rand Paul out there trying to woo the black vote by arguing that once upon a time, in a land far away, the Republican Party was good to and for Afro-Americans? Talk about underestimating voters. There's not a person in this country who would ally with any political party based on what some who were nominally of that party did decades ago. No one. I'm sure even Senator Paul could name lots of things the G.O.P. did in the past that would drive him from the party if they were examples of its current policies. I don't think today's Republican Party is the same mob that elected Ronald Reagan, let alone the one that supported the Emancipation Proclamation. If that's the best argument they can make for themselves…

I'm going to keep a running list of Things Republicans Shouldn't Do. So far, I have…

1. Discuss rape, especially if they're male.
2. Attempt to lure black voters by going back to the previous century.

There will be more plus I may start one for the Democrats. The first item on it will probably be something about blaming the Iraq War solely on Republicans.

The memorial service for Roger Ebert was held yesterday in, appropriately enough, a movie theater in Chicago. At the moment, you can watch the three-hour ceremony online on this page. These kinds of things have a way of disappearing from the Internet before long so if you want to see it, go see it.

We keep hearing about big cuts in military spending. So what are they? According to Fred Kaplan, darn near nothing is on the cutting block.

The show we now know as Saturday Night Live was actually called NBC Saturday Night when it first debuted. As I explained here, they couldn't use the former name because there was then, in 1975, a prime-time ABC series called Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. It was an attempt to replicate the appeal of The Ed Sullivan Show, turning the verbose sportscaster into a variety host — or trying to. Three things, I thought, went wrong with the program…

1. They didn't get very thrilling acts. Or at least they didn't seem thrilling in that context.
2. The show aired on the wrong night. Ed's show was perfect for Sunday evening when a lot of families gathered for dinner. After the dishes were cleared away, the whole clan could retire to the living room and watch The Ed Sullivan Show, configured as it was with performers for every age — a bear act for the kids, an old pro singer for the adults, Alan King and/or Myron Cohen for any Jews who might be watching, a teen heartthrob singer for the teens, etc. Families weren't congregating much in front of the TV together by '75 — that's a big reason why Ed went off in '71 — and they never did that on Saturday.
3. And Howard Cosell really only did two things well. He was a pretty decent sportscaster. He could be "the man you love to hate" with his obnoxious, snotty remarks and gin up controversy. This show called on him to do neither of those things he did well.

One of these days, I'll relate the tale of an encounter I had with Mr. Cosell. Right now, you just need to know that his Saturday Night Live went on in September of 1975 and it was gone before the end of the following January. This clip from it features one of my heroes…the master magician, Mark Wilson, performing here with his wife and son. A lot of guys my age got interested in magic in the sixties because Wilson made it seem to so cool. And even more got into it because they yearned for a wife/assistant who looked as good as the lovely Nani Darnell…

You know how sometimes you're standing in a line and it makes you feel oddly better if others come and line up behind you? You're just as far from the front as you'd be if they weren't there but somehow, it's comforting that you're no longer at the end. There are times when it's also comforting to have more people ahead of you.

I got into comic books in 1970, a date which seems like months ago — sometimes, weeks ago — to me. The musician Eubie Blake used to ask, "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?" I think I'd be around 28…around enough to learn some stuff, including how much I didn't know…but still a kid with a long way to travel. I'm really 61 and unable to process the hard fact that I'm now almost ten years older than Jack Kirby was when I met him in 1969.

Last year at WonderCon, I stunned my friends Marv Wolfman and Len Wein with a realization. There were 40,000 people there and the three people who'd been in the comic book industry the longest were the three of us. As far as I know, no one who set foot in that hall that year had worked in comics before we did. This year, there were a few who had. Russ Heath was there. And Jim Steranko. And Neal Adams. And I heard Stan Lee slipped in for one panel…but I think that was it. This year, there'll be 130,000+ people at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. I'll be surprised if there are ten people in that convention center who were in comics before I was.

People keep asking me, "Why don't you have those great Golden Age Panels anymore?" Well, I didn't do the math on it last year but the year before, insofar as I could tell, there were only three people at the convention who'd been in comics before Kennedy was shot. They were Stan Lee, Ramona Fradon and Jerry Robinson. Jerry's since passed away and Stan won't do panels about "the old days." So that's why no Golden Age Panel. That year, we couldn't have done a Silver Age Panel, either.

Someone called and asked me the other day who's still with us who drew Superman in the forties. I think that would be Al Plastino, who started in 1948. In the history of the Man of Steel, the next person to draw him professionally who's still alive would probably be Neal Adams who started doing covers in 1967. For Batman? Well, with the passing of Carmine Infantino, I think the honor goes to Joe Giella, who began inking Infantino's Batman stories in 1964 and later pencilled the Batman newspaper strip and a few stories. Next in line is, again, Neal Adams.

Those of you who are around my age may remember Neal Adams as "the new guy in comics."

There are still people around who were in comics in the forties — by my count, about fifteen — but they don't get to conventions much. Happily, the guy I believe holds the record for the longest career in comics of anyone alive is still drawing the occasional comic book. That would be Sam Glanzman, who started in 1939 and recently did some new "U.S.S. Stevens" stories based on his World War II memories. He's one of the few people left in our field who has any.

I mention all this not to be morose. We need to be reminded to celebrate the ones we can while we can and I'm delighted to hear that Joe Sinnott will be out for San Diego. Joe began working in comics in 1950. If you make it to the con, don't miss the chance to tell him what his work has meant to us.

Stop e-mailing me to ask when my Larry Storch obit will be up. The man isn't dead. Yes, I know it's being reported on the Internet. As hard as this may be to believe, people on the Internet occasionally get things wrong. In fact, they get them so wrong that the friggin' National Enquirer has to correct them!

Here's a little number from one of the best Broadway-type voices out there today, Idina Menzel…

From a friend on the "inside"…

You're right that [Letterman's] not dancing a jig that Leno's going off next February. It puts the spotlight on him to now begin making a graceful exit or justify why he's staying on and not letting CBS which has been so good to him, begin breaking in a new and younger host. Also I don't think this is likely but what if he starts getting clobbered by the two Jimmys and has to go out in third place? He'll wish he'd left when Jay did.

Leno going off means Dave will never have the triumph of finally beating Leno once again. No one thought that was ever that likely but it was also far from impossible. Jay hasn't been beating him by that much.

As you said, Dave doesn't have anything professionally he wants to do after he leaves his current show. He likes appearing in front of an audience as long as every single aspect of the appearance is under his control. He's God up on that stage for an hour a night and that's the only way he's happy. I always thought he envied Leno's ability to go anywhere and be happy entertaining any audience on any stage. His big trouble with retirement is that he loves that office and that building and having a staff and being able to get away from his house for the day. To have all that, he needs to have a show.

[Les] Moonves remaining in charge at CBS is a pretty safe assumption but I'm not sure Dave can stay on as long as he wants. That was the deal for him being as cooperative as he's been all those years there. He must have a certain sympathy for Leno who was promised all sorts of things by NBC and then different men in suits came by and reneged on what their predecessors had promised. One of these days though even Moonves may have to tell him nicely it's time to start on an exit strategy.

I agree with you his replacement won't be Ferguson. Everyone seems to be saying it should be Colbert. That means it won't be. I read someone say NBC might try and grab Colbert for Fallon's old slot. That will never happen. I'm not sure it will be Seth Meyers but it will definitely be someone who owes their career to Lorne. Lorne doesn't like the whole idea of anyone achieving comedy stardom without owing their career to him and Colbert is already a star without that.

re: Leno on Fox. You're right it's possible but not likely. The argument for it is that if they're ever going to open up that time slot for a talk show, this is the only chance they'll ever have to launch it with someone with a 20 yr. track record of success in that area. The argument against is that it's an investment of years and years in a guy in his sixties and it means dumping the reruns that are working well as counterprogramming. Our mutual friend [name redacted] thinks that it would be a bad marriage because Leno would want to do jokes in his monologue slamming Republicans and positions that Rupert Murdoch is pushing. He'll overlook that from Bart Simpson but not from Leno.

We agree on Kimmel whose show is awful. He's the penalty that Dave and Jay are paying for letting their shows get so predictable and formula. There was room in that time slot for anyone with a whole new act. Fallon will do better than Kimmel for the same reason Leno did better than Letterman. Bedtime is an hour to spend with people you like and people just like Fallon a lot more than Kimmel.

I don't know about Conan. He's got to be wondering what would have happened if he'd taken the offer to do Tonight after a half hour of Leno. The main reason he said no was that he and his people were sure Leno would never leave again until they carried him out feet first.

I don't think they would have considered putting Conan back to 11:35. The most likely result of him being moved to 12:05 would have been being bumped later back to 12:35 or fired with a less lucrative settlement than he got…and then having less "heat" when he went looking for his next job. Fox was interested in him when he was the guy who walked off The Tonight Show and even then, they couldn't put that deal together. They'd have been a lot less interested in him after he'd been fired or demoted from that later slot.

It's impossible to predict what Leno will do, especially since we have no idea when he'll be contractually free to negotiate with suitors. That probably means he doesn't know and is waiting to see what kinds of offers he gets. Well, actually, we can predict one thing with great certainty: An awful lot of well-compensated stand-up bookings. That's what he always does when he has free time.

I get asked a lot what Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were like. They were two fascinating men who — and I'm not saying this was good or bad because it was a little of each — were devoted to always working, always selling, always having new shows in production. This short interview done in 1990, just before the studio began to unravel somewhat, will show you a bit of the Bill and Joe I worked with, though both men had slowed down somewhat since my days in the studio — Joe, especially.

They rarely socialized and at work, they didn't have that much to do with each other. Joe was in charge of selling the shows and his part of the building took the process as far as writing the scripts and recording the voices. Bill was in charge of taking it from there and seeing that the shows got animated and painted and photographed and so on. Bill's office was about as far from Joe's as it could be and still be in the same structure. Joe usually talked to me about scripts and characters. Bill usually talked to me about schedules and budgets.

I have hundreds of opinions about them and what they did to and for the animation business and I've been known to argue with myself about many of them. I loved (and still love) their early shows. I didn't like a lot of the later ones, including some I worked on, but will at times insist that the system then in place was more to blame than the people. Then again, the people often gave in too quickly to the system. I was very glad that I worked for that studio and very glad that I got out when I did.

Here's that interview with Bill and Joe. Notice how they keep plugging what they have coming up next. That was the norm at H-B. The next show would always be the terrific one. And note their reactions when the interviewer asks them if The Flintstones was derived from The Honeymooners. This was not the first time they'd been asked that question…

That's right: Another post about this. Sometimes, a topic is just on my mind in a way that I have to write about it so I can move my brain over to thinking about something else.

My last post on Gay Marriage brought a number of private responses, including some long and thoughtful ones I'm not going to post because they agreed with me. Here's most of one that didn't — from a gentleman who asked I withhold his name. I'm going to interrupt a few times and respond…

I continue to enjoy your excellent, well-written blog even when I don't agree with you. I just read your "Tuesday Morning" post addressing Rep. Tim Heulskamp's comments on gay marriage. Unless I misunderstood you, you seemed to be saying basically that conservatives are hypocrites because they are just hunky-dory-fine with divorce, single parents, and gay adoption, but when it comes to gay marriage we suddenly have a problem. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It's not so much a matter of being "hunky-dory-fine" with any of this. No one is saying you have to be delighted with the concept of Gay Marriage. It's a question of what you think is so potentially damaging to society and mankind that there must be government action to stop it. "Hypocrite" is your word, not mine. I'm just looking at an argument that strikes me as illogical and inconsistent.

I keep reading how horrible it is that kids not have two loving, mixed-sex parents and thus we must prevent my friends Mike and Geoff from getting married just in case one of those two men suddenly gives birth…or something. That does not make a lot of sense to me. Gay marriages rarely involve children, especially in states where Gay Adoption is not permitted. Straight marriages usually do have offspring, especially in the idealized configuration preferred by most of those opposed to Gay Marriage. Someone — you, anyone — please explain to me why you so want the government to forbid the union of two same-sex folks (a union that rarely puts kids in that position) but do pretty much nothing about the epidemic dissolution of the unions of opposite-sex folks (unions which often do involve children). I'm also guessing you don't like the situation where a woman decides to have a child without getting married. Why is there no serious legislation proposed to discourage, let alone forbid that? It too creates the situation where a child is being reared without a male parent and a female one…and it creates it a lot more often than allowing Mike and Geoff to marry.

Back to you…

My wife was raised by a single mother after her father abandoned the family when she was just a toddler. She will be the first to tell you that even in her mid-thirties she still bears deep scars and hurts from her parents' long-standing separation and the lack of a father figure to shape and guide her growing up. Recently one of my best friends went through a divorce and his children were devastated. Yes you can quote scientific research saying that kids without a mom and a dad "get along fine", but I think deep down you know that's not the case.

It isn't and I didn't mean to suggest it was. Kids are better off when they come from a loving, safe environment and two good parents are better than one. Unfortunately, that is not always an option. There are bad marriages. There are sometimes bad people in marriages. A former lady friend of mine came from a family where the father had a tendency to drink, strike his wife and make sexual moves on his step-children. The parents divorced and my friend was better off being raised by her mother only as a single parent. She has scars because her folks didn't separate sooner. One reason we have divorce in this country is so that marriages that go that way can be dissolved for the good of everyone involved, including the children.

I do not disagree with you about the ideal. I believe I had the ideal and I wish every child in America could have parents as good as mine were. I also realize that is not possible and we have to deal with the realities before us…and it is possible for kids to "get along fine" with a parental situation that is less than ideal. In a nation with this high a divorce rate, it would have to be possible.

Your turn again…

Most conservatives genuinely mourn over the widespread wreckage and devastation that's been plaguing our country largely due to the breakdown of the traditional family and the "I'll do whatever I want" attitude when it comes to sex.

And yet, a lot of them — the overwhelming majority, I'd bet — were quite prepared to vote for Newt Gingrich over a man with what from all appearances is a very happy, healthy marriage with two beautiful daughters.

In the Bible God said, "I hate divorce", and most of us do too. To us gay marriage is just society taking another long step farther away from the God-given ideal of a loving, committed, monogamous man and woman whose complimentary roles help make the family stronger, and many of us wish more politicians would take a stand to help protect the institution of the family on all fronts, instead of watching it continue to crumble.

God may hate divorce but He sure makes a lot of them. Frankly, I think divorce is kind of a necessary evil in a world where lots of folks (the majority, some stats tell us) marry someone and then want desperately out…and often don't find the ideal mate until the second or third try. Ronald Reagan, who all my conservative friends seem to think walked on H2O, seems to have required a second shot at it. A very few of you might not have voted for Newt because of his dysfunctional marital history. Every single one of you would vote today for Reagan and point to his marriage to Nancy as an ideal, never mind anything any of their kids did.

I personally don't buy the premise that child-yielding monogamous relations have to be the ideal for everyone. In fact, I think a leading cause of divorce is that some feel pressured into that configuration before they're ready for it or in spite of the fact that they may never be ready for it.

Ultimately though, the problem with your argument is simply that there are gay people in this world and they cannot fit into your template. Mike and Geoff are just not going to abandon 20+ years of love and commitment to one another and go father children with women so they can conform to your ideal. That's off the menu for them. I frankly don't see that any argument that touches on procreation (or since they have no desire to adopt, child rearing) has anything to do with their lives. More and more, Americans are realizing that…which is why I expect to see Mike and Geoff married before long. They aren't a threat to your ideal. They're actually trying to get as close to it as biology will allow.

Today only! Amazon has the Looney Tunes Golden Collection, which gives you over 350 classic Warner Brothers cartoons, for $65.00. If you buy it, please don't write to me to complain that your favorite wasn't included and how dare they? Just enjoy the cartoons and all the special features and commentary tracks and other goodies. Here's your link and if you click on it, thank Vince Waldron, who alerted me to this delightful deal.

The great songsmith Tom Lehrer is 85 years old and the BBC is saluting him with a radio documentary on his life 'n' times 'n' tunes. You can listen online for only a few more days. So don't dawdle.

I've had several e-mails from folks waiting eagerly for my great Annette Funicello anecdotes. Wish I had one for you. I never met Ms. Funicello. I never heard much about Ms. Funicello. I never even had a crush on Ms. Funicello, perhaps because she was a bit too old for me. I admired her work and accomplishments but so did we all. Sorry I can't offer more than that.

This also applies, by the way, to Margaret Thatcher.