Monthly Archives: August 2014

I know I've said most of this before but (happily) Freberg keeps on having birthdays so I want to wish him more. Stan Freberg was and still is a master at doing voices for cartoons, recording hilarious and best-selling satirical records, producing brilliant funny commercials, writing books and articles, and raising the bar as one of the cleverest minds in the world of entertainment. I am far from the only person who writes silly things for a living who counts him as a major inspiration.

I discovered his records via Soupy Sales. I'd watch Soupy every day. Every day, Soupy would have his puppets mime to some comedy record. Many days, it would be a record by Stan Freberg. Soupy shaped my sense of humor a little. Stan shaped it a lot.

He intersected with most of the things I loved as a kid. He was the other voice, the guy who wasn't Mel Blanc in a ton of Warner Brothers cartoons. He and the brilliant Daws Butler were Beany and Cecil and everyone else on Time for Beany. He was involved with the early MAD magazine. He was in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. And then there were those records of his, which I played often enough to now have a permanent library of every word of them lodged somewhere in my brain.

Every so often when I'm with him, he challenges me to recite the words from one of them. I have never failed this challenge.

But like I said before, I've said most of this before. So I'll just wish him and his wonderful wife Hunter a Happy Freberg Day and warn you that I'll probably say most of the same things next Freberg Day and the one after that and the one after that…

This time out, I'm going to tell the story of two of the best laughs I ever got in my life, one at age ten and one at twelve. They were both with the same joke and the person who laughed at it twice was my Uncle Aaron. He was a nice man — my father's sister's husband — who looked enough like Art Carney to be occasionally mistaken for him.

One time when we went to a crowded restaurant with him and Aunt Dot, we were surprised to be seated immediately, ahead of many other parties. As he passed out the menus to us, the host told Uncle Aaron how much he loved him on The Honeymooners. Uncle Aaron, who was afraid they'd rescind our preferential seating, said, "Thank you. I love working with Jackie Gleason."

As I've mentioned here, he sold window displays. If you had a small business, you could peruse his catalog and order little, relatively-inexpensive creations of wood, styrofoam and cloth to jazz up your store or front window. He offered low cost displays for all holidays and occasions. As Halloween approached, he sold a lot of witches and ghosts. As Thanksgiving neared, he sold turkeys and pilgrims. Christmas accounted for around 50% of his annual sales.

The displays were manufactured by a company in Japan and much of Uncle Aaron's life revolved around "The Japanese." He never spoke of his suppliers by name unless, I suppose, he was meeting with them, here or there. When he wasn't, it was "The Japanese are giving me trouble again" or "The Japanese overcharged me on that last shipment" or "The Japanese will be in town next week."

Even as a child, it struck me as bizarre to refer to his associates that way. He'd say, "The Japanese will be visiting my apartment on Saturday" and I'd say, "Really, Uncle Aaron? All of them?" And he never got it. He'd say, "Of course. The Japanese will be in town all next week. I'm taking them all to lunch on Monday." There was nothing racist about it. It was just shorthand. In the same way, he'd turn to his secretary and say, "Get Chicago on the phone!" and I'd think to myself, "Really? You're going to talk to the entire city?"

The displays were also designed in Japan, often from little sketches Uncle Aaron would doodle out and mail to them. He wasn't much of an artist but he'd draw a crude, almost-stick-figure snowman sunning himself under a cruder palm tree and then "The Japanese" would figure out what he had in mind and build it. A few times, he let me do the sketches and even at age 10, I was better than he was.

He had an office/warehouse down on Beverly Boulevard in what was then largely a Hispanic neighborhood but is now trending Korean. Once every few months, I'd spend the afternoon there. He'd assign me my own desk and I'd sit and draw or sit and read. Sometimes, Uncle Aaron would let me stuff catalogs into envelopes. Then he'd ridiculously overpay me for about an hour of work and I'd spend it all on comic books.

One day, "The Japanese" presented Uncle Aaron with a proposition. His supplier over there had acquired interest in a firm that could make full-sized mannequins for an absurdly low price. I do not remember the exact numbers but they went something like this. The top department stores were paying $100 and up for the kind of mannequin you dress in the clothes you're selling and place in your store window or on the floor. Via this new connection, Uncle Aaron could sell mannequins of the same size for $29.95 and still make a nice profit on each one.

"The Japanese" proposed a partnership arrangement whereby he would advertise and sell them in America. He made the deal which meant expanding his business considerably. Fortunately, the store next door to his office was for rent so it became the warehouse and shipping center for the mannequin side of his business. There was a considerable expenditure in setting up that store, staffing it and especially in advertising and mailings but he saw it as a great investment. And indeed, orders were soon rolling in and mannequins were arriving from Japan for him to repackage and ship to buyers.

You have probably seen a horror movie or suspense drama where someone is trapped in a warehouse full of mannequins. They walk nervously through it with eerie lighting and eerier music setting the mood. They glance from face to face, from silhouette to silhouette with the mounting terror that one or more of those mannequins might just be…alive?

Well, I got to play in just such a warehouse.

I have this odd memory of being alone in the warehouse at least once. I don't recall the circumstances that led to me being alone in there and probably it was for a matter of minutes as opposed to the hour or two I recall. But in the memory, I am ten and I'm wandering around amidst hundreds of nude, genital-less mannequins, females outnumbering males by about two to one. At that age, I was still trying to get clear on what women actually had under their clothing and nothing I saw there was any help. The whole thing was, like I said, odd.

It was not scary like in the movies because it lacked the ominous music and lighting…but it was odd. At one point, I turned to them and said aloud, "Okay, you can knock it off, guys. Move!" When they didn't move, I felt safer.

Mannequins today are, like everything else except tattoos and Joan Rivers, sexier. Female mannequins now look very much like the women in Playboy, which is partly a function of more realistic eyes and hair and makeup and a greater suggestion of reproductive organs on the mannequins. It's also partly a function of the women in Playboy looking more and more like they were sculpted out of papier-mâché. The mannequins in Uncle Aaron's warehouse were designed to be as non-offensive (i.e., non-sexy) as possible.

That was true of the ones on the north side of the warehouse, which were the ones that were all assembled, mostly for display purposes for when potential buyers came around. Less sexy were the ones on the west side of the warehouse. These were the ones in pieces, newly-arrived from Japan, which were to be shipped to buyers for assembly. Each of them was in nine parts — head, a two-part torso plus pairs of arms, hands and legs. Being low-cost mannequins, they had limited posing possibilities…but what did you want for $29.95?

Well, you might have wanted something sturdier. On the south side of the warehouse were the broken ones. What turned out to be an unacceptable percentage of them arrived from Japan in unsellable condition. The secret of the $29.95 price tag was that they were made with cheap material from cheap molds by poorly-paid employees and then were shipped over with inadequate packaging.

When a shipment of mannequins arrived from their maker, one would be missing a hand, one would have a leg that was busted, one would have a defective arm that wouldn't lock into place, etc. Uncle Aaron found he had to have his staff inspect and try assembling each one. Then they'd cannibalize, taking the head from this one and the arm from that one to turn three busted ones into one whole one. He would soon get into a lawsuit with "The Japanese" over this. They'd bill him, say, for one hundred mannequins. He'd pay for the seventy-one out of a hundred he considered complete. They finally sued him and in a counter suit, he charged that the product they were delivering to him was inferior to the samples he'd been shown when he agreed to the joint venture.

There were also many returns from buyers of mannequins that didn't live through their 90-day guarantee. The flesh-coloring would flake off or fingers would break or the torso would implode from the slightest bump. The metal fittings whereby one part locked to another would snap off and be unrepairable.

The mannequins may have had a 90-day guarantee but Uncle Aaron's new business didn't. In less than three months, he realized he was in trouble and for a simple reason: He was being delivered, and was therefore delivering to his customers, an inferior, shoddy product. That doesn't always put you out of business in this world but it did in Uncle Aaron's case.

Before long, it was all in the hands of lawyers. Eventually, there was a settlement and I never heard the terms but Uncle Aaron did refer to it as — and I quote: "A very expensive lesson." I wish some companies today would learn it.

My almost-final memory of Uncle Aaron's mannequin venture was the last day I spent in his office, watching and helping a bit as he and his few remaining employees packed to vacate the premises. He was leaving the mannequin biz behind and moving what was left of the window display operation to new quarters a few miles away. As he packed, he quoted to me what he said was an Old Jewish Curse. It went as follows: "May you have partners."

Uncle Aaron, by the way, was an Old Jew and he knew how to curse.

As he put the lid on one box, he asked me to give him a hand. My comedy impulses were starting to kick in at that age so I ran into the adjoining warehouse, came back with the hand (only) of one of the mannequins and gave it to him. He looked at it for a second, puzzled. Then he "got it" and began laughing uproariously.

It was one of those laughs that just went on and on. Tears — the good kind — came to his eyes and then he hugged me and said, "This whole business venture has been such a nightmare. But this almost makes it worth it." I didn't believe that but I was real happy I could do anything good for my Uncle Aaron. Real happy. A little later, he let me pack up a box of pads and pencils and other office supplies he wouldn't be needing so I could take them home. When he wasn't looking, I put a few of those stray mannequin hands into the box. Just in case.

This all happened in 1962. A few months later, and I'm not suggesting a connection, Uncle Aaron got sick and he underwent a series of operations. The first was certain to solve the problem but it didn't so he had the second one which was certain to solve the problem. It didn't so he had the third one which was certain to solve the problem, which led to the fourth one which was certain to solve the problem. By that point, even I knew how the problem would end and that it would not be long.

One day in 1964, my parents told me we were going to see Uncle Aaron in the hospital. They didn't say "This may be to say goodbye" but from their manner, I figured that part out. Since a visit to the hospital usually involved sitting around a waiting room for long periods, I packed a little bag of comic books and a pad of paper and my favorite doodling pen…and I took along something else. Just in case.

Uncle Aaron looked terrible there in the bed. The sheet didn't completely cover his chest and I could see terrible, ugly scars and stitching all over him. I tried to look at his face without looking at the scars but his face wasn't much more pleasant. You could see he was in pain — the physical kind and the emotional kind. The latter kind seemed to be worse.

We all talked for a little while and then I was sent out of the room so he could talk to my mother and father in private. I later learned he was asking them to take good care of the woman who would soon be his widow. And of course, they said yes.

Then he asked to have a moment alone with me. My mother and father went out and I went in. Uncle Aaron told me how proud he was of me and how he regretted he wouldn't be around to see what I would become but he was sure it would be impressive. He asked me to never forget about my Aunt Dot, the woman he loved so, and to do what I could to be of help to her, especially right after he was gone. The way he said it, I wondered if he expected this to happen within the hour.

It was all a lot for a child of twelve to hear and I remember thinking two things during it. One was to wonder if I should say something like, "You're not going anywhere. You'll be up and around in no time." I didn't believe that. I also knew he would never believe that. And I really knew that he would never believe I believed that. Still, I was thinking: Isn't that the kind of thing you're supposed to say in these situations?

I wasn't sure why but I decided not to say anything of the sort. Looking back, I suppose my instinct was that what he was telling me was very serious. This was perhaps the most serious moment of his life and if I'd said "Oh, you'll be fine," that would have been me not taking his seriousness seriously.

So I was thinking that and I was also thinking, "How can I get this man to ask me to give him a hand?" Because you know darn well what was in my bag with the comic books and the drawing pad.

As he finished his emotional plea to me to grow up right and to prosper and to care for Aunt Dot, he got a tad hoarse. On the table next to the bed, there was a little cup of club soda with a straw in it. He started to reach for it and I asked, "Do you need help?" and he said, "Yes, please, give me a hand!" I couldn't believe my luck.

I grabbed for my bag of stuff and out came the mannequin hand I'd brought. Uncle Aaron stared at it and began howling with laughter. Howling! I have never made anyone laugh like that in my life since then and I doubt I ever will again. My parents and a nurse came in to see what was happening. For a moment there, I thought maybe I'd harmed him somehow…perhaps hastened his demise. Then I thought, "No, he's not going to survive anyway. Maybe I've given him the chance to literally die laughing."

I thought he would have liked that. I know when I go, I'd like that.

He survived my joke, snickering and savoring it, and insisted on putting the mannequin hand on his bedside tray. That was the last time I ever saw him but Aunt Dot and one of his nurses both told me he couldn't look at it without laughing and feeling a little better. He died about two weeks after my visit.

Yeah, the hand thing was a silly joke but it wasn't bad for a kid that age…and it made 100% of its audience laugh, which is more than most jokes do.

When you're a kid, you can't do much to make your family happy. You can not get into trouble, and I almost never got into trouble, but you can't actually do anything. I was glad I could do something good for my Uncle Aaron. He did so many good things for me.

• Rupert Murdoch withdraws $80 billion offer for Time-Warner; decides to spend the money on one shopping spree at Whole Foods Market.

Several websites like this one are reporting that Craig Ferguson's replacement as host of CBS's Late, Late Show will be British star James Corden. I'm surprised even though I said here, "It…wouldn't surprise me if they went with someone who hasn't been mentioned on any of the 'Who'll Succeed Craig Ferguson?' lists. After all, Craig Ferguson wasn't on the 'Who'll Succeed Craig Kilborn?' lists."

The rumor mill, which has been wrong a lot about the filling of this vacancy, says that quite a few others were approached before they settled on Mr. Corden. This is, assuming they have settled on Mr. Corden. It doesn't feel official to me until Bill Carter announces it.

Speaking of Mr. Carter, who covers this beat for the New York Times, in an article about Stephen Colbert taking over Mr. Letterman's time slot, he had this to say…

CBS has not set a date yet for Mr. Letterman's exit, or Mr. Colbert's first night. But there will need to be a hiatus between the two — most likely for several months — as Mr. Colbert installs a new set to the theater and his staff moves in to old Letterman offices. The most likely plan is a farewell to Mr. Letterman at the end of May, with a September premiere for Mr. Colbert.

I am baffled by several things here, starting with the fact that Colbert leaves his Comedy Central show on December 17 of this year. Even if he starts on CBS on September 7, 2015 (the first Monday of that month), that would mean he'd be off regular television for 37 weeks. That's more than enough time to organize a new talk show and remodel the studio…but it's also more than enough time to lose a lot of one's popularity with the public and general momentum —

— especially if (and this leads us to another thing that baffles me) CBS fills the intervening 14 weeks with audience-losing filler programming. What is CBS going to put in that slot for all that time? Letterman reruns? Dave might not be leaving if there was more of an audience for Letterman reruns.

Getting back to James Corden, and still assuming it'll be James Corden, I have no opinion of how he'll do. I'll just say that he seems as unlikely a choice as Craig Ferguson was and Craig Ferguson worked out fine. Then again, he's also as unlikely a choice as Piers Morgan was to take over for Larry King…

This is an audio recording of a 2003 panel that ASIFA, the animation society, held to discuss the late, great Daws Butler. I have no idea why I wasn't there for it because I loved the guy and am still fascinated by him and his work. On the dais were June Foray and three voice actors who studied with Daws…Corey Burton, Joe Bevilacqua and Nancy Cartwright. Other students, including Earl Kress, chime in with their comments. As I've told many aspiring voice actors, it's too bad you can't study with Daws, but you can study Daws. He was the best — and a nicer, more generous-with-his-time-and-talents man you never knew…

It's the anniversary of Watergate with all sorts of rebroadcasts of that fun event. I've set my TiVo to record most of them, including a Dick Cavett special on PBS which I'm told is quite wonderful. C-Span is also rebroadcasting much of the hearings.

My friend Roger still refers to it as the time Democrats, for partisan reasons, drove a Republican president out of office. I think it's obviously a case of Republicans driving the guy out, lest he cripple the party for years to come. Keeping Nixon in the job was the gift that kept on giving to Democrats. They kept investigating the guy and finding more and more, winning over more of the nation. Why would they have wanted that to end, especially since it meant setting up a new president who could run as an incumbent in 1976?

It was Republicans who panicked because the issue of what had to be done about Richard M. Nixon was splitting their base. If I'd been a Republican congressperson or senator, I'd have been terrified of casting an ultimate vote on impeachment. If I'd voted with Nixon, I'd have lost half the Republican vote, as about half of all Republicans had decided Nixon was guilty of criminal actions and/or had become such a liability to the party that it was time to get rid of him. And if I'd voted against Nixon, I'd have lost the other half. The other half would have backed him if he'd started robbing liquor stores.

You cannot get elected in this country if you split your base…which is why a delegation of G.O.P. leaders went to the White House and told Nixon that Republicans in Congress would not stand allied behind him. Barry Goldwater, the man with the best credentials as a Republican, said he'd probably even vote against Nixon on at least one article of impeachment. Nixon knew that if he could no longer portray the whole investigation as a political witch hunt by the Dems, it was over. And so it was over.

I wonder how many of those calling for (or at least refusing to rule out) the impeachment of the current guy believe that would happen. I think most of them just know there are short-term advantages to telling certain constituents that they'll save America from the evil boogeyman they've made Obama out to be. But there are still people out there who think Obama committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors just by being elected and they're still trying to figure out how to make that sound more like actionable charges. I'm going to watch all those Nixon specials with that in mind.

In case you haven't guessed, it's another Mushroom Soup Monday here at newsfromme.com, meaning I'm busy writing cheese dip and/or lasagna jokes and haven't the time to update my blog with as much content as usual. Even this message is more than most people post on their blogs some weeks (hell, some months) so I feel not a dram of guilt. We will be back tomorrow in full force, probably with another long "family" remembrance. This one involved my Uncle Aaron and one of those warehouses full of old mannequins that you see in suspense movies. 'Til then…

My buddy Paul Harris discusses his encounters with Ted Nugent. I don't know Mr. Nugent and I'm not sure I've ever heard and/or enjoyed his music…but it strikes me that he has some bizarre views about guns and race and politics and — and the "and" is the big part — has discovered that voicing them is very, very good for business. I guess this puts him ahead of the people who only seem to be saying such things because it's good for business.

Sad to hear of the death of TV writer Rick Mittleman last Wednesday. Rick, who was 84, was walking his dog in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles and was killed in a traffic accident involving an S.U.V. One of his colleagues, Jack Mendelsohn, just told me about it and he was really depressed…as am I.

Rick was one of the most prolific TV writers of his day, able to write comedies, dramas, adventure shows…he even wrote for The Flintstones. His was one of those names I knew from credits on all my favorite programs, including The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Odd Couple, Get Smart, M*A*S*H, The Red Skelton Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, That Girl and so many others. In the late sixties, when I was sneaking up on a career in TV writing, I went to a bookstore in Hollywood to buy some produced scripts to use as models. I was amazed at how many of those scripts were by Rick Mittleman.

I met Rick through our mutual work with the Writers Guild of America. In the late seventies, the WGA was trying to find a way to wrest jurisdiction of animation writers from Local 839, the Animation Union. For long, circuitous reasons we who wrote cartoons were in a union that represented artists with whom we did not have much in common. 839 wanted to maintain jurisdiction over us because we paid the highest rate of dues and the withholding of our services was a good weapon if and when that union had to threaten to strike.

Taking a body of employees out of one union and allowing them to join another is called Craft Severance…and the tricky thing about that is that you can't file for it when there's a contract in place. Once the union signs its new contract with Management, there's this thing called a "contract bar" that guarantees the employees represented will not leave the bargaining unit.

Rick had written both live-action (under the WGA) and animation (under 839) and he knew how badly the Animation Union represented the needs of its writer members. The Union still has control of writers at some studios and it does a better job of representing them now. But back then, the gent who was 839's Business Agent and negotiator was unabashedly hostile to writers. He even told some of us that if it had been up to him, he would have lowered our pay. Even after Rick stopped writing animation and had no self-interest, he campaigned to try and get us out of that union and therefore away from that Business Agent.

In 1979, it was necessary for the Animation Union to go on strike. It was Rick who realized that while we were on strike, no contract bar was in place. I don't recall if he was on the WGA Board of Directors then — he was, from time to time — but he got them to quickly file a lawsuit demanding Craft Severance. At the time, I was writing both animation and live-action so I was selected as the writer in whose name the suit would be filed, which was fine with me.

The suit did not succeed. Craft severance is very difficult to achieve and it's even harder when…the National Labor Relations Board is full of Republican appointees, as it was then so soon after Nixon. Also, management — in this case, the studios like Disney and Hanna-Barbera — was working closely with the union to keep us in the union. That should give you some idea of how poorly the union represented our concerns then. 839 wasn't just in bed with the producers, it was gleefully subservient in a committed S&M relationship. (And I will remind you again that this is no longer the case under its current Business Agent, who is a good guy.)

Before we reached that outcome, we spent a lot of time in hearing rooms at the N.L.R.B. and what struck me was that Rick was in there, devoting his time and fighting along with the rest of us. He was not writing animation at the time and was so successful in live-action that he could easily have avoided that kind of work the rest of his life. It was a matter of principle and justice to him…and that's when I realized that in addition to being a fine, fine writer, Rick Mittleman was also a fine, fine gentleman.

Stephen Colbert, not in character, gives advice to teenage girls. I'm not sure why Stephen Colbert's advice to teenage girls is any better than that of a random male of his age chosen off the street but he is quite famous. And he does say some things you might find interesting…

It looks like plans to expand the Convention Center in San Diego may have hit a little snag. I'll bet they find a way to work around this.

If you find yourself in one of those debates about whether the con will stay in San Diego, this may be of some interest. It's a list of every event that has inhabited that convention center for the last eighteen months and the estimated attendance. Comic-Con International is pegged at a turnout of 130,000 both times it's listed but what struck me was that nothing else was even close. I think the largest event after us is something called the Rock N Roll Marathon Health & Fitness Expo, which had 60,000 attendees — less than half of what Comic-Con draws — in each of its two stagings. Almost everything else is under 15,000.

So why are they talking about expanding that convention center? For us. They don't need the added room to attract the Western Car Wash Show and its 2,000 folks who are in, I suppose, the car-washing business. They need it, or feel they need it, to keep Comic-Con in San Diego.

(I wonder if, when you pay to attend the Western Car Wash Show, you can also purchase a car deodorizer, a giant-size Mountain Dew and a bag of Funyuns.)

Meanwhile: Several folks (starting with John Heaton) have written to inform me that the photo I posted of the Cookie Monster Imperial Stormtrooper was taken by a Flickr user called mooshuu. Here are a lot of his or her other photos of the convention.

Jamie Coville has posted a nice array of photos from the con and audio recordings of panels, including a couple of mine. The Bill Finger panels will be of particular interest to some.

Lastly: I am in charge of three of the most popular events at Comic-Con each year — Quick Draw!, the Saturday Cartoon Voices panel and the Sunday Cartoon Voices panel. For some odd reason, there's a debate going on over at one message board about who selects the people who appear on these panels. Simple answer: I do. I may consult with others but it's always been my decision.

The decisions are made at least six weeks before the convention and sometimes well before that. The convention program guide, after all, has to go to press long before the con commences. Still, this year, I had a lot of people who contacted me in the week before the con and either asked to be on one of these panels or, in one case, told me they were going to be on it. That was an interesting conversation but I managed to convince him that, no, he couldn't just insist on participating.

Then I had a couple of folks who showed up just before each of my two big events on Saturday — and I mean like two minutes before — and tried to talk their way into spots on the stage. I don't know what they were thinking. I do know what I was thinking and it wasn't flattering.

I actually do not need applicants for Quick Draw! I have more than a half-dozen people I've promised the third seat to, and one of them will do it next year and another will do it the year after and so on. Also, the Cartoon Voices panels for next year may be already close to full. I hate saying no to people so I'm posting this in the hope that fewer people will ask me, thereby forcing me to say no. Which, like I said, I hate doing.

Woody Allen's first-ever podcast interview! It's 35 minutes and it's mostly about his new movie…

Lenar Whitney, a Louisiana state representative running for Congress, has a video up in which she declares "Global warming is a hoax." You can see it at this page where you can also see the Politifact people explain, point by point, why she's wrong.

You know, I used to take a view of Global Warming that went roughly like this: "I hope the scientists who say it's so are all wrong but I don't think we can afford to take that chance and we need to act as if it's true." I thought that was a good way to look at it. I was acknowledging that I'm not a climate scientist or anything of the sort but that I believed the consensus among such folks was so overwhelming that we had to assume it was so. Sometimes in discussions, I'd parenthetically add that a lot of things that have been proposed to combat Global Warming — mostly involving limiting pollutants — seem like good ideas anyway.

Well, no one else thought this was a good way to look it. The debate has gotten so polarized that you kind of have to say, "Yes, Global Warming is real" or "No, Global Warming is a hoax" and there's no room for nuance…so I've given up nuance. Yeah, I think it's real. And I haven't heard anyone who feels otherwise for a reason deeper than that they hate the notion that Al Gore and "The Liberals" might be right.

On Saturday on my way to Quick Draw!, I passed this gent dressed in a Cookie Monster/Star Wars mash-up and thought he was very funny. Then on my way up the escalator to the top floor, I suddenly thought it would be funny to bring him into Quick Draw! and have the panel draw other variations on that mash-up. So I ran back downstairs, found him and invited him to come up for the event later. He never showed up so we did the premise anyway…and he missed out on all that attention, plus I'd sent my assistant out to get him a cookie.

Several folks sent me this photo of him which is apparently on several different sites at the moment. I don't know where it originated so I can't ask permission from the photographer but if it's you, please let me know if it's okay to leave it up here and let me give you credit.

Then on Sunday when I walked into one of my panel rooms, there was the real Cookie Monster. But I've already told that story.

Sunday was my favorite day of the con. As I mentioned, it started with the Jack Kirby Tribute Panel and then we had what was probably the best Cartoon Voices panel we ever did…including the last-ever performance of that "Snow White" script that panel attendees are sick of. Here's a decent video of the panel which featured, left to right, Gregg Berger, Vanessa Marshall, Fred Tatasciore, Debra Wilson, Robin Atkin Downes and surprise (to him) guest, Bill Farmer…

Then we did a panel called Cover Story: Art of the Cover. It's an annual thing I host in which artists discuss designing covers for comic books and this time, we had Amanda Conner, Fiona Staples, Mark Brooks, Jae Lee and Stan Sakai. A lot of folks seem to love the "shop talk" aspect of it. (Note to Self: Next year, either get the con to make this panel longer or have one less artist on it so we can go even more in-depth.)

My final panel of the convention was one called The Business of Cartoon Voices. Let me tell you two quick stories as to how this panel came about…

QUICK STORY #1: Many moons ago, I hosted the first-ever panel at Comic-Con with cartoon voice actors. Now, they're all over the place but back in whatever year that was, I got the con to give me a small room and I got a bunch of such people to come down and demonstrate their craft. Within a few years, we were turning away so many attendees that they moved us into the biggest room they had and because of how easily we filled that hall, we added a second Cartoon Voice panel — one on Saturday, one on Sunday.

For a while, we took questions from the audience but I finally decided not to do that. The questions were almost all about how to get into the profession and they warranted longer, more detailed answers than time allowed. The questioners also had a tendency to audition as they were asking their questions and it was obvious that most of the audience didn't want to hear that. People would start walking out the moment I said, "Let's take some questions from the audience." So I decided to stop saying that and to think maybe there should be a separate panel focusing on how to get into the business.

QUICK STORY #2 and this may not be so quick: There are an awful lot of people out there, mostly young, who want a career in voicing cartoons. By "an awful lot," I mean way more than the business can handle. Even if every one of them had the skills of a Daws Butler or June Foray, there could not possibly be enough work for them all. It's simple math. Not everyone who wants to pitch for the Dodgers will get that opportunity either.

Since there are so many people who want in, there's a thriving industry out there to coach and teach these folks. In Los Angeles alone, there are somewhere between 100 and 300 classes or private coaches and many of them are very, very good. But some are not. Some are, to put it bluntly, ripping off eager wanna-bes and promising them that which can never be. If a teacher has any integrity at all, it begins with not accepting money from folks with no flair for the profession.

The late Daws Butler was, I think, the best teacher of voiceover skills ever. (He was also, I am prepared to argue, the best practitioner ever of his art but if you wanted to say it was Mel Blanc or Paul Frees or Frank Welker or someone else in that phylum, I wouldn't quarrel.) The very first thing Daws did was to turn down students who he believed lacked promise. You could not get into his class with money…and if he did allow you in, he did not take an excessive amount of it from you.

I keep hearing of cases where someone has done the opposite and that's why my friend, the also-late Earl Kress and I started this panel called The Business of Cartoon Voices. Earl was a student of Daws and he shared my anger at such cases. Here's a recent one…

A troubled woman, about my age, approached me at WonderCon and said she was desperate for advice. Her daughter, who's about 25, is studying with a Voice Coach. Her daughter dreams of being a Cartoon Voice performer and has no other dream in life. The mother, who loves her daughter, is shelling out large sums of cash to a Voice Coach who promises the young lady will have a luscious and lucrative career.

This has been going on for around eighteen months without the slightest hint of a job. When the mother asks, "Shouldn't she be getting auditions or an agent by now?" the V.C. says more lessons (i.e., more payments) are still necessary. The woman told me the amounts of the checks she has written and I was shocked. They pretty much amount to her life's savings. She said, "I don't know if I should keep paying him or find another teacher or what." She is clearly motivated by nothing more or less than to help her daughter achieve her dream.

Much of the money she has paid out has been to make "demo" recordings of her daughter's work — the kind of recordings to which agents and casting directors listen. She gave me the most recent one and her phone number and I went home, listened and called her. While I hate to say that anyone could not possibly have a career in a dreamed-of field, I will say that Daws Butler would never have taken this woman's money in the first place.

This kind of predatory exploitation of burgeoning talent bothers the heck outta me. Earl and I talked about it years ago and we decided to start this panel to educate beginners and because we wouldn't feel good if we didn't do something like this. So I bring in agents (this year, Sandie Schnarr of AVO and Cathey Lizzio of CESD) and actors (this year, Gregg Berger, Vanessa Marshall and Bill Farmer) and we give the audience the basics. Some people have paid thousands of dollars just to learn what we dispense for free in ninety minutes. Sandie and Cathey are, by the way, two of the best voiceover agents in the business.

No, there's no audio or video of the panel available but in the coming weeks, I'm going to take some space on this blog to summarize what was said. For now, let me just say: If you want to get into voiceover work, be real careful about who you give your money to. There are great coaches and teachers out there. (Bill Farmer is one and Bob Bergen is another.)

So that was Sunday and that was Comic-Con 2014. I'll have more to say about the convention in the coming weeks. In fact, I'll probably be writing about it until it's time to prep for next year's…which, by the way, is earlier in the month than usual. Comic-Con International 2015 will convene on July 8 and run through July 12. It's barely worth my time to unpack.