Monthly Archives: March 2015

Sage advice — from that wisest of the wise, Cookie Monster…

This is a true item — and note that it doesn't say anything about how the couples have to be male/female…

Are you engaged and ready to tie the knot? If so, get ready for the biggest wedding ever! The Price is Right is taping a Mass Wedding Special on March 31st at the 8:30am show. You and your spouse-to-be will not only have a chance to win great prizes, but the ordained Drew Carey will also be marrying all the couples in the audience…All at once in a mass group wedding!

So grab your spouse-to-be and up to two wedding guests and "Come on Down!" (Guests must also be over 18 and will not be eligible to be a contestant. Guests do not need to be engaged to attend.) You must bring your California marriage documentation ready to be signed. Only California marriage licenses will be eligible. (You do not need to be a California resident to acquire a California marriage license.)

I just feel bad for the couple that is going to get their marriage off to a bad start by crapping out at Plinko…

Fred Kaplan doesn't think the re-election of Benjamin Netanyahu will be good for Israel. I have no opinion of any of this. I just think that anything short of total pessimism about any sort of lasting peace over there is baseless optimism.

I just saw this news item…

A Catholic cathedral in San Francisco installed a watering system in an attempt to soak homeless people who try to loiter and sleep near its doorways, radio station KCBS reported on Wednesday.

I'm so glad they're doing this because all that stuff about priests molesting children and the church covering it up didn't do quite enough damage to the faith. It is so in keeping with the teachings of Christ to treat the needy as an annoyance that needs to be shooed away like stray animals. Also, this will help Bill Maher in case he's short one "New Rule" for this Friday's show.

The number of Americans who claim No Religious Affiliation is higher than it's ever been and almost certain to get much higher. I don't necessarily believe this is a bad thing as long as everyone is free to choose their own church or lack thereof. I just think someone should realize that it isn't because folks say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" and it isn't because kids can't pray in schools. It's because of religions that are diminished by the human failings of their representatives.

In other news designed to diminish religion, Pastor Creflo Dollar of the World Changers Church International is telling his followers they need to donate more so he can buy a new $65 million private jet. His old one was getting a bit shabby and God, he says, wants him to have a new one.

It takes what my people call chutzpah to demand that the poor people who believe in you should ante up for something like this. Heck, it takes chutzpah just to name yourself Pastor Dollar.

Was there ever a more perfect bit of casting on a TV show than Don Adams as Special Agent Maxwell Smart in Get Smart? Well, would you believe he was not the first choice? This short video will tell you who was…

Several pundits are out there predicting that the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination is going to be a contest to convince those voters that you will expunge every last trace of the Obama presidency, reversing every executive order, overturning every bit of legislation passed and bombing everywhere he declined to bomb. I figure it's going to come down to a contest between the candidate who claims to have a time machine so he can go back in time and arrange for Obama to never have been born, and the one who'll insist he has a way to bring Bin Laden back to life so he can then be killed by a real American President.

The Emmy-winning thespian-for-animation Maurice LaMarche just wrote me about a list that's online called 20 Greatest Voice Actors compiled by a gentleman named Bill Treadway. I assume this is the same Bill Treadway who writes some smart political commentaries on the web so I'll just say as politely as I can that more than half the selections on his list don't make any sense to me. I'm not saying I disagree with his selections. It's that I don't see what his logic or reasoning is…oh, and some of those folks haven't done anywhere near as much as he apparently thinks they have.

Okay, so there's his opinion. Mine is that a list of great voice actors that omits Daws Butler, Don Messick and Frank Welker is like a list of great silent comedians that overlooks Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. Moe — that's what we call Maurice — wrote to me, "Mark, I think it's time for you to write a list that has some credibility." And it does say something about the list that a guy who was named on it as one of the 20 Greatest thinks it's lacking in credibility. I mean, put me on a list of the 20 Greatest Anything and I'll say you're a genius even if the other 19 choices are infectious diseases, human eyesores or Robert Durst.

So I'm going to whip up a list of some arbitrary number of Great Voice Actors…not today but within the next week or three. Or four or nine. Don't — repeat: don't — send me any suggestions because I want to do this myself and because I'm already wading through nominations here for the Bill Finger Award.

Also, before I even start coming up with names, I'm going to draw up some ground rules and criteria for myself…like I know I'm not going to include folks like Jim Henson and Frank Oz because I won't be doing a list of the 20 Greatest Puppeteers. Both men were brilliant but it's a different skill and if you're going to include them, why not Edgar Bergen and Shari Lewis and Paul Winchell and so on? I may just break it up into two lists — a golden age one and a modern one with 1968 as the dividing point. (There's a reason why 1968 and I'll explain it. The challenge of the job changed a lot that year.) Or the "current" list may take a different form so as to minimize the number of friends I lose. Watch this space.

An open letter to Stephen Colbert.

Today on Stu's Show, Stu Shostak's guest is Brian Levant, who's a director and sometimes a producer. From where do you know his name? Well, from the credits in these movies: Beethoven, The Flintstones, Jingle All The Way, Scooby Doo: The Mystery Begins!, Snow Dogs, The Spy Next Door and many others. He also worked on a lot of hit TV shows but Stu quizzed him about them on his last appearance on Stu's Show. Today, the story continues…the story of a very successful career for someone that everyone says is a real nice guy. They don't always say that about people in his position.

Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go way, way longer. Whenever a show ends, it's available soon after for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a measly 99 cents each and you can get four shows for the price of three. It's bargains like that which made Brian Levant wealthy.

Last week on this blog, we looked at the opening to the 1986 Emmy Awards where they marched out a parade of TV stars in a salute to their catch phrases. Due to an error during the live number, the wrong door was opened and we caught a fast glimpse of a man who didn't get to deliver his catch phrase, at least at that moment. I asked readers of this blog to help me figure who it was but before I get to that, I think I need to post one of these…

I received dozens and dozens of guesses and theories and after evaluating them all, I came to the conclusion that, yes, one celebrity who was supposed to be in the number didn't get to deliver his or her catch phrase…but it's not the one we catch a brief glimpse of on camera. The one we see behind the door is Bob Barker, who delivered his line later in the number. Donald Rooney was one of the folks who wrote in and convinced me…

Here's how I read it; see if it makes sense. The setup for the other doors is that the dancers arrive at the door in a medium shot, open it, and the actor/actress steps out in a tighter shot to deliver the line. Here's what I think happened with the botched door: the dancers arrive in the medium shot, the guy reaches for one door, backs away for some reason, then opens the door next to it. When they cut to the tighter shot, the camera is trained on that first un-opened door, and has to swing around to the door the dancer half-opened, which is the wrong door. The guy behind the wrong door — who looks like Bob Barker — doesn't step up to say his line because the dancer wasn't supposed to open that door. Later, when Bob Barker does step out and deliver his line, it does seem to be from the door the dancer half-opened by mistake.

I think it does. That, of course, leaves us wondering who was behind the door that didn't get opened. On this question, we're low on clues but Jeff Peterson found this article in the L.A. Times written by someone who didn't know how to spell Jack Paar's name…

A special "catch phrase" opening number featuring numerous television stars and their respective one-liners that have become part of the language added a touch of nostalgia to the 38th annual Emmy Awards telecast Sunday night on NBC.

Among the celebrities appearing live to utter their famous lines were Beatrice Arthur of "The Golden Girls" ("God will get you for that," from "Maude"); Walter Cronkite ("And that's the way it is"); Allen Funt ("Smile, you're on 'Candid Camera' "); Don Johnson of "Miami Vice" ("OK, pal"); Ed McMahon of "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" ("Heeeeeere's Johnny!"); Jack Parr ("I kid you not"); Joan Rivers ("Can we talk?"); William Shatner ("Beam me up"); and Herve Villachaize, ("De plane, boss, de plane").

Other performers scheduled to appear in the segment included Bob Barker, Milton Berle, Gary Coleman, Bill Dana, Sammy Davis Jr., Barbara Eden, Ralph Edwards, Peter Falk, Peter Graves, Don Knotts, Bronson Pinchot, Telly Savalas, Dick Van Dyke and Adam West.

Stars and characters appearing on archival taped inserts included Alfred Hitchcock, Don Adams, Billy Crystal, Ed Sullivan, Steve Martin, Jack Benny, Flip Wilson, Jack Webb, Ted Knight, Jim Nabors, Jack Lord, Polly Holliday, Michael Conrad, Carroll O'Connor, Phil Silvers, Rod Serling, Ted Cassidy, Bugs Bunny, Robin Williams, Tony Randall, Mary Tyler Moore, Lou Costello, Fred Flintstone, Mr. Ed, Lucille Ball and Art Carney.

Obviously, the number underwent some changes after this article was written, perhaps because some folks canceled. The opening as aired did not include live appearances of Joan Rivers, William Shatner, Barbara Eden, Telly Savalas or Dick Van Dyke. Shatner and Van Dyke were in clips so it was probably wasn't them behind the unopened door, although Dick was in the finale of the show so he was at least present. (I'm not sure what Dick Van Dyke's catch phrase might have been.)

Maybe the missing person was Joan Rivers, Barbara Eden or Telly Savalas…or maybe it was someone else not mentioned in the article. They didn't use clips of Flip Wilson, Jack Benny, Jack Webb or Art Carney as per the article. Maybe the reason Flip's wasn't shown was because he was there live behind the door that wasn't opened. Benny and Webb were gone by '86 and Art Carney obviously wasn't on the premises that night. If he'd been present, he would have been in the closing "Old Friends" number right next to Audrey Meadows. Several other folks who were in the closing like Steve Allen, Robert Stack and Red Buttons had catch phrases so maybe it was one of them…and I think I'm long past the stage of admitting we'll never know.

So enough about the 1986 Emmy Awards show opening. Let's look at the opening number from another year, this time saluting theme songs. Again, you'll see a lot of familiar faces if you're anywhere near my age. And again, you'll notice a lot of folks miss their cues and don't know which way or when to exit on live television. But it's still a fun number.

But don't believe everything you read. This video clip says it's from 1986 and it's not. I showed you the 1986 opening. What year is this then? Well, let's get the detective work about this out of the way now. Here's how I figured it out…

The big ovation for Bert Parks would suggest it was the 1980 ceremony. In early 1980, there was a big controversy when Mr. Parks was fired from his longtime job as host of the Miss America pageant. But this can't be '80 because there was an actor's strike in 1980 and most performers, including almost all the nominees, refused to show up for the Emmys that year. That would then make you think it was 1981, 1982 or 1983 but I have videos of those years' ceremonies and this ain't the opening of any of 'em.

So I figured it had to be between 1984 and 1991 because Parks died before the 1992 Emmy telecast…and we know it wasn't '86. I don't have videos of any of those possible years and the openings aren't on YouTube — but at least one award presentation for each year is up there. So I looked to see in which year the set matched…and sure enough, in this clip from 1985, it matches. In fact, Linda Lavin is in that clip wearing the same gown she's wearing in this number and then I verified that the award she presented was actually presented that year. Hey, you thought Columbo was thorough.

So here's the opening from '85. I think everyone who was supposed to be on stage actually got on stage, though a few of them seemed to forget they were supposed to lip-sync. And watch how Loretta Swit sings the M*A*S*H theme song but they end it before they get to the uncomfortable title…

The Sportsmen's Lodge is a big hotel/restaurant/meeting room complex located out in Studio City at the corner of Coldwater Canyon and Ventura Boulevards. The hotel and restaurant parts are nice but unremarkable. The meeting room complex is interesting because if you're in or around L.A. and you need to hold a luncheon or a dinner or a wedding or any sort of social event that involves feeding people, the odds are you'll wind up at the Sportsmen's Lodge. I don't know how many people I've heard say, "I didn't want to do our event there but I looked around and looked around and couldn't find anyplace else that was practical."

How many times have I been there for meetings and parties and such? I dunno…hundreds, maybe. Years ago when CAPS (The Comic Art Professional Society) was new, I booked its first banquet there because I couldn't find anywhere else at the time. The rooms and grounds are nice…not wonderful but nice. The service is…okay. The food is…

Well, people mock the food as inedible and that may be a misdirected mocking. The Lodge has many different levels of food quality and a group that rents space to hold their event there has to decide which level they want to pay for. The lowest is pretty grim. The highest is…well, not gourmet quality but it's also not something you'd complain much about. Most groups that hold gatherings there do not pay for the best so they don't get it; ergo, the Lodge's rep for low-quality cuisine.

Now then. I'm writing in the present tense about the place but that may not be valid for long. The developer who purchased the place in 2007 is saying that while the hotel and coffee shop will remain intact, the vast portions of choice real estate out there devoted to hosting Bar Mitzvah receptions will soon be torn down and replaced by a humongous shopping center.

This blog makes it sound like a done deal and it may be. But some locals are fighting the plan and this is not the first time it looked like all those banquet rooms and places to hold weddings and memorial services and anniversary celebrations were going away. If they do this time, it's going to leave a big void for some other business to fill. Dozens of events each week will have to take place elsewhere…and I'm not sure where that elsewhere might be. There must be someplace that has a big meeting room, ample parking and an option for food that leaves one salivating for those meals they serve you when you're in a hospital.

This annoys me. It's an article in a British newspaper that managed to get someone into a "test" (never to be broadcast) episode of The Late, Late Show with James Corden. Based on one rehearsal, they're eager to declare the whole program as boring and predictable and even though they apparently never spoke with any CBS executive, they suggest the network is worried they made the wrong choice.

It's really not Kosher to be reviewing this at all just as you're not supposed to review a play before it opens…and the criticisms seem strained. Someone of no importance is concerned that American audiences won't be able to understand his British accent. Yeah? Like they couldn't understand Craig Ferguson's Scottish accent the last ten years?

Need I point out that all talk shows start weak and improve? Conan O'Brien would probably be the neatest example but I recall David Letterman's early episodes of Late Night on NBC and before that, his morning show. They all get better. Some don't get much better but they all get better.

The audience for this test show was made up of folks who were paid to be there…not at all uncommon. (Ferguson's producers for a long time had to use paid audience members to keep his bleachers full.) A few are quoted as not liking what they saw…but they're not the real audience. Also, it sounds like the reporter went looking for people who would slam what they'd seen.

I may be writing here in a few weeks that the show is a colossal disappointment and I've canceled my TiVo Season Pass for it. But, jeez. Give the guy a chance. Let him actually start doing his show before you declare it a disaster. If I don't like it, I'll probably just stop watching for a few months and then check back and see what it's become.

Robert Reich served as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. And he's not a bad cartoonist…

I'm a little underwater today with regard to non-blogging duties…like, say, writing one of those things that are supposed to pay me. So the piece about who was behind the door on that Emmy Awards clip will have to wait 'til tomorrow.

Thank you for all the good nominations you're sending in for the Finger Awards. I still don't understand though why some people still nominate, say, Curt Swan. I have no problem with anyone who loved Mr. Swan's work and think he was the most talented man ever in comics. I just don't follow the logic that because his artwork enriched scripts by others, that meant he was kind of a "co-writer" and since he was a co-writer, he had a body of writing work worthy of a writing award. By that logic, Laurence Olivier was the co-author of Hamlet.

I'll be posting a Video Link a little later if you want to check back. Happy Leftover Pi Day!

Here's a post from way back on April 25, 2006. The site it linked to is still there but the link on that site to download the comic book in question no longer works. This is the story of the first comic book written by me to ever reach newsstands. It was not a monumental event…

A website called popcereal likes to scan old Gold Key comics and offer them for your downloading pleasure. They're currently featuring The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan #1 from 1972 and I'm going to suggest two reasons why you should not download it. One is that the way they have it set up, it'll take you an awfully long time. Secondly, it's not a very good comic…and I oughta know. I wrote it.

It was, in fact, the first comic book script of mine to see print in this country. Previously, I'd written lots of comics published overseas and about a dozen scripts for Gold Key. As you may know, comics are not always published in the order they're written and if you're working on a book that's in no danger of cancellation, it's not uncommon to try and get way ahead. The first things I did for Gold Key were Disney comics that didn't come out until more than a year after I wrote them.

The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan was a TV show that Hanna-Barbera produced for the CBS Saturday morning season that commenced in September of '72. As I later learned when I worked for H-B, there was always at least one "trouble" show that Joe Barbera would sell to one of the networks and then no one, including Joe, could figure out what to do with. Some years, they had way more than one. Chan Clan was about Charlie Chan and his ten (ten!) children solving mysteries that usually involved figuring out how some "impossible" crime had been committed — a kind of plot that was concurrently being featured on the prime-time show Banacek starring George Peppard. Banacek as a series debuted the same week that the Chan Clan debuted but the TV-Movie pilot for Banacek had aired the previous March when H-B was developing Chan Clan, and that's where someone got the idea.

I didn't work on the H-B TV show but heard about it from some who did. Between juggling all those regular characters and making that kind of gimmicky mystery work each week, the writers had a terrible time. One of them was an actor-writer named Jamie Farr who was struggling with a script when he got the call to run over to the Twentieth-Century Fox studio, put on a dress and make what was intended as a one-time appearance on a new show called M*A*S*H. I always figured that he was glad to do that because it meant he didn't have to write The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan.

Another problem the show had was with the voice cast. The wonderful actor Keye Luke was signed to play Charlie Chan and then the original idea was to cast all Chinese (or at least, Asian) actors in the other roles. This gave Bill Hanna a fit because it meant hiring performers who were not experienced in voice acting, which usually means long and expensive recording sessions and employing folks who can't "double" (i.e., do multiple roles). With Keye Luke, ten kids and someone to bark for the Chans' dog, that meant twelve regular actors each episode plus two or three more to play the villains, witnesses and other roles in each episode. That's two or three times as many bodies to pay as your average H-B show…and it was actually worse than that. There may well have been good young voice actors around of Asian extraction but the H-B casting people didn't find many. Several members of the cast had to be replaced…in some cases, quietly by Caucasian actors. Among the latter was a then-unknown child actress named Jodie Foster.

So the show was in trouble before it even debuted. Gold Key was then doing the comics based on H-B properties and had first refusal on the new ones. When they were offered The Chan Clan, they refused. The editor there, Chase Craig, was in close touch with writers and artists who worked at H-B and he'd heard about the problems the show was having and how those working on it didn't have much hope for its success. But the studio put some kind of pressure on Gold Key and one day, Chase was ordered to hurriedly get a first issue written and drawn. I got the assignment because I was, he felt, his fastest writer…and I also happened to walk into the office that day.

The show was still a few months from debuting on TV. Chase handed me a pile of storyboards and told me to read them all to get a feel for the property but to write an adaptation of one in particular. I don't think this was an episode by Jamie Farr and his then-partner, Eddie Carroll. My recollection, which may be faulty, is that Norman Maurer wrote it. Anyway, I was assigned to adapt it and later on if the comic continued, there would be original stories conceived fresh for the comics. As Chase explained to me, he preferred to launch a new H-B book in this manner. The studio had approval rights and the people there could get pointlessly picky about the material…but they rarely bothered looking at any issue after the first few. Therefore, it simplified the procedure to do the first issue as an adaptation and maybe the second. They couldn't very well complain that a plot taken from the show was inappropriate.

I wrote the script in one day, as I recall. It was drawn by a wonderful artist named Warren Tufts who is probably best known for his long-ago newspaper strip, Casey Ruggles. Tufts was much admired as an adventure artist but he was a slow, meticulous worker who never felt that the financial rewards matched the hours he put into his art. In the late sixties, he began telling everyone that his goal was to "become Ernie Bushmiller," Bushmiller being the guy who drew Nancy. This was a little like Sir Laurence Olivier announcing that since there was no money in doing Ibsen, he wanted to join the Three Stooges. Warren more or less made good on his goal. He later drew the Pink Panther comic books for several years with a Bushmiller simplicity. Chan Clan represented a transitional period between his adventure work and his more cartoony endeavors. He also dabbled in acting, filmmaking and even the building of airplanes. A few years later, he was killed while test-flying a plane that he built in his garage.

Tufts accepted the assignment without seeing the property because he figured it would go fast. When you drew a Hanna-Barbera comic book, you got a packet of model sheets with key poses of the characters and you could usually trace a lot of drawings right off the model sheets. Wherever possible in Chan Clan, Warren did that. But the comic had so many characters in it and they had to be in so many poses that weren't in the model packet that Warren hated the job…though he did stick with it for all four issues of the comic book. I was luckier: I only did the first issue before Chase decided my services were needed more on Bugs Bunny.

The first time I met Tufts was up in the Gold Key offices, not long after he'd drawn this story. He was just leaving as I arrived and someone introduced us. I told him how much I loved his drawing…and Warren made a curt remark about how he'd hated drawing my script. I said something like, "Gee, I'm sorry you felt that way" and then he left and I went in for my meeting. A half-hour later as I was leaving, Warren was waiting for me in the foyer. He'd gotten to his car, realized I'd probably taken his remarks the wrong way and returned to apologize and clarify. What he'd hated, he explained, was the Amazing Chan Clan and all the characters he'd had to draw for — he felt — insufficient pay. My script was fine, he said…and we wound up going downstairs to the Hamburger Hamlet for a long, late lunch. He was a fascinating man, very passionate about his work, and I guess I'm now happy we had that little misunderstanding because it led to my one chance to spend any amount of time with him. Thereafter when I encountered him, our conversations were brief. He always had to get home and put in more hours on a plane he was building.

Like I said, don't bother downloading the comic. It'll take you forever and you won't see either Tufts or me at our best. But having it online got me to thinking about what went into it. And I also recall the day when I was up in the office and someone handed me a printed copy — the first comic book script of mine to make it to print in English. You never forget your first time…even if it's The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan.