Monthly Archives: October 2015

California is about to become the fifth state in the U.S. to allow terminally ill patients to legally end their lives using doctor-prescribed drugs. For reasons I've mentioned here before, I think this is a good thing. My mother, who died three years ago yesterday, would probably have availed herself of such drugs if her health had gotten any worse without being fatal. She was miserable the last few months and had no hope of getting "better enough" to do anything she wanted to do. All she had ahead was more pain and more hospital stays and more guilt about how much of my time and energy she was consuming. I didn't mind the time and energy but she minded it a lot and it added to her pain. This exit strategy should be available to all.

I'm still kinda annoyed/horrified over that Congressional hearing over Planned Parenthood I watched last week. It really was a festival of Republicans firing loaded (and sometimes factually-challenged) accusations at the organization's president and then doing everything possible to not let her answer.

I know there are people out there who think such tactics are understandable and even laudable. They've gotten it into their heads that to eliminate Planned Parenthood is to eliminate abortion and that lying about the institution is the lesser evil. But if you want to make that comparison, you need to also factor in the number of women who will suffer or even die without Planned Parenthood. Seth Meyers has more on that hearing…

Andreas Eriksson saw this posting of a Marx Brothers impersonation in Sweden and sent me this…

It's not often that something Swedish pops up on your website, so why not add some extra info when I can:

That guy playing Groucho is actor Ola Forssmed. The play is a loose adaptation of Animal Crackers, so Forssmed is actually playing Captain Spaulding (Kapten Spoling in the Swedish translation). "Harpo" is seen briefly in the background, he is played by Eva Rydberg (yes, a woman) who also is the manager of the summer theatre where this show was performed in 2007. Chico was also in the show, played by Kim Sulocki.

The show is available on DVD, but not with English subtitles.

That's a shame because several folks wrote to ask if any translations were available and just how the Brothers Marx survived being imported into another language and culture. We already established that the real Groucho is not as funny in Spanish and we once had a video link — I think it's defunct now — that proved the same for German. But when someone is writing for the brothers in another country, what must that be like?

Harpo presumably can survive anything, even a sex change. Chico, I guess, would be simple but for the malaprops. I mean, I assume it's just as easy for a Swedish guy to do a bad Italian accent as it is for a Jewish guy in this country. But Groucho has to be a translator's nightmare. Does anyone out there have more insight into this? And is there a more thankless role for an actor than playing Zeppo in Swedish?

If you're anywhere near Los Angeles, this is for you: The new season of Instaplay starts Saturday evening, October 17. What the heck, you may want to know, is Instaplay? Instaplay is an improv troupe — the best I've ever seen and I've seen a lot of improv troupes. They take a suggestion of a title from the live audience and then proceed to make up an entire musical comedy based on that title. The cast consists of George McGrath, Deanna Oliver, Jonathan Stark, Cheri Steinkellner and Navaris Darson, all performing under the expert direction of Bill Steinkellner and singing to the improvised music of Mari Falcone.

They don't do these very often and the theater is very small. So if you're thinking of going, get tickets soon. As you can see, they're very cheap and you get way, way more than you pay for.

These are the last of the fake Gold Key TV comics I whipped up back in 2004. These two ran here April 15 and as you can see, by now I was making them as silly as possible. I don't recall if anyone wrote in to ask where they could secure a copy of the Ed Sullivan Show comic but someone may have. Believe nothing you read below — especially the part about writing in to tell me which other ones you'd like to read about…

I still have no idea what possessed Western Publishing to put out comic books based on The Ed Sullivan Show and 60 Minutes. A variety show and a news show?

I can almost see the Sullivan comic as they seem to have been interested in Topo Gigio, the little Italian mouse that appeared routinely on Ed's Sunday night variety show. But why did they think the comic book buying public would be interested in a strip about, as the cover says, "Jew Comedian Myron Cohen"? It's six very boring pages of Mr. Cohen just standing there, telling jokes about his relatives. Even at that, it's more entertaining than the three-page story about the plate spinner, the four-page trained seal act or the attempt to re-create in comic book form, a musical number by "British pop singing star Shani Wallis." The Beatles, who are advertised on the cover, appear in only a single-page gag that is really only about Ringo. (His drum set gets lost just before showtime so he winds up playing on the stomach of a tortoise.) Each strip is "introduced" by Ed Sullivan and either the letterer kept screwing up or someone thought it would capture Ed's personality to misspell the names of the acts he's introducing. The art for the comic was produced by the studio of Alberto Giolitti, who was best known for his work on Gold Key's Star Trek comic and Turok, Son of Stone. Giolitti worked in Italy so perhaps they felt he could best capture the essence of Topo Gigio…but he makes Myron Cohen look like a pterodactyl and in the one panel where Ed introduces "sports legend Billie Jean King" in the audience, she looks like George Takei. A very weird comic, indeed.

Even odder is the 60 Minutes comic, the interior of which resembles Gold Key comic books like Twilight Zone, Ripley's Believe It or Not and Boris Karloff's Tales of Mystery but with Mike Wallace and Morley Safer acting as hosts. They narrate allegedly-true crime tales which in the one issue were all written by Leo Dorfman. The three stories were illustrated by Jack Sparling, Jose Delbo and John Celardo.  The most interesting (and least believable) is the first one in which Mike Wallace takes a film crew into an old mansion that is supposedly haunted.  The other two are equally difficult to believe and the only redeeming feature of the comic is the one-pager in the back in which Andy Rooney (drawn by Winslow Mortimer) editorializes on how annoying it is to see TV shows turned into comic books.  The comic that precedes his page proves that pretty conclusively.

That's all I have now.  There are other great Gold Key adaptations and maybe I'll get to some of them one of these days.  If I've missed your favorite, please write and tell me.

The politics and problems of being the oldest person in the world. The biggest problem is probably that you don't hold the title for very long.

I just accidentally posted a post that wasn't finished and wasn't supposed to be here for a few days. I deleted it from the board. If you saw it, please delete it from your mind and don't tell anyone what it said.

This is an entry to Mark Evanier's list of the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968. For more on this list, read this. To see all the listings posted to date, click here.

Most Famous Role: Space Ghost.

Other Notable Roles: Roger Ramjet, Blue Falcon, Powdered Toast Man and the Narrator/Announcer on an awful lot of shows.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Just about everything but he was most notably a popular disc jockey, an on-camera personality, an off-camera announcer and a guy who did thousands of commercials, film and TV trailers and promos, and even a game show host.  His most memorable job in front of the cameras was as the announcer on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.

Why He's On This List: There are countless guys out there with All-American, testosterone-flavored male voices but very few who can underscore all that macho with a great sense of humor or, in the case of a show like Space Ghost, a convincing sense of drama.  And most of those other guys wind up sounding alike, whereas Gary was so distinctive that his inflections became a direction that other vocal talents would receive from their directors: "Can you give it a little more Gary Owens?"

Fun Fact: Gary started out to be a cartoonist but his voice seemed to be too valuable for that profession.  So he got into reading the news for radio and when programming directors discovered how witty he was, he became a d.j.  He was remarkably successful at it but still retained a strong love of cartoons, animations and old comic books. He was one of those kids who had Superman #1 and Batman #1 and all those early issues which would later be worth zillions but his mother threw them out. In this case, it was because Gary was a sickly kid — his parents were once told he wouldn't survive into his teens — and the smell of old pulp paper was actually having an adverse impact on his health — so out the comics went. In the seventies when comic book publishers began reprinting old comics on good paper, Gary happily bought every volume.

Re-read the item I posted yesterday about two phony comic book covers I created and then ask yourself why over twenty people have e-mailed me with comments and questions that make it clear that they thought the books I described as "fake Gold Key comics" were real. I got two or three of these each time before but…

I watched James Corden again Friday night. It was a rerun of a special episode he did a few months ago saluting YouTube…and one thing that was kind of interesting (I'm not saying this was a mistake) was that they did it with the presumption that everyone watching was a huge fan of YouTube and knew well all of the most-watched videos there. If you didn't you were outta luck…and while I do watch a lot of YouTube, I was about 60% out of luck.

But I did like moments, including this opening song that I presume was written by Corden's producer, David Javerbaum. When I come across a piece of special musical material I really like these days, it usually turns out to have been written by David Javerbaum. You can usually spot him because he does very clever rhymes and brings in a surprise cameo performer about two-thirds of the way through. So I assume this is him.

This little video was shot all over the lot at CBS Television City at Beverly and Fairfax in Los Angeles. The scene where two people fall with big milk canisters was done in an alley where — assuming I'm looking at what I think I'm looking at — CBS used to store unwanted pieces of scenery and large props for a while until they amassed enough to haul away. I used to drive through here and see all these retired or upgraded games from The Price is Right out there, some rotting from the rain.

I kept imagining getting a van, driving through there when no one was looking and picking one up. I thought it might be cool to have the Any Number game in my living room…and it would have been, though I never acted on my little whim. Hey, let's watch Corden sing about YouTube…

A lot of folks are hammering Jeb! Bush for his quoted response to the shootings in Oregon — "Stuff happens!" And when I heard the statement trimmed down to not much more than that, I thought it sounded clumsy and tactless. But Jonathan Chait, who sure isn't a fan of Jeb!, thinks the candidate is being taken out of a more sensitive context.

Incidentally, my response to the mass shooting is pretty much the same as it was for the last mass shooting and the one before that and the one before that (etc.) I don't have anything but the obvious to say but I'll try to come up with something for the next mass shooting. Or the one after that or the one after that or the one after that (etc.)…

Time for two more of these fake Gold Key comics of mine that some people thought were real…though I usually left a pretty big clue like calling them "spurious." Hello, people! Anyway, this was posted here April 9, 2004 and there really was a Gold Key series of Adam-12. In fact, I almost wound up writing it. But otherwise it's all like Strawberry Fields…

Time for two more of the obscure, even spurious comic books based on popular TV shows which Western Publishing Company issued in the sixties and seventies under the Gold Key (and sometimes Whitman) labels. These two are so difficult to find that some people have accused those of us who write about them of perpetrating some sort of hoax on an unsuspecting public…

There were eight issues of the Hawaii Five-O comic book, all produced out of Western's New York office. Paul S. Newman wrote the first, second and fifth issues and the rest were reportedly scripted by George Kashdan. All of the artwork was done by Luis Dominguez who did such fine art for Western's Boris Karloff and Twilight Zone titles.  Above is the cover of #3 which contained the story, "The Beachcomber Burglar," in which Steve McGarrett matches wits with a daring daylight thief who is stealing things apparently not for their value but to tweak McGarrett.  He leaves behind clues and the entire "game" distracts McGarrett and his men as they struggle to figure out where he will strike next.  My favorite moment in the story is when McGarrett is sitting in his office late at night, staring out the window as Danny Williams walks in.  You can almost hear the serious tones of actor Jack Lord as he asks, "What kind of man would steal fifteen crates of cat toys?"  Danny absently jokes, "Someone who's distracted by shiny objects" and that jars McGarrett's thinking and causes him to realize that the Beachcomber Burglar's crime spree is intended to distract.  A shipment of $20,000,000 in untraceable currency is being transported to a bank on Oahu and if Five-O follows the Beachcomber's leads, they will be miles away from there at the time of the delivery.  "That has to be it, Dan-O," he shouts as he calls for his car and back-up units.  And sure enough, when Beachcomber Bob shows up to steal the money, figuring McGarrett and his men are off on another island, there they are.  A very clever tale.

Three issues of Dragnet 1969 and one more of Dragnet 1970 (continuing the numbering) were published out of Western's Los Angeles office with scripts by Don R. Christensen and artwork by Doug Wildey.  Doug told me that he was allowed to visit the set on the Universal lot and to sketch Jack Webb and Harry Morgan from life.  "It was not a big deal," he said.  "Webb's face didn't change much no matter what he was doing."  The first issue (pictured above) presented a story called "The Big Puzzle" in which Joe Friday and his partner Bill Gannon investigate a string of murders all occurring within a two-hour period on the same afternoon.  The three victims were all killed in the same manner and obviously by the same murderer…but there was no apparent connection between them.  Friday's gut tells him that the key to finding the culprit is to figure out why those three people were killed.  He and Gannon investigate all their lives and can't find anything…until he realizes what they had in common. I won't ruin the story for you by telling you what it is but Wildey drew a great sequence showing Friday and Gannon, once they figure out the pattern, racing to prevent Murder #4!

More of these in a week or so.

This is not Frank Ferrante. This is some Swedish guy. Thanks to Anthony Tollin for the link…

Back around 2008, the fine BBC radio programme Great Lives did a nice half-hour profile of Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush aka Rufus T. Firely aka Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding, aka J. Cheever Loophole aka Quincy Adams Wagstaff aka Wolf J. Flywheel aka Groucho Marx. It's on their website again for a limited time. Go give a listen.