Yearly Archives: 2015

• Sorry to see Bobby Jindal drop out of the presidential race…because I had all my money on Lindsey Graham.

Matt Taibbi goes out on the campaign trail to see what some of the G.O.P. candidates are up to.

The oldest known video footage of New York City…

I have decided not to post a lot here about the ISIS/France/Syria matter. Darn near everything I'm reading now on the 'net strikes me as puffery that's more intended to sway our presidential election than to actually change the situation over there. There's also my long-held prejudice against people who talk tough…especially when that's all they do. They don't actually do anything that could be considered tough. Sometimes, they don't do anything at all. But a lot of people in this world believe that if you sound like John Wayne, you must be him. (They also forget that John Wayne wasn't tough. His stuntmen were tough. His agents were probably tough. He wasn't tough.)

But here's Fred Kaplan on how he thinks ISIS can be defeated and here's Daniel Larison on how he thinks ISIS cannot be defeated. I sure as hell don't know. I just know talking tough is about impressing people, not about defeating them.

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: Atom Ant.

Other Notable Roles: Jughead (on Filmation's Archie shows), Beetle Bailey, Mr. Peebles (owner of Magilla Gorilla), Jet Screamer (on The Jetsons), Wade Duck (on Garfield and Friends), The Gopher in the original Winnie the Pooh shorts, Flem (on Cow and Chicken) and hundreds of commercials including the Koala in a series of popular ads for Qantas Airlines and the Hamburglar and other denizens of McDonaldland.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Howie became famous as Sid Caesar's sidekick on Mr. Caesar's legendary comedy shows.  He directed TV shows like Get Smart, Hogan's Heroes and The Dick Van Dyke Show, movies (including "Who's Minding the Mint?") and commercials.  He guested on hundreds of TV shows and is probably best remembered as Ernest T. Bass, who appeared on five episodes of The Andy Griffith Show.

Why He's On This List: Howie was one of the most creative, spontaneous actors who ever voiced cartoons.  Have him read a line five times and you got five different interpretations, each more colorful than the one before.  Daws Butler used to cite him as a true comic actor who could find the "funny" in whatever lines you gave him.

Fun Fact: One of Howie's first animation voice jobs was doing all the major roles for "Munro," a 1960 theatrical short directed by Gene Deitch which won the Academy Award that year.

Here's a 90-minute interview with Terry Gilliam. It was conducted in early October, not long after he was the victim of a false (apparently) Internet death report, and that's the first topic. Folks who only know Mr. Gilliam for his Monty Python connection are missing an awful lot of what he's done, before and after…

Back in the 1965 TV season, there was a one-term situation comedy on NBC that I liked a lot called Hank. At the time, there were a lot of news stories about teenagers dropping out of school and a few of these were balanced by tales of students dropping in. That is to say, kids who couldn't afford to go to college were allegedly sneaking into classes and at least learning something even if it wouldn't result in a degree.

There was some question as to how true the "drop-in" reports were but they did form the premise of Hank, which starred Dick Kallman. Years ago on this site when we got to discussing the series, I posted this summary of its premise…

Kallman played Hank Dearborn, a fellow of college age who couldn't afford to go to college due to lack of funds and the need to raise his younger sister. They were orphans and though he was old enough to be on his own, there were social workers who felt that sis Tina, who was around twelve, should be in an orphanage. Neither Hank nor Tina wanted that so Hank had to keep proving he could support her, which he did by holding down a stunning array of odd jobs: Delivering dry cleaning, driving an ice cream truck, etc., most of these done at or around the local university. At the same time, he wanted to get a college education so he'd dress up in different disguises which he kept in the back of his delivery van and sneak into classes, eluding the campus police. As if that wasn't complicated enough, he was also trying to date a girl who was, you guessed it…the daughter of the Dean.

I remember enjoying this show tremendously. Kallman was a bundle of energy, the episodes moved fast, they were full of great character actors and the series even had a jazzy theme song with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. I've been waiting a long time to see it again and — hooray, hoorah! — Warner Archive just put all 26 episodes out on a 3-DVD set. I ordered a copy while I was in the hospital and it arrived a few days ago.

I have not watched all 26 yet. I watched five and I think I'll ration the rest out, one or two a week, until I've seen them all. But I'm pretty sure I've seen enough to answer the big question I had when I ordered: Would I like the show as much as I did when I was 13? Answer: No. The stories are quite contrived and being mostly farce comedies, the plots hinge on someone (Hank, mainly) telling a lot of fibs and then everyone around him being too dumb to see through them. I never bought that Ricky Ricardo couldn't recognize his own wife when she put on a wig and an accent. The folks who populate Hank's university are so blind to this one guy running around with bogus facial hair that you wonder how they got into college when he couldn't.

Also, the laugh track is really horrible. It didn't bother me then but it does now.

Which leads us to the question: Am I sorry I bought this? Answer: Heavens, no. Kallman is fun to watch. It's a shame he never found a better starring vehicle. Hank is filled with wonderful actors — folks who seemed to turn up on every TV series of that era. We're talking names like Dabbs Greer, Lloyd Corrigan and Howard St. John (who were regulars) and guest players like Burt Mustin, Henry Corden, Paul Smith, Allan Melvin, Peter Leeds, Les Tremayne, Marvin Kaplan and so many more. There's even one with Maury Wills in it.

A lot of shows I loved when I was younger stand up well for me today like The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Honeymooners, Sgt. Bilko and Car 54, Where Are You? Many do not. I can kinda tolerate and maybe even enjoy any I Love Lucy in which Ricky has a big part and no one ever says of their mate, "I'm going to teach him/her a lesson!" I can't make it through most of Lucille Ball's subsequent programs or the folksier, preachier episodes of The Andy Griffith Show or The Danny Thomas Show.

Hank is somewhere in the middle. If you remember the show and want to get 'em all for thirty bucks, I give you this Amazon link. It's the whole run, including the black-and-white, not-wonderful pilot and the other, better 25 episodes in color. The last one is the one in which — this is not deserving of a SPOILER ALERT! — Hank manages to get into the university as a legal student, though he retains all his crazy businesses. The producers figured the "drop-in" gimmick had run its course and were trying to reposition the series for a possible second season which never happened. As is, it does make for a nice final chapter.

In addition to hosting TV shows, Steve Allen wrote well in excess of nine billion songs. Here's the Barbershop Quartet group Instant Classic singing the only one most people know…

I very much enjoyed the Live From Lincoln Center production of Act One. I had not heard much about this recent Broadway production so I was unaware of how ambitious and lush it was with a big cast and bigger sets. I was also pleasantly surprised that author James Lapine didn't, as a lot of playwrights would have done, chuck the whole first half of Moss Hart's autobiography and start where he meets up with George S. Kaufman.

I was a bit distracted by having two men switch off as Moss Hart — or sometimes both play him at the same time, especially since one of them (Tony Shalhoub) also played Kaufman. It seemed like a needless distraction to make Mr. Shalhoub's part large enough but it took away from a fundamental element of the story: Just how different these two men were. Still, the story moved along nicely, included all the important moments in a very long book and used large chunks of Hart's own words and those he quoted. If you loved the book — and I do — I don't see how you could feel it was not well served.

The play reruns a few more times on PBS and at the moment can also be viewed online at this page. Well worth your time.

By the way: When I wrote about it back here, I originally spelled Tony Shalhoub's name wrong. A few polite notes came in and I corrected it. Soon after, there arrived a non-polite e-mail from a frequent correspondent who finds fault with every political thing I post here — a guy who seem to think the future of mankind hinges on convincing the man who does the words for Groo the Wanderer that Hillary Clinton is indeed heading for prison and that the eight thousand times this has been predicted in the past and she's escaped incarceration is some sort of proof as to how devious she is. (Hey, fella…if she's really headed to the slammer, it'll happen. It doesn't matter if I think it will. You're upset with me because I cast doubts on this "certainty" you've been believing for more than a decade.)

I don't mind folks disagreeing with me as long as they're civil and don't try to convince me that the only source of truth in the world today can be found in Glenn Beck podcasts. This guy who wrote me though stooped to the old trick of "I found one mistake and that proves that everything you say is wrong. He wrote, "You purport to be an expert on show business" — which I don't — and then went on to say, "If you cannot spell the name of the star of a play your writing about, you clearly are not an expert on ANYTHING!!!!!" And yes, he did spell "you're" that way and put in five exclamation points.

I usually ignore these people but I wrote back to this guy that I am hardly the only person in the world who has misspelled the name of Tony Shalhoub. He wrote back that that's not so. Everyone knows how Tony Shalhoub spells his name.

So one of my favorite parts of Act One was the opening titles. Check it out if you don't believe me but there's a title card there that says it stars "Tony Shaloub."

I don't intend to post much more about the horrors in Paris since I still haven't thought of anything non-obvious to say about it. But this afternoon, I happened to come upon a quote from Jim Henson and it struck a timely note with me. I posted it on my Facebook page and I thought I oughta post it here too…

At some point in my life I decided, rightly or wrongly, that there are many situations in this life that I can't do much about — acts of terrorism, feelings of nationalistic prejudice, Cold War, etc. — so what I should do is concentrate on the situations that my energy can affect.

I think that's a real good way to look at tragedies like this. I doubt anyone reading this blog — and certainly no one typing on it at the moment — can do the slightest thing to prevent what happened in Paris from happening again. We probably can't do anything on that scale of bettering the world. But we can do what we can do and that usually isn't nothing.

People who do impressions of Oliver Hardy often quote him as saying, "Here's another fine mess you've gotten me into." Okay…but what he said in those movies was "Another nice mess." The confusion is understandable since they did make one film — excerpted in the montage below — called Another Fine Mess. Here are a number of times he said it the way he said it…

Yesterday before the attacks in Paris, Fred Kaplan had an article up on Slate that I meant to link to about the efforts this weekend to find some way to contain ISIS. That article has now been updated in light of the slaughter.

I'm not going to pretend that I know a lot about this kind of thing…or even that my opinion (if I had one) matters. I do fear a lot of bogus arguments about how we have to support So-and-So for President in this country because he/she is the kind of person to fight the terrorists, keep us safe, scare the enemy or even — God help us — "take the fight to them." But my view is that at least 95% of those we'll hear from in the media don't really have a clue what to do about this except maybe how to manipulate it to their own immediate advantage…and I hope that our immediate leaders are not in that 95+%.

I'm not sure what the next post on this site will be about but I'm going to try to transition away from this topic and towards one where I claim a lot more expertise…

I feel I should write something about the ghastly atrocities in Paris. An attack like that cries out for condemnation and sympathy and compassion and a general expression of shock. The trouble is that I can't think of a single thing to write that is not obvious to anyone who has the slightest trace of humanity and decency. All I'm coming up with are the usual clichés — and they're insufficient for a horror of this magnitude.

David Spade has an autobiography out and in this interview with Esquire, he says that he forgot to mention in the book that he was offered Late Night on NBC after David Letterman left. If he'd taken it, Conan O'Brien might still be writing on The Simpsons or something.

A friend wrote to ask if I think it's true that Spade was offered it and said no. Given that two of the three men he says took him to lunch and made the offer are still around and could deny it if it was a fib, I'd say yeah, that meeting probably happened pretty much as he describes it. But the thing to remember is that his saying yes would have been step one in the process, followed by negotiations and other folks approving and working out logistics and such.

In other words, it's possible that if Spade had wanted the gig, it still might not have happened…or as he got deeper into the details, he might have changed his mind. Before they made that offer to Spade, they'd apparently offered it to Dana Carvey, gotten a tentative yes and then Carvey backed out.

Sometimes, it's as simple as if I say I want to sell my car and you say you want to buy it. We don't really have a deal you could say yes or no to until we settle on a price or until you get it inspected or until we figure out who'll pay the license transfer fees and so on. A lot of agreements fall apart as you work out the finer points. Or as one or both parties face the reality of what they've tentatively agreed-to. There are rumors about stars who were offered talk shows, said yes…and then began to realize how much work one of those things is and how great the career gamble would be for them.

I'm always a bit skeptical when someone in Show Biz tells me they were offered some great job but they turned it down. A lot of times, that's wishful thinking…or exaggerating a slight chance at something into a firm offer. But people do sometimes turn things down…and there's also a grey area where it was sorta/kinda offered and they sorta/kinda said yes but then they didn't do it or the offer evaporated or got vetoed upstairs or something.

I have no idea, by the way, how Late Night with David Spade might have been. I've generally enjoyed the guy when I've seen him but I haven't seen him a lot. And there's a big difference between being funny now and then, and being funny five nights a week, week in and week out. A friend of mine told me once that his brother had been scouted as a pitcher for the Dodgers and the verdict was that the guy was one of the best pitchers they'd ever seen…for about an inning and a half. After throwing to four or five batters, he lost all control and was pretty much useless. A lot of performers are like that, too.

Kevin Drum thinks this election is not about the economy. It's about the Culture Wars: Illegal immigration, political correctness, abortion, Obamacare, Vladimir Putin, the War on Christianity, etc., and it's about a lot of Americans who feel "their" America is being stolen from them. I think he's right and if you view it that way, it sure explains why a lot of folks would flock towards a Ben Carson — who says the "right" things as far as they're concerned. Never mind that he doesn't seem to know how government and foreign policy works and doesn't seem to think it's necessary to learn.