Yearly Archives: 2015

• Upset to hear of Rick Perry's decision. I bet everything Lindsey Graham would be the first guy out of the race.

I probably shouldn't be amazed…but amazed I am at the number of people on the 'net who were ready to write off Stephen Colbert's new Late Show after but two or three outings. There were those declaring it an unfixable disaster halfway through Show One…when a lot of us were saying, "Hey, this is pretty good."

I don't know why anyone needs to be so harsh about this kind of thing. There has rarely been a program of this type that did not evolve and change as its star and staff learned what they were doing…and more importantly, what they were doing that audiences liked. Oddly enough, a lot of the folks I saw posting that they didn't like the show did say it was a lot better than Fallon's or Kimmel's.

There are a number of things I'd like to see changed but I'm going to keep watching it — something I have not found myself able to do with the other such programs these days. I'd like to see Stephen talk to us more and read to us less. I'd like the show not to be so loud and I'd like to see the studio audience stop chanting his name and giving everything a standing ovation.

Did you notice this? The first show opened with a pre-recorded bit of Colbert and various folks performing our national anthem. Then when they cut to the stage, the very first thing we saw was the bandleader, Jon Batiste, waving to the studio audience to stand up. It's not Colbert's fault that this has become de rigueur for talk shows but I wish he or someone would dial it back. (I thought, by the way, that the band was great. I think all these late night bands are great…or at least all more than up to the limited demands of the gig.)

I'd also like to see less editing. The showpiece of Show Three was the Joe Biden interview which was very interesting and unlike so much of what we see these days on talk shows, very real. It was more interesting and more real when I watched the longer, uncut version online this morning.

Here it is for those of you with twenty minutes. It's in two parts which should play, one after the other, in the player I've embedded below…

What I liked about it: It was, I felt, real — two men who'd experienced loss discussing it not as Vice-President and Big TV Star but just as two men. And you say you want to see the real Stephen Colbert? That's him, folks — and it's one of the reasons I think he'll turn out to be one of the best late night hosts ever. I don't think 95% of those who've had or currently have that job description could have handled that conversation.

What I didn't like about it: I'm still uncomfy with the idea that politicians can come on these shows, answer mainly softball questions, and show America what great, witty — often, writer-assisted — human beings they are. Colbert's not going to fawn like that over Ted Cruz or Donald Trump next week, nor should he.

Okay, so you could argue Joe Biden is not a candidate for president. Fair enough…but he still could be. (If he does run, I don't think this interview will help him, by the way. I think it'll just enable his opponents to argue that he's weak and fragile. I can already hear the commercial about how Biden couldn't handle chatting with military families behind a rope line…how's he going to stand up to Putin? A lot of America wants "tough" in their presidents. Some people don't even seem to want knowledge or experience, just "tough.")

You could also argue that Cruz and Trump are simply not the guys to talk about personal, soul-touching matters and that's fair enough too. I'm just not sold on the idea that political guests should be on a show of this kind.

The interview after it with Travis Kalanick, one of the guys behind Uber, was edited beyond belief. That may not have been the show's fault because reportedly, the conversation was interrupted twice by audience members — supposedly cab drivers who hate Uber — yelling out. According to the blogs of at least two people who were there, Colbert handled the situation with skill and calm, asking the interrupters to sit down and he would ask politer versions of their questions to Kalanick — which he did, though all of that was trimmed from the show.

I don't think Kalanick came off well. I wonder if he fared better in the unedited version.

The comedy spots last night were pretty good, too. Even allowing for my reservations about the Biden spot, it was a pretty fine episode, one that oughta have Colbert's detractors thinking, "Hey, this could turn into something I'd want to watch regularly." I'm already watching regularly. I'll let you know if that changes.

Craig Ferguson discusses why he left late night TV. I'm not sure how far his thought processes went beyond what he says in this piece but I can sure think of another reason why he might have ended his show. In show business, it's usually a good idea to not leave when you're at the bottom and they're showing you the door. You want to get out when you still look like something of a hit.

The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson had pretty much found its audience and while he might have been able to stay there for a few years, he wasn't going to soar. They weren't going to give him 11:35 even if he wanted it because he'd already shown he couldn't beat Fallon at 12:35. If the new host replacing Letterman drastically improved on Dave's numbers and brought in younger viewers, then Ferguson would have had the challenge of holding a lot of that audience and maybe modifying his act to do so. If the new host didn't improve on Letterman's ratings then the next step was for CBS to start cleaning house and changing their whole approach to late night.

So it was a lose/lose situation for Ferguson and by leaving when he did, he avoided all that and left as a guy with a successful late night show, as opposed to a once-successful late night show that got axed. And that was pretty smart, especially for someone who wanted to do more with his career than host a talk show until he dropped. Ferguson's very talented and not just as a stand-up, and now's he a mostly-free agent to pursue those those other areas. Pretty smart of him.

• Would someone tell Stephen Colbert that he has the job and he can calm down?

As you've read here, an exhibit called "Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby" can be viewed through October 10 out at Cal State Northridge here in California. If you can get out to see it before then, do so. Here's the info.

If you can't get there to see it, let its curator take you on a video tour. Professor Charles Hatfield is a wise and enthusiastic Kirby scholar. Here he is showing you the wonderful exhibition he has assembled…

Jonathan Chait says that Jeb Bush's newly-released plan for the American economy is basically his brother's "tax cuts for the rich" idea dressed up with a few token, minor tax hikes for some rich folks and a few token, minor tax cuts for the non-rich. One nice thing about Donald Trump is that he's a Republican who's at least open to the idea that cutting taxes for wealthy folks does not automatically grow the economy enough to make up for those lost revenues. If you're any other Republican seeking public office, you're forbidden to even consider that might not work, no matter how many times it fails to work.

Lawrence M. Krauss on the intersection between religion and science. There really isn't one, he says. I think, as I've said here before, that these folks demanding Religious Freedom are the kind of people that Jon Stewart was talking about when he told one of them, "You're confusing not getting everything you want with a war on your religion."

And I have not seen anyone in the public eye lately who claimed to be fighting for "Religious Freedom" who really cared about it for any religion but their own. In fact, lately Mike Huckabee's talking like a guy whose idea of "Religious Freedom" is that he has a right to live in a world where there's no religion but his kind of Christianity.

This is actually a newsfromme encore encore. This post originally ran here on 12/31/04 and I reran it in January of this year. I'm running it again because…well, read it again and then you'll see why…

Around 1970, when I got into the comic book business, the consensus was that there wouldn't be a comic book business for long…and not because of me. The traditional method of distribution — comics sold on a returnable basis to newsstands around the country — was failing, or at least it was failing comic books. The biggest distributor, Independent News, was making large sums off more expensive, adult publications like Playboy and Penthouse, and some there suggested that newsracks were no longer a place for kids or low-priced periodicals. Since comic books were low-priced and largely for kids, this was a pretty ominous suggestion, especially when you considered that Independent News not only distributed DC Comics but was a part of the same company. In other words, DC's wares were being sold by an outfit that no longer believed there was a future in selling comic books. With that attitude, there couldn't be much of one.

The "returnable" part was what was really hurting comics. Marvel would print 500,000 copies of an issue of Spider-Man and would get paid only for those that actually sold. So if the racks were crowded (or the distributor trucks filled with an extra-thick issue of Playboy that week), 50,000 might not make it to the racks at all. Many more copies would get damaged and returned with all the unsold copies for credit. 300,000 might actually be sold and the rest would get pulped…obviously, not the most efficient way to do business. In the past, the ratio had not been that bad, and a publisher could make a tidy profit…but by the seventies, the numbers were closing in on the comic book industry.

To the rescue came not Superman or Batman but a Brooklyn school teacher named Phil Seuling. Phil ran the big comic conventions in New York for years so he knew the fan market and its buying power. Around 1973, he began proposing to DC and Marvel that he sell their comics in a different manner, by-passing traditional newsstands and getting them directly to comic book dealers and shops. He would pay slightly less per copy to the publisher but he'd be buying the comics on a non-returnable basis, so a sale would be a sale; no printing five copies to sell three.

At first, publishers rebuffed his proposal. The "direct market," as it would come to be called, did not seem lucrative enough to warrant the attention, to say nothing of how it might further destroy the old method. But before long, it became apparent that the old method was being destroyed, with or without selling books the Seuling way, so DC, Marvel and other companies tried it. Within a year, around 25% of all comic books were being sold via "direct" distribution, through Seuling's company and about a dozen others, with 75% still on conventional newsstands. Within ten years, those percentages were reversed. Today, the "direct market" is the primary market…though Phil, sadly, did not live to reap the full benefits of his idea. He died in 1984 at the age of 50.

That's Phil in the above photo, second from the left, holding a stack of comic books. The man at the far left is talk show host Mike Douglas, and this is a still from his popular afternoon show, air date July 28, 1977.

Seuling was a guest on that episode to discuss comic book collecting and conventions and such. He was asked by the producers to bring along "a superhero" to surprise the audience…and Mike Douglas. They apparently expected Phil to find a guy in a Batman costume or something, but Phil had a better idea.

The character of Red Sonja was then big in Marvel Comics. Developed by editor-writer Roy Thomas from a brief appearance in one of Robert E. Howard's stories, she was one of the sexier characters around. Some of that was due to the way Roy wrote her and some to the way she was depicted by her illustrators…most notably, Frank Thorne. But a lot of it was because she began turning up at comic book and science-fiction conventions…in the flesh. There were many young women who seized on the inspiration to fashion an appropriate costume and to parade about the aisles and masquerades. None of them drew more stares or attention than Wendy Pini.

Today, Wendy is best known as the talented artist and co-creator (with her husband, Richard) of the Elfquest series. Millions of copies have been sold of Elfquest graphic novels, prose novels, comic books, calendars, art folios and other items from that wonderful fantasy world…but in '77, Elfquest was just beginning. To most comic fans, Wendy was that lovely lady who dressed up as Red Sonja at conventions, often performing a little show with artist Frank Thorne.

So when Phil Seuling was invited to appear on The Mike Douglas Show and asked to bring along his own superhero, he brought Wendy. Neither Mr. Douglas nor his co-host, Jamie Farr, saw her before she burst onto the stage at the close of the segment. (Douglas was concerned that her costume — or lack of one — might offend the show's female viewers. There's no report on what Farr thought, but he probably wished he had an outfit like that.)

That's really all there is to this story. I wanted to run the photo because it's so wonderful, and because it gives me the chance to tell you about Phil. And I also wanted to mention that, much to Wendy's amazement, I have actually located a tape of that episode of The Mike Douglas Show for her. I haven't yet discussed it with the programming folks at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, but I'll bet we can find some event at the 2005 convention where we can show that segment to everyone who wants to see it. It's a great moment.

P.S. Since I posted this, several folks (including Gary Sassaman and Steve Thompson) have pointed out to me that 1977 was the year that Phil Seuling's big New York comic book convention could not find hotel space in New York, so it moved to Philadelphia. Philadelphia was where Mike Douglas taped his show.

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Okay, we're back live in September of 2015 and you may be wondering why I reran this again. It's because I can now append a video of the segment in question. I don't think we ever ran it at Comic-Con but I see now that Richard and Wendy Pini have posted it to YouTube. That makes it easy for me to bring it to you here…and I know this will delight many friends of the late Phil Seuling.

As noted, this is from The Mike Douglas Show on July 28, 1977. Douglas interviews Phil along with Jamie Farr, and the other guests there are Fabian and Jerry Lester. Jerry Lester was most famous for hosting Broadway Open House, the early TV series that is often viewed as a precursor to The Tonight Show. Others (including Morey Amsterdam) hosted it besides him but he usually gets most of the credit, perhaps because more of his episodes still exist.

This video is typical of the way comic books were talked about in the media in the sixties and seventies. The news stories were about what old comics were selling for and not really about anything else. I'd be curious if some dealer could estimate what the collection Phil displays would be worth today. The scene at the end of Wendy in her Red Sonja suit is, of course, priceless…

My good buddy Ken Levine didn't like Colbert's first show as much as I did but basically we're on the same page: Colbert is a super talent and he's likely to turn this into one of the best late night shows ever.

I disagree a bit with Ken's statement: "One thing about Letterman, from the day he first stepped out onto the stage for his NBC morning show he had his persona down." It always struck me that one of the reasons Dave's morning show failed so totally was that he did it with an attitude of "I'm way too hip to be on between game shows and soap operas."

He had his human side well-protected behind thick layers of snide and sarcastic about absolutely everything. It's the same problem that I think doomed the ninety-seven different attempts to give Dennis Miller his own show. Miller on those programs always looked to me like he was only out there entertaining us because someone was holding his loved ones hostage backstage.

Even when Letterman went on in the more natural (for him) environment of late night, it took him a while to talk to the audience as himself. He hid behind prepared material and he seemed phony on those rare occasions when he said he liked anything. One could argue (I would argue) that he went too far in dumping the prepared material but I think America really began to love the guy when they got a sense of a human being there. That's how I see Colbert's show evolving.

I have some questions this morning about Stephen Colbert's debut show. This one's from Kiva K…

So when do we get the ratings? How long before they mean something?

Any minute now, they should be in. If they're great, I don't think they mean much since there was an enormous curiosity and a big advertising push. If they're dreadful, that would probably mean America wasn't as interested in Stephen Colbert as anyone thought and that could indicate trouble…but that ain't gonna happen.

My guess is the ratings really don't mean much for about 4-6 weeks unless they're spectacularly high or low. CBS will look at numbers that are not generally available to the public…like what was the tune-out during the show? Are people just tuning in for the first fifteen or the first half-hour? What's the drop-off after the mid-break? Some of that might be cause to worry. Some of that might contribute to the refinement and shaping of the format.

And this Friday night, Jimmy Fallon has Donald Trump on as a guest. How will Colbert with Amy Schumer fare against that competition?

But really, this is not a short-run competition. Colbert's going to be there for a while no matter what the numbers are. This is not like the situation when Conan O'Brien took over The Tonight Show and by the end of the first week, the network was hearing suggestions from the affiliates that they dump the tall kid and put Leno back in that slot. CBS is not going to try to put Dave back in his old position nor is there any obvious replacement. Even with less than stellar numbers, I don't think there will be any loss of confidence at the network in Colbert.

None of the above should be taken to suggest I think Colbert's numbers won't be stellar. Betcha he does great.

This next is from Richard Gersh…

For me the biggest surprise of the new Late Show with Stephen Colbert was the end credit — producer Jon Stewart. That sheds a whole new light on Stewart leaving The Daily Show when he did, and what he'll be doing next. I wonder what your thoughts are? Do you think Stewart will be an active, Freddie de Cordova-type producer?

The credit was Executive Producer, which can mean a wide range of participation, including only financial. I worked on a network series once where one of our two Executive Producers did naught but collect checks. He didn't even watch the show. It was just a deal.

My guess — and I'm guessing here because I was just as surprised at that as you were — is that it's basically ceremonial. It's Colbert's way of giving his old friend-benefactor some money and maybe an office to work out of…and if the Late Show with Stephen Colbert wins an Emmy, Mr. Stewart will get another Emmy. Otherwise, I think he's just consulting — and probably not taking any time away from whatever else he left The Daily Show to do.

Fred DeCordova, by the way, went from being a hands-on, run-everything producer for Johnny Carson to being largely a figurehead. He did very little on The Tonight Show in the last years of Johnny. There was a personal falling-out with Mr. Carson and also a feeling that Fred was dragging the show down, especially with bookings. It wasn't so much that he was old as that he was very negative about any guest he didn't know of…and he didn't seem to know of anyone who'd been in show business less time than Buddy Hackett.

Peter Lassally was really the guy running things then and others outranked Fred in a practical sense. So Mr. DeCordova just shuffled papers and ran some meetings and did traffic cop work here and there but wasn't making any real decisions. I would imagine Jon Stewart won't even do any of that…but he probably will turn up on the show for more cameos and the occasional guesting. Maybe they'll even regard him as their stand-by guest in case some biggie pulls a McCain and cancels at the last minute.

Lastly, here's a question from Joe Wahl…

Fallon's show seems to largely be about playing games with guests and Kimmel's is often about playing tricks on unsuspecting people. Do you think Colbert's made a conscious decision to avoid those two areas?

I sure hope so. Fallon's games seem like something they do because they work better than his interviews — and that seems like a function not of the games being so great but of the interviews being so weak. Not long ago when Jimmy had Don Rickles on, it really reminded me how poor an interviewer Fallon is. Since Rickles was in no shape to play drinking games or break eggs on his head, the segment was just talk. Fallon gushed a lot and said over and over how great it was to have The Living Legend on his show…but he didn't participate in the discussion. He just let Don ramble.

It's Talk Show 101: When you have Rickles on your show, you needle him, insult him and give him something to play off of. Fallon just sat there and grinned at everything Don said. One gets the feeling that while other talk show host's producers admonish their star to "Go out there and be funny," Fallon's urge him to "Go out there and be likeable!" Which he is. One reason I think Colbert will do so well is that he can be likeable and funny.

Likeable is not of no value in television. It's the main thing James Corden has going for him. Corden actually has some sharp material in his monologues but there's a disconnect. He doesn't feel like a comedian delivering his jokes. He feels like a guy who would never be doing monologues anywhere, let alone on network TV, if it wasn't part of his current job description…so he's out there reading material that someone wrote for him. That has always been one of my problems with Conan.

Say what you will about Leno, he never looked uncomfy delivering a monologue. Matter of fact, that was the portion of his show where he seemed most at ease. Stand-up is something new to Colbert but he's already better at it than most of the other guys.

I've set a Season Pass for his Late Show. I already like him in his new gig and I'm fascinated to see how it evolves, especially when it loses that New Show smell and has to run like an established program.

I think I need to modify my internal definition of a Talk Show. I started watching them at a time when the shows were either live or, more often, recorded in real time. If the show was ninety minutes, they rolled tape for ninety minutes and whatever happened…that was the show. They'd edit if someone said the "f" word but not for much more than that; certainly not if something went wrong. That was part of the fun of a Talk Show: Watching the host ad-lib his way around it or, if he was really facile, build something new out of the wreckage.

Hosts did ad-lib back then. So did guests. What distinguished a Talk Show from most other kinds of programming was that not everything was carefully planned. Some things were. Guests were preinterviewed and when Johnny said to one of them, "I hear you had some problem on the set recently…what was that all about?", that meant the guest was prepared to tell that anecdote — and Johnny, though he played naive, knew the story. He especially knew the punch line so that he wouldn't step on it.

And some stunts and exchanges that seemed spontaneous and improvised were planned, too. But the point is that a good Talk Show back then was supposed to feel improvised and I need to not get frustrated that they never do anymore. The premise has changed and no one's trying for a "live" feel anymore. Which is a shame because if anyone could do it today, it's Stephen Colbert.

I hope he'll get around to some of that before long but I certainly can't fault him for not risking it on opening night. The whole show felt read right off the TelePrompter and edited for a distinctly non-live feel. Reportedly, the taping went way over and many spots were retaped. I'm sure I would have known that even if it hadn't been reported.

But of course, no one was pretending that it wasn't edited. The interview with Jeb Bush especially felt cut-and-pasted and they don't care that you know that because they've put deleted moments from it up on YouTube and on the CBS site.

Given that, the interview was fine. I'm still not sure that it doesn't do a disservice to the process to allow political candidates to go out on TV and show how charming and witty they can be fielding softball questions. Colbert came a little closer than some of his brethren have to lobbing a tough one but I think his main goal (and the reason to have someone like Bush on before Bernie Sanders) was to show America that he isn't going to do a heavily Liberal show. And he also wants to not have other candidates fear coming on.

(One possibly-tough question I thought he was setting up but which he didn't ask would have gone something like this: "Governor, all your campaign ads and buttons and stickers just say 'Jeb!' Isn't that because you know a lot of people now have real problems with the last president named Bush?")

Before that, the interview with George Clooney was a bit too fawning and a bit too scripted. And before that, there was a lot of prepared material that was pretty good. The biggest surprise for me? For all the talk about discovering the "real" Stephen Colbert, it surprised me that he's pretty much like the guy on The Colbert Report but without the more ignorant right-wing lines. It's still basically a character because it's all in the Prompter.

I liked the band, though I thought they were too loud. It was like they had to play loud to be heard over the loudness of the set. I don't like the standing ovations for everything and the incessant chants of "Stephen, Stephen, Stephen!"

I'm looking forward to a lot of this shaking out and calming down. Even if it stays the same, it's a good show and I expect it'll do well. I'll be interested to see where the ratings are in a few months…and where Colbert is. I look forward to him actually hosting the show instead of reading it.

I posted loads of stuff here over the weekend so I'm going to go easy today.

I'm looking forward to the debut of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert tonight. A friend of mine who attended one of the non-broadcast "test" shows told me that what they've done to the inside of the Ed Sullivan Theater is spectacular but, he felt, distracting from the show itself. He said the show itself was excellent and wrote that "no one will be disappointed" by Mr. Colbert's transition from his screen character to himself…but he thought the program would have been better on a simpler (and therefore, more intimate) stage. We shall see.

I call your attention to this article by Jonathan Chait on what's up with the problems of Climate Change. According to Chait, the news is not all bad and is even encouraging on some fronts.

I keep reading pieces about Kim Davis, that clerk languishing in jail in Kentucky, that make me feel sorry for her…or as sorry as I can be for someone who has created such a mess for herself. You know, my father worked for the Internal Revenue Service and he hated a lot of the things his job called upon him to do. But he did them and didn't think that he was personally responsible for the actions of higher powers, nor did he think it would do a bit of good for him to refuse.

Watching Ms. Davis's lawyer being interviewed — and some of the people urging her to fight to the death in a battle of Gay Marriage they've already lost — it's hard not to think she's become a Useful Idiot in her own cause, which was just not to have her name on a marriage license she found offensive. If this case was still about just that, she might be home by now.

I continue to be amazed at articles that say the Tea Party folks and other Middle America Americans have taken to Donald Trump because they think, "He's like us." Hadn't realized there were so many obnoxious billionaires with weird hair in this country. There are some good things that can be said about Donald Trump but nowhere on that list is that "he's like us," no matter who "us" is. See you later.

[UPDATE, six minutes later: And now Kim Davis is out of jail but forbidden to interfere with the processing of marriage licenses in her office. I don't get why she that couldn't have been forbidden without them putting her behind bars but the law, like the Lord, works in strange and mysterious ways. I think she's out just in time to be a part of Mike Huckabee's big media event today where he'll argue that she was jailed for being a Christian, which as we all know is fast becoming a capital offense in this country. I just know the Obama Administration is thisclose to rounding them all up and tossing them all in the slammer.]

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: Goofy

Other Notable Roles: Bozo the Clown (on records), Sleepy and Grumpy in Snow White, Practical Pig in The Three Little Pigs, Gabby in Gulliver's Travels and later shorts, Oswald the Rabbit.  At times, he provided the voice of Bluto in the Popeye cartoons and the sounds of Pluto in Disney cartoons.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Vance DeBar "Pinto" Colvig was a cartoonist for newspapers and animation, a gag man and briefly a circus clown, plus he worked in front of and behind the camera for Mack Sennett comedies and dubbed Munchkin voices for The Wizard of Oz.  He did the voice of Bozo for Capitol Records and played Bozo on-camera for the character's first live TV show but never voiced the clown for animation.

Why He's On This List: The guy had some real funny, memorable voices and he livened up whatever he was in.

Fun Fact: His son Vance Colvig, Jr. followed in Dad's clown-sized footprints and played Bozo on television in Los Angeles in the sixties.  Junior also did cartoon voices, including the gravelly sounds of Chopper the Bulldog in the Yakky Doodle cartoons for Hanna-Barbera.

Okay, it turns out that the website which proclaimed Judy Carne's death a hoax was a site that sometimes runs phony stories just to see how many other sites repeat them. Here's what I posted last night…

It is just not turning out to be a good year for women I had crushes on back in the sixties. Judy Carne died last Thursday in Northampton in the U.K. She was 76 and had been hospitalized for pneumonia.

I apparently need to explain to some people what constitutes a "crush." It's not in most cases a basic sexual desire for a certain object of lust; more like a schoolboy fascination for someone you find attractive…and usually someone unattainable, viewed from a distance. I never got any nearer to Judy Carne than watching a Laugh-In taping from the bleachers — and before, when I first got my little interest in her, I never imagined I'd get even that close.

For about eight months starting in the summer of 1970, I was able to roam the halls of NBC Burbank studios and watch folks like Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, Dean Martin and Flip Wilson rehearse or tape their shows. It now seems like an unworldly fantasy existence but I still somewhere have one of Mr. Hope's cue cards to prove it.

Laugh-In taped in Studio 3 and I'd drop in and watch whatever they were doing at that moment. One time, happily for me, it was Judy Carne doing "sock-it-to-me" bits. She had left the show by this point but was back to guest star.

I always thought she was rather special — physically attractive (obviously) but also a good comedienne, singer and dancer. At the taping, I learned she was also pretty damn expert at cussing and telling dirty jokes. And that was about all the insight I got.

I was not the only person who thought she was talented. In the sixties, she was a regular on no less than four TV series on America TV: Two on CBS (Fair Exchange, The Baileys of Balboa), one on ABC (Love on a Rooftop) and one on NBC (Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In). She was also in a couple of pilots that didn't sell, plus she guest-starred on dozens of programs. That's an amazing career just in that one decade.

After about the mid-seventies, she didn't work as much and there were stories about her involvement with drugs and what the tabloids sometimes call "sexual debauchery." She was also in one or two ghastly automobile accidents and had some legal probems. I have no idea if the lack of work was a result of the mess she seemed to be making of her life or the cause of it. All I know is it seemed like a very troubled life from there on and we didn't see much of her as a performer after then. Her autobiography was pretty sad up until the end when she wrote, with a strong suggestion of fingers crossed, that she had put it all behind her.

I hope she did. At least on my TV screen and my one hour or so watching her tape Laugh-In, I really liked her.

We're still waiting either for some credible news source to say that Judy Carne has passed away or that she hasn't. In the meantime, I thought I'd note the passing of another actor who was in one TV series after another, Martin Milner. Mr. Milner had an interesting film career in which he set some sort of record for being decent (if not pretty decent) in movies that were otherwise pretty awful. He was good in good films like The Sweet Smell of Success or Compulsion and you can see him briefly in Mister Roberts. But it was in pictures like 13 Ghosts or The Private Lives of Adam and Eve or Valley of the Dolls where he proved how skilled he was.

He worked constantly in films and TV but no one really knew who he was until Route 66, which aired from 1960 to 1964. Good series. Then he was back behind the wheel from 1968 to 1975 as the veteran cop who drove Adam-12. I got hooked watching the latter on MeTV not long ago and I really enjoyed most of them, in large part because of Milner. The show raced from cop story to cop story and rarely had time to tell us much about who those two officers were. It didn't have to because Milner and his co-star Kent McCord had such great rapport and personality.

I really don't have that much else to say about him. I never met the man. If I had, I would have told him how much I liked watching him when he had a good script and how I even liked him when he took a weak one and made it work. The premise of Adam-12 was that veteran cop Pete Malloy (Milner) was teaching the ropes to new cop Jim Reed (McCoy). But when you watch then, you get the sense that veteran actor Milner was tutoring new actor McCord. But maybe that wasn't so. Maybe it just felt that way because they were both such good actors.