Monthly Archives: May 2016

And, speaking of talk shows that are no longer on: Here, from his next-to-last program on May 21, 1992, Johnny Carson delivers his last opening monologue. It's mostly applause…

Sorry I can't embed this video here but it's worth going over to this page to watch. It's a 70+ minute discussion with folks who worked on David Letterman's show(s) and the interrogator is Regis Philbin. Interviewed are Exec Producer Barbara Gaines, Director Jerry Foley, Writers Steve O'Donnell and Steve Young, and Stage Manager Biff Henderson. If you're interested in Dave or just in how talk shows happen, it's worth the time and clicking.

I seem to have let most of today get by me without posting anything. But that's okay because it allowed the Alan Young obit to stay in top position longer.

Speaking of that fine man: Our pal Greg Ehrbar takes us through some of Mr. Young's many audio roles — radio, records and animation. A lot of the animation roles were due to his close friendship with a man named Alan Dinehart. When I worked at Ruby-Spears and Dinehart was the in-house voice director, if you had an adult male role that wasn't a super-hero or a super-villain, Alan D. would cast Alan Y. and no one complained…because Alan Y. was so good.

Hey, I'll bet someone reading this can help me with something: I have a friend who has an antique cell phone — a Nokia 6102i. I believe those came out about the same time Warren G. Harding was running for president and guaranteeing us that there was "no problem" with regard to the size of his penis. Anyway: For reasons that wouldn't interest you, my friend has been saving old voice mails on his phone — messages he's received and wants to keep. Alas, the phone is now full and no more can be saved.

For reasons that also wouldn't interest you, he needs to preserve those pieces of audio. He wants to delete them so more messages can be recorded but he wants to somehow transfer them first so they can exist as MP3 files of WAVs or just about any format. Being an old phone, it has no known capacity to forward saved messages elsewhere…or does it? Or is there some way to record its playback? Or something? If you have an idea, please lemme know.

The Republican Convention, which will apparently be produced this year by Donald Trump to sell Donald Trump, runs July 18-21. The Democratic Convention is July 25-28. If I were in charge of the latter, I'd assemble a squadron of writers and performers from The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, The Nightly Show and other programs like that and alternate the political speeches with sketches that parodied the preceding convention. With Alec Baldwin as Trump.

A lot of folks reading this probably don't know what a big star Alan Young was. He was big on radio, big on early television, big in movies and even big on the stage. A lot of times when he wasn't on radio, TV or the movie screen, he was appearing in musicals, frequently Showboat. He often played Cap'n Andy across the length and breadth of this country. In the early eighties, I saw him playing the lead in a ghastly Vegas production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. (The production was ghastly. Mr. Young was terrific.)

He was also a prolific cartoon voice actor, most notably speaking for Uncle Scrooge on Duck Tales and other Disney productions. When I was writing for the Ruby-Spears animation studio in the eighties, he was a frequent cast member.

But of course, to most people he was the guy on Mr. Ed. There were a lot of those sitcoms in the sixties where someone was living with a witch or a genie or a Martian or a robot. What made the best of them work was not the gimmick but the comedic chops of the guy who living with the witch or the genie or the Martian…or the talking horse. I thought Mr. Young was the best of them. With anyone else in the part, that would have been a pretty dumb show.

He was real good and the few times I met him, real nice. The last time I encountered him was at an autograph show when he was more-or-less retired and not unhappy about that. "I've worked enough," he said. I asked him what he missed about it. "Not much," he said. I asked him what he didn't miss about it. "Being asked how they made the horse's mouth move like that," he said. And just then, a kid stopped by and asked him how they made the horse's mouth move like that. He gave me an expression that I wish you could have seen. It reminded me what a fine, funny actor he was.

William Saletan lists ten things about Donald Trump that his supporters should have to defend. I don't believe one should have to own or agree with everything done or said by the people you vote for. I'm voting for either Hillary or Bernie and I don't think either is perfect. For example, I think her foreign policy is too militant and his is too non-existent.

But the list of things Trump has said he would so as president is rich in illogical moves, plans that are clearly unconstitutional and even a few policies that we call "war crimes" when anyone but us does them. If a Democratic candidate advocated them, the leading Republicans who are falling in line behind Trump — especially the ones who claim moral high ground like Huckabee and Pence — would be calling that person immoral, evil and someone who must be kept from the White House at all costs.

I've received my by-mail ballot for the California primary. Actually, I've received my second one. The first had a printing error which I noticed and reported and they sent me a replacement…and no, there's no way I can send both in and vote twice.

I started voting by mail a few elections ago when I had last-minute emergencies on two consecutive Election Days that made it very, very difficult to physically get to my polling place. I am not the only Californian who votes this way. In 2014, close to 70% of primary ballots in this state were cast by mail and the number will probably be higher this year. I dunno how rapidly people return them but with eighteen days until June 7, it's possible a majority of ballots have already been marked and dropped in mailboxes. What happens in public henceforth between Hillary and Bernie may not matter in the Golden State. To paraphrase the sweepstakes ads, one of them may already be a winner.

I haven't marked mine yet because I haven't decided on the Clinton/Sanders race. I still like Bernie Sanders more but I'm starting to really dislike the vibe — which I hope is exaggerated by the media — that if we can't have Bernie, it's better for the country to crash and burn. One Sanders supporter who writes me daily — because obviously, as my blog goes, so goes the nation — seems to think it is scientifically impossible that Hillary could be getting more votes without a massive cheating effort.

I don't, nor am I bothered that she's pretty likely to be the nominee. I will admit though that I once thought it was impossible for an old Jew who calls himself a Democratic Socialist to do half as well as Sanders has without cheating. Good for him for proving this country isn't that afraid of someone who's not a Christian, who skews so far to the left and who only seems to own one suit.

If I had to vote today, it would probably be Sanders…but I'm going to wait 'til a week before my envelope has to be there. I'm just wondering how many people are so sick of this election that they immediately marked theirs and tossed it in a mailbox. As I've learned in the past, once you do, it's a lot easier to stop paying attention.

Today, class, we're going to find out how ice cream cones are made. And did you know that sugar cones are much stronger and sturdier than plain ol' waffle cones? I didn't…

J. Flores wrote to ask me…

You often suggest that a person has to love writing to be a writer. I find the process hard but the results rewarding. I was always taught that the most rewarding things in life are not the easiest ones and that you never advance unless you're willing to do the things that don't come easy to you and which may even be painful at times. Comment?

My comment is that I find being a writer is…well, I don't know if I find it easy. Certainly, certain assignments and projects have been anything but easy. But I never felt I was doing something I shouldn't be doing, whereas there have been times doing non-writer things where I have. But you can advance within your chosen profession. You can write better or more challenging things or venture into new areas of writing or new genres…and if you want something that can be painful at times, I can tell you about some writing gigs I've had…

But hey, listen: If you want to devote your life to doing things you don't enjoy, that's your right. I never bought into the idea that suffering and failure were great because they build character. And I sure never understood why anyone would say, "I hate math. I think I'll become an accountant."

Decades ago, I went out for a brief time with an actress who had the worst kind of stage fright — an overpowering kind that involved convulsions and projectile vomiting and shriek-inducing migraines and if you saw someone on the street with these symptoms, you'd call 911. Just awful. The night before she was to tape a short scene on Young and the Restless, she asked if she could sleep over at my place because (a) I live near the studio and (b) maybe I could keep her mind off what she had to do the next day so she could get some sleep. It was not at all a fun, romantic night. It was like taking care of someone who was going to be executed at dawn.

Being on TV and trying to become famous was an obsession with her. We talked about it a lot that night as I tried to lovingly suggest that maybe she'd chosen the wrong path in life. But with her, there was no other goal. If you weren't a star, you weren't anyone. We lost touch not long after that and I haven't spoken to her this century…but she isn't a star and I sometimes wonder if she ever found out it was possible to be happy but largely unknown. A lot of people in this world find that. I'd list some of them but I have no idea who they are.

So that's my comment: If you want to live like that, fine. I'd rather do something I like…and something where I don't spend any time wondering if I've taken the entire wrong approach to my life.

• By Election Day, Trump will have been firmly on both sides of every issue in this country except the size of his fortune and penis.

Mark Thorson has a question…

I've asked before, and you replied you'd do it, but you haven't. Repeating my request, have there been cartoons voiced by one voice actor? When you consider how talented some voice actors are and how cheap some studios have been, it seems to me this must have happened a few times if not frequently. I don't know of any examples, but if it were done well I wouldn't have noticed. Maybe the Road Runner cartoons, but they don't count because there were only two characters and they didn't talk.

Yeah, there have been plenty of them, mostly prior to 1968. Lots of theatrical cartoons were just one guy, usually Mel Blanc. On TV, you had things like the Tom Terrific cartoons (all voices by Lionel Wilson) or the Felix the Cat cartoons (all voices by Jack Mercer) or Deputy Dawg (all voices by Dayton Allen) and there were some episodes of Huckleberry Hound or Quick Draw McGraw where all they needed was Daws Butler.

Once upon a time, voice actors working under the Screen Actors Guild contract were paid by the session. The actor received a flat fee for the cartoon whether he did one voice or twenty. Most of the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons had a cast of two: Daws Butler and Don Messick did the Pixie & Dixie cartoons. The Secret Squirrel cartoons were voiced by Paul Frees and Mel Blanc. The Atom Ant cartoons were Howie Morris and Allan Melvin until Howie quit H-B, at which time they became Don Messick and Allan Melvin. Once in a while, they'd spring for a guest voice — usually a woman — but the writers were told not to write in too many female parts so that wasn't necessary. (There are early H-B cartoons where small female roles were voiced by men.)

Most cartoons were done with small casts. The Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons were voiced by June Foray, Paul Frees, Bill Scott, William Conrad and no one else. I don't think there's a single other actor in any of them…and in some, some of those folks play five or six roles.

In '68, the SAG contract was changed to limit the number of voices one actor could do for one fee. The math changed over the years but it pretty much came down to three voices per session fee per actor. Before, if a cartoon called for twelve speaking parts, you could have Daws and Don each do six and it cost you two session fees. After '68, you were going to have to pay four session fees…so you could pay Daws and Don each two fees per session or for the same money, you could bring in four actors. In most cases then, they would hire four actors.

This made things better for the kind of actor — like Hans Conried or Gary Owens — who couldn't do multiple roles. A voice actor no longer had to be like Blanc, Butler, Messick or Frees — guys who could do a couple hundred different voices. It also increased the opportunities for women since it led to shows having more female characters. And it even led to some of the multi-voiced guys making more money. I wrote a CBS Storybreak once which had a ton of tiny roles and we decided that we didn't want to bring in a parade of voice actors to each do 1-3 lines. It was easier to have Frank Welker do them all so that day, Frank — who was in the studio for about 90 minutes — played twenty characters and was paid for seven sessions.

And yes, there are still short cartoons that use only one voice actor…but if it's a SAG show, he or she usually doesn't do eleven voices.

My favorite vlogger (video blogger) John Green explains all about non-denial denials. My favorite is "That's a collection of absurdities!"

Hey, someone made a multi-part documentary on the end of The Late Show with David Letterman. I can't embed it here but you can watch it on this page. If you notice before I do, lemme know when they post the next chapter.

Here's Matt Taibbi with an overview of how Trump became the nominee and what it means for the future of the Republican Party — what little there may be of one.

Actually, I don't think Trump is or will be destroying the G.O.P. Just changing it for now.

• Nice of Trump to reassure his supporters he'd only appoint white people to the Supreme Court. Like we all couldn't have guessed.

That's a writing credit from Happy Days and as you can see, it was written by my pal Ron Friedman, who has a long, long résumé including The Danny Kaye Show, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, The Odd Couple, Starsky & Hutch, Fantasy Island, All in the Family, Chico and the Man, Vega$, Bewitched, Gilligan's Island, The Andy Griffith Show, The Fall Guy, The Dukes of Hazzard and many, many more. He's also written a lot of cartoons. He was one of the key writers for The Transformers and G.I. Joe and also worked on The Bionic Six, Iron Man, The Fantastic Four and quite a few others. He's the guest on today's episode of Stu's Show.

This is Ron's second visit and probably not his last. If you think I have a lot of great show biz stories, you should hear this guy…and you can today when Stu Shostak welcomes him again. 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 to three or beyond.  Shortly after a show ends, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a measly 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three. If you didn't hear Ron's first appearance, make sure you grab that one.