Monthly Archives: December 2016

Do "Coastal Elites" sneer openly at "Rural Folks?" Well, of course they do, just as they sneer at us. I'm amazed sometimes when I travel to hear the caricature that some people out there have of everyone who lives in or near my area code. It's about as accurate as the caricature of Southerners as folks who have missing teeth, live in trailer parks and marry within the family.

If you're interested in this discussion, read East Coast Elite Paul Krugman and then read West Coast Elite Kevin Drum. And then we can move on to the topic of how so many people of one religion sneer at those who are so foolish as to not be of that faith.

There's a biography out about the cartoonist who gave us Krazy Kat. It's called Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White and it's by Michael Tisserand

I haven't read it yet but you can do what I did, which was to order a copy of it here. Here's an article about the book.

I love Krazy Kat. My five favorite newspaper strips of all time would be — in no particular order — Peanuts, Pogo, Thimble Theater (aka Popeye by Segar), Li'l Abner (before about 1964) and Krazy Kat. This is not to say I completely understood Krazy Kat but I love as much of it as I've been able to understand. Maybe this book will help me understand its creator and that will translate into understanding more of the strip. Worth a try.

The annual Gypsy of the Year show had two performances in New York City earlier this week. It's a great event that raises money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and the way it works is that every (or almost every) show on Broadway creates a performance piece. This year, the most talked-about one was this one from the company of Hamilton…

The polls suggest that Donald Trump is the least-popular newly-elected president in American history. Even a lot of folks who voted for him don't like the guy and I won't be surprised if it gets a lot worse. I don't see that he's done a single thing to win over the folks who didn't vote for him and the ones who did are starting to move away from him.

It's not just him, it's the company he's keeping. Before the election, those who found things to like about Trump — or maybe just things to dislike about his opponent — could excuse his embrace of white nationalists and conspiracy nutjobs because, well, that's the kind of thing you have to do get elected. But now he is elected and he won't distance himself from the racists or from guys like Alex Jones who insists Hillary Clinton has murdered children with her bare hands. His cabinet picks sure ain't an example of either "draining the swamp" or picking the most qualified candidate.

And this is before he starts signing bills that will give tax cuts to people like…well, like Donald Trump.

Readers of this blog know of my admiration for the late Stan Freberg, who was a great actor, a great voice actor, a great satirist, a great maker of funny commercials and a great person. I owe a large part of my sense of humor to this man.

Stan left us in April of 2015. When his widow Hunter (whom he adored) phones me now, the Caller I.D. tells me Stan Freberg is calling and for a fraction of a second, I get excited; not that I don't love talking to Hunter but…well, you know. Anyway, with Hunter's OK — and Stan was very much behind this in the months before he died — some vintage items are about to be auctioned off so that his fans can get their mitts on some wonderful Freberg artifacts. There are two auctions and the first is this Saturday. If you're in the Los Angeles area, there's a viewing tomorrow at the Heritage Auctions offices in Beverly Hills.

You can see the items going up for bid in this first batch over at this page. Among the goodies are Stan's original scripts for the best satiric Christmas record ever made (Green Chri$tma$) and the best satiric history record ever made (Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Volume 1). There's also the manuscript to his autobiography, some awards he won, his old typewriter, his passport (see above), his high school yearbook…well, just go browse them yourself.

Let me give you a tip: If you want to bid, read the instructions carefully and don't wait until Saturday morning to do that. The first few times I bid on things in online auctions, I lost out on great treasures I would have gotten if I'd understood the rules of bidding better. There's some really great stuff here and if you're a lover of Freberg, I'd like to see you get it. Unless, of course, you're bidding against me.

That bidding starts Saturday morning at 9 AM Pacific Time. Let the games begin!

Boy, I hope Paul Waldman is not prescient when he writes that Donald Trump is going to cause someone to be murdered. I don't know if that's going to happen but I know that if it does, it will be everybody's fault but his.

The last time I ran this little counter graphic, the total also stood at six but since then, I got one back and lost another so we're still at six. The one I got back has become greatly disillusioned with Mr. Trump since the election, mainly owing to (a) The Donald acting like he can just reverse himself on things he said on the campaign trail he'd do and (b) the indicators that Trump's greatest interest in the presidency is how much he can increase his personal fortune, conflicts of interest be damned.

This once and future friend hasn't reached the point where he wishes Hillary (you know: the one who got the most votes) was the one who'll be inaugurated but he's starting to believe things I told him that he'd once thought were dirty lies. He called and apologized and I told him we're fine. He wanted to meet for lunch but I told him I'm a little busy right now so we'll have to delay it 'til after the first of the year. By then, he'll probably wish he'd voted for Clinton.

That felt good. What didn't was divesting myself of the offsetting friend whose support for D.T. hasn't wavered but he's starting to go all Alex Jones on me.

Apparently, we're entering an era where whatever you don't want to believe can be dismissed as a lie along with everything that we once called proof. I think the premise is that any reality is as good as the real one; that you're entitled to believe two plus two equals eleven if it's what you know in your gut and all those people who insist it's four are conspirators — or at least dupes of the conspirators who conspire to force their math on others.

I do kind of understand how nice it must be to live in a world where you can just make whatever you don't like go away like that. I'm thinking of taking the position that Hillary was elected…in a landslide, no less. And people across America do not have to worry about a nutcase National Security Advisor getting us into another stupid war or about them losing their health insurance or civil rights or ozone layer or anything. If someone tells me next month that Trump was inaugurated, I'll just say, "Don't tell me you fell for that lie!"

That might be a good way to get through the next four years. That's assuming any of us get through the next four years.

Here's a vintage TV commercial…and a bit of a mystery. As you may know, Time for Beany was a wonderful puppet show that went on the air in Los Angeles in 1949. It was one of those rare kids' shows that adults loved just as much as the young'uns did. It aired live on TV in L.A. where it was done and later, kinescopes were syndicated to some other cities around the country.

For the first few years, the puppeteer-performers were the supremely-talented duo of Daws Butler and Stan Freberg. Daws played Beany and Cap'n Huffenpuff. Stan played Cecil and Dishonest John. Both played other supporting characters and every so often, one of them had to play the other's characters…which they could do because they were both great mimics.

Either late in 1952 or early in 1953, their contracts were up and both chose to leave, in part due to disputes with the show's owner and producer, Bob Clampett. There was some amount of bad blood there. They were replaced by Irv Shoemaker, Jim MacGeorge and Walker Edmiston. Shoemaker assumed Freberg's roles. MacGeorge played Cap'n Huffenpuff. Edmiston played Beany for a while, then left to do a new show Clampett had launched, whereupon MacGeorge began playing Beany. The show ended in either late 1954 or early 1955. You following all this? Fine.

In 1959, Clampett made a deal with Mattel Toys under which he would produce a new show with the characters for ABC, this time with animation instead of puppets. The show was originally Matty's Funday Funnies but later, when the cartoons made for it were rerun, it became known as Beany and Cecil. For this show, MacGeorge did the voices of Beany and the Cap'n, Shoemaker was Cecil and Dishonest John, and both did guest characters, as did some other actors.

Concurrent with the animated show, Mattel flooded the market with Beany and Cecil toys. Below is a commercial from back then promoting the talking Beany and Cecil dolls. That's the great Frank ("Yesssss?") Nelson doing the voiceover but who did the voices that came out of the Beany and Cecil dolls? Surprising answer: It was Daws Butler.

He was not the current voice of either character. He was not the voice of Cecil on the puppet show except for occasional emergencies. He was not even on speaking terms with Bob Clampett (although a few years later, I played peacemaker between them.) So why did Mattel hire Daws?

This was a mystery that bugged me since about 1962 when I noticed that the Beany toy sounded a little like Augie Doggie or Elroy Jetson and the Cecil toy sounded a little like Quick Draw McGraw. Daws, of course, was the voice of all those characters.

When I got to know him years later, it was one of the first questions I asked him: Why did they hire you for that? His answer: He didn't know. He told me he got a booking one day to record some lines for Mattel. He showed up at the studio and found out it was Beany and Cecil. "I thought Clampett would have nothing to do with me then," said he.

The best we could come up with, theory-wise, was that Mattel wanted to just pay one person to do both voices and they figured Daws was the most versatile of the guys who'd worked on either version of the show. (When I got to know Bob Clampett, I asked him. He didn't even know Daws had done it.)

So there's the mystery. Here's the commercial…

• The GOP will never win the White House again. Trump picked a Climate Change denier to run the EPA and that means no more Florida!

Jeffrey Toobin, who does not have a bad track record in this area, makes seven predictions about legal matters for 2017. He tells us who he thinks Trump will nominate to the Supreme Court and he thinks Bill Cosby is going to be convicted of assault. Let's see if he's right.

Looks like a busy day here at Evanier HQ so not a lot of posting on this here blog today. Might I remind you I'll be heard on the big Tenth Anniversary webcast of Stu's Show today at 4 PM my time? Details are in the previous post.

I'm not paying a whole heap of attention to Mr. Trump this week because a lot of what's going on sounds like posturing and speculation from all sides. It is beginning to look like one big aspect of the Trump Presidency is going to be our Chief Exec's regular temper tantrums when a large part of the country refuses to recognize him as legitimate or respectable. Any day now, he may start threatening to deport anyone who insists Hillary Clinton (or anyone who ever ran for the presidency) got more votes than he did.

It also looks like Paul Ryan would let Trump start robbing liquor stores and running a white slavery ring if wealthy Americans got a good enough tax cut. I somehow don't recall the Tea Party movement was about running America to benefit the rich and letting the president ignore the Constitution when he feels like it. But hey, if that's what they wanted…

I'll be TiVoing tonight's live broadcast of Hairspray for future viewing and discussion. I like these prime-time musicals but I wish more of the attention was on the shows, as opposed to the stunt of doing them live. In the advance publicity, it sometimes feels like a reality show about "behind the scenes," as opposed to a theatrical event. I expect it'll be a good show, though Hairspray is pretty broad comedy and it's going to be hard for Martin Short and Harvey Fierstein to overact their roles. Somehow though, I'm confident they'll each find a way.

A topic for a further post here: The other day, I came across an article on a forum about comic books in which some fellow was raving about a certain series that came out years ago. On and on, he went about that a brilliant, perfect, genius, fabulous comic this was…a series that I recall finding boring and quite unreadable. I also recall a lot of other people feeling as I did, including many at the company that published it.

Now, that's fine, of course. My tastes don't match up with many others', nor should they. What struck me was how this commentator didn't seem to really think his view is darn near unanimous and inarguable. That something is good and that something is widely recognized as good are two very separate things and the latter, unlike the former, is not utterly subjective.

The article reminded me a lot of a friend I have who continues to argue that in the election just past, vastly more Americans wanted Bernie Sanders than any other candidate. Even though I voted for Bernie in the primary, I don't think the evidence supports that, even if you're only talking about Democrats, let alone those who think liberal = evil. I guess I have a problem with folks conflating the two separate views — "I feel this way" with "everybody feels this way" — and think it leads to a lot of disconnect.

You'd think that if the Internet teaches us anything, it teaches us that there are a lot of viewpoints out there that are the inverse of ours. I think this gets back to the Trump voters out there who simply refuse to believe any numbers that show that more Americans — and not by a tiny margin — wanted someone else. More on this and everything else at a later time.

Ten years ago, I told you to give a listen to the first installment of something called Stu's Show, which my pal Stu Shostak was doing on the Internet — a talk show about the entertainment industry. It was mostly about television and mostly about older television and his first guest was me. His third guest was also me and I've been on many times since even as the guest roster has gotten better and better. I guess when you start with me, it would kind of have to.

In those ten years, Stu has welcomed onto his show the likes of Dick Van Dyke, Jonathan Winters, Bob Barker, Julie Newmar, Shelley Berman, Ed Asner, Shirley Jones, Stan Freberg, Carl Reiner, Monty Hall, Bonnie Franklin, Rose Marie, Pat Harrington, June Foray, William Schallert, Geoff Edwards, Maurice LaMarche, Rob Paulsen, Gregg Berger, Hank Garrett, Howard Storm, Marty Ingels, Gary Owens, Ken Levine, Bob Bergen, Sergio Aragonés, Jerry Beck, Bill Mumy, Robert Clary, Angela Cartwright, Joe Alaskey, Vince Waldron, Jerry Eisenberg, Floyd Norman, Scott Shaw!, Leonard Maltin, Carl Gottlieb, Kato Kaelin, Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, Chuck McCann, Stan and Barry Livingston and so many others.

I will be back on with him — as will another frequent guest, TV historian Wesley Hyatt — for another in Stu's never-ending series of webcasts about the history of Late Night Television. This time, we're up to Tom Snyder getting fired and hired, Johnny Carson quitting, Jay Leno getting his job and David Letterman going elsewhere. There should also be time for some of the questions that Stu's loyal listeners will send in via e-mail. So won't you join us?

Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there and then. 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. Tomorrow's will probably go to three and beyond. In any case, shortly after a show concludes, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a paltry 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three, which is a better bargain than you'll find at Costco. Stu, however, does not make you buy a ten-year supply.

Back when the Playboy Channel started on cable, they had a series of executives who operated on the false principle that there were things their subscribers wanted to watch other than nude women. This was apparently what they had to tell certain higher execs (especially Mr. Hefner) in order to get the job. Hef always wanted to believe that the Playmates were just one reason of many that people bought the magazine…and that may have been so but it wasn't true of the channel.

When there were no nude women, there were no viewers. But for a few years there, they produced and programmed a lot of shows that either contained no nude women or at least long periods when there were no nude women. Eventually, as Playboy's fortunes declined, they surrendered and began giving the audience what it wanted. Before that capitulation, they ran a lot of really odd shows.

I got the station for free back then and I remember many cheaply-produced roasts starring older comedians. In one, Comedians A, B and C would roast Comedian D…and then in the next one, Comedians B, C and D would roast Comedian A and then in the next one….well, you get the concept. The budgets apparently did not allow for writers so little or nothing was prepared specific to the person being roasted. The comics would just get up, do their usual acts and try to work the name of the "honoree" into the jokes somewhere.

The following is an example. It's from a roast of Milton Berle…and I suspect if you were a comedy writer back then, there was no easier assignment you could get than to write jokes about Milton Berle. You could write about his dick, about his age, about his thievery of everyone else's jokes…it was a cinch. As I recall, almost no one had much to say about those topics. They just told dirty stories and tossed Uncle Miltie's name in here and there. Here's Jackie Vernon doing that…

As Jonathan Chait notes, Mike Pence is really impressed with how Donald Trump's shoulders qualify the man as a great leader. That's right: His shoulders.

One of the many things I think some Trump supporters got wrong about Trump is that they thought he was a macho, strong man…which is all some people seem to want in a candidate. Knowledge…good judgment…basic understanding of human needs? Who cares about that stuff if he's John Wayne? The two times I've seen Trump in person, he did not strike me as that. He struck me as a bully who expects to have his ass kissed and throws tantrums when he doesn't get his way. I imagine we're about to see a lot of that.

Jimmy Kimmel has been tagged to host the Academy Awards next February. I doubt this has much to do with his hosting skills and everything to do with his network's new deal with the Motion Picture Academy. It gives ABC much more control over the broadcast and they, of course, decided it would best be used to promote their late night star. Also, Kimmel has the advantage that the telecast is literally across the street from where he does his show.

My own feeling is that the host is largely irrelevant to the ratings of that event. What matters is whether it's a year where people really care who wins Best Picture or Best Actor or Best Actress. Once in a while, they even care who wins Best Director. I'm not sure that any of the films of this year, including those yet to open, are the kind that generate intense loyalty and emotions. We'll see.

I think history has shown that the best Oscar hosts are those who are either Big Movie Stars or Johnny Carson. But there is no more Johnny Carson and I wonder how many Big Movie Stars would risk their Big Movie Stardom on a highly-visible gig that is not what they do best, nor is it one that is really in their control. If I were in charge of picking a host, I'd try to get Kevin Hart, and not just to make sure there'd be a least one black person on the stage. And if I were Kevin Hart's agent, I'd tell him he'd be insane to accept.