Monthly Archives: June 2019

Folks are writing to ask me what happened with the Subway sandwich folks. I wrote about it here but basically: A week ago Saturday, I decided to order two Subway sandwiches via their app, then walk down to the store and pick them up. The app said the store closed at 9 PM. Shortly after 8, I ordered. My order was accepted, my credit card was charged $18.35 and it said my order would be waiting for me at 8:30. Ah, but when I got to the shop, it was closed. The app thought it closed at 9 but it closed at 8 so I paid for two sandwiches I never got and I walked about a mile to pick up nothing.

Because it was a weekend — and a holiday weekend, to boot — their Subway Care phone line for Customer Support was closed and I thought I wouldn't be able to straighten things out until the following Tuesday. In the previous post, I told the story up to this point.

Soon after I posted it, I got a message from a nice gent who manages a different Subway outlet. I gather he was unsurprised by incompetence at the company for which he works. He gave me a phone number that, he said, would get me through to someone at Subway Care on Sunday. Thank you very much, sir.

On Sunday, I called and did get to someone who apologized profusely. She said that while it might take until Tuesday when the full office was open, three things would be done. The $18.35 would be charged back to my credit card. I would be sent a Subway gift card as an apology for the error and inconvenience. And the app would be corrected with the proper hours. As of more than a week later, none of these things has been done.

(The gift card, by the way, she said would be $5.00. That didn't sound like much of an apology to me, especially from a company that often discounts an order of two sandwiches like mine by that much. But, hey, you take what you can get…which perhaps should be the slogan for Subway.)

Yesterday afternoon, I called again and spent way too much of my life on the phone, explaining to a different nice lady what I'd been promised and how none of it was done. She apologized even more profusely and assured me she would make it all happen…and that's where we are. These people can make a foot-long Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sandwich on 9-Grain Honey Oat bread in thirty seconds but refunding my money takes forever. Further details, if any, will follow.

We're still talking about how cartoon voice actors get paid. Robert Forman just sent me this…

A few years back, over at Cartoon Research, they did an article on the cartoon "Windblown Hare" in which it was mentioned that Mel Blanc was paid $125.00 for his work on the cartoon. I found that amount to be absurdly low.

Checking the CPI calculator, that works out to about $1,500.00 in today's dollars which would mean that Mr. Blanc would receive about $30k in today's dollars for 20 cartoons in a year. So it doesn't seem that at least at the time a person could make any kind of a living doing that as a career. I assume even a guy like Blanc had to do a lot of hustling to make a living.

I note that today the people who voice The Simpsons make about as much money per episode as Blanc made in 10 years of Warner's cartoons. My question for you is was there a time when there was a major shift, and the voice actor business became something a person could earn a living doing? Or is The Simpsons just an outlier and it is still a hard way to make a living?

The Simpsons is an outlier in just about every aspect of show business. It will probably turn out to be the most financially successful thing ever done for television if it isn't already.

About Mel Blanc's pay: You need to remember that Mel Blanc was not "just" a professional cartoon voice actor. He was an actor who did many things (a few even on-camera) including radio shows, records, voiceovers for non-animated films, commercials, etc. As with many actors, a lot of the work was for industrial or regional projects the mass public never heard or saw.

In his last few years, he sometimes got big paychecks to voice some Bugs Bunny project — like, say, a series of commercials. That was because he was The Great and Famous Mel Blanc and there was a fear there'd be a mass public outcry (and maybe a negative reaction to the commercials) if they replaced him as the voice of Bugs. This enabled him and his also-shrewd son Noel to demand large amounts.

I told a story here about how I once directed Mel for a TV show where we paid him what I thought was a lot of money to record three or four lines as Bugs. I'm thinking it would be okay to tell you how much and please understand I'm not suggesting he wasn't worth every penny of it. But for about five minutes of work that he didn't even have to drive anywhere to do, Mel got ten thousand dollars.

For most of his career, playing Bugs Bunny was nowhere near his main source of cash. One of the reasons he asked for and got that screen credit that ticked-off his co-stars was that he felt the job wasn't paying him enough. He thought maybe having his name on the cartoons would lead to more job offers…and it did. He certainly made more money being on The Jack Benny Program or dozens of other radio shows.

For a decade or three there, Mel would run around all day from studio to studio doing a radio job here, a commercial there, then a record or an educational short or something else. All that stuff could add up to a pretty nice living. June Foray was doing the same kind of thing, often for the same employers. June would leave her home out in Woodland Hills each weekday morning at 7 AM and drive into Hollywood. Then she'd spend the day going from job to job…sometimes four or five in a day, sometimes into the evening. Even during the years she did Rocky & Bullwinkle, cartoons were never the majority of the bookings.

At one point in the fifties, Mel did the voices for an animated commercial for PaperMate pens that ran constantly on TV. It is said he made more money off that commercial than he had off all the cartoons he'd done by then put together.

It's the same today. Almost no one is exclusively a cartoon voice performer. The people you think of in that category also do commercials, video games, audio books, promos, dubbing, industrial films, announcing, etc. I have worked with several cartoon voice actors who also provide voices for like when you call a business and a recorded voice asks you, "How may I direct your call? If you know your party's extension, you may enter it now."

This is something a lot of aspiring cartoon voice actors don't get. Each year at Comic-Con — and this year will be no exception — I do a panel late Sunday afternoon called "The Business of Cartoon Voices." I bring in a top agent and a couple of actors and we dispense free advice to the wanna-bes…the kind of advice for which some less-than-honest "teachers" charge hefty fees.

Each year, at least a couple of the folks in the audience look amazed to hear that the actors whose careers they covet don't just spend all day voicing furry creatures and giant robots. But even if that's all they book, some (note the emphasis) can do fairly well if they get on a couple of series or get called often enough.

Can you make a good living that way? Absolutely. It depends on how much you work. There are thousands of people who fail. I'm fairly certain the Hollywood voiceover industry has never been more overcrowded with talent but there are people who work. Some walk out of a recording session with a couple thousand dollars for a morning's work and then have another session booked after lunch. They're the exceptions…but so was Mel Blanc.

One of America's great portrait painters, Everett Raymond Kinstler, died last Sunday at the age of 92. Kinstler's portraits of the famous and powerful hang in important buildings all across this land and even presidents would pose for him. Starting with Richard Nixon, Kinstler painted every single one except Barack Obama. He was brilliant at capturing the essence of anyone he put on canvas.

So why am I writing about him on this blog? Because before he became a painter of well-known faces, Mr. Kinstler was a comic book artist…and a very good one.  Growing up in New York City, he attended the School of Industrial Art there, quitting school just before he turned sixteen to work in various "shops" (studios) as an apprentice. Most of his work at that age involved inking the work of other artists for the Sangor Shop. That led to his earliest solo work which seems to have been for Better Comics in 1942.

Kinstler jumped around from publisher to publisher. Among the companies that bought his work were Avon, Archie, Ziff-Davis, Fawcett and Marvel. He rarely worked on features that are remembered today but he drew some Hawkman stories for DC in 1947, some Zorro for Western Publishing in 1953 and '54, and Black Hood for Archie in 1945. Mostly, he did anthology-type stories for various books and especially excelled on westerns and romance stories. In the forties and fifties, he also drew for pulp magazines including Doc Savage and Ranch Romances.

In the mid-fifties as work became harder to get in comics, he did more and more painting for advertising and book illustration. His last work in comics appears to have been educational stories for Gilberton (the Classics Illustrated people) around 1960. From then on, demand for his services as a painter took him forever away from comics.

But he recalled those years fondly as I learned when I interviewed him at the 2006 Comic-Con International. I wrote then on this blog, "It's always nice when I get to meet a veteran comic artist I've never met before but whose work I've always admired. Everett Raymond Kinstler is a charming, classy gentleman." That, he was…and very talented charming, classy gentleman.

I was hoping to get through this weekend without thinking about Trump but I made a wrong turn at some website and stumbled into an essay by David Frum on why he thinks impeachment at this time is a bad idea. For what little my agreement may be worth, I agree.

Let's see now if I can make it to Monday morning without thinking about You-Know-Who again.

As a follow-up to this post, Andy Rose wrote in to ask…

In addition to Ducky Nash, wasn't Mel Blanc on an exclusive contract to Warner Bros. for a while (at least for cartoons)? It was my understanding that was why Mel suddenly stopped playing Woody Woodpecker for Walter Lantz in 1941, and then doesn't appear to have done cartoons for anybody else except Warners until around 1960. Of course, Mel wasn't exactly on staff since he was busy with lots of other radio and TV work, but I assume WB had to at least pay him some sort of ongoing retainer for him to not work for anybody else.

By "on staff," we're referring to a situation where someone is paid by the week or the month; where the employer buys his or her time rather than to hire them for a specific job. As I understand it, Mel had an exclusive contract with Warners for animation. They paid him some amount higher than union scale and gave him that screen credit that annoyed some of the other actors in those cartoons. They may even have guaranteed him a certain number of recording sessions over a specified time period.

In exchange, Mel agreed to be exclusive to them in…well, I'm not sure if it was for short theatrical cartoons or all animation but that would have been spelled out in the contract. As we all know, Mel recorded a voice for Mr. Disney's Pinocchio though only a hiccup was used. I'm thinking though that was before his exclusive deal with WB. (I'm having lunch in a week or two with someone who would know and I'll find out.)

The point is that an exclusive deal to work a certain number of days for a certain amount is not the same thing as a staff job. Mel never had the latter, which is why he was free to work anywhere else at any time of any day so long as he worked Warners' needs into his schedule.

A friend who worked for Disney and didn't want his name mentioned wrote me that Clarence "Ducky" Nash may not have been the only voice actor Disney ever had on staff. My friend thinks Cliff Edwards, who was the voice of Jiminy Cricket, did for a time, also. But both these men might also fall into that category I mentioned — folks who did voices and other things for the studio.

There were storymen and animators and others on staff who occasionally would play a role or two in a cartoon. Nash and Edwards did a lot of P.R. work and appearances and someone else wrote me that "Ducky" even sometimes conducted studio tours on the lot for V.I.P. guests. I wonder if they ever thought of putting him at the switchboard and having Donald Duck answer the studio phone. I've talked to operators who were less intelligible.

This is a quick peek at how videotape used to be handled in the television business. Someone pulled out what I believe is the final edited master of an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus made in 1970. That's close to half a century ago. Note if you will that it's in a Scotch box but it's Memorex tape and it looks like the colors are not what they used to be…