Monthly Archives: December 2019

The MeTV folks whipped up this little video tribute to one of my favorite (and much-missed) friends, the late Howard Morris. It's about all the voices that Howie supplied on The Flintstones — although I believe at least one that they think was Howie — the bird blowing up the balloons — was actually Mel Blanc.

I directed Howie for many years on Garfield and Friends and a few other shows. He was an amazing talent. If you made him do a line six times, he would give you six completely different interpretations. Sometimes, I'd give him no direction. I'd just let him do a speech over and over until he came up with something I liked and it was rarely something I (or anyone) could have coached him into doing. His talent as an actor was that organic and natural. He was hilarious off-camera or off-mike as well.

The Flintstones didn't use him to his full potential but as you watch this montage, note how he manages to make every line a little funnier and more colorful than what was on the script before him…

I'm not sure which I'm getting more tired of: People who are sure Donald Trump will win a second term or people who are sure he won't. One group will see their expected outcome but I think the "being sure" part is foolish.

This is such an unconventional, volatile presidency that I wouldn't wager he'll even be president by my birthday, which is next March. You know what I do feel certain of? That the current Ukraine mess won't drive him from the White House but that there will be more scandals of equal or greater magnitude that will emerge before Election Day…probably many more if/when some arm of government gets its mitts on his tax records. There was a time we never thought Nixon supporters would abandon him but eventually, it looked like he'd bring down his entire party…and they did.

Here are a few articles worth reading, starting with Daniel Larison, who notes that for all his self-promoted rep as a "great negotiator," Trump has done nothing in the area of foreign relations but fail, fail, fail. Here's an excerpt in case you're too feeble to click on the link…

He has no respect for diplomacy, and he doesn't understand how diplomacy works, so it is not surprising that he is so bad at it. Instead of securing new agreements, he has squandered a real opportunity with North Korea, and he has deliberately stoked tensions with Iran. He foolishly took ownership of a regime change effort in Venezuela that has yielded nothing but more suffering for people in Venezuela. For all of his empty blather about building a better relationship with Russia, he has scuttled one arms control treaty with Moscow and seems determined to scrap New START as well. His signature move of reneging on agreements in an attempt to force more concessions from other parties has consistently backfired and left the U.S. in a worse position than when he started. Trump has shown that he can burn down the diplomatic achievements of others, but all that the U.S. has to show for his efforts is ashes and smoke.

Meanwhile, as Republicans come up with new explanations of how Trump did nothing wrong vis-à-vis Ukraine, William Saletan keeps pointing out how these explanations are themselves damning to the guy in the Oval Office. The new justification for his actions is that Ukraine was out to bring him down. And how were they doing that? By cooperating with legitimate U.S. investigations of the Trump administration. Quote…

The revenge theory starts with a May 23 meeting at the White House. A delegation of Trump appointees and a Republican senator, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, had just returned from Ukraine. They told Trump that Zelensky, who had just been inaugurated, was launching an unprecedented campaign against corruption. If Trump had cared about corruption, the delegation's report would have moved him. It didn't. He fixated instead on the idea that Ukraine was out to get him.

Lastly, Rudy Giuliani may have stopped inflicting friendly-fire damage on his client Donald Trump by staying off TV talk shows but "America's Mayor" still has a Twitter account. As Aaron Rupar notes, the Bizarro version of Perry Mason is doing Trump damage with his latest tweets. Lovely.

Here from 1971 is one of the most famous, talked-about commercials ever made. It's a whole bunch of kids standing on a mountaintop in Italy, which means most of them probably didn't speak English and they're lip-syncing to a vocal track that was probably recorded in some other country with other people singing. What is the message of this commercial? It's to tell us it's The Real Thing…

Back here, we were talking about a 1967 special Hanna-Barbera produced for NBC — a retelling of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. A new part was written in for Gene Kelly, who was also credited as director, though it's doubtful he had a lot to do with the animated characters that were combined with the live-action performers. I thought it was a pretty decent special for what it was but recognize that there are many who did not agree.

My pal Greg Ehrbar is one of the best of the many experts now writing about cartoon history. He is quite familiar with this special and he sent me this…

Master Hanna-Barbera art director and effects animator Ron Dias talked at length about Jack and the Beanstalk. In his experience, Hanna and Barbera usually began a project with very grand plans but when the money was running out, they scrambled to get it done, just as you explained.

Of course, there was nowhere near the budget for a 1967 NBC hour special compared to a 1945 MGM extravaganza like Anchors Aweigh. What frustrated Dias was that H-B used a dry "just add water" blue paint for the blue screen rather than the more expensive liquid paint, which did things like flake off on Gene Kelly's knees if he did a kneeling slide in his dancing, making them disappear.

He also said that he was not thrilled that they hired a less competent processing house to do the compositing, so that is why you can occasionally see the mattes (look for the staircase on the goose). However, he was still fond of the special, and we have to keep in mind that it was the first of its kind and very ambitious, perhaps too ambitious.

I've had the soundtrack album for years and listened to it more times than you've sent back cole slaw after you told them not to include it. I am certain that Leo DeLyon (a singer by trade) and Cliff Norton (who mostly talk sings) are doing the singing in "The Woggle-Bird Song," which by the way, was originally written for Filmation's Journey Back to Oz (which began production in 1962) by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen as "The Woggle-Bug Song."

Dick Beals told me that after he sang for Bobby Riha, Bobby's mother was furious when she learned that Beals took out an ad in Variety, revealing this fact (with H-B's blessing). She wanted to establish Bobby as an all-around talent who could sing, dance and act (he appeared in Disney's The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band the following year, mostly danced and said, "The British are coming! The British are coming!"

According to Joe Barbera's autobiography, Gene Kelly was unhappy with the final show and asked that NBC pull it from the schedule, which was impossible. It turned out to be a huge ratings and critical success (paving the way for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the first TV series to combine live-action with animation unless you count Clutch Cargo). When it won an Emmy for Outstanding Children's Program, It was Kelly who received the award as the producer of Jack and the Beanstalk (Hanna and Barbera never received any award until Last of the Curlews in 1972 — even the seven Oscars they won for Tom and Jerry and the Emmy for The Huckleberry Hound Show were not given to them, but to those with the "producer" title).

When Kelly accepted the award, he did not mention Hanna and Barbera but instead said that he could not take full credit for the success because there were also a lot of "little hands" also involved. Barbera learned to deal with that because of the Hollywood's precarious effect on people's psyches (perhaps Kelly needed the recognition more than they did) and took it in stride.

Kelly later appeared in the CBS TV salute to H-B, The Happy World of Hanna-Barbera. Their animation also appeared in MGM's That's Entertainment, Part 2 co-starring Kelly and Fred Astaire, which could very well have been by Kelly's recommendation.

Thanks, Greg. (And those of you who want to check out Greg's fine writing about cartoons need only frequent — assuming you don't already — this cranny of the Cartoon Research website.

• The main talking point of Trump defenders lately seems to be that it's undemocratic to impeach a president, thereby overturning the last election. I'd be more impressed if any of them felt that way about overturning the two elections that put Bill Clinton in office.

I wish we had commercials these days like this one. This is Stubby Kaye selling Corn Chex…

The new word being trampled to death in our public discourse is "biased." It used to mean "unfairly prejudiced for or against someone or something." Now, it seems to mean "having a different opinion than me." If I think my Congressperson is good and you don't, I can say your view doesn't count because you're biased. Only people who think my Congressperson is good are unbiased and therefore have valid opinions.

This is especially true when those biased people who don't like my Congressperson have held that opinion for any length of time. In fact, the longer you believe something, the greater your bias. For quite a while, I've believed that Charles Manson was a dangerous psychotic. But you can't take that opinion seriously because, obviously, I'm biased against him.

"Hate" is also starting to get warped, especially when used in the phrase, "He hates America." It's become one of those insults you use when you want to condemn a person and don't have anything of substance. As I think I've said here before, I don't think it's fair to throw that put-down at anyone unless that person has actually said "I hate America" or "I despise America" or "I loathe America" or something like that.

If you don't agree with me, you're biased and you clearly hate America. No, I can't prove you do but you can't prove you don't. That's what's so great about it as an insult.

Robert Rose has a follow-up question to this installment of Rejection which I recently posted…

You mention: "…I think I usually managed to hit that sweet spot between being Too Cooperative and Not Cooperative Enough. Writers often lose work by being one or the other." This got me curious as to how you would define "too cooperative." My guess is that it might be that the writer is writing exactly what he or she is told and not bringing anything original to the project. There might be times and places where that is useful, but generally when you're hiring someone for a creative position you expect them to be creative.

Obviously a writer who insists he's right about everything and is overly resistant to editing and input from the buyer is going to have problems. But I can imagine that perhaps a writer who never pushes back at all at proposed changes might be seen as lacking any confidence in their own ideas and work. Is it something along those lines, or were you thinking in a different direction?

You pretty much nailed it. One piece of sage advice I got in different forms from any number of older writers was, "Your job is to write, not take dictation." Some writers think the "safe" thing to do is to take whatever the producer or editor says, embellish it a little and give them back their own words and ideas. I suppose that works at times but the usual result is a bad script for which the writer gets blamed. Being too cooperative can also involve being a "yes man" or being unwilling to stand up and defend your own work.

Generally speaking, the people who hire you expect you to hand in something in which you take great pride. If you're too willing to change it, they think, "Gee, he doesn't care about it." That is not a good thing to have them think of you.

Right this moment, I can't think of a story about a writer being too cooperative but I will. I have way more stories about writers being too unwilling to rewrite or change things. Of course.

Marlon Brando prefers not to talk about movies…

I just read this news item…

The Trump administration Wednesday formalized work requirements for recipients of food stamps, a move that will cause hundreds of thousands of people to lose access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP.

This doesn't become effective until April 1 and that surprises me. Why is the Trump administration missing an opportunity to take away poor folks' food just before Christmas?

William Saletan explains how even the House Republicans' report on the Ukraine impeachment inquiry — the one intended to show why he was innocent — proves he's guilty. Not that it will make much difference in how anybody votes on impeachment.

• It's not just Lindsey Graham. It's everyone in politics behaving like some blackmailer has something really, really bad on them.

One of my favorite singers sings one of my favorite songs. It's Audra McDonald with "Make Someone Happy" from the Broadway show, Do-Re-Mi — which starred one of my favorite comic actors, Phil Silvers. Favorites everywhere…

Matthew Yglesias provides an overview of what Donald Trump has accomplished in his first three years in office. It's not a bad list if you think the purpose of the government is to make things better for the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and defenseless.

Politifact itemizes six key findings in the public impeachment hearings.

Here's a report from another Fact Checker. Trump keeps claiming that whatever election tampering and mail-hacking was done in the 2016 election came from Ukraine, not Russia, and involved a Ukrainian company called Crowdstrike. Even his closest aides have told him this is wrong in so many ways, including the fact that Crowdstrike is an American company. The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler would like to award sixteen of his paper's non-coveted Pinocchios to Trump but must settle for the maximum of four. This is a good item to forward to any friends who'll tell you that Trump never tells lies. They'll probably argue that it's not a lie if he really believes it.

Is Trump really trying to dial back U.S. involvement in foreign wars? If you go by his speeches, the answer is yes. But as Daniel Larison notes, if you look at what Trump actually does, you get a very different picture.

And Bob Cesca lays out how the defense of Trump's actions in the quid pro quo matter is crumbling as more and more facts undermine it. Enoy.

I'm sorry — for my sake as well as yours — that I didn't know Dorothy Fontana well enough to have any great stories about her. I did know a lot of great stories she wrote and not all of them were for Star Trek, which is the impression you'll probably get from some of the forthcoming obits. But she also wrote for other TV shows including Ben Casey, Kung Fu, The Waltons, Dallas, The Streets of San Francisco, Land of the Lost and oh-so-many more. The length and breadth of her career could easily be drowned out by itemizing her contributions to the love and longevity of Captain Kirk and his merry band, as well as their successors in that franchise.

I knew her best from her service and devotion to the Writers Guild of America West. Things can get chaotic within that organization where some committees can feel dominated by folks who are angry about their careers and are taking it out on the Guild. Any time I was in a Guild meeting room with Dorothy, she was a wise presence, dispensing sanity and selflessness, gently reminding all to focus on the bigger picture.

She was very smart and very principled and, as far as I could see, respected by all. Dorothy Fontana died peacefully last evening at the age of 80 following a brief illness.