Tomorrow on Stu's Show!

I still find it kinda hard to believe that I got to meet and know and in many cases work with so many people responsible for what entertained me for the first 1.8 decades of my life. In the Top Five of that list would have to be Bob Clampett, who directed so many of the best Warner Brothers cartoons and who later gave us the Beany and Cecil cartoons of the early sixties.

In between those two grand achievements, he also gave the world the Time for Beany puppet show on TV starring (initially) Daws Butler and Stan Freberg as Beany-Boy and Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent. I was too young to watch that show when it was on but it may still have been important to making me whatever I am today. A few months before she died, I introduced my mother to Mr. Freberg and she told him, "I watched that show every day when I was pregnant with Mark and I think he somehow absorbed its sense of humor in the womb."

So I was pleased to get to know Bob and most of his wonderful family and to visit their home, often at his invite to come up and watch old cartoons with a bunch of young (compared to him) cartoon buffs and to talk about them. He was stunningly generous with his time. I think you could have phoned Bob at 4 AM to wake him up and ask about some obscure animator who was in his unit in 1938 and Bob would remember the guy, tell you all about him and not scream at you for waking him up. I am not entirely sure about that last part.

Bob left us in 1984. His kids have carried on his legacy, preserving and promoting, and guess what! His lovely daughter Ruth is the guest tomorrow afternoon on Stu Shostak's video/radio chat show. She'll be talking about her father's life and work and yes, there will be clips. She'll also be talking about her own work as a V.I.P. in the field of producing and selling collectible animation cels and other memorabilia and maybe she'll talk about the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award, which is presented each year at Comic-Con International. (I'm told it will be presented this year even though there will be no Comic-Con International.)

You can watch or listen to Stu's Show many ways and they're listed show over on the Stu's Show website. If you have a Roku-enabled TV set, you can watch it there if you do what that site tells you. There will also be a live feed on that page and also on this page during the show, which starts at 4 PM Pacific Time and runs for way longer than Stu expects. It oughta be great if only because Bob was.