Monthly Archives: July 2020

I have a problem with words being rendered meaningless due to overuse and misuse…"legend," to name one. These days, absolutely everyone is a legend and absolutely everything is legendary…and we completely ignore the aspect of the word that a "legend" may be a myth or gross exaggeration. Furthermore, everyone these days is an icon and everything is iconic. Earlier this morning, I fed the legendary stray cat in my legendary backyard some iconic canned cat food.

I don't know where this zeal comes from. It's probably the same place that gave us standing ovations for every single guest on most talk shows when they had live audiences.

Which brings us to "definitive," which has now become just another synonym for "great." Over at the Merriam-Webster website, they have this to say…

Some common synonyms of definitive are conclusive, decisive, and determinative. While all these words mean "bringing to an end," definitive applies to what is put forth as final and permanent.

I keep seeing people use that adjective as if it means "excellent." I can't find it again but a few weeks ago on some comic book website, I saw a guy refer to a dozen or so different bodies of work on Batman as all being "definitive." As the line goes in The Princess Bride, "I do not think that word means what you think it means."

That new, wonderful Laurel & Hardy DVD (this one) is advertised as having "the definitive restorations" of the films on it. When I said I had a "teensy-tiny microscopic quibble" with the set, that's what I meant. I think that's the wrong word. Yeah, it's highly unlikely better film elements will ever turn up but technology keeps accomplishing things that we thought were impossible a decade or two ago.

If not — if these are the best versions of these films that ever exist — I'll be satisfied. They look and sound so much better than earlier releases we thought were good enough. I hope nothing I said discourages anyone from buying this set.

This is worth ten and a half minutes of your time. It's the amazing impressionist Jim Meskimen reading the Declaration of Independence in 61 different voices including his own…

It's been ten years since I last posted this sketch from Your Show of Shows. It might just be the funniest thing Carl Reiner was ever involved in — and he was involved in an awful lot of funny things…

George Shapiro, Carl Reiner's manager and nephew, talks about Carl's last day. If you gotta go, that's the way to go. (Thanks to Birthday Girl Shelly Goldstein for alerting me to this.)

I found this on the fine blog of my pal Paul Harris. It's a CNN report on what it's like these days in a couple of San Antonio hospitals that are being maxed-out by COVID patients — in particular, young COVID patients. It'll make you want to show this to everyone who thinks the virus is a hoax or that it's no worse than the average flu or that it only affects old people who were about to die anyway so "What's the big fuss and why can't I go to my favorite bar?"

Or it might make you want to go slap the crap out of some of those people. Donald Trump and the folks who obediently parrot his positions say the virus is going away and any day now, it will just disappear. They need to be reminded that every single thing Trump and his minions have said about this plague has been absolutely and dangerously wrong.

My spies tell me that today, Dick Van Dyke recorded — from his home, of course — a special intro to run on tomorrow night's airing of two colorized episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show. The two episodes they selected — "Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth" and "October Eve" are exactly the ones I would have picked if you asked me to pick two that showed what a fine comic actor Carl Reiner was.

It doesn't really bother me that they're colorized. I mean, they were perfectly fine in black-n-white but if the gimmick of colorization gets a few more eyeballs tuning in — especially a few more younger eyeballs — then I'm fine with it. It does bother me that someone has had to chop a few minutes out of each of them. And I hope someone fixes the mistake they made in the end credits the last time they aired "Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth" colorized…

Richard Deacon did not play a dual role in that episode. The role of Johnny Patrick was played by Dick Curtis.

Speaking of multiple roles: I mentioned earlier that in addition to his role as Alan Brady and as the painter in "October Eve," Mr. Reiner also played the budding English anti-existentialist Yale Sampson in "I'm No Henry Walden." Nobody has written to point this out but I should have mentioned that he also played that drunken actor Willie Cook in Part II of "Stacey Petrie"…

Actually, Carl played a lot of roles on that series if you count off-camera parts like voices heard on a TV set that the Petries were watching. His stint as Alan Brady started that way. Brady's voice, furnished by Carl, was first heard in "The Meershatz Pipe," which was the tenth episode of the series to be aired. Later on, Alan Brady became an on-camera part but his face was concealed. Again, Carl played the role.

And they finally decided to let him be seen…a good decision since "Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth," which is the episode most folks think was the best, wouldn't have worked if you couldn't see his face and especially his scalp.

A woman who claims to work as a nurse in an emergency room — and I can't imagine why anyone would lie about this — posted this tweet…

I've been sitting in my car in the hospital parking lot for 20 min trying to process everything that I just experienced these last 13 hours, trying to muster up the energy to drive home. 6 years in the ER & I've never seen a night like last night. Please take this seriously…

That's chilling. I don't know where she works. It could anywhere in this country. But an E.R. nurse sees some pretty horrifying things in the line of duty. At 4 AM one morning when my mother was in the E.R. and we were waiting for lab results, I had a ten-minute talk with a nurse there. You could have built five seasons of a medical drama show just on the stories she told me.

One was about some children who that morning had come in, badly burned from a gas explosion in their homes. I said something about how that must have been terrible to deal with. And she said something like, "The ones that are really hard to deal with emotionally are the ones that could have been prevented."

Entertainment Weekly says CBS is quickly scheduling the following for tomorrow night…

The Dick Van Dyke Show — Now in Living Color! A Special Tribute to Carl Reiner will air Friday, July 3, at 8 p.m. ET/PT. Reiner served as creator, writer, and costar on the beloved sitcom, which aired for five seasons, from 1961 to 1966. A CBS news release confirms that Reiner personally supervised the colorization of the episodes.

In "Coast to Coast Big Mouth," Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore) blurts out a secret on a nationally televised quiz show, revealing that comedian Alan Brady (Reiner) wears a toupee. As for "October Eve," it centers on a painting of Laura that returns to haunt her when, despite her having posed fully clothed, the artist, Sergei Carpetna (Reiner), takes the liberty of "undraping" her. (In addition to being a favorite of Reiner's, "October Eve" was the only episode in which he portrayed someone other than Alan Brady.)

We who know The Dick Van Dyke Show backwards, forwards and inside-out know that last sentence is fake news. In the episode, "I'm No Henry Walden," he portrayed someone other than Alan Brady. He played the budding English anti-existentialist Yale Sampson…

By the way: The lady chatting with "Yale Sampson" is Betty Lou Gerson who, a few years before this show, had supplied the voice of the evil Cruella DeVil in Mr. Disney's 101 Dalmatians.

The other night on my webcast, Leonard Maltin and I got to talking about movies we liked but which are difficult to see. He mentioned the 1940 version of Swiss Family Robinson produced by RKO and starring Thomas Mitchell, Edna Best, Freddie Bartholomew and Tim Holt, with narration by an uncredited Orson Welles. As Leonard explained it, when the Disney folks made their 1960 version of Swiss Family Robinson, they purchased the RKO version and removed it from circulation.

Leonard is right, as he always is, but it had apparently slipped back into circulation. Reader-of-this-site Steve Feustel wrote me to say that the 1940 version and the 1960 one are both streaming these days on Disney+. (I don't have that channel by the way. I decided not to spring for it until I get through all the currently-unwatched Disney DVDs I have in this house. Which I just might do by the time the virus is gone but not much before.)

In the meantime, reader-of-this-site Daniel Frank informs me that The Art of Love, which is the film I mentioned, is coming out on DVD and Blu-ray in September from Kino Lorber. I am cautiously recommending this film because I last (and first) saw it when it was released in 1965 which is, after all, 55 years ago. I liked it a lot then. I might not now.

It has a good cast: James Garner, Dick Van Dyke, Elke Sommer, Angie Dickinson, Carl Reiner, Ethel Merman, Roger C. Carmel and Jay Novello. It was written by Mr. Reiner and directed by Norman Jewison and was for some reason advertised as "Ross Hunter's The Art of Love." That was back when producers sometimes got possessory credits.

If you want to trust the tastes of me when I was thirteen years old — and I sure wouldn't — you can advance order a copy of the DVD here and the Blu-ray here. Or you can wait 'til I get a copy, watch it again and tell you whether it's as good as I thought it was then. I'm a little cautious because when a few years ago I told Dick Van Dyke that I really liked it, he gave me a startled look and said, "Really?"

An "at home" number performed by my pal Jason Graae, who can be heard on a ridiculous number of original cast albums of musicals…

Here's an interesting fact check.  It's not about a speech some politician gave or an article by some pundit.  What's being fact-checked here is Hamilton.  That's right: The musical.

The Fixer Uppers is the name of a Laurel and Hardy film that's not on this great new release called Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations. Here's the simplest review I can give it: If you're a fan of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, you will want this. You will want it a lot. It's two of their feature films (some would say their two best) plus many of their short comedies, all miraculously restored. You probably have seen these films but you've never seen them look or sound this good.

That alone would be enough to warrant buying these on DVD or, as I did, Blu-ray. But the set also comes with extras galore, including 2,500 rare photos and documents, several commentary tracks, trailers, interviews with folks who worked with Stan and Ollie, plus various odds 'n' ends. In truth, I have not made it through the almost-nine hours of material on this set but I've already gotten more than my money's worth.

I talked about this last night on the webcast with Leonard Maltin, who loves this set as much as I do. We're close to the same age. We first experienced Laurel and Hardy mostly on TV, which meant watching bad prints with many splices, missing scenes, garbled sound tracks, commercial interruptions, etc. Those of us who loved old movies back then put up a lot of that, plus the fact that we could only see the films we craved when some TV station deigned to show them. And you had to watch them when they ran them, not when it was convenient for you.  You couldn't even go to the bathroom unless you could get there and back during a commercial break.

I was not the only Laurel and Hardy lover who had the following fantasy: A room in my home with a screen, a projector and shelves with one print of every Laurel and Hardy film. At the time, that fantasy involved 16mm films, which were hard to find and maintain, and I was sometimes clumsy threading them into a projector. You could have spent years and way more money that any of us had and not make that fantasy come true…and the prints probably wouldn't have been that wonderful if we could even have found them.

We did not dream of home video and digital restoration. You have no idea how it pleases me to see these films looking this good.

I have one teensy-tiny microscopic quibble with one thing about this set and I'll address it in another message here shortly. It in no way should prevent you from buying this magnificent creation which I expect to be raving about even more as I savor the rest of the nine hours. At a time when the news is usually bleak and in some ways getting bleaker, it's nice to have something that makes me so happy. Thank you to the Fixer-Uppers who fixed-up that which was in need of fixing-up.

If anyone doubted how beloved Carl Reiner was, they could confirm it by looking almost anywhere on the Internet yesterday. Everyone had a story of how they'd met him and/or loved him. Everyone who'd met him was posting a photo of them together…though I withheld mine. (I'll post it one of these days.) An awful lot of people posted clips or stills from "Coast-to-Coast Bigmouth," the episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show where Laura goes on a game show and…oh, hell. You know what happened. And how funny it was.

Last night on my chat with Leonard Maltin, we talked a lot about Carl and especially his movie career. Leonard liked Oh, God best of all. I spoke for Where's Poppa? We both agreed on how great it was just to be around Mr. Reiner.

My pal Paul Harris used to have a radio show and Carl — arguably the best "talk show" guest ever — was on many times. Paul has been nice enough to post eight of those conversations on his blog. They're all worth your time and they'll all show those of you who never got to talk to Carl Reiner what it was like to talk to Carl Reiner. You would have loved it.