Monthly Archives: January 2021

A recurring peeve of mine is "friends" — I'm intending a slightly-sarcastic usage of that noun — who love to tell you things that they hope will make you mad or make you cry or in some way disrupt your happiness. There was a writer-acquaintance who, during the eight-or-so-years that I did the Garfield & Friends TV show, would periodically send me notes that would say "Checked the ratings and it looks like your show's a sure bet to be canceled."

That was never true, not for a minute. We were the highest-rated program on CBS's Saturday morning schedule for much of that time and even when the show did finally end, it was because the producers chose to end it despite an offer (though not a great one) from CBS to do another season. In fact, one time when the "friend" told me we were on the chopping block, it was right after we'd just gotten a pick-up for three more years.

But some people are like that. They so love to tell you bad news that they can't even wait until it's real.

He tried to make it sound like he was a pal trying to alert me to something for my own good but he wasn't a good enough writer to pull that off. I always knew he was making things up just to try and wound me and for a time, I wondered why he did that. It didn't take much wondering to finally figure out he was just an unhappy guy. No matter what successes he had in his life — and he had several — he was still just an unhappy guy and I guess misery does love company.

When I discussed him with a few other friends — the true kind, not the faux kind — they all said the same thing. He couldn't help but piss on everyone else's good news and while he pretended to be a buddy while pissing, he didn't fool anyone. One true friend said, "He kept telling me I was about to be fired and I kept asking myself, 'Why is he telling me this?' If I was being fired, I'd find out soon enough."

True…but then he might not be there to see your expression or to hear you moan.

Election Night last week, I was sitting here not watching the election returns and I got an e-mail from a Trump-favoring "pal" (again, the quotes denote sarcasm) telling me he was "sorry" (yeah, right) that the Democrats were going down to such a smashing defeat in Georgia. I took a quick peek at the CNN site to see if it was true and at that moment, the G.O.P. candidates were each about two points ahead in the total.

I didn't — and this is just me being dumb — notice that we were at something like 70% of precincts reporting. Those races were far from being called. One of them wouldn't even be final until the following afternoon. I was also dumb to not remember that this guy was not exactly a pillar of truth. But at that moment, I believed what he told me.

Disappointed but not crushed after his call, I tried to get my mind back to the script on which I was working. It was hard but I managed it. A couple hours later when I took a break and turned on the TV, one of the Democratic candidates (Raphael Warnock) was claiming victory and the other (Jon Ossoff) was ahead. Moreover, three different channels I checked said that the yet-to-be-counted vote was mainly in Democratic areas and that turned out to be true.

I didn't know for sure that they'd win but I did know that when my "friend" had told me they'd lost, it wasn't true. He just said that to be an asshole…and I should point out here that this is not a slam at Republicans. I know Democrats who do that kind of thing too. Assholes come in all shapes and sizes, all races, all political parties, all religions, etc. They're easier to spot when they're not part of your group but that doesn't mean they aren't there — somewhere lurking about.

• Today's Potatoes are from Easterday Farms in Pasco, WA.

• Just saw a headline that said "Trump considering Giuliani and Dershowitz for impeachment defense team." Well, of course. Because they've done so well for him overturning the election results.

I should have posted this more than a week ago but I didn't notice it 'til now. Here's my favorite one-man singing group, Julien Neel, singing "Auld Lang Syne" wearing a shirt that may remind you of Rip Taylor's act, only funnier…

And if you've ever stopped to wonder what in the name of Guy Lombardo the title and lyrics of that song mean, here's a little video that will clue you in…

This may be a good sign. Last week, I was getting as many as twelve fund-raising e-mails a day from Donald Trump and his alter egos. Increasingly, they didn't convey any message about reversing the election or fighting to win Georgia or anything of the sort. Most simply told me to send money.

Yesterday, they all stopped. I haven't had one in twenty-four hours. Now, maybe after I failed to respond after several hundred of them, some computer finally decided not to waste the micro-second it took to send me between two and four copies of each one. Perhaps they're still going out to those who sent Donald money he could use to buy steaks or pay for some hooker or even take up heavy drinking, which wouldn't surprise me. He sure didn't spend it on a competent legal team who'd tell him his case was hopeless.

Maybe the demands for cash — which have sounded increasingly like a Mafia Capo threatening you to pay your gambling debts or else — are still going out to those they worked on. But maybe The Don's just not getting much return on them lately so he's got his crew working on other ways to extract bucks from his loyalists.

Hey, are you as impressed as I am with how rapidly and well Randy Rainbow puts those videos of his together? Even if you hate the message — and one lady who keeps writing to tell me they're not funny sure does — you've got to wonder how he does it. For this new one, he probably already had the music track but where does he get those costumes? How does he gather such clear news footage? How long does it take him to shoot the video of himself and layer them all and edit it all and put in the graphics and all the other elements?

Supposedly, he does all this himself from a not-huge apartment in New York…and he's got to do it quickly because these days, current news has — as Jon Stewart used to say of The Daily Show — the shelf life of potato salad. "Topical Humor" used to be about something that had happened in the last month or so. Now, folks like him and Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah and Jimmy Kimmel are going on-air or on the web with material about what happened six hours ago…or less. No wonder MAD Magazine with its six-week lead time couldn't compete.

At the Randy Rainbow live show I attended, someone in the Q-and-A part asked him if he was ever in the middle of assembling a video and Breaking News suddenly rendered it obsolete. He said it happened all the time; that he'd tossed several videos that were 75% done because they were suddenly Too Late. I'll bet.

And by the way: If someone is laughing at something, telling them "It's not funny" is one of the stupider, most useless things you can do in this world.

Just woke up to umpteen e-mails asking me why I haven't posted a link to Randy Rainbow's new video. Because I was asleep, that's why. But now I'm not so…

I have two choices today. I can work on a script I'd like to finish or I can think about what's happening to my country. I stayed up last night 'til the joint session of Congress adjourned. I thought maybe at its close, I'd write some pithy blog post that would summarize what it all meant. Alas, by the time Mitch gaveled things to a merciful end, I had neither the energy nor any real idea what it all meant, aside from the fact that Biden would be sworn in soon and everyone is hopping mad at everyone else.

So I'm going to opt for the script. At least I can do something about that and I have a pretty good idea as to what's going on in it. I think. Maybe.

The fine folks at Comic-Con International have issued a press release headlined "Gary Sassaman, Curatorial Director of Comic-Con Museum, Announces His Retirement." Actually, though Gary currently has that title, it would be more correct to say he's been a vital part of the con in many ways since 1992 and his past titles have included serving Director of Programming and Director of Print and Digital Media — meaning he supervised publications and the Comic-Con website.

I worked with Gary a lot when he was Director of Programming so I know how valuable he's been. In fact, he's the guy who came up with the initial idea for what turned into the Quick Draw! panel that we do every year. I don't begrudge him his retirement but he is one of the reasons Comic-Con has been the rousing success that it is every year. When they can have it, that is.

I am again having e-mail problems which may interfere a bit with communications. Right now, what I need is the expertise of someone who is really good with Mozilla Thunderbird for the P.C., especially with multiple accounts and moving the profile files of one installation to another. If you are such a person and would like to help, drop me an e-mail and let's hope I can read it. Thanks.

If you don't have a headache and dearly want one, this is a good way to achieve it…

Tomorrow morning, my cleaning lady comes and I know she's going to ask me to explain what happened in Washington today. I can't wait to hear what I'm going to tell her because right now, it's quite difficult to grasp.

This evening, I've been watching the alternating House/Senate coverage and heard some pretty fine speeches from politicians who never gave me much reason to respect them before.

I have learned this: If you want to riot and smash windows in this country, you'd better be white. If the same actions had been done in the name of Black Lives Matter, most of those pro-Trump protestors would have been sitting home wishing the police would just start shooting those damn rioters. There would at least have been a lot more arrests.

And those pro-Trump protestors sure shot themselves…in their feet. Their mission was to persuade legislators to vote for all the objections but their actions caused there to be fewer objections and less support for them.

But hey, wouldn't you love to know what they're saying in the White House tonight? Twitter probably did Trump a great favor by closing down his account.

I'm going back to watching the news. This is a day this nation will never forget.

Somehow, this doesn't look like Making America Great to me.

Yesterday, I posted one of the two short adventures on the Huckleberry Hound Movie-Wheel. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go read yesterday's post.

This one is Felix the Cat and all the voices are done by Jack Mercer, who started in the cartoon business as an artist (and occasional storyman) at Max Fleischer's Studio and wound up as the voice of their most popular character, a spinach-eater named Popeye. Once he became a voice guy, he did less artwork, some writing and a lot of time at the microphone. He was pretty good as Popeye and did a lot more work as a voice actor than most folks think.

The video version of the Movie-Wheel was prepared by my pal Greg Ehrbar, who is one of the great experts on animation and especially on voices and music. By coincidence, the same day I chose to post his Movie-Wheel video, Greg has a new article over at Cartoon Research about Jack Mercer. Go read it here. And if you'd like to get a look at Mr. Mercer, here's a link I put up some time ago to a 1974 episode of the game show To Tell the Truth.

I got to meet Jack Mercer briefly in the early eighties when Hanna-Barbera was producing a new Popeye cartoon show and Mercer was residing from time to time in L.A. to do the voice. I gather the studio searched high 'n' low for someone local who could speak for the sailor man and finally had to cough up the bucks to fly him out and house him for a few months now and then…but I think they also recorded him at times with him at a studio in Manhattan. He was a nice, funny gent and though I didn't work on that show, I got to take him and Daws Butler out to lunch. Daws was on the show playing Wimpy, a role Mercer sometimes did in the old Fleischer films along with playing Popeye and other parts.

He does every voice in this…

• Went out today with a mask over about a five day growth of beard. The mask clung to my face like the female side of Velcro and when I peeled it off, it made the exact same sound.

A New Year's song from Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear. I think that's Matt Vogel as the green one and Eric Jacobson as the brown one, both pretty good at their difficult jobs…

Hello. I seem to be back…and just in time to celebrate (?) 300 days of not going anywhere except occasionally to a doctor's office, a supermarket, a restaurant that offers drive-thru or curbside pickup or a walk around my neighborhood. I'd like to think we're all well past the halfway mark on this kind of life.

Constantly reminding myself that there's nothing I can do about it, I'm trying not to pay a whole lot of attention to what's going on in Georgia today or Washington D.C. tomorrow. About the election, I'll only predict that whatever the outcome, Trump will say it proves he won the November election. If the two Republican candidates for the Senate win, it'll be "See? The state is reliably Republican and couldn't possibly have gone for Biden!" If the two Democratic candidates win, it'll be "See? The state's election practices are all f'ed up because Republicans couldn't possibly have lost three elections in a Confederate state like that where everyone came to my rallies." If it's a split decision, it'll be a mixture of both.

And can you imagine how messy this would all be if so many of the judges and officials of swing states who've ruled against Trump weren't Republicans? We now have this kind of automatic assumption in this country that every single person in the opposition party wouldn't hesitate to cheat on its behalf.

Lastly for now: Before my quickie hiatus, I was marveling here at the fact that James Corden does a five-nights-a-week show for CBS but still somehow finds time to star in movie musicals. A couple of you wrote to remind me that he takes five weeks off from The Late Late Show every summer. Okay, fine. It's still an awful lot of stuff to do in a year…and having seen The Prom, it's hard to believe he could do all that in five weeks.

Still way behind in e-mails and deadlines. Don't be surprised if I submerge again.

When I was a kid, I bought every record album I could find that featured characters from my favorite cartoons. Often, I'd get burned because I'd buy a Huckleberry Hound record, get it home, put it on my record player and discover to my youthful horror that Daws Butler, who did Huck's voice on the cartoons, wasn't on it. Some hapless mimic was doing his best to replicate Daws as Huck…and doing a very poor job of it. (Actually, I'm not sure if there was or has ever been any Daws Impersonator who could have satisfied me at that age.)

To me, it was like if you bought a Frank Sinatra record, took it home and found out it was some guy imitating Ol' Blue Eyes. That was the kind of unhappiness I experienced when I ordered a set of two Movie-Wheels, which as far as I know were the only ones produced.

A Movie-Wheel had a cardboard sleeve the size of an LP record but the actual record in it was a smaller flexi-disc made out of bendable plastic or rubber or some amalgam. In the cardboard sleeve, there was a little window with a dial as as you played the record, you would advance the dial when you heard a certain sound effect. Each time you advanced it, you'd see a different image in the little window, illustrating what was happening in the record at that moment. Since records and record sleeves have two sides, there would be two short stories on each wheel. You'll understand all this better if/when you watch the video below.

The two Movie-Wheels were sold as a set on local kids' TV shows. I think I saw the commercial on Skipper Frank's show on KTLA Channel 5. This was 1960 and I think it was something like $4.00 for the pair. One was Felix the Cat and it was faithful to the Felix cartoons that were then running on local TV. The voices were all done by Jack Mercer, who did almost all the voices in the cartoons, including Felix. The drawings were credited to Joe Oriolo, who was the main designer of those cartoons as well as the owner of the studio that did them.

The other record was Huckleberry Hound on one side, Yogi Bear on the other. As mentioned above, Daws Butler was not on the record. The voices were done by — amazingly — Jack Mercer along with an announcer-type gent named Jim Sparks. I know nothing about Mr. Sparks. The drawings were done by Frank Little and I don't know anything about him either except that he obviously never worked on the cartoons. I was disappointed in the art as I was by the absence of Daws.

And both records were written, produced and directed by Paul White and Ruth Roche. Mr. White is unknown to me but Ruth Roche was active in the comic book field as a writer and editor. Starting around 1940, she worked for the Eisner-Iger Studio, mainly on comics published by Fiction House like Phantom Lady and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

I still have my Movie-Wheels…somewhere. But thanks to my friend Greg Ehrbar, who assembled video versions of one side of each. Here's the Huckleberry Hound one. Jack Mercer was great as the voice of Felix and the voice of Popeye but I don't think Huck and Yogi were in his wheelhouse. I'll post the Felix one tomorrow and you'll hear him being more properly cast…