Monthly Archives: April 2021

Turner Classic Movies is running my favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World Monday. The schedule says that, at least on my cable service, it starts at 5:15 PM and is followed at 8 PM by It's Always Fair Weather. That would suggest they're running the 2 hour and 42 minute version of Mad World — which is the version I'd show if I were them.

On the TCM site, they list the running time for the movie as 3 hours and 12 minutes. I know a lot of people don't believe in science anymore but I believe it's still impossible to show a 192 minute movie in a 165 minute time slot.

The running time of this movie is actually difficult to discuss because there are all these different elements: The overture, the Intermission, the recorded police calls during the Intermission, the Entr'Acte, the Exit Music and a couple of different versions of the movie, trimmed and untrimmed. When someone cites a running time, they're sometimes counting some of those elements and not others. I believe though the version that TCM always shows is 162 minutes from the first note of music to the last. I could easily be wrong.

I would ordinarily tell you not to watch it, especially if you've never seen it before or haven't seen it in a very long time. I love this movie but I love it on a huge screen in one of these things we used to go to called a "movie theater." Google that term if you don't remember what that is. And it should also be seen with a packed audience that's primed to laugh. It's greatly diminished when viewed alone or with one other person on a small home screen.

However, it may be some time before it's possible to see it that way. And if they show it that way in the next few months at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood — a theater that was literally built to show this movie — I'm not sure I'll even go.

It would be nice to. I first saw this film at the Cinerama Dome on 11/23/63 — the day after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a day when the entire world was still in shock. One of the reasons I love it so much is that for for 201 minutes (the running time at that point), I was living in a world of very funny people…a world where insane things happened but at least no one shot the President.

Some but not all of my affection for this movie flows from that. The rest has a lot to do with the age I was when I first saw it, my affection then and now for the performers, my affection for how fascinating every moment of the film is to me, and affection of other factors too numerous to mention.

I'm not recommending watching it on TCM but because it may be a while before you can see it the right way. I'm also not recommending not watching it on TCM. Proceed at your own risk. And if you don't like it there, don't judge it by that.

Here's a pretty good account of how MAD magazine came to be. It doesn't make the mistake that most histories do of claiming that MAD changed from a comic book to a magazine in order to avoid the Comics Code. The timing would make you think it did but actually, MAD went to magazine format to appease Harvey Kurtzman, its first editor, who was embarrassed to be in the comic book industry then.

He wanted to work in slick magazines so Bill Gaines, who was the publisher of MAD, offered to turn it into a slick magazine so Kurtzman wouldn't leave…and Kurtzman didn't leave. Not until a few months later when he was offered a classier job by Hugh Hefner. Gaines felt betrayed but he kept MAD going under a new regime and before long, he was very, very wealthy…

Like a lot of you, I know a fair amount about computers and like all of you, I know someone I can call who knows a lot more about computers than I do. You need someone like that because no matter how much you know, something will eventually go wrong that requires way more savvy than you possess.

I was just on the phone with my person-who-knows-way-more-than-I-do and we were fixing something. He gave me this great quote which came from a gent named Maurice Wilkes who was — according to Wikipedia — "a British computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored program computers, and who invented microprogramming, a method for using stored-program logic to operate the control unit of a central processing unit's circuits."

He was talking about debugging (studying the code of a program that ain't working to figure out why it ain't working) and he wrote…

By June 1949, people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.

I heard that quote and I thought it would resonate with a lot of folks who read this site but who don't write computer programs.

It's been four years ago today since my wonderful friend/love/companion Carolyn Kelly lost her battle with Cancer…and battle, she did. The last few years of it, she fought and she fought and she fought…and the outcome just became more and more inevitable.

At the oddest times, with no visible triggering mechanism, I find myself thinking about how horrible it was for her. There's always that maddening frustration of looking at a situation, knowing it shouldn't have been like that…but not being able to think of any other way things could have turned out for the better or been much less painful.

I miss her…and not just on this one day a year. I miss her often and in the better moments, I miss the Carolyn of happier times…the one who had so many reasons to live instead of that one ugly one to not. Often, something occurs and my thoughts take the form of "Oh, I wish she was here to share this experience with me." I think of her laughing, smiling and just being a wonderful presence. She was very good at those things and at so many others.

Most of me has moved on, as she wanted me to do. For years, I have told others who've lost loved ones that it's not disrespectful to the memory of the deceased to get on with your life, to meet new people, to stop grieving. Every so often, I have to tell myself…and not just on April 9th.

It's Charlie Frye again, doing more of that magic and juggling stuff he does…

Brian Dreger wrote me to ask…

I was born in 1960 and I read comic books during the 60s, 70s, 80s and into the 90s (and also read reprint collections of stuff before that). So, I'm just a fan. But…I can't figure out how you — who started out as just a fan — can look at a comic book and tell that the person who allegedly drew it is not that person but someone else trying to draw like that person!

Also, I am amazed that you can look at someone's artwork and tell who inked it! In various posts, you've talked about this, and you always seem very, very confident that you know that you're right. How? Did you take art classes and picked up a lot of insight from that? I realize this is a very long (and probably stupid) question, but if you could edit this down and figure out how to answer me, that would be great.

Yes, I took art classes but no, they had nothing to do with recognizing art styles…a skill which a lot of people have. It just comes from reading a lot of comics and paying attention to credits. To be honest with you, I was always more interested in how comic books were made and in the people who made them than I was in the characters in those comic books. I am not one of those guys who can name all the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes and which planet they came from…but I could tell you everyone who inked Jack Kirby's work or which Batman stories allegedly drawn by Bob Kane were drawn by Sheldon Moldoff, which ones were drawn by Jim Mooney, which ones were inked by Charles Paris, etc.

An awful lot of folks can do this and occasionally we get into little debates about certain work where it isn't so obvious. It can sometimes be tricky, especially on pre-1980 work where it was more common to have someone in the office retouch work done by outside artists. Stan Lee very routinely would look at a cover that was about to go to press and almost on a whim — just because he wanted to do something to maybe make it better — he'd have John Romita or Marie Severin or someone on staff redraw portions of it.

Of course, not everyone can do this. It kinda stunned me when I got into the business that there were editors who couldn't recognize styles…or at least, some styles. But then a lot of people in comics never spent much time looking at comics they weren't working on.

And now the Washington Post has another story up about Joye Murchison Kelly.

The Washington Post has a nice obit up for Joye Murchison Kelly.

Here's an article that doesn't really answer its headline question, What the Hell Are You Supposed to Do With Your Vaccine Card? I sense there will come a moment when I will have to show it to gain admittance to something. But they'd be so easy to forge, I can't believe they'll be used a lot for that purpose.

This is an hour-long episode of Cher's 1975 variety series but I've set the video embed to start playing at the 39:06 mark. If you want to watch the first 39 minutes of the show, move the slider all the way to the left.

At the 39:06 mark, Cher introduces and reads a Rudyard Kipling poem illustrated by my best friend, Sergio Aragonés…and pronounces his name all wrong. The producer of this show was George Schlatter, who knew Sergio well and used him in many projects, often as an actor such as in the brief 1977 revival of Laugh-In and the 1976 movie, Norman, Is That You?

Thanks to Steve Thompson for alerting me that this was up on YouTube so I could alert Sergio and all of you…

• Whenever you are in a ZOOM conference, the default assumption is that no one is wearing pants. Including, probably, you.

Every so often on Facebook — hourly, it sometimes seems — someone uploads the above photo and asks what's it from and who everyone in it is. Often, they also ask if it's a shot from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Taking the last of these first: No, it isn't, though three of the folks in the picture — Berle, Durante and Shawn — had significant roles in Mad World. It's from a Bob Hope TV special.

Recently, I uploaded a version of the photo to which I'd added captions to answer the other two questions. Someone who calls themselves "Herbert" (just Herbert) writes, in part…

Thank you for doing that but how about answering some questions for me? How many of the men in that photograph have you met? Which one was the funniest when you met him? Which was one do you think was the funniest comedian, regardless of whether you met him or not? Which one, regardless of whether you met him, struck you as the least funny?

Were any of the one you met rude to you? Which one were you most excited to meet?  Did any of them make you sad? Which one was the nicest?

Regardless of whether you met them, which one do you think was the richest?  How many of these people ever did voices for cartoons?  Which one would you have liked to dine with and talk to all evening?

Okay, here are some answers but first, let me remind everyone that if you click on the above photo, my larger and captioned version of it should open in your browser. Now, here we go…

I met Milton Berle, Soupy Sales, Dick Martin, Bob Hope, Jack Carter and Bill Dana.  The one I found funniest in our meeting(s) was Dick Martin.  The one I think was funniest…well, one of the most brilliant, hilarious things I ever saw on a stage was Dick Shawn's one-man show.  No one else in the picture ever made me laugh so much so I guess I'll say him. Least funny?  Well, Dan Rowan but he was mainly a straight man so he wasn't really in the business of being funny.

Rude? I met Jack Carter a few times and…well, he just seemed angry at everyone around him. I wrote about some of those encounters here. No one else among the six was rude in any way.

I was very excited to meet Soupy Sales because his TV show was so important to me when I was a kid.  The first few times I talked with him were not as wonderful as I might have wished because they were on the set of his 1978 syndicated "comeback" show.  The moments I chose to visit the stage often were moments when things were going wrong so Soupy rarely seemed to be in a good, affable mood. And then the last time I saw him in person was a few years after he had suffered an accident, falling down a flight of stairs. Thereafter, his speech and wit were impaired and it was very sad to see him like that and not easy to have much of a conversation.

It was also kind of exciting to meet Bob Hope, which I did on two occasions, because he was Bob Hope — and I wouldn't be surprised if he died with more wealth than all the others combined. The nicest of those I met would either be Dick Martin or Bill Dana.

Mr. Dana did some voices for cartoons, including on a Hanna-Barbera special that he also wrote. Jack Carter did voices on an ABC Weekend Special that I wrote.  Dick Shawn was a voice actor on the Rankin-Bass animated special, The Year Without a Santa Claus and Jimmy Durante was the narrator of the Rankin-Bass animated special, Frosty the Snowman.  Wally Cox was the voice of Underdog, Soupy was the voice of Donkey Kong on a Saturday morning cartoon and I'll bet most of the others did a cartoon voice somewhere or other.

I would have loved to talk to almost any of these guys at length.  I did have a couple of long conversations with Berle and he was fascinating because of all that history, including It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and I could have done with more of that.  I guess I'd pick Mr. Robert Hope, though I wish I could have met Mr. James Durante.

My all-time favorite game show might just be I've Got a Secret, particularly the version that had Garry Moore as host with Bill Cullen, Henry Morgan, Bess Myerson and Betsy Palmer on the panel. Lots of old episodes run on cable channels and therefore turn up on YouTube.

Someone just posted a very early one with only Moore and Cullen from the above roster. The series started on June 19, 1952 so it was still in its formative stage on September 18 of that year when this episode aired. Keep in mind that this is live television, not pre-recorded television.

One thing that they eventually stopped doing — and it was a better show because they stopped — was that the producers stopped planting questions with the panelists who had to guess the secrets. They reportedly did not give the panelists the answers but they gave them questions they were supposed to ask innocently but which would be funny to the audience that knew what the secret was.

For instance, in this episode, the first contestant's secret is that her father jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. The panel is told that her secret is "something her father did" and then the questioning starts with Mr. Melville Cooper, who almost immediately asks, "Is it something I could do?" (big laugh) and then "Do you think my wife would like me doing it?" (bigger laugh) Obviously, the producers told him to ask those things as if he just happened to think to ask them. (By the way: One of the those producers was Allan Sherman, co-creator of the program and later a singer of top-selling comedy records.)

They did a lot of this planting of questions on the show in its early days but stopped. Around 1956, it became a major scandal in this country that some of the quiz shows were rigged with contestants being given answers in advance and the producers controlling who won and lost, configuring the scenario for maximum excitement. Before the scandal exploded, there were rumblings that game shows weren't completely on the up-and-up so many shows even stopped that kind of question-planting.

Goodson-Todman, the company that produced I've Got a Secret and some others, stopped planting questions as these suspicions mounted. There was actually no way to really "rig" their shows because the winnings were of little importance. After all, on Secret the most a contestant could win was eighty dollars. But on this episode, they were still doing it and it gave a very phony air to the proceedings.

I have set this video embed to start with the second contestant of that evening. If you want to watch the first game — the one in which the contestant's father leaped off the Brooklyn Bridge — just move the little slider all the way to the left and the playback will start from the beginning. I did that because the second contestant is of great interest to me and, I'm supposing, many who read this site. It's Ham Fisher.

Ham Fisher was the guy responsible for the popular newspaper strip, Joe Palooka...or at least, Fisher's name was signed to it. Like another, unrelated Fisher — Bud Fisher, who did Mutt & Jeff — Ham Fisher started his strip and when it became successful, he hired others to write and draw it. One of the many who ghosted it was Al Capp, well before he created Li'l Abner. In the annals of comic strips and books, there may have been no two people who hated each other more than Al Capp and Ham Fisher, especially after Abner became a much more popular strip than Joe Palooka.

There were threats and invective and thinly-veiled attacks within their strips and it kinda reached its apex when someone began circulating photostats of Li'l Abner comic strips. They were charging that Capp had hidden pornographic imagery here and there…subtle but unmistakable.

It turned out that the alleged porn was not present in the strips when they ran in thousands of newspapers. There remains some question on how the naughty imagery got into the stats. Some say the strips were doctored; others say it was just artful cropping of what Capp had drawn. Either way, the stats were not legitimate evidence and the "someone" who was circulating them to try and hurt Capp turned out to be Ham Fisher.

Fisher was censured and ousted from the National Cartoonists Society for "conduct unbecoming a cartoonist." I think he's the only person who ever was even though some others — like, say, admitted rapist Al Capp — did far worse. Soon after, Ham Fisher committed suicide. Capp gloated that it was because of the ousting and humiliation…and that may have been a major reason but Fisher was in failing health and had just had his home destroyed in a storm. So maybe those factors entered into the man's decision to take his own life.

But here, we see Ham Fisher as a big celebrity on a highly-rated TV program a little more than three years before the end of that life. And if you want to keep watching after the Ham Fisher segment, the next contestant is the stunning actress Veronica Lake and the panel has to uncover her secret which was — and talk about your scandals! — that she thought her feet were too big.

• I think everyone should be required to wear masks…everyone except Matt Gaetz, of course. You don't need a mask when no one will come within six feet of you.

We lost another winner of the Bill Finger Award yesterday. In addition to 2009 recipient Frank Jacobs, we also lost 2018 honoree, Joye Murchison Kelly.  To quote the announcement of her choice to receive that trophy for Excellence in Comic Book Writing…

Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly was 20 years old in 1944 when she began working for Dr. William Moulton Marston on Wonder Woman. She had recently graduated from the Katherine Gibbs School in New York, where she had taken a psychology class from Dr. Marston. He had written almost all the scripts for his Amazon Princess and found himself in need of an assistant writer he could school in the precise way he wanted the heroine depicted, and Joye Hummel, as she was then named, learned quickly. Soon she was writing scripts on her own, mainly in Marston's New York office, where she also worked alongside Wonder Woman's artistic creator, Harry Peter. Like Marston's own stories, her work appeared in three publications — Wonder Woman, Sensation Comics, and Comic Cavalcade — under the house byline "By Charles Moulton," and none of it was credited to her. Her work appeared until 1947, and much of it has recently been reprinted to the delight of current readers. Ms. Kelly and her husband Jack will be traveling to Comic-Con so that she may accept her award in person and also appear on Saturday afternoon for a special spotlight interview: her first-ever visit to a comic book convention.

And what a delight it was to bring that woman out to California…to talk with her and her hubby Jack both in front of a packed audience and in private. I wrote about her panel at Comic-Con and linked to an audio of it here and a photo album of their visit was compiled by Anina Bennett and it can be viewed here.

One of my favorite Comic-Con memories — and I have a lot of Comic-Con memories, people — is how happy so many people were to meet them and how happy they were spending what Joye told me was "The best weekend of my life." Imagine having the Best Weekend of Your Life when you're 95 years old. She was 97 on Easter Sunday.

I would like to thank Richard Arndt for helping to connect with Joye and Jack so we could honor her. And I would like to thank Trina Robbins, Anina Bennett, Maggie Thompson, Jackie Estrada and all the other folks who made her visit such a delight…and I'd bet they'd all tell you the delight was theirs.

I believe we all awoke this morning to e-mails from Jack conveying the sad news. Those couldn't have been easy e-mails to write and send but Jack took great care of Joye and you could tell it was mutual. He has our thanks, our condolences and, I'm sure, a lot of spectacular memories of his own Wonder Woman.