Monthly Archives: June 2021

I met Len Wein on Monday, June 29, 1970 in the DC offices. We were introduced in a hallway just outside an office shared by two DC editors — Dick Giordano and Julius Schwartz. Len had just returned from lunch with Dick and I had just returned from lunch with Julie. Len and I became instant friends and remained friends until he passed away in September of 2017 at the age of 69.

69 is way, way too early to go…and I'm not just saying that because I'm 69. Len had way too much living and loving and laughing and writing yet to do. And I can't tell you how many things have happened since September of 2017 that I wish I'd been able to call him and talk about. At times, we were incapable of even looking at each other without laughing, often with no clear concept of what we were laughing about.

Len would have been 73 today. I usually don't note dates like this on this blog because there'd be too many of them…people I wish were still around. But I saw a lot of posts on Facebook about Len today and they got me thinking about him and…well, there you are.

Since August of 1988, NBC has had a third talk show following The Tonight Show and Late Night. It's usually been called something with "Later" in the title and it just came to an end. My old pal Aaron Barnhart will tell you the whole story if you'll click on his name.

The other day here, I posted a link to a video of Red Skelton doing a monologue on The Ed Sullivan Show. Here's a message I received from James Curtis…

A bit of trivia about the Red Skelton monologue.

I was in the audience the night this segment was recorded at Television City. It was on a Monday, which, as you know, was the usual night of the Skelton dress rehearsal. No orchestra, just a piano, but otherwise the whole show, apart from the musical numbers and credits. My friend and I had tickets for Jonathan Winters, but then one of the pages appeared with tickets for the Skelton show. I asked who the guest stars were, and he said, "Boris Karloff and Vincent Price." That was all I had to hear.

We got great aisle seats — third or fourth row — with two seats taped off directly behind us. Just before the start of the show, the tape was removed and down the aisle came Ed Sullivan and another man. As Sullivan sat down, I felt his hands on my shoulders and they gave me a squeeze. I turned around and asked him for his autograph, and he asked for my birthday. I said November 16th and he wrote "Hello Jim, and a happy November 16 to you, young fellow." Nice man; I still have it.

I later came to understand that if you wanted Red on your show, you had to come to him. So after the monologue, during which Sullivan emerged from the audience for a little on-stage banter, a replica of Ed's New York set was brought in, new linoleum was laid, Sullivan made the introduction, and out came Red as we see in the clip. I understand the whole episode is on a home video set, and I should probably pick it up for a quick glimpse of my 14 year-old self.

Then James added…

P.S. One thing that stuck with me about that night was that Boris Karloff was obviously quite frail — he died in London about five months later — and that he performed the rehearsal in a wheelchair pushed by a little man wearing a rubber Frankenstein mask. Despite this, he knew his part cold, and although Vincent Price and Skelton were glued to their respective cue cards, Karloff never glanced at his once. And when I watched the air show — which was taped the following night — Karloff did the whole thing on his feet. It was a remarkable show of stamina and professionalism at the very end of a distinguished career, and it later turned out to be a valuable thing for me to have witnessed.

I have seen that kind of professionalism now and then. I'm not sure if there are as many comparable tales of non-performers rising to those kinds of challenges but there does seem to be something about being in front of an audience that brings it out in performers.

Skelton seems to have been one of those stars who had his own odd ways of doing things and you either played by his rules or you didn't play with him. I would guess that Ed Sullivan and/or CBS decided that it would be mutually beneficial to both Ed's show and Red's to have that little crossover and they engineered that. It may not have been that Red insisted they come to him. It might have been that CBS wanted it to happen and Red couldn't fly to New York, do Ed's show and get back without disrupting the taping schedule of his own program.

But maybe Red did insist they come to him. He was on odd guy. Those "dirty hour" rehearsals he insisted on doing for his show cost a lot of time and money but if you wanted The Red Skelton Hour to get taped Tuesday night, you had to let him do that.

As I probably knew once upon a time, the Muppet I identified as a "Cookie Monster prototype" in this video has a name. He's the Beautiful Day Monster, seen above with the late Mr. Hooper. The Beautiful Day Monster is called The Beautiful Day Monster because in one Muppet routine, he ruined a little girl's beautiful day.

He appeared in all sorts of sketches they did, including many on Sesame Street under different names. Sometimes, they reconfigured his appearance a little with add-ons or maybe interchangeable parts. It's kind of like the way the Law and Order TV show used to use Danny Burstein.

Darren Foulds wrote in to note that The B.D.M. in the "Windy" video is, as I certainly recognized, "voiced by Frank Oz, the same as classic Cookie. Beautiful Day and Cookie were designed and built together for a snack food commercial in 1966 that never aired. The Muppet who became Cookie Monster became one of the more famous Muppets while Beautiful Day Monster never quite reached the same level of fame."

I guess it's similar to being one of those cast members on Saturday Night Live who never got a movie deal. Poor Beautiful Day Monster.

This is a monologue by Red Skelton on The Ed Sullivan Show for September 29, 1968. Mr. Skelton broke just about every rule of comedy starting with the one about how a comedian should never laugh at his own jokes…and he was clearly outta his ever-lovin' mind. But there was something so delightful about the man that I love watching him.

In the sixties, I went to one taping of his CBS show and a year or so later, I got into one of his infamous "dirty hour" sessions at CBS. These were supposed to be full dress rehearsals for the show he'd tape a day or two later but by and large, it was just Red telling dirty jokes for an hour.

I further got to hear Red tell dirty jokes when I visited a store in Westwood called Bel-Air Camera. I wrote all about these encounters in this article. The encounters with Red in the camera shop were in 1969 and 1970 so he was about the same age he is in this video…

• We had a high-speed police pursuit on TV here in L.A. the other day and the guy covering it from the helicopter actually said, "Police have determined there's at least one person in the vehicle." I guess in these days of driverless cars, that's not as dumb as it sounds.

Gene Henderson, a beloved figure of Comic-Con International, has left us at the age of 88. Gene was a lifelong comic book fan and a constant presence and participant in Comic-Con. He was a board member, an officer, a director of security, an archivist, the curator of the convention art show, the coordinator of the Russ Manning Promising Newcomer Award…it might be easier to list the things Gene didn't do for Comic-Con.

He and his wife Mary served the con in so many ways and were inseparable until her passing in March of 2016 after close to sixty years of wedded bliss. Some folks referred to them as the Dad and Mom of Comic-Con or at least Uncle and Aunt. I thought the great thing about them was how nice and joyful they were to everyone and how they fit in so well with us younger folks. They were not only at every Comic-Con, they could always be found there filling many useful, helpful functions. Just great people.

A fun piece from Jimmy Fallon's show the other night…

Okay, it's 1967 — my freshman year in high school — and I have a crush on a certain young lady who's in several of my classes. She's a big fan of a group that's then in vogue called The Association…so I become a big fan of The Association. Sitting here today, I can recall several memorable tunes recorded by The Association and they'll be popping up later in this series. But what I can't recall is ever knowing anything at all about The Association.

I couldn't tell you the name of a single person in the group. I couldn't tell you how many of them there were or where any of them came from. I'm not sure I ever saw them perform on TV. I was became a fan of them because she was a fan of them and I wound up liking some of their songs enough to include them on my mixtape.

Wikipedia tips me to one reason I didn't know who was in the group. The membership was constantly changing. It also tells me that "Windy" topped the Billboard Hot 100 on July 1, 1967 and stayed there for four consecutive weeks. Not bad.

Here's some assemblage of Association band members lip-syncing the record on some TV show.  When I see videos like this, I always wonder if the performers miming to the record are the exact same guys who made it.  When I worked with the Bay City Rollers, current members of the group occasionally had to mouth the words to records they weren't on…

And as a bonus, I also liked the various versions of this song performed by The Muppets. Here's one from Sesame Street featuring what I guess is an early prototype of Cookie Monster…

• Seems to me that when Trump says he'll be reinstated as Prez by August, it means he expects criminal indictments by August and wants to start the drumbeat that they're fake charges to keep him from his rightful office. And his fans should donate for his legal defense.

The nominations for this year's Eisner Awards were announced this morning and a nomination went to Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips: Volume 7: Pockets Full of Pie. The category is "Best Archival Collection/Project — Strips." All of us folks toiling down here in the Okefenokee Swamp appreciate it. It is a great honor to be nominated. It is even a greater honor to win but if we don't win, we will settle for the great honor of being nominated and pretend that's good enough.

If you have not bought this book, buy this book. Thank you.

So just what is Critical Race Theory?  Here's one thing I think about it: Like "global warming" and "defund the police," it's one of those topics that is so poorly named, it almost invites people to misunderstand it.  For one thing, the people who are fighting to not have it taught in schools want to deny not the theory part of it but the history part of it.

As you may know, I'm somewhat obsessed with the movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which was shot mostly in 1962 and released in November of 1963. In 1974, its producer-director Stanley Kramer hosted a series with him interviewing various folks from the film business. For this one, he chats with three of the stars from Mad World — Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters and Buddy Hackett…

• I wish my iPhone had a setting I could enable so that when I touch anything that causes it to call another phone, a little window pops up and asks, "Are you sure you want to make this call?" And then I have to confirm before it makes the call.

• If you're a pornstar, your non-pornstar name is the first name your parents gave you plus the family name.