Hey, remember a few days ago when I linked you up to a song by Audra McDonald from a Stephen Sondheim birthday special? Well, here from the same special is Elaine Stritch with a show-stopping rendition of Sondheim's "I'm Still Here." He didn't write this song for her to sing but I think after she did, she kinda owned it…
Ah, Day 503. Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends. I continue to be very happy that they didn't have an in-person Comic-Con International in San Diego this past weekend, thereby sparing me the stress of deciding (probably) not to attend. Yes, I'm fully-vaccinated…or at least I am until Real Doctors, including mine, recommend a booster shot of Moderna. I still wouldn't have wanted to attend a convention that was all about COVID and where to wear a mask and who's vaccinated and who's not. Would we have spoken of anything else…say, about comic books?
Also, I've grown so accustomed to being home, dining in and seeing only selected, wisely-screened people that I'm not sure my system could have handled the shock of suddenly being amidst thousands in a place other than my house. I'll have to ease back to that when the time comes.
Sean Hannity — whose show you may be stunned to hear I never watch — shocked a few people last week by coming out, sort of, for vaccination. He must have gotten some horrified feedback from the same folks who think Hillary's still running that pizza parlor for pedophiles because he came back a few days later and said, "I'm not urging people to get the COVID-19 vaccine." But here is what he did say which sounds like what he's denying he said…
Please take COVID seriously, I can't say it enough. Enough people have died, we don't need more deaths. Research like crazy, talk to your doctor, your doctors, medical professionals you trust based on your unique medical history, your current medical condition and you and your doctor make a very important decision for your own safety. Take it seriously.
That makes a lot of sense except for the "research like crazy" part. Talking to medical professionals you trust is a great idea and if everyone had done that, we might not now be hunkering down due to a new wave of coronavirus and worrying about the next few. If you take "research like crazy" to mean looking health matters up on the Internet, I think you are crazy. Because if you wanna believe COVID can be kept at bay by eating an excessive number of Snickers bars and you google enough, you can probably find supporting evidence for what you wanna believe.
Consulting a Real Doctor should be all you have to do…and if you don't trust your Real Doctor enough that it is, you have the wrong Real Doctor…or maybe the wrong idea of what they're for. I decided to get the vaccine the instant it was recommended to me by my primary care physician. And if I'd had any doubts he was right, they were dispelled by e-mails and personal advice from my gastroenterologist, my dentist, my orthopedist, my urologist…I've typed this list before here…who all weighed in before I was even able to get the first jab.
Sure. If I wanted to, I could find contrary advice from unknown, possibly anonymous people on the World Wide Web but why would I do that? Only if I wanted to believe that expertise is worthless and that my hunches are just as good as anything. I'm waiting for the political candidate — and we seem to be getting close to this — who will tell his supporters, "…and I promise you I will never listen to anyone on any topic who claims to know more than I do!"
This is going to take a while. A few times in the distant past on this blog, I've written about a TV series that ran here in Los Angeles back in 1967. It was called Groovy and here is what I wrote about it on this blog back in 2007…
The other day, I was telling a friend of mine about a memorable show that ran on Los Angeles TV in the late sixties. It was called Groovy and it was an afternoon "teen dance party" show on KHJ, Channel 9. What made it unique from dozens of other knock-offs of American Bandstand (and many such shows that preceded that one) was that when it debuted, Groovy was done from the beach in Santa Monica.
The following is not any sort of official history. It's what I remember and some of it may be incorrect. I'm putting it up here mainly to see if I can jar any other memories (or photos or — dare I dream? — videos) loose. I recall the show premiering around March of '67 and ping-ponging back and forth between the 4 PM-5 PM time slot and 5 PM-6 PM, Monday through Friday. I believe it was done live when it started and then, for reasons that will become obvious as I tell you more about it, its producers began taping it an hour or so before it was broadcast. Once or twice, it got "rained out" and a slapdash broadcast was assembled in the KHJ studios over on Melrose.
Michael Blodgett
The show went through several versions but its first and most notable period was when it was done from the beach and hosted by the gent seen in the above photo. His name was Michael Blodgett and he had a nice little acting career, which included the unforgettable Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (from which that is a still) before he moved on to considerable success as a novelist. He was a pretty good host on the Groovy show but I suspect even he would admit that he wasn't the main appeal of the show. The main appeal was young ladies in very tiny bikinis — and by "young," I mean sometimes fifteen or sixteen years of age, if that old.
Much of the show was, of course, teens dancing to records. There was one real musical act each day…usually a group that would come on to pantomime/lip sync to their current record, which made for an odd sight. There would be these musicians acting like they were playing on the beach…with their amps and electric guitars plugged into absolutely nothing. Most records of that era ended with the track fading out and I guess the acoustics out there weren't great insofar as hearing the playback was concerned. As a song drew to its close, you could see the performers become unsure if it was through so they'd keep "playing" and then one guy would stop and maybe another. And then you could tell someone had yelled, "It's not over! Keep playing!" And they'd scurry back into mime mode. Very odd stuff.
But the real "treat" — the reason thousands of depraved Southern California males tuned in — was the daily Bikini Contest. Blodgett would do short interviews with five or six young ladies selected not for their loquaciousness but for the elegance of their figures and the brevity of their swimwear. You got the idea that whoever was picking the contestants was rating them by subtracting their I.Q.s from their bust measurements. Blodgett would ask each where she went to school, what she liked to study and if she had any hobbies, and the lasses would giggle through their replies. Then each would parade down a little runway to show off her physique to hoots and hollers from the crowd. That day's musical act would be the judges and they'd select the victor. Usually, whichever lady looked the sluttiest would win passes to Gazarri's on the Strip or the Cinnamon Cinder or some other local dance club.
Other things I remember about the show: The cameras were always panning the crowds who were there to watch the proceedings. At least once per show, someone would either flash or moon or give the finger. (This, I assume, is why they stopped broadcasting live.) At the very least, you'd see an awful lot of young teens smoking and/or brandishing bottles of liquor. One person who worked on the show told me that they got very few complaints about the flashing or the mooning or even the 14 year old girls popping out of their microscopic bathing suits…but there were constant objections to the smoking and drinking.
I also remember a corollary to something I'd already formulated by then, which was the Cheap Movie Swimming Pool Scene Rule. That's the rule that says if you're watching a cheap or even medium-budget movie and there's a scene by a swimming pool, someone is going to fall or be pushed in with all their clothes on. There was no pool on Groovy but there was an ocean…so at least once per show, someone who wasn't dressed for it would get carried out against their will and thrown in the water. You can just imagine the hilarity of that.
I have a few other memories — including the story of a girl from my high school and her travails in the Bikini Contest — but I'll save them for a follow-up posting which, I hope, will contain additional info that someone reading this will send in. One thing I'm really not clear on is how long the Blodgett/Beach era of Groovy lasted. I do remember tuning in one Monday and discovering that with no advance notice, it had turned into a different show. Groovy was suddenly shot indoors at KHJ with all the dancing teens fully clothed. This version — which was quite ordinary and therefore inferior to The Lloyd Thaxton Show. a dance party series over on Channel 13 — was hosted by local deejay Sam Riddle. Later, Riddle was replaced by another local radio guy, Robert W. Morgan. By then, it was well on its way to becoming one of those shows that is watched by so few people that when it's cancelled, no one notices.
So does anyone have any stills or footage from the beach/Blodgett version of Groovy? Does anyone else at least remember it? Come on. Someone must have been in Los Angeles in the late sixties and watching TV besides me.
I heard from a lot of people who remembered it but no one who had any footage from it. Then in 2015, someone on YouTube posted not footage of the show but some 8mm home movies that were shot on location. It begins, of course, with someone getting dragged out and thrown in the water…
Also in 2015, I told the story of a girl from my high school who kept turning up on Groovy, trying (and failing) to win its daily bikini beauty pageant of (mostly) underage young ladies. You can read that story here. If you go do that now, come back here afterwards to read the rest of this post.
Those home movies were all we had…until now. Someone else has come up with some actual video of the show. It's not much but it's the only video of the show I've seen since it was on the air back when I was in my first year of high school. Actually, it's some sort of demo reel of Mr. Blodgett as a host and also as an actor so you'll see snippets of him on Bonanza and other programs. I'm guessing the absence of any clips from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is because this was compiled before that movie existed.
In this video, you'll also see several moments from Groovy. None of the bikini girls in this clip are the one in the story to which I just linked…
Rabbi-turned-stand-up-comic Jackie Mason has died at the age of 93. He had a strange career — up and down, up and down — full of fights and feuds and wacky business ideas that crashed and burned. But at the core of it all was a really great act. In the mid-eighties, he had a major "up" when he mounted a stage production on Broadway and elsewhere called The World According To Me. It was basically just him on a stage doing the best of all the material he'd been doing on stage the previous thirty years and it was hysterical.
I took my father to see it in Los Angeles and you would not believe how funny Mason was. He followed it with a series of other shows, some of which I saw. But the first show was kind of like "The Best of Jackie Mason" and the others were more like "The Rest of Jackie Mason" and not very good. For a time, he kept turning up in and around Broadway with new productions. When some show closed and the theater would otherwise have been dark for a few months, Mason would run in and rent the place for bargain rates. Then he'd stand outside the theater for much of the day, chatting with tourists and persuading them to buy tickets to his show.
For a long time, I think I saw him somewhere on every trip I made to Manhattan. He'd either be outside the theater where his latest show was playing or he'd be sitting in the Carnegie Delicatessen, holding court and telling people to go buy tickets to his current show or the next one. Some of the shows ran quite a long time but in 2003, he produced a musical comedy and here's what I wrote then…
As we predicted here, Jackie Mason's new Broadway show is closing in a hurry. It opened on November 19 and the last performance is November 30. Reviews ranged from bad to really bad. William Stevenson over at Broadway.com, for instance, wrote: "Charging Broadway prices for this comic catastrophe is truly criminal. It's only worth paying if you want to be able to say you've seen the worst musical comedy on Broadway in recent memory." For some reason, when I came across that, I had a mental image of Mason reading the notice and saying, "Well, it could have been worse…"
There are all sorts of stories about Jackie Mason…feuding with Frank Sinatra, feuding with Ed Sullivan, feuding with reporters who wrote about the field of comedy and didn't give him what he felt was his due. He was perpetually at the center of trouble. For a while, he was rabidly right-wing and in 2009, I wrote this here…
Once in the Carnegie, though he was several tables away, I had to suffer through an extended monologue about how it was a foregone conclusion that Bill and Hillary Clinton were heading for prison. There was so much evidence, in fact, that they were already secretly plea-bargaining for reduced sentences. Shortly after that, Hillary became the junior senator from New York, which I guess was part of the plea bargain. On that same trip, a "friend" took me to see Mason's then-current Broadway offering…and I put "friend" in quotes because real friends just don't do things like that to you. I once loved seeing Jackie Mason on stage but that night, his humor was about as sharp as his political reporting.
Two other things I want to say about him before I go: Back in 2013, my cousin David did a really good interview with Mason and you can read it here.
Also, if you ever come across the comedy record at the top of this post, get it. It's solid evidence that Jackie Mason was once a great, great stand-up. And if any of it seems familiar to you from other places, that may be because he was one of those comedians that a lot of other comedians stole from. I'll even give you what's probably an example here…
This is a brief audio link from that record, I'm the Greatest Comedian in the World Only Nobody Knows It Yet. It came out in 1962 and this was part of his opening…
And here's a clip from the opening of Don Adams…Live?, a comedy record that the star of Get Smart recorded in Las Vegas in 1967…
I can't guarantee that Jackie Mason didn't "borrow" the joke from somewhere else. But I suspect Adams got it from Mason's act — and probably that record. Mason was so good that other comics couldn't resist helping himself to his material. It wouldn't surprise me if more did now because a lot of it was timeless and he's no longer around to object.
Sergio Aragonés, Thomas Yeates and me (Mark Evanier) discuss the new Groo Meets Tarzan comic books series which should be at your local comic shop any day now…
Deciding to get vaccinated is a "personal decision" the same way deciding to go to work when you have the flu and sneezing on others is a "personal decision."
It's hard to wrap my brain around most things these days but a biggie today is that were it not for that virus thing we've all heard about, I'd be down in San Diego this morning, scurrying to get to a breakfast meeting before a business meeting before a panel before another panel, before a press interview, before another panel and so on.
I miss Comic-Con but I'm glad they ain't having it this year. For one thing, it wouldn't be Comic-Con. It would be Covid-Con and we'd all be struggling with where and when to wear masks and the number one topic of discussion would be who's gotten vaccinated and who hasn't. I'm not sure if I'd even be there. The novel coronavirus — which has long since stopped being a novelty in our lives — has been a powerful disincentive to go anywhere, to do anything outside my home. That is not necessarily a good thing but it is what it is.
If you're home this weekend, enjoy being at home this weekend. And watch some of the fine programming that's been concocted for your home viewing. Naturally, I'm pushing my three…
GROO MEETS TARZAN – Saturday, July 24 at 12 PM
me discussing the soon-to-be-released Groo Meets Tarzan mini-series with Sergio Aragonés and Thomas Yeates.
CARTOON VOICES – Saturday, July 24 at 6 PM
me interviewing four great Cartoon Voice Artists: Candi Milo (Space Jam: A New Legacy), Wally Wingert (Arkham Asylum), Jenny Yokibori (The Simpsons) and Zeno Robinson (Pokémon).
THE ANNUAL JACK KIRBY TRIBUTE PANEL – Sunday, July 25 at 12 PM
me discussing Jack with artist Walt Simonson and writer-publisher Paul Levitz.
These are all watchable in various places but the easiest place for you to see them is on the page you're on right now. I'll be posting them here at the appropriate times. You can also find them and all the other programming via this page.
For many years, the esteemed television journalist Edward R. Murrow hosted a show called Person to Person. Camera crews were dispatched to the homes of famous folks and they'd be interviewed live by Mr. Murrow with him in a TV studio and them in their houses. One of his more challenging conversations must have been this one with Harpo Marx. This is from January 3, 1958 and I'm sorry the video isn't better…
Wow. Day 500 of this thing. Remember just a few weeks ago when most of us felt the worst of it was behind us?
Like most of you, I have major concerns that (a) we'll be living in Coronavirus Mode for a long, long time and (b) Climate Change is passing some point-of-no-return and we'll be living with killer storms and killer heat and underwater coastal towns. Unlike some of you, I've been trying to not think a lot about these things and to discourage friends who want to spend long periods of time on the phone discussing how screwed we are on one or both counts.
I can't do anything about either one of them…but I can, I think, finish my assignments. If I don't spend too much time thinking about (a) and (b).
This may be just my wishful imagination but I think I'm seeing some of those loud voices who denied one or both trying to subtly shift positions without admitting they were wrong. Meanwhile, when Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene refuse to answer a simple question about whether they've been vaccinated, that suggests to me they have but they know the crowd they've been playing to will view that as a betrayal. And keeping your angry mob angry is more important than being right.
That's about as political as I want to get today. Please don't send me your views on this. When I finish this post, my mind goes back into the script I'm writing and I need it to stay there through the weekend. But before I go there, a few referrals…
If you didn't understand that yelling match between Dr. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci — two men who work in very different areas with the former pretending he understands the latter's — this will explain it to you.
If you need to know more about The Delta Variant, this article seems to know what it's talking about.
If you don't understand what it means that Ben & Jerry's ice cream will no longer be sold in occupied Palestinian territories, this may clarify things. This is another one of those matters that matters…but I try to correlate the amount to time I spend thinking about it with the amount of power I have to solve this problem.
KHJ Radio played "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" so often, you'd have suspected the programming director there was Otis Redding's uncle. That was understandable when it was a huge hit right after it was released at the start of 1968. But they played it and played it and played it. One time at lunch in high school, a girl I was sitting with pulled out her transistor radio and told me she was going to listen to a little KHJ and I said, "Betcha a buck they're playing 'Dock of the Bay'" and sure enough, they were.
I didn't know anything about Otis Redding then; not even the fact that he'd recently been killed in a plane crash and that "Dock of the Bay" was the first posthumous hit record ever…or maybe one of the few. From listening to the song, I think I imagined he was a real old guy who's been around forever and finally had a hit. In fact, he was 26 when he died and reportedly, he was a very active, vital performer. He had many good years ahead of him and probably a lot more #1 hits like this one…
My occasional employers Sid and Marty Krofft have put a number of video goodies on the web. This is the first episode of the show that put them into the kidvid business — H.R. Pufnstuf. I remember when this show debuted on September 6, 1969, it was one of those "I've never seen anything like this on television" moments. Some of the characters vaguely resembled the stars of Hanna-Barbera's The Banana Splits Adventure Hour which had debuted a year earlier, also on Saturday morning. But I didn't know then that the Kroffts had built those costumes and then gone into the producing business for themselves.
I became an instant fan of it and the many other Krofft shows that followed it. I didn't always understand what was going on and years later when I said that to Sid Krofft, he replied, "Neither did we sometimes" and he wasn't kidding. But he and Marty were well aware that their shows were always fascinating and that they were doing things that no one had ever done on television before. This was at a time when most producers — especially of programming aimed towards kids — were trying very hard to only do things that had been done on television before.
The first show I wrote on for Krofft Entertainment used Pufnstuf, Witchiepoo and many of the supporting players from this series, mostly voiced and played by the original performers. And I think one of the reasons I got the job was that, alone among the many writers they interviewed for the position, I was the only one who knew all the characters.
I watched this episode when it first aired. Here's your chance to watch it now…
That's obviously an old subject line because I'm not at Comic-Con International right now. No one is…physically. A lot of folks though are probably "there" in the online sense, enjoying Comic-Con@Home, a festival of online programming. They'll enjoy it even more in the coming days if they tune in for these three panels of mine…
GROO MEETS TARZAN – Saturday, July 24 at 12 PM
me discussing the soon-to-be-released Groo Meets Tarzan mini-series with Sergio Aragonés and Thomas Yeates.
CARTOON VOICES – Saturday, July 24 at 6 PM
me interviewing four great Cartoon Voice Artists: Candi Milo (Space Jam: A New Legacy), Wally Wingert (Arkham Asylum), Jenny Yokibori (The Simpsons) and Zeno Robinson (Pokémon).
THE ANNUAL JACK KIRBY TRIBUTE PANEL – Sunday, July 25 at 12 PM
me discussing Jack with artist Walt Simonson and writer-publisher Paul Levitz.
Me, I'm in my native habitat writing something that's due. If I was down in San Diego for the con right now, I'd have an excuse for not having this assignment finished next week but since I'm not, I guess I have to finish the thing. I am however glad they're not having it in-person this year. It saved me from deciding if I was going to go at a time when "The Delta Variant" is giving us a worry we wouldn't have if more people had gotten vaccinated. Maybe they'll all wise up now and we won't have to deal with "The Epsilon Variant," "The Zeta Variant," "The Eta Variant," etc. I'm thinking we could avoid "The Kappa Variant" if we got all the fraternities vaccinated.
The rest of this post is a replay of what I wrote here 7/24/09 the day after that year's Comic-Con. If I were writing it today, I'd say all the same things but I'd avoid the "geek" and "nerd" words which I've come to really dislike when applied to people I like. Also, sad to say, I can no longer host programming events with Stan Freberg and June Foray…
A couple times yesterday, I found myself trying to articulate just why it is I enjoy this convention so much. Me trying to articulate anything is always dicey but it goes something like this: It's invigorating to be in an environment where so much is happening, where so many people are having such a good time, and there's so much raw creative energy filling the space. Yeah, it's loud and if you hit the wrong aisle, it can take upwards up a month to traverse ten feet…but you're not a prisoner of any of that. You're in it because you love it and I'm a little weary of folks who bitch 'n' moan about it year after year after year. This is what Comic-Con is, people. No one brought you here at gunpoint.
I wouldn't/couldn't live in this environment all the time…but four days per year is invigorating. Look left and there's someone you want to meet or haven't seen in way too long. Look right and there's something you want to buy. Behind you is a kid in a brilliant homemade costume. And up ahead of you, just down that row you can barely squeeze through, there just may be an exciting career opportunity. (Or not. I think the surest way to let yourself down, and maybe even to make it not happen, is to come here expecting to land a job. If it does occur, great, but you need to let it be one of those unexpected bonuses in life.)
Years ago, I wrote a piece about Guilty Pleasures and why I think they're emotionally dishonest. There's some really stupid movie that you know is stupid but you love to watch it again and again. You're afraid to just admit that…afraid someone else will say, "Oh, you like that kind of crap?" So you call it a Guilty Pleasure and somehow you're supposed to be able to enjoy it without it counting against you. That's trying to have it both ways, which is how too many people want to have their Comic-Con. They can't wait to be here and when they leave, they can't wait for the next one. But to cut themselves away from the herd, to pretend they're somehow above what some see as geekery of the highest order, they belittle the con and join the throngs who dismiss it all as the Grand Festival of Nerd-dom. (I tried typing that with one "d" and no hyphen and it didn't look right.)
This is the 40th one of these and it's my fortieth…a fact which some seem to envy. It means I got a larger piece of cake than they did, or maybe that I found this wonderful mystical land before them. I've had my gripes with the convention and there were years there I didn't enjoy it as much as I felt I should. Those years were all before I came to realize that my problems were mostly with me; that I was approaching it with the idea that the con was there to entertain me and enrich my collection and career. When I figured out it was just a place I could have a good time — that's when I began to really have good times at these things. And I became unafraid to admit that I love this convention.
Gotta run. Four panels to do today, one of them the Stan & Hunter Freberg Spotlight, plus there's the award ceremony tonight and I'm presenting. Also, June Foray's autobiography makes its debut (and June arrives to sign it) and I have two meetings and one interview and don't you think I'd better stop blogging and get over there? If you're around, say hello. I'm easy to spot in the hall. I'm the one with the badge and the big smile.
