One of those folks who doesn't want his name associated with this blog wrote…
Your mention this morning of the TV show Van Dyke and Company reminded me of something you said years ago on a Kirby panel at a New York Con. You were talking about the DC Comics in the early seventies when Jack did his Fourth World series for them and you mentioned that variety show with Dick Van Dyke. I remember that there was some sort of connection but I don't remember what it was. Can you refresh my weak memory?
I'll try. First off, some TV history: Dick Van Dyke headlined a variety series for NBC that ran from September 20, 1976 to December 30, 1976 — eleven episodes. It was produced by the team of Bob Einstein and Allan Blye and it got generally good reviews but I don't think the network gave it much of a chance, plus it was in a rough time slot. It aired at 8 PM on Thursday evenings opposite The Waltons on CBS and Welcome Back, Kotter on ABC at the peak of those two shows' popularity.
I was working on Kotter at the time and everyone on our show liked Van Dyke and Company. We'd sometimes take a break during Thursday night rewrite meetings — which could last into the wee hours of the morning — to watch not our show but Mr. Van Dyke's. His show won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy-Variety or Music Series that year…unfortunately, after it was yanked off the air. It's only barely remembered and when it is, that's usually because Andy Kaufman was a semi-regular — his first real presence in prime-time.
A few years later with its ratings at a disastrous low, NBC hired the famed programmer Fred Silverman away from ABC to try and reprogram the network and raise its viewership. A month or three into his command, I was in a meeting with Silverman and he was rattling off some of the reasons why NBC had dug itself into such a deep hole. There were quite a few reasons but a big one was, he felt, that his predecessors had been too quick to cancel certain shows. These were good shows, he said…and if they'd been given more time, he believed they'd have found viewers (or vice-versa). I remember him saying, "They certainly would have done better than whatever the guys before me replaced them with."
He named four shows which, he said, should not have been canceled. I remember the names of three of them: Baa Baa Black Sheep, Sirota's Court…and Van Dyke and Company. His predecessors, he insisted, were too cowardly — the descriptor he used was "chickenshit" — and panicked. And there some talk about shows which networks almost canceled when the early ratings were disappointing — M*A*S*H being the textbook example — but which turned out to be huge hits. And often, Fred said, the show avoided early axing not because anyone had faith in it but because of some contractual factor or because there was nothing else available to put in its place.
I wish I could remember all the examples Silverman cited but in some cases, it was a happy accident that the show stayed on long enough to have a significant ratings uptick. There have been many more since and every time I hear about one of them, it gets me to thinking about the comic book industry and I think it has sometimes applied there. In this case, the parallel to M*A*S*H might be the first Conan the Barbarian comic which Marvel brought out in July of 1970. That was when I was just getting involved in the industry and I vividly recall that it was quickly proclaimed as a flop of immense proportions…especially by the folks at DC.
But it stuck around. I heard various reasons and "It's a good book" was not one of them. That should have been a reason and a lot of people thought that but that didn't seem to be a reason. What I heard was that since Marvel had paid for the rights, it was cheaper to publish it than to not publish it, especially since there were a number of completed issues which couldn't be printed anywhere else. They would lose less on those issues by publishing them by not publishing them. Also, Marvel was then trying to boost the number of comics they sold each month so as to boost their advertising rates. That was why they were then putting out so many new reprint titles.
Whatever the cause, Conan lasted until the book built up a substantial audience. It and several spin-offs became major profit centers for the company…
…and I believe this: That if Conan the Barbarian had been a DC book and had been launched at the same time and gotten the same sales figures, it would have been axed by issue #6. It would have been called a failure of the property and of the folks who produced the comic. People would not have said, "Well, maybe Management made a mistake canceling it when they did."
During this same period, DC launched a number of new comics which I thought were pretty good but which were terminated a.s.a.p. when someone looked at the early sales figures for #2 or #3. Here's a list of someone and in parentheses, I've put the number of issues the comic lasted, not counting any Showcase issues: Bat Lash (7), Secret Six (7), Anthro (6), Angel and the Ape (7), Beware the Creeper (6), The Hawk and the Dove (5), Hot Wheels (6) and Captain Action (5).
There were also a few comics which I believe were harmed by panicked makeovers. Inferior Five and The Spectre underwent such alterations — harmful, not helpful I thought, as of their seventh issues…and then didn't last much longer. To me, these were like if the programmers at CBS looked at the early ratings of M*A*S*H and said, "It's bombing! Quick! Let's fire Alan Alda and bring in Paul Lynde!" Or if the guys at NBC had tried to salvage Van Dyke and Company by replacing Dick with Jerry.
I'm not saying all these comics would have been smash hits if the publisher would have stuck with them longer but if even one had been a success the magnitude of Conan, it might have more than made up for umpteen failures. Also, so many cancellations at the time — and DC was dumping a lot of long-running titles, as well — gave the company the image of "Don't fall in love with anything here, kids! Whatever it is, it might not be around much longer!"
You, Anonymous ASKme Asker, probably heard me at that New York Con talking about this view of mine in conjunction with the books Jack Kirby did for DC in the early seventies. They did not sell badly at all even if you believe the official accountings from the distributor…which some people don't. With all the later reprintings, DC has certainly made a lot more long-term money off those issues than they did from contemporaneous books which were proclaimed as successes back then.
It is a fact of the television industry that just because a show gets quickly canceled, that might not be a failure of the show itself. It could be — and everyone knows this — a failure of the network to put the show in a proper time slot, promote it well and give it time to succeed. Believe me, there are a lot more examples of this than the ones from the seventies I mentioned. I don't see any reason why we should assume that if a new comic book is quickly axed, it couldn't possibly have succeeded.
