Monthly Archives: November 2024

I'm a little mystified at the choice of Conan O'Brien to host the Academy Awards next year. The New York Times says John Mulaney turned it down and I have to wonder who else did. O'Brien has been so far out of the public eye lately that he couldn't have been the next choice. I used to say that in order to host the Oscars you had to be either a big movie star or Johnny Carson but it's been a long time since the Academy thought that way. I'm not sure what the thought process is these days but it isn't that.

I'm awake and declaring this a Mushroom Soup Friday, meaning that Mark's gotta work on an assignment and won't have time to post much on this blog today. There's a whole worldwide web out there so you can probably find something else out there to read while I bear down hard on what I have to do to make a living.

And don't think I'm complaining. I'm a very-grown man and I picked this profession of my own free will. I do not like writers complaining about how hard they (sometimes) have to work. To me, that's like a guy who wanted to be a plumber complaining about having to fix toilets or a fellow who chose Sushi Chef as his profession bitching about having to cut up raw fish all day. When it seems like writing is hard work, I always remind myself of the immortal words of that great philosopher, Super Chicken…

See you later, folks. Maybe.

It's another Everything You Need To Know About Saturday Night Live. In this case, it's Everything You Need To Know About Saturday Night Live Season #17…as the show takes an unmistakable turn from the Phil Hartman/Jan Hooks/Dennis Miller period to the Chris Farley/Adam Sandler/David Spade years. Farley may still hold the record for becoming a major, recognizable player on the show quicker than any other New Hire…and not because of his weight but because of his energy.

I never had that kind of energy in my entire life. And I sure don't after sitting at the computer until this hour of the morning…

I think it's hilarious that the folks who run The Onion may have bought the Alex Jones Infowars site in a bankruptcy sale and that they intend to turn it into a satirical site promoting Gun Control. I say "may" because the sale seems to have been halted over some dispute over the rules of the bidding. According to this article, there were only two bidders and the Onion people didn't put up the most money but they were working some sort of deal in tandem with the Sandy Hook families to buy it for some of the cash that Jones owes the family but will never pay them. If that's so, I'll bet John Oliver is mad he didn't think of it first.

A few weeks ago here, I was talking about the Silver Slipper, a long-defunct casino in Las Vegas where I won a few bucks shortly before it was rased in 1988. Let's take a look at a sign that they had in front of the place in, I'm guessing, 1966.

They're luring people in with "The Show That Made America Blush," Minsky's Burlesque.  It promises a "stageful [sic] of exciting girls" and given that the show was free — "no cover" — I'm guessing a "stageful" was no more than four.  They did three shows a night — at 10 PM, half past Midnight and 2-friggin'-thirty in the morning.  Note that the sign does not say the show is dark (i.e., closed) any night of the week.

There still are free shows in Vegas but none for any price at that hour.  The free shows are usually in lounges full of drunk people and feature one or two performers and maybe, if you're lucky, a live piano player, plus you're expected to spring for a drink or two.

Then you have the Silver Slipper's "World Famous Buffet" for $1.57 or if you stick around or are up for breakfast, you can get one for 59 cents.  $1.57 in 1966 is roughly equivalent to $15.30 today.  Today, the cheapest dinner buffet in town is $27 and they run as high as $84.99 a person.  If today, you saw a buffet offered for $15.30, I think you'd stay far away, figuring it had to be, like, a steam table full of week-old Hamburger Helper and ramen noodles left over from the Korean War.  But I'll bet you that in '66, they put out a decent spread.  After all, it was there to lure you in, not gross you out.

So you could have gone there at 11 PM, eaten all you could eat, seen the 12:30 show and had two drinks for, let's say, $20 in today's money and that's including tips.  (The cheapest non-lounge show currently in Vegas at the moment seems to be Jen Kramer's magic show at the Westgate — which I hear is excellent.  It's $38.46 a seat, though it's not hard to find a two-for-the-price-of-one coupon.  But that's with no buffet and the drinks are extra.)  Or you could have hit the 2:30 AM show at the Slipper and stuck around after until they started serving the cheapo breakfast.

Either way, on your way out of the Silver Slipper, you could pick up a pair of free nylons.  That would come in handy if you wanted to make your legs look better or you needed a stocking mask so you could rob a liquor store. Or both.

The Minsky's show probably wasn't very risqué and if it had an old pro comedian or two in it — Hank Henry or Irv Benson or Tommy "Moe" Raft — it was probably a darn good show.  And it was free as long as you didn't cash your payroll check on the way in and blow it all on the roulette wheel on your way out.  I'm sorry I wasn't around for those days.

A lot of people are fans of Alton Brown because he teaches them how to cook. I'm a fan of Alton Brown because he has taught me not to cook. Every time I get the urge to spend more time in kitchen preparing what I eat, I have only to watch a couple of his videos to remind me that I don't know what the hell I'm doing and probably never will. He's also very clever with how he uses the media. Would that everyone who knows more than I do — which is, like, everyone — could teach in such an entertaining manner.

I have a special interest in his videos about cooking turkey because roast turkey just might be my favorite food and it's not that easy to get it where I live. My attempts to roast them myself years ago did not go well and I never even attempted to fry one because, as we've probably all seen, people attempting to do that often end up burning down their garages.

Mr. Brown has invented what seems like a relatively sane/safe way to fry a turkey but I'll probably never try it. My confidence in my cooking abilities is so low, I have to muster up all my courage to bake a potato in the microwave. But I'm fascinated by the subject so here's the first in a series of videos Brown is releasing to promote his method. As he tends to do, he veers a little into Mad Scientist Mode…

Here's another magic lesson from one of my favorite card handlers. This is Daniel Roy showing you the art of palming…

I often on this site talk about my fondness and interest for "old Las Vegas," which has prompted a few folks to write in and ask what "old Las Vegas" is and how it differs from current Las Vegas. Old Las Vegas had big stars at affordable prices, cheap food, cheaper morals, better gambling, loads more free stuff and an all-day/all-night party atmosphere. Okay, so it also had a little organized crime. It wasn't perfect. But it was in some ways better than what's there now.

One thing I liked about what I was able to see of it was the big signs. Today, they just tell you the name of the place, the name of any overpriced superstar who plays there and perhaps the names of a few overpriced restaurants that will charge you a fortune to dine. They used to advertise high (but not over) priced performers and sometimes a lot of free stuff. I see photos now of big signs from the past and there are amazing double bills of acts that I wish I'd been able to see. I'm going to post a few of them on this blog from time to time starting with this one…

I'm going to guess this was around 1972…The star attraction was Johnny Carson, his opening act was Bette Midler and her conductor — whose name you may be able to make out in tiny letters — was some guy named Barry Manilow. Twice a year or so, Mr. Carson would use a two-week vacation from The Tonight Show to play Las Vegas…and Vegas probably felt like more of a vacation for him than it would have a few years later when he moved his late night series from New York to L.A. It was rumored that he wasn't so much trying to vacation from The Tonight Show as he was trying to vacation from the current Mrs. Carson.

I would have liked to have seen that show. Heck, I wouldn't have minded seeing Stanley Myron Handelman and maybe even Little Anthony and the Imperials if they were still Little Anthony and the Imperials. That was one of those groups that kept changing who was in and who was out. There were periods when even Little Anthony wasn't in Little Anthony and the Imperials.

Stanley Myron Handelman, I remember as a comedian who was pretty funny when you saw him in person, not as funny on TV…one of those guys who needed time on stage and couldn't be at his best in a five-minute set. He passed away in 2007 and for the last few years of his life, he had a little school teaching stand-up comedy in Los Angeles.

The Sahara is one of the oldest casino-hotels in Las Vegas, having opened in October of 1952.  It has changed hands constantly over the years and it actually closed down in 2011.  The property then underwent a complete renovation and opened again in 2014 as the SLS Las Vegas.  It didn't do well and was sold and re-renovated, opening again in 2019 as Sahara Las Vegas, which is what it is today.  The big attraction in its showroom now is "Magic Mike," a show with a lot of shirtless bodybuilders replicating the mood of the movie of the same name. Me, I'd rather see Johnny and Bette but I don't imagine they'll be playing there soon. And if they did, good seats would be a thousand and up.

Hey, do you remember when The Beatles starred on a Saturday morning cartoon show? I do and I recall it as having real cheap animation but fast-moving and clever scripts along with (of course) some real good music. My pal Jack Mendelsohn, who I mentioned here the other day, was one of the writers and I knew some other folks who were involved. They all remembered working real fast for real low money but apart from that, I didn't know a whole lot about the show…not until I came across this video.

And before I got around to posting it here, I received a number of e-mails from folks telling me about it and saying I oughta feature it here. So I hereby feature it here. I guess it's pretty accurate…although they show a clip from the Rankin-Bass Frosty the Snowman special and identify the voice actor in it as Paul Frees, when it was in fact Billy DeWolfe. But I think the rest of it's pretty solid…

It's two weeks until Thanksgiving and MeTV Toons has already been running Christmas specials.  This coming Saturday, they're offering up Yogi Bear's All-Star Comedy Christmas Caper, the third of three Yogi Bear Christmas shows that Hanna-Barbera made. The online MeTV Toons schedule says it's on at 5 PM but that may or may not be true for your time zone or source of cable. Lemme tell you a few interesting things about it…

The show aired for the first time on December 21, 1982. It was written by Yours Truly in July of that year and even before I got the job, the show was horribly behind schedule and there was a genuine fear that it could not be completed in time to air on that contracted date.  Joe Barbera called me in, described the crisis and asked me if I had any ideas for a half-hour special.  Many other writers had written scripts or outlines for it and all had been rejected somewhere along the food chain. In fact, the show was originally supposed to be done for Christmas of '81 but it was kicked over a year because they didn't have a workable script.

They hadn't come up with anything that could get through the approval process since then and it was now looking too late to get it done for 1982. Hanna-Barbera had proposed delaying it yet another year but CBS said no, it's now or never. So time was running out and all they had was the title that Mr. B — that's what most of us called him — had come up with when he'd first sold the network on doing a prime-time Yogi Christmas special.

I didn't have any idea for a Yogi Bear Christmas special but Mr. B and I brainstormed for a little while and I came up with something that he liked. I'm not sure if I realized it at the time but it was not unlike the plot of a Laurel & Hardy movie which, like all Laurel & Hardy movies, was irrevocably etched into my brain. But Joe liked it and I liked it and he phoned someone at CBS and pitched it over the phone to them. Mr. B was one of the greatest salespersons who ever lived — which is why his studio had the success it had — and they said yes.

He told me to go home and start typing like crazy. I basically had about three days. For an important network special that was re-introducing a great many Hanna-Barbera properties to a prime time audience, I should have had three weeks.

I have worked on few shows in my career that had as many fights and problems as this one. The biggest one — one of the nastiest battles I've ever had — came when an attorney in Business Affairs at the studio decided that Daws Butler, the voice of Yogi, was asking for too much money. This Biz Guy actually ordered the voice department to recast Yogi and all the other roles Daws was to perform in the show — Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Quick Draw McGraw, Mr. Jinks, Hokey Wolf, Augie Doggie, Snooper and Blabber, Dixie the Mouse and Wally Gator.

So they not only wanted me to write the show in three days but this one guy there in a department which should have been called Non-Creative Affairs thought they could recast the voice of eleven of their established characters in a week or so. I wrote about that battle in this article a long time ago.

That article was about Daws — still one of the most wonderful and talented people I've encountered in my long journey through the comic book and television industries — so I didn't include some of the other problems we had on that special. Wanna hear about some of them? I had a feeling you would…

Well, first: We had a battle over what I would be paid and, of course, it involved that same guy in Hanna-Barbera Non-Creative Business Affairs. Joe Barbera was telling me I had to write the script as fast as humanly possible while this lawyer was stalling and making lowball offers. I think he thought that my sense of loyalty to the studio and Yogi would cause me to write all or most of the script before we'd settle on my fee. That, of course, would put me in a horrible negotiating position. My agent couldn't say "Mark won't write this script until you make us a better offer" if I'd already written the script.

That got settled with some bloodshed but that's a separate story, too long to include here.  And even after we'd settled on what I'd be paid and I'd finished the script and it had gone into production and everyone was happy with it, the Biz Affairs guy was trying to renegotiate the deal to which he'd agreed.

Everyone — including the folks at the network — approved the script with minor notes. I'm not sure if they really liked it or if at that point, they were so desperate that they'd okay anything but I made the minor changes and suddenly, we were in production, racing against the calendar.

Daws then recorded the voice track for the show along with a Who's Who of the best performers who'd worked on earlier Hanna-Barbera cartoons: Don Messick, Mel Blanc, Henry Corden, Allan Melvin, Janet Waldo, Hal Smith, John Stephenson and Jimmy Weldon. Jimmy Weldon was the voice of the little duck, Yakky Doodle, and I stuck the character in for a cameo and gave him only a line or two, then told the casting people they had to hire Jimmy Weldon. Amazingly, they did. (Weldon also played a few other parts in the show so they weren't paying him just for one or two lines.)

While the voices were being recorded, Bill Hanna assigned the script to an artist to storyboard. For those unfamiliar with the process, storyboarding means that the storyboarder draws out every shot in a format that looks like a horizontal comic book page with the dialogue written underneath each panel. This then becomes what everyone down the assembly line works with as they design scenes, animate scenes, time scenes, etc.

I went to this storyboard artist, introduced myself and told him that if he had any questions or problems to call me and I'd work with him to solve them. He said he would do that but whenever I later stopped by and asked to see what he'd done so far, he always said it wasn't ready for me to see. I never saw any of it before he turned it in to Bill Hanna, whereupon Bill Hanna made every last sound of pain and rage that you ever saw in one of his old Tom & Jerry cartoons.  There was, it turned out, a reason the artist hadn't shown any of it to me.

This storyboarder had a habit of rewriting scripts he was given to storyboard. When he finally turned the job in — and remember, everything on this cartoon was on a tight deadline — Mr. Hanna blew sky high. The artist had taken it upon himself to rewrite large chunks of the script. This was wrong for about eighty reasons but I'll just name a few. One was that the voices for the show had all been recorded and if they wanted to change the lines he'd changed, they'd have had to call back those voice actors, some of whom were highly-paid, and pay them again.

Another thing was that Hanna, Mr. B and the network had all approved the script he had changed. Even when you aren't battling an impossible deadline, you don't go back to the network — the folks who are paying for the show — and say, "Hey, remember that script you all approved? Well, we've changed a lot of it!"

The story was about a little girl who runs away from her father and hangs around Yogi for Christmas while everyone is frantically searching for her. The network folks had okayed this premise on the condition that I never use the word "kidnap" or any form of it and I didn't. But in the storyboard artist's rewrite, he'd used that word about twenty times and added in a scene where the police corner Yogi at gunpoint and are about to shoot him.

This was a Christmas special. It was airing a few days before Christmas. And this guy had, among other alterations, turned the finale into a Clint Eastwood movie with talking animals and someone talking about making Yogi into a rug in front of a fireplace.

Hanna and Barbera both read over his revision and both thought it was awful. Mr. B thought the guy had handed it in late intentionally, knowing how pressing the deadline was. The assumption was that he thought they'd be forced to use it as he'd done it. Instead, they fired the guy and Hanna had an interesting comment about the dismissed storyboard artist.  He said, "He won an Emmy once and ever since then, he's decided he knows more than anyone else, even guys like me who have several of them."

I don't know if the artist ever worked for Hanna-Barbera again. I do know he worked for other studios where he was dismissed for trying to rewrite scripts he was given. A few years later when I was doing Garfield and Friends — which was not an H-B show — he approached the producer and practically begged for work, promising he would not in any way try to rewrite the script. The producer gave him one I'd written, the artist went home and rewrote the script as he boarded it — again, a script that had already been approved by everyone and the voices had been recorded. He was dismissed and no one tried to fix this storyboard. It just went into the trash and they gave that script to another artist who started over. Maybe Bill Hanna was right about that Emmy.

Getting back to the Yogi Special which was about at DEFCON 2 status and climbing: Mr. Hanna called in Alex Lovy — said to be the fastest storyboard artist in the business — and he and a few other artists went to work on it.  In just a few days, they redid all the scenes that the first guy had changed.  The final board was a mess of notes and drawings that were practically stick figures and this all put the show in even greater deadline trouble.

It was being animated at a studio in Australia and the guys down under did triple overtime to get it done…and even then, several moments (including the last scene) were dropped out with Mr. Hanna's permission.  There just plain wasn't time, I was told, to do those scenes or even to fix some of the inevitable errors that always turn up in the first pass at animating a show.

In this case, the first pass was the only pass. The show arrived from Australia the day before it had to air and the editors worked all night on it, trying to fix mistakes and cover for the never-animated footage. I don't think anyone but the editors saw it before it went on the air…although someone at CBS did order the bleeping of a word uttered by Snagglepuss.

I've heard of cartoons being edited but this is the only time I know of a character being bleeped. It was bleeped when CBS ran it, it's bleeped on all the home video releases and I assume it'll be bleeped when MeTV Toons runs it this Saturday. It's in a speech right after the scene where Yogi and Boo Boo are in a phone booth. Snagglepuss says, "Seasons greetings…Happy Hanukkah, even!"

It was in the script when everyone approved it. They recorded Daws saying it. The animators animated to it. And then someone gave the order to delete the word "Hanukkah." And I thought us Jews were supposed to run show business.

As I said in the column to which I linked above, I was relatively happy with how it all came out but — and I'll quote myself here — the fact that my pride in everything I did for H-B had to be qualified with phrases like "given the circumstances," along with my discomfort at arguing with Mr. Barbera will all be featured prominently some day in an article entitled, "Why I Stopped Working For Hanna-Barbera." I didn't then intend to write such an article and was kidding when I said I would…but maybe I will one of these days.

Anyway, I'm not urging you to watch the special this Saturday but if you do, I thought you might enjoy some of the backstory on it. If you do watch, let me know if by some chance the word "Hanukkah" has miraculously reappeared. I'm betting it won't.

A person who, as you'll see, wished to remain anonymous wrote the following…

I'm shy so I’d be happier if my name stayed out of it. I decided to take your advice on Tuesday evening, take my mind off current events and, I watched Blotto. And, no kidding, I believe I've just watched my first Laurel and Hardy short. Ever. And I'm nearly fifty.

I had never wanted to watch Laurel and Hardy before. Virtually all the clips I'd seen related to their shorts involved Hardy looming over Laurel, growling something like "Here’s another mess you’ve gotten us into," as Laurel cringes or worse. That never really attracted me.

Now, I'm not going to say that Blotto absolutely converted me — I'm not really a serious comedy fan, some works for me, and a lot doesn't — but I liked this short, but maybe not for the reason a lot of folks might.

What really got my attention, was the friendship that was evident between our two leads, and in the short they snuck out a moment of freedom and bliss, and even if there was some chicanery involved, that moment was welcome. And I really appreciated the explosive ending! But is this short closer to the general Laurel and Hardy formula than those overbearing clips led me to believe?

Well, the underlying theme of their films is that these two guys are friends forever and that no matter what happens, they're inseparable. We don't really know how they met and in most films, we don't even know if they work together or what…but they need each other. That wasn't true of their earliest films (many of the silents) but after they figured out their screen characters, that was who they were. In some films, they were married men and their wives were not consistent. In some, they were in other countries in other time periods. But the relationship was the same…

…except for occasional departures the same way brothers can fight but they remain brothers. It's not there in every film and it wouldn't be there in clips because clips are usually of the visual comedy, not the "relationship" scenes. But their inseparability (there's a word I don't recall ever using before) is a key component of who they were on film.

Can you spare an hour? If you liked Blotto, you'll probably like Sons of the Desert, a short feature which a lot of us Laurel 'n' Hardy fans think was their best movie. They made this three years after Blotto and in some ways, it's an expanded version of that film…

Michael Paulson discusses how audiences seem to be overdoing it with standing ovations. The main problem I have with them is the same problem I have with the words "legend" or "legendary" which now seem to be applied to just about everyone and everything. I happened upon a clip of Andy Richter on The Masked Singer and he was referred to as a "late night legend."

Now, I happen to think Andy Richter is a very funny guy who was very good in the earlier years of Conan O'Brien's show. But if you describe him as a "late night legend," what term do you use for Johnny Carson or Steve Allen? And if you give a standing ovation to a C+ show, how do you show heightened approval for one that you think merits an A?

Corey Liss sent these two queries…

I've heard that, at the beginning of his career, Jack Kirby worked briefly for Will Eisner in the Eisner/Iger shop. Is that true? More generally, what was Kirby's take on Eisner's work? Did they ever talk or was it more like what you described with Carl Barks, two people in the same field who just didn't cross paths much?

Kirby definitely worked in Eisner's shop for a time. This was very early in both their careers and Jack often cited it as a great learning experience — not only learning from Will but from the other talented artists who worked there including Lou Fine. Once Jack left there, he didn't have much contact with Eisner but they got reacquainted in the seventies on the comic convention circuit, especially the Comic-Cons of San Diego.

Jack respected Will as both a creator and as one of the few guys in the field who knew how to write and draw a good comic book and — and this was the rare talent — knew how to get paid for its publication without getting screwed. But there was absolute respect between the two men and there were a couple of joint interviews in which this was mutually expressed.

Here's Corey's other question…

You've talked about how, when writing for animation, you often have a specific voice actor in mind that you're writing for. But, as you've also observed, a good voice actor can bring something to the character you didn't necessarily anticipate. When writing a long-form series, how much does that affect your writing of the character over time?

Or, to put it another way, by the end of Garfield and Friends, how much were you writing lines for Garfield and how much were you writing lines for Lorenzo Music playing Garfield — and how difficult was it to adjust when you started writing The Garfield Show?

On Garfield and Friends, I wrote for the voice of Garfield, which happened to be Lorenzo's own voice. So to write for one was to write for the other. There was never any separation in my mind.

When we later did The Garfield Show, Lorenzo was gone and Jim Davis had picked Frank Welker as the cat's new voice. Frank could have done a dead-on replication of Lorenzo's voice but that would have meant we'd be getting an impression, not a performance. So the goal was to have Frank do a voice that wasn't horribly unlike Lorenzo's but also didn't hinder his own ability to deliver lines in his own manner.

When I wrote for the character on that show, it took me a while to stop hearing Lorenzo in my head and to hear Frank instead. I don't think I ever really got there until we had some semi-completed episodes that I could see. That would have been about two-thirds of the way through writing the first season.

I swear to you, I wasn't going to post another thing under that header for a while. I really am trying not to think a lot about the election and to instead focus on all this work I have to do. But it's beastly hard to go anywhere on the Internet without glimpsing a "How Trump Won" essay. I was afraid to play Wordle this morning because I was afraid there would be a couple of 'em on that page. And what I glimpsed meant I had to post the following…

Maybe someone has said this — like I said, I'm avoiding all these discussions — but it seems to me that there's an overriding reason why the people who love Trump love Trump: Because he won. They loved him before he won because he was the only person on their side who had a chance of winning and they thought he had a damn good chance. They love him after he won because he won and because he dragged an awful lot of the Republican Party along with him.

Yes, inflation had something to do with it as did immigration and abortion and The Economy and gay rights and every other issue you can name. But the way I see it, the overriding reason is that all these people wanted to be able to yell, "THIS IS OUR COUNTRY AND WE RUN IT!!!" And if you can yell that, you don't worry too much about the individual issues.

I shall now return to not wanting to think or write about this stuff for a while. If I were you, I wouldn't bet on me being able to do that.

Time for the latest installment of Everything You Need To Know About Saturday Night Live. We're up to Season 16, nearing the end of what I thought was the best period for the show after the initial five years…