Monthly Archives: December 2024

Everyone who was ever a billed-in-the-opening-titles cast member of Saturday Night Live. I'm amazed how many of these people I've never heard of…

I'm not closely following the investigation of the killing of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare…but it does look like there's a lot more investigation of that case than there would be if you or I or some non-wealthy loved one of ours was to be ambushed and murdered. There's apparently even a big cash reward for info that will lead to the gunman and I don't think they do that with most murders…do they?

I gather some people are hoping it will turn out that the killer did it in revenge. The storyline would be that UnitedHealthcare turned down someone who died because the insurance firm refused coverage or compensation or made some other money-saving decision that led to that person's death. And it may turn out that was the motive but then you'd figure maybe the shooter would make that known; not the specifics but that he views it as a life for a life and wants to put the insurance industry on notice.

And I wonder if, as part of their manhunt, the investigators are looking at recent cases where someone was denied coverage by UnitedHealthcare and then died. Just wondering.

Brian Dreger wants to know…

I am reading your post about Lorenzo Music, and I’m curious about why the voice actor scripts do not have any descriptions of what the scene is about. Is an animation script not like a traditional movie or television script? Is there a reason why it’s better for the actors not to know what’s going on, requiring the director to explain it to them? Does a traditional formatted script exist for an episode but the actors just don’t get to see it? Just curious…

There are exceptions to all of what follows but generally, an animation script is full of descriptions of the characters, suggested camera angles, notes to pan from this to that, all sorts of details that are irrelevant to what the voice actors do. They don't need to know when their character has a close-up. So what generally (there's that word again) happens in that someone prepares a script for them that strips all that out and just gives them the dialogue.

This enables the Voice Director to control the flow of information to them and not overwhelm them with information that doesn't impact what they do. The Voice Director can describe the actions to them where that is relevant or show them the appropriate pages of the storyboard if the storyboard has already been done. (On about 95% of the cartoon shows I've voice-directed, work has not yet commenced on the board when the track has been recorded. In part, that's because I usually wrote the script and I wrote it the night before the recording session.)

You can give more information to an actor but once they know something, you can't take it away. That's one of the reasons I usually don't give the actors the script in advance. I don't want them deciding how to read a line before they have all the info I intend to give them. There is a value to a largely-cold read. On a lot of the shows I voice-directed, I had Howie Morris in the cast and Howie was the kind of actor who, if you had him read a speech seven times, he'd give you seven totally different readings…and often come up with a reading I had not imagined but loved.

Sometimes, there'd be another actor in the room who I felt needed more explanation so I'd send Howie out to the lobby while I explained a scene to the other actor. (This was back when we recorded with all the actors in the same room at the same time, obviously. These days, more shows work in what they call "splits," which means that you record one actor at a time and then the editor makes it sound like conversation. Also these days, even when you record all the actors at the same time, they're usually in their home recording studios.)

You just do what you think works for the particular recording with those particular actors…generally.

Hey, I'm back doing these!

Another song I had on my infamous mixtape a long, long time ago was "The Letter," a hit for The Box Tops in 1967. In fact, it was their biggest hit by far and it later became a hit again when Joe Cocker recorded it. I didn't know anything about the group in '67…just that this was a good song and KHJ played it with a frequency that felt like every ten minutes.

I later heard that The Box Tops was a group that, at least at times, was any five musicians that the group's managers could get to show up at any concert venue, play the group's hits and be passed off as the guys on the records. I guess it helped that we, the public, didn't hear much about the original band members and it always made me think about that Rocky & Bullwinkle storyline about a plot to flood the world with counterfeit box-tops from cereal boxes.

The Box Tops had a few other records on my mixtape which we'll get to. In the meantime, these are the original musicians — I think…

And while we're on the subject, here's the way Joe Cocker sang it…

My pal Gary Sassaman is back with another look at comic books from my favorite era. In this video, he discusses some of the best covers from that period and I don't disagree with too many of his selections…

So I'm getting a number of text messages lately from strangers that say things like this. I've redacted a few words…

Hello, excuse me, I'm Sarah from XXXXXX. Your background and resume have been recommended by multiple online recruitment agencies. Therefore, we would like to offer you a great remote online part-time/full-time job to help merchants update data, increase visibility and bookings, and provide you with free training. Flexible part-time and full-time jobs allow you to work 60 to 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week, earn extra income on weekends too. You can work anytime and anywhere according to your schedule, and earn $50 to $500 a day. The basic salary is $950 per 4 days worked. Paid annual leave: In addition to maternity leave, paternity leave and other statutory holidays, ordinary employees are entitled to 5-15 days of paid annual leave. If you want to participate, please contact me by Whats-App at XXXXXXXXXXXX (Note: You must be at least 20 years old)

Does this sound even remotely like an actual job to anyone? I'm assuming that a gig where you can work as many hours as you like and earn a widely-variable amount per day is a job where you make cold calls to strangers trying to get them interested in some product or service. Then you might — and that's a big "might" — earn a commission if they buy. But how can you get any "basic salary" on a job like that, let alone one that gives you paid days off? Also, the Whats-App number suggests it's either overseas or that someone is worried about being located…probably both.

Is anyone likely to fall for something like this? I suppose someone is. I get all these texts and voice calls, many of them from people trying to persuade me they're from Medicare or some real official-type agency affiliated with Medicare. Or they're from Walgreen's — a pharmacy with which I have no prescriptions — and they want to discuss my prescriptions there with me. The minute I start asking questions about their company, they hang up. One of them actually said, "I don't answer questions, I only ask them," then hung up.

The calls are a minor annoyance, though not when they come as one did this morning, at 6 AM. The area code for the number was the same as mine but obviously in this era of cell phones, area codes no longer denote where the caller is located. Still, even when they're a minor annoyance, they're an annoyance. Once in a while, you can even have fun with them. One clueless-sounding solicitor asked if I have diabetes. I made like I wasn't sure what that word was and asked him to spell it. He replied, "D-I-E-A-B…" and then added "Oh, shit" and the line went dead.

This is kind of interesting. I'm watching a police chase online and I'm seeing something I've never seen before. The fleeing suspect, identified as being armed, has pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. A fleet of cars from the San Bernadino Police Department and the California Highway Patrol is around him and look what they're using.

The little thing you see to the left of the suspect's car is a drone. The police are using a drone to peer into the car and see what the suspect is doing and perhaps they're somehow communicating with him. And after about ten minutes of the drone spying on him and being quite visible to the suspect, he's now out of his car and surrendering. Never saw that before.

You may have seen Dick Van Dyke on Jimmy Kimmel's show last night.  If not, here's what you missed: A preview of a new music video with Dick Van Dyke and Chris Martin…

And here's the entire video. Thanks to the trillions of people who sent me one or both of these links…

Here's the latest one of these…

So it's looking like the beloved Norms Restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard here in L.A. may not be transformed into a Raising Cane's…

Raising Canes announced Wednesday that it will no longer present its case to take over the Norms at 470 N. La Cienega Blvd. The chicken chain was slated to present its case during the Cultural Heritage Commission meeting Thursday morning.

The oldest surviving Norms, built in 1957, is known for its famous Googie architecture. In 2015, it was designated a Los Angeles Historical-Cultural Monument. After news broke that Raising Canes was considering potentially taking over the historic site, the public expressed displeasure with this possibility.

Incidentally, a few folks wrote me to discuss whether the name of the restaurant in question is Norms or Norm's with an apostrophe. Their website spells it Norms so I'm going with that. There also seems to be some confusion as to whether the fast food chain is Raising Canes or Raising Cane's. Their website spells it with the apostrophe. I know you're all staying awake at nights worrying about this so I'm glad to set things straight.

This is another great movie that's currently free on YouTube but it may not be there, free or free of ads for long. It's Irma La Douce, the 1963 Billy Wilder movie that reunited Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine after The Apartment. It's a bit long but well worth the trip if you've never seen it. Just about anything Billy Wilder did before his last few films is worth watching, especially if it has Jack Lemmon in it. The one time I got to speak with Mr. Wilder, we got to talking about Lemmon and he said, approximately, "I wish I had a nickel for every actor whose agent tried to sell him to me as The New Jack Lemmon. But there's only been one and I got him…several times."

Amidst the opening titles, Shirley MacLaine sells her services to a man with a mustache. That's Lou Krugman, one of those always-working-but-you-never-knew-his-name actors I've mentioned here before. The guy was in everything…even an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show in which Rob Petrie tried to buy a fur coat from him for Laura. I'm more interested in this kind of actor than I am in Big Stars…and I'll bet his agent never tried selling him as The New Jack Lemmon.

Here's the link to watch Irma La Douce. Hope it's still there and ad-free.

Step right up and order your badges for WonderCon 2025, taking place at the Anaheim Convention Center from March 28 to March 30. You can order three-day badges at this link right now at a special reduced price. Single-day badges will be available on January 16 and thereafter. I always have a great time at these and I expect to have a great time at this one.

Dick Van Dyke will be 99 years old on December 13th…and the way he looks and moves, that might turn out to be "middle age" on him. To celebrate this milestone, the Catchy Comedy channel is running a binge of 84 of the 158 episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show starting this Saturday at 12 PM with "Empress Carlotta's Necklace" and ending Monday at 5:30 AM with "You Oughta Be in Pictures." There's probably a very good reason why they aren't running 99 episodes the actual weekend of Dick's 99th birthday but I don't know what it is.

Many, many years ago when home video was mainly about VHS cassettes, a Los Angeles station did a marathon of all 158 episodes on some holiday weekend and I — lacking any vision of a future where I could buy them all on uncut, high quality image DVDs without commercials — decided to record them all. After all, it was my favorite TV show and when would I ever have another chance to get copies of every single episode?

I was not dumb enough to record them at Standard Speed, which gave you two hours on a cassette. That would have meant 40 cassettes and changing tapes every two hours. I was however dumb enough to record them at Extended Play Speed which gave you six hours on a cassette…so 27 tapes and changing them every six hours. I actually set alarms to wake me up in the middle of the night and arranged my days so I wouldn't be out when it was time to take out one tape and slide in another.

But I did it. Got all 158 of 'em on 27 tapes and I printed up labels for them. Okay, so they had mediocre video quality, commercial breaks and many bad edits to allow time for the commercials. The point was that I had all 158 episodes and could watch them any time I liked. And of course, I never got around to watching a single one of those tapes. The show was on often enough that I never felt the urge and so those VHS tapes still sit on a shelf in my closet…where they shall remain until I get around to tossing them out.

(There is, of course, no reason for me to watch them now and a decent chance that I couldn't if I wanted to. I haven't used my VHS tape deck in enough years to be certain it even works. I also have two other VHS machines and a couple of Betamaxes and my old Laserdisc player in the garage and I'm not sure which of them, if any, work.)

On a website many years ago — it might even have been CompuServe, that's how long ago it was — I wrote a line which was much quoted by others. It was that the entire premise of the evolving home video market was that someone somewhere was trying to see how many times they could get me to buy Goldfinger. I think I bought it on Beta, VHS, Laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray and I didn't just buy it once in each format. Sometimes, there were new, more complete versions with better imaging and special features.

The quip would have worked just as well with The Dick Van Dyke Show. I don't think there was ever a Laserdisc release and the Beta and VHS ones weren't of the whole run of the series. But I've purchased the complete run of The Dick Van Dyke Show three or four times on various formats…

…and I really didn't need to do that either because, first of all, it's now streaming — in some cases, 24/7 — on various streaming channels I can receive. At least one of those 24/7 channels on my Roku TV is video on demand, meaning that I can request a specific episode I want to watch again and ten seconds later, there's Rob Petrie on my screen, perhaps about to trip over the ottoman with the requested episode to follow. The whole run is also available on YouTube…

…and I don't even have to watch it via either of those platforms because I downloaded the whole run to my hard disk. Right this second, you can name an episode and I can find and be watching it in about twenty seconds on my computer. I have an interface so I can play my computer screen on my TV screen so if you were here with me, we could watch it together. So why haven't I thrown away those VHS tapes? Considering all the effort I put into filling them, I don't have the heart.

In case all I've written here has made you eager to see an episode, here's one of my favorites. From the beginning, Carl Reiner played Alan Brady either as an off-camera voice or if he was on camera, you saw the back of his head or his face was covered with a towel or a fake beard or something. They finally decided they needed him on-camera and this was the first time you saw his face…

As I've written here before, I used to spend a lot of my time in Las Vegas but now it's gotten so expensive and tourist-trappy (if that isn't a word, it should be) that I have zero desire to set foot in that town. The message of the city used to be "Come here and play" and now it's more like "Come here and empty your wallet, max out your credit cards, lose your kids' college money…"

As of today, the MGM group of hotels is raising parking fees and, even worse, resort fees. The latter are these mandatory charges added to the bill for your room. They advertise it'll cost you a reasonable $50 or $100 a night to stay there but now at the MGM hotels, there's this resort fee of $45 to $55 dollars, ostensibly for things like access to the gym or other services you don't want and won't use. Almost all the hotels have resort fees and the ones that aren't that high will probably be that high shortly.

It's a shame. That used to be such a fun place to go. I think I still have some comps for free rooms there but no desire to use them.

Speaking of things that may be going away: As you may have heard, the Muppetvision 3D attraction at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World is soon to close. The Disney folks have something more in the way of current product to erect on that piece of land and that was the only place one could see that show. The version they had of it for a time out here at Disney California Adventure closed in 2014.

I only saw it once — in 1994 in Orlando when the park that housed it there was called the Disney–MGM Studios Theme Park. That was the one time I "did" Walt Disney World. I was in Florida with a lady friend named Carolyn, not to be confused with the lady friend I later had named Carolyn — the one whose father created Pogo. The previous Carolyn and I did one theme park a day for three days there in Florida, deliberately skipping anything that was duplicated out here at Disneyland because…well, you can figure out why. We spent the evenings at a small theme park/mall there called Pleasure Island, an aggregation of restaurants and night clubs that too has closed.

We liked Muppetvision 3D a lot. After we saw it, we went to a nearby restaurant called Mama Melrose's Ristorante Italiano, which I remember thinking was basically Olive Garden with mouse ears. There, we thought about going back and taking in Muppetvision a second time. But we didn't because I thought, fallible prophet that I am, "Oh, we can see it again some other time." In thirty years, that hasn't happened and now it surely won't; not unless the Disney organization which owns vast parcels of real estate, finds some other place for it. I'm sorry my back yard isn't bigger.

I hope they will and not just because it was reportedly the last thing Jim Henson worked on. It was also a lot of fun and we shouldn't be losing things that are a lot of fun. In any case, it will at least continue to exist (barely) in the dozens of fan-made videos that captured the show, if not for posterity then at least for YouTube. Here's one and if you don't like it, you have many others to pick from. None of them are immersive and even if you squint a lot, they're not in 3D. Still, some of that magnificent Muppet Magic comes through…