It's been a while since I video-linked something that I wrote but I wrote this a long, long time ago. It's an episode of CBS Storybreak, a series which adapted kids' books into half-hour cartoon shows. It was hosted by Bob (Captain Kangaroo) Keeshan as Bob Keeshan, not Captain Kangaroo. One of many things I enjoyed about this particular job was spending tape day in Studio 33 — aka "The Bob Barker Stage" — at CBS Television City as he taped all the intros for the season.
We talked at great length there and then we talked at greater length that evening when I took him out to dinner — or rather, he took me since he could charge our meal to CBS. We ate at RJ's, a favorite restaurant of mine that's no longer in business. No one recognized him on sight but our server said, "Your voice is so familiar" and later figured it out. Mr. Keeshan said he was almost never recognized visually but was often recognized by his voice. The folks in the next booth recognized him the same way.
I asked him, "How many of the people you meet say 'I grew up with you?'" He replied, "Just about all of them."
The book adapted for this CBS Storybreak was Mama Don't Allow by Thacher Hurd…and we had a great voice cast: Jeff Altman, Hamilton Camp, Roger C. Carmel, Brian Cummings, Michael Dees, June Foray, Mona Marshall and Pete Renaday. I believe this was Roger C. Carmel's last acting job as he passed away a few weeks after the recording session.
I recall him being very excited because he was going to spend the following weekend at a Star Trek convention — in Seattle, I think. He'd be signing autographs (and making $$$) because he'd played the role of Harcourt Fenton "Harry" Mudd on the original Star Trek series. William Shatner would be at the con and he'd insisted they fly Roger in and he also advised Roger on what to charge for his signature.
Mr. Carmel ticked off a list of TV shows he'd appeared on in the sixties and seventies and it was a pretty long list — Banacek, The Munsters, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Batman, Hogan's Heroes, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Hawaii Five-O, All in the Family and on and on and on. His residuals for all those shows had either long since run out or trickled down to those pennies Donald Trump wants to get rid of. Then he said, "Isn't it amazing? I did two 3-day shoots on Star Trek and that's my pension!" He was referring to the money from autographing photos.
This was, I believe, the only musical episode of CBS Storybreak and it originally aired on September 19, 1987. A wonderful gent named Eddie Karam wrote the music and conducted. I wrote the script and the lyrics and the gent who played the saxophone in this episode was none other than Tom Scott, who a lot of folks would tell you was the best sax player in the business…and for this, we hired him to play badly for much of the half-hour. The animation was done by a firm called Southern Star which was otherwise referred to as "Hanna-Barbera Australia."
If you want to know more about this cartoon, I refer you to this piece I wrote back in 1998. Oh — and I want to mention this to devout Groo fans: You'll see the name of Gordon Kent in the end credits. Gordon was a dear friend of mine and he was the first colorist of that silly comic that Sergio Aragonés and I were doing then and, miraculously, still do. I wrote about Gordon here when we lost him and I still miss the guy. Here's the cartoon…