Monthly Archives: February 2007

Sam Fox is George W. Bush's nominee to serve as the new ambassador to Belgium. Mr. Fox got this nomination the way a lot of people get such nominations. He was a big donor to the campaigns of the Republican party…and let's stipulate up top that Democrats do that kind of thing too, whenever they're in a position to reward those who give cash to their electioneering.

Yesterday in his confirmation hearing, Mr. Fox was grilled by Senator John Kerry about why he'd donated $50,000 to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The exchange was quite extraordinary for a couple of reasons, one being the pathetic quality of Fox's reponses. He went out of his way to praise Kerry as an honest veteran who'd earned his medals and shown great heroism…in other words, the exact opposite of what was claimed by those commercials he helped put on the air. Asked why he gave money to the cause, Mr. Fox mumbled something about how one side engages in dirty politics so the other side has to, and then claimed he gave to so many charitable causes that he really didn't know who'd asked him to donate in this instance.

It was a pretty pathetic defense. I'm not sure what the Ambassador to Belgium is called upon to do but I don't think Fox demonstrated he's up to the task. This site has a video clip of the exchange and it runs a little less than seventeen minutes.

A couple of other folks have blabbed this on websites so I might as well mention it…

The New York Comic Con last weekend seems to have been rough on veteran comic book creators. The great writer Arnold Drake appeared there, went home and was then hospitalized with pneumonia. The great artist Joe Sinnott appeared there, went home and was then hospitalized with a heart attack. Both, I hear, are on the mend and we expect full recoveries and quick returns to their respective homes. I'll let you know if I hear anything else and in the meantime, you might want to direct your good thoughts in their direction.

I liked this paragraph in a news story on the deliberations of the Scooter Libby jury. They sent a note to the judge and a reporter wrote…

The note may indicate that jurors have made it through two of the five charges and are debating the third — or at least were debating it Tuesday afternoon. But there's no guarantee that jurors are going in order and reading juries is an inexact science.

In other words, this might mean something unless it doesn't.

We're talking about Judy Jetson here lately so let's have a look at the lovely young lady when she's a bit older. As you may recall, after they did The Flintstones, Hanna-Barbera did a series in which the infants Pebbles and Bamm Bamm were advanced to teenage. Several times, they also tried to sell a series that would do likewise with the futuristic family, adding about ten years to Judy and her brother Elroy. This is one of about eighty thousand presentation drawings that were done over the years to try and make that show happen, most of them the handiwork of the late Iwao Takamoto.

At one point, I was asked to do some writing for it and it's kind of interesting why they picked me. Someone, probably Joe Barbera, decided that the key to the idea was to make them like Donny and Marie Osmond were on their hit variety series produced by Sid and Marty Krofft. I was working for H-B but I was also, at the same time, working for Sid and Marty Krofft. So it seemed logical to turn things over to me, even though I hadn't worked on the Donny and Marie show. I didn't understand that, either. In any case, I never did any development work on The Judy and Elroy Show (or whatever it might have been called) but I did have one short meeting with Mr. Barbera about it. I remember there was a drawing similar to this one and there was also a duplicate of it in which the boy had reddish hair. I asked why and Mr. B explained that they weren't certain if it should be a sister/brother show or, like Pebbles and Bamm Bamm, a girl friend/boy friend show. So they had some art in which the boy wasn't supposed to be an older Elroy. He was supposed to be a new character who was dating Judy. The Freudian possibilities were infinite.

There were also a couple versions of this show developed that revived the Jet Screamer character and had him dating Judy, or maybe one was about Judy chasing after him or something. All the permutations I saw also had Astro the Dog in them and some had the little character you see above who was Astro's nephew, I suppose. During the meeting to discuss my possible involvement, he didn't have a name yet. I suggested "Tralfaz" and Barbera looked at me oddly and asked, "Where have I heard that name before?" I explained to him that in one episode of The Jetsons, it was revealed that Astro's birth name was Tralfaz. J.B. laughed and said, "How come you know that kind of stuff and I don't?" There was also a version where Astro was somehow in charge of watching over a whole litter of little dogs like this one. Not long after that meeting, H-B did a cartoon no one remembers called Astro and the Space Mutts.

That's about all there is to this story. And don't worry, I haven't forgotten. Another chapter in the ongoing series of how Scrappy Doo was born will be along soon in this space.

Dahlia Lithwick discusses what a mess the whole Jose Padilla matter has become. Mr. Padilla, currently rotting in a cell somewhere, was once an example of how our brilliant anti-terrorist experts had caught a saboteur before he could set off a "dirty bomb." He has since become a sad test case for some viewpoint having to do with the effectiveness of presuming those who are arrested are undeniably guilty and should be treated like maggots.

I have no idea if Padilla is guilty or innocent. Perhaps he deserves that cell, though it might be nice if a fair trial said that before he spends so much time in it. I'm not even sure what the charges against him are, this week. (They seem to change every time there's a chance of him getting near a courtroom.) It does bother me that some people don't seem to care. They want to believe so badly that we've caught people like those who caused 9/11 that it makes them happy to presume he's one, and never mind the reality.

Foxy Fagan was a comic book published around 1947 by an obscure company called Dearfield Publishing. It never found an audience and ran only seven issues but it makes for quite an interesting bit of funnybook history. It was drawn by a gentleman named Harvey Eisenberg, who was one of the great draw-ers of silly creatures. He was the main artist for decades on the Tom & Jerry comic books, which were really good-looking comics. Eisenberg had a way of "posing" his characters that other cartoonists would avidly study. He gave them weight and personality and movement. He also did this with a lot of the comics based on the earlier Hanna-Barbera cartoon shows like The Flintstones and Huckleberry Hound.

Even more intriguing is who his partner was in the Foxy Fagan enterprise. It was Joe Barbera, moonlighting (without credit) from his day job, which then was co-directing (with Bill Hanna) the Tom & Jerry cartoons for MGM. Barbera apparently got it into his head that there was money in publishing comic books, which of course was not one of Joe's sounder financial decisions. He and Eisenberg created the comic, he wrote it, Eisenberg drew it, Joe assembled a group of backers and put in some bucks of his own…and they lost a lot of money. I wrote about the endeavor some time ago in this item and my pal Scott Shaw! wrote about it here and reproduced some samples of the Foxy Fagan comic.

I bring this up again because the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive has scanned and posted a whole story from Foxy Fagan #1 and you can see it here. Go have a look. It's good stuff.

We were just talking about The Jetsons so here's a one minute promo for the show, complete with narration by George O'Hanlon, who provided the voice of George.

Here's the kind of Hanna-Barbera trivia that I should know and apparently don't. In the commercial, reference is made to the series taking place in the 21st Century. Did they ever say that on the show? I have the idea that they deliberately kept it vague but maybe they said it somewhere, somehow. Earl? Scott? Anyone?

This is another post for folks who live in Los Angeles but it may apply elsewhere…

Have any of you folks taken the bus anywhere lately?

You remember the bus…that thing that took you to school before you had a car? The long vehicle you rode with other people on it? If you don't know what I'm talking about, rent the first Speed movie from Netflix. It's an extremely realistic depiction of how it is on an actual Los Angeles bus.

Seriously: Up until late last year and not counting free shuttles, I hadn't been on a bus for over thirty years. I didn't even know what it cost to ride a bus in this town (answer: $1.25) and if it had occurred to me to take one somewhere, I didn't know which bus to get on to go anywhere I might want to go.

But lately, I've bused it a few times, usually when I had to go somewhere where the parking was impossible. Also, I had a little minor surgery a few weeks ago…nothing critical, nothing important. But it was one of those procedures where they don't want you to drive home, which means I couldn't drive there. So I took a bus there and had someone pick me up afterward. The trip there was a lot easier than I would have imagined. (And the same bus goes past the place where I take my car for servicing. When I've had to leave it there, I've taken a cab home, then taken a cab back. The bus will be so much simpler, to say nothing of cheaper.)

Los Angeles also has these things called Dash buses, which cost 25 cents to ride. If I need to go over to Cedars-Sinai Hospital — and I occasionally do — I can walk one block from my home to where the Dash will pick me up and take me where I need to be in not much more time than it would take me to drive over and find a place to park. That's not even getting into what you spend to park at Cedars-Sinai if you drive there. It's about the same per-hour cost as being a patient at Cedars-Sinai but the amount isn't covered by Blue Cross.

What has made this revolutionary new mode of transportation possible for me is that I discovered the MTA website. I guess most transit systems across the country have something like this but I was unaware of them. They have a form where you enter the two locations between which you need to travel and their database tells you how to get from one place to another and on which bus(es). I entered a number of places where I sometimes go and realized that with some of them, a bus might be easier than taking my car, hassling with traffic, finding a parking place and paying for that parking. (It was twelve bucks the last time I parked in the medical building where my doctor is located. There's a bus that goes right there.) It's also environmentally better and while I'm not doing it for that reason, when I do take the bus I intend to say it's because of that.

If it's been a long time since you've taken a bus anywhere, you might want to take a look and see if it's easier than you think. It can also be fun. On the way in for that minor medical procedure, I got to talking with a lady who was wearing a jacket with the logo of the Rio Hotel in Vegas. She said she'd just gotten back from that town and I asked her how she did at the tables. She said, "Let me put it this way. Before the trip, I used to drive to work in a Mercury Marquis." I laughed all the way into surgery.

The lovely lady at left is Judy Jetson, daughter of George and Jane. We all love Judy Jetson. The lovely lady at right is Janet Waldo, voice of Judy Jetson. We all love Janet Waldo, too. For reasons that Ponce DeLeon could perhaps explain but I can't, Ms. Waldo has been performing in front of a microphone since the days of radio comedy programs and still manages to sound like a teen-age girl and look not that much older than one. The only way I've been able to fathom how this works involves cloning and robotics so I won't try.

Nonetheless, she's been doing voice work — for cartoons and elsewhere — for some time. In addition to playing Judy, she was also Penelope Pitstop, Granny Sweet, Alice in that Hanna-Barbera special I keep writing here about, and many others.

Janet won't remember this but she was a voice on one of the first cartoon specials I ever wrote. The show had a director who was not overwhelmed with either tact or skill, and the way the recording session went for a time was roughly as follows. Janet would read a line and it would be perfect. The director would tell her she was way off base and he would then read the line the way he thought it should be done, which was all wrong. Janet would then read the line again, trying to do it the director's way but still managing somehow to do it right. The director would then scold her and say rude things and try to get her to do it his way. Janet would then do the line properly and he would get even madder at her and more insulting.

This went on until one of the other actors in the show — a leprechaun named Howard Morris — left his microphone, walked into the booth and said something to the effect of, "That woman knows what she's doing and you don't and if you don't knock it off, I'm going to knock several of your teeth out." Then he returned to his mike and thereafter, the director was much nicer to Janet and she was allowed to do the lines the way she wanted, which was exactly the way I, as author, wanted them.

It was a nice moment. On The Jetsons, Howie performed the role of a character named Jet Screamer, with whom Judy Jetson was very much in love. I always liked to think of our little recording session drama as a case of Jet defending Judy's honor.

Janet is, as I say, wonderful…and you can hear what I'm sure will be a wonderful interview with her, tomorrow on Stu's Show, which is live on Shokus Internet Radio from 4 PM to 6 PM, West Coast Time, or 7 PM to 9 PM, East Coast Time. Go to the station's site, pick an audio browser and you're in! I'll be listening.

The L.A. Times has a nice, formal obituary for our friend, Walker Edmiston.

We have here another one of those "best" lists where one entity — in this case, one person, it would seem — lists the best ten best or the fifty best or the hundred best in some category. I think we always take these things too seriously if they don't correspond to our own tastes but they can be fun.

This list is for The 51 Best Magazines Of All Time, as selected by Graydon Carter, who has been the editor of Vanity Fair for 15 years and apparently only thinks his own publication should place at #31, which is interesting. He selects Esquire during the Harold Hayes years as #1, The New Yorker as #2 and Life as #3.

Those aren't bad picks, I suppose. I was surprised to see — which is not to say I'd argue — his placing of MAD Magazine at #6. And what really surprised me was that he restricts his choice to "Post comic book, before the death of founder William Gaines (1955–1992)" and writes…

MAD was the skeptical wise guy. Ever ready to pounce on the illogical, hypocritical, self-serious and ludicrous, it was also essentially celebratory: to accurately parody something, you ultimately have to love it. MAD transposed onto the printed page the anarchic humor of the Marx Brothers and Looney Tunes, parodying comics, radio serials, movies, advertising, and the entire range of American pop culture. Nowadays, it's part of the oxygen we breathe; and Mel Brooks, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons would be unthinkable without it.

I think I'd debate much of that, starting with the claim that you have to love something to parody it. MAD loved tobacco companies? Misleading advertising? Lying politicians? I think it's usually the opposite. To parody something successfully, you must have some grasp of what's really wrong with it and the yearning to expose that. You can love something and still do that but I've interviewed almost every major MAD contributor from the years Carter praises. I sure got the impression they were most successful when trampling something they felt deserved trampling.

I would also quarrel with his choice of years. I don't see what part of his explanation doesn't apply to the comic book issues but unlike a lot of folks, I'm a big fan of the issues after it moved out of the comic book format and for many years thereafter. I just don't think the passing of Gaines was the end of a particularly good period. MAD seemed to me (and to many of those who worked on it) to be in considerable decline in the years before Bill died. Nothing against the man himself, but he'd have been the first to admit he got too set in his ways, too proprietary about keeping the magazine the same month to month. Some felt his passing may even have given the editors an opportunity to shake things up and clear out deadwood. In any case, I think it's now better than it's been in years.

Of course, you could argue the whole premise of comparing MAD to Sports Illustrated and National Geographic at all, and suggest that Spy (which Carter co-founded) is a bit high in the rankings. But it ain't a bad list. Have a peek.

The first one's short so let's make today a double feature. Here's a mysterious sixteen seconds of antique film. It's silent color footage shot on the set of the Marx Brothers movie, Animal Crackers, which as we all know was made in glorious black-and-white. Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Margaret Dumont are in it. I don't see Zeppo but then who ever noticed Zeppo? Harpo for some reason is out of costume — in a robe and without his wig. I have no idea why this was shot. I'm guessing it's home movie footage from a rehearsal, which is why Harpo didn't care how he was dressed in it. In any case, I can't recall seeing any other color film of the Marxes…so have a look. And look fast because it's short.

Turning to more important matters, how about a piano-playing cat? Here's Nora the piano-playing cat. Okay, so she doesn't play as well as Van Cliburn or even Mark Russell. So what? It's a cat, for crying out loud. And anyway, I've heard and tipped lounge performers who were worse than this…

Hey, it's Abe Vigoda's birthday! Let's see if he's still alive.

This is another one of those "If I Ran the Oscars" posts. I've already said I'd get rid of the backstage antics and the little trivia facts as the winners head for the stage. Another thing I'd do is get more movie stars there. There may be one or two exceptions to this but it seems to me that every celeb in the place last night was either a presenter or a nominee. In years past, if I remember my Oscars accurately, the audience shots showed a nice cross section of Hollywood, including many folks who were not there to get up on the stage at some point. They were there because it was the Academy Awards and that gave a certain importance to the proceedings.

I would also not announce all the presenters in advance and I'd try to get some big surprises in that area. It was nice that Jack Nicholson presented Best Picture with Diane Keaton but by that point, I think we'd seen Mr. Nicholson about eighty times during the broadcast. They kept cutting to him in the audience and people were chatting with him from the stage. I'd have kept him backstage until he made his entrance to present, the better to make that an arresting moment. I also would have tried to find at least one or two presenters who represented "Old Hollywood," whatever that is today. (I think it's the eighties but maybe we could go back a little farther than that.)

So now I have a challenge for the readers of this site: Let's say you're producing the Academy Awards. Let's say you have the power to phone anyone and invite them to come in and present an award. Who would you have asked? What surprise appearance would have been exciting? A few years ago, Woody Allen shocked everyone by showing up. Give me some other names that would have been a big deal last night.

You have to pick people who are alive and who actually might be able to show up. And let's consider them in two categories: New Hollywood and Old Hollywood. The latter would be folks who, though they might still be performing, would connect the ceremony with its heritage. In both cases, we want names of presenters who, when the host introduced them, the whole audience would make that wonderful sound of delighted surprise, clap their hands off and maybe even rise for a standing o. I'll post the best answers here in a couple days.

Earlier, at the suggestion of my friend Buzz Dixon, I linked to an article by Joe Lieberman about how things ain't so hopeless in Iraq. Now, at the suggestion of my friend Gordon Kent, I link to an article by Glenn Greenwald about how things ain't so honest with Joe Lieberman. The latter is less about Iraq than it is about the ongoing disingenuousness of the Senator from Connecticut but it's not a bad rebuttal.

What I'd love to find, and I mean this, is a solid "how we'll win in Iraq" article by someone who hasn't changed their rationales more often than their boxer shorts or panty-liners. My problem with a lot of the pro-war advocates is that they keep futzing with the rules, moving the goalposts each time they fail to complete a pass. It's like when Cheney said that the British troop withdrawal was a marker of success. You know that if Great Britain had pledged not to withdraw those troops, he would have said that was a marker of success. No matter what happens, they say that it's what's supposed to happen. The claim is made that everyone needs to be quiet and not question the strategy for six months. And then when things are worse in six months, they'll be saying everyone needs to be quiet and not question the strategy for another six months, followed by another six months and then another and another.

If the advocates of the Bush plan want Americans to believe that success is attainable in Iraq and thereabouts, they need to offer a direct, example-filled definition of what will constitute success. But they don't seem to want to do that because that would create a firm definition of failure and they can't have that. It's too hard to wriggle out of those when they come to pass.

Seriously: If anyone can point me to an article that says that defines success in Iraq without saying something like, "Success is when we win and they lose," please do. What turned me against this war was that I've never understood what it was supposed to accomplish and that its advocates have been so deliberately vague about how we'd know when that was or wasn't happening.