Monthly Archives: August 2009

Earlier today, I linked to a video of four guys singing barbershop quartet in Star Trek costumes. I've just replaced that link with one to a longer, better clip of the same fellows. If you watched it this morning, watch it again.

One other key point to keep in mind in this Disney-Marvel deal…

A lot of fans are wondering what this means about publishing plans…will the Marvel Masterworks reprint series continue? Will Marvel add a new Sub-Mariner comic? Will Aunt May either die or get resurrected? (I'm not sure if she's currently dead or not but if she isn't, she will be, and if she is, she'll come back.) Well, this deal is not about any of this. Take a look at the opening line in the L.A. Times coverage, and it's pretty much the same in all the reporting everywhere…

The estimated $4-billion deal would give Disney access to a library of more than 5,000 characters and help it strengthen its appeal to the young male audience. Ike Perlmutter, Marvel's CEO, will work directly with Disney to build and integrate Marvel's properties.

This isn't about publishing. Disney didn't say, "Gee, it would be great to own a comic book company!" They could have started fifty comic book companies for four billion clams. This is about characters and properties which can be exploited in many forms. The publishing of comic books may or may not always be one of them. But Disney's interest here is in two closely-related areas. One is to be able to market all these great characters and the history that rounds them out and makes many of them beloved. And the other reason is to make sure nobody else gets 'em.

The best news for the comic book division of Marvel in all this is how unlikely it is that anyone at Disney will care much what they do as long as the department shows a profit. If it generates new properties that can be turned into movies and video games and iPhone applications, so much the better. But the future of Spider-Man has very little to do with the Spider-Man comic book. That hasn't mattered for a long time.

The big news today, at least for me, is that the hills are still alive…and not, sadly, with the Sound of Music. They're alive in fire and it looks like it'll get worse before it gets better. I awoke this morn to headlines that said the "Station fire" (that's what they're calling the big one) doubled in size overnight to 85,000 acres.

I'm not personally threatened. I'm a good fifteen miles away from it and the inferno would have to burn through most of Hollywood to get to me. I don't think anyone I know is in its path, either. Still, it's just scary and sad. Every so often, the wind is such that I can see huge, ugly clouds of smoke to the north. It's hard not to think of those clouds as someone's life, perhaps literally, going up in flames.

It makes me angrier when I think of how, for example, various energy companies stole billions from this state in the last decade. I know there's no guarantee that that money, if it hadn't been looted the way it was, would have gone to help battle the fires and rebuild. But I'll bet you we could be doing more than we are or will.

That's really all I wanted to say. I need to get back to work, need to put it out of my mind for a while. I probably also need to stop checking the L.A. Times website and even looking out my window to the north. Sometimes, the way I stop thinking about things is to write about them here.

I woke up this morn to a mess o' e-mails asking me for my take on the news that Disney is buying Marvel for four billion bucks…and some are also asking me to speculate on how Jack Kirby would have felt about this.

Jack, I think it's safe to say, would have been unsurprised at the pricetag. One of the many ways in which he was a visionary is that in the sixties when Marvel was catching on, he was utterly alone in his belief that the stuff he and the others were creating for chump change had that kind of lasting value. Many of his monetary frustrations flowed from the fact that he was trying to negotiate with people who thought the material was a passing fad…so they personally had to grab as much money as possible before the whole thing went the way of the old Doc Savage pulps…and that when he spoke of the future in Disney-sized terms, that was just Ol' Jack being looney again. Marvel's original owner Martin Goodman sold out pretty darned cheap in 1968 to the firm's first corporate overlords. He never imagined his company would be worth twenty million smackers, let alone four billion…but Kirby did.

So Jack would have nodded at the amount and recalled unfulfilled promises of financial participation…and he would not have been a happy man. Then again, I think if Jack had been with us these last fifteen years, Marvel would have long since cut him in with what would to them have been a microscopic reward — and to him, all the money in the world.

As for what I think: I think I don't know. I don't even know what this means for me. I own four shares of Disney stock and two of Marvel stock. I may clear like eight, nine dollars on all this.

I doubt Disney has a lot of firm plans for the X-Men and the rest of the Marvel properties at this time. Most of the biggies are encumbered with existing deals. Sony has the movie rights to this one, Fox has the film rights to that one, etc. Everything the Disney folks might want to do for a while will be subject to current contracts, though they'll find some ways to begin intermingling the characters in the public mind…photo-ops with a guy in a Spider-Man suit posing with a guy in a Mickey Mouse suit. Stuff like that. Down the line, I suspect the word "Marvel" will become about as unimportant to the Fantastic Four as "Hanna-Barbera" is now to Scooby Doo.

And though we won't see evidence of this for a while, the publishing of comic books (those things on paper with staples in them) at that company is a few notches less important than it was last week. And it wasn't all that important last week.

From those who attend the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego and think it's too crowded, one often hears the wish the facilities could be expanded. I'm not sure why. I mean, it's not like the place is so small now that there's nothing to do there during the con. I can understand hoping that more hotels and parking spaces would be built…but a bigger convention center will just mean a bigger convention…and there's already more to see and do than any of us can handle.

That might be good news for those who are habitually late in reserving their badges or exhibit space — they'll have a better chance of getting in — but I'm not sure what it means to the rest of us.

Wait. I take that back. It will probably mean some higher fees. As this article explains, the folks who decide such matters are about to address a proposal for a $753 million expansion of the center which would add 1.27 million square feet, approximately a 50% expansion. There would be 385,000 square feet of new exhibit and meeting space, which would more than double the present size of 204,114 square feet. That all sounds great but someone's going to have to pay for it and as the article says, they're looking at options like increasing the hotel taxes, taxes on cab rides and taxes on food at nearby restaurants.

Even that might all be good news if the expansion improves the hotel, parking and transportation problems associated with convention attendance. I want to wait and see if that's the plan before I cheer on the proposals for making it all get bigger. If the ratio of attendees to available rooms and places to park one's car doesn't get more favorable, this is probably not a good thing.

Nevertheless, no matter what happens, the con will still be better off in San Diego than it would fare in any other city, especially Las Vegas.

Aaron Barnhart (hi, Aaron!) assesses the lay of the land as we approach the debut of The Jay Leno Show in prime time.

And Tom Shales discusses what's up with Conan O'Brien. I rarely agree with Shales and think he's wrong to say, with regards to the ratings, that "…he's in much better shape than Leno was at the beginning." Leno never finished third and even at his lowest had a lot more viewers. But I half-concur that the show feels too prepared and scripted, and that O'Brien interrupts his guests too much.

The problem — and I say this as a fan of the guy — is that Conan is trying too hard to be the comedy star of his show. He seems to not understand that principle that Shales cites; that the host gets credit for the funny things his guests say or do. When I watch the show, I keep being reminded of a variety special I worked on years ago. We surrounded the host with very funny guest stars and had him function like Jack Benny or Mary Tyler Moore — the central figure/anchor playing off all the eccentric, colorful people. The day before rehearsals started, he came to us and said, "Hey, I'm the star of the show. I should have all the punchlines."

I really liked Conan on Late Night but not so much in his last year or so. He seemed to think viewers were tuning in to hear him do catch-phrases and funny voices, and that guests were there to give him the chance to get laughs; not the other way around. He also seems curiously detached from his own monologue material. Leno came out and told jokes and made them sound like his own observations. O'Brien doesn't seem particularly interested in any of what he says. He acts like since he's the host of The Tonight Show, it's part of his job to come out and read those cue cards. (At least, he seems to have gotten over his habit of the first few weeks of constantly reminding us that he's the host of The Tonight Show.)

There are other problems. Everyone says his new studio is beautiful and it is…but it feels like a cold, vast place. Andy Richter seems to be a mile from him and the audience is off in the next zip code. It all adds up to Conan just not being as much fun to watch as he used to be. I agree that he had to change his act a little to move up to the earlier hour. I just don't like what he changed it to as much.

Once again, I have accurately predicted the future.

Where I am, it's still 93° — Fahrenheit, fortunately, though it could pass for Celsius. But it feels hotter because if you look to the north, you see huge, off-white clouds of smoke from fires in Glendale, La Crescenta, La Cañada Flintridge and Altadena. The fires are nowhere near me but it's still scary. People live up there. People are being evacuated from their homes. Many of them are now sitting in rescue centers wondering if they'll have homes to return to.

Crews are up there fighting the flames…and you can only hope that California's budget problems haven't reduced the effectiveness of that effort. Even if you're not threatened — even if no one you know is threatened — you want to think that everything that can be done is being done. I sure hope so.

I'm sorry to report that cartoonist Marty Murphy passed away on Wednesday evening. I'm also sorry to report that I don't have a lot of biographical info to pass along here. Marty was a highly-regarded and well-liked creator of funny pictures but there doesn't seem to be a lot of history available on him.

He worked extensively in animation…for a long time, at UPA on shorts and on Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, for which he was one of the main storyboard artists. He later contributed to a number of Hanna-Barbera shows including Hong Kong Phooey, Mumbly and especially Wait 'Til Your Father Gets Home, which was particularly designed in the Murphy style.

The last few decades, he was one of the privileged few gag cartoonists in the world to be published in Playboy. He was in almost every issue, often with the funniest gag. I told him once he had the best one and he replied, "I have to be funnier than anyone else to stay in Playboy. I can't draw sexy women."

A nice man, a funny man. There's a memorial service in Hollywood Monday evening and I'll bet the place is full of funny and talented cartoonists. Because that kind of person really loved Marty.

Elections in the Writers Guild are usually contentious and there are times when you wonder why anyone good braves the personal invective and decides to run at all. Our current one isn't quite as bad as some but it's heading in that direction. This article in the L.A. Times will give you a good overview of the current squabbling, which has less to do with the next negotiation than it does to do with the last one.

For whatever it's worth, I'm voting for Elias Davis and (mostly) candidates on his slate, including a few Board members who are also endorsed by his opposition, John Wells. If our silly term limits rule didn't prevent him from running for a third term, and if he wanted a third term, I'd be voting for two-term prez Patric Verrone. I have never really understood the value of any term limitations for any meaningful elected office anywhere. It's like we're saying, "Just in case an elected official does such a good job that we really want to keep him in office, we have to make sure that at some point, we can't have him."