Monthly Archives: October 2016

This ran here on Halloween last year. Forgive the rerun but I've been busy working on my Two Broke Girls costume for tonight…

As I've written here before, I don't like Halloween. I'm not a big fan of horror movies or of people making themselves up to look disfigured or like rotting corpses. One time when I was in the company of Ray Bradbury at a convention, someone shambled past us looking like they just rose up from a grave and Ray said something about how people parade about like that to celebrate life by mocking death. Maybe to some folks it's a celebration of life but to me, it's just ugly.

I've also never been comfy with the idea of kids going door-to-door to take candy from strangers. Hey, what could possibly go wrong with that? I did it a few years when I was but a child, not so much because I wanted to but because it seemed to be expected of me. I felt silly in the costume and when we went to neighbors' homes and they remarked how cute we were…well, I never liked to be cute in that way. People talk to you like you're a puppy dog. The man two houses down…before he gave me my treat, I thought he was going to tell me to roll over and beg for it.

Also, I've always been a fussy eater — an extension of my many food allergies. Even before I knew I had them, I was aware that some foods made me not feel great and I tried to avoid them. I would say that a good two-thirds of the candy I hauled home on a Halloween Eve was stuff I simply didn't want to eat…and I would have gotten very sick if I had. Into the trash can it went and I felt bad about it. Some nice neighbor had paid good money for it, after all.

And some of it, of course, was candy corn — the cole slaw of sugary treats. I promised to stop bashing candy corn on this site so that's all I'll say about that.

So I didn't like the dress-up part and I didn't like the trick-or-treating part. There were guys in my class at school who invited me to go along on Halloween when they threw eggs at people and overturned folks' trash cans and redecorated homes with toilet paper…and I never much liked pranks. One year the day after Thanksgiving, two friends of mine were laughing and bragging how they'd trashed some old lady's yard and I thought, "That's not funny. It's just being an a-hole."

I'm not writing this to try to change your mind about a holiday you might love. If you do, great. As long as you stay off my property, knock yourself out. But over the years, as I've told friends how I feel, I've been amazed how many agree with me. In a world where people now feel more free to say that which does not seem "politically correct," I feel less afraid to own up to my dislike of Halloween. About the only thing I ever liked about it was the second-best Charlie Brown special.

So that's why I'm home tonight and not up in West Hollywood wearing my Kim Davis costume. I'm fine with every other holiday. Just not this one. I do not believe there is a War on Christmas in this country. That's just something the Fox News folks dreamed up because they believe their audience needs to be kept in a perpetual state of outrage about something. But if there's ever a War on Halloween, I'm enlisting. And bringing the eggs.

Here, for those of you who aren't familiar with Buzzy the Crow, is the first Buzzy the Crow cartoon.  It's called The Stupiditious Cat and it was released to theaters on April 25, 1947.  He was in eight or nine other cartoons after this, all produced by Paramount's cartoon studio.

Buzzy was not hugely popular as a cartoon star but he did appear a lot in Harvey comic books. In fact, when I was a kid, I'm sure I had one that adapted this cartoon. In 1959, Harvey acquired the rights to much of what the Paramount cartoon division had produced, including all the films which featured Buzzy. They removed the Paramount name from the openings on all of them, inserted "Harvey Films" and released them to television. This video has the original Paramount opening though.

All the historians tell you that Buzzy's voice was intended as a soundalike to Eddie "Rochester" Anderson from The Jack Benny Program. I'm not as sure of that as some people are but it's possible…and it is worth noting that the cat in this cartoon sounds a little like someone trying to do a Jack Benny impression. Buzzy's voice was done by the prolific voiceover actor (and white guy) Jackson Beck. He usually gets sole voice credit for this cartoon but I don't think that's him as the cat. I don't know who it is but it doesn't sound to me like Beck.

I've also heard that at some point after these cartoons were sold to television, Buzzy's voice was redubbed with something a bit less stereotyped. If this is so, I've either never seen one of them or it was so long ago, I didn't know the difference. In any case, here's Buzzy's screen debut…

During the brief period of my life when I trick-or-treated, my options were limited. My parents took me to Newberry's Five-and-Dime store where there were Ben Cooper and Collegeville costumes to pick from. I rejected as tacky the generic ones — pirate, hobo, devil, etc. — and opted for the ones of licensed and known cartoon characters. I remember one year I picked out a great Bugs Bunny costume because Bugs was one of my favorites. I'd still like to be him if I ever grow up.

We got it home and I made the mistake of not trying it on before late in the afternoon of Halloween. When it came time to costume up for a party and subsequent door-to-door candy hustling, we found that the costume was misprinted and mis-made some way that rendered it unwearable. I was somewhat upset. My father grabbed it up and said "I'll take it back and get you another." He drove up to Newberry's but found that the display had pretty much been picked clean.

There were no more Bugs Bunny costumes. In fact, the only outfit in my size that was of a name character was Buzzy the Crow. Even friends my age who watched cartoons weren't sure who that was. So that year, I extorted little Snickers bars from neighbors dressed (with no small amount of embarrassment) as Buzzy the Crow. No wonder I learned to not like Halloween.

Last evening, I chanced to browse through a place called the Halloween Club near me and discovered a much, much wider selection of costumes than I had when my age was in single digits. Back then, we didn't have costumes of characters from situation comedies. If we had, I would have insisted on going as Sgt. Bilko or Rob Petrie. I would have preferred going as Bilko because he would not only have talked my neighbors out of all their candy but probably their wide-screen televisions as well. Here's a photo I took…

Hey, remember that selling piece that Hanna-Barbera produced for a cartoon series called Duffy's Dozen? The one we discussed here yesterday? Well, it turns out that master cartoonist Scott Jeralds knows some more about it. That's his YouTube channel I found it on.

Scott says it was done around 1970 for CBS by "pretty much the same crew that worked on Josie and the Pussycats." So that may be the reason Jerry Eisenberg didn't remember anything about it. He may not have worked on it. I still think it looks like his work but Scott says it might be Bob Singer and Iwao Takamoto.

He also discussed it with Iwao years ago and apparently just as the crew had tried to make Josie and the Pussycats look like the artwork of Dan DeCarlo, who originated the characters and drew their comics, Duffy's Dozen was intended to look a lot like the art of Lee Holley, who did the popular comic strip, Ponytail. Obviously, there is a lineage between Mr. Duffy and his dozen and The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, which H-B produced for CBS in 1972 and which I discussed here.

And about the same time Mr. Chan went on, Hanna-Barbera sold an evening (not prime-time) series called Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. Beginning with the TV season that started in September of 1971, the three major networks lost a half-hour of programming time in the early evenings which was filled by syndicated programming. Wait Till Your Father Gets Home was done for the timeslots that became available then. If Duffy's Dozen was done in late 1970 or early 1971, it was probably also intended for that market as opposed to conventional network prime-time.

Thanks, Scott.

People keep sending me links to pieces on right-wing websites that argue that Stephen Colbert's ratings are in the toilet because he's too Liberal and much of America won't watch him because of that. This position ignores two rather significant bits of evidence…

One is that Colbert's ratings aren't that bad. He usually finishes in second place ahead of Jimmy Kimmel, and he seems to have gotten extra boosts when he does live shows tied to the day's events in the election — i.e., his most political episodes. As one who feels his show has declined in quality the last few months, I'm actually a bit surprised his ratings are as good as they are.

Secondly, he's not the most Liberal guy in late night on any of the three major networks. Seth Meyers is and his ratings are just fine. He almost always wins his time slot and the drop-off from his lead-in (Jimmy Fallon) is about the same percentage of drop-off that Letterman had when he followed Carson in that slot or that O'Brien had following Leno. Here's a nice bit of Trump-bashing that Meyers did the other night…

Actors who supply voices for videogames are on strike for higher pay, financial participation in the games they voice and an end to certain practices in the business that can be harmful to one's health.

Longtime readers of this site will not be surprised to know that I am wholly on their side, especially on the last point. Those of you who've attended the Cartoon Voices panels I've hosted at comic conventions have heard actors tell tales of having to scream for hours or be dangled on wires while wearing "motion capture" suits. On the panels, those stories are often funny but they're not so funny when they happen. More than a few will do one of those throat-ripping sessions, then have to cancel all work for weeks and undergo extensive medical treatment.

Most of these games make huge amounts of money. The folks who make the games want to keep as much of that money as possible. When you leave aside the issues relating to the health and well-being of the performers, that's all this dispute is about. Nothing else.

As the strike goes on, one finds two kinds of opposition on the 'net. The videogame companies are setting up websites and planting "news" stories to try and paint the actors as greedy. I am reminded of a time when a producer wanted to hire me to write a script but he wanted to pay me $1000 less than I thought I should be paid. I held out for what everyone else paid me for comparable projects. He called me greedy because he didn't want to reduce his take-home pay from half a million dollars to an insulting $499,000.

You kind of expect that. What's more surprising are the attacks on the actors leveled by folks who have no direct stake in how the money is carved up. Last night, I read a message board peopled by folks who think it's some sort of obscenity for a human being to get paid $800 a day — as they hear most voice actors do — and then demand higher pay. I could side with this position if the money was being taken away from widows and orphans to pay the actors but not when it's otherwise going to folks who take home annual seven-figure incomes.

Also, of course, "$800 a day" sounds like more than it really is. That's $800 minus agent fees and maybe a manager's commission. It's also not a daily paycheck for most. If you have to do a dozen or more auditions (for $0) to land one of them $800 a day gigs, it doesn't seem so impressive — and some actors go months before they get one.

And also, there's something that a lot of people don't seem to understand every time some wing of show business goes on strike. As a trade-off for all the unpaid work and auditioning and instability, it has become a pretty well-established principle of the entertainment field that income is connected to profits.

If you star on a TV show that reruns for decades and makes its owners zillions of bucks, you oughta get more than what you're paid on one that gets canceled in two weeks and yields no ongoing revenue. Or if the book you wrote sells enough copies to make J.K. Rowling envious, you should get more bucks than, say, the guys who did some of the comics I've worked on. The money in the videogame market is growing and growing. Why shouldn't the compensation for being a vital part of the product grow as well?

I cannot believe the producers in the videogame arena believe the actors shouldn't get less. They just think that if they erect a stonewall and fight, they — the producers — can get away with paying less. It's just a game of another kind and like in politics, painting your opponents as bad, unreasonable people is sometimes a winning strategy.

In 1988 during a very long Writers Guild strike, I sat in a meeting room out on Ventura Boulevard and heard a man named Michael Eisner lecture the WGA Negotiating Committee on how "the business is hurting." And because it was, he explained, the producers of motion pictures and television could not possibly afford an additional six million dollars per year for all of the writers who were writing their products.

Mr. Eisner was then CEO for Disney and he probably made six million dollars that week, just for himself and his bank account. But we were being unrealistic and greedy.

In fairness, there are times when unions have pressed inappropriate demands at inappropriate times but this thing with the videogame voicers is not one of those. Their industry is not "hurting" and the CEOs are not taking haircuts out of financial necessity. I'm not even sure they're claiming that.

Here's a link to the SAG-AFTRA site explaining what's going on. And here's a good article from a site that covers the gaming industry discussing the issues in greater detail. And don't worry. The way the majority of these things end is that the two sides come together, they each give a little and take a little, the strike ends and life returns to normal. Most of the time.

Allen Fumbanks writes to ask…

I am long time reader of your blog. I hope that this is not too personal a question (if it is, please accept my apologies and delete this email) but I am curious as to what your work schedule looks like. I know that you write your blog, voice direct and write/story edit Garfield, collaborate on Groo, write books, write TV scripts, attend conventions, do video commentaries (I liked what you had to say on the Popeye DVDs) eat, sleep and post the occasional soup can on you blog. I am someone who always worked a standard workday/week and even knowing that you have described that as a professional writer you worked to have multiple income streams and embrace your professional independence, I still cannot fully understand (though I greatly admire) how you juggle such a multitude of activities.

Well, you may be overestimating the multitude. I average about one video commentary per year and about three conventions. The Garfield Show has been on hiatus for a year or two though I believe we are soon to resume production. Then again, I also write lots of stuff that you never hear about at the time and if it doesn't get published or produced, you might never hear about it.

What does my schedule look like? I've never had one, nor can I imagine how I could. What needs to be done and when is constantly changing so I get up in the morning, I look at the list and think, "I'd better try to get that done today" and then I try to get that done today. I don't know any other way to do it.

I sleep 5-6 hours a night, lately from about 2 AM to 7 or 8 in the morning, though certain kinds of work tend to shift later. When I'm on Garfield duty, I tend to work 'til 4 AM because that puts me more or less in sync with Jim Davis (who gets up early in the Eastern Time Zone) and the producers in Paris. My best work times are early morn and late at night and I usually start out in the morning by "sketching" (writing for this blog) and answering e-mail. But I've been known to work around the clock. Whatever it takes.

One nice thing about having multiple assignments is that when you're feeling blocked on one, you can sometimes shift over to another and spend a few hours on that one. Last year, I wrote something that was full of sex scenes and naughty words and I was switching off working on a cartoon script for very young kids. My Spell Checker got very confused.

I do like to finish something just before I go to bed. If it can't be a script, I write a blog post…like, say, this one. Good night.

Someone put this up on YouTube and folks have been writing to ask me what, if anything, I know about it. In the immortal words of Master Sgt. Schultz, "I know nothing." Here is the clip about which I know nothing…

It's obviously a short presentation that Hanna-Barbera made around 1970 to try and sell some TV network on a prime-time animated series called Duffy's Dozen, all about a big family touring the United States. H-B usually didn't make presentations with this much actual animation in them. Joe Barbera was a wonderful salesperson and I suspect the thinking was that if you put him in a room with a buyer and he couldn't sell the thing with a few pieces of art and his natural charisma, it was unsellable.

But at this time in our nation's history, it was very tough to sell an animated series for prime time. Specials, yes but series, no. There hadn't been a real hit cartoon show on in the evenings for a while and sponsors weren't telling the networks, "Hey, we want to reach more cartoon watchers."

There was also the problem that a series needed more lead time than a live-action show. Let's say my live-action production company sold your network on a new half-hour sitcom and you order thirteen episodes…half a season. By the time we've delivered and you've aired six or so, you know if you have a hit. If you do and you want the other half of the first season, we can remain in production and get them to you without a gap. You'll have Show #14 a week after #13.

Now let's say it's animation. Animation requires more lead time, especially if we aren't going to go wildly overbudget. If you give us a pickup for thirteen more, we can't get Show #14 done in eight weeks and Show #15 the week after that and so on.

We need a lot more time. Show #14 might be done six months later, by which time the interest in the show might have cooled to the point of non-existence.

Also, there's this: When the live-action Happy Days started production, everyone at the network or at the studio who watched the first few said, "Hey, we need to see more of that Fonzie guy." They could decide this by watching rehearsals or filming or looking at rough cuts. So his role was enlarged before the first half-dozen were done and that had a lot to do with that show succeeding.

That kind of course correction doesn't happen in animation. By the time you see a rough cut of #1, the next dozen episodes will be too far down the assembly line to make any real changes on them. I've seen good cartoon shows and bad cartoon shows. I can't think of one that got much better than its pilot during its first thirteen episodes.

So animation just doesn't fit in with the way you, the network, buy shows and how you sell the commercial time in them to sponsors. If you want a full season of my cartoon series, you're going to have to commit to that well in advance…and then if it tanks, you're stuck with a whole lot of episodes. If there's a reason to believe the viewing audience is receptive to prime-time animation — like there was when The Simpsons hit big — you'll find workarounds and take some gambles. But in 1970, H-B probably felt they needed this selling tool to convince anyone. And it didn't work.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera supplied their own voices in this, both sounding a lot stiffer and less funny than they were in person when I worked with them in later years. Live and in person, Joe could have charmed Ted Nugent into voting for Hillary. Here, voicing still caricatures of themselves, they both sound awkward. The voice actors in the animated segment are John Stephenson, Janet Waldo, Casey Kasem and one child actress I can't identify.

The artwork looks like Iwao Takamoto and Jerry Eisenberg. Iwao has passed away. Jerry is still around but he told me he doesn't recall a damned thing about it. So you now know as much about it as I do…and maybe as much as we're ever going to know.

• What passes for a Hillary Clinton scandal these days: Someone has some e-mails no one's seen but they could have something to do with her.

A classic Monty Python moment, including my favorite line in their entire body of work ("I'm not!")…

Bob Elisberg informs me that the new video of Gypsy, which stars Imelda Staunton, has not run yet on PBS. It debuts there on November 11. I'll remind you when we're close to that date because it's really, really good. Also, rumor has it that there will soon be a limited engagement of that production in New York. It's reportedly awaiting Ms. Staunton's availability.

If you enjoy this blog, you should check out Bob's over at Elisberg Industries. If you don't enjoy this blog…well, maybe you'll like Bob's better.

---

Friday night through Saturday, Turner Classic Movies is running a whole mess of old horror movies from 1931 to 1961 including Dracula, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, The Blob, The Black Scorpion and Village of the Damned. Another batch runs on Monday.

Early Sunday morning, they're showing The World's Greatest Sinner, a 1965 never-released-to-theaters movie produced, written and directed by Timothy Carey. I wrote about it here and explained that the music was done by Frank Zappa, who called it "the worst movie ever made" and urged his fans not to seek out copies. I wasn't a fan of Zappa's so I tried to watch it and after about ten minutes, wished I'd taken his wise advice.

---

As you may know, NBC broadcasts a live revival of a classic musical every year in December. In 2013, they did The Sound of Music. In 2014, it was Peter Pan. In 2015, we got The Wiz. This year on December 7, they'll be bringing us Hairspray. And it's just been revealed that the 2017 offering will be Bye Bye Birdie with Jennifer Lopez in the role originated on Broadway by Chita Rivera. No word on who'll play Dick Van Dyke's role but I sure hope someone at least tries to get Nathan Lane for the Paul Lynde part.

This doesn't sound to me like the greatest choice. Bye Bye Birdie has a lot of great songs but the book is pretty uninteresting. When they made the 1963 movie, screenwriter Irving Brecher rewrote about 85% of it, changing Albert (the Van Dyke part) from an English Teacher to a failed songwriter who wanted to get into Chemistry. Ever since then, people who go to see live productions are disoriented to find a very different storyline…and not a better one. Harvey Fierstein is reportedly set to adapt the book for television. Good luck, Harvey.

---

Tonight, Antenna TV is running a Tonight Show on which Johnny Carson welcomes Bob Hope, Gore Vidal and Steve Landesberg. Tomorrow night, it's Richard Pryor, Tim Conway, Dr. Lendon Smith and The Mighty Carson Art Players.

Lendon Smith was a frequent guest on TV back then, promoting a number of medical theories and the books in which he advanced them. I think Carson had him on so often because Dr. Smith was billed as "The Baby Doctor" and Johnny liked to mention that, make a gesture to indicate someone a child's height and say, "He's a little baby doctor."

No mention was made of the fact that Smith was often criticized by other doctors and got in trouble with the Oregon State Board of Medical Examiners. He finally surrendered his medical license in 1987 in a plea bargain when he was charged with insurance fraud. But for a decade or two, talk shows made him something of a celebrity.

Next year, Antenna TV is adding a lot of new reruns including Becker, Murphy Brown, What's Happening? and Alice. The ones I'm most likely to watch are Good Morning, World and The Joey Bishop Show. The latter was the sitcom Joey did which I recall as being not very good the first season and pretty good for the rest of its four seasons. I'll let you know when to tune in.

In another time and world, I helped launch the Saturday morning cartoon series, Dungeons & Dragons. I wrote the pilot and part of one other episode and also the "bible" that established who the characters were and how they functioned and what their world was like, then I went off to other projects and others steered the show for its three seasons. It still seems to have a lot of fans out there.

Here's a little video that the good folks at Comics Alliance assembled about the series…and I want to make one correction. In it, I'm referred to as the co-creator of Groo the Wanderer. I am not the co-creator of Groo the Wanderer. Sergio Aragonés was and is the sole creator of Groo the Wanderer. Keep that in mind if you give this video a click…

Justin Timberlake got into some trouble because he took a selfie photo in the booth when he went in to cast a ballot via early voting. As this article notes, that's illegal in many states. [Caution: Link may play noisy video when you get to that page.]

Back in 2015, I explained why this law doesn't make sense to me…and I even postulated then about something I never thought anyone would ever do: Voting for Donald Trump in a national presidential election. Briefly though, the premise is that by making it illegal to take such a photo, you make it harder for someone to sell their vote. But it doesn't since there are so many ways around it.

You-Know-Who and his supporters are going around suggesting the presidential election is "rigged" but only if Hillary wins. If D.T. wins, of course, it's proof that the system is sound and trustworthy and Kosher. Isn't this exactly backwards?

The overwhelming majority of polls show Hillary Clinton with a commanding lead. Even the few that show Trump ahead by a point or so nationally suggest he would lose at the Electoral College level. And aren't the polls kind of a "check" on the actual vote count? If the polls show Hillary winning by 4-8% and then the vote count on Election Day shows Hillary winning by 4-8%, don't the two sources kind of validate each other?

On the other hand, if the polls showed Hillary winning by a large margin and then Trump won by a large margin, wouldn't that indicate that one or the other might have been…well, maybe not rigged but that here was something amiss?

The last few presidential elections, there were pollsters and analysts like Nate Silver who called every state right or only missed by a fraction. How could they have done that if the polls had been rigged? Someone would have to not only have rigged the ballot counting in a whole lot of states but also rigged dozens of polls that were conducted independently of one another. Even the Fox News poll now has Hillary ahead by about four points. If Hillary had the power to rig the Fox News poll, don't you think she'd have the power to get Sean Hannity fired?

Of course, I understand that when Trump and his minions talk about "rigging," they're also talking about the press not covering the news the way they think it should be covered. I wonder if any politician of the last hundred years has ever not felt the press hasn't covered the news properly. Some of them try to act statesmanlike and above it all and not complain out loud. Some of them probably think that if you complain about the press, they'll hammer you more so it's better to act like you respect them.

In any case, I think it's dishonest to talk about getting slammed by the media as "rigging." Rigging is when someone tampers with voting machines or has dead people vote and that almost never happens. Disseminating negative stories about a candidate is not the same thing. That does happen and it's not even illegal. Often, in fact, it's accurate.

Here is how a silent film company — Essanay, for which Mr. Chaplin made some of his best shorts — used to reject screenplays that were submitted to them.