Monthly Archives: November 2018

Ron Glasgow writes…

I've noticed that on a lot of animated pictures coming out these days which feature well-known actors doing the voice work, that the voices of the characters in those films are often quite different from the actors' natural speaking voices that we hear them use on talk shows and in live action films. Guys like Mel Blanc did all kinds of different voices for radio and animation as a matter of course, and some actors today can do a range of voices and accents when they're making recordings for audiobooks, etc. I get the distinct impression though that many actors' voices have been electronically/digitally altered after being recorded for use in animated films, the way that some producers or audio engineers use Auto-Tune to make recordings of singers sound a little better.

Does that happen during the production of The Garfield Show, and are you aware of it happening in other animated productions? Maybe that has always been the case and I just wasn't aware of it. I did figure out ‎Ross Bagdasarian's trick with Alvin and the Chipmunks when I was a kid by playing around with the speed of those records when I listened to them.

Voices in theatrical animation are often tweaked and futzed and sped and pitched a half-dozen different ways. Modern technology makes it so simple, it's almost irresistible.  Obviously, it's done to actors playing giant robots and space aliens but it's also done to folks playing normal human beings or aardvarks.

Altering voices is not a new thing. A lot of Mel Blanc's voices in the classic Warner Brothers cartoons were sped, as was Woody Woodpecker's most of the time and others at still other studios. With Mel, they had this problem: They'd speed his Daffy Duck lines up X% but then when Mel made personal appearances or did his characters on live radio shows, he'd try to imitate the sped voices…and then when he went into the studio to record Daffy, he'd do him higher and faster and the engineers would find that X% was too much and they'd have to modify the numbers. Some of the engineers were not very good at this and when certain of Mel's voices didn't sound right, that was often the reason.

There's less tech-tampering with voices in TV animation but there's some.  Often, it's so subtle that the actors themselves don't realize their voices have been modified ever-so-slightly.

Quick story: When they did the Fantastic Four cartoon show for Saturday morning in 1978, my friend Frank Welker supplied the voice of a silly little robot named H.E.R.B.I.E.  Frank is one of those vocal magicians who can sound like anybody or anything.  He speaks for Transformers and fuzzy bunnies and makes the sounds of squeaky door hinges or cocker spaniels.  For H.E.R.B.I.E., he did a voice that sounded artificially-enhanced but wasn't…and then after he left, the engineers would trick it up a little more. No one had told that to Frank.

After the first four or five recording sessions, the director told Frank to re-read a certain line a little slower.  He said, "We need it clearer because we're filtering you to make you sound a little more robotic."  Frank said, "Really?  Could I hear what that sounds like?"

They played him a sample of how H.E.R.B.I.E. would sound in the finished shows, which of course were not finished yet.  Frank immediately began imitating that sound, giving them the filtered voice without the filter.  That's why the guy works all the time.

On The Garfield Show — for which Frank, by the way, had the title role — we did some fiddling when we needed a voice that sounded like a robot or a computer.  On the earlier series, Garfield and Friends, we had some recurring characters called the Buddy Bears who would sing and talk with sped-up voices…

Because people keep asking me about this: The speaking voices of the Buddy Bears were done by Thom Huge (who played Jon on that series), Gregg Berger (who played Odie on both series) and whatever other male happened to be in the room at the time. I did a few lines once as one of them. The late and lovely Lorenzo Music played Garfield then and we tried speeding his voice to play one of the Buddy Bears but found Lorenzo sounded like Lorenzo, no matter how much we sped him.

That was for the voices of the Buddy Bears when they spoke. When they sang, Thom Huge did all three voices. And yes, I wrote the lyrics and Ed Bogas wrote the music…and if you watched that clip, I apologize that you'll have that tune running around in your head for the next eight days.

Don't worry. It goes away.

The only other times I recall us adjusting voices on either series were because I would sometimes hire veteran, older voice actors. The pitch and timing might be A bit on the low side but they still had the acting chops. I did one session once where three of my seven cast members were in wheelchairs.

One was the late Marvin Kaplan, who was then in his mid-eighties. Our ace engineer Andy Morris would push a few buttons and turn a few dials and, like a miracle, Marvin would sound exactly as he did in the sixties when he was the voice of Choo Choo on Top Cat. We did a little of that with a few other actors, as well — Stan Freberg and Jack Riley, to name two. I wish more studios would try that instead of saying, "He's too old. Let's replace him with a younger guy!"

Donald Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen, has admitted that he lied to Congress about Trump's deal to build a skyscraper in Moscow so as to support a lie that Trump was telling to the public.  Conor Friedersdorf explains why this is such a big deal.

We interrupt Cookie Monster Week to bring you this…and you only need to watch the first one minute and forty seconds of it. It's the opening to Dean Martin's 1968 Christmas Show.

I was fascinated by The Dean Martin Show — the series that ran on NBC from 1965 to 1974. They had a lot of great performers on it (including its star) but the way it was put together was also interesting. Usually, if someone starred in a weekly hour-long network variety show, it would mean four or five long days per week of rehearsing and taping.

Dino did that for his show's first season and decided that if that's what it took to have a weekly series, he'd rather not have one. To keep him doing it, producer-director Greg Garrison invented a new way of doing a show. During the week, they'd tape all the segments Dean wasn't in and rehearse (without him) all the ones that required his presence. They eliminated the pre-recording of songs, kept Dean in a tux for almost everything and staged things so Dean could just stand in one place and read everything off cue cards on his one day a week in the studio.

If you watch those shows with that in mind, you can see all kinds of shortcuts and cutting tricks. Often when some bit went wrong, Garrison preferred to try and save it in the editing room rather than to take the three minutes on the stage to do a second take. Or if during a song, Dean was having trouble hearing the orchestra, they wouldn't stop, turn the volume up and start over. Instead, Dean would give a special hand gesture — you can spot it once in a while — to tell them to make the track louder as he kept on singing.

When I watched the opening to the show below in '68, I thought I noticed another trick but in those pre-VCR/TiVo days, I couldn't rewind the video and check. I just found this on YouTube and, sure enough, if you watch carefully, you can see how Dean managed to participate in a dance number that would have required some rehearsal. They could have made it impossible to notice if they'd done it in two pieces and edited it together but that might have taken an extra two minutes of taping…

Rebecca Onion — who does not write for The Onion — discusses the "I'm not a scientist but…" ploy.

26. Many people do not understand that writing a comic book is not just writing the captions and dialogue. It involves coming up with a plot, figuring out how to develop that plot beat by beat, figuring out how to tell that plot one panel at a time…and writing the copy and dialogue that appear on the pages.
27. Comics are not about drawing individual panels that are pleasing to the eye. They're about drawing individual panels which tell a story as you go from one to another. A drawing can be absolutely magnificent in a stand-alone context but wrong from the standpoint of storytelling.
28. One of the biggest mistakes made by beginners involves the density of information. They try to convey too much of it in one panel or too little.
29. Copying the work of another writer or artist is sometimes best described as an "hommage." But sometimes, the more appropriate term is "plagiarism."
30. It is impossible to make a decent living in comics if you don't love what you do.
31. If your hero is as unheroic or as insane as your villain, then I really don't care who triumphs in the end unless, of course, the villain is out to destroy Los Angeles.
32. The ability to write dialogue that feels natural and conversational when read on the page has less to do than one might think with the ability to write dialogue which sounds natural and conversational when read aloud by an actor.
33. In most fight scenes, the amount of time it would take actual combatants to throw all those punches is often less than one-tenth the time it would take them to speak all the words in their word balloons while they battle.
34. The paper that's available to the artists to draw upon gets worse with each passing year. So do the brushes, pen points and ink they use on that paper.
35. The drawing paper that most pleases the penciler will always displease the inker and vice-versa. And when letterers lettered on the same pages, they never liked either kind but they were stuck.
36. Whenever anyone tells you you are one of the two best writers (or artists) in the business, the other person they like will always be the person you think is the most untalented person in the field.
37. The two most important things an editor brings to a project are to create the proper working environment in which the work will be done and to place the right people in the right positions. And "right" is at least as important as "good."
38. Readers will usually have a deep fondness for what they read when they first got into comics and so will have a natural antipathy for a major revamp of those books and the characters in them.
39. Better comic books usually result when the writer and the artist are friends with good channels of communication. Sometimes, it helps if they are the same person but not always.
40. A character cannot register more than one emotion or perform more than one action per panel. That's because there's only one drawing of that character per panel. I don't think the "multiple image" trick works unless you're trying to convey super-speed a la The Flash. And I don't think going through multiple moods in the captions and word balloons work since the visual only shows us one mood.
41. When a comic ships late, it is not always the fault of any of the creative talents involved. Often, it's the fault of the traffic manager or schedule-maker but the talent will usually get blamed anyway.
42. People too often confuse the job of the editor with the job of the proofreader.
43. In comics, as in all the other arts, the most difficult response to get out of your audience is laughter.
44. Some of the best comic books ever done were done by writers and artists who were amazingly fast.
45. And being fast was often not because the person wrote or drew amazingly fast but because they were dedicated enough to sit at the keyboard or drawing table all day and/or all night.
46. An artist should never try to draw the female form until he or she has seen — and preferably, drawn — a lot of them in person. This applies to the male form also but not quite as much because comics don't do variations on the male form as much as they do on the female form.
47. Plots need to be the right length. Some very poor comics have resulted from trying to cram a good 25-page storyline into twelve pages or to spread a good 12-page storyline over twenty-five.
48. The more powerful your protagonist is, the harder you have to work to come up with a credible challenge to him or her.
49. Colorists often have to make up for the fact that the artist has not bothered to think about the source(s) of light in the panels.
50. "Stunt" storylines like marrying off or killing beloved continuing characters have very little impact because everyone knows they're stunts to be undone at a later date.

Sure have been a lot of them lately, haven't there? And there's an old saying that I just made up that says that when lots of people are going to jail for perjury and lying, there's something pretty serious being covered-up.

Hey, how many witches does a witch hunt have to catch before you can no longer dismiss it as just a witch hunt?

The New York Times has posted another chapter about the downfall of Les Moonves at CBS. It's a pretty ugly story that makes Moonves out to be a pretty horrible person…and you might get to wondering why someone with his money, power and charm would ever be involved in non-consensual sexual relations. People have asked that about Mr. Cosby and some others, as well.

Of note in this piece is the personal hell that one of the alleged victims of Mr. Moonves went through. At least, I think it's appropriate to say "alleged." There are still people who wonder, of certain reported rapes, "Why didn't she come forward sooner about this?" Maybe this article will help those who wonder to understand.

Cookie Monster as "The Lord of the Crumbs"…

"Gary in Buffalo," as he signs his message, wrote with this question…

I enjoy all the subjects you post about, but what really fascinates me are your remembrances of slipping into NBC in your youth to see tapings of various shows. As a TV-obsessed teenager in the golden era of Laugh-In, Dean Martin, etc., I think being able to watch shows live as you did would've been close to number one on my wish list. (Number one may have involved Joey Heatherton and/or Elizabeth Montgomery, but I digress.)

My question is, did seeing these live tapings adversely affect your enjoyment of the shows when viewing them later on TV? For instance did it take any of the magic away to see Laugh-In being shot tediously in pieces, rather than at the breakneck pace it had when edited for broadcast? I'm assuming there had to be a certain disappointment, in the same way learning how a magician does a trick is always a letdown. In my case I'm sure I would have been so starstruck that it wouldn't have mattered what the actors were doing on stage.

Anyway, any more details you could provide about being in the studios to see these shows created would be greatly appreciated!

No, it didn't take away any enjoyment…and actually, finding out how a magician does a trick is not always a letdown for some of us. I've been a member of the Magic Castle for more than half my life and just hanging around with magicians and (in my earlier days) doing a little of it myself, I've sometimes been more impressed to learn how a trick is done. Sometimes, they're a lot more difficult than you think. You kinda think it might be because the cards are marked or gimmicked but really, it's because the performer is doing a nearly-impossible sleight-o'-hand move that took years to master.

But no, no "magic" ever went away for me while attending tapings of TV shows. If anything, they seemed more magical. I never thought Laugh-In was done at that frenetic speed so being on that set was not disillusioning. Instead, you would have been struck by all the skill and devotion to craft that was involved in something that on your home TV appeared so effortless.

Also, some things are just funnier or prettier or better in person. I visited three rehearsals of The Dean Martin Show so I was there three more times than Dean was. I will confess that I was there in large part to ogle The Golddiggers with a vague fantasy motive of meeting one in particular. (Most of us have our little adolescent infatuations at that age…)

But I was also there once when Lou Jacobi was rehearsing a sketch with some other actors and Dean's stand-in. I have met some of the funniest human beings of the last century including Groucho Marx, George Carlin, Mel Brooks, Albert Brooks, Richard Pryor and Jonathan Winters. Lou Jacobi belongs on that list, too…and he was funnier in those rehearsals (and chatting during a break) than he even was on camera. Those Golddiggers were pretty darn adorable, too.

NBC was quite magical in those days. Not only were Laugh-In and Dean there but Bob Hope was sometimes taping a special and Johnny Carson, whose Tonight Show was then based in New York, was sometimes out in Burbank for a few weeks at a time. With all those programs taping there — plus Flip Wilson and Hollywood Squares and a few others — there was no telling who you'd run into in the halls. Or who'd be rehearsing on some stage or eating in the commissary.

Today, if there was a studio like that and if you wanted to get inside without a pass, you'd have to round up a team like in Oceans 11 and plan for months. Hell, even with a pass they sometimes put you through a strip search, a body cavity inspection and selective waterboarding. But back in the early seventies, if you carried a copy of Variety, acted like you knew where you were going and waved to the guards, you could waltz right in.

That was part of what made it seem like Wonderland. And it was a big moment for me years later when I walked into that building because I had an actual, scheduled meeting with a producer there who wanted me write for his show.

As William Saletan notes, Climate Change is already costing us many, many lives and many, many dollars. And what's our government going to do to stop it from getting a lot worse? Well, as long as Donald Trump has anything to say about it, nothing.

Dick Cheney used to say that if there's even a 1% chance that a rumored terrorist threat is true, we have to respond as if it's a certainty. Trump's position is that if he's decided the scientists are all wrong and he's right, he's right.

Wish I'd spotted this before Halloween…

As regular readers of this blog know, I get a lot of phone calls from contractors — or more likely, folks working on commission to solicit work for contractors — offering me free estimates on home repairs. Often, the pitch goes like this. Remember: This is a call from someone who has never spoken to me before, representing a company that has never had anyone call me before…

Mr. Ebner, this is So-and-So with Whatever Construction Company. I spoke to you last May about possible work on your home. You were very nice to me and you asked me to call back around now to discuss the work that you thought you'd be ready to do.

I mind all these calls but "Hi, I'm a contractor and do you have any work we could bid on?" bothers me less than the ones that start with a lie. Usually, I tell them it's a lie. In fact, I tell them it's the exact same lie from the same script as two other calls this morning and ten in the past week. If they don't hang up then, I tell them I'm not going to do business with someone who lies to me in their opening speech. That usually makes them go away.

Lately, I seem to have gotten on some list of folks who have Medicare so I'm getting these calls, most of which are from a company that's trying to sound like an official agency…

Mr. Eveenar, this is Somebody calling from Medicare Services with good news. Our doctors have examined your records and determined that you qualify for a free back-brace to alleviate the chronic pains you've been experiencing in your lower back.

I tell the person that I am experiencing no chronic pains in my lower back, and some of them sound very disappointed to hear that. One, thinking fast, decided to relocate my chronic pain. She said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I misread that. It's your knees. You're having chronic pains in your knees." Based on the principle that if she can lie to me, I can lie to her, I told her I was having no problems with my knees…whereupon she began ticking off body parts: "Feet? Wrists? Ankles?"

I said, "Spleen. Do you have a free brace for my spleen?"

She said, "I don't know what that is but I'll check and I bet we have a free spleen-brace we can send you!" (And bill my Medicare lots of money…)

From the early days of Sesame Street when our Monster of the Week was performed by Frank Oz…

I have no good reason for the lack of posting today. Just busy…and no particular topic is coming to mind. It might help if some of you would send some questions to my AskME address. And don't ask about politics or Stan Lee or how I can possibly not love cole slaw.

I could write about what a bad day it was for Trump but I suspect most of 'em are going to be like that from now on. I could also write about the insanity of rejecting a carefully-researched and vetted-by-experts report on Climate Change just because he disagrees with its conclusions. Why do we even have scientists if no one's going to listen to them?

Please stop writing and asking me what I think of the Stan & Ollie movie. What I think is that I haven't seen it yet. I will, I will…and I'm still trying to avoid watching clips or trailers or reading reviews. I don't like seeing movies before I see them.

I write with a Samsung monitor which has served me well for more computing hours than I would have imagined possible. Yesterday, the images on it began going intermittently yellow on me and I decided that either every website suddenly had jaundice or the ol' trusty Samsung was failing on me. Deciding the latter was more likely, I went to Google to begin doing some research on new models. On a whim though, I typed in "computer screen yellow" and was whisked to a website that reminded me, as I should have recalled, that a yellow screen can be a sign of a loose connection 'twixt computer and monitor. Ten seconds later, my monitor was live in living color.

I'll try and pick up the pace here over the next few days.

We're resuming Cookie Monster Week here on newsfromme.com. Here, the Champion of Chocolate Chip Chomping pays a visit to the popular vlog, Rocketboom…