Monthly Archives: June 2023

Here's the entire episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, minus commercials, for 11/12/1976. The guests are Frank Sinatra, David Janssen, Olivia Newton-John, ex-con Ray Johnson and there's a "surprise walk-on" by Don Rickles. There were very few actual surprise walk-ons on Johnny's show and he was reportedly pissed about every one of them.

Two quick thoughts: Rickles fawning over Sinatra reminds me a lot of certain Republicans talking about Donald Trump. And it's interesting to me that when you remove the commercials from this 90-minute show, it runs about 64 minutes…

A new "Legal Eagle" video, this time about Hunter Biden…

The good news is it that we're cautiously optimistic that Turner Classic Movies is going to more-or-less stay the Turner Classic Movies it's always been. And the further good news is that there's no good news for Donald Trump who just sinks deeper and deeper into that hole he insists on digging for himself. But then there's the bad (to some) news that I'm so swamped with Things That Must Be Done that I may not have much time to post here the next few days. So don't waste your time checking in here. There won't be much. Sorry.

Here's Mel Blanc guesting on Johnny Carson's show for May 26, 1983. I used to see Mel a lot when I worked at Hanna-Barbera and occasionally talk to him a bit. A year after this appearance with Johnny, I actually directed him for a brief voiceover for a CBS special and got to have a long conversation with the man. I told that story here — and I just realized I had the year in it wrong so I have corrected it. It was September of 1984.

Every time I saw Mel at H-B or that day in a recording studio, he was walking shakily with a cane. Given the severity of the 1961 traffic accident, it was amazing that he could walk at all…and I notice that when he made his entrance on Johnny's show, he managed to not use or seem to need that cane. I can't say I ever knew him well except in the sense that we all knew him well from growing-up with his voice so often in our ears. He really was as good as his reputation said he was.

At Comic-Con next month, there will be a panel on 4:30 on Saturday afternoon, July 22. I think I'm not supposed to announce program items before the con does but they'll forgive me for this one. The brilliant cartoon voice actor from Australia, Keith Scott, will be in town for the con. He'll be on the Cartoon Voices panel I'm hosting earlier that day at 1 PM and then later, in the 4:30 panel, Keith will be discussing the history of cartoon voice actors with myself, Jerry Beck and Leonard Maltin. The panel will cover just a smidgen of what's in two must-have books that Keith recently released.

We will, of course, be talking a lot about Mel Blanc, the man who pretty much defined what it means to be a cartoon voice actor. Here's Mel in 1983…

Last night, I linked you to a video of some of David Letterman's first morning show. A number of folks have written to me to suggest that at this point in the video, one sees Bill Maher and maybe Larry Miller in the audience. Also, there's a sign in the audience that says "The David Letterman Show" and the person seated just above the "The" looks like Budd Friedman, owner-operator of The Improv. You make the call.

So by now, you've probably heard the recording of Donald J. Trump apparently committing one of the crimes that Donald J. Trump is alleged to have committed. In many corners, this moves the discussion from "Will he be convicted?" to "How much time will he do?"

With expert timing, YouTube's Legal Eagle has a new video up explaining all about sentencing guidelines. It's kinda informative about how those guidelines work but all it'll tell you regarding Trump is that he surely won't be sentenced to the jillion-and-three years that some are suggesting…and that we can't say with any certainty what the actual magical number might be. Here's the video if you want to watch…

And this doesn't even address the question of what other crimes Trump may be charged with and what kind of sentences they could carry. Tomorrow in Atlanta, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger will be interviewed by investigators from special counsel Jack Smith's office.

As you may know, before David Letterman started his late night show (called Late Night) on NBC, he briefly had a daily morning show on that network. It went on the air on June 23, 1980 as a ninety-minute program, was cut to an hour as of August 4th, then left the air completely as of October 24. They then kept Letterman under contract — for a reported $20,000 week — until they could find a new spot for him…which more than a year later turned out to be following Johnny Carson's show.

Here from February 1, 1982 is the first segment in Dave's morning show which I remember as being a rather awkward series that didn't seem certain what it was or why it was on, especially in that time slot…

Imagine paying $1,809 for a fine art painting of Groucho Marx…

…only it's not Groucho Marx. It's Frank Ferrante.

Hi. Before you venture into the sixth part of this series, it might be a good idea to read the First Part, the Second Part, the Third Part, the Fourth Part and, just for good measure, the Fifth Part…

---

All up to date? Good. So when we last left me, I was ten years old and wondering why many (but not all) of my favorite Dell comic books had suddenly turned into Gold Key comic books. Here is a simple before-and-after of one of those comics. At left is The Flintstones #6 with a cover by Harvey Eisenberg,  It's Fred mooning the readers.  At right is The Flintstones #7 with a cover by Pete Alvarado…

As you can see, apart from a different symbol in the upper left hand corner, not much difference. There was not much difference inside, either but some of these comics changed as they passed from Dell to Gold Key. Below left we have the first page of the last Dell comic of Bullwinkle and at right, we have the first page of the first Gold Key issue of Bullwinkle. For this, it will help if you click on the image to make it larger on the screen…

See the difference? I don't know the names of the artists on the two pages except that they're not the same person and neither one of them is Al Kilgore. But the two pages have the same letterer — Ben Oda, who in his long career lettered an insane number of comic books for half the companies in the business. The difference in the word balloons was not Ben's idea. He was just doing what he was told by his editor.

They dispensed in this story with the traditional panel borders.  They put the words in oddly-shaped balloons and floated them away from the edges of the panels so the white of the balloon did not meet the white of the gutters between the panels.  This was supposed to make for better coloring since the colorist didn't have to deal with a huge blob of white in each panel throwing the color compositions off-balance.  They also reduced the "tail" (the pointer) on each balloon to a single line…and to do all this, they put fewer words in each balloon and limited the amount of space the artist had to draw in.

Personally, I thought it was a bad idea.  But suddenly, a lot of Gold Key comics were doing this to some (not all) stories in each issue.

As I mentioned in an earlier chapter that I'm too lazy to look up, some of the comic books produced by Western Publishing — at first under the Dell label, later under the Gold Key imprint — were produced out of an editorial office in Los Angeles and some were done in an editorial office in New York. There were several editors in each office but the main guy in L.A. was Chase Craig and the main guy in New York then was Matt Murphy.

Chase Craig was a traditionalist when it came to doing comics. (Full Disclosure: He was my main editor when I wrote comics for Western in the early seventies. He was a lovely man who was very good to me and he taught me a lot. He was also the primary — but by no means the only — person who gave me the information I am imparting to you in this series.) Matt Murphy was of the opinion that the switchover from Western producing comics for another company to Western producing them for their own company was the perfect time to try reinventing not so much the contents of the comic books as the graphic style. (Full Disclosure: I never met Matt Murphy but I met many of his associates.)

The two above issues of The Flintstones were edited by Chase Craig out of the Los Angeles office of Western Printing and Lithography. The two above issues of Bullwinkle were edited by Matt Murphy out of the New York office of Western Publishing and Lithography. Chase and Matt fought a lot.

I don't mean they were bitter enemies. They got together for friendly conferences and meals a few times a year on one coast or the other. They agreed on a lot of things. They just didn't agree on everything…and among the non-agreements were many of Murphy's ideas of changing how comics looked. To complicate matters, the New York office did most of the production work on covers, including things like title logos and lettering placement, and the coloring of all the interiors. Though he was in charge of roughly half the line, Chase did not have final say on the coloring on the comics he edited and he often disliked it a lot.

When Murphy persuaded the folks upstairs to try some of his innovations, Craig was told to apply them to the West Coast books. He balked and stalled…and he had an advantage. Most of the comics he edited had long-range contracts and were in no danger of being canceled so he was allowed to get them way ahead of schedule. He had issues of Mickey Mouse that had been completely drawn for the "old" format and wouldn't be going to press for a year.

But a lot of New York books were doing these experiments with no panel borders or balloons not touching panel borders or one-line tails on word balloons or color in-between the panels. Here are pages from two New York books from this period. And again, you can make the image larger by clicking on it…

I don't know who did the page on the right but the one on the left was drawn by Mike Sekowsky for the Boris Karloff Thriller comic. And both were, again, lettered by Ben Oda.

According to Chase, the New York office had the idea that these new approaches made the comics feel more sophisticated and set their books apart from what the other comic book companies were doing.  They were "gung ho" (that was the term Chase used) to make the whole line like that, even printing up new page blanks for the artists to draw upon.

Comic book companies have occasionally done that.  They print up sheets of quality (hopefully) drawing paper that are cut to the proper size and they print guidelines on each piece in light blue ink. The artist then fills in the blanks. It saves them from having to buy paper, cut it to size and then rule off the size of the image on the page and where the gutters between the panels will go. Also, if the penciler buys his own paper, others who work on it (like the letterer or inker) may complain they don't like his choice of drawing paper.

When a comic book page is finished in ink and is photographed for printing, light blue ink doesn't reproduce unless the camera guy or scanner makes special adjustments…so it can become invisible in the final image.  Western printed up pages with the margins for the art indicated in light blue and within each panel, there were margins to show how far from the panel borders (that were not going to be inked with black lines) the word balloons should be.

At first when Chase passed out these new page blanks to the artists drawing for him, Chase told them to ink in the panel borders and to ignore the dotted line margins that kept the word balloons away from the panel borders. And when he did that, a kind of intra-company Civil War broke out.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE NEXT PART OF THIS SERIES

The presence of Chris Christie in the presidential race has made it all-but-impossible for me to pay as little attention to it as I'd hoped I could. Once upon a time in a land far, far away, one-time governor Christie was on my short list of "Republicans I could imagine myself voting for." He was not on that list for long. Once I saw a little more of him, I realized I liked him for his entertainment value and because, like too many in both parties, he saw the wisdom in occasionally confessing to a mistake or admitting a weakness in his party. Unfortunately, when you brushed all that aside, he was still Chris Christie.

It was interesting to see him getting booed at the Faith and Freedom Conference the other day for criticizing Trump. I got the feeling that the booers didn't disagree with what he said. I got the feeling what they were saying was, "We know all that! But what you don't understand, you moron, is that we want to win!"

That's why they'll ignore the many lies and misdeeds of their guy: Because of all the candidates for the Republican nomination, he's the one who even if he winds up campaigning wearing an ankle bracelet, stands a better chance than Pence, Haley, Ramaswamy, Hutchinson, Scott, DeSantis, Durgum, Suarez, Hurd and especially Mr. Christie. All of them can pledge to ban abortion, cut taxes, police our borders, Make America Great Again, etc. Only one of them looks like he could win.

You can't beat something with nothing. I put that in boldface because I think we too often forget that. Most folks who support Trump are not going to abandon him until they have a viable alternative…and none of the others in the current bag o' candidates fills that need. Eventually, a few indictments from now, someone might if only by default. In the meantime, Christie's Trump-bashing is awfully entertaining and pretty accurate. It's just that a lot of people don't want to hear it because they have no one else to rally behind and, y'know, they want to win.

A number of big studios (including Marvel) will either have a minimal official presence at Comic-Con next month or none at all. I feel sorry for the folks who love that aspect of the event but it's not all or even most of what Comic-Con is about. It's just the part that gets the most attention from some corners of the media and generates the most headlines.

This article in Variety says there's an "existential threat" happening here and that's, well, kind of ridiculous.  The con will still be the con.  It will still have as many attendees…and if for some reason, some now decide not to attend and others don't rush in to claim that opportunity, that wouldn't hurt the con financially.  The tickets were all bought and paid for months ago and if they put tickets for 2024 on sale now, they'd also sell out in under an hour.  The only difference you'd notice if fewer folks showed up this year would be that the ones who were there would be happier about the shorter lines and less-mobbed aisles.

And the only downside I see is that Variety might not be able to write so much about one of the only two aspects of the convention that ever interests them. The rest of us will have a dandy time.

A few years ago, a friend of mine was involved with a movie that was showing previews at Comic-Con and he said to me, "This is going to be the event that everyone at the con will be talking about." Their preview/panel was in Hall H which holds 6,000 people and I told him that fact, reminded him that the con attracts 130,000 people (give or take a couple of guys in Harley Quinn suits) and asked, "How are you going to get the other 124,000 to talk about you?"

He didn't have much of an answer. I'm also reminded of those years when Conan O'Brien was recording his show at a theater in San Diego during Comic-Con. A exec for his network told Variety and other trade papers that Conan had become "the face of Comic-Con." One of their publicists called me to ask that I promote Conan on my panels because he'd become "the signature celebrity of Comic-Con."

Yeah, sure. Fine. Need I point out that since Conan stopped with the tie-ins, which was before he stopped with his show, not one person has noticed his absence? But, hey, that's what publicists try to do: Make everything all about their clients. Even back when Comic-Con had 300 attendees, it was never about one thing. It still isn't just about Hollywood using it, as a wise man named Jack Kirby once predicted, "…to sell the movies they made last year and to find out what they're going to make next year."

Comic-Con might have some sort of "existential threat" if all the studios were pulling out forever because they decided it was no longer a place worthy of a spot in their promotional budgets. I don't think even that would doom the con. There would be plenty of other businesses that thought it would be of value to them to participate. "Existential threats" are about the entire future existence of something. This year is just a one-time outlier because of one or more strikes.

And even this year, there will probably still be enough movie/TV promotions and celebs to interest Variety or anyone. There will definitely be enough cosplayers on the premises for Variety to make this year's version of the following video they released last year. This is the other thing besides the TV/movie stars they're there to cover…

About half the time when I meet people who've never attended Comic-Con but find out I have, I need to disabuse them of the idea that every attendee or almost every attendee comes dressed up as some super-hero or videogame character or Klingon. I say, "No, no…those are just the people who the reporters point their cameras at." Understandably. I mean, with those cosplayers around, I sure wouldn't point my camera at me. (It's another reason I like having the cosplayers around. I'm not thrilled about cameras pointed at me.)

It's never been just about the cosplayers just as it's never been only about the celebrities. They're just the elements of the con that mainstream media loves to focus upon.

The cosplayers will be out in full force this year. Some celebrities will be there. Some movies and TV shows will not miss the chance to promote their product. So Variety will be there. There's no "existential threat" to the convention. For one year, there just might not be as much there for Variety to write about. And Variety, if you want to write about "existential threats" to the existence of something, how about writing about industry trade papers that can no longer turn a profit printing every day or every week on paper?

Last night, I finally got around to watching the Tony Awards only to discover that for once, my trusty TiVo had failed me. It recorded the first half but with lotsa breakups…and the second half, not at all. I'll find a good copy of it one of these days but I did watch a few of the segments online.

This is the "In Memoriam" segment which, if I were producing an awards show, would be retitled "In Celebration" and we'd have a peppier "up" tune that said, in some manner, "Isn't it great that we had these talented people in our world?" Folks always complain about these spots because (a) they leave someone or several someones out who should be in and (b) they keep taking the camera off the screen to show a singer…but the segment isn't about the singer. It's about the people on the screen.

I dunno who they might have overlooked but they managed to have a singer — a good singer — and still do justice to the people on the screen. In fact, what I was able to see of the show itself looked pretty good. Ariana Debose is an incredible talent. I was just hoping the show would stink so badly that some high-level executives would see it and say, "My God! Give the writers whatever they want…just get them back!"

Fred Kaplan takes a real-world look at You-Know-Who's claim that he could settle the Ukraine War in one day. Well, so could I if I could persuade either side to surrender. Most likely, Trump doesn't even have a plan. He sure didn't make good on his long-ago pledge to design, in under a week as I recall, a new health plan that absolutely everyone would agree was better than Obamacare. I doubt he even spent ten seconds on that one.

I'll try to hold the Trump posts down on this site but if they bother you, do us both a favor and stop reading this blog, at least until he's gone.

And if you want more of that kind of thing than I'll be supplying…oh, have I got a YouTube channel for you. The Meidas Touch Network puts up video after video — several a day, many of them by experienced attorneys — explaining exactly what's going on in Trump's legal downfalls. The ones by Ben Meiselas (civil rights lawyer), Michael Popok (national trial lawyer strategist) and Karen Friedman Agnifilo (former Chief Assistant District Attorney of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office) are especially informative and refreshingly non-hysterical.

No, I have no idea when the Writers Guild strike will end and neither do you even if you think you do. And as it goes on, a lot of us are missing our favorite shows. Mine would probably be John Oliver's and his absence is a special shame because there's so much in the news that he and his staff could turn into wonderful, informative and funny programming.

But all they've produced lately is this "For Your Consideration" video because, you know, that show doesn't have nearly enough Emmy Awards yet. I think they're aiming to get every single one in every single category…

I am hereby resuming a series of posts that I stopped a month ago due to some major distractions, some of them involving the 45th President of the United States. So before you read what comes next, you might want to reacquaint yourself with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 or even Part 4. This fifth part will be waiting here for you when you return…

---

At the age of ten, I had been an avid lover of comic books for at least a third of my life…which may sound like a lot but today, it's more like 95%. In 1962, most of what I was reading was Dell Comics, especially those that featured characters seen in cartoons from the Disney Studios, Warner Brothers, MGM, Walter Lantz, Terrytoons, Hanna-Barbera and Jay Ward. All of these comics said "Dell" on the covers…

…until one day, they didn't.

I'm going to get way too deep into trivia here. Forgive me but this was a traumatic, life-changing moment in my existence. It began at a Von's Market at which my family used to shop. Below is a photo taken years later at the corner of Pico Boulevard and Westwood Boulevard in West Los Angeles. Almost nothing in the photo is still there except that the buses which run on Pico are still blue and #7. If you click on the picture, you can see more of it.

So one day when I accompanied my mother there for groceries, I hit the comic book rack and found a lot of new comics, some of which startled me. Bugs Bunny comics had always come from Dell Comics but this new Bugs Bunny comic book came from a company I'd never seen before: Gold Key. I don't remember how many books I was able to purchase that day but I'm pretty sure of these two…

This was on or a few days after Thursday, June 28, 1962 because that's the day those comics went on sale. Also on sale that day were these comics bearing the Gold Key logo : Checkmate #1, King Leonardo and His Short Subjects #1, Little Lulu #165, Snagglepuss #1, Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker #73 and Dr. Solar #1. I was ten years old and emotionally unable to process all this change.

Bugs, Rocky, His Highness King Leonardo, Lulu, Snagglepuss and Woody had always appeared in Dell Comics before this. In fact, I think there was a recent Dell issue of King Leonardo still on that rack. Checkmate was based on a prime-time detective series that I actually watched and knew had been canceled. Dr. Solar wasn't based on anything I'd ever seen before.

I instantly came to the obvious conclusion that Dell had just changed its name to Gold Key. And that was a sound bit of deduction until I noticed that the new issues of two Dell mainstays — Walt Disney's Comics and Stories and Donald Duck — still had Dell cover symbols.

So I didn't know what the hell was going on and it only got worse. Over the following weeks, there were more issues of comics that had previously said "Dell" on their covers that now said "Gold Key" but there were also comics that had previously said "Dell" on their covers that still said "Dell" on their covers. There were also an awful lot of brand new comics coming out, some with "Dell" on their covers (like Felix the Cat #1 and a new Disney book — Goofy #1) and brand new comics (like New Terrytoons #1 and Fractured Fairy Tales #1) that said "Gold Key" on their covers.

As I mentioned in Part 4 of this series, my family and I sometimes drove past a building on Santa Monica Boulevard for a company called Western Publishing and I knew that Dell Comics came from that building. For a few weeks in July of '62, I almost wanted my folks to drive me down there so I could pound on the door and scream, "WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE DOING TO MY COMIC BOOKS???!!"

I resisted the impulse and soon, things settled down. The next issue of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories that came out came out with a Gold Key logo as did all the future Disney comics. I reconciled myself to the notion that Dell had split into two companies, one named Dell and one named Gold Key, and each had some of my favorite comics. As I would learn a decade later, this wasn't exactly true but it was close.

But that didn't end the trauma. There was something else odd about some (not all) of these new Gold Key comics — something on the insides. I'll do some show-'n'-tell about it in the next installment of this series, coming soon. Or at least sooner than this installment did.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE NEXT PART OF THIS SERIES