Monthly Archives: April 2024

You may have seen Matt Granite "The Deal Guy" on YouTube telling you what's cheap this month at Aldi, Dollar Tree, Sam's Club or Costco. I find his videos rather entertaining even though I don't shop at Aldi, Dollar Tree or Sam's Club and my Costco never has anything he finds at his Costco.

Still, every so often, he does a video that could really save anyone serious money. Here he is talking about how to book cheap hotel rooms and I'll bet there are a couple of things in there that you never knew about. I did know about booking through a Vegas hotel's loyalty program. I got rooms at Harrah's for only the Resort Fee a few times. But some of Deal Guy's other tips were news to me, as they'll probably be news to you…

We talk a lot about actors on this blog but the kind that I think interests me the most are those performers whose names few people know but who worked constantly. They usually didn't get famous but they got a lot of jobs. At one point in his career, Jamie Farr was in that category…then he got cast as Corporal Klinger on M*A*S*H. If he hadn't, he would have been like Peter Leeds…an actor who worked constantly but there's no way I can point to one role and you'd all know who he was.

Back in this post, I told you about Eddie Ryder, an actor who was probably on network television every week for a decade or two but never in one identifiable role. The above photo of him is probably from the TV series, Dr. Kildare, where he had a recurring role as a doctor who had a couple of lines (usually just a couple) some weeks.  As I watch old TV shows from the sixties and seventies, I spot him all the time.

Recently, some folks on Facebook have taken to scanning and posting pages from old issues of TV Guide. I noticed this morning a page from Sunday Evening, April 28, 1974.  As you can see below, the CBS affiliate in whatever city this was from was rerunning an episode of Mannix and there's Eddie Ryder's name in the Guest Cast…

So let's say you watched that episode of Mannix and didn't feel like reaching for the remote control after it or — and this was frighteningly possible back in '74 — your TV didn't have one.  You stay tuned for the next show on that channel — a rerun of a Barnaby Jones — and guess who's in it…

I will bet you that isn't the only time that happened. That guy was on TV about as often as Ronald McDonald…or even Jamie Farr.

Recently, the UCLA Film & Television Archive got hold of a rare video and they did a restoration on it. It's an episode of the Kraft Music Hall and it's the oldest entertainment program known to survive on color videotape. The show aired October 8, 1958 on NBC and to be honest, it ain't all that wonderful. But it does have a cameo appearance by Bob Hope, a musical number featuring Lou Jacobi and the opening has a few moments from The Price is Right when it was hosted by Bill Cullen. And it's a piece of history…

This one comes from Martin Lund…

I was wondering if there was a "standard introduction package" for creative talent, recently assigned to a new comic book property, to help them get to know about said property. Say, if for some reason, an artist was familiar with the look of Batman and knew how to draw him, but was unfamiliar with the 85+ years of lore and needed a brush-up (i.e., always remember that Bruce Wayne is now blonde and cross-eyed without his cowl, after that incident with the Joker that must not be mentioned…). Or a writer gets assigned to a new Forbush Man title, but has no idea who that character is — at all (egads)!

Any insights on this to share? Have you even been assigned characters for a comic book that you weren't familiar with, and if so, how did you go about researching and/or learning about them? I could imagine that if we were talking TV shows or maybe even movies, that there would be a show bible. Does that exists for comic books as well?

Almost never. Basically, what you're talking about is within the job description of the editor. When New Talent (writer and/or artist) is assigned to a new book, it's up to the editor to brief them about what they want kept consistent with previous issues…and also what they might want changed. In addition to such instructions, they might supply certain past issues to use as reference — or even tell the new guy not to read certain past issues.

We have had occasional instances where a new person came onto a comic, changed things and readers were irate that he or she had not followed what had been done before. And what the irate folks didn't realize was that the new person's orders were to change the comic and they might even have been told not to read earlier issues.

But generally, the editor tells them everything they need to know and gives them the necessary reference material. Or at least, that's what the editor is supposed to do.

A whole mess of people — Tom Stern and Tom Mason to start — have identified the unidentified person in the photo in the previous post…and I was right to recall his name as Frank. It's Frank McGinty, who I knew from conventions and from the fan group, Capa-ALPHA. If you're reading this, Frank, drop me a note and please accept my apologies for not recalling your surname. Here's the pic again but with his name in place…

Recently, I was talking with the fine illustrator Ken Steacy and he mentioned a photo that he took at a gathering in my living room a long, long time ago. He was counting on my fabled excellent memory to recall the name of one individual in the photo. I absolutely remembered the also-fine illustrators William Stout, Dave Stevens, Steve Leialoha and Sergio Aragonés. I of course remembered the fine writers Len Wein and William Rotsler and the fine could-do-everything Trina Robbins and I could even identify the fine me.  I have added labels accordingly.

What I couldn't recall, and Ken couldn't either, was the name of the gent between Stout and Stevens.  I think his name was Frank but you could put me on the witness stand, swear me in and have me grilled by the entire prosecution team in the Donald Trump Civil Trial and I couldn't come up with that gentleman's name.

If he reads this, I apologize to him…and if you know who he is, could you please let me know?  It may help if you make the image larger on your screen, which you can do by clicking on it.

Audra McDonald sings "I Could Have Danced All Night" from My Fair Lady and then gives her audience the chance to sing it for her and with her. Her whole show from the London Palladium will debut on Great Performances on PBS on May 17…

While recuperating from my broken ankle, I've been living largely on the second story of my home.  I can get down the stairs (and back up) when I need to go to a doctor appointment but it takes a while, strains my healing appendage and kinda requires someone else be present to "spot me," using that term in the way it's used by gymnasts.  Basically, I live upstairs where I have my bedroom, two bathrooms, my office and a few other rooms — everything I need except a kitchen.

In one of my upstairs rooms, I have a small refrigerator and a microwave oven but there's a limit to how much good they can be at mealtime. Every morning, my Daredevil Cleaning Lady comes over, cleans up the rooms I inhabit, lays out clean clothes for me to wear, washes the dirty ones, etc. She also goes down to the kitchen, makes me breakfast and brings it up to my office. Sometimes, she brings me lunch the same way…or I order lunch from a meal delivery service. In that case, the food is delivered to my front step and my D.C.L. (or my assistant if she's here then) brings it upstairs. The point is that I don't go downstairs to get food.

For dinner, I sometimes have something in the upstairs fridge I can heat in the microwave but most of the time, I have a friend visiting and we order something delivered. When it arrives on my doorstep, the friend goes down to get the delivery and bring it up. Last night, the friend was a lady named Adriana. She called to say she was on her way and since she was famished, asked that I order dinner so it would be on my front porch around the time she arrived. Obviously, it wouldn't hurt the chow if it sat there five or ten minutes before she got here.

So I used an app to place the order. I got her what she wanted and I ordered chicken parm for myself. A few seconds later, I received a text message confirmation that my order was being prepared…but they would not, like this restaurant had in the past, have someone deliver it to my porch. They were instead sending a robot — one of these…

The app did not ask my OK on this. It just told me that was how I'd be getting my order.

The restaurant is located 1.3 miles from me and ordinarily, a kid driving a Kia would have my order here in under ten minutes. Instead, the robot would take about forty minutes and would then wait outside on the sidewalk for someone to go out and take the meals out of it. There was no way I could have gotten out there myself to do that…which created an element of concern when Adriana texted that she'd suddenly been delayed in leaving her place.

Apparently, there is a way on the app to request that they send a person instead of a robot but I never found it. I also couldn't find out, at least on the app, how long the robot would wait outside with our dinner before it gave up and headed back to where it came from.

I did learn that the robot is not like a self-driving car with no driver. Someone someplace is piloting it. Where this person is and how they control it and what they can see is a complete mystery to me. And in an area where I sometimes can't drive ten blocks without my phone cutting out on me, I wonder what kind of wi-fi connection the robot has with its operator.

I won't keep you in suspense any longer. Adriana got here before the robot so we could both watch from my office window as it approached. It came down a street towards my house and stopped at the corner where there's a traffic light to wait for a WALK signal.

Most of the corners in my neighborhood are beveled like ramps so a person in a wheelchair could cross but the robot wasn't at one of those corners. We watched as it hesitated to "step off" the curb, then it turned and went down the sidewalk until it found a driveway to enable it to cross. On the other side of the street, it located another driveway to get back to the sidewalk and headed towards me.

Finally, it parked itself in front of my house and I received a text message that it was outside and waiting for me. Adriana had to take my cell phone down and press a button on the text message that sent a signal to unlock the robot's lid. She opened it up, took out our food, shut the lid and brought our supper inside while the robot headed back to the restaurant.

The food was good and it was hot. I guess there's some heating element in the robot that keeps it that way. Still, I'm wondering what would happen if I'd ordered two hot entrees plus a frozen dessert. Or something like fried food that just plain isn't that good forty minutes after it's cooked, regardless of how you keep it warm. The robot did not seem large enough to hold a decent-sized pizza and I would think that that's what an awful lot of food delivery orders are about.

So I've decided I don't care for delivery by robot and if I knew more about how it works, I might care even less. How could this be cost-effective? It's not like those Doordash dashers it's displacing are commanding huge paychecks. Are the robots' drivers located in some foreign country where they can be paid nickels? If so, would that save enough to make up for having to design, build and maintain the robots?

Plus, I think you'd have to have a local human presence to service and repair the robots and to jump into action when one gets lost or tips over or is hit by a car or hijacked or its operator loses contact. We can all think of so many possible disasters.

I already don't like how long delivery-by-robot takes compared to delivery-by-human so I called the restaurant today and asked how I could order and specify a non-robotic delivery. The man who answered the phone didn't know and suggested I call the meal delivery service and ask. He seemed very worried that I would stop ordering from his restaurant because of this…and that puzzled me further. To the long list of things I don't understand about this, add the relationship between the restaurant and the company that operates the robots.

And what I really don't know is how many Americans will be thrown outta work by robot delivery drones. If it's a significant number, that alone would be reason enough to not patronize businesses that utilize them. I don't care how Jetsony it feels to get my chicken parm that way.

Here's a photo of me that looks like I have a chandelier on my head…but I don't care. I don't care because I am flanked by two of the best cartoonists who ever cartooned. The gentleman on the left is Jack Davis and the gentleman on the right is Sergio Aragonés. Mr. Davis was, of course, a contributor to the very first issue of MAD in 1952 and his work appeared in 241 other issues. Señor Aragonés has had his drawings appear in, so far, 511 issues and he's just finishing the cover of an upcoming issue.

If you are a fan of the talents of either man — or of Dave Berg, Paul Coker, Dick DeBartolo, Mort Drucker, Will Elder, John Ficarra, Kelly Freas, Al Jaffee, Harvey Kurtzman, Don Martin, Nick Meglin, Norman Mingo, Antonio Prohías, Marie Severin, John Severin, Angelo Torres, Sam Viviano, Richard Williams, Wally Wood, Emily Flake, Drew Friedman, Peter Kuper, Teresa Burns Parkhurst, C.F. Payne, Tom Richmond, Dale Stephanos and many, many others, this may interest you…

June 8 thru October 27, there will be an exhibition called "What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine" at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA. It will feature more than 150 original art pieces, artifacts and memorabilia stretching back to the publication's beginnings in 1952. Sam Viviano, MAD's long-time art director and one of its great illustrators is lead advising and the co-curators are Stephanie Plunket and illustrator Steve Brodner, and Robert Reiner is assisting with original MAD comics and early magazines, historic text and original art. There will be an opening reception on June 8 and you can find out more about this show, which I dearly wish I could visit, at this web address.

And if you only care about Jack Davis, you may want to take in "Jack Davis – A Centennial Celebration," which takes place at the Society of Illustrators in New York City. The exhibition honors Davis on the 100th anniversary of his birth and it's being curated by Robert Reiner along with Benno Rothschild and Clint Morgan working in cooperation with Jack Davis III. If you want to see a lot of original art from many of Jack's most famous pieces from comics, films, albums and much more, this show runs from June 12 to September 21 and its opening reception will take place on June 20. Info may be found at this web address and again, I wish I could be there.

And now…five minutes of people insulting Bob Hope!

Three weeks ago here, I posted a video all about the history of Chef Hector Boiardi, better known to you as Chef Boyardee. That's the man whose face adorns many a can of what technically qualifies as Italian Food. In the video, a food chef/historian tried to re-create Mr. Boiardi's original recipe for spaghetti and meat sauce — and we're talking here about the recipe that made him famous as a restaurateur, not the recipe that others devised for the canned goods now bearing his likeness.

That video inspired my longtime friend Paul Dini to whip up a batch of Boiardi Meat Sauce. Most of you know Paul as a fine writer of cartoons, comic books and TV shows but he's also a pretty great cook. Someone oughta put his face on cans of Beefaroni.

As you may know, I'm recovering from a broken ankle. I've been having friends drop by for lunch and/or dinner…and tonight, Paul came by with dry spaghetti, butter, cheese and his version of that sauce. He took over my kitchen and proceeded to whip up a big pot of really terrific spaghetti which we devoured while talking about cartoons and comics and mutual acquaintances.

I generally do not let friends cook for me. My numerous food allergies and my narrow palette have led to some unpleasant experiences when someone whose feelings I cared about prepared something for me and I just plain couldn't eat it. But Paul is so good, I may try to sabotage his career. I'd like him to give up writing and open a restaurant, preferably down the street from me. Does that make me a bad person?

Robert Forman wrote to ask…

I looked up a few of my favorite TV shows from childhood in Wikipedia and noticed creator credit given to William Hanna and Joe Barbera. I guess I doubt that they came up with all of those characters. The Wikipedia entry for Quick Draw McGraw indicates Michael Maltese wrote all of the shows, and I'll guess he was the person responsible for the characters in that show. Is there a different standard for credits in animated shows?

Yes…and the different standard is often No Standard. There have been some cartoon shows in the last decade or two that were created under a Writers Guild contract and the creator credit on those (and writer credits) flow from the contract and the rules it lays down. But a lot of cartoon shows in recent years weren't done under that contract and not all that long ago, none were. So we were in that jungle where you could create a cartoon show and the guy who ran the studio could put on a "Created by…" credit for himself or his grandson or his Lhasa Apso.

Now — and from here on, we're in the land of Grand Generalizations — animation is more likely to lead to team creation work with writers and artists sitting around a conference table and tossing out ideas and maybe sketching. It might be hard to nail down the point in the process where a given character was officially "created." Bugs Bunny went through a couple of cartoons with changes to his voice, attitude and looks before he solidified more or less into the Bugs we know today. There are even disputes as to which cartoon exactly was the first Bugs Bunny cartoon.

That kind of "gang" creation has been the rationale for the claim that a given cartoon series was the creation of the team, not one or two individuals; ergo, crediting (for example) Hanna and Barbera as creators of everything their studio did for a period. I don't think that was usually fair, I think a lot of cartoons were the creations of one person or one team and I think almost all live-action films or shows have one or two creators.

But anyway: The answer to your question, Robert, is that Quick Draw McGraw is said to have been created by Hanna and Barbera because they owned the studio then.

You know what this world needs? It needs a production of My Fair Lady performed entirely by children…

As People magazine and other "news" sources will tell you…

Dick Van Dyke has made history with his 2024 Daytime Emmy Award nomination! On Friday, April 19, the 98-year-old actor became the oldest person to earn a Daytime Emmy nomination with his nod for guest performer in a daytime drama series after starring as Timothy Robicheaux on Days of Our Lives.

This is true and congrats to Dick. But what none of those sources seem to be telling you is who Dick would be beating out for the honor of being the oldest person to win a Daytime Emmy…

On Sunday evening, June 17 of 2012, I had the honor of escorting June Foray to the Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony at the Bonaventure Hotel. That's me with the messy hair standing next to her, making sure she didn't fall off a rickety box they'd placed behind the podium so the audience could see her as she became (I believe) the oldest recipient of a Daytime Emmy as of this moment. She was 94 years, 8 months and 30 days old that day. A year later, she also received an honorary Emmy so if you count that, she was 95.

Dick and June are two of the nicest, most talented people it has ever been my good fortune to know…so I'm not sure who to root for. Dick has five prime time Emmys and a Tony Award so I think I'm going to hope he loses so June can retain her honor for a little while longer.

As longtime followers of this blog are sick of hearing, I love the movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I usually refer to it as my "favorite" movie rather than the "best" movie ever made…and I pick that adjective because when you use the word "best," there's always some clown who wants to correct you as if you'd stupidly said that 2 + 2 equals 749 or that the Mona Lisa was painted by Desi Arnaz. Like it's an established fact that whatever he thinks is the best movie is The Best Movie — end of discussion, you chowderhead!

"Favorite" cuts down on that, at least a little…though a few years ago, I did have one guy stop me at a convention and try to convince me that my favorite movie was not my favorite movie; that my favorite movie was actually his favorite movie. In fact, it was probably your favorite movie too, even if you didn't see it.

All that is one of the reactions I get when I say Mad World is my favorite movie. Another is that every few months, I get a call or e-mail from someone who wants me to tell them how to go visit The Big "W" from that film. I got one this morning from someone who read this article that I posted here. That piece was written by my dear, no-longer-with-us friend Earl Kress, who did once make the sacred pilgrimage to visit the location.

I need to inform the gent who wrote this morning that, first of all, that article is about thirty years old. Secondly, I have never bothered making that trek because I've been informed — reliably, I think — that the current owners of the property do not indulge visitors the way the previous owners did. I have also been told that there is absolutely nothing left there that in any way matches up with what was there when the movie filmed in 1962. The last of the four palm trees that formed The Big "W" fell down or was cut down a long time ago.

There are locations that can be visited. Stick "it's a mad mad mad mad world filming locations" into any search engine and you'll find all you need. The most recognizable and easiest-to-get-to is probably the California Incline, which is a road/ramp in Santa Monica that leads down to the Pacific Coast Highway. The ramp itself was completely rebuilt a few years ago but the area there still has the feel of the same period and a couple of key scenes were shot there.

But there's no reason to visit The Big "W" today, starting with the fact that there is no Big "W" there. And the $350,000 payroll from the tuna factory was dug up a long time ago.