Monthly Archives: October 2024

If a legal free copy of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein could be found on the Internet, I'd link you to it here as it's, to me, the perfect Halloween flick. Instead, you'll have to settle for this well-made short documentary on the Abbott and Costello Meet [Name of Monster] films. Most comedians made movies that called for them to be really, really scared but nobody was better at being really, really scared than Lou Costello — except for some Democrats I know at the moment…

I'm not paying much attention to the election. You can easily find articles online where learned men and women will predict every possible scenario next Tuesday so there's not much point in reading any of them. I've decided to save up my outrage for then because you know that no matter how the ballots are counted or what the count will be, Donald Trump will do something to piss off half the country.

I watched a smidgen and a half of the World Series…which is more than I usually watch by about half a smidgen. I, of course, missed Vin Scully and I, of course, didn't think the Dodgers won that last game so much as that the Yankees lost it. That fifth inning was included in the smidgen I did watch and I'll bet it was pretty exciting for folks who care about these competitions more than I do. I seem to be incapable of rooting for a team — or deriving joy from their victories — just because they have the same home base city as I do. I did not inherit that trait from my father who would have loved every second of a Dodgers victory.

I may be more interested in how television covers this kind of event than I am in the event. They seemed to have eighty million cameras out there to show us every move from every possible angle…to the point when I was sometimes momentarily confused as to whether what I was watching was a new bit of action or the ninth replay of the previous bit of action. And when some cameraguy with (I guess) a steadicam was running along with a player, the player looked to me like a videogame animation. I'll think about this more in a few years when I watch another smidgen or two of some future Fall Classic.

Congrats to the Dodgers but I really can't muster any feeling like I won anything. I keep hearing the Yankees referred to as the losers…and I keep thinking that the real losers are all those folks who would have profited mightily if the series had gone to Game Seven.

This is my almost-annual post about why I don't like Halloween. I run it each year and usually I change the name of the anti-gay person in the last paragraph — but if you've read it before, there's no need to read it again…

At the risk of coming off like the Ebenezer Scrooge of a different holiday, I have to say: I've never liked Halloween. For one thing, 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.

When I got home, I had a bag of "goodies" I didn't want to eat. In my neighborhood, you got a lot of licorice and Mounds bars and Jordan Almonds, none of which I liked even before I found out I was allergic to them. I would say that a good two-thirds of the candy I hauled home on a Halloween Eve went right into the trash can and I felt bad about that. 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. Absolutely no one likes candy corn. Don't write to me and tell me you do because I'll just have to write back and call you a liar. No one likes candy corn. No one, do you hear me?

I wonder if anyone's ever done any polling to find out what percentage of Halloween candy that is purchased and handed-out is ever eaten. And I wonder how many kids would rather not dress up or disfigure themselves for an evening if anyone told them they had a choice. Where I live, they seem to have decided against trick-or-treating. In earlier versions of this essay, I used to say, "Each year, I stock up and no one comes. For a while there, I wound up eating a couple big sacks of leftover candy myself every year." But I haven't had anyone at my door for three or four years now so I don't bother.

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."

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'll be home for Halloween and not up in West Hollywood wearing my Mike Johnson 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.

Walter Lantz ran a cartoon studio that made films from roughly 1928 until 1972, most notably of his character Woody Woodpecker but also of Andy Panda, Chilly Willy, The Beary Family and others. Like just about everyone else who made cartoons during his heyday, he began putting them on television in the fifties. The Woody Woodpecker Show debuted on ABC in 1957 then went into the syndication market a year later. I became a regular follower of it around 1958 when I was six and it wasn't the cartoons that delighted me. It was a short live-action segment most weeks when Mr. Lantz himself would teach us how cartoons were made.

I learned a lot of my cartooning skills from that program and also from a book called Easy Way to Draw which was published under Lantz's signature. I never got deep enough into cartooning to do much of it as a profession…which was fine because writing came to interest me a lot more than drawing. But up until about the time I entered high school, I could draw cartoon characters, Lantz's included, better than most kids my age…and I can still draw Woody about as well as I could when I was eleven.

Woody Woodpecker cartoons never meant as much to me as the output of studios like Warner Brothers or Jay Ward or Hanna-Barbera but I still felt a connection to Walter Lantz, in large part because of those drawing lessons and insights into how cartoons were made. After my mother passed away, I found in a closet in her house, a Woody Woodpecker comic book story that I wrote and drew when I was about eight, give or take a year. Twelve years after I was eight, I was actually writing the real Woody Woodpecker comic book.

Some years after that, I was at the Grand Opening ceremony for an art gallery specializing in animation art and June Foray introduced me to Walter Lantz who, in turn, introduced me to his wife, Grace. Grace was the voice of Woody Woodpecker for a few decades and it's said — I don't know if I believe this — that she got the job by submitting an audition tape without her name on it. In other words, Walter hired the new voice of Woody without knowing it was his wife he was hiring. Do you buy that?

Anyway, I was very glad to spend some time with them and of course I told him how much his work had meant to me and how I'd worked on the comic books and that like it or not, he had a lot to do with the direction in which my life wandered. He was utterly charming and exactly like the guy in those little live-action segments on The Woody Woodpecker Show. Here's a collection of some of them…

Hey, can anyone who uses an iPhone suggest a good Blackjack app for mine? I want one that's free with no ads or "in-app purchases" or which I can try out and then, if I like it, pay a few bucks for it and never get ads or offers of "in-app purchases." I've tried a few and I keep finding myself in commercial breaks for some variation of Tetris they want me to buy.

This may or may not be the last one of these before the election.  I'm not thinking that much about it and I have the feeling that with so much early voting and so much we've heard about the match-up, the winner has already been decided.  We just don't know who it is yet…a condition which may persist for quite some time.  I mean, we know Donald Trump will insist it was rigged unless he wins near-unanimously.  We know there will be anomalies and some voting sites or counting rooms about which accusations will be made.  Someone will swear they saw a voting machine change their vote to the candidate they didn't intend to vote for.  I'm just plain tired of it all.

One thing I'm really tired of is supposed news stories that come out of nowhere.  No one witnessed them.  No one has any evidence of them. No one stands behind their accuracy.  But someone may taken them as true and someone has to debunk them.  Politifact is now debunking a story that's making the rounds that Beyoncé was paid $10 million smackers to endorse Kamala Harris.

There's no source…no explanation for how anyone could find this out…and it doesn't make a lot of sense. First of all, I'm not sure you could get Beyoncé to do anything for a measly $10 million. She makes that much humming in the shower. Secondly, how would anyone find out about such a transaction?

Speaking of showers, it's like Trump's story about Arnold Palmer. Where the hell did that come from? I don't think golfers even shower together but if they did, does one of them run out and tell…oh, never mind. It's amazing how people give any credibility to a story that has no source and no logical source…and obvious reasons for someone to just make it up outta nowhere. And I'm not the only one who feels that way. Just last week, Abraham Lincoln told me he was fed up to the top of his stovepipe hat…

I link here to a lot of videos about Saturday Night Live and also about The Muppets.  Here's a twenty-minute documentary on how The Muppets were a part of the early days of SNL.  It was not a happy marriage of talents…

Jeff Bezos has written this editorial-type statement defending the Washington Post's decision — which is to say, his decision (ultimately) — to not endorse in this presidential election. This is in response to many subscriptions being canceled since this was announced. He doesn't say how many it is but N.P.R. says it's over 200,000, which is a pretty substantial number. He also does not talk about how many members of his staff have resigned in protest.

He does say "I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy." He's right they should have made it earlier. He should have made it before (reportedly) the editorial staff had decided the paper should endorse Kamala Harris.

I was (past-tense) a Washington Post digital subscriber — for $120 a year. Interestingly, when I clicked on the link to cancel my sub the other day, I instantly got a message that offered me an almost-immediate $60 rebate on my subscription should I decide to not cancel. I suspect everyone does not see this…only those of us who have some certain number of weeks left on their current subs. In my case, it's a lot. My subscription was on auto-renewal and it renewed on September 26. I declined the offer and am curious as to whether I will soon have discounts waved in front of me to rejoin.

I have access until September 26, 2025 and otherwise, nothing has changed except that now when I go the Washington Post website, I get a message that warns me I need to renew soon or I will lose full access. Yes…in 332 days. I have ample time to decide.

I started going to Las Vegas around 1986, just in time to pay one (1) visit to the Silver Slipper casino on The Strip.  I went in and walked around the place, absorbing the sense of Old Vegas that it had then….a sense that is nowhere to be found in that city now.  I played a little Blackjack and as was my custom then, left when I was ≈$50 ahead.  If you play long enough, you'll eventually lose everything so the trick to winning is to accept a modest win and move on.

The place intrigued me and I figured I'd go back on my next visit to Vegas and explore the Silver Slipper in greater depth…but on my next trip, it was in the process of being demolished. I was momentarily concerned that my big win had put them out of business but I decided that probably wasn't the problem. The land became a parking lot for the Frontier Hotel until the Frontier Hotel was demolished and now both their former sites are empty lots….very, very valuable empty lots. Some super-sized megaresort that costs zillions to build will sprout on that real estate someday.

But the Silver Slipper had an interesting history.  It opened in 1950 and for most of that decade, it offered three things that brought players to its doors.  It had one of the best buffets — great food at a teensy price, available 24/7. It had the rep, true or not, of offering slightly more beatable games than other casinos. And it had the most popular burlesque shows in town, usually headlined by some woman who was famous for disrobing and some comic who'd been a Top Banana back in the days of Minsky's. The comic was often Hank Henry or Tommy "Moe" Raft and they did three or four shows a night including often one at 3 AM.

Vegas doesn't offer shows at that hour anymore but it did then. All the headliners at other hotels — including Frank Sinatra and Johnny Carson when they were in town — were known to flock to that 3 AM show to watch the top comedians of that tradition.

All was well at the Silver Slipper until 1964 when the place was shut down by the Nevada Gaming Control Board for using "flat dice" at its crap tables. "Flat dice" are gimmicked dice and these were not gimmicked to favor the players. It was one of the very rare instances in Vegas history of an established hotel cheating its customers and all the other Vegas casinos demanded it be stopped and prosecuted.

One of the big selling points for wagering your paycheck in Vegas instead of your local bookie or backroom crap game was that in Vegas, the games were allegedly honest. The other hotels wanted to protect that reputation, as undeserved as it may have been at times. Eventually, new management reopened the Slipper but then in 1968, Howard Hughes bought it which was never good for any casino.

Thereafter, the Slipper struggled to stay competitive with the new hotels that were being built that could offer more comps, hire bigger performers for their showrooms, offer plusher rooms and just seem more modern. In 1977, the big sign at the Silver Slipper that said "BURLESQUE" changed to "BOYLESQUE" and the performers were thereafter female impersonators headlined by a guy who did Joan Rivers. Reportedly, this was good for business but still, the Hughes company sold it in '87 to the folks who turned it into a parking lot and that was the end of the Silver Slipper.

But getting back to those burlesque shows: I have a fascination with that kind of comedian and a regret that I never got to see any of them work in their natural habitats. I can still see Laurel & Hardy, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers — performers like that — at their peak. But very little film exists of the Hank Henrys or the Moe Rafts and what's around is amateurishly produced and obviously not them at their best. (Keaton, by the way, did a few tours of duty in the burlesque revues at the Silver Slipper. So did Billy Gilbert, as well as Joe DeRita in his pre-Stooge days.)

If I could go back in time with Mr. Peabody in his WABAC machine, I think I'd like to see this show that played the Silver Slipper…

Hank Henry…The Girl in the Champagne Glass…and Bela Lugosi, who was (I assume) their "Dracula in person" on the same stage?  That had to be one hell of a show.  "The Bela Lugosi Revue," as it was called in ads, ran from February 19 until March 27, 1954. Vegas then was a booming town with new homes and hotels being built at a brisk clip. Residential areas were springing up and often, streets were named for whoever was headlining in the town at the moment. There was (and may still be in some cases) a Fred Astaire St., a Peter Lorre St., an Elvis Presley Ct. and, yes, a Bela Lugosi St. That may have been the only honor Mr. Lugosi got out of his time at the Silver Slipper.

It was not a good time for him. He divorced his fourth wife in 1953, married his fifth in 1955 and was in the process of divorcing #5 when he died of a heart attack in 1956. Obviously, he was appearing in a Vegas burlesque show because he wasn't making a living in Hollywood, working only occasionally in movies like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952) and a couple of Ed Wood masterpieces. His last really good film — and I mean this, it's a great movie — was Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948.

What did the show consist of? I wish I knew…and unless I get a ride in one of them time machines, we may never know. But it's kinda fun to imagine…

From Randall Jessica Rainbow…

As I've mentioned here more times than I've plugged Frank Ferrante, my favorite movie is It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Another film of the sixties that I like a lot is The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, which was written by William Rose. Mr. Rose and his wife Tania wrote It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and there are a few tiny connections. In one film, Jonathan Winters has to ride a shaky girl's bicycle and in the other, Carl Reiner does. Also, Reiner and Winters were in both movies as were a couple of other folks like Paul Ford and Ben Blue, and both movies had wonderful poster art by Jack Davis.

The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming is another movie that can be viewed for free — at least in my country and a few others — on YouTube but it cannot be embedded on this site. So I've set up a link for you. Click on the image below and it will take you there. It's a fun film and it's largely stolen by Alan Arkin who was not too well-known at the time. But he sure was after this…

My longtime pal Paul Harris and I agree on most things but I don't think we do on this issue of newspapers declining to endorse presidential candidates due to their wealthy owners fearing retaliation from Donald Trump. Here's what Paul had to say and he's right that no newspaper endorsement is going to swing undecided voters.

But first of all, it's a bad precedent for newspapers to do anything out of fear of retaliation from the government.

Secondly, undecided voters aren't going to be completely swayed by anything as toothless as a newspaper editorial but some might be moved by the feeling of consensus out there. Hearing that almost all the major newspapers have endorsed Harris might be meaningful to some people. It might be a factor in causing someone to think she can't possibly be as dangerous for America as Trump and his sycophants are screaming.

No, the Washington Post editorial page didn't bring down Richard Nixon. But the editorial page kinda speaks for the management of the newspaper and the unwavering support the newspaper puts behind its reporters has had a lot to do with the effectiveness of their reporting. The regime then of Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham said to Nixon, in effect, "You can't push us around." The current regime is saying, in effect, "Well, you can on some matters."

Barnum was a musical which I never felt got enough attention. It opened on Broadway at the end of April in 1980 and stayed there for 854 performances, which was a pretty good run. I suspect one reason it isn't revived more often is that it requires a leading man who can sing difficult word patter songs, walk a tightrope, do other physical feats and be charming while being conniving. Also, circuses are not in great favor these days.

One person who filled the bill to play the title character was Michael Crawford, who starred in the London production. He worked hard to play the part and if you want to know how hard, watch the video at this link.

The London production was, fortunately for us, captured on video and released in many formats. It's now on YouTube but, alas, I cannot embed it here for technical reasons. Ah, but if you click on the image below, you will be transferred over to YouTube and you can watch it there…

Hello. This is a rerun from July 16, 2015 and insofar as I can tell, nothing in it has changed so no update is required.

I always hear people who've "made it" (in whatever field) tell folks who haven't: "Never give up. If you keep pursuing your dream, eventually you will succeed." This, I do not buy. I mean, it's a lovely thought — like marriages are forever and good always triumphs over evil — but it's just not so. Bet you can name twenty people who will do everything humanly possible to become President of the United States but will never spend one night in the White House.

I explained more about my viewpoint on this back here and in other posts. Right now, I want to tell you a story about someone I knew who never "made it." A few of you reading this will recognize who I'm talking about and if so, please keep it to yourself. I'm posting this to enlighten others, not to humiliate him…and I'm going to call him Harlow.

Harlow wanted very badly to be a famous cartoonist but I don't think his dream really included the part where you sit at a drawing table for twelve hours a day and draw, draw, draw. Whenever we talked about his goals, he seemed to only be interested in the part where he makes a lot of money and people say, "Hey, there goes a famous cartoonist." He idolized people like Jack Kirby and Milton Caniff but never grasped a key element of their success. Those two men worked their butts off for their entire lives.

So right there, I thought he had a basic misunderstanding of the career he sought. That alone can be fatal to most goals in life.

He didn't give up but he also didn't try very hard to improve his work. He half-heartedly signed up for a few classes and missed half of them. He didn't spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sketching like most artists need to do to get good. He'd just sit down, dash off a drawing every so often…then he'd wait for someone to throw money at him for it. This never happened.

I also thought there was another obstacle to him achieving his career objective: He was a terrible artist.

If he had tried harder, he would have been better but how much better, we'll never know for sure. My hunch is that he'd never have been great and might not even have ever gotten good enough to have a real career in the field. I further suspect that deep down, he may have known that and not seen the point of working harder at it.

His hope was that somehow — he had no likely idea how — he'd land a high-paying cartooning job and then he could hire talented assistants to do all the work. This was not entirely without precedent and here's one example of many: After Bud Fisher launched his newspaper strip, Mutt & Jeff, he hired ghosts to put in all those hours at the board. One of them — Al Smith — wrote and drew it for 48 years. As long as Fisher was alive, Smith did it all including the part where he signed "Bud Fisher" on every strip.

Harlow more or less hoped to emulate Fisher but there was a fundamental flaw in that plan: Bud Fisher did have the talent to draw the strip. He wrote and drew it for several years before handing it off to assistants. He made it successful enough that he could afford assistants. Harlow couldn't have done the first part which meant he never could have gotten to the second part.

Still, he tried and tried to break into cartooning work. He had a portfolio of samples which he forced upon anyone he thought might be able to hire him or recommend him to someone for work. When he thrust it before my eyes, I tried — honest, I tried — to think of somewhere in the cartooning world where there might be a place for him. I could not come up with one. This, alas, did not stop Harlow from trying to get work on a recommendation from me.

One day, he went to the Los Angeles offices of Western Publishing Company, which were then located on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across the street from the famed Chinese Theater. Western published many kinds of publications but he was mainly interested in the Gold Key Comics line, half of which was edited out of that office. The other half were edited in the firm's New York office. L.A. did comics like Tarzan, Woody Woodpecker, Scooby Doo, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Woodsy Owl, Pink Panther and all the Disney titles as well as many, many more. I was writing many of them at the time.

There would later be some disagreement as to how he represented himself there that day. Del Connell, an editor for Western who agreed to see him, said that he announced he was a friend of Mark Evanier and that I had sent him with my highest recommendation. Harlow later swore to me that he had merely mentioned he was a friend of Mark Evanier…which I guess was true. Del — a trusting soul — did not call me to check and see if what he heard Harlow say I'd said was what I'd said. I had not said that.

Del looked at his samples and decided Harlow was nowhere near qualified to draw or ink or even letter for their comics. This was true. Still, the guy seemed so eager…or maybe so needy. And there was one job Del had open at that moment…

Western was then publishing a few comics in digest format. Most of what was in them was reprints of material done for conventional-sized comics and that presented a problem. You couldn't just shrink an entire page drawn for a regular-size comic book down to the size of a digest comic page. They tried that for a time and realized the images were too small and the lettering was way too small. Also, the proportions of the pages did not match up.

So what they began doing was to have two sets of stats made of each of the old stories they wanted to reprint in digest format. They were reduced to two different sizes. Someone would then take these stats and repaste the panels in a new layout. They would take the artwork and rearrange it to fit the digest format, putting fewer panels on each page. A story that was 12 pages in the original format might be 16 or 18 pages in digest format.

They might take the images (as opposed to the lettering) in a given panel from either of the two sets of stats but they would take the word balloons wholly off one set so the lettering would be of a consistent size throughout. They'd rearrange that which needed rearrangement and paste all this up and it would then be necessary to do some minor art here and there, extending the background of a drawing or finishing a figure. Also, the rearranger would have to draw new panel borders around each panel.

If my explanation confuses you — and it would sure confuse me — take a look at the image below. It may explain things far better than I can here. On the left is a page as it ran in a comic book with the conventional page dimensions. At right is a portion of the material on that page reconfigured for a digest page. Note how someone drew in a few little things that weren't there before…

Okay, so it was mostly a cut-and-paste job but it did require some minor artistic skill to reposition images and to fill in a bit of minor drawing here and there and to rule new panel borders. Del decided to give Harlow a shot at this. They were at that moment preparing an issue of Walt Disney Comics Digest that would be all Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories by the great man himself, Carl Barks. Del explained to Harlow in great detail what had to be done. Then he gave him the stats to one Donald Duck story and sent him on his way with a one-week deadline.

Harlow was in heaven. He was a professional artist working in comic books…and on a Carl Barks story, no less.

Others who had done such work for Western could have done the job in a few days. Harlow took three weeks, most of which was spent coming up with other things he had to do before he could tackle the assignment…like, say, go to the movies. Finally though, he turned in the finished job. Del pronounced it utterly unusable.

The paste-ups were sloppy. The panel borders were shaky and blotchy. The places where he had to extend Barks' artwork were obvious because Harlow's linework didn't come close to matching what Barks had done. Del only had to look at the first page to realize that the whole job had to be redone by someone else.

As he paged through the rest of it, he got angry. He had explicitly told Harlow to extend Barks' drawings as necessary but not to change them in any other way. Harlow had done little additions and changes to the figures themselves, adding a new pattern on someone's shirt or adding gratuitous hair to some character's head. In one spot, he had added eyelids on Donald Duck, changing the facial expression Barks had drawn.

This was Carl Barks, widely hailed as the best artist who ever drew these characters…the creator of some of them. Harlow, an absolute beginner, had decided to "improve" Barks.

Harlow had also hidden his name on almost every page, writing it in on signs in the background or as graffiti on walls. Carl's name appeared nowhere on the story but Harlow's appeared in about fourteen places.

Del told Harlow that the job was unacceptable. They would not use it. He would not pay for it.

Harlow responded by screaming and crying.

Here, roughly, is how Del described it to me on the phone two minutes after he got Harlow out of his office: "I told him I wouldn't pay him for it and he began yelling and having some sort of breakdown. Everyone else in the office rushed in to see what was wrong. He started crying about how he wanted to be a cartoonist all his life and everybody was conspiring to deny it to him and how I was the latest one and he was not going to put up with us doing it to him any longer!

"I finally agreed to pay him half as a kill fee just to be rid of him. Zetta filled out the forms to pay him and then he left." Zetta DeVoe was the Associate Editor and Office Manager. She later confirmed Del's account to me as did others who worked there.

That phone conversation from Del to me had started with him saying, "Mark, that guy you sent me really screwed up the job I gave him." To which I replied, "What guy I sent you?" That's when Del told me Harlow had said he had my recommendation.

I told Del, "I wish you'd checked with me because I never sent him to you" and Del admitted that, yes, he should have done that. Before the call ended, I told him, "If you need someone to paste up digest pages, I can send you someone I do recommend."

I got off with Del and called a friend of mine named Rick Hoppe. Rick is now a top animator who's worked on Disney films and others but at the time, he was a beginning artist with more talent than most long-time professionals. He ran up to Del's office and picked up the stats to another Barks story that was slated to run in the same digest. He took the job home, repasted everything and I went in with him two days later when he delivered it. Del said what he did was perfect. No changes necessary.

Rick wound up doing that kind of work — and other, more complicated assignments — for Western Publishing until others started offering him far better art jobs. The third or fourth assignment he got from Del was to totally redo the Barks story that Harlow had ruined. Del ordered up two new sets of stats and Rick repasted them using none of what Harlow had done.

Harlow and I discussed the whole incident twice. The first time was the evening after Del called to tell me my "recommendation" had flopped. Harlow swore to me he had not said I'd recommended him. He also insisted he did a perfectly fine, professional job and that Del had said what he'd said in order to try and cheat him out of his fee. He was proud that he stood up to Del and got half of it.

Eight to ten months later, I was at a weekend comic convention that was held in a hotel up in Universal City. Harlow was present and he came up to me and asked if I knew if the issue of Walt Disney Comics Digest with his work in it was out yet. The digests had odd distribution and were very hard to find in some areas. I got my copies in the bundles I picked up at the office.

I told Harlow that the issue in question had gone on sale a few weeks earlier but his repasting job had been redone by someone else. He did not believe me and he went off to find a dealer in the room who had copies. Several did and Harlow bought every copy he could find on the premises.

He told me — like I was stupid enough to fall for that lie about his work being unacceptable — that it was definitely his paste-up. "They took out my name in all the places where I put it but I recognize all my little additions and changes."

The person I'm calling Harlow is no longer with us. To his dying day though, he refused to believe that his work had not been printed. Not only that but on his résumé, he listed it as a credit, phrasing it like he was Carl Barks's collaborator. He did not even indicate that he was referring to, at most, one reprint. If you read what he wrote, you might have thought that all those great Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books were drawn in the first place by Carl Barks and Harlow.

That wasn't the only credit on that résumé. Through sheer persistence, he got a few others — some, even real. Sadly — and I really mean that — at no point did he ever get near a living wage in the cartooning profession. There was never a moment when someone pointed his way and said, "Hey, there goes a famous cartoonist," which was the main thing he wanted. I know I felt bad for the guy but I was never sure if it was because he didn't get what he wanted or because he wasted so much of his life trying to attain the unattainable.

I told this story here because at Comic-Con last week, an aspiring writer asked me for some advice and I quoted my oft-offered belief — I'm sure I've said it on this blog and more than once — that to become a writer or actor or almost anything of a "glamorous" nature, one must find the sweet spot between Idealism and Pragmatism and not have an excess of either.

The newbie seeking my counsel instantly understood what I meant by an excess of Pragmatism. You don't get far by limiting yourself to what you absolutely know is possible. He asked me for an example of Too Much Idealism and I started to tell him the Harlow story then said, "Wait. I'll post it on my blog after I get home from the con and sleep for at least three days." Today is Thursday so there you have it.

I really believe in this concept I came up with — at least, I think I came up with it — about the balance of Idealism and Pragmatism. Everyone I've ever known who has failed has had too much of one and not enough of the other. You can't achieve a dream if you don't have one…but you also can't succeed in the real world without having at least one foot in the real world. Harlow had about half his little toe in there, maybe less.

This time around, we have two of my favorite movies. If you've never seen It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World before, I suggest you not watch it here, especially alone, especially on a small screen. Wait until some theater near you is running it on a big screen with a big audience because it really needs both. But if you've already seen it that way and just want to refresh your memory, here it is…

And here are Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in The Fortune Cookie from 1966. I had this movie up once before and a lot of you wrote to say you enjoyed it…