Category Archives: To Be Filed

A piece I posted over on my News page about Bill Cullen brought an amazing amount of response, including this note from Rich Twoley…

I had never realized how on those quiz-panel shows, the producers were making an important decision when they decided who to start the questioning with.  Did that apply to all shows or just I've Got A Secret?

All shows.  But it was especially evident in the famed "Mystery Guest" segments on What's My Line?  People occasionally accused a show like that of being rigged…of giving the answers to the panel.  There was, of course, no reason why they should do that, since the show was most entertaining when the panel was lost and guessing wildly off the target.  In fact, on What's My Line? and a couple of other game shows (especially The Name's The Same, which Game Show Network occasionally resurrects), it's obvious they were sometimes giving panelists false leads so their questions would be funnier.

On What's My Line?, they had to prevent the panelists — especially Bennett Cerf and Dorothy Kilgallen, who were fierce competitors — from knocking off the Mystery Guest too quickly and prematurely ending the fun of the game.  This was difficult because the main source of Mystery Guests was folks who were either performing in New York at the time or making the rounds to promote a soon-to-open movie or other project.  If Bob Hope had a film opening in Manhattan any day now, there was a better-than-average chance he'd be the Mystery Guest.

Kilgallen was a reporter and before each broadcast, she'd go over the newspapers and press releases to make up a list of likely Mystery Guests.  Cerf went her one better: As the publisher of Random House books, he had a whole staff that dealt with publicists and book tours and who was in town for promotional purpose.  He'd have the staff make up a list for him and, before the show and during commercial breaks, he'd pull it out of his pocket and cram for the Mystery Guest spot.

To make it more difficult for him, the producer (Gil Fates) would usually have the questioning commence with Cerf.  If he didn't…if the person before Cerf asked, "Do you have a movie opening this week?" and the Mystery Guest said yes, the odds were that Bennett would nail it on his first question.  Having him ask the icebreaker question generally ensured that the game would at least last until each of the four panelists had asked a question.

The problem got worse in later years when they did the syndicated What's My Line?, which Game Show Network has just begun rerunning again.  Apart from occasional guest shots, Cerf had departed but Soupy Sales was on the panel, and Soupy was too good at guessing the Mystery Guest.  He knew every obscure show biz celebrity — and on the syndicated version, some of them were pretty damned obscure — and, no matter what the vocal disguise, he could recognize most voices.  Fates, who was still producer, appealed to Sales to go easy.  Not only was the entertainment value of the endgame suffering but the shows kept running short and it was necessary to pad with lame interviews.  The Soupman, however, wasn't about to miss a chance to win.  To try and cut down on his quick identifications, the producer instituted a new rule, which they called "Fates' Law."  It specified that if a panelist guessed a name and was wrong, the panelist had to remove their blindfold and sit out the rest of the game.  It slowed Soupy down, but only a little.

I mentioned in the Cullen piece that one obstacle to a new wave of panel-type game shows might be a lack of great panelists.  Another could be a paucity of experienced game show producers who know how to set up and run a contest for maximum entertainment value.  Guys like Gil Fates had done them for years in the formative days of television — and some even in radio.  They perfected the rules of their games and how to make them work.  In today's TV industry, where shows have to prove themselves quickly or get axed, they'd never have the chance.

I've figured out how to get very wealthy at the Comic-Con International: You just have to get everyone to give you one dollar when they gasp and say, "I don't believe how big this con is."  And to get very, very wealthy, collect a buck from everyone who wonders how it is that a comic book convention can attract more than 65,000 people but most comic books can't sell a fourth as many copies.

Actually, no official number has been announced.  65,000 is just one estimate that's floating around the Internet and I've also seen 75,000 and up.  One site is claiming 125,000 which is obviously way over but indicative of how overwhelming the whole con felt.  Whatever the total, it's obvious that a lot of us just attended the largest comic-oriented convention ever held on this continent…and, yes, it's still a comic book con, though just barely.

Among the many things I found amazing was that there was so much to do.  Fifty different attendees could have, in effect, experienced fifty different conventions.  I just read a message from someone who apparently never strayed far from Artists' Alley but was still busy for every moment of all four days.  Others spent their time getting autographs, buying comics, previewing upcoming movies, etc.  Whatever you wanted, it was there…somewhere.

Me, I spent the time moderating panels and having a wonderful time.  Yes, it was fatiguing but I wouldn't have missed any of the dozen events on which I got to interview fine folks.  One moment I will not soon forget is when I introduced Ray Bradbury to a packed house and perhaps as many as a thousand people jumped to their feet and gave him an ovation that is probably still reverberating throughout the convention center.  Alas, I had to leave that panel halfway-through in order to host another one but, from what I could see, Julius Schwartz took over the interviewing with terrific skill.

The game show was fun, interviewing Bob Oksner and Herb Trimpe was fun (and educational) and we seem to have a new annual event in the "Quick Draw" competition.  Four cartoonists — Scott Shaw!, Erik Larsen, John Romita Jr. and Sergio Whatzisname — drew instant silly pictures as I prodded and poked them and solicited suggestions from the audience.  All the program items went well and, sore feet and bad concession stands aside, I can't think of a single thing I didn't like about this convention.

Which is, in a way, amazing to me.  I've been attending comic book conventions since 1970.  I've been to all 32 San Diego gatherings and many others, and I'd started to get bored by them.  I was even reaching the point where, halfway through the second afternoon of a con, I'd go back to my room and get in a few hours at the laptop, rather than hang around, autographing issues of Groo and surveying boxes of old comics I already own.  But this year, this con, I really enjoyed myself.

I hope you were there.  If you were, you probably had as good a time as I did…even though you probably attended a completely different convention.

Two tiny controversies seem to be erupting with regard to The Late Show With David Letterman and its Emmy nominations this year, or lack thereof.  Both relate to Letterman's moving 9/17 broadcast, his first following the tragedies of 9/11, the one on which Dan Rather broke into tears.  The Late Show was nominated in the category of "Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series."  The way the process works, the nominated entries must submit a tape of an episode for the judges to view so they can determine who gets the Emmy.  As recounted here in The New York Observer, Letterman's show submitted the 9/17 broadcast and some folks think that's tacky or perhaps exploitive.  The other controversy appeared in a column by David Bianculli in The New York Daily News which I won't link to because they charge money to read it.  Basically, it complains that…

In the category of Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program, for the period June 1, 2001, to May 31, 2002, David Letterman was not nominated.  This is the man who gave television one of its most important entertainment hours of the entire season: his Sept. 17 "Late Show With David Letterman" on CBS, six days after the terrorist attacks on his adopted city and home base.

I think both issues are pretty frivolous and I wonder if everyone really understands the procedure by which Emmy Awards are nominated and awarded.  Basically, there are three stages to receiving an Emmy…

One is the submission.  The show or individual submits whatever they believe qualifies in a given category.  So if it's a category for Outstanding Performance By An Individual, David Letterman's people submit his name, in effect saying, "We think David should be considered in this category."  If it's a category for a series (i.e., "Outstanding Series"), they submit the name of the show.  If it's a category for an individual episode, they submit the episode number and the date.  A screening committee then rules on whether each submission qualifies in its category, eliminates those that don't, then compiles the nominating ballots.

That brings us to the second stage: The nomination.  Ballots go out.  Ads are purchased. A lot of us get tons of tapes and DVDs in the mail.  (This year, Everyone Loves Raymond sent every voter both a tape and a DVD of two episodes and F/X sent us a box of tapes that lit up with a ring of battery-powered lights when you opened it.)  Voters throughout the Academy vote on the list of all eligible entrants, checking off their choices.  The ballots are returned and tabulated, and the top vote-getters in each categories become the nominees.  So if someone or some show doesn't get a nomination, it means either that (a) it wasn't submitted or (b) it didn't get enough votes from members of the Academy.  I would guess that (b) is the case in well more than 99% of the glaring omissions.

The third stage is the final voting: The nominees are asked to submit tapes that can be screened by the Blue Ribbon judging committees.  If the nomination is for an individual, they're asked to send over tapes of what they consider their best performances.  If it's for a show, they send over a couple of their best episodes.  If it's for a specific episode, they send over tapes of that episode.

The judges vote and the Emmy gets awarded.  End of story.

Letterman's show was nominated in four categories: Writing, direction, technical direction and "Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series."  As mentioned, they've reportedly submitted Dave's September 17 show as an example in the last category and it's bothering some folks, who consider it the exploitation of something that shouldn't be exploited.  I don't know that I have an opinion on that but I'm guessing that it will work and it's not a big deal.

(By the way, because folks always wonder about this: Except when the Emmy is for a specific episode, the clips that are shown on the Emmy broadcast are not necessarily from the submitted episode.  So they may or may not show a clip from that episode on the awards show.)

Now then.  The piece in the Daily News makes what I consider a very silly statement about the fact that Letterman wasn't nominated as a performer…

The executive committee of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences should rethink the unfairness of the competition in this particular category.  But before that, they should look at themselves in the mirror and accept the guilt and shame that ought to come from allowing such a pivotal TV performance to go unrecognized.

This is silly because, even as the category is defined, Jon Stewart got a nomination.  Does anyone think that there's something wrong with a process that puts Jon Stewart and David Letterman in the same category?  No?  Well, that's the only thing that the executive committee can control…the way the categories are defined.  If the voters didn't vote for Letterman in sufficient number, it's hardly a sign of "guilt and shame" on behalf of the administrators of the awards.  (Or there's another possibility — that Letterman wasn't submitted — which wouldn't be the exec committee's fault, either.)

It is the perhaps-unfortunate nature of any kind of competition in which human beings vote that, sometimes, they don't vote the way you think they should.  This applies to award competitions but also to things like electing presidents, senators and governors…all of which involve a vastly more mature selection process and one which most voters probably approach with more consideration.  When someone moans that the Oscar or Emmy or Grammy went to the wrong person, I always want to ask, "Do you think the right person is always elected to public office?  If not, why would you expect that something as inconsequential as an entertainment award be decided by a flawless procedure?"

Yes, the Academy could have reconfigured the category rules in a manner that would have made it more likely…perhaps even guaranteed that Letterman would have been nominated.  But that would almost certainly have meant breaking two categories — male and female — into four, creating two more Emmy awards.

This is one of the problems that the Emmy Awards face: There are too damn many of them.  Every time someone doesn't get a nomination they think they deserve, they petition the Academy to break out some job description and lower the bar.  It's like if I don't get nominated so I run in and lobby to create a new category for "Outstanding script by a 6'3" half-Jewish kid who previously wrote Porky Pig comic books."  The funny thing is that, in the past, the Academy has occasionally given in and configured a new award that seems slanted to favor one potential winner…and when they've done this, someone else has popped up to win the first one.

None of this is very important.  Nothing about entertainment awards is very important.  But if we're going to have them, let's just play by the rules and not get bothered when that doesn't yield the result we think it should.  David Letterman has a shelf full of Emmy statuettes and will probably pick up another for Outstanding Series.  Somehow…call me reckless…I think the world can survive him not winning this year for Individual Performance.

Here's the way I always heard the story…

One day in the seventies, Paul Newman was having dinner with a friend of his, Ron Buck.  Buck was a writer, artist and entrepreneur who had, among other ventures, built the 9000 Sunset building, as well as a trendy West Hollywood discotheque known as The Factory.  He had worked without credit on several of Newman's films, and he and the actor would later share credit for the screenplay of the 1984 Harry and Son.  Buck was also great at cooking hamburgers on his backyard barbecue.

He had recently inherited an old house in which his mother had lived…on Highland Avenue in Hollywood, a few blocks south of Sunset.  The other dwellings on the block were now housing real estate offices and Buck was trying to decide if he should sell the property or lease it to some business or what.  Somehow, the suggestion arose that he open a gourmet burger restaurant there…a place where folks in the movie business who could afford better than Hamburger Hamlet could get one of Buck's specialties, served with a glass of expensive wine.

The story then gets a bit murkier.  Some say Newman put up the money and Buck put up the expertise and management.  Since Buck was pretty wealthy, this may not be true, or it may be partially true.  Some say Newman just agreed to be a frequent customer and to allow Buck to exploit that fact in publicity.  Either way, the house was remodeled into a restaurant, mostly by enclosing the backyard.  There was a wonderful, gnarled old tree in the middle of the yard and, rather than remove it, the renovators bricked in the ground around it and allowed the tree to remain, reaching up through an opening in the newly-installed roof.

The place was named Hamptons (no apostrophe) because it was to reflect the fun and leisure of vacationing in the Long Island community known as The Hamptons.  Various burgers were named for various friends and soon, it became a very "in" spot for folks who worked at nearby studios, such as Sunset-Gower or Paramount.  The place didn't do much of a dinner business but, at lunchtime, it provided a welcome alternative to the fast food emporiums and taco stands of the neighborhood.  At some point, it became so lucrative that Buck opened a branch on Riverside Drive in Toluca Lake.  Some say that after Newman had recouped his initial investment thrice over, he withdrew whatever financial interest he had And gave full ownership to Buck.  That is, if he even had any financial interest in it.

As you can see the story of Hamptons and Paul Newman's involvement is a bit fuzzy.  I vouch for none of the above, but for the fact that the two outlets of Hamptons became very popular.  Once upon a time, it was impossible to get a table at lunch without a long wait.  People loved the eighty varieties of burgers, including Stan's Fantasy (with sour cream and black caviar), The Nelly Burger (creamed horseradish and bacon) and The Foggy Bottom Burger (peanut butter and sour plum jam).  People also loved the little buffet that accompanied each burger, allowing you to further dress your sandwich and pile the plate with salads and side dishes.  The menu did not include french fries — odd for a burger joint — but if the German Potato Salad available in the buffet wasn't to your liking, you could order a platter of Potatoes Hamptons, which was basically hash-browns with sour cream.

I have dozens of memories of Hamptons, commencing when I worked at various studios up in Hollywood and we'd eat there once a week.  It was a great place to spot celebrities and/or talk about that new screenplay.  One friend of mine said it was the best place in Hollywood to meet out-of-work actresses who were waiting tables.

One time, I was lunching with the star of a TV special I was producing and we had a little trouble with a fellow at an adjoining table.  He was a bit drunk and he kept banging his chair into our table and acting like it was our fault.  Finally, my dining companion told him to knock it off, and the drunk stood up like he was ready to start brawling.  My friend stood up to face him and the inebriated gent suddenly realized he was staring at famed dirty wrestler, Roddy "Rowdy" Piper.  He immediately paid his check and left, and Roddy and I returned to our burgers.

This was in the mid-eighties.  As that decade ended, so did the popularity of a lot of restaurants in Hollywood.  An amazing percentage of them folded and Hamptons, while it managed to stay open, was rarely crowded.  It also wasn't very good.  I believe — again, this is fourth-hand info, maybe more — Buck passed away, as did the fellow he had managing the two eateries for him.  Whoever was running it tried a lot of different things, including the introduction of french fries, but it didn't help.  Around 1990, I had a meal there that was so lousy, I scratched Hamptons from my list of places to go.  I was not alone in this decision.

Then, just a few years later, the two outlets of Hamptons were put up for sale, and were quickly purchased.  One group of investors bought the one in Toluca Lake, completely renovated it and  since they didn't get custody of the name, reredubbed it "Mo's."  The original Hamptons on Highland became Hamptons Hollywood Cafe and the group that purchased it also did a lot of remodeling, bringing in a new chef and adding new items to the menu.  For some reason, they installed a "car phone" in the parking lot…a phone booth made out of an old Nash Metropolitan.  And they rounded up a number of investors, one of whom was me.

I never expected to make any money off my investment and, indeed, I didn't.  The whole point of it was to be able to say to friends, "Hey, let's have lunch at my restaurant."  Taken on that basis, it was a lot of fun.  The folks who actually operated the place had a lot of good ideas, some of which were quite amusing.  Since Hamptons had catered largely to an industry (show biz) crowd, they instituted an unusual pricing policy.  Members of the Screen Actors Guild, Writers Guild and Directors Guild paid 10% less, while agents had to pay 10% more.  The latter was meant as a joke but, amazingly, there were actually diners who said, "I'm an agent.  Do I really have to pay 10% more?"  A few of those who asked were told yes, and they did.

The quality of the new Hamptons varied a lot.  Sometimes, it was a great place to eat; sometimes, not.  I didn't have much to do with it except to (a) rewrite the menu to make it sillier, (b) make occasional suggestions and (c) add one menu item: The Groo Burger, based on the way my partner Sergio Aragonés likes his served…Grilled onions on top, then Mozzarella and Cheddar melted over the onions.  I also had the supreme honor of having the barbecued chicken sandwich named for me and so consumed many.

But business was never too good and, in the last year, it declined to an intolerable level.  The place was sold and, for several months, "closed for remodeling."  Last week, they tore down the house where Ron Buck's mother had once lived, and even uprooted and removed that grand, majestic tree.  As of yesterday, when I went by and took the above photo, all that remained of Hamptons was the Nash Metropolitan and half of one of the signs.  I'm not sure what the new owners plan to do with the land, though rumor has it they've decided on condominiums instead of another restaurant.

I already miss Hamptons, even though I stopped going in there about a year ago.  It's not my investment I miss.  I figure, I had enough fun and discounted chicken sandwiches to almost call it even on that count.  I just always found it to be a friendly place to lunch with real good burgers and a great crowd.  What more could you want?

In the above photo, the big guy on the right is Gene Moss, who for most of his career was a top comedy writer, often in tandem with a gent named Jim Thurman.  The little guy on the left is Shrimpenstein, the title character of a short-lived but well-remembered kids' show on Channel 9 in Los Angeles.  Shrimpenstein ran every Monday through Friday at 5:00 in the afternoon.  It was done live and a casual viewer might sometimes have gotten the notion that the managers of KHJ had gone out in the alley, found two drunks, bought them a few extra pints and sent them out to do a TV program, ostensibly for toddlers.

The station was going through a period where it was acting like its parents weren't home.  During this time, it also tried an afternoon dance party show called Groovy, which was broadcast live from Santa Monica Beach.  Fathers all across Los Angeles were racing to get home in time to watch the 15-year-old girls in bikinis flash the camera.  Some left work early so they could also catch Moss and Thurman's televised Happy Hour.

Shrimpenstein went on the air in January of '67.  At the time, almost every local TV station was trying to work a Soupy Sales knock-off, some of them amazingly close.  Channel 9 also offered up — briefly — a morning man named Bill Holly whose show was a precise clone of Soupy's: Pies in the face, guys at the door, dog puppet-gloves reaching into camera range, etc.  Same show but not as funny.  Shrimpenstein incorporated most of the same elements: One guy on camera, another working puppets just off-stage.  The difference was that this show was set in a kind of Transylvania castle with Moss playing Dr. Von Schtick, who was supposed to sound like Boris Karloff but who sounded more like Bobby "Boris" Pickett on the record, "Monster Mash."  Actually, late in the run (sometimes, late in any given episode), Moss would tire of the accent and announce, "I'm sick of this stupid voice" and just drop it.

His partner Jim Thurman was the unseen guy, playing various roles.  They had two "White Fang"-type hairy gloves.  One was Klaus, who was some kind of rude creature who, like Soupy's canines, reached into the scene from next to the camera.  The other came out of a box like "The Thing" on The Addams Family.  He was called Wilfred the Weiner Wolf because he was originally the spokeswolf for a brand of frankfurters that bought much of the commercial time on the program.  Then one day, Wilfred — who muttered everything under his breath so he sounded like an obscene phone caller — started explaining that their sponsor used only the finest ingredients, including live kitty cats.  Dr. Von Schtick gasped (this was apparently not in any script) and asked Wilfred, "You don't mean this fine product actually grinds up cats?"  Wilfred answered, "Yeah…they take people's kitty cats and throw them in the vats."  Following that broadcast, the hot dog company was no longer involved with Shrimpenstein and Wilfred was occasionally grumbling about having lost his weiner.

That was how it often went on Shrimpenstein.  It became one of those shows you were afraid to not watch for fear you'd miss Dr. Von Schtick exposing himself on the air or Wilfred saying the "f" word.  None of that occurred but there was forever a sense of danger.

One time, they were off the air because there had been a fire at the Channel 9 transmitter that had blacked out the entire station for much of one day.  The following afternoon, Dr. Von Schtick explained that he had been the cause of the blackout because one of his experiments had gone wrong.  There was a huge toggle-switch on the set — they called it "The Bull Switch" — which he would often throw to start a cartoon or something.  He walked over and, to demonstrate what he'd supposedly done the day before, threw the switch…and the station went to black again, this time intentionally but only for about thirty seconds.  That thirty seconds, however, was enough to panic the station managers who thought the transmitter had blown up once more.  One of them reportedly was on the phone screaming and firing technicians when he finally realized that it wasn't another disaster; just Moss and Thurman screwing around again.  (Around this time, the station also gave up on a micro-budgeted late night talk show hosted by Moss and Thurman, with Stan Worth as their bandleader.  For no visible reason, Gene and Jim were dressed as basketball referees and, going in and out of commercials, they would toss free throws through a hoop on the set or make their guests try.)

At times, Shrimpenstein was almost an average kids' show, as per the Soupy formula.  Soupy had his puppets, Pookie and Hippie, who would mime to records.  Shrimpenstein had The Tijuana Bats, who would dance to records that were played at double-speed, a la The Chipmunks.

Early on, they tried running the Marvel Super-Hero cartoons that had just been produced by the Grantray-Lawrence studio on the lowest of budgets.  Dr. Von Schtick would introduce each as, "Another Marvel mediocrity" or "Another one of those cartoons where nothing ever moves."  One time, he even suggested that kids switch over to Channel 11 and watch Roger Ramjet…a good cartoon.  Moss and Thurman had been the head writers, and had provided occasional voices for Roger Ramjet.  KHJ must have loved that.

And, of course, two or three times a week, Moss would get hit with a pie.  On the very last show, he dragged Thurman on-camera and pelted him with about ten of them.

Their last telecast came abruptly.  As I recall, they didn't say it was their last show, though they seem to have known.  The following Monday, Dr. Von Schtick and Wilfred and the Tijuana Bats were gone, and one of the station's newsmen was awkwardly working Shrimpenstein.  (Moss and Thurman hadn't had much more success with the dummy, which was built by famed puppet-maker Wah Chang.  First, Moss had tried supplying its voice but he was no ventriloquist.  Then, Thurman did the voice from off-camera while Moss clumsily moved the mouth, never remotely in sync.  Then, for a time, they just ignored their title character whenever possible.  I seem to remember one show where Dr. Von Schtick announced that Shrimpenstein would not be appearing that afternoon because "no one remembers where we left the stupid puppet.")  The show only lasted another week or two after their departure.

Soon after, there was a much-publicized rally in Griffith Park.  Billed as a campaign to get Shrimpenstein (the Moss-Thurman version) back on the air, it reportedly turned into Gene and Jim just doing all the material Channel 9 wouldn't let them do, angering some parents who'd brought their kids.  It was the last time I know of either performing anywhere.  For a time, they wrote for different TV shows, including a stint with Bob Hope, and operated a small company that produced humorous commercials.  At some point, they split and Moss worked for various shows and advertising agencies, while Thurman became a key writer for The Electric Company and, later, Sesame Street.

Thurman continues to work at such projects but Moss passed away last week, following a short bout with pancreatic cancer.  I never had the pleasure of meeting either gent in person (I spoke to Thurman a few times on the phone) but as a devout Shrimpenstein watcher, I feel like I've lost one of my childhood buddies.

(P.S. Thanks to Scott Shaw!, who shares my fond memories of the show, for pointing out an egregious error I made when I first posted this.  It has, of course, been fixed.)

Yes, I saw that Pink Lady and Jeff, a show I worked on long ago and far away, made TV Guide's list of the 50 Worst TV Shows of All Time.  It clocked in at #35 and I think I'm annoyed that it wasn't either higher or lower.  I never quite understand these lists.  It always seems like some of the listings are "bad" in a good way, others are "bad" in a bad or incompetent way and still others are "bad" in an offensive way.  I also wonder if some of the folks who voted in this one, whoever they are, even saw all the shows — like Turn-On or You're In the Picture — or if they're just going by reputations.  (I saw both of those one-night wonders, by the way.  Turn-On was by no means a bad show.  It was yanked after one airing because some of the more conservative ABC affiliates didn't like its politics, though ABC found it easier to say viewers disliked it.  You're In the Picture wasn't much worse than the average game show of its day but it earned its "fame" because the host, Jackie Gleason, went out the following week and spent the entire half hour apologizing for the first episode.)

By the way: The show I worked on was never actually called Pink Lady and Jeff.  That's what everyone on the show and at the network wanted to call it, and it slipped into some NBC promos and publicity that way.  But the company that owned the Pink Lady act was quite insistent that the name of the show be Pink Lady and no Jeff.  At one point, they were threatening to sue anyone who called it Pink Lady and Jeff, or even to withhold their stars' services.  The second threat caused a lot of us to say, "Oh, please, please," but they never made good on it.  (The two girls who comprised Pink Lady, Mie and Kei, couldn't have cared less.  They just wanted to get the six episodes over with and go back to Japan.)

The title was argued about for weeks before the show debuted.  More effort went into it than into the show.  Finally, someone high up at NBC — it may have been Fred Silverman — went to the lawyers for the Pink Lady company and said, "We must have Jeff Altman's name in the title of the show."  The lawyers came back and said, okay, fine.  They would consent to it only if the title were phrased so as to make clear that Pink Lady was/were the star(s) of the show, more so than Jeff.  They suggested the title be — and it actually was, for a couple of days there — Pink Lady Starring Mie and Kei With Jeff Altman.  Everyone finally gave in and the title became Pink Lady, with the "and Jeff" used unofficially and with occasional threats of legal action.  I still think that if we could have gotten rid of the Pink Lady part and gone with just Jeff, it would have been a darn good show.

E-mail buddy Cory Strode writes:

I was a huge [Dennis] Miller fan, and love most of what he does, but this year the show just hasn't been as good as in year's past. He's lost that sharp edge and was really harping on older topics…it's time to let O.J., Bill Clinton and the like go.  Sadly, the last two times I saw him perform here in Minneapolis (a year apart) he did pretty much the same stand-up…you have talked in columns past about how comedians have a "solid 45" of old material they know works and use it if they feel the act not doing as well as they would like.  Sadly, Miller did his solid 45 with very few variations, which is bad for a comedian who is best known for his quick wit and topical humor.

I pretty much agree with the above.  Dennis Miller has no greater admirer than Yours Truly.  He genuinely brought a fresh, witty approach to stand-up at a time when too many guys were up there asking, "What's the deal with these people who work at 7-Eleven stores?"  I've had people tell me Dennis Miller jokes without identifying the source and I said, "That sounds like something Dennis Miller would come up with."  How many other comics of his generation have a distinctive style not just of delivery but of writing?

But I agree, that style does not lend itself to much repetition.  I could (and did) hear Sam Kinison do the bit about world hunger a dozen times and always enjoy it…but when Miller repeats something, it just sounds like old material.  I saw him live only once.  It was at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas with Rita Rudner as his opening act.  This is maybe seven years ago.  She was very funny but when Mr. Miller took stage, the show was darn near over.  He didn't do one line that I hadn't heard from him before and, even if I hadn't known the jokes, most of them were about "current events" that had long since been retired as topics from most other comics' acts.  Worse, he did the whole set with an attitude that suggested he had the limo double-parked and couldn't wait to get his check and get the hell outta there.  I felt like yelling back to the stage, "Hey, Cha-Cha!  We didn't fork over half a C-note apiece for the ducats to see some clown whose energy level makes Perry Como look like Roberto Benigni on crack."

Still, you know what?  I like him so much, I was willing to write that one off as a bad night.

I'll even forgive him his last month or three of Dennis Miller Live, which have not been up to standard, making one suspect he knew the end was nigh.  There was a lot of crankiness there without a punch line attached.  Except when he's really, really liked his guest, he's been acting like the limo is triple-parked and blocking oncoming traffic…

And I still like the guy.  I'll miss that show and would love to see it land somewhere else because, when he was enjoying it, so was I…and I think it was the perfect vehicle for him.  Even if that show doesn't survive in some format, I'm sure he'll turn up in something else and be terrific in it.  At least, until he loses interest…

According to a press release I just received, NBC has purchased the right to rerun the 1962 Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol later this year.  Also according to that press release, June Foray is in the voice cast of that holiday special, which is not true.  But, assuming the rest of it's accurate, this is an interesting move.  The animated adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol was always, I felt, one of the two most entertaining cartoon specials ever produced for TV, the other being A Charlie Brown Christmas.  The Magoo affair succeeds despite rather dreadful animation…poor even by the standards of limited television animation.  Matter of fact, the special's previous owner was at one point considering whether it might have more marketability if they went back and, using the exact same audio track, did all new design and animation.  He (the late Henry Saperstein) never did…but when he told me he was contemplating the cost-benefit ratio, I said, "You're not going to touch the script, voices or songs, I trust" and he said, "Oh, God, no.  You couldn't improve on any of that."

He was right.  Jim Backus, Jack Cassidy, Paul Frees and the others are terrific, even if none of them was June Foray.  And the score by Jule Styne (whose name is misspelled in that press release) and Bob Merrill is first-rate…one of the few times an animated TV special has thought to go out and engage top Broadway composers.

Someone at Classic Media (new proprietors of the nearsighted Quincy Magoo) pulled off a deft move in arranging this.  The special has been out on tape and rerun on low-profile cable channels for years, and you wouldn't think it would go back to network.  I'm guessing someone at NBC was a big fan on it as a kid, plus Classic Media was probably willing to give it to them cheap to get Magoo back in the public eye.  Even if they let NBC run it for nothing, it would be a wise deal for them and, of course, for NBC.

I don't think a lot of people realize how prime-time network animated specials have virtually gone the way of the passenger pigeon.  Disney does a few for ABC but they're mostly a matter of that company producing something they can market in many venues, one of which is ABC prime-time.  And there are a few more Peanuts specials in the pipeline, which ABC is doing because they think it's sound marketing to marry one of their Winnie the Pooh specials with a Charlie Brown show to fill an hour slot.  But there are very few specials of any kind being produced these days for ABC, NBC and CBS, and even fewer of the animated variety.

Few people seem to have noticed this.  Every few months, I'm approached by someone who has a property — a comic strip or a character from some other venue — they hope to adapt for animation.  They often speak of the weekly series they see as inevitable and then toss off, "And we might be willing to warm up by doing four animated specials a year for one of the major networks."  I'm not sure the major networks, collectively, are producing four new animated specials a year of all the available and proven properties put together…and even at the peak of such production, you had to have a helluva track record to get more than one a year.  Managing one for a new character would be an incredible achievement…though that could change.  The few that are airing have done pretty well and if Magoo continues the trend, that could bode well for more production.

One hopes we'll see Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol via a good, newly color-corrected print and that, assuming it's in an hour slot, the edits to allow more commercial time will be done more judiciously than has usually been the case.  The best Merrill-Styne song (the ballad, the name of which I do not know) usually hits the floor first, often followed by Magoo's opening "Broadway" song.  A friend of mine swears he once saw it with the one of the three ghosts eliminated, though I find that unlikely.

In any event, I think it's a terrific show.  It's also a pretty terrific adaptation of Mr. Dickens' story…in many ways, more faithful than some of the more serious, live-action attempts.

In the category of "Movies I Kinda Liked Even If Nobody Else Seems To," we have the 1974 remake of The Front Page, directed by Billy Wilder and starring the two guys in the picture above.  No, it's not as wonderful as the 1931 version with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien, and it especially isn't as wonderful as the 1940 version, which was entitled His Girl Friday, which put Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in the leads.  A lot of critics hated the '74 incarnation and legend has it that when Carol Burnett — who plays the heart-of-gold hooker — found herself on an airplane with The Front Page as the in-flight movie, she got up, commandeered the P.A. system and apologized to all aboard for contributing to such a stinker.  (She's actually the worst thing in it, and I say that as someone who usually loves Carol Burnett.  But she's miscast and her role is burdened with awkward expository dialogue and an over-the-top window-jumping scene.)

Still, no film with Lemmon and Matthau is without interest and there are quite a few terrific character actors aboard to support them, including Vincent Gardenia, Martin Balsam, Charles Durning, David Wayne and Herb Edelman.  Even when those guys are drowning, it's fun to watch them swim.  Austin Pendleton pretty much steals all his scenes in the role of a nervous leftist sentenced to swing…and gee, Susan Sarandon sure is pretty.

Anyway, I watched the DVD the other night and found myself enjoying the proceedings despite the overacting, a few curious anachronisms and a resolution that depends too much on a coincidence.  Maybe it's that's wonderful command that Lemmon and Matthau seem to possess.  Everything they say, everything they do seems convincing.  They did a few later films that not even their chemistry could salvage but this, I decided, was not one of them.  Wilder said that he felt he'd been "done in" (his term) by such obvious casting.  Jack and Walter were so perfect for the parts, he said, that he never stopped to think whether the movie itself was a good idea. It probably wasn't in terms of serving the underlying material…but I don't care.  I just love watching those guys.

Time to recall another toy from my childhood: I was never particularly into toy guns but around the time I was eight, Mattel brought out what momentarily seemed like a Must-Own.  It was the Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun…a tiny toy derringer built into a belt buckle.  The premise here was that you were caught unarmed by the bad guys.  "Put your hands up," they'd command and, since they had more conventional Mattel cap pistols (like the lethal Fanner 50 model) trained on you, you'd comply…and it would look like you were done-for.  But!  What they didn't realize was that you, shrewd lawman that you were, were wearing your Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun belt buckle.  Just as they were about to pull their triggers, you would stick your tummy out and spring the control on the obverse side of the buckle.  Suddenly, the derringer would pop out and fire at whoever was standing in front of you!  What a secret weapon.

Of course, in real life, it didn't work precisely the way it did in the commercials.  Few toys of my childhood ever did.  First off, if you exhaled too much — or sometimes, for no reason at all — the derringer would spring out and fire before you were ready.  The answer to this was that there was a little lock on the bottom of the buckle.  Just before you were ready to fire, you had to take the lock off…which, of course, telegraphed to the bad guys that you were up to something and they would kill you before you could.

Another problem was that, in the commercial, the good guy would pop the buckle and shoot one bad guy, then snatch the derringer off the buckle lever and use it to fire several more shots, felling the other villains.  This looked neat in the commercial but once you got your Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun, you discovered that it could only fire one shot before you had to stop and reload.

This took about five minutes.  Mattel Shootin' Shell guns worked with a three-part ammo.  One part was a plastic bullet — this was the part that actually fired.  The derringer came with ten of these and after you shot people, you had to run around and find your plastic bullets so you could reuse them.  Often, you couldn't, so you had to run out and buy another pack of plastic bullets.

You would insert one plastic bullet into a metal casing with a little spring in it.  The derringer buckle came with two.  Then, you'd take a page of Mattel's special caps — little round, green ones on a sheet of peel-off labels.  You'd apply one cap to the back end of the bullet casing and you'd have a complete bullet you could insert into the gun and fire.

It was all a clumsy, awkward assembly and half the time, the cap would not explode so the plastic part of the bullet would be launched with an unexciting thud.

I remember having a semi-wonderful time with my Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun for about three days, or until I'd acted out the big ambush scene with all five of my friends.  Then I stuck it in the back of my closet and got out my Chutes-'n'-Ladders board game.  It didn't make a loud bang but at least it didn't force me to crawl around in the grass looking for my plastic bullets.  Paladin — the guy on Have Gun, Will Travel — never had to do that.

The E! Network has been running hour versions of the first five seasons of Saturday Night Live — shows I haven't seen in quite some time.  I recall liking the series a lot when it first debuted, even though I felt a lot of its "innovation" involved putting on TV, the kind of sketches that groups like Second City, The Committee, The Groundlings and various National Lampoon troupes had been doing for years.  (And, if we believe certain members of those teams, sometimes the exact same material.)  I thought SNL was fascinating to watch, often not because of what they were doing but just to see what they'd do next.  At the same time, there was a certain smugness about the show, and an occasional nastiness, that made it difficult to completely embrace.  I suppose I liked individual performers and sketches more than I liked the show as a whole.

Over the Fourth of July holiday, I watched about a half-dozen episodes from the first five years and found myself enjoying them very much.  Like most reruns, the shows looked chintzier than I remembered and, even with a half-hour lopped out of these shows, some had some deadly dull sketches.  Still, I'd forgotten how good most of the cast members were and how sharp most of the writing was.  The famed episode hosted by Richard Pryor had me laughing out loud, and even some of the "nasty" jokes didn't seem as arrogant as I'd recalled.  I was also amazed how many sketches I did not remember.  The running bits — things like the Coneheads and the Greek Diner and Emily Litella — stick in our mind and it's easy to remember the show as just those routines.

One thing which I think hurt my memories of this show is that it was syndicated many years ago in a half-hour version.  Some shows just don't work in short doses.  (Laugh-In was spectacularly ineffective when they syndicated it that way.)  I suspect that when they edited those 30-minute programs, they concentrated on the recurring sketches and dumped a lot of the one-shot bits.  If so, it would explain why the show seemed so repetitive when I watched those reruns and why so many of the non-series sketches seemed new to me this week.

E! runs the shows in no discernible pattern.  They've been running one a night, Monday through Friday, but they seem to be moving to a 2-a-day schedule this week with episodes hosted by Elliott Gould, Buck Henry, Julian Bond, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin (3 different), Lily Tomlin and Rick Nelson.  I'm watching to see if they're going to air the ones hosted by Milton Berle and Louise Lasser.  These were the two that Lorne Michaels felt were so awful that he decreed they would never be rerun.  But at least 30 minutes of the Lasser one made it into the syndication package of half-hour episodes…so perhaps he's softened on his pledge.

Everyone who ever avidly read comic books has a couple of issues in their past that made a big impression on them; that linger forever in the memory like a favored childhood toy.  They may not be the best comics ever done but they hit you at just the right moment with ideas and imagery that were at least new to you.  Just like a guy never forgets his first girl (or vice-versa), you never quite forget your first favorite comic book.

For most folks who are around my age — I hit the half-century mark last March — that favored first comic is usually a DC or Dell from the late fifties/early sixties.  My friend Al Vey — the comic book artist with the shortest name in the biz, one letter less than Jim Lee — always remembered a Dell/Disney special called Donald Duck in MathMagic Land, which came out in 1961.  He told me this some years ago at a party at one of the San Diego Conventions and, by one of those loopy coincidences, we were standing next to Don R. Christensen when he said it.  Don is a lovely, older gent who has been in animation and comics forever, and who was an extremely prolific funnybook author.  When Al said what he said, I immediately turned him around to face Don and made him repeat it.  The conversation went as follows:

Al: I was just telling Mark that my favorite comic book when I was growing up was a special called Donald Duck in MathMagic Land.

Don: (after a moment of reflection) Oh, yes, I wrote that.

I love moments like these: Al was thrilled to meet the man who'd created his favorite comic book.  Don was thrilled that someone Al's age (and in the business) remembered the book all those years and loved it so.

Anyway, it wasn't the first comic I bought or even the hundredth but I always liked Around the World With Huckleberry and his Friends, a Dell Giant that came out the same year as Al's fave.  The book was drawn by Pete Alvarado, Kay Wright, John Carey and Harvey Eisenberg.  Years later, when I began writing comics, I got to work with the first three of these gents and — I have to admit — there was a giddy little thrill there.  It was the same as the thrill I got working in TV with people like Stan Freberg and June Foray, whose work I vividly recalled loving as a kid.  Never got to write a comic drawn by Harvey Eisenberg — he died before I got into the field — but I did work with and became good buddies with his son, Jerry.

The writers are unknown but, at the time, a lot of these comics were being written by Vic Lockman, Jerry Belson, Del Connell, Lloyd Turner and several others.  Lockman and Don R. Christensen were the most prolific writers but Don tells me he didn't work on this particular book.

Its contents may seem unremarkable — short stories of various Hanna-Barbera characters of the day, each dispatched to a different foreign clime.  Huckleberry Hound went to Africa, Pixie and Dixie to Switzerland, Yakky Doodle to Australia, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy to Ireland, Yogi Bear to Egypt, Snagglepuss to Spain, Snooper and Blabber to England, Hokey Wolf to Italy and Quick Draw McGraw to the Sahara Desert.  I can't tell you what I found so delightful about it and I really don't want to oversell it, since the joy of most of the stories was in their simplicity.  But the Hokey Wolf tale, to name one, was about a criminal who was running around Rome, chopping up all the spaghetti so it was impossible to get long strands.  At age 9, that premise and its resolution (the culprit was a messy eater, traumatized by having stained his clothes, determined to make chopped-up spaghetti popular) struck me as outrageously funny.

I'm not suggesting you seek this comic out.  Unless you're nine, it probably won't have the same impact on you…and it also helps to have a certain fondness for the early H-B characters, as I still manage to retain.  I don't like everything that I liked then but somehow, the early Hanna-Barbera output — the characters primarily voiced by Daws Butler — still strike me as amusing.  And of course, when I devoured the comic books of them, I had Daws's superb voice and comic delivery in my head, and was able to read the word balloons accordingly.  It all made for a comic that has stayed with me for more than forty years.  Best twenty-five cents I ever spent…

Time to reminisce about another food product of my childhood…and I'm being very liberal with my definition of a "food product" by applying it to Flav-R Straws.  They were, of course, another plot by the chemical geniuses of Corporate America to turn kids' milk some odd color.  In this case, the options were pink and a pale beige, though they somehow claimed these had something to do with "strawberry," "chocolate" and other "flavors."

A Flav-R Straw was an ordinary drinking straw with a flexible section — so you could bend it towards your mouth instead of moving your head two inches — and an odd, semi-toxic filament.  Nestled inside each straw was a piece of porous material — a paper product, I suspect, though it could have been a sliver of animal skin, for all I know.  The tiny strip was impregnated with the alleged flavor — that is to say, alleged chocolate or alleged strawberry or alleged whatever — and a whole load of Industrial Strength Food Coloring in brown or red variety.

The premise was that you'd stick one of these suckers in a glass of milk and then, as you sucked upon it, the pristine, white moo juice would pass through the filter and take on the hue and taste of it.  And as you repeatedly dipped the straw, the remaining milk in the glass would be similarly transformed. My recollection is that it really didn't work that way or that well.  For one thing, to get the milk through the blockade at all, you had to suck so hard, you practically developed a compound hernia in your cheek muscles.  For another, even the small amount of milk that made it through was only faintly tinted or altered in any way.  You could transfer a bit more "flav-r" to the milk by rapidly dipping the straw into the glass and withdrawing it, over and over for about an hour, but this felt silly and it still turned the liquid only slightly off-white.

Most kids just gave up and removed the Flav-R strip from the straw and tried sucking directly on it.  Employed that way, it would yield a bitter taste but, at least, it turned your tongue brown so that had some value.  Still, Flav-R Straws were a colossal disappointment…and, now that I think of it, that had a value, as well.  We all have to learn in life that some things just don't work as advertised.  Better we should learn it on something as silly and low-cost as Flav-R Straws.  It fosters a kind of Consumer Skepticism that can be very handy, later in life.  Then again, so can learning to suck real hard.

One last remembrance of Flav-R Straws: One time when we were both straining to get milk through ours, the girl who lived down the street from me asked what would happen if you tried to use a Flav-R Straw in a glass of Coca-Cola.  I told her she would instantly die.  She decided not to chance it.