If you've got twenty-eight minutes to spare today, spend them watching this video. It's called Great and it snagged the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film at the Academy Awards in 1976. It's actually sorta animated — a combination of various media used to tell the story of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a 19th century British civil engineer and architect. That may not sound like an interesting subject but I saw this film at an animation festival shortly after it came out and spent years trying to find a place to see it again.
It's a British film directed by Bob Godfrey, a very clever filmmaker who is often credited as inspiring Terry Gilliam's animation for Monty Python. If you watch this film, you'll see why people say that…
Writing this blog can be very educational. Since I posted this morning about Buster Keaton's first TV programs, I've received a number of e-mails telling me things I didn't know and setting me straight on some things I got wrong. I'll have a post up in a few days expanding and correcting this morning's.
We need to have at least a couple of renditions of Tom Lehrer's "I'm Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica" in this countdown so who better than Cali Rose and The CC Strummers, a ukulele group based in Culver City, California? Unlike others who sing this song, they're actually singing this in Santa Monica — at the The Martin Luther King, Jr. Auditorium in The Santa Monica Library. There'll be more of this song before the countdown's over…
Performances for Gypsy will resume as scheduled on Sunday, December 29. Due to continued illness within the company, our 2 PM matinee and 8 PM performances today have been cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please check with your point of purchase to exchange or refund your tickets.
Should we be suspicious that they don't say the performances tomorrow will be with Audra and other key members of the company? I dunno. But there's still time to get tickets for tomorrow's matinee performance at Stubhub. The above press release says it's at 2 PM while Telecharge and Stubhub says it's at 3 PM. There do not seem to be seats available for the evening performance on either site.
It's hard for me to type the words "Saturday Morning" without recalling what Saturday Morning used to mean to me. Saturday Morning was when I'd get up early — earlier than my parents, at least — and go into the living room. I'm thinking back to when we only had one TV set in the house and that's where it was. I'd turn on the set, adjusting the volume to a level where I could hear it but they couldn't.
My parents' chairs for TV-watching were too far from the set for me so sometimes, I'd sit on the floor. Most times, I'd move a chair from the dining room into place before the set and put a TV tray in front of it. At some point during a commercial, I'd run into the kitchen and get a bowl of cereal or something else for breakfast, then eat it in front of the set.
What I was watching was, of course, Saturday Morning Television which was mostly cartoons. Three networks — NBC, ABC and CBS — programmed for my demographic, my demographic being anyone who was likely to ask his mother to buy whatever cereal I favored at that moment. At various times, it was Sugar Frosted Flakes, Cocoa Puffs, Trix, Sugar Rice Krinkles (they don't make that anymore), Sugar Smacks or a few others that were only favorites for about one box or so. Often, one would be a favorite because there was a much-desired prize in the box.
My true favorite, if I was being honest and I occasionally was, was Cheerios. I loved Cheerios — the plain kind in the yellow box, not any of the inane variations now available. It was one of my favorite things to eat and still is. I swear on my oath as a 24-year blogger that I'm eating Cheerios — dry, which is how I like them — as I write this. I'm so glad they've never really changed them. If they'd had cartoon characters on the box all the time, I might never have eaten anything else ever.
Not all the shows I watched were cartoons. For a while, the local CBS channel ran a film show starring Buster Keaton. I don't think this was network. I think it was just the L.A. station filling the time slots before the network feed kicked in. Whatever it was, it was my introduction to a magical person who would become one of my favorite performers. I had no idea at the time that I was watching one of the low points of his career because he was still, to me, pretty funny.
Not a whole lot is known about this series so here's what I understand: Keaton's first TV series was called The Buster Keaton Comedy Show. It was done live in 1949 and only watchable in or around Southern California. Live shows then were only repeatable if someone made kinescopes of them — literally pointing a movie camera at a TV screen and capturing the image on film. If anyone made any of The Buster Keaton Comedy Show, they've never been seen to this day.
A year or two later, someone said to someone else something like, "It's too bad we didn't do those shows on film. We could make some money syndicating them." So they then made filmed episodes of The Buster Keaton Show, using much of the material that had been used in the live telecasts. Both shows, of course, relied heavily on gags and ideas from Keaton's earlier, better work.
A writer-producer-director named Clyde Bruckman was heavily involved with them. Bruckman was a colorful gent who worked with many of the great comedians of the silent era and early talkies, including Keaton, Laurel & Hardy and the Stooges. In later years, he was sometimes hired to work on comedy films and then sued for passing off script material from earlier films as new, never-before-filmed material. This new Keaton show was filled with jokes that Keaton and others had done before.
The Buster Keaton Show was syndicated in 1951. Two years later, its producers redid the opening titles to name it Life With Buster Keaton and they syndicated them again, reportedly representing it as a new show. That's why when you see surviving prints of the program, some have one title and some have the other.
Also reportedly, only thirteen half-hour episodes were ever made. I do not think the local CBS channel had all thirteen. I think they had six or seven and would run them over and over and over as long as they ran the program at all. The episode embedded below is the one I remember most vividly. I may have seen it ten or more times. You may have seen it on this site about ten years ago.
Don't think of it as a great comedian at his worst. Think of it as a guy who was still pretty good at the age of 56…and yes, I know he may look older in this but that's the way a lot of 56-year-old humans looked back then, especially if they'd had as rough a life as Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton. I think of it as a fond memory and one of the things that got me very, very interested in the kind of people who did the kind of films he did…
It's been mostly cloudy and cold in Los Angeles with occasional drizzle and sprinkles, and that's what the National Weather Service is projecting most days for as far ahead as they project. But their forecast for January 1 is mostly sunny and 72°. That's because that's New Year's Day and Nature wants everyone who watches the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl from snowy and freezing climates to hate us.
This is not strictly a Hanukkah song but I'm sure some people sing it on that holiday somewhere. It's by Mordechai Ben David, who is known as "The King of Jewish Music" in much the same way that Michael Jackson was known as "The King of Pop" because…well, I think that was just because he said he was. But M.B.D., as his many fans call him, has been performing to huge crowds for over fifty years and I like this song, "Mashiach," even though I only understand a small part of it…
Tonight's performance of Gypsy at the Majestic Theatre in New York has been cancelled — or even canceled, depending on how you spell it. But you can still buy seats 101 and 102 in Row C for $7,056 each on Stubhub.
Here we are with Everything You Need to Know About Saturday Night Live for Season 19. I'm enjoying this series but it startles me that we're not even up to half-way through the show's run…
A group called Six13 favors us with "A Wicked Chanukah" (or however you want to spell the name of the holiday). Great voices with some dicey rhymes but I enjoyed this…
And now they've cancelled this evening's performance of Gypsy. I don't know why I'm so interested in this. I won't be going to New York in the foreseeable future. Given my current mobility problems, I might not go see it if it was at the Pantages up in Hollywood, five miles from me.
At this moment, Stubhub still has tickets for tonight's non-existent performance and the top-priced seats are $2,121 and the seller seems to have four of them. If Stubhub refunds you 120% on a canceled performance, could I buy the four for $8,484 right now and then get a refund for 120% of that? I suppose not.
Today, they were supposed to do a 2 PM matinee and a 7:30 PM evening performance. The matinee has been cancelled — but don't worry. They're still offering tickets for it over on StubHub. There will be an announcement later about the 7:30 performance, which I guess means they're waiting for Audra to decide if she's up for it and if so, if they can deploy enough stand-bys and swings to cover everyone else who's out.
I've been curious as to what happens to the folks who bought $2800 tickets on Stubhub for performances that are cancelled. The Stubhub site says…
You'll receive a credit in your StubHub Wallet worth 120% of the total amount you paid. The credit is valid for one year from the issue date for ticket purchases in the same currency. To receive a cash refund, go to your StubHub Wallet and select "Request cash refund" on the appropriate credit. We'll issue the refund to your original payment method within 10 business days.
That sounds nice and I wonder how many of the other ticket resellers do the same. Of course, if your trip to go see Gypsy involved air fare you already spent and a hotel you already checked-into, you're probably outta luck there.
This is the final part of these memories that were jogged by the little holiday-themed strip mall in Carpinteria, California. Before you read this part, make sure you've read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3…
So in the seventies, when I took trips — alone or with friends — up to the Santa Barbara area, I'd always visit Dan Spiegle and I'd sometime visit Carl Barks. I'd also sometimes visit the man this fourth part is about, Russell Myers. Russell has been drawing the comic strip Broom-Hilda since April 19, 1970. That's, as of today, 54 years, eight months and six days. We met via mail (the paper kind, not the e-kind) as pen pals when he was still living in Kansas City. That was where he'd drawn Hallmark greeting cards for a living before the little green witch took him away from all that.
Here's a recycle of a story I told once before here in my obit for a great comedy writer named Phil Hahn…
In 1983, Phil and I were on staff working on a show for Dick Clark Productions. One day, my friend Russell Myers — who was then drawing the newspaper strip Broom-Hilda and still is — was in town so he came by the office to visit and to go out to lunch. We were heading out and we passed Phil's office where Phil was sitting, working.
Russell walked a few steps by Phil's door, then stopped and said, "I recognize that man!" He walked back into Phil's office and said, "Excuse me, sir, but I have the feeling I know you." Phil looked at Russell and said, "I think I know you, too." It took about two minutes before they figured out that they'd both been on staff at the same time at Hallmark back in Kansas City, MO. Phil wrote gags for cards. Russell did the artwork for many of them. But they'd never met or been introduced there; just seen each other in the halls. They didn't actually meet until years later in Dick Clark's building in Burbank.
Sometimes when I went to visit Russell, it was so we could work on a new comic strip he'd created. There was a period there where it seemed like every artist who had a syndicated newspaper strip wasn't satisfied with one. Johnny Hart had B.C. and The Wizard of Id. Hank Ketcham had Dennis the Menace and Half-Hitch. Mort Walker had Beetle Bailey and about nine hundred others. So Russell created a second strip, got someone else to help draw it and picked me to write it.
I remember sitting with Russell in Santa's Kitchen on Santa Claus Lane and working on gags. Then I remember we did six weeks of it and he sent it off to his syndicate and they said they loved it, it was terrific, it was a sure winner and they just had to figure out when to launch it. And finally, I remember a few weeks later, they decided they didn't love it, it wasn't terrific, no one would like it and forget the whole thing.
Oh — and I remember when they changed their minds, he breathed a little sigh of relief. At some point in the process, he'd come to his senses and decided that one strip was enough for him and he was just going to stick with Broom-Hilda for as long as it lasted. That was fifty-two years ago…not a bad decision on his part. And no, I was not disappointed. You can't let yourself be disappointed by promising ventures that don't venture as far as your imagination promised. You'll be disappointed too much of your life.
I did though kinda regret not working more with Russell because he was and still is a very smart man and damned good cartoonist. And then not long after that — for reasons which I'm sure had nothing to do with our strip going nowhere — he went to Oregon. He moved up there and a few years later, Carl Barks moved up there. I think they were like a block apart but I wasn't about to drive to Oregon to see either of them.
Russell and I have kept in touch though. Once, as in the story above, he came to L.A. A few times, we got him down to a Comic-Con in San Diego. Once, we hung out at one of Phil Seuling's famous comic book conventions in New York in, I'm guessing, 1976. This is a photo I took of him then. An art dealer was selling two Krazy Kat Sunday page originals by George Herriman for prices that today wouldn't buy you one of the new Bacon Cajun Ranch McCrispy sandwiches at McDonald's. Russell grabbed one and I grabbed the other. Here he is with his…
I don't have a photo of us together unless you count this. This is from the 1974 San Diego Comic Convention, back when they were at the El Cortez Hotel, an awful place to sleep or eat but a great place to have a comic book convention. Russell is on stage demonstrating how he drew Broom-Hilda. I'm the guy on one knee taking photos of his presentation and I wish I knew where those photos were today. It is, of course, a rotten picture of him but I thought you'd like it because it captures the sense of those early conventions…
Click on the pic to double the size of it on your screen.
And I'm not done yet. Some years later, there was a fad among comic fans and many of my friends. We had these hardbound sketchbooks of blank pages and we'd go to cartoonists and artists and ask them to each draw something on a page. I mailed mine up to Russell in Oregon and when it came back, he had drawn this lovely drawing in it…
Neat, huh? But there was a note of apology in the package via which Russell sent me back the book. He explained that while he had it in his studio, some old guy who claimed to have at one point been a cartoonist dropped by to visit and…well, before Russell could stop him, this old guy grabbed my sketchbook and insisted on drawing something on the page after the one Russell drew on. I opened up the book again and found this…
So that's the punchline to this series of stories that were jogged loose from some corner of my brain by the photo of Santa Claus Lane.
And if you'd like to know what became of Santa Claus Lane…well, the restaurant is now an Italian eatery called Thario's Kitchen. I've never eaten there but the food has gotta be better than when it was Santa's Kitchen. When I ate at Santa's Kitchen, I was always afraid of finding a long white beard hair in my meal. This video will tell you the fate of the rest of Santa Claus Lane and what became of that King Kong Kris Kringle that watched over the place…
P.S.: If you've enjoyed this series of articles, this is the last time I'm posting this particular appeal to help fund my software upgrades. Thanks to all who've helped so far…
This is from eighteen years ago so some of these folks, sad to say, are no longer with us. But here's a group of voiceover actors reading a classic Christmas poem. Because of what poem they're reading, I probably should have put this up last night…
