That clip from The Lucy Show is bringing me a lot of e-mail. Shelly Goldstein, April Wong and Elle Sanborn are all wondering if the middle lady in the group with the beehive wigs could be Lucy's daughter, Lucie Arnaz. Lucie (not to be confused with Lucy) turned up in a lot of her mother's shows before becoming a regular cast member of her next sitcom.

I honestly can't tell. Lucie Arnaz is on Facebook under the name Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill. How about if one of you — and only one; let's not nag the lady — posts a link to ask her?

I think one of the barefoot guys is the dancer who did the finished carpentry on my front door. When I moved into my current house in 1980, I had a lot of work done to it and my contractor brought in a guy he said was the best "finish carpenter" in the business. As I understand it, that denotes someone who does lovely detailed work as opposed to someone who just cuts up pieces of wood and then nails them together.

The fellow did a superb job and when we got to talking, I learned he was a professional dancer who did carpentry when he was between jobs on television. In the sixties, he was on every variety show in town, especially those that taped at Television City in Hollywood. I'm pretty sure I spotted him once on a rerun of The Red Skelton Show. I'd tell you his name if I remembered it.

I also wanted to quote this message I received from Carl Cafarelli, who blogs, mostly about rock music, here…

The "Wing Ding" clip you shared from The Lucy Show is a hoot. But, before even getting into its cheesy disconnect from what (as you said) "those kids today" wanted, I was immediately struck by how white it was. Shindig! is one of my all-time favorite TV series, and although I was initially drawn to it (after the fact) by its embrace of the British Invasion, the show always mixed in black performers, a Sam Cooke, Isley Brothers, or Martha and the Vandellas alongside its Kinks and Yardbirds. The Blossoms (with Darlene Love) were series regulars, and Billy Preston eventually joined the show's house band. Wing Ding was wall-to-wall Caucasian.

That said, the producers' disdain — or at least a lack of affinity — for rockin' pop of 1965 is as clear as you say. Visually, Wing Ding appears more directly modeled after Hullabaloo, a show I also love but suspect was created and produced with considerably less authenticity and sincerity than the creators of Shindig! brought to their show. Hullabaloo is closer to a variety show like Hollywood Palace taken over by its various teen sensations. Reb Foster does a good job channeling Shindig! host (and fellow DJ) Jimmy O'Neill, but I see way more Hullabaloo than Shindig! in Wing Ding.

There are so many examples of mainstream Hollywood just not understanding rock 'n' roll in the '50s and '60s. Even on Batman, a show with a sort of rock 'n' roll attitude, it was evident producer William Dozier considered himself smugly above the crass sounds of rock, just as he considered himself above the crass idea of superhero comic books. On the Batman episode where Catwoman literally stole the voices of British pop stars Chad and Jeremy, the TV host played by Steve Allen wonders if that's such a bad thing. Holy schisms! (In contrast, Chad and Jeremy's earlier appearance as the Redcoats on The Dick Van Dyke Show struck a more proper and appreciative chord.)

I'm sure some fans can't reconcile the contrast. Me? I'm delighted to know that I've lived in a time when both Jack Benny and Jimi Hendrix were contemporary parts of my pop culture. I'm going to need to track down this episode of The Lucy Show to watch in its entirety. And then maybe cleanse the palate with The Monkees. Or Shindig! Thanks for sharing the clip.

Thanks for writing, Carl. It's kinda fun to look at old TV shows and see how long it took some people to realize that rock 'n' roll was not a passing fad that would soon blow over like Brylcreem hair gel or hula hoops. And even the ones who accepted it sometimes seemed to not understand it. This was especially true of folks in the music business who specialized in one style, didn't particularly appreciate any others and certainly didn't embrace something that seemed to belong only to "kids."

One of the best "markers" of this kind of thing would be this 1958 spot on the What's My Line? game show where the contestants were Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote many of Elvis Presley's hits and others that topped the charts. The producers of the show assumed (correctly) no one on the panel would recognize their names and I think Vincent Price was planted with the question about whether their work inflicted pain. Someone thought that would be funny.

You see this in a lot of fields, certainly in comic books: People who want the world to stay the way it was at some point when they were very happy with it. Throughout the sixties, I saw all these folks on TV who were plainly distressed that the best-selling records in the country were by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones instead of The Four Lads. A lot of them never imagined that "those kids today" would carry their love of certain music into their adult years.

This is a good thing to remember if/when you find yourself alienated from what "those kids today" (meaning 2022) are listening to and watching. Much of it will not endure but some of it will.

This post may only help one or two of you but that's one or two more than most of mine do. It's for anyone who thinks they're going to get to Comic-Con in San Diego on Friday, July 22 by heading down from the north on the 5 Freeway…

Beware. That's Opening Day at Del Mar Race Track, which has been known to back traffic up to around Medford, Oregon. It also means a large number of people who ride the Pacific Surfliner train down from points north, disembark at the Solana Beach Station and take the free shuttle to the track. Similar problems can occur on the way home as well. This doesn't seem to cause a snarl every year but when it does, it does. Don't get trapped like I did a few years there.

Here's a musical number from a September 1965 episode of The Lucy Show entitled "Lucy in the Music World." She gets a job on a music show not unlike ABC's Shindig! (which went on the air in September of '64) or NBC's Hullabaloo (which went on the following January, obviously inspired by the success of Shindig!) It's a good example of what 1965 Show Business thought "those kids today" wanted.

The producer of the show, who you'll see in the first shots, was played by veteran character actor Lou Krugman, who turned up a number of times on I Love Lucy and again every few weeks on the next two of Lucille Ball's three situation comedies. He was also seen in darn near every filmed TV show done in Hollywood in the sixties. For example, he was Nunzio, the guy who tried to sell Rob Petrie a wholesale fur coat on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Take a gander at this IMDB list of credits.

Lou was just one of those actors who worked all the time without ever becoming a regular on a TV series. It was kind of the way Jamie Farr was before he got the role of Klinger on M*A*S*H. The guy worked everywhere but until he landed that part, there was no way you could tell anybody who he was and have them go, "Oh, I know who you're talking about." I was introduced to Lou at a party once and we spent a delightful half-hour talking about shows he was on. I think we covered about 8% of them.

And the host of Wing Ding — the show within the show — was Reb Foster. Mr. Foster was a Los Angeles disc jockey back then, bouncing back and forth between playing all the hits on KFWB and playing all the hits on KRLA.

Lastly, you might be interested to know who wrote that theme song for Wing Ding. It was none other than the great singer, Mel Tormé — best known on this blog for reading a newspaper at Farmers Market just before Christmas one year. Mel was in this Lucy Show episode, though not in this clip, as Mel Tinker, an outta-work songwriter who lived near Lucy's character. He played that part in later episodes of The Lucy Show in what obviously was an attempt to set up a spin-off into his own show. But somehow…it never quite spun. Maybe they should have tried selling Wing Ding instead…

This ran here on December 18, 2013 and I don't have anything to add to it except that Hollywood Park as we knew it is gone. Ah, but the memories linger on — or at least this one does…

The Hollywood Park racetrack — which is not and never was anywhere near Hollywood — will be closing forever shortly before Christmas. They'll tear it down and build condos and retail stores and other things on which people can lose money. It was a pretty old, shabby place in Inglewood that I gather will not be too missed. Horse Racing ain't what it used to be and Santa Anita Racetrack, which is still up and running 'em, is only about 30 miles away.

Hollywood Park was opened in 1938 by a bevy of stars and movie studio execs. Jack L. Warner was the first chairman and then Mervyn LeRoy took over and presided for the next 45 years. Al Jolson and Raoul Walsh were on the original board of directors and shareholders included Joan Blondell, Ronald Colman, Walt Disney, Bing Crosby, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, George Jessel, Ralph Bellamy, Hal Wallis, Anatole Litvak, Hunt Stromberg, Wallace Beery and Irene Dunne. I don't think a lot of movie people have frequented the place since most of those folks passed away.

One who frequented the track for a long time was Joe Frisco, a now forgotten stuttering comedian who was cast in a lot of movies because he was funny in front of the camera and even funnier off-camera. Denizens of Show Business loved having Frisco around for the anecdotes that resulted. He was always broke and always complaining in a hilarious (albeit, stammered) manner. One time at Hollywood Park, Bing Crosby was holding court with friends in a private box and Frisco wandered by and borrowed $100 which Bing figured he'd never see again.

A few races later, someone told Bing that Frisco had bet on a big longshot that had come in and had made a fortune. Mostly for amusement, Crosby told his pals, "I'm going to see if I can get my hundred back." He went into the clubhouse and found Frisco, who could never hold onto money long, buying drinks for everyone. He tapped his debtor on the shoulder and said, "Hey, what about the hundred, pal?" Nonchalantly, Mr. Frisco pulled out a C-note, waved it in Crosby's direction and said, "N-n-n-not so f-f-fast, B-B-Bing. F-first, give us a ch-ch-ch-chorus of 'W-W-W-White Christmas!'"

I have been to Hollywood Park, most recently when I was twelve. My Uncle Nathan never married and seemed more interested in horse racing than in women. And isn't that a premise for an entire Alan King monologue? Depending on the season, you'd find my uncle on the weekends at either Hollywood Park, Santa Anita, or down south at Del Mar.

One Saturday, he took me with him to Hollywood Park. On our way in, we passed through a mob of vendors selling mimeographed tip sheets.  My uncle purchased certain ones he believed to be of help and also bought a copy of that day's special Hollywood Park edition of a local newspaper that existed then, the Herald-Examiner. Inside, it was the regular Herald-Examiner for that date but wrapped around it was a special four-page section containing horse tips and articles for that day's races.

Once inside, we hunkered down in two seats with no one near us and he studied all this paperwork, made notes, did math, etc. I think we'd missed the first two races but he placed a $20 wager — not a small amount of money then or for a guy with his income — on a certain horse running in the third. He told me to pick a horse, any horse, and he'd place a two-dollar bet on it for me.

Well, what did I know from horse racing? The only horse in the whole world I really liked was Quick Draw McGraw and he wasn't running. But I scanned all the papers Uncle Nathan had accrued and decided arbitrarily to go with the tips of one particular columnist in the Herald-Examiner. But I didn't tell Uncle Nathan that's what I was doing. I made like I'd invented some sort of system and that I'd studied all the stats before making my selection.

He placed the bet on my behalf…and you can guess how it went. My horse won. His horse lost.

The next race went exactly the same way. I pretended, like some handicapper savant, I had a formula for picking a horse…but really all I was doing was following the advice of this one guy in the Herald-Examiner. My uncle bet two bucks on that horse for me and another twenty bucks on the horse he'd figured would win. And of course, I won and he lost.

The fifth race went the same way and so did the sixth. My uncle, the expert horse player, was losing. The kid who'd never been to a racetrack before was winning…but really, the guy in the Herald-Examiner was winning. Still, despite the fact that I was making nothing but money, I couldn't conceal from Uncle Nathan that I found the whole experience utterly boring. The races themselves were kind of interesting but the periods between them each seemed to go on for hours. There was nothing to do but study for the next race, place bets and eat hot dogs. I had enough hot dogs that day to last me well into the Nixon Administration.  If I'd cut myself, I would have bled French's Mustard.

Uncle Nathan decided we'd leave after the seventh race and by then, he couldn't resist discarding decades of horse-betting experience and putting it all on one of his nephew's (so far) infallible hunches. His own methods told him to pick Horse "A." I, consulting my source, picked Horse "B." He put nothing on "A" and a big bet — I think it was a hundred dollars — on Horse "B." The odds were such that if "B" won, Uncle Nathan would leave well ahead for the day.

And of course, you can guess how this one went. "A" finished first. "B" should be crossing the finish line right about now.

I felt bad for him and on the way out, I told him how I'd picked all those winners. He was a good sport about it. He'd lost about $250 total — that was probably close to a week's pay for him then — and I'd made about $40…or as I figured things in those days, 333 comic books off the rack or 960 at the second-hand bookstore. He did say to me, "Maybe I ought to pay more attention to that guy in the Herald-Examiner." After the following week's sojourn to Hollywood Park, he told me he'd consulted that pony-picker and had more than won back all he'd lost on our outing.

Maybe that's true. Who knows? It sounds like the kind of thing you'd say to your nephew to make him feel good…and Uncle Nathan would do anything to make me feel good. He had trouble showing affection so he did it via gifts. My father (his brother) and my mother told me how proud he was of my career but he never really said a word of it to me.

When he died in 1994, he was residing in a small apartment about eight blocks from my house. He lived alone, as he lived his entire adulthood, and one of the few friends he had, who also lived in the building, found him dead on his bathroom floor. He was 82.

It fell to me to be in charge of Uncle Nathan's funeral and his affairs and belongings…and my mother and I, together, cleaned out that apartment. We found a whole shelf full of comic books I'd written — I'm not sure where he got them — and tattered news clippings that mentioned my name, mostly in connection with TV work. We found a letter he'd written to an acquaintance in another state that had been returned to him because the acquaintance had just passed away. It was all about how his nephews Mark and David were doing so well as professional writers. My Cousin David was the son of another of Nathan's brothers and there were copies of his books next to my comics.

We also found a ton of horse racing forms and tip sheets and little toys that would randomly pick a "sure winner" for you. It all prompted me to tell my mother the story of that day at Hollywood Park. Uncle Nathan had asked me to keep the story of our wagering "our little secret" and at the time, I did. My mother laughed when she heard it then said, "Now I understand why he asked us every week for years after that, 'Do you think Mark would like to go to the races with me again?'"  Maybe he liked being around me but maybe some of it was that I'd picked four winners out of five that day.

I've told a number of stories on this blog about prowling the premises of the old NBC studios in Burbank, first as a kid who had little to no business being there; later, as a writer who had actual, work-related reasons to be in that building and a real pass. In the earlier days, Johnny Carson's show was still based in New York but sometimes when I was there, so was it, broadcasting from the West Coast for a few weeks. Whenever possible, I tried to get by and hear the band rehearse.

They generally did it around 2 PM, though it could be earlier or later depending on guest stars and the amount of music that would be in the show taped later in the afternoon. Trust me on this: That band was incredible, way more thrilling than anything you ever heard come out of your home speakers. It was really the last of the Big Bands and its personnel included many of the top guys who'd played for the most famous orchestras of an earlier time.

Much has been written about the transition from Johnny hosting The Tonight Show to Jay hosting but I haven't heard much said about how Carson's retirement also meant the end of that band…and a very sweet gig for the men (no women except for the occasional harp player) who comprised the orchestra. Many of them had been roaming nomads for years, away from home for weeks at a time, moving from one gig to another. Getting into the band on the Carson show meant a stability that few in their profession ever achieve. They worked maybe six hours a day, often only four days a week. And at times, they got to play with a guest of the stature of Buddy Rich or Pete Fountain.

For that, they received a good paycheck and could be home in time for dinner. They could also supplement that income with occasional other jobs. Being in The Tonight Show Band was a very prestigious thing indeed. When I was writing variety shows or cartoons and we needed to hire musicians for the day, the guy who did the hiring would often boast, "I got four guys from Carson's band."

And though everyone knew it had to come to an end someday, few were prepared when that day came around. I know a lot of people on Johnny's staff didn't understand why it had to end…why Jay's show couldn't just be exactly the same operation with Leno subbing, as he had for years, for Carson. A lot of emotion came with the transition.

Here from the show for 5/12/1977 is a band number that was often played during commercial breaks, of which Johnny's program had many. Musical spots like these became rare in 1980 when Johnny cut The Tonight Show from 90 minutes to 60…though the band always had a couple of numbers rehearsed and ready to go in case something went awry and they were necessary to fill time. No matter how good this may sound coming out of your computer speakers, believe me: It was surely way better in person. Way, way better…

A couple of things have to get written this weekend so you won't find a lot of new writing by me here…a rerun or two and some video links maybe.

If you're going to Comic-Con (which starts in TEN DAYS!!!), you might want to go over to the con's website and study the programming schedules that are posted so far. They have the one for Wednesday, which is Preview Night. They have the one for Thursday, the one for Friday and the one for Saturday. The final day's schedule will be posted tomorrow, probably by mid-morning.

I'm doing panels on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and I'll post that list here in a few days. You can find those events now by using the programming guide's search engine and looking for "Evanier" — but I'll caution you there will be a few changes from what's presently on the con website.

And while you're over there, read about how to get the CLEAR app on your phone. It sounds like something you'll need to do if you're attending and you'll save yourself a lot of time to do it before you get to the convention. I'll be back when I'm back.

Here's a piece of animation history. It's July 7, 2000 and June Foray is getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame…

Johnny Grant, a local TV personality who was some sort of unofficial Mayor of Hollywood, is officiating at the ceremony, which was on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard about half a block east of La Brea. Among the speakers are Steve Allen and Stan Freberg. I'm somewhere in that mob behind the platform with Keith Scott, Leonard Maltin, Frank Welker, Carolyn Kelly and all sort of other interesting people.

Here — let's watch the video and then I'll tell you what I remember about that day…

People wonder how someone gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The rules are here and a lot of potential applicants and nominators are scared off by the hefty fee that comes with it. I don't recall what it was in 2000 but today, it's $55,000. Sometimes, the honoree or his/her fan club comes up with the dough but I suspect it's usually paid by some TV or movie studio that has a show or film about to open starring the honoree. Agents have been known to say, when an in-demand star is in demand for a movie, "My client wants ten million dollars plus it would be nice (i.e., mandatory) if your studio would use all its clout to get him/her a star on Hollywood Boulevard and/or his/her footprints in the courtyard of Grauman's Chinese."

In June's case, she didn't have that kind of clout but Chuck Jones apparently did. He told Warner Brothers that he wanted it to happen and, sure enough, it happened.

Odd story about how I was present for the unveiling. At the time, I had written the script for a Scooby Doo videogame and although I was not voice-directing, I was required to be present at the session when the cast came in to record my script. Unfortunately, the session was the same day and hour as the star ceremony and I had promised June I would be there for the dedication.

I asked the studio to reschedule the recording session. They said no. I asked them to allow me to not be present for it. They said no. I stopped asking when I realized that — by one of those amazing coincidences in which my life abounds — the star ceremony was in front of a big office building on Hollywood Boulevard and the recording session was at a studio in that building commencing an hour before the ceremony. So we recorded for an hour, then took a break and all went out to watch June get her star, then we went back in and finished the recording. That's why Frank Welker was there.

(That Scooby Doo videogame, by the way, was never finished or released. I'll get someone very mad at me if I post the whole story about it. Let's just say a person involved in its production who did not work for Warner Brothers did something that rightly pissed-off the studio and they killed the whole project.)

Also present at the star ceremony was Larry Harmon, the proprietor of Bozo the Clown. Larry wasn't there because of June. Larry's office happened to be in that building and I ran into him in the lobby. When I told him what was happening outside, he came out, talked his way into the V.I.P. area with us, and spent the whole time telling me and everyone how unfair it was that he hadn't gotten a star on the sidewalk despite years of lobbying. Larry never worked for Chuck Jones.

But it was overall a very happy occasion with a lot of happy people. At one point in the video, Johnny Grant spotted Chuck McCann in the crowd and give him a big introduction…which was nice but it wasn't Chuck McCann. It was just a guy who looked a lot like him. One of those Chuck McCann impersonators you hear about all the time.

That's about all I remember. Thanks to Tom Knott, who I believe was the person who shot this video, and to Kamden Spies, who I know is the person who told me it was online.

Cartoonist (and historian of cartooning) R.C. Harvey died yesterday at the age of 85. He was a constant presence in the more prestigious magazines wherein folks preserve and analyze the history of comic art. He also did some very fine comic art of his own and the only negative comment I ever heard about him or his work was from folks who wished he'd spent a little less time writing about other folks' comics and do more of his own.

His daughter Julia Harvey McDonald posted the sad details to Facebook…

Last week Dad fell and broke 6 ribs. We did not know at the time how serious this would become. After he fell, he stood up, continued walking with us to a favorite restaurant. He joked with the waitress, drank his favorite martini (bombay gin, very cold) and told a couple stories. His last few days were in the hospital with his family as his body struggled with complications from the fall. We were with him for his last breath.

An awful story…but to go on walking and joking with people sounds like the Bob Harvey I knew. He was a fascinating guy…the kind you could talk to for hours about comic books and comic strips and never feel you were descending into the childish end of the business. His book on the life and career of Milton Caniff was daunting in its size — Bob never did a half-assed job on anything — but not one sentence of it wasted your time.

Bob was an important contributor to our current series reprinting the newspaper strip, Pogo. He would annotate the strips in each volume, noting the historical context in which they first appeared and explaining a lot of the obscure references and terms. Walt Kelly's work was brilliant but even on its original publication, some of it needed explaining. His last "Swamp Talk" section will appear in Volume 8, which is now at the printers and due out in a few months. He will be just about impossible to replace — in the Pogo reprints and in our lives.

He made it to 99…and worked well into that decade of his life. The last time I saw Larry Storch in person was 2014…when he, at age 91, performed on the stage of The Comedy Store. I have seen comics seventy years younger not be as funny or as fresh as he was that evening.

That was the last time I saw him. The first time was when he came in to do guest voice work on Garfield and Friends. I told that story here and you might want to stop reading this and go read that.

In-between, I saw him at a few conventions and parties. There was one New York convention where he was sitting there in some replica of the cap he wore as Agarn on the show F Troop and he was signing/selling autographs. The end of the line for them seemed to be somewhere in New Jersey. He remembered me from Garfield — or at least he said he did — and he had me sit with him, ostensibly so we could chat while he signed. But he also was engaging in friendly banter with every single person in that line. They all wanted to tell him how much they loved him as Agarn, loved him in The Great Race, loved him on Car 54, Where Are You?, loved hearing him on Tennessee Tuxedo, etc.

I enjoyed watching this man be loved as he was but when he apologized to me for the distraction, I said, "It's okay. I'll come back when the line disappears." And for the rest of the convention, the line did not disappear.

I wish I'd had more time to tell him how amazing I thought it was that he was capable of being funny in absolutely everything he was ever in. But all those folks in that line — and I'm sure in many lines at many autograph shows and conventions — told him that for me. Being consistently hilarious is not easy but doing it for something like seventy years? Amazing.

Juggling many things today. There will be something here before long about Larry Storch, who died today at the not-unimpressive age of 99. I'll also be writing about the cartoonist and historian R.C. "Bob" Harvey, who was in his mid-eighties. Loud, long sigh.

As you may have heard, Boris Johnson has resigned his post as the Prime Minister of the U.K. Here with the latest on this story is Jonathan Pie, Master of Understatement…

This will probably only be of interest to folks who live in Los Angeles and mainly to good friends of mine…

A few years ago on this blog, I wrote a lot about Andre's, a small Italian cafeteria here in L.A. that serves great pasta and pizza for modest prices. They were (and for the moment, still are) in a mall, half of which is being torn down to build a huge new retail and residential building. Alas, Andre's is located in the half being torn down.

Some of us were fighting to get the city not to approve the construction of this new building…and as I understand it, we did succeed in getting its size and scope to be seriously reduced. But it is now going forward. Every business in that part of the mall has closed except Andre's and Andre's will be closing July 30.

That, however, will not be the end of Andre's. No, sir or madam. It's slated to reopen this Fall at 5400 Wilshire Boulevard, an address that until recently belonged to a place called the Eleven City Deli. I just did a search and if Google is to be believed — and don't we all believe Google? — 5400 Wilshire is 1.3 miles from the old location of Andre's. I can live with that, especially if they deliver because parking ain't that great in that area.

• So…instead of prosecuting any other police officers for violating the civil rights of black people, authorities decided to just make Derek Chauvin serve two concurrent sentences for doing that.

Since we've been talking here about the movie Who's Minding the Mint?, Joe Dante was nice enough to write and suggest I might link to its trailer as narrated by Larry Karaszewski for the "Trailers From Hell" series. For some reason, the caption on its YouTube page is partially for a write-up for the film White Zombie, which somehow adds to the charm of this project.

Two clarifications on what Larry has to say: Contrary to what is said often on the Internet, Woody Allen was never a writer for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. Mr. Allen's contribution to Mr. Caesar's body of work seems to have been limited to two somewhat obscure specials late in the time of Sid's TV stardom.

Secondly, Who's Minding the Mint? does not present any insight to how money is printed or ever was printed in the real world. It presents the way a buncha guys in Hollywood, with no knowledge of or access to accurate info — or probably the budget to replicate the real thing — thought it might have been done. Goldfinger did not show us what it really looked like inside Fort Knox either. But I'm pleased Larry liked this movie as much as I did. He and Mr. Dante have been involved with a number of my favorite films…

Back in the early seventies, a company named Aniforms (I'm not sure if it was hyphenated) introduced a TV character named Elliot Nootrac, his last name of course being "cartoon" spelled backwards. Elliot was described as a living cartoon, meaning from his home on a TV monitor, he could interact and ad-lib with others in real time. A lot of folks were mystified as to how what looked like an animated character could do that.

The secret was that he wasn't animated the way Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny were. Elliot was a two-dimensional puppet operated on a flat surface over which a TV camera was suspended. The puppeteer did the voice and made Elliot move…and for a while, he was popping up on different shows, including Laugh-In, Sesame Street and The Dick Cavett Show. Somewhere — I don't recall where — I saw a program that revealed the whole process and showed what the "puppet" looked like backstage and it really was ingenious. There wasn't a lot of call for it but it was ingenious.

Here we have the episode of To Tell the Truth for November 7, 1973. The second segment will probably be of little interest to most of you but the first segment is all about Elliot, who more or less takes over as host from Garry Moore. And at the end of the segment, you meet the fellow who was operating Elliot and supplying the voice. His name seems to be David Doren or Doran or something like that and I would love to know what became of him. He was pretty good at what he did…