And right after I posted the previous video, I spotted this online — a quick tour of The Magic Castle, the clubhouse for a group of which I am a member of 40+ years. The piece has some errors. Penn & Teller and Johnny Carson owe nothing to The Castle for their careers — Johnny was the host of The Tonight Show long before he ever set foot in the place — but a great many other magicians do.
The attractive blond lady who says "It's a bucket list destination" is my friend Sara Ballantine, daughter of The Amazing (Carl) Ballantine. And Nick Dopuch is a much better magician than is represented here. But it's a great place and because of my temporary mobility problem, I miss not visiting it…
A question I get from time to time here is "Who's the best sleight-of-hand magician alive today?" That's a hard one to answer because there are at least a dozen guys who are so good that it's impossible to say that one's better than the others but a strong contender would be Steve Forte. Here's a few minutes that'll remind you never to play cards with strangers…
So the polls say that right now, Kamala Harris is about where Donald Trump was when Joe Biden elected to not stand for re-election and Donald Trump is about where Biden was then. And it feels like everyone who wants Trump to win is urging him to drop the personal attacks and obsession with crowd size and focus on the issues…to which Trump responds by increasing the personal attacks and the obsession on crowd size.
Many, many years ago I heard a speech by Dan Rather about all those years when he covered presidential elections. He went back to Nixon in 1960 and he said that you should never believe any politician of any party when they boast about how many people they had at their campaign stops. He had all these stories about candidates claiming they had 5,000 people in a building that could hold, at most, two thousand.
And he said that often, this was the function of "Advance Men" — guys who volunteered to do the dirty work in the campaign in the hopes of landing great jobs in the administration if their guy won. 1,800 people showed up but the Advance Guy, trying to impress the candidate, told him 4,000 and then the candidate figured he could bump it up to five. The press, of course, is then lying and biased for saying it was 1,800. Trump probably needs no middle man.
I meant to write an update when it had been 200 days since I mysteriously broke my left ankle but I missed that milestone. It's been 208 and I'm quite a bit better than when last I wrote about this. In fact, I was better enough to go to Comic-Con in San Diego and by limiting my activities and having folks wheelchair me from place to place and panel to panel, I got through four days and five nights with a minimum of discomfort. After many months of feeling (mostly) locked away in my home, there was something very therapeutic about getting out and getting so many things done.
There's still that balance problem when I walk but at least I can walk. One of my physical therapists at the Nursing Facility where I lived for 33 days said, "Don't get frustrated that it's not normal yet. Just be proud and pleased each time it feels a little closer to normal." I'm settling for that.
The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine who's now in a Nursing Facility due to a fractured hip. He's more or less where I was in February and I was telling him that my still-limited mobility has forced me to be more selective about activities. I decided to attend Comic-Con but there are a lot of activities I've decided not to attempt. It's not a bad thing to reassess your priorities and to say of some possible outing, "You know, I really don't need to do that." I now value my time and effort a bit more highly.
In this recent post, I wrote that Jay Ward's cartoon studio "…whipped up an unsold pilot for Super Chicken with Don Knotts in the title role and Louis Nye voicing his sidekick, Fred." This brought several queries wanting to know more about this cartoon and where it could be seen. Had any of those who wrote taken advantage of the search engine on this site, they could have found this from back when we were mourning the passing of Mr. Nye…
A voice track was recorded to try and sell Ward's idea but it was never animated. Actor Marvin Miller served as narrator, Knotts played Super Chicken and Nye voiced his faithful sidekick, Fred. Bill Scott and Mel Blanc (!) voiced some supporting characters. Ward and his business partners played the recording for potential sponsors and showed them storyboards and artwork but no one went for it. In 1965, Jay produced another Super Chicken pilot but this time, he cast Scott as Super Chicken and Paul Frees as Fred, and they ultimately did the roles when the series was picked up as an element of the 1967 Saturday morning series, George of the Jungle.
For what it's worth, I thought Super Chicken was the best thing on the George of the Jungle show, better even than George, and the best thing the Ward studio produced after the original Rocky & Bullwinkle series. It's a shame the property never had a show of its own.
Let's look back on Season 9 of Saturday Night Live on this installment of Everything You Need To Know About Saturday Night Live. This was a year I don't remember all that well…which I don't think I regarded as "Must See TV." By this point, I had long since stopped trying to be home Saturday evenings at 11:30 PM to catch its broadcast in real time. I had a VCR snag it so I could watch it the next day (or later) with the Fast Forward control at the ready. Maybe one of these days I'll subscribe to Peacock — or some other source by which I can watch those episodes again — and see what I missed…
Trump slips a little more in the polling…says some unhinged and desperate-sounding things online or in some speeches…articles say everyone is urging him to change his act, which sounds to me like someone telling Foster Brooks to knock off the drunk bit…
And so it goes. I saw a clip of him ranting — as if this is an issue of any importance whatsoever — that Kamala Harris was made to look unrealistically attractive on the current Time cover. As Kevin Drum points out, that's ridiculous. Donald's just mad he's not on that cover. (Remember when it came out that Trump had a fake cover of Time on his wall that made him look the way he wanted every magazine to make him look?)
In fact, that's pretty much what all Trump's rage tweets and speeches are about these days: I'm not getting all the attention! The Democratic National Convention oughta send him even farther over that ledge. And here, Amanda Marcotte makes a good point…
But Republicans may be overly optimistic that a pivot-to-policy approach would do much better for Trump. If there's anything the majority of Americans hate more than Trump's vile personality, it's his policy agenda.
I don't expect this freefall to last. At some point, Trump's gotta rebound a little and we'll get all those clickbait stories about him maybe making a comeback. But right now, I don't think Kamala's winning so much as Donald is losing…and not just the election. What he's losing is "it."
My list of My Ten Favorite Cartoon Show Openings From My Youth brought a few irate "How could you leave off my favorite?" messages but fewer than I expected. Most of what you wished I'd included fell into the category of Honorable Mentions for me so here are ten more of those in no particular order…
In the fifties, CBS acquired the Terrytoons cartoon studio and its entire library. There were some new shows produced for television but mostly they tried repackaging the old ones into shows like this. This is the opening for Farmer Alfalfa and His Terrytoon Pals from 1958 and it's pretty violent as some of those ancient Terrytoons could be…
Kimba the White Lion was a popular Japanese shōnen manga series created by Osamu Tezuka and turned into an animated series over there in 1965. The following year, a dubbed version became very popular here in the U.S. I never cared much for the show but I liked the main title…
A lot of folks thought I'd committed a heinous crime leaving Top Cat (1961) off my Top Ten list. I loved the show but the title and theme song just barely missed the cut. And, hey: See if you can spot Joe Barbera's initials hidden in this opening and also the egregious animation error where someone got the cel levels mixed up near the end. That mistake was on every episode every week and they never fixed it.
Also, the end credits are on here but they aren't real. Hanna-Barbera somehow lost the end titles with the credits but they did have a copy of the end titles without the credits. So they copied the credits off one episode and, imitating the font and the placement, put the same credits on every print of the series, even though the people listed may not have worked on every episode. So every time you see a Top Cat, it says at the end that Kin Platt wrote it but Mr. Platt only wrote a couple…
With the success of the Bugs Bunny cartoons on Saturday morning, Warner Brothers put together another package of their old theatrical cartoons and marketed it in 1964 as The Porky Pig Show. The animation of the new opening title they had made — done, I think by Hal Seeger's studio — was not good but I kinda liked the song…
Before Total Television — a short-lived cartoon studio with distant ties to Jay Ward's — gave us Underdog, they gave us King Leonardo and His Short Subjects (1960) and this was another case where I liked the opening titles more than the show. For some reason, I like that the vocalists sound like they just got everyone in the studio at the moment to gather around a microphone and sing. And there's something nice about a cartoon show main title that ends with some of the characters firing a machine gun at the other characters…
In 1963, veteran animator Joe Oriolo, who had previously done the Felix the Cat cartoons for TV, gave us this series of The Mighty Hercules. I loved the theme song which was composed by Winston Sharples, who did so much of the music for Paramount's cartoons, with lyrics by Mr. Sharples' son and a vocal by Johnny Nash, who later had a couple of hit records like "I Can See Clearly Now"…
This is The Peter Potamus Show, which Hanna-Barbera did in '64 as part of the same deal with Ideal Toys that gave us The Magilla Gorilla Show. As with that series, the sponsor's name was woven into the theme song and there were visual plugs which were awkwardly chopped-out for later syndication.
At the age of twelve when this show went on, I had a great affection for Mr. Potamus, partly because his voice was supplied by Daws Butler. I have affection for any character voiced by Daws Butler and in this case, he was doing a voice not unlike character actor Joe E. Brown. Those who've handled Peter Potamus in more recent times seem to have a desire to disfigure the character and it feels to me like some psycho slashing my old teddy bear. Here he is when he was a pleasant potamus…
This was the opening of the 1964 prime-time series, The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo. I assume this came about because of the success of the 1962 Magoo's Christmas Carol special. Loved the special, never quite got into the series but I liked the opening, though not enough for it to make my Top Ten…
Super Chicken was not a show. It was a segment on the Jay Ward series George of the Jungle (1967) but my friend Shelly Goldstein loves this mini-main title. It was, like the main title of the program it appeared on,sung by Stan Worth with the vocal stylings of Bill Scott, who produced the show and voiced its main characters.
Before this, the Ward studios whipped up an unsold pilot for Super Chicken with Don Knotts in the title role and Louis Nye voicing his sidekick, Fred. But these cartoons have Bill Scott as Super Chicken, Paul Frees as Fred and Daws Butler as most of the villains Super Chicken went up against…
Lastly, this was not a cartoon show but it aired among them and that's close enough. Supercar was made for British television beginning in 1960 and airing in this country soon after — the first show I saw featuring "Supermarionation" by Gerry & Sylvia Anderson. I loved the puppetry on the show and I especially liked the part of the main title where the Supercar plunges into someone's goldfish tank.
And though I titled this post "Ten More Openings to Cartoon Shows From When I Was A Kid," I just decided to use some creative accounting and turn it up to eleven. I'm ending with the next "Supermarionation" show I ever saw — Fireball XL5 from 1962. It had a pretty good opening and a great end title. When I was in my teens, I should have tried serenading some girls with that end song. I'll bet one of them would have agreed to go out with me…
Dick Shawn was, of course, one of the major players in my fave film, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. At the time it was made, he had not yet quite attained the stardom of most of the other major players but he was so good in it, that didn't matter. I have talked about this movie with hundreds of people over the year and there seems to be a consensus that the three greatest performances were given by Jonathan Winters, Phil Silvers and Shawn. In a movie packed with professional scene-stealers, that's quite an accomplishment.
Here's Mr. Shawn with Johnny Carson and Burt Reynolds on The Tonight Show for November 11, 1986. That was just a few months before Shawn passed away during the intermission of a one-man show in which he was performing. The video also ends abruptly but what comes before is very funny and very typical of this man's unique, tethered-to-his-own-reality sense of humor. No one else was quite like him and it's unlikely anyone ever will be…
As some of you know, my first few years of writing for television were as part of a team with a clever gent named Dennis Palumbo. After a while, we parted (and have remained) friends and our careers went in very different directions. These days, Dennis is a respected psychotherapist and an author of mystery novels. He recently sat for a two-part interview that's mostly about the psychotherapy end of his world and somewhat about writing. I found it enlightening and perhaps you will too if you read Part One and Part Two.
A really colorful gent named Wally Amos died yesterday at his home in Honolulu at the age of 88. Wally was an entertainer, an agent, a TV star, an entrepreneur, a life coach, an author and a maker of some of the best damned chocolate chip cookies in the world. Maybe you know him better as "Famous Amos, King of Cookies."
It was while he was an agent — mostly for musical acts including Simon and Garfunkel — that he turned a hobby into a business. The hobby was making chocolate chip cookies which he freely dispensed to his friends and clients. Some of those friends and clients told him his cookies were too good not to be made commercially available and two of them — Marvin Gaye and Helen Reddy — loaned him the bucks to open what was for a time a very successful business.
Like I said: "For a time." Eventually, due to some other business ventures, he had to sell the cookie company but the product continued to bear his name. In fact, because the firm that bought his business also bought his name, he couldn't use "Famous Amos" when, years later, he attempted to get back into that line of work. It was around then that our paths crossed for the first time. I have no idea how he found me but he found me and one day, he was in my living room outlining an idea he had…
He wanted to bring out a new line of chocolate chip cookies and at the same time, he wanted to get into the business of animated cartoons. He had some ideas for characters who would be mascots for his cookie line the way Tony the Tiger sells Frosted Flakes or Captain Crunch — is he still around? — sold Captain Crunch cereal. The show would sell the cookies and the cookies would sell the show. As I wrote here some time ago…
The project never went forward, at least with me involved…but one afternoon, we sat and swapped tales of our respective businesses. I told what I knew about how to make cartoons. He told me what he knew about how to make cookies. I sure got the better of that exchange.
The main thing I learned was that the recipe doesn't matter; that you can make great cookies with the recipe they print right on the bag of chocolate morsels you buy at the supermarket. The secrets are in, first of all, the quality of the ingredients you use…but mainly in how skillfully you combine them, how long you bake them, even in the way you just blend them together.
Which makes sense. You could give me the exact same paints that Edgar Degas used and the same brushes and the same canvas and even get similar fat ladies to pose for me…but that doesn't mean I could produce one of his paintings or anything a zillionth as wonderful. Great art is not about secret formulas and neither is great cooking, at least not completely.
You'd be amazed how often remembering that has been helpful in my life.
In later years, I ran into Wally Amos now and then — once, I recall, at a Licensing Show where I couldn't believe he recognized me from halfway across a very large hall. He was always cheerful, always doing something and always enthusiastic about whatever he was doing at the moment. At the Licensing Show, it was some sort of program to help illiterate adults become literate adults. A noble endeavor.
When I teach writing as I occasionally do, I've been known to tell my students what Famous Amos told me about how to make great cookies. I compare it to writing and I say, "You have all the same words available to you that your favorite writers had, just as Wally Amos had all the same ingredients and kitchen utensils as any other maker of cookies. It's what you do with them that matters." What Wally Amos did with his mattered.
Everyone has their own theories about why Trump/Vance is down and Harris/Walz is up. Mine is that when it was Trump v. Biden, most of America didn't want either guy but Trump was doing a more efficient job of making people scared of a Biden second term than Biden was of spreading fear about another four years of Trump. Then suddenly, we don't have to vote for one of those men.
I also don't think Trump is down quite as much as the media — including the pro-Trump media — is acting. But he's acting like he's plunging to his doom and that makes everyone feel it's worse than maybe the numbers make it out to be. Then again, the numbers are not good.
If you want to track this every day — and I'm not suggesting that's a healthy thing to do — keep your eye on…
None of these are infallible and since they exchange data, the fact that they all agree may not be an indication of anything more than all of them agreeing..if you know what I mean. I also think we have a number of game-changing events ahead of us including but not limited to the disposition of some Trump trials, the outcome of whatever debates occur and one or more huge "Hail Mary" tricks that Trump will try out of sheer desperation.
Also, keep your eyes on dates. I just read a piece on Nate Silver's site that said in its description line, "…the odds are in the ex-president's favor" and I let out a big "HUH?" until I realized it was from June 26, 2024. That was like a hundred years ago.
I have oodles of things I have to do today so to make you feel you didn't waste your time clicking your way to my blog, here are the ten openings — and I think there's a closing or two in here as well — to cartoon shows I enjoyed watching when I was a kid. We're not talking about enjoying the show itself, although I usually did. But here are my ten fave openings, starting with Number Ten:Mighty Mouse Playhouse (1955)…
The next show was originally sponsored by Ideal Toys and they had sponsor plugs in it and worked the word "ideal" into the lyrics. That word remained but they cut out the other sponsorship points in this version of Number Nine:The Magilla Gorilla Show (1964)…
And then we swing — on a vine, no less — to the vocal stylings of musician Stan Worth (with yells by Bill Scott, voice of the title character) for Number Eight:George of the Jungle (1967)…
Our countdown continues — and yes, I'm starting to feel here like Casey Kasem — with Number Seven:The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958)…
You may remember a version of the above with Huckleberry Hound doing all the acrobatics done above by the rooster on the Kellogg's Corn Flakes box. That was the second version which they made up when Kellogg's stopped sponsoring the show. Sponsor plugs were also later edited out of the opening titles on our next two entries. Here's Number Six:The Quick Draw McGraw Show (1959)…
And yes, it always bothered me a little that Quick Draw was a horse commanding a stagecoach pulled by his own species. Next, we have Number Five:The Yogi Bear Show (1961)…
Sometimes, the best thing about a cartoon show was its theme song. Case in point, Number Four:The Underdog Show (1967)…
And this is the original — and to me, vastly superior — opening for one of my favorite shows…Number Three:The Flintstones (1960)…
This strong second-place finisher on our list shows you what you get when the creator of the property and one of the main characters is a recording artist who's had a bunch of number one hit records and then he brings in the Johnny Mann Singers. You get our Number Two:The Alvin Show (1961)…
And I always thought they oughta start the Emmy Awards year with two male hosts coming out and performing this number, ending with a march-through by a lot of big TV stars. This is, of course, Number One:The Bugs Bunny Show (1960)…
Here's one of the earliest surviving episodes of The Tonight Show back when Johnny Carson hosted it. This is from 1/14/64 and by way of reference, Johnny's first episode was 10/1/62…so Mr. Carson hads been doing it for about fifteen months at this point. As you'll see, the show was looser and more casual than any talk show today — or even what Johnny did himself the last few decades he hosted.
The guest list includes "humorist" (that's how they usually described him) Sam Levenson, columnist Hedda Hopper, comedy writer Jack Douglas and Douglas's wife Reiko. Jack Douglas was one of the wittiest men in television back then though his spot here with Johnny was not his best. He and his spouse were frequent guests on the show when Jack Paar hosted it, though Paar — at least on a later talk show he did — spent most of those segments talking with Reiko. Paar got the rep for being erudite and witty but based on what I recall and clips I've seen, he liked nothing more than to have on people — women, especially — who were either dizzy or who didn't speak English well. He enjoyed making fun of how they talked.
Also in this episode: A rousing game of "Stump the Band." And it was even customary on The Tonight Show then to have the band play a complete number every evening. That tradition went away after a while as did the loose atmosphere…
I saw a clip of Trump talking the other night and it reminded me of something. It reminded me of what New York Mayor Ed Koch said the night he ran for re-election one too many times and lost. And if this sounds familiar to longtime followers of this blog, I'm cutting-and-pasting it from an old post here. Once it was obvious he'd lost, a reporter asked Mayor Koch to what he attributed his defeat. His answer went something like this…
I could give you all sorts of answers having to do with the changing demographics of the state and with people blaming the city for some of the labor unrest and strikes…and there might be some truth to some of that. But the real answer is that sometimes, after a while, the public just gets sick of your face.
There are a number of reasons why Trump is slip-sliding-away in the polls at the moment and…I dunno. Watching that clip of him, I got to thinking that might be one of them that people aren't talking about much. It just seems like his act — the name-calling at anyone who doesn't worship him, the endless blathering-on about his own greatness — is feeling real stale. Enough people were weary of Biden but that didn't kick in when it was Same Old Guy as Last Time versus Same Old Guy as Last Time. But now, whatever you think of Harris and Walz, at least they're new…
