Here's one you might not know. In 1967, British singer-songwriter Jonathan King had a modest (exceedingly modest) hit with a song called "Round Round," which I stuck on my mixtape. I didn't have his much bigger hit, "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" on there nor did I have any of the dozens of other songs on there that he reportedly recorded under other names. He was quite prolific, though his career hit some major blocks some years later when it was alleged he'd had indecent contacts with underage boys. I won't claim I understand enough about it to say if he was innocent or guilty; just that he was charged and tried and convicted but there were appeals and some dismissals and…oh, go look it up yourself if you're interested.

What interested me was "Round Round," which was an anti-drug tune released at a time when there were a lot of songs glorifying drugs.  It felt to me like Mr. King's song was getting some airplay on KHJ on something like an "equal time" basis…so the station wouldn't be pilloried for some of the other records they were broadcasting to a young, perhaps impressionable audience.  Or maybe I was just imagining this about a song that was about people imagining things that weren't there.  Here it is…

Here's another not-good review of the Jackman/Foster Music Man that explains pretty plainly what the reviewer didn't like about it. The notice may ring through for those of us who haven't seen the production but we shouldn't assume it's spot-on. Then again, it does remind me of some of what bothered me about that revival of My Fair Lady a few years ago.

The passing of Stephen Sondheim does not mean the end of Stephen Sondheim interviews.  D.T. Max conducted this conversation which may have been the composer's last one.

It may come as a surprise to my neighbors but Spectrum — the big cable provider around here — carries the Decades channel. It's tucked away, at least on my block, on Channel 1294 where no one will spot it and if I look at the Program Guide at any hour of the day, it will tell me that the show currently airing is Title Not Available, and it will be followed by episodes of Title Not Available, Title Not Available, Title Not Available and Title Not Available — in that order.

When I tune in, I might catch what looks like a vintage episode of The Phil Silvers Show, Family Affair, The Best of The Ed Sullivan Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Bob Newhart Show, Cheers, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy, Here's Lucy, The Millionaire, The Dick Cavett Show, Our Miss Brooks, The Odd Couple, Taxi, Petticoat Junction, Newhart, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Love Boat, Get Smart, The Donna Reed Show, The Abbott and Costello Show or Car 54, Where Are You?

That is not a complete list of what they air but it is a list that includes some real good programs. Most of them are on other cable channels but this is a nice selection to find all in one place.

You can learn what's on when (and where Decades is viewable in your area) on the channel's website but since it isn't in Spectrum's program guide, it's not on my TiVo's program guide.  This makes their programming hard to record and watch at my convenience…which reminds me.  My favorite show, Title Not Available is on right now.

From Late Night with David Letterman for November 16, 1983: Larry "Bud" Melman welcomes arriving visitors at the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal…

My buddy Bob Bergen continues to release wonderful videos on Instagram…tips on voice acting for those who wish to enter that profession. Some of them are worth watching if you're aspiring to any kind of job anywhere. If you haven't checked them out, go to this page and start watching.

I spoke with Bob last week to suggest a topic and it turns out he already covered it on a video I missed…but I'll tell you a story that illustrates it. In fact, I'll tell you two of them. The first occurred a number of years ago when in my occasional role as a Cartoon Voice Director, I had to hold auditions and find just the right actor to do the voice of a new character in a new series. I had written some audition copy for the actors to read.

These days, almost all those who audition do so from their home studios but this was back when they used to have to come in to a recording studio as per an appointment made through their agents. I think I auditioned about twenty actors that day. It was a long day.

An actor would arrive, usually while I was auditioning the guy before them. My assistant would welcome them and give them the audition copy which included a few drawings of the new character and a brief explanation of who he was and what he was like. They could study it until it was their turn to come in and record something to show how they'd handle the role.

So midway through the day, in came an actor I knew (sorta) from TV and some on-camera roles, though he did have credits for voice work. I was not the one who asked his agent to send him in to audition. An executive producer of the show thought this might be The Guy and that was how his audition was arranged.

When it was this actor's turn, I welcomed him, told him a bit more about the character and asked if he had any questions. He said no and went into the booth and positioned himself in front of the microphone we had in there. I was outside the booth, seated at a console next to the engineer who controlled all the buttons and dials. In such a set-up, I have a button I can push and communicate with the guy in the booth and I used it to ask him if he was ready. He said he was "more than ready" and he launched into…

Well, he was supposed to be reading the audition copy he'd been given but he wasn't doing that. He was instead ad-libbing a speech based vaguely on the same premise. What he was giving me was not the copy I'd written nor was it even close to the character he was supposed to be playing.

I hit the talkback and told him — nicely, I thought — "You might like to know that I wrote the audition copy you're not reading." "Nothing personal," he said, 'But I never follow the copy."

I said, "Well, if you do this show, you'll have to."

He said, "I don't do that. Like I said, nothing personal. But there's no one in the business who can write dialogue better than what I come up with."

I said, 'Even if that's true, you're not doing the character we need. He's nothing like what you're doing."

He seemed strangely uncaring about that. He just shrugged and said, "So change the character."

I said, "I think we're both wasting our time here." He agreed…and in an oddly friendly manner, came out of the booth, shook my hand and said, "Okay, thanks." He headed for the door, then stopped and looked back at me. "Someday, someone's going to try it my way and have the best friggin' cartoon show ever done." Then he left. The guy who got the part was terrific and just what we wanted.

The funny thing about this was that what he did in the booth was very colorful and I could imagine someone somewhere building a good show around what he was doing. It just wasn't the series we were doing.

(And just for context: I was also the main writer on this show so I did have some power to alter the script and I suppose I could have gone back to the network and the producers to suggest minor (minor!) changes in the character. But I didn't want to in this case, and in most instances, the voice director doesn't have the power to do that. We're hired to supervise the recording of the show the network bought and the script everyone has already approved.)

Up until a few years ago, every cartoon show I voice-directed was recorded in a studio in Los Angeles with all the actors present. It was technically-possible to record an actor via what they call a "phone patch" where he or she is in another studio in another city but except once in a rare while, we didn't do that. It took more time, it cost extra money, the results were not as good and I could probably think of a few other reasons we only did it in an emergency.

All that time, you'd be amazed how often I got a call or an e-mail or someone approached me at a convention to urge me to hire them for a voice job…but they would have to do it over the phone from far, far away. And when I told them, "That's not the way we do it," their reply was, "Well, you can change the way you do it."

And the reply to that which I usually didn't say aloud was: "Why should I? I can get the absolute top voice actors in the business to come into the studio and work the way I like to work." I wasn't going to change things to accommodate some beginner.

COVID has changed the way most cartoons are recorded. Most voice actors have now installed small state-o'-the-art recording studios in their homes and they record from there. Usually, it's with all the actors online at the same time in a ZOOM conference or something similar…so it doesn't matter as much where they are. But it changed because it had to, not because some kid way outta town wanted it to for his sake.

So now here's the other story…

For a brief time in the seventies, I edited a line of Tarzan and Korak comic books for the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate. These were comics published overseas and, so far, never in this country. One day, a young man who had never worked in comics before showed up at the office with his portfolio seeking work on these comics. That portfolio consisted of about two dozen drawings of the way he saw Tarzan. There were two things wrong with his work…

One was that all he had were figure drawings of the character — no backgrounds, no other characters, just a guy in a loin cloth in action poses. If he was drawing Tarzan swinging on a vine, he didn't even draw the vine. And there were no comic book-style pages that told any sort of story to demonstrate that he could do that.

I told him I'd need to see all that — actual panel-by-panel storytelling, backgrounds, the character interacting with others, etc. He said, "I don't want to draw that. I just want to draw Tarzan. Can't you just have some other artist draw all that other stuff?"

No, I told him, I couldn't.

The other problem was that everyone in this project was drawing the version of Tarzan depicted by Russ Manning. In fact, Russ had been the editor, making sure all the artists drew Tarzan roughly as he did. When he got too busy, I took over but the rule was still that the artists were drawing that Tarzan. The young man applying for work was drawing his own version of Tarzan who looked nothing like the same character.

And when I told him that's what I needed, he just shrugged and said, "That's the way I see Tarzan." Okay…but that wasn't the job.

When I said I couldn't even give him a tryout, he grabbed up his samples and walked out. The receptionist later told me he'd stormed past her desk and out of the office, cursing me out and muttering something about how when he was a big, famous illustrator, I'd be humiliated for having turned him down. I've since been humiliated for many things but I don't recall that being among them.

I have more examples but you get the concept. Audition for the job they offer, not for what you wish someone would offer. There are times when someone comes in and they're so spectacular that those doing the hiring will change their minds about what they're seeking but it's like winning the lottery. It happens so rarely that you shouldn't expect it.

I'm not really following the Canadian Truckers' strike/gridlock/whatever it is. But Jordan Klepper is…

• Any time Caller ID shows me an incoming call is from a strange name in Montebello, CA, I know it's spam. There is no one in Montebello I want to hear from and I doubt there ever will be. I wish my phone had the ability to block all calls from Montebello.

I just came across this graphic on my harddisk. I downloaded it somewhere on the 'net years ago and meant to write a post here about it. In the late sixties and early seventies, various projects caused me to deal with a lot of print shops. Every one I went into had some variation of this sign. Some just said, "Speed, quality, value…pick any two."  I thought about putting it on my business card but I realized it wouldn't register or matter with the folks hiring me to write things for them. Every one of them demanded all three.

"Good" or "quality" was the tricky one because it was so subjective. You could measure the other two with numbers. Three days is faster than six days, no argument. $500 is definitely cheaper than $1000 and always will be. But the quality of the work — how good it is — is much more arguable.

I don't know how many times I'd find myself in this situation, especially in the TV business: I'd be writing a script for a project where several folks had supervisory roles. I'd be getting "notes" (criticisms) from more than one person, often a whole committee. At Disney, it sometimes felt that I got notes from everyone who'd been to the Magic Kingdom in the past month.

Wherever it was, I'd go in for a meeting where all of them would gather to give me their comments —

— and they didn't agree. It was like they'd all read a different script, not the one (1) I'd handed in. One of them loved the character of Myron and wanted him to have more lines. One of them hated Myron and wanted him to have less, perhaps none. And there'd often be a person in the meeting who'd say something like, "I feel something is missing with the character Myron but I can't put my finger on what it is…"

There's a really helpful comment.

What I'd do in those situations is to just sit there quietly and let them duke it out. Sometimes, they'd all cancel each other out and I'd wind up making no changes. More often, I'd make one or two token changes for each…cut Myron back in some scenes; give him more than others. At a TV network meeting, I'd usually sense that for the people giving me the notes, it was not as important for them to win a discussion as it was to not lose or be ignored.

They just had to be able to feel and/or say they'd made some contribution. Sometimes, that meant rewriting every word and changing everything…but once, this happened:  I wrote a pilot for what turned out to be an unsold cartoon show once and when I handed in my first draft, the lady at the studio said, "Can we change the name of this character from Barbara to something else?  When I was going to school, there was a girl named Barbara I really hated."

I asked, "Did you go to school with any Brendas you hated?"  She said no so for the second draft, I changed Barbara to Brenda and that was it. This was back in the days of typing on paper so I had to retype a number of pages and then call a messenger service to come pick up the script and deliver it. In the computer era, I could have made the change and e-mailed the script to the producer in under five minutes.

The first draft had been delivered on the required date and the second draft was there the same day I got the "note"…so I guess the script was fast. I felt I should have been paid more for it so I guess it was cheap. And the buyer couldn't find anything but the name "Barbara" she wanted changed so I'll say it was good, at least up until the point where the network decided not to pick up the series.

In that case, I don't think it was because of the writing. The networks then developed a lot of shows they probably weren't going to buy. One then developed "one-to-ten," meaning that if they were looking for three new shows, they made thirty development deals and tried to do at least one or two with each studio they considered a major supplier. And in this case, the network then had another studio hire me to rewrite a pilot script that they did want to pick up from another company.

So I'd like to think that in that case, I did achieve Cheap, Good and Fast. There were other scripts where I managed two out of three. I was almost always on-time, no matter how tight the deadline was…and I usually felt I'd been underpaid so Cheap was usually achieved. It was that third one, Good, that like I said, was always tricky.

Continuing our parade of comedy teams on The Ed Sullivan Show, here — from July 10, 1960 — are Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. I thought they were a cut above most of the other teams around then but only a small cut. Later on, they got better…mostly because Dick Martin was a very funny man and they started building the act around him and his personality. Before that, as with this example, they were doing material that any two guys could do. In fact, not that long before they got popular enough to get on a show like this, it was Martin playing straight for Rowan. It worked better the other way around…

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver returns this Sunday so Mr. Oliver's on with Colbert tonight to promote that fact. [CORRECTION: I'm told it was last night. It's waiting on my TiVo.]

My favorite pizza place, Vito's, didn't reopen in time for Super Bowl Sunday and it apparently remains closed. Apparently, the fire was worse than some of us thought.

Amazon is now saying that the next volume of The Complete Pogo will be released in October. I think this is just them picking an arbitrary placeholder date. Because of that COVID thing you might have heard about, a lot of publishers are having a lot of trouble getting printers to commit to when they can get books printed and bound, and we are having that problem. But present indicators are that it'll be a lot sooner than October.

My iPhone has decided to get very selective about which text messages it delivers to me and which ones it doesn't. If you send me a text, do not assume I received it. I think I'm due for a new phone but I also think I'm too busy to deal with that right now.

Puppet Up! — the "for adults" puppet show about which I have raved here — is performing for three nights in Hollywood — March 4, 5 and 6 — and tickets still seem to be available. These are the same nights my pal Frank Ferrante is doing his Groucho show in Sierra Madre. I just checked and Google Maps says these two shows are 45 minutes apart so it may be possible to work a double feature. If you want to attend either or both, click for ticket info on Puppet Up! and/or Frank Ferrante's Groucho.

Comic book/strip/animation artist Mel Keefer has passed at the age of 95. Explaining to you who he was and what he did is going to be difficult because for more than sixty years, he was one of the busiest artists in the business, often called in as a replacement for other artists who had to be replaced for one reason or another. He was super-reliable and very, very good at what he did. When Roy Lichtenstein was swiping comic book panels and selling his copies as fine art, one of the artists whose work he copied was Mel.

No one is quite sure how many newspaper strips he worked on but I know of these: Perry Mason, Dragnet, Gene Autry, Mac Divot, Thorne McBride, Willis Barton M.D. and Rick O'Shay. His longest run was with Mac Divot, which ran from 1955 to 1977. A lot of comic strip fans didn't follow it because it was about golf and newspapers often ran it in the sports section. He ghosted on at least a half-dozen others but the most notable was Bash Brannigan, the strip drawn by "Stanley Ford" (Jack Lemmon) in the movie, How to Murder Your Wife. Mel did all the comic art in the film and when you thought you were seeing a close-up of Lemmon's hand drawing his character, that was Mel's hand you were seeing.

For that job, he replaced the great Alex Toth who had a tendency to quit jobs, often right in the middle. One time, Mel told an interviewer, "All the years that I have known of him, I have hardly said two words to him or he to me except once when I thanked him for affording me a nice living by accepting jobs that he walked out on. He didn't take too kindly to that."

Among many examples, Mel replaced Alex as artist of the Dell Zorro comic book and did piles of design work for Hanna-Barbera, often taking over design work on shows for which Toth was given sole credit. (Mel's first H-B job, on which he didn't replace Toth, was the original Jonny Quest.) Mel also did long stints working for Filmation on their adventure cartoon shows (from the Batman/Superman Hour in 1968 up to and including He-Man in 1985) and on the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoons produced in the sixties and on later shows produced by Marvel's animation studio.

And we haven't even discussed his illustrations for children's books (many) and all the comic books he worked on. The latter included comics for Toby Press, Charlton, Fawcett and a lot more than just Zorro for Dell/Gold Key. This obit could go on for days. He was also one of the comic book artists who appeared in the episode of Bob (Bob Newhart's short-lived sitcom about a comic book artist) in the episode about an awards show for that industry.

I knew Mel briefly and interviewed him at one Comic-Con in San Diego. Very nice man. Very serious about doing good work…and he did a lot of it. Sorry to hear he's gone but boy, did he have a great, prolific career.

I love these videos of old Los Angeles even though they've been colorized and had sound effects added. This one is from 1952, which is the year I "arrived" (was born) here.

We're driving down Sunset Boulevard heading west from around Cahuenga Boulevard. Sunset and Vine is a few blocks back and in the distance, there's a TV tower that I assume is on the lot that became KTLA in 1958. I think Paramount owned it then, having acquired it from Warner Brothers but I'm a little murky on the history there.

As we cruise along, very little is familiar to me. Some of the buildings are, though not the businesses in them. At one point, we pass the Oriental Theatre, which was located at 7425 Sunset Blvd. and was then playing Singin' in the Rain. That movie came out in March of 1952, just like me. The theater closed down in the early eighties and The Guitar Center is now located there.

Not much else is identifiable, though as we approach Crescent Heights Boulevard, we get a glimpse of Greenblatt's Delicatessen in its old location on the corner of Sunset and Laurel. The deli opened in that building in 1926, then moved a few doors west into larger quarters in 1979. It closed last August. The old building has been The Laugh Factory for many years and if you glance to the other side of the street, you'll see the famous Schwab's Drugstore. It closed in 1983 and a few years later, the whole corner there was turned into a big, hulking shopping center.

Shortly after that, we pass the Chateau Marmont, which is just about the only thing in the whole video that looks roughly the same to me. And just before the video comes to an end, we see Ciro's Nightclub, which was one of great nightspots…and in a way, still is since it became The Comedy Store. Enjoy the ride and all the Studebakers…

I see a lot of people online wondering about their safety regarding COVID by looking at national data. Seems to me they should be looking at the numbers where they live. At any given time, the numbers are going to be up in one county, down in another…and it's going to be that way for quite a while. I don't check it often because day-to-day movement is kind of meaningless but when I do want to see the trend for Los Angeles, I look here.

Currently, reports of people testing positive, people being admitted to hospitals and people dying from this &@#%!!! virus are on a steady downslope…but as you can see, they've done that before. How will I decide it's over? Probably when my primary care physician tells me it is. As I've probably said before, he doesn't know everything but he knows a helluva lot more about this kind of thing than I do.

I'm trying not to think about this a lot. I'm trying to spend less time thinking about things I can't do anything about. The other day here, I linked to a pretty good "explainer" about what's going on with Russia and The Ukraine. Parts of that piece may be outta-date by now and more will be tomorrow…but one thing will remain true: There's nothing I can do about it. So I don't really need an opinion about it.

It's still Valentine's Day so there's still time for me to feature this romantic music video starring the lovely Arlene Silver and the singing group, The Vantastix — Eric Bradley, Bryan Chadima and Mike Mendyke. There's also a surprise appearance by Arlene's husband who has been known to perform with The Vantastix…