Sorry for the sparse posting today. Something I ate, like your average Trump supporter, did not agree with me. It ain't serious — and it ain't mushroom soup — but it kept me away from the computer most of the day. I will make it up to you in the coming days. I owe that to you, just as I owe my ability to post this much to whoever invented Pepto-Bismol. At some point this afternoon, I decided it was a greater scientific breakthrough than nuclear energy, flight or fire.
Someone named Mike wrote to ask…
First of all, I'm a big fan of your blog. Your recent post about voice actors that you wanted to have guest star on productions got me wondering… what voice actors auditioned to lend their voices to the Garfield projects you worked on? Were there auditions for Jon, Roy and Binky before Thom Huge decided to voice those characters? Were there any voice actors who auditioned for characters, didn't get the roles, but still wound up guest-starring on Garfield and Friends? Were there auditions at all, or did the crew just call up various actors they liked and offer them the roles?
Well, the first Garfield project with which I was involved was the Saturday morning series, Garfield and Friends. Jim Davis, the cat's creator, selected the voices before I came along. Garfield's first voice was, briefly, a radio personality named Scott Beach and you can read about him here. He did the voice for a short segment in a 1980 CBS special called The Fantastic Funnies.
That segment more or less served as the pilot for a series of prime-time animated Garfield specials, kicking off with Here Comes Garfield!, which aired in October of 1982. For that special and all that followed, Jim decided Garfield needed a different voice and the answer to the question, "Who did they audition?" would be "Who didn't they audition?" Just about every voice actor in L.A. read for the part and some of them read several times before Lorenzo Music tried out and got it. (Lorenzo, by the way, redubbed the Fantastic Funnies clip for when it was later shown here and there.)
One of the people who auditioned for the role of Garfield was Gregg Berger. Jim liked Gregg tremendously and while he felt Gregg was wrong for the cat, he found out Gregg could make dog sounds and awarded him the role of Odie. To this day, Gregg has been Odie in every case where Odie has had a voice.
Sandy Kenyon (you can read about him here) was the voice of Jon in that first special. With the second special, Garfield on the Town, Jim decided to give the role of Jon to a friend of his who'd been working for his company and had a background in radio and voice work. That was when Thom Huge became Jon…and he also picked up other roles, including Binky. For that special, Jim also selected Julie Payne to voice Jon's lady friend, Liz. As far as I know, Liz was the last role for which auditions were done. In other specials, Jim just cast actors he'd heard of or who had auditioned for other roles.
When Garfield and Friends started, Jim was originally the Voice Director but I took over casting new roles and eventually took over the voice direction when Jim got too busy to fly out here and do it. Thom Huge, who lived back in Indiana and worked for Jim there, flew out for voice sessions so we ganged-up recording dates so Thom could do several shows while he was out here. He turned out to be quite versatile so he did a lot of other roles in the show, plus he played Roy in the U.S. Acres segments. Gregg Berger also turned out to have an endless supply of other voices.
To cast the other regular characters in U.S. Acres, we did the only other auditions ever done for the Garfield and Friends series. We decided that since they were already part of the show, we'd have Julie Payne voice the character of Lanolin, and we'd assign Gregg one of the male roles and I brought in about eight of my favorite voice actors to audition. I directed the auditions, Jim listened to the tapes and he picked Gregg to be Orson, Howie Morris to be Wade Duck, and Frank Welker to play Bo, Booker and Sheldon.
And that was that. Thereafter, when we needed a new voice for a recurring or one-shot character, I might be able to have Gregg, Thom, Howie, Julie or Frank — or even Lorenzo, once or twice — do it but otherwise, I'd just hire someone I knew could give me what I wanted. A few of the actors who auditioned for U.S. Acres, like Chuck McCann and Lennie Weinrib, wound up doing guest voices.
Over the 121 half-hours we did of that series, we hired a lot of people who were new to the voice business. We also hired a lot of actors who'd voiced cartoons I'd loved as a child including Stan Freberg, June Foray, Larry Storch, Don Messick, Gary Owens, Dick Beals, Shep Menken, Paul Winchell, Julie Bennett, Marvin Kaplan and Arnold Stang. I certainly didn't need to audition any of those people.
I don't have a lot of respect for most of the pundits and "talking heads" one sees on cable news and allied websites. Even a lot of the ones uttering thoughts with which I agree strike me as saying what they say mainly because it gets them (a) on TV and (b) some attention. But you've seen me link to a lot of Eric Boehlert's articles because I thought they were honestly well thought-out, lacking in needless dramatics and, as hindsight has shown, usually correct.
Mr. Boehlert was killed in a bicycling accident today. He was 57 years old. That's a shame for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that we need more journalists like that man.
Here's a link to what I believe is the last article he published. It's headlined, "Why is the press rooting against Biden?" Before any of you scoff that it isn't, read what Boehlert had to say. He was very good at making whatever case he made with solid examples and references.
Hey, let's watch a famous sketch from the famous TV series, Your Show of Shows. Here are Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howie Morris…
If you are a fan of old Warner Brothers cartoons, listen to this report. Don't ask. Just listen…
I do want to get off the subject of the Slapgate/Will Smith matter but — and this is on me — my brain keeps going back to it…and not because I care mightily about the slapper or the slappee or anyone who makes more money in a month than some people make in a decade. There are absolutely more important issues in the news and even more important (to me) topics in my life.
But the incident probably touches most of us in some way, not just because we saw it as it happened or can't avoid seeing replays everywhere we look. Some of us have or have had issues in our lives with someone who thinks violence is a fitting response to someone saying something they don't like. Or with someone who thinks he or she is so important that normal laws of common decency or legal statutes don't apply to them. Or of someone getting outraged at something we said. Or of someone saying something that made us want to hit them. Or of some personal moment or issue that was, to us, reflected in Will Smith laying a hand on Chris Rock.
I wasn't sure what had me thinking so much about it and then somewhere on YouTube, I came across a clip of Ricky Gervais — the noted expert at having people get pissed off by jokes — and he said these words: "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right."
And I suddenly realized what there was I wanted to say/write about this…
In this world, there's Being Right and there's Being Right and there's sometimes even Being Right. I'm talking about Being Right in one sense but not in another. In particular, you can be right from a by-the-rules standpoint and wrong from a strategic standpoint. Back in high school, there was one time a teacher of mine taught us some history that was just plain wrong — in a factual sense, not a political sense.
I tried correcting him politely but he didn't listen. He wasn't a bad teacher or a bad person. He was just the kind of human being who'd rather admit to a capital crime than a simple mistake…and for some adolescent reason that I hope I've long since outgrown, I felt a desperate need to "win" on this issue. So I went to the library and Xeroxed some references that proved I was right and I enclosed them in a letter I wrote to the principal…
…and there were two results. One was that the teacher was scolded somehow by his employer and he had to issue a correction and an apology to all his students, which he clearly did not like doing. The principal even came to the class I was in to hear him do it and, through gritted teeth, "thank" me for setting him straight.
That was one result. The other was that…well, I was going to say he made my life a living hell for the rest of that semester but that would be overstating the situation somewhat. Let's just say it was less pleasant in there, mostly towards me but also towards other students. I wasn't the only one who noticed the difference.
I came to regret what I'd done. Actions, as we all know, have consequences and they also have unforeseen, ancillary ones. I was right but like I said, there's Being Right and there's Being Right. I perhaps could have handled it in a manner that wouldn't have triggered those ancillary consequences. I could also have said nothing. It wasn't that important. The erroneous info would have been quickly forgotten and the rest of that term would have been more comfortable for all.
This is not a precise analogy to the Smith/Rock incident because, among other obvious reasons, I don't think Will Smith was right in any way to smack Chris Rock. I don't think anyone is ever right to resort to violence over words, especially words that were spoken without malice. But let's say Smith was on some level right to do what he did. There are people who seem to think so, most apparently people who've had a burr over smartass comedians.
So what did Smith achieve? Well, an awful lot of folks there think he's a maniac or that he has anger issues…and you don't have to venture far on the 'net to find some pretty insulting theories people have about him and his marriage and his wife. That would be the wife he was trying to protect from hurtful words. And every professional comedian who thinks of him- or herself as edgy and unafraid — which would be, like, 90% of them — is saying or writing the worst kind of material about the Smith-Pinkett marriage.
You hit one comedian, you hit them all. And most of them will hit back. You also have folks like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar saying things like, "With a single petulant blow, he advocated violence, diminished women, insulted the entertainment industry, and perpetuated stereotypes about the Black community."
That can't feel good.
Just as it can't feel good to have people saying, as many are, that his career is over. I don't believe that for a minute. There's a rumor around that that evening, he also won the Best Actor award and careers don't end when you do that even when you distract from that little accomplishment. Still, given his past earning power, to lose just one starring movie role because some studio doesn't want to gamble on him or some director doesn't want to work with him costs him what? Twenty million dollars? Thirty?
And here's an article headlined "Apple TV is Sitting on a $120 Mil Will Smith Movie For Fall Plus Investors in his Company May Be Holding a $60 Mil Bag." Slapping Chris Rock is turning out to be pretty damned expensive.
Like I said, I don't think he was right in any way, shape or form to take a swing at Chris Rock. But given the results, it's not hard to feel that even if he had been right, he would still have been wrong.
I will now try not to think much more about this and therefore feel I have to write about it again. Hey, isn't Frank Ferrante's PBS show terrific?
Randy Rainbow makes a shocking confession. I for one had no idea…
I posted on Twitter last night a bit of my frustrations with Spectrum, the service from which I get my home phones and cable TV. I was on the phone with them for an hour and twenty minutes trying to get those two things to work properly and for them to turn off the Internet service I discontinued on 3/20 and stop billing me for it.
During that call, I spoke to one guy who couldn't do anything but he was apparently ordered by some computer to try and talk me into switching my Internet service back to them…which he did by offering me slower speeds at a higher price. When I declined to grab for that tempting offer, he switched me over to someone else who couldn't help me with my tech problems but was apparently told by his computer to try and sell me on switching my cell phone service to Spectrum. I finally said to him, "How about if you get my current services working properly before trying to sell me on adding more with your company?"
I finally got to someone in the Retention Department who, after keeping me on hold for seemed like roughly the length of John Oliver's show which I couldn't watch because my HBO service was out, told me he'd arranged for them to turn off the Internet service I'm no longer using and to retroactively stop billing me for it…but I have to call the Billing Department today and make sure they did that.
So I tweeted what I tweeted while on hold and this morning, I found the following addressed to me on Twitter…
Having decided not to travel far or get on an airplane until COVID is much less of a concern, I can only follow Broadway from afar, as we did with the revival of The Music Man. I am intrigued that a new musical — Mr. Saturday Night — is currently there in previews with an announcing opening date of April 27.
It's at the Nederlander Theater and it's based, of course, on the 1992 movie which starred Billy Crystal, David Paymer and other folks. The musical version stars Billy Crystal, David Paymer and other folks. The screenplay for the movie, which was by Billy Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandell has been adapted for the stage by Billy Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandell. The music is by Jason Robert Brown and the lyrics are by Amanda Green. John Rando is directing.
I liked but did not love the movie and one thing that didn't work for me in it was the makeup jobs done to make Mr. Crystal look younger and then older and then younger again and then older again and so forth. David Paymer as his brother actually seemed to regress and age as per the film's timeline but Crystal, to me, just kept looking like Billy Crystal with stuff on his face. I wouldn't imagine that would be a problem with a stage version. When you do Peter Pan on stage, it's okay if the audience can see the wire because they'll pretend they don't. An audience for live theater can pretend Billy Crystal is whatever age the scene says he is…and he is thirty years older now.
The other night, a lady friend and I watched the DVD of the film and we both enjoyed it a lot…for me, more than when I saw it in a theater, way back when. I again thought that David Paymer was the best thing in it. He's usually the best thing in whatever he does…even a cartoon show for which he did voices, directed by me. A lovely man. A very fine actor. And don't for a minute think I had to give him any sort of real direction.
What makes me wonder about the storyline as a musical is that the character Crystal plays — semi-successful-but-not-for-long comedian Buddy Young, Jr. — is not a very nice guy most of the time. His two defining traits are that and a certain lack of self-awareness. As Paymer's character (Young's brother-agent) tells him in the film, he takes every bad break and makes it worse. Most characters in musicals have a certain understanding of what they want and at the end of the show, they get it. Buddy Young's story is mainly one of self-induced failure and blindness to his own self-destructive nature. Still, these are skillful folks making this show. I hope they pull it off and that it runs long enough for me to get back there and see how they did it.
It's The Muppets on The Ed Sullivan Show for November 30, 1969. And I'll bet most of you know exactly how this goes…