Search Results for: Frank Nelson

Life Upon the Wicked Stage

Posted on Friday, December 7, 2012 at 12:22 AM

My pal Bob Claster just sent me a link to a treasure trove for fans of the Broadway stage. The late Dorothy Loudon was a major star of that stage and her personal papers and memorabilia were deeded over to the New York Public Library which has put them online.

I haven't had the time to go through much of it but there are some very interesting items…her contract for the 1983 smash hit comedy, Noises Off, for instance. It's always intriguing to look at something like that and see the kind of things that you wouldn't expect to find in such a document. There are scrapbooks of reviews and photos from her various projects.

Ms. Loudon was in a number of hits but also in several flops, the most notable of which was the 1969 show, The Fig Leaves Are Falling. The show was about the sexual liberation of that decade and it had a book and lyrics by Allan Sherman with music by Albert Hague. Some of you may know Mr. Hague from his on-camera role in the movie and TV show, Fame, but more of you know him for writing the music for a number of great cartoon specials including the original How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

And of course you know Allan Sherman from his famous song parody records. His one effort for Broadway folded after four performances and Sherman folded not long after that. The show was probably doomed from the moment the New York Times review by the notoriously inept Clive Barnes hit the streets. He said, in part…

There is nothing much wrong with The Fig Leaves Are Falling…that a new book, new music, new lyrics, new settings, new direction, new choreography and a partially new cast would not quite possibly put right.

Reviews don't get much worse than that. The cast featured along with Ms. Loudon, Barry Nelson, Jenny O'Hara and David Cassidy. Also in the cast was one of the top dancers of Broadway, the stunning Charlene Ryan, who is now married to cartoonist Sergio Aragonés. George Abbott was the director. They were all stunned and saddened when the show closed so rapidly but Sherman was especially depressed.

His life was already in turmoil as his marriage of 21 years had ended in '66, the divorce being a major point of inspiration for the Broadway show. His recording career was also pretty much over. In 1962, he'd had the fastest-selling record album of all time with My Son, the Folk Singer and a huge single hit in 1963 with "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh." But by 1967, his records had stopped selling and his company didn't want him to make any more.

It was an amazing success story, the success coming as it did so sudden…and at age 39 after years of being an oft-fired TV producer. One day, almost out of nowhere, he suddenly became a major comedy star. And almost as suddenly, it all went away.

After Fig Leaves, he fumbled about, trying to turn himself into some odd combination of Frank Sinatra and Hugh Hefner. He wrote a book called The Rape of the A*P*E, which was just unreadable. If you ever want to show someone what it looks like when a male goes through a mid-life crisis and desperately seeks the sex life he wishes he'd had when he was younger, give them this book and ask them to imagine the person who'd write it. He died not long after its publication and failure in 1973. He was 48.

Why I mention all this is that I'd always wanted to read the book of The Fig Leaves Are Falling…and there it is online in the Dorothy Loudon collection: The entire script. When I get some time (ha!), I'll give it a read. I do have a demo recording of the score and some of the songs are quite good. We have here a video of one of them sung by, of all people, Pat Paulsen on his short-lived variety show…

COL295

Moose and Squirrel

by Mark Evanier

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 6/23/00
Comics Buyer's Guide

Set the dials on the Waybac Machine, Sherman…

The date? November 19, 1959.

The place? Right in front of a very bad Packard-Bell TV set in Mark Evanier's parents' living room.

The Wayback Machine performs flawlessly, as it always does. Within seconds, we're standing in a modest dwelling in West Los Angeles, watching as a budding 7-year-old comedy/cartoon writer takes in the first episode of a brand-new animated television series. Its name? Rocky and His Friends. Each half-hour consists of two episodes of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and one apiece of Fractured Fairy Tales and Peabody's Improbable History.

And so it began…not just for me, but for a lot of us — our introduction to the wonderful world of Jay Ward (and Bill Scott and all the other splendid folks who conspired to create Jay Ward cartoons…)

Rocky was not the first TV cartoon with which the inventive Mr. Ward had been involved. I had been a big fan of Crusader Rabbit and even, at age seven, noted certain similarities between the series…

Both offered us serialized stories, told by a stentorian narrator.

Both starred a small, fur-covered hero who roamed the world with his big, dumb pal. Crusader's was Ragland T. Tiger; Rocky's was Bullwinkle J. Moose.

Both featured a recurring villain who popped up almost everywhere they want. Crusader and Rags kept running into Dudley Nightshade; Rocky and Bullwinkle battled Boris Badenov.

And both shows had slightly-askew senses of humor. The key difference was that Crusader Rabbit was funny, whereas Rocky and His Friends was FUNNY. Not only that but it was FUNNY in a very hip manner, never condescending to the viewers, never taking the easy route to something that kinda resembled a gag. As such, the shows would stand up to repeated viewings…and the more you saw them, the more jokes you'd get.

So it didn't matter much that, like all the early TV cartoons, the animation looked like it was done in the back room at Pic-and-Save. It never got much better, not even when the festivities trucked over to NBC and were aired in prime-time as The Bullwinkle Show.

The graphics were clever, the characters and scripts were brilliant and the voice acting was first-rate…maybe the best cast ever assembled for a cartoon show — June Foray, Bill Scott, Paul Frees, Daws Butler and William Conrad, with Edward Everett Horton as the Narrator of the Fractured Fairy Tales and Charlie Ruggles as Aesop, narrator of the Aesop and Son cartoons that were added later. (The Bullwinkle Show also introduced Dudley Do-Right, with Scott, Foray, Frees, occasionally Conrad and, in every installment, the glorious Hans Conried stealing the show as Snidely Whiplash.)

Of those folks, only June Foray is still with us. Matter of fact, we lost most of the men in a very short span of time: Hans Conried died in '82, Bill Scott in '85, Paul Frees in '86, Daws Butler in '88, Jay Ward in '89 and Bill Conrad in '94. The last time I saw some of these folks was at a funeral for another of these folks.

Happily though, June is around to reap the honors. On July 7, she will be honored when a star bearing her name is unveiled on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And it's about damned time.

She'll also be getting loads of well-deserved attention as a new motion picture opens around then — Rocky and Bullwinkle, starring Robert DeNiro, Jason Alexander and Rene Russo. But of course, in this film, they're nobodies. The real star will be June Foray, performing the role of the animated Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

So, you may be wondering: Who's doing Bullwinkle's voice? The answer is that they found the perfect person, even though they had to go halfway around the world for him. His name is Keith Scott.

First off: Keith is not related in any way to Bill Scott. Bill was the original voice of Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-Right, Mr. Peabody, George of the Jungle and many others. He was also the show's head writer and co-producer and a very funny, brilliant gent.

Keith lives and works in Australia. American cartoons and radio shows were imported into his country and, at an early age, he fell in love with both and set his sights on a career in vocal acting. Around age 17, he wrote to Daws Butler in America. Daws was not only one of the best voice actors of all time but a steadfast encourager of new talent. He and Keith developed a back-and-forth tutor/protégé relationship, shipping letters and tapes between continents. Keith finally came to Los Angeles and not only met all the great voice artists but began to indulge a passion for research. His two main areas of interest were…

1. Cartoon Voice History. Only a tiny percentage of the actors in theatrical animation received credit, and most of them were Mel Blanc. While some of the other voices are easily identifiable, many are not…or weren't, until a number of animation buffs put their minds to it. Keith is one of us — and an especially valuable scholar, owing to his huge collection of (and knowledge of) old radio shows.

2. The Jay Ward Studio. Daws referred Keith to Bill Scott which, in turn, led to Keith interviewing darn near everyone who worked on the premises, as well as gaining access to old scripts, tapes, files…the works. He quickly became the world's foremost authority on the place and…well, let's cut directly to the plug:

Keith has spent years compiling a book that comes out any day now from St. Martin's Press. It's called The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward and Bill Scott. If you have even the slightest interest in its subject, you absolutely have to have it. And if you don't have even the slightest interest in its subject, you should.

Can I make myself any clearer?

Over the years, Keith honed his skills and became one of the most in-demand announcers and performers of character voices in Sydney, Australia. He has joined a select group that some call "second generation" voice actors, meaning that they replicate the sound of a classic character, once the original performer is deceased or otherwise unavailable.

In the U.S., we have reached the point where the majority of great animated characters are in such custody. Since Mel Blanc passed away, for instance, his menagerie of voices has been simulated by, among others, Joe Alaskey, Billy West, Greg Burson, Maurice LaMarche, Jeff Bergman, Neil Ross, Frank Welker, Mindy Segal, Bob Bergen, Frank Gorshin, Jim Cummings, Bill Farmer and (occasionally) Mel's son, Noel Blanc. By my count, six of those gents have spoken for Bugs at varying times, five for Foghorn Leghorn and so on.

This is not easy to do. A voice must not only be imitated but sustained. A lot of folks can sound like Bugs for a line or two, especially if repeating dialogue that Mel performed in a cartoon. It's a whole 'nother thing to sound like Bugs throughout a 4-hour recording session, running a full gamut of emotions, often with no identical Blanc example to use as a template.

(Another problem: No two employees of Time-Warner seem to agree on exactly what Bugs sounds like, since Mel changed over the years. So if you please one department head, you displease another.)

As you can see, a whole squadron has stepped into Mel's shoes, at least for cartoons recorded in Southern California. Down under, Keith pretty much has the hemisphere to himself. He does most of the recordings of Mel's characters — and Daws's and others — when they have to be recorded locally. I don't know if there have been any recordings of the Tasmanian Devil for Tasmania…but if there have been, Keith probably did them.

You've heard him up here, as well. Sometimes, they do it via what's called a phone patch…which means that Keith is in a studio in Australia, working for someone here in the states. On bigger jobs, they fly him in. We had lunch one day here in Hollywood when he'd just come from recording Popeye and Bluto for a ride at the Universal theme park in Florida.

And of course, they've flown him in several times to record the role of Bullwinkle (and also the Narrator) for the new Rocky and Bullwinkle feature. All the time he was studying the history of the studio, he was practicing its voices, honing his Moose Sound-alike. June Foray told me, "There are times with Keith when, if I just heard a recording without knowing who'd done it, I'd have sworn it was Bill." Can't imagine a better endorsement than that. (Keith, by the way, also did the Narrator in the George of the Jungle movie.)

When he's in L.A. and not recording, we get together and swap info on voice actors. He's been working with the U.S. expert on the topic, Hames Ware, and with the British authority, Graham Webb. (Graham, by the way, also has a fine book out, well worth your attention — The Animated Film Encyclopedia, published by McFarland.) They all hope someday to publish a reference volume that will identify as many voices as possible from American cartoons made for theatrical exhibition. I'm going to close this piece with some nuggets of info I jotted down after the last time Keith and I got together. Many of these were things I hadn't known 'til he told me…

Mel Blanc always recalled that his first WB cartoon job was as a drunken bull in Picador Porky. Not so. His first role was as a drunken tramp in that film. His first "star" role came about in Porky's Duck Hunt when he took over from Joe Dougherty as Porky's voice.

Blanc did Bugs from the start, all through the various prototype versions. One brief exception is Bugs' line, "Of course you know, this means war" in Porky's Hare Hunt. That one line was done by director-storyman Ben "Bugs" Hardaway. Hardaway later replaced Blanc as the voice of Woody Woodpecker.

Daws Butler's first cartoon was Little Rural Riding Hood, which was directed by Tex Avery for MGM in 1949. Daws did the George Sanders impression as the voice of the City Wolf while the Country Wolf was played by Pinto Colvig, who was best known as the original voices of Goofy (for Disney) and Bozo the Clown (on Capitol Records). The gangly Country Red was voiced by Colleen Collins who, among many other credits, played Queen Isabella on the classic comedy record, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America.

In that cartoon and many of Tex's, the singing voice of the attractive Red Riding Hood was Imogene Lynn, a popular radio singer. Her voice track in Little Rural Riding Hood was a re-use from Swing Shift Cinderella.

Daws Butler's first WB cartoon was a 1952 Tweety and Sylvester film, Gift Wrapped.

Stan Freberg did his first voice recording for WB doing a Franklin Delano Roosevelt impression for a cartoon that was to be called For He's a Jolly Good Fala. (Fala was the name of F.D.R.'s dog.) The film was written and recorded but then the President passed away and the project was abandoned.

Freberg's first completed cartoon was the role of Junior Bear in Bugs Bunny Meets the Three Bears (1944). Mel Blanc did the Father Bear and Bea Benaderet played Mama Bear. Years later, when the Three Bears were revived for a series of cartoons, Billy Bletcher took over the role of the Father Bear.

In the first Hubie and Bertie cartoon, The Aristo-Cat, their voices were done by storymen Tedd Pierce and Michael Maltese. For the second, Trap-Happy Porky, Maltese was replaced by Freberg. In the third, Roughly Squeaking, Dick Nelson and Freberg did the honors. Eventually, Blanc and Freberg played Hubie and Bertie, though both sometimes did pick-up lines in the other's role.

All of the Goofy Gopher cartoons apparently feature Blanc and Freberg as Mac and Tosh. When Hubie, Bertie, Mac and Tosh turned up for brief interstitial segments on the 60's Bugs Bunny TV show, Blanc apparently did all the parts.

Storyman Tedd Pierce did the Bud Abbott imitation in A Tale of Two Kitties with Blanc providing the Lou Costello clone. Pierce was also the voice of the father in Quentin Quail, imitating the character of Daddy Snooks from the Baby Snooks radio show. Sara Berner played his daughter, an imitation of Fanny Brice in the Baby Snooks role.

Pierce provided the narration for Uncle Tom's Bungalow and was one of the two French chefs in French Rarebit. Blanc was the other.

John McLeish (aka John Ployardt) narrated Chuck Jones's The Dover Boys. Blanc and Pierce did the voices of the Dover Boys, and the glee club's singing was by the vocal group, The Sportsmen.

McLeish narrated The Ducktators, which features Michael Maltese as Mussolini and Blanc as both Hitler and Hirohito.

Animator Dick Bickenbach did the Bing Crosby imitation in Swooner Crooner. ("Bic," as everyone called him, later drew many of the Flintstones and Yogi Bear comic books of the 70's.)

Tex Avery turns up in bit parts in many of his cartoons and occasionally in those of other directors. Tex's biggest part was the Laughing Hippo in Hamateur Night.

The spider character in Meatless Flyday was inspired by an Avery voice and he often said that he'd done the part, even though he had left WB by the time this cartoon was recorded. He may have recorded the role but the voice in the finished cartoon is that of Cy Kendall.

Several published reports have fingered singer Terrence Monck as the voice of the frog in Chuck Jones's One Froggy Evening. This was apparently someone's deduction based on the job Monck did many years later for Jones on an MGM cartoon. It was actually Bill Roberts, a studio singer of the day. Monck also has been wrongly credited as the opera singer who keeps Bugs awake in Long-Haired Hare. That was actually Nicolai Shutorov. (And while we're at it, Carlos Ramirez was the opera singer in Tex Avery's Magical Maestro for MGM.)

Okay, that's all I have room for this week, so let me summarize your assignments…

1. Pick up Keith's book, The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward and Bill Scott.

2. When you go see the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie, listen especially to June Foray as Rocky and Keith Scott as Bullwinkle.

3. Be here next week when I hope to provide a preview of some splendid panels that will take place at this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego.

That is all.

The Rainbow Connection

Posted on Sunday, August 21, 2011 at 5:09 AM

Several folks have e-mailed me to state what should have been obvious…the reason Jim Henson is a Disney Legend now and wasn't a few years ago. There's a new Muppet movie coming out now and there wasn't a few years ago. So I guess the question now is when does Frank Oz become a Disney Legend? And then what about Jerry Juhl and Dave Goelz and Jerry Nelson and all the other Henson associates whose characters are now Disney property?

A Callas Observation

Posted on Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 11:26 AM

When comedian Charlie Callas passed recently, obits argued whether he was 83 or 86. That's not a big deal but a slightly bigger one was made about something else.

Some articles said that Charlie's frequent appearances with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show came to an abrupt end in 1982 due to an incident that went something like this: Callas was on one night and he wasn't doing so well. Desperate for laughs, he started flailing about and getting frantic…and in the process, he gave Mr. Carson an unplanned shove on the air. Johnny, it was said, was so angry about it that he never had Callas back. This was even reported in the New York Times.

A couple of folks wrote to ask me about it and I was a bit baffled. I'd vaguely heard that story somewhere but not from any source that would cause me to believe it…and had it been true, I think I would have. Well, the Times has now decided it didn't happen and has run the following correction…

An earlier version misstated Mr. Callas's age. He was 83, not 86. It also misstated the title of a Mel Brooks movie. It is "History of the World — Part I" not Part II. It also incorrectly described his appearance on "The Tonight Show" on Sept. 21, 1982. While Mr. Callas was never on the show again, he did not have an on-air falling out with the host, Johnny Carson. He did not shove Mr. Carson, nor did Mr. Carson say that Mr. Callas would not be invited back.

I have the feeling that the 1982 date is a bit too early for the disappearance of Mr. Callas from Johnny's guest roster but that may be correct. It's true that Charlie went from being a frequent occupant of the chair on Johnny's right to not being asked back and that may have been for a simpler reason. Johnny would often decide that some guest had worn out his or her welcome and he'd tell his producers not to book that person anymore. If I sat here a while, I could probably think of dozens like Charles Grodin, Phyllis Newman, Jaye P. Morgan, Tony Randall, Orson Bean, Charles Nelson Reilly and others who were on with Johnny every few weeks for an extended period. At least two of those were even under exclusive deals — they would make X number of appearances with Carson over Y months, in exchange for not appearing on any other talk shows.

Then one day, Johnny would just decide the person had been overexposed or had run out of funny stories or something. There were some, I suspect, who overdid it with plugging their upcoming appearances. That was something Carson only tolerated up to a point. (Excessive self-promotion was said to be a big reason Joan Rivers fell out of favor as Johnny's guest host and would probably have lost that position had she not decamped for Fox when she did.) Anyway, there may have been no reason that Callas stopped appearing with Carson other than that Johnny thought audiences were tired of him…or maybe there was one.

In 1984, Jerry Lewis did one week of a talk show opposite Carson. It was an on-air tryout/pilot for a regular series which did not become a regular series. In fact, even though Jerry had on some pretty impressive guests including Francis Albert Sinatra, the show was widely mocked and derided, mainly for unmitigated fawning and ego. Remember The Sammy Maudlin Show, an SCTV burlesque of the old Sammy Davis Jr talk show? Well, Jerry's test shows were worse in the same way. It was all these celebrities sitting around and talking about the greatness of each other…and it wasn't just that they were all wonderful performers. It went way beyond that. They were all God's gift to humanity — people who had made the world such a better place with their singing and dancing and sitcoms.

Some folks in the field of entertainment can get like that at times. I remember one time when my pals Marv Wolfman and Len Wein and I were in Vegas and we went to see Don Rickles at the Sahara. We were quite surprised and disappointed with his act, which did not include insults or even much attempt at comedy. It was Don, singing and dancing and doing impressions…and in between, he'd talk about Frank Sinatra in terms that made Jesus Christ seem like an unimportant pisher. He even started scolding the audience because while we all presumably knew that Ol' Blue-Eyes was the greatest entertainer who ever lived, that wasn't nearly enough. We "who aren't in show business" couldn't possibly appreciate how sainthood should be conferred on this glorious human being who was so much more than a mere mortal. My friends and I were muttering to each other, "Did Frank Sinatra cure cancer and we missed it?" I was going to yell out, "What about Frank's mob ties?" but I thought it would be nice to not be beaten to death behind a casino.

That one-week Jerry Lewis Show was like that, and much of the fawning came from Jerry's announcer-sidekick, one Charles Callas. The desk spot at each show commenced with Charlie telling Jerry and the audience how brilliantly funny the monologue was, and then Jerry would talk about how brilliantly funny Charlie Callas always was. I usually agreed with that last part but I don't recall seeing Charlie actually be funny on that show. Still, we were told a lot that he was funny other places. Then Jerry would say how great his first guest was. Then the first guest would come out and tell Jerry how those were all great compliments, especially coming from someone as great as Jerry Lewis. Then Jerry would reiterate how great the guest was and just when he was running out of ways to express that, Charlie would jump in and talk about how great the guest was and Jerry would of course agree. Then the guest would just have to take the time and tell everyone how great Charlie Callas was and…

Well, you just wanted to reach into your set and slap all those people. Especially because they were all wearing tuxedos.

Among the many secrets of Johnny Carson's success was that he usually managed to rein in that kind of thing. Guests were told not to engage in too much of it and if they tried, he was usally adept at making a joke out of it or otherwise deflecting the genuflecting. He knew America wasn't eager to see a lot of overpaid and famous celebrities giving one another on-air tongue baths and he stopped booking people who veered in that direction.

And you know who another one of them was? Jerry Lewis. Johnny also was not wild about people who tried to do talk shows opposite his.

I have no hard info that Charlie lost Johnny as a champion because of his stint as Jerry's Ed McMahon but I don't think it helped Callas to have been part of that show…or the Mutual Adoration Society that Jerry's telethon became. I have heard from a pretty good source that Johnny told his own Ed McMahon that he found the telethon tacky and while Ed was free to participate, Johnny didn't want it mentioned a lot on The Tonight Show. And of course, he stopped appearing on Jerry's annual telecast nor did he have Jerry on much if at all to promote it.

Ultimately, Callas stopped appearing with Johnny because Johnny decided, rightly or wrongly, that Charlie wouldn't be good for the show. But it apparently wasn't due to a shove, at least not of the physical variety.

The Big Four-Oh

Posted on Saturday, July 3, 2010 at 1:51 PM

1970nycon01

Forty years ago today, I attended my first comic book convention. It convened at the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York City…a building which is still hosting comic conventions. I've stayed there a few times since 1970 and it hasn't, sad to say, changed all that much. (It was built in 1919 as the Hotel Pennsylvania. It changed ownership in 1948 to become the Statler Hilton and later went through another name or two before reverting to the Hotel Pennsylvania. Every year or two lately, they announce it will soon be demolished and replaced by something bigger and better…but it's still right where it's always been. It also still has the same phone number it's had since the thirties when seven-digit phone numbers were introduced: PEnnsylvania 6-5000.)

Perhaps you're wondering why, since I've lived in Southern California all my life, my first comic book convention wasn't a San Diego Con. That's because forty years ago today, there hadn't been any multi-day comic conventions in San Diego…or anywhere else in this state. The first one in San Diego, which was called the Golden State Comic-Con, was held August 1-3 of 1970. It became an annual affair which has since morphed into the Comic-Con International.

A few days before the 1970 New York Con, my then-partner Steve Sherman and I flew to New York and checked into the Statler Hilton. A day or two later, our friend Mike Royer flew back and joined us in a hotel room barely large enough for one of us. We were there about ten days, during which we attended the con. Between that and our visits to comic book company offices, I — a lifelong comic book reader — managed to meet a pretty high percentage of the writers, artists and editors whose work I'd been following for years.

Our first day in Manhattan, Steve and I spent the day at the offices of DC Comics, which were then located in an austere building at 909 Third Avenue. Among the folks I met in person that day were Julius Schwartz, Carmine Infantino, Dick Giordano, Nelson Bridwell, Joe Kubert, Murray Boltinoff, Sol Harrison, Neal Adams, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Robert Kanigher, Murphy Anderson, Gerry Conway, Denny O'Neil, Mary Skrenes, Mark Hanerfeld, Mort Weisinger, Sal Amendola and Byron Preiss. Julie Schwartz took us to lunch at a restaurant where the food wasn't very good but the waitresses wore short skirts and would bend over often.

The next day, we had an 11 AM appointment to go to Marvel and meet Stan Lee and the folks in the famed Bullpen. Around 10, someone called from the office and said Stan had an emergency appointment and like it or not, we were rescheduled for 2 PM. With several hours to kill, Steve and I went wandering around New York and something amazing happened at the corner of Madison Avenue and E. 52nd Street.

We were touristing about when we heard someone yell, "Mi amigos!" We looked and there, having spotted us from across the intersection, was famed cartoonist Sergio Aragonés. This was many years before Sergio and I became good friends and frequent collaborators. I think I'd met him twice in Los Angeles and wouldn't have dreamed he'd remember me at all, let alone recognize me across a busy New York street. We scurried over to say hello to him and explained we were in town for the upcoming convention and to visit comic book company offices. He said, "Are you going to visit MAD Magazine?" We said it hadn't occurred to us but yes, certainly, we'd love to visit the MAD offices. "Where are they?"

He pointed to the building we were standing in front of and said, "Right here! Come…I will give you a tour." As we walked into the lobby, I held the door for a little, sad-faced man who was walking out with an art portfolio. I later realized it was Wally Wood.

Sergio took us upstairs gave us a grand tour. We met William Gaines, Al Feldstein, Nick Meglin, Jerry DeFuccio, John Putnam and others of the Usual Gang of Idiots. Artist Angelo Torres was there and Production Manager Leonard Brenner let me hold and examine the original art to the first issue of MAD. I remember Sergio saying, "You may look at it but you cannot keep it." And I replied, "Hey, if I had a gun, I could keep it!"

That afternoon, we went to the Marvel offices, which were located at 635 Madison. The official address of the company was 625 Madison but the comic book division was squirreled away — hidden in a futile attempt to avoid fannish invasions — in a building down the street. In surprisingly-cramped offices, we met not only Stan Lee but also John Romita, Marie Severin, Roy Thomas, Larry Lieber, John Verpoorten, Herb Trimpe, Frank Giacoia and Bill Everett. The following day, Steve and I spent a few hours with Steve Ditko in his studio.

The high point of the trip — the convention — commenced on Friday, July 3, forty years ago today. That morning, I met in person, my pen-pal of several years, Tony Isabella. We went to breakfast with Al Williamson, Dick Giordano and Frank McLaughlin and spent the day meeting other folks in the comic industry, as well as fellow fans I knew through correspondence and the fanzine network. The latter group included Martin Pasko, Alan Brennert, Gary Groth, Martin Greim, Guy Lillian and Bob Beerbohm. Over the three days of the con, I also met Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood, Jim Steranko, Joe Sinnott, Gene Colan, Archie Goodwin, Tom Sutton and a few dozen others. It was a three-day conference but so much happened and so much was new and exciting that it felt like three weeks. Today, a four-day con in San Diego feels like it's over in about four hours.

That con and many others in New York were run by a gentleman named Phil Seuling who, for reasons I explained here, was very important in the history of the American comic book. Since then, I have probably attended somewhere around 200 comic book conventions, including many that were larger and more professionally-run. Not to take anything away from any of them but just as there's something special about your first love or your first kiss or your first anything, there's something special about your first comic book convention. At least there was for a guy like me. It was like landing on a distant planet, realizing it was where you belonged and instantly fitting right in. I later worked with many of the people I've namedropped here and some are still good friends.

I'm sure you had some days in your past when you could almost feel your life changing for the better. Mine changed that week in New York…but it really changed forty years ago today, high atop the Statler Hilton.

How I Spent Today

Posted on Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 9:27 PM

mushroomsoup110

Up at 8, at the computer by 8:10. Had to fix one more technical glitch on the website, then on to scripts which have to be finished pretty soon. They're for a cartoon show we're recording on Monday.

Ate, showered, dressed and made it up to UCLA by 11:30. At 11:50, I phoned Sergio who (I figured out) was doing a panel with Stan Sakai at the Motor City Comic Con near Detroit. If you're near there, go by tomorrow and say howdy to the both of them. I like heckling Sergio when he's in the middle of a panel.

At Noon, I appeared on the stage of the Freud Theater with a wonderful lady named Claudette Sutherland, who was in the original Broadway production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. A superb revival, about which I still need to rave here, is being performed eight times a week on that stage. As I've mentioned here, on Saturdays, they have these free lectures or seminars or whatever you call them. The idea is to have a noted theatrical scholar lecture on the history of the show…and if they can't find one, they call me. Sometimes, there's an interview of someone who, like Claudette, was there when it started. I had a great time interviewing her and discussing folks she worked with like Frank Loesser, Robert Morse, Bob Fosse, Rudy Vallee and Charles Nelson Reilly.

I'm doing another one of these next Saturday. Not sure yet if Claudette can juggle her schedule and come back or if it'll be just me. I'll let you know when she lets me know.

When it was over, I took Sunset to the 405 North to the 101 North to Encino and only missed the first half hour or so of a wonderful memorial service for our friend Eddie Carroll. I wrote about Eddie here…a dear man who had an awful lot of friends and zero enemies. The place was packed and no one budged even though the speeches totalled about two and a half hours. Eddie knew an awful lot of funny people.

And now I'm back here, locked in until I finish scripts. So once again, I've put the soup can up…just my way of alerting friends that I'm not returning calls or e-mails as rapidly as I should. I won't be posting much here except, of course, when I do this, I always find myself having to stop work and post an obit. Let's see if I can get through this little intense work period without that happening.

A Night in Riverside

Posted on Saturday, May 8, 2010 at 9:55 PM

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Mapquest, Google Maps and my GPS all swore to me the drive to Riverside would take one hour and five minutes, the liars. Well, maybe if you were going via rocketsled at 4 AM. Carolyn and I left Los Angeles at 3 PM and we got where we were going about 5:35…and here's one of those odd coincidences. My friend Gregg Berger and his dazzling spouse Dora were among the friends who'd decided to all caravan down there, rendezvous for a 4:30 supper and then go over and see Frank Ferrante do his Amazing Groucho Act at the Fox Performing Arts Center. As I was finally (finally!) on the off-ramp for the 91 Freeway, I was cell-phoned by Gregg who told me that he was just getting off the freeway…and then he noticed that he was directly behind my car. We were both, simultaneously, an hour and five minutes late.

So were writer Paul Dini and his extraordinary wife, magician-actress Misty Lee. So were writer Earl Kress and our pal Mark Nelson, who among his other endeavors is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Academy of Magical Arts (i.e., The Magic Castle in Hollywood). Here…I'll get ahead of the story and show you a photo of all these folks. I know it's small but most of the guys aren't that good-looking…

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The guy in the tux at left is Jim Furmston, who's Frank's musical director and on-stage foil. To the right of him is Mark Nelson. I'm in the suede jacket. Earl Kress is in front of me while Paul Dini and Misty Lee are on either side of me, behind. Frank Ferrante is presumably the one who looks frighteningly like Rufus T. Firefly and then, left to right, we have Carolyn Kelly, Dora Berger and Gregg Berger. Gregg, in case you don't know, is one of the top voice actors in the business.

(Quick aside about that suede jacket: I bought it around 1990 or so at the Rochester Clothing Store on 52nd Street in Manhattan. I tried it on and asked the salesguy, "How does this look on me?" One of the other customers volunteered, "That looks great," and asked if they had one in his size. The other customer was, so help me, Rush Limbaugh. I thought you might enjoy hearing about the last time he was right about anything. Well, anyway, I wore the jacket often until around '95 when I'd put on sufficient weight that it no longer fit me and it went into storage. Among the happy "marker" moments of dropping all that poundage a few years ago was that I got the jacket out of mothballs and it not only fit, it's actually a tad big on me.)

Getting back to Riverside: The theater was showing Duck Soup before Frank's performance but given our late arrival, we had to opt out of that. It would have been nice to see it on a big screen with a live audience but it was nicer to dine at leisure with friends. Then we hiked over to the place in the top photo and took our seats along with hundreds of other folks…including a few who didn't come up to me before the show, after or during intermission and tell me, "I heard about this on your blog." The ones who said it at intermission or after all added some version of "…and boy, you were right about this guy." That alone made the Bataan Death March on the Pomona Freeway almost worth it.

Frank was great. As usual, he hopped up on stage as Frank Ferrante, said a few words and proceeded to transform, not unlike Don Blake morphing into The Mighty Thor, into Julius "Groucho" Marx. The main difference, of course, is that Groucho is more powerful and godlike. It was the fifth time I've seen him perform and easily the best…and the most extemporaneous.

In a couple years of plugging Ferrante incessantly on this site, I've received 50-75 e-mails from folks who've been to see him and have written to tell me how much they loved the experience. I've received a grand total of one from a disappointed attendee, and he was mainly bothered that not everything that seemed to be improvised was. The answer to that (of course) is that, first of all, not every alleged ad-lib out of the real Groucho was created on the spot, either. Not only did he have secret writers on the quiz show but improvisation is often a function of rapid memory; of quickly pulling up the perfect line at the perfect moment. That's especially true when — and this is my second point — situations reoccur. Frank is well into his third decade of doing this act. When he asks an audience member, "What do you do for a living?," one out of twenty or so is going to say, "Lawyer." So out come the lawyer jokes. They may well have been on-the-spot inventions the first time they were uttered but now they're part of the repertoire.

I think I can tell the difference between a line that's recalled and one concocted for the moment. There were a lot last night in the latter category. At one point, Groucho/Frank went to fling himself onto an onstage sofa as Mr. Marx was wont to do. A huge dust cloud, probably visible from the balcony, burst forth. Frank broke up, the audience howled…and he did about five minutes on how the theater crew hadn't been able to find a proper couch in Riverside and had actually trucked this one in from a warehouse in La Mirada. For the rest of the show, every time he went to sit on the couch, he seated himself ever-so-daintily so as to not raise more dust. The whole evening was like that and we all laughed a lot. A lot.

Now, this is where I'd ordinarily tell you to rush to see him if and when he comes your way…and if you're anywhere near Longview, Washington, you can do that next Saturday. But outside that area, you may have a wait. Frank has another gig so his next scheduled Groucho appearances aren't 'til November — in Pomona, New Jersey and in Clinton Township, Michigan. If any pop up before then, I'll let you know here or you can occasionally check his schedule. Then maybe you can have an evening as much fun as the one we had last night…especially if you can manage to avoid the Pomona Freeway on a late Friday afternoon. I'm amazed I'm not still there.

Today's Video Link

Posted on Saturday, December 26, 2009 at 12:26 AM

Yesterday, we linked to Jimmy Fallon's re-creation of a number from the old John Denver/Muppets Christmas special. Here's what they were aping…the original from 1979. If I'm correct, there's only one person who was playing the same role in both versions — my pal Dave Goelz performed Gonzo (a role he originated) in the '79 version and he's still Gonzo after all these years. All the other Muppeteers are second generation.

Of course, it's probable that there's one other person who was in both versions. In the original, there are twelve Muppets who sing. Three are characters performed (back then) by Jim Henson, three were Frank Oz, two were Jerry Nelson, three were Richard Hunt and one was Dave Goelz. But there are nine or ten Muppeteers on that stage working the characters.

As a viewer, one can't be precise because, for example, I think Statler and Waldorf are on the two hands of one person. Janice and Floyd may have one operator…and I think whoever's working Scooter is also manipulating Zoot, who snuck in there. I'm assuming the shots of Rowlf, who requires two performers, were shot separately…but the least they could have needed for this number was nine Muppeteers. Presuming Henson, Oz, Nelson, Hunt and Goelz are five of them, there were four or maybe five others.

Steve Whitmire, who now plays Kermit, joined the Henson organization in '78 and was one of the other credited performers on the special…so he was probably one of the four or five. It's possible there was someone else in both the 1979 and 2009 performances but unlikely; not unless they got Jerry Nelson in, which I doubt. So Goelz and Whitmire are probably the only two folks to span those thirty years. Here's the clip…

VIDEO MISSING

Mark's Day

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 1:25 AM

And the day in this case is yesterday. Woke up around 8 AM. Did a little work on an issue of Groo and some last minute prep on the day's recording session for The Garfield Show.

Left the house at 9:30 and arrived at the recording studio about 9:45. We recorded two half-hour episodes of the show with a sterling voice cast — regulars Frank Welker, Gregg Berger, Wally Wingert and Jason Marsden, along with guest stars Jack Riley and Grey Delisle. I had to let Wally go at 2:30 so he could scurry out to Burbank and do his announcing work for that night's episode of The Jay Leno Show. The rest of us finished at 3:00.

On the way home, I stopped at a local Petco to buy supplies for the menagerie of strays in my backyard, then scurried home to work more on Groo and climb into fancier clothes. Then at 5 PM, I drove to FedEx to send off Groo pages. Shipping them turned out to be the hard part of the day. 5:30 is the cut-off time for Eastern and International send-offs, and people kept showing up with parcels in those two categories and the counterfolks there (there were two of them, working as fast as they could) would wave them ahead of us.

About 5:27, a burly gent with a huge crate on a dolly marched in and went past all the folks waiting with things to ship. Someone told him to go to the end of the line. Motioning to his package, he yelled out, "My job depends on getting this shipped out today so I don't give a damn about your line. I'm mailing this next." If he'd asked to go ahead of us, I suspect we'd all have said it was okay…but a rather nasty argument broke out, lasting until the clerk was ready to take his box, which she did. The next person in line, when he got to her, complained that since she saw darn well what had happened, she should insist he go to the end. She said, "We're told to take some customers ahead of others if there's danger of missing a cut-off time." Then she added, "If I'd made him go to the end, he's have caused trouble. Who needs trouble?" The debate was still going on when the other clerk was ready to take another customer. I rushed up, had my package processed and got the heck outta there.

Then it was off to the Magic Castle for the evening. Our dinner party consisted of Leonard and Alice Maltin, Gregg and Dora Berger, Earl and Denise Kress, and my friend Carolyn Kelly. Oh, yeah…and I was a part of it. Then we adjourned to the Inner Circle of the Castle, an especially magical place where comedians, cabaret performers and other non-magicians have been known to perform.

For the last two nights, it's been two of my favorite folks…Hunter and Stan Freberg. Stan, as you know, is the great satirist, actor, maker of funny records and commercials and cartoon voice performer. Hunter is his spouse and partner. For 90-some-odd minutes, following an impromptu introduction by me, they told stories of their lives together and tales from Stan's multi-layered career. There were anecdotes about him voicing Warner Brothers cartoons. Some of his commercials were played. He re-created a bit of his first record, "John and Marsha" and sang "Take an Indian to Lunch" from the greatest comedy record ever made (I think), Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Volume One.

The crowd loved every minute of it…and by the way, it was nice to see so many readers of this blog there, as well as friends like Paul Dini and Misty Lee, Mark Nelson, Milt Larsen and many others.

Got back here just before Midnight…and that's why I didn't post more yesterday. And why I'm going to bed now. Good night, Internet! See you in the morning.

Tuesday Evening

Posted on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 10:09 PM

Sorry I haven't posted more lately. I spent today in a recording studio directing the first three shows of the second season of The Garfield Show, an animated series I work on which runs in many countries. America, I hear, will soon be one of them. We had a fine cast today. We have our regulars — Frank Welker (as the cat), Gregg Berger, Wally Wingert and Jason Marsden. We have our semi-regulars — Audrey Wasilewski, Julie Payne, Laura Summer and David L. Lander. And today, we had as guest stars, Stan Freberg, Laraine Newman and Jack Riley.

Whenever anyone asks me the secret of directing cartoon voices, I tell 'em it's easy. Hire a cast like that, tell 'em which microphones to use and get out of their way. It's hard work but enormous fun. Having grown up listening to Stan Freberg records (and having purloined much of my sense of humor from the man), I still find it a little unbelievable to be working with him.

Anyway, that kept me busy today, and prepping for the session kept me busy yesterday. But I'm back now.

Oh, yeah. I've also been spending time hassling with my health insurance company. I was already for reform and public options and all sorts of other things that Fox News thinks are the Communist takeover of America. As if to cement my opinion, my provider has suddenly decided to stop covering one prescription medication I've been taking for two years now. With them, it's ten bucks a month. Without them, it's $320. My doctor is confident he can persuade them to cover it…but I have to wonder what folks who can't afford insurance, or can't get it due to pre-existing conditions, do if this drug becomes a necessity. And is this really the best use of my doctor's time?

A few folks have written me about what I wrote yesterday about comic book letter pages. I apologize if I underestimated the effort some put into assembling letter columns in the eighties. Paul Levitz noted that he wrote scripts for a lot of the comics for which he also wrote letter pages; that he was not just "some guy in the office." That's quite true. Long before he was head honcho at DC, Paul may have set the industry record for whipping up more letter pages than anyone else — and I say "may" because I have no idea how many E. Nelson Bridwell did. I'm guessing one of those guys is the champ and the other is first runner-up. (Paul also writes to remind me that when our pal Steve Gerber went to work at Marvel, he produced some of the best letter pages ever done in the ersatz Stan Lee style. They weren't signed with Stan's name but the editorial voice was supposed to suggest it was Stan himself answering your mail…and Steve was very good at it.)

Still, even if it happened a bit later than I suggested, there was a time when letter columns went away, which is a shame. I remember the utter thrill I got the first time I saw one of my letters in print. It was a copy of Aquaman and I was fourteen…and while the letter was childish and I (of course) didn't get paid for it, it was still something I wrote that someone has put into print in a real, sort of, magazine. Long before then, I'd decided I wanted to be a writer if and when I grew up so I can't say that it started me on that road. But standing there in the drugstore, seeing my words and name in print, my chosen career suddenly seemed a bit more possible. In fact, I felt more like a Writer that day than I did the last few times I worked for Disney.

Stamp Act

Posted on Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 11:51 PM

Interesting event, this morning. As you may have heard, the U.S. Postal Service has issued a set of stamps saluting twenty great shows from early television. The shows are The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, The Dinah Shore Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, The George Burns & Gracie Allen Show, The Red Skelton Show, Hopalong Cassidy, You Bet Your Life, The Honeymooners, Howdy Doody, The Phil Silvers Show, The Tonight Show, Lassie, The Lone Ranger, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Perry Mason, Dragnet, Texaco Star Theater, I Love Lucy, Twilight Zone and Kukla, Fran & Ollie.

Obviously, we could all quibble with the list but it ain't a bad selection. The reason some programs aren't there is that you can't put a live person on a U.S. postage stamp. Your Show of Shows would be there but Sid Caesar is still, happily, with us.

This morn, out at the TV Academy, there was an unveiling ceremony. They invited relatives of folks involved in the honored shows so I got to rub elbows with Clayton Moore's son-in-law, Jack Webb's widow and even a collie from the Lassie bloodline. The two gents in the photo above are Arthur Marx (son of Groucho) and Frank Ferrante, the oft-plugged-on-this-site impersonator of Arthur's father. Oh, and here's a photo I took of Jayne Meadows Allen who, despite a busted hip, wasn't about to miss the debut of a stamp with Steve's picture…

Among the other celebs present were June Lockhart, Barbara Hale (who played Perry Mason's secretary, Della Street), David Nelson (son of Ozzie 'n' Harriet), Gary Owens, Leonard Maltin and the host for the ceremony, Carl Reiner. The attendees were a curious mix of folks who love old TV, and folks who love first day issues of stamps.

Carl Reiner was wonderful. He's getting a bit slower in old age and he kept getting confused as to what he was supposed to introduce next…but he made wonderful, funny recoveries from every error and if he'd kept on talking, that whole audience would still be there listening to him and laughing. After the event, I overheard someone compliment him on his performance at the Comedy Central Roast of Joan Rivers which aired this past weekend. Mr. Reiner winced and told the man — and enough surrounding people that I feel it's okay to report it here — that it was maybe the most humiliating show of his life. He hadn't realized what he was agreeing to appear on and felt totally out of place. Given that, it's amazing he was as charming and funny on it as he was. (If you haven't seen it, don't…or at least, don't watch any part of it except for Carl Reiner.)

Not much else to report. I had a nice chat with Leonard Stern who assured me that the early sixties' sitcom I'm Dickens, He's Fenster (which he produced) is very close to appearing in the whole DVD treatment. I got to sit with Frank Ferrante and Arthur Marx and heard Arthur joke that he should have gotten a discount on the stamps he purchased. (I pointed out to him that I couldn't go out and buy U.S. postage stamps with my father's picture on them.) On the way out, I came about a half-inch from crashing into the daughter of Phil Silvers. All in all, a nice way to spend a morning…and the stamps looked so good, I may start putting them on my e-mail.

Second-Stringers

Posted on Tuesday, July 1, 2008 at 1:19 AM
Cookie Monster with avocado. Just kinda seems wrong, doesn't it?

I am assured by half the Muppet Experts in the world that Cookie Monster, as seen on The Colbert Report, was performed by a gent named David Rudman. Frank Oz began cutting back on his Muppeteering in the nineties due to age and other career opportunities, and others began imitating him. Around 2001, Mr. Rudman emerged as the primary Cookie Monster manipulator and it's easy to see why. He's darn good at it.

A month or two ago, I spent a few hours on the set of a Muppet shoot with Kermit, Gonzo, Fozzie, Piggy, The Swedish Chef, Pepe the King Prawn and a few others. Four Muppeteers were handling the cast…with a few more providing hands and such. The four were Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Eric Jacobson and Bill Barretta. Dave originated and still plays Gonzo and Bunsen Honeydew, and Bill started Pepe and a few other recent characters.

But for most of the stars, we're on to second (and third) generation Muppet Wranglers. When Jim Henson died in 1990, he willed the role of Kermit to Steve. Eric is the specialist in the roles Frank Oz no longer does — Bert, Grover, Fozzie, etc. For a while, he did Cookie Monster on Sesame Street but Rudman took it over, in part because it was easier to have Bert and C.M. interact if they weren't done by the same performer. I don't watch Sesame Street often and haven't since it essentially turned into The Elmo Hour. But when I've caught new Muppet segments, I am impressed with how faithful they are…and how well they integrate with scenes rerun from the era of Henson, Oz, Hunt, Nelson, et al.

Having been deeply critical of some cast replacements on animated shows, I'm impressed that someone knows the difference between a good Muppet imitation and a bad one…and hires accordingly. The four men I saw on that set a few months ago were as good as you could reasonably expect; maybe a little better than one would dare hope for. I wish more people cared that much about keeping classic characters sounding and behaving like themselves.