Search Results for: Garfield

It's two weeks until Thanksgiving and MeTV Toons has already been running Christmas specials.  This coming Saturday, they're offering up Yogi Bear's All-Star Comedy Christmas Caper, the third of three Yogi Bear Christmas shows that Hanna-Barbera made. The online MeTV Toons schedule says it's on at 5 PM but that may or may not be true for your time zone or source of cable. Lemme tell you a few interesting things about it…

The show aired for the first time on December 21, 1982. It was written by Yours Truly in July of that year and even before I got the job, the show was horribly behind schedule and there was a genuine fear that it could not be completed in time to air on that contracted date.  Joe Barbera called me in, described the crisis and asked me if I had any ideas for a half-hour special.  Many other writers had written scripts or outlines for it and all had been rejected somewhere along the food chain. In fact, the show was originally supposed to be done for Christmas of '81 but it was kicked over a year because they didn't have a workable script.

They hadn't come up with anything that could get through the approval process since then and it was now looking too late to get it done for 1982. Hanna-Barbera had proposed delaying it yet another year but CBS said no, it's now or never. So time was running out and all they had was the title that Mr. B — that's what most of us called him — had come up with when he'd first sold the network on doing a prime-time Yogi Christmas special.

I didn't have any idea for a Yogi Bear Christmas special but Mr. B and I brainstormed for a little while and I came up with something that he liked. I'm not sure if I realized it at the time but it was not unlike the plot of a Laurel & Hardy movie which, like all Laurel & Hardy movies, was irrevocably etched into my brain. But Joe liked it and I liked it and he phoned someone at CBS and pitched it over the phone to them. Mr. B was one of the greatest salespersons who ever lived — which is why his studio had the success it had — and they said yes.

He told me to go home and start typing like crazy. I basically had about three days. For an important network special that was re-introducing a great many Hanna-Barbera properties to a prime time audience, I should have had three weeks.

I have worked on few shows in my career that had as many fights and problems as this one. The biggest one — one of the nastiest battles I've ever had — came when an attorney in Business Affairs at the studio decided that Daws Butler, the voice of Yogi, was asking for too much money. This Biz Guy actually ordered the voice department to recast Yogi and all the other roles Daws was to perform in the show — Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Quick Draw McGraw, Mr. Jinks, Hokey Wolf, Augie Doggie, Snooper and Blabber, Dixie the Mouse and Wally Gator.

So they not only wanted me to write the show in three days but this one guy there in a department which should have been called Non-Creative Affairs thought they could recast the voice of eleven of their established characters in a week or so. I wrote about that battle in this article a long time ago.

That article was about Daws — still one of the most wonderful and talented people I've encountered in my long journey through the comic book and television industries — so I didn't include some of the other problems we had on that special. Wanna hear about some of them? I had a feeling you would…

Well, first: We had a battle over what I would be paid and, of course, it involved that same guy in Hanna-Barbera Non-Creative Business Affairs. Joe Barbera was telling me I had to write the script as fast as humanly possible while this lawyer was stalling and making lowball offers. I think he thought that my sense of loyalty to the studio and Yogi would cause me to write all or most of the script before we'd settle on my fee. That, of course, would put me in a horrible negotiating position. My agent couldn't say "Mark won't write this script until you make us a better offer" if I'd already written the script.

That got settled with some bloodshed but that's a separate story, too long to include here.  And even after we'd settled on what I'd be paid and I'd finished the script and it had gone into production and everyone was happy with it, the Biz Affairs guy was trying to renegotiate the deal to which he'd agreed.

Everyone — including the folks at the network — approved the script with minor notes. I'm not sure if they really liked it or if at that point, they were so desperate that they'd okay anything but I made the minor changes and suddenly, we were in production, racing against the calendar.

Daws then recorded the voice track for the show along with a Who's Who of the best performers who'd worked on earlier Hanna-Barbera cartoons: Don Messick, Mel Blanc, Henry Corden, Allan Melvin, Janet Waldo, Hal Smith, John Stephenson and Jimmy Weldon. Jimmy Weldon was the voice of the little duck, Yakky Doodle, and I stuck the character in for a cameo and gave him only a line or two, then told the casting people they had to hire Jimmy Weldon. Amazingly, they did. (Weldon also played a few other parts in the show so they weren't paying him just for one or two lines.)

While the voices were being recorded, Bill Hanna assigned the script to an artist to storyboard. For those unfamiliar with the process, storyboarding means that the storyboarder draws out every shot in a format that looks like a horizontal comic book page with the dialogue written underneath each panel. This then becomes what everyone down the assembly line works with as they design scenes, animate scenes, time scenes, etc.

I went to this storyboard artist, introduced myself and told him that if he had any questions or problems to call me and I'd work with him to solve them. He said he would do that but whenever I later stopped by and asked to see what he'd done so far, he always said it wasn't ready for me to see. I never saw any of it before he turned it in to Bill Hanna, whereupon Bill Hanna made every last sound of pain and rage that you ever saw in one of his old Tom & Jerry cartoons.  There was, it turned out, a reason the artist hadn't shown any of it to me.

This storyboarder had a habit of rewriting scripts he was given to storyboard. When he finally turned the job in — and remember, everything on this cartoon was on a tight deadline — Mr. Hanna blew sky high. The artist had taken it upon himself to rewrite large chunks of the script. This was wrong for about eighty reasons but I'll just name a few. One was that the voices for the show had all been recorded and if they wanted to change the lines he'd changed, they'd have had to call back those voice actors, some of whom were highly-paid, and pay them again.

Another thing was that Hanna, Mr. B and the network had all approved the script he had changed. Even when you aren't battling an impossible deadline, you don't go back to the network — the folks who are paying for the show — and say, "Hey, remember that script you all approved? Well, we've changed a lot of it!"

The story was about a little girl who runs away from her father and hangs around Yogi for Christmas while everyone is frantically searching for her. The network folks had okayed this premise on the condition that I never use the word "kidnap" or any form of it and I didn't. But in the storyboard artist's rewrite, he'd used that word about twenty times and added in a scene where the police corner Yogi at gunpoint and are about to shoot him.

This was a Christmas special. It was airing a few days before Christmas. And this guy had, among other alterations, turned the finale into a Clint Eastwood movie with talking animals and someone talking about making Yogi into a rug in front of a fireplace.

Hanna and Barbera both read over his revision and both thought it was awful. Mr. B thought the guy had handed it in late intentionally, knowing how pressing the deadline was. The assumption was that he thought they'd be forced to use it as he'd done it. Instead, they fired the guy and Hanna had an interesting comment about the dismissed storyboard artist.  He said, "He won an Emmy once and ever since then, he's decided he knows more than anyone else, even guys like me who have several of them."

I don't know if the artist ever worked for Hanna-Barbera again. I do know he worked for other studios where he was dismissed for trying to rewrite scripts he was given. A few years later when I was doing Garfield and Friends — which was not an H-B show — he approached the producer and practically begged for work, promising he would not in any way try to rewrite the script. The producer gave him one I'd written, the artist went home and rewrote the script as he boarded it — again, a script that had already been approved by everyone and the voices had been recorded. He was dismissed and no one tried to fix this storyboard. It just went into the trash and they gave that script to another artist who started over. Maybe Bill Hanna was right about that Emmy.

Getting back to the Yogi Special which was about at DEFCON 2 status and climbing: Mr. Hanna called in Alex Lovy — said to be the fastest storyboard artist in the business — and he and a few other artists went to work on it.  In just a few days, they redid all the scenes that the first guy had changed.  The final board was a mess of notes and drawings that were practically stick figures and this all put the show in even greater deadline trouble.

It was being animated at a studio in Australia and the guys down under did triple overtime to get it done…and even then, several moments (including the last scene) were dropped out with Mr. Hanna's permission.  There just plain wasn't time, I was told, to do those scenes or even to fix some of the inevitable errors that always turn up in the first pass at animating a show.

In this case, the first pass was the only pass. The show arrived from Australia the day before it had to air and the editors worked all night on it, trying to fix mistakes and cover for the never-animated footage. I don't think anyone but the editors saw it before it went on the air…although someone at CBS did order the bleeping of a word uttered by Snagglepuss.

I've heard of cartoons being edited but this is the only time I know of a character being bleeped. It was bleeped when CBS ran it, it's bleeped on all the home video releases and I assume it'll be bleeped when MeTV Toons runs it this Saturday. It's in a speech right after the scene where Yogi and Boo Boo are in a phone booth. Snagglepuss says, "Seasons greetings…Happy Hanukkah, even!"

It was in the script when everyone approved it. They recorded Daws saying it. The animators animated to it. And then someone gave the order to delete the word "Hanukkah." And I thought us Jews were supposed to run show business.

As I said in the column to which I linked above, I was relatively happy with how it all came out but — and I'll quote myself here — the fact that my pride in everything I did for H-B had to be qualified with phrases like "given the circumstances," along with my discomfort at arguing with Mr. Barbera will all be featured prominently some day in an article entitled, "Why I Stopped Working For Hanna-Barbera." I didn't then intend to write such an article and was kidding when I said I would…but maybe I will one of these days.

Anyway, I'm not urging you to watch the special this Saturday but if you do, I thought you might enjoy some of the backstory on it. If you do watch, let me know if by some chance the word "Hanukkah" has miraculously reappeared. I'm betting it won't.

Corey Liss sent these two queries…

I've heard that, at the beginning of his career, Jack Kirby worked briefly for Will Eisner in the Eisner/Iger shop. Is that true? More generally, what was Kirby's take on Eisner's work? Did they ever talk or was it more like what you described with Carl Barks, two people in the same field who just didn't cross paths much?

Kirby definitely worked in Eisner's shop for a time. This was very early in both their careers and Jack often cited it as a great learning experience — not only learning from Will but from the other talented artists who worked there including Lou Fine. Once Jack left there, he didn't have much contact with Eisner but they got reacquainted in the seventies on the comic convention circuit, especially the Comic-Cons of San Diego.

Jack respected Will as both a creator and as one of the few guys in the field who knew how to write and draw a good comic book and — and this was the rare talent — knew how to get paid for its publication without getting screwed. But there was absolute respect between the two men and there were a couple of joint interviews in which this was mutually expressed.

Here's Corey's other question…

You've talked about how, when writing for animation, you often have a specific voice actor in mind that you're writing for. But, as you've also observed, a good voice actor can bring something to the character you didn't necessarily anticipate. When writing a long-form series, how much does that affect your writing of the character over time?

Or, to put it another way, by the end of Garfield and Friends, how much were you writing lines for Garfield and how much were you writing lines for Lorenzo Music playing Garfield — and how difficult was it to adjust when you started writing The Garfield Show?

On Garfield and Friends, I wrote for the voice of Garfield, which happened to be Lorenzo's own voice. So to write for one was to write for the other. There was never any separation in my mind.

When we later did The Garfield Show, Lorenzo was gone and Jim Davis had picked Frank Welker as the cat's new voice. Frank could have done a dead-on replication of Lorenzo's voice but that would have meant we'd be getting an impression, not a performance. So the goal was to have Frank do a voice that wasn't horribly unlike Lorenzo's but also didn't hinder his own ability to deliver lines in his own manner.

When I wrote for the character on that show, it took me a while to stop hearing Lorenzo in my head and to hear Frank instead. I don't think I ever really got there until we had some semi-completed episodes that I could see. That would have been about two-thirds of the way through writing the first season.

The voice tracks for all the Garfield TV shows I worked on were recorded at Buzzy's Recording Studio on Melrose here in Los Angeles. Buzzy's, sadly, no longer exists but just about every actor you ever heard of — voice or otherwise — active during the years the studio was operating recorded something there. It had a great staff, a great mood, a great history, a great atmosphere, great refreshments and like any other recording studio in town, a terrible parking lot.

But we all loved working there and one of many reasons — apart from the owner-operator Andy Morris — was that when you there working in Studio A, you could run into just about anyone in Studio B or vice-versa. Case in point: One day while we were recording in A, James Earl Jones was recording in B.

I have no idea what he was recording but once he was finished, he heard laughing coming out of A and peeked in to see what it was. We, of course, stopped what we were doing and crowded around so each of us could tell him what our favorite thing was he'd done. There was a pretty long list from which to choose. The man had an incredible career even back then — this would have been around 1992 — and everything he'd been in had been good and often very good and award-winning.

It turned out he was a very nice man and he loved Garfield. I'm not sure I had the courage to ask him, "Would you like to do a voice in an episode some day?" if only because I was sure he got Top Dollar for saying anything in front of the microphone and we paid our guest actors union scale. That was pretty decent money but maybe not for someone used to working for ten times that or more. In any case, I didn't have to find out if I had the courage because he said, "If you ever have a part that I'm right for, I'd love to do it."

All the other actors — thinking of how thrilling it could be to act with James Earl Jones — looked hopefully at me and I said, "Well, do you have any samples of your work?"

Everyone laughed — including, fortunately, James Earl Jones. And I'm not sure you ever heard it fully on the screen but that man had a great laugh. I told him we had another recording session in two weeks and I'd have a script that was perfect for him. He said, "Great…what do I play?" I said, "I'll know as soon as I write it."

The only difficult part of arranging all this was that his agent, as you might imagine, wasn't thrilled about his client doing a voiceover job for a fee so far below his usual quote. He insisted I try to get his client more money so I went to our Executive Producer, Lee Mendelson, and told him what was going on. Lee, who I'm sure I've said here on this blog, was the smartest, most honest producer I ever dealt with the TV business. He authorized me to go back to the agent and offer double-scale and then, if necessary, triple-scale.

I called back the agent and said, "I have an offer for you." He said, "Never mind. I spoke to James and he said he wants to do this for the same money you pay everyone else. Actually, I think he'd do it for free if he could." Then the agent said, "Just out of curiosity, how much were you going to offer?" I told him and he said, "Well, I wouldn't let him do it for that but I've been outvoted."

I wrote a script that was about two ghosts — one very meek (kind of a Casper parody) and one very evil and sinister (like, say, Darth Vader in voice). To play the meek one, I booked a fine actor I knew named Will Ryan. I can't link you to a video of the cartoon but here's what the end credits look like on the version of the show currently streaming on a great many networks…

Some of those folks were in the two other cartoons that made up that half-hour of Garfield and Friends.

The recording went fine. I didn't really have to "direct" Mr. Jones because he did every line right the first time. Our recording engineer joked that it was a little tricky to get Will's meek, shy voice and James' booming monster of voice onto the same tracks. The contrast was pretty amazing.

I remember Lorenzo being very happy and saying he was going to a party that evening and if anyone asked him what he'd done that day, he was going to just grin and say, "I acted opposite James Earl Jones!" Mr. Jones was an absolute delight in every way…just like he was every time he got on a stage, in front of a microphone or in front of a camera.  He even made my stupid writing sound like it was worth something.

I have, you may be surprised to learn, a Willie Mays story. It's one of the many, many things in my life I owe to a wonderful man I worked for named Lee Mendelson. You can read all about Lee here but if you don't have time to click, just know that for many, many years, he was the producer of the Peanuts and Garfield cartoons.

Years ago when I was still working for him, Lee's production company hit some nice, round number anniversary and Lee decided to have a big celebration. He made up a list of people who had contributed to its success and he flew us all to Sebastopol, California for a big party and paid for everything. I mean, he paid our meals, our airfare, our transportation from the airport to a hotel, suites at that hotel, everything. Saturday night, there were buses to take us from the hotel to a local country club for the party itself.

Mike Peters, who draws the comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm, and I rode the bus together to the club. When we walked in, we saw two men standing at a bar talking: Charles Schulz and Jim Davis. Mike said, "Wow! The two richest cartoonists in history!" I think Lee had even paid their ways there…although Schulz probably just drove or took a taxi over from his ice rink.

The party was filled with people you never heard of and I'd never heard of. At one point, Lee took me around and introduced me to some of them. I only remember the name of one of those people so I'm going to make up names for the others. You'll recognize the one real name in what follows.

Lee said, "Mark, this is Harvey Fenstermacher. Harvey was the cameraman on the first documentary I made in 1962…"

I said, "Nice to meet you, Harvey."

Lee said, "And Mark, this is Sam Shlabotnik. Sam was the lawyer who helped me arrange financing to open my first office…"

I said, "A pleasure to meet you, Sam."

Lee said, "And Mark, this is Murray Whatshisname. Murray was the liaison to Coca-Cola when I sold A Charlie Brown Christmas to CBS…"

I said, "The pleasure is all mine, Murray."

Lee said, "And Mark, this is Willie Mays."

I said, "Homina-homina-homina…"

It was Willie Mays. Willie Freakin' Mays — and Lee introduced him to me in the same matter-of-fact tone as he'd introduced his cameraman, his lawyer, his liaison to Coca-Cola. Okay but this was Willie Mays. I am not an expert in any sense about baseball. The last time I really followed it was when I collected the trading card that illustrates this post. But even I know that if you were in a room full of baseball history obsessives and you said Willie Mays was the greatest player of all time, no one would give you much of an argument.

And there he was in person, tolerating me shaking his hand for an abnormal length of time while I tried to think of something coherent to say to him. I gathered he was used to reactions like mine.

Lee went on to introduce me to his barber and his insurance man and his dentist and to Tommy Smothers and a few more folks who'd been important to him in his life but I made a point of later getting back to Willie Mays. I apologized for my stammering reaction and he couldn't have been nicer. I told him that when my father once took me to a Dodgers-Giants game at Dodger Stadium when I was ten, we and everyone in our section of the bleachers was, of course, hating on the Giants…

…but we couldn't hate on him. I think I said, "…though we were all disappointed that you caught every one of those long flies to center without slamming into any walls."

He chuckled politely and said, "Well, I had my off days…"

And that was about all he said. Mr. Mays was not a great conversationalist. I guess when you're the greatest baseball player of all time, you don't have to be.

Thank you to the billions of you (it feels like) who sent me a link to this article about a guy who really, really loved Garfield. I appreciate the gesture but I don't need any more.

My Roku TV gets a seemingly-infinite number of channels, an annoying percentage of which are running the same shows. There's one I like where, on-demand 24 hours a day, I can select any episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show to watch. This is in addition to the five or six other channels which will show me episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, though on those channels, I can't pick and choose which ones I want to watch and when. For some reason, no matter when I turn to one of them, they're usually airing "Who and Where Was Antonio Stradivarius?" — not one of my favorite episodes.

And it's also in addition to the several different complete sets of The Dick Van Dyke Show that I own on DVD. I am more likely to run out of food, water and/or oxygen than I am to not be able to watch reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Which is not a bad thing because that's almost a necessity in my life.

A lot of TV shows I watched way-back-when hold little interest for me today and some I look at and wonder, "Why in the name of Bob Denver did I ever like this?" But some hold up, the list including Sgt. Bilko, Car 54, The Bob Newhart Show and a few others. I tried watching a My Favorite Martian recently and it was exactly as I remembered except for the part where I enjoyed it. The Van Dyke shows, if anything, get better.

Lately, I've even been watching some of the ones I didn't care for and I find moments in them that are wonderful. (The ones I don't like mostly have to do with jealousy. A chorus girl kisses Rob causing Laura to fear the marriage is over…or an old boy friend of Laura's pops up and Rob thinks the marriage is over. That marriage seemed way too stable for it to get shaky over a problem so small that it could be introduced, played out and solved within 24 minutes.)

I especially like watching Dick Van Dyke doing…well, just about anything that involved him moving around. Lots of people on TV could be funny using their faces and/or mouths. Dick was also funny using the rest of himself.

Watching these shows today is a little different for me since I met Rose Marie in the later years of her life. I spent a good amount of time with that lady and even gave her a meaty voice role — and directed her! — on an episode of The Garfield Show. It turned out to be her last performance.

Rose was a fascinating and wonderful lady but decades after she'd done The Dick Van Dyke Show, she was still always complaining about how many episodes she wasn't on at all (more than I thought) and how little she had to do in some episodes she was on. The show had so many talented, funny people on it that it couldn't service them all each week. There are shows she's barely in and as I watch them now, I can't help but think, "Boy, she must have been really pissed the week they filmed this."

This is something I witnessed/learned being around older performers of that generation. Most of them wanted to work until their dying day and had trouble coping with the periods when there was no demand for their services.  Once, I was dining at an outdoor restaurant with an older comedian who was still working but not nearly often enough to satisfy him.  A young kid with a handheld camcorder came up and asked him to say a few words for the camera.  I'm not sure the lad had recognized my dining companion.  I think his parents standing nearby had done the recognizing and had sent the boy to get the equivalent of a video autograph.

My companion was not only delighted to comply, he let his lunch get cold while he delivered a ten-minute monologue and then asked the kid to interview him.  I wound up jumping in with a few questions because the boy couldn't come up with any…which is what made me think he had no idea who the man he was videoing was.  He finally staggered back to his folks with a 15-20 minute tour de force.

This yearning to perform was not generally because of a yearning or even a need to make money and it often wasn't just a matter of ego. It was usually a matter of wanting to be wanted; of not being allowed to do what you'd done all your life. Some performers settle comfortably into retirement or semi-retirement. Others yell at the TV and ask God and their agents, "How come they didn't have me in for that?"

One older actor I knew got angry at me every time he heard that I was directing a cartoon show and didn't hire him. It was as if a friend of his was throwing a party and deliberately hadn't invited him. Rose was even a bit annoyed with me that after that one episode of The Garfield Show she did, I never had another part I could have given her.

If you ever catch the end credits of one of those Garfield Show episodes, you'll notice that the names of the voice actors are impossible to read. They're on for way too long in way too small a font. I was powerless to stop this…as I explained to Rose when she phoned to complain to me that she couldn't see her name. I remember saying to her, "Hey, my name's on the same card as Voice Director and I can't read mine, either."

If she had seen her name, she would have seen it said "Rose Marie Guy" and would probably have been annoyed that it didn't properly identify her as the performer who was billed simply as "Rose Marie." But that was her legal name — the one the producers made the check out to — and they didn't see a memo I sent telling them the proper way to bill her.

She became Rose Marie Guy when he married a musician named Bobby Guy in 1946. He died in 1964 while she was working on The Dick Van Dyke Show and she was understandably devastated by the loss. In fact, she didn't feel she could go on working and she announced she was quitting. Others involved with the program — mostly director John Rich — convinced her that it would not only be bad for the show if she left but also bad for her. She stayed and was glad she did.

She worked almost her entire time on this planet — from when she was three and billed as "Baby Rose Marie" until the last decade or so of a life that lasted to age 94. Performing was as much a part of her existence as breathing and she didn't cope well with the periods between jobs. When I watch those shows now, I am amazed how good she was and how she scored with every single line they gave her. And I can kinda hear her bitching to Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard that they didn't give her more of them.

I'm watching the Closing Arguments in the Donald Trump Hush Money Trial…only I'm not. What I'm really watching is the CNN coverage which consists of someone who's actually in the courtoom texting (I guess) summaries of what's being said and a few selected quotes to the CNN newsroom. Then reporters report and analysts analyze based on those summaries and selected quotes. So we're hearing how things are going in the courtroom from people who are not actually in the courtroom.

I don't have time to follow it all today because I have too much to do. There also won't be too much here today.

I have a number of e-mails asking me (a) if I had anything to do with the new Garfield movie, (b) if I've seen the new Garfield movie, (c) if I'm upset about not having anything to do with the new Garfield movie and (d) if I'm happy that it's getting not-great reviews and not-great reports that people are not flocking to see it. The answers to those questions are, in this order: (a) no, (b) no, (c) no and (d) no.

One thing I learned long ago about writing comic books and cartoons is that you should never get possessive about characters you don't own. I have friends who have made this mistake; who forgot that they were baby-sitters and not the actual parents. They wrote Marblehead Man for many years and perhaps did great work that brought Marblehead Man to new heights and new popularity. They may even have had people tell them, "You did the definitive Marblehead Man stories!"

But in a legal sense, Marblehead Man belongs to others and one day, someone else is writing Marblehead Man. The company that owns it is sold or it has a new CEO or…well, it really doesn't matter why. One content-creator is out and another is in and the old one no longer has the income or bragging rights. The new guy or gal might be following his or her template — in which case, the ousted creative person feels someone else is reaping the benefits of his or her hard work. Or the new guy or gal might be changing everything — in which case, the ousted person feels his or her hard, acclaimed work is being disrespected or ruined.

Either way, there is reason to suffer if they made that mistake of forgetting they were baby-sitting. I watched one friend go through some genuine pains when he was no longer The Writer of Superman.

I had a great time writing Jim Davis's great character on and off for about twenty-five years but I was careful to remember it was Jim Davis's character and Jim was still in charge, still doing the insanely-popular newspaper strip, still supervising everything done with his cat. He has since deeded some of that over to others and that's his right.

I have no idea if I'll be involved with the lasagna-eater again. If I am, great. If not, I'm delighted to have had such a long run as the baby-sitter.

Cartoonist Russell Myers has been formally recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records for the "Longest running daily cartoon strip by a single author." This is for producing the Broom-Hilda newspaper strip since April 19, 1970 — a feat which I believe was called to the world's attention by this blog back in this message.

It seems unlikely anyone will wrest the title away from him in the few decades. I don't know who the next contender would be but Russell ain't stopping now. And even if he quit or died tomorrow, he still has a year or two of Broom-Hilda strips in inventory.

Speaking of dead cartoonists: The Guinness folks currently recognize Johnny Hart as the "Most syndicated living cartoonist" and their listing says…

Johnny Hart, creator of The Wizard of Id and B.C., is the most syndicated living cartoonist with both these cartoons syndicated in 1,300 newspapers each, giving his work a combined total of 2,600 syndicated outlets.

I don't think this was ever a valid record because, first of all, the way syndicates count newspaper strip placements involves counting daily strips and Sunday strips as two separate sales. If the Picayune Post-Dispatch carries a strip seven days a week, the syndicate counts that as two newspapers, not one. One newspaper that carried B.C. and The Wizard of Id both daily and Sunday would be considered four newspapers. So the total number of papers carrying Hart's two strips has really always been way less than 2,600.

Secondly, I believe Charles Schulz and Jim Davis, creators of Peanuts and Garfield respectively, have both at times appeared in more newspapers with one strip apiece than Johnny Hart has with two. Of course, Charles Schulz no longer qualifies as a "living cartoonist"…

…and since his death in 2007, neither does Johnny Hart.

From Bruce Bennett…

I like to watch old sitcoms, especially the well-written ones, and after seeing a particularly good episode of The Bob Newhart Show, I noticed Lorenzo Music happened to write it. I also remember that Steve Martin mentioned him in an interview about the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, where he wrote a lot for Pat Paulsen, which was some of my favorite stuff from that wonderful series.

So my question is, did Lorenzo Music stop writing comedy after becoming such a successful voice actor playing "Carlton, Your Doorman" on Rhoda, and then Garfield the Cat? You wrote Garfield. Did he ever make suggestions for storylines or dialogue with you? Or was he satisfied to be just a voice artist?

Lorenzo was a much-praised, very successful writer-producer before transitioning into (mostly) a much-praised, very successful voice actor. He didn't stop writing completely but a lot of his later writing was the kind he described as "for myself." He was a co-writer on one of the prime-time Garfield specials before I got involved with The Cat but he never suggested any storylines to me.

As for dialogue, yes. He didn't do it often but sometimes, he would ask me if he could rephrase a line to make it funnier and I probably said yes every time. Most good voice actors do at least a little of that. Lorenzo was very sharp and he'd had years of fine-tuning dialogue for comedy shows so as to wring all possible mirth out of a speech.

I should explain that on many cartoon shows — including all the ones I've voice-directed — the actors do not get the scripts in advance. On Garfield and Friends, I spent every possible moment writing and rewriting. I even sometimes rewrote during a session after I'd heard the lines read.

There are other ways to do it but the way we found worked best would be that we'd hand the actors a script for a cartoon and I'd assign the roles of non-recurring characters. In addition to playing Odie, Gregg Berger might also do the voice of a policeman or an alley cat. The scripts merely had the dialogue — no description of what the characters were doing in each scene — so I'd walk the actors through the script: "On line 22, you're falling down a flight of stairs…on line 23, you crash into a live goat…"

Then we would start recording. There was no point in rehearsing since we'd just do it over and over until we all thought it was as good as it was ever going to get. If a script was ten pages, we might do the first three until we were happy and then do the next three and so on. Our cast was amazing and a lot of what made it onto the air was the first time we did it. Some of the seven-minute cartoons were recorded in under fifteen minutes. As I explained back in this post, a guest star might occasionally be stunned by how short a time they were there.

So Lorenzo didn't have a lot of time to study the script and think of ways to improve it. From the moment my assistant handed him a script to the moment the engineer said "This is Take One" was about five minutes. But he was very fast and very funny and that was more than enough. And since I'm talking about Lorenzo — and because I miss the guy — here's a photo I've run here before of the two of having lunch at one of his favorite (but now defunct) restaurants…

Lorenzo is on the left, of course. And the reason I have that odd look on my face is because, I suspect, I just realized that the restaurant served nothing but cole slaw. No wonder it went out of business.

"Kal W." read this item here and then wrote me to ask…

In writing about that New York trip you took, you said that you took Imogene Coca to see the play Crazy For You and you took Carol Lay to see Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Didn't you have that backwards? Imogene Coca was one of the stars of Your Show of Shows and Laughter on the 23rd Floor was based on Your Show of Shows. I assume you took Imogene Coca to see the show based on her show.

Also, you said that Nathan Lane was playing Jackie Gleason playing Sid Caesar. I didn't quite understand that.

In Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Nathan Lane played a character based on Sid Caesar…but Mr. Lane's manner — and I suppose, his appearance — made him come across more like Jackie Gleason than Sid Caesar. He was very good in the part, by the way. He was very good in everything I ever saw him in.

As for the match-ups of dates to plays: No, I had it right. As I explained way back here…

I had arranged while I was in Manhattan to take her to see the on-stage version of Laughter on the 23rd Floor, the Neil Simon play that referenced his days writing for Your Show of Shows.  Since I was bringing her, it was arranged for us to sit in Mr. Simon's house seats.

A few days before, Imogene began to worry that her attendance would be exploited for publicity purposes.  She was bothered, she told me, that all the articles and retrospectives about Your Show of Shows were giving less than proper credit to Lucille Kallen, who — in Imogene's opinion — wrote her best material.  She said, "I'd feel bad if I were used to promote a play that didn't give Lucille her due."  To prevent this, I called the theater's manager (or someone in his office) and was assured that Ms. Coca could attend, quietly and without fanfare.

That was insufficient promise for Imogene, who told me she was developing a "bad feeling" about it.  She asked if we could go to some other show and I did some reshuffling.  The night after, I was going to take another friend — cartoonist Carol Lay — to see Crazy For You, so I swapped dates.  I took Carol to Laughter on the 23rd Floor, with Nathan Lane brilliantly playing Jackie Gleason and calling him Max Prince, who was supposed to be Sid Caesar.  At the close of the performance, an obviously-professional photographer scurried down the aisle and began searching the front rows, looking in vain for Imogene Coca.

The next night, I took that very person to Crazy For You.  We dined first at Sardi's, where the reception could not have been more regal, had I arrived with Princess Margaret on my arm.  Mr. Sardi himself came over, kissed her and told me I was with the most talented woman in the business.  Yeah, like I didn't already know that.  Then at the show, an array of fans approached her, endorsing that view.  One was a tall, skinny young gent who insisted on serenading her with the entire theme song of It's About Time, a short-lived situation comedy she did in the sixties.  Another was an even younger man who asked if she was — quote: "the old lady in National Lampoon's Vacation."  When she said she was, he asked with genuine curiosity, "Have you done anything else?"

After a few such folks, she turned to me with a genuine amazement and said, "You know, I think this is the first time I've been out in public and nobody's mentioned Sid Caesar."

Imogene was just charming…and very humble. Everyone around us that evening wanted to tell her how wonderful she was. So did everyone at the recording studio when we had her in to do a voice on Garfield and Friends. I have seen people who were very good at feigning modesty while at the same time encouraging everyone to repeat and ramp up the praise. Imogene just wanted to do what she did so well — funny acting — and if people applauded, fine. But she did not live for that.

When folks talk about the great comediennes, especially on television, I rarely see her name mentioned. I can't think of anyone who was better and I'm really glad I got to know her.

I have a real busy day today and it ain't helping that Stormy Daniels is testifying in the Trump Trial. I have no idea what that adds or doesn't add to those proceedings but it sure is fun watching newsfolks on TV relaying the latest details of her testimony and paraphrasing all sorts of things that are apparently being said in that courtroom.

One thing that makes me think Trump will lose badly is that he keeps posting and saying things like "THEY HAVE NO CASE – This according to virtually all Legal Scholars & Experts." Well, maybe the experts on Newsmax. With Trump, "Everyone says" is the greatest tell that he knows it's not true, as in "All legal scholars, both sides, wanted, and in fact demanded that Roe v. Wade be overturned." He's never right about unanimity or even near-unanimity.

As I try to look away from the trial and focus on work, I won't be posting much here today but I do have something for you. In this recent post, I wrote about the day in 1994 when I recorded Arnold Stang in New York for a Garfield cartoon. After that, I took the limo that our producer had let me hire to Kennedy Airport in New York and I flew to Orlando, Florida. In '95, I wrote an article about what transpired in Orlando at Walt Disney World. I've never put it up on this blog but I just did and you can read it here. See if you can solve the mystery of the missing luggage before I do.

I received this question from "Disneyfan94 The Muppets Forever." I don't usually answer questions from people who hide behind handles but I'm going to take the chance that that's this person's real name — Mr. and Mrs. The Muppets Forever had a child and named him or her Disneyfan94. It's probably a very common given name these days. Anyway, here's what he or she wrote…

First off, I'm a huge fan of your blog. I know you worked with Arnold Stang on Garfield and Friends and due to him arriving at the recording studio early, you were able to discuss many aspects of his career including Top Cat. Could you please share some of the stories he told about voicing T.C.?

That was a great day for me. In fact, I spent a great week in New York then, visiting the DC offices, the MAD offices, the Marvel offices, the offices of David Letterman's show, and I think I even had lunch with Joe Simon. And of course, I went to Broadway shows. I took Imogene Coca (yes, the Imogene Coca) to dinner at Sardi's and then to see the musical, Crazy For You. And I took my friend Carol Lay to see Neil Simon's then-latest play, Laughter on the 23rd Floor in which Nathan Lane played Jackie Gleason playing Sid Caesar.

Then on Thursday, I recorded the voice tracks for three cartoons for our show with East Coast talent. It was something I wanted to do and even though it cost a lot of money, our producer was nice enough to indulge me. This is Lee Mendelson I'm talking about…the best producer I ever worked with.

Thursday morn, I checked out of my hotel in New York and was picked up by a limo (paid for by Lee) which took me to a recording studio in New York (paid for by Lee) arriving at 10 AM so I could check and make sure everything would be ready for our first actor to arrive at 11 AM. To my delight, everything was ready and the first actor was already there. The first actor was Arnold Stang. He was sitting there, reading a magazine, looking exactly like Arnold Stang.

We couldn't start until the other actors were in place in the studio we used in Los Angeles.  The two studios would then be linked by some sort of ultra-strong digital phone connection and I could direct everyone at once.  If you saw the finished cartoons, you would never imagine that one of the actors and the director were 2,815 miles away from the other actors and the main recording engineer.

Call time for the West Coast actors — Lorenzo Music, Thom Huge, Gregg Berger and Howard Morris — was 8 AM (L.A. time).  Thus, I had an hour to talk with Arnold about a whole range of things but mostly Top Cat, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and working with Milton Berle.   No, I did not ask him about Berle's genitalia but we did talk about the recording studio — the name of which I don't remember, sorry — where he'd recorded voice tracks for Paramount cartoons like "Herman and Katnip" and many other shows.

The main thing I recall from our Top Cat discussion is the fine line they walked to not echo the Sgt. Bilko show too much.  As you may know, the first episode or two were originally recorded with an actor named Michael O'Shea voicing the title character.  Mr. O'Shea does not seem to have done any produced cartoon voice work for Hanna-Barbera or anyone and many different stories have circulated as to why his voice tracks were dumped and Arnold was hired.

Daws Butler had told me that at one point he was going to be Top Cat's voice.  He recorded either an episode or a demo of some sort using what was essentially the same voice he used for Hokey Wolf.

My great friend, the late Earl Kress and I used to puzzle about another piece of this puzzle.  On Top Cat, H-B used Maurice Gosfield, who'd played Duane Doberman on the Bilko show, to voice Benny the Ball.  Obviously, that was because of the Bilko connection…so why were none of the voices of Top Cat's cronies done by his fellow Bilko cast mates, Allan Melvin or Harvey Lembeck?  Melvin was then doing a lot of voices for H-B and Lembeck, though I don't think he ever received any screen credit there, can be heard voicing minor roles on one or two concurrent H-B shows. (Before anyone asks: Joe E. Ross, who was a semi-regular on Bilko and later did voices for H-B, was filming Car 54, Where Are You? in New York while Top Cat was recording in L.A.)

The answer to all this, I learned from Arnold that day, was that Top Cat vacillated between being too much like Bilko and not enough like Bilko.  "The lawyers couldn't make up their minds," he told me.  "One week, they wanted me to sound more like Phil Silvers and the next week, they wanted me to tone it down."

Apparently, Daws sounded too much like Phil Silvers and Mr. O'Shea didn't sound enough like him.  Arnold was the compromise.  Arnold didn't know anything about Melvin or Lembeck ever being part of the cast but that might have been before his time there.  He was good friends with both of them.  (He also was occasionally recorded separately from the other actors because he was sometimes commuting from New York. At the time, technology did not allow them to be able to record the way we did in '94. Some of Arnold's later voice work for H-B was done that way.)

Arnold was also good friends with Howard Morris, who was in our regular Garfield and Friends cast and was in the studio in Los Angeles that day.  Once we had the L.A. folks online, Howie and Arnold got to talking about all the times — and there were a lot of them — they'd been up for the same parts.  Howie had beaten Arnold out for the title role in the Beetle Bailey cartoons and the voice of the koala in the Qantas Airlines commercials.  Arnold had beaten Howie out for the role of Hysterium in the national touring company of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and a part in the cinema classic, Skidoo. Of Skidoo, Arnold said to Howie, "I should have let you have that one."

I told of other memories of that day in this post.  Before he left, Arnold was nice enough to record an answering machine message for me…

After we finished recording, the limo took me to the airport and I flew down to Orlando, Florida for a Garfield conference.  Many moons ago, I wrote a column about what happened down there.  I've never posted it on this website but in the next few days, I will.  And if I remember anything else Arnold Stang told me that day, I'll post it.  He was a great talent and I'm so glad I got the chance to spend time with him and work with him.  I have worked with no one else in the animation business who would have spent the money that Lee Mendelson spent to make that happen.

Rob Dow, who lives in Toronto, sent me this in a message with the subject line, "The Greatest TV Show Ever"…

Mr. Evanier, I have been obsessed with The Dick Van Dyke Show for a very long time and would enjoy any recollections from your stint as a member of the audience (which is incredible to me, how a person only 10 years older than I saw something happen that seems like ancient history, although it isn't…much like it seems impossible that my neighbor saw The Beatles in the Cavern Club and there are living people who remember when WW2 ended).

Where was it taped? How long did it take (were there long gaps between scenes?) Were only friends and family invited or could schmucks walk in if the street? How many attended? Was it shocking to see the actors and sets in color and not black and white? Did the actors acknowledge the audience? Did you know that you were watching something that would endure the test of time or would you have felt the same watching another show?

(You may very well have previously provided an analysis of this subject and if so I will enjoy it as I devour your blog which I only recently discovered thanks to the Gottfried podcast. )

If you've been stumbling around this site, you've probably found this article that I wrote back in 1995. It answers some of your questions but since I've received a number of requests to go into greater detail about that very important evening in my life, here we go. And first off, I'll mention that the episode my parents and I saw filmed was this one…

It was filmed (not taped) on February 2, 1965 at Desilu Cahuenga Studios, which was located at 846 N. Cahuenga Blvd. That building has gone through many names and owners since then and is now called Red Studios and a lot of different shows and videos are made there. The last time I was in that complex was a few years ago when we recorded songs — not scripts, just songs — there for The Garfield Show. One of the folks who did voices in an episode and came in there to record a song was Rose Marie, who had many conflicting memories of the building.

And I should mention: One thing I learned early in my days working in television was that a good way to piss off the crew is to talk about "taping" when the show is filmed or "filming" when the show is taped.

We were there between two and three hours. The filming was "hosted" by Carl Reiner who was doing the warm-up and chatting with the audience between scenes because Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam weren't in that episode. If they had been, they would have been doing what he was doing.

Mr. Reiner was, it will not surprise you to hear, a very good host…very friendly, very funny. At one point, he offered the prize of one dollar right out of his own wallet to the person in the audience with the oddest last name. Amazingly, "Evanier" did not win. Mel Brooks was also in the audience and they did a little bantering. The gaps between scenes were not long although at one point, there was a delay because a special effect did not go off — an ironing board was rigged to fall out of a cabinet on cue — and it had to be re-rigged.

The episode was about Rob and Laura buying their house and there was a business card which the actor playing the realtor had given Rob Petrie. Mr. Van Dyke used the delay to demonstrate how he could back-palm that card and make it vanish and reappear. I thought that was one of the neatest things I'd ever seen and I found a book in the public library (remember public libraries?) and taught myself how to do that.

I interacted twice with the folks on stage. At one point, the stage manager (or someone) "slated" for the cameras by calling out, "DVD, Episode number [some number]" and then they had to stop for tech reasons. Mr. Reiner told the audience, "We're the only show with the initials 'D.V.D.'" and I called out "What about Death Valley Days?" Everyone laughed and there was a brief discussion on the floor about how no one had ever thought of that before.

A bit later, Dick Van Dyke was taking some questions from the audience and someone asked about his well-known love of Laurel and Hardy.  As part of his reply, he asked if there were Laurel and Hardy fans in the house.  We were sitting in the front row of the bleachers and I waved my hand so enthusiastically that Dick asked me what my favorite one of their films was.  I think he was expecting that the thirteen-year-old kid there would say something like, "Oh, I liked the one where they were pushing the piano up all those stairs."  He seemed pleasantly startled when I started ticking off the names of "the boys'" best films.

I answered your other questions in the above-linked piece so I'll just wrap this up by answering the one where you asked, "Did you know that you were watching something that would endure the test of time or would you have felt the same watching another show?" I saw other shows being taped or filmed and I was always thrilled to see how the magic happened. But this one was really special. I wasn't thinking, "Boy, I'll bet people will be watching these in reruns forever." I was too busy thinking, "I wanna be a TV writer."

(And also: "I didn't realize that anything on this planet could look as good as Mary Tyler Moore in color, in makeup and in person.")

This is a partial rerun of a post that ran here on November 11, 2019…

In 1977, the film The Goodbye Girl was a surprise smash hit. It had a screenplay by Neil Simon and its two leads — Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss — were nominated for Academy Awards, as was the film itself. Dreyfuss won his category, becoming at the time the youngest Best Actor in Oscar history. Very much a successful film.

In 1992, it was announced that Mr. Simon was transforming his screenplay into a Broadway musical of the same name. If ever an upcoming show looked like a guaranteed smash, this was it. Just the fact that it was Neil Simon and a beloved storyline sold a lot of tickets. When it was announced that David Zippel and Marvin Hamlisch were doing the music and Michael Kidd was directing, they sold more. And they probably couldn't have found two bigger stars to star than Bernadette Peters and Martin Short.

The advance sale was huge. So were the problems during rehearsals and tryouts. So was the disappointment of many when the show finally opened on March 4, 1993. The previous Neil Simon musical, They're Playing Our Song, ran for 1,082 performances. The Goodbye Girl closed after 188.

How could "the show that couldn't fail" fail? There were many factors and in his autobiography, Mr. Simon blamed everyone but Mr. Simon, implying he thought it was a terrible idea to try to make that movie into a stage musical. He didn't really explain though why he agreed to do it. I mean, it wasn't like he needed the money or the credit.

I saw one of the 188 performances and we somehow got tickets at the last minute…in the front row! I liked parts of it, especially David Zippel's lyrics which I thought were often funnier than what was coming out of the actors' mouths when they weren't singing. Before I explain what I didn't like, give me a sec to put up one of these…

There. Read on at your own risk. Like most musicals, the plot was about two people who shouldn't be together and maybe don't even like each other for most of Act One winding up very much in love. Anna never imagined she'd fall for the King of Siam. Marian the Librarian was repulsed at first by the traveling salesman, Harold Hill. Eliza Doolittle never dreamed she'd care about Henry Higgins…and in The Goodbye Girl, Paula McFadden (Bernadette on stage) never thought she'd have anything but disdain for Martin Short's character, Elliot Garfield.

You know how it's going to end before they even start the overture but you're going to pretend you don't, just as you pretend you don't see the wires that fly Peter Pan around, just as you pretend you don't know the ending of any play you've seen before. Well, with The Goodbye Girl, it was hard to pretend. From the moment he set foot on that stage, Martin Short was so funny and so adorable that you got angry with Bernadette's character for not falling in love with him ten minutes into the play. After fifteen, I wanted to marry him. That she kept treating this hilarious, wondrous guy like crap was more frustrating than amusing.

I also thought the set was confusing and that Short snuck in too many Ed Grimley gestures along with the occasional taste of Jerry Lewis. He made you laugh but as Martin Short, not as Elliot Garfield. I liked him better (but laughed at him less) a few years later in a revival of Little Me.

But you can see a little of the show for yourself here. This is the Press Reel offering video excerpts for TV reviewers to use in their reviews…