Today's video link is Randy Rainbow's version of a song from the musical Oklahoma! You'll have to sit through a commercial to get to it but it's worth the effort..

So now we have the sixth and final episode of the Laugh-In revival that starred Robin Williams, Sergio Aragonés, Wayland Flowers, Ed Bluestone, Lenny Shultz and a lot of other folks who probably deserved more attention than this series brought them. Some of the writing on this show was pretty good and some of the performers were pretty good. I think the problems were (a) the lack of a host or hosts and (b) there was something kinda stale about trying to revive a format that had worn out its welcome just four years earlier.

The original Laugh-In was successful because it was new. There wasn't enough new about the new Laugh-In but there were some very clever and funny moments in there…

I don't like pouring icy H2O on anyone's joy but I do like being cautious, especially on a matter as vital as the future of American Democracy. The New York Times has a poll out this morning that probably pleases anyone who feels about Donald Trump the way I do and feels about Kamala Harris the way I do. I've cropped out all that stuff you might not have looked at and here's what it tells us…

Cause for celebration, right? She's four points up in those three states and if she wins those three states, she's probably heading for the Oval Office and he's probably heading for a lot of courtrooms and maybe prisons. But there was some teensy type under those numbers and I've taken the liberty of enlarging it from the flyspeck font the Times used…

Changes things a little, doesn't it? It doesn't mean she and Governor Walz have a lock or even a near-lock on those electoral votes. It might mean they're heading in the right direction.

Here's another vintage commercial I didn't mind having interrupt my cartoon shows when I was a lad. It's for Kellogg's Rice Krispies and for years, I wondered who those singers were. Well, I finally found out: They were three-fourths of a singing group called "The J's With Jamie." Jamie was a lady — Jamie Silvia — and she was married to Joe Silvia, who was also in the group. The other two men were Marshall Gill and Len Dresslar.

The Chicago-based group recorded regular record albums like the one above in 1963 and even got nominated for Grammy Awards but they made their real money doing jingles and commercials — hundreds of 'em. Wikipedia quotes Time as saying "they have probably been heard by more people more times than any other group in the history of sound. Yet next to nobody knows who they are. They are the world's most successful singers of TV commercials." When Mr. Dresslar passed, the newspaper obits said he was the voice of The Jolly Green Giant. (I suspect several different people were at times.)

You can read more about them at that Wikipedia page. I'm just happy I no longer have to wonder who sang for Snap, Crackle and Pop in a series of commercials that went like this…

I love these old Kellogg's commercials with Daws Butler doing — in this case — the voices of both Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear…

Depending on which poll you consult, the Harris/Walz ticket is 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 or 0% points ahead of Trump/Vance. The 538 aggregate at this moment says 2.3 and the Ipsos poll says…

Democrat Kamala Harris leads Republican Donald Trump 42% to 37% in the race for the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election, according to an Ipsos poll published on Thursday. The poll found Harris had widened her lead since a July 22-23 Reuters/Ipsos survey, which found her up 37% to 34% over Trump.

Ipsos conducted the August poll independently from Reuters. The poll, conducted online, had a margin of error of around 3 percentage points. In a separate poll, Ipsos found Harris leading Trump 42% to 40% in the seven states where the election was closest in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

That's all well and good and certainly a lot better than being behind…but we're looking at — and I quote from above — "a margin of error of around 3 percentage points." I'm also leery of any poll conducted online so my optimism remains under guard. "Kamala comes out of nowhere and springs into the lead" is such a good news story right this minute that I can't blame the press for running with it.

But there will come a time when "Trump gaining" will be a good way to attract clicks and tune-ins and there will certainly be some polls somewhere you could cite to write that story. I'm waiting for more data. Oh, and Randy Rainbow has a new video dropping on Monday. I'm waiting for that, too.

Whether you were fortunate enough to attend Comic-Con in San Diego recently or not, you're going to want to download a PDF copy of the con's lovely souvenir book. It starts with a cover by the gifted Joe Jusko and then is full of info not only about this year's con but about the fields the con covers like comics and science-fiction. There are obits about con-type people who've passed in the last year (I wrote a couple of 'em) and all sorts of other interesting features.

My pal Gary Sassaman details the history of the Inkpot Awards…and I probably should just be quiet about this but I seem to be the only person who remembers that I suggested the idea of these annual bestowals in the first place. Then again, I might be one of only about four people still alive who were at the meeting where I suggested it. Perhaps I should have made some noise about this when there were more living/breathing witnesses.

The souvenir books for this convention have always been grand and glorious but they used to actually be books which came in your little bag of goodies when you showed up at the con. For many reasons, $$$ being chief among them, they've turned into downloadable PDFs, which I understand. I just wish they'd make arrangements with some print-on-demand company so that I could easily order a printed copy. And yes, I can make my own but it wouldn't be bound like a real book and fit in nicely next to the earlier ones.

Anyway, it's very good and it's free and you can get your copy at this link.

A few correspondents have taken me to task for not mentioning, in writing about the passing of dear Mitzi McCall, how they were on The Ed Sullivan Show that same night in 1964 when The Beatles took the stage and the country. I left a lot of their long, amazing careers out and I guess I omitted that because I've always felt they deserved to known for something more than bombing on Ed's show that night. That seems to be all that some people knew about them but I guess it's a good story.

It's told here and lots of other places…and to their credit, they didn't shy away from telling it. Here's one place where they told it.

Real good obit/bio of Mitzi McCall in the Hollywood Reporter.

I didn't think any of the possible choices on the shortlist to be Kamala Harris's running mate were bad choices but so far, Tim Walz is turning out to be better than I expected. His speeches are great and he brings a certain air of badly-needed joy to this campaign. Everyone else seems to be stuck in "I'm doing this because we have to save America" mode whereas Walz seems happy to be in the race.

But what really impresses me about the guy — and remember, this is "so far;" things could change — is how much trouble the opposition is having coming up with some way to define him as a man who will destroy this country. They've been carping about him signing some law that mandated tampons in boys' bathrooms. Even if that mattered, it would be pretty trivial. And the facts on the ground seem to be that he signed a bill that mandated that schools had to supply tampons for those that needed them and someone extrapolated that could mean boys.

And JD Vance is out there complaining that while Walz served in the National Guard for 24 years, he's misrepresenting some aspects of his service. As this article notes, they're pretty minor quibbles. In any case, I don't think anyone who values military service is going to look at Walz's record in that regard and then vote for the ticket headed by the Bone Spurs Guy.

And yeah, Walz is a liberal…or a progressive…and Republicans running against such folks always brand them as Dangerous Communists. That kinda comes with being a Democrat seeking office these days. They haven't found anything disqualifying about Tim Walz…so far.

A genuinely funny lady died last night. She'd probably prefer I not mention her age but Mitzi McCall and her longtime husband/partner Charlie Brill had been entertaining audiences since…well, her first attention-getting job was in the 1955 Jerry Lewis movie, You're Never Too Young. Mr. Lewis was an important mentor in her career which included hundreds of appearances on stage and screen, in cartoons and Las Vegas, and an amazing number of game shows.

There was a game show called Tattletales that must be rerunning on some channel somewhere at the moment. It started in 1974 and each episode featured three celebrity couples being tested on what they knew about each other. Mitzi and Charlie were on a lot of them and until last night, we could say that they were just about the only couple from that series that was still together.

I was pleased to know and work with them and you never saw two people who more belonged together. Which is why our hearts go out today to Charlie, their family, their extended family (they took care of a lot of others) and anyone who ever laughed at that lovely woman.

And here's the new installment of Everything You Need To Know About Saturday Night Live, delving into Season 8. The next installment should probably be titled, "The Lengths To Which Dick Ebersol Had To Keep Eddie Murphy On The Program." This year though does look like the show is going to be around for a while…

I shoulda known someone would ask this. And it was Neil Robertson who did…

It isn't just me, is it? The closing theme song from Matty's Funday Funnies had a musical riff that sounded an awful lot like one that was used in the Beany & Cecil show. Was that plagiarism or was there some kind of connection between two otherwise very dissimilar cartoon shows?

These was a connection. The original Matty's Funday Funnies debuted in October of 1959 and it featured old Paramount cartoons of, among others, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Herman & Katnip, Buzzy the Crow, Baby Huey and Little Audrey. These had been acquired from Harvey Comics, that publisher having purchased much of the Paramount cartoon library in 1958 for a reported $1,700,000. Harvey edited the original openings of the films to make them all "Harveytoons" and they also made a deal with ABC and Mattel to run them.

Funday Funnies was the show on which ABC ran them — with a newly-animated opening and closing along with interstitials of Matty Mattel and Sister Belle, who were mascots/hosts of Mattel Toys. Here's a promo for the show and it was narrated by the greatest game show announcer of all time, Johnny Olson…

The promo says the show was on Sunday afternoons at 5. Actually, it was on at all sorts of different times on different ABC affiliates at different times. I would guess it sold a lot of Mattel Toys. But after two years, I guess it ran outta gas.

In light of the recent success of the Hanna-Barbera operation, Bob Clampett was shopping around a cartoon version of the Time for Beany puppet show. He made a deal with Mattel for a whole line of Beany and Cecil toys and for cartoons of those characters to replace the Paramount/Harveytoons…and Matty's Funday Funnies became Matty's Funnies with Beany and Cecil. Matty and his sister (redesigned a bit) and all those commercials for Mattel toys stayed but the cartoons changed.

So the reason the theme song sounds the same to you is that the theme song was the same. Bob Clampett and another gent wrote new lyrics to the tune — which, by the way, was composed by Hoyt Curtin, who was responsible for so many memorable theme songs on Hanna-Barbera shows. Here's a whole half-hour episode…

This version of Matty's Funnies also ran in different time slot. It debuted in 1962, reran in '63 and '64 and then some awkward edits were done to the 26 episodes. Matty, his sister and all references to Mattel Toys were chopped out and the series was syndicated as The Beany & Cecil Show for a long, long time. They were pretty clever cartoons.

Following up on my previous video link: Even as an eight-year-old kid watching (and loving) The Flintstones when it debuted on Friday, 9/30/60, I was intrigued by ABC's decision to program it at 8:30 PM.

That evening, ABC prime time kicked off with a show called Matty's Funday Funnies which was sometimes called just Matty's Funnies. Either way, it was sponsored by Mattel Toys and initially ran old Paramount cartoons of Casper the Friendly Ghost, Herman & Katnip and others. That series debuted and aired on late Sunday ("Funday") afternoons commencing in October of 1959. The night The Flintstones debuted at 8:30, ABC added a Friday night edition of Matty's at 7:30.

Here's the closing of one episode. I'm not sure if this is from the Sunday or Friday version but it includes a promo for The Flintstones…

Now, given the way networks think on those rare occasions when they do, you'd figure that show would be a natural lead-in to Fred and Barney and their stone-age escapades but no. As I said, they were on at 8:30. So what filled the 8 PM time slot? What show did ABC decide would create a natural flow from Casper cartoons to Flintstones cartoons? Answer: Harrigan and Sons.

It was not a cartoon. It was a half-hour filmed situation comedy starring the old character actor Pat O'Brien as a well-seasoned lawyer and Roger Perry as his son and lightly-seasoned junior partner. To give you an idea how unlike its lead-in and lead-out it was, here's the opening of one episode…

And here are the end credits to the show. I vividly recall watching them each week as I waited for Fred and Barney to start…

Harrigan and Son didn't debut on 9/30, the same night Matty's Funnies and The Flintstones debuted. It didn't come on until 10/14. And once it did, it came between those two shows. Then The Flintstones was followed by 77 Sunset Strip, The Detectives Starring Robert Taylor and then to close out the evening at 10:30, The Law and Mr. Jones, which starred James Whitmore and which was a lot like Harrigan and Son only more serious. So what you had there was, in order…

• Cartoon show about friendly ghosts and talking cats
• Situation comedy about a law firm
• Cartoon show about cavemen in the Stone Age
• Drama about detectives
• Drama about detectives
• Drama about a law firm

But now I hear you wondering what ran on ABC at 8 PM the night The Flintstones debuted? And what was there on the following Friday, October 7? My research was unable to answer this riddle which, I'll admit, intrigued me more than it should have. So I consulted with TV expert Stu Shostak and he consulted with TV expert Steve Beverly and they came up with the answer…

On September 30, the night The Flintstones premiered, its lead-in at 8 PM was an ABC News Special on the then-current presidential election. So the first 90 minutes of ABC's prime-time lineup that night had this natural flow…

• Cartoon show about friendly ghosts and talking cats
• News Special about Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy
• Cartoon show about cavemen in the Stone Age

And then on October 7, they pre-empted Matty's Funnies and that 90 minute block went like this…

• One hour live televised presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy
• Cartoon show about cavemen in the Stone Age

The odd placement of The Flintstones may have been because, as was then sometimes the case, a given sponsor had a long-term contract for a certain time slot.  So the company that chose to sponsor The Flintstones or its ad agency controlled 8:30 PM on Friday nights on ABC and the show they wanted to sponsor had to go there.  Or maybe ABC felt that the success of The Flintstones might have hinged on it attracting an adult audience and that was less likely with Buzzy the Crow cartoons as its lead-in. Or there might have been some other reason. We may never know.

But I do know that even when I was eight, I thought, "They have those shows in the wrong order." I also thought everyone on The Flintstones was more realistic than Richard Nixon.

Daniel Klos wrote to ask…

For much of his career, it seemed that Jack Kirby mostly used a six-panel grid in his page layouts. But when he returned to DC in the mid-1980s for issue 6 of that New Gods reprint mini-series, as well as the Hunger Dogs graphic novel, his page layouts became much more experimental, largely eschewing any underlying grid system. Did Kirby ever discuss this change and why he made it?

Yes. He said DC had asked him to saying that his simple grid layouts were "old-fashioned." He didn't like it but to make the company happy, he tried some different panel arrangements on some pages. I don't have an exact quote for you but he said (to me) something like, "A good artist can make the contents of the panels interesting. Anyone can divide the page into weird shapes."