I thought Steve Martin was the best Oscar host in many years…better even than Billy Crystal.  I always liked Crystal but felt that when he hosted, the show — which oughta be about the awards and their recipients — was a bit too much about Billy Crystal.  Martin was funny, unobtrusive and managed to treat the event with the limited seriousness it deserves.  And I find the response to him interesting.  Today's Variety review is a rave, whereas the guy at the Hollywood Reporter was apparently watching a different Academy Awards broadcast, on which Martin bombed big-time.  Reaction across the Internet — not that that's ever indicative of anything — seems generally positive, though one finds the usual unwarranted assumption about comedy material.  It's the old, naïve audience belief that the jokes which flopped were all because of the lousy writers, whereas the jokes that succeeded were all a matter of, in this case, Steve Martin being brilliant.  I still think the odds are against there being a Writers Guild strike in May (or, at least, a long one) but if there is one, maybe it'll remind America that there's a reason that writers get paid all that money.

I haven't seen a copy yet in person but I'm told that The Groo Kingdom, our latest collection of old Groo stories, is now in book shops.  If you're collecting these, you'll want to race right out and purchase at least one copy.  If you're not collecting these…well, we all do dumb things in our lives.  You'll wise up someday.  Some day, you'll suddenly have a moment of revelation and you'll say to yourself, "How could I have been so foolish?  How could I have gone through life, thinking I was happy, ignoring the massive void in my soul that was created by my failure to collect all those wonderful Groo paperback books and put money in the pockets of Mark and Sergio?  What a dolt I was.  If only I could go back in time and rectify this tragic error on my part!"  Don't let this happen to you.  There's still time to redeem yourself.  Rush out.  Buy books in mass quantity.  If you want to really save your self-esteem, you can read them but this is not necessary.  We'll settle for you just buying them.

I'm not sure what, if anything, I want to write about Bill Hanna, who died — not unexpectedly — this morning.  Like many who will read this, I was reared on Hanna-Barbera cartoons and loved at least the early ones — Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones — dearly.  And before that, he and partner Joe produced and directed millions of Tom & Jerry theatrical cartoons, most of which compare favorably to any animation ever done.  My feelings about the man are more varied when I look at the latter half of his career.  He became the "production" half of the team: For the most part, it was Joe Barbera who sold the shows and supervised — sometimes from afar, sometimes not — the creative end, such as it was.

Hanna was in charge of getting the episodes made on time and on budget.  Way too often, there wasn't enough of either to do the job properly.  Most of my personal encounters with Bill when I worked there were of the kind that prompted many a staff artist to caricature him yelling, "Faster!  Cheaper!  Faster!  Cheaper!"

But there is one evening that sticks in my mind.  I was toiling way after hours on the Richie Rich show and figured I was alone in the building.  I wasn't, as I discovered when Mr. Hanna came into my office.  (He and Joe both worked very hard, even long after each had a bank account that made Richie look like a pauper.)  He wanted to put a script into production before I thought it was ready and, when we argued — politely — he said that if he didn't send something to the studio in Korea by a certain date, dozens of artists over there would get laid off, and he might even have to cut a few working there at the H-B Studio.  He got to talking about how proud he was of all the employment he and Joe had provided for people, and how they'd kept the animation industry up and functioning when theatricals died out.  As a Depression-era child, that was very important to him.

Historians of the future will view and assess the incredible body of work that bears the co-credit of William Hanna.  My guess is they'll find it wildly variable, including some of the best and worst animation of its day.  But I hope they'll also give a little weight to the staggering number of people who bought homes and groceries for 30-some-odd years working for Bill.  And I hope they'll give him some credit for an entire generation of us who got into writing and/or drawing because, back when we were small, we loved watching The Flintstones.

Whenever we write about Las Vegas here, we caution you about trying too hard to save money in that city, as it can lead to extreme discomfort and/or ptomaine.  However, if you're egregiously cheap — or if you just want to browse a rather funny travel guide — check out Las Vegas on 25 Cents a Day.  It's brutally honest, and one of the few websites that has ever made me laugh out loud.

Wondering what became of Chuck Barris?  Here's a link to an article in The New York Observer about the current activities of the man who gave us The Dating Game, The Gong Show and the song, "Palisades Park."  (If that link doesn't work, go to the Observer's website and do a search for "Chuck Barris.")

I have a new definition of a good interviewer.  A good interviewer can grab your interest even when interviewing someone you don't care about, about something you don't care about.  By this measure, Bob Costas is a great interviewer.  I have next-to-no interest in sports but I've gotten hooked watching his new HBO series, On The Record with Bob Costas.  Each week, he interviews a couple of sports figures, or non-sports figures discussing sports.  And even when the focus is one of those games I never follow — which is just about all of them — he's got my attention.  If you're by-passing it because you have zero interest in athletics, you might be surprised.

Speaking of sports: Two days ago, I reported that the overnights for last Saturday's XFL game gave it a 2.0 rating which would probably drop further when the nationals came in.  Well, the nationals took it down to a 1.6 rating, believed to be the lowest-ever prime-time night in the history of the three major television networks.  (Mr. Leno noted this evening that they were getting more of the male audience at The Vagina Monologues…)

How secure is your computer? If you'd like to see if someone can hack into it, go to Gibson Research and run the "Shields Up!" test.  Steve Gibson is a world-class expert at matters of Internet security and his independent research has forced many software makers to fix loopholes in their products.  He has also alerted the world to the dangers of "spyware," which is software that — unbeknown to you, its user — is recording and transmitting information on your buying or browsing habits to some company out there.  Gibson's Opt-Out program, which you can download at his site, will identify some of the spyware, if any, on your computer.  And if that matters to you, you might also want to download and run Ad-Aware (which you can do here) which is from another maker and which locates and removes other spyware.

The latest of the XFL Ratings: Well, we were told they couldn't go any lower than a 2.7 but somehow, they managed.  Week #7 got a 2.0 in the overnights, which will probably drop further when the nationals come in.  This is less than a fifth of the first week's numbers and less than half the guarantee to advertisers.  Vince McMahon was making the rounds of the talk shows last week, saying that it takes time to launch a new brand name and that the quality of the playing is finally where they want it to be.  It may be…but unless NBC signed the stupidest contract in the history of television and can't bail out now, they've got to be picking out what's going on in its stead.  A 2.0 rating would get you cancelled on the WB Network.

That's a picture of Groucho Marx above, not of Frank Ferrante.  But you might get the two of them confused after you watch Groucho: A Life in Revue, a special which is running on PBS stations this month.  This is the biographical play by Groucho's son, Arthur, and Arthur's longtime writing partner, Bob Fisher — and it's been slightly revised from the earlier video version, which starred Gabe Kaplan.  It's on in Los Angeles, on KCET, this coming Thursday evening, and if you're not in L.A., consult your local listing or phone your local PBS station and make trouble.  Mr. Ferrante is, by the way, wonderful in the role.  It ain't easy to do justice to Groucho but he sure does.

While you're at it, start keeping your eye on PBS listings (which you can do at www.pbs.org, among other places) for the Great Performances series.  They've been running some amazing shows — that is, if you can get past the constant 5-minute commercials wherein they urge you to support PBS because it has no commercials.  Last season, they aired a wonderful concert taped at Carnegie Hall which featured a host of wonderful "divas" singing show tunes.

It was called The Leading Ladies and it reruns next week on many stations and is also available on DVD and VHS.  This year, they did a similar show called Broadway Love Songs which had some wonderful moments but wasn't quite as good, up until the end.  The last number — which commences with Michael Crawford singing "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" — is an absolutely thrilling moment for any Broadway theater buff.  (Oh, hell, I might as well tip the surprise since the PBS promos did: Julie Andrews, who has been unable to sing since a botched throat operation, enters and manages to warble a few, perfectly-appropriate lines.  The audience goes absolutely and justifiably crazy.)  Broadway Love Songs does not seem to be scheduled for imminent rerunning, at least on the PBS stations I receive, but it may be on yours one more time soon.  It will certainly be rerun at some point, and it's also out on DVD and VHS.  If nothing else, at least catch the last ten minutes.

I'm not going to do a real obit column on Morton Downey, Jr., who died the other day because I didn't really (a) know him or (b) like him.  Matter of fact, I disliked his on-air routine so much that I wrote a Garfield cartoon in which I parodied the guy.  To do the voice, I hired someone I did like — a gravelly-voiced actor (also a writer and producer and restaurant critic) named Stanley Ralph Ross.  About a week after the episode was recorded, Stanley met Downey at a party and told him about it, whereupon Downey asked him for my phone number.  Ostensibly, it was so he could call and ask for a drawing from the show but, the next day, Downey phoned and tried to convince me to dump Stanley's performance and to re-record the episode with him playing himself.

He said we could even call the character "Morton Downey, Jr." and treat him as a total idiot.  I declined…but that almost caused me to dislike the off-camera Downey as much as the on-camera guy.  This feeling was reinforced a few months later when I happened to sit near him at the Lawry's Restaurant on La Cienega, and watched him be needlessly rude to the waitress and bus boys.  Still, I was sad to hear that all that smoking caused him to die of lung cancer this week.  Oddly enough, his death came almost a year to the day after Stanley Ralph Ross died from the exact same thing.

I want to recommend one more book from the McFarland website.  It's called The Animated Film Encyclopedia and it's subtitled: A Complete Guide to American Shorts, Features, and Sequences, 1900-1979.  That, it is.  Its compiler, Graham Webb, has done a terrific job listing every single bit of American theatrical animation — even title and animated sequences in live-action movies — complete with extensive credits.  I was most impressed with the hitherto-unidentified voice credits.  It includes some amazingly-obscure ones, many of which answer riddles that some of us have discussed for years.  At $125.00 the copy, this book is not cheap.  But if you're the least bit into animation history, it's a must-get.

Just got a big crate o' books from McFarland Press, which issues a lot of esoteric books, mainly on The Arts, in what are usually limited press runs.  One (which gives me the excuse to run the photo at left) is From Beautiful Downtown Burbank (Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In: A Critical History).  It's written by Hal Erickson, an e-mail acquaintance who interviewed me when he did a book on Sid and Marty Krofft, which was also issued by McFarland.  Both are good, as are most — though by no means, all — you'll find in that company's catalog.  What you will find are a lot of titles that will prompt you to say, "Gee, I've always wanted a book about that."  Hal's Laugh-In book is, incredibly, the first real history of a television program that changed the face of American TV comedy, launched several major stars and, some theorize, helped put Mr. Nixon into the White House.  Even without access to some of the key players who declined to be interviewed, Hal did a fine job and you can purchase a copy, or just browse the McFarland offerings, at the publisher's website.  Here, you'll be happy to know, is that link.

Well, if I'd wagered that the XFL ratings would go even lower last Saturday eve, I'd have lost.  I didn't expect the network to stoop as low as that promo spot in which an incredibly-cute cheerleader promised a half-time tour of the cheerleaders' locker room. Amazingly, that only boosted numbers .1 over the previous week's — to 2.8.  At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if they got rid of the football players and just turned the whole thing into a big wet t-shirt contest.

The drawing above is the cover of Bugs Bunny and Friends: A Comic Celebration, a paperback collection of old Warner Brothers comic book stories that I helped assemble a couple of years ago.  Just thought it deserved a mention here as there's some neat, vintage stuff in there, especially the stuff from the earliest issues of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies comics, reproduced off copies from my very own personal collection, primarily from old Dell and Gold Key Comics.  You can get it for around twelve bucks at amazon-dot-com and I don't make another nickel off it, so my recommendation is quite sincere.  These comics were an important part of my childhood and unlike some, they actually hold up quite well in my alleged adulthood.

Well, things have been fun around here, lately.  Yesterday morn, around 2:00 AM, there was a high-speed police-type chase in my neighborhood.  It ended on my front lawn with the "suspect" (that's what they have to call the guy who ran from, in this case, the Beverly Hills Police) crashing his car into the front of my house.  He didn't do a lot of damage — one big hole in the wall surrounding a little courtyard — but it sure made things interesting.  And this is the third time cars have jumped the curb and wound up on my property in the 20 years I've been living where I live.  I'm going to have to start charging for parking in my patio.