• Deciding to get vaccinated is a "personal decision" the same way deciding to go to work when you have the flu and sneezing on others is a "personal decision."

It's hard to wrap my brain around most things these days but a biggie today is that were it not for that virus thing we've all heard about, I'd be down in San Diego this morning, scurrying to get to a breakfast meeting before a business meeting before a panel before another panel, before a press interview, before another panel and so on.

I miss Comic-Con but I'm glad they ain't having it this year. For one thing, it wouldn't be Comic-Con. It would be Covid-Con and we'd all be struggling with where and when to wear masks and the number one topic of discussion would be who's gotten vaccinated and who hasn't. I'm not sure if I'd even be there. The novel coronavirus — which has long since stopped being a novelty in our lives — has been a powerful disincentive to go anywhere, to do anything outside my home. That is not necessarily a good thing but it is what it is.

If you're home this weekend, enjoy being at home this weekend. And watch some of the fine programming that's been concocted for your home viewing. Naturally, I'm pushing my three…

GROO MEETS TARZAN – Saturday, July 24 at 12 PM
me discussing the soon-to-be-released Groo Meets Tarzan mini-series with Sergio Aragonés and Thomas Yeates.

CARTOON VOICES – Saturday, July 24 at 6 PM
me interviewing four great Cartoon Voice Artists: Candi Milo (Space Jam: A New Legacy), Wally Wingert (Arkham Asylum), Jenny Yokibori (The Simpsons) and Zeno Robinson (Pokémon).

THE ANNUAL JACK KIRBY TRIBUTE PANEL – Sunday, July 25 at 12 PM
me discussing Jack with artist Walt Simonson and writer-publisher Paul Levitz.

These are all watchable in various places but the easiest place for you to see them is on the page you're on right now. I'll be posting them here at the appropriate times. You can also find them and all the other programming via this page.

For many years, the esteemed television journalist Edward R. Murrow hosted a show called Person to Person. Camera crews were dispatched to the homes of famous folks and they'd be interviewed live by Mr. Murrow with him in a TV studio and them in their houses. One of his more challenging conversations must have been this one with Harpo Marx. This is from January 3, 1958 and I'm sorry the video isn't better…

Wow. Day 500 of this thing. Remember just a few weeks ago when most of us felt the worst of it was behind us?

Like most of you, I have major concerns that (a) we'll be living in Coronavirus Mode for a long, long time and (b) Climate Change is passing some point-of-no-return and we'll be living with killer storms and killer heat and underwater coastal towns. Unlike some of you, I've been trying to not think a lot about these things and to discourage friends who want to spend long periods of time on the phone discussing how screwed we are on one or both counts.

I can't do anything about either one of them…but I can, I think, finish my assignments. If I don't spend too much time thinking about (a) and (b).

This may be just my wishful imagination but I think I'm seeing some of those loud voices who denied one or both trying to subtly shift positions without admitting they were wrong. Meanwhile, when Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene refuse to answer a simple question about whether they've been vaccinated, that suggests to me they have but they know the crowd they've been playing to will view that as a betrayal. And keeping your angry mob angry is more important than being right.

That's about as political as I want to get today. Please don't send me your views on this. When I finish this post, my mind goes back into the script I'm writing and I need it to stay there through the weekend. But before I go there, a few referrals…

If you didn't understand that yelling match between Dr. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci — two men who work in very different areas with the former pretending he understands the latter's — this will explain it to you.

If you need to know more about The Delta Variant, this article seems to know what it's talking about.

If you don't understand what it means that Ben & Jerry's ice cream will no longer be sold in occupied Palestinian territories, this may clarify things. This is another one of those matters that matters…but I try to correlate the amount to time I spend thinking about it with the amount of power I have to solve this problem.

With the time you don't spend thinking about these issues, why not visit the new Groo website? And subscribe to the new Groo Twitter Feed and the new Groo Instagram Account? Now, there are some constructive things you can do.

KHJ Radio played "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" so often, you'd have suspected the programming director there was Otis Redding's uncle. That was understandable when it was a huge hit right after it was released at the start of 1968. But they played it and played it and played it. One time at lunch in high school, a girl I was sitting with pulled out her transistor radio and told me she was going to listen to a little KHJ and I said, "Betcha a buck they're playing 'Dock of the Bay'" and sure enough, they were.

I didn't know anything about Otis Redding then; not even the fact that he'd recently been killed in a plane crash and that "Dock of the Bay" was the first posthumous hit record ever…or maybe one of the few. From listening to the song, I think I imagined he was a real old guy who's been around forever and finally had a hit. In fact, he was 26 when he died and reportedly, he was a very active, vital performer. He had many good years ahead of him and probably a lot more #1 hits like this one…

My occasional employers Sid and Marty Krofft have put a number of video goodies on the web. This is the first episode of the show that put them into the kidvid business — H.R. Pufnstuf. I remember when this show debuted on September 6, 1969, it was one of those "I've never seen anything like this on television" moments. Some of the characters vaguely resembled the stars of Hanna-Barbera's The Banana Splits Adventure Hour which had debuted a year earlier, also on Saturday morning. But I didn't know then that the Kroffts had built those costumes and then gone into the producing business for themselves.

I became an instant fan of it and the many other Krofft shows that followed it. I didn't always understand what was going on and years later when I said that to Sid Krofft, he replied, "Neither did we sometimes" and he wasn't kidding. But he and Marty were well aware that their shows were always fascinating and that they were doing things that no one had ever done on television before. This was at a time when most producers — especially of programming aimed towards kids — were trying very hard to only do things that had been done on television before.

The first show I wrote on for Krofft Entertainment used Pufnstuf, Witchiepoo and many of the supporting players from this series, mostly voiced and played by the original performers. And I think one of the reasons I got the job was that, alone among the many writers they interviewed for the position, I was the only one who knew all the characters.

I watched this episode when it first aired. Here's your chance to watch it now…

Longtime reader of this site Galen Fott just wrote to tell me something I didn't know; that the version of "The Glamorous Life" that Audra McDonald sang in this video posted earlier is the version that Mr. Sondheim wrote for the movie version of A Little Night Music. It starts the same as the song of the same name did on Broadway but then turns into a very different tune. I just checked out the cast albums and he's right. I like the movie version better. I suppose Sondheim did too or he wouldn't have changed it.

Here's another instrumental that oddly topped the charts during the years I was listening to 93/KHJ Boss Radio. "A Walk in the Black Forest," which we discussed here, never sold as many records as "Love is Blue" by Paul Mauriat. Contrary to what many assumed, Mauriat did not write it. As many around the globe were recording it for different countries with translated lyrics, he recorded it for the American market…and wisely, without lyrics.

The original song had French lyrics by Pierre Cour and the tune was composed by André Popp. Someone named Bryan Blackburn wrote the English-language lyrics for it and I'm afraid they went like this…

Blue, blue, my world is blue
Blue is my world, now I'm without you
Grey, grey, my life is grey
Cold is my heart since you went away

Red, red, my eyes are red
Crying for you alone in my bed
Green, green, my jealous heart
I doubted you and now we're apart

They went on from there but didn't get any better. Still, the instrumental was on my mixtape so the song goes here, as does this video of Muriat leading an orchestra that seems to be actually playing it…

This is from the concert on Stephen Sondheim's eightieth birthday at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. Paul Gemignani is conducting the New York Philharmonic as Audra McDonald sings "The Glamorous Life" from the Wheeler/Sondheim show, A Little Night Music. And sings it about as well as it's humanly possible to sing it…

In a non-COVID year, I'd be packing for Comic-Con right now but everything is different now in CoronaWorld. Nevertheless, I'm kinda busy so I figured that this week, I'd reprise a few past posts about Comic-Cons back in the good ol' days when we actually went to them. This post ran here on July 28, 2010…

Super Retailer Joe Ferrara took the pic below of Comedy Legend Chuck McCann posing with the three cartoonists who competed in Quick Draw! at the Comic-Con on Saturday. The three fast 'n' funny sketchers were, left to right, Sergio Aragonés, William Stout and Scott Shaw, who spells his name "Scott Shaw!" with the exclamation point. Quick Draw! is always great…and I can say that because it's not great because of me. We get three speedy cartoonists and I throw challenges at them and more than 2000 people watch as they draw and howl with laughter.

Here's one thing that happened there. Our cartoonists onstage were Sergio Aragonés, William Stout and Scott Shaw. I then brought three more up: Katie Cook, Sam Viviano and Tom Richmond. The idea was that one cartoonist would draw the top half of someone — a character, a monster, an alien, an animal, whatever — and then we'd cover over that drawing. Another cartoonist, who hadn't seen what the first one drew, would then draw the bottom half of the "someone" without having any idea what the top half was. Then we'd uncover the two halves and see what resulted. Here is one of the drawings done that way. Tom Richmond, who is the star caricaturist in the new generation of MAD, drew this…

We then covered Tom's drawing — everything but the belt — and had Sergio draw the bottom half. Remember now: Sergio had no idea what Tom had drawn…

Once Sergio was done, we unveiled the joint creation…

See? That's how it's done!

As we all know, The Dick Van Dyke Show evolved out of an unsold pilot that Carl Reiner wrote and starred in called Head of the Family. It's amazing how something that missed so totally could have turned into such a fine, on-target TV series.

Head of the Family had its one and only network broadcast 61 years ago yesterday. Ramsey Ess takes a look at what went right and wrong with it. I think the main thing that went wrong with it is that Carl Reiner was trying to play the kind of beleaguered, unappreciated father that was then fairly common in sitcoms. Of course, there was also the uninspiring theme song and opening and supporting cast and bad canned laughter and thirty or forty other things.

Even before this Pandemic Thing was in all our lives, I was becoming more and more convinced that the three most dangerous creatures in the world are — and this is not in order of threat-level —

1. The West Nile Virus Mosquito
2. The Black Mamba Snake
3. That friend of yours who thinks he or she knows more about medicine than Real Doctors

I've managed to avoid the first two of them so far but, alas, #3 can be found everywhere these days.  None of what follows is meant to suggest that Real Doctors are infallible or that some of them might not be unworthy of the title.

But you know, if I ever need open-heart surgery, I think I'm going to go with the recommendations of my cardiologist over, say, a certain friend of mine who inks comic books for a living.  The following sentence is not an exaggeration: I have lost friends and loved ones who I believe would be around today if they'd listened to Real Doctors…or even just listened to them a lot earlier than they did.

I understand and on some levels encourage skepticism of alleged experts. Life and years of reading MAD taught me to question authority…but some people get so paranoid that "the world is always lying to me" that they presume that if something sounds official, that alone proves it's wrong. If putative experts say "don't drink bleach," they want to run out and chug-a-lug a half-gallon of Clorox.

On the matter of vaccinations these days, I keep reading anti-vaxxers say, "Do your own research!" Do your own research where? On the Internet, where even they agree a large percentage of the alleged "information" is dead wrong?

Organizations like the F.D.A. and C.D.C. are spending zillions to test out vaccines and they employ folks who've spent decades studying this kind of thing. Maybe I should ignore that, haul out my old Gilbert Chemistry Set from when I was eight, get a sample somewhere of the Pfizer vaccine and run my own tests.

Or it just might be easier to listen to my own doctor. Or to be more specific, my general physician, my proctologist, my gastroenterologist, my dentist, my orthopedist, my urologist — I went through this list in an earlier post — my orthopedist, etc., and just take the vaccine they all recommend…which, of course, I already did.

The new Groo Website is live! Or at least, it's off to a start! There will be more goodies there in the months to come but there's plenty already there for you to enjoy…including a place where you can sign up to keep abreast of all the latest Groo News. What more do you need out of life?

I was thinking of writing a post about how the low (undoubtedly) ratings for the coming Emmy Telecast have a very simple, obvious reason. But I don't have to write that article because my buddy Paul Harris did.