I apologize I don't have a better photo of Don Jurwich — preferably one without me in it. That was taken at a Christmas Party thrown by the Animation Guild a few years ago, the last time I saw Don. He was semi-retired from animation and was very happy to be painting what he wanted to paint instead of writing, producing or directing cartoons that someone else wanted him to do. He did a lot of that because he was so good that everyone wanted to hire him.

Don, who died yesterday at the age of 87, had a tremendous career in cartoons. It included working for most of the studios in Los Angeles but long stints with Jay Ward (where he worked on George of the Jungle) and Hanna-Barbera (where he worked on dozens of shows including Super-Friends, Scooby Doo, The Smurfs and so many others).

He was one of those guys — I encountered many of these in animation — who'd gotten stuck in executive-type positions, dealing with the networks and overseas animation studios and budget problems when he would rather have been just writing and drawing. Another producer there once said to me, "Don has to spend ten hours fixing a storyboard by someone else when it would have taken him five hours to draw it himself right in the first place."

But he was a tremendous talent and a supporter of tremendous talent. At H-B, he gave an awful lot of young artists their first jobs

I can't do Don's story justice but maybe Don can. Some time back, he sat for a two-part interview on his career. The two parts total a little less than an hour and if you're interested in the reality of the cartoon business and how it worked in years past, you couldn't learn more than you'll learn listening to this fine man.

Any number of you who read this post yesterday wrote to remind me that Stacey Abrams, who was among those nominated for a Voiceover Emmy, is not even a live-action actress. She's a politician and activist and former member of the Georgia House of Representatives. I probably should have said something about that but my mind was on my main thesis, which is that the nominators were nominating celebrities instead of real voice actors.

Also, my view is not that it's wrong to nominate famous people or on-camera performers. Some of them, as I noted, occasionally give outstanding performances. I think it's wrong to favor them to the exclusion of folks who are first and foremost voiceover artists. I have no idea what show Ms. Abrams was nominated for and I'm pretty sure I never saw it…so I have no opinion on whether her performance was Emmy-worthy. The problem for me is not Stacey Abrams. It's a judging process that appears to overlook superlative work done by lesser-knowns.

I should probably have said something else here which I think I've said before on this blog. I think people take awards and nominations and especially supposed "snubs" way too seriously. I served briefly on a committee for the TV Academy that was trying to survey the process and recommend improvements to it. As far as I know, the committee never came to agreement on anything that was worth submitting to the Board of Governors or whoever we supposedly were advising.

What I learned was how random and political and (most of all) subjective the process was. Expecting it to yield the nominees and winners you think are wise decisions is like expecting a bunch of pussycats to do what you want them to do. They might…but only by chance. I do not disdain the Emmys or any awards. I just think people take them too seriously. Maybe in this case, I did.

Here's another one of these.  It's the openings to 36 (actually, more than 36) shows that were on NBC in the Fall of 1960…

The nominations for this year's Emmy Awards in the category of "Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance" are as follows: Jessica Walters, Maya Rudolph, Stacey Abrams, Julie Andrews, Tituss Burgess, Stanley Tucci and Seth MacFarlane. With the exception of Mr. McFarlane, these are all actors known for their on-camera or on-stage work who do an occasional voice in a cartoon or something. When they do, they are at the center of two prejudices.

One — which I hear less often but I do hear it — is the presumption that they aren't very good and they were cast — to the exclusion of full-time voiceover performers — only because of their reputations. This is undoubtedly true in some cases. Hell, I've even had producers or casting directors admit as much to me and I can almost (almost!) defend it in certain cases, especially relating to feature films.

The sale of a movie to exhibitors — or of a TV series or special to a network — can often be easier with a S*T*A*R attached. Not everyone is cast in roles because they are the most talented or "rightest" for a role. Sometimes, they're cast for their reputation and the belief that they have some sort of following that will sell tickets or bring in viewers.  The movie Shrek might not have been made or been sold in advance to so many theaters with unknowns voicing the leads instead of Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy. A certain part of the movie business (emphasis on "business") does revolve around star names. That screenplay you wrote that no one even wants to read, let alone make, might be helped immeasurably if Tom Hanks was interested in starring in it.

Still, I love "real" voice actors — the kind who follow the lineage of Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, June Foray, Paul Frees, Don Messick and so many more…the kind who really know how to act with only their voices. No body language…no facial expressions…just their voices.

If I just start giving you the names of current "real" voice actors, I'll offend many friends by leaving them out so I'll just list the ones who've participated in the online Cartoon Voices panels I've done during The Pandemic. All of these videos can be found in this section of this website. Here's the list…

Bob Bergen, Julie Nathanson, Fred Tatasciore, Phil LaMarr, Secunda Wood, Jim Meskimen, Gregg Berger, Kaitlyn Robrock, Rob Paulsen, Debra Wilson, Alan Oppenheimer, Alicyn Packard, Jason Marsden, Elle Newlands, John Mariano, Debi Derryberry, Michael Bell, Neil Ross, Neil Kaplan, Nickie Bryar, Laraine Newman, Misty Lee, Dee Bradley Baker, Bill Farmer, Corey Burton, Kari Wahlgren, J.P. Karliak, Kimberly Brooks, Jon Bailey, Mara Junot, Maurice LaMarche, Anna Brisbin and Brock Powell. And in two weeks, the one I did with Candi Milo, Wally Wingert, Jenny Yokibori and Zeno Robinson will be online.

These are all folks who do a lot of voiceover work. Some of them also do on-camera…just as Mel Blanc, June Foray, Paul Winchell, Gary Owens, Stan Freberg and other inarguable voice actors occasionally did on-camera. But I think you can see the difference between them and when a cartoon special or Mr. Disney brought in Bing Crosby or Ed Wynn or Boris Karloff to do a voiceover for a cartoon.

As a director of cartoon voices, I've hired the "on-camera" variety — Don Knotts, Buddy Hackett, Jonathan Winters, Jesse White and even a few who weren't in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World like Jeffrey Tambor and Shelley Berman. The prejudice that such actors are only hired for their names is just plain wrong. Some of them are good at voiceover and some of them are not.

But the other prejudice is also wrong. That's the prejudice — and I've heard this one too from folks who admitted to it — that on-camera actors are somehow preferable because they're "real actors." That's absurd. Look at the names in the list above of folks who've been on my online panels. Any one of them is capable of doing things in front of a microphone that such "real actors" could never do.

We once had James Earl Jones on an episode of Garfield and Friends. I would never have thought of casting him but one day when we were recording in Studio A, he was recording promo-type announcements in Studio B. He wandered over and watched our troupe for a while and then asked me if I could use him someday for a character part. I immediately said, "Have you got a demo of your work I could listen to?"

No, I didn't say that. That stupid, I am not.  What I actually said was, "Sure if you're willing to work for what we pay." He was…and two weeks later, he came in and played — of course — a dastardly villain with a real deep voice. He was fine but throughout the whole session, he kept saying of the other actors in our cast, "I can't believe them, switching voices like that, making creature sounds." He was impressed with the sheer acting.

I don't know if we submitted him for Emmy consideration that year. If we had and he'd been nominated, that would have felt very, very wrong to me. I'm sure he was magnificent doing Othello or Driving Miss Daisy or The Great White Hope or almost anything else on the Broadway stage but not everyone can do everything.   Laurence Olivier was ten times the actor that Bruce Lee was but if you'd been casting the lead in a martial arts movie when both were around, which one would you have picked?

My point is that the great voice actors are great at voice acting.  Some who are not primarily voice actors can be fine in certain roles in certain situations as Mr. Jones was…but when I see a list of nominees like the one for this year's Emmy Awards, I think someone is disrespecting professional, full-or-most-time voice actors.  They're voting for celebrity, not talent.

They're not understanding what James Earl Jones understood about how the other actors in the session with him were exhibiting a range and expertise he did not have.  Even the late Lorenzo Music, who really only had the one voice, was using it to give life to a fully-fleshed characterization, created using only his voice, not his face or body.

I have not heard all of what earned this year's nominees their nominations.  Perhaps some of their performances were wonderful but it's hard to think some judges didn't stampede over the work of some actors with less familiar names to get to actors they'd heard of.  Come on, Academy.  Give voice acting awards to voice actors.

I try to limit the amount of space on this blog to plugging things I have coming out because as far as I'm concerned, every single person — no, let me put that in all caps, italics and boldface: EVERY SINGLE PERSON — who posts often on the Internet posts way too much self-promotion. But every so often, I allow myself one of these…

The first issue of the long-awaited Groo Meets Tarzan mini-series is coming out July 28 from Dark Horse. Here's a preview and if you plan on buying this comic, don't read the preview. Wait and read those pages in context. But if you're on the fence or on the wrong side of it, take a look. It's four issues and — truth in advertising — Groo doesn't meet Tarzan in the first one. But he does later on and it's very strange and very silly and there is wonderful artwork in there by Sergio Aragonés (the stuff with Groo and the stuff about him and me) and Thomas Yeates (everything Tarzan).

Some of you may not know and less of you will care that I used to write Tarzan comics. They were not published in America but they were fun for me to do and the job heightened my already-extant love of Mr. Burroughs and his characters. It was fun to get back to it for a little while. Also worth noting: This may be the last crossover we ever do with Groo and Somebody With Whom He Should Not Be Crossing Over so if you like that kind of comic book intermarriage, enjoy this one while you can.

(P.S. The preview makes reference to "Groo creators Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier." Groo was created by Sergio Aragonés. I know the author of the preview probably didn't mean "creators" literally. He just meant "the guys who create each issue" but this is kind of a provocative matter with me.)

How about another selection from The Peacherine Ragtime Society Orchestra? This is a tune written by George M. Cohan for the 1906 Broadway musical, Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway. But if you've ever seen the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy, you already know that. Here to favor us is vocalist Molly Ryan with "Mary's a Grand Old Name"…

Our pal Doug Abramson wrote to ask…

I am curious if in your wandering around the Burbank Studios, if you ever got an idea of how big the original squares for Hollywood Squares were? I know that they weren't anywhere as large as they appeared on screen, because I was in a Summer day camp in 1978, when I was 6, where we went someplace everyday and one day was the Burbank Studios; where the squares were sitting out in the hallway. Even to a 6-year-old, they looked really small. Not a space you would want to be squeezed into for several hours during a marathon taping session.

Well, the stars weren't in there all through the taping session. They taped five shows in about seven hours so they were in the boxes for half an hour, then out for half an hour, then in and so on.

I sat in one once when the big set was out in the hallway outside Studio 1. It was there, no one was around and I couldn't resist sitting in a ground-level box that had Jonathan Winters' name on it. I'm not good at estimating sizes but I'm 6'3" and the ceiling in that box was about two inches over my head. I was sitting kind of low but sitting there wasn't uncomfy; just getting in and out of it.

Sitting there for the length of a game wouldn't have been uncomfy. I might have gotten worried if Louie Anderson was in the box above me.

Sutton Foster is one of our favorite Broadway performers. She is soon to star in a London revival of the show Anything Goes…and I should note that she won her second Tony Award for the 2011 Broadway revival of this show. Here she is with some sailors doing a little preview performance on a British TV series…

John Oliver goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about octopuses…

1965 was an odd year for music. You had The Beatles and The Byrds and the Stones and many other rock groups…but one of the big hits was a little classical-sounding instrumental called "A Walk in the Black Forest" written and performed by a German artist, Horst Jankowski. It was a light, simple tune that, I'm told, had actually been used as background music on the Perry Mason program starring Raymond Burr. It was Mr. Jankowski's greatest hit but far from his only record. He put out dozens of albums with a similar sound and did very well with them…and dozens of other artists covered "A Walk in the Black Forest" on their albums.

I actually met Horst Jankowski. In the early eighties when I was writing for That's Incredible!, we had on a segment about a lady who had had no formal music training but was somehow able to compose music that experts said was frighteningly like Mozart…not as good, of course, but it followed a lot of his structures and concepts and she'd never studied…they said.

Where we found her, I had no idea — I was not involved with that end of the program — but our producer told someone to find a respected musicologist who could come into the studio and discuss the parallels between this lady's work and what Wolfgang Amadeus had done. He also wanted them to find an esteemed pianist who could come in and play one of her works.

Whoever was charged with finding these two people came back and said that one man could fulfill both needs — Horst Jankowski. So he came in on tape day and we wound up skipping the barely-edible meal served to the crew and going across the street to Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles. A few weeks later, we saved the life of another guest on the show by taking him over to Roscoe's instead of making him eat the catered meal in the studio. You will never have service in any restaurant as great as we did walking into a black-owned eating establishment with Muhammad Ali.

Mr. Jankowski did not somehow generate the same excitement but he was a champ in his field. Very nice, fascinating man. He made a lot of albums, most of which seem to have made the transition to digital. I don't know how to label what he did except maybe under the catch-all grouping of Easy Listening. Here's the one song of his that earned a spot on my mixtape…

Kevin Drum runs down a list of symptoms of COVID-19. The few people I've encountered or seen on TV who refuse to get vaccinated seem to me to fall into one of four categories…

1. They're young and figure they're healthy enough to fight off any problems and besides, they're too busy.  Obviously, they don't have time to check out the stats of how many people who thought that got it and got it bad.

2. They resent the government telling them to do anything.  And yet, for some odd reason, they have no problem with stopping at red lights or not robbing liquor stores.

3. They feel they're making some sort of political statement in support of certain leaders, every one of whom got vaccinated as soon as it was possible and/or got the disease and had horrible hospitalization experiences.

4. They've heard of someone who got vaccinated and was really sick for a day or two.  To avoid that, they'll take the risk of getting way sicker for a longer time and possibly dying.

Yes, I've set my TiVo to record the new CNN eight-part series, The History of the Sitcom. The first two episodes air this evening.

No, I don't expect it to do any more justice to its topic than CNN's History of Late Night — assembled by the same people — but there will still, I'm sure, be some great clips and recent interviews. The problem isn't with the assemblers. It's more with the Mission Statement. You could do eight hours on the history of just I Love Lucy, All in the Family and The Munsters and not cover the topic adequately especially with CNN's desire to run what feels like nine minutes of commercials every four minutes.

But hey, someone was smart enough to engage the great caricaturist Tom Richmond to do the key art for the series — though not smart enough to put out a poster of his amazing crowd scene of sitcom players. They won't let Tom put one out, either.

A song called "He'd Have to Get Under, Get Out and Get Under (to Fix Up His Automobile)" was one of the big hits of 1913. The tune was by Maurice Abrahams, the lyrics were written by Grant Clarke and Edgar Leslie, and it was recorded by many, many artists and played everywhere popular music was then played.

I have no idea where I first heard it but it's been rattling around in my head since I was a wee lad in the fifties. It may begin rattling in yours after you watch this recently-performed version of it from The Peacherine Ragtime Society Orchestra. They're performing the original 1913 arrangement and the vocalist is William Edwards.

It might help the experience if you imagine that somewhere, you find an old metal box. You take it away to a place of seclusion where no one can see you, you open it and out pops a frog. The frog puts on a top hat and proceeds to sing this…

The other day, we were talking here about the Beach Boys record, "Wouldn't It Be Nice." My pal Tom Hensley — who seems to know every single person in the music profession — wrote to tell me…

Tony Asher wrote the lyrics. The last time I spoke to him, the song had just been chosen for the ad campaign for the Australian lottery. Having your song used for lottery ads is almost as good as winning the lottery.

I'm sure it is. Meanwhile, Jeff Ingall wrote to ask…

I'm curious why you or anyone would pass on an invitation to be an honored guest at a comic book convention. Isn't it a free trip somewhere and they pay you money to be there and have your fans adore you and you sell lots of things and make tons of money?

Sometimes for some people it is. But for a reason I"m not sure I can explain even to myself, I don't sell things at conventions. I'll sit for a while at a table where someone else is selling something I wrote because that might help a seller of my stuff. But I don't want to sell my own work and I certainly don't want to sit all day at a con signing my name for money…or fretting, as some do, that I'm not signing my name enough to make enough money.

Please understand that I'm not knocking anyone who does that. Or who loves going to conventions.

Free trips are nice if they take you somewhere you want to be. I accepted invites from a number of cons in New York because I like going to New York and it's even better when someone else pays for it. Also, I'm not as active in today's comic book field as I once was so at a con, I don't see as many friends as I once did. And if you add in prep, travel and unpacking days, a three-day convention is more like five days of my life.

This is just a personal choice. I often enjoy being in certain places but I don't really enjoy traveling. I might go to more cons when it becomes possible to just teleport me to one of them.

Lastly, shortly after this appeared on this blog, I got this from John Trumbull…

I was surprised that in your recent post about Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest sitcoms of all time, you said that you thought Married With Children deserved a spot on the list. I never would've guessed that that show appealed to your sense of humor. Can you expand a bit on what you thought was so great about Married With Children? I just found it a surprising inclusion for someone who also loves Car 54 and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

I'm not sure if I can even explain why I love Car 54 and The Dick Van Dyke Show. I watched Married With Children from time to time. I didn't find everything on it to be funny but there was enough there that I laughed out loud most times I watched. There are many widely-honored TV shows at which I never laughed out loud, even some shows I liked. I liked The Andy Griffith Show but I don't think I ever laughed during any scene without Don Knotts or Howie Morris in them.

There are people who think comedy writing is only about laughter. It is and it isn't. You can get a good feeling out of some stories without howling with laughter. Situation comedies are about comedy but they're also about situations. You can enjoy a story even when it doesn't make you howl like a hyena. At least, I can. And sometimes, I do laugh at things that no one else finds funny.

Thank you all for writing in. If you have questions, here's where to send them…

My favorite folk-singing group, The Limeliters, started busting up in 1963 with its tenor Glenn Yarbrough moving on to a solo career. By 1965, he was really established as one with a big hit record — "Baby, the Rain Must Fall," which was the title song to a movie that year of the same name. It starred Lee Remick and Steve McQueen and it was a modest hit. A lot of folks seemed to think Mr. Yarbrough's rendition of the song mattered a lot.

Here he is lip-syncing it on the TV show Hollywood á Go Go, which was a syndicated show hosted by L.A. disc jockey Sam Riddle. The amazing thing about this series was that they shot it in the studios of KHJ TV over on Melrose. I worked in that studio and it was about the size of a three-car garage but they somehow made it look like real television.

You will note that when the song starts, you briefly hear an echo on Mr. Yarbrough's lovely voice. I think he started to sing to the record and the engineer quickly cut off his microphone so there'd be only the one voice. It's a great song though…