This is the opening to the Batman TV show from the sixties except they don't sing the word "bat"…

At this link, you'll find a map of the world covered with little green dots. Every green dot represents a radio station at that location and if you click on the dot, you can hear that radio station. In some cases, you'll have your choice of many in the same city. That's enough radio to last you for the rest of your life…and several lives after that.

In a post here on November 7, I complained about the rising price of…no, not gasoline. Cashews. For years now, I've been buying a certain size box of Planters Salted Cashews. Each box contains eighteen little baggies, each of which holds 1.5 oz. of said nuts.

Recently, the boxes skyrocketed in price — from $11.24 a box to, at the time I wrote that post, $27.49. That was the price on Amazon and when I looked around online, other vendors had instituted similar increases.

I didn't understand why…just as I have no idea why the same boxes of eighteen 1.5 oz. portions went down to $15.06 for a week and are now back up to $24.69. Fortunately, I bought three boxes when they were $15.06. Hopefully, that'll hold me until the next price drop.

And this one's from The Ed Sullivan Show for November 10, 1963. Shelley Berman was still one of the hotter "stand-up comedians" in the country even though he did most of his bits sitting on a stool. Here he is with the plight of a man with a cut finger in a strange town…

Remember the reported incident last September at Carmine's Restaurant in Times Square? The way we heard it then, some people came in, the host asked to see proof of vaccination and they became physically abusive to him. This article suggests that maybe that wasn't exactly what happened at one of my favorite places to eat in New York. Correction.

I know you've been sitting up for nights, racking your brain for the answer to the question, "Why oh why is the label on a can of Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce upside-down?" Well, at last you can relax.

The Comic-Con Special Edition in San Diego takes place this coming weekend in San Diego. It will be taking place without me but I'm still interested and hoping it's a success for the attendees and for the folks running it. One of the folks running it is David Glanzer, who holds the title of "Comic-Con Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer." For our purposes, that pretty much translates to Spokesperson and Planner. Rob Salkowitz spoke to David about the event and here is what was said.

My longtime buddy Jim Brochu knows everyone who has worked in the legitimate theater in his lifetime and has seen every show. I should have expected the following e-mail from him…

Before I totally lose my powers of recall, I wanted to add a couple of things to the discussion of the original Odd Couple. I think I'm in a very unique position in that I saw Matthau and Carney do it five times together.

One of my high school jobs was selling orange drink at the back of Broadway theaters and my usual theater was the St. James when Ginger Rogers was appearing in Hello, Dolly! But my father took me to see The Odd Couple a few weeks after it opened and it was the one play where he almost got thrown out of the theater for laughing so hard. Truly, when everyone else had stopped laughing, my father was howling and still rolling in the aisle.

Then I became the substitute orange drink boy at the Plymouth for four weeks during the summer of 1965. Every Saturday afternoon, I got to watch art Carney and Matthau go through the play. Carney was like watching a movie. Every performance was so close to the other and it was magical that he kept it looking absolutely spontaneous. Carney was a heartbreaking Felix. Totally vulnerable. Matthau was the slob and did what Matthau did best. The one revelation was the last Saturday when I got to the theater and Carney was out.

Paul Dooley was going to play Felix. Of course, everyone was disappointed after the announcement but quickly it became apparent that Paul Dooley was going to be brilliant in the part. As good as Carney and maybe an edge better in some scenes. It was a great experience to watch those actors. It was like going to a master class.

Of course, I remember the famous story about the rehearsal where Walter Matthau turned to Art Carney and said, "You need to put some balls in this scene!" to which Mike Nichols yelled, "Props!"

Wish I'd seen that show. I did get to see Mr. Carney star in Prisoner of Second Avenue and he was perfect.  I mean really perfect.  I was told that Neil Simon loved Peter Falk in the role and loved Carney even more.

Never got to see Walter Matthau on stage unless you count the time that you and I, Jim, went to a one-night-only benefit performance of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It opened, you will recall, with Matthau coming out in a toga and reciting the opening speech — "Playgoers, I bid you welcome, et al…" — and then handing the play off to Danny Dayton to play Pseudolus for the rest of it. I offered to bet you afterwards that by the time they got to "Everybody Ought To Have a Maid," Walter was home in bed.

And here's one of those weird examples of how, as you know, people in my life keep intersecting with other people in my life.  A few years later, I became good friends with a comedy writer named Don Segall — not to be confused with the film director — who had a background writing comic books. Don was the producer of that benefit performance of Forum and I asked him how he persuaded Walter Matthau to learn a few lines, go down to the Variety Arts Theater, put on a toga and appear for as long as he did so that the charity could exploit his name to sell tickets.

Don said, "I promised him he could be out of there and home in bed before the first act was over."

This is the trailer for the 1970 re-release of my favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It is not one of the trailers produced by Stan Freberg for that film.

One odd thing about it is that Peter Falk gets better billing than he had in the movie and its original advertising. I have no idea how that came about. It might have made sense a year or so later when Columbo was a Top Ten TV show and Falk was a much bigger star than he'd ever been…but when this trailer was made, Columbo was a couple of as-yet-unsold TV pilots.

And the other odd thing about this trailer flows from the fact that Mad World was filmed in a super-widescreen format called Ultra Panavision 70. It was described at the time as Cinerama but some would argue it was not. I have no particular opinion on this.

But whatever you call its screen format, it's probably why this trailer was done in a little-used format called "Smilebox." The premise of Smilebox is that the screen gets distorted in a way that simulates the way you'd see the film if you were sitting in the middle of a Cinerama theater with the screen somewhat wrapping around you. I don't think it does that. I think it just looks weird.

I also think this trailer shows too much of the ending and the surprises in the film. If you've never seen the movie, don't watch this…

• I spent most of today changing channels over and over on my TV, trying to find a show that didn't have Chris Christie on it. The only one seemed to be a rerun of To Tell the Truth.

We have confirmed that Art Carney did at least one production of The Odd Couple in the role of Oscar. Intriguingly, Felix in that production was played by Don Knotts. Wouldn't you have loved to have seen that? The fine artist Drew Friedman has a whole page of ads and playbills and photos from various mountings of The Odd Couple — including Carney/Knotts — and a lot of them sound like fun. Ernest Borgnine as Oscar and Don Rickles as Felix? Tom Poston as Oscar and Tim Conway as Felix?

I have a lot of e-mails about that. I also have way too many about the Groo animation project that was announced Friday — some asking me what channel it will be airing on; others, wanting to work on the show or do the voice of Groo or something. Please. If this happens, it won't happen for a while.

I love looking at old Las Vegas. This video is black-and-white footage that has been restored and colorized…so the colors are just someone's recent guesses. But hey, wouldn't you have liked to go to the Sands to see a double bill of Alan King and Mel Tormé? And Louis Prima appears to have been performing elsewhere on the premises.

The video is labelled to say it's in the seventies but the marquee for the Stardust has "Lido '67" on it and the one for Caesars Palace offers the afternoon show, "Bottoms Up '67" produced by and starring Breck Wall. I wrote about Mr. Wall and my one encounter with him in this post.

At the Desert Inn, you could have seen a touring company of Hello, Dolly! with either Dorothy Lamour or Ginger Rogers. Their names are both on the marquee and they took turns. On eBay and elsewhere online, you can find all sorts of photos and souvenirs from that engagement — like the postcard above — and they all say it was 1967. As a point of interest, Hello, Dolly! didn't close on Broadway until December of 1970.

All of this leads me to the fearless conclusion that all or most of this footage was shot, not in the seventies, but in 1967. And hey, Don Rickles was playing at the Sahara. That might have been welcome news if you were in town then and eager to sit in the front row and be called a hockey puck…

This is the first part of a piece that ran in yesterday's Hollywood Reporter…

'Groo the Wanderer' Eyed for Animation Adaptation

Entrepreneur Josh Jones has acquired the animated film and television rights to the long-running comedic comic from legendary Spanish cartoonist Sergio Aragonés.

Groo the Wanderer, the long-running comedic comic from legendary Spanish cartoonist Sergio Aragonés, is on its way to animation.

Entrepreneur Josh Jones, who counts businesses in venture capitalism, cryptocurrency and airlines among his portfolio, has acquired the animated film and television rights to Groo, with the intent of producing the character's first-ever animated adaptation via his film company, Did I Err Productions.

Jones and his Did I Err partner Scott Nocas will serve as executive producers on the possible projects along with Aragonés and Groo writer Mark Evanier.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE

Our pal Greg Ehrbar has written a long, fine history of Will that covers a lot of things I didn't mention about him. You can read it over on the Cartoon Research website.

As far as I know, no plans have been made for any sort of memorial gathering. I've spoken to a lot of Will's friends (and Will had a lot of friends) and they all seem to want one. That's an indicator of how much we don't want to let him out of our lives.

Actress Katie Leigh, who worked closely with Will, says he was 72 years old. Sounds about right to me.