Another fine performer from kids' television has left us. Actually, Sonny Fox did plenty of TV that wasn't for kids, both as an on-screen personality and a behind-the-scenes producer. Sonny hosted game shows and he was Tom Snyder's producer on Tomorrow for a while and he did dozens of other programs…but he was probably best known as the host of Wonderama, a four-hour Sunday morning series for kids. He did it for 8.5 years while also hosting other shows, including a Saturday series called Just for Fun. He also for a time was the exec in charge of children's programming for NBC.
He was big in New York where all of his shows aired. Intermittently, we'd get some of them out here in Los Angeles for a while so I sure knew who he was. I was later fortunate to encounter Mr. Fox on several occasions and he was charming and funny and you could see why he was so good on television.
The last time I saw him was at Vitello's Restaurant in Studio City and I wrote about it here. I was there taking in a show with Amber and with Leonard and Alice Maltin and we were talking about friend Chuck McCann, who had just died. Suddenly, we noticed that at the table next to us was Sonny Fox and he was talking with his party about Chuck, who'd been on so many of the shows Sonny had hosted and/or produced. We all got to talking and Sonny talked about how lovely and charming and clever and beloved Chuck was. I wish I could remember all the things he said because I could use them all here to describe Sonny Fox.
It's Thursday and I'm still not a werewolf…at least, any more than I ever am. A couple of folks have written to inform me or link me to articles that tell me that side effects with the Moderna vaccine are more likely with the second dose than with the first. They still seem unlikely and the ones described seem well worth it if it means not getting the whole, nasty illness.
One friend wrote me that they were choosing not to get vaccinated because they don't want to put a strange substance into their body. I've known this person to put some pretty strange things into his mouth, including substances that were supposed to induce strange side effects but I guess he sees a distinction here.
He also wrote, "It's my body and if I want to take the risk, that's my right." I suppose it is but let's remember that it's not your right to infect others and that "herd immunity" — which would mean that this crisis is just about over — is defined thusly…
Herd immunity is achieved when large percentages of a population become immune to a disease and therefore indirectly protect those who do not have immunity. If, for example, four out of five of the people who are exposed to someone with an infectious disease are immune to it, the disease is much less likely to spread.
The fewer folks who get vaccinated, the more the plague will spread and kill more people and keep vast portions of our lives shut down…and the longer it will take to be rid of it. Just because you have the right to do something doesn't mean you should do it.
I wish I had a good anecdote about Cloris Leachman, who died Tuesday at the age of 94. I never met the lady and don't recall any stories about her. Just about everyone who ever worked with her thought she was a fine, gifted performer but you already know that. All I have to offer here is this clip from one of her most memorable performances…
It has now been more than 27 hours since I was injected with the Moderna vaccine. I have experienced absolutely no pain, no queasiness, no side effects and I have not, to the best of my knowledge, turned into a werewolf. There's a full moon tomorrow night so we'll see what, if anything, happens then.
My buddy Jim Newman wrote to say…well, why should I summarize it? You can read it for yourself…
Congratulations on getting the first dose of the vaccine. You end your 'blog post by writing, "it's 100% effective against my physician telling me I'm a friggin' idiot for not getting this done."
This implies (but does not state) that you did not ask your physician first. I'm assuming that you DID ask first. I think that conversation with your doctor is an important part of this story.
In just the past couple of days, I've met a couple of people who seem very doubtful about the vaccine. They did not seem to be anti-vaxxers in general, just anti-this-vax. Based on their gender and their race (which, I know is dangerous to base anything on) they did not seem like they'd subscribe to the current conspiracy theories being put forth about it. I'm talking about the theories from a faction of people who also seem to believe that Mr. Trump put on safety goggles and lit the Bunsen burners in the labs that developed the vaccines. Despite giving him credit for developing it, they want no part of it.
So, I think your journey before Philippe's and Dodger Stadium are important for people to understand.
First off, I should say that I think we give presidents (every one of them) too much credit/blame for things that happened on their watch. And we shouldn't define their "watch" as the precise time period they occupied the Oval Office. The impact — good and bad — of each president's actions or inactions can extend many years after their terms expire. Which is not to say they don't also cause our world to change — again for good or bad — while they're in power.
Yes, my doctor told me to go get vaccinated and when I e-mailed him that I'd secured an appointment, he wrote back a message that just said, "Great."
I like my doctor a lot. He wouldn't be my doctor if I didn't like him a lot. And I'm a big believer in having a doctor I like and trusting him…not blindly but a lot. I'm also really skeptical of medical advice from people, however well-read and intentioned, who have not done that little, insignificant-to-them step of graduating Medical School and securing a license to practice.
No, let me rephrase that: I am really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really skeptical of medical advice from people, however well-read and intentioned, who have not done that little step of graduating Medical School and securing a license to practice. I have had friends who I believe killed themselves or others with Pretend Medical Advice.
It's always been like this and the Internet, while it has made many things oh-so-better has made this worse. No matter what nutty, baseless, unscientific thing you want to believe, you can find someone on the 'net who'll tell you it's the only way to go. Many years ago, I wrote a cartoon on the premise of "If they said it on television, it must be true" — and I even hired the most convincing, sincere person in the world, Gary Owens, to play the announcer. A brief excerpt…
If I were doing that show today, I'd do "If you saw it on the Internet, it must be true."
So around 325 days ago, my doctor warned me about the coronavirus and advised me to stay home, buy masks, not socialize, etc. — excellent advice that most doctors were saying a week or two later — and I've done it and I haven't gotten sick and I'm continuing to listen to this man and I place great trust in what he tells me.
I don't think he or any doctor is infallible…and certainly, with something as new to the world as this particular virus, Science has had to learn as it goes along and we all have to keep updating what we know. But I'm pretty sure that at any given time, he knows more than I do. He explained to me the problems with distribution of the vaccine, which are many. He told me he doesn't know when his office will be getting a supply, nor does he know how much they'll get and which of the two vaccines it will be. And he told me to get one — either Pfizer or Moderna — by any means I could.
For those of you who dwell in Los Angeles, I found my appointment via this website. At the moment, there are very few appointments open but I secured mine ten days ago because my doctor — this is my primary care physician I've been talking about here — directed me to it. Actually, I also got e-mails about it from my gastroenterologist and a few other specialists who've bettered my body.
So that's how I got my appointment and I decided, as they say in Hamilton, "I am not throwin' away my shot." So many folks have already have been inoculated only trivial, outlier reports of side effects that I was convinced it was safe…or if it wasn't, I was at least safer with it than without it. I cannot testify that its effectiveness is everything they say it is but I believe "they" — the overwhelming majority of the medical community — are right way more often than the minority and the Pretend Doctors.
One very unfortunate condition in this country — and the rise of Trump made this worse but did not invent this — is the intermingling of political opinion with science. Just because Trump said it doesn't make it true. Doesn't make it false either. Too many people were in denial about this disease early on because politicians they liked were in denial about it…and some of both are still stubbornly refusing to admit it's as bad as it is. I can't change those minds but I could go get vaccinated. I'm so sure that it's the right thing to do that I'm going to double-down and do it again in four weeks.
My pal Paul Harris, who is now retired from roughly the same business Larry King was in, has a good essay up about Mr. King. What bothered Paul about the man's broadcasting was the same thing that sometimes bothered me about it: When he'd hand his widely-heard or widely-watched forum over to some charlatan or phony psychic. I believe, by the way, that the term "phony psychic" is redundant.
Occasionally, King would challenge their claims but not often enough for me. And as Paul reminds us, there was that time when "The Iron Horse of Broadcasting" (as many called him) turned his CNN show into a series of infomercials for Ross Perot's presidential candidacy. I've written before about this moment…
A day or two before the presidential election of 1992, independent candidate Ross Perot went on Larry King Live, the TV program which was largely responsible for him even being on the ballot. King asked him the obvious question: "How do you think you're going to do on Tuesday?"
I haven't been able to find a video or transcript online but I remember his answer quite vividly. It struck me as especially stunning since Perot's appeal to voters — the only real reason he was a major candidate who'd been included in the debates — was that he was a straight-talking, atypical politician. And what this straight-talking, atypical politician said was that he was going to carry every state and win 100% of all 538 electoral votes. All of them.
I remember the look of shock on Mr. King's face and he muttered something about how no one in history had ever done that, to which Perot replied with dead seriousness that he'd be the first. I don't recall if King then pointed out that at that moment, not one single pollster was showing Perot as being even close to winning one state, let alone every one. And indeed on Election Day, Perot won as many as I did. Or you did. Or Donald Duck did. Zero.
I wonder to this day: Was that what he really believed or was it something he thought he should say? It had to be one or the other and neither is flattering to the man.
If I'd been Larry King on that show, I would have been thinking: I shouldn't have given this man as much air time as I did. And by the way, I don't think I ever want to be "The Iron Horse" of anything.
Meanwhile, my one-time writing partner Dennis Palumbo has written a piece that's well worth reading. Dennis is still a writer but also a psychotherapist and he wrote a piece about how some of his patients are coping with the downtime caused by The Pandemic. For the record, I am not one of Dennis's patients nor have we spoken lately except for the video chat we did. I would fall into the "optimistic" category of those he discusses but really, my writing career ain't changed much during the lockdown.
I enjoy watching old panel shows like I've Got a Secret, What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth. I find them entertaining and every so often, they give you a little peek at history.
Here's an I've Got a Secret from August 28, 1952. The Celebrity Guest was Gloria Swanson and she was the third of four contestants that evening. Her spot wasn't all that interesting and the first two were pretty unremarkable so I've set this video to start playing just before Contestant #4
You can move the slider back and watch the whole show if you like but if you're a fan of the musical Gypsy, you might like to see that last contestant. It's the real Mama Rose…
This morning, I drove out to Dodger Stadium — my first time there since Sandy Koufax was pitching. I thought maybe they'd let me play Shortstop or at least throw out the first pitch but it turns out, they aren't playing baseball there these days. They are however giving out COVID-19 vaccinations and I figured, "Well, I'm here. I might as well get one."
Actually, I had a 12:30 appointment but we got there at Noon, "we" being me and my friend/assistant Jane. In an uncommon show of cleverness, we stopped en route at Philippe's the Original (a sacred downtown restaurant) and picked up a couple of their famous French Dip sandwiches. Waiting in the drive-thru line at Dodger Stadium is much more tolerable when you're chowing down on a double-dipped Philippe's sandwich.
So I sense some of you have questions…
How long did it take? The vast Dodger Stadium parking lot is set up with multiple lanes defined by orange traffic cones. They send you in a wild variety of "S" curves that eventually direct everyone to one of several lanes where cheery folks are only too happy to inject you while you remain in your vehicle. From the moment we got there until I got the shot was about 75 minutes. They then make you wait fifteen minutes to see if you have an adverse reaction or turn into a werewolf.
Did you have an adverse reaction or turn into a werewolf? Nope. Not yet, anyway and it's been about two and a half hours. After the fifteen minute wait, they give you a card proving you got your shot and it tells you when to get the second dose. Then you get to go.
Which vaccine did you get and did it hurt? The Moderna and no, it didn't. I didn't even know the lady had given it to me until she told me she'd done it. No pain, no soreness, no nothing. She applied a band-aid but I just peeked under it and I can barely see where I was vaccinated.
Was it crowded? Very. And I have to say I was impressed by how many people they were processing. The amount of time it took seemed very reasonable once you took that into consideration. Somebody did a real good job designing the system.
Did anything else happen? I asked one of the nurse-like people if I could get a couple of Dodger Dogs with mustard. She said, "Oh, wouldn't that be wonderful? They feed us real healthy food and that's fine but sometimes you want something greasy and fattening." Jane told her that on the way there, we'd stopped at Philippe's and got French Dip sandwiches. The nurse-like lady moaned and said, "Now I'm going to be craving one of them all day."
I am very glad I got that done and I'll get Dose #2 in four weeks. Of course, I'm still going to mask up and avoid most people but the first dose is supposed to be somewhere between 50% and 82% effective against the coronavirus. And it's 100% effective against my physician telling me I'm a friggin' idiot for not getting this done.
And today we have another one of those videos starring Broadway performers all in different places on different cameras but singing the same song with the same enthusiasm. This was posted on Inauguration Day…
I often quote a pundit named Kevin Drum here. I'll be quoting him less in the future because he's moving from a daily column to every-so-often blogging but I'm going to quote him now. He believes that the reason everyone thinks America is doomed is that everyone in America is telling everyone else in America that America is doomed.
Now, this is "apart from The Pandemic" and that's a pretty big thing to set aside. But that is (we hope) going to end soon and it is one of the few things we're actively working to fix. To quote Kevin…
Political parties that are out of power normally have a keen interest in making things sound terrible. After all, they have to promise to fix things in order to get the votes to get back in power, but nobody is interested in fixing things unless they're convinced they need fixing. So Republicans shout about the deficit and moral decay because those are well-known ways of scaring people into voting against Democrats. Democrats insist that the middle class is dying and Medicare is under assault, because those are well-known ways of scaring people into voting against Republicans.
This is all normal but it can become abnormal if both parties, along with pretty much every pundit, is insisting that the country is going to hell.
I don't agree 100% with that but I do think too many people approach elections with the same panic as Superman's biological father warning everyone that Krypton is about to explode and we'll all be killed. Except that Jor-El was right and everyone else was wrong.
The morning after Barack Obama was first elected, I got an e-mail from a Republican friend who warned that within four years, the same fate would befall Earth…if we were lucky. One or two years seemed much more likely. She was quite serious about this.
And last year around this time, a Democratic acquaintance was telling me the same thing was inevitable if we elected anyone other than Bernie Sanders. He was just as certain of that as the QAnon supporters who are still trying to come to grips with the fact that on Inauguration Day, Biden and Harris were inaugurated and not arrested.
I'm glad Trump is outta there and I wish certain supporters would follow him. But I never bought into the joke that Jon Stewart made before the 2016 election; that we could either vote for Hillary to be the next president or Trump to be the last president.
So read Kevin Drum's piece and if you like what you see there, read this one from a week or so ago. He took on a right-winger who listed things that were going horribly wrong in this country and pointed out with some pretty sound charts and facts that most of those problems weren't problems…or at least weren't huge problems.
We love old, lost TV clips, especially when they've been lovingly restored. Here are a few minutes from The Tonight Show with Mr. Carson from August of 1964, when he'd been doing it for a little less than two years.
His bandleader then was Skitch Henderson (Doc Severinsen was probably in the band) and his announcer was, for his entire run, Ed McMahon but Ed was off this night. The monologue wasn't that long and wasn't that funny but that would change…
Here's a few minutes from a 1965 Ed Sullivan Show with impressionist George Kirby…a performer I'd always liked. I still do but let me tell you what happened when I worked with him in 1986…
The CBS Saturday Morning department persuaded me to help develop a cartoon show starring Michael Jackson. I signed on…and it was one of those jobs I knew I should have said no to and later regretted that I hadn't. Everyone involved with the project was really enthused about it with one exception: Michael Jackson, a man who loved watching cartoons but really, really didn't want to be one.
Some of it was wanting to be taken more seriously as a musician. Some of it was not wanting to be seen as a performer for children. Some of it was him wanting people to see him the way he wanted them to see him, rather than a cartoon character on a show that would have been somewhat out of his control.
I do not understand how a person who was obsessed with making sure every note of every song was done exactly as he wanted it done agreed to allow this show to proceed as far as it did; only that a lot of people around him had reasons for wanting the project to go forward and he didn't want to disappoint them. I didn't either but it was tough when they were all pulling it in different directions.
So I found myself in meetings with him where one of his associates (he had many) would say to Michael, "I really think you should do the voice of the Michael Jackson character in this show yourself." And Michael would say, "Can't you do it without a Michael Jackson character in it?"
There were many moments in the two or three months I worked on this project where I thought, "This is never going to work." That was about six of them. And then there was the George Kirby problem.
He was part of the deal. In recent years — remember this was 1986 — Mr. Kirby's career had hit the skids. Going to prison can do that to you.
He'd been sentenced to one in 1977, which is what can happen to you when you sell cocaine and heroin to an undercover police officer. He served 3.5 years and once he was out, The Industry was in no hurry to employ him, at least on a steady basis. He spent a lot of time in front of audiences but they were mostly unpaid speaking engagements where he told kids to stay the hell away from drugs…and usually threw in a few impressions.
For what it's worth, I believe he was sincere in his message. It wasn't just something he was doing to try and rehabilitate his image to get his career up and running again…but he was clearly angry that it hadn't. At some point, he hooked up with Michael who took an interest in helping the guy and when this cartoon show was proposed, someone — probably Michael — decided that George would be heavily involved.
I met with him several times. He was a delightful gentleman, filled with great show biz stories — and you know what a sucker I am for great show biz stories. But he had no idea how to do animation or television for kids, and while a fresh mind can sometimes be an asset, it can also send things wildly off in wrong or impractical directions. And he wanted to be the Executive Producer and overall head honcho and do all the voices and write all the music and…
…and that was never going to happen.
TV Networks aren't fond of giving the kind of control he wanted to someone who's never produced a show — especially a cartoon show — in his life. They also were a bit leery of a kids' show "run" (in some way) by a guy who'd served time in prison for dealing heroin.
So you have those two problems and then you toss in Michael J. saying he was fine with a Michael Jackson cartoon show as long as Michael Jackson wasn't seen, heard or mentioned in it. And I haven't even gotten to Michael's manager Frank DiLeo, who wanted the show to be about Michael's Pets, a line of toys based on the critters in The King of Pop's private zoo…and yes, M.J. took me on a tour of it and I met Bubbles the Chimp.
There were other people and with each new person who was involved, there were new problems and new ideas about what the show should be. I wrote outline after outline and the one that pleased Michael didn't please CBS or anyone else and then the one that pleased George didn't please Michael and then I wrote one that pleased Frank but he was the only one. Michael didn't like it, George didn't like it, CBS didn't like it, I wasn't fond of it and even Bubbles said he wanted no part of it…
…which is about when I decided I wanted no part of it either. I moonwalked off the whole project and shortly after that, CBS killed the whole development deal, which I'm sure made Michael very happy and George Kirby very unhappy. I felt bad for George because I really liked the guy. Watch this little clip of him and you will, too…
Okay, let's answer two quick queries, starting with this one from Brad Ferguson who asks about the opening I posted from The Magic Land of Allakazam…
Re the Allakazam open (and thanks so much for that), is that Jackie Joseph on the left, in the back? Sure looks like her.
That may be because it is her. She played a recurring character on the show. And hey, while we're talking about that opening…
Watching this show when I was eight, I could never quite make out the last few words in the line about the Hanna-Barbera characters in that opening. Now at the age of sixty-eight, I still can't. Can anyone figure them out?
And in the last hour or two, Gary Cundall and a couple of other folks wrote to ask, as Gary did…
In today's post about Larry King you mentioned that you were back stage at the Craig Ferguson Show. Could you tell us more about that? Why you were there and what it was like? Did you get to meet Craig?
Briefly, I did. It was the Halloween show from 2011 and I was there because my pal Neil Gaiman was on the show and I had to bring him something. You may be able to figure out what it was from this post and you can read about the experience here. You can even watch Neil's segment on that episode here.
Craig was as nice offstage as a guy can be when he's about to do a show and a musical number and he has eighty-seven things to think about. We spent about two minutes talking — which is a lot when you're that busy — and he told me he krew of Groo and loved the comic. But I don't think he recognized my name, which never surprises me. I think Neil had told him who I was.
Reading again over my post about that evening, I should have said that I was impressed by how smoothly things went; how the crew there had been doing that show so long that everyone knew how to do their job and I didn't see any of panic and angst I've seen on shows I've worked on that were one-shot specials or that just went into production.
It was that way when I poached on the set of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and later on Jay's. The warm-up guy (usually Ed McMahon in Johnny's case) knew exactly when they were going to roll tape and he knew exactly how long before that moment to begin chatting with the studio audience and he knew exactly what to say to fill that time. And I could see Johnny enter the studio at exactly the right moment in Ed's usually-the-same warm-up so as to be right in place to make his entrance at precisely the proper moment. Craig Ferguson's show had the same efficiency.
Just because a show's been in production for a while, that doesn't ensure it always goes like clockwork. I went to work on Welcome Back, Kotter in its second season and every single taping started late and with a great many screw-ups and problems.
And I recall being backstage for Letterman's show. This was in his NBC days but he'd been on for a while and most tapings were like Carson's with a good mood and a carefully-kept schedule. The one time I was there though, everything was thrown into chaos by a guest who was yelling and making demands and they had to stop tape and start over because the guest approached Dave while he was walking out to do his monologue and the guest wanted to argue.
I won't tell you the name of that rude guest but as of last Wednesday, he no longer had possession of the nuclear codes. Or maybe what they told him were the nuclear codes.
