An early consensus is forming that the line I couldn't understand in the Magic Land of Allakazam opening goes…
Ride the Magic Carpet Express
Where Huck presents
Yogi Bear and Mr. Jinks
And Pixie and Dixie no less
…and I guess that's it. But even at eight, I knew that the last word should rhyme with "presents" and not with "express."
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.
I don't know about you but when I awoke this morning to the news that there was no more Larry King, my first thought was of a friend of mine who said, about thirty years ago, "I just want to be important enough in this world to be interviewed by Larry King." To the best of my knowledge, he didn't manage that.
Neither did I. Possibly, neither did you. None of what I'm writing here should be taken as any sort of insult or demeaning of Mr. King but that was a very low bar to clear. Those of us who never made it are in the minority in this world. My gardener was probably a three-time guest on Larry King Live.
I'm sorry Larry King is no longer Live. There was a time I couldn't venture into Beverly Hills without seeing Larry King. My two favorite places to eat there — both of them, like him, gone — were Nate 'n Al's Delicatessen and Wolfgang's Steakhouse. Any time I went to either one, there was Larry King.
You couldn't miss him. He looked like Larry King and he dressed like Larry King (with the braces) and he had that loud way of always making it The Larry King Show around him, talking to whoever was at his table and to everyone at surrounding tables. (Another person who was like that was Tom Snyder. Something about hosting interview and phone-in shows must make men like that.)
After two or three times at Wolfgang's of finding the impossible-to-tune-out Mr. King at the table next to me, the following happened. I arrived there early to meet a young lady with whom I had an appointment to dine. I checked in with the reservations lady who asked me if I had a seating preference. I said, "Let me have the table that's not next to Larry King." She laughed because, I guess, that was not the first time she'd heard that and assured me that Mr. King did not have a reservation that evening.
She seated me. My date arrived. We ordered. And then a party of eight came in and was seated at the table next to us. Larry King was in the party of eight and he got the chair closest to mine.
The hostess ran over, apologizing, saying she didn't know he was in that party and offering to reseat us. But it was fine. Larry King was always entertaining.
He was also always available…one of those celebrities who only declined an invite to appear before a camera or audience if he was already committed to appear before a different camera or audience.
The one time I was backstage at Craig Ferguson's show, I heard someone ask someone, "What do you do if a guest cancels at the last minute?" The answer was "We do what everyone does. We call Larry King." He was as good a guest as he was a host.
And yes, he never prepared and it showed. And yes, he sometimes asked questions that made you wonder why anyone would want to know that. And yes, there seemed to be no product he wouldn't sell, no conversation into which he couldn't inject the name of Frank Sinatra, no woman he couldn't marry and no person he wouldn't interrogate except me and maybe you. He was still a great host. Even if the only thing he ever asked me was, "What's that you're eating?"
In my little tribute piece about Mark Wilson here, I wrote mainly about his TV show, The Magic Land of Allakazam, which ran on Saturday mornings for four years. It was, as you'll see in this clip of the opening, sponsored by Kellogg's cereals. Kellogg's also was backing Hanna-Barbera's second TV series — their first for syndication — Huckleberry Hound. So every episode of Allakazam the first season contained a cartoon from my other favorite show. (The cartoons were eliminated after the first season and they remade the opening to omit Huck, Yogi and the others.)
I started watching this show when I was eight, way back in the days when you had to be in front of the TV when your favorite shows were on. You couldn't pause the show. You couldn't slow-mo it or replay a scene. If something distracted you and you took your eyes off the screen for a moment, you missed whatever you missed…possibly forever but at least until reruns months later. Oh, if we'd had TiVo back then, I would have studied each and every trick in obsessive detail.
By that age, I was reading books…from the children's section of the Public Library. My parents were big on libraries and they went at least once a week, sometimes more often, to take books out and take books back. They also took me along and I had my very own library card.
One day, I asked the librarian if they had any books on magic tricks. They did but, alas, they were in the adult section for which my card was not authorized. I got my father to check out a few of those books on his card and this led to me, at around that age, getting a special one that let me check out books from both ends of the library. I believe we had to get a letter from the principal of my school saying that I was mature enough or smart enough or something enough…but it was arranged.
I studied them backwards, forwards and inside-out. None of Mark Wilson's tricks were revealed in them exactly but some of the tricks taught in the book were based on similar principles so they helped me figure out a few of the feats from The Magic Land. I was proud that I could do that and even prouder that I was able to perform a few for my friends and relatives.
At the same time I was imitating Mark Wilson, I was also shadowing another magical guy on TV — Paul Winchell — trying to learn ventriloquism with my very own Jerry Mahoney figure. I don't recall ever thinking I might someday follow in either profession or even become a performer of any sort. But I do recall wanting to be able to do something that was kinda/sorta like what those two men did. And I recall how happy I was each week when this theme song played as I could spend a half-hour in The Magic Land of Allakazam…
The e-mail spam flood from Donald Trump and his minions ceased a week or two before that administration did but that flow was replaced by a very similar stream — similar in rhetoric and format — from the Republican National Committee. These aren't as amusing so I've blocked them.
Not thinking (much) about Trump has been good for my sleep and, I'd like to think, for all of us. But I don't know what the hell Joe Biden thinks he's doing all day holding planning meetings and signing executive orders. Why isn't he out on the golf course all day, stopping only to tweet childish insults at anyone who doesn't worship him? The nerve of that guy.
Hank Aaron died the other day. Knowing as little as I do about baseball, I'm not able to write any sort of valid tribute to him as a player. Ah, but I do know he wrested the title of Baseball's Home Run King from Babe Ruth and held it for something like three decades…and I know there was a strong burst of racist anger when he did this.
A few days before he tied the old record, I found myself in a bar — a very rare occurrence — near someone whose purchases there were making up for my abstinence and that of about ten other folks. This very loud, very drunk person was holding forth on how Mr. Aaron should "know his place." That term was only uttered about eighty times, which was a few less than the accompanying "N-word."
Apparently, Aaron's "place" was to not play to the best of his ability…an odd position for the bombed bigot who also announced that he always bet serious money on the Braves. You'd have thought he'd have liked the concept of a Braves batter belting one over the left field fence or wherever Aaron hit that one. But no. Only if that Braves batter had been a white guy. It made about as much sense as that kind of hatred ever does.
I never saw Hank Aaron play and I know very little else about his career other than that it was long and that The Babe's wasn't the only record that got shattered. But merely based on how mad he must have made that guy in the bar when he did beat Ruth's record, I liked Mr. Henry Aaron a lot.
This message is being posted at the 21st minute of the 21st hour of the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century. If only I were 21 years old and in a Las Vegas casino with $21,000 riding on a hand of Blackjack.
We've lost another great magician…and a personal boyhood hero of mine. Mark Wilson, the Master Magician of The Magic Land of Allakazam, died last Tuesday afternoon. His son Greg, who followed in his old man's footsteps, posted this on a magician's forum…
Whether you know him from his TV appearances, his Live productions, the Mark Wilson Complete Course in Magic book, or one of his many in-person Magic University classes at the Magic Castle, or through one of his many other achievements…Mom and Mike and I are so proud that he brought "Happy Magic" into not only your life, but the lives of more people around the world than he could possibly meet.
Mike is another brother. Mom is Nani Darnell, aka Mrs. Mark Wilson and maybe the loveliest assistant who ever got levitated, sawed-in-two and vanished from an endless series of boxes. To Greg's list of his father's achievements, I would add that I think Mark Wilson has the world's record for inspiring young people to take up magic and also perfecting and popularizing the presentation of magic on television.
The Magic Land of Allakazam was on CBS and later ABC Saturday mornings from 1960 to 1964. Most professional magicians have enough tricks in their repertoire to fill thirty minutes…a few can do an hour…but Mark Wilson somehow managed to fill 98 half-hours over those years. To do that, he had to be an expert at every kind of magic there is — close-up, sleight-of-hand, grand illusion, parlor magic, the works. And almost every week, he also taught home viewers a trick they could do at home with everyday objects.
That's where I learned my first feeble feats of prestidigitation. That's where an awful lot of kids learned their first tricks and a hefty number of them went on to do that professionally. I cannot tell you how important this man was to the Art Form. One of the great perks of being a member at the Magic Castle was that you occasionally got to talk with Mark and sometimes even see him perform.
One evening when I was there with friends, we went into one of the small showrooms to see a magician perform. The scheduled gentleman had a sudden emergency and had to run so, to everyone's delight, Mark Wilson walked and did a completely-unplanned half-hour show. He hadn't gone there that evening to perform. He didn't even have any props with him but it isn't hard at The Castle to scrounge up a deck of cards and a couple of hankies…which was all he needed.
He was in his early eighties at the time but he was just as skilled and charming as the star I watched on Saturday morning when I was eight. And like everyone else in the room, I was just as entertained…and well aware we were in the presence of one of the world's great entertainers.
Antonio Prohias, who drew "Spy Vs. Spy" for MAD for many years, would have turned 100 last weekend were he still with us. Not that we need a reason, but that makes it a good time to remember his amazing story. In some places at some times, it has been highly possible to be killed for drawing cartoons. Here is how he almost did.
Let's get off the subject of politics. As you probably heard, Siegfried Fischbacher — who was one half of the popular duo Siegfried and Roy — died last week at the age of 81. His partner Roy Horn died last May.
Siegfried and Roy were superstars of magic and Las Vegas. They first played that town as the star act of the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana in 1967. In 1978, they got their own show — Beyond Belief — at the Frontier and then in 1987, Vegas Mogul Steve Wynn signed them to be the star attraction at his new hotel, The Mirage, when it opened three years later. The showroom was built to their specifications, the money end of the deal was astronomical…and suddenly, every hotel in Las Vegas was looking for its own superstar magician or team to compete and every magician who did "Grand Illusion" (big tricks) was trying to get a Vegas residency.
I saw their show at the Mirage a grand total of once. If you went in expecting to be dazzled by incredible illusions and beautiful live animals, you were not disappointed, though I think I was more impressed with the folks who designed and built the illusions than with the two men who fronted the show. I remember thinking that apart from the handling of the big cats, elephant and other creatures — which was mostly done by Roy — most of the magic was the kind that anyone could learn to "perform." You just had to stand in the right place and point to the right thing as the stage crew pulled the levers.
This may sound like a "faint praise" review and I guess it is. I'm not as fond of animal acts as I used to be and I like my magicians with more personality and I like to see them doing the tricks instead of the tech guys. But there was no denying that millions of people passed through that showroom and enjoyed the hell out of what went on in there and that S-and-R, as some called them, did a lot to promote the art form. And of course, I wouldn't expect a magician working in a show that size to be standing on stage doing sleight-of-hand card tricks.
Their long run there ended abruptly when…well, there are two versions of what happened on stage the night of October 3, 2003. One is that Roy had some sort of stroke in the middle of the show and Mantecore the White Tiger, sensing his master/friend was ill, locked his jaws onto Roy's neck to drag him offstage and in the process, caused him to lose enough blood to make the stroke worse. The other is that Mantecore for reasons unknown simply attacked and mauled Roy.
Take your pick. Either way, the result was the same: Roy seriously disabled and the end of the act. Such an awful way for one of the most popular live shows ever to come to a close.
Our video today is a 46 minute version of what they did six nights week at the Mirage, not only trimmed down but modified somewhat for the cameras. It will still give you a good idea of what the show was like and what Siegfried and Roy did to become that rich and that famous. It doesn't fully capture what was great about the performance, magic sometimes being a "you had to be there" kind of experience. But you'll see why the countless folks who went to see them thought it was well worth the price of the not-inexpensive tickets…
One more political post right now: William Saletan compares yesterday's speeches by Biden and Trump. Biden's was all about humility and compassion and working together and doing what's best for the country and for all of us. Trump's was about how friggin' awesome Donald Trump is and how great everything he's done has been and how everything that wasn't great is somebody else's fault.
Even if you're not an actor or model whose picture gets submitted to those who hire such people, you might benefit from this article. It's advice from five photographers who specialize in headshots about how to get a good one.
There's so much to say about the exit of Trump-Pence and the takeover by Biden-Harris…but as I look at the 'net, I see everyone else saying it.
It's gotta be strange to be a die-hard Trump backer today. They believed in that "mountain of evidence" that he really won the election in a landslide and must find it difficult to process the fact that most of the alleged evidence was never presented to any judge or higher authority and what was presented didn't impress anyone; not even Trump appointees or G.O.P. state officials. If they stormed The Capitol or cheered on those who did, they must see that they didn't rally the Senate to say, "The hell with what voters might have said, give the man four more years!"
If anything, they had the opposite effect and Trump's post-election popularity suffered a lot for it. His exit from Washington, D.C. has made him look worse than anyone he ever derided as a loser. I'd feel sorry for him if I thought he'd ever felt sorry for anyone in his whole life. Even Mitch McConnell, whose one aim in life is Republican Control, thinks that that can be arrived at via — too little, too late — some repudiation of Donald J. Trump.
I do feel a little sorry for Joe Biden, whose "honeymoon" will probably be even less than the week or so they gave Obama. That man has a lot to do. I only caught a little of the inauguration but it sounded like his speech was a good one and there's something hopeful about seeing Kamala Harris on the job. She's certainly not going to be the kind of vice-president whose main job, as someone once said about another one, was to "sit around waiting for a foreign leader to die."
Anyway, I'm not expecting instant results and neither should anyone. For the time being, I'll be happy if they just somehow slow down things getting worse.
I stopped posting links to articles about Trump partly because everyone else was posting plenty and partly because at some point, I got sick of reading about him. But here are some I've come across lately that might be of interest to you…
The Complete List of Trump's Twitter Insults — a list of everyone and everything he insulted on Twitter. You may notice a tendency to predict unemployment and failure for everyone who mocks or criticizes him…and almost all of those folks are doing fine.
EXPLAINER: Election claims, and why it's clear Biden won — Two Associated Press reporters explain why it's clear the election did not go Donald's way. It will forever baffle me why, when every single poll (including right-wing ones like Rasmussen and Fox News) showed Biden winning handily and Trump never had an approval rating higher than his disapproval rating, so many people think it's inconceivable that he lost.
The Final Tally on Trump's Campaign Promises — Politifact takes a look at what Trump promised to achieve and how few of them he actually made good on.
Jonathan Chait writes about how Trump is on the verge of losing everything and how little of Barack Obama's legacy Donald was unable to undo.
The full list of pardons that Trump issued — Wish I'd had the money to get one. I don't expect to be charged with any crime but it still would be nice to have a presidential pardon around, just in case.
There are a lot of articles online condemning the Capitol Insurrection and saying that Trump incited it and bears more than a little responsibility for it. I'm just linking to this one by Daniel Larison.
And lastly: Here's a quick montage of Lindsey Graham, who by my reckoning is in a dead heat with Rudy Giuliani for the title of Public Figure Who Most Debased Himself in Service of Donald Trump…
And the song parodies keep on comin'…