Search Results for: foray

Ever since I learned there was a Garfield & Friends channel on PlutoTV, I've been watching occasionally. They're running shows I wrote in 1991 and 1992 and haven't seen since. One or two, I'm not sure I ever saw at all. So I sit here, occasionally amusing myself or more often thinking, "Why the hell did I write that?" Yesterday, I heard a minor character speak and I thought, "Who was that? We had such fine actors in the cast, I can't believe one of them gave that bad line reading or that I let it through."

And then I realized who it was. It was me. Yeah, I occasionally did a bit part…and when Garfield's creator Jim Davis was in town, so did he.

It's fun and educational to watch these now. I can't look back on old work without learning something. I learn it too late but at least I learn. I also have an emotional response that I'm not sure I can describe to hearing the voices of actors who worked on the show but are no longer with us. Lorenzo Music, Gary Owens and Howard Morris — three great actors and great friends — were in every episode. I'm also hearing Stan Freberg, June Foray, Rip Tay;or, Don Knotts, Paul Winchell and a few others we've lost.

I'm relatively new to Pluto TV and I still don't understand some things about it. Although they presumably have access to all 121 half-hours of Garfield and Friends, they only run a select chunk of shows at a time. I'm not keeping close track but it seems like yesterday, they were running thirteen or fourteen shows over and over, not always in the same order. Today, it seems like they're running a limited number of shows — probably the same number — but some were in yesterday's rotation and some weren't.

But I may be wrong about this. I'm not making a close study.

Each show is interrupted several times with a little "we'll be right back" message which is like a commercial break only it isn't a commercial…though Friday, I did see one actual commercial in there. For some reason, they don't put these little "time out"s between cartoons. They stick them in the middle of a cartoon or near the end. So a character says the next-to-last line of the cartoon and there's a funny end line coming but you have to wait a minute or so for that last line.

I don't understand why they do this. Perhaps I would if I understood the business model of PlutoTV. Is there any revenue stream apart from the occasional few bucks from the occasional commercials? I have a feeling that when I get my cut of what they're paying to run these shows day and night, it'll be about enough for an order of McDonald's french fries. A small order of McDonald's french fries.

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.

Bill Turner sent me this…

I know in previous years you have posted about Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol. I watched it again this year, for probably the 50th time, and am wondering whether you can tell who sang which singing parts, particularly on the Plunderer's March ("We're despicable"). My family still remembers my high school buddies and me belting that out back around 1968.

Sure. Let's go through all the voices…

As we all know, Jim Backus played Quincy Magoo and Jack Cassidy played Bob Cratchit and they sang for those characters. Les Tremayne played The Ghost of Christmas Present and he didn't sing but Jane Kean, who played Belle did. That's the same Jane Kean who took over as Trixie, wife of Ed Norton, when Jackie Gleason brought The Honeymooners back to television in the sixties.

Laura Olsher played The Laundress, the kid with the turkey, Peter Cratchit, Mrs. Cratchit and she supplied the speaking voice of the daughter in the Cratchit family. Marie Matthews played Scrooge as a young boy. She sang as him and also she did the singing for the Cratchit daughter. John Hart, who was The Lone Ranger for one season on TV, played Mr. Billings and the Stage Manager. He didn't sing in the show.

Royal Dano played Marley's Ghost who had no songs but Dano did do the singing for the Junk Shop Owner. Paul Frees did the speaking voice of the Junk Shop Owner and also voiced The Director, Fezziwig, The Undertaker and the hapless gent who asked Scrooge for a donation.

Joan Gardner played Tiny Tim, The Charwoman and The Ghost of Christmas Past. She is often confused with voice actress Joanie Gerber who was not in this show. Neither was June Foray, who used to be credited all over the place as being in it, including in some TV Guide listings and on the box for the Beta and VHS releases of Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol.

Morey Amsterdam — Buddy Sorrell from The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Human Joke Machine — played two tiny parts as the gents on the street discussing the death of Ebenezer Scrooge. Why only two tiny roles? Because he was hired for a larger part which was recorded and cut out of the finished show.

So the speaking voices of the four Plunderers (as you call them) were Olsher, Gardner and then Frees spoke for both men. Since even the great Paul Frees couldn't sing two parts at the same time and they wanted to record the four characters together, he only sang for the Undertaker. Mr. Dano sang for the Junk Shop Guy.

I verified these credits in Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol: The Making of the First Animated Christmas Special by Darrell Van Citters. This is the only book that focuses on the special and since it's so well-researched and exhaustive, it's the only one you'll ever need. Here's a link to buy the paperback edition. There was a beautiful hardcover edition but it's beastly hard to find and I ain't parting with mine. Hope this helps.

Here's a neat question. After she read this posting, Dina Wolfe wrote to ask…

In a recent post, you listed what must have been hundreds of names of people who were stars in the forties and who performed at the Hollywood Canteen. How many of them did you ever get to meet? And did any of them ever disappoint you? And do you have any tips about approaching or talking to stars like that?

Ooh. Well, I'll go over the list and use the loosest possible definition of "meet." I didn't introduce myself or shake hands with every one of these people but I did at least exchange a few words with them…

Bud Abbott, Eve Arden, Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Mel Blanc, George Burns, Cab Calloway, Adriana Caselotti, Bette Davis, Doris Day, Yvonne De Carlo, Dale Evans, Eva Gabor, Bob Hope, Gene Kelly, Pinky Lee, Harold Lloyd, June Lockhart, Fred MacMurray, Groucho Marx of the Marx Brothers, Roddy McDowall, Fayard Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers, Margaret O'Brien, Vincent Price, Roy Rogers, Mickey Rooney, Phil Silvers, Red Skelton, Moe Howard and Larry Fine of The Three Stooges, Shelley Winters and Jane Withers.

I also met Joe Besser and Joe DeRita of the Stooges but they weren't Stooges in the forties.

But I should emphasize that some of those were real brief encounters. The one with Jack Benny (which I told here) was under thirty seconds. The one with Bud Abbott (which I told here) lasted about ninety seconds.

I was disappointed by the brevity of my encounter with Mr. Abbott. It was at the Motion Picture Country Home/Hospital, which a lot of people still refer to as "The Old Show Biz Folks' Home" and I was leaving after a long chat with Larry Fine. Back then, you could talk to Larry as long as you wanted and as long as you were willing to sit and hear the same nine anecdotes over and over and over. He had nothing else to do and he welcomed the company.

On my way out that day, a nurse mentioned to me that Bud Abbott was also there so I popped in to see him. Like Larry, he had nothing to do but I caught him in a foul mood and he did not welcome company at that moment or maybe ever. I was outta there faster than you could say "Susquehanna Hat Company."

I might have been disappointed that Mickey Rooney acted like a crazy person, ranting and yelling at one of those Hollywood Collectors Shows. But I already knew he could be like that so I was not surprised.

Everyone else on that list was at least civil and some of them — like Berle, Burns, Silvers and especially Harold Lloyd — were genuinely pleased that a kid my age knew as much about their careers as I did. Red Skelton didn't care that I wanted to talk about his films or TV shows. He just wanted an audience to listen to dirty jokes which was…well, okay, I guess.

Vincent Price was pleased that I asked him about work he'd done that was not in horror films. Gene Kelly liked that we talked about his work as a film director and not just as a dancer. You want a tip? Here's a tip…

If you ever get to meet someone you've admired who has had a long career, try to ask them about something they did that not everyone asks them about. When I was introduced to Robert Morse, he was so happy that I knew of things he'd done besides How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, including projects that were relatively recent. When I met Billy Wilder, he was pleased that I wanted to know about Ace in the Hole instead of Some Like It Hot.

I doubt one person on the above list could have told you my name a day later and at least two-thirds of them never heard it at all. The only person I can think of who performed at the Hollywood Canteen who I would call an actual friend was June Foray. She danced there on stage with other starlets who kicked up their heels for the soldiers but she wasn't on the list I posted. It was a list which, in case you couldn't guess, I cribbed off Wikipedia. I still find it a little hard to believe that anyone — let alone silly ol' me — could actually meet most of those folks.

From Mark Bosselman…

I asked Leonard Maltin if he ever met Paul Frees on live Instagram/Facebook chat Sunday and he said no. Leonard mentioned your name and he said you haven't twirked with him either. Is this true and if it's not, do you have any Paul Frees stories that you can share?

Well, I'm not sure anyone ever met Paul Frees on live Instagram/Facebook chat on Sunday but I think I know what you're asking. I "met" Paul Frees on the phone for brief (very brief) conversations twice but never in person and never for very long.

I have always felt truly fortunate that I grew up on cartoons with voices by Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, June Foray, Don Messick, Stan Freberg, Bill Scott, Jimmy Weldon, Julie Bennett, Shepard Menken, Dick Beals, Gary Owens, Chuck McCann, Frank Buxton, Arnold Stang, Marvin Kaplan and a few others…and in my alleged adulthood, got to meet and work with Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, June Foray, Don Messick, Stan Freberg, Bill Scott, Jimmy Weldon, Julie Bennett, Shepard Menken, Dick Beals, Gary Owens, Chuck McCann, Frank Buxton, Arnold Stang, Marvin Kaplan and a few others. I'm sure everyone reading this can understand why that would be meaningful on several levels.

By the time I got into the animation business, Paul Frees had largely gotten out…and had totally gotten out of Los Angeles. He'd moved up to Tiburon, California, which is near San Francisco. He said the air there was much better for him and June told me that Paul had reached the stage in his life where he had an awful lot of money and not an awful lot of desire to work.

He did work once in a while. If you offered him enough money, he might (might!) agree to go to a studio somewhere near his home and record there. June told me that on rare occasions, someone would offer Paul so much loot that he'd fly down to Los Angeles to record something, record it and then fly right back. I recall her complaining once, "He was down here last week for three hours and he wouldn't even delay his flight home to have lunch with me."

One time when I was visiting Daws Butler (one of the nicest and most talented people I ever met), we got to talking about Paul and he spent a lot of time telling me how great Paul was. Before I left, the phone rang and it was Paul…and Daws put me on the line with him for a few minutes. Paul spent most of that time telling me how great Daws was.

At the time, I was head writer for a program called The Krofft Superstar Hour which ran on NBC on Saturday mornings for not-very-long. We were taping shows and our cast included Lennie Weinrib and Walker Edmiston, who worked off-camera supplying the voices of many of the Krofft characters. Lennie and Walker were two more guys I knew from their voicework when I was younger, though both of them did more on-camera work than off. Walker, who I wrote about here and here and other places, had a great kids' show on local TV in Los Angeles for a time.

At the time, he was supplying the voice of Ludwig Von Drake for a series of educational filmstrips or recordings or something that some division of Disney was doing. Mr. Frees, of course, had originated the role of the eminent Professor Von Drake but he wasn't tempted by the scale fee that Disney was offering for these projects. Walker, who did a pretty fair imitation of Paul's voice as Ludwig, was the go-to second choice.

Most voice actors work under an unwritten Code of Honor not to imitate another voice actor while that person is alive and possibly available. Walker abided strenuously by that rule. So what would happen is that Disney would call and ask him if he could come in next Tuesday and record a few tracks for them and Walker would say — every single time — "I can but I have to check with Paul first."

The guy at Disney would say, "Walker, you don't have to check with Paul. He's fine with you doing this for us. He's said yes the last twenty-three times you asked him." Which was true but Walker felt he still had to check with Paul. He'd call Paul and Paul would say "Fine" and Walker would thank him and go in and do what Disney needed him to do as Ludwig..

A week or two after my chat with Frees at Daws' home, Walker came into my office where we were doing The Krofft Superstar Hour. We were on a break from taping and he asked if he could use my phone to call Paul Frees up in Tiburon. I said, "Yes, if I can say hello to him." Walker called, got Paul's permission to talk like him and then put me on the speakerphone.

Paul remembered me from the call with Daws and in that second (again, brief) conversation, I asked him about doing his impression of Peter Lorre on a Spike Jones record. Paul told me how he'd do anything for Spike and how when he met Peter Lorre, Mr. Lorre said, "You sound more like me than I do" and they spent some time teaching each other how to sound more like Peter Lorre.

The story was told, of course, with Paul playing both roles. He played Paul Frees imitating Peter Lorre and he also played Peter Lorre talking the way he really talked…and he even played Peter Lorre trying to sound more like Paul Frees imitating Peter Lorre. It was one of the many "Boy, do I wish I'd had a tape recorder running" moments of my life.

The call ended soon after and that was my last-ever contact with Paul Frees, who passed away in 1986. Before he went back to work that day, Walker demonstrated for me how he occasionally did Peter Lorre and said that what he (and everyone else who imitated Peter Lorre) was doing was an imitation of Paul Frees imitating Peter Lorre. Walker did that in a lot of cartoons so somewhere out there, there's probably someone who thinks they do a great imitation of Peter Lorre but they're really doing an imitation of Walker Edmiston doing an imitation of Paul Frees doing an imitation of Peter Lorre.

Here is the Spike Jones record on which Paul Frees imitated Peter Lorre. Paul's part starts around a minute and a half into it but for the full effect, listen to the whole thing…

Quite a few folks who own a copy of Fantastic Four #1 responded to my public appeal. I think we have what we need and when this project gets closer to its publication date, I'll tell you what this was about. Thanks to all of you.

Last night, Turner Classic Movies ran The Hospital, the 1971 movie which starred George C. Scott and Diana Rigg…but really starred a killer script by Paddy Chayefsky. I meant to record it on my TiVo but forgot. I haven't seen it since it came out and I recall liking it a lot…so I wanted to see if I still did and I wanted to check something else out. The late/lovely June Foray told me that she was called in to do a fair amount of dubbing and looping on the film including a couple of lines for Diana Rigg. I wanted to see if I could recognize June at all in the film and especially impersonating Ms. Rigg, who was back in England and unavailable when dialogue replacement was needed. It's not a big thing but did anyone notice June?

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My buddy Gerry Conway has written a lot of great comic books over the years and a lot of great other things. He recently penned an essay about what he thinks has to happen for the comic book industry to thrive or at least survive. The attention-grabbing headline says he wants them to "Cancel Every Existing Superhero Comic." Actually, he says he'd cancel 'em and reshape that genre as "a limited new line for a Middle-Grade readership" with simpler characters and storylines and…

Why am I summarizing it? You can read the whole thing in his own words here.

I don't disagree with any part of it unless Gerry thinks that (a) DC and Marvel are likely to try it, (b) that if they did try it, their sales forces would know how to begin reaching that yearned-for New Audience and (c) the companies would give this approach a fair shot at establishing itself before they panicked at the first sales figures, declared the whole thing a failure and went back to the old approach. And then if they behaved as folks running comic book companies have in the past, they'd (d) blame the writers and artists for giving them a non-commercial product, rather than their own inability to sell anything except what they're currently selling (not very well) and their hurry to surrender.

But Gerry's a smart guy. I don't think he believes (a) and he certainly knows how the rest of the story goes.

As long as I've been in comics, which is about the same amount of time as Gerry, I've heard endless discussions and panels and meetings about "reaching a new audience with different kinds of comics." The 2% of the time all that talk has led to an actual attempt, it's been half-assed…and you can kind of sense the sighs of relief when they get in some early numbers that justify saying, "Well, we tried and it didn't work so let's give up on this."

Also, no one is suggesting that if you put out different kinds of comics, the mere fact that they're different will in and of itself attract an audience. They have to be different and good…or at least different and compelling. Sometimes, it's like if you had a pizza business and I suggested you might be able to sell some other kind of food as well. Then you go and put Baked Gopher Guts in Hollandaise Sauce on the menu and when they don't sell, you say, "You were wrong. People only want pizza."

Tomorrow afternoon, I'm hosting a live online YouTube version of The Business of Cartoon Voices, a panel I've been hosting every year at Comic-Con International. For the last umpteen years, my Sunday at that convention has gone as follows. Unless there's a business-type meeting elsewhere, once I get to the convention hall, I go upstairs and stay there until the convention is over.

I start with the 10 AM panel, which is the Annual Jack Kirby Tribute Panel in Room 5AB. That ends at 11:15, whereupon I hike down the hall to Room 6A and host the Sunday Cartoon Voices Panel, the second of two such presentations at the con. That's over at 12:45 and by the time I get the panelists out of the room, it's at least 1 PM.

One of the hardest parts of moderating a panel, especially in one of the big rooms, is ending it on time and clearing out so the next panel can begin on time. Audience members rush the stage at the end to meet the panelists up close and personal and to ask for autographs while I try to do two things. I have to get the panelists in a group so photographers — amateur, freelance and shooting for the convention — can snap off some shots. Then I have to get the panelists to physically leave the stage and exit the hall while the stage crew resets for the next event. That is sometimes more difficult than you'd imagine.

I then have an hour before my next panel. The con is nice enough to provide me with an assistant who usually has my lunch waiting but I may have to wolf it down while giving an interview or discussing business. No matter what, I have to get myself down to Room 25ABC, which is quite a schlep, to set up for the Cover Story panel which starts at 2 PM. If you've never seen Cover Story, it's kind of "shop talk" for artists who create covers for comic books. I invite some good ones to participate and we discuss design, color, art supplies, lettering, logos…even how the cover illustration is cropped.

At 3 PM, I get to stay in the same room for The Business of Cartoon Voices. I have a couple of voice actors and an agent or two and we discuss how one goes about getting into the business of speaking for animated characters. This panel evolved out of the Cartoon Voices Panels I've been doing at Comic-Con for a couple of decades. If you've never seen one, six that I've done online since The Pandemic started can be found on this page. They consist of oft-heard Cartoon Voice Actors demonstrating their art (or craft; it's a little of both) and the panels are very funny and fascinating, not because of me.

The in-person ones used to end with me taking questions from the audience but I stopped doing that some years ago. All the questions seemed to be from folks asking the panelists some version of "How do I get your job?" For reasons of time and mood, that did not seem to be the place to sufficiently answer those questions.

And I'll be honest with you: An awful lot of the questions wound up being from wanna-be voice actors wanting to turn their moment at the microphone into their audition. They'd talk about their careers and what they'd done and they'd start doing voices. Often, they wanted to "work with" (sort of) the panelists. If June Foray was on the panel, at least one audience member would want to do his Bullwinkle impression and have her do Rocky. If Rob Paulsen was on the panel, someone who thought he did a much better impression of The Brain than he did would want Rob to do Pinky so they could have a little exchange.

As a moderator, I always keep an eye on the audience. That's as important as anything else you do when you're hosting something like this. And what I saw when the audience-questioners were trying to make it all about them was members of the audience rolling their eyes, yawning and walking out. It ended those panels on a low note.

At the same time, I had another concern…

Hollywood (and I'm not just using that word in a geographic sense) abounds with wanna-bes…people who dream of careers they may or may not ever attain. It also therefore abounds in people who seek to profit from those dreams. Exploitation seems to materialize in any situation when there are people leaving themselves open to be exploited.

If you're one such person who wants to be a successful, working voice actor, they want to charge you for photos or for coaching or for participating in "showcases." Showcases — which always seem like scams to me — give you the opportunity to pay some serious bucks to perform in front of people who may or may not have the power to hire you to be in a movie or on a TV show. Please read the following paragraph carefully…

There are coaches and photographers and teachers who are honest and good and helpful and you may be able to benefit mightily from their services. Most folks who do make it in the business have studied with good ones. There are also people who will tell you that you have talent and potential, especially if you don't have much of those but do have money. About all they'll do is take that money while moving you no closer to the career you seek. You need to be really, really careful to avoid those in this second category.

I have seen some heartbreaking instances of preying on Aspiring Talent. Often, it takes the form of a parent shelling out cash they can ill-afford to try and give their beloved child the career that the beloved child wants oh so badly. This bothers me and it bothered a great friend of mine named Earl Kress.

Earl passed away in 2011 and I miss him every day. Here is the obit I wrote for him back then and it still makes my eyes damp when I read it. He was a writer but also at times a voice actor. We were introduced by another lovely, talented person I miss a lot…Daws Butler. One of the best voice actors who ever lived.

Earl had co-hosted a few Cartoon Voices Panels with me and we talked a lot about the above two concerns — the Q-and-A segments and what they'd become, and also the predatory gougers of newcomers. He as much as I came up with the idea for the Business of Cartoon Voices panels and he was involved in the first one. I think I wrote here once that those panels were my way to try and lessen the predatory practices. If I said it that way, I was wrong. I should have said our way.

So every year, I don't take questions from the floor at the Cartoon Voice Panels but I do host this seminar. I am very pleased that we have seen audience members — a few, please understand — go from being audience members to being working cartoon voice actors. At least two have even appeared with me on Business of Cartoon Voices Panels to serve as instructors for the kind of folks they used to be.

It's the last program event I do each year in San Diego. It starts at 3 PM and runs 90 minutes…then panelists and audience move out into the corridor and we talk in little groups and one-on-one for at least a half-hour. By the time I get away from that, the convention downstairs has closed so that is how my Comic-Con International always ends. It is always very satisfying for me.

For tomorrow's online version, I've asked two of the best voice actors (and coaches) working today…Debi Derryberry and Bob Bergen. And I've lassoed two of the best agents…Cynthia McLean, who represents some stellar voice actors at SBV Talent, and Paul Doherty who is the "D" in CESD Talent. There are also bad agents in this business and if Cynthia and Paul are too modest to explain why they are among the best, I will.

The panel is live at 4 PM tomorrow. That's Pacific Time so you can figure out what it is in your Time Zone. You can watch it on this site but if you want to ask questions while it's in progress, you'll need to watch it live on YouTube, which you can do via this link. If you miss it or miss part of it, don't fret. It will rerun here and there on demand for a long, long time.

Just think of it as yet another Public Service from newsfromme.tv.

Some of you have read about this. Some of you have written to ask for my views on it…

The Simpsons will no longer use White actors to voice non-White characters, according to the show's producers. "Moving forward, The Simpsons will no longer have white actors voice non-white characters," Fox spokesman Les Eisner said in a statement Friday.

My view? That's fine. I think it's a small step but small steps are better than no steps, assuming they're in the right direction. What is the possible objection to this? Is someone saying they prefer to have cartoon black guys voiced by white guys?

What I would hope is that it doesn't lead to fewer non-white characters on cartoon shows for budgetary reasons. I'm talking here about minor characters, not major ones. Back in the early Hanna-Barbera days, when Bill Hanna went around the studio turning off lights to save money, the non-primetime shows had almost no female characters in them. The Yogi Bear cartoons had Daws Butler doing the voice of Yogi, Don Messick doing Boo Boo and the Ranger, and both of those Caucasian gentlemen taking turns doing all the incidental roles.

Cindy Bear and other female characters rarely turned up in those cartoons because Mr. Hanna didn't like the idea of paying three voice actors. Once in a while, they would spring for it but for the most part, the writers were told to avoid writing female characters. (And once in a while, when a lady had a line or two, they would have Messick do it.)

The Simpsons, of course, can afford anything, it being the most profitable entertainment franchise in the history of mankind. I just hope shows with shallower pockets don't skimp on minor non-white characters because someone says, "That character only has two lines. I don't want to pay an additional actor to come in for two lines. Make that character white so one of our white actors can do the part." I've known animation producers who were cheap enough to think that way.

Of course, ideally most shows would have a multi-racial cast and there'd be folks of all colors among the regulars. I also wouldn't mind seeing them hire older actors more. On The Garfield Show, I hired many actors who were in their seventies and eighties, and even a few in their nineties. We had Stan Freberg, June Foray, Marvin Kaplan, Rose Marie, Jack Riley and a number of others on the program.

But I think the new policy on The Simpsons is fine. I just hope they don't feel they have to take Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, et al, and spray-paint them yellow.

Let's do two of these because the first one is short. A person who for some reason wanted his name withheld wrote to ask about a book in which my friend Harlan Ellison published his draft (not to be confused with the script they actually filmed) of the episode he wrote for the original Star Trek…

In the late 1990s, I considered buying a hardcover of The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay but I already owned Six Science Fiction Plays, the 1976 paperback that included the first publication of Ellison's original draft, so I passed. Today, I finally happened to read the long segment of Ellison's introductory material readable at Amazon's page for the Kindle edition of this book, and I see that he names you first in his "no particular order" list of the "soldiers and scavengers and hustlers and shotgun-riders who helped get this book into your hands." So in what way did you contribute?

What did I contribute? Absolutely nothing. I don't know why my name was in there — in first position of all places. I not only didn't aid the publication of that material in any way, to this day I have never seen that episode or read that script or even obtained a copy of that book it was in. I can admit that now that Harlan has left us.

I have a vague memory that Harlan realized he'd neglected to thank me for some contribution I made to a previous book of his…probably answering some research question he had when he decided, as he often did, that it was easier to phone Evanier than to get out of his chair and find the answer in some book. I think he tried to right that teensy wrong by thanking me in the next book he did.

But I contributed zero to that book. In this world, you're often not acknowledged for the things you do but that's partly offset by the times you get acknowledged for things you didn't do. I was also not a puppeteer on The Muppet Movie and it took me until just recently to convince the Internet Movie Database that I wasn't. They thought I was the one who was wrong.

Our main story tonight, as John Oliver would say, is this question from Chris Gumprich…

For cartoon voice recordings, are they usually done individually (one actor at a time) or in a group? I don't mean someone like Mel Blanc or Paul Frees who would be the only voice actor for an entire cartoon, but I've heard some cases where only one actor at a time records (such as Jason Alexander on Duckman) and others where the entire group records at once, like a radio show (The Simpsons is a good example).

Is there a standard? Is one way "better" than the other, or does it depend on the show?

First off, recording actors separately is called "recording in splits" and getting them all in the same room is called "ensemble." Is one better? I would guess that if you polled everyone in the voice business including actors and directors, you would find about a 95% preference for "ensemble" for TV show work. In some cases — and Jason Alexander on Duckman is as good an example as any — you feel some actor is so valuable to a series and so busy with other commitments that you have to record him when he's available and consume less of his time.

They do "splits" on most feature animation, partly because they employ so many otherwise-busy actors, partly because they usually want eighty takes of every line and partly because you're not going to do an 80-minute script in one session anyway. Tracks for features are often recorded over a long period since the film is produced over a long period. You bring Alec Baldwin in to record half his part and then you bring him back months later to record some more of his part including new lines that have been added or changed in the sections you did before with him.

Most actors prefer "ensemble" because they can feed off the energy of the other actors. For silly technical reasons, I once had to redo a scene with Stan Freberg and June Foray and I had to record them separately on different days. When June read her lines in the original session, she was responding to the lines as delivered by Stan. When she read them in the pick-up session, she was responding to those same lines as read by me. Stan was a great voice actor. I am a rotten voice actor. June was a pro and she gave a wonderful performance both ways but it was a tiny bit better when she was reacting to the great voice actor.

Also, getting everyone together in the same room is a lot more fun. If the director isn't a tyrant (as a few have been), it's almost like a party and the actors do better work when the atmosphere in the studio is supportive and not oppressive. And as a writer-director, I like hearing the actual exchanges because the way some actor reads Line 18 may cause me to change what another actor says in Line 19 or my idea of how Line 19 should be read. In such a situation, you can't change Line 19 if it was recorded before Line 18.

Quick story. One time, I voice-directed a cartoon with a prominent guest star actor who shall remain nameless. Let's just call him "Jeffrey Tambor." His agent said he could only spare an hour so I had to record his lines all at once, then record the rest of the cast after…so the rest of the cast just waited in the lobby, which is something you'll do a lot if you ever become a professional voice actor.

I finished recording this nameless actor in about 40 minutes and told Mr. Tambor he could go run off to do The Larry Sanders Show or wherever he had to be and it was then that he told me, "I don't have to be anywhere." I told him what his agent had said about him having another booking. He said his agent had fibbed and that he was looking forward to recording with other actors because he hadn't done that much before. The few times, he'd done animation voicing in the past, he was usually recorded in "splits."

So I brought the other actors in, we took it from the top and we didn't use any of the lines I'd recorded with him alone. He was fine doing it that way but even better working with the rest of the cast. Most actors are.

Actually, these days there are recording sessions done a third way…everyone's separate in their own studios but they're doing it simultaneously, connected via a video conference. Some shows started doing that before we all went into quarantine but there's a lot more of that now. Even after all this isolation is no longer necessary, that may become the dominant method of recording. We shall see.

Also: The Simpsons was ensemble when it started but I believe these days, some performers have moved outta-town or gotten busy so it's not as "ensemble" as it used to be.

And to bring this full circle, I once cast Harlan Ellison in an episode of the cartoon series, Mother Goose & Grimm. He played a magic mirror that sounded like an old Jewish insult comedian. I wrote it when I thought I could get Shecky Greene in to play the part but when it turned out I couldn't, Harlan was my next choice. He was probably better than Shecky would have been.

In this message, I said that when they did the classic Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, four people — Bill Scott, June Foray, Paul Frees and William Conrad — did all the voices. This prompted Erik Sansom to write…

I know you're a busy man, but I can't let this pass. Are you not counting Fractured Fairy Tales with the late, great Edward Everett Horton?

No, I was just talking about the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons. The Fractured Fairy Tales cartoons were narrated by Mr. Horton and then the other voices were done in each by some combination of Daws Butler, June Foray, Bill Scott and in just a few, Paul Frees. The late Julie Bennett filled in on three cartoons that were recorded during one session that June Foray missed because she was working with Stan Freberg that evening.

While I'm at it: The Mr. Peabody cartoons all featured Bill Scott, Walter Tetley and some combination of Paul Frees, June Foray or, once in a while, Dorothy Scott, who was Bill's wife. The Dudley Do-Right cartoons were voiced by Frees, Foray, Scott, Hans Conried and then some were narrated by Bill Conrad and some by Paul Frees. The Aesop & Son cartoons had Charlie Ruggles as Narrator and they all had Daws Butler, almost all had Bill Scott and when they needed her, June Foray. All of the cartoon segments on the George of the Jungle show were voiced by Scott, Foray, Butler and Frees.

The point is that most cartoons then didn't hire guest actors except if one of the regulars was unavailable. Over at Hanna-Barbera, a lot of the cartoons on shows like Huckleberry Hound or Quick Draw McGraw were just Daws Butler and Don Messick or Daws Butler and Hal Smith. A few were just Daws Butler. The Augie Doggie cartoons were usually just Doug Young and Daws. If they had a guest star, it was because they really needed a female voice or they had a baby duck in the cartoon. They'd call in a baby duck specialist.

In those days, actors were paid a flat session fee, regardless of how many different characters they voiced. If the cartoon had eight voices in it, two guys would do them all. That was why most actors in cartoons were people like Daws and Paul and June and Don and Mel who could do nine different voices in one film. It's also why very few of those cartoons had female characters in them. Once in a while in a cartoon voices by Daws and Don, one of them would try to do a lady's voice.

So most actors then had to be capable of many voices. Hans Conried, who just basically had the one voice, was a rare exception. Jay Ward thought Conried's contribution was so great it was worth the extra cost, rather than have Paul Frees or Bill Scott play Snidely Whiplash.

Also, Dudley Do-Right was produced for prime-time. On a prime-time cartoon like The Flintstones or The Jetsons, there were higher budgets so you might hire more few one-voice actors like Mr. Conried and you were also likely to have more female roles. Both of those series had two female characters in every episode; thus, at least two voice actresses in every recording session.

In the late sixties, the contract was changed so a session fee covered three roles. If your cartoon had 7-9 characters speaking, you would need to pay three session fees. You could pay one actor to do five and the other to do three. Or you could divide them up between three actors for the same cost. This led to even more female roles in cartoons and to more jobs for the actor who could do one or two voices but couldn't do ten.

In the eighties, it was changed so the session fee covered two roles but you would get a small "bump" for the third role. Then if that actor did a fourth part, they'd be paid another session fee which could also cover a fifth role…and then there'd be that "bump" again for the sixth part. When we cast shows, we often think in multiples of three.

When we did Garfield and Friends, Lorenzo Music played Garfield and Lorenzo, wonderful though he was, only had one voice. It was a great voice but it was one voice. (Actually, there were one or two cartoons where he did a line as someone else but that was rare.) Gregg Berger played Odie and Thom Huge played Jon. Gregg and Thom could each do multiple voices and usually each would do his regular character plus two others. So if we had ten speaking parts, the three of them would cover seven of them. If the three other voices were all male or all female, one person could cover them but I might need two. Of course, we could also pay Gregg or Thom a second session fee to do those three but there was no financial advantage to us; just the convenience of not having to bring in another actor and fill out contracts and such for them.

And of course, every so often, I might decide a certain role should be played by a one-voice actor because that person was so perfect. Among the actors we had on who fit into that category were Gary Owens, Marvin Kaplan, Buddy Hackett, James Earl Jones, Don Knotts, Shelley Berman, Dick Beals and Arnold Stang.

We paid our actors very well on that show. The producer agreed to do so but I promised him that I wouldn't hire more actors than absolutely needed for each episode. Whenever we had a bit part in the show that could be male or female — a store clerk or a food server or a newsperson, for example — what would determine if that character was male or female was how many other roles the actors of each gender were otherwise doing in the cartoon. It was a lot simpler in the old days where a director could just bring in Daws Butler and June Foray and they could play everyone.

Here's our pal Bob Bergen again, now demonstrating how he might create a new voice for a new character. As I told you back in this message, Bob's great at simulating voices done in the past by Mel Blanc and others but he's also great at baking from scratch.

If you're interested in how one goes about getting a career like Bob's, ask yourself if you have a range like Bob's. There is room in the field for someone who only has one voice if it's a great one. It didn't hurt my dear friend Lorenzo Music. But I think you can see how if you were a producer looking to cast voices for a new show, it certainly wouldn't be a waste of your time to have Bob Bergen come in…and guys like Bob really can come up with ideas and new sounds this fast.

Bob will not at all mind me saying that there are a number of performers like him out there…guys 'n' gals who can do this. When I was casting and voice-directing The Garfield Show, our core cast consisted of Frank Welker (who played Garfield), Gregg Berger (who was Odie), Wally Wingert (Jon) and sometimes Jason Marsden (Nermal) or Audrey Wasilewsky (Arlene) and a few other recurring roles. All of these folks were and are that versatile and could play many other roles along with their main ones.

I did hire other actors (including Mr. Bergen) to guest in certain episodes, mostly for variety and to bring some different kinds of energy to the recording sessions. But I could have done the show forever with just a couple of those men and a couple of those ladies. When they did the classic Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, four people — Bill Scott, June Foray, Paul Frees and William Conrad — did all the voices — and I mean all.

Hey, Christopher Geoffrey McPherson wants to know something…

Had an interesting dream last night that I won a contest with the prize being a guest-voice spot on The Simpsons. I'll glide past most of the details (including a ride in Dan Castellaneta's giant white pickup and that I woke up before we got into the studio) to ask you the following question: How long does a typical recording session last for an animated show? How much time elapses from when you arrive and high-five Paul Frees, June Foray and Stan Freberg to the moment when you flick off the lights and head out to the Musso and Frank Grill for lunch (or dinner or breakfast)?

Well, I only met Paul Frees over the phone so we didn't do any high-fiving but I did dine with both June and Stan at Musso & Frank, though not at the same time and not after a recording session. And that's not what you wanted to know, is it?

A cartoon recording session can take any length of time, especially if some actor is late or there's music to do. Generally speaking, if there's no singing and everyone's there, a half-hour cartoon should take 2-3 hours to record. That's allowing lots of time to rehearse and discuss and to do it in short chunks so the actors don't feel oppressed. I believe the current union rule is that for a scale session fee, you're allowed four hours before there must be overtime pay and they may still have the rule that says you get eight if it's the first episode of a series.

Once upon a time, you got eight hours all the time for that fee but almost no one was using eight. Four became the accepted max and most sessions finished in three. If you booked an actor to be there at 9 AM to record a half-hour cartoon, they would usually try to also get a booking to do another one at 1 PM or 2 PM. (Obviously, if you were booking and paying them to do two half-hour cartoons, that would change things. Occasionally, a very in-demand actor might do three or four cartoons in one workday, including perhaps an evening session.)

The problem with this was that there was one voice director who took all day to do a cartoon. I was never in one of his sessions but actors who were told me he just loved playing with them so much that he'd needlessly elongate the sessions, wasting a lot of time and doing every line at least ten times. It didn't lead to better work. He'd make an actor do a speech twenty times and then use the second take and folks ran out of energy before they ran out of script pages. I once was offered a voice directing job and the producer said, "Please accept because I don't want to have to hire him."

At some point in the late-seventies, the voice actors went on strike for better pay but also to shorten the official time of a session…from the eight hours in the contract to the four hours in reality. Some said that it was entirely because of this one director. And the contract was changed.

The time it takes can vary. Some actors take several tries and it's worth it because what you wind up with is very good. I did a show with Jonathan Harris, who many of you remember from the TV series, Lost in Space. His first take was good, his second was usually better, his third was even better…and he peaked at around the fourth or fifth.

There are also actors who are so quick and sharp, they nail it the first time. On Garfield and Friends, we could probably have used every "first" take that came out the mouth of Mr. Lorenzo Music. The rest of the cast was also so good that we often recorded a seven-minute cartoon in under fifteen minutes. One time, a guest star was in and out so swiftly, he thought he'd been fired and was being replaced.

And once when I was at Hanna-Barbera, I watched as Don Messick and Frank Welker did a seven-minute cartoon in one continuous take of about seven minutes with each of them doing five or six different characters. I doubt that in the history of animation, there has ever been an actor who could swap voices and be right on top of every cue better than Don Messick. He could sound like five different people having a conversation and even interrupting each other, all in real time.

The Simpsons, by the way, is a special case. They do that more like a live-action situation comedy with table reads and rehearsals, and most or all of the regular actors are paid on a different basis and aren't scurrying off to other sessions afterwards so a session can be much longer. But the Jay Ward cartoons with Paul Frees and June Foray were all recorded at a frantic pace in something approaching real time. You can do that when you have real professionals who are used to working together. And it's a joy to watch in person.

Actress Julie Bennett has died at the age of 88. The cause being reported was complications from COVID-19. Three other people I know have had the disease and recovered from it but I think she's the first person in my Contacts list to have died from it.

For decades, Julie was one of the "workingest" actresses in Hollywood, appearing on dozens of TV shows including but not limited to Highway Patrol, Leave it to Beaver, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, The Donna Reed Show and Get Smart. If you watch reruns of Jack Webb's Dragnet in the sixties, she was on a lot of them and she was usually guilty. She also worked a lot doing cartoon voices.

Sometimes when writing of Jimmy Weldon, who's 96, people refer to him as the last surviving cartoon voice performer from the early days of Hanna-Barbera. But Julie was doing the voice of Cindy Bear there before Jimmy began doing Yakky Doodle. She also did voices on a number of Jay Ward and Warner Brothers cartoons when June Foray was unavailable, along with cartoons for UPA, Larry Harmon and many smaller studios. She was heard in the animated feature Gay Purr-ee, as well as Hey There, It's Yogi Bear.

I hired her a few times on Garfield and Friends and she played Aunt May on the 1994 animated Spider-Man show. She was a nice lady and when she hit a period in her life when she wasn't getting enough voiceover work, she put her skills to work in other ways. She adopted two other identities — one as a manager of actors and another as a realtor. She had another name and voice and telephone as the realtor and her many clients never knew that the lady who sold them their house was Cindy Bear. I think but am not sure her acting clients knew her secret.

We were friends for a while and while I guess I could have figured it out from her credits, it didn't occur to me that she was twenty years older than I was. She seemed very lovely and alive and just charming and talented. You can see it and hear that in all that she did.

There are a number of obits up on all the major news sites about Lee Mendelson. They get his career mostly right but some had a little problem with the longevity of the main show I worked with him on, Garfield and Friends.

CNN says he did "over 100 episodes," which is only technically correct. Variety and People both said the show lasted from 1991 to 1994. CBR.com, which lately is vying with Donald Trump for erroneous statements, says Lee "executive produced 64 episodes of Garfield and Friends."

The Los Angeles Times didn't mention the series at all and TMZ did but didn't say how many episodes there were. With their usual flair for accuracy though, TMZ did run what they thought were two photos of Lee. One was and the other was of his partner, Bill Melendez.

The correct answer is that Garfield and Friends was on for seven years and 121 episodes, and Lee Mendelson was an Executive Producer on all of them.

But that's not the story I want to tell you here. The story I want to tell you here is about some specials that Lee did — hour-long prime-time specials that celebrated newspaper comic strips. They featured historical lessons about the form, interviews with cartoonists, musical numbers about comic strips and the last two of these specials even animated sequences of some newspaper strips that had never been animated before.

The first was called The Fabulous Funnies and it ran on NBC on 2/11/68. A description of it that I just stole off the website of Lee Mendelson Film Productions said…

Produced for NBC-TV network broadcast in cooperation with the National Cartoonists Society. The Fabulous Funnies is a one hour special on the history of the comic strip in America. It features some of the country's greatest cartoonists and their creations, from Barney Google to Dick Tracy. Hosted by Carl Reiner, the program also shows the artists at work, their characters animated, and a medley of songs from the comics performed by the Doodletown Pipers. The show is a unique combination of animation and live Action with a musical score by John Scott Trotter.

The ratings were huge and the folks at CBS, for whom Lee was producing the Charlie Brown specials, said to him, "Why didn't you offer that special to us?" Lee replied, "I did. You didn't think it would do very well and passed so I sold it to NBC. The folks at CBS said, "Well…we want the next one." It wasn't until 1980 that Lee did the next one, which was called The Fantastic Funnies and, yes, it was on CBS. According to that same website…

This 60 minute television special is a tribute to the history of the comic strip. Loni Anderson hosts with interviews of the 14 most famous cartoonists. The show features animation of all the famous comic strips along with a number of musical segments and a comedy sketch by Howard Hesseman. Music by Ed Bogas and Judy Munsen.

There were several newly-produced segments animating then-new newspaper strips that had never been animated before, including Garfield The reaction to just a few minutes of the lasagna-eating cat in that special led to a second series of award-winning animated specials for Lee.

CBS also wanted another "Funnies" special but he was busy, plus he felt — even if the network didn't — that a TV special saluting comic strips was the kind of idea that would only work about once a decade or so. He put it off and put it off and eventually decided to just wait until he could make the next one about the 100th anniversary of newspaper strips.

Exactly what year that anniversary would be is a bit arguable depending on what cartoon-in-print you believe qualifies as the first comic strip. I have seen scholars of the form almost come to blows about it. Lee decided the first was something-or-other in 1897 so in 1997, he produced The Fabulous Funnies: The First 100 Years and he asked me to write it and co-produce with him. Quoth the website…

Using comic characters as hosts, this show celebrates 100 years of comic strips in America. From "Orphan Annie" and "Blondie" to "Peanuts" and "Shoe," cartoonists share the ideas and inspiration behind the creation of their comic strips. Cartoonists include: Chic Young (Blondie); Al Capp (L'il Abner); Dale Messick (Brenda Starr); Lynn Johnston (For Better or Worse); and Cathy Guisewite (Cathy).

Do you remember that show? If you think you did, you're wrong. It never aired. CBS paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for it, we produced it and delivered it and they said, "Great job! We'll find a spot on the schedule for it!" and then never found one. It was during a period when the three major networks aired very few specials and the ones that did get on had to be really, really important…like Emmy Awards important. They'd discovered that if a weekly series had a loyal following and you pre-empted it one week, not all of that loyal following remained loyal enough to not be following some other show the following week.

It had not always been like that but in and around 1997, that was the way audiences were behaving. Or at least that was Conventional Wisdom at the networks at the time.

The broadcast of The Fabulous Funnies: The First 100 Years was delayed and delayed, and at one point there was some discussion of us going back and redoing some narration to change "This year is the 100th anniversary of comic strips" to "Last year was the 100th anniversary of comic strips." Lee also thought about maybe picking something in 1898 to declare as the first newspaper strip so he could keep "The First 100 Years" in the title. Finally though, they decided they were never going to air it and that's why you've never seen it. Since you probably never will, I'll tell you a few things about it…

There was no live host. One fourth of it was hosted by Charlie Brown, one fourth by Mother Goose and Grimm, one fourth by Cathy (from Cathy Guisewite's strip of the same name) and one fourth by Momma (from Mell Lazarus's strip) — all animated. June Foray, by the way, did the voice of Momma. There were also freshly-produced segments wherein some relatively new strips were animated for the first time, including Ernie by Bud Grace and Jump Start by Robb Armstrong.

There were interviews of cartoonists — some newly-recorded, others pulled from previous specials or Lee's film archives. I did some traveling for it and interviewed Charles Schulz up in Santa Rosa, Stan Lee and Mike Peters back here, Robb Armstrong in New York, and a few others. Yes, I know Stan Lee was not a cartoonist. We cribbed a musical number from the 1968 special and it was a pretty nice end product if I do say so myself. Since I'm one of the few people alive who saw it, I have to say so myself.

Still, my most positive memory of it was working more closely with Lee than I had on other projects. He had that rare, wonderful ability that you don't always find in producers. He knew how to be there when he was needed and how to leave the other folks working on the show alone when he wasn't needed and on Garfield, he'd left me pretty much alone. It was while putting this project together than I really began to appreciate how good he was at producing television shows and I learned a number of things that I wish I'd learned a decade or two earlier. I'll tell you about all that in Part 2 tomorrow.

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