So what's going on with Trump and all these contempt fine and threats about throwing him behind bars? An associate of the Legal Eagle explains…

I received this question from "Disneyfan94 The Muppets Forever." I don't usually answer questions from people who hide behind handles but I'm going to take the chance that that's this person's real name — Mr. and Mrs. The Muppets Forever had a child and named him or her Disneyfan94. It's probably a very common given name these days. Anyway, here's what he or she wrote…

First off, I'm a huge fan of your blog. I know you worked with Arnold Stang on Garfield and Friends and due to him arriving at the recording studio early, you were able to discuss many aspects of his career including Top Cat. Could you please share some of the stories he told about voicing T.C.?

That was a great day for me. In fact, I spent a great week in New York then, visiting the DC offices, the MAD offices, the Marvel offices, the offices of David Letterman's show, and I think I even had lunch with Joe Simon. And of course, I went to Broadway shows. I took Imogene Coca (yes, the Imogene Coca) to dinner at Sardi's and then to see the musical, Crazy For You. And I took my friend Carol Lay to see Neil Simon's then-latest play, Laughter on the 23rd Floor in which Nathan Lane played Jackie Gleason playing Sid Caesar.

Then on Thursday, I recorded the voice tracks for three cartoons for our show with East Coast talent. It was something I wanted to do and even though it cost a lot of money, our producer was nice enough to indulge me. This is Lee Mendelson I'm talking about…the best producer I ever worked with.

Thursday morn, I checked out of my hotel in New York and was picked up by a limo (paid for by Lee) which took me to a recording studio in New York (paid for by Lee) arriving at 10 AM so I could check and make sure everything would be ready for our first actor to arrive at 11 AM. To my delight, everything was ready and the first actor was already there. The first actor was Arnold Stang. He was sitting there, reading a magazine, looking exactly like Arnold Stang.

We couldn't start until the other actors were in place in the studio we used in Los Angeles.  The two studios would then be linked by some sort of ultra-strong digital phone connection and I could direct everyone at once.  If you saw the finished cartoons, you would never imagine that one of the actors and the director were 2,815 miles away from the other actors and the main recording engineer.

Call time for the West Coast actors — Lorenzo Music, Thom Huge, Gregg Berger and Howard Morris — was 8 AM (L.A. time).  Thus, I had an hour to talk with Arnold about a whole range of things but mostly Top Cat, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and working with Milton Berle.   No, I did not ask him about Berle's genitalia but we did talk about the recording studio — the name of which I don't remember, sorry — where he'd recorded voice tracks for Paramount cartoons like "Herman and Katnip" and many other shows.

The main thing I recall from our Top Cat discussion is the fine line they walked to not echo the Sgt. Bilko show too much.  As you may know, the first episode or two were originally recorded with an actor named Michael O'Shea voicing the title character.  Mr. O'Shea does not seem to have done any produced cartoon voice work for Hanna-Barbera or anyone and many different stories have circulated as to why his voice tracks were dumped and Arnold was hired.

Daws Butler had told me that at one point he was going to be Top Cat's voice.  He recorded either an episode or a demo of some sort using what was essentially the same voice he used for Hokey Wolf.

My great friend, the late Earl Kress and I used to puzzle about another piece of this puzzle.  On Top Cat, H-B used Maurice Gosfield, who'd played Duane Doberman on the Bilko show, to voice Benny the Ball.  Obviously, that was because of the Bilko connection…so why were none of the voices of Top Cat's cronies done by his fellow Bilko cast mates, Allan Melvin or Harvey Lembeck?  Melvin was then doing a lot of voices for H-B and Lembeck, though I don't think he ever received any screen credit there, can be heard voicing minor roles on one or two concurrent H-B shows. (Before anyone asks: Joe E. Ross, who was a semi-regular on Bilko and later did voices for H-B, was filming Car 54, Where Are You? in New York while Top Cat was recording in L.A.)

The answer to all this, I learned from Arnold that day, was that Top Cat vacillated between being too much like Bilko and not enough like Bilko.  "The lawyers couldn't make up their minds," he told me.  "One week, they wanted me to sound more like Phil Silvers and the next week, they wanted me to tone it down."

Apparently, Daws sounded too much like Phil Silvers and Mr. O'Shea didn't sound enough like him.  Arnold was the compromise.  Arnold didn't know anything about Melvin or Lembeck ever being part of the cast but that might have been before his time there.  He was good friends with both of them.  (He also was occasionally recorded separately from the other actors because he was sometimes commuting from New York. At the time, technology did not allow them to be able to record the way we did in '94. Some of Arnold's later voice work for H-B was done that way.)

Arnold was also good friends with Howard Morris, who was in our regular Garfield and Friends cast and was in the studio in Los Angeles that day.  Once we had the L.A. folks online, Howie and Arnold got to talking about all the times — and there were a lot of them — they'd been up for the same parts.  Howie had beaten Arnold out for the title role in the Beetle Bailey cartoons and the voice of the koala in the Qantas Airlines commercials.  Arnold had beaten Howie out for the role of Hysterium in the national touring company of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and a part in the cinema classic, Skidoo. Of Skidoo, Arnold said to Howie, "I should have let you have that one."

I told of other memories of that day in this post.  Before he left, Arnold was nice enough to record an answering machine message for me…

After we finished recording, the limo took me to the airport and I flew down to Orlando, Florida for a Garfield conference.  Many moons ago, I wrote a column about what happened down there.  I've never posted it on this website but in the next few days, I will.  And if I remember anything else Arnold Stang told me that day, I'll post it.  He was a great talent and I'm so glad I got the chance to spend time with him and work with him.  I have worked with no one else in the animation business who would have spent the money that Lee Mendelson spent to make that happen.

In case you haven't seen the announcements, the folks who bring you MeTV, MeTV+ and a whole bunch of other channels will soon be bringing you MeTV Toons, a channel which will run 24/7 cartoons. Many will be from the Warner Bros. library…so a lot of Bugs Bunny, Scooby Doo, Flintstones, Jetsons, etc., but they will be also tapping other toon libraries. Mentioned so far are Rocky and Bullwinkle, Casper, Betty Boop, Speed Racer, Woody Woodpecker and others.

More exciting for some of us is that our friends Jerry Beck and Bob Bergen are involved — Jerry as a consultant and as a producer of new content to run before and in-between classic cartoons, Bob as the signature voice of the channel.

The announcements I've seen say the channel will commence on June 25, 2024.  There will soon be info available on how you can watch it on your TV.  This is all very good news.

The late Bill Finger, as many but not enough of us know, was the unbilled-for-far-too-long co-creator of Batman and much of the Batman mythos. Throughout his life, he received way too little credit for this (i.e., none) and nowhere near enough financial reward.

That injustice has been undone somewhat as the credits on Batman now say "Created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger," whereas they used to just say "Created by Bob Kane." It's sad that Mr. Finger never lived to see this happen but at least it has happened. Unfortunately, his face continues to be miscredited. Very few photos of Finger exist and one often sees photos of other longtime contributors to DC Comics identified as Finger.

Most often, it's a photo of Robert Kanigher, who wrote Wonder Woman for about eight million years and who edited and often wrote DC's war comics for a very long time. When Kanigher received a posthumous Bill Finger Award, I procured a photo of him from a relative of Kanigher's and did an awful lot of Photoshopping to make it look even that good. It was part of the press release announcing the award.

The way search engines like Google and Bing index photos is that they find photos and then they find words and names near those photos. If I were to go onto the 'net and post a photo of you on many websites with the word "aardvark" near your pic, the engines would eventually decide you were an aardvark and would probably display the pic of you when someone searched for an image of an aardvark.

Because the photo of Kanigher often appeared near the term "Bill Finger" on the web, the search engines display it when you search for a photo of Bill Finger…so I keep seeing Kanigher identified as Finger.  I made up this graphic and I'm posting it here to alert anyone who comes here…but I'm also posting it because I want them to get into the databases of Google, Bing and other search engines.

If you have a website that has anything to do with comic books or Batman or which just gets a lot of hits from the "spiders" that crawl the web collecting images for search engines, please copy the image below and post it on your site. Do not change the name of it.

Put it up and if enough folks do this, it will be seen among the first images when someone searches for a photo of Bill Finger, the most neglected man in comics.  Thank you.

Micah Olsen sent me the following…

I was interested to read about the cancelled DC comics you mentioned, and it brought to mind a long running question I've had about them. I read all of those short-lived 60's series you mentioned a couple of decades after they were published. I especially liked Bat Lash, but I agree with you that they were all pretty good and I was disappointed that they didn't have much longer runs.

My question is what was happening in the market in the late 60's that caused the sales to go down enough that new series were quickly cancelled? It seems like series started earlier in the 60's from DC (Atom, Aquaman, Hawkman, Metamorpho, etc.) lasted longer. Even a non-superhero series like Captain Storm got 18 issues. I've figured something was going on that made it tougher for new series to get a foothold — beyond panicked employees at DC. As a reader at the time and a professional soon thereafter, do you have any insights about what why new series had so much trouble catching on in the late 60's?

I've discussed this at length with a lot of folks who were around then, a few of whom are still around and we're still discussing it. My answer is that there were many problems but I would put "panicked employees" pretty high on the list. When a bi-monthly comic ran 5-7 issues, that generally means that they gave up on it after seeing the early sales figures on the second issue.

I also think that kids were increasingly non-captivated by bi-monthly books, which is the way DC tried launching almost everything that was new. Most of the Marvel books were monthly and interconnected so you could get a couple visits to that world every week, whereas you had to wait a long time between issues of Anthro. Kids raised on television didn't like to wait for their entertainment.

In the late sixties/early seventies, the system via which comic books were distributed was crumbling and Marvel was gaining a headlock on what was left of it. Fewer and fewer stores had comic book racks. In 1970 when my pal/partner Steve Sherman and I visited DC Comics for the first time, the guy in charge — Carmine Infantino — kept quizzing on where we bought our comics in Los Angeles. He was asking us if we had any ideas of how DC could get comics to more potential buyers in our town. He wouldn't have been asking us if Independent News — a division of the same company that was the major magazine distributor in the U.S. — had any ideas.

But they clearly didn't. And what we learned was that the folks over in Independent office had very little confidence that the problem could be solved…or was worth solving. It was rumored around the DC office that some were suggesting that DC just scale back to the few properties that had merchandising value — Superman, Batman, a few others — and just publish those books, maybe as reprints, to keep the properties "alive."

Infantino was a wonderful artist. If you only know his later work, seek out what he did before he was elevated into DC management. Brilliant designs, brilliant storytelling. And when he was moved from drawing comics into the editorial division, he greatly improved the look and feel of the DC line, especially the covers…but only for a while. Others may give you other views of this but mine is that Carmine's skills were largely creative and he was installed in a position that required more of a head for business and marketing than he possessed.

As I keep pointing out here, when a TV show is canceled, that doesn't always mean it was a show no one wanted to watch. It may have been a case of someone in management panicking or making a bad call and dropping a show that would have built up a solid following if it had been given more time. There are plenty of examples of programs that were almost canceled but were given enough time including M*A*S*H, Cheers and Seinfeld. I don't see why anyone would think that the decisions to cancel certain comics after a few issues couldn't have been bad decisions.

When my ankle gets better, I wanna learn to do this…

Yes, it's hard to look away. Donald seems to be simultaneously complaining that the trial is going too fast and that it's taking forever. To the extent the latter is the case, a lot of that is because his side is refusing to concede anything, no matter how trivial. If the prosecution wants to show a video of Trump saying something in a speech, the Trump side won't agree to stipulate that the clip is legitimate and that Trump said what he said on the tape.

The prosecution has to bring in a witness to swear under oath that the clip is real. Some of the lawyers analyzing the trial for the media are saying it would shave a week or two off this trial if Trump's team would just concede little undeniable things like that.

Some of those analyst-type attorneys are saying that the prosecution doesn't need to call Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels to testify because everything they could add to the record has been or will be said by other witnesses. But other pundit-lawyers are saying the prosecution should call them because Trump wants his lawyers to savage them on the stand and that will just make the jury think a lot less of Donald.

Or they say it will drive home the point that Trump, in accord with his "never concede anything, just attack, attack, attack" policy is a liar. Does anyone still believe he never knew either, let alone both of those ladies?

"Never concede anything, just attack, attack, attack" probably worked well for Trump in other battles in other venues but it doesn't seem to work when he's a defendant in a court of law. In some kinds of disputes, it enabled him to control the dynamics of the battle and to make others play on his turf according to his rules. That doesn't work so well in a courtroom with rules and a judge.

The New York Times says Trump is furious that his lawyers — Todd Blanche, especially — aren't aggressive enough. Sounds like he wants less legal procedure and more name-calling. The prosecution showed some old clips of Trump calling Michael Cohen a great, trustworthy lawyer. You get the feeling that as Counselor Blanche watched those clips, he was thinking, "Hey, that's what my client was saying about me a few weeks ago"?

You may have seen Matt Granite "The Deal Guy" on YouTube telling you what's cheap this month at Aldi, Dollar Tree, Sam's Club or Costco. I find his videos rather entertaining even though I don't shop at Aldi, Dollar Tree or Sam's Club and my Costco never has anything he finds at his Costco.

Still, every so often, he does a video that could really save anyone serious money. Here he is talking about how to book cheap hotel rooms and I'll bet there are a couple of things in there that you never knew about. I did know about booking through a Vegas hotel's loyalty program. I got rooms at Harrah's for only the Resort Fee a few times. But some of Deal Guy's other tips were news to me, as they'll probably be news to you…

We talk a lot about actors on this blog but the kind that I think interests me the most are those performers whose names few people know but who worked constantly. They usually didn't get famous but they got a lot of jobs. At one point in his career, Jamie Farr was in that category…then he got cast as Corporal Klinger on M*A*S*H. If he hadn't, he would have been like Peter Leeds…an actor who worked constantly but there's no way I can point to one role and you'd all know who he was.

Back in this post, I told you about Eddie Ryder, an actor who was probably on network television every week for a decade or two but never in one identifiable role. The above photo of him is probably from the TV series, Dr. Kildare, where he had a recurring role as a doctor who had a couple of lines (usually just a couple) some weeks.  As I watch old TV shows from the sixties and seventies, I spot him all the time.

Recently, some folks on Facebook have taken to scanning and posting pages from old issues of TV Guide. I noticed this morning a page from Sunday Evening, April 28, 1974.  As you can see below, the CBS affiliate in whatever city this was from was rerunning an episode of Mannix and there's Eddie Ryder's name in the Guest Cast…

So let's say you watched that episode of Mannix and didn't feel like reaching for the remote control after it or — and this was frighteningly possible back in '74 — your TV didn't have one.  You stay tuned for the next show on that channel — a rerun of a Barnaby Jones — and guess who's in it…

I will bet you that isn't the only time that happened. That guy was on TV about as often as Ronald McDonald…or even Jamie Farr.

Recently, the UCLA Film & Television Archive got hold of a rare video and they did a restoration on it. It's an episode of the Kraft Music Hall and it's the oldest entertainment program known to survive on color videotape. The show aired October 8, 1958 on NBC and to be honest, it ain't all that wonderful. But it does have a cameo appearance by Bob Hope, a musical number featuring Lou Jacobi and the opening has a few moments from The Price is Right when it was hosted by Bill Cullen. And it's a piece of history…

This one comes from Martin Lund…

I was wondering if there was a "standard introduction package" for creative talent, recently assigned to a new comic book property, to help them get to know about said property. Say, if for some reason, an artist was familiar with the look of Batman and knew how to draw him, but was unfamiliar with the 85+ years of lore and needed a brush-up (i.e., always remember that Bruce Wayne is now blonde and cross-eyed without his cowl, after that incident with the Joker that must not be mentioned…). Or a writer gets assigned to a new Forbush Man title, but has no idea who that character is — at all (egads)!

Any insights on this to share? Have you even been assigned characters for a comic book that you weren't familiar with, and if so, how did you go about researching and/or learning about them? I could imagine that if we were talking TV shows or maybe even movies, that there would be a show bible. Does that exists for comic books as well?

Almost never. Basically, what you're talking about is within the job description of the editor. When New Talent (writer and/or artist) is assigned to a new book, it's up to the editor to brief them about what they want kept consistent with previous issues…and also what they might want changed. In addition to such instructions, they might supply certain past issues to use as reference — or even tell the new guy not to read certain past issues.

We have had occasional instances where a new person came onto a comic, changed things and readers were irate that he or she had not followed what had been done before. And what the irate folks didn't realize was that the new person's orders were to change the comic and they might even have been told not to read earlier issues.

But generally, the editor tells them everything they need to know and gives them the necessary reference material. Or at least, that's what the editor is supposed to do.

A whole mess of people — Tom Stern and Tom Mason to start — have identified the unidentified person in the photo in the previous post…and I was right to recall his name as Frank. It's Frank McGinty, who I knew from conventions and from the fan group, Capa-ALPHA. If you're reading this, Frank, drop me a note and please accept my apologies for not recalling your surname. Here's the pic again but with his name in place…

Recently, I was talking with the fine illustrator Ken Steacy and he mentioned a photo that he took at a gathering in my living room a long, long time ago. He was counting on my fabled excellent memory to recall the name of one individual in the photo. I absolutely remembered the also-fine illustrators William Stout, Dave Stevens, Steve Leialoha and Sergio Aragonés. I of course remembered the fine writers Len Wein and William Rotsler and the fine could-do-everything Trina Robbins and I could even identify the fine me.  I have added labels accordingly.

What I couldn't recall, and Ken couldn't either, was the name of the gent between Stout and Stevens.  I think his name was Frank but you could put me on the witness stand, swear me in and have me grilled by the entire prosecution team in the Donald Trump Civil Trial and I couldn't come up with that gentleman's name.

If he reads this, I apologize to him…and if you know who he is, could you please let me know?  It may help if you make the image larger on your screen, which you can do by clicking on it.

Audra McDonald sings "I Could Have Danced All Night" from My Fair Lady and then gives her audience the chance to sing it for her and with her. Her whole show from the London Palladium will debut on Great Performances on PBS on May 17…

While recuperating from my broken ankle, I've been living largely on the second story of my home.  I can get down the stairs (and back up) when I need to go to a doctor appointment but it takes a while, strains my healing appendage and kinda requires someone else be present to "spot me," using that term in the way it's used by gymnasts.  Basically, I live upstairs where I have my bedroom, two bathrooms, my office and a few other rooms — everything I need except a kitchen.

In one of my upstairs rooms, I have a small refrigerator and a microwave oven but there's a limit to how much good they can be at mealtime. Every morning, my Daredevil Cleaning Lady comes over, cleans up the rooms I inhabit, lays out clean clothes for me to wear, washes the dirty ones, etc. She also goes down to the kitchen, makes me breakfast and brings it up to my office. Sometimes, she brings me lunch the same way…or I order lunch from a meal delivery service. In that case, the food is delivered to my front step and my D.C.L. (or my assistant if she's here then) brings it upstairs. The point is that I don't go downstairs to get food.

For dinner, I sometimes have something in the upstairs fridge I can heat in the microwave but most of the time, I have a friend visiting and we order something delivered. When it arrives on my doorstep, the friend goes down to get the delivery and bring it up. Last night, the friend was a lady named Adriana. She called to say she was on her way and since she was famished, asked that I order dinner so it would be on my front porch around the time she arrived. Obviously, it wouldn't hurt the chow if it sat there five or ten minutes before she got here.

So I used an app to place the order. I got her what she wanted and I ordered chicken parm for myself. A few seconds later, I received a text message confirmation that my order was being prepared…but they would not, like this restaurant had in the past, have someone deliver it to my porch. They were instead sending a robot — one of these…

The app did not ask my OK on this. It just told me that was how I'd be getting my order.

The restaurant is located 1.3 miles from me and ordinarily, a kid driving a Kia would have my order here in under ten minutes. Instead, the robot would take about forty minutes and would then wait outside on the sidewalk for someone to go out and take the meals out of it. There was no way I could have gotten out there myself to do that…which created an element of concern when Adriana texted that she'd suddenly been delayed in leaving her place.

Apparently, there is a way on the app to request that they send a person instead of a robot but I never found it. I also couldn't find out, at least on the app, how long the robot would wait outside with our dinner before it gave up and headed back to where it came from.

I did learn that the robot is not like a self-driving car with no driver. Someone someplace is piloting it. Where this person is and how they control it and what they can see is a complete mystery to me. And in an area where I sometimes can't drive ten blocks without my phone cutting out on me, I wonder what kind of wi-fi connection the robot has with its operator.

I won't keep you in suspense any longer. Adriana got here before the robot so we could both watch from my office window as it approached. It came down a street towards my house and stopped at the corner where there's a traffic light to wait for a WALK signal.

Most of the corners in my neighborhood are beveled like ramps so a person in a wheelchair could cross but the robot wasn't at one of those corners. We watched as it hesitated to "step off" the curb, then it turned and went down the sidewalk until it found a driveway to enable it to cross. On the other side of the street, it located another driveway to get back to the sidewalk and headed towards me.

Finally, it parked itself in front of my house and I received a text message that it was outside and waiting for me. Adriana had to take my cell phone down and press a button on the text message that sent a signal to unlock the robot's lid. She opened it up, took out our food, shut the lid and brought our supper inside while the robot headed back to the restaurant.

The food was good and it was hot. I guess there's some heating element in the robot that keeps it that way. Still, I'm wondering what would happen if I'd ordered two hot entrees plus a frozen dessert. Or something like fried food that just plain isn't that good forty minutes after it's cooked, regardless of how you keep it warm. The robot did not seem large enough to hold a decent-sized pizza and I would think that that's what an awful lot of food delivery orders are about.

So I've decided I don't care for delivery by robot and if I knew more about how it works, I might care even less. How could this be cost-effective? It's not like those Doordash dashers it's displacing are commanding huge paychecks. Are the robots' drivers located in some foreign country where they can be paid nickels? If so, would that save enough to make up for having to design, build and maintain the robots?

Plus, I think you'd have to have a local human presence to service and repair the robots and to jump into action when one gets lost or tips over or is hit by a car or hijacked or its operator loses contact. We can all think of so many possible disasters.

I already don't like how long delivery-by-robot takes compared to delivery-by-human so I called the restaurant today and asked how I could order and specify a non-robotic delivery. The man who answered the phone didn't know and suggested I call the meal delivery service and ask. He seemed very worried that I would stop ordering from his restaurant because of this…and that puzzled me further. To the long list of things I don't understand about this, add the relationship between the restaurant and the company that operates the robots.

And what I really don't know is how many Americans will be thrown outta work by robot delivery drones. If it's a significant number, that alone would be reason enough to not patronize businesses that utilize them. I don't care how Jetsony it feels to get my chicken parm that way.