I very much liked the Broadway musical version of the Disney Beauty and the Beast. Liked it way more than The Lion King, which was way more successful. The Lion King felt more to me like something that belonged at a Disney theme park whereas Beauty and the Beast felt more like a Broadway show and had what was for me a more captivating storyline. I felt more emotionally involved with it.

Yes, I know this is probably a minority opinion but I think we're still allowed to have those in this country. (And before anyone asks: I haven't seen any of the other Disney Broadway offerings.)

This video is from the rehearsal period for Beauty and the Beast when they invited some of the press to come in and see a few of the numbers performed without sets, costumes, a full orchestra or context. I'm not sure why this is supposed to help sell tickets but most shows do it so I guess it does…

Brian Dreger has another Brian Dreger question…

I don't know much about magic/magicians except, as a kid, I was fascinated by magic & ventriloquism…but everything I knew pretty much came from adverts in comic books.

I'm curious about how someone becomes a magician. Do you have to apprentice with someone? Can you just study a bunch of books in a very good library? I've heard Penn Jillette — and I think even you — talk about being fascinated by a great magician because, although you know how the trick works technically, you don't know how they accomplished their specific variation.

How does one learn all that? It seems impossible that you can learn it from books. I mean, it can't be like learning to tap dance.

Well, in a way it is. Being a great tap dancer requires years of practice, practice and more practice…and so does being a great or even a good magician. I mean, I could teach you a dozen card tricks that each take about ten minutes to master but about all they're good for is impressing the easily-impressed.

And you can learn a lot from books. Every good magician I know has a serious library. Actually, these days, it's books and videos. You can learn a lot that way. In fact, if you see a terrific magician do a unique trick on TV — not the cups and balls, not the linking rings, not the torn-and-restored newspaper, something that looks newly-invented — there's a good chance you can purchase a tutorial by that magician via some online magic dealer.

Then, you have to practice, practice, practice before you perform it for your friends and relatives. Come to think of it, one of my early heroes of magic, the late Don Alan, advised, "When you believe you've practiced enough and are ready to do the trick for friends, practice six more months before you do." Remember you can only perform it for them once.

Don Alan became a hero of magic to me in 1961 (I was nine) with a syndicated TV show he did called Magic Ranch. Another was Mark Wilson who, beginning a year earlier, starred in The Magic Land of Allakazam on CBS Saturday morn and later on ABC. Yet another was Chuck Jones the Magic Man, not to be confused with Chuck Jones the Cartoon Director. The Magic Man had a local show on Channel 13 where he showed Felix the Cat cartoons and, in-between, performed difficult magic tricks and taught simple ones.

I got to know all three men but never thought of pursuing their careers. I loved magic but I loved comic books and cartoons and writing-in-general more. I had to pick at least one to not pursue, lest I devote insufficient practice to all. So the magic had to go. I still love it but not enough to practice, practice, practice to the exclusion of my other interests.

You don't have to apprentice with anyone to become a magician, though that wouldn't hurt. Heck, once you can perform one trick, you're a magician, kind of. To be a real one, you just have to have some talent, have some skill, have some sense of showmanship…and want to do it badly enough to put in a zillion-and-a-half hours.

MAD magazine debuted as a comic book, the first issue of which went on sale on July 10, 1952.  It turned into a magazine as of #24 and the numbering continued until #550, whereupon the numbering started over again with a new #1.  The current issue is #36 so there have been 586 regular issues of MAD.

For the purposes of this discussion, we are not counting annuals, specials, paperbacks, hardcovers or any other form even though some of them contained material published nowhere else.

Of all the writers and artists who contributed to those 586 issues, the most prolific was (note the past-tense) the late Al Jaffee who had new material in 509 issues. But with the last issue of MAD, my friend and collaborator Sergio Aragonés tied Al's record and with the current issue, Sergio has taken the lead with work in 510 issues.

Sergio's work first appeared in issue #76 and he has been in every issue since with the exception of #111.

In case anyone's interested, the next most prolific contributor is writer Dick DeBartolo. For a complete list, check out Mike Slaubaugh's website.. Since Sergio will probably be contributing to further issues, it is doubtful that anyone will ever wrest the title away from him.

Here from various sources, we have seventeen minutes of Charles Schulz doing what he did so well. I got to spend a few hours with him in his studio one day and for much of our conversation, he was doing this. He almost didn't seem to be thinking much about what he was drawing but (of course) he was…

From Derek Teague comes a message with a few questions…

Were you working for Welcome Back, Kotter when DC Comics issued its comic book adaptation during  the summer of 1976? What might have the reaction to it from the cast and crew? Did DC send free comic books to be used as on-air props?

Yes, I was a story editor on the TV show when DC put out the comic and I wrote two issues of it. I posted a bit about that experience back here.

As far as I know, DC never sent them anything and the cast members probably never saw most of the t-shirts, games, coloring books and other Kotter merchandise unless they went looking for that stuff in stores. We did hear occasional grumbling from some about how their likenesses were being exploited without them receiving any compensation.

Actually, if what I heard was correct, the "kids" on the show weren't paid all that much. One of the producers told me I was getting more dough per show than John Travolta and I wasn't taking home a very large paycheck.

If I was getting more than on that show than John, me was more than making up for it with outside gigs. While we were shooting the last few episodes of the only season I worked on, he was commuting to New York on the weekends for prep on Saturday Night Fever.

But that's what happens when you're low on or devoid of credits and you get hired in show business: You kinda have to accept the lowest-possible offer or something close to it. Once you're part of a success, you can demand and get way more. The first time I ran into him post-Kotter, Travolta told me about the airplane he'd just bought.

So I don't recall the cast — The Sweathogs, at least — having any awareness of the comic with one exception. Bobby Hegyes, who played Juan Epstein on the show, once saw some black-and-white Xeroxes of the first of the two issues I wrote of the comic book. I don't recall why I had them in my office or how he happened to see them but he flipped through the packet and said, "A little light on Epstein," which was the same thing he said about every single script we taped that season.

Back to Derek's message…

At the time, I was entering high school and the bloom seemed to be off the rose. My fellow ninth graders didn't think WBK was cool anymore – especially since ABC mistakenly shifted the program to lead off its Thursday night line-up.

I'm curious why you think that was a mistake since I believe the show won its time slot every single week that season.

I've noticed that, in the second season of Kotter that the writers were painstakingly shoving a new catchphrase down the viewers' throats, particularly "I'm so confused," which Vinnie Barbarino would utter when he was flustered. It seemed to have been used in a handful of consecutive episodes until it was abruptly and ultimately dropped.

What's it like when a second-generation catchphrase (or any catchphrase for that matter) just fizzles out just doesn't catch on?

For the most part, the writers on the show only wrote any of those lines once…the first time each line appeared in a script. Thereafter, they reappeared for a simple reason: They'd gotten huge laughs. The actor insisted on saying it and if it got a laugh during the dress rehearsal, it stayed in. It was kind of like, "Well, if he's going to say his catchphrase, I'm gonna say my catchphrase." I think we did put Horshack's "Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!" into scripts few times because he was going to say it, no matter what and we could pick a more appropriate spot for it. Our live audience wasn't going to leave until they heard it.

The main problem for me with the catchphrases is that Kotter was a half-hour show and while I don't recall the exact numbers, I think after you subtracted time for the opening teaser and credits, the closing credits and all those dangled commercials, we had something like 21 minutes. Each catchphrase got laughter and applause totaling about 30 seconds so if Barbarino, Horshack, Epstein and Washington each uttered two catchphrases in an episode, that was another four minutes we lost.

It's kinda rough to do a story featuring 6-7 people in 17 minutes and when we ran long, as we usually did, the decree from our Exec Producer was, "Cut story, not laughs." A frequently-heard phrase from his office was "Funny is money, funny is money."

With occasional exceptions — a show like M*A*S*H for instance — comedy on TV is best done in front of a properly-warmed-up live audience. But there's an easy trap there to fall into: Live audiences love the familiar. Imagine if Tony Bennett hosted a nightly program like The Tonight Show. If every single night he sang "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," the live audiences would always have been thrilled. And the same kind of folks sitting at home would have grabbed for their remotes and said, "Let's see what else is on!"

I think a lot of shows, especially those on every night like David Letterman's or Conan O'Brien's, lost audience share by catering too much to the few hundred people in the studio instead of the few million at home. And I think Welcome Back, Kotter was among a whole lotta shows that hastened their own demises by giving their live audiences the catchphrases and other elements they'd come to see and hear in person…and my, this was a long reply. Thanks for setting me off on this topic, Derek.

…or maybe three depending on how you count.

One day back when I was working with Jack Kirby, we were for some reason talking about Marie Severin. Jack was a great fan of many other artists and Marie was one of them. He thought she was the best caricaturist in the business and said it was a shame that she was drawing superhero comics for Marvel instead of movie and TV parodies for MAD. She should also, he said, be doing the kind of lucrative commercial art (movie posters, advertising, etc.) that Mort Drucker and Jack Davis were doing thanks to their MAD connections.

(Quick Aside: Marie worked for Bill Gaines back in the days of EC Comics as a colorist and production artist, and when Gaines pared his empire down to just MAD, she did occasional coloring jobs for them…but the number of times a female drew for MAD in the Gaines/Feldstein era is the same as the number of times you and I have done the polka on Saturn.)

I may have mentioned that to Jack that day. He definitely said it wasn't right that she was the only lady drawing for DC or Marvel. I said, "Well, except for Ramona Fradon."

Jack then asked me, "Who's Ramona Fradon?" Jack was not a big reader of comics and very little of the work Ramona had done by that time had had credits on it.

I told him about Ramona. I also rummaged through a pile Jack had of recent DC books he'd been sent until I found a couple of reprintings of Aquaman stories by Ramona. Jack looked at them and exclaimed, "She's great!" And he started pointing out interesting ways Ramona had staged what, in the hands of some other artists, would have been fairly placid drawings.

That was one of the things Jack felt was of paramount importance in drawing comics: Clear but imaginative staging. He felt a lot of artists could do one but not the other.

In the weeks that followed, we occasionally talked about having other artists perhaps take over some of the comics Jack had started for DC or wanted to start. Jack always mentioned Marie, Steve Ditko, Wally Wood, Don Heck, John Romita, Dan Spiegle, one or two others and "that lady whose work Mark showed me." He never remembered her name but he never forgot her drawing.

Okay, that's the first story about Ramona. You can count this next one as #2 or as an extension of #1…

It was at a Comic-Con International in the mid-nineties. Might have been 1995, which is when the last of these Ramona Fradon stories took place. Back in those days, I often moderated a Golden Age and/or Silver Age Panel. This is back when we had guests at the con who'd worked on comics in the so-called Golden or Silver Ages.

Ramona was at one of those panels and so was the great Al Williamson. I don't recall if they were both on the panel or if one of them was in the audience. I do recall that after the panel, Al took me aside and started asking me what comics Ramona had drawn.

I spotted nearby a pal of mine who was holding some issues of Metamorpho he'd brought to the panel to get Ramona to sign. He graciously allowed me to show them to Al…and Al did what so many artists in the business had always done: He imitated Jack Kirby — though in this case, without realized he was doing that. He said all the same things.

Then he had me introduce him to Ramona and he said all the same things again, only to her face. She was very flattered and more so later when she asked me who Al Williamson was and had me show her some of his work.

If I were a comic artist, I think I'd be pretty damn happy if either Jack Kirby or Al Williamson loved my work as much as they loved Ramona's. Even if every single other person who ever looked at one of my comics thought I stunk, I'd feel proud to impress just one of those men, let alone both.

Third story and I'm switching to the present-tense. It's the 1995 con and Ramona is an honored guest. She's still drawing the Brenda Starr newspaper strip and is not shy about telling everyone that she can't wait to be done with it. See earlier comments about how she came to prefer doing commissions rather than stories. Her contract is up soon…but not soon enough as far as she's concerned.

To clear time to attend the con, she'd rushed and handed in a large batch of strips ahead of time…and she brought her pencil roughs for them to the con to sell at her table. But there's this crisis: The finished strips she mailed off to the syndicate never arrived. Lost in the mail or something.

Whatever the reason, Ramona has to redraw them all that day. Re-creating the pencil art and the lettering is the easy part because she has those roughs. She stayed up much of the night doing that. But inking all those dailies will mean staying in her room all day. She won't be able appear on one panel. She won't be able to sit at her table making money doing sketches for her many fans.

Ramona tells me all this at the breakfast buffet at the Manchester Grand Hyatt. "After I eat, I have to back up to my room and spend the day inking," she tells me.

That does not seem right to me. I tell Ramona an idea I have and…well, let's just jump to a half-hour later at the con in the Artists' Alley section. I'm running around with the strips in pencil asking artists if they'd like to ink a panel of Ramona Fradon art.

Every single one of them says yes. Every single one.

I wish I could give you a full list. I just found an old article I wrote about this on Facebook and it mentions Paul Smith, Bob Smith, Jeff Parker, Rick Parker, George Freeman, Jim Amash, Scott Shaw!, Karl Kesel, Steve Leialoha, Colleen Doran, Trina Robbins and Al Gordon.

Others on Facebook mentioned Mark Schultz and I remember that I inked a background or two myself. In some cases, two artists sat very close together so one could ink the first panel of a strip while the other worked on the last panel on the same piece of illustration board.

I don't remember how many strips there were or how many artists inked a panel or part of a panel. I just remember we got the whole batch finished in about an hour. Ramona spent a little time retouching some odd variations on her style and thanking all who'd bailed her out.

I do remember the incredible feeling of camaraderie. Steve Leialoha just posted this on Facebook…

There was quite a crush of artists wanting to help out so Ramona could actually attend the con and not be stuck in her room. We were all long time fans and this was a great opportunity to repay her.

I also remember that among the artists who worked in the same area, an awful lot of "shop talk" about the craft of inking and how skillful Ramona's work was. If you were a beginning artist, you could have learned a lot eavesdropping on those conversations.

Lastly, I remember the one downside of the whole effort. We had more volunteers than we did panels that needed to be inked. A couple of fine artists heard what we were doing, rushed over and I had to tell them it was all taken. I believe that among the disappointed were Stan Sakai, Don Simpson and Mike Royer…

…and there was one artist who was really disappointed because he really, really wanted to ink some of Ramona's work and I hadn't thought to save him a panel. That artist was Al Williamson.

Early in January, the wonderful comic book illustrator Ramona Fradon announced her retirement. Today, we have the sad news that she has left us altogether. She was 97.

Ramona was an absolute delight both in person and on the page. She was born Ramona Dom and the Fradon came from her years married to New Yorker cartoonist Dana Fradon. Her father was a famous designer of logos and advertising materials and when she displayed some talent for drawing, he steered her towards art school. Her husband encouraged her too as did a friend, George Ward, who worked as an assistant to Walt Kelly on Pogo.

She eventually found her way to DC Comics around 1950 where among other assignments, she became the regular artist on the Aquaman feature. It was never a full-time job for her. Marriage and raising a family took precedence but for years, she supplemented the family income drawing comic books — one of the few women in the field.

She left comics briefly in the early sixties and then returned a few years later to co-create the super-hero Metamorpho with writer Bob Haney, then left again after drawing six issues. Her unique style seemed so much a part of the feature that her replacements slavishly imitated (and sometimes traced) what she'd done in those six issues. It was a decent imitation but readers must have sensed something was missing: Sales reportedly plunged the minute Ramona Fradon was replaced by a draw-alike.

Ramona found her way back into comics in 1972 and DC gladly put her to work on Plastic Man, Freedom Fighters, Super Friends and a little more Metamorpho. She also worked for other companies and became popular on the convention circuit, drawing for fans and taking orders for commissions, mainly of Aquaman and Metamorpho. Eventually, she came to prefer the commissions to regular comic book work — more freedom, fewer deadlines. She also for a time drew the Brenda Starr newspaper strip.

Like so many of her fans — and she had a lot o' them — I loved meeting Ramona and talking with Ramona. We had her on many a panel and today, I can't help but think that yet another giant of comics' earlier days is gone. We have so few of them remaining and she was one of the nicest and one of the best.

A couple of you have reported a problem playing my video embed of John Oliver's segment last Sunday about the Supreme Court. It's working for most folks but if you're not most folks, try this link.

Hey, remember the fuss I made when the Souplantation restaurant chain — known in some states as Sweet Tomatoes — went outta business? Well, Devlin Thompson has pointed me to this article saying that a Sweet Tomatoes is or was about to reopen in Tucson. Let's hope it did or does and that it's a big success and they regrow the empire!

Yesterday, I showed you four versions of the same Marty Feldman sketch, one of which appeared on The Flip Wilson Show.. Kevin Kravitz, a reader of this site, refreshed my memory of something else that happened in that episode…

I loved The Flip Wilson Show as a kid and I am glad you included one of his skits.

You mentioned a surprise cameo and it obviously was Howard Cosell. However, at the very end of the show when Flip had Marty take his final bow, Marty came out with that same box and decided to show what the monster looked like…AND IT WAS JACK BENNY!

As I recall, Jack had an NBC TV special that week. As soon as the lid came off, Jack started telling the audience to watch his upcoming special at 9pm and then Marty & Flip put the lid back on to shut him up. When the show was repeated in the summer reruns, music played over Jack's speech since the promotion for Jack's special would have been moot.

Thank you for running those monster skits, Mark.

Yeah, I do remember that. I don't see a clip of it anywhere online but if/when it turns up, I'll share it with everyone. Thanks, Kevin.

A couple of folks asked me to speculate on who/what was actually in the basket when they did those sketches. I would assume a stagehand with a smoke machine and other special effects…and he and Marty must have rehearsed the physical moves like it was a gymnastic competition. Then again, it may just have been Jack Benny. He'd do anything for a buck.

We recently looked at how a sketch that was originally performed by John Cleese and Marty Feldman turned up in several forms and with several different performers on both British and American television. Today we have for you four (count ‘em — four!) versions of a sketch Marty F. did during his travels through both nations.

In case you're wondering, "Does Evanier really expect people to watch the same comedy skit four times?," the answer is Yes. Feldman gives a helluva great performance and I found it fascinating to note both the consistencies and the variations.

I don't have dates on all of these but I think I have them in chronological order. The first of these may be the first time he did it — on some British show, possibly It's Marty!…

Now, this next one was from a British show that was also an American show. In 1970, Dean Martin's popular NBC show (produced and directed by Greg Garrison) here was replaced for a number of weeks in the summer by Dean Martin Presents The Golddiggers In London (produced and directed by Greg Garrison). It was shot over there with The Golddiggers, Charles Nelson Reilly, Tommy Tune, Marty Feldman and others. Garrison later recycled some of the material from the London show and ran them on Dino's program…

A few years later, Marty guested on The Flip Wilson Show and the thing in the basket guested along with him. Wait'll you see who they have doing the punch line…

And finally —- and it wouldn't surprise me if Feldman did it on other programs —- here's the version done on the show Fridays in 1981. He died the following year so this was probably the last time he performed it. If you watch all four, I hope you laughed all four times. I sure did..

Among my happiest memories of some years in which I commuted a lot to Las Vegas was watching (and hanging out with) one of my favorite comedians, Pete Barbutti. You may remember him from his eighty trillion appearances on Johnny Carson's show…that is, assuming you remember Johnny Carson.

Seeing Pete perform these days is a rare treat but not impossible. He's currently touring as part of a troupe of comedians billed as The Four Jokers. The other three Jokers are Mark Schiff, Scott Wood and ventriloquist Jay Johnson. Their next gig is March 2 down at the La Mirada Theater down in La Mirada, California. I'd go if I could but it's my birthday and I already have other plans.

But also — and this intrigues me — Las Vegas is about to get its first-ever production of the musical Follies with its score by Mr. S. Sondheim. You'd think a show about aging showgirls would be a natural for that town, right? Well, it will be staged there for the first time for six performances only in April and Pete is in the cast! Details can be found here.

I dunno what part he's playing but if I were in charge, we'd cut a few numbers to give Pete time to do his stand-up act. If anyone reading this goes, let me know how it is.

I "discovered" one of my heroes, Stan Freberg, in the early sixties when he was still making comedy records and also making a name for himself with innovative and funny commercials. His spots for Chun King Chow Mein were especially infamous…and one of the few times that the public was ever aware who was responsible for an advertising campaign.

In 1962, the company that marketed Chun King — which was so Chinese that they also made Jeno's Pizza Rolls — bought Stan a whole hour of network TV to do whatever he wanted to do. In fact, it was the hour on ABC which then usually housed Maverick, one of the highest-rated shows in all of television.

They hoped it would establish him as a television performer…and it did not. Critics called it one of the cleverest things they'd ever seen on The Box but everyone in the country who wasn't a critic or me was watching Ed Sullivan over on CBS that night.

But as you'll see if you click below, it was a unique 60 minutes of television time. Stan lassoed the famous designer Saul Bass to provide the "look" of the show and Billy May to provide music.

Then he brought along his stock company which included lots of people you may recognize, many of whom did cartoon voices. Most of you will recognize Sterling Holloway, June Foray, Shepard Menkin, Patty Regan, Peter Leeds, Mike Mazurki, Jesse White, Billy Bletcher, Frances Osborne, Arte Johnson, Ginny Tiu, Howard McNear, Byron Kane, Naomi Lewis, Max Mellinger, a few others and (briefly) some kid named Frank Sinatra.

Here's the whole show as aired February 4, 1962. You may not find it as brilliant as I did then or I do now but I doubt you'll think it's like anything else you've ever seen…

Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone takes us through the decision in Trump's civil fraud case. There's a tool in the YouTube player to slow the video down a little and that might come in handy for this one…

As promised, here's the segment from this week's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver that exposes or roasts or indicts (or whatever word you want to use) much of the current Supreme Court and Clarence Thomas especially…

The ASK me here yesterday brought this thorny question from Jeff Thayer. I'll try to answer as well as I can…

You mentioned that writing the Welcome Back, Kotter TV show paid you more than John Travolta was paid. I don't expect you'd want to reveal the dollar figure but how did the amount compare to what you made just writing comic books?

Well, I only mentioned the money to explain that it wasn't as much as most people would think. I would say that when I shifted from comic books to TV, the pay was 2-3 times the amount for 4-6 times the hours and at least that much more in stress. If I had given as much of my time, energy and stomach lining to writing comics, I might have made more there.

But! There were other perks of writing for television, a big one of which was writing for audiences. If you write a funny line in a comic book, you don't get to hear anyone laugh at it.

Another was that comics, back when that was my main income, had a hard glass ceiling. There were no royalties, no reprint fees, not much added revenue from the convention circuit. There were folks saying the industry would be gone in 5-10 years.

Even if it survived: If I'd somehow reached the level of making as much as it was possible for me to make writing comic books, that would at the time been as much as it was humanly possible to make writing comic books. Writing TV carried no such limits.

And a big difference for me was this: When I was mainly writing comics, I worked all day at home…and while I liked (and still like) writing alone, I missed the part of life that involved meeting a stream of new and interesting people. I liked spending my days with other writers, other creative people, new potential friends of both genders, etc.

In my twenties, I needed that. It was also a whole new world to explore and learn about.

In hindsight, it was a mistake for me to get so completely outta comics as I did that year but it was an understandable mistake. Kotter was a job that occupied almost every waking minute almost every day. I have not made that mistake again.

But my main point is that I did learn not to judge or make any career choice wholly because of the money. You can profit in non-monetary ways…and there are plenty of them. So comparing one paycheck to another is the wrong way to look at this kind of choice.

There's this new Broadway revival of the show Merrily We Roll Along, see? And they recorded a cast album for it and here's a video of them recording one of my favorite Sondheim tunes…