In the rerun of the first Saturday Night Live last night — and linked here — I noticed two interesting things in the closing credits and today, my pal Shelly Goldstein reminded me of the significance of one of them. She reminded me that in the Saturday Night movie, one of the thousand-and-one plot lines has to do with whether the very-important-to-the-series writer whose first name was Rosie was going to be listed in the end credits as Rosie Shuster (her birth name) or Rosie Michaels (her name after she married Lorne Michaels). At the last minute — probably too late to have it added in a real broadcast — she decides on Rosie Shuster.

Okay, fine. That's how it was in the movie. In the actual broadcast though, it was like this on the screen…

Just to explain: The "Bud" was a joke during the end credits. Almost everyone listed has "Bud" as a middle name. The point is that if she really did decide on Shuster, it didn't get on the air, at least the first week.

Another interesting thing I noticed: Near the end of the credits crawl, we saw this…

Dick Ebersol was very, very (insert a few verys) important person in the birthing of Saturday Night Live. It probably never would have happened without him and he later stepped into Lorne Michaels' position for several seasons. But at the time this first show aired, he was an NBC employee in a category where such credits were against company policy. Reportedly, there was a huge outrage in him getting this one in that particular form. He didn't get it again and some sources say it was edited out of rebroadcasts of this episode…yet it appeared in the rerun last night and I hear it's on the DVDs.

Okay. That's all I wanted to say here.

This blog used to track the fate of a stage musical called The Nutty Professor based on the 1963 movie starring Jerry Lewis. The musical was directed by Mr. Lewis and for several years, he kept announcing that it was going to open at this theater on Broadway or that theater not on Broadway and he gave dates as if they were firm and with one exception, they turned out to be imaginary. At one point, he announced that a tryout was booked for certain dates at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego and apparently, no one had spoken to anyone at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego about this.

That tryout never happened but the show did get a run in Nashville from July 24 through August 19 of 2012 and there was a production at the Ogunquit Playhouse in Ogunquit, Maine from July 1 through August 6 of 2022. There also seems to have been a production of it in Sandy. Utah from July 1 through August 1 of last year…and if anyone else has put it on, I haven't been able to find it on the Internet.

Recently, as they do every so often, Playbill posted a short list of shows that are soon to open on Broadway and a very long list of shows that are hovering about, most of them playing somewhere, waiting for the deal that will enable them to open on The Great White Way. There is no trace of The Nutty Professor on this list, nor has it been on the last few such lists.

So what's happened to it? The reviews in Nashville and Ogunquit were pretty good and most thought a New York residency was likely. The passing of Mr. Lewis in 2017 might have had some effect but it didn't stop the Ogunquit run and frankly, there hadn't been much movement in the five years before Jerry went to that big telethon in the sky. I don't have any answers to this question…and I'm wondering if anyone involved with the property has tried approaching any stars about doing it in New York.

I would think that if it's as good as the reviewers said and if they could get Martin Short to star in it, it would run as long as…well, as long as Martin Short was willing to do it. Of course, that's supposing there's anyone involved with the property trying to get the show up in Manhattan.

Here are some scenes from the Ogunquit production…

Last night, NBC reran the first episode of Saturday Night Live, which was then called NBC's Saturday Night. It looks a bit cheap and Public Access these days but you see the potential there. I wrote about this first episode back here and other places of this blog.

They've also made the episode available online so here it is. Note that with the commercials omitted, this 90-minute show runs a little under an hour and eight minutes…

It's been a while since I video-linked something that I wrote but I wrote this a long, long time ago. It's an episode of CBS Storybreak, a series which adapted kids' books into half-hour cartoon shows. It was hosted by Bob (Captain Kangaroo) Keeshan as Bob Keeshan, not Captain Kangaroo. One of many things I enjoyed about this particular job was spending tape day in Studio 33 — aka "The Bob Barker Stage" — at CBS Television City as he taped all the intros for the season.

We talked at great length there and then we talked at greater length that evening when I took him out to dinner — or rather, he took me since he could charge our meal to CBS. We ate at RJ's, a favorite restaurant of mine that's no longer in business. No one recognized him on sight but our server said, "Your voice is so familiar" and later figured it out. Mr. Keeshan said he was almost never recognized visually but was often recognized by his voice. The folks in the next booth recognized him the same way.

I asked him, "How many of the people you meet say 'I grew up with you?'" He replied, "Just about all of them."

The book adapted for this CBS Storybreak was Mama Don't Allow by Thacher Hurd…and we had a great voice cast: Jeff Altman, Hamilton Camp, Roger C. Carmel, Brian Cummings, Michael Dees, June Foray, Mona Marshall and Pete Renaday. I believe this was Roger C. Carmel's last acting job as he passed away a few weeks after the recording session.

I recall him being very excited because he was going to spend the following weekend at a Star Trek convention — in Seattle, I think. He'd be signing autographs (and making $$$) because he'd played the role of Harcourt Fenton "Harry" Mudd on the original Star Trek series. William Shatner would be at the con and he'd insisted they fly Roger in and he also advised Roger on what to charge for his signature.

Mr. Carmel ticked off a list of TV shows he'd appeared on in the sixties and seventies and it was a pretty long list — Banacek, The Munsters, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Batman, Hogan's Heroes, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Hawaii Five-O, All in the Family and on and on and on. His residuals for all those shows had either long since run out or trickled down to those pennies Donald Trump wants to get rid of. Then he said, "Isn't it amazing? I did two 3-day shoots on Star Trek and that's my pension!" He was referring to the money from autographing photos.

This was, I believe, the only musical episode of CBS Storybreak and it originally aired on September 19, 1987. A wonderful gent named Eddie Karam wrote the music and conducted. I wrote the script and the lyrics and the gent who played the saxophone in this episode was none other than Tom Scott, who a lot of folks would tell you was the best sax player in the business…and for this, we hired him to play badly for much of the half-hour. The animation was done by a firm called Southern Star which was otherwise referred to as "Hanna-Barbera Australia."

If you want to know more about this cartoon, I refer you to this piece I wrote back in 1998. Oh — and I want to mention this to devout Groo fans: You'll see the name of Gordon Kent in the end credits. Gordon was a dear friend of mine and he was the first colorist of that silly comic that Sergio Aragonés and I were doing then and, miraculously, still do. I wrote about Gordon here when we lost him and I still miss the guy. Here's the cartoon…

Recently here, we shared with you Richard Burton delivering an unusual performance of the title song from the musical, Camelot. Here is a more conventional — and seemingly sober — rendition which Richard Harris did on The Ed Sullivan Show for April 28, 1968. This was around a year after the release of the not-wonderful film version of the movie starring Mr. Harris…

Someone who signs himself "Johnny Enzyme" — and who I'm guessing is not really named "Johnny Enzyme" — came across some political cartoons by Jack Kirby, whose name at the time he did them was not "Jack Kirby," nor was it "Jack Curtiss," which is how he signed such work then. Mr. Enzyme asks…

I just saw these five images and was rather shocked by how talented the man was when his (evidently) full cartoonist sensibilities were unleashed.

I went on to comment: "I would guess then that Jack decided to work in an efficient, reductionist style for comic books, not so much trying to interject his full art sensibilities in to comics the way that someone like Bill Sienkiewicz or Walt Simonson did."

I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that, and perhaps just in general, hear about noteworthy examples of comic book artists who greatly streamlined their full fine arts talents in order to meet comic book deadlines and all that.

I don't think too many comic book artists streamlined their full talents to meet deadlines so much as their styles evolved into what (a) felt comfortable to them and (b) got them work. Meeting deadlines is always important but I think with most, it wasn't the kind of conscious decision you postulate except in this sense: You couldn't make a living in comics drawing one page a week…and the companies paid the same for a page that took you two hours. If you couldn't find a style and approach that yielded a living wage in that arena and also pleased you, you got out of comics and into something else.

Jack Kirby's #1 goal was always to make the kind of money necessary to provide well for himself and his family. That didn't mean he didn't care about the quality of the work. Quite the contrary, he believed that doing better comics would lead to better sales and better sales would lead to better compensation and financial security. Sadly, it didn't always work out that way but he still believed that until right around the time he got out of comics and into animation.

I think your suggestion — that he "decided to work in an efficient, reductionist style for comic books" — is wrong. I think he always did what he felt would make for good comics that would tell good stories well. The style you saw in the comics, especially when he had a faithful inker, was what resulted from that attitude.

There are and always have been comic book artists who skewed their drawing in the direction of what got them work. Almost all of them are or were more versatile than the pages you saw them produce for DC or Marvel or Whoever. Most of them did that work but also made time to sketch or paint what they wanted to sketch or paint. An awful lot of them, I think, could have been very successful in other fields.

The first one who comes to mind for me is Mike Sekowsky. I knew Mike, I worked with Mike…and I think he was an example of a guy who had enormous talents that were never tapped by conventional comic books. Left to his own devices, I could see his wicked sense o' humor taking his career more where Jack Davis or even Charles Addams worked. I loved his work on super-hero comics but that was him drawing the way he had to draw to get work. I could certainly imagine John Buscema with a career that more resembled Frank Frazetta's…or vice-versa.

Generally speaking, artists — and this applies to writers, too — gravitate towards the kind of work that seems available to them and they produce what seems appropriate to that marketplace. This was especially true of the ones who grew up during The Great Depression but it's also true of most creative people of any era looking for an outlet for what they do. Commercial art usually requires at least a little consideration of what might be commercial.

Jerry Eisenberg had a little merry band of cartooning friends from the early days of Hanna-Barbera. The Three Tooners were made up of Jerry, Willie Ito and Tony Benedict and they appeared at conventions and various functions…and on Stu's Show, the program run by my pal Stu Shostak. On July 25, 2018, Stu had them on his program for what turned out to be a three-hour conversation about that studio and all the things each of them did away from H-B. Stu has put this extraordinary program online for free viewing and you can watch it here.

A truly great cartoonist and a helluva nice guy died last night at the age of 87. Jerry Eisenberg had been sick for some time — the official cause of death was Pneumonia — and the news is already shaking up the animation community. Everyone knew him. Everyone adored him.

Jerry was a second-generation great cartoonist. His father, Harvey Eisenberg, had quite a history in animation and comic books…and both Eisenbergs were responsible for some of the better things that the Hanna-Barbera studio ever did. Jerry broke into the field as an animator for the MGM cartoon studio in the fifties, then when it closed down, he worked for H-B for years, designing many of their characters including — this is a very partial list — Peter Potamus, all the racers on Wacky Races, most of the gang on Jabberjaw…oh, I shouldn't have started this list either. Suffice it to say there probably wasn't a single Hanna-Barbera production done between 1961 and 1977 that didn't have characters in it designed by Jerry. He even worked on the super-hero shows.

'77 was when he moved over to the then-new Ruby-Spears cartoon studio — the one I was writing about earlier today on this blog — and became a producer of most of their shows including Fangface, Plastic Man, Thundarr the Barbarian…again, a list I shouldn't have started. Later, he worked for Marvel Productions, Disney, Warner Brothers…just about everywhere in town. He was one of the fastest artists I've ever seen and one of the nicest, jolliest guys.

Condolences go out to Raymonde, his wife of many years…and our thanks because she took great care of him.

Wanna know more about this man? Here's a three-hour interview with him. You can learn all about him and even if you just watch a few minutes of it, you'll see why everyone loved him. I certainly did.

The press is reporting that stores like Costco and Trader Joe's are putting limits on how many dozens of eggs one can purchase. That's what I'd do if I were them. And I don't know what Trader Joe's is charging but Costco seems to have not (not!) raised its prices because of the shortage. They upped the prices on eggs a few months ago but the prices I see on their online ordering page right now are exactly where they were before the current egg panic set in — two dozen for eight and a half bucks, five dozen for twenty dollars. If they doubled those prices, they'd sell just as many eggs but make a lot more money. I'm impressed that Costco has chosen to not make a lot more money.

Starting next week, MeTV Toons is running the 1979 Plastic Man cartoon show produced by the Ruby-Spears animation studio, which was then the newest cartoon maker in the business. I wrote several episodes including the first one MeTV Toons is airing — "The Weed," which according to my schedule, will air Tuesday morning, February 18 at 2:30 AM. That sounds like the perfect time slot for it. You won't be up watching and I won't be up watching.

I do not remember much about writing that episode except that I'm pretty certain no one mentioned any connection between a super-villain called The Weed and marijuana. I think (I'm not 100% positive) that I invented and named the character and I know (I'm 100% positive) the drug reference never dawned on me. As you may know, in my almost-73 years of life, I've never even experienced first-hand tobacco.

I was not involved in the development of the show that took Jack Cole's popular comic book character and changed an awful lot of things about him. And to be accurate, I believe the character was only popular when Jack Cole drew him and apparently had some input into the scripts. This would be from the time of the character's creation in Police Comics #1 — cover-dated August of 1941 — until sometime later that decade when Mr. Cole handed it off to others. There have been many versions of the character since then in comics and animation and I don't think any of them have wowed anybody that much. The cartoon show Ruby-Spears did for two seasons starting in '79 certainly didn't.

The development was mainly done by Norman Maurer, a former comic book artist himself. Norman was then a TV and movie producer and the manager of The Three Stooges — Moe was his father-in-law — and a much in-demand guy in the field of Saturday morning cartoons. I worked with him on Richie Rich at Hanna-Barbera and ABC loved him for that series. And like I said, I was not around when they decided Plastic Man should operate in a different world and format than he'd had in any of his comics.

A lot of it, I heard, had to do with the demands of the Standards and Practices Department at ABC and a lady there who felt cartoons for kids needed to be uplifting and clean and above all, free from violence. She hated the Super Friends show the network was then airing and I believe one of the reasons she was okay with Plastic Man was that the nature of his powers meant that he couldn't engage much in anything that fit her silly definition of "violence." It was pretty much anything you or I or a sane person would call "action."

So they put Plastic Man into this odd format of taking his marching orders from a sultry boss lady named The Chief. Then "Plas" would travel the world in a jet along with a lady named Penny and a sidekick named Hula-Hula. I wrote about Hula-Hula in this blog post here. As for Plastic Man himself, it's not how I would have handled the character but it's how we all had to handle the character. I wrote a few episodes and I also wrote the opening narration for each episode.

I am not recommending you watch this show. Just telling you what I know about its history.

It did pretty well ratings-wise for a while but back in those days of Saturday Morning Kidvid, the measure of a show was not how well it ran but how well it reran. They made 13 episodes per season (occasionally, a few more than that) and many a show would do well the first time they ran the thirteen, less well when they ran them the second time, even less well when they ran them the third time…and that series would probably be marked for cancellation before they could run them the fourth time.

Years later when I did the Garfield and Friends show, the episodes did well on first run, better on their second run and when they started doing even better on their third run, CBS decided to make the show an hour for its second season and renew it through its third. That was how the game was played.

Plastic Man's numbers went slowly in the opposite direction and eventually reached the level where ABC was unsure if they wanted to renew it for a second year. They said to Joe Ruby — the "Ruby" in "Ruby-Spears" — "We'll pick it up if you add some element to make the show new and different." My pal Steve Gerber, who was also writing episodes, and I went to Joe and suggested making it less like a super-hero show and more like a Jack Cole comic book.

That turned out to be exactly what ABC didn't want so Joe came up with the idea of having Plastic Man and Penny marry and have a baby with the powers of his father. I think I only wrote one episode with "Baby Plas" and that was under light duress. There was no third season.

I thought the first season was…well, better than a lot of what was then on Saturday A.M. teevee. It just wasn't Plastic Man. If you're up at 2:30 AM next week, you can probably find something better to watch…but if you give it a try, you might enjoy it more than you expect. Note that I said "might."

Plans are being made for a Celebration of Life, the life in this case being that of our friend Mike Schlesinger. Details will be posted here as soon as there are details that can be posted here.

And in case you didn't see Jon Stewart last night, here's his very funny/perceptive opening segment. It's 22 minutes long and if you don't have time to watch the whole thing, at least move the slider and watch it from the 16:00 mark…

I'm not paying as much attention to Donald Trump as…well, as much as some of my friends who are really stressing out over what he's doing and what he's saying he's going to do. Those are not always the same thing but sometimes they are — often enough that if he announced today he was going to execute everyone in the state of Michigan who refuses to become an Elvis Impersonator, two people I know would have the following conversation…

"Relax. He's never going to do that!"

"Maybe…but that's what we all thought when he said he's going to…" and you can fill in a description of any number of things he's actually done.

I guess some of his fans think this kind of "I'm in charge, I'll do any damned thing I want" attitude is an admirable quality in a leader. They will stop doing that when he does something more obviously detrimental to their lives…or the next time a Democrat is in power. It could be either one but I'll bet it's the first.

Anyway, I'm not writing a lot about politics here because I'm averting my gaze from a lot of it. I did though watch this video from Hank Green and it seems to me he's describing the situation perfectly…

Actually, it's not today's. This is from last Rosh Hashanah, which is when I should have posted it…

When I busted my ankle a little over a year ago, I made the decision that when I returned home to recover here, I would live upstairs in my two-story house. I only go downstairs — which is still kind of a struggle — when I have to go to doctor appointments. Oh, and I also left the upper story to attend Comic-Con last year. Today, I received this question from someone who asked me to omit their name…

Thank you first of all for the many years of pleasure that both your work and your blog have given me. My usual activity when I haven't kept up with the blog for a while is to binge, which I did today. Consequently, I was reading of the anniversary of your broken ankle, and I was curious about one thing since I'm physically handicapped myself. I hope you will excuse this nosy question, which is more a matter of what you might call professional curiosity.

I know how difficult stairs can be, and I was puzzled as to why you chose to modify your home in order to stay upstairs rather than downstairs. Was it because your office is upstairs? Wishing you a speedy recovery, and thanks again. Excuse my impertinence.

It's not impertinent and the answer is simple: It took much, much less remodeling and rearrangement to live upstairs. I have no bedrooms downstairs whereas I have my own, arranged-the-way-I-want-it bedroom upstairs. I have my arranged-the-way-I-want-it office upstairs. I have two bathrooms upstairs, both with showers, whereas the one bathroom downstairs has no shower.

The only necessity of life I didn't have upstairs was a kitchen so I got a microwave oven and a small refrigerator for upstairs and I moved some things like dishes, utensils and my toaster up. I also had one of the upstairs showers converted to what hotels call a "handicapped" shower. I have no idea how I could have set up a bedroom and office downstairs. It's worked pretty well. It might not work for someone else but given the way my home was already designed and how much time I was already spending upstairs as opposed to downstairs, it was the best for me.