Search Results for: Garfield

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.

Here's my buddy Bob Bergen critiquing other folks attempting to do the cartoon voices he does, most of which are Bob channeling Mel Blanc.  We had Bob on The Garfield Show a couple times and he was quite good at inventing brand-new voices on demand, as well.  The thing to remember about Bob and someone like him who does "second generation" performances of pre-existing characters is that it's not about mimicry.  The good ones — the ones who do major characters — are actors first and impersonators second.

Bob is also one of the best teachers of his art, which is why his classes have waiting lists longer than the lines outside Costco to purchase toilet paper. You can see in this video how well he has mastered the art of saying something constructive and encouraging about performances of varying quality.

I wonder how many of those demonstrating their talents here are aspiring to actually someday get hired to do Porky or Tweety professionally or if they're just out to imitate the voices to amuse their friends and show-off. There's a big difference. I've met lots of folks who could do a great Bugs Bunny when all it meant was repeating a few lines they heard Mel do in some cartoon. That's fine but the guy they hire to do the wabbit professionally needs to be able to, first of all, do Bugs speaking lines that Mr. Blanc never uttered. My friend Greg Burson was Bugs for a while and he was called upon to do Bugs with an Irish accent, Bugs with a Swedish accent, Bugs with a German accent…

And also, a pro has to be able to sustain the voice over many hours at what could be a very long recording session. I'm really good at juggling three balls for around ten seconds…enough to entertain my friends, not enough to be a professional juggler.

If you're interested in getting into doing voices for animation, there's a lot to be learned from this video. You might also see if you can get into Bob's class one of these years. The wait is so long that by the time you're accepted, you may actually be able to leave your house…

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.

This morning, I was up in San Francisco for a darned good reason: To speak at a lovely memorial service for one of the best human beings it has ever been my pleasure/honor/privilege (they all apply) to know…Lee Mendelson. I wrote about Lee here and here and here and here, and as I read them over now, I don't think any of them sufficiently conveyed just what a wise, kind man I knew him to be.

Yes, he produced the they'll-rerun-it-forever TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas and dozens of other Peanuts specials. Yes, he gave us other animated shows with characters like Garfield and Cathy and Mother Goose & Grimm, as well as dozens of live-action documentaries and films and specials. Yes, he had awards galore. All of that is true and it was all mentioned at the memorial today — a memorial, I should mention that was lavishly and lovingly produced by his kids. Maybe good producing skills are hereditary.

But we also talked about Lee the Man…the very human human being. In a time when there is way too much coarseness and shouting and knifing on this planet, it was wonderful to hear the stories about working with Lee.

And you know what else is wonderful to hear? David Benoit at the piano…maybe the best jazz musician working today. He did the music on many of Lee's shows and he took the time to be there and to talk about his association with Lee and to favor us with a recital. I was three feet from him as he was playing "Linus and Lucy" and I could feel the ripple effect as some in the room felt the electricity and others dove for the Kleenex. I will remember that performance for a long time.

There were touching words from Lee's past associates and members of the Mendelson family. His widow Ploenta delivered one of the most emotional and real speeches I've ever heard at this kind of event, and later, I got up and said some silly things. I was also pleased to see Phil Roman there. As recounted here, Lee helped Phil to establish one of the best animation studios in town and he, like all of us, was there to pay his respects.

There were so many great stories. I wish you'd all had the chance to know this guy.

Volume 6 of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips has been out for about a month, slowly dribbling into comic book shops everywhere as copies — apparently delivered by Churchy the Turtle — made their way to retailers. I think Joe Ferrara's store in Santa Cruz got some in and sold out immediately a month ago today. But within two or three days, they should be to every dealer that ordered 'em.

Amazon got them in in dribs and drabs and has been quietly filling mail orders in an order I do not pretend to understand. But they're now promising that if you order right now, your copy will ship in 1-2 days. So order right now.

I almost never blow my own horn on this blog about my work but I'm just co-editor of these books. It's not my work that makes 'em wonderful. Long before I met his daughter, I was telling people that Walt Kelly was my favorite cartoonist and I was hardly alone in this choice of favorite cartoonists. On the walls of one room of my house, I have framed originals of Pogo, Peanuts and Krazy Kat. If I'd ever come across a good Sunday Popeye by Elzie Segar that I could afford, it would join them.

The strips in this volume cover the years 1959 and 1960 so, as I noted in an earlier plug, Mr. Kelly had plenty of world-changing topics in the newspaper to work with. Pogo and his merry mob addressed many of them but the strip was also delicious when Walt was just being silly for silly's sake.

This volume is subtitled Clean as a Weasel and it features a foreword by Jim "Garfield" Davis plus other extras. The titles come from a list we found in Kelly's own handwriting. Most are phrases he'd used in the strip at least once and he was intending to use them as titles for some sort of series of "Best of Pogo" reprints in small paperbacks…I think. The next of our volumes, Pockets Full of Pie, will be in stores well before the end of 2020.

Phil Roman is one of the most important folks in animation in the last half-century, animating on many respected projects before launching his own studio, Film Roman. Many of the projects I worked on with Lee Mendelson were animated (and animated well) by Phil's studio, and so have an awful lot of popular shows involving neither Lee nor Yours Truly.

Phil's studio succeeded in part because of the support and patronage he got from Lee and the day after Lee passed, Phil posted this remembrance on Facebook. I got his permission to repost it here…and note where Phil says, "Lee was the most fair and honest person I ever met." Told ya so…

I woke up this morning to learn that Lee Mendelson, a very dear friend, passed away on December 25th.

Lee was very instrumental in helping me establish Film Roman after I left Bill Melendez Productions, where I had been directing the Charlie Brown specials as well as two Garfield specials.

Around October, 1983, I had decided to leave Bill Melendez and to open my own studio. I had always dreamed of having my own studio and decided that if I didn't make the move at that time, I probably never would. I would rather try and fail than not try at all. I talked to Bill Melendez, explained how I felt and gave him a two week notice that I was leaving.

Towards the end of my last week, Lee Mendelson flew in from Northern California and walked into my office. He said "I hear you are leaving the studio." I explained that I was going to open my own studio and give it a shot. He asked me whether I had any projects and I replied I would concentrate on that after I left. He said, "How would you like to do Garfield?" I replied: "But Bill is producing Garfield." He said that Sparky was not very happy with Bill doing Garfield and wanted him to concentrate fully on Peanuts.

So I said I definitely would be interested as I enjoyed working on Garfield with Jim Davis. I told him that I would be going to a vacation to Europe with my wife for three weeks. He told me to go on vacation and meanwhile he would talk to the network, the syndicate, and Jim Davis. He said to call him when I came back. We left it at that.

When I returned from our vacation, I called Lee and he told me that everybody had approved, that I should find some office space and work up a budget and schedule, as Jim Davis was already working on a new storyboard for the next Garfield special.

In the first week of January, 1984, I opened a small studio in Toluca Lake with a couple of employees. Within a month we started production of Garfield in the Rough with freelance animators we had used in the Peanuts shows. Lee's confidence in me paid off as I delivered the show on budget, on schedule, and it won an Emmy. Everybody was very happy and we continued producing Garfield specials.

I found working with Lee was a very pleasant experience. He had great work ethics and a good humor. Without him, who knows what Film Roman would have been. He played such an important role in my life and will be terribly missed.

Lee also deserves credit for partnering with two animation producers, Bill Melendez and I, both Mexican-Americans. He judged us not for our ethnicity but for our ability to deliver quality animation. All the shows that Bill and I produced were the highest-rated in their time slots and almost every show was nominated for an Emmy. Lee was the most fair and honest person I ever met. A big contrast to some of the Hollywood egos.

I always remember Lee warmly for the risk he took in helping me establish myself as a producer. All the gains the studio made, are directly attributable to his taking a chance on me. R.I.P.

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.

CLICK HERE TO GET TO PART 2

Producer Lee Mendelson, winner of a dozen Emmy Awards and four Peabody Awards, passed away yesterday at the age of 86. One of each of those trophies was for A Charlie Brown Christmas, which first aired in 1965. CBS expected it to bomb in the ratings but it turned out to be one of the highest-rated specials ever and its annual viewing became a vital tradition in households not just in America but around the world. It also led to more than forty subsequent Peanuts specials produced by Lee and his animation partner Bill Melendez as well as two movies. Lee Mendelson Productions also produced award-winning documentaries and animated shows not featuring Charlie Brown and his friends.

I worked with Lee on several of them including the Garfield and Friends cartoon show for CBS Saturday morning. He was — and I've said this before many times — the smartest, nicest and most honest producer I've encountered in the television industry. Once you knew him, you understood why cartoonists like Charles Schulz and Jim Davis were so willing to trust him with their beloved children.

Even though I knew he'd been ill in recent years, the news still comes as a jolt. I have so many memories of working with this extraordinary man, I have to decide which ones I should share here so this will not be the last post about him. And the recent airings of A Charlie Brown Christmas will not be the last that we will see of his screen credit. For one thing, that show will rerun forever.

Jim Davis, with whom I have worked since 1987, is selling off his vault of originals to his strip, Garfield. Yes, I already have a few…including one Jim sent me because it contained a sly reference to me. People have occasionally asked me how they can get one. Well, here's how you can get one.

Jim, by the way, did the foreword for the new volume of The Complete Syndicated Pogo — the sixth in the series reprinting Walt Kelly's wonderful newspaper strip. Due to distribution problems I described here, only a few stores have received their copies but in about three weeks, it should be everywhere it's supposed to be. The books for the first printing have been printed. They're just making their way to retail outlets by having a duck hand-deliver each copy…or something. Order yours with confidence…confidence that you'll receive it soon, confidence that you'll love what you read in there. You can also order a boxed set of Volumes 5 and 6 at this link.

The sixth volume of The Complete Syndicated Pogo has been printed and somewhere below, you'll see a photo of another famous cartoonist paging through a copy and enjoying the brilliant work of Mr. Walt Kelly. That's the good news.

The bad news is that many retailers — including probably Amazon — will not have their copies until around this time next month. How could this be? Well, you may not believe this but I'm blaming it on Donald J. Trump. Allow me to explain…

Many of the books that are coming out these days about comic books and strips are printed in China. If you can connect with the right printer over there, you can get great quality at a low, low price…or you could before Mr. Trump began imposing and escalating tariffs on imports from China. I'm not clear on what these fees are supposed to accomplish nor am I clear on how well they're accomplishing that. All I know is that it has thrown sections of the Chinese printing industry into chaos.

That creates chaos for the American publishers who use those printers and you can expect price increases on many of their books shortly. A number of announced books will be coming out late and some may not come out at all…or at least until things stabilize in this marketplace. If we still had Tom Spurgeon covering the comics industry, he would have done an in-depth report on this by now. You should hear more about this in the fan press after the December 15 announcement about how the tariffs will be modified or extended or whatever that guy in the White House is going to do.

Volume 6 of The Complete Syndicated Pogo — subtitled Clean as a Weasel — was originally going to be printed in China and the materials got to the printer over there in plenty of time. At some point, it became necessary to pull the book from that printer and it was moved to a printer in Korea — the one that handled earlier volumes in the series. They've printed it but when you print over there, most copies get over here via the cheapest/slowest freight. A few retailers have copies and a few more will have them in the next week or two but everyone won't have them until around the second week in January. You have no idea how sorry (and frustrated) we are about this.

But it'll be worth whatever you have to wait. This volume reprints the entirety of the Pogo newspaper strip for 1959 and 1960 — two years where so much was happening in America that Walt Kelly had too much to work with. The book also contains a foreword by Jim Davis of Garfield fame, R.C. Harvey's fine annotations, Maggie Thompson's pull quotes feature, an article on the late Don Morgan (who worked with Kelly on the later strips) by Jim Korkis and — what? You want more than that?

And here's some happy news: Volume 7, which will be subtitled Pockets Full of Pie, will be out sooner than you might expect. We actually have all the strips for that book in hand and we're going to send everything to press way before the release date. I'll announce that date here shortly. Nothing will stop us unless Trump slaps a 500% tariff on books about possums who dress like basketball referees — which, come to think of it…

The MeTV folks whipped up this little video tribute to one of my favorite (and much-missed) friends, the late Howard Morris. It's about all the voices that Howie supplied on The Flintstones — although I believe at least one that they think was Howie — the bird blowing up the balloons — was actually Mel Blanc.

I directed Howie for many years on Garfield and Friends and a few other shows. He was an amazing talent. If you made him do a line six times, he would give you six completely different interpretations. Sometimes, I'd give him no direction. I'd just let him do a speech over and over until he came up with something I liked and it was rarely something I (or anyone) could have coached him into doing. His talent as an actor was that organic and natural. He was hilarious off-camera or off-mike as well.

The Flintstones didn't use him to his full potential but as you watch this montage, note how he manages to make every line a little funnier and more colorful than what was on the script before him…

In 1977, the film The Goodbye Girl was a surprise smash hit. It had a screenplay by Neil Simon and its two leads — Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss — were nominated for Academy Awards, as was the film itself. Dreyfuss won his category, becoming at the time the youngest Best Actor in Oscar history. Very much a successful film.

In 1992, it was announced that Mr. Simon was transforming his screenplay into a Broadway musical of the same name. If ever an upcoming show looked like a guaranteed smash, this was it. Just the fact that it was Neil Simon and a beloved storyline sold a lot of tickets. When it was announced that David Zippel and Marvin Hamlisch were doing the music and Michael Kidd was directing, they sold more. And they probably couldn't have found two bigger stars to star than Bernadette Peters and Martin Short.

The advance sale was huge. So were the problems during rehearsals and tryouts. So was the disappointment of many when the show finally opened on March 4, 1993. The previous Neil Simon musical, They're Playing Our Song, ran for 1,082 performances. The Goodbye Girl closed after 188.

How could "the show that couldn't fail" fail? There were many factors and in his autobiography, Mr. Simon blamed everyone but Mr. Simon, implying he thought it was a terrible idea to try to make that movie into a stage musical. He didn't really explain though why he agreed to do it. I mean, it wasn't like he needed the money or the credit.

I saw one of the 188 performances and we somehow got tickets at the last minute…in the front row! I liked parts of it, especially David Zippel's lyrics which I thought were often funnier than what was coming out of the actors' mouths when they weren't singing. Before I explain what I didn't like, give me a sec to put up one of these…

There. Read on at your own risk. Like most musicals, the plot was about two people who shouldn't be together and maybe don't even like each other for most of Act One winding up very much in love. Anna never imagined she'd fall for the King of Siam. Marian the Librarian was repulsed at first by the traveling salesman, Harold Hill. Eliza Doolittle never dreamed she'd care about Henry Higgins…and in The Goodbye Girl, Paula McFadden (Bernadette on stage) never thought she'd have anything but disdain for Martin Short's character, Elliot Garfield.

You know how it's going to end before they even start the overture but you're going to pretend you don't, just as you pretend you don't see the wires that fly Peter Pan around, just as you pretend you don't know the ending of any play you've seen before. Well, with The Goodbye Girl, it was hard to pretend. From the moment he set foot on that stage, Martin Short was so funny and so adorable that you got angry with Bernadette's character for not falling in love with him ten minutes into the play. After fifteen, I wanted to marry him. That she kept treating this hilarious, wondrous guy like crap was more frustrating than amusing.

I also thought the set was confusing and that Short snuck in too many Ed Grimley gestures along with the occasional taste of Jerry Lewis. He made you laugh but as Martin Short, not as Elliot Garfield. I liked him better (but laughed at him less) a few years later in a revival of Little Me. It's not surprising that there have been few revivals of the musical of The Goodbye Girl.

There was one last night. The Musical Theater Guild here in Southern California puts on one-night "concert" performances of musicals that are rarely performed. There's almost no budget, almost no sets or costumes, a three-piece orchestra and precious little rehearsal time. They stage and learn each show in twenty-five hours, which is all Actors Equity will allow for this kind of production. The last one I saw there, which I don't think I wrote about then, was Barnum, which is usually done with a cast of no less than eighteen actors and often more. They did it with eight.

They did The Goodbye Girl with thirteen, which is more than enough. Thanks to clever directing by Linda Kerns and standout performances, this shoestring, makeshift, ragtag staging was more enjoyable to me than seeing Bernadette and Martin on the stage of the Marquis Theater on Broadway. All the performers were good but I'm just going to single out Wendy Rosoff (who played Paula), Will Collyer (Elliot) and an amazing young actress, Maya Somers, who played Paula's daughter Lucy. Everyone on stage was carrying scripts and reading from them but Ms. Somers looked at hers less than anyone else. Oh — and there was also an actress named Jenelle Lynn Randall who played Mrs. Crosby and demonstrated a stunning musical comedy voice and, like most of her co-stars, a keen ability to get every laugh they had in the script…and then some.

I think the reason this performance worked for me was that Mr. Collyer acted it and played a guy you didn't want to marry every time he delivered a line. And Ms. Rosoff played her part a bit more human, a bit more conflicted. Obviously, no one can prove it but I think Neil Simon would have been very happy with their interpretation of his words. They convinced me that The Goodbye Girl was, while not a great show, better than I thought it was in 1993. I'd be recommending you rush to see the other performances of it if there were any. Since there aren't, you'll just have to take my word for it.

A Question from Brian Trester…

I know that you are an expert in the history of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and how they ran things there. Can you answer a simple question for me? I noticed much like Sid and Marty Krofft, most of their shows were very short-lived, some only making 16 cartoons or less. Why did they give up or cancel shows so fast? I know it took a lot of time, effort and money to create these shows. This seemed to be a running theme with a lot of cartoons in the 60s and 70s.

Was it that the networks always wanted something new or were they that poorly received by the audiences? I loved cartoons like Hong Kong Phooey and the like but they seemed to come and go before you could really build a strong following. However, cartoons like Scooby Doo seemed to drag on forever to the point I almost dreaded to see the new Scooby Doo offering in the fall.

Can you help shed some light on this?

Sure. There are a few exceptions but very few to this: The show was axed because the folks at the network, wisely or unwisely, thought its ratings were just not high enough to warrant another season. They'd look at how the show was drawing audiences and in particular how it did in reruns. During the years I worked on Saturday morning network shows, the math was that they'd make thirteen episodes and run each one four times.

There were a lot of shows that did well on the first run, a little less well on the second run, a lot less well on the third run and poorly on the fourth run. If yours did, that was a show that was not going to get renewed for another season. Once in a while, a show fared so poorly in reruns that they switched in reruns of something else they thought would do better there. And of course, there were many that didn't do well on the first run, which almost always meant it wouldn't do well on any runs.

But really, that's all there is to it: How are the ratings? I can think of only a few exceptions. The run of the 1973 Addams Family cartoon show was reportedly truncated because of a legal dispute over the ownership of the property. In 1984, I worked on a live-action Saturday morn show for Sid and Marty Krofft, Pryor's Place, that probably would have had more than one season if its star, Richard Pryor, had been willing to do more than the thirteen episodes we did. Another show I worked on, Garfield and Friends, could have had at least one more season than the seven we did if the producers had been willing to lower the price it cost CBS. There are probably a few other cases but not many.

You sometimes hear that a certain show — like yet another series I worked on, Dungeons and Dragons — was canceled because protest groups thought it was too violent or too scary. I know that wasn't why that show went off. It was declining ratings. And I don't think it was ever true with any other program. As with most things in show business, it all comes down to the numbers.

I think Rip Taylor would have been very happy to see or know all the attention his passing has gotten in the media. It was hard to tell what would make Rip happy. The New York Times has an obit but unfortunately it includes this…

Mr. Taylor's voice proved to be a bankable commodity. In the 1960s, he did voice work as the son, Elroy, on The Jetsons. He was nominated for an Emmy for playing the voice of Uncle Fester in the television adaptation of The Addams Family.

I could have told you when I was ten years old that the voice of Elroy on The Jetsons was Daws Butler. Rip did a guest voice on the revival of that series in the mid-eighties. He actually didn't do that much voice work, at least in cartoons. When I worked with him, I sure got the impression that he wasn't even all that interested in performing when there wasn't a live audience present to laugh and applaud.

Speaking of which, I got an e-mail from someone named Jillian asking, "With Rip Taylor's recent death, I'd like to know how he came about to be in Garfield and Friends. Did he have a grandkid who watched the show?" Nope. I don't think Rip had any kids or grandkids but he was on the show because I wrote a part that I thought was right for him and I called his agent and booked him. And that day, I came to the above impression.

At the time, he was enjoying a bit of increased attention on TV. Various shows (Mr. Leno's, especially) were hiring him for cameos where he'd come on and do his great entrance — marching through the audience to the tune of "Happy Days Are Here Again" and throwing confetti — and that was all he'd do. We talked about it and he was not about to turn down a chance to be on television but he was frustrated that none of the folks hiring him seemed to want him to do any of his actual act. I didn't say this out loud but I kinda thought he was one of those comedians who was funnier than his own act.