Today's Person I'm Glad I'm Not is Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House. It's like being the drummer for Spinal Tap but without the occasional groupie.

Jeff W. asks what's easily the most important question I've ever received here…

Okay, you're supposed to be this big expert about the movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Maybe you can answer a question that's nagged at me for some time. In the scenes in the airport control tower, there are four men. I recognize Carl Reiner, Paul Ford and Jesse White but who is that fourth guy? He has a line or two but he doesn't seem to have had any billing.

Okay so this isn't the most important question I've ever received here but it is the easiest to answer: That's Eddie Ryder, who was one of those actors who was in everything for a decade or two. He was the kind of performer of whom directors and producers said, "Hey, we need a guy here to play this character. Get me Eddie Ryder!" He was on time, he was dependable, he knew his lines, he was never any trouble. Here's a picture of Eddie…

Eddie Ryder broke into TV acting in 1953 with roles on Space Patrol and The Adventures of Superman (the series starring George Reeves). He was in hundreds of TV shows and his many feature film roles included Operation Mad Ball, The Patsy, The Oscar, Silent Movie and High Anxiety. You can spot him in this still from Son of Flubber…

I have no firm info on this but I suspect he was a last minute "get" for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Because of all the tech problems and the sheer size of the endeavor, it was sometimes hard to predict when they'd get to a certain scene when they were filming. Sometimes, with regard to the smaller parts, it was a matter of "We have to shoot this scene first thing tomorrow morning! Who's available that we can get?" They wanted recognizable comedians in every role but occasionally had to settle. I don't know why he didn't get his name in the credits.

Eddie even had some history with his scene-mate Carl Reiner, having appeared twice on The Dick Van Dyke Show. One of them was the episode I got to see filmed and in it, he played Rob Petrie's tax accountant. It was the one in which Rob explained how he and Laura bought their home with the rock in the basement…

You can see the call sheet for that episode here and a still taken on the set here. Plus he was a director and a writer for other shows and you can see a most impressive list of credits over at the IMDB, though I doubt it's close to complete. He was even in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Just one of those guys who worked all the time.

This is a still from the set of a Muppets TV special and I'm pretty sure it's the 1979 The Muppets Go Hollywood, which celebrated/promoted the release of The Muppet Movie. It's interesting because you can see the proximity of the Muppeteer (Frank Oz) and the human in the shot (Dick Van Dyke). One of the many innovations that Jim Henson either invented or perfected was having his characters perform right alongside people instead of having the puppet in some kind of stage separated from any non-puppets in the scene.

This photo is either from a rehearsal or a number in which Mr. Van Dyke and Ms. Piggy were lip-syncing to a pre-recorded track. How do we know this? Because Frank Oz isn't wearing a microphone, that's how we know this.

When I started this "Person I'm Glad I'm Not" feature, I honestly thought it would be a different person every day. I shoulda known it would be tough to designate anyone besides You-Know-Who. Today, Trump's in a courtroom where his former "fixer" Michael Cohen is unloading on him while yet another Trump attorney — who by tomorrow he'll be saying was never his attorney — has flipped and will be testifying against him. I wonder if the people he currently admits are his attorneys have told him exactly how much trouble he's in.

If you're like me and you don't want to even hear this man's voice, check out a few seconds of any recent speech. He's incoherent, he's rambling more than ever, he's admitting things that will be used against him in a court of law and he's slurring his words.

More and more, he's reminding me of one of those drivers you see being pursued by police in a high-speed chase. He has no idea where he's going, just that he has to try and keep ahead of everybody, forgetting (always) that there's a police chopper overhead that he can't possibly outrun.

His tires are shredding from the spike strips or just how hard he's driving the auto. He hits things and his bumpers fly off and his rear-view mirror's gone so he has no idea what's going on around him. You're watching the car disintegrate piece by piece and just waiting for the inevitable crash…or maybe he'll stop or be PIT-manuevered into stopping and then in mad desperation, he'll foot-bail and start running across the freeway or into some strange neighborhood with the police just steps behind him and…

…and it's just getting more and more brutal. I actually have Jake Tapper's e-mail address and I'm thinking of writing him and suggesting he start covering this story from a helicopter.

Here's another collection of openings from TV shows of the seventies. The folk(s) who compiled it called these shows "mostly mediocre" and I don't know that that's an apt description except that at any given time, most of what doesn't last long on TV kind of naturally appears to have been mostly mediocre. A couple of these might have evolved into pretty good programs if they'd been given more of a chance to live. I suspect that if M*A*S*H had been axed after thirteen weeks — not inconceivable given its early ratings — it would be remembered by many as a mediocre flop.

When I see clips like these, here is where my mind wanders: I see names and faces I've seen, before and after, on more successful and memorable projects. What went wrong this time? In some cases, it may be that the network just gave up too soon on something that, like M**A*S*H and other shows we could name, took a little while to get its bearings and find an audience. At other times, I suspect, the problem calls to mind Stephen Sondheim's great advice about Broadway productions: "The most important thing is to make sure everyone involved is working on the same show."

Sometimes, I think it's a matter of the buyers — the folks at the networks — just being impressed by premises that turned out to be unworkable…and there are other reasons. It's fun in a way, especially after the fact, to say "Well, that stunk," but that's easy and doesn't explain much. I was always that way with comic books, too: "Hmmm…that writer and artist did such great comics elsewhere, why didn't it all come together on this one?"

Clearly, some of these short-lived TV offerings were loaded with talent — Norman Lear, Bernadette Peters, Michael Keaton, others — so what happened this time? We all know Raymond Burr had two very successful shows in Perry Mason and Ironsides but can you name the 1977 series that lasted thirteen weeks in which he played a big publishing magnate who used that position to investigate crimes? I couldn't…but it's the last show in this collection…

After too long a pause, here's the next part of this series. You might wish to refresh your memory by reading the First Part, the Second Part, the Third Part, the Fourth Part, the Fifth Part and, yes, even the Sixth Part.

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During the years I wrote Gold Key Comics for the Los Angeles office of Western Publishing, I heard a great many stories about the company. Some of them were about problems with the New York office. The two divisions had very little contact and overwhelmingly, what they had was professional and pleasant and involved both towards for the same goal, which was to put out the best possible comics to achieve the best possible sales.

But of course, there were what we might politely call "differences," some of which flowed from the fact that the way things were set up, the N.Y. office did the final production phases of getting comics off to press. For example, the comics were all colored in New York. Who did the actual coloring? I don't know and neither did the folks who ran the L.A. office. They'd send the finished line art back east and that was the end of it as far as they were concerned. Often — and by "often," I mean like all the time — they didn't like what the New York colorists did, especially on the interiors.

No, I take that back. Once in a while, they liked the interiors but from what I can tell, that "while" was a rare while. They also liked the coloring of the covers if and when it adhered to an old Western Publishing company policy. One person — and I wish I knew the name of any of the people in charge of this — would color all the covers with an eye towards the on and off-sale dates. The goal was to see that no two Gold Key comics that were on sale at the same time had the same color schemes on their covers.

This applied only to the line art and not to the paintings and I have no idea why. An awful lot of the painted covers, particularly on the "ghost" books (The Twilight Zone, Grimm's Ghost Stories, etc.) looked very much alike to me and not just because most of them were painted the same man…George Wilson. They were often excellent paintings but a lot of them looked the same to me. Mr. Wilson, by the way, did not paint every single cover but since those who now try to affix credits now on artwork aren't familiar with the other painters, they often slap Wilson's name where it doesn't belong.

The person in charge of coloring the line art colors back east would take all the black-and-white versions of covers that would be on-sale at the same time and put them on a big easel or pin them to a wall. The idea was to see all of them at the same time. Then he (or she) would designate: "This issue of Bugs Bunny will have a yellow background and a blue logo while this issue of Pink Panther will have a green background and a white logo and this issue of Woody Woodpecker will have a blue background and a pink logo…"

This was more complicated than it might seem because at the same time, this color coordinator would have to make sure that no two consecutive issues of any comic had similar coloring. This was a practice at some other companies, as well: The cover of the February issue had to be quite different from the cover of the January issue so that folks browsing the newsstands wouldn't think they already had that issue. The theory was that if you weren't sure if you'd already bought it, you wouldn't buy it.

And we're now into another one of those things that I've never seen discussed in any fanzine or fan forum. If you're intrigued by this aspect of comic creation, take a look at the covers of Marvel's Captain America comic, especially in the seventies. Once it was decided that the logo would always be red, white and blue, that limited the number of background colors available to the person coloring the cover. You could have a white background but you couldn't use red or blue because then the logo wouldn't "pop." Not only that but green and purple looked odd with a red, white and blue logo. So for a long string, they did it the easy way. The background colors on Captain America were white, black and yellow in rotation.

And the cover colorist at Western had another handicap: Some characters are always certain colors. You couldn't use a pink background on a Pink Panther cover unless the idea was to have your star blend into the background instead of stand out. Ideally, you'd want Tweety to be the only thing that was yellow on a Tweety & Sylvester cover. Woody Woodpecker had the same color scheme as Captain America and therefore his comic presented much the same problem.

At least, that's the way it was supposed to work. When the unknown cover colorist in New York screwed up, angry memos would fly back and forth. The New York office was also in charge of the logos on the covers.

In some cases, the company that owned a great cartoon character and licensed it to Western had a logo design which was used whenever appropriate. Someone in the dustant past of Western — I dunno who, I dunno when — had this idea that they could always craft a better logo than Walt Disney's artists, Walter Lantz's artists, Jay Ward's artists, etc. That became a company tradition so they tried, not always with the greatest results.

Now and then, a licensor would insist on his logo but for the most part, Western liked to design their own and the New York office did those — and not just for the comic books. Remember: Western was also producing coloring books, activity books, novels for young readers, jigsaw puzzles and other items, often featuring the same licensed characters.

Chase Craig, who headed up the L.A. office, thought a lot of their logo designs were horrible but as with the coloring, this was a battle that he simply was not going to win. We all have those in our lives. There was one time that I designed the logo for a Gold Key comic and I did it without knowing I was doing it. I told that story here.

So the two offices fought over the coloring and they fought over the logos. They also sometimes quarreled over jurisdiction — which coast would do the comic based on a new license that Western Publishing had acquired. I'll tell a couple of stories about that in our next installment and, sooner rather than later, I'll get back to the raging controversy over panel borders touching word balloons. I promise.

Hey, we haven't had a good a cappella Disney medley on this site lately. Here's one from the folks at Voctave…

I don't know if I missed it and I probably wouldn't have gone if it's past and I didn't know about it…but here's the announcement of Monty Python and the Holy Grail being re-released in theaters this year. As usual, a trailer made by the Monty Python guys is funnier than a whole movie by almost anyone else…

Today's Person I'm Glad I'm Not is Sidney Powell. Though she can take some comfort in the fact that she's now a lot less likely to go to prison, it must come as a shock to her to hear that she was never one of Donald Trump's lawyers as he's now claiming. I can't wait until Eric and/or Don Jr. are in so much trouble that Dad starts posting on Truth Social that they were never his sons.

With all these associates flipping on him, I wonder if Donald is going to reconsider not paying Rudy Giuliani's legal fees.

By the way: Yesterday's P.I.G.I.N. was the anonymous fellow who spam-phoned me, pretending to be with a company closely affiliated with Medicare, asking me none-of-his-f'in-business questions about my health so he could maybe send and/or sell me something. I cut him off in mid-shpiel, called him a liar and just as I was about to hang up on him, I heard him start sobbing and muttering, "Jesus, I can't sell anything…" That guy's gotta be pretty bad off.

Tomorrow's will probably be Donald again. Lately, every week seems to start with him getting really, really bad legal news.

An online post by my friend Bob Ingersoll called my attention to two changes that King Features Syndicate has made in its comic strip offerings as of today.  One is the cessation of the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip.  It started on January 3, 1977, written officially (and sometimes, actually) by Stan Lee and drawn by an array of different artists, some uncredited. The main credited ones were John Romita, Larry Lieber, Fred Kida and Alex Saviuk.

When Stan Lee passed away in November of 2018, production of the strip stopped and the last original one ran the following March. It shifted to reprint at that point and there was an announcement that this would be temporary and that new adventures would be forthcoming. I didn't understand why the pause since the artist was still alive and Roy Thomas had been ghost-writing it for Stan for years.

In any case, new stories never appeared and the last reprinted strip ran yesterday in whatever newspapers were still carrying it. It has apparently been scrubbed now from the King Features website which suggests to me that perhaps some contract with Marvel/Disney expired and was not renewed from one end or mutual decision.

Stan "wrote" the strip for a long time, which is to say that others plotted it for him and he composed the captions and dialogue. A couple of times, I turned down offers from him to do the plotting and in 2000, he offered — and I again declined — to have me ghost-write the entire thing for him. The following may be of interest to Stan Lee historians: At that point, he was not only writing the strip by himself but he was writing it full-script.

The man who invented the "Marvel Method" of comic book writing — having the artist draw it before he "wrote" it — had found that wasn't working for him so he figured out the plots, wrote a script and then it went to the artist. He may have later involved others but for a few months there, he did all the writing all by himself. Someone at the time told people I was ghosting it but I was not. All I did was to proofread a few weeks of those scripts. I have no idea just when he passed the job on to Roy.

So that strip is history…but today, Flash Gordon rose from the dead. That strip started in January of 1934 with the great artist Alex Raymond at the drawing board working with the uncredited writer, Don Moore. It passed through many hands over the following decades and the daily strip version ended in 1993 with the Sunday page continuing, produced by Jim Keefe (with occasional guest artists) from 1996 to 2003. Keefe's work has been recycled/reprinted since then and reprint strips never grow in popularity. Often, they're just placeholders until something new comes along.

But — surprise, surprise! — a few days ago, to the amazement of all of us who care about this kind of thing, a revival was announced of both a Sunday page and a daily one. Here's one panel from the first installment which is in newspapers (though probably not many) today..

The writer-artist is Dan Schkade and I think he's a real good choice…though die-hard Flash Gordon fans are already carping online that he doesn't work in "The Raymond tradition." No, it doesn't look like it did in thirties, forties, fifties and sixties and in this case, I think that's a necessity if this property is ever to have any life. A strip set in the distant future should not look like it was drawn in the distant past.

I'm going to follow it online, which I think I can do on this page. There are a number of once-great comic strips that turned into pale imitations of themselves and could do with a fresh approach. For a long time, I liked the Flash Gordon property not for what it was but what it could be. Jim Keefe tried updating it a bit but I don't know that enough people saw what he was doing for its popularity to increase much and King Features never gave it a daily strip. I'd love to see this attempt succeed.

I saw Don Rickles perform live twice in Las Vegas. Once was in the early eighties when my friends Len Wein, Marv Wolfman and I went there to vacation a bit and drop in on that year's Consumer Electronics Show. The C.E.S. was crowded and full of new, high-tech gadgetry which seemed very futuristic and Jetsony then. Today, it would probably look like something Thomas Edison invented in his teens while waiting for his acne to clear up. We stayed at the San Remo Hotel, an establishment that would have needed major renovation to earn a one-star rating. It's now Hooters and it's been extensively rebuilt, as have many of the women who work there.

We were in Vegas three nights and one of those nights, we went to the Sahara to see the dinner show starring Mr. Rickles. A gent who was in charge of seating asked us if we wanted to sit up front where we might find ourselves part of the show. If we'd said, "Yes, we do," we could have tipped him to put us there or if we'd said, "No, we don't," we could have tipped him to not put us there. Either way, that man had to be tipped and we wound up far enough back to be out of the line of fire.

We were all big fans of Don Rickles on television so we put up with the Tip Extortion and with what at the time seemed like an exorbitant price for prime rib which I think was leftover from when Martin and Lewis played that room. There was also an opening act to get through — a lady singer who was unknown at the time and who gave us no reason to think that might change. All of that would be worth it, we told ourselves, to see a great comedian in what seemed to be the perfect environment for him — a Vegas showroom.

After way too much of the mediocre prime rib and the mediocre lady singer, the mediocre on-stage band played the matador's fanfare, an off-stage announcer introduced the headliner and out came Don Rickles. And boy, did he stink.

I am not kidding. Simply awful…and I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "How could he stink when back then, he was so funny insulting people on Johnny Carson's show, on Dean Martin's show, on just about everyone's show?" Here's your answer: That night at the Sahara, he didn't insult anyone. He barely told anything resembling a joke. This was during a period in Rickles' career where (I guess) handlers and advisers we're telling him in their infinite wisdom, "Don, if you don't want to spend your life appearing for bad money on talk shows, you need to become an all-around entertainer."

So he spent 75% of his onstage time singing and dancing. That's right: Singing and dancing. I remember a very strenuous ten-or-so minute number imitating Jimmy Cagney in the best songs from the film Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Rickles the song-and-dance man. This was like if you paid good money to see Simone Biles perform and all she did was come out and play a harmonica.

I think it was at the end of the Cagney number that we witnessed one of the greatest moments of Show Biz Schmaltz I've ever seen in my life. Rickles, as he took his bow, was schvitzing buckets. (If you don't know what that word means, look it up. And while you're at it, look up schmaltz too. Both words are spelled many different ways, most of them correct.)

He was catching his breath before launching into the next bit when he "suddenly noticed" an elderly black gentleman standing just onstage at stage left. I put "suddenly noticed" in quotes because Rickles could not have done a worse job of pretending to be surprised at this.

The man was holding a pitcher of ice water and Rickles, acting like this had never happened before — which it probably hadn't since the second show the previous night — called the elderly black man by name and asked, "What are you doing out here?" Then Mr. Warmth lived up to that nickname, telling us that this man was his dresser…and had tended to him at most of the hotels he'd played at for the last few decades.

The man, who was not a very good actor, replied cautiously, "Oh, Mr. Rickles…I saw you out here singing and dancing your heart out to entertain these people. I know that you give your all every night to every audience but you have been so kind to me all these years that I wanted to do something for you so I brought you some ice water." (I'm doing this from memory so none of these quotes are exact.)

Rickles was so touched by this "sudden gesture" that he began sobbing and he kissed the man and asked the audience to give him an ovation, which of course we did. There was a little more banter about how wonderful each of them was and then the dresser shuffled off the stage and Rickles had to pause and wipe his eyes before continuing.

About half the audience seemed genuinely moved at the moment. The rest of us didn't buy one second of it. Len and Marv and I all whispered about how the elderly black man who wanted to do something nice for Mr. Rickles had brought out the pitcher of ice water but he hadn't brought out a glass, nor had Mr. Rickles received any of that ice water.

The rest of the show consisted of Rickles telling us over and over in so many ways that in the History of Mankind, there has never been a better human being than Frank Sinatra. It's not just that he's inarguably the greatest entertainer who ever lived, he's also a great humanitarian and a philanthropist and I think Rickles even put Frank's greatness against up Jesus Christ and Francis Albert Sinatra was the clear winner. At one point in a scolding tone, Rickles said something like, "You people who aren't in show business could not possibly understand the greatness of this man." And then Don dropped his pants and fired a rocket.

No, he didn't. If he had, we would have all felt that was worth the price of admission. Alas, he did not drop his pants nor did he fire a rocket. That might have been entertaining.

Like I said, this was in the early eighties. In the following years, Rickles continued to play Vegas often. I knew people who'd seen him and obviously experienced a very different show. I read reviews that said very little about singing and dancing and even praised one number — "I'm a Nice Guy," which was described as a fun, campy break from all the insults and putdowns.

I decided I ought to go see him again and I finally did. Around 1992, I was in Vegas with a lady friend and I promised to take her to a restaurant I didn't want to go to and she did if she'd accompany me to see Don Rickles. She said yes and we dined downtown at that restaurant, then went to a 9 PM (I think) show at the Golden Nugget nearby.

A gent who was in charge of seating asked us if we wanted to sit up front where we might find ourselves part of the show. If we'd said, "Yes, we do," we could have tipped him to put us there or if we'd said, "No, we don't," we could have tipped him to not put us there. Either way, that man had to be tipped and we wound up far enough back to be out of the line of fire.

What we got for my money (plus tip) was indeed a very different show…and a pretty good one, very similar to the show you'll see if you click below. In fact, I'm sure a lot of what Don said was the same. Different Jew, different Spanish kid, different black guy in the front row, same lines. In a way, that was part of the charm.  Hearing Don Rickles call someone a hockey puck was in its way like hearing Tony Bennett sing about how he left his heart you-know-where.  But there was also plenty of freeform, occasionally incoherent ad-libbing.  It was clear Rickles was saying anything that popped into his head at the moment and that he was working a lot harder than necessary.

My lady friend enjoyed it a lot more than she'd expected.  She said, "I didn't understand him on TV.  I think I do now."

The video below was recorded in 1996 at the Pine Knob Arena located in Independence Township, Michigan and it has a few bleeps and edits in it. I will not pretend to understand the decisions to omit certain words and leave in certain others. Rickles, in case you're wondering, was 70 years old when this was recorded and his opening act was Joan Rivers. When I saw him that second time in Vegas, he didn't have an opening act.

This runs just shy of an hour. If you don't want to watch the whole thing, he does "I'm a Nice Guy" at 6:02 and he does a nicer, more sincere version of the bit with the black colleague at 29:27 and I may be wrong but I don't think it's the same black colleague. The one I remember was much older then. You get a little Jimmy Cagney at 35:40 and there's a little about Sinatra near the end but there's a whole lot less of it and it's a lot less worshipful than what Len, Marv and I saw at the Sahara. That's at 44:15.

Is he funny in this video? I think he's very funny at times and I don't think anyone who bought tickets to see this Don Rickles show was the least bit disappointed. He was extremely Don Rickles. Some of the racial stuff hasn't aged well.  No one could or maybe should do that act today but Rickles was around long enough that he was more or less grandfathered in…or least, that's how I feel.   But hey, you're smart. You can decide for yourself…

Yesterday's Person I'm Glad I'm Not was, of course, Donald Trump, whose followers are probably wondering aloud, "Weren't we supposed to have so much winning we'd get sick of winning?" I think every day last week, Trump suffered some loss in some court and/or had some former close associate flip on him and/or saw someone he was backing lose big. And he has months and months of this ahead of him. I'd feel sorry for him if I saw even the slightest inkling that he ever in his entire life felt sorry for anyone but himself.

I'd like to write something here not about Current Events since I know a lot of you come to this site to get away from those nasty things…but it's kind of a Tons o' News Day. It's hard to yank my brain away from the Middle East situation, Ukraine and Trumpian legal developments and write about old sitcoms. What little effort I can muster in that area has to be poured into writing stuff that producers and editors are waiting for. But this weekend, I'm determined to finish the next installment of the Gold Key comics series and a few other things I've left dangling here.

So Jim Jordan, who doesn't believe in accepting the results of elections that don't turn out the way he wanted, has accepted the outcome of his and is no longer the Republican candidate for Speaker of the House. Can't wait to see who they come up with next. I hear Mike Lindell needs money.

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This past week, I spent some wonderful hours with my past (and it looks like future) employer Marty Krofft discussing upcoming projects. One in which I'm only peripherally involved is the forthcoming Sid and Marty Krofft Channel which will soon be streaming vintage episodes of H.R. Pufnstuf, Lidsville, Land of the Lost, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, The Bugaloos, The Krofft SuperShow, The Krofft Superstar Hour, The Far-Out Space Nuts and other Krofft Klassics.

The channel, which debuts early in 2024, will even air a few short things I did for Sid and Marty in the seventies that have never aired before. I'll let you know when it's time to see if you can get it via whatever system you get to get your television.

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Every time I plug something I (theoretically) make money on, I want to post something that doesn't earn me a nickel. There's a new book out featuring loads of work from the files of my longtime pal Scott Shaw! How "longtime" is "longtime?" Well, in this case, we met at Jack Kirby's house in 1971 when Scott was just an aspiring cartoonist instead of the full-fledged, prolific one he became a few years later.

If you've ever been a fan of Scott's work, you will very much want a copy of Scott Shaw!s Comix & Stories.  If you're not a fan of his work yet, buy a copy and become one.  It's stuff he did from the days even before he and I met and it goes up through current work — posters, doodles, sketches, stories…even a few stories he and I collaborated on. If you're going to be at a con soon where Scott's appearing, buy one there and he'll draw something wonderful in your copy. But since you may not be, order one right now at this link. You'll be happy you did, miserable if you don't.

If I were him, I think I'd get up, claim victory and announce that the voting machines were rigged.

…and it's always nice when your day starts with watching Jim Jordan lose another election for Speaker of the House.