The other day for no special reason, I watched the first episode of a new prime-time game show called We Are Family. As I recall when this was announced, it was to have been hosted by Jamie Foxx and his daughter Corinne but Mr. Foxx has been having medical-type problems so the job has passed to Anthony Anderson and his mother, Doris. We Are Family struck me as a good half-hour game show which, unfortunately, is in an hour time slot.

Obviously intended to ape some of what makes The Masked Singer so popular, We Are Family is a game show with musical performances and a guess-the-celebrity gimmick. There are three main performers in the hour. Each performer is an unknown but they have a famous relative. The main performer does a song on their own which segues into a duet with their famous relative who is seen in silhouette inside something called The Sphere.

100 (I think) contestants in the audience get to figure out (or maybe just guess) who the Mystery Relative is and then everyone who's right shares in the prize money in the first and second rounds. One of them then has the third round to themselves and can win up to $100,000 if they can immediately guess who the third Mystery Relative is based on their voice and some clues. The gent who had this opportunity on Show #1 took home $75,000 for getting the correct answer on the second clue.

This might be a cute little show if they did it in 30 minutes or if they filled the hour with enough show to attain the pace of The Price is Right. But not that much actually happens and to pad out the time, they have Mr. Anderson saying the same things over and over and over and over…and then they have his mother saying them and then he says them again and…

Well, I'll give it a few more chances. I also finally sampled Celebrity Name That Tune, which has been on for a few years now, naming tunes and often stretching the definition of "celebrity" fairly thin. That seems like a fun show…and it was not as reliant on recent songs as I guess I expected. I actually recognized enough of 'em to hold my interest for the hour. I'm not sure if I'll be back but I liked it more than I expected.

My favorite recent prime-time game show, The Wall, may have reached its end on American TV. They recently finished airing Season 5 which I suspect was recorded a long time ago and it was a difficult year. A few decades back, a friend of mine was working on Win Ben Stein's Money and she told me (correctly) it would probably be its last season.

Why did she think that? Because the ratings were dropping. Why did she think that was? Two reasons: They hadn't been able to find the right host after Jimmy Kimmel left it…and Ben was winning too often. She said, "Audiences want to see the contestants walk away with decent winnings more often than not and that's not happening." That was also the problem with the short-lived Million Dollar Money Drop game show. It felt like no one was ever going to win a million dollars or anything close to it.

The Wall has had a rough fifth season. It's a show where people stand to win a million-bucks-plus or if not, they usually at least go home with a few hundred thousand. In the fourteen shows aired, one couple won $1.3 million (significantly on the first show aired this season), one couple left with zero and the rest went home with between $100,000 and $250,000. That consolation moola is still a nice piece o'change but not on a show where the players seem extra-extra-deserving. And not on a show where anyone would feel like a loser taking away much less than seven figures.

I liked the show when players were winning more and I think Chris Hardwick is one of the best game show hosts to come along in quite some time. But I haven't heard anything about a Season 6. If there is one, I bet it'll have some rule changes. And someone will win over a million on the first episode they air.

Kevin Mummery — who assures me that's his real name — asked me this…

You're the go-to guy for questions about The Tonight Show, especially during Johnny Carson's tenure, so I thought you might be the guy to direct this inquiry to. I remember seeing a guy who was a member of the band that either Johnny or Tommy Newsom would bring out who did these weird dances…bizarre stuff, kind of like interpretive dance but without the interpretive aspect.

Usually he was brought out to fill in a gap between the monologue and the introduction of the next guest, or to fill time that would otherwise have gone by without anything more interesting to occupy that space. A few times when Bill Cosby guest hosted he had the guy come out from behind the bandstand and perform, and if anything he was even weirder then…I guess Cosby had the gift of bringing out the best in other people, or at least he did before we all found out what he spent his free time doing.

But I digress. Do you recall seeing this guy? Or have any idea or insight as to why Carson even had the guy perform this way apart from his normal duties as a band member?

The guy you're asking about was Ernie Tack, who played bass trombone on The Tonight Show for a very long time. Before that, he was in Ray Conniff's band and was heard on an awful lot of records, some of which are itemized here.

Along with his trombone skills, Tack did this weird dance that greatly amused Johnny and everyone on the crew, and they'd often have him do it to amuse the audience during commercial breaks. Every so often — usually when they were playing "Stump the Band" — he'd do it on the show. He does it near the end of this rousing game of "Stump the Band"…

The previous post featured a cartoon I wrote many years ago and it had in it a character named Aloysius Pig…and yes, I named the character for the role that William Demarest played in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. If you aren't familiar with the fellow who supplied the voice of Aloysius Pig, it was this guy. And I miss him…

Another "Name Withheld" person — but I know who he is and he worked on a lot of cartoon shows back in the eighties — sent me this…

I marvel at your occasional remark that during your seven seasons of Garfield and Friends you never had any interference from the suits at CBS or even from Standards and Practices. Did you ever write a cartoon that you thought would prompt them to demand changes?

Yes. This one. And they said absolutely nothing…

The voices, by the way, were done by Gregg Berger, Thom Huge, Howard Morris, Julie Payne and Kevin Meaney. I cut a few jokes because the cartoon was running long but the network folks didn't say a word. To their credit.

I would like to highly recommend two current projects by two friends of mine. You should be familiar with both of them and their work…and if you've ever attended one of our Quick Draw! games at Comic-Con International or WonderCon, you probably saw one or both of them drawing as fast as they could. This is the type of work they do when they take their time…

Tom Richmond is the guy who's been doing most of the movie and TV parodies for MAD since this century began. MAD is now almost all reprint so Tom has been filling some of his freed-up time to collaborate with one of MAD's best writers, Desmond Devlin, on a whole, beautiful book of the kind of thing they did for Alfred E. Neuman's favorite magazine. The difference is that now they get to have fun with movies that they wanted to spoof instead of what's current.

That's what it's called — Claptrap — and it's a dandy book that is now available. It contains Devlin/Richmond mockeries of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, The Shawshank Redemption, Psycho, Goodfellas, The Big Lebowski, Toy Story 4, Unforgiven, Blade Runner, The Blues Brothers, The Princess Bride, Citizen Kane, Die Hard and other films. It's first-rate funny.

Now, here's how you get a copy: You can order this lovely hardcover volume for $29.95 direct from Tom on this page but don't do that. Because he also offers a copy signed by the author and the artist for $75 and Tom will even personalize it to you.

But wait — there's more! The real deal here is on that same page. It's the $200 edition which includes a tip-in plate with an original sketch by Tom Richmond…and I happen to think Tom woefully underprices his sketches. That alone is worth the two hundred smackers and just think how impressive your copy will be!

Act now! I don't know how many they printed of this book but I know that once they run out, it might be quite a while before they got more in…that is, if there is a second printing. If I were you, I wouldn't even read the end of this sentence before I ordered my copy. Oh, wait. You just did.

---

I would also like to highly recommend a terrific new feature from my longtime friend Scott Shaw! If you have a lick o' sense, you already purchased this fine collection of Scott's past work. Well, here's what he's been doing lately…

Scott has logged a lot of time the last few years in hospitals and health care facilities as well as being visited in his home by caregiving nurses or maybe nursing caregivers. He's gotten to know a number of such folks and gotten friendly enough with them to inspire his new comic strip, Kilgore Home Nursing.

It's a been there/done that strip based on folks he's met, stories he's heard, adventures he's lived through and it's very funny and very insightful. If you haven't interacted with the people in that world, good for you…but your time will come. I've certainly seen enough of it to appreciate the humor and the truth in what my buddy has written and drawn.

This is a feature you'll have to follow online and it costs…but not a lot. It's certainly worth it as are many other goodies you'll find over at Aces Weekly. Check it out.

In 1970, when Jack Kirby moved from Marvel to DC, he became the writer-editor-artist of his work. There was some criticism of his drawing, though most of that went away when Mike Royer became his inker. What was left was mainly folks who simply didn't like Jack's style…or were horrified to see Marvel-style art in a DC Comic. There wasn't much he could do about that.

The dialogue and captions in his DC work, which definitely did not sound much like Stan Lee, proved to be more controversial. Some folks loved it. Some did not. I gave one interview in which I said some negative things about it and I can't for the life of me understand why I said that. I didn't really feel that way and in the years that followed, I came to really love the unique voice that Jack put into his work.

My pal David Seidman sent me this question to be answered here…

How did Jack Kirby respond to criticism of his work? I'm particularly interested in the criticism of his dialogue. From the 1970s to this day, readers have said that Kirby was a visual genius, but his characters spoke in ways that were too cornball, old-fashioned, or overblown even for the hyper-stylized world of costumed heroes. Did Kirby know about this viewpoint, and did it affect him?

As I said, some people liked it and some didn't. I think those in the "didn't" group would be shocked at how many there were (and now are) in the other group. I feel quite certain that over the years, the tide has swung wildly in his favor. There was a time there where it felt like DC was calling me every few months because they were reprinting that material again and wanted to consult with me and/or have me bang out a foreword. You don't reprint something that often unless people love it.

Even at the time Jack was doing that work, he got plenty of praise for his writing, much of it from people within the industry that he respected. What criticism he got from within DC was from the same folks who insisted that he should try to draw more like Curt Swan. In some cases, he felt (as did I) that the folks offering that criticism just wanted that end of his job for themselves.

I think what bothered Jack was that the folks saying he couldn't write were under the impression that writing a comic book was only about writing dialogue. When I discuss this with people, I'm reminded of something that screenwriter William Goldman wrote in his book about his craft, Adventures in the Screen Trade. The following excerpt is edited somewhat to get to the point quicker. Goldman was talking about a lesson he'd learned while writing one of his early scripts…

…I was approaching what I believe to be the single most important lesson to be learned about writing for films and this is it:

SCREENPLAYS ARE STRUCTURE.

Yes, nifty dialog helps one hell of a lot; sure, it's nice if you can bring your characters to life. But you can have terrific characters spouting just swell talk to each other, and if the structure is unsound, forget it.

Writing a screenplay is in many ways similar to executing a piece of carpentry. If you take some wood and nails and glue and make a bookcase, only to find when you're done that it topples over when you try and stand it upright, you may have created something, but it won't work as a bookcase. The essential opening labor a screenwriter must execute is, of course, deciding what the proper structure should be for the particular screenplay you are writing.

If you read the rest of that book and/or listen to some of Goldman's interviews, you'll see that he divided the role of screenwriter into two parts: (1) Writing the Dialogue and (2) Everything Else. And "Everything Else" included the plot — what the story was about — and what should be established in each scene in order to tell the story…in other words, The Structure.

I doubt Jack ever read Goldman writing about writing but it was clear to me that Jack looked upon writing a comic book in much the same way. I'm not sure that in his entire career in comics, he ever got any criticism whatsoever for the part of writing a comic book that he felt was most important — i.e., The Structure.  So he was satisfied he was doing his job well.  And he was annoyed that there were people who talked about "the writing" as something that did not include The Structure.

As mentioned in this article, we seem to be closing in on the day when some members of the public will see a print of the notorious Jerry Lewis film, The Day the Clown Cried.  As I understand it, this never became a finished movie.  The underfunded production shut down with many scenes unfilmed and after a while, it simply became impossible to go back and resume shooting.

A friend of mine who was for a while obsessed with knowing everything there was to know about this movie told me, "If it's ever made public, you'll probably see a mess of someone trying to an arrange an incomplete batch of clips into something coherent."  For a while, Jerry refused to discuss it but late in life, he did talk about it, acknowledging it as a failure on his part.  I just smell disappointment coming.  It may not even be bad enough for those who are dying to chortle at its rumored awfulness.

Several folks have messaged me that in the movie Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, there is a brief reference to the Beverly Cinema showing dirty movies. I missed it even though I saw the movie at the Beverly Cinema.

Just for the record: I never met Jeffrey Epstein and never got an invite or a ride to his island. I just thought I'd say that because I see so many other people saying that.

My computer runs a piece of software for which I have a subscription that is expiring on January 17. I have decided to let it expire not because I don't use the service or like it but because they're now sending me three pop-up reminders per day to renew and there's no way to turn them off.

I see threads popping up online wherein folks are saying they didn't like that Dick Van Dyke Birthday Special that I liked. This is not the kind of thing that I feel compelled to defend but I would remind some of these folks that (a) a pre-recorded show like that is edited so a lot of things were probably said that didn't make it to air, (b) it's not easy to round up "more people who worked with Dick" when Dick is 98 years old and (c) a birthday party is for the person whose birthday it is and Dick looked pretty darned happy.

Someone once said, "The single stupidest thing a person can do is to run out of gas." And he or she was right that it's stupid unless your gas gauge is malfunctioning. It may be equally stupid to allow your cell phone battery to get down to zero.

And as I was typing the previous paragraph, I got yet another pop-up reminder that my subscription to that program expires on January 17. Grrrrrrr.

I have met no one in my life who epitomizes the word "glamour" more than does Julie Newmar, especially if we expand the definition of that word to include "smart." She's really quite an amazing lady and this documentary will tell you all about her amazing career…

I haven't used that logo here since 2017 and don't you think it's about time? The International House of Pancakes up on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood closed its doors on New Year's Day — and as it was usually a 24-hour diner, those doors that had not closed much since the place opened in…well, that's a good question. The online articles give various dates ranging back as far as to say "over sixty years."

I think that's about right. Online sources tell me that the first IHOP opened in Burbank in 1958, followed by one in Panorama City and another in Baldwin Hills. I believe the one in Hollywood was open by the summer of 1961 because that's when the following story began. Reading about the closure made me think about it…

The Dick Van Dyke Show had not yet debuted on television but its earliest episodes were then being filmed. An episode was coming up which would be mostly a flashback to when Rob Petrie (Dick) met the woman who would be his wife, Laura (Mary Tyler Moore). For it, they'd need an actor to play Rob's army buddy who showrunner Carl Reiner had named Sol Pomeroy. One evening Reiner and the show's Executive Producer Sheldon Leonard, went to see a play that featured an actor they were considering for the role. After the play, they went to that IHOP for a late supper.

A completely-unknown actor-comic named Marty Ingels was at that IHOP when they walked in. Ingels — who at that point in his life had appeared in practically nothing — was there because his current girl friend was a waitress at that IHOP. He was sitting there drinking coffee, waiting for her shift to end so they could go home together.

When he saw Leonard and Reiner walk in, he instantly recognized them. He also knew about the show they were doing because he'd been scouring every inch of the Hollywood trade papers, Hollywood Reporter and Variety, looking for anything that could lead him to be cast in anything. So what did he do? He went to his lady friend and talked her into letting him dress in a waiter uniform and serve Mr. Leonard and Mr. Reiner.

And so Marty Ingels waited on their table and managed to be funny enough that Leonard and Reiner decided to bring him in for an audition…and yes, he he won the role of Sol Pomeroy. That was for Show #5 — "Oh, How We Met the Night That We Danced," which was filmed on July 18, 1961. Three months later, they had Ingels back and on October 17, they filmed "Sol and the Sponsor" in which he appeared again as Sol Pomeroy.

The first Sol Pomeroy episode turned out great. The second one didn't. Reiner and Leonard decided to bury it at the end of the season. They also decided it was the last time they'd hire Marty Ingels…and his performance in that second episode was only part of the reason.

Mr. Ingels had, to put it mildly, come on too strong. I once asked Rose Marie about it and she said, "He came in, acting like he was now a regular on the series and pitching ideas for his next appearance and the one after that and the one after that…" He was also doing a massive publicity putsch, giving press interviews about his new job.

(Years later, I had a not-dissimilar experience when I worked on the TV series, Welcome Back, Kotter. An actor who had one line in one episode — one line! — talked his way into a local Christmas parade where he rode in an open convertible with a banner on it proclaiming him as one of the stars of Welcome Back, Kotter.)

"And then," Rose said as we talked about Marty Ingels, "there was the matter of the coffee cart."

Ingels had gone to a carpenter and at great expense, had a gift made for the entire cast — a decorative cart that could be wheeled onto the stage and hold the large coffee urn that otherwise resided on a table, there for the benefit of anyone needing a cup of joe. The rack had handpainted coffee mugs each bearing the name of one of the stars of the show: Dick, Mary, Rose, Morey, Richard, Carl, etc.  And of course, there was one for Marty.

It made everyone uncomfortable. Everything about Marty was making everyone uncomfortable.

His debut in Show #5 aired on October 31, and Ingels, blithely unaware he had filmed his last Dick Van Dyke Show, took out full-page ads in those Hollywood trade papers showing him with Dick. Worth mentioning for reasons that will become obvious in the next paragraph is that the following week, Show #6 featured character actor Allan Melvin as a man named Harrison B. Harding who was another army buddy of Rob's.

"Sol and the Sponsor" didn't air until April 11 of the following year where it was Show #29 of the thirty Dick Van Dyke Shows made for that first season. By then, Marty Ingels had probably figured out he was no longer part of the series. And if he didn't know it then, he sure knew it by Show #17 of the second season. It was another flashback to Rob's army days and in it, his best pal was Sam Pomerantz (Sam, not Sol and Pomerantz, not Pomeroy) and he was played by Allan Melvin.

And then less than two months later in Show #24, Sam Pomerantz was back again…only this time, he was played by Henry Calvin. Melvin returned for two episodes as Sol Pomerantz (Sol, not Sam) in Season Five and he also played a few other roles on the series.

Ingels might not have been too upset about losing the job because by the time The Dick Van Dyke Show was filming its second season, he was filming the first season of I'm Dickens, He's Fenster, a show on which he was a co-star and in every episode.  It only lasted one season and in his autobiography, Ingels admitted that by the end of filming, most of the cast and crew steered clear of him, in part because at Christmas time, he came on too strong, showering them with expensive gifts.

His career went up and down thereafter and reportedly, he would occasionally go back to that IHOP on Santa Monica Boulevard.  He'd sit there eating pancakes and wondering how it had all been like a roller coaster since the night there when he pretended to be a waiter serving Sheldon Leonard and Carl Reiner. That's the story I couldn't help thinking about when I read that the place had closed.

---

My thanks to good buddy Vince Waldron, author of the highly-recommended volume, The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book, for helping me get some of the facts straight.

Daphne Pollard was one of the funnier women appearing in comedies of the thirties and forties. She was "discovered" by Mack Sennett in the latter days of silent films and appeared in dozens of talkies including several Laurel & Hardy films as Mr. Hardy's wife. Briefly, Vitaphone teamed her with Shemp Howard and here's one of the films they made together…

It's "Legal Eagle" time, folks! Here, Devin Stone discusses the legal basis for Donald Trump being booted from ballots in a couple of states with (perhaps) more to come.

Y'know: I think a pretty strong case can be made that the Fourteenth Amendment says that Mr. Trump is disqualified as a candidate. I also think that a pretty strong argument can be made that it would be better for our democracy if/when Donald Trump loses the election, he and his supporters couldn't say it was because of this. I also think it's bad for our democracy to ignore what a bona fide constitutional amendment says.

Since it's unlikely that I'm going to be appointed to any high court in the next few months, I don't have to cast a vote on this one…

Here's a whole movie…The Outlaws is Coming! starring The Three Stooges and Adam West. I wasn't fond of most of the features that the Stooges made late in their career and I don't think, as some people insist, Joe DeRita was the problem. The problem in most was the films themselves as well as the Stooges' ages. This was the last feature they made and, I think, the best from that period.

It was written and directed by Norman Maurer, a clever gent I had the pleasure of working with a few times. Norman was a comic book writer and artist…the partner of another great comic book creator, Joe Kubert. Maurer at one point did the Three Stooges comic book and he married Moe's daughter and wound up managing the Stooges' careers.

He made The Outlaws is Coming! in 1965 and in the cast, you'll also find Emil Sitka, who turned up in almost everything the Stooges did in their later years. Also, you'll find Henry Gibson plus a whole bunch of folks who were hosting Three Stooges films on TV stations all over the country.

Give it a try when you have a spare hour and 29 minutes…

In the previous item here, I made the simple, non-arguable statement that some people think Duck Soup is the best of the Marx Brothers movies and I stand by that: Some people do think that. You may think they are brain-dead morons who should be put up against a wall and executed for heresy but some people do think that.

Nevertheless, two separate e-mailers messaged me to express their outrage that I said "some" and not "all." The rhetoric of their missives would suggest to me that for these people, there are three incontrovertible, indisputable truths in the world and they are, not necessarily in the order of importance…

1. 2 + 2 = 4
2. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west
3. Duck Soup is the best Marx Brothers movie

One of them wrote me in an outrage a few months ago when I posted the following graphic even though I said "that any film on this list could easily swap positions with the one over it or the one under it."

This correspondent, ignoring the very real difference between "best" and "favorite" was upset on two fronts: (1) That I ranked one of the Marx Boys' M.G.M. films above any of the films they made for Paramount and (2) that I made the egregious factual error of not placing Duck Soup in its rightful unanimously-agreed-upon-except-for-stupid-me position of Number Uno. If we've learned nothing else from the Internet, it's that some people can be real dicks if you dare like something that they don't and vice-versa.

I also received a couple of messages insisting that Love Happy should not be consider a Marx Brothers Movie. Look: It's got Groucho in it, it's got Harpo in it, it's got Chico in it and the opening titles say "Starring the Marx Brothers." That oughta hold up in any court in this great land of ours.

But some people really love the five films the Brothers made for Paramount and abhor all the others. I love those first five but cannot discount the first two from M.G.M. and selected scenes from others that followed. While I loved the Marx Brothers from the time I was first aware of them, I didn't really love them until an evening in July of 1972.

My friend Rob and I attended and shared a room at Westercon 25, a science-fiction convention that was held June 30–July 4, 1972, at the Edgewater Hyatt House in Long Beach, CA. Like most of the s-f cons I attended, the proceedings had very little to do with science-fiction. I assume others do but the ones I went to were just multiple-day parties with sorta-like-minded people getting together at some unfortunate-to-have-us-there hotel. One evening, Rob and I played hooky from the con and drove just a few miles to the State Theater, located not far from Nu-Pike, a famous-then/gone-now amusement park in Long Beach.

They were showing a double-feature of those first two films that Groucho, Harpo and Chico made, sans Zeppo, for M.G.M.

In '72, long before the advent of home video and Turner Classic Movies, it was not easy to see those movies at all, let alone the right way. The right way was not watching them alone or with a couple of folks in your den. It was watching them with a big, raucous crowd on a big movie screen. This was the first time I saw those movies that way…and Rob, I and a maybe a thousand strangers laughed ourselves silly.

From start to finish. Every minute Allan Jones wasn't singing and even now and then when he was.

We laughed through the intermission too and there was a strong feeling in the place that went roughly like this: Where have these films been all our lives? Or maybe with some it was: Why doesn't some theater show them every week like this?

I cannot tell you how much love and laughter there was in the State that night. And even admitting the things that were right about the Paramount Marx Bros. movies and wrong about the M.G.M.s, I can't not love A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. The love for the former is greater than the love for the latter but I always think of them as one movie in two parts. Because of that evening.

Like Nu-Pike, the State Theater ain't there no more. It opened in 1920 as Loew's State Theatre and closed in the eighties. You can read the entire history of the place at this webpage and there are plenty of photos but I'll also offer you this one…

It's part of a frame grab from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Portions of the big chase scene near the end were shot in the streets of Long Beach and at one point, they go past the State and also past Nu-Pike. And you may not be able to make it out in this photo but one of the movies on the State's marquee is the version of Cape Fear which came out in 1962, the same year Mad World was shot. One of the stars of Cape Fear was Barrie Chase who, of course, was also one of the stars of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. In fact, she's the last surviving cast member of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

And here's one last little trivia point which intrigues me…

The first Marx film for M.G.M., A Night at the Opera, was shepherded by Irving Thalberg, an uncredited but powerful producer for M.G.M. Thalberg was the man Groucho called "The only authentic genius I ever met in Hollywood." A Night at the Opera deviated from the template of the Paramount Marx films in several ways, most of them dictated by Thalberg.

There are many stories about a sneak preview that was held of the finished or nearly-finished film at a movie theater. If you read every book about the Marx Brothers and read all the relevant interviews, as I think I have, you'll find that accounts of that preview vary but most go something like this: The audience sat, not laughing much, throughout a screening at a theater in Long Beach. Their tepid reaction panicked some or all of those who worked on the film but Thalberg kept a cool head.

Then, depending on which account you read, he either (a) arranged for the film to be shown that same night at another nearby theater where it got a much better reaction or (b) arranged for another preview a few nights later, perhaps after some edits had been made…and got a much better reaction. Either way, the movie went on to be a huge hit.

That night Rob and I saw it and the follow-up film at the State, a person of indeterminate expertise gave it a brief intro in which he said that A Night at the Opera had first played at that theater. Did he mean that was where the supposedly-disastrous preview took place? Or the more successful preview either that night or later? Or maybe it was where the film debuted locally when it went into general release? Or did that person even know what he was talking about?

Beats the heck outta me. All I know is that the State was probably the largest, most important theater in Long Beach in 1935 so it might seem like a good place to hold a preview. And I know that I love the idea that we had that wonderful evening in a theater that was important to the history of that movie.

And if it was the theater in which the audience failed to laugh, that would be fine. Because that night in July of '72, we sure made up for them.

Here's the trailer for what some people think is the best of the Marx Brothers movies…