This is for folks around my age who grew up in Los Angeles. It's a group shot of Los Angeles kid show hosts from when I was ten, give or take a few years. If you click to make the photo bigger, you'll see I've added their names. Some additional info…
Walker Edmiston (B) was probably my favorite, though he rarely appeared on camera. Usually, you saw one or more of his puppets, especially R. Crag Ravenswood, who is to the right to Engineer Bill. You (or I) never saw the face of Vance Colvig (E) because it was hidden behind Bozo makeup that his father had once worn when he was the first Bozo the Clown. Jimmy Weldon (F) passed away recently. Jimmy, seen here with his little buddy, Webster Webfoot, was the last surviving member of this fraternity…and the job of Los Angeles kid show host.
This was taken on the set of an afternoon movie show which Tom Hatten (G) hosted on KTLA years after he stopped hosting his own kid's show running Popeye cartoons on that station. The major omission for me in this gathering is Charles Runyon, who played Chucko the Birthday Clown on KABC for many years. By the time this group was assembled, he'd moved to Oregon. If you feel like using the Search function on this blog, you can read more about most of these men. When I was a kid, they were TV stars just as much as anyone on the networks.
Since "gag orders" are now in the news a lot, Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone explains all about them and the laws around them. This YouTube video ends with an ad but the subscribers' version (I'm a subscriber) has no ads and ends with Mr. Stone explaining that this story is changing so rapidly that after they recorded it but before they posted it, they had to go back and shoot and edit in some update footage — which is why his haircut changes back and forth during the video. I hadn't noticed…
At 2:10 AM, I received an e-mail from Holly, a reader of this site who was worried that I was still standing outside my home waiting for the poison gas to dissipate. I appreciate your concern, Holly, but no. I got in about ten minutes after the previous post and immediately got busy closing windows and drawers, putting all my food items back in their proper places and, in general, making my house my home again. Thanks to my incredible housekeeper Dora and my amazing assistant Jane, everything was returned here to normal quicker than I could have imagined.
In fact, things are so normal here now that I'm up in the middle of the night writing so I saw Holly's worried message as soon as it arrived.
Right after I posted that message, a neighbor came by to ask me how things were going. I pointed to a worker who was up the roof of my house letting down the last of the tarps and I said…
An exterminator on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But in our little village of West Hollywood, you might say every one of us is an exterminator on the roof, trying to scratch out a simple, pleasant development deal without breaking his neck…
My neighbor didn't get it but you do, right? Sigh.
Here — I'll post this for you while standing outside my house waiting for it to be aired out. They have to expel all the Vikane® gas and I'm hoping it doesn't take the smell of old comic books with it.
I picked this because there are some scenes you just can't see too many times. I hope the SAG-AFTRA negotiations aren't going like this…
The tent just came down and, indeed, the house is under it. As I stood watching the crew about to untent, I was reverse-engineering a David Copperfield trick in my head…how to make it look like the house is still there but when they remove the tarps — Presto! — it's gone, moved somewhere next to the Statue of Liberty and that train car from The Orient Express.
But it was there. In a way, I was almost disappointed because I'd figured out such a neat magic trick.
In case anyone's interested, I'm not at home as I write this. My house is filled with deadly poison gas.
Today's Person I'm Glad I'm Not should probably be anyone who can be described by the term, "Donald Trump's attorney." They all seem to have to sign their names to motions that get tossed out of court faster than a Sovereign Citizen's argument that operating a motor vehicle is not technically "driving." They all seem to become "Donald Trump's former attorney" even faster. And they all seem to lose every phase of every trial, every bit of his respect and maybe even their licenses to practice law.
Next Topic: A few months ago, the operator/promoter/guy-in-charge of an upcoming comic convention in the mid-west wrote and asked me to come be a Guest of Honor, which was nice but I politely declined. Apparently, this gentleman jumped the proverbial gun and announced or advertised me before I'd said no and once I said no, he put out the word that I had to cancel due to some kind of unspecified conflict. No, no. That is not the same thing as not agreeing in the first place.
And I continue to receive many an e-mail from fans of Frank Robbins and will perhaps soon whip up another page of them for this blog.
Speaking of e-mail, I just this minute received this from Craig Wiener…
In the previous compilations you posted, you remarked on shows that didn't work or failed to catch on with the public for one reason or the other. However, your latest posted video includes the credits for one glaring exception, namely, Bridget Loves Bernie.
This was a top 10 rated show with a prime slot on CBS's Saturday night schedule, yet was canceled after one season due to outside pressure over the fact that it portrayed an inter-religious marriage. Can you think of any similarly high-rated shows that were summarily canceled after such a brief run?
I don't think that's why the show was canceled. I think that was a reason given but I believe Bridget Loves Bernie was canceled because the folks at CBS decided that it had no substantive following; that the people who were watching it were watching it because it followed All in the Family and they were waiting through a show they didn't mucn care for so they could then watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show which followed. This was known as "The Hammock Effect." CBS felt that the time slot would be better served by a show people liked and would watch if it were moved out of that time slot…as M*A*S*H, (its replacement) was.
Yes, some groups did object to inter-religious wedlock and loudly claimed credit for the demise of Bridget Loves Bernie but I don't think that kind of union offended many viewers in the seventies. The Jeffersons routinely featured an inter-racial marriage and it was on the air for thousands of years…it seemed. I also don't think the original Star Trek was saved from cancelation after its second season by fan petitions. I just think that was a reason that the network allowed folks to believe because it served their purpose. Sometimes, you deal with loud pressure campaigns by letting them think they won when in fact you were doing what you wanted to do for other reasons.
Oh — perhaps I should explain about the deadly poison gas. My home is filled with it because I engaged an extermination company to fill the place with it for the purpose of killing termites. It's just something you have to do every once in a while…at least in my neighborhood, probably in every neighborhood. They tented it on Tuesday and did such a nice job of wrapping my house that I'm tempted to take it down to the UPS Store to see how much it would cost to ship it and me to Canada if Trump gets back into office. Which I'm pretty confident he won't.
And I just got a call: The tent comes off in 90 minutes and the house will be inhabitable soon after. I hope to come to you next over my own private WI-FI network.
Back in this post, we looked at the opening titles for 18 situation comedies of the seventies that came and went pretty quickly. Here's 18 more.
I didn't work on any of these. My agent set up a meeting for me to go in and talk to the producers of one of them about writing for the show but the show and the meeting were cancelled before the latter could take place. That happens all the time in television…
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…
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.
Three consecutive issues of Super Goof.
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.
Three consecutive issues of Bugs Bunny.
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.
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…
