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.
Not from the year we saw him there.
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.
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.
Marty on the left, Sid on the right, me in the middle. Photo by Bruce Guthrie
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.
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.
Dana Snow died a week ago, I'm told. I don't know the cause of death and I don't know his age…but he graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1970 so that should give you some idea. There was a memorial service for him the other night at the most appropriate place to hold a memorial service for Dana Snow…a comedy club. They were his natural habitat. If there is a grave for him, I know what he would have wanted on the headstone. He'd want it to say "Dana Snow, Comedian." Either that or a good joke.
I met Dana sometime in the early seventies at some local comic book mini-con or another. Comic books were Dana's secondary interest and they were a distant second. His first interest, far and away, was comedy, especially stand-up comedy. I had not seen much of Dana the last few decades but I find it hard to imagine that he ever had a third-place interest. He was an enormous fan of just about everyone who ever made an audience laugh and he devoted just about all of his life to trying to join their ranks…and succeeded here and there in his own way. If unrelenting persistence is a virtue — and in some instances, I don't think it is — Dana was the champ.
He could often be found in comedy clubs — usually the smaller ones, sometimes the ones that took him 90 minutes on the bus to get to. He'd sit there, watching other up-and-coming comics, waiting for his chance to go on even if it was at 2 AM in front of four patrons. He was a fierce taker of notes and extremely generous with everything he had. Some comics thought that when he was sitting in the back of the club scribbling, he was writing down their best jokes for purposes of theft. Never. He was studying, jotting down observations and thoughts that he felt might help his performance and his career. If he wrote stuff down about your act, he'd gladly share it all with you. Just trying to be helpful.
At times, he was. He worked for me for a few months — typing, filing, helping me sort the Groo mail, etc. He told some people that it ended when I caught him stealing…and that's not exactly true. What happened was that I found out he was working on his own stuff for too large a part of the time I was paying him by the hour to work on mine. I believe that was the reason he lost several other jobs around that time. He was just incapable of not working on his own stuff for very long.
That was in the nineties. The last decade or two, I ran into him here and there…usually at a tiny theater in West Los Angeles where a couple of different improv comedy troupes performed. When I went to see them, I'd see Dana in the back, taking notes like his life depended on it. I guess in some ways, it did. He was a benevolent presence and I know he helped hundreds of different comedian friends in whatever ways he could. His greatest regret was probably that when they had that memorial for him at the comedy club the other night, he couldn't sit in the back and take notes.
I have a bunch of these…pictures someone sent me or I stole them off the Internet…images I thought I might want to use on this blog and then I never did. I'm going to post a few of them here now and then.
I don't remember if it was at this past year's Comic-Con International in San Diego or the one before but I saw a cosplayer roaming the premises with this clever outfit. If you remember the end credits of the original Star Trek, you remember the credit line for Herbert F. Solow superimposed over an alien face. This is a more-than-reasonable facsimile of that title card. I spotted it, said "I have to get a shot of it and put it on my blog" and then I got distracted…I think by someone approaching me to get a Groo signed or something.
By the time I was undistracted, the cosplayer had gone elsewhere. I never spotted him — I assume it's a "him" — again. I didn't get my photo but I spotted this one on some site and grabbed it. It matters to me not just because it's well done but because Herb Solow was the guy who gave my partner Dennis Palumbo and me our first TV writing job. A lovely man. I think he would have been flattered…
Well, I think I have my streaming service set up properly…and today, I subscribed to Apple TV largely so I could watch The Problem with Jon Stewart. Then about twenty minutes later, I saw headlines on several sites that proclaimed some version of "Jon Stewart's Show on Apple Is Ending." What timing. I assume though that if Mr. Stewart wants to continue with it, Mr. Stewart will find a willing buyer.
Lately, I've seen and heard of an awful lot of damage done by medical advice that did not come from someone who attended medical school, received a diploma, took some modernized version of the Hippocratic Oath and has years of experience in his or her chosen field. To me, everyone else is like Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies who insisted she was a doctor because she knew how to cure leprosy with raccoon sweat or something like that.
The fourth and final issue of the four-issue Groo in the Wild mini-series is either at your local comic book shop or it will be any day now. I don't plug Groo often on this site and it's not because I'm not proud of the comic or don't want you to buy it. It's because I have to be in the right frame of mind to plug something that pays me. I usually get out of that frame by seeing the online offerings of folks who think the Internet was invented just to promote their current products. Today, I feel like telling you that this is out and I think this mini-series is one of the best things Sergio and I have ever done. I won't mention it again.
So my first thought was that Today's Person I'm Glad I'm Not should be Sidney Powell, the Trump lawyer and election denier who pleaded guilty this morning in a Georgia courtroom. But then I realized: This woman has just done the single intelligent thing I've ever heard of her doing…the thing that will keep her out of prison if she doesn't do something else illegal and foolish. So maybe today's P.I.G.I.N. is Donald Trump who's now had this attorney and close associate flip on him like a cheese omelet.
Sorry I've been away from the blog a bit. It's been a couple of really crowded days but I'll make it up to you.
Recently here, I announced with a heavy heart that I was abandoning my beloved TiVos and my not-beloved cable company. I still believe TiVo makes the best Digital Video Recorders — or at least, the best I've seen. The trouble is that every cable company now has their own DVR and they make it very, very difficult to use their service with any DVR but theirs. Adhering to the old maxim that I wish wasn't true as often as it is — "If you can't beat 'em, surrender" — I've surrendered. So that's why I've stopped using TiVo.
And my reason for getting rid of my cable service is that their service has been really terrible. I have revenge fantasies in which the heads of the company are trapped for all eternity in the company's phone system, trying to get an actual human being on the line.
Well, it looks like my timing was spot-on. Stu Shostak sent me a link to this article about how this very cable company is taking a big step away from offering cable service. It will no longer be available to new subscribers. Can we all see where this is heading?
Today's Person I'm Glad I'm Not should probably be Jim Jordan who doesn't look like he's going to get the job of Speaker of the House. He seems to be the only person who wants it but even some members of his own party thinks he'd be a disaster…and these are people who think Trump wouldn't be.
