I'm having major construction work done on my home at the moment. These guys are really good. I wish they fixed broken ankles. But the noise is making it hard to get work done…and that includes blog posts.
For those who are interested: My ankle gets a wee bit better every day but I'm not expecting to be mobile enough by WonderCon to show my face there. If you go, have a good time there, as I always do…and if you see someone you think might be me, it's probably someone cosplaying as Busted Ankle Boy, one of the more obscure members of The Legion of Clumsy Super-Heroes.
The Spam Call I'm Sickest Of: "Mr. Evanier [mispronounced], I'm [FIRST NAME] with [NAME OF PHONY MEDICAL BUSINESS SOMETIMES WITH "MEDICARE" IN ITS NAME] and our records show you're experiencing serious pains in your back and knees. We would like to send you, at no cost to you –" And that's about as much of it as I hear.
"Professor" Irwin Corey died in 2017…but if you miss his unorthodox, incoherent syntax, it's alive and well and coming out of Donald Trump's mouth in almost every speech. I'm not completely kidding about that.
Lastly and to speak of The Devil: I keep hearing people on cable speculate that Trump will pick Ron DeSantis as his running mate. Aren't those two guys residents of the same state? And doesn't The Constitution say that two individuals from the same state can't comprise a presidential ticket? Not that either of those guys would let that stop them if Trump wanted that combo but I doubt Ron is under consideration. I think I stand a better chance of being his running mate.
[UPDATE, A LITTLE LATER: Several folks have written to correct me. There's nothing in the Constitution saying that the President and Vice-President can't be from the same state. But a rule of the Electoral College puts such a ticket at a possible disadvantage. Several folks sent me a link to this explainer.]
In 1971, Garry Marshall and his then-partner Jerry Belson produced and wrote Scared Stiff, a sitcom pilot much in the vein of an old Abbott and Costello movie. Bob Denver and Warren Berlinger starred and Paul Reed, who played the police captain on Car 54, Where Are You? played the police captain here. This was the year after Marshall and Belson had turned The Odd Couple into a hit for ABC so I guess they were coasting a bit on that success but ABC didn't go for Scared Stiff. Warren Berlinger once told me he was told the pilot was a smash hit and was going on the air as a mid-season replacement — and then it never did…
If you want to know more about the song "Hallelujah" — the one Steve and Eydie sang, not the Leonard Cohen version — you can find out more over at the blog of my pal Bob Elisberg. He'll even show you the original version, not in our language.
In 1967, most of the folks who brought you the Batman TV show tried to bring you a Dick Tracy series. This is the pilot that didn't make it…with the too-timely title of "The Plot to Kill NATO." A gent named Ray MacDonnell — who later had a 40 year run as a character on the soap All My Children — had the title role. It ain't bad but I'm not sure its makers were really certain how much they were ridiculing the source material, as they did with the Adam West Batman — and how much to play it straight. To me, it kinda doesn't work either way.
The most interesting thing to me is that the end credits say it's based on the character created by Chester Gould and Henry G. Saperstein. Gould, who wrote and drew the Dick Tracy newspaper strip, I can understand…and all the elements of the show seem to have come from that strip. But Henry Saperstein was the owner of the U.P.A. cartoon studio which had made the Dick Tracy cartoon studio in 1961. I suspect his co-creator credit had to do with him having some control over the TV rights to the property and I wonder if he contributed anything else.
Here's the show. If you make it all the way through, lemme know what you think. And hey, I promised I'd post another unsold pilot tonight and I made it with seconds to spare…
Two more things about the song "Hallelujah" which I still think coulda/shoulda been a bigger hit than it was. First off, Joshua Kreitzer corrects the date of the Tonight Show clip I posted earlier. It was May 25, 1979 (not 1976) and I have corrected the previous post.
Secondly: Here's an interesting theory as to why it didn't sell better than it did. Figuring that the names of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé were not exactly "hot" with record buyers at the time, they initially released it under the names of "Parker & Penny." See that record label above? It doesn't say it's by Steve & Eydie. It says it's by Parker & Penny.
Later on, they put it on more than one album under their own names but I think that if you'd heard them perform it on Johnny's show either time in '79 and you decided you wanted to run to your local record shop and purchase a copy, they'd have told you, "Sorry, we don't have a record by that name by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé!" Might that not have reduced sales somewhat? It also sounds to me a bit like the start of a Marty Feldman sketch.
There will be an Unsold Pilot here later today but I wanted to share this with you first. It's Steve Lawrence appearing with Johnny Carson on 5/25/1976 5/25/1979. First off, you'll see what a good talk show guest Mr. Lawrence was. Secondly, you'll get to see/hear him and his wife Eydie Gormé perform "Hallelujah," a record they were pushing at the time. A week earlier she was on, allegedly as a solo guest, and when she went out to perform the number, Steve miraculously appeared to make it a duet. This time, she not-so-miraculously appears.
I always thought this was a real nice, bouncy tune which might have been a big hit if they'd recorded it ten years earlier. If you want to skip the panel and go straight to the song, it starts around 14:20.
You'll also get a look at Stage 1 in Burbank which had one of the steepest "rakes" of any theater I've ever seen anywhere. Reportedly, it was built this way because either Milton Berle or Bob Hope (accounts vary) wanted to be able to do a monologue and see as many faces as possible. You'll also see a Tonight Show stagehand who made the unfortunate error of being in the wrong place at the wrong time…
Remember how little interest I had in the Super Bowl? I have about the same for the Academy Awards tonight. I don't care who wins. I don't care what they say. I certainly don't care how anyone is dressed. Hell, I don't even care who is "snubbed" by not being included in the "In Memoriam" montage. (I had an idea though about how they could liven up that segment about people who died in the previous year. They should select five or six people who are actually there at the ceremony tonight and put clips of them in that package. Just to see how everyone reacts.)
Seriously, I don't think I saw any of the nominated films this year and my tolerance for watching wealthy, successful people praising and honoring each other is hovering around the zero mark. If you enjoy this kind of thing, have a good time. In a way, I envy you.
Bozo the Clown was created in 1946 by Alan Livingstone, a writer-producer at the Capitol Records company who later became a senior exec there. Bozo at first was a story-telling clown heard only on Capitol Records for kids and his voice was done by Vance "Pinto" Colvig, a former circus clown and animation storyman who'd become a top cartoon voice actor heard in many Disney cartoons (as Goofy and other characters) and occasionally films for other studios.
Pinto Colvig
Bozo the Capitol Clown, as he was sometimes called, was a huge success and soon, Capitol was exploiting him in areas other than kids' records. In 1949, for example, Mr. Colvig donned clown makeup every day to host Bozo's Circus, a kids' show on KTTV Channel 11 in Los Angeles. Other folks played Bozo for personal appearances.
A lot of people think Bozo was created by a gentleman named Larry Harmon. This may be because Mr. Harmon at times said he was. Actually, he was among those who played Bozo when Colvig didn't. A company he headed up acquired the rights to the character in 1956 and began franchising him for television. Among their successes was a Bozo show which ran on KTLA Channel 5 here in Los Angeles from 1959 until 1964. It featured Bozo cartoons produced by Harmon's company and live hosting by Vance Colvig Jr., stepping into his father's role. Many other people played Bozo on Bozo shows produced in other cities.
Before Harmon got his mitts on "The World's Most Famous Clown," a TV pilot was produced by Hal Roach Studios for what would have been a weekly situation comedy. For reasons I would love to know and don't — though they probably involved money — they didn't hire Pinto Colvig to play the character. They hired longtime character actor Gil Lamb.
Gil Lamb
That's a photo of Gil Lamb, who was often in that position when he appeared. The very flexible Mr. Lamb did a lot of odd poses and eccentric dancing in movie musicals — you can see him in Bells Are Ringing and Bye Bye Birdie — and other places. He was kind of an odd choice since Bozo was best known for his voice and Lamb sounds nothing like Colvig but that's hardly the only thing wrong with this pilot. It didn't sell, like all the unsold pilots you'll see each day here on newsfromme.com during Unsold Pilots Week!
I don't think you'll make it all the way through this but you may watch enough to see why it didn't become a regular series…
The Comics Code Authority came into existence in 1954 because many comic book publishers feared that government regulation of their product was a' comin'. Most of the major publishers formed an organization called the Comics Magazine Association of America, drew up rules as to what could and could not appear in a Code-approved comic and hired someone to whom each comic had to be submitted for approval before publication.
It was technically a voluntary measure but a lot of smaller publishers quickly found out that it was tough to get distribution and/or advertising if they didn't join. One example: At about the time The Code was instituted, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were attempting to start a new comic book publishing firm called Mainline. According to both men, their distributor, Leader News, told them that if they didn't comply with the C.M.A.A., their books would never get on newsstands.
They went along with it and Mainline's books still didn't get decent distribution, at least in part because Leader News had also distributed Bill Gaines' E.C. line of crime and horror comics like Tales From the Crypt. Those books were largely killed by The Code but both Joe and Jack felt that the major publishers still had it in for Gaines and his distributor. Several other small publishers also folded despite displaying Code approval. Both Joe and Jack felt that was one of the reasons the major publishers banded together: To drive out smaller publishers.
But there were at least two companies then publishing that thrived despite refusing to sign onto The Code. Those two were Gilberton (which put out Classics Illustrated and other somewhat educational comics) and Dell (which put out Disney and a lot of TV and movie-based comics). Both those firms felt that the content of their books protected them and that they should let the wholesomeness of their lines be used to help the companies that had, as one editor who'd worked for Dell back then put it, "damn near destroyed our entire industry."
Later, when Dell Comics split into two lines — Dell and Western Publishing's Gold Key Comics (explained here) — neither outfit subscribed to The Code. Several times in interviews, whoever was the spokesperson for The Code at the moment would be asked about those two holdouts and they'd say something like, "Those companies choose not to participate but they've assured us they unofficially follow our guidelines," whereupon someone from Dell and/or Western would fire off a letter to the C.M.A.A. which said something like, "That's a lie and if you say it again, we'll sue your sorry asses!"
The Comics Code seal of approval/compliance was designed by the great designer of logos for DC Comics, Ira Schnapp. It appeared on the other publishers' wares until Marvel dropped it and stopped submitting their books in 2001 and the other companies withdrew over the next decade. And that was the end of the Comics Code.
A reader of this site, C.K. Bloch, wrote to ask me a whole bunch of questions about the Comics Code and I answered most of them in the above paragraphs. But he also wanted to know…
Do you know of a lot of cases where good stories or art were ruined by the Comics Code demanding changes?
Nothing in my career but I started in 1970. At the inception of The Code, that seems to have happened a lot. The C.M.A.A. had to prove that its rules had teeth and so they demanded way more changes than they did later. Arnold Drake, who started writing for DC around 1956, said that the editors there sometimes put in dialogue or images that were specifically intended to give The Code something to cut. There was also this problem: At the moment The Code was instituted, every publisher had a lot of material in the pipeline that was written and maybe drawn when those rules did not exist. Much of that material had to be laundered to pass The Code.
At Marvel, the guy stuck with making a lot of the alterations on as-yet-unpublished material was the Production Artist, Sol Brodsky. He not only relettered and redrew a lot of stories then in the works, he was told make "before" and "after" stats that the C.M.A.A. could put in press releases to show how the new standards were cleaning up the business.
In the mid-seventies, I had a long talk with Sol about how The Code had affected the business and I came to the conclusion — this is my view but he agreed with it — that the main impact The Code had was that editors, writers and artists more-or-less censored themselves. And they may at times have erred too much on the side of timidity.
Comic books have always been a business where things are being sent to press at the last moment and there were penalty fees if your book got to the engraver or to press late. So people tended to also err on the side of caution. Most did not try things that they were afraid might cause the Code Administrators to demand changes. Changes took time that they often did not have.
I experienced something similar when I worked in animation for Hanna-Barbera or Ruby-Spears or other companies making Saturday morning cartoons. Most shows operated on tight deadlines. If production on a show had to be halted to make changes demanded by the Standards and Practices divisions at the networks, a few days might be lost…and those few days might cost the show a lot of money. It might even jeopardize an episode making its air date.
At least a half-dozen times when I worked for H-B, the network folks (especially at ABC then) would ask for changes and I would talk them out of them…and even if it was only took a day or two to get them to say, "Okay, leave it in," Bill Hanna would already have made the alterations in a rush to get the show off to Korea or Taiwan or wherever it was being animated.
In that conversation with Sol, he admitted to me that Stan Lee or someone else in the office would decide to rewrite something or have something redrawn…and perhaps it was a creative decision or perhaps they were afraid something might not get past The Code and the book was running late. But the change would be made and if anyone asked or the writer or artist objected, the excuse was "The Comics Code made us change it!"
Over the years, I asked several folks who edited comics in the sixties and seventies, the following question: "Did you ever make a change in story or art and when the writer or artist complained, you fibbed and said the Comics Code had demanded it?" Offhand, I recall asking that of Julius Schwartz, George Kashdan, Joe Kubert, Len Wein, Archie Goodwin and maybe one or two others. All of them said yes. And of course, I asked Stan Lee and of course, his answer was, "I don't remember but probably." You got that answer a lot when you asked Stan a question about almost anything. He once said it when I asked him if he'd gone to lunch yet.
I am not saying the Code did not at times insist on changes…and often stupid changes. I am saying that I think it got blamed for a lot of changes it did not demand, especially in later years. And I think its main damage was that its mere presence — the fact that someone was going to look over the work and look for things that were in questionable taste — inhibited a lot of writers and artists and editors.
Ever since that conversation with Sol, I've been skeptical when I hear, "Oh, the Comics Code made us change that" or the assumption by readers that when something was changed that it was the restrictive, puritanical Comics Code at work. Here's an example. At left below, you see the cover of Captain America #101 as it first appeared, drawn by Jack Kirby and inked by Syd Shores. At right, we see the cover of an issue that reprinted the same material years later. You will notice that the head of the villain, The Red Skull, is different…
Click above to enlarge these images.
Comic book scholars noticed the difference and the theory/assumption or whatever you wanted to call it, went like this: Jack forgot and drew the old, uglier version of the Red Skull from the forties. When the artwork was submitted to the Comics Code, they thought the villain looked too scary and demanded that it be redrawn…which it was, not by Kirby or Shores. Years later, when the material was reprinted, Marvel used a stat of the cover as it stood before submission to The Code and whoever was at The Code then saw the material differently and let it pass.
That is all entirely possible but I have an alternate theory. When Syd Shores was inking Kirby on Captain America, he often made changes in Jack's work which Stan didn't like. Mr. Shores had been told that any issue now, he would stop being just the inker on the comic and it would take over the penciling of the book so that Kirby could be rotated to another project. That transfer of power never happened but when it was the plan, Shores took some liberties with Jack's art from time to time. And more than a few times, Stan had the work retouched back closer to the way Jack did it.
I don't think we know which artist — Kirby or Shores — made the Red Skull look like he did in the forties when both men drew him. If I had to, I'd bet on Shores but I think this was retouched before the folks at the C.M.A.A. offices saw it. Stan Lee often (very often) would look at a cover that was being ready for publication and ask to have the character's face redone by a staff artist, usually John Romita Sr. If you can't spot a lot of touch-ups on Marvel covers of that era, you aren't paying attention. Romita redraws abound and when they aren't by him, they're by Marie Severin or Herb Trimpe or someone else. Some editors just love to tamper.
Later when the reprint was sent to press, a pre-retouch stat was used but Stan wasn't in charge of covers by then…and if he did see it, by then he didn't care. And the Comics Code never cared.
There was plenty wrong with the Comics Code and we can talk more about that at another time. I just think that arguably-necessary-at-one-time institution didn't make all the obvious changes that comic fans think. And again, a lot of changes were made (or work softened) because someone was afraid of what The Code would say…which is not the same thing as The Code demanding something be changed. That's what I think.
This is the episode of Lunch With Soupy Sales that ran January 7, 1961 on Los Angeles television (and perhaps elsewhere) and it was probably my favorite TV series back then. If you don't love it, maybe that's because you aren't nine years old like I was. It ran around the noon hour on Saturdays on Channel 7 and my friends and I would never miss it.
The show starred Soupy (of course) and everyone else on it was played by a wickedly funny gent named Clyde Adler. When I watched the show, I dearly wanted to be one of those people on the set that you heard laughing. Many years later when Soupy did a short-lived syndicated revival, I was.
My good friend, the late Earl Kress, grew up on the East Coast so to him, The Soupy Sales Show was the version that Soupy did out of New York from 1964 to 1966 with Frank Nastasi taking over for Clyde. But to me, The Soupy Sales Show was the version Soupy did out here from 1960 to 1962 with Clyde. This was just about the only thing Earl and I ever disagreed on. Here's a prime example of what to me was what Soupy was all about…
Like an awful lot of folks on the 'net today, I thought Joe Biden gave a helluva State of the Union address last night. How…strong…was it? Strong enough that detractors like Trump and Hannity couldn't dismiss it as senile doddering; they had to retreat to the lame insistence that Biden had to be on performance-enhancing drugs or something.
We in California had three strong candidates vying for the Democratic Senate nomination — Adam Schiff, Barbara Lee and Katie Porter. I would have been satisfied with any one of them and am happy to see it'll be Schiff. Since no Republican has won statewide office in my state since 2006, Schiff looks to be in a strong position.
It dawned on me the other day that I haven't seen a word in the press lately about Rudy Giuliani. I thought, "He has to be in more trouble by now" and, sure enough, he is.
This is going to sound weird, but I want to ask you a question that I think I already know what the answer is.
The fact is, I grew up with a lot of 80s and 90s cartoons. I love such animation, still do to this day, it brought me a lot of comfort and fun. I felt growing up I had an obligation to help create cartoons such as this to bring happiness and joy to other generations of kids. Just like cartoons had helped me, I wanted to help others. Real life turned out to be more complicated than that; my life took many strange turns, but I keep wondering if I'm doing enough to fulfill that "obligation" I felt I had. An obligation which nobody thrust on me but I still feel its pull on me.
So I thought I'd ask you, a writer and creator of some of those cartoons I loved so much, if you thought I had such a responsibility. When people watch or read your stuff, do you think they've a responsibility to pass it on?
If you thought my answer would be no, you're right. At least, that's not why I got into the industry. I got in because I thought it would be good for me and I never for a second thought I could create work that would bring a significant amount of joy to a significant number of people. If anything I've done has ever done that, it was an unintended happy consequence. I chose the career I chose to pursue because I couldn't think of anything else I wanted to do or could be any good at.
When you answer the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?", I think there are two considerations. One is "What do you think you can do that you might be able to succeed at?" If I'd selected being a dancer or a nuclear physicist, I don't think I'd own a house now or be even remotely successful in either profession. I think I'd instead have had to take a job — any job, not necessarily one that appealed to me — just to pay rent and buy groceries. My father had to do that and I saw how he hated it and the resultant ulcer.
That's one consideration. And to me, the other way to answer the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" is by asking yourself, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I wanted to write cartoons and comic books and TV shows and other things but not because I felt any "obligation" to those forms. I did have some gratitude to the people who made them and whenever I have been in a position to express that gratitude and "pay back" those folks I have and still do.
But I didn't start writing comics or anything else for anyone else's benefit but my own. I hope that doesn't sound harsh or selfish. I just never thought I had an obligation to "bring happiness and joy to other generations of kids." I didn't have any particular confidence that I could do that.
The fast-talking lawyer Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone explains all about in vitro fertilization and Alabama laws and so-called "Pro-Life" people who pass laws without thinking them all the way through or consulting experts. His report is a little outta date already but if you're puzzled by any aspect of this, he probably explains it somewhere in here…
Hope your ankle is on the mend. Don't do anything to aggravate it like race against the Flash or buy a vineyard and stomp your own grapes.
A number of birthday related questions: How early did you discover the Marvel Comics Group? How soon till you were buying all their releases (if you did)? When did you stop following the titles?
Also, as you're six years older than me, did you have to sweat out the draft? As a kid, I wished I was five years older, so I could have read the Fantastic Four from the start rather than #55. Then, eventually, it occurred to me that, had that been the case, I might've been reading Sgt. Fury from a Vietnamese foxhole rather than on my bunkbed.
Actually, I just stopped wearing this huge, clunky boot that I'd been wearing whenever I walked after the surgery. With it on, I could have squished a grape orchard into Manischewitz Concord with a couple of stomps.
I'm a bit fuzzy on when I began buying Marvel Comics and I think some of the early issues were not distributed — or distributed well here in Los Angeles. I'm fairly sure I bought a few pre-superhero Marvels — comics full of silly monsters — before Fantastic Four #1 came out. And I'm pretty sure my first issue of F.F. was #11 and I found it at Bart's Books, which was a second-hand bookshop out in Santa Monica. That was not a wonderful issue but I still got hooked right away and quickly filled in the back issues. And at about the same time, I bought Amazing Spider-Man #1 off the newsstand.
I bought everything until such time as Marvel put me on the "comp" list and at some point in the eighties, the number of titles that arrived in the box each month was going up and my interest in their product was going down. I finally called someone and asked them to stop the shipments and I put a few years' worth of mostly-unread books in storage. Then a few years later, I gave them to a dealer and told him to sell them cheap and keep the money or donate it to charity or something. I just couldn't keep up and I needed the storage space. I can't give you a year on this.
I wrote about my experience with the draft back in this post. In hindsight, I don't know why I wasn't more worried about that than I was. I sure didn't want to go and my father really, really, really didn't want me to go. I think the happiest moment of his life was when I was assigned such a high draft number. Thanks, Joe.
I never met Steve Lawrence and I don't think I ever saw him perform live…but he was a presence on television as long as I've been watching television and I never saw him not sing well. I also never saw him not be funny. As a game show panelist or talk show guest, he was always amusing and you sure got the idea that when not performing, he was a real nice guy. I have no great anecdotes about the man. I just wanted to say what I just said.
