Harburg Lyric of the Day: "Sunset Tree"

Yip Harburg was over 70 when he wrote the lyrics for Darling of the Day, a musical version of Arnold Bennett's "Married Alive." The show marked Harburg's first and only collaboration with composer Jule Styne (Gypsy and many others). The source material was just about perfect for a musical: Arnold Bennett's "Married Alive," about a famous but eccentric artist who escapes the boredom of English high society by pretending to be his own valet. But the production ran into out-of-town trouble, brought on mostly by the hiring of an inexperienced director who wasn't up to the job and partly by the disastrous miscasting of the lead role (Vincent Price, who wasn't English, couldn't sing, and couldn't play romantic comedy). By the time the show came into New York, the book had been changed so much that writer Nunnally Johnson took his name off the credits; the show closed after 32 performances. It did have two things going for it: a mostly fine score from Harburg and Styne, and a Tony-winning performance by Patricia Routledge.

"Sunset Tree" is a ballad about the advantages of growing older, of love borne of wisdom rather than youthful impetuousness. It shows a mellower, gentler Harburg, who has tempered his most common theme -- the idea that life is short and we must grab happiness as soon as we can -- with a recognition of the virtues of patience and taking one's time. And note that even though the lyric has a deliberately old-fashioned feel to it (appropriately enough for the period setting), it is all achieved with very simple words and phrases; no flowery syntax for Harburg, just simple, direct imagery that adds up to something strangely beautiful.


When April's dreams are over
And all her songs are sung,
When the years are old and the hills are old
And only our hearts are young,
Then ev'ry sweet small wonder
Will still more wond'rous be,
In the brave new light of a world grown bright
Under the sunset tree,
Under the sunset tree.
Let youth have its apple blossoms,
Fair on the bough above,
But not so fair as the fruit we share
In the harvest-time of love.
Spring is a young man's fancy
In a world that is fancy-free,
But to know the grace of a warm embrace
When the heart is folly-free
Is to know why that bold leaf turns to gold
Under the sunset tree,
Under the sunset tree.

Why Do They Call It "Cheesecake?"

I stumbled on this links page, which appears to be a clearinghouse for all kinds of rare "cheesecake" (or as they called it at the time, "leg art") photos of Hollywood starlets. The guy seems to have downloaded every picture Ebay ever posted of Ava Gardner, Martha Hyer, Rhonda Fleming, Gina Lollobrigida, and various other people, including several people I've never even heard of. Plus the main page, which features nineteen pages of Debra Paget photos. ("Can you imagine me as Debra Paget?" -- Tony Randall in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?)

Go for the pictures, stay for the historical interest in noting how many glamour photos involved a woman looking blankly to the side or doing something funny with her arms.

Harburg Lyric of the Day: "It Was Good Enough For Grandma"

The next Yip Harburg lyric I'll post is one of his comedy songs, "It Was Good Enough For Grandma" from the 1944 Broadway show Bloomer Girl. Produced to cash in on the popularity of "historical" musicals in the wake of Oklahoma!, the show was set during the Civil War and concerned Evelina (Celeste Holm), a rich young woman who becomes involved in the women's suffrage and anti-slavery movements. To Harold Arlen's mock-march tune, sort of a cross between "Yankee Doodle" and "Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead," Evelina (Celeste Holm) leads the female chorus in a song about women wanting more than the previous generation. Harburg was never one to preach at us, and as usual, he gets his "message" across with humour, distorted words and crazy rhymes -- I particularly like "gov'ment" and "love meant."


When Grandma was a lady,
She sewed and cleaned and cooked,
She scrubbed her pots
And raised her tots,
The dear old gal was hooked.
She stitched her little stitches,
Her life was applesauce.
The thing that wore the britches
Was boss.
She had no voice in gov'ment
And bondage was her state.
She only knew what love meant
From eight to half-past eight.
And that's a hell of a fate!

It was good enough for Grandma,
That good old gal,
With her frills and her feathers and fuss.
It was good enough for Grandma,
Good enough for Grandma,
But it ain't good enough for us!

When Grandma was a lassie,
That tyrant known as man
Thought woman's place
Was just the space
Around a frying pan.
He made the world his oyster,
Now it ain't worth a cuss.
This oyster, he can't foist 'er
On us!
Our brains against his muscle,
Our tea against his rum.
A look behind the bustle
For the shape of things to come.
Join up with fife and drum!

It was good enough for Grandma,
That good old gal,
With her frills and her feathers and fuss.
It was good enough for Grandma,
Good enough for Grandma,
But it ain't good enough for us!

We won the revolution
In seventeen-seventy-six.
Who says it's nix
For us to mix
Our sex with politics?
We've bigger seas to swim in
And bigger holes to slice.
Oh, sisters, are we women
Or mice?
Look twice before you step on
The fair sex of the earth.
Beware our secret weapon:
We could stop giving birth.
Take that for what it's worth!

It was good enough for Grandma,
That good old gal,
With her frills and her feathers and fuss.
It was good enough for Grandma,
Good enough for Grandma,
But it ain't good enough for us!
No, it ain't good enough for us!

Harburg Lyric of the Day: "Cocoanut Sweet"

I just realized that this Sunday, March 5, marks the 25th anniversary of the death of E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, my favourite song lyricist. In his honour, I'll be posting a few more Harburg song lyrics over the next few days (if you're not interested in such things, there'll be other posts on other subjects), with the occasional nit-picky analytical comment.

The first lyric I'll post is probably my favourite Harburg lyric, "Cocoanut Sweet" from the Broadway musical Jamaica (1957). This show re-united Harburg with his most frequent composer, Harold Arlen, with whom he'd written the songs for The Wizard of Oz and hits like "It's Only a Paper Moon" among many others.

Sung by Lena Horne, "Cocoanut Sweet" is a unique and almost perfect love lyric. It starts as a "comparison" love song, where the singer compares the subject of the song to various nice things, and then moves on to a middle section about the intersection of love and the natural world, and ends by re-stating the premise of the song. The special thing about the lyric is that it overflows with images -- real, concrete images from nature. Most love songs are pretty generic in their imagery and depend on non-specific images: the lyricist will talk about "my heart" when in fact the heart is not directly involved (saying "I give you my heart" makes no more sense than "I give you my pancreas"). Harburg's lyric for "Cocoanut Sweet" overflows with real things, piling image upon image until the singer's love almost takes on a tangible, physical quality: so many physically real things are invoked that love no longer seems an abstract thing at all.

Harburg's gift for unique phraseology is on display too, including one of my favourite Harburg lines: "Spring tumble out of the tree." It turns a hackneyed idea -- it's always springtime when you're in love into -- something physical: spring physically falls out of a tree. And that one line makes clever use of alliteration and of rule-breaking grammar ("spring tumbles out of the tree" wouldn't have the same effect). Finally, note that even though the song is heavily rhymed and floridly poetic, it uses very simple language: a song lyric is no place for big or confusing words. And note also a little shout-out to an earlier song (Ned Washington's "The Nearness of You"). Finally, Harburg was one of the best lyricists when it came to dealing with Harold Arlen's unusually long, complicated song structures; this tune has all kinds of surprises and digressions, and Harburg matches his words perfectly to every twist in Arlen's melody. So here's the lyric:

Cocoanut sweet,
Honeydew new,
Jasmine and cherry
And juniper berry,
That's you.
Cocoanut sweet,
Buttercup true,
Face that I see in
The blue Carribean,
That's you.
Catch me the smile you smile
And I'll make this big world my tiny island,
Shining with spice
And sugar plum.
Cage me the laugh you laugh
And I will make this tiny, shiny island
My little slice
Of kingdom come.
The wind may blow,
The hurricane whip up the sky,
The vine go bare,
The leaf go dry,
But when you smile at me,
Spring tumble out of the tree,
The peach is ripe, the lime is green,
The air is touched with tangerine
And cocoanut sweet,
Honeydew new,
Ev'rything, dear,
That wants to cheer
The nearness of you.
How it all come true
Whenever we meet,
The magic of cherry and berry
And cocoanut sweet.

The show had a tortured history. Harburg and Fred Saidy wrote the script for Harry Belafonte. When Belafonte wasn't available, but Lena Horne was, producer David Merrick had Harburg and Saidy re-write the show to focus on the hero's girlfriend instead of the hero -- and during tryouts, when the show wasn't doing well, Merrick saved it by basically throwing out what was left of the script and turning it into what was effectively Horne's one-woman show. It worked, because the show ran 500 performances and made money, but it wasn't the show Harburg had written.

Harburg's original idea in the show was to satirize '50s consumerism and the way it was homogenizing old-fashioned, traditional culture. (Harburg's leftism is often emphasized in writing about him, but it was a very traditionalist kind of leftism, especially by the '50s, when consumer culture threatened to wipe out a lot of the quirky culture he enjoyed.) The story -- a calm Jamaican island is turned upside-down by exposure to consumerism, get-rich-quick schemes, and fads -- is a bit like Utopia Limited by Harburg's idol W.S. Gilbert, but only the basic kernel of the story survived in the final version. Harburg's satirical tone did come through in some of the songs, like "Push de Button" (an ironic paean to home gadgetry), "Yankee Dollar" (about the commodification of everything, including nature), "The Monkey in the Mango Tree" (about monkeys offended at the idea that man could have evolved from them) and "Leave the Atom Alone" ("Don't you fuss with the nucleus").

Hey, Dave...

Today's TV-DVD must-buy is the third season of "NewsRadio." The set includes, as extras, some short films made by the crew (for their own amusement) while the show was in production, including one of the most bizarre things I've seen: "One-Man NewsRadio," a short film where writer Joe Furey -- like all the staff writers, a proud Harvard-educated nerd -- acts out a "NewsRadio" episode playing all the parts himself. He even bares his midriff when he's playing the midriff-baring receptionist Beth. It's kind of the place where self-parody meets Theatre of the Absurd.

Whooo Is Iiiit?

The two-DVD set of the complete series "Action" was worth getting for a lot of reasons, but one reason was just the chance to see (in the making-of featurette) the creator of the show, Chris Thompson. Somehow he looks and acts the way I'd expect -- sort of a weather-beaten stoner with a deeply cynical and misanthropic view of the world.

Thompson, you see, is one of the odd ducks of the sitcom world, a man known for injecting a kind of unique strangeness into even the most conventional-looking sitcoms. His most famous credit is "Bosom Buddies." After writing and producing for "Laverne and Shirley," Thompson created "Bosom Buddies" for two of the producers of "Laverne and Shirley," Edward Miller and Thomas Boyett. Miller and Boyett would spend most of the '80s as the kings of bland wacky sitcom fare -- "Perfect Strangers," "Family Matters," "Full House" -- and "Bosom Buddies," the Some Like It Hot-ish story of two guys dressing up as women to live in an all-girl apartment building, by all rights should have been equally bland. But almost from the beginning, Thompson was putting in bits of bizarre humour and his young stars, Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari, were being encouraged to cut loose and ad-lib.

By the time "Bosom Buddies" hit its stride, the cross-dressing stuff had become more of an occasional gag (Hanks and Scolari were actually funnier in regular clothes, just riffing and playing off each other), and the focus of the show was on the insane improvised business between Hanks and Scolari, and on the unusually inventive stories and dialogue. Much of the dialogue doesn't even make sense on paper but is absolutely hilarious in context; a poster at Home Theater Forum collected some of the better "Bosom Buddies" lines, and I'll cut-and-paste them here:

"A bird with a hat - a very powerful aphrodisiac."

"I'll cherish this gift for...as long as it lasts. Does anyone have 15 'D' batteries?"

"Could I have your name?"
"You could, but it would be an incredible coincidence."

"But we were gonna live on Cheetos and develop respiratory infections...!"

"I was quite the bohemian at Vassar."

"What do you think of this piece here?...mm-hmm...uh-huh...It's the flag of Japan!!!"

"Mint donut?"

"Bosom Buddies" had, overall, probably the best cast of any '80s sitcom: Hanks, Scolari, Wendie Jo Sperber, Holland Taylor and Donna "How did Dan Aykroyd manage to get her to marry him" Dixon. All the performers cut loose so much, and the dialogue was so offbeat and nutty, and the plots so crazy (sample plot: a character tries to prove he's not uptight by throwing a water-balloon out of the window onto a car; the car belongs to ex-President Nixon, and the characters get hauled off by the Secret Service) that it was like a weekly subversion of the Miller-Boyett formula, a Chris Thompson middle finger extended to the conventional sitcom tradition that spawned him.

"Bosom Buddies" is for some reason not on DVD yet -- it can't have anything to do with Hanks, who is proud of the show and still friendly with the surviving cast members; it might be a problem with licensing the theme song, Billy Joel's "My Life". If it ever comes out, grab it.

And Now the Happy Stuff

In my previous post, I mentioned William Pechter as an example of a critic who wrote for a magazine that had moved to the right-of-center (Commentary) without being expected to follow the magazine's political line in his criticism. (This used to be common before the so-called culture wars.) Well, I notice that Amazon has used copies of "Movies Plus One," a collection of Pechter's criticism from the early '70s. In the thick of the New American Cinema, Pechter turned out long, insightful reviews of movies like McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. He also wrote a funny, stinging piece on the decline of Blake Edwards and the inexplicable Edwards cult that was growing among auteurist critics at the time (the piece was called "Block That Cult!" but I can't remember if it's in the book or not). Of the critics of the era, Pechter was similar to Pauline Kael but less of an attention-hog in his writing, more willing to think hard about a film; he was perhaps the best film critic of that period, but he's largely been forgotten. Check the book out if you get a chance.

Conservative Critics Fight For Freedom!!!

The Liberty Film Festival, an anti-Hollywood-perverts thingamajig run by Jason Apuzzo (or, as John Rogers calls him, the stupidest fucking guy on the face of the earth") is always your go-to source for angry movie reviews postulating that:

1. Hollywood has made another movie with an Anti-American, anti-Bush agenda,
2. It'll lose money because Hollywood socialists like Arnold Schwarzenagger and Rupert Murdoch are more interested in spreading their Anti-American propaganda than in making money,
3. Wait, it made money? But why don't those evil capitalists realize that it's not worth tearing down our children's values just so movies can gross millions of dollars?
4. I hate Hollywood enterpreneurs, movies that make money, and people who pay to see them, and this proves I am on the side of capitalism.

We can all expect the new movie V For Vendetta to provoke about 75,000 articles of this kind. And Libertas has risen to the occasion with this magnificent review by someone calling himself "The Road Warrior." (First rule of the conservative blogosphere: always give yourself a name that makes you sound like a wrestler or gay porn star. The classic examples are the genocidal dweebs at Powerline Blog, who used to call themselves "Hindrocket, Big Trunk and Deacon.") Now, the Road Warrior lets down the side in one way: he admits he's seen the movie. This is a no-no in the conservative culture-sphere, where, as Roy Edroso often points out, "Conservatives reviewing movies they haven't seen is the new black." But he makes up for it by his brilliant use of all the other important features of the conservo-review:

1. Plot synopsis in lieu of analysis. -- Nearly the entire review is taken up with summarizing the plot of the film and trashing its message. Apparently such things as acting, pacing, camerawork and dialogue are only discussed by loser liberal critics from California, not us manly men in the heartland.

2. Conservative victimology. -- Road Warrior wants you to know that Liberal Hollywood is out to crush dissent and destroy his values. Clearly special help -- possibly from a government grant, or a Ministry of Pro-American Cinematic Values -- is needed. He writes: "Now consider how many overtly political Hollywood films have been made that voice dissent against Leftist values? None. Whose voice is really being suppressed in this country?"

3. Godwin's Law. -- "Hitler also wanted to eliminate Christianity. Which party is in bed with the ACLU - currently attacking Christianity, crosses, and Christmas at ever [sic] opportunity? The party of the Left. " The conservative blogosphere: where Christmas is under attack all year round!

4. Declaring that a movie is bad because it expresses ideas you don't agree with. -- Road Warrior has one criticism of the movie and one only: it conveys messages that are mean to conservatives and to their cult leader. His review says nothing about why the movie isn't good; it's just a laundry list of mean ideas that those cross-dressing brothers are using to poison the body politic.

5. Creepy obsession with the bad scary Islamofascists who are so prominent in suburban areas. -- "I find it completely hypocritical that every time a Hollywood plot has to have a bad Islamic terrorists (which is a rarity in today’s movies anyway), it has to be balanced by a good Islamist." The corollary of this is complaining that Hollywood is mean to Christians, which combines the victimology stance with what might be called aggrieved majoritarianism: the belief that Hollywood should be sensitive to majorities but hard on minorities. If these guys had been around in the '40s, they'd be reviewing the movie Crossfire and demanding that Hollywood tell us less about Christian soldiers who beat up Jews and more about Jewish bankers running the Truman administration.

6. Predictions of failure for the movie, based on no actual evidence. "Hopefully people will stay away in droves once word gets around from the unlucky few who’ve endured this view askew of modern politics and morality." If the movie flops, this will be direct proof that real Americans reject Time Warner's anti-capitalist agenda, and if it succeeds, expect articles arguing how much more successful it would have been if it had been aimed at rural Utah and exurban South Dakota and all those other places conservative columnists and bloggers wouldn't visit on a bet.

I don't usually get pissed off about these things, but the recent explosion of right-wing cultural philistinism really makes me angry. For one thing, it didn't use to be this way. Some of you may remember that National Review employed John Simon as its movie critic for many years. Simon is at the very least culturally conservative, and his curmudgeonly attitude was a good fit with a conservative magazine -- but he never had to keep to the magazine's editorial line in his reviews, nor introduce any political content into his reviews at all. He gave a positive review to the pro-Sandinista thriller Under Fire (one of the great underrated movies of the '80s, by the way, and quite a bit better than Oliver Stone's Salvador) at the time when the magazine was running article after article about the evil Cuban-sponsored Commies (basically the same articles they're running now, except "Commies" has been replaced by "Islamofascists"). Look at today's National Review and ask yourself whether they'd ever run an article like that. The American Spectator used to have Bruce Bawer as a film critic until they spiked his review of a movie about gay characters (Bawer, a gay semi-conservative, had not expressed sufficient disgust for homosexuality); they replaced Bawer with James Bowman, a man so dumb and such an art-hating philistine that he could get a job on the Wall Street Journal editorial board with no questions asked. And, going back a little further, Commentary magazine replaced its great film critic of the '70s -- the apolitical, brilliant William S. Pechter -- with Richard Grenier, whose right-wing Stalinism (he wrote long essays criticizing movies like Gandhi and even The Empire Strikes Back for expressing dangerous political ideas) has influenced a generation of hacks.

The nuts at Libertas are easy to make fun of, but they're the culmination of twenty years or more of trying to reduce cinema to politics, reduce "Hollywood" to a pejorative, and evaluate movies entirely based on whether their ideas are acceptable to conservatives. (The recent target of this particular crusade appears to be George Clooney, the subject of a jillion articles complaining that he makes movies about the problems of America instead of the tribulations of Danish cartoonists. Yes, George Clooney is condemned for being more concerned with his own country than with Europe -- in other words, conservatives hate patriotism.) Apart from the sheer whininess and victim-envy of this kind of thing -- dudes, if you want a pro-Iraq-war movie, take some of the money away from Scooter Libby's defence fund and make the movie yourself -- it demonstrates a contempt for art, a purely utilitarian conception of art, that is very close to the Stalinists of the '30s. Apuzzo and his boys are funny, but they're not so funny when you consider that their basic premises are taken seriously by a lot of people. Dick Cheney's contempt for the media and paranoid belief that non-conservative reporters are out to destroy him is part of the larger idea that media -- television, movies, whatever -- is only good insofar as it delivers ideas that serve your political interests.

The sad thing is that this kind of thing is actually less dangerous than it was only a couple of years ago, when Fahrenheit 9/11 was pilloried up and down the media not for the factual distortions (fair enough) but for expressing ideas that were and still are perfectly mainstream ideas held by roughly half the population (the Iraq war was a mistake and the American government lied to the people it serves). Perfectly moderate, mainstream people were derided as members of the "angry left" by the likes of the Wall Street Journal's racist snob James Taranto, and many people took these attacks to heart and convinced themselves that they were, in fact, freakishly out of the mainstream when they weren't. And so Hollywood convinced itself that it was out of touch with the "heartland," even though it's become pretty clear that Hollywood's product appeals to the American heartland far more than, say, the President's State of the Union Address. And the philistinism of the Libertas crew was in danger of becoming conventional wisdom. Now things seem to be shifting; Hollywood is starting to recognize that George Clooney is a lot more in touch with the average man than, say, the average politician. He has to be: his living depends on appealing directly to average people, whereas the politician doesn't have to give a damn about average people when he's not out campaigning. I have a feeling that this year's Oscars will have the air of Hollywood's revenge on its attackers, as Hollywood stars and producers recognize that they, not Jason Apuzzo, have their finger on the pulse of the nation. But it's been a tough few years, and the conservative Stalinists seemed to be in serious danger of taking over the cultural conversation. We need to remember that and guard against it, even as we laugh at the ineptitude of their low-level apparatchiks.

The Truck From Duel Finally Got Him

Dennis Weaver has died.

He did so much TV work, so much good work, that it's hard to single one thing out, but his performance in the Twilight Zone episode "Shadow Play" -- as a death row convict trying to convince people that they are all just part of his dream, and that he is doomed to dream his death every night -- may be his best. In movies, I'm especially fond of his small role as the creepy motel manager in Touch of Evil. And of course I haven't gotten into the stuff for which he is best known, like Gunsmoke, McCloud and Duel. Here's his huge list of credits.

It's Finally Coming

"The Facts of Life": Seasons 1 and 2.

If you're having trouble remembering which episodes were which, season 1 was the season with Molly Ringwald and other actresses who didn't make it past the first 13 episodes, and season 2 was the season that narrowed the cast down to the quatrofecta: BlairJoNatalieTootie. All this and Mrs. Garrett teaching lessons too. Life is good.

Oh, come on, you know you watched it, and you know you're going to at least Netflix this. We are drawn to "The Facts of Life" as if by some force we can't control.

Thank Goodness For YouTube

Thanks to YouTube.com, it's now possible for me to link to a video of the complete, uncut Bob Clampett cartoon masterpiece from 1943:



It's not the greatest-looking print of the cartoon, but it's all there and it's a must-see if you haven't already seen it already. "Coal Black" is of course the most famous and by far the best of the "Censored 11" cartoons, Warner Brothers cartoons that were de facto banned from TV and home video due to racial stereotyping. The stereotypes in "Coal Black" are actually fairly mild by comparison with the really offensive stereotypes in, say, Chuck Jones's "Angel Puss" -- in fact, the most truly offensive joke in "Coal Black" is a wartime joke about the Japanese.

"Coal Black" was also one of the few cartoons of its time that actually used African-American performers to voice some of the characters; the wicked queen is voiced by Ruby Dandridge (mother of Dorothy Dandridge) and So White is voiced by Vivian Dandridge (older sister of Dorothy Dandridge). However, all the dwarfs are voiced by Mel Blanc.

A commenter on IMDb pointed out that one of the reasons the film is still controversial today is that cartoons, unlike live-action movies, don't really date: whereas the stereotypes in a live-action movie belong to their time, the stereotypes in "Coal Black" feel current, and therefore still have the power to shock. But the film is so good-natured, and so much of a piece with the exaggerated way Clampett treats all characters in all his cartoons, that the audiences I've seen it with usually get over the shock after the first minute or so, and start to lose themselves in the film.

The important thing about "Coal Black" is that it's one of the best and most imaginative cartoons ever made, with a crazy gimmick or wild experiment in almost every shot, and all kinds of visual ideas that no one had ever tried before (though Clampett's trick of changing the colour of the background to signal a change in mood was probably inspired by Chuck Jones's "The Case of the Missing Hare" from the previous year). Ideas like the words "Blackout So White!" appearing in print above the Queen as she speaks those words (and then bites off the phone she's speaking into); keeping the dwarfs offscreen in one shot and animating their shadows instead; starting a dance sequence with Disney-style rotoscoping and suddenly shifting to a cartoonily-animated jazz dance; having the dwarfs pop up one by one to the rhythm of "Blues in the Night": there's something spectacular or hilarious every second. And Rod Scribner's animation of Prince Chawmin' unsuccessfully trying to revive So White may be the best piece of animation Scribner -- or maybe anyone -- ever did.

The film is also a brilliant slam on Disney, with many mocking references to shots from Snow White and an implied antidote to Disney's lack of interest in dealing with sex and sexuality. And there's even a reference to the then-recent movie Citizen Kane. On a side note, you might notice that the design of So White is oddly similar to that of Tweety, whom Clampett had introduced the year before.

So check it out, and hope and pray that WB will get the guts to release it on DVD. They can have a dozen Whoopi Goldberg introductions for all I care -- I wasn't bothered by her "historical-context" introduction to the last Looney Tunes set, though I'll admit I always hit the menu button to skip it -- they can have a trillion disclaimers and historical explanations, but they need to make it available in a good print.

Update: More thoughts on this cartoon at Sterfish's Place.

More Lyrics: "Too Good For the Average Man"

Another obscure song lyric worth quoting is by Larry Hart, the wordsmith half of the team of Rodgers and Hart, from the 1936 musical On Your Toes. The song is called "Too Good For the Average Man," a duet for a Russian ballet impresario (based on Diaghliev) and a high-society patroness of the arts. To Rodgers' mock-minuet tune, they sing about their shared understanding of the fact that, as wealthy dilettantes, they feel entitled to enjoy certain pleasures that are not available to the lower classes: some things are just "Too Good For the Average Man."

Interestingly, even though most forms of entertainment and comfort have become cheaper and more widely available since 1936, the song actually holds up pretty well in the sense that many of the enjoyments and fads it describes are still mostly the province of the affluent, and many of the observations -- like the line about rich women having easier access to family planning, or the plastic surgery joke -- could be made today with no change whatsoever. The one thing that doesn't hold up is the joke about rich people being overweight; that's been replaced by fitness-mania among the rich. Otherwise, Larry Hart is always relevant.

Verse

When Russia was White,
It was White for the classes
And Red for the masses,
Unfortunate asses!
All wealth belonged to few.
When England was Tudor,
The King and his cronies
Had cocktails at Tony's,
The poor had baloneys,
And that's how England grew.
Sing "la and huzzah" for the poor folks
As long as the poor folks are your folks.

Refrain 1

Finer things are for the finer folk,
Thus society began.
Caviar for peasants is a joke;
It's too good for the average man.
Supper clubs are for the upper folk,
Packed like sardines in a can.
Through the smoke you get your check and choke;
It's too good for the average man.
Each poor man has a wife he must stick to,
Rich men have a different habit.
To be caught in flagrante delictu
Is much too good for the average rabbit.
All-night parties, drinking like a Lord,
Fit into our social plan.
Waking in the alcoholic ward
Is too good for the average man.

Refrain 2

Rich old age can blossom like a rose;
Plastic surgeons have a plan.
Cutting off your face to spite your nose
Is too good for the average pan.
Fancy foods are for the fancy taste,
Diets for the poorer man.
Gaining too much weight below the waist
Is too good for the average can.
Lots of kids for a poor wife are dandy,
Girls of fashion can be choosy.
Birth control and the modus operandi
Are much too good for the average floozy.
Psychoanalysts are all the whirl;
Rich men pay them all they can.
Waking up to find that he's a girl
Is too good for the average man.

R.I.P. Don Knotts

The beloved Don Knotts -- the actor behind one of the all-time great television characters, Barney Fife, and whose comedy performance style has had an incalculable influence on two generations of actors and comedians -- has died at the age of 81. Mark Evanier shares some of his memories of Knotts.

Here is perhaps the greatest Barney Fife dialogue exchange, from the episode "One-Punch Opie," where Barney lectures Andy on the necessity of stopping children from becoming delinquents. Of course the dialogue loses a lot without Knotts's superb delivery and his nervous pacing and gestures. He was unique.

BARNEY: I don't like it. I don't like it one bit.
I tell you this is just the beginning: goin' around breaking street lamps -- city property, mind you! Next thing you know they'll be on motorcycles and wearin' them leather jackets and zoomin' around. They'll take over the whole town... a reign of terror!

ANDY: Barney, these are just boys you're talkin' about. They're only about 8 years old.

BARNEY: Yeah, well today's 8-year olds are tomorrow's teenagers. I say this calls for action and now. Nip it in the bud. First sign of youngsters goin' wrong, you got to nip it in the bud!

ANDY: I'm gonna have a talk with 'em. Now what more do you want me to do?

BARNEY: Well, just don't mollycoddle 'em.

ANDY: I won't.

BARNEY: Nip it! You go read any book you want on the subject of child discipline and you'll find that every one of them is in favor of bud-nippin'.

ANDY: I'll take care of it.

BARNEY: Only one way to take care of it.

ANDY: Nip it.

BARNEY: In the bud.

Those Various Wilkin Boys

Since nothing is more important than obscure Archie comics, I am pleased to direct you to Mister Kitty's page on Archie ripoffs by the Archie company itself.

I knew about "Wilbur" and "That Wilkin Boy" (which the company is for some reason attempting to revive now), but "Bippy the Hippy" had completely escaped my notice. As someone said on a message board: "Anyone who uses the spelling 'hippy' clearly has no idea what a hippie is."

The same site also has this and this about Archie knockoffs by other companies. The best of the bunch was Tower's "Tippy Teen," largely due to the excellent artwork by Archie's best artist, Samm Schwartz. Though some have an affection for Marvel's "Millie the Model." Six of one.

I should also point out that the excerpt from the early "Josie" comic is yet another example of the snappy dialogue of Frank Doyle. Who else would start a kids' comic story with a joke that depends on the audience knowing French:

JOSIE: Ouvrez la porte, Pepper.
PEPPER: Later, Josie, but right now I have to open the door.

Obscure Mercer

Johnny Mercer was one of the most successful song lyricists of the 20th century, and you're probably familiar with his work on songs like "Moon River," "Something's Gotta Give," "Hooray For Hollywood," and many others. I thought, for the heck of it, I'd post a few lesser-known Mercer lyrics that give a further idea of his unique voice as a writer -- a combination of sophistication and folksy slang.

From the movie They Got Me Covered, "Palsy Walsy" (music by Harold Arlen)

Verse
I need a friend to see me through,
Someone who is tried and true,
Someone who will keep the wolves away.
Nothing is wrong with baby's eyes,
Noting is wrong with baby's size,
Which makes me romantic'ly one-A.
So, you see, I need to be protected,
And, my turtle dove, you are elected.

Refrain

Palsy-walsy,
My old pie-face,
Since I met you,
I'm a dead duck.
Palsy-walsy,
You old sly-face,
Can't forget you,
Rock on, I'm stuck.
Through thick, through thin,
Or any "how've you been,"
We'll grin and take it on the chin.
Who's excited?
Plan your campaign,
You'll get my vote,
I'll take champagne
Or beer,
Because you're my palsy-walsy, dear.

From the movie Daddy Long Legs, the weird "dance-sensation about a nonexistent dance that is never really described" song, "Sluefoot" (music by Mercer)

You want a dance that's easy to do,
Then dig the one I'm hippin' you to,
I'm gonna teach you to fall in
On what they are callin'
The Sluefoot.
You make your right point to the north,
You make your left foot point to the south,
And then you stroll sort o' westerly,
Slow and siest-er-ly,
Sluefoot.
Don't be an oddball,
And don't be a fig.
Try, why be shy?
After all, it's even better if your feet's too big.
You put the old posterior out,
Then you manipulates it about,
It is the most lackadaisiest,
I mean the craziest,
Sluefoot.

You gotta rock like
A rockin' chair,
The step is clocklike
But slightly square,
You count to one,
Two, three, four,
Then you holler:
Sluefoot!
You stick your toe out,
You grab it back,
You really go out,
You ball the jack,
Do what you done,
Done, done before
When you holler:
Sluefoot!

And if you learn to dance it just right,
It shouldn't take but half of the night,
It is the most lackadaisiest,
I mean the craziest,
Sluefoot.

Mercer also wrote a lot of conventional but lovely pop lyrics, like 1935's "Santa Claus Came in the Spring" (for which he wrote both music and words):

Verse

Is it April? Is it snowing?
Have I lost my head completely?
Have blossoms turned to snowflakes on the ground?
Are they robins, are they sleighbells
That I hear sing out so sweetly?
Has someone turned the calendar around?

Refrain

Santa Claus came in the spring,
Santa Claus came when the skies were blue,
I heard his sleighbells ting-a-ling
The day that I met you.
Santa Claus came in the spring,
Riding along through the daffodils,
And I just saw him vanishing
Across the distant hills.
I heard his reindeer on the ground,
I thought I caught a glimpse of red,
But suddenly I turned around
And you were there instead.
What if he hurried away?
Santa Claus came when the skies were blue,
And now it's Christmas ev'ry day
Because he brought me you.

And from the Danny Kaye movie Merry Andrew, "The Sum of the Hypotenuse" -- fun and educational:

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle
Is equal to the sum of the squares of two adjacent sides.
You'd not tolerate lettin' your participle dangle,
So please effect the self-same respect for your geometric slides.

Old Einstein said it,
When he was gettin' nowhere.
Give him credit,
He was heard to declare:
Eureka!

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle [etc.]

Sure as shootin',
When problems get in your hair,
Be like Newton
Who was heard to declare:
"Eureka!"

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle [etc.]

The Wright Brothers,
Before they conquered the air,
Like those others,
Orville hollers: "Lookahair,
Wilbur...."

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle
Is equal to the sum of the squares of two adjacent sides.
You'd not tolerate lettin' your participle dangle,
So please effect the self-same respect for your geometric slides. 

King of the Hill -- Undead Slasher Cartoon Rises Again!

I have been authorized by an Informed Source (tm) to say that King of the Hill, which was originally going to end this season, is now going back into production on March 17. Fox has ordered 20 more episodes. The show has been getting good reviews and pretty good ratings (when it's on, which isn't often), and it was felt that there's still some good material left in the adventures of Hank Hill.

Most of the animation staff is now working on Family Guy, but KotH is re-staffing and will borrow back directors and animators from other Fox shows when they have time (this is common practice; Family Guy in its first season borrowed a lot of animators from KotH). I don't know who will be on the reconfigured writing staff, but I think John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky will remain the showrunners, as they have been since 2002.

All of which proves that Fox animated sitcoms are like mad slashers in horror movies: no matter how many times they are killed, they are never dead. Family Guy is probably Jason, who comes back several years after being killed, whereas King of the Hill is Michael Myers: it just dies and comes back over and over again. No word yet on whether Futurama will be Freddy Krueger.

If It's Noir, It Doesn't Need to Make Sense

After he hit it big with Laura, Otto Preminger's next project as a director was Fallen Angel (1945). It used most of the same crew as Laura, including cinematographer Joseph La Shelle and composer David Raksin, as well as the same leading man, Dana Andrews. But unlike Laura, which was basically a high-society murder mystery with some film noir touches, Fallen Angel is pure noir in with a touch of murder mystery: Andrews plays a drifter who falls for a slutty waitress (Linda Darnell) and tries to get the money to keep her in style by marrying the local affluent spinster (Alice Faye). There's a greasy-spoon diner, a fake medium (John Carradine) who talks about "a strange vibration coming over me," a smoke-filled nightclub scene, and lots of shadows, cigarettes and hats.

The plot's twists and turns are basically incomprehensible, to the point that by the second half you can't really tell who's in love with which character or who murdered who and where and why. The confusion may be due to the post-production cutting: many of Alice Faye's scenes were apparently cut out in order to put more emphasis on Linda Darnell -- understandable, really, because Darnell is spectacularly sexy in the film and Faye is miscast. But even if the script doesn't always make a lot of sense, Preminger's camerawork is enough to keep the film watchable: whereas Laura had mostly static talking-head shots, Fallen Angel is the start of Preminger's love affair with the moving camera. He pulls off some truly spectacular crane and dolly shots, and complicated long takes that must have taken quite a bit of rehearsal. He also gives us -- albeit in shadow -- what is basically the first tongue-kiss in '40s cinema: