Round-Up of Recent Showbiz Deaths

1. Amid Amidi's tribute to Hanna-Barbera mainstay Iwao Takamoto, including a 1999 interview for Animation Blast.

2. The French Ambassador writes a letter to the editor about Art Buchwald. Buchwald was as much a fixture in France as in America, perhaps more; his work in France in the '40s and '50s was so well-known that in Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, he's the author of a gossip item that Cary Grant reads. And Jacques Tati's Playtime, for which Buchwald wrote the English-language dialogue, just came out in an excellent Criterion two-disc edition.

3. One more thing about Mike Evans, Lionel Jefferson on All in the Family. Here's his first appearance in the pilot (the 1971 pilot, not the two unsold pilots Norman Lear had already made of the same material). The character and his relationship with Archie were nailed right from the beginning; the only thing that's different is that Archie finally realizes -- at the end -- that Lionel is putting him on, whereas in the series he never seemed to catch on.