Another episode requested in comments: a one-hour episode from the third season. Johnny takes on a new persona, "Rip Tide," when he's forced to sell out and host a TV disco show, and he finds himself enjoying the sellout life so much that his new persona starts to take over all the time. The plot flirts briefly with the idea that this is some kind of actual split-personality problem, but primarily it's about a familiar character selling out to become the embodiments of everything that was bad in circa-1980 culture and being talked out of it when he realizes that his friends -- and he himself -- can't stand his new persona. It's like a music-business version of Taxi's Vic Ferrari (who first appeared a few weeks after this episode).
Unlike the other two-parters I think this one probably would have worked better as a half-hour, since it really doesn't give the other characters much to do and therefore feels padded in spots. But Hesseman is great and there are some good sequences, especially the ending (which was ruined in the '90s syndication version when the Little Richard music was removed).
This is also an example of how shows have to move fast if they want to be topical. The episode aired early in 1981 but the story was almost certainly conceived in 1980 (it might have been done earlier if the season hadn't been delayed by an actors' strike). In 1980, disco and the anti-disco backlash were very big and the story was topical. By the time the episode went into production, disco had collapsed; Johnny gets a line about how disco is dead, but the story would have made more sense if it hadn't come out after disco ceased to be popular. In a way the story works better now because it feels like a late-'70s period piece whereas at the time it was already a period piece.
Oh, and the late Mary Frann, who had previously appeared as an attractive woman who turns out to be an evil bitch on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, here returns to the MTM lot to play an attractive woman who turns out to be an evil bitch. In case you're wondering why she always seemed miscast as the loving wife on Newhart.
This being an episode about music on TV and radio, it's filled with music, including but not limited to: "Land of 1000 Dances" by Wilson Pickett; Xanadu" by Olivia Newton-John; "Sympathy For the Devil" by the Rolling Stones; "Le Freak" by Chic; "I Love the Nightlife" by Alicia Bridges; "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" by The Police; "Blue Suede Shoes" by Carl Perkins; and "Ready Teddy" by Little Richard.
Cold Opening:
Act 1:
Act 2:
Act 3:
Act 4:
Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Bees! Bees! Millions of Bees!
Do you realize that this year is the 30th anniversary of Irwin Allen's The Swarm?
The Swarm is probably the worst movie of the '70s if not ever, and since it has a huge all-star cast of distinctive actors who are all embarrassing themselves, it's one of the easiest movies to mock. There's something terrible not just in every scene but in every moment. But since a big-studio movie like this wasn't available to the MST3K guys, the most detailed Swarm mockeries have appeared online.
I used to think that the biggest and longest Swarm-o-phobic piece was Ken Begg's epic scene-by-scene summary.
But later I came upon another review which may be even longer: This gigantic, rant-tastic piece by someone calling himself "Trick Lobster."
I actually enjoyed the zonked-out, stream-of-consciousness approach in the "Trick Lobster" piece more than Ken Begg's more sober-minded, even serious analysis. Of course it's an acquired taste but I can't pass up a review that includes lines like this:
The Swarm is probably the worst movie of the '70s if not ever, and since it has a huge all-star cast of distinctive actors who are all embarrassing themselves, it's one of the easiest movies to mock. There's something terrible not just in every scene but in every moment. But since a big-studio movie like this wasn't available to the MST3K guys, the most detailed Swarm mockeries have appeared online.
I used to think that the biggest and longest Swarm-o-phobic piece was Ken Begg's epic scene-by-scene summary.
But later I came upon another review which may be even longer: This gigantic, rant-tastic piece by someone calling himself "Trick Lobster."
I actually enjoyed the zonked-out, stream-of-consciousness approach in the "Trick Lobster" piece more than Ken Begg's more sober-minded, even serious analysis. Of course it's an acquired taste but I can't pass up a review that includes lines like this:
Under the trees with the bees comes Paul, a kid with a Dorothy Hamill bowl cut whose parents call him "Paul" in every sentence so that we know he's important.
There hasn't been a sweaty person for a whole 2 minutes, and if we have learned anything about The Swarm, it's that there's always a bee around the corner and a sweaty guy screaming.
THAT'S what you get for messing with the SATANIC BEE POWERS of FRED MACMURRAY, you little bastard!
Look At Hon and Dearie!
Since I called attention to that terrible Herbie theme song with the terrible "nyah-nyah-nyah" theme, I should note that one of my favorite musical-theatre songs also uses that motif at the beginning (and runs it in counterpoint through the whole number). But when composer/lyricist Harold Rome wrote "Certain Individuals" for the musical Wish You Were Here, he actually had a point in doing that: the song has the secondary female lead, Sheila Bond, and the female chorus making fun of the heroine (Patricia Marand) for being so obviously in love.
Rome is a very underrated figure in musical theatre history. Most of the great Broadway songwriters were urban and Jewish, but they rarely wrote songs, let alone whole shows, about the urban Jewish experience. Rome, whose first hit was the union-sponsored revue Pins and Needles, wrote a lot of songs about urban life and New Deal politics (one of his biggest hit songs was called "Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones"), and worked a lot of "ethnic" expressions into his lyrics. And while he wrote musicals that followed the post-Rodgers-and-Hammerstein fashion for shows set in the past (like Fanny, based on Marcel Pagnol's films, and Destry Rides Again, a musical Western), his best scores were for shows about New York Jewish characters: I Can Get It For You Wholesale, which introduced Barbra Streisand, and Wish You Were Here, based on Arthur Kober's play about a singles' resort in the Catskills.
Rome is a very underrated figure in musical theatre history. Most of the great Broadway songwriters were urban and Jewish, but they rarely wrote songs, let alone whole shows, about the urban Jewish experience. Rome, whose first hit was the union-sponsored revue Pins and Needles, wrote a lot of songs about urban life and New Deal politics (one of his biggest hit songs was called "Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones"), and worked a lot of "ethnic" expressions into his lyrics. And while he wrote musicals that followed the post-Rodgers-and-Hammerstein fashion for shows set in the past (like Fanny, based on Marcel Pagnol's films, and Destry Rides Again, a musical Western), his best scores were for shows about New York Jewish characters: I Can Get It For You Wholesale, which introduced Barbra Streisand, and Wish You Were Here, based on Arthur Kober's play about a singles' resort in the Catskills.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Belated Tex Thoughts
Tex Avery was, in an odd way, a living contradiction of the idea that funny cartoons are all about funny drawings. Avery's cartoons rarely had the most advanced animation or the most expressive drawings and poses. Except Preston Blair's contributions, I rarely find the animation in his cartoons to be all that distinctive (Michael Lah, one of his animators in the later years at MGM, told Leonard Maltin that they found that too many drawings distracted from the comedy and that they found it was better to keep the animation closer to the "pose reels," or what we'd now call an animatic). Even his famous "wild takes" can be a little drab as pure drawings. He wasn't bad at funny drawings, but that is not what makes him great.
What makes Tex Avery one of the greatest figures in animated comedy is his incredible expansion of the range of gags available to cartoons, what we might call the vocabulary of gags. He was not the first to take advantage of the potential of animation for re-shaping characters' bodies, defying the laws of physics, or breaking the fourth wall, but he made that the primary basis of an animated cartoon. Before Avery, a cartoon was basically a comedy short with gags inspired by silent comedy or comic strips, plus some gags that took off into an alternate cartoon reality. Avery, particularly after arriving at MGM, switched it around: instead of that kind of gag being a special effect, it became the kind of thing that happened all the time. At a time when Disney was pushing cartoons closer and closer toward a heightened version of real life, Avery found an alternate path: why not make cartoons where everything that happens could not possibly happen in real life?
That's why the most common type of Avery gag is one that takes a real-world object and changes its physical properties in some way. Characters appear in two places at once, cannons act like giant penises (Blitz Wolf), logs get peeled like bananas (Three Little Pups), a little duckling can pick up a boat with two hunters in it (Lucky Ducky). The more removed a gag was from our physical reality, the better Avery liked it. One gag he reportedly hated and considered hacky was the standard gag of a character crashing through a wall and leaving an outline of himself, and that happens to be a gag that is almost too close to what could happen in real life (I mean, it doesn't happen, but if the wall was thin enough... anyway we've seen a live-action character do that, Daniel Craig in Casino Royale). For Bob Clampett or Chuck Jones, in their different ways, animation was about funny drawings. For Tex Avery, it's more that animation was about funny things that are drawn, or, more specifically, funny things that can only be drawn. Even his wild takes are essentially jokes about body parts flying apart or changing shape or size. For Avery, it was always about how to do what can't be done in real life.
The insight Tex had was that the limitations of a short cartoon can be liberating. The limitations are clear: it's only seven minutes so there's no time for any real depth or complexity of storytelling, a short funny-animal cartoon is incapable of giving a direct, realistic representation of life, and it's the light entertainment before the feature so the audience isn't really all that involved. Avery turned these disadvantages to his advantage. Audiences didn't -- couldn't -- take a short cartoon as seriously as a feature, so Avery talked directly to the audiences, made light of the insignificance of short cartoons and (almost accidentally) got the audience more involved in the cartoon just by enjoying the little asides he threw in for them. And because short comedy cartoons are inherently unreal, he was able to invent gags that would never work in live-action, even the more surreal era of silent comedy that he and other Termite Terrace directors were influenced by. In live-action, if you try to defy the laws of physics with a gag, the audience may like it but they may also be distracted by trying to figure out how it was done. In animation, everything is fake, there are no real people, so no one will ask any questions if a character instantly comes back unharmed after his body falls apart.
Other animation people may have done more for the art of drawing but nobody did more to help create the rules of what we now think of as cartoon physics and cartoon violence. Before Avery, cartoon violence was basically Popeye and Bluto hitting each other a lot, or violence influenced by the Keystone Kops. After Avery, and the WB and Tom and Jerry cartoons that were influenced by his ways of using violence, cartoon violence had its own internal logic and became at once more gruesome and more fun to watch (because Avery's violence was so removed from the real-world effects of violence, even when characters did something realistic like shooting themselves). He defied the laws of nature and science and created his own rules for the universe. And we're happy to live in his universe.
What makes Tex Avery one of the greatest figures in animated comedy is his incredible expansion of the range of gags available to cartoons, what we might call the vocabulary of gags. He was not the first to take advantage of the potential of animation for re-shaping characters' bodies, defying the laws of physics, or breaking the fourth wall, but he made that the primary basis of an animated cartoon. Before Avery, a cartoon was basically a comedy short with gags inspired by silent comedy or comic strips, plus some gags that took off into an alternate cartoon reality. Avery, particularly after arriving at MGM, switched it around: instead of that kind of gag being a special effect, it became the kind of thing that happened all the time. At a time when Disney was pushing cartoons closer and closer toward a heightened version of real life, Avery found an alternate path: why not make cartoons where everything that happens could not possibly happen in real life?
That's why the most common type of Avery gag is one that takes a real-world object and changes its physical properties in some way. Characters appear in two places at once, cannons act like giant penises (Blitz Wolf), logs get peeled like bananas (Three Little Pups), a little duckling can pick up a boat with two hunters in it (Lucky Ducky). The more removed a gag was from our physical reality, the better Avery liked it. One gag he reportedly hated and considered hacky was the standard gag of a character crashing through a wall and leaving an outline of himself, and that happens to be a gag that is almost too close to what could happen in real life (I mean, it doesn't happen, but if the wall was thin enough... anyway we've seen a live-action character do that, Daniel Craig in Casino Royale). For Bob Clampett or Chuck Jones, in their different ways, animation was about funny drawings. For Tex Avery, it's more that animation was about funny things that are drawn, or, more specifically, funny things that can only be drawn. Even his wild takes are essentially jokes about body parts flying apart or changing shape or size. For Avery, it was always about how to do what can't be done in real life.
The insight Tex had was that the limitations of a short cartoon can be liberating. The limitations are clear: it's only seven minutes so there's no time for any real depth or complexity of storytelling, a short funny-animal cartoon is incapable of giving a direct, realistic representation of life, and it's the light entertainment before the feature so the audience isn't really all that involved. Avery turned these disadvantages to his advantage. Audiences didn't -- couldn't -- take a short cartoon as seriously as a feature, so Avery talked directly to the audiences, made light of the insignificance of short cartoons and (almost accidentally) got the audience more involved in the cartoon just by enjoying the little asides he threw in for them. And because short comedy cartoons are inherently unreal, he was able to invent gags that would never work in live-action, even the more surreal era of silent comedy that he and other Termite Terrace directors were influenced by. In live-action, if you try to defy the laws of physics with a gag, the audience may like it but they may also be distracted by trying to figure out how it was done. In animation, everything is fake, there are no real people, so no one will ask any questions if a character instantly comes back unharmed after his body falls apart.
Other animation people may have done more for the art of drawing but nobody did more to help create the rules of what we now think of as cartoon physics and cartoon violence. Before Avery, cartoon violence was basically Popeye and Bluto hitting each other a lot, or violence influenced by the Keystone Kops. After Avery, and the WB and Tom and Jerry cartoons that were influenced by his ways of using violence, cartoon violence had its own internal logic and became at once more gruesome and more fun to watch (because Avery's violence was so removed from the real-world effects of violence, even when characters did something realistic like shooting themselves). He defied the laws of nature and science and created his own rules for the universe. And we're happy to live in his universe.
Bob! Bob! Bob!
Randy Salas of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is one of the few journalists who is really knowledgeable about TV-on-DVD (I mean the business aspect of what gets released and what doesn't). So when the first season of Newhart was released on DVD, he was the only journalist to ask Bob Newhart the question that is on fans' minds: what about the final two seasons of his first show, which Fox has abandoned?
Read the whole thing, which has more quotes from Newhart and more info about Fox's bizarre history with non-current catalogue titles.
Fox really, really needs to start licensing out its TV catalogue to someone, anyone. The current situation -- where they release the first season of Newhart and no one, not even Newhart himself, thinks we're likely to see the whole series -- is nuts.
I don't know if this would be practical or possible, but one thing that occurs to me is this: since these titles appear to sell better through Amazon than in regular stores (since Amazon has told Fox that they want these titles), shouldn't there at least be some consideration given to making these shows online-exclusive titles? It's probably not practical, but there's no doubt that these older shows are easier to market online -- where they will be bought by fans and by older viewers -- rather than to impulse buyers in stores.
Apparently, Newhart is coming out now because online retailer Amazon told Fox Home Entertainment of all the requests it had received for the ’80s show... Ironically, he added, it’s his understanding that Amazon also has urged Fox to release Seasons 5 and 6 of the older show, too.
“The fifth and sixth seasons of The Bob Newhart Show are in limbo as far as I am concerned, as far as Fox’s attitude toward them,” Bob said. “I think Fox has an obligation to put something out and not quit after the fourth year.”
He said he feels bad for fans, many of whom have contacted him through his website to ask what’s up.
“I think it hurts because people don’t want to start collecting if they’re not sure they’re going to have the whole collection,” he said, adding with a laugh: “There were eight years of Newhart. Now, how many they are going to put out, I don’t know.”
Read the whole thing, which has more quotes from Newhart and more info about Fox's bizarre history with non-current catalogue titles.
Fox really, really needs to start licensing out its TV catalogue to someone, anyone. The current situation -- where they release the first season of Newhart and no one, not even Newhart himself, thinks we're likely to see the whole series -- is nuts.
I don't know if this would be practical or possible, but one thing that occurs to me is this: since these titles appear to sell better through Amazon than in regular stores (since Amazon has told Fox that they want these titles), shouldn't there at least be some consideration given to making these shows online-exclusive titles? It's probably not practical, but there's no doubt that these older shows are easier to market online -- where they will be bought by fans and by older viewers -- rather than to impulse buyers in stores.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Tex Rex
Today is the centennial of Tex Avery's birth. It's like Christmas for animation fans.
Here are some celebrations of Tex that I've found online:
- The London Spectator blog post by Peter Hoskin
- An opinion piece from the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star in Virginia (score one for Fredericksburg over most other papers)
- "Avery Important Day" by Cashew Lou
- "Today is Tex Avery's 100th Birthday" by David Germain
- "Texcentennial" by Thad Komorowski
- "Happy 100th Birthday by Tex Avery" by J.E. Daniels
Update: Tribute and pictures from Kevin Langley.
(I wanted to write something myself but am going to have to wait until tomorrow. Sad, isn't it?)
Here are some celebrations of Tex that I've found online:
- The London Spectator blog post by Peter Hoskin
- An opinion piece from the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star in Virginia (score one for Fredericksburg over most other papers)
- "Avery Important Day" by Cashew Lou
- "Today is Tex Avery's 100th Birthday" by David Germain
- "Texcentennial" by Thad Komorowski
- "Happy 100th Birthday by Tex Avery" by J.E. Daniels
Update: Tribute and pictures from Kevin Langley.
(I wanted to write something myself but am going to have to wait until tomorrow. Sad, isn't it?)
Monday, February 25, 2008
Thank God For Movie Tie-Ins
Sony hardly ever releases TV shows on DVD any more, so we can be thankful for the Sex and the City movie (a phrase I didn't expect to utter), because their desperate search for Sarah Jessica Parker-related material has led them to announce a DVD release for SJP's cult flop series "Square Pegs".
This show used a bunch of music, which has been the hold-up on releasing it in the past. Sony has been better than most studios about not cutting or changing music (Paramount and Fox are the worst, while Warner Brothers seems to be the one that won't release any show if they can't clear the music), but we will have to wait and see if they've followed that policy with this release.
The lesson is clear: if you want any show to be released, you have to hope and pray that somebody on that show has a big movie or new TV series coming out. (For example, Paramount had pretty much written off the Cheers DVD releases until Ted Danson resurfaced in Damages.)
Square Pegs, created by SNL writer Anne Beatts -- who assembled a nearly all-female writing staff at a time when there were even fewer female sitcom writers than today -- was also one of two mid-'80s cult flop sitcoms that were shot one-camera, with a more movie-like look and fewer hard jokes than most sitcoms, but still had to use a laugh track. Buffalo Bill was the other. I don't mind laugh tracks for some shows but they did not work at all for these shows, and at a time when M*A*S*H had mostly dropped the laugh track, it was anachronistic.
This show used a bunch of music, which has been the hold-up on releasing it in the past. Sony has been better than most studios about not cutting or changing music (Paramount and Fox are the worst, while Warner Brothers seems to be the one that won't release any show if they can't clear the music), but we will have to wait and see if they've followed that policy with this release.
The lesson is clear: if you want any show to be released, you have to hope and pray that somebody on that show has a big movie or new TV series coming out. (For example, Paramount had pretty much written off the Cheers DVD releases until Ted Danson resurfaced in Damages.)
Square Pegs, created by SNL writer Anne Beatts -- who assembled a nearly all-female writing staff at a time when there were even fewer female sitcom writers than today -- was also one of two mid-'80s cult flop sitcoms that were shot one-camera, with a more movie-like look and fewer hard jokes than most sitcoms, but still had to use a laugh track. Buffalo Bill was the other. I don't mind laugh tracks for some shows but they did not work at all for these shows, and at a time when M*A*S*H had mostly dropped the laugh track, it was anachronistic.
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