Knurre, Schnurre, Knurre

The conductor Rene Jacobs keeps on providing the best evidence that classical recording isn't dead. Already this year he's given us a recording of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro that ranks as the best Figaro ever on period instruments, and one of the best overall. And his new recording of Haydn's oratorio The Seasons is in the same class. Compared with other period-instrument conductors like John Eliot Gardiner (whose recording of The Seasons is also very fine, though I think the new one would be my first choice), Jacobs is more willing to engage in "Romantic" devices like slowing down for emphasis; we've come a long way from the time when period performances were stiff and metronomic. And Jacobs makes the most of Haydn's representational effects; in the third-act hunting chorus, he's not afraid, for example, to get a rough, gruff sound from the brass to suggest (as Haydn intended) the hounds barking as they pursue the fox. The soloists and chorus are all fine, and it's nice that the recording assembled an all-German cast and chorus -- it's not often nowadays that you hear a performance or recording where everybody is singing in his or her own language.

What's so wonderful about Haydn's late oratorios -- The Creation and The Seasons -- is that they are perfect combinations of sophistication and simplicity. So in The Seasons we have the thematic, harmonic and developmental sophistication of a composer who more or less invented the rules of the so-called Classical style, alternating and/or combining with Haydn's celebration of the fun things music can do: hummable tunes representation of natural phenomena and physical actions, folk dances. (Haydn even pays a little tribute to his own hard-won fame and popularity: when the text describes a farmer whistling a tune as he works, the orchestra plays the famous tune from the second movement of Haydn's 94th symphony.)

The Unkindest Directors Cut

GEORGE LUCAS: These are my movies. I made them, and I have the right to do whatever I want with them.
STAN: You're wrong, Mr. Lucas. They're not your movies. They're ours. All of ours. We paid to go see them, and they're just as much a part of our lives as they are of yours.
KYLE: When an artist creates, whatever they create belongs to society.
(from the South Park episode "Free Hat")

Okay, first of all, I'm not the biggest Star Wars fan, though like everyone else I will probably wind up getting the DVD set. And, like many people, I thought it was pretty cool the way Han Solo shot that guy in the bar scene, and I didn't like the way this scene was wussified for the so-called "Special Edition." And, again like many people, I wish George Lucas would stop adding pointless new scenes and digital "improvements" to his movies and just release the films as they originally appeared in theatres.

But what interests me about the controversy over "special editions" of films (which was the subject of a very funny South Park episode, quoted above) is that similar controversy doesn't usually attach to so-called "directors' cuts" -- that is, films that are re-released with footage that was cut from the original release, or an ending that the studio originally didn't want, or just something that got cut. There are quite a few films where the version now in circulation is longer than the version that originally got released. The Wild Bunch and any other Peckinpah movie where extra footage can be found. Touch of Evil got two re-releases, one to add back the Orson Welles footage that got cut originally, and another to take out the scenes he didn't direct. Blade Runner, of course.

Sometimes the "directors' cut" doesn't really have much relationship to what the director wanted. Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game is probably the most famous case of a movie that was cut to pieces after previews, and "restored" some years later. But as is pointed out in a note on the Criterion DVD, the version we see today is not only longer than the original theatrical release, it's longer than the cut Renoir put together for previews (which is lost). The "definitive" version of Rules of the Game was assembled in 1959 from a bunch of different sources, with Renoir's consent but not his direct involvement, by two guys who loved the film but weren't involved in making it. There's little doubt that the version we see is different -- and longer -- than it would have been if the previews had gone well in 1939. (I still think, heretically, that the famous hunting scene goes on way too long after its point has been made, though I don't know if this scene is significantly longer than it is in the theatrical release version.)

We tend to think of directors' cuts as being all right because they restore the filmmaker's original vision at the time the movie was made, whereas "special editions" represent afterthoughts (by filmmakers who, like Lucas, may have lost whatever creative spark they had at the time they made the originals) and compromise that original vision. But to say that a directors' cut, even one created by the director, doesn't compromise the movie's "vision" is to ascribe the "vision" of the movie entirely to the director. I don't think that's true of movies, and certainly not of Hollywood movies, where the producer is (or was) just as likely as the director to be the driving force behind the project. A movie is "created" by the director and the producer and the studio executives and anyone else who has a hand in shaping the project and deciding what its final form will be. Touch of Evil is an Orson Welles film, but it's also a film by Albert Zugsmith (the producer) and by Universal (the studio). As such, if the studio chooses to cut some of Welles' scenes and add a few new shots by another director, that may be regrettable, but that's not a change made after the fact, that's a change made during the creation of the movie, as part of the whole editing/revising process. It's the form in which the film is released to the public. Whether we like it or not, it's the "definitive" version. To say that Welles' memo to the studio has more to do with the movie's definitive form than the actual theatrical release version is to imply that the director's creativity exists in a vacuum, apart from the contributions of the producer, the studio, the preview audiences, the general tenor of the times, etc. And I don't think that's how moviemaking works.

Now, having said that, do I think that the original theatrical release of Touch of Evil should be the only one we see? No way. Some of Welles's cut scenes are too good to lose. (On the other hand, I don't really care for the recent re-cut based on Welles' memo; to me it just proves that some of the studio's editiong decisions were good ones.) Same with the material the studio cut from The Wild Bunch and many other movies. But given the nature of filmmaking, I don't think these re-cuts have more validity than the studio-imposed final versions; if we accept that once a movie is released to the public, it's out of the creators' hands, then there should be no moral or artistic right to go back and put new scenes in, even if they're scenes that the director would have liked to put in in the first place. The argument for these directors' cuts is not moral, it's qualitiative: we like to have scenes put back if they improve the movie. And similarly, the argument against George Lucas adding computerized crap to his movies is not about morality or the original being the definitive version (because if the original Star Wars is the final definitive version once it's in theatres, then so is the original theatrical release of Touch of Evil), it's just that the older, politically-correct, computer-obsessed George Lucas shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the movies he made when he had talent.

Addendum: Among "special editions" of movies -- movies where new material was created years later -- one I like is the "special edition" of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, which had a new sequence recorded and animated for the DVD. What I like about it is not the song (which is good but doesn't really add a lot), but the little scene with Belle and the Beast reading Romeo and Juliet, which removes one of the more irritating things about the original version of the movie: that Belle is presented as someone who likes to read, but (in the original theatrical version) we never hear about her reading anything more challenging than Jack and the Beanstalk. So that little scene actually improves the character, and therefore the movie.

No, You Can't Ask One More Question

On the occasion of the DVD release of the first season of Columbo, LA Weekly has a good analysis of the show. Peter Falk also has a recent interview, mostly about Cassavetes stuff, but he does talk a bit about the tricks he came up with to liven up the final "explanation" scenes -- which, indeed, were better on Columbo than almost any other mystery show:

A prop is worth half a page of exposition. If you take out of your raincoat pocket a Mounds bar, and then the next time you take out something equally puzzling, when you take out the next time the gun, you've already captured the audience's interest, because they were surprised by the first two things. That's the kind of thing I would be dealing with, to find some way to always have a prop, as opposed to words... That's one of the reasons I would sometimes reach into my pocket and pull out a box of Raisinets. Or another time I might have salt and pepper, and in the other pocket I'd have a hard-boiled egg. And then finally I'd pull out something that actually had something to do with the case.

The one thing that always bugged me about Columbo is that Columbo often wound up nailing the murderer on incredibly flimsy pieces of evidence ("How did you know he was in his gym clothes if you didn't change his clothes?"). I guess that's part of any mystery show, but somehow it always seemed worse on Columbo because the murderers, being such ruthless Rich Guys, seemed like just the kinds of guys who could hire a good lawyer and make hash of Columbo's crackpot theories. I recall MAD Magazine did a parody of Columbo where his superior complains that Columbo always goes after the rich guy instead of the obvious suspect, gets the rich guy on some tiny piece of evidence that can't hold up in court, and then the department gets sued for false arrest. But instead, supposedly ruthless dudes like Jack Cassidy and Robert Vaughn crumble to pieces when Columbo says "uh, just one more question." Wimps.

Passing the Blogging Buck

I don't have much to blog about right now (though you'd think that the one advantage of a blog based entirely on random old stuff is that you're never at a loss for what to write about -- doesn't work out that way, I guess), so I'll instead direct you to a relatively new blog from James Wolcott, Vanity Fair writer, book reviewer, and the last good TV critic the Village Voice ever had. His blog deals quite a bit with the intersection of popular culture/media and politics, and sometimes just with popular culture itself, as in his explanation of why Leno is better than Letterman.

Lanterloo, Lanterloo

Can Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress be considered a standard-repertoire piece by now? I don't think so, but it seems to be performed more frequently now than it used to be. When it premiered in the early '50s, it was basically a flop, especially in its performance at the Metropolitan Opera -- conducted by Fritz Reiner and directed by frequent Stravinsky collaborator George Balanchine -- which more or less convinced Rudolph Bing (the artistic director) that he should do his best to avoid producing contemporary opera:

I must admit I absolutely hated the work, both the words and the music. I do not consider myself a prude, but a woman with a beard I think goes too far. The early box office was most encouraging... but later performances were played to many empty seats and in the next year the subscribers were furious -- people literally spat at the box office, and we couldn't give tickets away. We offered to send heated cabs, but nobody would come.

As the above passage implies, there was quite a lot of hostile reaction from audiences at the time. What seems weird about that, from today's standpoint, is that The Rake's Progress is one of the most musically accessible operas written after WWII: As the culmination of his "neoclassical" period, Stravinsky and his librettists (W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman) made a deliberate return to the form and style of 18th and early 19th century opera: individual numbers separated by harpsichord-accompanied recitative. Ever since Wagner, the ideal of opera had been to make an opera seem through-composed, with no clear distinction between aria and recitative; Wagner did this by writing whole operas in what was basically a heightened form of accompanied recitative. Stravinsky revived all the formulas that Wagner had supposedly rendered obsolete: relatively simple melodic lines, songs that are carried by the voice and in which the orchestra has a subsidiary role; even – in Anne's aria – the old 19th century Italian form of a slow cavatina followed by a fast cabaletta. Stravinsky was also reaching back to the 18th century ideal of making musical points in simple, short terms. Wagner had come up with all sorts of complicated ways to make music express ideas and portray physical objects; a gigantic orchestra, new and strange harmonic techniques, the leitmotif system. Stravinsky in Rake chooses older, simpler techniques for making music express something concrete. At the climax of Tom's first aria, when the words refer to horses ("Come, wishes, be horses/This beggar shall ride"), Stravinsky doesn't introduce a "horse motif," nor does he try to find a musical equivalent for the metaphor that the words are expressing; he just has the orchestra play some very simple melodic figures that are suggestive of horses, and then speeds it up a little when the words refer to "riding" those horses. It's the kind of very basic, simple representational music that Haydn did in The Creation and The Seasons, and which was commonly dismissed as hopelessly naive and silly by Wagner's era.

Of course, because of all this calculated simplicity, the musical avant-garde condemned Stravinsky as hopelessly out of touch; that, along with the failure of Rake, is part of what led him to start writing serial music in the '50s. But one would have thought that an opera with simple, attractive melodies would have appealed to general classical music audiences, and to the majority of music critics (who generally were anything but avant-gardists). Instead the Rake's Progress got lukewarm box-office and reviews that ranged from ambiguous to outright hostile. Why?

One problem may have been that Stravinsky and Auden and Kallman were harkening back to a kind of opera that was not very popular at the time. In the late '40s and early '50s, Mozart was still not a major part of the standard repertoire, and when his operas were performed, it was often in camped-up versions that tried to smooth out the ambiguities of tone -- so opera houses would present Cosi Fan Tutte as a pure featherweight farce, and Don Giovanni as either a gloomy tragedy or a campy sex romp; the thing that defines Mozart operas for many of us today, that they are serious and funny at the same time, was considered a flaw. The most popular operas were pure comedies (Barber of Seville) or, especially, pure tragedies, with direct emotional appeal. The biggest inspiration for The Rake's Progress is Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, with its shifts between farce and seriousness, and its shifting signals as to how we're supposed to respond to the characters. But that was the kind of thing that made Cosi a hard sell at the time. Stravinsky was bringing Mozart's ambiguity and irony back to opera at a time when audiences weren't accustomed to finding such things in an opera.

Conrad L. Osborne, with his usual brilliance, summed up another part of the reason for the mixed reactions when he wrote (reviewing a recording of the opera in High Fidelity, January 1965):

The source of our ambivalence in feeling towards the opera (I say "our" and mean "my," but apparently it's a widespread reaction, to judge from the quizzical stutterings of most critical response) lies in the fact that while the characters are placed in the perspective of fable, and the form is carefully calculated to keep our minds working, Tom emerges as a person, too. And while all the operatic hocus-pocus is being pointed at and even ribbed, it is working the old tricks on us; it uses the old forms for their own sakes, as well as for purposes of framing. This leaves us at something of a loss. Should we laugh or cry? Snicker or cheer? Remain detached, or give in?

This problem -- the ambivalence about how to respond to the opera -- was exacerbated by two things. One was Stravinsky's tendency to say, in public and in print, that his music was supposed to be unemotional, unrelated to anything but itself, etc. It's hard to know how seriously to take such statements, but in any case, critics did take them seriously and came to Rake assuming in advance that we were supposed to distance ourselves from the music and the characters. The other problem was that Stravinsky was paying tribute to operatic techniques that, for the most part, were no longer taken seriously, and that therefore seemed to send out a signal that the whole piece wasn't to be taken seriously. The thing about The Rake's Progress is that while Stravinsky's use of these musical anachronisms may sound, at first, like parody, it eventually becomes clear that he's not always using them ironically; he's just using them because they work, musically and theatrically. Osborne continues:

When we hear the harpsichord, we are immediately conscious of the anachronism -- that is unavoidable. Yet Stravinsky has chosen the harpsichord not merely for its status as an antique or even its functional value accompanying secco recitative, but for its descriptive coloration as well, and in this role it creates a chilling effect in the graveyard scene. When Anne launches her cabaletta, we are aware that a fine tradition of romantic opera is being sent up, as the English say; but we also respond to the genuine impetus of the writing, and wait for this high C as impatiently as for any in Verdi.

There is, as Osborne says, a problem with this bouncing between using musical devices for ironic effect and using them for their own sake; sometimes we may feel, as he puts it, that we're "being toyed with." But it's not a major flaw in the opera. What made it seem like a major flaw is that audiences and critics weren't used to taking these devices seriously, so Stravinsky's use of them was interpreted as pure parody. Evaluated just as an aria, Anne's aria is a very effective piece; but because it's cast in the form of a 19th-century Italian opera aria, and because that form was considered to be discredited by that time, it was hard to hear it just as an operatic number, rather than a spoof of an operatic number. This he-can't-be-serious attitude applied to a lot of Stravinsky's "neoclassical" pieces: Oedipus Rex, his great opera-oratorio, is filled with very sincere homages to Verdi, whose music Stravinsky loved; but few critics took Verdi seriously at the time Oedipus premiered, so it was interpreted as a bitter parody of older music. Similarly, Stravinsky's ballet The Fairy's Kiss was a loving homage to Tchaikovsky, but many critics called it a spoof or criticism of Tchaikovsky, because at that time, Stravinsky was held in much higher critical esteem than Tchaikovsky was, and few could seriously entertain the thought that the most celebrated modern composer had anything to learn from the composer of Swan Lake.

The problem with applying that kind of analysis to The Rake's Progress is that it's just too long to be a pure parody. Oedipus Rex is only 50 minutes, so if you interpret it as a big nasty joke, it can just about sustain that joke. But Rake is a full-length opera; unless you lose yourself in the music and become engaged with Tom as a character, it doesn't work. Part of the reason Rake has gotten more popular, I think, is that we are more willing now to accept the greatness of the older composers Stravinsky was paying tribute to -- Mozart, Haydn, Handel, Verdi -- and therefore more willing to hear the work as an opera that happens to use some old-fashioned operatic devices, rather than Igor and Wystan's big expensive joke.

Most of the recordings of Rake seem to be out of print, but the John Eliot Gardiner recording is still available, and very good; the conductor and singers take the work seriously and play up the emotional effectiveness of the music, rather than trying to make it sound dry and parodic. (The most famous singer in the cast, Bryn Terfel, actually overdoes it by snarling and barking his way through the role of the villain, Nick Shadow, but at least that's a non-ironic, non-parodic take on the character.) There's a DVD of a Salzburg production that is unfortunately not very good -- a "revisionist" production of an opera that's already plenty revisionist on its own. Hopefully a better production will find its way to DVD eventually.

A Good Enviro-Toon

In a previous post I had my say about the perniciousness of the "enviro-toon," the cartoon that tries to indoctrinate children about the importance of Saving Our Planet. What I realized after writing that is that I have, in fact, seen an enviro-toon that was actually good, though I'm not sure that it was actually intended as an enviro-toon. It's a Warner Brothers cartoon called "Lumber Jerks," 1955, directed by Friz Freleng and written/storyboarded by Warren Foster, where the Goofy Gophers find that their tree has been cut down and taken to a factory where trees are processed into furniture; in the end, they somehow swipe the furniture that was made out of their tree, and the ending shows them sitting on top of a stack of furniture, staring at a TV set that isn't plugged in.


This cartoon is not to be compared to "Captain Planet," and yet in a way it is an enviro-toon. Seeing the factory, one of the Gophers says "It definitely seems as though they are bent on the destruction of our forest." I remember, growing up in the '80s, hearing that line and preparing myself for a preachy environmental message, because that's what we were getting in cartoons at that time. The preachy message never came, of course. And yet, without preaching, the cartoon does seem to make a point about environmental devastation: animals are left without homes because of all the trees being chopped down. In the factory, trees are wasted in order to make frivolous or small things; one gag shows a whole tree being used to make one toothpick. It also shows that people are getting dependent on factories for things that they used to get themselves; in another gag, trees are chopped up and then combined with glue and other things to create "artificial fireplace logs." A theme of the cartoon is that everything is becoming artificial and man-made; the ending shows a natural tree replaced by a stack of furniture, including the ultimate '50s accessory, television. It never preaches, but it makes more points about the environment than all the Captain Planet episodes combined. And instead of showing that only evil people harm the environment, which was the complacent message delivered by "Captain Planet" or "Smoggies," it shows that trees are being chopped down in order to make the things we use every day -- in other words, we are the ones harming the environment.

Now, having said that, I have no idea whether Freleng and/or Foster intended to make a serious environmentalist point here. Probably not. The cartoon is a follow-up to a Goofy Gophers cartoon of the previous year, "I Gopher You," where the Gophers' vegetables wind up in a vegetable processing plant; both cartoons get most of their laughs at the expense of '50s over-mechanization and over-reliance on mass-produced stuff, and I think "Lumber Jerks" is more a riff on mass-production than it is on the destruction of forests. But still, anyone looking to make an enviro-toon could learn a few things from "Lumber Jerks." It's on disc 4 of the first Looney Tunes Golden Collection.

The Goofy Gophers had a weird history at WB, by the way. Bob Clampett came up with the basic idea -- two polite gophers of the not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-it variety, sort of combining Chip n' Dale with the personalities of Hollywood character actors like Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn -- but he left the studio before making any cartoons with them, and Art Davis, who took over his unit, made two cartoons with them ("The Goofy Gophers" and "Two Gophers From Texas"). When Davis's unit was shut down, he had another Goofy Gophers story ready to go, so Bob McKimson directed it ("A Ham in a Role"). Then two years later Friz Freleng took up the characters and made a cartoon with them. Three years after that, Freleng revived the characters, redesigned them, made them less aggressive (they were originally sort of like the early Tweety, inflicting violence on their adversaries while acting "cute"), and put them in three cartoons. Then they vanished again, but McKimson made one more cartoon with them in the late '50s. And finally they resurfaced as adversaries for Daffy Duck in one of those limited-animation DePatie-Freleng cartoons of the '60s. That's a long career for two characters who never really caught on. Something about them just caused one director after another to take a crack at them, but I'm not really sure what. (I like the Gophers, but I'd rather it had been Hubie and Bertie who had gotten revived -- those characters were really deserving of another shot at cartoon stardom.)

Ten Songwriters -- Ten Songs

Here's an expanded version of an exercise I once came up with on a musical theatre newsgroup: If you were given the names of ten musical-theatre songwriters and/or teams, what songs would you choose to introduce a newcomer (someone who knew nothing whatsoever about musicals) to the style of that songwriter?

To explain further, what I'm talking about is not "the best" song, but a song that best sums up what this particular songwriter's work is all about, in terms of style, emotions, choice of subject and approach to that subject? In other words, if a visiting Martian asked "What is this Rodgers and Hammerstein entity all about?" what song would you choose to explain it? This is actually something that comes up occasionally, not necessarily with visiting Martians (I'm sure that they're already advanced enough to know all about the best of Irving Berlin), but with people who want to be introduced to musical theatre beyond The Sound of Music or, God forbid, A Chorus Line. And one of the best ways to do an introduction is to play songs by some of the greats, songs that they might not have heard before, but that a) They will probably like, and b) Will give them an idea of what that particular songwriter is all about.

Anyway, here are ten songs I would use to introduce people to various songwriters and/or teams. You'll notice that there's a bias here towards composer-lyricists or longtime teams; I couldn't come up with something for, say, Jerome Kern because he worked as part of so many different teams.

RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN: "All Kinds of People" from their 1955 failure Pipe Dream. Even a visiting Martian has probably heard OKLAHOMA and CAROUSEL and THE SOUND OF MUSIC and the other R&H hits, so instead I'll choose something from their biggest failure. This short song is quintessential R&H: An optimistic message, sparsely rhymed lyrics, a cheeky melody for the verse followed by a soaring refrain that makes you believe in the lyric's optimistic, can't-we-all-just-get-along sentiments. The lyrics are, for better or for worse, representative of Hammerstein's calculated simplicity and optimism:

It takes all kinds of people to make up a world,
All kinds of people and things.
They crawl on the earth, they swim in the sea,
And they fly through the sky on wings.
All kinds of people and things,
And, brother, I'll tell you my hunch:
Whether you like them or whether you don't,
You're stuck with the whole damn bunch.

RODGERS & HART: "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" from Pal Joey. I gotta go with the obvious here; it has it all: romantic but tricky tune combined with bittersweet, romantic-cynical, heavily rhymed lyrics. I also know from experience that it really does make a perfect introduction, not just to Rodgers and Hart, but to musicals in general, for newbies who grew up thinking that musicals were all sweet and innocent. Another possibility would be "It Never Entered My Mind," which is arguably their greatest song and contains a line that, for some reason, listeners of my generation seem to find particularly risque:

Once you told me I'd stay up Sunday
To read the Monday morning dirt
And find you're merging with some skirt.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM: "Waiting For the Girls Upstairs" from FOLLIES. This five-minute number combines various Sondheim trademarks: Tunes built out of repeated melodic fragments, a long interlude that's almost a separate song in itself, an ambitious theatrical conception, themes galore, rhymes galore, and a Jonathan Tunick trumpet buzz right at the end. Also, since it's five minutes, it also introduces listeners to another important characteristic of Sondheim songs: extreme length.

IRVING BERLIN: He's the hardest because he re-invented himself so much. Maybe I'll go out on a limb and say "Falling out of Love Can Be Fun" from MISS LIBERTY:

Falling out of love can be fun,
Someone else can soon be the one,
Buy another name, he's the same as his brother,
Close your eyes and one is like the other,
Falling out of love can be fun.

It's got Berlin's wit (a major, but often overlooked, part of his talent), his ability to frame a familiar situation (getting over a breakup) in a fresh way, and his favored trick of ending with a twist on the title:

Love can give a lady a clout,
And she may be down but not out.
Get yourself a date, don't you wait for the count of ten,
Then
Falling out of love can be falling in love again.

Also, the orchestration, by master orchestrator Don Walker, can serve as an introduction to certain principles of classic Broadway orchestration: keeping the accompaniment thin when the singer is singing (because there were, thankfully, no microphones in theatres back then), punctuating the lines with muted trumpet fanfares, a discreetly jazzy piano part to liven up the beginning of the second refrain, and so on.

GEORGE & IRA GERSHWIN: "Someone To Watch Over Me" from Oh, Kay! is still probably the best introduction to this team -- a tune with one foot in the jazz age and the other in the style of Jerome Kern, a lyric at once knowing and naive.

JERRY BOCK & SHELDON HARNICK: "Marie's Law" from FIORELLO! In its comic approach to a serious case of unrequited love...

Here's another law we women'll
Do our best to legislate:
It shall be completely criminal
For a man to break a date.
Each offender shall be rapidly
Thrown in jail where he belongs,
Thus we'll write our bill of wrongs.

...it epitomizes the B&H way of taking a lighthearted look at something serious -- without ever trivializing the subject or the character; this is something they would do in many of their best songs, such as "If I Were a Rich Man" from FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. ("Marie's Law" is also a tribute to the director of FIORELLO!, George Abbott, who made Bock and Harnick throw out a serious torch song originally intended for this spot, and write something expressing the character's problem through comedy, not sentimentality.)

COLE PORTER: "Just One of Those Things" from JUBILEE -- but only if the verse is included ("As Dorothy Parker once said to her boyfriend...") to give the full picture of Porter's blend of disillusioned romanticism, name-dropping, imaginative variations on AABA format (Porter's final A sections are almost never literal repetitions), and internal rhyming. Another song that works as an introduction to Porter is "Cherry Pies Ought To Be You" from Out of This World; it's not even one of his best list songs, but its speed, verve, and rapid-fire rhyming always gets listeners laughing, even listeners who didn't particularly care for musicals. I remember playing it for a bunch of people, mostly music students with no particular interest in musical theatre except possibly Sondheim, who loved "Cherry Pies" and absolutely cracked up at these lines:

You look so enticing,
I'm starting to shake.
You are just the icing
To put on my cake.

I'm not really sure why that was such a big success with these listeners, but it's all in the delivery, and the way the words fit with the music, and the way the rhymes come so fast and so (seemingly) effortlessly. Anyway, it was a step in showing people an important point about musical theatre that is often lost among all the poperettas and self-pity-fests that people often think of as synonymous with musicals: the point is that musicals are fun, and more than that, they're funny. The great musical-theatre songwriters, up to and including Sondheim (but not so much since Sondheim) knew how to write songs that could actually get people to laugh.

LERNER & LOEWE: "How Can I Wait?" from PAINT YOUR WAGON. It's hard to come up
with something "representative" for a team which used a different pastiche style for every show, but this one will do: A tune that is recognizably in Loewe's Viennese-operetta style and yet is also appropriate for the time and setting of the show, and which absolutely soars in the orchestral interlude. The one problem is that, on the cast album, it's not all that well sung; Olga San Juan does her best, but the tune is obviously written out of her range, and so the song doesn't take off the way "On the Street Where You Live" (a similar song, but not quite as good) does. Somebody ought to make a new recording of this one; the worst thing about the movie was not that it had Clint Eastwood singing, but that it cut this song.

JERRY HERMAN: "That Was Yesterday" from MILK AND HONEY. This is probably Herman's best song, period; it shows off his Berlin-esque deceptive simplicity, as well as his love of building to a big, full-chorus, applause-baiting climax.

FRANK LOESSER: "Make a Miracle" from WHERE'S CHARLEY? This is the ultimate Loesser super-duet; Loesser was a specialist in duets where the singers' phrases overlap, and where the singers are at cross-purposes; the most famous is "Baby, It's Cold Outside," but this one is just as good.

Why I Hate FAMILY GUY

Someone suggested to me that if I took the time to explain why I think Family Guy is a bad show, I might stand a chance of getting some angry replies from some of that show's many online fans. Since the main reason to do a blog is the hope of getting angry replies and/or denunciations on other blogs, I've decided to give it a shot.

Here are ten reasons why I think Family Guy is a bad show:

10. Stewie, the most popular character, is a double ripoff. His world-domination ambitions and dictatorial rhetoric are ripped off from the Brain of Pinky and the Brain. And his design and personality are ripped off from Jimmy Corrigan, a comic-strip character created by Chris Ware. A Jimmy Corrigan strip from 1996 can be found here.

9. It constantly recycles its own meagre store of gags. It's got about three basic gags -- a cutaway to something that references a work of '70s or '80s pop culture; one of those "stretching out something so long that it's funny" routines (they do this one about five times an episode), and sexual-innuendo jokes that are sort of The Golden Girls for frat-boys. I don't mind that they sometimes use jokes from other shows -- recycling jokes is inevitable in comedy -- but they managed to get through 50 episodes without coming up with a new kind of joke, and that wears thin.

8. The characters are so boring, such a dull collection of sitcom stereotypes from the creator's youthful TV-watching binges, that there is virtually no humor to be gotten from the characters. Good comedy writing gets laughs from the characters; the writers on this show write around the characters. By the last few episodes, Stewie was so tapped-out as a character that he was written out of character in almost every episode (that is, almost every gag featured him taking on a personality other than his own), a sign that the character had nothing to him in the first place except the stuff that was taken from superior characters (like the Brain). About the only actual character on the show is Brian the dog, and even he doesn't have that much to his character.

7. It uses references as a substitute for humor. Talk to the average young Family Guy fan and you'll usually hear that what they like best about the show is that it refers to things they saw when they were growing up, and they're just tickled to find that someone else remembers it -- like the "kid in me/adult in me" commercial. Well, I remember that stuff too, but that's lazy comedy writing: there's no perspective on the stuff Family Guy is referencing, no actual joke beyond the reference itself. A golden rule of bad comedy is that if people recognize the reference, they'll laugh even if the joke's not funny. Family Guy goes beyond that; it doesn't even try to have a joke half the time -- it just assumes that making a pop culture reference is inherently funny. Another Family Guy hater makes a similar point here.

6. Seth MacFarlane's voice acting is quite poor: uninflected, monotonous, recycling the same few vocal tricks over and over the way the show recycles a few gag concepts. Mike Judge, Trey Parker, Matt Stone and others have developed into good vocal actors, but Seth MacFarlane is the best argument against creators voicing their own creations.

5. It's one of those things that presents itself as "cutting-edge" but is actually gutless. Its "offensive" jokes are neatly calculated to make sure they don't actually risk offending their fanbase; instead they make jokes that would be offensive to the kinds of people who don't watch the show -- sexual prudes, for example. Any genuinely cutting-edge comedy will risk offending people who watch it; but how is a penis joke supposed to offend the average college student? The answer is, it's not supposed to offend anybody who watches the show; it's supposed to give college kids a smug sense of superiority in believing that someone else might theoretically be offended by that penis joke. (An animated sitcom that actually dared to be tasteless and offensive was Duckman, which took on actual social and political issues; another animated sitcom that actually dares to challenge its audience is South Park, which takes the things that its youngish viewers have been told on other TV shows -- say, saving the rainforest is good -- and tells them the opposite.)

4. The style of the show, which its fans consider such an innovation, was pretty much familiar to anyone who had been following the Saturday morning and weekday cartoons of the early to mid '90s. Sitcom-style stories that went off into weird directions; a look and feel that parodied sitcoms of the '50s to the '80s; constant jokes about '80s pop culture: this was all characteristic of the funny kids' cartoons of the '90s. Essentially, if you watched enough episodes of the early Johnny Bravo (which Seth MacFarlane worked on) or some episodes of Tiny Toons or various other kids' shows of that era, then Family Guy looks like what it is: a kids' show, with all the things that characterized the kids' shows of the '90s: attempts to be hip, suspicion of big heartfelt moments, and lots of references to the shows the kids watched when they were very little. In other words, Family Guy isn't a sophisticated take on the sitcom; it's a kiddie show with some PG-13 references for older kids.

3. The animation was probably the worst of any animated sitcom ever, maybe neck-and-neck with the animated sitcom version of Dilbert. One veteran artist, who described Family Guy as the worst show he'd ever worked on -- and he'd worked for Hanna-Barbera in the '70s, so he wasn't saying that lightly -- summed it up this way:

When I'd suggest some sort of minor gag... [the director] just looked at me and, deadpan, asked "why"? The designs of the characters were murder to draw, so bland and expressionless, but I was somehow expected to get more "acting" out of them. Believe me, Peter's model sheet poses for "happy" and "depressed" looked practically identical! I was told not to add eyebrows, not to distort eye-shapes, not to draw "cartoony" poses...but still, somehow, creating "acting". Yeah, right.

The animation on "The Simpsons" or "King of the Hill" may not be classic-level, but every character acts with his or her face and body to a certain extent; they have, let's say, at least two expressions. "Family Guy" has the most inexpressive characters I've ever seen, and the only distinctive movement on the whole show is a gag that the supervising director (Peter Shin) invented to make characters fall down really fast... a gag that was then repeated to death for the rest of the series.

2. The scripts are bad. I mean apart from the shoddy recycled gags and characters, most of the scripts are just frankly terrible in terms of story construction, coherent satire, etc. The satire is, again, gutless and timid (taking on such never-before-seen satirical targets as tobacco companies and feminists); the dialogue is sub-According to Jim; the stories tend to feature one plot point per act surrounded by many minutes of filler. I guess you can say that what I call "filler" is really the point of the show. Even if the gags were funny (which they are not), I wouldn't buy this. The show is in the form of a sitcom and it should have good story construction and all the other stuff one expects of a sitcom. Otherwise all you're left with is a big overlong comedy sketch with the same characters every week, not unlike a really bad year of Saturday Night Live.

1. Plenty of other animated shows that went off the air didn't get anywhere near the same kind of following, and certainly didn't get revived. Futurama, of course, was far better; but so was Pinky and the Brain when it was in primetime; so was Duckman, which was the offensive, shocking show that Family Guy never had the guts to be (and Duckman's "Road To" episode was a million times better than Family Guy's). Even The Critic, which had some of the same problems as FG (bad animation, unmemorable characters, over-reliance on pop-culture references as opposed to genuine satire or parody), displayed a higher level of craftsmanship. Essentially Family Guy is a story of poor craftsmanship rewarded. I can't help but resent that.

Now, what do I think of the fact that this show has become so popular among younger viewers, popular enough to make it a huge DVD hit and guarantee a sizeable 18-35 demographic for the new episodes? First of all, I think that the Family Guy cult will look really embarrassing a few decades from now, because the '80s references will no longer be comprehensible, and so the episodes will consist largely of dead spots (since there are no jokes, just the references, which are supposed to be funny just because you "get" them). Second, I think it proves that people of my generation don't have better taste in TV than people of my parents' generation; in other words, how can I make fun of some elderly relative for enjoying some badly-written, badly-made CBS show, when I have younger relatives who enjoy the worse-written, worse-made Family Guy? In other words, I think "geezer TV" has been replaced by a new category... call it "whippersnapper TV": bad TV that succeeds because it appeals to the sensibilities of a particular age-based segment of the audience. All of which is a long way of saying that lots of bad shows become hits. This is another one of them.

Now, to add some fairness and balance: I actually did think that the last season of Family Guy showed some improvement, in the sense that there was some attempt to write coherent stories and give the characters something resembling a personality. It wasn't good, but it was better, and I suppose it's theoretically possible that the new episodes could be better still. There was one episode from the last season that I thought was just plain good: "Brian Wallows and Peter's Swallows," where Brian the dog meets a reclusive old lady who used to be an opera singer. That episode featured an original song that was quite a good attempt at a pastiche Broadway song, certainly better than anything Joss Whedon came up for for his Buffy musical, so I've got to give Seth MacFarlane credit for that, as well as for proving to college kids that musicals aren't for dorks. (I read that the upcoming Family Guy CD includes a song from Take Me Along by Bob Merrill, so he gets more points for that.)

Also, despite the life-ain't-fair tone of # 1, I'd say that in general, most animated sitcoms have gotten a fair shake; King of the Hill is still on, as is South Park; Futurama and Duckman got 70 episodes apiece; the animated sitcoms that outright bombed are mostly the ones that deserved to. So Family Guy's success doesn't actually take anything away from more deserving shows. It's just another mediocre-to-poor show on the air. The TV universe will survive that.

Vanity Fair, Cont.

Another thing about Vanity Fair that the new movie will have trouble preserving (no, I haven't seen it yet) is the narrator, that intrusive, ironic-yet-judgemental voice that breaks in constantly to offer us another perspective on the story. Unlike some of the writers who imitated his narrative intrusions -- like the early Trollope -- Thackeray isn't exactly writing in his own voice; it's been pointed out that the narrator of Vanity Fair makes some references to his wife and friends that indicate that he's not Thackeray. Again, the most logical comparison is to War and Peace. The narrator/historian in that novel isn't exactly Tolstoy himself, and so the novel comes off as a two-level story: first, the actual fictional story, and second, the story of the historian trying to show how these small personal stories fit into the big conventional history of great men and battles. In the Waterloo section of Vanity Fair, Thackeray does the same thing -- sets his characters' stories within the context of yet another Napoleon screwup. But the narrator of Vanity Fair isn't primarily a historian; he's a novelist, and he's mostly concerned with explaining and mocking the conventions of narrative fiction. Those are Thackeray's two levels: a story about people, and a story about a guy who's writing a novel about those people. As the story goes on, the narrator clues us in on what a lot of lies and over-simplifications go into creating the conventional categories of a novel; how, for example, to make someone like Amelia Sedley a "heroine," you have to overlook the downside of her supposedly good qualities.

This isn't the kind of authorial intrusion you got in most earlier novels, because most novels before Vanity Fair tended to present themselves as "histories." The novel was supposed to be an outgrowth of historical writing, particularly when (as with Vanity Fair) it incorporates historical events; that's why Walter Scott's novels often start with a blurb telling us that what we are about to read is a long-lost historical manuscript, just to get us in the right frame of mind to suspend our disbelief. Thackeray doesn't want suspension of disbelief, at least not all the way through; he's pulling back the curtain and exposing all the ways that novels manipulate us. If we get to the point where we have no idea what to think of the characters any more -- and where we don't know what to make of the narrator (does he mean it when he tells us what to think of a particular character, or is this more irony? who's speaking here, Thackeray or the narrator?) -- then Thackeray has us right where he wants us: he wants us to be distrustful of the way fiction over-simplifies character and action, just as Tolstoy wants us to question the way historical writing over-simplifies history.

In a way, there's something irritating about all this irony, all this ambiguity about what we're supposed to think of the characters and the story. Sometimes I get the feeling that Thackeray uses irony as a way of copping out, of not taking a moral or philosophical stand: if we don't know what he wants us to think of Becky, and if we can't even be sure whether he (or the narrator) means it when he tells us what to think of her, then Thackeray doesn't have to commit himself to any fixed position on the morality of what she does. Because of all this proto-postmodern irony, Thackeray isn't open to the same charges of sentimentality and banality that can be levelled at Dickens (when Thackeray's narrator says something sentimental or otherwise Victorian, we can't quite be sure whether he means it), but he is open to the charge of emotional reticence, of not committing to his story or characters. And if the author can't commit himself, it's hard for the reader to do so -- which means that I can read through Vanity Fair and find myself wondering what the point of all this is, beyond the purely satirical or parodic points that became all-too-clear several hundred pages ago. That said, I think Vanity Fair is a masterpiece. But sometimes it can seem like a pointless masterpiece, if there can be such a thing.

I'm Looking For My Wife's Navel

Interesting reviews of Billy Wilder's Kiss Me Stupid, which I watched again last night, can be found here and here. One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that Wilder and his co-writer Izzy Diamond intended Kiss Me Stupid as a tribute to Restoration comedies, those lewd, sex-crazed plays like The Country Wife where trying to hide your wife from the local Rake (tm) just leads to disaster. Kiss Me Stupid transplants that formula to early-'60s America: the Rake becomes a famously lecherous singer, Dino (Dean Martin, playing himself), and we have a man who lives outside the big city (Ray Walston, not very good in a part that was supposed to be for Peter Sellers), trying to hide his unworldly young wife (Felicia Farr) from the advances of his rakish guest. It's basically Wilder's The Country Wife, and the fury it caused was not so much because of the sexual content (which, as many commentators have pointed out, is pretty mild) as its portrayal of adultery as something that can actually improve people's lives -- something that hadn't often been seen in American movies, and hasn't been seen much since then.

The failure of the movie at the box-office can be blamed partly on the lack of Sellers -- Ray Walston's character has to carry a lot of scenes on his own, and he's just not a strong enough screen personality to do that -- and partly on the fact that, as others have pointed out, there's hardly a likable character in the picture except Kim Novak's character (another one of Wilder's many sad/bitter takeoffs on Marilyn Monroe). Another problem is that despite its pushing of the sexual-innuendo envelope, the film is oddly behind the times: as J. Hoberman points out, it is "firmly rooted in the smug ring-a-ding-ding of the Kennedy era." Wilder obviously intended the film as a satire of the way the debased, vulgar popular culture of the early '60s is debasing and vulgarizing American culture in general: because of the trickle-down influence of sleazy big-city cultural icons like Dino, small-town America has become a cesspool where marriage is indistinguishable from prostitution, and where people literally become pimps and whores in the hope of making it big in show business and getting out of small-town America. (Another, even nastier interpretation of the film is that it has nothing to do with influence: small-town America is just naturally as bad and as crass as big-city culture, and Climax, Nevada is not aping Vegas; it's just a smaller version of the same thing.) The theme of the movie is sort of summed up at the beginning, where Dino does his act -- his real-life act -- in Vegas: Wilder keeps cutting to four waiters. Three of them are laughing hysterically at all the drunk and sex jokes; one of the waiters, a little older than the others, and bald-headed, doesn't find any of this funny, and the others look at him as if to wonder what's wrong with him. The old waiter is Wilder's generation; the other waiters are '60s America: they're part of the sleazy world of Dino's culture.

But for this theme to really work, Dino has to be representative of the prevailing currents in popular culture -- and when Wilder got the idea for this movie, he probably was. But the movie came out in 1964, when pop culture was changing rapidly, when Rat-Pack-ism already seemed quaint, and when a major plot point was already an anachronism: Ray Walston's character is an aspiring professional songwriter, trying to sell his bad songs (Ira Gershwin fitting deliberately banal new lyrics to trunk tunes by George Gershwin) to Dino; by 1964, the market for professional songwriting, and particularly for the kind of songs Orville is trying to sell, was going away or perhaps even gone altogether. So what was supposed to be a cutting-edge satire on the corrupting influence of modern popular culture became, instead, an attack on the "older generation's" popular culture, a culture that already seemed to be on the way out. Sleazy Vegas entertainers in 1962 or even 1963 would have been an important target for satire; by 1964 they already seemed like too easy a target. Even if Dean Martin's "Everybody Loves Somebody" did beat the Beatles that year.

Not the Last Roundup

While I struggle to balance my busy schedule (Monday: Nothing. Tuesday: Wash vest. Wednesday: Buy rutabaga at half-price), here are some links I found today:

- David Hurwitz of Classics Today suggests holding a Classical Olympics, including the "Floria Tosca 30 Meter Platform Diving Competition."

- An interview with Amy Heckerling about Clueless, courtesy of the Jane Austen society page (well, Clueless is the best movie ever made from a Jane Austen novel, after all).

- A new interview with the ever-interviewable Paul Dini, best known for Batman and Superman the animated series. Being me, I'm actually more interested in what he has to say about Tiny Toons and -- though he didn't work on it much -- Animaniacs. I didn't realize he helped come up with Minerva Mink, one of the great lost characters of that show -- everybody liked her first two cartoons, but the network and/or the production company decided that they didn't want a kids' show to have a series of cartoons based entirely on sexual innuendo, so Minerva (voice of Julie Brown) was relegated to nothing but cameo appearances after that.

The World's Only Amelia Sedley Booster

I haven't seen the new Vanity Fair movie yet, but I gather that, as in previous movie versions, the emphasis is on the story of Becky Sharp and her rise and fall (like Becky Sharp, with Miriam Hopkins perfectly cast as Becky). This is by far the most popular of the book's two main storylines; the other, about wimpy Amelia Sedley and her self-delusion about her worthless husband George, is usually considered the weak link. So here's something I can say without fear of making sense: I've read Vanity Fair twice, and both times I liked the Amelia chapters much better than the Becky ones.

Not that Amelia Sedley is any great shakes as a character; she is, as Thackeray describes her, selfish, deluded, and simpering. She's not much of a heroine, but as Thackeray more or less admits at various points, she's not supposed to be. Amelia is the kind of woman who is idealized in most novels -- she is virtuous, she is faithful to her husband and then to his memory, she is devoted to her son -- but these qualities, which most novelists would celebrate, are shown by Thackeray to be faults, and pretty big faults too. Her devotion to George's memory isn't noble, and it isn't sweet; it's selfish, and Captain Dobbin's devotion to Amelia is shown to be foolish. When they finally let go of their delusions and get together, not for love but just because it's better to have each other than no one, Thackeray makes it clear that what would be the big love scene in another novel is transformed into a bittersweet little scene of two people settling for what they can get:

The vessel is in port. He has got the prize he has been trying for all his life. The bird has come in at last. There it is with its head on his shoulder, billing and cooing close up to his heart, with soft outstretched fluttering wings. This is what he has asked for every day and hour for eighteen years. This is what he pined after. Here it is--the summit, the end--the last page of the third volume. Good-bye, Colonel--God bless you, honest William!--Farewell, dear Amelia--Grow green again, tender little parasite, round the rugged old oak to which you cling!

Vanity Fair is sort of the British War and Peace, and part of the difference between the British and the Russian sensibilities is that Tolstoy is drawing on the style of historical writing, while Thackeray is drawing on the traditions of fiction; Tolstoy is creating a novel that's also a historical study, while Thackeray is creating a novel that's also a parody of other novels. This parody element is much more to the fore in the Amelia chapters, which is why they grabbed me more; the Becky story is a more standard rise-and-fall story, and a good one, but it always struck me as an adjunct to the Amelia story: Becky's selfishness is just a more open version of Amelia's selfishness, as both women take advantage of men who foolishly love them (Becky/Rawdon, Amelia/Dobbin) and want everyone around them to be focused on them, and only them. Becky's story is sort of the dark side of the traditional heroine, or what one of these selfish "heroines" would be without a privileged upbringing. But because her selfishness is more open, it's easier to know what to think of Becky: admire this quality, condemn that action. With the Amelia story, you find yourself hating characters for what you were raised to think of as good qualities, and liking characters for doing things that might seem mean and nasty in another novel. That kind of ambiguity is what makes the Amelia story so interesting to read. For me, anyway.

However, I think that any movie version definitely should play up the Becky story, as the Amelia story becomes dull when separated from the author's comments and that overlay of satire and parody of other novels.

Things That Suck: THE SMOGGIES

One of the weirdest ideas about popular culture is that the pop culture of the '80s was predominantly right-wing. I grew up in the '80s and that ain't the way I remember it. A few Rambo movies here and there, a few revenge fantasies, a few movies like Red Dawn, yes. But if you look at a broader range of '80s movies and TV shows, you will find the following themes expressed far more often, in more or less these terms: a) Nuclear war is bad and scary; b) Russians are people too, and this whole Cold War thing only happened because we don't realize that; c) Nature is all good and wonderful and we must protect the environment at all costs. '80s pop culture was so far from being right-wing that, as I've previously mentioned, a movie character could be identified as evil just by having a picture of President Reagan on his desk (eg. Ralph Bellamy in Trading Places). If anything the pop culture of the '90s was quite a bit more to the right in its general themes.

This is all a prelude to saying that the '80s was the golden age of that most terrifying type of kiddie show: the enviro-toon, the cartoon that seeks to "educate" children about the importance of preserving the environment. The most infamous is Ted Turner's hideous "Captain Planet," but the one under review, "The Smoggies," was pretty offensive too; it started in the late '80s as one of those cartoons made for world distribution -- that is, made as cheaply as possible, dubbed in many different languages, and distributed anywhere in the world that kids' TV programmers are looking for cheap filler. The premise of the show was that three comic villains, "The Smoggies" (a bumbling sea captain, a woman who's sort of a blandified version of Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle, and a big dumb guy), sail around on a dirty boat and try to pollute stuff. Their pollution plans fail miserably and, supposedly, comically, because of the intervention of the "Sun-tots," a bunch of little annoying Smurf-like creatures who use solar power and never get anything, but anything, dirty. Here's an "official" description of the show:

The Suntots live in harmony with all nature, but their lives are disrupted by the arrival of the Smoggies. The Smoggies pollute the air and sea around them and the Suntots must find inventive ways to solve it all. Uses animation to teach children about environmental issues.

The enviro-toon didn't start with the '80s; Dr. Seuss wrote a bunch of books with more or less that aim, and I wouldn't say they're among his best work, but they're not bad. But the '80s enviro-toon is the worst of the worst, combining the condescention of the worst educational kids' show with the simplistic morality of one of those action cartoons about steroid-enhanced heroes. What I mean by this is that the enviro-toon poses as an "educational" show, but it's not actually educating in the sense of teaching children about certain facts; instead of facts, it teaches a particular morality, and stacks the deck to make it seem like their morality is the only one that kids should accept. It's indoctrination, and though I don't like polluting sea captains any better than the next kid, I feel queasy about using cartoons to indoctrinate young children. (Someone on another site once compared the "Captain Planet" cartoons to Jack Chick Bible tracts.) Also, as another writer pointed out in talking about "Captain Planet," cartoons like this invariably portray villains whose only goal is to pollute. This doesn't even make sense; you'd get the impression, from watching a show like this, that there is absolutely no reason why anyone would pollute except for the desire to do mischief. The problem is that if the villains were trying for some other objective -- say, building something -- that created pollution, then this might introduce moral ambiguity and require the writers to explain why sometimes you have to give up certain short-term things for the long-term health of the environment. And you can't write that kind of script in five minutes.

"The Smoggies" was not as badly made as "Captain Planet"; the humor was stupid, but at least it had a sense of humor. Still, when I watched it as a kid over ten years of age, I knew I was in the presence of a show that was trying to spare me the tiresome burden of thinking, and I was surprisingly ungrateful about it.

And now here's the main thing people remember about "The Smoggies": the theme song, one of the last songs written by Sesame Street songwriter Joe Raposo. It pretty much says it all about the approach of this show and the enviro-toon in general:

Have you met the Smoggies?
We love the soot and grime,
We make the whole world dirty,
And we have a real good time.
We love to make things messy,
Just as dirty as can be,
And you can bet we'll mess you up
Ecologically.

(Sun-tots)
Make way for the Sun-tots,
A neat and tidy crew,
We'll stay young forever,
And we want the same for you.
(Smoggies)
If we get your magic coral,
Then forever young we'll be,
Do you think you'll find it somewhere
In the clear blue sea?

(Sun-tots)
We use the water, wind and sun,
To make our homes and gadgets run,
Where else can you have such fun,
Environmentally?

(Sun-tots)
Come and see our island,
And smell the sweet, sweet breeze,
Where we'll live for ever,
Just as happy as can be.
With the Sun-tots and the Smoggies,
Choose the way the world could be,
A messy mess or shiny clear,
Ecologically.

Sun-tots, Sun-tots,
Earth and wind and sea, and
Smoggies, Smoggies,
Smoky, oily, greasy...

To review: all pollution is caused by ugly, bumbling people who have nothing better to do than dump icky stuff in the water. Good guys use pure, clean, non-icky power and are rewarded by staying young and cute forever. There is nothing to gain by polluting and nothing to lose by not polluting. In the words of another Joe Raposo song, it's not easy being Green.

McKimson Addendum

A couple of things I left out of my long post about Looney Tunes director Bob McKimson:

- After 1955, in addition to using animators who were "castoffs" from other units, McKimson also had the problem of other units taking his animators. Tom Ray, a talented young animator who started with McKimson in the late '50s (and ended his career doing timing sheets for "Tiny Toons" and "Animaniacs"), moved to the Chuck Jones unit after a couple of years; Art Leonardi moved to Freleng about the same time. Going from McKimson to Freleng, Leonardi recalled, was considered a promotion: McKimson's unit was clearly considered the runt of the litter and he didn't have the power at the studio that Jones or Freleng did.

- Another couple of good McKimson cartoons I forgot to mention are "Kiddin' the Kitten" and "Easy Peckin's," both from the early '50s and both starring a big lazy cat named Dodsworth. Dodsworth was voiced by the comedian Sheldon Leonard, who went on to a highly successful behind-the-camera career as executive producer of The Andy Griffith Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show. Dodsworth's sheer sloth makes him an unusual cartoon protagonist, and Leonard's voice was perfect for the character -- but such a lazy and basically unsympathetic character (in "Kiddin' the Kitten" he tries to con a kitten into catching mice for him because he's too lazy to do it himself) unsurprisingly didn't catch on enough to lead to a series.

Geek Break

I was never really very deeply into "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fandom, mostly because of the romance stuff. Namely, my dislike of the romance stuff. Except for the "evil boyfriend" plot in season 2, which was funny/scary like the show was supposed to be, and the Xander/Cordelia hijinks in the aforementioned season, which was just plain funny, I thought most of the romances were a distraction from what should have been the main focus of the show (Buffy, her friends, and monsters as scary/funny metaphors for teen problems). When I realized that a great deal of talk about the show focused on who was "getting together" with who, and that the producers were starting to devote inordinate amounts of story time to non-funny, non-scary soap opera relationships, I knew that all I could do was sit and wait for the occasional romance-free episode.

Anyway, as an expression of my dislike for all things 'shippy ("'shipper," meaning someone who roots for particular characters to be together romantically, is not one of my favorite internet terms), I wrote a song during the show's final season to the tune of "Why Can't the English" from My Fair Lady. As a shameless attempt to cover for not having anything new to write today, I'm posting it here, with a few tweaks but with various geeky references intact (yes, I have the DVDs). Meanwhile, for some Buffy fandom that's more to my taste, I direct you again to "Boils and Blinding Torment," which includes this hilarious recap of one of that show's worst episodes.

HIGGINS
Look at her! No wonder I'm complaining!
You've not been conscientious in your training!
Her Slayer training clearly must have flagged,
Or she'd know that a monster should be killed, not shagged.
This is how a show that showed invention
Sinks to platitudinous pretention.

GILES: Oh, come sir, you exaggerate the problem.

HIGGINS: Do I?
Vampires dressed in basic black
Always get her in the sack;
It's become a stunning running joke.
Sir, do you think that's a waste?

CRITIC:
No; I'm a critic -- I've no taste.

HIGGINS:
Let's pretend this fellow never spoke.
In the episode called "Wrecked"
She necrophiliacally necked
Till the viewers felt a bit unwell.
If they're dead, girls love them so.
Wait, was Riley dead?

BUFFY:
No.

HIGGINS:
No?
Oh, sorry; it was sometimes hard to tell.
A slayer should not count among her goals
Vamping broody murderers with souls.

Why can't a watcher teach a slayer how to fight,
And not become romantic with creatures of the night?
If you slept, as she does, sir, with creatures who cause you pain,
Why, you might be shagging Ethan Rayne.

GILES: I beg your pardon, sir!

HIGGINS:
A slayer should be more focused, not a self-absorbed escapist.
A slayer should not be pining for her blond attempted rapist.
She once was amusing; now she only can moan and preach --
Oh, why can't a watcher learn to teach her that a slayer is one of a long line of lifelong vampophobes?
Poor Kendra would never nibble Angel's lobes.
Yet Buffy's all over a vampire who constantly disrobes.
She must have misread your Time-Life book on anal probes.
Why can't a watcher teach a slayer how to fight,
And not to give a damn if a vampire's pants are tight?
To vomit, like me, when Spike has nary a shirt in sight --
The network doesn't care what Spike does, actually, as long as his shirt is off.
The scripts are a little silly, and the camerawork is weakish,
But what can a show expect when it becomes so Dawson's Creek-ish?
So keep her away from any murderous beast with pecs,
Oh, why can't a watcher,
Why can't a watcher
Teach
Sane
Sex?

Bob McKimson

Of the directors of Warner Brothers cartoons, Robert McKimson is the forgotten man. Five of WB's directors are rated highly by most cartoon buffs: Tex Avery (though buffs agree that his best work was done after he moved from WB to MGM), Bob Clampett, Frank Tashlin, Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones. Bob McKimson, who started directing in 1945 after Tashlin left and continued directing WB cartoons until the studio shut down, probably directed more WB cartoons than anyone except Freleng and Jones, but he's often forgotten in discussions of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic, the first comprehensive history of Hollywood cartoons, calls McKimson an "uninspired director." It's certainly true that he made quite a few mediocre cartoons, and that his overall batting average is low compared to the above-mentioned directors. But I think it's also fair to say that the best of his cartoons could be as good as anybody's.

Before he was promoted to director, McKimson was an animator for WB, one of the best and most influential at the studio. He worked mostly for Bob Clampett, and he and Rod Scribner represented sort of the yin and yang of the Clampett unit and of WB animation in general: Scribner was unprecedentedly wild and crazy, distorting characters' bodies in ways never-before-contemplated in animation, both for comedy and characterization. McKimson's animation was graceful, fluid, and -- compared to Scribner, anyway -- subtle; he put so much detail into characters' movements that they almost seemed like real, breathing people. Examples of McKimson's animation in Clampett cartoons: the beginning of Daffy Duck's Danny Kaye routine in "Book Revue," all the new animation in the "clip show" cartoon "What's Cookin' Doc," and most of Bugs' masquerade as an "old-timer" in "Tortoise Wins by a Hare." (The Scribner style can be seen in "Tortoise Wins By a Hare" in Bugs' first scene: lots of flailing arms, broad poses, and daring distortion of his face and body.) McKimson was a big influence on other top WB animators, notably Chuck Jones' head animator, Ken Harris.

When Tashlin left, McKimson stopped animating for Clampett and took over Tashlin's unit; Clampett left the studio soon after, and his unit was taken over by a former Tashlin animator, Art Davis. With Tashlin and Clampett gone, story man Warren Foster, who had been splitting his time between those two directors, became McKimson's full-time writer; this was a big break for McKimson, as Foster was one of the best gag men in the business. But McKimson clearly made a contribution, at least in this way: he displayed a willingness to do offbeat stories and settings, perhaps more than any other director with the possible exception of Jones. Clampett's cartoons were completely insane in their execution, but the stories were often quite run-of-the-mill; when it came to Bugs Bunny, Clampett usually stuck with the formula of having Bugs outwit a hunter in a woodland setting. Freleng was more willing to contemplate putting his characters in unusual settings, but he was very timid about departing from formula in terms of the structure or style of cartoons; as Mike Maltese recalled in explaining why he stopped writing for Freleng and worked for Jones instead, "Freleng would kind of back off when you suggested something new to him." The Bugs Bunny cartoons McKimson did with Foster in the late '40s are very unusual in terms of setting and approach. One cartoon, "The Windblown Hare," is a truly cracked takeoff on fairy tales, where the Three Little Pigs, knowing in advance that the Wolf will blow their houses down (they have the book of fairy tales), try to con Bugs into buying their blow-downable houses, while the Wolf himself goes around reading the book of fairy tales and slavishly following it; "I gotta do like the book says." Finally Bugs blows up the Three Little Pigs' house with dynamite, and lets the wolf think he blew it down. (Many years later, Foster rewrote this as a "Yogi Bear" episode, but without the violence or cynicism.) Another cartoon, "Rebel Rabbit," is probably the weirdest Bugs Bunny cartoon ever: furious that the bounty for rabbits is very small -- rabbits are stereotyped as harmless woodland creatures -- Bugs goes on what I suppose we'd have to describe as a terrorist rampage: he swipes the locks of the Panama Canal, ties railroad tracks in knots, gives Manhattan back to the Indians ("They wouldn't take it unless I threw in a set of dishes"), and generally proves that a rabbit can be "more obnoxious than anybody." He's overjoyed when the bounty on his head is raised to one million dollars, but realizes he's gone too far when the army comes after him -- in live-action stock footage -- and he winds up in prison. The end.

McKimson and Foster also came up with some great Daffy Duck cartoons -- one of their best, "Boobs in the Woods," is on the first Looney Tunes Golden Collection -- and some new series: "Walky Talky Hawky," an Oscar nominee, introduced Foghorn Leghorn, and "Hop, Look and Listen" introduced Hippety Hopper, the baby kangaroo who is perpetually mistaken for a giant mouse. (A couple of years later, the Hippety Hopper series introduced another new character, Sylvester Junior, one of the few successful attempts at creating a pint-sized version of an older cartoon character.) McKimson also liked to do somewhat unusual one-shot and miscellaneous cartoons; he and Foster did two strange cartoons about a dog who punishes a cat with all kinds of sadistic and bizarre "penalties." The second one, "Early To Bet," is on DVD, but I prefer the first, "It's Hummer Time," which has more elaborate and funnier penalties. (Oh, no! Not The Thinker! Not that! NOT THE THINKER!!!") All in all, McKimson's cartoons from 1946 to about 1950 compare favorably with other directors' work. It's not quite on the level of the great WB guys; the one thing lacking in McKimson's cartoons was a distinctive style, something that was uniquely his the way that certain gags and approaches were uniquely Clampett's or Freleng's or Jones's. You often get the impression that McKimson was just content to stage the gags Foster came up with, rather than enhancing them with his own ideas. But he staged the gags well; a good McKimson cartoon gets just as many laughs in front of an audience as a good cartoon by any of the other WB directors.

At this point, in the late '40s, the WB cartoon studio was no longer the freewheeling, ramshackle "Termite Terrace"; producer Leon Schlesinger, who had basically run the studio independently and distributed the cartoons through WB, sold the operation to WB, which installed Edward Selzer, a company man, as producer. Selzer was not the monster that Chuck Jones and others sometimes made him out to be; he was a small, basically humorless guy, mostly focused on keeping the budget down and keeping the theatrical distributors happy, but other stuff I've read about him indicates that he wasn't a bad guy personally, just a company man through and through, sort of a Mel Cooley of the cartoon business. In any case, the cartoon operation went on more or less as before, but there was somewhat reduced demand for cartoons -- and after the Supreme Court ordered the studios to divest themselves of the movie-theatre chains they owned, studios could no longer just tell theatres to take a cartoon -- and it became apparent by the late '40s that WB no longer needed four units. Jones and Freleng were the senior guys, so it came down to McKimson vs. Davis, and Davis got the boot; he wound up becoming an animator for Freleng. Some cartoon buffs, who prize Davis's cartoons for their attempts to retain the wild, broad animation style of Clampett cartoons, consider that the wrong man got demoted; I don't. Davis had been unable to come up with a successful new series character, and as his story man Lloyd Turner recalled in an interview (posted at Mike Barrier's site), Davis didn't have much confidence in his ability to judge what was funny. McKimson may not have had a strong style, but the work he'd done in that period places him (in my opinion) far ahead of Davis in terms of variety and in terms of laughs.

But just as his job became more secure, things started to go wrong for McKimson. Friz Freleng had been using Tedd Pierce as his writer, but Pierce was a difficult guy to work with: he was an alcoholic, kind of pretentious, and better at elaborate parody stories (like "The Dover Boys," which he had written for Chuck Jones) than the kind of violent chase cartoons that were becoming the in thing in the wake of Tom and Jerry. Freleng dropped Pierce and, after briefly trying out Bill Scott (who had formerly written for Davis and would go on to write and voice Bullwinkle the Moose), he got Foster to leave McKimson's unit and join his unit. Pierce went to McKimson, and since McKimson was the junior director, it seemed very much like a demotion. Basically, it was a demotion. Although Turner described him as "the least creative" of the writers, Pierce could do excellent work under the right circumstances. Before joining McKimson full-time, he'd already written a truly great McKimson cartoon, "Hillbilly Hare," with the famous square-dance finale. But McKimson clearly didn't have the strength of creative personality to get Pierce to do what he wanted; what he needed was somebody like Foster who could pitch unusual ideas that McKimson could then use. (Freleng, on the other hand, knew what he wanted and could get a writer to do it; Foster's work for Freleng is funny but very conventional, nowhere near as offbeat as the stories and dialogue he'd done for Clampett, Tashlin and McKimson.) The cartoons McKimson did with Pierce in this era -- 1951 to 1953 or so -- are mostly kind of forgettable, with characters and gags often copied from other directors' cartoons, as though Pierce would scour other guys' storyboards for ideas and then work them into his own. However, McKimson's work took another upturn in the cartoons released in 1954; he started working more with other writers, especially Sid Marcus, a veteran writer who had worked for the Lantz studio and for Art Davis at WB. McKimson and Marcus came up with several offbeat cartoons including "Devil May Hare," which introduced the Tasmanian Devil.

This upswing in McKimson's career was interrupted, however, when the cartoon studio shut down for several months; convinced that 3-D was the wave of the future, and unimpressed by the one 3-D cartoon the studio had made, Jack Warner decided to suspend the studio's cartoon-making activities and laid everyone off. During the layoff, with no animators, McKimson took a story by Marcus -- "The Hole Idea," about a scientist who invents the Portable Hole -- and animated the whole thing himself. The result is a funny cartoon that was reportedly McKimson's own favorite, but the animation is actually, and surprisingly, the weak link in the picture -- kind of stiff and without the sense of character that informed McKimson's best work. (He did, however, do some excellent animation in a Hippety Hopper cartoon released the next year, "Too Hop to Handle.") The studio re-opened, but while most of the WB animators came back, not a single one of McKimson's animators came back, not even his own brother, Charles McKimson. (The McKimson brothers were a hugely talented family; Tom McKimson was a layout man for Bob Clampett and later drew some of the Looney Tunes comics.) Why he couldn't get his animators back, I'm not sure; the most likely explanation is that Jones and Freleng might have been able to offer their animators raises to come back to the studio, and McKimson might not have been allowed to. Also, working for McKimson wasn't always the most fulfilling thing for an animator; unlike Clampett, who allowed a lot of variety in terms of the kind of animation that appeared in his cartoons, McKimson had rather strong and somewhat unyielding ideas about what a scene should look like. Rod Scribner animated for McKimson from 1949 until the studio shut down, but McKimson usually made him tone down his wild, body-contorting style. McKimson never did seem to like animation that was too extreme or "wacky." In the only interview he gave before his death in 1977 -- not that he didn't give interviews; it's just that no one asked for them -- he commented "we tried to learn from Disney... but we would never look up to anything like Terrytoons or what Fleischer was doing. Popeye cartoons are terrible. They look like a child drew them."

Anyway, McKimson re-staffed his unit, in large part, with castoffs from other units; his top animator from 1956 to the early '60s was Ted Bonnicksen, who had started in Freleng's unit. Bonnicksen wasn't a bad animator, but he had been transferred to McKimson's unit because Freleng had three animators who were better; none of McKimson's new animators were first-raters in the way that Scribner or Manny Gould (who animated the arms-flailing opening scene in McKimson's "The Foghorn Leghorn") had been, and they often just followed McKimson's layout drawings without adding much in the way of new ideas. One castoff did work to McKimson's advantage, though: Chuck Jones was using Maurice Noble exclusively as his designer, so Robert Gribbroek, who had been the layout designer for Jones from 1945 to 1952, went to work for McKimson. Gribbroek was a talented designer and painter, and he made the backgrounds of McKimson's cartoons look attractive at a time when most other cartoon directors were struggling with then-fashionable but basically ugly stylized designs.

McKimson continued to work with Tedd Pierce, who started to specialize in TV takeoffs; they did two cartoons based on "The Honeymooners" (this was before "The Flintstones") and a whole cartoon with the cast of the Jack Benny show voicing themselves as mice ("The Mouse that Jack Built"). There were some other good McKimson cartoons in this period, but basically this is the period that's given McKimson his low reputation; it's not just that the cartoons are often a little stiff, but because of the problems with the animation -- not to mention the declining budgets at WB -- they look like less than first-rate examples of the craft. But on the other hand, nobody was doing his very best work at WB in the late '50s; Jones' cartoons became slow and cutesy, and Freleng mostly settled further into formula gag cartoons. There were some great cartoons made in this period, but the best of WB came before that mid-'50s shutdown.

An interesting point about McKimson is that he never seemed fully comfortable with the new '50s approaches to popular series characters. Daffy in particular. After Jones and Freleng re-launched Daffy as a fall guy, McKimson kept on casting Daffy as an obnoxiously crazy or devious little black duck, the way he had done in the '40s; Daffy was doing his hoo-hoo routine in a McKimson cartoon as late as 1958, and in 1957's "Ducking the Devil," while admitting that he's a "greedy little coward," Daffy actually wins against the Tasmanian Devil and gets the money he's after, something Jones would never have allowed. McKimson eventually made evil-Daffy cartoons, but they weren't very good, as if his heart wasn't in the new characterization. Another thing about McKimson is that showed a lot of variety in the choices of stories and antagonists at a time when the other directors were tending more and more toward formulaic stories. The Foghorn Leghorn series was probably the least formulaic of the cartoon series that were exclusive to a particular director; Foghorn rarely had a set kind of story he had to do every time, the way Pepe Le Pew or Tweety did. McKimson made one pure "formula" cartoon a year -- the Hippety Hoppers -- while Jones made at least three, what with the Road Runners, Pepes and Wolf/Sheepdog cartoons.

I don't have a big conclusion for this; McKimson wasn't a great director, but he was a good one, and he made a lot of very fine cartoons. He doesn't deserve to be lumped in with the hacks of other studios -- like Walter Lantz's basically incompetent Paul J. Smith -- but rather to be discussed as the animation equivalent of a "minor master."

Here are a few really terrific McKimson cartoons, in addition to the ones mentioned above; none of these are on the first or second Looney Tunes DVD sets, but I hope some of them will show up on DVD eventually:

- "Daffy Doodles": The first short McKimson directed, with Daffy painting mustaches on everyone and everything in town; a cartoon so crazy that it makes even Tashlin and Clampett's Daffy cartoons look a little subdued. A big favorite with kids, who love the mustache-painting and the punchline ("I'm doin' beards now! Woo-hoo!").

- "Hare We Go": McKimson's last Bugs Bunny cartoon with Foster, where Christopher Columbus gets his financing from Queen Isabella (who looks and sounds like Mae West) and takes Bugs Bunny along as his mascot on the voyage. "Captain's log. Mascot now cook. May have to cook mascot."

- "Of Rice and Hen": One of McKimson's best mid-'50s Foghorn Leghorns (probably because Warren Foster came back to write this one), it's best known for Foghorn's big calypso number: "Now that old hound dog is an awful pest/He barks so much I get no rest/Homely as an old mud fence/That old hound dog just got no sense."

- "Tabasco Road": McKimson came up with Speedy Gonzales in a 1953 cartoon, "Cat-Tails For Two," but it was Freleng who re-designed him and turned him into a popular (and merchandisable) series character. But McKimson made arguably the best Speedy Gonzales short; "Tabasco Road," a 1957 Oscar nominee written by Tedd Pierce, features a better plot than any other Speedy short -- Speedy trying to protect two drunken, belligerent friends who keep challenging cats to "combato" -- and has some great fractured Spanish dialogue as well as the first slow-motion replay in the history of animation.

Sing, Sing-a-ling-a

I picked up an excellent two-CD collection, The Essential Borodin, that collects fine performances of most of the major pieces of composer/chemist/procrastinator Alexander Borodin. Part of the fun of listening to Borodin, if you're a fan of the musical Kismet, is to identify the sources of the songs in that show; composer-lyricists Robert Wright and George Forrest took melodic ideas from Borodin, from pieces both famous and obscure, and re-shaped them into Broadway songs with an A-A-B-A structure. (The way most of the Kismet songs work is that the melody of the "A" section is Borodin, while the "B" section is newly-composed by Wright and Forrest to fit in with the style of the main melody.) Here's how the list of songs and sources breaks down:

- "Sands of Time": Borodin's "In the Steppes of Central Asia," basically unchanged, and with lyrics fitted to the second of the two main melodies of that piece.
- "Rhymes Have I": Wright and Forrest claimed that this was their own original music (though the liner note to the original cast album says it has some connection to a melody "Prince Igor").
- "Fate": The main theme of the first movement of Borodin's second symphony.
- "Bazaar of the Caravans": the finale of the second symphony.
- "Not Since Nineveh": the opening and closing musical phrases of the refrain are taken from the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor.
- "Baubles, Bangles, and Beads": the scherzo of Borodin's second string quartet.
- "Stranger in Paradise": another tune from the Polovtsian Dances.
- "He's in Love!": still another tune from the Polovtsian Dances.
- "Gesticulate": the long section at the beginning of the number ("Dear hand, deft hand") fits new words to the virtually-unchanged music of Konchak's aria from Prince Igor. The refrain ("When you tell a story") is taken from the finale of Borodin's first symphony.
- "Night of My Nights": this is a setting of a piano piece by Borodin, but I can't remember the name of it (it's not in the collection).
- "Was I Wazir?": I have no idea about this one; the cast album liner note says it comes from the second string quartet, but I can't hear anything in that piece that could have become that song. I think it's basically an original composition by Wright and Forrest.
- "Rahadlakum": another original, non-Borodin melody by Wright and Forrest.
- "And This is My Beloved": the slow movement of the second string quartet ("Nocturne").
- "The Olive Tree": a duet from Prince Igor (also quoted in the overture).
- "Zubbediya": Galitsky's aria from Prince Igor.

Wright and Forrest had already had a hit adapting the melodies of Grieg in Song of Norway, and a few years after Kismet they would have a mega-flop with their Rachmaninov-based score for Anya (a musical version of Anastasia).

Obscure Musicals: 70, GIRLS, 70

I've been listening recently to the cast album of 70, Girls, 70, a 1971 musical with songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb (the Cabaret and Chicago) guys. The book was outlined by Joe Masteroff, the writer of Cabaret, and written by Ebb and Norman Martin. It had a number of problems before opening; two directors pulled out, and David Burns, cast in a key role, died during the tryouts. The show opened around the same time as Follies, and included all the veteran performers that Follies didn't sign up; between these two new shows and the revival of No, No, Nanette, 1971 was the year for old troupers coming back to Broadway. 70, Girls, 70 used older performers than those other shows -- as the title implies, it was mostly for performers over 70, like Mildred Natwick, Lillian Roth, and Hans Conried (whose voice you might remember from the "Aesop and Son" segments on Rocky and Bullwinkle). The basic story is that a bunch of senior citizens, bored, neglected by their children, and needing money, turn to robbery, stealing fur coats from Bloomingdale's and other establishments.

This is a fine idea for a show, taking in all sorts of things that can work in musical-comedy terms: a caper plot, a romantic subplot (for an elderly couple that gets married during the course of the show), farce and pathos. But, apparently influenced by their own biggest hit, Cabaret, Kander and Ebb decided not to tell the story directly, but to tell it as part of a show-within-a-show concept. The story is acted out by elderly actors who haven't been on Broadway in some years -- in other words, by the actors themselves -- and they frequently break character to comment on issues related to age, death, and other stuff (one song and dance number is called "Go Visit Your Grandmother"). When it comes time for Mildred Natwick's character to die, she turns to the audience and says: "Well, I die. The script says I'm captured and I die." Each number is started with a vamp at the piano from "Lorraine," the rehearsal pianist who sits onstage (Dorothea Freitag, who also arranged the dance music for the show), and the small orchestra joins in only gradually; the orchestrations were by the dean of Broadway orchestrators, Don Walker, who created a charmingly tinny, small-band sound similar to the sound that Ralph Burns would later create for Kander and Ebb's Chicago. This whole "concept" allowed for some commentative numbers, Kander and Ebb's specialty. But from the version I read, which seems to be the original version -- I say "seems" because the show has been revised several times, never very successfully -- the conceptual, show-within-a-show staging comes off as an unnecessary distraction from what is really a pretty solid story. It doesn't come off as adding anything, the way the "concept" of Cabaret did; instead, it seems like a way of making the show seem hip, as if Kander and Ebb and Martin didn't want to be caught writing a conventional musical comedy; by 1971, a musical comedy had to have some some kind of framework to show that it wasn't just a musical, but a commentary on musicals. It's as if the people who wrote musicals no longer really believed in the form -- which, indeed, may have been the case, and certainly is the case today, with all the spoof-musicals and anti-musicals and musicals where they feel a need to explain why the characters are breaking into song.

70, Girls, 70 includes some of the best songs in Kander and Ebb's uneven career; after two efficient but kind of drab scores for rather drab shows -- The Happy Time and Zorba -- they returned to their forte, musical comedy with a cynical edge and lots of insistent vamps (the last number, "Yes," has the most repetitive vamp this side of Kander and Ebb's "New York, New York"). There are some dud numbers: "The Caper," where Conreid tries to explain his plan, is sort of a parody of expository numbers, but just comes off as a boring expository number; another song consists almost entirely of the phrase "Boom Ditty Boom" repeated over and over again, another attempted parody gone wrong (they're apparently trying to spoof repetitive Broadway production numbers, but all they do is drive us nuts with a repetitive number). Another song, "You and I, Love," is an uncomfortable combination of sentimentality and ageism -- it's about old people who, deprived of television, spend their time imagining their favorite daytime TV shows -- and it was understandably cut during the run.

But the best of the score is very fine. There's "Coffee in a Cardboard Cup," a rousing number about the decline of civility and the fact that "everything is 'hurry up.'" An elderly couple gets a song where they tease us, the audience, with the question we're all asking; the song should definitely be interpolated if they ever make a musical version of The Golden Girls:

Do we? Do we?
That's what you want to know, isn't it?
Do we? Do we?
That's what disturbs you so, isn't it?...
You sit there wondering
If we really ring that bell.
Do we?
Eat your heart out, kids, 'cause
We'll never tell.

My favorite song in the show, and indeed my favorite Kander and Ebb song, period, is the last song in Act 1, "See the Light." This is the last in a long line of Broadway gospel numbers, of the sing-you-sinners, "Get Happy," "Blow, Gabriel Blow" type. (Interesting subject for a thesis: why were the predominantly Jewish songwriters of Broadway so fascinated with the music of Evangelical Protestantism?) On the cast album, it's one of those songs that's so much fun that I can't hear it without skipping back to the beginning to hear it all over again:

I used to know a lady known as Emma Finch,
Emma Finch, Emma Finch,
She had a kleptomania that made her pinch
Any article she saw.
She liked to spend the afternoon at Bloomingdale's,
Bloomingdale's, Bloomingdale's,
But Emma's way of going to the bargain sales
Was a bit beyond the law.
Emma took along a shopping bag,
Emma took along a shopping list,
Emma thought whatever Bloomie's lost
Bloomie's never missed.
She couldn't see the light,
She wouldn't see the light,
Emma never knew wrong from right,
Which left her in the dark, unable to see the light.

But even this number, which sounds like a showstopper on the cast recording -- sung by Lillian Roth backed up by four guys singing "abba dabba dabba," and building to a climax where Emma realizes that she's been "an awful sinner" -- apparently didn't go over big in performance. At least that's what I've been told by someone who saw a production of the show, and I could guess why. Roth's character sings the song to distract the Bloomingdale's security guards while, in the background, her friends rob the store. So the number is integrated into the action and the staging; it's not just a showstopping number for its own sake, like a musical comedy might have had even ten years earlier. But the problem is that the background stuff distracts attention from what ought to be the focal point in any musical comedy: the musical number. You can't lose yourself in a number when there's something else happening in the background. This, like so much else of 70, Girls, 70, is the "concept" musical run amok; it's a musical that is embarrassed even to give the audience the old reliable pleasure of a big showstopping number. (Even Follies knows enough not to distract us with plot stuff in the middle of "I'm Still Here.")

So that's 70, Girls, 70 -- good source material, good score, good cast, but weighed down by an apparent lack of faith in the chosen form; it's one of the first real examples of the anti-musical: a musical written and staged by people who seem vaguely embarrassed about the idea of characters expressing themselves in song. When Kander and Ebb returned to Broadway with Chicago, they had another "concept" show that was done as a show-within-a-show -- but they also had a strong director, Bob Fosse, and he made sure a) to use the music and dancing to tell the story, and b) not to let the story points detract from the impact of the music and dancing. That's the balancing act in a modern musical, and something that 70, Girls, 70 couldn't handle. If Fosse had done it, it might have been different.