Steele Yourself

Looks like the second season of "Remington Steele" will have both stars on the cover. You'll recall that the first season had the worst cover ever, including the stupidest imaginable tagline: "Before he was Bond, he was Remington Steele." (Apart from everything else, he was not Remington Steele. That's the whole point of the show.) And as many people have pointed out, it's eerily appropriate: it was a show about a woman who has to stay in the background while a man gets all the credit, and the DVD cover had her staying on the back while the man gets all the credit.

"Remington Steele" is actually a very satisfying show to watch. I think it's underrated, in part, because "Moonlighting" came along a few years later and sort of stole its thunder. Since "Moonlighting" creator Glenn Caron had worked, not very happily, on "Remington Steele," and tended to less-than-subtly point to "Remington Steele" as the sort of show he was trying to subvert with the post-modern "Moonlighting," it was natural to think of "Remington Steele" as little more than another interchangeable part of the boy-girl detective show format that started with "Hart To Hart," and went on to spawn "Scarecrow and Mrs. King" and various other comedy/mystery/romance hybrids.

But "Remington Steele" was doing its own thing. The best thing about it -- the thing that makes it hold up so much better than most hourlong shows do twenty years after the fact -- is that it really tried to go for the look, feel and style of older movies. "Hart to Hart" tipped its hat to "The Thin Man," but was essentially an Aaron Spelling/Leonard Goldberg type show stylistically. "Moonlighting" had excellent production values, but despite all the comparisons to screwball comedy, never really went for that style to any great extent; it was in large part a satire of other television programs, and therefore its look was sort of a parodic mishmash of other shows. But "Remington Steele," especially the early episodes, really looks -- as much as an '80s TV show can -- like a Cary Grant movie.

The dialogue, the clothes, the sets and the settings come not from '80s cop shows but from the elegant world of Grant/Stanley Donen movies like Indiscreet and Charade; indeed, the influence of Charade is all over the first episode, as well as the basic conflict of having a hero with multiple identities and a heroine who doesn't know if she can trust him or even exactly who he is. The music for the episodes, by Richard Lewis Warren, is a pastiche of the '60s scores of Henry Mancini (who composed the show's two main theme tunes), especially The Pink Panther. And most of the plots openly borrow elements from old movies -- openly, because Steele always points out the similarity to whatever old movie is being referenced: "The Trouble With Harry, Paramount, 1956..."

The other thing that makes the show work so well, apart from the look of it, is the still-subversive twist on the usual conventions of a boy/girl detective story. In "The Thin Man," which was the model for "Hart to Hart" and "Steele" and all the other male-female detective teams, the man takes the lead in solving the mysteries, and the woman is there for support. "Steele" flipped this around, as co-creator Michael Gleason explained:

Stephanie would get tons of letters from women's groups because her character was a beautiful, smart, strong woman. Laura Holt was the brains. Remington Steele was the sex object.

'70s and early '80s TV, especially hourlong shows, was heavily dominated by male characters: cops, action heroes, sleuths. When you did have a show with women doing these things, they tended to be ultimately controlled by men ("Charlie's Angels"). Laura Holt is a character who can do anything a man can do, and better, and she's trying to go it alone without anyone to control her. Her creation of Remington Steele, her mysterious, unseen boss, may well be a parody of the unseen-boss concept from "Charlie's Angels," the idea that a strong woman is only acceptable to the public if she has an immediate superior who's male. The show is an implicit criticism of images and stereotypes: the stereotype that women are the sidekicks, and men the leaders, is so ingrained that people on the show assume Steele must be the leader even though Laura is clearly doing all the detective work.

The only person on the show who really appreciates Laura is, ironically, Steele: as someone who doesn't want to be controlled or pigeonholed either, and who switches identities for that very purpose, he understands that there's more to her than most people are willing to see. He also appreciates her, of course, because he knows first-hand how good she is at what she does. And he is interested in her not in spite of the fact that he can't control her, but because of that -- just as her attraction to him is largely based on what she doesn't know about him.

As the above description makes clear, it's also a show about role-playing. The two lead characters have both built their lives around playing parts and constructing fake identities. They're both con artists of a sort, and many of the best episodes strongly hint that they're not just playing these games to get work; they actually need to play roles and hide behind masks, and the big question is not only who they really are, but why they feel a need to disguise themselves so much. "Vintage Steele" (the Trouble With Harry takeoff, with the immortal line: "He was the Abbott of Costello") suggests that Laura's whole businesslike persona may be an act: Steele meets her ex-boyfriend, who remembers her as a frighteningly uninhibited person. The episode shows glimpses of the way she used to act with her boyfriend, but leaves it open as to whether she was acting with him, or if she's acting now, or just what and who she really is.

The first season offered two other characters who knew Remington Steele didn't exist: Laura's associate detective, Murphy (James Read) and her secretary, Bernice (Janet DeMay). Both these characters had very little to do in this season, and in season 2 they were dropped and replaced with Doris Roberts (as a character who didn't know about the secret, and treated Laura with semi-contempt as Steele's flunky). But Murphy, at least, was an unfortunate loss, because he not only gave the show a romantic triangle -- he was in love with Laura and anxious to keep her away from Steele -- he was the normal, genuine person whose basic normalcy made it easier to understand how weird the two leads were. Murphy, like Steele, admires Laura's skills and doesn't mind taking orders from her; he is basically the perfect man for her in every way. But he's not a role-player, not a faker; in the first episode he's saying how much he hates going along with Laura's Remington Steele imposture, and she waves him aside. He's too genuine for her, too normal; her interest is in people who share her own penchant for playing a part.

Laura has no interest in people who aren't faking to some extent; her career is based on finding out who people are, as opposed to what they pretend to be, and romance is for her an extention of the same thing. "Remington Steele" is a great hybrid of detective story and romance because it treats romance as similar to detective work: it's about finding out what the other person is hiding.

Many of the cases Laura and Steele take revolve around people who have constructed identities for themselves, and the steps they take (usually murderous ones) to preserve the identity and the illusion. One early episode called "Etched in Steele" is about ghostwriters of novels. A key plot point is that a publisher uses a glamorous-looking non-writer, sort of a female version of Steele, as a front for an unglamorous male writer whose novels would never sell if he used his own name. (In other words, a role-reversed version of the show's main premise.) The solution to the mystery hinges on Laura's realization that a writer's reputation is more important to the reception of his book than the actual quality of his writing: it's not what you are, it's the way people see you. Laura is a good detective because she can see through people's fakery and figure out who they are and what they want -- but she can't do that with Steele; he's the one case she can't crack. Steele succeeds because he has the con artist's ability to understand what people want him to be, and be whatever it will take to get into their good graces -- but he can't do that with Laura; he can't fool her because he doesn't understand her.

The weak link on "Steele" is usually the solution of the mystery. Unlike "Moonlighting," where the mysteries never really mattered and where detective-show conventions were openly mocked, the mysteries on "Steele" are semi-serious and play fair according to crime-fiction convention, but they're just too perfunctory sometimes, and sometimes it's all too easy to figure out not only who the murderer is, but why he did it. Still, since the fun of the show is in watching the leads investigate each other, as opposed to the guest characters, it's easy to live with the inevitable moment where the murderer is exposed and tries to run away. And sometimes they put a little character-based twist on that. "Etched in Steele" (not really one of the best episodes, by the way, but the one I watched most recently) has a running gag about Laura stomping on Steele's foot when she wants to stop him from talking in front of other people. At the end, when the murderer tries to flee, Steele sticks out that foot and trips him. He then says, with a glance in Laura's direction: "Good thing I've lost all feeling in that foot."

The first season was in my opinion the best, for two reasons: the elegant old-movie style was at its height in this season, and Laura was more clearly the dominant character in the partnership. In the second season, the main title was standardized to focus more equally on both leads, Steele became more competent, and it inched closer to a standard "Thin Man" takeoff. But it still had some fine episodes to go before it ran the whole sexual-tension thing into the cathode ground.

The Wit and Wisdom of Mr. F's Aunt

I think Dickens's "Little Dorrit" is his best novel -- the toughest, the smartest, the most consistent, and the angriest. Also the one where he comes closest to solving the problem that plagues most of his other novels: the inconsequential hero and heroine: Arthur Clennam and the title character aren't great creations, but they're more interesting than Dickens' lead characters usually are. It does suffer from the usual curse of the Dickens novel, the second-half slump -- it's divided into two parts, the second of which is less gripping than the first -- but that's just part of reading Dickens.

It's a very dour novel by Dickens' standards, almost as grim as his preceding book, "Hard Times," and with very few larger-than-life, lovable comic characters in the mold of Micawber, or funny rogues like Fagin and Silas Wegg. Most of the comedy in "Little Dorrit" is quite downbeat and angry. Especially the most famous chapter in the novel, the one dealing with the Circumlocution Office, the government bureaucracy (staffed mostly by members of one shiftless political family) dedicated entirely to making sure that nothing ever gets done, that no information is available, and that no invention or innovation ever gets approved.

Most of what little good-natured comedy there is in the book comes from two characters: Flora Casby Finching, the hero's ex-girlfriend, still trying to act as bubbleheaded at forty as she did twenty years earlier; she speaks entirely in long unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness monologues. (Flora turns out to be one of the kindest characters in the book, and more self-aware than she seems.) The other most memorable comic character in the book is the aunt of Flora's late husband, Mr. Finching; referred to only as "Mr. F's Aunt," she is an old woman boiling over with unexplained rage, who spends her brief appearances making strange, non-sequitur comments directed mostly at the hero, Arthur Clennam, and frightening him out of his wits. Some of her best lines, all said in response to nothing and no one, but usually while looking at Arthur:

"When we lived at Henley, Barnes's gander was stole by tinkers."

"The Monument near London Bridge was put up arter the Great Fire of London; and the Great Fire of London was not the fire in which your uncle George's workshops was burned down."

"There's mile-stones on the Dover road!"

"You can't make a head and brains out of a brass knob with nothing in it. You couldn't do it when your Uncle George was living; much less when he's dead."

"He has a proud stomach, this chap. Give him a meal of chaff!"

And her last line in the book:

"Bring him for'ard, and I'll chuck him out o' winder!"

If I ever add a tag-line to this site, it will definitely be "When we lived at Henley, Barnes's gander was stole by tinkers."

Pip Pumphandle's Deep Thoughts

I have long been willing to admit that I love "Animaniacs," and I haven't posted anything about that show in a while. This is unacceptable, since posting about "Animaniacs" really annoys animation purists (especially John Kricfalusi fans), and I can't pass up a chance to do that. So....

One of the best cartoons "Animaniacs" ever did, in its first season (nearly all the best cartoons from that show were from its first 65-episode season), was one called "Chairman of the Bored." Simple premise: Yakko, Wakko and Dot meet an incredibly boring man at a party who won't stop talking to them, and follows them wherever they go. But it's a terrific cartoon that does a fine job of portraying this nonstop talker without ever becoming static or talky itself.

What really made the difference in the cartoon, though, was the monologue itself. If you actually listen to it in between the gags and the characters' desperate attempts to avoid hearing it, it's actually a somewhat coherent, if rambling, story. Here it is, as delivered by Ben Stein (the Ted Nugent of cartoon voice actors: an insane man with a cool voice) as Francis Pumphandle -- "but everybody calls me Pip."

Cheese balls are one of my all-time favorite foods. I always seem to meet the most interesting people when I'm around them, too. In fact, cheese balls bring to mind the time I met Bob Barker, star of the most popular morning game show. He's an emcee, a host, and a celebrity all rolled into one. Anyway, eight months ago -- it was Tuesday the 17th, I believe -- or it might have been the 18th ... no, no, it was definitely the 17th, because it was precisely one week after my aunt Lucretia's birthday, which is the 10th. Aunt Lucretia's quite a woman. Loves to cook. She prepares a fabulous war shu a. That's a Chinese duck dish. I love Chinese food. I once went to a party where they served Chinese food and cheese balls. Now that was a Catch-22 situation. Catch-22 was a movie, you know. It was long, very long. They say the book was better, but it was a novel and I never finish reading those things. Of course, a lot of people don't read much nowadays. They watch television. I caught a program on PBS last night. A very good show on chimpanzees in the media. They had a clip of J. Fred Muggs, the chimp from the TODAY show. But it was Fred's chimpanzee girlfriend that had me stumped. I couldn't remember her name, so I looked it up. Her name was Phoebe B. Beebe. Anyway, as I was saying, eight months ago, Tuesday the 17th, I went downtown on a nice, relaxing stroll. I love to relax. In fact, relaxing is a pastime of mine. Some people play golf. Others like tennis, horseshoes, bridge, canasta, and other such fancy hobbies. Now, another hobby enjoyed by many is knitting. My grandmother was a great knitter. Knitted this sweater I'm wearing. It's red, which is not my favorite color. I prefer mauve or mustard yellow. Now, don't get me wrong: red is okay for ties and suspenders, but with sweaters I prefer more neutral colors. But when I'm relaxing, I don't care what I wear: long pants, Bermuda shorts, T-shirts, or formal attire. You name it, anything goes. Now, on the 17th, during my relaxing stroll, I recall wearing my herringbone jacket, my Laughlin, Nevada, souvenir tie, and my charcoal gray slacks. Or was it the navy slacks? Oh, I suppose it doesn't really matter. What matters is comfort. You know, I love comfort. It goes along with that pastime of mine, relaxing. Now, for me, there is nothing more relaxing than a nice leisurely stroll, like the one I took eight months ago on the 17th. It was a bright, sunny day, which of course is the optimum condition for relaxed strolling. And as I walked along, I found myself humming a haunting melody. I kept humming and humming and humming and humming. I couldn't get the tune out of my head. I racked my brains to come up with the title, but to no avail. You see, I'm not terribly musical. And yet, I'd always wanted to play an instrument and be like my musical hero, Leo Sayer. But who can compete with Leo? I think I was just scared that I'd fail. Well, I decided right then and there to go buy a musical instrument. So on the particular Tuesday the 17th to which I was referring, I went down to the Sixth Street Music Emporium to buy a new tambourine, a terribly soothing instrument, contrary to popular opinion. And as I was strolling along, I detected a wonderful scent in the morning air. "What could it be?" I asked myself. So I went toward that marvelous scent, distracted by its aroma from my musical mission. The odor was a mix of orchid flowers and bologna, which of course is one of the world's most under-appreciated luncheon meats. That and pimento loaf. I love a good pimento loaf and mayo sandwich -- the more pimentos, the better. Why, just the mention of pimentos makes my taste buds stand up and say, "Howdy." Now there's an interesting word: "Howdy." Is it from "How are you" or maybe "How you doing"? "Howdy"'s one of those strange words that really has no origin. I like saying "How do" more than "Howdy" -- more formal, I think. Not too flowery. But the flowery aroma of that particular morning carried me on my fragrant quest. Now, the smell was actually less bologna and more orchid -- the beautiful flower found on the island state of Hawaii. Of course, I wasn't in Hawaii, so I needed to search out the location of the nearest orchid. So, I visited every florist shop in town. Well, to make a long story short, not a single flower shop in town had any orchids in stock, which seemed mighty curious to me. Now, as we all know, curiosity killed the cat, but since I'm not a feline, I wasn't too worried. Felines are funny creatures, don't you think? I had a cat once. It used its claws to tear my living room couch to shreds. It was a comfy couch, too. Had a sleep-away bed in it with a foam rubber mattress. Now, I bought the couch and the mattress at Levine's Department Store on Third Avenue, the very same afternoon of that relaxing stroll aforementioned. I also bought myself a lovely tambourine on that same shopping expedition. Anyway, I didn't want to pay extra for the delivery of the couch, so I decided to carry the couch home myself. It was quite cumbersome. And getting it through the store's revolving doors was a bit of a challenge. And just as I emerged onto the street, by accident I bumped into a well-dressed man with an orchid in his lapel. It was Bob Barker, and he was eating a bologna and cheese balls sandwich. Well, it's been nice chatting with you.

Here Am I, Your Special Three Notes

The song "The Jitterbug", cut from The Wizard of Oz, is fairly well-known for a cut song whose original footage is lost; the audio of the song is included on the DVD along with home-movie footage of the filming, and it turns up in the stage version of the movie.

The thing I like about the song is that the first three notes of the refrain are the same as the first three notes of a song that would become a big hit ten years later: "Bali Ha'i" from South Pacific. Sing the first three notes of "The Jitterbug": it's the big three-note motif that runs through not only that one song in South Pacific, but the overture as well.

But to find the real origins of that three-note motif, you have to go back even before The Wizard of Oz, to the movie The Bride of Frankenstein, where Franz Waxman's music for the creation of the female monster is based around, yes, that same three-note motif: Da-da-DA... Ba-li-HA'I...

I'm not really sure why a somewhat exotic-sounding motif seems to be almost as ubiquitous as "How Dry I Am," and to have been used by three distinguished composers (Waxman, Arlen, Rodgers). But there we are.

Tom and Jerry and Family Entertainment

Animation historian Jerry Beck has this explanation for the inclusion of the three redubbed cartoons (see below) on the Tom and Jerry DVD set. I am posting this with his permission. This is all common knowledge anyway (it's long been known that except for the Looney Tunes Golden Collection sets, WB's animation releases fall under the "family entertainment" division). This just organizes the already-publicly-available information:

George Feltenstein and I feel as badly about this all the fans. We tried our best. The problem (and excuse me if I've explained this before) is that all cartoons at Warner Bros. fall under the "family entertainment" part of the Home Video department. George Feltenstein - the Senior VP who oversees the incredible boxed sets and library product (THIN MAN, KING KONG, WIZARD OF OZ, SUPERMAN, etc.) - has virtually no control over this material. The one piece he's fought for (and won)is the LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION. The LOONEY TUNES SPOTLIGHT collections that came out in years past were the "family unit" productions. The difference between the "Spotlight" collections and the "Golden" collections is obvious.

George is fighting to release (under his guidence) a TEX AVERY complete collection - and if it ever gets cleared, a POPEYE collection. The TOM & JERRY collections are compiled, packaged and marketed by the family department. George and I are "consulted" but we have no control over what they do, or what master material they use. George fought for the re-mastered CinemaScope cartoons on the set - in particular because of the new screen ratio of HDTV, he wanted to make sure those films would read correctly.

George and I reviewed a check disc several weeks ago and were horrified by several "re-dubbed" cartoons that made their way to the set. George ordered them to make the changes - and they did, except for the three remaining problem films. Again, we have little control. There is no one who knows the product reviewing these in advance. We were lucky to catch what we did.

Have you noticed the first six cartoons on disc one look better than the prints on the rest of the set (not counting the remastered CinemaScope titles)? That's because we urged the powers-that-be to restore all the cartoons from the best available master material in the vaults. They did it only for the first six. I have no idea why they didn't do all of them - other than budgetary reasons.

The whole TOM & JERRY thing saddens us too. Personally I see the glass half full here - and am happy to have what we do. George is hoping to get control of the classic cartoons - when he does, we will probably compile a complete set with all titles, complete & uncut.

I hope you are looking forward to LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION vol. 3. A lot of effort goes into these - and #3 is as good - or better - than the first two. These (along with Disney's Treasures) are an example of what can be done with the right people in the right places.

Thanks to Mr. Beck for clarifying the situation. And yes, the difference between the few cartoons that were specially remastered for this set, and the ones that use old DVD masters, is very noticeable. Some of the early cartoons, like "Puss Gets the Boot" and "Fraidy Cat," look mind-blowingly good, which only makes it all the more sad that they didn't do this for all the cartoons.

Tom & Jerry & Quality Control

Okay, I've gotten a look at the second "Tom and Jerry" DVD collection, and I have good news and bad news.

Good news: The original voice of Mammy Two-Shoes appears to be intact in most of the cartoons. And the blackface gags in "Mouse in Manhattan" and "Safety Second," often cut on TV, are intact here.

Bad news: There are three cartoons where Mammy's voice appears to be in a different acoustic from the rest of the cartoon, and she sounds like a voice actor imitating the original. These are "The Lonesome Mouse" on disc 1, and "Saturday Evening Puss" and "Nit-Witty Kitty," both on disc 2. Apparently these "redubbed" prints are from a British Tom and Jerry DVD -- Tom and Jerry are huge in England -- where Mammy's voice was redubbed to give her a marginally less exaggerated accent.

So what have we got? We've got a set where WB has not chickened out, and has included the original Mammy Two-Shoes and the blackface gags. But we've also got a set where three incorrect versions appear to have been included, not out of cowardice, but out of poor quality control. (I'm assuming nobody in the production process noticed that the voice in those cartoons wasn't the original; that's the only explanation I have for why Mammy would be redubbed there but not anywhere else on the set.) Warner Brothers gets a lot of good press for its DVDs, and much of it is deserved -- but they have some unnerving and frustrating quality control errors sometimes. This appears to be one of them.

As to whether the set is buying in this form: your call. I would say yes, if you like Tom and Jerry, because of the chance to see those other cartoons uncut. But mistakes like this just shouldn't be made on a major release.

Also: I'll bet you anything that WB gets more complaints over those three re-dubbed cartoons than they do over Mammy's real voice in all the other cartoons.

And Speaking of the Victorians....

After wallowing in the pure pleasure that is the new Minkowski recording of Offenbach's La Grande Duchesse De Gerolstein -- an operetta about which I have previously gushed, and which has had a substantial chunk of previously-unrecorded music restored in this recording -- I decided to do what I always do with anything I enjoy, and Google it until I know so much trivia about it that I don't enjoy it anymore. Anyway:

What I found was an English version of "La Grande Duchesse," which was performed at the Savoy theatre in 1897 (this was after Gilbert and Sullivan had broken up and they had to find non-G&S works to play there). The translation of the lyrics, written for this production by the prolific Adrian Ross, is pretty good at finding English equivalents for the French phrases; "Ah! Que J'aime Les Militaires" (Ah! How I love soldiers) becomes "Soldiers! I'm simply mad about 'em," for example. But there are a couple of big changes that pretty much sum up the difference between French and English tastes in the latter part of the 19th century.

In the original "La Grande Duchesse De Gerolstein," one of the best numbers in the the third act is a nocturne sung to a just-married couple as they prepare for their wedding night. Meilhac and Halevy's lyrics are concise but clear:

Bonne nuit, monsieur, bonne nuit!
Ce simple mot doit vous suffire.
Vous comprenez ce qu'on veut dire,
Heureux coquin, lorsqu'on vous dit:
Bonne nuit!

[Goodnight, sir, goodnight!
This simple word will have to be enough.
You know what we mean, you fortunate rascal,
When we say: goodnight!]

Bonsoir, madame, bonne nuit!
Ce compliment vous fait sourire,
Et vous savez ce qu'on veut dire,
Chère madame, quand on vous dit:
Bonne nuit!

[Good evening, madame, goodnight!
This compliment makes you smile,
And you know what we mean when we say to you:
Goodnight!]

So what happens to this scene from an 1867 French operetta in the 1897 English version? The number is moved to before the couple gets married, and instead of wishing them goodnight, it becomes a song bidding the couple to come and get married:

Come to church, noble lord, come to church!
And when the ceremony's o'er,
You will not care to rove any more,
Or leave your lady in the lurch.
Come to church!

You, my lady, we bid you to church!
And when the ceremony's o'er,
You will live happy evermore,
Two little love-birds on one perch.
Come to church!

"Bonne nuit" becomes "Come to church." I know Queen Victoria hadn't long to go at that point, but you just cannot get more Victorian than that.

UnBonded

I have very little to say about the whole James Bond/Daniel Craig thing. Given that the producers are going to keep making the same movies over and over, which means that Casino Royale will never be allowed to be as mean and cruel as the Fleming original, one Bond will do as well as another.

It's not like George Lazenby, who actually had to play the world's most popular movie character; Craig is being called upon to play a character who is reasonably popular but not particularly important, in movies that are reasonably popular but no more than that. The Bond movies are basically the big-budget equivalent of an endlessly-running TV adventure show, and replacing Bond doesn't mean much more than replacing Dr. Who.

The only interesting question about the new Casino Royale, apart from how much Fleming it will have in it (not much, I'm willing to bet), is what kind of an approach it will use to acclimate the audience to the new Bond.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which had the most riding on the new 007, tried several tricks to get the audience used to the new guy: starting the movie with M, Moneypenny and Q (so we know immediately that it's a real Bond movie), directly acknowledging the replacement ("This never happened to the other fella"), and including visual and audio clips from previous Bond movies. As insurance against an inexperienced Bond, they cast, for the first time, a leading lady who was more famous than the guy playing Bond (and they wanted someone even more famous than the actress they got: Diana Rigg was hired after Brigitte Bardot turned them down). And for the first time since From Russia With Love, they filmed the novel with few major changes; this was, I suppose, mostly because director Peter Hunt wanted to get back to the character's roots, but it also ensured that the new Bond would always be in-character, because most of his material would be pre-tested, authentic James Bond material. (Hunt, by the way, was probably the main reason -- apart from Connery -- for the success of the '60s Bond movies; he edited all the films prior to Secret Service, and he not only revolutionized the way action movies were edited, but he brought some life to the work of some directors who didn't do much of interest outside of Bond. He also pretty much rescued the same team's The Ipcress File.)

Live and Let Die took a different approach: Moore was a familiar figure, so he didn't need to be introduced; the problem was to keep viewers from associating him with The Saint. The solution: show him as little as possible. He doesn't appear at all in the teaser, and much of the movie is taken up by long, long chase sequences where Moore's stunt double appears more than he does. It was as though the producers didn't want to keep Bond onscreen too long for fear that we'd realize he was really Simon Templar.

I would comment on how Bond is introduced in the Dalton and Brosnan debuts, but I don't remember them well enough.

The Most Poorly Animated Man In The Universe!

In my previous post about toy-based cartoons of the '80s, I referenced the X-Entertainment.com site a few times, including their dissection of "Rubik, the Amazing Cube." Their archives have some more good, snarky stuff about '80s cartoons, including The He-Man Drinking Game, an examination of the lameosity of the Masters of the Universe pilot, a review of the surprisingly dark weirdness of "My Little Pony,", and a long review of one of the most drab toy-based cartoons ever, "Teddy Ruxpin" (remember the talking teddy bear that some toy company thought was going to be in every kid's home? they made a cartoon out of him).

Cinderella Mannerisms

The DVD of Disney's "Cinderella" just came out and is apparently selling well. (One of the reasons why Disney feels free to abandon hand-drawn animation is that they know their "classic" hand-drawn films will sell just as well on DVD as, if not better than, new product.) I haven't picked it up yet, myself, and I'm not sure if I'm going to.

The thing about "Cinderella" is that it really is the ancestor of the idea that Disney prettified and cutesified the classic children's stories -- it's the beginning of the kinder, gentler Disney. His "big five" animated features, the ones made between 1937 and 1942, don't fit this stereotype at all. If you compare Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" to the Grimm original, it's actually a very faithful adaptation, with most of the scary stuff left in and even some new scares added (like the elaborate, terrifying transformation scene of the Queen). There are changes, but they're all changes made primarily for dramatic effect, to make the story work better: killing off the Queen before Snow White is revived, not after, so the film can end with her coming back to life; having Snow White fall for the Queen's disguise only once instead of three times; setting up an earlier meeting between Snow White and the Prince. All good solid dramatically-relevant changes.

With "Cinderella," Disney's first full-fledged animated feature since "Bambi," Disney and his team were working from a far less dark and disturbing source than the Grimms' "Snow White." The Perrault version of "Cinderella," which is the basis for most adaptations including Disney's, is one of the more palatable versions of a children's fairy tale; whereas the Grimms loaded up their tales (including their version of "Cinderella") with death and mutilation, Perrault was more into whimsy and flights of fancy. A straight adaptation of Perrault's "Cinderella" will of necessity be nicer and cuter than an adaptation of the Grimms' "Snow White." But that wasn't enough for Disney: he added all kinds of cute sidekick characters, funny talking animals who perform side routines vaguely influenced by the then-most-acclaimed cartoon characters, Tom and Jerry, and generally a bunch of stuff designed to pad out the story and send it off in irrelevant directions, rather than (as with "Snow White") to tighten the story and make it more dramatically effective.

So "Cinderella" is the origin of all the things we associate with Disney at his worst: taking a children's classic, draining out the interesting stuff, and replacing it with cute filler. His next two animated features, "Alice in Wonderland" and "Peter Pan," did the same.

Now, to be fair, Perrault's "Cinderella" is a very short tale and not a lot happens in it; to bring it up to feature length, something had to be added. Disney probably figured that the thing to add was what worked in "Snow White": funny business with supporting characters, to distract attention from the inevitable blandness of the heroine and the equally inevitable boringness of the Prince. (Rule # 1 of animated movies: nobody wants to animate the Prince.) Still, what he wound up with was something very non-threatening in a way that his best work was not. The mean, nasty Disney of the big five ("Snow White," "Pinocchio," "Fantasia," "Dumbo," "Bambi") was pretty much gone, though he arguably made a secret comeback in live-action with the enjoyably creepy "Darby O'Gill and the Little People."

Rocket Man

Charles Rocket committed suicide last week. He was one of the members of the "Saturday Night Live" cast of 1980-1, the season when the entire original team had left and producer Jean Doumanian wasn't up to the task of revamping the show. Rocket, who was the key member of the cast that season, is best known for having been fired for saying "fuck" on the air (this being, apparently, the time before tape delays), but he was one of the better things about the show in that dismal year.

His best-known TV guest appearance was probably as Bruce Willis's brother in the second season premiere of "Moonlighting," competing with Willis for the attentions of Cybill Shepherd. He was a failed con man who started the episode by trying to plug the ultimate miracle product, "Rich 'n Thin," by doing the first and (deliberately) worst rap number by a white guy in prime-time TV.

This article is the best I've seen on Rocket's career. RIP.

Toys 'R Them

Well, I didn't get very far through the "He-Man" DVDs -- childhood nostalgia can take one only so far through these Filmation cartoons where every character sounds the same and the identical walk cycle is re-used approximately every three miliseconds. I can definitely see why I liked it as a kid, and why kids would still like it: It's full of magic. There's a magical occurrence almost every minute, many characters have magical powers of some sort, and the episodes revolve around magical McGuffins (the pilot episode is called "The Diamond Ray of Disappearance"). Kids love magic. I don't know why networks don't remember that when they make children's programming: a story full of magic will attract more kids than some drab little story about who gets to go to the school dance.

While I didn't get nostalgic for "He-Man," I did kind of get nostalgic for the great demon of the '80s: cartoons based on toys. You may recall that from the late '60s up until the early '80s, there were FCC standards in place effectively preventing commercial products from being part of the actual content of a show; these standards were relaxed in the early '80s, allowing companies like Mattel to finance television shows based on their toys. "He-Man" was the first and crassest of the bunch; Paul Dini, a writer for "He-Man," stated bluntly: “He-Man was a half-hour toy commercial. I hate Peggy Charren but she was right. Selling the product was the sole reason for doing that show.”

Certainly that was Mattel’s sole reason for doing the show. The story goes that they had originally intended to do a Conan the Barbarian line of dolls, until they realized that it wouldn’t be appropriate for children, and introduced a more kid-friendly alternative to Conan: a blond, muscle-bound warrior on a rather retrograde planet, who wore a minimum of clothing and carried a large plastic sword on his back. The concept lent itself fairly well to television – you had a hero, a picturesque setting, lots of villains to fight, and a concept that sounded violent without actually being such. So it was a good deal for Mattel, which got advertising for a rather bizarre toy line, and Filmation, which got a show.

"He-Man" inspired other toy companies to get into the act. I think the most bizarre of the many, many Advertoons of the '80s was "Rubik, the Amazing Cube". My heart goes out to the poor writers and animators who were told to come up with a cartoon starring a cube. Solution: if you put Rubik together in the Rubically-approved, uni-colored way, he gets magical powers and talks with a funny-accented voice: "Rubik feel tired now!"

But the thing is, doing a cartoon based on a toy is not, in itself, a bad idea. Children's action figures, are designed with stories in mind: who are the characters, how would they interact, what kind of situations could you imagine them getting involved in. A good action figure line is one that kids can make up lots of stories for and with lots of good possibilities for character relationships; it's not such a stretch to say that TV writers could see these characters and also come up with stories for them. Put aside the question of whether it brainwashes kids into wanting to buy the toys -- as I recall, the "hard sell" of the commercials made me want to buy my parents for toys much more than the extremely soft sell of the toy-based cartoons -- and it doesn't seem like such a bad source of material, if the material does indeed lend itself to a series.

The best of the toy-based cartoons were two shows based on Hasbro toys aimed at girls: "My Little Pony" and "Jem." The worst was probably "The Popples", from a line of plush toys that could be folded up into a ball. The show sort of exemplified the problem that arises when you have a line of toys that doesn't lend itself to storytelling, and when the toys are so bland that the stories you can tell (without hurting the toy's image and pissing off the toy company) are limited. The Popples existed for only two possible purposes: to hug (in doll form) and to toss around (in ball form). They were, in short, the friendliest dolls on the market, a refuge from all those violent action dolls. And that meant that the show had to be equally friendly and cute.

So The Popples had one plot and one plot only: the Popples make a mess, and then they clean it up. But, the Popples being “friendly” toys, they couldn’t even make a mess in an aggressive way; they just had to accidentally spill clothes or bowling pins or something. And then, just before the adults came back, the Popples would produce a bunch of whimsical tools and clean everything up just in time – much like the Cat in the Hat, except without the elements of menace and malice that make the Cat entertaining. But what else could the writers do? The Popples weren’t allowed to face off against villains, or battle threats, or anything that might have meant doing something aggressive; they had to be the most non-threatening characters in the world, because the toys were supposed to be the most non-threatening toys in the world. So the writers were left looking for a way to produce conflict without anyone to conflict with, and without anyone behaving badly. With those limitations, it’s something of a miracle that they even came up with one plot.

But something that happened just as often, if not more, was that the toy would set a standard that the TV show couldn’t live up to. Quite a lot of imagination and creativity can go into the making of a toy, after all. And sometimes that imagination and creativity wasn’t carried over into the TV version.

And that brings us back to "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe." Because of their origin as “Conan the Barbarian” knockoffs, Mattel’s He-Man figures were based on an unusually dark concept for kids’ toys: heroes battling truly ugly, scary characters for control of a big, terrifying-looking edifice called Castle Grayskull. The commercials for the toys portrayed He-Man’s world as a scary place where kids could live out their violent and scary fantasies: battles, swordfights, mysterious castles with trapdoors, horror-movie villains with names like “Skeletor” and “Beast Man.” It was like a slightly less Teutonic Conan fighting the cast of a Universal horror movie, and it was pretty intense.

The cartoon series retained the characters and the Castle Grayskull set; it had to, because that was what Mattel was trying to plug. But there would have been no way to retain the darkness of the toys’ concept, not under the restrictions of network Standards and Practices. So while the characters still had the basic characteristics that the action figures were supposed to have – He-Man was strong, Skeletor was evil, Beast Man was brutish and dumb – there was little of the darkness or horror that boys conjured up when they played with those figures. The TV He-Man wasn’t a fighter in a barbaric world populated by scary villains; he lived in an orderly society, Eternia, with a nice King and Queen ruling over a bunch of similarly nice people. And even Castle Grayskull became a friendlier place, as it became the home of the show’s representative of “good magic,” the Sorceress. Instead of battling He-Man for control of Grayskull as they did in the toy commercials, Skeletor and his other bad guys lived in a separate society, Snake Mountain, and tried without success to get into Grayskull, just as other bad guys schemed to get into the Smurf Village.

So again, we had the reassuring message of most Saturday morning cartoons: bad people don’t walk among us; they’re completely separate from the place where the good guys live, and they can never get into the good guys’ hangouts. That’s an important and reassuring theme of a lot of kids’ entertainment – if the good guys on the show don’t need to worry about the villains invading their homes, then we don’t need to worry about some bad guy coming into our homes, maybe even at night while we’re sleeping. But that wasn’t what the toys were about; the toys were based on the theme that the bad guys are out there and you have to fight them everywhere, even at home. A cartoon series that had that theme would have been interesting. But it would have been too dark to get on the air.

Noël Coward's Annotated Guide to the Victorian Era

Noël Coward's After the Ball, a 1954 musical adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, was his last operetta, and not one of his more successful ones. As is described here, Coward miscalculated in writing music for Mary Ellis, playing Mrs. Erlynne, that she could no longer handle, with the result that much of the best material had to be cut during the tryouts. Much of the music that remained was irrelevant comedy material that sounded like a refuge from Coward's cabaret act.

But one irrelevant comedy number, I think, should have had a life outside of the show: the opening chorus, "Oh, What a Century It's Been." In this song, the chorus basically fills us in on the entire political and cultural history of England in the 19th Century and in particular the Victorian period. Some enterprising English teacher should track it down and use it as a class teaching tool.

Here are some excerpts from the song (yes, only excerpts -- Coward habitually over-wrote his songs), annotated with the help of Wikipedia and Google.

We've seen the birth of Queen Victoria
And the death of William Pitt,
And then we won the battle of Waterloo.
Which gave our island story a
Certain lift, you must admit --
And if you don't, we do.
We've seen the National Gallery open
And the Houses of Parliament burn,
The introduction of income tax,
Which gave us quite a turn,
We've seen the late Prince Consort
On a magic-lantern screen.
What a happy and glorious,
Most meritorious
Century it has been.

We've read The Daisy Chain and Romany Rye
And passionately clung
To Walter Scott and Emily Brontë too.
We're rather cross that so many buy
The works of Charlotte Yonge,
But nonetheless they do.
We simply worship Christina Rossetti
And we're mad about Tennyson's "Maud,"
We love to be up an apple tree
With Mrs. Humphrey Ward.
From William Blake to Kipling,
With the Brownings in between,
What an uneconomical,
Tragical, comical
Century this has been.

We've praised the works of Frederick Leighton and hurled
Abuse at Holman Hunt,
For he invites Pre-Raphaelites to tea.
And if they hung "The Light of the World"
Completely back to front,
We shouldn't even see.
We only care to go shootin' and huntin'
On chestnuts and fillies and roans,
We're sick to death of Watts-Dunton
And we'd like to burn Burne-Jones,
We much prefer the pictures
In a weekly magazine.
What a Royal Academy,
Too Alma-Tademy,
Practical, mystical,
Over-artistical,
Highly pictorial,
Albert Memorial
Century this has been.

We've made the most exhaustive scrutiny
Of the cause of England's might,
Convinced that ev'ry Britisher's born to boss.
We thought the Indian Mutiny
Was extremely impolite --
It made us feel quite cross.
We then embarked on a war in Crimea with egos a little enlarged,
And cheered the charge of the Light Brigade
No matter why they charged.
And then those swine in China
Made a most disgusting scene.
What a quite irresistible,
Oliver Twist-ible,
Woman in White-able,
Wuthering Height-able,
Mill on the Floss-ible,
Frankly impossible
Century this has been.

The "Charlie Brown Kicks off Lucy's Head" Strip Remains Uncollected Too

Kim Thompson of Fantagraphics, currently and possibly forever in the process of bringing out volumes in the "Complete Peanuts" series, offers some examples of strips that were never collected in book form, and speculates about why Schulz never collected them.

(Via Mark Evanier.)

Selling TV DVDs Out of Season

Video Business has an article (free registration required) on the most frustrating thing about the TV-on-DVD boom: that some shows get one or two seasons and then no more:

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has yet to roll out a second set of Malcolm in the Middle after launching the first-season set in 2002. After much hoopla over the mid-2004 launch of Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy, Paramount Home Entertainment has yet to bow subsequent seasons.

High costs and low sales seem to be the culprit in most such cases, as music clearances on TV titles can get prohibitively pricey with no guarantees of big sales....

Gord Lacey, creator of TVShowsOnDVD.com, said some consumers hold off buying first-season TV DVD sets until further sets are announced.

“If season one doesn’t sell, the studio won’t release season two, but the problem with fans is that they’ll say they won’t buy something until a studio seems committed,” Lacey said.

Gord Lacey's colleague David Lambert has further comments at TV Shows on DVD.

I Have the Power!!!

Because I am a freak with a desperate need to re-live my childhood, I actually rented: "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: Volume 1."

The one thing I've learned is this: you know you've gone from innocent child to cynical adult the day this line from the opening titles stops sounding cool and starts sounding hysterically funny:

"Fabulous secret powers were revealed to me the day I held aloft my magic sword."

It's not that kids aren't dirty-minded -- I learned words from my classmates that some of their parents wouldn't have dreamed of using -- but kids don't look for dirty double meanings in everything. Adults do.

Other bit I noticed: Every episode of "He-Man" ended with a character addressing the audience with some public service announcement, so the producers of the show could prove that they were really setting a good example for kids. I skipped to one of the public service announcements, and it had He-Man lecturing kids on the importance of safety. He finished: "So whether you're riding a bike or driving a car, always put safety first."

Then he rides off on the back of a giant green cat.

That had to be an intentional joke.

The Death Card!

Writing about Val Lewton's movies, Gary Giddins has some interesting comments on Lewton's third horror movie and his last with director Jacques Tourneur, The Leopard Man:

A second look is especially warranted by Tourneur's "The Leopard Man," which has turned out to be Lewton's most influential film, though both men dismissed it at the time as cheaply violent... [It] keeps violence off-screen but cruelly focuses on the plight of its victims. In effect, it is the first slasher film, though we never see any slashing. Yet the murders are more disturbing than those in "Halloween" and its imitators, in which death is reserved for the sexually aggressive: "The Leopard Man" dispatches two virgins and one (apparent) hooker, and not when we expect. Twice we follow the wonderfully haughty dancer Clo-Clo (played by Margo), whose castanets augment Roy Webb's superb score, on menacing walks. Each time she escapes while we are sidelined to young women she passes in the street. No one who has seen the puddle beneath the door can forget it.

The Leopard Man is definitely the closest Lewton ever came to making what would later be called an exploitation movie. Most of his films deal more with the threat of violence than actual violence; one murder per movie is usually enough. The Leopard Man has four murders, and while only one character actually dies onscreen, the first three deaths -- all women -- are deliberately made as horrific as possible, with bloodcurdling screams and (in the first, most famous death) plenty of blood.

Each of these deaths is the culmination of a long vignette about the woman about to be killed, establishing who she is, what she does, and what ultimately leads her out into the night to be killed. The first character, a poor teenaged girl, is sent out by her mother to buy something for dinner; we follow her to the store and back, worrying every step of the way that something terrible is going to happen to her. Lewton and Tourneur throw in a repeat of their famous "bus shot" from Cat People (here involving a speeding train whose noise not only scares us but helps lead indirectly to the girl's death) to make us feel like there's a chance that it was only a fake-out, that she's not really going to get killed. And then she not only gets killed, but dies for the most horrible reason: because her mother wouldn't let her back in the house without the groceries. The next death involves a rich teenage girl who goes to a cemetary to meet her lover: as in most slasher movies, having a boyfriend leads to death. And the last death occurs because Clo-Clo loses money in the street and rushes out of her house to get it; she then puts on lipstick thinking she sees a lover, only to find that it's the killer.

The overall impression given by the movie is that the main preoccupations of everyday life -- sex, money, and food -- all lead to death. And the main point of the movie seems to be to show us obviously doomed characters and wait for them to die. These are all things that would be taken up by the violent shockers of the Psycho and Halloween type, the type of movie that, ironically, is considered the antithesis of the Lewton style.

I wouldn't say The Leopard Man is one of the better Lewtons; because so much time is spent on the three big murder set-pieces, the film is unbalanced, never creating a compelling reason to follow the two main characters (who are basically responsible for the first death and, until about halfway into the picture, don't seem to really care). And because it tries, not very successfully, to conceal the identity of the killer until the climax, we don't get much exploration of the killer or of the nature of evil, which are the main things that hold a good slasher movie together. Still, as Giddins says, it has probably influenced more films than any of the more famous Lewtons.

Tourneur himself thought this the weakest of his three films with Lewton: "It was too exotic, it was neither fish nor fowl: a series of vignettes, and it didn't hold together." He also expressed regret that RKO never teamed him and Lewton again after that: "We had the perfect collaboration -- Val was the dreamer, the idealist, and I was the materialist, the realist. We should have gone right on doing bigger, more ambitious pictures and not just horror movies." Certainly Lewton made some terrific movies with other directors, and Tourneur made history with Out of the Past and the Lewton-esque Night of the Demon. But what they might have done together on an "A" picture, we can only dream.

Incidentally, the cinematographer of the film, Robert De Grasse, ended his career as the director of photography for The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Yes, Michael

Something I just noticed in watching episodes of "Arrested Development" on DVD: every episode begins with a shot of Jason Bateman's character, Michael, and Ron Howard saying the character's name ("Michael Bluth was..."). It appears to be part of their formula, sort of like ending every episode of "Yes, Minister" with the same two words. Plus it's their way of signalling that Michael is supposed to be the lead character, though this hasn't really worked.

Actually, I think there was one episode that started with Michael's son instead of Michael. It felt wrong somehow.

Yes. No. Right.

I always used to think that the writer Harold Pinter most resembled was not Beckett but Noel Coward. Pinter's famous dialogue, with its clipped phrases and constant suggestion of something deeper beneath the surface (even if we're not really sure what that something is supposed to be), put me in mind of Coward, who did the same thing in all his plays, and even summed up his own method with a line from Tonight at 8:30: "Small talk, a lot of small talk, with other things going on underneath."

However, I note that Pinter never claimed much influence from Coward, though he professed to admire him and even directed Blithe Spirit once -- a production that doesn't sound like it was a barrel of laughs.

Alicublog has an amusing roundup of angry, politicized, generally Philistine reactions to Pinter's Nobel Prize from such Powerline-quoting, art-hating dolts as Roger Kimball. (For the uninitiated, Kimball is like a slightly better-read Mark Steyn.) This is an annual tradition, except for the time V.S. Naipaul won, but it's trickier with Pinter, because the work that made his reputation is not openly political, while his political stuff is not considered by anyone, left or right, to be his best work. Therefore the Kimballs cannot use the usual New Criterion method of critiquing a writer whose politics you don't like, which is to write three pages of plot summary followed by one page of explaining that the work is bad because it is "too political," meaning not political enough in your favored direction. Instead they have to skip or gloss over the work that made the writer's reputation, and say that the work is not even worth discussing because he's written some annoying articles in the last couple of years. Sort of a throwback to those Stalinist critics who used to dismiss writers on the basis of Bourgeois Decadence, only it's now the critics of the political right who want to bring down the left-wing Bourgeoisie.

That said, I'm not the biggest Pinter fan, just as I'm not the biggest Noel Coward fan -- both writers are skilled writers of dialogue whose plays are entertaining but tonally limited. Still, on the theory that an important criterion for the Nobel Prize is influence, Pinter is as good a choice as any, given that his influence on British play writing was largely positive, helping to free it from the extremes of Good Taste on the one hand and kitchen-sink bellowing on the other. Plus one of his plays, Betrayal, inspired a Seinfeld episode. That's Nobel stuff right there.

Cosmo Cwery

Here's a project I think some bored social scientist should undertake: go through the back issues of Cosmopolitan Magazine, catalogue the headlines on every cover, and figure out whether they've ever used the same headline twice.

In some ways, the headlines on the cover of Cosmo, which even the strongest of us are exposed to in every drugstore checkout line, are a tribute to the amazing variety of the English language. Because these headlines have been saying exactly the same thing every month for I don't even want to know how long -- Gawker notes that they used to deal with somewhat more risqué topics, so let's say since the mid-'80s -- and yet they always seem to come up with a slightly new way of wording exactly the same thing.

So this month, the headlines include: "Our new sex position," "How to turn him on without touching," "20 sexifiers," and "Get your guy to give you the attention you crave." Now, I have been standing in drugstore checkout lines for many years, and I know for an absolute fact that every cover of Cosmo promises new sex positions, ways to turn him on (sometimes with touching, sometimes without), and ways to get your guy to give you the attention you crave/want/need/desire/don't get from your mother. And yet I cannot say, definitely, that I have ever seen those things put in precisely those words before. They must have people working 16 hour days trying to come up with new ways of saying "New sex position."

Or maybe not. Maybe they cheat. Maybe they have a secret vault where Helen Gurley Brown kept all her headlines, and every so often they go back to the vault and pull out headlines they've used before, hoping no one will remember. For all I know they're re-using 1985 headlines in 2005, and we're none the wiser because let's face it, who wants to remember anything about 1985? And twenty years from now, they will reach back to 2005 (a time no one will want to remember either), pull up "How to turn him on without touching," and pass it off as new, putting it on the cover next to a movie star trying to be a model.

For shame, Cosmo. For shame.

Give Me a (Commercial) Break

This article gives a good primer on the twin banes of network television today: more ads, forcing the shows to run shorter and shorter, and more act breaks, forcing stories to be broken up into shorter and shorter sections.

The interesting question is whether timings can go any lower. I would be inclined to say that they can't go any lower than the current standard, which is two minutes of content for every one minute of commercial time -- but then, I didn't think they could go much lower than they were a few years ago, either. And it was only a few years ago that shows could have a tag scene during the closing credits (indeed, this was NBC network policy for some years, which is why shows like "Frasier" and "Friends" usually had closing-credits tags); then they started using the closing credits to show promos for upcoming shows. The old joke that they'll just cut out the program and show an hour of commercials is getting to be less and less of a joke every day.

One thing I find odd is that as timings have decreased, shows have become more heavily plotted. Back when a show had 24 minutes of content per half-hour, most shows had very simple plots and no "B" stories. Now that we're down to 20 minutes of content, we have shows with elaborate plots and "B" stories that try to cram everything they possibly can into this very short time.

Creatively, sitcoms are probably hardest hit by the short running times because there is absolutely no time to slow down and let a performer do his or her stuff. (You couldn't have Ed Norton taking all that time to write a letter, because you can no longer afford to waste that much time without getting back to the plot.) The miniscule running times could well be considered a factor in the decline of the sitcom; an extra minute or two of breathing space makes a lot of difference in a half-hour slot. Hourlong shows are somewhat less affected, especially serialized hourlong shows, because there's always the possibility of using something next week if you don't have time for it this week (this applies to serialized half-hour shows like "Arrested Development" as well). Still, an extra minute or two might make a lot of difference in the ability of some shows to get a little more creative and seem less like perpetual-motion plot machines.

I Runne To Death

For those of you who haven't seen Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim, buy or rent it (it's only available as part of the Lewton box set) and watch it before someone spoils the ending for you. For those of you who have watched it, here is the original screenplay, which includes scenes that didn't make it into the finished film. There was, for example, supposed to be an epilogue that would tie up the plot a little more clearly.

I think the movie works better in its final form than it would have with some of the additional scenes, though as with all Lewton's movies, I do wonder what it would have been like if it had been twenty minutes longer and therefore had time to flesh out the plot and the characters. (The Seventh Victim was conceived as an "A" picture and then made as a "B" so that the young Mark Robson could direct it; if it had been made as an "A," it would have been longer and presumably had a better-known cast.) Lewton movies had to be no more than 70 minutes, so most of the scenes are practically in shorthand: they seem to start late and end early, with no room for pauses or any kind of verisimilitude (a scene in an "A" picture will usually start with some small talk to lead into the main conversation; there's no time for that in a "B" picture). The disadvantage of that is that you're left wanting more; the advantage is that there's never a wasted moment, and the clipped, elliptical style of the scenes enhances the nightmare quality of the movies.

Here's the way the best scene in The Seventh Victim -- the scene between Jacqueline, suicidal fugitive from the Satanic cult, and Mimi, a woman dying of a debilitating disease (a reference to La Boheme) plays out in the script, which is almost exactly the same as the filmed version:

INT. UPPER STAIRS - HALLWAY - DANTE - NIGHT

The gas light has been turned down so that there is only a tiny flame to illuminate the hall. The draft in the hallway stirs this little flame and the shadows move with it. Jacqueline comes up the stairs. Now that she can be seen more closely, it can be seen also that she is exhausted, her eyes wild, her hair in disorder. She almost staggers as she reaches the landing and goes slowly supporting herself on the banisters, toward Mary's door. Her way brings her past Room #7, the room with the noose. For a moment she stands weakly staring at the door, then goes on. She has reached Mary's room, has crossed the narrow hallway and her hand is almost on the knob when Mimi's door opens and Mimi, white night—gowned, comes out into the eerie gas light. Jacqueline looks at her face which is distorted and horrible in the moving shadows and flickering light. She stifles a scream. The other girl is also frightened. The two stand staring at each other for a moment.

JACQUELINE
(weakly)
Who are you?

MIMI
I'm Mimi -- I'm dying.

JACQUELINE
No!

MIMI
Yes. It's been quiet, oh ever so
quiet. I hardly move, yet it keeps
coming all the time -—closer and
closer. I rest and rest and yet I
am dying.

JACQUELINE
And you don't want to die. I've
always wanted to die -- always.

MIMI
I'm afraid.

Jacqueline shakes her head.

MIMI (CONT'D)
I'm tired of being afraid -— of
waiting.

JACQUELINE
Why wait?

MIMI
(with sudden
determination)
I'm not going to wait. I'm going
out -- laugh, dance --do all the
things I used to do.

JACQUELINE
And then?

MIMI
I don't know.

JACQUELINE
(very softly end almost
with envy)
You will die.

But Mimi has already turned back into her room. Jacqueline stands watching until the light snaps on in Mimi's room and then the door closing, plunges the hall into weird half light again. In this semi-darkness, she turns away from Mary's door and walks down the hall toward room #7. She opens the door and goes in. For a brief moment the light from the hall casts the shadow of a noose against the further wall of the room and then the door closes behind her.

The strange, clipped quality of the scenes, along with the fact that many of the plot details are either obscured or unexplained, makes movies like I Walked With a Zombie or Curse of the Cat People or The Seventh Victim seem like art movies -- movies that are more about mood than story.

I previously posted some excerpts from Lewton interviews, in which he talked about his methods ("A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence, fadeout"), here.

If Only They Could Have Taken Out Johann and Peewit

"Smurfs used as shock treatment in UNICEF's fundraising drive: Cartoon characters' village bombed in anti-war TV commercial." (Audio-visual links here.)

Personally, while I love a good antiwar scare commercial aimed at kids (I grew up in the '80s when it seemed like there was one of those every week), I think UNICEF may have underestimated the extent to which some of us wouldn't mind seeing the Smurf village get severely shaken up. Though to be fair, in Belgium they might have fonder memories of the Smurfs, having been brought up on the Peyo books rather than the Hanna-Barbera version.

Personally, I think it was Brainy Smurf who bombed the village, in revenge for always getting thrown out on his head.

Magic Genie

I don't know if anyone else has pointed this out, but here's a bit of trivia about "Desperate Housewives" (yes, just what we needed: another bit of "Desperate Housewives" gossip). Apart from creator Marc Cherry, who comes from the same Witt/Thomas/Harris stable that produced the creator of "Arrested Development," most of the writing staff of "Desperate Housewives" comes from a little-watched '90s series on the USA Network called "Weird Science."

"Weird Science" was of course based on the 1985 movie, written and directed by John Hughes and produced by Joel Silver, which is kind of like saying it was directed by Satan and produced by Beelzebub. The show was co-developed for television by Tom Spezialy, who is now executive producer of "Desperate Housewives." The writing staff included Kevin Murphy (best known as the writer of the most successful of the musical versions of "Reefer Madness"), Adam Barr, and Chris Black, all of whom are now writing for "Desperate Housewives." And the head director of "Weird Science" was David Grossman, who... well, you can see where this is going.

"Weird Science" was actually a pretty enjoyable show, much more so than the movie (which was so crass that even Hughes was quoted as saying he thought it was beneath him). The story of two unpopular high school kids who accidentally create a living woman -- with the powers of a genie -- with a computer, it was basically a '90s take on the '60s-style fantasy sitcom, with good special effects, quite decent scripts, and a good cast that included Vanessa Angel (the woman who was originally cast as Xena, Warrior Princess), Lee Tergesen and the son of Bewitched director/producer William Asher, John Asher. The best episode was probably one in which the characters are trapped in a horror movie and have to rely on the Asher character's knowledge of slasher-movie conventions to keep them alive; with lines like "Characters with active sex drives are machete magnets," it pre-dated Scream by several years.

It never did catch on, possibly because its intended audience wasn't clear -- it seemed like a kids' show, but had a time-slot and sex jokes that sort of ruled out much of the kid audience -- but it was one of the more entertaining of the '90s crop of lighthearted fantasy shows (that took advantage of the fact that computers had made it possible to do good special effects on a TV budget), and probably more to my taste than "Desperate Housewives":

CHETT [the crazy brother, asked why he has so many guns]: Just exercising my constitutional right to bear arms, Wuss-boy. A man's gotta hunt. You got your semi-automatics for deer, grenades for pond-fishing, and the flame thrower's good for anything that lives down a hole.

LISA [possessed by a computer demon]: I am the living embodiment of all that is evil in the computer world.
GARY: You're Bill Gates?

GARY: Let's do that thing we did to that guy in that place that time.
WYATT: Good plan!

The other two things the show had going for it was a good eye for guest stars -- including a pre-Buffy Emma Caulfield, a pre-whatever-the-hell-she-did Denise Richards, and lots of people from "Parker Lewis Can't Lose," where much of the writing and producing staff came from -- and a good ear for language. I still quote the term "Magic genie," which was always used in place of the less redundant but more prosaic "genie."

Harper-Ly

Here is an article on the film Harper (1966), with Paul Newman as world-weary private eye Lew Harper, and how it differs from the book it's based on, the Ross MacDonald novel "The Moving Target," about world-weary private eye Lew Archer. (The name was changed for the movie because someone -- either Newman or the someone at the studio -- thought Paul Newman pictures did better when they started with "H.") The article does a good job of summing up the flaws of Harper as an adaptation and as a film.

Harper isn't on DVD yet, but it turns up quite a lot on television, and it's perfect lazy-afternoon TV viewing; it has a lot of familiar faces, it has a mystery that's entertaining without being particularly emotionally engaging, and like a lot of '60s studio productions, it even looks like a '60s TV show, with its flat lighting and generic sets and locations, bad rear projection, the works. It's one of those films that is useful as a sort of snapshot of all the problems that studio movies were having in the mid-'60s. There were still a few stars around -- Newman being one of the biggest and one of the best -- and there was still a pool of good character actors to draw on. But the pool of writers, producers, and directors wasn't anything like what it had been, and so Harper wound up presided over by a director of no particular interest, Jack Smight.

Like a lot of '60s movie directors, Smight had started in series television and been "promoted" to feature films; this could have been seen as the equivalent of the old system of promoting directors from "B" to "A" pictures, except that a director's involvement in the average weekly television show is essentially that of a traffic cop, telling everyone where to move and when. Very few directors of weekly TV series have any real degree of creative involvement. (Note: this is not to disparage good movie directors who came from TV, like Robert Altman and John Frankenheimer; I'm just on a generalization kick here.) When directors like Smight went to features, where a director needs to have more creative input (especially since, by the '60s, creative, auteur producers were already starting to vanish from the scene), they often brought nothing with them except the ability to get along with actors. The result was a string of movies where the actors were happy but no one seemed to be co-ordinating the creative people -- actors, writers, technicians -- toward the same goal. On a weekly TV show, the executive producer performs that task; in a movie, it can be either the producer or the director who does the co-ordinating. The problem with Harper-era Hollywood movies is that there wasn't anybody capable of doing that.

Harper also indicates how the studios were no longer really capable of developing young talent. The film features two actors, Robert Wagner and Pamela Tiffin, who looked like they might be headed for big things; but they're both miscast, unable to play to their strengths. Wagner's self-mocking humor should have made him a big star of romantic comedies, except there weren't any good romantic comedies at the time; in Harper, he can't do what he does best, and when he does get funny, he seems out of character. Pamela Tiffin, one of my favorite lost starlets of the '60s, looks remarkable, but is stuck with a generic part that doesn't make any use of her distinctive, off-the-wall charm. To become a movie star in the '60s, you essentially had to be a strong enough personality to shape your own career, the way Warren Beatty would do the following year by becoming a producer (on Bonnie and Clyde, which helped smash the system of which Harper was a part). Less strong personalities -- genuine talents but talents with limitations, that needed a strong hand to guide them into the right projects -- tended to flounder, the way Wagner and Tiffin do in Harper.

One more thing about the article: it never occurred to me that the end of the film was supposed to be ambiguous about what Harper would do, but I've since talked to other people who interpreted it that way, so there must be something to it. I just thought it was kind of cheesy to end a movie with the words "Aw, hell" and a goofy-looking freeze-frame. But that's the '60s for you.

Lyrics by Harold Rome: "Certain Individuals"

I should do a post -- indeed, someone should write a whole book -- about composer-lyricist Harold Rome, one of the best and least-appreciated of classic-era Broadway songwriters. He did many different types of shows, including big romantic musicals (his career sort of fizzled out over an ill-fated musicalization of Gone With the Wind), but his specialty was writing songs in his own New York Jewish vernacular; whereas other songwriters from the same background, he gravitated to subjects and songs that were directly connected to that background. And few lyricists have ever been as good at writing lyrics that really sound like a rhymed, heightened version of the way people really talk.

The lyrics I want to quote here are from the successful 1952 musical Wish You Were Here, based on Arthur Kober's play about the guests and staff at a Catskills resort. It's most famous as a show that had a swimming pool in the middle of the stage, and a show that became a hit through canny advertising despite almost uniformly negative reviews. The reviews may have had a point about the production, conceived by acclaimed but ham-handed producer/writer/director Joshua Logan. But Rome's score is one of his best, every number a funny, culturally-specific treat. My favorite song in the show is a throwaway, "Certain Individuals," sung by the second female lead and a chorus of women, teasing the heroine for being so obviously in love:

Certain individuals
Are walking on a rosy cloud,
And certain individuals
Are talking to themselves out loud.
Grinning like a birthday kid
With a brand-new toy,
Looking like Columbus did
When he said "Land ahoy!
(America!)"
Oh, oh, what we know
That we're not telling of,
About certain individuals
Fresh in -- pardon the expression -- love.

Certain individuals
Are feeling like a highness royal,
And certain individuals
Are reeling like they just struck oil.
Shining like a diamond pin
On a diamond chain,
Bubbling like the bubbles in
A glass of two cents plain.
(Or raspberry.)
Oh, oh, what we know
That we're not telling of,
About certain individuals
Fresh in -- pardon the expression -- love.

That's good lyric writing: simple yet cleverly rhymed, suggestive of everyday speech without being a carbon copy of it, full of specific images and fresh takes on familiar expressions.

Oh, Wolfie!

I see where Tex Avery's "Red Hot Riding Hood" is available for online viewing. Until Warner Home Video gets up the nerve to release a complete Avery set, it'll have to do.

The animation of Red, of course, is among the most famous and most-imitated pieces of animation ever. In this and all her subsequent appearances, Red's dancing was animated by Preston Blair, who came to MGM from Disney, where he had animated on Fantasia. He was proud of the fact that instead of using a live-action model, as Disney usually did when it came time to create an attractive human woman in animation, he made up Red's design and movements from scratch.

The reason Red has been so influential is that she really isn't anything like a human woman in design or construction or movement; in her initial appearance, the design of her face could just as easily lend itself to an animal character rather than a human. She conveys the impression of a sexy human being without ever seeming like a copy of one, and therefore without begging the question of why they didn't just do the dance in live action. One of the big questions of animation, from the beginning right up through so-called 3-D animation (it's all 2-D once it's projected on a screen, sez I), is how to create a character who seems like a realistic human being without seeming like a copy of realistic human beings. Blair solved that problem: he came up with a real-world human who was also surreal and "cartoony."

The other cool thing about Blair's animation of Red is that his Disney training shows through even more strongly than usual in some of her acting, so that she seems like a strictly G.I. version of Snow White, or the Disney princess from Hell. And, after all, taking Disney cartoons and sending them to Hell is a pretty good description of Avery's modus operandi at MGM.

Red was a creature of World War II and the unprecedentedly adult cartoons turned out by studios like MGM, Warners, and even Disney (what do kids make of "Der Fuehrer's Face?") during that period. After the War, cartoons started to place more of an emphasis on chase stories and try/fail blackout gags, probably influenced by the success of MGM's Tom and Jerry. Post-WWII, Avery made one more all-new cartoon featuring Red, "Uncle Tom's Cabana," but with a somewhat more demure Red (though it does feature the single best erection gag in the history of cartoons). Preston Blair left not long after that, but Red's dance from "Swing Shift Cinderella" was re-used in 1949's "Little Rural Riding Hood," the last of his great sex-and-violence combinations (which tops "Cabana" by including a joke where the wolf proves to be, as Seinfeld might say, not master of his domain). After that, sex jokes seemed to go out of Hollywood cartoons for a while, and violence reigned alone for a decade or more.

Randolph Scott! RANDOLPH SCOTT!!!!

USA Today reports on a Sam Peckinpah Legendary Westerns Collection coming in January 2006, with The Wild Bunch (two discs), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (two discs), Ride the High Country, and Peckinpah's own off-the-wall favorite, The Ballad of Cable Hogue:

Commentaries accompany Garrett and the other [three] films... Several documentaries detail the life of Peckinpah, who died in 1984 at age 59. "He was an almost mythic figure among directors," [George] Feltenstein says. "Our collection represents him really at the height of his skill."

The current disc of The Wild Bunch was an early release that required you to flip the disc over to see the whole film, so the prospect of a special edition is very pleasing, as is the DVD debut of High Country. (Joel McCrea did an interview for TVOntario's "Saturday Night at the Movies" where, as I recall, he gave a lot of interesting information about this film and his work with Preston Sturges; shame nobody's going to use those interviews on a DVD.)

On the other hand, the principle behind the DVD of Garrett -- which is to restore the film yet again, based on Peckinpah's "notes" of what he wanted the film to be -- sets off alarm bells in my little head. (Hell, I still think Touch of Evil is incomplete without the scenes Orson Welles didn't direct.) But then I've always thought that trying to restore a haphazardly made Western with Bob Dylan in it -- particularly one directed by a erratic man who had one more good movie left in him (Alfredo Garcia) but would soon wind up directing Kris Kristofferson in Convoy -- is kind of a lost cause. (Or as Joe Queenan put it: "Under pressure from French Peckinpah enthusiasts and other masochists, the film was re-released in its original thirty-seven-week form.") The Wild Bunch is a great movie because it combines the new freedom and amorality of 1969 Hollywood with Peckinpah's surprisingly Old Hollywood sensibility when it comes to characterization, themes, and the look of the film (it's so Old Hollywood in its look that it even uses dissolves between scenes). Pat Garrett, made only a few years later, required Peckinpah to try and seem more hep to the young people, and the movie is dragged down by that. Still, all four films are worth having.

And justifying my post title, not only is High Country coming, but the first Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott Western, Seven Men From Now, has been Officially announced.

Moore-ings

In case you were wondering, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show: The Complete Third Season" is on its way this coming January, so the complete series seems likely to come out on DVD.

Watching the long-delayed second season, I was surprised how little it improved over the somewhat disappointing first season -- in fact, it may have hd even fewer real standout episodes than the first (which at least had the brilliant pilot and the first Nancy Walker episode). Really, if "Mary Tyler Moore" had gone off the air after two seasons, it would look like a weak cousin of "The Dick Van Dyke Show," and not nearly as good a short-term creation as "He and She" (also from creator Allan Burns).

Of course it didn't go off the air after two seasons, and its reputation is largely built on the episodes from seasons 3 to 7 -- in other words, season 3 is where it gets good. As to why it got good, it's a combination of things ranging from the arrival of writer Ed. Weinberger (nobody knows what that period stands for) to the relegation of Mary to a less prominent role on her own show, so that the supporting characters finally got to take over and lead their own stories (this was the season where Ted got his regular girlfriend, Georgette, and where Phyllis thought Rhoda was making time with her brother -- leading to a famous punchline). Moore was in many ways the weakest link on her show, and building more stories around the conflicts and problems of the supporting characters made for more interesting stories than Mary's That-Girl-Goes-To-Minneapolis adventures usually could. Although the third season does offer probably the best Mary-centric episode, "Put on a Happy Face," a catalogue of everything that can possibly go wrong for a person before attending an important event, culminating in Mary's awards acceptance speech: "I usually look so much better than this...."

Camp Classic

Mark Evanier has a good post here on Hamilton Camp, the comedic actor and singer who died recently.

Camp was a member of the improv comedy troupe The Committee, one of the most influential comedy groups of the '60s and one that produced a roster of talent comparable to Second City (with whom Camp also performed). Members of The Committee did a lot of sitcom work in the late '60s and early '70s, and helped to inject some edge into what had become a somewhat staid, by-the-book era of TV comedy performance. Camp, with his nervous energy and strange grimaces, livened up the otherwise stolid first season of "Mary Tyler Moore" when he guest-starred in an episode as Mary's latest and shortest date. The part itself wasn't anything special; Camp made it seem special by playing the guy as if he were seething with barely concealed fury at the proximity of the irritatingly perfect Mary.

Of course Camp was also part of probably the best ensemble cast of the '60s, that of "He and She" (along with Paula Prentiss, Richard Benjamin, and Jack Cassidy as "Jet Man"), the original sitcom that was just too good and too smart to succeed, a one-season wonder as treasurable as any Judd Apatow show and considerably cooler than "Firefly." (Where's the DVD?)

Some Committee members, like Peter Bonerz found a home on "The Bob Newhart Show," and in the late '70s, former Committee members started to appear with increasing regularity on "WKRP In Cincinnati," whose creator, Hugh Wilson, also corralled a bunch of Second City people to write for the show, and sort of anticipated the late '90s vogue for improv comics on sitcoms. (Actually, Wilson said in 1979 that his dream was to do a sitcom without scripts, just a scenario and a cast of talented improvisors who could make the whole thing up as they went along; this concept, which he never actually put into practice, anticipated "Curb Your Enthusiasm" by over twenty years.) Howard Hesseman was a regular member of the cast, and guest stars over the years included Larry Hankin (shown with Hesseman and the future writer of the movie Jaws, Carl Gottlieb), Ruth Silveira (in an episode that also guest-starred Camp) and Julie Payne in a memorable turn as Hesseman's pill-popping ex-girlfriend ("When will I ever learn to listen to my psychic????").

Anyway, what all that is leading up to is that one of Camp's most memorable TV appearances was in an early "WKRP" called "Hold-Up". The episode is almost all Camp, Hesseman, and a third Committee guy, Garry Goodrow (it's so focused on the guests that Loni Anderson doesn't even appear in the whole episode). Camp, as Del Murdock, a stereo store owner even more sleazy and desperate to make a sale than Herb Tarlek, was handed the showiest role, and he ate it for lunch, knocked it out of the park, and any other metaphor you care to mix. How much of his rapid-fire, nearly-insane sales-pitch dialogue was scripted and how much he made up, I don't know; I do know that words on the page can't do justice to his delivery, or the expert way he uses broad movements (pointing, tilting his body back) to punctuate the lines. But here's his first speech in the episode:

Hah? Hah? Did you ever see such a selection in your life? Wait a minute, I know exactly what you're going to say. "Can Del Murdock, personable owner of Del's Stereo and Sound, set me up with the exact stereo system I need?" Well, let's take a look at you: Busy executive on the go, your belt matches your shoes, but there's a hole in your life. Well, let's fill that hole with sound!

Until "WKRP" goes back into circulation, or until "He and She" gets released to the public again, you're mostly going to have to take people's word about how good Camp was. But he was very, very good.

Noir-Iffic

Finally, after untold public-domain releases, Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street is getting a proper DVD release (scroll down), with an audio commentary by David Kalat.

As a remake of Jean Renoir's The Bitch (why do English-speaking critics insist on writing its title in French?), Scarlet Street is not only one of the seminal films noirs, but it provides an interesting case study in what happens when one great filmmaker remakes another's work. As you might expect from the filmmakers and the eras in which the movies were made, Lang's take on the material is quite a bit more mean-spirited.

Scoreless Movies

The DVD release date of King Kong gets nearer, and while we're waiting, I'll note that perhaps the movie's greatest contribution to the art of cinema was not its special effects (groundbreaking though they were, they didn't immediately inspire a lot of similar effects) but its re-popularization of music in movies.

When talking pictures came in, perhaps the worst artistic decision made by most producers -- not only in America, but worldwide -- was to release films with no background scores. Most early sound movies have music over the opening titles, and source music (like the record playing "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" in The Public Enemy), and maybe the occasional instrumentalist on the soundtrack (like the ensemble in Boudu Saved From Drowning), but no specially-composed, fully-orchestrated music accompanying the action.

The thinking was, I take it, that the purpose of music was to accompany scenes that didn't have any sound; if you have sound, you don't need music. It was a misguided notion. Many early sound films are severely hobbled by the lack of music; Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are two great movies that really cry out for music at key points.

Max Steiner and his big score for King Kong helped to change all that and really show how much a talking picture could benefit from a new, specially-composed score. Not that there hadn't been any talking pictures with musical scores -- Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise uses a lot of background music, composed in a style very similar to a score that might have accompanied a silent film -- but they were one-offs and flukes. It was Steiner, I think, who proved that talking pictures needed music as much as silent pictures did. From that point on, most dramatic movies had musical scores. Comedies still often went unscored (Bringing Up Baby has no musical score, nor does the serio-comic The Rules of the Game), but by the '40s, every movie had a composer. Since then, there have been only three types of movies without background music: movies that make a special effect out of the absence of a score (Robert Wise's The Set-Up; all but the last minute of The Asphalt Jungle); movies that use pop songs instead of a score (Goodfellas); and post-1961 movies by Ingmar Bergman, whose dislike of musical scores is just one of the many things that annoy me about him.

I'm not even a huge fan of Steiner's music -- like Alfred Newman, he was a fine musician but a very unsubtle composer. But Steiner, more than anyone, re-established the profession of film composition at a time when most producers seemed to think it wasn't necessary. So to a certain extent we can thank Mr. Steiner, and Mr. Kong, for Korngold and Auric and Raksin and Delerue and various people named Bernstein and several hundred people named Newman.

Look Out For Mister Storch

Ivan G. Shreve has some thoughts on "F Troop" and a forthcoming DVD sampler of the show.

My favorite joke about "F Troop," and about a stock-in-trade of '60s comedy, was on an episode of "Freakazoid!", where Freakazoid confronts a villain who can capture anyone who says his name out loud:

Why I Hate the Wild Card

Exhibit A.

I am not as young as I'd like to be, but I'm still semi-young, and yet I'm old enough to remember a time when two teams would actually compete for first place, one team would clinch first place on the next-to-last day of the season, and then the other team wouldn't get into the playoffs by finishing second.

This is the number-one reason why I don't have the interest in baseball I used to. The most enjoyable thing about baseball was always watching teams go down to the proverbial wire, and knowing that teams had the ultimate incentive to beat each other: if you don't finish first, you don't win. That was where all the competition, all the suspense came from, the fact that you could have the second-best record in the league and still lose if you came in second in your division (or, before 1969, second in the league). Where's the suspense if a good second-place team can reap all the rewards of a winner just by finishing second?

If you think about it, the Red Sox for the last two years have been exactly what they were in the '40s -- the perennial second-place team. Except that now it doesn't hurt them at all, and they can actually win the freakin' World Series by finishing second. I hate the Yankees, but I hate the idea of second-place "champions" even more.

And you know another thing I don't like? Them Ipods! Music warn't meant to be computerized. Now, in my day...

There's Always a Little One

My favorite recurring cartoon gag of all time is the one Sarah calls "There's Always a Little One." It's the gag where you see a whole bunch of identical creatures or things running across the screen and out of the shot, and then, after a slight pause, a smaller version of those creatures or things runs across the screen and out of the shot.

Examples that come to mind are mostly from Warner Brothers cartoons: the end of "Scaredy Cat" (a bunch of identical mice, followed by a much smaller mouse); the end of "Ready... Set... Zoom!" where the Coyote, disguised as a Road Runner, is pursued by a bunch of identical coyotes followed by a little Coyote; "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarves", with six dwarves in jeeps followed by the Dopey takeoff in a smaller jeep marked "Peep," and "Bugs Bunny Rides Again" (a bunch of bullets followed by a lone bullet). There's also an episode of "The Simpsons," "Itchy and Scratchy Land," where a violent cartoon-themed amusement park features a parade of axes followed by "a cute little baby ax."

There must be others, though. Anybody else remember this gag, and can anybody name some other cartoons that use it?

Best Comment Ever

My infamous "Why I Hate Family Guy" post still gets some comments, even a year after I posted it. One comment, posted today, may be my favorite yet. Some excerpts:

With all honesty i understand your points and i also must put out there that, you're opinion means nothing to the viewers or the people who hate it with you...

If Family Guy is poorly done, then why was it returned to air? Obviously that's not the case. So i will give you advice: 1. Grow up 2. Shut up, no one gives a rats ass what you have to say 3. Stop watching it if it bugs you so much. 4. Read a book instead of watching T.V. ; why spend all your time in front of a box? 5. Go outside and run or something 6. Stop being mad because it seems to me you are jewish and they pick on jews alot so get over that everyone will hate you until the end of time simple as that!

I just got PWNED. Well, not PWNED, more like EENTED. Or maybe VORROWED.