I recently wrote, in full-on '80s nostalgia mode, a post about cartoons based on toys. Continuing that theme, I'd like to post an article I wrote about what was probably the most entertaining of the toy-based cartoons, "Jem (and the Holograms)." Warning: it's a long damn thing, and goes into way more detail about the relationship between cartoons and toys than any sensible person should really want.
This show was based on a line of Hasbro toys, and produced by Sunbow animation, which consisted mostly of people from the just-out-of-business DePatie-Freleng company. The success of “My Little Pony” made Sunbow the obvious choice to do a show based on Hasbro’s most ambitious project yet: Jem. Or, Jem and the Holograms. Or, Punk Rock Barbie.
For some time, Hasbro had been trying to come up with a way to outdo Mattel’s Barbie dolls, which had given Mattel an invincible lead among young girls. In the mid-‘80s, Hasbro came up with what they thought was the answer: create a doll as pretty and anatomically-impossible as Barbie, but make it cool and hip. And what was cool and hip at the time was punk rock, with its elements of – in the words of the Jem show’s theme song – “glamour and glitter, fashion and fame.” Al Carosi, Hasbro’s senior vice-president of marketing, explained to the Los Angeles Times: "We wanted to get into the fashion-doll section of the toy industry. We had identified the interest young girls have in rock 'n' roll music. With the advent of MTV, Nickelodeon and 'Miami Vice' a rock 'n' roll feeling has permeated the youth market.” So Jem had pink hair, what clothing she wore was pink, and she had a star apparently tattooed around her eye. All this was supposed to give the impression that she was more rebellious than Barbie, leading less of a sheltered life; but to make sure that she wouldn’t come off as a bad role model, she had a team of adversaries – a rival rock group known as “The Misfits” – who represented all the bad things about the punk rock world, so that Jem could look like a saint by comparison.
In fact, the backstory of “Jem” was unusually detailed for a toy, and this derived from the fact that the TV show was planned from the beginning as part of the promotion. Hasbro and Sunbow planned it out together: who is Jem, who are her friends, who are her enemies. The resulting scenario would be the basis for the toys and the cartoon: Jerrica Benton, the daughter of a recently-deceased music mogul, inherits a share in his record company, “Starlight Music,” and a shelter for homeless girls (the plight of the homeless had become the issue of the time), the “Starlight House.” She immediately comes into conflict with her partner at the record company, nefarious record executive Eric Raymond, over his corrupt business methods and his promotion of a trashy punk group, The Misfits. Jerrica’s problems are solved when she discovers a third thing her father left her: his secret supercomputer, Synergy, capable of projecting “sophisticated holograms” that can change people’s appearance. To get money to keep Starlight House afloat, and to stop Eric from taking over the record company, Jerrica uses Synergy to transform herself into the “truly outrageous” and mysterious Jem, and forms a rock group, The Holograms, with her sister Kimber and two multicultural friends, Aja and Shana. But she hides her secret identity from her purple-haired boyfriend Rio, which creates complications when Rio finds himself becoming more and more attracted to Jem.
This secret-identity gimmick derived from both toy-related and TV-related concerns. Hasbro wanted to make sure that Jem wouldn’t be too far out and funky for girls to relate to, so they created the “Jerrica” alter ego, to let girls know that underneath all those layers of pink, Jem is just a regular gal like them (if they owned a music company and a giant hologram-projecting computer). And Sunbow, conscious that the show would be going into a market dominated by boys’ action-adventure series like He-Man, wanted to make sure that Jem would have enough action elements to keep the boys from tuning out, the way they tended to tune out of My Little Pony. So Jem became something of a rock n’ roll superheroine, with a secret identity to preserve, and recurring villains to fight – Eric Raymond, the Misfits. Plus the Misfits tended to be so crazy and violent that they would inflict enough damage to keep the violence fans happy; indeed, they probably did more actual harm than Skeletor ever managed.
The head writer of the TV series was Christy Marx, who had started with DePatie-Freleng on a "Fantastic Four" series where network censors forced the Human Torch to be replaced by a robot. She later recalled that she didn’t particularly want to do Jem, feeling that it was too “girly” after all the red-blooded action shows she’d been doing. But she liked the challenge of writing a show that combined the features of girls’ shows – romance, friendship, music – with features taken from action-adventure and even soap opera. Her five-part pilot of Jem was unusually entertaining because, unlike any other Saturday morning cartoon of the time, you hardly knew what to expect next. It starts as a soap, with Jerrica mourning the death of her father and discovering Eric Raymond’s plot to take over the company. Then it becomes a fantasy, with the arrival of Synergy and its rather overblown computerized powers. (In the ‘80s, when computers were just starting to arrive in people’s homes, there were many movies and TV shows that fantasized about the power of computers, inflating their abilities to near-mythological levels; remember 1985’s Weird Science, where ordinary home computers literally have magical powers?) Then it’s a musical, with a battle of the bands between Jem and the Misfits. Then it introduces various action-adventure cliffhangers: Starlight House gets burned down, the Holograms are on a boat about to crash into another boat, Eric Raymond slaps Jerrica and Rio punches Eric (He-Man could never get away with that kind of violence). By the end of the fifth episode, and Jem’s first, truncated season, you feel like you’ve actually seen something unique, and whatever the crudities of the animation or the dialogue, that made Jem a breath of fresh air in 1986. The fact that it was based on a toy didn’t change the fact that it had more to offer than most shows that weren’t based on toys.
One of the things it had to offer was fairly entertaining music. “My Little Pony” had usually included one original song per episode, but “Jem” was a full-fledged musical: every episode contained three original songs, usually two by Jem and one by The Misfits. The songs were vaguely related to the plot (Jem sang a song called “Deception” castigating herself for deceiving Rio; the Misfits went to Hawaii and sang “We’re Misfits in Hawaii”), but they were presented as MTV-style music videos, complete with band and song identification at the beginning and end. The videos could be unusually wacky and visually imaginative for a Saturday morning cartoon, with lots of shifting backgrounds and crazy visual ideas that commented on the lyrics of the song: the videos for the Misfits’ “(I’ve Got) Universal Appeal” actually showed their faces floating in space, as big and bright as the Earth. These one-minute segments may have been silly, but they were among the few moments in Saturday morning cartoons that gave any real visual opportunities to the animators.
And if you listen closely, the songs weren’t bad either. The lyrics were by Barry Harman, who was a veteran of shows like “All in the Family” and “The Carol Burnett Show”; he was also a real musical-theatre lyricist, who would have a show produced on Broadway (“Romance, Romance”) not long after he started working on “Jem.” He and the composers, Ford Bryant and Ellis Kinder, responded surprisingly well to the challenge of writing songs that sounded like ‘80s-style pop songs but functioned like integrated musical-comedy numbers.
They also did a good job of coping with the rules that the show imposed on the songs: Hasbro’s rule was that Jem and the Holograms had to sing songs with positive messages, while the Misfits would sing songs about being greedy and selfish (but without directly telling the viewers to act that way). Not surprisingly, Harman found the Misfits more fun to write for. “Jem and the Holograms were sweet,” he recalled, “but it’s hard turning out songs that are all so positively based. I think we did a decent job, but it’s more fun misbehaving!” Jem’s lyrics usually sounded like this:
People who care
Are people who share,
People who give
So other people can live.
While the Misfits got the fun stuff, and allowed the lyricist to enjoy himself with some references and rhymes that the kids might not notice:
The world belongs to the major movers,
The ones who'll keep up a relentless pace.
If you ain't up to their fast manoeuvres,
You're gonna wind up in second place –
You're gonna wind up with egg on your face!
All the prizes go to the swift;
You gotta be fast, you gotta be fast
Baby, baby, are you gettin' my drift?
You can tell those aren’t real ‘80s pop/rock lyrics because they actually rhyme. But kids loved the songs, so much so that Sunbow considered doing an album of “Jem” songs.
Before that or any other “Jem” tie-ins could happen, though, a problem arose. Not with the show; the show was doing fine. But the toys weren’t. And because the show had mostly been intended to help sell the toys, that was a problem for the show, too.
While the Jem dolls didn’t sell that badly, they didn’t sell nearly well enough, considering the huge promotional budget Hasbro put into it and the equally huge number of dolls produced. At the end of 1987, the company was left with $9 million worth of unsold Jem dolls that had to be sold off at discount prices, like remaindered books.
Carosi blamed it on size: ''One of the things we did wrong, in retrospect, is that we made Jem an inch taller than Barbie, so that the clothes weren't interchangeable for both.” Another possible problem was that if you didn’t know she was a good girl – that is, if you hadn’t seen the show and learned about her reassuring backstory – Jem looked kind of scary, as if she’d been made up for Halloween instead of a date. Hasbro had counted on the TV show to give the doll mainstream appeal to little girls. It turned out that all the TV show did was give mainstream appeal to Jem as a cartoon character; the doll was on its own. It had succeeded as a cartoon series, but it failed as a marketing tool.
And so, in 1988, Hasbro announced that Jem dolls and all associated paraphernalia would be taken off the market. The company turned its attention to a new girls’ doll, Maxie, described by the New York Times as “a fresh-faced high-school girl from California - a sports- and beach-oriented type.” In other words, the punk look was out and wholesomeness was in again. (Maxie didn’t catch on either, but Mattel executives at least paid her the compliment of saying that she was a better doll than Jem ever was.) And Jem became a fixture in remainder bins all over the continent.
But what of the cartoon show? The ratings were still good; girls and even boys were singing the songs; the people who worked on the show were willing to make more episodes. But by the time the toys were off the market, the show had gotten up to the magic number, 65 episodes, and Hasbro had no intention of making any more; they didn’t need any more for syndication profits, and with no toy to sell, there was no benefit, as they saw it, in making more episodes. By the time she wrote the last episode, Marx knew there wouldn’t be any others, and she was able to write it as a sort of makeshift series finale (with one of Jerrica’s adorable orphan charges finding her long-lost father). And then, nothing. Jem, a successful, well-regarded show, had been cancelled not because it failed to pull in the advertisers, because it failed as an advertisement in and of itself.
While what happened to Jem was the most spectacular example of marketing problems taking precedence over ratings success, it happened elsewhere, too. To a certain extent it even happened with He-Man. Mattel launched a spinoff series about He-Man’s sister, She-Ra: Princess of Power, to promote a new line of girl-oriented action toys. The show was a mild success, but the toys were not, and the show faded away with the toys. Moreover, with Filmation having taken most of the He-Man staff off that show to work on the spinoff, the success of He-Man started to wane, and with it, the success of the Mattel toys (and He-Man was one of the few cases of a show that really demonstrably helped to sell the toys it was based on). So when Mattel got burned by its rush to promote new toys, Filmation wound up losing one big hit series and one mildly successful one. The company never really recovered, though there was one more Mattel-Filmation collaboration, Bravestarr, featuring a toy that was described as “A sort of sci-fi Western, featuring a Native American space sheriff.” It flopped.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Elsewhere, Back at the Meanwhile Ranch....
Thrilling Days of Yesteryear has a good piece on the show "The White Shadow."
And Man vs. Clown follows up my own post on the epic suckitude of "Richie Rich" comics by quoting a one-page gag that sums up all that was evil and wrong about that comic book.
Platypus Comix has Part 4 of the Jon McClenahan interview, dealing with the production of "Animaniacs" and that show's great "lost" character, Minerva Mink. Minerva was a sexy mink, voiced by Julie Brown in her "'Cause I'm a Blonde" mode; every male character reacted to Minerva with Tex Avery-style wild takes, and the idea of the character was that she would defeat her adversaries -- like Newt, a "professionally trained hunting dog" after her fur -- by exploiting her sex appeal. Unfortunately, it was felt, by executives at WB animation and at Fox, that a series of cartoons consisting almost entirely of sex jokes of one kind or another was not the sort of thing they wanted for what was ostensibly a kids' show, so after starring in only two cartoons, Minerva was relegated to cameo appearances for the rest of the series. Someone should bring her back.
And Man vs. Clown follows up my own post on the epic suckitude of "Richie Rich" comics by quoting a one-page gag that sums up all that was evil and wrong about that comic book.
Platypus Comix has Part 4 of the Jon McClenahan interview, dealing with the production of "Animaniacs" and that show's great "lost" character, Minerva Mink. Minerva was a sexy mink, voiced by Julie Brown in her "'Cause I'm a Blonde" mode; every male character reacted to Minerva with Tex Avery-style wild takes, and the idea of the character was that she would defeat her adversaries -- like Newt, a "professionally trained hunting dog" after her fur -- by exploiting her sex appeal. Unfortunately, it was felt, by executives at WB animation and at Fox, that a series of cartoons consisting almost entirely of sex jokes of one kind or another was not the sort of thing they wanted for what was ostensibly a kids' show, so after starring in only two cartoons, Minerva was relegated to cameo appearances for the rest of the series. Someone should bring her back.
Mom, You Were Right
The "Which Peanuts Character Are You" test has been picked up on quite a few other blogs; it's shorter than most such tests, but produces fairly accurate results, as you will see from the results I got:
You are Charlie Brown!
Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
When I was a kid, my mother always used to worry that my interest in "Peanuts" would make me too much like Charlie Brown. I should've listened to her.
You are Charlie Brown!
Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
When I was a kid, my mother always used to worry that my interest in "Peanuts" would make me too much like Charlie Brown. I should've listened to her.
Prejudice, Schmejudice
I have nothing to say about the new movie version of Pride and Prejudice. No, I'm sorry, I just can't. I remember a time when there were almost no movies based on Jane Austen novels, and the conventional wisdom was that because her novels have very little in the way of physical action, they were basically unfilmable. The only well-known film version of an Austen novel was the 1940 Pride and Prejudice, which was based not directly on the novel but on a moderately successful Broadway stage adaptation by Helen Jerome. (Though Jerome can't be blamed for the infamously stupid ending of the film version; that was pure Hollywood.) Then suddenly it was 1995 and there were three successful movies based on Austen novels -- Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and the best of them, Clueless. And since then we've had to sit through movie after movie after movie: faithful adaptations, revisionist adaptations, post-colonial adaptations, re-adaptations.
Anyway, here's something I noticed about the book "Pride and Prejudice" that I haven't seen pointed out elsewhere (though I haven't read all ninety-seven billion words of analysis that have been published about the book). Wickham, the rake and/or rogue who feeds Elizabeth's prejudice against Darcy by convincing her that Darcy cheated and mistreated him, never actually tells a lie in his entire story about Darcy. Every detail of Wickham's story matches up with the account of the real story given later in Darcy's later; Wickham has simply omitted key pieces of information that place Darcy's behavior in a better light, or told the truth in such a way as to make Darcy sound as bad as possible. Austen's greatest strength as a writer was her unusually tight, rigorous sense of structure at a time when novels were often loose and rambling; like a mystery writer, she would play fair with the audience by planting clues early on as to what we're going to find out later on in the story. "Emma" is almost entirely a series of clues as to what is really going on, as opposed to the way Emma sees it; and "Pride and Prejudice" does the same thing by givng us Elizabeth's point of view of Wickham and his story, but giving us the clues we need to understand that she is seeing things in a distorted way. And so, late in the book, when Elizabeth confronts Wickham about his supposed lies, he replies to her, and by extention to us, that the real facts of the case were right there in front of us all the time:
Anyway, here's something I noticed about the book "Pride and Prejudice" that I haven't seen pointed out elsewhere (though I haven't read all ninety-seven billion words of analysis that have been published about the book). Wickham, the rake and/or rogue who feeds Elizabeth's prejudice against Darcy by convincing her that Darcy cheated and mistreated him, never actually tells a lie in his entire story about Darcy. Every detail of Wickham's story matches up with the account of the real story given later in Darcy's later; Wickham has simply omitted key pieces of information that place Darcy's behavior in a better light, or told the truth in such a way as to make Darcy sound as bad as possible. Austen's greatest strength as a writer was her unusually tight, rigorous sense of structure at a time when novels were often loose and rambling; like a mystery writer, she would play fair with the audience by planting clues early on as to what we're going to find out later on in the story. "Emma" is almost entirely a series of clues as to what is really going on, as opposed to the way Emma sees it; and "Pride and Prejudice" does the same thing by givng us Elizabeth's point of view of Wickham and his story, but giving us the clues we need to understand that she is seeing things in a distorted way. And so, late in the book, when Elizabeth confronts Wickham about his supposed lies, he replies to her, and by extention to us, that the real facts of the case were right there in front of us all the time:
"I have heard from authority, which I thought as good, that it was left you conditionally only, and at the will of the present patron."
"You have. Yes, there was something in that; I told you so from the first, you may remember."
"I did hear, too, that there was a time, when sermon-making was not so palatable to you as it seems to be at present; that you actually declared your resolution of never taking orders, and that the business had been compromised accordingly."
"You did! and it was not wholly without foundation. You may remember what I told you on that point, when first we talked of it."
Laudamus Te
I am currently listening to a good new recording of Mozart's Mass in C minor, K. 427. Known as the "Great" Mass because of its length and scope, it's Mozart's greatest religious work, and his second-most-popular religious work after the Requiem. What it has in common with the Requiem is that both pieces were left unfinished. Mozart wrote and premiered the Great Mass in 1783, but he only wrote half the Credo and didn't write any music for the final section of the Mass, the Agnus Dei. (He also left the orchestration incomplete for a few passages.) As the liner notes to the recording explain, nobody knows why Mozart didn't finish the Mass, or what music he used for the missing sections when he performed it. And since the movie Amadeus did not provide us with a made-up explanation for all this, we may never know for sure.
It's possible that Mozart didn't finish the Mass because it had simply gotten too long. The Mass as Mozart wrote it takes 50 minutes to an hour to perform; if he had finished the whole thing, it would have been as long as Bach's Mass in B minor or Beethoven's Missa Solemnis -- a huge work that's too long to be performable as part of a church service. The last part of the Credo that Mozart finished setting, the "Et Incarnatus Est," is a huge, nine-minute soprano aria in the style of the soprano arias from Mozart's operas, including his favorite device of accompanying the soprano with woodwinds that mimic her musical phrases; the other soprano aria, "Laudamus te," is an extremely difficult coloratura calling for phenomenal breath control (that the singer on this recording doesn't really have). And in between these grand-opera arias are numbers written in a "learned," pseudo-baroque style, even including a direct quotation from Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. It's a strange and wonderful mixture of styles that suggests that Mozart is trying to incorporate all his influences -- Italian opera, baroque religious music, popular tunes -- into one piece. You could even speculate that he didn't finish the work because, having written such a hodge-podge of styles into the work, he couldn't decide what style to pick for two of the climactic sections of the Mass (the end of the Credo and the end of the Mass itself), and finally gave up trying.
The tricky thing about the text of the Mass is that unlike most of the texts that are the basis for choral works, the Mass does not really have a built-in dramatic structure to it. The Requiem is a drama; it has an emotional arc to it, progressing from mourning ("Requiem aeternam") through fear ("Dies Irae") through other emotions, finally to a compromise between fear and hope ("Libera me, domine"). The Mass is more impersonal: most of it consists of either praise ("Gloria") or religious doctrine ("Credo").
Some composers have found ways to personalize the text by making it more about people than about metaphysics; Haydn's late Masses often included musical allusions to war, death, and even sex: one of his masses contains, at the world "Qui tollis peccata mundi," a self-quotation from a love duet for Adam and Eve in "The Creation," making it clear that sexual relations are not the sin that God is being asked to take away. Haydn also came up with the idea, in some Masses, of treating the final line, "Dona nobis pacem," as a loud and even angry demand for peace rather than a prayer. Haydn's pupil Beethoven would take these ideas and expand on them in the Missa Solemnis, which is basically a liturgical opera, using the text as a jumping-off point for a musical portrait of how human beings relate to God, the world, and each other.
Mozart's "Great" Mass is sort of in-between the non-dramatic Mass (the kind of short, de-personalized Mass for an aristocratic church service, which Mozart had written many times before) and the dramatic, operaticized Mass. Because he didn't finish it, and didn't decide whether he would approach the finale as a prayer or a demand, we'll never know for sure what kind of work he thought this Mass should be. But that's what's interesting about a great unfinished work; it keeps you asking what point it's making, and leaves the question forever open, with only the knowledge that whatever the artist was trying to say, he was clearly building up to something really fascinating.
It's possible that Mozart didn't finish the Mass because it had simply gotten too long. The Mass as Mozart wrote it takes 50 minutes to an hour to perform; if he had finished the whole thing, it would have been as long as Bach's Mass in B minor or Beethoven's Missa Solemnis -- a huge work that's too long to be performable as part of a church service. The last part of the Credo that Mozart finished setting, the "Et Incarnatus Est," is a huge, nine-minute soprano aria in the style of the soprano arias from Mozart's operas, including his favorite device of accompanying the soprano with woodwinds that mimic her musical phrases; the other soprano aria, "Laudamus te," is an extremely difficult coloratura calling for phenomenal breath control (that the singer on this recording doesn't really have). And in between these grand-opera arias are numbers written in a "learned," pseudo-baroque style, even including a direct quotation from Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. It's a strange and wonderful mixture of styles that suggests that Mozart is trying to incorporate all his influences -- Italian opera, baroque religious music, popular tunes -- into one piece. You could even speculate that he didn't finish the work because, having written such a hodge-podge of styles into the work, he couldn't decide what style to pick for two of the climactic sections of the Mass (the end of the Credo and the end of the Mass itself), and finally gave up trying.
The tricky thing about the text of the Mass is that unlike most of the texts that are the basis for choral works, the Mass does not really have a built-in dramatic structure to it. The Requiem is a drama; it has an emotional arc to it, progressing from mourning ("Requiem aeternam") through fear ("Dies Irae") through other emotions, finally to a compromise between fear and hope ("Libera me, domine"). The Mass is more impersonal: most of it consists of either praise ("Gloria") or religious doctrine ("Credo").
Some composers have found ways to personalize the text by making it more about people than about metaphysics; Haydn's late Masses often included musical allusions to war, death, and even sex: one of his masses contains, at the world "Qui tollis peccata mundi," a self-quotation from a love duet for Adam and Eve in "The Creation," making it clear that sexual relations are not the sin that God is being asked to take away. Haydn also came up with the idea, in some Masses, of treating the final line, "Dona nobis pacem," as a loud and even angry demand for peace rather than a prayer. Haydn's pupil Beethoven would take these ideas and expand on them in the Missa Solemnis, which is basically a liturgical opera, using the text as a jumping-off point for a musical portrait of how human beings relate to God, the world, and each other.
Mozart's "Great" Mass is sort of in-between the non-dramatic Mass (the kind of short, de-personalized Mass for an aristocratic church service, which Mozart had written many times before) and the dramatic, operaticized Mass. Because he didn't finish it, and didn't decide whether he would approach the finale as a prayer or a demand, we'll never know for sure what kind of work he thought this Mass should be. But that's what's interesting about a great unfinished work; it keeps you asking what point it's making, and leaves the question forever open, with only the knowledge that whatever the artist was trying to say, he was clearly building up to something really fascinating.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Gosh-Darn It
"Arrested Development" is out. (Also "Seventh Heaven," the show that everybody loves to hate but was always more popular than any of the WB's good shows.) We all knew it was coming, but it's a sad little moment.
The internet is already getting filled to the cyber-brim with "Damn Fox" and "I hate Fox" posts, though honestly I'm not sure what Fox could have done to make this show a hit. The default position is usually "If only they'd promoted it more," which begs the question: if lots of promotion can make a show a hit, then why do so many shows, good and bad, bomb after a huge promotional push? My own theory, admittedly not really based on any actual facts, is that at a certain point, promos for a show are more for the benefit of the advertisers -- to reassure them that they're buying time on a show that the network supports -- than for the benefit of the show, which isn't going to magically pick up several million extra viewers if the promos get better.
It'll be interesting to see what kind of show the creator of "Arrested Development," Mitch Hurwitz, does as his next project. I'd bet on it to be a bit more traditional than "Arrested Development" but somewhat similar in tone, and a bigger success. But, again, this isn't based on anything except pure speculation, along with a reading of what showrunners do after creating an acclaimed cult failure. (Example: Denis Leary and Peter Tolan following up the cult flop "The Job" with the similar but somewhat more traditional in format -- and more successful -- "Rescue Me.")
This is also a sad time for the many writers out there working on "Arrested Development" spec scripts, which will soon become useless due to the general taboo against sample scripts for cancelled shows. Though frankly I've never understood why that is; writing a spec for a show that's been off the air for years -- say, "Taxi" or "Dick Van Dyke" -- might be considered a better test of a writer's ability to change his or her style than a spec script for a current show. But that's my third consecutive statement based on absolutely no inside knowledge whatsoever.
The internet is already getting filled to the cyber-brim with "Damn Fox" and "I hate Fox" posts, though honestly I'm not sure what Fox could have done to make this show a hit. The default position is usually "If only they'd promoted it more," which begs the question: if lots of promotion can make a show a hit, then why do so many shows, good and bad, bomb after a huge promotional push? My own theory, admittedly not really based on any actual facts, is that at a certain point, promos for a show are more for the benefit of the advertisers -- to reassure them that they're buying time on a show that the network supports -- than for the benefit of the show, which isn't going to magically pick up several million extra viewers if the promos get better.
It'll be interesting to see what kind of show the creator of "Arrested Development," Mitch Hurwitz, does as his next project. I'd bet on it to be a bit more traditional than "Arrested Development" but somewhat similar in tone, and a bigger success. But, again, this isn't based on anything except pure speculation, along with a reading of what showrunners do after creating an acclaimed cult failure. (Example: Denis Leary and Peter Tolan following up the cult flop "The Job" with the similar but somewhat more traditional in format -- and more successful -- "Rescue Me.")
This is also a sad time for the many writers out there working on "Arrested Development" spec scripts, which will soon become useless due to the general taboo against sample scripts for cancelled shows. Though frankly I've never understood why that is; writing a spec for a show that's been off the air for years -- say, "Taxi" or "Dick Van Dyke" -- might be considered a better test of a writer's ability to change his or her style than a spec script for a current show. But that's my third consecutive statement based on absolutely no inside knowledge whatsoever.
Grudge Matches I'd Like To See: J.R.R. Tolkien vs. T.H. White
In this corner: J.R.R. Tolkien, an eccentric, bookish Englishman who wrote an immensely long, multi-volume novel, The Lord of the Rings, in an attempt to create a new mythology.
And in that corner: T.H. White, an eccentric, bookish Englishman who wrote an immensely long, multi-volume novel, The Once and Future King, in an attempt to re-create old mythology.
Who wins this fight to the death between two English guys in tweed? And who gets the adaptation rights to the story of the fight, Peter Jackson or Lerner & Loewe?
And in that corner: T.H. White, an eccentric, bookish Englishman who wrote an immensely long, multi-volume novel, The Once and Future King, in an attempt to re-create old mythology.
Who wins this fight to the death between two English guys in tweed? And who gets the adaptation rights to the story of the fight, Peter Jackson or Lerner & Loewe?
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Design For Living, or, Who Needs Subtitles?
I love Ernst Lubitsch's Design For Living (available in The Gary Cooper Collection in a pretty good print) for many reasons.
I love the performances: Gary Cooper, Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins all did some of their best work here.
I love the fact that Lubitsch and writer Ben Hecht dared to abandon almost all of the Noel Coward play the movie is based on, at a time when this was considered sacrilege (Coward was highly prestigious at the time, and a faithful movie version of Coward's Cavalcade had won the Academy Award), and came up with funnier characters and better dialogue than the original.
I love Lubitsch's use of elliptical and oblique jokes; no one has ever matched Lubitsch when it comes to mining humor and drama from things that are not said, or things that are not shown. Random example: the scene where Fredric March gets a letter announcing that Hopkins and Cooper have slept together. We never see the letter, we never hear what's in it; we just see his reaction to it, and witness his complete deflation. And it's not just about getting stuff past the censors (who, even in 1933, would have come down hard on some of the things that go on in the picture if they had actually been shown onscreen); it's Lubitsch's whole working method, to give every joke a fresh spin by keeping some part of it hidden from view. Gary Cooper breaking something in anger wouldn't be anything new; keeping the camera on Hopkins and March, sitting calmly but uncomfortably while we hear something break, is different and funny.
I love the suggestive visual jokes that would become hard to pull off only a year later, when the studios started enforcing the Production Code more rigorously; the shot of two obviously phallic flowers, presented to Hopkins as a wedding present from the two heroes, would seem like a raunchy joke even today:
I love the combination of Lubitsch's less-is-more style of building jokes and scenes with Hecht's more direct, wise-guy sense of humor. So yes, there are a lot of reasons to love this movie. But -- and here is where this post does a complete detour into something else:
One little thing I love about Design For Living is that the first dialogue scene (after an extended silent sequence) is conducted entirely in French. Cooper meets Hopkins on a train in France, and, each assuming that the other is French, they start talking, and then arguing, in French. (The first English line in the picture is "Oh, nuts!") There's another thing to love about the film: Gary Cooper speaking French, and, despite the American accent, speaking it quite well. But the great thing about this conversation is that it is conducted entirely without subtitles or any other method of indicating what the words mean in English; nobody translates it for us.
I'm not even sure if subtitles, as opposed to captions and intertitles, were commonly in use in 1933, so maybe the choice to do the scene in without subtitles was made out of technical necessity. Still, I always like it when a film contains conversations in a foreign language without feeling obliged to translate it for us. (This is more common in French or Italian movies, where you might frequently hear a few lines of dialogue in non-subtitled English, than in English-language movies.) Nowadays any line of foreign-language dialogue has subtitles, even if it's only "Bonjour" or "Adios." But if you look at, say, the German-language scenes in Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three -- made in 1961, by which time subtitles were very common -- the scenes are in fluent German and unsubtitled, and Wilder assumes that we will pick up what's going on by means of the visual cues and the occasional recognizable word (you don't have to speak German to figure out, from the onscreen conversations, that "Americanischer spion" means "American spy").
I love the performances: Gary Cooper, Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins all did some of their best work here.
I love the fact that Lubitsch and writer Ben Hecht dared to abandon almost all of the Noel Coward play the movie is based on, at a time when this was considered sacrilege (Coward was highly prestigious at the time, and a faithful movie version of Coward's Cavalcade had won the Academy Award), and came up with funnier characters and better dialogue than the original.
I love Lubitsch's use of elliptical and oblique jokes; no one has ever matched Lubitsch when it comes to mining humor and drama from things that are not said, or things that are not shown. Random example: the scene where Fredric March gets a letter announcing that Hopkins and Cooper have slept together. We never see the letter, we never hear what's in it; we just see his reaction to it, and witness his complete deflation. And it's not just about getting stuff past the censors (who, even in 1933, would have come down hard on some of the things that go on in the picture if they had actually been shown onscreen); it's Lubitsch's whole working method, to give every joke a fresh spin by keeping some part of it hidden from view. Gary Cooper breaking something in anger wouldn't be anything new; keeping the camera on Hopkins and March, sitting calmly but uncomfortably while we hear something break, is different and funny.
I love the suggestive visual jokes that would become hard to pull off only a year later, when the studios started enforcing the Production Code more rigorously; the shot of two obviously phallic flowers, presented to Hopkins as a wedding present from the two heroes, would seem like a raunchy joke even today:
I love the combination of Lubitsch's less-is-more style of building jokes and scenes with Hecht's more direct, wise-guy sense of humor. So yes, there are a lot of reasons to love this movie. But -- and here is where this post does a complete detour into something else:
One little thing I love about Design For Living is that the first dialogue scene (after an extended silent sequence) is conducted entirely in French. Cooper meets Hopkins on a train in France, and, each assuming that the other is French, they start talking, and then arguing, in French. (The first English line in the picture is "Oh, nuts!") There's another thing to love about the film: Gary Cooper speaking French, and, despite the American accent, speaking it quite well. But the great thing about this conversation is that it is conducted entirely without subtitles or any other method of indicating what the words mean in English; nobody translates it for us.
I'm not even sure if subtitles, as opposed to captions and intertitles, were commonly in use in 1933, so maybe the choice to do the scene in without subtitles was made out of technical necessity. Still, I always like it when a film contains conversations in a foreign language without feeling obliged to translate it for us. (This is more common in French or Italian movies, where you might frequently hear a few lines of dialogue in non-subtitled English, than in English-language movies.) Nowadays any line of foreign-language dialogue has subtitles, even if it's only "Bonjour" or "Adios." But if you look at, say, the German-language scenes in Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three -- made in 1961, by which time subtitles were very common -- the scenes are in fluent German and unsubtitled, and Wilder assumes that we will pick up what's going on by means of the visual cues and the occasional recognizable word (you don't have to speak German to figure out, from the onscreen conversations, that "Americanischer spion" means "American spy").
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Depressing Songs: "Doomed, Doomed, Doomed"
Another in my bizarre favorite category, the depressing song lyric. This is another song from the great 1954 flop musical The Golden Apple; more about that show and its brilliant lyricist, John LaTouche, here. The Golden Apple was a great, doomed show, and the song I'm quoting is, appropriately enough, called "Doomed, Doomed, Doomed."
The Golden Apple is an Americanized, musicalized version of Homer's Odyssey, and "Doomed, Doomed, Doomed" is part of the show's climactic series of Vaudeville turns: in successive numbers, characters from earlier in the show return as similar characters in the nightmarish city of Rhododendron, where Ulysses and his friends are corrupted and/or killed. Each number sheds some light on what's wrong with the modern world: "Scylla and Charybdis" are two stockbrokers who always do well no matter how many people's lives are ruined by their stock tips; "Calypso" is a society leech described as a "Nympho-megalo-ego-dipso-maniac," and the Sirens as hookers in fashionable Hawaiian garb singing "(By a) Goona-Goona (Lagoon)." The device probably influenced the similarly-structured climax of Stephen Sondheim's Follies, where the themes of the show are summed up in a succession of pastiche showstoppers.
The ragtime "Doomed, Doomed, Doomed" is sung by the actress who plays Minerva, the schoolmarm from Ulysses' hometown, here doubling as a crazy lady scientist who assures Ulysses and his friends that not only is the modern world terrible, it's only going to get worse. LaTouche spoofs doomsday prophecies (all the rage in the '50s, from all corners) and blind faith that science, and in particular the Space Race, can save us. And note that we're still worrying about quite a few of the same things today, fifty years later:
The Golden Apple is an Americanized, musicalized version of Homer's Odyssey, and "Doomed, Doomed, Doomed" is part of the show's climactic series of Vaudeville turns: in successive numbers, characters from earlier in the show return as similar characters in the nightmarish city of Rhododendron, where Ulysses and his friends are corrupted and/or killed. Each number sheds some light on what's wrong with the modern world: "Scylla and Charybdis" are two stockbrokers who always do well no matter how many people's lives are ruined by their stock tips; "Calypso" is a society leech described as a "Nympho-megalo-ego-dipso-maniac," and the Sirens as hookers in fashionable Hawaiian garb singing "(By a) Goona-Goona (Lagoon)." The device probably influenced the similarly-structured climax of Stephen Sondheim's Follies, where the themes of the show are summed up in a succession of pastiche showstoppers.
The ragtime "Doomed, Doomed, Doomed" is sung by the actress who plays Minerva, the schoolmarm from Ulysses' hometown, here doubling as a crazy lady scientist who assures Ulysses and his friends that not only is the modern world terrible, it's only going to get worse. LaTouche spoofs doomsday prophecies (all the rage in the '50s, from all corners) and blind faith that science, and in particular the Space Race, can save us. And note that we're still worrying about quite a few of the same things today, fifty years later:
LADY SCIENTIST
I've prodded the atom to its foundation,
Cross-indexed the human mind,
Reduced the universe to an equation.
ALL
What, oh, what did you find?
LADY SCIENTIST
Oh, the polar cap is slowly expanding,
In a million years we'll freeze to death, I guess.
If the Ice Age hasn't floored us,
There's a planet heading toward us;
When it hits, we'll be an interstellar mess.
Oh, the continent is crumbling and dissolving,
As our rivers wash our topsoil out to sea.
And the land we can retrieve'll
Be devoured by pest and weevil,
And there won't be nothing left for you and me.
ALL
Oh, we're doomed, doomed, doomed,
Oh, we're doomed, doomed, doomed,
Oh, we're doomed to disappear without a trace.
For the solar system's cracking up,
The universe is slacking up,
And time is running out at a rather hectic pace.
Oh, we're doomed, doomed, doomed,
Oh, we're doomed, doomed, doomed,
Oh, we're doomed to disappear without a trace.
Because all of us are just
Little specks of cosmic dust,
Oh, it's doom, doom, doom for the well-known human race.
LADY SCIENTIST
To save our all-too human necks,
I've now invented Gadget X.
ALL
A gadget?
LADY SCIENTIST
A super gadget.
Now, just beyond the planet Mars
Is System Zero, lots of stars
Aglow there.
ALL
We ought to go there.
LADY SCIENTIST
So when destruction starts to fall,
Our Gadget X will save us all.
ALL
Our gadget?
LADY SCIENTIST
A super gadget!
Oh, it's effective, never fear.
Now, which of you will volunteer
To ride it?
I never tried it.
DOC
I will be a volunteer!
ALL
He will be a volunteer!
(Doc gets into Gadget X -- a rocket -- and is fired upwards and offstage.)
LADY SCIENTIST
It works! It works! It's plunging past time's track
In twenty seconds flat!
ULYSSES
But how is he gonna get back?
LADY SCIENTIST
Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I never thought of that.
Well.... back to work.
© 1954 by John LaTouche. All rights reserved.
Archival Survival
Am very slowly trying to work my way through some of the interviews from the Archive of American Television, now available on Google Video. The interviews are long, unedited and rambling, but if you're patient, they can provide the TV geek with plenty of stories, insights, and combinations thereof. Also, Google Video allows for keyword searches, so you can, with trial and error, locate the part of the interview that discusses the subject you're interested in.
I've been working my way through the interview with TV directing legend Jay Sandrich, chief director for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Soap," "The Cosby Show," and many pilots.
One of the pilots he did was the great but not-frequently-discussed "WKRP In Cincinnati," and fortunately the interviewer asks him about it. He doesn't have a lot to say about the show -- as he says, when he does a pilot he's only there for a week -- but he does talk about how "WKRP" was cast in a hurry. The original actor playing the part of Andy Travis was fired a week before taping started (unfortunately he doesn't name the original actor; he only states that he was let go because the creator, Hugh Wilson, didn't like his line readings). Gary Sandy got the part after a reading for MTM executives. Richard Libertini was supposed to play Dr. Johnny Fever, but pulled out, and Roddy McDowall proved unavailable for the part of station manager Mr. Carlson. Sandrich pulled two semi-regular actors off the cast of his show "Soap" to fill the roles: Howard Hesseman and Gordon Jump.
The interview with Sandrich's successor as sitcom directing king, James Burrows, has some good information on "Taxi," including confirming something that various "Simpsons" writers have said about James L. Brooks: he's able to pitch entire scenes, complete and perfect, off the top of his head. Burrows also mentions that he was impressed with the Charles Brothers on "Taxi" because they had the nerve to tell Brooks when he was wrong about something.
And so on. If you like trivia like that, welcome to the Archive. If you don't... I dunno, go enjoy the shows and don't think about behind-the-scenes trivia, you Philistine, you.
I've been working my way through the interview with TV directing legend Jay Sandrich, chief director for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Soap," "The Cosby Show," and many pilots.
One of the pilots he did was the great but not-frequently-discussed "WKRP In Cincinnati," and fortunately the interviewer asks him about it. He doesn't have a lot to say about the show -- as he says, when he does a pilot he's only there for a week -- but he does talk about how "WKRP" was cast in a hurry. The original actor playing the part of Andy Travis was fired a week before taping started (unfortunately he doesn't name the original actor; he only states that he was let go because the creator, Hugh Wilson, didn't like his line readings). Gary Sandy got the part after a reading for MTM executives. Richard Libertini was supposed to play Dr. Johnny Fever, but pulled out, and Roddy McDowall proved unavailable for the part of station manager Mr. Carlson. Sandrich pulled two semi-regular actors off the cast of his show "Soap" to fill the roles: Howard Hesseman and Gordon Jump.
The interview with Sandrich's successor as sitcom directing king, James Burrows, has some good information on "Taxi," including confirming something that various "Simpsons" writers have said about James L. Brooks: he's able to pitch entire scenes, complete and perfect, off the top of his head. Burrows also mentions that he was impressed with the Charles Brothers on "Taxi" because they had the nerve to tell Brooks when he was wrong about something.
And so on. If you like trivia like that, welcome to the Archive. If you don't... I dunno, go enjoy the shows and don't think about behind-the-scenes trivia, you Philistine, you.
Another Run
I missed this news item, but it appears that "The Love Boat" is being prepared for DVD release.
You don't need me to tell you about this (in short: Julie was on drugs, Captain Stuebing was bald, Vicki was annoying, Charro said "Coochie-Coochie" a lot, and no one really believes that Doc was popular with women). I will note that I never saw this show as a kid, and when I finally did encounter it, I was both appalled and fascinated by the look of it. It ran from 1977 to 1986, yet the staging, blocking, set design and above all the lighting made it look like it was filmed in the mid-'60s. It was like the crew from "Mr. Ed" moved over to a boat set.
The other notable thing about "The Love Boat" is that it has been the inspiration for countless easy pop-culture references in the last twenty years, particularly Isaac. You can basically assume that any comedy show with a scene on a boat will have an Isaac reference. A more creative version of this was on the show "Weird Science," where the characters are abducted by aliens, and are greeted by an alien holographic projection of Ted Lange:
You don't need me to tell you about this (in short: Julie was on drugs, Captain Stuebing was bald, Vicki was annoying, Charro said "Coochie-Coochie" a lot, and no one really believes that Doc was popular with women). I will note that I never saw this show as a kid, and when I finally did encounter it, I was both appalled and fascinated by the look of it. It ran from 1977 to 1986, yet the staging, blocking, set design and above all the lighting made it look like it was filmed in the mid-'60s. It was like the crew from "Mr. Ed" moved over to a boat set.
The other notable thing about "The Love Boat" is that it has been the inspiration for countless easy pop-culture references in the last twenty years, particularly Isaac. You can basically assume that any comedy show with a scene on a boat will have an Isaac reference. A more creative version of this was on the show "Weird Science," where the characters are abducted by aliens, and are greeted by an alien holographic projection of Ted Lange:
ISAAC (Ted Lange): Now who's up for a little shopping excursion into Puerto Vallarta?
CHETT (Lee Tergesen): Which Puerto Vallarta would that be, my man? The one with the dissection tables and the butt-probe? Thanks, but I've been there and it was no day at the beach!!!
Monday, November 07, 2005
Some Really Bad Lyrics From SNOOPY!!!
Snoopy!!! The Musical, a follow-up to the hugely successful You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, has never achieved anything like the success of its predecessor, and didn't really deserve to. In fact, Snoopy!!!! is primarily notable as a test case for the way a similar approach and similar material can produce two very different results.
Snoopy!!! had the same producer as You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Arthur Whitelaw. It used the same format: a bunch of sketches with dialogue taken directly from the Peanuts comic strip; songs based on situations from the strip; adults playing the children and Snoopy (and in this case, Woodstock too, a non-speaking role); minimal scenery. The composer-lyricist of You're a Good Man, Clark Gesner, didn't participate, but the songwriters hired for the show were quite a bit more talented than Gesner: composer Larry Grossman and lyricist Hal Hackady are best known to Broadway buffs for cult flops like Minnie's Boys and Goodtime Charley, and Grossman was one of the most talented melodists of his generation, though he never managed to associate himself with a genuine hit musical (he did win Emmys for writing songs for "The Muppet Show," though).
But You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown is a funny, unique and affecting show, and Snoopy!!! is kind of a mess. As far as I can see it got one big thing wrong and two little things wrong. The big problem was that a show focusing on Snoopy is not as emotionally satisfying as a show focusing on Charlie Brown. Snoopy is a more limited character than Charlie Brown, and he doesn't interact much with any of the characters except the even more limited Woodstock. So instead of the situations from You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which add up to a realistic "day in the life" of the central character, Snoopy!!! becomes a series of wacky sketches based on strips that weren't Schulz's best work anyway (Woodstock falls in love with a worm, and so forth).
Second, the songwriters made the very basic mistake of basing many of their songs directly on individual Schulz strips. There's a song based on the famous "looking at clouds" strip (the one where Charlie Brown is going to say he saw a ducky and a horsie, but changes his mind); a musicalized version of Snoopy's "dark and stormy night" novel; a song based on the strip where Charlie Brown wants to be called "Poor Sweet Baby"; the London version of the show has a song that takes one panel of Peppermint Patty saying "Hurry up, face!" and repeats that theme for three minutes.
None of these songs add anything to the strips they're based on, and therefore they sound like retreads of stuff we already know about the characters. Clark Gesner wasn't much of a craftsman as a composer or a lyricist, but he found exactly the right way to write for the characters: create songs and musical scenes based on broad themes connected with the strip (failure at baseball, trying to fly a kite) but without any direct quotes from or references to Schulz strips: the songs are where you go to expand upon the strips, not quote them the way they're quoted in all the dialogue.
Grossman and Hackady were good songwriters and they did come up with a few good songs (the musical scene "Edgar Allan Poe" is funny, and songs like "Don't Be Anything Less Than Anything You Can Be" are catchy albeit generic). It does seem, though, like they never really "got" the material the way Gesner did. Their attempts at writing emotional songs for the characters are downright embarrassing. Gesner, drawing on but not re-hashing the strip, found the perfect theme song for "Peanuts": "Happiness," a song about taking pleasure in the little everyday things in life. The same spot in Snoopy!!! is occupied by a maudlin song called "(If) Just One Person (Believes In You)," whose sentimentality and facile, unearned optimism goes against everything the strip stood for in its prime. Not to mention that the lyrics include an unintentionally funny line (at least, I hope it's unintentional), italics mine:
The song goes on to tell you that if just one person believes in you, soon many, many people will believe in you, and then "maybe even you will believe in you too." It's hard to get that message from Schulz's strip, where nobody believes in anybody, and least of all themselves.
So that's Snoopy!!!: more evidence that one-of-a-kind successes are hard to duplicate -- particularly if the creative team doesn't fully understand what went into the original success.
Snoopy!!! had the same producer as You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Arthur Whitelaw. It used the same format: a bunch of sketches with dialogue taken directly from the Peanuts comic strip; songs based on situations from the strip; adults playing the children and Snoopy (and in this case, Woodstock too, a non-speaking role); minimal scenery. The composer-lyricist of You're a Good Man, Clark Gesner, didn't participate, but the songwriters hired for the show were quite a bit more talented than Gesner: composer Larry Grossman and lyricist Hal Hackady are best known to Broadway buffs for cult flops like Minnie's Boys and Goodtime Charley, and Grossman was one of the most talented melodists of his generation, though he never managed to associate himself with a genuine hit musical (he did win Emmys for writing songs for "The Muppet Show," though).
But You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown is a funny, unique and affecting show, and Snoopy!!! is kind of a mess. As far as I can see it got one big thing wrong and two little things wrong. The big problem was that a show focusing on Snoopy is not as emotionally satisfying as a show focusing on Charlie Brown. Snoopy is a more limited character than Charlie Brown, and he doesn't interact much with any of the characters except the even more limited Woodstock. So instead of the situations from You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which add up to a realistic "day in the life" of the central character, Snoopy!!! becomes a series of wacky sketches based on strips that weren't Schulz's best work anyway (Woodstock falls in love with a worm, and so forth).
Second, the songwriters made the very basic mistake of basing many of their songs directly on individual Schulz strips. There's a song based on the famous "looking at clouds" strip (the one where Charlie Brown is going to say he saw a ducky and a horsie, but changes his mind); a musicalized version of Snoopy's "dark and stormy night" novel; a song based on the strip where Charlie Brown wants to be called "Poor Sweet Baby"; the London version of the show has a song that takes one panel of Peppermint Patty saying "Hurry up, face!" and repeats that theme for three minutes.
None of these songs add anything to the strips they're based on, and therefore they sound like retreads of stuff we already know about the characters. Clark Gesner wasn't much of a craftsman as a composer or a lyricist, but he found exactly the right way to write for the characters: create songs and musical scenes based on broad themes connected with the strip (failure at baseball, trying to fly a kite) but without any direct quotes from or references to Schulz strips: the songs are where you go to expand upon the strips, not quote them the way they're quoted in all the dialogue.
Grossman and Hackady were good songwriters and they did come up with a few good songs (the musical scene "Edgar Allan Poe" is funny, and songs like "Don't Be Anything Less Than Anything You Can Be" are catchy albeit generic). It does seem, though, like they never really "got" the material the way Gesner did. Their attempts at writing emotional songs for the characters are downright embarrassing. Gesner, drawing on but not re-hashing the strip, found the perfect theme song for "Peanuts": "Happiness," a song about taking pleasure in the little everyday things in life. The same spot in Snoopy!!! is occupied by a maudlin song called "(If) Just One Person (Believes In You)," whose sentimentality and facile, unearned optimism goes against everything the strip stood for in its prime. Not to mention that the lyrics include an unintentionally funny line (at least, I hope it's unintentional), italics mine:
If just one person believes in you,
Deep enough and strong enough,
Believes in you,
Hard enough and long enough....
The song goes on to tell you that if just one person believes in you, soon many, many people will believe in you, and then "maybe even you will believe in you too." It's hard to get that message from Schulz's strip, where nobody believes in anybody, and least of all themselves.
So that's Snoopy!!!: more evidence that one-of-a-kind successes are hard to duplicate -- particularly if the creative team doesn't fully understand what went into the original success.
This Sucks, Huh-Huh
Those of you considering buying the new Beavis and Butt-Head Collection should be warned that five of the cartoons are apparently cut (the missing footage was intact on previous DVDs released through Time-Life). More detail in the Amazon customer reviews.
The best part of the set is the bonus disc, with the eleven music videos that they were able to clear for DVD release -- the videos, as everyone seems to agree, were the best part -- promos, and a pretty good talking-heads documentary with Mike Judge, director Yvette Kaplan, and others. Oddly enough, this doesn't seem to have the original Beavis and Butt-Head short, "Frog Baseball," just as the new Office Space DVD doesn't have the animated shorts where the Milton character first appeared. More rights issues, maybe?
Beavis and Butt-Head are so much a part of their time and place that no DVD collection can really do them justice, anyway; you had to be there, back when it was unusual to do such a politically-incorrect show (today, of course, anti-PC is so common that being against political correctness is in itself the new political correctness), back when it seemed so crazy and subversive for MTV to do a show mocking its own target audience as brain-dead losers. Now, Beavis and Butt-Head cartoons are still funny, but they seem more like descendants of the cartoon shorts of the '50s and '60s, mini-adventures where the heroes get involved in a wacky situation and make a mess of everything. They're like Yogi and Boo-Boo for the MTV generation.
The best part of the set is the bonus disc, with the eleven music videos that they were able to clear for DVD release -- the videos, as everyone seems to agree, were the best part -- promos, and a pretty good talking-heads documentary with Mike Judge, director Yvette Kaplan, and others. Oddly enough, this doesn't seem to have the original Beavis and Butt-Head short, "Frog Baseball," just as the new Office Space DVD doesn't have the animated shorts where the Milton character first appeared. More rights issues, maybe?
Beavis and Butt-Head are so much a part of their time and place that no DVD collection can really do them justice, anyway; you had to be there, back when it was unusual to do such a politically-incorrect show (today, of course, anti-PC is so common that being against political correctness is in itself the new political correctness), back when it seemed so crazy and subversive for MTV to do a show mocking its own target audience as brain-dead losers. Now, Beavis and Butt-Head cartoons are still funny, but they seem more like descendants of the cartoon shorts of the '50s and '60s, mini-adventures where the heroes get involved in a wacky situation and make a mess of everything. They're like Yogi and Boo-Boo for the MTV generation.
The Chicago School
Also from Platypus Comix is an interesting interview with animator Jon McClenahan, founder of the Chicago animation studio StarToons, and animator and director for some of the best episodes of "Tiny Toons" and "Animaniacs."
Part one is about his work with overseas studios; Part 2 is mostly about how he got started on "Tiny Toons," Part 3 is more about his work for Warner Brothers, and the site promises that soon we'll get a Part 4 dealing with his "Animaniacs" work.
StarToons, one of the few American studios that did animation production on an American TV series (usually the actual animation is produced overseas), eventually included quite a few excellent young animators, including Spike Brandt, Tony Cervone, Neal Sternecky, and for about a month, Genndy Tartakovsky (who quit when he realized that "we weren't trying to emulate John K[ricfalusi]'s style"). McClenahan was probably the best animator at his own studio, and his animation for "Tiny Toons" and "Animaniacs" was some of the best TV animation I've seen. His animation style is aptly described at that webpage as "bouncy"; his characters don't move fluidly (though there were some animators at StarToons who animated that way, like Sternecky) but instead have very pronounced, sort of rhythmically jerky movement with a lot of humor and precise responses to the situation. He also drew characters much chubbier and rounder than most animators did, and had a fondness for drawing very broad facial expressions, like this one where Buster Bunny's eyes come almost semi-detatched from his head:
The interview has some good information on various aspects of his animation career and on some of the people he worked with, like the writers and directors on "Tiny Toons":
There's also some information on the best episode of "Tiny Toons," a season 3 episode called "ThirteenSomething," on which he directed and animated many of the best scenes, including "the 108 foot (1 minute, 12 seconds without a cut) split-screen phone conversation between Buster and Babs, who both really missed each other."
Part one is about his work with overseas studios; Part 2 is mostly about how he got started on "Tiny Toons," Part 3 is more about his work for Warner Brothers, and the site promises that soon we'll get a Part 4 dealing with his "Animaniacs" work.
StarToons, one of the few American studios that did animation production on an American TV series (usually the actual animation is produced overseas), eventually included quite a few excellent young animators, including Spike Brandt, Tony Cervone, Neal Sternecky, and for about a month, Genndy Tartakovsky (who quit when he realized that "we weren't trying to emulate John K[ricfalusi]'s style"). McClenahan was probably the best animator at his own studio, and his animation for "Tiny Toons" and "Animaniacs" was some of the best TV animation I've seen. His animation style is aptly described at that webpage as "bouncy"; his characters don't move fluidly (though there were some animators at StarToons who animated that way, like Sternecky) but instead have very pronounced, sort of rhythmically jerky movement with a lot of humor and precise responses to the situation. He also drew characters much chubbier and rounder than most animators did, and had a fondness for drawing very broad facial expressions, like this one where Buster Bunny's eyes come almost semi-detatched from his head:
The interview has some good information on various aspects of his animation career and on some of the people he worked with, like the writers and directors on "Tiny Toons":
There was a marked & somewhat hostile division between the writers and the staff animation directors (guys like Ken Boyer, Rich Arons, & Rusty Mills). When we first got the contract for 'Henny Youngman Day', they flew me out to LA to discuss it with them, and Tom & Sherri were very nice and handed me the script and then introduced me to Boyer and some of his guys, and we went into a conference room, and the directors all started saying things like, "Well, this is a pile of crap" and "We're going to have to cut this and cut that and" and "we'll just re-write all this stuff when we do the boards." I was surprised because for the most part I thought it was all pretty good, and I didn't see any reason most of the stuff they hated wouldn't be good & funny, but I figured I'm the new kid on the block, so I didn't say much. They all took notes and we broke up.
Then I went on a tour of the facilities, and about five minutes later, I heard a page over the loudspeaker system: "Jon McClenahan, please come to Tom Ruegger's office immediately." So I hustled back to Ruegger's office, and Stoner was in there breathing heavily with her arms crossed and a scowl on her face, and Ruegger was like, "Jon, let me ask you something: what the hell do you think you're doing?" I had no idea what he was talking about, so he pushed the notes toward me and said, "Well, these changes are just unacceptable, but go ahead and explain to me why you don't like them." I said, "Tom, frankly, I'm happy with the script as is. I was just going by the advice of your other directors." Tom & Sherri looked at each other, and then looked at me and said, "Well YOU'RE directing this one, not them." In other words, they wanted their script left intact. Seems like I had been set up by the staff guys - I had no idea there was this hostility going on.
There's also some information on the best episode of "Tiny Toons," a season 3 episode called "ThirteenSomething," on which he directed and animated many of the best scenes, including "the 108 foot (1 minute, 12 seconds without a cut) split-screen phone conversation between Buster and Babs, who both really missed each other."
Sunday, November 06, 2005
The Worst Cartoon Show of All Time?
Platypus Comix says it's "The Mork and Mindy-Laverne and Shirley-Fonz Super Hour". Sounds about right to me.
Though around the same time, Hanna-Barbera was reportedly asked to make a "WKRP In Cincinnati" cartoon series with all the characters as dogs. The plan was abandoned when "WKRP" was moved to a low-rated time slot, but that might have been worse than Laverne and Shirley in the army or even the animated version of Punky Brewster.
Though around the same time, Hanna-Barbera was reportedly asked to make a "WKRP In Cincinnati" cartoon series with all the characters as dogs. The plan was abandoned when "WKRP" was moved to a low-rated time slot, but that might have been worse than Laverne and Shirley in the army or even the animated version of Punky Brewster.
Yes, I Cantor
I've always liked the recordings of Eddie Cantor, and in some ways I think his taste in songs was better than that of his rival, Al Jolson; Jolson's megalomania meant he had to be more important than the song, whereas Cantor introduced or popularized quite a few songs that still hold up on their own as classics ("Makin' Whoopee," "Margie," "If You Knew Susie," "You'd Be Surprised," "My Baby Just Cares For Me").
What I find odd about Cantor's taste in songs is that the majority of his songs are set up in such a way as to be about someone other than him. We now expect a popular singer to sing songs that express what he or she is feeling: I love you, I hate you, I'm glad, I'm sad. That's what Jolson usually did; he picked and sang songs about missing his mammy or being down on his knee, sonny boy. But Cantor's songs are often "story" songs, where he is telling you the story of someone else ("Makin' Whoopee" is about other people's marriages, sung from the perspective of a happy bachelor). And where they're not stories, they're often put into the mouth of someone other than himself: the verse will tell us what someone else -- not him -- said, and the refrain will be quoting that someone else.
To show you what I mean, here are some introductory verses from songs that Cantor either introduced or popularized:
I realize that framing devices and story songs were very common in popular music in Cantor's time, but still, his reticence -- his apparent unwillingness to pick songs where he would express a feeling directly, rather than framing it as the words of somebody else -- seems unusual for a popular singer. It might explain why he doesn't have the same profile Jolson does; Jolson had his problems as a singer, but emotional reticence wasn't one of them.
What I find odd about Cantor's taste in songs is that the majority of his songs are set up in such a way as to be about someone other than him. We now expect a popular singer to sing songs that express what he or she is feeling: I love you, I hate you, I'm glad, I'm sad. That's what Jolson usually did; he picked and sang songs about missing his mammy or being down on his knee, sonny boy. But Cantor's songs are often "story" songs, where he is telling you the story of someone else ("Makin' Whoopee" is about other people's marriages, sung from the perspective of a happy bachelor). And where they're not stories, they're often put into the mouth of someone other than himself: the verse will tell us what someone else -- not him -- said, and the refrain will be quoting that someone else.
To show you what I mean, here are some introductory verses from songs that Cantor either introduced or popularized:
You can talk about your love affairs,
Here's one I must tell to you;
All night long they sit upon the stairs,
He holds her close and starts to coo:
("Margie")
I know a couple of newlyweds,
They've been newlyweds for years,
Just a pair of spooners,
Sunny honeymooners.
This happy couple lives next to me
And it's music to my ears
When after ev'ry kiss
I hear him saying this:
("Okay, Toots")
I was strolling out one evening
By the silvery moon,
I could hear somebody singing
A familiar tune.
So I stopped a while to listen,
Not a word I wanted to miss.
It was just somebody serenading
Something like this:
("Mandy")
What's the greatest problem now throughout the land?
What's the only problem needs a helping hand?
It isn't Prohibition or farm relief, I find;
It's something more important now on ev'rybody's mind.
Just walk into any home today,
It's ten to one you'll hear each husband say:
("My Wife is on a Diet")
I realize that framing devices and story songs were very common in popular music in Cantor's time, but still, his reticence -- his apparent unwillingness to pick songs where he would express a feeling directly, rather than framing it as the words of somebody else -- seems unusual for a popular singer. It might explain why he doesn't have the same profile Jolson does; Jolson had his problems as a singer, but emotional reticence wasn't one of them.
A Show That I Didn't Think Actually Existed
Apparently "Willo The Wisp" was a real show. I wasn't completely sure.
When I was a kid, TV Ontario, Ontario's public TV network (and a very good one, at that, though they're not as good now as they used to be) used to show a lot of cartoons imported from overseas, especially England. One of them was "Willo The Wisp," which is well-described at the review above; the star voice actor, Kenneth Williams, was best known from the "Carry On" movies. But the thing most people remember about it was Evil Edna, the talking television set.
The only episode I remember very strongly is the one where the residents of Doyley Wood discover that Evil Edna has turned Mavis, the overweight fairy, into a tree. (Subliminal message to kids: TV will turn you sedentary.) Edna refuses to turn her back, and no one can figure out what to do, until Arthur, the caterpillar, meets a travelling salesman named Mr. Wand ("Now there's a name to conjure with!"). Arthur isn't interested in any of Mr. Wand's products except an "electronic miracle": a video-game set that you hook up to a television set to play Pong.
Arthur buys the "electronic miracle" and hooks it up to Edna while she sleeps. When she wakes up, Arthur switches on the video set and Edna's face starts to display the two lines hitting a dot back and forth. "It's just a bit of magic," says Arthur. "I've turned you into a game of tennis." Edna agrees to turn Mavis back to normal in return for being unhooked from the video game. The end.
Now, where's "Dr. Snuggles?"
When I was a kid, TV Ontario, Ontario's public TV network (and a very good one, at that, though they're not as good now as they used to be) used to show a lot of cartoons imported from overseas, especially England. One of them was "Willo The Wisp," which is well-described at the review above; the star voice actor, Kenneth Williams, was best known from the "Carry On" movies. But the thing most people remember about it was Evil Edna, the talking television set.
The only episode I remember very strongly is the one where the residents of Doyley Wood discover that Evil Edna has turned Mavis, the overweight fairy, into a tree. (Subliminal message to kids: TV will turn you sedentary.) Edna refuses to turn her back, and no one can figure out what to do, until Arthur, the caterpillar, meets a travelling salesman named Mr. Wand ("Now there's a name to conjure with!"). Arthur isn't interested in any of Mr. Wand's products except an "electronic miracle": a video-game set that you hook up to a television set to play Pong.
Arthur buys the "electronic miracle" and hooks it up to Edna while she sleeps. When she wakes up, Arthur switches on the video set and Edna's face starts to display the two lines hitting a dot back and forth. "It's just a bit of magic," says Arthur. "I've turned you into a game of tennis." Edna agrees to turn Mavis back to normal in return for being unhooked from the video game. The end.
Now, where's "Dr. Snuggles?"
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Wholesome Fetishists
I feel a little embarrassed bringing this up, but one of the least-known but longest-running sites devoted to old movies -- it's been around since the late '90s, I think -- is "!WOm!WAm! WOMEN Doing Things To Men", an anonymously-created site of stills and video captures from movies and TV shows of the '50s and '60s. The theme.... well, I'll let the webmaster describe it:
Basically the site examines, in terrifying detail, the fetishistic and outright weird content that became a standard part of popular culture (not only American, but British and Italian) in the '50s and, especially, the '60s.
As the '50s wore on, popular culture became more sexualized, but the taboos against overt portrayals of sex were still fairly strong, and outright nudity was not usually acceptable. So a strange hybrid started to take over pop culture, where you'd get absurdly sexualized material within what was supposed to be a "wholesome" piece of family entertainment. Think of The Dean Martin Show, or Ann Margret in Bye Bye Birdie playing a wholesome teenager as if she were a nymphomaniac, or Joey Heatherton on Bob Hope specials more or less stripping for the troops. Think of "Batman," a family show where every episode featured a good-looking woman in a cartoonily sexy costume; think of The Pleasure Seekers, a remake of Three Coins in the Fountain where the three girls abroad spend most of the movie in their underwear. It was a strange, strange time.
As I said, I'm a little embarrassed about linking to that site, because it does seem to be basically a fetish site, and some of the captions... well... let's say their interpretation of the movies can be kind of direct. Still, it's got pictures from just about everything, including a lot of movies and TV episodes that will probably never be available on DVD.
The webmaster writes at one point that Frank Tashlin is "the most represented director in this survey." I can believe it; as I wrote in my last post, Tashlin was incapable of getting through a movie without putting his heroine into a wholesomely fetishistic costume. The most famous is still Shirley MacLaine's Bat Lady costume in Artists and Models, see below, but the ultimate Tashlin scene (amazingly not represented on that site), is the number "A Day in the Country" (or "A Couple of Travelling Guys") in Hollywood or Bust.
In the "Day in the Country" number, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis drive through the countryside singing and waving to people they pass; the scene is (by Tashlin's own admission) a takeoff on the "Beyond the Blue Horizon" number in Lubitsch's Monte Carlo, except that this time, every single person Dean and Jerry wave to is a sexy chorus girl in a skimpy "farmer's daughter" outfit. I wish I could post screen captures of that scene, because it's almost impossible to describe what a strange scene it is: a combination of Playboy leering with family-fun wholesomeness. So are the credits of Hollywood Or Bust, where every credit is accompanied by a shot of Anita Ekberg in a different cheesekake pose. Tashlin had already done the same thing in the credits of Artists and Models, and he would continue this sort of thing right up through putting Doris Day in a mermaid outfit in The Glass Bottom Boat. He was a strange fellow.
In his best movies, and Hollywood or Bust is one of the best, Tashlin actually makes this combination work without coming off as sleazy or sexist, unlike most of the wholesomely fetishistic entertainment of the era. But that's why Tashlin was a genius and the producers of "The Dean Martin Show" were not.
Update: Here are some lobby cards from Hollywood or Bust that give at least a vague idea of Tashlin's weirdness; a still from the "Day in the Country" number is the second card on the right, and other scenes represented include Jerry pushing Anita Ekberg into a pool, which may have inspired her famous dunking in that exemplar of PG-rated fetishism, La Dolce Vita.
Update # 2: Here's the complete "A Day in the Country" number:
And another wholesomely fetishistic Tashlin scene, from Artists and Models with Dorothy Malone and Shirley MacLaine:
This site is a nonprofit Research & Review Reference studying male sexual fetishes in popular media during the 1950s/60s that feature scenes depicting 2 broad types of phenomena:
WOm: Women Overwhelming men
WAm: Women Attacking men
Basically the site examines, in terrifying detail, the fetishistic and outright weird content that became a standard part of popular culture (not only American, but British and Italian) in the '50s and, especially, the '60s.
As the '50s wore on, popular culture became more sexualized, but the taboos against overt portrayals of sex were still fairly strong, and outright nudity was not usually acceptable. So a strange hybrid started to take over pop culture, where you'd get absurdly sexualized material within what was supposed to be a "wholesome" piece of family entertainment. Think of The Dean Martin Show, or Ann Margret in Bye Bye Birdie playing a wholesome teenager as if she were a nymphomaniac, or Joey Heatherton on Bob Hope specials more or less stripping for the troops. Think of "Batman," a family show where every episode featured a good-looking woman in a cartoonily sexy costume; think of The Pleasure Seekers, a remake of Three Coins in the Fountain where the three girls abroad spend most of the movie in their underwear. It was a strange, strange time.
As I said, I'm a little embarrassed about linking to that site, because it does seem to be basically a fetish site, and some of the captions... well... let's say their interpretation of the movies can be kind of direct. Still, it's got pictures from just about everything, including a lot of movies and TV episodes that will probably never be available on DVD.
The webmaster writes at one point that Frank Tashlin is "the most represented director in this survey." I can believe it; as I wrote in my last post, Tashlin was incapable of getting through a movie without putting his heroine into a wholesomely fetishistic costume. The most famous is still Shirley MacLaine's Bat Lady costume in Artists and Models, see below, but the ultimate Tashlin scene (amazingly not represented on that site), is the number "A Day in the Country" (or "A Couple of Travelling Guys") in Hollywood or Bust.
In the "Day in the Country" number, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis drive through the countryside singing and waving to people they pass; the scene is (by Tashlin's own admission) a takeoff on the "Beyond the Blue Horizon" number in Lubitsch's Monte Carlo, except that this time, every single person Dean and Jerry wave to is a sexy chorus girl in a skimpy "farmer's daughter" outfit. I wish I could post screen captures of that scene, because it's almost impossible to describe what a strange scene it is: a combination of Playboy leering with family-fun wholesomeness. So are the credits of Hollywood Or Bust, where every credit is accompanied by a shot of Anita Ekberg in a different cheesekake pose. Tashlin had already done the same thing in the credits of Artists and Models, and he would continue this sort of thing right up through putting Doris Day in a mermaid outfit in The Glass Bottom Boat. He was a strange fellow.
In his best movies, and Hollywood or Bust is one of the best, Tashlin actually makes this combination work without coming off as sleazy or sexist, unlike most of the wholesomely fetishistic entertainment of the era. But that's why Tashlin was a genius and the producers of "The Dean Martin Show" were not.
Update: Here are some lobby cards from Hollywood or Bust that give at least a vague idea of Tashlin's weirdness; a still from the "Day in the Country" number is the second card on the right, and other scenes represented include Jerry pushing Anita Ekberg into a pool, which may have inspired her famous dunking in that exemplar of PG-rated fetishism, La Dolce Vita.
Update # 2: Here's the complete "A Day in the Country" number:
And another wholesomely fetishistic Tashlin scene, from Artists and Models with Dorothy Malone and Shirley MacLaine:
There's No Bat Lady, There's No Fat Lady
Via Mark Evanier, I only just found out that Jerry Lewis has published a book about his partnership with Dean Martin. (I've really got to stop following political crap and start keeping up to speed on the stuff that matters.)
Martin and Lewis, as a team, are still fascinating, perhaps more fascinating than funny. The continued fascination with them is pretty clear from books and movies like "Where the Truth Lies," or the many parodies of their 1976 Sinatra-hosted reunion. But they never left much of a comedy legacy, as a team, because the quality that made them famous -- unpredictability -- couldn't be carried over into their movies.
The critic Andrew Sarris wrote that while Martin and Lewis weren't at their best in any of their movies, when they were at their best -- in some of their live stage appearances -- they had "a marvelous tension about them." That "tension," I think, derived from the thing that made their partnership unique, and the thing that ultimately drove them apart: they were a rare case of two complete talents working as a comedy team. (You could make a case for Crosby and Hope, but they weren't really a team outside of the relatively few "Road" movies; they were occasional co-stars, not a comedy team.) Comedy teams, especially two-man comedy teams, are usually made up of complementary talents: two guys who are not necessarily star material on their own, but who gain star quality by the way they combine, the way each supplies qualities the other doesn't have.
Martin and Lewis weren't like that: they clearly had what it took to be stars on their own, as in fact they did become stars on their own. Each one had the kind of diverse talents, not to mention the desire to be the center of attention, that one associates with solo stars, yet they were working as a team. And a Martin and Lewis routine wasn't really teamwork, but competition: instead of working in synch they seemed to be trying to upstage each other, jockeying for the audience's attention. Their trademark routine had Martin trying to do a solo song and Lewis interrupting him with what amounts to a solo comedy act: they're not working together but working against each other. The fascination of Martin and Lewis, really, was wondering how these two massive talents and massive egos could possibly share the stage.
Most of their films were either remakes of earlier comedy films (The Ghost Breakers remade as Scared Stiff; Nothing Sacred remade as Living It Up with Jerry in the Carole Lombard role) or films that might just as well have been remakes. They all have their moments, as any movie would have with two gifted entertainers in their prime, but the only Martin/Lewis movies I'm a big fan of are their two with Frank Tashlin, Artists and Models and Hollywood Or Bust. Yet Martin and Lewis were already on the outs when they made these films, and they're not really at their best; they're great Tashlin films, not great Martin/Lewis films.
Most people who've seen Artists and Models remember a couple of Martin and Lewis routines -- mainly the "bat lady, fat lady" scene that is almost impossible to transcribe. But mostly they remember the comic book publisher's rant about the necessity of blood in comic books, or George "Foghorn" Winslow as the child corrupted by comic books, or Shirley MacLaine practically beating up Jerry as she reprises Dean's "Innamorata" song, or Tashlin's satire of American popular culture, or Tashlin's longstanding obsession with putting his female characters into fetishistic costumes. The final scene, with Martin, Lewis, MacLaine and Dorothy Malone, makes it pretty clear where Tashlin's interests lie, and it ain't with Martin and Lewis:
And so even though Martin and Lewis were huge talents, their most interesting movies, as a team, are only tangentially about them. It's hard to imagine what kind of movie could have made really good use of their qualities as a team. But it might have helped them to do a movie like Crosby and Hope's "Road" pictures where they were actually competing with each other -- incorporate some of their trademark competitiveness into the movie, instead of always having Jerry be Dean's loyal friend.
Martin and Lewis, as a team, are still fascinating, perhaps more fascinating than funny. The continued fascination with them is pretty clear from books and movies like "Where the Truth Lies," or the many parodies of their 1976 Sinatra-hosted reunion. But they never left much of a comedy legacy, as a team, because the quality that made them famous -- unpredictability -- couldn't be carried over into their movies.
The critic Andrew Sarris wrote that while Martin and Lewis weren't at their best in any of their movies, when they were at their best -- in some of their live stage appearances -- they had "a marvelous tension about them." That "tension," I think, derived from the thing that made their partnership unique, and the thing that ultimately drove them apart: they were a rare case of two complete talents working as a comedy team. (You could make a case for Crosby and Hope, but they weren't really a team outside of the relatively few "Road" movies; they were occasional co-stars, not a comedy team.) Comedy teams, especially two-man comedy teams, are usually made up of complementary talents: two guys who are not necessarily star material on their own, but who gain star quality by the way they combine, the way each supplies qualities the other doesn't have.
Martin and Lewis weren't like that: they clearly had what it took to be stars on their own, as in fact they did become stars on their own. Each one had the kind of diverse talents, not to mention the desire to be the center of attention, that one associates with solo stars, yet they were working as a team. And a Martin and Lewis routine wasn't really teamwork, but competition: instead of working in synch they seemed to be trying to upstage each other, jockeying for the audience's attention. Their trademark routine had Martin trying to do a solo song and Lewis interrupting him with what amounts to a solo comedy act: they're not working together but working against each other. The fascination of Martin and Lewis, really, was wondering how these two massive talents and massive egos could possibly share the stage.
Most of their films were either remakes of earlier comedy films (The Ghost Breakers remade as Scared Stiff; Nothing Sacred remade as Living It Up with Jerry in the Carole Lombard role) or films that might just as well have been remakes. They all have their moments, as any movie would have with two gifted entertainers in their prime, but the only Martin/Lewis movies I'm a big fan of are their two with Frank Tashlin, Artists and Models and Hollywood Or Bust. Yet Martin and Lewis were already on the outs when they made these films, and they're not really at their best; they're great Tashlin films, not great Martin/Lewis films.
Most people who've seen Artists and Models remember a couple of Martin and Lewis routines -- mainly the "bat lady, fat lady" scene that is almost impossible to transcribe. But mostly they remember the comic book publisher's rant about the necessity of blood in comic books, or George "Foghorn" Winslow as the child corrupted by comic books, or Shirley MacLaine practically beating up Jerry as she reprises Dean's "Innamorata" song, or Tashlin's satire of American popular culture, or Tashlin's longstanding obsession with putting his female characters into fetishistic costumes. The final scene, with Martin, Lewis, MacLaine and Dorothy Malone, makes it pretty clear where Tashlin's interests lie, and it ain't with Martin and Lewis:
And so even though Martin and Lewis were huge talents, their most interesting movies, as a team, are only tangentially about them. It's hard to imagine what kind of movie could have made really good use of their qualities as a team. But it might have helped them to do a movie like Crosby and Hope's "Road" pictures where they were actually competing with each other -- incorporate some of their trademark competitiveness into the movie, instead of always having Jerry be Dean's loyal friend.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Favorite Comedy Lines
Since I'm always talking about my theory that the best comedy lines are often the ones that don't look like jokes on the page, I thought I'd demonstrate how that theory works out in practice, by nominating ten of the lines of movie dialogue that I consider among the funniest ever. In another mood, of course, I could pick ten others, but here are ten that always, always, always make me laugh, even though they don't look like much, or indeed like jokes, out of context.
All these lines share the basic trait of a great comedy line: mention them to anyone who's seen the movie, and they will laugh; mention them out of context, and they make little sense. With that in mind, I'll take them out of context anyway, and encourage others to mention their own favorite not-funny-out-of-context lines:
1. "I was wondering, could you possibly see an older woman in the part?" -- Constance Collier, Stage Door
2. "Everyone will say anarchists can't spell." -- uncredited anarchist, Jules and Jim
3. "Duck, Magnum, duck!" -- Julie Brown, Earth Girls Are Easy
4. "You'd better go, Gilda, to Tarzan." -- Gary Cooper, Design For Living.
5. "Wait! This is Boomerang. This is Boomerang." -- Zero Mostel, The Producers (the script has the repetition written in; "This is Boomerang wouldn't be funny if he said it only once)
6. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling." -- John Barrymore, Twentieth Century (Runner-up: "Anathema! Child of Satan!")
7. "You tell Daddy I'm off to the U.S.S.R. That's short for Russia." -- Pamela Tiffin, One, Two, Three
8. "Souvenirs, novelties, party tricks." -- Ian McNeice, Top Secret!
9. "Aw, I'm not gonna hurt him." -- John Wayne, Rio Bravo
10. "Remember what Napoleon said before he went to Elba: 'So long.'" -- Maurice Chevalier, The Smiling Lieutenant
All these lines share the basic trait of a great comedy line: mention them to anyone who's seen the movie, and they will laugh; mention them out of context, and they make little sense. With that in mind, I'll take them out of context anyway, and encourage others to mention their own favorite not-funny-out-of-context lines:
1. "I was wondering, could you possibly see an older woman in the part?" -- Constance Collier, Stage Door
2. "Everyone will say anarchists can't spell." -- uncredited anarchist, Jules and Jim
3. "Duck, Magnum, duck!" -- Julie Brown, Earth Girls Are Easy
4. "You'd better go, Gilda, to Tarzan." -- Gary Cooper, Design For Living.
5. "Wait! This is Boomerang. This is Boomerang." -- Zero Mostel, The Producers (the script has the repetition written in; "This is Boomerang wouldn't be funny if he said it only once)
6. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling." -- John Barrymore, Twentieth Century (Runner-up: "Anathema! Child of Satan!")
7. "You tell Daddy I'm off to the U.S.S.R. That's short for Russia." -- Pamela Tiffin, One, Two, Three
8. "Souvenirs, novelties, party tricks." -- Ian McNeice, Top Secret!
9. "Aw, I'm not gonna hurt him." -- John Wayne, Rio Bravo
10. "Remember what Napoleon said before he went to Elba: 'So long.'" -- Maurice Chevalier, The Smiling Lieutenant
Thursday, November 03, 2005
More Lyrics I Like
I quote too many Yip Harburg lyrics, but the song "Napoleon," from Jamaica (music by Harold Arlen) has been going through my head lately. It's not very well-known, perhaps because many of the products it refers to don't exist any more (I don't recognize a lot of them), but it's one of the great comic meditations on the transience of fame and of life itself:
Napoleon's a pastry,
Bismarck is a herring,
Alexander's a creme de cocao mixed with rum,
And Herbie Hoover is a vacuum.
Columbus is a circle and a day off,
Pershing is a square -- what a pay-off!
Julius Caesar is just a salad on a shelf,
So, little brother, get wise to yourself.
Life's a bowl and it's
Full of cherry pits,
Play it big and it throws you for a loop.
That's the way with fate,
Comes today we're great,
Comes tomorrow we're tomato soup.
Napoleon's a pastry,
Get this under your brow:
What once useta be a roosta'
Is just a dusta' now.
Dubarry is a lipstick,
Pompadour's a hairdo,
Good Queen Mary just floats along from pier to pier,
Venus De Milo is a pink brassiere.
Sir Gladstone is a bag -- ain't it shocking?
And the mighty Kaiser, just a stocking.
The Czar of Russia is just a jar of caviar,
And Cleopatra is a black cigar.
Yes, my honey lamb,
Swift is just a ham,
Lincoln's a tunnel, Coolidge is a dam.
Yes, my noble lads,
Comes today we're fads,
Comes tomorrow we're subway ads.
Homer is just a swat,
Get this under your brow:
All these bigwig controversials
Are just commercials now.
Better get your jug of wine and loaf of love
Before that final bow.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
My Tashlin Prayers Are Semi-Answered
The Digital Bits reports that Fox is finally planning to give us DVD releases of the two most famous live-action movies of Frank Tashlin, The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? But they're doing it in a roundabout way:
The Wayward Bus is a black-and-white melodrama from 1957 featuring Mansfield and Joan Collins, and while the cast does make it sound pleasantly crazy, Tashlin's masterpieces deserve better than to be lumped in with one thing that is so clearly not like the others.
Oh, well, at least they're coming. These are two of the best movies of the '50s, where writer-director Tashlin gives the raspberry to everything and everything about American culture, from success-worship to advertising to breast fixations (Tashlin, a leg man, was quoted as saying that finding Jayne Mansfield's breasts attractive made no more sense than finding oversized feet attractive). If I had to choose, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is the desert-island title here, because of the presence of the great Tony Randall instead of the so-so Tom Ewell of The Girl Can't Help It.
Unfortunately this means limbo for Tashlin's two other films for Fox -- including The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, which is very nearly as good as the two Jayne Mansfield pictures (though it uses another of Fox's Marilyn Monroe substitutes, Sheree North). Hopefully Paramount will get around to releasing more Jerry Lewis films, upon which we can finally get Tashlin's insane masterpieces like Artists and Models and Hollywood or Bust. Meanwhile, look forward to (despite the title) "The Jayne Mansfield Collection," and take a look at the Tashlin featurette on the third disc of the new Looney Tunes Golden Collection.
Other "Cinema Classics Collection" titles coming in early 2006 from Fox include... The Jayne Mansfield Collection (a box set including The Wayward Bus, The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?)
The Wayward Bus is a black-and-white melodrama from 1957 featuring Mansfield and Joan Collins, and while the cast does make it sound pleasantly crazy, Tashlin's masterpieces deserve better than to be lumped in with one thing that is so clearly not like the others.
Oh, well, at least they're coming. These are two of the best movies of the '50s, where writer-director Tashlin gives the raspberry to everything and everything about American culture, from success-worship to advertising to breast fixations (Tashlin, a leg man, was quoted as saying that finding Jayne Mansfield's breasts attractive made no more sense than finding oversized feet attractive). If I had to choose, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is the desert-island title here, because of the presence of the great Tony Randall instead of the so-so Tom Ewell of The Girl Can't Help It.
Unfortunately this means limbo for Tashlin's two other films for Fox -- including The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, which is very nearly as good as the two Jayne Mansfield pictures (though it uses another of Fox's Marilyn Monroe substitutes, Sheree North). Hopefully Paramount will get around to releasing more Jerry Lewis films, upon which we can finally get Tashlin's insane masterpieces like Artists and Models and Hollywood or Bust. Meanwhile, look forward to (despite the title) "The Jayne Mansfield Collection," and take a look at the Tashlin featurette on the third disc of the new Looney Tunes Golden Collection.
Boingy, Boingy, Boingy....
More on the impending DVD release of "Animaniacs" and "Pinky and the Brain," from senior producer Tom Ruegger:
Here are some quotes from some of the "Animaniacs" episodes that we can expect to see in the first volume:
This is the info I can pass on to you from an unimpeachable Warner Bros. source:
Planned release of "Animaniacs Volume 1" and "Pinky and the Brain Volume 1" is currently scheduled for 7/25/06. Volume 2 of each title is currently scheduled for release on 12/6/06.
That's the entirety of what I can tell you at this point.
There's joy in the water tower tonight.
Here are some quotes from some of the "Animaniacs" episodes that we can expect to see in the first volume:
DOT: Oh, oh, my heart aches with the sorrow of a thousand Scouts! No merit badge. I mourn my loss.
EINSTEIN: Now to measure the speed of light. (Checks his stopwatch) Boy, that's quick. ("Cookies for Einstein")
MICHELANGELO: I'm the great Michelangelo and this is the Sistine Chapel.
YAKKO: Oh, yeah? If you're so great, what did you do with the other fifteen chapels?
("Hooked on a Ceiling")
SLAPPY: No one ever gets hurt in cartoons....
SKIPPY: But "Bumbie" wasn't a cartoon, it was a movie! Bumbie's mother is -- Waaaaaaahhhhh!
SLAPPY: Is it me? That mama deer was just an actress, Vina Walleen! We were pals. She used to date George Jetson. Look -- have I ever lied to you before?
SKIPPY: You said Keno was legal in Burbank. You said Magilla Gorilla was a woman. You said--
SLAPPY: Can it. ("Bumbie's Mom")
BRAIN: Now, Pinky, if by any chance you are captured during this mission, remember: you are Gunther Heindriksen from Appenzell. You moved to Grindelwald to drive the cog train to Murren. Can you repeat that?
PINKY: No, Brain, don't think I can.
("Where Rodents Dare")
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Bugs Bunny vs. America
The new Looney Tunes Golden Collection includes a number of cartoons that weren't released on VHS tape before, including one of my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoons, Bob McKimson's "Rebel Rabbit" (1949).
McKimson's Bugs Bunny cartoons from the late '40s aren't quite like anybody else's. For one thing, his Bugs looks very different from everybody else's -- chubbier, toothier, and frankly uglier than the Bugs who features in other cartoons, which is ironic considering that all the other directors were working from a Bugs model sheet designed by McKimson. When it came to character design, McKimson never seemed to care much about making characters look good; his one-shot supporting characters, like Gruesome Gorilla in "Gorilla My Dreams" or the hillbillies in "Hillbilly Hare," are grotesque-looking, with weirdly-proportioned bodies.
This kind of design doesn't look pretty but gives lots of opportunities to any animator who wants to take advantage of the characters' long arms and chubby bodies to put lots of characterization into the upper body movements, especially arm movements. Manny Gould, a Clampett animator who worked for McKimson from 1947 to 1949, arguably did even funnier animation for McKimson than for Clampett; Gould's specialty, as I've written before, was having characters swing their arms about and thrust themselves directly toward the camera, and McKimson characters were perfect for this kind of animation. Here are some still frames from a Manny Gould scene in "Rebel Rabbit" where Bugs confronts a U.S. Senator (based, like Foghorn Leghorn, on the Senator Claghorn character from Fred Allen's show):
McKimson and his writer, Warren Foster, took what might be called a situation-based approach to Bugs Bunny. Whereas most other directors usually stuck with the formula of Bugs vs. a hunter (most of Bob Clampett's Bugs cartoons stick to this) or Bugs vs. a big loudmouthed jerk (Chuck Jones' favorite kind of Bugs cartoon), and put a spin on those basic situations, McKimson's and Foster's way of putting a twist on the Bugs Bunny formula was to put Bugs in the weirdest situations possible.
So in the Bugs cartoons directed by McKimson and written by Foster, we get:
- Bugs is suckered by the Easter Bunny into delivering eggs for him ("Easter Yeggs")
- A lab researcher wants to remove Bugs's brain and replace it with the brain of a chicken ("Hot Cross Bunny")
- Bugs tells the story of his life, in which he is a failed entertainer who caught a lucky break ("What's Up, Doc?")
- Bugs is conned by the Three Little Pigs into buying straw and stick houses before the Wolf blows them down ("The Windblown Hare")
- Bugs helps Christopher Columbus on his voyage ("Hare We Go" -- one of the few Bugs cartoons with no villain, though Columbus does at one point try to eat Bugs when the food runs out)
- Bugs rubs a lamp and meets an annoying genie voiced by Jim Backus, who sends him to Baghdad ("A Lad-In His Lamp")
You'll also note from some of those plot descriptions that McKimson's Bugs in this period is not particularly smart, nor is he particularly sympathetic. He usually wins, but more out of sheer destructive aggressiveness than the intelligence we usually associate with him. He's not a crazy rabbit either, as he is in Clampett's cartoons; he is, really, kind of a tough-talking thug, who's sympathetic largely because his opponents are also thugs.
"Rebel Rabbit" takes that approach to the logical extreme: here Bugs is not only a thug, but almost literally a terrorist. He is so furious to discover that the U.S. government only has a two-cent bounty for hunting rabbits ("Rabbits are perfectly harmless") that he swears to prove that "a rabbit can be more obnoxious than anybody!" The rest of the cartoon is just one gag after another of Bugs doing the most destructive things he can possibly do short of actually killing people onscreen; he literally ties train tracks in knots, sells Manhattan back to the Indians, and in the most famous gag, saws off Florida and cuts it loose, yelling: "South America, take it away!"
Bugs goes as far with destruction and mayhem as a cartoon character possibly can -- by his own admission, "too far" -- to the point that the government declares him a menace and sends in the army (in stock live-action footage) to take him down.
It's a disturbing cartoon, in the sense that we're seeing a beloved cartoon character running amuck, wrecking private property and getting attacked by the army. But in a way it's the most plausible portrait of what would happen if a cartoon character were let loose in the real world, our world: the things that look cute in a cartoon universe don't seem so cute when he's doing it to us. Accordingly, the backgrounds for this cartoon (designed by McKimson's layout man, Cornett Wood, whose departure in 1951 may have been what caused McKimson's cartoons to get visually duller) are mostly very realistic portrayals of familiar real-world sights like the U.S. Senate and Times Square. It's a cartoon about cartoon energy and violence being unleashed upon a non-cartoony world, and it's both funny and kind of scary.
McKimson's Bugs Bunny cartoons from the late '40s aren't quite like anybody else's. For one thing, his Bugs looks very different from everybody else's -- chubbier, toothier, and frankly uglier than the Bugs who features in other cartoons, which is ironic considering that all the other directors were working from a Bugs model sheet designed by McKimson. When it came to character design, McKimson never seemed to care much about making characters look good; his one-shot supporting characters, like Gruesome Gorilla in "Gorilla My Dreams" or the hillbillies in "Hillbilly Hare," are grotesque-looking, with weirdly-proportioned bodies.
This kind of design doesn't look pretty but gives lots of opportunities to any animator who wants to take advantage of the characters' long arms and chubby bodies to put lots of characterization into the upper body movements, especially arm movements. Manny Gould, a Clampett animator who worked for McKimson from 1947 to 1949, arguably did even funnier animation for McKimson than for Clampett; Gould's specialty, as I've written before, was having characters swing their arms about and thrust themselves directly toward the camera, and McKimson characters were perfect for this kind of animation. Here are some still frames from a Manny Gould scene in "Rebel Rabbit" where Bugs confronts a U.S. Senator (based, like Foghorn Leghorn, on the Senator Claghorn character from Fred Allen's show):
McKimson and his writer, Warren Foster, took what might be called a situation-based approach to Bugs Bunny. Whereas most other directors usually stuck with the formula of Bugs vs. a hunter (most of Bob Clampett's Bugs cartoons stick to this) or Bugs vs. a big loudmouthed jerk (Chuck Jones' favorite kind of Bugs cartoon), and put a spin on those basic situations, McKimson's and Foster's way of putting a twist on the Bugs Bunny formula was to put Bugs in the weirdest situations possible.
So in the Bugs cartoons directed by McKimson and written by Foster, we get:
- Bugs is suckered by the Easter Bunny into delivering eggs for him ("Easter Yeggs")
- A lab researcher wants to remove Bugs's brain and replace it with the brain of a chicken ("Hot Cross Bunny")
- Bugs tells the story of his life, in which he is a failed entertainer who caught a lucky break ("What's Up, Doc?")
- Bugs is conned by the Three Little Pigs into buying straw and stick houses before the Wolf blows them down ("The Windblown Hare")
- Bugs helps Christopher Columbus on his voyage ("Hare We Go" -- one of the few Bugs cartoons with no villain, though Columbus does at one point try to eat Bugs when the food runs out)
- Bugs rubs a lamp and meets an annoying genie voiced by Jim Backus, who sends him to Baghdad ("A Lad-In His Lamp")
You'll also note from some of those plot descriptions that McKimson's Bugs in this period is not particularly smart, nor is he particularly sympathetic. He usually wins, but more out of sheer destructive aggressiveness than the intelligence we usually associate with him. He's not a crazy rabbit either, as he is in Clampett's cartoons; he is, really, kind of a tough-talking thug, who's sympathetic largely because his opponents are also thugs.
"Rebel Rabbit" takes that approach to the logical extreme: here Bugs is not only a thug, but almost literally a terrorist. He is so furious to discover that the U.S. government only has a two-cent bounty for hunting rabbits ("Rabbits are perfectly harmless") that he swears to prove that "a rabbit can be more obnoxious than anybody!" The rest of the cartoon is just one gag after another of Bugs doing the most destructive things he can possibly do short of actually killing people onscreen; he literally ties train tracks in knots, sells Manhattan back to the Indians, and in the most famous gag, saws off Florida and cuts it loose, yelling: "South America, take it away!"
Bugs goes as far with destruction and mayhem as a cartoon character possibly can -- by his own admission, "too far" -- to the point that the government declares him a menace and sends in the army (in stock live-action footage) to take him down.
It's a disturbing cartoon, in the sense that we're seeing a beloved cartoon character running amuck, wrecking private property and getting attacked by the army. But in a way it's the most plausible portrait of what would happen if a cartoon character were let loose in the real world, our world: the things that look cute in a cartoon universe don't seem so cute when he's doing it to us. Accordingly, the backgrounds for this cartoon (designed by McKimson's layout man, Cornett Wood, whose departure in 1951 may have been what caused McKimson's cartoons to get visually duller) are mostly very realistic portrayals of familiar real-world sights like the U.S. Senate and Times Square. It's a cartoon about cartoon energy and violence being unleashed upon a non-cartoony world, and it's both funny and kind of scary.
Another Bandwagon Hopped On
Sorry to be both predictable and sort of up-to-date in my tastes for a moment (two things that go against my mission statement), but I should report that, yes, "Veronica Mars" is as good as everyone says.
It was a relief to disover that the creator, Rob Thomas, understands how to make an audience take his characters seriously without taking the premise too seriously. There are a lot of shows with ridiculous premises -- especially the ones that involve kids or college students doing dangerous things -- and there are two "extreme" ways of dealing with a ridiculous premise. One is to go the "Batman" route and just play the whole thing for laughs. The other is to simply do a show with no humor, where everybody acts like this premise is the most important and incredibly realistic thing in the whole wide world. This produces my least favorite type of show: the ridiculous show that's too square to realize it's ridiculous. "Alias" is like that, and I can't stand the humorless pomposity of "Alias." "Knight Rider" was like that, and I like that a little better than "Alias," but not much.
Anyway, "Veronica Mars" has a basically insane premise: the lead character is a teenage master detective who can solve cases for her classmates and for her struggling P.I. (and ex-sheriff) father. The premise is a distaff "Encyclopedia Brown," but set in a town where everybody has some kind of dark secret and tough talk and double crosses run rampant. It's like a film noir in color and set in the 21st century and starring a kid who fills the role of the world-weary private eye. And every episode is filled with things that just wouldn't, and don't, happen.
Luckily, the tone is just right: there's a sense of humor about the premise, without being campy or coy about it. Any particularly nutty plot development is handled with at least some hint of humor that shows that the writers are not trying to make the premise out to be more serious than it is: the humorous touch can be as little as a wisecrack from Veronica or as obvious as her bringing along a dog named "Backup" on a detective job for her father (who told her to "take Backup" if she goes out on the job), but it's there and it's enough to deflect any suspicion that it's in "Alias"-style denial about the silliness of its concept.
It's not laugh-out-loud funny like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was, but it's based on the same underlying idea, which is to play fair with the audience. They tacitly admit that the premise is silly, and we (and by "we" I mean me) are more likely to take seriously the stuff that is not silly: the characters and their emotional conflicts. (It's a bit like the technique used in a classic film noir like Out of the Past, where the more absurd elements of the plot are handled with a slight touch of humor, but the big moments of character development are handled with the dead seriousness they deserve.) It also allows them to get away with some fairly standard mystery stories, because we understand that what's important in the episode is not how the mystery gets solved but what emotional conflicts arise while the story is in progress. Whereas with something like "Alias," I can't take the characters seriously because the show seems to expect me to take everything seriously, and makes no apparent distinction between what is silly and what isn't.
"Veronica Mars" also takes advantage of something that most "teen" shows ignore: the extent to which technology has made it possible for kids to complicate their lives as much as adults. With internet access, cell phones and other electronic miracles, the kids on the show sort of have instant independence, and can get involved in plots that previously only made sense with adults. The second episode takes a very standard story: the poor sap who lives beyond his means to please a worthless, spoiled woman, and winds up stealing to give her the life to which she has been accustomed. It's all there, but normally that story is done with adults; here it's done with kids, and you realize that with access to credit cards, cell phone communication, and other things that These Kids Today take for granted, this old plot can quite plausibly be acted out by kids.
And that fits in with a theme of the show, that the things kids have to deal with -- emotional crises, issues of class and status, financial burdens -- sort of turn them old and cynical before their time; the lead character has, as the show begins, been turned into a hard-boiled cynical adult, while her father seems like more of an innocent. The theme that kids are now forced to live and suffer like grown-ups is in equal parts funny and truthful, which is what you want a show like this to be: funny, but emotionally true.
Rob Thomas's previous show, "Cupid", was a one-season show that got great reviews, though its production was, apparently, troubled (two producers quit over what they described as "Creative differences with its pathological star"). It'll probably get a DVD release one of these days.
It was a relief to disover that the creator, Rob Thomas, understands how to make an audience take his characters seriously without taking the premise too seriously. There are a lot of shows with ridiculous premises -- especially the ones that involve kids or college students doing dangerous things -- and there are two "extreme" ways of dealing with a ridiculous premise. One is to go the "Batman" route and just play the whole thing for laughs. The other is to simply do a show with no humor, where everybody acts like this premise is the most important and incredibly realistic thing in the whole wide world. This produces my least favorite type of show: the ridiculous show that's too square to realize it's ridiculous. "Alias" is like that, and I can't stand the humorless pomposity of "Alias." "Knight Rider" was like that, and I like that a little better than "Alias," but not much.
Anyway, "Veronica Mars" has a basically insane premise: the lead character is a teenage master detective who can solve cases for her classmates and for her struggling P.I. (and ex-sheriff) father. The premise is a distaff "Encyclopedia Brown," but set in a town where everybody has some kind of dark secret and tough talk and double crosses run rampant. It's like a film noir in color and set in the 21st century and starring a kid who fills the role of the world-weary private eye. And every episode is filled with things that just wouldn't, and don't, happen.
Luckily, the tone is just right: there's a sense of humor about the premise, without being campy or coy about it. Any particularly nutty plot development is handled with at least some hint of humor that shows that the writers are not trying to make the premise out to be more serious than it is: the humorous touch can be as little as a wisecrack from Veronica or as obvious as her bringing along a dog named "Backup" on a detective job for her father (who told her to "take Backup" if she goes out on the job), but it's there and it's enough to deflect any suspicion that it's in "Alias"-style denial about the silliness of its concept.
It's not laugh-out-loud funny like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was, but it's based on the same underlying idea, which is to play fair with the audience. They tacitly admit that the premise is silly, and we (and by "we" I mean me) are more likely to take seriously the stuff that is not silly: the characters and their emotional conflicts. (It's a bit like the technique used in a classic film noir like Out of the Past, where the more absurd elements of the plot are handled with a slight touch of humor, but the big moments of character development are handled with the dead seriousness they deserve.) It also allows them to get away with some fairly standard mystery stories, because we understand that what's important in the episode is not how the mystery gets solved but what emotional conflicts arise while the story is in progress. Whereas with something like "Alias," I can't take the characters seriously because the show seems to expect me to take everything seriously, and makes no apparent distinction between what is silly and what isn't.
"Veronica Mars" also takes advantage of something that most "teen" shows ignore: the extent to which technology has made it possible for kids to complicate their lives as much as adults. With internet access, cell phones and other electronic miracles, the kids on the show sort of have instant independence, and can get involved in plots that previously only made sense with adults. The second episode takes a very standard story: the poor sap who lives beyond his means to please a worthless, spoiled woman, and winds up stealing to give her the life to which she has been accustomed. It's all there, but normally that story is done with adults; here it's done with kids, and you realize that with access to credit cards, cell phone communication, and other things that These Kids Today take for granted, this old plot can quite plausibly be acted out by kids.
And that fits in with a theme of the show, that the things kids have to deal with -- emotional crises, issues of class and status, financial burdens -- sort of turn them old and cynical before their time; the lead character has, as the show begins, been turned into a hard-boiled cynical adult, while her father seems like more of an innocent. The theme that kids are now forced to live and suffer like grown-ups is in equal parts funny and truthful, which is what you want a show like this to be: funny, but emotionally true.
Rob Thomas's previous show, "Cupid", was a one-season show that got great reviews, though its production was, apparently, troubled (two producers quit over what they described as "Creative differences with its pathological star"). It'll probably get a DVD release one of these days.
Friday, October 28, 2005
Something To Insult Everybody
Since my first and last all-political post was a little hard on the U.S.A., I thought I would post these lyrics from the musical Do I Hear a Waltz? (lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, music by Richard Rodgers). Fioria (Carol Bruce), the proprietress of a pensione in Venice, welcomes her latest group of American tourists by telling them how much nicer they are than all other nationalities:
But in Act 2, when the Americans are leaving and the English tourists are arriving, Fioria sings a different tune, or rather, the same tune with different lyrics:
Moral: you can find something nasty to say about any country. Except possibly Canada. We're great.
On an analytical note, since this song is basically a catalogue of national stereotypes, it's interesting to note which stereotypes have and have not remained current since the song was written (1965). The stereotypes about the French -- focusing on snobbery, in the traditional sense (a "snob" originally meant a bourgeois person who affects to be higher-class than he or she really is) -- have mostly lost their currency. The stereotype of the tight-fisted German has, since German re-unification, been replaced in popular culture by stereotypes of Germans as hyper-efficient on the one hand and decadent on the other. Most of the other stereotypes have remained familiar enough to be a part of any bad comedian's repertoire.
I saw at least one analysis of the song that chewed Sondheim and Rodgers out for promoting all these horrible stereotypes. The writer had apparently listened only to the cast album, not realizing that in context the song is not about the stereotypes, but Fioria's willingness to say whatever her guests want to hear.
Last week the Germans,
You can keep the Germans,
Always cheap, the Germans,
Even on a trip.
Sweet? Not the Germans,
Sweat a lot, the Germans,
Full of smiles, the Germans,
Don't expect a tip.
But this week Americans,
Open-armed Americans,
I am charmed, Americans,
Welcome, welcome, welcome,
I love Americans,
The pleasure is mine.
Remember, no breakfast after half-past nine.
Next week the English,
You should see the English,
All the tea, the English,
Thirsty, I suppose.
Good eggs, the English,
Rotten legs, the English,
All those teeth, the English,
Rows and rows and rows.
But this week Americans,
More than kind Americans,
Much-maligned Americans,
Welcome, welcome, welcome,
I love Americans,
And my home is yours.
I can't be responsible, so lock your doors.
Then come Parisians,
Full of food Parisians,
Always rude Parisians,
Every one a sneak.
Perfumed Parisians,
Over-groomed Parisians,
Middle-class Parisians,
Far more cheek than chic.
But this week Americans,
Generous Americans,
Never fuss, Americans,
Welcome, welcome, welcome,
Thank you, Americans,
For coming to stay.
How charming, my guests are from the U.S.A.
No alcoholic Swedes,
No double-dealing Russians.
No Spaniards with their beads
And their deafening discussions.
No narcissistic Greeks,
They're worse than the Italians
With overblown physiques
And St. Christopher medallions.
No millionaire Brazilians
Who somehow never pay,
I much prefer the millions
From the U.S.A.
But in Act 2, when the Americans are leaving and the English tourists are arriving, Fioria sings a different tune, or rather, the same tune with different lyrics:
Last week Americans,
Who can bear Americans?
Wash-and-wear Americans,
Charmlessly naive.
Two-faced Americans,
Dreadful taste Americans,
Summertime Americans,
Thought they'd never leave!
But this week the Britishers,
Cultivated Britishers,
Educated Britishers,
Welcome, welcome, welcome,
Thank God for Britishers,
You aren't like them.
And welcome till Saturday at three p.m.!
Moral: you can find something nasty to say about any country. Except possibly Canada. We're great.
On an analytical note, since this song is basically a catalogue of national stereotypes, it's interesting to note which stereotypes have and have not remained current since the song was written (1965). The stereotypes about the French -- focusing on snobbery, in the traditional sense (a "snob" originally meant a bourgeois person who affects to be higher-class than he or she really is) -- have mostly lost their currency. The stereotype of the tight-fisted German has, since German re-unification, been replaced in popular culture by stereotypes of Germans as hyper-efficient on the one hand and decadent on the other. Most of the other stereotypes have remained familiar enough to be a part of any bad comedian's repertoire.
I saw at least one analysis of the song that chewed Sondheim and Rodgers out for promoting all these horrible stereotypes. The writer had apparently listened only to the cast album, not realizing that in context the song is not about the stereotypes, but Fioria's willingness to say whatever her guests want to hear.
I Take Back Anything Nice I Said About Garry Marshall
"Happy Days Musical To Spin in 2006 Los Angeles Debut"
This one has been in the works for some years -- I read about it three years ago, when a book had been written but a songwriter hadn't been hired. I'd make fun of the choice of Paul Williams, but actually I think he's kind of talented, so I'll stick to making fun of the above description, which sounds cobbled together from every bad episode of the "Happy Days" series, and seems predicated on the assumption that anybody even wants to see freakin' Lori Beth or Pinky Tuscadero again in any form.
Actually, "Happy Days" wouldn't be bad material for a musical if you based it on the early, good years when Richie was the star. A musical based on the Fonzie-is-God years (and I never tire of reminding people that it was Michael Eisner who suggested making Fonzie the star), which this seems to be, mostly just begs the question of whether it'll be more crass than All Shook Up.
"Kicking off 2006 will be the world premiere of Happy Days, a brand new musical which I wrote with Oscar and Grammy Award-winning composer/lyricist Paul Williams, with a book based on my successful TV series," boasted [Garry] Marshall in the company's season announcement.
"It's May, 1959 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Fonzie is still the king of cool at his favorite malt shop, Arnold’s," reads show materials. "The school year is coming to an end and the rest of the gang, including Richie, Lori Beth, Potsie and Ralph Malph, are getting ready to graduate from Jefferson High School." The musical "celebration of nostalgia" will feature appearances by Pinky Tuscadero and the Malachi Brothers as well.
This one has been in the works for some years -- I read about it three years ago, when a book had been written but a songwriter hadn't been hired. I'd make fun of the choice of Paul Williams, but actually I think he's kind of talented, so I'll stick to making fun of the above description, which sounds cobbled together from every bad episode of the "Happy Days" series, and seems predicated on the assumption that anybody even wants to see freakin' Lori Beth or Pinky Tuscadero again in any form.
Actually, "Happy Days" wouldn't be bad material for a musical if you based it on the early, good years when Richie was the star. A musical based on the Fonzie-is-God years (and I never tire of reminding people that it was Michael Eisner who suggested making Fonzie the star), which this seems to be, mostly just begs the question of whether it'll be more crass than All Shook Up.
The Joke Machine
I agree wholeheartedly with Terry Teachout in his assessment of Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple":
This is one of the reasons why the TV version of "The Odd Couple" (with which Simon had no involvement) is so much better than the play or the movie. Simon's original "Odd Couple" is essentially a collection of jokes. Some of the jokes are good, some aren't so good, but all of them feel like carefully scripted, carefully arranged jokes with tick-tock rhythms leading to a punchline. The TV series, created by Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall, was character-driven, not joke-driven, and mined most of its humor from the characterizations of Oscar and Felix and the difference between them -- in other words, from all the stuff that Simon set up in the play but didn't really follow through on.
Simon's characters have no apparent lives beyond the confines of the one set; references to Oscar's job, or Felix's job, are offhand and minor, and they have no apparent interests or hobbies. With the TV Oscar and Felix, we know a lot about what they do for a living, what their interests are, what they think about various things, and much of the humor comes from that. Simon's Oscar Madison is a sportswriter because that's a convenient plot device: he had to do something that he wouldn't require him to dress well or act refined, and which would explain how he affords a nice apartment, why he's often home during the day. Marshall and Belson's Oscar Madison is really a sportswriter; his job is the vehicle for stories and jokes. Simon's characters are automatons; Marshall and Belson's characters are people.
Interestingly, according to Garry Marshall's commentary on an episode he and Belson wrote for "The Dick Van Dyke Show," Carl Reiner did not want to hire them for that show because he thought they were wisecracking New York jokewriters who wrote jokes instead of stories. Translated into the terms of this post, Reiner didn't want anybody who wrote Neil Simon type material. Marshall (an annoying personality, but a smart comedy writer and an interesting DVD commentator) says that Reiner taught them the importance of putting story and character first and of not writing jokes that aren't related to anything, and they carried those lessons over into their subsequent work (like "The Odd Couple"). This goes a long way, I think, toward explaining why situation comedies hold up so much better than most of the Broadway stage comedies of the same era: the people who wrote for character went West, and the East was dominated by people like Neil Simon, who mostly just wrote jokes.
Were Mr. Simon’s insert-flap-A-in-slot-B jokes ever funny? I remember chortling at them as a boy, but now they mostly leave me cold. In fact, the whole first act of “The Odd Couple” feels less like a comedy than a set of instructions for making an audience laugh....
This is one of the reasons why the TV version of "The Odd Couple" (with which Simon had no involvement) is so much better than the play or the movie. Simon's original "Odd Couple" is essentially a collection of jokes. Some of the jokes are good, some aren't so good, but all of them feel like carefully scripted, carefully arranged jokes with tick-tock rhythms leading to a punchline. The TV series, created by Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall, was character-driven, not joke-driven, and mined most of its humor from the characterizations of Oscar and Felix and the difference between them -- in other words, from all the stuff that Simon set up in the play but didn't really follow through on.
Simon's characters have no apparent lives beyond the confines of the one set; references to Oscar's job, or Felix's job, are offhand and minor, and they have no apparent interests or hobbies. With the TV Oscar and Felix, we know a lot about what they do for a living, what their interests are, what they think about various things, and much of the humor comes from that. Simon's Oscar Madison is a sportswriter because that's a convenient plot device: he had to do something that he wouldn't require him to dress well or act refined, and which would explain how he affords a nice apartment, why he's often home during the day. Marshall and Belson's Oscar Madison is really a sportswriter; his job is the vehicle for stories and jokes. Simon's characters are automatons; Marshall and Belson's characters are people.
Interestingly, according to Garry Marshall's commentary on an episode he and Belson wrote for "The Dick Van Dyke Show," Carl Reiner did not want to hire them for that show because he thought they were wisecracking New York jokewriters who wrote jokes instead of stories. Translated into the terms of this post, Reiner didn't want anybody who wrote Neil Simon type material. Marshall (an annoying personality, but a smart comedy writer and an interesting DVD commentator) says that Reiner taught them the importance of putting story and character first and of not writing jokes that aren't related to anything, and they carried those lessons over into their subsequent work (like "The Odd Couple"). This goes a long way, I think, toward explaining why situation comedies hold up so much better than most of the Broadway stage comedies of the same era: the people who wrote for character went West, and the East was dominated by people like Neil Simon, who mostly just wrote jokes.
More Warner Annoyances
The Sitcoms Online Blog reports that Warner Brothers appears to have more or less given up on season-by-season sets for most older shows:
I suppose "best-of" highlights discs make a certain amount of sense for some shows -- which is to say the shows I don't care for, like most of the shows on the above list -- but for anyone who likes these shows (or some of the other shows that have only gotten best-of discs from WB, like "F-Troop") it must be unfortunate to be given only six episodes out of hundreds.
The only personal disappointment from the list above is "Night Court," which got a first season release earlier this year, and apparently did not sell well enough to warrant complete sets of the later and better seasons. Too bad, because it's one of the more underrated shows of its time, and (for me anyway) holds up a lot better than the show that inspired it, "Barney Miller" (which also got a first season release and nothing more).
They will be releasing a "TV Favorites" (basically a one disc set with six episodes) set of the sitcom [Alice] in 2006. They also promise "TV Favorites" sets of Family Matters, The Drew Carey Show, Step by Step, and Night Court.
I suppose "best-of" highlights discs make a certain amount of sense for some shows -- which is to say the shows I don't care for, like most of the shows on the above list -- but for anyone who likes these shows (or some of the other shows that have only gotten best-of discs from WB, like "F-Troop") it must be unfortunate to be given only six episodes out of hundreds.
The only personal disappointment from the list above is "Night Court," which got a first season release earlier this year, and apparently did not sell well enough to warrant complete sets of the later and better seasons. Too bad, because it's one of the more underrated shows of its time, and (for me anyway) holds up a lot better than the show that inspired it, "Barney Miller" (which also got a first season release and nothing more).
Warning
The post right below this one is outside the normal scope of this blog: a weird mix of confession and political rant. I had to get it out of my system.
Regular blogging will resume shortly.
Regular blogging will resume shortly.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
OT: Political Detox Program Needed
Is there a twelve-step program for politics junkies?
As you may guess from my choice of stuff to blog about, I'm not a particularly political person. I don't mean that as a veiled compliment to myself (as in "I'm above all that partisan bickering"); it's more of a sad admission: others are out there making a difference and fighting for what they believe in, and I've never been able to muster up enough political conviction to do that. Not good, but there we are.
In the last couple of years, though, and in the last few months especially, I've become addicted to U.S. political stuff, especially political blogs (I can't stomach television news). This wouldn't be a bad thing, except I hate this addiction. I hate it for several reasons:
1) I am not American. I am Canadian, I have lived in Canada all my life. Therefore I am addicted to news about a political process that is for the most part none of my damn business. If I were addicted to Canadian politics, I could get involved and work to make a difference. This is not, and should not be, an option with the politics of a foreign country. To some extent the U.S. foreign policy is my business; given that the Bush administration is basing its foreign policy on outdated pre-9/11 ideas and clinging to silly bromides about freedom and such (amazing what a bunch of touchy-feely hippies conservatives have become in the last ten years or so), I definitely feel that the world is becoming less safe for, well, everyone. But as to whether I as a foreigner should be able to influence U.S. foreign policy, the answer is obviously no. In theory, anyway.
2) I am afraid I'm one of those foreigners who is convinced that the U.S. federal government is profoundly screwed up, that the Bush administration is for various reasons much worse than any other in my lifetime, and that the political and social right is essentially horrible. I don't want to get into the whys and wherefores of why some of us "moderates" (and I considered myself, when I considered myself anything at all, a moderate) have decided on this. Short answer, the Iraq war -- when people start getting killed for stupid reasons, politicians stop being a punchline, and when pundits keep making up more stupid reasons, they cease being fun to read. (However, I thought the Iraq War was a terrible idea back in September 2001, when I first heard talk that Iraq might be "next"; yet apart from feeling very bad that this terrible and stupid idea was being put into practice, I didn't follow politics that closely until mid-2004 or so. Maybe it was the U.S. election or the rise of readable liberal blogs, or both, that created the real addiction.) But the thing is that following U.S. politics is not enjoyable or funny, it's ulcer-inducing and depressing. I used to be able to read many American conservative magazines and enjoy them to some extent (for one thing, a few years ago the liberal publications sucked; they've gotten better in opposition, and conservative publications have gotten very bad indeed); now that they generally exist to advocate killing a lot of Muslims for vaguely-defined reasons, I don't find it so enjoyable.
3. Given that I am not American and don't have any particular brief for the Democratic party (they're obviously less inclined to make up stupid reasons for killing a lot of people, but only slightly, and U.S. domestic issues are none of my business), I can't do the whole Daily Kos thing and cheer for the revival of the Democratic party, or the "Democrat party" as stupid people like to call them. Horseracing is not my thing. All I can do is watch and wait and feel my stomach turn inside out.
Sorry for what amounts to a rant, and I promise this will be a one-time-only thing; this is not a political blog. The fact that I don't want to write about politics, don't like writing about politics, is ironically what prompted me to write this post: I had to let it out because that's the first step on the road to trying to step away, realize that the U.S. is not my country and not mine to fix, and try to concentrate on works of art and popular culture that will outlast the current U.S. administration by quite some time.
Wish me luck in trying to recover, folks.
As you may guess from my choice of stuff to blog about, I'm not a particularly political person. I don't mean that as a veiled compliment to myself (as in "I'm above all that partisan bickering"); it's more of a sad admission: others are out there making a difference and fighting for what they believe in, and I've never been able to muster up enough political conviction to do that. Not good, but there we are.
In the last couple of years, though, and in the last few months especially, I've become addicted to U.S. political stuff, especially political blogs (I can't stomach television news). This wouldn't be a bad thing, except I hate this addiction. I hate it for several reasons:
1) I am not American. I am Canadian, I have lived in Canada all my life. Therefore I am addicted to news about a political process that is for the most part none of my damn business. If I were addicted to Canadian politics, I could get involved and work to make a difference. This is not, and should not be, an option with the politics of a foreign country. To some extent the U.S. foreign policy is my business; given that the Bush administration is basing its foreign policy on outdated pre-9/11 ideas and clinging to silly bromides about freedom and such (amazing what a bunch of touchy-feely hippies conservatives have become in the last ten years or so), I definitely feel that the world is becoming less safe for, well, everyone. But as to whether I as a foreigner should be able to influence U.S. foreign policy, the answer is obviously no. In theory, anyway.
2) I am afraid I'm one of those foreigners who is convinced that the U.S. federal government is profoundly screwed up, that the Bush administration is for various reasons much worse than any other in my lifetime, and that the political and social right is essentially horrible. I don't want to get into the whys and wherefores of why some of us "moderates" (and I considered myself, when I considered myself anything at all, a moderate) have decided on this. Short answer, the Iraq war -- when people start getting killed for stupid reasons, politicians stop being a punchline, and when pundits keep making up more stupid reasons, they cease being fun to read. (However, I thought the Iraq War was a terrible idea back in September 2001, when I first heard talk that Iraq might be "next"; yet apart from feeling very bad that this terrible and stupid idea was being put into practice, I didn't follow politics that closely until mid-2004 or so. Maybe it was the U.S. election or the rise of readable liberal blogs, or both, that created the real addiction.) But the thing is that following U.S. politics is not enjoyable or funny, it's ulcer-inducing and depressing. I used to be able to read many American conservative magazines and enjoy them to some extent (for one thing, a few years ago the liberal publications sucked; they've gotten better in opposition, and conservative publications have gotten very bad indeed); now that they generally exist to advocate killing a lot of Muslims for vaguely-defined reasons, I don't find it so enjoyable.
3. Given that I am not American and don't have any particular brief for the Democratic party (they're obviously less inclined to make up stupid reasons for killing a lot of people, but only slightly, and U.S. domestic issues are none of my business), I can't do the whole Daily Kos thing and cheer for the revival of the Democratic party, or the "Democrat party" as stupid people like to call them. Horseracing is not my thing. All I can do is watch and wait and feel my stomach turn inside out.
Sorry for what amounts to a rant, and I promise this will be a one-time-only thing; this is not a political blog. The fact that I don't want to write about politics, don't like writing about politics, is ironically what prompted me to write this post: I had to let it out because that's the first step on the road to trying to step away, realize that the U.S. is not my country and not mine to fix, and try to concentrate on works of art and popular culture that will outlast the current U.S. administration by quite some time.
Wish me luck in trying to recover, folks.
Now, That's Comedy
TV Shows on DVD reports plans for mid-2006 DVD releases of "Animaniacs" and its spinoff "Pinky and the Brain".
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Meathead!
Season 5 of "All in the Family" is getting a DVD release.
Because "All in the Family" was never officially cancelled -- instead it was folded into "Archie Bunker's Place" -- everybody can sort of make up their own minds as to where the show ends. For some people, it ends in "Archie Bunker's Place" when it's announced that Edith has died. (The producers of "Archie Bunker's Place" were about as crass as anybody can be when dealing with beloved characters. Not only did they kill off Edith so Archie could star in his own spinoff; they had Michael abandon Gloria and his child -- utterly out of character for Michael, and an insult to viewers who had spent years watching these characters -- so that they could set up a solo spinoff for Gloria.) For others, it ends with the last official season of "All in the Family." For still others, probably most people, the show is over once Mike and Gloria leave.
For me, "All in the Family" jumps the shark at the end of the fifth season, when Mike and Gloria move out of the house. True, they only move next door, and true, it was inevitable that Meathead would eventually get a job and be able to pay for his own house. But the premise of the show (and of the show it was based on, "Till Death Do Us Part") sort of ended when Archie and Mike no longer had to live together.
More importantly, after the fifth season, there was a big staff shake-up on "All in the Family." For the first five seasons, most of the scripts were written by Don Nicholl (a transplanted British writer, best known now as the founder of a big screenplay contest that neither you nor I will ever win), Michael Ross and Bernie West (the dentist from Bells are Ringing in his previous life as an actor). Nearly all the best episodes were either written or re-written by one of these three.
After the fifth season, Nicholl, Ross and West left "All in the Family" to run the spinoff, "The Jeffersons," and a year later they would leave Norman Lear's company to run "Three's Company." To replace them on AITF, Lear turned to a bunch of veteran writers he'd known since his days in radio and early TV; they included Jack Benny's former head writer Milt Josefberg and "Your Show of Shows" head writer Mel Tolkin (one of the models for Rob Petrie, incidentally).
The new writers were all talented, experienced comedy writers, and you sort of have to admire Lear for hiring veteran comedy writers instead of considering them over-the-hill. But the new scripts were awash in comedy formulas and the kind of setup/punchline routines these guys had been doing for years. At the same time, they tried to punch up the show by making every episode a Very Special or Relevant Issue episode: Edith almost gets raped, Archie sits down to dinner with a Vietnam draft dodger, Archie gets hooked on pills. The Ku Klux Klan episode was probably the worst of the bunch. Most of Archie's lines now consisted of elaborate malapropisms and Gracie Allen-style misunderstandings. They essentially wrote for "All in the Family" as if it were a cross between "I Love Lucy" and a soap opera.
That's the way most of Lear's shows were written -- and that's why they don't hold up very well any more. But the Nicholl/Ross/West years of "All in the Family" were different, because their scripts (and the episodes Lear wrote himself) were mostly based around character comedy, around jokes that don't, in fact, read like jokes. I've harped on this before, but the best comedy writing is often not writing that looks funny on paper, but rather lines that are funny because of who's saying them and the context in which they are said. Most of the best lines from the first five years of AITF are like that:
The other thing about the Nicholl/Ross/West years of "All in the Family" is that the show did very few Very Special or Serious episodes in those five years. There were a few "issue" episodes -- like the episode where Gloria almost gets raped and ends the episode by deciding not to report it, a much more effective episode than the Edith episode of a few years later. But most of the Nicholl/Ross/West episodes deal more with everyday problems, get-rich-quick schemes that don't work, arguments between the characters, and so on. They wouldn't avoid dealing with controversial issues if that was what the characters needed to talk about, but they weren't about to build the stories around iseues instead of people. Even the "dramatic" moments were relatively low-key and more about character relationships than issues. For example, the episode (written by Ross and West) where Archie disapproves of his niece dating Lionel Jefferson; the climax of the episode is partly about a social issue, but mostly about Lionel explaining the nature of his relationship with Archie, and making it clear that there's a point at which he doesn't find Archie's behavior funny:
That exchange, which builds on a character relationship that was established in the first episode (Lionel as the guy who subtly makes fun of Archie's ignorance and prejudice, but sort of likes him), takes that relationship to a new place, and uses a very simple device to do so (it's the first time Lionel ever calls Archie by his first name), is also a good example of the way the best sitcoms have all the character development and growth that we expect in the best dramas. Actually, in the '70s, hourlong dramas were more like anthologies, and didn't have anywhere near the character depth or development of good sitcoms.
Anyway, with the departure of Nicholl/Ross/West, "All in the Family" lost the character comedy and the organic character development. In a weird way, Nicholl/Ross/West brought some of that to "Three's Company"; it was in no wise a great show, but it did try to mine laughs from character and situation instead of setup/punchline routines, and for that reason it holds up a lot better than most Norman Lear shows, including AITF after the fifth season.
Because "All in the Family" was never officially cancelled -- instead it was folded into "Archie Bunker's Place" -- everybody can sort of make up their own minds as to where the show ends. For some people, it ends in "Archie Bunker's Place" when it's announced that Edith has died. (The producers of "Archie Bunker's Place" were about as crass as anybody can be when dealing with beloved characters. Not only did they kill off Edith so Archie could star in his own spinoff; they had Michael abandon Gloria and his child -- utterly out of character for Michael, and an insult to viewers who had spent years watching these characters -- so that they could set up a solo spinoff for Gloria.) For others, it ends with the last official season of "All in the Family." For still others, probably most people, the show is over once Mike and Gloria leave.
For me, "All in the Family" jumps the shark at the end of the fifth season, when Mike and Gloria move out of the house. True, they only move next door, and true, it was inevitable that Meathead would eventually get a job and be able to pay for his own house. But the premise of the show (and of the show it was based on, "Till Death Do Us Part") sort of ended when Archie and Mike no longer had to live together.
More importantly, after the fifth season, there was a big staff shake-up on "All in the Family." For the first five seasons, most of the scripts were written by Don Nicholl (a transplanted British writer, best known now as the founder of a big screenplay contest that neither you nor I will ever win), Michael Ross and Bernie West (the dentist from Bells are Ringing in his previous life as an actor). Nearly all the best episodes were either written or re-written by one of these three.
After the fifth season, Nicholl, Ross and West left "All in the Family" to run the spinoff, "The Jeffersons," and a year later they would leave Norman Lear's company to run "Three's Company." To replace them on AITF, Lear turned to a bunch of veteran writers he'd known since his days in radio and early TV; they included Jack Benny's former head writer Milt Josefberg and "Your Show of Shows" head writer Mel Tolkin (one of the models for Rob Petrie, incidentally).
The new writers were all talented, experienced comedy writers, and you sort of have to admire Lear for hiring veteran comedy writers instead of considering them over-the-hill. But the new scripts were awash in comedy formulas and the kind of setup/punchline routines these guys had been doing for years. At the same time, they tried to punch up the show by making every episode a Very Special or Relevant Issue episode: Edith almost gets raped, Archie sits down to dinner with a Vietnam draft dodger, Archie gets hooked on pills. The Ku Klux Klan episode was probably the worst of the bunch. Most of Archie's lines now consisted of elaborate malapropisms and Gracie Allen-style misunderstandings. They essentially wrote for "All in the Family" as if it were a cross between "I Love Lucy" and a soap opera.
That's the way most of Lear's shows were written -- and that's why they don't hold up very well any more. But the Nicholl/Ross/West years of "All in the Family" were different, because their scripts (and the episodes Lear wrote himself) were mostly based around character comedy, around jokes that don't, in fact, read like jokes. I've harped on this before, but the best comedy writing is often not writing that looks funny on paper, but rather lines that are funny because of who's saying them and the context in which they are said. Most of the best lines from the first five years of AITF are like that:
GLORIA: Do you know that sixty percent of all deaths in America are caused by guns?
ARCHIE: Would it make you feel any better if they was pushed out of windows?
(From the menopause episode)
ARCHIE: I know all about your woman's troubles there, Edith, but when I had the hernia that time, I didn't make you wear the truss! If you're gonna have the change of life, you gotta do it right now! I'm gonna give you just 30 seconds, come on, change!
EDITH: Can I finish my soup first?
(The closing line of the episode "The Bunkers and the Swingers")
ARCHIE (to Edith): Don't you read no more magazines!
EDITH: Oh, look, Archie, Chanel Number 5! That's their highest number!
The other thing about the Nicholl/Ross/West years of "All in the Family" is that the show did very few Very Special or Serious episodes in those five years. There were a few "issue" episodes -- like the episode where Gloria almost gets raped and ends the episode by deciding not to report it, a much more effective episode than the Edith episode of a few years later. But most of the Nicholl/Ross/West episodes deal more with everyday problems, get-rich-quick schemes that don't work, arguments between the characters, and so on. They wouldn't avoid dealing with controversial issues if that was what the characters needed to talk about, but they weren't about to build the stories around iseues instead of people. Even the "dramatic" moments were relatively low-key and more about character relationships than issues. For example, the episode (written by Ross and West) where Archie disapproves of his niece dating Lionel Jefferson; the climax of the episode is partly about a social issue, but mostly about Lionel explaining the nature of his relationship with Archie, and making it clear that there's a point at which he doesn't find Archie's behavior funny:
ARCHIE: I'm saying youse guys oughtta stick with youselves.
LIONEL: You mean guys oughtta stay with guys?
ARCHIE: You know what I'm talking about, Lionel. I'm saying that whites oughtta stay with whites and coloreds oughtta stay with coloreds.
LIONEL: Look, Mr. Bunker, it's been a year and a half now since we moved into this neighborhood. I was just nineteen, and I got a big kick out of you and me for a long time. But I'm pushing twenty-one now, and I'm not getting that big a kick out of it anymore.
ARCHIE: Put a lid on it, Lionel --
LIONEL: I'm not finished. Now, we've been friends and we can go on being friends. But when it comes to black and white and all the other wonderful thoughts you have in between, put a lid on that, Archie!
That exchange, which builds on a character relationship that was established in the first episode (Lionel as the guy who subtly makes fun of Archie's ignorance and prejudice, but sort of likes him), takes that relationship to a new place, and uses a very simple device to do so (it's the first time Lionel ever calls Archie by his first name), is also a good example of the way the best sitcoms have all the character development and growth that we expect in the best dramas. Actually, in the '70s, hourlong dramas were more like anthologies, and didn't have anywhere near the character depth or development of good sitcoms.
Anyway, with the departure of Nicholl/Ross/West, "All in the Family" lost the character comedy and the organic character development. In a weird way, Nicholl/Ross/West brought some of that to "Three's Company"; it was in no wise a great show, but it did try to mine laughs from character and situation instead of setup/punchline routines, and for that reason it holds up a lot better than most Norman Lear shows, including AITF after the fifth season.
Monday, October 24, 2005
Wherever We Went, They Loved Us
One of the great American flop musicals, The Golden Apple (the subject of an excellent introductory essay by Erik Haagensen), takes place right after the Spanish-American War. This is a war with an uncomfortable number of parallels to the current conflict, though it was more successful. And in the introductory song for Ulysses, lyricist John Latouche draws a funny and biting portrait of soldiers who are still not quite aware that the rest of the world doesn't see them the way they see themselves:
LaTouche was one of the great American lyricists and opera librettists, whose career was cut short by a heart attack at the age of 41; The Golden Apple, an insanely ambitious, dialogue-free musical transplanting the story of The Odyssey to turn-of-the-century America, is his masterpiece, but it's never received a major revival or even a complete recording.
It was a glad adventure,
The Philippine scene was so sweet.
Them wee eager roots
In their birthday suits
Made life just a Sunday School treat.
Wherever we went, they loved us,
So dazzled they were with our charms.
The folks in them lands
Ate right out of our hands,
But why do they chew off the arms?
Oh, why do they chew off the arms?
The same held true in Cuba,
When gaily we bombshelled a port.
Though harsh blows were dealt
By Ted Roosevelt,
They knew it was only in sport.
Wherever we went, they loved us,
They tucked us in rose-petal beds.
They welcomed our troops
With their dances and whoops,
But why do they shrink our heads?
Oh, why do they shrink our heads?
Oh, Theodore, oh, Theodore,
The Roosevelt that we adore!
Wherever we went, they loved us,
They cheered when they saw us arrive.
They loved us so much,
Their affection was such
We're lucky to get home alive.
Oh, we're lucky to get home alive.
LaTouche was one of the great American lyricists and opera librettists, whose career was cut short by a heart attack at the age of 41; The Golden Apple, an insanely ambitious, dialogue-free musical transplanting the story of The Odyssey to turn-of-the-century America, is his masterpiece, but it's never received a major revival or even a complete recording.
What the MILF?
One of my least favorite among today's popular slang terms is "MILF" (Mother I'd Like to Fuck). Not because I'm offended by the implication that a woman can still be attractive once she's old enough for "US Magazine" to lose interest in her, but because I just think it's a lousy acronym. An acronym should be an actual word. Oddly enough this is one case where the "cleaner" versions of the acronym actually work better: "MILK" (Mother I'd Like to Kiss) or "MILD" (Mother I'd Like to Do) make way more sense than "MILF."
Anyway, I did a Google Groups search for the acronym "MILF" to find out when it was first used. I discovered that the first major usenet use of "MILF" occurred in 1990, except it stood for "Moro Islamic Liberation Front," a Muslim separatist guerilla group based in the Philippines.
For several years thereafter, most references to "MILF" involved this Muslim separatist group and its increasing number of guerillas. But just as MILF was starting to become news, American Pie came out in 1999 and introduced the new meaning of the acronym. Thus undoubtedly earning the producers the enmity of the real MILF, which was soon almost forgotten on Usenet among the flood of American Pie-style "MILF" references.
So while Wikipedia says that the usage of "MILF" in the modern sense pre-dates American Pie, I can't find anything on usenet that would suggest that anyone ever used it that way before the movie. Take that, Wikipedia.
This has been your slang lesson for today. You're welcome.
Anyway, I did a Google Groups search for the acronym "MILF" to find out when it was first used. I discovered that the first major usenet use of "MILF" occurred in 1990, except it stood for "Moro Islamic Liberation Front," a Muslim separatist guerilla group based in the Philippines.
For several years thereafter, most references to "MILF" involved this Muslim separatist group and its increasing number of guerillas. But just as MILF was starting to become news, American Pie came out in 1999 and introduced the new meaning of the acronym. Thus undoubtedly earning the producers the enmity of the real MILF, which was soon almost forgotten on Usenet among the flood of American Pie-style "MILF" references.
So while Wikipedia says that the usage of "MILF" in the modern sense pre-dates American Pie, I can't find anything on usenet that would suggest that anyone ever used it that way before the movie. Take that, Wikipedia.
This has been your slang lesson for today. You're welcome.
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