Every hit musical has songs that don't become hits. (Sometimes a show becomes a hit without producing any hit songs; after he did the hit musical Wonderful Town, Leonard Bernstein wrote an article where he imagined his alter-ego asking him the question everybody else was asking in real life: "That musical of yours, it's very popular and successful, and yet there's not a hit song in it. Why is that?") And every hit musical has at least one song that I always think should have been a hit, but isn't.
One such song is "(Baby) Talk To Me," from Bye Bye Birdie. This song was cut from the film version and isn't particularly well-known, yet it's probably the best number in the show -- more effective than many of the more famous numbers. The setup of the song is Albert (Dick Van Dyke) calling Rosie (Chita Rivera) on the phone from a diner, asking her to talk to him after the inevitable Act 2 lovers' quarrel. The song is a deceptively simple melody and lyric with a great arrangement by Robert Ginzler, a truly great orchestrator who had a fondness for reeds (though when I suggested to Jonathan Tunick, who considers Ginzler his mentor, that I associate Ginzler with flutes, he quite rightly lectured me that there was much more to "Red" Ginzler than that).
Charles Strouse's melody and Ginzler's arrangement make a lovely moment, both a nod to and a send-up of typical late '50s ballads. But the song really becomes magical when the other people in the diner start singing along with Albert in the second refrain, in a marvelous vocal arrangement; if the song has hints of parody, the arrangement is a flat-out full-on parody of the kind of vocal harmonies you heard in "backup" vocals at the time -- yet at the same time it works on a gut level too, so it's both touching and hilarious. "Go on, what can you lose, it ain't gonna hurt" may be my favorite moment in any number in any musical ever. I'm serious.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Why Is it "Sylvester and Tweety" and not "Tweety and Sylvester?"
Warner Brothers will release the first season of the WB network show The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries on DVD. I'm actually surprised it took them this long, given how important Tweety is to their merchandising these days.
This was one of the new shows that launched the WB's first Saturday morning lineup in 1995, aimed at younger audiences than their other animated shows. Tom Minton was the producer and head writer, but the format was not his idea. Warners had the idea that Granny (voiced by June Foray, but the original design from the Bea Benaderet years) should be an Angela Lansbury-type sleuth who travels around the world solving mysteries; Tweety, Sylvester and Hector the bulldog sometimes help her but mostly just do their usual chase routines. (I'll give the show credit for that much: despite the format, Tweety and Sylvester were usually in character.)
The show actually became pretty interesting after the first season. The first season suffered from doing all half-hour stories, way too long for a Tweety/Sylvester cartoon even with the mystery stuff. In the second season and for the rest of the series' run, Minton and his crew (including writer/storyboardist Carolyn Gair) made two big changes: one, they reformatted the show so the episodes had two separate 10-minute cartoons, and two, they revamped the design style of the show in the style of late '50s cartoons, with very stylized backgrounds and a different stylized design approach for every story. Add in the penchant for unusual cameos by WB characters of the past -- the writers had a Cool Cat obsession and would work a reference to him into just about everuy episode -- and a good knowledge of Sylvester/Tweety gags, and it was actually quite enjoyable to watch.
The first season, despite the flawed format, has one thing going for it: Tokyo Movie Shinsha animated many of the episodes (Warners decided that the "classic" characters would benefit from TMS animation, which is part of the reason why Animaniacs didn't have access to TMS that season).
This was one of the new shows that launched the WB's first Saturday morning lineup in 1995, aimed at younger audiences than their other animated shows. Tom Minton was the producer and head writer, but the format was not his idea. Warners had the idea that Granny (voiced by June Foray, but the original design from the Bea Benaderet years) should be an Angela Lansbury-type sleuth who travels around the world solving mysteries; Tweety, Sylvester and Hector the bulldog sometimes help her but mostly just do their usual chase routines. (I'll give the show credit for that much: despite the format, Tweety and Sylvester were usually in character.)
The show actually became pretty interesting after the first season. The first season suffered from doing all half-hour stories, way too long for a Tweety/Sylvester cartoon even with the mystery stuff. In the second season and for the rest of the series' run, Minton and his crew (including writer/storyboardist Carolyn Gair) made two big changes: one, they reformatted the show so the episodes had two separate 10-minute cartoons, and two, they revamped the design style of the show in the style of late '50s cartoons, with very stylized backgrounds and a different stylized design approach for every story. Add in the penchant for unusual cameos by WB characters of the past -- the writers had a Cool Cat obsession and would work a reference to him into just about everuy episode -- and a good knowledge of Sylvester/Tweety gags, and it was actually quite enjoyable to watch.
The first season, despite the flawed format, has one thing going for it: Tokyo Movie Shinsha animated many of the episodes (Warners decided that the "classic" characters would benefit from TMS animation, which is part of the reason why Animaniacs didn't have access to TMS that season).
WKRP Episode: "In Concert"
By request, one of the most famous episodes from the second season: "In Concert," written and aired soon after the 1979 The Who Concert in Cincinnati where several fans were trampled to death. Steven Kampmann, one of the writers, felt that as a show about rock radio in Cincinnati they couldn't avoid dealing with the event, so he came up with this story. Hugh Wilson was reluctant to do it initially, but agreed to do the episode if they could take a stand against the "festival seating" that caused the tragedy (since that would give the episode a purpose and not make it exploitative). Originally the caption at the end of the episode was supposed to chide other cities for not following Cincinnati's example in banning festival seating, but CBS refused to allow that and changed the caption to something less controversial.
Music: "The Wait" by The Pretenders; "Sympathy For the Devil" by The Rolling Stones, and in the final scene, "Remembering the Rain" by Bill Evans. Steven Kampmann does the voice of the contest winner in the opening scene.
Music: "The Wait" by The Pretenders; "Sympathy For the Devil" by The Rolling Stones, and in the final scene, "Remembering the Rain" by Bill Evans. Steven Kampmann does the voice of the contest winner in the opening scene.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Why Didn't the POGO Special Work?
I originally didn't see Mark Mayerson's post from last year on the Walt Kelly/Chuck Jones "Pogo Special Birthday Special" from 1969. Fortunately the special still seems to be available on YouTube. Unfortunately, it's not a whole lot better than I remembered it being.
I saw the Pogo special when I was quite young, before I had ever read a Pogo strip. It was available on VHS at the time, and my Dad, a big fan of the strip, saw it in a video store and advised me to rent it to get acquainted with Pogo. But the special was so dull that I couldn't get through it, and it probably turned me off from seeking out the strip (though I eventually did, and it was great).
Kelly blamed the failure of the special on Jones, telling his ex-Disney colleague Ward Kimball that "the son-of-a-bitch changed it after our last meeting!" I don't fully buy this. Jones certainly made some mistakes that Kelly did not approve or approve of, particularly giving Mam'zelle Hepzibah the Skunk a new, human face. (Why he would do that when he'd already spent years successfully drawing a skunk -- who probably influenced the character of Mam'zelle Hepzibah in the first place -- is beyond me.) But Kelly wrote the script and did some of the voices, and it doesn't seem to me that he's blameless for the weaknesses of the film; the lines the characters are saying are less funny than a typical week of Pogo strips, even circa 1969 when the strip was not as great as it had once been (but still funny).
Jones and Kelly undoubtedly were hoping that The Pogo Special Birthday Special would do for Pogo what another half-hour prime-time special had done for Peanuts. But A Charlie Brown Christmas preserved the tone of the strip, in part by lifting large chunks of dialogue directly from the daily strips. The Pogo special doesn't feel the same as the strip, not even the Sunday strips where Kelly deliberately toned down the political content. (Kelly saw the Sunday page as essentially a separate strip with a separate, younger audience than the weekday strips.) Some of that is Kelly's writing, and some of it is Jones' slow pacing.
There's a pacing problem built into any adaptation of Pogo, which is that the pacing of the strip doesn't match the setting. The Pogo strip moved pretty fast, even in the strips where Pogo and the gang were just lazing around the swamp. It moved fast because the panels were crammed full of dialogue and there was always some piece of background action to keep your attention. Translate that to animation and you've just got cute animal characters lazing around a swamp, and it instantly feels too slow and soft for Pogo. That's one problem Jones didn't solve. But he compounded it with the pacing issues that plague all his work from the early '60s on.
Watching it, I tried to figure out why Jones's later stuff feels so slow. There are a bunch of contributing factors, like the musical score (when it was up to him to dictate what kind of music he got, he tended to favor scores that didn't really push the action along) and the tendency to linger on his favorite poses, but what strikes me most is that these late Jones cartoons have a "show-offy" feel as regards their full animation -- that is, there's a lot of time taken on in-betweens and fluid movement, too much time taken between funny poses. (Remember what Michael Lah said about animating for Tex Avery, that the'd always find themselves taking out in-betweens because they found that the pose reels had sharper timing.) At some point he seemed to lose track of what all great comedy animation directors know, that if the animation is too full, you lose the timing. I don't know if that was related to his admirable determination to continue with full animation at a time nobody else was; but it does seem like his later stuff has a tendency to call attention to the full animation, whereas when full animation was taken for granted, he was more willing to pop characters from pose to pose in a funny, snappy way.
I saw the Pogo special when I was quite young, before I had ever read a Pogo strip. It was available on VHS at the time, and my Dad, a big fan of the strip, saw it in a video store and advised me to rent it to get acquainted with Pogo. But the special was so dull that I couldn't get through it, and it probably turned me off from seeking out the strip (though I eventually did, and it was great).
Kelly blamed the failure of the special on Jones, telling his ex-Disney colleague Ward Kimball that "the son-of-a-bitch changed it after our last meeting!" I don't fully buy this. Jones certainly made some mistakes that Kelly did not approve or approve of, particularly giving Mam'zelle Hepzibah the Skunk a new, human face. (Why he would do that when he'd already spent years successfully drawing a skunk -- who probably influenced the character of Mam'zelle Hepzibah in the first place -- is beyond me.) But Kelly wrote the script and did some of the voices, and it doesn't seem to me that he's blameless for the weaknesses of the film; the lines the characters are saying are less funny than a typical week of Pogo strips, even circa 1969 when the strip was not as great as it had once been (but still funny).
Jones and Kelly undoubtedly were hoping that The Pogo Special Birthday Special would do for Pogo what another half-hour prime-time special had done for Peanuts. But A Charlie Brown Christmas preserved the tone of the strip, in part by lifting large chunks of dialogue directly from the daily strips. The Pogo special doesn't feel the same as the strip, not even the Sunday strips where Kelly deliberately toned down the political content. (Kelly saw the Sunday page as essentially a separate strip with a separate, younger audience than the weekday strips.) Some of that is Kelly's writing, and some of it is Jones' slow pacing.
There's a pacing problem built into any adaptation of Pogo, which is that the pacing of the strip doesn't match the setting. The Pogo strip moved pretty fast, even in the strips where Pogo and the gang were just lazing around the swamp. It moved fast because the panels were crammed full of dialogue and there was always some piece of background action to keep your attention. Translate that to animation and you've just got cute animal characters lazing around a swamp, and it instantly feels too slow and soft for Pogo. That's one problem Jones didn't solve. But he compounded it with the pacing issues that plague all his work from the early '60s on.
Watching it, I tried to figure out why Jones's later stuff feels so slow. There are a bunch of contributing factors, like the musical score (when it was up to him to dictate what kind of music he got, he tended to favor scores that didn't really push the action along) and the tendency to linger on his favorite poses, but what strikes me most is that these late Jones cartoons have a "show-offy" feel as regards their full animation -- that is, there's a lot of time taken on in-betweens and fluid movement, too much time taken between funny poses. (Remember what Michael Lah said about animating for Tex Avery, that the'd always find themselves taking out in-betweens because they found that the pose reels had sharper timing.) At some point he seemed to lose track of what all great comedy animation directors know, that if the animation is too full, you lose the timing. I don't know if that was related to his admirable determination to continue with full animation at a time nobody else was; but it does seem like his later stuff has a tendency to call attention to the full animation, whereas when full animation was taken for granted, he was more willing to pop characters from pose to pose in a funny, snappy way.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Music-Free Movies
The Gunfighter, the first "revisionist Western" and one of the best, comes out on DVD tomorrow. Buy it. It is awesome. (The two Westerns it's packaged with I have not seen yet, but one of them has a Bernard Herrmann isolated score, so that can't be bad.)
Henry King had an odd career. His style, as I've said often, is very similar to John Ford's; their movies look similar, have similar cutting, lighting, camera angles, both of them liked relatively static shots at low angles with the ceilings in full view, etc. He wasn't as self-consciously arty as John Ford, and he wasn't as sentimental; his best movies for Fox are as good as Ford's or better. The difference between them was that King didn't have Ford's independent streak, and starting in the mid-'30s he was happy to spend virtually his entire career as a Fox contract director, doing basically whatever project was handed to him. As a director-for-hire, he was probably better than Ford (Ford kind of shut down when he was handed a project that he hadn't had any role in developing), but directing-for-hire is just about all he did, meaning that the quality of his films depended more on the work of the producer than on him. He was the Michael Curtiz of Fox; he didn't do as many great films as Curtiz because Warner Brothers was a better studio than Fox for most of the '30s and '40s, but they were both brilliant directors-for-hire.
One thing about The Gunfighter that I noticed is that even though Alfred Newman gets a music credit, it has no music at all except in the opening and the closing. It seems like there were a number of movies in the post-war period that tried to turn the lack of music into a sort of special musical effect. (Nunnally Johnson, the producer and uncredited co-writer of Gunfighter, had tried something similar with The Grapes of Wrath, which he co-produced: that movie has a bit of music in a few sequences, but most of it is deliberately music-free even where you'd normally expect to have some soundtrack music.) I'm thinking especially of three movies from MGM: The Asphalt Jungle (1950) has opening credits music and then not a single piece of musical scoring until the final scene, when Dix gets out of the city and into the country; Intruder in the Dust (1949) has no music except in the opening credits; otherwise it's all "source" music (music played by radios and so on), and Lady In the Lake (1947) not only has that crazy POV camera gimmick but doesn't score any of the scenes.
There are others; those are the ones that come to mind. I don't know if this move toward music-free filmmaking was a reaction against the over-use of soundtrack music in the late '30s and early '40s (when some movies were wall-to-wall music) or if it was an attempt to play more with other things you could do on a soundtrack -- The Gunfighter uses distant crowd noise, kids shouting outside, etc. -- but it was almost a return to the early talkie pictures that had music stings at the beginning and end but nothing in between.
Henry King had an odd career. His style, as I've said often, is very similar to John Ford's; their movies look similar, have similar cutting, lighting, camera angles, both of them liked relatively static shots at low angles with the ceilings in full view, etc. He wasn't as self-consciously arty as John Ford, and he wasn't as sentimental; his best movies for Fox are as good as Ford's or better. The difference between them was that King didn't have Ford's independent streak, and starting in the mid-'30s he was happy to spend virtually his entire career as a Fox contract director, doing basically whatever project was handed to him. As a director-for-hire, he was probably better than Ford (Ford kind of shut down when he was handed a project that he hadn't had any role in developing), but directing-for-hire is just about all he did, meaning that the quality of his films depended more on the work of the producer than on him. He was the Michael Curtiz of Fox; he didn't do as many great films as Curtiz because Warner Brothers was a better studio than Fox for most of the '30s and '40s, but they were both brilliant directors-for-hire.
One thing about The Gunfighter that I noticed is that even though Alfred Newman gets a music credit, it has no music at all except in the opening and the closing. It seems like there were a number of movies in the post-war period that tried to turn the lack of music into a sort of special musical effect. (Nunnally Johnson, the producer and uncredited co-writer of Gunfighter, had tried something similar with The Grapes of Wrath, which he co-produced: that movie has a bit of music in a few sequences, but most of it is deliberately music-free even where you'd normally expect to have some soundtrack music.) I'm thinking especially of three movies from MGM: The Asphalt Jungle (1950) has opening credits music and then not a single piece of musical scoring until the final scene, when Dix gets out of the city and into the country; Intruder in the Dust (1949) has no music except in the opening credits; otherwise it's all "source" music (music played by radios and so on), and Lady In the Lake (1947) not only has that crazy POV camera gimmick but doesn't score any of the scenes.
There are others; those are the ones that come to mind. I don't know if this move toward music-free filmmaking was a reaction against the over-use of soundtrack music in the late '30s and early '40s (when some movies were wall-to-wall music) or if it was an attempt to play more with other things you could do on a soundtrack -- The Gunfighter uses distant crowd noise, kids shouting outside, etc. -- but it was almost a return to the early talkie pictures that had music stings at the beginning and end but nothing in between.
The Crystal Skull?
Turns out not only did Bob Bolling come up with the name "Doctor Doom" either before or exactly at the same time as Marvel Comics, but when the Archie title assigned him to Sabrina the Teen-age Witch for a few issues in the '80s (the idea being to see if he could liven up that title with his trademark mix of action-adventure and comedy, the way he did for Little Archie), here's one of the stories he came up with.
I don't know what the new Indiana Jones movie will be like, but I think it would be seriously enlivened by the presence of Professor Pither (say it without the lisp) in Mad Doctor Doom's Time Taxi. (The idea of this brief run of Bolling Sabrinas was that her arch-nemesis was using Mad Doctor Doom's house, Crackstone Manor, and all his gadgets, while Doom and Chester were away.)
I don't know what the new Indiana Jones movie will be like, but I think it would be seriously enlivened by the presence of Professor Pither (say it without the lisp) in Mad Doctor Doom's Time Taxi. (The idea of this brief run of Bolling Sabrinas was that her arch-nemesis was using Mad Doctor Doom's house, Crackstone Manor, and all his gadgets, while Doom and Chester were away.)
Friday, May 09, 2008
WKRP Episode: "God Talks to Johnny"
I really like this season 2 episode, written by Hugh Wilson and directed by Will Mackenzie. The structure of it is quite odd, though: essentially, the plot stops after the cold open and doesn't start up again until Act 2. The first act is mostly a series of self-contained scenes with Johnny talking to other characters who aren't involved in the story, getting their perspectives on the situation. It works because the scenes are very strong, culminating in the famous physical-comedy routine in Carlson's office (Gordon Jump gives an object lesson in how to play off a big laugh from the audience and even extend it), but today the other characters in the office would be given a B story to give them something to do, instead of commenting on the A story. Music: "Arrow Through Me" by Paul McCartney and Wings.
Unfortunately this episode is missing a few seconds: originally at the end of the scene in the broadcast booth, after Johnny turns the Paul McCartney music back on, Herb enters the scene and says: "John?" Johnny, without looking around, stands up and says "Yes, yes, Lord, what is it?" Herb replies: "New advertising copy," hands Johnny the papers and leaves, looking confused. This bit was cut from the old syndication versions, and on the Comedy Network's complete version it was badly redubbed with voice actors (to get rid of the music). What I did was dub over the music from the beginning of the act, turning it into a silent sequence, to at least show how it played. If I ever get an original CBS version of this episode, I will re-post the episode with the missing lines. Update: The episode now has the missing scene restored.
WKRP s02e13 God Talks To Johnny by carpalton
WKRP s02e13 God Talks To Johnny by carpalton
Thursday, May 08, 2008
They Blu Themselves
You may have heard that The Criterion Collection has announced it's jumping into the Blu-Ray format and will be re-releasing a bunch of titles in Blu-Ray -- plus Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket, the first product of his "Remember When We Weren't Tired of Wes Anderson?" period.
I don't have a Blu-Ray player yet, and am not enough of a videophile to go for one until the prices go down still further. (That is, I know that Blu-Ray looks better than Standard, but not so much better that I would notice at the moment.) I assume they will eventually become the standard, just as widescreen TVs are becoming the standard, but for now the question about Blu-Ray is whether it can actually revitalize the sagging DVD business.
Those of us who collect DVDs have noticed that the quantity and quality of DVD releases has gone down lately, especially older movies and shows. Part of this is that the studios were holding back until one format won in the high-def wars, but it's also that DVD sales have flattened out, and that studios now have a good idea of what old movies will and won't sell on DVD.
I think we were lucky, to an extent, because from 2002 to 2005 or so, DVDs were booming and so the studios had a lot of releases, but the format was new enough that they weren't really sure what would sell or how much money these things were expected to make. It was in those years that we got a lot of old movies in surprisingly elaborate special editions or expensively-done transfers, TV shows released with music intact, and so on. Around 2005-6, that started to change a bit, and some studios dropped out of classics almost completely (Paramount) or started chopping out all the music from TV shows (Paramount, Fox).
Will Blu-Ray help revive the market for non-new films? I kind of doubt it, though obviously Criterion getting into the act is an important thing in that respect. (Though most of the movies they're starting with for Blu-Ray are not really ones that would make me want to save up for a player and discs to go with it.) Warner Brothers already kind of tested this by putting out two of their best-selling classics -- Casablanca and The Adventures of Robin Hood on high-def, and apparently they did not sell particularly well. On the other hand, doesn't mean a whole lot at the moment, since so few people have high-def DVD players. But there is the problem of bang for the buck: while black-and-white movie will presumably look better in high-definition, they won't look so much better.
Also, just as Super Audio CD never really took off because consumers preferred lower-quality but easier-to-access online downloads, I have a suspicion that we may be seeing the same with Blu-Ray: the companies will be pushing it, and maybe it'll work out, but this is a time when more and more of us clearly don't want the very highest quality, we just want to see stuff -- see it on TV, see it online, whatever. The age of YouTube and downloading is not a great time to be pushing audiophile/videophile formats. But we'll see; I'm not making predictions. I do think that I'll get more excited when/if I see the studios putting more old movies and TV shows online; for worse or better, we're more likely to see our favorite unreleased classics online than on Blu-Ray.
I don't have a Blu-Ray player yet, and am not enough of a videophile to go for one until the prices go down still further. (That is, I know that Blu-Ray looks better than Standard, but not so much better that I would notice at the moment.) I assume they will eventually become the standard, just as widescreen TVs are becoming the standard, but for now the question about Blu-Ray is whether it can actually revitalize the sagging DVD business.
Those of us who collect DVDs have noticed that the quantity and quality of DVD releases has gone down lately, especially older movies and shows. Part of this is that the studios were holding back until one format won in the high-def wars, but it's also that DVD sales have flattened out, and that studios now have a good idea of what old movies will and won't sell on DVD.
I think we were lucky, to an extent, because from 2002 to 2005 or so, DVDs were booming and so the studios had a lot of releases, but the format was new enough that they weren't really sure what would sell or how much money these things were expected to make. It was in those years that we got a lot of old movies in surprisingly elaborate special editions or expensively-done transfers, TV shows released with music intact, and so on. Around 2005-6, that started to change a bit, and some studios dropped out of classics almost completely (Paramount) or started chopping out all the music from TV shows (Paramount, Fox).
Will Blu-Ray help revive the market for non-new films? I kind of doubt it, though obviously Criterion getting into the act is an important thing in that respect. (Though most of the movies they're starting with for Blu-Ray are not really ones that would make me want to save up for a player and discs to go with it.) Warner Brothers already kind of tested this by putting out two of their best-selling classics -- Casablanca and The Adventures of Robin Hood on high-def, and apparently they did not sell particularly well. On the other hand, doesn't mean a whole lot at the moment, since so few people have high-def DVD players. But there is the problem of bang for the buck: while black-and-white movie will presumably look better in high-definition, they won't look so much better.
Also, just as Super Audio CD never really took off because consumers preferred lower-quality but easier-to-access online downloads, I have a suspicion that we may be seeing the same with Blu-Ray: the companies will be pushing it, and maybe it'll work out, but this is a time when more and more of us clearly don't want the very highest quality, we just want to see stuff -- see it on TV, see it online, whatever. The age of YouTube and downloading is not a great time to be pushing audiophile/videophile formats. But we'll see; I'm not making predictions. I do think that I'll get more excited when/if I see the studios putting more old movies and TV shows online; for worse or better, we're more likely to see our favorite unreleased classics online than on Blu-Ray.
Oh!
I think that of all the stupid Superfriends moments, this may be my favorite. The villain sends the ulimate weapon to defeat Green Lantern:
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Grudge Match: Magnificent Seven vs. Seven Samurai
East meets West, original meets remake: The Seven Samurai face off against The Magnificent Seven in an all-out fight without weapons. Will Brynner's Band Bring the Badassery, or will Takashi and Toshiro's Team Take them to the Top?
Why are no weapons allowed in this fight? Because the Seven Samurai have swords. The Magnificent Seven have guns. Indiana Jones can tell you how that fight turns out.
Why are no weapons allowed in this fight? Because the Seven Samurai have swords. The Magnificent Seven have guns. Indiana Jones can tell you how that fight turns out.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Alice Faye Is More Popular Than Betty Grable?
Fox released a Betty Grable collection on DVD, and it didn't do well enough for them to release a second set (so far), but they have announced The Alice Faye Collection, Volume 2, with "Hollywood Cavalcade," "Rose of Washington Square" (aka "Please Don't Sue Us, Fanny Brice"), "The Great American Broadcast," "Hello, Frisco, Hello," and the USO tribute "Four Jills in a Jeep" (which doesn't actually star Faye; she and Grable and other Fox stars appear as themselves).
If the Faye collection sold better than the Grable collection, as this seems to indicate (though it may be that the films in this collection, being mostly black-and-white, are cheaper to remaster than Grable's mostly Technicolor movies), it surprises me; neither is among my favorite musical stars of the period but I'd always assumed that Grable was better-known. Apparently not.
Speaking of Fox musicals with Alice Faye, the best of the lot, Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here, received a transfer with incorrect colors last time around; Fox is releasing a "remastered," and hopefully corrected, version with the same extras, either individually or as part of a Carmen Miranda Collection -- which, except for Gang, is really more of a Vivian Blaine collection, since she's in most of those movies.
Every studio in the Golden Age of Movie Musicals (tm) had its strengths and weaknesses. Fox's strengths included photography (especially in Technicolor, of course), musical direction (Alfred Newman's arrangements could be overdone at times, but they were a lot more tasteful than the garish, generically loud work of the MGM department) and comedy relief players like Phil Silvers (who also helped out some musicals at Columbia). I think their front-line talent, like Faye and Grable, was not nearly as strong as the other studios'; their top musical stars are a lot more limited than anybody else's.
Update: It occurred to me that if Faye is indeed more popular than Grable, it might be evidence that movie-musical performers with one outstanding talent hold up better than performers who are good but not great at everything. Faye wasn't very strong as an actor, wasn't really a dancer, but she did have a genuinely outstanding singing voice. Grable was a valuable performer because she could supply all four things you look for in movie musicals: singing, dancing, acting, and looks. But she wasn't great at any of those things, she was good, not great. I think you could argue that a performer who is outstanding at one or two things but weak at other things will inspire more interest years down the road than someone who is good but not outstanding at everything, even though the latter performer is probably more valuable to the studio at the time.
If the Faye collection sold better than the Grable collection, as this seems to indicate (though it may be that the films in this collection, being mostly black-and-white, are cheaper to remaster than Grable's mostly Technicolor movies), it surprises me; neither is among my favorite musical stars of the period but I'd always assumed that Grable was better-known. Apparently not.
Speaking of Fox musicals with Alice Faye, the best of the lot, Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here, received a transfer with incorrect colors last time around; Fox is releasing a "remastered," and hopefully corrected, version with the same extras, either individually or as part of a Carmen Miranda Collection -- which, except for Gang, is really more of a Vivian Blaine collection, since she's in most of those movies.
Every studio in the Golden Age of Movie Musicals (tm) had its strengths and weaknesses. Fox's strengths included photography (especially in Technicolor, of course), musical direction (Alfred Newman's arrangements could be overdone at times, but they were a lot more tasteful than the garish, generically loud work of the MGM department) and comedy relief players like Phil Silvers (who also helped out some musicals at Columbia). I think their front-line talent, like Faye and Grable, was not nearly as strong as the other studios'; their top musical stars are a lot more limited than anybody else's.
Update: It occurred to me that if Faye is indeed more popular than Grable, it might be evidence that movie-musical performers with one outstanding talent hold up better than performers who are good but not great at everything. Faye wasn't very strong as an actor, wasn't really a dancer, but she did have a genuinely outstanding singing voice. Grable was a valuable performer because she could supply all four things you look for in movie musicals: singing, dancing, acting, and looks. But she wasn't great at any of those things, she was good, not great. I think you could argue that a performer who is outstanding at one or two things but weak at other things will inspire more interest years down the road than someone who is good but not outstanding at everything, even though the latter performer is probably more valuable to the studio at the time.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
"Well, That Was No Good At All."
Reading this post about Paula Prentiss's great performance in Howard Hawks' last comedy, Man's Favorite Sport?, reminded me of something I wanted to mention about this movie: I've noticed that in the past few years, this film's reputation seems to have gone up. Not so much among critics, but among average movie-goers; I keep hearing people remember it as one of the comedies they liked best when they saw it on TV growing up, or picking it as one of the great romantic comedies. I don't think it is, but I do think it's better than its critical reputation.
Man's Favorite Sport?, like every movie Howard Hawks made in the last decade of his career, is a re-hash of stuff Hawks had done before, with gags and lines lifted from Bringing Up Baby. He also lifts gags and story points from a movie he didn't make, Libeled Lady (where William Powell also tries to fish even though he doesn't know how, like Rock Hudson in MFS?). It is over-long, studio-bound and has a less-than-great cast except for Prentiss and the great veteran Roscoe Karns. All these problems together were obvious enough to critics at the time that even the most die-hard auteuriste critics, the ones who thought Hawks could do no wrong, thought he'd gone wrong with this one. (This was virtually the only Hawks movie that got a bad review from Andrew Sarris.) And, yeah, as a Hawks movie, it's a slightly sad indication of how much he'd lost in terms of pacing and story construction, and though the script was improved by Leigh Brackett's uncredited rewrites, it's still not great.
But most people coming to MFS? for the first time don't approach it as a Hawks movie; they see it instead as a Rock Hudson romantic comedy from Universal in the '60s. Because, well, it is that, too. And people who approach it that way are often pleasantly surprised to find that while it has the look and feel of a comedy from that period (the flat, studio-bound look is an inescapable part of the Rock/Doris world), it totally goes against what they're set up to expect from that kind of comedy. I remember someone explaining to me why he loved Man's Favorite Sport?: he was used to seeing Rock Hudson in comedies where he humiliates Doris Day all through the picture, and where the whole thing is slightly sexist and corny, and here's a movie that looks like those other movies, but the woman is getting the best of Rock Hudson right from the beginning, and the battle-of-the-sexes comedy feels more equal and more modern. I explained to him that a lot of what he liked in MFS? was borrowed from Bringing Up Baby, but he hadn't seen that movie (though he'd heard other people recommend that if he liked MFS? he should see Baby). A comedy about a man being constantly one-upped by a crazy, strong, dangerous woman was normal in the '30s but it was like nothing else being done in the '60s. So when Hawks re-did what he'd been doing for decades, it seemed fresh and cool by comparison with most other comedies of the period.
The fact that no one else was doing this kind of comedy is one explanation for why Paula Prentiss never became a huge star. ("She should be a big comedy star," Hawks said a few years later. "I don't know what's wrong.") With her height, her quirky line delivery and body language, Prentiss projected a strength of character -- albeit weird, off-kilter character -- that required others to play straight man to her, in a time when female leads in comedies usually played it straight. (Look at The Pink Panther, which came out around the same time and is one of the best '60s comedies: the women mostly play it straighter than the men do.) She needed movies like MFS? and shows like He & She where guys would play George Burns to her taller, curvier Gracie Allen, but there weren't many projects like that in the '60s.
Man's Favorite Sport?, like every movie Howard Hawks made in the last decade of his career, is a re-hash of stuff Hawks had done before, with gags and lines lifted from Bringing Up Baby. He also lifts gags and story points from a movie he didn't make, Libeled Lady (where William Powell also tries to fish even though he doesn't know how, like Rock Hudson in MFS?). It is over-long, studio-bound and has a less-than-great cast except for Prentiss and the great veteran Roscoe Karns. All these problems together were obvious enough to critics at the time that even the most die-hard auteuriste critics, the ones who thought Hawks could do no wrong, thought he'd gone wrong with this one. (This was virtually the only Hawks movie that got a bad review from Andrew Sarris.) And, yeah, as a Hawks movie, it's a slightly sad indication of how much he'd lost in terms of pacing and story construction, and though the script was improved by Leigh Brackett's uncredited rewrites, it's still not great.
But most people coming to MFS? for the first time don't approach it as a Hawks movie; they see it instead as a Rock Hudson romantic comedy from Universal in the '60s. Because, well, it is that, too. And people who approach it that way are often pleasantly surprised to find that while it has the look and feel of a comedy from that period (the flat, studio-bound look is an inescapable part of the Rock/Doris world), it totally goes against what they're set up to expect from that kind of comedy. I remember someone explaining to me why he loved Man's Favorite Sport?: he was used to seeing Rock Hudson in comedies where he humiliates Doris Day all through the picture, and where the whole thing is slightly sexist and corny, and here's a movie that looks like those other movies, but the woman is getting the best of Rock Hudson right from the beginning, and the battle-of-the-sexes comedy feels more equal and more modern. I explained to him that a lot of what he liked in MFS? was borrowed from Bringing Up Baby, but he hadn't seen that movie (though he'd heard other people recommend that if he liked MFS? he should see Baby). A comedy about a man being constantly one-upped by a crazy, strong, dangerous woman was normal in the '30s but it was like nothing else being done in the '60s. So when Hawks re-did what he'd been doing for decades, it seemed fresh and cool by comparison with most other comedies of the period.
The fact that no one else was doing this kind of comedy is one explanation for why Paula Prentiss never became a huge star. ("She should be a big comedy star," Hawks said a few years later. "I don't know what's wrong.") With her height, her quirky line delivery and body language, Prentiss projected a strength of character -- albeit weird, off-kilter character -- that required others to play straight man to her, in a time when female leads in comedies usually played it straight. (Look at The Pink Panther, which came out around the same time and is one of the best '60s comedies: the women mostly play it straighter than the men do.) She needed movies like MFS? and shows like He & She where guys would play George Burns to her taller, curvier Gracie Allen, but there weren't many projects like that in the '60s.
Friday, May 02, 2008
WKRP Episode: "Jennifer Falls in Love"
This was the fourth episode broadcast in season 2, the second episode produced for the second season. For the first and only time in the series, Jennifer dates a man somewhere around her own age, while Les demands a raise. This episode features the famous exchange between Les and Jennifer's new boyfriend: "I like to think that a person's name tells us a lot about the type of person that he is."
Thursday, May 01, 2008
The Original "I Love to Singa"
This is where it all started, folks; before (albeit not long before) there was an Owl Jolson, there was Al Jolson, singing this Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg song with Cab Calloway, one of the few people who got caricatured in more cartoons than Al Jolson.
The Singing Kid was released on April 3, 1936, while "I Love To Singa" was released on July 18, 1936, only a little more than three months later. Since the song was written for The Singing Kid, this is another reminder that the songs in early Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons were sometimes taken from movies that hadn't even been finished, let alone released. (I'm assuming that when a Warner Brothers musical was in production, some potential hit songs would be recommended to Schlesinger's cartoon department as titles worth featuring in a cartoon.)
The Singing Kid was released on April 3, 1936, while "I Love To Singa" was released on July 18, 1936, only a little more than three months later. Since the song was written for The Singing Kid, this is another reminder that the songs in early Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons were sometimes taken from movies that hadn't even been finished, let alone released. (I'm assuming that when a Warner Brothers musical was in production, some potential hit songs would be recommended to Schlesinger's cartoon department as titles worth featuring in a cartoon.)
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Now I Wear Coyote Underwear
There's a new dirt-cheap Bob Hope Collection from BCI packaging together the various Hope films that he either owned or bought from the studios. (Road to Rio, Road to Bali, The Lemon Drop Kid, Son of Paleface, The Seven Little Foys, My Favorite Brunette, The Private Navy of Sergeant O'Farrell, and a couple of others.) These movies have all been released and packaged together before, but the package says that the two Road movies, My Favorite Brunette, and Son of Paleface are all "Newly Restored Masters." (BCI released these four films on the now-defunct HD-DVD format, and that's why they were remastered and not the others.) Son of Paleface is by some distance the best movie in this set, and while it looks more or less the same to me as the other DVD releases -- which, fortunately, came from a good print -- the previous DVD release had some sound distortion problems, especially in the loud music, which this version does not have. So at the price, it's worth picking up either if you want Son of Paleface or if you just want an overview of Bob Hope's career from the late '40s to his bad late '50s and '60s period. (The Seven Little Foys is the last decent film in the set, and it's from 1955.)
Son of Paleface was Frank Tashlin's second film as a director -- his first, appropriately enough, was The First Time, which TCM will be showing in July -- and I just found out that he wrote an article for the New York Times about his experiences making the movie. Not a whole lot of insight into the production, since it's basically a humor piece, but it's still valuable as a behind-the-scenes account of the greatest and most subversive sequel before Gremlins 2, so I'm transcribing it here. He doesn't mention his animation background here, of course.
Son of Paleface was Frank Tashlin's second film as a director -- his first, appropriately enough, was The First Time, which TCM will be showing in July -- and I just found out that he wrote an article for the New York Times about his experiences making the movie. Not a whole lot of insight into the production, since it's basically a humor piece, but it's still valuable as a behind-the-scenes account of the greatest and most subversive sequel before Gremlins 2, so I'm transcribing it here. He doesn't mention his animation background here, of course.
New York Times
October 5, 1952
"Son of Paleface" Went Thataway
By Frank Tashlin
Mr. Tashlin is the director and co-scenarist of "Son of Paleface," now at the Paramount.
Inasmuch as a certain lady reporter was in Culver City at the time, documenting the appetite and habits of a dog, the script of "Son of Paleface," Paramount production 10104, Revised, Final, White, came out of the Paramount mimeographing department unheralded. It consisted of a blue cover, 112 pages, weighing less than a pound.
During the preparation of the script the writers -- Robert L. Welch, Joseph Quillan and myself -- had eaten at Chasens at least three times and not one of us had been called "darling" by anyone. Even the East Coast myth of front-office interference was absent. Barney Balaban, Y. Frank Freeman, Don Hartman and D.A. Doran approved the script, set aside enough money to operate Oak Ridge for a day and signed contracts for four veteran performers to appear in the Technicolor production. After writing apologetic letters to the Paramount stockholders, these front-office gentlemen hied themselves to the Hollywood hills.
Bob Hope was veteran of thirty motion pictures; Jane Russell had pleased veterans in seven motion pictures; and Roy Rogers and Trigger had explored the vastness of Corrigan's ranch in eighty-eight motion pictures. The director of "Son of Paleface" was the veteran of one motion picture.
Previously -- as do most motion picture writers -- I had regarded directors as an evil, necessary to bring words and plot to their final two dimensions -- sour, growly gentlemen, critical of every page of script. With the star of shooting began an awareness of their problems; and, as director, I became extremely critical of two-thirds of the script -- the third I authored I insisted would play beautifully. I'm still insisting, though the floor of Eda Warren's cutting room, in some cases, proved otherwise.
Putting Mr. Hope through his paces has difficulties for the director. His thirty-picture memory draws a bead on the particular joke you are trying to sell him. He remembers a similar routine in "Road to Singapore." A fast rewrite is called for and the material is given what you hope is a new twist. No. Mr. Hope recalls that he did that twist in "Sorrowful Jones." His narrowed eyes, squinting at you down that much maligned nose, is a withering experience. Your puttees curl and your megaphone sags. Lunchtime is spent in digging for a new piece of business and Mr. Hope's approbation.
With Miss Russell I decided on a daring innovation. I photographed her legs.
The approach to directing Roy Rogers is the approach used by Cecil B. DeMille in his picturization of the Old and New Testament -- no deviation from the Sacred Word is allowed. The tenets in this case are contained in the unwritten Code of the West -- notwithstanding the birth rate in Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, etc., motion-picture cowboys cannot indulge in "Fade Out" bussing. From Tom Mix to Roy Rogers, the present King of the Cowboys, this commandment has held fast. Horse kissing is perfectly permissible -- girl kissing, never.
The script called for Miss Russell to fall in love with Mr. Rogers. A serenade below her balcony was to culminate in an embrace. But at the last moment this was eliminated from the script... by breakfast-food lobbyists who claimed Young America might change their eating habits if ever their hero was seen caressing anything but his horse's furry nozzle.
My inexperience as a director reached nervous proportions the day Mr. DeMille arrived on the set, having consented to play a small part as a kind of Western Matthew Brady. This guest shot was in retaliation for a similar appearance made by Mr. Hope in a sequence of DeMille's "The Greatest Show On Earth." Directing Mr. DeMille (veteran of more than seventy motion pictures) in how to do the scene was like telling Washington how to spend money. Mr. DeMille saw the scene playing one way -- I saw it playing just the opposite. A crisis developed, with everyone taking sides. But I'll show them -- I'll do it my way in another picture.
As a youngster I remember the admiration I held for Frank Buck. His handling of wild animals filled me with awe. I realize now that my hero-worship was not misplaced. Animal direction is a craft all its own. In "Son of Paleface," besides Trigger, we had two vultures (the script called for buzzards, but the available Hollywood buzzards were at that moment occupied). Besides the vultures, we also had two penguins.
Contrary to a certain lady reporter, none of the creatures ate bananas -- and none insisted on lobster thermidor.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The Golden Days of 1988
I notice that the first season of "A Pup Named Scooby-Doo" came out on DVD recently. This was a pretty interesting show and in its own way, fairly important. Though it was basically a children's show and doesn't have a lot of adult references or humor -- unlike Tiny Toons, done by a lot of the same people, or Mighty Mouse, which premiered a year before this, Pup wasn't trying to pull in grown-ups -- it had a nice combination of reverence and irreverence towards the Scooby-Doo franchise. It made fun of the clichés of Scooby-Doo and of H-B cartoons in general, but its style actually felt much closer to early H-B cartoons than any H-B show had been for years; early H-B character designs popped up among the supporting characters, there was no Scrappy-Doo, no plundering whatever movie or TV show was big at the time, and the stories were, in their tongue-in-cheek way, the most "pure" version of the series premise; it actually made the mystery-solving format kind of fun and cute.
It was also literally the first H-B show ever that actually looked better than previous H-B shows; Hanna-Barbera and indeed every other cartoon studio had been making cartoons that looked worse every year, Pup finally dumped the Ruby-Spears look that the studio had been doing for decades -- the flesh-colored eyes, the drab, ashen backgrounds -- and went for an angular look, stylized backgrounds, bright colors, Tex Avery takes, and even some decent animation (from Wang's Cuckoo's Nest studio, supervised by Glen Kennedy). Even the music was different, with doo-wop vocal tracks inspired by Little Shop of Horrors. Velma even had her own distinctive way of walking, and while they may have over-done it on the accompanying sound effects, it was the first time in a while that a character was actually characterized and given individuality by the way she walked.
Everybody in 1987-88 was scrambling to revive old characters, sometimes as kids, sometimes not (Mighty Mouse, Beany and Cecil). Within a few years, the people working on these shows would create new shows with new characters, but shows like Pup weren't just notable for the people who worked on them (notably Tom Ruegger, who conceived and produced the show, Charlie Howell, who co-wrote the first episode, Alfred Gimeno, and Scott Jeralds) but just for helping to establish the idea that network kids' cartoons could, and should, look a lot better than they had been for the previous 20 years.
This interview with Tom Ruegger gives a lot of great background information, including the information that Bill Hanna directed the first episode himself, the first time in a number of years that he'd done that. (By that point H-B shows did not have individual director credits for the episodes.)
It was also literally the first H-B show ever that actually looked better than previous H-B shows; Hanna-Barbera and indeed every other cartoon studio had been making cartoons that looked worse every year, Pup finally dumped the Ruby-Spears look that the studio had been doing for decades -- the flesh-colored eyes, the drab, ashen backgrounds -- and went for an angular look, stylized backgrounds, bright colors, Tex Avery takes, and even some decent animation (from Wang's Cuckoo's Nest studio, supervised by Glen Kennedy). Even the music was different, with doo-wop vocal tracks inspired by Little Shop of Horrors. Velma even had her own distinctive way of walking, and while they may have over-done it on the accompanying sound effects, it was the first time in a while that a character was actually characterized and given individuality by the way she walked.
Everybody in 1987-88 was scrambling to revive old characters, sometimes as kids, sometimes not (Mighty Mouse, Beany and Cecil). Within a few years, the people working on these shows would create new shows with new characters, but shows like Pup weren't just notable for the people who worked on them (notably Tom Ruegger, who conceived and produced the show, Charlie Howell, who co-wrote the first episode, Alfred Gimeno, and Scott Jeralds) but just for helping to establish the idea that network kids' cartoons could, and should, look a lot better than they had been for the previous 20 years.
This interview with Tom Ruegger gives a lot of great background information, including the information that Bill Hanna directed the first episode himself, the first time in a number of years that he'd done that. (By that point H-B shows did not have individual director credits for the episodes.)
Monday, April 28, 2008
Not Good, But Pleasantly Weird
I think that when a long-running show gets really bad -- not just mediocre, but really, really bad -- it sometimes becomes more interesting to watch than when it was just mediocre. That's because a show that has totally lost it and has no chance of being renewed for another season will sometimes do the most bizarre things, knowing that nobody's watching and nobody cares anyway.
That's what I was thinking when I saw an episode from the awesomely bad final season of Laverne and Shirley without Shirley (and for the most part without Lenny). Apart from being unbelievably depressing, since you're watching a show that literally has no reason to exist now that even its title is a lie, the writing and acting were about as bad as they could be. (Carmine: "I don't think you know the difference between right and wrong." Squiggy: "Sure we do. It's left and wrong that get me confused.")
But the good side of that is this: only a show that was completely destroyed, ravaged and wrecked would have thought to do this scene: Laverne has been mistaken for a murderer and sentenced to Death Row, a priest comes to guide her on that last mile, and he starts singing. And then the prison doors fly open and a gospel singing group comes out and leads everybody in a song and dance number. And Anne Ramsey is in the scene, as is Laraine Newman in a blonde wig. (The producers tried to compensate for Shirley's absence by having a different "funny lady" as a guest star every week.) The only thing that's missing is that the Ernie Banks who plays the priest is not the Hall of Fame shortstop.
Mind you, I don't think this scene is good. It's just nuts. There's no setup for it; this isn't a "musical episode." It's like they had nothing to do for three minutes so they decided to see if there were some singers available. And they sure didn't spend much time on the choreography. (At one point you can even hear Laverne's voice singing on the playback when Laverne's mouth isn't moving.) But it's endearingly crazy. Most shows today would be off the air before they got this ridiculous. That's only partly a good thing.
That's what I was thinking when I saw an episode from the awesomely bad final season of Laverne and Shirley without Shirley (and for the most part without Lenny). Apart from being unbelievably depressing, since you're watching a show that literally has no reason to exist now that even its title is a lie, the writing and acting were about as bad as they could be. (Carmine: "I don't think you know the difference between right and wrong." Squiggy: "Sure we do. It's left and wrong that get me confused.")
But the good side of that is this: only a show that was completely destroyed, ravaged and wrecked would have thought to do this scene: Laverne has been mistaken for a murderer and sentenced to Death Row, a priest comes to guide her on that last mile, and he starts singing. And then the prison doors fly open and a gospel singing group comes out and leads everybody in a song and dance number. And Anne Ramsey is in the scene, as is Laraine Newman in a blonde wig. (The producers tried to compensate for Shirley's absence by having a different "funny lady" as a guest star every week.) The only thing that's missing is that the Ernie Banks who plays the priest is not the Hall of Fame shortstop.
Mind you, I don't think this scene is good. It's just nuts. There's no setup for it; this isn't a "musical episode." It's like they had nothing to do for three minutes so they decided to see if there were some singers available. And they sure didn't spend much time on the choreography. (At one point you can even hear Laverne's voice singing on the playback when Laverne's mouth isn't moving.) But it's endearingly crazy. Most shows today would be off the air before they got this ridiculous. That's only partly a good thing.
Friday, April 25, 2008
I Love Al Capp
Eddie Fitzgerald points us to this big post on Al Capp and Li'l Abner at the ASIFA-Hollywood Archive.
I don't think Capp is as well-known today as Walt Kelly, but, much as I love Pogo, I think in some ways I like Li'l Abner even better, and its best stories are about the best I've ever seen in comic strips. Capp's attitude to his characters was much less good-natured than Kelly's; he has contempt for most of his characters and most contempt of all for his "hero," Li'l Abner. But that gives a kind of complexity to the strip, because his open contempt for Abner butts against the moments of goodness and likability that he gives to Abner and other characters.
Update: In comments, Thad K points out that Mark Kausler has been posting strips from Capp's "Joanie Phoanie" story from the late '60s, the ultimate symbol of his decline into unfunniness. Too much is sometimes made of Capp's move to the political right; I don't think that specifically is what caused him to stop being funny. (My Dad recalls Capp going on talk shows and saying similar things in the '50s, when the strip was still funny.) Capp hated everybody and his sense of humor was very dark, very bitter. At some point the sense of humor started to fade away and all that was left was the bitterness; the problem with the Joanie Phoanie strip is not that he's angry at her or at student protests, but that there isn't much humor here. Plus he caricatures Baez, a good-looking woman, as an ugly crone: if Al Capp passes up an opportunity to draw a good-looking woman, you know he's letting his anger overwhelm his sense of humor and his love of drawing women.
I don't think Capp is as well-known today as Walt Kelly, but, much as I love Pogo, I think in some ways I like Li'l Abner even better, and its best stories are about the best I've ever seen in comic strips. Capp's attitude to his characters was much less good-natured than Kelly's; he has contempt for most of his characters and most contempt of all for his "hero," Li'l Abner. But that gives a kind of complexity to the strip, because his open contempt for Abner butts against the moments of goodness and likability that he gives to Abner and other characters.
Update: In comments, Thad K points out that Mark Kausler has been posting strips from Capp's "Joanie Phoanie" story from the late '60s, the ultimate symbol of his decline into unfunniness. Too much is sometimes made of Capp's move to the political right; I don't think that specifically is what caused him to stop being funny. (My Dad recalls Capp going on talk shows and saying similar things in the '50s, when the strip was still funny.) Capp hated everybody and his sense of humor was very dark, very bitter. At some point the sense of humor started to fade away and all that was left was the bitterness; the problem with the Joanie Phoanie strip is not that he's angry at her or at student protests, but that there isn't much humor here. Plus he caricatures Baez, a good-looking woman, as an ugly crone: if Al Capp passes up an opportunity to draw a good-looking woman, you know he's letting his anger overwhelm his sense of humor and his love of drawing women.
WKRP Episode: "Hotel Oceanview"
I had intended not to jump around so much from season to season in posting these complete, never-gonna-be-on-DVD episodes, but this third season episode is the only one I have uploaded at the moment: "Hotel Oceanview," the fifth episode broadcast in season 3 and one of the weirder episodes of this or any sitcom: Andy, Herb and Mr. Carlson go to the terrorized and terrifying town of Dayton to try and land the Vicky Von Vickey Jeans account. Some of my favorite lines include "Dayton can be nasty after dark" and "I don't know, Art, but I know one thing, it's got fruit in it."
The Herb story is actually based on a sketch that the writer, Steven Kampmann, did when he was at Second City. I found this out when I was reading a book on the Second City and found a description of a sketch Kampmann created: he played someone who goes to a convention and meets a woman (Shelley Long) who claims to remember him from high school. Only later does he learn that... well, it's in the episode. Anyway, I realized that Kampmann basically rewrote the sketch as a story for his favorite character, Herb.
Music: "Rise" by Herb Alpert, "Sailing" by Christopher Cross, and the Toccata from Bach's Toccata and Fugue in d minor, a piece Hugh Wilson seemed to like a lot because he used it (for similar creepy effect) on Frank's Place.
Hotel Oceanview by carpalton
The Herb story is actually based on a sketch that the writer, Steven Kampmann, did when he was at Second City. I found this out when I was reading a book on the Second City and found a description of a sketch Kampmann created: he played someone who goes to a convention and meets a woman (Shelley Long) who claims to remember him from high school. Only later does he learn that... well, it's in the episode. Anyway, I realized that Kampmann basically rewrote the sketch as a story for his favorite character, Herb.
Music: "Rise" by Herb Alpert, "Sailing" by Christopher Cross, and the Toccata from Bach's Toccata and Fugue in d minor, a piece Hugh Wilson seemed to like a lot because he used it (for similar creepy effect) on Frank's Place.
Hotel Oceanview by carpalton
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
The Hornblows At Midnight
I was going to write something about one of the most underrated of all the great Hollywood producers, Arthur Hornblow Jr., based on the fact that Universal just released four great Paramount comedies on DVD and three of them -- Midnight, Easy Living and The Major and the Minor -- were Hornblow's. But TCM beat me to it by showing those three films as a tribute to Hornblow, and putting up this biographical profile of Hornblow and his career.
His best period was at Paramount from the late '30s through the early '40s, producing a series of comedies that managed to be great-looking and very funny. His star director was Mitchell Leisen and they made a great team on stylish-looking comedies, musicals and dramas. Some movie comedies are a little drab in terms of set design and lighting, while comedies that have great production values often let it overwhelm the comedy. Midnight is a lavish production and a first-rate comedy, while his Bob Hope productions, The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers, look like well-made suspense thrillers that happen to have Bob Hope dropped into them. (Ghost Breakers in particular must be one of the most quietly influential movies of all time; not only did Martin and Lewis remake it almost scene-for-scene as Scared Stiff, but all kinds of horror-comedies owe an obvious debt to that picture -- Scooby-Doo, for instance.) Leisen/Hornblow's Hold Back the Dawn is also a fine romantic drama that ought to be on DVD.
His productions after he left Paramount and moved to MGM are also intelligent and stylish but less consistently entertaining, but he did produce Gaslight, The Asphalt Jungle and Esther Williams' best picture, Million Dollar Mermaid. The way The Asphalt Jungle turned out for John Huston, as opposed to the post-production debacle he suffered the following year when Gottfried Reinhart was his producer on The Red Badge of Courage, illustrates the importance of having a strong, smart producer on a film.
His best period was at Paramount from the late '30s through the early '40s, producing a series of comedies that managed to be great-looking and very funny. His star director was Mitchell Leisen and they made a great team on stylish-looking comedies, musicals and dramas. Some movie comedies are a little drab in terms of set design and lighting, while comedies that have great production values often let it overwhelm the comedy. Midnight is a lavish production and a first-rate comedy, while his Bob Hope productions, The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers, look like well-made suspense thrillers that happen to have Bob Hope dropped into them. (Ghost Breakers in particular must be one of the most quietly influential movies of all time; not only did Martin and Lewis remake it almost scene-for-scene as Scared Stiff, but all kinds of horror-comedies owe an obvious debt to that picture -- Scooby-Doo, for instance.) Leisen/Hornblow's Hold Back the Dawn is also a fine romantic drama that ought to be on DVD.
His productions after he left Paramount and moved to MGM are also intelligent and stylish but less consistently entertaining, but he did produce Gaslight, The Asphalt Jungle and Esther Williams' best picture, Million Dollar Mermaid. The way The Asphalt Jungle turned out for John Huston, as opposed to the post-production debacle he suffered the following year when Gottfried Reinhart was his producer on The Red Badge of Courage, illustrates the importance of having a strong, smart producer on a film.
The Buck Stopped
After a 20th Anniversary edition of John Sayles' Eight Men Out came out recently, I decided to read Eliot Asinof's original book again. It's still a very good read, though his decision to tell it like a novel makes it hard to tell exactly what's true and what's just speculation. (Some things are known to have happened; some things he's guessing happened based on the evidence, but they're all thrown together in this book.)
I hadn't thought about the scandal in a while. But since both Asinof and Sayles in their different ways portray Buck Weaver as the most sympathetic figure in the story, I have to say: it seems pretty clear to me that banning Weaver from baseball was the right decision.
Let's take as a given the assumption from Eight Men Out, that Weaver took no money, never intended to go along with the fix, and never played less than his best. (There are several problems with that assumption, like, how do we know he never expected to get any money even if he never got any? and how can someone play his best with the knowledge that his team is going to lose the game?) The purpose of kicking the Black Sox out of baseball was to reassure fans, who were only just now realizing how incredibly crooked baseball had become in the past few years, that the game wasn't going to be crooked any more. Weaver was known to be part of the group that was signed up to fix the World Series; fans knew that he knew about the fix in advance and through the whole Series. He wasn't such a well-known and beloved player that the fans would automatically believe the best of him. So unless he could have proven definitively that he didn't do anything at all to throw the Series, letting him play major league baseball would have looked to most fans like, well, a sign that crooked players weren't actually being thrown out of baseball. Which would have killed the effort to tell the fans, no, we're serious this time about cleaning up the game, really. (Yes, it is annoying that the team owners pretended to have a high-and-mighty attitude to a problem that they'd deliberately ignored for years.)
And the problem is that Weaver couldn't possibly prove that he didn't do anything to throw the Series. (I'm talking about the court of public opinion, not the criminal court, where there wasn't enough to convict any of the eight players and nobody even knew exactly what crime they were supposed to have committed.) The problem with being in on a plan to fix a game is that anything you do, any mistake you make, can be interpreted in one of two ways: as a legitimate mistake or a deliberate mistake. Weaver made mistakes during the Series. He ignored a signal, which caused some teammates to suspect that he did it on purpose; but then again maybe he didn't. He failed to drive in any runs, which led people to suspect that he wasn't trying, but maybe he was just unlucky. I don't know and I doubt even Weaver knew for sure; there's such a fine line between making a mistake accidentally, making it on purpose, and making it because you're really flustered and nervous (which guilty knowledge will do). When a player takes a bribe, or even agrees to take a bribe, that doesn't mean every mistake he makes is automatically a result of the bribe, but that's the point: there's no way of knowing, and if the fans are wondering whether Player X dropped that ball accidentally or on purpose, the game is ruined.
Also, I think people focus too much on questions of whether Weaver or Joe Jackson really helped throw the games through poor series play, which leads to the talking point that Jackson is exonerated by his high series batting average. It's pretty clear that most of the heavy work in throwing the games was done by the pitchers, Cicotte and Williams. (That's why Cicotte, the starter of the first game, was the first to get paid.) Jackson, in his Grand Jury testimony where he insisted he hadn't missed any plays on purpose (he said differently at other times) could think of only one play he'd seen in the whole series that looked suspicious. It's very hard for an individual hitter or fielder to throw a game except in unusual situations, like coming up in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded and the team one run behind. When it came to the hitters/fielders, the point was to sign up enough important position players so that the fixers could depend on them to throw the game if that was the only way to ensure defeat. Maybe they couldn't have been depended on; the point, however, is that the gangsters assumed they could depend on these guys to throw the game if needed, and the fix probably couldn't have happened without that assumption. If Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver had said no, then most of the best position players would have been actively working against the fix, and that might have derailed the whole thing. The way most of the games played out, Jackson and Weaver weren't required to strike out or miss plays on purpose (though maybe they did, but then again maybe they didn't); all that was really required to make the fix work was their consent.
This doesn't have much to do with Sayles' movie, by the way. That's a movie, not intended to be a factual record of what happened and why; Sayles is making a movie about how workers are scapegoated while the powerful people get off scot-free, and in that context, the portrayal of Buck Weaver makes sense. I just get the feeling that people tend to conflate the Buck Weaver from the movie (and the book, to some extent) with what actually happened, and forgetting that there are perfectly good reasons why athletes who are offered bribes and don't report them can get disqualified. (From Weaver's point of view, of course, he might have had good reasons to be afraid of reporting it even if he'd wanted to. But that makes Weaver sympathetic; it doesn't mean he shouldn't have been disqualified.) Sort of like you'll hear people conflating the innocent baseball-loving Joe Jackson from Shoeless Joe/Field of Dreams with the real Joe Jackson, an illiterate but intelligent person who knew he had done "An awful thing."
I hadn't thought about the scandal in a while. But since both Asinof and Sayles in their different ways portray Buck Weaver as the most sympathetic figure in the story, I have to say: it seems pretty clear to me that banning Weaver from baseball was the right decision.
Let's take as a given the assumption from Eight Men Out, that Weaver took no money, never intended to go along with the fix, and never played less than his best. (There are several problems with that assumption, like, how do we know he never expected to get any money even if he never got any? and how can someone play his best with the knowledge that his team is going to lose the game?) The purpose of kicking the Black Sox out of baseball was to reassure fans, who were only just now realizing how incredibly crooked baseball had become in the past few years, that the game wasn't going to be crooked any more. Weaver was known to be part of the group that was signed up to fix the World Series; fans knew that he knew about the fix in advance and through the whole Series. He wasn't such a well-known and beloved player that the fans would automatically believe the best of him. So unless he could have proven definitively that he didn't do anything at all to throw the Series, letting him play major league baseball would have looked to most fans like, well, a sign that crooked players weren't actually being thrown out of baseball. Which would have killed the effort to tell the fans, no, we're serious this time about cleaning up the game, really. (Yes, it is annoying that the team owners pretended to have a high-and-mighty attitude to a problem that they'd deliberately ignored for years.)
And the problem is that Weaver couldn't possibly prove that he didn't do anything to throw the Series. (I'm talking about the court of public opinion, not the criminal court, where there wasn't enough to convict any of the eight players and nobody even knew exactly what crime they were supposed to have committed.) The problem with being in on a plan to fix a game is that anything you do, any mistake you make, can be interpreted in one of two ways: as a legitimate mistake or a deliberate mistake. Weaver made mistakes during the Series. He ignored a signal, which caused some teammates to suspect that he did it on purpose; but then again maybe he didn't. He failed to drive in any runs, which led people to suspect that he wasn't trying, but maybe he was just unlucky. I don't know and I doubt even Weaver knew for sure; there's such a fine line between making a mistake accidentally, making it on purpose, and making it because you're really flustered and nervous (which guilty knowledge will do). When a player takes a bribe, or even agrees to take a bribe, that doesn't mean every mistake he makes is automatically a result of the bribe, but that's the point: there's no way of knowing, and if the fans are wondering whether Player X dropped that ball accidentally or on purpose, the game is ruined.
Also, I think people focus too much on questions of whether Weaver or Joe Jackson really helped throw the games through poor series play, which leads to the talking point that Jackson is exonerated by his high series batting average. It's pretty clear that most of the heavy work in throwing the games was done by the pitchers, Cicotte and Williams. (That's why Cicotte, the starter of the first game, was the first to get paid.) Jackson, in his Grand Jury testimony where he insisted he hadn't missed any plays on purpose (he said differently at other times) could think of only one play he'd seen in the whole series that looked suspicious. It's very hard for an individual hitter or fielder to throw a game except in unusual situations, like coming up in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded and the team one run behind. When it came to the hitters/fielders, the point was to sign up enough important position players so that the fixers could depend on them to throw the game if that was the only way to ensure defeat. Maybe they couldn't have been depended on; the point, however, is that the gangsters assumed they could depend on these guys to throw the game if needed, and the fix probably couldn't have happened without that assumption. If Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver had said no, then most of the best position players would have been actively working against the fix, and that might have derailed the whole thing. The way most of the games played out, Jackson and Weaver weren't required to strike out or miss plays on purpose (though maybe they did, but then again maybe they didn't); all that was really required to make the fix work was their consent.
This doesn't have much to do with Sayles' movie, by the way. That's a movie, not intended to be a factual record of what happened and why; Sayles is making a movie about how workers are scapegoated while the powerful people get off scot-free, and in that context, the portrayal of Buck Weaver makes sense. I just get the feeling that people tend to conflate the Buck Weaver from the movie (and the book, to some extent) with what actually happened, and forgetting that there are perfectly good reasons why athletes who are offered bribes and don't report them can get disqualified. (From Weaver's point of view, of course, he might have had good reasons to be afraid of reporting it even if he'd wanted to. But that makes Weaver sympathetic; it doesn't mean he shouldn't have been disqualified.) Sort of like you'll hear people conflating the innocent baseball-loving Joe Jackson from Shoeless Joe/Field of Dreams with the real Joe Jackson, an illiterate but intelligent person who knew he had done "An awful thing."
Monday, April 21, 2008
Bullfights Aren't Funny
I unexpectedly scored a copy of Disney's out-of-print "Complete Goofy" DVD set the other day. Ebay copies are out of my price range and blood pressure levels, but I happened upon a copy that was just sitting around in a used CD store. This store did not have any other rare cartoon DVDs; in fact that was pretty much the only cartoon DVD they had.
The first cartoon I watched from the set was "For Whom the Bulls Toil", a 1953 cartoon that sent Goofy to Mexico and made him a bullfighter, something that every cartoon character was required to go through around that time. (I've always been a little sympathetic to Eddie Selzer for telling Chuck Jones that "I don't want a cartoon about bullfights, bullfights aren't funny," because the context was that every cartoon studio including Warners had put out a bullfighting cartoon in the late '40s and early '50s. And it really isn't that great a subject. Bully For Bugs was like Jones' personal challenge to himself to see if he could put a fresh spin on what was already one of the lamest, most over-used cartoon stories around.) Anyway, the reason I watched it first was that it was my favorite Disney cartoon when I was a kid, probably my favorite Disney cartoon period, short or feature. I saw it in a special devoted to Disney "heroes," a catch-all subject that allowed them to recycle this cartoon and most of Ben and Me (another childhood favorite) and The Brave Little Tailor and maybe some other cartoons that did not become childhood favorites and which I have therefore forgotten about.
Seeing it again, I still like it despite the slight lameness of the subject. (Having Goofy unwittingly fight a bull before he gets into the bull ring is at least a little twist.) One thing I like about it is that it is a story cartoon. I find that even after Pinto Colvig came back to the studio, Jack Kinney and co. had gotten so used to their narrator-driven format that they didn't always give us enough of Goofy as a character, as opposed to a living illustration of whatever the narrator was talking about. Some cartoons work great that way, like "Hockey Homicide." Others might have been better with less narration and more character comedy, especially since the narrator format places a huge amount of emphasis on the quality of each individual gag, and great gags were never Disney's greatest strength. Other early '50s cartoons as well as Woolie Reitherman's Xerox-fest "Aquamania" tried to bring back the Goofy character but made him too much of a generic '50s suburban dad character, Dagwood Bumstead with buck teeth. (Or any teeth. Does Dagwood ever show teeth? How does he eat those sandwiches? Anywho...) The bull cartoon is one of the few I've seen where he really sort of seems a little like the early Goofy, even though I suppose technically it fits into the befuddled middle-class suburbanite persona they were giving him at that time.
The other thing about "Bulls" is that it points up a big difference between Disney's shorts and other cartoon studios' shorts: Disney always went for a little bit of verisimilitude. They're not realistic, of course, unless giant mice and ducks are considered realistic. But there's often at least some attempt to get real-life details right. So "Bulls" has real Mexican music on the soundtrack, the Mexicans mostly speak real Spanish and a Mexican actor was hired to do voices, the look of the cartoon is meant to at least suggest what Mexico looks like. In a bullfight cartoon by Warners or MGM, the Mexican setting is important only insofar as it's an excuse for jokes, broken English (or fake Spanish), "La Cucaracha" on the soundtrack. Disney would tone down the jokes somewhat to make a cartoon feel somewhat more like life (and the characters somewhat more like people), which was sometimes a weakness in short cartoons but was important for features.
The first cartoon I watched from the set was "For Whom the Bulls Toil", a 1953 cartoon that sent Goofy to Mexico and made him a bullfighter, something that every cartoon character was required to go through around that time. (I've always been a little sympathetic to Eddie Selzer for telling Chuck Jones that "I don't want a cartoon about bullfights, bullfights aren't funny," because the context was that every cartoon studio including Warners had put out a bullfighting cartoon in the late '40s and early '50s. And it really isn't that great a subject. Bully For Bugs was like Jones' personal challenge to himself to see if he could put a fresh spin on what was already one of the lamest, most over-used cartoon stories around.) Anyway, the reason I watched it first was that it was my favorite Disney cartoon when I was a kid, probably my favorite Disney cartoon period, short or feature. I saw it in a special devoted to Disney "heroes," a catch-all subject that allowed them to recycle this cartoon and most of Ben and Me (another childhood favorite) and The Brave Little Tailor and maybe some other cartoons that did not become childhood favorites and which I have therefore forgotten about.
Seeing it again, I still like it despite the slight lameness of the subject. (Having Goofy unwittingly fight a bull before he gets into the bull ring is at least a little twist.) One thing I like about it is that it is a story cartoon. I find that even after Pinto Colvig came back to the studio, Jack Kinney and co. had gotten so used to their narrator-driven format that they didn't always give us enough of Goofy as a character, as opposed to a living illustration of whatever the narrator was talking about. Some cartoons work great that way, like "Hockey Homicide." Others might have been better with less narration and more character comedy, especially since the narrator format places a huge amount of emphasis on the quality of each individual gag, and great gags were never Disney's greatest strength. Other early '50s cartoons as well as Woolie Reitherman's Xerox-fest "Aquamania" tried to bring back the Goofy character but made him too much of a generic '50s suburban dad character, Dagwood Bumstead with buck teeth. (Or any teeth. Does Dagwood ever show teeth? How does he eat those sandwiches? Anywho...) The bull cartoon is one of the few I've seen where he really sort of seems a little like the early Goofy, even though I suppose technically it fits into the befuddled middle-class suburbanite persona they were giving him at that time.
The other thing about "Bulls" is that it points up a big difference between Disney's shorts and other cartoon studios' shorts: Disney always went for a little bit of verisimilitude. They're not realistic, of course, unless giant mice and ducks are considered realistic. But there's often at least some attempt to get real-life details right. So "Bulls" has real Mexican music on the soundtrack, the Mexicans mostly speak real Spanish and a Mexican actor was hired to do voices, the look of the cartoon is meant to at least suggest what Mexico looks like. In a bullfight cartoon by Warners or MGM, the Mexican setting is important only insofar as it's an excuse for jokes, broken English (or fake Spanish), "La Cucaracha" on the soundtrack. Disney would tone down the jokes somewhat to make a cartoon feel somewhat more like life (and the characters somewhat more like people), which was sometimes a weakness in short cartoons but was important for features.
Shows With Many Lives
I posted about the show Stingray on the other blog, but one thing I wanted to add here is that it's an example of a show that went through multiple lives. There are some shows that are never really popular, yet they always seem like they're on the verge of being a big hit, so people keep trying to bring them back. (I think Family Guy was the first show to really become a big hit after going through multiple comebacks like that. That or Charles in Charge.) In the case of Stingray the chronology is:
- Stephen J. Cannell produced a two-hour pilot for NBC. NBC declined to pick up the show (either because they didn't like the pilot or they couldn't agree with Cannell on what the series should be like).
- When NBC burned off the pilot as a two-hour movie special, which was often done with double-length pilots in those days, the ratings were unexpectedly huge. (This, by the way, was one of the reasons why TV producers in the '80s liked to do two-hour pilots: it increased the chances of getting the pilot "burned off" in a decent time slot, and thereby increased the chances that it might catch on after all.)
- The show was picked up for 13 episodes with Lawrence Hertzog as showrunner. Production moved to Canada, making it one of the first U.S. shows to film in Vancouver.
- The show didn't do nearly as well as a mid-season replacement as it had in the two-hour pilot form, and NBC didn't renew it for the fall season. But it was brought back the following mid-season with a combination of episodes from the first 13 and some newly-produced episodes, this time with Frank Lupo (co-creator of The A-Team, Hunter and Wiseguy) as the showrunner. Then the show was finally officially cancelled by NBC.
- But the show did well enough in some markets (probably overseas markets) and had enough of a cult following that in the early '90s Cannell decided to revive it for first-run syndication. But the star, Nick Mancuso, committed to another show and the project fell through. But...
- Cannell, ever willing to turn out inexpensive imitations of any show including his own, filled the spot planned for the new Stingray by coming up with Cobra, a bad series that not only used a similar premise to Stingray but sometimes recycled footage from that series to save money.
So that's a show with nearly 10 years of comebacks or attempted comebacks. It makes Charles in Charge look positively stable.
What are some other shows you could think of that just would not stay down, no matter how many times they were canceled?
- Stephen J. Cannell produced a two-hour pilot for NBC. NBC declined to pick up the show (either because they didn't like the pilot or they couldn't agree with Cannell on what the series should be like).
- When NBC burned off the pilot as a two-hour movie special, which was often done with double-length pilots in those days, the ratings were unexpectedly huge. (This, by the way, was one of the reasons why TV producers in the '80s liked to do two-hour pilots: it increased the chances of getting the pilot "burned off" in a decent time slot, and thereby increased the chances that it might catch on after all.)
- The show was picked up for 13 episodes with Lawrence Hertzog as showrunner. Production moved to Canada, making it one of the first U.S. shows to film in Vancouver.
- The show didn't do nearly as well as a mid-season replacement as it had in the two-hour pilot form, and NBC didn't renew it for the fall season. But it was brought back the following mid-season with a combination of episodes from the first 13 and some newly-produced episodes, this time with Frank Lupo (co-creator of The A-Team, Hunter and Wiseguy) as the showrunner. Then the show was finally officially cancelled by NBC.
- But the show did well enough in some markets (probably overseas markets) and had enough of a cult following that in the early '90s Cannell decided to revive it for first-run syndication. But the star, Nick Mancuso, committed to another show and the project fell through. But...
- Cannell, ever willing to turn out inexpensive imitations of any show including his own, filled the spot planned for the new Stingray by coming up with Cobra, a bad series that not only used a similar premise to Stingray but sometimes recycled footage from that series to save money.
So that's a show with nearly 10 years of comebacks or attempted comebacks. It makes Charles in Charge look positively stable.
What are some other shows you could think of that just would not stay down, no matter how many times they were canceled?
Friday, April 18, 2008
WKRP Episode: "An Explosive Affair"
I won't be able to post much in the next few days, so here's a double-length episode with way too much music to ever be released on DVD: the season 4 opener, "An Explosive Affair." The main story is about the station receiving a bomb threat; the B story (about Mr. Carlson and his ex-receptionist) is a little undercooked, but Howard Hesseman's "phone cops" freak-out in part 2 is one of the most famous scenes from the show.
Music includes "Sweet Soul Music" by Arthur Conley, "Bad Mamma Jamma" by Carl Carlton, "Celebration" by Kool & the Gang, "Talk to Ya Later" by the Tubes, songs by Bob Marley and The Pointers, and most memorably, "Urgent" by Foreigner. (Can you imagine the end of Part 1 without that song? Wouldn't work at all.)
Part 1:
Part 2
Music includes "Sweet Soul Music" by Arthur Conley, "Bad Mamma Jamma" by Carl Carlton, "Celebration" by Kool & the Gang, "Talk to Ya Later" by the Tubes, songs by Bob Marley and The Pointers, and most memorably, "Urgent" by Foreigner. (Can you imagine the end of Part 1 without that song? Wouldn't work at all.)
Part 1:
Part 2
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Stella Star!
Edward Hegstrom has a post about the most amazerrific of all Star Wars knockoffs, the one, the hopefully only, Star Crash (or, as it's called in Italian, Starcrash). Starring Marjoe Gortner, Caroline Munro, Hamilton Camp, the young David Hasselhoff and Christopher Plummer. Poor guy. The casting implies that he's the Star Crash level equivalent of Guinness, which just isn't fair.
Seanbaby also did a Star Crash review a few years ago.
Seanbaby also did a Star Crash review a few years ago.
The second way in which Star Crash is superior to Star Wars is Stella Star. She can’t act and she delivers her lines like she’s speaking English phonetically, but she is constantly fighting in a bikini. Even when she puts on a space jumpsuit, she picks a transparent one so you can still see her bikini. Her ridiculous hotness leads to some problems, though. The film’s editor seems to have had trouble cutting one single millisecond of Stella Star footage, so after she stammers out a line, there’s usually an awkward four to five second pause while the camera lingers on her face. As an actress, she’s not prepared for this, and most of the movie is her trying to look busy by contorting her face into intense stares.
Grudge Match: Batman vs. Superman - Election 2008
Once again, all the candidates for President are forced to drop out under mysterious circumstances, and the race is between two independent candidates: Batman and Superman.
Who will win the election? Batman, with his huge cash-on-hand advantage but his distinctly sub-par PR skills, or Superman, who is less good at dirty tricks but better at projecting a likable image and dealing with the media (particularly since he's a journalist himself and knows how the media works)?
Yes, I know that Superman shouldn't be eligible to run for President, since he is an alien. But who's to say the Constitution hasn't been amended in this scenario? Besides, since he doesn't have a Kryptonian birth certificate, they can't actually prove he's ineligible, and Ma and Pa Kent probably faked an American birth certificate for him.
(I was considering doing a Bruce Wayne vs. Lex Luthor election instead, but I had a feeling that it might have already been done in the comics.)
Who will win the election? Batman, with his huge cash-on-hand advantage but his distinctly sub-par PR skills, or Superman, who is less good at dirty tricks but better at projecting a likable image and dealing with the media (particularly since he's a journalist himself and knows how the media works)?
Yes, I know that Superman shouldn't be eligible to run for President, since he is an alien. But who's to say the Constitution hasn't been amended in this scenario? Besides, since he doesn't have a Kryptonian birth certificate, they can't actually prove he's ineligible, and Ma and Pa Kent probably faked an American birth certificate for him.
(I was considering doing a Bruce Wayne vs. Lex Luthor election instead, but I had a feeling that it might have already been done in the comics.)
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Ollie Johnston
Update: Here is a 1956 Los Angeles Times article on Ollie Johnston's other great lifelong enthusiasm -- restoring and running antique trains. (Click to enlarge.) I know it's not related to his animation work, but I somehow feel like I can see that enthusiasm -- or maybe the fact that he just was so enthusiastic -- in his work. Obviously his animation does not depend on what he did in his off hours, but his work was that of a man who didn't do just what was required and no more. A man who has a hobby is a man who enjoys working hard at the things he loves, whether it's drawings or locomotives.
Please see Jenny and Jerry's round-up at Cartoon Brew.
Via Newspaperarchive.com, here's Johnston in 1954 (right) with Milt Kahl (left), doing some work for the opening of Marineland.
The Live Steaming clam-bake shown here took place at the Flintridge, Calif. home of Oliver Johnston. His layout, with 970 feet of track, is one of the largest in the west.
It takes about 5,000 hours to make a good model and minimum cost to have one built for you is $5,000 (Live Steamer Walt Disney recently had two built for Disneyland, cost: $35,000 apiece). Plans are procured from a railroad, then scaled down to 1/24, the most popular size. Most workmen scorn buying parts, make even their own nuts and bolts.
Johnston's La Cañada Valley 515 is a typical model. The locomotive is three feet, 11 inches long, weighs 251 pounds. The tender is three feet even, weighs 90 pounds loaded, which includes 45 pounds of water and the Live Steamer's favorite fuel: pea-size Welsh coal.
Nothing much happens on a run, unless a boiler explodes (very rare) or a flying cinder hits a shirt hanging on the line (pretty common). Mostly, the train just puffs and smokes around the track whistling for a grade crossing, stopping to take on water, finally pulling into the station.
Just, in fact, all the wonderful, exciting, fascinating things that make life, for a Live Steamer, really worth living.
Please see Jenny and Jerry's round-up at Cartoon Brew.
Via Newspaperarchive.com, here's Johnston in 1954 (right) with Milt Kahl (left), doing some work for the opening of Marineland.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Kismet Kate
The release of the movie version of Kismet on DVD is just another sad reminder that what could have been a terrific movie musical, done right, turned out to be a very weak one. I love the stage Kismet musical, but its tongue-in-cheek, bordering-on-parody operetta style is very difficult to bring off, and Vincente Minnelli, a director who didn't have much sense of self-parody and reportedly hated the show to begin with (and did it only so MGM would let him direct Lust For Life), was not the man to do it. And though you can get a sense of what Jack Cole's Broadway choreography was like, Cole's bawdy, showy style did not fit with the overly-tasteful Fred unit style; the sets, costumes and photography are not backing him up, and the numbers that were probably knockouts on Broadway just seem a little under-powered. Maybe this project would have been better at a studio like Fox, whose less tasteful photography and sets fit better with Cole's style (remember, Cole choreographed and directed the gloriously tasteless musical numbers in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). You could say that Arthur Freed's relentless good taste did this project in. Though speaking of taste, one thing to be said for the movie is that -- due to the post-Moon Is Blue collapse of the Production Code -- none of the lyrics had to be cleaned up for the screen; even "Rahadlakum," a song about an aphrodisiac, was able to be recorded and filmed (the first part got cut, but for time, not content).
Of the principals, only Ann Blyth is really right for her part: Howard Keel just doesn't have the charisma and style for an Alfred Drake part. (Drake, interviewed about why MGM kept passing him over for movies, said: "They had a guy they used for my parts. He wasn't very good." I think Keel was good, but not for this part, or even for Kiss Me Kate.) Vic Damone was a terrible idea, Dolores Gray is good but doesn't really have the right kind of voice for "Not Since Nineveh" -- it was written for Joan Diener, a performer who had both a belt and a high soprano voice, and Gray can't do the soprano parts of the song -- and casting non-singer Sebastian Cabot as the villain forced them to cut the wonderful quartet that precedes "And This Is My Beloved."
One thing the DVD release enables me to do, though, is to do a side-by-side comparison of some of the original Alexander Borodin music and the songs that Bob Wright and Chet Forrest created for Kismet. Wright and Forrest's specialty was making pop songs out of classical music, something they'd been doing since the '30s when they were at MGM. Instead of just taking the classical tune and putting lyrics to it, they would take the main theme from the original piece and then compose a new "B" section, re-do the ending, and turn the whole thing into an actual pop song with an A-A-B-A structure. This is what they did with all three of the big hits from Kismet, "Stranger in Paradise" (from the Polovtsian Dances in Borodin's Prince Igor), "Baubles, Bangles and Beads" (second movement of Borodin's second string quartet) and "And This Is My Beloved" (third movement of Borodin's truly awesome second string quartet). As you can see in the video below, each of the songs has new material that wasn't in Borodin's original pieces, and that's how the songs become true hit songs instead of just classical music with new words.
There were a few songs in Kismet that didn't follow this pattern; "Rahadlakum" is a completely original composition by Wright and Forrest, and two or three songs are taken directly from Borodin with no newly-composed music. The passage that precedes the "Gesticulate" number (that song, by the way, is based on Borodin's first symphony) is just Konchak's aria from Prince Igor with English lyrics.
Of the principals, only Ann Blyth is really right for her part: Howard Keel just doesn't have the charisma and style for an Alfred Drake part. (Drake, interviewed about why MGM kept passing him over for movies, said: "They had a guy they used for my parts. He wasn't very good." I think Keel was good, but not for this part, or even for Kiss Me Kate.) Vic Damone was a terrible idea, Dolores Gray is good but doesn't really have the right kind of voice for "Not Since Nineveh" -- it was written for Joan Diener, a performer who had both a belt and a high soprano voice, and Gray can't do the soprano parts of the song -- and casting non-singer Sebastian Cabot as the villain forced them to cut the wonderful quartet that precedes "And This Is My Beloved."
One thing the DVD release enables me to do, though, is to do a side-by-side comparison of some of the original Alexander Borodin music and the songs that Bob Wright and Chet Forrest created for Kismet. Wright and Forrest's specialty was making pop songs out of classical music, something they'd been doing since the '30s when they were at MGM. Instead of just taking the classical tune and putting lyrics to it, they would take the main theme from the original piece and then compose a new "B" section, re-do the ending, and turn the whole thing into an actual pop song with an A-A-B-A structure. This is what they did with all three of the big hits from Kismet, "Stranger in Paradise" (from the Polovtsian Dances in Borodin's Prince Igor), "Baubles, Bangles and Beads" (second movement of Borodin's second string quartet) and "And This Is My Beloved" (third movement of Borodin's truly awesome second string quartet). As you can see in the video below, each of the songs has new material that wasn't in Borodin's original pieces, and that's how the songs become true hit songs instead of just classical music with new words.
There were a few songs in Kismet that didn't follow this pattern; "Rahadlakum" is a completely original composition by Wright and Forrest, and two or three songs are taken directly from Borodin with no newly-composed music. The passage that precedes the "Gesticulate" number (that song, by the way, is based on Borodin's first symphony) is just Konchak's aria from Prince Igor with English lyrics.
Friday, April 11, 2008
WKRP Episode: "Jennifer's Home For Christmas"
This fine Christmas episode from season 2 uses a plot hook that had been used before -- in fact, Happy Days did the "everybody brings a Christmas tree" thing only a year before this -- but does it better. Jennifer slipping into her real accent on the phone is one of my favorite jokes from the show. (In a strange way, Jennifer is to WKRP as Jack Donaghy to 30 Rock or Barney to How I Met Your Mother -- there's so much we don't know about these characters that the writers can have a lot of fun hinting at their unseen lives and backstories.) This episode guest stars George Gaynes -- who later directed an episode and worked for Hugh Wilson on Police Academy -- and takes advantage of his linguistic skills.
Music: "Merry Christmas Baby" by Chuck Berry, "Jingle Bell Rock," and the most famous recording of "Jingle Bells."
WKRP s02e11 Jennifer's Home For Christmas by carpalton
Music: "Merry Christmas Baby" by Chuck Berry, "Jingle Bell Rock," and the most famous recording of "Jingle Bells."
WKRP s02e11 Jennifer's Home For Christmas by carpalton
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Lucky Berkeleyites
If you're in or near the Bay area (and I'm not saying you shouldn't be), the University of California at Berkeley is holding A week-long Frank Tashlin retrospective. There have been a bunch of these recently, but all south of the border (the Canadian border, I mean); I especially recommend next Wednesday's screening of Artists and Models because while the DVD version looks fine, I have a feeling that the otherworldly riot of color would look even better on a big screen in a dark theatre.
A few random points on Artists and Models while I'm at it, since this is one of those movies I just love (there are greater movies, maybe even better movies by this director or these stars, but there are few other movies that are more fun), because none of them are worth a separate post in themselves:
1) The plot of Artists and Models, if you look at it rationally, has so many holes in it, even for a comedy, that the script would be thrown out of any screenwriting class. Some of this is probably due to cutting; it's a long movie and some scenes were cut for time (including Shirley MacLaine's solo "Bat Lady" dance, which appears to be lost), and I imagine some of the deleted scenes would explain why Eva Gabor's character starts out thinking that Dean Martin is the person she needs to seduce and then, without any explanation for how she found out the truth, switches to trying to seduce Jerry Lewis. But there are various other unexplained plot points, things that are brought up and then never referred to again (Martin is worried about telling Lewis that he's drawing the "Vincent the Vulture" comic because "then we'd be through as pals," but this is never addressed), and stuff that just makes no sense, like how can Martin's character draw a best-selling comic book under his own name without Jerry Lewis's character finding out about it? You just kind of have to go with it; it's like a '50s throwback to many silent and early sound comedies that were very loosely structured and informal and didn't ask to be judged by classic principles of story structure. But you can see why Jean-Luc Godard fell in love with Artists; the idea that a movie can ignore all rules of storytelling logic, and get away with it if the individual scenes are entertaining enough, must have been very encouraging to him.
2) The publicity photo of Martin, Lewis, and the four top-billed women in the film (all dressed, of course, by Edith Head, who did some of her best work on this picture), appears to be the one Shirley MacLaine was talking about when she wrote that Jerry Lewis was a real jerk during the taking of a cast publicity photo with these six participants. Apparently he tried to essentially direct the taking of the photograph and tell everybody where to stand and what to do. Viewed that way, it's kind of a metaphor for why their partnership broke up: Jerry standing there trying to control everything, Dean looking a little ticked off. (Click to enlarge).
3) I notice that while Shirley MacLaine's character is called "Bessie Sparrowbush" in the film, many cast lists give the name as "Sparrowbrush." I wonder if somebody sneaked the name "Sparrowbush" past the censors by deliberately misspelling it in the cast list.
4) When I tried to research this film I didn't come up with much (to find out anything about its production I'll have to wait until I can look at Hal Wallis's papers, which are housed at the Motion Picture Academy's library), but I did find a Sheilah Graham column, complete with a quote from producer Hal Wallis, revealing that the part of Dean Martin's love interest was originally offered to Lizabeth Scott, a longtime Wallis contractee who had already been Martin's vis-a-vis in Scared Stiff. Scott turned down the script, upon which Martin asked for Dorothy Malone, his other love interest from Scared Stiff. That same year, Martin also made You're Never Too Young opposite Diana Lynn, who had been his love interest in the two My Friend Irma movies.
A few random points on Artists and Models while I'm at it, since this is one of those movies I just love (there are greater movies, maybe even better movies by this director or these stars, but there are few other movies that are more fun), because none of them are worth a separate post in themselves:
1) The plot of Artists and Models, if you look at it rationally, has so many holes in it, even for a comedy, that the script would be thrown out of any screenwriting class. Some of this is probably due to cutting; it's a long movie and some scenes were cut for time (including Shirley MacLaine's solo "Bat Lady" dance, which appears to be lost), and I imagine some of the deleted scenes would explain why Eva Gabor's character starts out thinking that Dean Martin is the person she needs to seduce and then, without any explanation for how she found out the truth, switches to trying to seduce Jerry Lewis. But there are various other unexplained plot points, things that are brought up and then never referred to again (Martin is worried about telling Lewis that he's drawing the "Vincent the Vulture" comic because "then we'd be through as pals," but this is never addressed), and stuff that just makes no sense, like how can Martin's character draw a best-selling comic book under his own name without Jerry Lewis's character finding out about it? You just kind of have to go with it; it's like a '50s throwback to many silent and early sound comedies that were very loosely structured and informal and didn't ask to be judged by classic principles of story structure. But you can see why Jean-Luc Godard fell in love with Artists; the idea that a movie can ignore all rules of storytelling logic, and get away with it if the individual scenes are entertaining enough, must have been very encouraging to him.
2) The publicity photo of Martin, Lewis, and the four top-billed women in the film (all dressed, of course, by Edith Head, who did some of her best work on this picture), appears to be the one Shirley MacLaine was talking about when she wrote that Jerry Lewis was a real jerk during the taking of a cast publicity photo with these six participants. Apparently he tried to essentially direct the taking of the photograph and tell everybody where to stand and what to do. Viewed that way, it's kind of a metaphor for why their partnership broke up: Jerry standing there trying to control everything, Dean looking a little ticked off. (Click to enlarge).
3) I notice that while Shirley MacLaine's character is called "Bessie Sparrowbush" in the film, many cast lists give the name as "Sparrowbrush." I wonder if somebody sneaked the name "Sparrowbush" past the censors by deliberately misspelling it in the cast list.
4) When I tried to research this film I didn't come up with much (to find out anything about its production I'll have to wait until I can look at Hal Wallis's papers, which are housed at the Motion Picture Academy's library), but I did find a Sheilah Graham column, complete with a quote from producer Hal Wallis, revealing that the part of Dean Martin's love interest was originally offered to Lizabeth Scott, a longtime Wallis contractee who had already been Martin's vis-a-vis in Scared Stiff. Scott turned down the script, upon which Martin asked for Dorothy Malone, his other love interest from Scared Stiff. That same year, Martin also made You're Never Too Young opposite Diana Lynn, who had been his love interest in the two My Friend Irma movies.
Straight From the Hartley
I guarantee you I won't be doing Archie nostalgia posts all the time, but via this comment, I see that other bloggers are rediscovering Al Hartley's infamous Christian Archie comics. The insanity of these comics is different from the insanity of the Frank Doyle/Samm Schwartz story I wrote about below; the stories by Doyle and Schwartz are crazy because they're intentionally crazy, not to mention very funny, while Hartley's stories are crazy but sincere and they're kind of disturbing because they're so sincere. (Favorite line: "Now we have books that say we all came from monkeys -- and the children are starting to ACT like it!") I've written about these Spire comics in a previous post, but the thing I want to re-emphasize is that Hartley had actually been writing and drawing this kind of material in the mainstream Archie comics for several years. The reason he took it to a separate Christian comic is that his bosses at Archie asked him to cut it out. But he was a talented artist and apparently a very nice man, so I'm not surprised that he managed to talk them into letting him do the Spire titles.
I actually have some examples of Hartley's Christian material in the "regular" Archie titles (I don't have a lot of Archie comics left over from childhood, and I don't feel like going out and shopping for them, but I do have this one) from a "Sabrina's Christmas Magic" special issue in 1972. Hartley wrote and illustrated a lot of Sabrina stories in the early '70s and really seemed to get into the character despite the references to witchcraft. So in this issue, the first story has her going to meet Santa Claus, and teaching children about the importance of faith over reason (click on the images to see them enlarged):
And then, as if worried that that was too allegorical, Hartley gets specific at the end of another story which he wrote and drew for the same issue:
I don't want to sound like I am bashing Hartley; his injections of religion into the Archie world are actually quite sweet and non-sectarian, and honestly I think the publishers would have been better off letting him continue with that instead of doing the more hard-core Spire material. But I wonder how he squared that religious content with the portrayal of witchcraft, or the rather obvious cruel streak he displayed in the stories he wrote/drew:
I'm no theologian, but even as a kid I thought that there was something morally wrong about drowning somebody and laughing at it. Apparently Hartley's message is that if Sabrina doesn't like you, she will kill you and that's a good thing.
I actually have some examples of Hartley's Christian material in the "regular" Archie titles (I don't have a lot of Archie comics left over from childhood, and I don't feel like going out and shopping for them, but I do have this one) from a "Sabrina's Christmas Magic" special issue in 1972. Hartley wrote and illustrated a lot of Sabrina stories in the early '70s and really seemed to get into the character despite the references to witchcraft. So in this issue, the first story has her going to meet Santa Claus, and teaching children about the importance of faith over reason (click on the images to see them enlarged):
And then, as if worried that that was too allegorical, Hartley gets specific at the end of another story which he wrote and drew for the same issue:
I don't want to sound like I am bashing Hartley; his injections of religion into the Archie world are actually quite sweet and non-sectarian, and honestly I think the publishers would have been better off letting him continue with that instead of doing the more hard-core Spire material. But I wonder how he squared that religious content with the portrayal of witchcraft, or the rather obvious cruel streak he displayed in the stories he wrote/drew:
I'm no theologian, but even as a kid I thought that there was something morally wrong about drowning somebody and laughing at it. Apparently Hartley's message is that if Sabrina doesn't like you, she will kill you and that's a good thing.
Monday, April 07, 2008
Syndication Performance
I was looking through the 1984 book "Television Comedy Series: An Episode Guide to 153 TV Sitcoms in Syndication," by Joel Eisner and David Krinsky. (Jerry Beck, back when he was working in TV catalogue sales for United Artists, is credited as one of their sources for the information.)
The book was useful at the time, when episode titles and writing credits were hard to find for most shows; it's been rendered obsolete by the passing of time and the availability of online episode guides. Also, the authors have a bizarre rant in their introduction about how badly television has declined since it started in with social issues and stuff. ("Television banned violence on network shows when they thought it was harmful to children, but did they ever stop to think what mental harm is done when a child believes prostitution, vasectomies, unwed mothers, V.D. etc. are all hilarious subjects?") However, one thing that Eisner and Krinsky have in many of their descriptions, which I find interesting, is a description of how the show did in syndication. (They got some of their information on the shows from TV stations and syndicators, so along with the episode lists they were presumably also able to find out how these shows were doing in reruns, or if they were even being rerun at all.) I thought I'd make a note of some of their descriptions to show how some shows were doing circa 1983 when they were writing this.
I don't know how accurate their information is, but I would suspect that it's fairly close to the mark because it mostly confirms things that were known already: all of the MTM comedies except WKRP performed disappointingly in syndication; Happy Days and its spinoffs all tanked in syndication but The Odd Couple was a huge syndication success; some of the Norman Lear comedies didn't do as well as expected.
One thing that's obvious, once again, is that there is no relationship between how popular a show is in first-run and how popular it is in syndication. Part of the reason is that syndication audiences tend to be younger (a bigger percentage of children is watching in daytime reruns than in prime time), but that can't be the whole explanation for every success or failure. Also it seems like shows that focused on women didn't do well in syndication at the time, though I think that's probably changed since then.
Barney Miller - "The series still does extremely well in syndication."
The Beverly Hillbillies - "The now-syndicated episodes are popular in many Southern cities but not elsewhere, perhaps because it is felt to be so out of date."
The Bob Newhart Show - "The series was very popular during its original run, but it has been a failure in syndication. It now usually runs during the middle of the night or early afternoon."
The Brady Bunch - "Remains one of the most popular reruns of all time."
Chico and the Man - "The series has all but died in syndication even though it is still run all over the country. This is due to the death of Freddie Prinze during the series. What makes matters worse is that now that Jack Albertson has also died, the series is in worse trouble. Within a few years, the show will probably disappear from the air completely."
The Dick Van Dyke Show - "The show was a big hit during the first years of its syndication. However, it has died out in popularity because of its dated look -- caused by the black and white film and fashions of that time."
Family Affair - "The series is still run occasionally but has become too dated for many people and has begun to disappear from many stations."
The Flintstones - "It is still a big hit over twenty years since it was first created, as it can never become dated."
Gilligan's Island - "Despite contemptuous reviews by critics... Gilligan's Island has remained one of the most successful syndicated comedy series of all time."
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. - "Still a popular series today, Gomer Pyle's main audience is in rural areas of the U.S."
Happy Days - "The reruns have not done very well at all. Syndicated under the title Happy Days Again, it has been a big disappointment to the local stations which run the show."
The Jeffersons - "The series is not doing as well as it was expected to do."
Laverne and Shirley - "The series is still doing well on the network, but it is a complete failure in reruns despite the fact that it is running all over the country."
Mary Tyler Moore - "This was a very popular series during its rrun, but has suffered in syndication. This is also a more sophisticated series which fails to attract the attention of children."
Maude - "It has done very poorly in syndication."
Mork and Mindy - "It entered syndication in September 1983 and immediately died."
Nanny and the Professor - "Seen frequently on small rural stations (mainly UHF) but rarely in large cities."
The Odd Couple - "The series did fairly well on the network but is a big hit in syndication."
What's Happening! - "It didn't do very well on the network, but it is doing rather well in syndication."
Other shows that did well in syndication include:
The Addams Family
Bewitched
Get Smart
Green Acres
Hogan's Heroes
I Dream of Jeannie
I Love Lucy
Leave it to Beaver
M*A*S*H
The Munsters
Three's Company
Welcome Back Kotter
WKRP in Cincinnati.
Shows that didn't do well in syndication (as of this book):
Diff'rent Strokes
Here's Lucy
McHale's Navy
Our Miss Brooks
The Patty Duke Show
Rhoda
The book was useful at the time, when episode titles and writing credits were hard to find for most shows; it's been rendered obsolete by the passing of time and the availability of online episode guides. Also, the authors have a bizarre rant in their introduction about how badly television has declined since it started in with social issues and stuff. ("Television banned violence on network shows when they thought it was harmful to children, but did they ever stop to think what mental harm is done when a child believes prostitution, vasectomies, unwed mothers, V.D. etc. are all hilarious subjects?") However, one thing that Eisner and Krinsky have in many of their descriptions, which I find interesting, is a description of how the show did in syndication. (They got some of their information on the shows from TV stations and syndicators, so along with the episode lists they were presumably also able to find out how these shows were doing in reruns, or if they were even being rerun at all.) I thought I'd make a note of some of their descriptions to show how some shows were doing circa 1983 when they were writing this.
I don't know how accurate their information is, but I would suspect that it's fairly close to the mark because it mostly confirms things that were known already: all of the MTM comedies except WKRP performed disappointingly in syndication; Happy Days and its spinoffs all tanked in syndication but The Odd Couple was a huge syndication success; some of the Norman Lear comedies didn't do as well as expected.
One thing that's obvious, once again, is that there is no relationship between how popular a show is in first-run and how popular it is in syndication. Part of the reason is that syndication audiences tend to be younger (a bigger percentage of children is watching in daytime reruns than in prime time), but that can't be the whole explanation for every success or failure. Also it seems like shows that focused on women didn't do well in syndication at the time, though I think that's probably changed since then.
Barney Miller - "The series still does extremely well in syndication."
The Beverly Hillbillies - "The now-syndicated episodes are popular in many Southern cities but not elsewhere, perhaps because it is felt to be so out of date."
The Bob Newhart Show - "The series was very popular during its original run, but it has been a failure in syndication. It now usually runs during the middle of the night or early afternoon."
The Brady Bunch - "Remains one of the most popular reruns of all time."
Chico and the Man - "The series has all but died in syndication even though it is still run all over the country. This is due to the death of Freddie Prinze during the series. What makes matters worse is that now that Jack Albertson has also died, the series is in worse trouble. Within a few years, the show will probably disappear from the air completely."
The Dick Van Dyke Show - "The show was a big hit during the first years of its syndication. However, it has died out in popularity because of its dated look -- caused by the black and white film and fashions of that time."
Family Affair - "The series is still run occasionally but has become too dated for many people and has begun to disappear from many stations."
The Flintstones - "It is still a big hit over twenty years since it was first created, as it can never become dated."
Gilligan's Island - "Despite contemptuous reviews by critics... Gilligan's Island has remained one of the most successful syndicated comedy series of all time."
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. - "Still a popular series today, Gomer Pyle's main audience is in rural areas of the U.S."
Happy Days - "The reruns have not done very well at all. Syndicated under the title Happy Days Again, it has been a big disappointment to the local stations which run the show."
The Jeffersons - "The series is not doing as well as it was expected to do."
Laverne and Shirley - "The series is still doing well on the network, but it is a complete failure in reruns despite the fact that it is running all over the country."
Mary Tyler Moore - "This was a very popular series during its rrun, but has suffered in syndication. This is also a more sophisticated series which fails to attract the attention of children."
Maude - "It has done very poorly in syndication."
Mork and Mindy - "It entered syndication in September 1983 and immediately died."
Nanny and the Professor - "Seen frequently on small rural stations (mainly UHF) but rarely in large cities."
The Odd Couple - "The series did fairly well on the network but is a big hit in syndication."
What's Happening! - "It didn't do very well on the network, but it is doing rather well in syndication."
Other shows that did well in syndication include:
The Addams Family
Bewitched
Get Smart
Green Acres
Hogan's Heroes
I Dream of Jeannie
I Love Lucy
Leave it to Beaver
M*A*S*H
The Munsters
Three's Company
Welcome Back Kotter
WKRP in Cincinnati.
Shows that didn't do well in syndication (as of this book):
Diff'rent Strokes
Here's Lucy
McHale's Navy
Our Miss Brooks
The Patty Duke Show
Rhoda
Beam Me Up, Raymond Scotty
I don't quite get what this Your Hit Parade show (from 1955) was trying to accomplish with the superimposed graphics (if those graphics are indeed part of the original; they seem to be). But it does lend a sort of prototypical music-video style to this performance by the show's bandleader, Raymond Scott (with his Quintette), of... well, you know which piece.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
HestFest
I've always thought Charlton Heston was one of the better stars of the '50s and '60s when it came to choosing projects. With the collapse of the studio system, and star actors actually able to choose what movies they made and for whom, some stars made really bad choices. (See Brando, Marlon.) Heston made some bad movies, as everybody did, but he also picked some really interesting films that probably wouldn't have gotten made without him, like Will Penny (which he sometimes cited as his favorite).
He also had pretty decent taste in directors at a time when many stars preferred to work with hacks with whom they felt comfortable, or just didn't care who directed them; Heston most famously recommended Orson Welles for Touch of Evil, and also asked for Franklin Schaffner to direct Planet of the Apes. (Which is another movie that must have seemed fairly risky when he committed to it, given that it was produced by a man whose biggest previous credit was Dr. Dolittle.) He made a lot of good movies, and the reason his mannerisms are so easy to make fun of is that he was such a distinctive screen personality.
He also had pretty decent taste in directors at a time when many stars preferred to work with hacks with whom they felt comfortable, or just didn't care who directed them; Heston most famously recommended Orson Welles for Touch of Evil, and also asked for Franklin Schaffner to direct Planet of the Apes. (Which is another movie that must have seemed fairly risky when he committed to it, given that it was produced by a man whose biggest previous credit was Dr. Dolittle.) He made a lot of good movies, and the reason his mannerisms are so easy to make fun of is that he was such a distinctive screen personality.
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