Daffy Duck, Comeback Kid

All this talk of Looney Tunes (see below) has got me to thinking: of all the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies characters, the one whose popularity has gotten the biggest boost in the last ten years or so is Daffy Duck. While Daffy's slightly underrepresented on the new DVD collection -- they're hopefully saving some of the classics like "Duck Rabbit Duck" and the wartime stuff for volume 3 -- he's considered enough of a draw to get his mug on the cover, right next to Bugs. Indeed, when WB advertises Looney Tunes, Bugs and Daffy are likely to be shown together, whereas when I was growing up, it was likely to be just Bugs, or Bugs with some other popular series character: the Saturday morning compilation show was called "The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show," then "The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show," but never "Bugs and Daffy."

Daffy was originally a character whose popularity started going downhill in the '40s, perhaps even right after the War (when he was perhaps the most active WB star in terms of conking Nazis with mallets, collecting scrap metal, and so on). By the late '40s or early '50s, audiences seemed to be tiring of crazy/obnoxious characters like Daffy, and mild-mannered characters like Porky; what was "in" was the violent chase cartoon, epitomized by Tom and Jerry at MGM and later by Tweety and Sylvester and the Road Runner at Warner Brothers. Unlike Bugs Bunny, who was aggressive but didn't have to be too aggressive if the story didn't call for it, Daffy was basically a wild, inherently aggressive loudmouth, respecting no bounds of propriety or decency. (The wartime cartoons were an exception, but even during the war effort, Daffy could be a jerk, like Bob Clampett's "Draftee Daffy," where a cowardly Daffy goes to every length possible, even attempted murder, to escape the little man from the draft board.) The cartoons of the postwar era, whether at WB or other studios, were less crazy, a bit more observant of decorum, and Daffy didn't completely fit in. Fewer Daffy cartoons were being made by the early '50s, and the WB directors started looking around for new things to do with him, presumably to keep the character going: Chuck Jones came up with the two most popular solutions, namely a) Teaming him with Bugs Bunny, where Daffy's aggressiveness could be a foil to Bugs' infernal self-control; b) Putting Daffy in genre parodies, where he tries, unsuccessfully, to play the role of a classic hero. These things kept Daffy going, but there's no question that Daffy was nowhere near as popular in the '50s as he once had been. At least he was luckier than mild-mannered Porky, who never got another solo vehicle after 1951's "The Wearing of the Grin."

By 1960, when Bugs Bunny got his own TV show ("The Bugs Bunny Show," an example of which can be found on the first Looney Tunes DVD set), Daffy was getting hardly any solo cartoons at all; his main function was just to be the bitter, resentful foil to Bugs. (This started in two cartoons Friz Freleng made in the '50s: "A Star is Bored" and "Show Biz Bugs," where Daffy is jealous of Bugs' stardom and tries to upstage him or bump him off.) Whereas Daffy had retained traces of his "crazy" persona even into the mid-'50s -- he was doing his hoo-hoo routine as late as "Quack Shot," a 1954 cartoon directed by Bob McKimson -- that was all gone by the '60s; he was basically just a greedy jerk who always got his comeuppance. When the WB cartoon studio shut down and Friz Freleng's own company (Depatie/Freleng) started making new, cheaper cartoons using the WB characters, Daffy was somehow transformed into an adversary for Speedy Gonzales. Why a duck would chase a mouse was never really explained, but then, most of those cartoons are so bad that I never watched them long enough to listen for an explanation.

Anyway, that's where Daffy stood by the '60s, a utility character, a foil for Bugs, a second banana, not really a star. But by the mid-'90s, something seemed to have changed. Space Jam was awful, but it did give Daffy a pretty big role, and gave him back traces of his "crazy" personality. Daffy guest-starred in a combination live-action/animation sequence of The Drew Carey Show. In the late '90s, the WB network was intrigued enough by Daffy's popularity that it commissioned Paul Rugg, of Animaniacs and Freakazoid, to create a new show for Daffy; the show didn't get off the ground (the WB had lost interest in cartoons by the time the show was ready to be pitched), but it may have eventually led to Daffy's starring role in the Duck Dodgers series on Cartoon Network. And in the recent movie Looney Tunes: Back in Action, created in an attempt to re-introduce the Looney Tunes "brand name" to the younger generation, Daffy, not Bugs, is the character who gets the most screen time.

What happened to get Daffy back to his old level of popularity? I would guess it had something to do with Ted Turner's Cartoon Network, which used to (not anymore, alas) show a lot of WB cartoons; I think their block of WB cartoons was called "Bugs and Daffy," and it included a lot of the old '40s cartoons from the height of Daffy's popularity -- reintroducing audiences to the well-rounded Daffy rather than the one-dimensional Snidely Whiplash of the late '50s and early '60s. It also helps that Daffy is an exceptionally useful character, because he's so versatile: he can be a good guy, a bad guy, a winner, a loser, crazy, sensible, and everything in between. Bugs Bunny is a great character too, but because his popularity depends on him being a winner almost every time, he's more restricted in terms of what you can do with him. Therefore, starting in the late '80s (with the cartoon shorts "The Duxorcist" and "Night of the Living Duck," both co-directed by cartoon historian Greg Ford), Daffy became the go-to character for WB in attempting to re-establish the viability of the Looney Tunes characters.

Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Updated List of Extras

Based on lists of extras that have appeared in various places (notably at Cartoon Brew and TV Shows on DVD, here's a list of the cartoons and extras that will be on the next Looney Tunes Golden Collection. I'll update this as time goes on.

Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 2

Release Date: November 2, 2004

Disc 1: Bugs Bunny
"The Hare-Brained Hypnotist" (Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd - 1942)

"Little Red Riding Rabbit" (Bugs Bunny - 1944)

"Stage Door Cartoon" (Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd - 1944)

"Hare Conditioned" (Bugs Bunny - 1945)

"Rhapsody Rabbit" (Bugs Bunny - 1946)
Commentary by Daniel Goldmark (editor of The Cartoon Music Book)

"The Big Snooze" (Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd - 1946)
Commentary by animator Bill Melendez

"Slick Hare" (Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd - 1947)
Commentary by Mike Barrier, author of Hollywood Cartoons (with Paul Julian)

"Bugs Bunny Rides Again" (Bugs Bunny/Yosemite Sam - 1948)
Commentary by Greg Ford, director of the cartoons "The Duxorcist" and "Blooper Bunny"

"Gorilla My Dreams" (Bugs Bunny/Gruesome Gorilla - 1948)
Commentary by Jerry Beck, author of Looney Tunes: The Ultimate Visual Guide

"Bunny Hugged" (Bugs Bunny - 1951)
Music and effects track

"French Rarebit" (Bugs Bunny/Louis and Francois - 1951)

"Baby Buggy Bunny" (Bugs Bunny/Baby-Faced Finster - 1954)
Music and effects track

"Hyde And Hare" (Bugs Bunny - 1955)
Music-only track

"Broom-Stick Bunny" (Bugs Bunny/Witch Hazel - 1956)
Commentary by June Foray (who voiced Witch Hazel in this cartoon)
Music and effects track

"What's Opera, Doc?" (Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd - 1957)
Commentary by Daniel Goldmark
Commentary by Chuck Jones, Mike Maltese and Maurice Noble
Music-only track
Vocals-only track

Disc 2: Road Runner/Porky & Daffy

"Beep Beep" (Road Runner/Coyote - 1952)
Commentary by Mike Barrier

"Going! Going! Gosh!" (Road Runner/Coyote - 1952)

"Zipping Along" (Road Runner/Coyote - 1953)

"Stop! Look! and Hasten!" (Road Runner/Coyote - 1954)
Commentary by Greg Ford

"Ready.. Set.. Zoom!" (Road Runner/Coyote - 1955)

"Guided Muscle" (Road Runner/Coyote - 1955)
Music-only Track

"Gee Whiz-z-z-z!" (Road Runner/Coyote - 1956)
Music-only Track

"There They Go-Go-Go!" (Road Runner/Coyote - 1956)
Music-only Track

"Scrambled Aches" (Road Runner/Coyote - 1957)
Music-only Track

"Zoom And Bored" (Road Runner/Coyote - 1957)
Music-only Track

"Whoa, Be-Gone!" (Road Runner/Coyote - 1958)
Commentary by Greg Ford

"Porky In Wackyland" (Porky Pig - 1938)
Commentary by Mike Barrier (with Bob Clampett)

"Old Glory" (Porky Pig - 1939)
Commentary by Jerry Beck and Martha Sigall (ink-and-paint artist)

"Book Revue" (Daffy Duck - 1946)
Commentary by Mike Barrier (with Bob Clampett)
Restored original titles

"Show Biz Bugs" (Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck - 1957)
Commentary by Greg Ford (with Friz Freleng)

Disc 3: Sylvester & Tweety/Porky & Daffy

"Kitty Kornered" (Porky/Sylvester - 1946)
Commentary by Mike Barrier (with Bob Clampett)

"Tweety Pie" (Sylvester/Tweety - 1947)
Commentary by Greg Ford (with Friz Freleng)

"Back Alley Op-Roar" (Elmer Fudd/Sylvester - 1948)
Commentary by Greg Ford (with Friz Freleng)
Restored Original Titles

"Bad Ol' Putty Tat" (Sylvester/Tweety - 1949)

"All a Bir-r-r-rd" (Sylvester/Tweety - 1950)

"Room And Bird" (Sylvester/Tweety - 1951)

"Tweet Tweet Tweety" (Sylvester/Tweety - 1951)

"A Bird In A Guilty Cage" (Sylvester/Tweety - 1952)

"Ain't She Tweet" (Sylvester/Tweety - 1952)
Commentary by Greg Ford

"Gift Wrapped" (Sylvester/Tweety - 1952)

"Snow Business" (Sylvester/Tweety - 1953)

"You Ought to Be in Pictures" (Daffy/Porky - 1940)
Commentary by Jerry Beck

"Duck Soup To Nuts" (Daffy/Porky - 1944)

"Baby Bottleneck" (Daffy/Porky - 1946)
Commentary by Mike Barrier (with Bob Clampett)
Restored original titles

"The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" (Daffy Duck as "Duck Twacy" - 1946)
Commentary by John Kricfalusi (Ren and Stimpy guy; Clampett fan; Canadian)

Disc 4: All-Stars
"I Love To Singa" ("Owl" Jolson - 1936)
Restored original titles

"Have You Got Any Castles?" (1938)

"Katnip Kollege" (Johnny Cat - 1938)

"Hollywood Steps Out" (1941)
Commentary by Greg Ford

"The Heckling Hare" (Bugs Bunny/Willoughby - 1941)
Commentary by Greg Ford

"Tortoise Beats Hare" (Bugs Bunny/Cecil Turtle - 1941)
Commentary by Mike Barrier (with Dave Monahan)

"The Dover Boys at Pimento University or 'The Rivals of Roquefort
Hall'" (1942)
Commentary by Mike Barrier (with layout artist John McGrew, who created the innovative designs for this cartoon)

"The Hep Cat" (1942)

"Corny Concerto" (1943)
Commentary by Mike Barrier (with Bob Clampett)

"Rabbit Transit" (Bugs Bunny/Cecil Turtle - 1947)

"Mouse Wreckers" (Hubie and Bertie/Claude Cat - 1948)
Commentary by Mike Barrier (with Chuck Jones)

"Bear For Punishment" (Henry, Ma, & Junyer Bear - 1951)
Commentary by Mike Barrier (with Chuck Jones)
Music and effects track

"Cheese Chasers" (Hubie and Bertie - 1951)

"One Froggy Evening" (Michigan J. Frog - 1955)
Commentary by Mike Barrier (with Chuck Jones and Mike Maltese)
Music-Only Track

"Three Little Bops" (1957)
Commentary by Jerry Beck and Stan Freberg
Music-Only Track
Vocals-Only Track

----
FEATURETTES:
- A Conversation With Tex Avery
- The Man From Wackyland: The Art of Bob Clampett
- Crash! Bang! Boom! The Wild Sounds of Treg Brown
- Looney Tunes Go Hollywood
- Wagnerian Wabbit: The Making of "What's Opera, Doc?"
- It Hopped One Night: A Look at "One Froggy Evening"
- Chuck Amuck (1991)
- "Bugs Bunny/Looney Tunes 50th Anniversary Special" (1986)

BONUS CARTOONS
- "Orange Blossoms For Violet"
- "So Much For So Little"
- "The Aventures of the Road Runner": complete pilot (1962)
- "Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show" opening titles
- "Bugs Bunny Show" wraparounds
- "Daffy Duck For President" (2004)

----
There'll probably be some other "from the vaults" stuff that hasn't
been announced yet.

I Still Love To Singa

Jerry Beck has the list of extras for the next Looney Tunes Golden Collection, to be released November 2. (The complete list of cartoons is here.

Highlights include a commentary on Bob Clampett's "The Big Snooze" by animator Bill Melendez (he was an animator for WB in the '40s, and later went on to direct the Charlie Brown specials), various commentaries utilizing Mike Barrier's archives of interviews with the great WB directors and story people, and new featurettes about director Bob Clampett and sound-effects man Treg Brown. (Though he was only billed as "film editor," Brown's primary job from the '30s to the '60s was creating all those unique sound effects that turn up in WB cartoons, and even in WB's live-action movies. When Sal Mineo falls to the ground in Rebel Without a Cause, it's a bit distracting that he hits the ground with the same "crunch" sound effect that Treg Brown created for Wile E. Coyote slamming into a wall.) Also, several "Blue Ribbon" cartoons, which were stripped of their original opening titles and music upon reissue, will have their original titles restored, including "Book Revue" (which was mis-titled "Book Review" in the reissue print).

David Raksin, RIP

David Raksin, one of the best American film composers, died Monday. Here's a link to an interview he did in 1998. My favorite Raksin score, perhaps because it's my favorite of the movies he scored, is Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful, a tribute to the pleasures and pains of Hollywood's then-collapsing studio system. The soundtrack is out of print, but the DVD includes many of the soundtrack cues as an extra (including an alternate version of the haunting, long-phrased title theme).

Obscure Plays: DARKNESS AT NOON

I once read an article -- unfortunately I can't remember where I read it or the name of the author -- written in the early '50s, where the author examined the differing fates of two then-recent plays: the Sidney Kingsley play Darkness at Noon, based on Arthur Koestler's novel about an Old Bolshevik in one of Stalin's prisons, and Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which opened on Broadway about a year after Darkness at Noon did. The author pointed out that in terms of writing and stagecraft, Darkness at Noon was just as good as The Crucible and perhaps better. But Darkness got mixed reviews and a disappointing Broadway run, while The Crucible was more successful both critically and financially. Trying to account for this disparity in the reception of two equally serious-minded plays with tragic endings, the author concluded that the problem with Darkness at Noon was that it was telling the audience something it already knew going in: that Stalinism is bad. The Crucible wasn't a better play, but it did have a message that was sufficiently new, or at least unusual, to spark the interest of critics and audiences.

There are a couple of other points that come to mind with the comparison of Darkness and Crucible. One is that, while we now tend to think of the late '40s and early '50s as the height of Cold War hysteria, anti-Communist movies and plays didn't usually catch on with audiences in this era; anti-McCarthy plays and movies (The Crucible, High Noon) tended to do quite a bit better. The Cold War just didn't produce a flood of popular Cold War culture in the way that WWII brought on a bunch of successful anti-Nazi movies; and despite the stereotype of the era and its culture, the anti-anti-Communist messages tended to be more popular than the Cold War messages. The other point is that if you're going to write a political play, you'd be best advised to make it about your own country, or at least find some way to tie the play's message in with an issue facing your own country. I'm not fond of The Crucible, but it is an American political play about American political issues. Darkness at Noon, taken from a Russian source, is primarily about Russian issues and makes very little attempt to apply its themes to American politics. It's not hard to see why American audiences wondered what this had to do with them.

Kingsley's adaptation is generally very faithful to the book, with much of the original dialogue and all the same basic story points and flashbacks. He doesn't try to add any fake uplift to the ending, either. The comparison with The Crucible is interesting here: Proctor in The Crucible refuses to make a false confession and save himself, instead dying a martyr for the cause of truth, justice, and the Arthur Miller way. Rubashov in both the novel and the play of Darkness at Noon confesses to crimes he didn't commit in a Stalinist show trial -- after he has been informed that he will be executed no matter what he says or does. There's no martyrdom here, and no uplifting moment; Rubashov confesses because it's his last opportunity to do something for the Revolution to which he's dedicated his life -- even though he knows that the Revolution has gone wrong, and finally comes to suspect that there was something wrong with it at its core.

There are a few changes. Arlova, Rubashov's secretary who loved him and was sentenced to death when he wouldn't come forward to defend her (Gletkin: "To save your neck." Rubashov: "To be able to go on working." Gletkin: "Without a neck one cannot work. Hence, to save your neck?") is here renamed "Luba Loshenko," based on the immutable principle that all Russian women are named "Sonya" or "Luba." Her part is expanded, too, with more flashbacks to her relationship with Rubashov and a big scene of her interrogation just before her death. This provides a respite from the otherwise almost all-male cast, and Most of the other changes are just to drive home points that are made obliquely in the book; near the end, various bits from the book are combined and adapted to give Rubashov a big speech about where, when, and how the Revolution went wrong, and the play ends with a new dialogue scene between Rubashov and Gletkin, the epitome of the brutish, unimaginative "Neanderthal" that the Revolution has created:

GLETKIN: Enemy of the People Nicolai Semonovitch Rubashov, before you are executed, have you any last wish?
RUBASHOV: One. If I could only make you understand where in the very beginning we failed.
GLETKIN: These are your last words. Don't waste them.
RUBASHOV: You don't build a Paradise out of concrete. My son...
GLETKIN (quickly, distastefully): I am not your son.
RUBASHOV (after a long pause, sadly): Yes, you are. That's the horror.

(When I first read this bit, I thought Gletkin actually did turn out to be Rubashov's son, which would have been a hell of a plot twist for the third-act curtain.)

Politically, the play is an exemplar of old-fashioned liberal anti-Communism, one of the few such examples in movies or plays of the time (most of the anti-Communist movies of the era were of the right-wing variety, like Leo McCarey's bomb My Son John). This is driven home in a number of scenes, most clearly in the scene between Rubashov and Richard, the stuttering writer whom the Party turned over to the Nazis for writing the wrong kind of anti-Nazi propaganda pamphlets. In the book, Rubashov denounces Richard's pamphlets for admitting that the Party is in trouble; you and I can make mistakes, he explains, but the Party is infallible. In the play, Rubashov has a somewhat different objection to Richard's work:

RUBASHOV: We sense a certain sympathy with the Liberals and the Social Democrats.
RICHARD: The Storm Troopers are... Sl... sl... slaughtering them too, like animals in the street.
RUBASHOV: Let them! How does that affect us? In that respect the Nazis are clearing the way for us by wiping out this trash and saving us the trouble.
RICHARD: Trash?
RUBASHOV: The Liberals are our most treacherous enemies. Historically, they have always betrayed us.

That's probably as close as Kingsley gets to unveiling a relevant message for American audiences, namely that Communists are the enemies of liberals. It might have been relevant, say, ten years earlier; by 1950 it was kind of old hat.

Kingsley, whose best and best-known plays were Dead End (with the Dead End Kids) and Detective Story, was not a subtle writer, nor a particularly deep writer. But at his best, he was one of the best writers of Broadway social-problem dramas, through his ability to create strong characters and his willingness to allow more than one point of view in his plays; Detective Story has memorable characters throughout its large cast, and an especially strong protagonist who is portrayed as wrong-headed but not villainous. A play like Darkness at Noon, where the problems portrayed are less ambiguous in nature than those in a crime drama like Detective Story, and where the characters are not of a kind that Kingsley had encountered personally (which didn't allow for the slice-of-life realism of Dead End or Detective Story), may not have played to his strengths. A strength that does remain is Kingsley's superb sense of stagecraft, his eye for the strong theatrical gesture. In the book, the prisoners communicate with each other by tapping on the walls in code. This device is retained in the play (the characters speak the words they're tapping out, so we can know what they're saying), and the tapping sound is used for dramatic effect in several important spots, most notably at the end: as Rubashov is led away to be shot, one prisoner starts drumming on the wall, followed by other prisoners, followed by the tapping/drumming noise spreading throughout the whole prison, building to a crescendo, and then fading away: a perfect sonic counterpoint to Rubashov's offstage death.

The role of Rubashov was played on Broadway by Claude Rains, who was presumably great (when wasn't he?). Kim Hunter, Stella of A Streetcar Named Desire, played Luba.

Reality TV Awaits a Charles Van Doren

How long will reality shows continue to dominate television? I'd guess that, as with prime-time game shows in the late '50s, the popularity of reality shows will continue until a major scandal. I think that someday, a popular reality show will turn out to have been complely rigged -- not just "staged" to a certain extent, as all reality shows are, but planned out and with the winner decided in advance. I think this will happen because the need to keep viewers tuning in will drive some desperate producer to fix the outcome in favour of a more popular participant, just as Twenty-One did with Charles Van Doren). And if that happens, it might seriously hurt not only that show, but nearly all reality shows. Because - and I know this is a shockingly iconoclastic thing to say - the appeal of reality shows is that they're, well, real. Even if they are "staged" to some extent, with producers encouraging the participants to do this and move here and smile at the camera, we want to believe that the things we see are really happening to real people. If there's ever a reality-show scandal comparable to the game-show scandals, a lot of viewers won't be able to believe that anymore.

What makes reality shows more popular than scripted shows, I think, is that people don't feel embarrassed about getting emotionally involved with them. All TV shows aim to create a degree of emotional involvement, of course, and all successful shows get a large number of people to care about the characters (anyone who thinks SEINFELD was an exception doesn't remember how downright lovable these people came off as being in the early years, before Larry David decided we weren't supposed to love them). But there's a certain stigma attached to caring too much about what happens to fictional characters; you'll often hear people say "It's only a TV show" or "He's not real, he's just a character."

With reality shows, you don't have this problem. Everyone knows that these people are being manipulated by the producers to some degree, but when you come right down to it, these are real people and they're not acting; what you see is actually happening to somebody. That guy Bob who ate a bug is not an actor pretending to be Bob, and pretending to eat a bug; Bob is just who he really is, and eating a bug is something he really did. And that means that viewers don't have to feel abashed about following the proceedings and discussing them as though they're real -- because they are, sort of. If you say "Hey, did you see what the Friends did last night?" at least some people are going to tell you to get a life and stop discussing things that aren't real. But if you say "Did you see what Donald Trump did last night?" it's okay, because Donald Trump is real, and the stigma against fantasy -- against becoming too emotionally involved with made-up stories -- doesn't apply. Reality TV combines the week-to-week storytelling of scripted TV with the rule-bound "reality" of a sporting event; it captures the viewers who feel comfortable with cheering for a football team but not with cheering for made-up people in made-up situations.

So that's why I think a game-show-style scandal could hurt the popularity of reality TV; if people feel that it's all acting, that the outcome is fixed just like in a scripted show, they might enjoy it, but they won't feel the same lack of reticence about becoming emotionally involved with a reality show. The phrase "It's not real, get a life" will start to be used about reality shows.

On the other hand, you can say the same thing about professional wrestling, and it doesn't seem to have much of an effect on wrestling's popularity. So maybe I'm wrong about this. And of course, if reality TV does wind up rocked by scandal, it will still come back, just as game shows came back. And I should add that while I prefer scripted TV, I'm not exactly rooting for the demise of reality TV; I don't think it's displaced scripted TV so much as it filled gaps in the ever-expanding schedule. (Because there are more networks, cable and broadcast, there's probably as much scripted TV as there used to be, or more.) And there's nothing inherently with reality TV. There are some reality shows that have more interesting stories and characters than the average sitcom or drama.

Things That Suck: ROCKET ROBIN HOOD

Canada's cartoon channel, Teletoon, follows the two basic principles of Canadian cable TV: 1) Never show an older show if you can help it, and if you do broadcast an older show, make sure it's a bad one; and 2) Find the cheapest, crappiest Canadian-made show available to fulfil the CRTC's "Canadian Content" regulations. They're currently living up to these principles by broadcasting the mostly Canadian-made, generally terrible Rocket Robin Hood.

The above link gives most of the necessary background on the show; it was produced by Krantz animation, the same company that gave us "The Amazing Spider-Man," "The Mighty Hercules," and those Incredible Hulk cartoons with the theme song about "Dr. Banner, belted by gamma rays..." Canadian kids who grew up with "Mighty Hercules" will recognize that "Rocket Robin Hood" uses the same narrator and some of the same other voices.

Before I saw an episode last night, I hadn't seen the show since childhood; I remembered the super-cheap animation and even worse editing (actions with no sound-effects, mismatched shots, and so on), but not a single plot from the show. So for those of you who remember "Rocket Robin Hood" but can't remember what, if anything, happened, here's a summary of the episode I saw last night:

In their hideout on Sherwood Asteroid, Rocket Robin Hood and his Merry Men practice space-jousting. Then they go to Camelot Asteroid, in disguise, to watch the games. To get Robin out of hiding, the evil Prince John announces that he has betrothed Maid Marian (who wears the usual space-underwear of women in sci-fi cartoon shows, but topped off with a feathered Sherwood Forest-y hat) to the equally evil Baron Barth, ruler of the frosty planet Pluto. To save Marian from this fate, Rocket Robin Hood agrees to fight the Baron's champion, who turns out to be a giant space robot: the Red Robot Knight. They face off in five contests:

- Toppling, where each competitor has an electro-quarterstaff, and first one pushed off the anti-gravity log is the winner.
- Space wrestling.
- Archery, with space-arrows. (Prince John: "Curses! I forgot about his boomerang arrow!")
- Tug-of-war while standing on anti-gravity saucers. (There's an anti-gravity everything here, in the good Kingdom of Nott.)
- Space jousting. (Robin's previous experience comes in handy. See kids? Practicing is good.)

Robin loses the first two contests but wins the last three. Prince John orders his men to take out Robin anyway, and a fight ensues, with various still frames of characters with fists being slowly moved toward them. The Robot Knight winds up scuffling with Robin on board a spaceship, and things look lost for Our Hero until Maid Marian manages to take the Robot Knight's gears apart, using her compact and all the other stuff in her space-purse. "But now I have no makeup left," she laments. Cue hearty laughter from all concerned.

This "episode," in three segments, actually only takes up about fifteen minutes of screen time. The rest of the show, like some of Krantz's other shows, was taken up with filler: not only the opening and closing titles, but various "introductions" for the characters, which were repeated in every show, and which promised all sorts of adventures that never actually happened in the episodes. (This practice was spoofed on the show Freakazoid!, where a character called "The Huntsman" had an incredibly long introduction followed by an "episode" where noting happened.) Here are some of the better ones, all done in the voice of that Mighty Hercules announcer-guy:

Rocket Robin Hood, the happy outlaw of outerplanetary space, is the
direct descendant of Robin Hood of old. He's fast, with a joyful laugh,
a ready jest, and a quiver full of futuristic arrows. Robin robs from
the cosmic rich to give to the astral poor. He's fun. He's fantastic.
Rocket Robin Hood, merriest of the Merry Men in the astounding year,
3000.

Arch-enemy of Rocket Robin Hood is the cruel space tyrant, Prince John,
despot ruler of the National Outer-Space Terrestrial Territories. With
the help of the wicked Sheriff of N.O.T.T., the black prince plans for
that terrible day when he will destroy and conquer the entire Solar
System. Well, he might, if it were not for-- Rocket Robin Hood. Rocket
Robin Hood, outlaw defender of right in the astounding years to come.

Well, you can't argue with that, can you?

Come to think of it, in its medieval space stories, "Rocket Robin Hood" may have been the true ancestor of "Star Wars" and other science fiction stories that took place "a long time ago in a galaxy far away." I don't know whether George Lucas saw "Rocket Robin Hood," but really, would you put it past him?

A Little Pink Chair For Little Girls

Tomorrow brings the DVD release of The Bad Seed, the nutty movie based on the nutty Maxwell Anderson play based on William March's nutty novel. When I say "nutty" I don't mean that this tale of a cute little girl who's a psychotic evil murderer isn't any good; just that the assumption it's based on strikes me as more than a little wacky. This assumption is basically, this: that everything, but everything, can be explained by Freudian psychology or something like it. Your child is evil? Dr. Freud has the answer. Your child bumped off her classmates? Psychoanalysis will explain it. Pop-Freudianism was everywhere in '40s and '50s popular culture, of course; it was both a substitute for religion (previous generations of artists could look heavenward to explain everything; by the '40s, everyone was looking toward Vienna) and a way of giving a sense of pseudo-sophistication to a work of pop culture. The Bad Seed is a bit different in that psychobabble doesn't provide a pleasant explanation; it doesn't solve the problem of evil. (Whereas that same year, the movie Forbidden Planet -- based on a similar pop-Freudian idea of the dangers of the unchecked Id -- posits that you can vanquish your inner demons if you "renounce" them and "give them up.") But in a world that had been through Hitler and Stalin, there was a certain reassurance in the theme that evil can be explained by something, even if it's only something from old Sigmund's reject pile.

The Bad Seed was also one of a number of mid-'50s movies that took most of their casts from Broadway; in this case Nancy Kelly (as the mother), Patty McCormick (as the evil kid) and several other actors were repeating the roles they'd played in the Broadway play. And apart from the infamous tacked-on Hollywood ending, the script is pretty faithful to the play. It's one of a number of very "stagey" movies Warner Brothers made in this era; others were the adaptations of the musicals The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees (both with nearly the entire casts of the Broadway shows) and No Time For Sergeants (with Andy Griffith repeating his stage role). Essentially, Warner Brothers was responding to the collapse of the studio system -- the fact that they no longer had enough "in-house" stars to staff a picture -- by making extensive use of Broadway talent to fill their pictures. It worked, too, though all these films now look a little drab and stagey.

Patty McCormick has done a commentary track for the new Bad Seed DVD; here's what she had to say about the film in an article a few years ago:

The Bad Seed has become a camp classic. But for me, personally, I spent a lot of years pretending it never existed. I was almost embarrassed by that film. Now for some reason, everybody is looking at it fondly as all those movies and TV shows of the '50s and '60s are being embraced. After so many years of trying to push it aside, I now feel I have grown to appreciate what I did back then. And I have to say, I like it.

Addendum: It seems my memory may have played tricks on me and caused me to overrate the influence of pop-Freudianism on The Bad Seed. See comments section. However, I choose to blame my bad memory on a suppressed Oedipal conflict.

New Coke Fans?

I don't have much to write about today, but I was talking to someone about '80s culture (yes, that's all I ever talk about) and the subject of New Coke came up, as it inevitably does in such discussions. Here's the thing: my main memory of the New Coke era is that I tasted New Coke once and thought it tasted better than Old Coke. I remember thinking, gee, no wonder they changed it; this really is a lot better. I for one was disappointed that they changed it back. But as various histories of the New Coke blunder have confirmed, it didn't really matter whether the new product tasted better, compared to the anger the change aroused in "loyalists" and the bad publicity that would ensue. I've always thought it was interesting that the big flops, failures, blunders rarely come with the very worst products or movies or TV shows -- they come with products that may actually be pretty good, or at least not bad. The company, lured into a false sense of security by the decent quality of the product and the decent reaction of focus groups and test audiences, push the product with all their might -- and the public pushes back. You rarely have that kind of bomb with a really terrible product, because a really terrible product would not get that kind of push. This is also why the most disastrous movies are those that don't necessarily look bad when they're first cut together, e.g. Heaven's Gate.

We Got It Made In the Shade!

I saw the new DVD set of the first season of Happy Days, which will be released August 17, and I can definitely recommend it. There are no extras, which is unfortunate, because creator Garry Marshall is really good at commentary tracks (listen to his commentary on an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show). But the episodes are uncut, 25 minutes and 30 seconds -- ah, for the days when there were only four minutes of commercials per half-hour -- and they look better than I've ever seen them look in syndication. Best of all, unlike DVD sets of some TV shows, none of the music appears to have been changed.

This, of course, is the "good" Happy Days: filmed one-camera, with no studio audience, going for the look and feel of a '50s show to match the '50s setting, and focusing on Richie Cunningham, a smart, shy teenager dealing with the minor tribulations of growing up: buying a car, getting drunk for the first time, breaking up with a girlfriend. The first two seasons of the show are genuinely excellent; Marshall toned down the New York wisecracking farce style he had brought to other shows, and created a quiet, sweet, leisurely show that had more in common with The Andy Griffith Show than American Graffiti. I especially like the fact that it centred on the smart, kind of nerdy kid who gets good grades and plays chess; in most sitcoms, that kind of character is the sidekick at best.

Of course, most of you know what happened after the second season: after two seasons of unspectacular ratings, the show was completely revamped, with more of an emphasis on Fonzie, a corresponding de-emphasis on Richie, and perhaps most importantly, a complete change in format: the show switched from single-camera, no audience, to being filmed with three cameras in front of a studio audience. (There was actually one episode in the second season, "Fonzie's Getting Married," that was shot with a studio audience as a test; not co-incidentally, it's the worst episode of that season.) This led to the audience cheering whenever Fonzie walked in (and eventually, whenever anyone walked in), but it also changed the style and look of the show. They had to use mostly interior sets, redesign the Cunninghams' house, and, most importantly, change the acting and directing style to a more "theatrical" style to play to the live audience. Fonzie was originally a low-key character whose coolness came from the fact that he didn't say much or speak loudly when he did say something. But you can't do that with a stageplay-style, three-camera sitcom, so Fonzie became a loud showboat, posing and yelling so he could be heard and seen by the last person in the last row of the studio. Ron Howard, who had never performed before a live audience before, was clearly uncomfortable and it took him a while to adjust. It's actually a fascinating study in how the style of shooting changes a show, because the writing staff was still the same as it had been in the first two seasons, as was the primary director (Jerry Paris), but the feel of the show changed almost completely because of the difference between one-camera and live-audience performing.

Interestingly, Garry Marshall had previously saved a show by making the same switch: "The Odd Couple" was one-camera in its first season, but at Tony Randall's insistence, they went to a multi-camera, live-audience format in season two -- and it worked great. But that was different, because the material was based on a play and it starred two guys with stage experience; it was more appropriate with that "theatrical" style. The nostalgic charm and period feel of Happy Days was just all wrong for multi-camera.

Then again, if it hadn't been for the revamp, Happy Days would have gone off the air after two or three seasons and would be a fondly-remembered "lost classic." I suppose most of us would have done the same, if we'd been in Garry Marshall's position of having to choose between a succes d'estime and just a plain old success. But it's the first two seasons that I would recommend, so get the first season and hope that season two, when it comes, has a few extras.

Bob Merrill On Broadway

I wanted to write something more about Bob Merrill. I previously mentioned this Mark Steyn article, written for Slate soon after Merrill's suicide a few years back, which called him "the worst songwriter of all time" on the basis of his '50s novelty songs like "Doggie in the Window." Like a lot of Steyn pieces, it displays an impressive knowledge of popular-culture history but suggests that the writer is ignoring everything that doesn't support his main thesis. In this case, Steyn doesn't discuss Merrill's Broadway work (except his lyric for "People" from Funny Girl) because it doesn't support his point that Merrill was all about Mambo-ing Italians and Huly-Huly skirts. So I'd like to write a bit about Merrill's post-"Doggie" career, when he got out of the pop-song market and broke into writing Broadway shows.

As Steyn mentions, Merrill composed by tapping his melodies out on a toy xylophone. He couldn't read or write music (like Irving Berlin and Noel Coward among others), so he had the names of the notes marked down on the xylophone. As I understand it, he'd find the notes of the melody on the xylophone, write the melody and harmony on paper in letters (A, B, B-flat), and give it to an assistant to turn the letters into notes on a bar sheet. This being the case, it's no surprise that Merrill's melodies aren't exactly harmonically or structurally sophisticated -- but they can be delightful. He had a knack for finding just the right musical phrase to build a song around, a phrase or motif that could stick in your head instantly. (Once you've heard "Mambo Italiano," can you ever get that "HEY MAM-BO..." thing out of your head?) As a lyricist, he was... well... unique, in good and bad ways. Merrill wrote extremely fast. When Jule Styne played him five melodies he'd written for Funny Girl, Merrill wrote lyrics for all of them (including several of the show's hits) in only three days. And his lyrics always sound like they were written fast. They sound spontaneous and original; there are strange and different images in a Bob Merrill lyric that you won't find in a lyric by a more measured, sensible lyricist like Stephen Sondheim or Sheldon Harnick.

But he didn't always seem to care much whether his images made any sense, with the result that Merrill's lyrics abound in mixed metaphors, non sequiturs, and general weirdness ("Let them analyze/What our amalgamation implies"). He was also, in all likelihood, the sloppiest rhymer ever to have a successful career as a Broadway lyricist. A Bob Merrill score will always include non-rhymes like "Cozy/Knows me," "Lookin' in/Brook-a-lyn," "Got to/Not you," "Half-witz/Kafritz." A friend of Merrill's, posting on rec.arts.theatre.musicals, once explained the sloppiness as an indication of Merrill's lack of interest in a situation:

Merrill was sloppy all over the place, but not always at the right time. It wasn't the seriousness of the moment. Merrill could write an exquisite lyric like "Promise Me a Rose." But if he didn't feel a particular involvement with the characters, his words could fall to pieces. I've always felt that once he started with BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, he could never get a handle on who those people were, and he's sloppy all over the place. And when I listen I giggle.

It's definitely true that Merrill's lyrics were sloppier in flops than in hits, and in songs for weak characters as opposed to songs for interesting characters so there may be something to this.

Merrill's first Broadway show was New Girl in Town, a musical version of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. He had originally written a score for an updated movie musical version of Anna Christie that never got produded; writer-director George Abbott liked the idea, and decided to make it into a Broadway show -- but set in the original period, which meant that none of the songs Merrill had written could be used. Undaunted, Merrill wrote a completely new score in record time. The show starred Gwen Verdon as Anna, and she was such a hot ticket at the time that it made money even though it only ran a little over a year. Merrill's score is typical of his work in that it's half excellent stuff and half filler. Most of Anna's songs are very good, including her bitter "On the Farm" (about her sexual abuse at the hands of her cousins, which led her into a life of prostitution), which was selected by Stephen Sondheim as one of the songs he wished he had written. But much of the score consists of atmosphere-setting twaddle and pointlessly jolly chorus numbers, with rhymes like "Okey-doke, jack / smokestack."

Merrill's next show was yet another Eugene O'Neill adaptation, but from a more obvious source for musicalization: Take Me Along was based on O'Neill's nostalgic comedy Ah, Wilderness! The show didn't do as well as it should have, perhaps because there was an imbalance created by the casting: the biggest star in the cast, Jackie Gleason, played a relatively small part, that of Sid, the drunken uncle. So Sid wound up getting more than his fair share of songs and scenes, and the main story -- about the father, Nat (Walter Pidgeon) and the son, Richard (Robert Morse) -- got pushed to the side. It's a good rule of thumb that musicals don't succeed when it winds up giving too much space to what should be a subplot. Merrill's score has the usual share of clunkers, including more pointless choruses like "The Volunteer Firemen Picnic" and lines like "This very attrac-a-tive, thoroughly mod-er-in, marvelous fire machine." But it also has some exquisite songs, including two of my very favorite musical theatre songs of all time. One, "Staying Young," was sung -- surprisingly well -- by Walter Pidgeon, and is a beautiful and finally very moving song about a man trying to pretend he's not growing old; it's also one of the few songs where a second-act reprise actually expands on and develops the meaning of the song. And, in the second act, "Promise Me a Rose," delivered in a vibrato-ridden but charming way by Eileen Herlie (another non-singer -- after My Fair Lady, more and more shows were casting non-singing actors in singing parts), is a very touching song, sung by a woman who loves a man who perpetually disappoints her. The complete lyric is at the end of this post; I can't post the tune, but it is very lovely, and the trick of ending the song by repeating the B section is very well-done, giving the song the feeling of not having an ending -- which reflects the fact that it's being sung by someone who, against her better judgement, keeps on hoping.

Merrill's biggest hit was Carnival, based on the movie Lili. The score doesn't reach the heights of Take Me Along but has fewer dead spots than any of Merrill's other scores; combined with a fine book by Michael Stewart, the result is a show that ought to be revived more often. (The problem, I suspect, is that the lead part is difficult to cast.) In 1964 Merrill contributed to two hit shows; he wrote the lyrics for Funny Girl, which remains his most famous credit, and he wrote music and lyrics, uncredited, for two songs in Hello, Dolly!: "(I Stand For) Motherhood" and "Elegance."

Merrill's career after that didn't go well. Henry, Sweet Henry was a musical adaptation of the movie The World of Henry Orient; it was a good source, and it had an excellent star in Don Ameche, but Merrill's score was mostly second-rate. The following year he worked on what seemed like a sure-fire hit: A musical version of Breakfast at Tiffany's, produced by David Merrick, written and directed by Abe Burrows, and starring Mary Tyler Moore. But Moore proved unsuited to the stage (as she did recently when she dropped out of and/or was fired from a Neil Simon play), and Burrows never fully solved the problem of how to turn Truman Capote's story into a full evening's entertainment (he tried to be more faithful to the book than the movie version had been, which may have been a mistake). Burrows was fired out of town and Merrick, in desperation, turned to the man who was still the "in" playwright on Broadway: Edward Albee. Albee wrote an incomprehensible new book where half the story appeared to be a dream, cut most of Merrill's songs, and generally wound up with a total mess that closed down without even making it to New York. Merrill later financed a studio recording of all the songs he wrote for the show; the recording reveals some attractive ballads, but a lot of sloppy lyrics and monotonous tunes that show Merrill not knowing or caring why he should give a damn about these people.

Merrill wrote lyrics for a couple of other shows with music by Jule Styne, one of which was a moderate success (Sugar, based on Some Like it Hot) and the other of which bombed (Prettybelle with Angela Lansbury). He wrote scores for other shows that didn't make it to Broadway (including one called The Prince of Grand Street, with Robert Preston), and -- unlikeliest thing -- a musical about the Holocaust, Hannah 1939, which opened Off-Broadway in 1990.

I'm not very familiar with Merrill's later work, which is why I ran through it so quickly (that and space limitations). But based on his best work, in the late '50s and early '60s, I can say that he was by no means "The Worst Songwriter of All Time"; indeed, when he was at his best, he was very, very good.

Here are the lyrics to "Promise Me a Rose" (try to find the cast album of Take Me Along if you can, or pray for a reissue of this out-of-print recording):

If you promise me a rose,
I go out and buy a pot.
My imagination grows
Into roses by the plot.
I have roses on my doors,
On my ceilings and my floors,
And if you forget to keep your promise,
For some reason or another you fail,
How can the dreamer of sweet roses
Be bothered by a slight detail?
If you promise me a bird,
One to sing above my chair,
Then a dream in me is stirred
And one bird becomes a pair,
Then my room is full of song,
'Cause the pair becomes a throng,
And if you forget to keep your promise,
For some reason or another you fail,
How can the dreamer of sweet music
Be bothered by a slight detail?
All my birds are in their cages,
Ev'ry rose is in a pot.
I get dreamier by stages,
Maybe so -- so what?
If you even touch my hand
Absentmindedly as this,
Just your touch upon my hand
I can dream into a kiss.
Then the kiss begins to soar
Into love forevermore,
And though your little boat has no anchor,
And my little boat has no sail,
How can a dreamer on love's blue ocean
Be bothered by a slight detail?
All my birds are in their cages,
Ev'ry rose is in a pot.
I get dreamier by stages,
Maybe so -- so what?

PINKY AND THE BRAIN

So, finally, I have something about the last of the Warner/Spielberg cartoons of the '90s (the others, Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, and Freakazoid, are covered here -- scroll down -- and here). Pinky and the Brain was, of course, a spinoff from Animaniacs, taking the most popular of that show's supporting segments and turning it into its own show. Some episodes were full half-hour stories, others had two shorter stories; but the basic outline of every story was the same as it had been in the Animaniacs segments: the Brain, a superintelligent genetically altered lab mouse, comes up with a scheme to take over the world; he and his dumb cockney-accented sidekick, Pinky, try to carry out the scheme; in the end, the scheme fails, usually not because of Pinky but because of Brain's overconfidence or a fatal flaw in his plan.

The characters were conceived on Animaniacs by the producer, Tom Ruegger, and one of the writers, Peter Hastings. Hastings wrote or co-wrote many of the pair's cartoons on Animaniacs, and was considered sort of the unofficial creator of the characters, the guy who knew what they would or wouldn't do. (Though there were, apparently, some things he would have preferred they not do; Ruegger added a running gag about Brain hitting Pinky -- a slapstick bit to keep kids alert in the middle of expository dialogue scenes -- whereas Hastings always felt it would be funnier to have him threaten to hit his sidekick and never quite do it.) When the characters were spun off into their own series on the then-new WB network, Hastings was in charge of it, and he favored half-hour stories with more plot and satirical content than the Animaniacs segments. Hastings added some twists to make Brain a more sympathetic character; in the short Animaniacs he could rely on the natural sympathy that the audience gives to a frustrated Wile E. Coyote type of character, but to carry a whole show, he needed to display his own sympathetic qualities. One way to do that was to surround Brain with human characters who made him look good by comparison. In the first full-length Pinky and the Brain episode, Brain's plan to take over the world is complicated by a kill-crazy Cold War nut who thinks Pinky's trademark cry, "Narf," stands for "Nuclear Attack Readiness Formation." In the second episode, Brain joins the workforce as part of his plan, and finds himself facing craven corporate executives and unscrupulous lawyers. And in the first season's Christmas special, which won an Emmy, Brain actually breaks down and cries in a sentimental and not terribly convincing twist. But it did succeed in showing viewers that there was more to Brain than the try/fail formula. The most successful of these devices was the introduction of Brain's arch-enemy, Snowball (Roddy McDowall), another genetically altered animal who wants to take over the world for evil purposes, as opposed to Brain, who just thinks (correctly) that humans are really stupid and they'd be better off with him leading them.

The Emmy for the Christmas show was in the prime-time category, best animated series; it beat out "The Simpsons" among others. While "\Pinky and the Brain had been planned as a Saturday morning show and did in fact run on Saturday mornings, the WB decided to air the episodes in prime time as well. It seemed like a good idea; "Animaniacs" had a lot of popularity with adults, and the WB didn't have many good shows to fill its prime time schedule. The problem was that Pinky and the Brain wasn't really a sitcom, like The Simpsons; it had only two regular characters, the same basic plot setup every week, made use of Animaniacs-style cartoon violence that branded the thing as a "cartoon" in the eyes of prime-time viewers, and was as likely to do short segments as half-hour stories. It just didn't look or feel like a prime-time series, and the ratings, even by the standards of a tough time slot, were very poor.

The WB's initial idea was to leave Pinky and the Brain in its original form on Saturday mornings, but also commission new episodes, in a different style, for prime-time. Hastings explained in an internet post:

As P&B headed into its second prime-time season, the network wanted to push the show forward and get some new "prime-time" writers. They wanted to see more emotional plot lines, and a big community of characters (sorta like, what's that show? Oh yeah, The Simpsons) What they really wanted to see was a show that was a bit more like the rest of their family oriented shows with a broader appeal to more viewers. Here's a problem - Pinky and the Brain live a special life, they are special mice in a human world, they are not odd mice in a world populated with talking animals. They are trying to take over the world. NO ONE knows this (almost no one). Even though they constantly tell people, nobody ever believes it. And this is crucial to the charm and uniqueness of the show. PINKY AND THE BRAIN HAVE A SECRET. Only they know and we know. Lots of other characters can ruin this. Anyway, I'm babbling...to march forward...I hired several new writers. New prime-time scripts were written. They are good and funny, but they are not what they network wanted. They wanted something completely new. They like Pinky and the Brain, but they didn't care about taking over the world or Acme Labs or Infindibulators or taking over the world or working alone at night or giant dryers or fooling Bill Clinton or mechanical suits or taking over the world. They wanted to see emotional stories with relatable characters that would appeal to lots o' people. In the meantime, time is flying by and it's getting more and more difficult to get on the air in the fall. Therefore, the show was put back into development to see what we could come up with.

The "prime-time" staff of writers included people who had written for shows like The Simpsons and Duckman, plus a writer who would later go on to write for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, David Fury. But the show never made it back to prime time, and the prime-time writers were let go with only four scripts having been written, all of which were eventually produced for the Saturday morning show. It says something about how adult-friendly the WB TV cartoons were that scripts written for prime time, with sexual innuendoes and political humor, could fit into the Saturday morning format without anybody noticing. (Also, one of the prime-time writers, who had written for The Critic and The Simpsons, later described Hastings as "one of the most talented people I have ever worked with." Kricfalusi acolytes like Amid Amidi will often say that animation writers are just talentless hacks who couldn't get jobs in prime-time sitcoms, but with shows like Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain, the level of talent and skill among the writers was often equal to that of a good prime-time staff.)

While producing new episodes for Saturday morning, Hastings was asked to develop a new prime-time series for Pinky and the Brain, one that would have more of a sitcom format. He wrote a pilot which was a "behind-the-scenes" story, where Pinky and the Brain are Hollywood stars, dealing with agents, producers, neighbors, relatives, and, yes, wives. The WB passed on the script (it was later adapted into a Saturday morning episode, "You'll Never Eat Food Pellets In This Town Again), and, perhaps realizing that the WB was becoming disenchanted with cartoons -- as I said in a previous post, the network's executives were running into trouble with advertisers because Pinky and the Brain and Animaniacs had insufficient appeal to very young children -- Hastings left WB Animation soon after.

The show didn't really suffer from Hastings' departure; in fact, it improved a bit. The staff, headed by writer-producer Charlie Howell, shook up the formula by doing things like introducing Pinky's family ("The Family That Narfs Together Poits Together"), putting them in a three-part adventure inspired in part by The Prisoner ("Brainwashed"), and even writing musical numbers (though this may have been done, in part, so the writers could get royalties). The show even spoofed the network's suggestion that they add more characters; an episode called "Pinky and the Brain and Larry" revamped the title song and the show to include a new character, Larry, who completely screwed up the formula by his total uselessness.

The show went on strong for 65 episodes, but when it was up for renewal, the WB finally insisted that a new character be added. Somehow -- the idea is variously attributed to Steven Spielberg or some guy in marketing -- it was decided to put the mice in a house occupied by Elmyra, the obnoxious animal-loving girl from Tiny Toon Adventures. The idea was so stupid that even the new lyrics for the title song mocked it:

Now Pinky and the Brain
Have a new domain.
It's what the network wants --
Why bother to complain?

The writing of Pinky, Elmyra and the Brain was not bad (the staff was led by John McCann of Freakazoid), and by the end of its thirteen-episode run it was starting to get pretty good despite the horrible premise. But, inevitably, the addition of Elmyra didn't help the show gain an audience with little kids, so the ratings didn't improve, and the show was cancelled. I think it has to rank as one of the worst "re-toolings" in TV history. But it did win anohter Emmy, this time for outstanding children's animated series.

Pinky and the Brain always seemed to be well-respected by the animators who worked on it, more so than Animaniacs or Freakazoid. I'm not really sure why; maybe it was because it won an Emmy, or maybe because it was perceived as being less subject to interference from "The Suits" than most cartoons (until the Elmyra re-tooling, there wasn't a lot of network meddling with the format). But really, one of the weaknesses of the show was that it relied so heavily on dialogue that there wasn't always much for the animators to do in terms of facial expressions or visual effects. The first season of Animaniacs had much more visual imagination (that included the early Pinky and the Brain cartoons, which had more atmosphere and more visual gags than most of the spinoff episodes). But Pinky and the Brain were generally seen as the best characters WB TV Animation had come up with; there was a bit of Ren and Stimpy in them initially, but they soon went past that, thanks partly to the writing -- which gave them all kinds of interesting quirks and catchphrases -- and partly to the voice acting of Maurice LaMarche (Brain) and Rob Paulsen (Pinky). LaMarche's voice for the Brain was partly based on his famous impression of Orson Welles, which he also did in the movie Ed Wood; Paulsen voiced Pinky as a happy cockney idiot out of a Carry On movie. Together they did a lot to establish the characters as interesting and sympathetic and unique; their dialogue exchanges were often hilarious, especially in the famed "Are you pondering what I'm pondering" exchanges:

BRAIN: Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
PINKY: I think so, Brain, but where are we going to find a duck and a hose at this hour?

BRAIN: Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
PINKY: I think so, Brain, but if Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why does he keep doing it?

Pinky and the Brain is still remembered fondly; Entertainment Weekly recently had a blurb asking for its release on DVD (there are no current plans, WB said, but it's under consideration), and of course it has been ripped off a number of times, most obviously by Family Guy, where the baby Stewie is sort of an unfunny version of the Brain. I still think that the first season of Animaniacs is the best thing that WB TV Animation did, but I also think that the Pinky and the Brain spinoff is the show that has the best chance of becoming a classic.

Sondheim-Firsters

I keep meaning to write a long post on the Stephen Sondheim cult, but I haven't had time yet. As a placeholder, I'll re-post part of a post I wrote on a newsgroup a couple of years ago; it was called "How to Recognize a Sondheim-Firster." The term "Sondheim-Firster" was a term I invented to describe the sort of person who likes Stephen Sondheim but doesn't really like musicals. Some of the qualifications for Sondheim-Firster status were:

The Sondheim-Firster:
- Loves SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE and PASSION above all other musicals. Lukewarm about COMPANY and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. Thinks INTO THE WOODS is kind of a sellout. Hasn't seen A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM.
- Not quite sure who Harold Prince is. Can't name offhand any of the book writers Sondheim has worked with, except possibly James Lapine.
- Approvingly calls any Sondheim song "dissonant," whether it is or not.
- Not wild about Andrew Lloyd Webber, but really hates Rodgers and Hammerstein.
- Believes that WEST SIDE STORY was a commercial flop.
- Ends a discussion of any Sondheim musical with the phrase "audiences weren't ready for it."
- Knows nothing about CAROUSEL except that it glorifies wife-beating and ends with a sappy song about walking through storms.
- Evaluates *any* pre-1970 musical, including Sondheim's, by saying that it has "hints of what was to come later."
- Kind of bored by FOLLIES -- too many show tunes in it -- but knows it must be good because it makes middle-aged people uncomfortable.
- If he/she is a critic, reviews any non-Sondheim musical by comparing it unfavorably to the last Sondheim musical. Also reviews every Sondheim musical by comparing it unfavorably to the last Sondheim musical.
- Explains that Rodgers and Hammerstein brought the musical to adolescence, and Sondheim made it grow up.
- Uses "hummable" as a pejorative term.
- Saw MY FAIR LADY. Sort of enjoyed it.

I don't know how many people have met a Sondheim-Firster. There's a whole unreadable publication, "The Sondheim Review," devoted to Sondheim-First writing, and every now and then you'll get a Sondheim-Firster critic (Frank Rich, of the New York Times, pretty much fit the description). Here's a good, which is to say bad, example of Sondheim-First-ism, in a review from England -- where the Sondheim-First movement is at its strongest and most impervious to knowledge of musical-theatre history -- of a recording of a great show, Little Me:

Stephen Sondheim’s musicals/operas are musically and intellectually satisfying and truly moving. There are predecessors of similar standing but no-one so consistently packs Sondheim’s punch. The present musical is not in the Sondheim league. While pleasant and with the occasional hit (e.g. Real Live Girl) this is a slice of Broadway eclair: fluffy but with little nutrition. The brightly inconsequential Broadway-medley overture says it all: brash and superficial.

Where Sondheim ranks, in musical-theatre history, is a topic for another post, but I think it's fair to say that if you meet someone who talks like the reviewer above -- and if you like musicals, you've probably met someone who talks like that -- the best option is to nod and slowly back away.

Things That Suck: '50s Novelty Songs

Ah, the '50s. A decade with something for almost everyone to hate. Liberals hate the '50s as the decade of conformity, McCarthyism, and white picket fences. Conservatives hate the '50s as the decade of big government, over-unionization, and rock n' roll. But what if, like me, you're too wimpy to identify yourself with a political philosophy? Take heart, for there is still another very good reason to hate the '50s: it was the decade of "novelty songs." That may be worse than McCarthyism, come to think of it.

There had always been novelty songs -- songs on silly or wacky topics or built around gimmicks. Think of "Under the Bamboo Tree" or "Mairzey Doats" or "Bongo, Bongo, Bongo (I Don't Want to Leave the Congo)." But for some reason, the genre really came into its own in the early '50s. Maybe the regular avenues of pop music -- love, mostly, requited or unrequited -- had been over-explored and the music industry came to rely more and more on gimmicks to set individual songs and recordings apart. Whatever the reason, the '50s was the golden age of "wacky" songs, some of which are still popular today, e.g. "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)." But many, many other novelty hits of this era are not remembered with affection, but with horror. Think "Jingle Bells" by the singing dogs.

The unacknowledged king of novelty songwriting was Bob Merrill, who gave the world "Mambo Italiano," "How Much is that Doggie in the Window," and dozens of others. When Merrill died (by his own hand) at age 76, Mark Steyn's obit in Slate called him "the worst songwriter of all time," the man who "single-handedly produced the worst songs of the decade and so debauched the currency of mainstream Tin Pan Alley that it had no moral authority to resist rock 'n' roll." The piece is remarkably unfair to Merrill, a talented if erratic songwriter who happened to be writing for a particular market; I hope to write at another time about Merrill's Broadway work (which Steyn hardly mentions at all). But it does give a good summary of the terrors of the novelty-song craze:

In those days, Sinatra was a loser. The smart money was on [Mitch] Miller's new discovery, Guy Mitchell--nice kid, pleasant voice, no trouble. Frank didn't want "Sparrow in the Treetop," so Miller gave it to Mitchell, along with "My Truly, Truly Fair," "Belle, Belle, My Liberty Belle," "Feet Up (Pat Him on the Po-Po)," "She Wears Red Feathers (And a Hula-Hula Skirt)" and "There's a Pawnshop on the Corner in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania"--the biggest hit ever written about Pittsburgh.

All six songs were by Bob Merrill, all were arranged with Miller's unrelenting jolliness (whooping French horns throughout), and all were smashes. If Merrill had a yen to write boy-meets-girl, it didn't show: boy-meets-cake, girl-meets-dog, sparrow-meets-treetop ... Pop songs are supposed to be universal--"I Will Always Love You"--but Merrill was specific with a vengeance: Even if you were minded to write a song about a gal who wears red feathers and a huley-huley skirt and lives on jes' cokeynuts, why would you open with the line "I work in a London bank"? It remains, incidentally, the biggest hit ever written about a London banker who meets a hula-hula girl.

Merrill's most-derided song is, of course, "Doggie in the Window," but at least it makes sense. What happens when Merrill writes what amounts to a novelty song for grown-ups -- an attempt to write a bouncy, wacky but "suggestive" song? Well, you get this song, which was recorded by Doris Day:

Some have ginger and some have snap
Some have this'n and some have that,
But my guy, all he's got is
Ooh Bang Jiggly Jang (Boing Boing)
Some have kisses that taste so sweet,
Taste like 'taters or taste like meat
But my guy, what a flavor,
Ooh Bang Jiggly Jang (Boing Boing)
My Bonnie lies over the (Boing Boing)
My Bonnie lies over the
Ooh Bang, Jiggly Jang (Boing Boing)
There's nobody lies like my Bonnie,
But even though my Bonnie lies to me,
I'll forgive him 'cause
Some are charming and some have looks,
Some have money and some read books,
Buy my guy, he's got so much
Ooh Bang Jiggly Jang (Boing Boing).

But let's face it: Bob Merrill gets singled out for ridicule not because he was the worst, but because he was good at writing a bad, evil, misbegotten type of song. There are worse examples, by novelty songwriters who never became as successful. The very worst is the type of novelty song written to exploit a then-current phenomenon. Songs are supposed to have a timeless quality, but this is the kind of song that is absolutely intended to sound even stupider in two years than it sounds now. The one that always sticks in my mind is a song that the veteran lounge reptile Louis Prima recorded just after Sputnik went up:

My baby's going on a trip to the moon,
And she won't be back too soon.
She doesn't write me and I can't sleep,
All I hear from her is BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!...
I wonder if BEEP! means "I miss you,"
And maybe BOOP! means "I want to kiss you,"
I'm hopin' that BLOOP! means "I love you,"
And she's comin' down to earth again.
My baby's up in the stratosphere,
I'm so low 'cause I'm down here.
My love for her is gonna keep
Till she comes back and whispers BEEP BEEP BEEP!

The "beep"s are provided not by the singer but by sound effects apparently borrowed from some recently-wrapped science fiction movie. But really, anything recorded by Louis Prima becomes a bad novelty song even if it wasn't one originally. (And I actually like Louis Prima, in a through-a-drunken-haze sort of way.) Similarly, Mitch Miller's arrangements on recordings and his popular TV show "Sing Along With Mitch" transformed everything into novelty songs: relentlessly perky and with absolutely no connection to human emotion. For an example, take his recording of "Do Re Mi" with the kids from The Sound of Music, included as a bonus track on the Broadway Cast Album. Miller could take any song and make it sound like it could have, nay should have, been "Mama Will Bark."

Fad Meets Fad

Addendum to my post on internet fads: I found a link to an online video that ingeneously combines two then-big fads: The "All Your Base are Belong to Us" craze and the Mr. T web cult. Enjoy Mr. T vs. CATS, aka "All Your Base Are Belong To T."

Only the French Can

I rented the Criterion DVD of 1955's French Cancan, written and directed by Jean Renoir. It only seems to be available for purchase in a set of three films Renoir made in the '50s, all in gorgeous color and all kind of fluffy. (Though if you're a film critic, when a great but aging director makes light and fluffy movies, you're supposed to call them "humanistic" instead of "fluffy." Just as when a great but aging director makes a boring movie, it's "autumnal.") French Cancan, Renoir's first French movie since the '30s, is a semi-musical, with several dance sequences, including a great climactic can-can scene, and cameo appearances by performers like Edith Piaf. It's basically a straightforward backstage story -- an impresario takes an unworldly young laundry girl, makes her into a star dancer, and teaches her that when you're in show business, the show takes precedence over everything, even love. It's an entertaining movie that fortunately doesn't make the mistake of trying to ape the French Impressionist paintings of the period; there's a general suggestion of the look of those paintings, but Renoir, an informal, improvisatory director who tended to plunk the camera down and let the actors do their thing (this is why he was such a favorite of the New Wave critics and directors, who were devoted to seat-of-your-pants moviemaking as an aesthetic ideal), doesn't try to arrange everyone and everything into looking like they stepped out of a picture by someone whose name ends in "et."

The movie gets some extra kick from being, apparently, an allegory about moviemaking; Jean Gabin, the star, basically seems to be playing Renoir (a big, broadly-gesticulating guy who's both lovable and subtly controlling, as a movie director needs to be), and various aspects of the story seem to be played for their similarity to the process of movie production: the struggles with producers, the casting couch, the girl who rises to stardom and dumps her old acquaintances along the way. When Gabin says that show business people are always at the mercy of the people who put up the money, the joke is that while he's talking about 19th-century show business, he could just as easily be talking about 20th-century show business; nothing has changed. In a movie made a couple of years earlier, The Bad and the Beautiful, which was actually about moviemaking, producer Kirk Douglas plucks Lana Turner from obscurity and exploits her crush on him so he can turn her into a movie star; in French Cancan, Jean Gabin does something very similar while turning Francoise Arnoul into a star dancer. Of course, Bad and the Beautiful isn't a comedy, and French Cancan is; you could argue that if it's an allegory about moviemaking, it actually makes the movie industry look pretty good -- since it's saying, in effect, that the hucksterism of the movie industry isn't unique to that industry; it's just part of showbiz, and it's been going on forever.

Sitcoms Don't Stay Cutting-Edge

This isn't worth a whole post, but have you ever noticed that sitcoms, more than other types of TV shows, tend to start out being described as cutting-edge and innovative, and, after they become successful, begin to be described as bland and conventional?

The ultimate example of this is still The Cosby Show. In 1984 critics called attention to its innovations: no plot, stories based on small realistic details, parents who were smarter than the kids. Within two or three years, it was routinely described as the apotheosis of bland, conformist sitcommery, so much so that the producers of iconoclastic Married With Children wanted to call it "Not the Cosbys." The Cosby Show hadn't really changed its style, though it wasn't as good as it had been in its first season; it's just that once a sitcom becomes successful and imitated, critics have a tendency to turn on it. I think this is because many TV critics don't particularly like sitcoms and aren't very good at evaluating them, so they tend to judge a sitcom by how different it is from other sitcoms. Once the rest of the TV industry catches up with a sitcom, it's no longer "different" and can be slammed accordingly.

Other examples of sitcoms that lost some of their cachet after they became too popular: Everybody Loves Raymond, Family Ties, Leave it to Beaver, All in the Family.

All in the Family, you'll recall, was slammed in the 1976 movie Network as an example of the blandness of television: "Nobody gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house," Howard Beale points out. I've always thought it was in reaction to this line that the writers of AITF gave Edith breast cancer in a later episode. Of course, citing AITF as an example of TV's unwillingness to deal with real-life problems is incredibly stupid, yet another example of what's wrong with Network, namely that that reactionary old sourpuss Paddy Chayefsky had no idea of what was actually on television at the time. But it also indicates how even the most cutting-edge sitcom will get accused of blandness as soon as it gets successful.

It's All Your BASES, not BASE

The Internet's greatest Bay-Area stoner humorist, Seanbaby, offers his list of The Ten Greatest Internet Fads. I actually knew Jay Maynard, online anyway. He was a huge, I mean huge fan of "Animaniacs."

To Seanbaby's list I would add the phenomenon of Mr. T webcomics, which was a transatlantic phenomenon (there were probably more of them in England, where The A-Team has always been hugely popular, than in America). I previously wrote about the Mr. T craze here so I won't repeat myself.

Personally I think that the golden age of the Internet fad is over. People are more and more doing blogs instead of posting on newsgroups where they can obsessively discuss things; online content is more and more about expressing your thoughts rather than posting sound bites from obscure video games. I may be wrong, but I think there's no longer enough of an online "community" to make a fad; that's a relic of a time when people who posted on the Internet were like an underground cult.

David His Ten Thousands Slew

I can very enthusiastically recommend the recent recording of Handel's oratorio Saul, conducted by Paul McCreesh. Indeed, if you aren't familiar with Handel's work apart from "Messiah," this is the place to start; there's hardly a weak number in the piece, which starts just after David kills Goliath, and focuses on King Saul's pathological jealousy of David, which leads to his destruction when he drives David away (making him unavailable to help him fight the Philistines). Musical highlights include the third-act scene with Saul, the Witch of Endor and the ghost of Samuel, and the closing funeral scene for Saul and Jonathan.

Like most of Handel's oratorios (but unlike "Messiah"), "Saul" is a dramatic work that happens to be performed in concert rather than staged; it's written like an opera, and indeed is more dramatic than most of Handel's actual operas. That's largely due to the contributions of Handel's librettist, Charles Jennens, an interesting guy for whom I can't seem to find a webpage; he was an independently wealthy man who passed his time pursuing an interest in Shakespeare (he edited somewhat eccentric editions of five Shakespeare plays), politics, and music. He provided Handel with the librettos of "Saul" and "Belshazzar," and also compiled/arranged the libretto of "Messiah."

To follow up on my previous post about librettos, Jennens' libretto for Saul is a great example of operatic libretto writing, even though it's not technically for an opera. In adapting the Biblical story, Jennens picks the elements that lend themselves to the creation of drama in music. So whereas the librettos for Handel's Italian operas left all the drama to the recitatives and used the arias for generalized commentary on the situation (I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm vengeful), the arias in "Saul" actually move the drama forward and give the composer the opportunity to show characters thinking and acting, not just reacting. Here's the way Jennens adapts the key moment of the story, when the people's praise of David sets off Saul's jealousy:

22. CHORUS OF ISRAELITES
Welcome, welcome, mighty king!
Welcome all who conquest bring!
Welcome David, warlike boy,
Author of our present joy!
Saul, who hast thy thousands slain,
Welcome to thy friends again!
David his ten thousands slew,
Ten thousand praises are his due!

23. Accompagnato

SAUL
What do I hear? Am I then sunk so low,
To have this upstart boy preferr'd before me?

24. CHORUS OF ISRAELITES
David his ten thousands slew,
Ten thousand praises are his due!

25. Accompagnato

SAUL
To him ten thousands, and to me but thousands!
What can they give him more, except the kingdom?

26. Aria

SAUL
With rage I shall burst his praises to hear!
Oh, how I both hate the stripling, and fear!
What mortal a rival in glory can bear?

Exit.

That's hardly great verse, but it is superb libretto writing -- concise, clear, setting out character and situation in a few broad strokes, and with cues for dramatic effects in the music. There are opportunities like this throughout the libretto, and Handel responded with one of his very best scores. I don't know whether "Saul" has ever been staged -- some of Handel's other oratorios have been, with some success -- but if a director could solve the problem of what to do with the chorus (which, this being still an oratorio, comments on the action rather than really participating in it), it might work.

Eugene Roche

Eugene Roche, a wonderful character actor who enlivened so many TV shows in guest roles, has died at age 75. Mark Evanier has a good post about him. My favorite of Roche's many guest appearances was probably his role in three episodes of Night Court as Christine's father. He was also one of the actors considered for the role of Mr. Carlson on WKRP in Cincinnati (it was between him and Gordon Jump, and Jump got it).