More TV On DVD

The next few months are going to bring a flood of TV on DVD releases. Well, not literally a flood, because floods usually involve liquids and DVD sets are usually solids. But you get what I mean.

I thought I would go over the release schedule at good old TV Shows On DVD and pick out some upcoming sets that are worth a look, apart from the obvious ones like season 6 of "The Simpsons," which has the worst box design ever.

"Profit" - The Complete Series (August 9). I've never actually seen this show, but it is one of the most fondly-remembered of Fox's many cult flops, a melodrama-comedy reworking "Richard III" in a modern corporate setting. The co-creator, David Greenwalt (who provides audio commentary) became the original co-executive producer of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" following the cancellation of this show.

"The Andy Griffith Show" - the Complete Third Season (August 16). This was the season that introduced some new characters like Gomer Pyle who added some wackiness to "The Andy Griffith Show"'s low-key comedy, but it's also the season when the show hit its peak, largely due to the infusion of some new writing talent. In particular, the team of Everett Greenbaum and Jim Fritzell, who had previously written only one episode of the show, became full-time contributors, coming up with some episodes that really deepened the show and its characters. "A Man in a Hurry," where a city visitor to Mayberry is frustrated by the slow pace of rural life, is about as close as a sitcom episode has ever come to being profound. And another episode, "Mr. McBeevee" (written by Harvey Bullock), where Andy mistakenly believes that Opie has an imaginary friend, is such a great episode that it has been copied many times over, most recently in a "Simpsons" episode with Homer standing in for Opie. It also has the dialogue exchange where Andy's decision to trust his son takes on a religious dimension, ending with the famous exchange:

BARNEY: Do you believe in Mr. McBeevee?
ANDY: No. I believe in Opie.

"Undeclared" - the complete series (August 16). And speaking of Fox cult flops... from Judd Apatow, this was basically "Freaks and Geeks Goes to College," with all the F&G elements: quirky-looking cast, painfully realistic story ideas, lots of licensed songs on the soundtrack, and a short run. It's been given the same super-deluxe treatment "Freaks and Geeks" got.

"Taxi" - the complete third season (September 13). Despite the short (20 episode) season, this is by far the best "Taxi" season, with most of the episodes that are responsible for the show's high reputation, including "Elaine's Strange Triangle" (Elaine is interested in a man who is interested in Tony), "Going Home" (Reverend Jim's past explained) and "Latka the Playboy" (Latka becomes Vic Ferrari). This was also the season where the show started to get more surrealistic, with completely nutty moments like Famous Amos turning up in a fantasy sequence; the combination of semi-realistic humor with outright nutty humor in the same show was something that James L. Brooks became interested in with "Taxi," and would carry over into "The Simpsons" (which, early on, was very similar to "Taxi" in a lot of its comedy and story structures).

"King of the Hill," the complete fifth season (November 22). Some of the episodes from this season are as far as the adventures of Hank Hill ever went in the direction of cartoony wackiness, before creator Mike Judge and others sort of reined it in a bit. Episodes like the famous "Ho Yeah!," where Hank is mistaken for a pimp and Snoop Dogg voices a tiny white guy who proclaims himself the baddest pimp in Oklahoma City, are an entertaining glimpse at what a totally unrealistic, crazy "King of the Hill" might be like.

And this post mentions a whole bunch of shows to come from Fox over the next few months, most notably "Hill Street Blues," the show that proved that the MTM company's emphasis on character and theme could be carried over from sitcoms into dramas, thus making drama more character-based and less plot-based than it had ever been before. Also "Alien Nation," another Fox cult flop, and "The Time Tunnel," about which this page says all that needs to be said.

The Best of Bill Murray

Don't get me wrong: I think it's great that Bill Murray appears in non-blockbuster movies by youngish directors like Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and now Jim Jarmusch (the oldest youngish director in the world). Good for him for doing risky projects and believing in quirky scripts and all that.

And yet... the Bill Murray we're seeing in all these quirky, risky projects is not the essence of Bill Murray, not quite what makes Bill Murray great. Yes, he's a great actor; he always has been, and one of the things that made him such a standout on "Saturday Night Live" was his ability to give real depth and dimension to his comic characters when most of the other players were going for the easy catchphrase. He deserves the recognition he's getting as an actor. But the true brilliance of Murray, I think, manifests itself not in melancholy serio-comedies, but in mainstream Hollywood comedies. His particular talent is for cutting through the cliches of comedy, and of comedy performance, with a dose of reality. The reason Groundhog Day is a great movie -- still Murray's greatest movie, I think, no matter how many carefully-composed Wes Anderson shots he squeezes into -- is that Murray takes a high-concept comedy situation and makes it seem so real, so true, that we really get a feeling of what it would really be like to experience this impossible situation. Not to mention that Murray can actually play a jerk who converts to non-jerkiness without making either the "before" or "after" performance seem unconvincing. Maybe, indeed, my problem with his current work is that he hardly ever gets the chance to play a real jerk, which he does better than anybody.

But my favorite Murray performance, and one of the all-time great scene-stealing performances in a movie, is his performance in Tootsie, in a role so small that he didn't even get billed in the opening credits. Yet in a movie that I find very uneven both in terms of script (I can't abide Larry Gelbart's cookie-cutter one-liners) and performances, Murray simply walks off with every single scene he's in. He's usually acting with Dustin Hoffman, and the dynamic of most of their scenes is that Hoffman will emote and mug and overact, and Murray will get all the laughs while seemingly doing hardly anything at all. Every line delivery is hilarious, every look is perfectly timed. It's one of the funniest supporting performances of all time.

And it's a performance achieved by basically ignoring what the character was supposed to be. If you think about the way the character is written, he's supposed to be a young, serious playwright who rooms with the hero and has written a great play about the dangers of nuclear waste. This is the generic character of the young crusading intellectual, possibly wearing a tweed coat and glasses. Instead they got Murray, who basically sends up the whole concept of the character and generally acts as if only he understands what an idiot the hero really is.

The scene at the birthday party where Murray's character gives a long, drunken rant about his theories of play writing was, according to director Sydney Pollack (on a commentary on a long-gone Criterion laserdisc), improvised by Murray. Murray also came up with the idea to spend an entire scene eating a lemon. That's another thing his current movies need: more lemon-eating.

Anyway, here are some quotes -- from memory, so this may be wrong -- from Murray's semi-improvised party rant in Tootsie:

I don't like it when somebody comes up to me the next day and says, "Hey, man, I really liked your play." Or "I really dug your message, man. I cried." I like it when somebody comes up to me on the street a week later and says, "Hey, man, I saw your play. What happened?"

I wrote a play about the American Indian. And nobody came, nobody showed up. And to me, the American Indian is as American as Donny and Marie Osmond. It's sad, but I think that nowadays when people dream, they don't even dream in their own country. And that's sick.

On the Next Episode of Bleak House...

Based on a comment on my Dickens post (see below), I thought I would go through one of Dickens' novels and see how he ended each serialized instalment -- what devices did he use to keep the reader hanging from month to month? Most of Dickens' novels were serialized in monthly instalments of three or four chapters, with a final "double number" that was half again as long as the other instalments. "Bleak House", the novel I picked, was published over the course of nineteen months.

Fortunately, the Penguin editions of most of Dickens' novels indicate where the original instalments began and left off, making it easy to do exercises like this, and, more importantly, making it easy to know where to leave off reading for a while; these novels were not meant to be read all at once, and they're much more effective if you take a little break from them after each instalment.

Anyway, the instalments of "Bleak House" end as follows. As you will see, most of the instalments end with something to keep the readers in suspense until the next instalment; with a couple of exceptions, they don't usually end with deaths or huge set-pieces -- the big murder scene is reserved for the middle of an instalment, not the end of it -- but with little atmospheric details that increase suspense or are comical in a suspensefully sinister way. Oh, and there are spoilers ahead, but none of this will make much sense anyway if you haven't read the book:

Instalment # 1: Esther falls asleep with Caddy Jellyby's head resting on her lap; as she falls asleep, she starts to feel all the identities of the people wshe has met that day melding into one, culminating in her loss of her own identity: "Lastly, it was no one, and I was no one." Then she awakens to see the youngest of the neglected Jellyby children, "so cold that his teeth were cahttering as if he had cut them all."

# 2: Mrs. Rouncewell tells her grandson and drippy love-interest Rosa a story of how "The Ghost's Walk" got its name, and how it is heard whenever calamit or disgrace is coming to the house of Dedlock. The last line of the instalment is "So my Lady says" -- Lady Dedlock hears the ghostly echo of approaching doom.

# 3: Mr. Tulkinghorn goes to meet "Nemo," the law copyist whose handwriting so disturbed Lady Dedlock, but finds him dead of a drug overdose.

# 4: The oblique but clearly significant introduction of the "young surgeon," Allan Woodcourt, into Esther's life.

# 5: Just after a scene where Lady Dedlock interrogates Jo, the crossing-sweeper, for information on her dead ex-lover, Dickens transitions (the literary equivalent of a cut in a movie) to Mrs. Rouncewell remarking that "I never heard the step upon the Ghost's Walk, more distinct than it is tonight!"

# 6: Ends with a scene of Jo alone in the city, "the sun going down, the river running fast, the crowd flowing by him in two streams - everything moving on to some purpose and to one end - until he is stirred up, and told to 'move on' too."

# 7: Mr. Bucket, the detective, uses a ruse to figure out that it was Lady Dedlock that Jo talked to, and tells Mr. Tulkinghorn so.

# 8: Mrs. Snagsby is spying on her husband and entertaining suspicions of him.

# 9: Lady Dedlock says (in soliloquy) that Esther is her child.

# 10: Mr. Krook spontaneously combusts.

# 11: Esther admits that she was in love with Allan, but now that she is disfigured, she is glad that she never told him she loved him.

# 12: Esther asks Mr. Guppy not to make any more inquiries into the question of who her parents were; Guppy agrees but, having seen Esther in her current condition, wants to make it clear that he never made any legally-binding proposal to her.

# 13: Mademoiselle Hortense threatens Mr. Tulkinghorn.

# 14: Jo, dying, meets Allan Woodcourt, who thereby learns of Esther's disfigurement and finds out why Jo ran away; the instalment ends with Allan taking Jo "up out of Tom-All-Alone's" for treatment.

# 15: Mr. Bucket, the prototypical brilliant sleuth, arrests George Rouncewell, the prototypical guy-who-obviously-didn't-do-it-but-gets-arrested-first, for the murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn.

# 16: Mr. Bucket learns that Lady Dedlock went out, dressed in black, on the night of Mr. Tulkinghorn's murder, leaving us with the impression that she's the murderer.

# 17: Mr. Bucket and Mr. Jarndyce set out to find Lady Dedlock, who has run away, wrongly believing herself to be wanted for murder.

# 18: Esther finds her mother dead.

Carsey-Werner Strikes Again

A post on the Home Theater Forum indicates that independent sitcom producer Carsey-Werner has pretty much won the "which producer treats its product the shabbiest" sweepstakes. It was previously mentioned that the new DVD set of The Cosby Show uses cut syndication tapes, and there was some question as to whether this was the fault of the DVD distributor, UrbanWorks, or not. Now it turns out that it's definitely the fault of Carsey-Werner, because the new set of Carsey-Werner's Roseanne, distributed by a different DVD company (Anchor Bay), also uses syndication tapes.

Exactly what possesses a company to distribute chopped-up, cut-down versions of its two most valuable properties is beyond the ability of us mere mortals, who do not band together to form independent sitcom production companies, to say. Note, however, that Carsey-Werner is an LLC, meaning there's no point in suing them for everything they've got for false advertising -- as W.S. Gilbert said, "Nothing that is planned by mortal head is certain in this vale of sorrow, saving that one's liability is limited."

Dickens and the Dead

I've been re-reading a lot of Charles Dickens lately, and one thing that strikes me as odd -- though it never seemed that way when I first read his novels, in high school -- is how many of his characters die of no particular cause. Today's authors, when they want to kill a character, come up with elaborate explanations for why they die, how they die, and why it is logical for them to die. Dickens hardly ever does this. Instead his characters just seem to die of a broken heart (Smike in "Nicholas Nickleby"), or die of over-exerting themselves in a fruitless cause (Richard in "Bleak House"), or just collapse and die in response to something bad happening. In "Little Dorrit," Mr. Dorrit flashes back to his prison days, makes a fool of himself in front of a group of high-society snobs, and dies almost immediately after. Then his brother Frederick collapses on top of him and dies. Neither of these characters, as I recall, were portrayed as having anything in particular wrong with them that could cause them to go at any moment; we're just supposed to accept that death is the natural and direct consequence of any traumatic experience.

Now, some of this, or even most of it, may have to do with the fact that it was not considered in good taste to go into detail about diseases in a novel, or even call diseases by name. So Esther in "Bleak House" gets smallpox without ever actually calling it that. Some of Dickens' unexplained deaths come with hints about what disease the character might be dying from. Still, the way these things play out in the novels, death comes off more as a device for getting a character off the stage than as the result of any real-world afflictions. Because, of course, for Dickens, death is largely a way to get a character off the stage. It was rare for a character to get through a novel without either dying or getting married, and death is the obvious choice for any character who, for whatever reason, can't be married off. Also, killing off a character allows that character to end his or her time in the novel on a high note, rather than ending up as a pathetic figure. If Smike were allowed to live, pining away for Nicholas's sister Kate and painfully conscious of his own mental inferiority, he'd be utterly pathetic and depressing; since he dies with Kate's name on his lips, we can cry for him instead of feeling queasy about the character.

The main exception to the rule of vaguely-explained Dickensian death is, of course, the way he disposes of his villains. They usually die in some spectacular and grisly manner like being run over by a train (Mr. Carker in "Dombey and Son") or shot through the heart (Mr. Tulkinghorn in "Bleak House") or taking poison (Jonas Chuzzlewit in "Martin Chuzzlewit") or drowning (Quilp in "The Old Curiosity Shop"). Long before today's producers of blockbusters, Dickens knew that a bad guy needs a really big death scene -- and, as in today's blockbusters, many of Dickens novels run out of steam after the villain dies.

Ulysses - The Musical

In addition to my hellishly long "Paradise Lost: The Musical" post from a while back, I also once imagined what an opening chorus might be like for a musical version of Ulysses. The result of this English-major weirdness was a song called "Dublin (That's the Way It Goes)", and having nothing much else to post today, I thought I'd post some of that, just to be silly:

Oh, ev'rybody
Is in the dumps
In Dublin.
We drink hot toddy
And feel like chumps
In Dublin.
There's not much to relish
In a life so hellish,
But we cling to the comforting myth
That we would have been happier with
A regime patriotic and Parnell-ish.
The gloom's incessant,
So keep the cup
A-bubblin',
A strong depressant
Will cheer us up,
We suppose.
Since we're never getting better, we'll get drunk instead,
While we quote a lot of books we've never even read --
In Dublin,
That's the way it goes.

Our deep desires
Decay and die
In Dublin.
Those creepy friars
Are riding high
In Dublin.
Ev'ry new confession
Is a new obsession,
But we guess it's the way that we're built,
'Cause we're stricken with sickening guilt
And a big dose of Catholic depression.
No other city
Is half as low
Or troublin',
Our sweet self-pity
Can bloom and grow
Like a rose.
Things are worse for Mr. Bloom, whenever he's in bed,
He thinks he's good, but Molly thinks that he's The Dead --
In Dublin,
That's the way it goes.

And yeah, "bloom and grow" was an intentional Sound of Music joke.

Strange Music, Stranger Lyrics

Adding to my previous post on Wright and Forrest's musical Kean: in addition to the good songs, the show had one of the weirdest songs I've ever heard in a good musical, a pub drinking song called "The Fog and the Grog." The song was a mixture of weird noises (something like "Ogg, ogg"), silly vocal effects, and just plain bizarre lyrics, telling the story of a married frog who goes out for a night on the town and falls into a keg of rum:

That rummy frog, back on the track,
For lady frogs he felt a lack.
Bumped into one and lost his head,
Before she could blink her eye, he'd said:
"There is no time to piddle,"
And he had her in a huddle
In the middle of a cuddle
In a long, wet, rum-breath'd, bleary-eyed, frog-type smack!

Betwixt the fog and the grog,
It'll be blowsy, frowsy night tonight,
Which well we know, how we know,
For we've had a many, many such a night, all right!

That pair of frogs, though playing house,
They couldn't see, but didn't grouse.
She smelled so good, she felt so soft,
Till all at once, the fog left off,
And it's no taradiddle,
There he was in the middle
Of a bit of fiddle-faddle
With his fat-faced, gravel-voiced, bulge-eyed, on-his tail spouse!

I can't imagine what the point of this song was, but since it involved both Alfred Drake and Christopher Hewett, it's entirely possible that it might have been entertaining anyway. But on a cast album, it's a true what-the-hell-was-that moment.

Special Edition of the Damned

When I saw the announcement of two-disc special editions of all the Batman movies, I couldn't wait to see what they had planned for Batman and Robin. For obvious reasons, really terrible movies don't usually get the special-edition treatment. But because it's part of a series, Batman and Robin will recieve the puff pieces and everyone-was-brilliant commentary tracks usually reserved for good or at least passible movies:

Audio Commentary with Director Joel Schumacher

Shadows of the Bat: The Cinematic Saga of the Dark Knight Part 6
- Entitled Batman Unbound

Additional Scene: Alfred's Lost Love

Beyond Batman Documentary Gallery featuring:
- Bigger, Bolder, Brighter: The Production Design of Batman & Robin
- Maximum Overdrive: The Vehicles of Batman & Robin
- Dressed to Thrill: The Costumes of Batman & Robin
- Frozen Freaks and Femme Fatales: The Makeup of Batman & Robin
- Freeze Frame: The Visual Effects of Batman & Robin

The End is the Beginning is the End Music Video by Smashing Pumpkins

Foolish Games Music Video by Jewel

Gotham City Music Video by R. Kelly

Look Into My Eyes Music Video by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony

The Heroes and The Villains Profile Galleries

Batman & Robin Theatrical Trailer

A whole featurette on makeup for a non-horror movie? A making-of puff piece called "Batman Unbound?" I am so there. And Joel Schumacher's inevitable attempt to pretend he did something non-putrid should make a great entry for the Onion's "Commentary Tracks of the Damned" series.

To Look Upon My Love

Robert Wright, of the team of Wright and Forrest that wrote the songs for the musical Kismet, has died.

This post gives some details on what Borodin melodies Wright and Forrest adapted for Kismet. It was, as they said, a lot more than just picking a melody and setting it; some of the songs in Kismet have as much original composition in them as they do Borodin, and some of them are completely original melodies.

Their best non-adapted score was for Kean, a strange existentialist comic operetta about the great English actor, based on a play by Jean-Paul Sartre. Written by Peter Stone, Kean was about the inability of Kean (Alfred Drake) to separate the stage from reality, his quest to determine who he is offstage -- culminating in his realization that only in performance does he become anything special: "You make me real," he sings to the audience. Wright and Forrest's score, a mixture of overripe operetta ballads and period comedy numbers, served Drake very well, and the show should have been a bigger success than it was. "To Look Upon My Love," a duet contrasting Kean's romantic fantasies with his valet's attempts to call his attention to bills ("We owe the jeweler for the diamond solitaire!"), was probably the best number in the show, and the classical-flavored "Sweet Danger" had some success at the time.

Out With the New

I just noticed that the top two DVD sellers on Amazon, as of this writing, are the complete "Thin Man" boxed set (# 1) and "The High and the Mighty" (# 2). I'm not even a great big fan of these films (though I approve of the great job the John Wayne estate is doing in assembling special editions of his self-produced movies -- some of the major studios should take lessons), but that's impressive, particularly since only a few years ago it was reportedly received wisdom among some companies that old movies wouldn't sell on DVD.

Speaking of The High and the Mighty, one of the participants in the audio commentary is the inimitable Pedro Gonzales-Gonzales; this wasn't his first American movie (he'd been in a Budd Boetticher film the year before), but it was the one that started his long association with John Wayne. But I know him best from a movie called The Sheepman, because it was a movie that my dad saw as a young man, and years after he'd forgotten the name of the film, he always remembered Gonzales-Gonzales's big line: seeing a shipment of sheep being brought in, he cries out: "The sheep has come in!" Dad said this got a huge laugh in the theatre. One afternoon we were watching TV and we noticed Gonzales-Gonzales in some kind of sheep-herding situation; Dad realized this was it, and we waited for the big line. When we heard it, it was like we'd finally recovered the lost gold or something. So thanks, Pedro.

These Are the Tates...

Soap: The Complete Fourth Season hits DVD in October, making it one of the few non-current TV shows that Sony/Columbia has actually finished releasing. (Usually they release one or two seasons and then give up, as frustrated "Barney Miller" fans can confirm.) The fourth and last season of "Soap" is famous for being an example of how quickly a successful show can go off the rails. Creator Susan Harris lessened her involvement with the show -- she had written every single episode in the previous three seasons -- and the new writers came up with some unfortunate storylines. Also, Harris took Diana Canova off "Soap" to co-star in Harris's new show, "I'm a Big Girl Now" (with Danny Thomas, no less), and it opened up a hole in the "Soap" cast that the new writers kept trying to fill with new and frankly useless characters. By the end of the truncated fourth season "Soap" had become a mishmash of generically wacky comedy, like "Mork and Mindy" with a larger cast. But that cast is always worth watching, even operating at less than their best.

I offered some general thoughts on "Soap," and Susan Harris, here.

Anti-Movie Movies

I recently treated myself to a viewing of some Joe Dante films, including the two Gremlins movies. I'm one of those people who believes that the sequel is better than the original -- Dante himself thinks so -- but both have their own strengths.

One thing I didn't hear much about on the DVD commentary -- maybe it was on a part I missed; I can rarely listen to an audio commentary straight through, even with commentators as entertaining as Dante and Zach Galligan -- was the status of Gremlins as a satire of the then-recent blockbuster E.T. The film was and still is often seen as a shot across the bow of E.T. and the over-marketing of it. Gizmo is, much like E.T., an absurdly cute, funny-talking supernatural creature who enlivens a boy's life with warmth and innocence and niceness and goodness. But whereas E.T. played all that stuff straight, Gremlins basically expects us to get so fed up with the cutesiness that we cheer when the evil, nasty creatures arrive on the scene and start torturing the little creep. (In Chris Columbus's original script, which was much more of a straight horror story, Billy Peltzer is much younger and the gremlins actually kill Billy's mother by decapitating her, so the anti-E.T. aspect, the response to E.T.'s saccharine assertion that there's no reason to fear strange creatures from another world, was even clearer.) The satire of E.T. as the most-merchandised, most-exploited movie up to that point is pretty blatant too: not only does Hoyt Axton have a line (ad-libbed) about how every kid in America is going to want a Gizmo, but the whole story has been seen as a metaphor for the E.T. craze: the cute creature seems all right at first, but then he starts multiplying, and before you know it this cute little creature has spawned a horrible monstrosity that you can't escape no matter where you turn. It was, with Spielberg's approval and gleeful participation -- he wanted to do Columbus's original, more gruesome treatment -- a rather anti-Spielberg movie.

Gremlins 2 also takes satirical jabs at a movie, but this time the movie it's making fun of is the original Gremlins, which is satirized beat-for-beat, along with its own over-marketing.

What is interesting about this is that it's not very often that a movie comes off as a negative response to, or a criticism of, another movie. There are innumerable movies that pay homage to other movies, of course; and there are movies that parody other movies; but there aren't many that actually contain negative criticism of another movie. People usually make movies to pay tribute to what they like about other movies, not to slam what they don't like. Dante is one of the few moviemakers I can think of who has done it more than once; not only the two Gremlins movies but Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which he mostly took on so he could bash Space Jam.

Howard Hawks is another director who used movies to criticize other movies, which may be one reason why movie critics fell in love with him. Rio Bravo was his answer to High Noon, and To Have and Have Not takes shots at Casablanca by replacing Casablanca's superhero resistance fighter with a regular, cowardly man, and turning the hero's attraction to the resistance fighter's wife into a comic aside. And, while this is a bit too speculative, I sometimes think of Divorce, Italian Style as a satire of the image of Italy that was being conveyed in then-popular films like La Dolce Vita; a key scene shows the characters watching La Dolce Vita and contrasts the fantasy Italy of that movie with the glamor-impaired Italy of this movie.

Any other movies that seem like responses to and/or criticisms of other movies?

I Come To Bury Eisner and to Praise Him

I have to admit I don't fully understand the recent ascension of Michael Eisner to the rank of the online pop-culture community's public enemy #1. Yeah, he overstayed his usefulness at Disney, but most executives do in fact overstay their usefulness and need to be pushed out. Entertainment executives are like sports coaches -- each one has a narrowly-focused approach to doing things that can provide good results in certain situations; when the situation changes, their approach does not, so they become out of touch and start to screw up. Eisner's approach was what the Disney company needed in the '80s; it's not even a question of whether it was an aesthetically good or bad approach, it was just necessary. For example, Eisner's decision to bring Disney into the world of TV animation, direct-to-video animated movies and overseas outsourcing was, aesthetically speaking, a bad decision. Practically speaking, it was a necessary decision at the time to keep the studio competitive.

Something similar can be said about his work at Paramount in the late '70s and early '80s, where he and Don Simpson made roughly equal contributions to bringing about an end to the experimental, risk-taking movie culture of the '70s and create the blockbuster-happy, deal-driven movie culture that we've had with us ever since. (See this for more.) Still, movie production was a mess in the '70s for all kinds of reasons, and some kind of return to a more structured situation was necessary if the studios were to stay in business. Eisner was one of the people who figured out what the structure should be: since movie studios were all run by mega-corporations, why not apply modern corporate techniques to the moviemaking process? It was crass, and it was cold, but it was inevitable. Eisner was not so much the man who ruined movies as the guy who did what somebody was bound to do anyway.

But if you want an anti-Eisner story, here's one: he, more than any other person, was responsible for what I consider one of the worst, most crass changes ever made to a TV show. It was Eisner's idea to change Happy Days from a single-camera show to a three-camera show with a live audience. Basically, the story goes, the producers of Happy Days went to Eisner (who at that time was still an ABC executive, though within a year he would move to Paramount, the company that produced Happy Days) and asked him to move the show to a less competitive time slot. Eisner replied that he wouldn't move the show, but suggested that they revamp it by changing it to a three-camera show and retooling it to focus on Fonzie. At Eisner's urging, the producers shot a "test" episode with a live audience at the end of the second season, and the episode's story was suggested by, you guessed it, Michael Eisner. The story Eisner came up with was that Fonzie is about to get married to a woman, not realizing that she's actually a stripper. Whether this says anything about how Eisner's mind works, I don't know.

The changeover of Happy Days from a sweet, funny one-camera show to a loud, crass three-camera show is often attributed to Fred Silverman, but according to contemporary accounts it was mostly Eisner's idea. So thanks a bunch, Mike.

And it is, I swear, pure coincidence that I wind up talking about Happy Days twice in one week.

The "Long-Haired Hare" Formula

(Note: Part of the following is recycled from something I wrote on a message board. For those of you who would prefer something new, well, you get what you pay for, and blogs are free.)

I was recently watching the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Long-Haired Hare" again; it's the cartoon where Bugs gets revenge on an arrogant opera singer, and it's probably one of the most popular of all Bugs cartoons. In watching it, it occurred to me that the formula from this cartoon is probably the best-known formula for Bugs Bunny cartoons -- the one most commonly associated with Bugs -- and yet it wasn't used all that often.

The basic idea behind this formula is to have Bugs taking revenge on an authority figure or otherwise powerful figure who is abusing his or her power. You start off with a big character, in some kind of position of power and influence, acting like an arrogant jerk and making us root for him to be brought down a notch. Bugs, after being pushed around by the big jerk, springs into action (declaring "war") invades the sphere where the big jerk is all-powerful (the concert, the baseball game, the construction site) and gives the big jerk his comeuppance.

There were, as I have said, only a very few cartoons that actually used this formula. The first cartoon to use it was a 1942 Chuck Jones cartoon, "The Case of the Missing Hare," where Bugs finds himself mistreated by an arrogant magician; Bugs then shows up at the magician's act and gives him what for. The formula then lay dormant until a few years later, when writer Mike Maltese came up with a variation of it for Friz Freleng's "Baseball Bugs": we see a baseball team full of big, obnoxious jerks, and when Bugs gets pulled into the game, he torments the big, obnoxious players and manages to beat them single-handed. When Maltese became Jones's full-time writer a couple of years later, they started to use this formula a bit more often; both Jones and Maltese shared a conception of Bugs as a sort of Groucho Marx character who could deflate pomposity and arrogance. So they did one Bugs-vs-jerk cartoon a year for a while: "Rabbit Punch" (1948; Bugs vs. big, jerky boxer), "Long-Haired Hare" (1949; Bugs vs. big, jerky opera singer), "Homeless Hare" (1950; Bugs vs. big, jerky construction foreman), and "Bunny Hugged" (1951; Bugs vs. big, jerky wrestler). But after 1951, they pretty much abandoned this formula, though some of it found its way into "Bully For Bugs" (Bugs vs. big, jerky bull). Also, Bob McKimson and writer Sid Marcus did a sequel to "Homeless Hare" in 1954, "No Parking Hare," which is -- despite McKimson's low reputation -- pretty much as funny as Jones's original. And there's also a little bit of the formula in the cartoons where Bugs battles Wile E. Coyote, genius; Wile E. is a predator but he's also the kind of arrogant know-it-all intellectual who's just begging to have his pretentions deflated by Bugs. But apart from that, Bugs went back to his familiar routine of fending off predators and foiling Yosemite Sam.

And yet the formula survived, even after the Termite Terrace crew abandoned it. Not only is it still very much associated with Bugs in the public mind, despite its relative rarity; it became the basis for many other, later cartoons. For instance, a lot of "Tiny Toons" cartoons use this formula and almost every "Animaniacs" cartoon involving Yakko, Wakko and Dot is based on the concept of jerks getting their just desserts; the "Animaniacs" writers' bible specified that the villain should always be a big jerk and that a writer should start by having the antagonist show what a power-abusing jerk he is, so we can delight in seeing the heroes show him that he's not all that.

This is a very popular formula because it allows us, the audience, to enjoy seeing Bugs stick it to people who annoy us or are more powerful than us in real life. It also allows Bugs to use his abilities on someone who is an actual threat, as opposed to pathetic adversaries like Elmer Fudd or angry-but-tiny adversaries like Yosemite Sam. In most of his early cartoons, Bugs was up against characters who wanted to kill him: the excuse for bamboozling Elmer was that Elmer was out to shoot Bugs. When Friz Freleng created Yosemite Sam, he gave Bugs more of a socially conscious reason to act: Sam wasn't usually a direct threat to Bugs, but he was clearly a bad person, usually a criminal, who deserved to be stopped. But the antagonist in the "Long-Haired Hare" type of cartoon doesn't want to kill or eat Bugs, and he isn't a criminal; he is a respected member of society -- an opera singer, a man building a skyscraper, a star athlete -- and not the sort of person we'd normally expect to see getting pushed around. Which is precisely the point of this kind of cartoon: just as Groucho Marx insulted the people we'd never dare to insult, Bugs gets to beat up on the people who annoy us but whom we are expected to respect.

I'm not sure why this formula went out of WB cartoons after the early '50s. Maybe it's that this kind of Groucho-esque humor depends on the implication of class distinctions (we get revenge, through Bugs, on people who are richer or stronger than we are), and that kind of humor wasn't very big in the '50s? Maybe I'm over-analyzing. Really, the main reason the formula wasn't used often was probably just that starting in 1952 or '53 the cartoons got shorter -- because of budget cuts, the running times of the cartoons were cut by around a minute -- and so there was less time to do the kind of slow buildup that "Long-Haired Hare" or "The Case of the Missing Hare" provide; when you only have six minutes, there's no time to do a prologue where the big jerk displays his jerkery. Also, this formula couldn't be done with Bugs's regular adversaries like Elmer and Sam -- it requires a new, big, powerful character.

What a Crazy Pair!

Someone who knows more about these things than I should really try to make a list of all the parodies that have been done of the theme song to "The Patty Duke Show." (Which, by the way, was composed by Sid Ramin, best known as an orchestrator on such Broadway shows as West Side Story and A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum.) Many TV theme songs are easy to parody, but the "Patty Duke" theme song is particularly easy because all you have to do is take the phrase "identical cousins," plug in another word to replace "cousins," and change a few other words here and there in the song, and presto, you've got a song parody. Some of you may remember the SCTV episode that had a running bit about increasingly strange variations on the concept: "Identical Bellhops," "Identical Cheese Hostesses," and finally "Identical OPEC Oil Ministers." And one of the few really memorable posts on the "Jump the Shark" website was a sapphic version of the theme song. It's very malleable.

In fact, I think you could easily adapt the song into a song about the so-called blogosphere. Like so:

Meet Cathy, who writes that it's unfair
To over-tax a millionaire,
While Patty says she only fights
Reactionary troglodytes --
What a crazy pair!
But they're bloggers,
Identical bloggers, both of them,
Boosting their different parties,
Bashing the M-S-M.
Where Cathy insists that you're all wet
If you won't fight the terror threat,
Our Patty always wants to know
What happened at Guantanamo --
What a wild duet!
But they're bloggers,
Identical bloggers, and you'll find
They rant alike, they preen alike,
They hate Time Magazine alike,
You will lose your mind
When bloggers... are two of a kind!

By the way, and to veer off-topic again, have you noticed that any kind of humor or satirical writing (and the above is semi-humorous, sort of) seems to demand a certain even-handedness? I actually think that on the whole conservative blogs are worse than liberal blogs (there is no high-profile liberal blog that is quite as bad as, say, Powerline), yet the above song parody implies that they're equally annoying. It couldn't be done any other way; even if I have a partisan preference, it would be totally unfunny and generally ineffective to try to push that notion in a humor piece about blogs. Humor is better for generalized attacks on general annoyances; trying to do partisan humor often results in something that is partisan hackery rather than humor. I think that's why many of the best political comedians are actually rather even-handed in their satire -- because good comedians know that partisanship, while it may be necessary, isn't very funny.

Daws: The Revenge

TV Shows on DVD has the official announcements for sets of Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, and
The Flintstones Season 4. I'll probably get the "Huckleberry Hound" set, pass on "Flintstones," and consider "Yogi Bear."

With Hanna-Barbera cartoons, the earlier the better; the earliest cartoons have some fine animation within the limited budget, and stories that are reminiscent of classic Warner Brothers cartoons, mostly because they hired the classic WB cartoon writers, Warren Foster and Mike Maltese. As their shows get more like sitcoms, I lose interest. (I know the early Flintstones have some good things and are quite well-animated, but compared to The Honeymooners it's really just a collection of old-school sitcom plots with an occasional clever satirical joke thrown in.) And oddly enough, I like Hanna-Barbera's early TV cartoons a lot more than I like their MGM work -- funnier and less mean-spirited, and with more distinctive characters than Tom or Jerry ever were.

I also seem to remember that some of the early Yogi Bear cartoons, when he was on the Huckleberry Hound Show, had him as an obnoxious wise guy like Bugs Bunny, though I'll have to refresh my memory when I see the set as to how often he acted like that; I saw one which was basically a Bugs story with Yogi in it, but that might have been a one-off, or Foster or Maltese burning off a story they didn't get to use at Warners.

And for an indication of how popular "Huckleberry Hound" was, here's a quote from a 1959 recording by Canadian comedians Wayne and Shuster (and for any Canadian viewers with unfond memories of them, let me assure you that they were very funny back in 1959) of their routine "I Was a TV Addict":

SHUSTER: Come on, I've made an appointment for you with the psychiatrist. It's at five o'clock.
WAYNE: Five o'clock?!
SHUSTER: What's the matter?
WAYNE: I'll miss Huckleberry Hound!
SHUSTER: Aw, come on!
WAYNE: And Yogi Bear!

The Last Time I Saw Paris

A local station devoted to "family friendly" and/or religious programming has had huge success with Happy Days -- it's fun and it's so clean that they don't have to bleep the word "damn" out like they do with their Wonder Years reruns -- and I make an effort to tune in now and then whenever they get to the years after Ron Howard left. This may make me the TV viewing equivalent of people who gawk at train wrecks; I don't know, but there's a weird fascination in trying to watch how a show struggles to find stories to tell after its lead actor walks away.

What's really horrific is the season they did when Joanie and Chachi were off doing, well, Joanie Loves Chachi. To compensate for the loss of those characters (and Garry Marshall good-luck charm Al Molinaro, who also joined the new spinoff), the producers shovelled in a ton of new youngish actors who could hopefully appeal to the teenagers who made up the bulk of the show's audience, both in the nation and in the studio audience. (The Happy Days audience was legendary for its obnoxious cheering for almost everybody; it's almost ghoulishly interesting when somebody comes in and the audience doesn't clap, or claps very quietly.)

So in addition to Ted McGinley, the almost uniformly pathetic replacement for Ron Howard, and Cathy Silvers, who was actually quite funny, the 1982-83 season added Crystal Bernard as an innocent Southern girl staying with the Cunninghams for no discernable reason, Billy Warlock as "Flip," a young character of no discernable character traits but whose hair bore an eerie resemblance to Chachi's; and, just in case the Fonz hadn't already been emasculated enough, they gave him a steady girlfriend, Linda Purl, who was a spunky divorcee with a cute daughter played by, alas, Heather O'Rourke. Mix in a few guest characters who drifted in and out, and adjust for the fact that there may have been some new semi-regulars in episodes I haven't seen, and the new characters basically far outweighed the characters who had been there since the beginning. It was Happy Days: The New Class or Happy Days as produced by Dick Wolf.

And here's the really weird thing: these episodes are not that bad. In spite of the fact that nearly all the new characters are awful, that the old characters have outlived any point they may have had, that the stories end with huge horrible lessons accompanied by the most obnoxious "heartfelt" music in television history, a late episode of Happy Days is actually pretty entertaining, much more so than, say, a late episode of Law and Order. (Though admittedly Happy Days never had a line as funny as "Is this because I'm a lesbian?")

I think the main reason for this, and the real subject of this post, is the director, Jerry Paris. Garry Marshall sensibly hired Paris, whom he'd worked with on The Dick Van Dyke Show (where Paris was an actor and the principal director), and Paris set some kind of record by directing over 200 episodes of Happy Days. His way of directing a sitcom is the kind of lean, mean, tight and fast direction you hardly ever see today: no matter how sluggishly written the scene is, the show never stops moving because the actors are always doing something. There are all kinds of tricks he uses to speed up the pace of long scenes in confined spaces, like having the actors speed up their delivery, do little bits of business while someone else is talking -- basically, tricks designed to make even the corniest script seem relatively naturalistic in execution, so the actors actually give the impression that this stuff seems real to them, and so that the show is moving too fast for us to notice the clunkiness of the last line. He did the same stuff on The Dick Van Dyke Show; the early episodes, mostly directed by John Rich, are more carefully paced, but once Paris took over and got going, he sped up the show by finding ways to do physical comedy, and fairly complicated physical staging, concurrently with expository pages of dialogue. Of course, on that show he had better scripts to work with, but the job of the TV director is to do his best with what he's been given, which often means trying to make weak scripts entertaining. Paris did quite a job of that on Happy Days, and it's kind of a tribute to the craft of a good sitcom director that they turned out as fast and entertaining as they did, and that he cleverly found ways of disguising the weaknesses of some of the actors (by finding ways for the better actors to physically dominate a scene, regardless of who it's supposed to be about).

Another director who has done consistently good, fast work with poor scripts is Joel Zwick. Except for Bosom Buddies he hardly ever did a show with good scripts, and his feature hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding wasn't much better, but he turned out some of the fastest-paced and most cleverly staged sitcom episodes around. And of course there's James Burrows, whose near-legendary gift for pacing is probably the only reason Will and Grace has lasted this long (the scripts aren't much, but it's moving too fast for us to notice).

Two more notes on those later, bizarre Happy Days:

- The other reason why it's worth tuning into these episodes, or many Paramount-produced sitcoms of that era, is that you'll often see some interesting guest stars; Paramount's casting people in the late '70s and '80s were really good at finding young unknown actors and building up their careers by giving them guest shots on popular sitcoms, like Robin Williams on Happy Days or Ted Danson on Taxi. And sometimes the long-running shows would be sort of a halfway house for refugees from Paramount's cancelled shows; a glance at TV.com shows that Peter Scolari and Tom Hanks both turned up in guest shots on Happy Days right after the cancellation of Bosom Buddies. Plus sometimes they'd just use plain cool people as guest stars; the late episode of Happy Days I saw -- the one that got me off on this rant -- featured Wendy Schaal. I'm not saying that nothing with Wendy Schaal can be entirely unfunny (she's done some duds like everybody), but she's got quite a track record of being weirdly amusing, and casting her displays good sense on the part of any show.

- Despite all the Jump the Shark hoopla, Ted McGinley's reputation as a show-killer isn't really fair; Married... With Children went on fine with him in it. But that show recognized the point of Ted McGinley, which is that he looks, talks and acts like he stepped off the cover of Gigolo Monthly. Casting him as a dumb blond selling his surgery-enhanced good looks, as Married... did, is fine. Casting him as an actual human being, let alone an intellectual, like Happy Days did, is insanity. See the distinction?

Why Do The South Park Guys Hate All That's Good and Decent?

A little late, but to add to my collection of nasty quotes about Family Guy, here's one from an interview a couple of months ago with Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park:

What's the meanest thing ever said to you before, during or after a gig?
MS: When people say to me, “God, you guys have one of the best shows on television. You and Family Guy.” That fucking hurts so bad.
TP: Very well said. It's such a kick in the balls.

Maybe if I find enough quotes like that I can assemble them into the inevitable "Why I Hate Family Guy: The Book." Somehow I feel it's needed at this moment in history.

Bad Courtship Tips From Musicals

Sorry for the under-blogging lately.

While I try to write up something longer/better/nicer, here's an incredibly inappropriate, but fast, post. A year or so ago I did a post quoting passages from Cole Porter lyrics which would now be considered -- well, actually, they always were -- horribly insensitive to all races and even sexual orientations ("Hail, queen of fairyland, how's Hollywood?"). By lack of popular demand, I thought I would dig up some quotes showing the strange obsession of the great musical-theatre lyricists with men hitting women.

Everybody remembers and still arguest about the wife-beating stuff in Carousel, but that's actually a fairly palatable version of the subject, given that Billy Bigelow hitting his wife and daughter is treated as a bad thing (he's pretty much damned for it, after all). What's astounding is how often this was treated not seriously, but as a throwaway joke. Starting with Hammerstein, ten years after Carousel, in a song from Pipe Dream:

Stand up to the girl like a guy,
Stand up to the girl like a guy,
And tell her to behave herself
Or you'll put a mouse on her eye.

Carolyn Leigh got into the act in Wildcat when she had the hero sing to Lucille Ball:

If you were a smelt, I wouldn't mind,
Givin' you a belt, I wouldn't mind,
If I thought that you would learn a lesson from the welt, I wouldn't mind.

Alan Jay Lerner, of "Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?" fame, did it several times in the course of one song from 1979's "Carmelina":

Am I mad? Could I violently mistreat her?
Yes, I could, indeed I could.
Would I crush one delicious centimetre?
Oh, my God, of course I would.

And of course, the best-known and oftenest-replaced "joke" from a musical, from "The Very Next Man" in Fiorello!:

And if he likes me,
Who cares how frequently he strikes me?
I'll fetch his slippers with my arm in a sling
Just for the privilege of wearing his ring.

In context, this is actually not a bad nor even a particularly offensive line, because it just expresses, hyperbolically, the theme of the song: that if the hero won't love the singer, then she'll find someone -- anyone -- who will love her. You could probably get away with a joke like that in a modern play; there's a huge amount of politically-incorrect humor now, to the point that (as I said in an earlier post) un-PC is the new PC. But you can do that in a new play because audiences know that the un-PC jokes are just there for shock value; whereas with an older play, we're never sure if the jokes are supposed to be shocking or (as in the case of most of the quotes before the Fiorello! quote) they're just genuinely insensitive.

Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist of Fiorello! explained the changing reactions to that line:

In 1959, people understood that Marie was very angry with Fiorello, that he regarded her as no more than a piece of office furniture. So she wanted to quit. When she sang, she was being sardonic and not realistic. Over the years, especially as feminism has raised everybody's consciousness to the fact that battered women was not a joke, this was a reality we all had to face. Over the years, when I'd hear that line, it'd make me very uncomfortable. Then I saw a 25th anniversary production at Yale, and several women booed at the actress playing Marie when she sang those lines, and I realized it was time to change the lyric.

Oddly enough, Cole Porter, whose lyrics abound in jokes that would provoke boos today, didn't make a lot of jokes of this particular type. In fact, he gets through the song "Find Me a Primitive Man" without a single joke about wanting to be abused or any such thing. Though there is one example that I quoted in the other post, and you could make an argment for this one as somewhat queasy-making:

Ever since that magic moment
When I found your "No, no, no" meant
"Yes,"
I've become a mess.

Finally, I should add that none of this stuff is quite as bad as the beloved family classic The Philadelphia Story, where there are about half-a-dozen jokes about the fact that the hero used to hit the heroine, and at the end she gets back together with him and is made to feel lucky for getting him back. Ah, wholesome old entertainment.

Aaugh!!!

I check the Peanuts website just about every day in the hope of finding a strip that I haven't seen before, and this past week I hit the proverbial jackpot: a great week-long story that I'd never seen before and, as far as I know, was never included in and Peanuts collection. (But it's not from 1960, as the site mistakenly says; it's from 1969.) It starts here and climaxes with the strip they ran today. One of the interesting things about the sequence is that Linus sort of becomes a surrogate for the audience, screaming at Charlie Brown to finally stop standing there and doing something, and becoming more and more frustrated until finally exploding with rage at Charlie Brown's wishy-washiness.

As to why it was never collected, it's probably because Schulz soon abandoned the idea of the Little Red-Haired Girl moving away, and moved her back without any explanation as to why or when she came back.