A non-technical BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL post

One more post about The Bad and the Beautiful, but this time not blathering on about the length of shots. Having seen the movie again -- and if you haven't seen it, please buy or rent the DVD -- I thought I'd make a note of which character is based on which real-life Hollywood figure. Writer Charles Schnee, director Vincente Minnelli and producer John Houseman (aka Professor Kingsfield) drew on various Hollywood stories and legends to create the film, and part of the fun of the movie is guessing who these people are intended to represent. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes less so:

- Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), the brilliant and ruthless producer. As I said before, Shields is almost completely based on David O. Selznick, so much so that Selznick reportedly threatened to sue. (Houseman had dealt with this kind of thing before, since he was an associate producer on Citizen Kane, which did to Hearst what this movie does to Selznick.) Like Shields, Selznick was the son of an early movie-industry figure (Lewis Selznick who died broke and washed-up). Like Shields, Selznick started out producing B-movies for a major studio, hit the big time by greenlighting a successful monster movie (King Kong), gained a reputation as a boy genius, and eventually decided to start his own movie studio. Shields' pictures are parodies of the kind of big Southern epics Selznick made at his studio (Gone With the Wind), and eventually he meets his downfall by producing one too many expensive flops, including a big epic that he takes over from the credited director (Selznick reportedly directed much of Duel in the Sun himself). The only non-Selznick element of Shields' career is that he makes his name as a producer by deciding not to show the monsters in a monster movie, which is something that was actually done by RKO horror producer Val Lewton.

- Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner) is the daughter of a great actor who was an alcoholic and a womanizer. Her father is now dead and she can't escape from his shadow. She is described as "a drunk and a tramp," and spends her time partying, sleeping around, and doing occasional extra work. This is all based on John Barrymore's daughter, Diana Barrymore. Georgia's story has a happy ending; she gets out of her father's shadow and becomes a star. Diana's less happy story was made into a not-too-good movie, Too Much, Too Soon, with Dorothy Malone as Diana and, appropriately enough, an aging, alcoholic Errol Flynn as John Barrymore.

- As I said before, the Southern novelist James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell) is very loosely based on Faulkner -- actually, come to think of it, he combines a few Faulkner-esque qualities with the more generic qualities of a college-professor-turned-novelist, of whom there were quite a few in this era -- and his wife (Gloria Grahame) who distracts him from his work, is more or less Zelda Fitzgerald.

- Henry Whitfield (Leo G. Carroll), the British director hired by Shields, is a caricature of Hitchcock (for whom Carroll worked frequently, before and after this movie). His wife (the great Kathleen Freeman), who sits by his side and doesn't say much except to back him up, is presumably based on Hitchcock's wife Alma Reville.

- Von Ellstein (Ivan Triesault) is the director of Shields' first Academy Award winner, "The Proud Land," described by several characters as the best director in Hollywood. Trieseault plays him more or less as an Erich Von Stroheim type -- bald, heavily German-accented, and so on. But as written, he's probably William Wyler: like Von Ellstein, Wyler was a European, a tough-minded guy who won't be ordered about by producers, and a guy with a (to me, inexplicable) reputation as the best director in Hollywood.

- Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan) is the director who starts with Shields and is finally thrown over when Shields assigns Fred's big project to a bigger-name director. There's no clear model for this guy, but some have suggested John Cromwell, who directed many films for Selznick in the '30s (including The Prisoner of Zenda for Selznick's own studio), but didn't get to direct most of Selznick's big epic projects. However, Cromwell did direct a big movie for Selznick in the '40s (Since You Went Away), so the parallel isn't perfect.

Finally, I have no idea who Walter Pidgeon's gruff-but-loveable producer, Harry Pebbel, is supposed to be. I think I read somewhere else that he was based on a guy who was at RKO when Selznick was there, but I've forgotten the name.

Happy Days, Addendum

Follow-up to my previous post about "Happy Days," here's a little Associated Press item where creator Garry Marshall more or less admits that the early, one-camera version of the show had more integrity:

“‘Happy Days’ was my artistic period,” Marshall said. “I wanted to make a little film each week, all one-camera shoots like a little film. Pretty! Nice! And they said, ‘Too soft, and too expensive.”’

By season three, the show had switched to the live-audience format, which continued through the end of its 11-year run.

Marshall, of course, was always willing to retool his shows if the network suggested it. Mork and Mindy, after a hugely successful first season, ran into two problems in the off-season: the network wanted younger, hipper people onscreen (the only major characters apart from Mork and Mindy had been Mindy's father and -- a staple of the Garry Marshall cheese-factory -- wisecracking grandmother), and star Robin Williams wanted more "relevant" plots and for Mork to become less naive. So the show was retooled, several characters dropped, several new characters added, a whole new set added (a "hip" deli, to the extent that a delicatessen can be hip), and wacky new plots added in an effort to, as one writer put it to me, "distract" Robin Williams from his demands for a revision of his character. The show's ratings sank like a stone in the second year, and various subsequent retoolings, including bringing back the old characters, never returned the show to its former popularity.

That said, I like Garry Marshall, at least as a TV writer-producer (his films are a different story). He and his then-partner Jerry Belson wrote the funniest and most imaginative episodes of "The Dick Van Dyke Show"; "The Odd Couple," his last collaboration with Belson, is a classic that surpasses the play it's based on; I've already said that I like the early "Happy Days," and "Laverne and Shirley" is funny. (Admit it, it's funny. Admit it, you sing the theme song. Just admit it.) Even the crappy stuff he did, like the later episodes of "Happy Days," are redeemed by a certain professionalism in the structure, pacing, jokes; it may be corny but it's never slow or dull. Listen to Marshall's DVD commentary on one of his "Dick Van Dyke Show" episodes ("Baby Fat," season 4) and you'll hear a motormouth New York comedy writer who can't stop telling stories, but you'll also hear a comedy professional who has an eye and ear for what kind of sounds, sights, etc. will induce laughter in an audience. At one point he criticizes the actors' clothes for being too loud and distracting the viewer from the joke. You've got to respect that kind of professionalism.

One more trivia note: Jerry Paris, who had been an actor/director on "The Dick Van Dyke Show," became the principal director of "Happy Days" starting in the first season. Once the show went to a live studio audience, Paris directed every single episode, right up until the last one, yea, even through the Joanie/Chachi and Ted McGinley years. All in all Paris directed 240 out of the show's 255 episodes (the 15 he didn't direct were all in the early one-camera years, and that's only because it's hard for one director to handle all the episodes of a show that films on location). I don't know if that's a record, but I don't feel like going through TV Tome trying to find out. Of course Paris probably deserves a lot of the credit for keeping "Happy Days" fast and reasonably entertaining even when the plots were idiotic, but I'll save that for a post about TV directors.

The Greatest Olympic Athlete Ever

Like many Canadians, my interest in the Olympics basically died in 1988 when Ben Johnson got stripped of his medals and records. After that, what was the point in watching, when I knew that even if Canada won, there would probably be some twist to turn us back into losers? And that Perfect Strangers episode where Balki meets Carl Lewis (Larry: "You're Carl Lewis. You're Carl Lewis. You're Carl Lewis...") seemed to have been made especially to mock me: see, Americans get medals and big-time TV gigs. Canadians get drug tests and bad CBC documentaries. No wonder we have a national inferiority complex.

But anyway, the one thing I do remember fondly about the 1988 Olympics comes from the Winter edition -- this being when the Winter and Summer editions were held in the same year, requiring the genuinely entertaining TV to be pre-empted twice in one year -- was this guy who represented Great Britain in the ski-jumping event. His name was Eddie Edwards, but everybody called him "Eddie the Eagle." The English were not noted for skiing prowess, and everybody said Eddie would make an ass of himself. Everybody was right: he came in dead last and, while he wasn't a bad ski-jumper compared to you or me, he looked ridiculous compared to the best ski-jumpers from countries with actual skiing.

This (relative) ineptitude made Eddie the Eagle a cult figure for a few days. More people were talking about him, in my neighborhood, than the winning athletes in other events. There were news stories about the Eddie the Eagle fans, including a clip of some guy singing a song he'd written to the tune of "The Man on the Flying Trapeze":

He flies through the air
With no ease at all,
That's Eddie the Eagle,
He's having a ball.

Eddie the Eagle was my favorite part of that Olympics. I think, as a kid with no particular athletic ability, it was a pleasure to see a guy prove that you could come in dead last in an athletic competition and still be cooler than most of the people who finished ahead of you. In the Olympics, which are all about ferocious competition between nations, but disguised by a thin can't-we-all-just-get-along veneer, Eddie the Eagle stood up for national pride, proving that the British (and by extention, Canadians, since in 1988 we Canadians were still sort of allowed to feel British) were more fun than other countries, and that mattered more than who won the medals. Eddie had style; Eddie had a persona; Eddie was an artist. Maybe that marks the moment I became more interested in the arts than in sports; I don't know, but I do know that the Olympics have never been the same without Eddie the Eagle and his little dose of genuine entertainment.

For more on Eddie the Eagle, see here and here and, for an interview, here.

The Bad and the Boom Shot

This is one of those posts that deals with a very minor topic, so beware. I've previously noted that the director Vincente Minnelli favored long takes throughout his long career. That is, instead of shooting a scene from different angles and then cutting from one character to another, he preferred to shoot as much as possible in long uninterrupted shots, creating different compositions and angles by moving the camera instead of cutting. (In this, as he mentioned in the above interview, he was influenced by the director Max Ophuls.) This is very different from the way most Hollywood movies are made today, and it's doubtful that a Hollywood director would be allowed to get away with doing a whole scene with no cuts, the way Minnelli often did and the way other directors sometimes did. Hollywood producers have always preferred that their directors shoot a lot of "coverage" (i.e. shooting a scene from different angles) so the producer will have more leeway to change things in the editing room, but in practice, a director could sometimes shoot a scene in one take and declare it complete if he liked what he had wrought. Now the demand for coverage, for more and more footage with which to edit, is much greater, and non-American directors who come to work in Hollywood sometimes note that they are expected to shoot a scene from more angles, and allow for more editing, than they're used to. (Then of course there's Woody Allen, who prefers to shoot most scenes without any cutting at all. But how long has it been since Woody Allen movies have been relevant to a discussion of, well, anything?)

Anyway, to give an idea of the way Minnelli worked, I thought I'd go through the DVD of his finest non-musical movie, The Bad and the Beautiful, and point out some of the spots where he goes longer without cutting than we'd nowadays expect. (The movie, one of my favorites, deserves a post on its themes, characters, writing, etc., but right now I'm in a nit-picking mood.)

The opening features a succession of scenes introducing each of the three people Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) worked with and betrayed in some way. Each character's introductory scene is done in one uninterrupted take with no cuts. (The scene with Barry Sullivan, playing a director, features him doing an elaborate tracking shot in on a starlet -- Minnelli's little self-parody of his own penchant for elaborate camera movements.) The most elaborate of these shots is the one introducing Lana Turner's character: it starts with Turner's maid picking up the phone, and then the camera moves to show Turner in a mirror, then to Turner, seated in front of another mirror; then the camera follows Turner as she gets up and moves to another phone, and moves in for a close-up as she picks up the phone and listens in on the conversation that's taking place.

12 minutes and 30 seconds into the picture comes another elaborate long take (there are lots of other little scenes with no cuts or few cuts; I'm just picking out the highlights), at a Hollywood party. As the scene begins, a heavily-accented guy -- a producer or director -- is talking to someone about his latest picture. In the background, through a window, we see Douglas and his friends (this is a flashback, to when he still had friends) arrive to crash the party. They look through the window, point to the party, and walk out of the shot. The accented guy starts to walk as he talks, and the camera follows him through the crowded room. As he walks out of the shot, Douglas and his friends walk in through the front door, and the camera follows them sideways as they walk in and start to mingle. They walk past another guy talking excitedly. The camera moves past that guy. Douglas and friends start walking to the back of the room. The camera follows them to the back of the set, moving toward and then past a woman singing "Don't Blame Me" at the piano. (A woman who bears a suspicious resemblance to a young Judy Garland, by the way; make of that what you will.) The camera moves closer to Douglas and his friends, who are listening to an excitable blond starlet talking at a rapid pace. Finally Douglas and Barry Sullivan watch a waiter go into another room, and they follow him into that room and out of the shot... at which point we finally cut, to the other room. The amount of rehearsal this scene must have required, both for the actors and the cameraman, is probably staggering; what's more, it's not done without sound, the way an elaborate shot might have been done in a European movie; the sound is mostly recorded "live" and rehearsed just like the camera movements.

19:27 - The scene where Douglas and Barry Sullivan get the idea to do a horror picture ("Doom of the Cat Men") without showing the monsters. (This was of course inspired by the career of Val Lewton, producer of "Cat People," though almost everything else about Douglas's character is based on David O. Selznick.) Another scene done in only one take, with many camera movements -- the camera follows Douglas and Sullivan into the projection room and then follows Douglas as he gets up, walks around, dims the lights, etc -- and changes of lighting which have to be handled in the middle of the shot.

35:05 - The scene where Sullivan discovers that Douglas has taken his (Sullivan's) pet idea and given it to another director. The scene proceeds in yet another uninterrupted take (again, one of many) for about a minute, until Douglas mentions that he's given the project to the other director -- only then do we cut to a close-up of Sullivan, one of the first true close-ups in the whole movie. The confrontation between Sullivan and Douglas takes in a few more close-ups, a few of Sullivan, and a few of Douglas; then the confrontation ends and we go back to another long medium shot with a moving camera. For Minnelli, the close-up was a special effect, something to be used only at moments of maximum emotional voltage, when it would have a big impact. Cutting to a close-up was not something to be done casually; it was something to surprise you after all that time without any cuts. And by his avoidance of cutting and close-ups, he really gives those things an impact when he does them.

56:06 - The camera cuts to a close shot, over romantic music, of Douglas and Lana Turner sharing a drink. They drink -- and suddenly, without cutting, a door swings open in the background, the camera changes focus and pulls back, and several characters enter the room, including the director Henry Whitfield (Leo G. Carroll playing a parody of Alfred Hitchcock) and Douglas's right-hand man Harry (Walter Pidgeon). An argument ensues between the two of them, with Douglas listening; meanwhile, Turner leaves the room, and, after a while, Gaucho (Gilbert Roland) enters the room and takes Douglas aside. By the time there's another cut -- to Gaucho's car, parked outside -- another minute has gone without any cuts, and we've had several changes of mood and camera angle within that uninterrupted take.

1:19:57 - Turner's famous crying scene, in a car on a dark and stormy night (tm), consists of two longish takes separated by one insert of her foot on the brake. Minnelli had a mock-up of a car rigged up in the studio and moved the camera around inside the car while the car itself was being jerked around, creating a feeling that both Turner's emotions and the car are spinning out of control. How many movies do you see with elaborate camera movements inside a car? A car is usually the one place where even the most visually inventive directors give up trying to move the camera, but Minnelli found a way, and he found a way to make it technically and emotionally effective.

1:25:44 - The scene where the Faulkner-esque writer (Dick Powell) and his distracting, Zelda Fitzgerald-esque wife (Gloria Grahame) get a call from Douglas asking Powell to come to Hollywood. The shot starts on Powell, in the foreground (with the door to the room in the background), trying to work and, as usual, finding himself distracted by the Southern-belle antics of his wife. The maid comes in to bring him some food, and goes out again. He tries to work and can't. The phone rings, he picks it up, and Grahame comes rushing in through the door. As she joins Powell, the camera does a 90 degree turn and also moves in closer on the chair where Powell is sitting, becoming a two-shot of Powell on the phone and Grahame, by his side, listening (there's quite a bit in this movie about listening in on other people's phone conversations). The camera stays at this angle for the rest of the phone conversation; when Powell hangs up, the camera moves back a bit for the conversation between Powell and Grahame. Then the scene ends; two and a half minutes, several changes of situation, mood and angle, no cuts.

1:51:32 - The big final confrontation scene between Powell and Douglas is, again, one uninterrupted take, no cuts. I call attention to this one not because it has any huge technical challenges -- though, again, the amount of rehearsal it requires must be more than the average movie scene requires -- but just because there's traditionally been an idea that in movies, drama = cutting. (The old books on film technique and film "language" always used to be based on this idea, that comedy is about long takes and wide angles, but drama is about cutting and close-ups.) Minnelli doesn't accept this, obviously; here's one of the biggest dramatic scenes in the movie, and there are no cuts; the drama is created by the actors interacting, reacting to each other in real time and real space. That's the biggest advantage of the long-take technique: you get the sense that you're seeing actors together, meeting each other's eyes and reacting to one another's movements. A cut, cut, cut approach to a scene can be effective, but it isolates the actors, picking them out one at a time according to who's speaking. Minnelli's approach isn't any less manipulative than cutting (I think there used to be a theory in some circles that long takes are more "democratic" because they allow the audience to choose what to look at, but of course the director is always finding ways to call our attention to what he wants us to look at, even within a long shot), but it certainly is different, and in some ways -- especially when the actors work well together -- more satisfying.

Obscure Musicals: OH, CAPTAIN!

My last couple of posts about musicals have been about shows whose cast albums aren't readily available, so here's a post about an obscure musical whose cast album fortunately is available on CD, and well worth picking up: Oh, Captain!, a 1958 musical based on the movie The Captain's Paradise.

The Captain's Paradise was a popular British film starring Alec Guinness as a sea captain who creates the perfect life for himself by marrying two women simultaneously (unbenownst to them, of course), who give him the best of both worlds: a prim and proper Englishwoman who gives him the traditional domestic pleasures, and a wild and free woman who gives him excitement. Disaster ensues when his two lives collide, and the women start to take on each other's distinctive characteristics. The musical, being an American stage show instead of a dark little British comedy (have you ever noticed how many British comedies of the '50s end unhappily, or at least unpleasantly?), changes things a bit: now Captain Henry St. James (Tony Randall) is no longer a bigamist; he's married to the prim Englishwoman Maud (Jacquelyn McKeever) and merely shares a Paris apartment with wild-and-free Bobo (Abbe Lane in the stage show, though she was unable to record the cast album for contractual reasons). This allows for a happy, monogamous ending; I don't think I'm going to shock anyone by giving away that particular plot detail. Anyway, the basic point remains that Captain St. James has tried to construct three separate and different "paradises" for himself: the home, the ship, and the sinful flat:

Paradise number one,
Perfect for the Englishman,
Bounded on the North by the cricket club,
Bounded on the South by the tepid tub,
Bounded on the East by the Union Jack,
And on the West by bric-a-brac.

Paradise number two,
Where the men are navy blue,
Bounded on the North by Cunard White Star,
Bounded on the South by a good cigar,
Bounded on the East by the Captain's log,
And on the West by gruel and grog.

Paradise number three,
Land of morning lechery,
Bounded on the North by Toulouse-Lautrecs,
Bounded on the South by the act of sex,
Bounded on the East by a Left Bank den,
And on the West by sex again!

...But the conclusion is that you can't have it all -- and yet you can. Harry finally accepts that he must "conform," but also that his attempt to pigeonhole his two women was unfairly limiting: Maud was more than just the stereotype he had of her, and so was Bobo, who ends up settling down with Harry's first mate, Manzoni (Edward Platt). (That description makes the show sound a lot more non-sexist than it really is, though it certainly isn't as sexist as the premise would initially imply; there's even a song, "Double Standard," where the women berate Harry for wanting to sleep around himself while expecting his wife to be spotless.)

Oh, Captain! was co-written and directed by Jose Ferrer, a mainstay of the New York theatre as both actor and director. As a serious actor who had won an Academy Award for playing Cyrano de Bergerac, and starred in and directed The Shrike, a Pulitzer-Prize winning (albeit not very good) play about an insane asylum, one might have expected his first musical to be something dark and serious. Instead Ferrer came up with a show that was, in every possible way, a throwback to the musical comedies of the '30s: loud, brash, and above all bawdy. Sex, which had once been a mainstay of the musical comedy, was pretty much absent in the '50s; with the exception of the occasional Cole Porter show, the hit musical comedies of the era tended to follow the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical-play format in being more about love than sex: Guys and Dolls is a great show but it features the most un-lecherous gangsters and wholesome striptease artists in the history of the musical comedy.

By the late '50s, some people were growing weary of all this wholesomeness, and Ferrer apparently was one of them, because Oh, Captain! was one of the least wholesome shows of its era. The evening abounded in double entendres, skimpy costumes, and lines like (introducing the showgirls in one number) "And now, folks, on with the show and the ladies of the ensemble. That's a French word for, like, broads." The show also turned away from the thematic organization and coherence of recent hits like The Music Man and West Side Story, shows which had a consistent overall style and tone. Ferrer made Oh, Captain! more like the freewheeling musical comedies of his youth, where anything goes as long as it's entertaining. So the ballerina Alexandra Danilova appeared for no better reason than to do one dance number (and even do a few steps with star Tony Randall); Susan Johnson, possessor of what many -- including me -- consider the greatest "belt" voice in Broadway history, had two songs utterly unconnected to the plot. This isn't your BMI workshop geek musical, nor is it your corporate-product musical comedy like The Producers or Hairspray; this is musical comedy -- disorganized, ribald, existing for no better reason than to give lots of fun to the tired businessman (tm). It may not have revived the old-style musical comedy, but you've got to give Ferrer props for trying.

The ideal choice to write the songs for a show like this would have been Cole Porter; I don't know whether Ferrer tried to get him, but in any case he would have been too old and ill to do it by 1958. The score was written by the veteran Hollywood team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, whom you know for "Buttons and Bows," "Mona Lisa," and the "Bonanza" theme song (da-dadala-dadala-dadala-BONANZAAAA!) among many others. Some of their work here has the generic sound of Hollywood and pop songs of the era, with determinedly nonspecific lyrics ("Now I see/The way it's meant to be/'Cause you're so right for me"). But after a few duds early on in the score -- like an opening chorus that sounds like bad Gilbert and Sullivan -- they get into the spirit of Ferrer's spectacle and unleash a series of entertaining ballads ("All the Time," surprisingly well sung by Randall, became a hit for Johnny Mathis), production numbers ("Give It All You Got," for Susan Johnson, and written to show off her superb breath control and ability to sing loud sustained notes), and, best of all, cheerfully bawdy songs. "Femininity," for Bobo, was considered too racy for radio stations at the time:

There's only one thing they want, that's understood,
I tell them I shouldn't, they tell me I should.
There must be other ways to make a man feel good...
There are times I can't help feeling,
As I'm staring at the ceiling,
What's the point of femininity?

Another song for Bobo, "Keep it Simple," was both a nightclub specialty -- complete with wailing horns, wild drums, and an ending where the time signature changes for no particular reason -- and a character song:

Keep it simple,
Don't make too much of love.
Keep it simple,
Let's enjoy each touch of love.
Don't end up with self-reproach,
Don't bring your dramatic coach,
Take that direct approach,
Why be tricky?
Grab a quickie.
Come with me, but
Don't pack a big valise.
Take my key, but
Don't expect a long-term lease.
For tonight, c'est la guerre,
And tomorrow, who knows where?
Keep it simple
And we'll have a simply splendid affair.

The show had a superb cast: Randall could sing passably well, and certainly had the comedy chops to carry a musical comedy; Abbe Lane was a popular singer/entertainer famously described by critic Walter Kerr as "better-constructed than the book," Edward Platt (a frequent Ferrer associate, but an out-of-town replacement for Lane's bandleader husband, Xavier Cugat) revealed a surprisingly fine singing voice that he only occasionally got to use on Get Smart. Jay Blackton, who had conducted such shows as Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun, led a terrific orchestra and created the kind of rousing, exciting choral arrangements you don't hear on Broadway any more (Blackton did the choral arrangement for Oklahoma!'s title number, which has become an inseparable part of the song). Just about everything about the show was professionally done and created for the maximum amount of fun.

So why did it run less than a year? Opinions vary. Some say that this kind of musical comedy, loose, bawdy, and gaudy, was just too old-fashioned and not what the public was looking for; the public wanted My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Music Man -- all in their differing ways coherent works of musical theatre, not just collections of entertaining bits. Another, related theory is that it was just a ferociously competitive time for Broadway musicals, with so many huge hits still playing to capacity crowds, the chances for a pure musical comedy -- which rarely ran as long as the musical play or the nostalgia-musical anyway -- were slim. Then, too, Oh, Captain! might have been too bawdy for family audiences and not bawdy enough for Playboy readers, leaving it without a particular segment of the audience to play to. Also, Abbe Lane, one of the biggest names in the cast, left the show very early (after three or four months she was replaced by Dorothy Lamour). All these factors combined probably had something to do with the show not performing up to expectations, despite a strong first few months at the box-office.

And then there's another theory, which was related at the now-defunct Livingston and Evans website. Basically, the story is that one of the producers of Oh, Captain! sold shares in the show to people, didn't put them on the list of investors, and pocketed the money for himself:

The show got mostly rave reviews and everyone was happy, until a man came across the river from New Jersey and demanded to know why he wasn't getting any statements, as he was an investor. But his name didn't appear on the rolls, and that's when the creative team knew that one of the producers was a crook. He simply pocketed the man's money, and otherwise dipped in the till at random. The show ran for six months and then closed to a full house because there was no money to pay the actors.

Whether this story is true, I don't know; whether it was the inspiration for The Producers, I definitely don't know. I'd like to think so, since we all know there must have been some Max Bialystock types in real life. And it would be fun to think that one "throwback" musical comedy that started strong but performed somewhat below expectations eventually led, over forty years later, to another "throwback" musical comedy that started strong but performed somewhat below expectations. Though given the choice between the two, I'd definitely take Oh, Captain!

The cast album, despite including none of the dance music, is one of the longer cast albums of the era, almost a full hour. Abbe Lane, as I said, was under contract to RCA and wasn't allowed to record the cast album, but luckily Eileen Rodgers, who sings Bobo's songs on the recording, is excellent. A show like this doesn't really come to life on the recording, of course; musical comedy depends on the performers, the showgirls, the schtick, the costumes. All the stuff that's gone, basically. But the recording is still well worth getting for a little taste of what a real brash n' bawdy musical comedy sounds like.

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.