Best Gag Credits Ever

I don't know when "Tiny Toon Adventures" will be re-released; the show that started the WB animation boom of the '90s (thereby furnishing the staff for "Batman," "Animaniacs," and other shows that are on their way to being classics), it wasn't quite as good as some of the shows that came after it -- being the first, it was very inconsistent -- but the good episodes were as good as anybody's.

Anyway, the thing that I was reminded of when looking over the episode guide is that "Tiny Toons" had the best gag credits of any show ever, bar none, end of story. Every episode's closing credit had a jokey message in it. Many of these were just funny shout-outs to staff members, like "Guy who says 'Narf': Eddie Fitzgerald" (Fitzgerald's appearance and "Narf" catchphrase would inspire Pinky of Pinky and the Brain fame) or "Mermaid Model: Sherri Stoner" (writer-producer Stoner was the live-action model for Ariel in The Little Mermaid), or "Caricaturist: Bruce Timm." But sometimes, and increasingly so as time went on, the producers would use the gag credit to vent their feelings on the production process, and even to put down their weaker episodes. Here are a few of the more memorable ones:

Secret of Quality Animation - Lotsa Shadows

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(After an episode that used an animation studio whose work wasn't up to snuff)
Number of Retakes: Don't Ask

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(After an episode with a "Cartoon Physics" theme, including an unfunny cartoon called "Cub For Grub")
Top 5 "Toon Physics" Facts:
5. "Cub For Grub" Becomes Funny When You Watch It Backwards.
4. Sneezer Is Actually A 45 Year Old Man.
3. Barky Marky Was In This Episode.
2. The Boy In The Orange Hat Is Actually Danny Bonaduce.
1. We Wanted Carl Sagan To Do The Wraparounds, But He Snubbed Us. Go Figure.

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TV Guide Said That Writer Deanna Oliver Was "Deliciously Clever" - But That Was Another Episode.

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(After an episode where the characters go to Washington D.C.)
Guess What We Are?
A. Republicans
B. Democrats
C. As Of This Broadcast Being Investigated By The F.B.I.

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Top 4 Reasons A Caricature Of David Letterman Is In This Video:
4. We Admire His Comedy Stylings.
3. We Wanted To Use Merv Griffin, But He Threatened To Sue.
2. We Needed Some Filler.
1. We're Brown-Nosing Weasels Who Want Him To Mention Us On His Show.

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They really went crazy with the gag credits in the direct-to-video movie "How I Spent My Vacation." This (terrific) movie was considered for theatrical release, and given a theatrical test screening, but WB decided to release it direct-to-video. So this was acknowledged in the credits:

Reason This Movie Went Straight To Home Video: Cuz It's So Darned Good!

First Theatrical Screening: June 8, 1991, Old Orchard Theatre,
Skokie, Illinois

Last Theatrical Screening: (Same As Above)

There was also a musical episode where the characters sang the song "The Name Game," and the network censors nixed a gag about the application of the name game to the character of Plucky ("banana fana fo f...."). So the closing credits read: "Inadvertently omitted in 'The Name Game': Plucky."

But my favorite "Tiny Toons" gag credit of all is still:

ABBA Spelled Backwards
Is ABBA

Red Hot Rutabaga Rag

I have to admit I haven't really been keeping up with the "Disney Treasures," a series of themed collections of Walt Disney shorts. (Many of which, in the Disney company's time-dishonored tradition of pulling stuff off the market as soon as possible, are already out of print.) But I had to check out the new volume, Disney Rarities. In addition to a selection of the silent "Alice" live-action/animation shorts that gave Disney and Ub Iwerks their start, the set mostly consists of one-shot cartoons, especially the ones from the '50s and '60s after Disney had stopped production on all his regular characters (Mickey, Donald, Goofy) and began using short cartoons exclusively for one-time ideas and experimental techniques.

To be honest, I wouldn't say that most of these cartoons are particularly good. "Ferdinand the Bull" is great, "Chicken Little" is still the most gruesome short ever produced by a mainstream studio, and the two-reel (20 minutes) "Ben and Me" was probably my favorite Disney cartoon as a kid. Seeing "Ben and Me" again, on its own (as a kid I encountered it as part of a one-hour Wonderful World of Disney special about "Great Disney Heroes"), it's a little stodgy, as Disney animation usually was by the '50s -- all those fluid, graceful, near-weightless movements seem natural and pretty but a little devoid of personality. But the voices are great (Charlie Ruggles, Hans Conreid, and the inevitable Sterling Holloway), it covers a lot of story in only 20 minutes, and you just have to love the conceit of a film (and before that, a book) whose basic message is that a great historical figure was a complete fraud. You're left wondering if it's supposed to be a patriotic or unpatriotic film, or both, but it's lots of fun.

Most of the other shorts consist of Disney trying out stuff that he wouldn't do in his animated features. There are two shorts that make use of the type of stop-motion animation Bill Justice did for the title sequence of The Parent Trap: "Noah's Ark," which is all stop-motion, and "A Symposium on Popular Songs," which combines stop-motion musical sequences with hand-drawn sequences starring endless chatterbox Ludwig Von Drake, drawn in that flat, kind of messy-looking style Disney was using for 101 Dalmatians, with the characters looking like someone rubbed out half the character with an eraser:



"Symposium" has a commentary track by Richard Sherman, who with his brother Robert wrote all the songs for this film. It's a great idea for a short -- an illustrated tour through the development of popular music from Ragtime through Rock -- but except for the first song, "The Rutabaga Rag," most of the songs are kind of grating, as is Von Drake (despite Paul Frees' brilliant voice work), and the whole thing just stops being fun after about five of its 20 minutes.

Another early-'60s short on the set is "The Saga of Windwagon Smith," which was designed by Ernie Nordli, one of my favorite layout artists. Apart from his work for Disney, he did about a year's worth of work as layout artist for Chuck Jones at Warner Brothers ("Broom-Stick Bunny," "Baby Buggy Bunny," "Rocket Squad" and "Gee Whiz-z-z" were some of the cartoons he designed). His style of design is very stylized but, unlike a lot of people who created stylized backgrounds in this period, his designs always feel cartoony and allow the characters to "read" well in front of the backgrounds; in some ways I like his work better than the work of Jones's favorite layout man, Maurice Noble. Here's a shot from "Windwagon Smith":



And here's a sample of Nordli's work for Warner Brothers, from "Baby Buggy Bunny":



Back to the "Disney Rarities" set: it also has the two UPA-inspired "Adventures in Music" shorts, "Melody" (originally in 3-D) and the Oscar-Winning "Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom" (in CinemaScope). I'm not a big fan of either one; some nice design, but they're just too long and twee, with all those cute animal characters singing endlessly about musical concepts that would be more entertainingly explained by Leonard Bernstein.

They also have the two solo cartoons for Humphrey Bear, an unusually comical, MGM or Warners-style character for Disney cartoons. The one everybody remembers from childhood viewing is "In the Bag," with Bill Thompson (voicing the Ranger) leading all the bears in a great dance number to the catchy song "First you stick a rag, put it in the bag, bump bump." By the way, the Ranger has to be one of the ugliest-looking characters in Disney cartoons:



So where was I...? Oh, yeah. I'd recommend getting this set, or at least renting it if possible; the cartoons aren't masterpieces or anything, but it's a pretty fascinating tour through the history of Disney, from his beginnings in Kansas City to his '60s multimedia empire.

Pettin' In the Park (Bad Boy!)

Busby Berkeley Box Set to be released in March 2006. Fans of elaborate overhead shots and dozens of dancers repeating the same step over and over, rejoice!

No, seriously, I love Berkeley, but he was not (as the article itself mentions) much of a choreographer in any technical sense. His Broadway work, on shows like Rodgers and Hart's A Connecticut Yankee, was reportedly much like his movie work, just a lot of repeated stepping in unison. What made him special was his ability to come up with design concepts for dances and his skill at using the camera to photograph a dance -- not the actual dancing.

Berkeley's post-WB masterpiece, The Gang's All Here -- the only Fox musical that is as garish, gaudy and glorious as Fox's overripe Technicolor photography -- isn't on DVD yet, but Fox is launching a series of musicals on DVD, and The Gang's All Here's trailer is included as an extra on one of the first releases, suggesting that it's planned for release sometime next year.

The End of StarToons

Platypus Comix has the last part of its interview with Jon McClenahan, dealing with the last projects of StarToons (including some of the better late "Animaniacs" cartoons and the only well-animated episodes of the generally disappointing show "Histeria") and the end of a studio that produced a lot of terrific animation and animation talent.

Snoopy's Novel

The Peanuts website has finally gotten around to the 1969 strips where Snoopy writes his great novel. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

They haven't yet gotten to the strip that has the best line (Linus: "But what about the king?").

Grudge Matches I'd Like To See: Clark Kent vs. Lois Lane on Fox News

When Rupert Murdoch buys the Daily Planet, he gives its two star reporters, Lois Lane and Clark Kent, a chance to audition for a spot in TV reporting. They will each get to host a show for a week on Fox News, and whoever is more popular will get to host their own Fox News show.

Will the show be "Lois Lane: Fair and Balanced?" Or will it be "Clark Kent Reports: You Decide?" Who will be a bigger hit on Fox News?

Clark has two advantages: he frequently beat Lois out for stories (in the '30s comics anyway), and he is more adept at lying through his teeth. A guy who can fool everyone into not noticing that he's just Superman with glasses should have little trouble reading talking points off a teleprompter. Besides which, his familiarity with essentially meaningless catchphrases like "up, up and away" will help him recide more meaningless catchphrases ("Criminalization of politics," etc).

However, Clark is probably too mild-mannered for today's cable news. Lois, as a good-looking, loudmouthed, obnoxious person, is what most cable news networks are looking for. And Lois's barely-concealed RAGE (tm) at being scooped by Clark all the time will project well on Fox News. Clark seems too happy with the Daily Planet's reporting, which will convince the audience that he is a representative of the Liberal Media (tm). Lois will pound Clark when it comes to shouting down her guests; they will be like a bunch of Jimmy Olsens to her.

And finally, if it comes out that Clark is in fact an illegal alien, he won't have a prayer with a substantial segment of the audience.

Conclusion: a win for Lois, and another reason not to watch cable news.

Wendie Jo Sperber, RIP

Actress Wendie Jo Sperber has died. She was only 46.

Sperber is best known for her role on "Bosom Buddies". That very underrated show had one of the best ensemble casts of its era, and she was one of the best members of that great cast; always funny, and always projecting great warmth and likability, turning what could have been a degrading, stereotypical role (the young overweight woman with an unrequited crush on the Peter Scolari character) into a very human and attractive character. She also had funny roles in a number of movies written and/or directed by Robert Zemeckis, including I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Used Cars and Back To the Future III.

A very funny and lovable performer, and a very sad loss.

"You're Never Out of ICE"

Gary Tooze at DVD Beaver has the first review of the complete Matt Helm set. The transfers are nothing special, but cheesy-looking, slightly substandard but cheap DVDs are probably in line with the inherent value of the films. Still, I won't be able to resist picking up this set, not when it features lines like these:

NANCY KOVACK: Just drop my clothes anywhere. I won't be needing them till morning.
MATT: Don't you think we should be introduced first?
NANCY (aka THE FUTURE MRS. ZUBIN MEHTA): You're Matt Helm.
MATT: That's good enough for me.

MATT: We have a long wait ahead of us, so let's get comfortable.
JANICE RULE (wondering why she's in this movie when she was the star of the original production of Picnic): Oh? How comfortable?
MATT: Hey, it's broad daylight!
JANICE RULE: What's the matter with a broad in the daylight?

STELLA STEVENS: You're really a good sport about this. I'm surprised you didn't take umbrage.
MATT: Oh, I take a belt now and then.

And, of course, the lyrics of the theme song of The Wrecking Crew are pure gold:

On the street of many pleasures
Stands the House of Seven Joys.
Like you see it in the movies,
It's for groovy girls and boys.
In this Oriental pad,
You are welcome night and day.
Recommended by Matt Helm,
And by the A.A.A.
Ah, so
Ah, so
Very, very nice!

Matt Helm movies -- not to be confused with the badass Matt Helm books that were thrown out the window when making these movies -- embody all the worst, cheesiest, just plain wrong-est things about the '60s and wrap them all up in a brightly-lit, clumsily-shot, inanely-costumed package. Where else can you find Dean Martin stopping Ann-Margret's go-go dance, ripping off her explosive dress, and throwing it in the direction of a photograph of Frank Sinatra? ("Sorry, Frank!") God bless you, Dino.

Best Dickens Name Ever?

The success of the new BBC "Bleak House" miniseries has reminded the world once again of the most important thing about Charles Dickens: the man really knew how to come up with a name for a character.

For the most part, names of characters in fiction tend to be a) chosen at random; b) chosen for some very obvious symbolic significance; or c) shout-outs to the writer's friends. Dickens was not averse to any of those reasons -- names like "Dedlock" or "Krook" are obviously supposed to tell us something about the characters they're attached to, and occasionally he'll disappoint us all with a conventional name, like "Mary Graham" (a bland name for the bland heroine of "Martin Chuzzlewit"). But the most memorable Dickensian names are the ones that don't have any particular meaning, but shape our reactions to the characters just by the way they sound. A good Dickens name is like a musical theme: it has no literal meaning, but it has all sorts of connotations.

Some examples from "Bleak House": Tulkinghorn, Jarndyce, Chadband, Rouncewell, Turveydrop, Skimpole, Hawdon. You can analyze why these names have the effects they do. "Tulkinghorn" sounds sinister because "tulk" mostly rhymes with mean-sounding words (bulk, hulk) and "horn" has several unpleasant connotations; "Skimpole" sounds like a perversion of "simple," and that's what the character's behavior amounts to. But analysis is almost beside the point: it's the pure sound that works. These names resonate in a way that more conventional names never could.

What's your choice for best Dickens name ever, or, beyond Dickens, the best name in fiction? My choice for best Dickensian name might well be the conventional choice, "Ebenezer Scrooge." I don't think the story could even work if he were called anything else; the name just seems to tell us exactly what he is without ever meaning anything specific. I'm also very partial to "Podsnap" ("Our Mutual Friend"), which Dickens liked enough that he tried to turn it into a catchphrase within the novel itself (sub-titling one of the chapters "Podsnappery").

T Time

An in-depth analysis of the history, rules and significance of the Mr. T webcomic.

Late-'90s/early-'00s internet fads already seem so remote that they're ripe for nostalgic pieces (I write nostalgically about the Good Old Days of usenet slang and "all your base are belong to us") and rigorous analysis. Maybe we'll be seeing university courses on "classic" internet culture before the decade is out.

Those Dastardly Sony Guys

From USA Today:

Cary Grant classics in time for 'Holiday'

Just in time for Valentine's Day, five classic Cary Grant films will be available Feb. 7 in the Cary Grant Box Set (Sony, $60), including the DVD debut of 1938's Holiday, starring Katharine Hepburn. The collection - which also contains Only Angel Have Wings, The Talk of the Town, His Girl Friday and The Awful Truth - features new bonus material on each disc and a set of collectible postcards.

So those who already have the other four films on DVD but want Holiday will be obliged to get the box. Oh, well. It's still probably worth it, because Holiday was one of the most-needed titles among the unreleased "classic" movies: made by the same director (George Cukor), writers (Donald Ogden Stewart adapting a Philip Barry play) and stars (Grant and Hepburn) as The Philadelphia Story two years later, it's a much better movie. It's also continually relevant in its story of a young man who wants to drop out of the corporate rat race and explore the world while he's still young enough to enjoy it. The plight of the bored white-collar worker is a cliché now, but in 1938 it was an unusual subject.

Holiday also has great performances from everyone in the cast, especially Grant as the wannabe bohemian and Lew Ayres as the heroine's brother. This is also one of only two movies where Katharine Hepburn played a character I find sympathetic. The other is Stage Door. (Usually she either played characters who were basically unsympathetic people -- Bringing Up Baby, Philadelphia Story -- or else she was so annoying that I wound up hating the character anyway, as in every performance she gave after 1950 or so.)

Hopefully the new box will have a new transfer for The Awful Truth, which looked rather sub-par in its last (overpriced) DVD outing.

Hey, That's Not Bad!

You find the strangest things when you look through the Usenet archives, and one thing I found was a copy of one of my favorite pieces from the early, funny years of the National Lampoon. (The good years of the publication were roughly 1970 to 1975, or perhaps even 1974 when Michael O'Donoghue left.)

This is "Chums in the Dark," written by Hugo Fleisch and Lampoon co-founder Henry Beard, a great parody of the Hardy Boys that captures all the gee-whiz-gosh narrative style of the books. Apart from the accuracy of the parody, most of the fun of the piece comes from forcing poor Frank and Joe Hardy to deal with subjects, like sex and drugs, that they've literally never heard of before in any of their many adventures, and consistently fail to understand.

Chapter 1 * Chapter 2 * Chapter 3 * Chapter 4 * Chapter 5 * Chapter 6

If you want a "legit" copy of the piece, try to get a used copy of the excellent This Side of Parodies, a collection of parodic material from the 1970-1974 Lampoon.

I Am Just a Simple Paperboy, No Romance Do I Seek

For those who are interested in sweaty atmospherics, as well as a case study of what had to be changed in order to bring an "adult" play to the screen in the '50s, there's a Tennessee Williams Film Collection coming next March. The films are The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Night of the Iguana, and two-disc special editions of A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Baby Doll.

Baby Doll would have to be my favorite of the bunch; the sheer trashiness of it is exhilarating, because it's not often you see such trashy material brought off with such style and skill in all departments. It's a great companion piece to Elia Kazan's similarly over-the-top, unsubtle movie of the following year, A Face in the Crowd, which also used a mostly unknown cast, and which also flopped. I think I like Kazan's flops a lot better than his hits.

That's Kleinzach!

I wish I liked the movie The Tales of Hoffmann better. When I say I wish I liked it, I don't mean that I feel it's my duty to like it; I mean that there's so much I admire about the film that I really want it to add up to an enjoyable experience, and it just doesn't.

The admirable things about the film have been much-remarked-upon by people wiser than I am (like Martin Scorsese and George Romero in special features on the new Criterion DVD). The magnificent use of Technicolor; the revolutionary "multimedia" concept behind the combination of song, dance, stylized sets and special effects; the utterly unique look of the film; the constant flow of new and unique visual ideas in every shot. Michael Powell had a visual imagination comparable to the early Disney animated features, and Tales of Hoffmann is Powell and Pressburger's Fantasia: an attempt to exploit all the possibilities of cinema, and a celebration of cinema as a combination of all the arts that have come before it.

But unlike Fantasia, The Tales of Hoffmann is based on a single work (albeit a work that consists of three or four only semi-related stories), and there's supposed to be a story somewhere in there. And that's what keeps me from liking the movie: it's awesomely beautiful and imaginative, but emotionally it's the coldest of cold fish. The opera Offenbach and Jules Barbier wrote, or mostly wrote (Offenbach died before the premiere, and people have been arguing for 125 years over what form the opera was intended to take), is also somewhat emotionally cool, as befits a somewhat cynical fantasy which concludes that an artist is better off concentrating on art and giving up romance. But it does have its moments of warmth, and something to say about love and art and the dangers inherent of devoting oneself to art (a theme, in one way or another, of all the stories). The movie puts so much distance between itself and the story that there's never any question of emotional involvement: when Hoffmann first becomes openly emotional, in the middle section of the Kleinzach ballad, the movie cuts away from him to a ballet-pantomime with a couple of dolls on the shelf.

It is, ultimately, a movie about nothing except itself; it ironically exemplifies the self-absorbed kind of artistry that Offenbach and Barbier make fun of in the original opera. Hoffmann in the Olympia story is mocked for being someone so cut off from reality that he can't tell the difference between a woman and a robot; Powell and Pressburger, who drain all the humor out of this sequence and reduce all the characters to automatons, are more like Hoffmann than they perhaps would like to admit.

On the upside, though, the choice of Robert Rounseville to play Hoffmann -- one of the few performers in the film who does his own singing; most of the others are dubbed -- was ideal. Rounseville was a wonderful singer who went back and forth between opera and musical theatre without ever making an issue of whether he was "crossing over"; he was Stravinsky's original Tom Rakewell, Bernstein's original Candide, the Padre in the original production of Man of La Mancha, and his Enoch Snow is one of the few highlights of the movie version of Carousel.

Still Not On DVD, Sorry

Thanksgiving (the American version, I mean) is never complete without the "Turkeys Away" episode of "WKRP in Cincinnati." But due to music rights issues, that show will probably never be on DVD -- as I've lamented many times before -- and it isn't in syndication anywhere as far as I know, so if you want to see that episode, you're kind of out of luck.

"Turkeys Away" was only the seventh episode of "WKRP in Cincinnati," and while it's the most famous episode of that show, it's not necessarily one of the very best. Hugh Wilson (the creator of the show) had the idea for the turkey drop from the beginning. The story of a radio station that dropped turkeys out of a helicopter was a radio-industry urban legend; it's likely that it never actually happened, but instead was a composite of a number of disastrous promotional stunts at various U.S. stations. Wilson presumably assigned the writer of the episode, Bill Dial, the task of writing up an episode based on this idea.

Because main idea of the episode doesn't kick in until the last three or four minutes, the episode consists almost entirely of buildup to that big scene, and for that reason it can feel a little slow in spots, especially if you know what's coming and are waiting for them to get on with it. So it's not one of my upper-echelon WKRP episodes, but that's only because when the show was at its very best -- in episodes like "God Talks to Johnny," "Real Families," "Frog Story" and "Changes," to name only a few -- it was as good as any situation comedy ever made, a rich mixture of smart stories, perfectly in-character lines that never sounded like jokes, and great characters who interacted beautifully and really grew and developed.

The characters were in their TV infancy in "Turkeys Away," so when you watch the episode you can get a sense of where they started as opposed to what they finally became. The premise of "WKRP" as Wilson pitched it to the network was "The suits vs. the dungarees" (he actually incorporated the line into an episode). The fault lines at the station would be between the older employees left over from WKRP's first incarnation as an easy-listening station (Mr. Carlson, Herb Tarlek and Les Nessman) and the hipper employees who turn the station into a rock station (Andy, Venus, Dr. Johnny Fever). The central relationship on the show was supposed to be between the head of the Suits, Mr. Carlson, and the head of the Dungarees, tight-pants-wearing Andy; they would learn how to bridge the generation gap.

"Turkeys Away" is one of the few episodes of the show that actually used this formula: Mr. Carlson is feeling left out at the station, so he decides to take charge, and with Herb and Les (who also feel left out because they have had less power at the station since Andy showed up), undertakes a disastrous promotion without consulting anybody who could warn him what a disaster it will be. The generation-gap stuff doesn't really work, especially since Andy never was able to establish himself as the central character of the show (his role would soon be very effectively switched from the hero to the once-normal guy being driven slowly insane by his employees). But the episode is very effective at establishing Carlson as something other than a fuddy-duddy buffoon, which he might have been on any other show: he is a nice guy who wants to run a successful station and give the staff the freedom they need to make the new format work, but feels genuinely hurt at the fact that no one seems to think he's useful. That's why the episode isn't just a crazy farce.

Several characters, at this point in the series, had really not come into being at all except in name. That's especially the case with Venus (Tim Reid), who essentially had no character for most of the first season. As Reid said, "my character would come in, flash his clothes, and leave." It wasn't until the last produced episode of the first season, "Who is Gordon Sims?" (in which Venus turns out to be a fugitive who, strangely, deserted from the army after coming back from combat in Vietnam) that Wilson and co. hit on the idea of making Venus a serious-minded guy who is the exact opposite of the "hip" wardrobe he adopts as a gimmick. By that time, all the characters had been pretty much fleshed out, so that by the end of the second season, Jennifer (Loni Anderson) could concisely sum up each member of the workplace "family":

There's Mr Carlson, the occasionally confused but always concerned father; Andy, the success-oriented, competent, tight-panted son; Les, the consistently strange bookish brother; Herb, the semi-loveable troublemaker and general jackass; Johnny, the weather-beaten uncle who always wanted to be a sailor - no, that's not right, I never could nail you down... Venus, the spiritual, loving brother; and Bailey, the beautiful shy sister with the brains.

Also by that time, "WKRP" had established its greatest strength, which is that as a true ensemble show, all the characters could interact with each other in different ways. The producers of "NewsRadio" have pointed out that "every character had different chemistry with every other character," and that's true of "WKRP" too: you could put any two characters together in a scene and they'd be funny together in a unique way, because not only were the characters well-defined, but their relationships were well-defined too. (So you not only know that Andy is annoyed by Les, Herb, Mr. Carlson, Johnny: you also know that each one annoys him for a different reason, and those reasons play out in any scene between them.) Instead of a show about a down-the-middle split between two groups of characters, it became a show about the diverse and funny interactions between individual characters.

Some quotes from the Thanksgiving episode, to bring this back on topic (mostly taken from the WKRP Quotes Page:

Mr. Carlson: Young lady, I've done thousands of promotions in my time. Now tell me, what's the problem?
Bailey: We don't know whether to give away Boston T-shirts or Foreigner T-shirts.
Mr. Carlson: Boston. Foreign stuff shrinks.

Johnny: Look, man, I took this job because I thought Carlson was like me. A guy who doesn't quite know what's going on around him, and he likes it that way.

Herb: Andy, I've got to complain to you about Mr. Carlson.
Andy: Well, get in line.
Herb: Okay.
(Herb gets in line behind Johnny and Venus)
Andy: Herb, I was kidding.
Herb: I knew that.

Herb: When that farmer asked me what I wanted with twenty live turkeys, I had to do some pretty fast talking, let me tell you.
Les: What did you tell him?
Herb: I told him it was a secret.
Andy: That's pretty fast, Herb.

Venus: Les! Are you okay?
Les: I don't know. A man and his two children tried to kill me. After the turkeys hit the pavement, the crowd kind of scattered, but some of them tried to attack me! I had to jam myself into a phone booth! Then Mr Carlson had the helicopter land in the middle of the parking lot. I guess he thought he could save the day by turning the rest of the turkeys loose. It gets pretty strange after that.
Andy: Les, c'mon now, tell us the rest.
Les: I really don't know how to describe it. It was like the turkeys mounted a counterattack! It was almost as if they were ... organized!!

Ira Levin, You Old Softie

The lyrics I feel like quoting today are some very sweet, sentimental lyrics from an unexpected source: Ira Levin, of "Rosemary's Baby" fame and "A Kiss Before Dying" acclaim.

This is a song from Levin's musical Drat! The Cat! It's a song called "She's Roses," sung by the innocent, almost childlike hero of the show, Patrolman Bob Purefoy, after falling in love with the heroine (at this point he doesn't know that she's the notorious thief, the Cat, whom he has vowed to capture). The sweet list song, about all the things that his beloved means to him, is obviously inspired by "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music, but I actually like this one better, especially for the mention of "the automobile" as a thing of wonder and beauty (the show is set near the end of the 19th century) and the line about " Marbles, the clear ones." Mr. Levin, you should've written more musicals.

She's roses, she's snowflakes, she's barrels of apples,
And ice cream and velvet and bells when they ring.
She's birthdays and New Year's, the night before Christmas,
The last day of school and the first day of spring.
Other girls, other girls borrow and buy
Cosmetics and feathers and fur.
Other girls, other girls hopelessly try
To change from themselves into her.
She's bluebirds and baseball and hitting a long one,
And laughing and dreaming and Central Park Lake.
She's marbles (the clear ones) and milk when you're thirsty,
She's five kinds of candy and six kinds of cake.
Other girls, other girls, ain't it a shame,
They're seaweed and splinters and glue.
Other girls, other girls, no one's to blame,
Pray God the poor creatures pull through.
She's all of the stars and the moon when it's rising,
And music and peace and the automobile.
And how can I live till the next time I see her?
She touched me right here, and she's really real.

Hi, This is Jim Rockford...

This Amazon.com review indicates that the first season set of "The Rockford Files" isn't all we could have hoped for: not only are the discs apparently poorly produced (a constant problem with TV DVDs from Universal, which likes to squeeze as many episodes as possible onto as few discs as possible), but it's missing the two-hour pilot, where Rockford's father was played by Robert Donley (Noah Beery took over, memorably, for the series).

So, caveat emptor, and all that, but still, I mean, it's "The Rockford Files." It would take a lot to stop me from recommending "The Rockford Files." Maybe if they digitally replaced Noah Beery Jr. with Jar-Jar Binks. And even then, I might suggest you buy it just for James Garner, Angel, and that angry cop guy.

Lyrics On My Mind

The songs going through my head lately are mostly songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, especially their out-of-left-field love songs. No one was better than Hart at writing a love song that didn't sound like the typical gooey ballad; indeed, some of his love songs can be downright dark. Here are some examples:

From On Your Toes:

It's got to be love,
It couldn't be tonsilitis,
It feels like neuritis,
But nevertheless it's love.
Don't tell me the pickles and pie a la mode they served me
Unnerved me
And made my heart a broken-down pump:
It's got to be love,
It isn't the morning after
That makes ev'ry rafter
Go spinning around above.
I'm sure that it's fatal, or why do I get that sinking feeling?
I think that I'm dead,
But nevertheless it's only love.

From Higher and Higher (which also produced the greatest Rodgers and Hart song, "It Never Entered My Mind"), the love duet "I'm Afraid":

I'm afraid of snow and ice,
I'm afraid of rats and mice,
I'm afraid of reading scary tales,
Even of fairy tales.
I'm afraid of rain and fogs,
I'm afraid of touching frogs,
I'm afraid of counting sheep at night,
'Cause sheep can scare me too.
Afraid of cops,
Afraid of crooks,
Afraid of germs,
Afraid of worms
You put on hooks.
I'm afraid of Fu Manchu,
And of tigers in the zoo,
But most of all
I'm afraid I'll fall
For a horrible thing like you.

Or for something less dark, "Morning is Midnight," a love song (with a gorgeous, classical-sounding tune) celebrating shared slackerdom:

Morning is midnight
And the sun's the moon.
My break of day
Doesn't start, let us say,
Until half-past noon.
Later to bed
And later still to rise,
Who cares for health
Just as long as he's wealthy
And wise?
They say that the early
Bird will catch the worm;
I prefer a girlie,
If she doesn't squirm.
Morning will come,
But must it come so soon?
My break of day
Doesn't start, let us say,
Until noon.

Hart's way with a love song was certainly the quirkiest of any popular songwriter; he just seemed to want to find the strangest angle on the subject. When he did write a conventional-sounding love lyric with all the usual love-song phrases, he subverted it by subjecting it to a little pronoun trouble (tm Daffy Duck) in the song "If I Were You":

If I were you,
Here's what I'd do:
I'd tell me that I really loved me.
I wouldn't hide it,
I'd just confide it,
I'd pet me and let me pet you.
I'd be oh so tender
Sitting on my knee,
Then, with sweet surrender
I'd give in to me.
Gosh, you ought to see,
I'd hold me closer,
I'd kiss me too,
I'd do that if I were you.

"Morning is Midnight" and "I'm Afraid" were recorded by Ben Bagley for his "Rodgers and Hart Revisited" series (Dorothy Loudon sang a fine "Morning is Midnight" on the first and best of those albums); "If I Were You" was recorded by Frederica Von Stade for her "My Funny Valentine: A Rodgers and Hart Anthology"; "It's Got to Be Love" is on the 1983 cast recording of On Your Toes.

A Couple of Travelling Guys

Just a brief addendum to my post on Martin and Lewis: Jerry Lewis has reportedly been telling audiences that the Martin and Lewis movies are going to be released on DVD by Paramount, and a poster at Home Theater Forum has semi-confirmed this, saying that the following double-feature DVDs are slated for August 2006:

Living It Up/ Three Ring Circus
You're Never Too Young / Artists and Models
Pardners/ Hollywood or Bust

Those are the late Martin/Lewis movies, including some duds (Three Ring Circus, Pardners), but also the cream of the crop, the two films with Frank Tashlin, Artists and Models and Hollywood or Bust. If that information is correct, then hopefully the earlier Martin and Lewis movies will appear in the first few months of 2006.

I'm Not Even a Little Bit Country

I haven't seen Walk the Line yet (though I am one of the few people who has managed to sit through even a portion of I Walk the Line, a movie known only for the title song and for Gregory Peck looking ridiculous as Tuesday Weld's love interest). It did get me to thinking, though: have we reached the end of the era of universally-popular country singers? I'm not saying everybody likes Johnny Cash, but I don't think I ever met anyone who didn't like Johnny Cash. He's a performer like Elvis or Louis Armstrong or Sinatra whose work transcends his genre and appeals to everybody, even people who aren't into "that kind of music."

Now, even beyond Cash, I can think of plenty of country singers who are popular performers and/or personalities even with people like me, who aren't country-music buffs. But they're either dead (the first and best Hank Williams; Waylon Jennings) or elder statesmen of one kind or another (Loretta Lynn; and, yes, Dolly Parton, who is cool for every possible reason). Are there any current country performers who have that kind of "crossover" appeal? I wouldn't be surprised if there are some and I've missed them -- I miss a lot of stuff that's contemporary -- but most of the contemporary country musicians I hear, or hear of, are clearly "niche" performers, as much as any other type of specialized musical performer.

Now, I know there are a bunch of obvious explanations for the disappearance of the universally-loved country performer. Start with the obvious point that country stars are stars, building their careers and images like any other kind of star, and therefore they can't have the kind of authenticity that Johnny Cash projected; even if they have colorful biographies (and a colorful biography probably helps someone get signed up by a recording company), they just don't feel "real" once they get on the stage in their carefully-chosen wardrobe and those damn hats. (I really don't know what it takes to look "authentic" wearing a cowboy hat indoors, but I know most people don't have it.) Dolly Parton created a persona for herself, but the persona is unique and funny. Some guy with a beard and a cowboy hat is not playing a part that I find particularly entertaining.

The music, or what I've heard of it, tends to be more obviously market-driven and to shy away from anything really dark or potentially controversial, so there goes the chance to hear another "(Mama's Got) the Pill." (Though the point of a song like that is not the "controversial" aspect of it but the realism of it; it's a celebration of a real-world fact that nobody had mentioned, let alone celebrated, in song.) The appeal of a good country song is that more than any kind of popular music -- more even than the folk-rock style of Cash's friend Bob Dylan -- it sounds like one man or woman talking directly to us through song, telling us what he or she has been through. It may be simple, it's sometimes crude, but it's direct and sounds like it hasn't been filtered through the formulas of popular songwriting or the demands of the marketing people. (Of course country songs have their formulas and their marketing strategies, like any other kind of song; the point is that a good country song sounds unfiltered and direct.) It seems to me, again, speaking from a position of less-than-complete familiarity with today's country music, that country songs now sound like any other commercial pop music.

Probably a simpler way of saying this is that Johnny Cash could kick the ass of any living country star with one hand tied behind his back and the other hand strumming a guitar. And he'd make them take off those hats.