Bugs Bunny's Nonexistent 20th Anniversary

I'm always interested in finding old articles about the Warner Brothers cartoon studio -- there weren't many, at least not until after it was closed down, so finding one is a rare treat, even if it's not a particularly good article.

In researching something else, I came across this article from March 31, 1956. It's by Aline Mosby of the United Press (now known as United Press International or UPI) and it's about the 20th anniversary of Bugs Bunny. Except, of course, that it wasn't the 20th anniversary of Bugs Bunny; even if you define "Porky's Hare Hunt" as his debut, that only takes you back to 1938. 1956 was sort of the Warner studio's unofficial 20th anniversary of making really great cartoons, since 1936 was a key year in that respect, but it wasn't Bugs Bunny's birthday. Oh, well.

WB cartoon producer Eddie Selzer provides the interview quotes for the article; his reference to Anna Magnani is based on the fact that she'd won the Academy Award the week before (where the WB cartoon studio had picked up its first Oscar in several years, for "Speedy Gonzales").

The only bit of information that's semi-new is Selzer's comment that they were reluctant to do a Bugs Bunny TV show because of the fear that it might make him over-exposed and dilute his popularity. (A few years later, of course, Warners did do a Bugs Bunny Show, but theatrical cartoons were collapsing by then and it wasn't feasible to have a character do only theatricals.) The article mentions that Bugs was a licensing and marketing bonanza for Warners, but you knew that.

I think this may be the first article to mention the much-repeated story that Mel Blanc was allergic to, or at least hated, carrots. Blanc denied that he was allergic to carrots, though he did repeat the story that he had to spit them out. I wouldn't be surprised if Selzer invented the allergy part or at least threw it in to embellish the story; Selzer started out as Warners' director of publicity (where he was extremely well-liked; Louella Parsons called him "one of the most popular publicity directors in town"), and making up little soundbite stories about actors was pretty much what publicity guys did.

------
BUGS BUNNY TOP MONEY MAKER FOR 20 YEARS

By ALINE MOSBY
United Press Hollywood Writer

HOLLYWOOD (UP) -- One veteran star has buck teeth, wears no clothes, is sassy and has a whining Brooklyn accent -- but today he celebrates his 20th anniversary as the boxoffice champ of Hollywood.

Bugs Bunny has been Warner Studio's top money-maker and the head of Hollywood's boxoffice poll for 20 years. No other actor can make that statement.

Unfortunately, Bugs, like Doris Day and Susan Hayward, never has won an Oscar. But his creators sigh that many a top ticket-seller never makes the artistic grade.

On Bugs' 20th birthday and 20th anniversary in pictures I dropped in at his home, the Warner cartoon department where Bugs is spoken about as if he were a two-footed veteran such as Spencer Tracy. The busy bunny shows no sign of dropping in popularity.

"We've just licensed Bugs Bunny carrot juice, carrots and waffle and gelatin molds in the shape of the rabbit," beamed Edward Selzer, chief producer of the cartoon department who is a pixie type himself.

"Bugs gets many offers to appear on TV. But if a star is on TV all the time, people get tired of him."

The racy rabbit started his film career as an extra in a cartoon, "Harem Scarem [sic]." Two years later the studio decided to star him in "Heckling Hare." Bugs was a smash.

Marilyn Monroe has changed in appearance since her first film. So has Bugs. His legs and body are longer and he's switched from tawny fur to blue-gray fur. But his personality remains the same.

"Bugs is sassy and happy-go-lucky," explained Selzer. "When we develop a story for him we select it with as much criticism and care as if he were Anna Magnani. We won't put him out of character."

Bugs appears in cartoon books and as the insignia for countless branches of the armed forces. During World War II he actually was transferred from one Marine outfit to the other -- complete with documents in triplicate. His service record with the Marines is still on file.

Bugs has starred in 146 movies, including this year's "Napoleon Bunny-Parte," and "[Roman] Legion-Hare." He appeared twice in live movies. Always the lop-eared star has the voice of Mel Blanc.

"Blanc," insists producer Selzer, "actually is allergic to carrots. So we leave his carrot munching line of 'What's up, Doc?' to the end when we record the sound. Mel tried celery and apples but nothing sounds like a carrot. Funny, but Blanc just can't stand carrots."

A Character Named "Character"

TCM showed Anatole Litvak's Blues in the Night the other day. I love this movie, which is a strange mish-mosh of every possible genre: the backstage jazz-band musical, the gangster drama, the social-problem picture, and elements of what would later become known as film noir. The songs are by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, including the title song, which could well be the best song ever written for a movie. The handling of what was obviously a low budget (even by Warner Brothers standards) is very clever -- the budget probably explains some of the noir-ish setups and shadows, and Don Siegel creates some great, kinetic montages that manufacture big scenes out of fast cutting, close-ups and disguised stock footage.

Unfortunately a DVD is unlikely because it has no big stars; it used mid-level WB contractees like Priscilla Lane, Jack Carson, Betty Field, Richard Whorf (later the director of The Beverly Hillbillies) and some actor named Elia Kazan.

The one thing I wish is that the songs had gotten more expansive treatment; the first performance of the title song deserves more than a minute and a half, though the way it's done is really interesting: it starts out sung a capella (this isn't a full-fledged musical, so people mostly sing in a realistic way) and the orchestra and chorus only enter when Don Siegel's fantasy montage come in. (This version edits out a little bit of dialogue in the middle of the song.)



And another song with a great Mercer lyric, full of '40s slang -- Mercer was one of the few great lyricists who really made an effort to keep up with developing trends in slang -- and preceded by another Siegel montage:

My Problem Is, You Never Do Anything With Me

Lois Maxwell has died at the age of 80. I always felt a bit sorry for her in some of the later James Bond movies, though my sympathy was totally misplaced: there's no reason to feel sorry for someone who has a role in the longest-running movie series of our time. But it wasn't fun to watch someone who was clearly too old for the part trade quips with various James Bonds who were also clearly too old for the part. (Granted, it would have been way worse to see a 95 year-old Roger Moore flirting with a younger Miss Moneypenny.)

The character of Miss Moneypenny in the movies is, I take it, a combination of the Moneypenny from the books with Bond's secretaries, Loelia Ponsonby and Mary Goodnight. (Just writing down those Ian Fleming character names makes me smile. The man came up with the craziest names since Dickens.) Fleming's idea was that anyone who would be a secretary in the secret service would be a little emotionally detached from the agents; she'll flirt with them but no more, because she doesn't want to get emotionally involved with a man who will probably be dead soon. Maxwell, one of those intercontinental actors who were in plentiful supply in the '50s and '60s -- she was Canadian, mostly lived in England, but appeared in American and Italian movies too (she was Amneris -- the acting, not the singing -- in the 1953 movie of Aida) -- nailed the role perfectly in Dr. No; her best part in the series was in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Worst Series Retool Ever?

As you can probably tell from my previous posts, I'm quite fascinated by shows that get retooled, especially when the retool happens in the second or third season. When a show gets overhauled late in its run, it's not as interesting, because those are usually done to cope with the departures of key cast members. What I'm talking about is what happens when a relatively new shows changes the cast, the setting, and even the premise. The idea is always that the show has the potential to be a hit, but to do so, it needs to add certain elements that will theoretically make it more appealing.

The thing is, this almost never actually works. The viewers they gain from the new setting or new demographic appeal almost never outweigh the viewers they drive away by changing everything so quickly. It worked with Newhart, but Newhart's retool happened very gradually; the new characters and new setting weren't all introduced in the same episode, and it took over a year for all the changes to be implemented. That helped regular viewers get used to the changes while bringing in new viewers. But when a show starts a new season and the sets are different, the supporting cast is different, the style is different -- I'm not saying it never works, but it certainly has a high probability of disaster.

So what is your nomination for the worst of these retools, either in terms of how bad the changes were, or just how stupid an idea it was to change the show? The classic example, of course, is Mork and Mindy, because as was explained in comments to another post, ABC and Paramount took a huge hit show and retooled it into a much less popular show.

But I think another retool from the same era may be even worse: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. You'll recall that the first season of this Glen Larson production was the cheesiest thing ever: bad '70s fashions in the future, an annoying robot sidekick (voiced by Mel Blanc, who didn't even bother to make up an actual voice for the character; that was basically just his real voice), and lots of space T&A. But it combined everything people liked in the late '70s and early '80s: cornball humor, action, robots, sci-fi, and jiggle TV. The abbreviated second season had a serious and depressing setting, serious and depressing plots, a serious and depressing supporting cast, and few female guest stars. I'm not saying Buck Rogers was a good show in its first season, though it was better than the second. What I'm saying is that I don't understand the logic: how did anyone think the show would get more popular if they included less humor, action and sex appeal? It would be like retooling Star Trek to make Kirk suicidal and celibate, and replacing every member of the crew with that alien from the Filmation cartoon.

TRANSCRIPT: "Diary of a Cavpag Madman" by Conrad L. Osborne

I decided to transcribe Conrad L. Osborne’s memorable and very, very long stream-of-consciousness review "Diary of a Cavpag Madman," one of his last pieces for High Fidelity and certainly one of his most unusual. It's too long to post here, so I put it up on a makeshift webpage; click the following link to read it. Unfortunately the page is having some problems reproducing accent marks, quotation marks, and so on, for reasons I don't understand, but I'll try and fix it when I get a chance.

Click here to read DIARY OF A CAVPAG MADMAN by Conrad L. Osborne.

Part of the background to this review was that for a decade or more, opera recordings had been stripped of any connection to actual opera houses. Most operas were recorded in London, because it was cheaper to record there. And instead of real opera orchestras like the Vienna Philharmonic or the La Scala orchestra, the companies turned first to symphony orchestras (London has more orchestras than any other city, so there was always one available) and then to ad hoc pickup groups. The recordings Osborne is reviewing here were made in London with the National Philharmonic Orchestra, which did not actually exist -- it was a group formed from players from all the London orchestras, assembled purely for recordings. James Levine, who made a lot of these London-based opera recordings in the '70s, later recalled that he'd spend a large part of the session simply teaching the music to the players, because while the orchestras were excellent, many of the musicians hadn't played the music before and they certainly hadn't played it together. Add in the necessity to schedule the recordings around the busy schedules of relatively few singers (Pavarotti and Placido Domingo were on just about every Italian opera recording made in the '70s), and it's no wonder these recordings didn't sound anything like real performances; they weren't anything like real performances. Today, most opera recordings are made in conjunction with stage or concert performances, so while they have their own flaws, they do kind of sound like everybody has worked together before.

Never Was There a Momentary Lull

I've commented before on the fact that My Fair Lady is a direct adaptation of the 1938 movie version of Pygmalion. Alan Lerner initially downplayed this and talked as if the additional scenes were his own idea, but eventually he wrote that the key to adapting Pygmalion was "following the movie more than the play." Other people had tried to adapt Pygmalion and, apparently, focused too much on Shaw's original play; by incorporating the movie's extra scenes, the ending (which Shaw didn't write) and the mid-point crisis from the movie (the Professor Karpathy scenes, which provided the story with an actual villain), Lerner came up with a viable musical. It wasn't the first show to succeed by leaning heavily on the movie version as a source; The King and I is basically a direct adaptation of the script for the movie Anna and the King of Siam, but the writers of that movie didn't get any credit anywhere in the show (kind of shabby, but not unusual for Rodgers and Hammerstein, who didn't like sharing credit).

Anyway, I strung together side-by-side comparisons of three scenes from Pygmalion with their counterparts in My Fair Lady: the marbles gag, Karpathy's identification of Eliza as a "fraud," and the ending. The biggest difference, obviously, is that everything is bigger and longer and slower in My Fair Lady. Pygmalion is a very fast-paced movie (only 99 minutes), and it was done as a contemporary 1938 piece -- which may not have been the best choice, but it probably wouldn't have been in the budget to do it as a period piece. My Fair Lady was always supposed to be a lavish-looking period piece; even though the original Broadway production actually had a rather modest budget, director Moss Hart and designer Oliver Smith made it look sumptuous and huge, and of course the movie version was a big-budget affair all the way. So the marbles gag is twice as long in My Fair Lady as it was in Pygmalion, and even though the ending is exactly the same, it's stretched out much more.

The most interesting comparison is between the Karpathy "revelation" in Pygmalion and in My Fair Lady. In the new scene written by Shaw for Pygmalion, Karpathy explains that Eliza can't be English because "only those who have been taught to speak it, speak it well." In My Fair Lady, the scene ends before this (I believe that in the original production they actually had the act break here) and Higgins tells us what happened in the "You Did It" number. This is a case where the musical improves on the original movie -- adding some extra suspense and giving Eliza a chance to actually be there when this is discussed.

"The" Chappelle's Show?

This New York Times article on TV-on-DVD really doesn't have anything new (I was mildly surprised to find that TV-on-DVD sales are up instead of down; somehow it seemed otherwise, what with all the shows being abandoned in mid-run), but it does offer this chart of the top-selling TV shows on DVD through the end of last year.



The high ranking for Sex and the City is partly due to HBO's inflated pricing.

KotH Protest Too Much

IGN has a pretty good article on voice-over actors on King of the Hill, interviewing some voice-over people who don't get interviewed all that often, like Lauren Tom and Breckin "Not the Same Person as Seth Green" Meyer. They also spend a lot of time talking about Tom Petty's role as Lucky, which kind of depresses me because I still think that's the biggest mis-step the show took in recent years.

Phyllis, Phyllis

I recently found a rare VHS tape with the first two episodes of Phyllis -- the second spinoff from Mary Tyler Moore. Since this show hasn't been on in a while, I thought I'd upload the pilot to DailyMotion for those who are curious to see what the show was like.

Unfortunately neither the pilot nor the second episode feature the show's most popular character, Mother Dexter (Judith Lowry). The pilot does have Barbara Colby as Phyllis's boss and the ex-lover of her late husband Lars. (If you take into account everything we've heard about the unseen Lars, including the fact that he had an affair with Sue Ann and his sticking Phyllis with no insurance, you kind of have to conclude that he was the worst husband ever.) After three episodes, Colby was murdered; her part was re-cast, but all the same, the emphasis had to shift away from Phyllis's job and toward her life with her husband's family; finally she just changed jobs altogether.

The show collapsed in the second season when Lowry died; with the most popular supporting character gone and with Phyllis looking increasingly cursed (Jane Rose, who played Audrey, died only two years after the show went off the air), it couldn't sustain its initial success. But it also had the problem of putting Phyllis at the center of a show. Usually on an MTM sitcom, the lead character is more normal than everybody else. But Phyllis was one of the weirdest people on Mary Tyler Moore; Mary and Rhoda both stood around and gaped at her endless self-delusion. If you look at the pilot of Phyllis, it's clear that the writer/creators Ed. Weinberger and the late Stan Daniels are trying to keep the qualities that made Phyllis interesting, but that means in practice that for much of the episode, other characters are playing straight man to her, instead of the lead character playing the straight man to the other eccentrics. That was why the introduction of Mother Dexter helped the show, because she was the only character who could make Phyllis look normal by comparison. But even so, as the series went on, Phyllis's character had to be softened to make her a more plausible sitcom lead, and when the show was canceled, some insiders expressed the opinion that it had softened Phyllis to the point of losing what made her popular in the first place.

Still, Cloris Leachman is great, and you can see why MTM and the network would have wanted to give her a spinoff: she was only available for a few episodes a year on Mary Tyler Moore (she was always credited as a "special guest star" when she appeared), and by giving her a show they could have her for a full 22 episodes. Perhaps it would have worked out better to create a new character for her, but that's hindsight, and anyway the audience probably wouldn't have accepted her as a non-Phyllis character at that point. The show also gets points for retaining Lisa Gerritsen as Phyllis's daughter Bess (who had a fairly prominent role in the very earliest Mary Tyler Moore episodes, but didn't appear very often in subsequent seasons) and for casting Henry Jones, who was so great in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Oh, and I've frequently offered praise for Stan Daniels' theme song.

Here's the prologue (with the guy who played the minister in "Chuckles Bites the Dust"), title sequence and Act 1:

And here's Act 2 and the closing credits:

No Parking Hare

Don't know how long this cartoon will last online, but it's good to see it again. "No Parking Hare" (1954) is one of the last cases of a Warner Brothers director semi-remaking a cartoon by another director (another example is Chuck Jones remaking CLampett's "Porky's Pooch" as the first Charlie Dog cartoon, "Little Orphan Airedale"). Bob McKimson and writer Sid Marcus basically remade Chuck Jones's "Homeless Hare," and, surprisingly, came up with a cartoon that is as good as or even better than the original. Marcus, who wrote a bunch of cartoons for McKimson that year, came up with some very imaginative gags -- like the "Raven" sequence with the construction worker's crazy reaction to the electrical shock -- and put some life back into McKimson and his animators. It's too bad that the WB studio shutdown happened at that point, effectively ending the McKimson-Marcus partnership (when the studio reopened, McKimson was working with Tedd Pierce again).

Paul McCartney Must Be Turning Over in His Grave

In honour of the release of Across the Universe -- or as it will soon be known, Sgt. Pepper The Movie Without The Bee Gees -- The Associated Press asked various Film Festival attendees what their favorite Beatles song is.

Jimmy Carter gives by far the dumbest answer -- "Imagine" is not a Beatles song, it's not profound, and its popularity in Cuba doesn't mean what he seems to think it means -- which is good, because sometimes I think I'm getting too politically one-sided and it helps to be reminded that I find Jimmy Carter annoying.

Runner-up for dumbest answer, only because he at least named an actual Beatles album beforehand, is Michael Douglas, who also names "Imagine" and pretends that he wants a world without possessions. He doesn't.

Jude Law's comment is more apropos: "No, it wouldn't be 'Hey Jude.' I've got so many memories of that song being played. Thank God, it's a good song. It would be terrible to be named after an awful song."

The good thing about the Beatles is that in spite of the air of '60s Boomer nostalgia that surrounds a lot of discussion of their work -- hence movies like Across the Universe and various Boomers who think "Imagine" is profound -- the actual songs really do transcend the period in a way that a lot of iconic '60s music and entertainment doesn't. I attribute this to the songwriting of Lennon/McCartney and Harrison, who always seemed to go for fairly timeless themes and influences, whether it's the traditional AABA pop-song structures they used, or McCartney's various pastiches of every style of popular song, or Lennon's Lewis Carroll nonsense lyrics. (The Lewis Carroll influence means that whereas most '60s "psychedelic" songs sound horribly dated, something like "I Am the Walrus" feels sort of timeless because it actually has its roots in 19th century nonsense verse.) That may be why movies and revues don't usually succeed when they try to put these songs in the context of the '60s mythology -- these songs aren't really '60s songs any more.

Silver's Good Enough For Me, Mr. T

Reading about the upcoming Sweeney Todd movie, I remembered that I always derived a lot of silly, juvenile amusement from the fact that Mrs. Lovett calls the title character "Mr. T" a couple of times. Of course this was 1979, long before Rocky III made "Mr. T" mean something else, so the creators of the show can't be blamed for that. But what's their excuse for calling characters "Buddy and Sally" in Follies? or Stephen Sondheim's excuse for using the expression "Sorry, Charlie" (in Merrily We Roll Along) without apparently realizing that it's a Star-Kist reference? Or for that matter the creators of Kiss Me Kate for calling a character "Lois Lane?" Sometimes it seems like people who write musicals should be a little more aware of what's going on in popular culture, just so they can avoid stuff like that.

However, if Mr. T were cast in Sweeney Todd, it would be way better than with Johnny Depp. Think of how much better his big number, "My Friends," would become:

MR. T
This is my van,
No car can catch it.
Why should I fly
When it beats any plane,
My van,
My big black van.
Don't touch my van,
Maybe you'd scratch it,
And if you did,
I'd be bringing you pain
Very soon,
Respect my van.
It gave the slip
To Colonel Decker,
Plus those other Colonels
And also General Fullbright.

My van is cool,
Wish it was private.
Those other guys
Need a van of their own.
This van
Is not their van.
Murdock, that fool,
Once asked to drive it.
Asking me that,
He deserved to be thrown
To the moon.
Lay off my van.
We can outrace
The Dukes of Hazzard,
Then we'll beat the Bandit,
And maybe Buford Justice.

MRS. LOVETT (countermelody)
It is indeed, Mr. T,
If your teammates need, Mr. T,
Speed, Mr. T,
A van of their own
Ain't as good.
Hannibal would wilt in a Pontiac.
Murdock's wacked out, Mr. T,
You were right to shout, Mr. T,
That he deserved to be thrown
To the moon.
Wish you would.
And them Dukes
Haven't a chance with you
And your custom GMC,
Mr. T.

(Mr. T finishes his repairs.)

MR. T: At last I can drive to the youth center again!

Compare and Contrast

In the comments to my Miller-Boyett post, asks about how Full House was re-tooled before it aired. I don't know much about it, but Wikipedia says that the original idea was for the three guys to be comedians. And there was an unaired pilot with a different actor whom Bob Saget was brought in to replace. And I recall reading that there was an even earlier version of the pilot script by different writers (MTM refugees and Who's the Boss? creators Blake Hunter and Martin Cohan) that didn't get used.

Anyway, one thing I forgot to mention about Miller-Boyett shows was that they all had insanely long opening sequences with uplifting theme songs. Once the Laverne and Shirley theme became a hit, no matter how farcical the show was, the song always had to be some huge inspirational thing about standing tall on the wings of the family everywhere you look, because out of the blue the sweet insanity will come to you. But when they re-tooled the show, they'd always go back and shoot new footage for the title sequence and re-tool that as well. Observe:

Angie, season 1:



In season 2, the setting is different and a character has been dropped, so most of the characters are brought back to the location in Philadelphia to shoot outdoor footage -- I guess the theory being that if they change the setting again, they won't have to re-shoot footage of people eating hot dogs outdoors. Also, the first season executive producer is already gone. And the song has been remixed.



Perfect Strangers season 1, when they were working at a crummy job, focuses mostly on how two guys both came to Chicago pursuing a dream and nothing's gonna stand in their way, even if they have to work a crummy job, yada yada.



And then the opening credits everybody remembers, which are almost entirely about how awesome these guys lives are and how successful they are (they get to go to ball games, run around in revolving doors, and just generally live in Chicago the way Ferris Bueller lived for only one day).

Licensees

DVD releases of older TV shows and movies are slowly winding down; with DVDs not selling as much as they used to, there are a lot of shows and movies that aren't going to get out of the vaults. One hopes that some studios will take the obvious step of licensing out the titles they don't want to release. That's what Universal seems to be doing. Criterion will be releasing Ernst Lubitsch's early '30s musicals with Maurice Chevalier -- made for Paramount but owned by Universal -- in its low-budget Eclipse line. And Universal has slowly started letting Hart Sharp Video have some old TV titles for its "TV Guide Presents" line, first Banacek and now, glory of glories, the syndicated seasons of Charles in Charge. I hope this becomes a trend; we're not going to see big-studio releases of obscure old movies and cheesy '80s TV shows, so why not let small companies have them?

Jane Wyman

The Yahoo headline for her obituary calls her "Ronald Reagan's first wife," which makes me wince a little, because she deserves to be remembered for much more than that. She was a fine actress in every genre, an Oscar winner for Johnny Belinda, a fine singer who didn't do nearly enough musicals. Her movies with director Douglas Sirk, star Rock Hudson and producer Ross Hunter, Magnficent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows, almost single-handedly re-invented the "woman's picture" and re-defined an entire studio (Universal would spend the next decade and a half making movies like this). And she introduced herself to a new generation on a prime-time '80s soap, Falcon Crest.

Here she is with Bing Crosby introducing the Oscar-winning "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening":



And here's her solo number from her second movie with Crosby, Just For You:

The Retoolers

I happened upon this 199 Time Magazine article about the Urkel phenomenon, and what caught my eye was this passage about the producers of the show, Miller-Boyett productions (originally Miller-Milkis-Boyett), the producers of some of the cheesiest and most popular "family" sitcoms ever. Explaining their method, the author writes:

But they have gained a reputation in TV circles as expert fix-it men, skilled at tinkering with shows and playing up the elements that work. Their legendary success was boosting the role of Fonzie, the greaser with a heart of gold, in Happy Days. "Basically, the concept of a show is merely a vehicle to get it launched," says Boyett. "What keeps it going is the ability to present characters people want to follow."

That reminds me that these guys -- whose shows were usually evil but phenomenally successful -- could write a book on how to re-tool a sitcom: almost every show they were ever involved with was substantially re-tooled in the middle of its run, sometimes several times. Like their mentor Garry Marshall, they didn't do the whole artistic-integrity thing and would basically do anything to keep a show on the air, whether it was bowing to network demands, playing up any character who became popular, or changing the setting. Let's look at some of the shows produced by Miller-Boyett or some variant thereof (Miller-Milkis, Miller-Milkis-Boyett -- basically, Miller, a former assistant to Billy Wilder, was the constant factor in all this):

- Happy Days: one of the most famous and successful (commercially anyway) re-toolings ever. Then it was re-tooled several times to adjust for the departure of Ron Howard and the departure/return of Joanie and Chachi.

- Laverne and Shirley: they moved the whole show from Milwaukee (Miller was from Milwaukee and it was presumably his idea to set these shows there) to Hollywood, then did it for a year without Shirley (or Lenny).

- Mork and Mindy: Completely overhauled in its second season.

- Angie: this was one of the few older-demographic comedies this team did (Bosom Buddies, which underwent a mild second-season re-tool, was another). Since all their shows were attempts to cash in on the success of something else, I suspect that this was done in response to the launch of ABC/Paramount's Taxi, which briefly made it OK for the network to do smart adult comedies. Then Taxi's ratings tanked and they abandoned that pretty quickly. Anyway, despite a successful first season, Angie had a new setting and had dropped some characters by the time the second season started.

- Perfect Strangers: early on, Larry and Balki were working for a mean shop owner played by Ernie Sabella. In the third season, they were working a big glamorous Chicago paper. Apparently the producers had decided that people didn't want to see the characters working a depressing dead-end job like Laverne and Shirley; this was the '80s and audiences wanted successful people.

- The Hogan Family: one of the most notorious and publicized re-toolings of the '80s, started as a show with Valerie Harper and wound up as a show about Sandy Duncan.

- Going Places: a show I never saw, but which according to the linked article had the characters change jobs/settings in the middle of its short run.

- Family Matters: the focus of the Time article that started this post; it starts off as a Perfect Strangers spinoff and suddenly it's a show about Urkel, whom the producers embraced just as they once embraced the Fonz.

Just about the only show on that list that didn't get heavily re-tooled was Full House, and even that got changed a lot before it first aired (change of premise, and an unused pilot with a different actor).

I don't have much to say to sum up, except that Tom Miller and co. are a test case for what producers can accomplish if they don't really care what their shows were originally supposed to be about. If they throw the whole integrity and plausibility notion aside and just rejigger every show to emphasize whatever the public likes at a given point, they can actually be pretty darn successful. Frightening, but successful.

Choose Your "A-Ford" Pun

Dave Kehr, who first broke the news about Fox's upcoming Ford At Fox box, now has all the information about the set, contents and special features. It doesn't have all of Ford's Fox movies -- some of the surviving silents are missing -- but it does have 24 movies, some of Ford's wartime documentary work, and a new feature-length documentary. The official studio release is here.

Everybody will have an oddball favorite among the movies that haven't been previously released on DVD. Mine is Tobacco Road. Yes, it's a sanitized version of the book and play, but it's like a satire of The Grapes of Wrath by the same people who made that film (Ford, producer Darryl Zanuck and writer Nunnally Johnson) -- the dark side of the people that they were sentimentalizing the year before.

Now, given the price of the set, how many reviews will include some variant of: "Get it if you can a-Ford it?"

Little Rich

After all the Richie Rich bashing, I should give equal time to Jerry Beck, who has compiled some stories from the early, "cool" Richie Rich.

Leslie Cabarga and I spent the summer mining the Harvey Comics vaults and cherry-picked the best of the original Richie Rich comics of the 50s and 60s for a new trade paperback volume due out next month. This is the second of several high quality Harvey Comics reprint books we are compiling for Dark Horse.

I don't know, though. Those early stories were certainly better drawn than the ones I grew up with, but they still have the problem of pretending that Richie, a privileged little snot, is some kind of hero. I mean look at that sample Jerry posts. Richie's beating up some poor underprivileged schmuck. I know that guy is probably a "crook" (in Richie-speak), but maybe he wouldn't have to steal if Richie would give him some money and a decent meal instead of breaking his bones.

Update: Commenter Andrew asks: "Out of curiosity, Jaime, do you feel the same way whenever Uncle Scrooge thwarts the Beagle Boys et al?" First of all, I didn't mean the above with absolute seriousness, or indeed any seriousness at all. In other words, no, I don't think that the "crooks" in the Richieverse are in fact tragic victims of society.

But I should probably clarify that I don't actually have a Marxist attitude toward fictional millionaires. I do not begrudge Scrooge McDuck, nor Bruce Wayne their tremendous wealth. I'm not even all that bothered when Daddy Warbucks does The Full Benito and has his goons take criminals out back to be executed. But Bruce Wayne has other qualities to offer besides wealth, Daddy Warbucks isn't the star of the strip, and Scrooge is a funny miser. Richie's like Scrooge if we were supposed to admire him for no other reason than being an insane miser who likes to keep piles of cash in his house. So, no, he's not an evil capitalist exploiter of the martyred proletariat. But he is annoying.

If you want to know what makes Richie so annoying, I can't sum it up better than this one-page gag recalled at Man vs. Clown:

PANEL 1

[Richie is walking on his estate with his asshole cousin, Reggie Van Dough. Richie's chauffeur Bascomb is working on one of the Rich family's luxury automobiles.]

Richie: Bascomb is the greatest mechanic in the world! He can make anything run!

PANEL 2

Reggie [pointing at pile of rags]: Oh yeah?! Let's see him make that pile of rags run! Haw, haw!

PANEL 3

Richie [whispering; pointing to pile of rags]: Uh, Bascomb...

Bascomb [wiping hands on rag (not from pile); steely look of determination]: I'll take care of it, Master Rich.

PANEL 4

Bascomb [sternly; hands on hips]: Excuse me, sir, but I think it's time you moved along!

Vagrant [fleeing; very tattered and filthy]: Chee! Can't a guy find a place to sleep around here?!

Reggie [flabbergasted; sweat drops flying]: A TRAMP!!!

Richie [doubled over with merriment]: Yep! And Bascomb made him run! Ha! Ha!

So, yeah. The joke is that Richie Rich kicked a homeless man off his property.

Pavarotti

Update Ken Furie, music editor for the now-defunct High Fidelity, has a post up about Conrad L. Osborne's great article "Diary of a Cavpag Madman," the definitive piece about how Pavarotti the brilliant young singer became Pavarotti the media star. He also talks about how the piece came to be published intact:

About all the credit I can claim for the "CavPag Madman" piece is giving C.L.O. the records to review--unless you count getting the thing into print, and getting it into print intact. (In fact, this was no small feat, but that's another story. Okay, if you must know, I had to threaten to quit. I knew it was a weak bargaining chip--the next time I used it, or at the latest the time after that, it was taken not as a threat but as an offer, and accepted--but this time, at least, it worked, more or less.)

I do recall talking to Conrad while he was working on the, er, "review," and being told that it was taking a strange form, which he projected would represent "either a breakthrough in criticism or the final flipping out of C.L.O." (I suggested there was no reason why it couldn't be both.)

Oddly enough, he was most prominently associated with an aria that wasn't really right for his type of voice: "Nessun Dorma" really needs a bigger, more heroic voice. But Pavarotti made that aria work for him anyway, because he used his voice very intelligently and could always figure out how to make an aria display his voice to best advantage, even if he really shouldn't have been singing it.

One piece that was perfect for his voice was the "Ingemisco" from the Verdi Requiem. One of the things that helped make him a star was his appearance in Herbert Von Karajan's La Scala film of the Requiem, with Leontyne Price, Fiorenza Cossotto, Nicolai Ghiaurov, and Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear) directing the cameras. Pavarotti was a last-minute replacement for Carlo Bergonzi, and this film -- along with the commercial recording of the Requiem he made in Vienna that year with Georg Solti -- was a huge boost for his reputation.

"I gaze upon the glory of THE PRICE IS RIGHT and I see the face of America, and it is divine. Plus, you know, hot chicks on sports cars." -- Barney

I'm glad there's going to be a DVD set for The Price Is Right, but how do you pick "the 20 best episodes?" What makes a good episode of TPIR? Is it one where somebody manages to win an unusual number of fabulous prizes, like winning both showcases? Or is it a show where something silly happens, like that one where the yodeling "Cliffhanger" guy gets stuck?

Unkind Cuts

One thing I like about the DVD reviews at Sitcoms Online is that they provide timings for the episodes. (TV Shows on DVD does this too, but they don't review as many shows.) This is useful because it helps identify which episodes have had musical sequences cut, or had syndication versions included by mistake.

CBS/Paramount is the most notorious studio these days when it comes to edited releases. The Sitcoms Online reviews of some recent releases indicate that The Odd Couple Season 2 probably hasn't had any major edits (all the episodes run over 25 minutes), Sabrina the Teenage Witch Season 2 has probably had a few episodes hacked up (there are a few episodes that run 30-60 seconds shorter than the rest, which usually means that they cut a scene with someone singing a song), and Bosom Buddies Season 2, apart from the expected absence of "My Life", has a couple of musical sequences missing -- people on the message board have identified one of the missing sequences as the cast singing "Yakkity Yak." (Paramount also cut Yakkity Yak" from a couple of Happy Days episodes.)

The upshot is, if you see any favorite old show in syndication, record any episode with any musical content. You can't be sure that your favorite scene will make it onto DVD.

Also, Paul Mavis at DVD Talk shares my affection for Bosom Buddies season 2, pointing out that it was one of the first mainstream sitcoms "to incorporate the whole ironic, self-reflexive, pop-culture referencing humor then found only on Saturday Night Live or at comedy groups like Second City or The Groundlings, or in movies like Animal House and Caddyshack."

Very Uplifting

Nothing much to post today, and I hope you're out doing something instead of sitting in front of the computer. So here's the all-time greatest "signing off the air" promo, from Joe Dante's masterpiece Gremlins II.

More From the '70s

I've mentioned earlier that by the '70s, the Broadway musical was basically a director's medium: from that point on, musicals would be largely about the way they were staged and the conceptual gimmicks that the director came up with. Another part of this was that songs were increasingly written around the staging, whereas in the past, the director would build the staging around the song that was written for a particular spot.

So in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, R&H (the producers as well as the writers) would come up with a song, and leave it to the director to figure out how to execute it. Joshua Logan, the director and co-writer of South Pacific, had to come up with physical gimmicks to maintain interest during a song -- like having Liat act out the lyrics of "Happy Talk" while her mother sings the song -- but what he didn't do was come up with a stage picture and ask the songwriters for something to fill it.

By the late '60s and '70s, you have more and more songs whose music and lyrics are shaped by the staging, rather than vice-versa. A lot of the songs in Bob Fosse musicals are like that, with the melody shaped to fit the typical Fosse moves instead of Fosse coming up with dance moves based on the music. And Stephen Sondheim became Hal Prince's favorite songwriter, in part, because he was willing to write long numbers around Prince's stage pictures. (It's said that Sondheim didn't come up with the Act 1 finale of A Little Night Music, "A Weekend In the Country," until Prince had already blocked the whole scene.)

Here's a good example of what I mean, Sondheim's personal favorite of his songs, "Someone In a Tree" from Pacific Overtures. This is a song entirely based on a stage picture: instead of seeing the signing of the treaty of Kanagawa, we get it from the perspective of onlookers: someone who saw the whole thing from a distance when he was a ten year-old boy (but couldn't hear what they were saying), and a samurai hiding below the treaty house (who is listening in case he's summoned for backup, but can't see what's going on). We have the narrator (Mako) and the old man in the present, and the young boy and the samurai in the past, and the lighting picks out little fragments instead of showing a big scenic picture all at once. That's all built into the song, and so although the song does work on a recording, it really isn't designed to work separately from the staging. And instead of the director coming up with stage business to sell the song, the song incorporates stage business that is necessary for the scene, like the tree climbing. It is, in part, a song that expresses the director's vision.

Here's the original Broadway cast:



Speaking of Pacific Overtures, the same uploader also has the original cast doing the first number from the second act, "Please Hello" (where various Western countries come in and force Japan to trade with them). It's one of the weaker numbers because the music consists of lame parodies of Sousa, Gilbert and Sullivan, etc., but the lyrics may be the most intricately-rhymed of all time.

Little Octagon

Brian Hughes at "Again With Comics" has posted "Playful Obsession," Dan Clowes' vicious parody of Harvey Comics. (this link comes via a comment by Anthony Strand.)

It's all there, with the characters changed enough so he doesn't get sued. The main target, of course, is the way all the Harvey Comics kids have unhealthy obsessions, and the way these comics portrayed money-fixation, dot-mania and compulsive overeating as positive things. (If you read "Little Lotta" you'd swear that overeating gives you superhuman strength.)

And I particularly appreciate the fact that Clowes makes a reference the way Richie flaunted his wealth in front of his pauper friends Freckles and Peewee, and did nothing to help them out of their crippling poverty.

What the '70s Called a Hit Musical

I noticed that someone has uploaded excerpts from the biggest hit musical of 1970, Applause, a musical version of All About Eve starring Lauren Bacall. This is probably my least favorite hit musical, certainly my least favorite from before the '80s. (And even Cats doesn't annoy me as much.) The Broadway musical was on life support by 1970, with the collapse of Broadway-style music in the pop market -- which meant that most musicals, even successful ones, didn't have hit songs to help market them. And so a lot of shows were increasingly coming to rely on production gimmicks. Some directors, like Hal Prince, went for big conceptual ideas, and others, like Applause director-choreographer Ron Field, just tried to throw everything at the audience to keep them entertained.

When this worked, it worked fine; it had worked in Cabaret -- a Prince production that Field had choreographed -- where Field's imaginative, movement-filled musical numbers were a highlight. (Everyone who saw the original version of Cabaret -- which is, by the way, far superior to the movie or any of the revised versions -- recalls that Field's "The Telephone Number" was the hit of the whole show.) But it was an approach that could make a show more about the staging than about the songs or performances. And what bugs me about Applause is that Field seems to have so busy coming up with gimmicks that he let the show fall apart creatively.

The talent was there: Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (Bye Bye Birdie) wrote the songs, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green were brought in to write the book (after an earlier script was thrown out). But Comden and Green's book doesn't have a funny line in it. (They were not able to use the All About Eve lines, because they didn't initially have the rights to the movie script, but their dialogue is shockingly witless for the people who wrote Singin' in the Rain.) And many of Strouse and Adams' songs are mediocre -- like a really stupid song called "Fasten Your Seat Belts" -- and the ones that are good are wrecked by the bad pseudo-hip orchestrations of the veteran Philip J. Lang.

So it was a good idea for a musical that was turned into a really poorly written musical, and nobody seemed to care because of a) Lauren Bacall, who overplayed entertainingly, and b) Field's relentless staging, which sort of beat the audience into submission. But the performances were basically terrible; everybody was encouraged to overact and oversell every single line or bit of business. It's the kind of loud, annoying, cartoonish faux-entertainment that gives Broadway musicals a bad name.

Here's an example of how Applause wrecked what is actually a pretty good song -- the title song, which could have been a rather sweet tribute to the joy of performing and instead becomes a monstrous thing led by a vocally-overstretched Bonnie Franklin (One Day at a Time).



Making a slightly better case for the show, from a TV version (there never was a movie), is Bacall's number "But Alive." The staging is kind of wearying too, and the arrangement is early-'70s crass, but at least it's entertaining. Bacall didn't have much of a voice, but she did know how to make the most of a number.

Haw, Haw! Or, Things That Suck: Jackie Jokers

I already touched on this a bit in my anti-Richie Rich screed, but Mister Kitty's "Stupid Comics" has has a great overview of Richie Rich's most annoying friend, Jackie Jokers.

Actually, he started out with his own comic, something I wasn't aware of as a kid (because I encountered him in the Richie Rich digests); his solo title failed, so it became "Richie Rich and Jackie Jokers." I agree with everyone that there's something deeply weird about a little kid working as a Borscht Belt comedian, especially when his look-alike father seems to have pushed him into it -- don't they have child labor laws?

And yet as a child, I kind of liked the Jackie Jokers stuff, even though I knew even then that the writing wasn't any good and that Jackie's jokes were terrible. (It really was an indication of how little respect Harvey Comics had for kids that they thought we'd believe Jackie was a great comedian, even though he never had a funny joke.) I probably liked them because they were the only stories in those digests that took the focus off a) Richie's disgusting wealth and b) Richie preventing desperate, hungry people from stealing anything from his vast wealth.

So in addition to the stories mentioned on that page, I remember Richie and Jackie writing a script for a sci-fi comedy (Reggie Van Dough tried to steal it, but they fixed him), which consisted entirely of bad puns:

FUTURE JACKIE: Can I borrow your spaceship, Richie? I want to be a star on some star!

FUTURE RICHIE: How star-tling!

Okay, that doesn't even rise to the level of a bad pun.

There was also this story that featured a second show-biz kid, "Kool Katz" the musician with an overbearing Jewish mother. In this story, Kool's "Mama" had written a play called "Boy in the Big House," which she thought was a drama but everyone mistook it for a comedy. Richie produced it on Broadway with Jackie as the star, and it became a huge hit as a comedy, and Mama accepted it when she realized it was a hit.

BOY IN THE BIG HOUSE: Oh, what a fate, to be the Boy in the Big House! If only I had listened to my Mama and worn a sweater on windy days, this wouldn't have happened to me!

At least the dialogue was better than in Richie and Jackie's frickin' script.

And yes, I remember those movie and TV parodies with Jackie. I remember "Carry" (Jackie is forced by everyone to "carry" their books, until he uses his telekinetic powers to get even). I remember "Shirley and Laverne," a parody of "Laverne and Shirley." (Worst title parody ever.) And I remember "Sez-a-Who Street," featuring the Comic Book Monster, who ended the story by eating the whole comic book.

Yes, I screwed up my childhood, and all because I had nothing better to read on bus rides and boring assemblies.

If you can stand more of this, Scott Shaw! reviews a Jackie Jokers issue where Jackie meets Nixon and Kissinger.

Obscure Musicals: The Grass Harp

One of those flop musicals that is sacred to hard-core Broadway fanatics is The Grass Harp. This is a 1971 musical based on the novel by Truman Capote, about a dotty spinster who runs away from her sister's house and goes to live in a treehouse rather than allow her sister to market her miracle dropsy cure. That's an over-simplified summary, of course, but it gives you an idea of what the story is like: a very delicate, whimsical fable about eccentric people. The musical adaptation, which ran only a week, was further proof that whimsy and delicacy rarely succeed on Broadway.

The book and lyrics were by playwright and poet Kenward Elmslie, who was the significant other of the late, great John LaTouche. His theatre work is similar to LaTouche's in that he tries to create a fusion of high and low -- to bring poetry and highbrow experimentation to Broadway while still keeping that Broadway pizazz. He's not nearly as good a lyricist as LaTouche was, though, and while some of the lyrics for Grass Harp are very beautiful, others are a little clumsy or drab. The music was by Claibe Richardson, who died in 2003.

This 2002 interview with Elmslie gives some background on The Grass Harp, as does this online chat from 2003. It was originally produced in Providence, Rhode Island, with a cast that included Barbara Baxley from She Loves Me and Elaine Stritch as the evangelist Baby Love. For the Broadway production, the show managed to pull together an even better cast including Barbara Cook, Max Showalter (the creepy father from the movie Lord Love a Duck), and the great contralto Carol Brice, who was equally comfortable on Broadway and in the opera house. Celeste Holm, who was originally supposed to play Cook's part, was then cast as Baby Love, but she quit the show out of town because her part was too small, and was replaced with Karen Morrow -- a good thing too, because while Holm was an excellent actress she didn't have enough of a voice for the very difficult music that had been written for the character (more on that later).

With the high-powered singing voices of Cook, Brice and Morrow in the production, it was decided to do the show without amplification; it was the last Broadway musical that didn't use microphones. (Not that everyone agreed with this. Capote's last word of advice to Elmslie after he looked at the show was "Mike it.") Several of the best numbers have the kind of sound you only hear in un-miked musicals: starting soft, building to a big vocal climax, orchestration deliberately thinned out during the vocal portions so the singer can always be heard. Even though some of the music has a contemporary sound -- some of the weaker songs are reminiscent of Burt Bacharach or the music for Company (a show from the previous year) -- much of it is in a very old-school style that feels like Rodgers and Hammerstein. Brice's first song, "If There's Love Enough," is a song of homespun wisdom that's sort of like a Capote-ized version of "Climb Every Mountain," and it's a great song. (Note: to include audio clips in this post I've uploaded the audio files to Daily Motion; click on the embedded video to hear the song, but there's no actual video except a caption identifying the song.)

There were many other superb songs in the piece, including almost all of Cook's numbers; there were also some pretty good comedy songs, like Brice's "Marry With Me (Love, Bill)." Although the show flopped, Elmslie and Richardson arranged with their mutual friend Ben Bagley to record it: to save money, orchestrator Jonathan Tunick went to Europe and recorded the orchestral tracks there (the union rates were lower) and the cast added their vocal tracks back in New York; Bagley released the album on his label Painted Smiles, and it became a cult classic. It was Cook's last Broadway musical; tired of appearing in one cult flop after another, she concentrated on concert performances after that.

Like all flop shows with great songs, the problems were blamed on the book. And it's hard to deny that the story is maybe just too whimsical to be a musical; several other Capote musicals have had the same trouble, finding themselves unable to work up the kind of raw energy that a story needs to sustain a bunch of musical numbers. (Capote's own House of Flowers was one of the great cult flops of the '50s, and a musical version of Breakfast At Tiffany's starring Mary Tyler Moore was such a disaster that it got rewritten by Edward Albee and then closed out of town.) But there was another problem apart from all the whimsy, which is that the audience didn't have a very clear rooting interest. The focus of the musical is on Dolly (Cook), a slightly nutty old maid; her behavior is supposed to be saintly, but it can come off as annoying. And so while "Chain of Love" -- whose opening lines are taken directly from Capote -- is a beautiful song, perfect for Cook's voice, it's one of the few moments in the score or the show that makes us feel any real emotional attachment to the character, and it comes too late in the first act to make us really care about her.

And then there's the problem that often comes up in adaptations of novels: what to do with the narrator? The narrator, and sort of the main character, of The Grass Harp is Collin, the orphaned teenage boy who's been sent to live with the two sisters (the good Dolly and the greedy Verena). But take him out of the novel and he doesn't really do a whole lot. So Collin (Russ Thacker) is a weak presence in the musical and his songs are the worst in the whole show; his first number, "Floozies," is proof of why it's a bad idea to write a peurile number to reflect a character's peurile sentiments. And coming so early in the show -- it's the second number -- "Floozies" may have helped turn people off the whole evening:

Elmslie and Richardson worked on some other projects, including a musical about Lola Montez, but I don't think any of them got to Broadway. (Bagley recorded some songs from Lola on Painted Smiles, and released a few of them as bonus tracks on a CD of The Grass Harp.) Elmslie has concentrated mostly on his poetry, but to many people he'll always be best known for that handful of great songs from The Grass Harp, and for creating one of the last showcases for great old-school un-amplified Broadway singing. Including one of the longest "belt" numbers in musical theatre history, "Baby Love's Miracle Show" -- a number that lasts a full twelve minutes and where Karen Morrow hardly ever gets a break from singing. It's also, of course, a number in the great Broadway tradition of fake gospel numbers, starting with "Blow Gabriel Blow" and going through "The Lord Done Fixed Up My Soul" and "Brotherhood of Man" and many others.

My Intercostal Clavicle

I'm sure a lot of you have already seen the panels from this famous 1951 Batman comic story (also reproduced at Superdickery and many other places). The thing I wonder after reading it, though, is whether Bill Finger could really have been using "boner" over and over again without any double meaning, even in 1951.

I think that when this story is discussed it's usually assumed that "boner" just means a particularly stupid mistake, and that nobody could have known what it would eventually mean. But the use of "boner" or "bone" as a double entendre wasn't exactly unheard of before that. Think of Bringing Up Baby a movie from 1938, that gets a huge amount of mileage from obviously very deliberate double entendres around the word "bone." (Cary Grant is first seen holding a dinosaur bone and saying "I think this must belong in the tail." That's not accidentally funny; that's deliberate.) So while I may be totally wrong on this, I don't think it's far-fetched to imagine that "boner" already had a sort of secret meaning by 1951, even if it wasn't generally known. It's sort of like -- and again, you can see this in Bringing Up Baby -- the way the secret meaning of "gay" was hinted at in song lyrics and movies for decades before it went into general public use.

Another one I've always wondered about is from Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial By Jury:

DEFENDANT: Is this the Court of the Exchequer?

CHORUS: It is!

DEFENDANT (aside): Be firm, be firm, my pecker.

This is a huge problem for anyone producing Trial By Jury now, but at the time it was a reference to the old saying "keep your pecker up," with "pecker" meaning "heart." On the other hand, this was W.S. Gilbert, a writer who once had a female character say (in the play Engaged) "what have I in common with tarts?" (She is referring, or thinks she's referring, to the pastries.) So I've never been quite convinced that there wasn't some kind of early, dirty meaning of "pecker" that he might have been aware of.

Alternate TV Universe: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Sort of like a "grudge match I'd like to see," except instead of imagining a fight, we ask what would happen if a TV show were done with a few minor tweaks:

Scenario: The show Buffy the Vampire Slayer has the same setup we're familiar with: an ordinary girl named Buffy discovers that she is the Chosen One with the power to fight vampires and other monsters. She protects the town from evil under the guidance of her British Watcher. The only difference is that Buffy is Buffy Patterson from Family Affair, and her Watcher is Mr. French, who was placed with Uncle Bill by the Watcher's Council for the express purpose of guiding Buffy to her destiny.

Can Buffy protect New York from vampires? How will Jody, Uncle Bill and Cissy deal with being the new Scooby Gang? Speculation welcome.

First Looney Tunes Reference

Earlier I wrote that a scene from Kitten With a Whip (1964) was "one of the first references to Warner Brothers cartoons in a non-WB movie." I'd forgotten about the ending of the 1958 Paramount production The Geisha Boy:



Of course since Frank Tashlin wrote and directed this movie, you could argue that this is more of a Looney Tunes insider reference than anything else. But still, it might be the first time that Looney Tunes cartoons were referred to as a general cultural reference instead of Warner Brothers plugging itself (e.g. My Dream is Yours).

Jerry Lewis's delivery of the Porky Pig line isn't all that good, by the way. He doesn't seem to realize that he's not supposed to stutter on "folks."

Screw The Director's Vision

Finally I can embed a clip (poor quality, but at least it's there) of the original version of the opening shot of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. The only version of Touch of Evil currently available on home video is the version that was created after the death of everyone who made the picture, to conform to the vision that Welles outlined in a memo to Universal. The most obvious change, besides the removal of scenes that weren't shot by Welles, is that the opening credits are removed from the famous opening tracking shot; Welles didn't want any credits over the shot, and he didn't want any music in the film other than "source" music (Henry Mancini's score is mostly heard from distant radios). The released version runs the credits over the shot, and has loud opening-credits type music. So it's not at all what Welles wanted.

The thing is, I can't bring myself to care that much what Welles wanted here. I find that the revised version, without the credits and the blaring theme music, is kind of dull. Yes, it's an amazing shot, but that doesn't justify holding on a shot of people walking down the street for such a long time, particularly when the audience hasn't been clued into what's going on. I know that the theory is that we're all supposed to be in suspense about when the bomb is going to go off, but I think that it's hard for the scene to build suspense when we have no reason to care if these people get blown up or not; the movie's only just started. So I think the studio had it right: the movie doesn't truly begin until the characters start talking and we get a sense of who they are, and that's indicated by putting the credits over the first part of the shot.

I also don't agree with the idea that Welles's intentions are the final word on a movie like Touch of Evil. Yes, Welles wrote, directed and starred in it, and it's unquestionably his movie. On the other hand he didn't produce it, and the producer, Albert Zugsmith, wasn't just there to raise the money; the project was his idea (he brought in Welles to rewrite and direct it, at Charlton Heston's suggestion), and he had his own style as a producer; Touch of Evil is very much a Zugsmith movie as well as a Welles movie, even if Zugsmith's career was less distinguished overall.

The credits sequence of Touch of Evil is similar to that of Zugsmith's production Written On the Wind, where we get the credits over an opening sequence where we're not completely sure what's going on (it's explained much later in the movie). Zugsmith did the same thing in Touch of Evil: run the credits over the first minute or two where the audience doesn't know what's going on, so they won't start scratching their heads in confusion; the "official" beginning of the movie comes when the credits end and we get into the part that's easier to follow. If this is the producer's movie as well as the director's -- and it is -- then I don't see why the producer's decisions are less legitimate. Particularly since Zugsmith was probably more in charge of the post-production than Welles was.

I feel the same way about the additional non-Welles scenes, some of which I think are effective and useful. This isn't something like The Magnificent Ambersons, where Welles was the producer as well and the decision to re-cut was entirely made by people who had no creative involvement with the film. This was a movie with a strong director and a strong producer, and where the producer won out, I think his decisions are worthy of respect.

In fairness to the people who put together this version, I don't think they intended it to replace the other versions of the film (the original 96-minute cut and the 108-minute reissue, both of which contain scenes that Welles didn't direct). It's not their fault that Universal hasn't bothered to release a DVD of the other versions.

Anyway, here's the version currently available:



And here's the version that was actually released, with the opening credits running over the shot:



Update: It occurs to me that I'm assuming, in this post, that most of the changes/reshoots were the idea of the producer. It's possible, of course, that some of them were suggested by the studio. But it's hard to say because the things I've read about Touch of Evil don't seem to make any distinction between "the producer" and "the studio."

More Depressing TV Intros

- How could I forget about the intro for the Coy and Vance episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard? Apparently the producers thought that if they showed both new guys with their shirts off, we'd hate them less. We didn't.



- Another milestone in TV opening sequences that are really anguished cries for help: "Golden Palace."



- Season 8 of "Diff'rent Strokes" reminds us that when shows have suffered major cast departures and are completely exhausted, they will a) Re-record the theme song in a "hipper" arrangement and b) Create a new title sequence where we see how much the characters have grown up. (They think that by showing old clips of Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges, we'll feel a sense of how far we've come with these characters. They don't realize that all we're thinking is "these guys are too old for this schtick.")



- "The New WKRP in Cincinnati," a direct-to-syndication mediocrity. Hard to say which is more gloom-inducing: the shots of the three original cast members, or the shots of the five new cast members that nobody liked.

The Magic Man

Of all the dozens of different versions (with different lyrics) of the Marineland commercial, this mid-'90s one may be my favorite, because of the shot of the Marineland mascot, King Waldorf. Also known as "the guy in the giant walrus costume," and referred to in the lyrics as a "magic man." As a YouTube commentator asks: "Is he the king of Canada?"

You Put Your Down Down And Thrust Your Pelvis!

Over at t'other blog I have a post about Duckman, one of those '90s shows that inspired a considerable cult following on the internet but seems to be pretty much forgotten today. (And there's no sign of a DVD release.) It's too bad, because while this show was not the best-looking prime-time cartoon, it was often very funny, and its combination of animated sitcom and pitch-dark bad-taste satire was more successful than later shows that tried to do the same thing.

I actually think the best episodes of the run came from the last couple of seasons, where the show lightened up a little at the behest of the network -- in the final season they even added a "nice" character, Bernice's long-lost sister Beverly, to make the family more palatable -- and it was more relaxed and funny. But there were a lot of very good episodes in its 70-episode run.

While there's no DVD, DailyMotion has a bunch of full episodes, and YouTube has some more. Unfortunately they don't seem to have my favorite, "Crime, Punishment, War, Peace, and the Idiot," a parody of Russian epic literature (where the flatulent, comatose Grandma-ma recalls her marriage to the Duckman-like cad Trigorin).

By the way, one of the most prolific writers for the show, Michael Markowitz (he wrote, among many other episodes, the series finale which deliberately ended on a cliffhanger that was never resolved or explained), has his own blog, "Should Have Asked Me."

Depressing TV Intros

Not only can TV title sequences get you in the mood for a show, they can also be unbelievably depressing when they accompany a show that has Jumped the Shark™. Has there ever been a title sequence more soul-crushing to watch than the final season of Laverne and Shirley, when Shirley was gone, Lenny had abandoned Squiggy (to make This is Spinal Tap) and they had to bring in a bunch of kids just to do the "Schlemiel, Schlemazl" bit? Particularly sad is the shot that accompanies the now-inaccurate title -- Laverne dancing with two versions of herself, just to make it look like the show is still about more than one person.



Or how about the last seson of The A-Team? The new arrangement of the theme song -- which sounds like a very early version of a custom cell phone ring -- practically screams "we've been re-tooled in a desperate attempt to revive a show that should have been canceled two years ago."



And once the opening voice-over of Charlie's Angels contained the line "Two of them graduated from the police academy, the other graduated from a top school for models," you knew it was over, even if Aaron Spelling didn't.

John From...

With the cancellation of John From Cincinnati, someone came up with the inevitable "John From WKRP in Cincinnati" mashup, but it doesn't do much more than combine clips from the two shows. I decided, for the heck of it, to try and come up with something that actually makes it look like Dr. Johnny Fever was the star of a David Milch production:

Silence!

While the cartoons on the "Woody Woodpecker" DVD set are uneven (I think the Lantz studio's best work may have been outside their most famous series), they have a lot to offer up until the third disc, when, all of a sudden, Woody turns into a silent character. Starting with "Puny Express" and continuing through the rest of the early '50s Woody cartoons on the set, Woody never says anything, and neither does anybody else; the only "dialogue" is Woody's famous laugh.

This GAC Forums thread explains why. Lantz discovered that his cartoons weren't being shown overseas because it was too expensive to dub them into foreign languages, so for several years he made cartoons without dialogue, which could then be shown in any foreign markets. He abandoned this eventually, but it really is jarring to see a familiar character suddenly lose his voice, and I wonder what English-speaking audience thought of it.

The Other Walt

Looking at Thad's animator breakdown of the Lantz cartoon "Abou Ben Boogie" (directed by Shamus Culhane), I was interested to note that when Art Davis became a director at Warner Brothers, his staff had a number of Lantz people on it, including three who worked on this cartoon: background man Phil De Guard, and animators Don Williams and Emery Hawkins. And Williams and Hawkins had both animated for Disney before going to Lantz, which meant that Davis was working with three ex-Disney animators in his unit: Williams, Hawkins and Bill Melendez.

That may explain why the animation in Davis's cartoons has a slightly different feel from the animation in the other units -- a bit less "solid," less based on precise movements and more on animating the entire body. A cartoon like "What Makes Daffy Duck" sometimes feels like a WB-ized version of the style of Disney or Lantz (whose studio tried to do Disney-style animation on a lower budget).

Surprisingly Good Series Finales

The CTS channel (sort of a local cross between Christian broadcasting and an old sitcom rerun channel) ran the series finale of "Happy Days" recently. One thing that always surprised me about that finale is that it was actually pretty good. There was really no reason why a show that more or less sold its soul back in 1976 should have gone out with a good episode, but having Fonzie adopt a son and Joanie marry Charles in Charge was a decent way to end the series.

And Tom Bosley's speech at the very end, despite the treacly music, is kind of sweet and simple; it's about the characters but it's also about the pleasure we get from following the lives of TV characters -- something that becomes explicit when he breaks the fourth wall and thanks us for "being part of our family." It's almost enough to make you forgive them for Pinky Tuscadero, Ted McGinley, Crystal Bernard, Mork, the shark jump and various incarnations of Linda Purl. Not quite enough, but almost.

Also, it's only after watching this scene for a second time that you start to ask an important question about the speech: "Two children?" "Both of our children?" What happened to Chuck? Well, Tom Bosley asked the same question in a famous outtake from this scene, where he says "Chuck? Where's Chuck?"

Any other shows you can think of that had better series finales than you might have expected?

Let's Kick This Hick Town Into High!

Revisiting musical films by George Sidney has given me a new appreciation for a film I didn't use to like much, Bye Bye Birdie.

The reason I didn't like it is simple: I love the stage musical, and as an adaptation of the stage show, the film is a travesty. The story was rewritten from a gentle satire to a bizarre cartoon (complete with wacky cartoony climax); some of the best songs were dropped or rewritten; Janet Leigh was both miscast and wasted; Ann-Margret was playing herself instead of the character and Sidney unbalanced the whole production by giving her extra material (including a title song that wasn't in the play). Also, Johnny Green's orchestrations -- brash, vulgar and loud -- are jarring to those of us who think Robert Ginzler's flute-heavy Broadway arrangements are among the greatest in Broadway history.

All of that is still true, but when I return to the film version and evaluate it on its own terms, I think it has to rank as one of the better movie musicals of the '60s. Everything about it is garish and vulgar, but that's what makes it a George Sidney film; he was one of the least tasteful of musical directors, a guy who would overload his films with loud color patterns and lighting. It's a good-natured, larger-than-life piece of escapism, whereas the original musical was actually kind of observational and even subtle. Sidney had achieved some of his biggest hits by ignoring the spirit of the source material and coming up with something completely different; Scaramouche has very little to do with the Sabatini novel, and his version of Show Boat (another movie I like a lot more than I used to) is almost unrecognizable compared to the stage play.

The odd thing about Birdie is that by the time it was made, most Broadway adaptations didn't work this way any more: now the fashion was to stick closely to the Broadway show and come up with a long musical that approximated the experience of going to a Broadway play. (West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Music Man were examples of this.) What Sidney did to Birdie would have been pretty common back when he was under contract to M-G-M; he wrecked the source material a lot less than, say, the makers of On the Town did (now there's a movie I still haven't come around on). But in 1963, such a heavy rewrite of the source material was frowned upon, and so, like Sidney's Viva Las Vegas, the film feels like a throwback to the M-G-M golden age, in both its good and bad points.

The good points include the simple point that Birdie has a vitality and unpretentiousness that most of the big, bloated movie musicals of the '60s simply didn't have. It's not a big musical, not an event; it's just fun, a showcase for the director, the choreographer, and the performers. What keeps it from being a really great movie musical is that some of the performers are wasted (Dick Van Dyke doesn't get enough to do, and was apparently unhappy at the downgrading of the part he'd played on Broadway). But when it's good, it blows you away with its inventiveness and energy the way a good movie musical should, and the way most '60s musicals didn't.

Also, you can't really blame Sidney for wanting to give Ann-Margret more to do in the picture. People often explain this decision by saying that had a crush on her, which may be true but isn't very specific; everybody had a crush on Ann-Margret at that time. There were two perfectly good reasons for throwing more of the movie to her. One is that she was really good, and deserved more opportunities to do her own thing rather than stay within the limitations of the part as written (which was intended for a very different kind of performer). And the other thing is that the original Birdie play was very much aimed at adults; the grown-ups were the focus of the story and got most of the numbers, and the kids were very much secondary. The makers of the film clearly wanted it to skew younger, and that meant giving more time to the young characters. It worked, too.

The "A Lot of Livin' To Do" number, with Onna White's choreography (she came up with that crazy arms-out, head-tilting move that runs through the whole thing) is an extravaganza of creative lighting, color, dance and music that is probably -- just as a stand-alone number -- superior to any individual number in Gower Champion's Broadway staging. Even back when I didn't like the movie, I liked this number.

First Movie With Licensed Recordings?

Oh, just one more thing (™ Columbo) about music licensing: what was the first movie that paid to use real recordings of popular music?

For many years, licensed recordings were almost never used in film (or television for that matter). If characters turned on the radio or played a record, it would usually be music that was directly written for the film by the composer. For example, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window uses only "source music" from radios, phonographs and pianos -- but nearly all of it was composed by Franz Waxman; you don't hear anyone putting on a record that actually existed. In Out of the Past, when Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer put on a record, it's a recording of the movie's main title theme by Roy Webb, which has also been played by a jazz band in another scene.

By the early '70s, with American Graffiti and other films, movies and television had changed their tune (bad pun intended); now if a record was playing in a scene, it would be a real record. In The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman and John Williams even parodied the old practice by having Williams' title song reappear as every single piece of source music in the film (including two radios playing different "recordings" of the same song); that's how out of date that practice had become.

While I'm not fond of the way pop recordings are often used in place of real soundtrack music, I think it is much, much better (though more expensive) to have real recordings whenever source music is called for. If someone is playing a record, it should be a real recording, not only for realism but because the character's choice of music tells you something about that character. But when did it become all right for studios to pay to use recordings that they didn't own?

The first movie I'm aware of that uses a clearly-identifiable popular recording (that wasn't created directly for the film) is Henry King's masterpiece Margie (1946). This movie is framed as a flashback to the '20s, and transitions from the present to the past by having Margie (Jeanne Crain) and her daughter put on "My Time Is Your Time" by Rudy Vallee. Most of the other '20s songs are performed by people in the film, but the use of "My Time Is Your Time" is more akin to what we'd expect today: a real period recording that the filmmakers paid to use.

But that's 1946, and there must be others before that. Are there? (I'm not talking about having people in the movie play or sing popular songs, like the bar pianist playing Rodgers and Hart's "The Blue Room" in The Big Sleep. I'm talking about actual recordings that had been made and released separately from the movie.)