Implausible But Fun

I just watched Hangover Square, part of a three-movie box of films by director John Brahm. (Unfortunately Fox can't seem to get the rights to release Brahm's Philip Marlowe movie The Brasher Doubloon -- the first Marlowe film with a lot of real L.A. location shooting.) Hangover Square is probably most famous as the part Laird Cregar killed himself to get; the legend is that Cregar lost a hundred pounds to play his first top-billed role, wrecked his health in the process, and died.

The movie itself is a good example of a film that's very entertaining as long as you do your damnedest not to think about the story. And I mean you have to try really hard not to think about the story, because there's something implausible or absurd at every turn. The idea of the film (based on a Patrick Hamilton novel but with the time period changed to the turn of the century, the better to re-use stuff from Brahm's previous film, The Lodger) is that Cregar is a promising young composer/pianist with a split personality; when he's stressed out and hears loud horrible noises, it causes him to black out and commit acts of violence without being fully aware of what he's doing. At the beginning of the film, we see him kill someone; when he comes to, he knows that a) He was in that area; b) Someone was killed in that area; c) There's blood on his coat. Police shrink George Sanders investigates and concludes that there is no evidence at the crime scene that could link Cregar to the murder (huh?) so Cregar puts the whole thing out of his mind even after finding the knife with which the murder was committed (why didn't Sanders find it?).

Then later in the film, when Cregar's pal Faye Marlowe is attacked from behind after an argument with Cregar, no one suspects him of having done it -- not even Marlowe, who knows about his problems. How did he get into her house and try to strangle her without anyone, including her, having any idea he was there? Why is it that the police think that a later murder couldn't have been done by Cregar, even though he's the only possible suspect, because "he doesn't act like a guilty man?" Why does Sanders take the whole movie to figure out what he could have figured out in the first twenty minutes?

None of that really matters much, because the movie has a) A good cast, including Cregar, Sanders and Linda Darnell playing another one of the slutty characters she mostly played at Fox (I guess she got the bad-girl parts while Gene Tierney got the good-girl parts); b) Some amazing camerawork from Brahm, not a great director but a very fine visual stylist; c) A score by Bernard Herrmann. So forget the plot and enjoy those elements.

In many ways this is really Herrmann's movie; as a film about a composer who writes in several different genres -- he's writing a concerto and he also writes trashy popular songs for Darnell -- it wouldn't work unless the music was good enough to justify the idea that Cregar is talented. With an efficient but less talented composer, like Fox's head of music Alfred Newman, the movie wouldn't have worked; Herrmann's big Concerto Macabre convinces you that Cregar is a good composer and works perfectly with the cutting and flashbacks and provides a psychological portrait of Cregar's character.

Note: A little bit has been cut out of the clip below; the movie itself is complete on the DVD (if rather beat-up looking in spots).

Biting the Hand that Will Someday Feed You

A commenter on the "Weird Science" DVD announcement notes:

I think that the Season 3 episode "Fly Boy" was arguably the best X-FILES parody any show did at the time.

That brings up one of my favorite bits of silly writer trivia: the guy who wrote that episode, Jeff Vlaming, was hired a few months later as a staff writer for The X-Files. Which means that an X-Files parody for a cable sitcom ("Molly, in 1959, three Soviet Georgian Yak Herders inexplicably burst into flame") was one of the last things he wrote before joining the actual X-Files.

There's at least one other case I can think of where something like this happened: Arnie Kogen, the veteran comedy writer and Mad magazine contributor, wrote a parody of Newhart for the magazine in 1983 and was hired as a writer for the retooled Newhart three years later.

There must be other instances where someone was hired for a TV show after having already done a parody of it, for a sketch show or something like that.

Deborah Kerr

I was not the world's biggest fan of Deborah Kerr. In the '50s and early '60s she was the most prestigious actress in Hollywood, the automatic choice for any Oscar-baiting film and herself an almost automatic Oscar nominee (though she didn't win any). But for that reason, a lot of her career consists of the airless, static "prestige" pictures that infested Hollywood in the post-television era. And there's something a little airless and static about some of her performances in these movies; sometimes she could seem too unspontaneous. When she played two parts that had previously been filmed by Irene Dunne -- in The King and I and An Affair to Remember -- she suffers by comparison with Dunne's naturalness and vitality.

That said, Kerr was always at least good and sometimes more than that. Her early work in British films, especially for Powell and Pressburger in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Black Narcissus, has the very liveliness and naturalness that her American work didn't have; she was by no means the first or the last English actor to do better work in her own country. (Even her best later film, The Innocents, was actually a British production with a British cast and crew.) And even in her U.S. period, she could loosen up if she had the right director; in An Affair To Remember she adapted well to Leo McCarey's trademark improv (remember her improvising "What? I don't know, I thought you said something" with Cary Grant), which a lot of serious actors -- Paul Newman, for example -- couldn't do.

Ain't Got Much To Say...

But TV Shows On DVD has a few more news items of moderate interest: Universal is getting closer to finishing The Rockford Files as they've announced a release for the fifth of the six seasons (and, for you Sopranos-o-philes, David Chase's last season with the show), and Miller/Boyett retooling buffs can check out the original dead-end jobs of Larry and Balki when WB releases the first 28 episodes of Perfect Strangers (after those first two seasons the show was re-tooled, their jobs got better and the Ernie Sabella character was dropped).

Enough Is Too Much!

I got my Looney Tunes Replacement disc today. For those who don't know what I'm talking about: disc 4 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2 had a transfer glitch that caused several cartoons to receive "interlaced" transfers, which makes them choppy and shuddery on many TVs and computer screens. They corrected it and you can get a replacement copy by calling 1-800-553-6937. Anyway, I now can watch "I Love To Singa" without it looking like crap on my TV, coincidentally just in time for a DVD set of The Jazz Singer that also includes "I Love To Singa" (since it's a cartoon takeoff on that movie).

I think this is one of those cartoons that's been elevated to historical classic status by popular opinion. The critics and animation historians rarely mentioned "I Love to Singa" as a seminal Warner Brothers cartoon, but anyone who ever watched the pre-1948 cartoons on local stations recalled "Singa" as one of the best cartoons they'd ever seen. I remember seeing it in the middle of one of those dispiriting blocks of pre-1940 Merrie Melodies, the type that gave pre-1940 cartoons a bad name (after twenty minutes of round, bouncy characters singing songs you'd never heard of, you'd long for a Daffy/Speedy cartoon). I was hooked; this was clearly an "early" cartoon yet it grabbed my attention, made me laugh and sing along, and just felt totally fresh and modern in a way that most '30s cartoons did not.

If you go through the archives of alt.animation.warner-bros you'll find that seemingly every other week there was someone writing in to ask "what's the name of that cartoon with the owl who sings 'I Love To Singa About the Moon-a...'", and of course the first episode of South Park refers to this cartoon and the song. It is, really, the first Warner Brothers cartoon that needs no historical excuses: it's not great for an early WB cartoon, or great because it broke new ground, it's just great because it never fails to be a huge hit with audiences.

As for why this cartoon grabs so many people, I think it's a cartoon that combines strong storytelling (even if the story is largely cribbed from The Jazz Singer) with a modern satirical style. It's not a gag cartoon, like most non-Disney cartoons in the '30s, and it's not a purely musical cartoon, like a lot of the Merrie Melodies; it's a story/character cartoon like "The Three Little Pigs," but with a Tex Avery edge to the humor.

Re: Carol Bruce

Following up on my previous post, someone has posted two clips of Carol Bruce in her prime as a singer:



Her sultry voice seems to have gotten raspy rather more quickly than it should have; by Do I Hear a Waltz she sounded very different, even though she was in her 40s. Her early drop to an "older"-sounding voice may have contributed to the fact that she often seemed to play characters who were older than she actually was.

I'll also note that her casting as Julie in the 1946 revival of Show Boat -- the first revival of that show -- helped change the casting of the part. It had been written for Helen Morgan, a high soprano; after 1946 it's mostly been a part for lower-voiced singers like Bruce.

"Since Rock N' Roll Went Clean"

Every so often I self-indulgently post song lyrics that I wrote and can't use anywhere else. (Not very often, though, so don't worry.) This is one I wrote for a spot in the One, Two, Three musical I wanted to write; since it took place in 1961, I thought it was worthwhile writing something about the music of 1961 -- the bland, post-'50s, pre-Beatles rock n' roll. The rhythm of this may be incomprehensible without a tune, but anyway I like some of the jokes about early '60s music, though it could use some more specific references.

----

GIRLS
Oh, tell us, Fraulein Scarlett,

What songs do you sing with your friends?
Won't you give us a list
Of the twists that you twist
And each new weave and bob
We have probably missed?
We're jealous, Fraulein Scarlett,
You know all the musical trends,
So, tell us, Fraulein Scarlett,
The rock-n'-roll music that sends.

BOYS

American music, American music rocks!
American music is full of electric shocks!
We do all the dances we see on the TV box!
Hopping in socks!

BOYS & GIRLS
We're zealous, Fraulein Scarlett,
We shake till it gives us the bends.

Rock n' roll has no shame
And it sets us aflame.

SCARLETT
But today's rock n' roll
Is a whole different game.

GIRLS & BOYS
Was ist das? Was ist los?

SCARLETT

I'm explaining it badly.
Won't you gather in close
While I try again?

GIRLS & BOYS

                  ...Gladly!

SCARLETT
America two years ago
Was in the worst of binds,
'Cause rock n' roll had seized control
Of all the teenage minds.
In sixty-one, we still have fun,
But less offensive kinds.
The army came for Elvis,
Little Richard came to Jesus,
And so we looked around and found
A softer sound to please us.


Since rock n’ roll went clean,
Since rock n’ roll went clean,
Music is preachy
But bouncy and beachy,
So everything’s peachy keen.

Oh, yeah,
Everything’s peachy keen
Since rock n’ roll went clean.

GIRL
Clean, clean, clean.
Keen, keen, keen.

SCARLETT
Since rock n' roll broke through
To something bland and new,
Kids who were shameless
Are perfectly blameless,
‘Cause rhythm became less blue.
Oh, yeah,
Dancing is less obscene
Since Rock n’ Roll went clean.

GIRLS & BOYS

Woo, woo, woo.

Doo, woo, woo.

SCARLETT
All the hits of the week
Are so pretty and meek,
Just give your baby an
Album by Fabian,
Maybe she'll kiss your cheek.
We won’t hop to a song
If the message is wrong,
So baby, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on,
But don’t come on too strong.


GIRLS
Doo-wah!


BOYS
Oo-wah!


SCARLETT
Since every single teen
Is part of a machine,
Folks like Chuck Berry
Seem terribly scary,
And probably very mean.
Oh, yeah,
That new Frankie Valli
Is right up our alley,

Which means a finale
For tall girls named Sally,
Since rock n' roll
Got more heart, less soul,
And went clean.

BOYS & GIRLS
What's become of the joys
Of your dangerous noise?

GIRLS
Rock that's not rock-like
With rhythm that's clock-like
Will never arouse the boys.

BOYS
Did the law of your land
Cause hot bands to be banned?

GIRLS and BOYS
What made this come on, come on, come on, come on, come on?

SCARLETT

You just don't understand.
We're in a different key,
More fancy and less free,
Happily turning
To high-level learning
Or golfing at Burning Tree.
Oh, yeah!


GIRL
You no longer back out
Of doing your duty,
You'll cast Wolfman Jack out
And squash Tutti Frutti.

BOY
Your dangerous hormones
Are starting to shrivel,
So singers, no more moans;
You want something civil.

SCARLETT
Oh, yeah,

Everything's peachy keen,
The bopping and hopping
Is finally stopping,
And when we're not shopping,
We're mostly do-wopping,
America's future is brighter,
'Cause music is so much politer and whiter
Since rock n’ roll went clean.

Carol Bruce

The actress and singer Carol Bruce died at age 87. She was in one of my favorite cult musicals (Do I Hear a Waltz?) and one of my favorite TV shows (WKRP in Cincinnati), so naturally I think she was great. Her singing/acting career went all the way back to the '30s, and at the age of 22 she got her big break in Irving Berlin's musical Louisiana Purchase, where she played the role that all musical comedies had: the woman who doesn't have any actual role to play in the show but is there because she has a great voice and can belt out some big numbers. (Ethel Merman got her start in parts like that, and Susan Johnson was the undisputed champ when it came to that kind of role.) She had the title song and the inevitable fake-gospel number in act 2, "The Lord Done Fixed Up My Soul." When Oscar Hammerstein assembled a young cast for his 1946 revival of Show Boat, she got the part of Julie, which Helen Morgan had played on Broadway and in the film.

Later on her voice got darker and hoarser and she put it to great use, specializing in playing sophisticated, attractive middle-aged women, like the role of Fioria in Do I Hear a Waltz?

Here is her solo number from Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965), "This Week Americans" (music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim). Playing Fioria, the worldly owner of a Venetian pensione, she welcomes her American visitors by attacking all the other nations; the character despises American provincialism but cynically plays up to it to make her guests happy. (Later in the production she attacks Americans for her latest round of English guests; this reprise isn't included here.)

And here she is on WKRP (the episode where she visits the station and gets drunk) singing "Someone to Watch Over Me":

Grudge Matches I'd Like To See: Friends vs. That '70s Show Kids

Who wins a fight between two groups of six: the FRIENDS (Ross, Chandler, Joey, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe), six young people from a popular '90s sitcom who sit around on a couch and ingest a drug (caffeine) or the kids from THAT '70S SHOW (Eric, Hyde, Kelso, Fez, Donna and Jackie), six young people from a popular '90s sitcom who sit around on a couch and ingest a drug (marijuana)?

This is a six-on-six fight, so the '70s kids don't get any help from the additional characters. Which is a good thing for the Friends, because Red Forman could crush them all single-handed.

Comrade DeCarlo Is Counterrevolutionary

Stupid Comics catches Archie comics scrubbing the very existence of Dan DeCarlo when they reissued one of his stories in 2003.

Esultate!

YouTube has some excerpts of the tenor Mario Del Monaco singing Verdi's Otello. Del Monaco was the leading Otello of his time, but his singing of this role -- probably the greatest tenor role in all of opera -- takes some getting used to.

He was an unremittingly loud singer; he had a gigantic voice and he was always trying to show it off, so he would just show up and bellow all night. The fact that he could be as loud at the end of the evening as at the beginning was part of what endeared him to audiences. But of course it makes his recorded legacy very wearying, because when you're listening at home you don't want a guy shouting at you for three hours. (Del Monaco's fans have claimed that he was better on live bootleg recordings, but he really wasn't, mostly -- it's just that the miking is more distant on those recordings and doesn't put him right in your ear all the time.) Christopher Raeburn, a producer for Del Monaco's record company Decca, said that Del Monaco always wanted to stand right next to the microphone and sing into it, and finally they had to turn off the microphone in front of him and record him with a hidden mike a few feet away. Franco Corelli, who came along and surpassed him as the most popular Italian dramatic tenor, was more willing to shade his voice or sing semi-quietly.

But while Del Monaco wouldn't be my first choice for most roles, I can see and hear why he was the great Otello of his day, and I honestly can't think of anyone since then whom I'd prefer in the part. There was one point in Otello -- the love duet at the end of act 1 -- that Del Monaco usually had trouble with (he'd often alternate between crooning and shouting). But the rest of the part calls for unremitting intensity and passion, and that's what he could bring to it. His physical acting was unsubtle (and unlike Corelli, who never sang Otello, he didn't have leading-man looks), but, again, very intense and often frightening when it needed to be.

The two singers who made the biggest impact as Otello in subsequent years were Jon Vickers and Placido Domingo. But Vickers, while certainly intense, had a tendency to over-intellectualize his performances (especially in Italian opera, where he didn't seem quite comfortable). And Domingo has never had a big enough voice for the part; he's done well with it, but out of intelligence and experience, not necessarily appropriate casting. Otello isn't really about intelligence or a reasoned approach; it's a fast-paced, ferociously intense opera and none of the characters are very smart, except Iago. (If Othello and Desdemona and Cassio weren't idiots, the whole thing would be over halfway through.) For a visceral experience, you need a native Italian singer with a huge, powerful voice and unrelenting intensity. So I appreciate Mario Del Monaco for those qualities.

One thing Del Monaco always did well was Otello's entrance arioso, which establishes Otello's heroic side in 40 seconds of very difficult music. (One thing I love about Verdi is that he can do in 30-40 seconds what would take any other composer about five minutes.) A smaller-voiced tenor can get through this music, but it takes a real dramatic tenor to really thrill the audience with it.



And, at the end of the opera, he's still loud, still intense, still unsubtle and still quite exciting:

"My Mother Didn't Raise Me to Be a Heating Pad!"

I've always liked this Peanuts strip (from 1960), because I have a soft spot for moments when authors parody their own most famous lines. In this case, it's not exactly self-parody, just sort of the other side of the coin -- if happiness for us is a warm puppy, that doesn't mean the puppy is happy.

The D.A.

I'm glad to see that someone (not me) has finally added a Wikipedia entry for TV producer Danny Arnold. Since there's already been a biography of Nat Hiken, Arnold is the TV behind-the-scenes person whom I think would be the most interesting subject for a biography, as a comedian and jack-of-all-trades showbiz guy who became a very important and influential showrunner.

A lot of his work was ahead of its time: the early episodes of Bewitched certainly were, as I've explained before on this site; his Thurber-based sitcom My World and Welcome To It was one of the great one-season wonders; his failure The Wackiest Ship in the Army (loosely based on the movie of the same name) appears to have been a pre-M*A*S*H attempt to combine service comedy with serious war drama. And then there's Barney Miller, which in many ways was one of the oddest and most iconoclastic shows ever to become a mainstream hit (and the first successful cop show where the cops were the most interesting characters). He also seems to have had a knack for improving shows he was involved with; in the years when he was running That Girl he made it into a much better show than it originally promised to be in its first season. The title "producer" of a TV show was a position that meant, or could mean, a lot of different things at that time, but Arnold made it mean something close to the modern position of showrunner, in that any show he produced would start to show aspects of his style (so his episodes of That Girl show some of the same obsessions he'd worked through in Bewitched, and I just watched a That Girl where he introduced a huge number of the cops-in-drag jokes he'd later bring to Barney Miller).

The other biography-worthy aspect of Danny Arnold was that he appears to have been somewhat rage-filled and maybe a bit nutty. Few people who worked with him seem to have been terribly fond of him as a person. Theodore Flicker, who is credited as the co-creator of Barney Miller, despised Arnold; director John Rich, who helped Barney Miller get picked up after the networks turned down its weak pilot presentation film, got into an argument with Arnold and left after two episodes. And when Rich took his name off the second episode, Arnold took the director's credit himself (is that even allowed under union rules?). His all-day, all-night rewrites on Barney Miller drove the cast to distraction and finally made it impossible to continue shooting the show in front of a live audience, because he never had the scripts ready in time. One of the few people he seems to have actively gotten along with was Marlo Thomas, and, as I've said in an earlier post, it appears that they liked each other because they were both impossible for anyone else to get along with.

Arnold's apparent breakthrough success, Barney Miller, was actually the end of the line for him; he never had another successful show. So a biography would have a clear, if slightly depressing, trajectory to it. There may not be all that much to know about the guy apart from what is mentioned here and on Wikipedia, but then again maybe there is.

Here is Arnold making a cameo on That Girl as a harried television producer.

Jungle Book Smarts

I agree with Michael Sporn that The Jungle Book is not one of the better Disney movies. It reminds me of Alice in Wonderland in that they were adapting stories that weren't truly adaptable, and so the movie became a series of vignettes with very little coherence as a whole. But whereas in Alice the vignettes are truly brilliantly animated and designed, the Xeroxed, corner-cutting look of The Jungle Book doesn't hold my attention. (The Xerox process combined with the digital monkeying of the "restored" DVD version makes it look like somebody went over the whole film with a giant eraser.)

I don't know if I can agree with him about voice acting, though:

The singers killed it. By that I mean, the character of Baloo became more Phil Harris and less Baloo the bear. Louie Prima’s King Louie was more Louis Prima than anything you’d find in the African setting. George Sanders was more of an actor than a personality, and he offered Shere Khan a character that Milt Kahl was able to build on. Sterling Holloway as Kaa was also more an actor than a personality, and he played what was asked of him. Ollie Johston was able to develop on it.

Animated features try to continue in the same vein. Voices like Robin Williams or David Spade or Eva Gabor are not going to make the animated character better. It’d be more interesting to have unknown voices that are well cast. Peter Pan, Snow White, Bambi and Cinderella. Lady & The Tramp, Alice, Pinocchio are all brilliantly cast features.

Now, it's true that many animated features go overboard with celebrity stunt casting. But I don't think that's what happened in Jungle Book, even if it did have more big-name actors than Disney's other features. All the main actors except Louis Prima are character actors, supporting players, who happened to have really distinctive voices. The casting of Phil Harris, a popular radio personality, is no different than the popular radio personalities Ed Wynn and Jerry Colonna in Alice; George Sanders may have ben better-known than Hans Conreid (Captain Hook), but Hans Conreid was stil a guy who, at the time, was better-known as an onscreen character actor than a voice actor. And when you go into later actors -- well, Robin Williams, Eva Gabor and David Spade wer all well-cast, good choices in my opinion. As are many other people who have done animation voice acting without a lot of background in voice acting.

Celebrity casting is bad when the actor becomes more important than the character, so that the animators are just animating to the actor's personality rather than finding the character. This happens: it happened when Disney re-used Phil Harris in two other movies and just recycled his Baloo character, and it happens a lot with today's non-Pixar animated movies. But there is often a good reason for casting a celebrity, because these are often people who become famous because they're good actors, or have distinctive voices. And you need good actors with distinctive voices in an animated film.

I realize and understand the objections to famous actors taking work away from full-time voice actors. But the other side of this is that many animated features require a different kind of voice acting from the kind that professional voice actors provide. A lot of cartoon voice acting is a little exaggerated and broad, because that's what's required for television and short cartoons. But to sustain that kind of acting over a whole movie can become difficult, especially when the movie has a lot of serious moments. So the ideal thing is often to find an actor with a really good voice who can use his or her own voice, or something close to it, and sound "natural" in a way that traditional cartoon voice acting is not. There's a reason why Disney usually saved the June Foray, Bill Thompson type of actors for smaller or more comic roles ("Squaw no dance! Squaw get-um firewood!") and gave the lead roles to people who might be fairly well-known but weren't necessarily animation pros (like Cliff Edwards, Walter Catlett, and other people that the audience sort of knew at the time).

Two Bunch-Related Thoughts

I did a piece on the Brady Bunch were-they-or-weren't-they-lesbians story, and it left me with two random thoughts about a show that I didn't really like that much, even as a kid, but which I respect in a weird way.

1. I'm increasingly convinced that the secret of Sherwood Schwartz's success is his ability to create shows that are, quite literally, timeless -- they don't exist in any particular time or era. Gilligan's Island is the ultimate timeless show: the jokes were considered dumb at the time and they're dumb now, but they're timeless jokes (hitting someone on the head with a coconut will always be a laugh-getter), the character types could come from any era at all. If it weren't for the occasional '60s reference you'd never be certain when it was made. The Brady Bunch is dated by the clothes and hairstyles, but otherwise it exists in a hermetic, generic world that could represent an idealized version of family life at just about any time. And all the jokes are, if fairly lame, also fairly durable.

Most show have a way of getting stuck in their own time; you watch Friends and hear a joke and immediately know, just by the way the joke is constructed and delivered, that it's from the '90s. And even shows that don't try to be timely wind up incorporating all sorts of then-current cultural trends and fears. The evil genius of Sherwood Schwartz is that he managed to create shows that are eternally irrelevant, and therefore eternally relevant.

2. I'm not the first person to notice that Eve Plumb stumbles over her line before the famous "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia" line ("All I hear at school all day long is how m... great Marcia is"). I'm always kind of glad when things like that get left in. Today, even shows that pride themselves on being semi-improvisational will not use takes where somebody is on the verge of forgetting or missing a line, but I think that as long as the actor recovers and doesn't make a full-fledged mistake, those little moments of hesitation can make a scene work better.

'90s NostalgiaPalooza!

Oh, man. "Weird Science," the TV series, comes to DVD on January 1. Fortunately it's the first two seasons (13 episodes each) together -- fortunately, because the second season was better than the first.

I've written before about why I liked the "Weird Science" show. It had a better cast than the movie, and almost everybody who wrote for it now has a job on Desperate Housewives or The Office or something like that. But most importantly, this was one of my favorite guilty-pleasure shows of the '90s and I hereby make a New Year's resolution to buy this thing. I hope it sells well enough to bring out the third season, which was the best; the fourth season, which was uneven, and the final season, which was... kind of bad.

Best line from any of the 26 episodes included in this set:


(Gary and Wyatt need to think of a plan to save themselves from their evil clones made from bubble gum.)

GARY: I've got it! Let's do that thing we did to that guy that time.
WYATT: Good plan!

(They run off together and save the day.)

BACHELOR FLAT (1962), John Williams, and So On

I recently obtained a widescreen copy of Frank Tashlin's Bachelor Flat (1962) with Terry-Thomas and Tuesday Weld. It's not on DVD and it was never on laserdisc or VHS, but apparently the Fox Movie Channel showed a widescreen print one time (I think they've reverted to showing it in fullscreen, though).

Andrew Sarris called this Tashlin's best movie, but I think it has too many flaws to live up to that billing. Tashlin complained about being forced to use Richard Beymer for an important part and about the fact that the movie was cut down too much before the release, and you can definitely see where the cuts were made (Celeste Holm's part almost disappears from the movie because her scenes all end abruptly). Tashlin turns in some weaker-than-usual gags and and borrows very heavily from other movies like his own Susan Slept Here (Tuesday Weld's juvenile-delinquent act is all borrowed from Debbie Reynolds in the earlier movie) and Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (there's an extended gag about a dog burying a dinosaur bone).

All that said, I was very glad to get a copy because a) I loved this movie when I saw it as a kid, and b) It's the last truly "Tashlinesque" Tashlin movie, the one that really feels like only he could have made it. All his other subsequent movies were either Jerry Lewis vehicles (which, since Lewis produced them, are as much his movies as Tashlin's) or work-for-hire projects for aging stars (Bob Hope, Doris Day, Danny Kaye). Bachelor Flat is a real Tashlin movie right down to the crazy fade-outs -- here and in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter, Tashlin always has the screen fade to blue or green or red instead of fading to black. And he has Tuesday Weld and Terry-Thomas, both of whom make up for Richard Beymer's miscasting. You can tick off the Tashlin elements: the bad-taste risqué jokes involving a teenage girl (Weld), the cartoony chases, the sympathetic middle-aged woman (Holm), the gag about how bad old movies look when they're shown on TV (Beymer tunes in to watch a black-and-white movie, and the screen immediately distorts).

It also is the last Tashlin movie to have one main satiric theme running through it, the way all his best movies do. Here it was, in Tashlin's words, about "The difference between us and our British cousins." The Terry-Thomas character, a prudish, reserved British professor teaching in California, unexpectedly finds himself treated as a sex symbol by women because they find his British reserve and good manners and sartorial good taste (the running gag of the film is that he constantly carries an umbrella around, even though he's in California) irresistible. The Beymer character admits that no girls are interested in him; they only want Terry-Thomas -- and the joke is that you can kind of see how this would be true, because while Beymer's character is younger and more conventionally handsome, he's also kind of a clod. Terry-Thomas for his part is just put off by American aggressiveness, and finally is convinced by Beymer that the only way to turn off American women is to become an aggressive, lecherous drunk -- that is, a typical American. It's very much of its time, of course: even two years later, post-Beatles, you couldn't have made a movie about inhibited England vs. vulgar America.

The other thing I noticed about the film was the musical score, by the young John Williams (or "Johnny" Williams as he was billed at the time). The score is described in more detail at this John Williams fan website, but it's quite an impressive score, especially for a comedy. As Terry Teachout has pointed out, comedies don't usually have particularly good scores. For many years they barely had scores at all (most sound comedies in the '30s and '40s just didn't use music except in sentimental or action scenes). And big-name composers would hardly ever work on them; at Fox, Alfred Newman almost never did comedies, and neither did his friend Bernard Herrmann; Newman usually handed comedy scores to Cyril Mockridge, who cobbled together scores based on familiar public-domain tunes. John Williams in the '60s was one of the few composers who really specialized in comedy, and his scores for movies like this or Guide For the Married Man were a lot funnier and more imaginative than most; in fact, I like his early comedy music better than most of his bombastic post-Star Wars scores.

Here's a dialogue-free scene from Bachelor Flat which is carried by Williams' music, and also contains some Hitchcockian angles (a reminder that Tashlin always wanted to do a serious thriller, but he could never put such a project together).



This next scene doesn't have any music except for what Williams referred to in "chords for cuts to brassieres," but it features one of the most Tashlinesque shots ever: a woman on a vibrator/reducing machine eating a huge piece of chocolate cake, all the contradictory American obsessions (they're health nuts and junk food addicts) rolled into one. The woman, Francesca Bellini, was an ex-dancer who was also used around this time by Jerry Lewis in The Ladies Man and by Lewis and Tashlin in Who's Minding the Store? I don't know if they had bigger plans for her, but anyway she wasn't heard from again after a few TV guest shots.



And Williams also came up with some funny music for the dog burying the dinosaur bone -- which, as you can see, is a little bigger than in Bringing Up Baby. The shot of the dog pushing the bone across the beach was, Tashlin said, his parody of CinemaScope. Specifically, early CinemaScope movies had a lot of gimmicks to fill the entire wide screen, and this scene is just a slight exaggeration of some of the stuff that "serious" 'Scope movies used to do.

1954 Article on Looney Tunes Composer Milt Franklyn

Another old article I came across on Newspaperarchive.com was from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, August 15, 1954, about Warner Brothers cartoons composer/orchestrator Milt Franklyn, who was a Long Beach resident at this time. It's not much of an article -- too few direct quotes from Franklyn, and it doesn't mention that he'd only just been promoted to full-fledged composer a year before this article was written (he was Carl Stalling's orchestrator before that). But still, it's one of the few articles ever written about a WB cartoon guy when the studio was still open.

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Long Beach Press-Telegram, Sunday, August 15, 1954

Daffy Duck Dances to His Music
By Vera Williams

You know Bugs Bunny, who asks, "What's up, Doc?"

You know Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Sylvester the cat, Tweety the bird, Pepe LePew the skunk that speaks with a French accent, and Elmer Fudd, who can't pronounce his "r"'s?

You know the background music for their antics -- imitative, interpretive music that now is lilting, now is mournful, and that sounds like a worm is crawling when a worm IS crawling?

Milton J. Franklyn, 5340 El Prado, Park Estates, who with his wife Charlotte moved to Long Beach last November from Lido Isle, writes that music. He not only composes it but he orchestrates it.

Franklyn, musical director of Warner Bros., now is on his 19th year with Warner Bros. and his 599th cartoon. He'll be doing his 600th cartoon, he thinks, by September.

Currently, Franklyn is working on "Past Perfumance," which as you may guess is about the little skunk. Before that was a U.S. Air Force film, "A Hitch in Time." Just before that was "Stork Naked" and "Baby Buggy Bunny" and before that was "Lighthouse Mouse." Incidentally, he recently wrote the music for the Sloan Foundation film, "By Word of Mouse," about a foreign mouse that comes to the United States and learns about big stores and automobiles owned even by the workers and freedom to vote. The background music, he says, "sounds something like Austria... or Germany... or Sweden."

Franklyn has a piano in his study and an organ in the living room of his home. Unlike many composers, he does not "finger out" his melodies on the piano and then write them. He "thinks" his melodies before he goes to sleep. The next morning, early -- 5 a.m. -- he gets up to write them down. Later he plays them to see how they sound.

In filming cartoons, he explains, 16 drawings are needed for every foot of film and the average cartoon short is 500 or 600 feet long. The drawings then are colored and the proper backgrounds made. When the picture is finished, the music is set to the picture.

Franklyn does all of his work at home, going to the studio only to see the finished picture, or to watch the 30-piece orchestra record his music.

Starting his musical career early, he was leader of the University of California band at Berkeley and played in a San Francisco supper club. For eight years he was master of ceremonies and musical director for Fox, Loew's and Paramount-Publix theaters.

The Cisco Kid

Thanks to a collector for exhuming the rarest of all SCTV episodes: "The Cisco Kid." This wasn't actually made for SCTV, but was incorporated into the show in the third season when they were strapped for material and cast members (that was the year of Robin Duke and Tony Rosato, when most of the original cast was off trying to make it in Los Angeles). It was a long, elaborate exercise in re-dubbing a low-budget movie, a la What's Up Tiger Lily; three Second City members took a "Cisco Kid" Western and dubbed in new voices. It comes off a lot like MST3K.

The segment was created and voiced by Martin Short (Pancho) Steven Kampmann (Bart, Dwayne Muncey, Patty) and Peter Torokvei (Cisco). It's said that the three used this piece as their calling card when they, too, went to L.A. to get jobs; Kampmann and Torokvei went to work on "WKRP" (where they recycled a line from this short and gave it to Herb: "I make money, you make money and no one knows the difference") and Short got the lead on James L. Brooks' The Associates, though he came back to Canada to work on SCTV full-time after that show flopped.

The segment may be too long for the joke, but it's still worth posting here if only because it's never been included in any SCTV syndication package.

Part 1



Part 2

Why Didn't They Ask Bateman?

When they do DVD features for a TV show, the question is always which of the cast members will show up for the making-of talking-head featurettes? And which ones won't be interviewed? The point of this, of course, is to speculate on why those particular people refused to be interviewed. (Reasons include: they were out of the country or on location when the features were made; they're tired of being typecast and don't want to re-associate themselves with the show; they just don't like it any more.)

On Family Ties season 2, there are two regulars who aren't interviewed (Brian Bonsall isn't there either but he doesn't count because he wasn't on the show yet): Justine Bateman and Meredith Baxter.

Whether this means that Meredith Baxter really was pissed over not being the star of the show, I don't know. But it would be wrong not to speculate.

The people who were interviewed for the DVD set, by the way, are Gary David Goldberg, Michael J. Fox, Michael Gross, Tina Yothers and Marc "Don't Call Me Skippy" Price. And yes, there is music editing, but neither I nor the Sitcoms Online reviewer are quite certain where. In the episode where Alex has an older girlfriend, the music they dance to sounds fake and isn't in proper balance with the dialogue, so I would guess that's a substitution right there.

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.