H-B's Pencils

The publication of Jerry Beck's The Hanna-Barbera Treasury has touched off some debates over whether Hanna and Barbera helped or hurt TV animation. (Artistically, I mean; everybody agrees that they helped TV animation in the sense that they made it commercially viable and kept a lot of artists employed.) Mark Mayerson makes a pretty good case that they were all too willing to settle for the lowest possible quality. He points out that whereas the pioneers in theatrical animation, like Disney, kept working to improve the quality of animation and the amount of money available to animated films, H-B did the opposite: whereas production companies would traditionally increase their budgets after they had a success, H-B seemed to use each success as an excuse to make the cartoons cheaper or at least cheaper-looking. Most prime-time shows start to spend more money and look better after they have a successful season (at least until their ratings start to tank and the budget gets cut); The Flintstones looked a little worse every year. Or as Mark puts it:

Rather than attempt to reform or beat a system that was clearly stacked against the production of good work, Hanna-Barbera embraced that system and milked it for their own personal gain. They expanded the number of shows they produced and with each expansion, the quality of the product suffered. They opened studios overseas in order to take advantage of cheaper labour. The savings went into their pockets, not onto the screen. After their initial decade, when they had the opportunity to work in prime time or in features where budgets were better, the projects were only marginally better than the low-budget work they turned out for Saturday mornings. The thinking and procedures behind their Saturday morning shows infected the entire company. In their hands, the art of animation (and here I'm talking about the entire process from writing to post-production), was degraded and debased without apology.

Hanna himself gave an interview in the '70s -- reprinted in Danny Peary's American Animated Cartoons -- where he admitted openly that Hanna-Barbera's product had gotten steadily worse since they set up their studio: "Our new shows," he said simply, "are not as good." He explained that this was because of rising costs and shrinking budgets, and that's true as far as it goes. But, again, he and Barbera didn't really try to fight that. Maybe they were right, from a financial point of view: as a commenter on Mark's blog points out, Disney brought his studio to the point of near-bankruptcy every time he increased budgets or took chances, and with that kind of precedent, it's not surprising that H-B would not want to take financial or artistic risks.

The other thing I think we need to remember about Hanna-Barbera is that, as people who came late to television (the medium was long-established by the time they were kicked out of theatrical films and emigrated to TV), they always saw it as important to do whatever was popular in television at the time. They were in a much riskier position than they'd ever been in when they did theatrical shorts; not just because they owned the product, but because their shows actually had to carry a half-hour and sell commercial time on their own, whereas for twenty years they'd been used to making cartoons that played second fiddle to the feature film. (That creates less recognition but also creates a sort of cushion: a theatrical cartoon doesn't need to succeed on its own.) Nobody had ever been able to make cartoons for their own sake, as the main attraction, consistently successful, on TV or in theatres; Disney had had some monster hits, but an equal or greater number of movies that didn't make back their cost.

So H-B not only had to invent TV animation, they had to invent a way to make cartoons that could succeed on a regular basis; they couldn't just make shorts and put them out there like they'd done for years, and they couldn't afford to do things the Disney way (be satisfied with one hit followed by one expensive flop). The solution they arrived at was to leech off non-animated television and pop culture, making a cartoon series based on whatever trend was popular in TV that year. I found an interview with Hanna and Barbera from United Press International (November 15, 1959), where they explained to reporter Ron Burton that they were looking to make animated shows that would parody the live-action shows people were watching:

Barbera said using parody and imposing human-like situations on animal groups are two of the main devices used in their TV cartoons. Viewers can see without too much trouble who or what is being kidded gently in H-B cartoons -- and this season it's TV westerns [Quick Draw McGraw] and private eyes [Snooper and Blabber].

And so they made the decision to base every show on prime-time TV trends (something they would continue for decades thereafter, finally culminating in those '80s cartoons that were actually based on prime-time shows) and give every character a voice/personality based on a famous movie or TV person. Maybe that wasn't a great decision, but they were making that decision in a vacuum: Disney may have shown how a cartoon feature could be a big hit, but nobody, not even Disney, had figured out how to make cartoons that would consistently make more than they cost.

And I'll say one thing for H-B: at least they did actually care, at least initially, about making TV cartoons that would appeal to more than just children. In that same interview, Barbera was very proud that the pop-culture references had given their shows an adult following:

"This makes it possible for our stuff to be enjoyed by adults as well as children," Barbera said. "And we know adults are in our audience, because a friend told us there's a bar in Seattle with a sign over the TV set. It's brought out during our shows. The sign reads: 'No loud talking. No tinkling of glasses. We are watching Huckleberry Hound.'"

It was by no means universally believed at the time that television cartoons should aspire to an adult audience; some cartoonists believed that TV cartoons should ignore the adults, tone down the references to live-action prime-time shows, and be more like live-action kiddie shows. One of the people who believed that was the sainted Bob Clampett. In an interview to promote the Beany and Cecil cartoon (I found this in the Mansfield, OH News-Journal, March 4, 1962), he proclaimed that the show would be successful because he was aiming it exclusively at kids, and criticized other cartoon-makers -- including H-B -- for trying too hard to appeal to adults:

In other words, the chit-chat for grownups has disappeared. This cartoon series is strictly for kids. And that's why Clampett, a man who looks like he'd just gotten out of bed, isn't worried about the series' success. "Top Cat, Calvin and the Colonel" (Bob has other names for them) "were aimed too high," he says.

Bob is going to ignore the adult class and concentrate on the population explosion of unending youngsters. "We'll have a whole new audience every year," he says, meaning an audience range of from six to 11. It can go lower. Clampett's year-and-a-half-old daughter, Baby Ruthie, can sit through five cartoons without wandering, and his five year-old boy Bobbie can say all the names of the Clampett characters.

At least H-B established the idea that cartoons could and should be plugged into the larger world of television as a whole, which would pay off in the better prime-time cartoons (mostly not H-B's own) and some of the better '80s and '90s Saturday morning cartoons.


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Incidentally, that 1962 interview with Clampett only mentions his Warner Brothers experience in one paragraph. In view of how much time he later spent taking credit for everything that happened at the studio, it's interesting that in 1962 -- when the studio was still open, and when having worked there was a much less prestigious credit for him -- he's more modest (the article only gives him credit for sole creation of Tweety, which is a character he actually did create) and more dismissive:

During this time Clampett dreamed up "Tweetie" and thought about Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd during working hours. "I tried every gag that came into my head," said Bob. "Most of them were terrible, but it was the only way to learn."

Update: Thanks to Michael Barrier for the link and, yes, I should have remembered to mention that the newspaper quotes above were found via Newspaper Archive (whose slogan is: "Our search engine will drive you insane").

Mel Blanc Slowed Down

You know how in the the cartoon "Rabbit's Kin" (aka "The One With Pete Puma") Bugs meets a little rabbit who talks in an almost incomprehensibly high-pitched voice? Most of you probably know that it's just Mel Blanc's voice sped up even more than usual. (The closed captions even indicate what he's actually saying.) But I thought I'd try slowing the dialogue down until it was back to more or less Blanc's real voice, and then dub it back into the cartoon.

I couldn't slow the picture down as well as the audio, so I mostly had to repeat the same footage twice. But at least you can hear where they took a line of dialogue that was supposed to occur earlier ("And all of a sudden, just as I was passing the big old oak tree") and put it in near the end of the scene, figuring nobody would notice. And I just think it's fun to hear Blanc's real voice (more or less) coming out of this cute little Scribner-animated rabbit.

Bicycle Bob'll Eat a Bucket of Scorpions If He Doesn't Give You the Business

This toonzone post from Ron "Keeper" O'Dell offers some details on the upcoming (later this year) DVD release of Tiny Toon Adventures:

Warner seems to be committed to producing at least two sets of TTA. The staff are being interviewed currently for the first two sets in one go.

The first set's extras will cover the development of the series and characters. The second set's will focus on the creative team.

I don't know who will be interviewed for the set but I'm willing to bet we'll hear from Tom Ruegger (producer), Paul Dini (writer). Bruce Timm was a storyboard artist on the show so he might pop up somewhere. Hopefully we'll hear from the staff directors who included Art Leonardi, Rich Arons and Eddie Fitzgerald among others.

Since Animaniacs volume 4 is currently on hold I'm a little pessimistic that we'll get to the final episodes of TTA, which are my favorites, but one can hope. There's also the question of what to do with the specials -- the very good "Night Ghoulery" and the not-very-good "Spring Break Special" -- and the direct-to-video movie How I Spent My Vacation, which was one of the best things TTA ever did (in its interweaving of many different, seemingly unconnected plots, it was like a wacky cartoon version of Nashville and anticipated the style Simpsons episode "22 Short Films About Springfield" by several years). I guess we'll see.

The early Tiny Toons episodes -- the first 65 that ran in syndication -- are interesting because you can see different styles of writing and cartooning butt up against each other as the show, and the newly-formed WB TV animation department, tries to find a style. There are episodes that are influenced by classic cartoon comedy, others that are more in the mold of '80s Saturday morning cartoons, others that are more like Duck Tales, and these styles sometimes co-exist in the same episode. The episode "Hare-Raising Night," where the characters meet a mad scientist and a Gossamer-like creatre named Melvin, has elements of "Hair-Raising Hare" (the title, the mad scientist gags, the fourth wall breaking) mashed together with straightforward adventure storytelling and a bit of the socially-conscious messaging that '80s cartoons all had to have (the characters are trying to stop the mad scientist's experiments on animals).

Even if you're not that into the '90s Warner TV cartoons, it'll be interesting to watch as a snapshot of an important time in animation history, when TV cartoons, which had been getting progressively worse for decades, suddenly had the opportunity to get good again and were finding their way by trial and error.

Oh, and from the TAG blog, here's Bruce Timm's 1990 caricature of some of the WB artists, including his director, Art Vitello, and animation veteran Norm McCabe.

Little Tin Box

Will this song (from the musical Fiorello!) ever go out of fashion? It's a song from the '50s about politics in the '20s, but it always works perfectly. I and others were thinking about it because of recent hearings here in Canada, but really it's applicable to any situation anywhere in the world.

Incidentally, this was a song that was added on the road; needing a new comedy song to lighten the mood of the second act, lyricist Sheldon Harnick remembered a previously-unused melody by composer Jerry Bock and started to write a song where characters make fun of the testimony at the hearings on Tammany Hall corruption.

One of the reasons Fiorello! is one of my favorite musicals (it beat Gypsy for the Tony and the Pulitzer, and deserved to) is that it's the ultimate "serious musical comedy." Instead of the book being relatively lightweight and the songs adding weight, it's almost the opposite approach: the book deals with very serious issues and the music adds comedy.

WKRP Episode: "Bailey's Big Break"

Note: I'm uploading episodes more or less at random (I should probably be doing them in order, but it's too late for that). If anyone has any requests for episodes they'd like to see, let me know.

(Again, see here for my explanation of why I'm posting WKRP in Cincinnati episodes.)

This one is from the second season and called "Bailey's Big Break," in which Bailey is promoted to assistant newscaster and Les doesn't like it. The writer, Steve Marshall, originally wrote the story as a spec script, but MTM bought the idea and hired him to write the new script. It's a solid "regular" episode with some good lines (my favorite is Mr. Carlson's "the center cannot hold" speech at the beginning of act 2).

I can't remember the name of the song Venus plays in Act 1 but I recall that it was a contemporary hit from that year (1979).

Also, watching it again I noticed that a few people in the audience try to applaud when Loni Anderson (then the most popular person on the show) enters, but nobody joins in. MTM seemed to impose a semi-ban on its audiences applauding for individual characters ("special guest stars" could get applause, but no regular could be singled out). The MTM refugees who did Taxi also enforced this rule. MTM finally abandoned this when they allowed the audience to whoop and cheer for Larry, Darryl and Darryl on Newhart.

Teaser and Act 1:

Bailey's Big Break, Part 1
Uploaded by giebergoldfarb

Act 2:

Bailey's Big Break Part 2
Uploaded by giebergoldfarb

Comedy Tonight, If By "Tonight" You Mean "April 22"

The Digital Bits takes time out from its Blu-Ray victory lap to report that Universal will be releasing four much-requested Paramount comedies on April 22:

- The Major and the Minor (1942), Billy Wilder's first and in some ways funniest movie as a director;

- Midnight (1939), written by Wilder and Charles Brackett and directed by Mitchell Leisen, with Don Ameche, Claudette Colbert and John Barrymore, a movie that is fondly-remembered enough that it recently spawned remake rumors;

- Easy Living, directed by Leisen and written by Preston Sturges, starring Jean Arthur, Ray Milland, and Edward Arnold. Often thought of as a sort of embryonic Sturges movie; he didn't direct it, but it's the sort of movie he would later direct.

- She Done Him Wrong with Mae West and Cary Grant.

(For some reason Sturges and Wilder never had much good to say about Leisen, though by any normal standards he was one of the best directors at Paramount; maybe they just happened to feel they would have done these scripts differently, but his direction has a lot of charm, which is not something that Wilder or Sturges were particularly good at creating.)

Michael Kidd

I should have said something about the great choreographer-dancer-director Michael Kidd, who died December 23 at the age of 92.

Kidd is best known for his movie work, but he was probably even more important and influential on stage. As you can see from the obituary, he is often linked with Jerome Robbins, in that they were both young, brilliant, innovative ballet choreographers who made an easy transition to Broadway choreography and eventually to directing. There had been other ballet people who did well on Broadway, like George Balanchine, Agnes De Mille and Kidd's mentor Eugene Loring. But they were limited to being choreographers; De Mille tried to break into directing but didn't really succeed. (She was credited as the director as well as the choreographer of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro, but Hammerstein took over directing many of the book scenes himself.) Robbins and Kidd became directors and not only became fully successful and authoritative directors, they made a case for the advantages of having one person in charge of the whole production, including dancing.

You could argue that Kidd's Li'l Abner was the first show to really make a case for one man having full control over a musical. Robbins had already done Peter Pan with Mary Martin, but it wasn't really a hit at the time; and while Robbins directed Bells Are Ringing the same year as Kidd did Li'l Abner, Robbins split the dance duties with Bob Fosse. Li'l Abner was Kidd's show all the way: not only did he direct it and choreograph it, he was one of the producers. Kidd selected the composer and lyricist (bringing over the same people who had done the songs for Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, which he choreographed). Traditionally, the staging of a Broadway musical was a mix of at least two people's ideas; it had to be, because a regular stage director was equipped to approve the dances but not to create them. Li'l Abner, which would never have worked if the larger-than-life tone had let up for even a second, showed what could happen if one person was staging all the scenes himself; it had been done on film to some extent (like in the movies directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen) but not really on stage, and that paved the way for super-director productions like West Side Story, Gypsy, Fiddler On the Roof (Robbins) or Sweet Charity and Chicago (Bob Fosse), or even A Chorus Line (Michael Bennett) shows that were all part of one vision from beginning to end.

Kidd also had a big influence, on film and stage, on choreography: his famous athletic moves were copied all over the place. For example, the "Step In Time" sequence from Mary Poppins was choreographed by Kidd's former assistants, Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood (who re-created Kidd's choreography when Kidd didn't do the film of Li'l Abner), and is essentially imitation Kidd.

For some real Michael Kidd, here's the big number from the only movie he directed, Merry Andrew with Danny Kaye. The song is "Salud" by Johnny Mercer (Kidd's favorite lyricist, and for good reason) and Saul Chaplin (who had arranged the music for Seven Brides), led by Kaye and Salvatore Baccaloni; the dancers doing Kidd's trademark death-defying steps in his equally trademark color-co-ordinated costumes include Tommy Rall.

And from the original cast of Destry Rides Again (1959), directed and choreographed by Kidd:

Storyboard Now

I see there's yet another controversy about whether cartoons had scripts which is going on at various websites. This is not a favorite topic of mine, since the argument follows the exact same pattern and the division is always the same, into the following three groups:

Group One: "Cartoons shouldn't have scripts."
Group Two: "Cartoons in the Golden Age did so have scripts."
Group Three: "Can't we all just get along and agree that what matters is good storytelling?"
Group One: "But in order to have good storytelling, cartoons shouldn't have scripts."
Group Two: "But Golden Age cartoons had good storytelling and they did so have scripts..."

Repeat cycle.

But though I don't enjoy the argument, I think there is a point to it. Most animation (especially 2-D animation) is done for television and in television, the process is extremely important: when you don't have a lot of time to make episodes, every episode will be made more or less the same way, and the question of how to do them -- at the storyboard, in script form, or whatever -- becomes extremely important.

You'll notice that for animated feature films, the argument over scripting is much less contentious than for television or short cartoons; all but the most hard-core anti-script partisans accept that Brad Bird's movies are visual and "real cartoons" even though they have written scripts. But movies take a long time to make, and the script will be modified and expanded many times, so that the final result won't (or shouldn't) feel like a script translated to the screen. In TV or shorts, there's no time for that. Whatever the "blueprint" is for the story, whether it's the script or the story sketches, will be much closer to the final result than a movie script at that same stage of production.

The reason for the storyboard-vs-script battle is, I think, partly a result of the understanding that in TV, if you're working from a script, the finished product will often be just pictures illustrating the script. Whereas if the storyboarding starts earlier in the process, then the cartoon will develop in a looser and more visual way. That's the theory, anyway, and I think it's often true in practice. Even though I unabashedly love some TV cartoons that were completely scripted by writers who couldn't draw a line, I don't think that's the most efficient process for making a cartoon. And TV cartoons and seven-minute shorts have to be as efficiently-made as possible if they're going to deliver consistent results.

Also, in television, the script is the final blueprint that gets approved by the network or the executives. With a more informal production process, it's easier to sneak things by them. There's a legitimate, proven-to-be-true fear that if you start with a formal script, the higher-ups (producers, executives, whoever) will get mad if something new has been added (tm).

But even on shows that use the storyboard-first process, you really can't compare that process to the Golden Age (just as for the most part the cartoons don't compare). Why? Because in the Golden Age, doing cartoons at the storyboard was not primarily something that was done to exclude formal scripting. It was just the way these things were made, a process that had its roots in non-animated silent comedy. (A lot of silent films, obviously, went forward with more of a scenario than a fully-written script. And silent comedy movies were by far the biggest influence on sound comedy cartoons.) But of course they'd sometimes write stuff out in words, and of course there were some story men who couldn't draw much, like -- according to Barrier -- Bill Cottrell. Nobody would have objected to such things because there was never a formal decision that scripting was against the law and that non-drawing writers had nothing to contribute to animation. Non-scripted cartoons written by story artists were the rule, but that was just the process being used.

What has always bugged me about the post-Ren and Stimpy non-scripted cartoon is that the lack of scripting was not just a process decision but, really, a political decision: it wasn't just about adopting the older, more efficient, more cartoony process but about excluding certain kinds of jokes and ideas as not "cartoony" enough. Which might be how a lot of the R&S clones wound up with such weak dialogue, storytelling and characterization.

And yet maybe this kind of exclusionary way of doing things is the only way to go; it could be. In the Golden Age, Disney cartoons could be done with some non-drawing writing because, again, everyone was secure in the basic process. But today, a cartoon that starts using any scripting at all will soon find itself facing network/studio demands to do the whole thing with a script. (You can see this with the Disney features of the '90s, how the perfectly sensible idea of using some outside screenwriters got out of hand, to the point that the studio was bringing in three or four people to rewrite everything before the animators even came into the process.) But that's why it's not useful to talk about bringing back the Golden Age process. If a cartoon is boarded by people who are consciously excluding scripts, and consciously trying not to do anything "scripted," that's not the way things were done. There were many reasons why cartoons were produced the way they were; rebellion against scriptwriter tyranny was not really one of them.

Election Grudge Match: Mr. T vs. Chuck Norris

After all the candidates are forced to drop out of the race under mysterious circumstances, someone has to run for President of the United States. So America calls upon its two most admired and feared citizens to run as independent candidates for President.

On Election day, America can choose Chuck Norris or Mr. T. Who will become President? And who will they choose for their running mates?

I suspect that Chuck Norris is slightly more electable. His background as a Texas Ranger will get him an easy win in that state. While Mr. T doesn't have an obvious lock on a state: he'll be hated in Pennsylvania for having tried to beat their beloved Rocky, while California may be split between people he and the A-Team have helped and people whose homes or businesses have been trashed in the crossfire.

However, Mr. T's populist platform -- encouraging kids to stay in school, promoting healthy dietary habits (lots of milk) and promising to take down any and all crazy fools -- may prove more broadly appealing than Chuck Norris's interventionist foreign policy. He'll want to go around the world shooting at everybody, and Mr. T can point out that this is a fiscally irresponsible policy, while offering to sell his gold to pay down the national debt.

But I think in the end it comes down to attack ads. Both have extensive military experience, but Mr. T will be the target of attack ads from an organization funded by Colonel Decker. The ads will point out that T's combat experience ended when he was thrown in jail for allegedly robbing the bank of Hanoi. Plus he can be attacked by environmentalists for driving that gas-guzzling van. Chuck Norris, on the other hand, won't have any enemies running attack ads against him, because all his enemies are dead. So it's Chuck Norris, with Mr. T given the position of Secretary For Throwing People Helluva Far.

Finally, as to running mates, I think Chuck Norris should pick M. Emmet Walsh, while Mr. T should definitely select Murdock. (You might make a case for Face, but really, you don't want his seven zillion ex-girlfriends coming forward during the campaign.)

Who do you think will win the Toughest Election Ever?

"Either You're Babbling, Or You Just Told Me in Cherokee That My Scrotum is Many-Colored."

Duckman to DVD? Really? Truly? Hopefully. The linked article by Susanne Ault says among other things that this is a response to heavy fan demand and that "it’s possible that multiple seasons will be released within one package next year."

The first two seasons of Duckman were both 13 episodes, so the first two seasons would make a much better package than the first season alone.

Update: Everett Peck, creator of the Duckman comic, says that there will be some special features on the DVD but he doesn't know what as yet. I hope they talk to the showrunners, Reno and Osborn (rather than to Klasky and Csupo, who apparently didn't like the show).

Also I was wrong about the episode count: season 1 was 13 episodes but season 2 was only 9, so the first set will have 22 episodes.

Of all the Simpsons-wannabe cartoons that proliferated between The Simpsons and King of the Hill ("Simpsons-wannabe," by the way, is an accusation that Cornfed once leveled at Duckman), this is my favorite. It had its flaws; it could be too preachy, some of the jokes had a punchline-y rhythm more appropriate for a multi-camera sitcom, and the design style of the show was not particularly pleasant to look at. But the virtues it had were much more important: a great voice cast, wordy, funny scripts from a team of writers led by Jeff Reno and Ron Osborn (as writer-producers on Moonlighting, they brought a similar style of mile-a-minute dialogue to this other show about detectives), and an ability to tell the most insane and tasteless stories without losing sight of plot or characterization. There's never been a show quite like it; lots of animated half-hour sitcoms have done crazy plots, but this one had a certain internal logic to its craziness -- it was like no matter how crazy it got, the writers were still kind of committed to the stories they were telling, and the craziest episodes could be surprisingly touching in spots.

This being CBS/Paramount, I assume there will be music cuts, though I don't recall this show using a lot of music. The first season credited Frank Zappa with some of the scoring (his son Dweezil was a voice on the show, and Zappa worked on some of the music before he died), so that might or might not be a problem.

Footnote # 1: a few of the early Duckman plots were recycled from other shows. Specifically: in the first season, one episode is based on the episode of Taxi where Alex falls in love with a sensitive-sounding phone operator, and in the second season, an episode lifts its plot setup from the episode of Moonlighting where Whoopi Goldberg became a national hero for accidentally foiling a political assassination.

Footnote # 2: Duckman ran on the USA Network in a block with two similarly-constituted seasons of Weird Science; as you know, I like both series, but the shows had almost nothing in common and were probably the most incompatible comedy block of the era; Duckman's second season finale had King Chicken trying to kill the casts of both shows together, explaining that "USA won't allow one show to do anything without the other, so I'll just kill you all and we'll rerun Silk Stalkings."

The clip show, from season 2 with Ben Stiller as the guest voice, serves as a decent introduction to the show:

WKRP Episode: "Bad Risk"

(the original post for an explanation of why I'm sometimes going to be uploading WKRP in Cincinnati episodes and embedding them at this blog.)

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This episode is "Bad Risk," the fourth episode broadcast in the second season. It was written by two freelancers, Gene Fournier and Tom Joachim. But I think that some of the episode, especially Herb's dialogue, has a bunch of rewriting by Steven Kampmann and Peter Torokvei, two Toronto Second City writer-performers who got hired for WKRP on the basis of the "Cisco Kid" redubbed video they did with Martin Short. Their "voices" as writers were distinctive enough that their contributions could sometimes stand out in an episode, and they did a lot to develop the character of Herb, a character they kind of fell in love with. Starting in the second season, Herb starts to take on some of Kampmann's mannerisms; if you've seen Kampmann on the first two seasons of Newhart, you might think he was doing Herb from WKRP but it's just as likely that Herb was mimicking Kampmann.

This is also the last episode of the show that is without one of the eight regulars; after this, all eight characters had to appear even if it was only for one line.

This is one of the episodes that the Comedy Network only showed in a 22-minute cut version but someone kindly sent me a copy of a CBS broadcast (again, if anyone out there has copies of original-length CBS versions please let me know and we can work out a trade). So the upload below sometimes cuts back and forth between one copy and another, but it's better than not having two-and-a-half minutes' worth of the episode.

Music: "Good Girls Don't" by The Knack, "Lonesome Loser" by Little River Band, and "Bitch" by the Rolling Stones.

Cold opening and Act 1:

Act 2, tag and credits:

Cartoon Violence

Some comments in my last post have gotten me thinking about the question of when cartoon violence crosses the line: what makes cartoon violence horrific rather than funny?

Many of the violent acts in Tom and Jerry cartoons and most of the violence in Famous Studios cartoons are famous for provoking disgust instead of laughter; the violence in The Simpsons "Itchy and Scratchy" cartoons is a parody of that kind of violence (they were inspired in part by Herman and Katnip), violence that is so horrible and painful that feels real, and therefore sickening. Warner Brothers, Tex Avery at MGM, and to some extent even Woody Woodpecker were better able to do violent gags without making them feel like real, painful violence. But what's the difference, and where's the line that bad violent gags cross?

As I said, I think that T&J's success helped make cartoons more violent at every studio; the Warners directors were doing more violent gags, both in terms of number and the degree of violence, after 1945 or so. But while the stuff that happens to Daffy Duck in "Rabbit Fire" is probably the most extreme violence that Chuck Jones had done up to that point, I think most people would agree that it doesn't cross that line. (The one possible exception is when he gets scalped by a bullet and we see the bullet hanging from his ripped-off scalp; when I saw that gag with an audience, the audience laughed, but there was some audible discomfort in the laughter.) So why is it funny rather than horrible to see Daffy get a part of his body blown off?

I don't know if there are any immutable rules about when a violent gag is funny and when it isn't; it's all about context and timing and many other things. For example, one of the few Warners gags that is truly horrible rather than funny is in "Sahara Hare" when Sam gets split in half. That's really not funny at all, at least for me and other people I've watched it with. But there are plenty of other cartoons where characters get scratched in half by cats' claws, cut in half by accident, and it's funny. There's just something about that particular moment that doesn't work.

Still, if there is any rule at all, it's probably that the most important issue in cartoon violence is how the character reacts. If a character reacts as if he's in agonizing pain, it's hard to laugh. The more realistic his pain, the more we associate the gag with what would happen to us if we were in that situation (namely, that we'd be in pain). Warners was famous for taking the edge off cartoon violence by placing the emphasis on the character's reactions, which were not reactions of pain but of humiliation or irritation. Daffy is always just pissed-off when he gets shot; he's not in pain, he's just angry that Bugs tricked him again. We instinctively understand that the shooting isn't a "real" shooting, just a punchline to the real point of the scene -- Bugs one-ups Daffy again. To get back to that "Sahara Hare" gag, one of the reasons it doesn't work is that Sam has his back to the camera when it happens and the scene blacks out immediately, so we never see Sam's reaction to the incident and we don't see him reconstituting himself. So the scene isn't about him getting outwitted by Bugs, it's just about a guy getting chopped in two, which isn't very funny at all.

Tex Avery's way of doing cartoon violence was a bit different at MGM, I think: he'd have characters act like they're in pain, but make their reactions so over-the-top that it, again, doesn't seem like real pain. I think the most crucial thing for a violent cartoon gag is that we should not relate it to anything that could happen to us (or worse, anything that has happened) to us.

How Tom & Jerry Changed Cartoons

Reading Thad's thoughts on Hanna and Barbera (I know he makes fun of me for posting about what I've just seen on TV, but he forgets that I just as often post about what I've just read on someone else's blog!), I was reminded that the success of Tom and Jerry series had a sort of ripple effect on the cartoon industry. I can't prove this, but it seems to me that a lot of the other cartoon studios changed their approach and even certain elements of their production process based on the huge popularity and prestige (all those Oscars) of the cat and mouse series.

For one thing, I think Tom and Jerry helped establish the idea that one director, or team of directors, should be exclusive to a particular series. Obviously there had been other characters who were handled exclusively by one director, either because the studio only had one director or because only one director wanted to use him (nobody else was fighting to borrow Sniffles from Chuck Jones). But in general it seems like characters belonged more to studios than to particular units within a studio. At Warners, the star characters the studio came up with up to 1940 were shared by all the directors at the studio: each director was expected to make cartoons with Porky, Daffy and Bugs. (Even if, as in the case of Frank Tashlin and Porky, they hated that character.) Fred Quimby's decision to assign Hanna-Barbera exclusively to Tom and Jerry was different. Normally if a studio was going to give a big push to a character or series, they'd assign the series to all the directors; perhaps because MGM's other unit was headed by Tex Avery, who wasn't right for T&J and who Quimby didn't really trust anyway, the idea was to make the push for these characters by freeing up their creators to focus completely on that series.

It worked, obviously, and from that point on, cartoon studios were clearly more aware of the advantages of having a character handled by one unit exclusively. What's more, there was increased pressure on cartoon directors to come up with new star characters; that was a part of their job in a way that it hadn't been earlier, when character development was piecemeal and no one unit really "created" Bugs or Porky. At Warners, every unit started scrambling to come up with its own exclusive characters. Bob Clampett left just as the T&J craze was starting to take hold, but he was obviously thinking about the need to start up his own series: he was apparently getting ready to do more with Tweety (according to some accounts including his own -- which can't necessarily be trusted -- he'd already decided that Tweety should be teamed up with Sylvester), and he was doing pre-production on "The Goofy Gophers" (which was directed by Art Davis after Clampett left), an obvious attempt at a "pilot" cartoon for a potential T&J-ish series, albeit with a Clampett twist. Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and Bob McKimson were all looking around for series ideas. Warners also followed the T&J lead when it came to submitting and promoting cartoons for Oscar consideration: the first three theatrical WB cartoons to win Oscars were all "series pilots" that took previously-existing characters and re-launched them as the stars of rigidly-formatted T&J type series. ("Tweety Pie," "For Scent-imental Reasons," and "Speedy Gonzales.") Except for the Speedy Gonzales series, which was shared between two units because it was a McKimson character developed by Freleng, there wasn't really much sharing of characters between units.

The advantage of this approach was that a character looked the same in all his cartoons, and all his cartoons shared the same approach. The disadvantage is that without multi-unit work on a character, they tended to be a little one-dimensional. Tom and especially Jerry are not very interesting characters to me; Avery's MGM characters, to the extent that he could come up with any, are like parodies of one-dimensional cartoon characters (literally so in the case of Screwy Squirrel). The single-unit, post-1945 WB characters don't have the depth or variety of Bugs, Daffy, Porky and Sylvester; you couldn't do as many things with them. Hanna-Barbera and Quimby sort of reduced cartoon-making to its essence: have one or two characters, have a formula, have a good unit working on that series. (Again, this had been done before -- Popeye, for example -- but almost by accident. And Popeye cartoons had more variety in terms of setting and plot.) But that approach helped make post-1945 cartoon-making a bit more predictable than it had been.

The other thing T&J may have done was to help increase the violence quotient in postwar cartoons. Hanna-Barbera, of course, sort of learned cartoon violence from Tex Avery; but Avery's cartoons weren't very influential at the time (MGM didn't promote them for Oscars and Avery's characters, if you could call them that, didn't hit it big), not compared to T&J. The extreme, outrageous violence in the T&J cartoons helped change the perception of how violent a cartoon could get without alienating the audience or losing Oscar-worthy respectability. (Again, the violence in Popeye cartoons is a bit different, as a lot of it is really just broad slapstick fistfighting that you could find in live-action comedies too.) And suddenly every cartoon studio was amping up the violence and pain. Even Warners. If you look at Warners cartoons from before 1945, what's surprising is how little actual violence there is. There are some violent gags, of course, anvils and mallets and such, but a gag is just as likely to have a non-violent punchline as a violent one, and very often, gags that seem like they're building up to violence are not building up to anything of the kind. (Two examples: in "The Big Snooze," Elmer walks off a cliff, looks down, sees that he's walking on air -- and rushes back to solid ground without falling. And in "The Unruly Hare," the entire last section of the cartoon involves Elmer and Bugs handing off a lit stick of dynamite to each other -- but they get rid of the dynamite before it explodes, and instead of blowing Elmer up it automatically lays the train tracks.) By the late '40s, every other gag in every studio's cartoon involves somebody being blown up or falling from a great height, and you'll almost never see a stick of TNT or an anvil without the violent payoff. Hanna-Barbera sort of rewrote the rules of how much damage you could inflict on characters' bodies and how much of a cartoon could be devoted to cartoony violence.

The Drapes of Wrath

I did not make up that joke about Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb (1955), which I watched on TCM last night and whose entire plot revolves around a set of drapes for a library at a booby hatch mental hospital. The joke comes from this review by clydefro at Film Journal, who says most of what needs to be said about this film, namely that it is a "trashy mess" with a great cast and a plot that makes no sense at all. Or as the film's producer, John Houseman, put it in his reserved way: "something contrived about the plot ... The emotional turmoil aroused by the hanging of a set of new drapes in the main living-room of the institution was never entirely credible nor dramatically viable."

The film also has a number of scenes that end abruptly, suggesting that it was probably cut down some before its release. If MGM cut it down, I can't blame them, since it runs over two hours as it is, but it might explain why the story (such as it is) is hard to follow.

In some ways I think the coming of CinemaScope wrecked Vincente Minnelli's career. Starting in 1954 all his movies were made in the 'Scope format (except for his remarkably bad last film, A Matter of Time). Minnelli was always a director who liked long takes; he said he was influenced by Max Ophuls, who believed that it was more interesting for the camera to move from one composition to another within a shot instead of cutting between compositions. Minnelli's pre-1954 movies are famous for their long takes, dazzling camera moves and heightened emotion, whether in musicals or melodramas. But when widescreen came in, camera movements became more cumbersome for a while (not so much because of the camera itself, as because it took a while for directors and cinematographers to figure out how to move between one 'Scope composition and another), and there was a pervasive idea that 'Scope movies should be filmed in long takes with minimal cutting and minimal camera movement. This wasn't just out of convenience; if you look at film-theory essays from the '50s, there was a strongly-held belief that it was aesthetically right to shoot a 'Scope film this way, that the format demanded that viewers be allowed to decide for themselves what they wanted to look at.

The result is that most of Minnelli's post-1954 movies have some great long takes and beautiful compositions, but a lot of static scenes where characters sit talking in the centre of the frame, with maybe one cumbersome camera movement at the very end of the shot. With some exceptions (like some of the big scenes from Some Came Running) his movies don't have a lot of energy or tension; they're slack and slow. This may be a partial explanation for why The Bad and the Beautiful, which he'd done with Houseman only three years before, feels so fast and brilliant and the melodrama of The Cobweb is kind of boring by comparison, despite the great cast. (The other part of the explanation is that The Bad and the Beautiful had a script that didn't suck.) His post-1954 musicals, including Gigi, are also a little low on energy.

The Cobweb is also known for having the first Hollywood score to make substantial use of Schoenberg's twelve-tone system; Leonard Rosenman, who'd studied with Schoenberg, was the hot young composer in Hollywood for 1955 only (when he did the two James Dean vehicles and this picture). Houseman hired him over the objections of MGM's music department and gave him free rein to write any kind of score he wanted, so he decided to write music that would elevate the story by portraying what was going on in the characters' minds -- which is to say, they're nuts. He unwittingly helped create the longstanding Hollywood rule where atonality is associated with madness; Jerry Goldsmith later used some twelve-tone procedures when he scored a movie about Sigmund Freud. I don't know that Rosenman's music actually helps the movie very much, not because of the Schoenbergian techniques but just because the actual material isn't very interesting and seems to call attention to itself rather than the movie. It certainly doesn't compare to David Raksin's score for The Bad and the Beautiful or Minnelli/Houseman's later over-the-top melodrama, Two Weeks in Another Town. To be honest, I've never heard a score by Rosenman that I really liked.

WKRP Episode: "For Love Or Money"

After the debacle that was the season 1 set, it doesn't seem likely that Fox will release the other seasons of WKRP in Cincinnati any time soon. The first season sold well, but I've heard that Fox is still reluctant to spend actual money on music and doesn't want to deal with the flak they (quite rightly) received for cutting out entire scenes in the first season set. And of course in seasons 2-4, music was often heavily intertwined with dialogue; since there are no separate music and dialogue tracks, the choice would be between approving a decent music budget or cutting several minutes from many episodes. Until something changes -- like for instance Fox's current unwillingness to let an independent company have a crack at their catalogue properties -- the show is more or less lost.

And, wouldn't you know it, Fox has taken to pulling WKRP clips off YouTube and other sites (apparently they put the hacked-up season 1 DVD prints on hulu.com and don't want the original versions competing with them). So any WKRP episode that goes online won't stay up for long.

With all that in mind, I want to at least dig out a few WKRP episodes from my own collection and present them more or less the way they originally aired. So once in a while -- I don't know how frequently -- I'll upload a WKRP episode complete and with the original music, and display it for as long as it's allowed to stay up.

I don't have all the episodes complete, and if anyone is reading this who has any episodes taped off CBS broadcasts (or off the CBC, which apparently showed this series uncut in the early '90s for a brief period), please contact me and maybe we can work out a trade. But I do have some episodes and in the absence of any other complete versions I might as well present them here, with some comments.

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The one I'm starting with is the season 2 opener, a two-parter called "For Love Or Money." The script is credited to Mary Maguire, who was one of Hugh Wilson's two secretaries in the first season (his other secretary, Lissa Levin, became a staff writer on WKRP and a writer for Cheers and other shows). But a lot of it was apparently written by the staff at the last minute, because this episode was not actually planned as a two-parter.

According to the book America's Favorite Radio Station, it was written as a one-parter and got as far as the table read, or maybe even rehearsals, as a one-parter. But playing opposite Howard Hesseman was one of his colleagues from the comedy troupe The Committee, Julie Payne. (Committee-ites like Hesseman, Hamilton Camp, Peter Bonerz and Mel Stuart were all over TV sitcoms in the '70s; they were to '70s TV what SNL was to '80s movies.) The two started improvising a lot, and extending their scenes together longer than they'd been written. At some point it was suggested that instead of cutting down the scenes, the writers should let the scenes run long, write additional material and additional scenes, and make it a two-parter.

What that produced is an episode with an unusual feel for a two-part story. Most two-parters have bigger stories than a regular episode. This one really doesn't; it doesn't even have a B story. It's just a regular story -- Johnny forgets his date with Bailey and goes for what he thinks is a hot date with his ex-girlfriend, who announces that she wants to sue him for part of his earnings -- expanded to double length because every scene runs a little longer than it normally would. The first act of part 1 is mostly just a series of showcase scenes for the characters who are not involved in the plot (Herb, Les, Jennifer), and they're very leisurely character pieces; they have a little bit of relevance to the plot, but in a half-hour episode you'd just get the part that's relevant, whereas here you get extra stuff. It feels a bit like one of the super-sized episode of The Office in that it's a normal story but they can slow down and let the scenes have room to breathe.

It also has two memorable musical sequences. The opening features "Bad Case of Loving You" by Robert Palmer (a song that is sometimes called "Doctor, Doctor") and two scenes (really one scene divided between two parts) with "After the Love Has Gone" by Earth, Wind and Fire. Also a bit of "Rise" by Herb Alpert when Venus is on the air at the beginning of Act 2.

This is in four parts, two parts for each half-hour episode. (DailyMotion's 15 minute upper limit allows most episodes to be uploaded with clean breaks between acts, so the clip breaks are where commercial breaks would originally have been.) The copy is a composite, the version broadcast on the Comedy Network in Canada combined with the original music at the beginning.

Part 1, Cold Open and Act 1:

For Love Or Money (1)
Uploaded by giebergoldfarb

Part 1, Act 2:

For Love Or Money (2)
Uploaded by giebergoldfarb

Part 2, Recap and Act 1:

For Love Or Money (3)
Uploaded by giebergoldfarb

Part 2, conclusion:

For Love Or Money (4)
Uploaded by giebergoldfarb

Epic

Todd VanDerWerff at South Dakota Dark has finished up his epic series on the 100 best American TV series of all time (plus "sidebar" posts on shows that didn't quite make the list or overrated shows or one-season wonders). It's a big damned thing, a great overview of television and pop-culture history and the role each of these shows played in shaping TV history.

I don't want to argue with Todd about what should or shouldn't be on the list because a) It's his list, b) Most of us will agree with most of the choices. I will add to his statement that "TV is the easiest art form to overrate" that TV is also the medium where the evaluation of a show can change the fastest and the most radically. A book or a movie is a product of its time, and when you look back on it 20 years later, you can see it in the context of its time. But TV shows date almost instantly; a show from 2001 looks, feels and plays differently from a show that was made five years later. TV has to be produced so fast that it depends heavily on the basic production process that's in place -- the process of how things are made, how much money can be spent on certain things, how things get produced -- and as soon as the process changes, TV changes.

A movie, which has more money and time at its disposal, can sort of create its own unique process: Star Wars or 2001 were made differently from any other movie of their respective years, but a sci-fi television series has to use more or less the same production process as any other show. Which means that while Battlestar Galactica is a great show and will undoubtedly hold up, its methods of production will still date very quickly. Twenty years from now people will look at it and clearly see, or at least feel, that it's a product of a time when shows were produced in a certain way, shot in Vancouver instead of wherever shows are being filmed twenty years from now, and used certain kinds of shots and special effects techniques.

What all that means is that more than in any other medium, when you evaluate a TV series you're evaluating two separate things: how it played at the time, and how it plays now. Both are important, and Todd takes both into account ("how it played at the time" shapes the "influence" portion of his evaluations). But the two can be incredibly different; watching an hour-long drama now, whenever "now" is, and then watching it two decades later is like watching two shows. Not just because times change but because context changes; on the original broadcasts you have all kinds of promos and surrounding publicity and chatter that helps shape the way you look at the show. Someday soon we'll return to some of the recent greats -- the Deadwoods, the Sopranoses -- and be shocked to see how different they feel. But the fun of television is in part in the fact that it dates so suddenly and so unexpectedly. The question we ask in revisiting any show is "does it hold up?" which not only means "is it too dated to be entertaining?" but also "how has the passage of time changed the experience?" Sometimes time enhances the experience by revealing things that no one could have been aware of at the time. Sometimes it just makes you aware of the bad special effects and voice-overs that you didn't notice in 1983 or whenever. But that's what makes it interesting, that you don't know what you're going to get. With a book, you can find new things on re-reading. But with a TV show, even a short amount of time can make it different than it was; you're not just finding new things but experiencing a different show, because a 1997 show watched in its original broadcast is not the same as a 1997 show being watched in 2007.

Also, I didn't have time to go through it title-by-title, but it sure seems that a lot of the shows on the top 100 list were snubbed at the Emmys -- especially the dramas, where the "best drama" category has been famously erratic (though The Rockford Files did manage to pull off a surprise win one year).

WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? [Re-Post]

'Tis the season for re-posts, so here's a 2004 "obscure musicals" post about the musical version of What Makes Sammy Run? To add something the original post didn't have, I've uploaded some of the songs from the cast album, which has never been commercially available on CD, at least not in stereo. The song clips can be found by scrolling down to around the middle of the post.

In 2006, there was a revised version of the show produced and directed by Robert Armin, with some new songs by Drake and some editing of the script. There's more information about that production at the official What Makes Sammy Run? site, and the script of the revised version is available here as a PDF. I don't get the impression that it solves the problems that are inherent in the material, and most of the weaker songs are still there and still weak. But I haven't seen the production, which I gather was attempting to be more true to the book than Abe Burrows' glitzy Broadway production.

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This show, which opened on Broadway in 1964 and ran over 500 performances (but lost money), already has an excellent background article available online. Read this article, part of the terrific What Makes Sammy Run? website, devoted to all the incarnations of Budd Schulberg's on-the-make, hustling anti-hero. The article tells most of what needs to be told about this show; I just want to mention a few other things.


First, What Makes Sammy Run? was one of several shows that followed in the wake of the success of How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. With the smash success and Pulizer Prize victory of a musical comedy about an amoral schemer clawing his way to the top, other producers thought it was time to adapt various older stories about, well, amoral schemers clawing their way to the top. David Merrick produced I Can Get it For You Wholesale, adapted by Jerome Weidman from his own novel; this was a fine show (which I'll write about some other time) mostly remembered today for introducing Barbra Streisand. And producer Joe Cates unveiled What Makes Sammy Run? adapted by Budd Schulberg from his own novel (he co-wrote the script with his brother Stuart). The problem with these shows, as compared to How to Succeed, is that that show was a cartoon, a spoof; Wholesale and Sammy were adapted from more serious stories and dealt with characters who really hurt other people in their rise to the top. Lehman Engel, the conductor for What Makes Sammy Run, wrote about how unpleasant it was to follow Sammy's adventures for an entire evening:

Sammy Glick goes after everything with hammer and tongs, and the sight we see is neither pretty, unexpected, nor entertaining, and nothing is added to whet our interest along the way. He is an unstoppable steamroller. Then, too, What Makes Sammy Run? is thin for the stage... There was no attempt made to remedy this by creation of a real subplot, and so we were stuck for a full evening with people we didn't care about and a far too familiar situation.

I think that's about right; and I don't usually agree with Engel's evaluations of shows (but that's another story). Schulberg's novel is very effective and Sammy is a character who continues to fascinate and infuriate people -- but the story of the novel doesn't have all that much to it; it's basically Sammy knocking down one person after another to get to the top, until he finally meets one person (Laurette, the boss's daughter) who knocks him down, and he gets his comeuppance but good. There's not an evening's worth of story in there, nor in Schulberg's observations about Hollywood, which were sort of worn out by 1964. And one of the themes of the novel -- that Sammy's rise to power is a metaphor for the rise of fascism -- is inexplicably retained in the musical (Al explicitly compares Sammy to Hitler, and Sammy even-handedly replies that Hitler stole from his playbook); if it was slightly offensive in 1941 to compare a Hollywood con artist to Hitler, in 1964 it's not so much offensive as boring and silly.


There might have been more of a story if Schulberg could have turned the good guy, Al Manheim, into a sufficiently interesting character, a guy we could cheer for while recoiling from Sammy; but Al is even more of a nothing in the show than in the book; like many observer-narrators in novels (think Nick in The Great Gatsby) he seems pointless when the story is adapted to a medium that doesn't require a narrator. Speaking of which, you can see signs of the amount of hasty rewriting the show underwent in the fact that Al starts out narrating the show, as he did the book, only to drop the device partway through the first act (the show briefly returns to this device at the beginning of act 2, then drops it again).


The choice for Sammy Glick was Steve Lawrence. Yes, of Steve and Eydie infamy. But whatever you think of their wholesome lounge-lizard act, you've got to admit that both were and are extremely talented entertainers. In fact they were exactly the kind of performers for whom, in Broadway days gone by many stage and film musicals would have been written. But this was the '60s, and the age of the star vehicle was already nearly over; Lawrence would only do one more musical after Sammy -- Golden Rainbow, co-starring with Eydie Gorme. It was his effectiveness as a performer that kept Sammy running for as long as it did.


The rest of the cast was equally good: Robert Alda (the original Sky Masterson of Guys and Dolls) as Al Manheim; Sally Ann Howes as Kit, the designated love interest, and Bernice Massi as Laurette; she was generally agreed to be the best thing in the show, apart from Lawrence (in part because the bitchy Laurette gets most of the best lines in the script).


The website states that Ervin Drake's score "contained some of the best theatre music of the period," which is overstating things rather a lot. Drake was a pretty good pop songwriter, one of the last of the successful non-rock pop songwriters. His most famous credit is the Frank Sinatra song "It Was a Very Good Year." His score for Sammy definitely sounds like the work of a pop writer making his first try at theatre writing. The songs are all integrated into the action and appropriate for the characters, but the sound is not that of the period in which the show is set, nor of '60s Broadway, but of early-'60s, Vegas, TV-special pop music. "A Room Without Windows," which became a hit for Lawrence, is a generic pop song about Getting Away From It All, dressed up in an orchestral arrangement that features all the standard lounge-act sounds, including a flute obbligato to pep up the second refrain. [Note: Yes, Lawrence keeps popping from one speaker to another in the introductory section. That's not a mistake; that's a clumsy early '60s stereo-demonstration effect.]

"The Friendliest Thing," which Laurette sings while seducing Sammy and which has become the show's most enduringly popular song, is a great example of the easygoing, wholesomely sleazy ballad, ambling along to a melody built almost entirely out of a single phrase. These songs are good, but they don't sound like theatre pieces; they sound like specialty spots.

"My Home Town," Lawrence's other hit song, is a nice example of how a pop song can work in and out of context; out of context, it's just a charming song about how the singer feels at home in a city he's just moved to; in context, it features Sammy turning on the charm (to impress a character he will use and eventually destroy) while obliquely making the point that Hollywood is the true "home town" for creeps like Sammy.

This is good theatre songwriting, one of the last essays in the great Broadway tradition of fusing theatre and pop into one; so is the final song, which all the critics called attention to, "Some Days Everything Goes Wrong," where Sammy proclaims his determination to keep on running; so is the duet for Sammy and Laurette, "You're No Good," a sort of Satanic bossa nova. Alda also got a good ballad, "Maybe Some Other Time."


But mixed in with the good stuff are too many duds. Some of these may have arisen from the necessity to write for Steve Lawrence's specialties; "Lights! Camera! Platitude!" is an overlong and lame and not even very accurate sendup of Hollywood cliches, but it gave Lawrence (and Howes and Alda) a chance to do some clowning around.

But there are other songs that fit in with the plot and the proposed dark tone of the show, and are just bad. Someone once selected "You Help Me" as the worst lyric in Broadway history; it isn't, but it's definitely stupid, an attempt to write a Cole Porter list song without caring whether the list makes any sense (this is sung by Al, sarcastically responding to Sammy's statement that he was trying to "help"):

Uh... yeah. All of Kit's solos are pretty dull too, with equally clumsy lyrics ("I'm your only raison d'etre / To love and honor, et cet'ra"). With only half a good score and only half a story, it's no wonder that Abe Burrows, called in to direct (and punch up the book) felt a need to distract the audience with jokes and staging tricks -- one of the good songs, "I Feel Humble," climaxes with the entire stage being plunged into darkness, followed by a spotlight picking out Sammy, who completes the number. Without Burrows, and Lawrence, I don't think this show would have run a few months, let alone a year.


Drake wrote one other show, Her First Roman, a disastrous musical adaptation of Caesar and Cleopatra (proving yet again that adapting Shaw into a musical can work once and only once). The score was another mixture of the good and awful, but the good stuff wasn't as good as in Sammy. The cast album of Sammy was recorded by Columbia, but Lawrence owns the rights; unfortunately, he somehow lost the stereo tapes, with the result that his website offers the cast album only in mono. If you can find a used stereo LP for a decent price, it's worth a listen, for the good parts.

You're Coming Back a Star... Or Not a Star... But One Way Or Another You're Coming Back.

I couldn't make it through more than a few minutes of the Canadian broadcast of Scott Baio is 45 and Single or Scott Baio is Ripping Off Entourage and calling it a Reality Show or whatever it's called. But it did remind me that Scott Baio, while by no means the worst actor in the world (or even the worst actor on any show he's ever been on), was extremely lucky to be the object of a showrunner's failed attempt at star-making. What I'm talking about is when a TV showrunner or a movie director becomes so taken with a particular actor that he tries over and over again to make that actor a star.

That's what happened with Garry Marshall and Scott Baio. The chronology is as follows: Garry Marshall saw Scott Baio in Bugsy Malone and thought he had star quality, so he put Baio in a new show called Blansky's Beauties. (This was a 1977 midseason replacement that was sort of a clearing-house for every actor that Marshall liked: the cast included Baio, Lynda Goodfriend, Pat Morita -- playing "Arnold" again -- and Eddie Mekka, who temporarily left Laverne and Shirley to play virtually the same character on this show.) The show deservedly bombed, so Marshall immediately added Baio to the cast of Happy Days for the new season. In 1978, Marshall transferred Baio to another new show, Who's Watching the Kids? But that show didn't take either, so Marshall brought Baio right back to Happy Days. When Ron Howard left, Baio's part got built up, and then he got his own spinoff, the infamous Joanie Loves Chachi. That bombed too, and Baio was back to Happy Days for one last season. That's seven-plus years of Garry Marshall trying to make Scott Baio a star and shoving him onto Happy Days to make sure he'd be employed once these other shows kept failing.

Why Scott Baio? Who knows? You can just as easily ask Alfred Hitchcock "Why Tippi Hedren?" or Howard Hawks "Dewey Martin?" The point is that when a powerful director or producer decides that someone is going to be a superstar, he may keep using that actor over and over again even though it's pretty clear that he or she is not going to be a big star.

Garry Marshall also had a bewildering tendency to use the nondescript Lynda Goodfriend over and over; she was on Blansky's Beauties and Who's Watching the Kids too, and she followed Scott Baio's trajectory for a while, shuttling back and forth between Happy Days and new failed Garry Marshall shows.

Sometimes the producer's faith in an actor turns out to be well-founded, though. Aaron Spelling added Heather Locklear to at least three shows in mid-run -- Dynasty, T.J. Hooker and Melrose Place -- and in each case, more Locklear equalled more ratings.

Buck Rogers Meets Duck Dodgers

I am not the first person to do this, but I took the obvious step of combining the Buck Rogers TV series with "Duck Dodgers" and this is what I got:



An earlier, similar mashup (which I didn't know about before I came up with this one, I swear) can be found here.

A Song I Like

I keep thinking I should write an "Obscure Musicals" post on the 1957 show Jamaica, which was a hit, and produced one of my favorite cast albums of all time, even though the show itself is basically unrevivable. But I concluded that I'd already written enough about it in this post on Harold Arlen's Broadway musicals. Short version is, Arlen and Yip Harburg wrote the show for Harry Belafonte; he wasn't available but Lena Horne was, so the show was completely re-tooled to focus on the hero's girlfriend. The final product that reached Broadway was a complete mess with a book that made no sense (due to the constant rewriting), but succeeded anyway because of Horne, Ricardo Montalban, the songs, and Jack Cole's choreography.

It was also apparently a pioneer in the practice of using microphones in theatres. The orchestra pit included several saxophones, and Horne, who never had a particularly big voice, couldn't be heard over the multiple saxes. So she was given a body mike to allow her to be heard without reducing the orchestration. (It wasn't the first body mike, though: Mary Martin used a mike in Peter Pan so she could be heard clearly when she was flying around the stage. It was, most likely, the first time amplification was used to allow the singer to be heard over the orchestra while standing still.)

Anyway, the best song in Jamaica is "I Don't Think I'll End It All Today," one of my favorite songs ever: Arlen's insanely catchy tune combined with Yip Harburg's just-plain-insane lyric -- a grotesque catalogue of violent death that nonetheless carries an upbeat and optimistic message -- makes for the most unique "charm song" ever written. And it's a reminder of the biggest reason why Harburg is my favorite lyricist: his insistent on using specific, tangible images instead of vague ones. Not only is he specific about methods of death that the singers won't use, but he's specific about the reasons why life is worth living. It's a lyric with lots and lots of nouns and verbs, few adjectives.

Here it is, from the original Broadway cast led by Horne and Montalban and conducted by Lehman Engel:

Get the Munchies

Sony or Amazon or somebody is calling for fan voting on the cover art of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen.

I voted, as did most users, for the third cover. Not that it looks that great, but my rule of thumb with covers is that the less you see of the actual actors, the better the cover is. (Reproductions of old posters, where they used drawings of the actors, are fine. But photoshop in a close-up of the real actor and it just looks cheesy.)

Speaking Of Stephen Sondheim...

I'm surprised that the song "Everybody Wants to Be Sondheim" by Alan Chapman hasn't become better-known; it's been recorded by Amanda McBroom, Bruce Kimmel (under his recording alias of "Guy Haines") and Chapman himself, but I don't think it's all that frequently done outside of New York cabaret. Which is a shame because it's one of the few really good parodies of Sondheim and Sondheim-firsters. Actually it's not so much a parody as a song about musical theatre that incorporates moments of parody -- mostly Sondheim's infamous quirk of repeating one chord over and over (like someone who heard part of The Rite of Spring and thought all songs should sound like that), as recognizable a trait as Richard Rodgers' tick-tock accompaniments.

This is Kimmel/Haines's version from the now out-of-print album "Broadway Bound" (devoted to songs by new or new-ish musical theatre writers). The arrangements are by Larry Moore.

Sweeney Todd Flashbacks

Here's a 1979 commercial for the original Broadway version of Sweeney Todd.




I always find it interesting that the show was not really advertised with the horror/blood aspects played up, the way the movie is being marketed; starting with the jokey poster (which placed a caricature of Angela Lansbury next to an old Victorian cartoon caricature with a Sweeney Todd razor in its hand), it was pretty clearly being marketed for its camp value, even though the actors were trying to avoid camping it up in the show itself, and continue to be rightly proud that they didn't give into the temptation to play the thing for camp.

This was probably the sensible way to market the show, given that it didn't really work as a straightforward horror story or as a straight drama. The flaw of Sweeney Todd as a piece of theatre is that it comes off as vaguely pointless. The original legend of Sweeney Todd has a point, the same point as any horror tale, which is to play on our paranoia about some real-life thing: it's about our fear of going to the barber and putting ourselves in the hands of someone with sharp instruments. But the more you inflate the story the more you bump up against the question of what the hell it's supposed to be about; no matter how hard it tries to sell itself as a revenge tragedy, it just isn't. (The story would be truly unsettling if it made us feel for a moment that we could descend into revenge the way the main character does; but because his actions are so over-the-top, we know for certain that we would not, in fact, do what he does.) I used to think that Hal Prince's decision to overload the show with ersatz "social commentary" on the Industrial Revolution was taking things too far; now I think he might have just been giving the audience something to hold onto; if they started to ask why this story was being told, the show would turn around and reassure them that it was something to do with how bad the Victorian era was.

It's been suggested, plausibly, that Sweeney is a sympathetic character until he snaps and starts killing people randomly; everything he does in the first act is sort of justified and the audience might actually be on his side. (That's the way Len Cariou apparently played it.) Given that the show appeared at the height of vigilante-justice fantasies, Death Wish movies and the like, it could work by drawing us into sympathizing with a vigilante and then reacting in horror when we see what we're sympathizing with. But that's not really an option because the show telegraphs from the very first moment, and throughout the first act, that the lead character is going to go bonkers and start chopping up everyone in sight. So a Bonnie and Clyde-style approach (first half, make us like the killers, second half, make us realize that maybe we shouldn't go around liking killers) isn't an option.

Also, it points up a structural problem with the show, which is that not a whole lot happens until the end of the first act, which makes it consist of a very padded first act and a second act that tries to get too much done too quickly. The movie makes some good cuts as well as some less-acceptable cuts in the score, but at least the cuts go some way toward counteracting the biggest problem in any Sondheim musical: songs that take five minutes to say what could be said in half the time. (Or, in the case of the Judge's song that was cut from the original production but recorded for the album, take five minutes to say what we already knew from two lines of dialogue.)

The movie, I think, is playing it more as a dark horror story that moves too fast for us to notice that the story doesn't have much of a point. Tim Burton is good at that, since several of his other movies fall into that category (Mars Attacks is one of the most pointless movies ever made, and I like it). I'll have more on the movie later this week, but I think it was quite well-done and does a good job of not making you question why this story is being told, a key job for any production of this material.

By the way, three years after 1979, Little Shop of Horrors would sort of take this marketing idea -- a combination of violence and camp in a musical format -- and run with it by sustaining that tone of camped-up gruesomeness for an entire evening.

Grudge Match: Charlie's Angels vs. Three Stooges

Charlie (on the speaker): Angels, the picture on the screen in front of you is the home of Mrs. Angela Palledankhurst, wealthy widow of J. Trumper Palledankhurst.

Sabrina: There's nothing on the screen, Charlie.

Charlie: I'm sorry, I assumed it was. That's the disadvantage of not being there in person. Well, if there were a picture on the screen, it would be of Mrs. Palledankurst's palatial estate, and she needs your help getting rid of her three new servants.

Kelly: Can't she just fire them?

Bosley: She's tried that. They just keep bopping each other on the head and going... (consults notes) "Woob-woob-woob."

Jill: I don't think it takes all three of us to save a wealthy dowager from three idiots. Or three fools. Or three dopes. Or three of anything, really.

Charlie: Think again, Jill. These men are insane, violent and virtually impossible to get rid of. If you don't get them out of that house, they'll soon destroy one of the oldest and snobbiest mansions in wherever this episode takes place.

Sabrina: All right, we'll get on it. Jill, Kelly and I will go undercover as maids at the Palledankhurst estate and try to get those guys out of the house by any means necessary. Bosley, can you get us three French maids' outfits, including a high-cut, long-skirt version for me?

Bosley: Already made them myself.

Charlie: Good luck, Angels, and be careful. Larry, Curly and Moe are unlike any adversaries you've ever faced. But I have confidence in you. Just don't bother me for the next twenty-four hours, because I've got a hot date with an Olympic figure skater.

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Who wins? Will the Stooges deplete the dowager's domicile, or will the television trio terrify the stumbling Stooges?

Treasure Trove

Update: Thanks to a commenter for pointing out that the clips at that YouTube account are in fact lifted from the site Bluegobo.com, the online musical theatre archive.

I hadn't known about that site before, because I am dumb. So (as I said) the material was new to me. But the point remains that it's great to have this stuff online and if you get a chance, go to Bluegobo.com and look at what they've got. And while I regret mistakenly giving some YouTube user the praise for someone else's hard work, well, that's what the internet is for -- making mistakes that you can't get sued for.

For an example of what you can find, there's more Susan Johnson in The Most Happy Fella. You can never have enough Susan Johnson.

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Check this out before the copyright complaints start and the account gets shut down: a YouTube user called "soulgrrl" has, within the last week, posted dozens of clips from Broadway musicals from the Ed Sullivan Show. (The account also has other Broadway performances from variety shows, award shows, and the like.) It may be that others have seen this material before, but much of it is new to me, and it's great, even with that time-ticker thingie at the bottom of the screen.

The clips uploaded are not just the hit shows and songs that often get excerpted in best-of-Broadway or best-of-Sullivan compilations, but obscure cult flops like Ankles Aweigh and The Gay Life and moderate successes like Destry Rides Again and Golden Boy. Amazing stuff. So thanks to "soulggrl," whoever he/she is.

It's hard to choose one or two clips from this treasure trove, but here are two. From a hit, Dick Van Dyke performing the original "Put On a Happy Face" number from Bye Bye Birdie:



And from a worthy flop, Donnybrook! a musical version of The Quiet Man with songs by the great veteran pop lyricist Johnny Burke (writing his own music), two songs, starting with the show's best song, "I Wouldn't Bet One Penny" sung by Eddie Foy Jr. (playing the Barry Fitzgerald part) and Broadway's greatest singer, Susan Johnson (playing a part added for the play; Susan Johnson always played people who didn't have a lot to do with the plot).

Also, Foy's line "I'm under your spell" is a cleaned-up verion of the line from the show, "Damn it to hell." Ah, the days when you couldn't say "Damn" and "hell" in prime time. I don't miss them at all.

Maurice Binder Rips Himself Off

I remembered Blake Edwards' 1974 spy drama The Tamarind Seed as an underrated movie -- maybe the last time Edwards made a movie that actually could be called a good movie without a caveat attached. (As in, "yes, Victor/Victoria is good but many of the jokes suck, the songs aren't very good and Edwards completely cops out by having James Garner find out she's not a man." Or "yes, S.O.B. is good even though many of the scenes and performances are actually pretty bad.") What I didn't remember was that it had a Maurice Binder title sequence that completely rips off his own James Bond work. He doesn't even bother to use a different typeface from some of the Bond movies.

This was one of the last of the "alternate" Bond movies like the Harry Palmer movies, where key Bond people are recruited and asked to do something very different from what they do for Bond. John Barry comes through as he did in the Palmer films with a moody, un-Bond-ish score, but Binder's solution is just to do what he always does in Bond, but have the characters doing different things: the silhouetted woman has her clothes on -- bell bottoms, yet -- and they're brooding and writing letters instead of shooting off guns. That's not really enough to give the sequence its own non-Bond identity, but then Binder, great though he was, didn't have a whole lot of range as a title designer.

One thing here that Binder would later incorporate into the Bond titles themselves, though, is having the stars' faces actually appear. He'd do this with Roger Moore starting with The Spy Who Loved Me.