Mike Evans, RIP

Mike Evans, the original Lionel Jefferson on All in the Family and co-creator of Good Times, died of cancer this week at the age of 57.

John Rich, who directed All in the Family for the first four seasons, has a long passage in his autobiography "Warm Up the Snake" about how Evans was cast as Lionel. He was looking for someone who would be able to tell Archie off, and be subtly sarcastic to Archie, without ever seeming "threatening" or unsympathetic. None of the experienced actors seemed to be right for the part, but Rich found Evans -- who had almost no acting experience and wasn't very good at his audition -- and realized that he was exactly right for the part. Even though Evans' readings for the part were disappointing, Rich convinced Norman Lear to let him cast Evans in the role, and worked hard on improving his acting skills. It paid off: Evans was great in the very first episode, and Lionel's relationship with Archie was one of the key relationships on the show for those first four years.

Evans's Lionel Jefferson was sort of a more sympathetic alternative to Rob Reiner's Meathead. Like Mike, Lionel was liberal and disgusted by Archie's bigotry. But unlike the self-righteous Mike, Lionel understood that Archie was basically a good man who was parroting the prejudices he'd been taught from an early age. (In one episode Lionel admits that in some ways he objects more to Mike's condescending attitude to race issues; he can handle Archie, he explains, because "he [Archie] doesn't know any better.") Lionel corrected Archie, made fun of him, and showed him up, but he also treated Archie, as a person, with respect, even as he rightly showed no respect to Archie's bigotry. The first time Lionel ever got angry at Archie was in a third-season episode when Archie objected to his niece dating Lionel. In the climactic scene from that episode, Lionel tells Archie that he's gone too far, and calls him by his first name for the first time in the series:

ARCHIE: I'm saying youse guys oughtta stick with youselves.
LIONEL: You mean guys oughtta stay with guys?
ARCHIE: You know what I'm talking about, Lionel. I'm saying that whites oughtta stay with whites and coloreds oughtta stay with coloreds.
LIONEL: Look, Mr. Bunker, it's been a year and a half now since we moved into this neighborhood. I was just nineteen, and I got a big kick out of you and me for a long time. But I'm pushing twenty-one now, and I'm not getting that big a kick out of it anymore.
ARCHIE: Put a lid on it, Lionel --
LIONEL: I'm not finished. Now, we've been friends and we can go on being friends. But when it comes to black and white and all the other wonderful thoughts you have in between, put a lid on that, Archie!

Because he'd co-created Good Times, Evans wasn't available to play Lionel on The Jeffersons; he was replaced by Damon Evans (no relation). He returned to the role after Good Times was canceled. But the character of Lionel was never quite as good as he was when playing off Archie Bunker; it was that relationship, and the interplay between Carroll O'Connor and Mike Evans, that made for some of the best scenes in the first four years of All in the Family.

Razzle Dazzle 'Em

It may be a display of narcissism, but I've been looking through the posts I used to write on usenet in the late '90s. I loved usenet posting, in some ways more than blogging; a good newsgroup felt like a true community of like-minded people. A blog, even with comments, isn't communitarian, and a message board doesn't have quite the same spirit.

Anyway, part of the fun of usenet was creative stuff -- fan fiction, song parodies, and more -- and I'm surprised to find how much of that kind of thing I wrote for usenet, especially alt.tv.animaniacs. Most of it makes no sense out of the context of the show's fan base, but there was one thing, a parody of "All that Jazz" from Chicago, that I think still holds up pretty well. It was originally written to be sung in-character by Slappy Squirrel, but with one or two changes it works as a generalized song about cartoon violence and cartoon logic. So here it is, as part of my recycling drive.

Look at that, a stick of TNT.
(And all those jokes!)
It seems the villain hopes it might demolish me--
(And all those jokes!)
All I do is pick it up and throw.
And now I'm safe and sound, but where'd the villain go?
He really ought to learn: If there's one thing I know,
It's all those jokes!

Over here, oh, isn't this a shock!
(And all those jokes!)
Why, it's a phoney door that's painted on a rock!
(And all those jokes!)
I go in, and it's a real-life door,
The villain has a try, and it's a rock once more.
It's violent gag X-8, and it's been done before,
Like all those jokes!

Oh, the villain's sawing off the branch I'm on!
And all those jokes!
Oh, the branch is staying there, the tree is gone!
And all those jokes!
Now he's got a way to trick me!
Wow, he's got a dog to sic me!
He'll get lots
Of rabies shots
From all those jokes!

Here's a fact he won't be learning soon:
(And all those jokes!)
He's gonna get the knocks, I'm gonna be immune.
(And all those jokes!)
Though his wounds will all be quickly healed,
He's up against a law that never gets repealed,
'Cause it's the cartoon law, and it'll be my shield
In all those jokes.
Oh, he's trying that!
And oh, he's lying flat!
And all
Those
Jokes!

Chase Scenes

I was a little worried when some months went by without further seasons of The Rockford Files, but fortunately Universal has announced the complete third season for February 2007.

This was the season when The Rockford Files went from good to really good. The first season had to tone down the humor a bit more than the creators probably wanted (the network didn't want a lot of jokes and they especially didn't want too much of Stuart Margolin as Angel); the second season was funnier but may actually have gone too far in the direction of goofiness. The third season -- you can read the list of episodes here -- got the serious/funny mix about right. It also added a new writer to the staff, the young David Chase, who immediately started writing some of the best scripts. I've mentioned this before, but the regular writing staff of Rockford in this period was one of the best ever: Stephen J. Cannell, Juanita Bartlett, and Chase. All three would return to write the Rockford TV movies that James Garner made in the '90s.

I should probably add, apropos of nothing, that when the New York Times compared Chase's The Sopranos to Cannell's Wiseguy, Chase wrote a letter to the paper saying he'd never seen a single episode of that show.

The Babes of The Big Sleep

I asserted in a previous post that Howard Hawks's movie version of The Big Sleep "comes off as Hawks's excuse to feature as many beautiful women as possible." With the help of easily-embeddable video (the godsend for the lazy entertainment blogger), I don't have to limit this to a simple assertion. Here are some examples of why the real subjects of The Big Sleep is a) beautiful women and b) the surprising tendency of said beautiful women to be attracted to Humphrey Bogart.

1. The very first scene of the movie, with Martha Vickers, sums up what the movie's about. There used to be a rumor that Vickers' part was cut down because Lauren Bacall was jealous of how good she was, but I don't think that's accurate -- what actually did happen is that new scenes were shot with Bacall to give her more fun things to do in the picture. Vickers herself obviously should have had a much better career. You can't always believe what Hawks said, but he claimed, plausibly enough, that he urged her to continue playing bad-girl roles, but instead she went back to playing ingenues, in which roles she just seemed like any other pretty Hollywood actress -- she couldn't do the unique things she did in The Big Sleep.



2. In what is quite rightly considered one of the sexiest scenes in '40s movies, Humphrey Bogart goes into the ACME book shop (yes, Warner Brothers used "ACME" for everything) and meets bespectacled clerk Dorothy Malone. ("I'm a private dick on a case.") Originally Malone was just supposed to deliver some exposition and be done with it; Hawks said he expanded the scene because Malone "was so damned good-looking."



3. Bogart gets into a cab to do (as I said earlier) a very standard follow-that-car scene, except his driver is a woman, Joy Barlow, who is clearly interested in more than just tailing a car.

4. Bacall -- who's really kind of overshadowed by nearly everyone else in the film -- sings "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine" while both she and Bogart take appreciative glances at a randomly-appearing (and, once again, clearly interested in Marlowe) attractive woman.

And I haven't even gotten to Mona Mars, or Agnes, or other Big Sleep women (SleepFemmes?).

So many women throw themselves at Bogart throughout the movie that you almost get the sense that Hawks is making some kind of meta-joke about Bogart's unlikely sex-symbol status; he'd only just recently established himself as a romantic leading man (in Casablanca and Hawks's own To Have and Have Not), and it's almost as if Hawks is saying: well, if we're expected to believe that Humphrey Bogart is a sex symbol, we might as well take it to an extreme.

Not So Silent

I know that Spite Marriage isn't one of Buster Keaton's better movies -- it was the last good picture he did before the M-G-M factory broke his spirit, but it still shows signs of being compromised, in a way that his independent pictures don't -- but I like it. And one thing I really like about it is that as a silent film made after the introduction of recorded sound in theatres, it has a pre-recorded and synchronized musical score, meaning that for once we can actually see a Keaton film with a score created at the time.

As I've complained before, most silent movies are currently saddled with scores that just don't sound right. They're either too peppy or too morose, or they don't match up very well with the action, and they certainly don't sound like anything that would have been heard at the time. The score for Spite Marriage may not be a great score, but at least it represents an example of the kind of thing audiences would have expected to hear with a silent comedy. Yet most composers don't try to listen to these scores and learn from them. The DVD set that includes Spite Marriage also includes The Cameraman, which didn't have a pre-recorded score, and the composer for the DVD version created a score that is, stylistically, nothing like the Spite Marriage score. Would it have hurt to ask a composer to listen to that score, or other scores from the late '20s, and model his or her work after that? Then you'd have something that fits the movie.

This scene from Spite Marriage, where Buster tries to get the heroine to lie down, is by far the most famous in the movie (Keaton performed it live for many years thereafter). But note how the music works in this scene. The composer doesn't play a long, jaunty tune to set the rhythm and pace for the scene -- which is how most silent-comedy scores seem to be written nowadays. We don't really get the kind of thing we associate with silent comedy (a peppy tune for muted brass) until the last minute or so. Instead, the score uses short musical sequences, frequently stopping and starting according to the progress of the action, and tries to catch individual actions in the music, as if this is a cartoon. And scoring a silent movie is in many ways quite similar to scoring a cartoon.

I Wallow in Negativity

Judging from my last two posts at TV Guidance, I've become a real Negative Nelly (tm).

- One's about James Burrows, a great TV director who I don't think is so great any more.

- And the other is about King of the Hill, a great TV show whose creative direction I don't quite agree with.

Somebody should really remind me that in real life, people don't actually become successful critics by hating everything.

Joe Barbera

Joe Barbera's death has inspired a lot of amazing tributes and reminiscences around the WWW. Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew has a great round-up, as does Mark Evanier at POV Online.

Google Video has the Archive of American Television's seven-part interview with Barbera, conducted in 1997 by Leonard Maltin.

And here's the logo that -- as a child -- I associated with the shows that entertained me the most:

The Big Sleep Thoughts

I was talking about The Big Sleep, and we noted that it's one of those movies that sort of seems to make sense right up until you're finished watching it, at which point you realize that there were a million things that went unexplained.

It's not just the famous story (mentioned in the Wikipedia article above) about how neither Howard Hawks nor Raymond Chandler knew who committed one of the murders; it's that the movie builds toward a big revelation -- who killed Sean Regan -- that never really comes, at least not in a satisfying way. The way the final scene is played, the murderer could have been one of two people, and I've gotten into arguments about who the killer was supposed to be. (The obscurity of the final scene may derive partly from Production Code requirements: murderers had to be punished, so it had to be said that Eddie Mars, the villain, was the murderer, even if we were left free to believe that he wasn't. A lot of the obscurity in the film comes from the convoluted ways in which the filmmakers have to imply drug dealing, or nymphomania, or a lot of other stuff, without actually saying the words.)

But the other thing that has always struck me about The Big Sleep, and which I haven't seen a lot of other people mention, is that the whole movie comes off as Hawks's excuse to feature as many beautiful women as possible; not until the James Bond movies would an action-adventure movie lean so heavily on eye candy. The first scene is primarily focused on how good Martha Vickers looks in shorts. (The original script called for Bacall to show off her legs in her first scene, too, but either it was changed or she didn't want to do the scene that way.) Then there's the famous bookstore scene with Dorothy Malone, where Hawks turned a bit part into a long -- and mostly pointless -- scene because, by his own admission, he thought Malone was hot and he wanted to give her more to do.

I've always thought the iconic scene of The Big Sleep is the one where Marlowe gets into a cab to do the follow-that-car scene, but his driver is a good-looking woman. Obviously women are an important part of the Raymond Chandler world, but Hawks overdoes it to an extent that we wouldn't see again until Frank Tashlin came along. I'm still not sure what possessed him to do the movie that way, though of course I am grateful for Vickers and Malone.

Baer Necessities

Not much time for posting today, but here's something I stumbled on that seems like it could be interesting. Richard Baer, who has been writing for television since the '50s and worked on just about every TV comedy you can name, has written his memoirs at the age of 89. The book is called I Don't Drop Names Like Marilyn Monroe Just to Sell Books. (The semi-ironic title comes from the fact that before he started in TV writing, he was a production assistant on the Fritz Lang film Clash By Night, which had Monroe in a supporting role; the excerpt on the website is, inevitably, a Monroe anecdote.) I haven't read the book, but Baer was a good scriptwriter (he wrote weaker scripts when working under weaker producers, but that's true of any screenwriter) who had a long career; he was writing prime-time situation comedies well into his '60s. I would think there would be some good stories in the book; I'll try and get a copy and give a fuller report.

Shorter Daniel Henninger: Don't you realize "heck" is a four-letter word, you rebel?

See Roy Edroso's Alicublog for more on Henninger, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page's most unintentionally hilarious member of the prematurely-cranky-old-man club.

Happy Beethoven's Birthday!

Here's the slow movement of the seventh symphony, with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Claudio Abbado. I don't know whether I'd consider it one of the very best versions available online, but unlike the YouTube clips, this one (from DailyMotion) is in stereo, allowing you to hear stuff like Beethoven's penchant -- similar to Haydn's -- for giving very different material to the first violins and second violins. (This is emphasized because Abbado, unusually for him, uses divided violins.)

When I say "slow movement," of course, that's kind of a misnomer; Beethoven rarely wrote actual "slow" movements in his symphonies except for the funeral march in symphony # 3. This particular movement is much more propulsive and rhythm-oriented than the typical second movement of a symphony; usually this part of the symphony is a relaxing or soothing interlude between two fast and loud movements, but here it's as neurotic, unsettling, as the rest of the piece. It also became very influential for the very stripped-down version of theme-and-variations form which Beethoven used here: it's really just one theme repeated over and over and over again without a whole lot of actual variation, and somehow that becomes hypnotic instead of boring. Ravel's Bolero and the Minimalists wouldn't exist without the example of this particular movement.

And leave us not forget Schroeder and Lucy.

Low Blood Sugar

Tenor Roberto Alagna blames his La Scala walkout on "Low Blood Sugar."

The fun thing about the Italians -- especially at La Scala -- is that they still treat opera not as a source of highbrow boredom but as a sort of sporting event. Opera singers are as close as musicians get to being athletes; they have to perform amazing feats every night. So in Milan, the audiences react as they would to athletes: you cheer when the athlete/singer scores a point/hits the high note, and you boo for a bad play or a bum note.

Closing Theme Songs

I'll have more on WKRP in Cincinnati as more information trickles out about the DVD release, but for now I wanted to add just one little thing. I was surprised, looking at a comment on a message board, to discover that people are still asking about the lyrics to the closing theme song. So I will link to this interview clip with the guy who wrote and sang the closing theme, Jimmy Ellis, who explains very clearly that the whole thing is gibberish.

And speaking of closing theme songs, what are some other shows that have a different theme in the closing credits than in the opening? All in the Family is one that comes to mind. Arrested Development, Remington Steele after the first season... others?

Here, by the way, is the WKRP closing theme, complete with the MTM kitten and those MTM picture credits for cast members:

Down With Python!

Want to know what BBC network executives thought of Monty Python's Flying Circus? The Daily Telegraph has the story.

The article reviews "new documents" -- a term normally reserved for the secrets of government departments other than the BBC -- to find out what was going on behind the scenes while Python was on the air. Highlights:

The minutes state: "Aubrey Singer (the head of features group) said that he had found parts of this edition disgusting. Controller BBC1 said the programme was continually going over the edge of what was acceptable: this edition had contained two really awful sketches – the death sequence had been in appalling bad taste, while the treatment of the National Anthem had simply not been amusing.

"The Managing Director Television said it must be recognised that in the past the programme had contained dazzle and produced some very good things but this edition had been quite certainly over the edge and the producer Ian McNaughton had failed to refer the show to the BBC when he should have done.

"Stephen Hearst (the head of arts features) was critical of the fact that the values of the programme were so nihilistic and cruel… Bob Reid (the head of science features) felt the team seemed to wallow in the sadism of their humour. Controller BBC2 thought they also shied away from their responsibility. D.P. (the director of programmes) Television said the episode had been a sad end for the series. Bill Cotton (the head of light entertainment group) said it would be sad if the BBC lost the programme; the team seemed to have some sort of death wish."

Actually, most of the article isn't as much of a scoop as previously thought, because the sketch to which these comments refer -- about a cannibalistic undertaker -- was already known to have been extremely controversial at the BBC. The network was reluctant to approve the script in the first place, and finally agreed that the cast could do the sketch on condition that it ended with the studio audience expressing its disgust over the bad taste. Which, as network censorship goes, is pretty post-modern.

One thing I wasn't aware of is that John Cleese, who finally did leave after the third season (or "series," I should probably say), considered leaving after the first 13 episode run and had to be talked into returning for a second year.

Update: Thanks to a commenter for pointing out that this info is even older than I thought:

The memo you quote from was printed in Robert Hewison's "Monty Python: The Case Against" published in 1981.

Noir Gang

DVD Beaver has a list of the films that will be in Warner Home Video's Film Noir Collection, Volume 4. It looks to be an improvement over the last two volumes in two ways: a) It'll have ten films instead of five, and b) It'll include more of the grungy little "B" movies, or relatively inexpensive, under-the-radar films, that have more of the real noir spirit than some of the star-studded "A" pictures included in previous volumes.

The movies are:

- Act of Violence (MGM, 1949) - an MGM "A" picture directed by Fred Zinnemmann before he got really boring.

- Cornered (RKO, 1945) - the team that made Murder My Sweet -- director Edward Dmytryk, writer John Paxton and star Dick Powell -- followed it up with this post-war noir thriller about Nazis who are alive and well and living in Argentina.

- Crime Wave (WB, 1954) - it's got Sterling Hayden and the young Charles Bronson, it's only 73 minutes and it's a violent little crime movie about how one mistake haunts you for the rest of your life. Late noir, but noir nonetheless.

- Decoy (Monogram, 1946) - very strange, very cheap, very implausible and very entertaining "B" picture about a very bad woman.

- Illegal (WB, 1955) - Edward G. Robinson (who was making a lot of "B" movies in the mid-'50s because the political situation made it harder for him to get hired for "A" pictures) plays a D.A. who gets an innocent man executed for murder, quits out of guilt, and then gets all sorts of shady problems in private practice.

- Mystery Street (MGM, 1950) - an early film from John Sturges about the investigation into the murder of a prostitute (Jan Sterling).

- Side Street (MGM, 1950) - before Anthony Mann started mostly directing Westerns, he mostly directed crime thrillers. This, with Farley Granger as yet another guy who makes one stupid mistake and finds he can't escape the consequences, is one of them.

- Tension (MGM, 1950) - Richard Basehart works out a plan to murder the guy who ran off with his wife (Audrey Totter), but somebody else kills him first and he's the suspect for something he planned to do, but didn't actually do. Cyd Charisse is in it somewhere as well.

They Live By Night (RKO, 1949) - The pick of this particular litter, directed by Nicholas Ray. Robert Altman later remade it as Thieves Like Us.

Where Danger Lives (RKO, 1950) - Obligatory Robert Mitchum movie. Faith Domergue is the woman who, you'll be shocked to hear, leads him astray.

It says on the site that Eddie Muller has recorded commentary tracks for Crime Wave and (with comments by Farley Granger) They Live By Night.

The Cultural Identity of the Late '90s

I was watching a Pinky and the Brain episode where the lab mice appear on a parody of MTV's The Real Life. The episode, written by Jed Spingarn and directed by Kirk Tingblad (whom I'll always think of as the guy who animated the scene in Animaniacs where Slappy Squirrel lipo-suctions lard out of Roger Ebert's stomach), aired in 1998, and I was enjoying all the late-'90s stereotypes in the show: the depressed female wanna-be poet, the backwards baseball caps, the grunge rock, the fashions.

And then it occurred to me: the late '90s are, by simple mathematics, less than a decade old, and yet they already seem to belong to a distant past -- and they have a cultural profile that is much stronger than many other eras.

I can barely remember what the early '90s were like, in a cultural/fashion sense, even though I was in high school then and, in theory, I should have been noticing stuff. But boy, do I remember the music, fashions and cultural obsessions from about 1996 right up to the dot-com bust.

We can all think of stuff that symbolizes that era. Internet cartoons. Alanis Morissette (and I'm not talking about the teen pop queen Alanis, either). The cable news channels caught up in Monica Lewinsky fever. Titanic. Austin Powers. Anything whatsoever to do with the term, or aimed at the people considered to be, "Generation X." Bad Friends ripoffs on every network. Mawkish tributes to the "Greatest Generation" (that would be the World War II generation, or so said Tom Brokaw). The debuts of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and the general ubiquity of empowered kick-ass females in popular entertainment. The march of Starbucks.

And, above everything else, an absolute obsession with people in their '20s who don't know exactly what to do with their lives.

This particular era was killed stone dead by, first, the dot-com bust, which killed the mystique of the 20-something by making it clear that we would, in fact, never get rich and there wasn't anything cool about us. And second, September 11, 2001, which ushered in a bunch of new, different worries.

So what are some other things -- shows, clothes, things like those -- that you associate with that particular cultural moment?

And here's an excerpt from the Pinky and the Brain episode that started this whole post; see how many late '90s things you can spot that already seem like ancient history. The guest voices, by the way, include Pamela "Milhouse" Hayden, Scott "Nick on Family Ties" Valentine, and LeVar Burton.

WKRP on DVD - A-OK

Fox appears to have finally spilled the beans: they're going to release WKRP in Cincinnati on DVD.

I've been hearing about this for a while but I couldn't say anything until it became official (for one thing, it might have fallen through and then I'd have looked like an idiot).

I'll have more to say about the music issue when more news starts coming out. It will fall short of having all the music, but my guess for now is that it'll be a lot better than the atrociously re-dubbed versions that ran on Nick at Nite (in the U.S.) or The Comedy Network (in Canada). More later.

While I'm not making threats, I will say just this: if, when the first season comes out, you have some money to spare and choose instead to spend it on some other DVD, I will find out about it and I will be very, very annoyed with you. Not that I'm making threats.

The point is that the first season needs to sell as well as it possibly can or we won't get the other three seasons.

I think it will sell, though. For one thing, while the first season of WKRP wasn't the very best in my opinion, it did produce a huge number of fan-favorite episodes, episodes that people still think of immediately when they remember watching WKRP in Cincinnati. One of them, of course, was the Thanksgiving turkey drop (which was much-viewed on YouTube a week ago), which I'm assuming Fox will call attention to when they promote the DVD. But the first season also had:

- The concert by the "hoodlum rock" group, Scum of the Earth
- Les Nessman's news report about "Chi Chi Rodriguez"
- Mr. Carlson mistaking cocaine for foot powder
- The episode where Johnny's reflexes get better with every drink
- The episode about Venus Flytrap the army deserter
- The "Ferryman's Funeral Homes" jingle
- The tornado episode

And so on. One of the possible reasons that show did so well in syndication is that the first season was very strong; that meant that the episodes people liked were turning up as soon as it hit syndication, whereas with some shows, people have to wait through 22 or 44 episodes to get to the seasons they like best.

Finally, here's a short scene from the first season where the DVD producers really will need to do everything possible to retain the music:

Oh, Chuck!

I have nothing to say about the moving candle scene from Abbott and Costello's Hold that Ghost, except... well... it's the moving candle scene from Abbott and Costello's Hold that Ghost. Enjoy.

In Defence of Very Special Episodes

Over at Maclean's I have a post that amounts to an apologia for "Very Special Episodes" of TV comedy shows.

And a thing to understand about "Very Special Episodes" is that in the '70s and '80s, so-called TV drama was mostly not very good -- you had a lot of cop shows and medical shows and stuff, but very little serious character development. If you wanted to see characters grow and change, or see the lead character of a show go through any kind of emotional development at all, you mostly had to go to sitcoms, and that's why shows like M*A*S*H or Family Ties would do serious shows where a character grew up a little -- because hourlong dramas weren't doing this kind of thing. Now they are, so there's less need for sitcoms to do them.

I now recall that Larry Gelbart (not my favorite writer, but certainly important in the development of the VSE) said something to the effect that the reason M*A*S*H stood out was because nobody else in the '70s was doing actual drama. He had a point. Most of the episodes of '70s hourlong drama shows revolved around plot, not character: the resolution of the episode would come when the murderer was caught or the disease was cured. The comedy shows, like Barney Miller and All in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore, were the shows that did stories that depended on character, where the resolution of the episode depended on a character learning something or two characters making an emotional connection.

Clown Zombies

I'm glad to have volume 2 of Animaniacs in my hot little hands... well, more accurately, on my hot little shelf. I probably should do a longer post about just how popular that show was in its first season. It was to a lot of us what the first season of Ren and Stimpy was to a lot of others: the TV cartoon that finally got it right. (I know it makes real animation fans very angry to hear people talk about Animaniacs as if it's on a level with Ren and Stimpy. And maybe they're right. But the impact it had on its fans was quite similar.) It was pulling together a lot of stuff that TV cartoons had been slowly trying to do throughout the '80s: get a little funnier, a little more pop-culture-savvy, a little less socially-responsible, a little less weighed down by network standards and practices.

You could see even bad late Hanna-Barbera cartoons at least trying to get some funny stuff through the muck, and it often turns out that those semi-funny episodes were written by people who went to Warner Brothers in the early '90s. Anyway, Tiny Toons came close to breaking through, but a lot of the scripts still had the old '80s Saturday Morning Cartoon problems, especially the need to tell socially responsible stories with uplifting messages. Animaniacs was the first cartoon to do this kind of stuff and be almost totally amoral. It was a heady mix, and for many of us, the first time we saw a good Animaniacs cartoon was a "eureka!" moment.

All that said, I won't feel satisfied that the '90s WB legacy (for better or for worse) has been properly represented until Freakazoid! comes out on DVD. There's been no announcement of that yet. Hopefully it will come sometime, and if you want to know why I want that show most of all, here are two reasons why.

Freakazoid tells the story of an after-school special he saw about what happens when friendships go bad:



And Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA, explains their fascinating ratings system: