Mark Evanier's Blog, page 123

Today's Video Link

Dick Shawn was, of course, one of the major players in my fave film, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. At the time it was made, he had not yet quite attained the stardom of most of the other major players but he was so good in it, that didn't matter. I have talked about this movie with hundreds of people over the year and there seems to be a consensus that the three greatest performances were given by Jonathan Winters, Phil Silvers and Shawn. In a movie packed with professional scene-stealers, that's quite an accomplishment.

Here's Mr. Shawn with Johnny Carson and Burt Reynolds on The Tonight Show for November 11, 1986. That was just a few months before Shawn passed away during the intermission of a one-man show in which he was performing. The video also ends abruptly but what comes before is very funny and very typical of this man's unique, tethered-to-his-own-reality sense of humor. No one else was quite like him and it's unlikely anyone ever will be…

Go Read It!

As some of you know, my first few years of writing for television were as part of a team with a clever gent named Dennis Palumbo. After a while, we parted (and have remained) friends and our careers went in very different directions. These days, Dennis is a respected psychotherapist and an author of mystery novels. He recently sat for a two-part interview that's mostly about the psychotherapy end of his world and somewhat about writing. I found it enlightening and perhaps you will too if you read Part One and Part Two.

Wally Amos, R.I.P.

A really colorful gent named Wally Amos died yesterday at his home in Honolulu at the age of 88. Wally was an entertainer, an agent, a TV star, an entrepreneur, a life coach, an author and a maker of some of the best damned chocolate chip cookies in the world. Maybe you know him better as "Famous Amos, King of Cookies."

It was while he was an agent — mostly for musical acts including Simon and Garfunkel — that he turned a hobby into a business. The hobby was making chocolate chip cookies which he freely dispensed to his friends and clients. Some of those friends and clients told him his cookies were too good not to be made commercially available and two of them — Marvin Gaye and Helen Reddy — loaned him the bucks to open what was for a time a very successful business.

Like I said: "For a time." Eventually, due to some other business ventures, he had to sell the cookie company but the product continued to bear his name. In fact, because the firm that bought his business also bought his name, he couldn't use "Famous Amos" when, years later, he attempted to get back into that line of work. It was around then that our paths crossed for the first time. I have no idea how he found me but he found me and one day, he was in my living room outlining an idea he had…

He wanted to bring out a new line of chocolate chip cookies and at the same time, he wanted to get into the business of animated cartoons. He had some ideas for characters who would be mascots for his cookie line the way Tony the Tiger sells Frosted Flakes or Captain Crunch — is he still around? — sold Captain Crunch cereal. The show would sell the cookies and the cookies would sell the show. As I wrote here some time ago…

The project never went forward, at least with me involved…but one afternoon, we sat and swapped tales of our respective businesses. I told what I knew about how to make cartoons. He told me what he knew about how to make cookies. I sure got the better of that exchange.

The main thing I learned was that the recipe doesn't matter; that you can make great cookies with the recipe they print right on the bag of chocolate morsels you buy at the supermarket. The secrets are in, first of all, the quality of the ingredients you use…but mainly in how skillfully you combine them, how long you bake them, even in the way you just blend them together.

Which makes sense. You could give me the exact same paints that Edgar Degas used and the same brushes and the same canvas and even get similar fat ladies to pose for me…but that doesn't mean I could produce one of his paintings or anything a zillionth as wonderful. Great art is not about secret formulas and neither is great cooking, at least not completely.

You'd be amazed how often remembering that has been helpful in my life.

In later years, I ran into Wally Amos now and then — once, I recall, at a Licensing Show where I couldn't believe he recognized me from halfway across a very large hall. He was always cheerful, always doing something and always enthusiastic about whatever he was doing at the moment. At the Licensing Show, it was some sort of program to help illiterate adults become literate adults. A noble endeavor.

When I teach writing as I occasionally do, I've been known to tell my students what Famous Amos told me about how to make great cookies. I compare it to writing and I say, "You have all the same words available to you that your favorite writers had, just as Wally Amos had all the same ingredients and kitchen utensils as any other maker of cookies. It's what you do with them that matters." What Wally Amos did with his mattered.

Today's Political Post

Everyone has their own theories about why Trump/Vance is down and Harris/Walz is up. Mine is that when it was Trump v. Biden, most of America didn't want either guy but Trump was doing a more efficient job of making people scared of a Biden second term than Biden was of spreading fear about another four years of Trump. Then suddenly, we don't have to vote for one of those men.

I also don't think Trump is down quite as much as the media — including the pro-Trump media — is acting. But he's acting like he's plunging to his doom and that makes everyone feel it's worse than maybe the numbers make it out to be. Then again, the numbers are not good.

If you want to track this every day — and I'm not suggesting that's a healthy thing to do — keep your eye on…

Charlie Cook's website, especially this pageNate Silver's website, especially this page538.comand 270 to Win

None of these are infallible and since they exchange data, the fact that they all agree may not be an indication of anything more than all of them agreeing..if you know what I mean. I also think we have a number of game-changing events ahead of us including but not limited to the disposition of some Trump trials, the outcome of whatever debates occur and one or more huge "Hail Mary" tricks that Trump will try out of sheer desperation.

Also, keep your eyes on dates. I just read a piece on Nate Silver's site that said in its description line, "…the odds are in the ex-president's favor" and I let out a big "HUH?" until I realized it was from June 26, 2024. That was like a hundred years ago.

My Ten Favorite Cartoon Show Openings From My Youth

I have oodles of things I have to do today so to make you feel you didn't waste your time clicking your way to my blog, here are the ten openings — and I think there's a closing or two in here as well — to cartoon shows I enjoyed watching when I was a kid. We're not talking about enjoying the show itself, although I usually did. But here are my ten fave openings, starting with Number Ten: Mighty Mouse Playhouse (1955)…

The next show was originally sponsored by Ideal Toys and they had sponsor plugs in it and worked the word "ideal" into the lyrics. That word remained but they cut out the other sponsorship points in this version of Number Nine: The Magilla Gorilla Show (1964)…

And then we swing — on a vine, no less, to the vocal stylings of musician Stan Worth (with yells by Bill Scott, voice of the title character) for Number Eight: George of the Jungle (1967)…

Our countdown continues — and yes, I'm starting to feel here like Casey Kasem — with Number Seven: The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958)…

You may remember a version of the above with Huckleberry Hound doing all the acrobatics done above by the rooster on the Kellogg's Corn Flakes box. That was the second version which they made up when Kellogg's stopped sponsoring the show. Sponsor plugs were also later edited out of the opening titles on our next two entries. Here's Number Six: The Quick Draw McGraw Show (1959)…

And yes, it always bothered me a little that Quick Draw was a horse commanding a stagecoach pulled by his own species. Next, we have Number Five: The Yogi Bear Show (1961)…

Sometimes, the best thing about a cartoon show was its theme song. Case in point, Number Four: The Underdog Show (1967)…

And this is the original — and to me, vastly superior — opening for one of my favorite shows…Number Three: The Flintstones (1960)…

This strong second-place finisher on our list shows you what you get when the creator of the property and one of the main characters is a recording artist who's had a bunch of number one hit records and then he brings in the Johnny Mann Singers. You get our Number Two: The Alvin Show (1961)…

And I always thought they oughta start the Emmy Awards year with two male hosts coming out and performing this number, ending with a march-through by a lot of big TV stars. This is, of course, Number One: The Bugs Bunny Show (1960)…

Today's Bonus Video Link

Here's one of the earliest surviving episodes of The Tonight Show back when Johnny Carson hosted it. This is from 1/14/64 and by way of reference, Johnny's first episode was 10/1/6…so Mr. Carson hads been doing it for about fifteen months at this point. As you'll see, the show was looser and more casual than any talk show today — or even what Johnny did himself the last few decades he hosted.

The guest list includes "humorist" (that's how they usually described him) Sam Levenson, columnist Hedda Hopper, comedy writer Jack Douglas and Douglas's wife Reiko. Jack Douglas was one of the wittiest men in television back then though his spot here with Johnny was not his best. He and his spouse were frequent guests on the show when Jack Paar hosted it, though Paar — at least on a later talk show she did — spent most of those segments talking with Reiko. Paar got the rep for being erudite and witty but based on what I recall and clips I've seen, he liked nothing more than to have on people — women, especially — who were either dizzy or who didn't speak English well. He enjoyed making fun of how they talked.

Also in this episode: A rousing game of "Stump the Band." And it was even customary on The Tonight Show then to have the band play a complete number every evening. That tradition went away after a while as did the loose atmosphere…

Today's Political Comment

I saw a clip of Trump talking the other night and it reminded me of something. It reminded me of what New York Mayor Ed Koch said the night he ran for re-election one too many times and lost. And if this sounds familiar to longtime followers of this blog, I'm cutting-and-pasting it from an old post here. Once it was obvious he'd lost, a reporter asked Mayor Koch to what he attributed his defeat. His answer went something like this…

I could give you all sorts of answers having to do with the changing demographics of the state and with people blaming the city for some of the labor unrest and strikes…and there might be some truth to some of that. But the real answer is that sometimes, after a while, the public just gets sick of your face.

There are a number of reasons why Trump is slip-sliding-away in the polls at the moment and…I dunno. Watching that clip of him, I got to thinking that might be one of them that people aren't talking about much. It just seems like his act — the name-calling at anyone who doesn't worship him, the endless blathering-on about his own greatness — is feeling real stale. Enough people were weary of Biden but that didn't kick in when it was Same Old Guy as Last Time versus Same Old Guy as Last Time. But now, whatever you think of Harris and Walz, at least they're new…

Today's Video Link

Today's video link is Randy Rainbow's version of a song from the musical Oklahoma! You'll have to sit through a commercial to get to it but it's worth the effort..

Today's Bonus Video Link

So now we have the sixth and final episode of the Laugh-In revival that starred Robin Williams, Sergio Aragonés, Wayland Flowers, Ed Bluestone, Lenny Shultz and a lot of other folks who probably deserved more attention than this series brought them. Some of the writing on this show was pretty good and some of the performers were pretty good. I think the problems were (a) the lack of a host or hosts and (b) there was something kinda stale about trying to revive a format that had worn out its welcome just four years earlier.

The original Laugh-In was successful because it was new. There wasn't enough new about the new Laugh-In but there were some very clever and funny moments in there…

Today's Political Post

I don't like pouring icy H2O on anyone's joy but I do like being cautious, especially on a matter as vital as the future of American Democracy. The New York Times has a poll out this morning that probably pleases anyone who feels about Donald Trump the way I do and feels about Kamala Harris the way I do. I've cropped out all that stuff you might not have looked at and here's what it tells us…

Cause for celebration, right? She's four points up in those three states and if she wins those three states, she's probably heading for the Oval Office and he's probably heading for a lot of courtrooms and maybe prisons. But there was some teensy type under those numbers and I've taken the liberty of enlarging it from the flyspeck font the Times used…

Changes things a little, doesn't it? It doesn't mean she and Governor Walz have a lock or even a near-lock on those electoral votes. It might mean they're heading in the right direction.