Mark Evanier's Blog, page 125

Today's Video Link

Following up on my previous video link: Even as an eight-year-old kid watching (and loving) The Flintstones when it debuted on Friday, 9/30/60, I was intrigued by ABC's decision to program it at 8:30 PM.

That evening, ABC prime time kicked off with a show called Matty's Funday Funnies which was sometimes called just Matty's Funnies. Either way, it was sponsored by Mattel Toys and initially ran old Paramount cartoons of Casper the Friendly Ghost, Herman & Katnip and others. That series debuted and aired on late Sunday ("Funday") afternoons commencing in October of 1959. The night The Flintstones debuted at 8:30, ABC added a Friday night edition of Matty's at 7:30.

Here's the closing of one episode. I'm not sure if this is from the Sunday or Friday version but it includes a promo for The Flintstones…

Now, given the way networks think on those rare occasions when they do, you'd figure that show would be a natural lead-in to Fred and Barney and their stone-age escapades but no. As I said, they were on at 8:30. So what filled the 8 PM time slot? What show did ABC decide would create a natural flow from Casper cartoons to Flintstones cartoons? Answer: Harrigan and Sons.

It was not a cartoon. It was a half-hour filmed situation comedy starring the old character actor Pat O'Brien as a well-seasoned lawyer and Roger Perry as his son and lightly-seasoned junior partner. To give you an idea how unlike its lead-in and lead-out it was, here's the opening of one episode…

And here are the end credits to the show. I vividly recall watching them each week as I waited for Fred and Barney to start…

Harrigan and Son didn't debut on 9/30, the same night Matty's Funnies and The Flintstones debuted. It didn't come on until 10/14. And once it did, it came between those two shows. Then The Flintstones was followed by 77 Sunset Strip, The Detectives Starring Robert Taylor and then to close out the evening at 10:30, The Law and Mr. Jones, which starred James Whitmore and which was a lot like Harrigan and Son only more serious. So what you had there was, in order…

Cartoon show about friendly ghosts and talking catsSituation comedy about a law firmCartoon show about cavemen in the Stone AgeDrama about detectivesDrama about detectivesDrama about a law firm

But now I hear you wondering what ran on ABC at 8 PM the night The Flintstones debuted? And what was there on the following Friday, October 7? My research was unable to answer this riddle which, I'll admit, intrigued me more than it should have. So I consulted with TV expert Stu Shostak and he consulted with TV expert Steve Beverly and they came up with the answer…

On September 30, the night The Flintstones premiered, its lead-in at 8 PM was an ABC News Special on the then-current presidential election. So the first 90 minutes of ABC's prime-time lineup that night had this natural flow…

Cartoon show about friendly ghosts and talking catsNews Special about Richard Nixon and John F. KennedyCartoon show about cavemen in the Stone Age

And then on October 7, they pre-empted Matty's Funnies and that 90 minute block went like this…

One hour live televised presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John F. KennedyCartoon show about cavemen in the Stone Age

The odd placement of The Flintstones may have been because, as was then sometimes the case, a given sponsor had a long-term contract for a certain time slot.  So the company that chose to sponsor The Flintstones or its ad agency controlled 8:30 PM on Friday nights on ABC and the show they wanted to sponsor had to go there.  Or maybe ABC felt that the success of The Flintstones might have hinged on it attracting an adult audience and that was less likely with Buzzy the Crow cartoons as its lead-in. Or there might have been some other reason. We may never know.

But I do know that even when I was eight, I thought, "They have those shows in the wrong order." I also thought everyone on The Flintstones was more realistic than Richard Nixon.

ASK me: Kirby Page Layouts

Daniel Klos wrote to ask…

For much of his career, it seemed that Jack Kirby mostly used a six-panel grid in his page layouts. But when he returned to DC in the mid-1980s for issue 6 of that New Gods reprint mini-series, as well as the Hunger Dogs graphic novel, his page layouts became much more experimental, largely eschewing any underlying grid system. Did Kirby ever discuss this change and why he made it?

Yes. He said DC had asked him to saying that his simple grid layouts were "old-fashioned." He didn't like it but to make the company happy, he tried some different panel arrangements on some pages. I don't have an exact quote for you but he said (to me) something like, "A good artist can make the contents of the panels interesting. Anyone can divide the page into weird shapes."

How to Pronounce "Kamala"

It seems to be a badge of honor in some circles to mispronounce the first name of the Democratic nominee for President. For those of you who want to get it right, here's a video that she released many years ago when she was running for The Senate…

Today's Political Post

Where did all those Harris/Walz posters come from so quickly? It seems to me that one minute, no one was quite sure who Kamala's running mate would be and then she announced and twenty minutes later, the signs were all over every venue in which she or her new running mate spoke…and her website had merchandise with the official Harris/Walz logo.

I'm kinda curious how this happened. I can imagine that a week or three ago, some designer was commissioned to get to work and that somewhere — on some computer — there were and maybe still are versions of this logo that were Harris/Shapiro or Harris/Kelly or Harris/Beshear or Harris/Pritzker. And I wonder if the smaller font for the vice-presidential candidate was because that designer had to make up one that was for Harris/Buttigieg.

But it's one thing to have a logo design; quite another to have hundreds of posters and banners — some of them rather large — ready for a rally the next day. Did they print up some with Harris/Someone Else to have them ready? If anyone sees press coverage of this, lemme know.

The polls still have this as a pretty close race. At this moment, 538 has Harris at 1.8% ahead of Trump. Given the margins of error on the polls they're aggregating, that's pretty much the same as Trump being 1.8% ahead of Harris. There are also polls that show her ahead by wider margins and state polls that show her ahead in some key states…but I think optimism still needs to be well-guarded.

What may be cause for a smidgen of celebration is the feeling of momentum and how panicky Trump seems to be. His increasingly-slurred speech and increasingly-wacko accusations are probably making a lot of people feel Harris is doing better than she is…so far. Some of my friends wish he'd shut up. I think the more he talks and tweets, the more America is becoming convinced this man is outta his f'in mind.

Today's Second Video Link

This is the minute-and-a-half pilot/sales film that Hanna-Barbera produced in either late 1959 or early 1960 to try and sell a show called The Flagstones. This, of course, soon morphed into The Flintstones, a weekly series on ABC that was originally marketed more for adults — complete with a cigarette sponsor some of the time — than for kids.

Had it been for younger audiences, ABC would have programmed it for 7:30 PM, which is when "prime time" then began. Instead, it debuted at 8:30 on Friday evening, September 30, 1960 where it was a surprising hit. By this point, the recently-opened Hanna-Barbera studio had sold The Ruff and Reddy Show (NBC Saturday morning) and then Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw (both syndicated) but this was the series that really put them on the map.

Before anyone asks: It is said that the name was changed because in the Hi & Lois newspaper strip — by Mort Walker and Dik Browne, which debuted in 1954 — the family was named The Flagstones. And that may be true, though some question that reason.

The voice of Wilma was supplied by actress Jean Vander Pyl, who continued through the series and almost every other time Wilma Flintstone spoke until Ms. Vander Pyl left us. Betty Rubble was voiced in this pilot by June Foray, while Fred and Barney were both by Daws Butler, doing much the same voices he did as the mice in the Warner Brothers "Honeymousers" cartoons which aped the Honeymooners TV show starring Jackie Gleason and Art Carney.

June and Daws did not go on to do the series — Daws reportedly because that might have made the show close enough to Mr. Gleason's series to prompt a lawsuit…a move which Gleason once said in an interview had been contemplated. Again, there might be more to the story than that. Daws did play Barney for a few episodes later on when Mel Blanc had his infamous, near-deadly auto accident. And Daws was certainly capable of inventing a voice for Fred which did not sound as much like Ralph Kramden.

Two decades later when I was working for H-B, I made a comment to Joe Barbera about how Barney Rubble had obviously been named as a sly way of saying "Carney Double." Mr. B, as most of us younger folks called him, did a "take" that would not have been out of place in a Tex Avery cartoon. He then swore to me that that had never occurred to anyone at the time and I was the first person he'd ever heard point that out. I still find that hard to believe.

But enough background. Here's the pilot/sales film in question…

From the E-Mailbag…

Dick Murry sent me the following…

With respect to your recent "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat" festival, Stubby Kaye's original rendition is, in my opinion, far and away the best.

Speaking of Mr. Kaye, an equally memorable performance was in the 1959 movie Li'l Abner when he sang Jubilation T. Cornpone. He also played Marryin' Sam in the Broadway production.

Speaking of Li'l Abner, since you are well plugged into the illustrated comics community; how is Al Capp thought of these days?

Agree with your opinion of Mr. Kaye's performances of those two numbers. I also like him in the "I Love to Cry at Weddings" number in Sweet Charity. He really was a talented guy. And I know all about Li'l Abner on stage and screen, having researched them extensively for this article and this article.

I would guess that if you polled a roomful of cartoonists and experts on newspaper strips about Mr. Capp, you'd hear that he was a very good artist and that his strip was brilliant for most of its run…until its last decade when it went into serious decline, eventually becoming a pretty sad, clumsy mess. And if you asked about Al Capp the human being, you'd hear that he was a rather lousy excuse for one — and today would have or at least should have gone to prison for his misdeeds.

Today's First Video Link

This is the installment of Everything You Need To Know About Saturday Night Live covering Season 7 and that brings us up to date with what's been released so far. I'll link you to the video about Season 8 when it's released, which will probably be this Friday.

Season 7 was when Saturday Night Live really began turning into The Eddie Murphy Show…and the folks at NBC had to be worried because it was pretty obvious that guy wasn't sticking around indefinitely. A few weeks before the movie 48 Hours came out, Leonard Maltin invited me to accompany him to a screening room at Paramount for an advance viewing. When the film ended, we both turned to each other and almost simultaneously said, "Well, he's now a movie star!"

There's one blatant mistake in this chapter. They show a photo and identify it as NBC announcer Bill Hanrahan but it's a photo of Gene Rayburn — on the set of The Match Game, no less. The folks making these videos are very thorough so it wouldn't surprise me if they fixed this…

This Just In…

CNN and other sources are saying Kamala Harris has selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. That seems to me like a good choice although I didn't think the list of folks she was considering had any bad choices. He's certainly a fine contrast to the guy Trump chose to be his running mate. Trump can't even bring himself to say that J.D. Vance is qualified to be president on Day One if some tragedy occurs…but then, Trump lives in a world where Donald Trump is the only human being qualified to lead this country with the possible exception of Vladimir Putin.

Trump and his minions are trying really hard to make this election about Kamala being unfit for the job but I don't think that's going to work with a lot of swing voters. Making her out as some sort of racial opportunist ain't gonna do it. The last few days, he almost seems to have given up on that, instead opting to claim she's stupid…and that certainly won't stick. Put the two of them on a debate stage and even Fox Moderators won't be able to make that work for him.

Donald won the presidency once by convincing just enough voters that Hillary Clinton was unfit. He seemed to be coming close to winning it again because just enough were feeling that way about Joe Biden but now that's no longer in play, whereas Harris certainly has enough talking points to convince the swings that Trump is the one who's unfit. He can't make this election be about her but she can sure make it about him.

Save a Soul

Before we totally leave the subject of Guys and Dolls: I mentioned that Abe Burrows wrote the book for the show and then I received a message from someone who writes me often but never signs his or her name. The message said, "Jo Swerling co-wrote Guys and Dolls and had a great career. Abe Burrows cooperated with HUAC and betrayed writers."

Yes, Burrows testified — twice, I believe — before the House Un-American Activities Committee. I wasn't commenting on him as a human being; just saying that he wrote the book for the show. If my correspondent was objecting to me not giving Swerling credit…okay, so noted. But when one of the producers of Guys and Dolls, Cy Feuer, penned his autobiography, he wrote — and I quote…

…we saw that Swerling was the wrong guy for us. It was basic. Irreconcilable differences. We finally had to fire him, although he insisted that he still receive first billing in the credits for the play and retain some small percentage of the royalties. This in spite of the fact that not one of his words ever appeared in the show.

That's from a book called I've Got the Show Right Here and in it, he says that when Swerling left the show, it didn't even have Nathan Detroit or Adelaide in it. So make of that what you will. I also think that, though he may have done a very bad thing by testifying, Abe Burrows had a pretty good career too.

If we're going to talk about Guys and Dolls and the blacklist, I should probably post the following video of Tom Pedi, a longtime actor who was in the original Broadway production in the role of Harry the Horse. I had the pleasure — and believe me, it was one — of dining a couple times with Tom not long before he died in 1996. He was the cousin of my friend Christine Pedi, who has been mentioned often on this blog. Here's a photo I took of Tom, Christine and my dear buddy Howard Morris at one of those dinners…

Tom was a genuine blacklisted actor as he states in this interview. The actor he mentions, B.S. Pully, was also in the original company of Guys and Dolls, having originated the role of Big Jule. When they made the movie, they hired a lot of actors who did the show on Broadway…and Pully was hired but Tom Pedi was replaced by Sheldon Leonard. Guess why. As you can see in this interview from late in Tom's life, he still had a lot of anger about the blacklist — justifiably…

Today's Political Post

Apparently, we find out tomorrow who Kamala's running mate will be. I don't have a preference just as long as it's not Donald Trump. Since I haven't heard anything, I guess I didn't make it through the vetting.

Kevin Drum explains — and I think he's spot-on — the working premise of Trump's attacks on the blackness of Kamala Harris. Well, it's that plus Trump's insistence on attacking the honesty and integrity of anyone who isn't on his side.

If you didn't catch John Oliver's show last night and you're thinking of voting for Robert Kennedy Jr., you might want to catch John Oliver's show before the week is out.