Mark Evanier's Blog, page 171

Today’s Third Video Link

I “discovered” one of my heroes, Stan Freberg, in the early sixties when he was still making comedy records and also making a name for himself with innovative and funny commercials. His spots for Chun King Chow Mein were especially infamous…and one of the few times that the public was ever aware who was responsible for an advertising campaign.

In 1962, the company that marketed Chun King — which was so Chinese that they also made Jeno’s Pizza Rolls — bought Stan a whole hour of network TV to do whatever he wanted to do. In fact, it was the hour on ABC which then usually housed Maverick, one of the highest-rated shows in all of television.

They hoped it would establish him as a television performer…and it did not. Critics called it one of the cleverest things they’d ever seen on The Box but everyone in the country who wasn’t a critic or me was watching Ed Sullivan over on CBS that night.

But as you’ll see if you click below, it was a unique 60 minutes of television time. Stan lassoed the famous designer Saul Bass to provide the “look” of the show and Billy May to provide music.

Then he brought along his stock company which included lots of people you may recognize, many of whom did cartoon voices. Most of you will recognize Sterling Holloway, June Foray, Shepard Menkin, Patty Regan, Peter Leeds, Mike Mazurki, Jesse White, Billy Bletcher, Frances Osborne, Arte Johnson, Ginny Tiu, Howard McNear, Byron Kane, Naomi Lewis, Max Mellinger, a few others and (briefly) some kid named Frank Sinatra.

Here’s the whole show as aired February 4, 1962. You may not find it as brilliant as I did then or I do now but I doubt you’ll think it’s like anything else you’ve ever seen…

Today’s Second Video Link

Devin “Legal Eagle” Stone takes us through the decision in Trump’s civil fraud case. There’s a tool in the YouTube player to slow the video down a little and that might come in handy for this one…

Today’s First Video Link

As promised, here’s the segment from this week’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver that exposes or roasts or indicts (or whatever word you want to use) much of the current Supreme Court and Clarence Thomas especially…

ASK me: Comics v. TV

The ASK me here yesterday brought this thorny question from Jeff Thayer. I’ll try to answer as well as I can…

You mentioned that writing the Welcome Back, Kotter TV show paid you more than John Travolta was paid. I don’t expect you’d want to reveal the dollar figure but how did the amount compare to what you made just writing comic books?

Well, I only mentioned the money to explain that it wasn’t as much as most people would think. I would say that when I shifted from comic books to TV, the pay was 2-3 times the amount for 4-6 times the hours and at least that much more in stress. If I had given as much of my time, energy and stomach lining to writing comics, I might have made more there.

But! There were other perks of writing for television, a big one of which was writing for audiences. If you write a funny line in a comic book, you don’t get to hear anyone laugh at it.

Another was that comics, back when that was my main income, had a hard glass ceiling. There were no royalties, no reprint fees, not much added revenue from the convention circuit. There were folks saying the industry would be gone in 5-10 years.

Even if it survived: If I’d somehow reached the level of making as much as it was possible for me to make writing comic books, that would at the time been as much as it was humanly possible to make writing comic books. Writing TV carried no such limits.

And a big difference for me was this: When I was mainly writing comics, I worked all day at home…and while I liked (and still like) writing alone, I missed the part of life that involved meeting a stream of new and interesting people. I liked spending my days with other writers, other creative people, new potential friends of both genders, etc.

In my twenties, I needed that. It was also a whole new world to explore and learn about.

In hindsight, it was a mistake for me to get so completely outta comics as I did that year but it was an understandable mistake. Kotter was a job that occupied almost every waking minute almost every day. I have not made that mistake again.

But my main point is that I did learn not to judge or make any career choice wholly because of the money. You can profit in non-monetary ways…and there are plenty of them. So comparing one paycheck to another is the wrong way to look at this kind of choice.

Today’s Video Link

There’s this new Broadway revival of the show Merrily We Roll Along, see? And they recorded a cast album for it and here’s a video of them recording one of my favorite Sondheim tunes…

A New Oliver Twist

I raved here Sunday evening about that night’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. A number of you who apparently don’t subscribe to HBO or MAX or whatever-the-hell channel it is have written me about this episode, the rudest of whom wrote, “If Oliver’s show this week is so good, why the f*ck haven’t you posted it so we could all see it?” (The asterisk was his, not mine.)

My answer: Because I couldn’t. And Steve Bacher, a loyal reader of this site, snooped about and found an online article that explained why…

HBO is delaying the upload of clips of "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" to YouTube in hopes of encouraging viewers to sign up for subscriptions to its streaming platform.

In a post Monday, Oliver explained that the streaming giant would hold off until Thursdays before posting the clip. “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” airs Sundays.

"I know I usually share a link to our main story here on Mondays, but HBO has decided they’re going to wait until Thursday to post them to YouTube from now on," Oliver wrote. "I hope they change their mind, but until then, you can see our piece about the Supreme Court on HBO, on MAX, and on YouTube in a few days."

So I’ll post the segment when I can and those who are too impatient can go f*ck themselves or buy a subscription. I know one guy who will probably opt for the former.

ASK me: The Welcome Back, Kotter comic book

From Derek Teague comes a message with a few questions…

Were you working for Welcome Back, Kotter when DC Comics issued its comic book adaptation during  the summer of 1976? What might have the reaction to it from the cast and crew? Did DC send free comic books to be used as on-air props?

Yes, I was a story editor on the TV show when DC put out the comic and I wrote two issues of it. I posted a bit about that experience back here.

As far as I know, DC never sent them anything and the cast members probably never saw most of the t-shirts, games, coloring books and other Kotter merchandise unless they went looking for that stuff in stores. We did hear occasional grumbling from some about how their likenesses were being exploited without them receiving any compensation.

Actually, if what I heard was correct, the “kids” on the show weren’t paid all that much. One of the producers told me I was getting more dough per show than John Travolta and I wasn’t taking home a very large paycheck.

If I was getting more than on that show than John, me was more than making up for it with outside gigs. While we were shooting the last few episodes of the only season I worked on, he was commuting to New York on the weekends for prep on Saturday Night Fever.

But that’s what happens when you’re low on or devoid of credits and you get hired in show business: You kinda have to accept the lowest-possible offer or something close to it. Once you’re part of a success, you can demand and get way more. The first time I ran into him post-Kotter, Travolta told me about the airplane he’d just bought.

So I don’t recall the cast — The Sweathogs, at least — having any awareness of the comic with one exception. Bobby Hegyes, who played Juan Epstein on the show, once saw some black-and-white Xeroxes of the first of the two issues I wrote of the comic book. I don’t recall why I had them in my office or how he happened to see them but he flipped through the packet and said, “A little light on Epstein,” which was the same thing he said about every single script we taped that season.

Back to Derek’s message…

At the time, I was entering high school and the bloom seemed to be off the rose. My fellow ninth graders didn’t think WBK was cool anymore – especially since ABC mistakenly shifted the program to lead off its Thursday night line-up.

I’m curious why you think that was a mistake since I believe the show won its time slot every single week that season.

I’ve noticed that, in the second season of Kotter that the writers were painstakingly shoving a new catchphrase down the viewers’ throats, particularly “I’m so confused,” which Vinnie Barbarino would utter when he was flustered. It seemed to have been used in a handful of consecutive episodes until it was abruptly and ultimately dropped.

What’s it like when a second-generation catchphrase (or any catchphrase for that matter) just fizzles out just doesn’t catch on?

For the most part, the writers on the show only wrote any of those lines once…the first time each line appeared in a script. Thereafter, they reappeared for a simple reason: They’d gotten huge laughs. The actor insisted on saying it and if it got a laugh during the dress rehearsal, it stayed in. It was kind of like, “Well, if he’s going to say his catchphrase, I’m gonna say my catchphrase.” I think we did put Horshack’s “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!” into scripts few times because he was going to say it, no matter what and we could pick a more appropriate spot for it. Our live audience wasn’t going to leave until they heard it.

The main problem for me with the catchphrases is that Kotter was a half-hour show and while I don’t recall the exact numbers, I think after you subtracted time for the opening teaser and credits, the closing credits and all those dangled commercials, we had something like 21 minutes. Each catchphrase got laughter and applause totaling about 30 seconds so if Barbarino, Horshack, Epstein and Washington each uttered two catchphrases in an episode, that was another four minutes we lost.

It’s kinda rough to do a story featuring 6-7 people in 17 minutes and when we ran long, as we usually did, the decree from our Exec Producer was, “Cut story, not laughs.” A frequently-heard phrase from his office was “Funny is money, funny is money.”

With occasional exceptions — a show like M*A*S*H for instance — comedy on TV is best done in front of a properly-warmed-up live audience. But there’s an easy trap there to fall into: Live audiences love the familiar. Imagine if Tony Bennett hosted a nightly program like The Tonight Show. If every single night he sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” the live audiences would always have been thrilled. And the same kind of folks sitting at home would have grabbed for their remotes and said, “Let’s see what else is on!”

I think a lot of shows, especially those on every night like David Letterman’s or Conan O’Brien’s, lost audience share by catering too much to the few hundred people in the studio instead of the few million at home. And I think Welcome Back, Kotter was among a whole lotta shows that hastened their own demises by giving their live audiences the catchphrases and other elements they’d come to see and hear in person…and my, this was a long reply. Thanks for setting me off on this topic, Derek.

ASK me: Wikipedia (and sites like that)

Fowler Jones wrote me to ask…

Hi Mark, Here's a question for you and forgive me if you already answered it – Do you ever contribute (edit) Wikipedia or other crowd sourced online compendiums? If not, is it a question of time, a question of standards or something else?

I did for a while but I gave it up. Either I forgot how to do that or they changed the software and I couldn’t figure out how to enter corrections. Since then, I’ve occasionally asked someone else to that for me…but most of the time, I just let it (whatever “it” is) go.

I submitted a few corrections on topics where I felt I had some authority and too often wound up on some discussion page arguing with someone who thought he knew my work better than I did.

And I’ll tell you another problem I had: I was friends with a well-known but older comedian. He didn’t understand just about anything about how the Internet — which for some unknown reason, I always capitalize — worked. He called me once, very upset about some bogus (according to him) “info” that had been posted on his Wikipedia page.

I went to Wikipedia, edited out the lines in question and that was that…

…except that by so doing, I had instilled in him the idea that I could get anything he didn’t like off any page on the World Wide Web. Which of course, no one can do. Heck, I sometimes even have trouble editing this blog. But he kept calling and calling…

Today’s Video Link

Here we have one of the funnier episodes (I think) of The Dick Van Dyke Show and it’s built largely around my buddy, the late Lennie Weinrib. I suspect it was written around him since Lennie was an obsessive practical joker, especially on the telephone. He owned a green Rolls Royce with a phone in it back at a time when you rarely saw a green Rolls or a phone in a car.

Once in a while, he’d give me a lift in the car and I’d be a captive audience as Lennie, employing the same verbal and acting skills that made him a top voiceover, cartoon and occasional on-camera actor would “hook” someone via phone the way his character “hooks” Rob Petrie in this episode.

I happen to dislike practical jokes about as much as I dislike cole slaw and generally find them about as funny. But even I had to concede that Lennie was a master of that questionable art form…

Sunday Evening

Boy, John Oliver was good tonight. If you didn’t see it, see it.

Hey, if you’re bothered by that report that said Joe Biden mishandled classified documents and the Special Prosecutor declined to prosecute him because he was such a doddering old man, read this. It’s a piece by journalist Marcy Wheeler and she makes a darn good case that the real reason Biden’s not being prosecuted is because the charges against him are so minor. She also argues that the stuff about him being feeble are there because Special Prosecutor Robert Hur is a Republican. Special Prosecutors are always Republicans.