Mark Evanier's Blog, page 173

Today’s Video Link

The lovely Laraine Newman is Hanging With Doctor Z, who sounds suspiciously like Dana Gould. Thanks to longtime pal Marc Wielage for recommending the link on which you are about to click…

Today’s Video Link

From The Ed Sullivan Show for March 1, 1970, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme sing a Beatles song the way a Beatles song oughta be sung…

Mushroom Soup Monday

Going to be a very busy day where I am. Please forgive the paucity of posting.

Today’s Bonus Video Link

From Stephen Colbert’s special post-Super Bowl episode this evening…

Today’s Video Link

Here are seven clips of John Mullaney stand-up. They’re all pretty good but the first one — the one in the diner — really made me laugh…

ASK me: Bill Scott at Western Publishing

My longtime pal Jeff Wasserman writes…

Reference was made in that Bill Scott documentary that he wrote comic books after being blacklisted in the 1950s. Did he work on Dell Comics edited by Craig Chase out of the Western Publishing office in LA?

Yes, though Bill had only vague memories of what he worked on and who he worked for. He recalled what he did was for “Bugs Bunny and other Warner characters” and that he worked for Chase but also for other editors there. He could not recall any specific stories or dates.

I suspect there were very few artists or storymen who worked in the animation field in Hollywood in the forties or fifties who didn’t at least attempt to get work from Western, if not on the Dell Comics they were producing then on their activity books, kids’ books, coloring books, etc. It was a great way to moonlight for some extra bucks or even make a living when your studio laid you off and you couldn’t immediately land work elsewhere. Some folks, like Carl Barks or Phil DeLara, came to prefer working for Western over working for Disney, Warner Brothers or wherever they’d been making cartoons.

(Just had a thought: I should probably link you to this piece I wrote for anyone unfamiliar with the unique relationship between Western Publishing and Dell Publishing.)

Western Publishing was a huge operation, a fact which many folks at other comic book companies tried to not believe. There was a longtime gent at DC Comics who steadfastly refused to admit any company ever sold better than the firm from which he got his paycheck.

But Western did. In a few weeks, I’ll be resuming my series of articles about the company. Right now though, I think I‘ll tell a story that will make certain of you weep…

Western transitioned over the years from a very large company to a small one before becoming a just-about-nonexistent one.  One constant though at their L.A. office was a lovely, grandmotherly lady named Zetta Devoe. I’m not sure when she started with the company or what her official job title was but when I worked for them in the early seventies, she’d been there a lonnng time and was responsible for all sorts of paperwork and scheduling.

Among her many duties was maintaining records on every story, every cover, every feature page that was prepared for the comic books produced out of that office. She had them in a series of loose leaf binders on a shelf over her desk. A few times, she let me page through them.

Each page listed the elements that went into one issue. It showed who’d written each item, who’d penciled it, who’d inked it and who’d lettered it and how much everyone had been paid and when. The earlier volumes showed who’d done the coloring but at some point in the sixties — I was never able to pinpoint exactly when — the Los Angeles office stopped handling the coloring of their comics and it was all supervised by the New York office.

Comic book historians reading this are probably wondering what became of those notebooks. Well, here’s what became of them and you’re not going to like it…

After Western closed that office, Zetta called me one day to say hello and to ask me a question that is of no relevance to this story. She told me she was enjoying her retirement but missed all the people she’d worked with. I finally got around to asking her about the notebooks and here, approximately, is what she told me…

“Oh, they sold or threw out everything in that office or shipped it back to some warehouse the company had back east. Everything except those notebooks. Nobody seemed to care about them so I called The Disney Archives department over on the studio lot. They didn’t want them so I called the division of Warner Brothers we dealt with on the Bugs Bunny comics and they said, ‘Why in the world would we want that?’ I think I called a few other licensors and they weren’t interested…

“…so I threw the notebooks out a couple weeks ago.”

I think she heard me gasp because she then said, “Maybe I should have called to see if you wanted them.”

See? Told you you wouldn’t like the way this story ended.

I have nothing to add except this observation: Looking through those books the few times I did, I saw a lot of familiar names…even my own. But I also saw an awful of names I did not recognize.

Those of us who try to identify uncredited writers and artists from back when most comics did not have credits tend to work under the following assumption: That the work under scrutiny was done by someone whose name we know from credited comics or other sources. That is often so.

But I think that over the years, Western bought scripts or art (probably mostly scripts) from folks who were never known to work for Western…or in some cases, for any comic books published anywhere. We cannot put a name to certain pieces of work because the correct name exists nowhere in the Grand Comics Database or other repositories of comic book history.

And it probably never will. I can’t imagine how we could ever find out for sure which comics Bill Scott wrote.

I Get E-Mail…

Okay, okay…I probably have seen scenes from other football games. Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman.. The movie of M*A*S*H. One Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon.

Then there was the Three Stooges short, Three Little Pigskins with Lucille Ball. Moe used to tell this story about a scene and I cribbed the following off of Wikipedia…

[Director Raymond] McCarey assured the Stooges that it was safe, saying "Listen, fellows, you know how to take falls. You've done enough of them. It'll take hours to find doubles for you. Besides, we can't afford them. Don't worry, you won't get hurt." Moe Howard dryly agreed with McCarey, saying, "You're darn right we won't get hurt. We're not doing the scene."

Less than an hour after the exchange, the studio found three stunt doubles made up to look like the Stooges. McCarey yelled "Action" and chaos ensued. Two of the doubles were seriously injured with broken limbs, as were both photographers. The only stuntman not hurt was the one doubling for Curly Howard because of the padding that he wore to resemble the rotund Stooge. Moe Howard later said in his autobiography that "McCarey was speechless and sat in his director's chair with his head in his hands."

There are probably a few other movies I’ve seen with football scenes…so let’s just say I have zero interest in the game except when it’s fictional and funny.

Here’s the Stooges short we’re talking about. The football scenes were filmed at Gilmore Stadium which was torn down in 1951 to build CBS Television City which is now being torn down to build a huge multi-use studio/mall complex…

Today’s Video Link

Some moments from Rocky and His Friends, which was the name of the show that first introduced Rocky and Bullwinkle. The cartoons on this show and other Jay Ward productions were later repackaged under other show names…

From the E-Mailbag…

Larry Jezek sent me the following about his Super Bowl prediction…

Pretty much yours, though with much added effort put into the preceding weeks up to game day.

My personal annual goal is to make it to Superbowl Sunday without having a clue as to which two teams are playing.

Achieved this goal last year, but it's not that easy.

So thank you Taylor Swift for killing the dream in me this year, but at least I still have some small comfort, having no idea which Kansas City will have a parade if they win.

I think I’ve got you beat this time, Larry. I know the game is in Las Vegas because I’m tuned into a number of websites and podcasts that cover Las Vegas and they’re all talking about what a mess it’s going to be and how the price of a hotel room is about the same as the cost of building a hotel these days.

But I have no idea what teams are playing. I know Taylor Swift is involved with some player on some team and you suggest it’s one team from each of two Kansas Cities playing…but I couldn’t tell you the names for those teams if you covered me in soy sauce and released a pack of rabid badgers.

I’m sure I’ve heard the team names and all my friends say I have a great memory…but it just refuses to absorb certain kinds of information and that list includes anything having to do with football. The only two football games I’ve ever watched in my life were the finales of The Longest Yard and a Marx Brothers movie.

Today’s Video Link

Not everything that’s legal now was always legal. My favorite YouTube Lawyer (if you don’t count George Conway or the two main guys on The Meidas Touch Network) Devin “Legal Eagle” Stone lists some of them for us…