Mark Evanier's Blog, page 181

Today's Video Link

A few years ago, the fine animation voice actor John DiMaggio and a bunch of his friends made a documentary on a bunch of his friends. I Know That Voice is all about folks who speak for cartoon characters and there are an awful lot of them in the film which has now been posted to YouTube and therefore to here…

A Thursday Afternoon Comment

A lot of folks think the Internet has too much porn and sex. That doesn't bother me half as much as this: I can't seem to browse any multi-participant website without seeing clip after clip of people falling down, crashing into things, colliding cars, having things fall on them…it's like every time someone injures themselves in the world there's someone there with a cell phone to catch it on video and post it somewhere. Sometimes it even looks like folks are injuring themselves just for the cameras and any possibly-lucrative clicks.

And if you sustain some real ugly wound or physical sign of injury, I really don't need to see it. Please.

Rest in Peas

Back in this message, I talked about Pea Soup Andersen's restaurant in Buellton, California. It was a place that my parents and I used to visit when we took vacations to the north back in the sixties. It was a friendly diner that served great pea soup…and I haven't been there since around 1967.

Looks like I might not have another opportunity. Despite the "We Are Open" sign in the above photo, Pea Soup Andersen's has closed, a few months shy of what would have been its one-hundred-year anniversary. No word on if it's permanent but I have to shake the feeling that it wouldn't have closed if I'd eaten there at least once in the last fifty-some-odd years.

Today's Video Link

Here's the Legal Eagle talking about the House Mouse: His "take" on the expiration of copyright on Steamboat Willy and what that definitely means and what it may not mean. I think some folks who are overjoyed about this are merely celebrating the notion of the Disney Company suffering any kind of loss and they might not be looking at the bigger picture…

Whatever Happened to Percy Helton?

The veteran character reportedly died in 1971 but somehow, he's back. He's now practicing law under the name of John Sauer and today, he was arguing before the three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that the President of the United States has total immunity from prosecution.

You're now fooling anyone, "Mr. Sauer." We all recognize your voice. And it's obvious you were too busy playing train conductors and creepy little murderers in movies to attend law school…

Today's Video Link

I know what you've been waiting for. You've been asking yourself and everyone, "When is Evanier going to show us Kermit the Frog's song from The Muppet Movie dubbed into Japanese?" Well, your long wait is over. Here it is with Kermit dubbed by Yasuo Yamada, who is kind of a superstar in the field pf dubbing over there…

Games People and TV Stations Play

The other day for no special reason, I watched the first episode of a new prime-time game show called We Are Family. As I recall when this was announced, it was to have been hosted by Jamie Foxx and his daughter Corinne but Mr. Foxx has been having medical-type problems so the job has passed to Anthony Anderson and his mother, Doris. We Are Family struck me as a good half-hour game show which, unfortunately, is in an hour time slot.

Obviously intended to ape some of what makes The Masked Singer so popular, We Are Family is a game show with musical performances and a guess-the-celebrity gimmick. There are three main performers in the hour. Each performer is an unknown but they have a famous relative. The main performer does a song on their own which segues into a duet with their famous relative who is seen in silhouette inside something called The Sphere.

100 (I think) contestants in the audience get to figure out (or maybe just guess) who the Mystery Relative is and then everyone who's right shares in the prize money in the first and second rounds. One of them then has the third round to themselves and can win up to $100,000 if they can immediately guess who the third Mystery Relative is based on their voice and some clues. The gent who had this opportunity on Show #1 took home $75,000 for getting the correct answer on the second clue.

This might be a cute little show if they did it in 30 minutes or if they filled the hour with enough show to attain the pace of The Price is Right. But not that much actually happens and to pad out the time, they have Mr. Anderson saying the same things over and over and over and over…and then they have his mother saying them and then he says them again and…

Well, I'll give it a few more chances. I also finally sampled Celebrity Name That Tune, which has been on for a few years now, naming tunes and often stretching the definition of "celebrity" fairly thin. That seems like a fun show…and it was not as reliant on recent songs as I guess I expected. I actually recognized enough of 'em to hold my interest for the hour. I'm not sure if I'll be back but I liked it more than I expected.

My favorite recent prime-time game show, The Wall, may have reached its end on American TV. They recently finished airing Season 5 which I suspect was recorded a long time ago and it was a difficult year. A few decades back, a friend of mine was working on Win Ben Stein's Money and she told me (correctly) it would probably be its last season.

Why did she think that? Because the ratings were dropping. Why did she think that was? Two reasons: They hadn't been able to find the right host after Jimmy Kimmel left it…and Ben was winning too often. She said, "Audiences want to see the contestants walk away with decent winnings more often than not and that's not happening." That was also the problem with the short-lived Million Dollar Money Drop game show. It felt like no one was ever going to win a million dollars or anything close to it.

The Wall has had a rough fifth season. It's a show where people stand to win a million-bucks-plus or if not, they usually at least go home with a few hundred thousand. In the fourteen shows aired, one couple won $1.3 million (significantly on the first show aired this season), one couple left with zero and the rest went home with between $100,000 and $250,000. That consolation moola is still a nice piece o'change but not on a show where the players seem extra-extra-deserving. And not on a show where anyone would feel like a loser taking away much less than seven figures.

I liked the show when players were winning more and I think Chris Hardwick is one of the best game show hosts to come along in quite some time. But I haven't heard anything about a Season 6. If there is one, I bet it'll have some rule changes. And someone will win over a million on the first episode they air.

ASK me: That Weird Dancing Guy

Kevin Mummery — who assures me that's his real name — asked me this…

You're the go-to guy for questions about The Tonight Show, especially during Johnny Carson's tenure, so I thought you might be the guy to direct this inquiry to. I remember seeing a guy who was a member of the band that either Johnny or Tommy Newsom would bring out who did these weird dances…bizarre stuff, kind of like interpretive dance but without the interpretive aspect.

Usually he was brought out to fill in a gap between the monologue and the introduction of the next guest, or to fill time that would otherwise have gone by without anything more interesting to occupy that space. A few times when Bill Cosby guest hosted he had the guy come out from behind the bandstand and perform, and if anything he was even weirder then…I guess Cosby had the gift of bringing out the best in other people, or at least he did before we all found out what he spent his free time doing.

But I digress. Do you recall seeing this guy? Or have any idea or insight as to why Carson even had the guy perform this way apart from his normal duties as a band member?

The guy you're asking about was Ernie Tack, who played bass trombone on The Tonight Show for a very long time. Before that, he was in Ray Conniff's band and was heard on an awful lot of records, some of which are itemized here.

Along with his trombone skills, Tack did this weird dance that greatly amused Johnny and everyone on the crew, and they'd often have him do it to amuse the audience during commercial breaks. Every so often — usually when they were playing "Stump the Band" — he'd do it on the show. He does it near the end of this rousing game of "Stump the Band"…

Today's Video Link

The previous post featured a cartoon I wrote many years ago and it had in it a character named Aloysius Pig…and yes, I named the character for the role that William Demarest played in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. If you aren't familiar with the fellow who supplied the voice of Aloysius Pig, it was this guy. And I miss him…

ASK me: Network Interference

Another "Name Withheld" person — but I know who he is and he worked on a lot of cartoon shows back in the eighties — sent me this…

I marvel at your occasional remark that during your seven seasons of Garfield and Friends you never had any interference from the suits at CBS or even from Standards and Practices. Did you ever write a cartoon that you thought would prompt them to demand changes?

Yes. This one. And they said absolutely nothing…

The voices, by the way, were done by Gregg Berger, Thom Huge, Howard Morris, Julie Payne and Kevin Meaney. I cut a few jokes because the cartoon was running long but the network folks didn't say a word. To their credit.