Mark Evanier's Blog, page 242

Cheesy Reminder

Last week for Last Week Tonight, John Oliver and his staff prepared two shows. The one that aired on HBO-type channels had as its main story, a rather scary look into Home Owners Associations. But — aware that most people under a certain age will never be able to afford a house, Oliver and Company prepared a second "main story" for them. This story was about Chuck E. Cheese and similar places to eat and play and have your kid's birthday party, and they posted it online.

It was a very entertaining story and when I ask my friends who love Last Week Tonight as I do how they liked the Chuck E. Cheese story, they all said, "Oh, I forgot to watch it" and one even said, "Is that a real thing? Did they really post a whole other segment about that?" Yes, they did and this is your reminder to go and watch it at Last Squeak Tonight dot com.

Today's Video Link

This is one of my favorite episodes of The Phil Silvers Show aka You'll Never Get Rich aka Sgt. Bilko. Writer-Producer Nat Hiken had worked for some unstable comedians in radio and early TV. He'd also dealt with a lot of sponsors and ad agencies who didn't let knowing nothing about comedy stop them from critiquing everything. So this installment about an unstable comedian and his know-nothing producers and sponsors was probably a lot of fun for Hiken and his co-writer Billy Friedberg to write.

And it works to a large extent because of the man in the above photo, Danny Dayton, who I consider one of the great unsung comic actors of stage and screen. You may not know his name but he was all over TV and occasionally in movies for many years, always great but never quite becoming as famous as I think he deserved. Here — before we get to the Bilko episode, here's Danny Dayton in the movie version of Guys and Dolls, performing with Stubby Kaye and Johnny Silver. Mr. Dayton played Rusty Charlie, the horseplayer in the tan suit…

Recognize him now? I didn't think so. But he had showy parts on lots of programs you watched including a recurring part on All in the Family and Archie Bunker's Place as Archie's pal, Hank Pivnik.

He was on the Bilko show in other roles but his best appearance was in this one. He played the neurotic comedian Buddy Bickford, who combined the worst traits of Red Buttons, Milton Berle and a few others. In so doing, he did the impossible. He actually stole an episode from Phil Silvers. I'm not sure anyone else ever managed that…

In addition to being a great comic actor, Danny Dayton was also a director for the stage and television. He was a cast replacement and stand-by for many of the roles in the original Broadway production of my favorite musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Zero Mostel was the original Pseudolus and then when he left the show, he was replaced by Dick Shawn. After Shawn left, he was replaced by Danny Dayton.

After the show closed on Broadway, Dayton played Pseudolus in some national tours and regional productions, often doubling as director. More people probably saw him in the role than saw Mostel and Shawn combined. In the mid-eighties when he was mainly directing for TV, I got to see him do what may have been the last time he did Forum on stage. He was as fine in the lead as anyone else I ever saw…and I've seen a lot of Pseudoluses. So I wanted to call attention to him.

Also in the Bilko episode, you may have noticed a cameo by Virginia Ruth "Jennie" Lewis, a popular TV personality of the fifties known professionally as Dagmar. She turned up on a great many programs as a dumb blonde type and there were a great many jokes made about her voluptuous figure. At the time this episode of Phil Silvers' show was done (it first aired on 2/12/57), she was also Mrs. Danny Dayton.

ASK me: 60's Letter Columns

A person who asked to remain anonymous sent me this…

You recently mentioned how thrilled you were to see your name in print for the first time in a comic book letter column. I'm fairly certain that you're referencing the attached that appeared in Aquaman #28 in 1966.

Having to spoken to a lot of fans of "Silver Age" books, many have said that in trying to get a letter printed, they deliberately chose titles that they deemed less popular, hence figuring they had a better chance of being selected. Do you recall if that was your strategy back then, in targeting Aquaman? And was that your first letter, or had you sent in some previously that didn't get printed? And did you share this accomplishment with friends and family at the time, or did you keep it to yourself?

I sent a lot of letters in to comic book letter pages and I'm going to guess that the one you mention — indeed my first to make it into print — was my eighth or ninth attempt. Eventually, most of the letters I sent were getting into print but at first, the ratio wasn't that impressive.

I never had any strategy about which titles to write to. What I did though was to submit the kind of letters they seemed to be printing. If the editor of the comic in question published mostly short letters, I sent short letters. If he selected longer letters, I sent longer letters. If he seemed to like critiques, I sent critiques…and so on.

As I may have mentioned here someplace, I stopped because of a couple of incidents where someone (the editor or an assistant) edited or just plain rewrote my letter and changed its meaning, in one case turning a negative review into a positive one. In a couple of other instances, I wrote something sarcastic and/or silly and it got rewritten in a manner that suggested I was serious. It seemed to me that since I wasn't getting paid for my writing, they shouldn't be doing that to it.

Later when I got into the industry — and was actually assembling letter pages myself — I became somewhat less proud of having had so many of my letters chosen for publication. I learned how few letters most comics got and how unpublishable 75% of them were, especially if you wanted to promote the notion that your comic was read by older, erudite consumers. That explained (though in my mind, did not excuse) the rewriting of letters and the publication of bogus letters, which most comics did at times. It further explained the elimination of most letter columns in comics over the years.

At almost every convention I attend, someone compliments me on the letter pages we run in the Groo the Wanderer comics. I always thank them and then ask if they can name another current comic book that even has a letter column. And they usually can't.

This Week's Post About Trump

Donald Trump's operation is sending me messages again insisting that everything we care about in this world will be gone soon unless Donald Trump is reinstated as POTUS and, of course, he won't be reinstated as POTUS unless all the phony arrests and lawsuits against him are immediately terminated and of course they won't be immediately terminated unless I send him vast amounts of money and take to the streets demanding blah blah blah. I blocked the messages of this sort coming from one address but now they're coming from another…and they're about as credible as the ones I get from the Nigerian royalty who'll put billions in my accounts just as soon as I send them all my banking information.

I'm still not following all the news but what I see makes me think someone could start a 24/7 "Trump's Legal Woes" channel and not lack content for the next few years. The trial over E. Jean Carroll's accusations looks like it'll keep the news channels and the late night monologues full to the point of overflowing for a few weeks. Some reports are saying he's going to have to take the stand…and given his recent inability to sound coherent in interviews, that looks to be some interrogation.

This has been This Week's Post About Trump. See? I'm holding it down to one a week.

Today's Video Link

Among the many earworms that have wormed their way into my ears in the past few years is a song by the group Walk the Moon called "Shut up and Dance With Me." If you've never heard it — and it was hard not to for a while — it went like this.

I recently mentioned it to a friend and she said, "Did you see what they did with it at The Gypsy of the Year Awards? That's an annual show put on each year for fund-raising purposes by the worthy cause, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Each year for two performances, members of the Broadway community — mostly folks performing in current shows — put on sketches and skits and song parodies and…well, the shows I've seen have been a lot of fun.

I hadn't seen what they did one year with the Walk the Moon number but I found it. It was the opening to the 2015 Gypsy of the Year Awards show and it went something like this…

ASK me: About That House of Mystery Story…

Yesterday, I ran a message here from Jeff Thayer and part of it said…

You said on your blog that the first time you got a writer credit on a comic book you wrote was Welcome Back, Kotter #4 from DC which came out in February of 1977. But one online database says you wrote a story in House of Mystery #214 which came out in 1973. I happen to have that issue and your name is on that story.

Yeah, it is but I'm credited only for "Story Idea." Here's what happened: DC had made a deal with a group of very able comic book artists in The Philippines to draw stories for them. Later, many of those artists (like Alfredo Alcala and Nestor Redondo) would relocate in the United States and be paid U.S. page rates but at the time, they were living over there and were satisfied with much, much less per page than DC was paying American artists.

The styles of the Filipino artists seemed to lend itself best to ghost/mystery stories and DC's books in that genre were selling well. There were some plans to add several more comics of the sort per month and to also get as much of that kind of material drawn while they had access to all that cheap labor. That meant a sudden rush to buy scripts that those artists could draw.

I was invited — as I'm sure were many others — to submit as many premises (short outlines) for ghost-type stories as I liked. If Joe went for any of them, I could submit a finished script and, assuming he liked that finished script, I'd be paid $10 per page for it. We're talking here about stories of 6-8 pages mostly. At the time, Gold Key Comics was paying me $12 a page and I didn't have to submit premises first but I thought it might be good to write different kinds of comics for different publishers. I dashed off a half-dozen premises and sent them off to DC.

One of the problems you often encounter as a freelancer is that you're outta the loop as to what they want as their needs change. On Monday, they tell you "We want stories about fifty-foot monsters with big noses" and you start writing premises and pitches for stories about fifty-foot monsters with big noses, unaware that on Wednesday, they decide they have too many stories about fifty-foot monsters with big noses.

And then on Friday, your submissions arrive in their office…and of course, they're D.O.A. and they probably go unread. Back when I was submitting work on that basis, that happened to me a number of times.

In this case, I sent my premises in right away and heard nothing for several weeks. Then Joe wrote me back that he liked a couple but he was suddenly committed to giving script assignments to certain of DC's "regular" writers so what he wanted to do was to buy some of my premises for $10 each — that would be the entire pay — and then have his regulars turn them into scripts…if that was okay with me. I wrote him back politely it wasn't OK with me; that I didn't think the compensation was sufficient.

I didn't hear anything more from Joe but a week later, I got a check from DC for $10 for one of my plots…and it was turned into that House of Mystery story scripted by Robert Kanigher. I decided not to make a fuss about it. I just forgot all about it until you reminded me. I'm only telling it here because it's a situation that happens in some form to most freelance writers. When you try to sell scripts to people far away, you're sometimes quite unaware when their plans change.

I have a couple of other stories about this kind of thing happening. Maybe I'll post one in the coming weeks. Thanks, Jeff.

Today's Video Link

Stephen Colbert offers a tribute to the late, lovely Al Jaffee. And I wish I had one of Al's snappy answers to the stupid question, "What are you doing up blogging at this hour, Evanier?"

ASK me: More on Credits

After he read this posting here, Jeff Thayer wrote to ask…

You said on your blog that the first time you got a writer credit on a comic book you wrote was Welcome Back, Kotter #4 from DC which came out in February of 1977. But one online database says you wrote a story in House of Mystery #214 which came out in 1973. I happen to have that issue and your name is on that story.

Also, what was it like to write the Welcome Back, Kotter comic book when you were also writing the Welcome Back, Kotter TV show? I assume the money was better on the TV show.

Taking the last question first: Yes, the money was better on the TV show, which was only right since it was being seen by about seventy kajillion more people than bought the comic book. But there were advantages to the comic book job. I wrote the comic book all by myself in one or two days, whereas each episode of the TV show involved a solid week of collaborating with, at various times, anywhere from four to eight other writers.

That's an awful lot of meetings, some of which ended at 3 AM. And sometimes, you just want to be able to look at the finished product and think "I wrote that" instead of "Oh, there's one of my jokes…I think!"

Also, when I wrote the comic book, no actor came up to me to complain that he didn't have enough lines or didn't like the ones he had. I didn't get notes from eighty different network reps, producers, Standards & Practices people, etc.

I did get one (and I think only one) note from the editor of the comic book, Joe Orlando…and I need to preface this story by saying I generally got on well with Joe, though we had our differences, one of which related to that House of Mystery story. When Joe got my script for that issue of Welcome Back, Kotter, he phoned me and insisted I change one line.

The "Sweathogs" on Kotter were always "ranking" each other, hurling schoolyard insults. At the time, a big news story in this country was that motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel had announced he was going to jump the Grand Canyon on his bike. Without a lot of thought — which as should be obvious is the way I do most of my writing — I had one of the characters, Arnold Horshack, insult a particularly talkative other character by saying, "Hey, Evel Knievel just called. He want to know if he can jump your mouth!"

As anyone who ever watched the show can tell you, that was a perfectly normal line for Welcome Back, Kotter. But Joe didn't like it. He said, "I've watched the show, Mark. I don't think Horshack would say something like that!" I told Joe that Horshack would definitely say something like that. He told me that Horshack would never say something like that.

Back and forth we went for a minute or so. I think somehow Joe had forgotten that I was a Story Editor on the TV series, living with those characters seven days a week. I was, in fact, taking that call from a phone right outside the rehearsal hall as we were working on that week's episode.

Just then, Ron Palillo — who played Horshack on the show — walked past me. I asked Joe to hold for a moment, put my hand over the phone mouthpiece and said to Ron, "Hey, in that scene where you're arguing with Judy Borden, how about if you say…?" And I told him the line. Ron said, "Oh, that's great. Can we put that in?" I told Ron, "It's in" and then I went back to Joe and I agreed to cut the line out of the comic book script.

It was heard on the show we taped that week and it got a big laugh. In fact, ABC used it the promos for that episode and it aired constantly in the days before. I still wonder if Joe Orlando ever saw one of them.

I'll tell the story about the House of Mystery script tomorrow.

Today's Video Link

My favorite one-man barbershop quartet, Julien Neel, favors us with "Bridge Over Troubled Water." I always said I really liked this song but only when sung by Art Garfunkel — but I kinda like what Mr. Neel does with it…

Al

Apparently, one feature of getting to be as old as Al Jaffee is that everyone in the news business has your obit pre-written. I was amazed how swiftly they appeared today. I call your attention to the ones in The New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter, The Associated Press and Rolling Stone. They'll tell you about his long, extraordinary life. I'll tell you about some other things…

Al 'n' me. Photo by Charles Kochman.

Al was a shining example of what I wrote about here the other day; about how sometimes you meet your heroes and they're everything you want them to be. Al was friendly, kind, charming and way less abrasive than you'd expect of the guy who created a feature called "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions." Everyone loved the guy for himself, not just for his cartooning.

Al contributed to (by my count) 469 issues of MAD magazine in its original numbering which stopped at 550. MAD began renumbering after that and Al had just a few new pages in the new version including his last Fold-In, drawn but not printed a few years before. So his first MAD contribution was in 1955 and his last was in either 2019 or 2020, depending on how you score the last few. That would be impressive even if they were mediocre but Al's batting average was pretty darned good.

I regretted that in his last decade or two, he didn't do much beyond the Fold-Ins. Some of the non-foldable material was quite wonderful and I really liked some of the MAD paperbacks he did. I have them all but they should be in print for others to enjoy.

Al was one of those guys who was just born to be a cartoonist. It was hard to imagine him being anything else and he loved doing it. The last time we spoke was not long after he'd given up the notion of drawing anything and you could hear the frustration in his voice. He was still occasionally thinking of gags, though. His drawing hand may have failed him but his sense of humor didn't. I'd like to think it's what kept him around for so long.