Mark Evanier's Blog, page 244

Today's Video Link

You can find plenty of articles online — some of them even from legal authorities! — telling you that the case against Donald Trump is very sound or very weak. Interesting to me is that I only seem to find the latter on right-wing sites but I find some of each on sites that are middle-of-the-road or even left-wing.

Me, I figure it doesn't matter what I think. The process will decide and I gather it might not decide for some time…maybe not even until he's gone through a few more arraignments. My guess is that being prosecuted will be good for Trump's fund-raising, bad for him winning over voters not already in his camp, and that whether or not he's the G.O.P. nominee will have more to do with who gets in the race and who doesn't.

And that's about as much as I want to write or think about him for a while.

Occasionally watching the news today, I saw George Santos wading through the crowds and I thought I saw Jordan Klepper asking him something about his volleyball career. It turned out I did…

Indictment Day

I'm watching some of the live news coverage from New York. It's great if you enjoy hearing the ten minutes of actual information paraphrased and repeated over and over for hours. Every now and then, someone gets around to noting that at this moment, none of the folks taking stands and commenting on Donald Trump's guilt or innocence actually know what's in the indictment. And every now and then, someone suggests that the actual charges might matter. I suspect they don't with some people.

I'm turning the TV off and trying to get some work done.

Around the Web

Andrew Farago wrote a real good article about the late Joe Giella. You will be impressed with how much Joe did in his long, glorious career.

A number of you have written to ask what I thought of this article on the CNN website by Roy Schwartz. It's about Jack Kirby and Captain America…and what I think of it is that it's pretty good. There are a few minor quibbles — like I don't think Stan Lee asked Jack to try super-heroes again in 1961. I think Jack convinced Stan it was a good idea. But my main problem is that I don't think the piece gives Joe Simon enough credit for his contributions to the classic first ten issues of Captain America.

Today's Video Link

Here's a sketch from At Last, the 1948 Show, a British comedy program that helped set the stage for Monty Python. This sketch features Marty Feldman, Graham Chapman and John Cleese. Some years later, Mr. Cleese did a slightly different version of the sketch with Rowan Atkinson which I posted here back in 2012…

Mushroom Soup Monday

Way too much to deal with today. Will post later if I can. In the meantime, there are plenty of other things to read on the web, most of which have the word "indictment" in them.

Today's Video Link

Randy Rainbow…

Today's Video Link

This is from The Ed Sullivan Show for Sunday evening, November 13, 1960. It's Dick Van Dyke performing the number "Put on a Happy Face" from the then-running Broadway show, Bye Bye Birdie. If you're only familiar with the movie version of the show, you may be puzzled by the context. The book was heavily rewritten when it was made into a movie.

On stage, Albert Petersen (Van Dyke's character) was an aspiring English teacher who was writing songs for Elvis Presley Conrad Birdie and who hoped to get another song recorded by Birdie and on the Hit Parade charts before the recently-drafted singer went into the army. The happy ending [SPOILER ALERT!] is that Albert gives up songwriting, marries his long-waiting fiancée Rosie and they move to a small town so he can become an English teacher.

The movie inserted most (not all) of the songs into a new storyline. Albert was a biochemist who was pursuing songwriting to make money and to keep a promise to his mother. There was a weird subplot involving Russians along with ballet dancers and tortoises on speed and the happy ending this time is [SPOILER ALERT!] that Albert gives up songwriting, marries his long-waiting fiancée Rosie and they move to a small town so he can pursue his biochemistry.

That's why in this clip, he sings the song to a morose Conrad Birdie fan instead of to the woman he's going to marry. By the way, the script for the film was written by Irving Brecher, who also wrote At the Circus and Go West for the Marx Brothers.

Program with the names of Dick Gautier and Paul Lynde confused.

Some interesting dates: Bye Bye Birdie opened on Broadway on April 14, 1960. Business was probably sagging a bit by November, which is why the cast was doing numbers from it on Ed's show.

Dick took a week off in January of 1961 to fly to Hollywood and film the pilot for The Dick Van Dyke Show. His replacement for that week was Charles Nelson Reilly, who ordinarily played the role of Mr. Henkle in the show except on most Thursday nights when he filled in for Paul Lynde, who was playing Harry McAfee. Lynde had a contract to appear every week (live) on Perry Como's TV show. Whenever Reilly was playing Albert or Harry, a cast member named Lee Howard played Mr. Henkle and also covered Harry when necessary.

I once heard Dick Van Dyke tell a very funny story about returning from California. He got back too late to do that evening's performance but not too late to get a seat in the audience and watch it with Reilly playing Albert. And then Dick did a very funny impression of C.N.R. trying to ad-lib his way through songs for which he did not know the lyrics. This one went: "Ya-da-da-da-da-da-da, put on a happy face…Ya-da-da-da-da-da-da, put on a happy face…" Here's how it was supposed to go…

The show finally closed on October 17, 1961, two weeks after The Dick Van Dyke Show debuted on CBS. The Broadway run was 607 performances but Van Dyke and Chita Rivera (the original Rosie) left after April 8, 1961 and were replaced by Gene Rayburn (yes, the game show host) and Gretchen Wyler.

But "Put on a Happy Face" long outlived the show. It was recorded by dozens of top recording artists and it even became the theme song for the TV series, The Hollywood Palace where it sounded like this…

Today's Political Comment

I probably shouldn't be surprised by this but there are an awful lot of people on the web and the news who are absolutely, 100% certain that Donald Trump is innocent and an awful lot who are sure he's guilty.  And none of them felt they ought to wait and hear exactly what he's being charged with before they locked into those opinions.

Duane Poole, R.I.P.

Another damned obit. Duane Poole, a fine writer and gentleman, passed away this evening following a battle with cancer over the last year or so. I knew Duane as an animation writer, mostly at Hanna-Barbera but also at other studios, but he also wrote dozens of live-action TV shows and movies and was both a playwright and an important figure in local theater. When we had lunch, we usually talked about plays and musicals, and he knew everything about them.

Between around 1975 and 1983, Duane (usually with a partner) wrote for all the major shows at H-B including Scooby Doo, Laff-a-Lympics, Captain Caveman, Super Friends, Jana of the Jungle and The Great Grape Ape. During that period, he also worked for Sid & Marty Krofft on shows like The Far-Out Space Nuts and ElectraWoman and DynaGirl. His live-action credits included Love Boat, Hart to Hart, Hotel and about forty TV movies, some of which are listed over on his IMDB page. At least the animation credits over there are quite incomplete. You can find a more complete list and a bio over on his website.

I have no idea how old he was but I can tell you he was as nice and bright a person as I've met in this business. I have no memories of him not smiling. Sympathies to his friends (he had a lot of them), his family and especially his husband Frank.  I am so sick of writing these about people I liked.

Today's Video Link

It's a sampler of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown — in Japanese. Tomorrow, we'll have a number here from a Broadway show in English…