Mark Evanier's Blog, page 263

Today's Video (Actually, Audio) Link

My pal Lee Goldberg came across this. It's a Little Golden Record — a label aimed at young kids — with a probably-created-just-for-this-record group called The Satellite Singers. And what they're singing is the theme song from the sitcom, My Favorite Martian — but with lyrics…

Late Night News

Deadline is reporting that Sony Pictures Television is shopping around a new syndicated half-hour show that would bring Craig Ferguson back to the late night marketplace. The show is called Channel Surf with Craig Ferguson and folks are reacting like it's a new talk show but what we know about it suggests more comedy than interviews.

Whatever it is, I hope it sells enough stations to go forward. I thought Mr. Ferguson was terrific on The Late Late Show and way better than most talk show hosts of the last decade or two. He went on the air each night with less pre-planned interview questions and he usually started each conversation with a guest by tearing up the ones he had. And with a much lower budget and (often) the necessity of recording two shows in one day, he managed to do a lot more creatively — and get better ratings — than most of his competitors. I'm happy to hear he might be back.

Attend the Tale Again

The original production of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street — the one with the Sondheim score — opened on Broadway on March 1, 1979. For a show that seems to get revived and restaged somewhere every few weeks nowadays, its Broadway run was surprisingly short. It closed on June 29, 1980 after 19 previews and 557 performances.

That's not nothing of course but, for example, They're Playing Our Song opened a few weeks earlier and lasted almost twice as long. And a few months after that, Evita opened — with the same director — and ran three times as long. I suspect most people would agree that Sweeney Todd is a way better musical than either of them.

One reason The Demon Barber of Fleet Street didn't barber longer on Broadway was that it was an expensive show with a pretty large cast and a 26-piece orchestra. I also think that it was, like many a Sondheim show, not sufficiently appreciated at the time and that love for it has grown after so many productions in so many places. I've seen around eight different stagings of it, only one of which — the national touring company which parked in Los Angeles for a month or two — had the size and scope of the original.  It often gets revived in "concert" style with minimal (if any) sets and costuming.

Apart from one scene in the Hal Prince tribute show, Prince of Broadway, the last time the gruesome Mr. Todd was on The Great White Way was 2005 when Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris starred in a version with smaller sets, smaller cast and smaller orchestra.  Even with two major stars, it only ran eleven months.

Still, that production was positively lavish compared to the 2017 off-Broadway mounting in Greenwich Village which I attended with my friend Amber. It was described as an "immersive production," meaning the tiny cast was all around you in a small theater with most of us seated at tables. The actor playing Sweeney literally "killed" someone on ours.

How tiny was the cast? Eight people…with a three-piece orchestra.  We both loved it but it also made me eager to see the show again in its original configuration.

Well, Sweeney Todd is about to get what I was surprised to learn will be its first full-sized revival on Broadway. Josh Groban has the title role and Annaleigh Ashford will play Mrs. Lovett. As you may have noticed during The Pandemic, I often take an interest in some show that is soon to open in New York even though I am unlikely to get back there to see it. I didn't get back there to see Billy Crystal's Mr. Saturday Night, which closed before most folks expected it to. I also didn't get back to see the Hugh Jackman Music Man, which just closed.

The new Sweeney Todd begins previews at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater on February 26 and its opening night will be March 26.  Depending on how long it runs, I may actually go east to see it…but maybe not.  I just looked at what they're charging for tickets. The prices are about what you might expect from a show about a scalper.

A lot of the info on this new production can be found on the show's website where I just spotted something that made me laugh out loud. I didn't create this. It's actually there on the website…

That's right: American Express is teaming up with a barber who kills the people he shaves. As a longtime cardholder, I always thought AmEx was kind of a cutthroat operation and now I have proof.

Comic-Con Memories

Over on his blog, my pal Gary Sassaman posts a lot of his Comic-Con Memories. Gary's retired now from working on conventions but he was heavily involved in the programming, promotion and graphics (among other duties) at Comic-Con International and WonderCon (among other cons). He's also the guy who came up with the idea that turned into the Quick Draw! panel at both.

He has recently posted a lot about the period when WonderCon was acquired by the Comic-Con operation and he has some key graphics and info there that you might enjoy. And if you do, scout around his blog and you'll find more stuff that you'll like.

Meanwhile back at this blog: I've just put up my panel schedule for Comic-Con International 2006. That was the year I added a second Cartoon Voices Panel on Sunday and also a new annual panel called "Cover Story" and/or "The Art of the Cover." I think that was Gary's idea too.

Today's Video Link

Bernadette Peters with another lovely Sondheim tune…

ASK me: Frank Giacoia

Wil Gregersen read this post, then sent me the following…

You wrote that John Buscema was okay with being inked by Frank Giacoia and that Giacoia was probably the inker most Marvel pencilers wanted inking their work, and I'm wondering why. I've always thought that Giacoia's inking is clear and clean and never overwhelms the pencils underneath, but his lines also seem delicate to me and less powerful than the lines of other inkers.

When I look at Buscema inked by Joe Sinnott, I'm overwhelmed by dynamism. Buscema inked by Giacoia seems less dynamic to me. I'm assuming pencilers at Marvel were focused on creating strong and potent images, but maybe they wanted other things to come through. What am I missing?

Well, Wil: Artists want strong and potent images where they intend strong and potent images. There are also spots when they intend humanity and expression and emotions and maybe even some subtlety. An artist's work is very personal to them and I don't think an outsider always understands what they intend or want to see in the finished product. It may not be what you or I want to see.

In the case of John Buscema, what I got in our conversations is that he looked at the output of most inkers of his work and did not see a lot of understanding of what he had put down in pencil.  When an artist says that, I think we have to bow to his expertise in this matter.

Sometimes, it may be that lack of understanding.  Sometimes, it may be the inker making deliberate changes…and that inker may be doing so at the direction of the editor.  Or maybe it was the inker relying on a limited repertoire of inking tricks. Gil Kane used to complain about one of his inkers who had a certain way of rendering foliage and another who had a certain way of rendering hair. He said that no matter what he put down in the pencils, those men inked it the way they inked all foliage or all hair. It's like the way some comic book artists (pencilers and inkers) give every hero the same musculature.  It's often "One physique fits all."

Frank Giacoia. Photo by m.e.

I would guess that if you'd asked all those artists who liked having their work inked by Giacoia what they liked, the answer would have been something like "Frankie understands what I do." That might mean thinner lines in some places than you want to see. I would think it would almost always involve capturing all the humanity and personality and expression in bodies and especially in faces.  I think what most often goes wrong in awkward penciler/inker match-ups is a loss of expression in the faces.

Since you don't usually see the pencil art, you don't know what got changed or left behind in the inking process. Buscema knew what he'd put in and what he didn't see in the finished comics.  You may love his work inked by Joe Sinnott — I did too, though I preferred Giacoia (or better still, John himself) but John didn't.  Most pencilers loved what Sinnott did with their work but to John, I believe it was too uniformly slick.

On Fantastic Four and maybe Thor when he inked that book, Sinnott was usually under orders to keep the Kirby flair, To do so, he often overpowered the various pencilers who followed Jack. I don't think John liked that overpowering.

He greatly respected Joe Sinnott, as did everyone at Marvel, but there has always been a problem inherent in the penciler/inker breakdown of labor. Another noted penciler whose name I won't mention once complained to me about certain inkers he had. He said, "Most of them are inking me because they're not good enough artists to pencil. And since they're not as good as I am, they bring my work down closer to their level."

And then he added, "The results may be good but since the readers don't get to see what I did, they don't know how much the inker diminished what I did." You might not agree that certain inkers diminished certain pencilers but I think we can all understand that a pencil artist who cares about his work doesn't want to see it diminished. Or in the case of a Buscema/Sinnott Fantastic Four, made to look a little less like Buscema and more like Jack Kirby.

Comic-Con Memories

Here's a look at my panel schedule for the Comic-Con International of 2005.

As I look over these old lists of Comic-Con panels I hosted, I keep being struck by how we would have someone wonderful on a panel like Will Eisner or Julius Schwartz or even younger folks like Dave Stevens…and then a year or three later, we'd be doing a memorial panel for them.  And we didn't do memorial panels for a lot of folks because, with rare exceptions, those panels didn't get good turn-outs, no matter how beloved the subject.

I will share with you one thing I learned about them, just in case you ever have to moderate a panel at a convention for a deceased loved or respected person: Finish on time.  Do not let attendees think that anyone who wants to can get up and speak and speak for as long as they want.  Time is finite in any panel about anyone and there's another panel outside waiting to get into that room.

It does not honor the departed one to do a panel that runs so long that it has to be cut off and someone who wanted to say something for two minutes doesn't get on because someone else wanted to speak for twenty.  That advice wasn't necessary this year but it was at other times.

Today's Video Link

As we all know, The Dick Van Dyke Show started life as Head of the Family, an unsold pilot written by and starring Carl Reiner as Rob Petrie — pronounced "Pete-ree." It took off when it was renamed and totally recast with Dick Van Dyke as Rob Petrie, pronounced "Pet-ree." It also looked and played better as a three-camera sitcom shot in front of a live audience in Los Angeles than it did as a one-camera sitcom shot with no audience in New York.

We have here a pretty good video of Head of the Family. I love about 98.5% of everything Carl Reiner ever did but I think this was in the 1.5%. You don't have to watch the whole thing but watch enough to see if you agree with me…

Sunday Evening

Many of you have written to remind me of other places where one can view vintage Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies that may not be on HBO Max. Chief among them is MeTV, which runs a lot of them in the morning. The point is they're not difficult to find if you Google around a little.

And on the topic of "serious" interviews on talk shows, many of you have reminded me of Craig Ferguson's conversation with Stephen Fry and Desmond Tutu. Those were, of course, not his norm. My sense is that he insisted on doing them and CBS gave in to keep their host happy. It's worth noting that he did them both without a studio audience or his usual format and that he was on at 12:35. My hunch is that the network would not have been so agreeable if he'd been on at 11:35 and/or if they weren't at the time trying to persuade Mr. Ferguson to extend his contract.

In case you haven't heard: The San Diego Comic Fest — a small, personal comic convention that is unaffiliated with the big one in that town — has announced they will not have their 2023 gathering in Spring as they usually do. It will be held, they say, later in the year on dates as yet undetermined.

At some point in the next week or so, there will be some heavy maintenance work on this blog. When it's all over, things will look very much like they do now but with a few (what I hope will be) improvements. Until we get through all that, some parts of this site may be unavailable or funny-looking. Please excuse our cyber-dust.

Looney Programming

Many animation fans are incensed — more than I suspect they need to be — over the news that HBO Max has removed over 250 Warner Brothers cartoons from that streaming service.  Gone are pretty much every cartoon WB made from 1950 onward. Some of the responses I've seen on the 'net make it sound like Warner Bros. Discovery — that's what the parent corporation is called this week — has decided to burn all existing prints and never let those wonderful cartoons be seen anywhere ever again.

That's not what's happening here. It's a programming decision and whether it turns out to be a good one remains to be seen. It probably depends solely on where and when they make those cartoons available again. They will. Those films are among the company's most valuable assets. They attract an audience every time they're shown anywhere and they don't really cost the corporation anything to run. Oh, sometimes one division of WBD has to pay something to another division of WBD but the money doesn't go outside the firm. No residuals are paid to Mel Blanc's estate or Chuck Jones's estate or anyone.

They're also the bedrock of an extremely lucrative merchandising program that rakes in zillions.  Taking away the Tweety and Yosemite Sam cartoons jeopardizes the sales of Tweety t-shirts and Yosemite Sam whatever-they-can-sell-with-his-image-on-it-this-month.

All the news items about this move say that no decision about the future of those cartoons has been made. That may be so or it may be more correct to say that no plans have been announced. Either way, they'll turn up somewhere. It would be Corporate Malpractice for the current management to not monetize them in some way.

And the current management is just that: The current management. It's been quite a while since I talked to anyone who works for any arm or tentacle of WBD who didn't seem unsure whether they'll have a position there next month…or if so, to whom they'll be reporting.

If anything, this episode may teach us a lesson about not relying on streaming services to stream what we want to see when and where we want to see it. My friend George shares with me a love for the 1951 movie Ace in the Hole starring Kirk Douglas. Almost every time I talk to George, he complains that nobody ever runs it these days.

Well, I do…or can. I bought the Criterion DVD — great print and extras aplenty — and it's still available on Amazon for $22. What George (who has a lot more money than I do) is complaining about is that no one's running it for free, like on TCM. But it's available. If you don't want to spend the $22, it's watchable 24/7 with a premium subscription on Amazon Prime, for $3.99 on Vudu or Apple TV, for $2.99 on Google Play or YouTube…

…and even if all those services drop it next week, George can come over to my house and watch it if he'll stop at Vito's Pizza on La Cienega and pick up a pie with mushrooms and meatballs. In a world of infinite streaming services and channels, nothing good is ever going to be unavailable for very long. You just have to look a little and, in some cases, spend three damned dollars.

Getting back to Bugs Bunny and his pals: Someone on a comment thread I read wrote, "It's criminal that children today will never be able to watch classics like What's Opera, Doc? and Duck Amuck." I think "never" is too strong a word here, especially since a lot of the cartoons in question are quite viewable on Boomerang if someone is willing to spring for $5.99 a month.

And for less than a hundred bucks, it is still possible to purchase the Looney Tunes Golden Collection — a 24 DVD set of 40 hours of Warner Brothers cartoons that no one can ever take away from you or charge you more to view. That's not all of them but by the time you get tired of watching those over and over, it's likely the ones you can't see on HBO Max right now will be available somewhere else.  That somewhere else might even be a better showcase for them.

Don't despair.  Bugs, Daffy, Porky and all the rest will outlive all of us, including the current management at Warner Bros. Discovery and the next management at Warner Bros. Discovery and the one after that and the one after that and the one after that…