Mark Evanier's Blog, page 88

Today's Bonus Video Link

Someone has put together a "reconstruction" of the infamous lost/hidden/incomplete movie by Jerry Lewis, The Day the Clown Cried. I have no idea how close this is to what Mr. Lewis intended but here, for what it's worth, is the link…

Today's Video Link

If you've got twenty-eight minutes to spare today, spend them watching this video. It's called Great and it snagged the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film at the Academy Awards in 1976. It's actually sorta animated — a combination of various media used to tell the story of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a 19th century British civil engineer and architect. That may not sound like an interesting subject but I saw this film at an animation festival shortly after it came out and spent years trying to find a place to see it again.

It's a British film directed by Bob Godfrey, a very clever filmmaker who is often credited as inspiring Terry Gilliam's animation for Monty Python. If you watch this film, you'll see why people say that…

Myth Buster

Writing this blog can be very educational. Since I posted this morning about Buster Keaton's first TV programs, I've received a number of e-mails telling me things I didn't know and setting me straight on some things I got wrong. I'll have a post up in a few days expanding and correcting this morning's.

Mark's Hanukkah Video Countdown – #5

We need to have at least a couple of renditions of Tom Lehrer's "I'm Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica" in this countdown so who better than Cali Rose and The CC Strummers, a ukulele group based in Culver City, California? Unlike others who sing this song, they're actually singing this in Santa Monica — at the The Martin Luther King, Jr. Auditorium in The Santa Monica Library. There'll be more of this song before the countdown's over…

Audra Watch

The latest…

Performances for Gypsy will resume as scheduled on Sunday, December 29. Due to continued illness within the company, our 2 PM matinee and 8 PM performances today have been cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please check with your point of purchase to exchange or refund your tickets.

Should we be suspicious that they don't say the performances tomorrow will be with Audra and other key members of the company? I dunno. But there's still time to get tickets for tomorrow's matinee performance at Stubhub. The above press release says it's at 2 PM while Telecharge and Stubhub says it's at 3 PM. There do not seem to be seats available for the evening performance on either site.

Saturday Morning with Buster

It's hard for me to type the words "Saturday Morning" without recalling what Saturday Morning used to mean to me. Saturday Morning was when I'd get up early — earlier than my parents, at least — and go into the living room. I'm thinking back to when we only had one TV set in the house and that's where it was. I'd turn on the set, adjusting the volume to a level where I could hear it but they couldn't.

My parents' chairs for TV-watching were too far from the set for me so sometimes, I'd sit on the floor. Most times, I'd move a chair from the dining room into place before the set and put a TV tray in front of it. At some point during a commercial, I'd run into the kitchen and get a bowl of cereal or something else for breakfast, then eat it in front of the set.

What I was watching was, of course, Saturday Morning Television which was mostly cartoons. Three networks — NBC, ABC and CBS — programmed for my demographic, my demographic being anyone who was likely to ask his mother to buy whatever cereal I favored at that moment. At various times, it was Sugar Frosted Flakes, Cocoa Puffs, Trix, Sugar Rice Krinkles (they don't make that anymore), Sugar Smacks or a few others that were only favorites for about one box or so. Often, one would be a favorite because there was a much-desired prize in the box.

My true favorite, if I was being honest and I occasionally was, was Cheerios. I loved Cheerios — the plain kind in the yellow box, not any of the inane variations now available. It was one of my favorite things to eat and still is. I swear on my oath as a 24-year blogger that I'm eating Cheerios — dry, which is how I like them — as I write this. I'm so glad they've never really changed them. If they'd had cartoon characters on the box all the time, I might never have eaten anything else ever.

Not all the shows I watched were cartoons. For a while, the local CBS channel ran a film show starring Buster Keaton. I don't think this was network. I think it was just the L.A. station filling the time slots before the network feed kicked in. Whatever it was, it was my introduction to a magical person who would become one of my favorite performers. I had no idea at the time that I was watching one of the low points of his career because he was still, to me, pretty funny.

Not a whole lot is known about this series so here's what I understand: Keaton's first TV series was called The Buster Keaton Comedy Show. It was done live in 1949 and only watchable in or around Southern California. Live shows then were only repeatable if someone made kinescopes of them — literally pointing a movie camera at a TV screen and capturing the image on film. If anyone made any of The Buster Keaton Comedy Show, they've never been seen to this day.

A year or two later, someone said to someone else something like, "It's too bad we didn't do those shows on film. We could make some money syndicating them." So they then made filmed episodes of The Buster Keaton Show, using much of the material that had been used in the live telecasts. Both shows, of course, relied heavily on gags and ideas from Keaton's earlier, better work.

A writer-producer-director named Clyde Bruckman was heavily involved with them. Bruckman was a colorful gent who worked with many of the great comedians of the silent era and early talkies, including Keaton, Laurel & Hardy and the Stooges. In later years, he was sometimes hired to work on comedy films and then sued for passing off script material from earlier films as new, never-before-filmed material. This new Keaton show was filled with jokes that Keaton and others had done before.

The Buster Keaton Show was syndicated in 1951. Two years later, its producers redid the opening titles to name it Life With Buster Keaton and they syndicated them again, reportedly representing it as a new show. That's why when you see surviving prints of the program, some have one title and some have the other.

Also reportedly, only thirteen half-hour episodes were ever made. I do not think the local CBS channel had all thirteen. I think they had six or seven and would run them over and over and over as long as they ran the program at all. The episode embedded below is the one I remember most vividly. I may have seen it ten or more times. You may have seen it on this site about ten years ago.

Don't think of it as a great comedian at his worst. Think of it as a guy who was still pretty good at the age of 56…and yes, I know he may look older in this but that's the way a lot of 56-year-old humans looked back then, especially if they'd had as rough a life as Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton. I think of it as a fond memory and one of the things that got me very, very interested in the kind of people who did the kind of films he did…

Looking Ahead…

It's been mostly cloudy and cold in Los Angeles with occasional drizzle and sprinkles, and that's what the National Weather Service is projecting most days for as far ahead as they project. But their forecast for January 1 is mostly sunny and 72°. That's because that's New Year's Day and Nature wants everyone who watches the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl from snowy and freezing climates to hate us.

Mark's Hanukkah Video Countdown – #6

This is not strictly a Hanukkah song but I'm sure some people sing it on that holiday somewhere. It's by Mordechai Ben David, who is known as "The King of Jewish Music" in much the same way that Michael Jackson was known as "The King of Pop" because…well, I think that was just because he said he was. But M.B.D., as his many fans call him, has been performing to huge crowds for over fifty years and I like this song, "Mashiach," even though I only understand a small part of it…

Audra Watch

Tonight's performance of Gypsy at the Majestic Theatre in New York has been cancelled — or even canceled, depending on how you spell it. But you can still buy seats 101 and 102 in Row C for $7,056 each on Stubhub.

Today's Video Link

Here we are with Everything You Need to Know About Saturday Night Live for Season 19. I'm enjoying this series but it startles me that we're not even up to half-way through the show's run…