Mark Evanier's Blog, page 92

This Month's Big Holiday!

Someone once likened running a blog to having a pet in the house. It's always there, it's kind of alive and it needs constant feeding and attention. At the moment, it needs a big chunk o' money to upgrade some software so I thought I'd give some of you the chance to kick in. You don't have to. This blog has always been free to read and it's never taken a dime of paid advertising. I intend to keep it that way: No subscriptions, no paywalls, no content only available to donors. Just every so often, we ask for a little financial help…

Mark's Xmas Video Countdown – #9

We have a new entry this year…Lou Monte's 1960 Xmas novelty tune, "Dominick the Donkey." I have a special fondness for Christmas carolers, especially the little quartets who are hired to serenade diners at restaurants at the holiday season. When I'm dining and they're going table to table taking requests, I always ask them, "What's your silliest song?" and the answer is always "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" (which we'll get to before the week is out) or "Dominick the Donkey." I guess diners of Italian heritage remember it from their childhoods and ask for it.

Here's a recently-made (I believe) music video for the song and I love the fact that someone went out, found a donkey and dressed it up to make this…

Lou Monte (1917–1989) was an Italian-American singer of Italian-American songs and he actually managed to have a couple of big hit records on the charts over the years. One that you may be familiar with was "Please, Mr. Columbus." If you go to YouTube and search for that title, you will find not only many, many uploads of Mr. Monte's recording but a staggering number of interpretations by choral groups, barbershop quartets and just guys in their living rooms with guitars. It has nothing to do with Christmas but it's the season for giving so I'm giving you the chance to hear Lou Monte's recording of it again or even for the first time. Please forgive a bit of heritage insensitivity therein…

A Tip

If anyone's ordering tickets off Telecharge to see Audra McDonald in Gypsy, try entering the promo code "GIMMICK" and see if that gets you a discount. Can't hurt to try.

ASK me: Jack's Faves

Someone who signed their message "Comicspies" wrote to ask me…

In a 1974 radio interview with Jack Kirby, Jerry Connelly asked Jack what his influences were and he responded: "The masters in comics, certainly, are the ones in the newspaper field: Milton Caniff with Terry and the Pirates and Alex Raymond, who did Flash Gordon. There were the fellows who did the funny strips, too. They all influenced me because their product had such appeal."

Who were Jack's favorite artists who specialized either specialized in humor (like Walt Kelly) or both adventure and humor storytelling (like Segar)?

Elzie Segar — who for anyone reading this who doesn't know, did the Thimble Theater newspaper strip which was later renamed in honor of its main character, Popeye the Sailor — was the one Jack mentioned most often. He loved Al Capp's work, though not the man himself. He loved Billy DeBeck's Barney Google and pretty much anyone who was on the funnies page back in the thirties. I don't recall him ever mentioning Walt Kelly or anyone who came along in the forties or after except Charles Schulz. He did like a number of guys in comic books who combined humor and adventure like Jack Cole or Dick Briefer. (Briefer was a friend and he worked with Jack on some early comics.)

One cartoonist Jack sometimes named as an inspiration was Will Gould — no relation to Chester Gould, who did Dick Tracy. Will, who I knew through a brief telephone-only friendship, did funny strips in the thirties along with a hard-boiled detective comic strip called Red Barry. I think Jack favored Red Barry over the humor work but he admired the guy in both genres. Will was very flattered when I told him Kirby was a fan of the work he'd done long, long ago.

That's all that comes to mind. I wish I could give you more names but by the time I worked with him, Jack rarely looked at what other contemporary artists were doing. He respected anyone who created anything that was popular, especially if it was highly original…but I don't think he paid much attention to newspaper strips in the seventies…or even to most comic books unless there was a specific reason for him to read one of them.

Tickets to Nowhere?

Mama Rose complaining about ticket prices.

I'm still a little puzzled and curious about this thing with Stubhub and the tickets to Gypsy. The best seats are $471 each at the box office. At the moment, the Stubhub site has someone offering up to four seats in Row F for tonight for $940 each. Lately, there always seem to be four tickets available in Row F for varying high prices and others in the next few rows for slightly lower prices. But to add to the mystery, the site also has a line that says, of tonight's performance, "3 tickets were sold in the last 7 days."

So what I'm thinking — and please correct me if you have direct knowledge or a better hunch — is that these higher-priced seats are being offered by some person or agency with ties to the box office and that they're house seats. House seats are tickets that folks involved with the show can arrange for their friends or contacts to buy at face value at the last minute. So if they sell on Stubhub for more money, great…but if they don't sell by an hour or so before the show, they go off Stubhub and the box office offers them for face value or less at the ticket window.

The point is that somebody is going to sit in those seats for that performance and someone will make money off them. But maybe I'm wrong about this.

Meanwhile, one of my frequent correspondents here, Prentice Hammond, wrote to say…

I don't know why ticket pricing is not more like Comic-Con. Maybe it would not work because Comic-Con tickets are always in demand. However, Comic-Con has made it so external players cannot profit by buying all the tickets and reselling them for a much higher value.

Well, someone is trying to sell Comic-Con 2025 tickets on Stubhub. Right now, someone is offering four-day passes with Preview Night there for $2873 each and there are other offerings for slightly-less outrageous sums. I have no idea who this is or if these passes would actually get a buyer in the door. I do know though that there's a Kosher, legal way to get badges for less money. The Comic-Con Museum sells what they call Legend memberships which give you all sorts of privileges and discounts and access and special invites to the museum but it also includes a 4-Day + Preview Night SDCC 2025 badge.

The price for one of these is $1900, which is steep but not as steep as $2873 or some other current asking prices on Stubhub for badges of questionable validity. I'm thinking of putting up a Stubhub offering that won't get you into Comic-Con but Sergio Aragonés and I will come to your home and sing the entire score from Gypsy. It won't be cheap.

Mark's Xmas Video Countdown – #10

And we begin this year's countdown of Christmas-themed videos with one of my faves, "Jingle Bell Rock," recorded by Bobby Helms in 1957. There is some dispute as to who wrote it — Wikipedia, of course, has all the deats — but no dispute about its popularity. Here's a video that was made to Mr. Helms' version of his big hit…

There have been countless covers of this song, both professional and amateur, and I could fill this page just with videos of folks imitating its presentation in the movie Mean Girls. We'll settle for a peppy version that Lindsay Lohan did for a film she did for Netflix…

But my favorite is still the glitzed-up, guest-star-laden version done by Emmanuel, an entertainer often described as "The Barry Manilow of Mexico." I'm not certain if that's a good thing to be or a bad thing but he and his friends are sure having fun here. They're pretending to lip-sync and/or play instruments that most of 'em obviously can't play…

For Fans of Nazi-Themed Comedies…

Tomorrow night, TCM is showing Life is Beautiful at — on my streaming service — 7 PM. This is the 1997 movie starring and co-written by Robert Begnigini, who plays a Jewish-Italian bookshop owner trying to keep his son out of a Nazi concentration camp. It won a surprising number of Academy Awards including one for Best Actor and it reminded some of the infamous Jerry Lewis movie, The Day the Clown Cried.

Before it — at 5 PM on my streaming service — my streaming service guide says they're running From Darkness to Light, a documentary about the infamous Jerry Lewis movie, The Day the Clown Cried. I mention this because (a) I know a lot of us are fascinated with this movie we've never seen and (b) the online TCM guide doesn't mention it. It doesn't even say what's on at that hour.

You may wish to program your DVR or one, both or neither. But at least I've alerted you and you can make an informed decision. Check your listings for the correct start time on your source for TCM for Life is Beautiful and if it doesn't list the film before it, assume it's probably From Darkness to Light.

Today's Video Link

It's Randy Rainbow. Oh yes, it's Randy Rainbow. Definitely Randy Rainbow…

Monday Morning

A new week…a new Randy Rainbow video…Mark busy on a script. But we'll be starting our annual countdown of great Christmas videos later today. Stay tuned…

Mark's 93/KHJ 1972 MixTape #47

The beginning of this series can be read here.

Here's another one that fits into the "novelty" category. "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" was recorded in 1966 by Jerry Samuels, a man of many occupations including songwriter. At the time, he was working as a recording engineer so he had access to all the studio equipment he needed to make this strange record. It was released under his other identity of "Napoleon XIV"..and talk about a "one-hit wonder." The flip side of this single was the exact same track played backwards and it was called, "!aaaH-aH ,yawA eM ekaT oT gnimoC er'yehT." On this side, the artist was identified as ""VIX noelopaN."

This is a promotional video that Samuels made for his record company. It is suitably as bizarre as the "song" itself…

Mr. Samuels recorded other pieces as Napoleon XIV, mostly having to do with the topic of insanity. This one wasn't on KHJ radio or my mixtape but I thought I'd throw it in here. This is "Split-Level Head" from his album…