Smarter Than The Average!

BLOGCAA: Articles From A Time When Critics Were Still Allowed To Say What They Genuinely Thought

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:04:00 +0100

BLOGCAA: Articles From A Time When Critics Were Still Allowed To Say What They Genuinely Thought:

The historians of comedy archivist website Some Of The Corpses Are Amusing, better known as SOTCAA, have for nearly a decade now been performing sterling work in the field of uncovering the many mysteries of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s series of Derek and Clive albums, including confusion regarding the release of its film version Derek And Clive Get The Horn. After too long an absence the SOTCAA boys, back on the internet in blog form and now going by the name BLOGCAA, have this week uploaded a 1993 interview with Peter Cook and offered observations on this and other aspects of the film’s video release (including an image of the video’s original sleeve).

Inspired by this your trusty STTA writers dipped into the archive in search of Derek and Clive-related press clippings and found some very interesting facts indeed. They have been annotated and posted in the ‘Comments’ for this article over at BLOGCAA, so pop on over there and have a good read. And then stay and read the other posts on what is undoubtedly the most intelligent, well-written and enlightening blog about comedy on the internet.

Muttley speaks! An unusually eloquent conversation between Dick...

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 13:43:00 +0100

Muttley speaks! An unusually eloquent conversation between Dick Dastardly and Muttley from the back cover of Hanna-Barbera’s Fun-In #18, an issue of the comic published in the UK in 1978. The inside back cover, incidentally, was the same advert, identical but for being in black-and-white.

ToughPigs.com: Remembering Bernie

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 13:20:02 +0100

ToughPigs.com: Remembering Bernie: The website for Muppet fans who grew up recalls the life and career of both the real-life Bernie Brillstein and his Muppet namesake.

Down With Dagwood!

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:37:00 +0100

From pages 82, 83 and 129 of Argosy, “the largest-selling fiction-fact magazine for men”, May 1961:

Peering around his ever-present cigar, a famed funnyman takes a withering look at the boob-like image of the American male as purveyed by television and comic strips, and shouts lustily

“Down With Dagwood!”

by Ernie Kovacs

When Lindsay Crouse brought forth “Life With Father” in 1939, it still seemed that humor in the home did not stem from father’s being a helpless clod. But then, That Great Capricious Funnybone in the sky decided that what was funny in the home was oafish daddy versus brilliant wife and flip kid.

And so the American public was told, or the American public decreed, that henceforth, Eugene O’Neil, Mark Twain and the Bible had just about had it and it was no longer honor, but humor thy father and that the minor was to inherit the earth.

Even Lindsay and Crouse diluted dad a little with a mother-children gentle conspiracy against father that tittered the matinée audiences as they clutched their out-of-town bus tickets in their fat little webbed fingers.

And now, today? Hogwild! Daily, and in color on Sundays, Dagwood’s children and even his puppies shave and shove this stalagmite of incompetence into clockwork-like collisions with the mailman and onto the bus laden with other Dagwoods, sucking fifty-cent pipes and clutching their bags of peanut butter sandwiches.

What is, according to TV and the comics, today’s Everyman? Five-Foot-Eight With a Cowlick just about sums him up. In weight, if he is not medium, he must be potbellied, for the inevitable when his straight-up-and-down wife and stripling brood fall mirthfully to the floor at the sight of the skimpy field jacket and shriveled puttees that don’t fit for the parade. He makes less money than the reader of the comic strips, but if he makes more, he has buck teeth. This compromises any individual who rises above The Stamp as either moronic, a product of incest or a descendant of a generation of either or both. Thus, with the artist’s stroke of angled incisors, we libel his progenitors right along with him. A kind of retroactive genealogical pogrom.

Sartorially, Mr. Oaf’s shirt puffs out above his belt line, for not having sufficient pride or sense, he does not tuck it in. Thus, like a field thief hiding a cantaloupe stolen out of season, he blunders with what well might even be suction feet. His tie, a birthday present purchased by his wife wearing her let-out muskrat, is bright red. In the daily comics or on black and white TV, it is a pattern that is a four-in-hand Rorschach reflection of his primitive intellect. (The let-out muskrat is his station of life, not hers.) If it is an evening tie, he stands brainlessly by the cold-cream-smeared sink waiting for the fragile fingers of his Schweitzer-like, omniscient and bustless wife to whip it into a symbol of perfection… but not until she changes the paper in the parakeet’s cage. If it becomes untied later in the evening, he hides behind a bush at the country club until the chairwoman sends his wife out with a flashlight to cluck at him, as he stands Lennie-like by in his “Of Mice and Men” existence. One can only wonder at this continued Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance routine progressing into his even more personal functions.

The comic cartoonist and the TV author gave Peter Putty a Favorite Chair in his home. It becomes his thumb-sucking supplement. It is the crawling infant’s baby blanket, soiled and worn, but not to be cleaned or reupholstered on pain of an insecurity complex. Washing his fishing trousers send him into a foot-stamping tantrum and his wife cowers in mock fear, throwing him an emotional bone with her Academy Award hysteria.

Mr. Boob’s home is a floral wall pattern. There is no den unless his creators need one for additional mirth-provoking bits showing his displacement by his mother-in-law’s jungle parrot. This undressed fowl has a vocabulary consisting of one word - “Stupid” - and becomes sufficiently articulate to utter it only when The Boss is visiting Mr. Boob.

The North American Ass doesn’t drink, for drinking is a sign of independence. His tobacco is a straight Burley… blends he gets for Christmas. If he smokes cigars, they cost a dime and he asks her for the money. He plays sneak poker in garage attics or basements for the smallest coins of his miserable realm. Home from the office, Little Eager dips a starving, bony finger into the kitchen stewpot, like a stowaway D.P. blundering into the cuisine of the Liberté after three foodless days at sea. He then accepts the traditional rap of wooden spoon across the knuckles like a grateful cocker spaniel and is happily shooed into his thumb-sucking Morris chair. Here he sits, hands on knees, waiting for the imperial summons to both nourish and illustrate the meager house money with which he supplies Mrs. Wizard. (He smokes a penny’s worth of tobacco while submissively waiting, complaining of the delay, as he feels he should, only to show his appreciation of whatever smell she has concocted through a dozen push buttons and thawing process. These moments are graphically filled with deep inhalations and childlike tummy rubbing.)

Tomorrow is Saturday, and after peanut-butter time, Elsie Efficiency will pull him by his stew-dipping finger into a store where they sell nice blue serge suits, where she accomplices the salesman when he bunches Stupid’s coat in the back to make it a good fit. The salesman is aggressive - not because he is a male coming into his own, but through affiliation with Elsie E. - and he makes Stupid even less an intellect than we have been shown.

Mr. Boob’s oafdom, combined with his inability to get into the bathroom for a look in the mirror (much fun in the daily strip and on TV showing him pounding on the bathroom door), makes it only natural that he be told to get a haircut, and off they go, stew finger stretched an inch at the first joint, to the barber shop where a peanut-butter-eating barber meekly makes the wife’s directorial cuts to this cow-licked clod’s colorless locks.

As it is prerequisite in this type of comedy to have children the mental superiors for proper abuse of the American Male, it is equally prerequisite to have either a group in varying annoying age degrees of abundance, or a single offspring endowed with every fiendish facet and masochistic prowess of the Katzenjammers’. (At least, the Katzenjammer kids’ creator performs the necessary compromise of having the kids spanked each Sunday.) However, whether it is because we are dealing with a “family newspaper,” or because it might make him seem too much a man to have had a relationship with his electronic brain of a spouse, there is no hint of his having produced this progeny by the standard method. (Indeed, there is no hint of his having any knowledge of the standard method.) This leaves, besides ignoring the whole thing completely, two possibilities: The first one, artificial insemination, is untidy. The second, and fairly logical means to this end would, therefore, appear to be some form of immaculate Sunday-supplement conception.

Some day, there will be an award given to the shallow-minded cartoonist who drew the first dirty cartoons of Little Orphan Annie. While these under-the-counter booklets were somewhat objectionable on the surface, they did manage to clear up a few glossed-over points. The institution of dirty comic books was probably brought on more by rebellion than perversion.

Privileges: Besides the basement far-thing-ante, our clod is allowed to bowl once a week because everyone bowls once a week and, far from making him an individual, this fits him even more tightly into The Mould, even to puttying up the cracks. There is another rather left-handed privilege aided more by tradition than the cartoonist’s kindness: It is always his flat-chested wife who bangs up the car. But the sweet juices of victory are snapped away from the thirsting male by establishing this is a female prerogative rather than a deficiency. Anyway, just to make sure no distaff ground has been lost, she subsequently fixes the engine with a hairpin while he drops eleven dollars’ worth of wrenches to the ground in open-mouthed amazement. He no longer gives her chuckling admonishment when she refers to the engine as “the motor.” (She also calls all metals “iron,” sink washers “thingamobbies,” and all glue is “goo.”)

But Peter Putty does not live by bowling balls alone. Once a week, three hours after The Haircut on Saturday, they visit the neighbors who live next door, separated by an idiotic eight-inch hedge which the two men clip with great glee, indulging in halcyon garden-hose battle in the dividing-line dispute. (When they’re not clipping the green armpit, they are putting up screens for male houseflies.) This is a helluvan evening built mainly around melted cheese on croutons. After which, the girls have a wild roundelay of angel-cake-recipe exchanges. The men show each other an inexpensive power drill. Overcome by the excitement of the day, the peanut-butter buddies begin to nod and the angel-cakers sagely shake their heads and lead the idiots off to their platonic beds where they undress their weary little breadwinners and lay (to rest) the poor castrated souls… to sleep… to dream, perhaps of a power mower or a monogrammed bowling ball. Then, emerging in a chaste, June Allyson nightie, they crawl, mud-packed and virginal, into the other (always) bed and briskly fall asleep.

The next morning, Mrs. Clever is up bright and early. The children, the puppies, the damned cat and the pet turtle are leaping nimbly about nudging each other gleefully at the mirth-provoking fact that Stupid is still asleep upstairs - a drugged sleep brought on by the rigors of last evening’s fruit punch and canasta.

When he awakens, sheepish and apologetic, there follows a mad succession of putting up shelves, beating rugs, looking into the wrong end of garden hoses, hedges, crab grass and lifting of his feet for the vacuum cleaner. Later, he will nap while Mrs. Brilliant takes a dollar bill out of his pocket; be caught in the bath when the bridge club comes into the bathroom en masse; chase the puppies, then toddle off, tuckered out, to another eight hours’ rest with Mrs. Abstinence.

What remains, then, for the American Male? Memories, perhaps only. Cherish those moments of your childhood. The warm scenes of father as we knew and adored him. Bursting into the house, roaring drunk, sending us and mother slamming against the wall with a well-paced series of haymakers. Throwing us the hell out of the bathroom when he wanted to shave. Losing the rent and milk money at craps. Four-lettering his opinions to the other suburbanites… divorcing mother finally and ignoring the alimony, to the delight of the judge who wins the alimony each week in the Friday-night crap game. The one and only time Dad saw a peanut-butter sandwich, he thought it was something else. If we could only return…

Dagwood is a funny place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

A picture of Henry Winkler’s London honeymoon from page 34...

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:39:48 +0100

A picture of Henry Winkler’s London honeymoon from page 34 of the TV Times, 20th to 26th of May 1978. The caption reads:

These really are happy days in London at the moment for “The Fonz”, actor Henry Winkler. The star of Happy Days which you can see again on Saturday is on his honeymoon here with bride Stacey Weitzman.

"It’s a bit of fun!"

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:17:00 +0100

“It’s a bit of fun!”

- Catchphrases That Somehow Never Caught On: Keith Barrett from The Keith Barrett Show et al

Biography of a One-Man Menagerie

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 15:25:00 +0100

A treat from the archives for you today - this is the official biography of Mel Blanc which Warner Brothers’ cartoon division used to send to the press during its golden era. From the reference to his “sixteen year old son” we can date this press release as being circa 1955, Noel Blanc having been born on Wednesday the 19th of October 1938.

N 652 D
Warner Bros.
477 Cartoons

MEL BLANC BIOGRAPHY

Mel Blanc was born in San Francisco May 30, 1908 and first started recording for Warner Brothers Cartoons in 1937. He really came into his own when Warner Brothers Cartoons developed their very famous character, Bugs Bunny, in 1938.

Since then Mel Blanc has done not only the voice of Bugs Bunny, but that of Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweetie, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Pepe Le Pew and practically all Warner Brothers Cartoon characters.

So famous did Mel Blanc become through the medium of the voices he did in cartoons that there arose a great demand for his services in radio work, especially on the Jack Benny program. In addition, he appears in motion pictures and on television, doing the voices of the Cisco Kid.

Amongst his many activities is recording records of the various Warner Brothers Cartoons characters for children. Probably the outstanding success was his recording of “I Tawt a Puddy Tat”. [sic]

Mel Blanc is married and has a sixteen year old son. He always consults his wife, Estelle, before entering on any business venture. His hobby is collecting antiques and novelty watches of all kinds and his collection, gathered through the years, amounts to several hundred watches.

An amazing thing about Mel Blanc is the fact that he is allergic to carrots, which Bugs Bunny frequently chews in the course of his cartoons. It seems his throat tightens up after chewing carrots to record the chomping of Bugs Bunny. Consequently, in recording the dialogue for Bugs Bunny’s lines, the chewing of the carrots is scheduled for the last part of sound effects or dialogue to be recorded.

Mel Blanc has been very appropriately called “The Man With 1,000 Voices” and it is really amazing how he can do four or five different voices in a Warner Brothers Cartoons and still make each voice sound different from the others.

The thing that makes Mel Blanc so outstanding in his field is his ability to immediately grasp the type of voices wanted and to follow the directions of the Cartoon Director recording the voices. He has a very fine baritone voice and is also very frequently used in a cartoon where singing is required.

As a bonus, here is a longer version of the opening of that biography taken from an early draft, before it was tightened up so as to fit on one side of a sheet of paper:

Mel Blanc was born in San Francisco May 30, 1908 and he first started recording for Warner Brothers Cartoons in 1937. However, he did not really come into his own until Warner Brothers Cartoons developed their very famous character, Bugs Bunny, in 1938,

Since then Mel Blanc has done not only the voice of Bugs Bunny, but that of Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweetie, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Pepe Le Pew and practically all Warner Brothers Cartoon characters. He is under exclusive contract to the Cartoon Division of Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. for all voices needed in their cartoons.

So famous did Mel Blanc become through the medium of the voices he did in cartoons that there arose a great demand for his services in radio work, especially on the Jack Benny program on which he did, amongst others, the voice of the French Music teacher, Pedro, the voice of the parrot, and created the voice of the engine of Jack Benny’s famous Maxwell car. In addition, he appears in motion pictures and on television, doing the voices of the Cisco Kid.

Amongst his many activities is recording records of the various Warner Brothers Cartoons characters for children. Probably the outstanding success was his recording of “I Tawt a Puddy Tat”. [sic] A strange thing developed so far as this record is concerned. It premiered in England and became such a tremendous hit that it was used as a subject of editorial cartoons in the newspapers and subsequently it came back to the United States where it also became a tremendous hit.

Finally, here is a article Warner Brothers occasionally sent out with the above biography. Like all press releases it’s a sea of exclusive information and infuriating half-truths - how can we believe the story about coming up with Yosemite Sam’s “fairly recent” voice when we know him to exaggerate about other the creation of other voices? Also, the statement that all of his Warner Brothers characters are naturally produced is patently false when you recall the sped-up voices of Daffy Duck, Tweety Pie and Porky Pig, among others. Interesting, too, is the very specific claim that Blanc voices ninety-seven characters - anyone care to name all of them?

ONE-MAN MENAGERIE

Mr. Melvin Jerome Blanc is a gentleman who needs no introduction but who is always getting one, anyway, because the invisible part of his personality is so much better known than the rest of him. That’s Mel’s voice, which is also the voice of Jack Benny’s Maxwell car, Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker and a French skunk, Pepe Le Pew.

So important has Mel’s voice become since he used to bedevil Portland, Oregon, high school teachers with his Woody-Woodpecker laugh that, at any time in the last 20 years, a simple case of Blanc sore throat could have crippled 95 per cent of the Warner Bros. Cartoons output, knocked a hole in The Jack Benny Show or deprived Musical Chairs (a local Los Angeles show that just went network over NBC) of one of its three stars.

Mel not only can imitate anything, but does - to the tune of $50,000 a year. Working in Walt Disney’s “Pinocchio” a few years ago, he was paid $800 for one hiccup, the only thing left of a cat’s dialogue after editing. Jack Benny’s writers, a creative group given to outbursts of fraternal sadism, delight in writing sounds into the script they don’t think anyone can reproduce; but so far Blanc has risen to all these crises. Once the Benny script contained the cryptic direction: “Mel whinnies like a horse (English horse).” Unaware that it was a gag, Mel ended a routine horse whinney with an equine “Haw!” so unmistakably British that the old radio bit has been revived for Benny’s TV show.

Mel insists that all the 97 comic characters he has created are the natural issue of his own vocal chords, except for an occasional children’s record spun fast or slow by Capitol engineers to produce a special effect for tot album buyers. Basically a musician - in 1930 he was the Nation’s youngest (22) theatre pit orchestra conductor - he developed his genius for creative mimicry by singing novelty songs with various dance bands around Portland, while doubling on tuba and violin.

In just the reverse of what most people think, all the cartoon characters Mel has voiced - Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Woody Woodpecker, Tweetie - are drawn by the artists from the voice mannerism he first supplies on tape. He says Yosemite Sam, a fairly recent one, was the hardest to devise. Sam, a Western roughneck, is only two feet tall, and because he is tiny, Blanc made the mistake of giving him a soft, Western drawl, Finally, after weeks of doing “Sam” quietly in the shower and on his way to and from work, he leaned out the window of his car one day and yelled at an obnoxious driver in the loudest Yosemite Sam voice he could command.

“It turned out to be just the ticket,” he says. “Volume was what Sam needed.”

Of all his characters, and Blanc lapses into them on cue as one of his chores as panelist with Johnny Mercer and Bobby Troup on Musical Chairs, he says Bugs Bunny is his favorite. “Bugs,” he maintains, “Does things everyone wants to do, but represses. When he kicks little old ladies and then says, ‘Ain’t I a stinker,’ that’s me.” Pepe Le Pew, however, is the only one who gets fan mail - all of it from women beguiled by the seductive quality of his Continental overtones.

In spite of the fact that Mel’s best work remains invisible, he is generally recognized wherever he goes, thanks to television. Believing that he was anonymous, though, has led him into some interesting situations. Once he struck up a conversation, in character, with a talking parrot at Catalina Island zoo and was squelched by the parrot, who glared at him and remarked: “Oh, a wise guy, huh?”

“I felt terrible,” Mel says, “until I found out it was part of his act.”

"Let’s go, is it Mand?"

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:04:00 +0100

“Let’s go, is it Mand?”

- Catchphrases That Somehow Never Caught On: Bridget from popular (within Wales) Welsh sitcom Satellite City

The above image was taken from a Grange Hill comic strip that...

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:28:00 +0100

The above image was taken from a Grange Hill comic strip that appeared in a short-lived BBC magazine aimed at kids named Beeb. It illustrated an article about the launch of said magazine printed on page 18 of the 18th to 24th of January 1985 edition of City Limits as part of its ‘Circuit’ pages, and reprinted below. The major revelation therein is that Beeb was very nearly a comic based around The Young Ones! Alas, this was never to be and The Young Ones only made it onto the funny pages twice - once drawn by Hunt Emerson in The Comic Relief Comic (which has a March 1991 cover date), and parodied in issue 270 of British MAD (cover date October 1984) as The Young Bums, written by Robin Seaville and illustrated by Dave Stoten. (In addition, Neil appeared solo in a three-page strip illustrated by Joseph Wright in Neil’s Book Of The Dead, published 1984, and the quartet appeared in a handful of photo-comics in both their own book, 1984’s Bachelor Boys, and The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book in 1986.)

Comic strips

Kids comics have a bad reputation. A new one is being launched next week that hopes to break the mould. CLIVE DAVIDSON looks at the world of ‘Beeb’.

British Kids’ comics have, in the past, almost invariably taken a dim and narrow view of their readers. Now a new comic, based on BBC children’s TV, intends to treat its readers as bright and with a broad interest in the world.

‘Beeb’ is launched next week. Aimed at eight to 14 year olds it will be out weekly.

‘It will be more of a magazine than a comic,’ says Kay Goddard, its editor. ‘It will have comic strips, but it will also have features and up-to-date news - not necessarily linked to television programmes.

‘People like John Craven and Mike Beynon, the BBC wildlife presenter, are doing regular features. We will have a pop element, but we won’t fill the magazine with waffle. Kids have matured a lot with the media. They are more intelligent than most comics make them out to be. Kids today are sharp and are interested in what goes on in the world.’

Publishers have been trying to get a comic like ‘Beeb’ off the ground for almost ten years, but always failed to gain the BBC’s endorsement. ‘Beeb’s publisher a small independent company called Polystyle, won the corporation’s confidence through their production of ‘Buttons’ , an equivalent for pre-school children.

‘Beeb’ was set on the right track by its original editor, Malcolm Shaw - one of the most intelligent and creative people working in children’s periodicals until his untimely death in December. He wanted to centre the comic around ‘The Young Ones,’ which would have given it instant credibility (Neil, Rik, Vivian and Mike are the most mimicked characters in schools today even though many kids have never seen the show) but the BBC wouldn’t countenance the idea.

Apart from this one priggish reservation, the BBC are living the comic their full co-operation and backing. And Argus Press, Polystyle’s parent company, are putting up £1¼ million for a promotion campaign that will put posters on bus shelters and other sites outside thousands of schools.

In Europe and America, comics are respected as a medium for all ages that can entertain, inform and agitate. But in Britain, a Victorian attitude prevails: children’s comics are tolerated only if they are ‘educational’, otherwise they are dismissed as cheap escapism for the semi-literate; while political and adult comics provoke the same kind of censorship that novels were subject to 70 years ago.

Kids’ comics fall into four main categories: the ‘funnies’ like ‘The Beano’, ‘Dandy’ and ‘Topper’ which, like movie cartoons, have a timeless appeal with their knockabout humour and which have hardly changed in the 40 years they have hardly changed in the 40 years they have been published; educational comics, the most famous of which was ‘Look and Learn’ (IPC, the largest publisher of children’s periodicals, made a recent attempt to relaunch ‘Look and Learn’ but their use of archive material from old issues made little impression on computer-age kids). There are the comics for boys, like ‘Eagle’, ‘2000AD’ and ‘Victor’ with pre-occupations of war, sport, cops and robbers, and space. And there are the comics for girls, ‘Girl’ and ‘Bunty’ whose pre-occupations are relationship and emotional issues.

The attitudes and values of those comics are best illustrated by the fact that the heroes of boys’ comics are nearly always men, while the heroines of girls’ comics are nearly always young women. In boys’ comics, problems are mostly resolved by violence. Women who appear in girls’ comics are usually housewife mums, teachers or riding instructors.

IPC dominate the market, together with DC Thomson, the Dundee-based company. Titles disappear and new ones appear at an alarming rate. IPC, in particular, throws little consideration or commitment to its readers. Both companies, however, ensure that the contents of their comics rarely touch on contemporary social realities: the stories in girls’ comics mostly take place in isolated private schools, riding stables or Dickensian Britain; the soldiers in boys’ comics fight endless re-runs of World War Two, but never appear in Vietnam or Northern Ireland.

Wilf Prigmore, one of ‘Beeb’s editorial staff, has edited several comics for IPC and is highly critical of that company which, he says, puts accounting first and their young readership last. He thinks that ‘Beeb’ will prove that children want periodicals that are intelligent, entertaining and relevant.

‘Hopefully “Beeb” will open the door to publications from smaller independent companies,’ says Prigmore. This year might see something exciting happening in kids’ comics at last.

Bill Thompson: King Of Wimps

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:45:16 +0100

Bill Thompson: King Of Wimps: Here’s an excellent blog post detailing the working life of Bill Thompson, the radio/voice actor who worked for Disney and Hanna Barbera, but will forever be remembered for providing the voice of Droopy.

"Not in the way you’re thinking!"

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:37:26 +0100

“Not in the way you’re thinking!”

- Catchphrases That Somehow Never Caught On: Barry Welsh from Barry Welsh Is Coming

"You start by being polite and lying"

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:57:00 +0100

It’s hard to remember a time when Robin Williams wasn’t considered a tiresome embarrassment. At least he isn’t seemingly ubiquitous these days – after his cinematic breakthrough in 1987’s Good Morning, Vietnam he was a genuine superstar, and everyone seemed to think he was the bee’s knees. Within another five years the tide had turned, and he was no longer a selling point but an indicator of a movie predicated on unfunny ad-libbed jabbering (Mrs Doubtfire), queasy sentimentality (Jack, Bicentennial Man – which one of your slack STTA editors once sat through in its entirety, on their own at home, in the full knowledge that it would be 100% awful even before it started) or an ungainly mixture of the two (Patch Adams etc).

On closer examination, there’s been another thread throughout his career: solid roles (both comedic and dramatic) where the director has been able to take a steady hand and utilise Williams’s strengths, whilst being keenly aware of his limitations. There are more of these than you’d think: films such as The World According to Garp, Moscow On The Hudson, Dead Poets Society, Cadillac Man, The Fisher King, Deconstructing Harry, Insomnia and One Hour Photo. Off the top of our heads.

Popeye, his first feature (the smutty sketch film Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses would have been his first, if he hadn’t been excised from the initial cut and later reinstated for a post-Popeye re-release) falls into the latter category, with his ad-libs encouraged by Robert Altman, and refined into a form befitting the character by Jules Feiffer. In retrospect, Williams can’t be seen as anything less than perfect casting; he was the vocal and physical fit for the character (allowing for bulgy limbs and an actual pop-eye), and his muttered ad-libs evoke Jack Mercer and Mae Questel’s similarly improvised dialogue for the early Fleischer shorts. There was never a better time for Williams to take the role, either: an overinflated belief in his own comedic skills was yet to develop, buoyed by the sycophancy of others (many a comic, good or bad, has fallen foul of this – Jerry Lewis, Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, Chris Tucker, Peter Kay, Mike Myers, Ricky Gervais… although Gervais succumbed ridiculously early). He was still fully aware that overnight sitcom success could be fleeting, and if he wanted to make it in Hollywood (as the accepted career path demands) then there could be no laurel-resting. Furthermore, he was to play the title role in an expected blockbuster about one of America’s beloved pop culture heroes (with a huge international following), established in the public consciousness for 50 years - surrounded by seasoned talent on both sides of the camera. He had to live up to expectations of who Popeye should be, raise his game to let his co-stars shine and sell the movie for everyone involved (Williams was the only element of the production that everyone, including the suits, instantly accepted and even insisted upon until its completion). All this, and he was well into his cocaine years!

Despite his warm, enthusiastic words about the film during promotion, Williams would soon condemn the film publicly in the subsequent 4^th season of Mork and Mindy. In the episode ‘Metamorphosisism’, Mork and his ‘adult’ son Mearth (played by the fantastic yet virtually forgotten hero of Williams, Jonathan Winters) have their minds switched, and at one point Mork declares “Yes, I’ve seen Popeye 14 times and if you run it backwards, it has an ending.”* He would later go so far as to disown it, claiming it had set his career back by years.

From The Times, 13/3/1981:

Robin Williams gets a tall order in Popeye

Popeye comes back to the screen at the beginning of next month in time for the Easter holidays. This time he is not in cartoon form, but a live actor in the shape of Robin Williams. Joan Goodman talked to Mr Williams, night-club entertainer and star of Mork and Mindy, in Los Angeles.

Two years ago the producer Robert Evans asked the comedian Robin Williams, familiar to British audiences from the Mork and Mindy television series, to play Popeye on film. “This idea terrified me when he first mentioned it”, Williams admits. “But he was so positive in his approach. He asked me ‘Haven’t you thought about it? Haven’t you ever wanted to play Popeye?’ You start by being polite and lying – ‘Well, yes, I guess now you mention it, I have’ – and come away convinced.”

Popeye’s reincarnation by a live actor comes half a century after the pugnaciously righteous sailor first appeared as one among many other characters in E. S. Segar’s (sic – STTA) “Thimble Theatre” comic strip. Popeye, his shrewish girlfriend Olive Oyl, the glutonous (sic again; not one of our fave Led Zep tunes – STTA) Wimpy and the villainous Bluto were an immediate hit with Depression-era readers in the United States. Later the sailor with a passion for spinach appeared in cartoon series made for cinema, then for television. As Popeye, Williams is required to sing, dance, do acrobatics and spend most of the film with his right eye firmly closed and a pipe clenched between his teeth – all the while remaining faithful to the image established by the strip and the cartoons. It is a tall order for any performer, let alone for somebody playing his first film role.

The 27-year-old Williams was actually Evan’s second choice for the part. The original Popeye, Dustin Hoffman, dropped out of the project after a dispute over the script (written by Jules Feiffer, himself a distinguished cartoonist). Evans has since admitted that at the time he suggested Williams to Paramount Pictures, who financed the movie, he had no idea that Williams was already a star thanks to Mork and Mindy.

He knew him only as a promising young comic from the Los Angeles night-clubs.

However accidental, Williams turned out to be a lucky choice, For one thing, the comedian’s bent for improvisation meshed well with the informal, collaborative style of Popeye’s director, Robert Altman. For another, Williams has a striking gift for mimicry as striking as that of Peter Sellers (one of his idols). And mimicry rather than declamation or rendering subtle emotions turned out to be the key to playing Popeye.

“Popeye understands his own worth,” Williams says. “He’s a natural man, Like he says, ‘I yam what I yam and that’s all I yam’. We took that statement as our basis. I think we made a very gentle film, we kept the innocence in.”

Williams, whose offstage voice is surprisingly soft and shy, worked for a year to lower his speech into Popeye’s distinctive growl. At the same time, he honed his body for the strenuous, cartoon-type falls, fights and contortions the part involved. Exercising for three hours a night in the Paramount gym after spending the day on the Mork and Mindy stage, Williams trained with Lou Willis Jr, a veteran acrobatic dancer. “And after all that,” Williams says, “when Bluto threw his first punch at me on the set, I bent forward when I was supposed to bend back and came away with a bloody nose.”

The sort of working schedule Popeye demanded was nothing new to Williams, whose overnight stardom in Mork and Mindy has led to a succession of 16-hour and 18-hour days. Despite the reputed 30, 000 dollars a week he gets for the series and the dispensation – rare in American televisions – to ad lib his own lines in addition to the written script, Williams still finds his Mork role creatively stifling. That is not surprising once you have met him. Even when only two of you are present, a conversation with Williams regularly features a dozen or so extra “characters” Williams adopts, shrugs off then shuffles between at lightning speed. They include the Beverley Hills Blues Singer (“Woke up this morning… ran out of Perrier”), the children’s television hist who puts a hamster in a microwave oven to demonstrate the effects of radiation (“Pop goes the weasel”) and the elderly wino from the year 2000 (“Maybe you remember me. I used to play an alien on television. Wasn’t so funny after they landed.”).

Every Monday night, Williams can be found working incognito, as it were, with an improvisation troupe at The Comedy Store, a Los Angeles club. One of his favourite “bits”, as comics call their routines, is to ask the audience to shout out a topic: Williams will proceed to extemporize a Shakespeare play on the subject, in blank verse. Only the occasional cry of “give us Mork” halts the flow of comic invention. He comes to the edge of the stage and replies: “No, no, that’s what I come here to get away from.”

Williams is the son of a Detroit automobile executive, now retired. “The craziness comes from my mother. She’s from the South. My discipline comes from my dad.”

Although he has several half-brothers and half-sisters, he was raised as an only child. “I was this lonely little fat kid. When I was by myself, I would invent conversations with other people. I used to tape comedians off the television and study their voices. I also collected armies of toy soldiers and took them on manoeuvres. Kind of scary, huh?

“My parents didn’t mind when I said I wanted to be an actor. My father just asked me to learn a trade as well, so I’d have something to fall back on. It was a reasonable request. I went to welding school and lasted one week until the instructor said: ‘You can kill yourself if you don’t use this torch properly.’ I thought, ‘Oh, oh, I’m not willing to die.’”

Drama training at the Juilliard School in New York, and experience as a stand-up comic in San Francisco followed, before Williams moved to Los Angeles and broke into television.

“I’m still learning how to act for the camera,” he admits disarmingly. “Everything’s happened so fast – this is only the third season for Mork and Mindy. But doing Popeye was fun. It was like going back to the discipline of acting after the freedom of stand-up comedy. We filmed in Malta for six months between January and June. It was like a holiday for me – it was wonderful to get away from being recognised and asked for autographs. Valerie (Williams’s wife) and I even managed a couple of days off in London. We saw Nicholas Nickleby with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the most exciting piece of theatre I’ve ever seen.”

Williams says he wants to do theatre himself. But first there is a film script he is writing with a partner and will star in - “Going the Woody Allen route”, he laughs. Charles Joffe, who manages Williams, also manages Allen. And will he direct himself too?

“Oh no, maybe one day, but it’s years away. I saw what a director has to go through on Malta. Just getting the fake foreams I had to wear as Popeye right was a nightmare. The rubber wrinkled, they cut off circulation in my arms. Then the first costume they gave me was all wrong. So much of a film depends on thousands of details like that, all of which Altman had to oversee at once.

“About a week into rehearsals, I went to see Bob [Altman] and we talked about the character. We decided Popeye should evolve through the film. The other people were all cartoons to begin with but he starts out as a realistic sailor looking for his Pappy. Gradually he gets drawn into their world. Then Bob said that, besides saying the written lines in my Popeye voice, I could do a lot of mumbling under my breath. We figured Popeye was a lonely sailor who’d grown used to talking to himself. Bob said I could ad lib the mumbles – they’d be for me. On one or two occasions, when I went too far, they simply lowered the sound.”

Williams’s script still hasn’t been realised to this day. He did have a stab at directing however - ‘The Mork Report’, which was the final episode of Mork and Mindy to air. The show took the form of a news report about how to have a happy Earth marriage, which results in a ‘promotion’ from his superior Orkan, Orson. However, it was actually intended to air before the dramatic end-of-season three-parter, where Mork and Mindy use a faulty pair of magic shoes in order to flee a villainous Neptunian, and up in the company of prehistoric tribesman.

* - There is an alternate version of this quote: “If you watch it backwards, it has a plot.” This is often credited to Williams himself, rather than the character of Mork, so we wonder if it was a line later used in interviews to laugh off the film. Also, this version works better as a joke - although Popeye definitely does have both an ending and a plot, Altman movies are often criticised/praised for being meandering character studies. If any readers would care to clarify this, then… we’ll thank you.

"Wilco, Mr Brittas!"

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:53:43 +0100

“Wilco, Mr Brittas!”

- Catchphrases That Somehow Never Caught On: Colin from The Brittas Empire

We Don't Wish To Know That

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 16:56:00 +0100

As you can’t have failed to notice, we’ve been celebrating some failed catchphrases here at Smarter Than The Average - those phrases that worked their way deep into the population’s subconcious but never worked their way out via the mouth. Nigel Rees devoted a chapter (titled We Don’t Wish To Know That) to this non-phenomenon in his 1984 book The Nigel Rees Book Of Slogans And Catchphrases, and with no permission at all we reproduce it below.

A failed catchphrase is a contradiction in terms. If a phrase does not catch on it is not a catchphrase. However, here are some phrases which were contrived so that they might take off but lacked some essential ingredient to help them do so. The prominence of Bob Monkhouse in this section is not significant - he just had the courage to remember more than others!

He remembered (1979): ‘As a comedian in the early 1950s I had one unique aspect. I was without a catchphrase. Radio producers sympathized and made suggestions. Charlie Chester even offered to give me one. “Every time you score a big laugh,” he said, “just remember to dance a little jig and say: Now there’s a beaut if ever there was one!” I tried it out on a Variety Ahoy! down at Portsmouth. I got a big laugh which I killed by suddenly shuffling inexplicably and shouting this catchphrase at the audience who were understandably baffled. So they stopped laughing at once. I politely declined and Charlie, never a comic to waste material, repeated it in his next series until its consistent failure to please drove him to ad-lib another line, a plea for audience response - “Speak to Charlee-ee!” - which proved to be a genuine winner.’

Monkhouse also tried to launch I said a subtle when, for some reason, a joke failed. Another trick that Denis Goodwin and he both used if a gag really died, was to give a complicated explanation of the joke, ending with ‘That’s what the joke means, and I wish I was dead.’

Later, at the time of his Golden Shot appearances on TV: ‘I had the idea that a phrase like Hang on to your hollyhocks! would work. During the warm-ups I would tell a joke “I’d been told not to tell” - Lady Chatterley is in bed with a light cold. Through his French windows comes Mellors the gamekeeper, his hands full of hollyhocks, freshly-picked from the gardens, to present to her ladyship. She says, “Thank you for the hollyhocks. And I would appreciate your attention for I have never been bed-ridden before.” “Haven’t you?” says Mellors. “Hang on to your hollyhocks!” I could then place that phrase anywhere in the show with a hundred per cent certainty of getting a roar of laughter… and I waited and waited for the nation to be aware of this phrase. A year later I quietly dropped it…’

Ted Ray recalled two failed catchphrases from Ray’s A Laugh in about 1950: What about Rovers? - as in the exchange ‘Unlucky? - what about Rovers?’ ‘Unlucky? - you don’t know you’re born.’ Also: He’s one of Nature’s! - as in Martha about Albert: ‘Don’t you insult my husband, he’s one of Nature’s…’)

Peter Cook remembered (1979) that the exclamation Funny! - delivered in a strangulated Dud and Pete voice between himself and Dudley Moore on BBC 2 TV’s Not Only… But Also in the late 60s - caught on with the performers if not with the public at large. I think he may underestimate the extent to which the pronunciation of the word did catch on. Later, Fozzy Bear had something similar in The Muppet Show, pronouncing the word ‘fun-neee!’

Max Bygraves told me that in his 1979 series: ‘I had Geoff Love keep walking on. He’d get a big laugh and I’d turn to the audience and say You can’t help loving him, can you? It happened in the studio, but it didn’t happen with the public.’

On the Generation Game in the early 70s, Bruce Forsyth tried Tell me - who’s to know? while Larry Grayson unsuccessfully to follow Brucie’s ‘Didn’t he do well?’ with What a lot you’ve got!

Advert from page 48 of Screen International, Saturday the 23rd...

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:00:10 +0100

Advert from page 48 of Screen International, Saturday the 23rd of October 1982. Notice that Goofy and Pluto are carrying reels of Tron.

Who The Hell's John Junkin?

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:49:07 +0100

From the ‘Bits’ section on page 5 of City Limits, 3rd to 9th of February 1984:

One of American comedian MEL BROOKS’ characters is the ‘2000-year-old man’, an old gent who knew everyone - ‘the great and the near-great’. Last year LWT organised an ‘Audience with Mel Brooks’ - to be broadcast this Saturday (see TV for times) - at which this fictional character could be questioned by ‘celebrities’. The only problem was that there seemed to be more of the near-greats than the greats there. Bryan Forbes, Nanette Newman and Lynsey de Paul - still flushed from having helped Mrs T to be elected - were on hand as well as Patrick Mower, Donald Sinden and Derek Nimmo. So Mr B had a bit of difficulty in identifying who was who - he called John Junkin ‘John Jenkins’ and got Helen Mirren’s name wrong. Ah well, some people are born near-great, some achieve near-greatness and some have near-greatness thrust upon them. There are some gems in the show so it’ll be worth watching for them as well as to see whether the fluffs have been cut out.

"My mum will do her raving nana!"

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:42:00 +0100

“My mum will do her raving nana!”

- Catchphrases That Somehow Never Caught On: Constable Goody from The Thin Blue Line

Popeye II

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:46:00 +0100

You would have thought that after Popeye Hollywood would be trying its utmost to keep Robin Williams away from any proposed big-screen adaptation of a daily newspaper strip, but no. From Leonard Klady’s Hollywood Cinefile column, page 10 of Screen International, Saturday the 9th of June 1990:

JOHN HUGHES has now come aboard as director of the film version of Johnny Hart’s The Wizard Of Id comic strip. The one-time Carolco project has shifted to Andrew Vajna’s Cinergi Productions with Robin Williams attached to play the title role. Production is targeted for early 1991 with Hughes planning to squeeze in his coming-of-age drama Reach The Rock for Universal this summer.

What I’d like to know is, who would have played the strip’s most famous character, the tyrannical pipsqueak King of Id? Surely it would have had to have been Danny DeVito.

Reach The Rock, incidentally, wasn’t completed until 1998.

Shelley Vision

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:42:00 +0100

Previously on this blog we have lamented the career of Shelley Duvall post-Popeye, how she fell into producing shows for television and never quite clawed her way back up to the big screen. Here follows press reports of the two films she had intended to appear in after Popeye but which never were produced.

A project close to Duvall’s heart was an adaptation of Tom Robbins’ novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. The fable had previously had a troubled time getting made into a feature when Robbins originally wrote the story as a low-budget screenplay in the mid-seventies - after failed to sell it to Hollywood he rewrote the script into a novel, which quickly became an underground favourite.

You have already read in the previously posted article that Duvall had bought the rights to the book in early 1981. One year on from that followed this news report from the pages of Rolling Stone, from Thursday the 18th of February 1982:

Duvall writes ‘Cowgirls’ script

“I feel this is Cuckoo’s Nest,” says Shelly Duvall of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the Tom Robbins novel that the Texas-born actress owns the rights to. “It’s gonna surprise everybody and be a big hit.” Duvall’s penning the screenplay and plans to assay the lead role of Sissy Hankshaw, the daffy heroine who hitchhikes across the U.S. No other actors are set for the project - which, truth to tell, hasn’t been sold to a studio yet - but Duvall’s got big ideas for the soundtrack. “I’m gonna try and get Linda Ronstadt and possibly James Taylor. Ringo Starr loves the book, too, and said he’d do some road music; he also wants to play one of the guys who picks Sissy up.”

While shopping Cowgirls around, Duvall will serve as executive producer of a series of live-action fairy tales for television. One of the stories under way: The Frog Prince, for which Duvall hopes to get Teri Garr and Buck Henry.

No studio picked up Duvall’s version of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. It was finally made into a feature in 1993, but with no involvment from Shelley Duvall - the film was written and directed by Gus Van Sant, with Uma Thurman taking the part of Sissy Hankshaw.

The Tale Of The Frog Prince, the first in the series of Faerie Tale Theatre, aired on Saturday the 11th of September 1982. A month later, this was reported on page 19 of the Saturday the 13th November 1982 edition of Screen International:

The making of a medieval movie

“BLONDEL - A Search For The King”, Gore Vidal’s medieval adventure story about King Richard the Lionheart and his loyal troubadour Blondel, is the subject of a new movie, scheduled to go into production next spring in Austria.

The film is to be directed by Robert Dornhelm,whose last film “She Dances Alone”, featuring Nijinsky’s daughter, was “Critic’s Choice” for 1981 in Cannes.

The screenplay is being written by Richard O’Brien, whose film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” has become a phenomenon.

Shelley Duvall, Demis Roussos, Bill Wyman and Michael York are mooted to take part.

At this stage the film will be produced independently of the Austrian government.

This film, too, was never realised.

Shelley Duvall spent seven years producing Faerie Tale Theatre and, apart from a cameo in 1981’s Time Bandits, didn’t make another feature film after Popeye until 1987’s Roxanne, and even then she was only in a supporting ‘best friend’-type role to Daryl Hannah. One can only wonder what would have happened to Duvall’s career had the years following Popeye been filled with an award-worthy drama like Even Cowgirls Get The Blues and an eccentric epic like Blondel - A Search For The King.

"Well ain’t that cute? BUT IT’S WROOOOOONG!!"

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:19:00 +0100

““Well ain’t that cute? BUT IT’S WROOOOOONG!!””

- Catchphrases That Somehow Never Caught On: Mr. H/Hollywood from 2 Stupid Dogs