Today's birthday: J Troplong "Jay" Ward

I admit that I got Jay Ward's full name (today would have been his 92nd birthday) from Wikipedia. As I wrote yesterday, the site has its uses. For instance, this paragraph, lifted in its entirety:

An eccentric and proud of it, Ward was known for pulling an unusual publicity stunt that happened to coincide with a major national crisis. Jay Ward bought an island in Minnesota near his home and dubbed it "Moosylvania," based upon the home of his most famous TV character Bullwinkle. He and publicist Howard Brandy crossed the country in a van, gathering signatures on a petition for statehood for Moosylvania. They then visited Washington, D.C. and attempted to gain an audience with President John F. Kennedy. Unfortunately, they arrived at the White House just at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and were escorted off the grounds at gunpoint.


So, a sampling of Ward's work. There's lots of other people involved, of course, but there's something about his shows that is just him. We've got to start with Moose and Squirrel. Mr. Know-It-All was a regular feature.



This is pretty much the origin story of Mr. Peabody and Sherman and, of course, the Wayback Machine.



After Rocky and Bullwinkle went off the air, Ward returned with this character. Short-lived, but beloved by all.



And the advice in the George cartoons still applies today: Watch out for the tree.

For Roald Dahl, on what would have been his 96th

You used to be able to watch Way Out on YouTube, but it's been pulled. It's the TV show Dahl hosted in the '60s, introducing the weird tales with his appropriately weird commentary. For a short while the show followed The Twilight Zone on Friday nights, but I think Dahl was just too wickedly British for the room, as compared to Rod Serling's gritty American pugnacity. It's too bad you can't see just a little bit of Dahl doing the show. He was perfect.

You can find various takes of his filmed work on YouTube, of course, but better you should read him if you wish to celebrate. Personally I would recommend Boy and Going Solo, both biographical works. And for your surfing pleasure, here's a couple of worthwhile pages that haven't been pulled down:

Big Sometimes Friendly Giant

Roald Dahl's 10 finest hours

The Capitol Theater in Port Chester, NY

Bob Dylan is opening there next month, marking a rebirth of the famous music venue.

Pfffft.

Music venue? I was raised in Port Chester. It was a movie theater when I was a kid. And every Saturday, they had kids' matinees. The best of these included space/monster movies. Creature Features. Whatever you wanted to call them. Double features, plus cartoons and coming attractions. A movie theater virtually packed to the ceiling with an audience ranging in age from about 8 to 12, with one sole adult, the theater manager, doing his futile best to keep a lid on the proceedings.

These were the movies I would watch with gaping jaw, and then go home nonchalantly and not be able to get to sleep out of sheer cold terror. One of the best of these, if not the best, was Enemy from Space. I only ever saw it the once, 50 some odd years ago, and I still remember that this gook came from Jupiter attached to rocks, and it jumped off the rocks and took over humans and made them slaves, collecting the rest of the rocks and getting their passengers into giant tanks where they could breathe their native methane. The monsters, once assembled, were fairly blobbish and run of the mill, but that whole idea of a mind-controlled slave army... In a way it was another twist on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, of course, but when an idea is good, run with it.

By the time Five Million Years to Earth came around, I was too old to lose sleep over a movie, but let me tell you, this one with its primal satanic imagery still managed to shake me up a bit. The whole exercise was way more complex than simple invading extraterrestrials.

I don't know when I finally put it all together and realized that they were of a part, both being Quatermass stories. As explained in ‘QUATERMASS AND THE PIT’: THE ORIGINAL, CLASSIC TV SERIES BY NIGEL KNEALE, this all started as a British TV series. And my guess is, it is pretty well forgotten, as are the movies. I can't recall, until seeing this article, a mention of Quatermass in years.

There's a video of the TV version of Million in the posting. I wonder how it compares to the movie, and if it holds up on its own. As soon as I get a few hours... In any case, find the two movies, if you're a classic SF film buff. At the very least, you'll be amused.

Music: Cher

Cher does West Side Story. All of it.



As one of the YouTube commenters points out, if there ever was a video where the words "No description available" didn't begin to sum it up, this is it. It's from one of her specials in the late 70s.

Via Hairpin.
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Britain really does have talent

Presenting Pudsey, this year's winner of the Britain's Got Talent competition:



Pudsey has an autobiography coming out later this year. Or as the Guardian put it, an autobidography. Take that, Susan Boyle!

[Via]
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Asimov vs Roddenberry

Isaac Asimov was a real character. I started my publishing career at Doubleday, which was just one of his publishers (he was ridiculously prolific, producing both fiction and nonfiction), and he was a regular visitor to the offices. Maybe too regular a visitor. He had a Harpo Marx tendency to almost literally chase the young female assistants around the office, for one thing, a practice that the young female assistants did not find endearing. On the other hand, he was Isaac Asimov. Maybe this was what was meant by poetic license.

What I remember most about Asimov personally was a talk he once gave about publishing. I forget the occasion, but he made a most interesting point. This is the gist of it: "Only ten percent of the people in this country read books," he said. He went on. "Fifty years ago, only ten percent of the people in this country read books. Fifty years for now, no doubt, only ten percent of the people in this country will read books. Reading is an elite activity, and a minority activity." Publishing, therefore, was similarly elite and similarly small. He didn't mean it as a pat on the back for our specialness, but a reality check. That was life, and he wasn't suggesting that we change it, but that we live with it.

Thirty some odd years later, I think he was right.

Anyhow, I love the exchange of notes between him and Gene Roddenberry. Mostly we have the Roddenberry side of it, but that's enough. Asimov had taken Star Trek to task for scientific inaccuracy. Roddenberry's response is enlightening, and apparently sparked what would become a friendship between the two. You can follow it at Letters of Note.
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How I Was Traumatized for Life at Age 3

The Howdy Doody Show was one of the first TV programs for kids. One of my very first memories is going to see the show live at Rockefeller Center. I was approximately three years old and sat with the rest of my peers in the famous Peanut Gallery.

I recall all of this vividly.

Our part of the set was a few rows of seats off to one side. Parents watched from some perch off in the distance. The show played out in front of us. On TV it looked like a real world of sorts, but in person it was all cameras and wires and monitors surrounding a small and fairly barren stage on which cavorted Buffalo Bob, an assortment of puppets and, among a handful of humans, the silent demon, Clarabell the Clown, originally portrayed by Bob Keeshan.

Part of Clarabell's silent schtick was spraying Buffalo Bob with the contents of a seltzer bottle. On that fateful day, when the other Peanuts and I were rollicking in the stands doing our best to respond to BB's exhortations to cheer the proceedings, as always Clarabell was poised for the attack. But on this day, instead of spraying Buffalo Bob with his seltzer bottle from hell, he accidentally, and unexpectedly, squirted me.

I immediately broke down in a coulrophobia-fueled panic. I have not cried so much since. Nothing anyone on the staff, not Buffalo Bob and certainly not that child spritzer Clarabell the Clown could calm me. Finally my parents arrived at the Peanut Gallery from, where, the Elephant Gallery?, and took me away, still in tears, weeping inconsolably over losing my belief in television heroes.

I never went to another Howdy Doody show.

Bob Keeshan, on the other hand, went on to become the legendary Captain Kangaroo. By the time that show came around, I was too old for it, thank God, because the few times I did watch it, perhaps staying home sick or whatever, even at the ripe old age of seven I realized that this was, shall we say, on the slow side. Then again, it was the 50s. Life was slower then.

The premise of the show was that Captain K was a grandfatherly figure, and that little kids naturally responded a certain way, and vice versa, to grandparents. The show lasted about thirty years, so I guess the premise was a good one. This clip is indicative of the show as one saw it back in the day, slow and in black-and-white. It's even got the Cap'n's venerable sidekick, Mr. Green Jeans.



In a remarkable feat of triumph over adversity, I recovered from my duel to the death with Clarabell, and grew to have no fear of clowns whatsoever, except for the one played by Tim Curry in It. Today is Bob Keeshan's birthday, and in all seriousness, his work as a pioneer of children's TV, and his gentle persona inhabiting the young lives of three decades of kids, is worth celebrating.
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Elmo and Ricky Gervais

[Via Boing Boing]
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I just watch it for the commercials

Substitute some big broadcast for "it" in the headline above. That's about the only times I ever watch commercials on television. Still, some of them are rather creative, and there is a set of awards, the Clios, to acknowledge the best. Here's 2012's big winner:



I originally saw this on Slate, where the point was made that, cute pigs in a machine versus cute pigs in the open air, they're still making burritos out of them...

For the full sense of the awards, of which there are many, check out the Clio website. It's like watching the Superbowl without all that pesky football to distract you from the main business.
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So, we like the Beach Boys

You gonna fault us for that? Watch this:

Beach Boys Perform New Song on 'Fallon'

If the whole album is like this, they've really done it. And here's more from the show, if you're interested.
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Must See TV

I can remember watching television in the 70s. There was one big block, Saturday nights on CBS. MASH, All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart. If you were home on Saturday night, you watched these. You'd be crazy not to. And keep in mind, there were no VCRs then, much less DVRs and Netflix and Hulu. You watched what was on, and that was the end of it.

Those shows marked a golden age that wasn't repeated until NBC conquered Thursday night in the 90s. Cheers, Friends, Seinfeld, ER. Must see TV, they called it.

Warren Littlefield was the President of NBC Entertainment in the 90s, and he's out on the circuit pushing an oral history of the shows of Must See TV. You might have caught him on the radio or TV, talking about it. The Atlantic has a major interview by Kevin Fallon. Take the genesis of Will and Grace for instance, a show that might have a hard time getting on the air in 2012.

Management said, "What the hell are you doing? Why are you developing Will and Grace?" It's network television, and we have advertisers to answer to. Advertisers are not ready to embrace, at the core of a show, a relationship between a gay man and straight woman. What are you doing? To make matter worse, we're in business with these writers. We own them. They're under a deal to our company. So it's not like you're wasting somebody else's time and money. You're wasting ours.

Very inside baseball, but worth a read. The Death of Must See TV: A Former Executive on NBC's Rise and Fall.
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Trebek for $100

Alex Trebek has been monitoring the answers (i.e., questions) on Jeopardy for 28 years, which makes him one of the icons of television. There are a few other folks who go on, reliably delivering their material again and again, but not many. And even fewer come across quite as smart.

Spoiler alert: Trebek already knows the answers (i.e., questions).

Profiling Trebek, Dan Zak at WaPo doesn't exactly rake through the dirt. There is no dirt. Trebek is not a Jekyll and Hyde, is not a secret high-lifer, and appears to be exactly the same onstage or off. And let's face it. Onstage he's not exactly a house a'fire. But he's not supposed to be. He's the man with the answers (i.e., questions).

[He] remains apart, behind a lectern near a wall of flat-screen TVs. He is also cordial and sedate. He is the host of the show. He cracks few jokes. He hugs no one. He wears suits in gray and navy. He announces categories and reads clues and says “Right” or “Correct” or “Yes” and, sometimes, “No.” He has all the answers, which means he knows all the questions. He used to stand behind the lectern but now he sits. He used to have a mustache but now he doesn’t.

That almost completely sums him up. Except he likes to read Immanuel Kant in his spare time. Immanuel Kant??? Maybe he does know all the answers. And all the questions, for that matter.

Jeopardy is the show we like to watch to feel smart. If you want to feel smart for reading a web article, check out Alex Trebek, thinking deep after 28 seasons of ‘Jeopardy!’ (By the way, halfway through we had to log in via Facebook to continue reading. We were not harmed in the process.)
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The Newsroom

Ten to one if you're reading this you're an Aaron Sorkin fan, and you're going to want to watch The Newsroom when it hits the airwaves. You already know it's coming, and you're just tapping your foot, waiting.

Here's a piece from Vanity Fair to tide you over. It includes the line, “I’m pretty wordy when I write,” Sorkin said.

Really?

Have at it: The Sorkin Way.

And a little bonus, an interview following The Social Network:

3D

There's something about 3D that Grinwout's finds intrinsically uninteresting. Oh, it's fine for a gimmick, but when push comes to shove, it just isn't all that great. First of all, there are plenty of people who can't watch 3D movies without getting a headache, and others whose vision is such that they can't even see it. Under the best of circumstances, let's admit it, it isn't all that good, which doesn't help. There's a lack of naturalness to the visuals you're seeing, and it can keep you from enjoying the movie. The funny thing is, while we can watch a black-and-white film and immediately accept its reality, with 3D, which is geometric progressions more "real," it feels less real. On top of that, you have to pay a premium for 3D movies in the theaters.

And now TVs are coming out in 3D. The ultimate promise is that we won't need special glasses some day. My question is, do I have to? Can't I just skip this so-called innovation? My mind works pretty well with black-and-white movies, and I can't once remember thinking to myself, if that had only been in color... Come to think of it, remember colorization? Casablanca in living, breathing imitation Technicolor? Bleeeech!

David Bordwell explains why this is happening the way it is, going back to 2005, when James Cameron and George Lucas were touting 3D as the coming thing to theater owners, and warning them to get with the program. Now Cameron is back, and he's doing it again!

Having pressured exhibitors to go digital and 3D, Cameron is now asking them to change their equipment to permit him to shoot in a new way he likes better—and to compensate for a deficiency in the 3D system he thrust on them. But he assures them that revamping their projectors is merely a matter of “little tweaks . . . tiny things that make it better.” He has claimed it’s a matter of a software upgrade... You have to give Cameron credit for chutzpah.

Are we being Luddites about this whole thing? Is someone about to take the colorized version of Casablanca and release it in 3D because otherwise, how could we possibly enjoy it?

The future is still unclear, perhaps. To understand the present better, read It’s good to be the King of the World..
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Quick take - End of civilization as we know it

Shame on you, America: 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians' Gets 3 More Seasons.
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In defense of My Little Pony

MLP is not new. The toy—always the toy comes first—was introduced in the early 80s, originally as My Pretty Pony. Whatever. They were colorful, they came with accessories, and they were marked with symbols on their flanks. Their target audience of little girls ate them up. They hit the TV and movie screens in the mid 80s. Somewhere in the 90s they all galloped off into the sunset, and we figured we'd never see them again.

We were wrong.

According to Wikipedia, Grinwout's source for all things related to MLP, we are now in the fourth generation of ponydom. Normally this would escape the notice of most adults without young children, except that this time out MLP has spawned the notorious Bronies, grown men fans who—while presumably living in their parents' basements when they're not trying to figure out what kind of work they're out of—are eating them up.

Todd VanDerWerff, while not necessarily standing up for the Bronies per se, does stand up for the present TV show, which he claims is the best program available for today's kids:

What’s wrong with telling our kids that there’s nothing more wonderful than the moment when someone says they’ll love you forever, even if that’s an impossibility, given who we are? What’s wrong with telling them that doing good things is something that will have impact far beyond yourself and your immediate friends and neighbors? And what’s wrong with believing in these things just a little bit yourself?

Forget about Bronies. Or better yet, incorporate them into your thinking. Check out VanDerWerff's article on The A.V. Club.
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Come on baby, let's do the twist

I watch this video, and I feel as if it was recorded on another planet:



When Dick Clark died last week, plenty of people wrote up his story, which in fact was very simple. He was a smart businessman who started out in music and went on to build a fantastic television empire. He wasn't a musician; he just happened to see his chance with American Bandstand, and he took it. Not that he didn't do well with it, but it could just as easily have been a hog auction show, if that's what the traffic would have borne. Not that Clark wasn't, we are sure, a fine fellow. But the teens of the Bandstand era didn't exactly relate to him; it's just that, you didn't not relate to him. He didn't represent the music, but nor did he represent the older generation. He was neutral. Probably anyone who was not neutral couldn't have pulled it off.

What he pulled off is what you see in the Chubby Checker video. Groups came on the show and lip synched. That was the live portion. The rest of it was just listening and dancing to records. What makes Chubby extra interesting is that he doesn't just stand there and mouth the words. He throws in the Twist. Which is why the video feels like it was recorded on another planet, a planet where they had dance crazes that took the nation by storm.

It wasn't all that long ago, folks.

Chubby Checker's reminiscence is at Let's Do the Twist: Chubby Checker Remembers Dick Clark. It seems that it was Clark who invented Chubby Checker, so to speak.

That was some planet!
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"The Closer" for the preschool set

Grinwout's enjoys "The Closer," with Kyra Sedgwick and her L.A. homicide team. We've been catching up with it on disk (because we hardly ever watch anything when it's on; that seems so... common). I'd recommend it to anybody, or at least I thought I would until I saw this video. It's sort of hard to imagine the Venn diagram of people who watch both "The Closer" and "Sesame Street."



Then again, it is pretty funny. And yet another video to watch when we should have been doing something—anything—else. This one was via Criminal Element, which makes the Venn diagram even harder to imagine.
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George Takei

Is George Takei the most interesting veteran of Star Trek? Today's birthday boy (4/20/37) was interned with his family during WWII, he was student body president of his LA junior high school, he was one of the first Japanese actors to build a career in post-war Hollywood, and eventually served as a Lieutenant on the Starship Enterprise on The Original Series. As true connoisseurs know, he was promoted to Captain after TOS ended:



Of course, his greatest fame was from TOS, where he worked with the only other contender for the most interesting Star Trek veteran, a relationship he describes here in his predictably gentlemanly fashion:




As a measure of cool, he's done voice work on everything from Archer to Scooby-Doo to Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Having served both masters, so to speak, he is the voice of reason in the ongoing war between Carrie Fisher and William Shatner on which Star X is best. And he's also a noted advocate of gay rights.

Did we mention he's also one of the funniest people in the universe:



Happy birthday, George Takei.

The worst travelogue ever

Thank you, Dangerous Minds, for digging this one up. Apparently it's quite rare: It was screened before The Life of Brian, but only in theaters in Great Britain and Australia, where boring, groan-worthy travelogues were still being routinely shown prior to feature films. (More details are on the DM site.) I started watching it thinking it was just a bad travelogue, and then you start getting into it, and it gets really bad, and then... Watch it.