The Joan Collins Blogathon is an event dedicated to the life and career of the film and television actress, hosted by RealWeegieMidget Reviews. For a list of participating bloggers, visit the link at the host site.

Fourteen Hours

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Henry Hathaway tends to be associated with westerns, and indeed, some of his biggest hits as a director were in that vein: How the West Was Won, The Sons of Katie Elder, and of course, the original True Grit. A perusal of his IMDB page reveals a variety of movies, including war, film noir and drama. While he may not have had a clear signature style as a director, he was one of a number of Hollywood filmmakers from the Golden Age who turned out reliable product again and again; a go-to man.

A former assistant director during the silent era, he got his break in the early 30s making adaptations of Zane Grey westerns with Randolph Scott. In 1935, Lives of a Bengal Lancer with Gary Cooper got a Best Picture nomination and Hathaway was on the radar.

If you’re a professional actor, voice acting for cartoons sounds easy, right? Just speak into the mike and do what you normally do. But for those who have made careers embodying animated characters on television, it can be almost as involving as live-action; certainly as meaningful. 

I’m gonna stick to TV for this post; I imagine many of us have at least a passing familiarity with the voice talents who originated in the movies: Clarence Nash, Pinto Colvig, Chuck Jones, Arthur Q. Bryan, Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, to name a few. And I’m only highlighting a few among many.

—Alan Reed and Jean Vander Pyl voiced, among other characters, Fred and Wilma Flintstone. He got his start in radio, appearing in The Shadow, The Life of Riley, The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show and Crime Doctor, as well as the movies (including Disney’s Lady and the Tramp) and early TV. She also started in radio, appearing in The Halls of Ivy and Father Knows Best, as well as TV. She was in the original Flintstones pilot, when the show was still called The Flagstones.

While Fred and Wilma were visually inspired by The Honeymooners’ Ralph and Alice Kramden, the voices were not. Fred had Ralph’s temper, but not his Brooklyn accent, while Wilma seemed a bit less sassy than Alice. Their voices fit their looks: Fred’s voice was heavy and earthy and Wilma’s was light and thin.

Back in the 70s and 80s, it was still possible to see animated shorts that originally played theatrically on free television, so the newer, made-for-TV cartoons I watched as a kid were mixed with much older material.

The animation career of Walter Lantz goes all the way back to the silent era. At Universal, he directed Oswald the Lucky Rabbit shorts and his studio created Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, and Chilly Willy, characters that played on TV beginning in the late 50s.

Tex Avery began at the Lantz studio and helped develop the Looney Tunes characters at Warner Bros., but in 1942 he moved to MGM, where his cartoons took on an even wilder tone. In addition to creating new characters like Droopy Dog, he directed memorable shorts like “Red Hot Riding Hood” and the controversial “Magical Maestro” (which is hilarious; I don’t care what anyone says).

Paul Terry co-founded Terrytoons in New Rochelle, New York in 1929, and among the studio’s best known creations include Mighty Mouse (another superhero) and Heckle and Jeckle (a comedy duo).

In the midst of an intense hearing for Alabama senator and U.S. Attorney General appointee Jeff Sessions, there was a surprising bit of silliness: Jeff Sessions is a big fan of “Schoolhouse Rock!”

During the hearing, Republican Sen. Ben Sasse said that there was a “civics crisis” in the U.S. and asked about Sessions’ thought on [President] Obama’s use of executive orders. While arguing that Obama’s use of executive power was an overreach, Sessions said that he felt “Schoolhouse Rock!” was “not a bad basic lesson in how the government is supposed to work.”

Bob Dorough

This is not meant to be a definitive post on Japanese animation. There are other places you can go for a more comprehensive study on the subject. This will be much more subjective and personal and chances are I’ll have missed your favorite show and/or movie, so please, no whatabouts. I just feel I should bring it up because no discussion of Saturday morning cartoons is complete without it.

I was a tad too young for Astro Boy, Gigantor, Kimba the White Lion and Speed Racer, but they were among the first wave of animated programs to hit the States through syndication. The animation is on a par with American cartoons of the 60s: limited, stiff, broad. 

Some of these characters, such as Astro Boy and Kimba, were the creations of the man considered the Japanese Disney, Osamu Tezuka. A cartoonist as well as an animator, he was first published at 17, and his graphic novel series—“manga” in Japanese—remain in print to this day. In 1961 he founded his own animation production company and his TV adaptation of Astro Boy was the first to be dubbed into English for an American audience.

The cartoons of Jay Ward are different from Looney Tunes in that there’s a higher premium on words. Not that Bugs Bunny and pals don’t engage in funny banter; they do, but with Ward his cartoons are all about the wacky wordplay: the ever-present narrator, the quickness of the delivery, the stronger sense of a plot as opposed to variations on a theme (Elmer tries to shoot Bugs, Wile E. Coyote tries to eat the Road Runner, etc.), perhaps as a means to compensate for the—let’s be honest—limitations in the animation. The scripts and the strong voice acting, shorn of the visuals, would make good radio plays.

Ward, a graduate of UC-Berkeley with an MBA from Harvard, was a television pioneer. In 1948, he and his longtime friend, animator Alex Anderson, made an animated pilot film for NBC, The Comic Strips of Television, featuring a variety of original characters. The only one NBC liked became the first animated series made for TV, Crusader Rabbit, debuting in 1950. Ward served as producer and business manager for the duo’s Television Arts Productions.

I watched some episodes for this post. The roots of later Ward shows are clearly visible: funny animals in a serialized show—squeaky-voiced “straight man” CR and dimwitted partner, in this case a tiger named Rags; villains, of a sort, who are equally silly; an omniscient narrator who interacts with the characters. The animation is very primitive, but the characters are endearingly cute and the serialized format makes one want to know what happens to them.

CR was syndicated nationwide, mostly at NBC affiliates including in New York and LA, until 1952, then a second series was commissioned in 1956 by new parent company Capital Enterprises, but Ward and Anderson lost a legal battle over ownership rights.

Next Ward packaged some more new characters in an unsold pilot, The Frostbite Falls Revue, set in the territory known as the North Woods, which covers northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. It didn’t succeed, but two minor characters from the series did pretty well for themselves...

I suspect I knew, even as a kid, that Rocky & Bullwinkle were a little different from most cartoons. The fast pace, the number of jokes that flew over my head but seemed significant somehow, the humor that relied on bad puns and other turns of phrase—it wasn’t Scooby-Doo by any means. 

I was used to cartoons with, shall we say, a limited range of expression, but I wasn’t accustomed to cartoons this sharp-witted. I still preferred action-adventure shows overall, but I made time for R&B whenever they were on, in its various incarnations (like Looney Tunes, it appeared under different names).

The original show, Rocky and his Friends, aired on ABC in 1959 before switching to NBC as The Bullwinkle Show in 1961. After 1964, it aired in syndication. Ward created the show with Anderson and Bill Scott. Fun fact: Dudley Do-Right, one of the show’s feature characters, began life as part of the original lineup for The Comic Strips of Television. He went on to a spin-off series of his own.

Ward and Scott collaborated on two more series, George of the Jungle (a Tarzan parody) and Super Chicken (a superhero comedy), both from 1967. 

In addition to cartoon series,Ward is notable for his commercial illustration. I never ate kiddie cereals Cap’n Crunch, Quisp or Quake but he designed their mascots. Here’s the first Cap’n Crunch commercial from 1963, and it’s very much of a piece with Ward’s other cartoons: 

He also put together this bit of drive-in welcome/intermission filler.

Ward died in 1989 of renal cancer. DreamWorks Animation currently has the rights to his characters. We could use a little more of their kind of madcap humor, don’t you think?

A Jay Ward visual essay

The live-action movies

Filmation cartoons were hit or miss for me. Often times, I liked the characters, but the actual animation could leave me cold. It never seemed as lively as it should have been—but there were some good moments.

For my money, the Looney Tunes characters of the Warner Brothers Animation studio may be the funniest cartoon characters ever created. All I have to do is think of a scene of one of their classic cartoons, a line, even a word or two (“wabbit,” “puddy tat,” “duck season”) and the giggles start.

Once upon a time, Saturday morning was magical. Armed with nothing more than a bowl of sugary cereal, a spoon and a drink of some sort (it didn’t matter what), you could spend hours parked in front of the TV and commune with talking animals, monsters great and small, heroes both super and non-super, cavemen, aliens, teenagers, sentient cars and little blue elves in funny hats.

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I first became aware of UFO sightings sometime in the mid-80s, and like many people, I dreamed of it happening to me one day. I still believe life of some form other than humanity is out there somewhere, but I suspect the odds of us finding it in our lifetimes is slim at best.

That doesn’t stop people from trying, of course. This 2018 New York article goes deep in re-examining UFO mythology in the age of DT and his proposed “space force.” 

If aliens exist, though, why would they abduct and experiment on humans? Do they see us as an inferior form of life? Possible—but I have a hard time imagining the popular image of little, skinny grey men with large, almond-shaped eyes and big heads (and no clothes) as genetically superior.

And at what point did this become the default image for “extraterrestrial,” anyway? (The emoji for “alien” on my iPhone is a simplified version of this.) It’s as if the same species were observing us for over half a century, and if that were so, at what point would they decide we actually are intelligent and talk to us? Or are they not as advanced as we thought? Could anal probes be their species’ equivalent of cow tipping? 

Regardless, the notion that aliens have nothing better to do than pick apart our insides persists—and one of the first widely-reported abduction stories was turned into an unusual and unsettling TV movie.

The Rutles: All You Need is Cash

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Ten years of this blog and I have yet to talk about Monty Python. For now, I’ll say what practically everyone else says about the British comedy troupe: they’re hilarious, I thoroughly enjoy their material, both on TV and in the movies (I own Holy Grail on DVD), and I could watch them all day. But this is not about Python as a group, just one of them: Eric Idle.

In the sixties, Idle appeared on the ITV children’s show Do Not Adjust Your Set with Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Terry Jones and met John Cleese and Graham Chapman as a guest on At Last the 1948 Show.

Idle and the others from Adjust were offered an adult, late-night show at around the same time Cleese and Chapman were offered a series by the BBC. In 1969, after a taping of Adjust, Cleese arranged a dinner meeting between the six of them to discuss a collaboration, and a legend was born.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired on the BBC from 1969-1974, and afterwards, Idle and the others pursued solo projects. In 1975 Idle created the sketch show Rutland Weekend Television, with music by Neil Innes. It was during this period that the two came up with characters that spawned a life of their own.

Spider-Man (1977)
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Ever since the Spider-Man film rights were acquired by Marvel Studios, their signature character has seen some changes. He got himself a suit of armor designed by Tony Stark. He became an Avenger and travelled with them to outer space. He’s met versions of Spider-Man from parallel universes, including a black kid, a girl, even a cartoon pig!

In the comics, back in the 70s, he was still recognizable as Peter Parker, college kid and part-time freelance photographer—living with his Aunt May, fighting the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus, getting no respect from J. Jonah Jameson and the Daily Bugle. He began the decade mourning the death of girlfriend Gwen Stacy at the hands of the Goblin, grew four arms for a brief time (don’t ask!), became more of a stud with the chicks than in his high school years, first proposed to Mary Jane Watson (no relation), only to get shot down, and ended the decade in a relationship with a burglar called the Black Cat, who only loved him as Spider-Man and could’ve cared less who was under the mask.

At the same time, Marvel Comics’ inroads into Hollywood grew deeper. You may remember the early animated series from the 60s, including the Spidey series with the awesome theme song. Marvel continued to pursue this avenue, but they also looked into developing live-action material for television. The success of the live-action Batman and Wonder Woman series from the Distinguished Competition was no doubt an impetus for them.

If you’re from my generation, you may remember the Spidey skits on The Electric Company, for example, but that was kid stuff. Marvel wanted something that could play in prime time.

Brian’s Song
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These are the facts in the brief career of pro football star Brian Piccolo: he was college football’s leading rusher in 1964 at Wake Forest, and was named the Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year, finishing tenth in the Heisman Trophy balloting.

He was signed by the Chicago Bears as a free agent, after both the NFL and the AFL passed on drafting him. In 1968, the year in which teammate and former Rookie of the Year Gale Sayers injured his knee, Piccolo ran for 450 yards, had 291 yards receiving, and two touchdowns.

In 1969 Piccolo was diagnosed with embryonal cell carcinoma, and underwent surgery twice. He died June 16, 1970 at the age of 26, leaving behind a wife and three daughters.

Those are the facts... but the facts only tell you so much.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
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In 1977, Roots held American television audiences in thrall like nothing had before by telling the truth about slavery. It was a true television event that opened up new levels of discussion about race relations and acknowledged how far black people have come and how far we still have to go.

Three years before that landmark, however, another television movie told a story about slavery that was not too different; in fact you could say it helped pave the way for Roots.

A novel was published in 1971 called The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines, and I feel the need to emphasize it was a novel, a work of fiction. It references numerous real people, places and events throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, but it is fiction. CBS adapted it into a TV movie that aired in January 1974, with the teleplay by Tracy Keenan Wynn and directed by John Korty.

The star was Cicely Tyson.

The Girl Most Likely To...
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Joan Rivers might have been the first female stand-up comic I had ever seen. I had seen comedic actresses on TV—Carol Burnett, Isabel Sanford, Nell Carter—but I associated Rivers with stand-up. I would see quite a bit of her on TV, and she was part of the zeitgeist at the time.

I thought she was funny, not so much for the things she said as for the way she acted: gossipy, manic, catty. It’s a safe bet I knew no one in real life remotely like her.

In 2010 there was a documentary on her, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. It provided insight on where she came from and how her distinctive brand of humor originated. I remember she said in the doc, and I’m paraphrasing, something about how “ugly” women made better comediennes. I suspect she was making a distinction from comedic actresses, because we can all think of beautiful examples of those: Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, Madeline Kahn.

If this were true, was it a form of compensation? Tina Fey is good looking, no doubt. Would I call her sexy? The word can mean different things to different people. I wouldn’t kick her out of my bed; I think she’d be a lot of fun to be with and would have lots of interesting things to say, and that’s sexy, in its own way. But I think we all know what Rivers was referring to: objective physical beauty.

The Alfred Hitchcock Blogathon is an event dedicated to the life and career of the legendary filmmaker, hosted by Maddy Loves Her Classic Films. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the link at the host site.

Good evening.

Perhaps more than any other director of the Golden Age, Alfred Hitchcock was a personality, someone known by movie audiences as well as any movie star, and never was that more apparent than when he made the leap to television in 1955 with Alfred Hitchcock Presents, AKA The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

A weekly anthology of suspense and horror stories, it’s notable not just for the quality of the stories but for how it shaped the Hitchcock persona. His droll sense of deadpan humor was often on display in his movies, sometimes as part of the cameo appearances he’d make in them. For TV, it was like he became an eccentric uncle with whom you were never sure if he was pulling your leg or not.

His introductions to each episode painted him as macabre yet self-depreciating, with a dry wit and a strong sense of the absurd, much like The Addams Family years later. The creepy theme song and the stylized cartoon silhouette of him also helped sell him as an iconic persona that one looked forward to seeing as much as the stories themselves. Here’s a collection of some of his more memorable intros and outros and here are some fun facts about the show.

So nothing fancy here; just my take on a few episodes picked at random. I didn’t realize when I began planning for this post AHP (a half hour) was a little different from AHH (an hour), though it’s all basically the same show.

Thursday’s Game (AKA The Berk)
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With 21 Emmys and three Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, James L. Brooks is an undisputed legend of the big and small screens. Let’s count the hits he was involved in creating, shall we: The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Rhoda. Lou Grant. The Tracey Ullmann Show. And of course, The Simpsons—and that’s just TV.

Switch to the movies and you can add Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets, all Best Picture nominees he directed and wrote. As a producer, you can even add Jerry Maguire, Say Anything and Big.

Before all of that, though, he was just a TV writer from Brooklyn working his way through the 60s. He had been a copywriter for CBS News, writing for broadcasts and documentaries as well as some work as an associate producer before switching to sitcoms, like That Girl, The Andy Griffith Show and My Three Sons. He created the show Room 222, the second one with a black lead character.

In 1970, he and Allan Burns created MTM. 29 Primetime Emmys later, it made him a major player in television. Here’s a nice appreciation of the show from TV Guide in the context of the pandemic.


In 1971, Brooks tried his luck with a feature film. Thursday’s Game was an ABC movie that didn’t air until April 1974. Gene Wilder and Bob Newhart are two guys who enjoy a poker game with friends every Thursday night. When the game breaks up because of a fight and they need something new to do, Wilder and Newhart are forced to confront their inadequacies in life, especially when Wilder loses his job producing a crappy game show.

This all-star cast looks like a powerhouse now, but in 1971 many of them were not yet household names: Ellen Burstyn (two years before The Exorcist), MTM cast members Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman, Rob Reiner (the same year All in the Family debuted), Norman Fell (five years before Three’s Company) Chris Sarandon (four years before Dog Day Afternoon) and Nancy Walker (same year as McMillan and Wife and three years before Rhoda, not to mention those Bounty commercials). By the time Game aired in 1974, some of these people were better known, including Brooks.

Game feels like the sort of thing the future creator of Terms of Endearment would write. It has its funny moments—Walker plays an unemployment agency counselor, and her scenes with Wilder are cute—mixed with a little drama: Wilder and Burstyn’s marriage is in jeopardy due in large part to his inability to admit he lost his job; he pretends his Thursday night poker game is still going on, but he actually stays out all night with Newhart, which naturally stresses her out. Game is less funny-ha-ha and more funny-ain’t-life-peculiar.


Steve at Movie Movie Blog Blog wrote about Game last year. I agree with him in that the poker scene in the beginning was a highlight and that nothing afterwards is quite as funny as that. The manic explosions Wilder was so great at are reined in and I admit, I kinda longed for more of them, but this isn’t that kind of movie. Indeed, at times Wilder looked like he was exploring his sexy side(?): he has a couple of shirtless scenes with Burstyn and Harper tries to seduce him in another scene. Young Frankenstein this is not.

I’d say Game is worth checking out overall, especially if you’re nostalgic for 70s television.

Trilogy of Terror
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When I remember TV movies, I remember the epic mini-series of the 80s. They were trumpeted as a Big Deal in TV Guide and they usually had all-star casts, not that I would’ve heard of most of the names, but the point was they got my attention and I watched them, even if I was too young to completely understand what was going on.

As for the shorter, considerably less-than-epic ones, I think I understood even then that they were inferior to theatrical movies. I definitely remember The Day After and how that film stoked our nuclear apocalypse fears. When the Amy Fisher trial became popular, all three networks made TV movies about her! (I forget which one I watched.)

As kids, we also had the ABC Afterschool Specials: young adult melodramas about the issue of the week, usually starring some popular teen actor from television. Here’s a MeTV top ten list. I don’t remember any of these; I think I only watched them sporadically—why would I, when GI Joe and He-Man were on instead?

TV movies get a bad rep, it’s true, but back in the 70s, they aimed a little higher, had greater aspirations, and were more memorable overall. I’ve already discussed some of them, like The House That Would Not Die with Barbara Stanwyck, and Duel, the first feature film directed by Steven Spielberg. This month I’m gonna look at some more, and today we’ll begin with one that developed a huge cult following to become a pretty big hit thanks to a certain terrifying-looking doll.