What happened to the hat and the birth of the blues.  (click to find links if you’re reading this on Facebook.)

I don’t see movies
or buy comics from
people who screw over
friends of mine.

The redoubtable Charles Brubaker passed along this YouTube link to the one & only episode of T.K. Ryan’s Tumbleweeds comic strip ever animated & aired.

I bring this to your attention because:

1. I was (& still am) a big fan of the Tumbleweeds strip
2. I wrote this particular episode
3. We animated & aired it without the knowledge or permission of Mr. Ryan

How can you do such a thing?  Easy, if you’re Filmation Studios…

Well, that’s my topic of the day…

Filmation in 1978 was my first writing gig in Hollywood.  I had been hired after luckily knocking on the right door at the right time & put to work on a show that had the dubious distinction of being cancelled even before the first episode was completed.

Nevermind, there was other stuff to do.

After writing several segments of the Tarzan And The Super 7 series[1], I was moved over to another show:  The Fabulous Funnies[2].

Frankly, it was a lousy idea for a show.  Almost all the comic strips they selected were old & anemic even at that time; I couldn’t imagine any kid being interested in them.

There were two exceptions:
Broom-Hilda, which at 8 years of age was the newbie in the pile, and Ryan’s Tumbleweeds, which began in 1965.

I’d been reading Tumbleweeds since junior high and had the first paperback collection.  While somewhat extreme in its stylization, it had a sly, savage wit and cartoonist T. K. Ryan filled it up with a cast of memorable eccentric characters, each a delightful off-beat take on Western cliches.

Naturally, I glommed onto Tumbleweeds the moment I was assigned to the show, eager to make full use of its wide range of characters and situations.

Only one problem:  The budget was so small we could only afford 4 voice actors on the show.

And to make matters worse, we weren’t allowed to use any of the Indian characters because the network would let us record their voices with non-Native American actors and at the time the only Native American actor anybody in Hollywood knew was Iron Eyes Cody[3], who was waaaaaaay too expensive for Filmation.

Fortunately there was a workaround for the Indian situation.  Two of the strips recurring Native American characters — Lotsa Luck and Bucolic Buffalo — were mute.  Further, in the strip Lotsa Luck communicated by scribbling notes for other characters to read, so I was able to secure permission from the network to use them.

The person whom we didn’t secure permission from was T. K. Ryan.

It seems Filmation sold the idea of the show to the network without first formally securing the rights to any of the comic strips.

Once the series was picked up, Filmation’s lawyer then went to the various strips & picked up the rights.  Most of the rights were granted through syndicates, but Ryan personally held all rights to Tumbleweeds.

So Filmation’s lawyer contacted Ryan and told him Filmation was interested in doing a Tumbleweeds segment of The Fabulous Funnies and Ryan said he’d like to see a storyboard first so he could tell if we knew how to handle his characters and Filmation’s lawyer said sure and then he called the producer and told him Ryan was okay with the idea.

So I started writing.

I was disappointed to learn there were only going to be four Tumbleweeds segments but I was determined to make the best of them.  The first was the short segment seen above, a brief intro to the characters and setting before getting ito the real character comedy.

So I wrote it and it was storyboarded and animated and produced and aired.

And the following Monday Filmation got a call from Mr. Ryan’s lawer, saying Mr. Ryan liked the episode very much only he wondered why Filmation never bothered to sign a contract with him…

Can you say “Oops!”, boys and girls?[4]

Anyway, long story short, Filmation quickly ponied up and, for reasons I could never fathom, opted to removed Tumbleweeds entirely from the show rather than run the segment again or make new ones.

They even went to the trouble of editing him out of the main titles.

Ryan kept the ‘Weed running for another 30 years, finally signing off in December 2007 in one of the classier endings of a comic strip.

I’m truly sorry we never got a real chance to do something with his characters; they were perfect for animation.

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[1]  Yeah, yeah, I know:  No way is it possible to configure that show & end up with the number 7.  We figured if the network didn’t care, why should we.

[2]  Which was neither

[3]  Trust me, I am deeply appreciative of the irony here…

[4]  I knew you could.

I am putting on my size 16-EEEEE clown shoes
and am going to stomp over a whole lotta people’s
delicate sensibilities.  Those who are willing to
actually read what I am writing are welcome to do so,
those who will only proceed to the point where said
delicate sensibilities are offended may considered
themselves officially honked off at this moment;
no need to proceed further & waste your time & mine.

Read the rest of this article »

Following basic training, I was stationed at Ft. Benjamin Harrison, IN for Advanced Individual Training at the Defense Information School (DINFOS).

This is where they teach people how to write news & press releases the military way.

We had people from all branches of the service there, including two privates with the same name (I’ll refer to them as Jimmy Jones to protect their real identities).

The black Jimmy Jones was a marine, the white Jimmy Jones was an airman.

One day they decided to play pool.  You needed to turn your military ID (w/picture) over to the supply sergeant to get the pool cues and, since it was white Jimmy Jones’ idea to play but he had left his ID upstairs, he asked black Jimmy Jones if he would give him his ID to hand over.  Black Jimmy Jones was flabbergasted.

“What?!?!?  Are you crazy?!?!?  They’ll take one look at it and know it’s not you!

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“YOU’RE NOT A MARINE!!!”

I posted here about how difficult it is for artists and directors to approach a script when the writers don’t think visually.  In the examples linked to above, people who came up with ideas gave no thot as to how they would be physically executed.

This works fine if you’re conjuring up a surrealist manifesto, but not if somebody has to actually execute the script.

But there’s another, deeper problem:  Bad enough when the characters violate visual common sense, but what about when they violate emotional common sense.

Stick around; that’s what I’m blogging on.

So ABC Sat-AM had a good thing:  A hit show in the form of Richie Rich.

There’s a lot to recommend Richie Rich, both in his original comic book incarnation (6-8 years of age) and in his TV cartoon incarnation (10-11 years of age).

In both incarnations the primary joke was dealing with the sheer volume of surplus ready cash the Rich family had laying about,

Seriously.  They’re constantly tripping over piles of the stuff, it clogs the swimming pool filter, and it doesn’t even make that good a substitute for toilet paper.

And both versions work because the meta-gag is that this is how young kids view money.  They have no idea how capital is created, passed along, codified in credit & cash.  No, to young kids money simply grows on trees & once you find your magic money tree the only problem is how to get rid of it.

Okay, fine:  We can deal with that.
All the stories have to reflect that child-like view of cash.
Keep that mindset, and the resulting scripts will be fun,
charming, and whimsical.

But it changes once the kid hits adolescence.

And that’s the problem with trying to update the concept simply by making the kid/s older.

Because once they hit puberty, a whoooooooooole ‘nuther set of issues arises.

And even if the kids who make up the audience are still pre-teens, they aren’t blind, they aren’t stupid:  They know teens think/act/feel differently about things than they do.

Compare Little Archie with Archie.  Both are aimed at the same demographic, but one is about pre-teen adventures in the Archieverse while the other is about teen shenanigans.

To put it bluntly, there’s a sexual tension in the (Clean!  Wholesome!) teenage Archie stories that’s lacking in the Little Archie tales.

Even when Little Betty and Little Veronica are fighting over Little Archie’s attention, it has nothing to do with any actual (non-existent) romantic feelings they have.

Rather, they are little kids playing at having feelings like big kids.  Little boys want to play at having grown-up adventures, little girls want to play at having grown up relationships.

‘Twas ever thus.

So when the suits at ABC decide that if Richie Rich is a good thing, then two shows about rich kids would twice as good, they contacted the studio I was working for & told ‘em to craft a series about a wealthy teenage girl.

(To protect the innocent & confound the guilty,
I will be changing names & obscuring details)

Read the rest of this article »

So Eduardo M. Freyre observed:  “Hector Ramirez sure gets around.  Does this mean GI Joe, Transformers, Inhumanoids, and Jem take place all take in the same universe???”

Why, yes.  Yes, it does.

And I almost managed to add My Little Pony to that same shared universe.

Hector Ramirez is the host of the popular TV news program “20 Questions” — well, in the tooniverse, at least.  A parody of pompous newscasters, Hector turned out to be one of the most serviceable characters we came up with at Sunbow while making the Hasbro-based cartoons.

Whenever we needed some jerk character to make a big exposition dump in the middle of a program, Hector got the nod.

The real explanation is somewhat prosaic:
After I created the Hector Ramirez character for GI Joe, Hasbro’s legal team checked to make sure he wasn’t based on any real life person.[1]

Tho originally intended as a one shot character for the “20 Questions” episode, I brought him back for the 2nd part of “The Traitor,” a 2-parter about a Joe accused of treason.

Rather than do the standard “In our last episode…” re-cap, I opened part two with Hector anchoring his news program, 20 Questions.  His topic that night?  Dusty Rudat, the Joe accused of treason who had escaped custody and was now presumed to have joined Cobra.

Once they had cleared a TV news reporter character for one series,[2] it was just easier to plug him in whenever another show needed such a character. Hector proved to be a remarkably resilient foil:  Logically he could be expected to know & deliver all sorts of detailed background information.  He was also dumber than box of frozen chimichangas & irritatingly full of himself.  Whenever info had to be dumped, he was the lad to dump it.

And now you know…and knowing is half the battle…[3]

Oh, and as for almost tying My Little Pony in with Joe/Jem/Trans/Oids, at the same time we were doing the My Little Pony: The Movie, we were also working on the Transformers: The Movie and GI Joe: The Movie.  I suggested one of the Ponies go look for help against the menace facing them.  The first person she would have asked would have been Optimus Prime, the second would have been Shipwreck (who would assume he was suffering from DTs & pour out the beer he was drinking).

Alas, humorless spoilsports cooler heads prevailed and those scenes were never animated…

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[1]  Standard movie/TV legal practice; while Hector was based loosely on Geraldo Rivera, Hasbro’s legal department wanted to make sure that wasn’t another real life Hector Ramirez working in journalism who might sue the bejeebers outta them take umbrage at the character’s name.

[2]  Coincidentally, just about the time the first GI Joe episode with Hector went into production, the infamous serial killer Richard Ramirez was captured.  Hasbro wanted to change Hector’s last name but we persuaded them not to, Ramirez being a fairly common Hispanic surname.

[3] Red lasers and blue lasers making up the other half…

My grandmother nicknamed me Buzz when I tried to imitate a doorbell at age 18 months.

A different technology application, and I would have been Ding-a-ling Dixon.

Recently I received an e-mail[1] asking about my work on THE NEW SHMOO show from 1979.

Wow, talk about a blast from the past!

I get asked frequently about writing for G.I. JOE et al and THUNDARR and even TARZAN AND THE SUPER 7 but THE NEW SHMOO almost never comes up.

And for good reason, I might add, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

I remember working on the series, a pretty standard SCOOBY-DOO, WHERE ARE YOU? rip-off imitation[2] of the “3 kids & a nyah-nyah” variety ala RICKETY ROCKET (a show so offensive even the Internet Movie Database won’t list it!) or RUBIK, THE AMAZING CUBE.

The writing process was fairly typical.  I was a freelancer.  The story editor, Chuck Menville, sent me a show bible, which described the concept & characters.  I came up with some ideas & sent them to him (they were probably no more than a page or two long, perhaps even as short as a paragraph).  Chuck picked one he liked, called me in, and we discussed how the story should be developed.  Then I went back to my office (I worked out of my home) and wrote the script.  There may have been Hanna-Barbera staff writers working on the show as well, but I never had a meeting with any of them.

From start to finish, probably no more than 7-10 days (including re-writes).  However, since there could be delays in Chuck’s schedule or mine, the actual start to finish time probably ran closer to a month from the point where I got the bible to the point where Chuck approved the final draft.

I can’t remember how long my outlines were; as I said above, they could have been as short as a single paragraph or up to 2 pages in length.  The scripts were written at roughly 1 page of script = 30 seconds of animation, so a 22 minute script probably ran about 44 pages (by the time I started working for Sunbow on G.I. JOE, etc., more and more staging was being given to the storyboard artists, so our scripts required less exact staging instructions and became shorter, more along the lines of live action screenplays, which are 1 page = 1 minute of screen time).  I was either using my first dedicated word processor or my last typewriter to write my scripts at that time.[3]

I had known Chuck (who passed away in 1992, alas!) since I first started working in animation at Filmation Studios; it was always a pleasure to work with him.  He and his writing partner Len Janson were the first story editors I worked with & the two of them taught me a great deal about the basics of writing scripts.  The two of them had done a series of incredible pixilation shorts, one of which, STOP, LOOK, AND LISTEN (1967), was nominated for an Oscar and still plays occasionally on Turner Classic Movies.  While I was at Filmation, Len — with great justification, I might add — attempted to smash my head against a wall with a coat rack, but that’s another tale for another time.[4]

To be frank, while the time working with Chuck was enjoyable, I was disappointed in the show itself.  As I said, it was yet another imitation of SCOOBY-DOO, and had virtually nothing to do with the Shmoos that Al Capp created for his Li’l Abner comic strip.

If you aren’t familiar with Li’l Abner, look him up online; it was one of the funniest strips ever published.  Capp used the Shmoos as a modern parable of consumerism, capitalism, & wasteful use of resources.  I wish we had done stories that were more in line with what Al Capp had envisioned for the Shmoo, but this show is what the network wanted:  Yet another Scooby-doo clone.

I can’t remember anything about the episode I wrote, not even the title, and since the shows had gang writing credits at the end there’s no way to determine who did what.  I do remember I tried to do something a bit differently from most Saturday morning shows at the time, and when I finally figured out my angle of approach I was happy with it, but I’ll be danged if I can remember what that was today!

What I remember most about working on THE NEW SHMOO was giving Chuck a terrible fright.

The outside of the H-B buildings had concrete lattice that was strong enough to support a full grown man.  To enter the executives/writers building (the artists were in another building), one parked in the back, then walked down a courtyard between the two buildings to the front lobby.  Since Chuck’s office was located at the far end of the building from the lobby, it meant schlepping back the length of the courtyard to meet with him.

Being the sort of person I am[5], I decided to save some shoe leather and for one meeting instead of walking down & back, I opted to climb the lattice to his 3^rd story office.

Chuck as on the phone when I rapped on the window behind him and nearly fell out of his chair in surprise.  He hung up quickly (“Excuse me, I gotta go; a writer just climbed through my window”) and opened the glass to let me in.  We then discussed the script & changes he wanted on it, and when the meeting was over he asked me to leave in a more conventional manner.

When I can back with the completed script, H-B security now had a guard patrolling the courtyard, keeping an eye out for anyone else who might try my shortcut!

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[1]  Hi, Louis!

[2]  Kosher b/c Hanna-Barbera produced both series.

[3]  If it was a typewriter, it was my Adler, a heavy duty German-made machine apparently made by the same people who built Panzer tanks during WWII; I had destroyed a series of Olivettis with my literally heavy-handed typing technique.

[4]  I ducked.

[5]  i.e., Lazy

It has been my pleasure & privilege to have met & known & on a few special occasions work with some of the greatest creative talents in pop culture.  It has been an even rarer & greater pleasure & privilege to have been able to count some of them as my friends.  This is a story of one of those occasions.

Mark Evanier has posted a wonderful remembrance of joltin’ Jack Kirby on his blog in honor of the 94th anniversary of Jack’s birth.

As Mark observes:  “If Jack Kirby isn’t your favorite comic book artist, he’s probably your favorite comic book artist’s favorite comic book artist.”

I discovered Jack Kirby & Marvel comics the same summer I discovered Famous Monsters of Filmland (and Wally Wood’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents).  A kid in our cabin at summer camp had brought along a trunk full of Marvel & other comics as well as plenty of Forry Ackerman’s FM.

To be frank, I was a little put off by Jack’s style at first.  I was used to the more sedate goofiness of DC’s Superman & Batman comics; Jack’s work was ten times as crazy but unlike DC,
he was dead serious!

No camp here; no, sir.  Jack drew every line with the utmost of conviction.

It took a while to fully appreciate what he was doing, and by the time I fully grasped what he was going for, he had long since left the den of thieves house of Marvel and gone on to work his wonders at DC, then doing development work for animated shows.

It was in that context that I met him.

I was working at Ruby-Spears Productions with Steve Gerber (another great guy & a great creator who deserves his own post; soon, soon…).  They had just sold a series called THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN and now the time had come to actually develop scripts & art for the show.

Steve told Joe he could recommend some comic book artists to help give the show a more dynamic feel than standard Saturday morning fare.  What he didn’t mention to me was who these artists would be.

We had a production meeting; I came into the conference room early.  There was a little old man sitting there, talking to John Dorman (the head story board artist for the series).  I liked the old guy almost immediately:  He was the only person I’ve ever met whom I could say his eyes literally twinkled.

We started talking about the show, kicking around ideas before the meeting actually got started.  Steve and Joe and the rest of the writing team came in and, since I was already there & chatting with the old guy, everybody assumed we’d been introduced.  The meeting started without further fanfare.

As we kicked ideas around, I was astonished at the imagination the old guy was showing.  Joe and Steve would throw out ideas, the rest of us would kick them around & play with them, then he would casually say something and boot that particular concept right into orbit.

And he did this again and again and again, “plussing” every idea thrown out there, turning it around & inside out & making it better…

…and never taking credit for it.

Quite the contrary:  He was unfailingly self-depreciating, always deferring to others, and shrugging off praise for his ideas & concepts with a sheepish grin.

It was a great meeting, one of the best & most creative ones I’ve ever been involved in, and when it ended the old guy left with his wife (who had to drive him everywhere since he was turning ideas over so much in his mind he would get distracted in traffic) to start working on the ideas we had discussed.

I remember thinking at the time how glad I was somebody with his imagination would be working on the series; not only that, but I was particularly happy how well we had hit it off.

He was, as they say in the biz, a good guy to have in the fox hole.

After he left, I drifted over to Steve’s office & commented on how much I liked the old guy.  “But who is he?” I asked.  “Nobody introduced us.”

“That was Jack Kirby,” Steve said.

“That was Jack Kirby?” — no, wait, that’s not the way I said it.  What I said was:

“THAT WAS JACK KIRBY ?!?!?”

To say I was floored would have been an understatement.  If I had known it was Jack, my contribution to the meeting would have been along the lines of “Homida-homida-homida…”

If you know Jack’s career, you know I’m talking about one of — if not the — most important people in the history of comics.  He and his then-partner Joe Simon created comics:  Oodles & oodles & oodles of comics.  Name a genre, Simon & Kirby were usually there first:  True crime, romance, kid adventure.  They didn’t create superhero comics, but boy, they sure did ‘em better than everybody else combined.

And by the 50s, when comics were fading fast in the face of TV & censorship, when the team of Simon & Kirby had to split up & go their separate ways in order to eke out livings for their families, Jack drifted over to one of the bottom feeder companies.  There he cranked out weird monster stories until the early 1960s when the company decided to ape the success of their rival DC’s re-introduction of The Flash.  Together with his young editor, Stan Lee, Jack came up with Thor, and the X-Men, and the Incredible Hulk, and the Fantastic 4, and…and…and…

Well, no need to go on; you get my point.

It was great working with Jack and Steve and John and all the other wonderful writers and artists on THUNDARR.  It was great working with him on other shows and projects.  The first comics I ever wrote professionally were drawn by Jack (and my career has been going downhill ever since >rimshot<).  I came to know & love Jack and his wonderful wife Roz & am proud to count them among my friends.

You’re a great guy, Mr. Kirby.  God bless you for what you gave us.