Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
You know, I'm not sure if Barack Obama is looking better and better to me or if Hillary Clinton is just looking worse and worse. Feels like the latter.
Once upon a time, Mr. Disney nicknamed nine of his best animators "The Nine Old Men." They were kind of like the Yankees of great character animation but they were, alas, old. Their names were Les Clark, Wolfgang Reitherman, John Lounsbery, Marc Davis, Milt Kahl, Eric Larson, Ward Kimball, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.
Their animation will live forever but sadly, they couldn't. One day, there were only Eight Old Man. Then Seven. Then Six and so on. I was fortunate to meet the last three at a gathering in December of 2001. All of us present that night felt fortunate...and quite aware that these were men to be treasured and honored for as long as they could remain for us to treasure and honor.
Then there were two: In the above photo, Frank Thomas is on the left and Ollie Johnston is on the right. Frank died in September of '04 and now Ollie's left us. We mourn not only his passing but the loss of that kind of wonderful, magical artist.
Jim Hill has a nice remembrance...the first of many I'm sure we'll see on the Internet in the coming days.
In 1959, the Kenner Toy Company of Cincinnati, Ohio introduced its Give-A-Show Projector. What this basically was was a flashlight that looked a little like a projector and which came with little six-frame filmstrips that told stories, mainly featuring licensed cartoon characters. More primitive, it couldn't have been...but in the pre-VCR days, it was kind of impressive. That is, if you were young enough. I probably got mine around '60 or '61. I would have wanted one anyway but the fact that some sets featured Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear was an added incentive.
Unfortunately, like a lot of toys with a great premise, the Give-A-Show Projector had limited fun. Each one came with around 32 of the flimsy little filmstrips and once you'd shown them all to your friends, that was it. They gave you some blank strips on which you could draw your own but that didn't work so well. Still, it was fun for a couple of days.
Looking back now, it looks so primitive...and actually it did, not long after I gave up on mine. I began collecting and running 8mm silent movies of Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, etc. Once I was into that, the Kenner Give-A-Show didn't seem so impressive. Now, it all seems positively prehistoric...and it makes you wonder what, a decade or two from now, will make our TiVos and LCD screens and Blu-Ray players seem like one step above making hand shadows.
For more into on the Kenner Give-A-Show Projector, take a look at Jon's Random Acts of Geekery. I especially like the fact that over the years, the Kenner folks made the box look more modern and made the projector look a little more space-age...but the toy itself remained a technological no-brainer — a flashlight and some flimsy filmstrips.
Mel Blanc and Jack Benny guest with Johnny Carson. I think the date on this is January 23, 1974 and it was one of Benny's last TV appearances. He passed away the day after Christmas of that year.
The thing that's most interesting about this clip is what an enormous fan Mr. Benny was of Mr. Blanc. Benny was apparently that way with everyone — a wonderful audience and utterly unthreatened by someone else getting the laughs or the spotlight. That was one of the reasons his radio and TV programs worked as well as they did: He was willing to let Dennis Day get the laugh or to let Don Wilson get the laugh or to let Rochester get the laugh, etc. As long as somebody got a laugh, Benny was fine with it.
There have been a lot of great comedians who wouldn't do that because they thought — wrongly — that their career hinged on them being the funny one. And not even the example of Jack Benny would dissuade them from that belief. There have also been some comedians who for emotional reasons couldn't stand still while someone else was funny.
But Jack Benny could and did...and no one was more successful. Click and see.
April 15, 2008
