News from me - July 28, 2001

July 28, 2001

AS I HOPE I made clear in an article I wrote and posted on this site, I treasured my friendship with the late, great Bob Clampett. (That's Bob at lower left on the set of Time for Beany. The puppeteers are, left to right, Daws Butler and Stan Freberg; the gent with the clipboard is Klaus Landsberg, who founded KTLA television in Los Angeles.) I loved the cartoons Bob directed of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. I loved the puppet and cartoon shows he produced of Beany and Cecil. But most of all, I just loved Bob...a witty, friendly gent who took a genuine interest in his many fans and who was unsparingly generous with his time and knowledge. It's nice to see that he still lives, not just in his amazing body of work but all over the Internet.

Here's a rundown of six venues...

Bob Clampett Productions, which does a splendid job of presenting and protecting Bob's work, maintains a must-visit website at www.bobclampett.com.

One of the best things they've done is to issue a wonderful DVD that is ostensibly a collection of cartoons from the Beany & Cecil cartoon show. But it's so loaded with extras about Bob's life and times that it's really an interactive look at the man and, either way, well worth your purchase. The cheapest place I've found to order it online is a place I've never patronized called Digital Eyes. They sell it for $20.99 plus $2.90 shipping, as you'll see if you go there. (You can also obtain it at any decent DVD dealer.)

Each week, Cartoon Network presents three uncut Clampett classics on their series, The Bob Clampett Show. To find out when it airs, click here and go to their schedule.

The opening titles for The Bob Clampett Show feature a wonderful mix of animation and puppetry (much as Bob's career did). They were executed by an outfit called Curious Pictures and you can read how they did it — and view what they did — at their website. Click here to go there.

An expensive limited-edition portfolio of cels has been made from the Clampett-supervised model sheets of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and Tweety. If you can't afford the folio, you can at least view it online at their website.

Martin "Dr. Toon" Goodman has written a number of fine articles about Bob and his work. One is over on the www.bobclampett.com website while another can be read at this link.

All of this is a woefully inadequate way of expressing my thanks to Bob's wife and son, Sody and Rob, Jr. Last week, they made the long trek from L.A. down to the Comic-Con International in San Diego where they presented the annual Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award to a 49-year-old kid whose mother watched Time for Beany when she was carrying him. I have a lot of awards in which I place little stock. This one's different...because it has Bob's picture on it.

BACK IN 1995, the fine folks at Wildstorm issued a set of Groo Trading Cards that are still avidly collected. The main set consisted of 153 cards drawn by Sergio Aragonés with clever-but-difficult-to-read quips on the rear by Yours Truly. If you are lacking a few of these to complete your collection, you can do so by participating in The Great Groo Trading Card Exchange — a special service performed by the large-hearted people who bring you Groo the Wanderer comics. (Why don't others do this? I don't know. You'll have to ask them. Maybe they're not as nice as we are.)

The same set also included nine harder-to-find "Images of Groo" cards featuring artwork by Mike Allred, Kevin Nowlan, Stan Sakai, Dave Sim, Sam Kieth, Simon Bisley, Jeff Smith, John K. Snyder III and Jim Lee. (We will not help you complete your collection of these. That nice, we aren't.)

Now, here's where it gets complicated. Sergio originally signed 500 of the regular cards — the ones that comprise the set of 153. Let us call those "autographed cards" for the purpose of this discussion. He also signed and drew sketches on 50 of what we'll call "sketch chase cards." One side featured a little sketch and autograph by Señor Aragonés; the other featured a printed picture of Sergio explaining what the cards were. Here's an example of the two sides of one of these. (Obviously, what was sketched varied from card to card.)

These are very rare. (How rare are they? Here's how rare: I wrote the word balloons on the front of them, I've had thousands of packs of Groo cards pass through my mitts...and I've still never seen one of the chase cards in person, let alone obtained one.) They go for a lot of money — generally between $50 and $100.

The "autographed cards" are, however, worth a lot less — perhaps five or ten bucks. This is because, at conventions and store appearances, Sergio signs thousands of autographs and these are often on Groo trading cards that are thrust beneath his pen. When he does this, it creates something that is utterly indistinguishable from the "autographed cards" so they're much more common and their number is growing. For that reason, we've tried to avoid referring to the "autographed cards" as "chase cards," since the latter term implies rarity and a limited supply, neither of which is true of these.

Alas, every so often, some dealer either intentionally or unintentionally advertises one of the "autographed cards" as rare, and some buyer thinks he's getting one of the scarce "sketch chase cards" and pays accordingly. The other day, one sold on eBay for $66.75. The auction listing will scroll off soon but for now, you can see it by clicking here. The seller called it a "chase card" and he was in error when he said they were all signed in black ink but otherwise, he did not really misrepresent anything. He just did not make clear (or perhaps did not know) that, though the card he is selling was one of 500, Sergio has since created another two or three thousand and will doubtlessly sign more.

I have notified the eBay seller and he says he will put things right with the buyer...but the rest of you, beware. And if you see someone else making the same mistake, point them towards this page.

THE DAVID LETTERMAN show sent a video crew to the Comic-Con International in San Diego to shoot a segment. It's tentatively scheduled to run on Late Show this coming Monday, July 30.

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I recommended a visit to Gary Grossman's website and the purchase of his terrific book on the George Reeves Superman TV show called Superman: From Serial to Cereal. If you don't have a copy, you should and — lucky you — he's having a sale on them. Go over to www.supermanbook.com and order a copy before he wises up and cancels the sale.

MICHAEL KINSLEY offers up a pretty simple explanation of why the privatization of Social Security cannot possibly work. Here's that link. And here's a nice little piece by Roger Simon about the seventies.

BOB SOMERSBY is a comedian and political commentator with an uncanny gift for pointing out when reporters (a) contradict themselves or simple logic and/or (b) report as fact, things they couldn't possibly know to be so. Back when the whole world was pillorying Al Gore for supposedly claiming he'd inspired the book, Love Story, Somersby posted a pretty airtight case on his website that Gore hadn't made such a claim and even if he had, it was basically true. (Somersby was in a unique position to make the case, as he was Gore's roommate in college, back when the two of them were hanging out with Erich Segal, author of Love Story.) That Somersby's rebuttal did little to dissuade Gore's opponents was not surprising but I sure lost a lot of respect for certain reporters who kept it alive after that.

I lose a little more belief in America's journalists every time I visit Somersby's terrific site, The Daily Howler, where he is currently surgically deconstructing news coverage of the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy soap opera. I highly recommend his last half-dozen dispatches on the topic, most of which involve reporters and pundits leaping to unsubstantiated conclusions. (One interesting thing he points out is that, though Dan Rather has been both praised and condemned for avoiding the Condit story, those who call him a "lone holdout" are wrong. PBS's Jim Lehrer — perhaps the most widely-respected newsman currently anchoring on TV — has also steered clear of it.)

And just so we're clear: I have no idea what Congressman Condit may or may not have done wrong. He may have chopped up Ms. Levy with one of Ron Popeil's kitchen gizmos and fed her remains to piranha for all I know. But what is verifiable at this point does not justify the media's seeming decision that he must be guilty of something, so no aspect of his and Ms. Levy's lives, together and apart, cannot be dredged up, enhanced or even fabricated. If you have no sympathy for Mr. Condit being in this position — and I'm not sure he, personally, is deserving of any — you might at least weep a bit at what it says about the level of journalism we have today.

JUST ADDED to this site: A column about the insanity of Comic Book Numbering, plus a whole mess o' cosmetic changes that took forever but which will probably go unnoticed. Sigh.

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