Mark Evanier's Blog

The years I was in high school were years when America was seriously rocked by protest demonstrations, mainly about (a) the war in Vietnam and/or (b) officials trying to stifle protest demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. I was largely indifferent to both causes which, in hindsight, seems odd to me. My age was such that I was soon to be draftable and sent off to fight that war…so you'd think I'd have cared a lot about it. Somehow, I didn't. For no particular reason, I just felt things would work out and I wouldn't have to go…and when it was my year, things worked out and I didn't have to go. +

But in my high school days, I was largely apathetic to that issue and many others that were then protested by folks my age. And to the extent I had political views they were largely — you may find this hard to believe — Conservative. Not too Conservative but Conservative. I was not however supportive of the many Conservative leaders we had.

You can do that, you know…support a cause but not everyone who advocates for it. In many a case, I agree with what a politician says he or she wants to do but I don't think they'll really do it. Or sometimes I feel they're exploiting the matter for votes and/or donations but don't believe what they're saying.

In 1969 — the year I graduated from University High — the mayor of Los Angeles was a man named Sam Yorty who was pretty right-wing, as were many members of the L.A. City Council. I thought they were all pretty inept and dishonest, Yorty especially.

I also felt that way about the Governor of the great state of California, as well. His name — you may have heard of him — was Ronald Reagan and as you may have heard, he went on to become President of the United States. I thought wrongly he would forever be the worst person to ever occupy that position in my lifetime…but then I'd thought that about Richard Nixon too. Those men were not the only reason my politics changed but they were certainly contributing factors.

A lot of my memories of University High School involve campus unrest, protests and the odd hills some people chose to die on. The same would be true in my didn't-stick-around-long-enough-to-graduate days at U.C.L.A. but this is about my time at Uni. Some of those tumultuous times involved a little underground newspaper called The Worrier. The official school newspaper at Uni was called The Warrior but a tiny cabal of students got together and published a cheaply-printed counter-argument to it called The Worrier.

They gave it out, preferably but not exclusively for a dime donation, on street corners one block from the school. If you accepted one on your way to class, its distributor would caution you to keep it hidden from teachers and school administrators. Interestingly, some of my teachers then found ways to let it be known that they admired the spirit behind the paper and, occasionally, certain articles in it. I doubt that anyone on this planet would agree with everything in it. Its editor and publisher certainly didn't. They just felt that Free Speech involved extending that right to everyone.

At heart, The Worrier had two main goals. One was to end the war in Vietnam and the other was to get the principal of University High, a Mr. Foley, fired. It pursued these goals with equal fervor as if both were within its reach and they did sorta manage the latter. Mr. Foley wasn't fired but he was transferred to a different high school. One of the loudest arguments involving The Worrier was how much credit it could claim for his reassignment. (In my opinion: A little.) Another was how much better things were at Uni with him gone. (In my opinion: Not a bit of difference. You now the term, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?")

Most of those who wrote for The Worrier did so under pseudonyms but the main guys behind it signed their real names to it and paid some price for that. Most were transferred to other schools — in at least one case dripping with irony, to the school Mr. Foley was now running. I heard third- or fourth-hand of other punishments that were levied against those who contributed to the paper but no one punished one of its columnists, Charles Marvin. That may have been because he was not as Liberal as others who wrote for this underground paper…though he did take a lot of shots at "Ronnie Raygun," as he insisted on calling our then-governor. It may also have been because no one knew who Charles Marvin really was.

His columns got a tad more attention than what others were writing for The Worrier. The comedian Mort Sahl was then hosting a local radio show in Los Angeles and the Worrier's editor, who worshipped Sahl and tried to emulate him in some ways, would take each new issue down to the radio station and present Mort with the latest copy, hot off the press.

Sahl praised the paper as a whole, more for its very existence than its content. He would occasionally single out Charles Marvin's writings and even read them aloud on the radio. And Newsweek, when it wrote a piece on underground student newspapers, quoted the mysterious Mr. Marvin. He didn't get a lot of attention but the fact that he got any at all — and was not aligned with the politics of the paper as a whole — soon led to him no longer appearing in The Worrier.

A few years ago, I went rummaging through my crates and crates of stuff to see if I could find any copies of the paper but I couldn't. I may have thrown them away without realizing it. But oddly enough, I recently found two issues of The Worrier, scanned and posted to the Internet. The edition for February 7, 1967 can be found here and the issue for November 11, 1967 can be found here. Only the first of these carries a Charles Marvin column. He was gone long before the other one was published.

His writing is crude and nowhere near as clever as he thought it was at the time…but he kept on with it. Under his real name, he later had a decent career as a professional writer and, amazingly, he's still at it. Why, just this morning, he wrote and put up the blog post you're reading at this very minute.

This is just to remind you about my favorite thing to watch on my computer — the live feed from a watering hole a waterhole in the Gondwana Namib Park in Namibia. Sometimes, there's absolute nothing happening there for a long stretch of time but every so often, you see animals wandering by for a drink. It helps to keep the time difference in mind. There's less activity when it's the middle of the night here…although even then, there's a stunning visual when a band of zebras stop by for an H2O nightcap.

And here's a tip: If you do click over there at any hour and there's nothing happening, you can move the slider back over several hours and find something interesting to spy upon.

The folks who set up the live camera there sometimes post recorded moments. Here's a few minutes of giraffes, including a very young one, and some oryx…

Here's what the opening titles of Love American Style would have looked like if they included everyone who starred in a segment in Season 1…

Yesterday here, we asked you, "What do all these people have in common?"

Desi Arnaz Jr., Jan Berry (of Jan & Dean), Jeff Bridges, James Brolin, David Cassidy, Sandra Dee, Annette Funicello, Judy Garland, Jack Jones, Werner Klemperer, Gary Lewis (son of Jerry), Lorna Luft, Betty Lynn, Roddy McDowall, Marilyn Monroe, Randy Newman, Frank Sinatra Jr., Nancy Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor.

The answer is that they are all listed, as are many others, as graduates of University High School — a school in West Los Angeles from which I graduated in 1969.

The only one of the folks whose names appear above who I know was there when I was was David Cassidy, who I knew ever-so-slightly. As I understand it, he was expelled from Uni — as everyone called it — for missing too many classes, then at some point a year or two later, he was back at Uni for a while, during which he auditioned for a talent show and wasn't selected. I was on the committee that rejected him.

That was our only contact. I never saw him again after that audition, not even a few years later when in one of my earliest writing jobs, I ghost-wrote a "David Cassidy Gives Advice to Teenagers" column for a teen fan magazine. I wrote the column, the publisher printed what I wrote, Cassidy — though he was a pretty big star by then — neither had nor wanted to approve what the magazine printed under his name.

The rest of the folks on that alumni list were either at Uni before I was there or they were never actually at Uni at all. Many of them were working at local movie studios and going to classes with tutors on campus. When it came time for them to graduate, their diplomas had to come from a real, full-fledged, run-by-the-L.A.-Board-of-Education high school so they were officially graduated from University High without, in most cases, ever once setting foot on its campus.

For years, I always assumed Marilyn Monroe was a Uni grad on that basis but every so often, someone on eBay or at some auction house sells a copy of the University High School yearbook for 1942 and her photo, as Norma Jean Baker, is in it. (Here's a link to one such sale.) By contrast, Betty Lynn, who as you may know was my neighbor when I was a kid, had a diploma from Uni but only attended classes on the lot of Fox Studios when she was a contract player there.

Anyway, I thought you might find this interesting. And tomorrow, I'll have another interesting (I think) story about Uni Hi.

Sad to hear of the passing of Tony Benedict, a great animation writer especially in the early days of Hanna-Barbera. Tony never talked much about his early life but we know that after he got out of the Marine Corps, he drove his 1948 Studebaker out to Hollywood to get into the animation business. He started at Disney in 1956 and worked as an in-betweener (assistant animator) on Sleeping Beauty and on some of the animation done for the Disneyland TV show. In 1959, he moved over to the U.P.A. cartoon studio and worked on several Mr. Magoo cartoons.

Then in 1959, he sold a script to Hanna-Barbera for a few show they had going on the air — The Flintstones. They brought him in on staff and he worked as a storyman and sketch artist on that show and pretty much everything they produced after that for several years including The Jetsons, Top Cat, Yakky Doodle, Magilla Gorilla, Secret Squirrel and many more. Later, he worked for other studios (including DePatie-Freleng) and produced and wrote several animated features.

He was just one of those guys who worked everywhere in town and was liked by everyone. Those of us who got to know him found him to be a talented and very clever gentleman. He'd been ill for some time and we think he was 88 years old. The animation community has lost a beloved figure indeed.

47 years ago tonight, The Brady Bunch Variety Hour (a Sid and Marty Krofft Production) debuted on ABC. Descriptions of that first episode usually go something like this…

The Bradys return to television with their very own variety show and realize that their father Mike Brady (Robert Reed) is "stinking up the act." Starring Florence Henderson, Barry Williams, Chris Knight, Maureen McCormick, Mike Lookinland, Susan Olsen and Geri Reischel as "Fake Jan." Also seen on that first episode were Guest Stars: Donny and Marie Osmond, Tony Randall, Ann B. Davis, along with the Krofftetts and Water Follies.

That first episode aired as a special but the ratings were so impressive that more episodes were hurriedly produced. Eight more aired under the name The Brady Bunch Hour but not every week. It shared its time slot with The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries and as the weeks went on, both shows lost viewer share. Fred Silverman at ABC finally decided The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries would do better if it appeared every week and they pulled the plug on The Brady Bunch Hour.

A lot of people loved The Brady Bunch Hour and the reason I know that is that every now and then at a convention or somewhere, someone tells me that under the mistaken impression that I was on its writing staff. Apparently, it said that in some articles and/or on some websites but the last episode aired in May of 1977 and I didn't go to work for the Kroffts until March of 1978. I did however then work with a lot of the same folks both in front of and behind the camera. (In the opening number of the first episode, one of the Krofftetts — that's what they called the synchronized swimmers/dancers — is dropped from the rafters into the pool. That was my wonderful friend Susan Buckner.)

You can see that opening number and all of the first episode below. Bruce Vilanch, who was a writer on the show, writes about that experience in his new book, It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote. I'm working on a book that kinda picks up where Bruce's book leaves off.

When the day comes that Donald Trump is outta power and maybe outta sight, half the folks who were part of his administration will try to cash in and maybe rehabilitate their images by writing books about their time with him. I probably won't buy any of 'em but there are a few things I'm curious about. One is that when Trump claims his approval ratings have never been higher, does he know that even Fox News says they've never been lower? Does he know he's lying or did one of this flunkies tell him his polls are glorious and he's simply never heard otherwise?

Can't be that, can it? He trashes so many reporters and talk show hosts that he must be watching some public news source — and if he watches any outside media, he can't help but hear how bad the numbers are for him. So does he not know that claiming the opposite shreds his credibility with so many of his on-the-fence followers and/or makes him seem, at best, uninformed and out of touch? Or is it this genetic trait he has to never admit bad news could be genuine? Every time a vote doesn't go his way, it was rigged. Every time a reporter writes something that if not flattering to him, it's Fake News.

I understand the principle behind lying but all the good liars I've ever known have had enough sense to not lie about things that could be so easily disproven. If I had to guess, I'd guess Trump has gotten away with so many lies during his professional career that he just figures he's invincible in that area. And in a sense, he has been: He's very rich and very powerful. If an aide said to him, "Sir, with all due respect, maybe you should issue a correction for that thing you tweeted that isn't true," he'd say or maybe just think, "I didn't get where I am today by admitting I was wrong."

But that's just a guess on my part…just like I'm guessing that a future book by some Trump friend or employee will tell me what I'm curious about. It may well be that none of them know, either.

What do all these people have in common?

Desi Arnaz Jr., Jan Berry (of Jan & Dean), Jeff Bridges, James Brolin, David Cassidy, Sandra Dee, Annette Funicello, Judy Garland, Jack Jones, Werner Klemperer, Gary Lewis (son of Jerry), Lorna Luft, Betty Lynn, Roddy McDowall, Marilyn Monroe, Randy Newman, Frank Sinatra Jr., Nancy Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor.

I'll tell you tomorrow.

Jonathan Groff and the cast of Just In Time on Broadway perform in the street at the big Macy's Parade. Looks to me like the band was miming the whole thing to a prerecorded track and Mr. Groff was lip-syncing any time he wasn't holding a microphone and sometimes even when he was…

The best Thanksgiving Day cartoon I can think of is this one, directed by Tex Avery in 1945 and — for some reason — released not in November but in April of that year.

Hey, you wanna know about the voice credits? Well, they're a bit of a mystery. A lot of folks think the main pilgrim was voiced by Bill Thompson, better known for voicing Droopy…but Bill Thompson was away doing military service when this cartoon was made. It's really someone imitating him and the question is who? Tex always claimed that he did Droopy's voice when Thompson was unavailable and maybe that's him playing the pilgrim guy. Or maybe not. Meanwhile, most experts have identified the turkey who sounds like Jimmy Durante as having been voiced by Wally Maher, better known as the voice of Screwy Squirrel — and perhaps it is. But I think it might be Frank Graham, who is clearly heard as the "half breed" character.

If these names mean nothing to you, just ignore the above paragraph and enjoy the cartoon…