Mark Evanier's Blog

A little less than two years ago on this site, we got to talking about an unsold pilot made in 1961. It was for a sitcom based on the movie, Some Like It Hot and it had Vic Damone playing the role played by Tony Curtis in the movie and Dick Patterson in role played by Jack Lemmon. That seems like a weird idea but then to some, so did the idea of turning The Odd Couple and M*A*S*H and a few others into TV shows.

What was bizarre about this transformation is that the pilot for this Some Like It Hot started with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon — unbilled — playing the same characters they played in the movie. Then in the first scene, they undergo plastic surgery and when the bandages are removed, turn into Vic Damone and Dick Patterson. That, it's explained, is how they will hide out from gangsters still trying to kill them. There is no explanation of how their voices and, I think, their heights change.

I wrote about this bizarre unsold pilot here and said I wished I could see it sometime. Well, I finally did and now you can, too. A nice copy is now on YouTube and I've embedded it below. It has a lot of good character actors in it including Peter Leeds, Jack Albertson, Mike Mazurki, Fritz Feld, Robert Strauss, Jerry Paris, Herb Ellis, George Liberace and, of all people, Rudy Vallee. Plus Tina Louise takes over the Marilyn Monroe role and Joan Shawlee plays the character portrayed in the movie by Joan Shawlee.

Someone spent a lot of money to make this and I'd love to know how they got Lemmon and Curtis to be in it and what Billy Wilder thought of the whole enterprise. I can see why it didn't sell and if you watch it, maybe you'll see too…

Actually, there's at least one King who's okay…Jack Kirby. And I have nothing against Alan King, Dr. Martin Luther King, The Little King or even King Kong. But I was glad to see so much of America out there peacefully protesting the kind of "king" we have now ruling this nation with an "I can do any f'ing thing I want" attitude. The turnout oughta convince a lot of elected officials in swing states that things will be swinging the wrong way for them if they don't distance themselves from Trump or Trumpism some time before the next Voting Day.

The Little King, by the way, was the title character of a now-obscure comic strip by the great Otto Soglow…

I wish politicians were better sports and didn't hide behind lame denials of reality like "They were all paid protesters" or "ANTIFA bussed them in." One unfortunate lesson that I think a lot of them have learned from Trump is "Your supporters never want to hear you admit you were wrong or the other side did something right." Here's Donald caught in a blatant mistruth refusing to admit he was wrong…

I suspect a lot of Trump followers know he lies left and right and that you can't believe what he says. I think they just like what they think he's doing to the country and the world and figure that, "Well, if he has to lie to get the job done, fine. Besides, all politicians lie, especially when they tell me something I don't want to believe is true."

I'm not walking well enough to make it to a No Kings rally today but I'm with them in spirit. I've seen a lot of very long lists online of illegal, immoral and unAmerican things that Donald J. Trump and his minions have done and if even only 10% of the offenses listed are true they exceed what any Trump backer would have tolerated from Obama, Biden or any Democratic President.

I used to have friends who were Trump supporters and we could engage in civilized conversations or at least agree to disagree and remain friends. Now, maybe half are former Trump supporters and the rest fall into one of three categories: They don't want to talk to me, I don't want to talk to them or both. They and I might all be better off that way.

I'm not walking well enough to make it to a No Kings rally today but I'm with them in spirit. I've seen a lot of very long lists online of illegal, immoral and unAmerican things that Donald J. Trump and his minions have done and if even only 10% of the offenses listed are true they exceed what any Trump backer would have tolerated from Obama, Biden or any Democratic President.

I used to have friends who were Trump supporters and we could engage in civilized conversations or at least agree to disagree and remain friends. Now, maybe half are former Trump supporters and the rest fall into one of three categories: They don't want to talk to me, I don't want to talk to them or both. They and I might all be better off that way.

I'm not usually a fan of biographical movies where someone plays someone we know well. I always sit there and (a) notice all the ways in which the actor playing the well-known personality doesn't act, look or sound like him. And then there's (b) in which I sit there noting all the ways in which the well-known individual's life has been changed for dramatic reasons when the real story would have been more interesting. But I kinda enjoyed the 2002 TV-movie Gleason, all about Jackie Gleason.

It was co-produced and written by two good stand-up comics, Rick Podell and my pal Mike Preminger…but I didn't know Mike that well when I found myself enjoying it in 2002. And it starred, of all people, Brad Garrett as Gleason. Good makeup made him look portly enough to play the part while clever camera angles made him look short enough. (Garrett is 6'8" whereas Jackie was 5'10".)

Anyway, the whole thing's online (legitimately) and free to watch. You might enjoy it too…

What appears on this blog is whatever's on my mind at the moment and what's on my mind at the moment is how much press — so far, all of it great — we're getting on The Essential Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz: The Greatest Comic Strip of All Time, a book which you can order…

Well, you pay the lowest price and I make a microscopic amount more if you buy it at Amazon but if you find that company distasteful these days, there are plenty of other places to find it. If you're going to order it, order it wherever you're comfiest.

Our biggest plug so far was this morning on The Today Show. I'd tell you what they said but I haven't seen it yet. Other reviews, articles, interviews are around…

At Boing Boing, Ruben Bolling — a darn good cartoonist himself — wrote a nice review of the book.Mercedes Milligan over at Animation Magazine had some nice things to say about the book too.Mary Beth McAndrews at Dread Central liked the book and shared some Halloween-themed Peanuts strips.Alex Yarde of The Good Men Project also chimed in.Ollie Kaplan of The Beat interviewed me about the book.And so did someone at Comic Buzz.

And lastly for now, I did a long chat with William Pepper on his long-running Peanuts podcast and though we wandered off the topic a few times, I think it might be of interest. I'll embed a player below so you don't have to click or budge off this site to hear it…

At the 2025 Comic-Con International last July, I was too busy to spend much time in the exhibit hall. Ergo, I didn't get to see very many of the fine, inventive cosplayers on the premises. Here's a long video showing what I missed. Some of these are truly amazing…

And maybe the most amazing one — and I heard a lot of people talking about this but I never got to see it in person — was a rendition of the character Galactus. You caught some glimpses of it in the above video. Here's a little more about it including an interview with the main guy (I think) behind its development. Oh, how I wish Jack Kirby could have seen this…

The first twenty-three issues of MAD Magazine weren't a magazine. It was a comic book and I don't know that anyone even referred to it as MAD Magazine then. But that comic book's editor-writer Harvey Kurtzman did brilliant and funny things in it, aided by a sensational squadron of artists.

Here's something I find kinda interesting. Maybe you will too…

According to all accounts, MAD was started because Kurtzman — a slow-and-steady writer-editor and sometimes-artist — felt he wasn't making enough money. He was writing, editing and sometimes drawing his two scrupulously-researched, adventure-type historical comics that William M. Gaines was publishing as part of the E.C. line of comics. Gaines and Kurtzman later disagreed as to which of them decided MAD was started because it seemed like something Kurtzman could produce more swiftly than the heavily-researched comics, nor did they agree on which of them named it MAD. But there was no dispute it was started as a way to perhaps increase Kurtzman's income.

Here's the part I find kinda interesting. Kurtzman's great squad of artists on those war/adventure comics consisted mainly of Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood and John Severin. And then he did the new humor comic with another great squad of artists — Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood and John Severin. He used the same guys and if he'd scoured the entire industry and had his pick of anyone then in it, he probably couldn't have done any better than Will Elder, Jack Davis, Wally Wood and John Severin.

MAD didn't catch on right away. If it had been a DC Comic in the late-sixties or most of the seventies, it would have been declared a flop and canceled as soon as they saw the sales figures of the second issue…maybe even the first. But Gaines kept it going and before long, it was not only the best-selling comic in his line, it was the one publication he had that survived the horror/crime comic purges of the fifties. It kept him publishing, made him a very wealthy man and spawned countless imitations.

A lot of people think that MAD went from being a ten-cent comic book to a twenty-five-cent (at first) magazine to escape the comic book censorship and the Comics Code. Nope. It changed formats because Kurtzman was embarrassed to be working in the comic book industry. Comics were printed via the cheapest printing possible on the cheapest paper available. Most of the rest of Gaines' line consisted of titles like Tales From the Crypt which many people regarded as a kind of pornography…and Kurtzman didn't disagree that much. He wanted to be in a more respectable kind of publishing.

When he received an offer to work for Pageant Magazine — then, a more respectable kind of publishing — he told Gaines he wanted to leave. Gaines panicked. Most of his comic book line was teetering on extinction. Only MAD looked like it might have a healthy future and Gaines was convinced that only Kurtzman could make the magazine work. He told his restless writer-editor something like, "Harvey, you always said you wished MAD was a slick magazine instead of a comic book. If you stay, I'll turn MAD into a slick magazine." Kurtzman agreed to stay. It kept MAD on the newsstands when many distributors were refusing to carry Gaines' comic book line but that's not the reason MAD became a slick; just a happy side effect.

The first week of May, 1955, the first issue of the twenty-five-cent MAD hit newsstands. It was #24, it was a sensation and it only got more sensational after that but Kurtzman didn't stick around. Hugh Hefner — then flush with cash due to the early success of Playboy — made Kurtzman one of those offers you can't refuse. He couldn't, anyway. As of #29, Al Feldstein was the editor of MAD — a job he did for the next 29 years as MAD became a top-selling American institution.

And believe it or not, I wrote all of the above just to lead into a discussion of MAD's famous cover logo. Kurtzman designed it and it first appeared on the first magazine issue. It looked like this…

Harvey did the drawings of the little nymphs frolicking around in the logo but was not happy with how it came out. Harvey was rarely happy with how anything he did came out. One of the causes of friction between Gaines and Kurtzman was that Harvey was the kind of creator who did something, then he did it over and he did it over and he did it over and then he did it over and might have preferred to never send the thing to press; to just spend all eternity trying to improve it another billionth of a percent. Wally Wood, who did finished art over a lot of Kurtzman layouts, told me that Harvey would get it as good as it was going to get on the third or fourth try, then do it ten more times of declining merit, before handing it off.

That mix of perfectionism and fear was the reason that under Kurtzman, the magazine version of MAD, though officially a bi-monthly, kept coming out late. There were three months between his second and third issues, four between his third issue and his fourth issue, etc. At some point in there, Kurtzman even took the time to redo the logo. He redid it for #27. Here's a before-and-after and if you click on it, you can enlarge it…

I once asked John Putnam, who was MAD's first art director, if someone else did the outline of the letters and then Kurtzman drew in his charming little creatures. He said yes but he didn't remember who the calligraphy person was, other than that it wasn't someone who did much (if any) other work for the magazine. I didn't know enough at the time to ask if he was thinking of whoever did the outlines for the first version, the second version or both. Kurtzman was not known for this lettering designs so I suspected both. Then I asked Feldstein and he wasn't 100% sure but he was semi-certain it was John Putnam. So that's as far as I got with that mystery.

The fine folks at Heritage Auctions are about to auction off the original artwork to the second logo — the one that became pretty much official — and a lot of online folks are unaware there were two versions of that logo/ There were, of course, lot of variations of it on MAD and MAD products over the years. Kurtzman's nymphs took the covers of #55, #67, #78 off, were parodied on the cover of #76, and then disappeared after #86 only to reappear on #93, #95 and very rarely after that. Sergio Aragonés, Al Jaffee, Don Martin and Antonio Prohias all took turns replacing Kurtzman's creatures with their own.

I read MAD for years before I paid any attention to what Harvey Kurtzman had doodled in the original official logo. Once I became aware of those nymphs (or whatever they were), I wondered what they were, who they were, what the hell they had to do with MAD, etc. The few times I got to talk with Harvey, I wish I'd asked him…but I knew him well enough to believe he had something on his mind. I only wish I knew what.

Hey, we haven't had a Three Stooges short on this blog lately. Here's Dizzy Detectives from 1943, although the opening scene is a reuse of footage from Pardon My Scotch, which the Stooges made in 1935…

And if you didn't like that film with Moe, Larry and Curly, maybe you'll like almost the exact same script with Joe (not yet a Stooge) Besser and his occasional partner, Hawthorne. This is a poorly-colorized version of Fraidy Cat from 1951. Same studio, same script, same director, same gorilla (I think), some of the same footage and different knuckleheads…

I assume everyone knows that I think Donald Trump and his mob are the worst things to ever happen to this country — or at least to the guiding principles of this country, science, equality, honesty and all that stuff Jesus Christ said about caring about those in need. I don't write a lot about this here because you only have about eighty zillion other places online to read that kind of thing. It would be easy to make this blog be about nothing else but I think I give service by mainly about others and sometimes directing you to certain of those eighty zillion other places.

One of the recent outrages was Pete Hegseth — our Secretary of Defense or War or Whatever The Hell He Is — trying to decree what the press can write about matters under his jurisdiction and what they cannot. It's about as unAmerican as anything anyone in our nation's history has ever done so I was glad to see this statement today…

And I was delighted to read this statement which turned up on the web soon after…

You probably saw one or both already. I just wanted to have them on my blog.