Category: The Fred Hembeck Show

Anybody out there remember when Senator Bobby had a hit record?

It was back in the earliest months of 1967 when the Senator’s version of the Troggs immortal “Wild Thing” inched its way up the charts. True, the quirky cover version peaked at the number twenty position and only spent four weeks in the Billboard Top Forty, but even with the limited exposure such middling sales insured, the combination of a faux Bobby Kennedy very awkwardly “singing” the lasciviously primitive rock anthem was more than enough to guarantee at least one sale – to ME!

You’re all familiar with the now-famous Kennedy Boston accent, right? And you probably know most of the overly simplistic lyrics to “Wild Thing” too, I’m betting. Okay, then – take a moment and try combining the two in your head!

Plain out and out hilarious, huh?

Well, it is – ESPECIALLY if you’re a fourteen year old boy at the time!

Man, I played that 45 over and over, and then over again, so much so that I knew every single vocal nuance and aside by heart!

I just discovered that there’s a very short article posted over at the Time website, extracted from the magazine’s January 13, 1967 issue, one that deals with the record (here’s the link). To give you a slightly better idea of what I’m babbling about, allow me to quote them quoting some of the record’s lyrics:

“Stand by,” the control room orders. “This is ‘Wild Thing,’ Take 72, Senator.” The music begins. “Bobby” comes on in the heavy-breathing opening stanzas with all the lustiness of a dried cod:

Wild thing, you make my heart sing. You make everything groovy. Wild thing.

“That’s perfect, Senator,” says the producer. “Lay it on them.” “All right,” the Senator tells his sidemen, “Teddy, on the ocarina, let’s go . . . Eunice, a little more tempo there.” Then Bobby is cued for the big sock finish. “Come on and hold me tight,” he begins laconically, but from the control room a voice interrupts: “A little more Boston soul, Senator.” Later, when he waxes too hot (“O come on, wild thing”), the producer cautions: “Not so ruthless, Senator.”

Yeah, that used to break me up every time!

And as a bonus – a big, BIG bonus – the flip side of this single featured the very same musical track, only “sung” by a Senator McKinley. This. y’see, was a parody of the long-time Illinois Senator (1950-1969), Everett McKinley Dirksen, an elderly, gravel-voiced politico whose flag-waving, spoken-word ditty. “Gallant Men”, was topping out at number 29 on the charts that very same month of January.

(Need I mention that THAT was one slab of round vinyl I took a pass on? I thought not…)

While not nearly as well known as the dulcet tones of a Kennedy, the growling impersonation effected by Senator McKinley – think a slightly less intelligible version of Soupy Sales pet canine, White Fang – was nearly as laugh-inducing as the record’s A side. At the time, I had no idea who was responsible for this two-sided gem, but thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I’ve since learned it was an actor named Bill Minkin (who later also apparently appeared in the film Taxi Driver, among a whole slew of other credits), working in conjunction with a comedy troupe called Hardly Worthit. The group released an entire LP of political yuks as well, and I imagine things were going along just swimmingly…

Then Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.

That put the kibosh on any Senator Bobby follow-ups (I would’ve liked to have heard him take a go at “Light My Fire”…), but – in a strange and extremely weird twist – nonetheless helped lay the foundation for the oddest Top Ten record of all time…

But first, a digression of sorts.

Back in August, my long-time pal, Roger Green – along with his lovely wife and daughter – stopped by for their annual visit. Inasmuch as Rog and I are the same age, and knowing him to be a repository of pop music info, I eventually got around to asking him if he was at all familiar with Senator Bobby’s version of “Wild Thing”. Most people, I’ve found, aren’t. Sadly, Roger was no exception to this anecdotal rule. Even more sadly, there was no possible way I could share the inspired wackiness of this fabled recording with him, as, to the best of my knowledge, not only isn’t there a CD reissue floating around anywhere out there, but I myself no longer even own my copy of that precious little 45rpm disc! (I have NO idea what became of it – I’ve generally been pretty good about carting along everything I ever bought previous to turning legal age my entire adult life, but this unique memento mysteriously escaped my clutches long, long ago. Damn…)

Anyhow, failing to land on the same page during our “Wild Thing” discussion (though I did drop in the provocative fact that the song was written by Chip Taylor, Jon Voight’s brother – and thus, uncle to the prototypical Wild Thing herself, Ms. Angelina Jolie!…), the conversation soon turned to ANOTHER politically connected cover version. But here’s the odd thing: Roger began talking about a post-Dion take on “Abraham, Martin, and John”, which, while it didn’t ring a bell with me, prompted me in turn to counter with memories of a post-Jackie DeShannon version of “What The World Needs Now Is Love” – and it STILL took us a few minutes to realize we were both talking about the very SAME recording!! Because, while I had completely forgotten the “AM&J” portion of the recording, there’s NO way I could’ve EVER forgotten the rest of the most peculiar number to ever crack the Top Ten – even though I hadn’t heard it since it reached the number eight position on the Billboard charts back during the summer of 1971 – Tom Clay’s astounding “What The World Needs Now Is Love/Abraham, Martin, and John”! !

Understand please that, even though I’ve frequently listened to Oldies radio stations in the three and a half subsequent decades, this was one disc that absolutely NEVER was exhumed for a revival spin after its initial burst of popularity! Sure, you might well hear oddities like “The Ballad of the Green Berets” and “They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Ha!” on rare occasions, but trust me, the aforementioned (you should pardon the initials) “WTHWNNIL/AM&J” never, ever left the vault.

Imagine then my twisted sense of delight when Roger confessed to actually OWNING a copy of this elusive track!

The Mowest single release (Mowest being a subsidiary of Motown – and more on THAT later) appeared on Mr. G’s copy of “20 Hard-To-Find Motown Classics, Volume Two” (as well as the somewhat easier to obtain “Motown Sings Bacharach”), and recently Roger – who maintains his own illuminating webpage, Ramblin’ With Roger, don’tcha know – created a theme CD of his own entitled “John, Bobby, and John”, a compilation on songs dealing with John Lennon, RFK, and JFK. Appropriately, Roger chose to end the proceedings with the number currently under discussion – and you can read all about Roger’s disc (which, yes, he ever so kindly sent me a copy of) by going here. (Nice job overall, Rog, though excuse me if I pick a few nits – where was Elton John’s Lennon tribute “Empty Garden”, or the Byrds JFK salute “He Was A Friend Of Mine”? Sorry, but I felt compelled to ask…)

Credited to a long-time Detroit DJ, Tom Clay, the recording commences with a man – presumably Clay – asking a young girl (who couldn’t have been very much older than three, if that) a series of questions, as the tinkling piano strains of Bacharach’s popular melody plays quietly in the background…

Man: What is segregation?
Girl: I don’t know what seggeration is.
Man: What is bigotry?
Girl: I don’t know what biggery is.
Man: What does… hatred mean?
Girl: I don’t know what that is..
Man: What is prejudice?
Girl: Hmm.. I think its when someone’s sick.

The toddler’s innocent mispronunciations add an extra layer of pathos, but before things get too cute, we segue sharply into the sound of marching troops and then gunfire. Good morning Viet Nam!

After that startling interlude, the Blackberries – the female trio providing vocals for the recording – offer up a brief snippet of “Abraham, Martin, and John”, after which, things get REALLY weird…

We’re suddenly transported back in Dallas on that dark, dark day of November 22nd, 1963. Apparently we’re listening to an on scene reporter’s broadcast as he witnesses first hand that infamous moment in history, all the while the girls croon “What The World Need Now Is Love” mournfully in the background. Here’s just a short portion of his report:

Somethings happened here, we understand there has been a shooting. The presidential car coming up now, we know its the presidential car. We can see Mrs. Kennedy’s pink suit, there’s a Secret Service man spread eagle over the top of the car. We understand Governor and Mrs. Connolly are in the car, with President and Mrs. Kennedy. We can’t see who has been hit if anybody’s been hit, but apparently something is wrong here, something is terribly wrong…

Yeah, don’t we know it.

Then we soon shift to another voice..

We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin: Dallas Texas, the flash, apparently official: President John F. Kennedy died, at 1 p.m., central standard time.

Another quick stanza of “AM&J”, and it’s time for some stirring excerpts of Martin Luther Kings’ famous “Mountaintop” speech, all the while – yes – the ladies continue to croon Hal David’s well-intentioned lyrical plea for peace over Burt B.s warm melody.

Back again to “AM&J” (which, compared to the other tune, makes but a cameo appearance on this audio melange, readily explaining why I so easily managed to forget its inclusion, pivotal though the usage of its transitional nature may be…), and now it’s Bobby’s turn. He triumphantly tells his campaign workers that it’s on to Chicago in his bid for the Presidential nomination, but then – uh oh – shots ring out!

Again we get to listen to the words of an on the spot reporter, and these are even more chilling than those of the fellow who watched as JFK’s motorcade sped away. Clearly shocked, the reporter implores the crowd surrounding the fallen Robert F. Kennedy to quickly subdue the assassin, and to track star Rafer Johnson, “Get the gun Rafer! Break his thumb if you have to!”, concluding with “We don’t want another Oswald”, which is used as a cue for our final “AM&J” segue, morphing into Teddy Kennedy’s eulogy for his slain brother, his voice quivering, near to breaking at several junctures. As the heartfelt tribute to JFK by his younger sibling RFK concludes (you all KNOW what the gals are singing in the background by now, right?…), the dialogue between Clay and the little girl that kicked things off is replayed once again in its entirety, giving the nearly six and a half minute recording a cold – and stark – ending when she innocently utters her line about prejudice being when somebody is sick.

Whew!

It’s an… interesting piece of work to be sure, something you might want to hear once, maybe twice, but certainly not something that stood up well to the scrutiny afforded the heavy airtime a top ten hit of the day generally received. And yet, there it was, played nearly as often as the then latest Three Dog Night smash (and I think everyone of a certain age can testify just how annoying the phrase “Jeremiah was a bullfrog, he was a good friend of mine” all too soon became…).

My most vivid memory of “WWTNNIL/AM&J” came while sitting on a warm, sunny Long Island beach with some friends one late summer day in 1971, the transistor radio tuned to 77 WABC-AM, the mood peaceful and mellow, when suddenly THIS thing comes piping out of the tiny speakers! No, it wasn’t the first time we’d heard it – not by a long shot. Fact is, me and my buddies had long since been inured to its poignant message, as the incessant repetition eventually spawned instead some mindless teen-age mockery (I was 18 by this time – but not particularly mature for my age. Some say that still…). The well-intentioned – if somewhat morbid – purpose behind this aural montage soon gave way from a thoughtful consideration on the nature of violence in our society to a bounty of inappropriate jokey catch phrases. Each one of my buddies – fine, decent fellows, every last one, I assure you – all took a turn at imitating that poor, clueless little girl! And who could even count the number of times the command, “Get the gun, Rafer! Break his thumb if you have to!” was used as a giggle inducing non sequiter in my little circle of goofball associates? Sitting on a blanket that day, expecting to hear a Beach Boy surfin’ classic, or maybe something by Tommy James and the Shondells, this instead came over the airwaves like a bucket of cold water thrown right in the face! WHAT were they thinking?

I never found out. Tom Clay never had another hit, and back then, if you had a question about some obscure topic or another, well, good luck, brother.

But that was then and this is now, and now we have Google! So, thanks to my buddy Roger giving me the opportunity to hear this curious cut again for the first time in (ulp) 35 years, I thought it was high time to investigate matters a mite bit further. Here’s what I found..,

Clay was indeed a popular Detroit DJ back in the fifties and sixties, but by the early seventies, he had no steady gig. Eventually, he landed a three week fill-in job on KGBS, and, overwhelmed by the spirit of the times, put together his little medley, apparently with no plans whatsoever to release it on vinyl. However, one night, Berry Gordy – head honcho of Motown Records – heard the piece, and was impressed enough to offer Clay a contract to release it for real on the aforementioned Mowest label. Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that, years earlier, Clay had been instrumental in propelling Marv Johnson’s “Come To Me” – the very first Motown hit – onto the local charts while working at another Detroit station, helping to launch an empire in the process. So obviously, Gordy owed the man a favor, and if he could accomplish same while concurrently extolling a message of peace and tolerance to the masses, well, all the better.

Of course, once Clay’s follow-up number, “Whatever Happened To” stiffed big time, that was the end of his association with Motown. Whatever happened to, indeed…

But that’s not quite the end of our story. In his blog, Roger wondered if this was the same Tom Clay also responsible for a 1964 Beatles novelty recording (take a look here). Yup Rog, same guy – even though, as noted next to the photos of said memorabilia, Clay never actually got to accompany the winners of the contest sponsored in his name to the Beatles’ Detroit show, as he’d already left the station by that time. Why? Well, perhaps this excerpt from the Tom Clay entry over at Answers.com will shed a little light…

He left CKLW in 1965 on the heels of a questionable promotional scheme, one of many Clay masterminded over the years. Over CKLW’s airwaves, Clay offered a membership card to what he called the Beatles Booster Club for one dollar and an SASE. What donators were supposed to receive was a card or a decal. The responses were overwhelming, lining Clay’s pockets with more than 86,000 dollars, as there were more than 86,000 letters in Clay’s recently rented P.O. box. With cash in hand, Clay resigned from CKLW and lived lavishly for awhile.

Yessirree folks, that’s right – according to Internet sources (which are rarely, if ever, wrong), the man who appealed so creatively to the social conscience of a generation of AM radio listeners in 1971 had, only a short half decade earlier, lined his pockets with their mailed-in dollar bills with a scam that puts Soupy Sales jokey attempt at same completely to shame!

“What the world needs now is love?” Perhaps, but it would seem that for Clay, “All You Need Is Cash”!

Sigh. We sure could’ve used Senator Bobby at a time like that.

What the world truly needs now is Hembeck.com! Get the link, Rafer! But try not to break your thumb…

-Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

Halloween is almost upon us again.

Me, I love All Hallows Eve. If there truly is one holiday that belongs to kids, this – even more so than Christmas – is it. But unlike waking up on December 25th, reasonably assured Santa stopped off the night before, delivering the requisite gifts, there’s always an unsettling uncertainty about October 31st’s grand finale.

Stop and think about it – you can watch a scary movie anytime, buy yourself a bag of candy corn at your tummy’s convenience, throw a costume party whenever you choose, even carve a pumpkin when the mood hits you, but trick or treating? Uh uh – there’s a very small window of opportunity for THAT activity – roughly a couple of hours on the last night of each October – and when it’s over, baby, it’s OVER!

You were too sick to go out gathering candy with your friends? Sorry, pal – there’s no do-overs on November 1st. You’re just gonna have to wait – AN ENTIRE YEAR!!

A torrential downpour? Oh, well – just gotta hope for better weather next time around.

Yeah, Halloween can be cruel.

It rained the night of my daughter Julie’s initial trick or treating expedition. Happily, while it was a steady rain, it wasn’t enough to keep us off the streets – or enough to give us pneumonia either! She was only three at the time, and the truth is, I got just as big a kick – maybe more – of roaming the streets in search of sweets as Julie did. We were living in the smallish city of Kingston then, where there was a rather early curfew of 7 o’clock, and I can still vividly recall the last house we visited that night as we headed back home. It was maybe five minutes past seven, and as we climbed up onto one final porch, and rang one last doorbell, I saw the women come from down the hallway towards us. Initially, all she could see was my weatherbeaten countenance, and frankly, she looked pretty disgusted, but as soon as she got close enough to spy the adorable two foot ghost accompanying me, her expression changed entirely. It was a lesson that would serve us well in the selling of Girl Scout cookies – it’s hard to say no to “cute”.

Well, maybe that evening’s precipitation was our trial by fire (such as it was), and we passed, because ever since, we’ve been lucky enough to have had rain free Halloweens, several of which were downright balmy for upstate New York. When we moved here to our new home ten years back, we also moved into a curfew-free environment. Generally, the rule of thumb around these parts is that the costumed ghouls and ghosties take to the streets somewhere between 5 and 9, with most of the heavy activity falling between 6:30 and 8. Of course, that doesn’t preclude teen-agers banging on your door at 10:45 as they did the first year we were here. I answered the door, but expressed a bit of surprise that they’d even consider stopping by at that late an hour. The teens were quick to point out that we had left all our outdoor lights on, and to them, that was clearly a signal that we were still actively in the candy-doling business. Well, I gave then their Baby Ruth’s and sent them on their way, quickly turning off our lights, and have made a point of extinguishing our outer illumination shortly after nine each year since, meaning we’ve had no further late-night visits.

Which is not to say that we haven’t been on the OTHER side of the coin ourselves. For a number of years, we’d go out with the next door neighbors, a pair of sisters and their mom. We’d head out as close to six as possible, and then just keep going, making big looping circles around the area, stopping in at home mid-way through to drop off our booty and maybe down a refreshing drink. Year in and year out, the kids next door would inevitably poop out about a half an hour before us, calling it a night while Julie and I trudged on, covering several now ever more deserted streets. One was a dead end where the folks way at the furthest end always put way too much effort into making their home Halloween friendly, as not nearly enough trick or treaters ever made it down there to fully appreciate all the cobwebs, skeletons, and carved pumpkins gaudily on display.

But we always made it, always alone, always near the end of our journey. HOW near the end? Well, I’ll never forget the one time, after our annual visit to the aforementioned Spooktacular, we headed on over to the house next door. Since the outdoor lights were still on – meaning it was fair game (no lights mean stay away, sorry, not home, or, done for the night) – we went up and rang the door bell. We waited patiently for a few seconds, and then through the large picture window in front, I saw a man, toothbrush still in mouth, dressed in pajamas, grab his robe, and head towards the door. By the time he’d opened the door, he had managed to put aside the toothbrush and bruskly gave Julie her treat.

Oops. You never want to be answering the door on Halloween in your jammies…

I accompanied my daughter on her annual moonlight treks from ages three right on up to eleven, but was then politely informed that y’know, maybe she was getting a wee bit too old to be trick or treating with her daddy. I had to agree, however reluctantly. The following year was pretty rough – I had street walking withdrawal (if you know what I mean), but at least these days I get to stay at home and hand out goodies to the costumed cut-ups who knock on our door. It’s not quite the same as the magic of being out in the thick of things, but I guess it’s gonna have to do me. No doubt about it, I really treasure the time I put in on past Halloween expeditions. More than once, I’d stop Julie and tell her to take a look around and consider what was going on: right then and there, in every town, on every street, and at every house, kids dressed up in funny outfits were going door to door to stranger’s houses, requesting candy, and – oboy! – getting it!! Wow! What a wonderfully crazy idea this was!

But it only lasts for a few ephemeral hours on one specific night each year, and if you missed it, you missed it. And even while we were amassing our booty – and it was more the thrill of the hunt than it was the bagging of the game, trust me – I could always sense the minutes ticking inexorably away, the magic of the night slowly evaporating, until the raucous crowds of kids criss-crossing each other on our suburban streets was reduced to merely occasional far-away echoes of stragglers as Julie and I headed home, rarely seeing anyone else still making out the rounds. All too soon, it was over, and everything was back to normal. Dull, unmagical normal….

Some folks don’t dig the trick or treating, and I respect that. Look, I was lucky enough to grow up in a Halloween friendly area, and the same can be said for now 16 year old Julie. But I suppose there are places where going out in the dark of night, angling for sweets, well, that may NOT be the best of ideas. That’s a dirty shame, because trick or treating really is a uniquely special custom, one I’m happy to take part of in any way possible!

One other personal tradition I’ve maintained growing up was rereading my various Little Lulu Halloween giants at the end of each October, especially in those years after I myself was deemed a bit too old to go trick or treating. This was a way for me to properly capture the spirit of the season, as these were the only comics I’ve ever encountered that acknowledged there was far more to Halloween than just telling hackneyed old ghost stories and the like. I’ve shared some random images from those late fifties, early sixties classic issues here to accompany my ruminations, and I hope I didn’t trick you into thinking this week’s episode was actually going to be about comics! Now, THAT would’ve been a treat! Maybe next time…

Happy Halloween, friends!

Hembeck.com – live from ghost to ghost all year round!

-Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

 

Several weeks back (The Fred Hembeck Show Episode 73), I wrote an almost impromptu salute to Mark Gruenwald, motivated primarily by several exchanges that turned up in a MySpace blog entry of mine that was otherwise unrelated in any way to the late Marvel writer and editor. Although I’d long been an admirer of the man’s work, I’d only ever met and spoke with him briefly in all the years he was employed by Marvel, so I’ll admit to feeling a certain amount of guilt in compiling the aforementioned episode. Because, I’m thinking, there’s probably no one better qualified for penning an appreciation of Gruenwald than my esteemed Quick Stop colleague, Peter Sanderson, and I certainly didn’t want preempt anything he’d planned.

Well, whether I did or I didn’t, in the final analysis, doesn’t much matter, since last week in Comics In Context #150, Peter wrote his own splendid tribute to his now decade departed friend, and it ranks as one of his very best columns – and that’s no small compliment. I strongly suggest all of you check out Peter’s heartfelt recounting of the recent gathering to remember, ten years on, Mark Gruenwald’s legacy – it’s every bit as good – and every bit as moving – as I knew it would be. Nice work, Mr. S.

Here abouts, well, we’re a bit pressed for time (translation: there’s an important Mets playoff game on the tube tonight), so we’re dipping once again into the archives. This time, we’re going way, WAAAY back, leading off with only the third ever blog entry written for Fred Sez, dated January 7, 2003. Midway through, we jump ahead in time to March 28th, 2005, for the second part of today’s warmed over examination of a man too often overlooked, especially here at Quick Stop Entertainment: Andy Williams!! Hey, what Kevin Smith fan DOESN’T dig a little crooner conversation upon occasion, hmm?

Well, here’s your chance! Back, back, back we go then, to early 2003…

Another day, another time, I’ll extol the (many) virtues of the British music magazine, MOJO. Today I’d just like to discuss a curious item I stumbled across in their January, 2000 issue, and a subsequent event that only further amplified this odd bit of trivia. We’re talking Andy Williams here, folks. You know, the old style crooner who anchored a long-running variety show on NBC back in the sixties? The man who made the Osmonds famous? Whose big, big song was “Moon River”? Yup, THAT Andy Williams. Well, the old smoothie may’ve seen his career cool down stateside, but apparently things are going great guns for him over across the pond! Finding several (mostly) positive reviews in the British music press would appear to bear this out, as would adverts (as the Brits say) for a seemingly endless round of Williams dates in the Isles might indicate.

So, he’s popular in England. Fine. That’s probably why MOJO chose him as one of the celebrities for a feature that asks a stock set of questions each month – what was the first record you ever bought, what’s your favorite record, what do you sing in the shower, that kinda stuff. Well, most of the answers were what you might’ve expected from an entertainer from his generation, with the requisite mentions of Sinatra, Benny Goodman, et al, but then we come to this query: “What is your favorite Saturday night record?” To quote amiable Andy in his entirety, he came back with this rather jarring reply: “Either Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd or Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen. I love both those records. They are such artistic triumphs of modern music. The Floyd’s preciseness – every note thought out completely. And then Bruce’s rawness and unbelievable energy. Whenever I need a lift, this is definitely the CD I put on”!?!

Excuse me? Did he just use the phrase, “the Floyd”?? He did, didn’t he? Andy Williams just referred to the archetypal space band in the same manner one of their more devoted – and heavily medicated – followers might!?! Pardon me for dropping my jaw, but what’s next? Charo extolling the virtues of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols?? The image of Andy spending a Saturday evening, blasting “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” out of his stereo, or stranger still, getting mellow with “Us and Them” dreamily piping in through a set of headphones…?? It wasn’t a disturbing image, exactly, but it wasn’t one I was going to forget anytime soon, either. Which leads me to the second part of my story…

Flash forward to the wee hours of Labor Day, 2003. As every year on that date, I’m sitting in front of the tube, glued to the Jerry Lewis Telethon. It’s after midnight, and Jerry, who’s not been in the best of health recently, is relieved of his duties for the evening. The nerve center of the event switches over from Jerry’s Las Vegas location to the Moon River Theater in Branson, Missouri. Said theater is owned and operated by our Mr. Williams, who takes on the mantle of host for the telethon’s next several hours.

Since this is the first real chance I’ve had to observe Andy since he made his comments to MOJO, I watch with more than a bit of curiosity. Now please don’t get me wrong – by no means am I anti-crooner. Despite being a rock and roll devotee, I’ve come to appreciate the sweet sounds of der Bingle, old Blue Eyes, and Dino, among others. Andy Williams, despite a distinctive voice and obvious talent, never quite distinguished himself enough in my eyes (and ears) to stand out much in that bunch. But here he was, looking a bit wizened – hey, none of us are getting any younger! – but sounding strong despite his advancing years. Acting as emcee, he brings out Yakov Smirnoff, the Lennon Sisters, several others, and then participates in a pleasant duet with “youngster” Glen Campbell, eventually singing a few predictable numbers exhumed from the Great American Songbook. Nice, but hardly noteworthy. It was getting late. Time for bed soon. But I think I’ll sit through one more pitch and see what happens afterwards. And man, am I ever glad I did!

If I was getting bleary eyed, if I was in any danger of nodding off, any chance at all of that happening instantly vanished as the rumbling bass line that introduced the next number came ominously out of my television’s speakers! Good golly Miss Molly, was I hearing what I THOUGHT I was hearing? Before my mind was able to totally process the information being fed it, after the number’s dramatic introduction, Andy sang the tune’s first words and my suspicion’s were confirmed: he was indeed singing “Every Breath You Take”, the biggest selling song The Police ever recorded (and incidentally, my particular favorite of theirs). A large laugh erupted from deep within me as the title phrase escaped from his lips, not so much because I thought it was funny, but because of the sheer audacity of it all!

Of course, I admit to expecting the worse. The guy’s a crooner, fer gawshsakes – this has GOTTA be outta his league, right? Right? But I sat there, transfixed. Maybe this guy really DID listen to the Floyd and Bruce in his spare time? And as surprised as I may’ve been to realize he may not’ve just been shoveling MOJO what he thought it’s readers wanted to hear, I was even MORE surprised at what was happening right there in front of me: he was singing the @#$% outta the song!! Who’d a thought? Backed by a surprisingly hot band and a soulful backup trio, when he reached the number’s climax and began to wildly scat his way to a cataclysmic finish – WHOA!! I sat there, stunned by the spectacle that I’d just witnessed. The man who once made the world safe for cardigan sweaters had just wrung out every iota of emotion from Sting’s twisted ode to a stalker!?! Even Puff Daddy would’ve been impressed! Who could sleep NOW?

Luckily, I had captured this eye opening performance on tape, or no one would’ve believed me – I’m not sure I would’ve believed me without the evidence to back it up!! But there it was, proof of a musical moment one’s not likely to see repeated again anytime soon! (…and as to WHY I was taping the Jerry Lewis Telethon, well that’s a whole ‘nother topic, one I’m sure we’ll get into some fine day. Just know that, yes, some of the ways of Hembeck are a bit… unusual.) I wanted to tell everyone what I’d seen, to share this knowledge with an unaware public. And now I can – and have. Though it happened months ago, still I hear the strains of Mr. Williams majestic interpretation rattling around in my noggin, leading me to ask but one question: anybody out there got any Branson bootlegs?? Hey, you know how to get a hold of me…

…and now, from March 2005, we serve up this little warmed over gem…

Recently, I mentioned my new found love of gleefully canvassing the very width and breadth of my considerable CD collection to compile my own eccentric home made mix CDs. Now, generally, these musical amalgamations consist of a wide variety of tunes all the way back to the swing bands of the thirties, on through the golden age of rock and roll, and right on up to cuts burned off of one of my daughter’s latest Now collections, but along the way, I’ve made up a few SPECIALTY discs. And, melody mavens, today I’m going to take a few minutes to tell you about one in patic…

Despite my deep abiding love of both rock and roll, I’ve also got myself a soft spot for the classic crooners as well. How my tastes veered off in this unexpected direction about a decade back is a whole ‘nother story, a digression much too long to go into here today, but suffice it to say, I’ve become quite the fan of all the biggies: der Bingle , Dino, Ol’ Blue Eyes, and Nat King Cole especially. I’ve even come around to appreciating Tony Bennett and (who’da ever thot?) Sammy Davis Jr. (pre-‘”Candy Man”)!

But I’ve pretty much stayed away from the next level down of warblers: Perry Como, Jerry Vale, Robert Goulet, Al Martino-and Andy Williams. Until, that is, I saw Mr. Williams take on The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” during the wee wee hours of the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon several years back, and was stunned to see him come out not only unscathed, but downright triumphant!!

Ever since that watershed performance, I’ve been inordinately fascinated by the easy going Mr. Williams, and recently, courtesy of a price-slashing sale at a mail order oldies outlet, I put my money where my mind was and picked up a half dozen Williams CDs, each featuring two complete LPs on every disc! Oh, the pure unadulterated joy! I was just over the moon – river, that is…

Okay, I’ll admit, the man still comes in no higher than number five on my own personal croon-o-meter (after Bing, Dean, Frank and Nat), but there’s one thing that truly separates him from these other legends (well, two things, actually, since he’s still ALIVE and they’re not, but…) – HE didn’t fear the Top 40 of his day!

Look, Sinatra recorded a grand total of one Beatles number-and he kept assigning credit for Harrison’s “Something” to John and Paul whenever he sang it in concert, so obviously, the man WASN’T a charter subscriber to Rolling Stone magazine! Bing took a go at “Hey Jude”, and, well, it’s best heard to be buh-buh-buh-lieved! Dean never went anywhere NEAR the new tunes, save for maybe the sort you’d find on a movie soundtrack or hear on the Broadway stage. And of course, Nat King Cole tragically died far too early, not only in terms of his career and his life, but also in order to get a fair shot at all the new compositions coming out of the burgeoning mid-sixties rock era. But Andy? Ah, Andy…

He was considerably younger (he checks in currently at 78, making him a mere babe of 40 in 1967), had his own long-running weekly network TV show (NBC, 1963-1972), and probably realized early on, he could belt out the best of Cole Porter and Harold Arlen for only so long before audiences would get bored and switch channels in search of something hipper – y’know, like The Perry Como Show. So, while Andy may not’ve gone so far as to offer up his versions of “You Really Got Me”, “19th Nervous Breakdown”, or “Pictures Of Lily”, he DID dip into the contemporary tune pool and reach a bit deeper than the latest Bacarach composition or “Hair” cover (which he did more than his share of as well, make no mistake), and in that spirit, I felt the need to assemble my own specially chosen collection of what you might well call “Pop Goes The Williams!”

What follows is the carefully considered sequence of the tracks I selected from the dozen Williams LPs available to make up this 79 minutes and change disc, plus the names of the original artists associated with the songs, the records highest Billboard position, and the year it charted…

• “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (Simon & Garfunkel. #1, 1970)

• “Spooky” (Classics IV, #3, 1968)

• “I Need You” (America, #9, 1972)

• “Alone Again (Naturally)”. (Gilbert O’ Sullivan, #1, 1972)

• “You’ve Got A Friend” (James Taylor, #1, 1971-also Carole King)

• “Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again” (Fortunes, #15, 1971)

• “Reason To Believe” (Tim Hardin, Bobby Darin, Rod Stewart, didn’t make Top 40)

• “Sunny” (Bobby Hebb, #2, 1966)

• “Everything I Own” (Bread, #5, 1972)

• “A Song For You” (Leon Russell, late sixties album track)

• “Windy” (The Association, #1, 1967)

• “If” (Bread, #4, 1971)

• “Pieces Of April” (Three Dog Night, #19, 1972)

• “An Old Fashioned Love Song” (Three Dog Night, #4, 1971)

• “Remember” (Nilsson, late sixties album track)

• “It’s Too Late” (Carole King, #1, 1971)

• “Seasons In The Sun” (Terry Jacks, #1, 1974)

• “Precious And Few” (Climax, #3, 1972)

• “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” (Frankie Valli, #2, 1967)

• “More Today Than Yesterday” (Spiral Staircase, #12, 1969)

• “Touch Me In The Morning” (Diana Ross, #1, 1973)

• “Without You” (Nilsson, #1, 1972-also Badfinger)

• “God Only Knows” (Beach Boys, #39, 1966)

Admit it – you’re horrified, aren’t you?

Yeah, I get that reaction – a LOT. Which, in truth, only makes this all the MORE fun! Not that this compilation is anywhere near unlistenable-quite the contrary. Some of it is in fact surprisingly good. Some of it clearly isn’t. But again, in putting this together, I wasn’t necessarily looking for the BEST performances but for the most seemingly unusual covers. I left out the handful of Carpenters tunes, and stuff like “Honey”, “Both Sides Now”, “Get Together”, “Little Green Apples”, “The First Time Ever (I Saw Your Face)”, “Abraham, Martin and John”, a handful of Jimmy Webb songs, some Neil Diamond – songs ALL the lounge singers of the day had already worked into their acts – and seven Beatles compositions as well (all of which are slated to wind up on my ongoing series of Beatles cover tunes discs, worry not).

(Just for the record, Andy got all Fab on “Michelle”, “Here, There, and Everywhere”, “The Long And Winding Road”, “Imagine”, “My Love” – no surprises THERE-AND “Be Here Now”, a relatively obscure track from George’s “Living In The Material World” LP, hardly as well known a ditty as Ol’ Blue Eye’s favorite, “Something”)

I sent my buddy Roger Green a copy of the mix, without first telling him what was on it , but it soon became readily apparent what madness was piping out of his speakers. After overcoming his momentary shock, it turned out that his feelings basically echoed mine – Andy did a fine job on most of the ballads (of which there were plenty), stumbled a bit when trying to notch up the groove a bit on several of the mildly up-tempo numbers (“An Old Fashioned Love Song” comes to mind) – and then there were those songs that never should’ve been recorded ONE TIME, much less twice!(Do I hafta identify the primary culprit as “Seasons In The Sun”? Not to anyone who’s ever HEARD the original, that’s for sure!…)

All in all, though, Mr. W’s smooth tones serve him well, particularly on the sparely orchestrated “A Song For You” and “Remember”. Still, he impressively exhibits the necessary fire to sell the climactic chorus of “Without You” nearly as powerfully as Nilsson did when he took this Pete Ham/Tom Evans composition all the way to the top of the charts.

And I like the sly leer lurking in his otherwise squeaky clean delivery when he sings about a “Spooky little girl like you”. I’m even more willing to buy into the lyrical pathos of several of the more downbeat selections when sung by Andy as opposed to their originators. Look, I’ve long been a fan of Diana Ross, but more for the unique sound of her pipes as opposed to the emotional content of her performances, which, frankly, isn’t generally very high. Call me crazy, but I find myself more easily swallowing Andy’s alleged heartache as he croons “Touch Me In The Morning” than I did Ms. Ross’s. And if there was ever one group who should’ve had ALL their hits covered by good ol’ Andy Williams, it was the David Gates led schmaltz and roll ensemble, Bread! Now, THAT album wouldn’t’ve been half-baked, lemme tell ya!

I bookended my CD with probably the two best cuts. Williams’ version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” sounds uncannily like the original, and while that may lose it crucial points on the imagination scale, anytime you can honestly measure up to Art Garfunkel’s vocal of a lifetime, well, you ain’t doing so bad! And his stately run-through of Brian Wilson’s “God Only Knows” – no lesser person than Paul McCartney’s favorite song – is performed essentially with the sole accompaniment of a Grand Piano, and quite honestly, his restrained performance borders on the magnificent! (This must’ve been a popular number in the Williams household, by the way, as his wife at the time, Claudine Longet, gave it a breathy – if not nearly as magnificent – reading, a vintage cut that turned up on the Gilmore Girls soundtrack CD anthology not long ago.)

A few fun facts about Andy Williams before we go, because who KNOWS when we’ll be back on this topic? (You can all only hope and pray, I’m guessing…) Andy got his start as the youngest member of the Williams Brothers, a group that first charted while singing back-up on Bing Crosby’s well-known Academy Award winning “Swinging On Star” disc in 1944: a year later, Andy dubbed Lauren Bacall’s singing voice in To Have And to Have Not; he left his brothers in 1952 to go solo, gaining most of his success a decade later: his 1973 album, Solitaire, was overseen by Richard Perry, shortly after the famed – and HOT – producer had come off huge hit LPs with Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, and Carly Simon (YOWSAH!!! – street cred for seventies survivors!..), and his ex-wife, Ms. Longet, became infamous for “accidentally” shooting her lover, a world famous skier, spawning the unforgettable Saturday Night Live “Claudine Longet Skiing Invitational”, a bit which consisted of stock footage of skiers tumbling, to which SNL added play by play and the requisite gun shot sound effects (“Oops – she’s got another one!”), one of the few comedy pieces, if my memory serves me correctly, the show was ever forced to apologize for. Too late – sick puppy that I was, I’d already laughed!

And you may well be laughing at me now, or maybe you’re just plain aghast – the mixed reaction my pal Rocco had when I tried to play my handiwork for him recently – but come on, now-what OTHER crooner had the gumption to tackle the greatest hit of Spiral Staircase, hmm? Chances are it WASN’T Johnny Mathis!…

Hembeck.com – we also cover comics! Honest…

-Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

 

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.

Gee, you think maybe the following picture is worth a thousand BUCKS, too?…

Probably not, I’m guessing, and that’s a bit of a shame. Y’see, I contributed the above drawing to a charity auction being held out at Portland, Oregon’s Excalibur Comics this coming October 29th, where their gala Wonder Woman Day event is hopeful of raising much needed funding for several local women and children’s centers. Okay, so the pic’s unlikely to score a grand, but I’m happy that whatever it DOES bring in will go towards a worthy cause. Big tip of the tiara to organizer Andy Mangels for including moi amongst an impressive – and ever expanding roster – of cartoonists he enlisted to conjure up their own renditions of the Amazon Princess: Joe Staton, Roberta Gregory, Jim Mahfood, Howard Cruse, Don Perlin, Jim Mooney, Michael T. Gilbert, Jaime Hernandez, Alex Robinson, Donna Barr, Steve Rude, John Romita Sr., Terry Dodson, Gilbert Hernandez, Colleen Coover, Jay Stephens and many, many more!

But if you don’t believe me, check out the Wonder Woman Day page at the Wonder Woman Museum site, and you’ll get a gander at all that delicious Amazon goodness! New stuff is being added all the time, but the single drawback seems to be that the art can only be viewed at a comparatively small size. That mostly works, true, but in the case of my particular drawing, since it was difficult to make out the (ahem) witty dialog I included, I felt motivated to share it with you folks here at a larger size, while at the selfsame time getting the word out about such a worthy cause. Better hurry, though – you have little under two weeks to make your ticket reservations on Invisible Robot Plane Airways out to Portland, so book your flight now!

Good luck, Andy!

Oh, and by the way, here’s ANOTHER, totally unrelated drawing I did recently…

This was done for ANOTHER, perhaps not nearly as noble, charity, yet one that’s close to my heart: Keep Fred Fed!

Yes, friends, this is where I remind one and all that we do indeed take on commissions of all manner at your behest. All the pertinent details can be found here. Christmas season is almost upon us, so get your orders in NOW! After all, ANYBODY can pick up the latest video game down at the local mall – how many people can boast a genuine Brother Voodoo illustration by Fred Hembeck under their Christmas tree come this December 25th, hmmm? It’s yours for the asking, folks! (…and, um, for the cash – let’s not forget the cash, okay?…)

Not many words this episode, huh? But hey, when you stop and add in the two thousand the above pair of illos compensated for, well, wow, we’re just overflowing! Time to go until next week!

Until then, I leave you to ponder this question – just WHY was Sappho suffering anyway? Didn’t she get a proper serving of succotash, or something?…

Hembeck.com – it may not be Paradise Island, but I invite one and all to visit anyway! Hola!

-Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

When Jazzy John Romita prepared the above illo for the cover of Marvel Age #54 back in 1987, he managed to squeeze most of the prominent guests in attendance at that summer’s gala Parker-Watson nuptials into the picture. Most, but not all.

He left out Dwight Gooden.

That’s right sports fans, Dwight “Doc” Gooden, one-time teenage phenom fastballer for the New York Mets, who burst onto the scene in 1984 in a stunning fashion never witnessed either before or since. Comics fans, if ever there was a baseball player who, thanks to his uncanny ability to strike out batters seemingly at will, looked all the world to be a graduate of Charles Xavier’s School for Talented Mutants, it was the young Gooden.

But after dominating the National League with a 24-4 record in 1985, handily winning a Cy Young Award along the way, Gooden’s career began to take a downturn, as he posted a less than super-human record of 17-6 during a 1986 campaign that saw his dominating teammates otherwise chalk up an astonishing 108 regular season wins. And then he inexplicably missed the celebratory ticker tape parade through Manhattan only days the Mets’ memorable World Series victory. This was a man who was on track to be the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball – what happened to Doc, Mets fans began to wonder?

We all found out during the early days of spring training the following season.

Cocaine.

When Gooden – who’d always come across as a gracious, likable, down-to-earth young man – failed his drug test, his legion of fans – myself included – reacted with shock. And somewhat selfishly, we reacted with disappointment as well – the team’s star hurler was suddenly sidelined for the opening months of the ’87 season, suspended for nearly a third of the schedule for his offense, y’see, and that couldn’t be good for the Mets prospects (it wasn’t – they failed to qualify for the post season).

Finally, having served his time, Gooden prepared to take the Shea Stadium mound against the Pittsburgh Pirates on the evening of June 5th to make his 1987 debut, but not before an equally historic event took place on the very same field:

Spider-Man and Mary Jane – or perhaps actors standing in for them, I’m not entirely sure – were tying the knot behind home plate in a ceremony officiated by none other than Stan Lee that selfsame day!

Obviously scheduled weeks – if not months – before anyone had calculated Gooden’s months-delayed initial start as also falling on that very evening, the publicity stunt that both Marvel (looking to get word out on the Webspinner’s landmark stroll down the aisle) and the Mets front office (hoping to lure some extra fans into the park for a weeknight contest against the lackluster Bucs) had mutually orchestrated didn’t turn out to be at all necessary to lure folks through the turnstiles. Fact is, Spidey’s big moment probably received scant attention from the packed-to-the-rafters house, preoccupied as fans were with their tarnished hero’s imminent return.

(In the stadium that night, by the way, was my old buddy Ron Marz, not yet a comics scribe, but still in the employ of local daily, The Kingston Freeman. The paper’s sports editor invited Ron to take in the proceedings with him from the press level, and while Ron recalls that game itself vividly, details regarding the faux wedding ceremony seemed to have escaped his attention. Ah well, Ron always did seem to be more of a DC guy anyway…)

As I recall things, while Gooden’s return dominated the discussion on Howie Rose’s pre-game radio show, I do remember the host making a passing – and bemused – reference to the Spider-Man stunt just before going to commercial. And later that night, at least one local NYC TV station included the briefest of glimpses of the happy couple leading into their segment about the game. But they had plenty more to show, so ex-bachelor Spidey was lucky to merit even a passing mention.

The Mets – and Gooden – won, 5-1. More disturbingly, center fielder Lenny Dykstra and transplanted-center-fielder-playing-left Mookie Wilson collided in mid-air as they both pursued a fly ball destined to fall smack dab between the two of them. Miraculously, as horrendous as it looked – and it was the sort of clip that got played over and over and over again – neither was banged up very badly. Peter and Mary Jane, though, most likely missed the play entirely, heading as they were off on to their honeymoon…

Gooden came back to win 15 games that year, but what had once looked like a lock for a first ballot Hall of Fame career ahead of him slowly degenerated into a middling baseball resume, the sort that justifiably gets passed over by Cooperstown voters. Beyond the stats, Gooden’s never really been able to shake that other monkey off his back either, and, sadly, is currently serving a one-year prison sentence on drug related charges. Such a shame.

And the once happy Parkers?…

All was sweetness and light in the beginning, but THESE days? Well, you know…

(Literally, YOU know. I’m fudging here because I’m afraid I don’t keep up with the trials and tribulation’s of Ben Parker’s nephew the way I used to, but from what little I’ve been able to garner from internet sources, the Parker’s union isn’t in much better condition than Gooden’s Hall of Fame credentials. Pastor Lee must be SO disappointed…)

Hembeck.com – home of the brave and promoter of peanuts, popcorn and Cracker Jack Kirby! Stop by anytime – we’re ALWAYS in season!

-Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

Over the nearly four years I’ve been posting my blatherings on the Internet – not only here at “The Show,” but also at my Fred Sez blog – I’ve recounted both a wide range of personal minutia and offered up a hefty amount of unsolicited opinions, much of it centered on aspects of the pop culture of the past fifty years. Comics, movies, music, the tube, bat invasions – I’ve shared it all.

Well, ALMOST all. There is one little portion of my day to day life I’ve been consciously holding back. Holding back, that is, until now…

Confession time, friends: I regularly watch a daytime drama.

You know – a soap?

I’ve been reluctant to cop to this fact for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that, by admitting I faithfully follow a daily sudser, it pretty much negates my ability to convincingly strike a critical pose regarding any OTHER corner of the video landscape. Look, I don’t care all that much for reality programs, for game shows, for forensic and/or police procedurals, for trumped up wrestling match scenarios, or even low-grade sit-coms, but well, how can I possibly criticize ANY of these genres with any sort of presumed intellectual authority once my soap addiction has been entered into the equation? I mean, how could I, for instance, possibly badmouth any of the CSI programs (putting aside for a moment the mildly relevant fact that I’ve never actually SEEN any of them) and expect to be taking seriously?

“Aw, what’s HE know?”, folks will sneer, “HE watches soap operas!”

T’wasn’t always the way, effendis, but it has been for long enough now. To follow, then, an explanation of how such a thing came to be, and the somewhat surprising manner in which it affected several of my later key prime-time viewing decisions (and what I happen to think is a pretty nifty piece of trivia bringing this episode of “The Fred Hembeck Show” to a stunning conclusion! Yeah, yeah – I’m overselling, but how ELSE am I gonna get you to wade through all of this?…)

Ahem. Well, back to our subject.

My mother watched the soaps. She called them her “sketches”. If memory serves, Another World, Days of Our Lives, and the long-defunct The Doctors – NBC productions all – comprised her regular daily slate when I was growing up. Whenever I was around and they were on – summers mostly – I generally ignored the drone of the melodramas piping out of the tube, focusing instead on reading my beloved comics while mom’s attention was riveted on the video serials. Of course, while I maintained a silent contempt for mom’s viewing choice, the funny books I was immersing myself in – sixties’ Marvels most prominently – were little more than spandex-suited soap operas themselves, with the emphasis leaning a tad bit more towards the action than towards the romantic angle. So, looking back, it comes as little surprise that I eventually became hooked on the television equivalent of one of Stan Lee’s multi-issue epics. But it wasn’t one of my mom’s sketches that did it…

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Norman Lear’s controversial syndicated soap-opera satire debuted in the fall of 1975, but not, as luck would have it, on any Buffalo, New York television stations. That’s where I was living at the time, finishing up my college education while sharing a ramshackle off-campus two story house over at 280 Stockbridge Avenue with five other fellows (new gal pal Lynn was also seen frequently in the environs). Although I had been a loyal viewer of much of Lear’s previous ground-breaking output (most especially All In The Family), there wasn’t much TV watching going on in that edifice in those days, so initially, the lack of access to this increasingly popular new show was hardly noticed.

Until one especially boring Saturday night, when a bunch of us were gathered around the tube, flipping through a far more limited array of channel choices than one is afforded these days. Suddenly, we stumbled upon the pig-tailed visage of star Loise Lasser, and out of curiosity – and frankly, because nothing else good was on – we backed away from the knob (no remotes for college students in those days, gang), sat back, and watched in fascination as Lear’s repertory company subversively turned soap opera conventions on their head – and better yet, offered viewers a sitcom with NO LAUGH TRACK!! Listening to each line, trying to pay close attention so as not to miss the absurd payoff to a typically banal conversation – this was just the kind of edgy entertainment that hip college students (and brother, that was us!) was looking for! Who knew we’d also get hooked into the serial viewing habit along the way?

(Y’see, MH2 was being broadcast from a Canadian border station, running the daily half hour show twice a week, with two episodes late Friday, and the remaining three on Saturday. Since we came in mid-story – and it wasn’t just me and Lynn watching, though we were probably the most loyal pair of viewers in the house – when news came that a Buffalo station would FINALLY be picking up the program and would be running it from the very beginning, the move was roundly applauded! The only drawback came later, when, in an effort to get on the same page with everyone else nationwide as the show’s second season commenced, they blithely skipped over Mary’s nervous breakdown on The David Susskind Show and subsequent stay in a mental health facility. I’ve always regretted being denied that heralded sequence, as well as a far less well known one: the final weeks of the retitled Forever Fernwood – revamped due to Lasser’s exit – which never played on their flagship New York City station (we’d moved downstate by early 1978, y’see) as the series Herculean 325 episodes drew to a close with little or no fanfare. Nearly thirty years later, I STILL wonder about the source of Mary’s daughter Heather’s visions that she was having down at the town gazebo, a dangling plot point the WNEW didn’t have the decency to allow hardcore viewers like myself to ever learn. Bah. And YOU thought my head was just filled with meaningless comics trivia! Hah! Little you know!…)

Naturally, since I’d found something I liked, I needed more. Lear himself provided it when, shortly after MH2 took the country by storm, he offered up “All That Glitters”, another five times a week soap satire, only this one had an extra helping of social commentary and fantasy heaped upon it: the premise here had all the women characters in positions of power, and all the men in subservient ones. In other words, a complete role reversal. The show was well done, and had a stellar cast – Gary Sandy, pre-WKRP In Cincinnati as the office boy toy, Linda Gray, pre-Dallas, as a transsexual, hunky ex-LA Dodger Wes Parker, and, in the role of the needy if somewhat slovenly “wife”, Chuck McCann!! – but the joke got pretty tiresome pretty quickly, and the show didn’t last past its inaugural season.

(Yes, I watched Soap too, the sitcom that brought Billy Crystal to prominence, but I don’t consider it quite the same thing, as only a couple of dozen episodes of that show were produced each season. It’s the unrelenting quantity as much as anything that marks the true soap viewing experience. And I never became a regular viewer of any of the prime-time sudsers (save for the latter seasons of Melrose Place) like Dallas or Dynasty – though many of the serialized night-time dramas I have watched – Hill Street Blues, ER, Gilmore Girls, Desperate Housewives, even Buffy the Vampire Slayer – all have undeniable soapy aspects.)

January 1980 saw a final, non-Lear, attempt at a satirical soap: L.A.T.E.R.. Here’s something that baffles me – I sometimes have to think twice to determine just what S.H.I.E.L.D., U.N.C.L.E., or T.H.U.N.D.E.R. stand for, but L.A.T.E.R.? Life and times of Eddie Roberts, naturally! And the thing only lasted three months! Geez, talk about your useless information….

At this point, there was only one sure way to feed my insatiable hunger for serials (as opposed to for cereals – mmm, cereals…) – turn the TV on during the DAY! Lynn was going to grad school at the time, and had a flexible enough schedule to take off a half hour around lunch to cozy on up alongside her cartooning hubby to tune into the daily trials and tribulations of ABC’s Ryan’s Hope.

I’m not sure how we settled on this particular series – it was never one of mom’s sketches – except that it was one of the few half hour soap being broadcast, and it had garnered a fair amount of praise for storylines tackling more contemporary issues than its video brethren. Revolving around an Irish family and their NYC bar, we soon discovered this essentially meant that something plot-worthy would happen to one or more of the regular characters one day, and then, for the next week or so, the OTHER characters would sit around the bar, discussing the possible implications of what had just happened! And then something ELSE would happen, and the cycle would be repeated! Given the genre, it wasn’t a bad show, really, just a whole lot slower than one might’ve liked. Which might well be why it was canceled back in 1989…

(Funny thing about the actors who appear on daytime soaps – you just never know how their careers are going to turn out. Shortly before he achieved sex symbol status on LA Law, Corbin Bernsen was saddled with the thankless role of being a third tier buddy on Ryan’s Hope. He played the police officer partner of one of the show’s ostensible heartthrobs (who always struck me as a big galoot, but hey, what do I know from beefcake?…), and his job was simply to sit in the patrol car and provide an ear for the star to unload about his romantic problems. Corbin’s character had absolutely no back-story, had no other interaction with the remainder of the cast, he was simply there to give the hunk a forum to emote. A year later, Bernsen was a prime time star, and the only other time I saw his one time uniformed buddy was in the opening minutes of an episode of Lois and Clark, as he ran cravenly into a dark alley, only to be gunned down by gangsters, after spouting maybe two lines of dialog! Showbiz sure is funny – you just never know…)

So anyway, we settled into our Ryan’s Hope habit, but the one thing I was determined not to do was to slip into watching a whole afternoon’s worth of soaps. Lynn wasn’t quite so adamant, though, and began to leave the tube on after RH closed up shop for the day, spurred on no doubt by the teaser scenes broadcast everyday during the serial’s final commercial break. That’s how she began watching All My Children…

Me? Well, I resisted, honest I did, but I saw the commercials too, and even though I got up and left the room immediately after my daily visit with the Ryan clan concluded, our place wasn’t all that big at the time, the drawing board wasn’t all that far away, so while I may not’ve seen things, I sure HEARD ’em! Oh , the things I heard! Was Brooke’s mother REALLY the evil crime-boss Cobra? (Yes – though we also found out it wasn’t REALLY her mother…) After awhile, just to make conversation, I’d casually ask Lynn, hey sweetie, so what exactly happened on All My Children today, hmmm? Initially, she dutifully filled me in, but eventually, she just tired of the daily recap sessions and point-blank declared, look buddy, if you’re so interested, why don’t you just watch the show yourself?

And so – God help me – I DID…

That was way back in 1981 – to give you some perspective, diva icon Erica Kane (Susan Lucci) had only been to the altar twice by then, though she was currently involved with a married man with the quintessential soap moniker of Brandon Kingsley – and I’ve been watching ever since! Twenty-five years, a full quarter century! Five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, one hour a day (though that latter total is essentially shaved down to a more manageable forty minutes per episode thanks to the miracle of the VCR – a miracle that, beginning in the spring of 1983 meant the Hembeck household NEVER had to miss an episode again!!) (But just try watching a week or two’s worth in one or two sittings after you’ve returned from vacation – if things are at a hot point, plot wise, you’re in pretty decent shape. Otherwise, it’s the video equivalent of driving the New York Thruway from Buffalo to Long Island – wholly necessary to get from point A to point B, but barren and mind numbing nonetheless…) – that’s a LOT of All My Children!!

And those of you who never developed a similar habit probably have one question screaming in your mind right about now:

WHY?

Well, I’m not really sure. Truth is, for the first five – maybe even ten – years, AMC seemed like a really good show to me! Honest! The characters (and actors) were interesting and appealing, while the melodramatic situations seemed clever and well conceived. Whether or not this was the actual truth or just the fact that the genre’s many cliches were new to us, I can’t say for certain. However, over the last dozen years, with the numerous improbable resurrections of long “dead” characters, the myriad of heretofore unknown sons, daughters, and half-siblings popping up at an alarming rate – not to mention murder mysteries that drag on for weeks, with the prime suspect ALWAYS found innocent during his or her trial – things have gotten a tad bit wearisome. But still I watch.

WHY?

Habit. And it really is the television equivalent of comfort food. There’s something reassuring about seeing the same characters day in day out, some of whom have been with the show for decades. (Despite being there since day one – years before me even – I’ve never cared much for Lucci’s Kane character, finding her more annoying than entertaining. Long term-wise, David Canary’s (Bonanza‘s Candy) meglomaniacal billionaire, Adam Chandler (and his sweet, simple minded twin, Stuart, who’s been criminally under used in recent times), is reason enough to justify tuning in.

Never off center stage (save for the occasional fortnight vacation) since joining the cast in 1983, his memorable portrayal has justifiably earned him a half dozen Leading Man Daytime Emmy Awards. I always got a special kick out of it when circumstances called for him to play Stuart pretending Adam, or vice versa – or that one unforgettable time he played Adam playing Stuart playing Adam! Okay, reading that sentence may’ve well made your head hurt, but if you’d seen him pull it off, trust me, you would’ve been impressed too! Michael E. Knight’s Tad Martin is another old friend I’d sorely miss if I quit watching…).

Let’s make something clear here – for me, the soaps aren’t really about the romances. Oh, I like me a good love story as much as anyone, but you’re far more likely to find a truly emotionally affecting romance in a movie. There have been some sweet couples on AMC over the years (Tad and Dixie USED to fall into that category – but then she came back form the dead, and well, you can just imagine the rest…), but I think the real appeal of following a daily soap boils down to two things:

Secrets and confrontations.

Everyone on a soap – unless you’re Corbin Bernsen – has a secret at one time or another. And while that secret is sometimes known to the viewer right from the outset, while other times it’s only slowly revealed to the audience at home, it’s a certainty that the character who’s MOST effected by said secret (like the mother whose baby was switched at birth, let’s say – hey, it happens!!…), they’re always the LAST ones to find out, after virtually everyone else in Pine Valley knows the bitter truth! And that leads inexorably to part two of this equation – the confrontation!

WHAT exactly is the mother who fell victim to the baby switch going to say when she confronts the guilty infant snatcher – just coincidentally her erstwhile best friend, natch – when she finally learns the truth? THIS is the moment you’ve been primed, Pavlovian-like – to anticipate for months on end, and when it finally arrives, well, you really, really hope there’s no breaking news story to deny you the important stuff, dig? (I STILL don’t know why Julie Chandler left for the Far East years ago, thanks to Peter Jennings interrupting the festivities at just the wrong moment, and as the future Mrs. – and later ex – Jim Carrey’s exit was more low key than most, Lauren Holly’s 1989 departure was never, ever mentioned again! ANOTHER dangling plot thread taking up crucial space in my slowly atrophying noggin! Damn you, ABC News!)

Yeah, I know – this all sounds pretty lame. And it probably is – but as addictions go, save for a few eroding braincells, happily, one’s health isn’t compromised! Sometimes, it’s just fun – in a rueful sort of way for loyal viewers – to simply sit back and mock the absurdity of it all. And in a crazy way, it even makes you appreciate other TV more. Check this out – a lot of folks labeled the second season of “Desperate Housewives” as substandard, but to these eyes, it was Masterpiece Theater compared to the thirty-sixth season of All My Children! And I’ve heard plenty of wailing about the perceived illogic of my beloved “24”, but friends, next to the wildly careening plot turns taken by the denizens of Pine Valley, Pennsylvania, the antics of Jack Bauer and company make plenty of sense to me!

One of the outgrowths of watching AMC over the years has been the way it’s affected my OTHER TV viewing. First and foremost, it taught me never to watch any other soaps, as Id likely never be able to stop, but it’s also pointed me towards several prime time programs I might’ve otherwise passed on (and no, LA Law, which I’ve never watched, wasn’t one of them – I didn’t even realize who Bernsen was until I stumbled across his soap credit somewhere).

Sarah Michelle Gellar joined the cast in 1993 as Kendall Hart, the grown daughter Erica Kane didn’t know she had (quite a trick – and Ms.Kane even more recently discovered a son she didn’t know about as well! As to HOW that was possible, don’t ask…). When she left to do Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I tuned in simply out of pure curiosity. wondering how a soap vet was gonna turn a little regarded horror flick into a weekly TV series. I didn’t even figure I’d be coming back for the second episode, but once I saw the debut, I was almost immediately transformed into a life-long Joss Whedon fan, and I’ve followed everything he’s done since!

Another actress in that role and I’d’ve most likely passed entirely (it didn’t seem, on the surface, my sort of show), probably wondering these many years later, what the fuss was all about. Far less the critical darling, but still a lot of fun, Las Vegas wouldn’t’ve even have been a blip on my radar, despite Jimmy Caan starring, if it weren’t for AMC’s ex-Leo, Josh Duhamel , being featured right alongside the Godfather vet as Danny. And even though I always found Kelly Ripa’s Hayley Vaughn either too shrill or too self-pitying, I couldn’t resist checking in to see how she’d make out sitting alongside Regis back when they were having on-air auditions to replace Kathie Lee Gifford several years back. Much to my surprise, I found her engaging, witty, and genuinely amusing, all the things that had never came across in her AMC work, and when she finally settled into the co-host seat five years ago, I became a regular viewer of a show that had gotten along just fine without me entirely for decades! the last time i had watched Reege was when he hosted a short-lived seventies gossip based game show, The Neighbors – who knew he was such a character? (I also watched Ripa’s sitcom, Hope and Faith, which I considered a well performed but dumb comedy, not something I would’ve otherwise followed, and shed no tears over its cancellation after three seasons…).

So yeah, I watch a soap – and you might well say, if it weren’t for Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, I never would’ve watched Firefly! And you might well be right…

Let me leave you with this curious little bit of cross-network trivia. As stated above, Sarah Michelle Gellar went directly from playing Erica Kane’s daughter, Kendall Hart, to playing Buffy. At the same time she was on AMC, future Buffy cast mate – who would play a heretofore unknown younger sister to the Slayer (actual magic was used to accomplish THIS oddball plot point, making it slightly more credible than typical AMC plotting…) thrust into the mix midway during the series run – Michelle Trachtenberg was also a cast member on the soap. She played Lily Montgomery, the autistic step-daughter of long-time (and perennial Kane paramour) cast member (and comic fan!) Walt Willey.

She was more of a plot device than a fleshed out character at the time, however, and Jackson Montgomery (Willey) was involved with her birth mother, and nowhere near the then current Erica-based storyline, so the Gellar and Trachtenberg characters never crossed paths during their time spent simultaneously in Pine Valley.

Then, a few years back, as is often the case, a new actress was brought in to assume the role of Kendall on AMC, and maybe a year later, another one to take on the task of bringing Lily from out of the halls of the special (but never seen) school she’d attended for nearly a decade off camera (her mom, y’see, had been killed awhile back). Jackson and Erica – who’d been on and off for nearly two decades, but who’d never actually tied the knot – FINALLY got married about a year ago, meaning that – just like Gellar and Trachtenberg on Buffy – the two characters originated by the aforementioned actresses, Kendall and Lily were now sisters too!

Ain’t that something? Aren’t you glad you read all this way for THAT? Hey, my head’s filled with useless information, no argument there, but I’d like to think that at least some of it is INTERESTING useless information!!

Well, gotta go. Lynn’s calling me – it’s time to watch today’s episode. I wonder when Adam’s gonna find out that his daughter Colby didn’t perish in that boat wreck (the one that served as a capper to her extravagant Sweet Sixteen Birthday party, shortly after she lost her virginity on board to Erica’s step-nephew!) and is instead hiding in the secret tunnels at the Chandler Mansion, listening in on everyone’s secrets? Hey, forget about how Marvel’s Civil War is gonna turn out – THIS is what I wanna see!..

May Rao help me…

Hembeck.com – c’mon over!

-Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

…So there I was, reading my fancy-schmancy Supergirl Archives, when I stumble across that panel up there in the provocatively titled “The Day Supergirl Revealed Herself!” (Action Comics #265, June 1960), and all I can think to myself is, “That is SO Mort!!” Mort, as in Weisinger, the demented mastermind behind a decade plus of the Superman Family’s most fertile, successful, but nonetheless peculiar period. And it’s panels like this that make statements like that hard to argue with…

Let’s just forget about the larger Supergirl story involved here, okay? For the purposes of our discussion, just know that the Jerry Siegel penned script has an amnesiac Girl of Steel – in an adopted civilian identity – wandering into Smallville’s Superboy Museum. That’s where she encounters this bit of young Kal-El’s self-portraiture in one of editor Weisinger’s typical trademark throwaway vignettes. Mort liked to sprinkle his tales with small scenes like this to help illustrate for readers exactly what it would be like to be gifted with all the amazing abilities author Jerry and partner Joe dreamt up for their Kryptonian kreation several decades earlier.

And just what would Mort have his mighty champion DO with his mighty powers? Well, how about seek out the world’s biggest diamond – JUST SO THAT HE COULD CARVE A STATUE OF HIMSELF OUT OF IT!?! Forget about the world’s biggest diamond – apparently, we’re dealing with the world’s biggest EGO here!?! I mean, is this really the BEST way to utilize this incredibly enormous gem?? I wouldn’t think so, and neither, it would seem, did any of his comics biz contemporaries…

Julie Schwartz had the citizens of Central City erect a Flash Museum for their hometown hero, but the speedster wisely left the establishment’s acquisitions to the duly elected board and not to some way-out whims of his own. And Stan Lee? Well, his Fantastic Four had to wait until they hooked up with the blind step-daughter of one of their arch-est of enemies before they found someone interested in sculpting their likenesses. And as for Spider-Man? We all know how J. Jonah Jameson’s Daily Bugle treated the Web-spinner, don’t we? Spidey was hardly considered a diamond of ANY sort by the sour newspaper publisher, although when it came to “World’s Biggest”, JJJ may’ve had some thoughts on THAT, though I’d prefer not to print the less-than-complimentary categories he no doubt considered here. Use your imagination, true believers…

My point is, it’s absolutely ridiculous to think a true-blue hero like Superboy would ever indulge in such an excessive act of self-promotion as Mort had pictured in this perverse little panel. A super-villain might do something like this, you bet – but a good guy? Uh uh. Hard to swallow that notion coming from the white hats.

I mean, try and think about this in real life terms. Maybe some megalomaniacal dictator would fashion a massive statue of this sort as a misguided tribute to himself, but certainly not someone who works for the betterment of mankind. Nope. No way.

After all, what self-respecting role model would EVER stoop to promoting their image in such a blatantly crass manner, I ask you?

….oh…

Um, well, I guess you could say that while that’s generally the rule of thumb…

…I suppose THAT little theory loses out being a hundred per cent true by…

…er…

…a NOSE…

(or three…)

Hope you enjoyed this little flashback extracted from the October 2003 “Fred Sez” archives found over at Hembeck.com! All new excitement next week! Probably…

-Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

 

 

Back in the spring of 1987, I received a call from Jim Salicrup, my editor over at Marvel Age Magazine, for whom I’d been doing a monthly feature for a number of years already at that point. He informed me that Marvel was going to include the fan-friendly promo publication amongst that summer’s roster of Annuals, and he had a swell idea as to how to not only promote the line’s upcoming books, but to entertain the readers in the process: he wanted me to expand my “Fred Hembeck Show” schtick that I’d been doing upon occasion over an entire double-sized issue!

The concept was this: Cartoon Fred would come out on stage at this mock late-night chat-fest, welcoming all the biggies (i.e., characters with their own ongoing titles) onto the couch one page at a time. There’d be some (hopefully) comedic banter, and then, in tried and true talk show tradition, I’d direct the audience towards the clip our guests inevitably brought along. In this case, that meant each alternating page in this book was handled by the costumed do-gooders current creative teams, showcasing the near future plans slated for such mainstays as Spider-Man, Thor, and the Avengers.

It was an inspired notion, and despite the fact that I had little over a month to write, draw and letter (and you betcha by golly, there sure was a WHOLE lotta lettering!…) nearly twenty pages, it was one of the most fun things I’ve ever been assigned to do in comics. Naturally, cranking out the set-up material at such a hasty pace, I didn’t have time (nor really, any need, since Cartoon Fred got to play the smoozing host who loves EVERYTHING, no matter what you put in front of him!…) to co-ordinate any of my intros with the folks who were actually in charge of this impressive parade of iconic Marvel characters.

With one exception.

Mark Gruenwald.

Truth is, he was the one who called me. Neither of us could’ve imagined at the time that he was merely at the comparative outset of an epic decade-plus long run scripting Captain America (1985-1995, issues 307 through 443, save for 423), but it was a task for which his enthusiasm apparently never wavered, and that was especially true for what he had prepared for the then immediate future. Only, he felt that the upcoming events in the Star-Spangled Avenger’s life needed a little more oomph than my (by necessity) generic, already completed introduction provided. So he suggested that I take a few further panels on top of the page entrusted to him (and artists Tom Morgan and Joe Sinnott) to really get across the title’s exciting new direction.

This is what it looked like…

Unfortunately, despite his near omnipresence at Marvel for nearly twenty years, that was the only time I ever worked with Mark Gruenwald (unless you count the fact that he’d done some production work for his friend, Dean Mullaney of Eclipse – color separations, mainly – on my first published collection, Hembeck: The Best of Dateline:@#$% back in the late seventies). We’d met up at conventions and parties on several occasions, but as I was never a regular New York City denizen, those brief encounters were few and fleeting. Still, he always seemed like a nice enough guy, and his going the extra mile to promote Cap’s book – and eagerly buying into the whole faux talk show conceit – really impressed me. It shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise, though – I’d long been a fan of his writing.

Now, some folks would tell you that Mark’s dialog wasn’t the best, and yeah, there were clunkers to be found lurking in his plentiful fully loaded balloons, but that always seemed a minor quibble at best to me. Y’see, there were always more ideas to be found in a single issue of a Gruenwald book than could oft times be detected in a full year’s worth of work from other, more ear-pleasingly glib, writers. And I’m not just talking about the nuts and bolts of the menace of the month – I was always impressed by the way Mark slowly but surely brought along the personalities of his always bountiful casts, having them interact in a surprising yet clearly logical manner. That above all is what I treasured about a Gruenwald penned episode – you could never quite predict where it was going, but it always made sense in getting there – and was true to the characters as established to boot. Little wonder then that far above anything else produced under the aegis of the regrettable New Universe experiment, Mark (and artists Paul Ryan’s) 32 issues (plus one Annual) of D.P.7 shines like a bright beacon of success amidst a gloomy cloud of failure.

And in the early nineties, when Marvel was cranking out books like sausages – bad sausages – and I was still on the freebie list, there were only four regular books I could stomach reading. Two were by Mark: Captain America, natch, and his 59 (of 60) issues of Quasar. (To stave off your curiosity, the other two were Walt Simonson’s F.F. and Peter David’s Hulk.) I always felt Mark’s books (save for the landmark 12 issue Squadron Supreme limited series) never quite got the props they truly deserved. Partially that had to do with the fact that Mark was usually paired up with solid, professional – but rarely flashy – artists, and partially because readers needed to immerse themselves in these continuing sagas to fully appreciate the thought and skill Gruenwald invested into his writing. Too bad. I have nothing but fond memories of his work.

Mark Gruenwald, as you probably know, passed away unexpectedly in August of 1996. Obviously, that was a great loss for everyone – his fans, the comics field, and most especially his family. Like I said, I barely knew the man, but if I can’t be counted among his personal friends, let me at least be happily identified as one his biggest fans.

The reason this all came to mind, oddly enough, was due to my MySpace page. I generally double post anything I write over there on my own Fred Sez blog. The advantage the MySpace page has is the ability for readers to leave their own pithy comments under my ramblings. Last week, in a brief posting pointing folks to the previous edition of “The Fred Hembeck Show”, the aforementioned Jim Salicrup, as well as an Italian fan by the name of Max Brigel, both chipped in their two cents, and after seeing himself sharing space with Jim and I, Max came back with this brief note…

Nice! Now, with you and Jim Salicrup, I’m almost on a Marvel Age page!! Ahh, those were the times…

Friend Max, it turned out, had good reason to wax nostalgic over the sadly long defunct Marvel Age, as he explained with his next posting…

Well, since I owe my career to the late great Mark Gruenwald I completely agree with that! I’ll tell you the story… because I didn’t have the chance to write it down anywhere last month, in the 10th anniversary of Gru’s passing.In 1990, I was only a fan of Marvel Comics (now I work for Panini Comics, which reprints Marvel for Italy/France/Germany/Brasil/Spain) and decided to check their boot at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. Lo and behold: the great Gru was there, and when I saw him I couldn’t resist asking the hostess if I could speak a minute with him. Only later I discovered we were both born on the 18th of June (ditto for Alan Davis and Paul McCartney), so maybe there was a weird connection between us, but in 1990 I only exploited my knowledge of Marvel Comics.I remember pointing at him, even when I was speaking to the hostess, and he noticed, and asked me to sit in the Marvel booth so we could speak everything Marvel. And so we did for a few minutes (15? Maybe more…), but he didn’t mind answering all of my questions. If I had had more of them, he would’ve answered more: he was kindness! Then I thanked him and got back home with a precious knowledge of Marvel’s next moves.

A few days later I went to my comic shop and spoke freely to the people there about my encounter with Mark Gruenwald… “Why don’t you write it down? We’re printing a fanzine next month and your ‘interview’ will be priceless!” they told me. No sooner said than done, I rushed home and wrote everything with a pen (using my memory too) on a piece of paper: I didn’t have a computer back then!

The “interview” was indeed printed in the fanzine (“Glamazonia”) and I was so proud of it I decided to send a copy to an Italian editor of Marvel Comics (Luca Scatasta), just to thank him for his great work. When Glamazonia arrived in his bullpen, it created quite a sensation, and everyone started to remember my name: “He’s a letter hacker!” said the editor-in-chief, “He’s buying comics in the comic book shop where I used to work” said the secretary. You see: they needed another freelance editor because Luca Scatasta was only very part-time at the moment, and they decided to interview me.

The interview went very well, and so my first articles and editing job (basically I edited a couple of translations of Wolverine issues)… In short, I got my very first freelance job! And it was only the beginning of a (so far) amazing experience in Marvel editing which started in 1990 thanks to the great man I discovered with “Mark’s remarks” in Marvel Age!Two or three years after that meeting (dated 7th April 1990, as I recently discovered), I had the incredible honor to start editing the translations of every single Captain America Mark G. wrote! I also wrote cliff notes on characters he would have surely appreciated!

This in turn inspired Jim Salicrup to share the following…

Well, this will be the longest comment ever on Fred’s MySpace page…First, here’s something I wrote for the latest issue of MoCCAzine, the newsletter for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org):“MoCCA Remembers Mark Gruenwald

“Peter Sanderson’s MoCCA Monday lectures on 1986: The Year That Changed Comics are incredibly insightful examinations of key important and influential comics and graphic novels. But Peter’s August 7th talk was extra special, and no, it’s not because Peter raced through his in-depth analysis of Marvel’s Squadron Supreme limited series in Speed Demon fashion (clocking in at a little over fifteen minutes compared to his usual norm of roughly two hours). What made this particular MoCCA Monday unique was that Peter had gathered together a group of special guests to talk about Squadron Supreme writer Mark Gruenwald, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Mark’s death. Remarkably, this wasn’t the first time Mark’s death has been tied to the Squadron Supreme, as some of Mark’s ashes were actually blended in with the ink used to print the first trade paperback collection edition.“Speaking before the standing-room-only crowd, guests included Catherine Schuller, Mark’s widow, who read movingly from a eulogy Mark had written for himself years before he died, and Sara Gruenwald, Mark’s daughter who announced she has, despite her father’s advice, recently published comics of her own. Many of Mark’s co-workers were present and shared their favorite memories of Mark. Mike Carlin, Jim Salicrup, Glenn Herdling, Glen Greenberg, Tom Palmer, Carl Potts, and Tom DeFalco all spoke of Mark’s humor, practical jokes, and love of comics. Also in attendance were several of the current writers of Mark’s creation, The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, one of whom spoke and told of Mark’s impact on his generation of comics fans and professionals.“Videos of Mark’s convention appearances and Bullpen hi-jinks were shown, and to conclude the formal proceedings, a friend Henry O, performed one of Mark’s favorite Beatles songs, ‘In My Life.’ The guests and audience members, including many comics industry professionals such as Bob Budiansky, Renee Witterstaetter, Ken Lopez, and many others, all then got to mingle, enjoy refreshments, and continue to share their memories of the clearly much-loved Mark Gruenwald. Despite the potential of such an event turning into a very sad occasion, the mood was upbeat and fun the entire evening, making for a truly memorable MoCCA Monday.”And, if that wasn’t enough, here’s what I said at MoCCA that night…

“A Few Words About Mark Gruenwald

“Asking me to say a few words about anything is often futile, as I tend to go on endlessly about almost anything. And when it comes to Mark Gruenwald, I’m sure I could write a monthly ongoing solo comicbook series, as well as an ongoing team-up title. But tonight, I’ll give it my best shot to be somewhat restrained.

“Like most people I liked Mark as soon as I met him. His unique sense of humor and passion for comics was infectious. He was sort of combination of Bill Murray and Jack Nicholson – the bad boy with that endearing twinkle in his eye. In the time I knew Mark, we went from being the young fans that were breaking into comics to becoming what they like call ‘comics veterans.’ We went from being very close friends to colleagues with a tremendous amount of mutual respect.

“In the early days, we spent lots of time together talking about our respective hopes and dreams, usually while taking long walks through Central Park, up to his West Side apartment. We both passionately loved comics, but the reality of working at a major comics publisher could be, shall we say, very challenging.

“Rather than simply despair, Mark and I would always embrace the challenge of finding a way to please both our corporate masters and our own fannish desires. For example, Mark was always more of a DC fan than a Marvel fan, but did Mark let that stop him from writing the Justice League of America?“Mark wrote, with Ralph Macchio, the long-time Marvel editor, not the star of Karate Kid movies, Marvel-Two-In-One, a team-up title featuring the Fantastic Four’s ever-lovin’, blue-eyed Thing character, which I got to edit. Working with such top artists as George Perez and John Byrne, we got to have fun with such storylines as Project: Pegasus and the Serpent Crown Affair. While most of the time it was fun to work with Ralph and Mark, sometimes Mark would come up with ideas that I wasn’t able to appreciate at the time. For example, Mark once wanted to feature Moon Man, the older version of Jack Kirby’s Moon-Boy character from Devil Dinosaur. I didn’t quite appreciate Mark’s sense of the absurd at that point.“Later when looking for a villain somehow related to the ballet, to include in a strange comic I wrote, which actually featured Spider-Man, Fire-Star, and Ice Man watching a performance of the Nutcracker, I was thrilled to come upon a character Mark had created – a guy who was repeatedly rejected because he was too short to be a ballet dancer, so he somehow got his hands on a growing formula that turned him into the freakish Daddy Long-legs – a guy now too tall to be a ballet dancer.“Quite often, Mark would try to get a concept by me, by saying, ‘But Jim, there’s never been anything done like this in comics before.’ And unfortunately, I’d have to respond by saying, ‘Sometimes there are good reasons.’

“Mark also wrote a monthly Mark’s Remarks column for Marvel Age Magazine, the official Marvel fan magazine I edited for eight years. While most of the columns were in someway promoting something or other that Marvel was publishing at the time, I’d sometimes be surprised at how personal his column could become. For example, unlike me, who thought it was great that everyone had an opportunity to submit their work to Marvel for consideration, Mark was far more compassionate, and felt strongly for the many people who would inevitably be rejected.“In another column, where Mark was just listing random thoughts, one of his philosophical points had a profound affect on my life. It was a simple thought, appreciate the people in your life who love you. Back then I was a bit too full of myself, and taking the people who loved me for granted. Mark’s sincere advice, coming from such an unexpected source – a column in a magazine devoted to promoting Marvel Comics – made me think about how I was treating people in my life, and for that, I’m eternally thankful to Mark.“I remember one difficult time, walking Mark home on the night that Spider-Woman, a title he had been writing, was reassigned to another writer. Mark was crushed. He was pouring everything he had into that comic. I told him he shouldn’t let this upset him too much. That he should remain open to future opportunities. That life was full of creative challenges, and the specifics weren’t all that important – that he would continually find ways to creatively express himself. And he did.“Instead of allowing the job to shape him, Mark shaped his job to reflect him. I’ve always thought it was an editor’s job to construct an environment conducive to creativity. Mark took that literally and would redesign and rebuild his office in amazing ways. Mark’s life was a constant expression of his humor, compassion, love, and spirit.“As much as I enjoyed Mark’s comicbook work, I think Mark himself was his greatest creation.”

Max, I’d like to read that interview you did with Mark. It would be like spending a few minutes with my old friend yet again.

Thanks Jim – and thanks to both you and Max for granting me permission to reuse your heartfelt words here – I felt both pieces were just too good to be shunted away in the comments section of my MySpace page. If nothing else, it spurred me on to offer up this long overdue tribute of my own to one of my favorite latter-day mainstream scribes. We all miss you Mark, but you haven’t been forgotten. Not by a long shot. And if you folks are at all interested in reading an expansive collection of the earlier alluded to Mark’s Remarks columns, well, this whole sentence will serve as a link to get you there. Go ahead and take a look – there are far worse ways to while away the time on the Internet, after all.

(Not including Hembeck.com, of course!…)

Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck (except for the material generously provided by Jim Salicrup and Max Brighel, used by permission)

Think you could possibly imagine the late Rodney Dangerfeld decked out in a long red flowing cape, making funny gestures with his fingers?

That pretty much describes Dr. Strange back in the earliest days of Marvel’s sixties revolution. Because, in the forty-five issues featuring the work of his visual creator, Steve Ditko, within the pages of Strange Tales 110-146 (editor Stan Lee was apparently so unsure of the character’s initial appeal that after a mere two episodes, he held the Master of the Mystic Arts out of the next two issues in a rare instance of wait-and-see judgment), the good Doctor was afforded little respect and but a single cover all to his – and Ditko’s – own.

One.

Uno.

And not only was it the enigmatic illustrator’s last foray into Doc’s dark dimensions, he didn’t even actually draw it!

Well, yeah, okay, he did – but he clearly never INTENDED what was ultimately fronting the July 1966 issue of Strange Tales to be the book’s cover.

Here – take a look…

Nice, huh?

So was the interior story’s art – some of which might’ve looked mighty familiar to readers who’d immediately flipped open to Ditko’s baldly titled swan song after falling under the spell of that powerful cover.

Like this panel on page four…

And then, a page later, the sight of the Doctor on this impressive full-page tableau no doubt caused many a fan to experience an immediate sense of deja vu…

Take another, closer look at the masterful bit of production that is the cover of Strange Tales #146. Our hero was flipped, tilted and slightly enlarged (most noticeable on the leg shadings), while the ever inscrutable Eternity had his right arm flawlessly extended by some long forgotten Bullpenner (who also added some big black blobs of ink to flesh out the composition). A nice job, aided immensely by its rich color scheme .

I noticed all this recently when I decided to cobble up my own version of this Marvel Age classic…

Dig this – Dr. Strange made it onto only eighteen of the Strange Tales‘ covers published during the Ditko era! Eighteen out of forty-five opportunities! Yeesh! The first one wasn’t until eight months in, either, on Strange Tales #118, and of that meager total, nine (including the big finale) consisted of small, smaller, and really teeny-tiny Ditko vignettes pasted up (check especially 137 – and all of the rest – over on this page at the Grand Comics Database). Eight of the others fell to the responsibility of lead feature Human Torch/Nick Fury cover artist, Jack Kirby – and as for the lone remaining one, well, we’ll get to THAT one later. More than once, Stan plastered a lamely apologetic blurb like the one found on the front of number 134: “Of course Dr. Strange is in this issue too – but we couldn’t find any place to put him on the cover!”.

Yeah? Well, I’m thinking maybe you coulda tried a little bit harder, Stan.

As it was, even with Kirby at the helm, Doc only managed to score equal or better pictorial billing on two of the King’s covers: 123 and 130. I’ve already drawn my own versions of both, writing them up to boot. (You can see for yourself by checking out these links to my gushing over the sublime delights of Strange Tales #123 #123 – and bitterly complaining about the Sorcerer Supreme upstaging the Beatles on the cover of Strange Tales #130 #130!)

No, Doc was afforded very little respect during the Ditko days, but after recently looking over all these covers, I think I’ve FINALLY figured out a mystery that’s been bothering comics fans for forty years now – why exactly DID Steve Ditko pack up and leave Marvel with no clear cut explanation back in mid ’66?

I’m thinking maybe it was THIS cover than pushed him over the brink…

C’mon, how lame was THAT? Yeah, yeah – there must’ve been some sorta monumentally insurmountable deadline crunch for Stan to stat the splash page of that issues S.H.I.E.L.D. story into the hands of a less-than-enraptured seeming Dr. Strange (drawn by future Doc artist, Marie Severin) – but even as big a fan of the Fury feature as I was at the time, it still just looked silly to me. Imagine then how Mr. Ditko, with his very specific views, reacted when he first spied this image:

“‘Almost everybody reads S.H.I.E.L.D.!”? I don’t think so, I don’t think so at all! Trying to suggest that we unmask the Green Goblin as Norman Osborn was bad enough, but THIS time, Lee has gone way, WAY too far! That’s it – I’m leaving!”

Well, y’know, it MIGHT’VE gone down like that – who can truly say?…

And as for this episode of “The Fred Hembeck Show”, in the words of that final Ditko Doc entry, yes friends, you’ve reached the end at last!

(If you haven’t already zipped on over there, check out Hembeck.com when you get the chance!)

Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

Where WAS she?

Where was Ellen Burstyn the other night during the Emmy Awards ceremonies? Unlike a majority of that evening’s nominees, she wasn’t in the audience, carefully preparing a spontaneous speech in her head in case she won, the way many of her peers undoubtedly were. No, the Oscar winning actress wasn’t anywhere to be found.

Gee, are we to assume Ellen WASN’T burstin’ with pride over scoring a nomination for a 14 second appearance in HBO’s Mrs Harris telefilm? That move–long and loudly ridiculed by many, including host Conan O’Brien (the only reason I tuned into a show I generally skip, by the way)–nonetheless stubbornly wasn’t rescinded by either the Emmy bigwigs nor graciously refused by the otherwise silent Ms. Burstyn herself, but I think there’s a bigger question here than an incompetent nominating process.

Such as, who exactly hires an Academy Award winning actress for their high profile project and then provides her with all of a scant 38 words to deliver? Huh? Who does something that screwy anyway?

The two leads–Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley–each own one of those golden little statues themselves, as chance might have it. Gee, ya don’t think that, maybe at the last minute, they got cold feet, afraid that one too many similarly honored thespians on set would somehow drain the spotlight from them, do ya?

“Hey, cut down Burstyn’s part, willya? Don’t even give her character a name–just tell her to use a funny accent. Keep the focus on us two–THAT’LL sure help our Emmy chances!”

Well, of course it didn’t.

And yeah, it woulda been one thing if Burstyn had herself an unannounced cameo, or was given the old “Special Appearance By” billing, but it’s my understanding (hey, I didn’t actually SEE the movie, although thanks to the cheeky Emmy broadcast Producers, I DID view most of the nominated performance–that sure was 14 transcendent seconds, lemme tell ya!…) that the cast list just rolled out alphabetically, with Ms. Burstyn’s role seemingly given the same amount of weight as performers who actually had to spend more time than a coffee break memorizing their lines! So, blame the Emmys if you must, but just remember–some genius hired this women, paid her good money, and THEN decided, y’know, 14 seconds is pretty much all we’re gonna need of HER!

And while I’m righteously whining about the awards, two more complaints:

How is it that My Name Is Earl didn’t manage to grab itself a slot in the final five selections of the Best Comedy category, but then when it came to naming Best Achievement in Comedy Writing and Best Achievement Comedy Directing, BOTH awards went to the pilot episode of Earl? What–was it all downhill after the series premiere, with the likes of Two and A Half Men easily outscoring it on the yock meter? (Look, I’ll confess to never having seen the latter, and to thoroughly enjoying the former, but it just makes no sense the way things played out in those three categories. I DO believe that, perhaps by blind luck alone, the funniest comedy–at least to MY taste–The Office, won. But Earl should’ve gotten a nomination nod, especially if the show’s writing and directing were seemingly held in such high esteem… )

Then there’s Desperate Housewives. A big winner last year, and a show I faithfully watch (hey, it all started with me because of Teri Hatcher, and things just developed from there), its sophomore season was almost entirely frozen out of ceremony. Now, I’m not amongst those who felt the quality dropped as precipitously as a lot of folk, though admittedly, the plot lines weren’t as well constructed as they were during the program’s debut season. And while I’ll always have a problem with shows like this one, Ally McBeal (which I’ve never watched), and Gilmore Girls (which I enjoy immensely) being measured up right alongside half hour sitcoms, I can begrudgingly understand it, considering the amount of effective comedic moments given to each of the lead actresses. But if there was one character who clearly WASN’T funny last season, it was new neighbor Alfre Woodward.

So who do you think gets nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy? Uh huh–the women who spent most of the year hiding her mentally challenged son chained in the basement, believing him (wrongly, as it turns out) responsible for a young woman’s death back in the town where they last lived! Sounds like a regular laugh riot, huh? Believe me, if anything, THAT was the plot primarily responsible for dragging the show down during its second season–so what do the Emmy Einsteins decide to do?

Yup–foist a nomination on the actress who embodied that downer storyline! (Nothing against Ms. Woodward herself, mind you, just the wrongheaded decision-making that gave her this unmerited salute. Her acting may’ve been swell, but trust me, she WASN’T funny–simply because the part wasn’t WRITTEN funny! No wacky antics in THAT cellar, I’m afraid! But considering Ms. Woodward was also nominated for her work in another movie or miniseries–my apologies, but the details are starting to blend together–apparently, she’s a reliably talented actress who’s also an Emmy favorite. Anyway, I’ve gotta give her SOME credit–she certainly had to work a heckuva lot harder than Ellen Burstyn did for the privilege of remaining comfortably in her seat not once, but twice, on Emmy evening!…)

Look, like I said, I only watched because Conan was hosting. If they had let–oh, I don’t know?–Tony Danza host, I probably wouldn’t be moaning about any of this now.

Except, of course, just HOW could they possibly they let Tony Danza host anyway?…

Speaking of which–check out Tony Danza.com! You might be surprised…

–Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

Let me make myself clear here – I’m not a criminal.

And I’m not particularly superstitious.

But when a bat begins flying around our indoor living quarters, totally uninvited, well friends, THAT’S when I find myself immediately aligning myself with that proverbial cowardly lot Bruce Wayne once pondered about so long ago!

Bats! Ugh.

It was the night before last, y’see. Lynn and I were in the bedroom, watching TV. In preparation for inviting a trio of gal pals over for an unusually modest birthday celebration this Friday – an annual event – daughter Julie was next door, cleaning out her room (also an annual event…). Suddenly, she came running into our room and blurted out that a bat had swooped past her when she’d gone out to the kitchen to dump some debris in the trash can.

A bat. It had been a full ten years – and an entirely different house – since we’d last had to contend with one of those unnerving critters. I really thought we were safe here – unlike our former domicile, there was no second floor, no attic window that wouldn’t quite close entirely. And even the doors here measured up less expansively, seeming to guarantee far less of a chance that an unwanted winged intruder could sneak in late at night when cat brothers Mario and Luigi rotated themselves in and out. But after a full decade of peace, Julie brought us the alarming news that – oh geez – there was a bat in the house.

I don’t like bats. I’ve NEVER liked bats. But I had no choice – I had to leave the comforting glow of the tube to try and flush the creepy li’l pest out of our house. So, I grabbed a plastic laundry basket that was lying nearby, took the broom from Julie’s room, had the ladies close the doors to all the rooms in that well lit, currently bat-free portion of the house, took a deep breath, and then set out on a hunting expedition that I truthfully wanted absolutely no part of.

And when we got to the kitchen dining room area, there it was, wildly flying around in that crazily erratic manner bats are infamous for. Despite the fact that Julie will turn sixteen years old tomorrow, she shrieked like a little girl, one a third her age – and despite the fact that I’m way, way older than that, I shrieked even LOUDER! The only one who kept her wits about her was wife Lynn, our savior during previous bat encounters. But that was years ago – Lynn’s knee isn’t what it used to be, and besides, the layout here is significantly different from our old house. If there was any hope of getting rid of the airborne rodent, it was pretty much entirely up to me!

Yup – we were in REAL trouble…

After the initial shrieking subsided, we lost sight of our uninvited guest. Where exactly he landed, we just plain didn’t know. I went downstairs, plastic laundry basket in one hand, broom in the other like some demented warrior, swatting at every nook and cranny, trying to determine if the vermin had fled to the lower level. Once I was satisfied he hadn’t gone in hiding down there, I closed up the entire area so he wouldn’t get the chance during his next fly-around.

Meanwhile, upstairs, Lynn and Julie opened the back door, hoping against hope that, given the chance, he would just happily fly back out into the wild. Initially, they had opened both the front and side doors as well, but being the paranoid type, I objected. What’s to keep OTHER bats from coming in while we searched for the one we were already inadvertently providing housing for, I protested? We soon reached a compromise – only the back door would remain open, and only if one of the ladies would keep a keen eye on it the entire time. Three entrances demanded just a bit more vigilance than we were capable of providing at the time.

Eventually, I made my way into the big room, the one that was built onto this house (before we moved in) as an addition. This is the room that has the stereo, the half-dozen chockful CD racks, the big TV, the two couches, the exercise bike, the wood stove, my drawing board, my art equipment, and – wouldn’t you know it – piles and piles of books! Oh, and did I mention the fifteen foot ceiling and curtained windows running across two walls? Well, when I banged my broom against one of those curtains, I hit pay dirt, at least figuratively – our prey darted out, and quickly reprised his flight of the damned.

Julie and I then reprised our blood-curdling chorus of shrieks, even as I tentatively swung my broom ineffectively at the loathsome creature whenever he swooped nearby, always careful to keep the basket up over my head! It was quite the picture postcard.

And after a few more minutes of this madness, we lost sight of him yet again. We knew he most likely was somewhere in the big room, but we just didn’t know where. So, we decided to turn the lights off, go back into the bedroom, watch a little more TV, and hope that when we came out, he’d once again be performing his unholy aerial maneuvers, and we’d figure SOME way to be rid of him.

After about fifteen minutes, I decided it was time to go back for another turn at the bat, and so I once again slunk into the breach, broom and basket at the ready. We flipped the lights on. Nothing. Another careful but cursory time around the perimeter revealed nothing, and Lynn, tiring of watching my ineffective Frank Buck imitation, declared that the time was overdue for taking a shower, so off she went, leaving me and Julie to our own devices.

That’s right – suddenly, we were operating without parental supervision!

And wouldn’t you know it, that’s when I found him! I pulled back the curtain from another of the large wall windows, and there he was, hanging stationary on the window’s inner screen! We had him! Because unlike a house fly, you can sneak up on a bat, and he’s not gonna move! I immediately surrounded him with the laundry basket, and called for Julie to get me a large piece of foam board. The creepy thing made no move, but I knew once I attempted to slide the board behind the basket, I’d knock him from his perch, and as much as I dreaded the thought of it, there’d be some unavoidable activity on the bat’s part to follow. So, I took another deep breath, and began the task at hand. Sure enough, as soon as I knocked him free, he began to squeal, and desperately fly about inside the laundry basket.

UNTIL, THAT IS, HE PULLED HIMSELF THROUGH ONE OF THE MANY ONE INCH SQUARE OPENINGS RINGING THE BASKET AND FLEW AWAY!!!

Gee, I didn’t know bats could do THAT?…

It helped explain how he most likely got in – earlier that very day, I had noticed that a small tear in the screen on the front door had somehow gotten a bit larger than I remember it, musing, “Gosh, I sure hope a bee doesn’t get in?” After seeing this Houdini act close up – TOO close up, trust me – I realized that bees were the least of my worries! (Thank goodness for Homeland Security recommendations – I’m not sure how well duct tape will serve us in keeping terrorists out, but it certainly turned out to be a palatable solution to our clear and present bat threat!….)

So, once again, our bat adversary flew about, and rudely avoided the beckoning open door to freedom, and once again – yup – we lost track of him.

It was turning into an awfully long, long night.

We needed a break. So, after informing a freshly scrubbed Lynn of the comedy of errors she’d just missed, I made myself a cup of caffeine laced iced tea, grabbed a video tape of that evening’s edition of Countdown With Keith Olbermann, and settled into Julie’s room to watch it while she continued to clean up things. Maybe a good forty-five minutes of darkness would give the bat a chance to rest up, and subsequently give us yet another shot at shooing him from where he clearly wasn’t wanted…

It was almost midnight when I went back out. Once again, there was no outward sign of the bat, and once again, I went around, tapping my broom in every place he conceivably could be hiding – and given the depressing amount of clutter I’ve blithely accumulated over the years, that could’ve been any of a hundred places! I could just see the Animal Control folks giving the place a once over: “He’s not behind the Elvis figure, and I don’t think he’s nestled down between this pile of Warren magazines – maybe over by the Elton John box set?…” No, that wasn’t gonna work – clearly, I had to find him, and for everyone’s sanity, it’d better be soon!

And then I looked up and realized I’d been giving the varmint too much credit – he wasn’t hiding at all, he was hanging there in plain sight! But in the dim light, his dark inert figure blended in easily with the wall of bricks surrounding the wood stove. The only problem? He found himself a nice cozy spot about a foot from the ceiling – the fifteen foot high ceiling!

What else could I do? I called for back-up, Julie got me the step-ladder, and Lynn provided me with a smaller, escape proof plastic salad spinner bowl and a matching piece of cardboard to slip behind it. This time I figured I’d better get it right – I didn’t know if my heart would survive a third try! So, with makeshift weapons in hand, I slowly climbed the ladder, Lynn holding it steady all the while as Julie watched in breathless anticipation (fully ready to shriek should circumstances call for it).

I was up on the top step when I carefully reached out to trap our intruder, praying that my hand remained steady and that the bowl wouldn’t somehow inadvertently shift.

Success! But that was the easy part – now I had to slip the cardboard behind the container, put my hand securely over it, and then carefully descend the ladder.

Happily, I was able to do perform all three of those monumental tasks properly, but, sensing the rapid beating of my overexerted ticker, Lynn quickly and calmly took my prize from me and swiftly exited through the back door, Julie at her side, where she walked a decent distance out into our back yard, and let our unwanted batboarder flap his wings free and into the night – but hopefully, NEVER again back into our house!

Bats – I hate ’em! Maybe that’s why I’ve always been more of a Superman guy than a Batman acolyte. After all, I’ much prefer that a tiny Kryptonian member of the Superman Emergency Squad from the bottle city of Kandor fly dizzily around my living room than a bat any day, y’know?

(The rest of the evening was uneventful, save for when that cute little moth landed on my shoulder in the kitchen, and I jumped a foot! What – and you WOULDN’T?…)

Hembeck.com – no need to have bats in YOUR belfry to visit my home site! Stop by, but please – no sudden moves, okay?…

Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

 

Have you checked the news lately?

Yeesh – we’ve got over-heated politicians going on the tube, blithely anointing the recent mid-east conflict as the beginning of the long dreaded World War Three, and airlines are suddenly confiscating your toothpaste in the name of safety (hah! – tell it to your cavities)! Makes you long for the good ol’ days, doesn’t it?

A word of caution – don’t be TOO hasty.

Back on Election Day, 2003, I wrote up the following not-so-fond-reminiscence, a little thing I called…

“Dr. Strangemouth – or, How I Learned To Eavesdrop And Fear The Bomb”

It’s Election Day – what say we talk politics, okay?

WAIT! WAIT! Get your itchy little index finger away from that mouse – it’s not what you think. Yes, we most assuredly have our own political biases here at Hembeck.com, true, but – well, how shall I put this? Probably the overriding one is that all – or, okay, to be fair, merely most – of the folks who take up the political profession as their life’s work seem to spend most of it beholden to the various moneyed concerns who provided the necessary finances to propel their candidacies in the first place, while our dear friends, the politicians, in turn try their doggone darnedest to convince the public that – gee whiz! – it’s actually the little people’s best interests that they actually have at heart. Uh huh. Cynical? Yup, you betcha, but hey, after all these years, just try convincing me otherwise. Partisan though I may be at times, that’s still the way I feel deep down inside even about “my” guy, whoever he – or she – happens to be at the time.

What kind of attitude would you expect, after all, from some poor sap whose very first exposure to national politics had him totally convinced that if Richard Nixon DIDN’T win the right to kick his loafers off in the Oval Office, this future voter – and his entire family – was assured a horrible, gruesome death?!?…

Understand that we’re hearkening back – WAY back – to the initial run Eisenhower’s Veep made for the White House in the 1960 Presidential campaign. America had just cruised through 8 years of Republican rule thanks to the former World War Two hero, General Dwight D. Me? Well, I have absolutely no memories of the old soldier’s term in office, but Mom and Dad Hembeck sure did. Hitting the seven year mark several months before the odometer on the decade turned over, I eventually became superficially aware of the constant campaigning by the two candidates for the Big Job – Nixon, of course, and his Democratic opponent, some guy named John F. Kennedy (who was, for reasons I then couldn’t fathom, also called “Jack”…). The glitzy looking campaign buttons – red, white, and blue, of course – that we picked up at a mid-summer’s outing at a local fair did an inordinate amount towards informing my nascent political sensibilities. My parents, lifelong blue-collar workers who nonetheless stayed firmly and loyally on the Republican side of the aisle, naturally scooped up a handful of pro-Nixon paraphernalia, and I’ll be darned if Little Freddy himself wasn’t tremendously impressed by it! That man on the button seemed to have such a nice, pleasant smile! Fact was, he sorta reminded me of that OTHER man I liked, y’know, the funny one with the similar looking proboscis? Bob Hope, I think his name was…

Everything would’ve been just swell during the final months of this hard fought political contest in my insulated little corner of the world if only it weren’t for a chance remark I accidentally overheard one of my dad’s friends offer up whilst they were engaging in a discussion at our kitchen table one fateful night. But before we get to the specifics of the curious comment, allow me to tell you a little bit about the speaker in question…

His name was Turbish. That’s what everyone called him – Turbish, just Turbish. Years later, I finally found out that his first name was “Rowland” – which may well explain things. Anyway, he worked alongside my dad in the kitchen of the Suffolk County Infirmary, and was around my house, on and off, pretty much my entire young life. Even in the days after my dad passed on and I had the family manse dropped unceremoniously into my hands, Turbish would drop by unannounced. He was a nice enough fella, I suppose, though, frankly, he never really related to me as a kid. Nonetheless, I always found him sort of amusing. He spoke rapidly, always as if he were out of breath, AND in a high pitched voice! Picture, if you would, a cross between Ed Norton (NOT the actor, young people, but the patron saint of all sewer workers..,) and Barney Fife, and THAT’D be a decent approximation of good ol’ Turbish! And for someone who long ago had let go of the notion of employing a first name, he had this amusing affectation of referring to my dad as “Mr. Fred”! He was prone to exaggeration, but on that early fall day back in 1960, I was too young, too naive – and dare I say it? – too STUPID to know the difference between hyperbole and reality. And friends, it cost me. The price? My peace of mind (small as it may’ve been…)

Y’see, there they sat, yammering on and on about the upcoming election, and as usual, Turbish was doing the vast majority of the lip-flapping. Dad would occasionally interject a comment or two, generally to lower the exasperation level of the conversation, if for no other reason. He well knew his colleague’s proclivities, and always had a bucketful of salt at the ready. But to me, this fast talking, shrill, bespeckled man was an adult, and at that point in my social development, I took everything an adult said as gospel. Everything…

So imagine if you will my alarmed reaction when I chanced to hear THIS prime bon mot:

“Mr. Fred, I’m telling you, if Kennedy and the democrats get into the White House, the Russians’ll drop the bomb on us all by Thanksgiving!!”

The bomb? That would be one of the atomic variety, the likes of which we’d long practiced avoiding by – good plan! – crawling down under our desks at school. And the Russians? Communists, and America’s sworn enemy. We always seemed to be on the brink of total annihilation back in them good ol’ days, so, by golly, the high-pitched words of doom and devastation emanating from Mr. Turbish’s lips (kids still addressed adults as “Mr.” in those long gone times, for those of you who came in late… ) didn’t sound all that absurd. Not by a long shot.

Of course, they had no clue I’d been eavesdropping, and being the sort of family we were – i.e., minimal communication, if that – I certainly didn’t ask for further clarification from anyone. Nope, I just kept it to myself and worried. And rooted desperately – DESPERATELY, I tell ya! – for the man destined to one day be known as “Tricky Dick” to win, win, WIN! Barring that, I consoled myself with the notion that, even with the awful possibility of imminent destruction awaiting everyone just before the Thanksgiving turkey could be carved, I WAS, at least, guaranteed one last, glorious Halloween!…

Okay, so maybe I didn’t lose any actual sleep over the loose-lipped remark my shell-like ears had chanced upon, but even forty years later, I can still recall the overriding sense of dread I carried with me for over a month, as I internalized my own private countdown to doomsday. I did share my concerns with a close friend, who told me the whole thing was just a bunch of hooey (kids still said stuff like that in those days…). Of course, HIS parents were Democrats, so how could I truly trust anything they said? Weren’t they the problem, after all?…

No, the problem turned out to be my own gullibility. I went out Trick or Treating that Halloween and partied like it was, well, 1959, and then I held my breath as the adults went to the polls on the first Tuesday of November. The election? It was a close one, mighty close, but I think you all remember how it turned out. Yup, Nixon lost. No turkey for me – or anyone else in our soon-to-be-demolished democracy. But…

Then Thanksgiving DID come after all! AND it was followed in rapid succession by not only Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Day, the JFK Inauguration, but perhaps MOST importantly of all, my very own Birthday towards the end of January 1961! Glory be – I’d made it to age eight! Heck, we’d ALL made it!! Who’d a thot? I thereby learned a great and valuable lesson – political pundits, whether they’re smartly dressed on a Sunday morning talk show or sitting around your kitchen in their work clothes, the general rule of thumb is that they don’t actually know what they’re talking about, they just SOUND like they do!!

Well, as fate would have it, I soon became a big JFK fan – how could I not? Mort Weisinger seemed to feature him in just about every other issue of one of those fabulous Superman Family comics I had only recently started buying and collecting. And a few years later, when things really DID go sour – a little thing known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, history buffs – I remained blissfully and steadfastly unconcerned. After all, I’d already been through this drill, hadn’t I? You people weren’t gonna fool me TWICE! Little did I realize just HOW close the sky actually came to falling that particular time, but by then I was fully convinced of Kennedy’s extraordinary governing abilities. Even my parents and the excitable Mr. Rowland – G.O.P. lifers all – gravitated toward the charismatic young chief executive in those so-called days of Camelot.

As for Mr. Dick, the man I so desperately wished to be 1960’s winner – if only to assure my further existence on this happy little planet – well, come 1968, let’s just say my attitudes had, um, changed somewhat. At THAT point it was my equally desperate wish was for Nixon to LOSE, again so as to guarantee my remaining existence on this not-always-so-happy little planet for the then foreseeable future.

But that, folks, is ANOTHER story!…

Vote! Because, hey, you might as well.

Hembeck.com, Fred’s MySpace, or click here to send a personal message – I invite Republican and Democrats alike to pull the lever on any one or all three of these choices! And yes, Whigs too!…

-Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

 

I went to see the big Superman movie recently…

And I DO mean big!

Y’see, we drove down to the Palisades Mall, just little over an hour away, near the New York/New Jersey borderline, so as to witness the film’s potential magnificence on an IMAX screen six stories high AND in 3-D! (Okay, so not ALL of it was in 3-D, just a half-dozen specially selected sequences, but still, who can pass THAT up?…) This took a little extra planning on our part, arranging daughter Julie and wife Lynn’s schedules to coincide with an agreeable to all time for the trip, which is why, rabid Man of Steel fan that I am, we didn’t manage to take it in until a full two weeks following its nationwide premiere. During that time – and in the weeks and months leading up to the film’s noisily heralded release – I did my very best to steer clear of any spoilers that may’ve snuck out in the guise of reviews or commentary, and happily, for the most part, I did pretty well.

(Oh, and if YOU still haven’t seen the flick, but fully intend to, now’s probably as good a time as any to stop reading, as in the course of my ramblings, I’ll inevitably let a few Streakys out of the bag…)

Going in, I knew that, in addition to the late Marlon Brando, Jack Larson and Noel Neill had cameos (but since their names were in the opening credits, this wouldn’t have come as any great surprise anyway), Lois had a kid, and – thanks to MSNBC’s Hardball, apparently desperate to fill airtime in those pre-Middle East crisis days – Perry White used the phrase, “Truth, justice, and all that stuff”, leaving out the words “the American way” in some sort of conspiratorial effort to turn the Last Son of Krypton into a dirty, stinking One-worlder, but the rest was all relatively fresh to me.

So, did I like it?

Well, yeah, I suppose. I didn’t DISLIKE it, and there WAS an awful lot to admire in the film, but as I write this ten days after our journey down to the wilds of the Palisades, a lot of what made an impression on me that afternoon seems to be slowly but inexorably fading.

One thing that did surprise me – and that I liked – was how Superman Returns was structured as such a direct sequel to the very first Christopher Reeve movie (and, I suppose, portions of the inferior second one – happily, the latter two as well as the events in Supergirl appear to have been largely ignored, though I can’t honestly say this with total confidence, as I’ve only ever seen those latter three films once, and Superman 2 but twice…). 1978’s Superman The Movie remains my sentimental favorite of all cinematic comic-book adaptations, and besides shelling out five times during its initial release to see it in a darkened theater – still far and away the most times I’ve ever done THAT, as I can likely count the number of other movies I’ve paid my way into merely twice without even taking my shoes and socks off – I’ve also watched it close to a dozen times on the tube over the years. Oddly, though I bought the DVD that came out a few years back, I haven’t yet cued it up in this latest format, and I know for a fact I haven’t otherwise screened Chris Reeve’s first outing wearing the red cape since before daughter Julie was born, which is (gasp) nearly sixteen years ago now. I guess I’ve always been waiting for her to show some sort of interest in the Man Of Steel’s big screen debut before attempting to foist it on her (a mistake I made with A Hard Day’s Night about five years back, with that Beatles classic called to an abrupt halt after twenty minutes of eye-rolling boredom on her part – but, given her recent blossoming interest in the Fabs, perhaps the time is ripe for another look? Who SAID “not a second time”, hmm?…). All the elements that spilled over from the long-ago original served to peak her interest in the Reeve vehicle, and for my part, made me feel warmly towards this new go at the Superman legend.

For example…

They had me almost immediately by mimicking the original’s opening credits. Yeah, I know they went on way too long – especially back then – but I always savored them if only for the opportunity to bask in the glory of John Williams’ wonderful theme.

And that theme was back!

In a way, though, that really wasn’t fair. Because, y’know, every time it played behind some majestic feat accomplished by our hero, I couldn’t help but get a little choked up, but I had to wonder – was that because of what was happening up on the screen, or was it simply some Pavlovian nostalgic response triggered by hearing that wonderful music? Hard to say – I’ve only seen the movie once, and have no immediate plans to take it in again until the inevitable DVD is issued – but there’s no denying that if that was indeed the filmmakers intention, well, it sure worked.

Marlon Brando’s involvement was admittedly a bit eerie, but effective – especially in his scene with Luthor. A totally unexpected – but nice touch – was seeing the photos of Glenn Ford as Pa Kent on the mantle place at the Kent farm.

Of course, seeing the two veterans of the George Reeves teleseries perform their cameos (in fact, I believe Neill’s voice is the first one you hear, which I interpreted as a fond tip of the hat to the trailblazing program) was fun. And having the first (and the best) Jimmy Olsen share a scene with Sam Huntington, the screen’s latest Daily Planet cub reporter, was a quietly inspired nod to the ongoing changing of the guard that marks Siegel and Shuster’s nigh-immortal creation. (Oh, and while I liked Huntington – he played his part with enthusiasm, managing to provide the audience with some of the movies all too sparse chuckles – I felt he didn’t have quite the right look. While he was a vast improvement over Lois and Clark’s Justin Whalen, the ersatz teen-idol, I feel a more traditionally boyish Jack Larson/Marc McClure look would’ve been preferable to his far less-baby-faced visage.)

The Daily Planet globe – I don’t know if it was an exact replica of the one used in Richard Donner’s film, but it was certainly close enough to satisfyingly recall the one Superman’s seventies era director used.

Then there’s Krypton, ice capital of the universe. Ironically, that was the one aspect of the original movie that threw me at first. And why not? I grew up reading nearly two decades of Superman comics featuring Jor-el in that green sweatshirt of his with the red sun on front, a thin yellow bandanna ringing his Kryptonian cranium, situated in an environment that looked like a sci-fi extrapolation of the Arabian nights. Marlon Brando, all decked out in white, brandishing the iconic “S” symbol on his chest, well, THAT took a little getting used to!

But I did – and NOW, seeing the crystals of Krypton reborn up on the big screen was, in – as they used to say in the funny books – a strange twist of fate, somehow warmly reassuring, nostalgic even! Plus the effects were really, really cool.

And the special effects surrounding that big airplane crash – especially on the giant screen in 3-D – was breathtakingly impressive, particularly when our pal Kal lowers the stricken aircraft gently down on the baseball field to the tumultuous cheers of thousands of fans in the stands. While I didn’t mind the way this mid-air rescue echoed – and improved upon – a similar event in the 1978 film, I was less than thrilled to hear Supes cornball line about flying still being the safest way to travel being repeated almost verbatim (although who knows – maybe we’re to believe that that’s just a bit of prepared patter the Big Guy recites EVERY time he saves a plane?…).

I could’ve done without Superman STILL trying to get Lois to quit smoking – though at least here, there was a new spin offered to this tired bit.

Kevin Spacey? Best Luthor EVER! And unlike the otherwise fine Gene Hackman, he wasn’t afraid to shave his noggin! (Though the way things ended up for him, he appears more likely to resurface in an Aquaman flick before eventually moving onto the next Superman blockbuster…)

Parker Posey wasn’t quite the bombshell Valerie Perrine was (gee, whatever became of her?…), but she played her part with perhaps more convincing emotional underpinning than anyone else in the film. And not having the smooth-domed criminal genius improbably assisted by the likes of Ned Beatty’s buffoonish Otis – the original film’s one glaring misstep – but instead by a cadre of mostly mum but menacing henchmen played much better. Plus, a majority of the time, I walk out of these super-hero flicks, and almost immediately forget the bad guy’s master plan, but not this time! I’m not saying it was completely well thought out, through – Lex would’ve had a heckuva time trying to build condos on top of those displaced Kryptonian crystals I’m thinking – but it WAS both spectacular, cleverly unique to the source material, and memorable. And more than enough to give the conflicted Ms. Posey pause…

Eva Marie Saint added some quiet elegance – as well as some old time Hollywood glamour – to her role as Ma Kent, brief as it was. Frank Langella’s a long way from Transylvania, heading up things at the Daily Planet as Perry White. He did okay, but I’d still peg him fourth on a list comprised of Lane Smith, John Hamilton, and Jackie Cooper. James Marsden’s role was more a plot device than an actual character, an all too obvious obstacle – but not a bona fide bad guy – for the two star-crossed lovers (Lois and Superman, as if I need remind you) to overcome. Serviceable in a thankless role (they don’t have a category to cover that at the Oscars, do they?…).

Then there’s the kid.

He looked all the world like a Caulkin, but he wasn’t, was he? I can’t honestly say he tugged very hard at my heart-strings – and I’m a self-confessed softie. I also admit to not being very swift (SPOILER ALERT): I didn’t even realize what the big reveal was going to be until Luthor himself confronted Lois with his parentage theory! In fact, mere minutes earlier, when Superman and Lois had their first sustained conversation after his return, she ends their uncomfortable tete’ a tete’ by bitterly declaring that it’s been five years and she’s moved on. When she said that, this thought actually entered my clueless mind: “Yeah? Well, by the looks of that kid, how long’d you wait to move on – a whole week?”

D’oh!

So I think I pretty much know what the sequel’s gonna be about! Bob Haney and Murray Boltinoff would be SO proud…

(And what’s all this talk about Superman being gay? Hey, none of those OTHER guys in the tights managed to impregnate Lois Lane – that’s gotta count for SOMETHING? At most, he’s bi…)

And what about that couple anyway?

Both Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth do acceptable jobs, and evidence a fair amount of chemistry together (at least, when he’s in that bright, shiny costume – Lois treats Clark as if he’s an inconsequential acquaintance, making you long for at least even the raw contempt Phyllis Coates would show George Reeves bespeckled reporter upon occasion), but on any personal list of video Supes and squeezes, these two would find themselves way down at the bottom. (For the record, and ruling out the only briefly seen Kirk Alyn and the various Superboys, my own rankings go like this: Christopher Reeve, George Reeves, Dean Cain, and then the new guy. For Lois. it’d be Teri Hatcher, Ms. Coates, Margot Kidder, Noel Neill, and then Kate Bosworth. Maybe I just need to watch and rewatch this latest film, but I doubt my opinions would change all that much).

Routh looked good in the suit, admittedly, and spoke with the quiet authority of Christopher Reeve. Facially, though, I think he came up just a tad bit short. Hey, he’s a great looking guy – no insult meant here – and normally I wouldn’t dream of putting someone’s mug under the microscope, but this is Superman folks! Routh had the strong jaw, but otherwise, I thought his face was too long, his earlobes too flabby, and his spit curl too phony looking (and Clark’s shaggy doo made Kent look too much like a hillbilly, sorry to say). Plus, his nose was too prominent, at least for Superman. Still, he’s no Nicholas Cage, and thank Rao for THAT! Cage is a fine actor, and he can play Johnny Blaze anytime – heck, he can even play LUKE Cage if he wants! – but when his name was floated as a possible Superman several years back, my blood ran cold! With THAT face? Uh uh, wasn’t gonna work – going for the unknown is always the right move, and Routh was pretty darn close, if no Chris Reeve.

So what’ve we got? Spectacular effects, a movie that doesn’t lag, is respectful of the source material, decent writing and performances, and – according to my daughter – a flick that’s FAR better than the Pirates of the Caribbean follow-up, making it easily the second best Superman movie (if not the second best Superman) lensed thus far. And yet, and yet…

Last year’s Fantastic Four movie was lambasted by comics fans and critics alike, but for all its faults – and there were plenty, both as an adaptation and simply as a film – I remember it as a more enjoyable experience, even without the Imax and the 3-D effects. Because Fantastic Four had something Superman Returns was almost entirely devoid of: good natured humor. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised – as much as Superman was a favorite of mine as a kid, I always had a better time reading a Fantastic Four comic book (or a Spider-Man one) than I did reading the adventures of the Man of Staid. Still, the Reeve movies – not to mention the Cain and Hatcher series – managed their share of clever chuckles, so it CAN be done. Perhaps director Bryan Singer could’ve spent a little less time figuring out ways to turn Superman’s story into some sort of thinly veiled religious allegory and instead worked in a few lighter, humanizing moments? Oh lord, we can only pray he makes an attempt the next time around…

Go see it if you haven’t already. I pick nits, ’tis true, but in the end, a job well done. It was, to quote my daughter, “emo”.

In the meantime, I’m gonna try and round-up my aforementioned offspring – I think the time has finally come to slip that Superman The Movie disc into the DVD player. You remember – that’s the one where Superman saves Lois at the end, NOT the other way around?…

Visit my own Fortress of Solitude, Hembeck.com! (Or my MySpace page, or even send a personal message).

Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

With the annual San Diego Con currently in session, I thought this might be a good time to dip into the expansive Fred Sez files for my very own little convention tale – albeit an East Coast based one. Enjoy.

Odin help me, but I have absolutely ADORED this crazy painting of Marvel mogul, Stan Lee, from the very first moment I laid my poor li’l ol’ eyes on it!!

That would’ve been way back at one of those small, monthly mini-cons the late Phil Seuling regularly held in New York City during the seventies, most probably ’74 or ’75. This FOOM issue, sporting the piece as its cover, came out in late ’76, but I clearly recall having had Arnold Sawyer’s masterpiece proudly hanging on my walls for a considerable amount of time already by then. And, believe it or not, I STILL do!

Yup, along with Neal Adams’ magnificent theatrical poster for the legendary sci-fi extravaganza, WARP, this remains my most beloved piece of wall art, and as I was loading up the VCR downstairs last night, it happened to catch my eye, prompting me to think back to our very first encounter. And I also remembered that not everyone shares my exceedingly high opinion of the piece. Far from it – and, as it turned out, THAT was readily apparent right from day one…

Like I said, when I first saw it from across a crowded dealers room, I made a bee-line to the table selling it and almost immediately forked over the cash that would allow me to take home with me my very own copy of this – yes! – Pop Art Masterpiece! Hey, what’s not to like? Combined with a very skillfully done likeness of lovable ol’ Smilin’ Stan is the cleverly colorful integration of nearly a dozen of his most famous creations – AND Howard the Duck. Hey, it was the seventies, after all, and Gerber’s fowl was getting all the publicity, so it makes a certain sort of sense that his diminutive hat was included in the mix. As for the rest of ’em, I’ll bet you can all easily name each and every one of them – meaning, of course, you’ve – uh huh – spent far too much time reading @#%$ing comic books!?! Hey, join the club…

Over the ensuing years, I’d always sooner or later ask any folks who’d visit whichever room currently housed this poster just what they thought of it. The results, I’m sad to say, generally weren’t pretty. Most seemed to find it either garish, creepy, a mish-mash, or just plain ugly – and these sentiments emanated from comics fanatics and non-fans alike! Luckily, since painter Sawyer wasn’t actually involved in the comics biz, but was instead a long-time neighbor of Stan’s who did this piece to express his admiration for the Man ( AND to pocket a few bucks as well!! Hey, artists gotta eat too, y’know!…), he didn’t have to endure the slings and arrows of fourteen-year old experts. Well, not usually…

Y’see, the poor guy wasn’t immune to ALL criticism. Flash back with me one last time to that long-ago mini-con. I hadn’t started up my cartooning as of yet, so I was just another nameless fan wandering endlessly through the aisles. On maybe my 17th time circling the dealer’s room, I again found myself near the table where I’d earlier bought my rolled-up treasure. I noticed that now, sitting behind the table with its original proprietor was none other than Howard Chaykin. Well, folks, I already was a big fan of Howie’s by that point, enjoying not only his stylish artwork, but his highly individualistic approach to scripting as well. And, whenever it snuck in, his bitingly sarcastic sense of humor, too. (I subsequently met Howie on several occasions in later years, and am pleased – and somewhat relieved – to report that, yes, he was always indeed a swell guy to me! Fact is, I continue to enjoy his efforts right up to this very day – but, anecdote-wise, that’s neither here nor there….)

Back to our story, then. As I hovered around the area, hoping to overhear some memorable bon mots from one of my favorite pros, a pair of teenage boys sauntered along, eventually stopping in front of the table in question, and looked up at the poster plastered across the wall behind the sales till. They considered it for a few seconds, and then one turned to the other and muttered, “That’s just about the ugliest thing I’ve EVER seen!..”

Our man Howie apparently caught enough of this exchange to cause him to lean forward, and request that our junior art-critic repeat his assessment.

“I said, that’s gotta be the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Well, don’t tell me, ” Chaykin said, a sly smile starting to play across his face as he pointed to the fellow sitting over in the next chair, “Tell him – HE’S the one who painted it, after all!”

At which point, our roving critic virtually shrunk to Ant-Man-like proportions, his skin turning redder than that of the Vision’s. I’m not all too sure Arnold himself was all that comfortable either, but it WAS a funny exchange, in a sort of nasty, Chaykinesque manner.

Proving once again, ALWAYS be careful what you say when you’re out in public – you just never know when Howie might be listening!

Visit Hembeck.com or send a personal message via this link.

Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

Once again, we dip into the Fred Sez archives for some old nudes – er, I mean, old news.

Well, just keep reading – you’ll understand..

A few days ago, whilst trolling through a handful of my earliest issues of DC’s Detective Comics for a suitable shot of our old friend, J’onn J’onzz, to run in the our annual St.Patrick’s Day entry, I stumbled upon this once ubiquitous full page advertisement in the very first issue of that Batman-headlined publication that I’d ever purchased, the August, 1961 issue, number 294…

Granted, there’s a lot going on there, but I really wasn’t all that concerned about being tough (after all, I was reading comic books, wasn’t I?…), learning to dance, or even forking over a buck for a book chock-full of fun for boys.

Nope, it was THIS portion of that ad that caught my attention – and not entirely because I liked to draw for fun, either!

Remember, folks, this was 1961. The Comics Code had been ruling with an iron fist for little over half a decade by that point, and they carefully scrutinized everything for objectionable content before a book made it anywhere near a newsstand – and I mean EVERYTHING! They probably even gave the staples the once over in that era of heavy-handed self-censorship!

So how, I’ve always wondered, did THIS ever get past them?

And not just once, but month after month – and not in some quasi-sleazy IW reprint sold in plastic bags in the nation’s bargain outlets, either – uh uh – but in books issued by industry leader National Periodical Publications no less!

Not sure what I’m talking about yet? Well, here’s an even CLOSER look…

That’s right – she’s NAKED!!

AND brazenly colored in warm pink hues, just so there’d be absolutely no mistake about our shapely young model’s lack of attire!!

Geez, talk about your fun for boys!?!..

This ad has ALWAYS baffled me. Were the Comics Code people on some sort of mind-numbing flu medication the first time this thing slipped through, with its continued appearances just a matter of lucky ongoing neglect?

Whatever it was, let’s face it – there were quite a few little boys out there aping the excitement of our overly animated cartoon friend pictured directly below the not-so-modest Miss back in that woefully flesh-deprived era.

Not ME, of course. I was SHOCKED, shocked I tell you!

(And I’m gonna KEEP telling you that until you believe me! However long it takes, I’ve got the time…)

Visit Hembeck.com, Fred’s MySpace page, or send a personal message via this link.

Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

 

Did you have a safe and happy Fourth of July, friends? Still got all the fingers you had on the THIRD of July? Here’s hoping.

Things were pretty busy roundabouts here at Chez’ Hembeck, so, begging your indulgence, we’re dipping into the Fred Sez archives once again. This time we feature a little piece I wrote in late 2003. I hope you’ll enjoy it…

Recently, the Bravo network ran several specials presenting what they opined to be the 100 Greatest TV Characters, EVER!

No, I didn’t watch, as I find these sort of things to be invariably frustrating, since at their core, they’re merely an accumulation of some faceless folk’s personal prejudices, and I’d rather not get myself all in an uproar barking at my poor, innocent television screen that, hey, Lucy Ricardo should be the number one choice, not Archie Bunker (yeah, I’ll admit it: I saw a list of the list. Believe me, that was far simpler than slogging through all those hours of clips…)

Still, that doesn’t mean I’m not susceptible to trying a little of my own List-mania!…

(…as opposed to Lizstomania, that awful Ken Russell flick that had The Who’s Roger Daltrey cast in the title role – with Yes’s Rick Wakeman inexplicably cameoing in a Kirby designed Thor outfit! But THAT’S another topic altogether…)

But my list is simply MY list – and I’m certainly not going to attempt to name the Greatest, the Funniest, and most assuredly not the BEST characters ever to grace the tube. Uh uh. My focus concerns a baker’s dozen of characters who, whenever they show up on my television set, a smile immediately dances across my face, and I confess to pretty much laughing before they even DO anything! Now, these aren’t your beloved Ernie Bilkos, Rob Petries, or Frasier Cranes, all of whom possessed the force of personality to headline some of the best comedies in the medium’s more than half century history. Those comedic personas were inhabited by gifted performers who brought to life and greatly enhanced already top-notch material.

The list I’M compiling is made up simply of actors (all male as it turns out) who, merely by way of their look, their voice, or their attitude, meant instant chuckles when they moseyed onto the scene. Most were second bananas, most were decidedly odd, and ALL of them still manage to break me up each and every time!

So, in no particular order, and with no additional commentary, I present you with my list of the 13 Characters Who Never Fail To Break Me Up Each And Every Time! (…okay, okay – so the title needs work. Don’t linger – just keep reading…)

1. Ed Norton (Art Carney, The Honeymooners)

2. Count Floyd (Joe Flaherty, SCTV)

3. Eddie Haskell (Ken Osmond, Leave It To Beaver)

4. Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson, Mr. Bean)

5. Sgt. Rupert Ritzik/Officer Gunther Toody (Joe E. Ross, Sgt. Bilko/ Car 54, Where Are You?)

6. Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens, Pee Wee’s Playhouse and especially any and all appearances he made while strictly maintaining character guesting on various talk and variety programs)

7. Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver, The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis)

8. Reverend Jim (Christopher Lloyd, Taxi)

9. Sgt. Vince Carter (Frank Sutton, Gomer Pyle, USMC)

10. SpongeBob SquarePants (Voice of Tom Kenny, created by Steve Hillenburg, SpongeBob SquarePants)

11. Soupy Sales (Soupy Sales, The Soupy Sales Show)

12. Ted Baxter (Ted Knight, Mary Tyler Moore Show)

13. Barney Fife (Don Knotts, Andy Griffith Show)

There you have it – a motley crew of goofballs if ever there was one. Please note that I consolidated Joe E. “Oo! Oo!” Ross’s two roles into one entry, as they were essentially the same character – both married to the same TV wife, and both working for the same producer, the legendary Nat Hiken. This was a unique circumstance, as the glory of Maynard G. Krebs did clearly not carry over for Bob Denver in his role as the just plain moronic Gilligan – and the less said about Ted Knight on Too Close For Comfort, the better!!

Soupy Sales, I realize, isn’t quite a character unto himself, but neither is he a stand-up comic or talk show host, folks I disqualified from consideration right off the bat, but he might just as well have been. Plus, he always, ALWAYS made me laugh, so…

Then there’s Gomer Pyle. He ALMOST made the cut, particularly when he was a supporting character on the Andy Griffith Show, but when he received his own spin-off, his personality became just a bit too candy-coated to be incessantly amusing – but the shift opened the way for the criminally under appreciated Frank Sutton to shine as the perpetually flustered Sgt. Carter. The Pyle show didn’t have the best writing (though they had far from the era’s worst), but the sitcom derived an awful lot of laughs from the pairing of this deliciously mismatched duo!

And you’ve probably caught on by now, but I really DO like that SpongeBob fella!

Those who just missed making the list include Cosmo Kramer, Homer Simpson, Mr. Fields (Abbott and Costello’s belligerent landlord), Al Lewis’ Sgt. Leo Schnauser, and the Fonz – who would’ve easily earned himself a spot had Happy Days been cancelled after a mere two seasons! Instead, he went on to do that stunt where he jumped the shark, and well – THAT’S a whole ‘another website, one with their OWN set of lists!…

(And on YOUR list of things to do, I’m hoping visiting Hembeck.com (or Fred’s MySpace page, or sending me a personal message) is on or near the very top of it! Or at least not TOO close to the bottom…)

Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

 

A few weeks back, I left my generally cloistered existence and headed down to the Big City – NYC, for those of you keeping score at home – where I attended the first day of the fifth annual MoCCA Art Festival. You can read all about it (as well as gape at nearly fifty on the spot shots we snapped with our handy dandy digital camera) if you follow this link over to the page dedicated to the event on my home site, the cleverly monikered Hembeck.com. For those of you with limited attention spans, a quick recap of the afternoon goes something like this: daughter Julie and I had one heckuva time, thanks primarily to our guide for the day, Jim Salicrup, and our friends Rocco, Kara, and Bill, who accompanied us. But when all was said and done, I belatedly realized there was something I’d inadvertently neglected that day:

The comic books.

Everybody had ’em, everybody was hawking ’em. But in case you’re not clear on this point, this was no ordinary comics convention – this was a massive gathering of indy creators (and I’m NOT talking about the current rights holder of Indiana Jones, friends!…). There MAY’VE been a super-hero comic or two somewhere on the premises, but I’m betting you’d have to look pretty darn hard to find it. No, with publishers like Fantagraphics, NBM, and Top Shelf among the more established names, this was definitely NOT the place to catch up on the latest Civil Crisis or what not!

Fellow Quick Stop columnist – and Big Apple denizen – Peter Sanderson expressed mild surprise at my presence, as he figured me as more of a capes and tights devotee (that’s as far as comics go, I’m assuming – otherwise, I’m busted! Heh…). I realize a lot of folks have that impression, due primarily to the various cartoons I’ve done over the years, and while it’s certainly true that I have a long and abiding affection for the genre, it’s not the ONLY type of funnybooks I enjoy. Ever since I first began scarfing up that initial wave of underground comix back in the late sixties, there’s always been a part of me that craved non-fantasy material done by artists completely unfettered by censorship and (in the traditional sense) commercial concerns. Following the halcyon days of Crumb, Spain, Jaxon, Shelton and so many others, I quickly became enamored by the work of such emerging alternative cartoonists as Peter Bagge, Roberta Gregory, Seth, Joe Matt, the Hernandez Brothers, Chester Brown, to name but a few. Thing was, though, each and every one of those artists drew their characters in their own highly individualistic style – often with an already cartoony bent – making it near impossible for me to transform them over into my own idiosyncratic style (I have the same basic problem with such humor icons as Little Lulu, Dennis the Menace, and, to a lesser extent, Archie and the gang). So, given the choice of having Cartoon Fred interview, say, Bagge’s Studs Kirby or Iron Man, Iron Man always won out. I didn’t have the tough task of drawing a character just the way it’s creator did for it to be at all recognizable, y’see – I only had to replicate a costume on one of my own goofy cartoon bodies to get my point across.

Plus, let’s face it, there’s a LOT more to mock (however, ahem, playfully) with the costumed crime fighter set than with characters that are either already satirical or else trying to evoke a sense of reality, so that’s primarily what I’ve done over the years. And along the way, understandably, folks – like Peter – may’ve gotten the impression that that’s ALL I liked.

Nope. Not true.

However, what IS true is that I haven’t been paying much attention to ANY current releases in recent years, whether they feature garishly garbed guys pounding the crap out of each other or slovenly attired anarchists with attitude. Mostly, I’ve been reading reprints, either of material from my childhood or else some of the choicer stuff that predated it. Y’know, there’s just something almost mystically appealing to me about re-experiencing an old Carmine Infantino Flash story from years gone by on crisp white paper, the radiant colors practically shimmering off the page, the sumptuous aroma of “new book” wafting up noseward following the ritualistic breaking of the protective cellophane!

So, even though I met a lot of folks at MoCCA that day (mostly courtesy of Jim), in retrospect, I did woefully little to investigate the multitude of offerings available for sale throughout the hall. Fact is, when all was said and done, I only brought home two major works: Drawing Comics Is Easy (Except When It’s Hard) by Denis Kitchen’s seven-year old (!!) daughter, Alexa, and Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson (there was, apparently, nothing by Alex Ross on sale, much less the late Alex Toth…). I was intrigued by both the novelty aspects – and the amazing quality – of young Ms. Kitchen’s book, but another time for that. Today I’m going to be talking about Box Office Poison.

Why, out of all the possible books I could’ve bought, did I ultimately decide to focus my attention on Box Office Poison? Well, sometimes size DOES matter…

Y’see, I’d come across the massive six-hundred page plus volume several times in the past while perusing with mild curiosity – but with absolutely no intention of parting with any cash – the comics and graphic novels section of my local Barnes and Noble. I’d remembered the name Box Office Poison from back in the nineties because I’d come across it seemingly every issue while filling out my monthly Diamond Previews order form – but even though the name intrigued me, I’d skip right past it each and every time. And why not? It was being published by one of those small companies that I’d never ordered anything from, and I didn’t know this Alex Robinson guy from Will Robinson! Maybe it was good, granted, but hey, there was – and is – so much stuff out there, it’s more than a little chancy investing in a complete unknown, sight unseen. I had in fact tried said sampling method several times in the past, purchasing material that, on the face of things had more than a passing resemblance to Box Office Poison, and generally speaking, it was NOT money well spent. So, as the years went on, my willingness to experiment diminished quickly and surely.

But when I saw a copy of the book on the shelves of Barnes and Noble – now under the aegis of Top Shelf, a well-respected publisher – I couldn’t help but mutter to myself, “Huh – guess this thing must be fairly decent after all” and picked up a copy to page through.

Like I said, dig that massive size! It was like one of those Marvel Essentials, only on way better paper and with far less spandex. And the artwork looked pretty good too. I’ll admit it – I was tempted, but then I remembered: hey, I’m trying to buy less comics these days, not more! So I put it back down, and wandered away to buy the latest issue of MOJO instead. But the memory lingered, and when Jim Salicrup mentioned that Alex Robinson was over at the Top Shelf table, selling and signing books, I knew what I had to do.

Jim took me over and introduced me to Alex (Jim knows EVERYONE, y’see), who, it turns out, met me at a convention several decades back. I’d even done a sketch for him and – luckily for me – was on my best behavior (i.e. I didn’t curse him out and cause him to flee from my table in tears)! He even professed to be a fan of mine, and generously gave me a nice discount on the book (even indy comics artists with books in large retail chains can’t quite afford to give away their wares willy nilly, after all…). I asked him which one he’d recommend, and though he personally prefers his latest endeavor, Tricked, we both eventually agreed that it might be better to start out with the book that made him his name, the aforementioned Box Office Poison.

After a few more minutes of pleasant small talk, I took my leave, and shoved my latest treasure into Julie’s back-pack (and then lugged the increasingly heavy thing around the rest of the @#$%ing day, but that’s a whole “NOTHER issue!…).

Thirteen days later, right on the heels of completing the Ant-Man/Giant-Man Marvel Masterworks (Volume 1), in lieu of moving on to the Sgt. Fury Masterworks as I’d originally planned, I decided on a whim to sit down and read this MoCCA memento thingie instead. That may not sound very impressive to you, but at this stage of my life, that’s pretty much analogous with my ten-year old self tearing open the cover of Fantastic Four #34 in the back seat of my parents car only scant moments after ponying up the shekels to buy it!

Now, please understand something. I’m not a critic, not really. Oh, I’ve tried my hand at the whole analyze and dissect game in the past, but I can’t honestly say I’ve managed to come anywhere near the level established by truly analytical comic book critics like our own Mr. Sanderson. No, I’m mostly a guy who reads (or sees or listens to) something, and then tells you whether he likes it or not, maybe throwing in a few pithy reasons to justify his opinion, but never enough deep thinking to hurt your (or – more importantly – MY) head.

So, given those low-level qualifications, WHAT, you may wonder, did I think of Box Office Poison?

I LOVED IT!

It may not’ve been Maus or Watchmen, but y’know what? I was so enthralled with the thing while I was reading it, it just might just as well’ve been! It took me three nights to get through – the days of wading through six-hundred pages in a single sitting are long gone – but the second night I genuinely regretted the need to put it down, and the third night, well, I vowed I wouldn’t stop until I finished! It’s been a LOONNNG time since I was that motivated to read me a comic, lemme tell ya!

So, what’s it about (besides “about six-hundred pages” – haw, haw…)? Well, don’t expect a rambling recounting of the book’s plot from me – instead, I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. The story follows a group of city-dwellers in their post-college years, and the two most central to the action are former roommates, Sherman and Ed. Sherman is a frustrated writer working a job he hates in a book store. During the course of this epic, he meets Dorothy, and the ups and downs of their uneven relationship is expertly charted by author Robinson. Ed, on the other hand, is an aspiring comic book artist who longs to work for the mainstream, but instead finds himself hired to be the assistant of an elderly cartoonist – one who just happened to dream up the character Nightstalker decades earlier, a creation that he reaps absolutely no benefits from despite the massive success the property now exhibits in a multitude of media. Ed tries to get some justice – and some much needed bucks – for his cranky mentor from Zoom Comics, and only someone conversant with the actual history of the medium as Alex Robinson apparently is could paint as convincing a portrait of the ins and outs of the funny book field as we witness here.

And there’s so very, very much more (a sequence involving a Santa Claus suit brought a lump to my throat, old softie that I am…), but that’s the main thrust of things. The writing is crisp, the dialog convincingly naturalistic. The plot turns are largely surprising, and not at all what one might readily expect. For example, there’s one character that keeps popping up throughout the first half of the book, seemingly unrelated to the main protagonists. When the connection is finally revealed towards the end of the book, it’s done in such a subtle manner as to nonetheless startle the reader (….and how’s THAT for talking around a key surprise without actually giving anything away? It wasn’t easy…)! The author’s rewritten version of comics history is at once, knowing, satirical, and affectionate. Hey, WHO knew cartoonists wore toupees?..

The artwork is very good. Some of the backgrounds in the opening pages are a little funky, but Robinson soon hits his stride, and plops his cast down into a visually convincing environment. The spotting of blacks, grays, and whites seems balanced just right, and the storytelling is always clear, even on those occasions when it gets a little showy (a sequence building up to an illicit kiss, though inventive, does seem to go on a bit longer than necessary, however). Each character in the large cast, even the minor ones, are unique enough to always be readily identifiable (though I found the rather outsized head of ancient cartoonist Irving Flavor to be disconcerting at times, as it seemed too blatantly out of proportion with the rest of the gang. However it was probably just one of those things – once you commit to the way a character looks when he’s first introduced on page 97, well, you pretty much have to follow through on model all the way to the end.).

Like I said, this thing was a joy to read. Despite liberal use of the ever popular “f” word – and intermittent glances at our heroes private parts – this is a very warm group of characters, and their story is mostly an uplifting one, if bittersweet at times. Look, I’m not exactly sure where this would place in the pantheon of today’s most celebrated graphic novels – I haven’t read enough of ’em to offer an educated opinion – but I really, really enjoyed the time I spent with this book, and it only makes me all the more anxious to find a copy of Tricked and give that the once over!

(And y’know, if you’re the sort who looks a little askance at the whole indy movement, and instead feels most comfortable with the fellows in funny outfits, this may well be the perfect book for you to check out, since there’s plenty enough knowing story points concerning the world of mainstream comics to hold your attention! And, along the way, you just might find the REST of the story of interest as well!…)

So okay, maybe I didn’t give most of the wares offered at MoCCA that day enough of my attention, but in the end, I guess I still somehow wound up buying just the right book! Because Box Office Poison just may prove to be my long overdue gateway back into the world in indy comics!

Y’know, Dum Dum, Happy Sam, Pinky, Gabe, Dino, Reb and all the rest may just have to wait a bit – there’s a book over on the shelf that my buddy Rocco convinced me to buy a few years back that I still haven’t gotten to. A little something called Blankets. I think maybe I’ll give THAT a read instead…

Find more of my facile musings over at Hembeck.com, my MySpace page, or contact me directly via this link.

Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

It happened to Leave It To Beaver, it happened to Taxi, it even happened to Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and now it’s happened to The Fred Hembeck Show as well!

WHAT happened? Well, the three programs mentioned above each successfully switched networks during their illustrious runs, and we’re hoping that The Fred Hembeck Show can make a similar smooth transition as we move over to the brand spanking new Quick Stop Entertainment site after posting 61 previous episodes over at the IGN Comics page. We wish our old friends there well, and thank them for the opportunity to launch this weekly web extravaganza of ours. Happily, we’ll still be working under the keen stewardship of newly anointed Quick Stop maven, Ken Plume, and while we don’t plan any radical departures from what went before, there are a few new quirks now available to us due to the switcheroo:

We can swear if we want to.

“@#$%” generally works for me, so I’ll save the f word for those precious moments at home when my darlin’ daughter does something to REALLY get on my nerves!

We can show a little skin!

I guarantee you, though, the minute I decide it’s time to flash you my nipple, we’re ALL in trouble! So, don’t hold your breath…

Most importantly, comics no longer have to be the focal point of every single episode! Oh, don’t worry – there’ll still be plenty of funnybook talk, but we’ll also be able to stray off into other areas of popular culture without having to go through any gyrations to force a comics connection onto the topic so as to make it palatable.

And so, with that in mind – and in honor of Sir Paul’s recent 64th birthday – I’d like to share with you something plucked from the Hembeck.com archives (my home site, for you new readers) that I wrote over two years ago to mark the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of The Beatles initial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show – which just coincidentally was the fortieth anniversary of the day I became a life-long fan!(Hey, look – Beaver, Buffy, Taxi – they all had summer reruns too, y’know! It’s a grand old tradition!)And now, on with our really big reminisce…On Saturday, February 8th, 1964, I was an 11 year-old boy, one who nurtured such a total disdain for the state of popular music as it then stood that my favorite singer was, by far, Al Jolson.

That’s right, folks – the fellow who regularly got down on one knee, face blackened in the now dubiously regarded but nonetheless historic minstrel show tradition, and beseechingly sang to his poor “Mammy”! Hey please understand, the guy WAS the biggest star in the world at one time, y’know, even if he DID peak just as the Roaring Twenties morphed unmercifully into the Great Depression.

My dad always talked him up, y’see, and when television broadcast his bio-pic, “The Jolson Story”, well, that was a major event in the Hembeck household, lemme tell ya! I sat enchanted in front of the tube as a fellow by the name of Larry Parks, in best proto-Milli Vanilli mode, lip-synced the master’s bombastic crooning. Of course, a great deal of my initial fascination with the storied performer was directly due to his pivotal role in the history of American cinema: that being, namely his starring role in the very first full-length – if only partial – talking picture, 1927’s The Jazz Singer.

Back in the early sixties, that still seemed like quite the notable accomplishment. A “Movies 101” gimme. Three and a half decades after the fact, it was still fresh enough in the collective consciousness to clearly be viewed as a landmark by many. Nowadays, however, the whole affair appears to have mostly been forgotten and/or ignored. Reports that the film was basically a fairly lugubrious melodrama with a few lines of dialog and a couple of songs thrown in probably didn’t aid in The Jazz Singer‘s long-term cinematic stature. And that embarrassing black-face make-up? I’d venture THAT probably didn’t help any either…

But nearly 20 years later, 1946’s The Jolson Story was met with such surprising success upon its release that it not only revived the celebrated vaudevillian’s floundering career, but even spawned a sequel three years later entitled Jolson Sings Again! When the man long billed as “The World’s Greatest Entertainer” died a year afterwards, he went out on top, and left a large legend for future generations of admirers to conjure with. Admirers apparently like me. After all, how could I NOT be impressed? Besides breaking the sound barrier decades before Chuck Yeager, here was a guy with a life so big it took not one but TWO major motion pictures to tell his story? Louis Pasteur made do with one flick – for Jolson, they needed a pair! Now, I ask you – how could anyone or anything possibly top THAT, hmm?…

Yes, Jolsonmania reigned in my own little corner of the world. My parents, life-long admirers of Lawrence Welk and musicians of his ilk, rarely if ever had their radio tuned to a station spewing out the wild and discordant sounds of rude, raucous rock and roll, and that was just fine with me. I held the entire scene in self-righteous contempt. On the one hand, I surmised, the music seemed to be the product of a group of wild men (Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and their beat-crazy brethren, a gang I found vastly unappealing and even vaguely frightening), or conversely, pompadoured crooners mouthing inane lyrics at a mildly accelerated pace, all suspiciously named “Bobby”, their entire persona’s specifically aimed towards selling black vinyl to gullible pre-teen girls. Either way, I didn’t want anything at all to do with the whole misbegotten genre – and that was years before I even KNEW what the word “genre” meant, much less “misbegotten”!…

Remarkably, up until the following Sunday afternoon, there were only a small handful of popular recordings that had somehow managed to register in my stubborn subconsciousness. My earliest musical memory? Elvis barking out “Hound Dog”. That’s a tough one to forget, friends. Why, at the oh-so-tender age of six, I can still distinctly recall thinking, geez, I’d sure never heard anything like THIS before! But perhaps being so young accounted for the impression left being substantially more negative than it was positive. Outside of “All Shook Up”, I don’t recall any of the King’s other classics wending their way deep into my cerebellum. Most of the other tunes that did manage to stick were novelty songs of one type or another…

“Big Bad John”, sung with a grave solemness by future pork sausage tycoon, Jimmy Dean, made a lasting impression (I gave up ALL thoughts of pursuing a mining life, for instance…). And despite what’s been said over the ensuing years in regards to the, ahem, “hidden” drug references in “Puff The Magic Dragon”, I still have to fight back a tear every time I hear Peter, Paul and Mary sing of poor little Jackie Paper’s sad if inevitable demise. OTHER, um, emotions were stirred up whenever I heard Brian Hyland’s mildly salacious “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini”, and the Rooftop Singers chart-topping “Walk Right In” was a perennial favorite as much for its innate catchiness as the for the cleverly modified lyrics the pint-sized Lenny Bruce’s in my neighborhood invariably came up with, ever hoping to liven up the rather pedestrian words!

Not that I ever actually OWNED any of these records, mind you. I’d only gotten my very first portable record player a mere 53 weeks earlier as a gift for my tenth birthday. Inasmuch as my folks seemed pleased enough previously to rely totally on the radio for their source for all sounds melodic, it automatically doubled then as a valued component of the now-burgeoning Hembeck family music center. And let me explain something – the Hembeck family in general found the price of long-playing record albums – generally roundabout three bucks a pop in those days – to be, yes, prohibitively overpriced! Certainly, the accepted theory went, why waste money buying THOSE records when perfectly fine – albeit budget-price – knockoffs could be had for a paltry dollar a disc? Why plunk down the cash for the REAL Al Jolson disc when for but a third the cost, you could get yourself an LP featuring a perfectly decent sound-alike doing all his most famous numbers – AND blatantly made-up in black-face on the cover, too, to boot? Yup, it’s true – I never actually owned a TRUE Jolson recording! But somehow, after watching his life unfold in the guise of Larry Parks on the tube, the ersatz version sufficed. In fact, for that whole first year, our record collection was totally composed of cheaply priced analog’s of the era’s light sounds, with but one exceptional exception: Hayley Mills’ “Let’s Get Together”…

What can I say? I’d been hopelessly smitten with the adorable British lass ever since I’d seen her up on the big screen in 1961’s The Parent Trap, which was home to this tune’s first appearance. Apparently, the 45 RPM being a few years old by the time I moseyed along and gleefully snapped it up, it was most likely priced to move. That was just swell by me – it was a pleasant reminder of a rare if memorable afternoon spent sitting in a darkened movie theater, watching a tousle-haired goddess – times TWO! And, as it turned out, the song served as a portent of the future as well. Y’see, for those of you unaware of this now-mostly forgotten Disney ditty, sung by the English actress, the catchy chorus cheerfully repeats the phrase, “Let’s get together, yeah, yeah, yeah!…” over and over.

I share all this seemingly extraneous detail with you so as to better present a sense of just precisely where I was coming from early in 1964. How, despite the fact that this oddly monikered group of mop-topped musicians had a record perched at the summit of the charts – a little something called “I Want To Hold Your Hand” – I could still be willfully ignorant of most everything concerning this latest overblown craze, save for perhaps a vague if begrudging acknowledgment on my behalf of their very existence. I knew about ’em – I just didn’t want to KNOW about ’em, dig? Rock and roll music was for juvenile delinquents, and pop music was for girls, and I felt absolutely no desire to be the slightest bit interested in either. But y’know, even the formidable barrier of close-mindedness that a pre-teen boy is all too capable of erecting can be breached if its pummeled often and long enough…

It all started when my dad brought home the Sunday papers that cold February afternoon. For reasons lost to the mists of time, besides his three standard purchases – the Sunday Daily News, Newsday, and the Long Island Press – he also brought home a copy of the soon to be defunct Journal American (at least, I THINK that’s what it was…). Floating up above the paper’s logo was a cartoony drawing of four shaggy heads of hair – sans the heads! This provocative illustration, shilling for an article found within heralding the English lads American debut that very evening on the Ed Sullivan program, somehow snared my attention and soon weaseled its way deep into my imagination. For the first time, I paused for a moment and truly wondered just what all this fuss about these four long-haired musicians from the U.K. was really all about…

Though it may be exceedingly difficult for those of you who weren’t there at the time to fathom, something ultimately as trivial as the length of these Beatle-boy’s hair was more than enough to intrigue many a usually uninterested observer, myself definitely included. EVERYONE, man and boy alike, maintained a short hairstyle in the early sixties. Even our popular westerns heroes, proliferating as they were all over the tube at the time, had nary a stray lock hanging out of place under their ten-gallon hats, flying totally in the face of historical evidence that indisputably proved otherwise. We were, simply put, an uptight, regimented, buzz-cut culture. And here were four young men armed with the sheer audacity to literally let their hair down – hey, how could I NOT be intrigued?

But still I was ambivalent. I felt I needed more evidence. After all, if it was just an outrageous image they were selling, well, for THAT, I really didn’t need to get involved. Instead, I was curious to see how their music shaped up. Now, in retrospect, I suppose I could’ve merely flicked on the AM radio and found any number of Beatles tunes giddily streaming out of the speaker, but I wasn’t nearly hip enough to the process at that point to conceive that plan of action. I never actually listened to THOSE stations, y’see, so it just didn’t occur to me at the time. I thought instead of my next door neighbors, the McGuiness family. My little pal John was three years younger than I was, and had even less use for this whole music scene than I did, but I was reasonably sure his two older sisters didn’t feel the same way. After checking with him, it turned out that his oldest sister, Jane, did indeed own a Beatles record. So, after some mild cajoling, he convinced her to lend it to me briefly. I’d give it a spin, sorta taking it out for what amounted to a test run…

No, it WASN’T “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, but rather the tune that would soon enough take the Liverpudlians to the top of the American Pop Charts for a second – though hardly last – time – “She Loves You”. Initially issued on the tiny Swan label, I took the small 45, inserted my handy-dandy adapter into the center hole, dropped the needle onto the opening groove, and sat back, listening with great interest…

I liked what I heard. A lot.

There was a freshness to the sound, a palpable sense of joy that, emanating as it was from a barely serviceable set of speakers, nonetheless projected upon me the most profound musical impression my ears had yet to encounter. But, tough sell that I was, I still wasn’t thoroughly convinced. Anybody can get lucky ONCE, I calmly surmised. So, I turned the record over. Now, even given the meager state of my singles collection up to that point, I was well aware that the B-side of most any record was little more a throw-away, and I had yet to come across one that’d had any sort of lasting impact. I wondered, then, what would happen when I flipped THIS disc over…

The tune in question was “I’ll Get You”. Now, gazing back on things from the vantage point of four accumulated decades, this minor composition hardly stands out in the Lennon-McCartney canon, even when measured against just their earliest recordings. There’s a sing-song like quality to the chorus that, let’s face it, hardly screams out, “Rock and Roll”! The fact is, I rarely recall it getting much, if any airplay, even in those heady months of wall-to-wall Beatlemania that followed the Sullivan gig. And yet, and yet…

When I listened to it for the first time, following directly in the wake of the justly more famous “She Loves You”, I was immediately charmed! Slight though it may’ve been, it nonetheless exuded a gleeful sincerity that was hard to deny. After but a single spin, I found myself happily muttering the chorus to myself. “I’ll get you, I’ll get you in the end, yes I will, I’ll get you in the end, oh yeah, oh yeah” – oh YEAH, they got me in the end, all right!…

You all have a pretty good idea what happens next, right? After returning to its rightful owner this little piece of black plastic that had effectively changed my young life, like millions of others, I sat down in front of my TV set later that landmark evening and tuned into the Ed Sullivan Show to watch, transfixed, as the Beatles took the country by storm by sheer force of their youthful exuberance and spirited musicianship. And they didn’t even play “I’ll Get You”!!…

The transformation was immediate and complete – from that point on, Al Jolson truly WAS history, as I, like so many others of my generation, had found our collective voice in this charismatically talented quartet from across the sea…

Soon after, I went out and sprung for my first fully priced 45, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” backed with yet ANOTHER even more brilliant B-side, “I Saw Her Standing There”. Needless to say, I played it over and over and over AND over!! I vividly recall getting up early one morning – never a happy chore for moi, I assure you – just so that I could give this precious piece of plastic a few extra spins before trudging off to school that otherwise-dreary day. Not long afterwards, I became the proud owner of one of those new-fangled tiny transistor radios, the dial of which was ALWAYS tuned in to NYC’s WABeatleC – and NEVER far from my ear!

And since the DJs only played Beatles music about, oh, roughly seventy per cent of the time, I soon learned there was a lot more to pop music than “Puff the Magic Dragon”, a WHOLE lot more! Early Rock and Roll, it turned out, was actually pretty exciting, once you developed a taste for it! And did I EVER! Even more amazing, it turned out that some of those Bobbys were actually pretty talented (Bobby Vee, Bobby Darin), some were sorta tolerable (Bobby Vinton), and some, well, some were NEVER heard from again after the sun came up on February 10th (Bobby Rydell – seriously, now, has anybody EVER heard one of the many alleged hits he chalked up prior to that fateful night? I never heard any of them played subsequently as oldies, even on stations that regularly pumped Fabian’s warblings out into the ether of the airwaves…)! The Beatles, simply put, opened my eyes – AND my ears – to so very much. It’s almost inconceivable to me that my wavering decision to reluctantly approach them with an open mind hinged on the chance purchase of a stray Sunday newspaper AND the modest merits of a quaint little B-side entitled “I’ll Get You”!?!…

THAT’S how my life-long devotion – some might say “obsession” – to John, Paul, George, and Ringo began. That’s how I met the Beatles. The story hardly stopped there, however. To quote the first words uttered on the silver screen long-ago by my erstwhile singing idol, “You ain’t heard NOTHIN’ yet!” and indeed, folks, we hadn’t.

But ANOTHER time for those tales, worry not…

And that’s all for this week friends, but you can always find more of me over at

Hembeck.com, on Fred’s MySpace Page, or you can contact me directly by going here. If you’re looking for porn, well, you’re on your own, pal – and no, I’m STILL not gonna show you my nipple! Although, who knows what’ll happen NEXT week, so I guess you’d all better come back, huh?

Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck

In the arena of popular culture, May is always one of the saddest months.

Why?

Well, because invariably, some long-running and beloved television show comes to the end of their line during season-ending sweeps. Sometimes there’s even a nationwide frenzy surrounding a treasured program’s demise, the most extreme example to date of mass audience mourning being the overheated reaction to the Seinfeld finale of several years back. But whether it’s an over the top reaction such as the farewell afforded Jerry and his associates, or the more low-key bye-bye’s directed towards several of this year’s departing programs – like The West Wing and Malcolm In The Middle, or the slightly more elaborate send-off’s bestowed upon Will and Grace and That 70’s Show – America annually gets out their collective hankies to bid adieu to some of their favorite TV characters.

Except, of course, when those TV characters originated inside the pages of a pulpy four-color comic book.

Think about it – has there ever been a comics-related show that went off the air blissfully wallowing in a country-wide swathe of melancholia? Back when the iconic Adventures of Superman shut down production, people weren’t yet conditioned to mourn the passing of a favorite television show much the way they would a close relative – and besides, until George Reeves met his unfortunate end, there was always a possibility of that show coming back for yet another season.

Then there was Batman.

When that Adam West camp-fest burst onto the scene in January of 1966, it was an immediate sensation, the likes of which had rarely been seen before – or since. Little over two years later, though, it quietly limped off the air, its welcome worn out in seeming record time. There were no “Final Batman episode” parties in March of “˜68, folks! (Though, considering what I’ve written about the show in the past, you can be excused for thinking that yours truly may’ve been throwing a celebratory shindig that very evening – but no, didn’t happen”¦)

After that, what have we got? Spider-Man? The Flash? Sable? Birds of Prey, fer gosh sakes? None of those shows lasted long enough for most Americans to even realize they were ON the air, so there was certainly no sentimental outpouring when they left those selfsame airwaves. And syndicated offerings like Swamp Thing, Superboy, and Night Man were off in their own obscure corners of the ever-expanding television schedule, so only their loyalist fans ever took the time to shed a tear or two when their inevitable end came.

The Incredible Hulk? Wonder Woman? Both shows had decent runs, true, but I wouldn’t term either one an across the board hit, either. I’ll be honest here – I only ever watched the debut episode of The Incredible Hulk (though I DID catch the trio of latter day reunion telefilms, which I suppose, was SOME evidence of the show’s enduring appeal amongst a more general public), and just a handful of Wonder Woman episodes, mostly in its forties-era situated initial season. Without actually having viewed their final shows, I’m reasonably certain that they WEREN’T the sort of “hail and farewell, tie up all loose ends” thingies that Friends, Cheers, and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer got to go out on. I think that’s mainly due to the fact that these shows don’t actually go out on their own terms, but were canceled while still desperately trying to hang on.

Which brings us to Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

This show ran four seasons on ABC and was a mild hit for the network. I liked it quite a bit myself (well, at least until the last season, but more on that in a moment). The series was a lot of fun, a nicely done mix of comedy, romance, and adventure, ably acted by an attractive cast. Hey, sorry Noel, Phyllis, and Margot – Teri Hatcher immediately became my favorite Lois Lane – AND the main reason I took a chance on Desperate Housewives last year! Dean Cain did a fine job as well, though I always thought it was interesting that he was made to look more appealing as Clark Kent, with the often wind-swept hair, than he was as Superman, who generally had HIS locks slicked entirely back, making him look like a muscle-bound Gilbert Gottfried! Well, at least he didn’t SOUND like him too”¦Things all went suddenly, shockingly downhill when the pair got hitched during the last season – and no, I wouldn’t blame the show’s deterioration on the mere fact that Lois and Clark married. The concept COULD’VE worked, but only with decent writing, but sadly, decent writing was nowhere to be found that last season. Truth is, I STILL have several of the program’s last episodes on tape somewhere, unwatched. I MEANT to get to them, honest I did, but somehow, I could never quite bring myself to do so, not with the memory of that horrific wedding episode still fresh in mind. I hear tell the couple were thinking about having a baby, but even that intriguing potential storyline wasn’t enough to save the show, and after such a promising start – both quality and popularity-wise – it simply vanished from sight in the spring of 1996. Faster than a speeding bullet indeed”¦

(Gee, y’know, that kid would be ten now, wouldn’t he (or she)? Wonder if he (or she)’s being kept in some kryptonite-aided stasis field buried deep in “Susan’s basement on Wisteria Lane? Hope not, cuz that’d probably be enough to kill THAT show, too”¦)

But y’know, there actually WAS one comics-based network televised program that was given a moderately respectful send-off after a long run: Sabrina The Teenage Witch.

While hardly of Seinfeld proportions, when Sabrina’s magic finally faded (not to mention star Melissa Joan Hart’s waning youthfulness) in 2002 after seven solid seasons, the folks at ABC were accommodating enough to allow the producers (many of whom were members of the Hart family, coincidentally enough) to do up a final episode, invite a few departed cast members back, and tie up the long-running romance between Sabrina and the mortal Harvey in a reasonably satisfactory manner.Hey, I’ll admit it – I watched every episode!

Partially, that was due to the fact that daughter Julie was six when the show debuted, and she was already a fan of star Hart’s earlier Clarissa Explains It All over on Nickelodeon, so it seemed like it’d be good show for us to watch together, what with its four-color roots. We kept watching because, at least over the first several seasons, it was also a genuinely good show. It was clever, it was hip (Penn and Teller had recurring roles early on, for instance), and it was actually able to pull off the trick of being funny without ever resorting to the pervasive – and oh-so-easy – suggestive material found on every other sitcom, without ever seeming sugar-coated in the process. Look, I have no problem with raunchy yocks, but I had to admire the way Sabrina was able to skillfully avoid them, and yet STILL manage to regularly elicit laughter.

But, after a fast start, the show eventually leveled off, and it seemed as if every year, the concept was overhauled and new background characters were continually rotated in as others were discarded without explanation. They even dumped Sabrina’s two aunts that last season, only one of which later elected to return for the big send-off (Penn and Teller were nowhere in sight either). Sabrina the Teenage Witch got to say goodbye all right, but it was maybe two or three years later than it should have. There were no fluffy interviews eating up time on network news programs to mark its passing. Too bad – I would’ve loved to have witnessed Barbara Walters asking that talking cat what kind of tree he wanted to be!

(Nick Bakay as Salem – he was the TRUE star of that show, and the source of an awful lot of my heart felt guffaws those seven magical years!”¦)

So currently, that leaves us with Smallville.

This show seems to be a hit of sorts, though being on a smaller network, I’m not really sure how wide-ranging a fan-base it truly has. Odds are though, when it does shut down production, it WILL be given the fond farewell salute. The intensity will no doubt fall somewhere between that of Seinfeld and Sabrina (closer to the latter, I’d imagine), and its finale, much like the freshly departed West Wing, will be more of a beginning than an ending. Just as that show morphed into “Mr. Smits Goes To Washington” as Martin Sheen tuned his office over to successor Matt Santos, the eventual end of Smallville can only mean one thing:

SuperMAN.

Gee, I wonder if Gilbert Gottfried’s gonna be available?”¦

Stay tuned”¦

But in the meantime, you can always visit Hembeck.com, my MySpace page, or send along a personal message – ain’t the Internet grand?

Copyright 2006 Fred Hembeck