Q: Whatchu Listening To Lately?
A: Lotsa this, coz I’m a young adult on the dole in Thatcher’s England:
Wish I knew what was going on with the guitarist’s wispy bullshit mustache. He looks like Schneider from “One Day At A Time.”
Unsolicited Thoughts On Marky Ramone’s Gelato Commercial
In the words of Michael Keaton, I tried to avoid all this but I can’t. Marky Ramone’s food empire has now expanded beyond pasta sauce to include gelato. He made a commercial for it, too. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a drill: Marky Ramone made a gelato commercial.
Gotta break this one down scene by scene as I occasionally do. What we’re looking at here is basically the Zapruda film of inane punk rock branding.
0:10 – Ten seconds in and already this seems pretty weighty for a dessert ad. Marky Ramone lurks in the shadows before a gig. Yes, he is a legend, and “the legacy” advertised on his jacket has brought him here. Will he uphold the brilliance of his work on such classic albums as Road to Ruin and Pleasant Dreams or will this affair crumple into a madness akin to that Jesse Camp video where Marky played the filthy janitor?
0:20 – As usual, the crowd gathered at this rock concert is waiting patiently in relative silence until each member of the band has made his or her way to the stage. Finally, Mark strolls out, women start screeching his name, and just as the mood reaches a fever pitch Big Bad Mark Ramone & His Non-Union All Stars launch into that beloved Ramones chestnut “Gimme Gimme Mah Ice Cream.” When I say “beloved Ramones chestnut” I of course mean “song Mark probably wrote in his head years ago assuming he’d one day star in a gelato commercial.”
0:45 – You know, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn Prince has his own gelato guy for mid-concert refreshment. That seems par for the course with his high-falutin’ ass. The only place I can imagine a Ramone even looking at gelato is in a paid advertisement.
0:50 – “So, what did you bring home from the concert? Did you manage to catch one of Marky’s drumsticks?” “No, but he did hand me this gelato thing he’d been eating. I ate the rest of it already, but it had a fuckin’ Oreo in it!”
1:04 – “Iz eazeeta fawlin love wit a legen.” I’d kill to get my hands on any ADR this guy recorded for Rock n’ Roll High School.
1:06 – The Marky Ramone Cookies Gelato logo seems really busy. Did they need so much detail on the Ramones shirt? “Doug, make sure we know that’s an officially licensed Ramones shirt. Also, if you put a crash cymbal on those drums you have to include the ride, it’s just common sense!”
The remainder of the ad is the ice cream song (can you believe Cookies recorded more than thirty seconds of that thing?) behind images of various Cookies products. My issue is the stuff looks yummy enough without the endorsement of the guy who played on “Zero Zero UFO.” Like, can I see these foodstuffs without some punk rock icon pretending his entire career’s been leading to this “Gimme Gimme Mah Ice Cream!” jingle?
“Duckman” Creator Everett Peck: The JG2Land Interview
Between 1994 and 1997 basic cable was haunted by an irritable, potty-mouthed water fowl who really only got away with neglecting/abusing his family, friends, and co-workers because he was animated. Yet “Duckman” wasn’t just another zany post-”Ren & Stimpy” squiggle fest—razor sharp wit and touching pathos were expertly sewn into this outlandish world for nearly every one of the show’s half hour installments (and it was all brought to life by the amazing voice talents of Jason Alexander, Nancy Travis, and Gregg Berger, et al). Today “Duckman” is firmly enshrined in tv’s cult canon, a forbearer to the “Family Guys” and “American Dads” of the world, albeit far smarter and more roundly satisfying.
Duckman and his brood were all the creation of artist Everett Peck, a Californian if not by birth than at least by heart (he called me from a beach-side bar for this interview). Here now for JG2Land Peck looks back at his CableACE Award-winning series, the struggles within, and what if any shadow Howard the Duck cast on his beloved Erick Duckman.
JG2: Was there concern on your end with transforming Duckman from a comic book to a television series? Were you afraid of your vision becoming corrupted?
EVERETT PECK: Well, the funny thing is the comic and the show were developed simultaneously. The comic wasn’t published yet, and I was doing some unrelated freelance work for [the production company] Klasky Csupo. Gábor Csupo asked me, “Hey, do you have any ideas for shows?” And I said, “Well, I’ve been working on this comic…” They saw Duckman and liked it, so we entered into agreement to develop it. But yeah, there’s always a concern like that, though I kinda set the tone with the comic—all the basic relationships were already there, and all the characters, like Cornfeld and King Chicken, Bernice, et cetera. And I felt confident in Gábor. So we started pitching it to networks.
JG2: Whom besides USA did you pitch?
EP: We went to FOX—well, first we went to Paramount, and they really got on board with it. So with Paramount we went to USA, who were looking for an animated adult series, and we went to FOX, and at that time “The Simpsons”…was in like its second season. Everything was kinda up in the air in terms of prime time animation on television. No one was sure it would work. So we pitched to FOX and USA simultaneously. FOX offered us a two script deal; USA offered thirteen episodes on air, basically a full season. So we went for the sure thing. And I have to say, USA were very open to what we were doing or trying to do. We always intended “Duckman” to be an adult show. Y’know, “The Simpsons” has something for adults and it had something for kids, but we strictly wanted to be for adults. I’m not sure FOX would have let us do that.
JG2: Did you have any issues with Jason Alexander, the voice of Duckman, being on “Seinfeld” at the same time, or did the scheduling just always work out?
EP: Well, at that time even “Seinfeld” had only been going for a couple seasons. It wasn’t the mega hit it would become. So Jason Alexander was still basically an unknown guy. As “Seinfeld” became so popular, yeah, it got a little weird [laughs], but the thing about Jason is he has such great comic timing, he can land all your jokes, he can talk a mile a minute if that’s what you need—he worked out perfectly even when things were weird.
JG2: Were there any other “names” in the running for Duckman? I know you auditioned seventy-ish people.
EP: We did, but I intentionally sort of went for obscure people, like Matt [Groening] did for “The Simpsons.” I don’t think there were any other standouts.
JG2: Earlier you said USA didn’t really note your show very much, but I have to wonder, were they behind that bit in the third season where you had the cast of “Weird Science,” the show “Duckman” immediately followed or preceded, appear as King Chicken’s hostages?
EP: [Laughs] Yeah, that was a USA thing. That was one of the instances were they did meddle. We really—we being myself, Jeff Reno, and Ron Osborne, the two main “Duckman” writers—we were really resistant to that, although I should say we weren’t opposed to doing topical things. I didn’t want to make the show too topical. [That can] really date the show. I wanted to deal with more universal issues, like love, sex, competition.
JG2: What would you say was the hardest aspect of the entire “Duckman” production?
EP: I think one thing was, there was just a constant struggle keep the scripts short enough. We tried to do forty pages or under. Doing that made the animation production much easier. Sometimes we’d have finished animation we had to cut—the show had to be 22 minutes, and to accommodate that we’d have to cut out ten minutes sometimes. Most of the scenes cut dealt with visuals—dialogue always had priority above visuals. That said, I wanted “Duckman” to maintain a quality in terms of the look of the thing. And the animators, they did an awesome job, some of the visuals were fantastic.
JG2: Can you remember any specific tussles about cutting a visual?
EP: I remember a shot in one episode where Ajax is picking a flower on a hill, and it’s a complete 360 rotation where he screams, “NO!!” at the end; that was gonna be cut, but we fought and fought and they kept it in. That was early on in the show, though. By the last season everything went smoother, we really got the feel of it.
JG2: That’s interesting, because it seems like the later “Duckman” seasons would have been harder to handle, what with [Duckman's long lost sister-in-law] Beverly showing up and other secondary characters like Ben Stein being fleshed out a little more. Doing those kinds of things didn’t upset the balance?
EP: No, I mean, what we always wanted to do was have kind of a world, a neighborhood where there were several characters that were reoccurring. The harder thing was a lot of times we’d have Duckman and his family go on locations, to Vietnam or whatever, so the animators would have to draw all new background scenes. I was in favor of the location stuff because it made for interesting shows, but the animators were angry, like, “We have to design 108 more backgrounds?” [laughs]
JG2: Weren’t there also some budgetary issues with USA?
EP: Sure, and that’s ultimately that’s why we were canceled. “Duckman” never got really high ratings. We got maybe a two share—that’s two million people. That was a good audience, but we were always sort of an underground show, and we were on an odd network. FOX, a lot of their programming supported “The Simpsons.” We didn’t really have that, and there wasn’t a culture at USA at the executive level that supported “Duckman” beyond three of four seasons.
JG2: Also, if I recall, “Duckman” was on at a weird time, like late Saturday nights.
EP: Yeah, and our lead in was, uh, wrestling or something, a sporting event, and sometimes the show didn’t start at the exact time. You know, all that stuff. USA did hire a publicity firm at one time who made some pretty cool posters and ads for us, but “Duckman” was just never was a show that had huge ratings, and our budgets reflected that. Our budgets were around $600,000 an episode. At that same time, “The Simpsons” were doing $1 million an episode. So we were already stretching to make “Duckman” look good. That was what I cared about—I wanted to make the show look as good as possible. And this was back when we were still doing animation on cells! That technology goes back to the 1920s!
JG2: So say “Duckman” doesn’t get canceled after season four. How much further could you have gone?
EP: I don’t know. I think when we were cancelled we were hitting our stride. Would we have had legs like “The Simpsons?” I don’t know that anyone else could go like that. I think we could have done another hundred episodes and kept it fresh. At its heart, “Duckman” was about a private detective, and you can go anywhere with that. And there was also his family, the family portion is pretty rich as well.
JG2: Well, you have to be proud as it stands—the show remains one of the best thing to come out of the 1990s.
EP: Oh yes, I am. I thought we did an amazing job with the thing. I still think it was the only story-oriented adult animated show ever. I mean, you see kinda weird things on Adult Swim, but we were really character driven.
JG2: That’s true. “Duckman” never relied on the fact it was a cartoon to find an out. The characters all dealt with their problems like real people, in between the zany jokes and sight gags.
EP: Yeah, I think we had a realistic emotional base for the characters. They had ups and downs, we would play them against themselves sometimes. I’m very proud of all that.
JG2: So how do you feel about Duckman’s forefather Howard the Duck? He’s really the only competition or measuring stuck that’s ever been in your field.
EP: You know, I don’t know that much about him. I never really followed him closely. I know the movie, and, uh, the technology at the time, there was more than what they could get across. [laughs] If they could have done it digitally…I don’t know. I thnk he’s an interesting character.
JG2: So Howard was never an albatross around Duckman’s neck?
EP: No. Duckman, you know, he’s a duck, but he’s really just a guy, a guy with a bill. Sure, he doesn’t wear clothes, but that’s just the cartoon convention. Daffy Duck never wore clothes.
JG2: I always thought Duckman didn’t wear clothes because he represented the show’s raw nerve, the “naked” emotion.
EP: Yes, exactly. [laughs]
“A Made-For-TV Movie Event!”
Remember when stuff like this “ripped from the headlines!” Al Pacino Phil Spector movie was the exclusive province of network television, and you could freely shout “CAREER SLUMP” at all involved because it was airing on the same channel as “Talking Hamster, MD” and “Mall Dash ’86?” Now, since this nonsense is on Showtime HBO, we have to pretend like there’s some kind of merit going on. There isn’t. Someone just decided saggy Al Pacino plus wigs equals ratings. Wig that fucker up, son! We’re up against Erik Estrada’s “Chupacabra Versus The Alamo” tonight!
I did not fabricate that last title.
Q: What Is Your Favorite Burt Reynolds Movie?
A: My favorite movie in which Burt Reynolds appears is Boogie Nights. My favorite movie in which Burt Reynolds stars is Smokey & the Bandit, though sometimes I pretend it’s Gator just for shock value. And yes, before you even ask, when it comes to Burt on tv “Evening Shade” holds a very special place in my heart.
Speaking Of Charles Rocket…
My buddy Rollie H. describes himself as someone who’s into “television history, famous failures, and not laughing.” As such, Rollie recently waded into the dark territory that is “Saturday Night Live’s” sixth season to review and analyze what countless historians have tagged as the absolute nadir of sketch comedy. Please, do yourself a favor right now and read my friend’s hilarious, insightful recap of his experience wherein at the very least you’ll pick up the hot fashion term “heino rippin’.” You’ll also see photographic evidence of Eddie Murphy eating dog food.
Happy Birthday, Samm Levine
I remember you from such movies as Inglourious Basterds and from such television shows as “Freaks & Geeks.”
I also remember you from that time I was an extra in Sydney White and between shots I looked you and you looked at me and I said, “S’up?” and you said, “S’up?” back. That was really cool. I’ll be telling my grandkids about that exchange one day (for real).
Have a good b-day, duder.
Area Man Has Opinion On Oscar-Nominated Short
Maggie Simpson’s animated adventure “The Longest Daycare,” screened before last year’s Ice Age: Continental Drift, has been nominated for an Academy Award. I didn’t see the thing until five minutes ago, and my reactions are thus: Thank Jeebus a cinematic “Simpsons” product of merit has come along to atone for that deflated mess in 2007 they called The Simpsons Movie. Let me also jam in the requisite complaint that “The Simpsons” tv show hasn’t been able to do anything with a fraction of this much soul since Dikembe Mutombo played for Atlanta.
Where is the soul, “Simpsons” brain trust? Where is the love? Must you give us irony in place of balls, balls in place of brains, and brains in place of soul? I used to think it was the lengthier commercial breaks that killed your show but that’s been disproven by about fifty different programs of similar time restraint since 2001.
P.S. I’m aware I’m screaming into an empty void and that if you line up all the complaints middle-aged Gen Xers have about “The Simpsons” they’d stretch from here to Eternia. I apologizing for adding to the problem.
Does Piazza Talk About This Career Highlight In Longshot?
Hard to tell which one of these knuckleheads was on his way up at the time and which one was heading in the other direction.
OMG BUY MY F’N BOOK
This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete Story of The Misfits is now available in hardcover; buy it if u like expensive, firm things about punk bands! Also look at the corresponding photography tumblr and official TMLS F.A.Q.
