May 1 (King City Temple)

The April "Flack" numbers as compiled by the Trends Research Department of the Latitudinarian Church are as follows:

Skunk Cabbage retains its precarious grip on the number-two slot for the second month, edging the Admiral by only a few hundred thousand viewings. The big story is still the meteoric rise of Poop, CEW's replacement for the unlamented What the Fuck? which early this year fell into the becalmed straits of the likes of Sparky and His Gang, and now survives only on the marginal sales of back numbers. And so what if the carpers claim "Poop" is really nothing but recycled "Fuck?" As Chairman Bigbird pointed out to the critics, "Food is nothing but recycled poop, isn't it? What's the big deal?"

Not so dramatic but still cause for some concern among the mandarins of Sentry/Sensational is the continuing slippage of the Peppy Show, a five-month phenom that's been slow and steady and shows no signs of having reached bottom. Asked if this might harbing an eventual end to the six-year stranglehold TGPS has held on first place, Peppy replied: "We always lose some numbers when we head into summer. It ain't got me crapping in my drawers."

More likely to put skid marks in his skivvies is the dismal rise of Sparky from thirty-five to thirty-one after a full year in production. Staff changes don't seem to have done the trick, though some observers point out that most of the small gain the show has posted came in the last two months, with the introduction of two new and somewhat more interesting regular characters: Inky Tagger and Arson E. Blazeworthy. Press releases trumpet that a series of new faces will soon transform the Gang. The word from here: Don't bet the farm.

from Howdy Doody

The Trade Mag of Kid-vid

6/30/58

"Boogers and Snot"

by Summerfall Winterspring

"This is Crimea River," says Polly, rather diffidently, as she pushes a sheet of drawing paper in my direction. It is a pencil sketch of a girl who has cried so much the tears have carved massive Mississippi deltas into her face. Catfish could feed at the bottoms of these tributaries. Her hair is disheveled and she is wringing a bucketful of water from the handkerchief she twists in her clawlike hands.

"And what does she do?" I ask. Polly turns to Sparky, seated on her left.

"Not much," Sparky says. "She complains a lot."

"She's had a hard life?" I venture.

"Not so bad. She's a whiner. She's like a sponge. If you get around her she'll take up all your time and all your energy. She'll drain you dry, like a vampire, then she'll find somebody else to complain to."

"Tell her about..." Polly pauses, then gestures to Sparky. "You tell it, Spark."

"Well, when she cries, pretty soon you start crying, too. You can't help it, it's like pepper up your nose. Pretty soon you're bawling like a baby."

"It's infectious," I suggest, hoping to help.

"Yeah. That's it."

Something in his voice alerts me and I look up at him in time to see a glimmer in his eye. I am being humored, I realize. He knows precisely what word to use to describe Crimea's tears. But his face gives nothing away. Only the eyes have that glint of mischief. I won't patronize him again.

I have found the secret wellspring behind Sparky and His Gang. Without even knowing I was looking for it, I have stumbled onto the real reason Sparky's Gang has suddenly climbed from the low twenties in AAS to a surprising fifteenth place in the monthly Flack ratings.

I claim no great reportorial skills in this. Sometimes you're just lucky.

It seemed like good luck at the time to be assigned the Sparky beat. Mission: visit the set and the story conferences once or twice a month, produce a diary of the progression of the show. Who wouldn't have thought it a plum? A new series in development from Gideon Peppy, the man who set the current record in first-place finishes, who can apparently do no wrong? Sparky's Gang had monster hit written all over it.

Who knew?

Actually, by the time the show was ready to air, a lot of us in the entertainment press corps had a pretty good idea. There's a stink that attaches itself to a show that's in trouble, and it ain't the sweet smell of success. Sparky and His Gang had that aroma from the first day of shooting, a day I had the dubious good luck to witness. On the surface everything looked fine. It was the normal circus atmosphere of hurry up and wait, the usual snags that came from crews not yet used to working together. One can usually assume that by the third or fourth episode these little misunderstandings, squabbles, and comic traffic jams will have sorted themselves out, and the production staff will be running in as near an approximation of a well-oiled machine as a television series in production ever gets.

But just below the surface serious trouble was brewing. Brewing? More like seething. This ship was rudderless, Captainless, and lacked a compass. Directions would come from somewhere to alter this or that detail of the set. Two hours later it needed to be altered again. Grips started pools to see how long a new production designer would last, and the times were sometimes measured in hours, not days. It was easy enough to discover these things. Everybody on the set was talking about it. But nobody knew what was going on higher up.

A few weeks later I sat in on my first story conference. Sometimes a writer is handed a metaphor on, as it were, a silver platter. That was the case with Gideon Peppy's famous conference table. Perhaps you've heard of long-ago peace conferences where step one was to determine the size and shape of the table where two groups of people who hated each other's guts could sit and rationally discuss their differences. Peppy's table was a perfect barometer of what was going on with Sparky and His Gang. You could have drawn a wide red stripe across the width of the table and called it the Demilitarized Zone. At the south end sat John Valentine, father of little "Sparky" Valentine, and Sparky himself. At the north end sat Gideon Peppy and everybody else.

The dynamic at the south end was obvious: a father and his son. At the north end some barnyard politic was in operation, its causes not evident to the outsider, but its effects painfully obvious. Simply put, those most in favor with Mr. Peppy sat at his elbow, ready to osculate his rectum should he take a notion to bend over. Beside these high Priests of Peppy sat more ordinary acolytes, legs poised to leap at the shout of "Frog!" Then in the hinterlands, sometimes almost on the DMZ itself, were the fuckups, the doghoused gazing hollow-eyed at the feasting to the north, pathetically eager to scramble after any morsel that dropped from the master's table. The temptation was strong to fashion pointy hats for them out of foolscap.

But no matter how far out of favor one fell, one was never seated to the south of the invisible red line. That was clearly enemy territory.

The view from John Valentine's end of the table was a compact version of da Vinci's Last Supper.

John Barrymore Valentine. Sparky Valentine. The fourth and fifth generations of an acting family that can trace its lineage back to Old Earth. John is the eldest of three siblings, and without a doubt the most talented.