Barks on CBS

Donald Ault ault at nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu
Wed Jan 3 15:14:03 CET 2001


Don Rosa wrote--

> But someone also told me that on last Sunday's year-end review on that CBS
> Sunday Morning show, whatever it's called, SUNDAY MORNING or somesuch,
> Barks was mentioned, but I don't know if the reference showed any clearer
> understanding of who he was than that ET mention.

Ed Forgotson, a former student of mine from Vanderbilt University (who had
taken my comics course about 15 years ago and thus knows Carl's works
intimately), is an associate producer for the CBS "Sunday Morning" show, and
he asked me to send some material that he might use for the year-end
obituary section. As I understand it, there was some resistance from the
programmers at CBS about doing a full-fledged obituary when Carl died in
August because CBS is in competition with ABC, which is owned by Disney. Ed
managed to get the powers that be to include Carl in the year-end obituary
recap, but the price was that he was primarily remembered for the influence
of the rolling rock sequence in "Seven Cities" on the first "Indiana Jones"
movie. The photograph of Carl that was used on the show came from the jacket
of the "Duck Man" video produced in 1996 by Tom Andrae and me and
distributed by the Bruce Hamilton Company. The photo was an excellent one
taken by Barbara Boatner in the 1970s. The images from the comics used in
the clip primarily emphasized the "Seven Cities" sequence. About half of the
20-second notice was taken up with footage from "Indiana Jones." Even so, I
think it was important that Carl be included as the only other comic artist
besides Charles Schulz to be remembered for his contributions to world
culture. CBS owns the rights to "Peanuts" material and has done several
specials on Schulz and therefore had much more material on him and no
copyright conflicts. Even so, the Schulz segment, which preceded the Barks
segment, was only a few seconds longer than the one devoted to Carl.

Donald Ault
Dept. of English
University of Florida
ault at nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu
ault at ufl.edu
http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~donault/
FAX: (352) 332-0551





More information about the DCML mailing list