A CARD FROM THE PAST!

Was gifted with a wonderful present yesterday! My bud, John McCann, has also been cleaning out his office and he came across the index card you see above. He brought it to our bi-yearly lunch at Barones. Also in attendance were Warner chums Jean MacCurdy and Tom Ruegger.

The above card was posted on a board in my old Warners office and represented the major plot point in our Daffy Duck Primetime Pilot.

In case I haven't mentioned it, as we imagined it, the Daffy Duck show was similar to the old Jack Benny program. Daffy had a weekly variety show with real guests. Porky was his sidekick. Yosemite Sam was the screaming producer. Anyway, the show also had a lot of backstage story...similar to the Larry Sanders show. We also had a part for Jonathan Harris. He would be Simian Vandertub, the network weanie. We had fake sponsors. One of my favorites was 'Dr. Underhill's Pure Sprucine Heave Ointment.'

Anyway...

John McCann, Doug Langdale and I were sitting in my office and trying to figure out what the hook of the pilot episode was going to be. We soon agreed that Daffy would perform a magic trick on his show and make the leader of Bellawania disappear. But, for real. The magic trick goes wrong and Bellawanian President goes poof. We all liked this idea very much.

Our assistant (that term isn't exactly right...he was more brilliant jack-of-all-trades who knew a lot more than us) wasn't exactly sure about the idea. He wanted to know where the President of Ballwania went. We kept saying that he really disappeared. Our assistant kept wanting to know where. He had to go somewhere. Where did he go? We said we didn't know where he went. He just disappeared. Our assistant said we couldn't do that. If he disappeared, he had to go somewhere. Where did he go? We kept saying we didn't know and it didn't matter. He said we had to know and it did matter because someone can't just disappear, they have to go somewhere.

We happily argued the point with him for about an hour. (It was fun.)

When the WB read the script they had one question:

Where did the president of Bellawania go?

Our assistant went on to be the head of ABC's miniseries development and is now a powerful agent who makes more money than us.

We sure showed him!