Darrell Vickers – The Magic Hour Part 7 – Put on a Happy Farce

For good or for incalculable evil, I have earned my daily crust as a professional comedy writer my entire adult life. During the innumerable decades spent splashing ink onto three-hole-punched paper, I have fashioned myriad ludicrous plots and fanciful situations. I’ve woven preposterous storylines replete with illogical reasoning and nonsensical outcomes. But only once have I found myself trapped inside a full fledged, Loony-Tunes, Ionesco play in real life.

Darrell Vickers – The Magic Hour Part 6: How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?

One requires only a smattering of seconds après being rudely jettisoned from the casual comforts of the birthing canal to realize that not everything in this life is perfect, though getting to snack on a pair of righteous milk-muffins ain’t a bad way to start. But we who toiled on The Magic Hour were a long time gone from getting to attach lip to nip eight times a day. After-all, we weren’t Les Moonves. All Andrew, Tony and I had for nutritional and spiritual succor was bad coffee, misshapen pastries and the occasional wife-swapping fruit flies in the snack-table trail mix.   

Darrell Vickers – The Magic Hour 5

Steve White. That’s all we really needed, just Steve White. He’d been air-lifted onto The Magic Hour pilot at the last tumultuous second as our co-host and he knocked it out of the park for us. Steve and Magic had a cool, breezy rapport with one another. Just a couple of guys rappin’ about the events of the day that segued seamlessly into our opening comedy bit. You can search for years and not find that kind of chemistry. Steve was also a dedicated team player and a truly funny guy. So of course, our first assignment on the show was to work with new possible co-hosts to replace him. Huh?

Darrell Vickers – Magic Johnson Part One of Part One – Every Little Thing We Did For Magic

 

For all the excitement and laugh-a-minute hijinks that ultimately end up on the small-but-getting-larger-every-day screen, animation is a fairly dull medium to write for but you sure can’t beat the commute. You lucubrate in the bosom of your own homestead, tenaciously hack your way through the occasional set of nettlesome network notes and when it’s all done and dusted, you press a couple of keys on your computer and send it off to anywhere in the world. A life of toiling in animation is totally absent the non-stop madcap Joy Circus that you get sucked into when manning the helm of a Hollywood set. It does not require dealing with studios and networks both asking you to do the impossible as a million unforeseen crises swirl around you like pissed-off bees. It is blissfully free of discontented actors unable to remember the simplest sequence of dialogue. You are spared having to wait endless hunger-filled hours for that intern to bring back food from Jerry’s Deli while you “amp the stakes” at the end of Act One.

Darrell Vickers – Kevin’s Castle Part Two: A Huge Amount of Castle Hassle

A Huge Amount of Castle Hassle

As we touched down in Toronto to start production, the weather was absolutely insulting. It was bitterly cold with this bizarre form of precipitation that refused to go away, even after it had fallen from the sky. It just lay around on the streets and people’s lawns like a drunken uncle and got in everyone’s way. Not the triumphant return to our beloved homeland that we had anticipated.

Alas, naughty Mister Winter was going to be the least of our problems.

Darrell Vickers – Kevin’s Castle Part One: I Nelvana Promised You a Rose Garden

I Nelvana Promised You a Rose Garden

Show business careers are all about ebb and flow. Minor ups and seemingly endless, bottomless, psyche-demolishing downs. As this story pops its initially happy head out of its comfy gopher hole, Andrew and I were flowing to beat the band. We were being paid a king’s ransom and change to consult on the cursed and doomed and damned Magic Hour when we received a call from CAA. A producer had just sold a pilot concept to the Disney Channel and they wanted Andrew and my humble self to develop it and, if it was picked up, to executive produce the pilot. Well, sure.

Darrell Vickers – Have Mercy Part IV – Show Them No Mercy!

As this happy-go-lucky little episode commences, Andrew and I were un-merrily scampering back to our very temporary offices on the Warner lot to begin unnecessary script rewrites while simultaneously searching for a new leading lady. Mr. Steinberg had wandered off in search of a phone to fire our old leading lady. We, by far, had the easier task. David said that Heather cried limpid, glistening, voluptuous tears that you could sell in any adult book store in America when she received the unfortunate news.

Darrell Vickers – Have Mercy Part Three: A Title or a Cry for Help?

 

Andrew and I now had our blindingly luminescent stars (Daniel Hugh Kelly and the ever-lovely Heather Locklear) and, thanks to Ellie Kanner, we also managed to accrue a rootin’-tootin’ supporting cast. Paxton Whitehead (Gilbert – the British concierge), Stuart Pankin (Bertrand – the French chef), Julie Payne (the maid) and a young Patrick Warburton as the muscle-bound bellboy were dreams to work with. Talented and cooperative? To quote the legendary Wally Shawn: “Inconceivable!”

Darrell Vickers – Have Mercy Part 2 – There Is No Easy Way from the Earth to the Stars

Back to the Future:

As Part Two of the Have Mercy saga commences, Larry Hagman was still tethered to our plucky little pilot. The outline had been okayed and fluffy-fluffy joy-joy was falling down upon the land like the screaming Wallendas, but now we had to actually write this sucker. All things being considered, pounding out 40-odd pages of funny shouldn’t really have been that much of a biggie. Andrew and I had written other pilots. Egad, we’d cranked out about a dozen of them in the previous year but there was something disquietingly different about this pile of paper and ink. Perhaps we were just tired from a non-stop year of wearing out typewriter ribbons. Perhaps it was little Davey mouth-breathing down our necks with his inane suggestions and dicta. For some reason, the all-important first major scene was not rolling out like Gene Simmons’ tongue at a Kiss concert.

Darrell Vickers – Have Mercy Part 1 – I Cheat the Hagman

Andrew Nicholls and I hardly had a moment to paint an old lady during the hustley-bustley year of 1991. We were as hot as Meg Ryan before she surgically turned her lips into sea-plane pontoons.