Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Career Suggestion for Richard Schiff from Star Ledger

From Alan Sepinwall's column:
" SAY, DID YOU hear the one about the sportscaster who got traded for the cartoon bunny? No, seriously. For letting Al Michaels get out of his contract to go work at NBC, ESPN/Disney extracted concessions including expanded Olympic highlight rights, mandatory NBC plugs for ESPN's Monday games and, best of all, the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
Oswald who? Before Walt Disney created his own movie studio, he produced 26 shorts for Universal featuring Oswald, a plucky bunny who essentially looked like Mickey Mouse with long, thin ears. Universal (NBC's parent company) has owned the rights to Oswald since 1927, but Disney got them back as a throw-in for the Michaels deal.
Now, beside whatever public embarrassment this may have brought Al Michaels, the first thing I thought of when I heard the news was "Why stop there?" If one network can swap a play-by-play man for a wascally wabbit, why can't all the networks get into the trading business?
***
Katie Couric, Richard Schiff and Matt LeBlanc to ABC for Kelly Ripa....
Schiff to give the struggling "Commander in Chief" (which just got temporarily pulled from the schedule in favor of "According to Jim" and "George Lopez") some White House street cred ("So let me get this straight: You gave your husband an official position?")
"

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