IN: Lane was born Morton Donald Isaacson at the Manhattan "Flower Hospital" in New York City to a Jewish father (Jacob) and a Catholic mother (Dolly), who later converted to Judaism. Jacob "Jack" Isaacson was a sergeant in the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and Dolly was a homemaker. He was raised in The Bronx, where he attended DeWitt Clinton High School and was classmates with Judd Hirsch and Garry Marshall. By his mid-teens, due to his mother's influential personality, Isaacson had decided he wanted to be in show business.

In 1965 the Irish comedian Dave Allen presented a talk show on Sydney television for TCN-9. He was eventually sacked and Nine producer John Collins looked for replacement hosts to fill in for the rest of the season. After a series of temporary hosts, Collins found Lane working in The Dunes Nightclub in Hawaii. While in the United States, Collins asked Las Vegas performer Wayne Newton if there was anybody he should consider as a replacement; Newton's answer was "Don Lane". Lane was offered the job after filming and sending in an audition tape for the TCN-9 executives. He was given the host's chair for six weeks. He planned to base his version of the show on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Lane's run was variously referred to as The Tonight Show, Tonight with Don Lane and Sydney Tonight. Within a month, Nine settled on Lane as permanent host. After four weeks, his original six-week contract was extended to forty weeks. Tonight with Don Lane featured comedy sketches, interviews with visiting entertainers and musical numbers often performed by Lane with the Tonight Show Orchestra. The announcer for the show was Mike Walsh, who later went on to host his own successful variety show. Due to technical restrictions, Lane's tonight show was only broadcast throughout New South Wales, just as In Melbourne Tonight(IMT) was restricted to Victoria. Work on a coaxial cable linking Melbourne with Sydney had begun in June 1959 and was completed on 5 February 1963. On 7 July 1965, Lane appeared on a then-innovative live split-screen link with Graham Kennedy via the cable. Lane and Kennedy sang the song "Seventy-Six Trombones" as a duet. They took full advantage of the new technology and the duet included the performers throwing jugs of water and Kennedy holding up a sign saying "Go Home Yank", to which Lane laughed. Lane also performed another duet with Kennedy at the Logies ceremony in 1967. In March 1968, Lane was charged with importing marijuana into Australia. He was arrested at Sydney Airport and remanded in custody. He strenuously protested his innocence, claiming that the drugs were planted into his jacket pocket by a former business associate who wanted revenge. He was found not guilty on all charges, being defended by barrister Marcus Einfeld.

When did the show end?

OUT:

IN: Lee was born on August 11, 1964 in Seoul, South Korea. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where he lived a "typical middle-class childhood". Lee attended River Bend Elementary School in Chesterfield and later St. Louis Country Day School, where he drew posters for school plays. Having had to learn English when he first came to the U.S. presented the young Lee with the sense of being an outsider, as did the "preppy, upper-class" atmosphere of Country Day.

Enticed by the idea of being able to exert more control over his own work, in 1992, Lee accepted the invitation to join six other artists who broke away from Marvel to form Image Comics, which would publish their creator-owned titles. Lee's group of titles was initially called Aegis Entertainment before being christened Wildstorm Productions, and published Lee's initial title WildC.A.T.s, which Lee pencilled and co-wrote, and other series created by Lee in the same shared universe. The other major series of the initial years of Wildstorm, for which Lee either created characters, co-plotted or provided art for, included Stormwatch, Deathblow and Gen13. In 1993, Lee and his friend, Valiant Comics publisher Steve Massarsky, arranged a Valiant-Image Comics crossover miniseries called Deathmate, in which the Valiant characters would interact with those of Wildstorm, and of Lee's fellow Image partner, Rob Liefeld. The miniseries would consist of four "center books", (each one denoted by a color rather than an issue number), two each produced by the respective companies, plus a prologue and epilogue book. Wildstorm produced Deathmate Black, with Lee himself contributing to the writing. He illustrated the covers for that book, the Deathmate Tourbook and the prologue book, as well as contributing to the prologue's interior inks. Wildstorm would expand its line to include other ongoing titles whose creative work was handled by other writers and artists, some of which were spinoffs of the earlier titles, or properties owned by other creators, such as Whilce Portacio's Wetworks. As publisher, Lee later expanded his comics line creating two publishing imprints of Wildstorm, Homage and Cliffhanger (that years later merged and were replaced by a single Wildstorm Signature imprint), to publish creator-owned comics by some selected creators of the US comics industry. Lee and Rob Liefeld, another Marvel-illustrator-turned-Image-founder, returned to Marvel in 1996 to participate in a reboot of several classic characters; the project was known as Heroes Reborn. While Liefeld reworked Captain America and The Avengers, Lee plotted Iron Man and plotted and illustrated Fantastic Four issues #1-6. Halfway through the project, Lee's studio took over Liefeld's two titles, finishing all four series. According to Lee, Marvel proposed continuing the Heroes Reborn lineup indefinitely, but under the condition that Lee would draw at least one of them himself, which he refused to do. Instead, he accepted an offer to re-imagine and relaunch (in the role of editor) three mainstream Marvel Universe titles: Defenders, Doctor Strange, and Nick Fury. Though scheduled to debut in December 1997, these three relaunches never appeared. Lee returned to Wildstorm, where he would publish series such as The Authority and Planetary, as well as Alan Moore's imprint, America's Best Comics. Lee himself wrote and illustrated a 12-issue series called Divine Right: The Adventures of Max Faraday, in which an internet slacker inadvertently manages to download the secrets of the universe, and is thrown into a wild fantasy world.

What is WildStorm?

OUT:
Lee's group of titles was initially called Aegis Entertainment before being christened Wildstorm Productions,