Zeppo Marxism

Rod Serling at the University of Missouri

2008-09-06T20:59:00.006-05:00

iYesterday, I posted some excerpts from interviews conducted for the campus radio program University Close-Up in the late 60s and early 70s. One interview was so good that I transcribed it in full (except for the questions, which were summed up by a narrator anyway and are summed up even more by me). So here it is:

Rod Serling on University Close-Up - April 30, 1970

"My two teenage daughters informed me, and continue to inform me, that my taste in the muse are decidedly anachronistic. 18-year-Jodi makes the point with almost deadening repetition and consistency that only Rod McKuen speaks to the moment and at the moment. She eschews everything written back to the time of the Greeks as irrelevant. Oddly enough, or perhaps not so oddly, these teenage daughters have somewhat pointed the way towards what I ought to talk to you about tonight, and that's the relevance of the arts and the mass media to the times. I find motion pictures currently being judged by college students not necessarily by what they say or how they're said, but rather - 'do they relate to the time?'

Now relevance is indeed a perfectly legitimate criteria by which an reasonably intelligent college student or for that matter anyone else can sit through a film or a television play, but where I part company with the young generation - and this includes my daughters - is when I find relevance is becoming the only criteria by which they come up with a qualitative conclusion. Now I imagine that 'Ode to a Grecian Urn' has no relevance to today's ghettos, and William Shakespeare even with his prescience can hardly be quoted in any debate having to do with 20th Century social disorders.

But because they aren't relevant does not necessarily mean they are unimportant, or that they are not craftsmanlike, or that they do not contain both truth and honesty. Simply that if we are to worship at the shrine of relevance, and assume relevance is scotch-taped to a calender, we consign to ignominy some inspiring literature written over the years that may tell it like it was, and in doing so come very close to telling it like it is. See if you can distinguish between the agony of a young man in uniform in 1942, say, with the agony of his father or older brother twenty years later.

Not too long ago, I was conned into seeing a film called Easy Rider. Once again, that beloved bane of my existence daughter Jodi assured me that not since the Old Testament has anything been written that is so altogether world-shaking, important and so uniquely definitive. So at her behest and at the behest of my own students, I went to see Easy Rider. And as much as said to Peter and Dennis 'do with me as you will, young men. Move me, titillate me, doing something to me.'

Well, they did something to me. They left me with an unalterable feeling that Mr. Hopper and Mr. Fonda should open up a Honda agency in Beverly Hills and get out of acting business."Mr. Fonda, who is an altogether charming and attractive young man, rides back and forth across the screen with all the facial mobility of a cigar-store Indian." Mr. Hopper, conversely, it seems, has a Vocabulary numbering about 16 English words, all of them prefaced by quote 'like, man' unquote.

And through the welter of this pretentious, dull sameness, I did manage to detect a plot, a theme if you will. Young men who ride motorcycles carrying heroin to pedal in southern cities and are put down by Southern bigots in lunch counters have a special, tragic stature. They represent the generation of the deprived and the misunderstood. Well, I'll grant you that beards and the longhairs and the peace beads are indeed misunderstood, and they are short-changed, and they are put down by an older generation that has neither the patience, the understanding or the sensitivity to read the pulse of the young and to understand that their sense of honor is no less real than ours."

But to devote an hour and fifty-odd minutes to a prolonged motorcycle ride through scenic countrysides and idyllic communes while they cart addictive drugs across state lines turns me on not a whit. I can sympathize - and do sympathize with the victims of legitimate prejudice, but to shambling, smarmy repetitive men like Captain America and his sidekick I can't conjure up even a short sob, let alone place them in the hallowed halls of legitimate, tragic personages. But I make a prediction here that ten years from now, Easy Rider's contribution to the cinematic art will be just about as vague as Abbott & Costello or an old March of Time or a vintage newsreel.

Now not all contemporary films that are so-called relevant are Easy Rider. Midnight Cowboy is a classic example of a movie with a point of view. And while I'm not familiar in real life with anyone similar to its leading characters, I felt for them. The Graduate is another such film, Z is another one, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is yet another. Now each one of those films talked of people and often of places that were literally outside of my experience. Their success, their honesty, lay in the fact that they made me care, that I was somehow able to feel and understand.”

Question from the audience – Given its dependence on sponsorship, would do you think TV could speak out against those same advertisers?

"For the same reason that newspapers feel no compunction about putting in an editorial against the US steel company raising its prices. Should television show any comparable timorousness in laying claim to some points of view of their own? We have so historically become wedded to a concept of sponsor and program that we have allowed sponsor to take over the thematic value of any program. It is, of course, part of the strength of a program that they can relate it to a product - The Kraft Music Hall, The Dinah Shore Chevrolet Hour, etc.

But that is incorrect and it's improper. The entertainment portion of a commercial television show should be absolutely unrelated to the advertising portion thereof. And indeed, one of the problems, one of the things that has proven such a desperate drawback to all television is that we are currently sharing the stage with such a foreign entity. You can put out the greatest Arthur Miller play on television, and 12 minutes into it, out come dancing rabbits with toilet paper.

I recollect most vividly, for example when ABC put on The Robe and about 30 seconds after the crucifixion, out come the Dove commercials. Where does taste stop? They are so concerned with offense. They don't want to offend with controversy. But they don't mind a whit offending with a distortion and with a tasteless intrusion of a commercial product with a religious experience."

Question – Why do you feel that movies showing the youth of today in communes, as flower-children, and showing human love and 'doing your own thing' are not relevant?

"I don't say, mind you, young man, that I'm right and you're wrong. You might be right and I might be miserably wrong. All I submit to you is, at this stage, at this conjure in our society, we cannot respond to the evils of Earth by putting ourselves in a shrub-enshrouded commune. Nobody's gonna cure cancer that way. Nobody's gonna bring up world peace that way. Nobody's gonna respond to poverty that way. It's grand, doing your own thing. God love them. Let them do it. But don't go through this pretense of being God's Loved Ones, because that's simply not true. You're copping out, you're retreating from reality, and you're not facing reality (Applause)."

Question – Could you share your thoughts about the television ratings system?

"I think ratings system is some sort of mad house arithmetic that has no bearing on anything. When the ratings service represented by the Neilson services, etc. etc. went in front of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington two years ago with charts that looked like something out of NASA explaining how they can interview ten people and have that statistic reflect the taste of ten thousand. And throughout all this welter of charts and arithmetic and insanity, certain clear-headed members of the commission said 'what do you mean by that?' and they literally could not answer and walked away tails between their legs making an admission that it was balderdash, it was nonsense. And yet, that was on a Friday and on Monday they were still quoting ratings.

Case in point, and altogether interesting of late - look at the two shows that were just canceled by CBS, The Red Skelton Show and Petticoat Junction. Now, I yield to no man in my admiration of Red Skelton, as a comic, as a mimic, etc. But I thought it was getting pretty tired. And Petticoat Junction I refuse to allow to be shown in my home. I have a queasy, aged stomach that responds a little negatively to these kind of thing. Now my kids can go over to the neighbor's and watch, but I don't want them to watch it in my house.

Now, these two shows, apart from their questionable entertainment value - or indeed, say that they're entertaining - had massive ratings, both of them. And it's conceivable that Red Skelton could have gone on ad infinitum. So why did they take them off? Because suddenly the network begins to realize that the arithmetic approach to television is not the key concern. It's who watches, who buys the product.

That's why they're losing shows that appeal to the middle-aged and the older. Who's buying nowadays? It isn't them. You don't buy much on social security. From 25 to 35, that's the group, get them. And they're not watching Red Skelton. Which is suddenly - the ratings suddenly, whether they exist properly not or authentically or validly isn't the question anymore.

Another great case in point, the most singularly, historically, popular show ever done on television, in terms of percentage of people watching , was I Love Lucy. On the night Lucy had her first baby, it had literally the largest audience - larger than the moonshot, larger than the Presidential Election, larger than everything - Lucy having her baby.

On the night they took that rating, it so ran away with competition that historically in terms of percentage of people watching we've never come close to it. And yet, during that period, the sponsorship's sales - Philip Morris, they were the sponsor - their sales dropped. Figure that one out!"

University Close-Up

2008-09-05T19:20:00.001-05:00

So I found out earlier this week that the University Archives here at Mizzou house a complete run of a fifteen-minute campus radio show that ran in the late 60s and early 70s called "University Close-Up". I looked through the show list the other day, requested several episodes, and spent a couple hours earlier today listening to them. Many of those segments are, naturally, campus figures talking about campus issues like new developments in the School of Agriculture and the revolutionary use of motion pictures in a "Family Life" class.

Most of the shows I listened to were interviews with or speeches from some prominent figure who visited the university. Here are some highlights -

Singer Andy Williams in 1968 talking about how much things had changed in popular music recently: "For a band singer, like me - that's what I call it, a band singer - it used to be you went into a studio with an arranger, and he picked out the songs, maybe twelve songs. You recorded maybe four songs in a session, and the sessions were three hours long. You can't do that these days; The Beatles changed everything. They spend four months in the recording studio, and they do all kinds of sonic tricks, and we can't keep up. And all of the young singers now are writing their own music. I used to call myself a pop singer, but I'm not that anymore. . . . I did just meet with the Beatles. I was in London - not for a meeting, but for something else, but while I was there, I met with them. I'm doing some specials this year, and I met with the Beatles about maybe doing one of them together."

That didn't happen, obviously, but it blows my mind that it might have.

New York Times humor writer Russell Baker in 1968: "Washington is the biggest factory town in America, and like in any factory town, every time you get a new boss, you get a new way of doing things. Every time there's a new president, you change your whole way of life in Washington. When Kennedy was elected, everyone started hanging French Impressionist paintings in their houses. 'Kennedy loves French Impressionism,' they all said, so they hung up French Impressionist paintings. And daiquiris. Everyone started to drink daiquiris. That gave me heartburn. I was drinking scotch & soda - we all got to drink scotch & soda under Eisenhower - and someone said to me, 'What are you doing? Kennedy likes daiquiris. We all have to drink daiquiris now.' So for me, the Kennedy administration was three years of heartburn. And you had to learn how to fall into a swimming pool with your tuxedo on and come up smiling. Head colds. Well after that we got Johnson, so everyone took down the French Impressionist paintings and replaced them with buffalo heads. I burned my buffalo head right before I left. It had begun to get fleas."

Also Baker: "Every day I go into a big giant box, get into a little metal box, go up seven floors and sit in a box all day. When the day is over, I get into a box on wheels, drive miles out in the country, go into a box, where I take off my tie, put my feet up and watch a box. Why do I this? Why am I living in boxes, waiting for the final box?"

That Girl star Marlo Thomas in 1970 talks a lot about helping out with underpriveleged youth and a star's responsibility to do what she can to help society. It's about what you'd expect from Marlo Thomas, but I really like the bit where she says "I'm crazy about the teenagers. They aren't creeps or law-breaking people. They just need something to do, and if you ask them to help with the smaller children, they will. Like everyone else, they need something to do."

Talk show host David Susskind in 1970 talking about the Vice President of the United States and his tendency to blame television for society's ills: "Television is blamed because it's so visible. When Agnew wants someone to lash, it's a good visible target. So are movies with the new permissiveness with nudity and obscenity."

[At this point, the interviewer brings up a quote from another news personality saying, essentially, that Agnew is evil and will destroy television.]

"I don't agree. You need Agnew. He's welcome. American mediocrity has a face to it. It's all in one face now. Spiro Agnew is all that's lousy and wrong in American life. Before, it was a theoretical proposition."

2001 author Arthur C. Clarke in 1970 predicting what life will actually be like in the year 2001: "Satellite communication will be everywhere, and everyone will connect through satellite hookups. Cities as we know them will no longer exist, because they won't be necessary."

I was hoping he was going to say more on that subject, but he really didn't. He mostly just talked about how 2001 doesn't have any messages, because he doesn't believe fiction should have any, saying "If you have a message, send it Western Union. Fiction should tell a story."

Anyway, I hope you got as much of a kick out of that stuff as I did. I transcribed one interview in full, but I'm saving it for tomorrow because it deserves a full post.

Sophomore Sprawl

2008-09-02T18:23:00.000-05:00

I’ve been watching The Wire: Season Two lately, which reminded me that I never posted about a TV-related theory of mine. I’ve never seen another name assigned to this before. If you have, by all means, point me to it. I dug through TV Tropes for some time, but I couldn’t find anyone documenting this phenomenon.

As you may have guessed from the title, I call it Sophomore Sprawl. Technically, I suppose, it’s a variation of the Sophomore Slump, but it’s more specific. Sophomore Sprawl occurs when a series which is tightly focused in its first season tries to do too many things in its second.

The Wire is a perfect example (spoilers follow). In the first season, everything – absolutely everything – revolves around the investigation of drug dealer Avon Barksdale by a Baltimore Police detail. We get plenty of character moments along the way, but we’re watching either the cops or the criminals at all times. It was about as pure as a narrative can be.

Season two, on the other hand, is all over the place. We’re following Barksdale and his associates both in and out of jail, getting up-to-date with the members of the police detail (who begin the season scattered at various jobs), and watching a new set of characters working at a shipping dock. It’s not that the show is worse than it was in season one, necessarily. It’s just juggling several different stories, which it didn’t try to do before.

Other examples abound. Veronica Mars season one is about Veronica tracking the murderer of her best friend Lily. Season two is about Veronica trying to figure out who caused the bus crash, and also who killed a gang member, and also about the aftermath of the arrest of Lily’s killer. Lost season one is about the survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious island. Season two is about a group of people living on an island where they have a fully-stocked research station in the ground, and a creepy other group who have apparently lived on the island for several years.

All my examples are recent, you’ll notice, and the reason for this is simple – until the last decade-and-a-half or so, TV shows didn’t have much scope at all. They established a formula and stuck to it. That’s not a criticism; it’s just true. Only recently have things shifted to a model where the status quo is expected to change.

But it does point to a possible explanation for the prominence of sophomore sprawl on TV these days – shows aren’t built to last forever anymore. The storytelling engines (to borrow a phrase from John Seavey) of these shows are designed to tell one story. (Lost excepted, of course. It’s more likely that storytelling engine was designed to leave many unanswered questions when the show fell victim to early cancellation.)

The first seasons of these shows are very carefully crafted – the creators likely spent years developing the concept to their satisfaction. For obvious reasons, the second season can’t have the same luxury – it has to get out there. This is often the cause of the “sophomore slump”. But why, specifically, does it cause sophomore sprawl?

When developing the second seasons, the creators have to deal with threads leftover from the first season as well as move the story forward. Consequently, they don’t have adequate time to fully address anything and the shows give off the appearance of having bitten off more than it can chew.

Again, I certainly don’t mean to imply that sophomore sprawl indicates a complete loss of quality. Rather, it usually amounts to a creative wobble early in the season before producers figure out how to effectively balance all of the storylines. Lost recovered quite quickly, as did The Wire.

I’ve been using the same few examples repeatedly in this post, and that’s where you come in. Is this not as much of a trend as I think it is? Can you think of other examples of sophomore sprawl?

AT&T is humanity's worst enemy

2008-09-01T14:17:00.000-05:00

If you're reading this, chances are high that you use the internet. You might, then find this Vanity Fair article interesting. It's an oral history of the internet, told by those involved. I was assigned it for class, but it's a good read.

The early parts, where yound bearded scientists do things like link one computer to another for the FIRST TIME EVER, are a little dry. It gets really interesting around part five, where average people start using the internet. The founders of sites like Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist all show up and offer a nice behind-the-scenes look at something I'd never really thought about before.

Sorry about all the links recently. Tomorrow I'll have actual content, I swear.

The producers come into the room, people start cryin' and stuff . . .

2008-08-31T16:47:00.001-05:00

It might be ironic and hip to make fun of Saved by the Bell, but I have no intention of doing that. Indeed, the show was really awful, but everyone knows that. So why dwell on it? Rather, I just want to point out the existence of E! True Hollywood Story: Saved by the Bell:

It's fascinating, to me, to watch those involved talk about the show years later. Creator Peter Engel and other crew members seem to think it was a clever and creative show. Haley Mills seems kind of embarrassed, although she shouldn't - her work as Miss Bliss was typically fine. Dustin Diamond, here, just seems kind of perplexed about the whole thing. And Dennis "Belding" Haskins reveals that, even though the part was written for someone "over fifty and black", he knew he had to have the part.

Anyway, there it is. It's pretty entertaining.

I'm back!

2008-08-30T21:09:00.001-05:00

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I moved to Missouri for grad school a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't get back in the habit of posting. Well now I am getting back in habit. To mark my return, here's a link -

A website with the number one song for each date in history. Apparently the number one song on the day I was born was "Like a Virgin".

No, I don't have any jokes about that, thank you very much.

Animation is the king of quality

2008-08-10T19:34:00.002-05:00

Rotten Tomatoes posted this list of the worst-reviewed movies of the last ten years the other day. It's kind of depressing to remember that someone paid money to make those movies. Also included, though, is the best reviewed movie of each year. Those, to me, are a lot more interesting. If you don't care to click on the link, here's what they are:

1998: The Truman Show
1999: Toy Story 2
2000: Chicken Run
2001: Monsters Inc.
2002: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
2003: Finding Nemo
2004: The Incredibles
2005: Murderball
2006: The Queen
2007: Ratatouille

Look at that list - according to the collected opinions of the nation's film critics, the best movie in six of the last ten years has been animated. And not even just animated, but a big-budget studio cartoon feature. It's not that other big-budget studio movies never get positive reviews - Lord of the Rings is represented on this list, and The Dark Knight might very well end up as the best-reviewed champion for 2008 - but they don't get them as consistently as animation.

Now, five of these six movies are Pixar, of course. Other studios simply don't put out the same kind of quality product that they do. But Chicken Run is an Aardman movie - their first feature of, thus far, three. I don't know what I'm trying to say with this post.

Animated movies are the best, I suppose. And Aardman should make more movies.

My favorite Python reference ever

2008-08-09T15:17:00.001-05:00

My father, as a general rule, does not make pop culture references. He doesn't think they're funny, and he often calls his sons "stupid" for "talking about that crap all the time".

Every once in a while, though, he'll make reference to a TV show or movie without warning. When he does, it always makes me laugh for three reasons. One, I don't expect it. Two, his delivery is, as always, stone-faced and straight-forward, like he's talking about algorithms or something. Three, his references never quite make sense, which makes the attempt even more amusing.

Today I was sitting at the table with two slices of buttered bread on my plate.

My dad sat down next to me and said, "Hey, Two Breads. Instead of Two Sheds. Two Breads."

He sat there like a statue. I went nuts. Then he smirked.

Well played, fatherly one. Well played.

(Here's the sketch he's referring to, by the way -)

12 Monkeys for just $14.95?! I can't turn that down!

2008-08-08T18:57:00.001-05:00

This Onion AV Club feature about the Golden Age of DVD reminds me that I had been meaning to post some things about the decline of DVD anyway. It also made me think about the last ever post at DVD Journal, which is just about a year old.

Both articles make similar points – DVDs used to be new and exciting, but now they’re old hat. Film geeks could barely breathe when the format was new, waiting to see what wonder would come next. Now we have high-definition discs, digital downloads, and all kinds of things that make DVD seem as old and tired as 78 RPM records (Hey, it was the only comparison I hadn’t seen anyone else make yet.)

Both pieces say most of what I would have to say on the subject better than I could, but what amazes me while reading them is how nostalgic they make me feel. Excuse me for a while, then, while I ramble on about how much DVDs have meant to me over the years.

I remember seeing Roger Ebert’s TV mention of the Fight Club 2-disc special edition in the summer of 2000 when I was 15 – it blew my mind. Commentary tracks? Documentaries galore? Deleted scenes? I had no idea DVDs had any of that stuff. Up to that point, I had assumed they were just like VHS, only with better quality and widescreen picture. I decided right then and there that I was going to get a DVD player as soon as possible.

I bought my first DVD player in December of that year – a big giant Toshiba that offered a friendly LCD “HELLO” when you turned it on and had a screen saver of a whale for some reason. I had to buy it for myself, because my dad said that DVDs were stupid and a waste of money. It cost me $140, but I didn’t care. In those days that was cheap for a DVD player, and anyway I would have paid a thousand if I’d had to.

I also bought the Toy Story Ultimate Toy Box three-disc set featuring both movies and a disc of special features. It was the perfect place to start. Two terrific pictures, looking clearer and more amazing than I’d ever seen them. And the crew from Pixar in their prime, completely geeking out over getting to share all these cool behind-the-scenes stories with people at home who didn’t get to work at Pixar every day. I ended up watching the commentary track for Toy Story 2 about four times. I had gone crazy for the fifteen-minute featurettes on Disney VHS tapes in the ‘90s. Here they were, amplified a thousand times. I was in heaven, and I loved every single second of it.

After seeing how great Toy Story could be, I started buying up my other favorites as quickly as possible – This is Spinal Tap, Young Frankenstein, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. They might not have been as stuffed with extras as the Pixar stuff, but they had plenty of good stuff. Spinal Tap, you may recall, had two completely separate special editions – the MGM one, where all the extras had the band in character, and the long out-of-print Criterion one, with features about the actual making of the movie. I bought the former as soon as I could, and my brother Christopher paid a ridiculous amount to buy the latter for me on eBay. I felt like he had given me a kidney.

It wasn’t just extras that had me hooked – DVD was my real introduction to the concept of seeing movies in their original aspect ratios. In particular, I remember watching Ghostbusters and being blown away by how many gags worked better when you could see everything as intended. Yes, Ghostbusters. I know it should probably be Star Wars or Lawrence of Arabia or something, but it wasn’t. It was Ghostbusters. So there. In any case, I was a complete widescreen zealot in high school – preaching the evils of pan-and-scan everywhere I went.

I quickly became known as “The DVD Guy” in my class. Just two weeks after I bought my DVD player, I got two copies of my all-time favorite movie - Duck Soup – for my sixteenth birthday. That same day, my friend Jason lured me away from the scene of my surprise party with the promise of watching the new Chicken Run DVD. I was late for the party because I insisted on staying through the end of the credits.

But I didn’t just stick with my favorites. In high school, I bought just about every movie I saw and even slightly enjoyed – I remember taking trips to Best Buy and leaving with six or seven movies. Most of these were completely superfluous. By the time I graduated, I had copies of Catch Me If You Can and All That Jazz and the Matthew Broderick movie The Freshman and many other things that I never watched once I owned them.

I did, however, watch the extras for those movies. I was a special features fiend. I tried to watch the extras for everything I owned. And by “the extras”, I mean everything. I didn’t skip over production notes or storyboards or trailers. I couldn’t risk missing even one piece of neat information about a movie. Of course, insisting on watching everything didn’t combine very well with buying DVDs at an unreasonably fast rate – I soon fell fifty or more titles behind in my extras-watching.

Even with all the DVDs I had, I (like all geeks in those days) still had a wish list of things I wanted to see released – Back to the Future, Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Godfather, a non-flipper version of Amadeus, special editions for Casablanca, Aliens and most of the classic Disney animated pictures. These were just the tip of the iceberg, of course. The list went on and on and on. Eventually I got most of them. Anyway, I remember screaming like a small child in October of 2001, when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Godfather trilogy were released just two weeks apart.

It was shortly after that, in fact, that the animation boom hit. Disney released the first wave of their Disney Treasures collection that December. I excitedly bought the two collections of shorts – Mickey Mouse in Living Color and Silly Symphonies – and excitedly ignored the other two. I was even more excited two years later when the first volume of Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes Golden Collection came out. Here I was, sitting in my own house, watching entire discs full of short cartoons.

By the time I went to college, I had a collection that was the envy of all my geek friends. I was constantly loaning movies and TV shows out to people. In fact, I used my obligatory college dry-erase board to keep track of who was borrowing DVDs from me. I was the DVD king of my neighborhood, and nothing in the world could have made me prouder. I genuinely felt like I was accomplishing something by being DVD Guy.

So why has that feeling faded in the years since? I mean, I still love DVDs. I buy them sometimes, I enjoy watching extras whenever I get the chance. But it just isn't the same. And I'm not quite sure why.

A big part of is exactly what those articles talk about – DVDs aren’t exciting anymore. The thrill of seeing The Indiana Jones Trilogy on the shelf in 2003 has been replaced by the skepticism that is the only possible reaction to the Repackaged to Tie In with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull edition of 2008. There’s nothing new happening anymore. I have most of the movies I want, and if I don’t, I could probably go buy them.

Also, I eventually realized that I simply had too many. All those unnecessary discs I bought in high school that never got watched? They became an easy way to make a little money back once I graduated college and had rent to pay. Sure, I only got rid of the ones that I probably shouldn’t have bothered buying in the first place, but I was still reducing rather than enlarging my collection. In high school that thought would have been unconscionable. That’s reality for you, I guess. It’s always spoiling my fun.

Maybe getting in to comic books as a college freshman made my enthusiasm for DVDs lessen. Here was a new, exciting thing; just as DVDs were starting to seem less than revolutionary. I might have owned Who Framed Roger Rabbit? for a couple years, but Watchmen and Kingdom Come were staring me in the face, and they were brand new.

I suppose it was none of those things. I suppose the time has just passed. I suppose everyone has those things they did in high school that they get nostalgic for when they can’t recapture the same sense of excitement. In my case, it happens to be DVD collecting. I guess I’m just a lot nerdier than most.

You are who you choose to be

2008-08-07T23:50:00.001-05:00

Today I re-watched the greatest Superman movie ever made. I hadn’t seen it in a few years, and I had forgotten just how well it captures the essence of Superman as a character – he’s an inspiration, a shining example to be looked up to. More recent takes (not just Superman Returns, but also the animated Superman: Doomsday) have tried to humanize Superman, to the point of making him fallible and even normal.

For whatever reason, the makers of those films wanted us to look at Superman and say “This fellow is just like me.” Today, though, I remembered once again that Superman isn’t just like me, and I would do well to try to be more like Superman. He would never think of himself before others, this movie makes a point of telling the audience. Superman will do whatever it takes to save the day, no matter how dire the situation for him.

What movie am I talking about? Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant from 1999.

(SPOILERS)

No, Superman doesn’t appear in the movie. But the ideal of Superman plays a key role, and his presence is felt all over. Early on, young Hogarth shows his metal friend several comic books. One is about an evil robot named Atomo. Another is an issue of Action Comics. When Hogarth explains that Superman always helps other people, the Giant decides that he wants to be like Superman.

Another plot thread concerns the Giant discovering death. After seeing two hunters shoot a deer, he decides that he hates guns and killing.

Later on, Hogarth wants the Giant to be Atomo when they play, but the Giant has other ideas:

His defense mechanisms triggered, the Giant realizes that he, too, is a type of gun – the one thing he never wanted to be. As the picture reaches its climax, the military fires an atomic missile at the Giant. Rather than allow everyone in the town of Rockwell, Maine, to die, the Giant heroically flies to meet it in midair. As he soars up to his death, he remembers that he has a choice to make. He can be a gun, or he can be something more. He can be Superman.

More than any of the actual Superman movies, that scene sums up for me exactly what makes the Last Son of Krypton a great character – just by existing, he inspires people to give everything they can for the good of others. By focusing on the man, other movies lost the ideal. By showing how the ideal affects a big giant robot, The Iron Giant reminds us of the man.

Dr. Looney's Remedy

2008-08-06T00:39:00.001-05:00

Every time I see a TV ad for or read anything about Pineapple Express, I hope anew that James Franco and Seth Rogen are going to sing this in it:

That would probably be amazing.

Horcruxes are fun

2008-08-05T12:37:00.000-05:00

So I've watched the trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince several times the past few days. A few notes:

1) I think it does a terrific job of establishing the mood of the story, which is tremendously dark (if you've read the book, you know it doesn't have a happy ending). But what strikes me about the trailer is that, heading into the sixth movie, whoever edited it assumes that the audience knows who Dumbledore is talking about when he says "the most dangerous dark wizard of all time". Sure, we see a flash of Voldemort, but we're never told that he and Tom Riddle are the same person.

In fact, Tom Riddle is never referred to by his full name at all. He's simply "Tom". Yet the trailer's sense of foreboding doesn't really work at all unless you know who "Tom" is and why he's important. That's remarkable, to me.

2) As much as I would have liked to have seen Richard Harris get to play out Dumbledore's story arc, the trailer makes me realize that he would have looked ridiculous in the flashback stuff in HBP, a very Dumbledore-centric movie. Michael Gambon probably looks older than the character should here, but he doesn't look feeble, which Harris invariably did in his last few years as an actor. Say what you will about Michael Gambon's Dumbledore, but he should capture the young man better than any of the other casting choices who were bandied about after Harris's death (Peter O'Toole or whoever).

3) Has there ever been a movie series that made it to six installments with this much of its cast intact? People seem to like On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but it's still the first Bond movie without Sean Connery. Revenge of the Sith had a few cast members from A New Hope, I suppose, but not this many.

Other than that, how many movie series have even made it to six? Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th. That's about it, isn't it?

Is it my fault? Do I have this effect on things I like?

2008-08-04T18:20:00.002-05:00

So I wrote this article for Tough Pigs today, and while I was doing so, I started thinking -

The Muppets used to be a popular entertainment choice among the young people of America, and now they aren't.

The fan base is aging and shrinking, and no one new is coming in to pick up the slack.

Pretty much everyone knows what Muppets are, but many people think they no longer produce new Muppet stuff.

In recent times, the Muppets have gotten farther and farther away from what made them popular in the first place in an attempt to seem "hip" and "edgy" (Muppets' Wizard of Oz, of example, was full of pop culture references and mildly dirty jokes).

Weighing all of this evidence, I can only come to one conclusion -

Muppets and Superhero Comics are the same.

Free Market Destroys the Universe

2008-08-03T23:02:00.002-05:00

I'm sure I'm far from the first person to notice this, but I finally went to see Hellboy II today, but in it, this happens (SPOILERS): Apparently, thousands of years ago, magical creatures made a pact with humans to leave each other alone. Now, a prince of Elves has decided he should attack humanity and reclaim the world. What made him decide that? Humans have spent too long tearing down nature to make room for "parking lots and shopping malls".

Two weeks earlier, Wall-E featured a world in which, essentially, Wal-Mart had brought about the end of the world by expanding over everything. Two movies in the same summer about the evils of consumerism. That's kind of neat.

Also, they both have toys for sale. I've seen them.

TARDIS = Operating Room

2008-08-02T21:47:00.000-05:00

So today, my friend Lara and I somehow ended up comparing various Doctors from Doctor Who to characters from M*A*S*H. Here's what we came up with -

First Doctor (William Hartnell) = Colonel Potter (Harry Morgan). They're both curmudgeonly and old.
Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) = Radar (Gary Burghoff). They're both much wiser than they look.
Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) = ? (We couldn't think of anyone for this. Any suggestions?)
Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) = Corporal Klinger (Jamie Farr). They're both funny and awfully strange.
Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) = BJ Hunnicut (Mike Farrell). They're both straight-forward, genial fellows.
Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) = Charles Emerson Winchester (David Ogden Stiers). They're both kind of pompous and arrogant
Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) = Lt. Colonel Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson). They're both, initially at least, kind of befuddled and quick-tempered.
Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) = Margaret Houlihan (Loretta Swit). They are both women.
Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) = Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda). They both mask indignation and angst under wisecracking exteriors.
Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) = Trapper John McIntyre (Wayne Rogers). They both just love to crack wise.

We also decided that Dr. Sidney Freeman (Allan Arbus) is The Face of Boe, because they both specialize in advice. And Colonel Flagg (Edward Winters) is The Master, because they're both crazy and evil.

The 6 Best Comic Book Super-Husbands

2008-08-01T21:50:00.003-05:00

A couple of days ago, cracked.com released their list of The 6 Worst Comic Book Super-Husbands. As you can see, they’re all Marvel characters. That’s because Marvel loves to inject drama into their comic books by having their “heroes” be abusive or crazy or deal-with-the-devil-makers. DC, as a general rule, does not do that. Their heroes act like heroes. Here, then, are my humble picks for the 6 *Best* Comic Book Super-Husbands.

Honorable mentions, by the way, to Buddy “Animal Man” Baker and Adam Strange.

6. Clark Kent (Superman)

For a long time, Superman was hesitant to return the advances of reporter Lois Lane, but they finally got married in 1996. Since that time, he’s been as devoted to Lois as he always was to the citizens of the Earth. While crime fighting, he sometimes thinks up new romantic gestures for her, and he takes for an anniversary flight every year. Lois, as much as his parents or his upbringing in Smallville, keeps Clark human and down-to-Earth, and he knows how lucky he is.

5. Jay Garrick (The Flash I)

When Jay first got powers in 1940, he used them to win a football game and impress Joan Williams. It worked, and she’s been Mrs. Joan Garrick for over fifty years. They’ve had their ups and downs – she thought he was dead for six years, he brought home the hyperactive Bart Allen for several more – but well into their 80s, they’re still so in love that Jay can barely bring himself to stop talking about Joan, even at JSA meetings. They exchange glances that mean more than a thousand words between most comic book characters. Most of all, though, they depend on each other. It's possible to imagine one without the other.

The best picture I could find was John Watson’s terrific painting of Joan mending Jay’s boots, which is pretty much “Why the Garricks are great in a nutshell” and can be found here.

4. Jack Knight (Starman)

SPOILER Yes, for all of James Robinson’s 1990s Starman series, the title character is actually unmarried. But, at the end of the series, when his fiancé Sadie issues an ultimatum – super heroics or her – he chooses a happy life with Sadie in a heartbeat. He didn’t abandon his duty – he talked to other heroes to make sure his hometown of Opal City would be in good hands, and then he rode off to live an average, unexciting married life. He doesn’t whine about having responsibility. He gets his affairs in order and gives it up, all to marry the love for his life.

3. Wally West (The Flash III)

Much like Spider-Man, Wally West once made a deal with the devil. In his case, however, it was to save his wife Linda, not his elderly aunt who will probably die before too long anyway. And he outsmarted the devil and saved his marriage. That story was just one of the many times that writers have used Wally’s love for Linda as his driving force. He’s a man madly in love with his wife and, now, with his two children. Even more striking is the fact that he started his solo series (in 1987) as a care-free playboy. He started to mature after he met Linda, and developed into the upstanding icon we know today.

I gotta say, though, that I still think “Linda Park-West” sounds like an upscale neighborhood.

2. Scott Free (Mister Miracle)

Scott and his wife Big Barda are both fighters by nature – they both fought their way off of the Hell planet Apokolips, in fact – and they’ve been known to engage enemies together. He often expresses excitement and/or arousal at seeing his wife swing into battle. To me, though, Scott’s devotion to Barda was summed up perfectly in the late 1980s, when she decided she wanted to live a normal suburban life. They were clearly not suited for it, but Scott invested in the dream wholeheartedly, because making his wife happy was more important to him than anything else in the universe.

1. Ralph Dibny (The Elongated Man)

The world’s stretchiest detective didn’t work alone – he was always part of a team with his wife Sue – they investigated cases together, traveled the world together, even joined the Justice League together (they were credited as “Ralph ‘n Sue” on the covers for a little while in the early 80s). They bickered constantly, in the way only two people who know everything about each other can. Every year on his birthday, Sue would set up a mystery for Ralph to solve. More than any other guy on this list, Ralph’s wife was his entire world, and he was hers. When writer Brad Meltzer foolishly killed Sue in 2004’s Identity Crisis, the writers of 52 had no choice but to follow suit and kill Ralph off. They’re currently together again, working as ghost detectives somewhere in the afterlife. Not even death could tear their love apart.

David Brent is the new Big Bird

2008-07-31T16:23:00.001-05:00

A look at the "International versions" section of The Office Wikipedia page reveals that the British original has inspired five remakes in foreign countries (the US, France, Germany, French-speaking Canada, and Chile) with a sixth (in Russia) set to premiere soon. That will be six versions, plus the original, in just seven years since the series premiered.

The reigning king of foreign remakes is, of course, Sesame Street, which has seen thirty-two different international co-productions since it premiered in 1969. The Office has quite a long way to go if it wants to catch up.

Of course, after Sesame Street had been on four seven years (1969-1976), it had only inspired three other versions - in the Netherlands, Germany, and Brazil. The Office has twice that already.

In conclusion, The Office is on pace to have sixty-four international versions by the year 2040.

What does "definitive" even mean, anyway?

2008-07-30T13:15:00.002-05:00

Well, there are only seventeen months left in this decade (have we decided what to call it yet? Is it “the aughts”?), and I think it might be time to start discussing what the definitive TV shows of the decade are. We could still see great movies, or albums, or books – those things come out as single entities. Any lasting TV shows that premier from here on out are unlikely to really find their footing until “the aughts” become “the tens”.

So what TV shows – one comedy and one drama – best sum up trends we’ve seen in American TV during the last eight-and-a-half years? It sitcom is easy – it has to be Arrested Development. That series has the one-camera/no-laugh-track format shared by shows like The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm, the cutaways and flashbacks found in Family Guy and Scrubs, and the same casual, assumed focus on dysfunctional family as Two and a Half Men and Malcolm in the Middle (which is different from 90s-style Roseanne “look how dysfunctional we are” shows where it was part of the shock. The newer series assume that all families are dysfunctional.)

It also uses sexual content not for shock value, but as background for jokes and character moments, much like shows from 30 Rock to Sex & the City (again, this is different from the 90s, where often the whole joke was “Hey, look. We’re talking about sex.”) Almost anything that marks a comedy as being “from the aughts” can be found in Arrested Development.

It’s harder to choose a drama. The past decade has seen no shortage of trends in TV drama. Shows like The Wire and Lost are dense with continuity and hard to begin watching in the middle of the series – each new episode depends on the viewer’s knowledge of what has come before. Lost and, to an even greater degree, Battlestar Galactica have shown that it’s possible to be a genre show and both be critically acclaimed and tell universally gripping stories. Shows as diverse as Six Feet Under, House and, again, Lost have shown a refusal to stick to a status quo, with situations and characters changing at a rate previously unheard of. Speaking of Lost one last time, it offers the most prominent use of time as a device – time on many shows is no longer linear, but bounces back and forth as suits the storytelling needs of the creators.

So far it looks like I’m going to say Lost is the quintessential aughts-era drama, but I’m not. While it would be a fine choice, there are a few other criteria that it doesn’t meet. First of all, we’ve seen a trend towards morally ambiguous (or downright evil) lead characters – Tony Soprano on The Sopranos, Vic Mackey on The Shield, Dexter on Dexter. Finally, the decade has been positively stuffed with procedural dramas – the CSIs, Law & Order spin-offs, Cold Case, Without a Trace, Bones and many others. If any show is going to sum up the decade’s dramas, it has to include elements of a procedural. Lost is a mystery show, but it doesn’t follow any procedure I’ve ever heard of.

If it isn’t Lost, what is it? What show combines all of these elements – heavy continuity, changing status quo, morally ambiguous hero, playing around with time, a combination of genre and procedural elements? Well, to find it, we’ll have to go back to the very beginning of the decade, when the WB was airing a series called Angel. That’s right, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s younger brother positively defines television drama in the past decade.

Look at the evidence –

- By the time the show had entered its third season, it was impossible to follow without having watched not only the first two seasons of Angel, but also the first three seasons of Buffy. If that’s not impenetrable continuity, I don’t know what is.

- The status quo on the series changed constantly. There wasn’t a huge amount of character turnover, but every single character was put through an avalanche of changes over the course of the series. This was best symbolized by the series’ two moves to a new home base for the main characters. It was a series that always moved forward, never stopping to put things back the way they used to be.

- Angel wasn’t the most devious lead character ever to appear on television, but he did kill when necessary, and in his previous incarnation as evil vampire Angelus, he was a brutal mass murderer. That persona resurfaces a couple of times during the course of the series, and he’s still our main character – even as he’s gleefully slaughtering innocents.

- That’s where the manipulation of time came in – the series spent a great deal of time flashing back to delve into the back story of Angel or other immortal characters.

- It has the genre elements, obviously. It’s a show about a vampire. As for universally gripping, it was never as popular as Buffy, but I think that’s mostly because it’s harder to get in to. Anyone can start watching Buffy, but only those who already know that they like the parent show will watch Angel, despite the fact that they’re very different stylistically. I'm going to say that it isn't about demons, because it is. But if Buffy was, at heart, a show about trying to make it through high school, Angel was a show about how you never stop trying to figure out how to be an adult. Everyone can relate to that.

- On the critical acclaim side, the show has had several books written about it in the years since it ended, and I know it is frequently used in college classes and the like.

- It’s not just a show about a vampire – it’s about a vampire who happens to be a private detective, which is where the procedural elements came from. Many episodes featured Angel Investigations working a specific case, which would be resolved by the end of the episode.

So as you can see, Angel is it, folks. Just a couple of final notes – like many series are now, Angel was shot in widescreen. It was one of the first such shows on network television. Also (SPOILER), it has an abrupt, cliffhanger-type ending with no resolution. Just like The Sopranos.

You might disagree with my choices. If you do, you should let me know what you think the definitive comedy and drama of the decade are.

Zmed's Legacy

2008-07-29T20:53:00.001-05:00

I’ve noticed a lot of unrelated (or tangentially related) sequels to old movies popping up lately. Things like WarGames: The Dead Code and Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation. Is this actually a new phenomenon, or have I just not noticed? I know direct-to-video sequels to newer movies have been common for years. Heck, American Pie and Bring It On have become franchises to rival The Land Before Time (and the American Pie Presents garbage bags at least all feature poor anything-for-a-buck Eugene Levy).

But this new breed consists of in-name-only resurrections of movies from twenty-five years ago – movies that weren’t tremendously successful in the first place. Oh, WarGames and Bachelor Party certainly have their fans, but it’s not like we’re talking about ET or Ghostbusters here. Of course, that’s it exactly, isn’t it? More beloved movies have a certain amount of credibility that the studios wouldn’t want to squander. I suppose these movies – ones that are kind of well-known – are the perfect ones for the nostalgia market.

Still, I have to wonder – who exactly is the intended audience for movies like these? All six superfans of the originals? People who recognize the names of movies they probably saw on cable one time? People who never saw the originals because they were too old? People who just plain wish it could be the 80s forever? In any case, it can’t be a very large demographic. And I haven’t seen any of these movies, but they can’t be very good, can they? Couldn’t the studios put that money into making something of value? Or, you know, give it to a charitable organization or something?

Because seriously, anything’s gotta be better than Slap Shot 2 starring Stephen Baldwin.

Something Old

2008-07-28T20:35:00.001-05:00

I've been meaning for a while to post some of the pieces I wrote as a commentator for college radio. This one was written in April of 2007. It has some references to it being April of 2007, but don't let that distract you. Anyway, it's pretty silly.

T-Ball? More like Commie Ball

Well, it’s April (once again, that's 2007 - author), and spring is here, and that can only mean one thing – yes, TV shows are new again until the end of the season! Lost, The Office, Gilmore Girls, a bunch of shows I don’t watch – all back until the middle of May. I can’t wait to see what happens on the island, at Dunder-Mifflin, in Stars Hollow. However, this piece doesn’t have anything to do with that, because spring is also baseball season. The MLB is in full swing, my friends. I’m sure Moises Alou, Reggie Jackson, Ted Williams and the whole gang are having a swell time hitting balls, shagging flies and running bases.

However, I’m not here to talk about them either, or even about the MLB. At a lower level, kids all across the country are getting ready for summer baseball, which should start up shortly after the season finale of Lost. There’s an organization for boys of every age – Legion for high schoolers, named after a team of DC Comics superheroes; Babe Ruth for junior high boys, named after that guy Benny Rodriguez dreams about in The Sandlot; and Little League for upper elementary kids, named after Little Luth, the mascot of the National Lutheran Youth Convention.

Well, based on the fact that I’m turning their names into terrible pop-culture references, it’s probably obvious by now that I’m not actually too interested in any of these levels of baseball. What I am interested in, however, is the lowest level of organized baseball play – Tee ball, for ages 6 through 8. T-ball isn’t regular baseball, of course, as it modifies the game in a number of ways, theoretically to make it easier for young children to play. Unfortunately, it has a much more negative effect in practice. Easier? Maybe, but certainly far more Soviet-esque.

Yes, friends – tee ball mirrors the threat of international communism in a number of ways, starting with the title figure – the “tee” itself. Similar to a golf tee, but much larger, it allows every player to hit the ball with little or no effort. Much like Stalin’s infamous Five-Year-Plan, this gives the appearance that everyone is skilled and productive. Even the bad kids can hit the ball nearly every time. This, of course, gives them a sense of false confidence, allowing them to think they’ll be able to beat the US to the moon. When they find out later in life that this isn’t true, they’ll only be disappointed.

This spread-the-wealth mentality continues in the structure of every inning. Rather than having three outs per team per inning (or four, or seven or any other number), tee ball allows every player on both teams to bat every single inning. On the surface, of course, this also appears to give everyone an equal chance. Each boy gets a chance and everyone is happy. In reality, of course, it just puts the teams at the mercy of the governmental structure. Like the Berlin Wall, the much-bally-hooed “Laaaaast Batterrrrr!” signals a split between innings that can not be moved.

Finally, at the end of every tee ball game, both teams are always told that they won, and well. In the history of the sport, no team has ever scored less than 30 runs and no opponent has scored more than 5. Just as Stalin told the people of Russia that they were leading the world in every conceivable area, these kids are told that they are unstoppable. This serves no purpose other than to tear them down when they lose at life, but this doesn’t matter to short-sighted Bolshevik coaches. They have only their immediate concerns in mind.

All I really mean to say is this – tee ball might seem like innocent fun, but every kid who plays it is going to grow up someday. They’ll remember the lessons they learned in tee ball, much better than the baseball skills. They’ll grow up to idolize Vladimir Lenin, not Vladimir Guerrero.

I didn't even know it myself

2008-07-27T17:29:00.000-05:00

So my friend Jon pointed this out to me the other day. Apparently I'm running a My Name is Earl fansite. Who knew?

Wild College Fun

2008-07-26T18:06:00.000-05:00

Today, while packing for my upcoming move, I found a bunch of notebooks from college. In between taking notes, I would often turn to the back on a notebook and start writing random things. Often, this took the form of a list. I had apparently forgotten just how geeky these lists were. Today, I found all 43 recurring or regular characters on Buffy, all 13 Beatles albums, all 16 Martin Scorsese movies I had seen at the time, and (then) all 38 members of the Justice Society of America. Each of those lists, and dozens of similar ones, were ranked in order of my personal preference.

So that was what I did for fun in college. Currently, I'm making a note reminding myself to not do the same thing in graduate school.

Don't cry to me; I was out with Herman Glimsher last night

2008-07-25T20:56:00.001-05:00

I’ve been watching The Dick Van Dyke Show: Season Two, and I think I’ve developed a crush on Sally Rogers, the female half of Rob’s writing staff at The Alan Brady Show (of course, I’ve always wanted to be Buddy Sorrell, the male half, but that’s a completely different story). If you’re familiar with the show, you’re certainly aware that Sally’s inability to get a date with anyone but Herman “Warm Milk” Glimsher is a prominent running gag.

That’s ridiculous, I say. Sally’s pretty attractive in an off-beat way. She’s smart – she’s generally more in control of any situation on the show than either of her co-writers - and she’s all kinds of quick-witted and funny. She works on a hit TV show. There must be guys out there in early-60s New York City who’d be dying for a girl like her, right? Not to mention that her circle of friends includes Rob Petrie and Buddy Sorrell, who are by all accounts hilarious guys. Her boyfriend would probably get to hang out with them all the time. Heck, I’d date Sally in a second if I lived in the same time period and were both single and fictional.

Of course, you know what? 30 Rock tries to pull the same conceit with Liz, played by Tina Fey. And that’s even sillier. Why can’t intelligent, funny TV writers be objects of desire, huh, TV writers? Just what do you have against, um, yourselves?

This is a weird moment: Rappin' Winslows

2008-07-24T22:38:00.000-05:00

When Family Matters premiered on ABC in the fall of 1989, it was little more than a pale imitation of The Cosby Show. You had an African-American family, sitting around relating to each other in loosely plotted stories. The show didn't really develop its own identity until Steve Urkel became a regular. This would eventually lead to the show doing decidedly non-Huxtable-esque stories involving things like robots, cloning, and time travel.

Never was the Cosby influence more evident than in this episode from late in the first season. In 1985, The Cosby Show had done a story where the Huxtable children performed for Cliff's parents on their 50th anniversary, as seen in this clip.

While the Family Matters episode in question is far from a direct lift - it involves eldest child Eddie shooting a music video for a contest - it's certainly an attempt to capture the same feeling. The problem is that while the Cosby Show Ray Charles number was unbelievable in a charming way (watching it, you almost wish you had a family capable of pulling together to put on a show like that), the Family Matters rap is just bizarre. The song isn't catchy, the jokes aren't funny, and you never believe that Eddie wrote and directed it himself.

Now, yes, I'm insulting a sitcom episode from 1990 for no reason at all. But my point is this - this is a series with no real reason to exist. This scene is strange, but mostly it's just laughably bad. By allowing a supporting character to completely take over, the series became something intensely memorable. Say what you will about UrkelBot or Steevil the Dummy, but you won't soon forget them.

Two advertisements in a comic book

2008-07-23T13:12:00.005-05:00

Recently, I read the entire run of DC Comics’ Starman by James Robinson. As far as I’m concerned, Starman is as true a masterpiece as has ever been produced in fiction of any kind – a large cast of well-written characters, a plot that continually builds to an amazing climax, consistently fun side-stories along the way. I’ll probably go into more detail about why I love Starman so much another time. In the meantime, check out Scott Tipton’s overview of the series at Comics 101.

This post concerns one particular issue - #54, published in April 1999. This is a terrific story, flashing back to 1899 to tell a story of Opal City, its citizens, and an object of great importance to our characters in the present. But I own the series in single issues, so it’s not just a story – it’s also a vehicle for delivering advertising. In this issue, two ads jumped out at me, and both of them were promos for new prime-time cartoons about to debut on FOX. I don’t know how comic book readers at the time reacted, but the two ads reveal a great deal about the respective quality of both shows.

First, on the inside front cover:

Here we get a tiny glimpse of the world of Futurama. We don’t really learn anything about the characters, except that one is named Fry and looks like a hipster. We don’t even know who Fry is. He might be a celebrity within this world, endorsing this product. What we do learn is that Futurama takes place in a universe where Earthlings have made contact with other planets. More importantly, though, it’s a world where advertising exists that promotes the tastes of alien cultures. If we want to learn more, we need to tune in to find out just what this world looks like.

Here’s the other, opposite page 7:

Here we learn that the dog can talk, and makes puns about bodily functions.

Draw your own conclusions.

A question for my readers

2008-07-22T21:35:00.001-05:00

Like two of my three brothers, I've never seen a James Bond movie. Until I was about twenty, I never even considered it. Then I decided it was going to a badge of honor - watching James Bond pictures was just something I didn't do, like sports or Star Trek.

Well, last month I broke my life-long Star Trek ban by watching "Space Seed" from season one of the original series, followed by Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I enjoyed both of those things a great deal. So I'm thinking it might be time to do the same thing with James Bond. It's a pretty important piece of pop culture, and I've never even touched it. Of course, I never read superhero comics until I was nineteen, and when I started, I became obsessed and unable to stop. That won't be much of an issue with Bond, of course. There's only twenty-one movies. I'd have to stop a lot sooner.

Is it worth it? If I start watching Bond pictures, will I become a better person? If, in fact, I will, what are the best entries in the series to start with? What are some I should specifically avoid?

The Difference Between The Dark Knight and Batman Forever in Zero Words

2008-07-21T17:01:00.004-05:00

MASSIVE SPOILERS
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Ramblings about some Batman movies

2008-07-20T20:36:00.002-05:00

BAT-SPOILERS ABOUND

Having gone to see The Dark Knight yesterday, my friend Justin and I watched three different Batman movies today, from three different directors:

Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin (on cable television)
Tim Burton's Batman Returns (on DVD)
Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (on DVD)

I realized something while watching them - The Dark Knight has changed how I view all of them.

First, Batman Begins is pretty slow in spots, just like I remembered (the early scenes with Liam Neeson seem to last hours), but it's also pretty great - once Bruce gets back to Gotham, it's non-stop excitement. That said, considering how revolutionary it seemed when it was released three years ago, it's shocking how much it feels like a prelude to The Dark Knight - almost as much as The Terminator plays like a text scroll for T2. In Batman Begins, we watch Bruce get to where he needs to be to become Batman. I won't deny that the second half of the picture is thrilling. But it's most exciting at the end, when it points boldly forward by saying "The Joker is coming". The Dark Knight delivered on that promise. In fact, it reinforces that point by giving Begins villain The Scarecrow a brief cameo where he gets defeated in about five minutes. "If you thought that guy was scary last time," the movie seems to be saying, "wait until you see what's coming up next."

Until today, I maintained that Begins was not the best-ever Batman movie, often loudly proclaiming that that honor went to the never-slow-for-even-a-second Batman Returns. Tim Burton's second Batman movie - his first, entitled simply Batman is good, but spends too much time being nothing other than a Joker origin movie - is insane in the best way. While Nolan's recent movies have been grounded in reality, Burton's pictures are like cartoons brought to life. Everything is over-the-top, and no character is allowed to behave like a normal human being. Danny DeVito's Penguin is a garish caricature, eating raw fish and biting people in the nose. Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman is brought back to life by the magic licks of street cats. A powerful businessman is played by Christopher Walken. Actual penguins waddle around with rockets strapped to their backs. Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle struggle to cover up their respective battle wounds during a make-out session. Over the years, the movie has gotten a lot of criticism for being wacky fun that never takes itself seriously, but that's what I love about it.

Here's the thing though - Today, I realized that Batman Returns doesn't look nearly as good to me now as it did a week ago. As you can hopefully tell from the preceding paragraph, I had a good time. But it's not quite the same. For over a decade, I always tossed off Returns whenever anyone would ask me my favorite Batman movie. I felt that Begins, in taking itself just a little bit too seriously, didn't live up to its full potential. "It's just not as much fun as Batman Returns", I would say. And it isn't. But The Dark Knight totally is. It does everything right. It's dark and serious and funny and exciting. It just might be the perfect Batman movie. Watching Batman Returns today, I felt like I was running into an old high school girlfriend. You know, someone you used to think was amazing, but now, compared to your wife, you wonder what you ever saw in her.

Yes, I just compared Batman Returns and The Dark Knight to my non-existent high school girlfriend and equally non-existent wife.

Conversely, The Dark Knight made me feel quite a bit better about Batman & Robin. Yes, it's still laughably awful - full of terrible acting and painful wisecracks and eye-infecting costumes. But now that we've gotten two stellar Batman movies in the years since, I don't really care anymore. I used to complain about Joel Schumacher all the time. I'd yell and scream "What is wrong with Warner Brothers?! HOW COULD THEY LET THAT HAPPEN?!" Today, I just laughed. "This is a really awful movie. You're a silly man, Joel Schumacher," I said aloud. But Warner Brothers has righted that wrong. Batman & Robin is just this unfortunate thing that happened one time. It didn't kill Batman. There's no reason to hate them or Joel Schumacher. Not anymore.

Thank you, The Dark Knight. You've helped me confront my pain, and made me a happier person.

This is a weird moment

2008-07-19T20:48:00.001-05:00

Let’s talk about Ernest Goes to Camp.

Now, in no way am I claiming that the second in the Ernest series (after Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, of course) is a good movie. It’s not. It features a grown man covering himself in poison ivy on the recommendation of a cabin full of convicted juvenile delinquents. It also features a toilet bomb.

But that’s exactly what makes this moment so strange. About an hour into the picture, Ernest (the aforementioned grown man, played by Jim Varney) sings a mournful song about how disappointed he is in his campers and himself. No songs are sung before or after that point. Once again, this is a ridiculous comedy full of crotch jokes. And yet it asks us to accept a straight-forward ballad sung by the butt of those very jokes. It’s not an ironic scene. We aren’t intended to laugh.

The movie is only twenty-one years old, and yet it seems like a relic of a different civilization. There’s absolutely no way this would happen today. This kind of scene might be used as a wink-wink “musicals are dumb” joke, but no silly kids’ comedy would shoe-horn a song in where it doesn’t belong. Even at the time, it must have seemed strange. Sure, other 80s movies like Revenge of the Nerds and Better Off Dead had only one song number each. The difference is that those songs are explained, however flimsily, by the plot – a student talent show in the former, a dream sequence in the latter. Here we have, for no reason at all, an idiot man-child singing to himself about his insecurities.

That has to be one of the strangest moments in movie history.

Jim Gordon is Awesome

2008-07-18T22:03:00.001-05:00

SPOILERS ABOUT BATMAN: THE NEWEST MOVIE

I'm still trying to process a lot of things about The Dark Knight, but one of the things that struck me most was how well it balanced all of the characters. It was promoted as being a movie about Batman, The Joker, and Harvey Dent. And it is, but it's also a movie about James Gordon. All four of those men have great arcs. None of them seems overused, and none of them gets the short end of the stick.

For me, though, Gordon is the heart of the movie. When we, the audience, believe Gordon to be dead, I was actually angry at the filmmakers and worried for him. True, I should have assumed that he'd be back (if only because he hadn't become Commissioner yet). But nothing seems impossible in the Bat-world that Christopher Nolan has created. He went out like a hero, and it would have been satisfying. The fact that he is faking his death (even fooling his wife and children) out of dedication to his job just underlines all the more what's great about Lt. Gordon - he will stop at nothing to do what's best for his city.

At the end, his basic heroism is underscored again when he agrees to help Batman paint himself as a villain for the good of Gotham. The last movie ended with Gordon creating the Bat-Signal, and this one ends with him destroying it - in both cases because it will help to clean up his city. Jim Gordon is the unsung hero of Nolan's Bat-series, and I can't wait to see where he goes from here.

You can read more adventures of Commissioner Gordon in the pages of DC Comics.

This will be the last post about Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon for a while, I swear.

Thoughts While Mowing: Part III

2008-07-17T11:40:00.002-05:00

This should totally be the Coen Brothers' next movie:

(Special Thanks to Joe Hennes for making the poster for me).

Faith Restored

2008-07-16T19:53:00.002-05:00

Joss Whedon is awesome.

I'm a big Buffy and Angel fan. That's no shock to anyone who knows me. But over the last year or so, I had begun to think that maybe Joss Whedon had lost his touch. His Astonishing X-Men comics weren't that great (well, they read like regular X-Men, I suppose), and the Buffy Season Eight comic book was at its best when actual comics writer Brian K. Vaughan was doing the scripting. As for the Angel continuation series that Whedon helped plot, I have a hard time remembering anything that happened it.

Turns out that maybe Joss should just stick to writing live-action programming. The first part of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog was posted yesterday. You can call me a big giant fanboy if you want, but it's stellar. The songs blend seamlessly into the action - kind of like Sondheim, but intentionally funny - and the jokes are terrific. This is hardly the first time we've seen a villain-hero dynamic from the villain's point-of-view, but it's certainly the most amusing.

What strikes me most, though, is the character work. In just under fourteen minutes; Dr. Horrible, his love interest Penny, and his cartoonish nemesis Captain Hammer are all fleshed out to a remarkable degree. I'm not interested only because it's Joss. I can't wait to see what happens next to Dr. Horrible, the character.

Good stuff.

Thoughts While Mowing: Part II

2008-07-15T21:05:00.011-05:00

So after yesterday’s post, I was thinking about character actors and also Robin Hood. Naturally, my mind rolled around to Disney’s 1973 version. It’s a movie that gets a lot of criticism for employing familiar character actors to play character roles, but I don’t think it deserves to. All of the actors are terrific. They might be playing themselves, but they’re doing a bang-up job of it.

Anyway, I realized today that five characters in the movie are played by actors who had supporting roles on CBS programs. Five! All from CBS!

Phil Harris (Little John) played himself as the smooth-talking bandleader of The Jack Benny Program for sixteen seasons on radio (1936-1952).

Ken Curtis (Nutsy the Vulture) played scraggly deputy Festus Haggen on the last eleven seasons of Gunsmoke (1964-1975).

George Lindsey (Trigger the Vulture) played replacement gas station attendant Goober Pyle on the last four seasons of The Andy Griffith Show (1964-1968) and all of the weak replacement series Mayberry R.F.D. (1968-1971).

Pat Buttram (The Sheriff of Nottingham) played slimy local salesman Mr. Haney on Green Acres (1965-1971).

John Fiedler (Church Mouse) played meek patient Mr. Peterson on The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978).

That’s kind of neat.

5 Good Perfomances by Character Actors in Warner Brothers Movies

2008-07-14T21:30:00.003-05:00

For a lot of motion picture fans, myself included, character actors are more fun to watch than big stars. It’s magic to see someone take a supporting role and make it sing. I’m not going to say that Warner Brothers is the All Time Greatest Studio for character actors, but it has to be close. During the Golden Age of Hollywood (you know, the 1930s and ‘40s), the studio had a stable of great bit players like no other. With the collapse of the studio system, the contract player died out, of course. But in honor of those halcyon days, here’s a sampling of some great WB character performances spanning seven decades.

1933 – Frank McHugh as Francis in Footlight Parade

Stocky, cock-eyed Frank McHugh played sidekick to James Cagney in a number of movies for Warner Brothers, most prominently The Roaring Twenties in 1939. But without singing a note, he steals this musical away from talents like Cagney and Ruby Keeler. As nervous, excitable dance director Francis, he frets and moans his way through the picture, always seeming to be on the verge of a breakdown even when things go right. You get the sense that Francis always wanted to be an accountant, but fell into choreography by mistake. The character appears for maybe twenty minutes total and, yes, I’m writing back-story for him. He’s that good.

This clip features McHugh at the beginning and at the end, the second time spouting his catchphrase from the movie.

1938 –Eugene Pallette as Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood

Robin Hood is all about Errol Flynn, of course. He’s in just about every scene, and he’s amazing. But like most WB pictures from this period, it’s also full of great performances perfectly matched to its tone. If Casablanca is full of subtlety, Robin Hood allows every actor a chance to play over-the-top. And no one is broader than Pallette. He plays a Friar Tuck who is simultaneously upset and over-joyed at everything happening in front of him. He loves the spectacle, but he would rather be eating. He’s a good fighter, but a better sleeper. Somehow, the character never seems like a paradox. He’s just too big a man to have only one personality. It’s all contained perfectly in Pallette’s distinctive voice and enormous presence.

1975 – William Duell as Sefelt in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Cuckoo’s Nest is a dream for a fan of character actors – all-time greats Christopher Lloyd, Brad Dourif, and Vincent Schiavelli, to just name a few, appear as mental hospital inmates alongside Jack Nicholson. William Duell isn’t as well-known as his castmates – he’s probably most recognizable as Johnny the Snitch on Police Squad! – but he’s no less remarkable. As little Sefelt, Duell has no big moments. His job, almost entirely, is simply to react to what other people are doing. While the others act like raving crazy people, Duell is left to act like an entertained crazy person. This scene, for example, is all about Lloyd as Taber and William Redfield as Mr. Harding. Duell does little more than giggle and repeat words (that's him saying "heh" at 00:49, for example). But that’s my point – you chuckle at him when he has funny reactions, and you don’t dwell on him when he isn’t on-screen. In a movie full of memorable performances, William Duell helps sustain the reality, and does so brilliantly.

WARNING: This scene contains dangerous words.

1985 –Carmen Filpi as Hobo Jack in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure

Carmen Filpi was not a homeless man. He was an actor who worked steadily in Hollywood for decades. You may have seen him in 1990s Adam Sandler movies or in that on episode of Boy Meets World. And yet, when he sings his filthy old heart out in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, you can almost smell years and years of hobo-ing on him. No one watches this scene and thinks “Carmen Filpi is a great actor;” they just think “That’s one disgusting old man.” Bravo, Mr. Filpi.

2005 –Gary Oldman as Lt. Jim Gordon in Batman Begins

For years, the Batman supporting character Commissioner Gordon never got the respect he deserved in live-action adaptations. In the 1960s TV show, Neil Hamilton played Gordon like a friendly uncle who called on his nephew Batman for help. In 1989’s Batman and sequels, Pat Hingle started out as a buffoon and got more embarrassing as the series got worse. One of the many things that Batman Begins did right was to finally raise Gordon to his proper place in Gotham. As played by Oldman, he’s a weary-but-dedicated cop who loves his job and loves his city even more. He’s amazed at the things happening around him, but doesn’t let that stop him from carrying out his duties. You look into Oldman’s eyes and you have no doubt that this man will one day be Police Commissioner.

Is it even possible for this movie to not be terrible?

2008-07-14T20:14:00.001-05:00

Land of the Lost: The Big Budget Will Ferrell Movie From the Director of Casper.

I mean really, is it?

No Posts this weekend

2008-07-11T21:33:00.001-05:00

I posted twice today, and I shall post twice again on Monday. I can't post tomorrow or Sunday because I have familial obligations. Sorry about that, large and adoring audience.

Thoughts While Mowing: Part I

2008-07-11T21:31:00.003-05:00

With Scrubs moving from NBC to ABC this fall, I started thinking about what would happen if other sitcoms switched networks. If, say, My Name is Earl went to CBS, it would probably have a laugh track, which would make a lot more sense. However, if 30 Rock were to move to another network, it would be chaos. It would change the series in a way no show has ever been affected by a network change in the past.

30 Rock takes place behind-the-scenes at an NBC program. It often pokes fun at the reality programming favored by the network, among other things. NBC, really, is an essential character. Sure, if the show switched to (for example) CBS, they could simply have TGS get canceled and picked up by CBS. They could do all kinds of jokes about multi-camera sitcoms and procedural dramas. That’d probably be okay.

Most of the characters could survive easily – if TGS were to move to a new network, it makes sense that the actors, producers and writing staff would go with it. But there would still be problems. Two of the show’s most popular characters could not credibly be brought over to a new network. Jack, played by Alec Baldwin, has spent years building a career at NBC/General Electric. Sure, at the end of last season, he was working for George Bush, but we all know he’ll be back where he belongs. But what he certainly wouldn’t do is go to work for NBC’s direct competition. Not in the long term.

The other character who would be out of place outside of Rockefeller Center (Say, that’s another thing – the name of the show is a GE-owned building. They’d have to rename the series CBS Television City) is Kenneth the page. Kenneth has spent his whole life with only one goal in mind – to aid those who work in television. The NBC page is the loftiest position one can achieve in that field. He lives to be an NBC page, and he would never abandon the dream just because one show got canceled.

Of course, this is all silly speculation for something that will never happen. If 30 Rock did get canceled, no other network would pick it up. It’s owned by NBC/Universal. Scrubs only got picked up ABC because it was owned by ABC parent company Disney. In this day and age, no network would pick up a canceled series that they won’t even own distribution rights for. Never.

Sorry for wasting your time.

Let's Hope It's For Real This Time

2008-07-11T17:56:00.002-05:00

DC announces that they’re going to step up movie production.

How did this not happen the first time, back in 2003? Warner Brothers owns DC Comics, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to that DC Comics own the most diverse fictional universe out there. Marvel is having success with their superhero movies, sure. In the ten years since Blade was released, Marvel has put out seventeen movies using their superhero characters. In the same time, DC has released five movies using their characters (and I’m counting Constantine).

But if DC gets their act together, they could put out so much more. In the DC Universe, even putting aside the familiar Justice League characters, there are masterpieces of a wide variety of genres just waiting – just begging – to be put on film. Now, it would be impossible to tie all of these together into a coherent universe in the movies (although the Justice League could and should be interconnected quite easily), but let’s take a look at just a few of DC’s more off-beat in-universe properties. There are only examples. There’s a lot more where these came from.

Comedy – Super Buddies. I would have said Justice League International, but that would probably confuse people. Anyway, I think a Super Buddies movie could be good, as long as it acknowledged that the characters all used to be a lot more prominent than they are at the time of the movie. A story about a bunch of upstart joke superheroes would just be Mystery Men again, but one about has-beens trying to stage a comeback could be comedy gold.

Action – Suicide Squad. This is a comic book where the government employs super-powered criminals to carry out jobs that can’t be accomplished through honest means. The cast varied throughout the series, so there are dozens of great characters to choose from. No matter who the characters are, though, the concept is a guaranteed winner.

Fantasy – Sandman. Hollywood has already adapted one of Neil Gaiman’s novels, so why not his epic masterpiece? Obviously, it would be impossible to do a completely faithful adaptation in the space of a movie. But with an approach based around The Endless as a family, I think it could be really terrific.

Horror – The Spectre. It might not be a typical slasher film, but the Vengeance of God going around punishing sinners in outrageously grisly ways is a pretty creepy idea, I say.

Procedural – Gotham Central. Imagine it – a picture about a mystery in Gotham City and the police who solve it. It would be, on the surface, a typical cop movie, but it could also introduce fantasy elements easily, as it’s set in Gotham City, a city everyone knows to be completely fictional and full of weird stuff. Also, a Batman movie without a high-cost Batman - it’s like printing money!

Science Fiction – Metal Men. It’s about a guy who builds himself a surrogate family of robots and may or may not be crazy! That’s awesome!

War – Enemy Ace. This could be a great character piece and a fun action movie. On the one hand, you have the examination of what went through the mind of a German fighter pilot in WWI. On the other, you have all kinds of exciting mid-air fights. Clint Eastwood scored an Oscar nomination a couple years ago by looking at WWII from the Japanese perspective, so why not WWI from the point-of-view of a German?

Western – Jonah Hex. There’s talk that this is in development, and for good reason. With a good script, director and cast; the scarred, amoral bounty hunter has the potential to be one of the great western heroes of all time. He’s serious about his work, but he’s got a dark sense of humor. He doesn’t relish using his gun, but he doesn’t hesitate to do so when he has to. He’s ugly, but women throw themselves at him all the time. It’s been years since we’ve seen a great new Western hero, and he’d the perfect front man for a comeback.

In addition to all of these, DC could use their characters to tell the kinds of movie stories that Marvel can’t – those that depend heavily on legacy. The public has seen enough origin stories in superhero movies that this is the ideal time for a second-generation hero onscreen. James Robinson’s Starman – where a young hipster reluctantly goes into the family business – or The Flash (volume two) – in which a former sidekick rises to fill the role of his dead mentor – would be perfect choices.

There’s a whole universe out there, Warner Brothers. Get to it.

When Bad Things Collide

2008-07-10T19:12:00.001-05:00

Bad news.

I’m not going to take the time to explain why I so intensely dislike Family Guy (especially since Jaime Weinman already wrote the definitive post on the subject. He says it all, far more eloquently than I ever could).

Additionally, I have to admit that I understand why Google thinks this is a good idea. The kids go crazy over Seth MacFarlane, and he’ll almost certainly draw attention to websites where these ads appear. That’s unfortunate, but it’s true.

That said, it’s still a terrible, awful thing to happen. I’m not alone in disliking online advertising that talks at me – really, does anyone? – but this is a new low. Online advertising that not only talks but was created by Seth MacFarlane?! It’s bad enough that he’ll soon have three shows on TV – including the upcoming, sure-to-be-hilarious Cleveland – but now his unique brand of unfunny will interrupt me while I’m trying to listen to They Might Be Giants.

Yuck.

The world's big enough for all different Batmans

2008-07-09T14:06:00.003-05:00

I’ve been enjoying Paul Dini’s run on Detective Comics, thus-far a series of done-in-ones and two-parters focusing, like the title implies, on Batman as a Detective. A crime is committed, Batman uses his skill to solve the crime, The End. The most recent issue, #845, was a typically solid entry, until the last page, where I saw this:

Now, Batman: R.I.P., appearing in the pages of Detective’s sister book Batman, has been pretty good so far, but it’s a story about Batman going crazy after learning about some kooky stuff that happened to him in the ‘50s. The Batman of Detective Comics is, so far, not cracking up at all. And I like it that way. Batman R.I.P. writer Grant Morrison is writing a story that only he understands, and tie-ins can’t help but be watered-down versions of the same story. Paul Dini shouldn’t be forced to fall in line when it will be keep him from doing what he does best.

Even the continuity hounds would have to admit that this crossover isn’t necessary. Batman hasn’t always been crazy. Someday, he will again not be crazy. Those looking for a single Bat-continuity could simply assume the Detective stories take place sometime before (or after) Batman R.I.P.

Grant Morrison is also writing Final Crisis, where he completely ignores Dini’s supposed lead-in Countdown to Final Crisis. DC would be wise to let Dini return the favor and ignore Batman: R.I.P.

The return of Hush is also a bad idea.

A Real Nerdy Interlude

2008-07-08T20:29:00.004-05:00

I was listening to "I Can't Get Next To You" by The Temptations today, I noticed something that I'd never really thought about before. There's a line in the second verse where Melvin Franklin says "I can live forever, if I so desire."

Is it just me, or is that staggeringly brilliant? His metaphorical superpower, in this case, isn't that he's immortal. It's that he could be immortal if he decided that he felt like it. He's so powerful that living forever is something he may or may not decide to do.

That's a short story just begging to be written. Good work, song writers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong.

I knew there was something I liked about that guy.

2008-07-07T19:22:00.003-05:00

Here are some excerpts from a feature on the Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy director entitled “Inside the Mind of Guillermo del Toro” in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly (#1001, July 11):

1. “Del Toro’s favorite superhero is a misunderstood mound of sentient muck named Swamp Thing.”

2. “Comic book creator Jack Kirby was del Toro’s biggest influence for his Hellboy movies. ‘Kirby’s monsters were incredibly powerful and incredibly silly – creatures with massive teeth wandering the streets popping cars in their mouths like popcorn,’ he says.”

3. “‘All movies should be designed like animation, where the style is the substance,’ del Toro says. He’s been inspired by certain cartoons from Chuck Jones, such as the Bugs Bunny opus What’s Opera Doc?, and by Eyvind Earle, the color stylist on Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.”

4. “One of his favorite authors is Charles Dickens.”

5. “Del Toro loves . . . [Terry Gilliam’s] Brazil.”

6. “I saw them [James Whale’s Frankenstein movies] at a very early age, and thoroughly identified with Boris Karloff’s performance as Frankenstein’s creature. Karloff embodies the most essential, existential quality of being human – a creature expelled from a womb of darkness and silence by an uncaring creator and thrust upon a world of fire, rain, and hatred.”

7. “I was weird as a kid. What can I say?”

Here are some facts about me:

1. Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing (v. 2, #20-64) is one of my two favorite comic book runs of all time.

2. Like all sensible comic-book-reading humans, I think Jack Kirby is awesome.

3. I love Chuck Jones. I own all five volumes of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection. Also, I believe that Eyvind Earle’s work is the best thing about Sleeping Beauty.

4. I read A Christmas Carol every year. Really.

5. Brazil is, officially, my 7th-favorite movie of all time.

6. Frankenstein is one of three so-called “horror” movies I really love. Until I recently moved out, I had a Frankenstein poster hanging in my apartment. Also, I always called Karloff’s character “The Creature” or “The Monster”, as opposed to “Frankenstein”.

7. I, too, was weird as a kid.

The only conclusion I can draw is that I am Guillermo del Toro.

The Anthony Strand Substitute Video Guide

2008-07-06T15:35:00.004-05:00

This past spring, I worked as a substitute teacher in the Fargo Public Schools and in the Fargo Catholic Schools Network. For those who don’t recall, substitute teachers don’t actually teach. Their job consists mostly of making sure none of the students (none of whom is paying any attention to anything going on in the classroom) gets injured. No sane educator would let a sub actually teach. Often, the sub will supervise a test or hand out a worksheet to be completed by the end of class. Just as often, the sub will show a video.

These videos might be educational, but are they entertaining? I’m going to look back at all of the videos I showed this spring (at least those I can remember) and rank them on a scale of 1 to 10. Now, of course none of these videos would be my first choice for Saturday night viewing, but it goes without saying that some are more tolerable than others. When you’re showing the same video as many as five times in a single school day, having one you can stand is better than gold. So here they are: the productions that pass for substitute education in Fargo, North Dakota.

Bill Nye: Energy (9th Physical Science, Fargo North High) – 1990s TV science man Bill Nye talks about various forms of energy and how they can be harnessed and used. Just like on the TV, Nye’s enthusiasm rubs off. The show is full of good information, presented in an off-beat way. It’s dry sometimes, of course, but it’s a video about energy. It could be so much worse. 7/10

Biography: Neiman Marcus (Marketing, Fargo North High) – Again, this is just an episode of the old A&E TV series Biography. This particular one is about the founders of Neiman-Marcus clothing stores. Did you know Neiman and Marcus were brothers-in-law? Did you know that Mrs. Neiman (sister of Mr. Marcus) worked on the floor of the original store? Did you know that heir Stanley Marcus lived to be 96 years old and worked almost until his death? Neither did I. Good program. 9/10

Parent/Child Communication: Making Things Better (9th Health, Fargo South Campus II) – Oh my sweet Nord. Amazing. We all saw videos like this as kids – ones with awkward conversation-inducing setup that doesn’t ring true in any way. They’re ever more bizarre and amusing in adulthood. In this case, it’s a group of students and a teacher meeting during lunch hour to discuss how to improve communication with their parents. You get students saying things to each other like “You need to act like the adult. You made a contract with your father and now you need to honor it,” as well as hilariously introspective voiceovers where one group member tries to reason out how to apply the lessons he’s learned to his negotiations with his father. It’s from about 1986, and the generic 80s music and fashion just add to the fun. I saw this video four times, and I awaited each new class period like I was going to Disneyland. 10/10

Planet Earth: Deep Oceans (7th Science, Sullivan Middle School) – This is part of the acclaimed Planet Earth series that aired on the Discovery Channel. Narrator Sigourney Weaver (sweet!) takes us underwater for a look at some fish and various other sea creatures. It’s tremendously well-done, if that’s your thing. It isn’t mine. I can’t fault the production, but I can only look at so many fish on a TV screen before my eyes start to glaze over. I did have a student mutter "I wish it was Oceanic flight 815," which led to a nice discussion of Lost, though. 5/10

Roofing (Tech Ed, Fargo North High) – Here, an astoundingly chipper man and woman tell us how to get started on our own roofing project at home. I kicked a kid out of class for being foul-mouthed during this video once. That was by far the most exciting part of my day. 3/10

Selling Parts IV & V (Marketing, Fargo South High) – Some guy who works for Ben & Jerry’s walks the audience through a typical sale, from initial meeting to final agreement. That’s what happened in part IV, I think. Part V was something else, about following up sales and making sure the customer is happy. I don’t know. I had mostly seniors in this class, and it was right at the end of the year, and I read Ultimate Spider-Man all day anyway. 4/10

Ser and Estar (8th Spanish, Carl Ben Eielson Middle School) I actually read during this day, too, (the first three A Series of Unfortunate Events novels) because the room had a student teacher and he did everything (in fact, we had a nice talk about our mutual disdain of student teaching). But I stopped reading for these fourteen minutes each period. A heavily accented narrator explains the proper usage of the Spanish verb forms ser and estar in rhymes such as:

“Do you know ser? And Estar, his brother?

When to use one, when to use the other?

It’s easy, man. Just like kissing your mother!”

Meanwhile, the cartoon images on the screen are completely hideous. They look like they were drawn by an eight-year-old using Microsoft Paint, and they aren’t actually animated. The camera just moves over the static image, in the style of a Random House Read-Along video. The whole thing is like an insane fever dream. I have no idea how to use ser or estar properly, but I won’t soon forget the experience of watching this amazing motion picture. 10/10

Sport Science: Reaction Time (9th Physical Science, Fargo South Campus II) – This is an episode of a series on FOX Sports Net which I hadn’t heard of. I’ve since noticed my brothers watching it, though. It looks as the science behind various things in sports. Here, as you may have guessed, the subject is reaction time. It looks at quarterbacks trying not to get hit, basketball players changing directions quickly, and a variety of other topics. I’m no sports fan, but I was fascinated. Also a plus: the announcer’s tendency to act like the sports guests are Amazing Humans (“One of the best quarterbacks of all time: Big Ben Roethlisberger!) 8/10

T3: Witness (8th Religion, Sullivan Middle School) – This is a pretty typical Christian “pastor talks to an audience of teenagers about some aspect of faith, and the camera frequently cuts to audience members who are clearly having a good time” video. I saw a bunch of these in confirmation. It’s a well-done example of the genre. A young pastor (who clearly thinks he’s a lot hipper than he really is, but seems like a nice fellow) talks about standing up for your faith when others mock you. It moved well, got its points across in an entertaining and occasionally genuinely amusing fashion, and wasn’t condescending, as these videos can often be. 7/10

Working with Acrylic (Tech Ed, Fargo North High) – I showed this the same day as Roofing. It’s a thousand times worse. Some guy who looks kind of Norm MacDonald as Burt Reynolds talks about acrylics and how his products are the best and you can use acrylics and your work will look just like this if you follow his step-by-step instructions that you can get if you call this number. It was only eleven minutes long, which was nice. I’ll give it one point for brevity. 1/10

Eater X is the France

2008-07-05T20:48:00.001-05:00

Like all Americans, you watched the 93rd Annual Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest on ESPN yesterday. You don’t need me to tell you that last year’s champion Joey Chestnut beat Takeru Kobayashi, the winner of the previous six years. You saw the exciting photo finish, which was declared a tie, and you thrilled to the five-dog eat-off, which ended with Chestnut victorious by a bun heel. But did you see the symbolism? While glued to your television for ten minutes plus a five-dog eat-off, did you notice that all of American history was staring back at you?

First of all, there are the obvious things. What’s more American than rampant waste and excessive eating for absolutely no reason at all? At the Hot Dog Eating Contest, hundreds upon hundreds of hot dogs and buns are dipped in water and swallowed whole, to serve no end at all. The people eating them might not actually become obese, but a regular American who attempted the same feat certainly would.

So how are these processed-food-consuming giants different from the average man or woman on the street? Why, they represent President Herbert Hoover’s ideal of Rugged Individualism, of course! These people trained themselves from nothing – from nothing! – to achieve perfection. Men like Joey Chestnut and Kobayashi can eat as many as sixty-four hot dogs in a single sitting, and that takes an inconceivable amount of work. The rest of the nation can view them as a shining example to look up to. With a little self-motivation, all Americans could be so astoundingly productive at work.

On a completely different level, the Joey Chestnut/Kobayashi rivalry is a metaphor for the battle between the United States and the forces of Eastern Imperialism. Kobayashi is a native of Japan, while Joey Chestnut was born in the United States somewhere, probably. Kobayashi’s six wins were kind of like six Pearl Harbors. Joey Chestnut’s victory last year was the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, and this year’s was Nagasaki. That’s right. Joey Chestnut’s win at the Hot Dog Eating Contest was, in effect, Fat Man.

That’s America, gang.

Happy 4th of July everyone!

2008-07-04T08:43:00.000-05:00

No real post today. Just this holiday treat:

I didn't say which holiday.

How many of the 12 Angry Men are actually angry?

2008-07-03T21:11:00.004-05:00

I was thinking today about the movie 12 Angry Men, as I very often do. The title works well – it’s very striking, and it teases the viewer into wondering what twelve men are angry about – but it isn’t really very accurate, is it? At no point in the picture are twelve men angry at once. In fact, many of them never are at all.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to figure out just how many Angry Men actually appear in the movie. In ninety-five minutes of screen time, how many of the characters actually get angry? Let’s examine.

(The closing credits identify which Angry Man is which):

SPOILERS FOLLOW. FOR A 51-YEAR-OLD MOVIE.

Juror #1 (Martin Balsam) – Probably the most affable of the twelve, he tries to get everyone to keep their heads on straight. NOT ANGRY

Juror #2 (John Fielder) – For most of the picture, he’s a meek, polite little man. Eventually, he gets pretty upset that no one takes him seriously and has one memorable outburst. ANGRY

Juror #3 (Lee J. Cobb) – Still distressed over a falling-out with son, he’s pretty mad at everyone about everything. ANGRY

Juror #4 (E. G. Marshall) – He’s the cold, logical one. Even when he raises a passionate argument, he never remotely loses his temper. NOT ANGRY.

Juror #5 (Jack Klugman) – The youngest and most nervous member of the jury, he’s too intimidated to get mad. NOT ANGRY.

Juror #6 (Edward Binns) – A construction worker who seems like a nice fellow. He’s pretty genial throughout. NOT ANGRY.

Juror #7 (Jack Warden) – He couldn’t care less about the trial. He just wants to get to his baseball game, and all this talk of a murder gets him pretty annoyed. ANGRY.

Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) – The voice of reason within the jury, he convinces the others one by one to see things his way. His calm, rational approach is a big help in this regard. NOT ANGRY.

Juror #9 (Joseph Sweeney) – A sweet old gentlemen, he breaks character and yells at #7 after the latter nails him in the head with a crumpled-up piece of paper. I’m going to call it ANGRY.

Juror #10 (Ed Begley, Sr.) – This crazy old racist can’t help but yell about “those people.” ANGRY.

Juror #11 (George Voskovec) – A straight-forward, soft-spoken European immigrant, he gets pretty upset when the validity of his opinions is called into question. ANGRY.

Juror #12 (Robert Webber) – It seems like nothing can cause the smooth-talking ad man to break a sweat. He gets slightly flustered a couple times, but never raises his voice. NOT ANGRY.

So there you go. Six who do and six who don’t. And of the six who do, three are only angry momentarily.

The picture, then, should have been called Three Angry Men, Three Men Who Lose Their Tempers Momentarily and Six Other Guys.

That would have been a much better title.

Y SOVAIN

2008-07-02T21:09:00.000-05:00

Personalized license plates have always bothered me. Without fail, they don’t make sense to anyone who isn’t a friend or relative of the car owner. Still, in theory the purpose is for the driver to express his or her personality. With that I mind, I started recording personalized license plates that I saw on the streets of Fargo. I’m going to make an honest attempt to figure out what they mean and/or what they say about the people who paid money to get them attached to their cars.

Before we go on, I must assure you that every one of these is a real license plate. I wrote down about one hundred and fifty. If you don’t think these are funny, I have a whole bunch more I can show you.

20MAX – But he or she usually only takes sixteen or seventeen.
3HOLSN1 – This person obviously has a three-hole punch that he or she uses to commit a variety of sins.
ALTIMTE – When this person plays football, he or she is always “All Time Tight End”.
APESCAR – This person stole his or her car from a gorilla.
BIG FOFO – This person was a big Follow That Bird fan as a kid, but got confused about Big Bird’s adopted name, having not seen the movie in some years.
BUD79 – Bud couldn’t remember how old he was, so he put it on his license plate.
CME4HMS – Actually, this sounds like a church ad. But it was on a personal vehicle, as far as I could tell.
DAJAVOO – I know I’ve seen that misspelling on a license plate somewhere before . . .
DR WILD – After earning his Doctorate degree, Tarzan got a vanity plate.
ERS – This person is well known for saying “Er . . err . . . err . . .” all the time.
FAB4EVR – This person wants to be fabulous forever.
GIGI RN – This person constantly runs to the video store to rent the Leslie Caron movie Gigi.
HIJUMPA – Hi yourself, but my name’s not “Jumpa”.
ILPETER – This person is named Peter, and gets sick quite often. Hence the nickname.
ITLDO – This is James Cromwell’s car.
ITLNSUB – This person really, really loves Italian subs. That’s funny enough, I think.
KRACKRZ – I lay awake at night wishing this plate was my own.
LUVYAH – This person loves me.
MDYBLUZ – In high school, this fellow had a crush on a girl named “Mandy Blutz”, and he hopes she’ll notice his shout out to her on his vanity plate.
MJ PI – This person is a private investigator who only serves clients with the initials “MJ”.
MNTROLR – This car is owned by a cyborg named “Mantroller”.
MOHRPWR – This person still can’t believe FOX cancelled Action starring Jay Mohr, so he or she is trying to devise ways to bring it back, using everything in his or her power.
MRS3577 – This woman loves the number 3577 so much, she married it!
OUTBUGN – While driving, this VW owner listens to Bugs Bunny’s rap song from the Space Jam soundtrack.
PRA4SUN – This person wishes he or she didn’t live in North Dakota for eight months out of the year.
R3BOYS – These boys love Robocop 3.
SHARMAS – Sharmas MacPherson recently emigrated from Silly Stereotypeland
SKOOL – This person usually skipped.
SNAVELY – Sharmas’s brother, Snavely MacPherson
TMUP – This person really loves The Muppet Show.
TOMIGRL – This person wanted to dedicate his plate “To My Girl,” but he can’t spell very well.
TRI E2 – This person is asking “You too?” in Latin three times.
WANKER – I swear to you I am not making this up.
WN2BCEO – This person is a serious tool, I guarantee it.
WORDS – False. That is only one word.
WRKN4YA – I am this person’s boss.

10 Reasons Why Frank Miller Shouldn't Write DC Comics

2008-07-01T19:05:00.000-05:00

Okay, that's a bit harsh, but it might have been a better title for this article (linked via Comics Should Be Good).

I’m no fan of Frank Miller’s writing or his art, and for all of the usual reasons. He seems to be trapped in a state of suspended adolescence, cranking out stories full of ridiculous over-the-top violence, mind-numbing amounts of T&A, and dialogue right out of a high school freshman’s creative writing project.

But that wide topic is a subject for another post. Reading the article, I can’t help but notice that nearly all of Miller’s views on what a superhero is go directly against the ideals and attributes generally possessed by DC’s lineup of heroes. In his own words, he demonstrates why his work for that company is often laughable. Let’s take a look at some of Miller’s “10 Superhero Commandments” and see how they compare with the typical DC hero.

1. The hero sacrifices everything.
Miller’s origin story goes like this: Born in 1957, he grows up in Maryland and Vermont with three brothers and three sisters as a self-described “maladjusted child,” obsessed with comics. At age six he meets his destiny. Instead of being bitten by a radioactive spider, he goes to the movies and gets bitten by the old B-film The 300 Spartans. “It changed the way I looked at heroes entirely,” remembers Miller, who decided then and there to pursue a life in ink. “It stopped being the fresh-faced guys who get medals on their chests at the end of Star Wars. It became people who were willing to sacrifice everything for the greater good.” The lesson stuck with him: “One of the most heroic movies I ever saw was Rocky, a guy who lasts 15 rounds before he loses a fight.”

This one sounds okay at first. In the DC universe, heroes are always willing to sacrifice everything, including their own lives. Hal Jordan, Barry Allen, Oliver Queen, Conner Kent, and dozens of others have died to, as Miller says, serve the greater good. However, the last quote shows Miller’s idea of a noble sacrifice – Rocky Balboa, who *loses*. I won’t argue that Rocky should end differently than it does, but Rocky isn’t a superhero. There’s nothing at stake in his fight against Apollo Creed. To me, this reads like Miller feels that heroes should sacrifice everything they have to accomplish nothing. He actively wants to see a downbeat ending. I’m not saying that all superheroes need happy endings every time, but if a hero sacrifices himself in the DC Universe, it will always be for a reason.

3. The hero does nothing small.
Miller grew up in small towns dreaming of Gotham, Metropolis, and planet-hopping superheroes. “It’s all got to happen on a grand scale,” explains Miller, who first became famous for his crime-fiction influences and later his wild style of slashing lines, abstract action, and Jackson Pollock–like splatter. “C’mon, Superman is ridiculous—he has blue hair, he can fly. It can’t just be, ‘This guy’s having a bad day.’ If Daredevil has a nervous breakdown, people are going to get hit.”

In the DC Universe, superheroes can and *do* do things small. The Flash might help save the world from a CRISIS every couple of months, but he’s just as likely to save a woman falling out of an airplane even though he can’t fly. Superman is frequently seen helping citizens with miniscule problems that he could just as easily ignore. In the DC Universe, no job is too big or small for a superhero.

Also, why does Frank Miller think Superman has blue hair?

4. The hero loves women of all kinds: Blondes, brunettes, redheads, dominatrices, strippers, hookers…
From his earliest strips to the strippers of Sin City, Miller’s heroes have been surrounded by beautiful, often nude, women. Why? Because, like many school-age outcasts, Miller has always loved to draw hot girls. “When you have a brush in your hand, inking a beautiful woman is a lot like running your hands over her,” Miller says. “It turns me on, OK?”

One thing is clear just from reading this passage: Frank Miller is a creepy, creepy dude. The portrayal of women in comics has enough problems without him. He certainly has no business writing Wonder Woman or Black Canary when Greg Rucka or Gail Simone could be doing so instead.

5. The hero fights dirty and looks ugly.
A Frank Miller man is nasty when he needs to be: He fights dirty, uses his fists, and knows how to take a beating. He’s not the clean-cut Captain America type. He’s almost always some nasty-looking, hulking freak who’s half-human, half-rhino. Miller’s Batman is a pink-fleshed Hulk. Sin City’s brutish Marv is Miller’s take on a modern-day barbarian. “If I go for a strong guy” he says, “I want him to be ugly.”

Miller likes the rough image for himself too. He’s earned a reputation within the industry for being ferociously demanding, a quality mirrored in his heroes. “Frank talks about his characters as if they won’t let him go until they’ve told him their stories,” says 300 director Zack Snyder. “The only characters that survive are the ones who are tough enough to fight back. Maybe that’s why he ends up with the hardest and scariest.”

Once again, “Frank Miller’s Batman is a pink-fleshed Hulk.” He in no way resembles the Batman of other writers. He’s a soldier, not a detective. He uses his fists, but rarely uses his brain. DC heroes are marked by their ability to solve problems using their wits. This isn’t just true of Batman, but also of Superman (in the Silver Age, he thought his way out of more than one red sun situation, I can tell you) and scores of others. Frank Miller has no use for brain power, so his “heroes” never use it.

6. The hero has a reason, but he doesn’t need therapy.
“When I first got going on what became The Dark Knight, I just thought about him a lot, what kind of guy would do this stuff,” he says of his endlessly influential 1986 reinvention of Batman. That said, Miller says he’s sick of “therapy culture” and hand-wringing heroes like Spider-Man who go around whining all the time about the burden of great power. In 300 Sparta’s King Leonidas didn’t have to ponder the Persian Empire’s diplomacy—he kicked Xerxes’ diplomat down a well.

Miller’s right that heroes shouldn’t whine. That’s certainly something I dislike about Spider-Man. But that doesn’t mean superheroes shouldn’t be able to talk like human beings or show feelings. One of the most memorable issues of the last fifteen years – Hitman #34 – consists of Superman and Tommy Monahan sitting around talking. Miller’s characters are unfeeling Dirty Harrys who couldn’t care less about the people around them. In fact, I’d say most of Miller’s characters would do very well indeed to seek therapy.

9. The hero is hated and misunderstood.
Miller has always been a controversial figure. The more popular he becomes, the more he seems to piss off colleagues, infuriate fans, and confound expectations–because he’s always restlessly pursuing some new direction. In Miller’s universe, superheroes are outlawed and ostracized—there are no trophies. “Community approval isn’t the motive for a hero anyway,” he says. “It’s the motive for a politician. A hero does the right thing because it’s the right thing.”

At Marvel, this is true – newspapers slander Spider-Man, the X-Men get garbage thrown at them in the streets, Silver Surfer gets driven out of town for stopping crimes – but at DC it is patently false. At DC, the heroes are beloved, for acting like heroes. They are pillars of their communities. All of Metropolis offers Superman a friendly wave as he passes by. Central City builds a museum for the Flash. The Opal City police department gives Starman all of the powers of an officer. Even Batman, who is perhaps more feared than loved, is without a doubt Gotham City’s protector, and people respect him for it.

10. The hero believes in good and evil.
Miller’s 300 became a lightning rod for criticism since many read it as an endorsement of the war on terror, the West versus the Middle East. “I did this comic in the 1990s, so I never could have expected that it would get this reaction from hawks,” says Miller, laughing. “I did 300 years before 9/11, but you don’t have to read much between the lines to see that I believe there is good and there is evil. As the great cartoonist Wallace Wood said, it’s the job of the good guys to kill the bad guys.”

DC Superheroes do not kill. That’s what separates them from the villains. Superman will never kill Lex Luthor. Batman will never kill the Joker. If Frank Miller doesn’t understand that, he has no business trying to write DC comic books.

And yet they keep letting him.

AHH! NO!

2008-06-30T19:22:00.002-05:00

They've made a huge mistake!

Am I reading this right? Mitchell Hurwitz left his new TV show over a union dispute? FOX will continue to air Family Guy and American Dad, but Mitchell Hurwitz gets the shaft because the contracts weren't clear?

Has the whole world gone mad?!

TV Comedy died forever in 1982

2008-06-29T21:02:00.003-05:00

I saw this, and I wondered why it was considered newsworthy because I remembered reading about that being a controversy in Brooks and Marsh. In fact, this post was originally going to be all about that, and was to be entitled "Is it 1982?"

But while I was looking for first-hand accounts of the controversy from the period, I found this Time article instead. The conceit of re-animating the characters from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to comment on great sitcoms that had just been canceled is a clever one, and writer Richard Corliss does an admirable job of writing everyone in character. They aren't all dead-on - Mary's a little too stereotypically hysterical, maybe - but Murray, especially, sounds exactly like he should.

Reading the article, a couple of things jump out at me. First, Mork & Mindy is included. In that company, it stands out like a guy dressed as Yoda at a Star Trek convention. The other three shows (Barney Miller, WKRP in Cincinnati, and the soon-to-be-saved-by-another network Taxi) were all character-based and driven by relationships. In my mind, they form a trilogy of near-perfect workplace sitcoms that has never been topped before or since. Mork & Mindy, especially after the first season, was based around finding new excuses for Robin Williams to act like a caffeinated eight grader. Admittedly, Corliss gives all of the Mork affection to dim Georgette, so it's possible he wasn't too fond of the show either. But can it be possible that in the spring of 1982, the critical community mourned Mindy along with all of the others?

The other thing that's striking is the title of the article. Of course, it's not unusual to read articles announcing the death of the sitcom during this pre-Cosby Show period. But the inclusion of the word "honest" gives it another dimension. He doesn't ever come out and say comedy is dead - he even makes a point of saying M*A*S*H was still on the air - but Corliss seems to be saying that TV was no longer capable of creating well-crafted comedy. It was going to be Diff'rent Strokes and Too Close for Comfort from then on. That fall, of course, Cheers would premier, and would feature a lot of the same qualities Corliss honors in the article (close-knit group of characters depending on each other, the city as a character).

You know what's great about Mary Steenburgen?

2008-06-28T08:59:00.001-05:00

If you read the subject of this post, you’re no doubt thinking to yourself “But Anthony, everything about Mary Steenburgen is great!” That’s true, obviously, but today I want to talk about one thing specifically.

Mary Steenburgen is so talented, so generally amazing that sometimes I do nothing for days on end but sit around and think about how terrific she is. With that in mind, it’s my theory that she would be well-cast in some role in any movie ever made. Not every role, but *a* role in every single motion picture ever made.

For example:

Rocky – Mary Steenburgen as Adrian
Batman Begins – Mary Steenburgen as Boring Katie Holmes Love Interest
Revenge of the Nerds – Mary Steenburgen as Gilbert’s mom
City Lights – Mary Steenburgen as the Blind Girl
Alien – Mary Steenburgen as Lambert
12 Angry Men – Mary Steenburgen as Juror #2
Toy Story – Mary Steenburgen as Bo Peep
Casablanca – Mary Steenburgen as that woman who wants to escape with her husband. Not Ilsa, the other one. The one who Rick rigs the roulette wheel for.
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure – Mary Steenburgen as Movie Dottie
Norbit – Mary Steenburgen as Eddie Murphy

I could go on until I’ve listed every movie, Leonard Maltin-style, but you get the idea. You may think I’m exaggerating, but I defy you to name me a picture that wouldn’t do well to feature Mary Steenburgen. Seriously – go ahead and give it a try.

Yes yes, yes. Without the oops.

2008-06-27T09:29:00.003-05:00

Now, like most of America, I stopped caring about Law & Order: Criminal Intent a long time ago. But then this had to go and happen:

The Tall Guy replaces Mr. Big

Obviously, I'm giddy with anticipation for the next season. The promise of Goldblum on my TV every other week is just about more complete awesomeness than I can stand. And honestly, when uptight, rigidly-structured L&O began eighteen years ago, could anyone have predicted that it would eventually give us a series in which all-time Hall of Fame Quirky Guys Vincent "EdgarBug" D'Onofrio and Jeff "BrundleFly" Goldblum traded off as lead character?

Of course, the great irony in all this is that I never think to watch L&O when I'm not at home, where my entire family consumes the show like oxygen. And I'll be in Missouri during this season.

Oh well.

Convenience Road Trip 2008

2008-06-26T08:06:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, as my friend Justin and I traveled from Fargo to our hometown of Hatton, ND, we stopped at eight convenience stores. If you’ve never been to more than one gas station in the Midwest, you might assume they’re all the same. You’d be wrong. Here’s a summary of our trip:

Stop ‘N Go – Fargo, ND (71 miles from home): I bought some iced tea here, as well as gas (currently priced at one soul per gallon). Like every other convenience store in Fargo, there is absolutely nothing remarkable about this one. Everything is where you’d expect it to be, and it’s all very boring.

Cenex – Harwood, ND (64 miles from home): Harwood Cenex is the most perfectly designed convenience ever in the history of Earth. It has every food item you might expect to find in a gas station, and more. When you walk in, the bottled drinks are directly to your right. Keep walking, and you hit the fountain drinks and then the coffee and cappuccino. These curve around, until you find yourself unexpectedly walking past the onion rings, cheese sticks, rotisserie chicken, and other fresh-cooked fatty things. A slight left, and you’re right at the counter. This is only a sample, of course. The whole store is full of food, in well-stocked, well-spaced aisles. If there are convenience stores in heaven, they are exactly like Harwood Cenex.

Stop & Shop – Grandin, ND (45 miles from home): Stop & Shop is, in many ways, the opposite of Harwood Cenex. It’s on the other side of Interstate from the town, and the outside looks creepy and sketchy and not friendly at all, covered in words like “Food” and “Fuel” and “Groceries”. But inside, it’s like entering a new, crazy universe just bursting with character. The walls are adorned with things an old-fashioned, light-up Pabst Blue Ribbon clock and a North Dakota Centennial Flag from 1989. They’ll sell you a rake there, or a garden hoe. And, best of all, cappuccino is only $1.09 for 20 ounces. You can’t beat that!

Tesoro – Hillsboro, ND (33 miles from home): Hillsboro Tesoro used to pretty much wall-to-wall booze. Now, apparently, they keep it all hidden somewhere. As anyone who knows me could tell you, I’m no drinker, but at least it used to be interesting. Now it’s just nothing.

Cenex – Hillsboro, ND (33 miles from home): Directly across the street from Tesoro, Hillsboro Cenex is most notable for two things. 1) New release rentals are only $2 each if you get two of them, which is nice if you happen to live in Hillsboro. 2) It has a Burger King attached to it, which is even nicer if you happen to live in Hillsboro. I grew up in Hatton and went to college in Mayville. Neither of them has a Burger King. I used to dream about living in Hillsboro for that reason alone.

Cenex – Mayville, ND (16 miles from home): Mayville Cenex is *the* convenience store in my college town, so I spent a lot of time there for several years. It’s easy, then, to think of Cenex as an average gas station. It isn’t. It has a rack of inspirational Christian books in it, which is pretty awesome. Also, it has a cream dispenser instead of cups, which is pretty kooky.

Tesoro – Mayville, ND (15 miles from home): Mayville Tesoro is Cenex’s weird little brother, and it has the worst layout I’ve ever seen. It’s a tiny little box of a store, with the cashier enclosed in the center. As soon as you enter the store, you’re standing in line to check out. The aisles are extremely close together, and it’s impossible to find what you’re looking for. It’s the anti-Harwood-Cenex.

Cenex – Portland, ND (13 miles from home): Portland Cenex is huge, and is full of empty space. The shelves it does have are filled mostly with motor oil and spare tires. Also, it closes at 6 PM. What a weird, pointless inconvenience store.

Ampride – Hatton, ND (Home!): Being at Ampride is actually very much like being at my parents’ house. I can’t begin to be objective about it. In fact, they recently replaced Piccadilly Circus Pizza & Subs with Hot Stuff Pizza and SmashHits Subs. At the same time, my parents remodeled their kitchen. It doesn’t matter. Both of those places are still home.

In August, I’m heading off to Missouri for graduate school. I’m not really looking forward to the actual process of moving, except that I’ll probably get to stop at a bunch of interesting convenience stores on the way.

One more good pop culture reference in a song

2008-06-26T00:04:00.002-05:00

Okay, I realize it was only supposed to be five, but I just thought of this one, and I couldn’t leave it out.

1979 - “Honest Lullaby” by Joan Baez, from the album Honest Lullaby

“Living in a fantasy, in love with Jimmy Dean. If you will be my king, Jimmy, Jimmy, I will be your queen.”

Each verse of Joan’s painful, beautiful, lyrically dense memoir of growing from teenager to mother tells of a separate phase in her life. Here, in the second verse, she’s blossomed into a teenager who isn’t awkward around boys the way she was in verse one. Now she has the opposite problem, as she’s “spending all [her] energy, in keeping [her] virginity.” The only way she knows to deal with it is to pretend she’s dating, instead, an idealized movie star. It's just one indelible image in a song full of them, but the use of the late actor's name makes it that much clearer.

This version, from the Muppet Show, contains only verses two and four. You really should hunt down the album track. It’s terrific.

5 Good Pop Culture References in Songs

2008-06-25T22:05:00.004-05:00

It’s a tricky thing to score with a good pop culture reference in a song. It’s easy to toss off an allusion, but considerably harder to make it mean something. A jumble of references that mean nothing will only lead to this:

So today, I’m going to present five pop-culture references that add to the songs they’re in. I’m not talking about songs dedicated to TV shows or movies, although that’s certainly a possible topic for a future list. None of these songs is about the item or person being alluded to. In all five cases, allusions help make a specific point about the song’s larger theme.

1974: “Young Americans” by David Bowie, from the album Young Americans

“Black’s got respect, and white’s got his Soul Train”

In his epic, vicious indictment of American life circa Watergate, Bowie invokes everything from the lack of emotionally moving music to the handiness of having a razor “in case of depression.” But one undercurrent that runs throughout the song is the state of race relations at the time, which reaches its peak in the bridge, when he implies that in the end, all it really achieved was a TV show.

1980: “Play It All Night Long” by Warren Zevon, from the album Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School

“Sweet Home Alabama, play that dead band’s song . . .”

Unlike David Bowie, the late Warren Zevon wasn’t railing against all of America – just the South. In “Play It All Night Long,” he paints a bleak picture of a staggeringly dysfunctional and, in his view, apparently typical Southern family. He mocks them for their backwards ways, bringing up child abuse, incontinent grandparents, and failed ranching endeavors. It’s all wrapped around the chorus, which claims that perhaps this is the type of person who listened to Lynard Skynard. Necessary? Probably not. But it certainly stings.

1985: “Bastards of Young” by The Replacements, from the album Tim

“Elvis in the ground – no way he’ll appear tonight.”

The Replacements carry out an indictment of their own, as they “trash that Baby Boom” for four minutes. In reaction to the protest songs and movements of the 60s, they proudly announce that their generation can’t be summed up like the previous one. They don’t have a cause. They don’t unite around an issue. There’s “no war to name [them]”, and the song gives the sense that even if there was, they wouldn’t care anyway. Getting involved is a thing of past, and Baby Boomers were silly to ever try. Nowhere is this sentiment clearer than in the line I quoted, where with a sneer they dismiss the false hopes of a generation who won’t let their time pass gracefully.

2004: “Damn Good Times” by TMBG, from the album The Spine

“She acts like David Lee Roth when he turned twenty-one.”

This song is much more upbeat than the previous three (or, indeed, the next one), but it uses its allusion to equally profound effect. The song focuses on a girl who is described at various times as a “natural dancer” and “a jumping bean”. Nothing puts across her crazy style of dancing better than when it nods to the man who a hit song of the same title. Honestly, can you even imagine what he must have been like on that occasion?

2005: “Stevie Nix” by The Hold Steady, from the album Separation Sunday

“And when we hit the Twin Cities, I didn’t know that much about it. I knew Mary Tyler Moore, and I knew Profane Existence.”

Like most Hold Steady songs, “Stevie Nix” is part of the larger tapestry of the album which contains it. In this case, the album is about two girls who transition from Catholic upbringings to drug-fueled lives in Minneapolis. Craig Finn often weaves in pop culture references, as he does a number of times in this very song (although, strangely, the Fleetwood Mac singer herself is never referenced). None of them work quite as well as this one, where the reality of the drug-addled world we hear about (and indeed, could read about in Profane Existence ‘zine) is contrasted with expectations engendered by watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

You know what? That turned out a lot darker than I thought it would when I started.

5 Good ___________: An Introduction

2008-06-25T21:52:00.000-05:00

Today I’m introducing a new feature, in which I choose something – anything - and offer five good examples of it. I plan to do this at least once a week. They will start out deal with pop culture (the three I have lined up now deal with comics, music, and the Greatest Movie Studio on Earth), but they’ll probably branch out into other topics as time goes on. Once I feel like I need to resort to “5 Good Charles in Charge Jokes”, I’ll move on to algebraic functions or something.

A disclaimer before we begin: I won’t claim (see that? I’m disclaiming) these are the top five in whatever category I’m discussing, because I haven’t seen everything and have no way of knowing the actual top five of anything. These won’t even necessarily be my five favorites. Each time, however, the five examples will be as representative of my tastes as any I could come up with.

This is a Career?: Cynthia Stevenson

2008-06-24T22:36:00.000-05:00

Cynthia Stevenson is awesome.

I first became aware of actress Cynthia Stevenson when USA Network started rerunning the 1995-1997 NBC flop Hope & Gloria in the fall after it had been cancelled. Now, Hope & Gloria was not a great sitcom, or even an especially good one. But even as a twelve-year-old, I was captivated by her offbeat-yet-shockingly-sincere delivery of stale sitcom punchlines. Somehow, on a TV show that also featured Alan Thicke chewing scenery like he was selling a trip to Las Vegas, she managed to convince me that Hope was an actual human being. I was astonished, and I became a fan for life.

I can’t find any decent clips of Hope & Gloria online (You’d think the Enrico Colantoni fansites would be all over that), nor can I find clips of the next place I saw her. Three years earlier, she had played Bob Newhart’s daughter on his failed sitcom Bob. I saw a few reruns on TV Land in the late 90s, when they filled time by showing failed sitcoms rather than reality shows (Weren’t those the days?)

Clearly, she wasn’t the best thing about this show opposite a legend like Newhart, but she held her own. Bob had resisted having kids on his hit sitcoms, and having an adult child here could easily have flopped. It didn’t, and that’s because Cynthia Stevenson was perfectly cast. Her flippant, wise-cracking delivery is about as far as you can get from Bob’s signature stammer, and the generational bafflement was all there in the performances. Too bad the scripts weren’t up to the same standard.

In the years since her failed sitcoms, Cynthia’s been working steadily, and she’s been wasted consistently – as the mom in the Air Bud sequels, as the mom in Agent Cody Banks, as George’s mom on Showtime’s Dead Like Me, as that one guy’s mom on ABC's Men in Trees. In all of these roles, she has the same snappy, believable delivery she always had, but she gets nothing interesting to say.

The one role I’ve seen that really allowed her to display the range of her talents was in Todd Solondz’s Happiness. Most of the praise directed towards the movie focuses on Dylan Baker’s role as troubled, twisted pedophilic father Bill Maplewood. But Cynthia matches him as his cheerfully, pathetically, heart-breakingly oblivious wife Trish. At the beginning, it's a pretty typical performance for her - the same smirk, the same wisecrack-y delivery. As the picture goes on, it becomes clear that much of that is a mask because the character can't bear to deal with the reality of her everyday life. It’s an amazing performance, and she deserves the chance to do that all the time.

I’d like TV and movies a lot more if Cynthia Stevenson wasn’t wasted all the time.

Is Anyone Still There?

2008-06-24T14:17:00.000-05:00

You may have noticed that I’ve had this blog for nearly a year now, and I’ve only posted a handful of times. I always mean to post. I get ideas all the time, but when it comes time to type them up, I just don’t. Instead of typing up my thoughts about comics and TV and movies and music, I decide I’d rather spend my time watching or reading or listening to them. Or, frequently, reading blogs where other people write about them.

Well, no more. Starting today – June 24th, 2008, I’m going to update this blog every single day for the next year. It will continue to be a grab bag – most of the posts will be about comics, TV, movies and music, but I’ll also talk about other things if they happen to catch my fancy. Some of the posts will be serious thoughts, some of them will be satirical pieces, such as the Simpsons entry a few posts down. I trust my readers will be able to tell the difference.

I can’t promise that each day’s post(s) will set the world on fire, but there will be always be something new. You see, the blog is called “Zeppo Marxism” because Zeppo was the Marx Brother who provided a point-of-view for the audience. He was our window into the world of his crazier brothers. With this blog, I hope to provide a window to the world from my point of view. For the geeks out there, some of it should prove to be interesting.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to introduce a new semi-regular feature and soon, I’m going to embark on a large project that I’ve been working on for some time. But come back tonight, for my thoughts on an actress who hasn’t been allowed to live up to her full potential.

Reactions to The Dark Knight trailer

2007-12-17T10:09:00.001-06:00

So we just got the first full trailer for The Dark Knight.

http://atasteforthetheatrical.com/deathtrap/default.htm

For the most part, the movie looks amazing. That said, I don't understand what they're doing with the Joker. I'm not a Heath Ledger hater, but the character in this trailer doesn't seem like the Joker at all. His voice is low, gravelly, and without a hint of psychotic fancy. His makeup looks like makeup. (Which, I guess that's supposed to be more realistic-looking scarring. But it sure doesn't look like the Joker). Most importantly, though -

He isn't smiling.

The entire thing with the Joker is that he's a homicidal clown with a smile literally frozen on his face. In the movie, he has a completely sober face. He just looks like a dour-faced hobo with too much makeup on. He says "Why so serious?" and "Let's put a smile on that face" to Commissioner Gordon and to Batman, but he could just as well be talking to himself.

That's not to say I'm not excited for the movie, because I am. I'll be there opening day. But the Joker means a lot to me, and that guy isn't him.

I Am Your Nemesis!

2007-11-30T21:50:00.000-06:00

So I was thinking about Superboy Prime today (Yeah, yeah. SuperMAN Prime. Whatever. You either know who I mean or you don't care).

Anyway, I realized something -

A whiny fanboy who idolizes superheroes as a kid . . .

Finds out his heroes aren't as ideal as he thought they were . . .

And swears to become the greatest hero of all by killing people . . .

Is hardly an original idea.

Knowledge-Filled Clash!

2007-11-15T00:01:00.001-06:00

Did anyone else see Jeopardy today? It was nuts!

It's the Tournament of Champions, and today was the last semi-final round. In an amazing coincidence, two of the contestants were as follows:

Craig Westphal: Stoic EMT who always seemed kind of amazed and kind of worried that he was winning money on television. Six-time champion, and my all-time favorite Jeopardy contestant. I always wanted to shake his hand and congratulate him.

Paul Glaser: Smug, pompous physicist who isn't nearly as clever as he thinks he is. Four-time champion, and my all-time LEAST favorite Jeopardy contestant. I always wanted to punch his face.

The third contestant was Cliff Galiher, 2007 College Champion. He seems like an okay fellow.

So today, at 5:00 PM, I sat in front of my TV as an epic battle between good and evil was waged before my very eyes. The Righteous Forces of Craig took an early lead, up $1600 over Paul at the first commercial break. Paul's filthy smirk made a comeback in Double Jeopardy, however, by the end of that round he had a lead of over $8000 over Craig's $4000.

All looked hopeless, but young underdog Cliff correctly answered Final Jeopardy ("Who is Nellie Bly?") to win! Ha ha! True light may not have triumphed, but at least darkness was vanquished. For the record, Craig also answered correctly in Final Jeopardy to double his score. Paul said "Who is Dix?" What a fool. Like that even means anything.

Halloween Viewing Fun

2007-10-27T15:12:00.001-05:00

So I finished writing up the list of everything Halloween themed and/or spooky that I'm going to watch or have on while working over the next few days. Here it is:

Most Importantly
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

Movies
Frankenstein
Bride of Frankenstein
Son of Frankenstein
Young Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Ghostbusters
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Ichabod & Mr. Toad

TV shows
Buffy - Halloween
Buffy – Fear Itself
Buffy – All the Way
The Muppet Show – Vincent Price
Fraggle Rock – Scared Silly
Pete & Pete - Halloweenie

Animated Shorts
Looney Tunes
Scaredy Cat
Hare-Raising Hare
Broomstick Bunny
Hyde & Hare
Pigs is Pigs
Claws for Alarm
The Case of the Stutteing Pig
A-Haunting We Will Go
Disney
The Skeleton Dance
The Mad Doctor
Runaway Brain
The Haunted House
Duck Pimples
Hell’s Bells
Lonesome Ghosts
Night on Bald Mountain
Other Shorts
Graveyard Jamboree with Mysterious Mose
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Mouse (Tom & Jerry)

Am I forgetting anything important that I probably own? Are there other Buffy Halloween episodes? Did Batman: The Animated Series or Justice League ever do a Halloween episode?

Comedy Tonight

2007-10-25T18:01:00.001-05:00

All airtimes Central Standard Time

Tonight is the season premiere of Scrubs on NBC (can it really be season 7 already?), meaning that NBC's Thursday Night Comedy Lineup is now intact:

7:00 - My Name is Earl
7:30 - 30 Rock
8:00 - The Office
8:30 - Scrubs

Now, I'm no fan of My Name is Earl, but the other three are all pretty great television. So to have them all back-to-back is a great gift, and one that nearly lives up to my most prominent TV-related desire. I'm speaking, of course, about a block of comedy as great as the 1973-1974 CBS Saturday Night lineup.

7:00 - All in the Family
7:30 - M*A*S*H
8:00 - The Mary Tyler Moore Show
8:30 - The Bob Newhart Show

Wow. Four masterpieces in a row. Not two great shows and two good ones, like NBC's 1984-87 Thursday lineup of The Cosby Show/Family Ties/Cheers/Night Court. Not one terrific show holding up an over-promoted night of crap, like that same network's Seinfeld-centric Thursday through the mid-90s. Four shows that are as near to perfection as the situation comedy has ever come. In two hours. On the same TV channel.

As a child, I used to dream that something like that would happen in my lifetime. We aren't quite there yet, but we're close. The shows in each lineup even share many similarities. They don't compare perfectly, of course, but here's how I see it:

30 Rock = The Mary Tyler Moore Show. This is the obvious one. I'm hardly the first person to notice that they're both sitcoms about single career-minded 30-something women working in television and having misadventures in dating (Mary/Liz). Both women have a gruff boss who acts as a mentor (Lou/Jack), a bald and married confidant working behind the scenes (Murray/Pete), and an egotistical on-camera personality to deal with (Ted/Tracy). It's not much of a stretch.

Scrubs = M*A*S*H. Again, this is fairly obvious. Both are shows about a wisecracking doctor (Hawkeye/JD) who loves to joke around with his best friend (Either Trapper or BJ/Turk). Dr. Cox is a crotchety superior who really has a warm heart, much like Col. Potter, and both shows frequently mix emotional drama in with the hijinx.

The Office = The Bob Newhart Show. This one doesn't work as well. I admit that. But I think the similarities are there. Both shows started out with small casts of 5 main characters (Bob, Carol, Howard, Emily & Jerry/Michael, Dwight, Jim, Pam & Ryan) and then grew to include a huge stable of recurring players (Bob's patients/Everyone working at Dunder-Mifflin). Both casts consist of eccentric people, but they always play it completely straight. They're exaggerated, but they never feel forced or artificially. Most importantly, in both series much of the humor comes from those characters showing up each week and doing a new twist on the same shtick, and doing it perfectly.

My Name is Earl is not All in the Family in any way, except maybe that both shows have a main character who is "conservative". It might be Sanford & Son, though.

If only NBC had picked up Arrested Development to air at 7:00! Not only would it make a lineup of four great shows, AD could even have worked as an analogue for All in the Family. Both shows were about the dysfunctional ways the members of one family relates to each other. They also were both known for pushing the envelope of what could be done on network TV, but they always put the comedy, not the shock value, first. They are also my favorite sitcoms of their respective decades, but that's neither here nor there.

Of course, I neglected to mention that the CBS lineup was followed by The Carol Burnett Show and the current NBC one airs before ER. Those two shows have very little in common, although the later seasons of ER might be funnier than the later seasons of Carol Burnett.

The Hobbit

2007-10-22T22:28:00.000-05:00

So now they're talking again about making The Hobbit. You know who'd be a good Bilbo if it happens?

Martin Freeman (Tim from the original Office). Am I off-base with that? True, I've never seen him in anything serious, but the Hobbit isn't exactly a realistic drama. And Freeman's great at playing grumpy and befuddled by his surroundings, two things necessary to The Hobbit's take on Bilbo. Also, the dude looks like a Hobbit. I mean, really - look at him.

I'm old. I hate everything but Matlock. Ooh, it's on now.

2007-07-27T14:25:00.000-05:00

Hard to believe it's been ten years since The Simpsons left the air.

After 8 seasons and 178 episodes, the Simpsons closed up shop in 1997 at the top of its game. The series went out in signature offbeat fashion with "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase". That memorable show offered a hysterical look at the various awful ways the show could have tried to carry on, such as a comedy-variety show and an action series starring Chief Wiggum in New Orleans. "Be happy we're saying good-bye," the show seemed to be saying. "You don't want this."

Still, it was a bittersweet finale, and fans have mourned the loss of their favorite family ever since. Sure, FOX gave a huge promotional push to Matt Groening's new project, Futurama, now heading into its 10th immensely popular season. Some enthusiasts say the show had explored everything it could without becoming tired. Some point to the untimely death of voice actor Phil Hartman a year after the series ended, saying that may have triggered a decline of its own. But many fans would have preferred more seasons of The Simpsons, insisting there was still several seasons' worth of good stories to be mined from the residents of Springfield.

These fans have spent the last decade pleading for the characters to return in some form, whether that be new episodes, web-cartoons starring the Comic Book Guy, or even (gasp!) a movie. Today, they finally get their wish, as The Simpsons Movie opens in theaters nationwide. Can it live up to the highs of a series that rarely had a subpar episode? Will this, after eight years of perfection, finally be the "shark jumping moment" for the series? Movie-goers hungry for a return to Springfield will find out tonight.

First Post

2007-07-27T14:21:00.001-05:00

Hey, gang. It's me, Anthony. I've had a LiveJournal for a while, but I've also been posting comments on a variety of comics blogs. So I decided that if anyone clicked on my name in a comments section, I'd give them something to read. I'll be talking mostly about TV, movies and comics.

This is my obligatory first post. Those that follow will be better.