Hooray for Captain Spaulding

Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:58 AM

On the 24th, I saw King Kong. The only way it could have been better would have been if, at the end, Spider-man had teamed up with some citizens of the Planet of the Apes to rescue Kong. Comments with possible spoilers (but let's be honest, how spoiled can you be on this movie?):

I watched the original after having seen Peter Jackson's version. Learning all the hidden jokes and references Jackson made, I realize that Jackson made a 200-million-dollar fan film. It's a really good fan film but it's not so different from the guys making new Star Trek episodes on the 'Net.
Chip Pope asked me if the original had a gay subtext between a black first mate and young Jimmy. Oddly enough, yes, yes it did.
Speaking of which, I didn't care for the whole explaining Heart of Darkness part. I am reasonably sure there's unused footage of Jimmy asking "Are we in a Heart of Darkness now?"
during the dinosaur stampede, some velociraptor-looking dinosaurs kept either getting shot or crushed by T-rexes. Was this some sort of "Ha! Our dinosaurs are better" slam on Jurassic Park?

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:53 AM

Speaking as we were a few days back about Airplane and the Golden Age of Leslie Nielsen playing the comedic role straight, Police Squad, the great TV show, is coming to DVD. Story here.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:37 AM

I had a traditional Jewish Christmas by seeing The Producers and having Chinese food. The Chinese food, not so good. "Number One Buffet" is anything but.

The Producers I enjoyed very much. I think some of the bad reviews are just that once you get the Broadway show to the big screen, you're reminded how good Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder (and Kenneth Mars also) were. Other criticisms I read and I wonder if the critic in question has ever seen a Mel Brooks movie since the things being criticized (old jokes, gay stereotypes, slightly dated worldview) are elements of all his movies.

As an Overlawyered reader, I was amused to see in the credits that a two-second joke where a policeman, a cowboy, a construction worker and an Indian show up at the end of the "Keep it Gay" number required getting permission from the Village People. Speaking of the credits, you want to stay through all of them. You get a new song not in the show, a Will Ferrell-sung FM-lite version of Ferrell's big song in the movie, and some hilarity at the very end.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:55 AM

Not to get all War on Christmas here, but why does jdate say "Happy Holidays"?

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:57 AM

Alaska's infamous Bridge to Nowhere which was removed from the budget actually never left. Alaska got the federal money; it just wasn't earmarked for a bridge. Details here.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:37 AM

The Chappelle Theory is, in fact, viral marketing.

It also inspired this parody site.

(via Defamer).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:26 PM

Angels with Angles (mispronounced by the Moviefone guys as "Angels with Angels") manages to disappoint despite the low expectations set by a film which was unreleased for a couple of years and has now rented a theater out of a deluded attempt to gain award nominations.

In it, George Burns is sent out to be the guardian angel for a schmo in exchange for which he'll get to be with Gracie. A fairly simple premise, yet the fifth time Burns shows up to the schmo, the aforementioned schmo says "George, what are you doing here?" He knows what he's doing there!

The funniest line in the movie was when Burns compares a life without friendship to performing in a theater without an audience; the line was, of course, made funny by the presence of only seven audience members for the movie. The second funniest line, for the same reason, was when Gracie demurred from a kiss from George because "everyone's watching".

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:59 AM

I stumbled upon today's Spider-man comic strip. In it, Peter Parker's bag with his Spidey outfit is accidentally taken by another guy with the same kind of bag. If the pace of the strip matches what I remember, Parker will realize what happened by mid-February.

That's still better than last month's issue of the the comic book where his left eye was eaten by a guy.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:57 AM

Either the writings of a loon or a great viral campaign: YOU DECIDE as you read The Chapelle Theory.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:04 AM

Via Slate, I learned about this teaser video for the 2006 Nintendo box's controller. Basically it's a remote-control-shaped doohickey that detects motion on all three axes. So it can simulate a tennis racket, a baseball bat, a gun, a sword, or whatever. If they come out with a good Star Wars game where you can use the controller as a light-saber, I might get it.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:50 AM

Regarding Angels with Angles, I could not get into the premiere. Judging from the ad in the paper, the folks behind the film paid the Laemmele's chain to let them screen it so they could get award nominations. Thus I'm getting in for free, thanks to the two sweetest words in Hollywood: "Plus guest". Also you get a free admission to the Comedy Store with your ticket stub which tells me that members of the Shore family have some dough invested in this turkey. (I half-suspected that maybe it meant that Pauley Shore was in the film but if they listed Frank Stallone in their cast list, they'd list Pauley Shore.)

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:59 AM

Since I know you care passionately about such things, I've decided to take the $80 I would have spent on the Calvin & Hobbes collection and the $40+ I would have spent on some DVD sets I don't need and get the fancy Little Nemo in Slumberland collection that tries to recreate the look of the strip back then (as featured in this New York Times article).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:55 AM

The Airplane discussion below came up as we were discussing the old Sledge Hammer! show. I noted that in the commentary on the pilot episode Alan Spencer discuss how great and subtle the comic direction of the director was. However as he says that, the camera does a close-up of a zany bumper sticker on Hammer's car and holds the shot for a minute. Contrast to the Simpsons or a good Zucker-Abrams-Zucker movie where the bumper sticker would just be there and you'd notice it after a second or third viewing.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:28 AM

A friend and I were joking on Sunday that the new DVD version of Airplane that came out Tuesday would be digitally edited so that Leslie Nielsen's deadpan performance would be digitally replaced by images of him making goofy faces. Thus I found it hilarious that the back cover features a picture of Nielsen acting muggier than an August day in Houston (said picture is also prominently featured in the DVD's website). My original complaint was "They found the one image from the movie of Leslie Nielsen making a dopey face" but I'm not entirely sure that this picture is from the movie.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:32 AM

An incomplete script for Studio 7 (the Aaron Sorkin behind-the-scenes-at-SNL pilot) pieced together from sides here.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:05 PM

A common feature of newspaper articles about how all of something have characteristic X is to stretch the definition of characteristic X beyond its traditional meaning. Like a couple of years ago when Lord of the Rings:The Two Towers was called a period film to support the claim that all the Best Picture nominees were period films.

So we have this LA Times article that "all five record-of-the-year nominees are sprinkled with raw lyrics". Only at the end of the article do we find out that "hell" is the raw lyric that qualifies Mariah Carey's song.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:53 PM

I was buying some toys for disadvantaged children (no applause please; I do it for the kids) and one child asked for Operation Shrek. I thought it was a video game of some nature until I did some research and discovered that the "Operation" in Operation Shrek refers to the wacky doctors' game. Operation also has a licensed Simpsons game and original Operation does not refer to itself as the wacky doctors' game.

Another kid wanted a Playstation 2 and Ultimate Spiderman. Instead I got him this nifty motion-detector Spidey game which seems pretty good but I still feel like the aunt who buys you the wrong toy but you still have to say "thank you" to her.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:38 PM

The obvious joke about the Joe Dante "soldier-zombies-rise-from-dead-to-vote-out-Bush" TV thing ("Billionaire Bill" Sherman review here) is that the dead voting Democrat is nothing new. (I said it was obvious, not funny). (In an alternate universe where SNL's audience is mostly Republican, Tina Fey would have told that joke to boisterous applause.)

UPDATE: This Bob Hope clip is being passed around the conservative blogosphere.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:49 PM

Via Evanier, Book Steve's Library, a nifty site of the scans of flotsam and jetsam. Here he displays It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World and here's a children's book featuring an early version of the Flintstones (with Fred, Jr!)

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:17 PM

Angels with Angles, starring Frank Gorshin as George Burns and featuring Rodney Dangerfield, Adam West, Soupy Sales, Frank Stallone, Richard Moll, Jerry Mathers, Dwayne Hickman and three guys playing the Marx Brothers. I'll find out how much show biz power I have by trying to get tickets to the world premiere. I want to go because of the stars there and because I'm not entirely sure there'll be a showing after that.

Given that they're running billboards on Sunset and Fairfax, that means they're aiming for the ironic hipster crowd.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:59 PM

So I was watching Miracle on 34th Street or fast-forwarding to the highlights since NBC cut the film to fit it in two hours. Now I'm wondering, what's the subtext behind the prosecuting DA's Jewish-looking assistant?

Last year, I explained why this version works and the two remakes don't.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:29 AM

Via Cartoon Brew, Jasper and the Watermelons.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:32 AM

Thanks to this post by Evan Dorkin, I learn about the genre of Bruce-ploitation (many examples of which can be found here) and the movie The Dragon Lives Again featuring Bruce Lee in the Underworld fighting James Bond, Clint Eastwood, Dracula, Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman, the Exorcist and Emmanuelle (yes, of the soft porn film series). Helping Lee are the One-Armed Swordsman, Caine from Kung Fu, and Popeye (yes, the sailor man). The ineveitable Film Threat review is here.

UPDATE: Commenter Marty McKee notes that the Godfather is also part of the villain team.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:13 AM

The Advantages of this Wonderful Age We Live In: When SNL does a sketch where Vincent Price hosts a Thanksgiving Variety Show in 1958 (and how did Robin Jones get screwed out of that gig?) and I say to myself "Hey, Vincent Price wasn't a 'Master of Horror' in 1958", I can confirm that.

UPDATE: Now they have Clark Gable plugging The Misfits in 1958!

UPDATE 2: Hey, those iPods just keep getting smaller and smaller. That's crazy!

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:15 PM

Faced with cancellation and the possibility that the episodes they're filming won't even air, an upcoming episode of Arrested Development gets so self-referential that it becomes a singularity. Variety story here.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:48 PM

Urban Outfitters is selling the tree from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. One's natural reaction is "That just totally goes against everything the special was trying to say. I can't believe the cynicism behind this. Only twenty-four bucks though and it looks really nice."

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:41 PM

The on-again, off-again Graduate psuedo-sequel is, according to trailers, is coming: "This Hoiliday Season". A early-winter trailer with a release date of "Coming Soon" or "This Hoiliday Season" is, of course, code for January.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:21 PM

I apologize for the sparse posting but I was moving into my new digs Thursday.
A move made more difficult by DirecTV which is apparently trying to demonstrate that their service can be as crummy as cable's (Worse in some ways since DirecTV only gives you 8-12 or 1-5 installation windows whereas Comcast gives you several three-hour windows).

Last time I moved, I had trouble with mail forwarding because my brother/roommate and I were moving to seperate locations and at different times. This time the confusion was that I unreasonably did not want my mail forwarding requested for November 10th to start before November 10th.

Some things I learned at the Wal-mart (a trip necessitated by the fact that Target only carries fancy $20 designer kitchen trash cans):

The name of the Wal-mart brand Dr. Pepper knockoff is Dr. Thunder. Amazingly, they sell a diet version of that beverage.
The George Foreman grill has a super advanced version with an on/off button (as opposed to plugging and unplugging it), a timer, a temperature control, and a preheating countdown doohickey. I'm keeping an eye open for a sale.
There's a nifty lazy-Susan-like doohickey for shopping bags. You load items into a plastic bag and turn the doohickey to get to the next empty shopping bag.
Vacuum cleaner technology has also vastly improved since I last bought a vacuum cleaner ten years ago.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:54 PM

Anyone interested has probably seen it but here's Thomas Haden Church as the Sandman (hat tip to the Howling Curmudgeons). The part I liked best was that they kept the striped shirt.

This reminds me that on Thursday when I was driving over to sign the lease to my new apartment that I saw a Daily Bugle truck making a left turn northeastward at Overland and Culver (which is where the Sony Studio is at).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:25 PM

My brother posting on grocery shopping has noticed, as I have, the absence lately of 99-cent two-liter soda specials. Yet the soda companies have been reporting record profits lately. We need a tax on these excess profits to force Big Soda to ease the burden on consumers of these record soda prices.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:46 PM

Some plot details of the Aaron Sorkin behind-the-scenes-at-an-SNL-esque-show.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:49 PM

From Slate: An editor of the Oxford English Dictionary shows that people who complain about the use of the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" are literally talking out of their asses.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:29 PM

WARNING: This blog post has such limited appeal that it would probably would have been more efficient to email it.

Diane Holloway has a blog.

To explain for the majority of you, Holloway is the TV critic for the Austin-American Statesman. She was/is so out-of-touch that she once expressed confusion as to what house the title of the sitcom In the House alluded to.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:59 AM

The cover of Red Skelton's Favorite Ghost Stories (from this site). This was part of a larger series that included Milton Berle's Tales of Mystery and Morey Amsterdam's Sci-Fi Wonders.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:25 AM

My decision to not watch Commander in Chief is validated by this Bill Sherman post that they did a "Will no one rid me of this archbishop?" episode.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:38 PM

In the comments to my novel post below I was going to make a joke that Frankenstein's monster met Dracula at the Monster Mash. But now that I look at the lyrics, there's no indication that Frankenstein's monster was at the party. He may be the titular monster who was born mashing and he may not be. I care too much about you the reader to deal in "may be"s.

Speaking of the Monster Mash, here's Bobby "Boris" Pickett's website with an excerpt from his autobiography of that magical moment:

Lenny sat down at the piano and began futzing with various four-chord progressions and I stood next to the piano. Like me, Lenny was a major horror movie fan from childhood. He loved Bela Lugosi as Dracula. He knew I had the Boris Karloff voice pretty nailed, although in reptrospect, I feel that what I actually had was a very cartoonish rendition of that wonderful actor's voice. In any case, we'd both seen how the audiences had loved it when I was with the group and we'd sing "Little Darlin'" and I did the monologue in the middle of the song in Boris's voice. We agreed that the Karloff voice was the most obvious one to tell the story. And what was the story?

"Well," Lenny suggested, "Maybe the Frankenstein monster should start a dance craze."

"That's it!" I said.

Sure the writer of the song says it's Frankenstein. And Arthur C. Clarke says HAL isn't one step beyond IBM.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:46 PM

Mark Evanier points out the upcoming release of the new Allan Sherman box set, particularly its inclusion of Sherman's normally bootlegged My Fair Lady parody. He notes that normally the folks controlling Lerner and Loewe's estate refuse to allow parodies. I have two thoughts on why they're tolerating the Sherman release:

They've become more tolerant. They also allowed the My Fair Lady parody on the first SCTV boxed set.
They're tolerant of this release because only 4000 copies are being sold.
Possibly a chunk of the $119 price is going to pay for music rights (for My Fair Lady and other things).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:38 PM

Speaking of Frankenstein's Monster, scroll down to the October 15th entry of Fred Hembeck's blog for one of those goofy publicity photos, in this case of Ole Olsen and Glenn (Frankenstein's Monster) Strange reading a Batman comic book. I'm not sure if the photo is selling a Frankenstein movie, Hellzapoppin' or Batman.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:34 PM

One advantage of apartment hunting and probably moving is that I have an excuse to skip National Novel Writing Month. The world will have to wait for my tale of Sherlock Holmes teaming up with Frankenstein's Monster to fight Nazis.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:20 PM

I apologize for the non-existant posting but my apartment building got sold and is going condo so I've been busy apartment hunting. You'd think there'd be colorful pamphlets outlining exactly what I'm entitled to ("Am-scray, Baby: Condoization and Your Rights") but I had to dig into the landlord side of the LA Department of Housing to find out anything. Good thing my throw-out-all-those-damn-boxes-from-the-closet project never came to fruition. Also a good thing I didn't buy the Calvin & Hobbes super-collection.

In more pleasant news, I got confirmation of weight loss, not just from my visiting parents but from some photos a friend sent me from Xmas parties from 2003 and 2004. Of course, the euphoria of "I look much better" devolved into "Did I leave the house looking like this?"

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:49 PM

Fantagraphics' blog sneak-previews the coming-in-April Complete Peanuts volume 5 (this, you'll recollect, is the one Whoopi Goldberg is going to ruin). The interesting revelations from the never-before-republished strips are that 1) Linus has a weight problem and 2) Schroeder is gay.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:17 PM

A Malcolm Gladwell book review in the New Yorker discusses how the current college admission system with its essays and letters of reference and extracurricular activities list has its origin in keeping Jews out of the Ivy League.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:25 PM

Some readers of my site will want to know that Chris Elliot just published a novel called Shroud of the Thwacker, a parody of the historical mysteries that have been popular with the young people.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:02 PM

More on the "Was Jack Benny gay" question:

I recently listened to a Burns and Allen episode where Gracie catches Jack going to a beauty parlor and blackmails him to let George Burns sing on his radio show. Granted that's arguably less "Jack is gay" and more "Jack is vain".
I was watching A Love Letter to Jack Benny, a 1981 clip special/homage (which as it turns out was my first exposure to Jack Benny) and a running joke was that Jack had a mincing walk. The Smothers Brothers, trying to figure out Jack's real age, were speculating on why Jack hadn't served in WWII and Tommy Smothers says "Look at how he walks." Johnny Carson told a joke that when he started out in show business, he did everything like Jack Benny. He talked like Jack; he paused like Jack. But when he walked like Jack, he got arrested.
Mike Tucker who selected the "Horatio Hornblower" episode which inspired this speculation was nice enough to comment on the original post and stated that he also interpeted the gay jokes as I did. (Mike's marvelous Tucker Mike Show deserves a plug and I just gave it one.)

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:01 PM

Torahs getting rescued from Katrina floods.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:33 AM

Speaking of the Washington Generals, the story of Louis "Red" Klotz, the founder of the Generals and the owner of the New York Nationals, the current play-against-the-Globetrotters team.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:21 AM

Roy Disney, after his failed attempt to take over Disney, just bought a controlling share of the Harlem Globetrotters. In other news, Byron Allen, after his failed attempt to buy the Pax network, just bought the Washington Generals.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:45 AM

A prediction about Commander-in-Chief (based solely on the fact of the involvement of Rod Laurie who did the same thing in The Contender): We will not see Geena Davis's character for the first several minutes of the show. She will be referred to in non-sex-specific terms ("Get the Vice President on the phone!", that sort of thing). In her first scene, she will be with her husband and the scene will be staged in such a way as to make it seem like the husband is the VP with the reveal that the VP is a woman ("A woman Vice President?!?!?! Crazy!!!!") supposed to be a surprise twist despite the fact that the show has been heavily advertised.

UPDATE: Based on this review, at some point during the show's run there will be a scene where Geena Davis is talking to some high muckity-muck on the phone while trying to get the kiddies ready for school with the inevitable "No, general, I did not tell you to eat your cereal" punchline.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:33 AM

LA Times article about Albert Brooks's new movie which I am cautiously optimistic about. And an aint-it-cool-news review.

UPDATE: Tim Cavanaugh suggests the optimism is unfounded.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:31 PM

This obituary for Don Adams contains this puzzling statement:

The show [Get Smart] lived on in syndication and a cartoon series.

Cartoon series?

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:05 AM

A frequently parodied scene is one where a pilot in a love triangle clubs the
other pilot in the love triangle over the head with a wrench so he can fly the suicidally dangerous mission. I vividly remember a Carol Burnett sketch with a punchline of a) the two pilots knocked each other out, b) the girl in question flies the dangerous mission and c) the two pilots wink at each other after she leaves as this was their plan all along. I'd also swear MAD did a "Scenes We'd Like to See" type parody -- not that I'm finding it in my CD-ROM collection.

So the question I put out to you good folk is what movie was this from? A Guy Named Joe was suggested to me but Spencer Tracy dies at the very beginning of the film. A Yank in the RAF seems like a good candidate but both pilots fly the dangerous mission so that can't be it. My Google skills are failing me. Or is this a cliche so widespread that there is no one origin?

UPDATE: Wings seems plausible but it has the same flaw as A Yank in the RAF, both gentlemen go on the dangerous mission. Test Pilot was also suggested but judging from this description, a) it again seems like Clark Gable also went on a dangerous flight and b) Spencer Tracy's character doesn't appear to be in love with Myrna Loy. It does make me realize that I assumed it was a war movie but could be any pair of pilots that do dangerous stuff. In fact, a war movie in this situation makes little sense since assumably all pilots fly the dangerous mission at the same time.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:48 PM

How far has Ben Affleck fallen? Not only is he doing commentary for Mallrats but Amazon can't spell his name right.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:06 PM

The irony of Mickey Kaus's billing situation with the LA Times is that the Times did an article about shenanigans used by various online companies to make unsubscribing difficult.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:04 AM

Arbitrators for the World Intellectual Property Organization awarded the rights to fatalbert.org to Bill Cosby and takes it from a Tennessee company (article here). In a side ruling, the WIPO also ruled that the Tennessee company was like school on Saturday.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:34 AM

Good news for loyal reader Jim Woster: Rockford Files is coming to DVD. Since it's Universal, probably no extras.

UPDATE: So is Mr. Peepers.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:00 AM

Not to start rumors or anything but apparently the new movie The Man consists entirely of Samuel L. Jackson and Eugene Levy saying "You the man" "No, you the man" "No, you the man" "How can I be the man when you the man?" and so forth for 90 minutes.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:53 PM

The various Bob Denver obituaries I've seen have ignored one of his most lasting contributions: Thanks to Far-Out Space Nuts, NASA modified the design of future space ships to not put the Launch button so close to the supply/meal-loading buttons.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:41 PM

This radio broadcast is of the original March of Dimes show. Interesting if, for nothing else, hearing Bob Hope introduced as a rising young comic.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:30 PM

I went to Knott's Berry Farm Sunday. My thoughts:

I found a carnival game I'm good at. I forget the name but it's a pinball game where you shoot the pinballs and try to catch them. I got 4-out-of-5 and won a 15" Homer Simpson doll on my first $2.

Not having learned my lesson from Six Flags, I nearly wrenched my back on the Ghostrider. Grumble.

How come if Dippin' Dots is the ice cream of the future, I only see it at carnivals, amusement parks and fairs?

The fried chicken at Mrs. Knott's Chicken Dinner Resaurant is quite tasty. And unlike other restaurants where if I'm eating alone they skimp on the bread basket, I was given a huge number of biscuits.

The restaurant also, as one would suspect, had a nice selection of jams at the table. And I know it was jam because jelly don't shake like that.

To my disappointment, the Snoopy store doesn't have any merchandise of relatively-but-not-that-obscure characters like Schroeder or PigPen. Or Marcy for that matter even though they have Peppermint Patty. They did have yellow T-shirts with the Charlie Brown squiggle design though.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:38 PM

The book Jerry Lewis has been saying that he's going to write about Martin and Lewis is apparently coming out in mid-October (Amazon link here). Given that every time he's talked about it, he's said stuff like "I just finished fifty pages about a dinner we had in March of 1950", I'm not too sure on the quality of the book.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:17 PM

A comment in this Hit and Run post answers the commonly-asked question, "How come gas stations raise prices when they didn't pay that price for the gas already in the storage tank?"

Most people think that the "fair" price for the gas they buy is the wholesale price of the gas the station has already purchased plus a reasonable markup for profit[...]However, the price of a gallon of gas you buy doesn't reflect the cost that particular gallon but rather the expected cost of the gallon of gas the station will have to buy to replace it. As the expected replacement price soars, so does the cost to the customer for the gas already in stations tanks because that is where the station is getting the money to buy the replacement fuel[...]It might look like price gouging when the local station raises prices three times in one day but if they didn't you might have cheap gas today but none tomorrow.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:10 PM

Snopes writes on the "looting" vs. "finding" photo caption controversy including quotes from the two gentlemen who wrote captions. An indirect quote from the "looting" photographer:

Jack Stokes, AP's director of media relations, confirmed today that [photographer Dave] Martin says he witnessed the people in his images looting a grocery store. "He saw the person go into the shop and take the goods," Stokes said, "and that's why he wrote 'looting' in the caption."

And a direct quote from the "finding" photographer:

I believed in my opinion, that they did simply find them, and not 'looted' them in the definition of the word...We were right near a grocery store that had 5+ feet of water in it. it had no doors. the water was moving, and the stuff was floating away. These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics. They picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow.

Sounds like looting and finding to me.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:43 AM

Last weekend, I called a friend of mine pretending to be Steve Carell. The premise was that Mr. Carell's contract for The Forty-Year-Old Virgin had an option for a sequel, Universal was going ahead (The picture was to be called The Forty-Two-Year-Old Virgin), and he needed my friend's help with the story problems. This project sounds worse (even given that I threw in that Bill Saluga was signed up for a 1.5-million play-or-pay deal and the movie was contractually required to feature "You can call me Ray..." three times).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:11 AM

Michael Sheard who played Hitler four times died today. Bobby Watson who's played Hitler in at least ten roles is also dead. Moe Howard and Charlie Chaplin both played Hitler analogues and they're both dead. Mel Blanc voiced Hitler in several cartoons and he's dead. Dick Shawn from The Producers, dead.

It's the Hitler curse!

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:42 AM

LA Times article on Hawaii's attempt to cap gas prices and the possibility of California following them. Thankfully owning a Prius means I'll only have to deal with the inevitable gas lines once every two weeks rather than weekly.

One thing omitted in the article is how come if the gas refinery business is so profitable in Hawaii ("far more profitable than similar facilities on the mainland"), how come there are only two refineries? I half suspect there's some government regulations involved here.

Buried in the back of the article is that many state regulations (including California) don't allow selling gas at below-cost prices. So if a station wants to lose a few cents on gasoline (under the theory that they'd make it up with Coke and Twinkie puchases (which is where the real money is in gas stations)), they can't do it.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:34 PM

Readers of this site who are SCTV fans may be interested in the DVD release of The David Steinberg Show which features five stars of SCTV before they were on SCTV. The show also features the titular David Steinberg, a funny comedian who recorded funny album "Booga Booga", and Bill Saluga aka Raymond J. Johnson, Jr.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:38 PM

Mark Evanier posts the Blondie crossover schedule.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:21 AM

So talking of old radio shows, I was listening to the September 9th, 1951 episode of The Jack Benny Show which you can listen to here. They did a parody of Horatio Hornblower. At the beginning of the parody, Jack is described as very brave and Dennis Day deadpans "Naturally". After that, other jokes that used "Naturally" as a punchline had an odd subtext:

Phil Harris: The men haven't touched land in a year. They're going crazy for the sight of a woman.
Jack: Why?
Phil: You wouldn't understand.
Jack: I wouldn't?
Dennis Day: Naturally.

Phil: I have the captain of the French ship. And they had a woman passenger aboard so I brought her too.
Jack: A woman, eh? Well, bring in the captain. I want to question him first.
Dennis: Naturally.
Jack: You stay out of it.

Phil: Captain, you better get her Ladyship below deck. The men are becoming unruly.
Jack: All right. Don't worry, your Ladyship. You're safe with me.
Mary: Naturally.

To my modern ears, that originally sounded like they were saying that Jack Benny is gay. I'm fairly sure that if this was part of the show, it wouldn't be the first I'm hearing of it. Now, I'm guessing that they're implying that Jack is so old that he has no libido. Or maybe my first interpretation was right.

UPDATE: I'm now sold on the idea that these were "Jack is gay" jokes. I dropped a comment on the Radio Memories site to get their opinion.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:10 AM

My brother (that crazy kid) was generous enough to give me an iPod for my birthday.
So what have I been doing with this amazing 21st century device? Dowloading old radio shows! Podcasts of old-time radio shows are available through Radio Memories, OTR and this podcast of what looks like the complete run of The Great Gildersleeve (cartoon fans "know" the show from any Warner Brothers character who giggles "Yes" and its catchphrase "Well, now I wouldn't say that" (swiped by "that dope from the draft board")).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:04 PM

Reader Jim Woster forwards this LA Weekly blog entry on a Today Show segment about a gent who padded his resume by saying he was an Oompa Loompa and was outed as a fraud. I did further research and found this BBC story on this fella by the name of Ezzy Dame. Surprisingly, I could not find an IMDB entry for him but did find one for Rusty Goffe, the real Oompa Loompa who outed him. Also the IMDB entry for Marcus Powell who was an Oompa Loompa and played the role of the Little German* in the underrated Top Secret

*As in Val Kilmer says that he doesn't know any German and the female lead says "I know a little German...he's sitting over there" and the camera pans to a German little person who waves.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:40 PM

Why I'm Not Unsympathetic to the Idea that Maybe John Bolton is what the UN Needs/Deserves Part 587:

The United Nations bankrolled the production of thousands of banners, bumper stickers, mugs, and T-shirts bearing the slogan "Today Gaza and Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem"

No, that's not going to encourage more violence. Article here.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:41 AM

When Radley Balko saw the Aristocrats, he had the same experience I did in that the only time the audience didn't laugh was when T. Sean Shannon dropped the N-bomb and the C-bomb.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:24 PM

I've been watching the Muppets First Season DVD set and I officially take back my Muppet Show-doesn't-hold-up pronouncement from last November. It's as entertaining as I remember. Some notes:

To see the relative primitiveness of this first season, you just have to look at the "This is what we call the Muppet Shooooow" part. It has about ten Muppets and three of them aren't moving. Compare that to later seasons with dozens of Muppets, all of which (as I recollect) sang along.
A concept in the two pilot episodes was that the guest star would be presented with a Muppet likeness of her-or-himself at the end of the show. This concept was, of course, quickly abandoned. ("Hey, ya know that thing we do where we bust our asses for three days to make a Muppet for a thirty-second appearance. Let's not do that.")
The Muppet morsels trivia is entertaining at times, like when it points out that you can see the puppeteer's head. It was also useful to me because I'd say "Hey, that was on the Muppet Show album" and a few seconds it would say that the number was on the Muppet Show album. It hasn't confirmed anything that was in the Muppet Show book yet.
The set features one of the prototype pilots when the Muppets were trying to get a network show, "Sex and Violence". I haven't rewatched it yet but one thing I vividly remember was that Kermit's only appearance was in a Ballroom sketch and his line was something to the effect of "How would you like a job in educational television?" Kermit using his Sesame Street position to get laid. Har.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:02 AM

MAD Magazine announces the launch of MADKIDS, a magazine aimed at 6-11 year olds. I don't know if my family's experience was unique but that's about the age range my brother and I were when we read MAD; we definitely stopped reading MAD around the time MAD seems to think we should have started. The new magazine will feature Spy vs Spy Jr. I picture traps on skateboards ("The kids love skateboarding!") and the Spys wearing propeller beanie ("The kids still wear those, right?")caps instead of their usual floppy hats.

UPDATE: Tom Spurgeon makes the same "don't most folk give up reading MAD around age 11?" point I did.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:36 PM

If you know anything about me, you know that when my parents decided to go for a trip to Niagara Falls, that I would yell "NIAGARA FALLS!" anytime they mentioned the name of said falls. I asked my parents that if souvenirs existed which alluded to the Niagara Falls sketch to buy them for me. Not a damn thing exists. They have souvenirs for the Marilyn Monroe movie but not for a classic piece of comedy. Grumble.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:32 AM

Something I noticed in the King Kong trailer:

Jack Black: I've come into possession of a map; an uncharted island.
Me: If you have a map, it's not an uncharted island.

I noticed this when I saw the Bad News Bears remake. The alternate title for that movie should have been "The Kids Today Like That, Right?".

One funny playing-on-our-expectations bit was a montage of Buttermaker trying to get a sponsor which ended with his entering Chico's Bail Bonds. However, it later turns that Chico is not the sponsor of the Bears.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:09 PM

COOP reminds me in the comments to the post below that there was some question (back in January) whether the Aristocrats joke was a hoax. The movie shows someone looking up the joke in G. Legman's No Laughing Matter: Rationale of the Dirty joke (Second Series). I only have the first series/volume but the first series does reference the Aristocrats joke (indeed the reference implies that the Aristocrats got its own chapter in the second volume). And since Legman was cataloguing old jokes, that implies that the Aristocrats is much, much older than Legman's 1975 volume.

Now, I have to get the second volume.

UPDATE:The Slumbering Lungfish gets proof of the joke's prior existence after asking about it. I, of course, stupidly answered the question for proof before checking that someone else had answered him.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:51 AM

Thoughts on The Aristocrats:

Chris Rock makes an interesting point, which wasn't really expanded on, that black comedy doesn't have the no-profanity tradition of white comedy; Rock's claim being that they weren't going to get on TV or go beyond what they were doing anyway. Seems to me that this makes Bill Cosby even more revolutionary than I realized.
Probably due to it being a Paul Prevenza film, the movie was kind of eighties-comedy heavy.
Interesting variations include the act being performed vs just being described and the pitch being made to an agent from the act vs the pitch being made by an agent to a booker (one version of the latter implies that "The Aristocrats" name is a reaction to a "we're too high-class for that" reaction). There's also the obvious 180-version where the act is genteel and the name is dirty.
At one point, it's suggested that the sex acts and scatalogy described aren't nearly as taboo and that "race is the new sex." Anecdotal proof is that the only point of dead silence (besides that for a comic that I'll leave unnamed who was just not funny) for an audience that was enjoying the film was when comedian/writer T.Sean Shannon dropped the n-bomb.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:51 AM

Tonight's episode of What's My Line (which I've been enjoying for reasons I'll outline in another post) featured Donald Farrell, the real-life "Where is Everybody" guy (without, of course, the hallucinations). The only mention I find of him on the 'Net is this article.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:44 AM

Robin Jones's post on the third season of Columbo and specifically the episode with the police commissioner had me thinking about Lt. Columbo's position in the force. The department is willing to tolerate his idiosyncrasies (which aren't always an act to fool the murderer). They, on occasion, pair him up with a rising up-and-comer in the department. Whenever someone threatens to have him removed from the case because "I've had enough of your harassment", it never takes. And if he has some scheme to trap the murderer which requires a dozen or two uniformed policemen, he gets them.

Of course, he does never get promoted past Lieutenant but then promoting Columbo out of solving crimes is like promoting Kirk out of commanding starships.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:38 PM

Speaking of Charlie Brown, much fun has been had over the sentence in the New York Times profile of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts that states he played the role of Peppermint Patty in a high school production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Here's the problem: Peppermint Patty isn't in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown as you can see here. Indeed the play opened on Broadway in March 1967 and Peppermint Patty's first apperareance in the strip was in August 1966 (as you can see in her entry on the official Peanuts site) so we wouldn't expect her to be in the show unless a wave of Peppermint-Patty-mania swept the country upon her debut. The way it looks to me is one of a few possibilities:

The school added the character of Peppermint Patty to the play (like many productions do) to give more roles to more students (since the play only has six characters).
John Roberts actually played the role of Patty and the reporter got confused (perhaps because Patty disappeared from the strip by the mid-70's).
Conspiracy theoryThe reporter misread Patty as Peppermint Patty deliberately or subconsciously because it fit into the "Roberts is gay" whispering campaign the Democrats are trying to spread.

UPDATE: This post hits the same points.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:58 AM

It's a Newspaper, Charlie Brown!: Harry McCracken posts a 1957 comic where Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt visit Earth-Prime and learn how The Des Moines Register and Tribune make newspapers.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:20 AM

My brother calls into question an article (that I quoted in this post) about a shortage of little people to play Daleks blamed on the Harry Potter film and the Wonka movie given that the Oompa-Loompas were all played by one actor. Some thoughts on that:

Just because we only see one actor as the Oompa-Loompas doesn't mean they only used one actor. In scenes with lots of Oompa-Loompas (particularly the elaborate choreography), it might be easier/cheaper to have have little actors as place-markers and computer-substitute your "actual" Oompa-Loompa than to start from a blank palatte. Or even not show a particular Ooompa-Loompa's face so you don't even have to do any special effects with it. In either case, you would need a lot ofmore than one little person for Wonka.
Given my experience trying to get work during the "programmer shortage" of the 90's, it is possible that the definition of what was needed for a little person actor was too narrowly defined. Just as tech companies' insistence of two years experience in a 2.5-year-old technology (or sometimes a 2-year-old technology) means they're all fighting for an unnecessarily small pool of employees, possibly Potter, Wonka and Dr. Who were fighting over a small circle of little people actors that always get work and didn't think to expand their search for less experienced little people.
Also possible is that the costumes of Potter's trolls and the Daleks limit what range of height is acceptable plus presumably Wonka wants people near Deep Roy's height. So it's possible that the number of little actors is reasonably high but that the three projects are fighting for use of the same height ranges which limits the pool.

UPDATE: OK, I'm full of it about point 1. See here.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:18 AM

ComicsReporter Tom Spurgeon reports that Whoopi Goldberg continues her plot to ruin any piece of entertainment I enjoy by writing the intro for Volume 5 of the Complete Peanuts.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:14 AM

From Chris Rock's press conference about his new UPN sitcom:

It was reported that Rock developed the pilot with Fox. The network ultimately passed on it, fearing that the comedian would withdraw his involvement after the show was picked up.

Rock responded to that notion by saying, "I've been working a while. I don't think I've ever walked out on anything; I don't think there's any evidence of that.

"My name's Rock, not Chappelle," he added. "Are you confusing me with another skinny black man? What have I walked out on?"

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:06 PM

A description of a press conference with Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Red Buttons and Mickey Rooney. Rooney, as he often does, hijacked the conference and Reiner and Buttons mocked him.

After a Rooney anecdote about the legendary producer and director Cecil B. DeMille that only Caesar seemed to understand, Buttons asked, "By the way, Mickey, was Lincoln a nice guy?"

Cathy Seipp was also there and reported on it.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:25 PM

Speaking of Woody Allen, Costco has three sets of 6 Woody Allen movies for around 47 bucks. The genius from MGM who was smart enough to not package all the Sean Connery James Bonds into one set was apparently working on these sets too. Just like you can't get some Sean Connery movies without a Timothy Dalton or a Roger Lazenby, similarly they don't package all the early, funny ones together.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:16 PM

The post below reminds me of some thoughts I've been having after my review of Spamalot. The main reason it disappointed me was because of how good The Producers Broadway show was. Yes, it's a retread of old material but he showed good instincts in keeping what works and removing what wouldn't any more (ie, Dick Shawn's character). Yes, he also tacked on a happy ending but it was consistent with the tone and theme of the show/original movie (plus arguably the original ending is a remnant of a time when every comedy seemed to end with people in the hospital, in jail or (in the case of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World) in the jail's hospital).

What's interesting to me is that with the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy or The Three Stooges or Bob Hope, I'm handed a body of work and can cooly determine "these movies are good whereas these in the later part of the career aren't so good". As opposed to Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Monty Python and David Letterman, where I'm watching the decline as it happens which pains me.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:06 PM

My favorite movie - evolution of a concept

From the meme passed on by my brother,

This is favorite, not "best":

1977 - Wizard of Oz

1979 - Animal Crackers

1980 - Airplane!

1982 - And Now For Something Completely Different

1983 - Return of the Jedi

1984 - Bill Cosby, Himself

1985 - Zelig

1986 - Brazil

1988 - Who Framed Roger Rabbit

1994 - Pulp Fiction

1998 - Run Lola Run

2001 - X-Men

2002 - Spider-man/The Kid Stays in the Picture

2004 - Animal Crackers/It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World

Years are approximate and sometimes based on release date (and taking my brother's word that 1982 was when we discovered Python which sort of gels with my memory). I pass this on to Jim Treacher, Bill Sherman, and Mark Evanier (if he's not too exhausted from this weekend). Also if my friends and frequent commenters Chip Pope and Jim Woster want to throw in theirs in the comments, I'd be interested to hear them.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:53 PM

A commenter notes that they're remaking Summer School.
Actually, I'm not sure why it's being called a remake since if you read the Defamer article, the only similarity between the remake and the original appears to be its setting of school in the summer (which, contrary to Fat Albert, does sometimes have classes in session). This is also where I'd remind folks that I've met Richard Horvitz.

Speaking of remakes, complaints by Gene Wilder about the upcoming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie being about money is funny given that the original film was funded by Quaker Oats as essentially a big product placement for their new Willy Wonka candy line. Tim Cavanaugh mocks misplaced nostalgia by Gen X for their kiddie films and the comments thread detours into a discussion of the two network TV attempts (this one and this one) to cash in on the popularity of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Speaking of Roald Dahl, Dark Horse has announced (scroll down) that they're reprinting Dahl's classic Gremlins book which has been out-of-print for some 60+ years. Illustrations by various Disney artists since the intention was to make the book a Disney movie.

Update: Tales of the Gold Monkey is available on DVD from this bootleg DVD store who also has the other Raiders rip-off show as well as Quark and When Things Were Rotten. The bootleg store is part of a larger site dedicated to Gold Monkey.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:54 PM

Many cartoon and Looney Tunes fans were concerned about the upcoming in-your-face and to-the-extreme Loonatics spin-off; I was less so since we always have the classic cartoons. But now a threat looms to the classic cartoons. I refer, of course, to the announcement that Whoopi Goldberg will be introducing each disc of the upcoming Volume 3 of the Looney Tunes DVD collection. The classic Warner Brothers cartoons, which could not be destroyed by mismanagement either intentional or not, could be made retroactively unfunny by the destroyer of all that is comedic or humorous.

UPDATE: Mike Chary theorizes that Whoopi is doing the set because the first two sets made too much money. The conspiracy-minded would note that Warner Brothers was unsure that a Looney Tunes DVD set would sell. Presumably there exist executives at Warner Brothers who made that prediction. Often when someone predicts failure for a project, one then proceeds to do all one can to make that prediction come true.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:13 AM

Press release for a huge comic strip crossover planned for Blondie's 75th anniversary. No word on whether Dagwood's millionaire parents will show up.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:07 PM

John Cole details the Jews Knew meme that's starting to spread about the London attacks.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:17 PM

I went to Six Flags Magic Mountain yesterday. A couple of minor points of interest:

The wacky dancing old guy in the commercials is named "Mr. Six." So that's what happened to the Prisoner!
The Superman ride shows its age as the pictures used to decorate the ride are of Superman in his mullet days.
I dopn't enjoy roller coasters as much as I did when I was 17.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:28 PM

What's the best part of the Fourth of July? Movie ads featuring the protagnoists wearing Uncle Sam hats and carrying either sparklers or American flags.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:24 AM

Jesse Walker reviews the discography of Sesame Street. The important thing I learned from this article is that I did not as a child own Sesame Street Fever as I thought; rather I owned Sesame Disco. I remembered "Me Lost Me Cookie at the Disco" and didn't realize there were two Sesame Street disco albums.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:35 PM

From my brother, a mess of crazy MP3's. Includes the two songs (this one and that one) that Burt Ward recorded with the Mothers of Invention (which Mrs. Zappa wouldn't let be included on the great Batmania CD), the Odd Couple sing "You're So Vain", Milton Berle does shtick while singing "Yellow Submarine" and Ted Knight's novelty hit "Hi Guys". Robin Jones may enjoy these two remixes of Vincent Price's cooking records or just the cooking lessons themselves.

UPDATE: Duh. It wasn't until I saw the Winchell/Mahoney theme on the site that I realized this was the website of the daughter of the just recently-late Paul Winchell (ventriloquist, inventor of the artificial heart, and voice of Tigger).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:24 PM

Daily Telegraph story about how a French magazine recreated the Shroud of Turin using methods available during medieval times.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:42 PM

I was really disappointed by the soundtrack of Spamalot. It's not that I know the jokes since I still laugh at the original movie. Possibly it's the tacked-on happy ending where "find the Grail" is actually a metaphor for finding one's happiness. I got some smallenjoyment imagining what the Python of thirty years ago would have done with that ending. I think I can nail down what's wrong with this Socratic dialogue:

Q:Tell me why we laugh at something and feel free to swipe your answer from The Dick Van Dyke Show.
A:Something unexpected happens and we laugh as a response. So you expect a society party to be dignified; you don't expect it to break out into a pie fight (even if the host did hire the Three Stooges to be plumbers and there's a table of pies in the buffet areas) and you laugh.
Q:So what makes the "Knights of the Round Table" song funny?
A:Until that moment, Holy Grail had been playing as a straight medieval tale. Also all the kinights are looking at Camelot with hushed awe and Arthur orders riding to the castle with much pomposity. Suddenly a silly song with an elaborate dance routine breaks out. It's unexpected and we laugh.
Q:Would such a song be unexpected in the middle of a musical comedy?
A:No, not so much.
Q:What if it were the fifth or sixth song of the musical?
A:Even less so.
Q:And therefore?
A:It's not as funny.

I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt that there were funny things in the musical not represented on the soundtrack but this Slate review reveals sins hidden by the soundtrack. Specifically, after the "There are those who call me...Tim" joke, Arthur sarcastically replies "Oh, Tim—what a scary name". The Python of old used to mock comedies that explain the joke by holding a sign that read "Joke" during a sketch or two. I now have another example to add to my "Police Squad vs. Naked Gun rant" that I often bore friends with.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:57 PM

A data point for the great Reason article that media concentration is no worse now than it was twenty years ago: Viacom just split into two companies.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:19 PM

Today's paper had an article about Gov. Schwarzenegger's ballot measures. Included was a picture of folk protesting the require-members-to-approve-public-employee-union-dues-going-to-political-campaigns. The problem is the public employees in question were DMV employees. I would think the last thing you'd want to do is remind people that public employees include DMV folk.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:04 AM

COOP, in a comment to the Bilko post, recommends Bilko: Behind the Lines With Phil Silvers, a book by Mickey Freeman who played Zimmerman. Appropriately, the book is only available in large-print edition.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:51 AM

From the Let's Spend Some Time Together Department: In Night and Day, the Cary Grant as Cole Porter biopic, during the singing of "I Get a Kick out of You", the lyric "Some they may go for cocaine" is substituted with "Some like the perfume from Spain". Ah, yes, that world famous Spanish perfume...

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:42 AM

You remember those really bad "humor" paperbacks you could order from Scholastic Books when we were kids. Apparently Will Eisner produced a bunch of them, two of which (this one and this one) are on sale at Ebay. I'm half thinking that I owned the Star Jaws one (or I'm thinking of the Spidey Super Stories issue of the same name)

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:41 AM

From The Internet Fails Me Once Again Department: I remember from The Electric Company a sketch featuring Columbo, Kojak and Sherlock Holmes (played by Morgan Freeman, I think) singing a song called "Who Done It?" ("Who done it?/Who done it?/Who done it?/Was it yoooooooooooou?"). But I try to find lyrics or a description so I can make an allusion to it in a comment on this post by my friend Robin Jones and nothing!

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:58 PM

Yes, it's only a rumor but what the hell: TV Shows on DVD reports that Sgt Bilko/The Phil Silvers Show may be coming to DVD. The show starring the man willing to drown for a joke. (twice apparently!)

Actual conversation I had many years ago:
Me: Mentioned Phil Silvers in some context.
Friend: Who's Phil Silvers?
Me: He was the star of The Phil Silvers Show.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:01 PM

Nancy Cartwright (voice of TV's Bart Simpson) reports that a table read was done for the Simpsons movie. Other snippets can be found here.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:54 PM

Variety reports that Ben Stiller has been cast in a movie version of The Persuaders playing the Tony Curtis role of the rough-and-tumble, self-made millionaire.

Now see if I had been in charge, I would have cast Stiller in the Roger Moore role of an English lord for three reasons:

Everyone expects Stiller to be the Tony Curtis (or at least everyone who's heard of the show). I'd be subverting their expectations (like how in Salt and Pepper Sammy Davis, Jr. played the role of Salt and Peter Lawford played the role of Pepper).

I figure that I could get Stiller to drop a mill or two off his asking price by convincing that I'm letting him stretch.
I really want to see Ben Stiller act in a role with an English accent and I believe America shares that desire with me.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:28 PM

Jews am smarter, according to SCIENCE! (via Just One Minute)

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:16 PM

Walter "TV's Chekhov" Koenig will be playing Chekhov in an Internet production. Story here.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:59 PM

A page about Frank Gorshin's hit record "The Riddler", authored by Mel Torme. If you find a copy of Batmania, a collection of Batman-TV-show-related novelty songs, the Gorshin song is worth the price alone (the Amazon page has a small snippet).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:54 PM

The theme song of the Merry Marvel Marching Society (not to be confused with the Mary Marvel Marching Society).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:51 AM

Via TCJ, via ComicsReporter, a "CartoonRetro" message board thread with some really excellent rare Harvey Kurtzman art. Kurtzman bio for those that need it.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:57 AM

A funny prank to pull when watching Sith is, as you walk out of the theater, say "Wait, Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father?"

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:23 AM

I link to this Mark Steyn column because of this line:

In October 2001 Faizal Aqtub Siddiqi, president-general of the International Muslims Organization, warned that the bombing of Afghanistan would create 1,000 Osama bin Ladens. In April 2003, Egypt's President Mubarak warned that the bombing of Iraq would create 100 bin Ladens. So right there you got a 90 percent reduction in the bin Laden creation program -- just by bombing a second country!

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:06 AM

Smigel's Saturday TV Funhouse cartoon goofed on the same thing I complained about two weeks ago.

I also noticed a lot of applause lines in the Weekend Update segment. An "applause line" is a joke where the punchline is not particularly funny (and sometimes isn't really a punchline) but expresses a politically correct viewpoint. The audience applauds the sentiment but doesn't actually laugh at the joke since laughter is involuntary but applause isn't.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:39 AM

I saw Sith Sunday. Action sequences are good; dialogue and non-action scenes not so good. Good but not great; about Return of the Jedi level. If Episode I had been like this, I would have been happy-ish. There is an unintentionally hilarious scene at the end which I wouldn't dream of spoiling. It was nice to see Chewbacca but he had more to do in that Diet Pepsi commercial (He's reading the paper; that's hilarious!). Also it needed Admiral Piett.

Spoilers below:

The scene I'm talking about is, of course, Vader screaming "Nooooooooo!" To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at that scene. Seriously, electric-distorted James Earl Jones should not emote.

That scene is proof that Lucas is out of touch with the pop culture of today since I would think post-Simpsons, anyone else would be ashamed to do such a scene. I predict that when the DVD comes out (if not sooner) someone will dub "Mendooooooza!" over that scene. And/or "KHaaaaaaaaaaan". (UPDATE: Someone's isolated the soundclip anyway.)

It would actually have been more in character if Vader had not been upset by Natalie Portman's death.

So it took twenty years or so to build the Death Star? No wonder it had the exploitable flaw. Pressure to get thing done after so many cost overruns.

Kenobi abandoning burnt Vader is arguably a good contrast with Luke allowing for there to be some goodness in him still.

Christopher Lee gives a really-good "what the hell" reaction when the Emperor orders Anakin to kill him.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:26 PM

Jerry's Famous Deli is a chain of decent delis in the Los Angeles area (and it's where Andy Kaufman used to work as a busboy). I drove by one in Marina del Rey and they switched their logo from the pleasant one on their site to a new one not findable on the web yet. The new one has this weird futuristic vibe. It looks the logo for a deli Logan eats lunch at between chasing runners. Or where one dines on Soylent Green.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:52 PM

Sorry posting has been light. A client was under deadline pressure which meant I was under deadline pressure. And I get to work Saturday. All of this means I probably won't see the new Star Wars until Sunday. Yeah, I know, tear up my geek membership card (fortunately I taped a conversation I had Wednesday at the funny book shop about the Superman Red/Superman Blue story so I can use that in appeal).

I will have time tonight to watch the combination of two of my greatest childhood loves: the Muppets and Oz. (Hey, what if the Muppets did a version of a different Oz? What would that be like? It might go something like...) I do have memories of how terrible Muppet Christmas Carol was* but I'm hopeful.

*The basic problem with Muppet Christmas Carol was that it was a fairly straight adaptation of A Christmas Carol. We don't need that what with there being 500 other adaptations. Plus you end up with Michael Caine giving the are-there-no-workhouses speech to Beaker.

The great Frank Gorshin died. One of the triumverate of great impressionists (the other two being Rich Little and Frank Travelena), the inventor of the hack Brando impression, the Riddler (whose performance literally revived a one-appearance character into one of Batman's more popular foes), and one of two comedians whose action figure I own (well, technically it's a Bele doll but I call it my Frank Gorshin action figure). (The other one if you care is a Bob Hope GI Joe doll).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:30 PM

Saturday, I saw Buck Benny Rides Again, a Jack Benny movie which, contrary to my assertion that such a film didn't exist, is an adventure of his radio character. Curious as to why he didn't make more movies like this, I skimmed Milt Josefburg's book on Benny and found that it was Benny's decision not to just play his radio character (or someone like him). I can understand how he felt but it's a shame we missed out on some possibly entertaining movies due to that decision.

You can tell that the audience of a theater is filled with film nerds (besides the fact that they're watching a Jack Benny movie) when they burst into wild applause at the unexpected appearance of Charles Lane.

And a microcosm of how African Americans were treated in Hollywood can be seen in the IMDB entry of Theresa Harris, the very attractive love interest of Rochester. Count how many times the word "maid" appears.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:00 PM

Available at Kroger, Ralphs and other Kroger-owned grocery stores is Old Yeller-brand dog food (Press release here). Idea for slogan: "Your dog will go crazy for it."

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:45 PM

A New Yorker review of Steven Johnson's book (the one on how pop culture is smarter than ever) quotes Johnson pondering a world (and its cultural critics) where the video game had been around for centuries and the book had just been invented:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page...
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children...
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you...This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.

UPDATE: I forgot to link to the review. D'oh!

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:32 PM

My brother, Mr. AEI-bigshot, is interviewed here. He gives a linkless shout-out to this blog (I'm assuming the linkless part is Legal Underground's fault and not my brother's).

Elsewhere he notes the consequence of a decision awarding 45K for a dead cat is apparently the state prefers one totals ones car to avoid hitting an animal in the street. Although if your car then damages the oldest tree in Bedford Falls, well, then you're screwed. (Maybe that's why George Bailey was going to kill himself; he knew he'd be sued for 45 G's for hitting that tree.)

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:35 AM

Via Evanier, a Newsweek article on how Nixon used to consult with Jeane Dixon. Dixon is, of course, the psychic who amazed the world by predicting the assasination of John F. Kennedy one week after it happened.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:40 AM

I learned two things from today's LA Times Summer Films Sections:

First The Aristocrats opens August 5th. However the film's website sez July 29 in NY and LA and August 12th nationwide.

Second, Stan Lee will be playing the role of Willie Lumpkin. I was going to say this was the first time Stan Lee played a character he co-created but he did play the guy rescued by young Matt Murdock in Daredevil. Yeah, the guy was just a MacGuffin to give Daredevil his powers and blindness and we never saw him again but Stan Lee co-created him.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:26 AM

Can someone explain to me why Paula Abdul was on SNL? She intros a skit with a "Hey, they're gonna do it skit but it's made up and it's all in good fun" and she closes the skit by critiquing the impersonations. So her presence adds nothing to the sketch. I mean, if American Idol were an NBC show, I could understand that maybe a network honcho would ask SNL not to crap on the golden goose. But it's not the hit show of another network! Sheesh.

Maybe Jim Downey needs to resubmit his Sneaker-Upper sketch (scroll down).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:54 AM

Via Hit and Run, an article on fan attempts to explain continuity errors in fictional universes. Science-fiction and comix universes mostly, although somewhere there's fan-fiction that rationalizes why The Odd Couple had three different contradictory episodes about Felix and Oscar's first meeting. And I'm still looking for Chuck Cunningham fan-fic.

One interesting section deals with a lad named Charlie whose father wanted him to watch Star Wars in numerical/fictional-chronological order.

Getting the child to watch the series with fresh eyes from Episode I through VI in order, in a way that we Generation Xers never can, would enable us to watch the child for signs of confusion: the child might spot contradictions that our chronology-skewed brains never would. Other obvious research questions suggest themselves: When would Charlie first notice that Senator Palpatine is a bad man who wants to become Emperor, for example? When would he first have doubts about Anakin? Would Charlie be saddened that in Episode IV Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru don’t remember their old friends C-3PO and R2-D2?

The experiment fell apart however when the boy's mother rented Return of the Jedi

one conclusion is unavoidable: due to contamination by girl, the experiment is now invalidated and must be abandoned.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:57 AM

Under the category of "Why couldn't they have toys like this when I was a kid?" is this Star Wars video game thing from Tiger Games. You plug the motion-detector doo-hickey framus into your TV and you can have light saber battles in the comfort of your own home.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:48 AM

Via Evanier, a fanmade video for Shatner's cover of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:40 AM

I saw Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy tonight. I liked it more than I thought I would but it's somewhat joke-free. Huge chunks of comedy are cut to get the story told which isn't really the strong point of the source material (however you define it).

One thing that's interesting about the movie is that technology is such that jokes Douglas Adams made because he was writing for radio can be realized on the big screen without looking like crap. Arthur can say that Ford is turning into a sofa and Ford can look like a convincing sofa. Heck, in 5-10 years, they could have Zaphod be two-headed throughout the movie with the same budget rather than do whatever the heck it was they did.

Spoilers:

One consequence of waiting until the second weekend the movie's out to see it is that I'm the only one in the audience to notice the self-referential jokes: Simon Jones's appearance, the original Marvin costume, the original Hitchhikers theme.
Given the amount of comedy they did cut for lack of space, it's a shame they decided to extend the joke of the Big Sneeze beyond the two sentences it received (and deserved) in the original. They cut the Philosophers' Union bit for this?
So they make a "Bush stole the election from Gore" joke but then the Gore analogue for that joke turns out to be evil.
An interesting plot change is that Earth Mark II is not a new version of the Earth but rather a backup (allowing for the ending where the Earth is back to its pre-destroyed state). But if it's a backup then how come the mice need Arthur Dent's brain? The original reason was that the Earth program was going to have start its ten million-year-old program over again and Dent's brain was a way around it. That doesn't seem to apply anymore.
Did they return New Earth to its solar system? 'Cause if they did, it's just gonna get destroyed by the Vogons again, right? (Unless the Earth was destroyed not for the hyperspace byway but to prevent the Question from being revealed, which I believe was a plot point in the fourth or fifth book, maybe).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:03 AM

If someone is seriously considering going to the 500-dollar charity screening of the new Star Wars picture, he probably doesn't need the press release to tell him that Mark Hamill played the role of Luke Skywalker. In the "Learn Something New Everyday" department, I didn't know that John Ratzenberger was in Empire.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:54 PM

One last time travel thing...In 1983-4, Lorne Michaels produced the New Show, a sketch show which preceded his return to SNL. One sketch involved time travellers (played by Dave Thomas and Buck Henry) deciding to warn Lincoln (played by Paul Simon) of his impending assasination. The joke was that his theater box quickly filled with time travellers. I recollect this bit of dialogue:

Time Traveller: Excuse me, I'm looking for Koznofski.
Buck Henry: Koznofski?
Time Traveller: Yeah, he's going to be shot today.
BH: No, this is where Abraham Lincoln is going to be assasinated.
TT: I don't think so.
[ENTER Second Time Traveller]
STT: Pardon me, Mr. Lincoln...
TT: Koznofski! [Takes aside STT.] You're not going to believe this but...

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:45 PM

Speaking of time travel, Lileks notes that we're approaching the point with Back to the Future where 1985 will be as far away as 1955 was to Marty McFly but notes that there's little in the film "that seems silly or dated."

One scene that does sort of date it is the scene where McFly orders beverages that haven't been invented yet. Were McFly to order these sodas in 2005, he'd have similar trouble, what with Pepsi Free having morphed into "Caffeine-Free Pepsi" and TaB only being available in speciality stores that carry Nehi and other such things. Although even in 1985, the comedy in that scene seemed forced since it wasn't like either beverage was likely to be carried in a small-town diner even in 1985

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:33 PM

Via a variety of sources, a time-traveller convention will be held at MIT in three days (or "kaputniks" as you in the 43rd century call them). I see a couple of flaws in this plan.

The idea is that you only have to hold one convention because you could always time travel back to it multiple times for repeat visits. But suppose time travel works like it does in Superman comic books and you become an invisible wraith if you time travel to a period where you already were? Then what?

If no time travellers show up, there are two possibilities for why that would be:

To avoid contaminating the past, all attendees from pre-time-travel-invented eras are hypnotized to forget.
A horrible disaster was destined to occur at the time and location of the convention. All time travelers were visited by their future selves, warning them not to attend.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:22 PM

Paraphrased conversation between myself and a friend Sunday .

ME: Hey, the Jiminy Glick movie is opening Friday. Ya wanna see it Friday night or some time Saturday?
FRIEND: I can't. How about Sunday?
ME: Sunday? Are you crazy?!?! The movie will have closed by then.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:12 PM

I understand that Honolulu only features rather than stars Burns and Allen. But why have George Burns and Gracie Allen in your movie if you're going to seperate them by a continent and an ocean? And in the few minutes that they were together, Burns kept fainting because he'd see lookalikes.

I was going to give A Damsel in Distress the same fast-forward-when-Burns-or-Allen-aren't-onscreen treatment that I gave Honolulu (with an exception made in Honolulu for Sig Ruman) but when I saw P.G. Wodehouse's name in the credits, I figured I shouldgive the movie my full attention so I'll wait until I have a full 90 minutes to watch.

Coincidentally I found this DVD of three other Burns and Allen movies at Costco for 9 bucks; these pictures seem to have the same "doesn't actually star them" issue.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:46 PM

BlogRoll Update: I've added my brother's new weblog. Read about his new gig with the vast right-wing conspiracy. Also added my buddy Robin Jones's site.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:38 PM

Speaking of Passover, Kosher for Passover Coca-Cola is still available for sale at my local Ralphs and may be at a supermarket near you. Look for a U surrounded by an O (or an "O-U" as the Jews call it) with a P next to it on the bottle cap. This Coca Cola is made with cane sugar rather than corn syrup. Coca Cola Inc. will tell you that corn syrup is just as good as sugar; they are liars. In a libertarian paradise, all soda would be made with sugar since a) you wouldn't have tariffs artificially bumping up the price of sugar and b) you wouldn't have price supports artificially lowering the price of corn syrup.

And talking of beverages, Virgils Root Beer is the best damned root beer ever.

UPDATE: The Dublin, TX Dr. Pepper bottler makes Dr. Pepper with cane sugar and will sell it to you online.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:30 PM

From the Dept. of You Think You've Got Troubles: As I approach the end of Passover and face a sminor hortage of Kosher for Pesach stuff because I didn't stock up enough, Responsa from the Holocaust arrived in the mail. Its questions and answers asked of a rabbi in the Lithuanian ghetto during the Holocaust. Questions such as "Can lumber stolen from the Nazis be used for a sukkot?" (Yes, since it was stolen by the Nazis to begin with and the original owners had no hope of retaining it) and "How can a man whose left arm was amputated perform the mitzvah of wearing tefillin on his left arm?" (Have someone wrap it on his right arm). Best taken in small doses but a good reminder that you've never had it so good.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:14 PM

An article by the guy who took the photo of people lining up to evacuate Saigon via helicoptor reveals that the caption that usually accompanies the photo are LIES!!! LIES, I tell ya! (via Hit and Run)

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:50 AM

The Boston Globe tells the story of how John Bolton got the "Zionism is racism" UN resolution repealed.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:59 AM

I Don't Get It Department: In Cracked Nuts, Robert Woolsey's character is trying to get the approval of his fiancee's aunt/guardian. At the end, the aunt lectures the two from their balcony and both reply "I do", the joke being that they're getting married by a minister who's under the balcony. The aunt realizes what's happened and says "Well, I'll take vanilla." Movie ends. Buh?

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