Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:54 AM

My brother notes various facts that contradict the King of Kong narrative (includng the fact that the "why is the champ afraid to compete" throughline was somewhat Roger & Me-esque).

My complaint is more simple: How do you do a documentary about a classic arcade game and not use any songs from the Pac-Man Fever album? There's even a Donkey Kong song.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:30 AM

I was curious what the Net had on the subject of Superintendent Hassle, a sort-of reverse-Superintendent Chalmers in the Archie world. Principal Weatherbee would worry about the superintendent's visit; Archie would mess up; the superintendent would assume the snafu was on purpose for whatever convoluted reason and say "Good job, Weatherbee".

Obviously there's nothing. I did find this Wikipedia page on Alternate Universes in Archie Comics. I'm surprised the inclusion of Little Archie wasn't more controversial.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:21 AM

So an odd element in the current Peanuts collection (from 1965-6) has a character yelling "Sydney or the Bush" and Charlie Brown looking at the audience and asking "Sydney or the Bush?" This occurs twice.

Mr. Google reveals that it's an Australian saying meaning "all or nothing". I'm curious as to its origin in the strip. Was there a 1965 Australia-mania fad similar to the one from the late eighties? Did Schulz hear the phrase by meeting an Australian, going to Australia, or getting a fan letter from Australia?

Google also reveals that the joke was considered hilarious enough to be included in a 1969 Peanuts cartoon movie.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:08 AM

Speaking of this remarkable age we live in, when I was a kid, I knew that the good Popeye cartoons were the black-and-white ones. If I wanted to see one, I'd have to sit through three or four terrible cartoons from whatever local channel broadcast Popeye cartoons. Now I can just watch all black-and-white cartoons on DVD!

An interesting commentary was by animators Jorge Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua for "Blow Me Down". They're so happy to see Popeye interact with Mexicans that they don't mind that they're stereotypes, just like how I like seeing Jewish stereotypes in cartoons and old movies.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:55 AM

Sony is finally packaging the Three Stooges shorts in chronological packages rather than just putting three films on a disc. Story here. The means we can look forward to getting some good Shemps on disc!
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:05 PM

Another example of the LA Times "layers of editors": An opinion column about how weblogs don't do original reporting cited Talking Points Memo as an example even though it does do original reporting. When Josh Marshall confronted the author, he states that he hasn't read the blog and that it was inserted by his editor. Marshall tells the tale here. (Via Evanier).
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:57 PM

Per the New York Post, Val Kilmer backed out of playing Hitler in the Hebrew Hammer sequel. The article is vague on why but the reason is obvious: Kilmer is afraid of the Hitler curse.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:23 PM

A couple of Potter spoilers below:

1. My brother makes the good point that the Elder Wand solution (die peacefully so it will lose its power) is a cheat and that "there are Dark Magic practitioners who will seek the Elder Wand within Potter's lifetime". It's actually worse than he suggests since Harry announced that he had the wand to a Great-Hall-full of students and Death Eaters. Fortunately,
   the Ministry of Magic has a very strict "One heroic journey/quest per wizard" rule. In fact, that was the real reason Harry Potter was almost expelled in Book 5; fortunately Dumbledore convinced the ministry that all of Harry's adventures were part of one historic quest. Alternately, this will be the plot of Book 1 of "The Adventures of Teddy Lupin".


2. Given Harry's plan to die peacefully, he presumably does not become an Auror.


3. I like that Gabe was promoted to vice principal. (Sorry, that's a Kotter spoiler.


4. The LA Times had the leaked photograph of the last two pages. It was semi-readable and I peaked at parts of it. I interpreted Ron's "I'm famous" joke as serious. I had a semi-theory throughout the series that Ron or Neville would save the day and Harry would get the obscurity he craved.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:43 PM

How mediocre was Thimble Theater before Popeye joined its cast? This mediocre.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:42 PM

To celebrate Blue Bell's 100th birthday, the Austin American Statesman has a big shot ice cream expert taste Blue Bell for the first time. Article here.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:31 PM

Speaking of Reason, they note that my brother got punk'd or or jammed or zapped or "scammy flammy mammied" or whatever the kids say these days. He gives his POV in the comments.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:23 PM

Don Surber compares the Live Earth line-up to Dean Martin playing Woodstock. A Corner letter writer notes a missed opportunity ("How about big stars performing acoustic sets from wherever they were at that time. Home, a local coffee house, a small venue, a park, etc...No jets flying people around, no plastic beer cup litter, etc"). And Nick Gillespie notes that one of the performers was in Tipper's "Filthy Fifteen".
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:34 AM

In 1947, Life magazine challenged the popular comic strip artists of the day to draw their characters blindfolded. The results are here.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:25 AM

One thing I liked about Knocked Up was this: The main character and his slacker friends have an idea for a web site. Now, I, like most web-savvy folk, know that the web concept exists as a website in real life. But I figure that we're supposed to pretend this site doesn't exist and the arc will have our slacker friend buckle down and make that web site concept a huge success. Perhaps there'd be a montage of working-hard scenes with "All Star" as the background music.

Then halfway through the movie, the site is described to Paul Rudd who says "Oh, you mean like MrSkin.com?" I was on the floor.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:24 AM

Can't a fella watch some decent gay porn without running into BDS?
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:18 AM

You remember Farfur, the Hamas knockoff of Mickey Mouse? On Friday, he was killed by the Jews.

UPDATE: Farfur is caught cheating and blames the Jews.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:37 PM

When Archies Collide: The Archie of today meets the Archie of the 40's in the July Archie Digest.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:04 PM

How Folks Did Stuff in the Olden Days Dept.: I was listening to an episode of Fibber McGee and Molly from Election Day 1940. Rather than the show being preempted for election updates, the character of McGee would just say "Hey, let's tune into NBC and see how the election is going". Some news would be broadcast and back to the show.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:01 PM

Voldemort Can't Stop the Rock!

Little did I know when researching this album that it's part of a larger genre.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:18 AM

Via Reason, a DNC inadvertently provides a good reason to vote for Fred Thompson:

Thompson Consistently Voted Against Ethanol Subsidies[...] In 1999, Thompson was one of only 13 senators to vote to establish a school voucher system, paid for by eliminating certain subsidies for ethanol, oil, gas and sugar

Whatever your thoughts are about school vouchers, he was willing to take on the corn and sugar lobbies.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:18 AM

Via Treacher, Cracked presents The 13 Most Ridiculous TV Shows to Ever Get Green-Lit:

1. Guess which show I own a bootleg DVD set of!
2. Guess which show I met the star of
3. As I noted before, arguably one of the reasons the sitcom genre is near death is that they stopped doing silly-premise sitcoms and just had shows set in living rooms/offices with people insulting each other.
4. If you're including the late-80's era of syndications, how do you list Out of this World and not Small Wonder?

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:25 AM

From the Muppet Wikipedia (via TF), we learn from the baker entry that

1. Two films debuted per same Sesame Street episode.


2. There was a "ONE WEDDING CAKE" episode. Assuming 00xx means episode #xx,
   then it debuted in episode 86 whereas two through nine debuted by episode 11 and ten in episode 21. This suggests that there was much discussion as to whether the kiddies needed help learning to count to one.


3. Apparently there were folks at the Children's Television Workshop who didn't like the baker falling.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:53 AM

Sesame Street used to have a sequence where they'd give examples of counting to a given number. The sequence would end with baker singing, for example, "NINE COCONUT CREAM PIES" and then fall down. Someone on YouTube has edited together all the baker sequences and it's so great that it deserves to be my first YouTube embed.WARNING: These segments are no longer on Sesame Street so it may be dangerous for the very young. They might start carrying baked goods and falling down steps.
The interesting thing to me about this is learning that Jim Henson was the voice of the baker.

Here is a full sequence for the number 9 which also contains a rare Sesame Street appearance by Rolf the Dog.

Allegedly there's a missing counting sequence with the baker singing "ONE WEDDING CAKE" which was pulled because the education folk figured that the kiddies don't need help counting to one. Some folk claim to have seen it. A few years ago, I would have dismissed a claim like that but then they found the Newlywed Game legend turned out to be true.

Speaking of great Sesame Street segments, here's one of that painter who'd paint on inappropriate surfaces. These segments are also no longer part of Sesame Street. Perhaps the kids today can't handle the hilarity our generation could.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:43 PM

The voice-over guy for a PSA does an alternate recording with high-larious consequences. YouTube link here. Warning: lots o' profanity.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:50 AM

Even CEO can't figure out how Radio Shack stays in business. "If Sony and JVC start including gold-tipped cable cords with their products, we're screwed."
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:58 AM

Via Evanier, Mad magazine ripoff Gag is issuing a new issue #1. You can tell they've been having money problems since this Spring 2007 issue contains parodies of the summer 2006 blockbusters.*

Their FAQ cops to being a MAD knockoff and uses the "MAD isn't as good as it used to be" argument that a Cracked editor used in an article many years ago when Cracked poached Don Martin.

Speaking of Don Martin, the Wikipedia entry for Fester Bestertester. Nothing for Karbunkle (the Laurel to Fester Bestertester's Hardy).

*UPDATE: My mistake. We have one Summer 2006 blockbusters, two Summer 2005 blockbusters, and a XMas 2005 blockbuster.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:49 PM

The Laughcast podcast features as "Laughcast #2" an excerpt from a Jack Benny episode where Jack has a nightmare after losing $4.75 at the track. Part of the nightmare has Ronald Coleman (or Ronald Coleman as impersonated by Dennis Day) talking about betting only on English horses. We know the horse is English because after it whinnies, it says "HAW HAW".

Why is that interesting? Whenever Mel Blanc lectured or did a talk show appearance, he'd cite the Jack Benny Show asking him to do an English horse as an assignment that nearly threw him for a loop. So here it is.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:32 AM

"Israeli melons have AIDS". The best part of the article is the deadpan sub-headline "Officials deny rumors".

I had no idea Israel was trading with Saudi Arabia.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:37 AM

According to Pravda, Don Imus was fired because he was going to blow the lid on 9/11. This just proves what a lousy conspiracy 9/11 was. I mean, the JFK conspiracy killed Dorthy Kilgallen.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:17 PM

Ted Knight's record album Hi Guys. The first verse of the titular song was about how you can't tell guys from gals with the crazy haircuts of today ("today" being 1975).
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:43 PM

The weird part about Meet the Robinsons is that even though the future it depicts has flying cars, there are still comedians doing the "Hey, it's the future; where are my flying cars?" bits.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:41 PM

On the back cover of a book about Michael Moore (of which I stupidly did not write the title on scrap paper), it notes that Michael Moore actually had two interviews with Roger Smith of Roger and Me fame. A new documentary about Moore has the footage.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:37 PM

Via Poynter.org, an article notes that the overused Fitzgerald "no second acts" quote was not referring to comebacks as it is usually used.

[I]n the theater the second act usually serves as a bridge or transition. The first act establishes the situation and the third act denouement solves or resolves it. It is safe to assume that Fitzgerald was conversant with the theater of his day because one of his works was a play, although not a very good one, called The Vegetable.

Could it be that he meant that American lives during the Jazz Age were so frantic and frenetic that they went straight from crisis to resolution because there was not enough time for any transition?

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:35 PM

From my brother, a New York Times article about the Florida "condo circuit" where former borscht belt comedians entertain Jewish retirees. The sad part is that, due to changing demographics of the retirement community, some of those comics may start losing gigs there.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:34 PM

Steampunk Star Wars.

Definition of steampunk for those unfamiliar with sci-fi sub-genres.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:58 AM

The Marx Brothers --- in color!!!!1! (via Evanier).
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:16 PM

Departed wins!!! Brad Grey is now shooting his TV set.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:08 PM

Spread out!!!

UPDATE: Scorsese wins! More gangster pics!!!
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:06 PM

Minor note: You can tell Bruce Vilanch isn't writing "ad-libs" in the sidelines or else there would have been a joke comparing Jack Nicholson to Britney Spears.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:49 PM

Red Buttons made the In Memoriam film. But he never got a dinner.

I was surprised James Doohan made the cut...
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:30 PM

Hey! Melissa Etheridge said "Democrat". According to today's Doonesbury and today's Candorville, she's like McCarthy!!!!!1!
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:04 PM

GM cut out the part of the commercial where the robot jumps off the bridge, probably because of concern about suicidal robots.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:48 PM

Gore wins. Which means six more weeks of winter in LA.

Also La Fonatine blames Katrina on global warming.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:35 PM

Snakes on a Plane!!!!1! Woo!!!
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:13 PM

"How about those kids with their cell phones and their YouTubes?"
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:55 PM

"You bet, Chris! More fun!"
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:36 PM

Al Gore's here? No wonder we've been getting Gore Effect temperatures.

UPDATE: OK, the music cutoff thing was funny.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:22 PM

Another Nikki Finke Oscar prediction that didn't happen: According to her, we weren't going to see the Supporting Acting Oscars until the last third of the show.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:13 PM

A sound effects montage and no love for the Wilhelm scream?
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:05 PM

In these magical days of the Interwebs, you can find the winner of Best Live-Action Short on the YouTube. Also the nice Jewish boy brings his mother to the Oscars.

UPDATE Oops, that was a trailer. It has a site but the site's already overloaded.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:49 PM

Tech awards gets thirty seconds? Prepare yourselves for thirty musical numbers and seventy montages. UPDATE If all the musical numbers are like the Black-Ferrell number, I wouldn't mind so much. Why aren't they hosting?
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:43 PM

Good double-take by Steve Carrell (Earlier I was wondering if Nancy Wall (the lovely Mrs. Carrell) was not here or was just asked to step aside while ABC interviewed Carrell. Now I know it was the latter).
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:40 PM

Back to the "billion viewers" claim, I see.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:31 PM

Don La Fontaine (one of the "In a world" guys) is announcing!
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:19 PM

A crawler during the interview with Cate Blanchett said she'd be playing Bob Dylan. Photographic proof.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:14 PM

I hearby predict that a humorous comparison will be made between Britney being bald and the Oscar statuette being bald.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:08 PM

The Rob Lowe Snow White production of 1989 which was literally the reason they stopped doing these numbers. I forgot Merv was in it too.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:26 PM

The beauty of the Internet: You can fact-check a Drew Friedman cartoon and find this:

Appel also quotes a personal conversation in which Nabokov mused: 'Dennis the Menace doesn’t look like his father. Could he be illegitimate?". When he ponders writing a letter about it to The Herald Tribune, "he is dissuaded by Vera who remarks that the paper had not printed his earlier letter about plot inconsistencies in Rex Morgan."

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:36 AM

Sorry. I'm a little behind on this:

Joe Rogan (who we remember here for calling out Dennis O'Leary for stealing from Bill Hicks) gets into an onstage fight with Carlos Mencia after calling Mencia a joke thief. Video here (and, yes, the "who's gonna build your border wall" joke isn't the best gag to build one's case on). He loses his agent over it here (which portrays it as a "You can't fire me; I quit!" scenario).

Coincidentally, Radar did an article on known joke-thieves.

Warning: All of the above has lots of swears.

I will say that I once heard the booker of a club tell a bunch of young comics "Don't steal. I don't book thieves...unless they put asses in the seats."

The story I heard about Robin Williams has David Letterman walking into the Comedy Store in the middle of a Williams set and asking somebody "Is he up to the L's yet?"
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:52 AM

Tina Fey at the WGA Awards:

I hear Aaron Sorkin is in Los Angeles wearing the same dress - but longer, and not funny.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:36 AM

As long as I'm linking to funny book reviews, here's something I'll probably be swiping:

[I]t's not even "not funny" in the way that Christmas cracker jokes aren't funny. It's not funny in the way that chairs and rocks aren't funny.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:33 AM

Is he strong? Listen, bub, he's got radioactive...ewwwwwww!*

*Scroll down to review of SPIDER-MAN: REIGN #3.

UPDATE: The scene in question.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:31 AM

Rethinking Chewbacca and R2D2's actions in Star Wars in light of Episodes I-III (via my brother). Of course, my first reaction was "What about Chewbacca being rescued from slavery by Han Solo?"

On the same page, I find this bit of dialogue which adds support to the hypothesis:

LUKE: What made you come back, Han?
HAN: Oh, the Wookiee here got stubborn about it.

.

I love the idea that they had been playing future-chess for years.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:19 PM

I wasn't going to post about National Gorilla Suit Day because I posted about it before it was cool and didn't want to just look trendy. But I was touched by the sentiment of this banner and my heart grew three sizes. So I asked a boy at the window to buy the biggest gorilla suit at the shop window and have it delivered to the Cratchetts. And I keep National Gorilla Suit Day in my heart not just on January 31st but all of the days of the year.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:13 PM

In celebration of the great Milton Caniff's 100th birthday, website Humorous Maximus (or "Humourous Maximus", as our friends across the pond say) is running old Steve Canyon strips.

In related news, according to Doonesbury, the Bush administration has banned saying how old Steve Canyon is.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:42 PM

Speaking of comic strips, I'm really digging Li'l Abner after buying the Kitchen Sink reprints off of eBay. Unlike the Spider-man strip where it took two weeks for a guy to walk across a room, the pace of Abner is lightning-fast. If he's hanging off a cliff with one hand while holding an anvil with the other with a lake full of piranhas and sharks on the cliff drop and twelve gangsters with tommy guns on the clifftop at the end of a strip on day x, the situation gets resolved on day x+1.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:32 PM

More on Grand Canyon-gate: Michael Shermer from Skeptic Magazine tells the tale (on Huffington Post of all places) of how he was duped by the press release and got PEER to retract the claim when he asked for specifics. He also notes that the Creationist book is sold in the Inspirational section of the bookstore so it's not like the Grand Canyon is calling it science.

Via "Jolly Jim" Treacher who does that thing where he puts different words in a comic strip and correctly notes that Shermer needs to learn how to do HTML quote-blocks (or someone at Huffington should have done it for him).

UPDATE: A more readable version of Shermer's apology.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:00 PM

Today's Doonesbury, which is based off of this press release (or an email about the press release with three FW:'s), claims that the Grand Canyon park Service is not allowed to tell the geologic age of the Grand Canyon. A three-minute Internet search finds this National Park Service page which tells the geologic age of the Grand Canyon.

If you look at the press release, you'll see that they have good documentation about the book but are vague as to the "not allowed to tell" claim (Who gave the order? When was it given? Etc.)

UPDATE:The folks who released the press release have disappeared the claim that park rangers aren't allowed to tell the geologic age of the Grand Canyon. Google cache is, for now, here.
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