Taking a Break
I’m taking a short hiatus to do some retooling around here. Movable Type and/or my server is running real slow and it’s driving me crazy. If you’ve attempted to leave a comment and it results in a slow load, I’m sorry. I will try and get this fixed.
Chronological Cartoons? How Looney!
Spending the last couple of months immersed in the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 4 DVD set. It’s a beautifully done package, as usual, but once again we had to ask ourselves “why didn’t they release these chronologically?” Under that scenario, the first volume would consist mostly of black and white Bosko cartoons — and, let’s face it, only hardcore animation devotees would buy such a set.
Releasing these cartoons chronologically would be unrealistic from a business perspective, but it’s fun to imagine how such a project would be carried out. Using my trusty guidebook, I’ve figured that a DVD release of every animated short that Warner Bros. produced between 1930 and 1969 (including the so-called “Censored 11″) would consume seventeen volumes of Golden Collections. Paying full retail prices for each box will set you back precisely $1,104.66. Some other tidbits:
- Porky Pig and Daffy Duck make their first appearances on volume 2; Bugs Bunny debuts on volume 5.
- Nearly all of Sniffles’ cartoons appear on volumes 5 and 6 (1939-41).
- Volume 7 is a real pip, with The Dover Boys, the controversial Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs, and the first appearance of a baby bird eventually known as Tweety in A Tale of Two Kitties.
- Volumes 8-10 cover the prime years of 1944-50 (many of these shorts are already covered on the existing Golden Collections).
- The classic One Froggy Evening appears on volume 14. You’d have to wait until volume 15 to see What’s Opera, Doc?.
- Volume 17 limps to a close with a bunch of lame Daffy Duck/Speedy Gonzales cartoons and footnote characters like Bunny and Claude. By this time in our scenario, however, DVD technology is so antiquated that downloading the cartoons directly into your brain is now the norm.
Impossible Mission II
Out of curiosity I went to the local Wal-Mart and Target to see if they had any Nintendo Wiis in stock. Neither had them, although at Wal-Mart I was treated to a blowsy woman yelling “They got the GAMES only!” into her cell phone.
By far the best (well, only) videogame related news I heard today — Impossible Mission is coming back. And it will be available on the Wii. Loved playing that one on the Commodore 64. And here’s a review of the Wii’s downloadable classic games.
Sticker Shock
Ephemera’s Marty Weil recently interviewed ’80s sticker collector Shawn Robare on his weblog. An interesting talk on something that isn’t usually thought of as a collectible. I also enjoyed Shawn’s weblog, Branded In The ’80s. Those stickers remind me of my fave local shop from back then, a multi-purpose gift store called Jutenhoops. They sold jokey greeting cards, board games, puzzles, kites and other such “fun” stuff (picture a more cluttered version of Over Our Heads from The Facts of Life), but one thing I definitely remember is the store’s section with rolls and rolls of stickers of every kind. It was amazing. This was around 1983-85, the same period as this sticker collecting vogue. Incidentally, Jutenhoops has stayed in business locally up until very recently, still having a healthy stock of “fun” stuff (but not as many stickers).
Tangentally related: x-entertainment’s piece on McDonald’s tray liners throughout the years is a fun and fascinating read (via Coudal).
1960 Time Trip
This morning I had a little time to kill, so I lugged out an old issue of Look magazine, scanned some of the ads, and created a small 1960 flickr set. This batch has some nice, kitschy imagery as well as some neato illustrations. Like these snappy cut-out kids advertising Armour Meats, for example:
Coupla other things: my review of the springy debut album from the bird and the bee has been posted at So Much Silence. Also, I’ve uploaded my first YouTube clip: the super-groovy opening titles from the 1972 TV movie Probe, previously discussed here. Motion graphics and Elke Sommer — what could be better?
Periodically Speaking
More magazines! Here’s The 51 Best Magazines Ever as ranked by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. An excellent read with Carter smartly highlighting specific periods with many of his choices (Esquire 1961-73, for example). I’m so happy that he included Games from its ’80s glory years, ranked at #36. That magazine in that time absolutely rocked the erasers off my pencils.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Oscars 2007
Good — Nice distribution of prizes with no one film hogging the honors; Naomi Watts’ lovely yellow gown; Melissa Etheridge’s surprise win; the classiness of Helen Mirren; montages clips that didn’t look like they came off someone’s third-generation VHS tape.
Bad — Ellen’s inoffensive, unedgy patter; Beyoncé and Eddie Murphy not clapping for Alan Arkin; too many goddamn montages; Jack Nicholson’s muggy mug.
Ugly — the broadcast’s stupefying overlength; Kirsten Dunst’s weird dress; Philip Seymour Hoffman’s skeevy hair.
Snarkier coverage here and here.
Maestro Morricone
As I write this, the Academy Awards are minutes away from starting. One of the things I’m most looking forward to at the ceremony will be the presentation of Ennio Morricone’s honorary Oscar award. The legendary Italian film composer has downplayed the honor, even going on record as to saying that he’s disappointed that he didn’t die winless. But it’ll be interesting to see what he says. The A.V. Club Blog did a nice overview of his career and how he’s managed to stay relevant over the years despite scoring a gazillion low-budget and/or forgettable flicks. One of his most beautiful melodies, for example, is “We Are One”, a foofily sung ballad from the cheesy Jaws ripoff Orca. Talk about making a silk purse from a sow’s ear. I wouldn’t want it any other way, Ennio darling.
Magazine Subjection
Y’know what I hate? When you sign up for a magazine subscription, and they begin by sending you an old issue. This happened when I started a subscription to Wired (it was only $10/yr so why not). Yesterday’s mail saw the first issue, from February. Whenever they do this, I can just tell that they’re trying to liquidate a warehouse full of unsold February issues — and that annoys me to no end. Sure enough, today I got the March issue in the mail.
100 Favorite Moments In Television Revisited
I’ve updated an old scrubbles page — 100 Favorite Moments In Television, a reprint of an article which appeared in the short-lived pop culture magazine Egg in 1991. When I first put this together back in 2003, I didn’t notice that a few missing pound symbols in the page’s HTML code resulted in a screwy looking page when viewed in Firefox. That’s been fixed, along with an addition that couldn’t have done so easily in ’03 — video links to many of the clips mentioned!
Though I’m not yet finished linking up the entire list, this little exercise has allowed me to dig up a lot of fascinating curios such as the infamous Rob Lowe/Snow White duet from the 1989 Academy Awards. The lavish musical number was actually kind of cute and not nearly the epic-sized disaster that critics called it back then.
Orphaned Music Reviews #2: March
The following music reviews were originally slated for publication in the March 2007 issue of az magazine. They appear here in unrevised form:
Among the current crop of sensitive male singer-songwriters, Ireland’s Damien Rice has made a name for himself as a coffee shop troubadour for the Starbucks generation. His second album, 9 (Heffa/Vector), expands his sound while never straying too far from the introspective folk he does best. Rice shines in emotionally raw, spare settings such as the opener “9 Crimes” — but his efforts at rocking out ring false. The resulting collection contains a few outright missteps, a handful of forgettable throwaways, and a pair of quietly powerful gems (“The Animals Were Gone”, “Coconut Skins”).
Fantasia Barrino is blessed with a timelessly soulful voice, but can she escape the ghetto of American Idol? With the simply titled Fantasia (J/Arista), she takes a confident step forward from the cookie-cutter R&B on her 2004 debut. Lead-off single “Hood Boy” smashes through with streetwise hooks and an unexpectedly cool sample of the campy Supremes oldie “The Happening”. She also delivers on the frisky “Baby Makin’ Hips” and the inevitable Diane Warren ballad “I Feel Beautiful”. Though the other songs here don’t measure up to the highlights, it’s still an enjoyably state-of-the-art set. We’re still waiting for her to make an Aretha-style album of stripped down Soul — but in the meantime this’ll do.
When part of the late ’90s Elephant Six collective, Athens, Georgia’s of Montreal started as straightforward ’60s revivalists with an predilection for the cute and whimsical side of indie pop. Nearly ten years on, they’ve moved their frame of reference up a decade and now sound like a lost New Wave dance-pop outfit on their latest effort, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? (Polyvinyl). While the band may still be considered an acquired taste, they display enough nifty synth melodies and herky-jerky rhythms here to make one regret throwing out those old Flock of Seagulls albums.
Great Lost TV Theme: Probe/Search
Every so often I have a mini-obsession with certain tracks in my iTunes library. Lately it’s been composer Dominic Frontiere’s theme from Probe, a made for TV movie which served as the pilot for the series Search. From what I can gather, Search was a technology-based caper series in the Mission Impossible vein. It ran for a single season, long enough to garner a nifty TV Guide cover illustrated by Bob Peak. Frontiere’s arrangement has such a totally “early ’70s TV movie” vibe, it hurts — a super swanky, swingy affair similar to Burt Bacharach’s A&M solo albums from around that same period. Unlike Burt’s stuff, however, this theme was likely never released commercially (hence the mp3′s faulty sound quality).
At the fansite Probe Control, you can download a nice mpeg of the Probe opening credits (complete with “computer” font and groovy motion graphics). The YouTube clip below demonstrates the shorter, sped up version of the theme used in Search.
Dominic Frontiere — Probe Main Title Theme
Weekend Update
A few jottings for an unusually warm Saturday:
- Christopher’s post on the U.S. Citizenship Test contains links to the test Qs and As which recent immigrants need to memorize to gain citizenship. Look over the 142 questions to figure out how much elementary school history you’ve retained.
- Scrubbles.net reader Chandy sent me The Final Take, an interesting All Movie Guide commentary on how John Cusack’s performances in Say Anything and High Fidelity reflect the romantic state of today’s man. Thanks, Chandy!
- My review of Sondre Lerche’s album Phantom Punch is posted at So Much Silence. The comparison with Phoenix’s It’s Never Been Like That (which I had just loaded into iTunes a few weeks ago) is completely apt.
- Sixteen months after redesigning this weblog, I’ve finally updated the corresponding favicon to match my little self portrait on the front page. The only thing that bugs me is that the icon still looks like gobbledygook in Bloglines — and mine’s the only one with that special “screwed up” look. Anybody know why that is so?
- Finally, head over to the Web Goddess Oscar Contest for a chance at winning a trio of Kris’s fabulous sock monkeys!
You Better Work
As Sports Illustrated runs its first-ever Swimsuit Issue with a celeb and not a model on the cover, Nikki Finke of the L.A. Weekly runs the numbers and confirms what we already know — celebs sell magazines. Now, I couldn’t care less about S.I. and their “Minivan Cheesecake” approach to fashion coverage, but this news kind of took me aback.
Doesn’t it make you miss the early ’90s heyday of the Supermodel? Christy, Linda, Naomi, where are you? Fashion seemed more “real” back then, and the industry didn’t need an anorexic trainwreck like Lindsay Lohan to help sell their wares. Another thing: the Todd Oldham of MTV House of Style was so much more fun and appealing than the waxy looking, monotonous creature currently hosting Bravo’s Top Design. The mag of record back then was the Liz Tiberis-edited, Fabien Baron-designed Harpers Bazaar, but that turned out to be a blip of brilliance in an otherwise vapid marketplace. It was an “anything goes” time that made you think of the creative possibilities. Okay, I think I’m done being nostalgic for now.
Related: S.I. Swimsuit cover gallery; ’90s Harpers Bazaar cover gallery.
Mary Mary Quite Stationary
An amusing series of short films dramatizes a few days’ worth of Mary Worth comic strips (via Crackskulbob). The actors are framed and positioned exactly as in the strips, making it weird and funny at the same time.
In a completely different vein, my review of the self titled third album from The Autumn Defense has been posted at So Much Silence. I requested it on a whim — since I thought this sort of pleasantly mellow, yuppieish music would be good for the aborted magazine column‘s readership. But it’s an excellent CD that’s been on heavy rotation ’round here.
