Author: Mike Gold

 Next year, life as we know it will end. Oprah Winfrey will be ending her successful show.

Oprah’s program grew out of her stint as host of A.M. Chicago. The local program was so successful that after two and one-half years it went national to the other ABC-owned stations, and to general syndication. Now that Oprah’s sailing off
into the fog, her host station WLS-DT has decided what to do with the valuable time slot between Good Morning America and The View. They’re going to do a live, local morning news show.

No big deal, right? Lots of teevee stations have news shows following the endless network morning “news” show. But this one has a difference. This one has a live audience.

Just like Howard Beale, central character of the movie Network.

Like all of the better news shows, this new thing will be “local and fun,” according to WLS president and general manager Emily Barr.
“This will be another opportunity for us to do something terrific.”

Well, good luck with that. Personally, I loved Network and, with guys like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly dominating the airwaves, the expansion of “unreality teevee” appears to be unstoppable.

You’ve probably
heard of Fred Phelps and his Topeka Kansas Westboro Baptist Church. He and his followers have well-earned a reputation as the most notorious, tasteless bigots in America. They get their thrills by showing up in force at funerals to protest the lifestyle or the politics of the diseased. These un-American vultures prefer going to funerals of gay American servicemen who were killed in combat overseas. They also protest at the funerals of those who “tolerate”
homosexuality. Just ask the family of the late Meet the Press host Tim Russert, who also committed the additional
crime of being Catholic.

It turns out they don’t like comic book fans either.

These astonishing assholes will be showing up in force on Thursday, July 22 at the San Diego Comic-Con from 1:15 pm to 2 p.m. I guess they’re on a tight schedule.

Why, you might ask. Here’s what it says on their website and, no, I’m not going to give you the link. You’ll have to Google this latest bit of hate-thy-neighbor.

“They have turned comic book characters into idols, and worship them they do! Isaiah 2:8: Their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made. Isaiah 2:9: And the mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself: therefore forgive them not.

 “It is time to put away the silly vanities and turn to God like you mean it. The destruction of this nation is imminent – so start calling on Batman and Superman now, see if they can pull you from the mess that you have created with all your silly idolatry.”

Previous to this announcement, my contempt for these lowlife scum knew no bounds. Now it’s actually gone into the 4th dimension: I hate their fathers for getting all liquored up, going home, raping their mothers and producing a movement unseen since the Reichstag fire.

But that’s just me. What do you think?

This was not a great week for big
box office blockbusters. Let’s look at this week’s quarter-billion dollar money
machine.

Twilight: Eclipse took
a dive!

Okay, let’s define “dive.” Eclipse made $161 million in its first
five days, and that’s good by anybody’s standards. But… It brought in 43% of those bucks in its first day. After that,
it was just another big movie. Even the opening day revenue was down 6% from New Moon. So where did this drop-off
come from?

Women.

No kidding. They accounted for 80%
of the New Moon audience, but only
65% of the Eclipse audience thus far.
But $161 million, plus another $100 million overseas (that’s more than a
quarter-billion bucks, or $36,000 a minute!),
seems like a lot of money, doesn’t it?

In Hollywood, perception rules the
day and reality doesn’t save your job. Eclipse
was expected to exceed the $200 million brought in by Transformers Two during its had a five-day start. If you don’t make
your projections, you’re a failure – at least temporarily.

So is Eclipse a bomb? Certainly not. Is it a disappointment? Yes it is…
thus far. The missing repeat business enjoyed by the previous two Twilight movies might come in
eventually, but one thing is sadly clear: the Twilight saga has lost some if its bite.

Now you’d have to be some sort of
Russian commie to hate Toy Story 3,
wouldn’t you? Well, the Rooskies certainly did not love Toy Story 3. It bombed. It took in less than $5 million in its
first ten days. Shrek Forever After
did almost eight times that business.

According to the Los Angeles Times, adults found Toy Story 3 to be too much of a kids
flick. Okay, fine. But does Russia have a shortage of children? As it turns
out, yes it does. Russia has endured terrible heat waves in its metropolitan
areas, and kids have been hustled out to cooler climates. Still, $5 million
sucks. Toy Story 3 was the first of
the series to be released in Russia, so perhaps the adults felt lost in the
backstory. I saw Home Alone 2 without
seeing the first one, so maybe I can understand that.

Well, maybe not.

It’s always fun to watch Disney
take one in the neck, but I can’t help but believe that bombing in Russia would
have made Walt Disney a happy man.

Trailers and photos are beginning to leak out from the most disparaged unreleased movie of the year.

We’re finally seeing something from Seth Rogen’s Green Hornet movie, set for release next January. Already, that’s a bad sign – usually, big deal action flicks are released in summer or around Christmas, and Green Hornet was moved back from this summer into an all-but-invisible slot.

The stuff that’s been released is, of course, the really cool stuff. There’s nothing that says this is all the cool stuff the movie has to offer, but we always have that sneaking suspicion. Seth doesn’t look too bad– sort of plumpish Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne. And Jay Chou looks like he
can handle the martial arts. It other words, there was nothing to chase me
away, like in the Spirit and Jonah Hex trailers. And there’s at least one thing that’s really cool-looking.

That would be the car, Black Beauty, after which they named the powerful amphetamine. It looks great. It damn well should; it might be carrying the movie. But… can it act?

I’ll probably see The Green Hornet for at least three reasons. The villain is being played by Christoph Waltz, of Inglourious Basterds fame, and he stole that movie, dropped it on me, and performed a lap dance. Edward James Olmos is playing hard-edged reporter Mike Axelrod, the man out to
expose the Green Hornet to impress his publisher, who also happens to be the Green Hornet. And long-time comics artist Arne Starr is in the movie, in a bit part but still, it’s always cool to see friends in the movies.

But I am most certainly not sold on The Green Hornet. At least, not yet.

I didn’t see Avatar, but I’ll bet you a boatload of lawyers will be seeing its X-rated sequel this fall.

Larry Flynt’s Hustler porn empire just finished making
what is said to be the most expensive porn flick in history, and it’s called This Ain’t Avatar XXX, and, of course it’s in 3-D. Perhaps they want to be faithful to the original.

This is awesome, although some fans of the medium might
think it’s a remake of the hit 1968 arthouse classic I Am Curious Blue. Me, well, I’m not so curious. Ever since The Stewardesses (1969; the first single-camera 3-D movie), porn has long been the most logical subject matter for 3-D movies, unless you’re really into small-breasted women or are easily frightened by money shots.

As it turns out there was an alien sex scene in Avatar, but it was cut because somebody thought showing the two leading blue characters hooking their tails together on-screen would jeopardize the movie’s rating or the merchandising licensees’ delicate sensibilities.

Maybe the parody will incorporate James Cameron’s environmental message. That would make This Ain’t Avatar XXX relevant… something that the original was not. We can find out in September. I can hardly wait for the IMAX screening.

Damn, the old kid’s gone. And she’s taken the papers with her!

Last Sunday marked the end of the classic comic strip, Little Orphan Annie. That’s sad, but that sort of thing has been going on for a long time now and it was inevitable,
despite some first-rate work on the feature by Jay Maeder, Jay Maeder and artists Andrew Pepoy, Alan Kupperberg and Ted Slampyak. Ignobly, the syndicate ended Annie in mid-story.

Newspaper comic strips were invented for one reason and one reason alone: to give the paper a competitive edge. If you were a New Yorker and you preferred Joe Palooka and Li’l Abner to Dick Tracy and Orphan Annie, chances were you bought the New York Daily Mirror instead of the New York Daily News.

The pompous New York Times turned not having comic strips into a virtue, but in fact at the time they could not afford to color presses needed to compete with Pulitzer and Hearst.

Today there is no such thing as newspaper competition:
most towns are lucky to have one daily paper, and most all papers carry the
exact same comics. With circulation zeroing in on zero, publishers are cutting back and, since they no longer need comics to compete, they’re vaporizing.

Ironically, we live in a time when virtually every major, important newspaper comic strip is being anthologized in hardcover and is readily available at the big-box bookstores. Without the newspaper comic strip
we wouldn’t have the comic book, and without the comic book I would have had to get a real job.

So goodbye, Annie and friends. And thank you.

ComicMix
editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs a weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking music and blather radio show on The Point every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.