This week’s award for best weird blog site — the new Bad Spock Drawings, which invites bad drawings of the popular Star Trek character from the general public (here are their guidelines).
In keeping with Leonard Nimoy’s current interests, I’m looking forward to seeing an appropriately bad Spock done up as a fat nude (NSFW) Jewish woman (also pretty much NSFW).
For those who didn’t get enough Star Wars on last night’s Robot Chicken, via SlashDot, "Harvard University celebrated its 356th Commencement on Thursday. It is tradition… to have an undergraduate deliver a Latin Salutatory address. This year’s speaker, Charles Joseph McNamara, delivered an address all about Star Wars in Latin!" Here’s the video for those of you who are into this sort of thing and have RealPlayer.
According to SlashDot, McNamara "apparently doesn’t like Star Wars that much, but it’s still awesome." The oration begins about a minute into the video.
Who cares if it’s in French? This clip from Astérix aux jeux olympiques looks like a cross between 300 and a Monty Python sketch.
Of course, if you need something subtitled, there’s always Astérix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra:
Peter David notes on his blog that according to Corey Tacker, keeper of Peter’s bibliography with a completism that borders on mania, this month’s Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man marks his 1000th comic book published. For those of you scoring at home (or even if you’re alone) that comes out to about 40 comic books out a year.
Congratulations on reaching such a huge milestone. Now what do you get for a gift, other than a new keyboard?
Peter will need that new keyboard soon, as he’s going to take over writing She-Hulk as of #22.
I used to have a reputation for sometimes being kind of negative. That comes with the career in radio and “journalism,” and I’ve worked at overcoming it. But, like most childhood pleasures, not using a skill doesn’t mean you no longer know how to use it.
For example. I have come to the conclusion that the Paris Hilton affair has become a legitimate news story (it didn’t start out that way), and that she got screwed.
After listening to a bunch of experts and pundits and reporters, it seems pretty clear to me that Hilton is doing time for being Paris Hilton – people in similar situations, and, sadly, there’s no shortage of them – would be given community service or pay a fine or be under house confinement. Being locked up at the taxpayers’ expense for such a violation is nearly unheard of. And, yes, in California as well as most of the rest of these United States the sheriff is charged to run his prisons as he sees fit.
Hilton was busted for violating her plea agreement. As such, she was real stupid. Hilton is despised for being an “artificial” celebrity, as if there’s any other kind, and for being a whinny spoiled brat. I understand; she is a whinny spoiled brat. But that’s not against the law; if it were, I’d have a much, much easier time going shopping here in Fairfield County Connecticut.
So Hilton is serving time not for breaking the law but for being a high-profile stupid whiny brat. She has my sympathy; fair is fair and, as she said while she was being hauled off to the slammer kicking and screaming for her mommy, this is not fair.
For example. Everybody seems bent out of shape about the conclusion to The Sopranos, including ComicMix’s own John Ostrander. I think the ending was fine. Not great, not awesome, but exactly on the money.
This is a show that lost its raison d’être the moment actress Nancy Marchand died, back in 2000. Her character, momma Livia Soprano, was the story’s anchor. Without her, the plot never was as compelling, nor was it as understandable. It was reduced to its core element: Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, the family of Made Men.
And that’s what the ending was all about. It didn’t matter if Tony got wacked in the restaurant in front of his family. If it didn’t happen then, if could just as easily happen the next day or the day after. Being a mob boss is not a “safe” job – Al Capone ran his mob for about seven years, and was only a functioning operative in that mob for a total of about a dozen years.
Here’s the proof: midway through that final episode, Anthony Junior became Christopher Moltisanti, which, as we all know, is what his father should have wanted all along. He got the mob-connected job in the film business, he got the mob-connected car, he’s always had the mob-connected father but now daddy finally delivered for him. Life goes on with the Nelson Family of New Jersey, and what goes around stays around. Nothing changes.
And, sadly, that’s what The Sopranos had been about.
For example. George W. Bush.
I’ve got nothing.
And, come to think of it, neither does George.
Mike Gold is editor-in-chief of ComicMix.
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer debuted in the number one position with $57.4 million in receipts, representing an increase of $1.3 million over the first Four film’s opening weekend two years ago.
One might look at this as a giant "screw you" to the movie critics, who, of course, are used to it by now. That’s how elitism works.
While my ComicMix colleagues are having the time of their lives in Charlotte or Philly, I’m moping here in NY with a bad case of the sufferin’ sciaticas. It breaks my heart, I love Heroes Con and really wanted to be a part of its big silver anniversary celebration. Oh well, at least I can catch up on comics reading while hearing about all the cool stuff to come (PAD on She-Hulk! Dwayne on JLA! MWaid back on Flash! Oh yes, I’m a happy fangirl) and, of course, bring you the weekly columnist wrap-up:
Meanwhile, Mellifluous Mike Raub marches on with his Big ComicMix Broadcasts:
Hope my fellow ‘Mixers bring me back some goodies from down south!
Yes, yes, I know. This is the week both the extended versions of the original Fantastic 4 movie and Ghost Rider are in stores. Fine, great, more power to them. And, yes, I realize that this website is called ComicMix, so, by all rights, what follows should be an in-depth, all-inclusive examination of every extra, Easter egg, and digital particle on both these comic book inspired phantasmagoricals.
But I really dont feel like it. First, because, even to be extremely kind, neither film rates the kind of slavish devotion that the Richard Donner Superman, Tim Burton Batman, or Sam Raimi Spider-Man elicits in me (this, of course, does not include the sequels, except the second Spidey [by no stretch of the imagination, the third!]).
Second, even these films most devoted proponents would have to accept that the extended versions of these adventures aren’t what one could call revelatory. While rumors remain that the original FF film was disemboweled to create the anti-climatic one seen in theaters, there’s no hint of that in the ultimately unnecessary extra scenes regrafted here.
Ill admit, however, that there are hardly two films that benefit more from DVD performance. Both flix, in fact, are more enjoyable to watch on TV. There, according to film expert Chris Gore (and I agree), there aren’t as many expectations as there are in the theater. What may have been annoying, even intolerable, on the big screen become humorously camp and acceptable on the small.
These two-disc DVD sets other extras — audio commentary, behind-the-scenes, making-of, and a nifty character history for Ghost Rider; three audio commentaries, scads of featurettes (including one on comic artist Jack Kirby), loads of concept art, and even more stuff like that there for FF are squeaky clean and informative, but dont make these pics resonate the way the two-disc Pans Labyrinth DVD did. To paraphrase Monty Python, these discs wouldnt resonate if you put 5000 volts through them.
So, if you’re wondering whether to get the single disc or double disc editions of either of these fine, though hardly spectacularly great, films, take to your heart the DVD Xtra Rules of Purchase: Always Widescreen, Always Subtitled, Always, Always, ALWAYS the Special Platinum Collectors Extended Ultimate Edition. If you’re going to buy, buy the best. Otherwise, Netflix.
So what shall we talk about now? Well, the Rider and FF bring to mind a particularly beloved aspect of DVD collecting and/or watching. That which does not start out great can become great with a judicious use of extras (as evidenced by last column’s Frankenstein Conquers the World). That which was shaky in production becomes illuminating in retrospect. Nowhere is this more true than in the next new release under scrutiny: the Dr. Who New Beginnings box set.
We’ve got an extra-special bonus edition of The Big ComicMix Broadcast today, because things are still cooking in Charlotte as we enjoy another day at the 25th Annual Heroes Convention – and we take you along for the ride! If you ever wanted to publish your own comic, then get ready to meet someone who made his dream come true! Plus… Matt Raub dives into Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer, we lay out the Late List of Missing Comics and take a trip back to the days when *Pow* and *Zap* were actually not insults to comic fans!
Press The Button – pretty please?
The rubber-reality phenomenon that one takes for granted in the animated cartoons and a good many comics seldom crosses over into live-action cinema, CGI and/or the influence of David Lynch notwithstanding. A low-rent music-and-slapstick comedy from 1945 called How Doooo You Do!!! makes for a striking exception and bears recalling here, in the context of a series devoted to stalking the pop-cultural borderlands in search of – well, of whatever oddities might turn up. No shortage of those, if one knows where to go prowling.
No entertainer seems to have more fun and less sustained success in appearing before the cameras than the radio gimmick-comic Bert Gordon (1895–1974). Gordon’s presence lay primarily in a persuasive and memorable voice (rather like the once-ubiquitous Paul Frees, of a somewhat later day). Gordon’s big-screen starring career consisted largely of false starts and commercial misfires. He had become so successful, however, as a supporting-act broadcast player – a regular with Eddie Cantor, from 1930 on through the ’40s – that the movies seemed a logical next step for a decade-and-change, progressing from supporting parts to attempted stardom.
Ralph Murphy’s How Doooo You Do!!! takes its title from Gordon’s signature-phrase. Nobody, but nobody, could intone that commonplace platitude, “How do you do?” with the style or the passion of Bert Gordon. In his radio-program guise of the Mad Russian (sometimes known as Boris Rascalnikoff), Gordon transformed the offhand question into the most emphatic of exclamations, a sustained marvel of escalating double-O’s that could move a studio audience to applause before he could complete the phrase. Sometimes, he would worry the first do into submission; on other occasions, the second, like a jazzman milking the improvisational possibilities from some nursery-rhyme melody.
This indelible signature-line was the most logical of titles, then, for a Gordon-starring picture – and in fact, the less imaginatively transcribed How Do You Do? had been the work-in-progress title of a 1942 Columbia comedy that got released as Laugh Your Blues Away, with Gordon and Jinx Falkenberg.
If any corporate-Hollywood studio was attuned to Gordon’s more eccentric tastes, it had to be Producers Releasing Corp. – better known by its initials, which the less charitable cineastes among us might hold to stand for “Pretty Rotten Crap.” Anyhow, PRC Pictures (better known for its horse-operas, rudimentary noirs, and mad-doctor chillers) seems precisely the right studio to have given Gordon and his radio-show accomplices free rein. And precisely the wrong studio to be taken earnestly in such an endeavor by the critics or the paying customers.
The film plants Gordon and fellow radio personality Harry von Zell amidst their own broadcasting culture. Exhausted by the radio-show grind, Gordon and von Zell (playing themselves, in broad strokes) retreat to a desert resort lodge. Two other associates, Cheryl Walker and Claire Windsor, arrive on their own in a similar quest for serenity. Neither party is aware of the other’s presence until von Zell spots the women and panics: Von Zell’s wife suspects an adulterous affair between von Zell and Walker. Meanwhile, Gordon’s over-amorous co-star, Ella Mae Morse, has trailed him to the retreat.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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