Jake & Elwood Do a Quarter

This week, the Chicago Sun-Times is running a special report on the 25th anniversary of the release of The Blues Brothers. Click the title of this post to go there now!
Read it now? Okay. In 1980 I was DJ'ing a novelty record show at Iowa State University called "The Mutant Patrol." John Candy got scheduled to do a comedy performance, "An Evening With Johnny LaRue." As the guy playing the comedy records, I got to interview him on the air. It appears that by that time, the full impact of "The Blues Brothers" was not yet felt; about the only comment I could get out on it was his famous line "Orange whip? Orange whip?"

Oh, and "Johnny LaRue" was, of course, his most famous and slimiest character from SCTV. He was leaving that show to star in a forgotten sketch show called "Big City Comedy," and had to leave the characters he had created for SCTV behind.

I've ironed your cape, Master Bruce

Wait a minute! Michael Caine is playing Alfred the Butler in "Batman Begins." And nowhere in the movie does anyone ask him "What's it all about?" Or whether it's "just for the moments we li-i-i-i-ve?" Where's Dionne Warwick when you need her?

And here's your epitaph, Mrs. Robinson

On the occasion of Anne Bancroft's death this week, every radio station that reported on the news, even the all-news stations, felt the need to illuminate the story with a drop-in of dialogue from "The Graduate," or a snippet of the Simon & Garfunkel song, "Mrs. Robinson." And then, in the obit story itself, they tell how Ms. Bancroft wished not to be remembered only for her role in than movie. She seemed to think that, I dunno, originating the role of Annie Sullivan in "The Miracle Worker" on Broadway, and winning both a Tony and an Oscar for that, might be a bit more important.

But rather, when you're in a medium like radio or TV, you go with the most instantly recognized clip. So cue up a sound bite from "The Graduate," or the famous shot of Dustin Hoffman framed by her legs. Too bad the studio that brought "The Miracle Worker" to Hollywood didn't think to get a catchy theme song for it.

So the lesson for actors is: look over your resume. The most popular theme song from your movies is going to be playing from your tombstone. Even if you didn't sing it.

Oil for Food Scandal

Senator Norm Coleman
Washington, DC

Dear Senator,

I'm pleased to see you expressing your concerns about the investigation into the United Nations' "Oil for Food" deal with Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps now you will also investigate Ronald Reagan's "Oil for Nerve Gas" deal with the same dictator. And George Bush's "Oil for Anthrax Spores" deal.

Finally, my Johnny Carson post

I realized I didn't have a lot to say on the topic of Johnny's passing that wasn't just rehashing all of the stories from people who were a lot closer to the subject. My personal experience was of creeping out of bed around the age of 9, and creeping to the grated hole in the floor of our upstairs hallway to listen while my folks watched the "Tonight" show. I distinctly remember the many visits from Joan Embry of the San Diego Zoo, including the monkey that urinated on Johnny's head (yep, a Golden Age of TV). But beyond that, what?
In the larger picture I can say that it's because of Johnny that we have TV talk shows in their present format. And why every TV network thought they needed a talk show after their late news. At the time Johnny took over "Tonight," most stations were perfectly content to run old movies. By the mid 60s, CBS and ABC were trying to duplicate the Carson-style talk show with only limited success. CBS usually went back to a schedule of movies, and ABC finally staked out an alternative when its nightly coverage of the Iran hostage crisies turned into "Nightline."
So now, every season there's a new talk show by some celebrity or TV psychiatrist or Oprah wannabe that misses the mark entirely. I think most of it is because they come the series with the baggage of familiarity, or some agenda. When Johnny started the job, he was known only as a TV presenter, not as a character from a movie. And as far as I know, he never aired his personal views or bore grudges on his show. the few details of his personal life that he shared (his many wives, for instance), were only details that were already part of the public record. His talent of putting interesting people in the guest chair.
And checking the usual string of editorial cartoons, thanks to Daryl Cagle's cartoon index on Slate, I am glad to see more cartoonists opt for a nice portrait of Johnny than for the same old "St. Peter/Pearly Gates" saw. Regrettably, Cagle himself falls for the cheap gag, but at least scores points for having St. Peter say "Every cartoonist who draws me saying 'Here's Johnny' will be going straight to Hell." Wish that could be applied to the 100% of cartoonists whose Rodney Dangerfield memorial involved St. Peter, the gown and angel wings, and "No Respect!"

And I call myself a Pop Culture Scholar…

I first started my little web site way back in 1995. One of my plans for the little darlin' would be to compile a Dictionary of Pop Culture References, where I would cite and define terms springing from TV and movies, to enlighten people of future generations. Somehwere out there, f'instance, is a guide to celebrities and topical references namechecked in the Looney Tunes (which I can't find to link right now). Well, my attention span being what it is, I hadn't updated it in some six years. But finally, I heard a word used that I knew was going to end up a part of the language. Click the title link to see my update.
Our secret word is "Monologuing..."

Tomorrow's Obsolescence Today!

Here I am at my new location (same company, different division), which I started last week. It's an office where a lot of other division are being crammed in as they prepare to move to a new corporate HQ and continue the shakeout from a recent merger.

But anyway, there's a trash bin not too far from my new desk here plenty of stuff has been disposed of following moves by many personnel. Last week, what should I find in there but a Zip drive and Jaz drive and many disks to go with them!

It's no surprise to most of you that most Iomega products are pretty much out the door. We used to get Zip disks from our clients, so our Macs were made to order with Zip drives in 'em already. But no one's sent us a Zip in years. Of course it's now a CD-R, or a big file drop to our FTP server. Zip drives were an indespensible part of the computer landscape for probably no more than five years.

The reason, of course, is that Zip disks NEVER went down in price. For as long as I've been aware of them, it was considered a bargain to get them in quantity at under $10 apiece. Compare that to CD-R's, which went from a coupla bucks to about a quarter each in spindles. and now even DVD+R disks are well under a buck. That's 45 Gb worth of storage for the price of one 100 mb Zip disk.

But of course the other thing mitigating against the two units I found in the trash was that they were also SCSI drives. Hey kids, remember SCSI?

But I'm not proud. No sense messing with the drives, but I still will need some quick backups. I promise I'll blank out those disks.

Ready to feel even older?

So, which pop song's use in a commercial represents the greatest sell-out of a generation's attitudes?

• Led Zeppelin's "Rock 'n Roll" for Cadillac?
  
• The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" for Pontiac's G6 "Oprahmobile?"
  
• The entire Who catalog for everything from the Hummer to cholesterol drugs?
  
• Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers" for E*Trade?

I was going to mention using Devo's "Uncontrollable Urge" in the Mitsubishi commercial, but it's hardly the first time they've leased out their tunes, and besides, more people are hearing their songs now than in their heyday. Still, there's an unpleasant attempt to sell one's irony back to the post-ironic consumer when we're told "When a problem comes along, you must Swiffer..."

And besides, when the Jeffersons recorded "Volunteers," they were recording for RCA Records, owned at the time by General Electric, the country's second biggest defense contractor. No conflict of interest here!

Where the Streets are Paved with Gold

I went to my home town of Schaller, Iowa the first weekend of November. While visiting with the family, I went for a walk to see the uncommon phenomenon of a "bin-buster" harvest. Yes, this unappetizing-looking mess is the sign of a good harvest: so much corn there's room in the silo, so they have to pile it on the town streets. Here they're loading it for shipment as fast as trucks can line up for it. This is happening in towns across the Midwest, thanks to good weather through the spring and summer. Add to this is the fact that higher fuel prices mean it costs more to harvest, and to dry corn down at the farm, thus they leave the corn in the field longer so it dries a little more. That's why we have this scene as late as November 6. So next time someone emails that list to you of how many rat hairs can be found in a hamburger, show them where their corn flakes were before they got into the box.

Semantical French Fries

A true story: As I was walking into the tunnel that connects the Thompson Center to the building across the street, I passed a little food stand selling Middle Eastern specialties. A woman was drilling the counterperson:

"Are you sure your French Fries are homemade?"
"Homemade?"
"Right! Not frozen at any time."

I laughed, but only to myself. We're talking sticks of starch deep-fried in oil. Is not being frozen going to make them healthy for you?

I also considered the girl behing the counter. I've bought hummus from her before; she's Middle Eastern, possibly an immigrant for whom English was a second language. She may have been wondering why this customer would have expected her family to be scrubbing and slicing up potatoes at home in the morning, then lugging them to the Loop to serve for lunch. It could very well be they made the fries fresh in that cafe's kitchen, but that wasn't the question. If they were "home-making" anything, it might have been their stuffed grape leaves. Or rather, they may have developed their recipe at home. Health inspectors take a dim view of making food at home, then selling it these days.

Backstage Here at the Blog

I decided to sign up for posting ads by Google on this site. After all, we all have the dream of just putting up something on the web and letting the click-through fees roll in. Of course it's not nearly as simple as that.
This is also a game we can play, like Mad Libs. With the range of topics I've blathered on about, it should be interesting to see what ads pop up relating to my subjects. For instance, Roger Ebert's "Movie Answer Man" columns in the Sun-Times used to have the same kind of ads on its page. Everytime he ranted against video companies that created "clean" pirate DVDs of popular movies with the "dirty words" and sex removed, or the DVD players that were programmed to skip over sex and language in movies, there at the bottom would be an ad for those same clean movie services. So what will we find to be relevant out of the jumble of words on this page? Let's you and me find out.
I've already got one method for seeing who has been wandering onto this little page. To the right and further down is a little graphic that links to Nedstat, one of those free counter services, but one that does not serve ads. It won't tell me who specifically is looking at this page, just the ISP they're coming in from. And most of the views are me looking to see if my latest post is visible. The fun part is the section that shows what page they linked to this site from: usually's it's a Google or Yahoo search on any number of terms.

Christopher Reeve

Chris Reeve was not really "my" Superman. (Know what I mean? In the way that each generation of British kids defined themselves by who "their" Doctor Who was.) As a tyke, I had reruns of "The Adventures of Superman," the George Reeves series, every afternoon, right after the local Cartoon Carnival (which ran only Warner Bros. and Popeye cartoons. Why mess with perfection). But anyway, George's Superman just came across as someone strong and protective as my Dad. Hey, this was the time of life when every kid's dad is Superman. It helped that George was a fatherly 37 when he took the role.

Chris' "Superman: the Movie" was a great special effects explosion. The tagline "You will believe a man can fly!" was no idle boast. You did not have to suspend disbelief to see Chris in the air, while George was confounded with very uncomfortable stage harnesses, "took off" by obviously jumping on a springboard, and was surrounded by bold matte lines as he soared through the same batch of clouds.

There was a marked difference in the way each played Clark Kent. Chris couldn't quite flesh out Kent beyond the bumbling oaf who made feeble excuses to get away and pull open his shirt. For Chirs, Clark Kent was the mask that Superman wore. George's Kent was a hard-hitting reporter as imagined by Hollywood, who had no qualms about tracking down gangsters, and was the equal to the headstrong Lois Lane, especially the Noel Neill edition. While Lois kept referring to Clark's milquetoast personality, Clark wasn't playing along with her. That said, Chris' Superman had a much lighter touch. Just think back to Margot Kidder's famous line, "You've got me? Who's got you!?," you can just about hear Superman's chuckle in response. This was the real big blue Boy Scout, helping people for its own sake, not too busy to rescue a kitten from a tree.

I can't reference Dean Cain from "Lois and Clark" here. I liked the show quite a bit, as it advanced the idea of "real life" romantic entanglements that super heroes might face if they were, a theme that went over even better in Smallville. And while Dean Cain was immensely likeable and believable as Clark/Superman, I can't remember much about how he approached the role.

Anyhoo, Chris' Superman was the first Hollywood treatment of a comic book hero that gave the hero any kind of personal conflict. When Superman impulsively turned back time to prevent Lois from dying (and once and for all, he didn't do it by just circling the Earth so fast that it spun backward; that was a visual metaphor, okay? [and no matter how Lucas recuts that scene, Han shot first! Just wanted to get that out]), he went against the warnings of the holographic Marlon Brando and, in way, had to face the consequences of that act in "Superman II."

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No doubt the air will be buzzing again with speculation about a "Superman Curse," what with George unable to find work and killing himself (maybe), then Chris getting paralyzed in a riding accident and now passing on. But let's get real. Bud Collyer, the Superman of radio and the Fleischer cartoon series, lived to be 61 and was a successful quiz show host, then reprised his role of Superman for the 60's Filmation series. Kirk Alyn of the serials did have trouble sustaining a career, so he simply retired to a ranch and was 89 when he passed on. Dean Cain has at least 3 dozen credits after "Lois and Clark," including his "Ripley's" host gig. The only "astonishing coincidence" is the similarity of last names, in the same way that Orson Welles became notorious for his radio adaptation of H.G. Wells.

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And we are again on Unimaginative Editorial Cartoon Memorial Watch! What cliches will the nation's editorial cartoonists use to pay their respects this time? A gag about Superman and St. Peter at the Pearly Gates? Superman with a tear in his eye? Some play on the phrase "Up! Up! and Away!" One thing's for sure: every cartoon will be a generic Superman that looks nothing like Reeve, except for the name "Christopher Reeve" written on his costume. I'll check in on Daryl Cagle's cartoonist roundup on Slate.com and report back! [Update: There may not be that many cartoons to pick from. I couldn't find any cartoons about the late Rodney Dangerfield on the site at all. What a fertile field for cliches that would have been.]

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Finally, the good links. Forget DC Comics; it's too full of promos for upcoming titles and short on history and archival material. Check out the Superman Homepage instead. Woo!