February « 2007 « FRED Entertainment

February 12, 2007

QSE News: 2/12/2007

Filed under: Columns,News — UncaScroogeMcD @ 1:51 am

Here are today’s top entertainment headlines:

Kevin Costner and his wife are expecting their first child together. While the couple is happy about the news, Mrs. Costner is not looking forward to drawn out labor and thinly conceived plot.

Nicholas Cage is set to produce the live action The Sorcerer’s Apprentice for Walt Disney Pictures. Cage says he will stay true to the original movie and plans to spend over half the films budget on genetic research to make living, dancing brooms.

The film Norbit was the number one film this past weekend grossing $33.7 million. Like in his other, more successful films, Murphy plays both the lead male and female parts – which is consistent with his real life where he likes females with male parts.

In a plea to her fans, singer Kylie Minogue has asked that her ex-boyfriend be left alone. In recent weeks various rumors have spread about the pairs split, and Minogue has asked that people respect their privacy. Sources close to Minogue have said “if you want to talk about something, at least talk about how bad Kylie’s music is, not her relationships.”

The Dixie Chicks picked up five Grammys at this weekend’s awards ceremony. President Bush immediately released a statement saying that he has proof that the Dixie Chicks are behind the insurgency and escalating violence in Iraq.

That’s all for today’s news, stay tuned to this channel for all the news that matters least but you still care about.

(Compiled by J. Allen)

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Quick Stop Thingamabobs: 2/12/2007

Filed under: Columns,Thingamabobs — UncaScroogeMcD @ 1:43 am

The web. It’s a big place, full of plenty of distractions ““ some funny, some informative, some ludicrous, some disturbing, some inane, some profound. Each and every weekday, we present links to a few of our favorite finds”¦

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Chaz Chase and an act made for vaudeville… (Thingamabob)

Peter Cook & Dudley Moore – “Superthunderstingraycar”… (Thingamabob)

And Pete & Dud chatting with Michael Parkinson… (Thingamabob)

Simon Pegg, on Americans and irony… (Thingamabob)

terry Gilliam on The Last Resort from 1987… (Thingamabob)

Have a THINGAMABOB? Send it in!

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February 10, 2007

Comics in Context #165: Super Slayer

Filed under: Columns,Comics in Context — admin @ 2:27 am

When Dr. Peter Coogan appeared at New York’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art last September to talk about his book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (MonkeyBrain Press, 2006), he said that of all the characters who possibly might be superheroes, he was most asked whether the Shadow and Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer qualified under his definition. Coogan’s answer in both cases was no.

I agree that the Shadow fits under the heading of pulp novel mystery men, rather than superheroes; indeed, he and Doc Savage are the foremost exemplars of the heroes of that genre.

But what about Buffy? With her new Dark Horse comics series, recounting what Whedon says represents what could have been the “eighth season” of her seven-season television series, on the horizon, that question takes on new relevance. Now that her primary venue is comics, is Buffy a comics superhero?

For the last two weeks I’ve been examining Coogan’s definition of the superhero in my column. Coogan establishes three major criteria for determining whether or not a character is a true superhero: a mission, which is altruistic, benefiting society rather than the hero, and long term; the super-powers; and a heroic identity, expressed through a codename and costume, and usually involving a secret identity.

Buffy has a mission, certainly: she is the Slayer, the “Chosen One,” selected by destiny to battle vampires and other supernatural menaces. At the end of her television series, she succeeded in activating the super-powers of all other potential Slayers in the world. But even though there are now other people who can follow the Slayer’s mission, she continues to do so, from choice, and has become the other Slayers’ leader.

Buffy has super-powers, which include superhuman strength and agility, and even that power Wolverine popularized, the ability to recover from injuries at superhuman speed.

It’s in the area of identity that Coogan believes that Buffy falls short. He states that “Buffy has an identity as the Slayer. But this identity is not a superhero identity like Superman or Batman. This identity is not separate from her ordinary Buffy identity the way Superman is from Clark Kent, whose mild-mannered personality differs greatly from Superman’s heroic character. The Slayer is not a public identity in the ordinary superhero sense. . . .Buffy does not wear a costume, and while such a costume is not necessary, it is typical” (Superhero, p. 48).

In discussing in his book why Luke Cage is a superhero, Coogan uncovered a precept which I have dubbed “declaration of intent”: Coogan demonstrated not only that Cage’s early editors and writers intended to make Cage a superhero, but the character himself expressed the intent to be a superhero. Last week I showed that a creator’s “declaration of intent” does not mean that his creation really is a superhero. The creator’s understanding of what a superhero is may be flawed. Hence, Tim Kring, the creator of NBC’s Heroes, believes it is a superhero show, but by Coogan’s definition, it isn’t. Nevertheless, as Coogan showed in his examination of Luke Cage, the intent of both the creator and the creation, as expressed in the work, is worth looking into.

Coogan claims that “The producers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer do not seem to regard it as a superhero show” (p. 48). Perhaps that is so, but do they consider Buffy a superhero? Buffy’s creator, Joss Whedon, clearly thinks of her as a superhero. Consider this exchange from the interview that Brian Bendis recently conducted with Whedon for Wizard. First, Whedon says that, “People long before I started writing Astonishing X-Men pointed out the similarities between Buffy and the X-Men that I hadn’t even noticed. I hadn’t even noticed that all her friends had turned into superheroes.” (Whedon is referring to the fact that several of Buffy’s friends, who aided her in combatting supernatural foes, had supernatural powers as well; hence they formed a super-powered team.) A little later, Bendis says, “I actually, in the first seasons of Buffy, saw the similarities between Buffy and Spider-Man.” Whedon replies, “Yes,” and Bendis clarifies, “The early [Steve] Ditko years of Spider-Man,” and Whedon does not disagree.

But it’s not just in retrospect that Whedon regards Buffy as a superhero. In interviews Whedon gave around the time he began writing the Astonishing X-Men comic (see “Comics in Context” #42-43), he stated that he has based Buffy in part on X-Men‘s teenage heroine Kitty Pryde. He told New York Magazine (June 7, 2004), “If there’s a bigger influence on Buffy than Kitty, I don’t know what it was. . . .She was an adolescent girl finding out she has great power and dealing with it”.

In the Buffy television series there are frequent references to Buffy’s “super-powers,” as when in the episode “End of Days” her fellow Slayer Faith memorably and truthfully commented to Buffy, “Thank God we’re hot chicks with super-powers.” Buffy is explicitly called a “superhero” by her friend (and superhero comics buff) Xander in “The Harvest” (the second half of the two-parter that started the TV series) and by her mother Joyce in “Dead Man’s Party,” and is called “a superhero or something” by a supporting character in “Tabula Rasa.”

In the episode “Inca Mummy Girl” Buffy’s “Watcher,” her mentor Giles, tells her, “Your secret identity is gonna be difficult enough to maintain while this exchange student is living with you.” (Since Whedon is a known Marvel aficionado, his use of the term “Watcher” seems to be a homage to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Uatu the Watcher, a character from the superhero genre.)

So Whedon explicitly endowed Buffy with a “secret identity.” As Coogan states, Buffy’s dual identity is not as clearly defined as Superman’s. Coogan notes that “The Slayer is not a public identity”; the public is not aware that there is a Slayer, or that vampires are real. But Whedon’s point is that Buffy leads an alternate life as the Slayer that she has to keep secret from public knowledge. Whereas Clark Kent has to prevent the public from learning he is Superman, Buffy is like a Clark Kent who has to prevent the public from even knowing there is a Superman. In the show’s early seasons Buffy even kept her Slayer career secret from her oblivious mom, Joyce. At the time this reminded me of Peter Parker’s efforts for years to conceal his Spider-Man identity from his equally oblivious Aunt May. Whedon’s acknowledgment of similarities between Buffy and Spider-Man may mean that this specific parallel was intentional.

It strikes me that Buffy’s situation is also somewhat like that of Marvel’s Doctor Strange. Former surgeon Dr. Stephen Strange uses his real name in as Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts; again, his everyday identity and heroic persona are not as sharply differentiated as those of Superman and Clark Kent. But the general public of Marvel-Earth does not believe in magic, and considers Doctor Strange to be an eccentric, or even a charlatan. Only Strange’s allies–and enemies–know that he has actual magical abilities, and Strange considers it part of his mission to prevent the general populace from learning about the supernatural terrors from which he protects them.

Buffy’s adversaries, notably the vampires, usually know her “civilian” name but refer to her as the Slayer; this further underlines the idea that she has a dual identity.

Coogan contends that whereas Clark Kent and Superman have distinctly different personalities, Buffy’s personality is the same in her everyday life as it is when she acts as the Slayer. First, although the “mild-mannered” persona of Clark Kent is traditional (as in the Superman movies), there have been successful versions of Superman in which his personality is not noticeably different in his Clark Kent and Man of Steel personae: neither George Reeves on television nor John Byrne’s Superman in the comics feigned timidity or shyness as Clark. Second, there was a difference between Buffy’s personality as the Slayer and the way she behaved as an ordinary student. In high school and college, Buffy was usually more insecure and less assertive than she was as the independent, aggressive Slayer. In fact, I suspect it may have been a mistake when Whedon had Buffy drop out of college in the later seasons: without a “normal ” life to balance her Slayer career, her personality grew harder-edged, more solitary, and less appealing.

Of course Buffy does not wear a distinctive costume, but she does characteristically wear a cross around her neck, which to some extent fills the functions of the superhero insignia that Coogan terms a “chevron.” Since vampires are repelled by the sight of a cross, Buffy’s cross signifies her role as vampire slayer. Moreover, although Whedon is not religious, Buffy’s cross inescapably suggests that she is on God’s side, or at least on the side of moral right, and perhaps even that her Slayer career is a spiritual quest.

Let me tentatively suggest the following classifications for superhero double identities. Superman has a First Level Dual Identity, in which his heroic persona and everyday persona are clearly defined, distinct public identities: the general public does not know that Superman and Clark Kent are one and the same person. Mister Fantastic has a Second Level Dual Identity, in that the general public knows that his heroic identity (Mister Fantastic) and everyday identity (Reed Richards) belong to the same person. Buffy has a Third Level Dual Identity, in that the general public not only does not know that Buffy has a heroic persona (the Slayer), but does not even know that that heroic identity exists.

In Superhero Coogan establishes that a genre can exert what he likens to a gravitational pull. Notice the effect of such “gravity” on the vampires that Buffy battles. In various ways Whedon downplays the supernatural nature of vampires. Compare Whedon’s vampires to that more traditional pop culture vampire, Barnabas Collins of Dark Shadows (see “Comics in Context” #11, 149). Barnabas can transform into a bat, and, by staring into people’s eyes, can place them under his mental control; Whedon’s vampires lack these powers. Even more importantly, Barnabas, as a vampire, is literally dead during the daylight hours, during which time he must lie in his coffin, and returns to his undead sort of life at dusk. Whedon’s vampires remain active during the day, although they must avoid direct sunlight, have no dependence on coffins (although Spike still made his home in a cemetery crypt), and can actually sleep rather than revert to true death during the daytime. But Barnabas, while his grip was indeed strong, was not usually portrayed as superhumanly strong. In contrast, Whedon continually emphasized that his vampires were superhumanly strong and agile, and nearly invulnerable. In other words, Whedon treated his vampires as if they were super-strong super-villains. While Buffy uses her stake to deliver the coup de grace, her principal weapon in combat is her own superhuman strength. Hence Buffy’s battles with vampires resemble fight scenes from the superhero genre. (The episode “Buffy vs. Dracula,” which pitted Buffy against a vampire with traditional supernatural attributes, was the exception to the rule that underlined how very different Whedon’s vampires are from the conventional model.)

Then there are explicit references to the superhero genre within the Buffy television series. The “Trio” of wannabe villains in the sixth season refer to themselves as “supervillains,” and even invent a freeze gun reminiscent of the weaponry of numerous comics supervillains, notably Batman‘s Mr. Freeze and Flash‘s Captain Cold. In the sixth season Buffy’s friend Willow, a witch, becomes addicted to magic and turns into a villain. Not only has Whedon repeatedly referred to this version of Willow as “Dark Willow,” but one of the Trio, Andrew, explicitly says in one episode that Willow has gone “Dark Phoenix.” Hence the “Dark Willow” arc is an explicit homage to X-Men‘s “Dark Phoenix Saga,” one of the most celebrated storylines in the history of the superhero genre (see “Comics in Context” #134-135).

I believe that Buffy the character does fit the definition of superhero. Nonetheless, Buffy the television series (or movie or comics series) is not part of the superhero genre.

Earlier in his book Coogan stated that “If a character basically fits the mission-powers-identity definition, even with significant qualifications, and cannot be easily placed into another genre because of the preponderance of superhero conventions, the character is a superhero” (p. 40). This means that, according to Coogan’s rules, a character could fit the “MPI” definition yet still not be a superhero, if this character can indeed be “easily placed into another genre.” Therefore we must examine which genre provides the “preponderance” of genre conventions in the character’s series. We must not simply study the character, but the context in which that character exists. “Generic distinction,” Coogan asserts, “is a crucial element of the superhero. . . .” (p. 48).

Coogan correctly argues that “the Slayer is a hero-type that predates the superhero, fitting firmly within the larger horror genre and specifically within the vampire sub-genre” (p. 48), and cites Dr. Van Helsing from Bram Stoker’s Dracula as the first version of this hero-type in literature. Marvel buff Whedon credits Kitty Pryde as an inspiration for Buffy, but surely the blonde vampire slayer Rachel Van Helsing from Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula was a direct influence. Come to think of it, Tomb of Dracula‘s small band of vampire hunters, led by an older British man, Quincy Harker, and including Rachel, resembles Buffy’s own vampire-hunting “Scooby Gang,” whose father figure is another Englishman, Giles. Coogan points out that “historically, the [vampire hunter] hero-type descends from actual vampire hunters, including the dhampir, the supposed male progeny of a vampire who is particularly able to detect and destroy vampires” (p. 48). That sounds like a sometime member of Harker’s band, Blade, who mother was attacked by a vampire while giving birth to him, and who wields stakes as weapons the same way that Buffy does. Janus, Dracula’s son in Tomb of Dracula who became his adversary, would also fall into this category of modern day dhampir.

Though Coogan concedes that “the writers of Buffy draw on superhero conventions,” he also points out that “They also make references to Scooby Doo and the show fits within the Scooby Doo formula” (p. 48). Well, it does to the extent that Buffy has a band of friends and allies, all of whom are young, who help her combat supernatural evil; in a stroke of metafictional wit, they even refer to themselves as “Scoobies.” But the Scooby Doo formula entails a solving a mystery, and Buffy doesn’t follow the detective story pattern. The Scooby formula also entails exposing the supposed supernatural menace as a fraud, but in Buffy supernatural evil is indeed real.

What Coogan is getting at is that the Buffy writers draw on conventions from various genres, including the superhero genre. Whedon has described Buffy as “My So-Called Life meets The X-Files“, and the show obviously draws on the high school/college comedy and “dramady” for its setting during the first four seasons. There are elements of science fiction, such as the cyborg Adam and robots like the Buffybot, and the Bondian superspy subgenre through the Initiative. Buffy is not just a vampire slayer, but a monster slayer, and thereby fits into a long line of characters going back to Gilgamesh and encompassing dragon slayers like St. George. Buffy is a television version of a bildungsroman, which is defied by the American Heritage Dictionary as “A novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character.” Buffy’s fight scenes are obviously influenced by Asian martial arts movies. Wikipedia’s Buffy entry correctly observes that “The show blends different genres, including horror, martial arts, romance, melodrama, farce, comedy, and even, in one episode, musical comedy.” As noted on the BBC’s Buffy website, in the fifth season episode “Spiral,” the sequence in which Buffy, standing atop a moving RV, combats pursuing knights on horseback “is reportedly the Buffy production team’s homage to [the] classic Western film Stagecoach [1939].”

Combining elements of different genres is a Joss Whedon trademark; his television series Firefly and its movie spinoff Serenity (2005) are fusions of science fiction with the Western genre. Whedon was more explicit in incorporating Western elements than was Gene Roddenberry, who famously pitched Star Trek as “Wagon Train to the stars”.

But the “preponderant” genre conventions are those of the genre of supernatural horror and fantasy. Whedon has made that clear in his repeated descriptions of his original concept for Buffy, explaining that he took the genre formula of “the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie” and intended “to subvert that idea and create someone who was a hero.” (Billson, Anne, Buffy the Vampire Slayer [BFI TV Classics series] pp. 24-25).

Whereas Coogan believes that Buffy is not a superhero, I’ve invented a special category for her, which I suspect reflects Whedon’s intentions for the character. To my mind, Buffy is a Displaced Superhero, which is to say that she is a superhero who operates outside the superhero genre. If someday, somehow, Whedon manages to do a Buffy-Batman or a Buffy-X-Men crossover, it will be interesting to see how well she fits into an actual superhero genre story.

Having defined what he considers to be a true superhero, what then does Coogan do with all the characters, like Buffy, who have super-powers but don’t fit his definition? Having declared that Buffy is not a “superhero” (one word), Coogan states that she is instead a “super hero” (two words), “as are heroic characters from other genres that have extraordinary abilities such as the Shadow, the Phantom, Beowulf, or Luke Skywalker. They are superior to ordinary human beings and ordinary protagonists of more realistic fiction in significant ways.” However, “they are not superheroes, that is they are not the protagonists of superhero genre narratives” (pages 48-49).

I see the point of Coogan’s distinction between “superheroes” (one word) and “super heroes” (two words), but his terminology presents problems. For one thing, the difference between the two terms does not work in spoken conversation, since you cannot hear whether there is a gap between the “super” and the “heroes.” Even in print (or on the computer screen), a simple typographical error can turn “super heroes” into “superheroes” or vice versa. Second, I understand that DC and Marvel have jointly trademarked both “superhero” (as one word) and “super hero” (as two words). DC and Marvel perceive no difference in meaning between the two forms of the term, so there is no legal distinction between them, either.

At this point Coogan does something in his book that delighted me: he quotes from the late literary critic Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957). I first encountered this book when I was in college and immediately recognized that his ideas could be applied to superhero fiction. (Another academic turned comics pro, Peter Gillis, paid tribute to Professor Frye by giving him a posthumous cameo in Defenders #133 [July 1984].)

As Coogan recounts, Frye identified the hero of myth as “superior in kind both to other men and to the environment.” Then there is what Frye terms the literary mode of romance. Among the definitions that the American Heritage Dictionary gives for “romance” are “A long fictitious tale of heroes and extraordinary or mysterious events, usually set in a distant time or place” and “The class of literature constituted by such tales”; this is what Frye meant by the term. According to Frye, the hero of romance is “superior in degree to other men and to his environment,” but is still a human being, who “moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended.” In the high mimetic mode, the hero is “superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment,” the hero of the low mimetic mode is “one of us,” and the hero of the ironic mode is “inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves” (Anatomy of Criticism, pgs. 33-34).

Coogan then declares that his “super heroes” (two words) are all “romance heroes.” Since, as he points out, nowadays the meaning of “romance” as love story is more common than its meaning as a tale of extraordinary adventure, calling these characters “romance heroes” would be confusing. So he calls them “super heroes” (two words) instead, which, as I’ve pointed out, is perhaps even more confusing.

Moreover, by stating that his “super heroes” (two words) are “romance heroes,” Coogan may, perhaps inadvertently, be leading readers to think that true superheroes are not romance heroes. But I think that Frye’s definition of the romance hero as a human being who is “superior in degree to other men and to his environment,” and who “moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended” is a nearly perfect description of the true superhero.

A superhero’s superpowers account for his superiority to his “environment.” This slight “suspension” of the laws of nature could account for what Coogan calls “superhero physics,” whereby superpowers, which do not exist in the real world, can exist in the Marvel Universe, for example. Hence, for example, thanks to the way that physics works in the DC Universe, Superman can fly, thereby demonstrating his superiority to an element of his environment, the law of gravity.

Frye’s description of the romance hero needs to be modified slightly to include those superheroes who are not literally human beings (like Superman, or the Silver Surfer, or the Vision), but all of them resemble Earth humans sufficiently, physically and psychologically, to be included. Also, as I’ve pointed out in previous installments, some superheroes, like Batman, lack actual super-powers; these characters are figuratively “superior in degree”: to other humans and to their environment.

Frye’s theory of modes also enables me to show further why Neil Gaiman’s Morpheus is not a superhero. Morpheus fits Frye’s description of the hero of myth, who is “superior in kind both to other men and to the environment.” A superhero is “superior in degree” to other humans, due to his powers, but is still a human being. Morpheus is “superior in kind” to humans: he is not human, but is one of the Endless, a different, higher form of being.

Elements of the superhero genre turn up at times in Gaiman’s Sandman, such as Element Girl and Doctor Dee (Justice League villain Doctor Destiny) in early issues, Batman and Clark Kent in “The Wake,” and the references to the Green Lantern and Superman mythos in Sandman: Endless Nights (see “Comics in Context” #17). But the predominant conventions in Gaiman’s Sandman are those of the fantasy genre.

Notice how Gaiman treats the character of Lyta Hall, who was the superheroine Fury in Roy Thomas’s Infinity, Inc. series. The “gravitational” pull of the fantasy genre is so strong in Sandman that Lyta’s superheroic identity is never mentioned in Gaiman’s series, nor her superpowers. Perhaps, however, Gaiman made an unspoken in joke by having Lyta (a. k. a. Fury) send the Furies of Greek mythology to punish Morpheus.

I also realized that the typical superhero is “superior in degree” to ordinary humans in his heroic identity, but in his alternate identity he is “one of us.” Superman is a romance hero, but as Clark Kent he is a “low mimetic” hero. Buffy is a romance hero when she acts as the Slayer, but when she is attending high school classes, she is acting as a low mimetic heroine.

While Morpheus is a hero of myth, different in kind than humans, Gaiman’s Sandman series can be read as the story of how Morpheus discovers he has an emotional capacity that is not so different from that of humankind. The series begins with Morpheus as a captive, reduced to being a “naked man” in a glass cage. He comes to acknowledge his friendship for the human Hob Gadling; he feels guilt and responsibility over the fate of his human son Orpheus. Ultimately Morpheus forfeits an aspect of his godhood by surrendering to death (or his sister Death, if you prefer). His successor, the new Dream, is somehow simultaneously Lyta’s human son Daniel and Morpheus himself reborn.

This is not to say that either Morpheus or the new Dream are superheroes. But notice that whereas a superhero typically has a double identity, one heroic and one that of a low mimetic “ordinary” human, the new Dream has a dual nature, making him simultaneously god and man. In the course of Sandman Morpheus discovers a “high mimetic” side to his nature, complete with a tragic flaw, enabling him to make himself vulnerable to death, sacrificing his life and becoming a tragic hero in the end.

Jack Bauer of television’s 24 presents an interesting case. On the surface he is a low mimetic hero, “one of us,” an operative of a United States government agency. Audience members who prefer realism to explicit fantasy would therefore be more likely to accept Bauer; thus Bauer also fits into the democratic ideal of American society, wherein everyone is equal.

In practice, however, Bauer is a high mimetic figure, “superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment.” Bauer is unquestionably CTU’s top operative, who usually takes a leadership position in field operations. Bauer has saved America for five seasons going on six, and, though the show never actually says so out loud, it consistently presents Bauer as the only one who can defeat each season’s terrorist conspiracy. (Like Buffy or Anakin Skywalker or Neo in The Matrix, Bauer is, in effect, the Chosen One.) Since Bauer is not superior “to his natural environment,” he can be severely injured (as we have seen time and again on the show) or even killed. According to Frye, the hero of tragedy, such as Hamlet, is a high mimetic figure. This helps explain why each season of 24 usually ends tragically for Bauer: for example, his wife is killed, or he is forced into hiding, or he is captured and tortured by enemies.

Ultimately, though, I think that Bauer is a romance hero, “superior in degree to other men and to his environment,” who “moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended.” Not only does he repeatedly outfight and outshoot his opponents, but he recovers from even severe injuries at unusual speed. In one season Bauer was tortured so badly that his heart actually stopped: he literally died and returned to life. Heck, the “suspension” of the “ordinary laws of nature” even explains how Bauer can drive back in forth in Los Angeles so quickly, as if its notorious traffic didn’t exist!

At present 24 and Heroes are on at the same time on Monday nights. One reason that I watch 24 rather than Heroes is that 24 feels to me much more like a heroic “romance” than Heroes, the supposed superhero series.

Until and unless I find a better term, I am going to call the heroes of romance (as Frye defines it) “megaheroes.” This category encompasses all the characters that Coogan calls “super heroes” (two words) as well as true “superheroes” (one word). Superheroes therefore form a subset within the larger category of megaheroes.

Having defined superheroes in his book, Coogan goes on to define supervillains. Here he takes what strikes me as a very different approach. In defining the superhero, Coogan went taken the approach that Superman is the first true superhero, who inaugurated the superhero genre. Therefore, Coogan sought to discover what distinguished Superman from his many megaheroic predecessors (drawing upon Judge Learned Hand’s perceptive court decision). In contrast, Coogan’s definition of the supervillain embraces characters from various different genres.

In Coogan’s view the supervillain long predates the first superhero (Superman) and the superhero genre. Indeed, Coogan counts the monsters Khumbaba and the Bull of Heaven, both slain by the title character of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, as supervillains, thereby making the super-villain concept at least over three thousand years old! Another of Coogan’s supervillains is the monster Grendel from the Old English poem Beowulf (circa 700-1000 A. D.). (When the Beowulf movie co-written by Neil Gaiman comes out this fall, I will surely have much more to say about this early romance.) Coogan also identifies as a supervillain Sherlock Holmes’s archenemy Professor Moriarty, who was introduced in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem” (1893). (Oddly, Coogan states that Moriarty only appears in “The Final Problem” and “is mentioned again only in the novel The Valley of Fear“ [p. 71]. Rather, besides “The Final Problem,” Moriarty plays an active role, albeit behind the scenes, in The Valley of Fear, and is mentioned in five other Sherlock Holmes stories by Doyle, most notably “The Adventure of the Empty House” [1903], which describes how Holmes survived his battle with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.)

In his introduction to Superhero, Coogan explains that its chapter on “The Supervillain” grew out of his contribution to The Supervillain Book, which was published last year by Visible Ink Press; I was another of The Supervillain Book‘s contributing writers. The Supervillain Book likewise took the approach that supervillans are not restricted to the superhero genre, and included not just Professor Moriarty but James Bond villains like Blofeld and Goldfinger. When I was working on the book, I agreed with this idea.

However, now that I’ve read Coogan’s Superhero, I’m not so sure. I suspect that just as true superheroes represent a subset of the category metaheroes, there are true supervillains who are part of the overall category of what I’ll call megavillains. Next week I’ll explain the distinction.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
Now on sale from Image Comics is the second issue of The Official Handbook of the Invincible Universe, to which I was a contributing writer. Just seeing the cover, which is a homage to the covers to Mark Gruenwald’s original version of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, made me smile.

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February 9, 2007

Scrubs Blog: My Blog To Nowhere

Filed under: Production Blogs,Quickcasts,Scrubs Blog,Video — UncaScroogeMcD @ 2:21 am

VIDEO BLOG #76: “My Blog To Nowhere” ““
The night is long, everyone’s a bit punchy, and they’re filming in a three-walled motor home sitting in a soundstage while first time director Mark Stegemann reveals how “first-timers” symptoms have frightened his wife. Enjoy!

Download Scrubs Video Blog #76:

Large (560 x 420 – QuickTime – 52.39 MB)

Small (320 x 240 – QuickTime – 22.49 MB)

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Interview: Tanya Donelly

Filed under: Columns,Interviews,Trailer Park — admin @ 2:20 am

By Christopher Stipp

Archives? Right Here…

In the end the letter would sit there until I finished this piece. More on that in just a moment.

When I stumbled upon Belly, most known to many as the group who made “Feed The Tree” a part of so many mix tapes in the early 90’s, I was emerging from my chrysalis of musical ignorance. My diet, until then, consisted of a milquetoast cadre of hip-hop, rap, R&B and every bland, vanilla, soul-crushing Top 40 hit you could ostensibly name. It was my senior year in high school and I was, understandably so, teased and publicly harangued for my taste in music. When other students pined for tickets to see U2 during their Zooropa tour I was steeped in the rhythm and soul of the musical choreography put on by Janet Jackson when she came through town in support of her JANET album.

It wasn’t until after I graduated high school, nearly 18 years of age, in the spring of 1993 when a friend took me to see 10,000 Maniacs at a huge outdoor amphitheater in Illinois. You want a definition of “watershed”? That was it. The musicianship, lyrical richness, passion, energy, all these things collided in my body and I knew I had a conversion of some profound kind.

It wasn’t until a few weeks had passed when I leaned of the Maniacs’ demise. Just as I thought it would be a good idea to dip a toe into this brave new world it was all I could do to try and keep myself from slipping back into old BPM habits. You have to understand that it is not a joke when I say that I still hadn’t yet purchased a Rock album, not even after the Maniacs show, once in my life. Ever.

But, it was Tanya Donelly who wrested my wallet free from my stingy pocket and it couldn’t have happened in the most odd way.

It was strange but as I was channel surfing one afternoon Tanya gave an interview to a local reporter in Chicago about an upcoming show she was getting ready to do with her band Belly. During the story they played a clip from the “Feed The Tree” video. While I took enough notice that I’ve never forgotten about it, and this is the important part of the story, it didn’t do a whole lot for me. Nothing, in fact. What happened, though, during the following weeks is notable in that the news segment stayed with me. The clip replayed over and over again in my head. I was humming “Feed The Tree” to myself every now and then when it played on the radio. The tune had such internal resonance for me that Belly’s STAR would be the very first Rock album I would ever purchase in the USED section of a small record store and, to this day, represents where my musical renaissance began.

I started purchasing mass quantities of CDs, eschewing the latest urban additions as if they were the ugly girlfriend I was happy to have cheated on, and I can tell you there has never been a time in my life, from the Summer of 1993 to the Summer of 1995 where I assimilated so many different variations on an alternative theme. From Juliana Hatfield, The Blake Babies, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, to KMFDM, Curve, Elastica, Rage Against The Machine, I was just insatiable. Although, I never forgot about Belly and, in fact, I was voracious in my consumption. From $30 imports from Japan, a special order vinyl that had just one notable song on it that I just had to have and pestered some poor record store owner as to whether it arrived, rough sounding bootlegs of Belly shows, to say nothing of the singles, magazines, tickets, of buying everything at their merchandise table when they finally came back to Chicago, I was enamored to the point of fiscal bankruptcy when it came to Belly. The music just did something to me that I still can’t explain very well without sounding like a complete geek. It was the mixture of lyrics and melody that defied you to listen to a world that wasn’t controlled by Cock Rock Neanderthals who only wanted to sing about the superfluous nature of their “dark” and “misunderstood” lives. Tanya had a grip on these things and, instead, used her music to work out more thought-provoking issues.

I remember standing in line, a line of one actually, during a bitterly cold October afternoon in 1995 as I kept my place in line for a show that would be one of Belly’s last. Determined to be the first person through that door to see the General Admission show, only to recede to the back bar area after the first song, it was at show I learned I had a condition that I didn’t know about: claustrophobia. However, I still remember the three times I did see the band to be on par with the arena rockers I would later measure everyone else against; being in a small club didn’t matter, it was more intimate and I remember Tanya always leaving the stage with a smile, not a sneer and splintered musical equipment, in her wake.

The band’s demise shortly after the tour that year and Tanya’s eventual solo career has been one, for me anyway, of evolution. I think I would’ve grown embarrassed as I reflect on the amount of my spending, my stumping, my need to collect everything, my unadulterated support for a band that just played musical notes and chords if it wasn’t for the book I wrote that was inspired by those two years of self-exploration and unwavering devotion. Tanya evolved as well. She got married to the bassist of Juliana Hatfield’s band, Dean Fisher, had two children, Grace Bee Fisher and little Harriet Pearl Fisher, and still turns out some of the most evocative and melodic that no one I know seems to be listening to.

Her latest, THIS HUNGRY LIFE, is a live album that puts to shame any live album you have in your collection for the simple fact that this is sold as a live album, yes, but it sounds unbelievably sharp. I would dare any casual listener to try and take a taste test of this album and, save for the clapping at the end of songs, try and pick out the imperfections. It’s that precise and it was good enough to get me riled up enough after sensing, again, no one cared about me talking about it in public, and I decided to see what I could do in devoting an entire column to Tanya and this work.

It’s not often I get to talk to someone who has been the basis for so much of my own creative endeavors, who really is at the core, the nexus, of who I hold up as the litmus test for any artist who wants to preen, whine, play dress-up, break a guitar or two or do anything less than make great music and enjoy the station they’ve been given in life. In fact, I count this interview as the completion of a circle she started drawing for me in the ephemera almost 14 years ago; damn near Â½ of my entire life on this planet.

She was an absolute joy and delight to talk to, my hand was getting numb from inserting so many “(Laughs)” into the piece, as I played the part of journalist and geeky fanboy all at the same time; she managed to top Lost’s Josh Holloway as the person who exuded the greatest sense of joy while talking to me, a complete stranger. We talk about her music, her passions, her kids, her inspirations and I even manage to take a jab at her procrastination that, unless it was just great timing, yielded the motherload of every Belly nerd out there.

It was at the end of the conversation, though, that Tanya inquired about the book I wrote and it’s involvement of her music in it. She insisted that she send payment for a copy of her own even after my heart sank as I tried to stop that nonsense (I would’ve sent every other copy I had for free), feeling not only like I was the kid in the Mean Joe Green Coke commercial who is overcome with gratitude for that sweaty jersey, but when that envelope came to my house it sat on my desk unopened until this week, only after the construction of this piece had been completed. It was only after the work was done did I ever feel entitled to enjoy the spoils of my labor and thankfully with Tanya’s consistent output of music she is still amazing me in a way that makes me feel 18 again when I wait for that special New Music Tuesday to roll around in anticipation of a new album and I can see what else is on her mind this time.

Here’s to hoping she never stops trying to part me with my money.

CHRISTOPHER STIPP: Hi, is Tanya there?

TANYA DONELLY: Yup, that’s me.

CS: This is Chris.

DONELLY: Hi, how are you?

CS: I’m fine. How are you doing?

DONELLY: Doing very well, thanks”¦I’ve got a new baby.

CS: Yes, congratulations on that.

DONELLY: Thank you so much. There’s a lot of juggling going on in that department.

CS: I just put my one-year old down for her morning nap.

(Laughs)

DONELLY: That’s what mine is doing right now.

CS: And I don’t think she was really ready yet, either. I just knew this interview was coming up and said to her, “You’re going down within the next twenty minutes.”

DONELLY: That’s what I did too. Hopefully that’ll work out.

CS: It’s an odd thing, trying to coordinate their schedules around my schedule. Life doesn’t feel like it’s about me anymore but I’m fine with that. But let’s get into it with the fact that this album, THIS HUNGRY LIFE, has been out for a few months. I bought it the day it came out and have been loving listening to it ever since.

DONELLY: Thank you very much.

CS: And it’s weird insofar that when I heard this was going to be a live album I was expecting something less than what this record actually is. The clarity, sharpness and precision on THIS HUNGRY LIFE trumps any live recording in my collection.

DONELLY: Well, we did the multiple takes of things. It was more that we wanted people to be there while we were recording so they suffered through us starting over sometimes, multiple takes and lots of tuning because that’s what I really wanted to do rather than just taping a show. I really wanted it to be people in the studio with me, sort of speak. It was fun.

CS: Now, was it the ten core songs that eventually made it onto the album or were there other”¦

DONELLY: No, we also did a set”¦We also recorded a set of”¦Because we went straight to Bellows Falls from touring the record before that so there’s actually live recordings of WHISKEY TANGO that we did on tour which I will probably put up on the site.

CS: You know, since you went there, I did my homework preparing this interview and I know I’ve read that in a few places. “When I get to it”¦” “When I get to it”¦” What is up with”¦.

(Laughs)

DONELLY: I just have to give my web mistress just a ton of stuff and let her struggle with it. I’ll find some of the archived material and hand it over and”¦she can deal with it.

CS: And, because I am an uber nerd, and I’ve been a fan for a long time, I’ve known that you’ve said you were looking to put out a children’s album. Where is that? I have a child that’s nearly four and I flatly REFUSE to allow the Wiggles anywhere near my stereo.

DONELLY: I know!

(Sighs)

It’s just been”¦It’s the kind of thing where we put it together, a bunch of us, and then we were really excited about it at the time and then it just got passed over and passed over and passed over and everybody started losing their enthusiasm, which happens”¦The main thing people are saying is that it is all over the place. Too much different”¦I mean that’s what we liked about it.

CS: Right.

DONELLY: It’s very varied but it’s what labels don’t like. I guess”¦I don’t know”¦Children’s music, so we’re told, except for a few very lucky instances, children’s music doesn’t really sell well. Stuff like The Wiggles will because it’s completely catered”¦and this is not at all. This is like regular rock music with just lyrics that are appropriate. So, people are just having a hard time figuring out just how to market it. At this point, the woman who started the whole project, Chris Tappin, she’s probably going to put it up on CD Baby and we’re waiting to hear”¦she’s going to let me know if that happens and then I’m going to let people know.

CS: Good. Good to hear. I am just not down with a lot of children’s music that’s out there.

DONELLY: I know”¦

Well, neither is my daughter. She just listened to what we listened to”¦she never really listened to the kids music, per se. In fact, the other day, just to give you a little window into her perspective on the world, I said as we were looking at something to listen to, I said, “Do you want to listen to The Beatles?” And she said, “Mom, that’s a little baby-ish for me.”

CS: Geez”¦What is she really into then nowadays?

DONELLY: She likes Blondie a lot. She likes Smoosh. You know who they are?

CS: No.

DONELLY: Is your oldest a girl?

CS: Yup.

DONELLY: You should check them out. It’s S-M-O-O-S-H. They’re an indie band of two sisters”¦and I don’t even want to say they’re four kids because they have a huge adult following. I wouldn’t even say it’s kid’s music, it’s just music that just happens to be made by kids. And they’re great.

[Chris’ note: I hope this doesn’t get me on NBC’s To Catch A Predator but I checked them out and this is a really great band of girls who know how to rock the mic.]

CS: Was that important to you as a parent when you became one, coming from a fairly rich musical pedigree, to give your kids a full exposure to different kinds of music?

DONELLY: I was less focused on what I wanted her to listen to than what I did NOT want her to listen to. Our attitude from the beginning was if it’s driving us crazy, it’s not good for the family. (Laughs)

So, we sort of played her the stuff we liked and she likes that. She likes that stuff”¦She’s a big Vic Chesnutt fan. She loved him”¦When she was little she called him “Vic Ketchup.” And Big Star, she really likes, and she also has her”¦she and her friends listen to things like “High School Musical.” She has to have SOMETHING that doesn’t belong to”¦has nothing to do with us.

CS: Of course.

DONELLY: Hanna Montana.

CS: Not Hanna Montana. The child of Tanya Donelly and Dean Fisher “¦Hanna Montana.

DONELLY: I just don’t say anything. You know, I listened to Shaun Cassidy when I was her age so”¦That’s the kind of stuff that you laugh at affectionately. It’s not harmful; there’s no harm in it. It doesn’t really bug me as long as she still”¦she’s good at compartmentalizing. (Laughs)

CS: And that wasn’t difficult? Exposing her to that kind of music as a kid? I only ask because I’m thinking of mounting some kind of campaign to get my kid to listen to Wilco, Neko Case”¦

DONELLY: No! It’s amazing how they get it. Like Gracie loves the fact that David Bowie is always dressed up. He’s cool, he’s a different person all the time, he dresses up, he has all these songs and characters. They get into that you know what I mean? They way that she listens to stuff”¦I find things in it that I had forgotten about when I was a kid. There’s so much that they can re-introduce YOU to when you’re introducing music to them.

CS: One of the things, and it makes me feel old to say it, of being a fan now for fifteen years, the lyrical content of your music, while it has always been rich and melodic, there has always been a dark undercurrent of things you’ve said have been auto-biographical, things you’re dealing with, I’m speaking here presently of a great example off of THIS HUNGRY LIFE, “Kundalini Slide”. That’s a dark song but unbelievably deceptive with how delicate it sounds. Is motherhood helping to make sense of the world, life, in general?

DONELLY: I think motherhood makes me focus on hope more than I did but it doesn’t but”¦it’s not a cure-all for what ails me or anyone in this world. I don’t know, that’s a tough one because sometimes I feel like it really changes the way I write and, other times, when I actually sit down and listen to stuff I’m like, “Nah, not really.” (Laughs) “Not so much.” But, I think that stuff stays in my music more than it used to now that I am functioning for people other than myself.

And it still comes out. On a song like “Kundalini Slide” those concerns, I think, are more global than just my own little”¦shit. And I do tend to think more outside of myself, obviously, that’s what happens, as you know, so that manifests itself rather differently now, it’s more concerned for everyone else. “How can I fix things for my children?” It’s making sure that I function well for my children and do what I can to make this a better place.

CS: And how is the writing process for you now? Do you have the same kind of groove, methodology, you’ve always had?

DONELLY: No, it’s completely different because it’s so much more structured. Especially with two kids there’s no such thing as “˜drop everything and write’ anymore. I have no books in my diaper bag.

(Laughs)

I do what I can! You just don’t have the luxury anymore of saying, “I think I’ll write today.” It’s more like little scraps of paper everywhere and when I have time in the evening, if I’m not exhausted, I’ll put it together.

CS: I believe you’re deserving of a lot of credit. Not so much for just creating the music you did that put you in the public sphere years ago but because you’ve been so prolific since then with your recordings you’ve released with the amount of responsibility you’ve had in the last few years. Has that been a conscious decision, to stay on top of your art?

DONELLY: Yeah. We are very fortunate in that we’re still are managing to get by without day jobs. And I think that being the case it gives us the opportunity to still make this work. As a result, I can still release more than I might if I had to be working all the time.

It sounds like you have a day that’s similar to mine”¦

CS: Yeah, you’re right. I absolutely find that I am able to write better after everyone has gone to sleep. I do my column late at night or trade in eating a lunch to get in some good, solid writing. Just with trying to start my second book it has been very difficult because I just don’t have that kind of quality time anymore.

DONELLY: Yeah, I know, I know. You just have to mourn that and go, “Alright, how do I get it done now?”

And, speaking of that, I heard about your book but I haven’t had the chance to hunt it down”¦

CS: Oh”¦You know, I’ll make this a brief story: It was written about six years ago, it had Belly as a sub-plot but only in the sense that I had the germ to write it when I learned of Belly’s demise. I almost am loathe to admit that my iPod is jammed full of Belly bootlegs, B-Sides, Singles, albums, tribute albums from other fans circa 1995, everything and anything; the band meant a lot, artistically, to me as a listener of music.

DONELLY: Oh, that’s cool.

CS: Yeah, but that’s also strays into Uber Nerd territory. The story itself, the core of which deals with the demise of things you never know about until it’s too late to do anything about, was just too tempting not to weave the band into the narrative.

DONELLY: Wow, that’s amazing.

CS: I self-published it, got a well-known artist to draw the cover for me and when it was all said and done I sent a copy your way, just as a cosmic way to say “Thanks” for the muse-like inspiration.

DONELLY: You know, things used to be so”¦I’ll say that there isn’t hardly any filter between my mail and me.

What is it called?

CS: “Thank You, Goodnight.” At the end of the day it’s a story of people when it’s post-coming of age and they’re in that nebulous area of when it’s pre-adulthood. It was kismet when I wrote it because I did this all right before my first daughter was born.

DONELLY: That is so great.

CS: It’s amusing…We actually talked, twice before this, during Belly’s last tour in 1995. You did a show at the University of Illinois and then a show in Chicago a few days later in late October. The first time, at UOI, you were enjoying a book and I intruded lightly. And then, in Chicago, I was standing in line, the first, from about noon until show time. That’s borderline lame and sad at the same time. It’s damn near embarrassing for me to even think about.

DONELLY: No, believe me. I have had plenty of those.

(Laughs)

I just spent the weekend with Gail [Greenwood, Belly’s former bassist] and we had a big, mushy, sentimental time so it’s completely ripe for this conversation.

CS: How is she doing?

DONELLY: She’s awesome. She’s great. She’s still making music with her mate but mostly she’s doing graphic design right now. They have a graphic design company that’s extremely successful. She’s just busy, busy, busy.

CS: Since we’re kind of on the topic, I know you’ve said that there were so many other songs Belly has done that no one has heard and it’s come back to the line, “When I get the time”¦”

DONELLY: Well, the main thing that I want to release are the demos. For STAR, which are actually Breeder’s demos, which, unfortunately, when I went back to try to mix it down the integrity of the tape is a little bit compromised”¦because they’re so freakin’ old”¦but I think Ivo Watts-Russell, who used to run 4AD, I think he has a CD of it. I’m going to see if I can wrestle that away from him and just put it up as-is.

CS: I’d like to know…When I was looking back at the period when Belly was nominated for a Grammy, when you were probably at that critical and media saturation point where it was nonstop attention, and now you’re at the point where you can comfortably do whatever you want is there some acceptance of that time for what it was?

DONELLY: Oh yeah. I do and for a long time I wrestled”¦there were a few years there where I was like, “Why am I so OK with this?” With the fact that I’m not famous anymore because I do have a tendency to push things down until they”¦start to form cysts.

(Laughs)

And so I thought, “Oh, here I go”¦” where I go around with my hippy-dippy face on and just say, “Oh, it’s OK. The universe has given me so much and I’m fine”¦” And I was trying to just, “Let’s get this out. Let’s weep. Let’s grieve.” And I did. Briefly.

But, I am fine.

And it took me years to kind of figure out, “Oh, I’m just fine and let’s accept the fact.” It’s not like I couldn’t handle fame anyway. I mean, that was so cool that I got to do that and we had such a blast and now I get to do other stuff that I wouldn’t be able to do if I was still doing that. I’m a full-time mother to my children and I still get to make music”¦I have time to write and time to do other things that I want to do and do projects with other people. And, you know, I really do feel like I’m fine and especially with raising kids I would rather do that under the radar, so to speak. I think everything has worked out.

The only thing is”¦is sometimes I wish I could get this music to more people. That’s the only thing but it’s never a lifestyle issue for a second.

CS: I think that’s one of the nicest things of being in the place I’m in today, after following the band as long as I have, for as much as I care about the music and what it means to me, is that I can honestly state that I don’t know of an artist who has matured and evolved as well as you have.

DONELLY: Well, thank you. My gosh”¦

CS: When you get down to it, you can be as experimental as you want, but it does all come down to the music and the quality of it.

DONELLY: Yeah, I know, and that’s definitely true. And when you are in the thick of it and you’ve got A LOT of people involved in your music, it gets convoluted. You can have as much integrity as a person can have and you still have twenty people constantly in your ear telling you what’s going to happen next and your process and how you’re going to do it and when they need it and how they need it. It doesn’t matter how shut-in you try to be, it gets in there. And I don’t have to deal with that.

CS: Did that happen with KING‘s creation?

DONELLY: KING was not so much”¦not so much with KING because, at that point, everyone just trusted us implicitly because STAR was such a fluke. There was no buzz around STAR until it happened. The label was not like, “Oooh, this is going to be so amazing.” And because that was such a big surprise they essentially said, “Ok, just do it again.”

And when Belly broke up, and with my first solo record, they sent me back in a few times, it was mixed a couple of times, they made me write more and take songs off and put songs on. They were very”¦on top of that one. Which, at the time, I was kind of in a panic myself, that was my year of panic, and then after that I calmed down.

CS: Do you think you’re calmer about the process?

DONELLY: Yeah, because music is in a very different place in my life now. It’s a part of my life, it’s not the theme anymore; it’s in there, it’s a part of a larger holistic picture now and it’s not the only thing that I have.

CS: Is the process as therapeutic as it has been or is there a shift in it’s ability to”¦

DONELLY: Oh, definitely. Absolutely therapeutic.

Writing a song is still one of my greatest joys and it’s how I stay healthy”¦it’s like anything you do for your health. I need to do that and I enjoy doing it. It’s weird, and it’s such a great position to be in too, as the whole family is in on it. Dean and I write together and play together and Gracie is right there with her suggestions. It’s really nice because it’s part of our life together.

CS: To that point, on one of my favorite songs “White Belly” is just saturated in darkness but it’s so melodic and peaceful to listen to. Do you take a song like that, something that’s really quite heavy and then try to find a way, pushing the content aside, to make it digestible?

DONELLY: Yeah, you know, that’s a really good question because for years”¦and I think this one of those un-self-aware things that, when you’re young, because I said, “Oh, no, no, no, it’s just natural. It’s the way I write.” And I do think that to a certain extent that’s true. I’m much more attracted to melody even though the stuff I’m interested in singing about is not always pretty but I’m very attracted to melody. But, as a person”¦(Laughs)”¦the older I get the more I realize as a person I tend to, when I’m dealing with something, past or present, I do tend to do it in a very “How can we make this easy?” sort of way. I’m not a head-on, confrontational person. I’m more of a “Let’s all sit down and talk about it”, “Let’s go to the beach”, “Let’s figure this out,” kind of person. So, musically, that’s how it happens for me too. It goes, “I have to say something very ugly right now so I’m going to make it really pretty to listen to.”

CS: And your husband, Dean, is an amazing musician as well. I remember seeing him play live when he toured with Juliana Hatfield, has he been a good sounding board for your music or do you have your own way of doing things?

DONELLY: It depends on the song. He’s a great arranger.

Some of the things I do pop out full-blown and there it is, that’s it, it’s done. And sometimes I definitely will say “Can you help me with this one?” and more and more, I have to say, he has become sort of the musical director when we’re recording. Like he and I will hash things out at home and he’ll actually do a lot of the showing people the song, what’s going on with it, because I’ve always got a baby on the hip or”¦I mean I haven’t handed it over completely but, to be honest, the places where I excel are more during the songwriting process and playing live and, as far as being in the studio goes, I have shorter and shorter patience with it.

I’ll go in on the first day and say, “This is the song, this is what I kind of want to do”¦” and then Dean will hash things through and bring it back to me. He’s become sort of liaison in a way. Which works out GREAT for both of us because that the stuff he loves and I get to do the things I love and it just works out real well; it’s been very fortuitous that we have the kind of strength and interest we have.

CS: You mentioned playing live. I know you’ve said you’ve had issues with stage fright in the past. Has that waned a little bit?

DONELLY: It has, a little bit. I still get very nervous but I don’t get”¦(Laughs)”¦It’s not a pathological condition. I think it’s just more natural stage fright that anyone would have and it’s not so horrible as it used to be.

CS: Any hint that you’re going to be touring a little bit more than you have been?

DONELLY: Well, we’re going to do something in the summer, is what we’re going to do and I’m hoping”¦and I don’t know if I should”¦Kristen and I are sort of talking”¦ it’s SO beginning stages”¦and probably silly”¦but we’re trying to hash out something to experience something together this summer. Manly, because we miss each other and, also, I just think it would be fun for people and fun for us. I can’t see why it wouldn’t work out at this point. It would be mid- to late-summer we’re thinking.

CS: And where is that children’s book of yours?

DONELLY: That has fallen so far”¦

CS: D.O.A?

DONELLY: I just took it out a few weeks ago and I wrote another chapter and I kind of worked on some stuff and then I put it back and, at this point, that’s how it’s going. I have this image of myself, breastfeeding on the couch while I write my book. (Laughs) It’s not quite panning out.

CS: Oh, come on. Did you really think that would work? I could have told you that years ago!

DONELLY: It’s not going to work at all.

CS: Then what’s the deal? They’re like ten pages long. I read them every night. It’s the biggest con in the book business. Just write ten sentences and you’re golden, you’re done”¦

DONELLY: Right! But this is a young adults book.

CS: Ah, OK”¦

DONELLY: Not even young adults, more like ten to twelve year-old girls. Adventure girls kind of stuff. That one’s going to be a long time coming”¦Actually, at one point I was thinking, “I wonder if could make this a much littler kids book?” but there’s too much I wanted to do in it.

CS: Any good inspirations, then? I know you’re a voracious reader”¦

DONELLY: Yeah, Gracie is at the point where she’s starting to read really interesting stuff so I have been reading a lot of, I pre-read things for her, so I read a lot of interesting”¦There’s a lot of good young adult work out there.

CS: Lemony Snicket?

DONELLY: She doesn’t like that….She’s not crazy about that yet. She really wants to be but she gets creeped out.

CS: What have you been into?

DONELLY: I’ve been reading a lot of travel non-fiction lately just because I’m interested in the world right now and”¦I’ve been reading just really weird, weird stuff. Like I just finished a book on the Moors of al-Andalus. Something will pique my interest and I’ll go to the library and read a book on it. I’m mostly into non-fiction right now but the last real good piece of fiction I read was “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” And I was just going to start the new John Irving book my mom just got me, “Until I Find You.”

CS: Irving has been a rather strong writer. He’s produced a lot of good work.

DONELLY: He wrote one of my very favorite books, “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” Some of his stuff I just really love.

CS: Since I only had a couple more questions I just wanted to know, because I’m getting older and these things are getting harder to find, what new music should I be listening to? What has rocked your boat lately?

DONELLY: What a bad question”¦only because it makes me feel so guilty. I really like the new Cat Power record.

CS: I’m a huge Mazzy Star fan and a friend said based on that I should find something enjoyable on the album.

DONELLY: Oh, you would. Absolutely. And, Joanna Newsom; I like all her stuff, actually.

[Tanya asks Hattie what mom listens to. Other than a gurgle and a coo, no new information is forthcoming.]

I know that my husband is a big jazz fan. He is a big everything fan.

CS: Does he have like the big, expensive high fidelity set-up in the house?

DONELLY: No. No, no, no. He’s not like that but he has been collecting a lot of stuff lately. What else? Hmm”¦What else? Those two are really the only things I can think of. I know, though, as soon as I get off the phone I am going to think”¦

CS: Of a few, right. Gary Smith asked me that question and it put me in such a quandary because it’s hard for me, nowadays, to find good music. The musical landscape, when I open Rolling Stone [Evidenced by the current issue with Panic! At the Disco on the cover] and realize that I can’t relate to the mascara wearing boys preening and emo’ing their hearts out.

DONELLY: Yeah, Dean keeps up with it. He’s impressive because he listens to all”¦he just got an iPod and he listens to everything, all kinds of stuff but, me, I don’t really as much. It’s annoying to say but I’ve been listening to a lot of African music.

CS: Really? Like Ladysmith Black Mambazo?

DONELLY: No, no”¦Yeah, a lot of compilations because, what I am doing right now, is trying to figure out what I like”¦OH! I know something! Joan as Police Woman. It’s my friend, Joan, Joan Wasser, who played violin on the record, the new record of mine and she has her own record out which is really beautiful. It’s called REAL LIFE. So, I have been, actually, listening to that. A lot of nepotism going on in our house.

CS: Where do you see yourself evolving in the next few years, musically? To read your lyrics you’ve already run the gamut of life, death, religion and everything in between. Is there light at the end of all this or are there always those things which will gnaw at you?

DONELLY: Oh everything, that’s going to happen. For the most part I am a person who walks in the sun in my daily life and the only place where I can process, aside from conversations with my husband, that’s where I process my anger. One thing I have been doing, though, is doing a project here and there with other people which may or may not see the light of day so I have to stop talking about all these possibilities.

CS: Because it’s evident you can’t follow-up on anything you talk about!

(Laughs)

DONELLY: Exactly!

(I laugh)

CS: You’re awful and I have no problem saying that from the side of a frustrated fan who needs more good music in their lives. You’re a disappointment as a woman of inspiration to so many, namely me.

DONELLY: It just takes me years to do these things but it’s fun because it brings out stuff I don’t usually do, that wouldn’t come out of me otherwise. More collaborations, maybe, in my future.

CS: Well, thank you so much for talking with me, Tanya.

DONELLY: Thank you so much.

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Weekend Shopping Guide 2/9/07: Amazing Screw-On Stuff

Filed under: Shopping Guides — UncaScroogeMcD @ 2:19 am

The weekend’s here. You’ve just been paid, and it’s burning a hole in your pocket. What’s a pop culture geek to do? In hopes of steering you in the right direction to blow some of that hard-earned cash, it’s time for the Quick Stop Weekend Shopping Guide – your spotlight on the things you didn’t even know you wanted…

While I thought the big-screen adaptation of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy was a bit hit or miss (though more hit than miss), it’s not often that the entire live action cast and director take their act to the small screen – and succeed. Both Mignola and director Guillermo del Toro have returned as creative producers for the first in a series of Hellboy: Animated films, Sword of Storms (Anchor Bay, Not Rated, DVD-$19.98 SRP). Even better than the tight, Asian-influenced story (our hero must tackle a pair of ancient Japanese demons) is the streamlined, evocative adaptation of Mignola’s art style for animation. Combined, they make the kind of fun yet adult action-adventure series that Spawn only wished it could have been. Bonus features include an audio commentary, behind-the-scenes featurettes, interviews, and much more.

Dark Horse has also jumped on the Hellboy: Animated bandwagon with a whole slew of merchandise, including collectible character magnets ($7.99 SRP each), stationary ($4.99 SRP), and journals ($9.99 SRP).

It’s not very often that you get a DVD release that contains just a single episode of a show – the pilot, in fact, but that is exactly what you get with the DVD release of the pilot for the animated adaptation of Mike Mignola’s steampunk adventure The Amazing Screw-On Head (Lionsgate, Not Rated, DVD-$14.98 SRP), about an articulate, seemingly immortal head (voiced by Paul Giamatti) that uses a series of robotic bodies to defend the country against supernatural threats – such as his maniacal former manservant, Emperor Zombie (David Hyde-Pierce) – at the behest of President Abraham Lincoln, with only his current manservant, Mr. Groin, and his dog, Mr. Dog, at his side. It’s offbeat and fun, and with a little more development it probably would have been an adventure in the vein of The Venture Bros., but sadly this seems like all we’ll get. The DVD features an audio commentary, a featurette on the adaptation process, storyboard comparisons, and trailers.

TwoMorrows, I love ya. Not only have you given me entries in your Modern Masters artist spotlight series featuring John Byrne, Walt Simonson, George Perez, and Alan Davis, but you’ve added Kevin Maguire to the list (TwoMorrows, $14.95 SRP), and for that I thank them. In fact, flipping through the selection of artwork contained in the volume, it reminded just how much I adored his run on the Justice League, bringing to brilliant life the scripts of Keith Giffen & J.M. DeMatteis – a run, sadly, that has been completely destroyed by the incompetent mooks at DC (I’m looking at you Dan Didio… ya schmuck). Until Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Max Lord, and the Dibneys find a way back from DC’s idiocy, at least we can remember the good times.

It’s a shame that Hollywoodland (Universal, Rated R, DVD-$29.98 SRP) largely came and went from cinemas, because Ben Affleck turned in quite a memorable performance as the late George Reeves – an actor whose most memorable role, much to his chagrin, was that of TV’s Superman, and whose life ended either in suicide or murder at the height of his TV fame. The film itself is largely the story of a P.I. (Adrien Brody) who tries to piece together the pieces of the puzzle, even though the LAPD has already ruled it a suicide. Was it a scheming fiancÃ©e that killed Reeves? A jealous husband (Bob Hoskins)? Or perhaps the police were right after all, and a despondent Reeves – a serious actor who lamented the typecasting his superheroic role brought him – did take his own life. Bonus features include an audio commentary with director Allen Coulter, deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes featurettes, and more.

It’s aged rather awkwardly in some sections, but by and large, Eddie Murphy’s Delirious (Anchor Bay, Not Rated, DVD-$19.98 SRP) remains a legendary bit of stand-up, and is a wonderful document of a performer at the height of his powers. Not only does the DVD feature additional bonus footage, but a brand new interview with Murphy as well.

It’s been almost 3 years since the last full season release of Mad About You, and when the “Best Of” collection was released a few years back instead of another season, I despaired of seeing things back on track anytime soon. Thankfully, things are back on track with the arrival of the complete third season (Sony, Not Rated, DVD-$39.95 SRP), featuring all 24 episodes. For the recurring appearances from Cyndi Lauper alone, this is a great season – and it’s the era just before things went downhill when the once brilliant sitcom decided to do “very special” episodes.

If you’re under that yellow journalism and political mudslinging in the American press is an invention of the 20th century, let Eric Burns’s Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism (Public Affairs, $15.95 SRP) set you straight. The title itself comes from a George Washington quote describing the journalists of his day, and the portrait of the Fourth Estate painted by this tome – and the politicians that both manipulated and were mauled by it – is far livelier and altogether surprising that one would expect.

You know, you think there’d more themed releases like Van Morrison: At The Movies (EMI, $18.98 SRP). The disc collects 19 Van Morrison tracks featured in movies ranging from An Officer and a Gentleman to The Departed. It’s a great idea, and hopefully it inspires other artists to follow suit… If only to get that McCartney release containing both “Band on the Run” and “Spies Like Us.”

In the early 90’s, an odd thing happened – Richard Lewis and Jamie Lee Curtis co-starred in a network sitcom called Anything But Love (Fox, Not Rated, DVD-$39.98 SRP) as a pair of best friends and co-workers who set aside their long-standing refusal to give in to their attraction for each other for fear of ruining their friendship, only to discover it’s every bit as tricky as they’d feared. Thankfully, it was actually quite a funny sitcom, as you’ll discover with the 28 episodes contained in this first 3-disc volume, that also features commentary from the stars on select episodes, plus brand-new featurettes. I do, however, want to also mention that Fox has become maddeningly cheap with their packaging choices, and it’s leading to damaged discs. It’s bad enough that they insist on continuing their use of double-sided discs, but when you combine that with lousy DVD cases, you get loose, scratched discs. Please, Fox, stop doing this crap to good releases.

Love is in the air and a brand new batch of themed catalogue releases are out just in time for Valentine’s Day, as Warners rounds up a batch of oft-requested titles from the vaults. The 5 tittles include Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue in A Summer Place (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$19.98 SRP), George Segal as an ex-wife obsessed lawyer keen on rekindling romance in Blume In Love (Warner Bros., Rated R, DVD-$19.98 SRP), Judy Garland and Robert Walker as wartime paramours in The Clock (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$19.98 SRP), Amy Irving as the object of her matchmaker grandmother’s attentions in Crossing Delancey (Warner Bros., Rated PG, DVD-$19.98 SRP), and Jane Wyman and Van Johnson as two lovestruck strangers in Miracle In The Rain (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$19.98 SRP). All 5 discs features the original theatrical materials, while The Clock gets vintage shorts and the radio adaptation, and Miracle contains a pair of vintage behind-the-scenes segments.

I’ve watched it twice – just because I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind so much – but Michel Gondry’s solo writer/director effort The Science Of Sleep (Warner Bros., Rated R, DVD-$27.98 SRP) is a largely incomprehensible visual exercise about a dedicated young dreamer (think a French version of Brazil) that is quite nice to look at, but very hard to care about. It’s a shame, because there’s obviously a lot of brilliant ideas in Gondry’s head – I just think he needs a collaborator to bring them out in a form an audience can connect with. Bonus features include an audio commentary with Gondry, behind-the-scenes featurettes, a music video, and more.

Based on numerous recommendations from friends (and a healthy plug from the likes of Derren Brown and Penn & Teller), I finally sat down and read Richard Dawkins’s treatise on religion, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, $27.00 SRP). Regardless of which side of the religion debate you fall on, I can’t recommend this highly enough to those with an open mind.

Of all the kids TV out there, very little of it is suitable for adult consumption. On that very short list, I can add the adventures of 10-year-old Ben Tennyson, whose discovery, while on holiday, of a mysterious wristwatch buried in a meteorite gives him the ability to transform into any of 10 alien heroes – a handy thing now that he has to fight the villainous Vilgax and his alien hordes. The 2-disc set features all 13 first season episodes of Ben 10 (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$19.98 SRP), plus commentary, drawing lessons, and a sneak peek into the future.

Speaking of palatable kid’s shows, another that fits the bill is Teen Titans, and you can now pick up their feature-length adventure Trouble In Tokyo (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$19.98 SRP), as our heroes take on the seedy underworld of Japan’s big city and the villain Brushogun. The disc features an additional “lost episode,” “Robin’s Underworld Race Challenge.”

While watching The Grudge 2 (Sony, Not Rated, DVD-$28.95 SRP), I couldn’t help but be nagged by the feeling that I had already seen the movie. I had, of course, and it was called The Grudge. Just swap out the quickly dispensed with Sarah Michelle Gellar for Amber Tamblyn, and hit “repeat” – there you go, instant sequel. It’s certainly an acceptable diversion, but nothing to remember 5 minutes after the credits roll. The unrated edition features the obligatory extra gore, plus an intro from Sam Raimi, deleted scenes, and behind-the-scenes featurettes.

It’s no When Harry Met Sally, but as romantic comedies go, Trust The Man (Fox, Rated R, DVD-$27.98 SRP) is likeable enough. Most of that is due to the cast, which includes Julianne Moore and David Duchovny as a New York City married couple whose marriage is in serious trouble – but so is the relationship of Moore’s brother-in-law, played by Billy Crudup, who’s having trouble committing to his novelist girlfriend (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Bonus features include an audio commentary, a making-of featurette, and deleted scenes.

Those wanting to complete their Hitchcock collections will probably want to snag a copy of the 3-disc Alfred Hitchcock: Collector’s Edition (Lionsgate, Not Rated, DVD-$39.98 SRP), featuring 5 of the master’s earliest films – The Ring, The Manxman, Murder!, The Skin Game, and Rich and Strange. The set also features the documentary Pure Cinema: The Birth of the Hitchcock Style.

If you’re addicted to sites like “The Smoking Gun” and “Defamer,” then odds are that you’ll get a kick out of Celebrity Secrets: Government Files on the Rich and Famous (Paraview Pocket Books, $14.00 SRP). The title is pretty self-explanatory, as author Nick Redfern dives into the files of celebs like Lennon, Hemingway, Costello, Presley, Monroe, Princess Di, and many more. Prurient, but engaging, reading to be sure.

Shopping for a toddler in the family (as I constantly am for my nephew Cameron)? You can’t go wrong with a pair of new collections from two of Nickelodeon’s most popular shows – The Backyardigans: The Legend of the Volcano Sisters and Dora the Explorer: Musical School Days (Paramount, Not Rated, DVD-$16.99 SRP each). Both discs feature 4 episodes, plus additional songs, games, and sneak peeks.

And speaking of DVDs for toddlers, the BBC has put out the third volume of Charlie and Lola (BBC, Not Rated, DVD-$14.98 SRP), which features outtakes, games, and hidden surprises.

Proof that not everything he touched turned to gold, Darren Star’s stab at soapy sitcom – about a group of 6 young actors forced to cope with instant stardom when their show becomes an unexpected success – met with much indifference after only 17 episodes, but the great age of DVD means you can get that complete run of Grosse Pointe (Sony, Not Rated, DVD-$29.95 SRP) for your very own library. Bonus features include audio commentaries on select episodes and an interview with Star.

I know somewhere there’s an audience of a touchy-feely tale of a rebellious 16-year-old and her horse, but I know I’m not it. Still, for those of you who fit that category, there’s Flicka (Fox, Rated PG, DVD-$29.99 SRP), starring Tim McGraw, Maria Bello, and Alison Lohman. Bonus features include an audio commentary, deleted scenes, bloopers, and a music video.

The release of Sideshow Collectibles‘s massive 12″-scale Jabba the Hutt is fast-approaching, so you’d better get on the ball and start picking all of the characters necessary for making an incredible display piece, starting with the “inclusive” edition Salacious Crumb Creature Pack ($32.99) – containing Jabba’s favorite cackling toadie, plus Ghoel Wol Cabashite (with bendy tongue and magnetic body), Worrt, a Sand Skitter, and a Dwarf Varactyl. Get them now before you’re outta luck.

So there you have it… my humble suggestions for what to watch, listen to, play with, or waste money on this coming weekend. See ya next week…

-Ken Plume

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QSE News: 2/9/2007

Filed under: Columns,News — UncaScroogeMcD @ 12:06 am

Here are today’s top entertainment headlines:

PBS and Discovery Kids have received the most nominations for this year’s Children’s Programming Emmy’s, receiving 18 and 15 nominations respectively. Not surprisingly, the two shows garnering the lion’s share of the nominations are PBS’s Here… Watch This Until Your Father Gets Home So Mommy Can Take A Nap and Discovery Kids’ Stop Crying You Little [EXPLETIVE DELETED] And Watch The Furry Animals.

Ruport Murdoch has proven, once again, that he has the “testisatchels” to take on a little controversy. Murdoch announced today that his film division, 20th Century Fox, has acquired the rights to a second Borat film. In response to the announcement, racists, misogynists and homophobes across the nation filled lawsuits against Murdoch, 20th Century Fox and Borat himself, Sacha Baron Cohen, in anticipation of the comedian “making them look like total, [EXPLETIVE DELETED] [EXPLETIVE DELETED]!”

In TV news, Mitchell Hurwitz, creator of Arrested Development, is doing a new show called The Thick of It for ABC. For the show, which is based on a sitcom from England, Hurwitz plans on using the same formula that he used on Arrested Development. The Thick of It will premier in the fall and will not be understood by the American public, leading to its cancellation in December.

Daniel Baldwin, known to many as “the other completely and utterly talent-less Baldwin,” has found himself in hot water after failing to appear in a Newport Beach court. Police issued a $25,000 bench warrant for the actor on charges of unlawfully taking a vehicle and receiving stolen property. Baldwin’s manager issued a statement that said Baldwin “can’t talk about the case at this time, but it sure is nice to finally see his name getting mentioned more than Alec’s.”

That’s all for today’s news, stay tuned to this channel for all the news that matters least but you still care about.

(Compiled by J. Allen)

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Quick Stop Thingamabobs: 2/9/2007

Filed under: Columns,Thingamabobs — UncaScroogeMcD @ 12:04 am

The web. It’s a big place, full of plenty of distractions ““ some funny, some informative, some ludicrous, some disturbing, some inane, some profound. Each and every weekday, we present links to a few of our favorite finds”¦

————————————————

Emmy Cicierega makes me laugh… (Thingamabob)

I want this. I want this so much. Somebody please buy it for me. (Thingamabob)

Learn how to ink Popeye with this 1934 Fleischer Studios inking chart, courtesy of those fine animation historians over at Cartoon Brew (Hi, Jerry!)… (Thingamabob)

This distrubs me greatly… (Thingamabob)

And because it’s Friday, let’s close out the week with some nifty pool shots… (Thingamabob)

Have a THINGAMABOB? Send it in!

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February 8, 2007

Ken P. D. Snyde-Cast #24: Little Gold Thingees

Filed under: Ken P.D. Snydecast — UncaScroogeMcD @ 3:07 am

Adult Swim’s Dana Snyder and FRED’s Ken Plume set out to have a literate conversation between two pals, but inevitably devolve into a verbal, and funny, free-for-all full of bickering, infighting, and the special kind of male bonding that comes from conflict expressed through the podcast medium.

Actor/comedian/raconteur Dana Snyder, you’re certainly aware, is Aqua Teen Hunger Force’s Master Shake, Squidbillies‘ Granny, Minoriteam’s Dr. Wang, and The Venture Bros.‘ Alchemist. Available for weddings and bar mitzvahs (bat availability pending), you can keep tabs on him via his website, www.eyeofthesnyder.com.

Ken Plume is the editor-in-chief here at FRED. He is a friend of Dana’s, as well as his arch-nemesis.

VISIT THE SNYDECAST EXPERIENCE

KEN P.D. SNYDECAST #24: Little Gold Thingees – [adult swim]’s Dana Snyder and Ken Plume’s weekly chat podcast returns with their first annual, extra special Oscar wager, wherein both Ken & Dana make an absurd bet based on their predictions of just who will win the Academy Award this year. Oh, and there’s plenty of kazoo.

[CONTENT WARNING]: This podcast may contain some foul language and horribly off-color jokes. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

DOWNLOAD: (right click to save)
Episode #24 (MP3 format)

[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/snydecast/ken_p_d_snyde_cast-24.mp3]

SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe to this Podcast via iTunes

Got something to say? E-mail Dana & Ken at the Snydecast mailbag.

CLICK HERE FOR THE SNYDECAST ARCHIVES

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The Fred Hembeck Show: Episode 90 – Vault Fred

Filed under: The Fred Hembeck Show — UncaScroogeMcD @ 2:54 am

Over at my home site, Hembeck.com, I have a sub-category on my catch all More page called “Stuff I Had NOTHING To Do With”, the general concept of which – if not the specific contents – should, I trust, be reasonably self-explanatory.

Of course, if I had nothing to do with the material contained therein, then I really don’t have any, um, RIGHT to post it, now do I? Not wanting to overstep any ethical bounds (at least, not by TOO much), I’ve tried to resist the urge to host online any but the most obscure strips, pages otherwise unlikely to ever again see the light of day.

Okay, admittedly, that description’s a bit extreme – and doesn’t quite cover some of my earlier selections – but friends, it sure does hit the nail square on the head concerning what I have to show you THIS time around!

Anybody out there besides me remember THIS?…

This 15 page story was unceremoniously chopped up into three parts and run in three consecutive early 1972 issues of the RBCC, numbers 85, 86, and 87. As I’ve mentioned here in the past, the main purpose of that once popular zine was the buying and selling of comics, and clearly, any editorial material contained within was likely included mostly to satisfy mailing regulations. The cavalier way this lost gem of a story was treated bespeaks its second class nature, at least in the context of RBCC‘s primary mission (in fact, the story’s concluding panel dates the work as being completed in 1968, meaning it sat on the shelf for an agonizingly long period of time before FINALLY seeing publication!).

What exactly IS “The Massacre of the Innocents” you might well ask ? Well, for one thing, it’s one of an unheralded trio of stories that nonetheless perhaps had the greatest impact on my own personal approach to doing comics (I plan to post the other two in due time – in for a penny, in for a pound, I’m thinking…). Back during a time when the very notion of a legitimate Spider-Man/Superman teaming seemed less likely than man walking on the moon, this cleverly constructed tale intermingled characters from both Marvel and DC, all plopped down in a lovingly rendered, richly atmospheric Eisner-like setting. Someone’s killing all the super-heroes, y’see – and though all the names have been changed (to protect the innocent, we’re told – the author!…), the art styles are strikingly familiar…

Ditko, Kirby, Boring, Sprang – they’re just a few of the cartooning immortals whose iconic styles are paid loving homage in this stirring – and in the end, moving – tribute to the costumed crimefighters of The Silver (and Marvel) Age of Comics. As big a comics geek as I was at the time (and yes, remain), there was just no way a story like this WASN’T gonna get to me! And though it was labeled an amateur effort (by the late Bruce Hamilton, who was auctioning off the pages in an ad adjacent to the stories’ very last page, something I never actually noticed until now! Guess it’s a tad too late to get my mitts on a page or six, huh?…), this was obviously the work of someone destined for great things.

Brad Caslor.

Yup, I don’t know who he is either.

Certainly, he didn’t go on to make his mark in the comics field. Happily, though, these days we have a little thing called Google, so once I typed in his name, I quickly discovered what had become of the talented gentleman who’d created “The Massacre of the Innocents” – he went into animation! (Unless, of course, there’s ANOTHER Brad Caslor that likes to draw funny pictures out there, but hey, what are the odds?…).

Fact is, there’s a swell little cartoon called Get A Job posted over at YouTube that was done by our Mr. C, and you animation buffs out there in readerland might want to go grab a peek at that as well! But before you do, take a few minutes – and this link – to zip on over to my site and read “The Massacre of the Innocents,” one of most memorable stories – and maybe the best “insider” tale of its kind ever attempted – I’ve had the privilege to read.

I love this story! I worship this story! I treasure this story! And now, I’ve just gone and completely WAY oversold this story! Pardon my passion, folks, but I’m telling you – you’ll probably enjoy this story, at least a LITTLE bit. Honest.

And if you somehow get wind of this, Mr. Caslor, I hope you’ll dig that I only want folks to share the thrill your delightful tribute afforded me, all those years ago. I calls ’em as I sees ’em, and I calls it a lost classic, case closed!

Believe me gang, when all is said and done, you’ll be just like THIS guy…

There won’t be a dry eye left in the house.

Sniff…

Hembeck com – now also featuring Hembeck! Check it out!

-Copyright 2007 Fred Hembeck

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Music For The Masses: 2/8/07

Filed under: Music for the Masses — UncaScroogeMcD @ 2:42 am

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends! We’re so glad you could attend… come inside, come inside! This week at Music for the Masses, I’m offering up a brand-spanking new podcast with the help of my “good friends” J. Allen from QSE News and M4M’s (as the “cool” kids like to call it!) own Double A. This week’s discussion focuses on, in no particular order, the latest “big band” reunion news, The Good, The Bad and The Queen, a “Cat Empire” and the various “things we wish the Teletubbies could do.” Oh yeah, and for those of you with “short bus” (read: slow) internet connections, we offer up a new installment of J.D.’s Reverb for your reading pleasure. Sound like fun? How’s about we find out?

I can’t quite put my finger on it… but something about those damn Teletubbies just makes me horny.

[CONTENT WARNING] This podcast is firmly grounded in “bad taste” and contains foul language, foolish notions regarding bass playing and the inexplicable butchering of some artist’s names. As a result of this, QuickStop offers up sincere apologies to the families of Gary Cherone, Paul Simonen and Cat Power… forgive them… they know not what they do…

DOWNLOAD: (right click to save)
Music For The Masses: Episode 3 (MP3 format) ““ 24.13 MB

REVERB… WITH J.D.

Back in 1984, the #1 song of the year according to Billboard magazine was Prince’s “When Doves Cry”. The 90^th ranked song that same year was “The Longest Time” by Billy Joel. I bring this up, of course, because these were the two artists featured at this year’s Super Bowl game. Many jokes have been made regarding the relevancy of the entertainment, but consider for a moment that a) the previous two Super Bowls featured Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones, so at least we’re 20 years closer and b) the last time the NFL opted for relevancy we got Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake”¦ and we all know how that turned out.

Anyway, I couldn’t wait to see Mr Joel’s rendition of the National Anthem”¦I mean, who at the NFL thought it would be a good idea to trot out someone recently out of rehab (second stint, I might add) to sing a hard song in front of one billion people? This had all the trappings of an historic crack-up – indeed, Adam Schefter of the NFL Network reported that Joel was puffing nervously on a cigarette right before he went on (smoking, of course, being Step One of Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-Step Program).

Luckily, though, ol’ Billy pulled it off just fine. Watching him sing, I was reminded that, in the 80’s, he also pulled off one of the all time ‘going way, WAY out of your league’ feats by marrying Christie Brinkley. Some of you youngsters may not know who Christie Brinkley is, but do the words “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Cover Girl” mean anything to you?

Please rise and, umm, remove your pants”¦

In today’s terms, Billy Joel marrying Christie Brinkley is like Pete Doherty dating Kate Moss (and by “dating” I mean “wooing with blow”)”¦excepting of course that Doherty’s main skill is not music but you know, not od’ing”¦.yet. Anyways, they’re both a couple of homely homeys who took down Supermodel Grade Betties.

Billy Joel in 1984: The most inspirational 5’5″ guy this side of Rocky Balboa

Three more notes on the National Anthem: One, did you know that the gambling website bodog.com was taking prop bets on how long it would take Joel to sing it? They put the over/under at 1:44. Now if you’re Joel, and you’ve practiced this thing 1000 times, aren’t you telling all of your buddies to bet the under?? (He came in at 1:36).

Two: I have no idea how they do it, but seeing those F16 flyovers hit right after ‘the home”¦.of the”¦.braaaaaaave’ is ALWAYS a goosebump moment.

And three, don’t you just love Marlee Matalin’s voice?

As far as the Prince halftime show goes, I’ve come across a fair number of dumb asses in the blogosphere either a) claiming that Prince hasn’t done anything good in years or b) bitching about his babooshka (say that five times fast).

Regarding point a, Prince has actually released two excellent albums in the past three years”¦.and both Musicology and 3121 were nominated for a slew of Grammys (not that Grammys equal cool, not at all. But you know”¦). And as for point b, I think it’s fair to say that Prince long ago established that he is one of the two men on earth (along with Lenny Kravitz) who can wear whatever the f**k he wants and still be Boss”¦.including a babooshka.

(So all of u Prince haters out there should keep yr comments 2 yrself & instead sit back & appreciate the Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. Or whatever.)

While Prince’s performance was typically fantastic, I was scratching my head a bit at his choice to include three cover songs (“Proud Mary”, “All Along the Watchtower”, “Best of You”) in his little medley. But then again, as my buddy Tony likes to say, sooner or later every band is going to cover Dave Matthew’s “All Along the Watchtower””¦(I love that joke).

However, it was nice to see Prince opt to flex his ridiculously sick guitar chops on most of the songs – strange as it seems, guitar skills are way down on the list of what you think of when it comes to Prince, but he’s among the best. And him singing ‘Purple Rain’ in the downpour that day? By far the best Super Bowl musical moment to date.

And finally, did you know that Prince is in need of hip replacement surgery? Seems that years of performing in 4-inch heels have done a number on him. So in retrospect, I’m sure it was a relief to everyone at CBS and the NFL that the little guy didn’t slip and blow out his hip on the rain-slickened stage that day. Just as I’m sure those same folks breathed a sigh of relief that Prince refrained from making any sexual innuendos whatsoever during his performance.

Hey, wait a second”¦

E-MAIL THE AUTHOR

UPCOMING MUSIC RELEASES… 2/13/2007…

ARITST TITLE GENRE

SOUL KID #1 Americanized ALT

OLSON, MICHAEL Where Fear and Faith N/A

PO’ GIRL Home To You N/A

CELLSKI Mr. Predicter Chapter 2 RAP

DA’UNDA’DOGG PRESENTS Da’Unda’Dogg Presents “Bay Boyz” RAP

G-DEP Bad Boy RAP

KEAK DA SNEAK On One RAP

SOUTH CENTRAL CARTEL Westurrection RAP

LUCINDA WILLIAMS West ROCK

NOTHINGTON All In ROCK

THE SOFTLIGHTES Say No To Being Cool – Say Yes To Being Happy [En. CD] ROCK

AMY STOLZENBACH On and On POP

ANTON BARBEAU In The Village Of The Apple Sun POP

BETH WATERS This Little Piggy POP

BLUETONES, The The Bluetones POP

DR. JOHN In The Night – Early Sessions Of Dr. John POP

HAGEN, NINA Fearless POP

ICEAGE COBRA Brilliant Ideas From Amazing People POP

JADE, FAINE Introspection – A Faine Jade Recital POP

REID, TERRY River POP

SEAFOOD Paper Crown King POP

SOPHE LUX Waking The Mystics POP

THE VISITORS The Visitors POP

WEBBE, SIMON Grace POP

WONDERFUL BROKEN THING Looking For Mike Lookinland POP

Thanks for tuning in! Until next time, keep wearing it proud and playing it loud!

Send the proper pronunciation of artist names, review copies, presents and assorted hate mail to:

M.C. Bell
P.O. Box 1222
Arvada, CO 80001

If I had a Cat Empire, this would be my queen…

This would be my jester…

And this… the Royal Guard… only he’d have corrective lenses… for those fucking “Budweiser Lizard eyes” of his…

E-MAIL THE AUTHOR

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PURE Indulgence

Filed under: Articles,Reviews — UncaScroogeMcD @ 2:28 am

-by David J Lieto (aka The Squeeg)

PURE Indulgence

The Holidays were a little lonely at the Squeeg household this year.Â The step-kids both started new jobs and won’t have any vacation time until next year.Â So Mrs. Squeeg decided to visit Ohio for a few days and, in true Vegas fashion, we drew for high card to see if I was to accompany her.Â (Could not believe my Eight of Clubs held up!)

While she went a-visiting, I showed some friends from Jersey what Vegas is all about.Â My guests, however, weren’t into gambling – zoinks!Â I mean, I know this city’s got a lot to offer but taking me away from gambling is like letting the air out of my wheelchair’s tires during a rain storm.Â Be-that-as-it-may, I recalled that my friends were fond of the nightlife and one of the best clubs Vegas has to offer is PURE.

PURE, located at Caesar’s Palace, is the place to go for a great time no matter what your taste might be.Â Â This is due, in part, to the design.Â There are three distinct and separate areas to the club – PUREÂ Nightclub, the Red Room, and the Terrace.Â And let’sÂ not forget the wonderful and adjacent Pussycat Doll Lounge; where one may be tantalized by the very talented and beautiful Las Vegas Pussycat Dolls.

As you enter PURE,Â you pass the entrance to the Red Room on your right.Â The Red Room is a private enclave for VIPs with a spectacular mirror-faced bar, VIP restrooms, and luxurious private booths.Â The rich red tones of the upholstered walls and dramatic drapery are contrasted by a warm champagne glow emanating from glittering chandeliers.Â This all comes together to create an unparalleled ambiance of sensual sophistication.Â The Red Room is the perfect balance between revelry and refinement.

The Terrace can be reached by taking the German-imported glass elevator or by ascending a twisting staircase designed for dramatic effect and offering great views of the main nightclub.Â Once atop the Terrace one is treated to awesome panoramic views of Sin City from four stories above The Strip.Â There’s nothing like partying up there below the stars. The TerraceÂ has its own bars, dance floor, and DJ.Â Â There are private cabanas and tables for those who love fresh air.Â The Terrace is open year round, with an ample supply of heaters on cool winter nights.

The PURE Nightclub is an astounding 36,000 square feet of uncomplicated sophistication.Â It feature three bars, oversized bed seating, and a raised VIP area which overlook the dance floor. The DJ’s selection of tunes and flawless segues brought a beat that just drew people to the dance floor.

The service at PURE was exceptional and, really, that’s the most important element to consider in my opinion.Â The bars were adequately staffed by courteous and attentive bartenders.Â As soon as I reached the bar someone was right there to see to my needs.Â There’s nothing worse than holding an empty glass and waiting for what seems an eternity to get a refill. I saw no evidence of this at PURE.Â That is because those with empty glasses received the same level of attention as those just arriving at the bar.

The bouncers were friendly and efficient.Â This is a far cry from what I was used to at the Jersey shore.Â Most of the bouncers I came across, in my clubbing days, were arrogant meatheads who were more concerned with impressing young females rather than ensuring that the patrons were having a good time. Again, this was not the case at PURE.Â The club’s bouncers handled any issues that arose in a timely manner, with a level of discretion that made their intervention unnoticed.

PURE is a fantastic club.Â I’dÂ recommend it to anyone looking to have a great time.

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QSE News: 2/8/2007

Filed under: Columns,News — UncaScroogeMcD @ 2:14 am

Here are today’s top entertainment headlines:

Prince, who is widely known for his family-friendly music videos and lyrics, caused a stir at this year’s Super Bowl as critics and internet bloggers are condemning his performance as both rude and crude. During the performance, the singer was silhouetted against a large sheet while playing his guitar that many say appeared to simulate the stroking a giant penis.Â Prince was asked for his opinion of the criticism but was unavailable as he was busy polishing his “guitar neck.”

The Smashing Pumpkins have released the name of their upcoming album ““ Zeitgeist. This album name comes as a shock to many as the album was expected to be titled “[EXPLATIVE DELETED] James Iha and D’arcy Wretzky/Who Needs Them?”

Actor Jeff Bridges has joined the already star-studded cast of the upcoming Iron Man film. In related news, Jeff’s brother, Beau Bridges, auditioned for a role in the film Iron Wang, but is still waiting for a call back.

Indiana Jones 4 has a tentative release date of My 22, 2008. While the story line is being kept a secret, insiders say that in this final installment, Indy will be looking for his lost shaker of salt.

That’s all for today’s news, stay tuned to this channel for all the news that matters least but you still care about.

(Compiled by J. Allen)

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Quick Stop Thingamabobs: 2/8/2007

Filed under: Columns,Thingamabobs — UncaScroogeMcD @ 2:02 am

The web. It’s a big place, full of plenty of distractions ““ some funny, some informative, some ludicrous, some disturbing, some inane, some profound. Each and every weekday, we present links to a few of our favorite finds”¦

————————————————

Will you be the lucky winner of McDonald’s $1,000,000 Menu Song contest? (Thingamabob)

VD is for everybody! (Thingamabob)

The 1938 Disney artist’s try-out book… (Thingamabob)

Aardman’s Purple & Brown… (Thingamabob)

It’s “Drinkin’ Time”… (Thingamabob)

Have a THINGAMABOB? Send it in!

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February 7, 2007

Take Me Home Blog #20: Enter, THE PODCAST

Filed under: Take Me Home Blog — UncaScroogeMcD @ 12:20 am

Actor/Filmmaker Sam Jaeger takes the “Take Me Home Blog” into brand new territory by introducing the miracle of SOUND! Partake of the “Take Me Home Blog Podcast”… And maybe even hear Sam play guitar… Will there be no end to miracles?

EPISODE 1: We’re well into a new year, and Sam kicks off the “Take Me Home Podcast” with an optimistic look at sports disasters, independent filmmaking, and promises of podcasts to come.

DOWNLOAD: (right click to save)
Episode #1 (MP3 format) ““ 10.45 MB

[display_podcast]

-Sam Jaeger

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February 6, 2007

QSE News: 2/7/2007

Filed under: Columns,News — UncaScroogeMcD @ 11:59 pm

Here are today’s top entertainment headlines:

In movie news, Tom Cruise is in talks to join Ben Stiller in a new movie called The Hardy Men, a send off to the Hardy Boys detective series.Â Little is known of the plot to the film, but insiders say that the film will revolve around a man (Cruise) who keeps his wife locked up in a basement and forces her to pretend he’s not bat-shit crazy.

Despite his own legal troubles surrounding the shooting death of Lana Clarkson, Phil Spector has been awarded $900,000 from a former assistant.Â Spector claimed that the assistant, Michelle Blaine, embezzled $425,000 from him and never repaid a $635,000 loan.Â When asked for comment about the case, Spector claimed that he knew he would get his money back eventually, because if he didn’t he’d have “shot the [EXPLETIVE DELETED].”

Organizers of this year’s Ozzfest have announced that tickets for the festival will be completely free.Â When asked why there would be no charge for admission, tour creator Sharon Osbourne was quoted as saying “we had to do something drastic, because no one was actually going to pay for any of this crap.”

Proving that it’s not only a place to meet underage girls, MySpace has announced that it has partnered with Film 4 and Vertigo Films to produce a full length feature film.Â The movie will be directed by an amateur filmmaker and will be found by a reality show-esque search on Myspace.Â Despite wanting to insert an unknown into the directing chair, many of the potential directors have already been featured on NBC’s “To Catch A Predator.”

That’s all for today’s news, stay tuned to this channel for all the news that matters least but you still care about.

(Compiled by J. Allen)

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Quick Stop Thingamabobs: 2/7/2007

Filed under: Columns,Thingamabobs — UncaScroogeMcD @ 11:52 pm

The web. It’s a big place, full of plenty of distractions ““ some funny, some informative, some ludicrous, some disturbing, some inane, some profound. Each and every weekday, we present links to a few of our favorite finds”¦

————————————————

You have listened to the Kevin Smith/Scott Mosier SModcast, right? (Thingamabob)

Did Budweiser rip this skit off for their Super Bowl ad? (Thingamabob)

You be the judge… (Thingamabob)

It’s magic! (Thingamabob)

Who’s that girl? (Thingamabob)

Have a THINGAMABOB? Send it in!

##

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Toy Box: Sideshow 12″ Legolas

Filed under: Columns,Toy Box — admin @ 12:31 am

Call me crazy, but I think the ladies of Sideshow are in charge of the sixth scale Lord of the Rings line. Why? Well, if the manly men were in charge the character selection might have started out a little different. Perhaps we would have seen Gimli, Gandalf, or Orc…most definitely an Arwen would have been in the early contention. But with Aragorn, Legolas, Boromir and Faramir starting things out, it’s like Middleearth as interpreted by the Chippendale dancers. Hey, I’m just saying.

But even if they are the hunks of Hobbiton (and were featured in a calendar of the same name that was quite popular in the Shire), they’re still pretty damn key to the story. And they make for some great looking sixth scale figures.

Legolas is the second figure to hit, just shipping over the last couple weeks. As usual, there’s a regular and an exclusive version, with the exclusive having not one but TWO extras this time: the Lothlorien cloak complete with elven broach, and an extra hand sculpted to hold an arrow in a stabbing pose.

Expect to pay around $55 for Legolas, at least for the time being. While the exclusive is long gone from Sideshow’s site, you can get on the wait list, or find the regular version at a number of online stores. Check my Where To Buy section for some suggestions.

If you have any comments or suggestions, just drop me a line at mwc@mwctoys.com. On to the review!

Sideshow LOTR 12″ Legolas

Packaging – ****
Once again, Sideshow pulls out all the stops. While all their packages are great, the work on the Star Wars and LOTR lines is exceptional. Plenty of photos, lots of text on both the general story line and specifics on Legolas’ background, and a beautiful presentation using a die cut flap on the front all add up to a great box.

And yes, it’s collector friendly too. You can take Legolas out, play around with him, display him, and put him back some day for storage or sale if you so desire.

My one complaint is the velcro closures on the flaps. Yep, I’ve been spoiled by the magnetic closures on the Star Wars boxes, and these are simply not as good. The top two velcro ‘dots’ pulled free from the box almost immediately, and that’s a fairly common problem. Still, you got to give them credit for producing some truly beautiful packages.

Sculpting – ***1/2
The sculpt is from Andy Bergholtz, one of Sideshow’s best sculptors. He’s since moved over to work exclusively for DC Direct, and I for one will miss his work on the sixth scale and Premium Format lines.

This is some of his best work, which is saying quite a bit. Orlando Bloom as Legolas has been a consistently difficult likeness for companies to capture. Toybiz tried a number of times, including a sixth scale version, but never quite pulled off the perfect version. Weta tried as well with the Legolas bust, and I thought it was, well, weak. And you thought I was going to say “a bust”, didn’t you? Even NECA tried in the quarter scale figure line, and it was not the success their earlier Aragorn was.

I’m going to lay down the claim that this is the best version we’ve gotten so far in any scale, and any format. That’s not to say he’s not without any issues, and he is a bit harder looking than in the films, especially Fellowship when Bloom was still quite young. If you look at him straight on, his ears do appear pushed out to far from his head, and the chin is slightly large. He also has a thin mold line across the top of his head, something that bugs me particularly at this price point and expectation level. While this might sound like a lot of problems – ears, chin, age – each is very minor, and the overall effect is not as great as I’d imagined. You do have to assume this Legolas is an older version than you’re used to though, which might be tough for some fans.

The regular version also has four hand sculpts, each with a slightly different positioning of the fingers and thumbs. These are all designed to hold the weapons though, and there are no open hand poses.

Paint – ****
When Sideshow has production problems with the paint on their figures, I’m one that always complains. No matter how good the sculpt is, if you don’t back it up with amazing paint ops, you’ll disappoint the buyers. And the poor sculptors.

This time, the paint work is excellent. First, there’s no slop what so ever. The hair line is perfect, the eyes are clean and straight, the lips are just the right shade, and the skin has just enough shading to add to the angular lines of the sculpt without becoming too obvious.

Some folks may think Legolas is a little too tan, but I think that works better in this scale than light skin. Even if he is paler in the movie, pale skin in this smaller scale tends to look cheap and unrealistic.

I’d also like to thank them for not putting any dark paint in the nostrils. That’s been a common thing lately for Gentle Giant with their mini-busts, and I really don’t like it. Here you can see that it’s not necessary to add that dark color to get the right amount of shadow.

Articulation – ***
The bulky tunic helps the underlying body here quite a bit, at least in terms of appearance. But the leggings simply can’t hide those skinny legs. Now, I realize that Orlando Bloom isn’t Ahnold, but he’s not Kermit either.

The body does have all the articulation you’ve come to expect, with the exception of a good ball jointed neck. They really do need to improve this joint, if they expect to give us a body that rivals companies like Hot Toys or Medicom.

The future of sixth scale bodies is NOT in more articulation though. Given all the standard joints (including a good ball jointed neck), and you have the expected body that will keep you even with the competition, but not give you the advantage. The advantage is going to come from developing the best body in terms of how that body ‘hangs’.

You can have the exact same number of joints, but the better designed joints hang and pose more naturally. And it’s this natural appearance that will be the next big advancement in the market. Hot Toys, Medicom and Takara are working hard in this area, and have made some great strides. They have some work still to go, but Sideshow needs to begin pushing the envelope in this area to bring them up to the competition, and then hopefully take them to the next level.

Outfit – ***1/2
The outfit starts out with the nifty well made leggings, which fit tightly. Unfortunately, a tight fit does tend to mean that the appearance of the skinny Sideshow legs is highlighted.

The shirt is made from a silk-like material, and is extremely well tailored. It has to be to fit well under the tunic, and not make the overall figure look too fat. The tunic, made from a very thin suede, is a bit poofy, but it’s not the fault of the shirt.

The tunic has high quality snaps in front, and a great combination of light and dark colors. It’s not quite as tight of a fit as I’d like, but that’s a minor nit. It’s held tight at the waist with a thin leather belt, that has a plastic sculpted buckle and imprinted pattern.

The boot and gauntlet sculpts look terrific, especially the boots. Sideshow has done some amazing boot sculpts in both the LOTR and Sideshow lines, and this pair does not disappointment. The intricate details are highlighted with some nice paint work on the silver designs.

The right gauntlet is sculpted to hang down slightly over the right hand. This looks terrific. The left gauntlet is sculpted tighter at the wrist so that it can’t reach down onto the hand. This is another minor nit, but the difference in appearance bugs me. I’m not sure that it’s inaccurate from the films, but in person it looks odd to me.

The Lothlorien cloak is perhaps my favorite cloak of the LOTR and Star Wars lines so far. It’s made from very thin cloth, and includes the thin wire in the hood for posing. The tailoring is excellent, and the hood poses well both on the shoulders and over the head. The big problem is the cheap looking elven brooch, which stands out against the green cloth. It’s not the quality of sculpt or paint detail that you’d expect, and is perhaps the one real disappointment here.

Accessories – ****
The figure comes with the standard base, emblazoned with the LOTR emblem. But you’ll be happy to know, if you’re like me, that the stand isn’t necessary to keep him standing in poses.

The exclusive version comes with three hands, while the regular comes with two. These are sculpted in various finger/thumb poses, and are designed to hold the various weapons. They come off and go on easily, but the posts are long enough and tight enough to avoid the problems with them falling off with basic posing.

The exclusive hand is designed to hold a single arrow in a stabbing pose, similar to what he did in the films. It’s a good sculpt, and looks quite a bit better in practice than I expected, but it’s probably not going to be the key pose for most folks.

Legolas needs weapons of course, and he has his standard ones here. There’s a nicely scaled bow, with five individual arrows. There’s also his pair of elven knives, which are done in a rather unique way.

There’s a pair that are full size, and there’s a pair of cut off knives, that are really just handles with stubs. These are designed to fit in the scabbards, and look good doing it. By doing this, they could make the scabbards and swords look terrific on his back, and yet give him a pair to hold as well. They aren’t quite perfect though, as they are scaled a little too small, and the handles are the incorrect silver color. Still, the sculpt detail is good, and the pair fitted into the back of his pack look great.

Speaking of the quiver, it fits nicely on his back either with or without the cloak. The pleater straps fit over his left shoulder, with the single strap running around his body under his right arm and attaching to the quiver again on his back. There’s a small hook at the base of the quiver on the right side, and there’s a small hole punched in the single strap. Attach the quiver there, and it will look just like it does on the box.

The bow and arrows are better scaled, with the exception of the string. It’s quite thin, and much smaller than it would be in reality in proportion to his hands and body. Still, it has enough bend to it to work with some interesting ‘aiming’ poses, and is affixed tightly to both end of the bow.

The arrows fit easily in the quiver, and the actually look great threaded on the bow. Each has the small notch With the various hand sculpts, you can get some terrific poses with the bow and arrows.

Fun Factor – **1/2
These figures aren’t really designed to be toys, so a lower fun factor should be no surprise. Small parts like the belts and straps aren’t going to hold up to normal play, and these are designed to look great on the shelf, not the sandbox.

Value – ***
Most of the other LOTR figures coming out from Sideshow are $65. I’m not sure why Legolas managed to come in ten bucks cheaper, but he’s an excellent value. On top of just running $55 at the official site, the regular version can be hand for as little as $47 at many online stores. Considering the number of accessories and the quality of the outfit, that’s an excellent value, and could very well be worth another half star in this category.

Things to Watch Out For –
I’ve already gone over how to attach the sling on his back, but be mighty careful doing it. That itty bitty hole and small hook can easily get damaged. Other than that, this is a very sturdy figure for the level of detail and quality.

Overall – ***1/2
I had some issues with Aragorn’s sculpt and paint, issues that were largely due to manufacturing problems. It didn’t help that his leather jacket didn’t come out as well as the prototype, or his hair looked a bit like tootsie rolls. Still, he was a better figure in person than most photos made him appear.

Legolas is a big step up from Aragorn. The excellent head sculpt is improved, not hurt, by the paint work, and there doesn’t appear to be any of the manufacturing quality issues. The costume and accessories have a few minor nits that hold him back from a perfect score – and I’ll keep harping on joint improvements – but if Faramir and Boromir are this good, fans are going to be mighty pleased.

This line doesn’t seem to be selling as well as the Star Wars line, nor as well as you might expect a license like this to do. The exclusive Legolas was a run of just 1750, and the regular edition is just 3500. I’m betting that this is a line that collectors will be kicking themselves over in a few years, especially if the quality stays like this.

Where to Buy –
You’re going to most likely look to the online stores to pick this guy up, unless you want to pay inflated toy show prices:

– Sideshow still has regular Boromir ( ) and the regular Legolas ( ) available, or you can get on the wait list for the exclusives.

– CornerStoreComics has Legolas at $46.74, which is a steal for this figure.

– Amazing Toyz matches that terrific price of $46.74!

– and not to be outdone, Alter Ego Comics also has him at $46.74.

– at only a penny more, you can pick him up for $46.75 at Fireside Collectibles.

– Dark Shadow Collectibles also has him at $46.75, in stock.

– Dark Figures has him for just $49.99.

– and for those of you in the U.K., Forbidden Planet has him on sale at 35 pounds.

Related Links:
I’ve had a share of Legolas reviews, as well as other Sideshow LOTR reviews:

– first, check out the sixth scale Aragorn and Premium Format Lurtz from Sideshow.

– Dragons in Dreams did a version of Legolas in this scale as well. Some of the costume or accessories from that figure would do well with this Sideshow version.

– Toybiz also did a nice rotocast 10″ version, that was very well done for the price point. They also did several 6″ scale versions, including this very early one, and a Two Towers style. I also reviewed their 12″ version over at the old Movie Poop Shoot.

– And if you like you’re Legolas cute and tiny, check out the Mini-mates version.

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Party Favors: Jackie Earle Haley Appreciation Society

Filed under: Columns,Joe Corey's Party Favors — UncaScroogeMcD @ 12:28 am

CHICO, CA – He did it! The Great Jackie Earle Haley is now Oscar nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

When his name was announced, I felt a joyful rush. I’ve had acquaintances get nominated for Oscars and not been that elated. I would have cried, but my tears are reserved for Dick Clark’s funeral.

On the big board, behind Salma Hayek, was Jackie Earle Haley’s face. Luckily his name was called early so there was no gritting of teeth for the final name. This column has been spreading Oscar buzz back in October when Little Children ran at Toronto. And the buzz wasn’t merely marketing hype. Jackie Earle Haley had the goods.

What are the odds of him beating the Eddie Murphy juggernaut? It could be very good. Eddie has pissed off a lot people in Tinseltown. He’s notorious for being a pain on the set. Where do you think Martin Lawrence learned how to be a soundstage diva? On top of it, the airwaves are flooded with ads for Norbit. It’s another unfunny Eddie Murphy movie with him in a fat suit. A few years ago, Bill Murray had his Lost In Translation nomination derailed thanks to his voice being abused in Garfield. Murphy could suffer the Garfield Effect.

There’s also hope that Peter O’Toole and Kate Winslet might be walking up the stairs. Plus Jennifer Hudson grousing about American Idol might backfire. The Academy Awards can’t afford to be seen as the victory lap for the usual winners. Are viewers going to stick around to see the same folks that collected hardware at the Golden Globes and the SAG awards? Expect to see “upsets.” Jackie’s best bet is that he gets Jim Broadbent action – since Jim won the Best Supporting Actor award for his work in Iris, a film starring Kate Winslet.

The cool thing about Jackie Earle Haley is that he didn’t end up having to launch his comeback by appearing on Celebrity Justice or The Surreal Life. He didn’t have to embarrass himself in order to get back in the spotlight. He was able to land serious acting gigs. I can’t wait to see him take on Joan Rivers. Although best would be if he beats the crap out of Ryan Seacrest on the Red Carpet. He’d win the Presidential Medal of Freedom for popping American Idol boy. Or at least Angelina Jolie’s undying love.

LITTLE MISS BOOZE

Do you know what I call a 20 year old girl that likes to get drunk, takes a sniff or two of cocaine and sucks face with hot girls? A sophomore in college.

Are we really supposed to get a message out of Tara Connor’s new sober ways? After seeing her fresh out of rehab on every TV channel, here’s my message to her: We don’t care. The only reason a vast majority of America knows about you was because you came off as Tara Reid’s less skanky, but still slutty younger sister. But now that you’re all clean and sober, you bore the crap out of us. You can now vamoose like nearly every other woman that has won Miss USA.

High profile rehab centers have invented a 13th step that declares, “You must appear on every major talk show to promote your new life.” Who didn’t watch her tell-all interview on The Insider and begged for Pat O’Brien to lapse into his voicemail rant?

I do hope that rehab didn’t make her want to stop humping Miss Teen USA. America needs to know that girl-girl action doesn’t always involve Rosie O’Donnell. We need to dream that those pictorials in Penthouse had a basis in reality. If Miss America and Miss Teen USA aren’t getting nasty, then the terrorists have won.

WORST MOTHER OF THE MONTH

Dina Lohan has lowered the bar for bad motherhood with her recent antics. While her daughter Lindsay is in rehab, Dina has turned the spotlight onto herself. Instead of making Lindsay’s recovery a private family matter, she made an exclusive deal to have a reporter and camera crew record her motherly plight. Nothing was more pathetic than her rushing from New York to Hollywood to reunite with her troubled daughter as an exclusive for a certain infotainment show.

Dina has the nerve to complain about the photographers hounding her meeting with Lindsay at a ritzy store. She despises how the media dares to exploit her daughter. Yet there she is turning home movies into an easy profit source. Is she just upset that the paparazzi have hounded in on her exclusive moment?

Dina is just a step above the mother who sells her daughter’s panties to Japanese businessmen. But Dina might be willing to stoop if the price is right.

NO MORE EXTREME ACTION?

While I was wandering around on the Raleigh location of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, I overheard a rumor that the show has only one more season before ABC-Disney gives it the axe.

Pretty much Ty Pennington will be putting down the megaphone after the 2007-08 season, according to the water cooler chatter. Why? The show still pulls in good ratings. People still love to come out and see the houses being built by volunteers. But the suits at the Mouse network are upset that it’s not really their property – even though each episode promotes various Disney properties. The Rat must be fed.

Write the network and complain now.

GATES TV

Why is the press drooling over Bill Gates’ vision of television five years from now? While the internet has already changed how people watch TV, his examples are rather clueless.

Gates declares that TV is terrible when it comes to the Olympics. Why? Because it has fixed times for the various events being broadcast. He envisions a split signal that will allow people to just watch their favorite events at the proper time. But it can’t go down that way. Why?

Because NBC is paying billions of dollars to run the Olympics in America. They need top dollar for commercials. And they won’t get top dollar if they splinter-cast the various events through the internet. They don’t want you to merely watch your sport. They want you to watch the show. If you really gave a crap about certain events, wouldn’t you just go see the Olympics in person? NBC has to run women’s gymnastics in prime time cause that’s where the money is at.

“Internet presentation of these things is vastly superior,” declares Bill. Really? Who is footing the bill for all this content? The networks and cable channels barely want to pay anyone for content right now. NBC pays billions to the NFL, but they’ve decided sound guys are unnecessary for news reporters. It’s just going to turn into the Al Franken SNL joke where he had the camera attached to him along with the Sat dish. The big question is who will be paying his expenses to collect the truth? Even though Mark Cuban has hired an investigative business reporter, the stories are tilted to giving Cuban stock tips. Of course media news is now being used as corporate football. Did you notice how Fox News and the Boston Herald (owned by Rupes) went after Ted Turner for the Cartoon Network’s publicity stunt that went bad? Ted doesn’t own the Cartoon Network anymore. But that didn’t stop Rupert Murdoch’s minions perform an around the clock character assassination. Heaven forbid a news organization check their facts.

The biggest problem with the narrowcasting vision of Bill Gates is that viewers are allowed to avoid being informed about the outside world. “You have to wait for the guy to talk about the thing you care about,” Gates says. Maybe while waiting, a person has to listen to something they don’t know about to hear something that needs to be heard. Bill and his buddy Bono keep going on about Africa. But under Bill’s vision of tomorrow, I can exist in an information world where I don’t have to know a damn thing about Africa. Dafur for all I care is another specialty cup served at Starbucks. And who is going to tell me differently in Bill Gates’ Five Years into the Future?

What regular TV offers us is the ability to stumble across stuff. We are a society that loves to flip channels. But if we have to pay for each channel we click, are you really going to be that adventurous? We don’t want to think that hard to be entertained. I’ve a wall full DVDs, but I’d rather not have to get up, decide on a title, open the box, load the DVD player, wait for the “don’t download movies” crap, and finally click on the movie. I’d prefer to channel surf to Green Acres.

Leave it to a billionaire to tell us how we should watch TV. When is the last time Bill sat down and watched HBO’s Cathouse: The Series on his 110 inch flat screen plasma TV? Isn’t this guy too busy saving the world with his foundation and figuring out ways to give you more Blue Screens of Death on your PCs to watch Charlie’s Angels and Gilligan’s Island? Go save the world, Bill. I’ll keep the sofa warm.

MORE CATHOUSE!

Cathouse, my favorite reality show, returns to HBO this Friday (Feb. 10). Get a sense of what it’s like to hang around a legal Nevada brothel with the lovely ladies as they service their customers. It’ll also be on the HBO OnDemand channel so you can watch it whenever you get the urge.

We’re hoping to get a few questions answered from Shelly Dushell in an upcoming column. She had told me earlier that while she’s now working at the Wildhorse Rance, she was at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch during the recent tapings.

The highlight of the show will be the return of Isabella Soprano, America’s Sweetwhore. After the first series aired, Isabella become a sensation as an internet fetish model. She knows her way around a ball gag. The things they do to her with a water hose would melt a fireman. She even made a guest appearance on Seymore Butts’ Family Business series on Showtime. Even when she’s strapped down to a bed with various mechanical devices working her private parts, she still has that true girl next door appeal. She’s like an extra sexy graduate assistant teacher.Â I want help refine her oral thesis. For those curious about the tattoo on her back, it reads, “Dream out loud.” And I’ve got a couple dreams involving her – although most of them end with my wife opening up the credit card bill and wondering what cost $13,000 in Nevada?

The amazing part about Cathouse is that if you really want to meet the “stars,” you can fly out to Reno and book time. This isn’t like The Girls Next Door where Hef teases you from behind the Playboy Mansion gates with his ladies. Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof is eager to welcome you into his life – as long you can pay in advance and be nice to the ladies.VERN IS YELLOW!

The “find the sticks of fake dynamite with the Party Favors logo in Boston” promotion has been canceled because I don’t want to be butt raped in jail by Vern Schillinger.

Here’s a strange piece of trivia, did you know that Vern Schillinger from Oz is the voice of the Yellow M&M? Yes, America’s favorite leader of the Arayan Brotherhood (played by actor J.K. Simmons) is our beloved candy icon. Can you imagine what’s been done to the Red M&M after all these years? Did Vern burn a swastika into the Red M&M’s butt like he did Tobias? Are red M&Ms the candy of choice for cellblock bitches?

The weird thing is that on an early episode of Oz, Vern experienced a chocolate coating. Simmons was able to connect the two roles on the gym floor.

An extra creepy moment is when Bill Fagerbakke arrived at Oz to play an Arayan prison guard. He’s the voice of Patrick on Spongebob Squarepants. If you close your eyes, it’s the Yellow M&M and Patrick the starfish talking about white power. Forget all the buzz about Harry Potter getting naked and nasty with horses on stage. Here’s two childhood icons that took on very daring roles and I’m scarred for it.

IS SHE FUNNY YET?

Has it really been 4 1/2 years since Jimmy Kimmel hooked up with Sarah Silverman? Some view this “power couple” as the comedy version of John and Yoko. I prefer to think of them as a super group featuring Yoko and Linda McCartney.

PRESIDENTIAL POOP

President Brownback? Come on. That sounds like character in a German fetish video. Does this guy really expect to run for president when his name sounds like a UPS slogan? Damn shame he can’t name Scatman Crothers as his Vice President. I’d put a “Brownback & Scatman ’08” bumpersticker on my Yugo.

And Gov. Huckabee is doomed because I Heart Huckabees put me to sleep. If people ignored the film, why are they going to care about the live act? Likewise, I’d never vote for Sen. Jurassic Park III.

And what is Gov. Pataki waiting for? Can’t you hear the corn growing? Can’t bother to run until you discover all the secrets of Lost?

With only two more years before the real presidential election, I’m already sick of these people and their hats in the ring. These goofs will mouth off about people taking advantage of welfare programs, but they’re the biggest welfare moochers in Americas. They need to con hundreds of millions of dollars from us for their campaigns. The winning candidate needs $100 million to win a job that pays $300K. It’s disgusting. Do we allow aspiring pizza delivery boys the right to raise millions so they can land a gig at the Pizza Transit Authority?

And I’m sick of Iowa and their caucuses. For three years out of the year, we only care about Iowa if they can beat the spread when Michigan stomps them. But for the next year, all we’ll see on TV is Sen. John McCain standing in a corn field. Whoopie.

Here’s a scoop: Saudi Arabia is in the process of building an ethanol plant on their soil. Why? Where does Saudi Arabia grow their corn?

And why is “Al Franken Considers Run For Minnesota Senate Seat” considered a new story? They made a two hour movie about his positioning for the job. Unless Franken puts his name on the ballot – it’s a non-story. You want an exclusive, I’m thinking about having an affair with Angelina Jolie. Put that on the cover of the New York Times. Or maybe Weekly World News.

LET’S GO COVERING

Why did Prince have to cover the Foo Fighters during the Super Bowl? I mean, here’s Prince and he’s doing covers of Hendrix and Ike and Tina Turner at halftime. And the Foo Fighters? Why no Sublime tribute? At least they didn’t try to force My Chemical Romance onto the bill. It was a great mini-show, but somehow it would have been nice if Prince had played something newer of his own than 23 year old material from Purple Rain.

It is amazing how he doesn’t completely come off as a nostalgia act. If the 1984 Super Bowl had Frankie Avalon, we’d think they were behind the times. Well at least they chose an American act this year instead of their First wave British invasion acts. Herman’s Hermits must have booked for a cockfight.

WHERE’S THE DVD?

When is The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh coming out on DVD? With all the talk about Pittsburgh getting a new arena for Mario and the Penguins, it’s hard to think of them trashing the old arena. It’s cinema history for the shot of the balloon with Dr. J in the basket floating down through the opening in the Mellon Arena’s retractable roof. If Orca and Gymkata can get released, then it’s time for the greatest basketball film to get shiny disc love. Plus it’s time for a James Bond III revival.

Gymkata is this month’s must see DVD. Director Robert Clouse helped define Bruce Lee when he directed Enter the Dragon. A decade later he was given the weirdest task in filmmaking – transform a male gymnastics star into an international action hero. And don’t play it for laughs. Kurt Thomas, the diminutive star who missed his chance to shine in the boycotted 1980 Moscow Olympics, is sent on a secret mission to a small Eastern European country. He has to win a brutal competition in order to get the US a site for a defense project. Instead of being buried under secret gadgets, Thomas has to use a mixture of gymnastics and karate against the opposition. And thus the world was introduced to Gymkata.

The greatest moment in the movie is when Thomas uses a town monument to score a perfect 10 in the Pummeling Horse. This film is pure unintended hilarity. It’s like a pilot for a show to follow Sledge Hammer. Shockingly enough, there would be no Gymkata 2: Vault of Death.

If you have a bottle of Jack Daniels, you need to watch this film as part of Really Dumb Action movie night. This would be the perfect double bill with John Cena’s The Marine. Did anyone else laugh during the film when they kept claiming Australian countryside was really South Carolina? I kept waiting for them to have Kangaroo-shaped possums.

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QSE News: 2/6/2007

Filed under: Columns,News — UncaScroogeMcD @ 12:09 am

Here are today’s top entertainment headlines:

Rick Rubin, the man behind the most recent and crappiest The Cure album, has been offered a job as co-chairman of Columbia Records. Rubin has yet to commit to the job but has told friends and family that he looks forward to ruining albums for a whole new group of artists.

In legal news, singer Whitney Houston has asked a judge to speed up her divorce proceedings from fellow singer Bobby Brown.Â Whitney’s prerogative is to have divorce end quickly so that she can ascertain exactly how much money she will need to give “that mother-[EXPLETIVE DELETED] deadbeat.” Custody of the couple’s children and crack has yet to be decided.

It appears that Steve Jobs and the Beatles have settled their long-simmering battle over the “Apple” brand name. According to sources close to situation, Jobs and ex-Beatle, Paul McCartney, settled their dispute in a back room where both men threw their gigantic bank accounts on the table to see “whose was bigger.”Â After news of the deal hit, Heather Mills was overheard saying that she is “totally going to marry that Steve guy.”

In a case of life imitating art, Granville Adams, who appeared in the hit HBO series, Oz, was arrested Sunday night after allegedly pushing a man into an elevator shaft.Â The man, Orlando Vale, later died of his injuries. Adams agent released a statement stating the actor is looking forward to his new role as “bitch” and is excited for the opportunity to stretch his acting skills while practicing his “Doesn’t Hurt face” for his upcoming love scenes.

Justin Timberlake has been tapped to host this year’s Kid Choice Awards. Timberlake, known for songs such as “Future Sex/Love Sound” and “Rock Your Body,” hopes to entertain the awards show attendees with suggestive lyrics, sultry dances and several crotch grabs.

That’s all for today’s news, stay tuned to this channel for all the news that matters least but you still care about.

(Compiled by J. Allen)

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Quick Stop Thingamabobs: 2/6/2007

Filed under: Columns,Thingamabobs — UncaScroogeMcD @ 12:08 am

The web. It’s a big place, full of plenty of distractions ““ some funny, some informative, some ludicrous, some disturbing, some inane, some profound. Each and every weekday, we present links to a few of our favorite finds”¦

————————————————

You – yes, YOU! – can be just as fashion fabulous as Brenda Dickson! (Thingamabob)

And after you see that, you know you want watch the second half of Ms. Dickson’s delusional video… (Thingamabob)

Come home to the best – only on NBC! (Thingamabob)

You got the touch… (Thingamabob)

It’s the Banana Man… (Thingamabob)

Have a THINGAMABOB? Send it in!

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February 5, 2007

Interview: Tad Stones

Filed under: Interviews — UncaScroogeMcD @ 6:07 am

-by Ken Plume

In a tenure lasting over 25 years and beginning in the transition from the Nine Old Men to young turks that included fellow artists like John Lasseter and Glen Keane, Tad Stones made his mark not in the Disney Company’s fabled feature animation department, but in its burgeoning TV Animation division.

Stones was one of the chief architects of the “Disney Afternoon” period of classics, including creating the much-loved Darkwing Duck. He went on to play a role – as both writer and producer – in shows such as Aladdin, Hercules, Buzz Lightyear, and Atlantis. Since leaving Disney, he’s produced The Adventures of Brer Rabbit for Universal.

In addition to that rather hefty line of accomplishment, he’s now the producer for the new line of direct-to-DVD Hellboy: Animated films, which kicks off with the just released Sword of Storms. Reuniting nearly the entire cast of Guillermo del Toro’s live action film (including Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, and John Hurt) and working closely with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, these films promise to be an exciting new chapter in the history of everyone’s favorite big red devil. You can even visit Stones’ online Hellboy production blog HERE.

I got a chance to chat with Tad about what it was like putting these films together (including the upcoming Blood & Iron), working with Mignola, his Disney past, and a few other odds and ends…

KEN PLUME: Is this Tad?

TAD STONES: Yes it is.

KP: Hey, this is Ken Plume from Quick Stop…

STONES: Hey! And I just stubbed my toe, so I’ll be in pain… Give you that extra edge…

KP: That’s good. Well, hopefully it’ll make up for what I’m sure will be a completely banal line of questioning…

STONES: Exactly…

KP: That you’ve heard thousands of times before.

STONES: Only in the last three weeks, I’m sure.

KP: Apologies for not being able to call you earlier…

STONES: No, that’s fine. Actually it turned out I was at a recording session for the whole first part of the morning.

KP: Oh, so it worked out.

STONES: Yeah. And then I was supposed to have an interview and I realized I must have made the time zone mistake. The guy goes, “Well, we’ll try to reschedule, sorry.” And it’s like, “I’m not supposed to talk to you until hours from now!” Oops!

KP: You’re certainly banging the drum in any way you can to get the word out about this Hellboy release…

STONES: Definitely. And shameless. People don’t get it. I don’t get a cut of the movie – It’s just that I want to make a lot more of these. It’s just so much fun and so cool, and the only way to do that is to get people to buy that first one.

KP: I noticed that you have an online journal that you’ve been keeping during production…

STONES: Yes. All the good stuff is earlier in the archives, though. It’s kinda like, once the movie’s done, it’s a lot of whining and complaining about, “Why aren’t people buying this?” “Because it’s not on sale yet.” I feel honored in that my composer Christopher Drake sent me an email to say we’re nominated for the “Rondo Hatten Horror Movies Awards.” It’s just like, “Ooh, I didn’t know that there was an award named after Rondo Hatten.”

KP: You know, if you can get the Hatten Award, then that’s got to be center on your mantelpiece….

STONES: Yeah, exactly. Definitely. Unfortunately, we’re up against Battlestar Galactica, so somehow I’m thinking…

KP: Yeah, but come on – if the Hattens know what’s good for them…

STONES: (laughs) Exactly.

KP: Then they know what they need to pick. Anyone can choose Galactica.

STONES: Exactly.

KP: They need to go with the quality choice, not the quantity.

STONES: That’s what I’m thinking.

KP: I’m wondering – is it an oversized award?

STONES: No, it looks like… about the size of an open fist.

KP: I would think the Rondo Hatten award would have to be at least somewhat larger than the average award…

STONES: Yes. Well, the nose alone, I think…

KP: It has quite a stunning profile up on the shelf.

STONES: Yes. (laughs)

KP: My first question would have to be when your first exposure to the Hellboy material was…

STONES: Well, you know, I was a comic fan, so I had been collecting a lot of Mike’s work even before I knew who Mike Mignola was. Certainly at Cosmic Odyssey, that he did for DC, is when he really started, I think, stepping onto the style path that he’s continued ever since, of exaggerating action – of simplification just in general – and just his storytelling started changing. So when Hellboy was announced, I was one of those people waiting for it. So, I was there from the very beginning. In fact, I pitched it at Disney Studios as a prime time show, because they were asking for new and different ideas about 12 years ago. I did a little Adobe Premier presentation, and I only had “Wake the Devil”, “Seed of Destruction” and “The Corpse” to choose from. I didn’t have any more visuals than that. So, early on there, I was already pitching the idea.

KP: Were you actually pitching it as an adaptation of his visual style, as well?

STONES: At the time, X-Files was huge. It was at its peak. This was 1994, I guess… ’93, ’94. And Bruce Timm had proved – along with Alan Burnett and Paul Dini and Eric Radomski and his whole gang – that animation didn’t have to be just morality tales for tweens. Animation could do some cool drama with The New Adventures of Batman. So my pitch was that this was the animated X-Files. It pretty much would have been the tales of the BPRD. (laughs) They never picked it up, so who knows what it would have become, because I certainly wanted to keep the folklore aspects and everything that was Hellboy. But the pitch was basically an animated X-Files. And they were looking for something more akin to, say… oh, I don’t know – The Simpsons…

KP: So, in other words, if you’d just put a couple more jokes in it…

STONES: Well, like I said in other places, thank god they didn’t take it or we might be dealing with Heckboy or having Hellboy in the Fantasyland castle posing with Tigger and Pooh. I don’t think the world’s ready for that.

KP: No. Or you can have a little BPRD section of Disneyland. Although they’d probably stick it in California Adventure.

STONES: That would probably be a whole different take on the Haunted Mansion.

KP: Yeah, like the Nightmare Before Christmas redress for the holidays…

STONES: Exactly. You just have agents there blowing the heads off some of the existing ghosts.

KP: Works for me.

STONES: Anyway, so it didn’t go there. But as a fan, I went way back right to the beginning – the very first publication, I guess, was in a San Diego Comic-Con handbook, but the first thing I saw was the few pages Mike did in the center of the Next Men, by John Byrne.

KP: How would you describe the creative boundaries of Disney TV animation at that time? You were able to accomplish quite a lot within that “Disney Afternoon” block that was unprecedented as far as Disney material was concerned…

STONES: Well, way back when on the Disney afternoon, we were kind of masters of our own destiny. We didn’t realize how good we had it. Although we had to answer to our boss, Gary Krisel, pretty much any show that we could sell to Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner got put on the air. We didn’t have to deal with the network in any of that. And I doubt that those early shows would have been as solid if we had been doing it with a normal network, because they would have been more gag oriented or there’d be no continuity. Where some of those shows really banked on that. It was just a different style of storytelling, I think. Especially when you get into something like Gargoyles. Arguably, it could have been too complex, but the point is working that, with a normal network situation, I don’t think that would have happened. It was just a special time in syndicated history. And then Fox started up their own network and that shifted things, and then as soon as cable got into cartoons, it’s a kind of golden age for animation in that it’s everywhere. But the problem is no one place makes a huge amount of money, so it’s hard to fund projects and things like that. So anyway, on Disney Afternoon, we were kind of left on our own, other than internal notes. We still have such a large fanbase… In fact, those fans are starting to have kids…

KP: Is there anything that surprises you, to this day, that you were able to get away with?

STONES: Not really. Because with the Disney Afternoon, we were still at Disney. So you just gear your thinking “G-rated.”

KP: Right. But I can’t imagine a show like Darkwing Duck getting launched today within Disney.

STONES: Yeah, just because they’re oriented to a whole…I don’t even think they’ve got funny animal programs outside of Mickey, Donald and Goofy. Just that kind of Carl Barks/Donald Duck tradition. A lot of us loved that stuff, and so that oriented toward thinking of, “Hey, you can tell any kind of story with these characters.” And now it’s just a whole different mindset, as to what they’re looking for. And not just at Disney, I think in all the networks you don’t see the same kind of shows. Darkwing Duck was my salute to the silver age of DC comics. You know – Julie Schwartz would just do those crazy covers of kryptonite stories of Superman turning fat or bald or old or something like that, and Darkwing had that same kind of silliness. It was back before the days of continuity, so Darkwing had, like, four origins at least that we animated. And we would have had more, had it gone on longer.

KP: I remember hearing the voice tracks for “Justice Ducks,” and being blown away, as a comic book fan, that this was being done for TV animation. And by Disney! That sense of superhero fun hadn’t been done at that point…

STONES: Basically, back then – especially with Darkwing – you had a lot of oversight at the very beginning when you’re creating the show, when you’re pitching the show, and then around the third script they all back away and start picking on other people. And then the scrutiny returns when you start getting animation back. So, in between times, I could pretty much come to work and say, “You know what? I’m thinking of an episode with mafia penguins.” Today it would be, “Let’s do the The Departed, but we’re doing them with penguins and Darkwing’s going to infiltrate this gang of penguins, and one of the penguins is going to come and masquerade as Darkwing Duck,” or something. You know, whatever the idea, whatever the notion is, there is no one to say no. It was like, “Okay, let’s make that funny.”

KP: I remember, to my young mind, I was thrilled with the idea that here was legitimately a spin-off series that was in the same universe as DuckTales, and piecing that together…

STONES: You know what? I never worried about that. I mean, by definition he was a spin-off because Launchpad was in both…

KP: And Gizmo Duck…

STONES: Yeah, and that really came more from the origin of the show than it came from… well, certainly Darkwing has nothing of the Carl Barks sensibility, or the DuckTales sensibility, which I feel is very different than the Carl Barks stuff. The notion started out as an episode called “Double 0 Ducks,” which was just Launchpad as a James Bond parody. And Jeffrey Katzenberg just loved the name, and asked me to develop a show, and I just felt, “Spy parody? We’re, like, 10 years too late.” This was before Austin Powers.

KP: “And we just did that episode.”

STONES: Yeah. (laughs) Well, I mean, it was done in DuckTales, and he was just saying, “Spin it off as a show.” I pitched something, and I just felt it had no sense of family to it, there were no strong relationships, it was just parody. I presented it, and he said, “You know, there’s no sense of family to it, there’s no relationships, it’s just parody. Do it over.” Suddenly, it’s like, “Oh crap, I can’t do the easy thing.” And then that’s when I started thinking about the old pulps like Green Hornet and The Shadow, and Doc Savage having a band of people who helped him. And that’s when he really got redeveloped. And until we found out we couldn’t use the words “double 0.” So the name is what kept him alive, and then we couldn’t use it. And we couldn’t come up with a new name, so we had a contest in the studio. The winner would get 500 bucks, and ironically the winner was Alan Burnett, who came up with Darkwing, and I said, “Oh, we just gotta make it a little sillier – let’s make it Darkwing Duck.” And Alan took his money and then left to go to Warner Brothers and write the first season of Batman. Had he stayed, Darkwing might have been much darker.

KP: What were the complications with “Double 0”?

STONES: It was owned by Cubby Broccoli. It’s not a real thing, it was made up by Ian Fleming, and Cubby Broccoli had the rights to all of the Ian Fleming novels.

KP: I never knew that.

STONES: Yeah.

KP: Must have been a heck of a thing to find out.

STONES: Well, Disney always pays attention to that stuff, because they want to sue everybody else. We’d see stuff all the time at Warner Brothers cartoons, and we’d say, “Why can’t we do that?” And it’s like, we didn’t want to get them in trouble, but they would never let us do similar things.

KP: Playing in that superhero wheelhouse with Darkwing… I was about to use the horrible pun, “wetting your beak…”

STONES: But it was gooey and you thought better of it.

KP: I caved in at the end. Moving on to Hellboy, do you think, in some ways, you can look back and see Darkwing as a precursor for fully embracing that sort of superhero storytelling in animation?

STONES: I enjoy comics. I’ve always enjoyed stories of the supernatural. My work on Hellboy had nothing to do with any evolution of my Disney stuff. It’s very strange, because I feel in a strange way that my almost 30 years at Disney was kind of a precursor to my work now. I really feel like now I’m taking the next creative step, and that they love me at Disney because yes, I could do fun shows, but I always watched the budget and the schedule because it was my job as a producer. And I look back at things with Darkwing and I say, “This could have been so much funnier if I’d gone back in and given the extra note and got in a little trouble to push things even better.” But now on Hellboy, it’s like, because of my work with Mike Mignola, I don’t want to let him down, and I’m striving to do something new in American animation. In Japanese animation, they’ve done all these subjects and they’ve done it in the same way and in a million different variations. But I just felt like animating horror and suspense and really making it suspenseful is something I’d certainly never done. And I no longer had to write for kids. I mean, yes, you always say, “We write for ourselves,” which is true, but you’re writing for yourselves with certain limitations. Just like you may use certain slang with your friends watching the Super Bowl game, but if you’re at a tea with Aunt Betty who’s 93, perhaps you wouldn’t use the same language. It’s still you, but you’re watching what you say. And it’s the same way when you’re writing for kids. Yes, you use your own sensibilities; yes, you’re coming up with gags that you think are funny, but they’re a certain kind of gag. With Hellboy, I could really work on stories and work with other writers to say, “Let’s do this for ourselves. For our peers. For people who are adults.” Because that’s who Mike wrote for.

KP: How would you describe actually working with a property that has a creator that is still very much with us and very much involved, as opposed to – with Disney – largely working within a corporate structure with corporately owned characters?

STONES: Well, it’s night and day. I feel Mike’s a friend now, and I feel a commitment to do things as good as I can, and to push for things, and to really get his vision as much as I can into our work, because we write the stories together. If he comes up with ideas, I generally take his, even if they’re just a different way of doing things. That’s the whole point. He has a unique perspective, a unique sense of humor. I just feel like he’s done this incredible thing on the page, and let’s try to get as much of that on the screen as we can. And I think our second movie is much stronger than our first, and we hardly had a learning curve on that one because we practically did it at the same time. We really produced these two movies as one big movie. Currently I’ve got a green light to write a third movie, and now I’m finally getting to use what I learned – what worked, what didn’t work as well, what’s a better way of carrying off a certain moment, how much information I have to give to the overseas studio to really capture a moment. That’s all stuff I’m finally able to apply.

KP: When you say “what didn’t work,” what are the lessons that you walked away with on these first two films that you’re carrying into the third?

STONES: I realized that if I wanted a really cool looking skull, we basically had to design and fully paint it here. A storyboard artist will just draw, like, a symbol for a skull, with just big circles for the eyes and all that, and that’s what you get back overseas. I just… it seems a stupid little thing, but it’s symbolic of – with Mike’s comics, he will cut to architecture, he’ll cut to a statue. And there’s always a reason for it. We do the same thing in the films, but normally you do a background key for an entire sequence, so that if you cut to something within the room, it’s up to the overseas studios to put a little more detail in it. Because it’s a close-up, and when it really matters for those insets, it’s just another level of detail we’re gonna have to push ourselves here to include in our design package. So, that’s a very specific example, but it’s indicative of a larger mentality of, “Boy, this little moment, what’s the best way we can do that moment and how do we pull off that special effect?” In a live action film you would have a room full of experts worrying about where to put the squibs and what’s safe and is the fire department there, and how big does the green screen behind it have to be. Nothing can just be done casually. You’ve got all these people in the middle of it. In animation, a storyboard guy could just say, “Oh, well this flares up and this rock melts,” and it could just go through. But at that point, you say, “What’s the best way to reveal that she’s getting so hot that the rocks are melting around her?” And you realize that has to be a whole discussion. Everybody’s got to be in on that and thinking about it just like we would for a live action movie. So at this point I think we accomplished the huge part of the task. Now I’m just anxious to refine things and to get more of Mike onto the film.

KP: Are there any lessons that you learned in terms of character or pacing or story?

STONES: Um, in the comics there’s definitely scenes in the BPRD where they’re handing out mission reports, and we have one in the second film, where guys are eating donuts and looking at photographs as you get the back story. We’ll still have sequences like that, but now I think I will illustrate them more. Whereas, if they say, “Okay we’ve got reports of strange ghosts walking around the streets of Burbank,” we will cut to Burbank, and show some little kid being stunned by an apparition crossing his path.

KP: You’re saying the Hill Street Blues debriefing doesn’t quite work for animation?

STONES: Exactly. You’ve got to put a little bit more in there. And especially when dealing with the paranormal, and just how we pace things. The pacing for the most part I’m happy with, in that the difference between doing a series and doing a movie is that when it comes to a haunted house in a movie, I get to reveal slowly that it’s a haunted house and hopefully in a spooky way so you have an emotional reaction. In a series, we have to just say, “It’s a haunted house,” because we have to get on with the story. And the fun stuff is actually trying to evoke an emotion in the audience.

KP: In the first two films, are there any characters that you feel were underserved? Or you really want to concentrate more on in the future?

STONES: Well, the only character who will be in every movie is Hellboy.

KP: One would hope.

STONES: Yeah. Well, I mean there’s a certain sentiment where people are saying, “Well, wait a minute, how come Liz and Abe aren’t around more?” Well, in the first movie, Liz and Abe were barely in it. They were in the first sequence, and then on the end of a telephone call. And because we felt like we’re gonna be dealing with this weird Japanese world, let’s have our world more normal by just having Kate Corrigan and another human agent. Then we were short and we had to come up with more material, and Abe and Liz got their own little subplot, which has some of the coolest moments in the movie. Certainly some of the best personality moments in the movie. There’s also the feeling that Liz should use her fire powers more. And we had to say, “She’s not the human torch.” The series of comics and the films are called Hellboy for a reason. Not Hellboy & Friends, or Hellboy and the Amazing BPRD.

KP: But there’s your spin-off…

STONES: Well, exactly. You know, we will do that show. No problem. That’s not a problem at all. In fact, we could do an animated X-Files. Why not do that series while we’re doing the Hellboy movie…

KP: Or you can do one for the under-5 set – Playhouse Hellboy…

STONES: Maybe not. (laughs) Maybe we won’t do that. We’re very lucky to be able to work in the long form on these. And there are characters that fans really want to see. Roger gets named entirely, and my feeling is that Roger the Homunculus can’t just be another agent. You don’t introduce him in a briefing and say, “Oh yeah, here’s a guy who’s kind of made of pig manure and straw and a few incantations.” You know? It’s like, “Okay, she’s a pyrotechnic. Got it. The fish guy? Okay, got it. I saw Creature from the Black Lagoon. Hellboy, devil. I understand that. The fist is a little odd, but it’s big and it hits things. I understand that.” Once you start getting into other stuff that gets weirder and weirder, I don’t want to make them mundane. Roger deserves his own movie. Will we do that movie? Maybe. That would kind of have to be a direct adaptation, and I don’t know if we’re ready to do one of those yet. We did, within Hellboy: Sword of Storms – available February 6, Tuesday! Buy two, they’re small.

KP: Why not three?

STONES: Exactly. I think they make a great set of coasters for your dinner table.

KP: Arbor day is coming up.

STONES: Hey, Valentine’s! Nothing says love more than Hellboy.

KP: Or three copies of it.

STONES: Exactly. Like I say, there’s no number three without people buying number one. Where was I?

KP: Well, fans may want to see characters…

STONES: Yeah, so fans really… you know, there’s that kind of thing with what they want to see and they really push for, and they’re not thinking it through, because if we just included those things, it’s gonna become the Fantastic Four or the X Men. Which are fine, but they’re not Hellboy. And the next one, if it goes as we plotted it out, the only BPRD agent with Hellboy is Kate Corrigan. Liz and Abe and those guys aren’t in it. And it’s partially because we’ve got so many other characters that are cool that are gonna be in it. We’ve talked of one where it’s Hellboy on a trans steamer. And then we’ve certainly talked others that really feature Liz.

KP: What are the characters that you really want to see? Forget about the fans for now. You’re a fan as well. Particularly when you talk about the problems with Roger, that you just can’t see a way to quite work it through just yet…

STONES: Well, Roger I could see doing it. I’m just saying if we did that story, “Almost Colossus”, the thing we would have to figure out is how to bring Liz Sherman more into the story. Because currently, her story starts in the previous adventure, and she’s comatose through the whole thing. And it’s like you’d really want to take time to set up how Liz fears her power and doesn’t want it and how dark it is, and then she gives it up to this homunculus. We just haven’t given thought to how to do that. A lot of Roger’s story doesn’t have Hellboy in it, so that’s kind of a tough row to hoe. So I’m not saying we couldn’t do it, it would just be a whole project in itself. Meanwhile, we have other stories that are original that fans don’t know anything about. It’s like, “You know what? Maybe we ought to do those.”

KP: Who would be the character that’s closest to you, besides Hellboy?

STONES: I just love writing him in interactions. I love writing between him and Kate Corrigan. So it’s less about any specific character, it’s about what story we’d come up with. Certainly Lobster Johnson is always talked about… Lobster Johnson is a lot stranger than fans realize. And they may not realize that until the second Lobster Johnson miniseries. Mike is quite the storyteller and part of his creative process is telling people stories he wants to do. Because it just helps him – when he says it out loud he comes up with more ideas, and it’s like, “Yeah, yeah…” That’s just part of his process. So, I will never have another unspoiled Hellboy story. The things he told me – it’s like, “That’s incredible. That’s weird! Yeah, I want to see that!”

KP: It’s going to complicate things, is what you’re saying…

STONES: Well, part of the thing is that Mike feels is, “I want to tell my Lobster Johnson story before you tell yours, or Guillermo tells his.” And it’s like, I’m all for that, because I’m a fan. Or we could use him, but we’ll only tell this little part of the story, because that’ll be a tease into the comics or something like that. So we go back and forth on everything, and he’s the one who kinda keeps me updated on what the live action movie’s going to do, without Guillermo having to drop by. We basically try to stay clear of each other’s subject matter.

KP: So how would you describe the working relationship between you and Mike?

STONES: Fun. Absolutely the best part of the production is working on the story with Mike. And he is just incredible at how many stories he can come up with in a short amount of time. Whereas you develop a story, he’ll come up with a visual that even has color references in it. So he’s already seen the movie in his head kind of, or at least a sequence, and you’re taking notes wildly. And some of my best moments is when I come up with something that he feels like he could have written… That could have come out of him, and by the time we get to the end people say, “Well, which ideas were yours and which ideas were Mike?” There’s a couple that I really know are mine and a couple that I really know are Mike’s, but past that, I have no clue. And that’s a good sign to me. It means that we’re really doing his kind of story. Mike has, from his point of view, just the right amount of involvement in our shows, in that he works on story, even up to dialogue notes. He may come to a recording session or two. And then he’s done. He’ll describe visuals. He doesn’t draw anything for the show. And then he sees it finished. I would love to have him more, except that I’m a fan, and we could use up all his time, and it’s like, “No, go write some comics.” (laughs)

KP: Is there anything, creatively, you’ve come to loggerheads over?

STONES: No. Part of what I did before starting these projects is read a lot of the source material that Mike did… Source material is the wrong way of saying it. Mike loved the Weird Tales stories. He loved the work of Manly Wade Wellman and obviously H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and Hope Hodgson. I read a lot of that stuff to get kind of the vibe, some of the things that he loved that led to Hellboy, which led to a certain kind of a story idea, which put us more on the same level. There was nothing…I’m not trying to sell him my version of Hellboy – we’re working on the story together and he’s keeping me on track on how to do Hellboy. If there was such a thing as he has a suggestion, and it’s just different, it’s not necessarily better, I’m gonna go with his idea, because that’s the whole point. He has the unique point of view, the quirky sense of humor that gives it a special flavor. And that is what I’m trying to get on film. It’s much different for Guillermo, who’s doing a movie that he’s gonna spend several years living with, both writing and developing and putting on. At a certain point, Guillermo is saying, “In my movie, Hellboy and Liz are going to have a romance.” And that may be the thing that made that movie stand on its own for an audience who’s never picked up a Hellboy comic. But it’s not something I would do, because my goal is to stay as close to the comic as possible. Although the specific events in our universe are different from Mike’s universe.

KP: Is there anything in your eyes that you’d say is completely inappropriate, either for a story or a character beat, within the universe that you’ve created?

STONES: There are things we did in the first one because we were still finding our way that I wouldn’t have done. Or I wouldn’t have done the same way. There’s a sequence where the Japanese artifact spirits kind of dance into the room, and it was kind of a little fun jab at Beauty and the Beast, and then they attack. That’s one of those moments where I should have gone back in and said, “This attack has to be horrific.” Part of it is, they’re in real jeopardy and Kate’s being smothered, but it’s like, that requires special care. The psychic character in the first movie is sillier than we should have gone. He was just a little too cartoon. In the second movie, Sidney Leach is involved, the Human Metal Detector, who’s a very minor character from the comics. But he felt right. He’s a little more solid in his portrayal, and he fit in with the other agents. So that kind of stuff, I look back and say, “You know, that’s inappropriate.” In one case, if you don’t try hard enough with something that seems like a silly concept, and then you can’t give it the energy and the effort to turn that silly into horrific, then avoid it. If there’s limitations with your schedule or personnel or whatever it is. And the other’s just a tone thing. “Here’s the level of silliness we’ll do.” There are places for broad, slapstick humor in this movie, but that wasn’t the spot.

KP: How much of it was a boon to you as a writer and a producer, knowing that you had by and large the film’s cast to depend on?

STONES: Well, it took away the worry there. You knew that you didn’t have to go through casting or, “What’s Hellboy going to be like?” or “How’s he gonna say this line?” We know how he’s gonna say the line. And I don’t want to make light of Matt Wayne, who wrote Sword of Storms – I came in and had to write the extra material and rewrote some of the stuff because of changes we made, so we split a credit. But Matt was one of the story editors on Justice League Unlimited, and did a huge amount of research into the legends. And really, a lot of the authentic feeling came right out of his work. The second movie was written by Kevin Hopps, who I’d worked with well before on Darkwing Duck. He had the benefit of having a little more time and he got to go to Mike Mignola’s house with me. In those early stages of working out the story, we kind of gave him the story and then he pitched it back to us on index cards, having fleshed out moments, and we could talk about that. So he had a little more involvement at the beginning than poor Matt did.

KP: At this point, within your own mind and between you and Mike, how many germs for films would you say you’ve developed?

STONES: Well, we’ve talked about, I’m sure in passing, at least another four or five. But not to say that we would do those four or five, that’s just kernels of… not even a premise. Barely a springboard. But you know that, “Oh! Of course! We can do a William Hope Hodgson Sargasso Sea type story with Hellboy.” And you kind of immediately know, “Yeah… yeah… I know exactly how that would do and how we would set it.” You don’t have to talk about it and you kind of know that when we get there, that’ll be a piece of cake. That’ll be a whole different feeling from these other movies, and we’ll get to that one. I was working with some Native American actors and I started talking about supernatural tales of the American southwest, and Michael Horse – who was the deputy on Twin Peaks, and played Indians in all sorts of movies and television, because he is one – grew up on the reservation in New Mexico, and was telling me about how he used to clip his crystal radio set to the barbed wire fence, and pick up blues music. And I thought, “Hellboy was raised in the American southwest, and that’s just the kind of thing that he would do, and that’s just the kind of music he would love,” and I said, “Can you give me references for paranormal stories or the supernatural?” I’ve got some, but the Navaho, the Hopi… I told that to Mike, and he thought that was great. There’s a huge space of Hellboy’s life he’s never touched. And we could possibly do that. So that one’s exciting. We were talking about it the other day. And then there’s certainly spin-offs of the books themselves, saying, “Gee, do we want to take the short story and make something more of it?” If you wipe out all those ideas and Mike got in a taxi in Manhattan Beach and was driving up here to Burbank for the studio, and I said, “We’ve got to come up with some new ideas,” I guarantee you he would have a half dozen ideas, and some of them fully fleshed out by the time he got here. It’s just the way his brain works. He cannot turn it off.

KP: Is the current plan to keep these as movies, or is there some plan to perhaps eventually spin this into a series?

STONES: The plan now is to do a series of DVD movies. As I understand it, it’s actually harder to sell a series on DVD unless you are a huge hit on television already. I would be much more comfortable with a BPRD TV series. Because you’d say, “Okay, we can plan it out in a different way, or we can do standalone stories or continued stories, or whatever we’re allowed to do.” But the movies are it. That’s what’s been talked about so far, and they’ve got the rights for several more years. I’d love to do three movies a year. You know, the sales would have to be pretty spectacular for them to commit to that, but I’m hoping they’re strong enough, and certainly with the second one being such a strong movie, that they commit to three more instead of just one more. But we’ll see. I take it as I get it.

KP: So, looking back on your 30 years in the animation industry, is there anything you would tell the your of 30 years ago, just starting out in Eric Larson’s training program at the Disney studio?

STONES: Yeah. Buy Xerox! Buy land in Sedona, Arizona! Buy Apple Computer. And hang out with John Lasseter a lot more.

KP: What was the he like at that point?

STONES: When Lasseter was there? John was just one of the trainees, and he worked on a lot of little Mickey Mouse ideas that were just great. He certainly did a great sequence in the movie Fox and the Hound with Glen Keane. The two of them plotted out this big bear fight. And then when he got a chance to do a little CG animation, plan out a test – actually, it was with Glen – he just… it was when Bill Kroyer was at Disney still working on Tron stuff. John, I think, had a vision of the future. He just saw that there was a lot of potential there, and wanted to do more and more about it, and that wasn’t going to happen at Disney. Not at that time, anyway. They didn’t recognize the potential of the medium, they just worried about the medium that they had. John is more Disney than Disney. So the fact that he’s now heading Disney animation – everything is right with the world.

KP: Was there any point that you regretted the transition into TV animation?

STONES: (laughs) Yeah, whenever my good friends would put out a movie that made 300 million dollars – yeah, around there. And I see books and magazines about them. Seriously…

KP: Yeah, but how many people are talking to an interviewer that has a Megavolt action figure on their desk?

STONES: There you go. And you know what? Actually, as silly as that sounds, that is exactly the difference. I always envied their resources, and literally the animation quality. I’m talking about the quality of acting and movement in the characters. I’ve always envied that. But for my personality, I love the fact that every year and a half or so I do a new show, or Darkwing is on longer because we did so many episodes. But I had, at that time, a lot of ideas. On Darkwing, it was fun generating those different ideas for stories and trying to get the most fun out of them. On Hellboy, I’m now enjoying the telling of the longer story, but already – as we’ve said in this conversation – we’ve got ideas for a half dozen more. I’m anxious to get those in work, too. So, I envied their ability to create these fantastic pieces of cinema, but what I enjoyed is the variety of storytelling I’ve gotten to do. In general, when people ask, “What are your favorite episodes?” I say, “Well, the episodes animated by Walt Disney Australia,” because they had the best animation and that was like, “Look!” You know, the first Darkwing Duck animation that we saw was a pencil test of an episode I had written. It was basically the pilot, which was called “That Sinking Feeling,” with Professor Moliarty. And they just did such a fantastic job of execution. I had never had a pencil test shown to the staff where the staff is laughing out loud. And, in fact, people came from the next office over and asked if we’d be quiet.

KP: And who was that office next door?

STONES: That was Gary Krisel, president of animation. And at the time, I’m thinking, “You see what’s happening? It’s like we’re laughing at one of our cartoons! In a big way!”

KP: A sign of things to come…

STONES: Yeah. Unfortunately, on my shows, I think I never got more than eight Australian episodes. In other series somehow it worked out that they had like 20 Australian episodes. How’d that happen?

KP: Like Little Mermaid?

STONES: No, it was things like Goof Troop and Bonkers.

KP: It always seemed, animation-wise, that Darkwing was two different shows. You had the really high-end, nicely on model stuff that would come from Australia every once in a while, and stuff that might not come from Australia but it was still on model. Then you had these episodes that would pop up that just, you wondered what show they were working on…

STONES: That was just that the shows back then were done by three or four different studios. So it’s purely…

KP: But there was one that had very bulbous designs and this weird sort of elastic animation style…

STONES: All I can say is they were all supposed to look alike. And then everything else is the studio overseas.

KP: But the stories always carried through.

STONES: Well, good. That stayed the same.

KP: So outside of Hellboy, if there’s any one thing that you worked on that they would turn to you and go, “We’ll give you all the resources you want if you want to revisit this,” is there anything that you would revisit?

STONES: Not really. I mean, as much as I love Darkwing – and if you had a gun to my head and say you must pick something, then I’d probably pick Darkwing and come up with some goofy superhero adventure. Give him yet another origin to drive the fans crazy. I’ve done that. I’ve done that stuff for 30 years. I’m up for an Annie Award on another show I did, for Universal. The Adventures of Brer Rabbit. It’s like, I’ve done that. I don’t need to return to that. There may be a time when, to pay the bills, I’d return to that, and I’ll enjoy what I’m doing, but as far as the creative challenge, I would much rather do Hellboy or talk to Dark Horse about some other properties they have, or just continue with projects that stretch what I can do, or what’s been done in animation.

KP: Are there any projects of your own that you’ve either pitched in the past or never pitched?

STONES: I have a character or two that it’s like, “Yeah, I’d like to get back to that character,” but I won’t even worry about that until I stop having fun with Mr. Mignola’s friends.

KP: So, for the immediate future, as far as you can see, this is your primary focus?

STONES: I was offered a huge Marvel property. They wanted me to show run it, and I gambled on staying here because of Hellboy.

KP: It was Mort the Dead Teenager, wasn’t it?

STONES: Yeah, exactly. No, it was Forbush Man…

KP: If it was Brother Voodoo, you would have been on it in a flash…

STONES: Exactly. Anyway, I gambled that there would be more here. Next week I’ll find out if that gamble paid off. But it’s just such a combination of a character I love, the type of stories I’ve always wanted to do, and working with a creator who’s just fun to work with, who I really admire and respect, and who I consider a friend.

KP: So, bottom line, you’re enjoying yourself.

STONES: Yes. It’s like, at this stage in my career, enjoyment means a lot.

KP: I think that’s a perfect place to end.

STONES: Okay.

KP: Anything else you want to get the word out on?

STONES: Well, the main thing is mention like is it comes out Tuesday. Hellboy: Blood & Iron, which is a much darker story, premieres on Cartoon Network on March 10th.

KP: Is there a current release date for that DVD? Is that summer?

STONES: If there is, I don’t know it. I believe it’s in May.

KP: Just in time for Comic-Con.

STONES: Yeah, basically. In fact, Mike and I will be in New York for the New York Comic-Con in February, and we’re going to have a rather large sneak preview of Blood & Iron at that point.

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SModcast 1

Filed under: SModcast — UncaScroogeMcD @ 3:50 am

SModcast is the meandering palaver of a pair of dudes whose voices are so dull, they don’t deserve to be on the radio (and, hence, aren’t). Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier are SModcast.

The best thing about SModcast? It don’t cost nothing.

SModcast 1: Fisting Flipper –

In which our heroes primarily puzzle over when “Oriental” became a derogatory term, as well as touch on the following subjects: the very tall, “Pump Up the Volume”, parental groping, the detritus that gets washed off a newborn, the notion of a Birth-Day celebration, mobile units, bear bars, and Wolfie.

[CONTENT WARNING] SModcast features harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Listener discretion is advised.

DOWNLOAD: (right click to save)
SModcast 1 (MP3 format) ““ 47.5 MB

[display_podcast]

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Wanna add your two cents? Spend it here, in the SModcast mailbag.

CLICK HERE FOR THE SMODCAST ARCHIVES

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QSE News: 2/5/2007

Filed under: Columns,News — UncaScroogeMcD @ 1:17 am

Here are today’s top entertainment headlines:

Actor Ryan O’Neal, the star of the film Paper Moon, was arrested for allegedly assaulting his son. According to police reports, O’Neal assaulted his son by forcing him to watch his film The Assault of the Killer Bimbos 13 times in a row.

According to the man himself, Joss Whedon is no longer attached to write or direct the upcoming Wonder Woman film. Rather than capitalizing on the fanatical, built in audience Whedon brings with him, DC hopes to move in a direction similar to that of the blockbuster Catwoman film.

In additional comic to movie news, David Goyer, will not be helming a Flash feature film. Rather than capitalizing on the fanatical, built in audience Goyer brings with him, DC hopes to move in a direction similar to that of the blockbuster Catwoman film.

Clint Eastwood is being honored by the Motion Picture Association of America. Eastwood will receive a Jack Valenti Humanitarian Award. The MPAA has promised to keep the ceremony a family affair by removing all “indecent” language and sexual situations. Extreme violence will be shown in full.

Acclaimed director Roman Polanski has said his next film will be a tale of the events before and after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.Â While casting is still a way’s off, Polanski is said to be interested in working with some of today’s hottest young actresses and then sleeping with them.

That’s all for today’s news, stay tuned to this channel for all the news that matters least but you still care about.

(Compiled by J. Allen)

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Quick Stop Thingamabobs: 2/5/2007

Filed under: Columns,Thingamabobs — UncaScroogeMcD @ 1:08 am

The web. It’s a big place, full of plenty of distractions ““ some funny, some informative, some ludicrous, some disturbing, some inane, some profound. Each and every weekday, we present links to a few of our favorite finds”¦

————————————————

And now, your Monday morning Shatner… (Thingamabob)

I want one of these chairs… (Thingamabob)

Jeremy Clarkson destruction mix… (Thingamabob)

Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport… (Thingamabob)

Peter Cook on Room 101… (Thingamabob)

Have a THINGAMABOB? Send it in!

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ARITST	TITLE	GENRE
SOUL KID #1	Americanized	ALT
OLSON, MICHAEL	Where Fear and Faith	N/A
PO’ GIRL	Home To You	N/A
CELLSKI	Mr. Predicter Chapter 2	RAP
DA’UNDA’DOGG PRESENTS	Da’Unda’Dogg Presents “Bay Boyz”	RAP
G-DEP	Bad Boy	RAP
KEAK DA SNEAK	On One	RAP
SOUTH CENTRAL CARTEL	Westurrection	RAP
LUCINDA WILLIAMS	West	ROCK
NOTHINGTON	All In	ROCK
THE SOFTLIGHTES	Say No To Being Cool – Say Yes To Being Happy [En. CD]	ROCK
AMY STOLZENBACH	On and On	POP
ANTON BARBEAU	In The Village Of The Apple Sun	POP
BETH WATERS	This Little Piggy	POP
BLUETONES, The	The Bluetones	POP
DR. JOHN	In The Night – Early Sessions Of Dr. John	POP
HAGEN, NINA	Fearless	POP
ICEAGE COBRA	Brilliant Ideas From Amazing People	POP
JADE, FAINE	Introspection – A Faine Jade Recital	POP
REID, TERRY	River	POP
SEAFOOD	Paper Crown King	POP
SOPHE LUX	Waking The Mystics	POP
THE VISITORS	The Visitors	POP
WEBBE, SIMON	Grace	POP
WONDERFUL BROKEN THING	Looking For Mike Lookinland	POP