July « 2007 « FRED Entertainment

July 31, 2007

DVD Late Show: Summer Heat

Filed under: DVD Late Show — UncaScroogeMcD @ 12:10 am

7/31/07

Welcome back to the Late Show, kids!

This week, I’ve tried to be a little more detailed with my reviews, and focus on discs that are more-or-less current; some of these discs are streeting today and others have hit the shelves in the past few weeks. In fact, several of these titles have been eagerly awaited by cult film fans since the advent of the DVD format. We also have some good news about MGM’s revived “Midnite Movie” line, and a preview of some of the titles that will be hitting stores this fall for Halloween.

Let’s get started, shall we?

“It is going to get wet in here tonight. Lace your boots up, kiddies…”

I recently watched the Starz Media DVD of BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON (2006). This unique take on the slasher subgenre had been garnering a lot of positive reviews in recent months, and although I haven’t really been in a horror movie mood of late, I was curious.

I persuaded my wife ““ who grew up on 80’s slasher franchises like FRIDAY THE 13TH and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET ““ to join me, and we gave the disc a spin.

The premise and plot of the film is that a small group of college journalists are offered the opportunity to accompany and interview an 80’s-styled psycho killer as he goes about his preparations for a full-blooded killing spree. From selecting the right female victim to terrorize ““ a virgin, of course ““ to planting the seeds of an appropriately spooky “legend,” to setting the scene for the final slaughter, the “mockumentary” portion of the film is both amusing and occasionally chilling, with plenty of dark humor and thought-provoking insights into the conventions of the genre.

Now, if that was the entire film, it would probably be fine and fun, but in the final reels, BEHIND THE MASK metamorphoses into a genuine slasher film, complete with last minute twists and ““ despite the fact that the whole formula has just been deconstructed in front of you ““ a suspenseful and frightening edge-of-your-seat climax.

Virtually everything about this film works. Lead Nathan Baesel is excellent, sliding startlingly from charming and amusing to terrifying with no apparent effort. Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund, is well cast in his small role, as is POLTERGEIST’s Zelda Rubinstein, who delivers a long expository speech in one perfect take. Especially good is veteran character actor Scott Wilson, from 1967’s IN COLD BLOOD, as Leslie’s “mentor” and confidante.

The screenplay by Scott Glosserman and David J. Stieve shows not only a deep understanding for the genre, but a genuine affection for it as well. Glosserman’s direction is brisk and breezy during the mockumentary sequences yet taut, atmospheric and chilling once things get bloody. It’s great stuff.

Starz Media gives BEHIND THE MASK a sterling, 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation, with Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby Stereo audio. There’s a fun and informative commentary by the main cast members, two “making of” featurettes, deleted and extended scenes, and some nicely edited trailers. As usual, Starz has included the screenplay as a DVD-ROM downloadable bonus.

For fans of the slasher film subgenre, BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON is strongly and enthusiastically recommended. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the best horror films I’ve seen in the last two years.

Check it out.

“Sergeant Butterman, the little hand says it’s time to rock and roll! “

What I really dug about Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s SHAUN OF THE DEAD was how they were able to so effectively parody and satirize a genre while never being mean-spirited or cynical about it. Their affection for George Romero’s “Living Dead” films was palpable and refreshing. I was also impressed at how well they could parody a particular genre of film while simultaneously making a perfect example of that genre.

Well, they’ve done it again, and this time they’ve set their sights on the overblown cops n’ robbers genre, with the delightful HOT FUZZ (2007).

Simon Pegg (“Shaun” of SHAUN) is Nicholas Angel, a London supercop, with the most impressive arrest record on the force. He lives, breathes, eats and sleeps his job and while that’s hell on his love life, it’s also making the rest of the department look bad. So he’s reassigned to the seemingly crime-free village of Sandford, where he’s befriended by fellow officer Danny Butterman (Nick Frost, “Ed” from SHAUN), who sees in Nick all of the Hollywood cops he idolizes. Soon Nick begins to suspect that the small town’s many fatal accidents are less accidental than they seem, and begins to investigate despite the derision of his colleagues. What is Sandford’s dark and deadly secret?

HOTT FUZZ is a great comedy and a pretty damned decent cop flick, too. The cast is filled with talented and familiar British stars, including Jim Broadbent (MOULIN ROUGE), Paul Freeman (RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK), Bill Nighy (UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION), and former Bond, Timothy Dalton (in a particularly devilish role). The script is sharp, smart and funny, and even when the plot gets ludicrous, it’s still completely logical within the framework of the story being told. There’s some high-octane action in the last act, as well as some surprisingly gruesome gore effects. But mostly, it’s just a hell of a lot of fun.

Universal’s DVD gives HOT FUZZ a first-class treatment, beginning with a reference-quality 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that is absolutely flawless. The Dolby Digital 5.1 EX audio is vibrant and appropriately explosive.

There’s not a whole lot of extras, but what there are, are swell. There’re outtakes, deleted scenes, a trivia game, a commentary with Pegg and director Wright, as well as a few cute bits like “Danny’s Notebook,” “Hot Funk,” and “The Man Who Would Be Fuzz.” Intrigued? Check out the disc.

HOT FUZZ is one of the best comedies I’ve seen in along time. Buy it, rent it”¦ just see it.

“You can’t escape/From the kiss and rape of the Glove”¦”

Two Seventies revenge thrillers share the bill in Dark Sky Films’ most recent DRIVE-IN DOUBLE FEATURE: SEARCH AND DESTROY / THE GLOVE (1979).

In SEARCH AND DESTROY, ten years after a jungle combat mission goes sour, a group of Vietnam veterans including Perry King (CLASS OF 1984) and Don Stroud (HELL’S ANGELS UNCHAINED), find themselves being hunted down and executed by the understandably disgruntled ARVN officer they left behind.

Shot in and around Niagara Falls, with George Kennedy (THE NAKED GUN) playing yet another cop, SEARCH & DESTROY is a moderately entertaining low-budget actioner, with some decent chase and fight sequences, ably directed by William Fruet (DEATH WEEKEND, SPASMS).

In THE GLOVE, former football star Rosey Grier (THE THING WITH TWO HEADS) plays an ex-con who dresses up in black riot gear, dons a lethal lead and steel glove, and sets out to brutally beat the hell out of a bunch of prison guards. Exploitation vet John Saxon (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) plays the down-on-his-luck bounty hunter who is out to bring him in.

Not as exploitative as it’s sold, devoting most of its screen time to dialogue and character development over the expected violence, THE GLOVE is nonetheless a fairly decent little flick. Saxon is particularly good here, giving his L.A. bounty hunter a lot of depth and providing a noir-esque voice-over narration. Grier is physically intimidating and, despite his limited thespian skills, still manages to make his killer sympathetic and his motives understandable. The cast includes a bunch of familiar B-movie faces, including Aldo Ray, Joanna Cassidy, Keenan Wynn and Joan Blondell, all competently put through their paces by director Ross Hagen, who has acted in more than a few B-movies himself. It also has a funky theme song that must be heard to be believed.

Dark Sky’s double-layer DVD presents both films in remarkably clean 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfers, and Dolby 2.0 Stereo sound. The disc is set up to play both features with vintage drive-in intermission programming (doesn’t that concession food look gross? Who looked at those ads and thought, “Yeah, I could go for that?”) and some awesome exploitation trailers from the proper era (THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, EATEN ALIVE, THE LAST HUNTER, THE DEVIL’S RAIN and ONE-ARMED EXECUTIONER). While the default drive-in program is the preferred way to enjoy this fun double bill, both films can also be played individually, if you’re so inclined.

Overall, it’s a great evening’s worth of Carter-era drive-in thrills, nicely assembled by the folks over at Dark Sky. I preferred THE GLOVE to SEARCH AND DESTROY, but then, I’m a John Saxon fan (isn’t everyone?). Check it out.

“Guess who?”

I was never a big fan of the red-plumed, cackling cartoon bird created by Walter Lantz, but I even I have to admit that the new WOODY WOODPECKER & FRIENDS CLASSIC CARTOON COLLECTION is an amazing anthology of theatrical animated films, many of which have never appeared on home video before in any format.

The collection includes digitally remastered toons from the Thirties, Forties and Fifties, as well as a handful of rare, vintage shorts and featurettes. The cartoons are uncut, complete with politically incorrect gags and artwork. Universal has even labeled the packaging (albeit in small print) as for adult collectors ““ nothing here has been sanitized for the protection of today’s small minds (and I don’t mean kids).

Aside from superstar Woody ““ who undergoes an amazing series of dramatic physical transformations over the years ““ Andy Panda and penguin Chilly Willy (a personal favorite) are well represented, along with some very early Oswald the Lucky Rabbit shorts. Among the earliest cartoons in the collection is a great parody of KING KONG, “King Klunk,” as well as a bunch of musical “Swing Symphonies,” like “Abou Ben Boogie,” “The Pied Piper of Basin Street,” and the politically incorrect “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.”

The cartoons are presented full-frame, with eye-popping colors and rock solid transfers. There’s a fair amount of wear and scattered dirt and debris, but it’s not overly distracting; generally speaking, the clean-up and restoration efforts are outstanding. A lot of work went into this set, and it ranks right up there with Warner Brothers’ exemplary LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTIONS.

Most of the bonus features are, unfortunately, previously-existing promotional material, and somewhat dated, although the single episode from the later Woody Woodpecker TV series, a Halloween special called “Spook-A-Nanny,” is really bizarre. I might wish there had been at least one new historical featurette or maybe some commentary tracks by contemporary animation experts, but it’s a minor complaint.

For fans of classic, hand-drawn theatrical animation, the WOODY WOODPECKER AND FRIENDS CLASSIC CARTOON COLLECTION is highly recommended.

“Wolfman’s got nards!”

After two decades of grotesquely panned and scanned, grainy VHS dupes and late night/early morning pay cable airings, Fred Dekker’s heartfelt valentine to the Universal monster films of Hollywood’s Golden Age, THE MONSTER SQUAD (1987), finally makes its way to the digital format with a beautiful, 2-disc 20th Anniversary Edition from Lions Gate.

Best described as “The Little Rascals (or The Goonies) meet The Universal Monsters,” THE MONSTER SQUAD tells of a group of 80’s kids who must save the world when Count Dracula, The Frankenstein Monster, a werewolf, a mummy and the Creature from the Black Lagoon’s clone show up in their small Southern bayou town in search of a magic amulet. The amulet is the key to keeping Good & Evil in cosmic balance, and Drac wants to tip the scales.

A charming, somewhat Spielbergian family film, SQUAD features a top-notch cast of talented young and veteran actors, fantastic monster make-ups by Stan Winston (PREDATOR) and his crew, a superior musical score by the underrated Bruce Broughton (SILVERADO), and a funny, yet suspenseful script by director Dekker and a young Shane Black (LETHAL WEAPON, LAST BOY SCOUT), filled with quotable dialogue and memorable moments.

For fans of classic horror, the movie is a treasure trove of references and homage ““ armadillos inexplicably haunt Dracula’s castle, just as they did in the 1931 Tod Browning DRACULA, the Monster first encounters little Phoebe (Ashley Bank) at the side of a pond, evoking strong memories of Boris Karloff and his doomed playmate in the original FRANKENSTEIN ““ but more than that, the film treats the classic creatures with respect and allows them to be scary. Most notable, perhaps, is Duncan Regehr’s Dracula, who combines Christopher Lee’s imperiousness with Lugosi’s reptilian menace, in a portrayal that ranks among the undead Count’s finest.

Lions Gate new 20th Anniversary Edition DVD is a 2-disc package. Disc 1 contains a gorgeous, 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer from pristine source material, and a new, 5.1 Dolby Surround mix. This disc also includes two commentary tracks. On the first, Dekker sits with cast members Andre Gower (“Sean”), Ryan Lambert (“Rudy”) and Ashley Bank (“Phoebe”) for an anecdote-filled trip down memory lane. On the second, Director of Photography Bradford May joins Dekker for a more technically informative audio commentary.

The second disc is dominated by “Monster Squad Forever,” a five-part documentary that recounts the making of the film and its slow rise to cult status, with extensive interviews with crew and cast. A lot is covered here, including the studio’s concerns over the kids’ occasional use of expletives, the difficulty in marketing the film back in ’87, and the disappointing downward arc of writer/director Fred Dekker’s filmmaking career. It’s a great, nostalgic documentary, filled with fascinating stories. Disc 2 also includes a few deleted scenes, the original theatrical trailer and TV Spots, a still gallery, and a “Conversation with Frankenstein” ““ an amusing interview with actor Tom Noonan in the Frankenstein Monster make-up, conducted during the original filming. It’s cute, but runs a little too long.

I’ve been a dedicated fan of this flick for years, and I’m grateful to Lions Gate for finally bringing it to DVD in a well-produced, thoughtful special edition. They’ve really treated the film well, and I cannot recommend this set ““ and this movie ““ more highly.

“Flash, Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!”

I make no apologies or excuses for this: Mike Hodge’s FLASH GORDON ““ SAVIOUR OF THE UNIVERSE EDITION (1980) is one of my all-time favorite movies. Based on the classic newspaper strip by Alex Raymond, the film is a gleefully silly, joyously tongue-in-cheek interplanetary fantasy that never fails to bring a dopey grin to my face. And now, finally, there’s a home video edition that does the movie justice.

When an unknown force from space threatens the Earth, a pro football quarterback named Flash Gordon (Sam J. Jones. ONE MAN FORCE, THE HIGHWAYMAN) and a pretty travel agent by the name of Dale Arden (Melody Anderson, FIREWALKER), find themselves kidnapped by slightly mad ex-NASA scientist Hans Zarkov (Topol, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY), and taken to the alien world of Mongo. There they meet merciless dictator Ming (Max Von Sydow, NEEDFULL THINGS), who rules the fantastic world with an iron fist, keeping its various kingdoms constantly warring and thus unable to unite against him. Faced with Earth’s imminent destruction, Flash must find a way to bring the tyrant’s enemies together in rebellion and save his home world.

The film story follows the original strip continuity fairly closely, although screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (1976 KING KONG) obviously can’t take the material very seriously. But that’s all right, because this is one film where a tongue-in-cheek approach actually works. Under the guiding hand of versatile British director Mike Hodges (the original GET CARTER, CROUPIER), the colorful, fetishistic fantasy embraces its campy nature and plays out with infectious good humor.

For FLASH, the producers assembled a prestigious supporting cast of Brit and Euro thespians that includes a pre-Bond Timothy Dalton, Brian Blessed, Peter Wyngarde, Richard O’Brien, and the gorgeous Ornella Muti, but it’s really Danilo Donati’s set designs and costumes that are the stars of the picture. Blindingly colorful, overly elaborate and utterly decadent, the movie looks exactly like an Alex Raymond or Al Williamson Flash Gordon comic strip come to life. Even the odd choice to get rock gods QUEEN to provide the film’s score works surprisingly well, with their pounding beat giving the film its pulse, electric guitars underlying the excitement of the movie’s various chases and battles.

I saw this film in the theater several times and owned it on VHS, laserdisc, and the previously-issued Image DVD, and this 27-year-old production has never, ever looked as good as it does here, on Universal’s new “Saviour of the Universe Edition.” The studio has given this release an incredibly sharp, perfectly color calibrated, 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, newly remastered and restored. The film’s colors have never been so vibrant. Special effects scenes have been cleaned up, removing virtually all of the era’s telltale matte lines and compositing artifacts. Detail is astounding: I’ve seen this movie dozens of times, and yet, there were a number of background elements, objects and sight gags that I had never before noticed until watching this new transfer. The audio has been pumped up, too, with a new Dolby Digital 5.1 mix that finally does justice to QUEEN’s triumphant score and the flick’s innovative sound design.

The extra features are a bit disappointing. One would have hoped for a nice, comprehensive retrospective documentary with cast & crew interviews and behind-the-scenes anecdotes, but the closest we get to that is a brief interview with screenwriter Semple, who admits that he never really read the comic strip before writing the script, and thought the whole enterprise was a lark. Fortunately, this is counterbalanced by an interview with acclaimed comics artist Alex Ross (Marvels, Kingdom Come, etc.), who is, quite possibly, the world’s biggest FLASH GORDON fan. He speaks with adult eloquence and adolescent enthusiasm about the film, its impact on him and his art, and the pure joy he derives from it. Ross also provides the new cover art for this edition, and a collectible art card by Ross is included in the package. The disc also includes the original theatrical trailer, the first complete chapter of the 1936 FLASH movie serial with Buster Crabbe, and an amazingly lame promo for the new SciFi Channel FLASH television series.

Aside from the (only slightly) underwhelming extras, this is the definitive DVD edition of the beloved cult classic. Highly recommended.

“I don’t know anything about saints, but I have an uncanny instinct for sniffing out a son of a bitch.”

Pretty much every thing you’re gonna read about the new adult animated film RENAISSANCE (2007) is going to name-check SIN CITY and BLADE RUNNER”¦ so I figured I ought to get it out of the way as early in this review as possible.

Paris, 2054: A young female researcher for the powerful Avalon Corporation has been abducted and maverick cop Karas (voice by Daniel Craig) is assigned to the case. With the help of the missing woman’s sister, Karas finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy and targeted by Avalon’s high-tech stealth assassins. In the end, Karas unravels the mystery and discovers the earthshaking secret at its core.

A visually stunning combination of hand-drawn/created elements, CGI and motion-capture technologies, Christian Volckman’s RENAISSANCE is a unique, computer animated movie for grown-ups, one that successfully attempts to mimic the harsh, high-contrast B&W imagery of the Sin City comics or the early Brian Bendis written-and-drawn graphic novels Jinx and A.KA. Goldfish. Backgrounds are gorgeously executed with endless little details, and the characters are generally distinctive and fairly easy to tell apart.

In terms of story, it’s yet another sci-fi noir with an overcomplicated plot and plenty of “˜40’s crime fiction tropes and iconic tough-guy characters transplanted into a dystopian futurescape, where the only real difference between it and a vintage detective film is a sci-fi MacGuffin. That’s not to say it isn’t involving or interesting ““ because it is ““ but it’s funny how filmmakers keep looking back narratively, while the technology to make the films keeps accelerating forward.

Miramax’s DVD sports a solid 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer and a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. Bonus features are lean ““ there’s a single “Making Of” featurette and a handful of other Miramax trailers, and that’s it.

While the story is literally nothing new, the visuals are innovative and unique. If you like BLADE RUNNER and similar films, you’ll probably enjoy this one, too. I thought it was pretty good, and would definitely recommend at least a rental.

DVD LATE SHOW CAPSULE REVIEWS!

In my continuing efforts to catch up with some of the older discs of interest that piled up during the last few months while I was ill, here’s some more “Capsule Reviews” of DVDs that are long overdue for some Late Show attention:

SUBURBAN SECRETS (2006). Seventies sexploitation director Joe Sarno (INGA, LAURA’S TOYS, MOONLIGHTING WIVES) teams up with the Seduction Cinema starlets to craft a modern version of one of his acclaimed erotic soap operas ““ which means lots of sweaty softcore sex, stilted line delivery and an actual, if sordid plot. Chelsea Mundae (SIN SISTERS), AJ Khan (SHOCK-O-RAMA) and other familiar bodies from the studio’s stable are joined by hardcore star Tina Tyler in this Michael Raso production. The sex scenes are pretty hot, if repetitive, and the performances are incredibly uneven, but there’s a lot worse out there. The 2-disc set from Pop Cinema includes a “Director’s Cut” and a “Hot TV Cut,” a couple of “Making Of” documentaries, a collection of Sarno trailers, and a booklet with liner notes by film historian Ed Grant.

KING KUNG FU (1976). An utterly unfunny but endearingly awful comedy made in Wichita, Kansas and starring a guy in a bad gorilla suit, KING KUNG FU chronicles the misadventures of a talking simian martial artist and the John Wayne-impersonating police captain who’s out to get him. This Image/Retromedia DVD presents the rare, regionally produced low budget spoof in a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer and includes the original theatrical trailer.

BLIND WOMAN’S CURSE (1970). A disturbing blend of historical Yakuza drama and graphic horror, this chiller features 70’s Japanese cult actress Meiko Kaji (LADY SNOWBLOOD, FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION) in her first starring role. Filled with macabre imagery, savage action and grotesque horror, Teru Ishi’s filmic head-trip is not for the faint-hearted. Diskotek’s special edition includes a good 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, audio commentary by Japanese film expert Chris D., a theatrical trailer and photo gallery. Challenging stuff, and worth a look.

DARKMAN TRILOGY (1990/1994/1995). Universal has just repackaged Sam Raimi’s (EVIL DEAD) pre-SPIDER-MAN superhero effort with its two direct-to-video sequels in one, handy, low-priced, 2-disc “Franchise Collection.” The first film stars Liam Neeson (KRULL) as a hideously scarred scientist who can create temporary new faces with which to fight crime, while Arnold Vosloo (THE MUMMY) takes over the role in sequels. As to those sequels, they’re not so hot; shot in Canada on tight, TV budgets, but then, the original feature wasn’t the greatest, either. Supporting actors include Larry Drake (DR. GIGGLES), Renee O’Connor (XENA), Kim Delaney (PROJECT: METALBEAST), Roxanne Dawson (ST: VOYAGER) and Jeff Fahey (SCORPIUS GIGANTUS)

The first disc contains DARKMAN and DARKMAN II: THE RETURN OF DURANT, and includes trailers for both films. The second disc contains only DARKMAN III: DIE DARKMAN DIE, and doesn’t even have a menu screen. All three films are presented in 1.85: anamorphic widescreen and look fine. For fans of the series, it’s an inexpensive, convenient package.

DVD LATE SHOW NEWS!

One or two of you may remember back in the early days of this column, when I championed MGM’s “Midnite Movie” line of cult and exploitation titles. Well, after a several year drought will the management of the MGM library shifted between several companies, a new batch of “Midnite Movies” titles have been announced by MGM and their new distributor, Fox Home Entertainment. In fact, the forthcoming “Midnite Movie” discs will include titles from both studios, and will be hitting shelves beginning in September.

Among the titles announced: THE WITCHFINDER GENERAL, FOOD OF THE GODS, RETURN OF DRACULA/THE VAMPIRE, THE BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES/PHANTOM FROM 10,000, PHARAOH’S CURSE/CURSE OF THE FACELESS MAN, THE BEAST WITHIN/THE BAT PEOPLE, KONGA/YONGARY, MONSTER FROM THE DEEP, TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972)/VAULT OF HORROR (1973), CHOSEN SURVIVORS/THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING, DEVILS OF DARKNESS/WITCHCRAFT, BLUEPRINT FOR MURDER/MAN IN THE ATTIC, GORILLA AT LARGE/MYSTERY AT MONSTER ISLAND, THE HOUSE ON SKULL MOUNTAIN/THE MEPHISTO WALTZ.

In addition, there will be a new VINCENT PRICE COLLECTION (THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES, DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN, TALES OF TERROR, TWICE-TOLD TALES, THEATER OF BLOOD, MADHOUSE and WITCHFINDER GENERAL) a new ROGER CORMAN COLLECTION (BLOODY MAMA, THE YOUNG RACERS, A BUCKET OF BLOOD, GAS-S-S, THE TRIP, THE PREMATURE BURIAL, X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES and THE WILD ANGELS.), a three-disc special edition of THE FLY, RETURN OF THE FLY and (the never before on video) CURSE OF THE FLY, a new special edition of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot more.

Hopefully, I’ll get the opportunity to review much of this Halloween bounty here at the Late Show. For more information on these titles and scans of the cover art, check out George Reis’ DVD Drive-In website.

Thanks for spending some time with me today. Look for my next column soon.

For older Late Show columns (adding up to well over 200 reviews!), visit the newly updated-and-revamped DVD Late Show website and archive. For additional pop culture musings, occasional DVD previews and lots of shameless self-promotion, you might try checking out my blog.

Comments, DVD questions, review requests and offers of money can be sent to: dvdlateshow@atomicpulp.com

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Party Favors: The Epic of Vegas

Filed under: Columns,Joe Corey's Party Favors — UncaScroogeMcD @ 12:05 am

LAS VEGAS – Lady Luck is about to bitch slap Sin City.

I’ve come out to this town eager to party down at Lindsay Lohan’s 21st birthday party. During our time in rehab, I had promised Firecrotch that her first legal drink was going to be a fuzzy nipple poured across my fuzzy nipples. For those wondering; yes, I did have a relapse on my Sudoku addiction. Damn those numbers and boxes. While I won’t go into details because I don’t want the tabloids to exploit this story, Lindsay saved my life. All I wanted to do to repay the strength she gave me with my struggles with addiction with a few top shelf mixed drinks to welcome her into the world of adulthood.

I arrived in Las Vegas and scooted down to Pure at Caesars Palace to secure my VIP booth. I had IV bags filled with Red Bull to insure that I wouldn’t miss a minute of fun. TMZ was going to be my playground. I sat in the booth for three days. I understand that Lindsay is late because she’s a busy girl. And I know that soon I’d be the reason she’d be late for the set. But then I was informed that there would be no birthday wildness for Lindsay and her friends. I was also told that I had to pay my own tab. They charged me $30 for gummi worms! How could she do this to me? We were supposedly Best Friends Till Step Five! What about the ecstasy, Lindsay?

And so I was stuck in Sin City suffering from Firecrotch withdrawal. Walking the Las Vegas Strip, it became apparent that what stays in Vegas isn’t always the debauchery. Mostly it’s your cash.

TROP-A-PAINA

Augie once declared that Vegas hotels didn’t need spa services since every employee knew how to give you a massage. In the past this town knew how to rub you just the right way so that you didn’t think about all the cash that floated from your wallet. A tourist smiled as they slid a tip to a casino employee. And they knew how to tip you back with sweet comps. Everybody wins – although odds were you weren’t winning cash.

You didn’t care about how much money you blew in Las Vegas. But now every dollar you burn comes with a receipt. Before you have a chance to pour your dollars into a slot machine, the hotel is nickel and diming your ass. A perfect example of this is the Tropicana hotel. We booked the place because it seemed like it was semi-Old School Vegas. After I locked down a great rate thanks to the roaming gnome, I discovered that the package deal didn’t include the “Resort Fee.” The hotel is tacking on a surcharge of $5 a day for their services we could never find in the complex. They charged me for using the pool when we checked in at midnight. They stuck us in a smoking room. Under old school Vegas rules, the desk clerk would have perked us to make up for stinking us in a room reeking of Viceroys and Kools. Even when we got a non-smoking room the second day, they didn’t even send a bellhop up to transfer our luggage. We might as well stayed at a Budget Inn.

The moron who decided to slap the Resort Fee on the bill didn’t understand that it pissed me off so much that I decided to take my main gambling action down the road. It’s not like they weren’t going to get that $20 from me after I stumbled across the That Girl slot machine near the elevator. But I played it at different casino (it might have been the Hooters casino behind us). I didn’t play it too long since t wasn’t paying off. I don’t want to feel angry at Marlo Thomas for taking my cash. Plus there wasn’t any winning panels featuring the Impeccable Hair of Ted Bessell. Marlo will be getting $20 from me in August, 7 when That Girl: Season Three comes out from Shout! Factory.

How was the Resort action for my $5 a day? Blah. The pool had too many leaves floating in it. Nobody seemed too eager to clear the floating futz. And the towel they gave me felt like it was stolen from a United Nations Refuge Camp.

SKIN OFF

The big thing the Tropicana pushed was Bodies. No matter where you were in the hotel or on the strip, you weren’t far from the image of a Chinese guy whose skin had been ripped off, head cut in half and organs left dangling in space. It was on posters. It was on the marquee. It was on the top of cabs. It was on rolling billboards. It was on my room key-card. It was too much.

Am I wrong in thinking that this is a pretty gross image? How exactly do we have Congressional hearings over Janet Jackson’s barely seen nipple (that was nearly hidden by a strange piece of jewelry), but nobody seems to care about posters of a dissected corpse plastered all over the neighborhood? Am I to believe that if Justin Timberlake had ripped the flesh off Janet’s chest during the Superbowl show, we’d all say, “That’s educational and entertaining!” Is there not a single parent in America willing to demand that the advertising for Bodies needs to be toned down? Or do all parents think their five year old kids need to involuntarily see a skinned and sliced human being as they look out the mini-van windows? Slim Goodbody was gross, but he didn’t quite look like the Incredible Melting Man.

I’m not going to get into the politics of where these bodies are coming from. Although it is strange they said that exhibits supposedly agreed to be used this way. Who donates their body to Showbiz? Joan Rivers doesn’t count. What’s strange is that after the Chinese government decided to tighten up and slow down adoption of their babies by American couples, they’re renting us their corpses. Is this a cradle to the grave policy shift?

There were a lot of Asian guests at the Tropicana. I wonder if they felt uncomfortable knowing their neighbors were on display in the main exhibit room. Did any of them recognize the guy on the keycard? Did any of them fear that if they protested the resort fee, they’d end up playing Poker with their innards on the outside?

VEGAS TIPS

Don’t rent a car if you fly into Vegas. You don’t need to be clogging up the Las Vegas Strip.

The town is filled with cabs. Put them to use. Why not risk a chance to be on HBO?

The roaming gnome told us to take the Grey Line from the airport to the hotel. It was $5 per person. We didn’t wait too long to load up and head out. But the ride back turned into a nightmare. They were supposed to pick us up 2 1/2 hours before the flight. No need to cut it too close knowing how fast those security lines grow and how slow the scanner cops work. Do they get paid by the hour or the bag? They have to be careful cause they can’t allow too much breast milk near the planes.

We stood outside the hotel a half an hour before the designated time to make sure we didn’t get missed. They missed us. Or just didn’t give a crap in the city built on craps. What was more frustrating than waiting in 112 degree heat was calling up the Grey Line’s phone number to find out where the hell they were since we were sweating in the hellish afternoon. I never got off their hold system. I was dumped off it on several occasions and had to call back. I burned through 50 cellphone minutes getting no response. Even though we pre-paid for the return voyage, I had to hail a cab. Once again, another Vegas company that doesn’t strike me as willing to give me a massage or pick up the phone.

Although while waiting in the heat, we got to watch a Jerry Springer level meltdown between a couple in front of the hotel. This woman went nuts on her baby’s daddy. And the guy was trying to keep his woman in check while constantly having to worry about his half off pants falling all the way down as he chased and pleaded with her. When are urban posers going to realize that nobody wants to see the top half of your boxer shorts? It’s not fashion. The only reason we watch you is because we sense that your pants will drop, you’ll trip, hit the ground and “impersonate” Phil Leotardo. We’re rooting for your demise, speedbump. Buy a belt.

For getting around during the day, The Deuce is cheaper than a cab. These are the numerous double decker buses that roam the Strip and run down to Freemont Street. If you sit up top and look down, you’ll be treated to more thrills than the roller coaster on the Stratosphere. I can’t even count the number of near misses that took place during one short trip. These buses cut through the traffic like a cow rollerskating through Swan Lake. The best part is that for $5 you can ride around for 24 hours. It’s like you’re gambling with house money when you watch multiple crashes without risking your car insurance.

The only bad Deuce incident we experienced was a late night trip to Freemont Street. We ended up waiting 45 minutes for a departing bus. There was this loud drunk fat guy who kept shouting at people in convertibles. He had to tell his friends about everything they had just done. During the early days of Vegas, mobsters must have killed these dorks in order to make the rest of us enjoy our stay. Do they make double sized holes in the desert? Luckily he grabbed a cab 2 minutes before the bus arrived. Nothing worse than being stuffed against a five day old Dread Snapper in a sardine can.

NETHER VEGAS

Once you go past the Stratosphere on the way to Freemont, you leave the world of mega-casino-hotels and enter a shady zone filled with wedding chapels, tattoo parlors and tiny motels. While staring out the Deuce window looking at these creepy sleepovers, I’m struck with the thought that every night clerk must has a story about Andy Dick calling for room service at 4 a.m. The Party Favors would like to congratulate Jon Lovitz for attacking Andy Dick at the Laugh Factory. A decade ago, I’d talk to Andy often on the phone. He was a great guy to talk to at odd hours. But since then, he’s become a monster. For a creative and funny guy, Andy has pissed it away. Hopefully Lovitz bashing his face will allow him to understand that there is a price to being an asshole. The incident has inspired a new VH1 series: Who Wants to Beat the Crap Out Of Andy Dick? Three people get to plead their case as to why Andy pissed them off. The audience votes and the winner gets to lay a beating on Dick. The runners up get to hold him down.

CRANE GAME

Here’s a joke you’ll hear every time you talk to a Vegas local: What’s the state bird of Nevada? The crane!!!

It’s funny cause it’s overwhelmingly true.

You want to get treated like a king in this town, don’t show up with Sean Combs and Britney Spears. You roll into town tugging a crane. Every pit boss on the strip will comp your ass. You’re a high rise roller. They’ll offer you everything under the sun to make sure you don’t take your skyscraping action to Dubai. Here’s a late to the party stock tip: Invest in cranes! They’re all going up! Is that a Wall Street construction joke?

CityCenter’s construction site had at least two dozen cranes of various sizes in play. It was like a Dr. Seuss book illustration with all the around the clock activity. What’s amazing is this latest Kirk Kerkorian mega-resort/casino has a price tag of $7 Billion. For those who thought the Dallas Cowboys were going overboard with their billion dollar stadium, here’s a place where that state of the art dome’s budget is meaningless. A billion will probably be the cost overrun on this project. Crammed inside the 76 acres will be numerous towers containing 7.500 hotel rooms and condos, hundreds of offices and a space shuttle launching pad.

The huge projects on the Las Vegas Strip now flowing onto the other side of the airport. The mega-casinos will flow for miles. Now before you decide to strike it rich land speculating, here’s a warning: Those “For Sale” signs on the empty lots on the Las Vegas strip are lies. All that land is being developed. Nobody is selling their land – especially buy putting up a sign. The land owners rent the sign space to realtors. When you call that number thinking you can become Steve Wynn Jr., they’re going to come up with a “it’s under contract” BS and then try to interest you into desert acreage that’s on the “next big zone.”

The city does need to change its slogan to “Pardon Our Dust.” You couldn’t walk anywhere without encountering a construction zone.

The hotels on the strip are following the McMansion craze that’s sweeping the nation. There’s no real approach space. Most of the casinos are slammed against the sidewalk. The casinos are so slammed together, it almost feels like downtown Manhattan.
The lush entrance of Caesars Palace has been tossed aside as they dump buildings all over what was a magnificent view. There’s no space for future Evel Knievels to leap over the water fountain. The once stunning landmark has lost its splendor with all the faux Roman junk filling the acreage. It’s a nutty neighbor’s lawn that’s been covered with plastic animals and windmills. It looks like one of those places that sell concrete yard statues.

Cinematographers do an amazing job to create the illusion of space when they shoot in Vegas. It’s hard to line up a shot that doesn’t look busy or show the other five casinos in the row. And its just going to get worse as even more hotels transform on the strip. The New Frontier is about to get demolished to make way for a resort that will look like the Plaza Hotel in New York. What’s the point of that? I’d rather be in Manhattan to experience the real deal. This was the first casino to book Elvis. And soon it’ll be rubble. We dropped by to see the Gilley’s bar that was hosting female mud wrestling. The place looked dead and we didn’t see any hot women lurking near the main bar. We decided to spend the Mud Wrestling ticket price in the Elvis themed slot machines. It only seemed appropriate. It’ll implode soon like so much of this town’s legends.

We were also told Tropicana and Circus Circus will be doing major reconstruction. The Aladdin is still making its transition to the Planet Hollywood Casino. How did that miserable relic of the ’90s dining afford a casino? While you’re waiting for your next blackjack hand, the dealer will attempt to sell you a t-shirt. What’s odd is that the Planet Hollywood restaurant is across the street at Caesar’s Palace. By the way, have you ever heard Caesar sing?

MAGIC MAN

Whenever we passed a parking lot, I’d yell out, “Is Criss Angel performing here, tonight?” The greatest trick Criss Angel has ever performed was making us think that he performs. Mindfreak was shot at the Aladdin/Planet Hollywood casino. But when I asked the guys at the Planet Hollywood ticket office when Criss Angel was going to be on stage, they laughed. Neither had ever seen a real stage show with Angel. What exactly is the point of Criss Angel becoming a magical personality if he’s not doing it every night on the big stage? They said he was now signed to perform at the Luxor. But the big headliner at the Luxor was CarrotTop.

My hotel window looked out at a 40 ft. high picture of CarrotTop in front of the Luxor. A mega-screen on the side of the MGM Grand pimped the prop comic by showing him barechested. After that sight, I was unable to achieve an erection for five days. Images of a half naked CarrotTop and the butchered Chinese guy don’t need to be shown in public.

We did see a lot of posters for Pam Anderson’s semi-act. The star of Stacked is only a magician’s assistant for the guy performing at Planet Hollywood. What does that say about your talent when you can’t even slap together a lame song and dance routine for 45 minutes? Jayne Mansfield did it. She didn’t even have Autotune. The least Pam can do is juggle her old implants. They really fixed her up on the poster so she didn’t look so burned out.

A more visually pleasant view is the side of the Flamingo Hotel covered with a giant picture of Toni Braxton striking a Lola Falana pose. Not sure about the show. They push the $100 tickets with “Toni Braxton takes audiences on a visual and musical journey through her life.” Make sure you eat a good meal before the show cause it sounds like a long trip.

WATER STOP

In case you get a dry throat from all the dirt in the air, don’t drink from your hotel room tap. It was chunky style with a tangy after taste. Luckily the nearby Walgreens Drugs had 2 1/2 gallons of drinkable water that cost as much as small bottle of Dassani in the hotel’s Coke machine.

BAD TELE

If you live in Las Vegas, you don’t need me to explain that your local television sucks. Not that it sucks any worse than most any other city in America. The local channels either had the news, Oprah, judge shows or Jerry Springer marathons. Whatever happened to I Love Lucy reruns? I’m in Vegas – shouldn’t there be a channel showing Vegas? Where’s the Dan Tanna love? While laying low in the hotel room to avoid the heat, we ended up watching the Elmo’s World segment of Sesame Street. There’s a chance that Elmo will end up in rehab next year. He’s showing a little meth-mouth around the gums.

We couldn’t take the constant news. Most of the local reporters were recounting the poor woman who was beaten to death on her Scoot-around. It was like they were promoting an episode of CSI. Something about old women being beaten to death in 113 degree heat that makes me ponder the up side of moving to Las Vegas.

Besides the crappy local TV, the Tropicana had crappy TV sets. The screen was barely 15 inches. I wasn’t expecting a 60 inch HiDef entertainment machine. But why a set that’s smaller than my video camera’s viewfinder?

The cable channel selection barely had ESPN. They had TNT, but no TBS. I was denied Comedy Central. And they didn’t have HBO. Nor Showtime. What hotel doesn’t have a single HBO channel? The creepy Crescent Motel on US 1 has HBO. And they don’t charge an extra $5 a day as a resort fee. Luckily we weren’t staying on a Sunday night. I can’t bare to miss John From Cincinnati. The first episode I miss will be the one that makes sense out of the show. When did Ed Bundy get the power to heal the dead?

The Tropicana didn’t even have any porn channels. What’s the point of being in a Vegas hotel without sanitized hotel porn? Sunny Lane was supposed to have a Spectra-vision debut! Did you know you can watch hotel room porn in Salt Lake City? Sin City gets trumped by Sprite-ville.

And the damn set didn’t have RCA input jacks so I couldn’t patch in my portable DVD player. Although the monitor on my DVD player was nearly as big as the hotel TV. We ended up watching network crap as we recovered from Keno madness.

Why are there two shows about people not knowing the lyrics to pop songs on network TV? Why is there BINGO on ABC? Why exactly are the network suits broadcasting star impersonators? Do I really care if you can dance? Why has network television been reduced to a UHF station booking amateur acts for a telethon? This crap wouldn’t cut it at summer camp. Maybe next week the dorks at NBC can have Competitive MacramÃ©? And why do we have to import English losers to be on the panel? Aren’t we allowed to judge our fellow Americans? Remember folks that the last time a guy in England tried to control our country, we rebelled. It’s time to throw Simon and his Brit clones into Boston Harbor!

INFLIGHT REVIEWS

The nice part about traveling with a portable DVD player is not being held hostage by bad in-flight movies. Perhaps hostage is a bad word when relating to air travel. Hopefully that sentence won’t put me on the Homeland Security Don’t Fly List. But I feel terrorized by Will Smith inflight movies. Crap. I shouldn’t have said terrorized. Remind me to pack lube in my carry on case so the anal probe will feel seductive. How much Analez can you take onto a plane without being anally probed as a terrorist for transporting anal lube?

What was on my DVD player heading out to Vegas? It was a double feature of documentaries. If you were underwhelmed by last year’s Miami Vice,, then you need to pick up Cocaine Cowboys (Magnolia Films). This is the inside skinny on how the Columbians turned Miami from a retirement community into the location of Miami Vice. Jon Pernell Roberts and Mickey Munday give thrilling tales of how they smuggled the cocaine into Florida and dealt with the Columbians. The movie makes it sound like in the early days, the cocaine business worked like Amway. Everybody was getting rich and living the good life. Things go bad on the arrival of Griselda Blanco, the Colombian Godmother. She’s as bloodthirsty as they come. She doesn’t mind having kids killed during hits. She’s the reason Miami became the Murder capital – to the dismay of Detroit, Washington D.C. and Newark. If you have all five seasons of Miami Vice, Blow and three different releases of Scarface on the shelf, then you better get your hands on Cocaine Cowboys. It’s also cool that Jan Hammer did the score for the movie. I was told that they hired Hammer after getting a quote for how much it would cost to license the Miami Vice theme. It was cheaper to hire “Jan the Man.”

The second feature was You’re Gonna Miss Me (Palm Pictures), a documentary about Roky Erickson. You might not know him by name, but you’ve heard his song “You’re Gonna Miss Me” on Dell computer ads. He was the main man behind the 13th Floor Elevators, a Texas psychedelic band that has a cult following amongst those who appreciate Nuggets. Before the guys could make it big, Roky flipped out. The film charts his mental breakdowns and attempts at recovery. It kind of reminds me of The Devil and Daniel Johnston since both men lived in Austin, Texas and hung out with the Butthole Surfers. Here’s a quick tip, if you are attempting to stay sane – do not hang out with the Butthole Surfers. Gibby Haynes is the anti-Oprah. If you are trying to get your head straight – do not let Gibby touch you. He’s like Madonna when she sucked the career out of Britney Spears mouth at the VMAs. The film isn’t told with only vintage footage and talking heads. We get to see Roky’s brother tries to rescue him from their mother. Can Roky flourish in the straight world?

YELLOW CAB FEVER

Leave it me to get HBO’s Taxicab Confessions and Discovery’s Cash Cab mixed up. I’d like to apologize to Ben Bailey for what I was doing with the two Glitter Gultch dancers while he tossed me the questions. The nice thing was that I was able to get a free cab ride back to the Dean Martin suite and pay for my dates using my knowledge of Francis Weber. I do feel bad for Ben having to hose out the backseat behind Circus Circus, but I was the winner. Those off duty clowns were merciless to Ben as they kept squeaking their noses as he scrubbed organic matter off the floorboard. My episode will be airing on the Pay-Per-View special.

PRICE IS WRONG

All along The Party Favors has declared that Todd Newton was lined up to take over The Price Is Right after Bob Barker laid down his skinny microphone. The network and producers have been making Todd’s life hell as each week they float another potential big name host whether it be George Hamilton, Rosie O’Donnell or Drew Carey. Why are we sticking with Todd? Because he hosts a live version of The Price Is Right at Ballys each afternoon. We had plans to drop by and see his live audition. There was only one thing that prevented us playing Plinko. They wanted $50 for a ticket!

What the hell is that about? To see the real show with Bob Barker was free. To see a recreation in Vegas, they’re charging $50. We’re not blaming Todd Newton for this price. We’re still rooting for him to be Mr. Showcase Showdown. But that’s a fierce price for afternoon entertainment. Although I would have paid for the adult version to see Dian Parkinson drop her bikini top while demonstrating the Turtlewax rub.

We ended up spending our afternoon playing the Wheel of Fortune slot machine.

RABBIT TROUBLE

Another thing we skipped was the Playboy Club at the Palms. We drove by the place and saw the giant bunny on the side of the tower. But decided against visiting when it was explained it was about a three hour wait to get into the place. My parents went to one of the real Playboy Clubs back in the ’60s. They didn’t wait in line for three hours to see real Playboy Bunnies with the fuzzy tails. I’m not going to stand for three hours for the hope of going inside a space to wait another two hours for my drink. Do they even have the Rabbit head swizzle sticks? What would “Ace” Rothstein say if he discovered people were standing in line for three hours to get into a club? He’d go nuts knowing that it’s three hours that we’re not gambling.

The Palms is another reason why Vegas is losing its cool for me. Old Vegas was a town that made you feel beautiful. No matter how big of a schlub you were, the doorman made you feel handsome and wanted. They even had greeters to make you feel like you had arrived. But New Vegas wants you to prove that you’re young and beautiful enough to dare visit. It’s like a party at Nicole Richie’s house. The velvet touch has become the velvet rope. Probably what stays in Vegas is your self-esteem. Are you pretty enough to hang out at Rehab or the faux-Studio 54? New Vegas doesn’t want Gene Hackman hanging out at their pool. This is a town that begs for George Clooney and Brad Pitt to crank out Ocean’s 21. Sleek and soulless structures glittering on a cramped street.

Remember a decade ago when Las Vegas wanted to be family friendly destination? Las Disney? Well that didn’t work out too good after the news media focused on roaming children while the parents remained glued to the roulette wheel. New Vegas wants to depict itself as adult playground, but what it really wants is those overgrown imbeciles that earn more cash than sense. What’s the point in begging to be accepted into a society that worships Paris Hilton and the cast of That ’70s Show? Do you want to have to rub elbows with Brandon Davis to get past the velvet rope?

NO MOUSE CASINO

We pondered the weird question: Why doesn’t Disney have a casino? They have the perfect characters to use in various slot machines. Three Poohs pays off the honeypot. They have themes for their hotel rooms. Why won’t the Mouse collect cheese in the desert? Is it because of the children? Nope. It’s because Disney doesn’t like the idea of having to pay off winners. The mouse didn’t get rich by giving it away. Nobody rides the monorail for free!

COST VEGAS

Las Vegas has always been seen as a cheap vacation. Ask anyone what they think of a trip to Vegas. They’ll talk about cheap hotel rooms, cheap buffets and comp show tickets. And what did they do with all the savings? They doubled down! But New Vegas doesn’t want any of that cheap crap. Think you’ll be getting a deal at Wynn, Venetian or Bellagio that rivals Circus Circus? The beautiful people must have all their fat in their wallets.

And the cheap eats are nearly a thing of the past. We went to the Spice buffet in the Planet Hollywood. It’s was $25 a head. They seemed to offer an amazing variety of international food. But every item had something off. The biggest offender was the King Crab legs. They were Viscount size. Plus they were boiled to the point of being shredded rubber. The stuffed grape leaves seemed like they were filled with paste. In order to slow eaters down, they wouldn’t let us refill our drinks. We had to wait for the waitress to perform this vital task. And our waitress was extra busy hiding from us.

Here’s a quick tip if you’re stuck at a buffet that won’t let you refill your drink as you reload your plate: as for a soda and a water. The buffet in the Tropicana also had the no drink refill policy. But they had an amazing omelet chef. He was a cheerful face on a rough morning.

The best buffet we found was Circus Circus. They didn’t try to overwhelm us with international selections. It was hardcore American entrees. They served meat! The offerings on the row would be best described as gambling fuel. Chow down and roll out. The pork and chicken were moist. The veggies crisp enough. And I could refill my soda whenever it was time. Circus Circus is still living up to its Diamonds Are Forever legacy.

THE BEST GAME IN TOWN

While some people go on vacation to play golf or ski or run with the bulls, I have my own favorite sport: Time Share Tours. It’s a true test of my will power against harden pros. In Vegas, I had two chances to get stuck with 1/52nd of a condo. Vegas is the prime city for hardcore time share action. While Orlando has more units, Vegas features the most annoying radio ads in the world. “It’s Las Vegas calling!” Tanya Roberts croaks. She’s the spokeswoman for Tahiti Village. I had to see if I could hold out against her and Alan Thicke. Vegas has been home to many great boxing matches and a Wrestlemania. How would I be able to deal with the heat in the 90 minute presentation?

Here’s three tips if you want to play to win:

1. Never admit you’ve been on a time share tour. Remember that all information you put down on the survey will be used against you when the finance guy arrives at your table. If you admit you’re a vet, you’re going to get pounded twice as hard. They will hit you with that nasty question about how you could be on a “free vacation” if you’d bought the timeshare in the past. Also claim that you work for a small company and rarely get a chance to go on week long vacations.

2. Don’t let your wife talk. This isn’t a macho move. She is considered the weak link by the sale staff. They know that she really controls the checkbook. If she seems curious, they’re going to double their powers to break her and take you down. The same is also true with children. The salesmen will turn into camp counselors to make the kids whine, “Daddy, we want to come here every year!” Your family ties will be wrapped around your neck as they force you into submission.

3. Don’t take too much pity on the salesmen. Most of them are really nice guys, but let’s face the simple fact: You’re only there because you want the promised freebies. You’re there to play the game and not make friends. You’re not looking for real estate.

The first place we hit was on the far side of the Palms. Their big selling point was a series of pics of the company owner hanging out with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Our primary salesman was a young kid that we nicknamed “Bill or Ted.” He was really laid back in his selling style. At one point he let us know that he’d already sold 3 units that day so he was under no pressure to hardball sell us. How laid back was he? At no point did he tell us the actual price of the unit. When the finance guy arrived, he kept talking vague numbers, but no point was there a hard number written on the scrap paper.

We had made the mistake of mentioning we’d visited a timeshare in Orlando. The finance guy went straight for the whole business of how we could have been visiting Las Vegas for “free.” He was all about making us feel guilty for not buying into the life. The key to competitive Time Share presentations is to not lose your cool and shout. You have to break their “No is merely a reluctant yes” salesmen philosophy. You want to see their posture deflate into the “These people aren’t buying” exhale. We had a 20 minute battle that made me draw into the strength that Robert Hegyes displayed on the tug of war finals of the first Battle of the Network Stars. They pulled out the brilliant logic trap of “If it wasn’t about the money, would you buy it?” Of course it’s about the money. This is the sex with a monkey for a million dollars joke. if you answer yes, they’ll spend the next hour trying to find the payment plan that’ll enslave you. You need to answer that you can’t deal with another piece of real estate at that moment. Once you give them a number, you’ve opened up a cut over your eye.

My defense story was that we were in the process of buying a bigger house and didn’t have the cash to invest on vacation property. They gave up on us. And we went off to collect our tickets. Our “winnings” included 2 tickets to V: The Variety Show and Nathan Burton plus 2 buffets at Spice. That’s a good amount of freebies for less than 2 hours of struggle. That’s better than the payout on the Match Game slot machine.

Of course they had the last bit of revenge. They had shuttled us to the time share joint. We wanted nearly 40 minutes in the 105 degree afternoon heat as vans drove past us. Finally we had to grab an off duty driver and beg him to return us to civilization or the World of M&Ms – whichever was closer.

I feared that the Tahiti Village would be my Waterloo. How can I compete against an all star line up that included Butch Patrick and the ghost of Al Lewis on the walls? We had a nice enough of a salesman giving us the tour. Although it was an odd tour since they were selling units for the new phase that was under construction. This was a series of buildings that would house over a 1,000 condos. He told me a lot of info about the town. Tahiti Village is on the side of the Strip that’s going to be under construction soon. Three casinos were going to be springing up in the neighborhood. He pointed out a spot that they were building a multi-billion dollar indoor ski slope like the one in Dubai. Why exactly you need to spend a fortune to build a ski slope since Vegas isn’t that far from skiable mountains? Think of all the energy that will be needed to keep that fresh packed powder snow on the phony slope in 115 degree heat. Al Gore sheds a tear for you, Las Vegas.

The sales guy almost had me thinking that this would be a great investment. But then he showed me the price. A two bedroom unit cost nearly $50,000. On top of that the yearly maintenance fee was $500. Ouch. They needed me to leave a deposit of $8,000 if I wanted to get in on the ground floor. When does the free part of time share vacations kick in? I pretty much didn’t have to make any excuses why that was too rich for my blood. I might be distantly related to the Maloof brothers, but not close enough to know their pin number. What’s even more frightening is a quick crunch of the numbers showed that the apartment had a price tag of $2.5 million if you bought it for the year. While the apartment was nice, it wasn’t $2.5 million nice. For that price, I expect hot and cold running hookers. I want a hot tub in the middle of my revolving bed. I want a bidet! And when you factor that unit price into the phase, Tahiti Village is a $2.5 billion dollar piece of real estate. That’s why Las Vegas can afford to keep calling you on your local sports radio channel.

When the finance guy arrived at our table, he tried to make a weird deal where we’d buy a single unit that we could use every other year. I went into the home upgrade story and he backed off. They didn’t even send the closer over to double team us. We were taken straight to the window to collect our booty. This time the tickets involved 2 tickets for Ice: Direct From Russia , Folies Bergere and the Tropicana’s buffet. After this hit, we were set for three nights of Vegas entertainment and two free meals. Now that’s old school Vegas.

Unlike the first joint, the Tahiti Village didn’t have us waiting long. Guess they needed to remove the odor of resistance from the lobby. It felt good to go 2-0 in my Vegas debut. I don’t want to brag, but those UFC guys don’t battle it out on back to back nights. Time Share Battling is a man’s sport that needs to be run on Spike. But were the shows worth the blood and missing teeth?

SHOWTIME

When we arrived in Vegas, I took at pact to avoid any Cirque du Soleil productions. They just creep me out with the freaky music, the spooky make up and their French Canadian attitude. They’ve taken over nearly major hotel in Vegas with their dangling circus act. Plus none of the Time Share joints offered Cirque tickets as freebies.

Also added to the no go list was Danny Gans. I had never heard of this guy, but his act at the Mirage has sold out for the next two years. Scalped tickets offered by brokers were close to $200. And what does he do? Pull a canned ham out of his mouth? Give you the secret to Keno numbers? Has sex with Britney Spears? Nope. He puts on a pair of glasses and impersonates George Burns. That’s entertainment?

The Producers was playing at Paris, but David Hasselhoff had left the cast. It was hard to tell who was in the show. I was hoping it was Pauly Shore and Chuck Norris. Now that’s worth burning the kids’ college fund. Luckily because of my bounty of freebies, we didn’t have to consult a loan specialist to see Blue Man Group. But were the fresh shows worth the price?

V: The Variety Show is a rough and tumble version of a talent show in what’s being rebranded as the Miracle Mile in the Planet Hollywood. The place still has it’s Middle East motif from when it was part of the Aladdin. V features Two Gauchos act as the MCs for a group of acts that include magic, juggling and balancing. They kept it lively as they had fun with members of the crowd. A few of the acts had appeared on last season of America’s Got Talent. The star of the show is Joe “TV Guy” Trammel. If CarrotTop and Frank Gorshin did so much blow (cut with rocket fuel) that their molecules hypervibrated and they merged, they would have created this act. In a scant few minutes he goes through decades of pop culture with dance moves and props. A day after the show we discovered him on Freemont Street in a jail cell. Turns out that he was spending time behind bars to match Paris Hilton’s hard time. You can actually see highlights of his incarceration on Youtube. We joked about Paris Hilton’s great quote that jail “was like being in a cage.”

The strange part about seeing V was recognizing faces from the Time Share tour. We gave each other that nod that gets captured at the end of disaster flicks between survivors.

We returned the following afternoon to the same theater to check out magician Nathan Burton. He had been a star on America’s Got Talent. I remember his illusion where he flushed a cop down a toilet. He’s a likable enough magician. And his face isn’t as creepy as Lance Burton. He turned each trick into a biographical vignette. It’s a good family magic show that doesn’t cost so much that you have to eBay your youngest.

Ice: Direct From Russia at the Riveria is a new show. They turned the stage into an ice rink including a loop into the audience so the performer can skate out to you. This was the same stage that Dean Martin once roamed. Now it was ready for Gordie Howe’s comeback. The show itself is majestic. A group of over three dozen Russian skaters perform a variety of acts that go between sweet, seductive, comic and thrilling. The opening alone is amazing with 40 people skating on the stage at once without slamming into each other. My favorite routine was a couple skating with kites. You heard it right, not only were they skating in the showroom, but they were flying kites. It was passionate and pure as they always kept moving. Later in the show one woman was hula-hooping on skates. She had so many silver hula-hoops going at once that she looked like a slinky.

We were told by the time share folks that they did two shows including an adult show. Visions of the legendary Showtime special Spice on Ice overwhelmed my senses. Sexy Russian female skaters going topless gets my attention over a bunch of guys covered in blue paint. But since the show had just opened, they only had one family style show each night. But even fully clothed, I got an eyeful of the women in motion. This show was a true reward for sitting through time share assault.

Folies Bergere at the Tropicana is a great Showgirls experience. And they did have the adult show. Strange to see people walk out of the theater when the dancers drop their tops. The upset audience members acted like it was a tribute to Catherine the Great with their sensibilities disturbed. The show featured lots of dance numbers. In the middle of the set, we were treated to a comic who juggled bowling balls. When you visit Las Vegas, at some point you must witness the glory of a statuesque woman with a giant feathered headdress.

All four shows were worth the hassle of resisting the hardcore sales pitch. I don’t recommend the sport of Time Share Pitching to people with weak wills and fat checkbooks.

What was really missing from the trip was the legendary dinner and a show of old Vegas. A ticket seller told me that the dinner and show died with Liberace. Who knew he was the that talented. He performed and cooked for his fans. I only hope that after time in his kitchen, he washed his hands before playing his piano. I also hope that before he cooked, he washed his hands after playing his organ. Please tip your waitress. Enjoy the veal!

ROGER WATER

The video screen outside the MGM Grand pimped the upcoming Roger Waters tour by declaring him, “The Genius Behind Pink Floyd!” Does this mean David Gilmour has to be billed as “The Fraud Who Drafted On the Genius of the Genius Behind Pink Floyd?”

LEAVING LAS VEGAS

We headed over to the Paris casino to get a freebie ride up to the top of their Eiffel Tower. It’s only when you’re 500 feet above the town that can you see beyond the mega-casinos to the small houses sprawling away from the strip. There’s a lot of people eager to live in 114 degree temperatures. Also all of the hotel construction becomes visible in a single glance. How long can it grow at this price?

For the longest time Last Vegas has claimed that it’s recession proof. That people will come no matter what’s going on in the world’s wallet. But all of these projects are costing billions (nobody does anything for a couple million bucks in this town anymore). And the cost of living the good life in Sin City has gone up faster than the jackpot on the Monopoly slot machine. This isn’t the cheap getaway of a decade ago. Everything was cheap in order to lure you to the felt covered tables. Those days seem to be slipping away. You are going to pay and pay for every minute you stay in the city. How long can so many luxury hotels with 3,000 rooms apiece pop up on the strip?

This is probably my last vacation to Vegas. The attitude is stifling. My shoulders felt tense. Instead of feeling like a welcomed guest, the corporate attitude of New Vegas is judgmental. Instead of employees asking me, “Would you like this, Sir?” The company handbook demands a response of “What do you want, now?” If you’re not Lindsay Lohan or a 600 ft. crane, this town has little need for your ass. My next visit to Nevada will be to Reno where I know I can eat a magnificent lobster dinner off Bunny Love at the Bunny Ranch.

FLYING HOME

Kudos to Airtran for installing XM satellite radio in their arm rests. Even though we got screwed twice connecting through Atlanta, being able to listen to the various channels instead of a screaming brat kept me calm. That airport is a mess on a sunny day. We spent 30 minutes on the tarmac waiting for gate to open up so we could race to our connecting flight. And then there was another long wait to get on the runway. But I was able to zone out to these hassles while listening to a baseball game.

The most beautiful moment was on the final leg. As we flew through the night sky, I turned to their ’60s channel. There was the voice of Wolfman Jack introducing the oldies. This was strange since he had died a dozen years ago, but he sounded more alive than any DJ working today. It made perfect sense when he bellowed, “Mercy!” Miles in the sky above the clouds I was listening to the Wolfman howling at the full moon from his heavenly abode. Finally my shoulders relaxed with an aural massage.

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Quick Stop Thingamabobs: 7/31/2007

Filed under: Columns,Thingamabobs — UncaScroogeMcD @ 12:01 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”¦

————————————————

Learn the secret art of the forehand smash… (Thingamabob)

Where do babies come from?… (Thingamabob)

Superman shills soaky toys … (Thingamabob)

This just makes me want to see Yo Yo Girl Cop all the more… (Thingamabob)

Lego Indy… (Thingamabob)

Have a THINGAMABOB? Send it in!

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July 30, 2007

SModcast 22

Filed under: SModcast — UncaScroogeMcD @ 2:19 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 22: Schwalcast –

The return of the distaff, in which our heroes talk about the likelihood of running into former intimates at ComiCon, the bending of the space/time continuum in an effort to bed a younger version of your spouse, why divorce is not an option, inappropriate hugging of the famous, Marion Ravenwood: gender traitor, shame-shorts, insecurities both founded and unfounded, middle-aged proms, the world wide hairshirt, and Shecky.

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

DOWNLOAD: (right click to save)
SModcast 22 (MP3 format) – 43.31 MB

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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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July 29, 2007

Trailer Park: Comic-Con 2007 Update

Filed under: Articles,Columns,Trailer Park — admin @ 11:31 pm

By Christopher Stipp

Archives? Right Here…
Want an exclusive piece of information? Seth Rogan stated tonight that his version of THE GREEN HORNET will NOT be played for comedic relief; it will be written as a straight, legitimate action movie. Take it for what it is.

OK, it’s Friday night, Saturday morning, 12:24 in the morning to be exact, and I have just come from the STAR WARS/WETA party to write a post.

What, with my screening of SUPERBAD just hours ago to said party where I consumed exactly two appletinis and two-thirds of a Heineken before tarrying away to Wendy’s so that I could eat great even late before midnight, I just had to let you know that I have seen the coverage from the other sites out there and, believe you me, there is no comparison.

Sure, you could follow the panels that have been written about, the information that’s been interpreted by other writers, but I figured something out this year with the help of esteemed EIC, Ken Plume: Video.

I bought a $15 tripod and hooked it up to my camcorder and took off into the throngs of my 1:1’s today and the ones I’ll be covering tomorrow. I should mention that if you’re interested in what major celebrities are saying to other sites who have been privileged enough to secure their holiest of holies, please go elsewhere. You can learn a lot from what a lot of writers are saying about the panels. For example, I can tell you, categorically, that the Warner Bros. panel sucked. It sucked for reasons that I can’t even explain at this point. I would use other, more descriptive language, to describe the sucktitude of the panel but I won’t.

I have audio.

It’s something I figured out after four years of attending this Comic-Con. You’ve got to get the stories no one else will bring and since most every single major studio deemed it good enough to shaft and tank every exclusive request for an interview I thought it would be fun to try and scoop the scoopers. Why bother having some writer’s interpretation of the panel’s events distilled when you can have the straight poop.

I have Zack Snyder’s audio of THE WATCHMEN panel; it’s just something no one else is going to bring you.

I’ve got Kevin’s latest Q&A.

I have a 1:1 video interview with Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon talking about BALLS OF FURY, where it ends up being hijacked by David Lo Pan himself, James Hong.

I’ve got the SUPERBAD Q&A which was done after an exclusive screening and where yours truly even made a jackass out of himself by asking a question about the Michael Cera “incident” which I never bothered to check up on after the fact to find out that the “leaked” video was just a hoax (yeah, that was a real journalistic shining moment).

I’ve got the lovely Missy Peregrym talking about her turn in HEROES and what her new series, THE REAPER, means to her career as an actress who’s simply trying to do whatever she can to stay out of the unemployment line. (She’s sensitive about these things…) She’s, perhaps, been the shining star of the Con so far.

I’ve even got Blair Butler of G4 taking some minutes to talk to me about comic books, nerd-ism and the magic of the con.

But, for now, you’ve all got to wait it out until I process all this raw footage. I’m not in the mood to do anything with it, I still have tomorrow to go. So far I’m looking at 1:1’s with the actors of MONSTER SQUAD, the director for SAW and a socio/political cartoonist who should be credited with being a voice for those of us who see our country devolving in ways that we can’t control on our own, Ted Rall.

Comic-Con is quite exciting this year. I don’t care what the haters will have you believe, the Con is just as alive and well as it should be, regardless of the slack treatment I’m getting by those in charge of the talent.

Wish you were here.

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July 27, 2007

Weekend Shopping Guide 7/27/07: Yellow Fever

Filed under: Shopping Guides — UncaScroogeMcD @ 1:57 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…

It’s time to catch the funny kind of yellow fever, as we all get geared up to head to our respective moving picture houses to gander and gape at the big screen adventures of The Simpsons. While we’re still a few weeks off from the release of the 10th season on DVD, you can get a trio of great books to tide you over, and help feed your cravings for our favorite family. First and foremost is the deluxe, hardcover Simpsons Handbook: Secret Tips From The Pros (HarperCollins, $39.95 SRP), which goes in-depth on the design and construction of the family proper, as well as Springfield’s most popular residents, with detailed visual breakdowns and drawing instructions, plus color cel-overlays. If you want some oversized fun, check out theSimpsons Masterpiece Gallery (HarperCollins, $17.95 SRP), which features dozens of big-scale film poster parodies, comic scenes, and portraits. Last – and the most fun you can have at a cheap price – is Greetings From The Simpsons (HarperCollins, $12.95 SRP), which contains a whole slew of fun postcards to mail to all your friends and family.

One of my favorite shows to watch during the 80’s – when I wasn’t getting my fill of Family Ties or Silver Spoons, or an endless stream of syndicated reruns – was Benson (Sony, Not Rated, DVD-$29.95 SRP). It is genuine elation that I can finally hold in my stubby mitts the complete first season of Robert Guillaume’s star turn as the only man able to bring order to the confused household of Governor Eugene Gatling. This 3-disc set contains all 24 episodes, plus a video intro from Guillaume, a featurette on the Governor’s mansion, and more.

With the final episodes of Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law – featured, conveniently enough, on the 3rd volume, now available (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$29.98 SRP) – the only remaining show from Adult Swim’s inaugural line-up is Aqua Teen. I admit, I’ll miss Harvey – it was the most consistently funny entry of that line-up, and its absence will be hard to take. The 2-disc set features deleted scenes, a joke timeline, an X the Eliminator comic book, and more.

If you’re just killing time until the Star Trek: The Next Generation megaset streets this Fall (just in time to suck your holiday cash away), you can snag the latest “Fan Collective” release. Captain’s Log (Paramount, Not Rated, DVD-$38.99 SRP). This time, the 17 episodes of the set feature one episode from each series – TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, & Enterprise – chosen by their respective captains. That’s right – not only do the fans get their picks, but so do William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, and Scott Bakula. Bonus features include intros from the Captains, and 5 newly produced featurettes. Where were all these bonus features when the original sets came down the pike?

Cool off from the summer swelter by taking a dip into Carl Barks’s classic “The Golden River”, the lead story in this month’s issue (#367) of Uncle Scrooge (Gemstone, $7.99). And why not follow it up with Donald Duck battling the elements at sea in the latest issue (#682) of Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories (Gemstone, $7.99).

Long before he conquered America as Dr. House, Hugh Laurie had earned his place amongst Britain’s comedic firmament alongside the brilliant Stephen Fry as the dynamic duo Fry & Laurie. After long years of waiting and hoping, the complete four season run of their sketch series A Bit of Fry & Laurie (BBC, Not Rated, DVD-$79.98 SRP each) has made its way to DVD. While the bonus materials on the first season is technically limited to the rarely-seen pilot, the second season features the documentary Footlights: 100 Years of Comedy, featuring early Fry & Laurie material. Unfortunately, seasons 3 & 4 lack any bonus materials whatsoever. Still, if you’ve never seen the show, rectify that glaring oversight immediately.

David Fincher turns down some of his more off-putting cinematic tendencies for an engaging thriller that evokes a touch of the Hitchcockian with Zodiac (Paramount, Rated R, DVD-$28.99 SRP), which plays off the infamous San Francisco serial killer to tell the tale of those in law enforcement and the press who desperately tried to track him down and put an end to his killing spree. Bonus features are complete nonexistent, so we can all expect the eventual deluxe edition.

The cast has fluctuated through the years, but the essential core concept of Stargate SG-1 (MGM/UA, Not Rated, DVD-$49.98 SRP) is what allowed it to reach a rare, nearly unprecedented (save for Doctor Who feat for a sci-fi series – lasting a full 10 years. The 5-disc 10th season box set features he final 20 episodes, plus audio commentaries, featurettes, galleries, and more.

It’s Halloween in July with the release of the 6th season of Tales From The Crypt (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$39.98 SRP). This was the season that featured the Zemeckis-directed sleight of hand that resurrected Humphrey Bogart, plus episodes guest-starring John Lithgow, Hank Azaria, Isabella Rossellini, Isaac Hayes, and more. It’s 15 fright-filled episodes sure to darken your summer day.

Available separately in the past, you can now snag three classic Hudson/Day romantic comedies in the 2-disc Doris Day and Rock Hudson Comedy Collection (Universal, Not Rated, DVD-$19.98 SRP), featuring Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, and Send Me No Flowers.

We still haven’t gotten the Saturday morning live action adventures of Captain Marvel, but we’re one step closer with the complete collection of The Secrets of Isis (BCI, Not Rated, DVD-$29.98 SRP), the good Captain’s companion show. The 3-disc set features all 22 episodes of the show’s two season run, plus an audio commentary, interviews, rare footage, galleries, a bonus episode, and more.

Cursed with a keen sense of smell that dictates how he perceives the world, a young French peasant (Ben Whishaw) becomes enraptured by the passing perfumed scent of a young woman in Perfume (Dreamworks, Rated R, DVD-$29.99 SRP). Desiring nothing more than to capture that essence, this tale of passion and perception turns into a far darker affair. Hey, with a cast that includes Alan Rickman and Dustin Hoffman, it’s at least worth a spin, right? The sole bonus feature is a behind-the-scenes documentary.

In their continuing effort to revisit and enhance their catalog through newly remastered and restored high definition prints, Criterion turns their eye towards Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles (Criterion, Not Rated, DVD-$39.95 SRP), and the results are definitely with the double-sip. Not only is the print nothing short of stunning, but the bonus features remain intact – including an audio commentary, interviews, galleries, and more.

Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, and Fred Astaire are just a few of the stars that light up the second volume of Classic Musicals From The Dream Factory (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$59.98 SRP), which pulls together another 7 musicals from the MGM vault – The Pirate, Words and Music, That’s Dancing, That Midnight Kiss, The Toast Of New Orleans, The Royal Wedding, and The Belle Of New York. Bonus features include vintage shorts, classic cartoons, outtakes, commentaries, featurettes, and more.

I was never a fan of the comic, so the animated adaptation of Todd McFarlane’s Spawn was never of interest to me. Still, there are plenty of fans who will want to flock to their favorite DVD emporiums for a copy of the new Spawn: 10th Anniversary Signature Edition (HBO, Not Rated, DVD-$39.98 SRP) features all 18 episodes, digitally remastered, plus a quartet of commentaries, behind-the-scenes featurettes, character profiles, and an interview with McFarlane himself – all in a collectible metal case.

Fans of John Woo’s classic Kong period will want to snag their own copies of a pair of special edition re-releases of The Last Hurrah For Chivalry (Genius, Not Rated, DVD-$19.95 SRP) and Hard Boiled (Genius, Rated R, DVD-$24.95 SRP). Hard Boiled is a 2-disc affair, featuring commentary, featurettes, interviews, and more.

Made during his wilderness days post-Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola brings a nice crackle and flair to his adaptation of John Grisham’s The Rainmaker (Paramount, Rated PG-13, DVD-$14.99 SRP), which gets the special edition treatment with a brand new commentary, featurettes, deleted scenes, screen tests, and more.

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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Comics in Context #187: All Hallows Eve

Filed under: Columns,Comics in Context — admin @ 1:38 am

Always looking for material for this column, I thought, why not go to one of the big bookstore events on Friday, July 20 for the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in J. K. Rowling’s series? The biggest bash in New York City was the one at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square, where Jim Dale, who performs the audio book versions of the Harry Potter series, would start doing readings at 10:30 PM. There would even be live owls in the store!

When the previous book in the series was released, I was in San Diego for the 2005 Comic-Con International. Despite the fact that I was at a Borders bookstore within easy walking distance of the Convention Center, I had no trouble getting into the store, and only a reasonable wait in line to pick up a copy of the book (see “Comics in Context” #97). This wasn’t bad, considering that among the hundred thousand people attending the Con, there was surely a huge number of Potter fans.

So I got to Union Square’s Barnes & Noble at 10:30 on Friday night and saw a long line stretching out the doors, which I followed to the end of the block, around the corner, down the block, around another corner, and midway down that side of the block, reaching the bookstore’s delivery entrance. It was obvious that these people weren’t being let in because the store was filled to legal capacity. That meant that none of these people would probably get in until the pre-release festivities were over at midnight, and a woman in line told me that everyone in line had already reserved a copy of the book. (I dfon’t recall seeing any small children in line. The people in line were mostly twentysomethings, who had presumably grown up reading the series and remained loyal to these “children’s books” which appeal to all ages.)

I had decided not to go to this year’s San Diego Con and had felt relieved that I would not be braving the lines to the dreaded Hall H, site of the con’s movie panels. Now, I realized, the Hall H experience had come to New York. Would I wait outside for at last 90 minutes, probably longer, not to get in until the show was over? Not this time. I headed home.

Besides, I had already had an experience appropriate for the release of Deathly Hallows. On the website of the book’s British publisher, Bloomsbury, there had been a webcast from the Natural History Museum in London, which is my favorite building in the city and whose Romanesque architecture makes it a good substitute for Harry’s school Hogwarts.
The audience counted down to midnight (London time), and then Rowling read the first chapter of the new book aloud. She did it rather well, too, much better than the reading I heard her do at Radio City Music Hall last year (see “Comics in Context” #148). You can hear her Natural History Museum reading, too. She did it in the Museum’s Great Hall; I wonder what it would’ve been like seeing the Museum’s famous Diplodocus statue looming in the background, as if playing the role of one of the Potter series’ mythical beasts.

The first chapter made for a suspenseful set piece, and made me thankful that I had refused to read any spoilers or reviews that had come out before the book’s official release. I realized that I was glad I hadn’t even known what the first chapter was about before hearing Rowling read it aloud. I wanted to be completely surprised about the direction the book would take from each chapter to the next. (And those of you who have not yet read Deathly Hallows and want to be similarly surprised should stop reading this week’s column now. In another paragraph I’m going to start discussing the plot, including the ending.)

The New York Times, including its Public Editor, has been defending its decision to run Michiko Kakutani’s review of Hallows on Thursday, two days before the official release. The Times claims that the review did not give anything important away; I read the review after finishing the book, and it’s true that Kakutani concentrates on Rowling’s style rather than the specific contents. But, as film critic Nathan Lee observed in a Times Op-Ed about the controversy, every review by necessity gives away something, and Kakutani did state in her review that “at least half a dozen characters we have come to know die in these pages, and many others are wounded or tortured.” (Rowling had publicly stated that two major characters would die, but I immediately realized that that quota would be filled and exceeded just by killing off the principal villains, including Voldemort. In fact, I’m rather surprised that Lucius Malfoy survives in the book. Perhaps since he had fallen from Voldemort’s favor, Rowling didn’t want to kick him when he was down.)

Moreover, it seems to me that by printing its review two days early, the Times was effectively giving its approval to the booksellers and Internet posters who had violated the official release date. The Times‘ tin ear as to the repercussions of its decision is demonstrated by the responses to the Public Editor’s defense, as you can read online.

Journeying into Manhattan on Saturday, I sighted a fellow subway passenger holding a copy of Deathly Hallows. At a midtown Barnes & Noble, I simply walked up to the sales counter, where the cashier handed me a copy of Hallows from what must have been a considerable stack. It was a beautifully sunny day, so I headed over to Central Park, where I found two appropriate locations to start reading the book: first by the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, and then by the statue of Alice in Wonderland. Yes, this was far better than waiting outside Barnes & Noble past midnight and then taking the subway home around 1 or 2 A.M Saturday morning.

Why should I write about Deathly Hallows in a column titled “Comics in Context”? First, I suspect that many, perhaps most of you are Potter readers and don’t mind. Second, one of my primary subjects in “Comics in Context” is the superhero genre, which is a form of the larger genre which the literary critic Northrop Frye called “romance,” meaning an adventure story involving heroes and villains who are larger than life. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga appears to have succeeded Star Wars as the dominant, most influential “romance” in popular culture.

Where should I start in tackling a critique of Deathly Hallows? I decided to focus on the declaration by Time Magazine’s Lev Grossman (Thurs., July 12, 2007) that “If you want to know who dies in Harry Potter, the answer is easy: God.” He continued, “Harry Potter lives in a world free of any religion or spirituality of any kind. He lives surrounded by ghosts but has no one to pray to, even if he were so inclined, which he isn’t. Rowling has more in common with celebrity atheists like Christopher Hitchens than she has with [J.R.R.] Tolkien and [C.S.] Lewis”.

I couldn’t recall any examples of prayer or religious services in the Harry Potter books, but I didn’t find Grossman’s pronouncement entirely convincing. Does the absence of references to religion on the printed page necessarily mean that the author and her hero don’t believe in God? What if Rowling thought that religious faith was too private a matter to insert openly into a children’s adventure saga? What if she thought it unwise to enunciate specific religious beliefs in her books when her audience consists of children and adults of many faiths, as well as agnostics and atheists? Besides, to be vulgar about it, although Rowling establishes the existence of lavatories in her fictional world (notably Moaning Myrtle’s hangout, the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets), she doesn’t depict her characters relieving themselves, though we may assume that they do. The Beat points out “the pervasiveness of Christian holidays” like Christmas and Easter in the Potter books; so maybe many of Rowling’s characters are praying and attending church when we’re not looking.

In this same piece, the Beat includes a quotation from Rowling, who was asked by the Vancouver Sun (Oct. 26, 2000) whether she was a Christian. “‘Yes, I am,’ she says. “˜. . .Every time I’ve been asked if I believe in God, I’ve said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what’s coming in the books.'” Rowling told another interviewer (CBCNewsWorld: Hot Type, July 13, 2000), “I do believe in God.” but “Magic in the sense in which it happens in my books. . . .I don’t believe in that. . .. This is so frustrating. Again, there is so much I would like to say, and come back when I’ve written book seven. But then maybe you won’t need to even say it ’cause you’ll have found it out anyway. You’ll have read it.” Grossman even reported in a previous article, “Interestingly, although Rowling is a member of the Church of Scotland, the books are free of references to God. On this point, Rowling is cagey. “˜Um. I don’t think they’re that secular,’ she says, choosing her words slowly” (Time, July 17, 2005). (For all three quotations, see here.)

Intrigued, I did further research and discovered that there has been considerable analysis of Christian imagery and themes in the Harry Potter books, notably the work of scholar John Granger, the author of several books on the series. (Granger maintains his own website, and is interviewed here.)

In her aforementioned blog entry, the Beat, who describes herself as “some kind of Zen Buddhist agnostic,” raises the question as to whether she would be “clubbed over the head” with Christianity in Deathly Hallows, but predicts that Rowling will take a more subtle approach.

That proved to be correct. In the previous books the subtext of Christian imagery and themes that Granger has found completely escaped Grossman’s notice, and, it seems, that of most reviewers. Why would Rowling change her approach in the final book?

Furthermore, the Beat makes a fine point in asserting that Rowling “understands that what many take as Christian symbols – blood, chalices, trees, etc etc – are actually universal symbols, many of them adopted from pagan faiths by the early Christian missionaries. “ I don’t know if Rowling has actually said so. But the Beat is right that many of these symbols are not restricted to Christianity.

For example, one of the Christian symbols that Granger finds is Fawkes, Dumbledore’s phoenix. Due to its ability to die and resurrect itself, early Christian writers used the phoenix as a symbol of Christ. But the phoenix dates back to ancient Egyptian mythology, and also appears in ancient Greek mythology, Chinese mythology, and Russian folklore. The idea of a bird, a creature of the air, that can thus transcend death, appears to be an archetype that turns up in various cultures.

(And is Jean Grey, the Phoenix of the superhero genre, a Christ figure? Well, she is well known for returning from the dead. And she did give her life to save the universe in Uncanny X-Men #137, although, significantly, that was not the ending that Chris Claremont and John Byrne intended for the “Dark Phoenix Saga.” I should ask them if their Phoenix was a Christ figure, but I expect they will look at me as if I have three heads and say no. But that doesn’t mean that she can’t be interpreted as such.)

C. S. Lewis intended his book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (see “Comics in Context” #99) to embody Christian themes. In it, Aslan the lion is the Christ figure who undergoes literal death and resurrection. So if the Harry Potter series has Christian themes, then one might expect Harry to die and return to life in the final, climactic book. And indeed he does, although Rowling carefully leaves it up to the reader to decide whether Harry’s death and resurrection are literal or figurative, as we shall see.

But death and resurrection is not uniquely a Christian motif. Osiris died and returned to life So did Dionysus. It is part of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” monomyth. Symbolic deaths and resurrections are everywhere in the romance (adventure) genre. Batman is left to die in an inescapable death trap; Batman escapes and triumphs over the villain. Virtually every two-part episode of the 1960s Batman TV show thus included symbolic death and resurrection.

So if we are to detect Rowling’s Christianity in Deathly Hallows, we must look carefully. Is there a particular interpretation that she puts on archetypal symbols and the phases of Campbell’s monomyth that may specifically reflect her religious views?

In Deathly Hallows we meet Xenophilius Lovegood, the father of Harry’s friend Luna. Both Lovegoods believe in all manner of things that are unlikely to be real. But on important matters, they tend to be correct.

Xenophilius inevitably clashes with Hermione, who takes a wholly rational approach to the world, even to magic, and, it would seem, to literature as well.

In his will Professor Dumbledore left Hermione his copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a collection of children’s stories–the counterpart of Grimm’s fairy tales for the wizards’ community, it seems–for young wizards and witches, “in the hope that she will find it entertaining and instructive” (p. 126). Significantly, rationalist Hermione had never heard of these fantasy tales (pp. 134-135).

Later, Xenophilius instructs Hermione to read one of the book’s stories, “The Tale of the Three Brothers,” aloud. Xenophilius then informs Hermione, Harry and Ron that the three magical objects in the story–the Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone, and the Invisibility Cloak–are real, and that they are known as the Deathly Hallows.

“”˜But there’s no mention of the words “Deathly Hallows” in the story,’ said Hermione.

“”˜Well, of course not,’ said Xenophilius. . . . “˜That is a children’s tale, told to amuse rather than to instruct. Those of us who understand these matters, however, recognize that the ancient story refers to three objects, or Hallows, which, if united, will make the possessor master of Death'” (pp. 409-410).

I suspect that here Rowling may be stating that though her Harry Potter books are “children’s tales,” primarily “told to amuse rather than to instruct,” that “those of us who understand these matters” recognize that they have deeper meanings, beneath the surface. Remember that Dumbledore wanted Hermione to regard Beedle’s book as simultaneously “entertaining” and “instructive.” Dumbledore wanted Hermione to discover those deeper meanings, and Rowling is thus encouraging those of her readers who are capable of literary analysis to do the same. And “The Tale of the Three Brothers” is about how to become “vanquisher” of death.

Notice that Xenophilius is also saying that “The Tale of the Three Brothers” is about the Deathly Hallows even though it never uses that name. Grossman contends that the Potter books are atheistic works because Rowling never mentions God in them. Through Xenophilius, Rowling indicates that her books can deal with subjects without explicitly mentioning them by name.

Hermione objects to the idea that there can be any truth within this children’s fable, whereupon Xenophilius scolds her, “You are, I gather, not unintelligent, but painfully limited. Narrow. Close-minded” (p. 410). That is because Hermione only believes in what can be proved by scientific methods.

Soon afterwards, Hermione and Xenophilius get into an argument about the existence of the Resurrection Stone. She refuses to believe that any magic object exists that can raise the dead. “Well, how can that be real?” she demands.

Xenophilius replies, “Prove that it is not.”

This infuriates Hermione, who explodes, “you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!”

“”˜Yes, you could,’ said Xenophilius. “˜I am glad to see that you are opening your mind a little'” (pgs. 411-412). And as it turns out, the Resurrection Stone–and resurrection–do exist in the world of Deathly Hallows.

However comedic this quarrel between Hermione and Xenophilius may be, it also makes a serious point. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard acknowledged that there was no proof that there is a God, but took a “leap of faith” to believe that God exists. I am also reminded of the philosopher Blaise Pascal’s “wager”: not knowing whether or not God exists, Pascal chose to act as if God does exist, since if he’s right, he’d go to heaven.

At least in his or her work, the fantasy writer is open to the idea that there may be a reality that cannot be detected by scientific means. The religious person believes in beings and things whose existence science cannot prove, such as God, heaven, and an afterlife. Xenophilius’s position–if you can’t prove something doesn’t exist, then it’s real–is a comic justification of faith.

Is there a hereafter in the Potter books? There are ghosts, such as Nearly Headless Nick. Though ghosts in fiction traditionally frighten the living, the notion of ghosts is actually reassuring, since their existence indicates there is a life after death. So it makes sense that the ghosts at Hogwarts are friendly spirits.

Just because an author uses ghosts in her stories doesn’t mean that she believes that ghosts exist or that there is an afterlife: the author may simply be working within a long literary tradition of the ghost story.

Rowling has an unusual take on ghosts in the Potter books: their existence (and that of souls) proves nothing about whether or not there is a hereafter. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the book, but not the movie), following the death of his godfather Sirius Black, Harry seeks out Nearly Headless Nick to find out if it’s possible for Sirius to return from the grave. Nick informs Harry that only wizards can return as ghosts, but that Sirius will not, because he “will have. . . gone on.” Nick does not explain what that means because he does not know. “I was afraid of death,” he tells Harry; “I chose to remain behind. . . .I know nothing of the secrets of death” (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, p. 861). Rowling has said, significantly, that “there are some people who would not come back as ghosts because they are unafraid, or less afraid, of death”. This may suggest that Rowling considers it important to overcome a fear of death. Voldemort is driven by a fear of death, leading to his vain attempt at immortality by concealing portions of his soul in the various “horcruxes” which figure so prominently in Deathly Hallows‘ plot. (So would this make suicide bombers even more cold-blooded than the Harry Potter saga’s master villain?)

In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, what appear to be the souls of Voldemort’s victims, including Harry’s parents James and Lily, emerge from Voldemort’s wand. But the book informs us that these are “spirit echoes,” not the actual spirits of the deceased.

The deceased headmasters of Hogwarts, including Dumbledore following his demise, appear in portraits in the headmaster’s office and can converse with the living. But Rowling has stated that “they are not as fully realized as ghosts. . . .the idea is that the previous headmasters and headmistresses leave behind a faint imprint of themselves. They leave their aura, almost, in the office and they can give some counsel to the present occupant, but it is not like being a ghost”. In a flashback via the Pensieve, the portrait of the deceased Dumbledore seems to me very much like the real Dumbledore as he discusses strategy with Snape, and not like a “faint imprint,” but I will bow to the author’s interpretation.

Thus through most of the saga, Rowling emphasizes the finality of death. Even so, there are hints in the books before Hallows that there is indeed a hereafter.

In Phoenix, Luna Lovegood tells Harry that she is confident she will “see” her deceased mother again (Phoenix p. 863). When Harry voices doubt, Luna reminds him that they heard voices behind a mysterious veil in an archway in the Ministry of Magic, a veil that seemingly separates the world of the living from the realm of the dead. The implication is that they heard the voices of the dead. At the time (Phoenix, p. 774) Hermione declared vehemently that she didn’t hear any voices from behind the veil. Here may be another case of a Lovegood, as a visionary, being aware of a reality that the rational Hermione denies.

Moreover, as early as the first book in the series, Dumbledore, that font of wisdom, declared, “After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure” (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, p. 297).

In “The Tale of the Three Brothers,” one of the brothers used the Resurrection Stone to resurrect the woman he loved. According to the tale, “Yet she was sad and cold, separated from him as by a veil” (Hallows p. 409); Rowling may well have chosen that last word as an allusion to the mysterious veil in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

The tale continues, “Though she had returned to the material world, she did not truly belong there and suffered” (Hallows, p. 409). Shortly afterwards, Harry speculates about using the Resurrection Stone to resurrect his parents and others, but then realizes, “But according to Beedle the Bard, they wouldn’t want to come back, would they?” (Hallows, p. 416).

This reminds me of another hero of the “romance” genre, who has undergone literal death and resurrection not once but twice: Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At the end of the fifth season, Buffy heroically sacrificed her life to save her sister and the world, and in the sixth season Buffy’s friends performed a spell that brought her back to life. But it turned out that initially Buffy did not want to be back in “the material world”: by resurrecting her, her friends had forcibly torn her soul out of a spiritual realm that Buffy called “heaven,” where she had achieved a transcendent bliss; it was actually painful for her to readjust to life on Earth. Whedon is known to be a Harry Potter fan (see “Comics in Context” #97-98); in this instance we find him and Rowling thinking alike, although Whedon is an atheist who only uses the afterlife as a fictional device.

Not only does the Resurrection Stone prove to be real, but it causes Harry’s parents, his godfather Sirius Black, and his ally Remus Lupin, all deceased, to appear and accompany him as he goes to what Joseph Campbell would call Harry’s “supreme ordeal”: his death at the hands of Voldemort. The omniscient narrator observes, “he was about to join them. He was not really fetching them: They were fetching him” (p. 698). The narrator says that these figures “resembled most closely” the Tom Riddle (the young Voldemort) who manifested in the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and who “had been memory made nearly solid” (p. 699). But the books have established that that version of Riddle was actually a portion of the real Voldemort’s soul, placed into his younger self’s diary. The narrator states that these figures were “Less substantial than living bodies, but much more than ghosts” (p. 699): I read this as indicating that these are the actual spirits of James and Lily Potter, Sirius and Lupin, though they have not taken on new physical bodies.

Here I am reminded of how the spirits of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and the redeemed Anakin Skywalker appear to the triumphant Luke at the close of Return of the Jedi. In Luke’s case the danger has passed. It’s a comforting idea that one’s parental figures would appear to him to ease his passage into death.

Though Rowling’s narrator treats these four spirits as real, I wonder if Rowling is providing an alternate way of reading this sequence for the agnostics in her audience. Sirius’s spirit informs Harry, “We are part of you. . .Invisible to anyone else” (p. 700). That could suggest that the four spirits are actually figments of Harry’s imagination, or “memories made nearly solid.” Or Sirius could just be speaking metaphorically of the spirits’ personal connection to Harry as being “part of you,” and assuring him that his enemies will not see them. The passage can be read either way.

Shortly thereafter Voldemort unleashes a Killing Curse at Harry, seemingly murdering him. Then, in chapter 35, Harry awakens within “unformed nothingness” (p. 706) that takes the form of an idealized version of King’s Cross, the real life London train station from which Harry travels to Hogwarts. If Rowling is intentionally putting Christian symbols into her work, then the name “King’s Cross” is blatantly one of them. As a train station, it is a place of transition; Joseph Campbell would call it one of the thresholds of his monomyth.

In this seemingly astral version of King’s Cross, Harry encounters Dumbledore, who readily admits to being dead, but who repeatedly states that Harry is not dead. Dumbledore also explains why, by the rules of magic, Voldemort’s attempt to murder Harry failed.

So Harry is not literally dead, but he is figuratively dead. Perhaps it is more precise to say that he is in a state between life and death, and that may be literally true, since Dumbledore says that Harry has the choice of whether to “go back” or to go “on.” (Again, Rowling is not defining what the hereafter is like.) Harry is in a place in which the living (himself) may interact with the dead (Dumbledore).

It is part of the pattern of the Harry Potter novels that Harry has an conversation with Dumbledore, reflecting on that book’s adventure, at the end of each (except for the sixth, in which Dumbledore dies). In Chapter 35 of Hallows this part of the pattern reasserts itself, even though this time Dumbledore is dead. In Hallows this encounter is what Campbell called “atonement with the father,” a reconciliation between the protagonist and a father figure. This may be especially necessary in Hallows since in this book Harry has learned disturbing things about Dumbledore’s past and even come to have doubts about Dumbledore’s true intentions towards him; in Chapter 35 Dumbledore confesses to his failings but reassures Harry about his good intentions towards him.

According to the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction’s description of Campbell’s monomyth, for the hero to undergo a transformation in this phase, “the person as he or she has been must be “˜killed’ so that the new self can come into being. Sometime this killing is literal. . . “. Scholar Lynne Milum, in describing Campbell’s Atonement, notes that “While he assists the hero through his journey, the father figure is mindful that the budding hero is destined to replace him.”. In their encounter in Chapter 35, Dumbledore acknowledges to Harry that “I have known, for some time now, that you are the better man” (p. 713) and that Harry has succeeded where Dumbledore failed, in becoming the “true master of death” (p. 720).

The next step in Campbell’s monomyth is the hero’s “Apotheosis.” The Maricopa Center website explains that “When someone dies a physical death, or dies to the self to live in spirit, he or she moves beyond the pairs of opposites to a state of divine knowledge, love, compassion and bliss. . . .the person is in heaven and beyond all strife. A more mundane way of looking at this step is that it is a period of rest, peace and fulfillment before the hero begins the return.” This fits Chapter 35, in which Harry receives considerable knowledge from the now rather godlike Dumbledore about what has been happening.

At this point in the monomyth, the hero receives the “Ultimate Boon.” With regard to this, Milum states that “Most prevalent is the recurring theme of Immortality. The hero achieves illumination that there is an indestructible life beyond the physical body. This Immortality is timeless and experienced in the here and now.” Well, certainly Harry has learned by meeting Dumbledore’s spirit that there is life beyond physical death.

Moreover, the “Ultimate Boon” is that, in Dumbledore’s words, Harry has become “the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die,” which Voldemort does not (pp. 720-721).

In Chapter 35 Rowling returns to the theme of the deeper meanings of children’s stories, or, perhaps, of fiction in general. Dumbledore exclaims that Voldemort’s “knowledge remained woefully incomplete, Harry!. . .Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing!” (p. 709).

In some cases, the next phase of the monomyth is the “Refusal of the Return.” Dumbledore tells Harry that the latter has a “choice” whether to “go back” or not. Since Harry has pictured this transitional realm as King’s Cross, he could “board a train” to go to the true hereafter. This is a nice parallel: Harry crossed a threshold in the first book by taking the train from King’s cross to Hogwarts, starting a new phase of his life, and he can make the transition to the next world by taking another train from this other King’s Cross. Harry is tempted: “it was warm and light and peaceful here, and he knew that he was heading back to pain and the fear of more loss” (p. 722). But, as Dumbledore puts it, it is “a worthy goal” to save others from Voldemort, and Harry decides to cross the threshold back to the land of the living.

The chapter concludes with my favorite passage in the entire book. Harry asks Dumbledore, “Is this real? Or has this been happening in my head?” Dumbledore replies, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” (p. 723).

Here Rowling offers different ways of interpreting chapter 35. It may be that Harry has imagined this conversation with Dumbledore. This reminds me of Ratatouille (see last week’s column), in which the protagonist, Remy, imagines that the ghost of Auguste Gusteau, the deceased master chef whom he idolizes, appears to him and gives him advice. Thus the archetypal mentor figure of Campbell’s monomyth is presented as an aspect of the protagonist’s own psyche. Gusteau’s “ghost” is actually Remy’s own wisdom, emerging from his subconscious to provide him with counsel. It may be that in Chapter 35 that Harry is dreaming, and that he imagines Dumbledore providing him with answers that Harry’s subconscious mind has worked out on its own. Dumbledore’s final words therefore mean that even though Harry is imagining all this, the information that he has gained in this “dream” is still true.

On the other hand, one could also read this final exchange in Chapter 35 quite differently. Dumbledore is pointing out that of course Harry is having this vision inside his head, but that Dumbledore’s spirit, and their conversation, and the knowledge Dumbledore imparts in their talk, are all real. (Of course, you could say that we all experience reality “in our heads” since we rely on our senses conveying information to our brains.)

So Rowling gives us the option of thinking that Harry actually did communicate with the spirit of Dumbledore, and that there is life after death, or that Harry hallucinated it all, and that there might not be. In either case, the information that Harry gains in this experience is both “real” and correct.

So Harry crosses the return threshold, in Campbell’s phrase, in order to become the leading figure of the forces of good in “The Battle of Hogwarts,” in which the entire school battles Voldemort’s forces of evil. Here I found myself thinking of the finale of season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like Harry, Buffy had been regarded with suspicion by many of her classmates. But in the final episode of the third season, Buffy leads her high school graduating class in combat against that season’s leading villain, the Mayor. Voldemort is a sorcerer with serpentine features who is accompanied by a large snake; the Mayor, in that climactic episode, transforms into a colossal serpent. I’m not saying that Rowling is imitating Whedon, but that in dealing with mythic archetypes, great creative minds can often think alike.

It looks as if Rowling studies Campbell as closely as George Lucas does. But what makes Harry’s figurative death and resurrection specifically Christian? I believe that it’s the fact that Harry goes voluntarily to what he believes will be his death at Voldemort’s hands, in order to save the lives of others, or like Christ going to his crucifixion without resistance, in order to redeem humanity. For me, a key moment comes when Voldemort insists on parading Harry’s supposed corpse before the Hogwarts community. Rowling’s narrator notes that “it must be subjected to humiliation to prove Voldemort’s victory” (p. 726). Christ, too, was mocked and humiliated by his tormentors, through means such as the crown of thorns. As the Beat observed, Rowling is an admirer of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, and its Christ figure, Aslan the lion, in order to save a life, willingly surrenders himself to the evil White Witch, and allows himself to be humiliated (though such means of the shearing of his mane) and killed, before rising from the dead to destroy the white witch. Harry is clearly treading in Aslan’s–and Christ’s–path.

Much earlier in Hallows, Harry, Hermione and Ron invade both the Ministry of Magic and the Gringotts bank; they are also captured and brought to Malfoy Manor. In each case Harry finds himself underground (below Atrium level at the MInistry, in a subterranean vault at Gringotts, and in the Malfoys’ basement). In Campbell’s terms, these are all descents into the underworld, or into the “belly of the beast” (and in Gringotts’ case, there is a literal beast: a dragon). When Harry and company escape from the Ministry and the Malfoys, they bring prisoners to freedom with them. I suspect that these are allusions to the “Harrowing of Hell,” whereby Christ, immediately after his death, descended into hell and freed souls of the just that had been imprisoned there. Even in his descent into Gringotts, Harry and company free a captive: the dragon whom the goblins kept chained underground.

I have still more to say about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but this week’s column is running long, and this is a busy summer, with more topics waiting in the wings. I hope to return to Hallows in the future to address, among other questions, just why did so many people expect that Harry would die–and stay dead? I’m glad to see that J. K. Rowling has a far more positive outlook.

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Trailer Park: Robert Vaughn

Filed under: Columns,Interviews,Trailer Park — admin @ 12:53 am

By Christopher Stipp

Archives? Right Here…

Sometimes you just feel you’re in the presence of great knowledge when you talk to someone.

Robert Vaughn has a list of film and television credits that span fifty years and spans multiple generations of people who grew up consuming television. I happen to be one of those people and it wasn’t until the A-TEAM came on in the 80’s when I was introduced to not only Robert but to the kind of history he brings to every production he’s in. Whether it’s acting alongside Mr. T or Steve McQueen or even modern day Gen X actors who are major talents across the pond there are just some things you’re never going to get around asking someone who has seen it all.

And Robert has.

From series that didn’t so well to the ones that did, Robert just will not relent. And it was this sense of enduring determination that has allowed him to strike ratings gold with his long successful series on the BBC with HUSTLE, a program that has finally found an outlet here, stateside, through AMC. Equal parts OCEAN’S ELEVEN, THE STING and a whole lot of snappy writing from the minds that brought the equally successful MI-5 to Americans, HUSTLE brims with intelligence while giving plenty enough to those who are in the mood for a show about modern day Robin Hoods. The show is fast, quick-paced and with four seasons equaling a total of 24 episodes you’re able to catch up with these cats in no time at all.

Robert spoke to me regarding the show, his take on the state of modern television and how much longer he intends on staying in front of the camera.

All four seasons can now be seen playing on AMC every Wednesday night at 10/9C and are now available to be purchased on DVD.

CHRISTOPHER STIPP: Great series. I only learned about HUSTLE a week ago and”¦

[Laughs]

ROBERT VAUGHN: Really? It’s been out for four years.

STIPP: I just don’t happen to live in England and haven’t heard anything about the series being brought over on AMC. I did want to say that the show is quite excellent and the fact that there are four seasons now on AMC really gives people a chance to get ensconced with what’s happening. I am curious to know, if you can answer it, why a full season represents six episodes on the BBC?

VAUGHN: Quite simply, that’s all the United Kingdom can afford, in terms of producing a series to try it out. Let’s say here you shoot a pilot and someone feels strongly about it, really strong about it, they’ll order 22 more. Well, in Britain, the BBC has much lower budgets. They have to wait until they have a group of shows that total 24 before they can sell it internationally. It’s what they’ve done with us. It’s playing all over the Orient, Africa, Eastern Europe and so on.

STIPP: It’s seems like it is here where if you can make it to five seasons, that’s the goal for any television show.

VAUGHN: Right. And AMC didn’t buy HUSTLE for four seasons. They bought three seasons and the fourth one was completed in time for them to show it last year.

STIPP: And what was Robert Wagner’s connection to the program? I saw him listed on IMDB for the show.

VAUGHN: He’s listed as a guest star on the last show we did for the season. Of the 24 shows we’ve done we filmed 2 in America, one in Las Vegas and one in Los Angeles. The one from Los Angeles, RJ, as he’s called by his friends, was a guest star on the show. And we used him in connection with the publicity of the show because I’ve known him since he married Natalie Wood the first time. So they put us all on shows, like The View, where we were brought out as a team.

STIPP: I’m fascinated by the show’s ethos, that you hustle those who don’t deserve it.

VAUGHN: One of the things I learned early on in the first season of the show, and I came in three days after they had started shooting, is that when I started reading about people who have been hustled out of large amounts of money, wealthy people, never report it to police”¦out of embarrassment. These people, most of them, made their money by their wits and they don’t want made known that they’ve been outwitted.

STIPP: So, do you think that’s the allure, that there are people who operate outside of the law, like modern day Robin Hoods, righting wrongs?

VAUGHN: Yeah, the fact that they are living at the highest level possible when they are successful and, when they are not successful, are trying to scrape by, which we have done in the series. We have done shows where living conditions dropped dramatically because they had not been successful, recently, with conning people.

[Laughs]

Kind of like any job.

STIPP: How do you keep things fresh without it seeming gimmicky?

VAUGHN: It’s exactly as you mentioned earlier. It’s not like American television where you have to come up with 20 plus episodes with 20 plus scenarios for one season. It’s much easier for the producers to come up with 6 as opposed to 24.

STIPP: How have you seen these characters evolve?

VAUGHN: I think they got lucky. Casting is everything in TV as it is in movies. If there’s something wrong with 1 or 2 people in the cast, the show doesn’t work. Television is all about attracting people to the personalities within the show. And everybody seemed to like all of us. The black guy who was in the first three seasons, Adrian Lester, he was referred to as the black Olivier in England. He’s the star of theater, he’s done everything and had a huge following even prior to getting into HUSTLE. Marc [Warren] was on his way up and is famous because of this show. He had done some wonderful things prior to this, character work, he had never done something so consistent. And Jamie [Murray], who’s a very pretty girl, and looks like she’s Eurasian, she’s one hundred percent Irish. So, we’ve all caught on.

One strange thing, and I did come into things one week after they started shooing the show, that happened after I began my work was that I started receiving these messages from these people I’ve come to know over the years, largely press people. They all wanted to know about my character, what I thought about it, what research I’ve done on it. And I explained exactly as I just told you, there was no research, I came in at the last minute. I’m getting all these questions and it was then when I started to talk, to myself, and said, “I’ll just make something up.” It was then when I said to people that, “Oh, it’s really like if Napoleon Solo from MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. went and retired on his government pension but all those years of being exposed to jewelry and wealth and beautiful cars and beautiful women and casinos all over the world, like James Bond, realizes he can’t live on his pension. So, what they do would be in the confines of the law”¦” I was just making it up as I was going along. Everybody wrote it down as what was going on with my character.

STIPP: Was that part of the appeal? That could you revisit this sort of debonair kind of character?

VAUGHN: I get scripts every year”¦Usually after 10 or 15 pages I close it. But I got sent three shows from a production company, called SPOOKS or MI-5 here, that company produced that show. I read the first script for the show and I continued to read the other two and my wife has never seen me read something like this all the way through. I said, “This is something really different.” My guess was right. Sometimes your guess can be wrong but I guess if everybody guessed right there’d be more shows on the air.

STIPP: Are the English different when it comes to what they like out of their television? I guess you could see it from a sociological point of view and see what the two cultures really value but do they respond to things differently?

VAUGHN: Well, the English seem to respond to our comedies but we don’t respond to all of theirs. Usually, comedies are harder to translate from one culture to the next but that’s not the case in England with what America exports over there. Or, in the case of ALL IN THE FAMILY, that was originally a British show.

STIPP: Good point. Now, if you try and compare apples to apples, not that you can do it exactly, but you had a spate of con shows debuting on a variety channels here in America. I’m thinking of Ray Liotta’s failed show and the failed show on ABC, THE KNIGHTS OF PROSPERITY. What was the angle that made this show really connect with the audience?

VAUGHN: I just don’t know. If I did know I could be a mega producer like Dick Wolf and be a billionaire. He’s the one who obviously knows because he has a formula that works.

STIPP: The producers of HUSTLE tip their caps to the older productions like THE STING and even recent movies like OCEAN’S ELEVEN.

VAUGHN: Well, that’s exactly the case of my television show, MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., which rode the crest of the first three James Bond movies and it came on just as the third movie opened. There was just a huge interest in secret agents and spying.

STIPP: Is there something to when people that the element of luck has something to with the success of a particular program?

VAUGHN: I’m writing an autobiography and it was just last week”¦David McCallum, who was my co-star on U.N.C.L.E., they’re putting a DVD of all four seasons, and Warner Brothers, who are putting out the DVDs asked us to be sat down and be interviewed for this. It lasted about three hours and it was because of this where I went and thought about why U.N.C.L.E. was as successful as it was, when it was. There were a number of reasons. Mainly, it was because of the success of the Bond pictures. Next, David and I were successful in engaging a young audience. And, the next most important reason was the time slot. Because, when we went on the air, in 1964 we were on the verge of being cancelled two months after we started because our Nielsen ratings were so low. They changed our time slots from Tuesday night to Monday night but one of the things about that is that the show caught on with college students who were away at school. In those days, in regular houses, there was just one black and white set so when they came back, during the holidays, they were the ones controlling what was being watched.

And so, the ratings suddenly went through the roof and, by the summer, when they re-ran the entire first season, it wound up being the number one show in the country almost a year after it almost canceled. It was mostly all due to college students and it the time slot was moved once more accordingly and the show remained a huge hit.

STIPP: It’s just these little things that contribute to the overall success and not just one big factor.

VAUGHN: I said yesterday when I was being interviewed for the U.N.C.L.E. DVD that this would not have happened in modern television. If the show is not a hit within the first two airings it is off the air. If the show, if U.N.C.L.E. would have been released now it would have been off the air permanently by October because networks do not take chances like that anymore.

STIPP: How does that sit with you now? That there a possible gems that are simply not given enough room to find an audience?

VAUGHN: And sometimes they’re not the most miserable show, either, but they’re put in one of the most miserable time slots. I mean ALL IN THE FAMILY is a good example of that. They did three pilots before they went on the air before they even had a crack at success. Everyone was terrified of that premise”¦glorify a bigot. But Norman [Campbell] kept coming back because he believed in it. The question of how long you’re willing to hang around, if you’ve got the money as Norman did, you’ve got to consider there are lot of other factors at play. In U.N.C.L.E., David had the ability to attract young girls and I attracted the older women, the women in their 20’s.

[Laughs]

STIPP: One of the other things I’ve found is that some really good television actors have, at one time, been good doing traditional theater. Have you found that to be the case?

VAUGHN: Yeah, very much so. Before movies, before talkies even, almost any actor could be put up on screen but once talkies started to come into play there was a rush to hire traditionally trained actors because there’s a famous story about Valentino opening his mouth for the very first time on the screen and out came [in a high pitched squeal], “Hi, my name is”¦”

[Laughs]

But that was the reason why there was a rush to get well-trained actors on the screen. The whole dynamic changed.

STIPP: In your fifty years as an actor you could be out enjoying your accomplishments away from the lens of a camera. What keeps you coming back?

VAUGHN: Well, I’ve played Hamlet three times, I’d play Hamlet a 100 times if I wasn’t so old but it is the most extraordinary role ever written in the English language for an actor to play. But all my children are grown, I have a lovely home in the Connecticut countryside and I don’t leave it that often but when I find something that I like I leave it because I still enjoy doing the actual process of acting.

As long as I am ambulatory I will be out there acting wherever I can.

[Laughs]

STIPP: That’s about as good as an end as there is. Thank you, Robert.

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Quick Stop Thingamabobs: 7/27/2007

Filed under: Columns,Thingamabobs — UncaScroogeMcD @ 12:29 am

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Short people got no reason to live… (Thingamabob)

“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, with Muppets… (Thingamabob)

Hey ROM!… (Thingamabob)

You and I and George… (Thingamabob)

A poignant Muppet moment… (Thingamabob)

Have a THINGAMABOB? Send it in!

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July 26, 2007

Scrubs Blog: Season 7 Begins

Filed under: Production Blogs,Scrubs Blog — UncaScroogeMcD @ 10:36 pm

PICTURE BLOG: “Season 7 Begins”
Our first picture blog of Season 7. HOORAY!!! In this blog, we’ll be shining the spotlight on some of our crew members.

But unfortunately, we aren’t shooting yet, the sets aren’t dressed, there are no actors, and really no crew members to be found. So we dug through our archives and unearthed these oh so flattering pictures…

Viva Las Vegas (APOC, Jared Weisfelner, and Prop Master, John Ornelas)

We’re still not too sure about Bill’s new dress code policy (Writers’ PA, Ryan Kemp)

Just another day at the office

Rats at Sacred Heart… closer to the truth than you could imagine (Production Secretary, Brian Davison)

Surprisingly, Disney takes your ID photo on Space Mountain (PA, Abel Charrow)

Someone call security

The genie of Sacred Heart (Script Coordinator, Devin Mahoney)

Our job beats up your job

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Quick Stop Thingamabobs: 7/26/2007

Filed under: Columns,Thingamabobs — UncaScroogeMcD @ 1:25 am

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After numerous computer problems, I’m back in the saddle with a fresh and sparkling edition of Thingamabobs for all you wonderful people. First up, here’s a Mac ad that skewers the new bane of my tech existence… (Thingamabob)

Fozzie Bear’s hit rock bottom… (Thingamabob)

The poor bear doesn’t even have rhythm… (Thingamabob)

Mark Evanier on a bit of Marx Brothers trivia… (Thingamabob)

And the reveal of the “foreign language” of the Brothers Marx… (Thingamabob)

Have a THINGAMABOB? Send it in!

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July 25, 2007

Preachin’ from the Longbox: We Don’t Need Another Hero

Filed under: Columns,Preaching from the Longbox — UncaScroogeMcD @ 4:53 am

This week’s sermon – “We Don’t Need Another Hero”

July 23, 2007

Welcome to another addition of Preachin’ from the Longbox where we prove that “Comic Book Characters (or Comic Book Columns) never die; they simply come back in Specials and One-Shots (I’m talking to you, Captain Mar-Vell, Bucky Barnes, and Jason Todd, n’est-ce pas?).”

Okay, since I lost my religion for comics late last year, I’ve been like a lost soul searching for some sort of sign, tangible or otherwise, that comics are still a viable form of decent escapism entertainment. Because, currently, I’m seeing the majority of display space in comic book stores and retail outlets dedicated to the latest Big Business Trojan horse (i.e. using these iconic characters with their never-ending, event-driven inter-company crossovers) to help bolster their bottom line and enhance their stockholders’ portfolio.

Then, it hits me. As hard as a Jon Lovitz shove (okay, probably quite a bit harder than an overweight short fifty-ish schlub could muster), this muse for a column captures my attention. And by captures, I mean, it made me almost physically ill. So, with a reaction that strong, a column must be written. What is the muse, you ask? It is”¦

Who Wants To Be A Superhero Season 2

Who Wants To Be A Superhero, Season 2

I know that it was a guilty pleasure for some last season and it does have Stan the Man’s image and name associated with the project. But seeing the formulaic reality grinder house churn out another American Idol-clone that uses people (get this) in the garb of their superhero creations was too much for even a Reality TV junkie like yours truly. So, much as I did with the Pirates of the Caribbean monstrosity, Pirate Master, I denied to its existence.

However, I somehow got this season’s contestants in costume and figured that its sole purpose to be on this earth (other than to fail in the cable ratings) was for me to analyze and mock each participant’s entry. And lucky you, dear reader, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

So, with that unnecessarily longwinded and egocentric laden setup, here are my thoughts, observations, insults and odds that the character will succeed for the WWTBAS, S2 cast. If using the Idol structure is the blueprint for this show, you know what judge I’m gonna be. So, on with it…

(The first PftL disclaimer ““ The odds provided below are for entertainment purposes only and are have really nothing to do with who actually should win this reality show competition. If this was an actual reality show that people somewhat watched, there might be some action to be had in Vegas. As it stands right now, the only place that would take such wagers is a lonely old Vegas-style operation off the coast of Bermuda who will make you buy $50 in credits for a $10 game. If that’s your idea of a rocking time, have at it, my friend.)

(Second PftL disclaimer ““ When referencing comics, I’m just referring to superhero books since that is where the majority of superhero books come from. Also, there has been no factual research performed on these characters by the writer. All comments are based on the impressions received by the characters’ costumes. After seeing them for yourselves, you’ll understand. Trust me.)

Trash Girl

Contestant #1 ““ Basura

Inspiration (meaning who they tried to rip-off ): Not sure; maybe Ant-Man for talking to bugs

PftL’s Comments: If ever there was a favorite, this one would be it only because the character has some originality and doesn’t really resemble (at least by name) of another superhero already in existence. If had to change only one thing, it would be the name. Inkow that it is the crux of the character but here’s what our good friends at Babylon.com had to say about the translation of the word “Basura”:

basura (female noun) – rubbish, refuse, garbage; dregs; manure, animal dung, fertilizer

Not exactly a descriptive list that strikes fear into the hearts of criminals nor is it one that other superheroes would like to stand next to in a group. There has to be a better name out there. But other than that, this character is the only one that I could even remotely consider in a comic book.

Odds of character making it as a lead book character: 25-to-1

Emerald Beacon

Contestant #2 ““ Ms. Limelight

Inspiration (meaning who they tried to rip-off ): Hmm, I wonder if it could be Green Lantern (Hal Jordan should be rolling in his grave. But please refer to the first paragraph of this column for further details.)

PftL’s Comments: God, this outfit needs work. Fringe on the arm sleeves haven’t been popular since Jon had long hair and Alec was strumming the four-string. And lemme tell you, it’s not time for a resurgence. The color combinations ““ silver, white and lime green ““ are awful not only to look at but also to have in a comic book. Outside of Captain Atom, the Engineer from The Authority and Jocasta, I can’t remember the last time an all-white or silver costume was in a decent book. Lastly, the clips on the waist for her accessories remind me of Ikea since I see stuff that looks good in their store but have no real use outside of it.

Odds of character making it as a lead book character: 30-to-1

Karate Hop

Contestant #3 ““ Hyper-Strike

Inspiration (meaning who they tried to rip-off ): Karate Kid, Iron Fist, Shang-Chi , or any other kung-fu dude out there

PftL’s Comments: Two thoughts initially come to mind when seeing this picture. Number one ““ when did Mike Reno lose weight and stop touring long enough to get on this show? And number two ““ does Northstar know that this guy might still be on the open market? Okay, the second one is a cheap shot but damn, this dude looks way too happy to be doing a flying high kick. If that was me, I would be a crumpled mess on the floor, which is why I’m not a superhero. And who wears a headband over six inches in width? Me thinks that he should be seeing the pharmacist about something to help with his MPB (Male Patterned Baldness).

Odds of character making it as a lead book character: 35-to-1

Bolero

Contestant #4 ““ Whip Snap

Inspiration (meaning who they tried to rip-off ): Zorro with a little Omega Red

PftL’s Comments: Ahhh, more fringe! Maybe, I was wrong but if there is a resurgence, I’m gonna stop it at all costs. Fringe is something for oriental rigs, hookers’ lampshades and El Camino dash covers but not on superhero costumes. Ack, are those wrestling boots? Seriously, did the people who sewed the wardrobe for “Nacho Libre” do the same for poor Whip Snap? And what’s up with the red swath on the top of the hair? Is it there just for distraction purposes? I’ll revert to a Randy-ism for this one: “I’m not feeling it, dawg.”

Odds of character making it as a lead book character: 45-to-1

The Blue Defuser

Contestant #5 ““The Defuser

Inspiration (meaning who they tried to rip-off ): Lock-Up mashed up with an unemployed Rent-A-Cop

PftL’s Comments: I thought that a defuser was an accessory to a hair dryer. Not only is the name lame but the costume is so uninspired that this superhero must be either a result of a small application pool or a drunken all-nighter in TJ before the show submission deadline. This guy looks more like mall security than a superhero. Hell, he even has a freakin’ blue badge on his flak jacket. And dude, here’s a piece of advice for a comic book geek to another. The exposed arms are more of a liability than a way to take girls to the Gun Show, especially when the caliber of your guns that is on display is so small.

Odds of character making it as a lead book character: 50-to-1

Pavillion

Contestant #6 ““Partenon

Inspiration (meaning who they tried to rip-off ): A twisted mix of Hercules and the Black Knight with a slight dab of Thor

PftL’s Comments: It’s the first Ren Fen entry and it’s a real gem. It looks so bad on so many levels. The bad ten cent stones around the belt, the tunic, the forearm shields, the gold llame tights; I could go on”¦ But, that’s not the worse of it. The crowning achievement to this very laughable getup is use of the leather Italian sandals. There’s nothing better than fighting crime while, at the same time, keeping your feet cool, casual and ready for that next summer concert series. The worst thing is that I have a feeling that this guy will only speak in some sort of bad Russell Crowe as Maximus accent. Ughh, he’s not going to be long in this contest.

Odds of character making it as a lead book character: 74-to-1

Gelt

Contestant #7 ““Mr. Mitzvah

Inspiration (meaning who they tried to rip-off ): The Seraph and Sabra with Blackhawk’s flight jacket spray painted gold

PftL’s Comments: Welcome Little Johnny Lydon to the party and he fights for the Star of David. And it’s another person who loves the gold on the costume. With all of that gold, maybe he should change his name to Gelt. At least, the kids would like him. Anyway, the suit is very unimpressive and lame that my level of snarkiness has temporarily left me. Hey, that may be his power. Must fight through ““ My last thought is that if a pair of henchmen could roll up on Mr. Mitzvah with a crow bar and a Louisville Slugger, they can Bar and Bat Mitzvah to death and that’s would make a pretty damn funny obit.
Odds of character making it as a lead book character: 75-to-1

Funky Headhunter

Contestant #8 ““Braid

Inspiration (meaning who they tried to rip-off ): Medusa with Robin’s staff

PftL’s Comments: Wow, here’s a shocker; it’s another lame name and lamer costume. It is obvious that this character’s hair is a weapon. This has been done better with the wife of Black Bolt. For her sake, I hope that she has an Eisner-award winning back-story and origin because if not, there’s only a five-page back-up story in her future. Since she did not put enough effort into making her character memorable, I don’t feel like I have to do more than she did. I’m done.

Odds of character making it as a lead book character: 100-to-1

Brain Scan

Contestant #9 ““Mindset

Inspiration (meaning who they tried to rip-off ): Charles Xavier, Brainwave, Doctor Strange’s eyebrows and Mysterio’s tailor

PftL’s Comments: Alright, for those of you who are looking to write comics are a career, here’s a nugget of useful information for you to use in your first superhero book. If a person needs to be either highly intelligent (ala Lex Luthor) or be a world-class telepath (Prof. X), he has to be as bald as the majority of porn stars’ nether regions. It must be the only way to convey the sheer magnitude of their gray matter because hair blocks the brain’s abilty to think powerfully. For example, Grant Morrison is beautifully bald and a genius; Lindsay Lohan, not so much on either count. Back to the subject at hand, Mindset must’ve just acquired this noggin power since no one who would be so high on the Mensa chart and wear those clam shell-looking shoulder pads that are so large that they would make Brian Urlacher wet himself. As a parting shot, men with large girth in their midsection should not wear tight clothing under any circumstances; especially when there are two triangles pointing at your beer belly. This guy might be blessed with smarts but he’s cursed with Dunlap’s Disease (and quite possibly on the Seafood diet). There, I’ve satisfied my old man jokes quota for the column. Yay for me.

Odds of character making it as a lead book character: 200-to-1

The Cleaner

Contestant #10 ““Hygenia

Inspiration (meaning who they tried to rip-off ): American Maid, blatantly

PftL’s Comments: Puhlease! This character is so bad that it deserves the number one spot as the worst of the worst. C’mon Stan, I know that you had an army of creators under your tutelage over 30 years ago. But to be a part of the show without camp that has a friggin’ maid with a unbelievably bad moniker as “Hygenia” as a superhero is out and out crazy. If I was Mrs. The Man, I would be looking into locking your ass up for this one; Stripperella be damned! The only thing that would rocket this character to the top spot in the All-Time Bad Superheroes list is if the first name of her secret identity was Gina. Then, all of her co-workers could yell at her, “Hi, Gina” and the laugh track would go off and it would be over. Get this pile of stink away from me. I’ll never be able to look at fish nets fondly ever again.

Odds of character making it as a lead book character: 2 million-to-1

So, who am I predicting as a winner of this season’s Who Wants To Be A Superhero? No one. Not the contestants, not Stan Lee, not the SciFi channel, and especially not the viewers. With this cast of rejects that the Great Lakes Avengers and the Substitute Legion of Superheroes would openly laugh at, this season is the television equivalent of what WOPR learned from Matt Broderick which is “the only winning move is not to watch.”

-britt

Britt Schramm is also a contributor for the pop-culture website Kung-Fu Rodeo and solely responsible for the mess that is Tripping the Life Fanatic. He also occasionally blogs about his own life at The Preach’s “Ahem” Corner.

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July 23, 2007

SModcast 21

Filed under: SModcast — UncaScroogeMcD @ 2:08 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 21: Little Outhouse on the Prairie –

In which the patriarchy is restored and our heroes discuss a wide range of topics like Flushable Moist Wipes, the triumphant advent of Flushable Moist Wipes, the historical significance of Flushable Moist Wipes, dry corncobs vs. Flushable Moist Wipes, magic ice boxes vs. Flushable Moist Wipes, and “Heroes”.

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

DOWNLOAD: (right click to save)
SModcast 21 (MP3 format) – 36.18 MB

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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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Comics in Context #186: Le Petit Chef

Filed under: Columns,Comics in Context — admin @ 12:05 am

In my childhood it was a special event when an animated feature film, almost always from the Disney studio, turned up in movie theaters. Nowadays, there are so many animated feature films these days that I wait to catch many of them when they reach cable TV.

That’s where I recently saw Ice Age: The Meltdown, 2006’s sequel to Fox’s previous animated film about a mammoth, a sabertooth tiger, and other animals of the Pleistocene period, and it was just as well that I had waited. I don’t care for computer-animated animals or humans that look more plastic than organic, as the Ice Age animals do to me, and it seems less forgivable in the second Ice Age film (and, for that matter, the third Shrek), considering the successes other computer animated films (like The Incredibles) have made in this regard.

I wonder if the premise of this second Ice Age, that the glaciers are melting, was inspired by the contemporary concerns with global warming. Yet considering that the end of the Ice Age made possible the worldwide growth of human civilization, why is the “meltdown” a bad thing?

One of the Ice Age movies’ most popular characters is Scrat the squirrel who is in continual, vain pursuit of an elusive acorn. This squirrel’s treading in the Sisyphean path of Wile E. Coyote’s pursuit of the Roadrunner, but falls far short of the comedic invention and brilliant staging and timing of Chuck Jones’s Roadrunner cartoons. However, I did like Scrat’s brief visit to a hereafter especially designed for him in Meltdown.

For me Ice Age: The Meltdown is an animated movie in which the celebrity voices pull me out of the story, preventing me from sufficiently suspending disbelief. That’s because the characters are too thinly conceived, so the familiar personalities of the celebrity voice actors overwhelm them.

In contrast, I quite liked another 2006 animated film I caught on cable, DreamWorks Animation’s Over the Hedge, based on the newspaper comic strip of the same name. In large part this was specifically due to the voice casting: the voices may have been recognizable, but they were suited to the characters. This was especially important with the two lead roles. Bruce Willis’s typical screen persona fit the role of R.J., the trickster raccoon, who is something of a rascal but in the end loyal to his comrades. Similarly, Garry Shandling’s familiar comedy persona as a neurotic worrywart fit the part of Verne the cautious turtle.

Regular readers know that I like to compare adaptations to their source material, whether it’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy” (over the last two weeks) or the Disney Tarzan musical to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first Tarzan novel (see “Comics in Context” #133).

Several weeks ago I took a look at writer/illustrator William Joyce’s 1990 children’s book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, the source for this year’s Disney animated film Meet the Robinsons (see “Comics in Context” #174). The eccentric, futuristic family is taken from the book, but It turns out that the movie’s entire time travel plot was the moviemakers’ invention. Director Brad Anderson and the screenwriters wove their story around Joyce’s book, while leaving Joyce’s material essentially intact. This is an approach that I admire, since it simultaneously shows respectful fidelity to the original author’s work while still allowing the adapters considerable creativity.

On the other hand, finally reading the late New Yorker cartoonist William Steig’s 1990 picture book Shrek! revealed how very different it is from the trilogy of DreamWorks Animation movies that are very loosely based upon it.

Though supposedly ugly, the movie version of the ogre Shrek, when he isn’t scowling, looks like he could be turned into a cuddly doll that parents can buy for children (as indeed they can). I think he looks more visually appealing in the movies than the human characters do, who look like animated waxworks. In the first film Princess Fiona, the seemingly human leading lady, is revealed to transform into a green-skinned ogre like Shrek. But as an ogre she seems pleasantly plump, with facial features that are sweet and endearing rather than ugly: she thus becomes a cuddly doll, as well.

In the book, however, Shrek is repellent in physical appearance, in behavior, and even in smell. Shrek is utterly antisocial, enjoys frightening people, and revels in his own repulsiveness. Steig’s story is a parody of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Unable to stand him any longer, Shrek’s parents kick him out, and he overcomes one opponent after another (by breathing fire at them, for example), until finally he reaches the princess, who never takes human form in Steig’s book. She is an ogre as repulsive in looks and behavior as he is. In other words, they are perfect for each other. Steig’s description of their meeting reads like sexual foreplay (“Shrek snapped at her nose. She nipped at his ear. They clawed their way into each other’s arms. Like fire and smoke, these two belonged together.”) In Steig’s parody of the hero’s wedding that concludes both a typical fairy tale and the typical Campbellian hero’s journey, he informs us, “And they lived horribly ever after, scaring the socks off all who who fell afoul of them.”

The appeal of Steig’s Shrek is like that of Sesame Street‘s Oscar the Grouch or the Bizarro World in 1960s Superman comics. Through Shrek the reader can vicariously experience the release of not having to obey the rules, of not having to conform to standards of proper behavior, of letting one’s aggression loose, and being bad and not only getting away with it, but being rewarded. In short, Steig’s version of Shrek is a far stronger, more interesting, and more memorable character than the considerably watered-down Shrek of the movies. (See some examples from Steig’s Shrek! for yourself at http://www.williamsteig.com/shrek-int.htm).

The Shrek movies and Steig’s Shrek! book both turn the traditional fairy tale upside down by making ogres the hero and heroine. The difference is that Steig’s ogres act like ogres. The movies turn Shrek into a conventionally lovable children’s hero, with a heart of gold beneath his bad temper, who risks his life to save the humans’ kingdom, and who by this year’s Shrek the Third has mellowed into dullness. The first Shrek movie, especially, seemed to be preaching racial tolerance, presenting ogres Shrek and Fiona as a sort of racial minority in the human world. Shrek may have green skin and these odd knobs on his head, the movie seemed to be saying, but he’s really a sweet, loving, and even heroic individual, Just Like Us. Steig’s point, on the other hand, was that his ogres aren’t Just Like Us, or stand-ins for minority groups, but rather, are like the nasty sides of our personalities that we don’t dare show in public. The Shrek movies sentimentalize the title character and his wife; the book Shrek! gleefully acknowledges the side of children–and adults–that would love to breathe fire at people who get in our way. Steig’s Shrek! gives its readers a harmless means of vicariously releasing that negative energy, and seeing the title character get rewarded for it. Indeed, in the book Shrek’s marriage to the ogre princess signals to the reader that he or she is not alone in having this shadow side: other people do, too.

Steig’s Shrek even has a certain admirable integrity, in that he is true to himself, however nasty and gross that self may be. Steig also takes care that Shrek does not become truly evil. Steig’s Shrek even reminds me of Marvel’s own bad-tempered, green-skinned “ogre,” the Hulk, who nonetheless comes off as preferable in comparison to his adversaries.

If Steig’s Shrek! follows a satiric version of Campbell’s hero’s journey, Shrek the Third founders by getting Campbell’s monomyth wrong. Early in the film we see Shrek trying to fulfill the role of a prince in Fiona’s royal family and clumsily failing at it. Steig’s Shrek, of course, would set all the regal costumes he was supposed to wear on fire with his breath and take pleasure in scaring all the courtiers away. But the movie Shrek fits into conventional society, and I have different expectations for this version of the character. So I assumed that this was a set-up, and that in the course of the film, Shrek would learn to adapt to his new role as prince. With great power must come great responsibility, right?

Princess Fiona’s father, the king, who has been transformed from a human into a frog, is on his deathbed. Yes, that’s right, he is about to croak. The king’s dying wish is that Shrek become his successor. Shrek declines, in a clear case of what Campbell calls “refusing the call,” which will leads to disaster. (For example, Luke Skywalker initially refuses to go with Ben Kenobi, and insists on staying with his uncle and aunt, and then the Storm Troopers kill his relatives.) It also seems downright cruel to refuse the king’s dying wish. Instead, Shrek promises the dying king that he will find someone else to become the new monarch. I thought, okay, the film will be about how the movies’ socialized Shrek matures and learns to accept the responsibility that his father figure, the king, sought to give him. It is necessary that the son must in time assume the role of the father (as in, say, Disney’s Bambi).

But no. The movie Shrek really does find someone else to take over the throne: the youth who becomes King Arthur.

This isn’t how Campbell’s monomyth works! Luke Skywalker doesn’t go into space looking for someone else to become a Jedi Knight instead of himself. Harry Potter doesn’t try to talk Ron into becoming Voldemort’s archenemy so Harry can go back and live under the stairs at the Dursleys. Whereas Steig presented a mock heroic version of the monomyth, Shrek the Third proclaiming that ambition and taking responsibility are better left to Somebody Else. This does not make for a gripping plot or an inspiring protagonist.

Arthur manages to quell the threat posed by most of the movie’s villains by sympathizing with their being treated as outcasts and persuading them to accept themselves. Any child watching this movie will surely realize that if he tried this tactic with schoolyard bullies, he would be beaten to a pulp. So much for this Arthur’s leadership abilities.

At the end of the movie, Shrek and Fiona have moved back to Shrek’s cottage in the woods, abandoning their thrones, the kingdom of humans, and, it seems, any role in that society, But this isn’t the movie Shrek reverting to Steig’s antisocial version. Earlier in the movie, Shrek balked at the idea of becoming a father, and even had a nightmare about having a baby that vomits at hurricane force (enabling the filmmakers to put in the sort of gross bodily functions joke that seems inescapable in non-Pixar animated films these days). But by the film’s end, without explanation, Shrek has changed his mind, and has a trio of babies (his equivalent of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, I guess). In the book, Steig’s Shrek has a nightmare about babies, but this is part of Steig’s assault on sentimentality. The book’s Shrek has no tolerance for cuteness and doesn’t change his mind about babies; the movie Shrek dives right into a sea of sentimentality. Becoming a father is accepting responsibility, of course, but Shrek doesn’t seem to have any goal beyond that. It’s not even clear how he will support this new family. It’s as if he has combined parenthood with retirement; he’s a slacker with kids.

In the July 28, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, film critic David Denby points out that contemporary romantic comedy movies are dominated by male slacker heroes who are “absolutely free of the desire to make an impression on the world and still [get] the girl.” Shrek the Third shows that the 21st century slacker hero has moved into animation, as well. Denby refers to these stories as “slacker-striver romances,” in which it’s the woman who has the real career. Yet Fiona gives up her “career” as princess to join Shrek in slacker parenthood.

So there’s Shrek the Third‘s message for kids: ambition is for other people.
When the call to adventure comes, refuse it. The movie Shrek is neither a true hero nor Steig’s distinctive antihero, but now merely a boring, unfunny disappointment. I think when the inevitable fourth Shrek movie comes out, I may wait to see it a year later on cable.

On the other hand, the great new Disney/Pixar film, Ratatouille, is about an unlikely protagonist–a rat named Remy–with an even unlikelier dream–to become a great chef–which he both pursues and triumphantly achieves.

As has been widely reported, Ratatouille‘s initial director was Jan Pinkava, who came up with the original story, but Pixar ended up reassigning the project to Brad Bird, writer-director of The Iron Giant (1999) and Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) (See “Comics in Context” #62). It was Pinkava who apparently set the story’s principal themes: Ratatouille producer Brad Lewis told The Hollywood Reporter (Thurs. June 28, 2007) that “The story was boiling over with themes dealing with prejudice, family, following your passion, art and criticism.” before Bird took over. Nonetheless, Ratatouille in its finished form clearly fits thematically with Bird’s other animated feature films: Bird is Ratatouille‘s auteur.

First, although Remy is specifically a chef, he represents any kind of creative artist. Bird acknowledged in an interview with Time Out Chicago that he was not himself a gourmet: “No, not at all. I am becoming more appreciative of good food every year, but I didn’t know that much about it going into this project and had to learn a lot”. On the website “The House Next Door,” Ryland Walker Knight argues that Remy as chef is specifically a metaphor for the filmmaker, even more specifically the director of an animated film. Knight points out that Remy thinks in visual images: “when he tastes something, the world disappears and a discothÃ¨que flurry of colors swirls around his head. He also imagines Chef Gusteau floating around his head as his own Jiminy Cricket, a figment of his imagination acting as guide and conscience.” Moreover, Remy directs his human ally, Linguini, in cooking by hiding beneath Linguini’s chef’s hat and pulling on his hair, as if they were the strings of a marionette, or, Knight says, “as would an animator bend characters to his or her will”. (I suppose that this could also be a less than complimentary visual metaphor for the way that an auteur director supervises the rest of the moviemaking team in implementing his creative vision.)

But Ratatouille settles the matter when one of its characters, the critic Anton Ego, asserts that “Not everyone can be a great artist. But a great artist can come from anywhere.” In his June 29, 2007 review, New York Times critic A. O. Scott observes that this is the “moral” of the film. Though in this weekly column I have repeatedly disagreed with Scott’s reviews, I agree with his declaration that Ratatouille is “one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film”.

Looking back to Bird’s The Iron Giant, I recall that it had an artist character, too: Dean, who builds sculptures out of scrap metal, and who becomes a father figure to the boy protagonist.

The title characters of The Incredibles are a family of superheroes who are forced by the government to stop using their super-powers and live conventional lives. They can represent any people with talents who are prevented from employing those talents, and who are thus not allowed to fulfill their true potential. Bob Parr, a. k. a. Mr. Incredible, is compelled to work at a mind-numbing job in an insurance company. Isn’t this the artist’s nightmare: to be trapped in an unfulfilling office job, without any outlet for his creative imagination? In The Incredibles a conventional lifestyle is depicted as a dreary desk job. In Ratatouille the conventional life that Remy wants to escape is literally eating garbage alongside the other rats, whose taste buds are nowhere nearly as refined as his.

There is an actual artist in The Incredibles: Edna “E” Mode, the woman who designs costumes for superheroes. Bird voiced the character himself, perhaps suggesting a degree of identification with her. Edna comes across as a critic as much as she does as an artist, continually dispensing her sardonic opinions. So her true counterpart in Ratatouille may be the fearsome critic Anton Ego, who ultimately becomes the title character’s ally.

The Incredibles draws on a standard motif of the superhero genre: the individuals who seem outwardly ordinary but who secretly possess superhuman abilities. In The Iron Giant there is an even greater disparity between the role that the title character’s unknown builders designated for him and the role that the Iron Giant aspires to achieve. The Iron Giant is a colossal metal robot that bonds in friendship with the young boy Hogarth: in effect, the Iron Giant behaves in a “human” manner, often seeming like a child himself. Furthermore, the film reveals that the Iron Giant was built and programmed to be a war machine. But through his relationship with Hogarth, the Iron Giant rejects this programming. Instead, he follows a goal that Hogarth set for him, to use his enormous powers for good. Hogarth told the Giant about the comic book superhero Superman, and towards the film’s end the Giant becomes a superhero himself, uttering the name “Superman” as he saves a small New England town from a nuclear missile. (Iron Giant fans would enjoy taking a look at this picture over at the John Byrne Forum) The Iron Giant rejects the destiny for which he was created, and instead chooses his own.

Similarly, in Ratatouille Remy might seem to be condemned by his very nature: he was born a rat. This film provides such a vivid, extreme metaphor for the dilemma of the creative individual whose opinions differ from the community around him. Remy’s community of rats, including his own father and brother, all literally eat garbage. Remy is the only one in his community who has more discerning taste and realizes that he can do better. And yet he is pressured by his family to follow the conventional behavior of the rat world, and not to act any differently. There is even social pressure in Remy to walk on all fours like the other rats, whereas he prefers to stand on his hind legs, to keep his forepaws clean enough to handle food hygienically. Bird told The Los Angeles Times (June 28, 2007), “Because our lead character is a rat who wants to move into the human world, let’s show him make that choice to be on two legs and let’s make him being on two legs something he has to hide from his dad and let’s show it as something that changes over the course of the film”.

In the Time Out Chicago interview Bird described Dean, the sculptor in The Iron Giant, as a “beatnik.” (The film is set in the 1950s.) Dean is a nonconformist who seems to be something of an outsider in the small New England town that is the film’s setting. Remy is a nonconformist in the world of rats. But just as the people of that New England town assume on sight that the Iron Giant is a menace (as indeed he was designed to be), Remy is doomed by his outward appearance to be rejected by (most) humans. In one key scene in the film, Remy’s father shows him dead rats displayed in an exterminator’s window: this is how the human race treats their kind. Like The Iron Giant, Ratatouille asks if one can transcend the role that the world has assigned him. I just wrote a short piece about existentialism for a client, and now I see this existentialist theme–freeing oneself from restrictive tradition, taking control of one’s own life, creating one’s own identity–in Ratatouille.

Remy’s inner self does not match his outer self, or rather it does not match the conventional assumptions that are made about that outer self. People assume, correctly, that rats are unclean and eat garbage. That is true about the rats in Ratatouille as well, but Remy, though he looks like the other rats, does not conform to those expectations.

Remy fits the recurring archetype of the figure whose outward appearance disguises his inner virtues and talents. Clark Kent fits that mold, of course. Consider, too, Luke Skywalker’s reactions on first meeting Yoda, who initially seems like an eccentric, grotesque little troll. Or look at detective series like Columbo, in which the title character’s somewhat slovenly appearance and servile manner masks his high intelligence and steely will, or USA Network’s current series Monk, whose title character, beneath his obsessive compulsive phobias, is a brilliant detective.

So Ratatouille is also about the limitations of judging by external appearances. In other words, it’s about prejudice. While working on this essay I found myself about to write that as a rat, Remy inspires “fear and hatred” from humans, and realized I was echoing a familiar description of mutants from Marvel’s X-Men, a series that is famously about bigotry. It’s as if Remy, with his own “special powers,” his sensitive sense of taste and his genius at cooking, is a mutant rat.

Through its metaphor of the creatively gifted rat, Ratatouille suggests that innovation in the arts may come from persons or areas of culture that are not held in high regard by the mainstream. Certainly there is a long history of members of the cultural establishment rejecting not only innovative artwork but also the innovators themselves as outsiders who aren’t like Us.

For example, think of how long comics were generally regarded in America to be a gutter medium, and those adults who perceived them as art were considered wrongheaded and downright strange. (We are all Remy.) Now, in the early 21st century, comics increasingly receive respect from mainstream culture. Ratatouille has received extraordinary critical acclaim, and yet in the Time Out Chicago interview, Bird observes the continuing prejudice against the animation medium: “People see it as a childish sort of hieroglyphics. They connect it with the comics on the funny pages, as something that’s only meant to be silly and can’t ever represent anything deep or serious.”

In Jungian psychology, the “shadow” can not only represent dark, fearsome psychological forces but also creativity. So it makes psychological sense that an artistic innovator, an outsider, should take the form of a rat in the fable that is Ratatouille.

I will have much more to say about Ratatouille in the near future, but right now it is time for me to turn to my new recurring feature.

ATROCITY OF THE WEEK

Actually, there are several. First, there is the posting of photographs of the entire text of Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows days before its official release date. I do not understand how people rationalize violating copyright laws and steal intellectual property. Do they somehow think that because it’s possible for them to steal it, then it’s not really stealing? In the case of these photographs, I wonder at the obsessive lengths to which someone would go to demonstrate to the world that he or she is an asshole.

Then on Thursday, July 19, two days before the release date, The New York Times published critic Michiko Kakutani’s review of the book, giving away elements of the plot. (I refuse to link to this.) This should give the Times‘s Public Editor, its in-house ombudsman, plenty to write about. And how would the Times feel if some mole smuggled Times articles to The Washington Post before the times published them?

But the atrocity which I choose to treat at length is the cover to DC’s Showcase: Batgirl book of reprint stories about the version of Batgirl, alias Barbara Gordon, who was created in 1966. The cover shows Batgirl casually, perhaps obliviously, putting on makeup (even though she has her mask on) while in the background Batman and Robin are fighting for their lives against crooks. Presumably people at DC thought this was charmingly funny, while themselves being oblivious to the idea that female readers might find this cover insultingly misogynistic.

One line of defense for the cover is that it not only refers to an actual Batman story of the 1960s, but that it reflects the attitude towards women in superhero comics during that unenlightened period long, long ago.

I was a boy during that time, long, long ago, and I remember the story in question: it was “Batgirl’s Costume Cut-Ups” in Detective Comics #371 (January 1968), whose cover showed Batgirl declining to help Batman and Robin in a fight against bad guys because, she tells them, she has a “bigger” problem: “a run in my tights”. Should you read the story, you’ll find that Batgirl is actually slyly diverting the criminals’ attention to her shapely legs, or, as one of the crooks, apparently fond of slang that was outdated even then, puts it, her great “gams.” Batman and Robin are then able to kayo the distracted malefactors.

I was one of the regular contributors to editor Julie Schwartz’s letter columns back then, and I distinctly recall writing a letter about how bad this story was. Today I suspect that it was Schwartz’s attempt at doing a humorous story for a change of pace, but the joke still fell flat. This story is stupid now and it was stupid then.

It was also an anomaly. In her other 1960s appearances Schwartz’s new Batgirl characteristically dove right into fighting criminals. In the comics of the mid-1960s, Batgirl’s willingness to engage in direct physical combat was bold and daring. (William Dozier, producer of the 1960s Batman TV show, is said to have forbidden the TV Batgirl from punching people with her fists because he considered it “unladylike.” Instead, she executed dance-like kicks, drawing on actress Yvonne Craig’s Ballet Russes background.) Marvel’s superheroines of the time-Invisible Girl, Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Marvel Girl–didn’t engage in fisticuffs. In the early Fantastic Four stories Sue Storm’s original power, invisibility, basically enabled her to hide.

For their period, Julie Schwartz’s Silver Age stories are actually surprisingly enlightened about women. Think of how Hawkman and Hawkgirl acted as equal partners, as spouses, as Thanagarian policemen, and as superheroes. Remember how Zatanna bravely traversed the world in search of her lost father. Consider how Schwartz and his collaborators presented several of the leading ladies of his series as career women: Iris West (The Flash) was a reporter (who did not snoop into secret identities), Jean Loring (The Atom) was a lawyer (who was perfectly sane, contrary to her depiction in Identity Crisis), and Carol Ferris (Green Lantern) ran a fictional counterpart to Boeing! Sue Dibny (The Elongated Man) was so intelligent and spirited a leading lady that her rape and murder in Identity Crisis seemed a cruel betrayal of the spirit of the classics of DC’s Silver Age. And I am of two minds about the fate that Alan Moore meted out to Barbara Gordon in Batman: The Killing Joke.

There was a lot of nonsense going on in Mort Weisinger’s Lois Lane stories in the Silver Age, but Schwartz and his writers John Broome and Gardner Fox shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush. Rather than fixate on that run in Batgirl’s tights like that dopey crook, DC could easily have found cover art for Showcase: Batgirl that would have captured the character’s true, empowered spirit.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF AND OTHERS

In last week’s column I was singing the praises of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Now you can read Ken Plume’s interview with another member of the MST3K team, Kevin Murphy, who played Tom Servo and the erudite Professor Bobo, and who partnered with Mike Nelson in the RiffTrax demolition of the first Fantastic Four movie. While you’re at it, go read Ken’s earlier interview with Murphy’s MST3K colleague Trace Beaulieu, the original voice of Crow T. Robot and the living embodiment of the show’s archvillain Dr. Clayton Forrester.

The July 23-Aug. 5, 2007 issue of TV Guide proclaims that “TV Guide hits Comic-Con International, the premier gathering of all things sci-fi and fantasy” (p. 29). Funny, I thought Comic-Con was primarily about, you know, comics (and what about WorldCon?). Well, this year I’m not going to Comic-Con, so you will be spared six to eight weeks of reports. Longtime readers will recall my past attempts to find the Marvel booth at the con. The Beat reports that this year Marvel will finally have a big booth in San Diego. And I still won’t see it. But I have plenty to write about here instead, as you will soon learn.

But if you do attend this year’s Comic-Con, and are not crushed to death by the crowds, please stop by the Comic Art Conference Session #9, “Superheroes, Villains and Vixens: A Discussion of the Top Pop-Culture Icons of 20th-Century America,” whose panelists include Gina Misiroglu, co-editor on The Supervillain Book (Visible Ink Press), to which I contributed. It’s in Room 30AB on Saturday at 10:30 AM.

One of this year’s special guests at Comic-Con, deservedly so, is Roy Thomas, one of the most important writers and editors in Marvel’s history. Mark Evanier will interview Roy during the “Spotlight on Roy Thomas” at 4:30 PM Saturday afternoon in Room 2. I understand that during the convention Roy will be doing a signing of The Marvel Vault (Perseus Books), the book on which he and I collaborated. Those of you with sufficiently large travel budgets should have Roy sign the Vault for you in San Diego, and then have me sign your copy at next April’s New York Comic-Con!

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Quick Stop Thingamabobs: 7/23/2007

Filed under: Columns,Thingamabobs — UncaScroogeMcD @ 12:01 am

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Paul Winchell sells Blue Cheer detergent… (Thingamabob)

And a here’s a little slice of the man at work… (Thingamabob)

Popeye sells beer… (Thingamabob)

Archie Andrews, fighting machine… (Thingamabob)

A Q&A with Gonzo & Dave Goelz… (Thingamabob)

Have a THINGAMABOB? Send it in!

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July 20, 2007

Scrubs Blog: My Convenience Store

Filed under: Production Blogs,Quickcasts,Scrubs Blog,Video — UncaScroogeMcD @ 4:42 am

VIDEO BLOG #83: “My Convenience Store” ““
The Scrubs Blog makes a triumphant, pre-season return with some bits and bobs from Season 6, kicking off with the art of stocking the convenience store featured in episode 6×17, “Their Story, and the filming of Ted’s hair fantasy.

Download Scrubs Video Blog #83:

Large (560 x 420 – QuickTime – 76.55 MB)
Small (320 x 240 – QuickTime – 36.51 MB)
[display_podcast]

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Trailer Park: Allison Janney

Filed under: Columns,Interviews,Trailer Park — admin @ 3:50 am

By Christopher Stipp

Archives? Right Here…

Allison Janney is one of the first people I’ve ever talked to that has radiated a genuine sense of ease and openness. She also takes the cake for being the first person I’ve ever talked to regarding prescription medication for generalized anxiety with regard to flying.

Allison’s career has been punctuated with Emmy wins (four, actually) for her work on The West Wing, is the only cast member from that show who has won more than one for her work, has starred in films like THE HOURS, THE ICE STORM but has integrated FINDING NEMO and PRIVATE PARTS into the mix and she’s managed to build a resume that many of her contemporaries only wish they could possess.

Today, though, Allison’s turn as Prudy Pingleton in the newest incarnation of HAIRSPRAY is one of those parts that demonstrate her ability to draw on her dramatic roots and play a part that is equal measures absurd and comedic. I wish I could say that the conversation ranges from the mundane to the insightful much like every other interview I’ve conducted but Allison was up for some casual conversing regarding the film, about what she still has yet to accomplish in her career and the fact that, yes, she does speak in the 3rd person in a way that is completely endearing when it comes to declaring her ability to sing and dance. The conversation picks up in the midst of an explanation of whether she’s been doing a lot of traveling in support of her next job, a role in The Autumn Garden during the Williamstown Theater Festival.

HAIRSPRAY opens today, July 20th.

ALLISON JANNEY: I’m doing a lot of back and forth these days.

CHRISTOPHER STIPP: Nice flight. Isn’t that a five hour one?

JANNEY: It’s four and a half out and five and a half back.

STIPP: Joy”¦ Do you do well, flying?

JANNEY: I’ve gotten better at it. I used to have a big fear but not anymore. It’s gotten better”¦maybe it’s the drugs. [Laughs] Maybe the drugs have gotten better. No, seriously, I’ve just been doing it so much that I’ve just let go of the fear a little bit.

STIPP: I’m in the opposite position. I was doing well all my life and now, whammo.

JANNEY: Really? Was there an incident or something?

STIPP: I’m pretty sure it stemmed from becoming a father some years ago. I’m equally sure that there’s some psychoanalytical component going on there but the Ativan is the world’s best drug. Ever.

JANNEY: Someone gave me a book, a pilot actually, when I did the Ellen DeGeneres Show, a pilot gave me his book”¦

STIPP: I’ve got that one! It did nothing to help curb the irrationality. I think I’m a lost cause at this point.

JANNEY: You have to ask yourself: Do you want fear or faith? Be fearful or faithful.

STIPP: Yes. You’re absolutely right. But enough about my irrational fears of burning in a wreck of metal”¦Are you doing this flying to help support the film, doing promotions on both coasts?

JANNEY: Actually, no. The premiere is tonight here in LA and I did a workshop in New York, and I did two weeks of that, I’m back for the premiere here tonight and I am going back to New York, renting a car, and heading up to the Williamstown Theater Festival; I’m going to be doing a play called The Autumn Garden. After that I come back here and then, hopefully, I’m going to be doing His Girl Friday at the Roundabout Theater this fall and through the spring. John Guare did an adaptation of it, in conjunction with The Front Page, which was a stage version of His Girl Friday and he kind of did an amalgam of those and we’re going to try and put it on if we can find the man who can play Walter.

STIPP: Keeping busy in the theater.

JANNEY: Yes and it’s making me happy, too. A lot of this movie stuff has been driving me crazy, so many things I’ve been attached to”¦I just wanted to do something that makes me feel good. I haven’t done any plays in seven years so I wanted to get back in doing that.

STIPP: That’s interesting you bring that up. I’ve talked with a few different television actors who’ve said that they enjoy being able to do things like that in their off time when they’re not in production. Were you able to squeeze in any of that during your time on The West Wing?

JANNEY: Well, I did little parts in movies during the break. One time, in the beginning, I did a play of Shakespeare in the Park in New York City but that was just after we filmed the pilot. Maybe it was the year after, I’m terrible with dates”¦but it was never really long enough to do any kind of serious theater because it couldn’t be any longer than a one month commitment.

I just didn’t.

A lot of times I would just get too tired. Work was so great but it was just so”¦so”¦

STIPP: Exhausting?

JANNEY: Yes. Yes. Exhausting”¦ and when you don’t get spend much time with any of your friends or family. So, when you get that time off”¦ you just want to do something other than work.

STIPP: Like any other job, I take it.

JANNEY: Yeah. And I really miss the theater. I’m just really excited to be able and do that again.

STIPP: What’s your passion? Shakespeare, the modern playwrights”¦

JANNEY: Shakespeare, I’ve done it. I went to study Shakespeare in London but I like doing revivals and modern new plays. I don’t have any specific genre that I like”¦But I am just a fan of other playwrights. There are so many different plays I like and there’s no one particular style that I think I excel at. I did Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge and I loved that”¦Shaw I love”¦I can handle style pieces, I tend to like them better. I’d like to do a musical too.

STIPP: Well, being in HAIRSPRAY”¦

JANNEY: I hate to say that I’m the only character that doesn’t get to sing or dance. I can sing and dance but in this incarnation of Prudy they did not have her sing or dance.

STIPP: I have yet to see the film but I’m surprised they changed that.

JANNEY: Yup, they changed it from the play.

STIPP: Why did they do it?

JANNEY: I don’t know. I can’t speak for them. I have no idea why they decided to do that unless it was”¦I think to pad out the other parts they took away some stuff from Prudy”¦.I don’t know, really. You’d have to ask them. I will say that I was disappointed that Prudy Pingleton didn’t sing or dance and I know that Allison Janney is one talented actress.

[Laughs]

STIPP: I’m surprised you didn’t kick down some doors and wield those Emmy’s. I was a fan of the original when Prudy is walking into the wrong side of town. That whole montage is wonderful.

JANNEY: I know! That was one of my favorite scenes and they took it away”¦John Travolta does that part now.

STIPP: Huh?

JANNEY: I know, believe me. They gave that part to John. She’s a little trimmed down in this version.

STIPP: What else, besides cutting the heart out of the original, have they changed”¦

[Laughs]

JANNEY: It’s still there. Prudy still has some very fun moments. It’s really a cameo”¦it’s what I’d call it. Scott Whitman and Marc Shaiman and Adam Shankman, they’re friends of mine, so when Scotty called and asked “Will you come do this?” I just said, “Of course I would. I’d love to.” I hadn’t even read it”¦.Of course I’d do it”¦I kind of remembered what Prudy’s part was so when I read it I was like, “Wow, didn’t she have more to do?”

[Laughs]

I wanted to do it anyway because I love them and I had a great time doing it and I’m really happy to have been a part of it because it was so much fun.

STIPP: How long were you on set?

JANNEY: I literally had three days of shooting and they were each a month apart.

STIPP: Why am I even talking to you? Are you sure you’re actually in the movie?

[Laughs]

JANNEY: I mean I really did just fly there, do one day, and then leave and then came back three weeks later and do another day. So everyone was like, “Oh”¦Yeah, hey!” It was a bizarre experience and I don’t feel like I made my HAIRSPRAY friends but I tell you, Nikki and Amanda were so great. They were the ones I worked with the most and I just adore those girls”¦They were just so great with me. We just bonded and instantly they were so welcoming and appreciative that I was there. They really made me feel welcome. I had a good time.

STIPP: Were you able to see them in other numbers that you weren’t necessarily a part of?

JANNEY: My very first day there I was able to see them do one of those really big numbers, Good Morning Baltimore, which was so exciting. It was thrilling.

I just wanted to run through one take, dance and leap around. It’s great, I loved it.

STIPP: Musicals are really making a comeback.

JANNEY: I know!

STIPP: I don’t know if you’ve seen it, the film called ONCE, it’s a musical that recently came out and has done especially well. It seems like people are genuinely open to seeing these kinds of films.

JANNEY: ONCE? It’s a musical?

STIPP: Yes. It’s a little film from Ireland and it’s perhaps one of the best movies I’ve seen this summer. Plus, it’s like 90 minutes. It’s short.

JANNEY: Hmm, love that too”¦I haven’t seen anything.

STIPP: Are you able to get out and catch a lot films?

JANNEY: I try but I think I’ve gotten spoiled being a voting member of different unions so I get a lot of screeners. I’ve got my nice TV and I love to be at home. I’m a homebody. I’d rather see a movie at home than go out. Unless it’s like to go out and see something like a DIE HARD where the only reason to go is to see it on the big screen.

STIPP: Have you seen anything of note?

JANNEY: I haven’t seen OTHER PEOPLE’S LIVES but I’d like to. I’ve just been working.

STIPP: And speaking of work, why did HAIRSPRAY lend itself to being remade? It seems like the original was especially good already. Did you have any reservations about dipping into the remake?

JANNEY: No, not at all. I love Scott and Marc so much and I saw their Broadway production. No, I totally thought it would be all fun. And I think John Waters, he’s in it, I think he’s happy with it and what they did. But I think it’s one of those movies that”¦I mean look at GREASE. People are less interested in taking a risk and doing something new so why not take something that’s tried and true, put some music to it, stick it on the screen and see what happens.

It seems like the American musical is an original invention so why not bring it to the big screen, that way people won’t have to go to Broadway to see a musical. They can go to their theater in Iowa and see a big Broadway musical.

STIPP: I think, too, that Waters’ original was pretty good with the way he treated segregation. The film comes at a time in history before the pressure cookers of racial change. Is that still at the core of this movie?

JANNEY: Yeah. Yeah, it is. And it still kind of works today too. At its heart it’s about people being afraid of what they don’t know. It’s a microcosm of what still goes on today. With different races, with different religions, different countries, it seems to be a message that people don’t ever learn.

STIPP: Are people just incapable of learning or is this something that will be a part of the human experience?

JANNEY: It just will. It may not be about black and white anymore but it will be something.

STIPP: What keeps people coming back to musicals that are seemingly brought out from the closet year after year?

JANNEY: I think that when you see something, like Grease, it’s a part of your past and when there’s a movie that comes out you have a relationship with it. People are more apt to seeing something that they have in their heart that they had a good experience with and experience it again. Or maybe they’ll feel like taking their kids and say something like, “I love this, maybe you’ll love this too.” There’s history attached to it.

STIPP: Is there more of a leniency with actors being able to move to film, to television, to the theater?

JANNEY: I think so, definitely. Especially as parts become more scarce. Actors might start saying, “You know”¦maybe TV isn’t so bad.” I think that most actors are scared of doing theater.

STIPP: Really?

JANNEY: Yeah. I think that Julia Roberts is brave to go and do theater. That’s how you really prove your weight as an actor is in the theater. And I feel like any great actor would be good in the theater and I think that everyone should do more theater. Most actors should not be afraid to jump in and do it but if you grow up doing television it’s like, “I’ve already done that scene. I don’t want to do it again.” People get lazy. But there’s so much fun in the repetition of the theater, you find new things, and there’s so much freedom in that structure and the relationship with the audience every night.

STIPP: As a woman growing older in this business what do you have to say about the women coming up through this business? The ones who have to look young and act young while you, yourself, try and find the parts that will allow you to keep working in the way you’d like to?

JANNEY: Well, it’s so different for every woman. I, because of my size”¦ I mean, when I was fifteen I was playing forty year-old women. My career has never been dependent on me looking young and beautiful so I don’t know what it’s like for those girls. It’s certainly going to be hard once that’s gone, so I think that the one thing that can be worked on is your acting and not so much what you look like. Really work on the craft of acting and if you really work on that craft time is kind to you, I think. But I think the women that last in this business are the ones that are really great actors. But that’s what I think!

[Laughs]

STIPP: And that’s a great way to end it. Thank you, so much, for the time.

JANNEY: Well thank you, Chris. I’ll think about you on my next flight.

STIPP: I’d say the same thing but the Ativan would wipe out any memory of you.

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Weekend Shopping Guide 7/20/07: Go Wolverines!

Filed under: Shopping Guides — UncaScroogeMcD @ 3:06 am

Call it kitsch, call it overkill – frankly, cal it anything you’d like – but there’s no denying that it’s hard to take your eyes off of John Milius’s memorable 80’s “what if?” war flick Red Dawn (MGM/UA, Rated PG-13, DVD-$19.98 SRP). Previously available as a rather mediocre bare bones DVD, those cries of “Avenge me!” must have finally reached the right ears, because the film has been treated to a 2-disc special edition, fully remastered, with a newly-produced cast & crew retrospective and behind-the-scenes featurettes. Other than the pathetic “carnage counter” feature – who in the hell thought that was a good idea? – the flick finally gets the edition it deserves… Even if they missed a goldmine of greatness by neglecting to get a commentary track from Milius.

Though short-lived, I don’t think I ever missed an episode of Voyagers! (Universal, Not Rated, DVD-$49.98 SRP) during my misbegotten early-80’s childhood. I think the time-traveling adventures of pirate Phineas Bogg (Jon-Erik Hexum) and 12-year-old orphan Jeffrey Jones (Meeno Peluce) inspired my love of the concept of time travel. It’s not a great series by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly is a fun romp, and you can snag all 20 episodes in one handy-dandy box set.

Long the objects of postmodern ridicule by Cartoon Network and then Adult Swim, the complete, original, unvarnished adventures of both Space Ghost and Birdman are finally getting their go on DVD with the 2-disc sets Space Ghost & Dino Boy and Birdman and The Galaxy Trio (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$26.98 SRP each). Each set features all 20 episodes of their respective series, plus a special documentary on the contributions of legendary artist Alex Toth.

Give it enough time and everything will eventually be collected and reprinted, and such is the case with the first quite welcome volume of classic Harvey Comics, starting with Casper the Friendly Ghost (Dark Horse, $19.95 SRP). Collecting over one hundred tales, it’s a beautiful start to what I can only hope is a genuine commitment to re-presenting these tales.

DVD has been a boon to studios eager to try and resuscitate the marketability of old, little-remembered TV series. Case in point is the release of the complete first season of The Rookies (Sony, Not Rated, DVD-$49.95 SRP), an early 70’s series that features a trio of young police officers from the “Southern California Police Department”, mixing both their on and off-duty lives, and brought to you by the legendary TV producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg. The 5-disc set features all 23 first season episodes.

Hollywood’s original mermaid queen gets the Warners spotlight treatment via the 5-film collection Esther Williams: Volume 1 (Warner Bros., Not Rated, DVD-$49.98 SRP). Those 5 films are Bathing Beauty, Easy To Wed, On An Island With You, Neptune’s Daughter, and Dangerous When Wet – the last of which features an animated sequence with Tom & Jerry, similar to Anchors Aweigh. Bonus features include featurettes, trailers, vintage cartoons, and more.

Weeds (Lionsgate, Not Rated, DVD-$39.98 SRP) is one of those quirky, loveable shows that you just can’t help but become addicted to. Mary-Louise Parker’s suburban pot dealer Nancy Botkin is one of those performer/character combos that simply clicks, and anyone who’s yet to check it out, now’s the time to do so with the release of the second season. Bonus features include commentaries, featurettes, a gag reel, and more.

Put on the Willie Nelson as we head back out on the road again with David Banner, wandering the American byways and hoping that someone manages to make him angry… Because he’s really cool when he’s angry. Yes, it’s the complete second season of The Incredible Hulk (Universal, Not Rated, DVD-$39.98 SRP) – a 5-disc set featuring all 22 episodes, plus commentary, an introduction from producer Kenneth Johnson, and a bonus episode from season three.

I’m still convinced that their existence has ultimately proved to be more harm than good for the industry, there’s no denying the influence that the debut of Image Comics had. The formation and legacy of the company – and its founders – is examined in George Khoury’s Image Comics: The Road To Independence (Twomorrows, $34.95 SRP).

It’s been available previously in via half-assed collections of public domain episodes, but you can finally snag yourself the complete first season of Gunsmoke (Paramount, Not Rated, DVD-$38.99 SRP), starring James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon (no word on what Kevin was up to in the Old West). The 6-disc set features all 39 episodes, but sadly no bonus features.

Moving beyond all the Dylan controversy that threatened the film’s release, Factory Girl (Genius, Not Rated, DVD-$28.95 SRP) stands on its own as a fascinating, often disturbing look at 1960’s “It” girl Edie Sedgewick’s rise and eventual fall within the coterie of moons circling Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) . Sienna Miller give a performance that is as poignant as it is all-too-realistically desperate. Bonus materials include an audio commentary, a deleted scene, a making-of, a look at the real Edie, Guy Pearce’s video diary, Miller’s audition tape, and the theatrical trailer.

Even if Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse homage met with mixed reception, at least it spurred on the release of a new double feature line collecting some of those so bad they’re… well, still bad – but interesting grindhouse flicks of yore. The first two releases in the Welcome To The Grindhouse line (BCI, Not Rated, DVD-$12.95 SRP each) are Pick-Up/The Teacher and Black Candles/Evil Eye. Grind on…

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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Quick Stop Thingamabobs: 7/20/2007

Filed under: Columns,Thingamabobs — UncaScroogeMcD @ 1:30 am

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It’s the House of 1,000 Muppets… (Thingamabob)

43 Roadrunner cartoons on eBay… (Thingamabob)

Flash! Ah-ahhhhhhhhh… (Thingamabob)

Bloopers from Babylon 5… (Thingamabob)

Monorail!… (Thingamabob)

Have a THINGAMABOB? Send it in!

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July 19, 2007

Nocturnal Admissions: DVD Review – Premonition

Filed under: Columns,Nocturnal Admissions — UncaScroogeMcD @ 4:28 am

When I told a colleague that I had to get off the phone in order to finish a review of the Premonition DVD, the question came up, “Why are you reviewing that film?” “Because I like Sandra Bullock.” “No you don’t! You told me you didn’t like her.” My reply was, “I have always liked her. It is unthinkable that I would ever say what you are attributing to me. It is simply not true.” My love for her may not run as deep as that for Lindsay Lohan, but it is sincere and consistent.

Premonition Sandy

And indeed I’ve been a fan of Bullock’s since Speed, like everyone else. Her spunkiness on the screen, where she more or less supplanted Meg Ryan in the kookiness wars, was not matched by business savvy off screen, evinced in her appearing in the sequel. Earlier, though, she was dignified in the otherwise girly role as the sidekick cop in Demolition Man, and powerful and underrated in the now ignored Wrestling Ernest Hemingway . My love I was especially taken with her in While You Were Sleeping, and subsequently Bullock has always excelled at lonely loners and oddball brainiacs, such as in The Net, which I also enjoyed. The kooky thing got old after a while ( Hope Floats, Forces of Nature), but one residue of them is that you almost always knew what a Sandra Bullock movie was going to be like. She was the author of a brand.

And as one must be, also a producer of her own movies, while still maintaining the kookiness franchise in the Congeniality movies. But, inevitably as it does to all actresses, maturity came to claim her. In recent years she was excellent in Crash, and better as Harper Lee in Infamous than Catherine Keener was in Capote. Earlier this year she had another serious role in Premonition, as a woman who finds her self in a time shift, a sort of Groundhog Day times two in which every other day she lives through a day in the future, after her husband has been killed in a car crash and other haphazard injuries have been inflicted on her kids and herself.

Though I respect what Bullock wants to do as she gets older (she is only 42, but that is something like 60 in Actress Years), I generally don’t relish seeing her in the serious stuff. The film ended up making almost $50 million dollars but these days that translate into a “disappointment,” and in any case, the trailers were not so hot, more confusing than intriguing. The Forgotten had enticing trailers, for example, but was a crappy movie; here, the opposite dynamic was in play. Premonition is an OK movie, not quite my thing, but Bullock is good in it, and it is movies like these, in which stars work so hard only to be more or less ignored, that must give them pause, make them stop and wonder why the hell they are doing this in the first place.

Bullock plays Linda Quinn Hanson, the female half of a perfect household. But one day she wakes up and time has shifted forward a week, after her husband, Jim (Julian McMahon), has died in a tragic highway accident right out of the Final Destination movies (in fact, Premonition reminds me of a film from the 1990s with a then-current flavor of the week starlet as a character who keeps waking up in a different world alternately with or without her boyfriend. I’ve been unable to remember the actress, the title, the plot, or the year, but I know it was out there). Of course, people think she is crazy, and she keeps picking up misleading hints as to her husband’s secret life (possibly with co-worker Amber Valletta). The script, credited to Bill Kelly, who likes time warp movies (he also wrote Blast from the Past and the forthcoming Enchanted), walks a delicate line between what Linda learns and what she really learns, but the film does demand that you mentally keep an accounting book going on the whole time. The cause of this disruption in time is never explained, just as it is also not explained in Me Myself I, one of numerous time warp movies from the 1990s that also include Sliding Doors and the movie I can’t remember.

For this reason, Premonition is probably idea for the home market, where you can pause, review, discuss amongst yourselves, and basically hash out the plot. What’s interesting about the film is how Linda’s moods and attitudes change with each new day, at one point deciding that Jim deserves to die and all she has to do is nothing. If the film has a major flaw, besides being confusing, it is humorlessness, although there is a scene of high comedy where Jim’s coffin falls and breaks and his head goes rolling down the street.

Premonition making of

As is to be expected from a major release from a big company, Premonition comes in a fine widescreen transfer (2.40 enhanced), with excellent Dolby Digital 5.1 sound in English and French, with English, French, and Spanish. The main supplement is the rather quite audio commentary with director Mennan Yapo ( Lautlos) and with Bullock herself, where the emphasis is on character motivation and shooting process.

Premonition alternate ending

There are also five deleted scenes with optional director’s commentary, most of the scenes excised for purposes of pacing (still not successful since Premonition still has a glacial pace), and an alternate ending, which turns out to be no ending at all. Following this, there are two making ofs, “Glimpses of the Future: Making Premonition,” about 15 minutes, and mostly boilerplate promotional material, and the slightly shorter “Bringing Order to Chaos,” which helpfully puts the days of the film in chronological order. This is followed by the two part “Real Premonitions,” about 30 minutes, and three minutes of gag reel material, mostly having to do with dead birds or pranks on the actors (which also show Bullock to be a fun person to have on the set). Finally there are trailers for Across the Universe (seemingly a cross between Hair and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), The Messengers, and Ghost Rider. I wish that they had also included her appearance on The Daily Show where she came across, as always, as a game girl who likes to have fun, and where she was quite forthright about getting lost in the labyrinth of the plot.

Premonition box

Premonition, in widescreen, full frame and Blu-Ray formats, comes in a keep case. The widescreen edition streeted on Tuesday, July 17th, and retailed for $28.95.

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July 18, 2007

Interview: Kevin Murphy

Filed under: Interviews — UncaScroogeMcD @ 7:38 am

–by Ken Plume

Though an accomplished author and performer, Kevin Murphy will perhaps be forever known as a wise-cracking robot with a gumball dispenser head, springy arms, a stout body, and an underwear fetish. Barring that, he’ll probably also be remembered as a giant talking monkey.

For 9 seasons, Kevin performed Tom Servo on Mystery Science Theater 3000, expanding his on-screen time with his frighteningly nuanced portrayal of the intelligent simian Professor Bobo, in addition to his writing duties for the series.

Post-MST, Kevin has been a frequent contributor to NPR, and written the cinematic travelogue A Year At The Movies, which chronicled his worldwide journey to experience a film a day in theaters around the globe.

He’s also re-teamed with fellow Satellite of Love refugees Mike Nelson and Bill Corbett as the B-movie quipping Film Crew, plus he’s been a frequent guest-riffer on Mike Nelson & Legend Films’ RiffTrax commentaries (you can check out their full catalog here).

Kevin was sequestered in his palatial, heavily wooded retreat when he deigned to grant us a sizeable fraction of his valuable (and creative) “me” time…

KEVIN MURPHY: Ken?

KEN PLUME: Hey, how are you doing?

MURPHY: I’m doing pretty well, how are you?

KP: I’m doing well. Is this still a good time for you?

MURPHY: Yep. I’m just sitting here watching The Fountain.

KP: Ah…

MURPHY: Everybody’s reaction is the same! “What are you doing?” “Well, today I’ve got to screen The Fountain…” They say, “Ah.”

KP: Well, it’s not exactly a happy-go-lucky, springtime film…

MURPHY: Well, for Aronofsky, it’s a romp. It’s a lark. It’s a spree.

KP: It’s a celebration of happiness and light and the power of love across the centuries.

MURPHY: It’s true.

KP: For everyone else…

MURPHY: It’s the Bataan death march on film.

KP: Have you made it a good chunk of the way through it?

MURPHY: Oh, I just got started. He’s a conquistador and his movie gets invaded by the cast of Apocalypto. Then suddenly finds himself in a sort of outer space Zen monastery, and that’s where I am right now.

KP: Is this recreational viewing?

MURPHY: It goes into the realm of research. First of all, you’ve got to keep on top of these things. Hollywood keeps whipping these things out, and you have to keep your eye on the thing. I’m always suspicious of Darren Aronofsky, so I need to make sure I know what he’s doing at all times.

KP: Do you sometimes feel like the cinematic equivalent of a Buddhist monk with a gas can beside you?

MURPHY: (laughs) Yeah, but you know, those Buddhist monks, they’re sort of like Karma criminals. They’re not supposed to do that sort of thing.

KP: No, but do you feel like,” This is when I finally light the match, on this film…”?

MURPHY: Oh sure, absolutely. But this is not the one. There are worse.

KP: Did you get a chance to look at some of the other pieces we’ve done recently?

MURPHY: Actually I have not. I ought to.

KP: Oh, so you have no idea what people are saying about you.

MURPHY: What are they saying about me?

KP: Oh, wonderful things. Bill was nothing but complimentary with most of he had to say about you. The other stuff was unprintable.

MURPHY: Bill who?

KP: He writes plays.

MURPHY: Oh, that guy.

KP: And I also have a special guest on the line. He’s a bit frail, but Kevin, I’d like to introduce you to Coleman Francis…

MURPHY: (laughs)

KP: Do you ever worry about a This is Your Life coming out of the blue and hitting you with all these things?

MURPHY: I can go on IMDB and make sure Coleman is dead – and if not, that he’s old enough that I could knock him over.

KP: Six years out, I’m curious if your thoughts on the theater going experience had changed any since doing A Year At The Movies.

MURPHY: You know, it’s better and it’s worse. I don’t think, in my mind, it’s any surprise that generally what comes out of Hollywood is still largely very highly polished shit. And yet there are still some excellent alternatives to the regular fare. I’m delighted to report that the small one-screeners that I love here in town have survived. They’re struggling, but they still survive because there’s enough people to keep them populated.

KP: Struggled in the same way they’ve always struggled?

MURPHY: Oh, it’s the same old struggle.

KP: So it’s not like things have gotten worse for them – it’s maintained…

MURPHY: Oh, the Parkway needs a remodeling job. The letters are starting to fall off the sign every now and again, but the popcorn is still excellent. And one of my favorites, the Riverview Theater, is doing quite well. In fact, it’s thriving. And the Heights Theater, which is up north of town, is also thriving, and that’s very heartening. They’re doing reparatory. That’s very encouraging. One of the things that’s changed significantly since I wrote that book is the spread of the small screen. The really, really small screen, in the case of You Tube and such things. And although it’s allowed the entire world to become a bad film director, or at least very derivative, it is changing things. Somehow I think that’s for the better, because people are hungry for alternatives to big giant movies. Except if you’re 12. You still want to go see Shrek on the night it opens.

KP: I find it interesting how much unseen product has made its way onto You Tube. It’s like You Tube is this no man’s land where anything is possible to be screened.

MURPHY: I love it. My house doesn’t have a basement, so thank god there’s You Tube, because it’s really like rummaging around in the basement that I never had. In the basement of my media memory. It’s great fun. There used to be a show called Night Music. It was produced by David Sanborn and it had Jools Holland as the host. It was on weekends. It was an obscure little show, but dear god they had some of the most wonderful performers on it. For several years I’ve wanted to at least see a copy of the one Leonard Cohen was on. He did a version of the song “Who By Fire” with most of the band Was Not Was and David Sanborn, and Sonny Rollins did this amazing, truly amazing solo on the saxophone, and it just came out of nowhere and it disappeared and there was nowhere to find it. Well, of course, now I found it on You Tube. It’s just one of those very rare performances kinda thing that you’d maybe see in a concert and never be able to recapture it, but this was something that was on a very obscure network television show many, many years ago, and now I can see it again. That’s kinda cool.

KP: How often do you spend time plumbing the depths of your memory in front of You Tube?

MURPHY: I don’t spend a lot of time. I’m not a shopper. You know how some people can just go into a secondhand store and look around for hours and hours? My spouse, for one. I love her, and she just loves to do that. I generally have something in mind. I go in, I look for it, if it’s not there, I leave. If I find it, I grab it, and then I leave. I’m not a browser, much. I just don’t have the time for that. My mind is already too full.

KP: Beyond the Leonard Cohen clip, what has been the most obscure or surprising thing you’ve found? Or wish you hadn’t found?

MURPHY: Nothing springs to mind. Again, I don’t spend a lot of time there. I usually go there with a task in mind. Some little psychic lawn darts from my own childhood are these little animated cartoons that used to be on the afternoon cartoon show when I was a small child. Which were already old when I was watching them. At Christmas time there’s an odd little song about Hard Rock, Coco and Joe, three elves that accompany Santa on his sleigh. I’ve always loved that song. I haven’t looked, but I have to look because the other thing that’s always plagued my dreams is this odd TV show called Diver Dan.

KP: Oh yes, my father talks about Diver Dan all the time.

MURPHY: Diver Dan would be in a brass hat – you know, the old navy deep diver brass hat suit – and he’d interact with fish string puppets. And he had this hot babe mermaid that he’d visit every now and again, although he’s in a brass hat so he really couldn’t get it on. And they film the whole thing – this is what I love – they film the whole thing in front of a giant aquarium. So you’d see fish swimming by. It was in an odd way quite brilliant, and that struck me when I was a kid. Are they really under water? And my brother would say, “No, they sat in front of an aquarium, for god sakes, grow up.”

KP: Was he always condescending to you like that?

MURPHY: My brother?

KP: Yes.

MURPHY: Oh no, no, they always tried to elevate me up to their level and bring me out of the depths of my stupidity.

KP: So it was like an aquatic Howdy Doody?

MURPHY: I guess you could say that, except it was much more serious. Diver Dan would get into some real mix ups, and there was a vaguely German, Eastern European sort of bad fish named Baron von Barracuda, who for some reason had a thug from the bowery as his assistant. He was a trigger fish and they called him trigger. And of course there were good fish and bad fish. The whole world’s about the struggle between good fish and bad fish.

KP: The Incredible Mr. Limpet taught us that.

MURPHY: That’s right. But this was really bad puppeteering and crude puppets, so it’s close to my heart.

KP: Have you found it on You Tube?

MURPHY: I haven’t looked for it, but this has inspired me to do such a thing.

KP: I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a DVD release. Is that something that, just for nostalgia’s sake, you would revisit?

MURPHY: Yeah. I wouldn’t spend a whole lot of time.

KP: The set would never grace your shelf.

MURPHY: I think not. I mean, I liked it, but I didn’t like it.

KP: You don’t need the entire 50 hour run.

MURPHY: There it is! I’ll be damned. It’s Diver Dan. It had a great opening theme song. Sort of sounded like the Kingston Trio or something. Here, listen to this. There, you see, and it goes on like that.

KP: Why don’t people do shows like that anymore?

MURPHY: You know, I think people do. Except they’re about eight years old and they do them in their basement.

KP: And now it’s on the net.

MURPHY: That’s right!

KP: And we’re not being facetious when we say those kind of shows are on the net now.

MURPHY: It’s true. Anybody can have a TV show. Truly.

KP: In many ways MST was a throwback to that sort of ethos.

MURPHY: Oh, I think there was no doubt about that. It generated from our childhood memories of having creature features and hosted movies. That was always in my mind, and it certainly led to the choice of movies we had. Because at KTMA, we had a shelf full of… a lot of films we could have done that were truly just dismal 80s films, but we always went for the cornier ones. For the science fiction ones. The Japanese monster movies seemed to be perfect, because that was the throwback I think was to the creature features.

KP: I’ve always been curious what the initial job description was for your time at KTMA. When you first took the job…

MURPHY: I was hired to shoot commercials. Jim (Mallon) actually called me up. I had worked with him at WHA in Madison, the public station there. And we would knock around, have fun. We’d go out on shoots every now and again. I always enjoyed his sense of humor, and he mine.

KP: What would knocking around and having fun with Jim entail?

MURPHY: Madison. Madison’s a college town, so use your imagination. (laughs) We ran in the same social circles, and that was based quite a bit around the university and the station WHA. And I still have a lot of good friends from down there even though I left there almost 20 years ago.

KP: Does it seem like that long?

MURPHY: Some days. Depends. If the humidity’s up.

KP: What was your initial impression of Jim when you first met him?

MURPHY: He had a sort of… what would you say… a status, having been in the Pail and Shovel party, and being the president of the student government and having done these amazingly anarchistic little feats of public exhibition. He was like a public artist, and he and his pal Leon Varjian were always surprising and always delightful. So, I had respect for him as a guy who did these mad quirks of, I guess you’d call them anarchistic comedy. But he was in a student government to do it. And he knew nothing about me, but I found him to be very unassuming and jovial and always great fun to hang around with. We really got to know each other… I went to work as a crew member on the film Muskie Madness, and we got to spend six or seven weeks up in the north woods of Wisconsin just being goofy and shooting a horror movie.

KP: This is what was eventually retitled Blood Hook, right?

MURPHY: Blood Hook, yes. The Troma people got a hold of it and said, “Muskie Madness, what’s that? What’s a Muskie? What are you talking about here? Listen I got a good title for you, it’s gonna be Blood Hook. Who knows for Muskie?” What they didn’t know is that muskie is the number one game fish in the United States, young man. It is tougher to land than the mighty tarpon. It will bite through piano wire. I have a friend who had his hand swallowed by a muskie. He had to pull it back out and it was filled with bite marks.

KP: As if I wasn’t afraid enough of the ocean, inland waterways are now off limits…

MURPHY: (laughs) Don’t go in the northern lakes during October, my friend, because the muskies are hungry then. That’s how we keep the ruffians out. It’s actually gorgeous here all year round.

KP: How long was the shoot?

MURPHY: It was about six weeks. It was Martin Mull who said that making movies was like college with money, or high school with money. I think that’s what it was. And that’s what it felt like. It was like summer camp. Although we really didn’t have any money, because it was an incredibly low budget thing, but we camped out at a local old-fashioned hotel and would shoot day and night and just… I learned so much about the filmmaking process in one shoot, because we had to do everything with nothing.

KP: So, really, titles meant nothing on that production…

MURPHY: Well, they really did. We had a professional crew and everything broke down the way it ought to. And everybody really counted on people to do their jobs and to know their jobs – and if they didn’t, then to learn their jobs damn quick. That’s one of the beauties of independent filmmaking. You can learn really fast, because for some positions… I mean, I’d never been a key grip on a film before. I’d run a dolly and rigged lights and things like that, but I’d always been… I’d done a few jobs as a PA on this film, or that or this commercial or that. I came to Wisconsin and this came along and it just seemed like, “Well, why the hell not? What a wonderful experience.” And it was. It’s the best fun I’ve ever had on a film set.

KP: What was the biggest learning curve for you on the set?

MURPHY: Well, probably, I learned later that some of the things we were doing were really dangerous. Like running wires from the shore out to a floating raft in the middle of this lake, in the rain.

KP: Who’s idea was that?

MURPHY: Well, we had a lighting director, and they needed light from a certain source, and it made sense. It worked. We did it and we didn’t kill ourselves, and we didn’t put ourselves in imminent danger. And we were never crazy stupid dumb about it, we were just… occasionally unsafe, is what I’d say. We had this one set for about a week on a boathouse on this beautiful lake in northern Wisconsin. There was something that wasn’t properly grounded, and so you could actually feel the current through your shoes as you were walking along the dock. It was a little unsettling.

KP: But no one thought to do anything about it.

MURPHY: Well, eventually. I felt the tingle, and I said to Rob, who was the gaffer, “Rob, do you feel a tingle through your shoes?” And he said, “Oh, that’s not good.” So he had somebody run and check the ground and we were fine. We were lacking some of the safety features that union shoots provide, let’s put it that way.

KP: Like death prevention.

MURPHY: But it was an adventure. We built all our sets with Makita screw guns and a chainsaw, pretty much. Truly, it was chainsaw carpentry. Everyone was issued a Makita screw gun, and so when I wasn’t actually on set, I was part of the swing gang putting the new sets up for the next day.

KP: So really it was that flexibility that was the biggest means of learning on that shoot…

MURPHY: Yeah. And also how to work 16 hours a day and still have the energy to drink like a fool at night.

KP: Well, that’s just Midwestern filmmaking, isn’t it?

MURPHY: (laughs) Yes, there were a couple of fine bars there and, at the time, the microbrewery Eau Claire had an all-malt lager, and it was quite a wonderful thing.

KP: That was the real muskie madness.

MURPHY: That truly was the muskie madness. It was a blast. It was the best summer camp I ever had.

KP: When you’re filming a low budget film like that, what are the expectations? Is it just, “We’re doing this because we can…”?

MURPHY: I think the number one reason to do it is because it’s going to be fun. People who make a low budget film thinking that they’re going to get rich are usually naÃ¯ve and stupid and they’re never going to get rich. If you don’t do it for the fun of it or for the enjoyment of it or for the pleasure of it, then I think it’s kinda stupid otherwise.

KP: Do you think that difference in reasons for doing it shows in the final product? You’ve seen enough low budget films that were made by fertilizer salesmen who are hoping for Hollywood…

MURPHY: (laughs) Well, that’s the thing. That’s what I mean – if you’re looking beyond the movie to what this movie’s going to get you, then you’re probably looking at the wrong thing. That’s shown up over and over again. But that doesn’t mean… one of the things you learn is that, with a few exceptions, when the thing’s low budget, you get what you pay for. So if you don’t have a whole lot of money to dedicate to the script writing and you don’t have a lot of money to dedicate to hiring actors, and so you get a lot of community theater rejects, you have to work with that. If whoever’s in charge has enough talent to hold it together – and, I would say, poise – then yeah, maybe you’ll come out with something that’s fun and interesting.

KP: So what was that first screening of Muskie Madness like?

MURPHY: Oh, it was great fun. It was great fun. We actually had a premier here in Minneapolis. We built a boat dock and people would drive up in their cars and get on the boat dock in their tuxedoes and go into the theater. It was pure showmanship there.

KP: And they were all rented tuxedoes at that point?

MURPHY: Of course! And, you know, the movie was goofy. It was meant to be goofy, and it was meant to look like a goofy low-budget film, and it certainly succeeded in that way.

KP: Is the fact that it’s still out there and available surprising to you?

MURPHY: No, actually, it’s not. Part of it’s probably because of the success that Mystery Science Theater had, that it’s still out there. And another one is that Troma never drops anything from their schedule once they put it on there. So you can always find those things. For me, I honestly don’t know what other people thought of the film, and frankly I don’t care, because for me it was sort of like, we went to camp and we made this movie, and so every time I watch it, I find something in there that I just love because I remember how it happened.

KP: If someone were to do an MST treatment to that, how would you feel?

MURPHY: If there was someone to do it, I’d possibly be involved, but I wouldn’t be involved in that. That’s a little too close to the bone. I mean, I wouldn’t care. The movie’s as ripe for it as a lot of movies have been.

KP: So, if Mike called you up and said, “Kevin, I’m thinking a RiffTrax…”

MURPHY: It would feel a little bit like incest. So it would probably not be good, because I’m not a fan of incest.

KP: Well, it’s good that no one has attempted it yet.

MURPHY: Well, I’m sure they have, in their own private little domains.

KP: Which is where that sort of thing originated anyway.

MURPHY: That’s right, (laughs)

KP: Having finished the film, at what point did the KTMA job enter the picture?

MURPHY: It wasn’t long after. Actually, Jim finished the film and he moved to Minneapolis and was editing it, and that’s where he met Joel (Hodgson). He was in an office space in the warehouse district of downtown Minneapolis, and Joel had a studio in the same building. And so they ran into each other and got to know each other a little bit. It wasn’t long after that Jim got the job at KTMA. And it was all subterfuge. I mean, he brought me out there pretty much telling that the reason to have this job – and we have to shoot the commercials and we have to do the local hosted matinee movies and we have to do the public relations programming – but we have access to tools and we can do anything we want with them. That was the appeal to me – we could make a TV show and we could actually get it on the air. It was truly the month after I got there that Jim and I started putting together these news parodies that we did.

KP: This was the introduction of the Bob Baggadonuts character, right?

MURPHY: Right. Yes, and that was always great fun.

KP: I wonder, having seen those pieces, if things had gone differently and Josh (Weinstein) had not left MST, I really cannot see you as being content behind the camera. Because it seemed like you had a certain joy in performance.

MURPHY: I’m a ham. I’ve always been a ham. I had trouble in grade school for being a ham. I’m made of ham. I’m a walking ham.

KP: What kind of trouble would it cause in grade school?

MURPHY: Well, what kind of trouble does a ham get in? Calling attention to yourself, it’s in the report card, get sent to the principal’s office all the time. Making a nuisance in the class. Cutting up in the back of the room.

KP: So the teachers were not appreciative of your outgoing personality.

MURPHY: Teachers don’t like too many people who actually bust up the class. It doesn’t keep things moving the way it’s supposed to. I remember someone saying to me, “Do you think you’re going to be able to make a living making fun of things?”

KP: And you were only five at the time.

MURPHY: No, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. I was probably nine.

KP: Do you remember how you reacted to that statement?

MURPHY: I’m guessing that it was just pure fear, because at that time I was very frightened of authority figures. So I’d only do things behind their backs.

KP: You’re one of how many brothers?

MURPHY: I’ve got four brothers.

KP: So there was a lot of competition in the house.

MURPHY: Well, I suppose. I was smaller, so the competition was decided pretty quickly.

KP: Are they hams, as well, or was that your domain?

MURPHY: My brother Brian has a band called Arranmore, and they do Irish and folk and Americana sort of music. He’s been the front man for that band for many years, so he enjoys it in that way, but he’s not a clown. He’s just an entertaining musician. We all did time on some kind of stage in one fashion or another. But collectively they’re still the funniest people I know, I think. We get together and bust each other up so quickly, it’s wonderful.

KP: Did you pursue that inclination towards performance in high school, at all?

MURPHY: I was in the high school musicals, of course. I played Emile de Beckque in South Pacific… pissed me off because I wanted to play Luther Billis. They said, “No, Luther Billis doesn’t have to sing. You can sing. As a matter of fact, you’re the only one who can sing these songs.” It was a very small high school.

KP: Of six.

MURPHY: No, there were 98 people in my graduating class, I believe.

KP: When you have that small a pool…

MURPHY: I could hit the notes, and I didn’t have acne. So.

KP: Was singing also something that you were immediately drawn to?

MURPHY: That was both my parents’ influence. My dad loved swing music and barbershop quartet, and my mother loved musicals. They always had us singing when we were kids.

KP: How would you describe your pre-teen musical tastes?

MURPHY: Well, that’s odd, because again I had these older brothers and my older sister. So instead of listening to the 1910 Fruitgum Company, my brother Chris brought home Frank Zappa’s first album Freak Out, and this was… what was it, 1966? And here’s this bizarre album, and the first song is “Hungry Freaks, Daddy,” and it’s a double album, and it has bassoons and glockenspiels and just was delightful. It was just weird. One of my first albums when I had the money to buy it was Uncle Meat.

KP: What’s odd is, through the influence of your brothers, you gravitated toward something that actually incorporated at least a knowledge of the kind of music that your parents were fond of… You just don’t go into rock music using a glockenspiel…

MURPHY: True. Conversely, Zappa based a lot of what he did on the work of Edgar Varese, and folks like that, which is very atonal and difficult to listen to. And I think he liked to do that because it put people on edge. I remember him saying in his autobiography that he liked to play the low notes really loud because it always unsettled people more. The high notes would make them irritated and angry but the low notes would make them feel bad and they didn’t know why.

KP: So it was all about forcing people to question what they were listening to…

MURPHY: I guess you could say that. I don’t know. I was never that conscious of it. I just thought it was fun and weird. And I had my pathetically indulgent taste, too. I had Yes albums and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and that sort of art rock stuff. I did get over that.

KP: Big ELO fan for a time?

MURPHY: No, not ELO. Too poppy for me.

KP: So it was never the pop direction you would go in.

MURPHY: No, I liked Steve Howe because he was a rocket on the guitar. I think Eddie Van Halen learned a lot from Steve Howe.

KP: Rick Wakeman?

MURPHY: Oh jeez, yes, I’m embarrassed to say I passed through my Rick Wakeman phase. It was like having malaria. I got over it. It took a while, but I got over it.

KP: But you never owned a cape…

MURPHY: Never owned a cape. I did own a leather hat.

KP: Which you’ve, through your book, made iconic as the ultimate symbol of a certain sad fellowship…

MURPHY: For me it is, yes. And it is true. That’s the other thread – I wrote about that in the book – is that punk rock saved my ass. It truly did.

KP: Did you know that at the time? Was it a conscious revelation?

MURPHY: It was just so much different than anything that I had experienced. In some ways it was new and scary and wonderful.

KP: What was the album that scared you the most?

MURPHY: Oh, jeez. Well, I’m working at this club, and this was… you know, it was the Midwest, so again – everything was behind everything else to a certain extent, but there’s kids who are launching themselves off the stage and they’re spitting at each other and they’re beating the shit out of each other on the dance floor.

KP: And you’re just timid with a leather hat in the corner?

MURPHY: No, at that time, I had discarded my leather hat. It was really the music more than anything else. You hear a band like The Stranglers, and it’s just so strong. It’s as if they’d say, “Let’s just take the biggest, loudest, creepiest, scariest elements of rock ‘n’ roll and push them to the extreme.” That’s how the New York Dolls struck me when I first heard them. They sounded a little bit… more than you want. Same thing with Iggy Pop. It’s like, “Okay, this is great. I’m really having a blast doing this.” And then suddenly the guy’s shaking his bony ass at you. That’s more than I want. We can ramp it down a little bit. The early punk scene always really pushed that edge, and it wasn’t necessarily about talent, it was just about anger.

KP: So was it the attitude or the music that struck you the hardest?

MURPHY: Ultimately it was the music, always the music. The Sex Pistols were really unpleasant to see on the stage, and they weren’t very good at all. But The Clash, dear god they were good. They were always good. They were wonderful.

KP: You mentioned a period where you saw just about everyone who went through the Midwest…

MURPHY: Yeah, and everybody did. Anybody who went across country would stop in Chicago, and quite often in Madison because it was a college town – and the school’s damn near 50,000 people, so they all came up.

KP: Did you feel – not to make a horrible pun – a sort of clash of cultures? This was a period when this was new to everybody…

MURPHY: Yeah. I guess so…

KP: Or was it just the people that knew and liked it were the ones who were there to see it…

MURPHY: Well, that’s what it was. You could tell. When Black Flag came to town and we were turning people away at the door and they were climbing through the windows, we knew something was going on. When U2 came it was the same thing. We wanted them to do another show, and they couldn’t. They actually played the 18 songs they knew and then played them again, because that’s all they had, but people were so hungry for it. It was wonderful.

KP: What was it like working at the club at that point?

MURPHY: It was a blast.

KP: I would assume it’s a unique experience in crowd control.

MURPHY: (laughs) Well, containment as much as anything else.

KP: Was there any time that you were afraid?

MURPHY: Well, I got lunged at a few times, and people trying to beat me up. They were generally drunk. The kids who were fighting on the dance floor, it was contained and limited to the dance floor. It was really sort of a ritualized sort of contained bit of adolescent boy’s island that stayed on the dance floor, and usually the worst that you get is a bloody lip or somebody’d get their hand stepped on or something like that. Or they’d miss him when he jumped off the stage, or that sort of thing. A couple of drunks lunged at me and tried to beat the hell out of me once or twice. We wrestled one guy out the door and he fell down the stairs. And this was a long flight of stairs. We thought he would have been dead by the time he got to the bottom. The nice thing about drunk people is they’re very flexible.

KP: Was he sober by the time he hit the bottom?

MURPHY: Oh, no, he was still quite drunk. But he had gotten the message and he said something like, “You don’t have to force me to leave, I’m going.” This is after he’d been hurled down the stairs.

KP: What would the cleanup process be like after an event?

MURPHY: Oh, thank god I wasn’t involved in that. No, no. It was quite the… they had sort of this indoor/outdoor carpet, the kind they put on boats. And then the massive dance floor. And you could pretty much hose the club down, and that’s pretty much what you needed to do.

KP: Just a big drain in the center.

MURPHY: Well, the bathrooms were definitely that way. Honestly, they’d take out the disinfectant and sponge everything and then hose it down with hot water and it was ready for the next night.

KP: Did you feel at the time that you were in a scene that was quickly to be co-opted and disappear?

MURPHY: Well, that’s what all the punks told me. They said everything that we do now is going to be commercial tomorrow. If it’s any good, somebody’s going to try to exploit it. That was simply the attitude. And even among the punks, it was…

KP: How many of them hoped for that?

MURPHY: Well you remember the thing about the hippies in San Francisco. Once the word “hippy” got out and used in the common nomenclature, they had a funeral to announce the death of the hippy – and that was in 1967, for crying out loud. So as soon as the word “punk” made it to Wisconsin it was already considered, by the people who consider themselves punk, to be passÃ©.

KP: As soon as something hits the Midwest, it’s culturally dead.

MURPHY: Peoria. If it plays in Peoria, it’s not for me.

KP: What future did you perceive for yourself at that point?

MURPHY: Absolutely no clue.

KP: You were still going to school at this time, right?

MURPHY: Yeah, I was in grad school. I wanted to work in movies. I got myself as many different odd jobs as I could on little things, and I went to every film I could get my hands on, and I was in school to learn directing for film and television, as well as for the stage. That’s when I had a loose idea of what I might want to do. I had a great time. Francis Ford Coppola came to town. He was directing the rally before the Wisconsin Primary for Jerry Brown. And he decided to do it on live, nationwide television. He actually bought and donated the time to the Brown campaign and tried to do this live thing with all kinds of video effects. It was the most disastrous thing I’ve ever seen on live TV. Francis Ford Coppola was not a TV director.

KP: So it’s like SNL at Mardi Gras.

MURPHY: Right! (laughs) It was just a disaster. But I got to meet Barrie Osborne, the guy who eventually produced Lord of the Rings. I can understand how he could do those films. When I heard that it was Barrie Osborne, I said, “Oh, this’ll be no problem, because this guy could sleep through a hurricane.” He was just that calm and that poised. That was very admirable. Coppola was screaming like a lunatic and Barrie was just there trying to hold the whole thing together, very calm and very quiet.

KP: What was your opinion of the “Hollywood director”?

MURPHY: He was an asshole.

KP: Did you get any sense of the odd cheer about him, or just pure asshole?

MURPHY: No, just asshole, pretty much. I mean, I’m sure he is, but it sure wasn’t showing on the days that he was there.

KP: That was also during his incredibly self-destructive period.

MURPHY: I suppose you could call it that. He’d done One From the Heart, I believe. But it was so strange… he wanted to have a soup line set up so he could show pictures of the soup line. He didn’t really think that he needed to feed hungry people, he just wanted to have a soup line. There wasn’t any snow, and he wanted there to be snow. It was actually a beautiful day, but he wanted to bring snow machines in to make snow, since there wasn’t any. So he was sort of a parody of himself. It was Jerry giving his speech, and he’s trying… he put a green screen behind him. A huge green screen, and they put on the Capitol dome. He was projecting pictures of waving fields of wheat and folks in the crowd and farmers, and shit like that. And they didn’t get the key right, so people’s faces were popping through Jerry Brown’s forehead. I wish there was a tape of this. In fact, I should look on You Tube.

KP: This would have been at what time period?

MURPHY: That was the 1980 campaign.

KP: And you’re in college doing your master’s degree…

MURPHY: I was in Madison doing my master’s degree, yeah.

KP: Was school important to you?

MURPHY: Well, I went to the University of Utah for my undergraduate, which means that I spent all my time skiing. So, I really went to graduate school in order to complete my undergraduate education. Because I realized I finished college and I knew nothing about the media or about working in television or in films. So I really had to learn something.

KP: Your undergraduate was in journalism?

MURPHY: Yeah, ostensibly.

KP: Was that the only way you could get media classes, at that point?

MURPHY: Yeah. It was an incredibly easy degree, too. And it allowed me a lot of time to ski. I could take a lot of night classes, so it was great. I could get a season pass to Alta and ski all day long.

KP: Did you think, at the time, that you were sort of coasting through your college period?

MURPHY: (laughs) No, certainly not! I resent the implication, as a matter of fact.

KP: I apologize for any insinuation…

MURPHY: They say there are more important things than college, and when you go to the University of Utah and you go up into the Wasatch range, you realize that’s true.

KP: So when you got that piece of paper, did you think you’d earned it?

MURPHY: From the University of Utah?

KP: Yeah.

MURPHY: Hell no. Paid for it, but I didn’t earn it.

KP: Was the idea of getting an education to go get the master’s?

MURPHY: It’s funny… people say this all the time, and I realize it’s true – You want to be in the media, but you have no idea how to get there. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s the old work-in-the-mailroom thing, but what does that work for, one out of 10,000 people?

KP: And it depends on what part of the media you want to get into…

MURPHY: Yeah. I actually registered in proxy for a friend of mine at the University of Wisconsin and saw that campus and thought, “Wow, this is the real deal here.” It’s wonderful, and they had a public TV station right there on campus. And so it seemed like the perfect place, and as it turns out it was a great place to finish my undergraduate education, and get a master’s degree in the process.

KP: Knowing you could get some practical experience.

MURPHY: Right.

KP: But no skiing.

MURPHY: Let’s say the skiing in Wisconsin’s a few pegs down the ladder from skiing in Utah, and we’ll leave it at that. Much more horizontal.

KP: Was there a lot of student produced material, or was it all structured within the coursework, getting hold of that studio time? Were you guys able to futz around in the studio?

MURPHY: Yeah. At that time it was disappointing to find… well let’s put it this way – the hand held world was still brand new and very expensive. And so it was difficult to do field pieces in video. If you wanted to do that, there was still the film department, and they had wonderful film equipment. A nice equipment catalogue there, so you could get a Bolex camera, and a crystal-sync with a Nagra tape recorder, and go out in the field and make movies. You just had to take the right classes, and then it all depended on how much money you had to buy film stock. So you go without pizza and beer for a week, and you had enough to buy film stock to make movies… and a lot of people did it that way.

KP: Is there anything you made at that point that was purely your own project?

MURPHY: Sure. Nothing that I would ever share with anybody else in the universe ever again, and you can’t see it on You Tube because it’s in my closet somewhere. These are student pieces. I’m not Mozart. Nobody gives a shit about what I did in college.

KP: Someone will put out a DVD called The Lost Works of Kevin Murphy…

MURPHY: And the reason they’re lost is that they ought to be lost.

KP: You wouldn’t have a little Murphy Film Festival at some point?

MURPHY: I appreciate what Franz Kafka said – “Burn all of my letters, burn all of my notes, burn everything.”

KP: You realize no one listens to that.

MURPHY: (laughs) I guess by saying it it’s actually a pathetic invitation to burn everything.

KP: Just for that, we’re going to do a Kevin Murphy retrospective at Dragon Con…

MURPHY: Well, most of my student stuff is still in uncut 16 negative cut. One light reversal work print, and magnetic perforated film. So if you can put that together, I’d be impressed.

KP: Have you ever had the urge to go back and look?

MURPHY: No.

KP: Why keep it, then?

MURPHY: I haven’t thrown it away. I actually don’t know exactly where it is. It’s out in the garage somewhere. I actually have not seen it since I was in school, and that’s enough.

KP: There must be some curiosity.

MURPHY: No. I made it… I did it… I’m done.

KP: Where would your creative impulses lie? What would you go out and shoot? Story pieces, sketches?

MURPHY: When I was in school?

KP: Yeah.

MURPHY: They were mainly for classes, and so there was usually at least a genre or a style that we were trying to learn. We had a wonderfully bizarre – he’s still there – experimental filmmaker who was in the film department named JJ Murphy. No relation. And he’d give us a tremendous amount of freedom to go out and shoot, and also learn a lot of what you’d call less conventional film techniques. So I got a lot of exposure to that. And I always tried to have fun with it and, of course, subvert it as much as I could. The one that I enjoyed the most was when we had to do a sync sound piece and actually put together a whole complete short film. That was great fun. It was fictional. It was humorous. At least I intended it to be humorous.

KP: Would you say your creative slant has always been towards comedy?

MURPHY: Yes, definitely. Don’t have a serious bone in my body.

KP: Going through that program, did you feel, “Well, now I have a master’s degree in hand. What now?”…

MURPHY: Oh yeah.

KP: Were there any thoughts of leaving the Midwest?

MURPHY: Well, I did a stint in San Diego that didn’t go too well. I thought about working on… they were shooting Simon and Simon, and I just couldn’t bring myself to go down there and try to be a grunt on Simon and Simon. It didn’t thrill me enough, so I came back to the Midwest and ended up back in Madison, and that’s where the whole thing with WHA started.

KP: Did that seem like a logical place to ply some kind of trade?

MURPHY: Madison is a great town. It’s a very creative place. You look at one of those Chad Vader guys, who came from there, and it’s the kind of ode to the unconventional entertainment that seems to constantly come out of Madison.

KP: This would lead into the various people that would assemble a hotbed of comedy, in many regards.

MURPHY: It’s kind of like Austin, Texas – only with bad weather. All kinds of shit’s going on there at all times, and a lot of creative stuff, and a lot of very smart people, and they found a place to congregate where other people won’t hassle them and they could be weird in their own right and they don’t have to worry about being weird.

KP: Were you aware of the comedy scene at that point?

MURPHY: You mean, like, standup?

KP: Yeah…

MURPHY: I didn’t have much interest in standup. I didn’t want to do standup. I never had the inclination to do standup. I thought you were crazy to do standup. And I’ve met so few people who are good at it. Now, when I came to Minneapolis, then I started meeting people who were really good at it. And, as you said, made a difference because they were really entertaining. I mean, in a small town like Madison, you either get the huge guys who play the theaters downtown, or you get the local people. And they just weren’t that funny. But Minneapolis actually was a place where a lot of people gravitated to work. There were, at the time, several worthy comedy clubs. That’s where I ended up meeting all these clowns on Mystery Science Theater.

KP: What was the initial pitch for doing the mock news pieces for KTMA?

MURPHY: Well, Jim and I put our heads together and said, “What would be fun? What would we both enjoy doing?” The genesis of that is simply that we had both spent many years working in news, in television journalism. A lot of what we did at WHA was go out with these news crews and shoot field pieces for their news magazine shows. And that was the whole genesis. And there was one fellow, whose name I’m not going to mention because he’s a sweet man and I don’t know if he knows that we were making fun of him… That was sort of the personality basis for Bob Bagadonuts.

KP: So there actually is a real world counterpart.

MURPHY: (laughs) Well, he’s an amalgam, but there’s one in particular.

KP: You say that as a way to cover…

MURPHY: Well, I don’t want to hurt his feelings. I really like the guy and I don’t think he ever knew that we were making fun of him. So I’ll leave it at that.

KP: I’m sure there are some redeeming qualities to Bob…

MURPHY: Well yeah, of course. He was clueless but likeable. He was never an asshole, that’s the thing.

KP: He’s very much an SCTV-ish character.

MURPHY: Yes, I guess you’d say that. And that’s a compliment, I’d say.

KP: Was that automatically the go-to, “We’re creating this and I want to perform in it…”?

MURPHY: No, it was because we couldn’t afford to hire anybody. And Jim didn’t shoot. He was a sound guy when he was at WHA. So we’d figure it out. We learned the camera together. I’d done more video when I was there, so we sort of taught each other. And when I wasn’t shooting, he was.

KP: How did it feel to perform in those pieces?

MURPHY: It wasn’t the first time I’d done anything like that. It was just a lot of fun.

KP: And to know this was going out to an audience of 10s of 10s….

MURPHY: Well, that actually made it sort of comforting and safe.

KP: I’m assuming you have copies of all the stuff you did for KTMA…

MURPHY: Probably.

KP: Including that travel agency commercial?

MURPHY: Oh god. Again, they’re somewhere either in the closet or in the garage. I’m not nostalgic. I really hate nostalgia.

KP: Why?

MURPHY: I think it’s stupid and pointless. It’s worse than prognosticating, which is another thing I think is simply mental masturbation.

KP: Do you have a problem with nostalgia on your own work? Because you’re the one who just looked up Diver Dan on You Tube…

MURPHY: (laughs) I think that’s a unique form of nostalgia, because it was so dumb.

KP: Now you’re trying to parse this…

MURPHY: (laughs) Of course I am, are you kidding? I’ll parse and rationalize all day, bitch!

KP: (laughs) Do you think it’s just the difference about being precious about your own work as opposed to that of others?

MURPHY: Yeah, I think that’s definitely it. I’m not self-nostalgic. I don’t keep things. I have too many things. If I had everything I accumulated over my life, I’d have to buy another house.

KP: At what point for you did Joel and MST enter the picture?

MURPHY: Well, we were doing these Bob Bagadonuts pieces, and they were really fun, but they were really, really hard. I mean, single camera work and there were two of us doing everything. I mean everything.

KP: Was that the same method even for something as big as those New Year’s Eve pieces?

MURPHY: Well, you know, we got the whole station involved because that was live TV, and live TV’s like heroin. You can’t get enough of it once you try it. It’s so much fun.

KP: What was the worst disaster that happened to you on live TV?

MURPHY: I forgot what I was doing next while I was on camera. I had a little IFB and I said, “For the love of god, what am I doing next?” And then Jim told me. So it worked out really well. So we’d get the whole station involved and we’d get all our friends involved in the New Year’s Eve thing, so those were a lot easier and a lot more fun. But the grind of doing single camera comedy, it’s a lot of work. I think that was part of it, is that we wanted to branch out from there. Both Jim and I. And we started talking to the folks in the standup community, Joel being one of them, and he came in with the idea, and the rest is already written down somewhere else.

KP: What was the station’s view of these projects?

MURPHY: We got press, so it wasn’t bad. And we didn’t cost them a whole lot of money, so we were able to sneak things in with very meager budgets because we didn’t pay ourselves more than our salaries and we didn’t pay anybody outside very much at all.

KP: Was there any oversight that would come in and go, “What are you guys doing?”

MURPHY: Yeah. The station manager liked us. He was a sweet fellow, and he liked us both, and I think he liked the idea of… when we did the first Melon Drop, it was probably the first time the station got any press outside of just the local business columns, the business pages. It was in the entertainment pages and the guy loved the show, so he wrote something really nice about it. That’s currency for a TV station, I think.

KP: Did you see a shelf life for the way KTMA was being run?

MURPHY: God no. They had reruns and bad movies. They think it’s cool to get Andy of Mayberry. They thought that was really exciting.

KP: What were the promos like that you would produce for things like that?

MURPHY: Oh, it was dreadful. They called them donuts, because it’d be the same on the beginning and the end and then you put in something about the episode in between, and that was the hole that you’d fill. That stuff was a grind. The commercials were a grind. Doing the Ax-Man Surplus Store or the Blaine Flea Market, or the endless used cars and discount furniture places…

KP: How much leeway would you take with those pieces?

MURPHY: As much as we could, which still meant very little. Sometimes you just had to get them done. The salesmen, the ad force, decided that a cool thing to do was if you bought a certain amount of ad space, you’d get a free commercial. Yeah, so we were run ragged. (laughs) It was awful.

KP: How would you describe your average day?

MURPHY: Half in the field, half in the studio or the control room putting together ads. And then doing promos. They were long days. And then we’d have to wedge in any of the extracurricular stuff on top of that. Mystery Science Theater was pretty much extracurricular.

KP: How much were you paid for that?

MURPHY: I wasn’t paid any more than my salary – which was the most I’d ever made, but it still wasn’t a whole hell of a lot.

KP: So, basically, it was considered part of your job to do these things…

MURPHY: Yeah.

KP: It wasn’t an extra thing that you were doing…

MURPHY: Well, it was an extra thing, but it was a labor of love.

KP: It fell within the purview of your paid duties.

MURPHY: Right.

KP: If you chose to waste some more of your time, that was your choice…

MURPHY: Right. The station manager would come back and see the mess we’d made out of Styrofoam and junk and jingle his keys in his pockets and shake his head and chuckle and say, “You crazy guys, what are you up to now?” Then he’d walk away. I don’t think he ever saw the show. But the station was going bankrupt while all this was going on.

KP: Was it known that the days were numbered?

MURPHY: No. It was actually after we finished the show that we started hearing the rumblings, and that was when Jim and Joel shopped it up to New York and tried to get it going, because Jim was saying we’d better get this going because we’re not going to have jobs in another six months, and that’s what it turned out to be. Weeks after we started at Best Brains, the station went bankrupt.

KP: What was the genesis and formation of, “We’re actually going to incorporate as Best Brains…” like?

MURPHY: Well, that was Jim’s and Joel’s when it started, so I wasn’t privy to that. They just decided to make a company. It was Joel’s idea to begin with and Jim was the one who’d produced it, so they were essentially the owners of the thing and declared it as such. Joel had the New York agent, and he had the connections. He was already doing some stuff at the Comedy Channel. You remember, at this time, Joel had already had and come back from a pretty successful standup career on both coasts. He did Saturday Night Live and David Letterman and all those things you’re supposed to do when you’re in the pipeline to become the next cool standup. Then I think it sort of sickened him, so he quit and came back home and started small again, which was probably pretty smart for him.

KP: What other options were you exploring at that point, if things were not going to happen?

MURPHY: I don’t know.

KP: Were you aware that things might be coming to a close?

MURPHY: Yeah, absolutely. It seemed to be sort of natural. It seemed like we were going to get something going with Mystery Science Theater. It was just a matter of negotiation. And so, as the station started to look a little scary, we just pressed a little harder to get Mystery Science Theater up and running. And we did that. In a matter of about eight weeks, I got married, went to Central America for a honeymoon, came back, we built the sets, and had the first show delivered to HBO. So it was a pretty quick transition once it actually happened.

KP: So that was an intense period of time…

MURPHY: Oh yeah. Again, it was like summer camp.

KP: During the KTMA shoots, what would be your responsibilities?

MURPHY: I’d shoot it and sort of supervise the set and supervise the post. Along with Jim.

KP: What were the challenges of doing a single camera shoot like that?

MURPHY: Well, that was easy. You didn’t move the camera. Mystery Science Theater was always a very, very easy show to shoot and produce. The oddest technical thing was getting the silhouette going and getting the little doors going, and that was just a matter of video math, knowing which screen to key through which hole at which time. Something an editor can figure out in five minutes.

KP: And the films were directly out of the library, so there was no real selection process.

MURPHY: Well, there was. I mean, we’d screen them, and say, “This looks dumb.”

KP: But there was no writing process that went into it.

MURPHY: Only the sketches.

KP: How quickly would an episode be put together?

MURPHY: Well, let’s see, Trace and Josh and Joel would come in and we’d sit down, and at that time I wasn’t doing a lot of writing because I’d be doing other things during the day or setting up for the show. They’re write the sketches in the morning, and then they’d go to lunch and then come back and shoot the show in the afternoon. So it was done in one day. And, as a matter of fact, for a while there we were almost doing it in real time, because the editing process – we just didn’t have the time to do it, and at 5:00 we had to turn the cameras around to shoot Saturday Night at Ringside, the wrestling show.

KP: This was a very tiny studio space?

MURPHY: It was pretty small.

KP: How would you compare it to what you eventually had at Best Brains?

MURPHY: Best Brains was roughly twice as big, which was still pretty small.

KP: What was your initial impression of Trace and Josh, when they came in?

MURPHY: I thought they were incredibly funny, and the three of those guys – Josh, Trace, and Joel – meshed very well together. It was just great fun to see how they worked together. They were always a great team, the three of them.

KP: But you felt firmly ensconced as a behind the scenes person?

MURPHY: Well, I loved doing it, and I knew how to do it. None of those guys knew how to do it, so somebody had to do it. It was a contribution I could make at that time.

KP: Then the transition to Best Brain happened…

MURPHY: Mm-hmm.

KP: At what point did you start writing?

MURPHY: Right away. That was one of the things I really wanted to do and asked to be on that crew, so I started writing right away. I couldn’t write all the time, again because there were so many dang things going on, and I was editing the show, as well as shooting it.

KP: You were editing during the first season, as well?

MURPHY: Yeah. That changed quickly as it could…

KP: When was an editor brought in?

MURPHY: I really don’t remember. I think it was for the second season… Well, we brought in a camera guy, is what we did, and that was really great. We had to because I was now running a puppet, and I couldn’t do both. Now that I think of it, I think we did bring that guy in during the first season – but again, it’s a fog. A long time ago. That was 20 years ago.

KP: Does it feel like 20 years ago?

MURPHY: Some days. When the humidty’s up (laughs)

KP: It’s literally, what… Next year it will be 20 years since the first rumblings of putting it all together…

MURPHY: It’s true.

KP: I’m sure you’ll fire a gun into the air, or light off a firecracker to commemorate the moment… Maybe some tequila…

MURPHY: Blow up the puppet…

KP: Now, I’m curious about that… No one I’ve talked to has kept a puppet… Even though you’re not a sentimental person, I’d think you would have kept the puppet…

MURPHY: I’m telling you man, did you ever see Magic?

KP: Yes…

MURPHY: Okay, I don’t have to say anything more.

KP: Trace was pretty intense about not having some puppet in the room, with its eyes following him…

MURPHY: Well, exactly.

KP: Bill seemed to want one, though…

MURPHY: (laughs) Well, you know, Trace is Crow, pretty much. Joel sort of hobbled together this odd thing with fixed eyes, but Trace truly breathed life into that thing from the outset. I think it was probably a lot more intimate and creepy for Trace than it would have been for Bill. Not taking anything away from Bill.

KP: I think Trace likened it to being like him watching himself…

MURPHY: (laughs) Like a Magritte painting, then…

KP: Or just a velvet painting of Crow, where the eyes follow him. Obviously you get presented with all these fan-made Toms to hold at conventions…

MURPHY: I do, and I hold them and have my picture taken, and I’m always amazed at the ingenuity that people have when they put these things together.

KP: Did it surprise you when these things started appearing?

MURPHY: Everything about the show surprised me. Everything. Its success, its continued success, the cult following, the conventions, the fact that people would build puppets that not only looked like them but were exact down to every last part – a complete replica of the puppet…

KP: Am I correct in understanding that the puppets couldn’t be copyrighted?

MURPHY: Well, the characters can.

KP: Right, but as far as the design…

MURPHY: I’m a little light in my puppet law.

KP: Has anyone tried to give you a puppet at one of the conventions?

MURPHY: No, they want me to hold it and have my picture taken with it, and then they want it right back. And they want me to work the mouth, too, and do the voice.

KP: Do you?

MURPHY: If they pay me a thousand dollars. (laughs) I’d consider it…

KP: Done and done.

MURPHY: Wouldn’t you??

KP: For an envelope full of cash, I certainly would. I’d sound like shit, but I’d do it. You know what? For $100, I’d operate a Tom Servo…

MURPHY: (laughs) Why not?

KP: I could be the cut-rate Tom Servo. When you can’t afford the right guy, you get me.

MURPHY: Servo Whore!

KP: Exactly! I’m just fulfiliing a need Does that mean I have your blessing?

MURPHY: There you go…

KP: Now I’m the officially endorsed Servo Whore. Do you miss the process?

MURPHY: I miss the company. It was really a great group. Continues to be great people. And we came together and it was one of those things.

KP: Did it feel like a bubble?

MURPHY: Everybody’s sort of painfully aware that nothing lasts forever. But you never think of that while it’s going on, just when it’s over. And those change all the way through. But in general it was always a good group to work with, and there were always fun people. I don’t regret a minute of it.

KP: Was the decision quick and painless as far as a transition when Josh left, and you took up Tom Servo? Bill mentioned there was an audition process for Crow…

MURPHY: There was. There wasn’t one for Servo. I just went in and talked to Jim and Joel and said, “Hey, I think I could do this and I’d like to have a shot.” And they said, “Okay.” It was pretty easy.

KP: Was anything difficult about that transition?

MURPHY: Well, I was nervous about it. I was about to perform in this show that was starting to get some press attention, and I was replacing a character that had already been established.

KP: Did you feel the momentum building on the show?

MURPHY: It was really like the second or third season…I forget when it happened, but Tom Shales wrote a glowing review in The Washington Post, and then the press started getting wind of the whole thing, and that really sort of propelled it. The thing that always got me from the very beginning is when we put the phone number on the screen and then the next day the answering machine would be jammed.

KP: Well, everyone’s seen the introduction of that on the KTMA episodes that have been preserved… Except for the mythical first three episodes, which nobody has… you probably do.

MURPHY: I don’t.

KP: It’s in a box in the garage. There’s probably a ‘bot in the corner.

MURPHY: I know that I didn’t bring a puppet home. I did that intentionally. Jim actually asked me, “Would you like to keep a puppet?” And I said, “Thank you, no.”

KP: What was your rationale?

MURPHY: Like I said, Anthony Hopkins in Magic.

KP: What’s it going to do to you?

MURPHY: It’s just weird. I wouldn’t call a puppet a transitional object, but at that point it would seem like that.

KP: Did the character become a solid entity to you over the years, as far as that characterization you developed?

MURPHY: Meaning…

KP: Did you feel it develop into, “This has become a whole character to me…”?

MURPHY: I think so, definitely. And that I attribute to the writers as a whole.

KP: You being one of them.

MURPHY: Yes, definitely. I got to sort of put the actual performance spin on it, but it’s amazing when you have that many people give their perspective of what Servo’s personality is, or any of the characters – what you end up with is fuller. A little bit more schizophrenic, perhaps, but fuller.

KP: How would you describe the atmosphere at Best Brains?

MURPHY: High school with money, man. Once again. We’re playing Doom on our network when we’re supposed to be working. Microsoft had just come out with the text-to-voice thing where you could type something down and have a robot voice say it. So we’d type up these things and then broadcast it, some foul thing about somebody else in the building, over the PA system. We had odd celebrities coming through and taking tours.

KP: Who were the odd celebrities who would come through?

MURPHY: I shouldn’t say odd. I guess you’d call them particular types of celebrities. Like, Roger McGuinn was a big fan of the show. I just love that, because he was a hero of mine. He’s another guy I listened to.

KP: Did he take a tour?

MURPHY: He did take a tour. And I got to sit in and watch him record a song, which was pretty thrilling. He recorded a song with the Jay Hawks, and it was fucking great, it was wonderful.

KP: So, you’re saying there were perks.

MURPHY: Are you kidding? I got to piss next to Leonard Nimoy. Things like this. I got kissed on the mouth by Kim Cattrall. I also met Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut.

KP: Did you ever have an encounter with Vonnegut outside of the rather awkward one you described in the MST book?

MURPHY: No.

KP: Did you entertain any thought of walking over to his table?

MURPHY: No. I knew then that he might call security.

KP: Or he might say, “You passed the test. Sit down.”

MURPHY: I’ll never know, will I?

KP: Are there any people that just completely shocked you to find out that they enjoyed the show?

MURPHY: I was stunned and floored and flattered… Dan Fogelberg, remember him?

KP: Oh yeah…

MURPHY: He was a fan of the show. He was, like, a real fan. And he invited us all to go to a show, and none of us could make it. It was just so embarrassing.

KP: I’m sure you were all, “Oh, I’ve got a dentist appointment…”

MURPHY: I would have gone. He’d gone from his fun folk rocky phase to his sort of gassy music phase, so I think I wasn’t as impressed anymore. Nobody went, and I think he left a little bit dispirited.

KP: That he had somehow sunk to a level of celebirty below a cow town puppet show that didn’t have time for him…

MURPHY: (laughs) Yeah…

KP: I’m sure he harbors that horrible, horrible hurt to this day…

MURPHY: (laughs). The other big thrill was talking to Frank Zappa on the phone.

KP: How did that call come about?

MURPHY: We got a call from Wally Nicita at Warner Brothers. Wally went on to have, and continues to have, a terrific career as a producer and exec. She was putting this together for Frank. She was a friend of Franks. I think that was part of it, was he had a script. A very, very weird script. You’d expect nothing less. He was dying. He was not even a year away. And he knew he was dying, and he just wanted to have as much fun as he could in his last few months. Then Wally called us up and said, “Frank Zappa has this script and he has watched you guys and he thinks you’re out of your gourds, and he’d like you to consider developing it into a movie.” And I said, “Yeah, uh-huh, that’s neat, that sounds really cool. Who are you again?” She said, “Wally Nicita from Warner Brothers.” And I said, “Okay, tell you what. Why don’t you have Frank call us.” She sounded a little put out, and she said, “Well, I’ll see what I can do.” She hung up, and a half an hour later, over the PA I hear, “Kevin, Frank Zappa’s on the phone for you.”

KP: At what point did your stomach completely go in a knot?

MURPHY: Right then. Absolutely. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say, “I started listening to you… it was in summer in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and my brother brought home Freak Out and I’d never heard anything so fucking weird in my life.”

KP: Did you say that?

MURPHY: In so many words, but the first thing he said is, “You know, when I knew that you guys were cool was when I turned on the show, and there’s Joel, and he’s wearing a clown outfit and he’s roasting a puppet over an open fire.” And he said, “I knew you guys were too fucking weird for words.” So we had a little mutual compliment for each other.

KP: That’s an incredible compliment, coming from him.

MURPHY: It was! It truly blew me away. And he said, “I’ve got this script, and it’s political and weird and I’d like you guys to consider doing it.” Then he sent the script and he sent some cassettes of some music that he had in mind to do the score for the thing. The essential idea was wonderful. He wanted to completely do the soundtrack and the score first, and then lip synch the entire movie. It was going to sort of be The Queen of Outer Space – you know, the spider lives in a cave on the moon?

KP: Right…

MURPHY: Except told from the spider’s point of view.

KP: How much of the music had he demoed at that point?

MURPHY: Well, it was a lot of songs that he’d either released or was just doing on his beautiful synthesizer machine. At the time he was pretty sophisticated into sampling and sequencing before a lot of people were, so he had stacks and stacks and volumes with music and scores already written. And they were released because he had these contractual obligations. and albums came out like Sleep Dirt and Studio Tan. Then they had some of these orchestral things that he’d done, and they were just wonderful. Sort of splendid weird pageantry. This is what he had in mind. He had already written “Spider of Destiny,” which was one of the songs on there. The spider becomes a sex slave of the queen of outer space, and that’s part of the story. And it just got weirder and weirder and weirder from there. It would have been wonderful. He had actually talked to Terry Gilliam about doing it, too. That would have been quite a combination.

KP: So, already you’re in this rarified air…

MURPHY: Yeah.

KP: What happened after your phone call at BBI?

MURPHY: It was a weird time, and the timing couldn’t have been worse, because this is when Joel was sort of going through the period of determining to leave the show.

KP: Was it known that he was making that decision?

MURPHY: It was being discerned by him, and what that would mean. He had said he didn’t want to be the star of the show for very long, and he was true to his world.

KP: What was the return call back to Frank?

MURPHY: Well, I talked to Frank and asked him to give us a little time, here. We’d like to consider it, but it’s nothing that we can move on right away. And he said, “Well, think about it, because I’d love you to do it,” and that’s when he sent the script and the tapes. We talked to Wally again, and she said, “If you can do it, this is the time to go, because Frank is not a healthy man.” We really, sadly, had to sort of walk away from it because, at that time, we didn’t know where we were going, much less trying to develop a script for Frank Zappa.

KP: Would you say that’s a regret?

MURPHY: It would have been fun. I don’t regret it. There’s very few things I regret. But it would have been fun.

KP: At least you know that you were part of something that impressed one of the people that was quite a formative influence in your youth.

MURPHY: Absolutely, yeah. That was quite fun.

KP: Do you still have the tapes?

MURPHY: Of the music?

KP: Yeah.

MURPHY: Those I have. And I think I know where they are.

KP: When was the last time you listened to those?

MURPHY: (laughs) About 10 years ago.

KP: How do you treat going back and listening to music?

MURPHY: That’s different.

KP: So that’s not nostalgia to you.

MURPHY: I don’t know. Well, there is music that is nostalgic. For me, even in pop music, there are songs that are timeless. When I listen to certain Beatles songs, they don’t remind me of a period – I just like the music. I listen to Bob & Ray not because they remind me of the good old golden days of radio. I could give a shit about the good old golden days of radio. Bob and Ray are funny. I think there’s a difference there. I don’t sit there and say, “Boy, I remember when I was in my pajamas as a child sitting on the couch with a cup of NestlÃ©’s Quik…” I don’t give a shit about that. It’s funny and it’s enjoyable of its own right. There’s a certain sort of cheese factor built into that.

KP: How do you listen to music? Do you have an iPod?

MURPHY: I still have LPs. I still have a lot of CDs. I actually have a lot of cassette tapes, and I have converted most of them onto my iPod.

KP: I’m sure, because of the amount of traveling you do, its nice to have an iPod.

MURPHY: I love the iPod. For me, it’s like the coolest thing built in the last century. It’s like the mechanical pencil. It’s just one of these things that it seems like life is possibly at least more fun with it in existence.

KP: Are you a shuffle person or a playlist person?

MURPHY: I’m a playlist person. Although I shuffle my playlists. Does that make any sense?

KP: Yes. So you have set lists, but they could come up in random order.

MURPHY: Yes, I do.

KP: How do you normally program a list? By artists or moods?

MURPHY: Has to be sort of moods. I’ve got a mix for baking bread, I’ve got a mix for putting the fishing boat behind the truck and taking it to the lake.

KP: Is it one you will always play for that action?

MURPHY: No. Sometimes I’ll play the bread making list while driving the boat to the lake.

KP: Makes a great loaf.

MURPHY: (laughs)

KP: Are these eclectic, or would you say that they fit within the context of what you were intending for the playlist?

MURPHY: Well, playlists are generally eclectic, aren’t they? Because they reflect the personality of the person that put it together.

KP: Yes, but you can still have a theme that runs through a playlist.

MURPHY: I suppose. I guess you could say that. Let me take a look at this thing here. I have a bunch of different playlists that I take with me when I go to Mexico, and certain ones that I like to play at certain times of day. It’s that sort of weirdness. But right next to… let’s see. Right next to Marc Ribot is Thievery Corporation. Right next to Buckwheat Zydeco is Senor Coconut. Make sense out of that.

KP: There’s a sense to it.

MURPHY: I’ve got Cannonball Adderley and Sergio Mendes. That’s quite a combination.

KP: Now that’s a one-two punch.

MURPHY: They’re playing together.

KP: Are you a one iPod family?

MURPHY: This is going to sound so fucking pretentious I could die. I have two. I don’t have more than two, though. I have one that I keep at home, and one that I travel with and take into potentially harmful situations.

KP: That’s the expendable one…

MURPHY: Yes, it’s the one in the dirty, beat-up case. That’s the one that goes to Mexico with me.

KP: Are these video, or music iPods?

MURPHY: I got the big guns for the one I take and watch movies with, and travel with, and back up files.

KP: How different would writing the book have been if the video iPod was in existence at that time?

MURPHY: Not much. For me, the video iPod’s kind of like having a DVD player. For me, the book was all about the public exhibition of a motion picture. That’s sort of my definition of cinema, there.

KP: But as one of your fallback positions, is what I mean…

MURPHY: Yeah, it would have been an odd decision to make. If I could find a way to project the iPod, it would have been fine. I might have taken that. There was something more tactile and more cinematic at the time about bringing a projector with me.

KP: I remember how heartbreaking it was to read that the Italian portion of the book, when your fallback options broke down…

MURPHY: Yeah, it was a pretty low point.

KP: And you conveyed it effectively through the writing.

MURPHY: Thank you.

KP: I remember writing you an email at the time, that the book had rekindled my interest in going to the theaters.

MURPHY: I love that.

KP: Which I’m sorry to say has died…

MURPHY: (laughs) I guess I’d better get back out there.

KP: All we have are the multiplexes in this area. Although I’ve always thought that if someone were to open a single screen theater in this area with classic programming, it would take off. Sadly, it’s not cheap to open a theater.

MURPHY: Nope.

KP: Maybe that would be something to tackle – what people can do in their home towns to start that sort of thing…

MURPHY: It certainly is possible. There are a lot of small towns around that have defunct theaters that have either become community centers or just sitting empty. There’s one not far from here where my partner Janes’s family is from. The Cameo theater. It used to be one, they split it into three, and now it’s just sitting empty.

KP: They did that here. They closed two of the old style multiplexes, the three screen theaters, to open a 16-plex. But the theaters are sitting empty.

MURPHY: Right.

KP: You’re not going to get a projector back in there cheap. But I guess if there were cheap digital presentations…

MURPHY: That’s true, but the bottom line is you’ve got to love it. You’ve got to really, really love it because it’s… you turn a hobby into a career and suddenly you realize you didn’t really much like your hobby, and that can be a nightmare.

KP: Has anyone presented that to you?

MURPHY: Actually, yeah. One of my brothers-in-law said, “Why don’t you think about getting a loan and opening this theater down in Owatonna?”

KP: What was your initial gut reaction to that?

MURPHY: I think it’s an excellent idea. I don’t know if I’m the guy to do it. I’m not a businessman. It would take a businessman, even if it is a film lover or a lover of independent film, or whatever. I think it would take a businessman to make it run. It’s just the way this country works.

KP: Spending that year traveling the world and going to theaters, what was the biggest revelation you had about the theater experience?

MURPHY: I think it’s still very cool. The movie depends on the theater and the theater depends on the movie, and the experience depends on both being something good or interesting. And it’s not always going to be that way. Sometimes you simply just go into the movies. And I still know a lot of people who just like to go out quote-unquote “to the movies” because it’s a past time. My own brother Brian and his wife go out to the movies about once a week. They just enjoy it. It’s their way of getting away and doing something. And he’s a lot less picky. I’m a snob, I’m a big-ass snob, and he’s a lot less picky about the movies he watches because he likes going to the movies instead of sitting at home and watching a movie.

KP: What are movies that you absolutely, positively, of your own accord will not go near?

MURPHY: Oh, hang on, what’s opening this week? (laughs)

KP: Last week was Shrek 3.

MURPHY: Yeah, I haven’t gone. It’s funny – I haven’t had any interest in seeing that or any of the big films.

KP: You were incredibly critical of the first Harry Potter film and Columbus’s treatment of that. How do you view the films after they shuffled off Columbus and brought actual filmmakers in?

MURPHY: I love Cuaron. I’ve always liked Cuaron. I like what he does with movies. That one I enjoy, I think, more than any of the others. I think it’s because of Cuaron.

KP: Did that set the reset button on your view of the franchise?

MURPHY: No. On that particular film, I’d say. I tried to get involved in the Harry Potter books, but they’re not written for me. They don’t engage me like they do other people, and that’s fine. I appreciate the craft and the whole charming English boarding school world, but I’d rather read Dickens, or Neal Stephenson, for god’s sake.

KP: Was there any franchise that….

MURPHY: No. (laughs) I can’t think of one. If we had The Thin Man, it would be a whole different thing. But we don’t have The Thin Man – we get Ocean’s 11.

KP: I’m sure we’ll have some kind of remake of The Thin Man.

MURPHY: I’m sure we will, but it won’t be The Thin Man. When I say that, I mean here was a series that had some fun to it, some charm, and it seemed like they weren’t just making them to make them. Maybe that’s just my own cynical attitude, but there are TV series that end up being more interesting.

KP: You enjoyed the first Lord of the Rings film…

MURPHY: Oh, I loved them all!

KP: That was a franchise.

MURPHY: No it wasn’t a franchise, it was a series of three films.

KP: In Hollywood, that’s called a franchise…

MURPHY: I think of a franchise as something that’s open ended. They could make Spider-Man 12. That’s a franchise. They could make Ocean’s 25. The notion of that becoming a franchise is absurd. I don’t know if you’d call it a closed world, but it’s a work in and of itself, The Lord of the Rings. Anything else would be derivative, I suppose.

KP: What is it like doing a RiffTrax with Mike on a film that you actually enjoyed?

MURPHY: It’s a blast. It’s just a blast. It’s easier. I said Mystery Science Theater was easy – it was easy, and it was also very difficult in some ways, because it was making television, and television’s always complicated. But RiffTrax is incredibly easy. The writing is always the hardest part. And long movies are difficult to write. Like, the Star Wars movies nearly killed us both. When Bill joins us, it’s always a lot easier. When three of us are working on it, it’s much easier. But the writing is the hardest part of it all, and trying to make these things fun for an audience is the hardest part. But once you go into the studio, it’s just a blast.

KP: Is it a different feeling knowing it’s not characters critiquing these films, it’s Kevin Murphy saying these things?

MURPHY: I suppose there’s a certain liability in there, because there’s a safety with hiding behind a character. Because you truly can hide behind it. You’ve got a puppet in your hand – not only are you portraying a character, you’re portraying a puppet character. So nobody even sees you.

KP: Even Mike was portraying a puppet character…

MURPHY: In a way, I suppose he was. But then when you consider the silhouette, then you remove it at another level.

KP: So you have these layers of distance that you can hide behind…

MURPHY: Yeah. There are several sets of filters between you and what’s going on. I think that’s at the heart of the success of Mystery Science Theater, is that we had these wonderful characters, and people gave them license to make fun of the movies. So yeah, we’re setting ourselves up to be knocked down hard. I think for me, what we found over the course of doing Mystery Science Theater is that the characters and the idea were what really got it going. And I think what kept it going was the fact that these great characters were having so much fun with the films, so in turn the audience was too. The writing is a huge part of what kept that show going for as long as it did. Otherwise it might have been a passing novelty, and once the novelty wore off, what is there for it besides good writing?

KP: Right. Which you’ve seen with the many imitators that have tried to snatch away that idea over the years.

MURPHY: Yeah, I suppose, but I do enjoy the Sklar Brothers, I’ve got to say. They do the show on ESPN…

KP: Oh yes, Cheap Seats…

MURPHY: Yes. I enjoy the way that they’re the most idiosyncratic pair of comics I’ve ever seen. And when you see them on stage… (laughs)

KP: But obviously they know what their influences are, since you guys did the appearance with them.

MURPHY: Yeah.

KP: Which must have been odd, after that many years, to go back into it.

MURPHY: It was fun.

KP: Did it feel weird to know that you were Tom Servo again?

MURPHY: When we did the thing on Cheap Seats?

KP: Yeah.

MURPHY: Yes, that was a little weird. But we didn’t actually have to pick up the puppets. I think Jim just borrowed silhouettes from old projects.

KP: Yeah, I noticed things weren’t in sync…

MURPHY: Yeah. Just had to do the voice.

KP: But it shows that people don’t pay attention unless you actually see the difference that you guys did bring to the characters, even in the silhouette sequence.

MURPHY: Yeah. The characters were, like I said… it separates you just from being a smart ass watching a movie. The only way that I think we can do RiffTrax now is the fact that we have this history of having done it on Mystery Science Theater.

KP: It’s clear that the camaraderie is still there.

MURPHY: Yeah. That’s what makes it fun, is that we always had fun playing off each other and working off each other, so it works out well. We’ve got a good sort of jazz shorthand.

KP: It also sounds like it’s pretty open ended, and open to people coming in. Mike was going to ask Trace about doing one.

MURPHY: That would be fun…

KP: Some of the rough cuts of MST3K have leaked out – particularly of the theater segments – so it has your banter in between the breaks during the recording…

MURPHY: Where the hell do you find this, You Tube?

KP: They might be on You Tube. Some of the bit torrent sites have the full rough cuts.

MURPHY: Oh wow.

KP: Apparently, when they had a garage sale when BBI closed, they sold a box of what they thought were blank video tapes, but they were the rough cuts. I think there’s two Joel episodes, the complete theater rough cuts. There’s three from season 10 – including the final episode, which has a lot of nice quips about how you feel about Sci-Fi.

MURPHY: That stuff doesn’t belong out there!

KP: It’s not their fault that they bought a box of tapes…

MURPHY: (laughs) No it ain’t.

KP: And I guess there’s an entire tape of host segment rehearsals, including 35 minutes of season one host segment rehearsals, which are unique…

MURPHY: (laughs) Yeah, I’ll bet they are!

KP: Full of a lot of Josh f-bombs.

MURPHY: Oh yeah, he liked to toss the effenheimer around the room.

KP: But as far as the camaraderie goes, there’s one segment where there’s an extended break halfway through the film, where you three start riffing on “Owner of a Lonely Heart”…

MURPHY: (laughs) Which became a sketch.

KP: Which became a sketch, but you can see the entire development process.

MURPHY: I may be bold, but I think you’ll find that we were never pissing at each other.

KP: No, which was consistent through all of it. The Joel segment recordings you can see you guys were building on each other in an improv fashion.

MURPHY: We really liked working with each other. I think we were better for it and I think that we were always able to jam something out and work well together.

KP: The Coiley stuff is in there, too…

MURPHY: (laughs)

KP: With you guys coming up with euphemisms for… well… for a trip to the bathroom…

MURPHY: Yes, indeed.

KP: And Mike stunning you both with “blowing mud.”

MURPHY: First time I’ve heard that. “Pushing a crayon” and “blowing mud,” I think, both came out of Mike.

KP: At which point you can hear this awed silence, but you can also hear this sort of quiet shift as you try to move away from him.

MURPHY: (laughs) Oh my.

KP: But you can see the camaraderie that’s carried through to RiffTrax. At what point did Mike approach you about doing a RiffTrax?

MURPHY: Almost immediately after he got it up and going, he said one of the reasons he was doing it was he wanted to be able to have his old pals come and join him for these things. And I offered my services right away. It’s just come up in various ways, several times. Mike, not long after the death knell sounded for Mystery Science Theater, was talking about issuing CDs which would go along with a movie, but the CD publishing industry is also pretty rugged. And MP3 comes along and suddenly everything gets a lot easier.

KP: It was a go-to question for the past 20 years when anybody would interview you, is first, “What was the worst movie you guys have done…”, and second, “Why don’t you do Star Trek V?”…

MURPHY: Yeah. And now that’s not a problem anymore. I think that’s one of the great, fun features of it, is that we can do anything. It’s a little odd for some people, because there’s not an actual product that you can hold in your hand. You’d have to be more than mildly technologically impaired not to be able to do RiffTrax. It’s pretty damn easy, and it works pretty damn well.

KP: Is there any film that’s untouchable for you?

MURPHY: There’s films that, out of discretion, we won’t do. The Passion of the Christ is not high on the list.

KP: Not so much content wise, but films that you hold dear enough that you would pass should it ever come up?

MURPHY: I’m sure there are. I haven’t thought of them because I just haven’t considered doing them – because one of the things we’re doing now is taking more current things and things we always wanted to do, first. And there are so many of them.

KP: So where’s Corky Romano?

MURPHY: See, here’s the problem with comedies. It’s difficult to make a comedy out of a comedy, especially when it’s a failed comedy.

KP: Which I believe is why you guys thought of Catalina Caper as one of the hardest ones you’ve ever done.

MURPHY: It was hard because it was supposed to be a comedy, and comedies are…it doesn’t make sense. There’s something about making a joke on a joke that just doesn’t work. Because bad jokes hurt. You can shoot a puppy and it doesn’t hurt as much as a bad joke.

KP: If you were to pick one of the films that you suffered through multiple times… would you say Serendipity would be an acceptable choice?

MURPHY: Definitely. I would tear that to pieces. As a comedy? I don’t know if it was a comedy. It was a romance. It was a chick film. We could have fun with that. It was just dumb.

KP: One thing about A Year At The Movies is that you watch them again and again and again…

MURPHY: Well, I saw Forrest Gump again. That may be the movie that I hate the most on the whole planet, ever.

KP: Just because of how manipulative it is?

MURPHY: Yeah. So cravenly manipulative. It’s a cowardly film in every way. It’s simply out there to milk tears out of the audience like a cow.

KP: So Forrest Gump is a prime candidate, is what you’re saying…

MURPHY: Oh yeah, I think so.

KP: In everything I’ve seen for Film Crew, it seems like the closest thing to being MST as you could get.

MURPHY: I guess it is, because it’s the three of us. There’s no puppets involved, that’s the difference.

KP: But there are framing sequences.

MURPHY: There are. Well, we wanted to have some sort of frame around it.

KP: And you’re playing, essentially, fictionalized versions of yourselves.

MURPHY: I guess you could say that, yes. I would never compare us to the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges, but I think that’s probably the sort of thing that it’s generated from. It’s just a way for us to stage ourselves and say, “Here we are, here’s how we’re doing it, and here’s why.”

KP: What was the desire to go back and do a thing where you’re on camera?

MURPHY: I never had the desire to do something on camera. It was just we needed to have it. (laughs) When I look at my big, ugly, middle-aged gob on camera, I sort of cringe a little bit, so I have to act as loony as possible.

KP: So you’d be fine if it was covered with, say, a monkey mask…

MURPHY: Well, I’m always less self-conscious when properly masked or bepuppeted.

KP: Everyone I talked to, who talked about the Bobo phase, talked about how uninhibited you were as a performer during that period, in that make-up…

MURPHY: (laughs) Even the Greeks knew they could always be a little bit freer behind the mask.

KP: So that’s an assessment that you wholly agree with?

MURPHY: Oh, absolutely.

KP: Seems like there was nothing that you wouldn’t do as Bobo.

MURPHY: Well, I’ve never actually flung my own crap, if that’s what you mean.

KP: At least not on camera.

MURPHY: Not even off camera.

KP: Mike said different.

MURPHY: No crap, no. I’m not saying that I didn’t fling other people’s crap, but we’ll leave it at that. The fun of the Film Crew is, I think – first of all, it’s a self-contained DVD. And I think people who like Mystery Science Theater for the choices of movies we made will like the Film Crew for that same reason. We combed the world and found the four most perfectly suited films… and let me tell you, it’s difficult to do it. The PD world is difficult to get through.

KP: How did you miss these films during the MST days?

MURPHY: Some of them I think we missed just because there were so many out there. I know we looked at the Peter Graves movie. I’m forgetting the name of it now. I’ll have to look it up on our website. Killers from Space. I know we looked at Killers from Space when we were doing Mystery Science Theater, and for some reason or another we couldn’t get it. So that’s one that we ended up doing. But The Wild Women of Wongo, I don’t think I’d ever seen before, and I sure as hell had not seen Hollywood After Dark. And that’s the one, boy, I don’t know why – it’s in its own way so much cheesy Hollywood. I mean, it actually captured something of cheesy Hollywood in a way it didn’t intend to.

KP: So, in some ways, it’s a very beautiful document of a bygone era.

MURPHY: (laughs) Well, in the way that I guess if you didn’t have your glasses on you could say that toilet paper is a beautiful document.

KP: It certainly is a moment in time, is what you’re saying.

MURPHY: Well, the Rue MacClanahan stripping thing, and the extended scenes of stripping in it, and they just go on…

KP: How does Rue compare to Nichelle Nichols?

MURPHY: (laughs) Nichelle looks graceful compared to Rue. And Rue has the body of a woman from the 50s. Sort of like a Dodge Dart.

KP: So she looks like your aunt getting changed.

MURPHY: Yeah, that’s the thing. Nichelle kind of looked like your grandma. She was too old for that, by the way. Poor woman, god bless her. Great legs – way too old for it. The thing I love about Hollywood After Dark is it had that lurid girlie magazine quality to it, in that you never actually see any of the naughty bits. Just there are pasties, for those who are looking forward to it. Yes, there are feathered pasties.

KP: You’re really building this up for me

MURPHY: I know! (laughs) It could be a big let down, but I don’t think so.

KP: How different is the writing process now that it’s obviously a much smaller group putting these together?

MURPHY: We used to sit and write as a group. And more recently we’ve been writing chunks of the movie separately.

KP: Obviously location plays a role.

MURPHY: That’s the main reason why it became out of necessity. But the thing about having written together for as long as we have – Bill, Mike and I – is that we kind of know each other’s beats and we can at least anticipate each other’s sort of perspective. I don’t try to write like Bill or Mike, nor do they try to write like me. But it ends up… I would dare people to figure out which part I wrote or which part Bill wrote or which part Mike wrote.

KP: If it has a fart joke, it was Bill.

MURPHY: I’m big on the fart jokes. They always accuse me of being the one who goes over the line. Mr. Blow Mud accuses me of going over the line.

KP: When I talked to Mike a few months back he mentioned if there’s anybody who needs to be pulled back, it’s you…

MURPHY: (laughs) Well, part of it is I do that because it seems to horrify Mike so much. There’s not a lot that can horrify Mike, but I can horrify Mike.

KP: Which is odd, considering he’s the king of scat.

MURPHY: (laughs) Well, poop is one thing, but when you start getting into, I guess, the sort of territory I tread in some times, it…

KP: He also mentioned he tends to avoid things of a political nature…

MURPHY: Yeah. He stays out of the political spectrum, and that’s just fine. I think I only go in there when it’s an obvious hand grenade I can drop into the room. Otherwise it’s not worth it, because nobody wants to hear my politics. I’m not a political comic. I can make fun of anybody on any side of the aisle. I can probably whip up a quick FranÃ§ois Mitterrand joke if I needed to.

KP: That’s a challenge.

MURPHY: It is a challenge, and I’m not going to do it. I will, but send me a thousand dollars first.

KP: Now I’m torn. Do I want to hear you play with a puppet…

MURPHY: Or do a joke on FranÃ§ois Mitterrand.

KP: There must be some thought of an MST reunion, approaching the anniversary…

MURPHY: Not in my mind.

KP: At all?

MURPHY: I don’t see how it would happen.

KP: Some convention, somewhere, must have tried to engineer it.

MURPHY: Not that I have heard, myself.

KP: If you were presented with someone saying, “We’d like to do an MST celebration and get all you guys together to do an event…”

MURPHY: I’d probably have to up my price to a million dollars.

KP: That’s a hell of a jump.

MURPHY: I’d always consider it – again, because of the people involved, whom I’ve had great fun working with over the years.

KP: But obviously, that is a looming specter with the anniversary coming up, that somebody’s going to try to do something, somewhere.

MURPHY: I would need to be invited. I certainly wouldn’t instigate.

KP: But you would not be adverse to that occurring.

MURPHY: Certainly not. I couldn’t stop it from occurring, and I wouldn’t have any reason to stop it from occurring. But this falls, for me, into the realm of nostalgia.

KP: And also the deadly realm of personal nostalgia.

MURPHY: Yeah, that’s the thing. You saw The Return to Gilligan’s Island. I mean, what the fuck? (laughs) It was horrible.

KP: Well, I can’t see you guys welcoming the Harlem Globetrotters…

MURPHY: Number one, we’re older….

KP: Yeah, but you were puppets…

MURPHY: That’s true. The puppets didn’t age. But it does. Nostalgia… even the word sounds like a disease. Suffice it to say, I would be surprised if it happened, let’s put it that way.

KP: But now it’s going to be in print.

MURPHY: I’ll have to eat my words.

KP: Are you still doing pieces for NPR?

MURPHY: I’m not. The three of us, when we first formed the Film Crew, we intended to do a radio show for NPR. We did the pilot, and we had great fun doing it, but it never made it to series. That sort of ended the… we were working on other things, and it seemed like the time for us to move away from each other there.

KP: So who controls the pilot?

MURPHY: Probably NPR, I would imagine. They own the thing. I don’t know. I have to talk to somebody about that.

KP: It might be a fun thing to throw up on the website.

MURPHY: Yeah, you never know. We actually had it for a while, or we had a segment on the Film Crew website, for a while.

KP: If they’re not doing anything with it, you might as well.

MURPHY: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s still up there.

KP: What would you say, then, is your primary focus at this point?

MURPHY: I’m also trying to get another book going, maybe two. Particularly with the subject matter, I’m having a devil of a time finding someone to rep the book, just because most of the agents I have met… the working title of the book is Why Hollywood Sucks.

KP: That’s not incendiary at all.

MURPHY: (laughs) No. It’s a bit of a petition. I have actually come up with 95 theses, in the tradition of Martin Luther, as to why Hollywood sucks, and when the book is sold and released, I plan on nailing a copy of it to the front door of the Chinese Theater.

KP: Could you name one or two of the theses that you are developing?

MURPHY: Oh, absolutely. The first one, not surprisingly, is Thomas Edison. Because I have to go through history. Thomas Edison is one of the large reasons why Hollywood sucks to this day, because he sort of set the trend for the crass, completely commercially driven product that we have today. And trying to milk as much out of the audience as possible, and give them as little as they absolutely need. I believe I discovered the first bad movie, too, which is Thomas Edison’s own electrocution of an elephant.

KP: I believe that was the precedent for the summer blockbuster.

MURPHY: Exactly. (laughs) You’ve got it.

KP: His animal snuff film, which I believe was meant as a swipe at Tesla.

MURPHY: Well, it was a swipe at Westinghouse, really.

KP: But was really an attempt to destroy Tesla’s theories on the safest means of delivering electical current…

MURPHY: As I read it, at that time he was really more pissed off at Westinghouse than he was Tesla, and he came to exact his personal vendetta and character assassination of Tesla along the line.

KP: Because it’s easier to attack a person than an entity, anyway.

MURPHY: Well, it’s kind of difficult when you’ve invested everything in a technology that’s not going to work.

KP: That’s quite deadly, actually.

MURPHY: That’s right.

KP: It’s a fascinating film on so many horrible levels.

MURPHY: Yes it is. And it’s a bad film.

KP: I’ll bet it’s on You Tube.

MURPHY: Of course it is.

KP: What is the resistance you’ve been hitting? What have they told you when you approached them with the book?

MURPHY: I get the same kind of cold reception I think anybody who’s baldly indicting the system that makes so many people so much money would fall upon. I think if I sold it to a small press I could probably get the thing going, but I also have to make a living at the same time, so I don’t know how interested I am in doing that. So, like a lot of books, it just may take some time to find the audience. The thing is I’m trying to keep it as current as possible, so I keep writing new chapters and updating old ones. It’s folly to point out M. Night Shyamalan as one of the reasons why Hollywood sucks now because everybody knows it and it’s no surprise.

KP: Right. So how complete is the book at this point?

MURPHY: I’ve actually written about 135 reasons, and I had to pare it down to 95. It’s pretty complete.

KP: So, other than revisions…

MURPHY: Revisions and updates is what I’d have to continue to do.

KP: But it’s pretty much ready to go.

MURPHY: It’s close. I did the cowardly thing and lumped some things together. Took five directors who you should not watch, and five actors who oughtn’t sing, and five singers who oughtn’t act…

KP: What’s one of the directors on your list?

MURPHY: Oh, let’s see, what would I have here… Pitof. You know Pitof?

KP: Oh yes.

MURPHY: And Mick G, of course. Dennis Dugan. This was a hard list to pare down.

KP: I really hope Brett Ratner’s on that list.

MURPHY: Brett is not. I chose Tom Shadyac, instead. The guy who did Patch Adams.

KP: In a fight, I’d have to go with Ratner. Just as far as pure, unadulterated crassness of filmmaking.

MURPHY: Well, Michael Bay still breaks the mold, as far as I’m concerned. Have you visited his website, “Shoot for the Edit”?

KP: Oh yes. And his musings on the audience are always…

MURPHY: (laughs)

KP: … fascinating.

MURPHY: Yeah.

KP: I’d still vote for Ratner, though.

MURPHY: And there are some easy targets that I threw out, like Uwe Boll. That’s just…

KP: Yeah, but what other filmmaker would challenge his critics to a fistfight?

MURPHY: That’s true. I think he did that out of desperation, because he lost his moneymaking machine. The German public funding moneymaking machine went away.

KP: That made it so he could crank out dozens of films a year.

MURPHY: Yeah. But since that loophole went away, he doesn’t have the investors he used to have. That’s one of the problems. Breasts is one of the reasons I have, too. It’s reason #34 right now.

KP: Yes, but what point are you dating the creation of breasts to?

MURPHY: I don’t think that breasts are a bad thing, but they’re a reason why Hollywood sucks.

KP: As far as the cinematic treatment of breasts?

MURPHY: Well, I invite you to imagine a world without breast obsession. Think about what the culture would be like if we looked at women’s bodies differently than we do right now. Jessica Simpson would have to get a job. Meryl Streep could probably get $50 million a picture.

KP: You saw the reality shows. We don’t want people like Paris Hilton in the workplace.

MURPHY: Oh, God is one of the reasons, of course, why Hollywood sucks.

KP: Go on, I’ve gotta hear this…

MURPHY: Well, because Hollywood’s scared to death of God. Hollywood doesn’t know how to treat God. It sort of goes hand-in-hand with sex, which sounds like an odd combination, but Hollywood’s also scared to death of sex. They don’t mind lurid things, but they really can’t deal directly with sex. And God, it’s almost impossible for Hollywood to do any sort of movie that directly reflects divine experience. What do we get? The Passion of the Christ, which… you know, you can take it for what it is. The DaVinci Code – is this as close as we get to God? Or Constantine? Those are odd examples. God reflected in an action film doesn’t work for me. For me, the best film about God – probably in the last 10 or 12 years – is probably Dogma. It does have action sequences, too, a couple of juicy ones.

KP: So you’re a fan of Dogma…

MURPHY: Oh, I love Dogma. It’s my favorite Kevin Smith film.

KP: I’ll have to tell Kevin.

MURPHY: Oh, that’s right, this is on View Askew, right?

KP: Yes, this is his entertainment site…

MURPHY: I’m not just pimpin’ here. That and Jay’s depiction of Jamie Gumm in the last Clerks movie. That’s wonderful. That’s the best two scenes in the movie.

KP: I’m sure Kevin will be happy to hear that. I don’t know how he’s going to feel about the Daredevil RiffTrax…

MURPHY: (laughs) Oh, it’s all in good fun, for crying out loud. Good natured ribbing.

KP: Oh, of course it is…

MURPHY: Every once in a while you’ve got to throw a snowball.

KP: I think Jersey Girl still hurts. That was a film that was close to his heart.

MURPHY: I’m sure it was. You could tell it was heartfelt.

KP: I admit, I did like your riff on Daredevil. That was one of my favorite RiffTrax.

MURPHY: Actually, we performed that live in San Francisco.

KP: Oh, that was part of the Sketch Fest performance…

MURPHY: Yes it was.

KP: So, how do you feel about performing live like that?

MURPHY: It’s a blast.

KP: You did it what, three times in the past, with MST?

MURPHY: Yeah.

KP: What is the setup when you guys are performing live doing the RiffTrax? Are you still facing the screen?

MURPHY: We’ve done it in two venues in two different ways. We’ve done it at the Rafael Film Center, in San Rafael. They’ve got a gorgeous theater out there. We sit looking at a monitor with the screen to our backs and with our faces to the audience. And that was fun to do. The house is dark so we don’t really see the audience, so it’s just like any sort of stage show. When we went to Cobb’s, which is also part of the sketch fest… they do a lot… almost like one of the regular houses for the sketch fest. We were sort of facing the screen. The screen was off to one side of the stage and we were on the other, so sort of facing the audience, but enough so we could see the screen. And we have music stands and our little lights there, so we looked like we’re the three cellists in a chamber ensemble. And we’d perform the film. We’d have a little give and take, a little improvisation. We have to listen to the audience. We have to drop a few things sometimes when the audience is laughing too hard, which is a good thing, when the audience is laughing too hard. But different nights, different performances, different things strike the audience as funny. And that part, you have to be a lot more on your toes than when you’re doing it in a recording studio. But it’s great fun.

KP: Do you feel more comfortable doing it now than you did the first time you did it?

MURPHY: Oh god, the first time, we thought the audience might turn on us, that they all might start throwing comments at the screen, and we’d lose control. But what we learned is – like anybody who’s done standup – if you don’t take control, then you lose control. We performed our material and had fun, and just made the audience have fun.

KP: Was there any point where things might have gotten a bit dicey or someone was in the theater who just thought it was all participatory and, “I’m just going to add a little something…”

MURPHY: Never. From the time we got going… the first time we did Mystery Science Theater live we did a movie called World Without End. Which I always wanted to be a Mystery Science Theater movie, but it never worked out. The first joke, there’s a big nuclear explosion. You see the mushroom cloud. And Crow says, “Ah, Dan Quayle’s first day as president.” And that’s all it took, and then the audience was with us the rest of the time and it was a love fest.

KP: That’s a clip that’s on the Scrapbook tape, I believe.

MURPHY: Ah…

KP: I believe it’s now discontinued, since you guys never got any rights to put all that stuff out.

MURPHY: Probably not.

KP: Does the footage still exist for the sequences cut from This Island Earth, from the MST motion picture?

MURPHY: I’m sure it does. I don’t know if that’s on any of the outtakes.

KP: Because you guys did the entire film, didn’t you? You wrote for the entirety of This Island Earth…

MURPHY: You mean did we write the entire script?

KP: Meaning the film, as it runs, was cut by what, about 30 minutes?

MURPHY: Oh yeah, it was chopped to hell. Actually, we did a trimmed version when we first started, because we knew that there were a few things that… in order to keep the thing to feature length, we wanted to chop it down – but then the studio insisted as we went along that we keep chopping and chopping and chopping, until it became shorter than a regular episode of Mystery Science Theater, which I thought was stupid.

KP: So, then, obviously if someone at the studio wanted to do a special edition, theoretically they could do an extended version… That footage still exists…

MURPHY: Theoretically they could, but I think if they wanted to they might have done it already.

KP: I don’t know. Have you seen how much that DVD goes for?

MURPHY: No.

KP: Two or three hundred dollars on eBay, for that original DVD release.

MURPHY: God almighty. I had one for a while. I think I gave it to Jeff Stonehouse, our photographer, because he didn’t have one.

KP: And he put it up on eBay!

MURPHY: (laughs) No, he’s very proud of the work he did, and I’m very proud of the work he did on that. That’s one of the things we gained along the way, was an incredible set of production people – craft people like Jeff and Brad Keeley, our editor… Tom Naunas, a sound man and musician who helped us out along the way all the time… and our staff photographer, Mickey Keinitz. These were really, really talented guys and they just loved to hang out with us, so we were really quite fortunate to have them around.

KP: The film is still spectacular…

MURPHY: Yeah, it’s pretty, isn’t it?

KP: It’s across the board a very nice looking film.

MURPHY: Yeah, thanks.

KP: You’re not the first to praise Jeff.

MURPHY: In his own way, he elevated us at the same time and made us look better. Everybody talked about bringing Mystery Science Theater to quote-unquote “the next level” from our sort of very cheesy beginnings, but he did it in a way, visually, that was very subtle, and that we didn’t ever get too polished. It always still had the handmade quality, and almost all the effects we’d do were in the camera. He’d use all the different photographic tricks, and we’d very rarely do anything in post, except for green screen effects every now and again. Still, when we’d shoot a spaceship, we’d bring out the old star background – a cloth with little flecks of foil on it. And we had a star wall, too.

KP: Just what was accomplished through the years with just that single camera is impressive…

MURPHY: (laughs) It’s true!

KP: It certainly gives a definition to the word innovation.

MURPHY: Yeah. He brought a jib. We always wanted to be able to do some sort of fluid moving crane-like camera shots, and he had this jib that sat on a tripod, and it was just revelatory.

KP: Was that ever proposed? How adamant was Joel about not having things like that early on?

MURPHY: I think we just sort of broadened it and grew up, because it started out there was a rigid set of rules that were sort of the rules of the show, and that was just fine because it was fun to operate within those limitations. And Cambot was actually supposed to be running the camera, and that was Cambot, and Cambot couldn’t move very much. The single camera thing was a very strong intention, and we kept pretty faithful to that. We’d play with our own conventions. After a while we found it enjoyable to break our own rules, and I think that’s just sort of our deviant nature.

KP: Right. But it was never something where there were arguments about it or…

MURPHY: I don’t think so.

KP: Because you were behind the camera during the first season.

MURPHY: Yeah. That’s one of the reasons why I’m happy the camera didn’t have to move.

KP: You mean it’s somewhat easy to get that director credit?

MURPHY: Oh yeah.

KP: You were the main director throughout the years. What was it like directing them as actors?

MURPHY: Very little was needed. Just maybe sometimes some suggestions on tone, but I think we were all… as we took turns being directors, were pretty open minded about what would happen. And a lot of it was worked out before we even got into rehearsal by reading through the scripts and understanding what they meant. One would immediately know what the character was supposed to do and how they were supposed to do it. And since it was a series, occasionally we’d have to, when we had a guest character or something, I’d sort of have to direct somebody into what I thought that should be. We’d have earnest discussions, but I don’t think there was ever a fight on set that I can remember. Nobody ever walked off.

KP: Budget or time-wise, was there ever a drop dead point as far as takes?

MURPHY: Oh absolutely. Well, just fatigue wise. We had to finish it in the time allotted. I think there might have been one time when we actually had to… maybe one time, over the whole course of the thing, where we actually had to have an extra day to do something. It was not that difficult, because we were always in the same set – you know, the same two or three sets. When it became difficult is when we’d write too much for ourselves and put in an incredibly complicated special effects scene that took forever. Every time you’d blow somebody up and they’d disappear, you know? (laughs) That kind of thing took more time than we wanted it to, but you put it down in the writing room, and it’s easy to do when you’re writing it – and then suddenly you realize, “Oh, we gotta direct this shit.”

KP: So would you say the Sci-Fi years were more challenging?

MURPHY: They all had their challenges. I think it was – and I’ll never blame anybody at Sci-Fi for this – it was the creepy people who we had at USA Network, who were sort of the overlords… because Sci-Fi at that time was really not… it was getting its legs. Right now, the thing is a monster. It’s just incredibly successful and it’s got a huge audience. And the folks I worked with at Sci-Fi, some of whom are still there, Tom Vitali in particular, were terrific advocates of our show. As a matter of fact, I think they’re one of the reasons why the show went on longer than it did. I think the folks at USA were ready to cut it after the first season, but Tom kept on going to bat for the show. So we had these overlords at USA who said, “The season has to have an arc. You have to have a story arc.” That’s why suddenly we had to have all these fucking set changes and traveling all over the universe, is that they wanted a seasonal arc for a show that they never ran in sequence. Now tell me that isn’t stupid.

KP: Well, it was USA…

MURPHY: Well, yeah! What was their other big thing at the time? Wrestling. That should tell you everything. The only prestige piece they had at the time, which I loved, was tennis. They had the US open.

KP: You can’t get more of an arc than wrestling.

MURPHY: (laughs) Well, at least they show wrestling in sequence.

KP: I’m surprised they didn’t say, “If you could just get one of our wrestlers in there…”

MURPHY: I’m really glad they didn’t call for that, but it was the one time I even hung up on a network executive, was when they told me to shoot something that I simply refused to do.

KP: Which was…?

MURPHY: Honestly, I don’t remember exactly what it was that I was supposed to do, but it was so stupid. We had an executive, and she was assigned to us, and her job apparently was to piss into the tea and tell us that it tastes like lemon. And do her best to drive the show into the ground before it actually got started at Sci-Fi. She had a toady, this little guy named *****. And I imagine that ***** had bad skin and was sort of paunchy. I don’t think I ever met him, because if I did I would have kicked him in the nuts. ***** was the guy who had to call us up, and *****, at first, had these delusions of grandeur that he could tell us what to do. So one time I said to *****, “Get your mother on the phone.” And he didn’t like that. Then he went and told her essentially that I had made fun of him, and she called me back and said, “Don’t make fun of *****.” Things like that. It was unpleasant. The folks at Sci-Fi – wonderful people. Salt of the earth. Loved the show. The folks at USA – they really just dropped their pants and emptied their bowels on us as much as possible.

KP: Did it make the Comedy Central years seem golden?

MURPHY: It’s a business, and it’s a big business, and it’s a big business run by these companies that are owned by companies that are owned by companies. So you’re always going to run into assholes, because there’s just assholes all over the place in that business. So I don’t blame USA, I blame these particular individuals. And I don’t name them because that wouldn’t be nice.

KP: Except for poor *****.

MURPHY: Well, I didn’t say his last name, and I won’t.

KP: Yeah, but someone who works with him will look at this and go, that’s *****. He is a toady.

MURPHY: He was a toady. And I think he probably knows that he was a toady at the time. We had a wonderful guy – who again, went to bat for us at Comedy Central… John Newton, who ran the network for a while, and he just loved us and we loved him. He did everything he could for us, and so in return we’d do everything we could for them. When it came to the stuff with USA, we didn’t want to do things for them because they were unpleasant. And so we did and we got as creative as we could with that, and that’s why we ended up with Rome and the camping planet and the odd little children, and we had and the ape planet and all of those things. Which were fun, but god it was a lot of work.

KP: Which of the children was based on *****?

MURPHY: (laughs) We never did a character based on *****, which was probably wise. We did do characters based on our execs at Universal when we did the movie. There’s one episode where Pearl and Clayton are the execs in charge of Earth Versus Soup.

KP: Oh, is this the focus group?

MURPHY: Yes. And you’ll see in that, that Trace keeps drinking larger and larger bottles of water, because we’d have this one guy who’d come into screenings with like two three liter bottles of water. And every time we’d see him it seemed like the bottle was getting larger. So by the end Trace is drinking out of one of those 10 gallon jugs that you put in the water cooler.

KP: What was the most ludicrous note that you remember having to deal with on the movie?

MURPHY: Oh, I wish I had kept those things, because there were so many. I think we ended up writing things just so we’d see if we’d get a note on them. That’s one thing I do wish I’d kept, because they were so damn funny. I remember we made the comment that… this was back in the Joel days. We almost never got notes from Comedy Central. We got tons of notes from USA. It was something about we had said Joel was hammered off his scrawny ass. It said, “He’s not really going to be hammered off his scrawny ass, is he?” “No, he’s not really going to be hammered off his scrawny ass.”

KP: How many notes did you get from – what was it, Gramercy that you were dealing with?

MURPHY: Oh god, pages and pages and pages from those people.

KP: Was it mainly to “tone this down,” “who’s Kurt Vonnegut”…

MURPHY: The one that killed me… the one that said to me, “That’s it, whatever happens is fine, I’ve done all I can here, I’m just going to do it and get it done…” At the very end where the monster we called Scrotor appears, with the big lobes and the eyes and the shimmery suit, Crow was supposed to yell out, “It’s Bootsy Collins.” It was perfect for the moment, and it would have busted the house down. And they said, “We don’t know who Bootsy Collins is, so you can’t use the joke.” And I said, “How white do you have to be not to know who Bootsy Collins is?” One was from Canada and the other was from, like, Van Nuys, I think.

KP: Just the self-importance of, “We don’t know the reference, so cut it…”

MURPHY: Yeah, “We don’t know, so I can’t be funny.” And so we had to change it. Small things are sometimes the hardest to accept, and that was one of those small things.

KP: How different was the initial draft of the script?

MURPHY: Oh god, when we first put the movie out there, when we pitched it to Universal, it was sort of an all-singing, all-dancing Mystery Science Theater. We had musical numbers, we had a fantasy scene in which Crow imagines himself to be Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, and he’s trying to rescue Kim Cattrall, who’s sitting on the other side of the barbed wire in a Heidi costume beckoning him. And we were actually going to shoot, shot for shot, the last parts of the chase scene with Steve McQueen, only with Crow on the motorcycle. It would have been sublime. We had a musical number for Gypsy, we had one for Tom. Here’s an irony – the one scene hat we wrote in the first draft that actually made it to film was this scene in which there’s a meteor shower that hits the ship and imperils everybody. And it’s the one scene that they cut from the movie. (laughs) You see, everybody who’s made a movie with a big studio has stories like this. It’s nothing new.

KP: But largely these stories are untold. Maybe that’s a special RiffTrax you can do, for MST: The Movie.

MURPHY: (laughs) I’ve mentioned these things before, and that’s why I’m being candid about them, is that I’ve mentioned them at conventions and things like that.

KP: But to document it, get the guys together, through RiffTrax, but for MST: The Movie, since Universal will never let you do it with any candor.

MURPHY: (laughs)

KP: You did This Island Earth when you were trying to sell the film during the first MST convention, didn’t you?

MURPHY: It was the second convention.

KP: I thought you did a live…

MURPHY: At the first one we did World Without End.

KP: Was that the original script that you used when you did the live This Island Earth?

MURPHY: When we did the live This Island Earth, that’s the script we started with in order to make the movie. And that’s the script that they immediately launched into. And that’s the script that brought the house down, which they never seemed to remember.

KP: Even though they were there.

MURPHY: I don’t know if the execs were there. Our agent was there, and one of the guys who bought the movie. But we were assigned these two people. Sort of like being assigned a locker. You just had to have them. They were there to come along and fuck up your film as much as they possibly could. Oh, this is lovely – and I have talked about this before – one of these guys had worked on Billy Madison. Does that tell you something? So we had the idea of the puppets talking over the credits. Mike and the bots talking over the credits, which seemed like a fun thing to do and an easy way to do the credits. He said, “I don’t think that’s going to scan with our audience. What you ought to think about doing is having a shot of each one of the characters and then freezing and having something underneath that tells what happened to them.”

KP: Did they just watch Animal House?

MURPHY: Well, American Graffiti. That’s what we always called the “Killed in Vietnam” thing. This is what I love – we said, “No, we don’t want to do that, we want to do the thing with the credits.” So they chewed on that for a couple of days and called me late at night one night and said to me, “Well, we talked this over with Casey Silver, who’s the head of production, and he said no, the talking over the credits isn’t going to work. You’re going to have to go with the died in Vietnam thing, the Billy Madison style credits.” And so I called our agent out of frustration and our agent called Casey Silver. And Casey Silver said, “What the fuck are you talking about?” So I caught these two execs in a lie. And after that, they treated us a lot lighter than they had before, which was nice.

KP: Because they knew there were checks & balances beyond just their personal playground?

MURPHY: Well, the one thing I think you don’t want to do if you’re a production exec is get caught lying about your boss. It’s a bad idea.

KP: I hope one day to see more of that footage. Tell Mike, RiffTrax, so you all can vent. Now, did Frank do any writing at all on the film?

MURPHY: On Mystery Science Theater?

KP: Yeah, on the motion picture.

MURPHY: I really don’t believe Frank wrote on the movie beyond the script for the live performance of This Island Earth.

KP: So he was there for the writing process, at least, on that.

MURPHY: Yeah.

KP: When did the decision come down that he wouldn’t be part of the on-camera stuff? Was that his decision?

MURPHY: No, Frank wanted to be out there. He wanted to be on the coast and he wanted to be working in TV out there. He’d always wanted to, and he had a lot of friends who were doing it, so it was just time. And no, he wasn’t part of the scripting of… he was part of the scripting of the live show, so his stamp was on the movie, This Island Earth, when we took that script and made it into the movie script. But no, it was really amicable, and I was sad to see him go. He was ready to move on, and so he did.

KP: He’s made quite a career for himself.

MURPHY: I love the guy. Whenever I see him, it’s always fun to see him.

Photo by Julian Weiss

KP: Have you ever entertained the idea of moving west?

MURPHY: Not seriously.

KP: I remember having this conversation six years ago with Mike, and Mike said, “Oh, I’ll never move out to the West Coast.”

MURPHY: Well, San Diego is a far, far cry from Los Angeles. It’s more than 100 miles away.

KP: And worlds away.

MURPHY: It’s ten million miles away. Everyone I know who gets stuck in Los Angeles tries to rationalize how much they like it. And they almost all bring up the Farmer’s Market. What the hell is that? “Oh, you gotta come down and have breakfast at the Farmer’s Market.” I’ve had breakfast at the Farmer’s Market. It’s like a county fair without the rides.

KP: Yeah, and you get to watch people lining up for Price is Right.

MURPHY: (laughs) So I don’t know what the big thrill is. It’s a company town. If you want to make breakthroughs in the automobile industry, do you move to Detroit?

KP: Even the ones who go out there… even Trace bought a place back in Minnesota again.

MURPHY: Yeah. It’s just a much more human environment. I don’t know how to say it. Los Angeles is a very difficult place to live unless you have a lot of money. And even then it can be a difficult place to live. You can set yourself up in a comfortable situation, and I know many people have, but I don’t know a lot of people who are truly happy living out there and having to do that commute, and they’d rather live someplace else. And when they’re done with whatever they’re doing out there, they move elsewhere. I know two or three people who love it there and would never move anyplace else. And actually two of those people aren’t even in the entertainment industry. If you’re an accountant, it’s a great place to live, let me tell ya. There’s this town that they profiled on All Things Considered yesterday, in China, which is one of the most polluted towns in the known world. I think I might take that over Los Angeles. Chernobyl actually has charm and appeal that Los Angeles lacks.

KP: It’s far less radioactive.

MURPHY: Bangladesh during the monsoon season.

KP: And the people are nicer.

MURPHY: They are. More real.

KP: How much traveling would you say you do at this point?

MURPHY: I do a lot less than I’d like to, but I do enough. I get out of the country. It’s a wonderful way to keep your perspective on the world. I do that whenever I can, which is not often enough.

KP: Are you the type of traveler that goes out and sightsees, or just relaxes? What is recreational travel for you?

MURPHY: Well, it depends. I like it both ways. Sometimes I like to go someplace and simply relax, sometimes I like to go someplace and immerse myself in the culture.

KP: Are you the type of person who doesn’t bring a camera?

MURPHY: Jane, my spouse, is a brilliant photographer, so I don’t have to bring a camera. It’s very freeing and liberating.

KP: But as far as you personally, could you ever envision yourself carrying a camera when you go on these vacations?

MURPHY: Sometimes when I travel alone, I bring a camera just to send pictures back home. Jane actually takes pictures – I take snapshots. There’s a world of different between them.

KP: I’m assuming you often partake of the local culture.

MURPHY: Especially music and food.

KP: Do you tend to avoid doing something that you could just as easily do at home?

MURPHY: Oh yeah. The only thing that interests me is how different we are from each other. I’m planning on going to Italy again this fall, but I think we’re going to take a train into Slovenia.

KP: What sort of planning is needed for that?

MURPHY: Two things that attract me is that they have drinkable water and I know nothing about it.

KP: I noticed which one you put first.

MURPHY: (laughs) Well, it’s not going to be a long trip. If we’re going to do something like India, you really have to plan for like a month. Or Africa. I’d love to go to Africa with Jane, because she’s been there before. But you have to plan at least a month so you can let the dysentery course through you, or maybe let the first wave of malaria get over you and then you can…

KP: So you can fly back fine, is what you’re saying.

MURPHY: Right. And alive.

KP: That’s always a plus, to know you’re going to come back alive. Is there any place that’s on your “always wanted to, but nothing ever aligns to get there” list of locations?

MURPHY: Well, when I was writing the book, there were two places that killed me I couldn’t go. One was Hong Kong, and the other was Mumbai, which are two of the world’s largest centers for film. And actually, the third was Rio De Janeiro. Three of the largest centers for film production in the world. Besides the little houses and very large cities, there are very few places to see these movies. And thousands of films out of these places that you never get to see.

KP: What prevented Hong Kong?

MURPHY: Time and money is what it came down to. I wanted to do Hong Kong on the way back from Australia, and I probably could have added it onto my ticket, but that of course is when 9/11 happened, and I wanted to get home. So it was just not to be.

KP: So it was largely circumstantial.

MURPHY: Yeah. But India, it just… again, there were only so many places I could go and so much time to do it, and I had already filled my hit list with more than I could possibly do.

KP: Could you envision doing something as jam packed as that again? That project wore you down in many different ways…

MURPHY: Oh god, yeah, but I’m richer for the experience. Always. As long as I’m upright and regular, I’ll be happy to do something like that.

KP: And no kidney stones since?

MURPHY: And no kidney stones, yeah.

KP: I wince just thinking about that chapter. And what was the other… you mentioned two book ideas…

MURPHY: Well, I’ve been sort of writing a novel on and off for a long time here. It’s the story of an American family, a dynasty that starts during the pilgrim years, and it comes all the way up to the present day. Actually, we had, at one time…

KP: Sort of a Michener type of novel?

MURPHY: Well, except they’re really unpleasant people. They’re cowardly and they’re crass and they represent all the things we don’t like about Americans.

KP: So the not terribly magnificent Ambersons…

MURPHY: Exactly. The reprehensible Ambersons. And the family structure stays pretty much the same throughout history. So it’s almost like the same cast of characters moving through history. And I was probably inspired by Black Adder to do something. I said, “Well, there should be an American family that’s just as despicable in their own way.” Delightfully despicable.

KP: Unrepentantly loathsome.

MURPHY: Yes.

KP: See, this is why you’re watching The Fountain…

MURPHY: (laughs) Yeah, just that shaved head Hugh Jackman has, has really got me intrigued now.

KP: Just wait. You don’t even know what you’re in store for. And since you’re one of the people who can answer this, what exactly is Jim up to now?

MURPHY: I’m not one of the people who can answer this. I sort of lost touch with Jim.

KP: Really?

MURPHY: Yeah.

KP: Has anyone kept in touch with Jim?

MURPHY: Recently? Well, functionally speaking, I think people have, but I don’t socialize with them, and I haven’t for a while there, and that’s just… our lives are different. He’s got a different family than I do, and Jane and I have been traveling a lot, and the last I heard is that he’s involved with Second Life. And that’s all I know about it. They said he was doing a lot of time on Second Life.

KP: Were there any issues that arose over you all doing Film Crew?

MURPHY: Well, you know, it’s different enough so that it doesn’t really compete with Mystery Science Theater, but part of the fact is we started out… Rhino was actually going to distribute it, but the powers that be at Rhino didn’t think it would be as complimentary as we did. But Shout Factory is very happy to do it, and I think in the long run, if Film Crew does anything, it’s going to re-pique some people’s interest in Mystery Science Theater again, and vice versa. So I think the two are actually going to be mutually beneficial as we go ahead in the future. So I don’t think there’s an issue there.

KP: There’s certainly no shortage of episodes that Rhino still hasn’t released.

MURPHY: Oh yeah. They’ll keep that franchise going for… now there’s a franchise. It’s a series, it’s supposed to be a franchise. A television series.

KP: When was the last time you actually saw an episode?

MURPHY: Of Mystery Science Theater?

KP: Yeah…

MURPHY: A whole episode?

KP: A whole episode.

MURPHY: That’s a really good question. I have no idea. It’s been a few years, I’d say.

KP: And it was because you ran across it, or you were at an event where it was shown, where you had to see it?

MURPHY: No, I’m trying to think of the context. I actually watched it here at home. There was something I was looking for in a particular episode and I ended up watching the whole thing.

KP: Do you remember what your thoughts were while watching it?

MURPHY: Oh, how much fun it was to make. It’s like Jiffy Pop – it’s as much fun to make as it is to eat. It’s the magic treat.

KP: So nothing but good memories about it.

MURPHY: I believe in releasing bad karma and embracing good karma, so I don’t have any bad memories at all. I’m not even thinking of that as brainwashing – it’s just what you choose to hold onto and what you choose to let go.

KP: Is there any residual interest? Were you ever made a partner in Best Brains?

MURPHY: I’ve got a very small stake in there, so I occasionally get a check, and that’s a very nice thing.

KP: So there is something of a legacy beyond it.

MURPHY: Yeah.

KP: So would you say, at this point in time, you’re doing exactly what you want to be doing?

MURPHY: Do you know anybody who is? (laughs) I’m never doing exactly what I want to be doing, but what I’m doing is certainly enough. Life plans, you see, that’s like gazing into the future. Again, it’s like being nostalgic.

KP: We can’t go either way with you!

MURPHY: No, I live for the moment, my man.

KP: So are you enjoying the moment?

MURPHY: I’m enjoying the moment.

KP: Well, I hope that you finish the novel.

MURPHY: Well, thank you.

KP: I desperately want to read it, and I want to know the other directors on that list…

MURPHY: One way or the other.

KP: Well, hopefully this will put the bug in somebody’s ear when they read this, that they should pick it up.

MURPHY: You never know…

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DVD Late Show: Pleasant Surprises

Filed under: DVD Late Show — UncaScroogeMcD @ 4:59 am

7/18/07

Welcome back to the Late Show. This time around, we’ve got looks at a lot of cult TV shows, both old and new, plus a bunch of B-movie reviews and another handful of capsule reviews as I work steadily to reduce the tottering stack of DVDs on my desk to a safer height. After all, if those things fell over on me now, it might be weeks before they could extricate my corpse.

You know what’s great about this gig? It’s picking up something I’m sent to review and looking at the box art and thinking that it looks like crap or just isn’t my “thing,” but upon viewing finding that I really enjoyed it. It doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, but I’ve had a few good experiences along that line in the last few weeks.

The first of these was the Starz Media (formerly Anchor Bay) direct-to-DVD horror flick DEVIL’S DEN (2006). From the uninspired packaging and rote synopsis on the back, this looked like just another SciFi Channel hack job, with a derivative premise and some familiar faces in the cast just to make it saleable.

Well, I was half-right. The plot definitely is derivative, borrowing heavily from Richard Wenk’s 1986 favorite VAMP and Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino’s FROM DUSK “˜TIL DAWN. And there’s some familiar faces filling out the cast.

Witness: two young slacker types are on their way back from Mexico with a suitcase of alleged “Spanish Fly.” They stop at an isolated tittie bar to try out the product, and discover that the strippers are all monsters when one of the guys is killed. The remaining slacker (Devon Sawa, IDLE HANDS) then teams up with a gun-toting hottie (Kelly Hu, X2) and a samurai sword-slinging monster hunter (Ken Foree, DAWN OF THE DEAD, FROM BEYOND) to battle the bodacious but bloodthirsty bitches.

Seen it before. But”¦

Here’s where I was wrong. It’s no hack job. Director Andrew Dunt and writer Mitch Gould weren’t content to just go through the paces. No, they chose to add some style, some wit, some depth of character to their chosen flick formula and shake up the recipe a bit. It’s still an oatmeal cookie, but it’s a really tasty oatmeal cookie.

Everyone in the main cast does an outstanding job. Sawa’s character starts out as a complete asshole, and slowly transforms into”¦ well, still an asshole, but a likable one. Ken Foree’s still busting monster skulls”¦ but he’s getting’ older, and his character is, too. Kelly Hu is not only gorgeous, but she handles the action scenes with sublime grace and convincing athleticism. Not only that, but she manages to give her comic book character a lot of depth and sympathy.

In fact, everyone involved in this seems to have put in just a little extra effort. Certainly more than they needed to on a film like this. The direction is taut and tense, the writing is witty and wry, the cinematography is excellent and the stuntwork top-notch. The monster make-ups and gore effects are completely professional and state of the art and deliver the requisite grue.

Starz presents DEVIL’S DEN in a rock-solid 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen ratio, with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. There’s a fun and informative behind-the-scenes documentary, an interesting and engaging audio commentary track, an amusing blooper reel, and a photo gallery. There’s also the film’s screenplay on DVD-ROM, and trailers for additional Starz/Anchor Bay horror titles.

DEVIL’S DEN isn’t a classic. But there’s a lot of talent on display and it’s a lot of fun. Check it out, and see if you don’t agree.

Another pleasant surprise was EUREKA ““ THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON (2006) from Universal Home Video.

I’d seen the promos, but I had no real interest in this SciFi Channel Original series. I knew nothing about it except that it was about a secret town of scientific geniuses”¦ and that didn’t intrigue me in the least. But I was sent the first Season of twelve episodes, and figured I’d at least check out the Pilot. Well, my wife watched it with me, and we were soon hooked.

U.S. Marshall Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson) and his delinquent teenage daughter inadvertently stumble upon the northwestern community of Eureka after a car accident. While waiting for their car to be repaired, Carter finds himself helping the local authorities deal with a series of strange events, which are soon revealed to be a scientific experiment gone awry. Carter then learns that Eureka is the home of the world’s top minds, all working under the protection of the U.S. government to push the limits of technological advancement. Proving his worth to the authorities through solid detective work, he is promptly reassigned to be the town’s new sheriff.

A great ensemble cast and a light touch gives this NORTHERN EXPOSURE/X-FILES hybrid a broad appeal, with an eccentric but likeable bunch of townspeople (including MAX HEADROOM’s Matt Frewer, T2’s Joe Morton and Debrah Farentino of EARTH 2), a few dark mysteries and conspiracies, and a smart, sharp sense of humor.

Universal’s 3-disc set is packed into an eco-friendly recycled package and contains all 12 episodes from the first season in crystal sharp 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfers. The disc includes over 10 hours of bonus features, most of which are commentaries and/or podcasts. There are some deleted scenes, and a couple of funny mock infomercials for “Made in Eureka” products.

EUREKA is a clever mix of sci-fi, drama and comedy, and I’m eagerly looking forward to season 2 on DVD (I guess it’s currently airing on SciFi).

And, also in the category of “better than I expected,” comes the animated movie STAN LEE PRESENTS: THE CONDOR (2006), written by comics vet Marv Wolfman and directed by Steven Gordon, based on a concept by Stan “The Man” Lee.

This animated film tells the origin story of a young Latino superhero called The Condor, alias Tony Valdez (Wilmer Valderrama, THAT 70’S SHOW). After his scientist parents are murdered by their evil business partner and his legs crippled, Tony uses their experimental cybernetic technology and becomes a superhero with a high-tech skateboard.

Not a lot of originality in the story, but the animation by Film Roman (the studio behind the same company’s HELLBOY ANIMATED features) is solid TV fare, while the script by comics pro Wolfman deftly fleshes out the characters and sets things up with some style. Voice work is competent, and the overall result is a pleasant ““ if predictable ““ superhero adventure.

Starz Home Entertainment gives THE CONDOR a rock-solid 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation, with a robust Dolby 5.1 Surround sound track. Both English and Spanish 2.0 tracks are also provided. Extras include a corny on-screen intro by Lee, a behind-the-scenes featurette, a couple of art galleries and a DVD game.

A decent superhero cartoon with an appealing hero, THE CONDOR is worth a rental for comic book animation fans.

Perhaps not the best entry in the long-running Godzilla series from Japan’s Toho Studios, INVASION OF ASTRO-MONSTER (GODZILLA Vs. MONSTER ZERO, KAIJÃ› DAISENSO, 1965) is, nonetheless, my personal favorite.

In this kaiju classic, two astronauts ““ American Glenn (Nick Adams, DIE MONSTER DIE) and Fuji (Akira Takarada) are sent to investigate a newly discovered planet near Jupiter. Upon their arrival, they discover that the natives are under constant siege by the space monster, Ghidorah. But the aliens of Planet X have a plan: they’d like to “borrow” Godzilla and Rodan from Earth, and use them to ward off the three-headed space dragon. Glad to get rid of the titanic terrors, Earth’s governments agree”¦ but can the aliens be trusted?

A fun mix of 60’s space opera and giant monster mayhem, ASTRO-MONSTER is a colorful, fun and exciting creature feature. Nick Adams is great as the randy, hotheaded American astronaut, while series regular Kumi Mizuno makes an extremely fetching alien. Former menaces Godzilla and Rodan have completely morphed into heroic creatures by this film, firmly on the side of Earth and humanity. The FX scenes are well crafted, with the 3-way monster battle on Planet X particularly memorable, if too brief.

Classic Media/Genius Entertainment’s new DVD edition features both the Japanese and slightly altered American (GODZILLA VS. MONSTER ZERO) versions of the film in their proper 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratios. The Japanese version includes English subtitles. Extra features include an audio commentary by author Stuart Galbraith IV, an image gallery, poster gallery and the original Japanese trailer.

You know how much I like these movies, and Classic Media’s special editions are first rate. Highly recommended.

Jeffrey Combs gives a tour de force performance as Edgar Allan Poe for frequent collaborator Stuart Gordon (RE-ANIMATOR, FROM BEYOND, CASTLE FREAK) as the acclaimed horror director takes his second stab (after 1991’s THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM) at the works of the tortured American author, with MASTERS OF HORROR: THE BLACK CAT (2007).

Working again with frequent writing partner Dennis Paoli, Gordon has deftly combined elements of Poe’s own real life with the events of the famous short story. The result is a nightmarish descent into madness. I don’t want to give a synopsis here: to do so would betray some of the short film’s best surprises, but I will say that even with the liberties taken, it may be the most faithful adaptation of the Poe classic ever committed to film.

Atmospherically shot by Jon Joffin, THE BLACK CAT has the look and feel of a Val Lewton 40’s B&W horror classic (specifically, THE BODY SNATCHER), with the only vivid color being the red of blood. And there’s plenty of that, as Gordon gleefully indulges his flair for gore. The make-up job on Combs is excellent; the likeness to Poe is amazing. Performances are excellent across the board, with Elyse Levesque’s sensitive and moving portrayal of Virginia Poe being of special note.

THE BLACK CAT comes to DVD in a perfect 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with Dolby 5.1 Surround sound. As usual, Starz/Anchor Bay has provided a plethora of bonus material, including a couple of “Making Of” featurettes, a great commentary track by Gordon and Combs, a photo gallery, and trailers for other MASTERS OF HORROR titles.

As a fan of Stuart Gordon’s work in the genre, I loved it. Recommended.

Universal’s new release of THE INCREDIBLE HULK ““ THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON (1978-79) lives up to the quality of the first volume, with the entire sophomore season of the popular series on five discs.

As Season Two kicks off, Dr. David Banner meets and marries a terminally ill scientist, and continues to wander the country, helping people in need and searching for a cure, while managing to “Hulk-out” at least twice a show.

Comic book fans can be pretty unforgiving about media adaptations of their favorite characters, and this show often takes a lot of heat for the changes made to the character and his milieu. But for the budget, and considering the realities of network television in 70’s, I think producer Kenneth Johnson made absolutely the right choices in developing the show. His FUGITIVE meets JECKYLL & HYDE approach not only allowed him to do some decent adult drama (usually) but get some serious mileage out of the fantasy elements, too.

Generally smart scripting (there’s only a couple of clunkers in the bunch) and the rock-steady presence of Bill Bixby as the sympathetic and believable Banner, made THE INCREDIBLE HULK one of the best fantasy shows of its era.

Season Two presents all 22 episodes in decent full-frame transfers. Colors are good, and there’s relatively little wear or damage evident in the source prints. This volume includes an introduction by producer Kenneth Johnson, and a Johnson commentary track over the season premiere episode, “Married.” The set also includes a bonus episode from Season Three.

Recommended.

Another Seventies superhero show, Filmations THE SECRETS OF ISIS (1975) has also just come to DVD courtesy of BCI.

The star of one of Saturday morning’s first live-action adventure shows, the lovely Isis (sultry Joanna Cameron) fought crime and saved lives every week, usually managing to teach a nice moral lesson, too. With the occasional assistance of SHAZAM’s Captain Marvel, the bookish high school chemistry teacher with the powers of an ancient Egyptian goddess gave prime time’s Wonder Woman a run for her money as TV’s sexiest super heroine for two seasons. (And for my money, Isis wins.)

BCI’s new DVD set includes all 22 episodes of the classic kid’s show, in full-frame transfers. Unfortunately, as the show was shot on cheap 16mm stock, usually outdoors, the source material looks very faded, grainy and washed out. It’s still watchable, but don’t go expecting reference quality transfers from this 30-year-old low budget program. As with the label’s other Filmation releases, there’s plenty of great bonus materials. There’s almost 2 hours of on-camera interviews with the producers crew, and cast of the show (excluding Cameron, unfortunately), isolated music and FX tracks on selected episodes, a commentary on episode 15, Three extensive still galleries, scripts on DVD-ROM, and a complete episode of the animated series FREEDOM FORCE, which also featured the Isis character. There is also the usual slew of BCI/Filmation trailers.

Another childhood favorite comes to disc courtesy of BCI, and since Joanna Cameron was one of my first celebrity crushes, I’m grateful to have the series on DVD today.

DVD LATE SHOW CAPSULE REVIEWS!

In my continuing efforts to catch up with the notable discs that piled up during the last few months, here’s some more “Capsule Reviews” of DVDs that are long overdue for some Late Show attention:

THE SEXUAL STORY OF O (1984). One of Jess Franco’s more coherent productions, this erotic epic actually has no connection to the famous “Story of O” (novel or film), but was deceptively re-titled by the distributors. Lovely Alicia PrÃncipe is seduced into a swinging three-way by an adventurous couple, and it’s all fun and games until they introduce their young conquest to a decadent older couple who are into S&M. Then, things take a nasty turn. Not much of a plot, but PrÃncipe is beautiful, and so is much of the photography. Severin Films presents this minor Spanish sexploitation effort with a sparkling, 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer and English subtitles. There’s also a new interview with the prolific Franco, who seems rather proud of this one.

COOL McCOOL: THE COMPLETE SERIES (1966). Created by BATMAN creator Bob Kane, the crudely animated adventures of superspy Cool McCool mix GET SMART antics with BATMAN-styled villains in 20 incredibly stupid episodes. Even for the presumably less sophisticated kids of the Sixties, this stuff is insultingly bad. The villains (Hurricane Harry, the Owl, The Rattler, et al) are lame, the animation is terrible, and the vaunted voice work by Chuck McCann and others is pedestrian at best. Nonetheless, BCI’s Ink & Paint label presents the entire series on 3 discs, with solid full-frame transfers of slightly worn and faded source prints. As is usual with BCI, there’s a whole bunch of extras including audio commentaries, an interview and episode intros by the aforementioned McCann, A music video, and previews of other, better, Ink & Paint releases.

WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE ““ THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON (1959-60). The first season of this classic Western show, starring the young and intense Steve McQueen (BULLITT), was released three or four years ago by New Line Home Video, who then abandoned the series. Fortunately for fans, BCI has now picked up the license. The Season 2 set is packaged to complement the first one, with similar graphics and art direction. The only difference is that the four discs are packaged in slim cases this time around. The transfers look on a par with the earlier set, with a solid, B&W full-frame image. Only one extra this time: a featurette called “The Women of WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE.” A great show, with expertly written 30-minute dramas, very well acted. Highly recommended.

Comments, DVD questions, review requests and offers of money can be sent to: dvdlateshow@atomicpulp.com

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Nocturnal Admissions: DVD Review – Foyle’s War Set 4, Da Vinci’s Inquest Season 1

Filed under: Columns,Nocturnal Admissions,Quickcast Commentaries — UncaScroogeMcD @ 4:55 am

Foyle Da Vince boxes

In case you don’t know it yet, Foyle’s War is one of the best shows on the tube. There are several reasons for this. The program appears only intermittently, which gives the creator and writer Anthony Horowitz, time to research and develop each movie length script. The show is also perfectly cast, with Michael Kitchen as the reticent but firm Christopher Foyle, Anthony Howell as the dedicated Paul Milner, and Honeysuckle Weeks as Samantha Stewart, Foyle’s tomboyish red haired Police driver. And the mysteries themselves, always keyed to some long-forgotten but interesting aspect of life during wartime, are invariably clever.

Television fanatics have been retraining themselves over the past decade. In the old days, we watch prime time shows religiously from September to June, circling our itinerary in TV Guide (one of my favorite hobbies as a kid, anticipation always being greater than the reality). During the summer we moaned in agony, having to fall back on reading books (I used to methodically re-read all my Marvel comics from cover to cover, even the letters sections). Then, come autumn and school and the Fall previews issue of TV Guide, it would begin again.

Foyle title

But now we have adapted to different styles of programing. We can wait a year between episode samplings of The Sopranos, or follow shows that start only in January, like 24. I think it was the sequelitis of movies from the 1980s that helped train us, having to wait a year or two between Star Wars editions the way the kids today wait for Harry Potter movies. But in any case, the result is that we now accept the long waits between shows like Foyle’s War and so many other British crime imports.

Foyle intro

Now the fourth box of Foyle’s eps is out, thanks to Acorn Media (having just aired on PBS’s Mystery). Streeting on Tuesday, July 17th, the set contains four discs, each in a slim case, and retails for $59.99. It is a measure of the show’s increasing popularity that either the producers of the show or the DVD manufacturers are including more in the way of extras with each release. In this set, Michael Kitchen even steps forward to welcome the viewer to the DVD edition. It’s true that most of the supplements are still text features, such as cast bios and backgrounds to the episodes, but with each new box the producers offer longer and more interesting making ofs. The shortish doc included here lauds the show’s attention to period detail and emphasizes how each episode requires the time and effort of a feature film.

There is a modicum of confusion attached to this box, which is numbered 4, but which contains seasons four and five of Foyle’s War, which in England were only two episodes each. Series six, which is slated to air in the UK in 2008, will come to Americans as season five.

Foyle team

Taken all together, the Foyles will end up being a popular history of World War II from the viewpoint of those at home. For example, the first film in the set, “Invasion” takes place in 1942, and concerns the invasion of England by – the Americans. Aside from an exploration of the resulting tensions and opportunities, there is a clever mystery and a touching story of friendship. Also set in 1942 is “Bad Blood,” which concerns a biological warfare test that goes awry, and the murder hidden within it. Later in 1942 comes “Bleak Midwinter,” in which murders take place around a munitions works, and Milner’s ex-wife is also killed. Finally, “Casualties of War,” set in early 1943, concerns a fascinating aspect of experimental warfare that is also covered in the movie The Dam Busters, and also touches on issues such as a woman’s place in the world of men. But the mystery itself ends on a morally ambiguous note, and the plot itself concludes on something of a cliffhanger.

If you are coming late to Foyle, however, don’t start with this box. Like all the great shows, such as The Wire, The Shield, and BSG, it’s best to start at the beginning and work your way forward. You won’t be able to stop, and you won’t be able to not re-watch them.

Da Vinci title

No such problem with another show now on offer from Acorn Media. This is Da Vinci’s Inquest, the cult hit Canadian show now just introduced to American home video. Set in Vancouver, B.C., Da Vinci’s Inquest concerns the cases confronted by the bibulous, divorced coroner Dominic Da Vinci, played by Nicholas Campbell, perhaps best known in the states for playing parts in Cronenberg films such as The Brood. Da Vinci’s Inquest began airing in 1998 with the first of seven 13-episode seasons. This box from Acorn contains all of season one in full frame transfers (that look a little soft. It hit the street on February 27th, and retails for $59.99; for those impatient to see other seasons, Atlantis Alliance has released them in Canada).

The Acorn box doesn’t have much in the way of supplements, just cast bios and a trailer, but just having the shows all together in the right order should be enough for the series’s mounting fans. Da Vinci’s Inquest has been popping up on local stations over the past year or so, but out of order and with the seasons mixed up. But from its cozy jazz theme song to its wholly different world of law and order, Da Vinci’s Inquest has pulled in viewers. It’s mix of flawed characters, occasionally ambiguous endings (who killed the professional dominatrix at the end of episode 7, “The Stranger Inside,” even though the case had been solved?), and refreshingly different approach to now-familiar territory (forensic medicine doctors examining gross bodies) has appealed to intelligent viewers.

Da Vinci's Da Vinci

As a forensic show, Da Vinci’s Inquest appeared two years before the somewhat harder edged CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, but Da Vinci’s Inquest integrates the problems of the characters better into both the plots and the texture of the show. And Da Vinci is loosely based on a real guy, former chief coroner Larry Campbell, who ended winning a mayoral race in Vancouver in 2002 (an eventual spin off of Da Vinci’s Inquest was the short lived Da Vinci’s City Hall). Like presumably his real life counterpart, Da Vinci’s cares too much, is confrontational with bureaucratic ineptitude, and is prone to joining or starting causes, such as in one episode the use of teen agers as drug informants. He’s an admirable character but also a troubled one, and an episode in which Da Vinci fears that he is the perpetrator of a hit and run accident is painful to watch on his behalf. His “solution” to his problem, show in the last shot, will shock Puritanical American viewers.

Da Vinci’s Inquest is a great series and it is a comfort to know that there are six (or seven) more boxes in the pipeline.

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Quick Stop Thingamabobs: 7/18/2007

Filed under: Columns,Thingamabobs — UncaScroogeMcD @ 4:49 am

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Jon Lovitz beats up Andy Dick… (Thingamabob)

Woody Woodpecker pimps Swiss Chalet… (Thingamabob)

And Popeye does the same for Cocoa Puffs… (Thingamabob)

Devil-Crab Quiz… (Thingamabob)

And we close things with Wilson Fisk’s ball… (Thingamabob)

Have a THINGAMABOB? Send it in!

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July 17, 2007

Toy Box: What you lookin’ at?

Filed under: Columns,Toy Box — admin @ 5:47 am

At first, the title of this review may not seem to make sense. With the Simpsons movie hitting in a couple weeks, Mcfarlane did the smart thing and got the toys out. I’ve already covered the four Movie Mayhem figures in the standard line up, but tonight I’ll look at the boxed set called… are you ready for it?… “What you lookin’ at?”.

If you’re one of those folks that is extremely adverse to spoilers, and want to know absolutely nothing about a film before it comes out, stop reading now. This set doesn’t give away any more about the plot of the movie (as far as I can tell) than the trailers have, but I just want to be sure you’re fully away that one of the three figures in this diorama but be considered spoilerific by some of the more anal retentive movie goers.

The set is hitting stores like FYE and Suncoast right now, but you can actually get a better deal online. I have some suggestions at the end of the review as always, and if you have any questions or comments drop me a line.

“What You Lookin’ At?”

I don’t know exactly what’s gone wrong in Springfield, but clearly something has. Just look at this playset and you can see that…why the Hell would Bart be fishing with Ned Flanders? Oh, the humanity!

Packaging – ***
This set comes in a box, and like the clamshelled individual figures, Mcfarlane has gone small and compact. I’m a big fan of small and compact, and the movie graphics look great. This box also shows off the diorama pretty well, and it certainly protects it. The back of the package gives you some Simpsons trivia and shows some hand drawn cels from the film, which is a nice plus.

Sculpting – ***1/2
Ned and Bart are standing behind what I originally thought was a bush, but now believe is a rock with mossy grass on it. They are peering over at the many eyed mutated squirrel in front, who has almost as many nasty sharp teeth as eyes. The sculpt on all three of these characters is great, managing to pull off the tricky switch from 2-D to 3-D with nary a hitch.

There’s the right amount of detail here for the style of animation, including the nicely done open faced spinning reel on Ned’s fishing pole, the nylon fishing line, and the size of Ned’s glasses. The scale between these figures is good, and if Ned were standing, he’d be about the same height as the Homer figures from Mcfarlane’s other releases (just over 4″ tall).

Clearly this is a very movie specific moment, and I’m cool with that. Their regular line should cover the show, but these figures should bring movie scenes to us as much as possible. I’m hoping that this particular scene is both memorable and critical to the plot of the show.

Paint – ***
The previous animated figures from Mcfarlane have been hit or miss in this category, but it looks like they went all out for the movie release. There’s still a spot of slop here or there, but the overall quality has gone up, and from looking at quite a few figures and dioramas on the shelves, the consistency of that quality also seems to have gone up.

There’s a liberal use of black outlining here, everywhere from Ned’s ears to Bart’s shoes. However, it works great on this set, and there’s only a bit of slop to be seen in these thin lines. Most of the slop that is here is on the base itself, in the paint work on the twigs and rocks, and not on the three figures.

Articulation – *1/2
There’s not much articulation here – remember, this is a ‘diorama’, and not really designed for a lot of posing. Bart has a cut neck, and Flanders has a cut neck and cut shoulders. That way you can get them in the best ‘shocked and in hiding’ pose possible.

Accessories – ***
How you score this area depends on what you consider the accessories. I’m grading it as though the base, rock and sign are the accessories, while the Bart, Flanders and squirrel are all the ‘figures’.

The “No dumping” sign fits nicely in a peg hole on the base, and the large rock pops onto a couple large pegs in the center. The base isn’t quite as nicely painted as the figures, with some sloppy edges and bleed on several of the rocks and twigs, but there’s plenty of little details sculpted onto the ground. One of the things I like about this base is that unlike some of the earlier ones from Mcfarlane, it doesn’t feel crowded. Everything is here that needs to be here, and while it’s compact, it doesn’t seem cramped.

The rock has some nice sculpted texturing too that doesn’t come through quite as well in photos as it does in person, hence my original confusion on what it was.

Talking Feature – ***
There’s no ‘try me’ feature on the sound chip, because these don’t come with the 2 AAA batteries necessary to make them work. Obviously, the negative there is that you need to spend some more cash to get them to talk. There is a positive though, at least for the MIBers, who won’t have to worry about battery corrosion over time.

The set says the following lines:

Ned – “You know, whenever my boys bake up a batch of frownies, I take ’em fishing”; “Well, this certainly seems odd, but who am I to question the work of the Almight!”; “If you look real close, you can almost YEEAAGHH!”
Bart – “Jabbity, jabbity, jab jab jab!”; “I’m troubled”;

That’s a fair number of lines for the price tag, and clearly right from the movie. The speaker (and button to activate it) is right on top, allowing the sound to be loud and clear. There’s no static or gabled sound, and the overall quality of the feature is quite good. I’m not big on sound features when there are no classic lines – Lost is a great example – but the Simpsons have always been a perfect license for this sort of gimmick.

Value – ***
The single figures are running $12 – $15 each depending on where you pick them up. I already ragged on what a lousy value that is, but this set (with three figures, sound, and a nifty boulder) is only running $16 – $20. That’s a much better value than the single figures.

Fun Factor – **
The talking feature is fun for your co-workers, at least the first fifty times they press the button. But these are intended as pop culture collectibles, not ‘toys’. This isn’t a category that will effect my overall impression, since I know that going in, but you might feel quite a bit differently.

Things to Watch Out For –
If you’re picking them off the shelf, watch the paint, but from what I’ve seen – and I’ve actually seen quite a few of these now – the paint ops have been much more consistently good this time around.

Overall – ***
I haven’t been thrilled to death with some of the early Mcfarlane Simpsons work – the Ironic Punishment set was an unfortunate way to start off the line – but the movie figures have all really been well done. I’m enjoying these, and would love an entire Simpsons universe, like WOS, in this scale. We’ve got a snowball’s chance in Hell of that actually happening, but it’s nice to see that what we are getting has improved in quality. I can’t wait to see the Manimals set now, and I hope that the interest in this line will be at least strong enough to get a few more of these diorama sets out.

Scoring Recap –
Packaging – ***
Sculpting – ***1/2
Paint – ***
Articulation – *1/2
Accessories – ***
Talking Feature – ***
Fun Factor – **
Value – ***
Overall – ***

Where to Buy –
Online options include:

– Amazing Toyz has them in stock with most of the regular figures at $12 (I&S run $14) and the dioramas at $16.

– CornerStoreComics hast the singles at $12, but the only way to get I&S is to order the full set of 6 figures for $68. They also have the dioramas at $16.

– Clark Toys has most of the regular figures at $12 and the playsets at $18. For some reason they have Marge and Lisa at $30…?

Related Links –
I’ve covered an awful lot of Simpsons merchandise over the years. Hit this link for links to just about all of them!

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