Assuming that you’re not all sick to death of thinking about Superman and ready to move on to other topics — like pirates, for instance — I’ve found a trio of articles that should give you adequate distraction from work on this Friday morning.
There are times when I think I continue reading newspaper comic strips only out of sheer habit. With the exception of the warm-hearted and curiously twisted “Get Fuzzy,” most strips currently running today are neither very funny nor terribly insightful, unlike, say, “Calvin & Hobbes,” “Doonesbury” in its heyday, or the long-defunct but still fondly remembered “Bloom County.”
Every once in a while, however, I get lucky and am rewarded with a good chuckle. Today, I got two chuckles for my efforts, which I’ve decided to share with you here. You’ll find both below the fold, for the convenience of any dial-up readers out there. If you have trouble reading them, click on them to see a larger version…
Several of the bloggers I read daily are in a snit this afternoon because of news that the creatively bankrupt suits at the Disney Channel have decided to make Christopher Robin into a girl in an upcoming Winnie the Pooh TV series. The spokesperson for this astoundingly lame decision says that, “these timeless characters really needed a breath of fresh air,” and the new series is not an “abandonment of an old, familiar world, but rather an alternate universe for Pooh and his crew.”
Uh-huh. Alternate universe. Gotcha.
This is the sort of boneheaded, focus-group-driven nonsense that made the otherwise mediocre movie Office Space into a monster cult hit.
Here’s a sampling of how people are reacting to this “breath of fresh air”:
I loved the Peanuts comic strip when I was a kid. I had — still have, somewhere in the depths of the Bennion Archives — a dozen or so paperback compilations that I carried around in my back pocket all through my elementary-school years. I practically had those books memorized, I flipped through them so frequently. I identified with Charlie Brown’s insecurity and I thought the World War I flying ace was the coolest. But as I moved into middle school, I came to realize that I didn’t think the strip was very funny. It was gentle and wise, as its fans so often claim. It was also stodgy and old-fashioned, sometimes preachy, occasionally heartwarming or cute, but it was never funny. I can’t recall ever laughing out loud at a Peanuts strip the way I did over Bloom County or Calvin and Hobbes or even the early, pre-sell-out Garfield, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I actually read a Peanuts strip.
Still, I do have a soft spot for the characters of Charles Schulz — they were very important to me when I was very young and memories of them linger in my heart, like kindergarten friends you haven’t seen in decades — so I couldn’t resist taking the latest personality quiz that’s circulating through the blogosphere, the Which Peanuts Character Are You? test. Here is my result:
You are Franklin!
Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
I guess this is an accurate enough description of me. Funny thing, though: I don’t remember this character. Not even a little. I find that odd and more than a little disturbing, considering how obsessive I used to be about this strip. Who is this guy? And what does it say about me that my Schulzian personality match is so forgettable?
Oh, boy, is this geeky… so terribly, terribly geeky that even I am frightened by it (but it seems to making the rounds of the ‘net today, so I’m honor-bound to link to it):
Changes in George Lucas’s Lord of the Rings: Special Edition.
For your convenience, I’ll reproduce the list below the fold so you don’t have to follow the link, but I caution you. Read on only if you are stout of heart…
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about these days, now the damn zombies are attacking the American Idol try-outs! Will the nightmare never end?
The mainstream media are curiously silent on the subject of zombism, but I understand there have been a number of similar attacks this summer. They’re a new fad that’s evolved from the “flash mob” phenomenon of a few years ago, in which a group of people quietly organize using the Internet, cell phones and other electronic means, show up simultaneously at the same public place, do something weird to attract attention, and then leave. While I always thought flash-mobbing sounded pretty pointless, the zombie-mob idea amuses me. The thought of badly made-up pretend-ghouls shambling around in broad daylight is so patently absurd that I imagine only the uptightest people could avoid smiling at the sight of them, and Lord knows we could all use a few smiles after reading the latest news from the Gulf Coast.
Incidentally, the American Idol producers were tipped off that this prank was in the offing, and they were ready for it. To their credit, they didn’t meet the zombie mob with stern-faced security guards and cease-and-desist orders, but rather with a fistful of release forms. That’s right, the new season of Idol is going to feature zombies as well as wanna-be pop-singers. Not that there’s a lot of difference, of course…
Writer Peter David tells a heartbreaking story today about a little boy who loves Spider-Man. He wears Spidey-branded shoes, plays the Spidey video game, owns the Spider-Man movies on DVD and regularly watches the animated series on the Cartoon Network. But he’s never read a Spider-Man comic. Even worse, he has no interest in reading one. Zero. Zip. The very source of the character and stories that he’s made the center of his young life holds as much appeal for seven-year-old Steven as sitting through a grad-school lecture on macroeconomics. (Not that a lecture on macroeconomics holds much appeal for anybody except the tiniest handful, but you get my point.)
It is stories like this that are propelling me down the road to premature Grumpy Old Man-hood.
I’m a shade too young to have owned the famous poster of Farrah Fawcett (or, as I believe she was known at the time, Farrah Fawcett-Majors). It was originally released in 1976, and I wouldn’t become interested in hanging my first girlie poster until sometime in the ’80s. Nevertheless, anyone who was alive and had their eyes open during the late ’70s surely knows that image of Farrah: the billowing mass of blond hair, the red swimsuit, the big, scary, “say cheese” smile. It’s an icon of its age, so much so that movie-set decorators often use it to help evoke that long-lost time when collars were wide and sex was just good, clean fun.
It turns out there’s an interesting story behind the poster, a tale of two brothers who started small, made a fortune, then lost everything, including each other. If you don’t have much on the agenda today and need something to while away your afternoon, check out this article about Mike and Ted Trikilis and their one time poster-publishing empire, Pro Arts Inc. It’s a pretty long piece, but I found it fascinating. It’s also rather sad, but then, many of the best stories are, aren’t they?
(For the record, the first pin-up to grace my bedroom wall was as much an icon of the ’80s as the Farah shot was of the ’70s, specifically that one of Heather Thomas in a pink bikini. Don’t know who Thomas is? She used to provide eye-candy for a TV series called The Fall Guy. Which, oddly enough, starred Farrah Fawcett’s ex-husband, Lee Majors. Hmm. There’s gotta be some kind of cosmic symmetry there, don’t you think?)
In retrospect, yesterday’s entry on the possibility of more Star Wars films got a little long and never came to as sharp a point as I hoped it would (much like the Star Wars prequels, actually), so my apologies if anyone was bored by my ramblings.
Perhaps it’s because I feel like I didn’t make much of a point that I’m still thinking about the subject this afternoon. Specifically, I’m wondering why it always seems so inevitable, so necessary, that any successful or much-loved story will give rise to sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. Why are we — by which I mean our society, producers and consumers alike — not content to just let things be? Why do we have to keep worrying at our favorite tales like an eight-year-old with a loose tooth? In short, why do we always want more of a story instead of simply being satisfied with a well-told ending?
James Lileks had some interesting thoughts this morning about film, specifically about the subjective nature of comedy, and how well (or how poorly) a film plays to an audience a couple of generations removed from the intended one.
He’s discussing one of the later Marx Brothers movies when he says:
