Reference: Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System: The First 100 Missions, Dennis R Jenkins.
Sorry to be late but I was just thinking about the movie Yesterday, as one will, and pondering in that universe what’s the last Beatles song the guy there would bring into his Beatles-less world. I’m feeling like “Doctor Robert” hits that sweet spot of being something a casual fan might know well enough to reconstruct from scratch. Anyway, no, I’ve never had any reason to think I’m not basically neurotypical, why do you ask?
The past couple months in Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) has seen a lot of Jungle Patrol head Colonel Worubu looking over the Unknown Commander’s new office. This is justified by the import of the thing. Tony DePaul is trying to revise a big part of Phantom Pholklore. Up to now, The Phantom has given his orders to the Jungle Patrol by orders left in a safe, signalled by a light above the door. Now, The Phantom, and DePaul, want the Unknown Commander to have new ways to be “seen” by his forces. If the big change doesn’t get screen time to make an impression and show why this is more interesting it doesn’t get weight; compare the hilarious failure of the multicolored Daleks that one Doctor Who. The bigger panels and looser story of a Sunday continuity give time to luxuriate in this.
That’s my interpretation, anyway; you can have others and DePaul is certainly willing to discuss his own ideas of why he writes what he does. Anyway, if you’re looking for recaps of the weekday plot, or for a more up-to-date Sundays recap and it’s after about July 2024, try this link. If those don’t work try some other links. Something will turn up. Back to Jungle Patrol Headquarters, now:
The Unknown Commander’s office renovations were freshly done, when I last checked in. And then we saw The Ghost Who Rehearses going over a script with Diana.
Back at Jungle Patrol Headquarters, Colonel Worubu and Captain Weeks can’t resist the temptation to see the Unknown Commander’s office. Especially now that there’s personal possessions in it. We spend a lot of time in this, examining things brought from the treasure rooms — sextants and battle flags and Maltese Falconses and such. It deeply impresses the Colonel and the Captain.
Finally, The Phantom breaks silence, speaking over the hidden speakers to Worubu and Weeks. His declaration: when John X gets back, bring him to the Unknown Commander’s office. X’s most recent report is inadequate. Also, turn the lights out when you leave.
The Phantom then returns to Jungle Patrol headquarters, in his guise as John X. He had, as John X, spread the story he thought the Unknown Commander was dead and was supposedly checking the post office box in Mawitaan for orders. Worubu brings John X in and they hear … nothing.
After some of the indignities of age we swerve into dog medicine in Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D., next week. Uh … there is pet endangerment in the current storyline but, c’mon, it’s Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan. Everything’s going to be okay, and pretty fast.
Happy March! This year I didn’t forget about the seasonal fun of pitting things against other things!
Mulberries
The Case For: Bushes keep monkeys, weasels amused for indefinite times.
The Case Against: What is a ‘mul’?
The 1931 Movie Of _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_
The Case For: Four of the seven credited actors have last names all starting with ‘H’ and two have first names starting ‘H’.
The Case Against: Everyone in the film says his name as “gee-kill”.
And I just put that in the subject line because I don’t want people to think I’m someone who thinks society doesn’t have problems. Oh, I’d love to say we did, or didn’t, and mean it, or mean we didn’t it, but without even trying I can think of four or even five problems society has and doesn’t look ready to get rid of anytime soon. I mean only to point out where there’s one we don’t have. And that is: whatever else might be going wrong, they never did make The Emoji Movie 2: Emojier Movierer.
Note to self: cancel this post if it turns out they did make The Emoji Movie 2 whatever its subtitle, even if it were Emojiish Movielesser.
So I’ve been watching Soylent Green, which I assume hasn’t been made into a new streaming media platform’s centerpiece show yet but I could be wrong, and I’m stuck thinking: wow, what a surveillance-free dystopia those people get to live in! Probably not the intended takeaway from the movie, which was instead “oh look at that cool roundy video game cabinet they have, it doesn’t look like an angry car radiator at all!”.
Reference: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard Wrangham.
It had to be a fancy rat because you know everyone on the show would pronounce it with this long, wavering emphasis, like, “FaaAAAAAAncy” and it would be so funny by the end of the episode.
Today’s Popeye and Son is the lone entry written by Charles M Howell, IV. Howell’s had a pretty long writing history, starting with the Filmation Tom and Jerry Cartoon Show and not done yet; he’s got a credit in 2022 for Octonauts. Along the way are fourteen Tiny Toon Adventures, eleven Animaniacs, and forty Pinky and the Brain credits (as staff writer). Plus some Snorks and something called The 7D. Also one of those Darkwing Duck episodes with the mind-controlling alien space hats. And it’s a story about making a movie; so Surf Movie is sure to land some good solid jokes, right?
Before we get into that, a reminder that you can find all my recaps and discussions of Popeye and Son at this link, with new essays added every week until I run out of show to watch. After that, who knows what I’ll do?
The plot: movie director Berkely Busby is coming to town! And the Sweethavenite he picks out for stardom is Junior. Can the production overcome Junior’s indifference to movie stardom, Bluto sabotaging the production to promote Tank instead, and trying to do a shoot on the beach with what seems to be almost no script or preproduction work? No. Bluto’s attempt to commandeer a giant lobster prop sets disaster going and while Junior and Popeye can eat spinach and make things better, the movie retools around Eugene the Jeep.
This episode got me to wondering: Muskmellen’s? Did they make that up for the show? Or is that the canonical name of the Thimble Theatre greengrocer? Does it say ominous things about the cartoon that I’m wondering that? I’d have to judge that as neutral. You’ve met me. My brain does this kind of stupid thing all the time.
Granting that. This isn’t a good episode. There are good moments, such as Olive holding a wall of paper bags when she gets the news about the movie. And finally poking her head out the center, and running off sending people spinning in place, and running back to catch the not-yet-fallen bags. Good cartoony concept, pretty well animated, diminished only by that 80s cartoon style I mentioned where stuff doesn’t quite touch. And there is a good comic idea circled by director Berkely Busby explaining how this isn’t a musical, this is a serious drama, and it’s some vaguely nonsense about a superhero surfer fighting aliens with giant robot(?) lobsters. That thread doesn’t have a real punch line, but it should be good for the characters to be funny.
That doesn’t happen, and I blame Junior. Not so much that he doesn’t want or seem to know why he’s there. You can get a lot of great stuff out of the protagonist who thinks he’s there by some mistake. And it’s nice of him that he isn’t trying to get out of the acting. But he doesn’t want to be there, he doesn’t want to not be there, could he at least say something funny along the way? When a Robert Benchley character or a Woody Allen character from (say) Sleeper or Bananas or, heck, even Chance Gardener is lost in the scene they have some reaction.
I dislike being negative, at least when I can’t be creative or bombastic about it. This episode, I completely forgot between when I first watched it last Monday and when I re-watched on Friday. I didn’t get that with too many of those Jack Kinney shorts.
Popping across my desk recently was a curious thing titled Popeye The Sailor – New Trailer. It’s a live-action trailer, put together by some company I never heard of before, and it’s … well, easier to just share the three minutes twenty seconds of it with you.
Your question and mine: is this a bit? And I can’t tell you. There’s elements of the short that look like a spoof of, oh yeah, if they made a Popeye movie today it’d be all somber and grim and stuff. I mean, “AN EYE FOR AN EYE”? On the other hand, this gets into stuff that only makes sense as a labor of love. Castor Oyl, for example, who’s hardly the most obscure character to a Popeye-lover, but who no normal person alive has heard of. Dressing Bluto to match his Sindbad the Sailor look. The Goons. They’re great and I can’t get enough of them, but if you surveyed people to name stuff from the Popeye universe, they’re not making the top eight. (My bet: Popeye, spinach, Olive Oyl, Bluto/Brutus, Wimpy, Swee’Pea, pipe, Poopdeck Pappy. In about that order.) I also like the design for the Goon we see; I’m curious about the decision to make them menaces, but the Goons doing a face-turn is pretty much what they did for the comic strip and cartoons.
There might be more about their deal on their Instagram, linked from the YouTube page. But I haven’t got an Instagram account, so can’t see any of it.
Their YouTube channel also has this short, that to my tastes doesn’t quite get the right balance between real menace and cartoony exaggeration. Your tastes might differ, though. You can see that at:
This short is from eleven years ago. The channel has some other shorts, of more clear fan film whimsy to them. Their Popeye movie has had trailers and teasers going back years, though, so I don’t know how seriously to take the whole effort in.
You ever think about how the world would have been different if the original film The Exorcist hadn’t used Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells but had instead gone with Frank Mills’s Music Box Dancer? I mean besides the movie having to wait until 1979 to come out. That would have taken a lot of patience on everybody’s parts.
595.
Note: it will never be less than 595 as long as the present day is the 2nd of September, 2023. Don’t get fooled!
Reference: War With The Newts, Karel Čapek.
Has it been four years already? Probably I just missed an airing. TCM, United States feed, is scheduled to show the 1931 film Skippy, Friday at 9:45 pm Eastern/Pacific. It’s based on Percy Crosby’s Skippy, maybe the most influential comic strip you never heard of. But every comic strip that takes childhood seriously, as something you have actual emotions about, follows where Skippy led, either directly or through Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.
I’ve written about the movie before, so I’ll point you to that rather than rewrite words that were okay enough. I will pass along the warning that when the story finally kicks in, it includes an animal’s death. If you want to avoid that, but still experience the film, watch up to the point where Skippy and his friend Sooky put on a show and then trust me.
Also, TCM’s page about the movie includes several good-length clips and an old Ben Mankiewicz introduction to the film. If you like all that, there’s an hour and 25 minutes of it in total. There’s also a sequel, Sooky, that I haven’t ever seen; I don’t know whether it’s ever run on TCM. I may have missed an airing.
I don’t remember why I was looking up the technically existant movie The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, but the Internet Movie Database decided to go and obliterate my ability to think about it by posing this question:
I’m not sure what are all the things someone might need to know about The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, but I suppose if this is the most important thing you don’t know about it, you’ve understood the movie pretty well. You can probably move on to understanding other movies, like Americathon or maybe that movie from like 1970 where a town is trying to give up smoking for a month and Bob Newhart and Bob and Ray are in it somehow? I haven’t seen it, but it doesn’t sound good. Maybe I need to learn more about it.
Sorry, I was just struck by how when the movie The Right Stuff came out, it was about events that happened from 36 and 20 years before. If you were to make a movie with the same premise today it would be about events that happend from 76 to 60 years before. And these numbers are only going to increase as we go into the future, or decrease as we go into the past.
So in the Star Wars galaxy universe, there are a lot of people. Even more when you count the people who aren’t on-screen in one of the movies unless you zoom way in on one of the stars. So there have to be lots of people who just happen to have names like those of Our Heroes. Probability tells us there’ve got to be, like, dozens of people who are always explaining, “Yes, I’m Han Solo and yes, I’m a smuggler who has never been shown to complete a single smuggle job, but I’m not that Han Solo. Way different guy.”
And for all the people who share a name and a job with the famous ones, how about the people who don’t? I’m thinking here of the poor guy just working some boring office job who has to keep saying, “Why should I change my name away from Kylo Ren? He’s the one who sucks. And yes, thank you, I know about the Leia Organa working up in Solenoid Accounting. We don’t have anything in common besides that coincidence and we’ve already talked about that, thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, these THX Droid forms aren’t going to fill themselves out. OK, they are going to fill themselves out, but it’s my job to make sure nothing stops them from doing that.” I guess we all have our burdens right up until someone blows up the planet and of course it’s after the Strategic and Long-Range All-Day Standup Scrum.
Sorry, I’ve been distracted all day by trying to think of the names of actors who played James Bond in the movies and somehow my brain. Thinking of things was a popular pastime before the Internet and I recommend it as a way to get yourself to daft corners. For example, right now, my brain wants to insist there was a stretch where Bond was portrayed by Roger Daltrey, which seems improbable but interesting.
Reference: Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds In The Third Great Age Of Discovery, Stephen J Pyne.
I got to thinking about Fly Me To The Moon, the 2007 computer-animated film about how heroic American flies kept Soviet flies from sabotaging Apollo 11. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about it, although I still haven’t seen it. It’s just that back in September 2020 I noticed some of the Internet Movie Database goofs recorded for the film. checked again and it seems like there are more goofs recorded now. Yet how could that be? Who is going in to a movie from 2007 and sneaking new errors into it? For that matter, who went and snuck into my old article and claimed it was a film from 2008 when the Internet Movie Database says it was 2007?
Anyway just so we can track the progress of whoever it is adding errors to the movie for some reason all these years later, the Internet Movie Database currently lists eleven goofs. This is less than half the number of goofs in The Third Man, so I guess we know who the craftsmen among filmmakers are here.
I owe my love thanks for noticing this. Turner Classic Movies is running a series of Dick Tracy movies from the 40s today, from 8 pm Eastern. None of them are long and the last of them has Boris Karloff so you won’t be sorry spending time there, at least. And it may help you catch up on obscure references for the daily comic strip.
But the interesting thing to me is what’s listed for 10:30 pm Eastern. It’s titled Dick Tracy Special: Tracy Zooms In. TCM’s web site offers no information about what it is and the page for it pretends there is no such thing. What it appears to be is a thing Warren Beatty does every several years, doing a performance as Dick Tracy, in order to retain the movie rights. So I don’t know what to expect other than “a thing that keeps a contract option alive”, which we’ve always known as our best entertainment value.
I don’t really have the time to go to Hollywood and pitch a script or write it up or anything so if someone could help me out how does this sound to them: movie where the person making a new version of 18 Again wakes up in the body of a person who’s making a new version of Vice-Versa? And so they both go and try to meet up and figure out how to undo this, but they find out that actually one of them is in the body of someone they didn’t know was working on making a new version of Freaky Friday? It’ll be something kind of but not exactly like something we’ve enjoyed enough before!
Reference: The Triumph Of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life, I B Cohen.
But in the shower this morning I realized that in all probability, they went ahead and turned fondly-remembered-but-not-rewatched TV show Mister Ed into a movie that even the people who worked on it don’t remember ever seeing. There’s an excellent chance they made a sequel where Mister Ed goes to New York or the Olympics or something too. What else are they getting up to while we’re paying attention to other stuff?
Reference: A Voyage Long And Strange: Rediscovering The New World, Tony Horwitz.
So I thought that bonkers word from Pepsi the Pepsi-Cola Cop I shared the other day was just some amusing odd little set of comic strip advertisements. And then I ran across a startling video apparently from 1946, in Technicolor:
Who would have imagined that the adventures of these very round cops gain astounding powers of limited-animation by drinking soda pop as though it were spinach? Also from being injected by Horse Drugs? Of many odd things that exist, this is among them.
So the news is that King Features has is developing an animated feature based on Slylock Fox. I don’t know how this is going to work, but I’m looking forward to it starting off with a short cartoon and asking us which six jokes got changed for the replay.
Reference: Tulipomania: The Story Of The World’s Most Coveted Flower And The Extraordinary Passions It Aroused, Mike Dash.
You may question my use of the time machine to go back and make an episode were SCTV’s Movie of the Week is the Ken Russell remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but what alternative would do so much to make the world a more wonderful place?
Note: Barry Lyndon is not listed as a 17th century movie; it is set in the 18th century.
Reference: The Secret Life Of Bletchley Park, Sinclair McKay.
I don’t envy the people working on the Columbo prequel, other than that I assume they’re getting money for work. But they have to be glad of one thing. Any time someone complains about how we don’t need to know Columbo’s origin story, we know how he turns out, they can just glare intently back and point to the name of the intellectual property. It’s something the poor folks doing the reboot of Cool Million can’t fall back on.
So here in the Northern Hemisphere we’re looking at the summer solstice tomorrow, or today if you’re reading this at the right time, or sometime in the past if you’re reading it after that. Anyway. Please remember that while this is the longest day of the year, it is not the day when sunset comes the latest in the year. This phenomenon may seem confusing if you don’t know this piece of information: Astronomers have always hated drive-in movie operators, and vice-versa. I hope this clears matters up for you.
Another Blog, Meanwhile 