Rudy Panucci On Pop Culture

Month: July 2014 (Page 2 of 4)

Stuff To Do Thursday

Todd Burge, photo by Amos Perrone

Todd Burge, photo by Amos Perrone

Thursday at 7 PM at Parkersburg City Park, it’s a state treasure, singer/songwriter Todd Burge, live in concert. We  just featured Todd on RFC 199, from FestivALL, but here’s a nice chance to catch him live, if you’re up in the Parkersburg area. I’m guessing this is free (guys, you need to mention details like this on your event pages). It’s at the bandshell, but in case of rain, the show moves to the horseshoe pit.

At the Empty Glass it’s Throwback Thursday with a night of retro stuff, including an acoustic set from Pantry and DJ-ing by Chroma. No cover charge. It all goes down at 10 PM.

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The PopCult Toybox: They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To

santas-workshopYour Popculteer is off on a secret mission, so instead of cool toy reviews or neat breaking news, we’re bringing you vintage video of three titans of the toy world. You will see how Lionel Trains were made in the 1950s. Then you will see how Mattel made their Jack-in-the-Box toys around the same time. Finally, we answer the question that has haunted mankind for decades…Just exactly how did they make the Betsy Wetsy doll?

The RFC MINI SHOW Starring Dina Hornbaker

Image3This week the RFC MINI SHOW shines its spotlight on Dina Hornbaker, who made her Radio Free Charleston debut back on episode 196, last March. Dina is a very talented singer/songwriter who just moved back to Charleston last year and has become a star of the open mic scene in town.

This week’s RFC MINI SHOW brings you three songs performed by Dina just last week at the Early Open Mic at Taylor Books. The RFC Crew just happened to be there armed with cameras and we decided to snag Dina’s first three-song set before deadline duties forced us to make a hasty retreat.This was true guerilla filmmaking because we forgot to tell anyone we were recording and had to ask permission afterward.

You’ll hear Dina doing a Summertime song with nods to Sam Cooke and George Gershwin, as well as the song that she performed on RFC 196, “Mountain Mama.” We wrap up the show with a lovely song that does not yet have a title. We’d like to thank Dina for allowing us to bring you this terrific little work-in-progress.

The Taylor Books Early Open Mic is developing into quite an eclectic scene. Keep checking PopCult for details on when the next one is coming up. The video in this episode may seem a little blocky, but that’s entirely due to your producer/director/host screwing up something while rendering it. So pretend it was done on purpose.

Monday Morning Art: Sunny Tower Day

sky 003

This week’s art is a digital painting composed of fragments of other digital paintings that I had laying around on the hard drive. It’s an exercise in throwing a few random components together to make a piece of art because Monday Morning rolled around too fast while I was recovering from a week of heavy deadline juggling and didn’t have enough time to put much effort into it. I’ve been posting a new piece of original art almost every Monday since March, 2006. They can’t all be winners.

Click to enlarge!

Sunday Evening Video: Not Safe For Work Laugh-In

laugh-in-title-card_thumbLet’s go back to the iconic 1960s comedy bonanza known as “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.” It was a major breakthrough in television comedy and doesn’t really get enough credit for inspiring “Saturday Night Live.”  This show launched the careers of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and boasted a ton of A-List Hollywood stars as guests.

Instead of looking at the funny stuff that made it to the air, how about we look at the funnier stuff that didn’t get past the censors? You’ll get to hear rude words, very rude words, celebrity guests blowing their lines and professional comedians trying their best to crack each other up.

Be warned that the language is definitely not safe for work, and these outtakes are much funnier than most of what made it to the air.

Here’s another batch, with just a little overlap…

 

 

RFC Flashback: Triple Play

This week we’re going to ramp up our game of catch up and bring you three classic episodes of Radio Free Charleston. These are not remastered, but instead are the edited versions that were posted to MySpace four or five years ago. Recently, MySpace brought back all the videos that they had removed from public display and we’re going to use those clips to fill in the gaps for videos that we haven’t remastered yet. This week we’re posting episodes 20, 22 and 25. Next week we’ll bring you three more of these.

Episode Twenty features music from Josh Buskirk plus Whistlepunk with Karen Allen of Tofujitsu on lead vocals. This show will eventually be remastered with the original animation restored, but this edited version has replacement stuff. From May, 2007. Read the production notes HERE.

RFC 20: "Carmen Shirt" from RFC Archives on Myspace.

Next up it’s episode 22, with tons of cool stuff. We have a Voices of Anatole video directed by Holly Siders, the first appearance of Captain Crash and The Beauty Queen when they were called “Aurora,” plus The No Pants Players eat a watermelon and Frank Panucci presents his classic cartoon, “No Running.” From June 2007. Production notes are HERE.

RFC 22" Shark Boy Shirt from RFC Archives on Myspace.

Finally, we have episode 25, which brings you music from The Amazing Delores and Joe Slack, plus we have scenes from Frank Panucci’s “Repurkussionz,” “Brokeback Coalmine,” a re-working/butchering of a short film by Danny Boyd and Steve Gilliland and part of Melanie Larch’s coverage of FestivALL 2007. From August of that year. Production notes are HERE.

RFC 25 from RFC Archives on Myspace.

Including these three episodes, the RFC Archive Blog now has every episode of Radio Free Charleston and The RFC MINI SHOW dating back to episode 89, in December 2009, and all of our first 25 episodes from 2006 and 2007.  We have around 35 shows missing from 2007 to 2009, but we’re working on getting those up and running as soon as possible.

 

 

Radio Free Charleston Update Plus Stuff To Do

2013 rfc logo shot 001The PopCulteer
July 18, 2014

What’s up with RFC

You may have noticed that the most recent full-length episode of Radio Free Charleston, was number 199. That means we have a milestone coming up. To be honest, it’s been a bit of a millstone, too. I want do do something special to mark our 200th episode as a video entity. Last year I panicked a little when I realized that episode 200 was rapidly approaching and I wasn’t ready yet.

So, in order to be lazy and put off the inevitable, I created The RFC MINI SHOW to fill in what would become longer gaps between our full-length episodes. That’s turned out great, with our shorter shows focusing on single bands or acts and the longer shows getting just a bit longer. The irony of reducing my workload by beginning production and hosting duties on a second show is not lost on me.

But now I can’t really delay episode 200 any longer.

The original RFC logo from 1989

The original RFC logo from 1989

Actually, I can. Because I have special plans for this show, I’m going to take longer to put it together. I plan to drop RFC 200 in September, which coincidentally marks 25 years since the debut of Radio Free Charleston on the radio.

We have a lot of surprises planned that will all come together with a cosmic alignment of brobdinganarian proportions. In the meantime, get ready for several week’s of RFC MINI SHOWs to keep you from forgetting that we exist. Continue reading

DC Comics Destroys The World

The PopCult Bookshelf

61QWGbI2zPLShowcase Presents
The Great Disaster
Featuring The Atomic Knights
Written and drawn by Various
DC Comics
ISBN: 978-1-4012-4290-9
$19.99

This is one of those niche comic book collections that seems amazing in that it was even published. Presented here in glorious black and white are 570 pages of post apocalyptic comic book stories published by DC Comics between 1960 and 1983.

In DC’s self published fan magazine, “The Amazing World of DC Comics,” back in 1976, Paul Levitz (who would go on to become the president and publisher of DC Comics) wrote an article that tied together several threads of DC Comics science fiction stories and showed how the early 1960’s adventures of The Atomic Knights could be tied to then current DC series “Hercules Unbound” and Jack Kirby’s classic, “Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth.” He created a cool chronology of “Earth: After Disaster.” Continue reading

Stuff To Do Thursday: Comedy at Mojo’s

It’s a special night as Mojo’s Sportsbar breaks from the open mic format to bring in Atlanta-based comedian, Laura Lewis, to headline a night of top-notch comedy, hosted by Ken Flippin. In addition to Lewis, you will be treated to sets by the area’s top comedians, Sheila Kerr, Annie Lane, Andy Frampton, Patrick Felton and featured act, Josh Weeks. The show kicks off at Mojo’s at 8 PM, and this week there is a five-dollar cover charge. 

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The PopCult Toybox: Figure Reviews

Img_1334Over the past few months your PopCulteer has been bouncing around the nation, visiting several cool toy shows, conventions and stores, and as such, the rooms here at Stately Radio Free Charleston Manor are filled with tons of cool new items that I have yet to review.

The plan is to play catch-up over the next few weeks with some capsule reviews of the coolness what has passed through these halls. This week we’re going to check out a couple of really cool figures that we picked up at MEGO Meet last month, and we’ll also look at one of the new “ReAction” figures from Funko.

First up we have “Henshin X” a line of figures inspired by the legendary Henshin Cyborgs, a Japanese toy line from the 1970s that eventually became known in America as The Micronauts. Cast A Way Toys recently developed a new MEGO-scale body in conjunction with ZICA Toys (I wrote about the Kickstarter campaign HERE), and it is deployed to wonderful effect here. Continue reading

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