Month: January 2023 (Page 2 of 4)

I’m still doing the ink thing here, playing with the Winsor-Newtons that Mel got me for Christmas. This week I cheated a bit. What you see above is really a mixed-media piece. Using photos for reference that I took in Chicago last month, I came up with a drawing of one of the buildings you see while standing in the Loop, looking up and gawking.

However, after trying to use a brush with a ruler, sanity prevailed and I switched to a marker. I did try a bunch of stipling with the brush, but lost all that when I did an ink wash over the basic drawing. There’s also a little watercolor at play here, since I felt the brownstone building on the right side was too yellow and I haven’t mastered the art of mixing ink yet.

I was attempting to use some of the light and shadow techniques I learned imitating Hopper a year ago, but I don’t know how obvious they are in this piece because the composition is nothing like his. I think the end result is a weird mix of architectural drawing and hyper-realism.  The ink wash over stipling gave me an almost-photographic look, but my fingers were too shot to do the whole piece that way, so it sort of has one foot in each world.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Check back in with PopCult later today because we’ll have a second post to tell you all about a milestone program this afternoon on The AIR.

Above you see my friend Greg Brown, from Cotswold Collectibles, showing off and talking about the new Super Joe Unlimited line, which I told you about a few days ago. Greg has some more info, plus you get to see video of the new Super Joe Unlimited figures, and stick around to the end because he has news on exclusive figures that you’ll only be able to get from Cotswold Collectibles.

We continue with our chronological run through the video version of Radio Free Charleston with our first two-part episode. Now combined into one video clip, it’s the first Radio Free Charleston Halloween Special. In our first year we decided to do two episodes for Halloween, back-to-back on consecutive weeks (the first time we achieved that, by the way). At the end of the first show, your host (that’s me) gets killed. Part two is hosted by my ghost.

Music includes The Concept, half of The Pistol Whippers, Whistlepunk, Clownhole and Professor Mike. These shows also include Pentagram Flowerbox, animation by yours truly and Brian Young, short films by Frank Panucci and the first on-screen appearance of Mrs. opCulteer, Mel Larch. This began the tradition of RFC taking on overly-ambitious ideas for our Halloween Shows, and if you haven’t seen it, I hope you enjoy it.

The PopCulteer
January 20, 2023

So HBOMax’s latest attempt at rebooting the Scooby-Doo Franchise, Mindy Kaling’s Velma, may be one of the worst-reviewed things in the world in recent history. At Rotten Tomatoes, the critic’s score was below 50% positive, which is bad, but the audience score is only 6% and dropping, which is atrocious. If Velma was a publicly-traded company, NASDAQ would have delisted it by now.

It’s pretty hard to defend. The show fails on almost every level. If you could somehow harness the power created by a swing and a miss, Velma could conceivably power a small European country for over a year.

Let me be clear here, I am the farthest thing from a Scooby-Doo purist you could find. I was seven years and one month old when I excitedly tuned in to watch the debut of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! on CBS back in 1969. I’d seen ads for it in comic books, and wanted to see if it was any good.

I sorta liked it. It was funny and fast-paced and I was seven and didn’t know any better, so I made it a point to tune in the next Saturday to watch.

And I clearly remember, to this day, what happened. The second episode of the show had exactly the same plot as the first one. I was disgusted. It was the first time in my life that I can remember realizing that my intelligence had been insulted. They just crapped out the same story with a different villain and pretended it was all-new.

From that point on, I viewed Scooby-Doo with no small amount of contempt. I still watched to see if they had diverted from the plot (they hadn’t) and I watched The New Scooby-Doo Movies simply because of the guest stars, like Batman and Robin, Sonny and Cher and The Harlem Globetrotters, but even those still used the same old plot of somebody pretending to be a ghost or a monster to scare people away (belated spoiler alert there).

Over the enusing decades there were a few bright spots. One short season of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, with Vincent Price tagging along, was pretty good, as 1980s television animation goes. In 2010 Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated began a very well-done 52 episode run on Cartoon Network.  It was actually clever, engaging and smart–something that was not the norm for Scooby-Doo cartoons.  For the most part, however, Scooby-Doo always struck me as a pretty pedestrian concept that was never really that great. I’m always a bit surprised when somebody says they liked it.

So I’m not put off by the idea of a reboot. And I’m not bothered by the new diverse cast, or the adult-humor aspect of Velma.

I am put off by the gigantic pointlessness of it all.

It’s okay to change the race of three of the five lead characters. It could even be okay to totally omit the main character (there is no dog in Velma). What’s so mind-numbingly baffling is that they completely changed the personalities and interpersonal relationships of every single character.

There was no reason for them to bother with this reboot when the only thing they kept was the names of the four supporting characters. The characters retain none of their distinctive characteristics, aside from some visual trappings of the original show.

The adult humor aspect completely falls flat. The Venture Brothers did the “Adult Swim” take on the Scooby-Doo gang a decade and a half ago, played with it for eight minutes, and having exhausted every possible joke out of the idea, tossed it aside, never to revisit it.

Velma based a whole series on that flimsy premise.

There was no burning need for this. Mike Tyson Mysteries (with the same executive producer and animation studio) cranked up the level of absurdity and did this so much better without all the cringeworthy failed attempts at humor.

In this series, which purports to be an “origin story,” Velma, instead of being highly intelligent and competent, is a clueless, oblivious idiot who just happens to be of South Asian descent. Daphne is an Asian “mean girl” who apparently deals drugs on the side. Fred is a stereotypical rich White kid with sexual dysfunction. And Shaggy, called here by his real name, Norville, is a Black anti-drug crusading, super-intelligent school newspaper editor.

It’s like the Bizarro World Scooby-Doo, only it’s as lame as the original series was.

And even that would be forgiveable if the damned thing was remotely funny. The real sin of Velma is that it’s imitation cutting-edge. Every joke in the show has been done better, usually a decade or more ago, on The Venture Brothers, Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law, Robot Chicken or Rick and Morty.

And the execution of those familiar jokes is piss-poor. They crack so many humorless lines about how diverse the cast is that you wonder if the writers have some kind of FOX News anti-diversity agenda.

Velma is awful enough that it’d be more at home on FOX Nation than HBOMax. The show is poisoned by its self-referential, “Look how clever we are” comedic tone.

It’s not the worst adult-oriented cartoon ever made. Allen Gregory and El SuperBeasto still out-horrid it by miles, but it’s just so self-absorbed, derivative, unfunny…unnecessary that you really have to wonder how this show managed to survive Warner Brothers Discovery’s budget axe. Certainly, it would contribute more to the world if it were merely a tax write-off, locked away in a vault, never to be seen by human eyes. Even much of the animation design and style is ripped off from The Venture Brothers.

This is the kind of project that people pay to have removed from their IMDB profile.

So…I don’t really recommend it. I hope all the talented people involved quickly move on to other projects. I try not to be overly negative in this blog, but a person has their limits.

More Super Joe Unlimited

My second Super Joe Unlimited figure arrived, and I promised photos.  For the main story, check yesterday’s post.

The African American Super Joe Unlimited Commander, in the red jumpsuit.

An action pose, showing off the dark versions of the chestplate and helmet. And yes, those are Action Boy boots. I had them handy.

That’s this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for all our regular weekend features and fresh content every day!

The PopCult Toybox

I first told you about the revival of Super Joe last summer, with preview images of the prototypes that were shown at The Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo. Now the figures are available and they are pretty spectacular.

First a little history is in order.  In 1976, following a healthy 12-year run, Hasbro decided to pull the plug on the 12″ tall GI Joe. Originally a military toy, Hasbro shifted gears and found even more success by adding fuzzy hair and Kung-Fu grip to the first action figure, but by 1976, competition from Kenner’s Six Million Dollar Man and MEGO’s World’s Greatest Superheroes line, combined with rising production costs convinced Hasbro to try something drastic.

Hasbro ditched the “GI” and co-opted half of MEGO’s “Superheroes” and most importantly, reduced the size of the figure. Super Joe was a vague science fiction concept that did its best to look sort of like it was a licensed property. The main figure looked a bit like the Adventure Team GI Joe, minus the fuzzy hair, but he wore a Flash Gordonesque body suit and had cool science fiction weapons. He also had a collection of aliens to fight. He was taller than the MEGO figures, but noticably shorter than his predecessor. Super Joe was a great-looking line that could have had a longer life, had circumstances not dictated otherwise.

Super Joe made his debut in 1977,  just around the time when the country fell in love with Star Wars. Kids wanted Star Wars toys…and nothing else. Competing toy lines didn’t really have much of a chance.

Super Joe was also at a disadvantage because of his size. He was too big to be compatible with MEGO figures.  He was noticeably shorter than Mattel’s Big Jim (which was being discontinued in the US around this time anyway) and he was dwarfed by Kenner’s Steve Austin.

One other thing about Super Joe that didn’t help matters any is that Super Joe was one of the most fragile action figures ever made. His body was basically a scaled-down version of Hasbro’s “Muscle
Body,” which was introduced at the end of the GI Joe Adventure Team line. That body replaced the sturdy nylon joints of the original Joe with super-fragile rubber joints that were prone to decay. Since Super Joe was smaller, so too were his joints, which made them exceedingly fragile.

The figures that didn’t break with standard play, eventually fell apart from the joints rotting…often in less than five years.

Almost everybody who has a Super Joe in their collection today has had to restore him by replacing the joints, or just gluing him together in a static pose. Figures found in unopened boxes are usually just held together by their jumpsuits.

Hasbro tried to reuse those bodies for a toy line based on the show, Space Academy, but those were so poorly promoted that I didn’t even know they existed until about six years ago. After two years, Hasbro threw in the towel and cancelled the line. The next revival of GI Joe would be the Real American Hero concept, which was wildly successful, and saw our action hero shrunk to even smaller dimensions.

A last note is that nearly everything I know about Super Joe I learned from Super fan, Steve Stovall.  Steve puts on the Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo in Louisville, and invited me to his house a few years ago, where I saw the largest collection of Super Joe stuff I’ve ever seen.  Steve is very important to the latest chapter in Super Joe’s story.

Steve discovered that Hasbro trademark on “Super Joe” had expired, and he teamed up with White Elephant Toyz to secure the trademark and develop a new body design that would be compatible with the original Super Joe, but would fix the design flaws that made them so fragile. With that, Super Joe Unlimited was born, and the first figures are being shipped now.

White Elephant Toyz has alread sold out of their Caucasian figures, but still have kits to build their African-American figures, plus loads of accessories at their website. Steve’s eBay business, My Vintage Toys and Trains, has a limited number of assembled figures for sale at eBay. Steve will also have figures for sale at the Kentuckiana Winterfest Show on January 28. I’ll be telling you much more about this next week, and I’ll have plenty of photos and maybe video from the event after the fact.

With all that backstory out of the way, here’s a quick photo essay showing off Super Joe Unlimited. I snagged one from Steve so I could preview this before Winterfest. There may be additional photos of a figure I have coming in from White Elephant Toyz in tomorrow’s PopCulteer.

Here is Super Joe Unliimted, fully outfitted with some of his weapons.

Undressed so you can see the joints, which were all tight and sturdy.

The back view

A closer look at that great headsculpt.

Dressed and with a cool space dog tag. The only criticism I have is that the tailoring of his suit needs a little tweaking. The legs of his jumpsuit could stand to be a bit longer, so that it doesn’t restrict his range of motion.

Sometimes when you rush into doing a photo shoot, you do stupid things, like putting on the chestpiece backwards.

Just a few of the cool accessories. One note on the belt. It’s very thick and sturdy, so it might be more pliable soaked in warm water or tightened up in a clamp before you use it. This one won’t break, like the originals did.

Is that helmet cool or what?

A height comparison: MEGO on the left, Super Joe Unlimited in the middle, and Playing Mantis’ Kid Action (repro Action Boy) on the right. The Ideal Action Boy is taller, so keep that in mind.

Super Joe Unlimited and Kid Action are about the same height, but the body proportions don’t match.

The first batch of Super Joe Unlimited headsculpts, swiped from their Facebook page. More are on the way.

Mike Power has joined the Super Joe Unlimited team, and will be available at Winterfest next week.

We are smack dab in the middle of Winter but there’s plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and the surrounding area this weekend.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Chet Lowther. Saturday Brandon Costello serenades the crowd at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/Coffee Shop/Art Gallery.

The Empty Glass has some great stuff through the week to tell you about.  From 9 PM to 11 PM Wednesday, Ginger Wix will be at the World Famous Empty Glass. Thursday from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin play fiddle and piano and sing swing and early jazz standards (details below). Each week they donate their tips to a local nonprofit.  Friday from 5 PM to 8 PM Timmy “Courts and Friends hold down the fort at the Glass. Sunday The Carpenter Ants host the Post Mountain Stage jam. Next week they’ll have an open mic Monday night, and Songwriter Showcase on Tuesday. Weekend shows that have graphics are listed among the images below.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. In fact, it’s surging again. Many people who have very good reasons are still wearing masks, and many of us, understandably, are still nervous about being in crowds, masked or not. Be kind and understanding  while you’re out.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the rest of this week, roughly in order.

It’s hard to believe we’re already well into 2023, so I guess we all have to start dressing like Zardoz now.

Despite that, it is cool that we’re three Tuesdays into the new year on The AIR  and that means it’s Radio Free Charleston time, and we’re back with another new three-hour episode of Radio Free Charleston. You simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

We have three full hours of music, much of it new, local and not, at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.   This week our latest Radio Free Charleston has killer new tunes from Jeremy Short, Sierra Ferrell, The Switch and more, plus we have a nearly hour-long megamix of David Bowie tunes, as a sort of tardy birthday salute.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store. Live links will take you to the artist’s page, but I’m only doing local and indie artists this week, ‘coz it’s a holiday as I write this and I’m lazy…

RFC V5 115

hour one
The Switch “Rock Will Survive”
Sierra Ferrell “In Dreams (fast version)”
Jeremy Short “Falling Into A Trance”
Robert Fripp and Daryl Hall “North Star”
Brandon Costello “She Is A Stone”
Blue Twisted Steel “Tar and Feather”
John Lennon “Starting Over (demo)”
Matt Berry “Blues Inside Me”
Nixon Black “Giving Up Everything But Hope”
The Long Lost Somethins “I Don’t Want To Be An Addict”
Payback’s a Bitch “Liar, Liar”
Pretty Things “Come See Me”
The Green Pajamas “Six Minutes In Heaven”
Iggy Pop “The Regency”

hour two
Byzantine “Sirens”
The Company Stores “Blue Tide”
Renaissance “The Flood At Lyons”
Mike Batt & Friends “The Light On The Edge Of The World”
Stark Raven “Riding A Wave”
Tautologic “Coltrane Supermarket”
Ann Magnuson “I’m A Man”
Joseph Hale “My World”
Simple Minds “Wondertime”
Todd Rundgren with Sparks “Your Fandango”
Hugh Cornwell “Moments of Madness”
Buni Muni “Love Spell”
Todd Burge “I Hope Fred Doesn’t Get Rabies”

hour three
David Bowie Megamix

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

After RFC, stick around for encores of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.  At 3 PM we have two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.

Continuing with our foray into using Winsor & Newton inks, this week I did a cityscape, framed by a mall entrance, based on several blurry photos I took on my phone during a trip to Chicago last month.

This time I worked with blue and black ink, and used a lot of straight edge guidance for the arcitectural elements and some of the cross hatching. Like last week, while the bulk of the work here was done with Winsor & Newton inks, I did use a marker for some of the detailed cross hatching and linework.

I’ll be posting more duo-color pieces in the coming weeks. Probably until I run out of ink.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a recent edition of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page.

On Psychedelic Shack, Nigel Pye offers up an hour-long mixtape of Psychedelic Music that, on this show,  kicks off with the semi-obscure band, Fox.

Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM.

On a classic Prognosis, Herman Linte presents his usual assortment of prog-rock classics mixed with new tracks, and he dedicated this show to Genesis, after Peter Gabriel left the band.

You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM.

Tonight at 9 PM we bring you an overnight marathon of Beatles Blast, hosted by yours truly. This week, following last week’s marathon, we’ll bring you the remaining half of the twenty episodes devoted to “The Lost Beatles Tapes.”

Guitar legend Jeff Beck passed away a few days ago, and I can think of no better way to pay tribute to the man than to post him making his magical music live in concert. Here we see Beck, recorded at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, in November, 2007, accompanied by Jason Rebello on keyboards, Vinnie Colaiuta on drums and Tal Wilkenfeld on bass. The version of “A Day in the Life” featured on the live album release of this show is legendary and was awarded a Grammy for Best Instrumental Rock performance.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Beck.

This week we have an early episode of Radio Free Charleston, originally posted in September, 2006, which is notable because this is the first time it’s ever been posted here in PopCult since we briefly had it embedded in a post in 2009 (I’ll be restoring that post soon).

There is no reason for this other than an oversight on my part.

See, over ten years ago, I began remastering old episodes of the RFC video show and uploading them to YouTube because MySpace, where I had an RFC Archives page, was becoming more and more unreliable.  So I re-rendered the shows and uploaded a bunch of them to YouTube, and then started posting them in the weekly feature that you’re reading now.

Last week I started presenting the shows in chronological order again,  posting the first five episodes, and in the process I made a surprising discovery:  I’d never gotten around to posting our sixth episode here, even though it’s been on YouTube for a decade.

Somehow, it got lost in the sauce, and we skipped over it. Making matters worse, this was a very early show, from before we had the ability to permanently embed the show in the blog. The original production notes have a now-dead link to the page at the Charleston Gazette that briefly held the video, but that was wiped from the servers a long, long time ago.

Unless you’re one of the couple dozen folks or so who have stumbled onto the YouTube clip in the last decade,  you haven’t been able to see this episode of the show for over fourteen years. This is not one of the four “lost” episodes, but due to my faulty memory, it’s making its first appearance as “The RFC Flashback.”

This is the sixth episode of Radio Free Charleston, originally posted at Gazz TV on September 28, 2006. Show number six cranked up the hyperactivitization level a bit as we brought viewers our loudest band at that time, Professor Mike, and the mysterious musical cabal known as Two Watts Of Power.

Episode Six was titled “Chris Hero Shirt,” named after Chris Hero, at the time, the reigning Heavyweight Champion of IWA East Coast. Nowadays, Chris Hero is an indie wrestling shaman, having spent years in WWE’s NXT federation under a different name. Chris later appeared on RFC in the flesh.

GI Joe returned to Radio Free Charleston in this episode. You can almost see an Action Marine sitting astride Bob Dobbs’ head in the background of Professor Mike’s performance. You can also check out an Adventure Team Astronaut menacing The Red Baron.

The host segments, shot by RFC Big Shot, Brian Young, were recorded on the roof of an unnamed parking building in Kanawha City. As I mentioned, our musical guests were Two Watts of Power and Professor Mike.  We had a fake movie trailer by The No Pants Players, and a short film and repurposed animation by Frank Panucci.

My brother, Frank, is also one of the members of Two Watts of Power and created the music video we brought you.  Professor Mike was recorded at the much-missed LiveMix Studio. The No Pants Players, I think, were recorded at The Labelle Theater, before one of their shows.

It’s a pretty wild time capsule of Charleston’s cross-pollinated music/comedy/wrestling scene from 2006. It’s nice that people can see this once-missing artifact. Next week in The RFC Flashback, we’ll bring you our two-part Halloween 2006 shows, edited into one big RFC.

Another historical note: I actually made a trailer for this episode of the show, and I was able to embed it in this blog (back then YouTube clips were limited to under ten minutes), and it was my VERY FIRST video ever on YouTube. Check it out…