Rudy Panucci On Pop Culture

Month: February 2023 (Page 2 of 4)

Sunday Evening Video: They Might Be Giants Again

The Giants in a photo swiped from American Songwriter

They Might Be Giants have been one of my favorite bands for nearly forty years, but I haven’t featured them much here in PopCult.  If that seems familiar, it’s because I wrote those words when I first featured this video in this spot more than eight years ago.

Once again, here’s the band in concert at The Kennedy Center. This show was recorded October 2, 2010, and captures Johns, Flansburgh and Linnel, with their full back-up band. If you think I’m simply recycling this Sunday Evening Video because I have other plans this weekend and needed to write this post in advance…that’s very astute of you. However, it’s a damned good show.

One of the most prolific bands on the face of the Earth, TMBG are still plugging away at it.

One of the coolest things about the original broadcast radio incarnation of Radio Free Charleston was that, alongside the great local music, I also played alternative and progressive music. One night I played TMBG doing their song “Youth Culture Killed My Dog,” which may have led to the band being booked on Mountain Stage a year later.

The RFC Flashback: Episode Twelve

From the last week of 2006, this week our trip through the video version of Radio Free Charleston brings you what may be our most pointless episode.

With the benefit of sixteen years worth of hindsight, and over 400 additional musical guests, the idea of doing a “best-of” episode of the show when we only had eleven episodes in the can seems a little silly, but that’s what we did with RFC #12, “Radio Free Charleston Shirt.”  Its eighteen minutes bring you highlights from every musical act and most of the animated shorts from our first year.

The production notes from December 29, 2006 explain that this was “Plan B,” and that the original idea for the show was for it to be a jam session held at LiveMix Studio, pulled together into a coherent show overnight and posted quick. It’s the kind of thing I do in my sleep now, but at the time it was extremely ambitious since I barely knew how to edit video on the PC. I was spared the effort when hardly anyone showed up to play music, and the one person who did asked us not to use his song because it wasn’t finished yet. You will see a little bit of footage I shot wandering aimlessly around LiveMix during what turned out to be a very nice music-free gathering.

This episode is historically important because it marks the first time we immortalized the RFC Big Shots in the credits. We also have a lovely accapella rendition of “Auld Lang Syne” by our resident diva and Big Shot, Melanie Larch. That’s followed by two goofy MIDI versions by me. It’s amusing now to see how far we came since our first dozen shows seven years ago. It’s also bittersweet to remember how cool LiveMix Studio was.

A Gathering Storm

The PopCulteer
February 17, 2023

MagicCon, the huge convention devoted to Hasbro’s Magic: The Gathering, starts today in Philadelphia. MTG is a huge pop culture phenomenon. Just yesterday Hasbro announced that MTG is their first brand to gross a billion dollars in one year in the company’s history. With over ten million avid players and 30 years of history, Magic: The Gathering is a generational game-changer, one that seems to have displaced fraternal lodges as the primary “get-out-of-the-house” social activity for many young people.

Just look at our local area. Two of the largest local Moose lodges, in Charleston and Nitro, have closed in recent years, while places to play collectible card games are springing up all over the place.

There is no denying that Magic: The Gathering is a big part of many people’s lives.

Which is why it’s important to realize that Hasbro may well be killing its golden goose.

Before we go any further, I need to confess to a great ignorance and indifference to MTG. I’ve never played it. I can’t even begin to even tell you what it’s about. I’ve never been into the social aspect of collectible card gaming, and I’m not the world’s biggest fan of “grown-up fairy tale” fantasy. Apparently, the game is about wizards or some shit.

I treat it with the same respect and bemusement that I reserve for organized religion. If people enjoy it and it doesn’t hurt anyone, great. It’s just not for me.

What this is all about is something that I am all-too-familiar with: Hasbro’s strip-mining of a beloved property that runs the risk of burning out and turning off its core audience. Hasbro is a huge corporation, and their primary reason for existence is to make money. With MTG, they have done this by releasing more and more product, raising prices and milking the fans for every penny they can wring out of them. Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast, the parent company of MTG in 1999.

As the website Markets Insider wrote, “The reported boom in Magic: The Gathering sales comes as fans and local game store owners have voiced growing complaints that Hasbro is over-monetizing the game by producing too many new expansions and releasing too much peripheral content.”

The New York Times reported on “player fatigue brought on by the release of 39 new card sets last year, up from 15 in 2019, according to an analysis by Bank of America. New sets can start around $50.”

Last November Bank of America downgraded Hasbro’s stock from “buy” to “underperforming,” specifically because of the way they’ve “over-monetized” Magic: The Gathering. MTG makes up about a third of Hasbro’s operating profit, and if that market were to collapse, it would be catastrophic for the company.

Bank of America said Hasbro has been overprinting cards and destroying the long-term value of the business.

Beyond Hasbro, however, there would be a domino effect that could be a total disaster. Thousands of hobby shops depend on MTG to support their business. More than half the comic book shops in the country sell MTG to subsidize their comics and collectibles customer base, and if Magic: The Gathering were to go bust, it’s a safe bet to say that half the comic book shops in the country would go with it.

As a life-long fan of comic books, I’ve seen what boom-bust cycles can do to a hobby.

In the early 1990s, there were close to 7,000 comic book shops in the country. It was a boom period, fueled by speculators who had been whipped into a frenzy by the investor-hype coming out of Wizard Magazine and the huge PR push that was mistaken for genuine newsworthiness surrounding the launch of Image Comics.

When that boom went bust it hit particularly hard. More than half the comic book shops in the US went out of business in a matter of months. Ironically, most of those that survived did so by diversifying into collectible card games. Magic: The Gathering pretty much saved the direct sales comic book industry.

The $1000 card set.

Hasbro is really pushing their customer base to the breaking point. Markets Insider goes on to describe one particular set, “The 30th anniversary release angered fans with an eye-watering price tag, with a set of four booster packs, which contain 15 cards each, selling for $1,000.”

This set reprinted some of the most rare MTG cards, which hurt the secondary market, and then in an attempt to “fix” that problem, they declared the reprints ineligible for sanctioned play.

And again, I have no idea how this game is played or what a tournament entails. All I know is that, if a hobby completist wanted to buy every MTG product on the market, they’d have to spend thousands of dollars more than they would have had to just five years ago. That’s enough to drive people out of the hobby.

Again, admitting my ignorance here, I’m not sure why you would need to keep buying booster packs to enjoy playing the game. I guess that’s why MTG has become such a cash cow over the past thirty years. It’s not like a board game that you buy once and then play until the board falls apart and the pieces go missing. You apparently have to keep buying new cards to keep playing.

As such, you’d think Hasbro would have a better concept of how important customer service is for repeat business.

This is what’s been keeping many comic shops open.

Back to what might happen if MTG went bust: Hasbro would take a huge financial hit. They’ve already announced layoffs and cutbacks, and that’s with MTG making a billion dollars last year. Imagine what they’d have to do if over the course of the next year half the MTG players left the hobby.

What if a sizeable percentage of players decided to just stick with the billions of cards that have been printed over the last three decades and just stopped buying new product?

Because of the nature of corporate culture and Wall Street, now that MTG has hit a billion dollars, if they don’t exceed that next year, Hasbro’s stock price will tumble. Even if they only make a billion, it’ll be seen as “flat” and Hasbro’s value will go down.

If MTG goes bust, half the comic shops in the country would likely shut down, or have to start selling vapes or something.

If your local comic book shop devotes a big chunk of their floor space to tables where people can play MTG, then it’s at a high risk of shutting down if Magic: The Gathering starts shedding players.

If half the comic book shops in the country shut down, Diamond Distribution will have a hard time staying afloat. They’ve already watched DC Comics and Marvel exit for other comic book distributors in recent years, this could be the final nail in their coffin.

If Diamond goes under, their toy company, Diamond Select, probably wouldn’t survive either. However, Diamond also buys toys directly from other toymakers like Playmates, McFarlane Toys, Mattel and…Hasbro.  And they buy those toys on a non-returnable basis, so they’re even higher profit items for the toymakers. That would all go away.

Comic book publishers would have to shut down or trim the amount of titles they offer. Toy companies would lose a chunk of their business.

None of this would happen overnight, but it could happen over the course of three or five years if we get a perfect storm of people quitting MTG.

You may have noticed that Books A Million and Barnes & Noble both sell a lot of Magic: The Gathering product, as well as action figures. They have also depended on diversifying to prop up declining book and magazine sales. Nobody can afford to see such an important product for their bottom line burn out and decline.

This is why it’s vitally important for Hasbro to manage MTG properly. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic here. That MTG fans complained so loudly that Bank of America downgraded Hasbro’s stock is a stunning development.

Maybe Hasbro knows what they’re doing, but decades of watching them mismanage everything from GI Joe to Atari to The Hub does not make me optimistic.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for fresh content every day and all our regular features.

Recent Acquistions At PopCult

A confession to begin: Your Popculteer is not having a great week with his Myasthenia Gravis, and as such, is not up to typing a long essay or anything like that for today. There will be a longish essay tomorrow, but today, rather than crank out a detailed review, I’m just going to bring you annotated photos of some of the cool things I’ve picked up or received in the mail over the last few weeks.

The captions will be lengthy and, I hope, informative, but since last week’s photo essays from Winterfest went over so well, I thought I’d share a few more pictures for my readers. So let’s take a running start and dive into some of my recent acquisitions…

I wrote about Final Faction, the surprisingly cool Dollar Tree exclusive action figure line back when it debuted, but I haven’t been keeping up with it much lately. It seems that they have now released a third series of figures…all repaints from earlier lines, and they are trickling out nationwide. This one is the only one I’ve found locally.

Here’s the back of the card. These repaints (not officialy series three) have the bad guys, The Kharn, re-colored with bright green pieces under the banner, “Venom.” The good guys, The Alpha Team, are labelled as “Elite” and are repainted in black and gold. Start watching your Dollar Tree stores for the new assortment. They’ve redone the vehicle and accessories, too.

The new issue of Toy-Ventures arrived this week, along with the bonus “Mangler” keychain for ordering early. I haven’t had a chance to crack it open yet, but I know it’s going to be good. You can get your own copy HERE.

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STUFF TO DO For An Unseasonably Warm Weekend

Valentine’s Day is in the rear-view mirror, but there’s plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and all over The Mountain State this weekend, so let’s just gawk at this partial list of suggestions.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Khegan McLane. Saturday Neil Curry entertains 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.  Every Wednesday in Feburary Jacob Copeland will take the stage at 9 PM. Thursday from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin play fiddle and piano and sing swing and early jazz standards. 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 it’s Empty Glass Got Talent at 10 PM. Next week they’ll have an open mic Monday night, and Songwriter Showcase on Tuesday. Other shows that have graphics are listed among the images below.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. In fact, it’s sort of 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.

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Local and Indie Music, Plus A Dive Into The Vaults, On RFC

Your humble blogger/radio host is traversing a rocky road this week on The AIR  as we premiere another mostly-local and partly-new 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 elsewhere on this page.

We’ve created another new/old hybrid for you this week that you can hear at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday. The first hour is filled with new, local and indeendent music. Hours two and three bring you a vintage episode of RFC Volume Four, from 2016, and it’s loaded with goodies.  Live links in the playlist will return next week.

Our first hour is all-new, but we open it with a couple of oldies but goodies.

Near the end of our first hour I play a song by The Defectors because…well…I basically don’t know what else to do. The Defectors’s guitarist is one of my oldest and dearest friends, John Estep, and last week John’s son, Greyson, took his own life. I can’t imagine the hell that John and Suzanne are going through now. All I can do is send my love and support, as so many other people are doing right now  There is a GoFundMe page set up to help the Esteps with the funeral expenses, and aside from that, I don’t know what I can do to help my friend…but I intend to try to do it.

You can contribute to the GoFundMe page HERE. and if you are having any thoughts of self-harm, please reach out for help HERE.

For our second and third hours I went back and an early episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume Four from 2016. This show hasn’t been heard for over six years, and I didn’t want to let it languish any longer.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store (live links will be back next week. My fingers weren’t willing this week)…

RFC V5 119

hour one
Holden Caulfield “Work Ethic Of A Dead Man”
Johnny Compton “Until We Meet Again”
The Dirteez “Dance of Souls”
Law Biting Citizens “Stuck In A Rut”
Byzantine “Wings of My Soul”
Quasi “Queen of Ears”
Three’s Company Blues “Addicted To Love”
Logical Fleadh “Rights of Man/Foxhunter’s Jig/Morrison’s”
Long Lost Somethin’s “Holy Sunday”
Novelty Island “Gloomy Monument”
Frenchy and The Punk “Gear Geist”
The Defectors “Nightlife In Tokyo”
Matt Mullins & The Bringdowns “Heat of Whiskey”

hour two
The Laser Beams “The Ballad of Patrick Morrissey”
Under Surveillance “Modern World”
Strawfyssh “Netted Fish”
Trielement “Accidental Chaos”
Hybrid Soul “Stay”
Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “Ain’t That A Kick In the Head”
The Science Fair Explosion “Cosmic Girls”
69 Fingers “Average Joe”
The Renfields “Transylvania Fight Song”
Time and Distance “War”
Mother Nang “Peel”
Farnsworth “I’ll Tell You When I’ve Had Enough”
Joe Vallina “On TV”
Boulevard Avenue “Mary Mary”
Billie Vacation “Get Paid”

hour three
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up, I Love You”
Wolfgang Parker “The Father The Son”
Crack The Sky “Invaders From Mars”
Jeff Ellis “Capitol City”
Andy Park and the True Lovers “I Got Some Swag”
Crystal Bright and the Silver Hands “Adungo”
Government Cheese “Camping On Acid”
Snakebox “Dead Planet”
Blue Million “Down To A Groove”
Scooter Scudieri “Ancient Ritual”
Michael Cerveris “Atlas”
Super Heavy Duty “Here I Be”
Three Bodies “Three Bodies”

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 2 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.

 

Then at 1 PM we have MIRRORBALL, followed at 2 PM by Curtain Call. At 3 PM two great recent episodes of The Swing Shift arrive.

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 AM, Friday at 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

Monday Morning Art: Art By Numbers

This week your PopCulteer is back to working digitally. Demands on my time combined with weak fingers from MG meant I had to revert to my old digital abstract style for this new entry.

What you see above this text does not exist in the physical world (unless somebody decides to print it out). It was created by generating simple textures and patterns and then distorting the results, running them through filters and messing around with the colors and finally cropping it to produce an artificial context. Hopefully the end result is fun to look at.

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 starts off with very early David Bowie.

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 recent Prognosis, Herman Linte presents a two hour tribute to the late keyboard virtuoso, Vangelis.

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.

At 8 PM you can hear classic stand up comedy from Richard Pryor on an encore episode of Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM we bring you an overnight marathon of Live and Local music from The AIR Archives, so you can tune in and support the local scene.

Sunday Evening Video: GI Joe Winterfest Rhapsody

Above you see a music video showcasing the sights of Kentuckiana’s GI Joe Winterfest, which took place January 28 in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find my photo essays devoted to the show  HEREHEREHERE and HERE and a look at Super Joe Unlimited HERE.

We had a great time, and it was a wonderful toy show. I turned Mrs. PopCulteer, Mel Larch, loose with the video camera, and for reasons I can’t quite explain, I decided to edit what she shot to Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 2.

That required mixing in some of my still photography, and using a couple of Mel’s shots twice due to the length of the music, but I think the end result is a nice little look back at a very fun toy show.

I hope you folks get a kick out of it. Your PopCulteer’s video editing chops are a bit rusty. Maybe we’ll have to do something about that in the coming months.

The RFC Flashback: Episode Eleven

Even though I just ran this a couple of months ago, I want to try to stick with the chronological presentation of the video edition of Radio Free Charleston. So here it is again, our first Christmas episode, from December 2006.  This one features music from CLOWNHOLE and MELANIE LARCH, plus Pentagram Flowerbox and more animation from Rudy Panucci and Brian Young. Host segments were shot at the original location of The Purple Moon.

This memorable show included Mel singing “Ave Maria” live on the fifth-floor fire escape at the old Livemix Studio. That clip recieved notice from around the world and remains our most-watched music video on YouTube.

The rest of the show is pretty impressive as well, with Pentagram Flowerbox, holiday cartoons by Rudy Panucci and Brian Young and a punk rendition of “Deck The Halls” by Clownhole. We also have an onscreen appearance by The Charleston Playhouse Quartet, performing the RFC theme song, buried in the end credits. Original production notes are HERE.

 

MIRRORBALL’s Feeling Trammpy Again

The PopCulteer
February 10, 2023

After a busy and hectic week at Stately Radio Free Charleston Manor, we’re a little PopCulted out. So all we have to share today is the playlist for a new episode of MIRRORBALL, on The AIR, for you Disco fanatics.   The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

Getting right to that, at 2 PM, Mel Larch uncorks a new MIRRORBALL! The AIR’s showcase of classic Disco music presents the second of two episodes devoted to the music of The Trammps.

Emerging from the ashes of the 1960’s R&B band, The Volcanos, vocalists Jimmy Ellis and Earl Young teamed up with the Wade brothers, from MFSB to form a Disco Music powerhouse. In this and the next episode of MIRRORBALL, Mel will bring you their hits along with important album tracks and a few oddities from their career. Disco wouldn’t have been the same without “Disco Inferno,” but there is so much more to The Trammps than that one iconic hit.

Mel played that big hit last time, but there’s still plenty of Disco Gold left in The Trammps’ mine. This time Mel brings you some deep album cuts along with five top-ten hits, including the band’s first hit, a cover of the Broadway standard, “Zing Went The Strings of My Heart.”  The Trammps even merge hard rock with Disco years before Run DMC teamed up with Aerosmith to mix hard rock and rap.

Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 068

The Trammps
“The Night The Lights Went Out”
“That’s Where The Happy People Go”
“Don’t Burn No Bridges”
“Hold Back The Night”
“The Whole World’s Dancing”
“Hard Rock And Disco”
“Everybody Let’s Boogie”
“Let Me Dance Real Close”
“Is There Any Room For Me”
“Zing Went The Strings of My Heart”
“Where The Happy People Go”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays throughout the following week.

At 3 PM we bring you an encore of an episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat from last May.  This was the show where Sydney Fileen delivered a special mixtape edition of her show that, rather than flowing smoothly, attempted to be as jarring and disconnected as possible. It was all designed to jar your senses with the type of random diversity that you’d have experienced at the time. You can find the playlist HERE.

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon, Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Two classic episodes can also be heard every Sunday, starting at 10 AM.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content, and more stuff from Winterfest over the weekend.

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