Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 123 of 581)

This week we present our artistic kick-start with a high-detail digital painting based on a composite of several photos I took out of the hotel window on our trip to Chicago last July. This is a view looking East down the Northern part of The Loop, the famed “L” platform train that encircles and gives its name to the downtown area. This is another one of those digital paintings that I spend several hours working on, only to have the end result look like something you’d get with an Instagram filter. I must point out that was supposed to look more involved than that.

I hadn’t gone with the high-detail look for a while, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget how.

If you wish, you can click this image to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon presents eight hours of Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack beginning at 7 AM. This hour of trippy music normally comes to you each Tuesday at 2 PM, with lots of replays through the week. Nigel tells us to expect a new episode this week. Likewise, Herman Linte has told us to expect a new episode of Prognosis at 3 PM Monday, this time devoted to the legendary underground Prog band, Gong. As I write this, we have not received our expected transmission of The Haversham Recording Institute, so it’s possible the crew may have been waylaid once again by the coverage of their extended Parlimentary crisis, but we’ll hold out hope as long as possible.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

The late John Ritter hosts this informative look at the history of Toys and Games. This far-reaching documentary traces the development of toys and play patterns going back to pre-historic days, and bringing us into the modern era. Produced in 1998, this History Channel documentary is loaded with archival footage, interviews and scenes from vintage toy commercials.

This week go back to the first show of 2014, The RFC MINI SHOW number 9, starring Sheldon Vance. Sheldon calls his music “Acoustic Country Punk” and that’s a pretty apt description. In his music you can hear traces of Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams…but it also shares a lot of musical DNA with Joe Strummer. Sheldon melds his influences into something new and exciting.

We recorded Sheldon at the old East End location of Kanawha Players Theater late in 2013. This was part of an open mic/concert series produced by Project Biscotti, who later turned up on Radio Free Charleston. On this show you will hear Sheldon with two great songs, an uptempo rocker, “Turn It Back Around,” and a political country ballad, “This American Dream”

Check out Shedlon’s official Facebook page for information on his excellent album, “Logan County Rejects” and any upcoming projects.

The PopCulteer
October 4, 2019

We have two updates on previous PopCult posts this week, one short, one long.

Let’s get get the short one out of the way first, shall we?

First up, news came out this week that the toy company, NECA, who make licensed collectible action figures and board games and own WizKids (HeroClix), have reached an agreement to purchase the embattled “geek” subscription service, Loot Crate.

Loot Crate, the unsustainable subscription surprise box service, filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy a few weeks ago, and seemed to be doomed to a quick demise. Dozens of people were suddenly laid off with no warning or severance pay, and things looked grim for the company that popularized the subscription box industry.

Since that filing, they started sending out subscription boxes for the first time in months, and have still be accepting new subscriptions (presumably from people who never use Google before signing up for anything).

Aside from what seemed like an inevitable crash-and-burn for Loot Crate, this may turn out to be a good business move by NECA. They have renamed Loot Crate “The Loot Company,” and I would presume that they got the company for next to nothing, and using the bankruptcy proceedings, managed to eliminate, or negotiate downward, most of the crippling debt that Loot Crate had accumulated.

Although Loot Crate laid off most of their warehouse and inventory staff, I’m sure they still have the accounting infrastructure in place to process periodic subscription boxes on a grand scale. Given that NECA’s core businesses are perfectly compatible with that type of marketing, this could be a match made in heaven.

Action figures and gaming are a good fit with a business designed to deliver collectibles to fans, and with NECA owning The Loot Company, they have the chance to pre-finance some pretty cool exclusive products, and possibly gauge consumer interest in whether or not to take a product line to a wider audience.

Next up, and the much bigger story, is the changing face of professional wrestling.

Last May I wrote about the emergence of AEW, a new and very well-financed wrestling company that is poised to challenge the WWE monopoly that’s existed for the last eighteen years. Since I wrote that piece, several new developments happened, and more information about the genesis of the new company has come to light.

AEW debuted on TNT two days ago, and their fourth weekly television show will originate from right here in Charleston, West Virginia.

As I wrote last May, WWE was at a creative low point, sort of flailing about while killing time until their new big-money TV deals began (which is also happening this week). RAW drew a large audience for their “season premiere” on Monday, and Friday evening Smackdown debuts with a guest star-packed spectacular on the Fox broadcast network.

Since my earlier post, WWE’s Vince McMahon unexpectedly reached out and brought in two former competitors, Paul Heyman of ECW and Eric Bischoff of WCW, and turned over the creative reins (sort of and almost) of RAW and Smackdown, respectively.

In truth, McMahon still has final say, but it’s also clear that the shows have become more interesting over the summer, and the ratings seem to have stabilized and may have even begun to rebound (judging from the most recent weeks). Occasionally they even show signs of making sense. The talent is being utilized better and more attention is bing paid to detail.

Also making the news since May is that AEW secured a timeslot and announced that they would air “AEW Dynamite” live each week on TNT, Wednesday’s at 8 PM. Wednesday at 8 PM has been the timeslot of NXT on The WWE Network for the past five years. Reports are that AEW wanted to debut on Tuesday, in the spot vacated by WWE’s Smackdown just this week, but TNT’s deal with the NBA made that move impossible.

Faced with the prospect of moving NXT to another night, WWE instead cut a deal with the USA Network to move NXT to their longtime cable home, expand it to two hours and go live weekly. Reports had Fox interested in acquiring the show for their FS1 channel, but as with AEW, an already existing deal with another sports league had that timeslot tied up. USA pursued NXT pretty aggressively, because they were looking to offset the drop in ratings from losing Smackdown this week when it moves to Fox.

NXT, while owned by WWE, is largely under the creative control of McMahon’s son-in-law, Paul Levesque (right) who is known as the wrestler, HHH. As such, the product seems markedly different than mainstream WWE programming, with younger talent and more innovative and experimental production and wrestling.

This is being framed as “The Wednesday Night Wars,” which, to be frank, is really doing a huge favor to AEW. Rather than competing head-to-head with one of WWE’s two flagship shows, AEW Dynamite gets to run against what was designed to be the TV outlet for WWE’s developmental talent.

Given that AEW is spending an estimated ten to forty times as much producing Dynamite, and has the full marketing power of the Turner Networks promoting them, it would have been a huge embarrassment if they didn’t easily beat NXT in the ratings.

When the numbers came in Thursday afternoon, AEW had pulled down 1.4 million viewers, to NXT’s 890 thousand. They beat them by about half a million viewers, and AEW boosters are crowing about it like they slayed the beast.

Which brings me to another point. Something AEW has very successfully cultivated is a strong “us vs. them” mentality, where their most rabid fans see WWE as the evil empire (with no small amount of justification) and see defeating NXT as driving a stake through WWE’s heart.

While this is extremely silly, it’s also a lot of fun for the fans, so I’ll try not to puncture any illusions here, since basically professional wrestling is the art of illusion combined with combat sports. However, it’s worth pointing out that Dynamite‘s numbers came in more than half a million shy of what Smackdown had been drawing in recent months, and more than a million fewer people watched Dynamite than watched RAW this week. Essentially, WWE handed AEW an easy victory for them to crow about. WWE also issued a congratulatory message Thursday on their successful debut, which was a pretty classy, if suspect, move.

However, AEW is not exactly “David” in this battle. Tony Khan (left), of the mega-wealthy Khan family, the owner of AEW, has revealed that he began organizing this company back in April, 2018, when an executive at TNT guaranteed him a prime-time timeslot. Khan knows wrestling inside and out as a fan, and was well aware that you could spend billions on talent and produce the best wrestling show on the planet, and it wouldn’t mean anything if you couldn’t get it on a primo TV channel. Khan has deeper pockets than McMahon, but isn’t going to empty them out on a fool’s errand.

After that Khan lucked into a perfect storm where former WWE wrestler Cody Runnels (Rhodes) and super-talented free agents, The Young Bucks, decided to put on their own Pay Per View, All Out, and sold out a 12,000 seat arena in Chicago,and pulled down over a hundred thousand buys on PPV. This show performed better than any non-WWE show had in a long, long time.

Khan aligned himself with these talents, and made just about every brilliant move possible, bringing in a beloved veteran announcer in Jim Ross, one of the best minds in wrestling in Chris Jericho and a disgruntled top-tier WWE star whose contract was up in Jon Moxley (Dean Ambrose in WWE). He also made great moves behind the scenes, hiring some of the top agents, producers and other creative talents to shape this new wrestling federation.

AEW still has an uphill battle. WWE has just begun two very lucrative television deals that guarantee that they don’t really have to worry about losing money for the next five years. That means they can afford to pay millions of dollars to wrestlers just to keep them from going to AEW. AEW s also on a cable channel that hasn’t had wrestling for almost twenty years.

But by moving NXT to the USA Network, and having it go head-to-head with AEW, WWE has given AEW a quite a gift. NXT is basically WWE’s minor league. They put on a fantastic show, and have a loyal fanbase, but they are still largely an unknown quantity outside of subscribers to the WWE Network. Instead of being compared to RAW or Smackdown, Dynamite was basically handed a squash match.

This week was the first time the two shows went head-to-head (NXT had a two-week headstart on USA). Both of the shows Wednesday were terrific, and this is a great time to be a fan of professional wrestling.

I gave the edge to NXT, which I think produced the superior show. They had the better matches, much better women’s wrestling and I thought the pace was more exciting than AEW. NXT also had the better surprises. The announcment that WWE main roster A-lister, Finn Balor, would be returning to NXT completely overshadowed AEW’s surprise of Jake Hager, who used to be Jack Swagger, a minor player in WWE who has since moved on to success in mixed martial arts. The return of former NXT champ, Tommaso Ciampa, who has been out of action since March after undergoing neck surgery was also bigger than any surprise on AEW.

NXT fell short in promising “limited commercial interruptions,” which gave them a commercial-free first half hour, but also loaded the rest of the show with too-frequent commercial breaks, making it a bit hard to follow the action at times.

AEW delivered a very hot show with top-notch production values that easily matched anything WWE has done on their main shows. They also delivered two incredible matches, and hearing Jim Ross and Tony Schiavone on the announce team was pure bliss for any long-time fan. For their first-ever weekly broadcast, AEW checked off every box and hit a solid home run.

The live crowd (over fourteen thousand in Washington, DC) added so much to this show. They reacted wildly to everything that happened, even if the wrestling was unremarkable, or in one case, even pretty bad. This gave AEW a major advantage over NXT, who are commited to doing their show from a 200-seat studio at Full Sail University through the end of the year. If the live crowds are this hot every week, it’ll make AEW’s television program look more exciting than it already is.

However, there were some weaknesses. The comedy segment with a wrestler imitating President Obama would have been right at home on the worst episode of RAW. The celebrity guests, Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes, were awkward, and their segment added nothing to the show (author’s bias note: I’ve never been a fan of Smith). Another issue was the interference in the main event, which didn’t draw a disqualification.  The brawl into the back between Moxley and Kenny Omega was great, but the match Omega was part of kept on going, which is exactly the kind of logical miscue that AEW fans complain about when they happen in WWE. It marred what would have been a third incredible match to close the show.

This point betrays a bit of a double standard among the folks rooting against WWE.

There was also a women’s championship match between Riho and Nyla Rose. The crowd reacted to this match like it was the greatest wrestling match ever to happen anywhere.

Only the match wasn’t very good. The wrestlers had no chemistry, and each one seemed like an indie-level talent who stole their gimmick from current WWE superstars. Riho was like a poor-woman’s Kairi Sane, while the transgender Nyla Rose is sort of an imitation Nia Jax. The wrestling ranged from sloppy to inept, but the crowd made it seem like a million bucks. When it comes to women’s wrestling, AEW lags far behind NXT.

Overall, NXT delivered a show that was on par with their best-ever Takeover PPV specials. That was great for the first week, but if they try to do that every week, the talent will burn out in no time. In week one, AEW handily won the ratings war. NXT easily prevailed when it came to quality.

AEW delivered a show that was not exactly the drastic reinvention of the wheel that some fans are claiming. The truth is that AEW Dynamite was almost exactly what you’d get if you produced a “What If?” show based on the premise, “What If they did a really good episode of RAW, without any input at all from Vince McMahon?”

Dynamite followed the WWE formula, only without the annoying quirks of WWE’s owner, and delivered a show that was as good or better than any episode of RAW has been for twenty years. To be honest, I think that’s really their point. They don’t want to do anything drastically new. They want to do a wrestling show that’s drastically better than what WWE has delivered for the last 18 years.

Putting aside any rooting interest, it’s a good time to be a wrestling fan. With the rooting interest, it might be even better. It’s going to be fun watching the ratings come in every Thursday afternoon, and then watching the online reaction and spin.

That’s this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for our regular features.

It’s the Thursday before a busy weekend in Charleston, with the big car show I told you about yesterday and all sort of other things happening (some of which will be boycotted). Yet, there are even more things still into which you may find yourself involved. As longtime readers of PopCult probably know by now, this is the kind of post you get when your PopCulteer has paying work on his desk that needs his attention. Without further ado, here are a collection of images swiped from Facebook plugging events that are happening in town, or within easy driving distance this weekend. There’d be a lot more, but people are getting really lazy about making graphics with time, date and location on them.

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It is the best of times (for lovers of vintage automobiles) and the worst of times (for folks who work in Downtown Charleston). Wednesday sees the start of the Charleston Boulevard Rod Run & Doo Wop, the annual event where Charleston sacrifices the most convenient access road in the city for four days of a celebration of steel and wheel artistry.

You could probably tell that I have mixed feelings about this annual car show. On the one hand, vintage cars are pretty damned cool, and the event brings in car enthusiasts from around the country and generates millions of dollars of revenue. It’s a huge positive for the city.

On the other hand, shutting down Kanawha Boulevard for four days can be a real pain in the ass for folks who regularly travel that road.

In the end, it’s a fair trade-off, especially if they cut down on all the other days that the Boulevard gets co-opted for questionable activities. Luckily it seems that our new administration is not quite so cavalier about disrupting traffic, so it makes this event even more special. As much as I hate to see the Boulevard shut down, I can’t deny how cool it is to see Chevy Tri-Fives and other classics lined up along the street.

Now if they could only do something about the ethnic slur in the name (I kid, I kid).

In the past PopCult has covered the Rod Run via video and photos, and if the weather reports for this weekend are accurate, there is a remote chance we may do so again. As your PopCulteer has mentioned (in what seems to be every post lately), Myasthenia Gravis does not play well with extreme heat, and this summer has nearly rendered me a prisoner of air conditioning. Even when we go on trips, a big chunk of my time is spent chilling (literally) in hotel rooms, rather than venturing out into the increasingly-warmed globe.

If it’s as cool as the weathermen say it’s supposed to be this weekend, I may venture out and take a few photos to share with those of you who can’t make it out yourself.

However, one other observation I made back when I did extensively cover the show three years in a row a while back is that, while it is an impressive and huge gathering of cool vintage cars…the three years I went they had pretty much the same cars every year. I could’ve re-used the photos and I doubt anyone would have noticed.

On the whole, if the weather is perfect, it’s a fun show. There will be music and food and craft vendors and lots of people from all over the country who will gladly tell you everything you could possibly want to know about their cars. If you love vintage cars and are anywhere near Charleston, you pretty much have to go.

The show kicks off in earnest Thursday on Kanawha Boulevard. There will be a cruise-in Wednesday night at the parking lots for Cabela’s and Home Depot out at the Southridge Shopping Center. You can visit the Facebook page for more details on the schedule and all the tie-in events.

Don’t panic, I’m talking about The AIR, PopCult’s sister internet station. The nice Eastern European folks whose servers host our little radio station are upgrading their software this week, and as such, there many be the occasional outage, or “dead air.”

Because of this, we have decided not to program any first-run episodes of our shows, because we don’t want to frustrate or annoy our listeners by getting them all enthralled and intentedly anticipating the new shows, only to have them fritz out. If you want to risk that with our encore shows, you can still tune in at The AIR website, or on this embedded radio player…

Lucky for you, we have the best reruns in the world, and that includes episode 117 of Radio Free Charleston, which debuted the first new music by The Bounty in over twenty-five years. You can find the production notes and playlist for that show HERE, and you can listen to it on demand HERE. The Bounty’s new album is available now on iTunes and other streaming services.

There rest of our specialty music programming this week will dust off some of our better shows to make the reruns more palatable. Tuesday at 3 PM, The Swing Shift will re-present our 50th episode special, plus our tribute to Brian Setzer. Tomorrow, Curtain Call will rebroadcast it’s 50th, Mel Larch’s “I Sung That” show.

While the fine folks at our host service are ironing out the bugs in the new software, we’ll be working on loading up the schedule with new shows for next week.

Today’s art is a digital painting/doodle inspired by the sights of my last trip. However, I didn’t base this on any image in particular, and just wanted to make an impressionistic imaginary landscape of a rural scene at twilight. We saw lots of stuff like this while driving the back roads of Pennsylvania, but this just sprang forth from my head. I painted the sky and land first using a variety of digital brushes and canvas effects, then added the silhouettes and shadows afterward. I was trying to create the feel of the time just after sunset, where you can’t see the sun anymore, but you can still see the shadows cast from it in the distance.

If you wish, you can click this image to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon presents  eight of the “Lost Beatles Project” episodes of Beatles Blast. Inspired to drop this hear by the 50th anniversary edition of Abbey Road, I thought it’d be a fun audio trip to bring you eight hours of alternate takes, studio chatter and unreleased tracks from the only serious contender for the title, “Most Important Band In History.”

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

In other news on The AIR, we have just been informed that, due to server upgrades, there will likely be intermittent periods this week of disrupted service. Because of this, we have decided to dip into our vast pool of high-quality re-runs for our afternoon specialty music programs this week, rather than have new episodes potentially interrupted. We should be back with all-new programming next week when all bright, shiny new servers are in place and running smoothly.

Last year we told you about the big Kickstarter Campaign to bring The Aquabats Super Show back from oblivion. Well, the campaign was a success. The ‘Bats raised enough cash to make 12 new webisodes of The Aquabats Super Show, and the first new show debuted yesterday. That’s it at the head of this post. We’re also going to get two new albums, plus we already have the soundtrack album to the first two seasons of the show.

Watch and enjoy The Aquabats and their encounter with Horsebeard Man, then go to their YouTube channel and subscribe so you can watch a new episode every two weeks.

This week we take you back to our 2013 Christmas episode of Radio Free Charleston.

RFC 194, “Hasa Diga Shirt,” is our Christmas spectacular, with music from The Bob Thompson Unit and Frenchy and The Punk, plus a message from Santa, and new animation from Jake Fertig, which opens our show with a commercial for The Bearded Axe.

It’s our way of brnging you Christmas in late September. You can read the original production notes HERE.