Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 193 of 581)

The AIR is still flying on autopilot while your PopCulteer is en route to ToyLanta, but we will always have some great programming for you. A new episode of Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle is the highlight Wednesday, while we pull a classic episode of Radio Free Charleston International out of the archives for you on Thursday.

You can visit the The AIR website, or listen in on this embedded radio player…

Wednesday at 1:30 PM, right after our replay of last year’s JoeLanta preview episode of On The Road with Mel, Michele Zirkle tells us how Life Speaks to us about water and how it’s been a running theme through her life.

You can hear Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle Wednesday at 1:30 PM and 7 PM, with a replay Friday morning at 9:30 AM.

Later Wednesday afternoon, at 2 PM you can hear classic interviews with The Fab Four on Beatles Blast, and at 3 PM it’s an encore of the two part “Broadway Swings” crossover between Mel Larch’s Curtain Call and your truly’s The Swing Shift.

From 7:30 PM to Midnight tune in for a mini-marathon of The (BS) Crazy Show. At Midnight we have an impromptu overnight blast of That Conversation with Patrick Felton.

Thursday we replay this week’s dip into the archives with Blue Million on Radio Free Charleston at 2 PM, and follow that with the first broadcast in over a year of an episode of Radio Free Charleston International that brings you music ranging from DEVO to Kate Bush, to Franz Ferdinand with Sparks and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes.

You can keep track of the full schedule right here…

ToyLanta (incorporating JoeLanta, Botlanta and The Great Atlanta Toy Convention) happens March 9-11, 2018, and we’re so excited that we’re bringing you videos from last year’s event all week long leading up to it.

One of the most highly-anticipated panels featured James Wozniak, the man behind Classic Recasts, who tells the tale of hunting down vintage Marx Toy Company molds, and how that led him to Mexico. That’s James with his back to the camera at left, making a dad and his kid very happy with some great Marx reproductions.

James tells us the history of the Guzman family of Mexico and their toy empire and how their patriarch came to rub elbows with the likes of Walt Disney and Louis Marx. He also tells the enthralled crowd how toy molds that were made over half a century ago found their way to Mexico and are still being used to create cool toys.

You can find more information about Classic Recasts and James’ work at the Classic Recasts website.

Visit ToyLanta for early details on how you can be part of the coolest toy show in the South. You can also check out the Facebook page .

We have a great new episode of Radio Free Charleston for your enjoyment this week, and you can hear it Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, or on this sweet litle embedded player…

This week’s show is all from deep in the RFC Archives, and it’s built around a twenty-five minute video I uncovered in my recent computer crash.  I didn’t even realize it at the time that I did the voice over work for this show, but this is Blue Million recorded live at The Empty Glass in 1993 at a Flood Aid Benefit that I actually promoted.

That means that somewhere in my house I probably have video of The Carpenter Ants and The Leon Waters Blues Band recorded that same night. The only problem is that the video isn’t really watchable, but the music sounds great, so we bring that to you. I was so happy to find this that I put the show together before I even knew what songs Blue Million performed that night.  As you can see in the playlist below, Alan Griffith and the boys gave us eight songs, including six originals and a couple of classic covers.

Because of this find, I made the whole episode an archive show. We kick it off with hardcore punk from 2007, courtesy of Holden Caulfield, and no track is less than ten years old. Here’s this week’s line-up…

Holden Caulfield  “Open For Business”

Blue Million – Live At The Empty Glass 1993
“Real Life Baby Doll”
“Tangled Up In Blue”
“Barfly”
“What Would It Take”
“Blueberry Jam”
“That Was Then, This Is Now”
“Folsom Prison Blues”
“Flesh Blood and Bones”

Three Bodies  “Gardens of Hope”
Go Van Gogh  “Shut Up, I Love You”
Two Watts of Power  “World”
Whistlepunk  “Falling Down”
Raymond Wallace  “Shine On Harvest Moon”
Mark Bates and the Vacancies  “Spiral Down”
Under the Radar  “Mothman”
The Amazing Delores  “Rats In My Trailer”

You can hear a replay of this show Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 8 PM, and Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, exclusively on The AIR.

In just three days ToyLanta happens again at the Marriot Century Center in Atlanta, Georgia. I’ll be there along with Mrs. PopCulteer and we’ll be shooting video of the cool stuff going on and some of the panels. To remind you how cool this show is, we’re going to bring you some of last year’s panels all week long.

The Monster Squad talks all about their favorite monster-based toys and games, touching on AHI monsters and other permutations of the classic Universal Monsters, plus Aurora model kits, toys based on The Outer Limits, The Mummy, The Addams Family and more. Listen in as the guys discuss classic monster themes in action figures, playsets, boardgames, model kits and Halloween costumes.

ToyLanta begins this Friday in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s not too late to make plans to attend.

Visit ToyLanta for early details on how you can be part of the coolest toy show in the South. You can also check out the Facebook page .

ToyLanta, the convention formerly known as “JoeLanta” begins this Friday, so we devote our Monday Morning Art to a piece that I created to be auctioned off for the benefit of the Cody Lane Memorial Toy and Diorama Museum. The auction will be held Saturday night, and it’s one of the highlights of the convention.

This particular painting is a new take on an old project that I did about almost twenty years ago, then abandoned. I wanted to created a custom box for a red-haired, beardless GI Joe Adventure Team member. The reason it had to be custom was that Hasbro never made a red headed guy without a beard back in the day. I discovered, in one of my loopier experiements, that if you got one of the dark brown-haired, beardless Adventurers that Hasbro was reproducing back then, and dipped his head in bleach for a couple of days, for some reason it turned red–the same shade as the red-headed Sea Adventurer back in the day.

After that discovery I decided to take my newly-reddened GI Joe, who only faintly smelled of chlorine, and make a box for him. I called him the “Stealth Adventurer,” because he had managed to make it through the 1970s Adventure Team era without having his own box.

As a base, I used a scan of the Air Adventurer’s box, then worked some digital magic on it, removing the beard, changing the color of the hair, the sky and his jumpsuit, and changing the typography to create a cool-looking box. Unfortunately,  I never got around to printing it. If you’re interested, you can see the progression of how I changed the original box to the right. That tiny .jpeg is all that I had left of the project.

But since I have a bright, shiny new PC with much faster art gears in it, and I have control of my fingers again, I decided to just do a digital painting based on the finished design. I didn’t try to hew too closely to the original style, and I didn’t want to mess with the logos since this was not intended for a custom box. I know lots of guys who can make fantastic custom boxes now without my art. I ended up using a color scheme like I used on my painting of my late pal, Johnny Rock– Sort of as a tribute, and sort of because I just liked the way it looked.

That’s the story of this week’s art, and it kicks off our countdown to ToyLanta. Stay tuned to PopCult for more ToyLanta coverage, and click the image to see it bigger.

In five days your PopCulteer will be at ToyLanta, the new name for JoeLanta and The Great Atlanta Toy Convention.  With the addition of BotLanta last year, a shorter name was needed, and ToyLanta is it. In the clip above you can see the wrap-up for last year’s show.

This brisk half-hour looks at the many facets of ToyLanta: The custom figures; the dioramas; the toy dealers; the music; the panels, the film festival, the parachute drop and more! We are thrilled to have this video onine now, instead of taking eight months to produce it like we did last year. Over the next week PopCult will bring you more videos from last year’s ToyLanta as we count down to this year’s big event.

In the above video you will see amazing toys, toy soldiers parachuting fifteen floors indoors, a musical blue gorilla, panelists from around the world and even Larry Hama, the creator of GI Joe: A Real American Hero, singing and playing guitar. We also bring you soundbites from some of the organizers, dealers, and attendees.

ToyLanta happens every March in Atlanta, Georgia. Visit ToyLanta.com for early details on how you can be part of the coolest toy show in the South. For timely updates, check out their Facebook page.

From April 2011, this week we bring you Episode 128 of Radio Free Charleston, “Valhalla State Park Shirt.”  This show features music from Prank Monkey, Jay Oakes and Paul Callicoat and Short of Cash. We also have more classic animation from Frank Panucci.

Our first musical guest is Prank Monkey, who were then the house band for the Wednesday night jam at The Blue Parrot. At that point Prank Monkey was Johnny “Hurricane” Compton, Jamie Skeens and Mike Vandergriff, and you can see them rip through “VooDoo Child.”

Our animation was “Turkey Wang,” yet another bit of classic, mind-altering Frank Panucci animation, re-mastered into Hi-Definition by a crack team of Korean re-tracing artistes.

Our next musical guest came to us courtesy of Doug Imbrogno and WestVirginiaVille.com. Doug shot and edited a music video for Jay Oakes and Paul Callicoat’s musical tribute to The Mystery Hole.

Wrapping up the show is an early incarnation of Short of Cash. This band, lead by Roger Simms, formed at one of the Charleston United meetings, and they were loads of fun to watch before they scattered to the four winds.  You can read the original production notes for this show HERE.

The PopCulteer
March 2, 2018

It’s a slightly more distracted than normal PopCulteer this week as I prepare to hit the road next week on my way to ToyLanta.  I’ll be telling you more about that all next week, but today I’ve got a funny/disturbing anecdote about one person’s reaction to one of my recent posts. Before we get to that, I need to give you a little context.

During PopCult’s coverage of Toy Fair last month, I wrote a piece that speculated about the end of the Monster High toy line. I clearly used words like “seems” and “appears,” because Mattel did not put out any official notice that the line was done.

They wouldn’t. Why would they put the entire toy industry on notice that they were abandoning a product line that just a few short years ago was nearly as big as Barbie? The writing was on the wall, but they certainly weren’t going to call attention to it.

A little more digging on my part showed me that last year Mattel had “demoted” Monster High from being a core brand to just being one of the many low-prioirity lines that they offer their customers.  Product that was intended for release in 2017 was instead slowed down in the production pipeline, spread out over an extended release period, and offered to retailers as “2018/2019” product lines.

They sent out solicitation for these last few dolls last summer, and they’re starting to filter into the few remaining retailers who carry the line now. There are still a few stragglers finishing up what was announced last year, but after that, the line is essentially defunct. They no longer advertise the line on television, but old product is still available at deep discount retailers, and the last few new items have yet to completely disappear from Target and Walmart. Despite these moves Mattel has a few very good reasons for not verifying the line’s cancellation.

First is that they have partnerships with other companies that still produce Monster High-branded books, educational software, websites and programming for their YouTube channel. They don’t want to leave their partners high-and-dry by saying that the line was cancelled.

Another factor is that Universal Pictures holds an option to produce a live-action Monster High movie. There has been a director as well as scriptwriters attached to this project since 2015, and the initial release date was to have been in October, 2016. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but the project is not officially dead, and in the event that Universal decides to put the movie into production, Mattel wants to be able to support it with new toys. It’s highly unlikely that the movie will be made at this point, but why would they kill any possible chance of it happening?

There’s also the matter of trademarks and intellectual property. It’s entirely possible that Mattel will continue producing low numbers of their budget-line five-dollar figures and listing them in their general mechandise catalog simply to keep the trademark alive. This way they can say they’re still selling Monster High toys, even if nobody’s buying them. It protects the trademark for future use.

The reason I’m bothering to explain all this is because I had an email exchange with one very devoted Monster High fan. He claimed that he owned a large, independent Monster High retailer in the UK, and he provided links to a real online store. Because of the ease with which any loon on the internet can claim to be someone that they’re not, I will refrain from naming the store. The person who contacted me was certainly not acting in a professional capacity…or manner, and I would hate to falsely associate an online crank with a legitimate business. I seriously doubt that this person was really as he presented himself.

In fact, he seemed to be a graduate of the Basil Fawlty School of Charm and Good Behavior. He started out insulting me, calling me a liar, saying that I was just writing “Fake News” to get more readers, and demanded that I produce a statement from Mattel to confirm that the line was cancelled.

He began in a rude manner and asked for something that, as I explained above, does not exist. I calmly and politely replied and explained the situation, and he accused me of “patronising” him. From the nature of his initial request, I assumed that he had no knowledge of how the toy industry works, so if I came across patronizing to him, it was not intended. For someone who claimed to be a retailer, he became awfully flustered when I told him that he should know whether or not he’d ordered any new product since last summer.

After my second email response, he started saying that I was bullying him, then he’d tell me to leave him alone, and ask one more question which invited a reply. More than once he suggested that this blog should be shut down. After a couple of emails filled with simple-minded insults alternating with accusations that I was bullying him, I finally told him to enjoy having the last word and placed his email address in my spam filter. For all I know he’s still sending me angry emails demanding that I stop bothering him.

What was all the more remarkable about this exchange was that, if I were indeed just fishing for more readers (and naturally, I do like it when people read my blog), I would not have bothered writing about a pop culture property that is near extinction. There are plenty of topics floating around out there that are “clickbait.” Monster High has not been one of them for about three years now.  I wrote about Monster High because I admire the passion of the fans and the cleverness of the customizers and felt that they deserved to know what was really going on with their favorite toy line. I went back and re-read my post just to make sure that I was properly respectful of the fandom and the toy line.

It sucks when a toy line that you love gets cancelled. I remember when Hasbro pulled the plug on the 12″ GI Joe in 1976, and again on the revival around fourteen years ago. I’ve also learned that, if the fandom is strong enough, beloved toy lines can be revived after a few years have passed. I believe that in five or ten years, when nostalgia kicks in, Mattel will decide to give Monster High another shot, regardless of whether or not a movie gets made. For now, retailers just won’t order any Monster High product so there’s no point in making any.

The way the game has been played for the last few decades is that, retailers get really excited about a hot toy, then they order way too many, then they get stuck with overstock, and then they blame the toy for not selling and won’t order any new ones. This is what happened with the GI Joe revival, when Hasbro made a brilliant line to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of GI Joe. The figures did not sell fast enough for the retailers so they dumped them all at deep discounts and let Hasbro know that they were not interested any more 12″ GI Joe product. Hasbro made a couple of abbreviated efforts to keep GI Joe in his original size, but eventually reverted to smaller scales and let the Official GI Joe Collectors Club handle the 12″ stuff.  You can’t sell toys if the retailers won’t order them.

That’s part of what happened with Monster High. Once the line peaked retailers kept ordering, and when subsequent sales fell short, they quickly jumped ship. There was also the redesign of the figures, but that was a “Hail Mary” by Mattel, to try and save the line after the retailers already began to sour on it. The success of dolls based on the movie, Frozen, soared like a rocket and overtook Monster High, and now those dolls are in a steep sales decline.

This email exchange reminded me of my old “Arguing with Idiots on The Internet” piece, but the sad part, the really heart-rending fact in all this is that not one other person bothered to respond to my original post. It attracted about as many readers as my other posts about Toy Fair, but only one person bothered to get in touch with me over it. And he was much more upset than willing to listen to reason. I think the vast majority of Monster High fans who read my piece simply saw it as a confirmation of what they’d suspected, or expected, over the last couple of years.

Next week I’m heading to Atlanta for ToyLanta, which grew out of JoeLanta, which was a toy show devoted to the 12″ GI Joe. Most of the people at the convention will be fans of the original GI Joe. Many of them have daughters who loved Monster High. Hopefully they can share the experience of a favorite toy line falling by the wayside and give them some hope that it may someday come back.

The PopCult Bookshelf

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
by Nancy MacLean
Viking
ISBN-13: 978-1101980965
$28.00

This is the scariest book I’ve ever read. Nothing that came from the pens of Stephen KIng or H.P. Lovecraft is nearly as terrifying as the story told in these pages. Sadly, it’s not a horror novel. This book tells the true story of James McGill Buchanan, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who developed the philosophy and the strategy by which the right-wing elite of this country have spent the last six decades systematically destroying the very foundations of our Democracy.

Democracy in Chains is not a tinfoil-helmet conspiracy. This is a meticulously researched and brilliantly written book that traces Buchanan’s influence using his own archives, which are housed at George Mason University. Miraculously for such a secretive movement, one that is steeped in re-writing history to suit their goals, the disciples of Buchanan made little effort to hide his personal archives, and MacLean had unfettered access to his entire written output, including personal correspondence.

Essentially Buchanan was a pioneer in articulating the concept of “I’ve got mine, screw everybody else.” He was stirred to action by the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that set the ground for school segregation. Buchanan was so outraged at the prospect of his tax money paying for the education of young black kids that he founded an entire movement to take over the government and defund every public program imaginable.

He didn’t get very far with this philosophy, until he encountered a new disciple in the 1970s, Charles Koch, who put billions of dollars into placing his carefully chosen candidates in office across the country. Koch, after giving up on getting anywhere with the Libertarian Party, decided to load up state legislatures with hand-picked minions who would gerrymander political advantages for his candidates for higher office. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything as frightening as this true story of how people who seem to be evil incarnate have successfully undermined the basic tenets of our Democracy.

It was the success of Democracy and the rise of a middle class that alarmed Buchanan. To quote from the cover blurb, “In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.”

To put it bluntly, these are people who don’t think anyone but them should vote.

In this book we learn how Koch, using his money, took over the Republican Party and turned it into a “dream team” of zealots hell-bent on breaking unions, privatizing Social Security, Health Care, Education and our Interstate system and suppressing as much of the vote as possible. Along the way they’ve made willing stooges of evangelicals, who are too blinded by their own political passions that they don’t care that they’re following the grand plan of a militant atheist. Another weapon in the Libertarian Elite arsenal is the mistrust of the media that they’ve bred by financing “alternate news” sources like FOX News, Brietbart, and ministers of disinmoration like Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Predictably, there is an organized campaign to “review” this book at Amazon and give it a one-star rating. You can guess who’s behind that.

MacLean spent ten years researching this book, and it’s gotten quite a bit of acclaim since it was released last year, but it’s not being read enough. This book should be mandatory reading for anybody who plans on voting. This is scary as hell, but the public must know about this, before it’s too late.

As always, we have a brand-new episode of Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle Wednesday at 1:30 PM and 7 Pm on The AIR. Check it out at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

This week Michele presents a follow-up to last week’s episode on worthiness and love, and veers into a discussion of education, which is on a lot of people’s minds this week. She doesn’t focus on the political angle of the strike here in West Virginia, but does talk about education in general and the need for people to be perpetual learners.

In that spirit, Michele will be making two appearances in Ohio this weekend.  On Friday, March 2, she will be at the Tranquility Salt Cave in Columbus for a session of “Heal Your Heart Meditation. ”  Michele will share her inspirational story of transformation from an abusive marriage to getting in tune with the Divine source of love. Afterwards, attendees join in the Healing Heart Meditation led by Michele in the cave and let the salt soothe your soul. Each paid admission also gets a free signed copy of Michele’s novel (soon to be a motion picture) Rain No Evil.

The fee for this experience will be $40, and you can  Call the salt cave to register (614) 859-3419. You’ll find more details on the Facebook event page.

Saturday, March 3, finds Michele in Zanesville, Ohio, at Gemini’s Eclectic Emporium from 10 AM to 5 PM as she sits in as the guest Tarot reader and also signs copies of her book. You can call Gemini’s at 740-995-9617 to make an appointment, or visit the Facebook event page for more details.

Of course, you can also stay tuned to The AIR for the best of our music programming, as well as stimulating and entertaining talk and comedy.