Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 83 of 581)

Tuesday on The AIR we deliver brand-new episodes of Radio Free Charleston, and NOISE BRIGADE.  In order to hear these great new musical treasures, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to this convenient embedded radio player…

We have a mostly-new Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  This show kicks off with brand-new music from Todd Burge, and the first hour carries on with new music from The Empty Hearts, Abandon The Ship, Norah Jones, and Billy Ocean. Our second and third hours this week are recycled, sanitized and gently-used fragments of an episode that debuted in January of this year, and has since departed our servers.

Check out the full playlist to see all the fantastic goodies we bring you this week…

RFCV5 031

hour one
Todd Burge “Never Alone”
Andy Prieboy “Honey Don’t Be Good To Me”
The Soft Boys “Vegetable Man”
Abandon The Ship “The Ballad of Denny Ray”
Tom Rader “Angels”
The Bounty “Anything but Ordinary”
The Empty Hearts “Come On And Try It”
The Dollyrots (with Jaret Reddick) “Love Ya, Love Ya, Love Ya”
Emmalea Deal “Queen (Unplugged)”
Norah Jones “After The Fall”
Lady D “Rock Stone Blues”
Linda McCartney “Seaside Woman”
The Cast of Paradise Park “We’re Gonna Have A Party”
Meadow Zero “Loving You In 5 Dimensions/Aquarius Falling”
Billy Ocean “One World”

hour two
Karen Allen “Here We Are Now”
Missing Words “Breathe In”
Model Kaos “Heroes”
Ptolemy “Wax Knoll”
Nina Hagen “Geburt (Extended Mix)”
Tarja “Tears In The Rain”
Bobaflex “Long Time Coming”
Hawthorne Heights “VANDEMONIUM”
Emmalea Deal “Ghost”
Time And Distance “Sell”
Fontaines DC “Boys In The Better Land”
The Revillos “Can I Have Some? (Demo)”

hour three
Adrian Tabacuro “Lucifer”
Ovada “Blood of the Sun”
David Cross Peter Banks “Plasma”
Qiet “Pet Driftwood”
Miniature Giant “Wendigo”
Jack Griffith “Alone With You”
Psychedelanaut “Saturnine Serpent”
Midge Ure “Vienna”
Toyah “It’s A Mystery”
The Stranglers “Bless You”

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 7 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 1 PM and the next Monday at 8 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

At 1 PM we bring you an encore of last week’s new episode of MIRRORBALL that you can read about HERE.

At 2 PM Steven Allen Adams graces us with a new edition of NOISE BRIGADE which opens with a tribute to Toots Hibbert, the Reggae pioneer who lost his battle with COVID-19 last Friday. Check out the playlist to see what all Steve’s got up his sleeves…

NOISE BRIGADE 012

Toots and the Maytals “Take Me Home, Country Roads”
Toots and the Maytals “I Gotta Woman”
Toots and the Maytals “Monkey Man”
Toots and the Maytals “Pressure Drop”
Sublime “5446 Thats My Number/Ball And Chain”
The Planet Smashers “Trip and Fall”
The Nerve Agents “Fall of the All American”
The Creepshow “They All Fall Down”
Streetlight Manifesto “We Will Fall Together”
Rancid “Fall Back Down”
Bumpin Uglies “Stop the Fall”
Bad Religion “Heaven is Falling”
Against All Authority “All Fall Down”
Five Iron Frenzy “So We Sing”

NOISE BRIGADE alternates weeks with Psychedelic Shack Tuesdays at 2 PM, with replays those weeks on Wednesday at 11 AM and 10 PM, Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at Noon, Saturday at 10 AM, Sunday at 4 PM and Monday at 7 PM.

At 3 PM we have a very special Two-episode premiere of The Swing Shift, which we will tell you about in a separate post.

Twenty eight years ago I did a series of drawings to be considered for cassette insert artwork or flyers for the band, Mother Nang.  Some were used for flyers, but most sat unused in my sketchbook until I finally got around to scanning them a few years ago. This past weekend, I decided to print one out and colorize it using a medium in which I do not often work: Crayola Crayons.

The original drawing was meant to be printed in black and white, and to be honest, I don’t remember if this was a rough sketch or the finished piece. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

The idea was to make a piece of art that didn’t have a set orientation. Either way you looked at it, some of it seemed sideways.

Even though I intended this to be in black and white, I decided to try my (very shaky) hands at putting color to it, and the result is what you see above. I’m not thrilled with the re-scan, because it lost some of the subtlety of the color.

If you want to see it bigger, just click on the image.

You can see the original drawing to the right. Don’t bother clicking on it. It doesn’t get any bigger.

Meanwhile, Monday on The AIR, we bring are shrinking the Monday Marathon to six hours so that me may return to our original scheduling concept.At first, our big idea was to debut one of our specialty music programs at 3 PM, and then, the next weekday, we’d replay it at 7 AM.  When we started the Monday Marathon this was disrupted, and now we’ve put things back the way they were. So at 7 AM, you will hear a replay of last Friday’s edition of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. At 9 AM you’ll get six hours of Radio Free Charleston, this week, and whatever we decide to drop in that space each week going forward.

At 3 PM on Prognosis, Herman Linte brings us a recent encore episode, and then that’s followed by a classic Prognosis and an evening of Psychedelic Shack and Radio Free Charleston. You can hear replays of Prognosis Tuesdays at 7 AM and 8 PM, Wednesdays at 9 AM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 9 AM. But we’ll be tinkering with the schedule over the next few weeks, so don’t get too used to that.

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

The music world lost a legend last Friday as Toots Hibbert, a pioneer who was key in the transformation of Jamaican Rock Steady and Ska into Reggae, lost his life to COVID-19.

As a brief tribute, this week our Sunday Evening Video presents Toots and The Maytals live in concert at Summerjam 2017, in Cologne, Germany.  This week on NOISE BRIGADE (You can hear in Monday afternoon on 88.1, WTSQ, and Tuesday at 2 PM on The AIR), Steven Allen Adams pays further tribute to this brilliant singer, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader.

This week we’re going back to November, 2010, for an episode of the show loaded with great music and animation. Above, you see a rarely-seen episode of Radio Free Charleston, “Flash Photography Shirt.”  The wide-ranging music on this show comes from Andrea Anderson, The Dad Horse Experience, and Shayla Leftridge. Our animation is Frank Panucci’s very first animated film.  We also have some Super Fancy Dancing.

For the full story on this edition of RFC, check out the production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
September 11, 2020

It’s our post-Labor Day lull. I could use this space to remember the terror attacks of 911, but there is no shortage of such things on the web, and your PopCulteer is in the midst of his annual late-summer sinus infection. I have been fairly useless all week, but I did get some reading done, so you can expect more of The PopCult Bookshelf in the coming week or three. But I didn’t quite feel up to cranking out an eloquent essay on a pertinent subject for this space this week.

Luckily, I did feel like producing a new episode of MIRRORBALL, hosted by my lovely wife, Mel Larch, and that’s what I’m going to tell you about this week.

It’s hard to believe, but we’re already up to our tenth edition of MIRRORBALL  Friday afternoon on The AIR. and that’s followed by two great encore epsodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat.  You can hear all this good stuff on The AIR website, or just click on this embedded radio player…

This week we open the show with Kool and The Gang’s “Celebration,” which, aside from being a great show-opening tune, is also here in memory of Ronald “Khalis” Bell, who wrote the song as a member of The Gang. He passed away this week at his home in the Virgin Islands. That celebration of his life kicks off an hour of top-notch Disco music, to which buttocks may start a-jigglin’. Check out the playlist:

MIRRORBALL 010

Kool And The Gang “Celebration”
Teena Marie “I Need Your Lovin'”
The Village People “Macho Man”
The Detroit Spinners “Working My Way Back To You”
Luther Vandross “Never Too Much”
Stephanie Mills “Never Knew Love Like This Before”
McFadden and Whitehead “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now”
Eddie Kendricks “Keep On Truckin'”
Rufus “Tell Me Something Good”
George McCrae “Rock Your Baby”
Shalamar “The Second Time Around”
Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King “Shame”
Earth Wind and Fire “Mighty Mighty”
Kelly Marie “Feels Like I’m In Love”
Chic “Good Times”

You can tune in at 2 PM (Eastern time) and hear the latest edition of MIRRORBALL. The plan is to drop a new episode roughly every other Friday afternoon, until Mel gets tired of doing it, or people stop listening. Later today, it will go up in the Podcast section of The AIR website, so you can listen on demand.  MIRRORBALL will also be replayed Friday night at 10 PM, Saturday at 7 PM (part of a mini-marathon), Sunday at 11 PM and Tuesday at 1 PM. We’ll probably sneak in a few more airings during the week.

And that wraps up this short, headache-y PopCulteer.  Check back for fresh content every day, even if some of it is prepared while fighting with a throbbing noggin.

The PopCult Bookshelf

Five Minutes, Mr. Byner: A Lifetime of Laughter
by John Byner and Douglas Wellman
foreword by Nathan Lane
WriteLife Publishing
ISBN-13 : 978-1608082346
$13.99 Kindle Edition $3.99

When I was a wee lad, John Byner was one of my favorite comedians. He was a talented impressionist (much better than Rich Little), he appeared on shows like Ed Sullivan, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Get Smart, Dean Martin and others too countless to mention. What got my interest initially was his cartoon voices, beginning with The Ant and The Aardvark (more on that later) and continuing for decades, up to this day. He was even the voice of Bill The Cat in the Bloom County animated TV Special, The Wish For Wings That Work.

He was always funny, talented and very likeable.

Five Minutes, Mr. Byner: A Lifetime of Laughter, is a funny, pleasant likeable story of Byner’s life in show business. He spends some time on his early life, not dwelling on the negatives (his father passing away when he was young) but concentrating on his generally positive outlook and how he cultivated his talents into a long career. Byner, and his co-writer, Douglas Wellman, have crafted a very enjoyable showbiz book.

In briskly-written chapters, Byner gives first-hand accounts of working as a stand-up in The Hungry I, a legendary comedy club, and tells his readers what it was like appearing on shows with Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson. He talks about his many film roles, dropping some big names along the way, and gives accounts of what it was like appearing on TV shows like Soap and Bizarre, which Byner hosted for five years, and which was the show that made Super Dave Osbourne a star years after he first appeared on another variety show hosted by Byner.

We don’t get a lot of personal details, and to be honest, that’s a bit of a relief. I wanted to read the story of Byner’s career, and didn’t need to hear the warts-and-all details of his three divorces. We do get a chapter on dealing with hecklers and difficult people (like Woody Allen and Alan King), but the book is overwhelmingly positive and enjoyable.

Five Minutes, Mr. Byner: A Lifetime of Laughter is a fascinating time-capsule into show business in the 1960s and beyond that doesn’t weigh down the reader with dark stories of personal demons. It’s a quick and enjoyable read, but it’s got lots of meaty showbiz stories.

You have to indulge me here for a moment. I do have one quibble with the book, and this may very well be an example of The Mandela Effect in action. Growing up, I ate, slept, drank and lived for cartoons. I loved everything about animation, and would even get excited about animated commercials. And one reason I was a fan of John Byner was that I saw an interview with him where he talked about creating the voices for The Ant and The Aardvark.

I have vivid memories of Byner, in that interview, talking about how he based the voice of The Ant, on Dean Martin, one of the top television stars of the day and a member of the legendary Rat Pack. I also remember Byner saying that he based the voice of The Aardvark on another member of The Rat Pack, Joey Bishop, who at that time was hosting a talk show on ABC that attempted to compete with The Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson.

It has been very frustrating for me seeing references all over the internet to the voice of The Aardvark being based on comedian, Jackie Mason. It’s an easy mistake to make. Basically Joey Bishop and Jackie Mason have the same very Jewish, very New York voice.

I can understand the confusion, but when production began on The Ant and The Aardvark cartoon series in 1968, Joey Bishop was a household name. He was hosting a late-night talk show (Regis Philbin was his announcer) and he’d co-starred in several high-grossing movies during the 1960s. Mason, on the other hand, was still in what he has described as a “twenty year slump” after the 1964 “Middle Finger Incident” and was fairly obscure at the time.

Byner did know Jackie Mason, and was even on the same episode of Ed Sullivan where the “Middle Finger Incident” happened, but it seems to me that a cartoon producer would be more likely to base a character’s voice on a high-profile member of The Rat Pack than he would an obscure stand-up comic.

But in this book, and also in Nathan Lane’s intro, the voice is said to be an impression of Jackie Mason. It is entirely possible that I am totally mis-remembering something that I saw when I was seven or eight years old over half a century ago, but I’m wondering if maybe Byner could be remembering it incorrectly too. Maybe for years, people asked him why he was doing Jackie Mason’s voice for the Aardvark, and he just decided to go along with them since Joey Bishop had pretty much sunk into oscurity. Since Bishop and Mason have identical voices, it’s pretty much a moot point, but I had to get that off my chest.

Aside from that quibble, which probably wasn’t worth the effort it took to write, I do recommend this book for anybody who wants to hear some great showbiz tales without any heavy overtones. Five Minutes, Mr. Byner: A Lifetime of Laughter can be ordered from Amazon in print in or Kindle form.

The PopCult Toybox

I was a lucky kid. I grew up in the golden age of really cool space toys. I got to experience Major Matt Mason, Zeroids, Billy Blastoff, Outer Space Men and others first-hand.

Since that time, the majority of space-based toys were licensed stuff, Star Trek, Star Wars, Space: 1999 and the like, and it all has its charm, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a space toy concept debut based on an original idea.

Playmonster has released a new series of building toy space ships called Snap Ships, and they’re pretty darned cool. They come in a variety of sizes and price points. There are tons of them to collect. Each set allows kids to reconfigure the ships in several different ways. And there is a YouTube series that tells the story behind these cool ships that do battle in the stars. I have a feeling that a lot of adult collectors are going to want to get there hands on these.

Snap Ships is a collectible, durable and versatile modular building system that stands up to action play. Snap Ships invite kids to build, battle and display an exciting array of cool spacecrafts, merging two of the biggest play patterns for boys—action-play and construction.

Designed for kids ages 8 and up, the exciting new Snap Ships fleet launches with eleven ships at a suggested retail price of $9.99–$39.99, each coming with a mysterious UJU tech piece that holds special value hidden inside the box. Snap Ships come with multiple build options and are available at Amazon, Target and other retailers.

More than just a toy line, Snap Ships creates a 360-degree play experience inviting kids into the Snap Ships universe through an immersive animated series from acclaimed content studio Wind Sun Sky Entertainment, and a free interactive AR app from highly successful video game developers.

“Snap Ships is so much more than a great toy line; it is a content-driven franchise that allows kids to not only build, but also play, battle, rebuild, customize, watch content, engage with the app and then do it all over again,” said Tim Kilpin, PlayMonster’s newly appointed President. “We set out to change the building play experience, and it is the biggest launch in Play Monster’s history.”

To tell the epic story of the Snap Ships universe, PlayMonster joined forces with award-winning content studio Wind Sun Sky to produce a fast-paced and edgy animated series. Season one of the series, Snap Ships Dawn of Battle launched in August on YouTube, with new episodes releasing each week. Check out the first episode here…

The epic storyline introduces viewers to The Forge, an elite team assembled to pilot a fleet of versatile and specialized Snap Ships defense attack craft, and The Komplex, an alien species determined to annihilate all life, that has invaded with no warning. Along the way, The Forge discovers mysterious UJU tech, left behind by an ancient civilization, that can be added to their Snap Ships to give them unheard-of abilities.

Rounding out the Snap Ships launch is the release of the free interactive Snap Ships app, designed to complement the toy line and animated series, allowing users to explore the vibrant world of Snap Ships. Highly detailed digital versions of the constructible toys come to life in the app and can be summoned into your room via Augmented Reality. Kids are invited to “Build to Battle” with digital building instructions for the core Snap Ships kits, as well as a huge assortment of custom ships unique to the app. Track your collection, prep ships for flight in AR, and test fire your ship’s weapons as you battle against the ever advancing Komplex.

Developed by Scott Pease and Jeff Swenty, AAA video game veterans (Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero, Call of Duty) and the inventors of Snap Ships, the app, rated E for everyone, is available now for free for iOS on the Apple App Store and for Android via the Google Play Store.

“To us, Snap Ships are more than toys—we imagine them as real, working spaceships,” said Pease. “The Snap Ships app brings that fantasy to life: summon life sized ships in Augmented Reality, walk around them, test their weapons, and fly them into Battle. You also get access to an endless supply of unique ships with detailed, 3D building instructions, so you can build them all with your real-life toy kits!”

Each Snap Ship set comes with at least one buildable figure, plus a tool to help assemble and disassemble the ships. All ships can fire projectiles. The top of the box converts into a cool base so that the ships can be displayed in flight. These are also great for collectors who don’t have a lot of room. A full collection might take up one decent-sized shelf.

With a huge ad campaign behind, plus inherently cool toys and a nifty animated series, Snap Ships has the potential to be a breakout hit this holiday season, and could rank up there with the evergreen space toys of the past.

The PopCult Comix Bookshelf

DC Goes to War
by Robert Kanigher and various
DC Comics
ISBN-13 : 978-1779500151
$39.99

This is a bit of a strange compilation of great comics. From the 1950s to the 1980s DC’s War comics boasted some of the top creators in the company’s history, and this hardcover collection includes work by Joe Kubert, Joe Simon & Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Russ Heath, Mort Drucker, John Severin, Garth Ennis, Eduardo Baretto and more, but aside from having a stellar line-up of classic war stories, this book has a bit of a half-assed feel to it.

There are no text pages in DC Goes To War. Nothing gives you the history behind these stories or provides any context. There is nothing to explain the evolution from the comics in the 1940s, when the characters are preoccupied with “killing Krauts,” to the nuanced anti-war stance of a story like “Head-Count,” where the reader is left to ponder whether or not a medal winner was also a murderous psychopath.

Like I mentioned, the stories within this collection include some amazing work by the finest artists to ever work in the medium, but they were assembled in the laziest manner possible.

I realize that it’s really not fair to compare a reprint collection to another reprint collection that came out 41 years earlier, but of 17 stories collected in DC Goes To War, 13 of them were previously published in 1979 in a collection called America at War: The Best of DC War Comics, which was edited and compiled by Michael Uslan. That book also included Uslan’s 7-page essay that did provide the historical context and background information that this new collection is sorely lacking.

Only four of the stories collected in DC Goes To War were not included in the previous collection, and only three of those were published in the ensuing forty-plus years since that first collection. One of those newer stories, an excellect Enemy Ace mini-series from 2001, written by Garth Ennis, takes up the last 100 pages of this 352-page collection. It’s a great story and well deserving of a reprint, but because of its length it crowds out a lot of other notable works.

I can’t quite understand why DC didn’t simply publish an updated edition of America at War: The Best of DC War Comics, and then, if that did well, produce a second volume with newer stories and some of the gems that were missed. Both books include the first notable appearances of Blackhawk, Hop Harrigan, Sgt. Rock, The Haunted Tank, The Unknown Soldier, Capt. Hunter, Gunner and Pooch, Mlle. Marie and Enemy Ace. Each book makes for a good overview and introduction, but there are so many high-quality stories in those series that warrant more than just a “Secret Origins” collection.

Since DC shut down their war comics in the mid-1980s, there haven’t been many memorable war comics published by them. Many of the better recent stories are already collected in hardcover or paperback form.

DC has produced Archive Editions and Showcase collections of some of their classic war comics, but most of those are out of print, and there is still a wealth of top-quality material in the DC Comics war library that has never been reprinted before, from dozens of classic Kanigher/Kubert Sgt. Rock tales to stories with spectacular art by Russ Heath, Alex Toth, Frank Redondo and Sam Glanzman, among many others. It would’ve been nice if DC had chosen to tap into that motherlode, rather than simply copy their own previous collection.

As I said, DC Goes To War is a terrific collection, if you don’t already have America at War: The Best of DC War Comics. It’s a good introduction to DC’s war comics, and the production is pretty decent. You can order it from any bookseller by using the ISBN code, or you can get it at a discount from Amazon.

This week we have another timed piece, only this time I gave myself three full hours to work on this mixed media on artboard imaginary portrait. The base sketch was done in pencil, then I turned to oil pastels and a little colored pencil before attempting a light wash over it and touching it up with watercolor and ink.

I had to let it dry for a day before scanning it.

It’s just a sketch of a girl in a newsstand. I used photos online to help me figure out the lighting, but otherwise this is reference-free.

If you want to see it bigger, just click on the image.

Meanwhile, Monday on The AIR, we are in the middle of our Labor Day Weekend Marathon of Radio Free Charleston. This one goes on until Tuesday evening, so tune in and check out a unique mix of local music, with the best classic and obscure music from around the world! You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

If you are of a certain age, Labor Day seems synonymous with The Jerry Lewis Labor Day MDA Telethon, which the famed comedian hosted for almost sixty years.

The telethon is gone, as is Jerry, but MDA (the Muscular Dystrophy Association) maintains a YouTube page where they still post highlights from the vaults.

Above you see a playlist with 104 videos of musical legends like Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, B.B. King, Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Toni Basil and many others. Best of all, you can watch these clips without sitting through four hours of corporate spokespeople droning on in a monotone about how much they care about the kids. I mean, no offense to the guy from 7 11, but I’m pretty sure they play those parts on an endless loop in hell. Above you see the good stuff, the cream of the crop.

Seriously, there are some gems in there like Duran Duran, MC Hammer and Charo. There’s lots of Charo. Lots of MC Hammer, too, now that I think about it.

Enjoy!