Author: rudy panucci (Page 22 of 34)

We kick off this week’s Monday Morning Notes with a digitally assaulted photograph called “Shadowplay.” Shot in wild, wonderful Dunbar. (Click the picture to enlarge. ) Now, on to the notes:

Briefs and Shorts-the Leprechaun edition: Thursday night, Kanawha Players presents the latest installment in their “Briefs And Shorts” series at Capitol Roasters, at the corner of Quarrier and Summers Streets in downtown Charleston. This edition of KP’s series of short plays is entitled “Scenes From An Irish Pub Part Two.” The ten-minute plays are “Cinder Reilly,” “Green,” and “Mrs. Harrigan’s Big Mistake.” In addition, there will be fiddle music, dancing, and stereotypical Irish behavior. Admission is only five bucks, and the show starts at 8 PM.

Calling Earl: Big news for fans of NBC’s My Name Is Earl–a DVD collection of the first season will be in stores late this summer, before the start of season two. Aside from all the first-season shows, the set will include commentary, deleted scenes, highlights from the show’s gag reel, and a 15 minute mini-episode that shows what would have happened if, instead of obtaining his life-changing epiphany from Carson Daly, Earl had continued to flip channels while in the hospital, and had obtained his new outlook on life from Stewie Griffin, the murderous evil genius baby from The Family Guy. “Must See TV” indeed!

Postal Irony: Have you ever had a piece of mail that was so badly mangled in transit that it arrived in your mailbox enclosed inside another envelope that bore the following apology?

I got one of these the other day. The funny thing is, the piece of mail that was nearly destroyed by the mail-sorting machines was none other than junk mail. But it wasn’t just any old junk mail. The piece of junk mail mangled by the Post Office was an advertisement for…….the Post Office!

I guess that the mail sorting machines were so offended by the badly drawn “Cathy” comic strip, that they saw fit to rip it to shreds. Who knew postal equipment had taste? And what does it say about the Postal Service when they have to resort to paying to license a comic strip character to promote a service on which they hold a monopoly, and then they can’t even deliver that piece of mail intact?

Song of the week: The Marxist Brothers, by Punk veterans NOFX. In stores tomorrow, this cut from NOFX’s “Never Trust A Hippy” EP, is a clever comment on those folks who go through a Marxist phase, but never really understand what it means.

Paging Bettie: Bettie Page was the glamour queen of the 1940s and 1950s. Then she suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Her absence enhanced her mystique, and she became a pop culture icon, with tributes appearing in comic books, movies, rock songs, and even fine art. After searching for the missing pin-up queen for years, she was finally discovered a few years ago, with a remarkable tale of how she went from being the nation’s top model to working as a missionary for Billy Graham, and hitting rock bottom before finding out that, over the last couple of decades, she had become more famous than ever. Her story is coming to the big screen in April as The Notorious Bettie Page hits theaters, with Gretchen Mol in the title role. You can read more about Ms. Page’s incredible life at her website, here.

In a departure this week, instead of bringing you a cool toy, we’re going to point you to a TV show about all kinds of cool toys. Cable channel VH1 presents I Love Toys a countdown of the top 100 toys as voted on by the sort of people who go to the VH1 website.

It’s not a bad list. There are a few glaring omissions, and a few questionable picks. The number one toy is remarkably lame, but most of the rest are decent picks. I Love Toys is a fun rundown of cool toys, with just the right mix of nostalgia and hipster cynicism. The commentary ranges from strange to funny, which is perfectly appropriate for this topic.

VH1 has been running this five-episode series in a strange manner all week. On Monday, they showed the first episode, which presented the toys numbered 100 to 81. Tuesday, they re-ran that show, followed by the second episode. Wednesday, the pattern continued as they re-ran both previous episodes before they premiered episode three. So Friday, starting at 5:30 PM, you could watch the entire series, leading up to the premiere of the final show in the series, which told us the top 20 toys.

Of course, with this being VH1, you can be sure that they’ll only show this series five or six hundred more times in the coming months. The entire series will be shown again on both Saturday and Sunday afternoon, this weekend.

Online, you can check out the entire list of 100 toys, and if you have fully functional broadband, you can watch video clips of the toys that didn’t make the list, as well as out-takes and additional smarmy comments. I Love Toys is a fun diversion, and might bring back a lot of memories.

Now that the Gazz Blogs are adding new video features, I thought I’d share some video of something my brother worked on……

Visit Frank’s site and tell him how much you enjoyed his delightful little children’s cartoon!

Lots of stuff to note this week, but first, have some art:

“The Rails West, Out Of Dunbar”
Digitally Assaulted Photograph

February 2006

Click the picture to enlarge to full size.

A Night At The Vagina: Last night, The Samaritan Players, in conjunction with Kanawha Players, presented a performance of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” with all proceeds going to the Worldwide V-Day Fund to stop violence against women. Competition was fierce, with “Thoroughly Modern Millie” at the Clay Center, and The Third House at the Cultural Center.

I always thought it would be cool to attend a performance of the Vagina Monologues dressed in full Confederate Colonel gear. Then, halfway through the show, I’d stand up, loudly proclaim, “I have been sitting here for this entire show, and I have yet to hear ONE WORD about the great state of Virginia!” And then I’d storm out. I also think it’d be funny to ride a horse into a Bridal shop.

Grace Under Investigation: Nancy Grace, the host of three hours of cable TV each day on Court TV and CNN Headline News , tells a remarkable story about how, after the murder of her fiancee, she became a prosecutor, and eventually a crusading television reporter on the legal beat. According to a report at the New York Observer, the most remarkable thing about her story is that it’s not entirely true.

Background Tune of the week: “The Tide Is Turning” by Roger Waters, from his 1987 album, Radio KAOS. This song, inspired by Live Aid, could be a nice theme song for what seems to be the reawakening of common sense in America.

Just wondering: After the end of King Kong, how long did the street outside the Empire State Building smell like dead monkey?

Bonus cool toy: I’ve mentioned the Official G.I. Joe Collector’s Club before, but something new has been added. If you join up, and are a member of the club in good standing by March 15, you will get a cool one-of-a-kind action figure, the “Foreign Adventurer”(seen at right) .This 12” tall figure is comprised of a reproduction of the Vintage GI Joe body, with the rare “Foreign” head that was only used on a few figures in 1966. For the first time ever, this head will have flocked, “fuzzy,” hair and beard, like the Adventure Team GI Joes of the 1970s had. You can read more about the Foreign Adventurer, and some nifty extras you can order to go along with him here, and you can join the Official G.I. Joe Collector’s Club for the annual fee of $36 by calling 817-448-9863. You have to join up by the 15th in order to get this cool figure.

WWE Programming Conflict: WWE returns to NBC in a big way on March 12, with a prime-time edition of Saturday Night’s Main Event. The problem for local viewers is that WHCP shows the WWE’s Friday Night Smackdown! on Saturday Nights at 8 p.m. That’s the same time that NBC is showing their WWE special. On top of that, events will happen on that week’s episode of Smackdown! that will set up matches on Saturday Night’s Main Event. Maybe, even if it’s just for one week, WHCP could move Smackdown! to a 10 p.m. Friday night timeslot, to avoid putting the shows on opposite each other. It’s not like they have a newscast to worry about anymore.

Speaking of WHCP: The latest rumor, innuendo, and scuttlebutt in the Charleston broadcasting community is that WHCP‘s owner, Charles Harker, played the group of Charleston-based investors in the WB30 Newscast like a cheap violin. He needed their investment to upgrade his transmitter, so this story goes. WHCP’s broadcast signal was so poor that they couldn’t meet the minimum standards to be picked up as a local channel by Direct TV. According to the new local legend, part of the deal that brought the newscast to the airwaves also involved upgrading the WHCP transmitter on the news division’s dime. The old transmitter was apparently powered by rubber bands and old Erector Set motors. Once the new transmitter was installed and the signal was strong enough to be picked up by Direct TV, the news division was essentially kicked to the curb. Promises were broken and everything possible was done to encourage the dissolution of the partnership. This is the story going around the other TV stations in town, but nobody directly involved will comment on it. At least not to me. For some reason they don’t seem to like me much. What’s odd is the way the Portsmouth crowd has taken to using Reader’s Voice, Vent Lines, and goofy names in the comments of this blog to spin their side of the story. A word of advice guys: Mocking people for expecting the health insurance that they were promised in their contracts is not going to be a winning issue.

A Blog for You: Bubblegum Fink is THE blog for people obsessed with both Bubblegum music of the ’60s and ’70s, and Hot Rod icons like Rat Fink and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. If you know who Ron Dante is, then this is the site for you! This frequently-updated page brings forth lots of blasts from the past of the late-period baby boomers and fans of slick pop music and gnarly Car-toons. You’ll find old album covers by The Catanooga Cats and The Partridge Family, vintage artwork from the hot rod/surf rod/Juxtapoz crowd and links to places where you can find CD re-releases of the classic bubblegum music masterpieces. Poke through the archives for more 70’s era coolness like covers of Dynamite Magazine, and Gold Key Star Trek comic books, and strange appearances by the likes of Frankenberry. It’s a little taste of heaven for children of the 70s.

Shameless self-promotion: As I have mentioned in the past, aside from my duties here at PopCult, I also write articles that appear in Non Sport Update, a magazine devoted to non-sport trading cards. In the most recent issue, I wrote a piece on trading cards based on the TV show Veronica Mars. You can read it online, for the next week or so, here.

A Personal Note: Just in case this blog doesn’t get updated as much as usual this week, it’s because I’m helping out with my new nephew. William Franklin Margolis arrived March 4, 2006 at 5:30 a.m.. Baby, Mother, and Father, are all doing fine. Uncle is pretty happy, too.

If you enjoy board games with elements of fantasy and sword and sorcery, but you don’t want to invest half your life into learning the rules and playing them, then Darkness Falls On Sevinpold is the game for you.

This is a great board game that up to six people can play. It depicts a classic battle between good and evil, and a quest to reunite a scepter with the Castle Of The Living Throne. Set in the mystical land of Sevinpold, gameplayers explore 32 castles looking for treasures to help them complete their quest. The good guys are The Valiant. One player in each game represents The Darkness (not to be confused with the band, The Darkness), and commands up to 10 evil game pieces. The Good guys each control one Valiant piece, but they work as a team, so that if six people are playing, it’s possible for five to win. This sort of team play is unique in the board game world.

You get all the trappings of a Dungeons and Dragons-like game, but you can play Darkness Falls On Sevinpold in 30 minutes. It’s got enough variables to make repeated play fun, but you don’t have to hold marathon gaming sessions in order to enjoy it. Plus, it’s great for kids, who can grasp the rules fairly quickly. The Sevinpold website has a short tutorial on the rules that you can watch to get an idea of how the game plays.

You can order Darkness Falls On Sevinpold directly from their website, but it can also be found at Amazon.com and other online board game retailers. It’ll set you back $30 plus shipping, but it could be a great addition to a family game night, and it might keep junior away from the X-Box.

Monday night, for the fourth year in a row, Charleston will be treated to a benefit performance of Eve Ensler’s play, “The Vagina Monologues” at the West Virginia State University Capitol Center Theater. It’s part of the V-Day Worldwide Campaign, which will receive the proceeds from the performance. This performance is sponsored by the Samaritan Players, in conjunction with Kanawha Players.

V-Day is a global movement to end violence against women and girls that raises funds and awareness through benefit productions of Playwright/Founder Eve Ensler’s award-winning play. In 2005, more than 2500 V-Day events took place in the U.S. and around the world. To date, V-Day has raised over $30 million and educated millions about the issue of violence against women and the efforts to end it; crafted international educational, media and PSA campaigns; reopened shelters; funded safe houses in Kenya, South Dakota, Egypt and Iraq and over 5000 community-based anti-violence programs. The ‘V’ in V-Day stands for Victory, Valentine and Vagina. You can read more about it here.

Local performers featured in this year’s production include Aila Accad, Bethany Cline, Penny Fioravante, Debbie Haught, Janet Johnson, Shannon Kessler, Ariana Kincaid, Olubunmi Kusimo, Katie Pleska, Amy Prunest, Kate Rainey, Julie Wirts, Monica Young and others. My Animated Discussions partner, Melanie Larch, will also be performing. It’s her fourth year in the show. In fact, the reason there is no Animated Discussions column today is because she’s been tied up all week with Vagina practice. AD will be back next week.

If you go: The performance starts at 7:30 p.m., March 6 at the West Virginia State University Capitol Center Theater, 123 Summers Street. Tickets are $20 ($15 for students).

Lots of diverse little items to get to today, so we’ll kick off with a digitally-assaulted photograph of the trees on the Lee Street Triangle, and then dive in. Click the photo to enlarge.

So long, guys: We lost two of my childhood heroes over the weekend. Mark Evanier has a nice remembrance of Don Knotts here. While Knotts was beloved for his portrayal of Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, I always think of his role as “The Incredible Mr. Limpet,” when his name comes up. I must have watched that movie a hundred times when I was growing up. We also lost Darren McGavin. It’s a toss-up whether he was more famous for his role in “A Christmas Story,” or if he’ll be remembered as Carl Kolchak, “The Night Stalker.” Both men were great performers whose work will live on.

Uno down: So, the Pizzeria Uno out at the Trace Fork Plaza closed down. I ate there once. Evidently, most people did. The owners say that they’ll be soon be opening a different franchise restaurant in that building. Guys….just in case you haven’t settled on which restaurant to go with yet..Isn’t it about freakin’ time that Charleston finally got a Denny’s?

The real spirit of Rock N Roll: Finally, somebody has pointed out how the slick showbiz aspects of the Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame are the complete antithesis of what Rock music stands for. The Sex Pistols have turned down the invitation to be inducted into the hall. You can read their hastily-scrawled rebuke here. The Pistols even used the worst insult imaginable: they said that the place would be filled with “Music Industry People.” This is a relief. The image of the Pistols performing “Anarchy In The UK” while Clive Davis and Herb Albert sit in the audience wearing tuxedos could have upset the balance of the universe.

Rove and the Republicans: Someone smuggled a camera into last week’s clandestine meeting, where Karl Rove rallied state Republicans on how to best conquer and divide West Virginia. You can see what the meeting looked like here.

The Coolest New Blog: John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren And Stimpy, and a longtime pal of Animated Discussions, has started a blog, and he’s using it to pitch and tease ideas for new cartoons. Over the last few days he’s posted short animations of George Liquor, and he also has scripts and comics online. For God’s sake, man, go check it out immediately!

Countdown: I’ve been meaning to write about how great a show that Countdown with Keith Olbermann is for some time. But now that Bill O’Reilly is trying to get Olbermann cancelled, I really have to recommend it to you. O’Reilly must really be scared to resort to such an act of desperation. Countdown is the only show on any of the 24-hour news channels that doesn’t lean to the far right and run administration propaganda unchallenged. And it’s funny, too. In addition to top-flight coverage of breaking news, Olbermann also includes humorous regular features like “Oddball,” and “Worst Person In The World.” Check it out. It’s on MSNBC, which many people ignore because so many of their other hosts are Fox News and CNN cast-offs. Weeknights at 8PM are a little oasis of actual quality television journalism in the vast desert of cable news.

Minor Comics News: Brandweek reports that DC Comics is now handling ad sales for Matt Groening’s Bongo Comics. This means that now, Bongo Comics, which include comic books based on The Simpsons and Futurama, will have exactly the same advertisements on exactly the same pages as all DC comic books. But the two companies are still separate. Weird, and a bit of a bummer. Bongo Comics used to be virtually ad-free. Now there’s fewer pages of comics in each issue.

It’s official, the WB30 Newscast has been cancelled. Thursday night’s 6 and 10 PM broadcasts were replaced by an unscheduled home improvement show, and, unless it gets re-written, the station’s Wikpedia entry already reports that the broadcast has “been axed.” Also, the latest controversy seems to have stirred things up over at the fake Tom McGee Myspace Page (not really work safe, folks). Late Thursday afternoon, according to this entry at LiveJournal, the news operation was shut down. There are full details in this morning’s Gazette.

It’s not too hard to figure out what to make of the latest developments. I’d been hearing rumors for some time that the Portsmouth faction of WHCP was undermining the efforts to establish a successful newscast and move the station to Charleston. Evidently there’s a lot of resentment there over the move. The physical ejection of lead anchor Tom McGee on Tuesday was an indication that the end was near. McGee’s story is that he was standing up for the reporters that he helped the station recruit in a dispute over health insurance and parking. It looks like McGee may have been the hero of this piece. WHCP hasn’t made a public statement yet, and as of Thursday night their website still had the 6 and 10 PM newscasts listed on their schedule, along with several other programs that weren’t on Thursday evening. The internal memo that was posted on an industry message board blamed “recent events within the organization as well as the apparent unwillingness of the advertiser community to support our news products.”

And so, the newscast is done and I’m betting that lawsuits will start flying in all directions. With so many lawyers on the Charleston end of the equation, things don’t look good for WHCP. I’m also guessing that the station won’t be moving to the West Side, after all. I hope I’m wrong in that assumption. If you could manage to sit through the newscasts, it was obvious from the poor quality of the commercials that WHCP didn’t have a sales staff that could sell advertising here in Charleston. A local newscast should be a cash cow for a TV station, but all that WHCP could manage were really awful commercials for businesses in Portsmouth and Ironton, promos for RCW wrestling and public service announcements. They really should have hired experienced ad sales reps before they started the newscast. A move to Charleston might have forced them to produce better work.

It’s too bad this didn’t work out. Even with the relative inexperience of the news crew, it was nice to have an alternative to the slick, professional newscasts that the other local stations air. Plus it’s hard to beat the sheer entertainment value of watching reporter Mike Karr’s stammering, “deer-caught-in-the-headlights” reaction every time one of the anchors asked him a question. Plus, it would have been nice if the news division managed to drag the technical quality of the station up from the sad levels that they are now.

The bottom line is that we nearly lost the Duchess Bakery for nothing! Reportedly, the investors from Charleston are going to take another shot at local TV, maybe with a more willing partner, this time. It’d be sweet if they can make it happen quickly, and then hijack the new CW Network away from WHCP. Maybe if that happens, Charleston area viewers can watch those surviving WB and UPN shows in stereo, with a decent broadcast signal, for the first time.

Chances are that if you were a kid during the 1970s, you were aware of MEGO action figures. These were little 8-inch tall figures that started out as a wildly popular line of Superhero figures, featuring both DC and Marvel characters. After mining that trend for a couple of years, MEGO started acquiring licenses to produce action figures based on hit TV shows of the day, like C.H.i.P.S, The Dukes Of Hazzard and Happy Days.

The MEGO figures were made like the old-style GI Joe, with an articulated body held together with elastic bands, and cloth uniforms. The head sculpts were a bit clunky, but that was part of the charm. Collectors go nuts over these figures. MEGO went belly-up in the early 1980s, after famously passing up the chance to make toys based on a little movie called Star Wars, but the company’s 8-inch action figures left quite an impression on the collective pop culture psyche of the children of the polyester decade.

Today, a new company has resurrected the classic MEGO-style action figure. Classic TV Toys began producing reproductions of some of the most-beloved MEGO figures last year. They’ve also picked up the license to make action figures in the MEGO style for other TV shows that didn’t have their own action figure lines back in the 1970s. Happy Days, The Munsters, The Brady Bunch, Married With Children and Space 1999 are just a few of the action figure lines they have available. They’ve even produced a MEGO-style figure of Andre The Giant.

These figures are very close reproductions of the body types used by MEGO back in the day, and they’ve even designed the packaging to look like the old blister cards that we used to see hanging in K Mart. If you have some older MEGO figures in distress, they also sell new replacement parts.

Classic TV Toys has also recreated several of the “generic” MEGO figure lines as well, with new figures of Pirates, Monsters, Cowboys and Knights. This is a huge nostalgic rush for those of us who had these toys when we were kids. Priced between 10 and 15 dollars, they’re inexpensive enough for today’s kids. You can order Classic TV Toys action figures, and check out their full assortment, at their website.

Animated Discussions
by Rudy Panucci and Melanie Larch

The movie Doogal opens this week, and this story of a dog on a quest has one complicated pedigree. For openers, this movie was not produced in America. The Weinstein Company brought it over from another country, dubbed in American voice actors, and is releasing it with a new title. That may not seem like such a big deal, except for one point: The “other country” is The United Kingdom. Doogal was released in Great Britain last year as The Magic Roundabout, and boasted a voice cast that included Joanna Lumley, Jim Broadbent, Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue, and everyone’s favorite “Dr. Who,” Tom Baker. It was already in English.

We don’t know whether they were spooked by the failure of Valiant, or if the distributors thought that the new voice cast would have more box-office appeal, but some of the replacements seem a bit odd. Zeebad, the villain of the movie, was voiced in the original British version by Tom Baker, who can be quite menacing. In the American version, Zeebad has the voice of Jon Stewart. The lead character is voiced either by Daniel Tay or Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson, depending on when you check the official website. We guess they’re still making their mind up on that one, and the movie opens in two days as we write this.

Even more strange is how the movie, which only had the soundtrack changed for its domestic debut, now has a different director listed. Butch Hartman, who was brought in to supervise the new voice recordings, gets to walk off with a sole director’s credit. Dave Borthwick, Jean Duval, and Frank Passingham share the director’s credit for the British version, which to reiterate, is the same movie. It looks like Hartman, who created The Fairly Oddparents for Nickelodeon, found an easy way to get a feature film credit under his belt.

This sort of cross-cultural confusion is par for the course for The Magic Roundabout. Created by Serge Danot as a stop-motion-animated children’s program in France in the 1960s, the show was brought over to the United Kingdom where it was chopped up, scrambled, and translated into entirely new stories that had a large measure of adult humor added. They bore little resemblance to the French version. The show was wildly popular in the ’60s and ’70s. After fading from the public’s memory, the show was revived last year as a feature-length movie.

The show was rarely seen in the United States, so this CGI revival didn’t have the nostalgic boost that the movie had in Britain. We can understand the title change, since American’s don’t know what a Roundabout is, but we’re puzzled by some of the new voice casting. Joanna Lumley, who has high recognition due to Absolutely Fabulous, was replaced by Whoopi Goldberg. While they evidently can’t decide who will voice Doogal, the trailers show him singing with Robbie Williams’ voice, from the UK version. Kevin Smith is listed as providing a voice for the movie, but he’s not on any of the cast lists we’ve seen, so he may be another late addition.

Aside from all the confusing history and voice-cast quirks, Doogal looks like it might be a fun little family movie. There are a few pop-culture jokes in the trailer, and the animation is worlds beyond the primitive mess that polluted Hoodwinked. Doogal might be a fun way for animation fans to pass the time while we’re waiting for Ice Age 2.