Thursday, October 2, 2003

The Saga of Stan Lee Media (cont'd.)

Those of you who are following the sordid tale of Stan Lee Media (a company for which I once worked) may be interested in this article in the L.A. Times. And you might enjoy this one in the New York Post and this one in the Miami Herald. And...oh, heck. You might as well read this one over on Newsmax, a well-known Clinton-loathing concern. Sounds like by the time this is over, everyone will have testified against everyone else.

• Posted at 11:49 PM · LINK

The Plame Scandal

At least, that's what some folks — eager to avoid another "gate" nickname — are calling the issue of whether someone in the Bush White House committed a prosecutable crime by blowing the cover of a C.I.A. agent.

This story didn't really interest me until someone compared it favorably to my all-time favorite scandal. Incredibly, it was Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, who agreed with MSNBC's Chris Matthews that it was "worse than Watergate."

Ah, Watergate. Now, that was a scandal. And in today's Salon, no less a Watergate central figure than John W. Dean carries the comparison forward.

• Posted at 11:40 PM · LINK

Another Great Way To Waste Time Online

A few months ago, I got hooked by a clever little game on the Garfield website. It's called Garfield's Scary Scavenger Hunt and in it, "you" (as Garfield) walk around a haunted house avoiding monsters and looking for donuts. It took me about forty-five minutes to solve it and I apparently got a lot of you hooked, too. At least, a great many folks wrote to ask for the walkthrough solution I'd written up. Well, I am pleased and perhaps a bit fearful to tell you that the sequel is now online: Same house, roughly the same mission, most of the same monsters...but everything's in a different place and you have to do all different things to get out alive.

It took me about a half hour but some of that was luck. At the end, as your reward, the game lets you download a Garfield's Scary Scavenger Hunt screensaver...which is anti-climactic since you can also download the same screensaver from the margins of any screen. But have fun and keep your eye out for twins of Binky the Clown and cameos by two members of the U.S. Acres cast, one of whom is now apparently an entree. It's a very cleverly designed game.

To go on the first Garfield Scary Scavenger Hunt, click here. And to get to the sequel, click here. I took notes so I could whip up a walkthrough for this one but I'm not going to write it out for a couple weeks. Don't even ask for it now. Go solve it yourself. But for God's sake, don't click on the third cabinet from the left in the kitchen.

• Posted at 11:27 PM · LINK

Groping for the Truth

A scant six days before the election, a number of women have come forward to say that Arnold Schwarzenegger groped them or otherwise committed improprieties of personal etiquette. As with similar charges against Bill Clinton, we really don't know how true the charges are...and it almost doesn't matter. Those who are already politically committed to the accused give him the benefit of the doubt. Those who are already opposed to the guy insist every allegation is as good as substantiated fact. Arnold gave a non-specific apology which I suppose will enable women who were already going to vote for him to feel more comfortable with their choice, and everyone's weighing in on what, if anything, it all means.

The discussions I read today seemed to be missing a thought that occurs to me, which is that this isn't so much an issue of sex as the other great aphrodisiac, which is power. Obviously, a man who makes unwanted contact with a woman is a boor and maybe even a criminal. But when we talk about a potential elected official doing these things, the salient issue may not be Abuse of Women but Abuse of Power.

There are plenty of illegal and/or immoral things we might like to do but don't because we fear the consequences. Even a person devoid of personal ethics can be smart enough to behave because he doesn't want to be arrested or sued or slapped or even scolded. But suppose we remove the possible penalty. Suppose you could do it and there's little or no chance of you being punished. To refrain out of simple human decency in that situation would be a greater display of character.

Years ago on a show I wrote, I walked in on the make-up and hair people exchanging war stories and cautioning one another about certain Big Stars. Generally speaking — exceptions are rare — such crew members are in a position of total vulnerability. If they clash with the star...well, it's a lot easier to get another hairdresser than another star. It doesn't happen often but sometimes, the star decides to be an asshole for the same reason dogs lick their genitals: Because they can. Groping people is one offense but there are plenty of others and, nine times out of ten, the abused person has to just take it. They know that if the star points at them and says, "Either that person goes or I go," they go. That day, I heard one make-up lady tell a horrible story of sexual harassment verging on rape, committed by a Very Famous Actor who knew damn well there was nothing she could do about it.

Later that very day, I saw another Very Famous Actor fondling this lady and asking her unwanted questions about her sex life. She did her best to daub make-up on his face without getting felt and strained to divert the conversation into professional areas. But the V.F.A. knew he could get away with it so he was going to get away with it. Later, I saw him screaming at male crew members, ordering them about and obviously enjoying their subservience and the fact that they couldn't answer him back. It wasn't that this man had a problem with women. He had a problem with not being answerable; of having no concept of decency for the sake of decency.

I'm not suggesting any of this applies to Mr. Schwarzenegger. I have no idea what kind of governor he might make. (So far, the biggest gripe I have about him is that I don't think any of his supporters do, either.) I just thought I'd throw out the idea that when the issue of a politician or candidate supposedly mistreating women pops up, it may not just be a sex thing. It may be that like too many rich and famous folks, they've come to feel that they have some sort of cosmic Get Out Of Jail Free card. Hubert Humphrey once said that the moral test of a government was in how they treat the sick, the needy and the handicapped. I think the moral test of a Big Person may lie in how they treat the Little People. And in whether they behave like human beings even when it's not absolutely required of them.

• Posted at 10:54 PM · LINK

HiYo, Cartoon Fans!

Given how many hours of how many cable channels are given over to rerunning old TV cartoons (about half of them, Scooby Doo), it's interesting how many good-to-great shows of the past are unavailable. One, which is almost forgotten, is the 1966 Lone Ranger cartoon series produced for CBS by Herb Klynn's Format Films. Format produced a number of shows in the sixties before being shoved aside by the Hanna-Barbera juggernaut. The Lone Ranger probably hastened their fall. It was not considered a success, a fact the industry attributed to its unique graphics. The artwork, done mainly by artists who'd worked on cartoonier cartoons, was very stylized and simple. The major sources of design inspiration were Roy Crane, who did the Captain Easy and Buz Sawyer newspaper strips, and Jesse Marsh, who drew the Tarzan comic books. Both of those men illustrated adventure tales in broad, simple terms that some found stunningly effective but others dismissed as childish. The artists at Format Films simplified the Crane/Marsh approach further for animation and also tried something else that was then largely unprecedented in TV animation: Large black areas.

As I said, the show failed. A good argument can be made that it would have failed no matter how it had been drawn. It had a bad time slot and the Lone Ranger was never particularly popular with kids of that generation. Moreover, by 1966, westerns on TV were on their way out and there was never any interest in animated cowboys, before or since. (A 1980 Lone Ranger show animated by Filmation didn't click, either.) Still, somehow, the graphics "took the fall" on the '66 show and thereafter, anyone attempting an animated adventure show went for a less cartoony style and often removed black from the palette used by the cel painters. The 1992 Batman: The Animated Series may have been the first show to reverse the trend. In light of its success, it might be time to haul the '66 Lone Ranger cartoons out of some vault.

For more info on the Lone Ranger's history in animation, check out Jackson King's overview over at Jim Hill Media. It's what got me thinking about the show again and prompted me to write this.

• Posted at 1:35 PM · LINK

Mission Accomplished (Again)

I think the redesign of this site is completed. But I've been wrong before.

• Posted at 12:43 PM · LINK

Note to Self

This staying up 'til all hours writing has got to stop.

• Posted at 3:46 AM · LINK

October 3, 2003 • Current • October 1, 2003