Tuesday, May 4, 2004

Moore Trouble for Disney

Michael Moore has this new movie he's made all about alleged links between the Bush family and the Saudis. And now it's being alleged that the Disney organization is trying to kill the film's distribution so as to not endanger certain tax breaks that the company receives, especially in Jeb Bush's Florida. Read all about it.

• Posted at 10:06 PM · LINK

Interesting eBay Item

Someone is selling the contract that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy signed to authorize the publication of the Laurel and Hardy comic book that came out from St. John in 1955. Here's the link and here's some history. What's interesting is that the contract is written as if this is a new relationship and the St. John folks are about to begin creating the material. In fact, St. John had published three issues of a Laurel and Hardy comic book in 1949 and the only thing issued under the terms of this 1955 contract were reprints of those three issues. It may all have been a matter of timing for St. John. The firm launched a rather successful Abbott and Costello comic book in 1948 and — I'm guessing — grabbed up the rights to Stan and Ollie figuring they might do just as well.

But in '49, Laurel and Hardy were pretty cold. Their last major American movie (and maybe their worst), The Bullfighters, had come out in May of '45. By 1949, the act was so inactive that Hardy went off and made a movie, The Fighting Kentuckian, without Laurel. They still had their own production company — the entity with which this contract was made — but it never actually produced anything. And their comic book obviously didn't do very well. In 1949, if a comic lasted three issues, that meant that the publisher cancelled the book after seeing the earliest sales reports on the first issue.

By 1955, the St. John comic book company was in serious decline but Laurel and Hardy were actually enjoying an upswing in fame, especially among youngsters, due to their movies being released to television. I'll speculate here that Mr. St. John noticed this and thought it would be a cheap gamble to reprint the old issues. At the time, reprints were frowned upon by both readers and distributors but he probably figured the first go-round had gone so unnoticed that no one would realize he was recycling. I'll further speculate that he had someone just retype the 1949 contract and got Stan and Oliver, via their current reps, to sign it again for another payment. Perhaps if we could see the middle page of this 3-page contract, which is not on the auction site, we'd know more. I'd be curious to learn how much they were paid but that info was presumably on Page Two.

The comic probably didn't sell any better in '55 than it had in '49. St. John was pretty much out of business the next year. None of the subsequent Laurel and Hardy comic books from other publishers (there were several) sold well either, even when the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series of The Boys was on the air and the comic was a tie-in.

The three St. John issues were primarily drawn by an animator named Reuben Timmins, sometimes credited as Rube Timinsky and other permutations. His career stretched from working on Betty Boop for Max Fleischer (1931) to A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) and the animated Star Trek series (1973). He passed away in 1994 and apparently did very few comic books, all for St. John, beyond the three issues of Laurel and Hardy. A pretty good artist. [Thanks to "Paskegren" for calling my attention to the auction.]

• Posted at 3:18 PM · LINK

A Needed Product

When I travel, as I just did, I take along a modular phone cord so I can hook my laptop into a telephone line. I've been using ones with little reels like the one above. They're handy when they don't break, but they break too often to suit me. The little plastic tab that you press to release the plug from its socket is always breaking off mine. This happened to me in San Francisco and it's happened to me too many times before.

When that little tab breaks, it renders the whole thing largely useless unless I want to haul out my modular plug crimping tool and put on a new one, which I don't. Does anyone make one with unbreakable modular plugs? Say, made out of metal? I'm really tired of being in a hotel and having one of these snap on me.

Tuesday, May 4, 2004

Recommended Reading

• Posted at 11:26 PM · LINK