Sunday, November 13, 2005

Better Late Than...

I think it's very nice that Ollie Johnston, the last of Disney's legendary "nine old men" was honored this last week with the National Medal of Arts. But really...did someone say, "Hey, almost all of the greats of theatrical animation are dead. Maybe we'd better give this award to one of them while there's still time"? They started this award informally in 1983 and more formally in '85. They could have given it to Chuck Jones and Walter Lantz and Grim Natwick and four or five of the other Nine Old men. Ollie had to be sitting there thinking, "Why couldn't they have done this fourteen months ago when Frank [Thomas] was still around to receive it with me?"

• Posted at 8:42 PM · LINK

Under the Sea

Just finished watching the entire Penn and Teller special, including the first nine minutes. Maybe the most amazing feat was that they got a network to spring for a prime-time magic special. David Copperfield hasn't done one in a long time. Lance Burton stopped doing them. Those "World's Greatest Magic" spectaculars have vanished without magically reappearing in the rear of the house.

Specials in general aren't seen much anymore. Viewing patterns have changed and the current network thinking is that if you love a certain show, it's risky to pre-empt it for a week and put something in its place. There was a time when viewers were patient enough to wait for their faves but now they're more inclined to sample something else and perhaps fall in love with it. (This is not unrelated to why Leno and Letterman rarely air reruns older than a month or two. When Johnny Carson took a night off, he often ran a year-old program. Jay and Dave don't dare because, the thinking goes, the out-of-date references will make viewers think, "Old show. Let's see what else is on." And they may find something they like better.)

Penn and Teller: Off the Deep End was fun but a little long. I suspect that's just a matter of tight budgeting. Ten years ago, this would have been an hour special with a similar budget or higher. Today, networks are looking harder for the "bargain" license fee and they like their shows to either come in cheaper or fill more time for the same money. That probably explains why Penn and Teller are still in the TV special business when the other guys aren't. They aren't better magicians but they're cleverer and almost every trick has a concept and a story behind it...so they not only do the trick but they show you the set-up and later, they show you how they do it...and in this special, they even showed some of the rehearsals and screw-ups. Mr. Copperfield would rather show you his private parts than show you his rehearsals and screw-ups. He's the master when you have major bucks to spend but when money is tight, as it seems to be these days in prime-time television, Penn and Teller have the edge.

Okay, I'm going to go watch the Saturday Night Live special that followed. I may or may not be back.

• Posted at 8:17 PM · LINK

enn & Teller

I'm watching the satellite and it looks to me like Nascar coverage ran over and NBC just lopped off the first nine minutes of the Penn & Teller Special for the east coast. This kind of thing is among the many reasons the networks are losing market share. I can (presumably) watch the whole thing on the west coast feed but if I were on the opposite coast, I'd be pissed — especially since it wasn't that the race ran over. It was the post-race interviews.

• Posted at 4:14 PM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

I haven't written anything political here for a little while because every time I try, things quickly descend into the Painfully Obvious. Does anyone not know that Bush is in trouble? That the torture scandal is a no-win game for him? (For more on that, read John McCain, Larry C. Johnson and Frank Rich.)

I actually don't understand the logic behind Bush's new excuse about how Congress had the exact same intelligence and most of it voted to authorize the war in Iraq. Even if that's true — and I don't see Republican leaders racing to assure us it is — it's a pretty lame admission from a guy who claims that even if he'd had better info, he still would have done all the same things. I don't think even supporters of the war are comfy with the notion that the President of the United States and Congress operate off flawed intelligence, even if that somehow leads them to the proper course of action. They need to be reminded that bad information is always dangerous and that this administration doesn't seem all that upset about it.

But I also don't get why Democrats keep harping on this "lie" thing and saying he "misled us into war." Some people will buy that it was deliberate but others will write it off to good intentions and bad sources, and we shouldn't tolerate that, either. Seems to me, Democrats would be better off (and perhaps more accurate) saying, "Our Iraq policies have been a mixture of faulty intelligence, misleading intelligence, cherry-picked intelligence and intelligence slanted to justify what this administration already intended to do. It doesn't matter how much of this was done intentionally. None of these are acceptable, especially when sending Americans off to war." Then again, I also don't get why some of them — John Kerry, especially — aren't more careful about quotes that include the word, "intelligence." When politicians are out there saying, "We didn't have the intelligence" or "our intelligence was insufficient," you wonder if something Freudian isn't in the air.

By the way: I have now had TimeSelect, the new subscription service for the New York Times, for two months and I've yet to read an article there that I couldn't find for free elsewhere on the Internet. The Frank Rich column linked above is a good example. I don't think they're getting another fifty bucks out of me next year, especially since this year's fee is all going for Judith Miller's severance package.

• Posted at 12:46 PM · LINK