Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Speaking of Jack Kirby...

Recently, a new comic strip called Ink Pen introduced a superhero character named Captain Victory. It's a great name for a hero and it was a great name when Jack Kirby created a character with that name in 1981. As this article details, cartoonist Phil Dunlap has built a storyline out of the need to change the name of his cartoon hero. A very clever approach to the problem.

• Posted at 7:42 PM · LINK

Senator Stomp!

My friend and mentor Jack Kirby was a lovely man but one capable of great anger at times. Every so often, I see something happen either in the comic book business or the real world and think, "Gee, I'm sorry Jack's gone but I'm glad he's not around to see that."

I just thought that when I read an item about Ted Stevens, the Senator from Alaska who thinks we should drill like crazy for oil in his home state, and that oil company executives should be allowed to testify before Congress without having to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but you-know-what. Jack was very pro-environment and against letting big corporations have unchecked power and I doubt there's much that Stevens has ever done that wouldn't have outraged him. But wearing a tie featuring one of Jack's characters while he did those things and taking inspiration from it...that really would have pissed Kirby off.

• Posted at 7:09 PM · LINK

Beauty Marx

Here we see Groucho Marx — he's the one with the mustache — hosting The Hollywood Palace on March 14, 1964. The lady at left is the show's "Billboard Girl" who came out at the end each week to hand the host a list of who'd be appearing the following week. She was a then-unknown starlet named Raquel Welch. And this is my way of billboarding that I just posted some tickets and history of The Hollywood Palace over on our sister website, Old TV Tickets. If you're interested in that kind of thing.

• Posted at 6:56 PM · LINK

Happy Hairball Holidays

Last year around this time, I pointed you to one of the cleverer bits of web animation I'd come across — a daily "Twelve Days of Christmas" cartoon with Garfield the Cat over at the Garfield website. Well, it's back up again and up to Day Seven. Take a look between now and Christmas. I had nothing to do with this.

• Posted at 4:35 PM · LINK

Big Deal

For no visible reason, I found myself enjoying the debut episode of Deal or No Deal, a prime-time game show hosted earlier this evening by Howie Mandel. The premise is pretty simple: There are 26 brief cases held by 26 models, each case containing a secret dollar amount ranging from one cent to one million dollars. A contestant is selected from the audience and picks one brief case. He or she now "owns" that amount but doesn't yet know what it is. The contestant then calls out numbers to open the brief cases that were not chosen, one by one. Each time a low amount is revealed, hopes are raised that the secret amount is high. Each time a high amount is revealed...well, that lowers the odds that the contestant has a high amount in his or her brief case.

Every so often, a mysterious "banker" phones Mr. Mandel and offers to buy the as-yet-unrevealed amount of cash from the contestant and the contestant must decide "deal or no deal" (hence, the name). The offers are calculated to make the choice harder and harder, and to make the contestant sweat and squirm. The lady tonight had several members of her family on stage with her to offer advice and they were sweating and squirming a lot, too. She turned down many higher offers — one for $138,000 — because though she knew by then she didn't have the million dollar prize in her case, there was still a chance the $500,000 one was in it. However, by the time it got down to the last decision, she knew she either had $500 or $50,000 and when the "banker" offered $25,000, she grabbed it...a good move since it turned out she had the smaller amount.

In broad strokes, this sounds a lot like Let's Make a Deal or maybe the Geoff Edwards version of Treasure Hunt. On the one hand, those shows had more opportunity for variations, whereas Deal or No Deal sounds like it'll be exactly the same game, over and over. On the other hand, Deal or No Deal doesn't delight in humiliating the contestants the way those other contestants did, and Mandel didn't have the genial smarminess of Edwards or Monty Hall.

Matter of fact, I thought Howie did a good job, though I was amused by the opening which had him in a bank vault, talking as if he was surrounded by millions in genuine currency. At the end of the program, if you froze your TiVo, you could read the following statement in a very tiny font...

The host's statement at the top of the program regarding the "high security vault" and any statements regarding "cash" being inside the brief cases were scripted for dramatic purposes. There was no cash on the program set. The producers determine and communicate all bank offers.

Four more episodes run tonight, tomorrow night and so on through the week. I'm TiVoing them to see how long it takes me to get bored with it. I'm guessing half past Wednesday.

• Posted at 12:23 AM · LINK