Friday, August 3, 2007

Radio Days

Did you grow up in Los Angeles? If not, skip to the next item. If you did, keep reading.

Fellow Angelenos: There's a great website called L.A. Radio that tracks the local radio personalities of yesteryear with articles and indices. Usually, it's a subscription (pay) site but for this weekend only, you can browse for free. Instructions on how to do this are on the first page, as is a salute to The Real Don Steele, a local legend of Los Angeles radio.

I've read a few pieces on there. The first guy I looked up was "Sweet" Dick Whittington, who I followed fiercely on KABC from 1966 through 1968 and then on KGIL for ten years after that. (He should not be confused with another local broadcaster, Dick Whittinghill, who was on KMPC from about the time Marconi invented the radio until 1979.) Whittington was one of the freshest, funniest talents to ever work a microphone and some of the things I heard him say are still part of my repertoire of silly things to say. If you heard him today, you'd think you were listening to a guy imitating the less controversial, funnier aspects of Howard Stern and Don Imus, but Whittington was doing that kind of thing before either of them. I wonder if anyone has any tapes of vintage Whittington.

• Posted at 10:15 PM · LINK

Breaking Panda News (and Porn)

We cover many important topics on this site — politics, comics, movies, my cell phone problems — but none more important than Baby Pandas. Baby Pandas, as you well know, are the cutest thing in the world.

There is one more Baby Panda in the world today. Bai Yun, a giant panda at the San Diego Zoo, gave birth this afternoon at 1:31 PM. So far, there are no pictures of the cub and zoo authorities haven't gotten close enough to determine its sex. But it's a Baby Panda and any day now, we should get to see it in all its unparalleled cuteness.

In the meantime, the zoo has some video clips on this page of its website. There's one there entitled "Panda Birth" that shows the announcement and some footage of Bai Yun in labor. There's another one called "Giant Panda Birth Watch" that will show you how she got pregnant. One of the reasons pandas don't mate more often is probably because they never have a minute of privacy.

• Posted at 8:43 PM · LINK

Today's Comic Book Book Recommendation

At a Comic-Con International a few years back, I met a photographer named Greg Preston who had an interesting project. He'd been travelling the country taking photos of comic book and comic strip artists in their studios. The pictures were magnificent. Not only had he gotten shots of some of the best in the field, not only had he gotten some important ones (like Carl Barks and Jack Kirby) before we lost them...but the photographs were good photographs. They looked like the people and in most cases, captured some key aspect of the person's personality. You could just look at one and understand a little more about a favorite cartoonist or illustrator.

Greg was then looking for the right situation to put them in a book...and I'm delighted to say he found it. Dark Horse has recently issued The Artist Within, a handsome hardcover that needs no hard sell from me. If you're not convinced it belongs on your shelf, go look at a few samples of what's in it. Then click here to order a copy from Amazon. I'd gush further but the photos really speak for themselves.

• Posted at 7:49 PM · LINK

Don't Set the TiVo!

Turner Classic Movies is currently running a "salute" to Joan Crawford. I put in the quote marks because they're running all of her best movies and then, in the wee small hours of tomorrow morning, they're running Trog, a 1970 film that pretty much suggests the following scenario. Someone approached Ms. Crawford and said, "Joan, dear, you're getting along in years and your health isn't great. You may have only enough time left on this planet to appear in one more movie. Have you given any thought to what you'd like to do as your final project?"

To which Joan Crawford replied, "Yes. I've been thinking...I've appeared in so many great movies, so many true classics, that I think I ought to cap my career with the worst movie ever made. I think it would be a wonderful trick to play on my many fans. I want them to all rush to see a film because I'm in it and then just sit there in the theater, thoroughly appalled — and hopefully drinking Pepsi-Cola — at the most tasteless, uninteresting, crummy, low budget horror film I can find. Ideally, they will all stumble from the theater, go home and start petitions to revoke my Oscar for Mildred Pierce."

To which her friend must have said, "You can't possibly mean you're thinking of appearing in..."

"That's right," Ms. Crawford replied. "I'm thinking of appearing in Trog."

It's the only possible explanation.

• Posted at 10:03 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

We've written here before about Castle Films, which were those 8mm condensations of full-length movies. I collected them as a kid — they were the home video of that era — and marvelled at the way they could often abridge a 90-minute flick down to ten minutes or even four. Here we have the 8mm sound version of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. It runs eight and a half minutes and it works pretty well at that length. Have a look...

• Posted at 3:36 AM · LINK

From the E-Mailbag...

Bill Lund was among the founders of the massive entity we now know as the Comic-Con International. He writes...

Regarding your mention of the con being too big and not concentrating solely on comics, well, I had this very discussion with several con attendees last week. From its inception, the con had always focused on comics, science fiction and films. In fact, if anyone has the earlier program books — which, sadly, I no longer have, myself — when the con was known as Golden State Comic Con or West Coast Comic Con, there were three circles in the logo that featured each subject as mentioned. Our featured guests in those earlier years, besides such luminaries from the comics world like Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, Russell Myers, Russ Manning, and Neal Adams, included Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, Forry Ackerman, Kirk Alyn, George Pal, Bob Clampett, June Foray, Edmund Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, and Frank Capra. We even had Chuck Norris demonstrating martial arts. Therefore, San Diego's convention, under whatever name it used at the time, featured various artists from each field of interest.

It was George Lucas and Charles Lipincott who had the foresight to showcase Star Wars at the con that showed the rest of Hollywood — eventually — how important the Comic Con could be to their films and tv shows.

I have all those program books and Bill's right. I don't know what the mission statement says (nor do I know anyone who ever reads mission statements) but a key concept of the San Diego Con was always that comics intersected with other media...and were perhaps in some ways legitimized by those intersections.

The other point I should make is that it isn't just that the convention caters to Hollywood and other non-comic concerns. So does almost every major news site that purports to cover the world of comics. Most were more interested in that stuff than in the programming and presences that were comic-specific. That's kind of the way the whole comic fan community has skewed the last few years. Whether we like it or not.

• Posted at 3:10 AM · LINK

August 4, 2007 • Current • August 2, 2007