Monday, August 31, 2009

Briefly Noted...

Earlier today, I linked to a video of four guys singing barbershop quartet in Star Trek costumes. I've just replaced that link with one to a longer, better clip of the same fellows. If you watched it this morning, watch it again.

• Posted at 5:43 PM · LINK

Marvel and The Mouse

One other key point to keep in mind in this Disney-Marvel deal...

A lot of fans are wondering what this means about publishing plans...will the Marvel Masterworks reprint series continue? Will Marvel add a new Sub-Mariner comic? Will Aunt May either die or get resurrected? (I'm not sure if she's currently dead or not but if she isn't, she will be, and if she is, she'll come back.) Well, this deal is not about any of this. Take a look at the opening line in the L.A. Times coverage, and it's pretty much the same in all the reporting everywhere...

The estimated $4-billion deal would give Disney access to a library of more than 5,000 characters and help it strengthen its appeal to the young male audience. Ike Perlmutter, Marvel's CEO, will work directly with Disney to build and integrate Marvel's properties.

This isn't about publishing. Disney didn't say, "Gee, it would be great to own a comic book company!" They could have started fifty comic book companies for four billion clams. This is about characters and properties which can be exploited in many forms. The publishing of comic books may or may not always be one of them. But Disney's interest here is in two closely-related areas. One is to be able to market all these great characters and the history that rounds them out and makes many of them beloved. And the other reason is to make sure nobody else gets 'em.

The best news for the comic book division of Marvel in all this is how unlikely it is that anyone at Disney will care much what they do as long as the department shows a profit. If it generates new properties that can be turned into movies and video games and iPhone applications, so much the better. But the future of Spider-Man has very little to do with the Spider-Man comic book. That hasn't mattered for a long time.

• Posted at 3:31 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Bruce Bartlett, who was once as loyal a Reaganite as you could ever find, explains his unhappiness with the current Republican party. It has to do with the fact that its leaders would rather have the support of "birthers" than of folks like him.

• Posted at 3:01 PM · LINK

Monday Afternoon

The big news today, at least for me, is that the hills are still alive...and not, sadly, with the Sound of Music. They're alive in fire and it looks like it'll get worse before it gets better. I awoke this morn to headlines that said the "Station fire" (that's what they're calling the big one) doubled in size overnight to 85,000 acres.

I'm not personally threatened. I'm a good fifteen miles away from it and the inferno would have to burn through most of Hollywood to get to me. I don't think anyone I know is in its path, either. Still, it's just scary and sad. Every so often, the wind is such that I can see huge, ugly clouds of smoke to the north. It's hard not to think of those clouds as someone's life, perhaps literally, going up in flames.

It makes me angrier when I think of how, for example, various energy companies stole billions from this state in the last decade. I know there's no guarantee that that money, if it hadn't been looted the way it was, would have gone to help battle the fires and rebuild. But I'll bet you we could be doing more than we are or will.

That's really all I wanted to say. I need to get back to work, need to put it out of my mind for a while. I probably also need to stop checking the L.A. Times website and even looking out my window to the north. Sometimes, the way I stop thinking about things is to write about them here.

• Posted at 12:53 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

In The New Yorker, David Grann has a long article about Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texan who was put to death in 2004 for, the court said, starting a fire which killed his three daughters. Since then, an awful lot of experts have suggested that the investigation and trial were flawed and that Willingham may have been right when, just before his execution, he insisted for the eight zillionth time that he was an innocent man.

Lately, there doesn't seem to be anyone who wants to argue that he was guilty. But there do seem to be folks who don't want this matter to be investigated too much because — well, you know — it might cast some negative light on the way the Death Penalty is administered in Texas. And we can't have a little thing like executing the innocent get in the way of stringing up folks we think deserve to die.

• Posted at 12:33 PM · LINK

When Titans Clash Acquire

I woke up this morn to a mess o' e-mails asking me for my take on the news that Disney is buying Marvel for four billion bucks...and some are also asking me to speculate on how Jack Kirby would have felt about this.

Jack, I think it's safe to say, would have been unsurprised at the pricetag. One of the many ways in which he was a visionary is that in the sixties when Marvel was catching on, he was utterly alone in his belief that the stuff he and the others were creating for chump change had that kind of lasting value. Many of his monetary frustrations flowed from the fact that he was trying to negotiate with people who thought the material was a passing fad...so they personally had to grab as much money as possible before the whole thing went the way of the old Doc Savage pulps...and that when he spoke of the future in Disney-sized terms, that was just Ol' Jack being looney again. Marvel's original owner Martin Goodman sold out pretty darned cheap in 1968 to the firm's first corporate overlords. He never imagined his company would be worth twenty million smackers, let alone four billion...but Kirby did.

So Jack would have nodded at the amount and recalled unfulfilled promises of financial participation...and he would not have been a happy man. Then again, I think if Jack had been with us these last fifteen years, Marvel would have long since cut him in with what would to them have been a microscopic reward — and to him, all the money in the world.

As for what I think: I think I don't know. I don't even know what this means for me. I own four shares of Disney stock and two of Marvel stock. I may clear like eight, nine dollars on all this.

I doubt Disney has a lot of firm plans for the X-Men and the rest of the Marvel properties at this time. Most of the biggies are encumbered with existing deals. Sony has the movie rights to this one, Fox has the film rights to that one, etc. Everything the Disney folks might want to do for a while will be subject to current contracts, though they'll find some ways to begin intermingling the characters in the public mind...photo-ops with a guy in a Spider-Man suit posing with a guy in a Mickey Mouse suit. Stuff like that. Down the line, I suspect the word "Marvel" will become about as unimportant to the Fantastic Four as "Hanna-Barbera" is now to Scooby Doo.

And though we won't see evidence of this for a while, the publishing of comic books (those things on paper with staples in them) at that company is a few notches less important than it was last week. And it wasn't all that important last week.

• Posted at 11:00 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Recently, we featured a great "barbershop" group with about eleven hundred people in it. Here's a more traditional-sized quartet...but with a Star Trek theme. Some of the lyrics are from the works of Allan Sherman...

• Posted at 1:14 AM · LINK