Monday, July 19, 2010

Counter Protest!

Hey, remember that group that's planning to stage a protest at the Comic-Con? That's right...the assholes, also known as the Westboro Baptist Church. Would you like to send a real statement about how you feel about them?

Go to this page. Pledge money...a charitable donation in response to them. You don't even have to attend the con to let them know what you think of their hateful campaign. Congrats to whoever organized this.

• Posted at 5:36 PM · LINK

Good Godfrey!

Dick Cavett has more about Arthur Godfrey. I'm not as familiar with Godfrey's work as Mr. Cavett is, which may be why my impression of Godfrey is nowhere near as favorable. There were a lot of flukes in radio and in the early days of television where folks of limited talent and charm were somehow in the right place at the right time to have grand careers and stardom. Can you say, "Ed Sullivan?" (And yes, that still happens...) Godfrey had an avuncular folksiness and I could understand audiences enjoying his company...but I always had the feeling that his presence on 93 shows a week, or however many he had, had a lot to do with him ingratitating himself with the ad agencies and sponsors. America was always watching him because they were always putting him on the air.

• Posted at 11:44 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Matt Zoller Seitz writes about the pending disappearance of the Blockbuster chain.

I was only a Blockbuster customer for a brief time. The one near me (now extinct) never seemed to have the titles I wanted on hand...or if they did, they'd be well-worn, unplayable copies. There were times I'd feel silly renting one movie — making the trip there, making the trip back with one — so I'd find myself wandering aisles and browsing racks, looking desperately for something else I wanted to watch. It got to be more like a chore to go there than a pleasure.

I was mostly interested in older movies since the current releases were readily available on my satellite dish. But if Blockbuster even had some desired older film, they had one scuffed copy of its first DVD release, no copy of the more recent, deluxe DVD release. Netflix doesn't upgrade as swiftly as the sellers of DVDs either but it's not as bad. The only thing I liked about Blockbuster was the occasional comedic moment...like when I asked a teenaged employee about a certain film starring Buster Keaton and she went to the computer, looked it up and said, "We don't have that but we just got in a movie with someone named Diane Keaton." Yeah...Buster Keaton, Diane Keaton — what's the difference?

• Posted at 9:39 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

This is a very brief TV news item about the unveiling of the new postage stamps featuring five classic comic strips — Garfield, Beetle Bailey, Calvin & Hobbes, Archie and Dennis the Menace. Jim Davis is interviewed for five seconds and if you look quickly, you can see Mort Walker in there. To no one's surprise, Bill Watterson declined to participate but he did okay the stamp and one reporter scored a brief interview with him. Either the interviewer somehow didn't ask Watterson what he's working on these days or he did and the interviewee declined to answer.

The stamps are nice, of course...though I'm told that the copyright line for Dennis the Menace misspells the name of his creator, Hank Ketcham. There actually seems to be little mention of the cartoonists themselves in most of the p.r. material...and none whatsoever of the one who did the drawing of Archie that was selected for his stamp. Anyone know who it was? Doesn't look like Dan DeCarlo to me.

Here's the news report. It's very short...

• Posted at 12:01 AM · LINK