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…
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.
Rudy Giuliani recently "unveiled" (sort of) a health plan proposal (sort of) and it's really perfect, insofar as a Republican presidential candidate is concerned. Given the mood of the country these days, you kind of have to have a proposal of some sort. If you don't, you look uninterested and naïve about an issue that a majority of Americans think is important and which will probably get even more important to them as time passes. But if you want to get the hardcore Republican right behind you, to say nothing of the pharmaceutical companies and insurers, you have to make sure you come up with health care ideas that don't fix anything.
I have the feeling we're going to see a lot of these.
Matthew Yglesias tries to pinpoint the real trouble with what's going on in Iraq. Apparently, the problem isn't that things are going wrong. They are…but what's awful is that some people are pointing this out.
Here's a computer question that seems so simple that I can't believe I can't solve it or find a solution online. This applies to computers running Windows XP.
Moe, Larry and Curly each have a computer and all three computers are networked. Each uses the others' computers from time to time. Each has an account on each computer so Moe, for instance, can log into the Moe account on any of the three computers and work. What they want to do is to keep their Documents Folders in sync. Moe would like to be able to click one command on his Desktop and have all three computers automatically sync themselves up. The trouble is that no program seems to want to sync up files that are in three separate Documents and Settings folders.
There must be a simple way to handle this. What is it?
This is what's called a Soundie. Soundies were little 16mm music videos that were made, primarily in the forties, to play in the equivalent of video jukeboxes in public places. This one features Spike Jones and His City Slickers pantomiming to a record they released called "Clink Clink, Another Drink." Spike is the guy behind the bar with the fake mustache. The soloist is the great Mel Blanc. The miming isn't wonderful but who cares? It's Spike Jones and Mel Blanc. Watch it.
A number of people seem to be laboring under the impression that I'm the Complaint Department for the Comic-Con International down in San Diego. They're all wrong about that and most of them, I think, are wrong in their complaints…or at least, wrong to expect what they seem to have expected. In some cases, it's for the convention to be run largely according to their tastes with little or no attention given over to movies that don't interest them, guests they don't respect, genres for which they don't care, etc. To me, it's all Mexican Food. I may not like it but it doesn't threaten my life that it's there for others who do enjoy it.
Yes, the Comic-Con is no longer exclusively about comics. I'm not sure it ever really was. The fourth or fifth San Diego Con, back in the Paleolithic Era, I attended a very lovely talk by — and then had lunch with — Frank Capra. That was a somewhat more memorable moment in my con-going than any of those panels about how to improve comic book distribution. In fact, as I recall, a lot of those "Industry Future" panels were about how to get our medium recognized as an important one, ranked and reviewed alongside film and television. Maybe it's all one of those "be careful what you wish for" deals but comics now intermingle freely with other media…so freely that the other media feel welcome at something called a "comic book convention." Can't have one without the other.
If you'd like to attend a comic book convention that's only about comics and not about Nicholas Cage and Gwyneth Paltrow, they have them. I attended a great one just a few months ago in San Jose…the Super-Con. There are others and I think some of the complainers who wrote me would have been happier at one of them.
But I kinda think the genie's outta the bottle on San Diego. It is what it is, which is the most successful event of its kind in the world. One of my correspondents seems to think the convention operators should be holding emergency meetings, trying to figure out how to get it all back into the El Cortez Hotel and back down to a 3,000 attendance that includes Jack Kirby and Will Eisner. Ain't gonna happen.
What you can do is what I do, and I know I said this before but it bears repeating, is find your convention in that San Diego monstrosity. It may well be in there but you have to look for it. During one two-hour stretch when for some reason I didn't have a panel, I hiked down to the end of the room that housed Artist's Alley…and yes, I had to machete my way through the videogaming section to get to it. But once I was there, I happily roamed aisles that were busy but not crammed, talking with artists new and old. It was very much like San Diego Cons in days of yore. The only way it could have been more like The Old Days was if we'd all then traipsed down to Denny's for dinner, then hiked back to the hotel to sit around the pool and wonder why there were no women at our convention.
My AT&T cellphone has been dropping calls and getting bad connects for a couple weeks now…since about the time Cingular became AT&T. Based on the experiences of others down at the Comic-Con, I'd say it's not just me. It wasn't this bad before.
If you have a GMail account, you might want to check your Spam folder carefully. Their filters are declaring an awful lot of legit e-mail as Spam, at least on my accounts. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to turn it off or adjust its sensitivity. I guess you really do get what you pay for.