These are posters from the Oswald the Rabbit cartoons. As you may know, Walter Lantz's company inherited the character when Walt Disney, who started the Oswald series, lost the rights to the character in a dispute with his distributor. What you may not know is that after Walt and before Walter, another studio produced more […]
Fred Kaplan on why the DVDs from Warner Home Video look better than those from many other companies. […]
Several folks have written me to say that Sandra Dee was not in the Oscarcast "In Memoriam" segment because it was for 2004 deaths and she died in 2005. This is not the case. Yeah, she passed away on 2/20/05 but Ossie Davis died on 2/4/05 and he was in there. The rule, as I […]
And now, I've taken the extra "L" out of Hilary Swank's first name. Thanks to Clifford Weimer Jr. for pointing that one out to me. […]
Just fixed the spelling of Martin Scorsese's name in several earlier entries. I thought it was "Scorcese" and a Google search shows that a lot of other folks who oughta know better think so, too. But Charlie Eckhaus is a smart guy and he alerted me. Thanks, Charlie. […]
Former California governor (now mayor of Oakland) Jerry Brown has set up his own weblog, and he seems to be actually writing it. […]
Ratings for last night's Oscars seem to be up a bit over the last few years. That oughta make the folks at ABC happy because they probably felt they had an uninteresting batch of nominations this year, and that the average viewer out there really didn't care that much if Clint beat Martin or if […]
Final thoughts for the evening… Shelly Goldstein just called to point out another notable omission from the "In Memoriam" montage: Sandra Dee. I know she only died last week but they could have included her if they'd made the effort. They cut Hilary Swank off in mid-acceptance speech but seemed to let Jamie Foxx go […]
Catching up on the Oscar telecast… I think I see the nature of the "empty seat" problem. When the Academy Awards were done from other venues, the cameras mostly showed you the front audience section, so when Jack Nicholson went out for a smoke, a Seat Filler could scurry down, sit in his chair and […]
I'm watching the Oscars off-and-on, hit-and-miss. Here are some thoughts about what I've seen so far… I don't understand why Chris Rock got a standing ovation just for showing up for work. But then, I think audiences have cheapened the whole concept of the standing-o down to near-meaningless. You now get one just for appearing […]
One other interesting Oscar thought… A job I'm glad I don't have is assembling the annual montage of folks who've died since the last Academy Awards. This year, it'll include Christopher Reeve, Rodney Dangerfield, Janet Leigh, Tony Randall, Alan King, Paul Winfield, Cy Coleman, Arthur Miller, Peter Ustinov and many others…but there are some dicey […]
As you might have heard — and as I only heard after writing the preceding — ABC's Standards and Practices folks have vetoed the material that Robin Williams wanted to do at tonight's statue-presenting festival. Here's an article about it, and here's an e-mail from Pat O'Neill… What do you think the chances are that […]
Cruising the blogs, the Oscar predictions seem to be less about what will win than about whether Chris Rock will outrage some section of America. I suspect the answer is yes, not because anything he'll say will be that harsh but because a certain segment of America now actively looks for ways to be outraged […]
Here we see some promo art for Calvin and the Colonel, the 1961-1962 prime-time animated series. Yesterday afternoon, I went to an A.S.I.F.A. screening of three episodes of the largely-forgotten cartoon show, followed by a panel with some of the folks who worked on it. Like a lot of things from my childhood, it was […]
In 2002, the publishing giant known as TwoMorrows Books brought you the acclaimed (by not only them but me, as well) collection, Comic Books and Other Necessities of Life, a must-have paperback full of articles by Yours Truly. In it, I tackled such vital issues of the day as my old comic book club, The […]