Leslie Nielsen, back when he was hiding in the glen with a tail on his hat – Walt Disney’s The Swamp Fox
I learned the Swamp Fox theme song by heart when I was a kid. There’s nothing remarkable about this in and of itself, as kids memorize any number of TV jingles when they’re growing up. What makes this stand out is that the TV show this one came from departed the airwaves two decades before I was born. If I recall correctly, my father used to jokingly hum the theme when he and I went hiking through the woods around our house, having had it drilled into his memory when he was a kid. So it was passed on, like an heirloom, or a story told around the campfire.
When something as ethereal as this is handed down from generation to generation, you know there was a bit to it. Read more…
It’s unclear how a transistor radio fits in with school supplies (really, what scholar is complete without a Thor portfolio tucked under his or her arm?), unless Marvel is encouraging daydreaming and truancy. But who’s to complain? If you were a child of the 1970s you might have been lucky enough to have either a Captain America or Spider-Man transistor radio attached to your wrist, one that could receive AM signals up to 200 yards away from the station. Truly a halcyon age of pixies and rainbows — Apple Watch, eat your heart out.
Trading Card Set of the Week – Spider-Man (2002, Topps)
That Marvel is getting the Spider-Man movie rights back — or at least the creative direction of said movies — is good news all around. Sony has managed to augur two trilogies into the ground, the second not even getting to the third installment, and some fresh faces in the world of Peter Parker are most welcome. We’ve pretty much run the gamut of every permutation of the Mary Jane/Gwen Stacy romance angles, and it’s about time New York’s spindly, teenage hero found himself in some costumed company.
I’ve made no secret of my indifference/disdain for the Amazing Spider-Man films — the first was mediocre, the second was fairly dreadful — but not that long ago we had a genuine, viable Spider-Man franchise on our hands. One that, wonder of wonders, managed to capture the sunny joy of the wall-crawling world, the bright primary colors that made the original 1960s comic book run such a sensation. Well, at least until we had to suffer through the emo Spider-Man 3. But as Meatloaf taught us, two out of three ain’t bad.
Today we look back at the first Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spider-Man, through the medium of its trading cards. But before we dig elbow deep into the cardboard collectible adjunct, a word about the movie itself. Read more…
Do we really want a magician who learned his trade through a comic book ad performing the “saw a woman in half” trick? Wouldn’t OSHA want to step in here? Doesn’t this guy bear too close a resemblance to a Snidely Whiplash type villain to trust with such a deed? So many harrowing possibilities!
I’m rather indifferent to Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock and his costumed alter-ego. I hope he does well in the role, and hope that he’s able to shoulder the burden that is the first entry in Marvel’s Netflix wing. But the real excitement here, at least from this corner, comes from Vincent D’Onofrio’s turn as the Kingpin. Get your popcorn ready. Read more…
In the annals of blatant foreign rip-offs of hallowed exemplars of American cinema, there’s one that stands above all others: Turkish Star Wars. It’s the dreadful standard by which all dreck is judged. How bad is it? It makes Indian Superman look like Casablanca. That’s terrible, people. Really, really terrible. Read more…
Jack Kirby’s sojourn at DC Comics might not have been an unalloyed blockbuster, but it provided a fertile creative soil that helps populate that fictional universe to this very day. Really, where would DC be without the villain of all villains — Darkseid? We all know that the eventual Justice League movie will have the stone-faced ruler of Apokolips as the big bad, right? Right. Indeed, the entire Fourth World has become one of the cornerstones of Earth-1 and its environs. (The First Lady of Heroines, Big Barda, is alone worth the price of admission.) The New Gods, The Forever People, and Mister Miracle might not have had long debut runs, but their legacies speak for themselves.
Of course, there was also that improbably ancillary Fourth World book: Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen. We all know how Kirby took the reins of DC’s lowest selling book, because why not — you can’t crash a plane that’s already augured into the ground. And Jolly Jack made that former bastion of Silver Age goofiness (Jimmy Olsen, Harvester of Tears! Jimmy Olsen’s TV Show!), well, he made it, how shall we say, interesting. He injected a bit of zaniness into the Man of Steel’s world, which had become a tad staid by this point. Like the rest of Kirby’s DC experiments, it didn’t soar, but it was at least different. Kind of wacky, in a good, charming way.
And nothing was more wacky than when Don Rickles showed up.
Yes, that Don Rickles. Read more…
Avengers: Age of Ultron is just under two months away, for many of us it can’t get here fast enough, and Marvel has bestowed the final trailer upon us to further whet our appetites and whip us into a frenzy. It certainly has more scope than the previous promos, and mercifully ditches the somewhat overdone “There Are No Strings” musical motif. And it even has our first live-action glimpse of the Vision — or at least part of his face. Take what you can get, I guess. Read more…
Spider-Man and the Hulk’s 1970s TV shows once both held great promise, but only one fulfilled it
With the word coming down that Marvel is getting a degree of control back when it comes to the Spider-Man movie rights, one is bound to reflect on the assorted live-action adaptations the wall-crawler has had over the years. Read more…
It’s often been remarked how lily-white the world of comics has been throughout its lengthy history. In fairness, good old stapled newsprint wasn’t alone in this lack of minority representation, as its pop-fiction cousins, TV and movies, have had similar struggles. But comics seemed to be even more non-representative, a problem that has trickled down to the present day as other once under-representative mediums have integrated much more fully. Yes, there have been strides made in the past couple of decades, but it’s not easy to completely fix things when there are a number of venerable black characters with the color of their skin appended to their very names: Black Panther, Black Lightning, Black Racer, et al.
In the mid-nineties, a newly formed company called Milestone Media sought to redress this imbalance. Securing a publishing deal with DC Comics and developing their own shared world, the Dakota Universe, a group consisting primarily of African-American creators tried to tilt (or untilt) the scales. To close out Black History Month, our featured trading card set for this week is going to be the series of cards that commemorated that world. Read more…
Leonard Nimoy, RIP. Or LLAP.
Even when he was at his goofiest we loved him. Sad day.
With all respect to the many towering African-American figures that have come after, none have stood as tall as the first intellectual champion of their rights: Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery, he dragged himself up from that hell, escaping into a life of the mind, and honed a voice that rings down to this very day. Those who carried his legacy forth — one that began before there was even such a thing as “civil rights,” much less a movement — people like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, were very much following in his trailblazing footsteps. Read more…
Howard the Duck is trapped in a sales pitch he never made! Waaugh!
How often back in the day did you see Playboy as one of the critical publications girding a comic book reputation — or at least mentioned as doing so in an ad? It’s enough to make the likes of Fredric Wertham roll over in his grave. Read more…
Thor vs. The Asgardian Goldfinger vs. Twinkies!
Gudrun, the “Glutton for Gold,” might not be at the forefront of Asgard’s pantheon, but he apparently has an Odin-sized hankering for all things associated with that precious metal — which extends to goldish-hued snack cakes. Read more…
Sunday Stupid: Long before Walter White squared off with Gus Fring, he battled his own hemorrhoids!
Bryan Cranston, one of the more likable people in Hollywood, has now gratifyingly ascended to the apex of the acting world. After numerous supporting turns, most famously as the somewhat sleazy dentist Tim Whatley and the father on Malcolm in the Middle, his talents were finally given full rein as Walter White in Breaking Bad. But like everyone else he wasn’t always there at the top, or even on one of the lower rungs of that metaphorical ladder to thespian megastardom. Read more…
Jared
blog into mystery 