No, we aren’t going to forget– but we aren’t going to let it paralyze us any longer either, or keep us from being kind.
If you feel like paying your respects, go watch 110 Stories. Or give a pint of blood today. Or help a scout troop. Give two Korans for every one that’s burned. Or just build something. Illegitimis non carborundum.
For those who missed it (including us, to be honest), on Labor Day, a funny thing happened; at 8:30 PM, Cartoon Network aired a ‘MAD‘ cartoon. And guess what? It wasn’t a one-time fluke! Our friends over at HeroComplex snagged the new animated sketch show’s producers Mark Marek (of Crank Yankers fame) and ‘Emmy winner’ Kevin Shinick (of Robot Chicken) and sat them down for an interview. For those who are too lazy to click that link and read their awesome interview, allow us to give you the 411:
The show is a 15 minute sketch cartoon show meant to carry the programming of Cartoon Network’s normal schedule to it’s [ironically bumpered] Adult Swim block of shows. Taking a ‘film festival’ approach to presentation, the MAD cartoon show will feature short cartoon sketches in a variety of styles. Mimicking the work and look of long time MAD contributors like Sergio Aragonés, the late Don Martin, and Al Jaffee, as well as including anything animated ranging from photo montages, flash animation, to stop motion sketches all in a single episode. Crediting the writing to “the Usual Gang of Idiots” means the material featured will provide wonderfully skewed takes on current events… targeting an audience that’ll range from the ‘kiddies about to say goodnight’ crowd to the ‘college frat kids just waking up’ demographic.
The show comes as a welcome surprise, as the last “MAD” penned show, Fox’s MADtv did little to take the real MAD brand to the masses. For those who tried to forget, we implore you to recoil in horror as you remember that the show provided the world with a sub-SNL quality sketch show with even more annoying repetitive characters (The UPS guy! Ms. Swan!), and literally no material ever gleaned from the pages of the long-running magazine. OK, that’s a bit of a lie. The show did feature a ‘Spy vs. Spy” cartoon, but it was cut after the second season, we assume because the average Fox viewer at the time was too confused by the high brow humor and subtle racial undertones of ‘Spy vs. Spy’.
Well, let’s wash our minds of that dreck, and check out ‘MAD’ on Cartoon Network… Mondays at 8:30 CST. I mean, if the show is as good as we think it’ll be, dare we say it… “What, Me Worry?”
Check out Cartoon Network for a short sneak preview.
Artist David Burton has a special place in his heart for painting scenes and characters from classic pulp fiction. Learn from his interview his technique of working on pulp art, his favorite characters, and the reasons he has a passion for this medium! Click on the INTERVIEWS tab and enjoy the full conversation!
Rarely are Philip K. Dick’s stories appealing and accessible to mass audiences. You need fights and things blowing up and Arnold Schwarzenegger to really attract a crowd because the thought-provoking subject matter doesn’t always translate well from the printed page. As a result, it was a major mistake to release [[[A Scanner Darkly]]] on July 7, 2006, in the midst of the summer blockbuster season. The movie was certainly appealingly cast and was nicely marketed, but it opened small, never caught on and vanished from the public discourse. Instead, its competition the same weekend was the seasonal popcorn favorite [[[Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest]]].
And that’s a shame because in its own way, the movie is a well-made antidrug film whose message is told in a way its target audience might hear. After all, who could be hotter and hipper than Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr., and Woody Harrelson? Reeves was just coming off [[[The Matrix]]] trilogy so was a major star while people always liked Downey despite his personal battles with addiction.
Thankfully, the movie was rushed onto DVD that year and now, Warner Home Video has given us a crisp, swell-looking Blu-ray edition. One of the odder choices made by screenwriter and director Richard Linklater was to film his talented cast then rotoscope the entire feature. On the one hand, you might miss seeing the real actors but on the other, it also allowed the animators to play with reality just enough to further the story’s message. As we learn in “[[[The Weight of the Line: Animation Tales]]]”, the actors actually broadened their performances to give the animators something to work with and that also helps given the drug-induced state most of them live in.
In a near future, the hyper-addictive Substance D has become the drug of choice and undercover cop Reeves is sent into the sub-culture to make arrests and stop the supply. Wearing a camouflage suit that perpetually alters the personal traits of the wearer, Reeves goes about his job until he encounters a group of addicted misfits — Harrelson, Downey, Winona Ryder & Rory Cochrane. As we learn who these people are, we descend into their drug-haze which is seen by increasing paranoia and inability to think rationally.
Linklater wisely gathered his cast together for two weeks of rehearsal so they could become a cohesive acting troupe before letting becoming the druggies. Better, he let them modify and add to his script. Downey, for example, converted his lines into run-on sentences which informed his quirky performance while Reeves annotated the novel the film is based on.
It has been said that Dick wrote this work based on elements of his own life and one of his themes is the role of government in dealing with personal choice in taking the drugs. In adapting the work, Linklater twists and turns the events so it actually might require more than one viewing. Thankfully, the movie is so well translated to Blu-ray this will be more pleasure than chore.
The extras from the original DVD mostly remain, including the so-so commentary from Linklater, Reeves, Dick’s daughter Isa Dick Hackett, Producer Tommy Palloton and Dick historian/novelist Jonathan Lethem. “Weight” is a lengthy and fascinating look at the rotoscoping process and why it took twice as long as anticipated. Oddly missing is “One Summer in Austin: The Story of Filming A Scanner Darkly” which was a making of featurette.
Spidey-Fans, make sure you’re up Friday morning for a chance to sneak a peek at the upcoming Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark on Good Morning America. The musical, which is rumored to be one of the priciest to swing into the Foxwoods Theatre, opens November 15. Lucky for all us musical theater geeks, director Julie Taymor and Spidey himself, Reeve Carney, will bring a solo song to GMA via a performance at the Hudson Theater, with fans invited to come down for the free show. We television viewers will enjoy a post-performance interview with the director and the authors of the music and lyrics, Bono and The Edge. Word has it that aside from this musical, both men dabble in rock and roll in a quartet by the name of U2.
While most comic fans are skeptical of their favorite web-spinning hero spinning songs and soliloquies on the Broadway stage, stranger things have become a success. Lest we forget, the Evil Dead Musical was damn good. So, before we light our torches, let’s give the ol’ webhead a chance to sing his spandex off.
UPDATE: So, we watched the telecast, action figure firmly placed in our palms, ready to watch our hero make his way to the stage. Would it be webtastic or a kill a little bit of our soul, like One More Day? Let’s let some pasty white people wax poetic first:
A “pop-up book” set? Those costumes? The Swiss Miss? Is this some kind of cruel joke? Is Norman Osbourne financing this play in hopes of murdering the wall-crawler on the stage? Our high hopes haven’t been crushed this hard since the dance sequence of Spider-Man 3: Attack of Emo Parker. And to put the final nail in the coffin? How about a song from the show:
Let’s be honest here. The song is actually catchy. And because it’s being performed with a rock band, with absolutely no context to the final play, we’ve no idea how terrible this will be once it’s sewn into the “pop-up book” scenery and gaudy costumes. Kudos to Bono and The Edge for writing a catchy rock song (a feat that shouldn’t be that hard, given their 20+ years doing it), but frankly we’re scared for the final product. A lanky rock singer running around in a body sock, whilst a cast of dancing, prancing chorusmen flail about over a rock-and-roll score? Someone give us a copy of the “Death of Gwen Stacy” so we can recall the last time Spider-Man was worth our fanfare.
Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia has been an acclaimed video game and he is one of the fortunate creators to be intimately involved in the adaptation from game to feature film. Mechner managed to write the screen adaptation, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton. The Disney feature was released to middling reviews and so-so box office in May and comes to home video tomorrow. Disney provided us with this conversation.
QUESTION: What were your feelings when you finally saw the film?
JORDAN MECHNER: Firstly, the original Prince of Persia was a character 40 pixels high on the Apple II screen, running and jumping. The technology at the time was quite primitive, I think in my mind I imagined a much grander spectacle, and to see Jake [Gyllenhaal] in the best shape of his life running around the rooftops of Morocco and doing parkour and all this stuff was more than I could imagine.
QUESTION: What initially drew you to the setting of Ancient Persia? And how does that culture and mythology inspire you?
JORDAN MECHNER: I was inspired 25 years ago to make the game really by the tales of the Arabian Nights, and by old Persian legends like the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings. And also those great old Hollywood swashbuckling movies like the 1940 Thief of Baghdad, by Alexander Korda. As a kid I must have heard those stories, the storybook versions are in all of our cultural DNA. We know of that world without really knowing exactly where or when we first heard it.
QUESTION: How did you start the world of Prince of Persia ?
JORDAN MECHNER: You go back to 1985 when I was right out of college and I took my brother down to the parking lot across the street from the high school. He was in a pair of baggy trousers and I had him run and jump and climb and fall down and I video-taped him doing these moves. Then I set about the three year process of bringing these animations into the computer and that was the first Prince of Persia .
Have you enjoyed or been enraged or somewhere in the middle by All Pulp yet? Have you wanted a chance to offer your comments on what we do right, wrong, and in between? Need All Pulp to know if you liked a book we reviewed or didn’t care for an interview we did? Now you have your chance! Your very own COMMENTS page on All Pulp! Yes, that’s right, get on the horn by clicking on COMMENTS and let us know what you think! And please, put the weapons away…we hear ya…honest…
Many days, we will find ourselves in heated debates with the uninitiated when it comes to the general quality of comic books. Yes, super muscular guys in spandex parading around in violent battles with other super muscular guys and overly boobed chicks in impossible costumes isn’t what we’re calling haute artistic visual fiction. But we’ve got those pocket references ready for the nay-sayers, don’t we? Watchmen. Sin City. Maus. Ghost World. Justice League International… And then they drop a bomb on our argument. They’ll reference a comic they heard about on the nightly news, or in the “lifestyles” section of the paper, or from some pinko-liberal-starbucks-blog they read on their iPads whilst they wait for a triple-grande-non-fat-latté. And with the mere mention of that book, our arguments are as potent as a pinch of salt in the ocean.
Now, gentle reader, what book could I possibly reference (without even reading it mind you) to encapsulate the entirety of how low we can go, when it comes to our sequential funny books?
Why, I direct you to Bluewater Comics’ Female Force: Betty White.
Yup. The fine folks behind the Justin Bieber, Sarah Palin, and forthcoming Fame: The Cast of Glee comic books is releasing a biographical comic book about America’s favorite only living Golden Girl, Betty White. Now, before you ignite your flaming arrows, let me be clear: I love Bette White. She was hilarious in the aforementioned ‘Girls, as well as numerous other sit-coms. Her recent turn as Facebook-demanded Saturday Night Live Host was one of the better shows of recent memory. Hell, even her cameo in last week’s Emmy show was adorable. But seriously… a comic book bio? Allow me to fire up the rant and raving engine.
I was too young to buy the 1962 Topps trading card series, [[[Mars Attacks]]], and grew up hearing about these wonderful cards and was delighted when a facsimile edition was released in the 1990s. Others, though, were clearly inspired by them and when he was in a position to do pretty much whatever he wanted, director Tim Burton said he wanted to use the cards for a loving tribute to the goofy SF movies of the 1950s.
He turned to Jonathan Gems to write the story and then the first screenplay but as 1993 turned to 1994, it was clear he wasn’t delivering what the visionary director wanted. Instead, he gave the assignment to Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who gave him a sprawling story set in Washington and Las Vegas, giving a meaty part to the President of the United States so Burton could attract some big name talent. And the cast is stuffed with wonderful performers in parts great and small including Jack Nicholson (as the Prez), Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Natalie Portman, Rod Steiger, Michael J. Fox, Lukas Haas, Jim Brown, Tom Jones, Jack Black, Sylvia Sydney, Paul Winfield, and Pam Grier.
Part of the film’s fun turned out to be watching these celebrities get blown to bits by the aliens as their invasion of Earth continued unimpeded.
Costing a then-eye-popping $80 million, Warner Bros. heavily promoted the feature but it opened to decidedly mixed reviews and very poor box office. When I went to see it with a select group of pals, I loved it. Of course, I was the prime audience and “got it” while others couldn’t fathom the satirical aspects or homages to many other cheesy productions. The film became one of the first released by Warner on DVD and finally, this week; it comes out on blu-ray.
L’shana tova, ComicMixers! As we enter the year 5771, may you stay healthy, wealthy, and grow all the wiser.
May your blessings be bountiful, your crops remain unspoiled, and your comic books stay relevant and interesting.
Let this new year bring fewer company wide crossovers, unnecessary mini-series, and character revamps that skew towards the dark and macabre.
May the brightest days and heroic ages in which we live stay bright and heroic.
May Superman finish his walk across America and realize he should have flown.
May Wonder Woman remember she’s better off in a one piece and boots, sans jacket.
May all 350 X-Men and Avengers Teams maintain a roster for longer than 2 months.
And may all comic book movies fare better than Scott Pilgrim.
Without further adieu… a lil’ mashup for all our Jewish brethren. Tip of the hat to Lisa Sullivan.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
February 24, 2022
