Author: Dennis O'Neil

The Super-Hero Car, by Dennis O’Neil

The Super-Hero Car, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • February 26, 2008

When we last looked in on our intrepid, tv-watching old guy – that’d be me – he was waiting to treat himself to the premiere of Knight Rider, a remake of an old series.

 
Okay, I watched it.
 
I can’t really compare it to the original, which aired at a time in my life when television had a very low priority. The episode I do remember seeing annoyed me, just a bit, I think, because he talking car seemed to be as much a – brace for a pun – deus ex machina as…oh, say, the shafts in Green Arrow’s quiver or the items in Batman’s tiny utility belt compartments; whatever the hero needs, that’s what’s there. But, as noted, I was never a real Knight Rider watcher.
 
Having made that confession: the show I saw last Sunday didn’t seem to be awfully innovative. The one blatant updating was that one of the good guys was a gay, black woman, a character who probably would not have appeared on network television during the original Knight Rider’s heyday.
 
And that talking car? Pretty nifty, I have to admit – similar to the original, but a bit improved. For example, it changed colors at the twiddle of a dashboard thingy, which brings us to the aforementioned Batman.
 

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Nighty Knight Rider, by Dennis O’Neil

Nighty Knight Rider, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • February 19, 2008

Once again, the other day, I found myself wishing I’d spent less of my youth with, as folks might have said back then, my nose buried in some silly book and more time in the company of hammers, saws, wrenches. You know. Manly stuff. Tools. The reason was, something in the bathtub wasn’t working and we had to call the plumber, who is one of the nicest guys I know and might be the best plumber in Rockland County New York, and we had a chat while the water was running to accomplish something arcane and, well, plumberish. If I hadn’t wasted my youth, maybe I could tell you what.

 
Anyway: because he knows what I did and sometimes still do to earn money, we discussed movies and television. He’s of the opinion that nobody in the media has any new ideas.
 
I didn’t argue, and I won’t. With a few reservations, and looking at the evidence, I agree, kind of.
 
Of course, one could assert that there are no new ideas, an assertion borne out by the fact that treatise after treatise has demonstrated that there are only seven plots, or five, or eleven – some very finite number, in any case. But even given that near = truism, there doesn’t seem to be a lot that’s genuinely fresh around these days.
 
For instance: As I type this, I’m about two hours away from experiencing the latest incarnation of Knight Rider. Twenty-plus years ago, this saga of a young man and his talking car launched the career of David Hasselhoff, who later became world-famous as the tanned and buff father figure to a lot of equally tanned and buff, but younger, lifeguards. This is the latest of a seemingly endless catalogue of old films and TV shows revamped for the Twenty First Century. Some I’ve liked; the remake of the old Glenn Ford western, 3:10 to Yuma, was, by any reasonable criterion, a good movie. Others…well…
 

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Lost In ‘Lost’, by Dennis O’Neil

Lost In ‘Lost’, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • February 15, 2008
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Denny’s column normally runs on Tuesdays, which is great because Denny e-mails it to me on Sundays. For some reason – and for the second or third time – his various e-mail accounts don’t seem to like my various e-mail accounts. We think we’ve straightened it out. Go figure. If computers were cars, we’d all be riding horses.

 

And now, Mr. O’Neil… -MG]

 

While I was sort of half-watching the two Lost specials our pals at ABC television were treating us to recently, I recalled the hot new trend of a couple of years ago. Serialized stories. Nothing resolved until late in the season. They came and they went, those shows, though there are a few survivors, of which my favorite, and apparently the favorite of millions of my fellow citizens (including you?) is the aforementioned Lost.
 
The purpose of the specials, which ran on consecutive evenings, was ostensibly to remind the Faithful of what’s been happening to those funsters on the island, and to clue in the non-Faithful, like me, people who just watch the thing for an hour’s easy amusement, as to what the hell the continuity is. (Another reason for the specials might have been the writer’s strike, now settled; clip shows like these eat up airtime at little cost and need no new material. Or am I being cynical?)
 

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William James and the Superbowl, by Dennis O’Neil

William James and the Superbowl, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • February 5, 2008

Big game day. As I sit down to write this, the coin toss that will start this year’s Superbowl is about 90 minutes away. Let a hush fall over the universe. The Pats and the Giants are preparing to vie for godlike supremacy. Who’s your favorite QB – Eli or Tom? Me – I’m going for the Giants, not because I know anything about them, but rather because Marifran likes the Patriots and we have this annual bet. Winner gets to choose the next movie. Call us sports.

Wonder what William James would have thought of the Superbowl?

William James, brother of Henry, as the English majors and philosophy fans among you probably know, launched the concept of the “moral equivalent of war.” Although he was a self-proclaimed pacifist, he recognized that war has its uses – he even declared that history would be “insipid” without it. And it does. It hastens technological development, helps young men understand others who are not of their tribe, offers an opportunity for individuals to test themselves (and maybe learn what they really feel), provides an opportunity to develop managerial skills…You can probably add to the list.

War also kills and maims the innocent and destroys economies and nations and minds and brutalizes the survivors and gives money and power to those least deserving of them, such as men who have never fired a shot except, maybe, at forest animals and who knows? – even then the shooter might miss his target and hit a companion instead. Feel free to add to this list, too.

The trick, then, according to James and like minds, is to find a way to do the good things war does, and omit the bad. It’s a trick nobody has learned how to do. But we have some activities that approximate war that don’t do significant harm and may do some good, and sports is one of them. It allows young folk to obey their evolutionary imperative to engage in strenuous physicality with the goal of beating someone or something and maybe copping some glory and admiring glances and, please, let us not knock that imperative; it helped our distant, burrow-dwelling ancestors to claim a home on the Earth’s surface after a big chunk of rock did in the dinosaurs.

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Hate, by Dennis O’Neil

Hate, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • January 29, 2008

Calling movie actors “stars” was appropriate when I was a midwestern lad, long ago, because they seemed as distant and unattainable as those celestial twinklers that speckled the summer sky. None of my friends or relatives were movie stars — they were butchers or clerks or drivers or printers — and what the stars did, acting, wasn’t a real job and so those who did it weren’t real people. They were…stars. But if you knew someone who knew, or at least had spoken to, one of these distant beings who lived in places you never expected to visit, the stars became somehow real — or maybe realer, anyway. They were, if not people, then some sort of demi-people.

Clark Gable was a star. But Rock Hudson was both more and less than a star because I knew a girl who had worked as an extra on one of his films. Julia Adams…heck, she was a person, because she did a personal appearance at the grocery co-op my father belonged to when she was co-starring with Tyrone Power in Mississippi Gambler and people I knew actually saw her in the flesh. And didn’t that make Power a demi-person, too, by association?

Which brings us to Heath Ledger. I was never in a room with him, never saw him on the street, spoke to him on the phone, none of that. But when a heard about his death a few days ago, I felt just a tiny bit worse than I usually feel when someone whose work I admire passes. Why? Mr. Ledger and I lived in two of the same neighborhoods, one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan, though not at the same time, and my big 2007 project was writing a novel based on the script of a movie Mr. Ledger performs in. Somehow, all this makes me feel a dim and distant connection to him.

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Morality and such, by Dennis O’Neil

Morality and such, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • January 22, 2008

It seems to me that I used to hear the word “morality” a lot more than I do nowadays. That might have a simple explanation: I used to hear

Look, sorry, I gotta break in here for a minute. You don’t know me unless, maybe, you once read an online thing called The O’Neil Observer and ain’t that a laugh. Like anybody would want to observe that loser! Well, one of those guys who studies bugs…an ente-something – maybe a guy like that would be interested in observing chrome-dome O’Neil. Anyway, I was introducing myself. Name’s Randy Hyper and I’m a character the loser made up because he’s too wussy to tell people about what’s he’s doing and he needs to hide behind a scrap of fiction to do it and if that ain’t pathetic, I don’t know what is. What he’d like you to know about is a course in comics writing he’s supposed to teach at New York University beginning February 13th and you could sign up for by contacting NYU. Or you could hit your toe with a hammer. That’s all I got to say. Now back to Mr. I’m-Too-Modest-To-Talk-About-Myself.

people use the word “immoral” when they mean something like, “I really, really don’t like this.” It’s been suggested – I don’t remember by whom – that the great bete noire of the comics world, Dr. Fredrick Wertham, whose background was European high culture and whose wife did fine art, found comic books unbearably vulgar and that perception of vulgarity somehow morphed into a perception of immorality and, worse, psychological corruption. 

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Cut Them Off At The Past, by Dennis O’Neil

Cut Them Off At The Past, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • January 15, 2008

And the Screen Writers Guild lurches into a tenth week and if there’s any end in sight, I haven’t heard about it.

Last time, I mentioned the Academy of Comic Book Arts and its failure to do any significant negotiating on behalf of its members. ACBA wasn’t the first attempt, though, to organize those glorious mavericks, the comic book community. In the 60s…

Wait! Better issue a warning before I go further. Do not regard anything that follows as gospel. (In fact, you might consider not regarding the Gospel as gospel, but let us not digress.) I have no reason not to believe what I’m about to tell you except one: About a year before he died, Arnold Drake, who was a busy comic book writer at the time we’ll be discussing, told me that the story I had wasn’t the whole story, or even necessarily accurate. I don’t know why I didn’t press him for further information, but I didn’t.

Okay, the story:

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Cartoonists Of The World Unite, by Dennis O’Neil

Cartoonists Of The World Unite, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • January 8, 2008
The television and movie Writers Guild strike lurches into its ninth week. If it goes on much longer, we may be doomed to even more staged “reality” and contest shows. Might be a good time to rekindle a book reading habit.
 
I’ve heard grumbling from folk who work that side of the street to the effect that the strike could have been better managed. Although I’m technically a member of the Guild, I don’t have an opinion – about the strike, that is. Two years ago, I was told that since I hadn’t done any United States television work for a decade, I was being put on retired status, which means, I think, that I can still benefit from the Guild’s services, but I don’t have to pay dues or have my mail box filled with notices of seminars and other industry events. 
 
All fine with me.
 
About the Guild, as separate from the strike, I do have an opinion. I think the Guild is a noble organization, one that does exactly what a union should do, and no more. It collectively bargains, it protects members’ rights; it offers education and retirement benefits. And membership costs are more than reasonable. The current disagreement is over whether/how much writers should benefit from ancillary use of their stuff, mostly new media and computer related. I can imagine no sane reason why writers should not get such benefits, but I admit to bias.
 

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Leveling down, by Dennis O’Neil

Leveling down, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • January 1, 2008

New Year’s morning.  Cold, wet, bleak.

I’m sure that within easy walk of where I’m sitting, there are people who are wishing they’d done something else last night.  The wages of sin are, indeed, death — death is the wages of everything, sooner or later — but sin can have some more immediate wages in the forms of headaches, sick stomachs, dry-mouth. The self-inflicted results of having a good ol’ time.
 
In Times Square, poor devils who work for the New York City sanitation department are busy cleaning up the detritus from the annual big hoo-hah.  Watching it on television was like glimpsing purgatory: crowds and noise and chaos — not my idea of fun anymore, if it ever was.  But the would-be poet in me is responding to the chilly, soaking sanitation men symbolize: get rid of the old to accommodate the new.  Yeah, ‘t’was ever thus, but we resist the notion, which is really an incarnation of the inevitable, particularly in our national politics.
 
Given the kinds of things the candidates spend most of their energies fussing over, it would seem that we’ve learned nothing in the past seven years.  
 

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Little Ditty About Danny and Fred, by Dennis O’Neil

Little Ditty About Danny and Fred, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 25, 2007

Danny and Fred were the last two kids in their grade to still believe in Santa Claus. 

 
Danny had first believed in Daddy, but he stopped when Daddy began to yell a lot, and drink whiskey, and throw things. So Danny could believe he had a father, because he could see a man coming and going, but he stopped believing in Daddy. 
 
But he still believed in Santa Claus. Santa Claus would never yell or throw things or drink whiskey, and besides, he brought presents and all Danny had to do was be good, which he was anyway. Fred, who lived next door, also believed in Santa, though he and Danny never discussed the etiology of it, so Danny didn’t know why Fred believed. He didn’t care, either.
 
Then, when Danny was fourteen, Father, who was once Daddy, came into Danny’s room on Christmas Eve and pulled Danny from bed and hustled him into the front room, where the Christmas tree was. Father sat Danny down on the sofa and got a big cardboard box from a closet.
 

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