Tagged: Birthday

Happy 61st birthday, Philip Pullman!

Happy 61st birthday, Philip Pullman!

Today is Philip Pullman’s birthday, who, sad to say, does not yet share the deserved household name status of his colleague, J.K. Rowling. Mr. Pullman was born in 1946 and penned the brilliant and award-winning series, His Dark Materials. The first of the series, The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights if you read it in the U.K.), starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, is being released as a movie this December 7th. Here’s the latest trailer:

Here’s hoping the film does better than the last Kidman/Craig outing, The Invasion… 

Happy 32nd birthday, Saturday Night Live!

Happy 32nd birthday, Saturday Night Live!

Thirty-two years ago, at 11:30 PM Eastern Time, the National Broadcasting Company aired this live:

…and with that, a revolution was born. NBC’s Saturday Night premiered with George Carlin as the host, Janis Ian and Billy Preston as musical guests, Jim Henson’s Muppets, and Not Ready For Prime Time Players Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, George Coe (remember him?), Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Michael O’Donoghue, and Gilda Radner. A few years later, it would be renamed to what we know it as today, Saturday Night Live.

Del Close, subject of last Friday’s Munden’s Bar story, was acting coach and rehearsal director of SNL in 1981 and 1982.

JOHN OSTRANDER: Genius and Barbecue

JOHN OSTRANDER: Genius and Barbecue

There are ways of getting ComicMix E-I-C Mike Gold to do what you want. Most of them involve barbeque. It has to be good barbeque, mind you, and we’re talking beef rather than pork. Smoky brisket, a sharp sauce, maybe some hushpuppies (forget the cole slaw), fries, and a coke – get these into him and he becomes remarkably malleable.

Another really good way is talent. Mike is seduced by talent. I’m not talking big names; Mike knows plenty of people who are “names” and it’s no big deal. I’m talking about talent.  He loves being a part of what happens when talented people do things; hell, Mike’s plenty talented in his own right. But he really enjoys how creative minds work.

It’s how I got him to originally go for Munden’s Bar. The character that Tim Truman and I created, GrimJack, had proven such a hit in the back of Starslayer that he was being promoted into his own book. Given the page count of comics at the time, it meant we needed an eight page back-up feature. I wanted GrimJack to be all set in the pandimensional city of Cynosure where the main feature itself was set so I proposed that we do an anthology series of eight page stories set in Munden’s, the bar that GrimJack owned and used as his office. Each story would be complete unto itself, each could have a different artist, and maybe I’d even let another writer in. Occasionally. Maybe.

Mike wasn’t sold. His objections were that anthologies could be a lot more work, they didn’t always sell very well, the company liked to use back-ups as launching pads for new series which Munden’s Bar was unlikely to do, and the idea with backups was to have something separate from the main feature that would draw in a crowd perhaps on its own, as GrimJack had done for Starslayer.

These were all reasonable objections. I couldn’t really dispute any of them so instead I fought dirty and appealed to Mike’s love of talent.

I told him I thought I could get Del Close to co-write some of them with me.

Let me tell you about Del. He was an actor, a teacher, and most of all he was the director at Second City in Chicago for twenty-plus years. He was teacher and mentor to some of the biggest names who came out of Second City and later founded, with Charna Halpern, ImprovOlypics – out of which came more students who became important people in comedy. Like who? John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Bill Murray, John Candy, Betty Thomas, Stephen Colbert, Mike Meyers, Steve Carell, and so many others that I could spend the rest of the column just listing them.

Simply put – Del Close is one of the greatest influences on late twentieth century comedy and humor in America and, thus, the world. He influenced his students and they in turn are influencing others. Del shaped the sensibility of Second City for two decades. Without it, there is no Saturday Night Live, no SCTV (Del created the format for that show), none of the other improv groups that have also fed American humor in all its forms.

Hyperbole? If anything, I think I’m understating it. Del is perhaps the only individual I have ever personally met whom I would call a genius. It’s not just a matter of intellect although Del had a considerable brain; it wasn’t just a matter of knowledge – Del was enormously well read on a multitude of different subjects. It was perception; he knew how it worked because he saw the patterns. I think Einstein knew what the answers were; he had to then find the proof. Same thing with Del.

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Happy 25th birthday, Billie Piper!

Happy 25th birthday, Billie Piper!

We want to wish a happy silver birthday to Billie Piper, best known here in the States as Rose Tyler, the recent companion of Doctor Wh– pardon? Why are we covering the birthday of an actress that has nothing to do with comics?

Three reasons: first, there is going to be a Doctor Who comic book from our good friends over at IDW coming out this December. Second, she might be making a return appearance to Whoville.

Third, Because We Want To:

Happy 41st birthday, Star Trek!

Happy 41st birthday, Star Trek!

Forty one years ago today, on a little network called NBC, a little TV show from Desilu hit the airwaves for the first time with an episode entitled "The Man Trap" or as everybody else knows it, the one with the salt vampire.

Six TV series and 726 episodes later (not to mention ten movies with a new one on the way, twelve comic book series and a passel of mini-series and one shots, video games, role-playing games, books, e-books, and that Power Records book and LP with the Neal Adams cover — oh, don’t give me that look, you know the one) Star Trek has grossed billions of dollars and changed the world as we know it.

As one of the thousands of people who’s worked on the franchise and through my own small contributions helped build on this marvelous future, I’d like to offer my congratulations to all the people who helped make it happen and all the people who watch it with us, and here’s hoping we still keep it going where we’ve never gone before.

Now, if I only had a way to somehow link this post with yesterday’s birthday post for Monty Python… oh, wait, I do:

UPDATE 9:44 PM: Okay, so I can’t count– it’s 41 years, not 40. Been bopped on the head with one too many tribbles.

Happy Sweet 16, Ariel David!

Happy Sweet 16, Ariel David!

We know you’ve had a tough childhood– having Peter David as a father can’t be easy on anyone– but you’ve thrived and blossomed, and we hope you’re having a happy birthday. Good luck with getting the driver’s license.

(Never let it be said that we don’t take any available chance to embarrass Ariel.)

Happy belated 55th birthday, Paul Reubens!

Happy belated 55th birthday, Paul Reubens!

I actually was aware of Paul Reubens’s birthday this past Monday, August 27, but I didn’t really know what to say about it– I mean, we all know Pee-Wee Herman, readers of this site remember him in Batman Returns, Murphy Brown and You Don’t Know Jack, and we all remember the other stuff, but really, what was there to add?

Then I was reminded that he’s responsible for the Best. Death Scene. Evah.

Okay, so it’s probably the worst version out there. So sue me. Go rent Buffy The Vampire Slayer and watch it yourself.

 

Happy 95th birthday, Gene Kelly!

Happy 95th birthday, Gene Kelly!

Just because… oh, all right, we’ll tie it into comics somehow. Here, enjoy one of the more interesting crossovers from the MGM days:

Hayden Panettiere turns legal

Hayden Panettiere turns legal

Yep, fandom’s favorite cheerleader (all right, I remember her as Princess Dot from A Bug’s Life, but I’m weird) turned eighteen on Tuesday. And what did she do to commemorate it? She registered to vote:

Exercising her civic right, star of NBC’s Heroes, Hayden Panettiere, celebrated her 18th birthday today by registering to vote utilizing the Declare Yourself campaign’s easy-to-use online registration process. Panettiere is an official spokesperson for the Declare Yourself, the national nonpartisan, nonprofit youth voter initiative aimed at empowering and encouraging America’s 18-year-olds to register and vote in the 2008 primaries and general election.

Like millions of other young people, Panettiere logged on to the campaign’s official site at http://www.DeclareYourself.com, completed the voter registration form online, printed it out and then mailed it off. She was also able to have any voting related questions answered through Declare Yourself’s FAQ section.

Now that’s a way to save the world.

Happy 25th birthday, compact discs!

Happy 25th birthday, compact discs!

One hundred and thirty years ago this past Wednesday, Thomas Edison made the first ever audio recording, which consisted of him reciting "Mary Had A Little Lamb". It entered the charts at #1.

But twenty-five years ago today, the world’s first compact disc was produced at a Philips factory in Germany, ushering in a new world of audio and laying the groundwork for digital copying, MP3s, Napster… well, at least we got rid of all the hisses and pops, right?

Sigh. Edison hate future.