Popular music has become a swamp, with sinkholes and tangled underbrush. Every musical form can now be considered “niche” music -- not shades along a spectrum, but a patch in a crazy quilt of vaguely related or wholly unrelated sounds and lyrical stylings. Strangely,...
Astro Boy is a conscious robot, nuclear-powered, with synthetic skin giving him the appearance of a twelve-year-old boy and plastic hair that sticks out like horns from the top and the left of his head. He has lasers in his fingertips, rockets in his limbs, blasters...
There have been a number of efforts to produce live action films based on the Batman comics. The first, in the 1940s, developed as a series of interconnected episodes released weekly in theaters. There was a respected, high budget feature length film in the 1980s,...
"The tragedy of your time, my young friends, is that you may get exactly what you want." [1] ___ Monkees, the Signifier "The Monkees”: this sign signifies a number of phenomena, related yet not identical. For instance: [1] A television show, broadcast in the...
When I was 17, I fell in love with three older men. Indeed, they were so much older that two of them were dead at the time. They were everything I wasn't. They were short and thin, and though not athletes, they moved swiftly and with agility. One couldn't say that...
We will first consider the Scooby Doo phenomenon in terms of its original appearance in the series Scooby Doo! Where Are You? (1969). The artwork is crude, the animation sloppy, and the music and laugh-track are downright annoying. The show won its audience with its...
Say everyone’s talking ’bout chicken Chicken’s a popular word But anywhere you go, you’re bound to find A chicken ain’t nothin’ but a bird -- Emmett Wallace, as performed by Cab Calloway A couple months ago, I found a copy of the DVD Sitting Ducks, a collection of a...