THIRTY YEARS AGO!

The first time that Matt Groening's family ended up animated and in a short on the Tracy Ullman Show was THIRTY YEARS AGO, April 19th, 1987.

!!!!!!!

If you have an hour or so, you can read through the little discussions on the following list of the 100 best episodes. It is excellent, brings back a ton of memories, doesn't omit as many as I thought (but still omits two of my favorites ("King Size Homer" and "The City of New York Versus Homer Simpson")), has an episode from 1997 as the newest on the list (S9:E5, "The Cartridge Family") and has the main episode I've seen multiple times before in the top spot as Numero Uno.

The make a good point before they got started with the lists, to wit (and to paraphrase): If you want to make a list of the 100 best Simpsons episodes ever, you could take every other episode starting from the first and going all the way to 200, and either 100 would be better than entire runs of plenty of television shows.

From the "Right Fielder or Tight End?" File

Player A: 6'6", 265 Pounds
Player B: 6'7", 275 Pounds

Player A: Rob Gronkowski

Gronk is a beast who has a difficult time staying healthy but has game-changing skills. Also, on a separate topic, if a black player acted like Gronk, that behavior wouldn't tolerated with as much amusement as meets the Patriots tight end.

Player B: Aaron Judge

Seriously, the Yankees ball mashing-or-whiffing newly minted starting right fielder is literally bigger then Rob Gronkowski, if only marginally, and answers the unasked age-old question: What would an NFL tight end look like playing right field?

See if you can find him in the next picture, a Where's Waldo of sorts:

Are you kidding me? His forearms are like other folks' thighs, and his thighs are like the foul poles. And, let's not forget, that the "other folks" from the previous sentence are professional major league baseball players.

Let's hope he mashes often enough to justify the whiffs.

Also, just purchased tickets for Cass' first baseball game: a day game in the Bronx in July during our New York visit, against the Blue Jays. Early enough to get front row loge seats just beyond the right field foul pole. Pretty sweet...

New Previously Unknown Whitman Novel Discovered

Can you believe that 165 years later a grad student with a hankering for SQL-query writing and access to the Library of Congress's digital database for newspapers was able to discover a serialized novel written under a pseudonym?

I may have misrepresented the details above, but not the essence, A grad student and Whitman scholar moved on to another one of his Whitman projects: searching various databases for anything that uses names from Whitman's unpublished notes.

A main character named Jack Engle? Go...

He got a series of hits from a currently defunct newspaper from the 1850s, had the pages microfiche sent over, and set about reading it.

Consensus: the world has been gifted previously unknown Whitman content.

It's Uncle Walt as a young man and young writer, but pieces of the foundation of Leaves of Grass are all over the place, like the nurse-centurion in Fiskadoro is really the heart of the story Johnson wants to write in Tree of Smoke.

Anyway, it's been described as "pre-modern Pynchon" for its naming shenanigans and plot twists.

Reports are that the ending is where Whitman lost interest more than a conclusion of the plots/story.

Check out an article about it here. For a PDF of the book itself before it goes up for sale on Amazon, click here.

Observations and Memories Collide

I was reading about Snagglepuss, the pink cartoon mountain lion, the other day, when I read that he was voiced by Daws Butler. Daws is the guy who voiced almost every other Hannah-Barbara character. I went to YouTube and found footage of a Butler interview; at one point he says: "...and here's Wally Gator..." and then he started doing a voice.

Wally Gator! I thought. I remember that name, if not the exact look. 

So I looked him up:

Huh, I thought. I guess it didn't really click with me as a kid that Wally Gator is just a gator-rip-off of Yogi Bear.

Yogi Bear is an animated American icon and is to Hannah-Barbara what Mickey Mouse is to Disney and Bugs Bunny is to Warner Brothers. His cartoon has been updated more than once and has even been the subject of a CG/live action film voiced by Dan Ackroyd (do you remember that Boo-Boo was voiced by Justin Timberlake?). His catchphrase of "Smarter than the average bear" is a cliche, and he's even the subject of plenty of tattoos, some even well executed:

It makes sense that Yogi would be copied by his parent company.

I just didn't realize how many knock-offs Hannah-Barbara made until I looked up Wally Gator.

The list was surprising: After Wally was Hokey Wolf, who I slightly remember, and his own little Boo-Boo (whose name I do not remember):

Almost exactly Yogi-as-a-wolf.

And then a different wolf (maybe a fox), whom I don't recall at all, Loopy de Loop:

And then they get kinda off track with Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har, a hyena, a pair I had never seen once in my life before that fateful Google search:

I have to say that an updated and re-imagined Lippy and Hardy Har Har could be pretty damn good.

Here's Snagglepuss, just because I should:

What I was reading about him is that DC Comics is bringing him back as a Tennessee Williams-styled southern gothic gay playwright fighting McCarthy-era politics, If Huckleberry Hound is Faulkner, then, apparently the thinking goes, Snagglepuss is Williams.

They're going with the fully gay aspect that is hinted at or joked about by fans. Here's a page from the first upcoming story, and it's pretty good, if a little serious:

DC Comics has been updating many of the Hannah-Barbara properties that it controls, like the Flintstones:

...and Scooby Doo:

Obviously a Sherwood

I gave a professional development the other day and filmed it for review purposes. I've been growing a beard this time of year as a means of interacting with the kids: I let them vote on how to shave (I've had a "Chester A. Arthur" the last two years in a row...).

Anyway, when checking out the footage I was shocked to see one of the frames. I captured it and carved it up for this forum specifically:

I thought it was Uncle Matt at first. He and Auntie Laura came by and visited before we left Austin, and the resemblance is uncanny.

Obviously Sherwoods...

An Illusion or...Dang!

We were at Roberta Parker's the other Sunday, and, first let me say: holy cow! The 30+ miles it is from our place to Bobbi's sure seems further than, er, 30+ miles:

I guess that's an illusion on the urban scale.

The other illusion is the photo that Bobbi took of me holding the Boy:

He looks friggin' yooge! I know he's a baby and all, but he's just a hair under my vitals that mom sent out---only Cass is five months old where I was eleven months old at time of said vitals.

Dang!

Western Views

Corrie and I were hanging out the other night, perusing our few local free channels on the tube, and came across an old western, one that looked pretty good, and pretty quick I could tell which one it was: Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen were recruiting a super-young Jimmy Coburn to be on their team.

Ooh! It's the "Seven Samurai" remake, "The Magnificent Seven":

I hadn't seen it before, and it being late on a Friday, we decided to keep an eye on it until a commercial break.

It turns out it was on one of our PBS channels, and we watched probably the last hour of it, interruption free.

I'd forgotten how Russkie Yul Brenner looks, and the Toshiro Mifune character---the young, hot-head seventh from the title---is a dude named Horst in real life, a Kraut if ever there were one.

Anywho, the ending spawned a conversation about the ending of the Wild Bunch, the more fatalistic look at the end of the "wild west era."

Kurosawa is influenced by American westerns, makes samurai films like "Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo" that are essentially Japanese westerns, and these films in turn influence American westerns. "Magnificent Seven" and "A Fistful of Dollars" (as well as the Bruce Willis prohibition-era vehicle "Last Man Standing") are direct remakes, respectively.

Magnificent Seven seems like the connection of the earlier, John Wayne-era westerns with the Peckinpah-era blood-letting westerns, mostly starring Clint Eastwood.

That's when I remembered I hadn't ever seen Eastwood's "Unforgiven."

I was under the impression that this was a different storyline. Or different and novel plotlines. Or something.

I found a list calling itself the "30 Greatest Westerns" online, and was disappointed at best. "Unforgiven" was ranked quite high, and so we stuck it in the instant queue and trudged it out later that weekend.

At this point I'm not sure what my previous misconception about it was...maybe I thought Clint's Will Munney was, like, a librarian or professor or in someway not really connected to the "cowboy life."

Nope. I guess Eastwood held onto the script for a decade until he felt he was old enough to star in it.

I thought the opening and closing silent prologue and epilogue were hackish, but thought the bumbling Will Munney was a pretty decent frontier-era doofus. That worked well. This guy was so crazy and mean that he inspired what?

I thought some scenes went on and on and on, past the point of they were trying to prove, but I did like the chilling conversation between Morgan Freeman's Ned and Eastwood's Will that went something like this:

"Remember [some character I can't remember]?"

"You shouldn't waste time thinking about him."

"His teeth were blown through the back of his head." (Silence) "In the morning I couldn't remember what reason I had for doing that." (Silence) "I get to thinking about him sometimes."

"You shouldn't waste time thinking about him."

Those little terrifying and heartbreaking moments made the movie for me.

I didn't realize it's essentially the same as most other Eastwood westerns, only made from the perspective of age, wisdom and regret. Gene Hackman plays "Gene Hackman the Badguy", and his bullying scenes are what he does well. Even when they drag on. I guess the whores coming up with the bounty money is novel; I found it striking no one ever uses the N-word or anything in that vein; my favorite line may be Eastwood telling that kid, "Well, you sure killed the hell out of that guy."

The end was pretty satisfying.

But I wouldn't rank it ahead of plenty of the movies of which it was ranked ahead.

The ending of "The Wild Bunch" is like crossing Unforgiven's with The Magnificent Seven and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's.

I watched the ending of that one when I was laid up on the couch when I heard news that Ernest Borgnine had died. The first time I saw the movie was in high school when I went on a "classic" movie watching bender. Still one of my favorites, and the ending definitely doesn't fuck around:

These conversations Corrie and I were having over the course of this specific weekend led me to reflect a little on other westerns I had really enjoyed growing up. None of them starred either Jimmy Stewart or the Duke. That probably says more about me and my age group and our visual sensibilities than it does the quality of those films.

I loved "Silverado" as a kid, and doesn't follow the same story arc that many of the Eastwood westerns follow, the same ones as Seven Samurai and it's copies...

Eh...maybe it does follow the same arc...my memory is fuzzy.

Are these all the same movie?

I saw "Tombstone" in the theater on a movie-hopping afternoon and loved it ever since. Even as a young person I tried to understand why it was so much better received than Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp from that same time period. Maybe because of the laser focus of Tombstone, Val Kilmer, and a running time under three hours.

I remember the "shootout" scene at the OK Corral happens mostly by accident, and it wasn't until later in the movie that I learned this was the famous shootout from the OK Corral that's been burned into our collective consciousness, and it made me love the movie even more---it was an accident and downplayed and acted as a precursor.

More recently there was the movie-for-grown-ups that was also a western starring Brad Pitt as Jesse James:

I read about it while we lived in New York. It was well received by critic but not well attended by audiences, and I never saw it. A year later in Texas I found the DVD in a dollar bin (or some facsimile thereof) and bought it. If it sucked, whatever.

I really liked it. It was mostly plodding, but deliberate. Jesse James isn't the heroic figure Rob Lowe played in the "Frank and Jesse" HBO movie upon which I've based my entire knowledge of the crew. Brad Pitt plays him probably how he would had been: a violent and abusive asshole, damaged by many awful things that happened to most people back in those days. Casey Affleck is also pretty good.

One reason this movie surfaced is because of a recent conversation with Auntie Peg and Uncle Dan, two film buffs whose opinions I respect and seek. They hated it. I tried to quickly rattle off the things I liked about it, but was too slow, and pretty much the subject was changed without me able to make my case.

And I don't even know what that case would be. I posted about back in 2010, but still...

And the Rambler Award goes to...!

What're your favorite westerns?