Confidence: The Cartoon That Helped America Get Through the Great Depression (1933)

in Animation, History, Music | May 6th, 2026

No more bummin’, let’s all get to work…

Actually, hold up a sec. We’ll all be happier and more productive if we take a moment to start our work day with Confidence, a peppy musical animation from 1933, starring newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Mickey Mouse precursor, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Few Americans—today we’d refer to them as the 1%—could escape the privations of the Great Depression. The movies were one industry that continued to thrive through this dark period, precisely because they offered a few hours of respite. No one went to the pictures to see a reflection of their own lives. Gorgeous gowns, glamorous Manhattan apartments and romantic trouble certain to be resolved in happy endings…remember Mia Farrow’s beleaguered waitress basking in the Purple Rose of Cairo’s reassuring glow?

Given the public’s preference for escapist fare, director Bill Nolan, the Father of Rubber Hose Animation, could have played it safe by glossing over the backstory that leads Oswald to seek out advice from the Commander in Chief. Instead, Nolan delivered his joyful cartoon animals into nightmare territory, the Depression personified as a cowled Death figure laying waste to the land. It’s weirdly upsetting to see those hyper-cheerful vintage barnyard animals (and a rogue monkey) undergo this graphic enervation.

Oh, for some oral history—I’d love to know how matinee crowds reacted as Oswald raced screaming before a spinning vertigo background, seeking a remedy for a host of non-cartoon problems. Irony is a luxury they didn’t have.

Unsurprisingly, the can-do spirit so central to FDR’s New Deal quickly turned Oswald’s frown upside down. As presidential campaign promises go, this one’s uniquely tailored to the demands of musical comedy. Witness Annie, in which the 32nd president was again called upon to Rex Harrison his way into audience hearts, this time from the wheelchair the creators of Confidence didn’t dare show, some forty years earlier.

The division between entertainment and nation-leading is pretty permeable these days, too.

Accordingly, what really sets this cartoon apart for me is the use of a Presidentially-sanctioned giant syringe as a tool to get Depression-era America back on its feet. A figurative injection of confidence is all well and good, but nothing gets the barnyard back on its singing, dancing feet like a liberal dose, delivered in the most literal way.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

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Ayun Halliday can’t get enough of that rubber style.

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Why Ancient Egyptian Honey Remains Edible After 3,000 Years

in Film, Food & Drink, History | May 5th, 2026

The global bee population comes up in the news every now and again. Sometimes we’re assured that the number is stable or rising; more often, we’re warned about collapsing colonies and the large-scale ecological disaster that could result. As with most high-stakes issues, it can be difficult to know what to believe. But even if you lack the time to invest in an understanding of the science behind the complex connections between apian and human welfare, you can easily come to appreciate the importance of bees if you learn just how long they’ve played a role in our civilization.

As Elana Spivack writes at History.com, “a cave painting in northeastern Spain depicting a human harvesting honey dates back 7,500 years to the Neolithic period, according to research published in 2021 in the journal Trabajos de Prehistoria.” Just last year, a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society confirmed that bronze containers discovered in an underground shrine in a sixth-century-BC Greek settlement not far from Pompeii contained a residue of honey. We’ve long known of hieroglyphs from ancient Egypt that depict bees and the keeping thereof; “according to a 2022 paper in the journal Animals, the use of honeybees in the Nile Valley can be traced to the earliest years of the Egyptian kingdom.”

Here in the twenty-first century, most of us regard honey as nothing more than a relatively healthy sweetener. In ancient Egypt, too, it was used to improve the taste of their bread and beer, but it was also put to important medical uses. “Because it’s so thick, rejects any kind of growth and contains hydrogen peroxide, it creates the perfect barrier against infection for wounds,” writes Smithsonian’s Natasha Geiling. “The ancient Egyptians used medicinal honey regularly, making ointments to treat skin and eye diseases.” They may not have been the first to do so, given that the earliest known uses of honey are recorded on Sumerian clay tablets, but they took respect for the stuff to a whole new level, describing honeybees as originating from the tears of their sun god Re (formerly known in the English-speaking world as Ra).

That particular piece of mythology is recorded on some Egyptian papyri; others reveal how much honey was rationed to workers, at least those employed directly by the Pharaoh. In those days, the substance’s golden color reflected its dearness, and it seems that common laborers and their families could go a lifetime without ever tasting a spoonful themselves. Today, of course, we take it for granted that we can go down to the supermarket and cheaply buy an economy-size tub of honey that never goes bad. But then, ancient Egyptian honey has never gone bad either: thanks to the very same chemical and biological properties that made it useful for healing, the sealed jars of it remain theoretically edible even after 3,000 years. Drizzle it on some genuine Greek yogurt, and you’ve got a large swath of the history of civilization in breakfast form.

via Boing Boing/Smithsonian

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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When Francis Bacon Shocked the Art World: Viewers Were Horrified by His Paintings, But Couldn’t Look Away

in Art, History | May 5th, 2026

A difficult childhood and adolescence, saturated with the feeling of being an outsider, may or may not contribute to becoming a great artist. Experiencing the social and cultural ferment of Berlin and Paris in the nineteen-twenties probably wouldn’t hurt one’s chances. Nor, surely, would formative exposure in such cities to films like Metropolis, Battleship Potemkin, and Abel Gance’s Napoleon, as well as to the paintings of Pablo Picasso. Going to art school may seem like the natural choice for any aspiring artist, but there’s also something to be gained from avoiding that academic system entirely.

These, as gallerist-Youtuber James Payne tells us in the new Great Art Explained video above, are all aspects of the life that produced Francis Bacon. As usual on that series, he proceeds from a single representative work, in this case Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, from 1953.

If you’ve seen that painting even once, you haven’t forgotten it, and indeed, you’ve probably seen it again in your nightmares since. To trace the source of its troubling power, Payne plunges into the history of Bacon’s harrowing life as well as that of the Irish, English, and European historical contexts in which he lived — often to its dangerous, chaotic fullest.

Not that any art historian can ignore the inspiration cited right there in the painting’s title. It is to that seventeenth-century Spaniard’s acclaimed portrait of that head of the Catholic Church (who pronounced the finished work “troppo vero”) that Bacon pays twisted, deconstructive homage. Yet despite having been to Rome, he never actually saw the original; that, as Payne explains, “would have meant facing its power directly.” Instead, he worked from a small, washed-out “copy of a copy,” all the better to allow for not just reinvention, but also the incorporation of other scraps of the rapidly expanding mass media of the twentieth century: the period, despite the out-of-time quality of so much of his art, to which Bacon so thoroughly belonged.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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You Can Have Your Ashes Turned Into a Playable Vinyl Record, When Your Day Comes

in Life, Music | May 4th, 2026

Even in death we are only limited by our imagination in how we want to go out. There are now ways to turn our corpse into a tree, or have our ashes shot into space, or press our ashes into diamonds–I believe Superman is involved in that last one. And now for the music lover, a company called And Vinyly will press your ashes into a playable vinyl record.

You like that punny company name? There’s more: the business lets the dear departed “Live on from beyond the groove.” Hear that groan? That’s the deceased literally spinning in their grave…on a turntable.

The UK-based company has been around since 2009, when Jason Leach launched it “just for fun” at first. But a lot of people liked the idea and have kept him in business.

It will cost, however. The basic service generally costs between £1000 and £3000 GBP, and it partly depends on how many vinyl records you produce. From what we can tell, you cannot use copyright-protected music to fill up the 18–22 minutes per side. So no “Free Bird” or “We Are the Champions,” unfortunately. But you can put anything else: a voice recording, or the sounds of nature, or complete silence. Get more information over at the company’s FAQ.

No doubt, the service can provide comfort and a memory trigger for those left behind. The above video, “Hearing Madge,” is a short doc about a son who took recordings of his mother and used And Vinyly to make a record out of them. It’s sweet.

“I’m sure a lot of people think that it’s creepy, a lot of people think it’s sacrilegious,” the man says. “But I know my mother wouldn’t have. She would’ve thought it was a hoot.”

Jason Leach, a musician and vinyl collector himself, talks of the immediacy of sound and what it means to many.

“Sound is vibrating you, the room, and it’s actually moving the air around you,” he says. “And that’s what’s so powerful about hearing someone’s voice on a record. They’re actually moving the air and for me that’s powerful.”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts.

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Chuck Jones’ The Dot and the Line Celebrates Geometry & Hard Work: An Oscar-Winning Animation (1965)

in Animation, Education, Film, Math | May 4th, 2026

The animated short above, The Dot and the Line, directed by the great Chuck Jones and narrated by English actor Robert Morley, won an Oscar in 19656 for Best Animated Short Film. Based on a book written by Norton Juster, “The Dot and the Line” tells the story of a romance between two geometric shapes—taking the archetypal narrative trajectory of boy meets girl, loses girl, wins girl in the end (finding himself along the way) and injecting it with some fascinating social commentary that still resonates almost fifty years later. One way of watching “The Dot and the Line” is as a “triumph of the nerd” story, where an anxious square (as in “uncool”) Line has to compete with a hipster beatnik Squiggle of a rival for the affections of a flighty Dot.

The Line begins the film “stiff as a stick… dull, conventional and repressed” (as his love interest says of him) in contrast to the groovy Squiggle and his groovy bebop soundtrack. With the possible suggestion that this love transgresses mid-century racial boundaries, the Line’s friends disapprove and tell him to give it up, since “they all look alike anyway.” But the Line persists in his folly, indulging in some Walter Mitty-like reveries of heroic endeavors that might win over his Dot. Finally, using “great self-control,” he manages to bend himself into an angle, then another, then a series of simple, then very complex, shapes, becoming, we might assume, some kind of mathematical wiz. After refining his talents alone, he goes off to show them to Dot, who is “overwhelmed” and delighted and who “giggles like a schoolgirl.”

Here the subtext of the nerd-gets-the-girl storyline manifests a fairly conservative critique of the “anarchy” of the Squiggle, whom the Dot comes to see as “undisciplined, graceless, coarse” and other unflattering adjectives while the line—who proclaimed to himself earlier that “freedom is not a license for chaos”—is “dazzling, clever, mysterious, versatile, light, eloquent, profound, enigmatic, complex, and compelling.” I can almost imagine that George Will had a hand in the writing, which is to say that it’s enormously clever, and enormously invested in the values of self-control, hard work, and discipline, and distrustful of spontaneity, free play, and general grooviness. At the end of the film, our Dot and Line go off to live “if not happily ever after, at least reasonably so” in some cozy suburb, no doubt. The moral of the story? “To the vector belong the spoils.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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How Sylvester Stallone Rescued the First Rambo Film With a Radical Recut, Cutting It From 3½ Hours to 93 Minutes

in Film | May 1st, 2026

About a year ago, a certain kind of cinephile took note of obituaries for Ted Kotcheff, a television-turned-film director who worked steadily from the mid-fifties to the mid-nineties. Even to readers only casually acquainted with movies, more than one title pops out from his filmography: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Fun with Dick and Jane, North Dallas Forty, Weekend at Bernie’s. The focus on genres, and their variety, suggests not an auteur but a journeyman, the kind of efficient, versatile problem-solver that used to keep Hollywood afloat. But occasionally, the work of a journeyman can achieve its own kind of transcendence: that moment came with First Blood, in Kotcheff’s case, which launched the Rambo series in 1982.

Those who remember Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo as a headbanded one-man army bent on re-fighting and winning the Vietnam War, one bout of ultra-violence at a time, will be surprised by the relative meekness of his first onscreen incarnation.

As First Blood’s story is summarized by the CinemaStix video above, Rambo drifts into a small Washington town after a search for his Vietnam comrades comes to a fruitless end. Hostilely ejected by the local sheriff, he nevertheless walks right back into city limits. Arrested and booked at the police station, he turns on the cops in a PTSD-triggered rage. When he makes his escape into the forest, the law pursues him, leaving him no choice — at least in his own mind — but to declare war on the police, the town, and perhaps the whole of American civilization.

This is a promising enough narrative for a post-Vietnam genre picture, as a variety of producers must have thought while David Morrell’s original novel was circulating through Hollywood. But only the star power of Stallone, with the first couple of Rocky pictures under his belt, could get it made. And indeed, he almost got it un-made: dismayed by its initial three-and-a-half hour cut, he decided to buy the rights and destroy the negative. The solution that ended up saving the movie wasn’t much less drastic, producing a 93-minute cut that excised most of Rambo’s dialogue. The result, as CinemaStix creator Danny Boyd explains, possesses the good kind of ambivalence, which lets the audience share not just the beleaguered protagonist’s perspective but also that of his increasingly frustrated pursuers, who escalate the battle out of all proportion to his actions. 44 years on, First Blood still offers surprises, not the least of which is that Rambo — for the last time in his career — never actually kills anyone.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

Confidence: The Cartoon That Helped America Get Through the Great Depression (1933)

Why Ancient Egyptian Honey Remains Edible After 3,000 Years

When Francis Bacon Shocked the Art World: Viewers Were Horrified by His Paintings, But Couldn’t Look Away

You Can Have Your Ashes Turned Into a Playable Vinyl Record, When Your Day Comes

Chuck Jones’ The Dot and the Line Celebrates Geometry & Hard Work: An Oscar-Winning Animation (1965)

How Sylvester Stallone Rescued the First Rambo Film With a Radical Recut, Cutting It From 3½ Hours to 93 Minutes

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