In 2002, the elusive novelist Thomas Pynchon made two cameo appearances on The Simpsons. Of course, we didn’t actually get to see Pynchon. His cartoon depiction wore, rather humorously, a bag over his head. But, we did get to hear Pynchon’s voice. And apparently that, alone, was a first.
This past week, Matt Selman, an executive producer for The Simpsons, shed some more light on those playful cameos. On Twitter, he posted a copy of the script Pynchon edited and faxed back to the show’s writers. (Click on the image above to see it in a larger format.) In some cases, Pynchon, always the writer, tweaked the language to make it flow as he liked. In other cases, he added his own material to the script — new sound effects, jokes, and puns. (The word “Scrumptious” gets turned into Vi-licious.) And, in one case, he removed a joke. Deleting the words “No wonder Homer is such a fat ass,” Pynchon scrawled the comment: “Sorry, guys. Homer is my role model and I can’t speak ill of him.” Finally, Homer gets some respect.
1979 was a strange year in music. A year of endings, in a way. Sid Vicious died, Ozzy Osbourne left Black Sabbath… an old guard faded away. On the other hand, U2 went into the studio for their debut, Kate Bush went on her first tour, and new wave emerged from punk’s end. It was also the year, notably or not, that Berlin/New York cabaret performer Klaus Nomi broke, sort of. Nomi had been performing Wagner and Vaudeville in New York, and David Bowie, always on the make for unusual traveling companions, invited him to appear as a backup singer on Saturday Night Live. Bowie himself was in transition, leaving behind his high concept work with Brian Eno on his Berlin Trilogy (Low, ”Heroes,” and Lodger) and entering another high pop phase. It was an abrupt, but natural, shift for Bowie; tapping into Nomi’s art-pop affectations may have seemed a perfect way to bridge the two.
Bowie, Nomi, and flamboyant New York performance artist Joey Arias do three songs, reaching back to Bowie’s folkier times for “The Man Who Sold the World.” Bowie launches next into Station to Station’s “TVC 15” in a skirt and heels, while Nomi and Arias drag around a pink plastic poodle. For the last number, Lodger’s “When You’re a Boy,” Bowie perhaps invents the look of 80s new wave videos to come—from Peter Gabriel to the Pet Shop Boys—while wearing a life-size marionette costume. Some amazing mechanism, puppeteers offstage or Bowie himself, operates the oversized arms, and the whole thing takes SNL musical performances to a place they’d never been. Nomi was so impressed with the costuming that he adopted the huge plastic tuxedo Bowie wears during the first song as his own, wearing one on the cover of his first album and performing in it until his death from AIDS in 1983. The broadcast above took place on December 15, 1979.
You’ve probably seen “Illusion of Choice,” a 2011 infographic detailing how six media conglomerates “control a staggering 90% of what we read, watch, or listen to.” (The entities named are GE, News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS.) Another “Illusion of Choice” infographic from last year documents how “ten huge corporations control the production of almost everything the average person buys.” Are these webs of corporate connection kooky conspiracy theories or genuine cause for alarm? Do the correlations between business entities cause political currents that undermine democracy and media independence? It’s not particularly controversial to think so given the amount of money corporations spend on lobbying and political campaigns. It’s not even particularly controversial to say so, at least for those of us who aren’t employed by, say, Viacom, Time Warner, GE, etc.
But pointing fingers at the corporatocracy may have not gone over so well for famed comedy writer Robert Smigel in 1998 when his recurring animated “Saturday TV Funhouse” segment produced the “Conspiracy Theory Rock” bit above for Saturday Night Live. A parody of the beloved Schoolhouse Rock educational ‘toons of the 70s, “Conspiracy Theory Rock” features a disheveled gentleman—a stereotype of the outsider crackpot—leading a sing-along about the machinations of the “Media-opoly.” Figured as greedy octopi (reminiscent of Matt Taibbi’s “vampire squid”), the media giants here, including GE, Westinghouse, Fox, and Disney, devour the smaller guys—the traditional networks—and “use them to say whatever they please and put down the opinions of anyone who disagrees.” The segment may have raised the ire of GE, who own NBC. It aired once with the original episode but was subsequently pulled from the show in syndication, though it’s been included in subsequent DVD compilations of “Saturday TV Funhouse.”
Now “Conspiracy Theory Rock” is circulating online—amplified by a Marc Maron tweet—as a “banned” clip, a misleading description that feeds right into the story of conspiracy. Editing a sketch from a syndicated comedy show, after all, is not tantamount to banning it. While the short piece makes the usual compelling case against corporate rule, it does so in a tongue-in-cheek way that allows for the possibility that some of these allegations are tenuous exaggerations. Our unwashed presenter, for example, ends the segment mumbling an incoherent non sequitur about Lorne Michaels and Marion Barry attending the same high school. For his part, Michaels has said the segment was cut because it “wasn’t funny.” He’s got a point—it isn’t—but it’s hard to believe it didn’t raise other objections from network executives. It wouldn’t be the first time the show has been accused of censoring a political sketch.
It happened before, and it still happens now and again today, but in the second half of the twentieth century, auteurs really got into making commercials: Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, David Lynch. Not, perhaps, the first names in filmmaking you’d associate with commerciality, but there we have it. Where, though, to place Federico Fellini, director of La Dolce Vita, Satyricon, and Amarcord, movies that, while hardly assembled by the numbers, could never resist the entertaining and even pleasurable (or the somehow pleasurably displeasurable) spectacle? On one hand, Fellini went so far as to campaign against commercials airing during the broadcast of motion pictures; on the other hand, he made a few of the things, and not minor ones, either. In a post here on Fellini’s own commercials, Mike Springer referenced a trio shot for the Bank of Rome, quoting on the subject Fellini biographer Peter Bondanella, who notes their inspiration by “various dreams Fellini had sketched out in his dream notebooks,” and other Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich, who describes them as “the golden autumn of a patriarch of cinema who, for a moment, holds again the reins of creation.” Today, we present all three.
“Money is everywhere but so is poetry,” Fellini himself once said. “What we lack are the poets.” In these three spots, the creator synonymous with Italian auteurhood brings poetry and money together — even more so than most commercial-making “creative” filmmakers, given the overtly financial nature of the client’s business. You can read more about the project, “the last thing he did behind a camera,” at Sight & Sound: “In 1992, the year before his death, [Fellini] realised his best corporate work. [ … ] Here Fellini comprehended, skilfully conveyed and exposed the ultimate essence of advertising: the creation of needs and fears that the given product will magically solve.” The setup involves Paolo Villaggio as a nightmare-plagued man and Fernando Rey as his attentively listening analyst — and in addition to his professional interests, evidently quite a Bank of Rome enthusiast. The spot at the top of the post includes English subtitles, but as with Fellini’s features, even non-Italophones can expect rich, long-form (by commercial standards) audiovisual experiences watching the other two as well (above) — and ones, unlike any experience you’d have actually stepping into a bank, not quite of this reality. Today, we present all three, the last films Fellini ever made.
Don Pardo voiced the introductions of Saturday Night Live for 38 seasons. He began calling out the names of the S.N.L. cast members during the first episode in October, 1975, and (except for the 1981–82 season) he kept calling out those names straight through last May. Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey — he called them all. Thanks to an impersonator, you can hear a compilation of Pardo’s call for every cast member.
Don Pardo died yesterday at 96 years of age. Earlier in his career, he was the announcer for a number of American TV shows, including The Price Is Right, Jackpot, and Jeopardy!. But his voice became part of the fabric of America’s greatest comedy show, Saturday Night Live. And he continued voicing the intro long after his formal retirement from NBC in 2004. Not lacking energy (watch him blow out his candles on his 90th birthday), Pardo flew from Tucson to New York weekly to get S.N.L. started. Above, we have a short video that features Pardo, then 88, showing off, his sheer linguistic awesomeness.
Somehow, I’m now hoping that whenever my day comes, Don Pardo’s voice will introduce me on the other side.
Living in Los Angeles, I suppose I could go up and have a look (albeit a distant one) at Charles and Ray Eames’ Eames House any time I like. But I’ve never got around to visiting that most notable of all works of midcentury modern California architecture, since I have another example of their era- (and coast-) defining design much closer at hand. Whenever I look to my left, I see an Eames’ Lounge Chair — not my Eames Lounge Chair, per se, but the one my girlfriend brought with her when we moved in together. Much more than the sum of its molded plywood and leather parts, the Eames Chair made even more of a mark on the design sensibility of the 20th century than did the Eames House. Could the Eamses themselves have known, when they first rolled it out in 1956, that the chair would remain unsurpassed in its furniture niche more than 55 years later? Watch them debuting the Eames Chair on TV, to Home Show host Arlene Francis,and see if you can read it between the lines.
We first see the Eames Chair only in silhouette — but already we recognize it. “Well, that is quite a departure, Charles, and it looks wonderfully comfortable,” says host to designer. He takes the question quite literally: “It’s rosewood, plywood, and it’s black leather, and its insides are all feathers and down. I think it’d be a better idea if we would just build it for you right here.” We then see a short film, produced in a combination of live action and stop motion, showing the complete assembly and subsequent disassembly of an Eames Chair. It also includes the packing of its parts into a box with the logo of Herman Miller, the company for whom the Eames originally designed it, and one that, so Charles says, allowed them seemingly complete aesthetic independence, dependent on no specific market or season. Hence the range of timeless Eames-designed chairs displayed on the segment that reveal the design evolution leading up to the Eames Chair itself, the most timeless of them all. “You really create your own market, don’t you?” Francis asks. Charles remains modest (and Ray has already exited stage left), but on some level must have understood that every important designer does just that.
Osamu Tezuka is one of the great creative forces of the 20th century. Known in his native Japan as the “god of manga,” Tezuka was mind-bogglingly productive, cranking out around 170,000 pages of comics in his 60 years of life. He almost single-handedly made manga respectable to read for adults, creating tales that were both universal and emotionally complex. And he worked in pretty much every genre you can imagine from horror, to girly fantasy, to an epic series about the life of the Buddha. Yet of all of Tezuka’s many volumes of comics, his best beloved work was Tetsuwan Atomu, otherwise known as Astro Boy.
In 1962, Tezuka fulfilled a childhood dream by opening an animation studio. One of his first projects was to adapt was Astro Boy. The television series premiered in 1963 and proved to be hugely popular in Japan. It wasn’t long before American TV started airing dubbed versions of the show. You can see the very first episode, “Birth of Astro Boy,” above.
After his son dies in a freak car accident, scientist Dr. Astor Boynton is driven mad by grief. He develops an insane laugh and, with it, an equally insane plan to build a robot who looks just like his dead son. After a Frankenstein-esque montage, Astro Boy is born. All seems well for the adorable, sweet-natured robot, until Boynton freaks out over Astro Boy’s lack of growth. “I’ve been a good father to you, haven’t I?” he whines. “Well then, why can’t you be a good son to me and grow up to be a normal human adult?” How’s that for a parental guilt trip?
So Dr. Boynton casts Astro Boy out, selling him into slavery to The Great Cacciatore, an evil circus ringleader who forces him to be the world’s cutest robot gladiator. Fortunately, Dr. Elefun, a colleague of Dr. Boynton, takes pity on Astro Boy and works to free him from his bondage.
The whole story plays out as if Mary Shelley and Fritz Lang collaborated to make Dumbo. Tezuka throws in a lot of wacky slapstick comedy, which just barely takes the edge off the story’s Dickensian melodrama, which relentlessly mines all those primal fears you thought you got over. In short, it’s brilliant.
The series ran for two years in the States and then continued on re-runs thoughout the decade. One of the shows fans was apparently Stanley Kubrick. During the mid-60s, Kubrick sent Tezuka a letter asking if he would be interested in helping with the art direction and design of his new movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. The offer would have required that Tezuka spend a year or more in London. Though greatly flattered, Tezuka turned the offer down. The workaholic artist simply couldn’t spend that much time away from his studio. One has to wonder what Kubrick’s masterpiece would have looked like seen through the prism of Tezuka.
In 2001, Steven Spielberg premiered a movie that was a long gestating project of Kubrick’s – the wildly underrated A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The parallels between that movie, about a robot child cast out by his parents into a cruel world, and Astro Boy are striking. Kubrick, as it turns out, might have been even a bigger fan of the God of Manga than previously thought.
Here’s the trailer for A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.
If you call yourself a Tolkien fanboy or fangirl, you’ve almost certainly kept up with the various film and television adaptations of not just the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but of its predecessor, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. Tolkien’s first children’s novel (or so the literary world first received it). The story it tells of the reluctant hero Bilbo Baggins and the band of raffish compatriots who drag him out to claim some treasure from Smaug the dragon offers understandably irresistible material for adaptation: the richly detailed, often funny high-fantasy adventure has, over the decades, made for numerous productions on the stage, radio, and screen.
Known in English as The Fairytale Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit and in Russian, in full, as Сказочное путешествие мистера Бильбо Бэггинса, Хоббита, через дикий край, чёрный лес, за туманные горы. Туда и обратно. По сказочной повести Джона Толкина “Хоббит,”the hourlong TV movie debuted on the Leningrad TV Channel’s children’s showTale After Tale in 1985. This unlicensed adaptation frames itself with the words of a Tolkien stand-in called “the Professor,” using live actors to play the main characters like Bilbo, Thorin, Gandalf, and Gollum, portraying the more exotic ones with either puppets or, according to Tolkien Gateway, dancers from the Leningrad State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre. The fact that this version of The Hobbitonly recently became available with real English subtitles (as opposed to goofy parody ones) goes to show just how seriously the Tolkien fandom has taken it, but it does retain a kind of handcrafted charm. Plus, it gives the internet the chance to indulge in the obligatory Yakov Smirnoff gag: in Soviet Russia, ring finds you.
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