Are you like me? In the absence of any information about him, did you entertain a weird moment of hope that Kim Jong Il’s son was maybe going to be somehow more grounded and in the real world and might be like some sort of storybook prince who makes up for the evils of his [...]

I had no idea this cartoon existed until the other day. The opening theme song is quite possibly the best thing you will hear all day. Or year. Or century. It is just so shameless and presentational. If you go that route, you have to go hard and pass through a barrier of “bad” to [...]

I’m really not into the whole spin-the-bottle-mock-o-tron-3000 thing that goes on with stuff like Rebecca Black. My only real take-away from that big, momentary Warhol-fame-bomb was that her parents, society, and people’s general sense of decency failed this poor girl. All in that order. A lot of the mocking people who mocked her awful song [...]

Chances are you’ve never heard the name “Gene Colan.” But if you’re aware of super-heroes, if you’ve watched larger-than-life costumed figures on a big screen engage in world-saving acts of derring-do, then you’re living in a world he helped build. Gene Colan is known in the comic-book world as the artist who defined the Silver-Age [...]

People tend to paint the 90s into an over-simplified caricature, wherein everyone was in flannel and had long hair and listened to Sub-Pop Seattle-scene music while navel-gazing about the generations collective identity. As someone who spent 1992 in flannel (and super-hero TV shirts; some things never change) with long hair, listening to Sub-Pop Seattle scene [...]

Unless you’ve seen someone brain another person with a brick for no reason at all this morning, I’m reasonably certain this will be the worst thing you see today. It is crazy how unbelievably condescending and racist stuff was about Asians not so long ago. There was this weird rule that no Asian person could [...]

They have not yet invented words for how much I hated this kid. But there it is, kids– this was what people did pre-internet. Instead of downloading pre-written reports, we had to schlep to the library to photocopy encyclopedias and plagiarize vast swaths of stuff, switching a word here and there for plausible deniability. Share [...]

Be water, my friend. What I love about this seemingly esoteric, mystical imagery about the nature of identity and approach is that it is practical advice on how to enter a situation where your goal is to beat the crap out of another person. In context, this is something he wrote as lines of dialog [...]

Christopher Hewitt, TV’s Mr. Belvedere. He does something so magical and amazing here that there may not be words for it. It’s part ham, it’s part over-the-top-British-queening, it’s part awkward and it’s all awesome. Listen to his ad-libs and crazy-creepy sex-sounds at the idea of eating stuff and know the power and majesty of the [...]

There are few things I love more than Shawscope Shaw Brothers kung-fu movies from the late 70s and early 80s. Check this out, Legendary Weapons of China, 1982. When they played it at the drive-in I went to, way back when, it was billed as Legendary Weapons of Kung-Fu. That happened a lot with these [...]

That was his name and job description. They used to play the late 60s cartoons in the late 70s on channel 5, WNEW, in the afternoon. This and the Spider-Man one, with the theme song everyone knows. (Does whatever a spider can!) While Spider-Man offered more heroic action, this was always the cooler show. It [...]

There may be weirder things than the HAPPY DAYS cartoon. But I can’t think of four of them off the top of my head.  I mean, I know you’ve got to make things a little different for a cartoon but… It featured a talking dog mascot who would grab onto Fonz’s jacket, prompting him to [...]