Month: February 2006

• Abe Vigoda status — Still alive [via]
• Monty Python IM slang — it’s almost worth using AIM more often (i.e. at all) to use shorthand like SYFGYT.
• Re-enactments (spoilers may apply):
• Shaun of the Dead with knitted dollies [via]
• Serenity with Muppets [via]
• Serenity in Lego [via]
• Firefly Barbies [via]
• Mr. T Visitor Guide to Los Angeles [via]
• Speaking of Mr. T:
  

  California company NavTones has contracted with Mr. T and the actors Burt Reynolds and Dennis Hopper to record voices that can be loaded into navigation systems, giving your driving directions a little extra personality. More voices are coming, the company said.

  I suspect that would get very old very fast. (CNN apparently agrees.) [via]

• Forbes‘ list of the richest fictional characters [via]
• The William Shatner DVD Club [via]
• TV host Cooke’s body plundered by ghouls — That’s ghouls as in graverobbers, not the evil spirits or demons who plunder graves and feed on corpses. That Cooke died of lung cancer that spread to his bones makes this even more disturbing. [via]
• Double Feature Finder — Not that I’m encouraging theater-hopping without paying for both shows or anything. [via]
• Chuck Norris responds to the Random Facts meme [via]
• Futurama returns?
• Chewbacca’s Blog — Strangely compelling [via]
• Statler & Waldorf: From the Balcony — Like most post-sale-to-Disney Muppets projects, this is pretty hit and miss. And it’s hard not to listen to the two main characters without missing their original puppeteers, Richard Hunt and Jim Henson, both of whom have sadly passed away. But some of it’s genuinely very funny. [via]
• Speaking of Disney, Walt Disney’s first successful cartoon, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, was recently traded back to the company for sports announcer Al Michaels. [via]

As I posted there, I’ve never seen the episode in its entirety, so I don’t know if the characters ever acknowledge that it’s an actor — George Reeves — playing Superman. It’s one thing if Little Ricky thinks Superman is real, but it’s quite another if the adult characters on the show think the same thing. Were the writers suggesting that Lucy and Ricky live somewhere near Metropolis?

Update: In response to the question “Was this episode canonical? Did Superman really exist in the Lucyverse?” over at the Dial B for Blog, cboldman writes:

It was left ambiguous, so as not to disillusion any kids who saw the episode, I suppose. They never suggested that he didn’t have super-powers, but they didn’t show him doing anything unrealistic, like flying, either. And, while Ricky was always bringing home celebrities that he knew, in this case (as mentioned elsewhere), he was referred as Superman all the way through, not as actor George Reeves.

Well, tip number one is, don’t let him or her go to a school with a Monty Python Society.

5. What is the title BRAZIL supposed to mean?

Certainly BRAZIL is an enigmatic title for a movie that seems to have nothing to do with the country of Brazil. One of the drafts of the screenplay was entitled _The Ministry of Torture, or Brazil, or How I Learned to Live with the System — So Far_, and Gilliam also considered calling his screenplay 1984 1/2. Many of the drafts appear to have simply been titled “The Ministry.” In the book _The Battle of Brazil_, Gilliam explains where the inspiration stemmed from, while he was in Port
Talbot, Wales:

“Port Talbot is a steel town, where everything is covered with gray iron ore dust. Even the beach is completely littered with dust, its just black. The sun was setting, and it was quite beautiful. The contrast was extraordinary, I had this image of a guy sitting there on this dingy beach with a portable radio, tuning in these strange Latin escapist songs like ‘Brazil.’ The music transported him somehow and made his world less gray.”

Sid Sheinberg didn’t like the title, and had the Universal staff submit suggestions for a new title. These suggestions included the titles:

If Osmosis, Who Are You? Vortex What a Future! The Works You Show Me Your Dream… Arresting Developments Lords of the Files The Staplegunners Forever More Explanada Fortunata Is Not My Real Name Chaos Disconnected Parties Erotic Maelstrom The Man in the Custom Tailored T-shirt Can’t Anybody Here Play the Cymbals? The Ball Bearing Electro Memory Circuit Buster This Escalator Doesn’t Stop At Your Station Gnu Yak, Gnu Yak, and Other Bestial Places.

Some Day Soon Day Dreams and Night Tripper Litterbugs Skylight City Access Nude Descending Bathroom Scale Dreamscape Progress The Right to Bear Arms All Too Soon Where Were We? Blank/Blank Shadow Time Forces of Darkness Fold, Spindle, Mutilate Sign on High

I get the sense that the Universal staff was just screwing with Sheinberg with most of those. They read like a list of Monty Python episodes — right up there with “Owl-Stretching Time,” “The BBC Entry For the Zinc Stoat of Budapest,” and “Whither Canada?”

• “The controversy is not about whether if Osama bin Laden phones you, the government should be listening in. It’s about whether the Bush administration can overlook a law that was set up to govern how wiretaps would be done, and can conduct them without any oversight, either before or after the fact. How come nobody’s polling on how we feel about that?” – Mark Evanier
• “In order to find another five million people who have not already read The Da Vinci Code, they’re going to have to start passing the damn things out to newborn babies along with the free formula samples.” – Jessa Crispin¹
• “Quite a fun series, even if it doesn’t really live up to the quality I often expect from an early-cancelled show.” DVD Times, on Point Pleasant, the first and only season of which is now out on DVD²
• “Inspector Clouseau has been played by other actors before Martin (Alan Arkin and Roger Moore), but what’s the point? The character isn’t bigger than the actor, as Batman and maybe James Bond are. The character is the actor, and I had rather not see Steve Martin, who is himself inimitable, imitating Sellers.” – Roger Ebert
• “It’s the whole thing of deadlines being cowards, and not spacing themselves out sensibly, but hiding behind things and leaping out at people all at once.” Neil Gaiman