We do it #ForTheCultrs
On 5th January 1999, Mitch Hedberg did a half-hour special called An Escalator Can Never Break where he did jokes about escalators, fire exits, medical examinations, and comedy itself.
Here’s a video of Val Kilmer talking about his experiences filming Batman Forever at C2E2 2012. Like Michael Keaton, Vilmer commented on the restrictiveness of the Batsuit and how drew parallels with that lack of mobility and needing assistance with being old. He also gave his thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and his answer won’t surprise many.
Val Kilmer related: Batman’s Movie Lips Ranked
Batman Forever related: Appreciating Joel Schumacher’s Batman
Move over, there’s a new world’s most realistic lightsaber in town, courtesy of Kyle Krueger.
Sarah Elizabeth Marston was a psychologist and attorney, originally from the Isle of Man. Amongst her accolades, she’s co-credited, with her husband William Moulton Marston, with a device seen as a predecessor to the polygraph and as the muse for Wonder Woman, whom her husband created. But the inspiration doesn’t end there as Wonder Woman was also based on their polyamorous life partner, Olive Byrne (affectionately named “Dots”):
William was hired as a psych consultant for what would become DC Comics to help guide comics into mainstream America. Charlie Gaines, credited with inventing the modern comic book, semi-jokingly suggested to my grandfather that he write a comic. William went home and spoke to my grandmother, Elizabeth, about it that evening. She told him that it was fine to write a comic, but that the hero must be a woman.
Elizabeth became the role model for Wonder Woman’s character. Illustrator Harry Peter developed Wonder Woman’s appearance, a medley of Dots’ height and Gram’s [Elizabeth’s] curves, wearing bracelets like those which had adorned Dots’ wrists for many years. Editor Shelly Mayer suggested that “Suprema the Wonder Woman” be shortened to “Wonder Woman,” and the rest is comic book history.
via Christie Marston, the granddaughter of William Moulton Marston and Elizabeth Holloway Marston, for The Hollywood Reporter
Now, decades later, we have a new Wonder Woman in the form of Diana Prince’s daughter named Elizabeth Marston Prince or “Lizzie” for short (see the connection?)
Related: Stephanie Williams on Granny Goodness’s Blaxploitation villain traits and Calafia: the Black warrior queen
Another great piece by Ryan Broderick in his Garbage Day Substack newsletter, this time on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign gaining momentum (although it’s now losing it, thankfully). But the main subject was on how so many so-called social movements are effectively bloated content farms in trench coats:
Inside an online platform everything, even reality, is just content and content just begets more content. And in a world run by big platforms, a person’s post becomes discourse, discourse creates memes, memes inspire a fandom, and fandoms become social movements. And over the last decade, as platforms flattened everything into content, most news publishers, hiding behind antiquated ideas about objectivity and made desperate from vanishing ad revenue, allowed themselves to be flattened, as well. And now, even though they don’t think of themselves as a competing news fandoms, they absolutely are.
Shout out to Arisa Trew who became the first female skateboarder to land a 720. Oh, and she’s just 13 years old. Tony Hawk’s legacy lives on (he did the first-ever 720 back in 1985).
Australia is diverse nation with rich cultural heritage, heavily influenced by colonisation, and areas of stunning natural beauty. Here are some facts about the country.
Carrotblanca is an 8-minute Looney Tunes short from 1995. As a parody/homage of Casablanca, the film is set during World War II and sees Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Pepé Le Pew (amongst others in cameo roles) play similar roles from the 1942 classic.
The short was originally shown during showings of The Amazing Panda Adventure in the US and Canada and The Pebble and the Penguin in the rest of the world. It was also notably included in special edition DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray copies of Casablanca, the film it parodied.
LEGO have created a Pac-Man Arcade. Unfortunately, it’s non-functional but it has plenty of the original charm and apparently, Pac-Man was inspired by those little yellow bricks:
There were conversations around what shade of yellow to use for LEGO PAC-MAN.
During collaborations with Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc. (owners of PAC-MAN), Sven later found out that the yellow used on PAC-MAN was inspired by the yellow color of LEGO bricks. Seems like it was always meant to be!
“Not knowing that PAC-MAN was inspired by LEGO bricks was quite a funny situation, as we spent a lot of time wondering what shade of yellow to go for.”
So, there you have it, it was a match made in LEGO brick heaven! We hope fans love all the features of LEGO Icons PAC-MAN. Enjoy the thrill of the challenging build, and then display it at home as a reminder of simpler times and a little slice of childhood. What better way to pay tribute to an eighties icon?
via the official LEGO website
Argentina has had a massive impact on South America, and the world, in a variety of ways. But there’s much more to Argentina than Lionel Messi, Eva Perón, and Diego Maradona. That’s why I’ll be giving you 28 facts about Argentinian culture to broaden your scope and show you just how influential the nation is.
JSTOR Daily on Windrush Day: There were British African Caribbean immigrants to the UK well before June 22, 1948, but it was the arrival of Empire Windrush that got the media’s attention.
In his Garbage Day newsletter, Ryan Broderick wrote about film criticism and how it has fallen in quality and been replaced by aggregated review scores:
Every fandom has some online leaderboard they obsess over and if their favorite artist or franchise gets a bad score on it, they react extremely violently. You can see this attitude really clearly in recent tweets from pop artist Charli XCX, who recently lashed out at Pitchfork writer Laura Snapes, who wrote in the Guardian that she was wrong about her initial review of Charli XCX’s Vroom Vroom EP. “This is why reviews are kind of silly in my opinion…,” the singer tweeted. “Like if the sway of culture and popular opinion is the thing that’s forcing a journalist to reconsider their review with hindsight then what’s the point of even reviewing in the first place?”
Which, yeah, what is the point when your review gets aggregated into unmovable score? But it’s the platforms that got this wrong, not the critics. Criticism is WWE. It’s a fluid conversation that’s meant to rile you up. I still hold grudges against certain critics and I actually think that’s fine. I can’t even remember why I’m still angry at the Boston Globe’s former film critic Ty Burr, but I knowhat t (sic) I have beef with him. It’s all meant to be debated and reassessed. It’s not a product review.
The only (living) film critics I know from memory are probably Mark Kermode and Dom Griffin. I don’t have any strong feelings towards the former but Dom is a friend and I respect his opinions on film and wider popular culture. Much like Quentin Tarantino, who Ryan quoted at the start of his piece, I don’t really know what other critics are saying or what they think of movies. The difference is I don’t really seek it out so I guess that’s on me.
But I do agree that there’s an obsession with numbers, whether its aggregated reviews on Rotten Tomatoes or box office figures on opening days, followed by weekends, then weeks, months, and then when it goes to streaming platforms or digital download. None of it really matters to the viewers but the general media force an imagined importance on everyone so we end up quoting it and using those arbirtrary figures as a proxy for success and quality.
How many older films have you heard got panned upon release, only to become “cult classics” and then “reevaulated” by critics (sometimes by the ones who panned them in the first place). It’s all nonsense. Yeah, we can all change our minds but not so often, and not if its guided by a social media campaign (echoing Charli XCX’s sentiments above).
Update: it looks like the original article was taken down as the link was broken and I can’t find it anywhere now.
As people get old, their hair starts to go grey but there’s also a yellowing.
That’s because with pigments in hair follicles dying with old age, the melanin levels decrease and they become transparent, giving a silvery-grey colour. But then water containing minerals like calcium and magnesium (what you may call tap water in the UK) turns it yellow. So how can this be combatted? A blue rinse.
A blue rinse involves washing the yellow-grey hair with blue shampoo which replaces the yellow (fortunately not making green if you remember your colour wheel). The trend of blue rinse grew in the 30s thanks to the movie, Hell’s Angels, staring Jean Harlow who used it.
“Some women, having observed the lavender effect and decided that it heightens rather than lowers their standing in the beauty scale, go in for it deliberately,” a columnist wrote in The Baltimore Sun in 1939. “At this particular moment, it appears, the ladies are on the verge of forgetting the original intention of the blue rinse and are using it for its own sake.”
via Mental Floss
Some of the most famous people to give their locks a blue rinse include The Queen Mother and allegedly Benjamin Netanyahu, according to some Israeli hairdressers. Nowadays, blue rinses are more colloquially associated with old Conservatives, perhaps due to the colour (the Conservative Party in the UK uses blue as its primary colour) and the notion of vanity and looking more respectable.
Blue related: the blue cows of Latvia, the Ancient Greeks and their relationship with the colour blue, and Easy Klein: an ‘Incredibly Kleinish Blue’ paint for everyone to use
In 1993, there were not one but two Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons on air with awkwardly similar titles. Sonic the Hedgehog (known by fans as “SatAM” to differentiate itself from the other series and referencing the Saturday morning slot it found a home in) featured Sonic alongside the likes of Princess Sally, Bunnie Rabbot, and Antoine Depardieu as freedom fighters against Robotnik and his tyrannous rule of Mobius. In Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic is partnered with Tails like the original games and the tone is much more light-hearted.
Toy Galaxy chronicled the rise and fall of both cartoons and how SEGA eventually fell apart after their peak during this era.
This pops into my head every so often. For context, Al Pacino starred in 2011 comedy film Jack and Jill as himself and appeared in an in-film Dunkin’ Donuts commercial, promoting a new coffee called the “Dunkaccino.” If that sounds weird, just watch the commercial and how the wildness continues.
What this commercial also does is make me want coffee and donuts.