What a week, right?! It’s one of those weeks where nothing and everything happened all at once! I mean, nothing I tend to write about happened, but you politics junkies were happier than pigs in shit, amirite? “There’s no Epstein files! Wait, OK, we were joshin’. They exist, but we’re not gonna let you see ’em. No, that wasn’t JD Vance on a secret flight to see Rupert Murdoch!” Lotta political junk. As for pop culture, just a lot of death. But we’ll get to that.
Last night, I saw Fantastic Four: First Steps, but I know the rules: Most of you all are better husbands/wives/fathers/mothers/parole officers, so you did not get to see it last night. So, I’ll wait til next week to discuss it. What I will discuss, however, was the moviegoing experience itself. I mean, if they’re gonna keep making me see Nicole Kidman, she’d better be nude. And you can tell Keith Urban I said that with my whole chest! Seriously, though, we get it: The bitch loves movies. Or rather she loves paychecks. Can you imagine if she gets a royalty from every time that plays, before every movie, in every AMC theater, daily? She’s gonna be able to buy her own Epstein Island pretty soon! I deliberately got to the theaters 20 minutes after the movie’s “start time”, and still ended up sitting through SIX trailers!
Anyway, even though I’m a Thursday Night Premiere Guy, I forget what the rest of those guys are like. See, I’m considerate, but a lot of those guys are mouth breathers who get excited by everything. They gasp! They cheer at trailers that they’ve never seen! They loudly whisper to the person next to them, whether they know them or not! Yet, I just keep subjecting myself to that. One of the trailers that elicited those gasps was something of a bait & switch. You see, we’d already seen Nicole Kidman do her thing, and they’d done the whole thing about how “Silence Is Golden”. Time for the movie, right? NOPE! Instead, that green screen came on, signaling another trailer. I guess Disney roped them into this, as it turned out to be a trailer for Avatar: Fire and Ash. I’ve talked a lot of shit about that franchise over the years, but I really know nothing about it. I sat through that thing, which I realized was meant to be seen as a “visual spectacle”, and I felt absolutely nothing. With no context, it just feels like Zack Snyder’s Smurfs. And don’t me started on how laughable the crew-cut soldier aliens looked! They have standard military hair, and they wear little flak vests, but they’re blue like all the rest! Anyway, have fun with your alien Blue Man Group or whatever.
I bring this up because I know that I’m expected to be impressed by how “cinematic” the film is. And I was…to a point. I think this is just another way we’ve been ruined by A.I., but also why we really need more precise terms for what’s good and bad in that sector. I mean, it’s “generative A.I.” that’s bad, where you’re feeding prompts into an app, and then one of the polar ice caps melts so 1,000 supercomputers can show what Don Knotts looks like as a Fast and the Furious character. The cost doesn’t justify the result and all that. I get it.
With something like Avatar, we’ve always been told that James Cameron was inventing all these new forms of filmmaking, and a lot of the franchise relies on CGI. So, CGI is Computer-Generated Imagery, and it has still, pretty much, been driven by people. It’s an “artform”, done by “artists”. But what happens when it’s not? I don’t think we’re that far away from generative A.I. being able to make an Avatar movie. Would it look as good? Probably not, but I don’t think Avatars even have 5 fingers, and that’s A.I.’s greatest weakness! So, it’d be close enough. The tech has taught us to accept mediocrity. It won’t be as masterful as anything Cameron would give us, but it would “get the job done”. And that’s all studios want: the lowest effort, for the least money, that results in the highest earnings. At first, folks would go see it out of curiosity. They’d even admit that it wasn’t as good as it had been with people involved. Over time, though, they’d just accept it, the same way they got used to the milkman not showing up on their porch anymore. Directors like Cameron swear that A.I. won’t replace “Art”, but neither studios nor most filmgoers even care that much. Because, eventually, they’ll say “Well, we’ve got to raise ticket prices to give you the “human element”, and we’ll all balk. And then they’ll make it our fault that they “had” to resort to A.I. It’s coming, baby. It’s coming!
So, where was I? Right, death. LOT of it this week! First up, we had Malcolm-Jamal Warner, best known as Theo Huxtable from The Cosby Show. To be honest, he was the first sign to me that there might be a “Cosby Curse”. I mean, even without Bill’s fall from grace, that cast went NOWHERE! Lisa Bonet became best known for getting fired, Tempestt Bledsoe had a one-season daytime talk show, Keshia Knight-Pulliam is puttering around Tyler Perry’s House of Payne, we already know Geoffrey Owens was working at Trader Joes, Sabrina Le Beauf hasn’t acted onscreen in 16 years, and Phylicia Rashad was last seen in a Jason Statham movie. Considering these people starred in the first black middle-class sitcom, you’d think they would have moved on to bigger and better things. The only real success story is Raven-Symoné, and she still had to do Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper and That’s So Raven to cement her celebrity. But I expected more from Malcolm-Jamal.
He tried, though. He moved on to UPN’s Malcolm & Eddie, which was a pretty lackluster show, but it was early UPN, so it still managed to run for four seasons. He did 41 episodes of The Magic School Bus, 35 episodes of Jeremiah (with Luke Perry), bounced around Community, American Crime Story, Major Crimes, and even Suits. Yet, he never really grabbed anything befitting his…stature? It’s hard to convey now, as we had The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Family Matters, and about a decade worth of UPN and The WB cranking out forgettable black sitcoms, so folks forget that The Cosby Show depicted a black family that hadn’t been seen on television before. The Evans family of Good Times ran for six seasons, but they were beyond poor. The title is ironic, because there were no good times to be had. Sanford & Son? Poor. Diff’rent Strokes? Poor, but adopted by rich. The Cosbys, however, were upwardly mobile professionals. A doctor and a lawyer, who also didn’t seem to come from poverty. There was a lot of emphasis on “Remember where you came from”, but very little “We waited in chow lines”. Hell, we met the grandparents, and they weren’t struggling either. Not only did this show change how white people saw black people, but it also changed how black people saw themselves. And maybe that turned out to have been more of a burden than we realized, as the majority of that cast could qualify for a True Hollywood Story. But I was always rooting for Malcolm-Jamal.
He was the older brother/cousin you never had. I remember my mom bought me a copy of his book Theo and Me: Growing Up Okay, which she had found at a used book sale. By this point, I was a young teenager, and The Cosby Show had been off the air for quite some time. Long story short, it seemed corny as Hell. Since he was sort of America’s Teenager, he was giving tips and whatnot for navigating adolescence. Yet, even though we felt like we knew him, he never actually seemed entirely relatable. Like, I think I understand Theo, but I don’t understand Malcolm-Jamal, and it felt sort of disingenuous that he was trying to act like he experienced the same issues as every other run-of-the-mill teenager. Needless to say, I didn’t read it. I do remember that it came with a poster folded in it, though, which was weird. I mean, it was primarily written for guys, but what guy in the early 90s was gonna put up a poster of Theo in his room?
So, it seems maybe most of us knew Theo, but never really knew Malcolm-Jamal. Did you know he was married to Regina King? I sure didn’t! The Huxtables wouldn’t have let 227‘s Mary Jenkins into their house, yet their kids were a couple?! After that, he married again, and had a daughter – he was with his wife and daughter when he drowned on vacation. Yet, we don’t know who they are. He kept his private life private. Who knows what else we never knew? Maybe there’s a reason he never got the opportunities that you’d think he’d have earned from Cosby. Anyway, 54 is too young to go, and he touched the lives of more people than he maybe ever knew.
Run The Numbers
I was in such a beach haze last week that I forgot to post my updated totals! As you can see, still no “Books”, but I’m working on it. I started one without looking at the page count, only to realize it’s roughly 500 pages. So, that’s gonna take a while. In the meantime, I’ve got some comic stuff to talk about.
First up, there’s the Scholastic graphic novel Akim Aliu: Dreamer, about black hockey player Akim Aliu. Another “middle grades” book, this once was tricky, because there’s the story it tells, and then there’s the truth. Aliu was a mixed race kid, with an African dad and a Ukrainian mom, growing up in the early 90s. The family wasn’t accepted in Africa or Ukraine, and eventually worked hard to move to Canada. Meanwhile, Aliu fell in love with ice hockey, but immediately learned it was a white man’s sport. So, it’s about how he stayed focused, persevered in the face of blatant racism, and eventually made the pros. In fact, the most jarring thing is that he names names, citing known hockey personalities Steve Downie and Moe Mantha for the parts they played in the racism he faced. Hockey is a weird sport, though, where it seems like they’ll bust you down to the minors at the drop of a hat. So, instead of him ever actually “making it”, it’s just a continuous cycle of promoted to pros, something happens, busted back down to minors, repeat. So, by the end of the book, he’s not really even playing anymore. Instead, he and his brother form a foundation meant to introduce the sport to kids who might not experience it otherwise. Nice, right?
Well, if you do some research on Aliu, you’ll find it wouldn’t be a stretch to say he’s hockey’s Colin Kaepernick. By that, I mean that he’s better than the average person would be at hockey, but he’s far from the best. In fact, in his own book, his mother breaks the fourth wall and says she never understood why he chose hockey over soccer, as he was much better at soccer! Anyway, he probably came up against some racism, but his career is also spotted with incidents that conveniently didn’t make it into the book. For example, he missed a good chunk of a season from breaking his hand in a bar fight. So, Scholastic managed to eke out a nice little inspirational story for the kids, but I’m not exactly convinced that Racism robbed the sport of hockey of one of the greatest talents to ever step on the ice.
Next up was Teen Titans Go! On TV! Like last week’s Metropolis Grove, this was an original graphic novel from DC Comics, starring the characters from Cartoon Network’s Teen Titans Go! These are pretty straightforward, and read like an extra sized episode., In this story, the Titans decide that they’d be more influential as reality stars instead of super heroes. So, they try out different formats of reality shows, trying to make their mark. Well, it was Robin’s plan, as he thought it would earn them adoration, and convince Starfire to fall in love with him. What he didn’t expect, however, was that the other team members would be systematically poached for their own spinoffs. So, it’s fun to see them against the backdrop of familiar formats, like Survivor and dating shows, but it doesn’t reinvent the wheel or anything. In fact, there were some fill-in artists whose style didn’t mesh with the overall look that main artist Agnes Garbowska was going for, so that was sometimes jarring. It was fun, only cost me $5, and isn’t something I feel I need to keep. Still, if you’ve got kids who are fans of the show, and you’re trying to get them into reading comics, then this just might do the trick.
Finally, I read Giant-Size Wacky Races #1, from Dynamite Entertainment. This was an odd duck, in several ways. First off, due to the Diamond situation, it didn’t have a unified roll-out. So, shops started getting it over the course of a month. Most of my shops hadn’t gotten it on the release week, while one received only one cover, and it was an ugly variant. I was able to track down an A cover, and proceeded to ignore it for another month.
The other weird thing was how it was marketed. It was 48-pages, which is why it got the “giant size” label, but it’s more of a prequel than anything. And it’s an interesting start, yet there’s no real indication on what, if anything, is next. It reminds me of the comic that Devil’s Due Publishing made for Lanard’s The Corps toy franchise after they lost the G.I. Joe comic license. In that scenario, they released a #0 issue, which deftly provided the type of “We’ve got G.I. Joe at home” approach that we’d come to expect from The Corps, which was followed by…nothing. No further issues. Comic artist Leinil Francis Yu would go on to design some characters, which were used on revitalized toy packaging art, but no further comics were released.
Now, I’ve mentioned this on a podcast or two, but I have no real relationship with Wacky Races. I know that it’s a thing that exists, but my only familiarity was when the concept was updated as The Fender Bender 500, as part of the Wake, Rattle, and Roll show. That incarnation, however, didn’t feature the character Penelope Pitstop, who happens to be the star of this comic. So, I know nothing of her other than random appearances in various Hanna-Barbera stuff. I don’t know her story, her origin or anything. So, if any of this comic adhered to it, I don’t know it.
Anyway, Penelope is our star, as she is trying to qualify for the Wacky Races. A former child star, who headlined the racing sitcom Pumping The Brakes, no one ever believed she’d actually take that role to the next level, and try to become an actual racer. The opening race’s ending is torn directly from the ending of Talladega Nights, and she somehow qualifies for the Races. Meanwhile, some crazy stuff is happening in American politics at the time. The greatest Wacky Races champion, Peter Perfect, has been rumored to be running for president. He makes an announcement declining the nomination from either party, but instead announces that he has merged the Wacky Races with the Global Racing Federation, which means that the Wacky Races will be delayed a year. This is great news for Penelope, as she needs the time to build her fan base and get her car ready. What started as a racing comic, however, turns into some sort of political espionage drama – set against the backdrop of competitive racing. This is the kind of thing TNT would pay Taylor Sheridan $100 million to produce for them!
During that one-year delay, neither political party manages to produce a candidate, and Perfect becomes a write-in candidate. Despite his weak protests, Perfect ends up winning as the first write-in President-Elect. During the campaign, he’s been sort of parading Penelope around the country, as “The Future of Racing”. As her popularity had grown, so had his. By the end of the book, he has asked her to be his Vice President – for reasons unknown – which she declines. At this point I should point out she has a twin sister, Pandora (was that in the cartoon?), and Perfect insinuates he would just pursue her instead for the position. Given that there’s something physically going on with him, I wouldn’t be surprised if he somehow needs Pitstop DNA or something for a cure. Penelope and Pandora are estranged, following the fallout of their acting career, but I would assume she’d figure prominently in whatever shape this story takes. It didn’t end with a ‘To Be Continued” or a “Check out the Wacky Races ongoing series, coming this fall!” Not even a “The End?” So, I just spoiled that, and saved ya $5. If it never amounts to anything, you didn’t lose anything. You’re welcome!
Things You Might Have Missed This Week
- Let’s hope Joss Whedon heard Alan Tudyk supporting him, and has a role lined up for him, as Resident Alien has been canceled after four seasons.
- Speaking of cancelations, E! News has been canceled after 32 years. Given that Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood somehow still exist, I’m sure the hosts will be fine as long as they haven’t burned a bridge with Mario Lopez.
- After vowing she was never going back to The Voice, it was announced that Kelly Clarkson will be returning to her swivel chair. Also, it was announced she has sold a share of her song catalog, so methinks “Miss Independent” might be cash poor at the moment.
- Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige held a roundtable interview this week with the leading media outlets. Some of the things revealed include he’s never been satisfied with any movie they’ve released, The Marvels underperformed because the audience had no clue who the other women were with Brie Larson (since they had skipped the Disney+ series), and the recasts will begin with Avengers: Secret Wars, which will serve as a reboot/timeline realignment for the franchise.
- After vanquishing Stephen Colbert, the Trump Administration has turned its sights to The View, after Joy Behar said that Trump was jealous of Obama because he’s slim and in a happy marriage.
- Chuck Mangione, like Jonathan Joss and Johnny Hardwick, sadly won’t get to see the premiere of the Hulu King of the Hill revival. The flugelhorn player behind the 1978 hit ‘Feels So Good”/Mega Lo Mart spokesman passed away yesterday, at the age of 84.
- Hulkamania has left the building, as Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea passed away yesterday at 71, after a brief illness. And that’s all I’m gonna say about that. Y’all know who he was.
- Rock legend Ozzy Osbourne passed away this week, at the age of 76, from Parkinson’s Disease. Sadly, I know him best as a reality star than for his music, so that means I know almost nothing. Was he a good guy? Did he really bite the head off that bat? Somebody tell me in the comments!
So, my friend Mike is probably the most loyal reader of this column, and last night he texted me with “Surely South Park got the West Week Ever, right?” And I was like “Why?” We proceeded to have a conversation about all that happened with South Park this week. You see, it was announced that Paramount had finally signed a deal with creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone for $1.5 billion dollars. The deal included the streaming rights to South Park, and also called for 50 new episodes produced over the next five years. Great deal, right? Mike thought so, as I’m sure many of you do, as well. I, however, disagree.
I’ve been following the South Park thing for a while, which is somewhat odd, given I’m not exactly a fan of the show. Between The Daily Show and South Park, Paramount/Comedy Central have done more damage to American politics than you might realize, but I’m not here to get into all that. The thing here is that South Park‘s original deal was set to expire soon, and it was renegotiation time. Now, there had already been some issues, as HBO Max had the streaming rights in North America, while it was Paramount+ everywhere else. This is because that streaming deal was made prior to the creation of Paramount+. Paramount, ever the upstanding corporation, tried to screw over Warner Bros Discovery, as that deal included any new “regular season” episodes that were produced. So, during Covid, Paramount moved to a model where they didn’t produce regular seasons of South Park, but rather created a handful of “specials”, which would be exempt from the WBD deal, and would be exclusive to Paramount+. WBD caught wind of this and sued. So, that’s been an ongoing concern.
Meanwhile, for the renegotiation, Stone and Parker were looking for $3 billion, for a 10-year deal. Originally, Paramount was going to go along with this, as South Park is one of the few brands they haven’t ruined yet. The problem, though, is that they’re in the process of a merger with Skydance Media – run by David Ellison, son of Oracle founder/close Trump friend, Larry Ellison. The FCC had held up the merger, and changes needed to be made. Skydance balked at the idea of paying $3 billion for South Park, and one of the conditions of the merger was that Skydance would have approval over any upcoming deals of this size. They felt that the changing landscape of television didn’t really justify a 10-year deal. As this was going on, the season 27 premiere was delayed twice, while the show was pulled internationally from Paramount+. Meanwhile, Paramount is something of an ugly duckling, in that nobody wanted them but Skydance. So, they really needed this deal to happen, and they needed to do whatever they needed to make themselves more attractive – like, say, firing the network personality who said bad things about their suitor CEO’s family friend. Yeah, it’s that petty.
So, earlier this week, it was announced that Paramount had finally reached a deal with Stone and Parker, for five years, at 1.5 billion. So, in the end, they got half the money they wanted, for half the amount of time. This is hardly a “Win”. Also, after Covid, the South Park creators reportedly took out a loan for $800,000,000, so they were really angling for the $3B so that the bulk of the contract wouldn’t go toward repayment. The next day, the FCC approved the merger. Paramount has a new owner, the South Park guys have a new contract, the new season finally began, and the show returned to streaming. But were there any “winners” here? In a scenario where studios will bend over backward to make the current administration happy, for fear of retribution? Where two guys are being paid an ungodly amount of money (yet less than they felt they were worth) to continue to make cartoons about the Devil sleeping with evil men? Nah. South Park didn’t have the West Week Ever. Nothing had the West Week Ever. But there’s always next week, I suppose…