How the Grinch Stole Christmas

We were watching the Grinch (the classic Chuck Jones cartoon, not the overblown Jim Carey movie) last night and marveling at how well it has held up. The show was made in 1966 and all of the principles have died (at ripe old ages) but the show still seems fresh.

Part of this is the source material. This was the only Seuss book that is really aimed at the entire family instead of very young children. It is similar to Dickens's A Christmas Carol with a lonely character having a life-changing experience revolving around Christmas.

Part of it is the animation. This is Chuck Jones at the top of his form. You don't have to see the credits to know that he directed it but it is not as stylized as some of his work. It is also the best animated Christmas special that I can remember from the 1960s through the 1990s. The Charlie Brown Christmas special was done on a very limited budget and even that was nearly twice what CBS paid to show it. It didn't make a profit until its second showing (which was once per year back then). The Rankin Bass programs like Frosty the Snowman were poorly done and got progressively worse into the 1970s. The Grinch is theatrical-quality animation.

Then there is the voice talent. I'm sure that Boris Karloff would be pleased to know that his best know work turned out to be a classic children's tale instead of horror roles. Then there is Thurl Ravenscroft who sang "You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch" and June Foray who did Cindy Lou Who. While best remembered for voicing Tony the Tiger and Rocky the Flying Squirrel respectively, these voice actors were mainstays of animation for decades.

The splashy new Christmas special this year was Disney's Prep and Landing. While very well done, you wonder if how it will hold up in 40+ years.

Christmas Story

I haven't seen anyone mention it but the events in Christmas Story take place 70 years ago this year (1939).

The movie was not a big hit when it came out but it has gained a huge following thanks to repeated showings on cable, especially USA's annual 24 hour marathon.

I think that the secret to the movie is that it is a realistic depiction of Christmas from a child's point of view. While I was born too late for radio dramas, classrooms had not changed appreciably between the 1930s and the 1960s. And who among us hasn't had fantasies about what we will do with a new toy? Or had a classmate dare another one into doing something dumb?

The kids act like real kids but the adults don't act like real people. They act the way that kids think they act.

Zune HD Review

I got a Zune HD for my birthday. It is a fun device.

Previously I had been using a Sansa View and a Nokia n800 Internet Tablet for viewing media. The Zune falls somewhere in-between these. It has similar dimensions to the Sansa and can do a lot more than the Sansa but it isn't up to the Nokia. The Nokia has a larger screen and more applications. On the other hand, it is too large to carry easily and the battery life is too short.

The Zune is incredibly small and light and the battery life is rated similar to the View - up to 33 hours of music or 8+ hours of video.

Like other Zunes, the HD supports WiFi. It can use this for wireless syncing and it comes with a web browser. The browser is slow and automatically switches to mobile pages where available. It does not support Flash so you cannot watch Youtube on it. Besides Flash, I would also like to see an email application on the Zune. It does support a Zune-only messageboard. It also has an app that supports Twitter.

There are several apps available. The Zune Marketplace has some, both general and games. All are free but the games have ads that play when they start.

Microsoft has released a game developer kit and people have already used this to create some freeware. The best part about this is that it is not as tightly controlled as the iTunes store.

Microsoft has a special program for communicating with the Zune. This will automatically sync content or allow you to drag and drop. Personally, I prefer the directory model where I can move files directly into the Zune's directories.

As a media player, the Zune is easy to use. The touch screen makes navigation easy. I have a wide selection of videos I've saved from YouTube or ripped from DVDs. All of them played without any problems, even a couple that always caused my Sansa View to hang up for unknown reasons. The display is sharp and there is no sign of choppiness, even when playing a movie I had ripped for my netbook.

It is a long-standing rule of thumb that it takes Microsoft at least three releases before they get a product right. That puts the Zune right on schedule.

Update: I found a major limitation in the Zune's implementation of WiFi and the browser. Most hotspots redirect the first page to a form where you either log in or at least agree to their terms of service. The Zune will not connect with these. It just gives an error and tries connecting again. It does not connect with WiFi that requires a security key, either. The only place that it can connect is to a completely open WiFi. That makes it useless as a mobile browser since almost all hotspots have a redirected opening page. I hop that Microsoft issues a fix for this.

Platform wars

Things are getting interesting in technology. A lot of new players have entered the arena and there will be a lot of shake-out in the next couple of years. Lines are blurring between PCs, netbooks, phones, MP3 players, and digital book readers. All of these can now play music and most of them can browse the Internet.

The big loser is Microsoft. I'm not sure that they've noticed yet but they have become irrelevant to all of the interesting technologies. Yes, they have a new operating system out. You can run a crippled version on netbooks. That's about it. It doesn't do anything that the old versions of Windows didn't do and it doesnt' run on anything except PCs.

Microsoft did introduce a new touch-screen Zune which got good reviews. This may be their salvation if they can expand it into phones. It's long-term success is doubtful. Previous versions were easy to find at places like Walmart and Target. The new Zune HD is not. Walmart offers "ship to store" which means placing an order and coming back in a day or two. There is no sign of it at Target.

Regardless, touch-screen MP3 players are the little brothers to the new breed of touch phone. Microsoft has a version of Windows Mobile that runs on these but it is a third-tier player.

Several ebook readers came out this year. All of them have significant flaws. The biggest one is that you still pay twice as much for an ebook as for a paperback. On top of that, you don't really buy books. You buy the rights to read them on a specific platform or device. They only make sense if you carry a lot of hardbacks around with you. The real purpose of these devices is to tie you to one book-seller. I expect them to eventually vanish.

For the last few years Apple owned the touch phone market. That is over. There are a slew of competing phones on the market. I'm going out on a limb and predicting that Google android will be the eventual winner. The phone market right now looks a lot like the PC market did in the early 1980s and the lesson from that is that the operating system that runs on the most platforms wins. Google's Android is not tied to a specific phone company or manufacturer the way that all of the other phones are. They have also announced the Chrome operating system which is designed to run on netbooks. Nothing will actually run or be stored locally. Chrome will do nothing except run the Chrome browser and everything else will be a web service running somewhere else. This is a direct threat to Microsoft.

Microsoft practically gave away MSDOS in the 1980s in order to spread as far as possible. Google is giving away their operating system. Their goal it to get as many people onto their search engine as possible. With wide acceptance running across multiple platforms they could easily be the default operating system for everything smaller than a business workstation.

Good by Mr. Monk

Something over eight years ago Tony Shalhoub came up with an idea for a TV detective. This one would be obsessive-compulsive name Adrian Monk - sort of an anti-Columbo. He would also notice and remember everything. The networks passed but USA picked up the show. The show was a hit, such a hit that NBC showed Monk reruns.

Monk had a fair amount of back-story. He was a cop who had married in college. When his wife was murdered, he had a breakdown and had to leave the force. When the show started he was trying to get his badge back and doing police consulting to make ends meet. He also had a full-time nurse who accompanied him everywhere and handed him hand wipes whenever he touched anything (or anyone).

The early shows featured crimes that only Monk could solve because he noticed and remembered everything.

Somewhere along the way the format changed, possibly when USA adopted their "characters welcome" promotion. Monk episodes were no longer about the crimes. The crimes were just a way of placing Monk in new and (usually) uncomfortable positions. Often the crimes were an afterthought. At the same time Monk seemed to pick up new phobias weekly. The writing became lazy.

When it was announced that Monk was in his final season, a few questions remained - would he solve his wife's murder? Would he get his badge back? Would he become involved with his assistant?

The series finale is a two-part episode. Prior to that they answered the question about the badge - yes he got it back but he decided that he preferred consulting and resigned again. This was very disappointing since it was something he had been working for the entire run of the series. Just a couple of episodes earlier he had been meeting with the review board.

As for his wife's murder, it was pretty obvious from the first part who had her killed and the episode ended with him about to receive the final clue. The big question is if he will survive since he was poisoned in part one.

Even if the way that the series is closed is unsatisfying, at least it came to an orderly close. Many series, Columbo to name one, just trail off.

In Defense of the Little Mermaid

Wired's Geekdad listed Top 10 bad lessons from good movies movies. Number two was:

It's OK to completely change your physical appearance and way of life for the person you love, even if he makes no sacrifices at all (from The Little Mermaid). This movie has the single most appalling ending of any Disney movie ever made, which is a shame because, apart from that, it's a great film. I just cannot comprehend how anyone could make a movie in the late 1980s with this message, which is not exactly subtle: Ariel gives up her home, her family, and BEING A MERMAID because she loves Eric so. And he gives up … nothing. Yeah, that marriage is off to a great start.

At least he included the movie as a good movie. In fact, this was arguably the most important hand-animated movie of the last fifty years. After years of shoddy animated movies, Disney probed that it could still make one as good as any produced under Walt. It was the first of two decades of great Disney movies.

Regardless, it has been attacked since it came out. Feminists didn't like it because Ariel chased a prince and was eventually rescued by him. It didn't matter that she saved his life twice and he saved her twice. They didn't give the movie much credit for presenting the first Disney prince with a real personality or the first time that Disney had an actual courtship between one of their princesses and her prince.

But, that's not Geekdad's complaint. His complaint was that Ariel became human in order to be with Eric. Is this a valid complaint?

Keep in mind that staying a mermaid was a deal-breaker with their romance. They could only have a tenuous relationship on the boarder between land and sea - an environment that was dangerous to both. The choice was transform or give up someone you love.

This is not the same as having breast enhancements. The closest equivalent is leaving your native country to marry someone.

I'm sympathetic to this. My daughter moved to England to get married. A close friend moved to America from Canada to marry his girlfriend. I used to work with a German woman who married an American serviceman and moved here. She had to give up her language.

By Geekdad's reasoning, all of these choices were appalling.

Also, it was established early in the movie that Ariel was fascinated with the surface. You got the feeling that she may not have been ready to make a deal with the devil but she would gladly have traded her tail for legs, even before she met Eric.

Why Are They Showing This Now? - the game

It used to be that studios simply advertised movies. Now they market them with other movies. When I watch a movie on TV I tend to wonder, "Why are they showing this movie now?" You can make it into a game. Here are some examples from the last couple of days:

The Matrix Trilogy - the Directors have a new movie coming out on Thanksgiving.
Demolition Man - Two possibilities - Sandra Bullock as a movie coming out (The Blind Side) and has one out on DVD (The Proposal).
Almost Famous (a movie about a 1970s rock band) - Pirate Radio just came out (a movie about rock in 1966).

The Original Prisoner

It came and went forty years ago on American TV as a Summer replacement series. I was syndicated in the 1970s on independent stations. It went on to have a huge, devoted cult following. I'm referring to The Prisoner staring Patrick McGhoohan.

The premise was simple. A secret agent angrily resigns. As he is packing his clothing he is gassed. He wakes up on in the Village on an island where he is told that no one has a name, just numbers. He is Number 6. The island is governed by Number 2 (who changed weekly). Everyone on the island was under constant supervision. Many of the people there were there against their will. Others were spies. There was no way to tell who was who.

That's about all that we ever learned. We were never sure if Number 6 was abducted by his own government who suspected him of defecting or by a foreign government that figured that whatever made him resign must be important. It is possible that the Village was run by multiple governments as a sort of retirement center for spies who knew too much to be left out in the wild.

Every episode was different. Sometimes the new Number 2 would try a new interrogation technique. Sometimes he simply played mind games with Number 6, making him think that he was escaping only to fail at the last minute. A few times Number 6 played mind games with Number 2, doing meaningless activities designed that looked like a plot with the idea of implicating Number 2.

Prior to making the Prisoner, McGoohan had played a secret agent (Danger Man in the UK, Secret Agent in the US with the song "Secret Agent Man" as the theme song). We never learned if he was playing the same agent or if this was a different character. In fact, about the most we ever learned about Number 6 was that he built his car himself and it was one of his few prized possessions.

The show finally ended with Number 2 and Number 6 locked in a bunker until one of them broke. Number 6 won and was told that he was the new Number 2. In a surrealistic episode, he brought down the Village and escaped to London where he had the option of returning to his old life (symbolized by his apartment) or leaving (symbolized by his car). He drove off. The last shot had the door of his apartment closing automatically - something that the door in the village did.

The show was the only tv show or movie that the Beatles licensed a song to (All You Need Is Love in the final episode). They were big fans.

The show had long-term impact on other media. The Fantastic Four did a couple of issues inspired by the show. The Simpsons did a great parody. AMC is showing an updated version this Sunday.

Side-note: Patrick McGoohan turned down the chance to replace Sean Connery as James Bond. It was a wise move. The Bond movies of the 1970s were progressively sillier and he would have been a poor fit.

Dickens's Christmas Carol

A new version of A Christmas Carol comes out today. This one uses motion capture and CGI. Reviews have not been kind. From the beginning I was wondering why we need a new version. The advertising for this version has been relentless and all of it has focused on Scrooge flying through London.

This seems like a good time to mention some previous versions that are redoubtably better than the new version.

Years before Charlie Brown's Christmas, Mr. Magoo did a version. I was very young at the time - I turned 8 a few days after it was shown. In retrospect, this was a very 1960s production. The animation was not all that good. Regardless, it holds up fairly well.

CBS aired a made-for-tv production in 1984. CBS was at the top of their game in the 1980s. This one had a great cast starting with George C. Scott as Scrooge. We watched it last year. It holds up very well. Production values were very high. The sets look authentic. Scott plays the part with a light touch. His Scrooge is never evil but events in his past conspired to make him lonely and bitter. Regardless, he never lost his sense of humor. He tries to dismiss Marley's ghost as indigestion, using line straight from the book. about my only quibble is that Tiny Tim looks too well-fed and healthy.

WKRP in Cincinnati did a Christmas Carol adaptation in the early 1980s. The Art Carleson, the station manager, ate some funny brownies and dreamed a version. It was one of the best episodes of one of the best sitcoms of its day. Again, this was a CBS production.

Bill Murray did a great update of the story in 1988's Scrooged. This includes a play within a play where Murray is producing a live TV special of a Christmas Carol while living the story. It includes lots of digs at TV producers. This is up there with Groundhog Day.

Also in 1988, BBC's Black Adder did a Christmas special in which the nicest man in England is accidentally visited by a spirit who gives him visions of his ancestors and decedents. It turns him into the meanest man in England.
 
Following Jim Henson's death, the Muppets went from new plots featuring Kermit to adaptations of classics as ensemble productions. Their 1992 version of a Christmas Carol was the first of these and quite effective.

There have been other versions but none of them are worth looking up.

In the meantime, wait until December before watching any version.

Too Many Vampires?

MSNBC asks if there are too many vampire movies and TV shows. Their conclusion:

While their popularity may ebb and flow, vampires always will have a place in the audience's heart, said Nicolas Cage, who starred in 1989's "Vampire's Kiss" and was a producer on 2000's "Shadow of the Vampire."

"The vampire is always going to be fascinating," Cage said. "It's like the vigilante cop, or it's like the cowboy or the Western. It's part of the fabric of society."

I agree that vampires have a strong place in movies but there is a real possibility that they are overexposed. I remember a "what's coming" column (sorry, no link) that vampires are so 2008 and that werewolves are the new big thing. Since the next Twilight movie features werewolves, this may be hard to prove. Similarly, the Sookie Stackhouse books that Tru Blood is based on adds several other types of supernaturals into the mix.

Back in the early 1970s, Hammer Films thought that vampires were a bottomless well. Hammer released several Dracula movies (Dracula AD, Taste the Blood of Dracula, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the Scars of Dracula) plus Captain Cronos Vampire Hunter, the Vampire Circus, and the Vampire Lovers. Other vampire movies and movies with vampires released around then included House of Dark Shadows, The House the Dripped Blood, Black Sabbath, and a really cheap Dracula vs. Frankenstein.

On TV, Dan Curtis followed Dark Shadows with Night Stalker, both a made for TV movie and a series, and a version of Dracula. PBS did their own adaptation of Dracula.

Inevitably, the supply exceeded demand. Most of these movies lost money and Hammer went out of business.

The vampires of today have more variety than the 1970s versions. Back then vampires were always monsters. Some, like Dark Shadow's Barnabas Collins, were sympathetic but they were still monstrous (Barnabas still drank women's blood then strangled them but he felt bad about it). Today's vampires have transcended the traditional image of the undead who thirsts for blood. Some of them are outright heroic. That gives today's vampire movies more variety but there is still a lot of them. Also, many of them are aimed at a narrow demographic that has a tendency to outgrow such things. When that happens, the next generation often establishes its own tastes.

Bottom line, there will always be vampire movies but don't bet the house on the current fad continuing much longer.

The Raven

In the early 1960s, American International pumped out a series of movies loosely based on the writings of Edgar Allen Poe and staring Vincent Price. While The Raven was one of them, it was quite different - it was done for laughs.

I was watching the movie for the first time in years on the cable channel MyTV. It continues to be entertaining.

This is a movie that would not be made today. It is too obvious that everyone in it was having fun. Even today's comedies take themselves more seriously than the actors in the Raven.

It had an all star cast: Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff and a very young Jack Nicholson. Much of the movie is scenes with Price and Lorre and those feature a lot of ad-libbing. In one clever bit, the pair are about to open the coffin of Price's character's lost love, Lenore. Lorre's character finds nothing unusual with keeping a coffin in the house. The pair remove a velvet cover from the coffin and carefully fold it up, then Lorre tosses it over his shoulder.

The highlight of the film is the wizard's battle between Price and Karloff's characters. Unfortunately, MyTV cut the movie for time and cut out the entire battle. A shame since this made the movie a cult classic.

The Coming IPhone App Crash

Newsweek has an article on how few IPhone developers actually make money. This is probably the first part of a market shakedown.

The math is pretty simple. It takes $20,000-$100,000 to develop an app. Most apps are priced low enough to be impulse purchases - around $1 and the developer only gets part of that amount. This means that you have to sell tens of thousands of apps before you break even. That might be possible except you are competing with 80,000 other apps. Unless you get very lucky and get a lot of word of mouth, no one will even find you app so you might have to spend additional money on publicity.

There is nothing mysterious about this. A new market opened up and started a gold rush. When this happens, only a very few get rich. Most people lose their shirts. Sometime soon, a lot of IPhone developers are going to move on to some other occupation.

This is a familiar pattern. When the IBM PC was first introduced there were a lot more programs available for it. A lot of those have fallen by the wayside over the years. A lot of web sites have come and gone in the last 15 years, also.

Monty Python at 40

40 years ago this month Monty Python started running on the BBC. A few years later it appeared in America on PBS. On the station I watched, it showed up at 10:00 pm on Sunday.

I started watching it fairly early. My father had been channel surfing (with only a dozen channels available you went through everything pretty fast) and left it on this for a while. I heard him laughing and turned it on in the basement. I got hooked pretty fast.

The show was unlike anything preceding it and very little after it. The general formula was to get it, tell your joke, then get out before the sketch turned stale. Often sketches would be ended by a BBC announcer, an army officer, an armored knight armed with a rubber chicken, or an animation. There were often running gags such as the Spanish Inquisition which turned up when someone said, "I wasn't expecting the Spanish Inquisition."

Back when the show was new it was also pretty obscure. Almost no one I knew watched it. When I started college I found more people were fans. Regardless, it took it a long time to seep into the public consciousness. A movie that was nothing but clips from the tv show toured campuses but I don't think it was shown in theaters. Monty Python and the Holy Grail showed for one week in Columbus in one small theater.

The show appealed to comic book fans and there were occasional references to it in comic books. In a short-lived revival of the Metal Men, Walter Simonson slipped in a chapter title named "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition". Iron Fist's girl friend carried a Colt Python with "Monty" engraved on the barrel.

Things changed in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. The Life of Brian got a lot of notice, mainly because many people assumed that it was a parody of Christ and called for it to be banned. A lot of people went to see what the fuss was about. PBS syndicated it nightly in most markets which gave it a lot of exposure. Still, I was quite surprised that my daughter's friends could recite scenes from Holy Grail.

Modern shows like SNL could learn a lot from Monty Python. SNL in particular relies on the one-joke sketch too much. In this, there is one joke. It takes around 40 seconds for the audience to get it but they continue the sketch for five minutes or more - long past when it stopped being funny. They could really use a pompous official coming on every now and then and proclaiming that the sketch had become silly or boring and needs to stop.

Peanuts

50 years ago Peanuts started. It had a long run with the last new strip appearing the day of it's creator's death (Charles Shultz had actually retired a few weeks earlier). This was back in the days when every city had at least two papers and every family subscribed to at least one. Everyone read the comics.

Peanuts was special. Only children appeared but they lived in an adult world. Instead of cheap jokes, the kids worried about things like wearing away the planet by scuffing feet.

From the beginning Charlie Brown had a pet dog. In fact, Shultz's first published drawing was of a dog that looked a lot like Snoopy in Ripley's Believe It or Not. The real turning point in the strip came when Snoopy started thinking. After that he often took over the strip. He even got the last line in the last strip. 40 years ago he acquired a side-kick, a bird named Woodstock after the rock concert. Other characters were added over the years.

The strip looks dated now, especially the early ones that are currently being syndicated. The girls always wear dresses, the kids are all white and none of them come from broken families. This reflects how society saw itself at the time. Still, most of the humor still works.

FF Blogging - Galactus

It's been a while but I got up to FF #48-50. Stan and Jack wanted to introduce something new - a character so powerful that he thought of Earth in the same terms that a human thinks of an anthill. This character was Galactus.

I already covered some of FF 48. This combined the wrap-up of the Inhumans arc and the introduction of the Silver Surfer. In the beginning of the issue Maximus discovers that the Inhumans are mutated humans instead of being a different sub-species. The knowledge drive him insane and he uses his atmo gun to create a negative zone around the Inhumans' city, sealing it off from humanity. The FF escape before the dome can harden and return to New York where they discover that the sky is on fire. People panic, blaming the Human Torch. The Thing rescues the Torch and the flames vanish. Later they are replaced with flying boulders.

It turns out that Reed and the Watcher have been collaborating on masking the Earth from the Silver Surfer. Reed has been working non-stop for days and is unshaven.

The boulders do not work. The Surfer senses that something is unnatural about them and flies through them, landing on the roof of the Baxter Building (because he senses the Watcher?) where he signals his master. A moment later the Thing knocks him off of the building and across town. He is too late. Galactus arrives.

In the next issue, the Torch and Thing try attacking Galactus. He absorbs the Torch's flames and extinguishes the Torch. Then he uses the equivalent of a bug bomb on the Thing.

The FF retreats to plan their next step. Reed finally shaves and they try again, without the Torch. This time they attack Galactus's converter, the machine that will drain the Earth of life. Galactus summons the Punisher, a short, powerful being who quickly defeats the FF.

In the meantime, the Watcher sends the Torch to Galactus's homeship.

In the meantime part 2, in an amazing coincidence, the Surfer lands in Alicia's apartment. She convinces him that humanity is worth saving. He vows to use his power to stop Galactus.

In issue #50, the Surfer fails to defeat Galactus but delays him long enough for the Torch to retrieve the Ultimate Nullifier. Appalled at something so powerful in the hands of a human, Galactus agrees to leave the Earth. On his way out, he imprisons the Surfer on Earth.

The issue has a low-key ending with Johny enrolling at Empire State University and meeting his new roommate, Wyatt Wingfoot.

Several things about this story arc:

• It completed the transition from the early FF to the more mature version. The earlier stories often had more energy but just as often suffered from sloppy plotting and pacing (see my post about the first appearance of the Frightful Four).
• This was the first "cosmic" story arc and one of the most successful. The FF had faced enemies with immense power before but never one who was so impersonal. Galactus never directly addressed the FF until Reed had the Ultimate Nulifier.
• The general form of having the climax in the middle of the issue with an epilogue was used in some of Stan's best-remembered stories. A Spider-Man story where he was trapped beneath tons of metal in a flooding building is another example.
• The Surfer was an after-thought. Stan and Jack had a story conference and Jack drew issue #48. When Stan saw an unfamiliar character he called Jack to ask who it was. Jack replied that someone as powerful as Galactus needed a herald. Regardless, the Surfer quickly became Stan's favorite character. During the days when Stan was still active at Marvel he never allowed anyone else to write the Surfer.
• This wasn't the first time a character dropped in on Alicia. Just a few months earlier the Torch and Thing's fight with Dragon Man burst through her roof. The Surfer met her several times later including a quick affair near the end of the second run of his own comic.
• For years the letter columns of the FF and Thor had debates over who was more powerful - Galactus or Odin. I don't think that this was ever resolved.
• Galactus raised the power level of the Marvel Universe by a quantum level. Up until then it was obvious that DC characters were much more powerful than Marvel ones. Superman was splitting planets in half while the Hulk was trying to batter his way out of a cave. With the introduction of the Surfer and Galactus, Marvel had a character who could probably beat Superman (the Surfer) and one who could eat him and the planet he rode in on.
• It was one of the few "big" anniversary issues that worked. By contrast, FF #100 was thrown together as an afterthought and completely forgettable.
  

Disney and Marvel

Over the weekend Disney announced that it was buying Marvel for $4 billion. This is probably a good thing.

For the short-term, it does not mean a lot to Disney. Marvel has been pretty aggressive about licensing so there isn't much left for Disney. Long-term, Disney hopes to either continue profitable licensing contracts or to take them over as they expire. It is also hoping to appeal to boys. After years of marketing Disney princesses, fairies, Hanna Montana, etc., it finally occurred to them that boys have money, too.

This could mean a lot to Marvel. For decades they have been the tail wagging the dog. They have been owned by companies that were less profitable than Marvel. At least a couple of times Marvel's parent company has filed for reorganization. In contrast, DC has been owned by Time-Warner for decades. Time Warner regards DC as a source of licensing revenue and treats it pretty well. In particular, the animated versions of DC characters have all been consistent and high quality.

There has been a bit of meddling from DC. When the first Batman movie came out and they found out that Robin had been killed (and therefore could not be licensed) they directed that he be brought back. This turned out well. The new Robin was critically praised.

I'm not too worried about Disney meddling like this. After the current Marvel editorial staff came up with A Brand New Day, eliminating decades of Spider-Man continuity, it's hard to believe that Disney could be any worse.

Side-note - the Hulk is green because Marvel's owner in the 1960s used a cheap printing process that had trouble with colors. The Hulk was supposed to be gray but came out a different color on each page. After the first issue came out, Stan changed the character to an easier-to-print green.

Netbooks, Microsoft and Apple

(Taking a break from comic book blogging)

Netbooks are currently the hottest part of the PC market. These are loosely defined as an low-cost, low-power, ultra-light PC with a screen no larger than 10 inches and with a long battery life. Both Microsoft and Apple have made some disparaging remarks about this market segment. Microsoft expects it to vanish when the new line of thin-screen PCs are introduced. Apple refuses to discuss making inexpensive hardware but there are rumors that their new tablet computer will be aimed at this market. I don't think that either company understands the market.

Let's be honest - netbooks are lousy PCs. They are under-powered for games and they have tiny screens. So why are they popular? Because they are so portable. Their small screens may be harder to read but they also reduce the size and weight enormously. They are underpowered because the high-powered chips suck up battery power. A more powerful CPU means more batteries and more weight or shorter battery life which means adding in the weight and size of a power brick. They are also cheap which is important because they are a second PC for most people.

I have a netbook. I got it for traveling. It is great at that. I can stick it in my carry-on. I don't need a separate PC bag which is bigger and heavier than my carry-on. The 10-inch screen is big enough for web browsing and email which is what I take it for in the first place. An IPhone-sized screen is just too small for serious web browsing.

The new, thin laptop PCs that Microsoft is pushing will be more expensive and they will not be as portable. No matter how thin you make it, laptop with a a full-sized screen is still bigger than a 10-inch one. Battery life will be a problem again, also.

Then there is cost. Microsoft is almost giving away Windows XP on netbooks. They want to sell Windows 7 for a lot more. That will add to the price. So will the new technology. These will not be priced to be second PCs.

It's hard to figure out what Apple's market will be. Rumors say that their tablet will be a larger IPhone. Without AT&T subsidies it will be a lot more expensive. Will people want something that expensive with no keyboard that is too big to put in a pocket? How many people use an IPhone as their primary computing device?

More Anti-Hero Villains

Continuing my last post...

Marvel has a long history of noble villains who crossed over but still maintained most of their original characteristics. Hawkeye may have joined the Avengers but he remained a smart-mouth rebel.

Joining the Avengers seems to assure that someone will eventually reform, even if that wasn't why he joined in the first place. Both Wonder Man and the Swordsman joined the Avengers with the intention of betraying them. Both had a change of heart, reformed, died and were resurrected. With Wonder Man the process was fairly straightforward. He was given his powers by Baron Zemo with the caution that they would kill him within a week without further treatment. After betraying the Avengers, he repented and freed them but died without the treatment. As it turned out, he actually went into a state of suspended animation while his body rebuilt itself. He joined the Avengers for several years and even got his own strip before dying and being reanimated again.

Swordsman stayed a villain for several years until he reformed with the urging of his girlfriend, Mantis. He eventually died. When Mantis became the Celestial Madonna, swordsman's body was reanimated by an intelligent plant so that its marriage with Mantis could be consummated although this body eventually crumbled to dust.

The Fantastic Four introduced several characters who started as enemies but eventually became allies. Many of these were never really villains but ended up on the opposing side. Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner is at the top of this list. He was anti-human back when he was first introduced in the 1939. Eventually he was persuaded to limit his fight to the Nazis. He later mellowed. When he was brought back in FF #3 he found that his ancestral city of Atlantis was deserted. Blaming human nuclear testing, he declared war on the human race starting with the USA and New York City. When the FF stopped him, he transferred his rage to them personally. Despite this, he was infatuated with Sue Storm (prior to her engagement to Reed). Magneto tried to recruit Namor but he ended up refusing to join either side.

Even after the Sub-Mariner got his own strip in Tales to Astonish his role was ambiguous. As Prince of Atlantis he sometimes came in conflict with humans. Later his book took on environmental overtones causing more conflict.

I'm trying to confine myself to characters from the 1960s but I have to include Thanos in this discussion. He started as the ultimate villain - powerful, crafty, and literally in love with Death. In his first appearances in Iron Man and Captain Marvel he was evil personified.

Things got more confusing when he appeared in Adam Warlock. Adam was fighting a rogue version of himself called the Magus and Thanos came to his aid. Why? Somehow Magus became the champion of life. He was also a ruthless tyrant. As death's champion, Thanos wanted Magus eliminated. Despite his motivations, Thanos was a valuable ally. He reverted to type in his next appearance - a pair of annuals wrapping up the plotlines from Warlock's canceled comic. Thanos had built a machine capable of destroying the stars, hoping that it would win Death's affections. Along the way Warlock died but returned long enough to kill Thanos.

Thanos returned again several years later and collected the Infinity Gems in order to gain ultimate power. Warlock also returned and defeated Thanos. In the aftermath Warlock divided the gems between six guardians including himself and Thanos. From that point on, Thanos tended to side with the heroes although it was often in self-defense. He even gained ultimate power but detected a flaw in the Universe which required his self-sacrifice to fix (surprisingly, he survived). He even got his own comic book for a short time.

Anti-hero villains

I was just thinking about some of the early Marvel villains. I've always maintained that one of the reasons for Marvel's prominence is that they have better villains than the competition. Part of this is that many Marvel villains were more complex than elsewhere.

This started with FF #1 and the Mole Man. He wasn't just a megalomaniac who wanted to conquer the world. He was a ugly little guy with glasses who wanted to conquer the world because he was too short to get a date.

Magneto's motivations were pretty straightforward at first. He felt that mutants were superior to normal humans so they should be in charge. He was solo in his first appearance in X-Men #1 but he was back a few issues later with the "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants". This was a very strange brotherhood. They all hated each other and only stayed together because they feared Magneto. The brotherhood consisted of the Toad who was mainly there to flatter Magneto's ego. Mastermind was kind of creepy and obviously in it for the power. The unusual ones were the brother and sister - Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Magneto had rescued the Scarlet Witch from a mob earlier. They joined him out of gratitude and stayed out misplaced loyalty and fear.

The X-Men recognized this and tended to go easy on these two. Eventually Magneto was taken off-world by the Stranger and the Brotherhood broke up. Shortly afterward Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch joined the Avengers along with Hawkeye.

Hawkeye was another example. A circus performer, he decided to become a superhero using trick arrows. He quickly foiled a robbery but was soon with the stolen money and assumed to be the thief. Not long after that he met and became infatuated with a Russian agent - the Black Widow. She convinced him to attack Tony Stark's factory which brought him into conflict with Iron Man. Not long after that the Widow wanted to quit spying but her parents were threatened (the became a continuity problem later). She was given a costume and sent to re-enlist Hawkeye. She vanished after this appearance and Hawkeye joined the Avengers.

The Black Widow eventually resurfaced. She had defected and become a member of New York society. She made herself a new costume and tried it out on Spider-Man who was, as usual, wanted by the law himself. SShe eventually joined the Avengers herself.

DRM and digital devices

Two incidents have come up recently which illustrate the problems with modern electronic devices.

The first happened with Amazon's Kindle e-book reader. Recently they discovered that the company that was selling electronic versions of George Orwell's works did not have the rights to do this. If this had happened with a printed book then money would change hands between publishers and booksellers but people who actually had a printed copy of the book could keep them.

In the new digital age, this has changed. Amazon remotely deleted the books (along with any notes that students had been keeping) and refunded people their money. This is a reminder that you are not buying a book, you are paying for the rights to read a book. The rights are subject to many more restrictions than a physical book.

Amazon announced that it has changed its internal procedures and will not do something like this again - unless it changes its procedures again.

The other incident involves Apple's iTunes and the Palm Pre. When the Palm was released, one of its features was that it could load music directly from iTunes. Apple recently pushed out an update to iTunes that stopped non-Apple devices from connecting to it (the Pre is the only non-Apple device that can connect). Palm just released an update that restores this feature.

Again, with iTunes you are not buying music. From Apple's point of view, you are buying the right to listen to music on specific devices - theirs. Loading music that you have paid for onto an unauthorized device is a violation of their license and they have the right to stop it. This will probably hurt Apple in the long run. Once someone has paid for something they don't like it being tied to a particular manufacturer.

Sony learned this the hard way. Since Sony has both a media publishing arm and a hardware arm, the media wing was able to impose restrictions on their media players. Sony never released an MP3 player. Their digital players used a proprietary format that only they supported. No one was interested. They wanted to play MP3s.

Apple got around this two different ways. The first was that iPods can play MP3s. Most of the music on iPods was ripped from CDs (yours or someone else's). The other way is that Apple's DRM is fairly light-weight and their price per song is so low that people don't worry about it.

Imagine what would happen to the iPod market if Apple did what Amazon did - remotely removed content that people had paid for. They can do this with the iPhone.

The bottom line here is that there are still major issues with digital rights that have not been solved.