The Inhumans and the Munsters

Someone left an anonymous comment that got me thinking:

The Addams Family TV show: 1964-66
The Munsters TV show: 1964-66
First appearence of the Inhumans: 1965.
Coincidence? 

Looking back at it, I don't think it was a coincidence at all. This sort of melding of popular culture with the Marvel Universe was something that Lee and Kirby (especially Jack Kirby) excelled at a few years later. The Inhumans began appearing in late 1965 (not counting Medusa who was introduced without an origin more than a year earlier). By 1968 and 1969, Stan was openly promoting the take-offs of pop culture in the FF. Two of the most memorable were the 1930s gangster plot (an entire planet of Skrulls were so taken with gangster movies that they redid their planet like one) and the Prisoner plot (Doom imprisoned the FF in a village much like the one in the classic TV series).

With this in mind, you can almost see the story conference. One of them (I'm going to guess Kirby) suggested that they do a take-off of a Munster standard where Marilyn, the normal-looking Munster, brings home a boyfriend who meets an array of monsters. In this case, the normal-looking one is Crystal, the only member of the Inhuman royal family who does not wear a mask or costume. She meets the Human Torch, mistakes him for an Inhuman, and takes him home to meet the family. Being the Marvel Universe, the family has hidden powers and wears masked costumes instead of being monsters. Things go as well as can be expected until Crystal introduces the Torch to her sister - Medusa.

This tied nicely into prior stories. They never explained where Medusa came from and there was some speculation that Medusa had escaped the Torch a few issues earlier because he was attracted to her. She was a bit old for the Torch but her younger sister...

I haven't looked it up yet but I think that there was even a reference to the Munsters in one of these issues.

The Torch was involved in a few 1960s situations. Back when he had his own strip, his girl friend, Dorris Evans, hated his powers. While dating a superhero might seem glamorous, their dates were constantly interrupted. Dorris wanted a regular boyfriend instead of one who burst into flame. This echoed TV shows of the time like Bewitched where mortal Darrin wanted his wife Samantha to stop using her supernatural powers and live like an ordinary housewife.

By the end of the story arch that introduced the Inhumans, Johnny and Crystal were deeply in love but were separated. The separated, anguished lovers was another 1960s staple (it happened constantly on Dark Shadows). While Reed and Sue managed to get married, most other superhero had some reason for not being able to tell his true love about his feelings.

Doomed Superhero Romances of the 1960s (off topic but a fun exercise)
Spider-Man/Betty Brant - hated violence after her brother's death
Iron Man/Pepper Potts - not fair to date with a heart condition
Daredevil/Karen White - not fair to ask someone to date a blind man
Cyclopes/Marvel Girl - not fair to ask someone to date a man whose eyes can destroy buildings
Hulk/Betty Ross - do I have to elaborate?
Thor/Jane Foster - romance forbidden by Odin
Human Torch/Crystal - Crystal imprisoned in a sphere of negative energy
Silver Surfer/Shala-Bal - separated by Galactus

And a few DC late-entries:
Metamorpho/Sapphire Stagg - not fair to ask her to date a freak
Dead Man/Lorna Hill - he was dead

The Return of Futurama

In the late 1990s, Fox approached Simpsons creator, Matt Groening about doing a follow-up series to be shown following the Simpsons. Taking his cue from the approaching year 2000, Groening set the show a thousand years in the future and gave it a retro-feel. Even the name, Futurama, somes from the "rama" suffix that was popular in the 1960s (my high school's marching band contest was a Band-o-rama).

Almost as soon as the show started, Fox began playing with the schedule. The show was moved multiple times. Even dedicated fans had to pay close attention to find it. This was made worse when Fox moved it to 7:00 Sunday. This spot was frequently preempted by football games. In fact, the show was preempted so often that Fox used unaired episodes from the third season to create a fourth season. Even though the show's ratings were fairly good and it often won its time slot, Fox canceled it.

But things didn't end there. The Cartoon Network picked it up as part of their Adult Swim, showing it at 11:00 or 11:30 (or sometimes, both). It also came out on DVD. Given a consistent time slot, the show did quite well. Comedy Central picked it up and commissioned a set of four straight-to-DVD movies. These were designed so that they could be cut into four half-hour episodes, each, essentially giving the show a fifth, 16-episode season. The response to these justified new episodes.

I admit that I was only luke-warm to the show when it started but it grew on me. After seeing all of the episodes multiple times in syndication, I think that the first season was the weakest and it grew stronger with each season. Most of the best episodes were in the final season and the last episode, where Fry writes an opera after exchanging his hands with the Robot Devil's, is especially strong.

The DVDs varied in quality. The first one, Bender's Big Score, was the best, but also had the most complicated plotline. The third one, Bender's Game, was also enjoyable. The second one, The Beast With a Billion Backs and the final one, Into the Green, didn't really merit two-hour status.

The new season has 26 episodes. The first two showed last night and showed that you can go home again. The style and tone of the show is unchanged from its years on Fox and the quality matches the fourth season.

Cartoons to Live-Action

Someone commented on cartoons being made into live-action. That got me to thinking about this genre. This is a mushy group. I'm going to include characters from syndicated comic strips, non-realistic comic book characters, and animated characters. The main criteria is that they are not presented in a realistic manner in their original form but were done as live-action, anyway.

This seems like a stupid idea but it can work. The Addams family began as single-panel cartoons. They worked because of the magnificent job that the creators of the TV show did in fleshing out the characters.

There was a popular series of movies based on Blondie in the 1930s and 40s. IMDB lists 26 of these.

Lil Abner was made as a life-action movie twice in 1940 and 1959. I've only seen the 1959 version but it was true to the comic strip and a critical success. It also holds up well. Much of the political commentary seems as relevant now as it did 51 years ago.

Dick Tracy also made the jump to live action and made a lot of money. It played up its comic strip roots with stylized sets and costumes.

I'm going to skip Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and the Phantom as too realistic for this genre.

The live-action Popeye suffered from several bad choices. One was to adapt the comic strip which no one remembered rather than the cartoons. The pacing was uneven. Most of the movie was very slow with half the plot taking place in the last fifteen minutes (I discovered that this is a much better movie if you skip the rest).

Some movies don't totally make the leap to live-action. Scooby Doo work pretty well because most of the elements of the cartoon were realistic. The main non-realistic part, the dog, continued to be animated. This approach has been used with kids movies like Alvin, Garfield, and Marmaduke. Adults should avoid these.

Jay Ward cartoons translate poorly to live action. Rocky and Bullwinkle was a mistake. George of the Jungle was better than it should have been, mainly because of Brendan Frasier's ability to play goofy roles.

The live action Flintstones was successful enough to warrant a sequel, but not successful enough to pay the original stars to come back. I skipped the movies so I can't comment on them.

Then there are the star vehicles. Richie Rich and Mr. Mcgoo are the two worst offenders. Mcgoo, was an especially puzzling choice since the title character is supposed to be short, bald, and half blind. None of those made the transition to the movie.

All of this reflects Hollywood's laziness in creating new characters and its belief that a familiar name is better than a good movie.

TV to Movie

When I was growing up a surprising number of TV shows were based on movies. Many of them were successful and ran for several years but, with the exception of M.A.S.H., none of them were memorable. Things did not go the other way - TV shows did not become movies.

There were minor exceptions to this. Some TV shows would make a theatrical version - basically an extended episode shot during production of the TV show with the regular cast. These were shot in color and had a slightly higher budget than a regular episode but otherwise were indistinguishable. Examples include the 1960s Batman movie and ones featuring the Munsters and McHale's Navy.

As far as I know, Star Trek was the first TV show to make the jump to the big screen after it had been canceled. It is also a special case for reasons I will get into later.

I'm going to sub-divide the TV-to-movies genre a few different ways. First, there are the movies made with the original cast. These have generally been successful, either artistically or financially. This includes Star Trek, The Simpsons, Firefly/Serenity, Sex in the City, and the X-Files.

The other divide is movies with entirely new casts. These can be further divided into dramas and comedies. I said that Star Trek is a special case - with the recent reboot, it now qualifies as both original cast and new cast.

The dramas have been fairly successful. I am including lighter shows like Maverick and the Wild Wild West in this (WWW made a lot of money, even if I don't want to see it ever again). Mission Impossible is probably the top money-maker in this class. Some of the early efforts like the Fugitive show that it is possible to get critical acclaim in a TV-to-movie.

There have also been a lot of bombs. Comedies usually translate poorly. The Brady Bunch is the only one I can think of off-hand that made enough money to get a sequel. Others like McHale's Navy, the Beverly Hillbillies, and Car 54 Where Are You sank fast, leaving a stink behind. Even a first-rate cast like Bewitched had couldn't save it from being a bad movie.

There is one exception to this - the Addams Family. Both movies were very good and quite profitable. The question is, do they count? I am not counting other media that was adapted to TV before being made into a movie (Spider-Man). The Addams Family was a series of cartoons first and some of the humor in the movies came directly from these. On the other hand, the cartoon characters were undefined. They didn't even have names. This came from the TV show.

I think that the lesson here is that characters and situations that can fill an hour-long TV show can be expanded to fill a feature-length movie but half-hour situation comedies rely of short doses and established characters. These are much harder to flesh out.

A further lesson is that SNL sketches usually strain to fill ten minutes. Trying to expand most of these to feature-length is an exercise in futility.

Looking back at Lost

We've had a couple of weeks for things to settle after the Lost finale episode. Looking back at it, we can see that each season had a general theme:

Season One - Where are we?
Season Two - Pushing Buttons
Season Three - Meet the Others
Season Four - The Freighter
Season Five - Return to the island
Season Six - Everyone dies

When you consider the show by season instead of by episode then season six represents a clear break with the rest of the show. Up until then they held out the possibility of a scientific explanation for everything. Granted their science didn't meet high school levels, but at least they pretended that there was some science behind the show. Magnetism was given a lot of the credit, especially for healing people and time travel. Even the smoke monster could be repealed through science (sonic towers).

The final season abandoned almost all pretense to science. Jacob and his mother explained the island in mystical terms which all turned out to be true. They didn't even try to explain how a stone plug in a pool of water caused the glow or how manipulating the light and water could cause the island to shift in time and space.

Exposure to extreme electro-magnetic radiation caused Desmond to become aware of the sideways time but this turned out to be some version of an afterlife.

The sideways time was the biggest cheat of the show. The implication was that it was a parallel world created by detonating an explosive in the pool of magnetism that the hatch was built over. At the very end we found out that it was really some sort of consensual afterlife. The producers had promised that the island was not an afterlife. Having non-island time turn out to be an afterlife was a cheap trick.

The show ended in a fit of symmetry. It began with Jack waking up in the bamboo grove then seeing the dog and the shoe suspended from a tree. As he died, Jack passed the shoe and the dog lay beside him as he died.

Possibly the biggest disappointment in the show is the idea that a stone plug in a glowing pool is so important. This raises too many questions about who built the pool and the plug in the first place.

The producers say that the show was never about the plot. It was about the people. They were all "lost" when they arrived and it is true, the whole cast had been nothing but losers in the outside world. Locke tried to point this out at the end of the third season - they had nothing to return to. Jack didn't listen, but then Jack was always wrong.

A few lessons from Heroes

NBC made it official - Heroes has been canceled. What happened?

The first season was far and away the best. We spent most of it meeting the various heroes and learning about their powers and lives. At the same time, the show had an urgency. First, there was the mass-killer Sylar who kept becoming more powerful. At first, Sylar was a shadowy man in a ball cap who killed heroes in a gruesome fashion. There was also HRG and the group that employed him. Finally, there was a future event that would wipe out New York City and the need to stop it.

There were problems in the first season, especially with pacing, but it was worth watching through the end.

The second season had some real problems. The biggest was the writer's strike which caused things to be tied up in a couple of quick, messy episodes. This caused major pacing problems. The addition of some romantic subplots slowed things down even worse. Still, you could give it some slack because of the strike.

Things went very wrong in the third season. They tried too hard to recreate the first season and failed totally. Plot elements like an eclipse removing everyone's powers made no sense. The first half of the third season was called "Book 3 - Heroes and Villains". This meant constantly shuffling who was on which side. By the end of Book 3, the writing staff had been fired.

Book 4 was more promising. The government found out about the heroes and moved to imprison them. Several escaped and spent time on the run. While an improvement, it was not up to the original season.

Season four, aka Book 5 made some improvements. The regular cast was cut way back with the rest appearing just a few times. New characters were added. It was not enough to attract the viewers back.

So what went wrong? Sylar was the biggest problem. He started as a memorable villain. He killed people so that he could steal their powers. He was powerful and scary. Over the rest of the show he alternated between reforming and going back to merciless killer. Between inconsistent characterization and overexposure, he lost his edge. He was no longer scary. Other villains were introduced but none could match Sylar.

There was also too much Claire. A teenage girl who could heal from anything, she kept getting in over her head. Her powers made her a natural victim. And, her relationship with her father, HRG, took the edge off of him.

In fact, most of the cast should have been discarded after the first season. Part of the magic about the first season was meeting these people and seeing what they could do. We got to know them too well. The constant shuffling in Book 3 hurt the characters a lot, too. It might seem like an interesting literary device to make people heroes one week and villains the next but it ruins long-term characterization.

The biggest problem was the need to keep the show fresh. Lost did this by having a plot arc that contained all six seasons but also allowed for seasons that were totally different from each other. Characters were added or killed. Only about half of the cast from the first season made it to the sixth season but new characters have been added along the way.

Lost started dragging when the producers decided where the show was going but were not sure how long they had to stretch it out. Heroes never looked forward any further than the end of the season so it could not build on itself to a conclusion.

That's probably the big lesson here. Continuity dramas need a goal. It is not enough to remember where you have been, you have to have a destination. Characters should grow, not simply change and be discarded when they start to drag down the series.

Early Iron Man

I've read over the early Iron Man comics from his origin to his red and gold armor. Most of these were plotted by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby.

There's no polite way to say this - the Lee/Kirby issues suck. They are formulaic and generic. Each started with Tony Stark introducing some new, impossible weapon - an automatic weapon that could demolish buildings or powered roller skates that can transport troops at 60 MPH. After that, Stark would move on to the real adventure. The stories ran around 14 pages so there wasn't much room for characterization or anything else.

The stories themselves were standard super-hero stories. There was nothing that made them Iron Man stories. It would take less than five minutes to rewrite any of the scripts for any other hero who was stronger than Daredevil. They would even work as Green Lantern or Flash stories.

Things got a lot better when Kirby left and Don Heck took over the art. While Kirby is remembered for his ground-breaking art from the late 1960s, in the early 1960s he could be boring. Heck's artwork was much more dynamic.

Not long after Heck took over the art, several elements were added to the character. Happy Hogan, an out-of-work boxer saved Stark from a race car crash (which was suggested in Iron Man 2) and Stark hired him as a driver and bodyguard. Stark showed Hogan around his plant in Flushing New York next to the site of the 1964 World's Fair (the inspiration for the 1974 Stark Expo in Iron Man 2) and introduced his secretary, Pepper Potts. From that point on, Happy, Pepper, and the plant figured prominently in most stories.

Once the plant was introduced, it became the target for saboteurs - some Communist, some rival munitions makers, and some scientists trying to steel Stark's inventions. Iron Man stopped being a friend of Stark's who happened to be hanging around and became the unofficial protector of the plant.

An unusual story element was Congress. Whenever someone disrupted Stark's plants, Congressmen and other government officials started talking about pulling contracts. This came to a head years later when a senator ordered Stark's plant closed until he testified before Congress (another element in Iron Man 2).

The final element was Iron Man's armor. In his first appearance it was gray. In his second appearance, he heard people react to the armor in fear. Stark's girlfriend at the time (in her only appearance) suggested that he color his armor gold which he immediately did. While this outfit did look like an "iron man", it was also bulky for a super hero. In a one-shot drawn by Steve Ditko, Iron Man decided that he needed a lighter suit.

The Iron Man story finally came into its own. No longer could you use an Iron Man plot for another character. By the time you subtracted all of the Iron Man-specific details you had lost at least half the story.

All of this was in the early 1960s. As the Viet Nam war progressed, readers became uncomfortable with Stark making munitions. Eventually he divested his company of weapons and started making unspecified civilian products.

Note - In an earlier post I mentioned Stark keeping his new armor in a briefcase. I forgot that he also kept his original armor in a briefcase. Somehow he was able to fold the bulky suit up like tinfoil.

Lost - Jacob and Nameless

We finally know more about where Jacob and the man in black came from. Their mother, a Roman named Claudia, washed up on the island shortly before having a set of twins. Claudia was assisted in her delivery by another woman whose name was not given. Claudia only had one name chosen - Jacob. When a second child was born, she didn't know what to name him. Before she could think of anything, the midwife killed her and raised the boys as her own.

Jacob was loyal, incapable of lying, and wore light colors. His brother was clever and wore black. Sometimes the brother knew things without being told like when he found a game. He also kept secrets and could lie. For some reason he assumed that his (adopted) mother would not let him keep the game.

Claudia appeared to Nameless. I assume that this was a real haunting like Hurley's instead of the Smoke Monster appearing as Claudia. She led nameless to a camp of her people. While Claudia was dressed like a Roman, had a Roman name, and spoke Latin, these people looked like Celts. That puts the episode 2000 years in the past, plus or minus a hundred years or so.

Nameless confronted his mother about their real past and their real mother. Mom admitted the truth and Nameless went off to live with the other people. He didn't like them but they knew things. Mom had shown the boys a glowing cavern. Nameless and the Celts kept digging dry wells until they found it. Then they built the wheel - the one that moves the island through time and space.

Mom didn't like this so she knocked out Nameless, filled in the hole, and killed the rest of the people. We have no idea how she did this but it implied that she had supernatural powers.

She made Jacob her successor guardian of the island, apparently using the same bottle that Jacob gave to Richard centuries later.

Nameless killed Mom. Jacob killed Nameless and sent his body into the glowing cavern. The pillar of smoke erupted from it but Nameless's dead body came out the other side. Does this mean that Smokey was only using Nameless's form the same way that he used Locke's form?

Jacob placed the bodies of his nameless mother and brother in the cavern where they were discovered by Jack and Kate in the third episode.

So, now we know where the wells came from and how Jacob became guardian of the island. We might know where Smoky came from (if Nameless's soul was transforemd into the Smoke Monster). At the very least, we know how he came to look like the man in black. We also know where the in-joke of the white and black pieces representing a giant game came from.

There is probably a lot of symbolism in Mom's loom. She spent a lot of time at it and Jacob took over from her, although his work did not look as good. Before Nameless killed her, he ruined her weaving.

I figured that "Adam and Eve" would be one of those mysteries that was never answered. With only three and a half hours of episodes left, I'm not sure that this was worth the time spent on it.

Iron Man 2

It is tough for a sequel to live up to an original like the first Iron Man movie. When they expended the best picture category for the Oscars, Iron Man was given as an example of a picture that should have been nominated but was not.

So, given that baggage, I don't think that the sequel is quite as good as the original. That said it is still a lot of fun.Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark continues to be as much fun out of the armor as in it.

The first movie had two sets of villians - a Taliban-like group of terrorists living in caves in Afghanistan and Stark's partner. The new movie has a Russian genius who hates the Stark family and a munitions manufacturer name Justin Hammer.

While the names come from the comic books, the characters are very different. Hammer, in the comics, was a businessman who would enhance supervillians' powers in exchange for a take of their future earnings.

The Russian becomes Whiplash although his name, Anton Vanko, comes from the original Crimson Dynamo. The character is much more dangerous than the comic book version of Whiplash.

In the original book, Stark seems driven to create his Iron Man armor. In this one, he is haunted by his coming demise. The arc reactor that keeps his heart pumping is slowly killing him.

The action has been ramped up. There are more and bigger fights. There is also more laugh-out-loud humor which keeps things going during the slow parts of the plot.

Chuck - Season 3.5

In its first season, Chuck was good but it always seemed like it should have been better. During the second season it started firing on all cylinders, especially near the end of the season.

At the end of season 2 they shook things up a lot. The original premise was that a slacker computer nerd had a confidential database in his head. He had a pair of agents guarding him and running missions based on the information in his head. There was always some plot contrivance so that he had to come along, even though he was untrained. There was also a long-running almost-romance between Chuck and Sarah, one of the agents.

Season three shook things up. Chuck got a new set of information including abilities and the season was devoted to him becoming a real spy.

Originally NBC ordered a short season of 13 episodes. Part-way through production they expanded the order by six episodes. Apparently the scripts were already in place when the expanded order came through. This resulted in a season 3.5.

At the end of the original season 3, Chuck was finally a real spy and finally got together with Sarah. There was a break of a couple of weeks and things picked up from there.

Often when a series is based on will they/won't they, the series declines when they finally do. Moonlighting and Remmington Steel are prime examples. This is not a hard and fast rule. Cheers had its best days after Sam and Dianne got together.

Chuck seems to have improved again. Instead of concentrating on Chuck's ineptness, it is exploring his relationship with Sarah.

The show has always had a strong supporting cast between Chuck's sister and her husband and his co-workers. This is also continuing as Casey, the other agent tries to train Chuck's best friend, Morgan. While Chuck was a slacker with potential, Morgan is a genuine idiot. This relationship promises to continue any comic relief that was lost when Chuck became competent.

In the meantime, loyal fans formed flash mobs yesterday to try to get the show renewed. With the Leno disaster leaving NBC with a gaping hole in its schedule, the bar may be lowered. At the same time, Chuck's ratings are up a bit so it may make season four, yet.

Armor in a Briefcase

"As a little tip of the hat to the fans, I wanted to pull off the suitcase suit," he says. "In the comic book, they have this ridiculous thing where Tony Stark would open up an attache case, throw a glove on, and on the next page, he'd have the whole suit on. How do you make the suitcase suit real? That was another challenge we presented to ourselves." - Jon Favreau

Read More http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/04/jon-favreau-iron-man-2#ixzz0mteJ5NKY

The original version of Iron Man was big and bulky. It had a lot of cast iron pieces and it limited the artist. Stan started improving it immediately. In the first issue, Iron Man was iron gray. In the second issue he noticed that people were nervous around him and, at someone's suggestion, he painted the armor gold (earning the nick-name the "Golden Avenger"). That wasn't good enough and a few months later they redesigned the armor completely. Don Heck had been doing the art with Jack Kirby providing some of the breakdowns. For the redesign, Steve Ditko took over the strip for an issue or two.

The new armor was light and flexible. It had the red chest piece (it actually covered his entire torso) which Stark could wear over the unit keeping his heart beating. To put on the rest of the armor, Stark would pull on a red glove or put a foot through a thick red ring. Golden armor would emerge from this, pulled up his arm or leg by magnets and lock into place in the chest plate. The boots worked the same way. He just stepped on the sole and the boot covered his foot. The mask slid over his head like a hood. The faceplate was hinged and could be raised. It also has larger eyeholes so his expression could be seen through it. The whole assembly was so small and light that he could put it in his attache case and carry it with him. The lock could be set to release tear gas if someone unauthorized opened it. This had to be set separately, allowing someone to steal his armor once.

This remained the basic armor well into the 1980s. There were a few modifications. The face plate became part of the helmet. The pods on his hips grew. The position and size of the unibeam and two smaller plugs moved around.

In the late 1970s, the helmet was redesigned to allow for Stark's nose. It looked ridiculous and Stark quickly returned to the original helmet.

He also went through a phase with red and white armor instead of red and gold. Eventually the armor was redesigned to look more armor-like and began looking like the suit(s) in the movie.

There was a long-running debate in the letter column about the armor. It was flexible when it went on and it had no visible joints so how could it give Stark added strength or even protect him from crushing force?

Eventually a writer threw in the word "polarized" and the debate stopped. Apparently the armor stiffened when a current was applied to it. What is more, it would take different shapes depending on the current, allowing movement.

Something that no one ever commented on is the weight. A thin sheet of high-carbon steel can be pierced by bullets and would weigh something in excess of 100 pounds - not something you could lightly carry with you. Stark's armor is significantly stronger than steel and significantly lighter.

Then there are the batteries. Most of his power was supposed to come from the pods at his hips plus (indestructable?) solar cells in his armor. Batteries that size are more suitable for powering a laptop than a battle suit.

But that's comics. A large portion of disbelief is required.

A Lost Rerun?

During its first two years, the most infuriating thing about Lost was the reruns. In a series with strong continuity and constant cliff-hangers, the show lost all momentum when reruns intruded. Sometimes it seemed that they ran more reruns than new episodes. During the second season, they ran through the reruns so fast that they had to show some first season episodes as fill-ins.

Someone started a web site devoted to the question Is Lost a repeat? The site features a single word - either "yes" or "no". The site seemed out of date after ABC pledged that they would never show another rerun, ever again (not counting the times that they showed the prior week's episode at 8:00).

But today the answer is YES.

What happened?

Sweeps month. ABC preferred showing a rerun in April and having the show run an extra week during the May sweeps. Also, they preferred showing double episodes at the beginning and end of the season.

How to Train Dragons vs Kick-Ass

How to Train Dragons finished the weekend in a box-office dead heat with Kick-Ass. This is unusual in several ways. First, it was the second weekend in a row with a virtual tie. Second, Dragons was in its 4th weekend and was only number one its first weekend. Now it rose back to the top.

Kick-Ass opened to disappointing numbers. It earned around $20 million when it was expected to earn $25 million.

What happened? I think I have a couple of explanations.

First, How to Train Dragons is a good movie. It is probably benefiting from word-of-mouth. I didn't write about it because we saw it in its third week but it is certainly worth seeing. My wife's comment when we left the theater was, "Why are all the good movies animated?"

Dragons has shown a lot more staying power than most movies. Clash of the Titans, which was number one the last two weeks, dropped to a distant number three.

Then there is Kick-Ass. It got good review, but the reviews make me unlikely to see it. The movie is supposed to be violent and profane. This bothers me because of the age of the cast. It seems troubling that the cast couldn't see the movie without a parent.

For years, studios have been convinced that an R rating helps the box office because the target 20-something audience thinks that anything less is a kid's movie. This is part of why people under 30 tend to use language that makes older people shudder - they took their cues from movies which did not reflect the way that people talked. Over time, the younger generation started talking like the movies.

Regardless, the biggest movies of the 21st century have not been R rated. Maybe the studios will get the message and tone down their content.

Tomb of Dracula

As the Silver Age of Comics ca to a close, Marvel and DC were looking for a new hook to bring the readers back. The recent changes to the Comics Code gave them an opportunity - horror comics. Marvel in particular launched a full line of horror comics. They started comic books staring vampires, werewolves, mummies, swamp monsters, zombies, and mummies. Vampires were given the star treatment beginning with Count Dracula himself.

Gerry Conway wrote the first couple of issues. Gene Colon was the artist for the entire run. They took advantage of the more adult setting.

The first issue began with Frank Drake, his best friend, Cliff, and his lover (who had been Cliff's lover) on their way to Drake's castle in Transylvania. Drake's original family name was Dracula. He had run through the family fortune and all he had left was the ancestral Castle Dracula. Cliff suggested opening it to tourists.

It was a dark and stormy night and their car got stuck. A peasant gave them a lift in his carriage. As soon as they arrived, Cliff separated from the group, fell through a rotted floor, and found Dracula's skeletal remains. He removed the stake from Dracula's ribs (of course) and Dracula came back to life. He attacked Cliff then moved on to Frank's girlfriend. Frank used a silver compact to keep Dracula at bay for a while so he flew off and killed a barmaid. The villagers formed a mob, Dracula killed Frank's girlfriend and the villagers set the castle on fire. Frank escaped with his girlfriend's corpse but she came back to life as a vampire.

In the second issue Frank Drake searched the burned-out castle for Dracula. He didn't find him but he did find his friend Cliff, imprisoned a pit. Drake rescues Cliff and steals Dracula's empty coffin and takes it to London. Dracula follows along with Jeanie, Frank's newly vampirized girlfriend. Jeanie tries to seduce Frank but he takes her prisoner and ties her to a chair. She manages to seduce Cliff.

Dracula forced a Transylvanian doctor to treat his pale skin so that he could pass as a human (a point that the colorist missed until issue #4). He traveled to England, picked up a girl in a bar and killed her then attacked Frank and Cliff. Jeanie hypnotizes Cliff who attacks Frank. During the fight, Jeanie is staked and the rising sun forced Dracula to flee.

The issues were poorly written, especially the first one. I remember wondering at the time how much research went into it. Looking back on it - none. Transylvania has not existed in decades. It was part of Romania which was a communist country at the time. Conway and Colon's version of Transylvania was straight from a Universal Picture - full of peasants in 19th century clothing. The plots were trite.

Still, the strip was a huge success. Soon Dracula was staring in a monthly comic, a quarterly double-sized comic, and a monthly, oversized black-and-white magazine.

In issue #3, Archie Goodwin took over for a short time. He introduced a supporting cast - Rachel Van Helsing (the great-granddaughter of that Van Helsing), Quincy Harker (from the novel), and Taj - a mute giant from India. Goodwin had been writing Vampirella where he also introduced Van Helsing descendants. Goodwin answered the question of why Dracula followed his coffin across Europe - it had a bunch of gold coins concealed in the bottom.

Goodwin's writing was better than Conway's. The inking changed from Vince Colletta.to Tom Palmer. At the time Palmer was becoming one of the premier inkers and colorists. The Colon/Palmer team quickly became fan favorites.

More as Marvel posts the digital versions.

IPad Anger

In the days preceding the actual release of the IPad we were repeatedly told that the release if this device would be the most significant event of the year. It made the cover of both Newsweek and Time. It was covered on the national news. Every talk show host had one. articles gushed over how it made all other computing obsolete.

The actual device does not live up to its press and some people, including me, dislike Apple's role as gatekeeper for content and the model for content which assumes that you will be buying everything, sometimes for more than retail price. Personally, I resent the pressure to buy a $500 device (which costs more that $1,000 after warranty and extras) so that I can buy content that I get free now.

I've vented on the IPad several times already and I wasn't going to do so again until I saw this post on Huffington. Basically, the author, Daniel Sinker, is offended that some people don't like the IPad and mounts a spirited defence of it.

First, to prove that the virtual keyboard is usable, Sinker used it to write his post. That doesn't convince me. I have used virtual keyboards on other devices and there is no way that you can touch type. You can enter text but it is more of a stunt than proof of anything.

Sinker moves on to the expectation that moving content from paper to the IPad will cause people to start paying for subscriptions again.

In his day-after critique, Jarvis says "it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn't create." The "their" in that sentence are big media companies, who are furiously building iPad apps in an attempt to rescue their broken business models. And he's right: the apps these companies have released are for consuming conglomerate content. But what do you expect from a pig but a grunt? It's not Apple's fault that big media companies don't know how to create new things. It's not Steve Jobs who told the Wall Street Journal to charge more for an iPad subscription than a print subscription or Time magazine to make the bizarre decision of releasing a separate app for every issue. Big media has done a great job of making bad decisions for a couple decades -- who'd expect them to stop now?

Since Steve Jobs made a big presentation on the IPad to the Wall Street Journal, he may have told then to charge more. At minimum he gave them the impression that they could. Jobs made the rounds to Big Media and told them that the IPad was their salvation. That means he made them expect that they could charge their newsstand (not subscription) price for content.

Sinker also dismisses Apple's gatekeeper role:

A lot of the "there" there is about control: do we want a gatekeeper to devices we own? It's a valid argument, but one that applies equally to game consoles, mobile phones, most real-world content distribution, and many other corners of life both digital and physical (I can't walk into a Japanese restaurant and order latkes, in the same way I can't upload a Word file to Flickr). But for some, there is a line in in the sand and the iPad, apparently, is one grain too far

This is a very strange argument. No, you cannot go into a Japanese restaurant and order latkes but you can go to a different restaurant that does server them. There are no competing stores for IPad apps. If you want a WiFi-finder app or a subscription to Vougue or FHM then you are out of luck. Apple has rejected these, and, since on-line subscriptions to these magazines require Flash, you cannot get them through the web browser, either.

Sinker indirectly bring up another sore point about the IPad but I will have to point it out:

But the only thing locked down on the iPad are the apps. The web is (wonderfully) wide open. Reading, Listening and Watching, also open -- I can drag in any epub-format books, mp3 audio, or mp4 video that I want. But you can't execute arbitrary code on the iPad. And if you know what that means, my guess is that you've already got a device that can.

When talks about dragging in content he means that he had to use a real computer to download or rip the content then connect the IPad to his computer with a sync cable and use ITunes to move the files. I have yet to see anyone say that they love ITunes. For a company that is supposed to make things that "just work", ITunes generates a lot of hate. Plus, what's with the cable? Microsoft has supported wireless syncing on the Zune for years.

Sinker finishes with three paragraphs of ranting about how great the IPad is and how it will be transformational in ways that we cannot appreciate, yet. This isn't worth arguing with. He is speculating on things that may or may not happen months or years from now. If these new, unimagined, paradigms emerge then they will speak for themselves. In the meantime, the IPad is still just a toy instead of a serious tool.

Different Ads

Currently Verizon is running Droid ads fairly often and Apple is running IPhone ads. I noticed a big difference between them. The current IPhone ad has someone deciding to buy the album she is listening to. While she is doing that through her IPhone, it tells her that the group is giving a local concert so she also buys tickets for that. There are a couple of Droid ads but they center around all of the things you can search for with your Droid. Do you see the difference? The IPhone ad is about the things that you can buy with your phone and the Droid ad is about things you can do with your phone.

This isn't surprising. Apple has redefined itself as a company that sells content. Google is still a search company.

Dick Giordano

Dick Giordano died recently. Wired has a quick overview of his career here.

I became aware of him when he started at DC in the late 1960s. DC was in the process of upgrading itself. Several of the characters had become stodgy, 1950s relics. This included their flagship characters, Superman and Batman. DC had done one upgrade of Batman in the early 1960s but the Adam West TV show ended that. Superman hadn't had a change in style since the 1950s.

DC's overhaul consisted of two parts. One was to bring in new arch-enemies for the characters. This wasn't particularly successful. Who remembers Tera-Man (a cowboy with high-tech alien weapons) or the man with ten eyes (someone grafted his optic nerves and his fingertips together)? Other changes were longer-lasting. Robin graduated and went off to college and Clark Kent was moved from being a newspaper reporter to a news anchor.

The biggest change was in the artwork. Neil Adams and Dick Giordano gave the books a fresh, new look that still influences today's comic artists. The two defined a new house style for DC. Since Giordano was a prolific inker as well as penciller, his influence went further, giving other artists a touch of the new style.

Giordano did a little work for Marvel. The most memorable was an serialized adaption of Dracula that ran in the back of one of the black and white comics that Marvel produced in the mid-1970s. Regrettably, Marvel killed their black and white line before the adaptation was complete.

In the 1980s, Giordano became editor-in-chief of DC during one of its most creative and audacious periods.

IPad - Reviewing the reviews

Coverage of the IPad has been ... interesting. When the device was first announced several correspondents live-blogged it. Their initial reaction was "it's just a big IPod Touch". While the world waited to get its collective hands on units, a few select journalists got pre-release units. Suddenly the reviews went from positive to glowing, even gushing. The most extreme example I have seen is here. This reviewer believes that we all secretly hate our computers (even ones from Apple). He goes on to insist that the IPad is different. Using it is so natural that anyone can use it without thinking, even a three-year-old or an 80-year-old.

Why the big change? John Dvorak points out that the dying media are clinging to the IPad as their lifeline. Beyond that, Apple was selective in only handing them out to people with a history of Apple boosterism. Put the two together and you have a conflict of interest where the people writing the reviews have already been given units worth hundreds of dollars and their editors are hoping to promote the new business model. No objectivity here.

I can understand why the old media is making the attempt. The Wall Street Journal is an example. You can get their content for free here or you can download their "free" app and pay $3.99/week for the same content. I know which the WSJ wants you to do.

There have been numerous articles that mention reading ebooks and magazines on the IPad. All of them make a point of how the experience mimics the real thing. I think that basing an interface on an older technology is a mistake for several reasons. The biggest one is that newspapers and magazines are laid out like they are because of the limitations of ink on paper. Some people have a fondness for the tactile experience. I suspect that they have associated the media with the experience of reading the content. People who have not been taught this relationship will be confused by it and probably reject it.

Now that people actually have IPads in their hands, people with no vested interest are weighing in. They still call it an impressive device but some are questioning the idea that it is a replacement for notebooks or even netbooks. For example, this article lists 13 glaring shortcomings. To those, I would add the lack of email folders, the lack of tabbed browsing, the lack of handwriting recognition, and the inability to print and its tiny amount of memory. During the gushing phase, some reviewers suggested that the IPad could run business applications. Given these problems, it is hard to see how this could happen.

The bottom line is that the IPad is an expensive toy that hopes to create a niche.

I could afford to buy an IPad but I'm not going to. I really don't know what I would do with it. My Nokia N800 is much smaller and good for checking emails (it supports folders), quick web browsing (including Flash). I can also read ebooks from Project Gutenberg on it.

Most anything else I do is handled quite well by my notebook or my netbook. All of these have more storage available than the starting IPad and I can run the same software on the notebook and netbook. Also, none of them cost what the IPad costs (I got a good deal on the notebook - it came with Vista just as Windows 7 was being rolled out). Given all of that, the IPad would be nothing but an extra toy that I don't need.

Now, if someone would just port an ebook reader to the Zune HD...

UPDATE:
Speaking of the Zune HD, my biggest disappointment was that it could not connect with  WiFi that redirects your to a terms of use page. Microsoft just released a firmware update that solved this problem. I verified this at dinner tonight.

IPad Mania

The IPads are about to arrive and the press is frantic. Presonally I hope that it fails or is nothing more than a marginal product. I have nothing against the concept but there are two things about the execution that makes me root against it:

First, it is an attempt by Apple to take over computing. Apple has already said what standards they will and will not support. Their various stores have been successful but they have also given Apple enormous power. Jobs can now tell the recording companies what they will charge. Amazon can's do that. They tried to set the price for ebooks at $9.99 but had to back off. Expect to see the ebook price rise to match print editions even though you have much deeper rights with a printed book. You can keep a printed book until it falls apart, you can lend it out, or you can sell it. Try doing any of that with an ebook on a Kindle (or an IPad).

Apple rules its app store with an iron fist. It has no set standards. Developers often have their apps rejected without comment. Even when a reason is given, it is often too cryptic to be useful. Even if an app is accepted, it might be rejected without notice in the future. If you bought an app more than a month ago and Apple rejects it, they will remove it from your phone or pad. They will not notify you that this was done and they will not refund your payment. It just vanishes.

Then there is Flash, Silverlight, Javascript, and other similar technologies. Apple does not allow any of them. The reasons they give are excuses. The real reason is that they want to control content. They do not want you using Flash to watch videos for free when they can sell it to you.

And this brings me to my second reason for wanting the IPad to fail - Apple is trying to monetarize the web. By funneling everything through their stores, they can put micro charges on things that have been free. Newspapers and magazines are overjoyed by this prospect. Most newspapers in the country are going broke. They cannot compete with on-line news sources. They hope that they can sell you content through the IPad that is currently free. Others are also lining up for this gravy train. Marvel Comics announced a new IPad application. 500 titles are currently available. You can read the first three pages of any of them for free and pay $2.00 for the full comic. That may sound like a great deal but there are thousands of comics available through the digital service and the subscription rate is so low that a half dozen comics a month through the IPad is more expensive. I lost count of the number of digital comics I've read in the last three months but it is well over 100. Just catching up on the She-Hulk would have cost more on an IPad than a year's subscription.

If the IPad is a major success then we can expect to see the Internet drained of content and moved over to Apple on a pay-per-view basis. I have my doubts that this will be the salvation of the content producers but once it becomes established it will be like ITunes - you may not like it but it represents too big a market to ignore.

Consider the IPhone apps developers. There are currently something like 150,000 apps available. It costs money to produce all of these apps but only a few make any real money. The real winner here is Apple. As the middleman, they profit regardless of what apps sell.

A few years ago people worried about Microsoft taking over the Internet and locking down content. Now Apple is trying to do the same thing but no one seems to care because of how polished their product.

None of this is new. Apple tried to lock people into the original Mac. For the first year it was produced you violated your warranty if you plugged a non-Apple printer or disk drive into a Mac and the only way to write a program for it was to buy a $10,000 LISA computer. Steve Jobs never got over his desire to control everything. I prefer not to be a co-enabler.

Rick Jones, the Ultimate Sidekick

Marvel Digital has a highlight of Rick Jones's career (if you can call it that). While this covers some of Rick's highlights, it misses a lot. Here's my take.

Rick is one of Marvel's oldest characters and their longest-running supporting character. His first appearance was in Hulk #1. The government was about to test a new atomic weapon (back in the days of above-ground testing) when Bruce Banner spotted someone in range of the blast. He told is assistant to stop the countdown and rushed to get this person to safety. The intruder turned out to be Rick Jones, an orphan who sneaked onto restricted land as a bet. He had no idea of an atomic test. Banner's assistant was a spy and failed to stop the countdown. Banner got Jones to safety but was caught in the radiation from the blast. Banner and Jones were put in an room for observation. When the sun set, Banner changed into the Hulk and escaped. Jones followed, figuring that he owed the Hulk. Their relationship changed a few times during the Hulk's original run. At one point, Rick gained mental control of the Hulk.

Rick formed a group of ham radio enthusiasts called the Teen Brigade. Back then, a lot of people bought high-powered radios. Under favorable weather conditions, the signal could reflect off of the ionosphere and the ham radio operator could talk with people all over the world. When the Hulk was reported to be on a rampage, Rick and the Teen Brigade called the Fantastic Four for help. The god Loki changed the frequency that they were broadcasting on in order to lure Thor into a fight with the Hulk. Iron Man and Ant Man were listening to the same frequency and ended up forming the Avengers. Because of his role in creating the Avengers, Rick was given access to Tony Stark's mansion where the Avengers met.

After Captain America was revived, he mistook Rick for his lost partner, Bucky. Cap took Rick on as an apprentice along with the rest of the Teen Brigade. They managed to save the Avengers from Kang and Count Nefaria. At the same time, Rick used his Avengers ID to have a meeting with the President (I think it was LBJ by that point but he was off-panel) to ask for help for Banner. Banner was imprisoned a couple of times on suspicion of espionage and released thanks to Rick. Later, Banner was shot in the head and apparently killed. Rick stole the body and exposed it to gamma rays, reviving Banner as an intelligent Hulk. When the Hulk vanished and appeared dead, Rick finally confessed Banner's secret.

Rick finally got a chance as Captain America's costumed sidekick for a couple of issues.

During the Kree/Skrull War, Rick was imprisoned with the Kree Supreme Intelligence, a composite being who stimulated Rick's capacity for mutation. For a short time Rick became powerful enough to end hostilities between the two races.

DC comics let the trademark to the name Captain Marvel lapse and Marvel Comics created their own version. Originally he was an alien with divided loyalties sent to spy on Earth. Marvel decided to rework the character, making him more like the original Captain Marvel. The original was a boy who shouted "Shazam" and became the Captain. Marvel's new version was sent into the Negative Zone where he could only be released when someone wearing a pair of "nega bands" traded places with him. This person turned out to be Rick Jones. Rick also started a career as a singer.

The two were eventually separated. At one point, Rick exposed himself to radiation in the hope of gaining super powers. Instead he got cancer and became a supporting character in ROM. After being cured of cancer, Rick returned to the Hulk where he actually became the Hulk for a couple of issues. The Leader drained his "Hulkness" away but Rick remained as a supporting character in the Hulk for years (through most of Peter David's run). Rick fell in love with a Vegas showgirl named Marlo and the two hosted a talk-show for a while.

Captain Marvel's son became the next Captain. He was artificially created and was merged with Rick so that Rick could give him guidance.

When the Red Hulk appeared, some hints were dropped that he was actually Rick. It quickly turned out that Rick was actually the new Abomination.