Our pal Herbie J scores again, albeit in an unusual fashion.
We finally got around to watching Then Again with Herbie J. Pilato, a half-hour classic TV-themed talk show that premiered last month. You can stream it free with ads on Shout Factory TV and Tubi, or ad-free if you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber.
We enjoyed the four episodes available so far, but they seemed…well, dated…and not in the way you might expect.
And we at TVWriter™ think that’s a pretty good idea. (Although this TVWriter™ minion’s a little concerned about the fact that she is and a major corporate profiteer are on the same side of his particular issue and…)
Ah well, nevermind. That’s a thought for another, more paranoid day.
Now that superheroes – especially Marvel superheroes – rule the entertainment spectrum, it behooves us all to know a little something about them and how they came to be. Art Spiegleman, the man behind Maus, fills us in, and includes some very uncomfortable truths about today.
ack in the benighted 20th century comic books were seen as subliterate trash for kiddies and intellectually challenged adults – badly written, hastily drawn and execrably printed. Martin Goodman, the founder and publisher of what is now known as Marvel Comics, once told Stan Lee that there was no point in trying to make the stories literate or worry about character development: “Just give them a lot of action and don’t use too many words.” It’s a genuine marvel that this formula led to works that were so resonant and vital.
The comic book format can be credited to a printing salesman, Maxwell Gaines, looking for a way to keep newspaper supplement presses rolling in 1933 by reprinting collections of popular newspaper comic strips in a half-tabloid format. As an experiment, he slapped a 10 cents sticker on a handful of the free pamphlets and saw them quickly sell out at a local newsstand. Soon most of the famous funnies were being gathered into comic books by a handful of publishers – and new content was needed at cheap reprint rates. This new material was mostly made up of third-rate imitations of existing newspaper strips, or genre stories echoing adventure, detective, western or jungle pulps. As Marshall McLuhan once pointed out, every medium subsumes the content of the medium that precedes it before it finds its own voice.
NOTE FROM LB: I didn’t know Bruce Lee, but many of my friends did.
Hey, what can I say? I used to hang out with martial artists. My martial artist friends were all good guys as well as world champions, and they made me feel safe. In many ways it was like being around superheroes.
Yeah, I was very young back then.
Frequent visitors to TVWriter™ and People’s Pilot entrants over the last few years have been reading a lot about “audio drama” and the boom that has started within the “audio series” genre. (Although the boom very often is referred to as “podcasting,” broadening the traditional definition of that last word.
In order to clarify what audio drama is, we’ve turned to writer, actor, director, and producer Pete Lutz of Narada Radio Company (“radio!” another term of course for, erm, podcast). Here’s what Pete has to say.
When you engage with an audio drama, here’s what happens: From the opening sequence, the dialogue, music and sounds combine to form a picture that only you can see.