Television Zombies text
A few weeks ago, I did a little thing for the Television Zombies podcast, describing how I go about analyzing The Venture Bros. For those who missed it, the text of my thing is below the fold.
apropos of nothing
I drove past the Music Hall Theater in Beverly Hills the other day. They’re showing Sugar and Moon and their marquee looked exactly like the above image, the two movies’ posters jammed together for a display.
Had I not already seen Moon, I would have guessed that they were showing one movie called Sugar Moon. “One’s black, one’s white. One’s big, one’s small. One’s close up, the other is far away. One’s in front of a bridge, the other is in front of an op-art design. One carries a duffle bag, the other carries an astronaut helmet. Each prefers his title in the lower left-hand corner. Together they fight crime. Sugar Moon.”
Memory Lane, part 2
Yesterday I posted a bunch of flyers I made for my monologue shows back in the late 80s – early 90s. Today I’m posting a bunch of flyers I made for various play productions during the same time. Don’t forget to click to enlarge.
Memory Lane, part 1
I came up in show business as a playwright and monologuist in the late 1980s. My beat was the East Village of New York City. I didn’t have a computer back then — my plays and monologues were written on a clackety old Royal Portable that dated from the Koren War. And my flyers were all assembled by hand. I had no layout tools at my disposal, so I leaned into the crude aesthetics of the punk rock I loved — I slapped together things I found on the street, I doodled in the margins, I made all the scotch tape visible. Instead of trying to make my flyers look slick, I emphasized their shabbiness. If you weren’t there, they probably won’t make much graphic sense.
It’s also worth pointing out that all these images were meant to be reproduced in black and white, at Xerox machines at Kinko’s. Sometimes they looked better that way, sometimes much was lost.
Do remember to click on any of the images to see them bigger.
Happy faces, action movie division
In the past few days, I’ve been researching the "happy face" phenomenon, where the studios intentionally drain whatever dramatic tension exists in a poster image for the sake of selling more DVDs. Mostly I’ve looked at comedies (here and here), but one of my readers suggested I also investigate the packaging of some of my favorite action movies. I did, and the results were, to say the least, disturbing.
Read more
Television Zombies
Long-time WADPAW reader the most pressing issues of our day TV shows. Chris has been following my Venture Bros analysis and asked me to contribute a little something to his show, and I was happy to oblige. The podcast can be heard here or through your nearest iTunes thingy. My contribution, where I gas on about how I go about my VB analysis, is toward the end, but the whole show is certainly entertaining enough to listen through, and features a guest-opening from Rusty Venture himself.
Some more happy faces
As one of my readers pointed out the other day, Up is not the first Pixar movie to receive the happy-face treatment. Here we see the original Toy Story poster on the left, and the DVD cover on the right. In the first, Woody looks frightened and mistrustful of the cocky, headstrong Buzz — rightfully so, as their relationship is the central drama of the narrative. But in the second image, Woody looks like the secrets of the universe are being revealed to him. He’s not just happy to be carried off by Buzz, he’s positively ecstatic. Woody apparently has no problems at all in the DVD version of this movie. (The army men have also been included in the fun.)
Put on a happy face
Old-timers like me can remember back to the dark ages of 1990, when Ivan Reitman’s Kindergarten Cop came out. The posters for Kindergarten Cop featured star Arnold Schwarzenegger enduring the enthusiastic attention of a bunch of five-year-olds. The joke was clear: the Terminator can travel through time and walk through explosions, but a bunch of five-year-olds is a little too much for him.
Then something strange happened: a few weeks into the run of Kindergarten Cop, the posters suddenly changed — the "overwhelmed" Arnold became the "beaming" Arnold. I remember clearly, I was living in New York, and all through the subways the Kindergarten Cop posters suddenly went from funny to not-funny. Arnold overwhelmed by children is funny, Arnold proudly hoisting kids is not.
