#Prohaska

[fireandiceland]

Petition für einen deutschen hetalia dub nur damit ich dann beim deutschen Synchronsprecher von aph Austria anfragen kann das er mal „Do san a poar Huankinda dabei.“ in seiner Roderich Stimme sagt

[universallyarbiterinternet]

Karin Prohaska; „Schleich nicht wie die Katze um den heißen Brei“

Aufnahme aus dem Jahr 1965 (DDR, Amiga).

[opera-ghosts]

Jaro Prohaska (Kurwenal), Germaine Lubin (Isolde), Max Lorenz (Tristan) and Margarete Klose (Brangäne) after the guest performance of the Berlin State Opera in Paris occupied by the German Wehrmacht on May 22, 1941 at the Opéra, the conductor of the performance was Herbert by Karajan.

[frenchcurious]

Ray Prohaska (1901-1981). 20th Century Limited, NY To Chicago 1941. - source Myra Clergé.

[evilhorse]

Blackhawk: Blood and Iron miniseries (circa January 1988)

[atomic-chronoscaph]

The Outer Limits - The Architects of Fear (1963)

[gameraboy2]

"The Secret of Bogie Bill" Saturday Evening Post, July 22, 1950 Illustration by Ray Prohaska

[lupisspiss]

This is totally a WIP but I can absolutely see Luca taming a Whispering Death

Like I know they're a colonial species but this bitch answers to him

They're both little bastards and the dragon never fully listens to him

[tomoleary]

Ray Prohaska Beach Picnic Illustration Original Art (c. 1959) Source

[soreheadinamblemood]

Hamlet und Ophelia - Wiener Konzerthaus

[issela-santina]

Reinoud van Mechelen, what's it like to play a t(en)ortured heterosexual Greek lover boy in French opera while the staging feels more like 70% installation art, 30% storytelling

LEFT — Hippolyte et Aricie, Staatsoper under den Linden, 2018. Pictured are soprano Anna Prohaska as Aricie and tenor Reinoud van Mechelen as Hippolyte who is right behind her, covered in smoke as Aricie cries out for him.

RIGHT — Titon et l'Aurore, Opéra Comique, 2021. Pictured left to right are soprano Gwendoline Blondeel as Aurore and Reinoud van Mechelen as Titon. Aurore approaches a prematurely elderly and balded Titon who sits and laments his sudden curse while he strokes his white beard reaching the floor in his seated stoop.

[onenakedfarmer]

Currently Watching

VISITORS FROM THE ARKANA GALAXY [GOSTI IZ GALAKSIJE] Dušan Vukotić Yugoslavia, 1971

[cantsayidont]

March through May 1988. While the Evanier/Spiegle BLACKHAWK revival was prompted by Steven Spielberg's interest in doing a BLACKHAWK feature film as a follow-on to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, this controversial Howard Chaykin miniseries feels a fair bit like RAIDERS: a slick, stylish, rather cynical adventure story about a square-jawed heel and a saucy, two-fisted dame who save the world from fascism when they're not too busy bickering, in a nostalgia-bait setting full of visual allusions to '30s and '40s advertising and propaganda art.

Although Chaykin was certainly familiar with the Blackhawks (and had done covers and a couple of backup stories for the Evanier series), he indulges in some obligatory late '80s revisionism, dismissing or discarding some familiar elements of the feature (for instance, the characters laugh off the possibility of a Blackhawk Island, a staple of the earlier series) and tinkering with some details. Perhaps his most significant move was to reaffirm that Blackhawk was Polish, as shown in the first Blackhawk story in MILITARY COMICS #1 (by Will Eisner and Chuck Cuidera) back in 1941. Later versions of Blackhawk's origin had claimed he was American and had merely been flying for the Polish Air Force at the time of the 1939 Nazi invasion, but Chaykin was having none of that: The Blackhawk of this series is Janos Prohaska (a name borrowed from a veteran Hollywood stuntman who'd worked on STAR TREK and other movies and TV shows), a broad-shouldered, left-leaning (and, this being a Howard Chaykin story, Jewish) schlub from Krakow who spends a lot of the story under fire for "premature antifascism" from a Red-baiting Southern senator who's also a secret Nazi agent.

(Special note needs to be made of the exceptionally creative lettering of Ken Bruzenak, without which this series would be much less than it is, and also the effective color work of Steve Oliff.)

Exactly when this story is supposed to be set is a little vague. One of the pastiche magazine covers suggests that it takes place in June 1941, about the time MILITARY COMICS #1 went on sale, but the story concerns the theft of an American atomic bomb, and the U.S. already seems to be at war, so who knows! Chaykin is not Roy Thomas, who would undoubtedly have sweated such details.

The villain is none of Blackhawk's past opponents, but rather a newly created character, British fascist and disgraced Hollywood star Sir Death Mayhew, a very thinly veiled pastiche of Errol Flynn, obviously informed by Charles Higham's muckraking 1980 bio ERROL FLYNN: THE UNTOLD STORY, which alleged that Flynn was a Nazi spy. Other biographers have challenged Higham's evidence and conclusions (although even the most generous accounts of Flynn's life are pretty seamy), but by the '80s Flynn was long dead, this was after all a comic book, and Mayhew is a pretty effective (and thoroughly risible) villain. Probably the biggest disappointment is that we don't ever actually see Mayhew's earlier encounter with Blackhawk, who he says had previously exposed him as a Nazi spy, and there's never really a clash between the Blackhawks and Mayhew's fascist White Lion squadron (which ends up basically carrying the water for Mayhew's mad plan to give himself "a Viking funeral").

The original BLACKHAWK series eventually introduced a Lady Blackhawk, blond adventuress Zinda Blake, but Chaykin creates his own version: a feisty American-born Communist expat, Natalie (Gurdin) Reed. She's a flight engineer as well as a pilot, although her primary function is to spar with Blackhawk. It's not hard to envision this scene with Harrison Ford as Janos and Karen Allen as Natalie:

One of the biggest complaints levied against this series is that the other Blackhawks get short shrift: They don't show up until well into the story, one of them is killed off-handedly, and they don't have much to do other than be exasperated with their boss.

Nonetheless, this was, believe it or not, the first time in their long history that all the Blackhawks actually got full names, including "Chop Chop" (Weng Chan), who subsequently became a supporting character in the John Ostrander/Graham Nolan HAWKWORLD series in the early '90s.

Your reaction to this series will likely depend on how you feel about the Blackhawks. If you'd never heard of them beyond perhaps glancing past their WHO'S WHO entry, it's a pretty good time — the story has some missed opportunities (including surprisingly little aerial action), and marginalizing the rest of the team is definitely a flaw, but it's entertaining in its slick '80s way, and it's more cohesive than a lot of Chaykin's other work from this period (e.g., AMERICAN FLAGG!, THE SHADOW, BLACK KISS, TIME²). Hardcore Blackhawk fans (and I guess there are still a few) generally hate it, and certainly for purists, the Evanier/Spiegle series is likely to be far more satisfactory. Also, Chaykin's particular schtick is something of an acquired taste, and if you're not a fan, his customary abrasive cynicism may be a bit much. However, you can tell he was having fun, which counts for a lot. He even manages to work in the Blackhawks' "HAWKAAAAA" battle cry at the end, though not their jaunty theme song:

This miniseries, originally released in what DC used to call its "Prestige Format," apparently didn't sell as well as anticipated; for a long time, you could find copies in comic shop bargain bins for a fraction of the cover price, which is how I first read it. However, in 2020, DC finally, miraculously, reprinted the series in trade paperback (as BLACKHAWK: BLOOD & IRON), also tossing in the 1989 SECRET ORIGINS entry (by Marty Pasko, Grant Miehm, and Terry Beatty), which attempts, with fair success, to square Chaykin's version with the original Eisner/Cuidera story, and the now hard-to-find ACTION COMICS WEEKLY Blackhawk serial by Mike Grell, Rick Burchett, and Pablo Marcos, which is set after the war and is basically a straightforward pastiche of the early years of Milt Caniff's STEVE CANYON newspaper strip. I actually find the ACTION COMICS WEEKLY serial significantly more cynical and abrasive than the Chaykin series, although Burchett's art is nice. DC hasn't bothered to reprint the short-lived BLACKHAWK ongoing series of 1989–1990, by Pasko (and later Doug Moench) and Burchett, which is just as well: Also set in the late '40s, it follows on from the ACW serial, but is a pretty much unmitigated disaster, full of puzzling creative choices, including some bizarre (and misogynistic) abuse of Natalie Reed. The art is fine (although the interiors never live up to Burchett's excellent covers), but it can't save the muddy, mean-spirited storyline, which is often confusing and intermittently preposterous in a way that clashes with the intended gritty tone, making it highly missable even for completists.

[oldshowbiz]

Love, Unbearable Style

[evilhorse]

Who’s Who in the DC Universe style pages from Blackhawk Annual #1 (circa May 1989)

[opera-ghosts]

ONCE UPON A TIME: Bayreuth Festival 1937. The Viennese Jaro Prohaska (1891-1965) sang Friedrich von Telramund in “Lohengrin”. The photo shows the bass-baritone in his dressing room.