#name one other saturday morning tv show from that time with such a lasting legacy

[challenge-ant]

(x)

[onenettvchannel]

THIS JUST IN: High Guardian Spice Releases a First Trailer at the V-CRX 2021 [#OneNETnewsEXCLUSIVE]

BURBANK, CALIFORNIA -- After a few years of negative controversies online from this web animated series in early 2019 onwards, High Guardian Spice has now releasing a first trailer at a Virtual Crunchyroll Expo (V-CRX) 2021. Due to a number of Corona Virus Disease-19 (CoViD19) cases in California, the entire physical Convention Expo event were decided recently for its 1-year postponement last August 2020 and transitions completely to next year by going virtual by August 6th thru 8th, 2021 as reported from the Crunchyroll News.

We teamed up with Crunchyroll to our independently-affiliated news media and broadcaster for OneNETtv Channel (ONC) and Radyo Bandera: Sweet FM Network (RBSFM) - Visayas, as the series creator named Raye Rodriguez via the exclusive Video Conferencing like Zoom to Radyo Bandera (an affiliation of OneNETnews in Negros Oriental from the Philippines).

In a latest full-hour virtual panel of "Hime Stage" last Saturday early morning at 3am in Manila (August 7th, 2021 - a day early from Friday afternoon: Pacific local time) under a "Crunchyroll Industry Panel" this year, Tim Lyu interviews with a show creator of High Guardian Spice for what does the web animated series look like in this synopsis, "The lives of 4 fierce girls converge at High Guardian Academy (HGA), the one place where they can stumble comically towards the adulthood, while becoming the heroes they've always admired. As they master the ways of battle and sorcery, the foursome form alliances, uncover legacies, face betrayals, and discover their true identities, while preparing to protect the world from an ominous unknown threat".

Lyu is presented a first trailer, as obtained exclusively to Radyo Bandera for a last presentation of Crunchyroll Originals in this year's panel.

===

One dragon was traveled outside the Lyngarth City, as 4 of the fierced girls were embarked for the adventure. A protagonist leader girl sees an unknown place below the dragon wind with a fresh air for what is new outside.

At a local town on foot, a tiny animal chases behind the two girls, while a giant person in front of a village house named Joseph (not an actual real name) are chilling in for a monitoring upon looking out for a possible enemies and/or soldiers later on.

Two girls are heading over to the High Guardian Academy (HGA) in this same city, they are about to enroll a 1st year Magical School (which is classified in relation for the Philippines' K-12 Program of Grade 7 as Junior High) with a selected interest for what is the best roles in magic per student. Whether if you're planned to have a witch to educate, potion making, magic spells or some leisure and recreational activities to do so, this academy in Lyngarth City is just for you to enroll. There is NO online classes before that.

In magical and physical practices such as a broomstick-like magical staff takes off for a ride in higher altitudes, smashing a bouldered rock with a sledgehammer, casting the spell, shooting arrows, stabbing the enemies with a sword, and more on these to learn in a magical school of Junior High.

The best experience of teachers, expertise and maybe the professors of HGA were educating the entire school year of its magical students as subjected for the approval of the Department of Education (DepEd).

Some magical students of HGA are well-trained on the spot with a sharpened dose of skills. It'll take months or years to master your magic with perfection and execute safely with your own self. This is to ensure all the magical students to play fair as possibly can and stay true to yourself without a fear. Because one day when you graduate a magical school of HGA in Lyngarth City, you are now officiated as a perfect magical guardian for life.

The best of all... Make some new friends with a quest of its adventures! Defend and protect yourself to the world, free from the enemies and monsters to save the day. You will earn yourself for a victory when defeated more of it than a darkness in a supportive way possible.

===

As mentioned from this first trailer, Rodriguez explains its web animated series takes place in the magical city of Lyngarth. 4 of its confirmed fictional protagonist characters where the HGA students are named to Rosemary, Sage, Parsley and Thyme. All of the girls from this said academy were attending a magical school upon starting for an upcoming adventure. He subsequently adds, they make friends and rivals, and they learn about some pretty huge world changing events that are happening in the shadows, and they make it their mission to help save the day.

New Key Visual for High Guardian Spice!! 🌟 #VCRX More: https://t.co/KWGCLEIHWR pic.twitter.com/fZRsf0F7aP

— Crunchyroll @ #VCRX! 🔥 (@Crunchyroll)

August 6, 2021

Key art poster of High Guardian Spice named James Betrez, a digital artwork person and his friend of Raye Rodriguez had come up with a final version of his art. He featured from a digital poster during a short online interview told Radyo Bandera, Amaryllis and Snapdragon are hanging out for a while, in front of the HGA. Based from this said poster art, there are bunch of the magical creatures that appears in this place around the Lyngarth City.

The former studio of Ellation Studios will be turned over possibly to Crunchy Onigiri, LLC in San Francisco, California, U.S.A.; as they rebranded into a regional anime-distributed office of Crunchyroll in Chinsinau, Moldova under the Consumer Division of Otter Media as Diez reported from a russian news site.

We contacted our news team for questioning to Crunchyroll via E-Mail and the Interactive Chat of V-CRX 2021 about the negative controversy issue of High Guardian Spice but, the streaming company manager deflects to decline for a comment.

However during a 'Question and Answer Feedback Panel' last Sunday early morning at 1am in Manila local time (August 8th, 2021) as Angie Hurst, Crunchyroll's Title Marketing Manager told Radyo Bandera, "It all depends on what type of kid content with your families out there that you've loved us to provide. We do have also a lot of shows that our kid-friendly in other Crunchyroll Originals' favorites, maybe we can do something around those shows in the future".

Hurst has learned the appropriate age viewing targets of High Guardian Spice, the exclusive demographics from this show will be targeted and classified as kid-friendly, almost less likely than adults this time. She clarifies about the Crunchyroll Originals from her statement during the V-CRX 2021, "Crunchyroll fans gets really excited about our current line-up. We have several original titles that are coming up onto some of them announced like Fena: Pirate Princess and others later down the pipeline. We take a look of their shows between the anime and cartoons together to be showned on stage without its confusion upon informing the fans will see it first. We're so ready to share with the world with you".

In conclusion as final, High Guardian Spice will now being classified as a web-animated cartoon show. Our research team of OneNETnews says, there is no evidence of "Anime" genre for the individuals of one-sided hate of LGBT and racism, without requiring a bad silence of Cartoons and/or Anime. This was like a Franchise Shutdown of ABS-CBN from the Philippine President named Rodrigo R. Duterte.

Whether you like it or not from this negative controversy a few years ago that no one talks about it for the dislikers, bashers, boycotters and even grave threats (under the Philippine Laws with a relation of Republic Act #10175 or the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 and Article 282 & 287a or the Revised Penal Code) from the early 2019 until today in 2021, the release date of High Guardian Spice hasn't been released yet for now.

Lyu assures its animation and production team of Crunchy Onigiri, LLC & Crunchyroll Originals may subject for a final touches, post-production episodes and the distribution rights were soon publicly available in a later several months or more. Crunchyroll promises to correct the hate of its mistakes if the web animated series are supportive smoothly for a 2nd chance.

The world premiere of High Guardian Spice, streaming soon (for real this time) on Crunchyroll.

----

Radyo Bandera: Sweet FM Network and Bandera News Philippines (both in Bacolod and Palawan) is a parent affiliated firm on this internet TV station of ONC and OneNETnews.

SPECIAL THANKS to Ridley Terrance & Marco Diaz (a fictional dual characters of Glitch Techs & Star vs. The Forces of Evil) for contributing this news article.

SCREENGRAB COURTESY: Virtual Crunchyroll Expo 2021 - Hime Stage & Crunchy Onigiri

SOURCE: *https://www.linkedin.com/in/rayetoons [Profile Reference] *https://uspto.report/TM/88096914 *https://expo.crunchyroll.com/en-us/panels/panel-information.html?gtID=726846&panel-name=Crunchyroll-Industry-Panel [Panel Schedule for the Crunchyroll Industry Panel] *https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2020/06/03-1/crunchyroll-expo-2020-cancelled-2021-dates-planned-for-august-6-8 [Reference Article #1] *https://ru.diez.md/2020/04/17/ellation-luchshiy-rabotodately-2019-goda-pereimenovyvaetsya-v-crunchyroll/ [Reference Article #2] *https://4nn.cx/.159103 [Reference Article #3] *https://ched.gov.ph/k-12-project-management-unit/ *https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugx-7iDVzRPOS8FJifB4AaABCQ [Referenced YT Post, as based from the Negative Comments of HGS - Aug72021] *https://expo.crunchyroll.com/en-us/panels/panel-information.html?gtID=727128&panel-name=Virtual-Crunchyroll-Expo-Feedback-Panel-with-Live-Q-and-ampA [V-CRX 2021's Feedback Panel - Schedule Information for Aug82021] and *https://steemit.com/minnowsupportproject/@discordiant/one-sided-hate-and-some-of-it-s-consequences [Referenced Article Opinion for One-Sided Hate]

HONEST DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed from this Exclusive News Article are not necessarily those from the Crunchy Onigiri, LLC. Furthermore, the assumptions of this Exclusive News Article will NOT state, intervene or reflect those of our affiliated reporters. The show, the station, the management, interwebs and the network. Thanks for reading! Stay safe and may the Celestia blesses you. Daghang salamat, mga Ka-Bandera and everypony. Later!

-- OneNETnews Team

[moviesrotbrains]

George A. Romero Day

I was nine or ten when I first saw Tom Savini’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1990) remake. It wasn’t my first horror film. FRANKENSTEIN (1931) was an early memory, and a giant life-sized poster of his monster1 protected my room from nightmares. I’d often dream of Freddy Krueger despite never having seen any of his films at that point. Horror was everywhere in the 1980s.

I was in awe of LIVING DEAD ‘90. The idea of being trapped in a house with evils lurking outside. The paranoia that brewed among the humans… how the humans became monsters long before they were even bit. It was heavy stuff at the time. I don’t know if I drew parallels to all of this or simply thought, “Wow, those intense zombie fights that would make a cool NES game!”2

Savini’s redo was probably my first actual zombie experience. Again, I had seen zombies in other media, most like Scooby Doo or whatever other Saturday morning cartoon cribbed and remixed the undead concept to sell toys or comicbooks.

It was a few years later that I finally got to see George A. Romero’s original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). I can’t recall if I first saw it on TV or an actual repertory screening of it. Memory is weird that way. I do remember being thoroughly blown away by it, despite more or less having memories of the plot from that remake.

I never had a problem with Black & White movies, having already been a full on film-junkie at that point, but somehow that black & white depiction of old school zombies felt hyper real. Unsettling. Fucking cool as hell. Unerving. Or maybe I was just a dumb kid. Oh, I definitely was a dumb kid, and still am, but that moment cemented George Romero in the pantheon of cinematic greats. Didn’t matter what else he did, he made NOTLD. He made a weighty zombie film full of social commentary and subtext.3 He popularized zombies. He didn’t need to do anything else.

Oh, but he did. He so did. 

It was around the time I was starting to consume more horror4 that a classmate had cut some scenes into a film project we were working on. My jaw was on the floor when I first saw the gory display of gritty carnage.

“This is from the 70s?” 

I knew so little. I definitely didn’t know those effects were also by Tom Savini, but everything was coming full circle, and that was one of the key moments that I fell in love with Savini without even knowing.

“You never seen this? Here, man, I’ll loan you it.”

And that was when I first saw Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978). Take some people of various walks of life and have them take refuge in an empty mall-- only to find the Zombies have returned to the place they frequented most.

“WHEN THERE’S NO ROOM IN HELL, THE DEAD WILL WALK THE EARTH!”

DOTD ‘78, The brutal and hilarious takedown of consumption and mall culture. Social Commentary, Zombie Gags, and Sick Kills. A film that’s loved by both critics and horror junkies. A film that said something and also entertained. George Romero in a nutshell.

A film that also became my gateway drug to Good Horror. And to Bad Horor. Again, I already loved horror. I loved the aesthetic, the vibe. Always drew monsters. Always collected weird monster toys. If a film was playing on a movie channel, I’d watch it. 

But Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD was THE film that made me WANT to actually seek them out. The film that made me want to rewatch my older brother’s old worn Betamax tapes of classic 80s horror flicks. A film that introduced me to Dario Argento.5 A movie that got me into the music of Italian Horror Prog Rock legends, GOBLIN. The life changing event that made me a nut for Savini and every 80s fx guru around. A story that made we want to watch every zombie film I possibly could. Good or Bad, and there’s a lot of bad out there. But there’s also a lot of good. So much good.

Romero’s DAY OF THE DEAD (1985) is one of those good zombie films. I saw a midnight screening with my dad at that same repertory cinema.6 This was Romero’s third DEAD film and took place on a military base. It introduced the concept of the military studying, training, and weaponizing the living dead. It also has one of the freakiest scenes involving hands and walls that still rattles me to this day. It has a stomach churning scene involving a ripped stomach. It’s wonderful, largely in part to once again utilizing Savini’s talents, as well as Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger-- who years later brought THE WALKING DEAD to your homes. Romero’s legacy still felt to this day.

That being said, Romero’s legacy was far more than just Zombie films, of course. He made a film, that’s rather timely now7, about a plague that made people crazy called... THE CRAZIES (1973).  There was another about a vampire wannabe named MARTIN (1978). A spectacular 80s horror anthology film series called CREEPSHOW8 (1982 & 1987). And a wonderfully bizarre film about a homicidal monkey named, appropriately enough, MONKEY SHINES (1988). I saw that last one before I even knew who he was but I never really forgot it. And those are just a few. 

He revisited his LIVING DEAD films with additional sequels in the 2000s and 2010s and was working on another up until his death. I was very lucky to briefly thank him during a convention, a year or so before he passed. Thanked him for the films. For everything.

He didn’t just impact me, of course. He impacted the people he worked with, who’ve gone on to impact other people in turn. He’s impacted the fans who got into horror because of him. He’s impacted the horror fans who weren’t even fans of his, because they most definitely liked something that was made by someone who was inspired by George Romero. 

You’ll see it with a DOTD’s actor cameo in a Rob Zombie film, or a gruesome creature effect in a micro-budget classic. You’ll see it in a modern classic like TRAIN TO BUSAN (2016) or while laughing your guts out at SHAWN OF THE DEAD (2004).

We aren’t just talking about movies, we’re talking books, music, and video games. 90s SIMPSON’s references. We’re talking art, tattoos, and comics. RPGs, Board games, Toys, and Funko Pops. Those Halloween decorations you keep in your home all year long . The clothes you wear. Your creepy and kooky badass goth aesthetic. A lot of what we love about horror today is thanks to George A. Romero.

He didn’t create zombies… but he certainly gave them life. He did more than that. He made horror important again.

I can’t do justice to George A. Romero with words. His work speaks for itself. So today, on what would have been his 81st Birthday, watch some Romero. If you’re out there quarantining, staying at home, under a curfew, and fearing the unfathomable, infectious dangers lurking outside your door… definitely watch Romero. 

This decade is off to a weird start, luckily we have Romero’s influence to get us through it.

Happy Birthday, George! And thank you for infecting me with horror.

-Theo Radomski, MOVIES ROT BRAINS

photo via Global News

---------

ENDNOTES FROM THE GRAVE

1. And you know what? I still call him Frankenstein. Because he’s essentially his son. That’s his creation. And Victor would have had the hubris to name his creation after himself if he had not abandoned that poor schlub. But I digress… 

2.  Actually, that’s exactly what I thought. And about 30 years later, Zombies are still a staple of modern video gaming, from Resident Evil and Doom still going strong after three decades, to Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption still having Zombie mods. To every friggin’ game out there that has any undead horror creeping about. The nine-year-old me is having a blast right now.

3. I had definitely caught on the subtext and themes by that point that I may have missed while watching the remake as a kid. Still a dumb kid, though.

4.  Thanks in part to HBO’s TALES FROM THE CRYPT reruns on FOX. Expect another nonsensical rambling piece on that show and the 50s comics that inspired it sometime in the future.

5.  And that opened the doorway into Giallo, Fulci, and a whole slew of Italian Exploitation and American Slasher films and that’s a whole other long screed for another time.

6.  My dad was another reason I love this genre. He loved horror movies. I still hear his voice in my head saying, “Ooooh, It’s a Scary Movie!” in his German accent.

7.  Actually, aren’t they all?

8.  Which has also had a revival in the form of Shudder’s excellent new CREEPSHOW anthology series made by Romero’s DAY OF THE DEAD Alumni Greg Nicotero! See how it’s all connected?

[awinger24]

My Issue With Disney Channel’s “Animation Cram Session”, Even the Promo

@mysteriesofmewni​ @cid331​ @jess-the-vampire​ @tangledbea​ @disneyschedules​ @dreamschedules​ @disneychannelforever99​

Disney Channel’s schedule is very inconsistent with little to no variety except for their live action sitcoms spamming the schedule. This post will be explaining how the channel treats their animated content, even summarized by just one promo.

Just look at one of the schedules courtesy of @disneyschedules​

I think this schedule is boring as what Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon are doing with their TV schedules.

Cartoon Network = Spamming Teen Titans Go! and Gumball while shows like Steven Universe, We Bare Bears, and OK KO! don’t get a lot of air time.

Nickelodeon = Spamming SpongeBob and Loud House, even Paw Patrol on it’s preschool block while it’s other shows get aired less and bumped to bad time slots (even some are on NickToons).

Disney Channel = Spamming Raven’s Home and Coop and Cami, also Sydney to the Max (even Bunk’d and Stuck in the Middle before they were removed). The issue is that they are focusing heavily on their sitcoms in terms of scheduling and advertising. 

DuckTales and Big City Greens are being promoted regularly but they air at time slots where much of the channel’s demographic is at school. Right now, Big City Greens is seen at 2:30, 3, and 4:30, so it seems to be the only cartoon they care about (a lot like how they treat Phineas and Ferb).

All this but shows like Milo Murphy’s Law, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Tangled: The Series, and Big Hero 6: The Series, are promoted less, even using a same generic promo without any special new ones to hype up audiences, and placed at an inconvenient time slots between 7-9 AM. Even worse is that viewers have to wake up very early even in the Central and Mountain Time Zones. 

For example, trying to get up at 5 AM in Colorado to watch Milo Murphy’s Law and Tangled might be difficult unless you set an alarm or go to sleep early. For Arizona, the issue is worse since there is no daylight savings time so, waking up at 4 AM just to watch it is a challenge.

With the four shows I mention, they only air a new episode once and they never rerun while they spam their schedule with the same sitcom repeats.

I have heard the senior vice president in charge of programming at Disney Channel, Paul DeBenedittis, was recently hired by Nickelodeon. Paul seems to be in charge of what we see on the channel. If he is gone, it’s unclear how things will change because Disney ABC Television has a team of executives still in control of the schedule, and we wonder who the new one is. But if Paul left before the spamming of Raven and Coop and Cami reruns, we have no idea if the new Senior VP is behind this.

TLDR: Disney Channel doesn’t schedule their animated content well and overshadows it while they only put so much focus on their Disney Channel sitcoms and stars (I mean Ruby Rose Turner, immediately had a song just after Coop and Cami aired).

Now, on to my next topic. I have some problems with this “Cram Session” promo.

Disney Channel has released a promo in September 2018 promoting audiences about it’s “Animation Cram Session” line up (which even includes Phineas and Ferb, before it was removed in January 2019 because they air it at 6 AM, not at 7.)

The promo still uses the same graphics that Disney Channel uses for it’s bumpers and commercials from 2017 up until February 2019.

https://miguelmonteagudo.com/disney-channel-2017-graphic-package

This was before the channel got a massive overhaul probably to reflect their new sitcom, Sydney to the Max. Appealing to the channel’s demographic of teenagers (mostly girls). Which if you were Walt Disney, this seems out of place from a company that had major successes in its movie divisions, theme parks, and merchandising.

The “Cram Session” promo was voiced over by none other than a man named Jim Pratt.

He has been doing Disney Channel promos/advertising since the 2010s alongside doing voice over for dozens a promos for other networks like TLC and Fox. In 2016, he has replaced the main Disney Channel voice over, Cam “Buzz” Brainard, and he ended up doing nearly every promo for the channel.

The way I describe his voice is “high energy” and “in your face” as a way to hype up people about a certain show or lineup.

http://www.jimprattvo.com/highenergy

Sure when I was very young, I have grown up with the voice overs of Mark Elliot, Brain Cummings, and even Beau Weaver but if I imagined them voicing over for the Disney Channel, they would’ve brought a new meaning of excitement while still keeping that trademark Disney magic.

It’s been updated a few times removing and adding clips from various shows.

- Version 1 (September 2018-October 2018), DuckTales, Big City Greens, Milo Murphy’s Law, Big Hero 6: The Series, Gravity Falls, Phineas and Ferb.

- Version 2 (October 2018-December 2018), DuckTales, Big City Greens, Milo Murphy’s Law, Gravity Falls, Phineas and Ferb.

- Version 3 (January 2019-February 24, 2019), DuckTales, Big City Greens, Milo Murphy’s Law, Star vs. the Forces of Evil

- Version 4 (February 25, 2019 - present), DuckTales, Big City Greens, Milo Murphy’s Law, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure

Because I have seen this a bunch of times, I can even almost identify some of the clips they use from some respective episodes.

DuckTales: The Other Bin of Scrooge McDuck!, The Last Crash of the Sunchaser!

Big City Greens: Parade Day, Welcome Home!, Gridlocked (even audio from it), Blue Tater, Family Legacy

Star vs. the Forces of Evil: The Season 3 intro, Marco and the King, Puddle Defender, King Ludo, and Toffee

Gravity Falls: Roadside Attraction

Now onto the promo along with the voice overs used.

(We show a sad face of Cricket from Parade Day, then we cut to Huey, Dewey, Louie, and Webby from Last Crash of Sunchaser as they all groan (clip is out of context).

VO #1: Sad not having school on weekends. 

Cricket: Aw, man. (Clip is from Blue Tater).

First off, this wouldn’t make sense if you were the channel’s main demographic of 6-14 (or even teenagers if you like some of these shows), because usually cartoons were a bit of a after-school (3-5 PM)/early morning before school (5-7 AM) thing because it was a way of entertaining children, sometimes even teens where their high schools start as early as 7 AM. Usually, children are happy there’s no school on weekends.

VO #2: You can still learn a thing or two with the Animation... Cram Session!

I sorta think think this is tedious and gives a mixed message. Usually real life cramming is a negative effect.

https://www.gavilan.edu/tutor/documents/DONTCRAM.pdf

This PDF page from Galivan College says,

“Cramming deposits information in your short term memory. Material reviewed in cramming sessions is not learned. Some students think they have learned the material and will be able to recall it for the midterm or final. Wrong! It’s gone! The information is generally unavailable to recall after one or two days. So, when students rely on cramming they cheat themselves out of a true education.

Cramming is also more work. It takes longer to learn material when it is done under pressure. Cramming does not save time. Cramming also has its limits. If you haven’t cracked a book in any of your courses, have daydreamed through the classes, or haven’t attended, cramming will not help. Cramming for several courses also doesn’t work.”

To apply this with how Disney Channel schedules their cartoons, they of course only air their animated shows once within the early morning hours of 6-9 AM on Saturday and Sunday. With the fact they only air one new episode of a show once (Milo Murphy’s Law, Tangled, Big Hero 6, Star vs, the Forces of Evil), this makes it even worse for people who don’t have access to DVR, Direct TV/Dish/Premium Cable (Spectrum) with Disney XD, On Demand, and even DisneyNOW, but only get Disney Channel through basic cable. 

Once they see the episode once, they might try and remember it, but with different mindsets, it’s highly possible they will forget it and move on with their repetitive sitcom reruns or the next cartoon to cram in. They wouldn’t be able to recall anything from the show, unless it’s amazingly entertaining and appealing thanks to either bright and fast-paced animation, emotional moments, or even the funniest moments.

Also, it seems odd they attached two random clips from two shows and edited them together.

Webby (in The Other Bin of Scrooge McDuck): Diamond dagger cuts through anything.

Cricket (in Blue Tater): Wait. Come again?

Well, it does segue into the next voice over but it gets kinda boring once you’ve seen it again and again.

VO #3: Every Saturday and Sunday morning, Cram in... all the adventure!

VO #4: Cram in... all the action!

These two does seems like a generic way to promote a lineup but it is all “in your face”

Now it features clips from the DuckTales episode, Last Crash of Sunchaser.

Dewey: Nothing can’t stop us.

(The plane jerks as Huey, Dewey, Louie, and Webby jerk in a halt too.)

Cut to a later scene

Louie: WE GOTTA GO NOW!!

Launchpad: Now?

Dewey/Scrooge: No!

(Launchpad starts the Jeep)

The scene then cuts to a clip from Big City Greens’ “Blue Tater as the show’s main characters fly out of a shopping cart.

Note: These clips being edited together like that and seeing it over and over again when it comes on during commercials is just flat in some way. 

(Shows clips of characters laughing/having fun. One of them is from Gridlocked.)

VO #5: And cram in all the laughs in the Animation Cram Session!

VO #6: Weekend mornings starting at 7 on Disney Channel

Again, the issue with airing these shows once at 7-9 AM seems to be inaccessible for people who want to sleep in. Or don’t know it’s on because they live in the Central and Mountain Zone and it airs 1 and 2 hours early respectively.

Gramma Alice talks to Tilly

Gramma Alice: You kids are smarter than you look.

All set to generic high-energy music (pop/rock/electronic), this “Cram Session” promo just doesn’t make sense and with some of the shows just getting generic promos alongside it, and seeing it a bunch of times with the same clips reused, especially focusing more on DuckTales and Big City Greens, not giving as much spotlight on the other cartoons, makes this a questionable promo.

It all comes together the main issue with how Disney Channel is treating their cartoons. 

Bad time slots, little to no promotion, not even individual promotion with the exception of DuckTales and Big City Greens (which the channel favors more than their other cartoons). 

Plus this promo is basically saying to the channel’s demographic of 6-14 year olds that you should “Cram In All”. 

Sure this seems to be a Saturday Morning cartoon lineup thing but the fact that this is Disney Channel, they choose to put all their animated shows at an inconvenient air time while they spam their sitcoms. It’s more of a lose-lose situation. Milo Murphy’s Law, for example, suffers in low ratings.

Sadly but true, cable is decreasing (even prices are increasing) as Disney is launching its new streaming service, Disney+ very soon. Even DisneyNOW seems to be the current way of watching/streaming shows (with TV provider or Apple TV).

Still, I just don’t see why Disney Channel would spam their sitcoms (alongside Big City Greens which is a good exception), while their animated shows don’t meet up to the potential if the channel airs them at prime time.

To conclude, Disney Channel’s schedule isn’t full of variety, the “Cram Session” promo has some issues, and the future of our favorite shows and how we watch Disney’s TV animated cartoons is uncertain. Also, Disney Channel after Paul DeBenedittis’ departure leaves us in a mystery who is his replacement and how the schedule will change in the future.  Plus, I provided you some brief Disney Channel history.

P.S. I hope Amphibia, 101 Dalmatian Street and The Owl House have potential for great ratings if Disney Channel cares for their cartoons more.

[lookbackmachine]

Disney Afternoon History Part 1

Disney Afternoon Part 1

Transcript of: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-look-back-machine/id1257301677?mt=2

[music]

0:00:06 Speaker 1: Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, The Fonz, was the pinnacle of cool for a generation. The leather jacket, the jukebox and "Ayyy". And in 1981, he hit the cultural height of fame with his own Saturday morning cartoon show. Unlike, say, Mork & Mindy in which Robin Williams was limited by the constraints of reality, there's nothing inherently animated about Happy Days, but that wasn't a deterrent for the Academy Award winning studio Hanna-Barbera, when they created this.

[music]

[video playback]

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0:01:19 S1: The animated Fonz didn't just jump the shark, he time traveled so he could ride a brontosaurus. Jumping the shark seemed baked into the premise of many of the cartoons from this period, because they started as a gimmick and only kept gimmicking. Besides a big hit with The Smurfs, this period, for Hanna-Barbera, was littered with Scooby-Doo knockoffs.

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0:01:49 S1: The studio that once produced The Flintstones, Quick Draw McGraw, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi, Snagglepuss and The Jetsons was producing uninspired paint by numbers replicas. The parity was at its peak when the animated Fonz had a supporting role in Laverne & Shirley in the Army. The cartoons essentially amounted to barely animated fan fiction. For years, art and commerce clashed on Saturday mornings and commerce had a far better record. And yet, only four years later, a cartoon would raise the artistic bar for the medium, and strangely, it would be based on the currency of kid commerce, candy.

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0:02:34 S1: Animated television started in 1949, as it should, a talking rabbit wearing a suit of armour, riding a horse toward camera. It was the spectacular opening of Crusader Rabbit, whose other animation wasn't nearly as good as the opening. It was designed, with little to no movement, by Alex Anderson, who was inspired by Baby Weems, from Disney's behind the curtain feature, The Reluctant Dragon. In the Baby Weems segment, there are story boards with a tiny bit of motion included to keep it from being entirely static. There are quick cuts, camera movements, and narration to carry the short all the way to the end. After seeing this, Anderson believed he could use this barebones style to have notoriously expensive animation make financial sense for television. He partnered with Jay Ward and the two created The Crusader Rabbit shorts for NBC. The shorts were successful and ran for several years, which sparked Anderson and Ward to create the cartoons that they were famous for, Rocky and Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right. Despite their massive success, their partnership didn't end well. In fact, it got worse, even though Ward was already dead. Alex Anderson, animator.

0:03:45 Speaker 2: I was surprised that... To discover that my 50% equity in the characters had disappeared and was not being honored. Yeah, I went to court, sued, got them to acknowledge that I was the creator. I learned about it at his funeral, when I was doing a eulogy and the names of several of us who were doing a eulogy were indicated, and it said Alex Anderson, creator of Bullwinkle and Rocky. And somebody had scratched it out and said, "An artist who worked for Jay Ward." And I thought, "Well, what's this? Why is this in?" Then I started checking and I found that, indeed, Jay had registered the characters in his name.

0:04:31 S1: The show's limited animation technique was taken by Hanna-Barbera and updated with better animation to produce several hits like Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, and eventually the Flintstones, a primetime hit for ABC in 1960. Hanna-Barbera went on to an unprecedented run of hits and non-hits, but when it came to television animation, Hanna-Barbera was in a class of their own. However, things fell off in the 1980s. In those years, The Smurfs were their only big hit. This left a gaping hole in the market that was filled by cartoons based on toys, like GI Joe and He-Man. But their ratings were drooping as well. And then something happened that had never happened before. During the entire history of television animation, from 1949 to 1984, the most famous animation company in the world never produced a single animated television cartoon. That was about to change with a single brunch, but the events leading up to that brunch showed an American titan in peril.

0:05:36 S1: Walt Disney was dead, to begin with, he died in 1966. But he was still running the company from his grave. After all the company's internal motto was, "What would Walt do?" But hypothesizing about what a genius would do is not the same as having the genius actually there. Because when it came to the question of "What would Walt do?" the company wasn't guessing correctly. Even though it was 1984, its last motion picture hit had been The Love Bug, in 1968. And so, because the company no longer had Walt, it figured the next best thing was Ron Miller, an ex Ram quarterback and Walt's son-in-law, who became CEO in 1978.

0:06:16 S1: The best quote to describe Miller's tenure was his own, "Because of Walt, because of his influence, I second-guess myself all the time." Miller wasn't only contending with Walt's legacy, he was also dueling with E. Cardon Walker, who was the chairman of the board. Walker had been one of Walt's right-hand men. He was in charge of advertising and public relations. And in his tenure, Walker launched the Disney Channel, opened Epcot and Disneyland Tokyo, but he also had peccadilloes that were killing the company. Walker was not in favor of a $1 parking fee. "The parking lot is the first thing the guests see. We have to keep our prices low." And despite having been in charge of advertising, Walker did not believe in advertising or marketing. The Disney parks did not run ads or commercials. For some perspective, the first American newspaper advertisement was in 1704. In 1922, Queensboro Corp buys airtime from AT&T to create the first radio commercials in advertising history. The first TV ad was aired for Bulova watches in 1941, which cost $9. Advertising was not new, and yet, E. Cardon Walker wouldn't do it.

0:07:26 S1: In fact, Walker was even stingy on advertising when it came to the motion picture division. Budgets for advertising were growing since the big blockbuster Jaws. ET had cost $10 million in ads alone, but when Disney's TRON came out, they gave it such a minuscule advertising budget that no one knew the film was even out. The film took a $17 million write-down. While all this was going on, there was another heir to the Disney throne who was dubbed the idiot nephew by Uncle Walt himself, who once said, "My nephew will never amount to anything." Thanks to Walt-think inside the studio, Roy Disney was considered the village idiot. It didn't help that he wasn't the most charismatic individual. John Sanford, director, Home On The Range.

0:08:11 Speaker 3: He had this legacy kinda handed to him, and I think he really took it seriously. But on the other hand, he was just a normal guy who happened to have a ton of money. We were in La Verne, California, I think it was, at this movie theater. Doing a preview for Home On The Range, and there was a Bed Bath & Beyond, and Patty suddenly turns to Roy and says, "Oh, Roy, they've got glasses on sale. Do you mind if I go looking?" "Eh, go ahead, Patty." And Patty runs into the Bed Bath & Beyond and he says, "You know, we need to get new glasses. You know, you've got kids and they break all the glasses. And suddenly, it's 20 years later, and you don't have one glass that matches. So Patty wants new glasses." And he's just talking very frankly like that. And I said, "Yeah, I know that. I know how that goes." And then Patty comes running up. "Oh, Roy. They've got a wonderful set of glasses that are on sale. Let's go in and get them." And Roy goes, "Well, I don't wanna carry them all over the goddamn mall." And she goes, "Okay. I guess we'll get them later." [chuckle] It was just fun to watch them, 'cause it was like... Reminded me of watching my grandparents bicker.

0:09:12 S1: Roy didn't like his role at the company, nor constantly being at odds with Miller, so Roy left in 1977, but remained on the board. From afar, he watched the animation division go to hell, which was once the company's crown jewel. On Miller's watch, the Fox and the Hound was almost torpedoed, when soon-to-be-legendary animator Don Bluth left the studio after run-ins with Miller and the executives, and Bluth didn't leave alone, he took 15 animators with him. At the time, Ed Hansen, the head of the animation department, said this, "The whole animation department could have gone under at that time. As it was, we made it, but the release of the film has been delayed, and we lost half of our creative staff." Bluth had his own thoughts. "The thing that would help Disney the most is to have a living profit, not a committee. They need somebody who knows and cares about animation. They won't roll up their sleeves and plunge in like Walt did. They wanna hire somebody to do it. It just doesn't work that way. I think they've found that out now. It was a matter of constantly bumping up against Ron Miller and the older guys, people who wouldn't relinquish authority and who wouldn't make a decision except by committee. It just doesn't work that way. They had some of the best talent in the world there. But if a production head doesn't have talent or push, you won't make it."

0:10:29 S1: In spite of everything, the company did have some good news. Miller had gone against the Disney Brain Trust and was making adult fare with his newly-created Touchstone Pictures, and he had a huge hit on his hands with Ron Howard's Splash, on March 9th, 1984. It just also happened to be the same day that Roy Disney decided to resign from the board. Roy Disney's resignation set off a chain reaction. Corporate raiders tried to take over the company. Miller was forced out. Walker retired. Roy took a vice-chairman and chairman of animation role. Michael Eisner became CEO and Chairman of the Board. Frank Wells became President, and Jeffrey Katzenberg took the role of Walt Disney Studios chairman, and the corporate raiders were turned away. Eisner and Katzenberg had blazed a trail at Paramount and became the talk of the town for their track record and by throwing their names into the press as much as humanly possible. Meanwhile, Frank Wells had been vice chairman of Warner Brothers. They set about using their industry experience to transform a company that was run like a mom-and-pop shop.

0:11:33 S1: The fourth member of their team was assets, and there were assets galore that Disney simply wasn't utilizing to their full potential, or at all. The Walt Disney Company was like the drowning man in the flood who doesn't accept help from a rowboat, motorboat, or helicopter because he believes God will save him. The man dies, and he meets God and asks, "Why didn't you come to my rescue?" God says, "I sent you a rowboat, motorboat and a helicopter. What do you want from me?" Now, Eisner, Wells and Katzenberg would take the rowboat, motorboat and helicopter to the promised land. Under their leadership, the company began advertising its parks. Attendance rose 10%. They raised the price of admission, which led to hundreds of millions of dollars into the company's coffers. Eisner releases Disney classics on home video. It was initially sacrilegious in the company, but money talks. Cinderella alone made $180 million in revenue. Animation was losing money, so they thought about shutting it down. But Eisner didn't wanna piss off Roy, so they kept it around. It was a smart choice because Roy was a little bit more cunning than he seemed. He was no Richard III but he'd just usurped his own brother-in-law. And because Eisner would later fail to keep him happy, Roy would take out Eisner decades later. Roy might have been treated like Fredo, but he was secretly Michael Corleone.

0:12:57 S1: But that was a long way off, now Eisner was simply basking in his good fortune. "Such a bounty has fallen in my lap. Every day a new asset falls out of the sky. The real estate is just gravy, there are 40 unused acres next to Disneyland planted in strawberries." To re-emphasize his life on easy street, he was drinking a milkshake when he said that. And of course, there was another blue-ocean opportunity for Eisner to slurp up, animated television. On Eisner's first day at the studio, he announced he wanted to have a Disney TV cartoon on the air in 10 months.

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0:13:35 S1: Willie Ito, animator.

0:13:41 Speaker 4: We knew internally at Disney that things are gonna start happening. And so, one day, they had all of the Burbank employees meet in the backstage set, we had a big open set area and everyone from the studio was there. And Michael Eisner was introduced and the whole bit. Then he gave us the overall picture as to what to expect in the future now that the new regime is here. And one of the things he commented on was we're going to alt Hanna-Barbera, Hanna-Barbera.

0:14:20 S1: According to the New York Times, he asked someone to find them the six most creative people at Disney to figure out how to make Disney TV animation work, which leads to the aforementioned brunch that started it all. One of the creatives brought to the table was Jymn Magon. Magon had produced story records for Disney music for eight years. Why bring a record producer, with no animation experience, to the table?

0:14:41 Speaker 5: I ask myself that every morning when I wake up, [chuckle] it's a bit amazing. Well, one of the things that Michael Eisner did before he was at Paramount was... I think he was head of ABC children's programming, I think he told me that he was the guy who actually bought the Scooby-Doo franchise from Hanna-Barbera, which of course, is still running after all these years. So, that was very successful, and I think he always had a soft spot for TV animation, and so when he took over the company in '84, one of the first things he wanted to do was to start a TV animation department. So, being new to the company, I think he just looked at different departments and said, 'I wanna meet some of the bright people that are doing things here at the company.' And we had just made a lot of money off of Mickey Mouse disco and a lot of projects that were new at the time in the record business. And so Gary Krisel, who was the president of Disneyland records, and myself, were invited over to Michael Eisner's house on a Sunday morning. Michael Eisner invited a bunch of people... Not a lot, I think there were about 12, in all, that were at this meeting in his living room on a Sunday morning in Bel-Air. And I had never been to Bel-Air, never been invited to someone's house up there, [chuckle] so, it was very fancy-shmancy for me.

0:16:01 S1: And there was also Tad Stones, who began his work at Disney in 1974. He was an uncredited animator on the Fox and the Hound as late as 1981. Now, he too was at the brunch.

0:16:13 Speaker 6: I was in Features, I eventually moved into Story, went to Imagineering and help design rides for Epcot Center, and back in charge of some Epcot Center documentaries that then never happened. Eventually ended up back in Features, I'm not sure they knew what to do with me. And that's about the time management changed, with Michael Eisner coming in and Jeffrey Katzenberg and those guys. And I was... Along my trials through the company, I had done some animation development for the guys over in the merchandising side of things 'cause they felt like the only way to really sell toys is to have some cartoons on TV. You can't wait for these features that come out every four years, or so, 'cause that's what it was at the time. Anyway, those same guys were pitching TV animation to Michael Eisner. I was actually on vacation, but I got a call that said, "We know you're on vacation, we know it's gonna be Sunday, but would you mind coming to Michael Eisner's house to talk about television animation?" So I was like "Yeah [chuckle], I think I can make time." Went there with like 10 people. These were the guys who basically I had worked with before and they were impressed with what I had done. And from the beginning, Michael Eisner felt like Disney is the top in animation, and it should be in every area that animation is in, it doesn't mean that television animation is going to look like feature animation, but it should be the best TV shows in animation on TV.

0:17:39 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:17:40 Speaker 7: Michael revealed that he wanted to start this new department, he wanted us to come up with some ideas and whatnot, and he actually came up with an idea himself, which was his kids who were in the other room eating cereal in the kitchen, in their pajamas [chuckle] on Sunday morning, had just come back from camp and I guess they had told him that they were eating these really cool candies called Gummi bears. And he said, "I just like the sound of that." And he looked at me, which was really weird, 'cause he didn't know me at all, and he said, "Make me a show called Gummi Bears." And I thought, "Why'd he pick me out?" [laughter] And I said, "Oh yeah, cool, great."

0:18:20 S6: So I pitched an old project, Mickey and the Space Pirates, they liked it a lot, but then they said, "No Mickey... We wanna make sure we can pull this off. Mickey is too precious." So there was a lot of respect there going in. No one was prepared to actually pitch shows. I had that artwork left over from stuff I had pitched to the merchandising guys, who were in the room, but it was kind of more feeling what Eisner wanted.

0:18:43 S7: But Tad was at that meeting, and he didn't come over for probably a full season to TV animation, but he eventually did, and thank God he did, because we worked on so many shows over there. But yeah, he was at that initial meeting, and he had a lot of great ideas. But he didn't come join us right away. And afterwards, we all met at a coffee shop, in Brentwood, and I remember us all kind of looking at each other, like, "This guy's crazy. Who wants to do a show about characters that get eaten every week?" [chuckle]

0:19:15 S6: And I remember saying, "Well, he seemed pretty sharp and respectful of animation, except for that idea about Gummi bears, that's like doing pepperoni people, or something. I don't know how to do that".

0:19:25 S7: So I think we all kind of felt like, "He's a busy man. This will all go away". It was about two weeks later I got a call, "So where's my show?" "Well, I'm writing it now", [chuckle] and I typed up something and it was horrendous, but it was the beginnings of development. And so I ended up, at one point, doing two jobs, I was still doing my record producing, but I was also developing two shows, both Wuzzles and Gummi Bears for Disney. And we didn't even have offices for the department back then. I remember we went over to a fellow named Lenny Ripps. Lenny Ripps was responsible for creating Full House and he was under contract at Disney for the time, and Lenny said, "Come on over, let's talk about this." And so there was Gary Krisel, who was going to be the president of the new division. So he was doing double duty at the same time, with records and TV animation. And Michael Webster turned out to be our office manager, and there was me. And that was the four of us sitting there around a card table in Lenny's office kicking ideas around. And that's how that department started, very bizarre and very humble.

0:20:47 S7: I remember having to take pitches from people and we were discouraged from doing that, because Disney became a big company and had deep pockets, and of course, people would come in and pitch, and then say, "You stole my ideas." And so pretty much kept to ourselves and almost all the development was from inside, from people on staff. So we didn't... It was in the time of [0:21:10] ____ and other people pitching their ideas from outside. There was a travel office for Disney across the street from the studio in Buena Vista and it was just a crummy old office building. And I think that's where we put Art Vitello when they brought him in to run Gummi Bears. And they were just sort of makeshift offices, they put some of the artists on the back lots, above the tea room. We were just spread all over. So we all became sort of bastard children.

0:21:41 Speaker 8: This is the great book of Gummi.

0:21:45 Speaker 9: What's in it?

0:21:46 S8: Well, we really don't know.

0:21:49 S6: Well, they actually developed Gummi bears kind of on a candy basis with a villain called Licorice Whip, I think. And they were actually gonna have the Gummi bears give dental hygiene messages at the end of every show. That went nowhere, and they threw it all out and came up with what was on the air.

0:22:06 S1: Instead of candy, the show got a complicated 500-year-old plus mythos. The Gummi bears were descendants of the great gummies, tasked with protecting all things Gummi from human greed and exploitation.

0:22:18 S7: I was very fortune that I got to work with two of my childhood heroes, which were Rocky and Bullwinkle. I found myself staring at Bill Scott a lot because besides doing all the voices of George of the Jungle and Tom Slick and Bullwinkle, he was a fantastic writer, and he had written all of these commercials for Quaker Oats, Quisp and Quake and Cap'n Crunch, and stuff like that. He once said to me, "You know the old story, Jymn, about how do you make a statue of an elephant? Well, you start with a block of granite and you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant". He says, but writing a script is different. You start with nothing, and you chip away until you have a story. [chuckle] And I thought, "Oh, that's interesting. You don't even have the rock to work with." [laughter] And I just thought he was a delight. He died after the first season of Gummi Bears and that was just devastating for us.

0:23:16 Speaker 10: Welcome to the land of Wuz, where nobody is like anybody you've seen before. The people who live in Wuz are called Wuzzle, naturally. And as you've probably guessed, Wuzzles are a little bit, you know, different.

0:23:33 S7: I didn't stay on Wuzzles. Once we got the two shows sold, I stayed exclusively on Gummi Bears. But in the early days, we were trying to put together these shows to pitch to the networks. And we had a show called Jumble Isle, the idea was that there were these animals that were jumbled up, and there were two of each animal. And, lo and behold, it turns out Hasbro has... Already has a project called The Wuzzles, which they had plush animals at the time. And, again, I don't know the ins and outs of the business side, but it was decided, "Well, why create these things when they already exist and let's just do a deal with Hasbro to take our development and put it with their characters." which I'm not even sure they had much of a back story. But once the deal was made, then we'd develop them into talking, breathing, and living characters. [chuckle] And so what happened was that Wuzzles then went on to have its own production department, just like Gummi Bears had, but like I said, my involvement at that point, I had dropped out after it sold to CBS.

0:24:39 S1: Besides Wuzzles and Gummi Bears, Disney television animation had one more venture in its early years. Fluppy Dogs was the first animated Disney feature for television. The show revolved around the Fluppy Dogs going through an interdimensional portal to Earth. It got a 5.3 rating on November 27th, 1986. The numbers were so low that it killed off the idea for a television series based on the special, and with that, Fluppy Dogs was over before it even really got started.

0:25:08 S7: Fluppy Dogs was sort of the... I kinda call it the albatross around the neck. [chuckle] It was a cross to bear. And I think everybody in the department worked on it at one time or another. And so what happened was that we were gonna do this Fluppy special and it was going to be the kickoff for a series and it just never took off, it never... It just never happened, and I think we were all kind of glad it didn't go any further. I mean, they were cute, but I just remember it being like, "Oh crap, I don't wanna go on another meeting about Fluppy Dogs." [chuckle]

0:25:49 Speaker 11: We've been to so many worlds. I don't know how long it's been since I've seen my family.

0:25:55 Speaker 12: You can talk!

0:25:56 S1: I wish you wouldn't keep saying that, I've been talking since I was 3.

0:26:00 S1: I'm sorry, but I mean, talking dog? Fluppy, and doorways to other worlds? I just wanna find one world, my world.

0:26:12 S1: Disney was going in cheap in terms of the price for pristine Disney Animation. Disney knew they couldn't afford movie quality animation and expect to make a profit. But Disney still spent $285,000 on each episode of Wuzzles. That was double what Hanna-Barbera would spend. It was so much, in fact, that it was $35,000 more than it was being paid by CBS. Why spend so much? The reasoning was simple, if it looked better than everything else on TV, then the characters could become part of the parks, and because of the success rate of their recent films, Disney needed characters more than ever. Willie Ito, animator.

0:26:51 S4: When I was at Hanna-Barbera, Michael Eisner was the VP of Children Programming at ABC. So when we were doing presentations and they would fly out here to review what we were working on, Joe would ask us to come in on a Saturday, sit at our desk as if we're busy bees and then bring Michael Eisner and his people through, and says, "Hey, here, look, they're all working on the new show idea," and then see the presentation. So I knew of Michael Eisner. And so, when he says he's gonna hop Hanna-Barbera Hanna-Barbera, I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I came back to Disney to get away from this rat race, and I hope we're not gonna be all caught up in the middle of it." Well, to make a long story short, a few months later, a fellow named Michael Webster, who I worked with in animation, was hired on to be production coordinator for the newly forming Disney TV Animation. Michael got with me and says, "How would you like to come back to animation?" I said, "Michael. No, please don't, don't do this to me. I'm perfectly happy. I'm actually in my new career back at Disney." And he says, "Well, we're gonna have a little boutique operation. All we're gonna do is be responsible for the scripts and we'll do story boards and maybe character design, but otherwise, everything is going to be farmed off to a production house. So we're just gonna have a little boutique operation and let me dangle this carrot in front of their view."

0:28:29 S4: What it was is, he says, "I know you used to make a lot of trips to Japan and Asia, and you know a lot of the production houses over there. So I wanna send you there and meet with these different companies and talk business." And he says, "Well, we'll be sending you first class. You'd stay at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo." And then all that. How could I resist? Plus, the fact that there was a handsome increase because of my position, would be like an executive thing. "Michael, I'm gonna give you three months. That's what I could promise you." So, "Okay, that's a deal." I did the pilot storyboard for a two-minute pilot. The soundtrack was recorded. They cut the exposure sheets, and the whole bit, and with those two copies under my arm, I flew to Tokyo. As I was registering, this American gentleman approaches me, "So are you Mr Ito?" I say, "Yeah." And he says, "Oh, hey. I understand you're here to make pilot films for your fledging Disney TV animation." I said, "Yeah, I am. You could talk to me initially, but the decision will be Michael Webster, who will be arriving here in about half an hour."

0:29:50 S4: So we sat in the lobby, having a cocktail, and then Michael shows up and he's at the desk and I said, "Well, there's Michael now." So, well, we flag him over and he says... The fellow talking to us says, "What we wanna do is we wanna throw our hat in the ring. I understand you're gonna be talking to people at Toei Animation in Tokyo, then you're gonna be flying to Korea, and you're gonna be meeting with Steve Hahn at the Korean studio." I said, "Well, we only have two sets of soundtrack, exposure sheets and copies of the layouts and storyboards." He said, "No problem, they can make copies of all that." "So, okay, what do you think, Michael?" And Michael said, "Yeah, sure, why not?" So we awarded them to also do a pilot. Three months later, the three studios submitted their two-minute pilot. So the three pilots came in. We all go in the sweat box, all the executives are there, I think even Roy Disney Jr was sitting in on it, and all of the newly-appointed executives of the newly-formed Disney TV Animation.

0:31:02 S4: So we sit there and, number one, okay, number two, then number three, then the lights go on, and then now we have to say which one we liked, and it was unanimous. We liked this one, say, number two. Well, it turned out that that was produced by a company named Tokyo Movie Shinsha. It had nothing to do with the other two that we submitted, but this one had the rich, full animation and all that. So they got the contracts. So TMS is the producing company. TMS, they later did the Little Nemo in Slumberland feature also, and so they had access to a lot of young Disney animators with full animation training to work on their project. As a matter of fact, even that two-minute pilot, they sort of farmed out some of the animation to Disney animators, that's why it showed such quality and it beat out the Koreans and the Japanese studio.

0:32:08 S4: They cheated, but, in essence, they... Disney kept striving to get the utmost in animation quality, which is good, because that was one of my concerns. If Disney gets into TV animation, are they gonna lose their integrity by just schlocking it on, doing limited animation, and all that, but the quality is there.

0:32:34 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:32:35 S7: I remember we did a lot of tests with other studios. We ended up with... At least for Gummi Bears, we ended up with TMS, Tokyo Movie Shinsha, and I had to remember, when I was really used to looking at hamburger sort of animation, which is you move across the proscenium left to right, the background that keeps repeating, and that's sort of what we grew up with and were used to. And I remember the first episode of Gummi Bears, I saw Sir Tuxford ride his horse into camera. The horse came to camera, he did a full turn around, which you'd never saw in TV animation, it was like, "Holy cow! Look at what just happened!" And it was a real leap in the animation quality, and I remember talking to Karl Geurs, who was working over at, I think he was at FilmNation at the time, and he eventually came over to Disney to do the Winnie the Pooh show. And he said everyone in other studios was talking about, "Did you see what Disney did on Saturday morning? Oh, my God!"

0:33:38 S7: So the quality really raised the bar. Now, true, it wasn't feature animation, but it was a big jump in quality. Finally, they put us all together over at the Cahuenga Building, which was on Cahuenga, near Universal Studios, and it just got bigger and bigger as we added more and more people. So, on the one hand, we weren't on the lot anymore. The sort of good news was, nobody was looking over our shoulders, so that department started and grew and made its success sort of off by itself. Nobody was actually sitting down reading, our scripts, and saying, "Gee, I don't think this is very Disney, or I don't think... " There just wasn't any interference because they had other and bigger fish to fry. We went off and sold our first two shows, Wuzzles and Gummi Bears, to CBS and NBC respectively. And it just took off from there.

0:34:29 S1: Willie Ito.

0:34:30 S4: We had our own growing pains within the studio, getting people together, finding a crew, a good animator, story, bit people. And before that three months was up, I could see the frenetic pace. We were moving from office to office because it was like we move in and then they say, "You know, it's not enough room because we're expanding our staff." And I'm thinking, "What happened to the boutique operation? Now we're gonna have a whole staff. And then am I gonna have to do what I did at Sanrio, is manage this crew of people and all that." So I started feeling the pressure of that position, but in the meanwhile, I went back to Carson. And Carson van Osten, who was my boss in consumer products, and I said, "Oh, Jesus, it's the same old thing. Before I get too caught up into it, can I come back?" So he said, "Oh, yeah, there's always an opening for you to come back." So I came back to consumer products, but I stayed with the Disney TV, as far as merchandise and by-products and whatever else, but I was now out of the production rat race.

0:35:55 S1: Tad Stones.

0:35:56 S6: Anyway, I went back to Features, and pitched some stuff, and actually was considering leaving the company, and maybe just freelancing and then going into more, actually, science fiction short stories and novels. I met one of the guys who was then the head of the TV department that was just starting, and mentioned, "Hey, do you have any freelance opportunities?" And he said, "Oh, I don't know if you wanna do that, why don't you come and visit?" And I came to visit their very small building and he introduced me around, he said, "Yeah, Tad may be coming over here." Actually, he said, "Tad would be coming over here." And I just was quiet. I didn't know what he was talking about, but they ultimately brought me over to be the creative manager of the department, in which I was supposed to take pitches and come up with stories, and actually, I was supposed to take pitches more than come up with stuff, but I wasn't geared that way.

0:36:50 S6: And we had a gong show coming up with Michael and Jeffrey, which is you do like a two cents description of a show and they either like it or not. And I think we pitched 22 ideas. I think 18 of them were mine. And it's not like they were fully developed, it was like, "Hey, Trojan Birds and Legionnaire Cats, the city of Troy is up in trees, like Roadrunner and Coyote," and they gong. Anyway, Gummi Bears had been through two seasons, it was run by Art Vitello and created by Art Vitello and Jymn Magon. And Jymn had had no animation experience before that, Disney just said, "Hey, if you want the show, this is the guy who's gonna do it." So there was always a contentious relationship there. And by the third season, NBC said, "We want to change," and they tapped me and Jymn went on to, I think, DuckTales development at that point. Anyway, so that's how I got to Gummi Bears, it was just kind of like, "Hey, you, over here". And that started me story editing and producing.

0:37:51 S1: Willie Ito.

0:37:52 S4: But the question always was, "Well, how come Wuzzles and Gummi Bears, when Disney has such a stable of great characters that they could work from?" But I think initially, they says, "Well, we're gonna be making cartoons for Saturday morning, and that's a lesser market quality-wise, and we don't want to ruin Disney's image by turning out the limited animation with Mickey Mouse and all that, so let's go with new characters." But then the shows were a hit and it started to see that Disney TV was getting some recognition, and so Roy Disney said, "Well, come on, let's... Let's use some of our own characters, that way the market and the kids will gravitate to it knowing it's a known Disney character." So we did DuckTales.

0:38:52 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:38:53 S7: After two seasons of Gummi Bears, I moved over to work on DuckTales, which was a big deal at the time, we were doing this as a syndicated program as opposed to a network program, and it had already been developed, Tedd Anasti and Patsy Cameron were always creating episodes.

0:39:10 S1: Patsy Cameron-Anasti and Tedd Anasti, writers.

0:39:14 Speaker 13: My career in writing really started when I met my future husband, Tedd.

0:39:19 Speaker 14: That would be me.

0:39:20 S1: I was 18 and I auditioned for Walt Disney's new Mickey Mouse Club as a performer, and Tedd was a writer for Walt Disney and chose me at an audition, and I appeared on the new Mickey Mouse Club singing and performing sign language, and then I fell madly in love with him, Tedd, and started writing him love letters...

0:39:42 S1: Didn't spell my name right, though. So, during a union break, I'm sitting on a bench back when I did smoke cigarettes and the guy from the mail room comes by and goes, "Is your name Ashy?" I went, "No, no, it's Anasti." He goes, "Well, I think somebody's been writing you a bunch of letters, we've got in the mail room, didn't know where to deliver them." I discovered that she has an interest in me.

0:40:08 S1: Yeah, and he said... When he called me, he said, "You're really funny." He thought my love letters were funny, and he said, "I think you could be a writer." And Tedd showed me Micky Mouse Club scripts and taught me how to write scripts, and then I moved up here to Los Angeles and my first job was a freelance for Hanna-Barbera on a show called Casper and the Space Angels, and I freelanced for a couple of years and then became a staff writer on The Smurfs, and I was the first woman staff writer at Hanna-Barbera, as well as their youngest at the time at age 23. And then a little bit later, Tedd started writing for The Smurfs and we became story editors together. Margaret Lush, who approved my very first cartoon episode on Casper and the Space Angels, Margaret Lush, noticed that we had fun together when we wrote, not knowing we were dating or anything. And Margaret, she teamed us up as story editors on The Smurfs and then Tedd and I wrote on The Smurfs for three years, in which it won one Emmy. And then the next show that we did was DuckTales for Walt Disney.

0:41:16 S1: DuckTales was based on the Carl Barks comic book stories about the world adventurer ducks of Duckburg, Scrooge McDuck and his nephews. The comics were a hit back in the 1940s and '50s, and their comic adventure styling seemed a perfect fit for what Disney envisioned for its television programs. Barks was never really consulted, said Tom Ruzicka, associate producer on DuckTales. He continued, "Although the show was initially based on the concept of doing Scrooge McDuck and the nephews, we discovered that a lot of stuff that made wonderful comics wouldn't translate into the '80s, or into animation. So we started evolving new characters and other things to contemporize the show. As we did that, the stories got further and further away from the comics, although a few episodes are lifted right out of them."

0:42:03 S1: We had a meeting with Gary Krisel, where he showed us two projects, DuckTales and a special called Fluppy Dogs, and we chose DuckTales. That was a good choice.

0:42:16 S1: They hired us because they knew it would be a big show with lots of episodes. We got known as people who could do 65 half hours in a season and stuff like that.

0:42:25 S1: Or 90 minutes on The Smurfs. Our first year as story editors, we'd never story-edited before, it was 90 minutes, because it was such a hit, or on DuckTales, it was 65 half hours. People would say, "How come you're not freaking out?" Well, I just knew we would get it done, but Tedd, his energy and his dedication, I credit a lot of it to him.

[video playback]

0:43:18 S1: They were definitely based on the Carl Barks books, but the main thing we had to do was, again, bring the heart, bring heart out.

0:43:26 S1: Well, one day, certain executives said, "You're not following the books very closely." And we said, "We have 65 episodes to do and Carl Barks only wrote 16, and they're not that different from one another."

0:43:41 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:43:42 S7: The idea came up, "Why don't we do a mini-series that we can cut into a movie we can then show as a pilot, a kick off to the series?" So what was really fascinating, for me, anyway, was, even though the show was already in production, was to do the episodes that set the tone for the series. So the first thing that the public was gonna see was this five-parter, and we just had so much fun putting that together, because they had to work as five separate episodes, but it had to work as an overarching big story as well, so that it could be shown as a movie. And I have a picture of Mark Zaslove and Bruce Talkington and I standing in front of this chalkboard, we have this gigantic story outline in front of it of all five episodes. It was like, "Are we gonna be able to do that?" And it turned out spectacular, I was very happy with it.

0:44:32 S1: A lot of the episode went to Japan, the earlier ones, and the animation was just exquisite. It was so exciting to have the films come back, especially the earliest episodes. Wow, dazzling animation, like A-team animation. They had a party and they showed one of the fully realized episodes, it was called Duckman of Alcatraz, it was really, really sensational. But I remember even Tedd saying, "I didn't really realize how good this was." I think that no one really understood that, I don't think I did until the episodes started to come back with all the music, fully-animated, everything, and then when it debuted, it was a really, really big smash.

0:45:16 S1: Meanwhile, the LA Times' Charles Solomon was not impressed by DuckTales. In fact, he found it rather distasteful. "Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and other Disney cartoon stars owe their popularity and longevity to the fact that they were so well-animated, they ceased to exist as drawings on screen and emerged as clearly recognizable characters. By breaking with that tradition in DuckTales, the new management at Disney Studio is risking far more than the $20 million it has invested into the series. At stake is a name that has been synonymous with the best in animation for 60 years." But the risk of ruining their name in animation was well worth it, because the show was gigantic. DuckTales was big, really big. The series was in 56 countries and seen by 25 million kids each day. It went so far that it doubled the ratings of kids shows that it was in competition with. Even though each episode cost $275,000, Disney more than made its money back, and Disney television animation had finally truly arrived. Tad Stones.

0:46:20 S6: Well, DuckTales was a huge thing, because a Saturday morning show is just... Your first order is 13, and then maybe 10 the second season, and eight, and eight, and then you're lucky if you're still on. DuckTales, suddenly, it was like, "No, we're doing 65 episodes." George Lucas told us once that DuckTales was to syndication as Star Wars was to movies, I mean, it was huge.

0:46:43 S1: Patsy Cameron-Anasti and Tedd Anasti.

0:46:46 S1: We finished DuckTales and they didn't pick up our contract. The figured, find somebody cheaper, I guess, I don't know.

0:46:53 S1: Well, actually no, let me... I would like to differ with that. It was a smash and that was a wonderful thing for our career. They offered us Aladdin, actually, and we... I think we had always wanted to develop, like kind of be in developing new shows, and when Nelvana offered us vice president of development, we took that, and they were just starting out, kind of, they had done some things, but Beetlejuice really was their first big blockbuster. So I think they did offer us Aladdin after that, and then later, The Little Mermaid.

0:47:28 S1: I was sitting in a restaurant and here are the guys from Disney, the executives, end up sitting behind us, and we were with ABC at the time. When the girls from ABC went to the ladies room, the guys from Disney leaned over and said, "We need you back. We need you back on our show 'cause we can't get anybody that's doing a good job." So we went back and...

0:47:49 S1: Yeah, we spent three years on The Little Mermaid, which was, again, a very, very wonderful experience.

0:47:55 S1: They wanted us for five years, but we said, "Well, maybe just one year at a time." So we stayed there for 14 years, just one year at a time.

0:48:02 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:48:03 S7: I know that I was a big Carl Barks fan growing up, just as a kid, reading the comic book, and so we owed so much to Carl Barks, creating the Beagle Boys and Gyro Gearloose and Magica de Spell, and all these characters. And I felt bad that he never got any credit on the series. So one of the episodes I wrote was based on one of his comic book stories, I actually gave him credit as "Story by Carl Barks, script by Jymn Magon." Because I wanted his name in there somewhere on the series. There were two things that were key to DuckTales. One was Scrooge McDuck was torn between the cold, hard cash and the warmth of his heart for his family, his nephews, that's what was always driving the series, was this man caught between the cold and the heat. The second thing was, young children don't understand money, it's just like the coins, built different sizes, and paper, and they honestly don't have a concept of how money works. But Carl Barks was a genius when it came to, "Well, what do kids understand?" Well, they understand the tactile quality of coins. And so to have a money bin full of coins that you were able to dive into and just swim through like a porpoise, just that's what kids could understand and appreciate. And the fact that he gave Scrooge McDuck that childlike quality to be able to enjoy his money in a very tactile way, I think, was a real breakthrough for the character.

0:49:31 S1: Carl Barks, an except from The Duck Man, an interview with Carl Barks, 1975.

0:49:37 Speaker 15: The office, I think, wanted me to do a Christmas story and so I'm casting around for Christmas stories. I began to think of the great Dickens Christmas story, about Scrooge. It is the classic of all Christmas story. All I did was just peep enough to sort of steal some of the idea and have a rich uncle for Donald. Well, he had turned out to be kind of an interesting character in that first story, and so I began thinking of how to use him again. I guess the fact that he was rich was the thing that triggered all further developments, is just how rich, and the showing of his wealth. I found that that was quite a fascinating subject, just piles of money. It seemed to appeal to a lot of people.

0:50:33 S1: And I just gradually made him richer and richer and then I had to develop a place where he could store the money and all the time, there were the Beagle Boys trying to steal it from him. Those things just grew like building brick walls, you just lay one brick on top of another, and finally, you've got a whole thing built. You can't dive into a pile of money like you would into a snowdrift, so he had to have a trick by which he did. And I don't explain that trick because I don't understand it myself. And he can go out in the desert, and he can smell the presence of gold. Other prospectors would have to dig mountains of dirt before they could find any nuggets, but he can smell them. I think he represents something that nearly everybody wishes they could be, some time in their life, just a little bit too rich.

[music]

0:51:25 S1: Disney had another project that was budding at ABC. Disney had a long, strange history with this character, with lawsuit after lawsuit, but the character was about to become part of Saturday mornings in 1988, with an unlikely candidate to help lead it. Mark Zaslove, writer.

0:51:53 Speaker 16: What happened was I went to Cal Berkeley as a eventually theoretical astrophysics person, but I was also writing at the time, and I had a buddy, we were doing live action. So every summer, he was in UCLA, I was at Cal, we'd come back and we'd write a script or something. And then I wrote my first novel over there, and then it was like, "Well, what am I gonna do also for money?" I was doing magazine work, I worked for Larry Flynt for about seven months, meteoric rise and fall on Hustler and a couple of magazines like that, which was fun.

0:52:25 S1: I used to say, though, I was karmically balanced 'cause I did Pooh and Hustler. By the time anybody even asked about it, it was never a big deal, no one cared, I mean, it wasn't like I was posing or anything, or it was gonna come back and bite them. Not that I couldn't have. Oh, sorry. [chuckle] And I got my first gig in animation while I was there as well. But basically, I went, "I got to make some money." It's like, "Oh, yeah, animation. They need writers." My dad said, "Yeah, maybe try that." And it's like... So I went in, not thinking anything of it, really, and it was very easy to do, and so I was doing some freelance work and I had sent in something... Oh, GoBot, a GoBot script to Jymn Magon, and he went, "Oh, my God, it's the only funny GoBot script I ever read." So I went in, and he'd probably tell you better.

0:53:12 S1: I just had this sort of full of himself attitude, not in a bad way, according to him, but I just look back and it was just kind of funny, 'cause he saw it and he went, "This is really good writing." And I was kind of like, "Well, yeah, of course it is." It was like, "Well, it's animation." I never thought much about it. I learned to very much respect it. I always liked the product, but I was never like a fan of animation because I grew up around it, so it was always the discipline. But you have to understand, my dad was an animator/producer/director, so when I was growing up, animators were guys who were drunk on my living room floor. So I get to Disney and they're all teetotallers, except for a few people. I'm like, "You're not animators. I know what animators look like, and none of you are animators." I had gotten some bad raps there that I didn't do, I was always upset later when people say blah, blah, blah, and you were being blah, blah, blah, and I went, "I didn't do that. If I'd just known, I would have done that." I would have been much more obnoxious. I would have actually caused these problems.

0:54:10 S1: I think I could rub certain people the wrong way, although everybody could. But there was one day where, I don't know why, it was just one of those things where maybe we'd been working too hard, too long, and you're near the end of something, and I started taking tape and I started taping across the hallway. And then somebody threw something on it. It became like a giant spiderweb that stopped the hallway up. And then people started throwing items onto it, so it stuck. And so suddenly there's this whole blockade hallway, and people have thrown knickknacks and this and that. And suddenly, Michael Webster or Tom Ruzicka came by and they just look at me, like, "This is your doing, right?" It's like, "Ah, leave it." And then they walked off, 'cause they knew it was a way to blow off steam. But it was one of those almost MASH moments where you start off doing something silly, and the next thing, the entire place is sort of doing it. But I got nailed for things that other people did a lot. Where they were nicer, and I was more like, "Ah, whatever." I was certainly tolerant.

[music]

0:55:08 S1: And I think ABC wanted a Disney show. And then it became, "What do we give them?" And then Pooh, because they had mechanical rights, I guess, was a safe thing to do. So it was above my pay grade, but I remember that it was ABC wanting, but I think the machinations were, "What can we do that's very Disney that we have?" And then it became Pooh, and then it came down to us. It was funny. I knew it could be really good if we didn't screw it up, and they didn't think I should do it, 'cause I was young and I wore long leather jackets before Matrix. I was, theoretically, a dark character. And so they were questioning me. And I remember sitting at a table. I had to do the entire Bible premise pitch in a three-day weekend, and then go have lunch with Gary Krisel and some other people and explain why this show would be great.

0:55:53 S1: I remember going, "Look, I will bet you a year's salary," and fortunately, they didn't do it. "We will win our time slot, be number one, we'll win an Emmy, I guarantee it. I bet you my whole year's salary." And we did. We were the only show to do that at that time. But it was one of those where you just go, "If you don't screw it up, how can you miss?" The designs are good, great characters. Just don't be stupid. Write really well, and it'll be a good show. I never used anything from the books, because it wouldn't have worked for me. It was always, "How can I become Mill?" And then, "How do I expand that?" For whatever reason, they previewed it on the Disney Channel and then it went to ABC. And then ABC changed their order from 13 to 20-something for the first season. So we were all kinda cranking. That was actually a lot of fun. I loved that show.

0:56:41 Speaker 17: Why thank you, Piglet. It's perfect. What is it?

0:56:47 S1: That was the first time I was in charge of anything, and actually had to have responsibility, and scheduling everything. And Karl Geurs, he was very much pro-what I was bringing to the table. And that was a great learning experience. And it was about professionalism, and a way of looking at things that Karl had without being blighted or too jaded about it. Karl was Winnie The Pooh, just had that sort of attitude. As much as people used to say that he'd walk by and we'd be shouting at each other, I don't think we were ever ever ever angry. We were just loud. We'd circle, "What about this? No, this!" And then suddenly, I guess our voices went up. And people would go, "We walk by Karl's office," and it'd be like, "We hear you guys shouting. Is everything okay?" And I'm like, "Yeah, why? What's going on?" But you couldn't ask for a better person to take you in on your first day. We fell through the cracks at that time. They didn't know we were there, really, 'cause DuckTales was getting up to speed, and I remember, Karl telling me vividly, he goes, "You know, if we're a hit, they're gonna suddenly start caring about what we do, and give us all sorts of terrible notes".

0:57:49 S1: And he was right. Suddenly everybody wanted a finger in it the second season, and we got a ton more notes. "Well, we gotta do this. Is this good? Should we do that? We don't understand this." Anytime you try to do something, whether it's cutting edge, or just very truthful, and I thought the Pooh characters we handled extremely truthfully, they weren't just saying gag-lines. They were saying a line because that's what Pooh would say, or that's what Tigger would say, which is the essence of any kind of good writing, is, "Are you telling the truth?" And so we get people who wouldn't necessarily understand that, so we get notes, and then you'd have to explain it. And then that wouldn't necessarily work. And then it would be weird. I always had a really good relationship with standards and practices, but I remember I wanted Gopher to have a huge cask of black powder, 'cause he's a miner, and he digs, and I wanted to blow the side off of a mountain.

0:58:44 S1: And of course, ABC standards and practices says, "No, you can't do that." And I try to explain why, it's like this, and then kids'll do that. And I go, "I don't think they can get all the dynamite, or black powder." And they're like, "Well, you can do it in fire." And so I thought for a while, and just as a joke, I said, "Well, could you use a thermonuclear device?" And they thought for a while, and they go, "Yeah, that's okay." And so then I brought it to Karl, and Karl thought for a while. And he went, "You know we can't make the bomb look Pooh-ish, so we can't use it." But at least I feel like, "Okay, I got a thermonuclear device approved of for Winnie The Pooh."

0:59:15 S1: There's only one thing left to do.

0:59:18 Speaker 18: You mean?

0:59:20 S1: Yes, Rabbit. We must give Piglet a "staying inside" party. It's like a going away party, only different.

0:59:31 S1: While Pooh was doing well at ABC, DuckTales remained the number one kids show for two years. Luckily for Disney, when the show was finally toppled, it was by Disney's Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.

0:59:44 S5: We didn't know this at the time, but I think in Eisner's mind, or whoever was in charge of that, felt like, "Let's see how the department goes first, before we start putting our flagship characters on the television." Because when you look at characters like Mickey, and Donald, and Pluto, and Chip and Dale, and whatnot, they were always on the big screen. So to suddenly take them and put them on the small screen, I think it's, you know, "Woah, we've got a big star. Let's not put them on TV, let's put them in movies," kind of thing. So yeah, we needed papal dispensation just to put Donald into DuckTales as a cameo to explain why he wasn't in the series, [chuckle] because he went off to join the Navy and left the nephews with his uncle. I remember we had to get permission to put him in to explain that.

1:00:29 S1: Tad Stones.

1:00:30 S6: I pitched Miami Mice 'cause Miami Vice was on the air. They liked that a lot because of the name. We called it Metro Mice and did a script for it, never went past that, although the villain of the script was a character called Fat Cat. We brought back and the idea of mice detectives came back as Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers.

1:00:49 S5: We had two characters, two little mice called Kit Colby and Colt Chedderson. They were the original rescue rangers. And every time we would meet with Eisner and Katzenberg, they'd say, "That just is not a home run yet."

1:01:01 S6: And then later on, it was like, "Okay. DuckTales is a huge success. Are there any other Disney classic characters that we should be developing for?" And Mickey was still too precious. Donald made an appearance in DuckTales, he's very hard to animate. Goofy, yes, Goofy has always been the every man, definitely develop a bunch of things for Goofy." And then when they got to Chip 'n Dale, it was Michael Eisner who said, "Put those guys in that show," and Jeffrey said, "Home run." And that was Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers.

1:01:29 S5: And that sort of broke the ice for, "Oh, now we can start to put other characters."

1:01:35 Speaker 19: I guess there's only one thing to say then. Rescue Rangers, away!

1:01:41 S6: I felt like, on Rescue Rangers, we lost a lot from script to screen because, one, we were working way too fast, throwing things together and not being able to follow up on stuff. The schedule was the same. The problem was, on the story side, there was just two of us editing. I literally was working 13, 14-hour days, except for Saturday, it was an eight-hour day, and then Sunday, my day off, was four hours. Those hours were at the studio. It wasn't like working at home.

1:02:10 S6: There was this particular point of contention that when it came time to do the multi-part pilot, we were told that we had slipped the schedule in some way, that we had less time to do the four episodes that were supposed to kick off the show than doing any given four episodes, which made no sense to me. It means we were rushing through the most important thing. So we took our shot at it, and we did what we could. And then they took me off the show and I said, "You know what? That's fine. There's only 15 episodes to go. I got to do the pilot, to set things up, so that's good." But then it turned out they were having people rework the pilot, rewrite it, and they were being given more time to rewrite the pilot than we were given to write it the first time, and that was too much for me, and I was out the door. [chuckle] Disney had certain landmarks in your career, give you a plaque or a ring or a statue. And the two statues I really wanted were Mickey as the Sorcerer's Apprentice and Tinkerbell. And Mickey was at... Hold on, I have it right here... I wanna say 15 years. Yes, I was about to get that. I was two months away from it, and it was like, that was somehow stupidly enough to make me calm down, and went back to work.

1:03:29 S1: Jymn Magon.

1:03:30 S7: It was a very strange time. I was busy trying to develop TaleSpin and we got this call that Buena Vista Television wanted someone to look at the pilot show that he had done. I think it was a four or five parter, just like what we'd done on DuckTales. I think they wanted someone to come in with fresh eyes and punch it up or do whatever, and it was like, "Well, I'm in the middle of doing TaleSpin and whatnot." Okay. So I said to Mark, "Look, I'm not gonna be here to help with TaleSpin. This'll go a lot faster if you help me." So he and I both jumped in and kinda reedited the pilot movie. And then I think we edited a couple of individual episodes that had been in the works during that time. And finally, just threw our hands up and said, "Look, we gotta get back on our project." And I think it went to Ken Koonce and David Wiemers next. So our time on Rescue Rangers was very brief. But, again, I never understood why Tad didn't follow through on that. I think it was some decision high above our heads, and I'm not sure why, so it was just like, shrug, "Okay."

1:04:32 S1: By the year 1990, Disney had invested $150 million in television animation, and by 1995, had plans to invest $400 million more. At this point, the output of television animation was prolific. Katzenberg was quoted as saying, "Each year, we are now producing as much animation as was done in the years 1920-1950 when all the classic Disney cartoons were made." These television animation shows had 22,000 full-painted cels per episode. Other shows at the time, of good quality, were averaging 15,000. Once Chip 'n Dale was another bona fide hit, Disney put plans in motion for television domination. And that plan was simple. It would have a two-hour block of cartoons when kids got home from school. Gummi Bears, DuckTales, Rescue Rangers, and their newest offering, TaleSpin. The shows were expensive, and yet, Disney wasn't even charging the networks for the shows. Instead, the deal was that Disney would retain the six minutes of advertisements to sell themselves. And this worked like Gang Busters. Despite the cost of production and advertising, the Disney Afternoon earned the company $40 million a year for a period of time. But this incredible run almost didn't happen because of one pitch. Jymn Magon.

1:05:46 S7: It didn't last long, but we had a process by which Tad would be developing a show and I'd be producing the show. And then I'd be done, so I'd go into development and he would go into production, and we would sort of flip flop as to what our duties were at TV animation. I was at a point of development, and we were creating this show called B players, and B players, I thought was kind of a clever idea. Came out at the time of Roger Rabbit. So the idea of all these cartoon characters mingling with live action people was popular at the time, so we said, "Well, who's the one character who is a star in motion pictures and then never worked again?" It was Baloo, so he said, "Oh, here's a guy who should be doing more movies, and he's not, he's stuck on the back lot. And along with him, is this kid who turns out to be a nephew, I think, of Mickey Mouse, his name was Ricky Rat, and Ricky had stars in his eyes, he wanted to be as big as his cousin or his uncle, whatever it was. And so the stories were all about Baloo and Ricky trying to convince the powers to be, specifically Michael Eisner, as a character in the show. "But it's too Western. Hey, let us do a space show. Hey, let us... " And then every week, they would be... Try in some way to get into the next gig, in that part of the cast, where all of these other people that weren't working anymore, like Horace Horsecollar, and Clarabelle Cow, and whatnot.

1:07:07 S7: Everytime we pitched it, it just never seemed to stick. And, at one point, Kaztenberg said to me, "If you say B players one more time, I'm gonna throw you out the window."

[chuckle]

1:07:18 S7: Well, it's like, "Well, I guess that project's dead." Everything I'd pitched there had pretty much gone. And so we were thinking, "This is gonna go", but it didn't, we'd stopped dead, and we were stuck, as we had to pitch the next series to all the department heads in Florida, and we had no show. And we had to get into production for the next 65 episodes. And on top of which, it was going to be the linchpin of the Disney Afternoon. And I remember Michael Webster, who was not a fan of mine, poked his head in my room and he said, "You better come up with a new show real quick or it's gonna be Tumbleweed City around here," meaning, we're gonna fire everyone."

[music]

1:08:01 S7: And I thought, "How did this fall on my shoulders, that everyone's future depends on me? Am I that important? And if so, let's see a bigger paycheck, [chuckle] if I'm that important." So it was like, "Oh, scratch head, scratch head, what am I gonna do?" And one of the guys that I had hired at TV animation was Mark Zaslove, and Mark had gone onto fame and fortune by story-editing the Winnie The Pooh Show. And so Mark and I did a lot of talking, a lot of collaboration on ideas and whatnot, and I said "Mark, come in here, I have an idea that I wanna chat with you, I wanna use you as a sounding board. "So what had happened was during DuckTales, one of the early ideas about Launchpad McQuack was that he had a courier service, and that he would fly anything anywhere overnight, or something like that, was his slogan, and so, Scrooge McDuck would use him to send things to crazy places like, 'I need a whale sent to Sea World', [chuckle] in Dubai, or something.

1:09:01 S7: And that never went anywhere, because, eventually, Launchpad became Scrooge's private pilot. So I said, "What if we took Baloo from B players, who's a really good character, I believe in him, and we took this air cargo service of Launchpad McQuack's and kind of glued them together so that Baloo is the pilot and he's got this company, and it's failing because he's a jungle bum bear, and he's got this kid, the typical Disney orphan, like Mowgli, who he's gotta look out for." I said "Now, we're starting to get the dynamic of what drove Jungle Book so well, which was here's a guy who is torn between being a big kid himself, and being a father figure." And I said, "I think there's something there." And so Mark and I kicked it around and we had some drawings made up. And in three days, we had TaleSpin. And we went and pitched it, and it was like home run. [chuckle] So whereas we could pull our hair out over B players for weeks and months, TaleSpin came together really very quickly. And so Mark and I ended up as the producers on that show.

[music]

1:10:12 S1: Mark Zaslove.

1:10:13 S1: He had pitched B players and that got shot down and they didn't have that fourth show to put on, which became The Disney Afternoon. I gather it was a $2 billion pitch, eventually, that's what they made off of it, off of TaleSpin. I remember walking in sort of in the middle of something, on Pooh, or on a break or something, and it was like, "Yeah, try this. What can we do with these characters?" And then, three days later, we had TaleSpin.

1:10:35 S1: Tad Stones.

1:10:36 S6: Gummi Bears, it was just... I mean, it was cool. We were a very small team, we were still trying to figure out things. It was just a lot of camaraderie in the studio, there was only... I wanna say like, two shows going, or on a special like, Fluppy Dogs and gummies and Wuzzles had just one season, and development was going on, so it was a very small group and a lot of energy. It was a lot of fun. And then when we got into the Disney Afternoon, it was even better because we didn't have to have network approval for anything, it was basically, if we could sell Michael and Jeffrey on an idea, we then did it. [chuckle] Buena Vista Distribution had to take it, they didn't have any input, and we got a lot of close scrutiny for the first three scripts from our president, who was Gary Krisel, of TV animation, and then he had stuff to do. So you were on your own. You'd come up with anything and then when first footage came back, there was kind of like a little more scrutiny, 'cause is it going the way we expected? How is it looking? What adjustments do we have to do? You went back to doing whatever you wanted, until it's about time to go on the air.

1:11:41 S6: At which time, it'd either be good times or panic, depending on what they thought of your show. I couldn't have done Darkwing Duck and had the show we ended up with under any other situation, because I was just trying all sorts of crazy, goofy things.

1:11:57 Speaker 20: I've just gone crazy!

1:11:58 Speaker 21: Come on, dad! It's not that complicated. Cabbages from outer space are duplicating everybody in the world, so they can take over the planet. And this cow, who's really an alien, has come here to recapture them. Just deal with it.

1:12:13 S6: It started as Jeffrey saying, "Hey, you did this episode of DuckTales called Double-O-Ducks. I want a show called Double-O-Duck." Again, I thought it's just a spy parody, there's no Disney heart to it, but boss said I gotta do it, and that's all I presented to him, and he said the same thing, he says, "There's no Disney heart to this. Do it over. Thank goodness. [chuckle] He should have said, "Get me somebody else, " but instead, I went into, "Okay, what about the Shadow and Doc Savage had a team of guys who worked in secret?" And ideas like that bubbled around Silver Age of comics and he really turned into more of a superhero, a non-super superhero than a spy, but you could look at that pitch and really do a normal show, [chuckle] I guess. And then, as we got into it, it was like, "No, I'm pitching, what if you take Warner Brother shorts and gave them heart in 22 minutes instead of seven minutes of just gags?" And that's what I was chasing, and some hit it better than others.

1:13:10 S6: When I was doing development, they wanted a new character, so I came up with Double-O-Duck, who, at the time, wasn't much more than... Visually, was Donald Duck, white tuxedo mask and a little hat. But, anyway, when we were developing him, Launchpad was not in it. In my head, was Doc Savage, who had a team of guys who worked with him, who were specialists, and then that shrunk 'cause it was like too many people. And for a while, he had a sidekick who was a little guy who wore derby, so it wasn't until Gosalyn entered the picture that we really had a show based on the idea that what if Batman had a little girl who refused to stay at home? Although I don't think we said it that concisely at the time. And we still felt like we needed a guy for Darkwing to talk to. And Launchpad, because he had been there in the beginning, and we knew him, just seemed like that personality is great. So we brought him on to Darkwing, but really changed his design and subtracted many an IQ point from him. [chuckle] So he's a lot dumber in our show.

1:14:10 Speaker 22: I got a whole scrapbook, a few newspaper clippings. Of course, it's not a very big scrapbook.

1:14:16 Speaker 23: Wouldn't it be easier to fly if we were facing the other way?

1:14:20 S2: Oh, yeah, sorry. [chuckle] I sometimes have trouble with that.

1:14:25 S6: The real pilot for Darkwing Duck is an episode I wrote called, "That Sinking Feeling", with Moliarty as the villain, this guy who is based on the mole man, basically, except he really was a mole, stealing objects from the surface, bringing him down to the center of the Earth where he'd reconstruct them into this giant ray that was going to pull the moon out of orbit to block the sun so it would be darker on the surface, and Moliarty and his minions could all live on the surface. That was the first one written, and the first one boarded that we went into and act three of that, for no reason at all, they're in a baseball stadium, and suddenly, everybody's in... Except for the villain, is in baseball outfits. It was that thing where Bugs Bunny would go off screen, come back with a whole new costume.

1:15:07 S6: We actually didn't get that level of breaking reality in the show a lot, although we went crazy in different ways, but that was the one that was testing out everything, it really set up Gosalyn's relationship with Darkwing Duck and how close they were and her relationship to Honker. So that was our pilot. That's the first thing through. Then what everybody considers the pilot, which is the four part, Darkly Dawns the Duck, that story, again, became a little straighter. But the main thing is, everybody always asked about the origin of Darkwing Duck, and I said, "You know, he's basically a Batman, what am I gonna do? Have him sitting in his mansion and a duck breaks through a window and he goes, 'That's it, an omen, I shall become a duck'"? Wait. There was nothing to tell there. I certainly wasn't gonna kill his parents, and have him have this life of seeking revenge. So, I said, "No. Let's address the heart, let's bring Gosalyn." This is the story of how he adopted Gosalyn, and then that story got a little darker, dealing with what happened to her parents. But that's what made you really care about her, so... And care about her predicament.

1:16:17 S2: Yeah, once again, saved by my buzzsaw cufflinks.

1:16:21 S6: Some of the things with Darkwing were very not formulaic, but I had orders for my editors, and I said, "Every show, he has to say, 'Let's get dangerous'". The secondary thing was, "Suck gas, evildoers" when he used his gas gun, and too many people didn't hear the G, and it just didn't come up as much, that one kinda fell away. Originally, he just had one thing that he said, he said, "I'm the terror that flaps in the night." And I, frankly, forget the second line, it was like the third script in, it was an episode where Launchpad had to play the part of Darkwing, and he could never get the line right. He said, "I am the road salt that rusts the underside of your car." He continually screwed up throughout the episode, and we all thought it was hilarious. And I said, "You know what? Rewrite the scripts we've already got done. Let's give that to Darkwing. That's too good to just leave on this one episode," and that became his ongoing thing.

1:17:15 S2: I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the jailer who throws away the key. I am feeling really stupid. Boy, I hate it when I'm early. You'd think criminal masterminds would be more punctual.

1:17:35 S1: Dean Stefan, writer.

1:17:37 Speaker 24: So, throughout the entire office, everyone from secretaries to producers and everything, they ran a contest. "Name this character", "Name this star" "Name this guy", and out of all the names, out of all... You know, we each put in dozens. They picked Darkwing Duck, and of course, it was Alan Burnett, who came up with the name and he got the 500 bucks. I would never conceive the name "Darkwing Duck", it just doesn't make sense. But now, how could it be anything else. Actually, Wiemers and Koonce, who were my story editors, who by now, had left Disney to seek their fortune in sitcoms, they sued Disney because they said they had written that Double-O-Duck episode of DuckTales and they thought they should be recompensed or whatever the word is.

1:18:19 S2: Of course, anything to do with Disney, they own anyway, but they did see some kind of settlement, I believe. I don't think it was huge. Then they later came back to Disney, so I guess there's no huge bad blood, or maybe that was part of the deal. Tad really had the whole thing down first, he was really into Twin Peaks at the time. I remember our first meeting, where we all go in to pitch stories and stuff, he had two bagels or donuts in front of everyone, which was like a thing from Twin Peaks. I wasn't a fan, so I didn't really know, but I knew it was sort of an iconic thing and he was very into the whole Twin Peaks thing, and very artsy stuff. And I would later make fun of him, because he would... I guess, it became such a big deal, the show, that he would start giving notes.

1:19:05 S2: Everybody would write out notes and give it to the story editors and stuff, like, he would start cassette-taping his notes like from some undisclosed location, like Howard Hughes, or something, and then the cassette would arrive at the story editors, and then they would play the cassette for you, and I would put this cover under... A lot of that may have been because of his hours, he liked to get there like five in the morning and leave at two or three in the afternoon, 'cause he had kids, and he was an early guy. Most people like me, I'm probably the worst case, but before 10:00 AM, forget it. So I never worked directly under him, where I had to report to him directly as a story editor, but he liked to run a tight ship, I think. But the cassette notes were a bit much.

1:19:49 S2: I am the thing that goes bump in the night. I'm the neuroses that requires a $500 an hour shrink!

1:19:55 S6: I know, when we started Darkwing, they wanted to do a Darkwing Duck movie, and the studio in Paris, that later went on to work on features, they did a bunch of development that was totally ignoring what the show was. I took one stab at it. Again, this is the opposite of being left to do whatever you want. I had to pitch this, and it didn't go, and I just said, "You know, I can't do both. I can't do a movie and get this show up and running. So I'm just gonna do the show". I only found this out recently, they thought that maybe that should be a musical. Jymn Magon was actually gonna have meetings with Barry Manilow, ended up having meeting with another big music guy, not a name you would know as a star, but that was just crazy. And that really showed that, man, they don't understand what Darkwing Duck is, so thank goodness that didn't happen.

1:20:41 S2: I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the weirdo who sits next to you on the bus. I am the swan prince?

1:20:52 S1: With the Disney Afternoon well on its way, it was time for the first of the fab five to get his own vehicle.

[music]

1:21:02 S5: I think they were going to originally do it as a scout troop to the show, and that's why it's called Goof Troop. I was not there for that development, but when it finally came around who... Goofy's gotta live in Spoonerville, and have a next door neighbor, Pete, that's when we developed the show in earnest. We looked at those old cartoons of Mr. Geef or Goof, or whatever his last thing was supposed to be, and he was always... Lived in the suburbs and would wave bye-bye to his wife, as she would get in a car and drive off, and he was in charge of the kid for the day. Goofy would make mistakes, and the son would just go along with it, and I remember thinking, "Well, we've gotta kinda make it more interesting than that." And you look for the key to the series. And the key to Goof Troop, for me, was, "I don't wanna grow up to be my dad," and I think we felt like, "Yeah, that's what we want. We want this guy who's a single dad trying to raise his kid right, and was next door to this bad influence, Pete and his family." That, to us, was where all the comedy gold was to mine, skateboards and school and working in town, and commuting, and stuff like that.

1:22:11 S5: My forte was always in the comedy [1:22:15] ____ is in Rescue Rangers and TaleSpin kinda thing. Goof Troop was more of a sitcom, [chuckle] more Laverne & Shirley, that kind of thing. Feels like adventure to me because Goofy found a way to mess everything up.

1:22:30 S1: Michael Spooner, artist.

1:22:32 Speaker 25: I was a principal layout designer on the project. We decided to go with the style of 101 Dalmatians, where it was line art, the painter would actually do a watercolor under a cell line, so my line art would be transferred to Xerox to cel, like traditional animation was, and then they would do a watercolor. I had done so much design on the town in which he lived. The studio decided to name it Spooner though.

1:23:00 S1: Jymn Magon, original pitch for syndicators to buy Goof Troop.

1:23:05 S7: So, I wanna introduce you to Goof Troop. And, in it, Goofy is now a man of the 90s. He's a single dad living in suburbia, with his three phones, two TVs, one cat, and a very contrary 11-year old son. Let me take you through a day in the life. An alarm fire goes off. It belongs to good old Goofy, that good-natured klutz whose motto is, "A day without sunshine is like night!" Goofy embraces the dawn like every other obstacle in his life, with boundless and fondling enthusiasm. Now I wanna show you the difference, here is his son Goofy Jr, or Max, as he likes to be called, because he hates being silent with an adjective, like his father. Anyway, as you can tell from Max's enthusiasm, this is a school day. Now, Max loves Bo Jackson, Goofy thinks he's one of the Jackson Five.

[laughter]

1:23:50 S7: Max loves Mario Brothers, Goofy's pretty sure they'd beat him off in the third grade. Max loves his VCR. Goofy can't spell VCR.

[laughter]

1:23:58 S7: Anyway, Goofy heads downstairs to make a nutritious breakfast, or more to the point, a nutritious mess. "Junior, food's on!" Well, Max heads downstairs, shaking his head, wondering, "How does such a radical kid like me end up with such a goof for a father?" And so it would appear that the fruit seldom falls far from the tree. However, this is a curse that Max is determined to break. He desperately wants to swim out of the deep end of his father's gene pool. But you know, through all these crazy escapades, the one thing that Max learns is, "Just when you're convinced your folks are totally useless, they're there for you when you're totally useless." So relax, Max, your father ain't so bad. He's just Goofy. Hell, let's face it, kid, you're a little goofy. Welcome to the Goof Troop, kid.

1:24:47 S7: Yeah, I had done an episode called 'Have Yourself A Goofy Little Christmas', which the idea of the father-son going off and father wants to do one thing that's traditional and the son wants to do something different. That, to me, felt the most like a booby, and kind of set the tone. And, at one point, we were gonna do, I think, a two-parter, that was Goofy and his son on vacation, and somehow, that two-parter turned into the idea to do another... Well, it was called "Movie Tunes" at the time, when we did the DuckTales movie, and that was driven pretty much by Mr. Katzenberg, who told us a really interesting story about how he was losing touch with his daughter, and he decided "We're just gonna take time off and she and I are gonna get the car and just go somewhere." And he says, "I don't know where it happened or how it happened, but we connected on that trip, being trapped in a car together. That became the gist of The Goofy movie, which was father wants it the one way, the son wants it another way, then they finally find each other along the way. That was very rewarding for me, to be able to move from the TV show into a feature film.

1:25:57 S7: Well, I sat by myself for a long time, and then they finally brought in Kevin Lima. Kevin just had a whole plethora of people he trusted, and they were great. The film took off from there, and I think, of all my experiences in animation, that was the most... I want to make sure I say this right, kind of the most disconcerning, because it was so different from writing for episodic television, 'cause in episodic television, the writer becomes king. I'm not sure that that's the correct position for the writer, but just because of the time limitations, you had to have something written and, basically, directed on paper, and then everybody followed it. That's whether you could get it done in time. But when it came to a movie, it was a very flexible thing, and lots of people are involved, and they're changing their sequence, and that sequence is so powerful that it changes that sequence. And suddenly, the writer's, "Huh? I think I recognize one of my lines in here." [chuckle] I think Moss Hart said that. I would come into work and I had written a sequence and then it would be storyboarded, and I look at this and say, "This is genius! I wish I had written this!" [chuckle]

1:27:05 S7: It was terrific. It was such a new way of working for me. So it was disconcerning from the standpoint that, gee, I don't have the kind of control over the project that I used to have on TV, but that's not to say that they weren't doing spectacular work and that I was such a lucky guy to be a part of it. While I feel like I brought the essence of 'I don't wanna grow up to be my dad', I really feel like so much of all the clever little things and the sort of Kelly moments, that was Kevin and his team coming in there with their stuff, and it was just such a delight to work with them, and that's why I think I was upset, because I didn't get to follow through on the movie. I was told in... Go over here and work on DuckTales. We went to lunch as I was leaving the series, we went to Sizzler, of all places, and I just said, "I feel so bad, Kevin, because I wanted to be so helpful and such an important part of this and I feel like so much of what I did didn't end up on the screen." And he said, "But Jymn, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing, if we weren't standing on your shoulders", and it was like, "Oh yeah, I guess so" [chuckle] Made me feel better. That's just a part of the creative process. The first link in the chain sometimes doesn't look like the last link in the chain [chuckle], it's painted a different color along the way.

1:28:33 S1: After the company had dabbled in its most famous IPs, the next show would be a wholly original character, well, sort of. Bonkers was loosely based on the idea of Roger Rabbit, he was a former cartoon star who had fallen on tough times after his show had been cancelled, and became a cop, teamed with a human partner. But its production was mired in reboots and dissatisfaction. Greg Weisman, creator, Gargoyles.

1:29:00 Speaker 26: Well, I mean, Bonkers is complicated. Bonkers was a show that I developed, and got Duane Capizzi, the producer, story editor, Bob Hathcock was chosen to be the director, producer on it. We had real high hopes for it, but, unlike Gargoyles, that was a show where I got it up and running and then I walked away from it, and other people were supposed to be paying attention to it, and the very first two or three episodes that came back didn't look very good, from an animation standpoint, not sure that, initially, the show's art directed very well. We had humans and quote unquote "toons", even though the whole thing was animated.

1:29:37 S2: And I think there should have been a distinct, more kind of realistic art style, not Gargoyles, necessarily, but something, even from a color palette standpoint, that felt a little less cartoony, so that the quote unquote "toons" on the show, like Roger Rabbit, and Jitters Dog really pop, because they were toons in a human world, and I don't think that art direction ever quite came off, but I think we had a really smart show which featured Bonkers partnered with Miranda Wright as a cop. Bonkers drove her crazy but he was her partner, so she'd back him no matter what, and ultimately, they were friends, and we did a lot of smart sort of clever things about what it would be like in a Roger Rabbit vein to live in a world with toons and humans.

1:30:25 S2: And then I think, honestly, that some of the executives, when the first stuff came back and didn't look very good, overreacted. There were certainly problems, maybe even some problems with the writing, but I don't think the problems were quite as problematic as some people thought, and I think, frankly, most of it could have been fixed by fine-tuning the art direction. But I wasn't in charge and I was also in the process of trying to move over to Gargoyles and all this stuff is sort of happening simultaneously. I did get dragged back into it, and at some point, it became clear that... To Gary, that he wanted some real wholesale changes here and neither Duane nor Bob were giving him that, so both of them wound up getting booted off the show, and a guy named Bob Taylor, who had done Goof Troop, was brought in, and Bob made some very drastic and, I think, unnecessary changes to the show.

1:31:19 S2: He did get the art direction better, but Bob didn't think girls were funny, so he ditched Miranda and put in a character who, in essence, was Pete from Goof Troop, and was voiced with Pete's voice by Jim Cummings, and Jim is great. Jim voiced Bonkers. I love Jim. But it was just a dynamic that we had seen before. The story lines were, I thought, way less interesting, and I was really not happy with the change in direction on the show. And then, of course, they wanted this stuff first, so it all got very rushed and they couldn't throw away the dozen or so episodes that featured Miranda, so even though that stuff was made first, it aired last, and they actually created an episode where Piquel joins the FBI and moves away, and Bonkers is partnered with Miranda for the last dozen episodes, which again, were the dozen or so that were made first. But they created a new pilot and basically played it as if the Piquel stuff was first, and the Miranda stuff was second, when it was really the other way around. And so, it became a show of...

1:32:31 S2: It makes me sad, [chuckle] but... 'Cause I think a lot of potential was squandered there, and I think a lot of the changes were unnecessary, and, to be fair, Taylor and I didn't really see eye to eye on anything, and I finally just begged off, and asked Gary to take me off the project, 'cause I didn't think I was helping Bob, 'cause we agreed on almost nothing. And so I was just in his way, and Gary had gone with Taylor, and it was his show now, so I had to let it go, and so Gary said, "Okay." And I sort of stepped away from the project, and had very little involvement with all but the first couple Piquel episodes, which I didn't care for, which doesn't mean they're bad, it just wasn't the show I had developed, and wasn't the show that I wanted to make.

1:33:30 S1: Bonkers hit the air in 1993. It had almost been a decade since the brunch that started it all. In that time, Disney television had gone from nonexistent to the standard that everyone else had to chase. The problem was, by the time Bonkers hit the air, other networks had already caught up and would even take the lead, and now Disney television animation would have to decide if they were going to chase by rebranding, or stick with the girl who brought them to the days.

1:34:00 S2: Here were all these people from different studios, there were people like me that had never worked for any studio, in animation. I was a record producer. So I think it was [1:34:09] ____ and I, we're talking, and we said, "Are we doing this right? Are we doing a Disney TV show correctly?" And then we realize, there's never been a Disney TV show, at least a Saturday morning style TV show. And therefore, because we work for Disney, and we're making these shows, we are Disney [chuckle], what we're doing is Disney. And that, whatever we were doing, whether it was right or wrong, would be a Disney show.

[music]

Subscribe: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-look-back-machine/id1257301677?mt=2

[blackkudos]

Stuart Scott

Stuart Orlando Scott (July 19, 1965 – January 4, 2015) was an American sportscaster and anchor on ESPN, most notably on SportsCenter. Well known for his hip-hop style and use of catchphrases, Scott was also a regular for the network in its National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Football League (NFL) coverage.

Scott grew up in North Carolina, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He began his career with various local television stations before joining ESPN in 1993. Although there were already accomplished African-American sportscasters, his blending of hip hop with sportscasting was unique for television. By 2008, he was a staple in ESPN's programming, and also began on ABC as lead host for their coverage of the NBA.

In 2007, Scott had an appendectomy and learned that his appendix was cancerous. After going into remission, he was again diagnosed with cancer in 2011 and 2013. Scott was honored at the ESPY Awards in 2014 with the Jimmy V Award for his fight against cancer, less than six months before his death in 2015 at the age of 49.

Early life

Stuart Orlando Scott was born in Chicago, Illinois on July 19, 1965 as the son of O. Ray and Jacqueline Scott. When he was 7, Scott and his family moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Scott had a brother named Stephen and two sisters named Susan and Synthia.

He attended Mount Tabor High School for 9th and 10th grade and then completed his last two years at Richard J. Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, graduating in 1983. In high school, he was a captain of his football team, ran track, served as Vice President of the Student Council, and was the Sergeant at Arms of the school's Key Club. Scott was inducted into the Richard J. Reynolds High School Hall of Fame during a ceremony on February 6, 2015, which took place during the Reynolds/Mt. Tabor (the two high schools that Scott attended) basketball game.

He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and was part of the on-air talent at WXYC. While at UNC, Scott also played wide receiver and defensive back on the football team. In 1987, Scott graduated from the UNC with a B.A. in speech communication. In 2001, Scott gave the commencement address at UNC where he implored graduates to celebrate diversity and recognize the power of communication.

Career

Following graduation, Scott worked as a news reporter and weekend sports anchor at WPDE-TV in Florence, South Carolina from 1987 until 1988. Scott came up with the phrase "as cool as the other side of the pillow" while working his first job at WPDE. After this, Scott worked as a news reporter at WRAL-TV 5 in Raleigh, North Carolina from 1988 until 1990. WRAL Sports anchor Jeff Gravley recalled there was a "natural bond" between Scott and the sports department. Gravley described his style as creative, gregarious and adding so much energy to the newsroom. Even after leaving, Scott still visited his former colleagues at WRAL and treated them like family.

From 1990 until 1993, Scott worked at WESH, an NBC affiliate in Orlando, Florida as a sports reporter and sports anchor. While at WESH, he met ESPN producer Gus Ramsey, who was beginning his own career. Ramsey said of Scott: "You knew the second he walked in the door that it was a pit stop, and that he was gonna be this big star somewhere someday. He went out and did a piece on the rodeo, and he nailed it just like he would nail the NBA Finals for ESPN." He earned first place honors from the Central Florida Press Club for a feature on rodeo.

ESPN

Al Jaffe, ESPN's vice president for talent, brought Scott to ESPN2 because they were looking for sportscasters who might appeal to a younger audience. Scott became one of the few African-American personalities who was not a former professional athlete. His first ESPN assignments were for SportsSmash, a short sportscast twice an hour on ESPN2's SportsNight program. After Keith Olbermann left SportsNight for ESPN's SportsCenter, Scott took his place in the anchor chair at SportsNight. After this, Scott was a regular on SportsCenter. At SportsCenter, Scott was frequently teamed with fellow anchors Steve Levy, Kenny Mayne, Dan Patrick, and most notably, Rich Eisen. Scott was a regular in the This is SportsCenter commercials.

In 2002, Scott was named studio host for the NBA on ESPN. He became lead host in 2008, when he also began at ABC in the same capacity for its NBA coverage, which included the NBA Finals. Additionally, Scott anchored SportsCenter's prime-time coverage from the site of NBA post-season games. From 1997 until 2014, he covered the league's finals. During the 1997 and 1998 NBA Finals, Scott did one-on-one interviews with Michael Jordan. When Monday Night Football moved to ESPN in 2006, Scott hosted on-site coverage, including Monday Night Countdown and post-game SportsCenter coverage. Scott previously appeared on NFL Primetime during the 1997 season, Monday Night Countdown from 2002 to 2005, and Sunday NFL Countdown from 1999 to 2001. Scott also covered the MLB playoffs and NCAA Final Four in 1995 for ESPN.

Scott appeared in each issue of ESPN the Magazine, with his Holla column. During his work at ESPN, he also interviewed Tiger Woods, Sammy Sosa, President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. As a part of the interview with President Barack Obama, Scott played in a one-on-one basketball game with the President. In 2004, per the request of U.S. troops, Scott and fellow SportsCenter co-anchors hosted a week of programs originating from Kuwait for ESPN's SportsCenter: Salute the Troops. He hosted a number of ESPN game and reality shows, including Stump the Schwab, Teammates, and Dream Job, and hosted David Blaine's Drowned Alive special. He hosted a special and only broadcast episode of America's Funniest Home Videos called AFV: The Sports Edition.

Style

While there were already successful African-American sportscasters, Scott blended hip-hop culture and sports in a way that had never been seen before on television. He talked in the same manner as fans would at home. ESPN director of news Vince Doria told ABC: "But Stuart spoke a much different language ... that appealed to a young demographic, particularly a young African-American demographic." Michael Wilbon wrote that Scott allowed his personality to infuse the coverage and his emotion to pour out.

Scott also integrated pop culture references into his reports. One commentator remembered his style: "he could go from evoking a Baptist preacher riffing during Sunday morning service ('Can I get a witness from the congregation?!'), to quoting Public Enemy frontman Chuck D ('Hear the drummer get WICKED!') In 1999, he was parodied on Saturday Night Live by Tim Meadows. Scott appeared in music videos with the rappers LL Cool J and Luke, and he was cited in "3 Peat", a Lil Wayne song that included the line: "Yeah, I got game like Stuart Scott, fresh out the ESPN shop." In a 2002 segment of NPR's On the Media, Scott revealed one approach to his anchoring duties: "Writing is better if it's kept simple. Every sentence doesn't need to have perfect noun/verb agreement. I've said 'ain't' on the air. Because I sometimes use 'ain't' when I'm talking."

As a result of his unique style, Scott and ESPN received a lot of hate mail from people who resented his color, his hip-hop style, or his generation. In a 2003 USA Today survey, Scott finished first in the question of which anchor should be voted off SportsCenter, but he also was second to Dan Patrick in the 'definitely keep him' voting. Jason Whitlock criticized Scott's use of Jay-Z's alternate nickname, "Jigga", at halftime of Monday Night Football as ridiculous and offensive. Scott never changed his style and ESPN stuck with him.

Catchphrases

Scott became well known for his use of catch phrases, following in the SportsCenter tradition begun by Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. He popularized the phrase booyah, which spread from sports into mainstream culture. Some of the catchphrases included:

"Boo-Yah!"

"Hallah"

"As cool as the other side of the pillow"

"He must be the bus driver cuz he was takin' him to school."

"Holla at a playa when you see him in the street!"

"Just call him butter 'cause he's on a roll"

"They Call Him the Windex Man 'Cause He's Always Cleaning the Glass"

"You Ain't Gotta Go Home, But You Gotta Get The Heck Outta Here."

"He Treats Him Like a Dog. Sit. Stay."

"And the Lord said you got to rise Up!"

"Make All the Kinfolk Proud ... Pookie, Ray Ray and Moesha"

"It's Your World, Kid ... The Rest of Us Are Still Paying Rent"

"Can I Get a Witness From the Congregation?"

"Doing It, Doing It, Doing It Well"

"See ... What Had Happened Was"

Legacy

ESPN president John Skipper said Scott's flair and style, which he used to talk about the athletes he was covering, "changed everything." Fellow ESPN Anchor, Stan Verrett, said he was a trailblazer: "not only because he was black – obviously black – but because of his style, his demeanor, his presentation. He did not shy away from the fact that he was a black man, and that allowed the rest of us who came along to just be ourselves." He became a role model for African-American sports journalists.

Personal life

Scott was married to Kimberly Scott from 1993 to 2007. They had two daughters together, Taelor and Sydni. Scott lived in Avon, Connecticut. At the time of his death, Scott was in a relationship with Kristin Spodobalski. During his Jimmy V Award speech, he told his teenage daughters: "Taelor and Sydni, I love you guys more than I will ever be able to express. You two are my heartbeat. I am standing on this stage here tonight because of you."

Eye injury

Scott was injured when he was hit in the face by a football during a New York Jets mini-camp on April 3, 2002, while filming a special for ESPN, a blow which damaged his cornea. He received surgery but afterwards suffered from ptosis, or drooping of the eyelid.

Appendectomy and cancer

After leaving Connecticut on a Sunday morning in 2007 for Monday Night Football in Pittsburgh, Scott had a stomachache. After the stomachache worsened, he went to the hospital instead of the game and later had his appendix removed. After testing the appendix, doctors learned that he had cancer. Two days later, he had surgery in New York that removed part of his colon and some of his lymph nodes near the appendix. After the surgery, they recommended preventive chemotherapy. By December, Scott—while undergoing chemotherapy—hosted Friday night ESPN NBA coverage and led the coverage of ABC's NBA Christmas Day studio show. Scott worked out while undergoing chemotherapy. Scott said of his experience with cancer at the time: "One of the coolest things about having cancer, and I know that sounds like an oxymoron, is meeting other people who've had to fight it. You have a bond. It's like a fraternity or sorority." When Scott returned to work and people knew of his cancer diagnosis, the well-wishers felt overbearing for him as he just wanted to talk about sports, not cancer.

The cancer returned in 2011, but it eventually went back into remission. He was again diagnosed with cancer on January 14, 2013. After chemo, Scott would do mixed martial arts and/or a P90X workout regimen. By 2014, he had undergone 58 infusions of chemotherapy and switched to chemotherapy pills. Scott also went under radiation and multiple surgeries as a part of his cancer treatment. Scott never wanted to know what stage of cancer he was in.

Jimmy V Award

On July 16, 2014, Scott was honored at the ESPY Awards, with the Jimmy V Award for his ongoing battle against cancer. He shared that he had 4 surgeries in 7 days in the week prior to his appearance, when he was suffering from liver complications and kidney failure. Scott told the audience, "When you die, it does not mean that you lose to cancer. You beat cancer by how you live, why you live, and in the manner in which you live." At the ESPYs, a video was also shown that included scenes of Scott from a clinic room at Johns Hopkins Hospital and other scenes from Scott's life fighting cancer. Scott ended the speech by calling his daughter up to the stage for a hug, "because I need one," and telling the audience to "have a great rest of your night, have a great rest of your life."

Death

On the morning of January 4, 2015, Scott died of cancer in his home in Avon, Connecticut, at the age of 49.

Tributes

ESPN announced: "Stuart Scott, a dedicated family man and one of ESPN's signature SportsCenter anchors, has died after a courageous and inspiring battle with cancer. He was 49." ESPN released a video obituary of Scott. Sports Illustrated called ESPN's video obituary a beautiful and moving tribute to a man who died "at the too-damn-young age of 49." Barack Obama paid tribute to Scott, saying:

I will miss Stuart Scott. Twenty years ago, Stuart helped usher in a new way to talk about our favorite teams and the day's best plays. For much of those twenty years, public service and campaigns have kept me from my family – but wherever I went, I could flip on the TV and Stu and his colleagues on SportsCenter were there. Over the years, he entertained us, and in the end, he inspired us – with courage and love. Michelle and I offer our thoughts and prayers to his family, friends, and colleagues.

A number of National Basketball Association athletes—current and former—paid tribute to Scott, including Stephen Curry, Carmelo Anthony, Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, Jason Collins, Shaquille O'Neal, Magic Johnson, Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Bruce Bowen, Dennis Rodman, James Worthy and others. A number of golfers paid tribute to Scott: Tiger Woods, Gary Player, David Duval, Lee Westwood, Blair O'Neal, Jane Park and others. Other athletes paid tribute including Robert Griffin III, Russell Wilson, Jon Lester, Lance Armstrong, Barry Sanders, J. J. Watt, David Ortiz and Sheryl Swoopes. UNC basketball coach Roy Williams called him a "hero." Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians said: "We lost a football game but we lost more this morning. I think one of the best members of the media I've ever dealt with, Stuart Scott, passed away."

Colleagues Hannah Storm and Rich Eisen gave on-air remembrances of Scott. On SportsCenter, Scott Van Pelt and Steve Levy said farewell to Scott and left a chair empty in his honor. Tom Jackson, Cris Carter, Chris Berman, Mike Ditka and Keyshawn Johnson from NFL Countdown shared their memories of Scott.

During Ernie Johnson, Jr.'s acceptance speech for his 2015 Sports Emmy Award for Best Studio Host, he gave his award to Scott's daughters, saying it "belongs with Stuart Scott". At the 67th Primetime Emmy Awards and at the 2015 ESPY Awards, Scott was included in the "in memoriam" segment, a rare honor for a sports broadcaster.

Filmography

He Got Game (1998)

Disney's The Kid (2000)

Drumline (2002)

Love Don't Cost A Thing (2003)

Mr. 3000 (2004)

Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005)

The Game Plan (2007)

Enchanted (2007)

Just Wright (2010)

Television

Arli$$ (2000)

I Love the '80s (2002)

Soul Food (2003)

She Spies (2005)

I Love the '70s (2003)

One on One (2004)

Stump the Schwab (2004–06)

Dream Job (2004)

Teammates (2005)

I Love the '90s (2004)

I Love the Holidays (2005)

I Love Toys (2006)

Black to the Future (2009)

Publications

Scott, Stuart; Platt, Larry (2015). Every Day I Fight. Blue Rider Press. ISBN 978-0-399-17406-3. 

Wikipedia

[zenkatki]

Pandemic Ironman 2020

I have been asked by a few people to write something regarding Ironman Florida, the first full 140.6 Ironman held in the United Stated since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have never done a race write up before and I am not sure where to begin. I will take it from training which started in March to the end of the race and the reader can skip around to the parts they find interesting.

Training

Ironman Florida was to be my tenth Ironman, a step on the road to Legacy. I started a training plan that I had used before in February and tweaked it a little with my Ironman Coach certification. I already had a good endurance base from the 2020 Dopey Challenge at Walt Disney World in January, so February was primarily weight training and short distance swim, bike and runs. I still had a pool this month at New York Sports Club in Smithtown.

March is where things got interesting and COVID-19 lock-down started. The gym closed. I quickly purchased a Thermal Reaction wetsuit from Blueseventy and found my gloves and booties. I am fortunate to live 2.5 miles from the Long Island Sound so open water swims started early March. It was freezing but a bit fun to channel my inner Wim Hof. The swim training for this Ironman was entirely open water, with one pool swim in July when my sister invited me to her Town Pool once it opened. It was a concern because I feel pool intervals are important but I learned to incorporate intervals in the open water which helped break up those sessions and gave me focus.

I was able to get weight training done at work, we have a pretty decent set up in our garage. Biking and running proceeded as usual with a mix of outside rides and runs and some Zwift workouts. With a ten month training period I worked a lot of Zone 2 heart rate training, I’ve become a big believer.

It was weird not knowing at this point if the race was even on, and training helped me deal with a lot of the unknown, the anxiety. It pushed me through the spring and summer feeling hopeful despite seeing all the races on the circuit being cancelled. I had a 70.3 planned for late August in Maine that was not to be this year.

Time passed and soon it was race time. Ironman sent multiple e-mails stating they were still looking to hold the race and how it would function. I kept a folder in my e-mail with all the correspondence from Ironman, the airline, the hotel and TriBike Transport.

Travel

For whatever reason this was a tough flight to find. I had to go American Airlines and the flight to Florida was out of LaGuardia to Charlotte to Fort Walton Beach, an airport that was about an hour away from Panama Beach City. Going home was Panama City to Charlotte to JFK. Out of all three airports, JFK in New York was the only one with the Department Of Health forms to fill out upon arrival.

Now the story I’m about to write is to show how important it is to remain alert and pay attention to detail when you travel. Hopefully you will learn from my mistake here.

I wearily got off the plane at Fort Walton and found a cab outside, a nice, elderly man named Bill who was willing to drive me over an hour to my hotel in Panama City. He was driving, we were chatting and he asked me if it was okay for him to stop for gas. Sure, no problem. At the gas station he asked if I wanted to get anything and I said yes, I’ll run in for a drink. As I exited the gas station I saw the taillights of my cab leaving the pump and proceeding down the road. Without me. I did my best to stay calm but my cab had just left me stranded and my bags were in the car, along with my wallet, shield, and ID. I wondered if I was on a television show. After a few minutes it became clear that I was not on TV, and I needed to do something to track down this car. I was angry at myself for not knowing the cab company name, or getting the vehicle’s plate. After getting nowhere on the phone trying to contact the airline I asked the woman at the gas station to call the police. It was at this moment my cab returned, and my friend Bill said he thought it was weird I wasn’t answering his questions anymore and when he turned around and didn’t see me, he remembered I ran into the gas station. I refrained from physically strangling this man and climbed back into the minivan, clearly shook regarding how this race weekend just started.

Hotel

I had booked the Boardwalk Beach Hotel & Convention Center when I registered for this race. It was originally the host hotel and the race was to take place right on the grounds which is super convenient. Due to COVID and the safe return to racing, the race venue was moved six miles away to Aaron Bessant Park so they could spread us out more. I kept the reservation at BBH to be fair and help with the hotel’s business. I did enjoy being there but it was far from everything. In retrospect I should have rented one of those kewl golf carts and used that to get around for the weekend. I spent approximately $100 in Uber fees going back and forth to Aaron Bessant and Pier Park. All my cab fees, airport runs included, came to about $250. A shuttle would have been super nice but I think the majority of the people racing switched their accommodations upon the announcement of the venue change.

The hotel itself was okay, I was on the ground floor so it was out and a short walk to the water and road. The cafeteria had coffee in the morning and some pastries but I only saw them cooking food my last day as I checked out. The people that worked there were nice, I’ll forever remember me cleaning my bike in my room with the door open and housekeeping cleaning the adjoining rooms. I had put some music on the Bluetooth and we had a great time.

Race Check In

About a week before traveling Ironman sent out an Active.com e-mail with a link to reserve race check in times. This again was to space us out and not have us standing in line, clogging up the area. I picked Wednesday night between 5-6PM. Bibs were given out first come, first serve so the lower your bib number was the earlier you checked in. I was #1038. I arrived at about 4:45 with my mask and was told I could go in. It was athletes only so if you were with someone they had to wait outside the Ironman Village for you. I had to answer a short survey verbally, get my temperature taken, and then was directed table to table, just like a regular race. For places where a line of people might happen there were tape marks and lanes were roped off with string and little ribbons indicating every six feet. I was able to pick my bike check-in time for Friday, they gave me a little card with 2-3PM on it. I actually really liked this system and I think it would be great even when racing goes back to its regular routine. I found it interesting that the swag such as the swim cap and back pack didn’t have the race name on it. The finisher shirt and medal had no date on it. I guess up until the very start of the race it was always uncertain if it would be a go.

I learned that Ironman Gulf Coast 70.3 would also be on Saturday, November 7th, with an 11:00AM start time. So both races would be going at almost the same time using the same course and staging area. I received an e-mail from Triathlon Wire with the numbers of about 1250 athletes for the full and 300 for the half.

After checking in I walked over to the TriBike Transport tent, picked up my bike, put air in the tires and rode it back to my hotel. It was dark when I got back so I walked over to Subway for a veggie sub.

Thursday was a day for me to ride a little, swim a little and look around a little. My calves let me know when I did too much walking. That happens to me often at Disney for marathon weekend. You’re in a great place and want to see it all but remember, there’s a race in a couple of days! I did what I could to find vegan food options in a very big seafood area. I remembered to bring food to eat later back to my room, I had a refrigerator and a microwave there.

I walked on the pier and saw a few of the swim course buoys set up. It always looks so far, doesn’t it?

Before bed I watched the athlete briefing on-line and reviewed the race packet I printed out before I left New York. I got my gear bags ready to be handed in along with my bike the next day.

Bike Check In

Friday I rode my bike and gear bags to check in at 2PM. For some reason we also needed to wear our timing chip which made me thankful I watched that briefing the night before, because they really weren’t letting people go in without them. Athletes only again, no one without a timing chip and an event race band could enter transition. In I went with my mask on again.

Bikes were placed every other space on the rack giving us a little more room. Gear bags stayed with the bike. I tucked mine under the rear wheel that was in the air. All items in the bags must stay in the bags even during the race. So the guy two spots down from me who set his area up like he was doing a neighborhood sprint complete with a towel mat had to put all his gear back in the bags. After taking a picture of my set up and saying good night to my bike (for real, I speak to it) I got out of there. I made sure I knew where I was regarding swim in, bike out/bike in and run out before I left. I picked up a veggie pizza before heading back to the hotel. I spent the remainder of that day eating, relaxing, reading, prepping my Special Needs bags. I usually apply race numbers (TriTats) the night before but there was no body marking for this race so I wasn’t going to use up the numbers.

I was slightly concerned about getting to the race start so early the next morning. The front desk had recommended a cab service, but I met an awesome man named El by the hotel pool. He needed a charger for his Garmin. I let him use mine and we started talking about the next morning. He had driven to Florida from Tennessee, had his car and offered me a ride to the start which I gratefully accepted.

Race Morning

Up at 3:45AM race morning. Made instant coffee, ate half a bagel, lubed, dressed, double checked all my bags and headed out. El and I drove to transition and he was able to park close to the transition entrance. Special Needs bags were handed off on the way in to Transition. Masks were on. I went to my bike, double checked the tires and filled the water and Gatorade bottles. They didn’t want us wondering around too much. I did see Chris Nikic walk into Transition. This race was his attempt at becoming the first person with Down Syndrome to complete an Ironman. I thought it was great to see him, a good sign. Now that I think about it at this point I just focused on that good thought and the cab ride from the airport wasn’t even in my head. Mike Reilly was there! I got ready to swim and tucked my Morning Clothes bag behind my gear bags, Morning Clothes stayed with us as well.

Swim

The forecast projected it being overcast most of the day and the morning was a bit cloudy. I picked goggles with a super light tint and it was a good choice. We were to stand with our bikes until our projected swim time was called out. I stayed put until I heard, “1:20-1:30 head to the swim start now!” Everyone thinking they were finishing the swim in that time started out and towards the beach, it was about a seven minute walk on the road and on sand. Some people had throw-away shoes on, I did not. The road had tape marks every six feet, they wanted you to try to stay on them when walk-traffic stopped. On the sand they had roped off lanes with pink ribbons tied on every six feet. We were to stay on a ribbon. There were spectators the whole walk. Eventually my lane made it to the water and they were letting four people enter every five seconds or so. Despite this great system guess what. Once we were in the water in was a traditional Ironman. It took some time to get passed the breaks but once I was in I was going. Two loops, clockwise in the Gulf. I saw fish and a sea turtle. There was a current pushing us sideways so it took some effort and a lot of sighting to stay to the left of the buoys. It wouldn’t be an Ironman if I didn’t get hit in the eye and I got it on my second loop. If you’re familiar with the Lake Placid swim it was like that only no cable though, sorry. Despite it being wetsuit legal I was getting hot towards the end. I really enjoyed the water though and had a swim time of 1:27:01.

T1

My transition neighbors were gone by the time I got into T1 so I had plenty of room. I was expecting to have to wear a mask in Transition but we did not. I had my bike gear in the bag set up so I could just pull it out and put it on and it worked well. I hung my wetsuit on the bike rack to dry hoping that was allowed. It was still there when I got back so I guess it was. Once I was bike ready I made my way out to start my ride. My T1 time was 10:39.

Bike

Because the swim had been warm I started my bike ride a little thirsty which was unfortunately a sign of things to come. To keep contact points down Ironman had reduced the amount of Aid Stations, so after drinking my water and most of my Gatorade quickly it was some time before I could refill. I ate every 45 minutes to an hour on the bike. Solid food was no problem, I had a lot with me and grabbed extra going through the Aid Stations. It was fluid I needed more often than it was available. If the sun had been out full force I think I would have had an even worse problem. It was about 80 degrees, humid, still overcast and windy which meant I was sweating and not really going anywhere when pedaling against the wind. I used the tail wind as best I could to make up time. I really think I need to be re-fit for my bike because at mile 30 I was already having terrible lower back pain. It wasn’t an easy ride and despite everyone telling me how flat the course is, it was over 3,000 feet of elevation. I had to get off to use the porta-potty and stretch early on. I guess at this point I should mention my race kit. I wore a one-piece tri suit from Zoot, the Autism Ohana kit. Google it if you have a chance, I think it’s great. Very colorful and for a good cause. I wore it to remember my friend Lizzie that I run with sometimes in Central Park as a volunteer for Achilles. But there are goods and bads of wearing a one-piece and the bads is definitely when you try to use the bathroom in it. It has little sleeves that are tough to find and get your arms through when they are wet. So there was a struggle in that porta-potty, no doubt. Finally I opened the door. The porta-potty was on an incline and I kind of stumbled out of it and cracked my left knee on the doorway. Then I bent over to grab my knee and hit my big, bike helmet head on the side. I felt like the Three Stooges was trying to do an Ironman, I really did. Shaking my head I got back on the bike and started to go. I felt my knee throbbing for about twenty miles. As I write this I have a wicked bruise. But back to the bike…This was a one loop course on the highways of Florida. There were wide shoulders and a bike lane that we rode in but in the back of my mind I kept thinking this was an active road way and any passing needed to be super carefully done. Cars were courteous enough not to use the right lane but if a driver wanted to be a jerk and use it they could. Any residential/business areas had spectators. As I said before it was windy. I did the best I could and had some good splits when the wind was with me but I needed to get off a few more times to stretch. I finished the bike with a usual time of 7:14:01.

T2

Again I had the area to myself so I sat to change shoes and get ready for the run. I was a little put off by my bike split and my stomach was not 100% but I thought I could have a strong run if I stayed focused. Removing sand from my feet was a challenge but it was important so avoid any irritation so I took the time to do that before I put my socks on. I stretched my back and drank more Gatorade before I left. I had a T2 time of 10:53.

Run

As I started my run I was greeted by just as many spectators as any other Ironman. Some had masks on, some didn’t. Some were dressed up, some played music. Everyone was encouraging and motivating. I started out so happy to be running. This course was an out and back two times along the highway parallel to the beach, passed all the hotels, bars and restaurants. The halfway turning point and the finish line were at Pier Park. For six miles I ran strong and thanked everyone for being out. A lot of people liked and commented on my race kit. It was great. But soon I knew I was going to have to do the run/walk, even as the sun went down and it started to cool off. I was unable to eat anything solid for the majority of the run. The thought of trying made me dry heave. I saw a few people really heaving in the bushes and was afraid I was going to join them. I took in as much fluid as I could, mainly water and Coke. I was sweating out a lot of salt, my neck and face were all gritty. I thought at first maybe it was sand but why would there be sand on my face, right? Out and back, out and back, using whatever I could in my brain to keep moving. I followed the cones they used to mark off the run area. Walk one cone, run five cones. My quads were shredded. I thought of my Mom and my Family. I thought of work and how I wanted to make everyone proud. I thought of the finish line and finally, FINALLY it was my turn to cross. My run took 6:25:20. Mike Reilly called me an Ironman with an official time of 15:27:52.

After crossing the spectator-less finish line I was given a mask and a masked volunteer guided me along, not touching me, to a table with plastic bags containing my finisher shirt and race medal. Someone with gloves and a mask removed my timing chip. I made my way over to Athlete Food and choked down half a veggie sub. I got my picture taken with my medal. (There were photographers out on the course too.) I had completed my 10th Ironman.

As I gathered my gear and dropped my bike back at the TriBike tent, Chris Nikic became an Ironman. I cheered from the parking lot. I started to walk back with the plan of getting passed the road closures to an area where I could call an Uber to get back to my hotel. But I started walking with a man named Dan who had volunteered in a kayak for the swim and at the finish line as well. He had just as long of a day as I had but when he heard of my plan to get back he ran into his hotel, got his keys and drove me to my hotel. And that really, really describes the Ironman atmosphere and Family to me. We all help each other, we all do what we can to get each other through the challenge. I am so grateful I found this sport, these events and have met some of the most amazing people.

I hope this write up helps someone with their goal, be it an Ironman or a first sprint triathlon, or a marathon or whatever. Please feel free to contact me with any questions if I missed something you wanted to know about.

Thank you to everyone for the well wishes, encouragement and congratulations. Thank you to Ironman and the Volunteers for having this race during one of the most hectic times in our lives.

Thank you for reading.

Kristen

SuperKat1029@aol.com

Instagram - @zenkatki

[ahopkins1965]

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What Alexander Hamilton Can Teach Christians about Living in Faith

Bible / Bible Study / Topical Studies / What Alexander Hamilton Can Teach Christians about Living in Faith

Whitney Hopler | Crosswalk.com Contributing Writer

Saturday, May 23, 2020

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Standing in front of Redoubt 10 at Yorktown Battlefield in Virginia, I imagined how much courage it must have taken Alexander Hamilton to lead a battalion of soldiers in a charge there during the American Revolutionary War. They took British soldiers inside the fort by surprise in the middle of the night on October 14, 1781, charging forward with no ammunition (only bayonets to stay quiet), then rushing over logs with treacherous spikes to enter the fort and jump on the well-armed British. Hamilton, whose brave work as an American founding father is now celebrated in the hit Broadway show and soundtrack Hamilton, led his men to capture the fort for George Washington’s Continental Army. 

In a matter of minutes, Hamilton’s soldiers overpowered the British, who were caught sleeping and unprepared – despite their ammunitions advantage. That critical achievement led to victory at Yorktown, which became the last major battle of the war to win American independence from Britain and create the USA.

But Hamilton could have chosen not to fight at Yorktown. His wife Eliza was expecting their first child soon. Instead of staying at home in New York, he asked Washington to appoint him to lead the dangerous charge at Yorktown. He wrote to Eliza about his decision shortly before the battle: “I am going to do my duty. Our operations will be so conducted, as to economize the lives of men. Exert your fortitude and rely upon heaven.” Hamilton was confident that he could take on the challenge well, because of his faith in God’s help.

Hamilton became known for taking all sorts of major risks to invest in our nation’s future. He created our nation’s first bank and formed much of its commercial laws – working diligently despite criticism from those who were suspicious of his new ideas. He wrote the majority of essays in The Federalist Papers to inspire divided Americans to unite behind the new US Constitution and learn how to work together to build our new country. 

Today, we celebrate Hamilton for his remarkable, and even audacious, courage. He did what many others were afraid to do – and he did so without knowing how it would all turn out. Why? Hamilton made a lifelong habit of asking God one key question: “How can I be bolder?”

Here’s how asking God that same question yourself can lead you to make your own great contributions to God’s work in America:

Remember who you’re asking for courage. 

God is all-powerful, and he wants the best for you. So you can be confident in trusting God when you take the risks he calls you to take. Like everyone else, you will encounter doubt in your life. But if you respond to your doubts by searching for a deeper faith, as Hamilton did, God will meet you where you are and help you grow. Hamilton, who was a lawyer as well as a military officer, looked for – and found – evidence that he could trust God. As he once wrote, “I have examined carefully the evidence of the Christian religion, and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity, I should rather abruptly give my verdict in its favor.” When you ask for greater boldness, you’re asking your trustworthy Creator, who can reliably give you courage in any situation.

Take a stand for what you believe in by taking action. 

Hamilton was a man of action. He didn’t hesitate to work hard on causes that he believed God led him to pursue. Sometimes, Hamilton’s projects were controversial. He upset some people by acting on his beliefs – including political rivals Thomas Jefferson (who argued with Hamilton about federal versus states’ rights when they served in Washington’s administration together) and Aaron Burr (who ended up killing Hamilton in a duel). While God doesn’t want you to make enemies as Hamilton sometimes did, he does want you stand up for your convictions. The Bible story of three faithful young men (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) who faced a fiery furnace rather than back down from their convictions (Daniel, chapter 3) shows that God honors those who act on their beliefs. “Those who stand for nothing will fall for everything,” Hamilton once wrote. What convictions is God calling you to act on? How is he leading you to do so? Don’t be afraid to move forward.

Be prepared to make sacrifices for a cause. 

Too many great ideas die because people don’t invest time, money, and energy into following through on them. When God calls you to support a cause, he will provide what you need to do it – but not necessarily all that you want. Hamilton’s Yorktown experience exemplifies that. He and others in the Continental Army had to march hundreds of miles south from New York City to Yorktown, carrying heavy loads of supplies and equipment with them. Once they encamped at Yorktown, they sacrificed their comfort in order to fight for freedom. Hamilton and his colleagues endured separation from loved ones, hunger, exhaustion, and constant life-threatening danger. Some men were killed in combat; more (including Washington’s adopted son) died from camp diseases like typhus, typhoid fever, and malaria. In Luke chapter 14, Jesus advises counting the cost of the work you undertake for his kingdom, saying in verse 27: “… whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Trust God to do what you can’t. 

Simply do your best, day by day, with the work God leads you to do. When you do your part faithfully, God will faithfully do his part. Philippians 1:6 says you can be “… confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” Hamilton, who worked so hard for America’s liberty, said he did so with confidence that God’s power was at work even more. “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records,” Hamilton wrote. “They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

God created you – just as he did Hamilton – with a unique purpose to fulfill in our nation and the whole world. Let’s Hamilton’s life inspire you to boldly discover and fulfill that God-given purpose. The last song on the Hamilton soundtrack asks “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” You can be confident that your legacy will be great if you ask God how you can be bolder each day, and rely on the Holy Spirit to empower you!

 

Whitney Hopler works as Communications Coordinator at George Mason University’s Center for the Advancement of Well-Beingand has written for Crosswalk.com since 2001. She also writes for Thrive Global and blogs. Learn more on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Photo credit: ©Thinkstock/GeorgiosArt

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[gyrlversion]

Jacksons family using his childrens pain to discredit abuse claims

One of them has stopped talking, another has reportedly tried to slit her wrists. How the third is feeling has yet to be revealed, but he can’t be that happy.

The effect that any public scandal has on the children of those involved is often ignored but usually devastating.

In the case of Michael Jackson, who has gone from being an object of international showbusiness veneration to a despised paedophile whose legacy is being torn down, the fallout must have been particularly crushing.

Close: Jackson with (from left) Prince, Blanket and Paris. Could it be that members of the Jackson family are using the children to ramp up sympathy for the fallen star, discrediting the documentary and its headline-grabbing claims? 

On Saturday, Paris Jackson — the star’s only daughter — was taken to hospital. Los Angeles police told news outlets they were called to her LA home at around 7.30 am following a suicide attempt.

According to showbusiness news website TMZ, she was placed on what is called ‘5150 hold’ — the California state code for the temporary psychiatric commitment of someone whose mental state indicates they pose a danger to themselves or others.

Citing members of the Jackson family as sources, TMZ claimed the 20-year-old model had attempted to slit her wrists largely because of the backlash to the new documentary Leaving Neverland, which provides testimony from two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who say the superstar sexually abused them for much of their childhood.

Ms Jackson has previously spoken about her problems with depression, in particular following another attempted suicide in 2013.

Medical officials have said she is now in a stable state, although she sparked concern after taking to Twitter to rail at the media reports of her suicide attempt. ‘F*** you you f***ing liars’.

Paris has repeatedly referred to media ‘lies’ about accusations levelled at her father, but this was not enough to avoid the wrath of Jackson ‘Truthers’ — fanatical fans who will hear no ill word said against their icon, above

Her sudden hospital visit this weekend came shortly after she became embroiled in a heated social media exchange with zealous Michael Jackson fans who had criticised her for not doing more to defend her father’s reputation.

Paris has repeatedly referred to media ‘lies about accusations levelled at her father, but this was not enough to avoid the wrath of Jackson ‘Truthers’ — fanatical fans who will hear no ill word said against their icon.

They must have expected Jackson’s children — and most of all Paris, who was particularly close to him — to have leapt to his defence. But on Thursday, Paris insisted it was ‘not her role’ to champion her father, although she did praise her cousin, Taj (son of Jackson’s brother, Tito), for standing up for the singer.

‘There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t already been said in regards to defence. Taj is doing a perfect job on his own,’ Paris tweeted.

Amid claims she is worried the new furore will kill off the aspiring actress’s plans for a film career, Paris last week told militant Jackson fans to ‘calm down’ and ‘smoke some weed’.

Citing members of the Jackson family as sources, TMZ claimed the 20-year-old model had attempted to slit her wrists largely because of the backlash to the new documentary Leaving Neverland

‘I’m just tryna get everyone to chill out and go with the flow, be mellow and think about the bigger picture. That’s me,’ she added. Two days later, she was rushed to hospital.

The reported reaction of her younger brother, Blanket, to the bombshell documentary has been equally dramatic.

According to Taj — now the singer’s cheerleader — 17-year-old Blanket Jackson (who nowadays calls himself ‘Bigi’) has retreated into an uncommunicative, shocked state since Leaving Neverland was released.

Taj Jackson told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show recently: ‘Bigi is one of the most talkative kids at school. He’s not talking now and people are worried about him because he’s sensitive just like his dad was.’

Asked about the impact of the allegations against Jackson on his children, Taj said: ‘It’s beyond devastating because . . . seeing what they’re going through, it really upsets me.’ Taj said each of the children was ‘handling it different’.

We have yet to hear what Jackson’s eldest child, aspiring film-maker Prince, 22, thinks.

But a source close to the family claimed last week that Prince and his siblings were considering suing Jackson’s accusers, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, for fraud, emotional distress, slander and misrepresentation.

Jackson’s three children say they will give any damages to charity and primarily want the men to ‘accept’ responsibility and apologise, said the insider.

The source told the New York Post: ‘It’s very important to them they carry forward [Jackson’s] legacy of philanthropy and humility.’

Given both Paris Jackson’s insistence that it isn’t her job to defend her father and her brothers’ public silence, the claim that they’re preparing to take legal action seems dubious.

Similarly, Taj Jackson’s statement that the documentary turned Blanket into a virtual mute has been undermined by ex-British child actor Mark Lester, Blanket’s godfather. 

Lester (who, complicating the picture, is believed by some to be Paris’s biological father after he gave the singer a sperm sample) said Blanket had been worryingly uncommunicative long before Leaving Neverland came out.

Could it be that members of the Jackson family are using the children to ramp up sympathy for the fallen star, discrediting the documentary and its headline-grabbing claims?

If so, it wouldn’t be the first time. Older members of the deeply dysfunctional Jackson clan were accused of cynically pushing the three children into the spotlight after the singer died of a drug overdose in 2009.

Medics attended Paris Jackson’s Hollywood home this morning on an attempted suicide call, LA police have confirmed – despite the star denying she had tried to take her own life. Pictures of Paris following her hospitalization carrying cigarettes later emerged

Then, Jackson’s public image already hung in the balance: would he be remembered as a drug-abusing weirdo with a huge question mark hanging over his relationships with young boys, or would he ascend into the showbusiness firmament as the King of Pop whose life was cruelly cut short by the pressures of fame?

Paris Jackson, then 11, helped sway opinion in his favour when — speaking publicly for the first time — she addressed his memorial service. 

‘I just want to say ever since I was born, daddy has been the best father you can ever imagine, and I just wanted to say I love him so much,’ she said before bursting into tears.

Black civil rights activist Al Sharpton received a standing ovation when he told the children: ‘There wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with.’

It’s not surprising the large family is anxious to protect the good name of Jackson given that, even in death, he remains their main breadwinner. Many Jackson family members live entirely off the earnings of the estate, which were $75 million in 2017.

The Prince’s Trust, the youth charity founded by Prince Charles, has ended a partnership with Thriller Live, a West End musical celebrating Jackson’s life 

That estate is losing its value by the day as the wider world tries to disassociate itself from a man whose monstrous behaviour towards children as young as seven is difficult to deny after Leaving Neverland. 

The Prince’s Trust, the youth charity founded by Prince Charles, has ended a partnership with Thriller Live, a West End musical celebrating Jackson’s life. 

The Indianapolis Children’s Museum — just two hours’ drive from the Jackson family’s hometown of Gary, Indiana — has removed Jackson’s fedora and famous spangly glove from display. 

A Jackson poster has also gone from the museum’s Power Of Children exhibition.

French fashion brand Louis Vuitton has removed Jackson-inspired clothing from its new collection. Makers of animated TV series The Simpsons have pulled an episode in which Jackson voiced his character.

The Jackson family estate is suing broadcaster HBO, which released the film with Channel 4, for an estimated £75 million for breach of contract. 

The estate claims HBO agreed not to disparage the star in the future during a 1992 deal to air one of his concerts. HBO says the legal action reeks of ‘desperation’.

As the singer’s family face a future in which the ‘MJ’ connection will be anything but a golden ticket, they have every reason to feel their well-cushioned world must be caving in on them.

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[richmegavideo]

My Horrible Records Time Capsule, Subtitled: Crapsule

  Cuing up "That Smell" by Lynryd Skynyrd

Related to Elements: Crate Digging, DJ, Underground

Every evening as I descended the basement stairs on my way to my nightly music-listening ritual in the man cave, I'd be forced to ask myself "What is that God-forsaken, moldy-ass smell?  ...And why are the stairs squishy feeling?"  I knew the answer already, but I was afraid to look and find out.  I ignored it until the smell became unbearably strong and it was obvious at that point it was time to act for the health and safety of my family.  

So after a little liquid bravery on a quiet Saturday morning it was time to bust out the power tools and demo some basement walls!  After a little sweat and a lot of noise I found a hidden crawlspace right next to the basement steps where the smell was emulating from.  

IT WAS ABSOLUTELY NASTY!  As soon as I removed the paneling hiding the hell hole, the smell rushed out of there and grabbed my nose hairs.  Thankfully my family was gone for the weekend and luckily I had a dust mask to help at least keep some of that death out of my lungs. Well now I did it.  I just created a huge job for myself, but it was one that couldn't be avoided any longer.  I knew looking at the hole what I had to do.  It was time to man up and seal this place up properly.  But only AFTER dealing with the mold that came courtesy of the dumbassery of the previous owner of my house.  I've watched enough Holmes on Homes on TV to know it needed to be "done right the first time or not at all!" Don't worry, I'm not going to go through the entire child birth process, I'll skip right to the baby.

Removed the nasty, poured concrete, sealed with Dry Lok Paint, insulated properly!

Long story short, after a lot of work the smell was finally gone!  Now I can seal this up properly and I'll know there will be no problems with moisture or moldy insulation again.

Water Tight, Air Tight, Sealed Space = Time Capsule

Before I seal this small crawlspace up behind walls for "eternity", I knew I had one chance to leave behind a permanent message for future archeologists or pissed off home-owners.  Something that I can leave behind that represents my lifestyle as a human being.  After pondering a while on the dilema with a few beers it hit me, "Duhhhhhh, RECORDS!!!" Records Last Forever!  Well, they do if stored andor played properly, and this was now the perfect sealed-off from the elements environment.  But there's no way in hell I'm going to leave behind any of my cherrished records!   Even some of my crappy records can still be sold for cash, so I couldn't just throw in random crap that some people would enjoy. I had to choose the most horrible records I had.  Stuff I'd have a hard time selling even if I wanted to.  I had to choose records that were horrible quality pressings or massively overproduced or just terrible music.  So I chose 3 records that represented all of those qualities and gifted it to the future inhabitants of my little corner of Earth.

Time Crapsule: The List!  My 3 Worst Records Left Behind in No Particular Order

Relax!  It's the Mexican Pressing

1.  Devo ‎– Freedom Of Choice "Libertad De Eleccion" LP (Warner Bros. Records) Mexican Pressing 1981 Look, I LOVE Devo.  It pained me to even THINK about dissing Devo in any way.  But this pressing was not their fault and if anything it probably pissed them off more than it did me.  I actually bought this record earlier this year from an online seller.  It was never the best album they did but it was a Devo album I didn't yet have on wax, still sealed for only 6 dollars!  What could go wrong with that deal!?!  Well, I guess I didn't pay attention to the "Mexican Pressing" footnote on the product listing.  

  "I'm on a Mexican, (woah woah) Radio!"

"What's so bad about a Mexican pressing?" you may ask.  After all, they invented the world's only perfect food, the taco, so how could they possibly screw up something as simple as pressing a record?  Well apparently they didn't have the speed setting right at the pressing plant that day because this record sounds like the Chipmunks doing Devo.  No lie, this thing somehow plays too fast at 33 RPM.  

But hey, no problem, I have a deck with pitch control, so I'll just slide it way down and then it will sound normal right?  Well it helps a little, but screw that!  Any time you have to use your pitch control to make ANY record sound right you are literally bending over and taking it from the record companies.  Even with the pitch adjusted the entire thing sounds hollow and without any nuances.  This is probably one of the worst cases of quality control I've ever seenheard in all my years of collecting records.  

So Naturally I couldn't sell this to anyone in good conscious knowing the look on their faces would be similar to the look on my face when the needle was dropped on it for the first time.  I can't pass on crap to others, that's the opposite of paying it forward.  Besides, Devo deserves more respect than that.  So I whipped it into the hell hole!  (sorry, bad pun!)

$12 from 720 records, this was unofficial as all hell, a DJ Shadow boot to boot

2.  DJ Shadow ‎– March Of Death / Karmacoma 12" BOOTLEG (Mo Wax) 2005 I love DJ Shadow's music and I love Zach De La Rocha's music so the thought of hearing a collaboration between them was WAY to intriguing for me to pass up when I saw this back in 2005.  I'll admit, I knew it was a boot when I bought it, but there was no other way to get that music back then, and, as it is often the case, curiosity killed the cat.   This sounds like pure ass.  It sounds like it was recorded from telephone and then pressed to record.  There is almost ZERO bass, it is muffled, it doesn't even begin to sound good at any point.  Even with my EQ highly tweeked it was not enjoyable to play on either side.  

As with all bootlegs, the artists on here didn't make a penny off this sale.   Shadow himself mentioned it's existence on his website and obviously if it was legit it would have gone through quality control until it sounded great... Like it does here...

The Real Deal.  Buy THIS if you want to actually enjoy that song.

Once I bought the Handmade record, there was no way I was going to keep that bootleg around, and I couldn't justify passing the buck onto a fellow Shadow fan even if he or she knew what they were buying.  They deserve better and the musicians deserve better.  It was clear that this boot deserves permanent dark days in the hole.  

  3. Natalie Imbruglia ‎– Smoke (Remixes) 12" Promo (RCA) 1998

Horrendous music doesn't even begin to describe this

Why in the name of all that is unholy do I even have this?!  I don't even REMOTELY LIKE Natalie Imbruglia so why is this vile record touching my other records?  It's not that she's a bad musician, (well yeah, she's pretty horrific or maybe average sounding on her best days) it's that this is an overproduced sounding remix clusterfuck.  The remixers didn't even attempt to use her vocal track in a respectful way, in a way that accentuated her vocals, or even left the vocals alone.  These songs were all about over-effect-processing trippy-trance sounding beats and basically they were trying to make it get played at some upcoming rave.  

I think I bought this on year one of my record collecting days, when I was an utter newb.  I clearly didn't play it before I bought it or I would have left it in the store.  I'm pretty sure I bought it because I liked some of Rae and Christians productions at the time.  Yet even that remix, the only remix I bought it for, sounds abominable.   There is literally nothing about this collection of corny, predictable-build filled, and utterly outdated sounding remixes that sounds even remotely tolerable.   I attempted to sell it a few times and I got blank stares from the record store owners I showed it to.  The last guy I brought it to said "Dude, I have like 5 of those online right now for a buck, so even if you want to donate it to me, I don't want it."  I swore that would be the last time I took it home feeling embarrassed and defeated, so into the hell hole it goes with the rest of the heinous archaic black discs!

A Warning for the Future

  And now the message.  Time to write something that will be my legacy, something awe inspiring...  I could leave a written http link to this blog, but blogs are too temporary and who knows if the Intenet won't be directly responsible for Skynet in the future.   

Hmmmm....

Ah hah!!!

Sometimes I just can't leave well enough alone

Cuing up Taps

  It's the moment of truth!  Now it's time to permanently seal the horrible record time capsule.   2" pink foam was cut to size, but not too tight yet leaving room for expansion foam to cement it firmly into place.

Closing the coffin lid on wack records

  Lastly I sealed off the capsule forever with Great Stuff expansion foam.  

Using expansion foam around all 4 sides for an airtight, watertight seal

That's all folks!  Nothing more to see here!

The expansion foam has now cured, the cavity is officially sealed off forever.  Now I'll cover it up with drywall and hopefully the next guy won't see it until I'm dead and buried.  

And on the day I die, I can do so with a small sense of fulfillment knowing this little piece of history was left behind for future generations to hopefully enjoy hating as much as I did.

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[chestnutpost]

How Lorena Bobbitt Reclaimed Her Place In History

Lorena Bobbitt is beaming. It isn’t yet 1 p.m., and she has already done on-camera interviews for the “Today” show and “Un Nuevo Día,” Telemundo’s morning show, from her suite at the Lotte New York Palace hotel. The room is bustling with female journalists waiting for their turn to speak with her.

For Lorena, this is the most media attention she has received in 26 years, since the “incident,” as she calls it. Back then, she had an acrimonious relationship with the press, who found so much humor in what was the worst night of her life. Not incidentally, they skewed heavily male. (Notable men who covered her case included Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer and Geraldo Rivera.) All they wanted to talk about was her infamous act and not what caused her to do such a shocking thing ― to take a knife, cut off her husband’s penis and toss it out a car window like a discarded apple core.  

When Lorena spots me, she rushes over, petite even in three-inch sparkly heels, and presses her hands to my shoulders. “Melissa!” she exclaims, eyes shining. “It’s so good to see a familiar face!”

Lorena and I met only once before, but it was an encounter that played a key role in her present-day return to the national spotlight. In 2016, I contacted her to see if she’d be open to an interview. I had been thinking about the ways in which the media vilified high-profile women of the 1990s, like Monica Lewinsky and Anita Hill, and wondered what had been left out of Lorena’s story.

STR New / Reuters

Bobbitt in court in Manassas, Virginia, in January 1994, describing how her husband choked her.

When the world learned her name, Lorena was a 24-year-old immigrant manicurist in the process of leaving her husband. As she recalls it, John Wayne Bobbitt used to kick, hit, choke and rape her. On June 23, 1993, she says, he held her down by her wrists as he’d done time and time before and sexually assaulted her. Afterward, she went to the kitchen to get a glass of water and saw a knife. Her next vivid memory is driving her car and throwing a severed penis out the window. It was later successfully reattached to John Wayne.

She was charged with malicious wounding ― an offense for which she faced up to 20 years in prison. He was separately charged with marital rape. Both went to trial, though only hers was televised, and both were acquitted.

I told her that I wanted to retell her story through a contemporary lens because it seemed no one in my generation remembered the vicious accounts of domestic abuse and marital rape that she said triggered her assault. All anyone recalled were the jokes made at her expense.

She was the subject of “Saturday Night Live” skits, late-night comedy routines and a “weenie wacker” song to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” She became so infamous that someone nicknamed a horrific sea worm known for its severing abilities after her. 

The only thing that stuck in the national consciousness was that penis.

Lorena, wary of the media after how she’d been treated, needed convincing. After four months of emails and calls, I visited her in Virginia, where she lives with her partner, David, and their 13-year-old daughter, Olivia. In the resulting profile, “Lorena Bobbitt Is Done Being Your Punchline,” I wrote about how her 15 minutes of fame could have launched a national dialogue about domestic abuse. Instead, it led to a deluge of dick jokes.

Damon Dahlen/HuffPost

In the years since she was last in the public eye, Bobbitt started a charity for victims of domestic violence.

After our meeting, we kept in touch via text. She told me that my story prompted a wave of messages from survivors. Someone else read the piece too: Joshua Rofé, a documentary filmmaker. He told her that he wanted to capture her on film, telling her story on her terms. Two years later, Amazon’s four-part docu-series “Lorena,” executive-produced by Jordan Peele, is set to stream on Amazon, starting Feb. 15. (Full disclosure, I’m in it.) Using original interviews with Lorena, John Wayne, police, neighbors and domestic violence advocates, the documentary re-examines her place in U.S. history.

Over lunch in Manhattan this week, I asked Lorena — who now goes by her maiden name, Gallo — how she felt about being in the national spotlight again.

“I am thriving!” she replied. It took two and a half decades, but journalists are finally talking about the gravity of domestic violence instead of her ex-husband’s external organ, she said. She pulled out her phone and started showing me articles from the past week about men who killed their female partners. “Did you see this one?” she asked. “He choked her and threw her in a lake!”

Her decision to participate in the Amazon documentary was a complicated one, she said. For years, she kept mostly out of the public eye while running a small charity to help victims of domestic violence. Sometimes she would consent to a televised interview so she could talk about her work, she said, even though she knew she’d be the butt of a joke about penises. It was a trade-off she was willing to make. But Rofé convinced her that he could tell her story with as much detail as she needed, that the world was finally ready to really hear her above the buzz of the laughter.

Even decades later, it remains viscerally distressing to watch footage from Lorena’s trial. In clips included in the documentary, she shrinks in her seat, shakes and cries as she describes being raped and beaten by her husband. Her testimony is backed up by a procession of credible witnesses. One client at the nail salon where she worked as a manicurist recalls seeing her arms covered in dark bruises. A neighbor testifies that Lorena confided about John Wayne’s relentless violence. The jury is shown photos of her bruised and cut face.

For her, watching footage of herself from that time — mobbed by the media, breaking down in court, insecure and fragile — was the hardest part of doing the documentary. Every time she watches it, she cries; her maternal instinct kicks in and she wants to hug the young Lorena.

“I was in survival mode, consumed with fear for my life, and I didn’t even know how to help myself,” she said. “I felt hopeless.”

Getty Images/AP

Lorena Bobbitt and her lawyer James Lowe (left) and John Wayne Bobbitt (right) during her trial in 1994. 

In many ways, Lorena is in a stronger position to tell her story now, as a 49-year-old woman, she said. She has had time to go to therapy, to become a mother, to mature.

The culture is also better positioned to hear her, she added, noting how the Me Too movement has raised awareness about systemic sexual abuse of women.  

For those who are old enough to remember the Bobbitt case in detail, perhaps the most shocking part of the documentary is finding out what happened to the couple in the years since their respective court dates. While Lorena has lived a fairly quiet life, John Wayne has been arrested multiple times for domestic violence offenses involving two other women.

One of those women is interviewed in the series. In chilling detail, she describes being beaten by John Wayne, hung over a balcony by her legs and then tied to a bed and raped.

“He told me I was his Lorena now,” she tells the camera. “Neither she or I or anyone he’d been with would ever escape him.”

Lorena said she was devastated when she heard the woman’s story. “I felt horror,” she said. “Obviously, he hasn’t changed. It didn’t surprise me because I lived with him. I knew his ways.”

John Wayne denies hurting anyone. He too has been back on the media circuit, doing interviews. Does it bother Lorena to see him on TV, I wondered, telling the world that she was a liar?

“That’s the beautiful thing about this country,” she said matter of factly. “He has the right to tell his story or whatever he calls it. It doesn’t affect me at all. People are very smart. They will be able to work out what really happened.”

She shrugs, takes a sip of tea.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Lorena Bobbitt outside court after her acquittal in February 1994. 

“He doesn’t define who I am. Nope. My mind is clear. I am focused. There is no time for me to hear about the peanut gallery, so to speak,” she said. She paused.

“I said peanut gallery!” She broke into a mischievous smile. The jokes are hers now.

While Lorena and I spoke at her hotel, her daughter and partner were out in Times Square, trying to find the Amazon billboard with her name on it, but they had no luck.

When Olivia was in kindergarten, Lorena told her the bare bones version of what happened: A man hurt Mommy, and she hurt him back. Over the years, she hesitated to say much more. “I didn’t want to open Pandora’s box,” she said.

But she took Olivia to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, for the premiere of “Lorena.” While Lorena was busy doing an interview, Olivia and David were in a theater, watching the series. For the first time, her daughter got the whole story.

Later, they went back to their hotel room. Olivia told her mother she never knew how strong she was, Lorena said. They cried and hugged. Everything was out in the open now.

I asked Lorena how she felt about her legacy. Did she think the documentary would change how she is remembered? Does it matter?

“I don’t know if this is the right way to say it, but I feel vindicated,” she said. “To be understood … I feel free. I walk with my head high.”

The post How Lorena Bobbitt Reclaimed Her Place In History appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://www.thechestnutpost.com/news/how-lorena-bobbitt-reclaimed-her-place-in-history/

[ourmrmel]

Mel Feller Shows Grandfathers Can and Should Leave a Lasting Legacy by Mel Feller

Mel Feller feels that every child needs a dad. In addition, children benefit from the wisdom and influence of other men, over and above what their father can supply. Therefore, your grandkids will profit from the distinct advantages that you bring to their lives, which complement what your son or son-in-law can give them. Your work is not done, granddad. It has just become more enjoyable.

According to the Proverb, “Children’s children are the crown of old men.” Grandfathers have a keen sense that they are leaving a legacy, and that can be very motivating and energizing. For many men, grandfathering is one of the most joy-filled roles they have ever had.

 A UNIQUE RELATIONSHIP

 Who can explain what happens between a grandparent and grandchild? The grandfather sits down with his grandchild and tells stories no one has heard before—or stories everyone has heard many times, but they still enjoy the telling. Alternatively, a child asks to see that trick where Grandpa somehow pulls his thumb apart, then puts it back together again. Others can try, but no one can do it quite like Grandpa.

 Earlier, Grandpa complained that his back was acting up after he dragged thirty pounds of garbage out to the curbside. Now, he can hoist his granddaughter up for a hug without a second thought, without the slightest pain, almost effortlessly. Blake wants to go try to hook that big catfish in the creek, but he wants to wait until Grandpa can come, because only he knows where the “old monster” lives.

 How do you explain it? You do not. You just enjoy it.

 RELATING TO GRANDCHILDREN

 As a grandfather, you bring a wealth of wonderful resources for your children to enjoy. What are the details of a relationship between a grandfather and his grandchild? At the risk of taking something magical, breaking it down and robbing it of its charm, here are some practical ideas:

 Make Time. Time is one of your secret weapons as a grandfather; it sets you apart from most of the other influences in your grandchild’s life. You can be a reminder that there are worthwhile, memory-building pursuits that do not happen in a hurry: chess, reading, just sitting and talking, evening walks, breakfast out on Saturday mornings, or sitting on the porch swing and watching the sunset. Your hobby may be the key that unlocks a point of connection with your grandchild. Find the magic and mystery of a pocketknife or a pocket watch. Bring to life those features that make you the granddad that you are.

 Do Little Things. Some of the best grandfathering comes in cards and letters that you send, maybe with a newspaper clipping or a small trinket that made you think of your grandchild. There are hundreds of little ways to communicate, “You’re special to me.” Consistently recognize your grandchild for good grades, or the ways she is showing her personal character. Reward her just for being the great kid that she is. Send an e-mail just to see how her day is going.

 Inspire and Motivate. Your grandchild will have many teachers, coaches, and friends. There will be new challenges and risks around every corner. He will succeed in many ways, but he will also fail. He’ll need comfort, sometimes advice, and always someone to be positive and believe in him, no matter what. You can be a consistent, long-term source of encouragement through all the changes that come with growing up.

 Be a Living Library. There is a saying: “When an elderly person dies, a library burns down.” Your grandchildren need a sense of family history. They need to hear your stories about what it was like growing up, about your grandparents, about what your sons and daughters (their parents) were like, about that old Chevy you used to drive, about “the good ol’ days.” When you tell stories about aunts and uncles, cousins and grandmas, you convey to them: “You are part of this family.”

 Transmit Values. The world in which your grandchild is growing up probably has different—or at least changing—definitions for concepts like commitment, sacrifice, respect, honesty, responsibility, work, faith, even love. Passing on values can be one of your grandest roles as a granddad. A child will often feel pressure to behave or an ongoing power struggle with her mom and dad. However, with you, she can relax a little more. She may listen better and ask more thoughtful questions, like, “Grandpa, when Daddy was seven, was he like me?” “Did he have to clean up his plate?” Alternatively, maybe, “Why did Aunt Julie get a divorce?” She is trying to learn about her world, including school, her family, and relationships in general. You may have a unique opportunity to help shape her young mind. You may also see a chance to support her parents by pointing out all they do for her, as well as reinforcing their established limits and routines.

 THE EXTRA MILE

 During a National Center for Fathering essay contest, a nine-year-old named Jordan wrote this about his Grandpa:

 Four months before I was born, my real father left my mommy. My Grandpa drove 400 miles to come get my mommy. He took care of her until I was born. When I came home from the hospital, there was a cradle that Grandpa made just for me. Someday, my kids will sleep in the same cradle.

 When I was a baby, I cried a lot at night. Grandpa would walk me around and around the kitchen table. He rocked me to sleep and he was my first baby-sitter. Now I am nine years old and Grandpa is my best friend. We do many things together. We go to zoos, museums, and parks. We watch baseball games on TV and we have Chex Mix together, just the two of us.

 When I was four, my Grandpa spent a whole summer building me a playhouse with a big sandbox underneath. He made me a tire swing and pushes me many times in it. He pushes me real high, way up over his head. Now he spends all his extra time building new rooms on our house so that Mommy and I will have our own apartment.

 My Grandpa is really patient. When he is busy building things he always takes time to start a nail so that I can pound it in. After he is spent all day mowing our big lawn he is tired but he will still hook my wagon up to the lawn mower and drive me all over the place.

 Sometimes people on TV talk about kids from single parent families. I am not one of them because I have three parents in my family. My Grandpa is not my Father, but I would not trade him for all the dads in the world.

 As a dedicated grandfather, you have a lot to offer children in need. With the number of broken homes in our society, chances are good that you will find that child right in your own family. However, even if you do not, there is still a lot you can give to other single-parent families, abandoned children, or a family whose grandparents live far away. All of your grandfatherly assets can apply to children outside your family as well.

 Granddad, building a lasting legacy is about investing in relationships with those who will be the leaders of the next generation—your children and grandchildren. They represent your greatest legacy, and one of your most significant contributions to the future.

Mel Feller loves being a grandpa.  He has four wonderful grandchildren and loves them equally.  His oldest is 20 and the youngest just turned 1 year old.

[jackfollmanwriter-blog]

The Phantom

No one knew more about the West Texas Phantom than grizzlymane415.

I exhausted all of the available information online - the Wikipedia page, the citations on the Wikipedia page, the weird blogspots, wordpresses and even a couple of Angelfires back in the day, the annoying slideshows which promised shocking revelations, but delivered none and just crashed my browser - they had all been laid to waste. My last bastion for any good information about the Phantom was an unsolved murder subreddit populated by other lonely weirdos who were probably collecting unemployment checks and ignoring the creepy messages on their numerous online dating profiles.

The group was great for the passionate discussions about the Phantom I could only have with complete, anonymous strangers who didn't assume I was some kind of sociopathic serial killer myself when I wanted to talk about my fascination with the still free killer of more than 20 people who stalked the plains and oil fields of West Texas in the late-80s. The group was also well-stocked with fascinating theories, like how the Phantom may have been a railroad conductor, or how he was a well-known high school football coach named Butch whose crimes were covered up to protect his legacy.

I also relished when some "newb" would wander into the group and start spouting out information we all had already dissected down to the finest molecule. It got to the point where I put a sticky on top of the page which focused on the six principle pieces of information which defined the Phantom and led to  my gang's particular fascination with him. Unless someone had NEW information about any of these principles, any posts about them would be promptly deleted.

The Phantom took all of his victims in broad daylight (whether or not they were killed during the day was up for debate)

All of the Phantom's victims were regular women, not the common prostitute victims most serial killers claimed

He used an 1894 Marlin Model rifle. An incredibly rare and valuable weapon.

It is likely he had a regular, white collar job as his killing sprees tended to take place just once a year in two-week spans.

It is possible he used railroads for transportation as nearly all of his killings took place near rail stops.

Tracks from a 1959 Chevrolet Apache truck were found leaving a few of the scenes.

However, none of this fully-satisfied my appetite for discovery. The only person who was able to do that was grizzlymane415.

It all started when grizzlymane415 posted viciously gruesome autopsy photos of one of the Phantom's first victims. The images were so horrifying I felt I should have put that white powder they use in autopsy rooms in cop shows/movies underneath my nostrils so I didn't vomit all over my keyboard. Full disclosure, about 90 percent of what I know about crime comes directly from TV and movies.

RachWhov: How did you get that?

I couldn't have typed the question fast enough. I never got an answer.

That would be far from the last juicy nuggets grizzlymane415 would post. Within days, he posted a copy of a letter to a news reporter at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. The letter took credit for the first three murders which had been attributed to the Phantom and another I had never heard of which had never been connected to the Phantom.

RachWhov: Where did you get that?

I would get an answer this time from grizzlymane415, but not necessarily to that exact question.

(Note, for some reason, grizzlymane415 always typed in all caps. Sorry, I know)

grizzlymane415: THE PHANTOM LEFT CLUES EVERYWHERE. HE WAS ACTUALLY ONE OF THE SLOPPIEST SERIAL KILLERS TO NEVER GET CAUGHT. SOMETIMES I THINK HE DID IT ON PURPOSE. DID YOU KNOW HE USED TO TAKE MONEY FROM THE WALLETS OF EACH VICTIM AND THEIR JEWELRY TO RAISE AT LEAST SOME DOUBT IN THE COPS' MINDS THAT MAYBE HIS VICTIMS WERE SIMPLE VICTIMS OF ROBBERY?

RachWhov: I never heard that.

grizzlymane415: IT'S TRUE. CHECK ALL THE CASES. DO A LITTLE MORE GOOGLE SEARCHING. YOU WILL SEE SOME OF THE THEORIES.

grizzlymane415 was right. Everything I could find online suggest The Phantom had stolen money from each victim and their jewelry. Reports never seemed to focus on that too much, but it was occasionally mentioned. While it was never really mentioned in the stories, online threads and comment threads on stories frequently pointed it out, sometimes with foolish dissenters chiming in that he was just a random thief or many of his killings were just random robberies in the area which were attributed to him.

grizzlymane415: DON'T BELIEVE THE FOOLS THAT SAY IT WASN'T HIM EITHER. THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT. THE COPS KEPT TABS ON ALL THE PAWN SHOPS AND GOLD BUYERS IN TEXAS AND NONE OF THAT JEWELRY EVER WAS SOLD AGAIN. SO IT WAS NOT SOMEONE KILLING FOR A QUICK BUCK.

RachWhov: I believe that, it wouldn't make a whole lotta sense.

grizzlymane415: AND YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW THE CRAZY PART YET. THE JEWELRY SHOWED UP AGAIN, BUT IT WASN'T SOLD.

RachWhov: What?

grizzlymane415: CORRECT. THE JEWELRY STARTED SHOWING UP ON STATUES AROUND CHURCHES IN TEXAS. ANY VIRGIN MARY STATUES THAT HAD FINGERS WHICH COULD FIT THE RINGS OR NECKS FOR NECKLACES.

grizzlymane415 attached a few pictures of virgin Mary statues with rings and necklaces on them in what looked like Texas settings. The hair on my arms stood at attention. It was enough for me to put the brakes on the forum, and grizzlymane415, for a little while. I slunk back to my other favorite haunts of the Internet – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, OKCupid – for a little while to stay safe and warm.

But I had to go back to the forum. At first I thought I would just ignore grizzlymane415, check out other cases, chat with my other super non-creepy, anonymous Internet friends, but I just couldn't do it. Here was my dream. Someone who could help me solve the crime which had engrossed and haunted me for years and I was going to run away because I was a scared, little girl? Plus, what's the worst that could happen? It was an anonymous board.

I cracked.

RachWhov: Where did you get those pictures.

grizzlymane415: THINGS ARE OUT THERE. HAVE YOU READ ABOUT THE JUDY PARCH AND PETRA HOLLIVER MURDERS?

RachWhov: Nope.

Tip – don't ever Google the Judy Parch and Petra Holliver murders. It is one of those cases which cues up first-page results of gruesome photos which will cling to your brain like an old stick of gum burned onto the sidewalk of a city street. My search pulled up a black and white photo of two women who I assumed were Judy and Petra clinging to each other in the backseat of a car, a blood-drenched blanket just not quite covering the damage of their faces.

To me, it wasn't even the gore of the photo which struck me so hard. It was the image of these two women who were clinging together like the last thing they wanted to do in the world was let each other know they loved one another before they suffered the world's great insult. They didn't even get the respect of having their final moments filled out with color. Nor, did they get the closure of having their case solved. Which brings me to one of the first major curiosities of grizzlymane415.

The murders of Judy Parch and Petra Holliver had never been connected to The Phantom in any way that I could find. Plus, they were murdered more than 1,000 miles away from The Phantom's stomping grounds of West Texas in Yucaipa, California, 50 miles or so outside of Los Angeles.

Overall there wasn't much information about the murder of Judy and Petra, other than a few archived articles from 1990 in the The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California and some brief cold case pages. Not even a Wikipedia page frustratingly lacking of hyperlinks to other stories to engross yourself in. Their murder was just a little footnote in the murder history of the Inland Empire of California.

RachWhov: There is nothing at all on the Internet which connects The Phantom to the murder of Judy and Petra. Where are you getting this?

grizzlymane415: CHECK THE RECORDS ON THE CASE. OTHER THAN THE LOCATION, IT ALL POINTS TO THE PHANTOM. REMEMBER YOUR OWN PRINCIPLES ON THE TOP OF THIS PAGE.

I did live in California, but hours away from Yucaipa, so driving out there to check their public records search wasn't in the cards. However, my fascination with The Phantom runs deep, and I was able to get in touch with an old high school classmate who lived in Yucaipa who I Paypalled cash in return for wasting a Saturday morning and afternoon going through old murder records for me.

grizzlymane415 was correct, the Yucaipa muders covered all of the bases of my principles except the sixth.

The bodies of Judy and Petra were found just before sunset on a February day, meaning they were murdered sometime during the day.

Both women worked for the school district and were married, with children. They were in no way prostitutes or people who operated in "risky" behavior.

Ballistics showed the women were shot with an 1894 Marlin rifle.

The women's murder occurred in middle of the two-week stretch of The Phantom's last killing spree.

The bodies were found less than a mile from train tracks.

RachWhov: You were right. Everything adds up to Judy and Petra being victims of The Phantom. Why is this not out there anywhere? Couldn't that bring a huge break in the case?

grizzlymane415:

RachWhov: I get it, cops suck, but this isn't right. Have you told the police there?

I didn't get an answer. A week went by.

RachWhov: ???

Another week.

grizzlymane415: I THOUGHT YOU WERE CAPABLE OF NOT NEEDING HAND HOLDING ON THIS, BUT JUDY WAS THE WIFE OF THE POLICE CHIEF IN YUCAIPA. YOU THINK HE WAS VERY INTERESTED IN KEEPING THE DETAILS OF HIS WIFE GETTING MURDERED IN THE BACKSEAT OF A CAR, HALF NAKED WITH ANOTHER WOMAN IN THE PUBLIC EYE? YOU DO THE MATH.

Another curiosity. I couldn't find anywhere, or in anything my friend from Yucaipa sent me where it said Judy and Petra were "half naked" when they were shot. A self-taught expert on my murder myself, I knew this reeked of a detail cops would deliberately leave out of public record to filter out false confessions. Something only the actual killer would know about the murder.

My house grew cold in the middle of an 80-degree day even though I didn't have air conditioning. It's entirely possible grizzlymane415 was completely making this detail up, or it was something he had heard through word of mouth, but those goosebumps upon my arms also knew another thing most self-taught murder experts learn in their 101 class. Murderers love to brag about their work, even though they know it almost always leads to them being caught.

I went over to the front door of my house and checked the lock.

I cut off all communication with grizzlymane415. He probably wasn't really The Phantom, but at best, he was an asshole who was trying to get underneath my skin. I didn't need that. I already had three online dating profiles adept at connecting me with sociopathic beta males who get off on messing with your head.

I remained on the board. I couldn't pass the monotony of semi-employed life and single woman living in a town of just 16,000 without the comfort of faceless online companionship which revolves around the cold murders of human souls.

Things were fine for quite a while, probably a few weeks, before I received another message out of the blue from grizzlymane415.

grizzlymane415:

grizzlymane415: KNOW WHAT THAT IS?

I didn't have to even look it up. I just assumed it was an 1894 Marlin rifle.

He was probably some dumb fuck 15-year-old boy fucking with me who pulled the image off of Google or a gun message board or something, but I can't act like I wasn't totally scared shitless by the thing.

My response came in the form of deleting my account. It may have been the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, but it was all I could do to keep my sanity. It wasn't worth it. Sorry Reddit.

*

Tyler came back in the heat of summer. I flinched when I heard the familiar rumble of his old motorcycle pull into the gravel of my driveway. Tears welled into the corner of my eyes when I walked out onto my rickety porch to see him pulling his helmet off of his shaggy brown hair.

Tyler and I were engaged, technically maybe still engaged. We never officially broke it off.

We met just after college, when both of us were fighting off the adult world by being full-time snowboard bums in Tahoe. We moved in with each other in just a couple of months out of financial convenience, but somehow dated just casually for a few years before we turned up the heat.

Tyler finally proposed about a year before this. That's when things started to get weird between us. I don't think either of us could take the pressure. Engagement meant we were creeping towards adulthood – getting real jobs, paying taxes, moving off the mountain. We decided we would start working on getting "real jobs" in Reno - maybe even Sacramento. We got a rustic rental house in Truckee, California to stay in an earthy little town, but still get a little bit away from Tahoe and try to figure out our lives.

We were in no way ready and took it out on each other. I shocked myself when I discovered I was in no way interested in an office or professional job after a few interviews where I felt I wanted to rip the business casual outfit off of my body and run out into the snow to do what I truly wanted to do with life.

Even more shockingly, Tyler went in the other direction. A quick taste of an internship at a law firm stoked the fire of opportunity which apparently burned inside of him once you got past the haze of weed smoke, shaggy hair and dirty beard.

Tyler came home late from work one night, told me about his plan to move us to the Bay Area where he had a full-time job opportunity lined up and we slowly but surely slipped into a fight which led to him driving off on his motorcycle to go to "San Francisco."

It would be more than six months before he would come back.

I couldn't believe it was him when I saw Tyler walk up the porch, but he didn't let me get a word out before he grabbed me sternly on the back of the head and pulled me in for a kiss. We went inside the house without a word spoken and headed to the bedroom.

We would exchange a few words for the next hour or so, but it would be dark before we had a real conversation.

"How was San Francisco?" I broke the numbing sound of our breathing as we laid in bed.

Tyler just gave a dismissive laugh.

"Not good?"

"No. I was just only there for like three weeks, sleeping on Mike's couch. Couldn't get a job, couldn't afford to live there."

I could tell Tyler was embarrassed when he responded. He knew what question was coming next. He tried to distract me by grabbing the modest engagement ring he gave me months before out of the pocket of his jeans which were sprawled next to us on the bed. He slid the ring onto my ring finger.

"Did you go to your parents?"

"Yeah," Tyler almost whispered his answer before he kissed me behind my ear lobe.

I figured Tyler ran back to the comfort of his parents' five-bedroom house on the coast in Orange County once he said San Francisco didn't work out. I would have done the same, but swap out Orange for Marin.

"What...

Tyler pushed his index finger upon my lips.

"Let's not ruin the moment. Talk about that stuff now. We're just going to get into a fight about it."

"Okay," I agreed, upping the pitch on the second half of the phrase.

"How the fuck is it so hot in here?" Tyler broke the silence and jump up out of the bed naked.

Tyler shuffled over to the large bay window doors of the master bedroom of the house, unlatched them and pushed them out onto the little deck which housed a few pots filled with neglected plants about 10 feet up off of the ground below. I admired Tyler as he stood in the pale moonlight the open doorway let in, his back to me, his arms outstretched. I slipped the ring off of my finger and placed it in a little crystal bowl I kept by the side of my bed.

Tyler yawned when he turned back to me and crawled into bed. He pulled another item out of his jean pocket before I could ask another question.

"You still?" Tyler sheepishly offered up a pipe.

"Yeah, yeah," I took the pipe right after Tyler filled it.

I lied. I hadn't smoked since Tyler left. Too poor. Too depressed and honestly too lazy to go out and get weed myself.

I took a heavy, heavy hit and deflated back down onto the bed. It felt divine.

I watched Tyler take a stiff hit himself. Turned down his second offer.

The hit kicked the malaise and fatigue which was pumping through my veins into overdrive. It wasn't long before I was struggling to keep my eyes open. I could tell I was going to fall asleep before 10 and that was fine for me. I let it come, a cool, gentle breeze drifted through the open bay window doors and gave me a kiss goodnight.

*

I woke up with a calm in my blood I had not felt in quite some time. The comfort of no longer sleeping alone seemed to put my soul at ease. The fresh morning sun of Summer was shining bright through the open door, melting away the refreshing cold of morning. It was just about a damn perfect morning. The kind you would see in a commercial for coffee.

I yawned and looked over to Tyler asleep on his back next to me, the pipe comically rested on his shoulder like the parrot of a pirate. I moved a little bit closer to him but hoped to not wake him at the same time.

My attempt to keep Tyler awake didn't work. He weaved his hand into mine as soon as I slipped over to his side of the bed.

"What happened to the ring?" Tyler said with a froggy, morning throat.

"Oh, uh. I took it off. My fingers swell up in my sleep sometimes, so I don't sleep with rings on. But I can put it back on."

I stretched my body back over across my side of the bed and blindly dropped my hand down into the little bowl. The ring wasn't there. I furiously scanned my hand around the dish a number of times.

"What the hell?"

"What?"

"The ring is gone?"

"You sure you didn't just put it somewhere else?"

"Yes."

I got up out of bed and stood over my nightstand. The ring was not in the bowl or anywhere near it. I dropped hard down to the floor and combed the slick hardwood, looked underneath the bed and behind the nightstand. It was nowhere to be found.

Crawling on all fours, I turned my attention to the floor which led to the open deck door. Quickly stopped dead in my tracks.

Ever-so-faintly pressed into the dust of the floor were boot tracks – the tread of the boots looking like cookie cutter stamps of dog kibble upon the floor.

"Shit."

I traced the tracks to the open door of the deck.

"We didn't just lose a thousand dollars, did we?" Tyler asked from behind.

"That's the last thing I am worried about right now," I shot back. "I think someone came in here and took the ring last night."

It took Tyler a few seconds to reply, but when he did, his voice carried the tenor or building fright.

"Are you serious?"

I turned to see Tyler looking down at me.

"You're joking, right?" He added.

I looked down at the boot tracks one more time.

"Unless you walked around here with boots last night and lost the ring, I'm not."

My mind instantly went to grizzlymane415. I hadn't communicated with him for a while, but he was the last creepy thing taking up residence inside the dark recesses of my brain.

But how the hell could he have tracked me down?

I never shared any personal information with grizzlymane415. There was no information on my profile. I was unsearchable on Facebook and pretty much everything else and he didn't even have my real name. Even RachWhov didn't have a direct connection to me. Rach was short for my middle name and Whov was a play on my last name of Hoover, but the combination of those two would lead nowhere.

Oh shit. Nevermind.

The thought building in my brain shut down every single sense of my body for a moment.

Instagram. Fuck.

My username on the Instagram account I hadn't updated in nearly a year was RachWhov and it was a  picture journal of my life for the past few years, including a fine documentation where I visually bragged about our killer little house in Truckee.

"You think someone climbed up onto our deck in the middle of the night, snuck in here, grabbed just the ring, nothing else, and left without us waking up?" Tyler asked from over by the deck.

"Uh huh. We, were, high."

"Well that's comforting," Tyler snipped before turning back around to me. "Who the hell could have done that?"

"No idea."

I lied. I was not yet ready to tell anyone else about my online life and I myself was far from convinced grizzlymane415 was the one who took the ring. It was a pretty outrageous thought that he found my Instagram and was able to find exactly where I lived and snuck into my bedroom and stole the ring.

I logged into my Reddit account to see if I had received any new messages from grizzlymane415.  

grizzlymane415: WHERE DID YOU GO?

grizzlymane415: SORRY IF I WAS A DICK. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS SHIT?!?!?!?

What followed was a link to an article detailing a string of three murders which had taken place across the Southwest over the past couple of weeks – one in West Texas, one in New Mexico, one outside of Las Vegas. All three had the calling cards of The Phantom, including taking place in a two-week cluster. Worse yet, they occurred in the order which suggested The Phantom was moving in a Northwest pattern, right towards Northern California.

grizzlymane: HE'S BACK.............

I typed up: Where do you live?

Was about to hit Enter...

"Hey," Tyler's voice shot up from behind me in the living room.

I jumped up out of my seat, scrambled to close my browser.

"You looking at porn?" Tyler quipped from behind me.

"No."

Tyler let out a deep exhale.

"I found something weird in the mailbox."

Tyler pushed a bullet into my face. I don't think I had ever actually seen one in-person so it would have been a jarring vision even if he hadn't explained it was resting in our mailbox.

"It was just sitting in there. There weren't letters or anything else."

"Shit. Shit. Shit."

"What?"

"This just has me totally freaked out."

"Well let's go down and talk to the cops."

Tyler had a good idea for the first time in a really long time.

"I gotta take my motorcycle down to Devin's shop anyways."

He followed it up with a really bad one.

"Just take my car with me. We should go together."

"Devin just texted me. If I don't get it down there in like twenty minutes, I won't be able to get it looked at till Monday and I might need it this weekend. I'll just meet you at the station."

I didn't even want to know why Tyler might need his motorcycle for the weekend.

"Fine."

"Alright," Tyler grabbed his motorcycle helmet before he had even finished the word.

"Wait," I pleaded.

Tyler was already out the door.

"Motherfucker."

I could still see the dust lingering from the tires of Tyler's motorcyle when I walked out into our dirt driveway. I fought the urge to call him. He wouldn't answer anyway.

The morning glow which made the start of the day so glorious was long gone. A hazy sky of moist gray hung above, threatening rain and a cold wind whipped around the side of the house.

I jumped into my battered Ford Focus. Shook my head to myself about Tyler's ridiculous selfishness, wondered if I should just say fuck it and drive straight to my parents' house in Marin, but I couldn't do it. It was only about a 10 minute drive down the highway to the station and I was pretty sure the cops would be able to at least bring me some soul relief for a little while.                             

The road from our house to the main highway was probably the last road I wanted to be on at the moment. It was a glorified gravel road, lined with trees and tree-surrounded little shacks and shanties next to the river. Once upon the road, my eyes lingered on something sticking out of the tall grass next to the road - Tyler's motorcycle, propped up halfway between the road and the woods.

I took my foot off the gas, slowly pushed on the brake, felt the world outside my car window come back into regular speed.

Then I felt something hit my bumper.

What the?

I shot a hurried look into my rear-view mirror to see a black truck stuck onto the bumper of my car. The afternoon haze and the brevity of my glance didn't allow me to see the face of the driver behind the wheel, but I took in the outline of a dark hat and dark gloves draped upon the steering wheel.

Another thud hit hard upon my bumper, pushing me off to the side of the road. I tried to correct, but couldn't pull it off, my car went off the embankment of the country road and rumbled into the tall grass field which flanked it.

It now felt as if I was on some kind of rocky road amusement park type ride. My car bounced up and down, roughly and wildly, everything inside the cab, myself included, thrashed about violently. The seatbelt was the only thing saving me from smashing up against the windshield or the steering wheel.

I had much more sinister fears at the moment than smashing my head against the wheel and there was no way a seatbelt could save me from them. Another look out my rear view mirror while airborne allowed me to see more of the truck which had slammed into me from behind and I recognized it all too well. I knew nothing about trucks, but I could pick out a 1959 Chevrolet Apache in any lineup.

My car finally started to slow as I approached the line of trees which led into the woods. The entire world around me got darker when the front of my car smashed into the light shrubs at the edge of the tree line and started plowing over some of the younger trees. It came to a stop just under the cover of the tall firs.

I wasted no time in ripping off my seatbelt, going for the handle of my car door, but it wouldn't budge. The door appeared to be wedged up hard against the thick trunk of a tree.

I climbed over to the passenger-side door. My eyes threw a glance out the back window of my car and saw the black Apache parked on the side of the road.

"Ah, shit!" I screamed when the passenger-side door wouldn't open either.

I shot another look out of the back window – didn't see any movement, but heard the familiar sound of a truck door closing. I didn't wait to see if anyone was walking out of the truck, dove into the backseat and tried one of the back doors.

The highest I have ever felt in my entire life was when I felt that back door give and open out into the darkened forest. I piled out of it before I even got the thing all the way open.

I dragged my field of vision across the grass between the Apache and the back of my car when I climbed out of the car. The driver of the truck was out of his vehicle, his black cowboy hat obscured his pale face just enough to where I couldn't make it out. He took tall strides around the front of the truck in a long, black trench coat.

I wasted no more moments in observation, turned into the woods and fled, pissed at myself for leaving my cell phone in the center console. It didn't matter now, my only hope was running deeper into the woods, finding a house, the river or something, basically just losing the approaching stranger behind me.

For a second, I thought I heard the rumble of the river coming in front of me, but the sound quickly took a familiar form. It was Tyler's motorcycle. I slowed my sprint, shot a look over my shoulder. At the edge of the trees was Tyler on his motorcycle, he reared back on the cycle, tried to maneuver his way through the brush which served as the doormat for the thicker forest.

"Tyler," I screamed through the trees. "Call the cops. Call the cops."

But he couldn't hear me over the sound of his motorcycle. I came to a complete stop and watched him make his way into the forest where he would have a little bit more space to snake his motorcycle around trees. I tried to also look out behind him, where the truck was parked up near the roadway, but couldn't see that far.

Tyler put the motorcycle into a skid just before he reached me. He killed the engine and jumped off, was  greeted by me screaming out at him over the sounds of his dying engine.

"Where is he?"

Tyler whipped around, looked back through the woods.

"The guy in the truck. He ran me off the road."

Tyler lifted up the belly of his shirt to show a horrible road rash sprayed across his stomach.

"I hid in the woods for a while. I tried to call you, but you didn't answer."

"He ran me off the road too," I screamed in Tyler's face. "Where is he?"

Tyler kept his eyes off through the woods.

"He peeled out and drove off when I got back on my motorcycle. He's gone."

I followed Tyler's eyes through the darkening woods and had to agree. There were no signs of the driver, or his truck.

*

The cops had a really tough time not just believing what I told them happened, but even understanding it. I had to pull up Reddit on one of the officer's computers to show them all what it was and how it worked.

Honestly, it seemed like they all thought we were concocting some kind of elaborate alibi to cover up a domestic squabble and/or drunk driving accident. They basically did the least amount of work they could to document it and stopped returning our calls after a couple of weeks. I told them all of the details about The Phantom of West Texas. They didn't care in the least. I may have well just said The Phantom of the Opera.

Making it a little harder to believe my story, I deleted my account and apparently so did grizzlymane415. There was no record of our conversations, all of our comments within the board said they were posted by [deleted].

I found the generic form email for the FBI and a couple of police departments in West Texas, but I never even heard back from them. Maybe the only people who still cared about The Phantom were me and my weirdo Internet friends. Maybe it was a sign that I should just forget about that kind of stuff. At least that was Tyler's opinion.

We left Truckee that day, took the important stuff out of our house and never came back. We moved to Marin County where Tyler was able to get an entry level job with my dad's company and I could find a real job in the office of the local hospital with some of the friends I grew up with.  

Speaking of growing up, it was officially time to. I left the Internet serial killer groupie community behind me and focused on my job and trying to re-plan a real wedding with Tyler.

The months went by and I had almost completely forgotten about that old life and that horrible cloudy day, or at least I tried to, but I could not fully run away. My blood ran cold when I received a voicemail on my phone after getting a missed call from my former landlord, Dale, back in Truckee.

I initially thought the message would be a scolding for the state we left the house in or bailing on the last five months of our lease, but Dale actually seemed to have a softer tone than he usually used. He wanted to get in touch with me because someone had left what seemed like an important piece of mail for us in the mailbox. He just needed our new address so he could send it to us.

I chewed my nails down to the tender skin the next few days, feveriously anticipating receiving our unopened mail. Dale was polite in insisting he would absolutely not open our mail for us, even if we wanted him to (which I did).

I tore into the little forwarded envelope as fast as humanly possible when it showed up.

I recognized exactly what was in the envelope as soon as I opened it up. It was my engagement ring, the tiny little diamond perched upon the top of it glittering back at me.

A note fell out of the envelope.

It was just a cursive signature written in black ink.

It read: The Phantom.

Originally published by Thought Catalog on www.ThoughtCatalog.com.

[itsworn]

Miss Golden Shifter, Linda Vaughn, Highlights the Second Annual Carlisle Hurst Nationals

Car and Driver magazine once referred to her as Racing’s Earth Mother, back when the Aquarian philosophy impacted pop culture. For many male race fans, she was the ultimate trophy girl. To the sponsors and sanctioning bodies, she remains a valuable spokesperson. For the attendees at the Second Annual Hurst Nationals, Linda Vaughn’s popularity stood the test of time as she again took to the rear platform of a Hurst-themed car featuring a huge Hurst shifter display.

The 2018 event, held on the same weekend as the Carlisle Chrysler Nationals, goes into the books as one of the most interesting in Carlisle Productions’ history. The annual Chrysler show is one of the largest in the world; more than 2,700 vehicles were in attendance this summer, with tens of thousands of attendees during the three beautiful days of Mopar celebrations. However, the event managers all admitted that nobody before at any Carlisle event had garnered the attention Linda did on her parade lap.

Last year, the Carlisle crew and Performance West Group manager Larry Weiner took the plunge to cohost a special event for enthusiasts of the legendary shifter manufacturer. Weiner is responsible for late-model vehicle conversions to Hurst-themed packages and a longtime manager for the Mr. Norm Krause franchise under the Grand Spaulding Sport logo; he knows the Hurst mystique well. Ms. Vaughn is best known as the brand’s timeless spokeswoman. She and her original Hurstettes were a fixture at many events in their heyday. However, health issues kept her from making an appearance at the inaugural event. This year she headlined a list of celebrities that included Bob Riggle of Hemi Under Glass fame, Hurst employees like Howard Marsales and Don Glover, and others.

It was 50 years ago, in 1968, that the Hurst brand seriously branched out to do vehicle conversions. While some of this was related to taxicabs and vans, best known to muscle car fans are the first 455-inch Hurst/Olds packages and the notorious A-Body Hemi Darts and Barracudas. With the Chrysler event close by, those cars were a focus, and a number of them were inside on display in the Carlisle Expo Center, which is located only a block from the formal fairgrounds show location.

Thursday kicked off the event with a huge cruise-in and barbeque in the outdoor parking lot. On Friday a non-stop gathering of people trekked through the cavernous hall to see the cars, meet noteworthy former Hurst engineers and employees, and pore through albums of rare photos, old blueprints, and glass cabinets full of prototype parts and rare promotional items. Meanwhile, several seminars were given by experts on both Friday and Saturday, the two days the event is formally held.

But the big moment was on Saturday just before lunch, when a vibrant Linda, again dressed as Miss Hurst Golden Shifter, climbed upon the platform on the original Hurst/Olds convertible pace car from the 1972 Indy 500. Owner Joe Spagnoli then drove her slowly through the fairgrounds to a planned luncheon. This had not been announced until moments beforehand. Thousands of fans poured out from the show fields to see The First Lady of Motorsports recreate history. Always gracious, Linda was thronged by people for the entire route, and had massive lines for her autograph as well.

As part of the celebration of Hurst’s heritage this year, the featured cars were the Darts and Barracudas that were built under contract 50 years ago, in 1968, for NHRA Super Stock racing. There were 10 of the original cars on display in the Carlisle Expo Center, plus others at the associated Carlisle Chrysler Nationals.

The return of Miss Hurst Golden Shifter, Linda Vaughn, was highlighted by this parade lap within the Carlisle Fairgrounds, where she was followed by a huge crowd. The car is the original pace car for the 1972 Indy 500, and the original platform was given as a gift to car owner Joe Spagnoli by the late Jack Watson.

Of course, the Hemi Mopars were not the only thing Hurst did. The 1969 SC/Rambler package came in this colorful scheme as well as a more vanilla version (seen behind) and helped establish the reputation of the AMC product line thanks to colorful period advertising and a good street reputation.

This 1968 Hurst/Olds Cutlass was from the first of the H/O programs. Engineers had originally designed an operable spoiler that would have gone on the rear edge and lifted from the surface under acceleration. The images of that prototype were among the photo albums on display. This example, owned by Glen Katterson, is number 45 of the 515-unit run produced that first year.

Howard Marsales served as the Hurst “shifty doctor” at many events during the 1970s, but he was also employed by Hurst as a fabricator when the Hurst Hemi cars were constructed in 1968. He is seen here with Clayton Wright’s “Slo-Motion” Barracuda, whose last national event pass down the track was in 1987.

Bob Riggle of Hemi Under Glass fame was reunited with the “infamy” car, the 1968 Barracuda that put him and Jay Leno on their heads during a TV show taping at Irwindale. Now repaired, the car was sold by owner Bill Sefton to prolific collector Joe Spagnoli before the weekend concluded. We’re not sure if Riggle will be giving him flying lessons.

This 2017 Mustang owned by Andy Jacko was among the cars modified in more recent years by Performance West Group under approval from Hurst. We do not know the extent of the modifications from stock beyond paints and spoilers, but would imagine horsepower is not an issue for this ponycar.

How cool is this? It’s a 22,000-mile unrestored Rebel Machine from 1970 done in Bayshore Blue with the 340ci engine, four-speed, E60-15 tires, dual-speaker AM/FM radio, and more. List was $4,136.15 discounted to $2,700 in December 1970. It is owned by Darrin and Nash Boeckel.

Bruce Smith owns this 1973 model Hurst/Olds. Built in the first year of the Colonnade design, it has some interesting options, foremost the rotating front bucket seats. Indeed, if the Firebird was carrying on the ponycar legacy, the Hurst/Olds was doing likewise for the luxury performance market.

The optional bucket seats in the 1973 model rotated a full 90 degrees.

The following year, the model again was selected to pace the Indy 500. This example received the W-30 455ci engine, pace car lettering, and Indy Firehawk raised-white-letter tires. Jack Hooks owns it today.

The 48 Dodge Darts built by Mr. Norm for 1968 are rare today, possibly due to the attrition from foolish ownership. Hurst created these Mr. Norm–exclusive cars under contract, and later Grand Spaulding sales manager Al Smith submitted a list of owner’s names to NHRA for legality. Larry Weiner believes Norm ordered all of them, with a selection of colors and options, in one fell swoop, allowing customers to take immediate delivery. This example is owned by Rick Simpson of Canada.

Collector Glen Kattering had this prototype of the stillborn 1977 Hurst/Olds program on display. Beautiful with many one-off components, it would have used the 403ci engine. Olds built only six examples of that.

For its 15th anniversary, there was a special release of the 1983 Hurst/Olds, which had taken on a far more formal appearance than its 1968 elder. This unrestored example, one of 3,001 built, shows 6,900 miles and is owned by Ed and Sharon Pienta.

Seen through the open hood of a 1970 model Hurst-Chrysler 300H is another one of the late-models modified by Performance West Group under the GSS name. The original car is powered by a 440 TNT engine and owned by Rikk Morris. The 2017 model is a limited-edition conversion done by PWG’s Grand Spaulding Sport and is available on any 2008-2018 model.

This car was raced back in the 1970s by the Carpinet brothers, who still own it. It was one of many that were resold through the Sox & Martin racing team after the 1968 season. Buddy Martin took these cars in on trade or simply to resell. Though not stock mechanically, it is a beautiful survivor from the second generation of changes to the Super Stock rules.

This was the 1988 20th Anniversary package. Only four actual H/O cars were built, but several dozen kits were sold to upgrade the Cutlass model. Those installed on a pre-1988 model were considered Aero Coupe conversions, not 20th Anniversary cars. This 1986 example, owned by Rick and Sharon Tice, was number 57 of the fewer than 100 kits believed sold.

The 1969 model year saw the debut of the H/O’s white/gold paint scheme as well as the hoodscoop design that would lead to the forward-edge production fiberglass versions for 1970. This matched-numbers car with A/C and cruise control is owned by Carl Sherwood and is one of 912 built that year.

Among the items on display was this shadow box showing the E-Body prototype handles for the Hurst Pistol Grip shifter.

T-tops were part of this 1976 edition Hurst/Olds, owned by Rick and Sharon Tice. This was a factory test mule for several years, but production challenges led Olds to cancel plan for these cars before they went into production. The car was discovered in 2004 after being missing since the late 1970s.

This 1979 version has been appreciated since new, showing only 1,965 total miles since delivery. Rick Clark is the owner of this black-on-black combination.

It is very rare to see one 1968 documented authentic Mr. Norm 440ci Dart; two were here this weekend. Bill Sefton owns the one in front. There are only 14 of these cars presently known to exist.

Mark Janacky (shown) and Dell Jones maintain an extensive collection of 1968 Hemi Dart and Barracuda research materials and shared info with interested people on Saturday morning.

Seen outside in the show field were more cars, including this 1979 version owned by Eugene Miller.

One more look at the 1972 convertible of Joe Spagnoli, whose giant shifter needed to be disassembled to move in and out of the building.

Got Chrysler? Oh, Yeah! Oh, that Chrysler deal? Here are a few images from the 2018 Chrysler Nationals, with a record 2,749 cars in attendance and tens of thousands of spectators.

This view represents about a third of the fairgrounds the show was held on. The event covers Mopars of every era.

Old and new thoroughbreds meet when Bill Woesnner’s 1970 Charger RT/SE and a new 2019 Hellcat Charger owned by Dodge posed in an open area on Thursday.

In addition to tributes to the Road Runner and Super Bee, there was this great display for the 50th anniversary of the 340 engine, which also arrived for the 1968 model year.

This vendor had the eye candy with this display of mainly boxed OE components.

Saturday night’s Hall of Fame banquet is a favorite tradition, as many of the people who made Chrysler’s history are on hand. Hosted by Mopar Collectors Guide, the event had a number of slide presentations. Ron McDaniel was accepting Hall of Fame honors for his late father, Bob.

The post Miss Golden Shifter, Linda Vaughn, Highlights the Second Annual Carlisle Hurst Nationals appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

from Hot Rod Network https://www.hotrod.com/articles/miss-golden-shifter-linda-vaughn-highlights-second-annual-carlisle-hurst-nationals/ via IFTTT

[newsonlinegroup-blog]

The Best TV Moments of 2017, From 'Game of Thrones' to 'Master of None'

Nowadays, TV is everywhere. It's in living rooms, on laptops, streaming on phones. Very rarely are there events anymore that cause everyone to gather 'round the television set. But that doesn't mean folks don't bond over great TV anymore. From Master of None to Handmaid's Tale to Game of Thrones, a lot of shows had people talking in 2017. These TV moments were amongst the best. The Good Place Goes Deep Michael Schur's afterlife comedy is the best thing on broadcast TV for a lot of reasons—incredible performances, smart writing, a Simpsons-level love for puns—but in its first season and a half, nothing has distilled its genius better than the episode "The Trolley Problem." Fed up with Chidi's (William Jackson Harper) theory-heavy philosophical teachings, Michael (Ted Danson) puts his ethics to the test by turning the famous thought experiment into a real-life re-enactment. Things, as you might expect, go off the rails. There are still background gags (the movie marque announces both STRANGERS UNDER A TRAIN and BEND IT LIKE BENTHAM), but above all the sequence underscores what fans already knew: The Good Place thinks harder about thinking hard than anything else on TV. —Peter Rubin Saturday Night Live's 'Come Back, Barack' Since being sworn into office in January, Donald Trump has attempted to bankrupt the middle class by raising taxes, reshape environmental policy, overhaul the justice system into a more conservative enterprise, rewrite civil liberties for transgender servicemen and women, strip Americans of affordable healthcare, impose a travel ban on Muslim countries, and has continually insulted private and public citizens on Twitter. All of which made SNL’s “Come Back, Barack” segment—starring Chance the Rapper, Kenan Thompson, and Chris Redd in a 1990s Boyz II Men-inspired music video—one of the most enjoyable slices of TV all year. We miss you, 44! —Jason Parham Dave Chappelle's 10-Minute Freestyle on Def Comedy Jam 25 Fifty-six minutes into the Netflix special honoring the legacy of HBO's groundbreaking standup comedy showcase, host D.L. Hughley and Dave Chappelle walk onstage, and you know something is going to happen. Dave's just too loose, standing there in his amber-tinted aviators; he's not here to perform, he's just here to be with his comedy family. The payoff comes after barely a minute. Just as he finishes saying something semi-deep—"What Def Comedy Jam was always willing to do was take the heat, the criticism, and the hate...’cause that's just basically being black in America"—a mistimed musical cue from house DJ Kid Capri crashes through the speakers. Dave laughs, and what follows is a master class in extemporaneous comedy. Over the next few minutes, as he and Hughley run through their "scripted" intro again and again, they interrupt themselves to savage tiki-torch-bearing white supremacists, talk about reading in public, and lead the crowd in a rendition of Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm Just a Bill." You can keep your UCB Theater and Harold podcasts; this is what improv really looks like. —Peter Rubin Insecure's Show-Within-a-Show, Due North The one thing Issa, Molly, Lawrence, Kelly, and the Insecure crew could all agree on this season was the irresistible appeal of its must-see TV-show-within-the-show, the pre-Civil War soap-opera Due North. Set in the Antebellum South but molded in the likeness of Lee Daniels’s drama-fueled Empire, it starred Regina Hall as a slave named Ninny, Scott Foley as her slave master and secret lover, and Michael Jai White as Ninny’s one-legged husband. What began as a joke in the writers room soon became one of the more engrossing aspects of Issa Rae’s HBO hit. When the finale aired, Due North was finally, and rightfully, given screentime in the ultimate five minutes of the show, proving to be every bit the delicious and surprising piece of TV the Insecure crew promised it would be. —Jason Parham The 'Thanksgiving' Episode of Master of None There wasn't a single, more perfectly written episode of comedic television last year than Master of None's "Thanksgiving" chapter. I say that subjectively, but also objectively—None star Aziz Ansari and his co-star/co-writer Lena Waithe won an Emmy for it. But "Thanksgiving" is so much more than a good episode of television. It's also a testament to the curious and lasting bonds of family and friendship and the iterative process that coming out is for most LGBTQ people. Largely written by Waithe, and based on her own experiences coming out to her mother, the entire story—told over a series of Thanksgiving meals—is handled with such depth and levity that it's heartbreaking and heartwarming from beginning to end. It warrants second helpings. —Angela Watercutter Olenna Tyrell Getting the Last Word on Game of Thrones Look, a lot of friggin' people die on Game of Thrones. Killing off your problematic fave is kind of the show's thing. But man, when the writers off somebody, they do it right. This blaze-of-glory style was never more apparent than when Jaime Lannister showed up to sack Highgarden and kill Lady Olenna Tyrell. The Kingslayer thought he had the upper hand until he gave the Queen of Thorns her poison and she, in no uncertain terms, told him it was she who had poisoned Joffrey, his child with his twin sister Cersei. Lady Olenna then twisted the knife by adding, "Tell Cersei. I want her to know it was me." There are no microphones in Westeros, but if there were, this is the moment when she would've dropped hers. It was so perfect and cutting it even inspired a meme. Well played, Lady Olenna. —Angela Watercutter Easy Lives Up to Its Name All Over Again Joe Swanberg has always told small stories about regular life, but as his career has progressed from mumblecore (Hannah Takes the Stairs) to star-stocked festival indies (Drinking Buddies) to this Netflix anthology show, his lens has widened in some heartening ways. Easy's first season introduced viewers to a sprawling, sometimes overlapping assortment of Chicagoans navigating relationships of all kinds; this follow-up adds a number of new characters, virtually all of whom help feel the show even broader (despite limited screen time, Odinaka Malachi Ezeokoli and Karley Sciortino are promising newcomers). This isn't appointment TV, it's anointment TV. You probably hate this kind of advice as much as I do, but feel free to skip the season's first episode—despite a great cast, it's anomalously pointless—and mainline the rest. Preferably on a Sunday morning. —Peter Rubin Handmaid's Tale. All of It There couldn't have been a more awfully apropos year for Hulu to release its adaptation of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. From the worldwide Women's Marches to the myriad sexual harassment and sexual assault stories that came out, 2017 was a year during which people spent a lot of time talking about the rights and roles of women. And in no other story are the rights and roles of women placed into more stark relief than Tale, which imagines a theocratic future where any woman who can have a baby is forced to do so for families in the ruling class. Dark and foreboding, and sometimes even funny, Handmaid's Tale cut to the bone at a time when a lot of folks could glom on to its message—even if it was hard not to feel like you were under his eye. —Angela Watercutter Big Mouth Gets to the Heart of Filth If you heard the phrase "Nick Kroll co-created an animated Netflix show about hormone-addled seventh-graders," you'd be forgiven for assuming that the result would be wall-to-wall NSFWness. And it was: between the masturbation, Veep-level profanity, talking vaginas, singing tampons, and planet-humping, there's just about nothing I can embed here without incurring at least 19 HR violations. But it also ended up being the sweetest, most honest show about adolescence since Freaks & Geeks, due in no small part to its equal-opportunity puberty woes—which is something I can embed. Add in an incredible voice cast (in addition to Kroll and John Mulaney, there are star turns from Jessi Klein, Jenny Slate, Jordan Peele, Maya Rudolph, Richard Kind, rightly ubiquitous weirdo Jason Mantzoukas, and a many more), and you've got one of the best comedy surprises of the year. Catch up now, before the show comes back in 2018. —Peter Rubin 'Finding Frances' on Nathan for You Few television creators achieve in a single episode the embodiment of a show’s entire ethos. This year, Nathan Fielder, creator of the cult-hit Nathan For You, did exactly that. The show—a blend of reality TV and absurdist comedy—is full of scenes that obliterate the boundaries of social norms, creating cringe-worthy moments sustained by the awkward energy Fielder infuses into his role as human and situational puppeteer. But the show’s true genius has always been in the way it simultaneously finds comedy in the subtle (and not-so-subtle) forces that drive behavior, and the humanity at the heart of it. In “Finding Frances,” the show’s two-hour Season 4 finale, Fielder is given the space to explore that idea more thoroughly—to reach deeper into the dark well of humanity and pull out a story that’s as much a meditation on love, regret, and empathy as it is a must-press-pause-to-finish-laughing journey through the limits of the absurd. It will leave you both devastated and out of breath. —Nate Goldman The Finale of Big Little Lies In the span of just a few weeks, HBO's Big Little Lies went from "Are you watching...?" to "OMG, did you see?!" There's a reason for that. What started out as a high-gloss soap opera about self-involved privileged folks with great beach houses in Monterey, California, quickly turned into a hard-hitting look at toxic relationships and abusive marriages. And by the time it got to its heart-stopping finale, no one was able to turn away. We won't spoil it now, but OMG, did you see that?? —Angela Watercutter Sasha Velour's Rose Petals on RuPaul's Drag Race The key to any great drag performance—besides precise dancing, flawless makeup, a fabulous wig, a good tuck, and a perfect outfit—is an element of surprise. And in all nine seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race, no queen ever brought more of a surprise than Sasha Velour did during her lip sync battle with Shea Coulee to Whitney Houston's "So Emotional." During the song's, well, emotional chorus, Velour—looking more distraught by the second—shook off her crimson wig as a cascade of rose petals came raining down. It was a moment of inspired genius that was only made sweeter by watching her proud father and partner tear up in the audience as the number came to an end. Nothing but chills, honey. —Angela Watercutter Saturday Night Live's 'Welcome to Hell' Was a more biting or of-the-moment Saturday Night Live musical number this year than “Welcome to Hell”? We’ll go ahead and answer that for you: No. No, there was not. Released in the immediate aftermath of Matt Lauer’s firing from the Today show and Kevin Spacey’s release from House of Cards amidst sexual misconduct allegations, the music video was a reminder to everyone clueless about the harassment of women that “this been the damn world” they've lived in for centuries. Funny, scathing, and so on-point it was alarming, “Welcome to Hell” was a badly needed laugh after an incredibly crappy year for women. And just remember: Nothing good happens in a van. —Angela Watercutter Read the full article

[brandonrucker]

It should probably go without saying that if it’s a Skybound book it’s going to read well. I currently read Skybound titles such as Redneck, Extremity and I’ve read Gasolina and Green Valley, I have a Ghosted trade paperback on my shelf yet to read, and I’m now trade-waiting Birthright after reading it in floppies for the first 20 issues or so. Skybound Entertainment founder/CEO Robert Kirkman and company have a lot to be proud of these days. They’re one of the best comics lines around, a line that also includes Manifest Destiny, Kill the Minotaur, Outcast, Invincible, and of course The Walking Dead.

And I have no doubt the Image Comics remaining founders/partners are glad they made Mr. Kirkman a partner nine years ago.

1st Issue Fetish

The newest Skybound title Slots by creator/writer/artist Dan Panosian – the first issue was yet another fine Skybound read. It takes place in Vegas and features a middle-aged guy trying to get back in the game – of gambling and boxing – and make a big score. Is it a crime book? Maybe not per se, yet, though I could see it going down that route at some point (hopefully). But it is heavily soaked in the same kind of flavor of crime and suspense-thriller comics as books like Criminal.

Lackluster Legacy

Marvel Legacy #1 – I’ve got love for writer Jason Aaron – a very nice Southern Gentleman I met at New York Comic Con some years back, so I take no pleasure in saying this about a book he wrote. I initially passed on this the week it came out, but against my better judgment I decided to give it a shot the following week. Well, I’d like my $6 back. Bamboozled again. I was told it was a really good story and that it was just like DC Universe Rebirth. False. It would’ve been better had they totally aped Rebirth. The comparisons to DC Rebirth are superficial at best. Of course for it to be like Rebirth that would require a kind of reboot that would abandon the recent narratives they’ve just emerged out of the last five years since their Marvel NOW! Initiative. Legacy mimics Rebirth terribly, but again, given that it’s not a ‘rebirth’ or even a fresh restart, that’s to be expected. Btw, having 3 uniformed beat cops showing up to arrest Deadpool for the murder of SHIELD’s Agent Coulson is . . . an ill-advised story decision (it would actually be the FBI or some other abbreviated/acronym-ed agency, or even a vengeful former SHIELD Agent would work). Moving forward I suppose I will simply stick to Jessica Jones and The Defenders – the only two Marvel series I’ve been reading the past year.

Legacy vs Rebirth? No Contest

By the way, I have a little rant inspired by Marvel Legacy. CBR.com (formerly known as that great entity Comic Book Resources) ran an article with this quote:

“It’s definitely an effective way to set up a new line of comics, and you can’t fault Marvel Legacy for copying the Rebirth formula.”

CBR has officially left the reservation! How the hell does Legacy copy the Rebirth formula??? How does it set up a “new line” of comics when Marvel isn’t launching a new line of comics?

And to go off on CBR even more . . .  in a different article they said DC’s Vertigo Comics launched with The Sandman #1 in 1989, when Vertigo actually “launched” in 1993 — hence 2018 being the 25th anniversary of Vertigo Comics as an imprint. I’m not sure why CBR’s editorial staff couldn’t seem to reconcile that simple math . . . I guess because their start date was all wrong. It wasn’t 1989. Granted The Sandman started with a cover date of January 1989. But the Vertigo imprint was not adopted and applied to certain pre-existing DC comics like The Sandman, Hellblazer, Doom Patrol, Shade: The Changing Man and Swamp Thing until 1993.

When it comes to CBR I still lament the fact that former owner and founder Jonah Weiland sold away what USED to be the gold standard of comics news sites.

News and such coming out of New York Comic Con

I am writing this on Saturday night going into Sunday morning, so New York Comic Con is still going on, but there are a few things of note.

Doomsday Clock, the upcoming Watchmen sequel – this might be the first Mature Readers story to feature Superman? But hey, it’s Geoff Johns writing it, right? Surely there won’t be a cussing Superman, right??? Nah, but ol’ Supes may have to witness some naughty words . . . or maybe just share pages in a book has some “mature” content. At any rate, I think Supes is strong enough (and man-of-steel-enough) to handle it.

Speaking of the official sequel to Watchmen . . . Watchmen artist/co-creator Dave Gibbons says he will not be reading it. And of course we all know our favorite grumpy old man and co-creator/writer of Watchmen, Alan Moore will not be reading it either.

Sticking with DC Comics – they are dropping the Rebirth banner on their comics soon (like, this December soon) and going with a new trade dress that’s probably their sharpest looking yet, because let’s face it, DC’s trade dress has always been less than stellar compared to Marvel’s and other publishers. Now they’ll have a corner box with the DC circle at the top, followed by the issue number and price and then below that will be the family name icon such as Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, etc.

They look good and you can get a first look at them over at Bleeding Cool.com

Over at Marvel, the only thing of note for me in regards to their comics are rumors or hints of a new Storm of the X-men series. Please, please let it be written by Chris Claremont. He’s the best writer of Ororo Munro in all of her history, and it’s the best option for Marvel to get some publishable work from the man, the legend they’ve been paying for a decade to essentially NOT write comics for them or anyone else.

Oh, you didn’t know that? Yeah, it’s been confirmed that Marvel actually has  Chris Claremont on a kind of retainer, pretty much paying him some kind of salary as well as provide health benefits so that he does not do work-for-hire superhero comics elsewhere. Think of it as an exclusive contract that several of today’s creators have – only this one is for a creator whom they do not stipulate that he produce X number amount of scripts. They’re essentially paying him NOT to write since they haven’t given him any assignments in a good while now. Comics best kept secret – it’s almost scandalous, really. Set Chris Claremont free, Marvel! Or, at least allow him to write that new Storm series.

So DC’s Vertigo imprint will be re-launching in August 2018. I remember the early days of Vertigo in the early to mid 90s. Good books, good times. The expansion of the British invasion that began in the late 90s thanks to Karen Berger and Shelly Bond – both editors now elsewhere at Dark Horse (Berger’s Books imprint) and IDW (Black Crown imprint), respectively, due to drastic changes to DC Entertainment’s editorial structure AND their business model – no longer offering fully creator-owned IPs. But that’s a discussion for another day.

AMC’s The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead will have a crossover in the near future. Robert Kirkman is not yet revealing what character from which show will be crossing over to which show. So naturally with this kind of tease we’ll just have to wait for it to happen.

Additionally . . .

I have watched both the Runaways and Cloak & Dagger They look to be good modern adaptations of their source material. Well casted and production as good as any of the Marvel Netflix shows or even FOX’s The Gifted. I’m hopeful they’ll play well and garner enough viewership to be successful.

Speaking of The Gifted, I have watched the first episode and I’ve got to say it is indeed intriguing. It has a good blend of action and drama – team and family drama. Featuring B-and-C-level X-book characters like Polaris, Thunderbird, Blink, Sage, Shatter and one I never heard of, Eclipse – who was created for the show, taking inspiration for Sunspot of the New Mutants, I presume. The show promises to showcase other low-level characters deserving of onscreen exposure. I need to watch the Pilot again uninterrupted before I can make a final critical analysis, but upon that one viewing I’m entertained and intrigued enough to continue.

And finally . . . FINALLY!

Coming on the horizon are two TV adaptations of two of my favorite comics. Greg Rucka & Michael Lark’s Lazarus over at Amazon and Ed Brubaker & Steve Epting’s Velvet over at the newly re-branded Paramount Network (formerly known as Spike TV). I have casting ideas for both leading ladies, but that’s another column for another day.

That’s all the comic culture goodness I have for now. Until next time . . . keep turning the pages!

Comic Book Fetish #1: Skybound’s SLOTS, Marvel’s LEGACY and more! It should probably go without saying that if it's a Skybound book it's going to read well.