I like how Sonny Bono is replaced by Bill Macy, Bea Arthur’s co-star from Maude, while the artist maintained the contrast in the singers’ heights (calling Sonny a singer is pretty generous on my part). I think Bea, normally pronounced “BEE” in most American accents, and short for Beatrice, is supposed to be mispronounced “BAY” which is popular with kids and sheeple who like overrated Beyonce Knowles.
Too bad this only took me around four years and two Apple Watches to pull this off. Let’s hope getting to 1000 days will happen faster. I’m also curious if any owners who achieved this at some point in 2018 received a new goal of either 1500, 2000 or more days.
BEFORE
AFTER
Finally another notch in the win column for DC. It accompanies Wonder Woman and not the dreadful Justice League, Batman v. Superman, Man of Steel or the by-the-numbers Aquaman. A less-serious adaptation of their Captain Marvel (known as Shazam by stupid people and DC’s failure in trademarking) was the right decision because not everybody in a universe should be dark and brooding, it’s pretty tired.
The core concepts involving Billy Batson remain intact while key details were updated to make the character more credible; he’s still an orphan but lives in a foster home with other kids from an Old Navy commercial. Billy is also a troublemaker, not the goody goody he was in the Forties and Fifties. Plus his enemies were (and will be) modified to keep them from being Superman copycats, see below.
Unlike other DC and (recent) MCU flicks, Shazam! starts with the villain’s journey since Captain Marvel’s powers come from a magical source protected by the last remaining wizard guarding the Rock of Eternity, aka Shazam. Back in the recent past, an adolescent Thaddeus Sivana was tested by Shazam to prove his worthiness. Obviously Sivana failed but from that day forward he became obsessed with finding the wizard. Through his wealthy family’s resources he discovers dozens of people who had similar experiences…and they too failed.
Then you meet Billy. An orphan with a long, troubled history of running away from every home he is placed in. Being part of a group or family gets in the way of his quest, finding the biological mother he lost at a carnival when he was a toddler. After making Philly’s finest look foolish with his latest antics to aid his efforts, Billy is given an ultimatum by child services. You can deduce the rest from the trailer.
Initially I was worried about Shazam! being mediocre since Hollywood loves to insert the predictable cliche known as the training montage, thus it would be a clone of Iron Man. I’m glad to report I was mostly wrong and its execution was amusing. Actor Zachary Levi is the main reason why the movie succeeds too. He did a fantastic job channeling the personality of a 15-year-old boy in a super-powered adult body. Mark Strong as Sivana was no slacker neither. He excels at being the menacing enemy as he did in Kick Ass and Sherlock Holmes; Shazam! was just better use of his talents. Other elements? It does borrow from The Incredibles, namely how the superhero tropes work in the real world, and a nod to Tom Hanks/Penny Marshall’s Big you have to watch for.
As expected, you need to stick around through the end credits and then some. A sequel? Pretty likely. Jokes? Yes. More importantly, at the finale, you see how Captain Marvel fits in the larger DC Universe which is currently a mess with the firing of Henry Cavill and Amy Adams and Ben Affleck quitting. Let’s see if the upcoming, super serious and dark Joker and next year’s Wonder Woman 1984 revives DC’s fortunes.
(New) Alamo Extras: Scenes from a Japanese action show; Trailers for Captain Pinoy (Thai movie) and Big; Captain Planet toy ad; Scenes from a Captain Marvel serial from the Forties called Scorpion Mummy; Scenes from the Saturday morning show Shazam! I used to watch in the Seventies; List of past Zachary Levi roles/appearances, most involve singing; and Neil Gaiman explaining the UK’s version of the hero called Marvel Man which would become Alan Moore’s Miracle Man.
LEGO Somara & Steve all ready to play! Hanging at this year’s cool Savage Worlds: Battle of the LEGO Bands game.
The Austin area’s primary gaming convention coincides at a bad time but I always go with it first because we don’t have anything better nor closer (allegedly HavenCon is trying to turn that around). GenCon is in Indiacrapolis (pass), DragonCon is in Atlanta and PaizoCon is in Seattle around Memorial Day weekend. However, I think ChupacabraCon has potential and I want to see what I can do to get it to grow further. The only serious competition it may have are those franchise conventions run by Hasbro and their San Antonio-based offering is at a bad time of the year, January. Plus, I don’t believe Hasbro has a good grip on D&D.
As for the “bad time”…well, it happens during May the Fourth be with You weekend and there’s an incredible fan expo in Dallas; this year they had three of the five voices from Teen Titans Go! and the principle cast of Back to the Future. There’s next year.
Back to ChupacabraCon!
I scored an early weekend pass to save $10 but more importantly, I secured spots to play Call of Cthulhu and Flash Gordon (Savage Worlds rules). Didn’t bother with any D&D/PF, the lion’s share of those games are “organized play” scenarios which are boring. Ran into friends/former players Mark and John. No luck getting to play alongside them in anything. The lady who ran a Simpsons game (Savage Worlds rules too) did something equally impressive, a battle of the bands adventure using LEGO minifigs with the Friends line of accessories. I do want to get back to the Flash Gordon fun. I was in two different games. I was a lion man and a sarcastic maintenance robot.
A talented young artist dressed up as Link.
I definitely need to get off my ass for ChupacabraCon VII. Savage Worlds is flexible enough to do my long overdue Futurama idea but now I have King of the Hill action figures and Super 7 has a ton to work with. LEGO and Playmobil are filled with possibilities too. Send me your suggestions!
The photo above is a very cool, sweet artist named Erika. Check out her Instagram stuff via owlette23. I bought a couple customized notebooks from her, one is the spell book for my second campaign’s wizard. The must-have items I did get were these miniature books which were the perfect scale to give my Playmobil Fantasy figures.
The short wish list I have for next year’s convention is easy. A bigger venue that still has free WiFi yet more power outlets and sound-dampening curtains to put around the tables; it can be really annoying when you can’t hear the other players or you have a soft-spoken GM. Lastly, getting my gaming sensei Lester to be a key guest in which he can run events based upon his d6xd6 system.
Both duos are low IQ types but Bill & Ted were more endearing since they didn’t use frogs as baseballs or put firecrackers into innocent creatures…and they wouldn’t vote for Donal Trump. However, Beavis & Butt-Head are closer to reality for I went to high school with their true counterparts in all five locations.
It’s pretty amazing how the two sets mash up well. I never would’ve thought of putting them together with good results. Wayne’s World with Beavis & Butt-Head were a more logical pairing given their judgmental natures.
This shirt may be just in time for the alleged sequel involving a grown-up Bill & Ted.
My favorite Duran Duran album mashed up with the cool, newer character from the Star Wars saga. The minimal of colors and porcelain skin applied to Rey via the Nagel style works pretty well.
Joe DeRosa! Better Call Saul’s Dr. Caldera!
Austin’s Eighth Annual Moontower Comedy Festival (aka Moontower 2019) was pretty good this year. For me, it wasn’t as cool as last year when they had the after party at a place the comedians enjoyed hanging out at but I still had fun and got my money’s worth via the $100 badge.
They were pretty big sticklers on not letting us peasant badge-holders have any vacant spots with the marquee shows. The only one I really wanted to see was the Schitt’s Creek stuff because the sitcom is going into its last season and who wouldn’t want to see SCTV legends Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara‽ The showcases and podcast recordings are really the better times.
On the opening night I went to this one hosted by Kevin McDonald. Between each comedian, Kevin told a “true story” about his time with The Kids in the Hall. I skipped Thursday because I was tired and wanted to save my energy for the weekend. Friday had a big showcase at the Parish with Eddie Pepitone kicking it off; he had a great dig at Austin’s downtown scooter mess. Another guy brought up how crossfit is really a scam to get overweight suckers to clean out warehouses filled with tractor tires and rope. The lady from Brooklyn pointed on how using “neutral” pronouns made her sound like an escaped slave. I then threw in my support later on for Fragile Rock who played new songs from their upcoming sophomore effort, Smile More.
I returned to the Sklar Brothers’ annual Ping Pong Slap Down. The field was wide open this year thanks to Judah Friedlander not attending! Randy and Jason continued to demonstrate their incredible ability to ad lib during play and when they interview the losers. Ultimately, the winner was a ringer, one of the people who works for the company providing the ping pong equipment.
Saturday night, I gambled on being an audience member at Eddie Pepitone’s podcast Pep Talks. His guests were Joe DeRosa and local comedian J. T. Habersaat. I accidentally got razzed by Joe and J.T. for knowing what the hell a water knife was, so much for watching Science-based television. It was OK, when I met Joe after the show, he was cool and I told him I didn’t mind. We mainly talked about Shudder and how I remembered him hosting a local comedian showcase a couple years earlier. Since the Lucas Brothers bailed, Dana Gould and Eliza Skinner were moved to Cap City and I went to the NYC showcase instead. Good mix of people. One guy used to be on SNL and he plugged his minor character on Hulu’s upcoming remake of Catch-22 with George Clooney.
I had a bit more luck hanging out at the after party, I spoke to Andy Kindler again and found out how he knew MST3K alumnus J. Elvis Weinstein…they’re neighbors, four houses apart back West! There was another local guy I need to catch during his weekly gig at Sixth Street’s Velveeta Room. Dana Gould dropped by for a bit. He gladly modified the autograph on my copy of the Boom Comics’ adaptation of Rod Serling’s original Planet of the Apes script Dana adapted. We even made tentative plans to try the birthday movie thing since he would be returning to Cap City in late May-early June.
What’s sillier is how I was thrilled to score these Moontower Fest socks, I plan to have them ready by next year’s festival. Maybe I’ll have them on whenever there’s a stand-up show I want to attend.
Until then, we await Moontower 9.
Here comes yet another concert I attended over six months ago and finally posted about, Todd Rundgren. Even in a city with a somewhat exaggerated reputation for loving popular music, his name elicits either “who?” from most under 40 and “really?” from anyone that just knows his Seventies’ hits. I will go with one exception, XTC fans, the majority of which hate Todd despite his producing giving the British Post-Punk Trio one of their biggest hit albums in the US. Yes, they disagreed on putting “Dear God” on Skylarking yet even Mozart made mistakes; Todd said it didn’t fit with the overall essence, Andy had it added on later printings.
As for me, Todd is one of the few “Classic Rock” artists I liked during my formative years because he produced numerous albums I loved in high school and college. Besides Skylarking for XTC, he was behind the board here:
I wasn’t too thrilled with him taking Ric Ocasek’s place when the Cars reunited briefly as the New Cars. Sure Elliott Easton and Greg Hawkes were present with Prairie Prince (Tubes) on the drums. It just isn’t the Cars unless Benjamin Orr (deceased) or Ric sing the lead vocals. I do have It’s Alive and compared to other bands who replaced their lead singer, I have heard much, much worse.
When I found out Todd Rundgren was playing the more intimate 3Ten venue in Austin, I had to go and I wasn’t disappointed. Although he only had Utopia’s bassist Kasim Sulton, I immediately recognized Greg Hawkes of the Cars playing keyboards! Anyone expecting to hear nothing but an evening of Rundgren’s “hits” which ended around “Bang on the Drum” in the narrow minds of the Midwest…they would be pissed. Two thirds of the set was comprised of covers he felt like doing, on the spur of the moment, after all, this tour was labelled “An Unpredictable Evening with Todd Rundgren.” What they played is listed via this link which isn’t completely accurate. For example, they closed with “Let’s Do This” from his latest record White Knight.
Greg Hawkes! Cars Keyboardist and a favorite of mine.
Obviously I did see Todd in the hopes he would do the hits I prefer, namely “Can We Still Be Friends?” A resounding yes here. No luck with “We Gotta Get You a Woman” but he did save “Hello It’s Me” for the encore; he wasn’t too enthused to perform it, yet sometimes you have to embrace your signature song. Take a lesson from Tom Jones, he said as long as his audiences continued to enjoy “What’s New Pussycat?,” he would share their joy.
Todd is returning to Austin this Summer. Would I go? Probably not, mainly over the venue, Emo’s. It’s a bad fit for him and his audience (mostly older people, plus one asshole I saw downloading the Ben Shapiro Show). I agree on 3Ten being too small but Emo’s is too big. There has to be somewhere in between. I’m grateful to have seen him in this smaller setting for he was the rare Boomer artist who embraced New Wave and tried new things (like being an Apple developer) instead of attacking change.
Todd mainly performs sitting down. Here he’s belting out Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life”
Before I head out to enjoy my three-day weekend of geeking (or is it needing) out at Chupacabracon VI, I achieved 1000 miles on the exercise bike at the gym! A much better result than last year, I think I got this far after Halloween in 2018.
D’oh! Wait, that’s not his catchphrase. *Ahem!*
BARNACLES! TARTAR SAUCE!
Much better.
Yesterday was the premiere of what became Nickelodeon’s biggest, most successful cartoon character. One could say, he’s the cable network’s equivalent of their Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny.
Like many characters who manage to live on for more than three seasons, Spongebob’s longevity is due to his appeal to all audiences so his adventures with Patrick, Squidward, Sandy, Plankton and Mr. Krabs entail jokes that kids don’t always understand. Tommy Kenny (the voice) being an on-again/off-again stand-up comedian helps.
I do have a quick confession to make. Initially, I didn’t like SpongeBob. What little I had seen wasn’t funny to me and I got pulled into the trap of expressing an uninformed opinion (I’ve improved over the years not to do this) based upon the show’s popularity. I did come around because Spongebob would be on before, after or during the other cartoons I did want to watch in the Aughts (Fairly Odd Parents, Jimmy Neutron, My Life as a Teenage Robot namely).
The show did have a brief hiatus of several years and when it returned, there were new writers and obviously came the expected…it’s not as good as it used to be. I’m on the fence leaning toward disagreeing. Yes, Spongebob’s voice has changed a bit. Yes, the jokes different, a logical thing given the changes. However, people have to remember, everything changes and the writers do have to explore new ideas to avoid repeating past stories. Otherwise, the complainers would have a different gripe to make.
Let’s see if Spongebob can make it to 30 as cable and its networks justify to adapt to a streaming-based future without Disney acquiring him.
What makes Peter’s passing even sadder was that he was scheduled as a guest for Austin’s upcoming comic book convention; he had spent his final years living in Texas because he married an American lady.
Unlike David Prowse (the other tall English guy in Star Wars, aka Darth Vader), I don’t think Peter had ever acted in anything else. Allegedly, he did get first pick on which part and going with Chewbacca was the smart move.
Farewell Peter! You did a great job playing a well-loved alien co-pilot loosely modeled after George Lucas’ dog and your character was the second action figure I bought 41 years ago.
Can’t remember what my source was saying that either Voyager 1 or 2 arrived at their first destination around May but one go there in January, the other in July so I’ll just accept May as the compromise, hence this month’s header art!
What those two probes sent back was incredible and blew away whatever the earlier Pioneers did in the early Seventies. I remember very clearly in sixth grade how all the best, more revealing photos were featured in National Geographic. Thanks to that issue, I had one of the best and funniest class presentations later in the Winter. Funniest? I gave an illustrated explanation on the chalkboard of why Earth and Jupiter having magnetic fields was important. It wasn’t completely accurate but it had everybody laughing for a couple minutes.
Forty years later, we know even more about our system’s largest planet thanks to Galileo in the Nineties and the current Juno. Maybe one day we’ll have people visit as per 2001, 2010 and Outland.
I think this movie did pretty poorly at the box office because Dystopian films tend to fail when they’re released between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. Can’t even remember why I didn’t see it sooner but it popped up on one of the three streaming services we subscribe to.
Loosely based upon a novel written some years before the movie, both interpretations of Children contain the same urgent message that is being ignored now…if the dozen or so civilizations on Earth don’t get their shit together, nature will solve the problem for us. In the case of Children, it’s sterilization. Unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, everyone is incapable of reproduction and has been for almost two decades. When the story opens, the youngest person in the world (about 18) has died from his injuries in a bar fight. It’s all over the news in London as our hero Theo watches on a TV in a cafe. He then goes about his day as a low-level bureaucrat as you see how the UK has become a police state due to other countries falling apart during the biological crisis. The big boogeymen (and -women) are immigrants so you hear constant reminders about turning them in to Homeland Security for deportation.
Sometime later, Theo is kidnapped by a group called the Fishes. The government has labelled them a terrorist group. Others say they’re an immigrants’ rights organization. Theo is puzzled why they want him until he discovers their local leader is his ex-wife, Julian. She needs his help in getting a young African woman named Kee, safely out of the UK. Turns out Theo has connections to more powerful people who may have the means needed. He reluctantly agrees until he finds out why; the Fishes are protecting the first pregnant woman in 18 years. They want Kee to give birth elsewhere so the UK government can’t use the baby for propaganda purposes; namely, lie about the mother being citizen and from the upper socio-economic class.
So Theo dedicates his all to Kee’s exodus after Julian is killed and he discovers there’s treachery within the Fishes. Does he succeed? You have to see Children of Men to find out.
What I loved about Children was its attention to detail. London is even dirtier than today and it’s rapidly deteriorating since the majority have given up, the human is heading toward extinction, why bother. However, the wealthy continue to live in denial and their walled-off sections are well maintained as they go on with their posh lives. Others haven’t given up hope. You see a special building acting as a vault for future generations containing famous artwork the UK has “liberating” from other countries before it could be destroyed. The most horrifying part was the immigrant/refugee detention city on the coast. There, thousands of people are fenced off and they’ve made their own society but when the army has to step in to capture Kee and Theo, the army doesn’t bother discerning who is a non-combatant. Drawing on possible parallels to the never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The movie may seem like a downer yet I disagree, especially if you watch it. Besides, not everything should have a happy ending. For me, movies should make you feel something. Meanwhile, I’m glad to add Children of Men to my short list of great Dystopian Movies, it is now in the company the greats: The Omega Man, Soylent Green, Mad Max, Logan’s Run and Silent Running.
