What Some Folks Need...

Some folks might need a little excitement in their love lives, a spark maybe. This is true for real people and even works its way into art, if you can consider the following photos from a television show "art".

Even fictional characters need a break from their own lives in order to provide a spark:

I'd forgotten that I'd even taken these pictures. This episode was late in the run, but I couldn't tell you what the other storylines were, but Al and Peggy were out of the house.

(I mostly just wanted to share these pictures...)

Super Team

Down here in the Southland the pop-culture muses spent all night partying, celebrating the groping-leading-to-wedded-bliss marriage of Star Wars and Disney. Two billion straight cash for Lucas, as he hands over the Lucasfilms reins to Disney and starts his retirement, passing along the "goods" while he's still alive, gracefully?

Now we can expect to be inundated with Star Wars crap even more than already. Holy shit, hope you didn't think we were at a saturation point. New movies, toys, video games, television shows, amusement park rides, board games, radio teleplays, vaudeville acts, and new iambic pentameter Jedi poetry are all sure to show up very soon. They'll fit nicely along with the costumes, bed sheets, party cups and favors, throw rugs, decorative pillows, Yoda bath salts, Jamaican Greedo cigarettes, cool-looking-but-wholly-uncomfortable chairs, Indian-made compact and luxury automobiles, speed boats, yachts, airplanes of both the Cessna and jumbo-jet varieties, as well as hot air balloons emblazoned with the mouse logo on one side and the Rebel Alliance logo on the other.

Get. Prepared.

I guess it's super-fucking-cool if you're into all that.

A WTF Moment from a WTF Movie

Not all weird movies on Netflix's streaming list are created equal. One movie the missus was convinced by the synopsis to tuck n the instant queue was about contemporary Mongolia. "Dealing with traditions in modern Mongolia" or something similar.

I like Mongolia. It's one of the places that fascinated the hell out of me as a kid. So exotic in the arid, Asian steppe kind of way. Genghis Khan, people! He alone has got somewhere like thirty-million descendants.

And...then there's this movie, called Khadak.

Brief Notes Before I get into the Meat of this Post::

1) Khadak was a German production filmed on location in Mongolia with a Mongolian cast.

2) In the very funny Strong Bad Email "Independent", about the differences between "Independent Films" and "Indie Films", the character Strong Sad makes a joke that in film school he majored in holding on wide shots for too long. I'm betting this German director was the dean of that college.

3) Mongolian language sounds odd. It's not tonal, like Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese. In fact, it sounds as close to a kid's gibberish language as anything I've ever heard. But it's real, so that makes it kind of interesting. But, from this movie, you could hardly tell since there may be fifty words spoken in the first hour of the movie. That may be generous.

The movie starts out on the steppe with a herding lad and his sheep. He's moving them along grazing lines. When he makes it back, he says that he needs to go back out, see, one of the sheep got lost. He lives in a really nice yurt with his mom and her her dad. Grandpa says go back out and get it. After the teenager leaves, mom says was that such a good idea. We viewers (besides wrongly believing that this will actually turn out to be a dialogue using kind of a movie) wonder why she's so overprotective.

Until Bagi, the boy, has a vision of the yurt on fire, and has a seizure right there on the step. If you've got an epileptic kid, maybe sending him out on his own isn't such a good idea. Mom knows this, and she's already out looking for him.

The next few scenes portray his being unconscious from the seizure as him being lost in a forest, while a shamaness screeches and dances in the yurt, tending to his condition, he sees her in his woodsy visions as a helper, trying to get him back to the camp. Eventually he comes to.

That was pretty cool. Artsy and mostly quiet, the scenes unfold like a early seventies convoluted plot, where as an audience member, you're expected to figure certain things out. And the damn Kraut director kept holding on his shots for too long. (Don't get me wrong; the compositions being held upon for too long are beautiful, so there's that.)

Then the government comes through with news of a plague on the animals, and how they need to confiscate all heads of sheep and move all herders into a "city" and become productive workers in a coal mining concern. Then Bagi rescues a beautiful coal thief from sure death, and then they both get arrested.

It must be my powers of summary, because those preceding paragraphs almost make Khadak sound like it was a nearly coherent movie, when that's not the case. There's some performance art later on, and then some other stuff, but it really breaks down near the end. I remember when the camera was in a maneuver that I couldn't comprehend exactly why it was fucking doing it, the combination of the image and the subtitle from the voiceover was so perfect as to demonstrate this movie's essence, that I blurted out laughing, and pretty loudly at that.

I paused it and took a picture, laughing that showing it to someone who hadn't seen the movie was just as enlightenng as having seen it live in the 75th minute of this 100 minute long thing. Here's the picture:

So...there you go. Have fun with that.

When I say the movie broke down near the end, I should some things. There was a fair amount of gin and beer involved, but those things only help with my critical enjoyment of cinema. I seriously watch films, especially when they're perplexing or otherwise incoherent because that's how I enjoy them--trying to figure out just what the hell is going on. This movie's incoherence is widespread.

I went to Wikipedia to get a sense of what contributors to the site said about the movie. They claimed that Bagi and the girl thief start to pull pranks to on the people in the mining town to enliven their lives and bring some mirth to the cadre of former herders. Um, that's not this movie. They try to get some justice, because of course there was no plague, but pranking?

And then, on Khadak's own webpage, they claim the story is about Bagi trying to come to terms with his own destiny to be a shaman. What? In no way did I get that as a sense of what the movie's trying to be about. I mean, Bagi finds and saves the girl from under a huge pile of coal that he would otherwise have no way of knowing about. He said he heard her, knew she was there. Fine. He has visions and epilepsy--or at least what we call it these day--but he's connected to her, and this connection made it possible for him to find her. At least that was my take on that whole scenario. But since there is very little dialogue and the actors are more like statues in a windy valley, there is very little cues to give away the motivations beyond the human sculpture.

And besides, Bagi dies. (I can't imagine anyone being terribly upset about me spoiling it.)

Neither Wikipedia nor their own website have story explanations that resemble what  we watched, and neither resemble each other...wow, good job German director.

One thing I learned to appreciate from this German/Mongolian production is that they have very cool names in Mongolia. The main character, teenager Bagi, has for a real first Batzul. Now that's pretty sweet.

Also, they all have such badass coats and hats.

Some Well Executed Tattoos

In my random journeys around the Internet, I've come across some weird things. One was originally subtitled "The Gallery of Regrets", it was known as Ugliest Tattoos.

In the early times, they'd showcase poorly executed or poorly designed tattoos, maybe with misspellings, maybe with zombie-my-little-ponies, and each one made you embarrassed to look at it.

Now they focus on a wider range of tattoos, some that are done well, some that are godawful, but they don't have the really explicit stuff like they used to have. It always shocked me how many people have tattoos of flying penises. Seriously.

So here I've collected some that mean something to me and are well executed.

The first is a pretty well done Cornholio, Beavis' alter ego that emerges after too much caffeine or sugar:

Next we have a pretty well executed Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the band from the Muppets. I always liked the name:

This look of Popeye--as a realistic person and grizzled sailor--always caught my attention. I have no tattoos, but this work has been done masterfully, and is from an artist that I would want for myself, had I an upcoming ink-work plans.

Gonzo Gonzo and Animal as Oscar Acosta. Awesome.

How could I pass up a brilliantly executed portrait of Tesla, history's baddest-ass maddest-ass scientist?

(Thanks to Ugliest Tattoos.)

The Many Meanings of "Ocean View"

This blog is about pop-culture and/or the Southland, and like an earlier post about some of our finer highways down here, this one highlights one of the other, less thought upon phenomena.

There's seventy miles of coastline in Los Angeles County and another forty in Orange County. A-hundred-ten miles of coastline sounds like a lot, but there are more than a dozen-million people living in the five counties that make up the "Southland", and yet...

...Not all views of the ocean are equal.

Here's a shot from the hills in San Pedro, an erstwhile independent community that was annexed by Los Angeles (and everybody around here insists on pronouncing it San Peedro):

This is the western edge of the breaker system fencing in the ocean around the south-eastern side of the RPV peninsula and encircling our little breezy berg in Long Beach .

From this vantage, residents can watch as the sheer tonnage comes and go every day if they wanted, but I imagine few do. At least this view is better than this next, only off to the left of this point:

Not all are "Ocean Views" are equal. This hazy look back at towards the ports would be showing off Terminal Island and Long Beach's skyline, if the visibility was a little more forgiving.

Sometimes the views you get around these parts in no way jive with the romantic views most of this country ascribe it.

Cold Cases

There was a show that used to be on prime-time Sunday night, I guess, called Cold Case. I've caught a few episodes in rerun latenight on one of the free channels we have. The premise is that a Philly cop team solves old, still open, cases, AKA "cold" cases. The gimmick is that the scenes of the crime-time are played out with one set of actors, and then usually a second set of older actors are used during the investigation phase, and they occasionally flicker between the two, for dramatic effect.

If you like cop mystery/procedural shows, it's probably serviceable. If you're one of the many The Wire fans, most cops shows are ruined for you. The fully preposterous nature of solving crimes on a single span of forty-two minutes of show is made painfully clear in that hyper-realistic show.

But then there's the cold case aspect  of the show. Another show they used to show on A&E, I think, and now on some local channel in the morning, is called Cold Case Files, and it's a documentary style cop show about how old cold cases are solved. This show is hard to watch as well, but for a different reason. It seems like the only cold case files that get solved these days are rape/murders where now they have DNA technology and old swabs left over.

I'd be willing to guess that the prime-time cop drama doesn't feature too many rape/murders getting solved due to DNA samples. That's a little too, eh, much of a downer for Sunday night television, I guess.

Essentially LA

What's essential to Los Angeles and the Southland? Why, driving of course.

And what's more essential to LA driving than our criss-crossing collection of freeways? Nothing, I'm guessing.

Here's some "neat" shots of the various locations and names of highways in an around LA county, and even a non-LA county destination. It's not Orange County, and good luck finding which one it could be.

First up on our non-exhaustive list of area highways is the Artesia Freeway, in the numerical nomenclature it's CA Hwy 91, Redondo Beach to Riverside. This is an actual freeway, bigger than US 101 in San Luis Obispo.

Here's a buy spot getting near downtown LA, where the arteries break apart like the branching aorta, 101 heading to downtown LA, I-5 heading to the mountains and north out of the city, and I-10 heading west to Santa Monica. The eastbound section of 10 is less than a mile away.

Here's where the 101 splits off just north of the city on it's way to Hollywood and Ventura, with the 110 becoming Interstate 110 heading south, through LA all the way to San Pedro, becoming the Harbor Freeway, and becoming CA Hwy 110 going up to Pasadena (that's probably more like "over to Pasadena" at this point).

CA Route 27 is also known as Topanga Canyon Road, and it dies/begins at the ocean into/from the PCH. I made sure I got the sign notifying the location: 4 miles to Santa Monica, 7 miles to Malibu.

Having seen CA Hwy 91, we see CA Hwy 90 here, the Marina del Rey Freeway. This seems to be a freeway link from the 405 through Culver City to Marina del Rey, a coastal community immediately south of Santa Monica. This is also the first picture of the famous CA Hwy 1, also known as the Pacific Coast Highway. Calling something "the Pacific Coast Highway" doesn't make as much sense when it's an urban street like Lincoln Blvd here, or Santa Rosa Rd, in my old college town. But it is what it is; weird things happen when it's an almost thousand mile long road.

Briefly we see the 405, the San Diego Freeway on the way to Long Beach, as the spur 105 shoots off in two directions, one to Norwalk, and one to El Segundo. Norwalk is in the South-Central section of the city, while El Segundo is north of the Rancho Palos Verdes peninsula and even north of Torrance, but south of Redondo Beach (which itself of south of Santa Monica and Marina del Rey).

CA Rte 107 heads from Inglewood to Lawndale, to mostly forgotten communities in Central LA; neither is violent enough to become famous in the hip-hop arts, nor wealthy enough to influence politics.

Here we see the Harbor Freeway, I-110, again, as it crosses the 405 far south of where it originated, heading off to San Pedro.

And, getting back to where we started our journey, we meet up with the Long Beach Freeway, which heads south to Long Beach and north to Pasadena, while the 405 heads down to Orange County, where it meets up with I-5 and heads down to San Diego.

Lastly, here is the classic picture with the classic name, seen together. Oddly, this exit represents easily the ugliest stretch of this road. Before this crossing of the 710, the road signs in Long Beach all say "PCH", but it's really 18th street, a few miles from the ocean. On the west side of the 710, it stretches between refineries and industrial wastelands. At least the sign gives the right idea.

Public Votes for Movie Characters--Resulting List Heavy with Whitey

I came across a list of the top 100 movie characters as voted on by readers of the magazine, or site, or whatever. I didn't keep really tight notes, but they were tight enough for me.

I made some observations I wanted to put up somewhere, and here seemed like the best spot.

Cutting through the treacle:

10. Vito Corleone
9. Ripley
8. Cpt. Jack Sparrow
7. the Dude
6. Indy
5. Hannibal Lecter
4. Han Solo
3. the Joker (Heath Ledger version)
2. Darth Vader
1. Tyler Durdin, Brad Pitt, Fight Club

To start: Tyler Durdin? Okay...wouldn't have been my choice, but what can you do? It's not the worst choice, now that I think about it, but...wow.

I was kinda bummed that Charles Foster Kane isn't there, or Jake Gittes, but I guess I didn't really expect that, especially with today's voters.

Also: Harrison Ford twice, Star Wars franchise twice.

One girl, Sigourney Weaver as the badass alien killer. And, this is a pretty white list. Very white. All you have is James Earl Jones' voice, but it is number 2.

The next black face? Which is actually the first black character on the list? Clocks in at #19: Jules Winnfield, Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction.

The list is so white that a computer character, Gollum, ranks higher, #13, than Jules. This list is pretty light on the minorities, and I'm trying to figure out if it's just because the voters were mostly guys my age and skin color, or if there's just a dearth of good roles for the non-white actors and actresses.

Well, shit, it's gotta be both. That, and the institution of the cinema in this country is inherently racist, but...that's fodder for another post.

So, I move on with the observations. Sticking with the minorities:

19. Jules
22. Red, Morgan Freeman, Shawshank Redemption
33. Tequila, Chow Yun-fat, Hard Boiled (I saw this in a theater in Sacramento in 1996 or '97)(badass)
47. Blade, Wesley Snipes
78. Axel Foley

Wow. 4 black guys and Chow Yun-fat. Tony Montana was on there somewhere, but since that was Al Pacino, I didn't write it down, but I guess you could make the case that a Cuban should count.

Does this put into perspective the three computer animated characters, two puppets, 1 actual computer and 1 cell animated character?

13. Gollum
25. Yoda
63. Wall-E
74. ET
94. Buzz Lightyear
99. HAL

I didn't mention the cell animated character because it's Jessica Rabbit, a lady. The Ladies are better represented in the latter half of the list. Some of these should rate way higher, and I'm sure any of the few people reading this might agree. Here're the women:

9. Ripley
41. Mary Poppins (32 spot wait for Mary Poppins?)
45. Amelie
56. Juno
62. Mathilda, Natalie Portman as a young lady in movie of the same name
66. the Bride (fucking number 66?)
75. Marge Gunderson, Fargo
88. Jessica Rabbit
89. Princess Leia
90. Wicked Witch
91. Scarlet O'Hara
97. Carrie

Random "Luke" observation:

53. Luke from Cool Hand Luke
54. Luke Skywalker

Right next to each other. Go figure.

Jake Gittes, Jack Nicholson, Chinatown

Where's his number? Oh yeah, he was left off the fucking list. Who was that other guy I mentioned earlier...CITIZEN fucking KANE himself?

98. CharlesFoster Kane

I guess this is what you get when you let regular folks vote for something as important trivial as a movie character list.

The Really Real Ghostbusters

On one of the free digital signals we get down here in the Southland seems only to play at night, later night anyway, and is called Qubo.

Qubo has all sorts of cartoons that are designed to get the viewers like me specifically into waxing nostalgic over and leaving the channel tuned to Qubo. They are the 'toons of us early-30s guys' childhoods.

They show He-Man, She-Ra, something I never heard of called BraveStarr (it sounds cool enough: a Native American sheriff-type on an alien world with a laser blaster and maybe a mechanical horse), and, of course, the show from which this picture's taken, Ghostbusters:

This is not the Ghostbusters that most of us know and love, but I'll get to that in a second.

First let me say that all these shows suck sweaty balls. Holy shit are they bad. Poorly animated, poorly voiced, poorly written, trite from every angle. I suppose the fantasy-meets-and-drunkenly-humps-sci-fi universe that He-Man and She-Ra romp around in is novel---in theory...but goddamn. These Ghostbusters do go in and out of some netherworld dimension, but I wasn't drunk enough to give half a shit.

So, the Ghostbusters...There was the 1984 smash hit Ivan Reitman movie. It's canon for being a kid in the '80s. It spawned a sequel, which was also beloved by us stupid kids, although there have been plenty of worse sequels out there. It also spawned an animated show, starring the same main four characters from the movie. And Slimer. It was great.

Another show arrived around the same time, in between the two movies, in 1986, calling itself "Ghostbusters", and starring an ape, a fat idiot, and the blond hero. Their car was ghostly, had a mind of it's own, and was a scaredy-cat like C-3PO. 

This show surfed on enough of the attention and buzz created by the "main" franchise that they caused that "main" franchise to rename themselves "The Real Ghostbusters".

I remember thinking, even at that time, this seems weird. How can this show be getting made? There were things about it I preferred to the Real Ghostbusters, namely their frequent trips to the ghost-lands. But even as a kid, it just seemed illegal somehow to make a show and call it the exact same name as a different highly popular franchise.

The very first episode was on the other night, and I caught a little bit more that I had of the other shows I'd surfed through before going to bed. The fat idiot and the blond hero both were reluctant to become Ghostbusters, but were forced into it by the Gorilla after the original Ghostbusters, both guys' fathers, had been kidnapped. They showed the fathers, and I remembered a picture I'd seen somewhere:

Each of those two guys were animated, and were supposed to be the fathers of the young men who are in the animated cell from above.

See? Who was the real Real Ghostbusters?

There was a television show 1975 called the "Ghostbusters". Larry Storch was the star. It turns out that they sued, and won (or it was settled) Columbia Films over the name of the 1984 movie kids my age consider classic, and somehow were able to retain enough rights over the name of the property that they could produce an animated show pretty quick after that '84 movie.

While I preferred the fake "Real Ghostbusters" to the real "Fake Ghostbusters", I never hated the one with the Gorill, like some of my cohorts did. Maybe it was easier for kids to hate and talk shit, but for me, that show had some neat aspects lacking in the other, more popular show.

I always imagined them coexisting in the same universe, going about their ghostbusting business in separate circles, as there were enough ghosts to go around.

Early Adaptation

The other night the missus and I were looking though our instant queue on Netfilx and settled on an exploitation film. These kinds of films are kinda defined by being low budget, churned out quickly so the production values are slight, and generally made for a specific audience and set to be released in their neighborhoods.

This was a Blaxpoitation movie, and starred a young lady that was the reason we put it in the instant queue in the first place: Pam Grier.

Made in 1975 in Los Angeles, the movie is called Friday Foster. Pam Grier plays a young lady named Friday Foster, a young former model who lives with her younger brother, and now makes a living as a fashion photographer.

I was surprised to learn that this premise was actually based on a daily comic strip, and when I looked it up, I found this:

This is the Dell Comics edition/collection(?) of Friday Foster stories, where she splits her time between photography and sleuthing.

This is an early comic adaptation movie, and shows that non-superhero comics have a long history that spans to this era (Road to Perdition, From Hell).

As an exploitation movie, this is pretty good. The story and plot are convoluted and will keep you on your toes (uhh, with a grain of salt of course), and, if you compare it to Superfly or Shaft, it looks very good.

Also: if you've ever had any idea why Pam Grier was an "it" girl, watch this movie. She's smart, resourceful, loyal, has more moxy than power, is fearless, has a sense of humor, and is a young fox, showing off her stacked chest in non-gratuitous ways. It kinda reminded me of watching the 1989 Tim Burton's Batman for the first time in many years back in 2007. Having seen Kim Basinger in things like L.A. Confidential I remember thinking of how in love with her I was back during the Batman days when I was a kid. Then, 2007, and I was reminded what it was that did it.

Seeing Pam Grier in Friday Foster reminded me of a feeling that I didn't have specifically for her, but was the, "Oh...now I get it," epiphany.

Bongo Shows up in "The Simpsons"

One of the great pleasures in the alt-weekly liberal newspapers are the comics, things like "This Modern World" and "Trouble Town", and one of my favorites, the cynical and scarily brilliant "Life in Hell", from Matt Groening.

"Life in Hell", or rather a single comic given as a gift to James L. Brooks, prompted that producer to give Matt Groening a meeting, the results of which are well known by now.

Bongo is the single-eared son of Binky, the main character of "Life in Hell". He has been the star of two of my favorite single panels ever (I took these pictures from my Big Book of Hell).

So, when I was watching an episode of The Simpsons one morning while lately being on the mend, I was excited to see Bongo sitting in the front row of a studio audience during an Itchy and Scratchy segment.

This is from the "Bart After Dark" episode, when Bart gets a job working at the burlesque house. That show has one of my favorite lines, uttered by Bart, upon believing the Maison Derriere was inhabited by witches: "Lady, I've been grossly misinformed about witches."

Preface?

I wrote a piece about three topics recently in which I mentioned a few of the random comic book artists I like and would follow no matter the title or character. I didn't mention specifically the good writers I respect, like Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, John Byrne, maybe John Ostrander. This was more about artists, or those really cool creators who both write and pencil the work.

What I've done for this post is go through my collection and find the random things some of the guys I named have done and have some pictures. The guys I named were Frank Miller, Tim Truman, Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, and my favorite superhero artist, Joe Quesada.

Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee and Erik Larson and Sam Kieth and Greg Capullo...the powerhouse of the Image comics lineup, while spectacular, aren't really for me. I recognized the skills, but I wasn't around while they were cutting their teeth on things like Spider-Man and the Hulk, and I always felt like going with them would be just too easy and trendy. I found my own guys I liked.

Tom Mandrake's a guy I liked, but he was the artist for a specific title I read, and I'll be getting to that one in due time.

Okay, so...Frank Miller has become mostly famous lately because of the movies made from his Sin City and 300 properties, two collections I have pretty much have all of. I first found Sin City in 1991, when it was that weird smelling paper and nothing but stark black and white, expressive silhouettes, and adolescent boy fantasy. I started then and followed it going forward. 300 was beautiful, while "based of historical events", was a fun comic miniseries.

Here's my random Frank Miller comic:

It's designed to look like an old "Tales from the Crypt" book, and has three stories, all written and illustrated by Miller. The first is a Lance Blastoff story, the first story with this character, reprinted from the A-variant cover of "Dark Horse Presents #100", but in color for the first time. The second story is a Sin City tale, and the third story is an original Lance Blastoff tale. The different styles between the two Blastoff stores is interesting; the first is the original, and the original was initially done in the black-and-white Sin City style, the stark contrasting that fans are used to. In this edition, it's colored in, but retains a bit of the original blocky flair. The second Blastoff story is similar to the cover, closer in style to a space-comic.

Tim Truman is the next guy, and his style is much different. I can't really describe the design, but "un-flashy" may be a start. He tends to bring in elements of the old west and science fiction, blending them seemlessly with his unique artwork. At first I was not a fan, but it grew on me. His most famous work may be his screwball Jonah Hex mini-series', the one of which I have is "Riders of the Worm and Such". An early project that Truman created for the small publisher Eclipse was called Scout. In this post-apocalyptic tale the main character is an Apache warrior, because in Truman's own words, "who else would still be surviving?"

He was given the reins to a title I followed, Turok, Dinosaur Hunter, and drew and wrote issues 7, 8, and 9 with it's own contained story line. Here's the cover for #7, with Turok, the dinosaurs, and the Spider-people, who Truman brought into the Lost World. Up until this story line, Turok was one of the sleekest looking, dinosaur killing Miwoks ever presented in comic form. With this issue, I remember thinking, WTF? What did they do to my character? Eventually I came to like the artist and found some of his older books and kept an eye out for his newer ones.

Mike Mignola has become "famous", kinda, also, with the two Hellboy movies. Hellboy was Mignola's creation when he left the constricting gigs and was given more freedom. One of the earliest works he did is seen here, an off-regular-timeline tale of Batman, "Gotham by Gaslight." This story is set in London in the late nineteenth century, where the Wayne's are wealthy philanthropists, get gunned down, and young Bruce does his thing, and eventually we get Batman tracking down Jack the Ripper. The cover below shows off the basis of Mignola's eventual off-kilter Hellboy look.

Mike Allred is a different story. His comic here is anything but random. He's spent many a year trying to forge a career outside the mainstream, and created his most famous character, Madman, a few years before getting this almost-major company, Dark Horse, to publish a new series. The colors are eye-popping, the action is cartoony and anachronistic, and the plots are bizarre enough to be fun as hell. I have an even more random and harder to find book by Allred, from an even smaller imprint, but I'm trying to raise awareness to Madman. Allred sued Warner Brothers Animation for their character Freakazoid, who looks almsot exactly like Madman, except he's got a purple suit with a black exclamation point. I think they settled, or Allred dropped the case because he couldn't afford the court costs. He's since worked on Superman and a few other things, but his unmistakable character design always catches the eye.

Ah, on to my favorite superhero artist, and candidate for simply favorite comic artist, Joe Quesada. This is the third, and last, issue of Ninjak that Joe Quesada worked on. His work for Valiant was fast and bright. He did some covers for Solar, did the for Bloodshot #0, did the entire X-O Manowar #0, and the first three issues of Ninjak. I'm pretty sure that's all the Quasada Valiant work. Seems so bizarre, thinking about it now. Even now, fans like me can pick his work up easily.

Maybe this is some kind of introduction to a lengthy attempt to discuss my time with comics and how it's evolved through the years.

No, this isn't an introduction, it's more of a preface. A tiny taste.

Look at all the pretty pictures!

Pep Streebek Memories

Using my streaming Netflix I watched a movie that was a favorite of my brother and myself: the 1987 "classic" Dragnet. A comedic look at the police procedural from the fifties and sixties, it stars Dan Ackroyd as the anachronistic Joe Friday, acting exactly as his "uncle", the original show's star, named the same and played by the show's creator Jack Webb. Ackroyd plays is straight from the sixties, the super straight man for Tom Hank's detective Pep Streebek.

It was this night that I remembered how funny and entertaining and confident Tom Hanks was, or maybe "can be". I never watched the Med Ryan movies he made, and ever since Forrest Gump knocked out Pulp Fiction in most categories at the Oscars, I was pretty much done with Tom Hanks.

Of course you can recognize skill, and I enjoyed Catch Me if You Can, but Tom Hanks as a draw for me was over.

I had somehow buried my fond memories of what his movies use to mean for me. I'm talking the bad ones, or at least the ones other folks consider not his star-turns. I'm talking after Big, after Splash...I'm talking my old favorites. (Actually Dragnet is older than Big.)

The Big 3 as my brother and I probably see it were Dragnet (1987), The 'Burbs (1989), and, probably the weirdest one, Joe Vs the Volcano (1990), which it turns out is a Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks movie. I remember it more fondly...the brain cloud and a suicidal sacrifice...maybe I should watch it again, and try not to be too disappointed.

Maybe it was just Dragnet and The 'Burbs that endeared Tom Hanks to us. I do know that I fully loved those movies as a kid, and Tom Hanks was a funny guy who could carry a movie.

Seeing Dragnet again as an adult filled in the blanks that whooshed over my head as a kid watching a movie with those kinds of jokes. The first time newly minted partners Friday and Streebek show up at the skin mag Bait creator's Hefner-esque mansion, the lady on the intercom mistakes who they are, and with a throaty and sexy voice asks, "Vibrator repair?" How ridiculous, of course, but that was a joke that I never understood.

There were other jokes like that, but really, I was more basking in my pleasant memories of the Streebek Phenomena. How crazy a mostly wasted movie about glorifying the LA cops in 1987, the same shitty group of assholes that had lost their grip on the crack epidemic and fed the anger and fear of an entire subset of the city's population until they blew four years later in a major race riot caused me to remember the power that fucking Tom Hanks had over my imagination as a kid?

Good stuff. Also, A League of Their Own. I liked that one, too.

Homosexual Green Lantern Clarifications

I thought I'd clear up this whole gay Green Lantern conversation. Mainly because of a stupid republican-themed comic strip in my local paper, "Mallard Filmore", kept muddling up the situation with its ignorance.

So here goes. DC Comics is considering it a brave and bold move from the company, trying to keep it cutting edge. They consider it the first "major" gay superhero, since he's pretty far from the first. Green Lantern's major, right? He did just have a big budget movie release, right? Yes and no.

In DC Comics, Green Lantern is a major character, but that would be Hal Jordan or later, Kyle Rayner.

The character they made the first "major" gay superhero is indeed a Green Lantern, but it is Allan Scott, the gentleman on the left below, labeled as the Golden Age Green Lantern.

This was the first incarnation of a hero called Green Lantern, and this is not the same as the Hal Jordan iteration and the one the film's based upon. The Green Lantern Corp from the movie and both the Silver Age and Modern Age from above is an intergalactic police force that wield rechargeable rings that manifest will power.

Alan Scott was a train conductor who found a magical meteor and forged a magical ring from it. Whereas Hal Jordan used power from the central core, Alan Scott uses an entirely different source: magic.

Above it may seem odd that Hal Jordan occupies both the Silver Age and Modern Age spots. A few notes on that. One, this set is from 1992, and the major changes in both the industry as well as the DC Universe had yet to take place. At different times after 1959 many of the early comic book characters were updated and revamped for a more modern audience. 1959 is when the first updating occurred, when the Flash became the more recognizable hooded iteration named Barry Allen. Soon after all the major DC characters followed, and a real rival, Marvel Comics, entered the market with their stable of complex characters.

Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corp were created, and the Silver Age, as it's known, was in full bloom.

The main difference you'll see between the Silver and Modern Ages above will be the silver streaks in Hal's hair. That was a construct to show that Jordan had been updated for the modern times, hence, the Modern Age.

DC had big changes in store for Hal Jordan. It turned out the the silver in his hair was the sign of an evil having inhabited his body, and it has since been purged and Hal Jordan has returned as Earth's main Green Lantern. In the interim, though, he went crazy, blew up the central core, started a huge war, was killed, was then resurrected as the Spectre, and another (white) Earth Green Lantern was found and cultivated; this is Kyle Rayner. Check out the picture below.

The first spot is labeled "Green Lantern", even if you can't read it. That's Kyle Rayner. Next is Allen Scott; then a tool named Guy Gardner, who got himself a power ring; then Sinestro, an early ally of Hal Jordan who eventually became an enemy (in the 1970s); then Hal Jordan himself in one of his super-bad-guy outfits; and then the Guardians, the creators of the central battery core and forgers of the power rings.

These cards are from maybe 1994 or '95, so the entrance of Kyle Rayner has occurred, but not Jordan's final demise before becoming the Spectre.

Now Jordan's returned to the dark haired hero with no silver streaks, and then an announcement came along saying that a Green Lantern is coming out. So...I knew it wouldn't be Hal Jordan. That would have been bold, but they're trying to market and fund the second Ryan Reynolds GL movie, and I imagine his sexual orientation would be too hot of a potato. If  it had been Guy Gardner or John Stewart, a black Green Lantern from Earth that doesn't get enough press, they wouldn't be able to say that it was a "major" character coming out.

I expected it to be Kyle Rayner. He didn't have the decades of love built up or new movies coming out. But, what he does have, or did get, is/was a promotion. He was bumped up, when Hal Jordan returned, to a character named Ion. His powers and abilities were enhanced and he's not so much a Lantern anymore. I think he might have changed again, but I haven't really found out.

So, since 1938, Alan Scott has been running around the DC Universe. First in the mainstream, but then for much longer around the edges, along the fringe. A cynical view would be that they're trying to drum up some attention to an archaic character, a nearly outdated title and premise.

But, who are we to say to what's a major character or not? I haven't really collected comics in many years and I don't know what has happened in the DC Universe since then. Maybe Allen Scott has become an important character besides just a "major" title.

In any case, good for him. Them. Eh, keep reaching for that rainbow!

Must be the Southland...

Last night, pissing me off something fierce, I had an annoying sound effect keeping me company for a sold hour, maybe more:

That's not a UFO folks, it's goddamned helicopter.

Now, I understand that we don't live in Brentwood, or Bel Aire, but we also don't live in the middle of the fucking ghetto, and this recent spike in the amount of helicopter attention later at night is more annoying to me than troubling.

I know you wouldn't fly a damn chopper over the wealthy enclaves, that's for sure...unless, like, the leader of al Quaida was running through Beverly Hills for some reason.

Have you ever seen a helicopter as close as that picture above has it? That makes it look far, but those things are LOUD. Even at that distance, when the circling is above your house you can almost feel the wind being hacked by the blades...when it's far off like in the picture, it still stops your ability to hear a conversation or a television.

I Bed-Stuy once a helicopter was much, much closer, so close it rattled our entire building. That time it had everyone out in the street yelling at it in a futile show of anger.

I've included the next picture because 1) you can kinda make out the helicopter as kind of a Morse Code symbol in the upper left quadrant; and 2) I thought it looked cool.

Cop Shows and Presidents

I was thinking about presidential administrations and police procedural television shows from that era and how that show was somehow reflective of the administration. Is is me or is this kinda weird?

I've really only gone back as far as the Clinton Administration, and with that I've chosen The X-Files. The FBI are just federal cops, so I think it works.

The X-Files, at least all the episodes before Dogget and Reyes came along to fuck everything up (consequently, that was during Bush's tenure), represent a more innocent time, when things were mysterious, hard to explain, conspiratorial, ultimately knowable, and full of sexual tension. Bill Clinton's reign, right?

Now, what authoritative cop-like show would best represent the reign of Dubya? What cop-like show could only exist in a world where someone like George W. Bush was in charge, and only last as long as his royal highness the Imperial King George II? Better not call my mom during Jack-time. Jack Bauer heads the torture department in the various long days of the various seasons of the (somehow) beloved 24. 24 is the epitome of the Bush era: macho guy does it his own way, and the hell with your conventional and antiquated ideas about privacy and international law (laws that an erstwhile administration in this same country had a major hand in writing).

How about the Obama Administration? I was thinking that the Tom Selleck vehicle Blue Bloods would fill out this list nicely. Any show that has multiple generations of New York City cops sitting around a dinner table having a civilized conversation about the benefits of legalization of drugs could only come during a time where rational discussion has been allowed to commence once again, and a more realistic view of drugs has itself become reasonable. That seems to represent the best of the reign of Barry.

I think I'll do some more thinking about it and look deeper...like Miami Vice and Reagan? Rockford Files and Carter?

Was haben wir hier?

Those with a keen eye and a knowledge of botanical things might be able to recognize.

Es wohnt nach der Strasse von meine Haus, aber ich bin keine Mann genug, es zu versuchen.

That's what we call Cali-deutsch.

Don Juan and Carlos can tell you about the flower.

Forgettably Essential

I recently went to the Long Beach Comic Convention, and while I did find a book I was looking for, I also found a special gift for my brother. I was going to try and keep it a secret. It's a DVD, and since it wasn't shrink wrapped, I figured I should watch it. After watching it, I realize I have to speak about it somewhere in my collection of blogs, and it seemed to fit here. Also, I don't think Shipping Magnate Gonzo, younger brother of the Chef, doesn't read this site.

Here's a shot of the DVD case:

Yup, that's the goddamned Holiday Special, the most godawful piece of crap produced with the name "Star Wars" attached to it, and that's saying something.

Most hard core fans try to ignore this program,and even the actors regret doing it. George Lucas himself had nothing to do with it, and, in the picture of the reverse of the DVD jewel case below, they have Lucas quoted as saying: "If I had time and a hammer, I'd track down every bootleg copy and smash it..."

This copy has some bonus features: the "Troops" parody of "Cops", which has its moments. The "Hardware Wars" was funnier than I remember, and the "Lost Auditions" was actually from MAD TV, and SNL.

So, in 1978, just a year removed from Star Wars and two years to go still before Empire Strikes Back, someone who had enough power over the rights of the intellectual property, decided to put together a variety show style Holiday Special revolved around the Star Wars universe.

It's been roundly criticized by fans of the Star Wars universe, fans of variety shows, and even slack jawed yokels who spend hours staring at the tube.

It does, as any hard core fan can tell you, actually have the first appearance of the strangely popular bounty hunter Boba Fett. So, while it would be most helpful to pretend that it doesn't exist, the fourteen minutes of animation from Nelvana Studios is necessary for Boba Fett's existence.

I thought, you know, I should watch this sucker. I'd be a more complete fan. Nevermind that I don't really consider myself a fan so much anymore.

Let me start with an all-caps warning, from the critical eye that just watched this "special": IT IS FUCKING EYES BLEEDINGLY AWFUL. I do thing that every fan should have to sit through it, but they should be forced to have a gravity bong rip before hand, or only after a six pack or something.

I kept notes as it went on and on and on. It opens with Han Solo and Chewie sitting at a lame remake of the Millennium Falcon cockpit, dodging imperial fighters, all the while Han promising he'll get Chewbacca back to Kashyyyk, his home planet, in time for the "Life Day" celebrations. The opening scene is fast paced and jerky looking.

Then the "Holiday Special" credits roll, and we see who the guests are to be, and afterwards we're introduced to Chewie's fam: his wife Mala, son Lumpy, and father Itchy. They have some other, real, names I guess, but those are all we really hear, and then only by humans.

And then we get the Chewbacca family for eight minutes, all growls as they do housework, and then Grandpa Itchy gave the boy Lumpy a tape to watch, and we get four minutes of the lamest Cirque du Solei crap to a horrible instrumental disco inspired track. Ugh, already it's worse than bad.

Around the 12 minute mark we get Mark Hamil's appearance. he's working on his X-wing, or something, and he shows concern for Chewie and Han not being there yet. See, they're still off fighting, or running, or whatever.

Then we get to watch as Malla watches a cooking show, with what looks like some guy in drag and blackface, and who eventually gets an extra set of arms, and it is really awful. It goes on and on, isn't funny but you get the feeling it should be, and all the while Malla is showing she can't cook? Maybe? She's at least having trouble with the recipe, or the pace of the show's chef is setting. It seems to go on forever, but it may be just about six minutes, which feels like an eternity.

Maybe the cartoon is next, but it could just be more of the Chewbacca family growling around their treehouse. At one point Grandpa sits in a chair and puts his head into hair a dryer thing from a salon and he's subjected to a psychedelic show, and we're subjected to another glittery light show, and then signing. It's a young and pretty black girl with some kind of plastic stuff on her head where hair might be.

At the 37th minute we finally see Leia, who's also nervous about Han and Chewie not being back, but at least the human trader has stopped by the Chewbacca residence; he can translate. After the picture phone call, the imperial gaurds show up, and at some point, around minute 45 one guy sits down to watch a fucking video. It's actually a long Jefferson Starship disco era absurdity.

Now you ask yourself What the fuck is wrong with me for staying with this garbage this long? Somehow we make it to minute 69...over an hour of this shit, and we're in a tavern on Tatooine. Who's the bartender?

Bea Arthur.

Beatrice Fucking Arthur is the bartender in the bar on Tatooine. Bastards should've opened with this; you've got me. Some dill-hole is trying to woo her, then the imperial guys send out a picture wall message that a curfew has been instilled on Tatooine, and she has an effective way of getting the drunks to leave: she starts singing. Oh good gravy, at minute 77 there's Bea Arthur singing in a Star War, er, project.

That cartoon was kinda cool...a planet with a surface like bubblegum, and Boba Fett at first saving Han and Luke, but turning out to be a big douche. I dunno. Check it out on YouTube if you really want to see it. It's an interesting look at late 70s Canadian animation.

Just when you think it should be over, guess what: Princess Leia sings the words to a song about Life Day and Peace to the main John Williams score, the dam theme score, if you can call it that. She sings the theme song.

And it still isn't over yet, as we get part of the Life Day ceremony, because Chewbacca and Han made it back safely at some point where I guess I was making another gin and tonic. No, I remember it now; it sucked like everything else.

I once wrote a piece about Troll 2 and this Holiday Special is much, much worse.

"Hardware Wars" almost makes up for it. Seriously...almost. Where the Holiday Special is long, plodding and awful, "Hardware Wars" is short, fast-paced, and actually genuinely funny.

Look out Brother Gonzo, it's coming to you sooner than you think!

Springy Clothespins or the Other Kind?

The title of this post refers to the church's marquee explaining that particular day's sermon in the third episode of the fourth season of The Simpsons, "Homer the Heretic". I thought that would be a good title for two reasons: it is another one of the beautiful absurdities associated with the show, and the particular storyline covers America's aversion to going to church and how it's relevance comes into question.

To start a conversation or debate about clothespins means you have either too much free time or a specific neuroses. And what do we call those "other kinds"?

In the episode, Homer is bothered to get out of his warm bed and put on his lousy church clothes. When his pants split, he decides to go back to bed, refusing to go to church. While Marge and the kids suffer through the sermon inside the freezing hall--the heater's broken--Homer hangs out at home, turning up the heat, watching football, and realizing how little he needs going to church in his life.

That's the main metaphor here: convenience and comfort are the motivating factors keeping Homer home, and are the tempting factors facing the churchly masses in America. Homer does what they, I imagine, would like to do if they either allowed themselves, or were allowed to do: skip the whole thing and stay comfortable at home watching football (or whatever).

I get the feeling the masses reluctantly go to church when they do, and Homer represents their base desires. The important thing here is that church has lost its relevancy for Homer, and those masses. With a sermon like the one described on the marquee, and adorning the title of this post, about fucking clothespins, how can anyone consider it relevant?

To me, that's the important discussion in this episode: reconciling the problems that American "believers" have with how they cultivate their relationship with their deity.

I've known Hindus who don't have a place to go to "worship" on a weekly basis, rather they have a daily ritual they perform. I've worked with Muslims who took their time everyday to go do their prayers, much to the sneers and muffled cursing of the Christians also working there.

Homer, though, is mostly selfish and thoughtless, and lets his slovenly ways get the best of him, accidentally setting his house on fire while he naps on the couch.. The religious forces come to his rescue (Christian, Jewish, Hindu), and his return to church in ensured.

We're left with the final image, that inconclusive conclusion of this conversation: Homer asleep and snoring in the church. Everything's okay as long as you show up?

What a poor lesson.

Old School Sampling/Appropriation

Hip Hop artists started sampling the rhythm tracks from older R&B, funk, and early rock and roll songs to  create new pieces of music. Most people in this country have come into contact with one form of sampling or another.

In an older time certain aspects of making music, and making songs, was to use other people's musical pieces, and by "use", I mean to basically steal them. In a way this appropriation is a kind of sampling, and since music is collaborative and things can be done to change riffs and beats just enough to not be legally actionable, most artists seemed to have just said, salud, good for you, nice song.

The Keith Richards and Eric Clapton both started as white English guys ripping off American blues musicians, so there's a grand history to that sort of thing.

A song that is such a cultural touchstone for America, and was made by Americans, has in itself a rich legacy of appropriation. I speak of The Doors' "Break on Through (To the Other Side)".

The opening drum beat is a modified samba beat. The samba sound was reaching the States from Brazil around this time, and to use it in a rock song was as novel as it was radical. Instead of the brush on the snare-drum, John Densmore hardened the sound to make it a little more rock sensible by using a stick lightly on the cymbal.

The Ray Manzarek's organ starts, and the bass, being played by his left hand, is basically a repeating four note beat lifted directly from Ray Charles. Hearing it by itself it's pretty obvious.

Robby Krieger, on guitar, played a slightly modified riff of the driving part of "Shake You Money Maker".

String those components together behind Jim Morrison's words, a positive message about resistance and self realization, and you end up with an American classic.

Quintessential or Not, Two LA Movies

I was originally title this "Two Quintessential LA Movies", but the more I thought about it, one I felt less and less was quintessentially Los Angeles. They were made eight years apart and both are beloved by certain elements as cult classics.

The first is from 1976, and it is generally called an underrated action film before that genre really became a thing. It's taut, suspenseful, has lots of shooting, and was made by John Carpenter. I'm talking about Assault on Precinct 13.

For some reason this is considered an LA movie. I know it was filmed in LA, and certain neighborhoods are seen before the siege starts, but it doesn't really address LA things. It's not a bad movie, and maybe because I'm not from the Southland I can't understand.

It's basically Rio Bravo mixed with Night of the Living Dead, where the zombies have guns with silencers.

The zombie hoards that lay siege to the last-day-open police station are actually well-armed punks and gangsters. Why they assault the station is left to your imagination, or, is it really because of the guy who's daughter is shot? Probably, but that meaninglessness of it all is central.

A couple of notes: the soundtrack is composed and played by Carpenter himself on a synthesizer, and it captures the eras burgeoning digital dread. It was originally to be called The Siege, and then something else, before an executive changed it himself, thinking Assault on Precinct 13 sounded more ominous. The only reference to 13 made in the entire movie is early on, when the closing station house is referred to at "Precinct 9, District 13".

It's low budget and taut.

The second movie, from 1984, is much easier to call "quintessentially LA". The music captures the LA punk scene perfectly, the locales used for the shoot show off the underside of Reagan's America and Reagan's Los Angeles, and alienated youth takes centered stage, and shares it with an alien in a trunk.

I'm talking about Repo Man. An early vehicle for Emilio Estevez, his father figure was played by Harry Dean Stanton, and the cris-crossing lives of Los Angeles repo men make for great fun when intersecting with a scientist going mad from radiation poisoning hauling an alien corpse in his trunk.

You see the LA river in a car chase scene; you see the boonies in their home office; you see a neat homey atmosphere at Emilio's house. The '80s LA punk rock blares mostly the whole time, and all food and drink commodities are branded exactly the same: white packaging with blue lettering.

I remember the first time I saw the movie was on VHS cassette, and it wasn't new anymore, but when the end credits roll, I was inspired. Instead of the usual coming from the bottom and rolling up, the credits in Repo Man cascade slowly down from the top of the screen to the bottom.

Even the credits are punk rock.

Notes from Chef Gonzo's Brother

"

Not sure if you saw the picture of the driveway… after about 25 years of having dirt on the driveway I am in the process (which the rain is not helping) of cementing it over.  So I have had to do a lot of digging and pickaxing and… well… shit ass labor that my already screwed up back was not fond of.  Well… after a nice farmer sunburn (yay, arms and neck are still pink!) I made a really interesting discovery.  The back panel of an action figure’s torso.  I would like to say this: No matter how much of Kentucky’s finest I have swallowed in the past my deductive skills are still as sharp as Billy Zane in a Purple unitard.  That’s right.  I’m as good as The Phantom!

And so I bring you a picture of the action figure I found, in the dirt, broken, faded and almost lost forever.  Like the show it was from.

Have fun on the long winding trip down memory lane.  I picked up a hitchhiker… he made me want to watch the Battle For Endor and The Caravan of Courage in a double feature…  I killed him by making him choke on an old ET windup toy that had a red belly.

Then I washed the toy.

"

That was from my brother, and the discussion of the driveway and us losing our toys in the dirt has been a topic before, especially with our erstwhile next door neighbor. I myself, had a similarly themed post back in 2009, and here's a similarly reminiscent passage that mirrors his hitchhiker talk below the picture:

"

After clicking on the link for a picture of the toy, I remembered. It all fell into place. A memory of waiting for a double pie at Little Caesar's Pizza with my Captain Power action figure claiming a back counter, rappelling down an invisible rope, and then blasting the (unseen) badguys came rushing up to the front of my neo-cortex, and my Sunday afternoon with no television to watch the Yankees clinch, the Giants rout the Bucs, or the Jets womp the Titans, was totally complete with a stroll down memory lane.

"

I Forgot "Golden Tee"

In my expanded discussion on the birth, death, and phoenix like rebirth of an experience, I forgot to mention the world's most profitable arcade game, and the proverbial exception the proves the rule.

The golfing game Golden Tee has, like Big Game Hunter, carved a nice niche out in bars, similar to the Megatouch consoles. Simulations of what you can't really do in the city, I guess...

Golden Tee, though, was made in America, not Japan, and has enjoyed a decade of success, earning over $2 billion around the world during that time.

That's a lot of quarters.

The Birth, Death, and Re-Birth of the Arcade

The arcade experience can be divided up into three distinct things that will better help explain the birth, death, and phoenix-like rebirth of the video game arcade: (1) venue; (2) hardware; (3) content.

The venue was a place that housed the hardware, or games themselves, and the content was the style of game play. Just in case that wasn't obvious.

Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, realized that games that people pump quarters into could be a sound business model. The first quarter-eating game Atari brought to the market was lamely called "Computer Space". It was a ripoff of an older game called Space War, but they seemed to replace the wrong word when they named their game. It was a flop, but mainly because people couldn't really get into the controls. A certain level of  hand-eye coordination that today we take for granted hadn't yet developed.

Ironically, the game "Asteroid", much better known today, came out just a few years later, after the explosion of "Pong" and "Space Command" and was a success; it had the exact same controls as Computer Space: accelerate, fire, rotate left, rotate right. By the time Asteroid hit the arcades, folks understood.

Once the popularity of the games finally took off, the gamers just needed a place to go to play. This is the birth of the arcade as we know it: a dark and dimly lit place where kids spent hours and dollars hunched over games and a weird guy patrolled with a crotch mounted quarter dispenser.

The games, housed in those large plastic cabinets, had a very specific style of game play: they were programmed to kill you. Bushnell and Atari knew where the threshold was for profitability, and they programmed the games as such to make them profitable. What does that mean? Games that offer just a burst of excitement; games that are easy to learn but nearly impossible to master; games that keep you coming back for more.

Venue, hardware, and content set and ready to make millionaires out of some people.

Atari and the millions came later, though, with the home gaming console. Fairchild Semiconductor released their Channel F Video Entertainment System, the first real home video game console. Seeing this as the future of the gaming market, a console you put interchangeable game cartridges into (how revolutionary), Atari jumped into the fray, and a year after the Channel F, the Atari 2600 was unleashed on the world.

The Atari 2600 has gone down in history as one of the most important consoles ever. It (1) made people think video games in your house was a viable activity; and (2) it almost destroyed the entire market for video games in America. Both the creator and nearly the destroyer. It's complicated, baby.

Why mention this in a post about arcades? Well, because it's all connected.

The arcade was for a long time under scrutiny from unhappy parents who didn't want their kids going to some dark sweaty place and spending money hunched over a plastic cabinet. That doesn't seem like it makes men out of those young pimply boys. That's another misconception, that boys were the only arcade gamers. Both Centipede and Pac-Man were very hot commodities with the ladies, not to mention the most popular arcade booth ever: Ms. Pac-Man.

In any case, the Atari 2600 began to sap some of the arcade's business. After Warner, who was brought it as a financial backer of Atari, forced out Nolan Bushnell, then shit all over Atari's game programmers, they left and formed Activision, and took the title of "Fastest Growing Company in the US" away from Atari. What hadn't yet been realized by the honchos at Atari was that video game design is more an art-form than simple computer programming. There are plenty of creative decisions that are needed to be made during the course of game design, and even at that early juncture, there was an obvious difference good game design and poor game design.

When Activision became so profitable, other companies decided to jump in the mix and make cartridges for the 2600. What happened? There was a flood of shitty games for the Atari, so much so that you couldn't distinguish the good games (the few from Activision like "Pitfall") from the awful crap that saturated the market.

It got so bad that two awful missteps, the wretched port of Pac-Man (the bringing of the arcade classic to the home console)(considered one of the two or three worst games ever) and the even worse ET game (considered the worst game ever by many lists) pretty much destroyed then entire market.. Atari literally buried thousands of the ET cartridges in the desert. Check online for reviews and gameplay if you're really interested in seeing for yourself. I recommend it if you like video games and history.

Those two games, coupled with the total saturation of garbage cartridges, spelled the collapse of the market, which in 1983 happened. The home console market was dead, and the arcade was fading as well.

At the height there were maybe 10,000 arcades open throughout the country, but they started closing in the early '80s, and then more steadily after '83.

It took some shrewd business decisions and partnerships, but by 1986 Nintendo hit the Christmas shelves, and by Christmas '87 Nintendo was everywhere.

Arcades were still around, but on the wane, when the "The Legend of Zelda" was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Compare the game play of an arcade game and the first Zelda: one is built on short bursts of excitement and designed to kill you fast, while the other has no clock, makes it necessary to simply explore a world, lets you save your progress, and has no score.

Once home gaming became this sophisticated the arcade experience really started to look antiquated.

The venue was changing to a living room or bedroom, the hardware was now a tiny console you could put different games into, and the content, or style of gaming, was radically different.

The last throws of life was seen in the cartoony Street Fighter 2 and it's more realistic rival, Mortal Kombat.

The legacy of Street Fighter 2, you could say, came from it's six button and joy-stick control setup. That game allowed players to do special moves with specific combinations of stick-directions and button strokes. Mortal Kombat also had this feature, and it can be argued that this complexity of button control helped usher in a world where very complicated controllers and game styles became the norm of what today we call hard-core gaming.

Meanwhile, in Japan, the 1983 collapse hadn't effected either the home gaming or arcade market.

Really, at the heart of this business model you have venues, hardware, and content.

Japan began to look at which arcade experiences were successful there and how they might fare in the States. One of the first import games of the rebirth era was Dance Dance Revolution. This is a rhythm game where a player uses their feet and body  as the controller, jumping up and down on a controller pad.

Like Mortal Kombat a decade before, it began to garner a crowd. People loved to watch someone who was really good at it. Here was a gaming experience you couldn't have at home (until the home pad was made available, but the idea is sound). That's come to define one of the three main directions in which the arcade experience has gone: things you can't do in your living room.

Nowadays there are games you literally climb into that whip you around while simulating a flight mission. There's even a house-of-horror type game where you're using a light-blasting automatic weapon protecting yourself from marauding zombies. It's like lazer-tag, a haunted house, and those mirror-rooms combined.

That's the main direction of the hardware aspect of the rebirth of the arcade.

Besides places like Dave and Busters, Kitchen Den and Bar, and Chuck E. Cheese's, a separate direction for the venue evolution of arcade games are bars with the ubiquitous Megatouch consoles.

(Chuck E. Cheese's incidentally was founded by Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, as a relatively safe place for your kids to play arcade games--a venture from which he made more money than Atari due to his early ousting.)

At the end of many, many a bar in this country's watering holes sits a coin-operated television touch screen that has pre-loaded hundreds of puzzles and games. We've all seen them, right? This may seem a strange inheritor of the title arcade game, but these consoles number about 100 million, which is as many Pac-Man cabinets there were at that game's apex. Megatouch games only trail Ms. Pac-Man for the top arcade gaming apparatus in history.

Now in the realm of content, that fast-paced style of game play that was left by the way-side as gamers went for the Zelda and Final Fantasy style of role playing and exploration games, has seen a resurgence as well. People who made franchises like Halo and Gears of War and Call of Duty very profitable entities have become on occasion tired of such long adventures. Those games take on the order of 30 to 40 hours to complete, and sometimes you just want a quick burst of action.

Besides hand held devices like the Sony PSP or the Nintendo DS, both of which offer fast paced style games, possibly the best example of this new/old style of game is Geometry Wars. The game is beautiful, all action all the time, easy to learn but hard to master, over quickly, and, for the first time in maybe fifteen years, the score is beginning to matter again.

The full circle.

There are a few things that I, while not a gamer per se, respect and admire about the industry, and represent a few things I'd like to touch on later: the fact that the industry generates nearly three-times as much revenue as the NFL; that casual gaming is so pervasive that I had to convince someone that yes, Angry Birds is a video game; that hard-core gaming has become so involved as to bring about MMO games (Massive Multiplayer Online--the top banana being World of Warcraft)--online worlds where people spend more time than they're regular ones...

...I don't know. Anything that has such a wide array of related objects of human observation--casual gamers playing on their phone or getting grandma to play Wii bowling, versus the hard core gamers spending fifty, sixty, maybe even seventy hours a week using an avatar to run around a virtual world with friends they've never met in person--has got to be worth observing and reported about.

That shit is almost past pop-culture. It affects people and commerce in staggering numbers.