Teevee Time: Powerpuff Girls

I’m still not clear: what did he do with Professor Utonium? And was the professor on board with it?

Take-two Tuesday — Daily Batman: Enter the Bookworm and Up With Love plus Surprise Connections and Zodiac-quackery

This post originally appeared on January 5, 2010 at 8:05 pm.

Roddy McDowall and Francine York, Batman, “The Bookworm Turns,” Season 1, Episode 29. Original airdate April 20, 1966. Well, that’s inauspicious. Shit.

I hate to come off as a down-at-the-mouth grump on the topic of love. I am a romantic. Here is the Bookworm and his lady, the lovely librarian Miss Lydia Limpet, and may I add that I rooted like gangbusters for this pair to win?

via Batman villains database — I love clunky contraptions on men’s heads. I find it so fucking cute. I really do.

In fact, I remember pretty strongly wanting him for myself (girls like a boy who reads!), but I rightly understood Miss Limpet having him was almost the same thing. Later, when I figured out he was in Planet of the Apes, I was even more impressed, but, being a fickle little girl, I soon made way for other crushes, like Matthew Broderick and the Great Mouse Detective — shut up, because that could work — to the point that, when I stayed at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona several years back and was given the “Roddy McDowall room,” I merely remarked that I’d “once thought he was cute,” and meant nothing more by it.

Interestingly, after his role as the Bookworm in the live-action television series, McDowall continued to wreak villainy in the DC world. He voiced Jarvis Tetch/the Mad Hatter for both Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures, as well as performing him in a brief cameo for the late ’90s animated Superman.

In the original television series, the Mad Hatter was played by David Wayne. More on the Mad Hatter another day cause he was really depressed as a character and had some killer-great deadpan lines, even though no one matches King Tut in my estimation for the male villains’ comedic value. But back to love, because that is what I’m trying to prove is probably more important than trivial details of cartoons and old lunchbox-selling serials.

No, I can’t stop talking about it. Okay, because I’m looking at his page on the imdb to make sure I had the dates and titles right and it ends up Roddy McDowall was also the Breadmaster on Edlund’s masterwork The Tick, which is of grave emotional significance to me, and, moreover, had cameos on Darkwing Duck, Quantum Leap, and mother-effing Gargoyles. Also, he was monumentally in to photography and experimental camerawork. So, holy hell, I was smart to have a crush on him as a kid and now I’m going to have to get back to Roddy McDowall another day; he’s obviously been far more of an important thread in my life than I ever could have possibly understood … y’all please excuse me because Roddy McDowall has just now blown my mind.

Finally, according to authorities on these matters, the Catwoman outfit regularly worn by Julie Newmar appears to have been “upcycled” and worn by Francine York (who played librarian Miss Limpet on Batman) for the Lost In Space episode “The Colonists.” Also, in looking for pictures of her, I stumbled across a page where a woman had collected a bunch of pictures of famous Virgo women and though I always claim to put almost zero stock in that stuff, I have to say that they/we all have the faces of birdlike closet freaks who are too shy to smile with our lips parted but rock straight-up crazy do-me eyes despite our distrust of other people — to say nothing of the number of patron saints in her gallery of too-close-to-home horror. Good thing I think that’s largely bunk, or the unnerving similarities might have me concerned that my chakras weren’t aligned with the downward dog position of my chi and I’d have to bury a peeled potato under a full moon or some shit.

Truly the end of this post. Moving on for my own sake.

Daily Batman: Christmas With the Joker

Come on, Batman, it’s Christmas Eve. Let’s kick back and get into the spirit.

The Joker’s escaped from Arkham Asylum, Robin.

And you really think he’s going to make a move on Christmas Eve? Even scum spend the holidays with their families.

He has no family.

Okay — I’ll make a deal with you. If we go out on patrol and Gotham is quiet, with no sign of the Joker, then we come back here and have Christmas dinner and watch It’s A Wonderful Life.

You know? I’ve never seen that. I could never get past the title.


(Batman: The Animated Series. Season 1, Episode 38. “Christmas With the Joker.” Original airdate November 13, 1992.)

Mark Hamill says he will no longer be reprising the voice role of Joker in Batman material (for now). Sad face. It was such a beautiful intersection of my dorky needs.

Goin’ on a tiger hunt

I guess I should mention in case things go haywire in the next nine or ten days that I won’t be here — haven’t been for almost a day now, actually, I think. It’s all ghost posts for the next week and some odd days.

I’m taking my hips on a gold road trip to the Old Home. It will bring good and bad. I will be stopping at several points along the way there and back for some painful purposes, and at other times for what I hope will be crazy-joyful occasions of reunion.

The only way out is through.

(Geneen Roth.)

This quote puts me in mind of a memory that is tied closely to the trip I am about to make. A long time ago, when I used to live where I am going, my aunt — the one who is a nun, not to be confused with my bereaved aunt who is reading Kubler-Ross and about whom I talk all the time, nor my chic deaf aunt who lives on a cliff — used to sing to me this song called “Goin’ on a tiger hunt,” some variant of which you have doubtless been taught in church youth group or some scout camporee or perhaps by a cartoon. Animaniacs was surprisingly educational at times.

If this picture of a little girl making a wish on her birthday candles some fifty years ago does not make you accuse the room of being dusty you have no soul. I hope every one of her dreams came true and she has lived a long and happy life.

The main thing of the song — which sitting on the steps of my grandparents’ house by the highway singing with my aunt is one of my happiest memories — was this syncopated repetitive chorus whenever the hunter would encounter an obstacle. You would chant back and forth while clapping rhythmically, “Goin’ on a tiger hunt. * But I’m not afraid. * Cause I’ve got a gun. * And bullets at my side. — What’s that up ahead?” and Aunt B would respond, “A tree! / Tall grass! / A fence! / Mud!” Then you must say,

Can’t go over it * (can’t go over it)
Can’t go under it * (can’t go under it)
Can’t go around it * (can’t go around it)
Gotta go through it.

And then you would delight in making squelching noises for mud, slidey hand sounds for grass, creaking like a gate, etc. *

You went with delcious slowness through the first part of the song, forgetting really in the process that your whole job in this call-and-response game of foley artistry is to hunt a tiger and catch him with bullets all while not feeling fear, and then suddenly when you asked “What’s that up ahead,” Aunt B would shout, “THE TIGER!” and your heart would pound and you’d hastily run backward through all of your previous sound effects trying to go as fast as possible while keeping in the proper order and lastly mimic the final sound of the slam of the gate behind you. Then you would say, “But I’m not afraid.”

In Girl Scouts we played it as “Going on a Squeegee Hunt” and we just skipped the guns and bullets part. I’m not sure what a-changing times lead to the substitution of the made-up “squeegee” monster for the visceral image of the tiger — whether it was less scary than the tiger or whether it was less encouraging of poaching a potentially endangered species — but in any case I feel like with the whitewashing the song lost its sizzle.

I am going on a tiger hunt, and I am afraid, and I do not have a gun, nor bullets at my side. But I cannot go over, under, or around what comes next — I will go through what painful obstacle stands in my way because that is simply the only choice I have. Which, as that is the case, it can only be meant to be and I therefore have double reason to persevere.

I must maintain this mindset. Wish me luck.



*For the tree, I believe we said, “Gotta climb it,” the only deviation in the song’s demandingly strict meter — why not just omit the tree in favor of a thing which might be gone through? It is scarcely true that you cannot go around a tree, and climbing it is the same as going over it. Really the only thing in the words of the chorus that you can not do when faced with the tree in this song — besides obviously the impossibility of going through it as is evidenced by the replacement of “go through it” with “climb it” — is tunnel under it, but even that is only for lack of time or machinery. You technically could go under it as well as around and over it. “Through it” is wholly out, and thus it destroys the fundamental message of the repetition of the chorus. A puzzling lyric.

Has anyone ever been taught to chop it down? Get back to me if you have. Now I’m ten kinds of curious.

Daily Batman: Patron saint advice set in the mouth of my least favorite character

Mixing up a tall glass of sugar-free haterade, right over here.

“Channeling Harley Quinn” m/u and photograph by very talented RaenaValentine on the da.

Why slap them on the wrist with a feather when you can belt them over the head with a sledgehammer?

(Katharine Hepburn)

God, I hate this character so much. But Katharine Hepburn rocks. And the quote does work really well with this conceptual shot of the good doc.

Still — hate.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: RIP, AK edition

via yawp barbarian on the flickr.

Cheez-balls — May 16th totally snuck past me. I’ve had a lot on my mindgrapes but I’d planned to throw some things up about Andy Kaufman because he died that day in ’84. Yes, he did. Up there is some referential liberated negative space in his honor to at least partially atone for the oversight.

Screencap of Andy Kaufman taken by me.

And here he is selectively lip-synching the theme song to “Mighty Mouse” on the premiere of SNL, October 11, 1975.

RIP, A.K.

Daily Batman: Permanently inked ghosts of childhood

Bat tat, too.

Girls Like A Boy Who Reads … comics! Thought it was time for some rare female fan service up in this piece — wink-wink. You’re welcome. Photo via iheartbatman on the tumblr, very cool bloggy-blog.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Bender Bending Rodriguez and Baum edition

Page @ Pierce, San Francisco.

“Who knows?

Our big world rolls over as smoothly as it did centuries ago, without
a squeak to show it needs oiling after all these years of revolution.
But times change because men change. The impossibilities of yesterday become the accepted facts of to-day.

Here is a fairy tale founded upon the wonders of electricity and
written for children of this generation.

Dortman, Germany.

Yet when my readers shall have become men and women my story may not seem to their children like a fairy tale at all.

Perhaps one, perhaps two–perhaps several of the Demon’s devices will be, by that time, in popular use.

Who knows?”

(L. Frank Baum, Introduction, The Master Key. Bowen-Merrill (Indiana): 1901.)

There is a bright flash, and a being who calls himself the Demon of Electricity appears. He tells [young protagonist and electrical experimenter] Rob that he has accidentally “touched the Master Key of Electricity” and is entitled to “to demand from me three gifts each week for three successive weeks.”

Rob experiences adventures exploring the use of the Demon’s gifts, but eventually concludes that neither he nor the world is ready for them. Rob rejects the Demon’s gifts and tells him to bide his time until humankind knows how to use them. The Demon leaves.

With a light heart, Rob concludes that he made the right decision, and that “It’s no fun being a century ahead of the times!”

(the wiki.)

Who knows … ?






*”‘Others’ may read it.” rad.

Daily Batman: Enter the Bookworm and Up With Love plus Surprise Connections and Zodiac-quackery

Roddy McDowall and Francine York, Batman, “The Bookworm Turns,” Season 1, Episode 29. Original airdate April 20, 1966. Well, that’s inauspicious. Shit.

I hate to come off as a down-at-the-mouth grump on the topic of love. I am a romantic. Here is the Bookworm and his lady, the lovely librarian Miss Lydia Limpet, and may I add that I rooted like gangbusters for this pair to win?

via Batman villains database — I love clunky contraptions on men’s heads. I find it so fucking cute. I really do.

In fact, I remember pretty strongly wanting him for myself (girls like a boy who reads!), but I rightly understood Miss Limpet having him was almost the same thing. Later, when I figured out he was in Planet of the Apes, I was even more impressed, but, being a fickle little girl, I soon made way for other crushes, like Matthew Broderick and the Great Mouse Detective — shut up, because that could work — to the point that, when I stayed at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona several years back and was given the “Roddy McDowall room,” I merely remarked that I’d “once thought he was cute,” and meant nothing more by it.

Interestingly, after his role as the Bookworm in the live-action television series, McDowall continued to wreak villainy in the DC world. He voiced Jarvis Tetch/the Mad Hatter for both Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures, as well as performing him in a brief cameo for the late ’90s animated Superman.

In the original television series, the Mad Hatter was played by David Wayne. More on the Mad Hatter another day cause he was really depressed as a character and had some killer-great deadpan lines, even though no one matches King Tut in my estimation for the male villains’ comedic value. But back to love, because that is what I’m trying to prove is probably more important than trivial details of cartoons and old lunchbox-selling serials.

No, I can’t stop talking about it. Okay, because I’m looking at his page on the imdb to make sure I had the dates and titles right and it ends up Roddy McDowall was also the Breadmaster on Edlund’s masterwork The Tick, which is of grave emotional significance to me, and, moreover, had cameos on Darkwing Duck, Quantum Leap, and mother-effing Gargoyles. Also, he was monumentally in to photography and experimental camerawork. So, holy hell, I was smart to have a crush on him as a kid and now I’m going to have to get back to Roddy McDowall another day; he’s obviously been far more of an important thread in my life than I ever could have possibly understood … y’all please excuse me because Roddy McDowall has just now blown my mind.

Finally, according to authorities on these matters, the Catwoman outfit regularly worn by Julie Newmar appears to have been “upcycled” and worn by Francine York (who played librarian Miss Limpet on Batman) for the Lost In Space episode “The Colonists.” Also, in looking for pictures of her, I stumbled across a page where a woman had collected a bunch of pictures of famous Virgo women and though I always claim to put almost zero stock in that stuff, I have to say that they/we all have the faces of birdlike closet freaks who are too shy to smile with our lips parted but rock straight-up crazy do-me eyes despite our distrust of other people — to say nothing of the number of patron saints in her gallery of too-close-to-home horror. Good thing I think that’s largely bunk, or the unnerving similarities might have me concerned that my chakras weren’t aligned with the downward dog position of my chi and I’d have to bury a peeled potato under a full moon or some shit.

Truly the end of this post. Moving on for my own sake.

Movie Moment: Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973)

Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen as Holly and Kit in Malick’s masterwork Badlands (1973). Warren Oates as her father.

Holly practices her clarinet on a bench, waiting for her father. Her father pulls up. They go home. Holly goes upstairs. Her boyfriend Kit comes over. He and her father have words. Kit shoots Holly’s father.

Having come down the stairs, Holly goes to her father’s side.

Kit watches and lights a cigarette.

She knows her father is going to die and that Kit has shot him, and she is not really shocked or reproachful, per se. It’s difficult to judge whether Holly is an unthinking person or if she is a person who just floats — don’t be fooled by her voice-over narration; Malick plays with contrasts between what’s reported and what we actually observe — through her life, someone who expects nothing and accepts everything.

Either way her father’s death is not a surprise. But because she expects nothing, she isn’t sure what Kit will do next. She is only slightly afraid that he might do something to her. You can read that here.

What Kit does next is he goes to a service station to get a can of gasoline. There is a coin-operated game there, a voice-recorder. He punches through the glass of the game. This act of time-consuming vandalism when he is trying to quickly throw together a plan to conceal a crime is open to interpretation: Kit either makes his own fun, or he cannot brook the bourgeois notion that some witless rube, some fool who has wandered a million years afield from the purpose of man as a hunter, might pay to have his own voice recorded, then, by hearing it played back, feel delight worth the coin he paid. Or maybe Kit has different ideas of how to make a mark, and what ought be recorded. I don’t know. I’m not Kit, and I don’t know Malick and his mind. This is guesswork. Kit leaves with his gas.

He uses the gas to douse Holly’s house, with her father’s corpse still inside.

Holly watches. Darkness is all around her and she is only lit by the lights from within the house. She is getting ready to turn her back on that light, and go in to the dark completely. She’ll go with Kit now.

The fire that began in Holly’s bed is about to consume their entire house. It was a choice that started there and now she has no choice but to go forward with Kit.

Malick handles the destruction of Holly’s house and her father’s body by focusing on the doll and the dollhouse as they burn. This is important. The end of small-minded, cast-mold imitations of real life, the end of modeled and scaled efforts at simulated perfection, leaving innocence behind in ashes. What now, Holly?

I will tell you what now. They leave Fort Dupree, South Dakota, and embark on a several-state killing spree before being captured. Really disturbing, incredibly-acted, understated film, almost totally perfect, and very gorgeous from the compositional perspective. A mixed bag. You very much need to be in the right mood.

The film drew inspiration from the real story of mass killer Charles Starkweather and his teenaged accomplice, Caril Ann Fugate, who killed eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming in January, 1958. Besides Malick’s Badlands, the pair of jerkwad murderers also inspired Natural Born Killers, the 1993 Tim Roth and Fairuza Balk TV mini-series Murders in the Heartland and, though I have never heard it confirmed, rather obviously and less seriously The Frighteners. Starkweather also pops up in works by Stephen King. That’s all I want to say about it. Go look it up if you want more.

I don’t feel like going in to all that partner-killer, famous-murder-spree, monstrous fucking shit right now. I will just say I have not grown into an adult who — nor an adult with the patience to tolerate another adult who — makes a huge to-do over killers. Exceedingly not. It’s why I didn’t even link you up with a wiki hook to that asshole Starkweather and his girl. So please don’t start in on me with factoids or comments about them, thinking we’re buddies-in-kink, if searching for killers because that’s how you get your kicks is how you found this post.

I’m not saying it’s not worth talking or thinking about — anyone with a stake in the success of society as a cooperative effort needs to worry and think and talk about people who break the rules, how they do it, why, and how we deal with it. But glorification and gory gushing on the intricacies of those transgressor’s little personal details? Making them celebrities while forgetting their victims’ names? Not interested.

Daily Batman: Batman’s desktop wallpaper

You know this is hecka the background on Batman’s computer. Also the wallpaper image on his cell phone and he keeps a printed copy clipped to the back of the sun visor in the Batmobile. Some guys.

Daily Batman: The Cat and The Bat

The Batman: Season One, Episode 6, “The Cat and the Bat,” in which Selina Kyle sees a reporter on the news discussing Batman and, her interest piqued, sets out to meet him and steal his utility belt. Predictably, like a kitty who bites and bats at your laces and looks up at you like, “Aren’t I terrifying? Aren’t you shaking right now! I am so awesome!!” and has no idea you could just stomp them right there, she bites off more than she can chew and ends up laying waste to the Batcave with a giant robot and Batman has to bail her out. Original air date 11-6-04. Gina Gershon voices Catwoman. (i really like batman okay)