As I pointed out before, Davy Jones, of the pre-fab four band The Monkees, was on The Ed Sullivan Show the very same night that The Beatles first appeared. You’ll find him on the video player as the Artful Dodger in “Oliver!”, followed by a bit of “Making the Monkees,” recently shown on the Smithsonian Channel. Last year I highlighted Jack Nicholson’s involvement in the making of the Monkees movie “Head.”
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Back at this link I showed the comedy duo Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall on the Ed Sullivan show, stuck with the unenviable task of being the lead-in act to The Beatles. I’ll plop it here again, for your viewing convenience.
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Earlier I said there are two connections to Star Trek in the video. One of them is Sally Kellerman, who did the voiceover for the Pillsbury cake commercial. Kellerman was in the second Trek pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, which I think is, for a sci-fi/comics fan, one of the best hours of TV ever made.
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The second Trek connection is Charlie Brill himself, who appeared as a Klingon agent in one of the most popular of all episodes, “The Trouble With Tribbles”.
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Hey, ya know what? Brill resembles John Lennon in this picture.
The best comic book series I ever read was Watchmen. Now the movie of it is about to come out. I agree with everything that Boston Globe movie critic Ty Burr says about his own sense of anticipation.
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/blog/2009/02/the_watchmen_wa.html
I thought 300 was one of the worst movies I’d ever seen. I scanned through most of it on DVD. Something I’m worried about for a general audience is that a full appreciation of Watchmen requires a vast knowledge of the history of comic books and their creators. Everybody knows Batman, but almost nobody knows that Dr. Manhattan was adapted from Captain Atom, and Rorschach is based on the work of Steve Ditko.
Fifty years since the plane crash. Buddy Holly, one of the most important innovators in Rock music, sure did pack a lot into his short life, as did Ritchie Valens.
The Beatles covered Holly’s “Words of Love.”
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/FEB/WordsofLove.mp3]Ritchie Valens was present at the birth of surf guitar, as heard in “Fast Freight.”
J.P. Richardson wrote “Running Bear,” which was recorded by Johnny Preston after The Big Bopper’s death.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/FEB/RunningBear.mp3]When George Bush took office in 2001 I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he started talking up a renewed missile defense program, and followed it up with a cut in federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. So even before 9/11 my negative view of him was cemented.
President Obama is moving quickly to undo the many misguided directives of his predecessor, including the ban on stem cell funding. Some time back I had posted these items about Michael J. Fox’s struggles with Parkinson’s Disease
http://www.dograt.com/2006/10/21/pd-is-not-pc/
http://www.dograt.com/2006/10/31/colbert-catches-up/
This week the PBS series Frontline is featuring a program about Parkinson’s Disease called “My father, My brother, and Me.” As one would expect, Michael J. Fox appears in the show, and in this extended interview you can see that he looks pretty good, but the long-term effects of his medication are in evidence. It was these sorts of mis-movements, called dyskinesias, that Rush Limbaugh — no stranger to the effects of drugs — in his ignorance ridiculed as being intentional on Fox’s part.
Oh, p’shaw. A giant, bronze-colored fiberglass shoe, commemorating the throwing of shoes at George Bush by an Iraqi journalist, has been removed.
You can still give the dearly departed ex-President a virtual whack by clicking here.
