Author: DOuG pRATt

Watching a Little Beaver

Whah hah! Leave It To Beaver is back on Netflix Watch Instantly! But it’s in high definition, despite the lack of the HD symbol. Why is this not good? Because on my Sony 32XBR100 TV it puts a small 24-inch image on the big 32-inch screen. Why, Roku, don’t you provide a feature to disable HD on SD outputs?

(By the way, the title of this post is a reference to a character in the Red Ryder comic strip.)

Follow-up: 42-inch Panasonic 1080p plasma, with a free Blu-ray player deal, is on the way from Amazon, with free shipping. Total cost is $470, thanks to Amex points.

A Hard Day’s Write

Richard Lester, who directed the two truly great Beatle films, A Hard Day’s Night and HELP!, has received a Fellowship from the British Film Institute. With the recent death of Davy Jones, I’ve been hearing the old assertion that the Monkees TV show was based on AHDN, but I just don’t see it. HELP! was clearly the model for the series, with producers Raphelson and Schneider drawing inspiration from the fantasy of the boys living together in a quirky, colorful pad, full of groovy stuff.

I have high praise and thanks for author Ray Morton, and his book about the making of A Hard Day’s Night. Besides being a solid and thorough telling of the background and production of the movie, in A Hard Days Night: Music on Film Series, Morton did something no other writer on the subject has done — he gets the facts right about Prue Bury, and for that I am sincerely grateful. Ray Morton can be heard on Reject Radio talking about the movie and his book at this link. He comes in at 40:30 into the podcast.

Back in 2002, Rolling Stone had a piece about the Miramax DVD release of A Hard Day’s Night, and it has one of the classic promotional photos of the Beatles with (l-r) Pattie Boyd, Tina Williams, Prue Bury, and Sue Whitman.

By coincidence, and to my great amusement, that issue also had this item:

So the first time that Doug Pratt had a connection to Prue Bury, it was a different Doug Pratt!

Mixed-up comix memories

I’m getting ready for the New York Comic Book Marketplace show in, you guessed it, New York. Denro and I will be heading down there on Friday. Going through a portfolio of original art, I came across some stuff I did myself, over twenty years ago, when I was an occasional contributor to the Comics Buyer’s Guide. The late Don Thompson bought pretty much everything I submitted, except for a cartoon that made fun of writer Peter David’s barf bag puppets. These are a few cartoons I never submitted.

Here’s my take on what really happened after the Fantastic Four were bombarded by cosmic rays. The caption is “Sue! Where ARE you?? SUE!!”

In this one I wondered, “What if Disney bought Marvel Comics?” At the time the idea was silly, but now it’s reality!

I did bunch of strips paying homage to Calvin & Hobbes, calling them the names of two other philosophers, Carlyle & Hobson. I had Calvin-Carlyle’s parents commit him to a psychiatric institution, where he meets Dennis the Menace.

P.S. This one is from an attempt at doing a comic strip.