The vending machine at work had a surprise. A huge 5-oz package of cookies for only $.90. That couldn’t be right, I said to myself. It had to be a mistake. But here I sit, eating Basil’s Bavarian Bakery Duplex Sandwich Cremes. No, I’m not eating the whole package in one sitting!
Sony’s new Internet appliance, the Dash, looks very slick, and Sony’s using a Beatles song to promote it. They can do that because they own the publishing rights to most of the Beatles catalog, but not the performance rights to the EMI/Apple recordings.
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Discussions about flexible-yet-limited Net appliances, like the Chumby and the Sony Dash, include a lot of naysayers. They call them glorified alarm clock radios, and for now they’re right, but in the big picture they’re wrong. Eventually you’ll see touch screen devices like these built into refrigerator doors.
Ah, Saturday morning TV in the 1960’s. A sublime mixture of awful-to-pretty good cartoons. During the Summer of Love, 1967, Marvel Comics featured this centerfold ad for ABC-TV’s “America’s Best TV Comics”. The Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man were being introduced, having not been a part of the syndicated Marvel Super Heroes cartoon series from the year before.
The Beatles first appeared as cartoon characters on US TV in 1965. How Brian Epstein cut the deal is explained in a book, now out of print, called Beatletoons, by Mitchell Axelrod.
I have a fondness for the cheaply-produced Beatles cartoons, but it’s been said that John Lennon, persistent curmudgeon that he was, disliked them. This photo of Lennon contemplating some layout drawings seems to back that up.
The third season of the show would be the last to include some new material. Two of the titles — ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Nowhere Man’ — were later animated again, with strikingly different interpretations, for Yellow Submarine. It’s hard to believe that some of the people who worked on the Saturday morning cartoons were also involved with Yellow Submarine, but you’ll find some fab bits of surreal creativity in there.
By 1967 the Beatles looked nothing like they had in 1964-65, yet their character designs didn’t change. The producer of the series, Al Brodax, more than made up for that with Yellow Submarine.
After Eric and I watched Tuesday night’s Colbert Report, Carol wanted to know what we were laughing at so loudly. (Note: I had to explain to Eric who Steve Guttenberg is.)
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Did you know that the BBC has an online school site?
An outfit called Iconix Brand Group will own 80% of ‘Peanuts’, and the family Charles M. Schulz will have 20%, in a deal that acquires the licensing unit of United Features/Media that apparently includes the licensing of ‘Dilbert’.
