As you would expect, Chip Cronkite spoke at the memorial service for his late father, Walter.
But would you expect Chip to direct a documentary about comic book creators?
The Legends Behind the Comic Books Trailer from Stonebridge Productions on Vimeo.
The Old Guard has now truly come to an end. As Bismo said tonight, it’s perhaps fitting that Walter Cronkite passed away during the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s flight to the Moon. This video clip is from a 2007 CBS special celebrating Cronkite’s 90th birthday. The program was produced by Nancy Kramer, who Carol and I helped last year with some background material for an installment of 48 Hours|Mystery.
I also agreed with Bismo when he said that he never warmed up to Huntley and Brinkley as TV news anchormen. Many adults apparently preferred the team, but they were much too severe to appeal to kids. Cronkite was The Man. He narrated the audio book of his autobiography, “A Reporter’s Life”, and I listened to it twice, all the way through. It was abridged from his book, but I trusted Walter to leave in all the good stuff.
Cronkite is indelibly associated with not only NASA in the 60’s, but his live coverage of the assasination of JFK, and his landmark editorial asserting that the Vietnam War, in his opinion, could not be won. Cronkite’s credibility and judgment were held in such high esteem that LBJ realized his Presidency was doomed and he declined to seek re-election.
Another noteworthy accomplishment of Cronkite’s was that he helped introduce The Beatles to America. Here is a video clip from Nancy Kramer’s TV special that I first posted over a year ago.
© 2007 CBS Worldwide Inc.
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Lastly, I would like to point out that Walter Cronkite was a big fan of the comic strip Peanuts, and he wrote the introduction to volume 2 of The Complete Peanuts. Walter cried on air when John Kennedy died, he cried on camera again when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, he denounced the Vietnam War, he has a Beatles connection, and he loved Charlie Brown and Snoopy. I loved the man and everything he stood for.
Now that I’m subscribing to The New Yorker, I look at the weekly cartoon caption contest, and sometimes a gag comes to mind instantly, without thinking. Here’s an example of what pops in my head. I know that puns are not favored by the magazine, and I’ll be amazed if a submission with this idea is picked by the editors as a finalist.
Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit is about a woman warrior who has been hired to protect a boy prince sentenced to death by his father for being possessed by a water spirit. Hey, Stephen King story summaries sound silly too! 😉
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This series is another one that looks particularly good on the Panasonic video projector. We’re disappointed, however, by the DVD box set of Mushi-shi, which suffers from the excessive video compression required to fit seven episodes on a single disc. The original release had only four shows per disc.
In 1968, Snoopy attempted to enter the World Wrist Wrestling Championship in Petaluma, CA, only to be disqualified for not having a thumb. This week in Petaluma, Jon Provost of “Timmy and Lassie” voted on the world’s ugliest dog, with a boxer named Pabst being awarded the distinction.
Jon’s super-duper tell-all autobiography, written with his wife Laurie Jacobson, Timmy’s In the Well is a great read, with many Hollywood stories, concentrating on the staid Fifties into the Swinging Sixties. Timmy never did fall in a well on the TV show, but as I pointed out a couple of years ago, a cartoon version of Timmy did fall in a well, in a Kenner Give-a-Show slide, and today that slide was given the Give-A-Show Projector Blog treatment.
Harvey Kurtzman created MAD Magazine, which is, sadly, apparently about to fold. Kurtzman also inadvertently helped put Monty Python together, as I explained here.
There’s a brand-new book out, called The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, and I’m sure if I buy it for Dennis on his birthday, he’ll buy me a copy for my birthday. That way we don’t feel like we bought our own copies.
