Tuesday, December 31, 2019
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!
It's that time already! New Year's Eve 2019! And it's time to open that other gift, the one I've promised for so long now: Monopoly Millennium, Collector's Edition.
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Sunday, December 22, 2019
Monday, December 16, 2019
Next Sunday...WE HIT LUCKY SEVEN!
Yes, it's true! The Millennium Museum will celebrate its seventh anniversary next Sunday!
I can hardly believe it myself. At the beginning, it seemed like something that would last a couple of months until I found a proper job. Yet here we are, still going strong.
Cheers and happy birthday!
I can hardly believe it myself. At the beginning, it seemed like something that would last a couple of months until I found a proper job. Yet here we are, still going strong.
Cheers and happy birthday!
Thursday, December 12, 2019
Coming January 2020: A commentary track for "The World Is Not Enough"
Last New Year's Day, I tried to write an in-depth review of the James Bond movie "The World Is Not Enough." It didn't go too well, so this year I'm going to try something new: my own commentary track.
Stay tuned!
Cristal d'Arques Millennium Champagne Flutes
We're a little over two weeks away from saying au revoir to 2019, and I hope you're using this time to stock up on things you'll need, like party hats and champagne flutes.
Speaking of champagne flutes, how about these?
I bought these, box and all, from eBay this past June. The box is about all I have to say for them, because they arrived in a million pieces. At least the seller refunded me as soon as I showed him the proof.
Right. Griping out of the way; let's get on with the history lesson.
The parent company, Arc International, began producing handmade glassware and crystal in 1825 as Verrerie Cristallerie d'Arques. For simplicity's sake, I shall call it Arc from here on.
Arc grew and innovated in the 1930s when it imported American glass-blowing machines and other equipment, then unheard of in a Europe still rebuilding after World War I. This ultimately led to the founding of Cristal d'Arques in 1968, the first company to automate crystal stemware.
Arc is still producing glassware and fine crystal to this day, and their latest products employ cutting-edge science to provide consumers with ever finer and more durable goods.
...Which leads us back to these fine flutes. They were much larger and more finely-made than the other 2000 flutes I've featured. For one thing, the zeroes are hollow rather than filled-in, and they look rather more like they were carved from ice than turned from lead-crystal; for another, these things--or at least what I could hold on to--were heavy. If treated well, they could conceivably last for decades.
Saturday, November 23, 2019
The Millennium Museum Revisited--Doctor Who: The Movie/Regeneration/The 2005 Revival
Today is 11/23/2019, and we are forty days away from celebrating twenty years of the new century.
Today is also the fifty-sixth anniversary of the premiere of Doctor Who, the BBC's long-running adventure series. It's been a part of the Museum ever since the beginning--in fact, Doctor Who: The Movie was one of the first entries from back when I thought I wouldn't have to put too much work into it. Seven years does indeed make all the difference, because it's time to take a closer look at the thing...with an eye toward the show's earliest and more recent days. (It will become more apparent as you read on.)
Today is also the fifty-sixth anniversary of the premiere of Doctor Who, the BBC's long-running adventure series. It's been a part of the Museum ever since the beginning--in fact, Doctor Who: The Movie was one of the first entries from back when I thought I wouldn't have to put too much work into it. Seven years does indeed make all the difference, because it's time to take a closer look at the thing...with an eye toward the show's earliest and more recent days. (It will become more apparent as you read on.)
DOCTOR WHO: THE TV MOVIE
This was where my whole obsession with Doctor Who began. In a way, it was fate, as I'd already been obsessed with Bill and Ted, Back to the Future, and Star Trek: The Next Generation, and had become at least somewhat aware of Who through the myriad video catalogs which came to our home. Critic's Choice, Signals...there were dozens more in those pre-Internet days, most of which had a fully-stocked Doctor Who section.
May 14th, 1996 rolled around, and...I can't remember anything except being terrified at the Master's gooey snake-form. To a nine-year-old with an overactive imagination and a penchant for wandering into the wrong part of a video store---the horror section---that was pretty eerie. (In hindsight, that qualifies as my first "behind-the-sofa" moment!)
It drifted away, nearly forgotten, until that summer, when our PBS affiliate WTTW ran ten weeks of the old series, the last three of which encompassed the show's final episodes from 1989. I was hooked right from the get-go and have never looked back.
=================================================================
Doctor Who: The Movie came out on Region 1 DVD in 2010, and I got it for Christmas in 2011. These were the days of getting stuff through Columbia House, before I went region-free.
I popped it in, and, after the initial nostalgia wore off, it struck me that the story made no sense whatsoever. I'm gritting my teeth just writing the synopsis:
The Doctor's arch-nemesis, the Master, has been executed by the Doctor's even older arch-nemeses, the Daleks, who summon the Doctor to collect his foe's remains and take them back to his home planet, which he does. (Three questions: Why, why, and why?) The Master, now a puddle of...something, gets out of his box and slithers over to the main console with plans to hijack the time machine, prompting the good doctor to land in 1999Vancouver San Francisco, whereupon a gang of Chinese ne'er-do-wells pop several caps into him....and he dies on the operating table after being exposed to America's healthcare system, only to renew himself down in the morgue.
Meanwhile, the slippery Master possesses a walking plot-device who bears a striking resemblance to character actor and Julia's brother, Eric Roberts. Now in his new body, he plans to turn the time machine into a doomsday device that will end the world on New Year's Eve, just before the millennium, so that he can gain a brand-new life cycle and continue on in his evil ways. He just about succeeds, but the Doctor somehow manages to rewind time by programming the TARDIS like a VCR, thereby undoing the Master's nasty plan.
...Doesn't all that just make you want to reach for a vodka and tonic? I needed three after writing it.
For the longest time between 1996 and 2011, though, the TVM was "the one that got away." I was aware of it in some form, and remembered that it got the journey started, but the substance of it was lost to memory. Fortunately, Santa happened to leave this under the tree in 2001:
Since no video was available stateside, this volume served to mark the beginning of the journey.
Doctor Who ended with the third part of "Survival," broadcast on December 6th, 1989, ending a nearly thirty-year run on BBC.
That said, the property was far from dead and buried: It lived on through Doctor Who Magazine, Virgin Publishing's The New and The Missing Adventures, a steady stream of home-video releases, and the dreams and ambitions of a few big-name fans intent on reviving the series in a big way, a few of which were described in this book. Certainly, the show had ended, but there were several attempts to produce either a new series or a big-budget motion picture, none of which really went anywhere and none of which are really pertinent to this entry.
Except for one of the drafts. Remember how I said that the Doctor returns "on New Year's Eve, just before the millennium"? In the movie proper, the event is nothing more than a means for the Doctor to pilfer a processor chip from a new beryllium-powered clock that's being used to mark the occasion...and perhaps to add some apocalyptic "race against time" flair to a meandering script that's chock-full of little tidbits and Easter eggs for the fans but without much tension or even drive.
The millennium served a purpose in an earlier draft. It turns out that Matthew Jacobs, the screenwriter, wrote a draft which featured
All the same, no amount of pseudo-religious waffle could shore up the structural problem at the core of the production: It uses the mythology of Doctor Who, but clumsily. All that stuff at the beginning with the Daleks putting the Master on trial? Use that to introduce the Master on Earth, taking lives so that he might extend his own, viscerally and nastily. The Doctor gets to Earth when his ship picks up the news broadcasts...or UNIT gives him a call to say "We've been called to San Francisco, there's something going on that might interest you, can you check it out?" The Master 'kills' the Seventh Doctor as the Act One twist; the Act Two twist is his resurrection as the Eighth Doctor. Perhaps the Master can also fulfill the "monster" requirement that the production badly needed--have him badly deformed from some cosmic radiation or something, and he wants the Doctor's lives to restore himself to the Roger Delgado/Anthony Ainley look.
Yes, the manhunt genre is worn so thin as to have holes in it, but adding the Doctor Who elements elevates the story. (Having thought about it, the Master's gimmick might have put it too close to that X-Files episode about the serial killer who can extrude himself into tight spaces. Never mind that The X-Files is largely a remake of the Third Doctor's first season, with the FBI standing in for UNIT and Scully standing in for Liz Shaw.)
The 90s revival of Doctor Who is, far from being a missed opportunity, a dodged bullet. It took about nine years and several more false starts before Doctor Who made a proper return in 2005.
Compare the openings of the TV Movie and the two first episodes, "An Unearthly Child" and "Rose."
The show starts in space, with a red planet helpfully subtitled "Skaro." Paul McGann intones that the Master, his old enemy, is the prisoner of the (unseen) Daleks, on trial for...some reason, and we get an orchestral rendition of the opening titles, like Star Trek: The Next Generation, signifying that this is a BIG, BIG, BIG THING. The logo and main credits zoom toward us amid asteroids and the fierce, Northern Lights-colored winds of the time vortex.
Following the titles, we pan across the gorgeous, Jules Verne-inspired TARDIS interior as the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) locks an ornate box. Satisfied, he goes off, puts on a record, and sits down to relax. Meanwhile, the watery blob that was inside the box breaks free and sabotages the main console.
Right off the bat, I can give you two big problems: The TVM takes its audience for granted. You have to know that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside; you have to know what the Doctor, the Master, and the Daleks are. That, and There. Is. Narration. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Here, it doesn't, because the main plot for the story does not work.
The series hits the ground running with whirling, psychedelic titles and an eerie theme tune, the likes of which audiences had neither seen nor heard before or since. We fade into a creepy, dilapidated junkyard at night. Broken dolls, an old baby-carriage, and other detritus frames a police box in a forbidding tableau. Once a familiar sight on British street corners, by 1963 they were superseded by two-way radio, so it might find a home in a junkyard, but this one seems alive, humming with some unknown power.
The rest of the episode consists of two teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, commiserating over a student named Susan Foreman. By turns genius and fool, she complains about having to solve a three-dimensional equation without variables for the fourth and fifth dimensions, yet has a shaky grasp on world history.
Her home address is the junkyard we saw at the beginning. They follow her there, and find that she's living in that police box with an old man who calls himself her grandfather. (Yes, it is played as creepy as it sounds, though in an understated way. It's almost a relief that the opening title sequence has clued us in that things are not going to go as we would expect them to.) When Ian shoves the old man aside and barges through the doors, he and Barbara fall into Wonderland: that battered old police box contains the enormous, gleaming white control room of a spaceship. The ship takes off, filling the screen with the whirling patterns we saw in the opening titles. Finally, the camera pans across a blasted landscape where the box now stands, as a mysterious shadow looms over it. Those last few seconds contain the secret to the show's longevity: It can go anywhere, do anything, tell every kind of story imaginable.
The opening titles show the TARDIS police box racing through the vortex, accompanied by that original theme tune, but augmented with string and brass. We fade to the vastness of space, with Planet Earth in the distance. We hang on Earth for a moment, and freefall faster and faster. We see the cloud layer, followed by Europe, the United Kingdom, and London...and we settle on a digital alarm clock, one second before it starts blaring. In a high-speed montage, we follow young Rose Tyler through her life: doing her hair, having breakfast, saying goodbye to Mom, and checking in at Henrik's Department Store, scarcely considering that her life will change forever tonight.
Of course, with a then forty-plus year-old history, the revival of Doctor Who had to acknowledge the past in some way, and "Rose" did so with the Nestene Consciousness, an entity which could bring plastics to life--in this case, the department store's display mannequins, which are colloquially known as "Autons2."
As Who historian Shannon Sullivan writes in her website, "A Brief History of Time (Travel)", "The Autons appealed to [showrunner Russell T.] Davies...because their nature would allow Rose to spend much of the episode dubious of the alien origins of the threat." Indeed, her first instinct in the episode is to assume that her coworkers have dressed up as mannequins and are scaring her for a laugh. That's what "An Unearthly Child" and "Rose" get, but which the TVM does not: the gradual bridge from mundane reality into the grand fantasy of the Doctor's world.
The best thing about "Rose," though, is that it suddenly and unceremoniously introduces the Doctor: He grabs Rose's forearm and whispers, "Run!" No big introduction, no fanfare. As it should be--this is not "DOCTOR WHO: THE MOVIE," but "Rose," an Earthly Child.
The other best thing about Rose is how it introduces the secret of the TARDIS. Rose runs into the police box with the Doctor. We get only a closeup on her face as her eyes bug out in shock, and she bolts out of the box, back toward the advancing peril, and paces around its four sides like a skittish cat with an unfamiliar toy--"WHAT IS THIS THING?"
Within twenty-five of the forty-five minutes, we grasp all the basics of the show--humans, monsters, the Doctor, and the TARDIS. The TVM's problem was its self-awareness, presenting itself as the grand return of a legendary series, packed with fifteen-odd years' worth of characters and mythology3. "Rose," by contrast, understands that its biggest audience will be brand-new, and it keeps the fan-service to a bare minimum.
====================================================================
* Doctor Who: Regeneration, Philip Segal and Gary Russell, 2000, HarperCollins Publishing.
* http://www.shannonsullivan.com/doctorwho/serials/2005a.html
====================================================================
1 Interestingly, he ends up doing almost that in Series Three's finale, "The Last of the Time Lords," from 2007, by hijacking the Doctor's TARDIS and converting it into a "Paradox Machine," whereupon he crowns himself ruler of the planet. John Simm's first Master gets a lot of flak, but give the guy props--he gets stuff done. Also, the "Master Race" idea was implemented in the two-part "The End of Time," wherein he futzes with a machine to turn everyone on Earth into copies of himself.
2 The name "Auton" comes from "Auto Plastics," the company which made the Nestene-infused goods in "Spearhead from Space." "Rose" treats this as the artifact it is, and never once refers to them by name, instead going for "living plastic."
3 I say "fifteen-odd years" because everything we take for granted--Time Lords, Gallifrey, all that--only started in the Jon Pertwee years and took hold with the Tom Baker and Peter Davison eras.
It drifted away, nearly forgotten, until that summer, when our PBS affiliate WTTW ran ten weeks of the old series, the last three of which encompassed the show's final episodes from 1989. I was hooked right from the get-go and have never looked back.
=================================================================
Doctor Who: The Movie came out on Region 1 DVD in 2010, and I got it for Christmas in 2011. These were the days of getting stuff through Columbia House, before I went region-free.
I popped it in, and, after the initial nostalgia wore off, it struck me that the story made no sense whatsoever. I'm gritting my teeth just writing the synopsis:
The Doctor's arch-nemesis, the Master, has been executed by the Doctor's even older arch-nemeses, the Daleks, who summon the Doctor to collect his foe's remains and take them back to his home planet, which he does. (Three questions: Why, why, and why?) The Master, now a puddle of...something, gets out of his box and slithers over to the main console with plans to hijack the time machine, prompting the good doctor to land in 1999
Meanwhile, the slippery Master possesses a walking plot-device who bears a striking resemblance to character actor and Julia's brother, Eric Roberts. Now in his new body, he plans to turn the time machine into a doomsday device that will end the world on New Year's Eve, just before the millennium, so that he can gain a brand-new life cycle and continue on in his evil ways. He just about succeeds, but the Doctor somehow manages to rewind time by programming the TARDIS like a VCR, thereby undoing the Master's nasty plan.
...Doesn't all that just make you want to reach for a vodka and tonic? I needed three after writing it.
For the longest time between 1996 and 2011, though, the TVM was "the one that got away." I was aware of it in some form, and remembered that it got the journey started, but the substance of it was lost to memory. Fortunately, Santa happened to leave this under the tree in 2001:
 |
| The first page, with 90% of the main cast's autographs. (I'll consider it complete once I get Beryllium Clock Guy and at least one of the Morgue Workers.) |
Doctor Who ended with the third part of "Survival," broadcast on December 6th, 1989, ending a nearly thirty-year run on BBC.
That said, the property was far from dead and buried: It lived on through Doctor Who Magazine, Virgin Publishing's The New and The Missing Adventures, a steady stream of home-video releases, and the dreams and ambitions of a few big-name fans intent on reviving the series in a big way, a few of which were described in this book. Certainly, the show had ended, but there were several attempts to produce either a new series or a big-budget motion picture, none of which really went anywhere and none of which are really pertinent to this entry.
Except for one of the drafts. Remember how I said that the Doctor returns "on New Year's Eve, just before the millennium"? In the movie proper, the event is nothing more than a means for the Doctor to pilfer a processor chip from a new beryllium-powered clock that's being used to mark the occasion...and perhaps to add some apocalyptic "race against time" flair to a meandering script that's chock-full of little tidbits and Easter eggs for the fans but without much tension or even drive.
The millennium served a purpose in an earlier draft. It turns out that Matthew Jacobs, the screenwriter, wrote a draft which featured
"the Master harnessing the power of...the Millennium Star, which is passing overhead on New Year's Eve 1999. With this, he will severely damaged Earth [sic] and appoint himself as a false Messiah and rule. [It] was described as: an intergalactic roving force field that gives out a massive light so bright it can be seen like a glowing star moving through both the day and night sky...Every thousand years this shining force field loops around Earth for a few days and moves on. 2000 years ago the three wise men followed its path to discover the Christ child. 1,000 years ago it marked the start of the Crusades. And now it's due back...The Master is bringing the TARDIS and the Doctor to Earth to meet it. Here, he will open the Eye of Harmony, creating another force field as a beacon.
The TARDIS' presence on Earth at the exact point the Millennium Star approaches will act as a magnet to keep the star in orbit long enough for the Master to exact his plan. The two will be drawn together...As they come closer and closer all the laws of relativity will be progressively broken until finally the entire thrust of the Universe's existence will be thrown into reverse, the slate will be cleaned, and the Master will rule...he needs the Doctor's humanity to carry out his plan and act as an Adam and Eve to sire a master race over which he will rule." (Regeneration 109)Wow. Now that would have been some pretty delicious characterization for the Master. What a pity the Millennium Star premise got neutered until it became "The Master wants to get the Doctor's remaining lives, and..." so on1.
All the same, no amount of pseudo-religious waffle could shore up the structural problem at the core of the production: It uses the mythology of Doctor Who, but clumsily. All that stuff at the beginning with the Daleks putting the Master on trial? Use that to introduce the Master on Earth, taking lives so that he might extend his own, viscerally and nastily. The Doctor gets to Earth when his ship picks up the news broadcasts...or UNIT gives him a call to say "We've been called to San Francisco, there's something going on that might interest you, can you check it out?" The Master 'kills' the Seventh Doctor as the Act One twist; the Act Two twist is his resurrection as the Eighth Doctor. Perhaps the Master can also fulfill the "monster" requirement that the production badly needed--have him badly deformed from some cosmic radiation or something, and he wants the Doctor's lives to restore himself to the Roger Delgado/Anthony Ainley look.
Yes, the manhunt genre is worn so thin as to have holes in it, but adding the Doctor Who elements elevates the story. (Having thought about it, the Master's gimmick might have put it too close to that X-Files episode about the serial killer who can extrude himself into tight spaces. Never mind that The X-Files is largely a remake of the Third Doctor's first season, with the FBI standing in for UNIT and Scully standing in for Liz Shaw.)
The 90s revival of Doctor Who is, far from being a missed opportunity, a dodged bullet. It took about nine years and several more false starts before Doctor Who made a proper return in 2005.
Compare the openings of the TV Movie and the two first episodes, "An Unearthly Child" and "Rose."
1996
The show starts in space, with a red planet helpfully subtitled "Skaro." Paul McGann intones that the Master, his old enemy, is the prisoner of the (unseen) Daleks, on trial for...some reason, and we get an orchestral rendition of the opening titles, like Star Trek: The Next Generation, signifying that this is a BIG, BIG, BIG THING. The logo and main credits zoom toward us amid asteroids and the fierce, Northern Lights-colored winds of the time vortex.
Following the titles, we pan across the gorgeous, Jules Verne-inspired TARDIS interior as the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) locks an ornate box. Satisfied, he goes off, puts on a record, and sits down to relax. Meanwhile, the watery blob that was inside the box breaks free and sabotages the main console.
Right off the bat, I can give you two big problems: The TVM takes its audience for granted. You have to know that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside; you have to know what the Doctor, the Master, and the Daleks are. That, and There. Is. Narration. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Here, it doesn't, because the main plot for the story does not work.
1963
The series hits the ground running with whirling, psychedelic titles and an eerie theme tune, the likes of which audiences had neither seen nor heard before or since. We fade into a creepy, dilapidated junkyard at night. Broken dolls, an old baby-carriage, and other detritus frames a police box in a forbidding tableau. Once a familiar sight on British street corners, by 1963 they were superseded by two-way radio, so it might find a home in a junkyard, but this one seems alive, humming with some unknown power.
The rest of the episode consists of two teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, commiserating over a student named Susan Foreman. By turns genius and fool, she complains about having to solve a three-dimensional equation without variables for the fourth and fifth dimensions, yet has a shaky grasp on world history.
Her home address is the junkyard we saw at the beginning. They follow her there, and find that she's living in that police box with an old man who calls himself her grandfather. (Yes, it is played as creepy as it sounds, though in an understated way. It's almost a relief that the opening title sequence has clued us in that things are not going to go as we would expect them to.) When Ian shoves the old man aside and barges through the doors, he and Barbara fall into Wonderland: that battered old police box contains the enormous, gleaming white control room of a spaceship. The ship takes off, filling the screen with the whirling patterns we saw in the opening titles. Finally, the camera pans across a blasted landscape where the box now stands, as a mysterious shadow looms over it. Those last few seconds contain the secret to the show's longevity: It can go anywhere, do anything, tell every kind of story imaginable.
2005
The opening titles show the TARDIS police box racing through the vortex, accompanied by that original theme tune, but augmented with string and brass. We fade to the vastness of space, with Planet Earth in the distance. We hang on Earth for a moment, and freefall faster and faster. We see the cloud layer, followed by Europe, the United Kingdom, and London...and we settle on a digital alarm clock, one second before it starts blaring. In a high-speed montage, we follow young Rose Tyler through her life: doing her hair, having breakfast, saying goodbye to Mom, and checking in at Henrik's Department Store, scarcely considering that her life will change forever tonight.
Of course, with a then forty-plus year-old history, the revival of Doctor Who had to acknowledge the past in some way, and "Rose" did so with the Nestene Consciousness, an entity which could bring plastics to life--in this case, the department store's display mannequins, which are colloquially known as "Autons2."
As Who historian Shannon Sullivan writes in her website, "A Brief History of Time (Travel)", "The Autons appealed to [showrunner Russell T.] Davies...because their nature would allow Rose to spend much of the episode dubious of the alien origins of the threat." Indeed, her first instinct in the episode is to assume that her coworkers have dressed up as mannequins and are scaring her for a laugh. That's what "An Unearthly Child" and "Rose" get, but which the TVM does not: the gradual bridge from mundane reality into the grand fantasy of the Doctor's world.
The best thing about "Rose," though, is that it suddenly and unceremoniously introduces the Doctor: He grabs Rose's forearm and whispers, "Run!" No big introduction, no fanfare. As it should be--this is not "DOCTOR WHO: THE MOVIE," but "Rose," an Earthly Child.
The other best thing about Rose is how it introduces the secret of the TARDIS. Rose runs into the police box with the Doctor. We get only a closeup on her face as her eyes bug out in shock, and she bolts out of the box, back toward the advancing peril, and paces around its four sides like a skittish cat with an unfamiliar toy--"WHAT IS THIS THING?"
Within twenty-five of the forty-five minutes, we grasp all the basics of the show--humans, monsters, the Doctor, and the TARDIS. The TVM's problem was its self-awareness, presenting itself as the grand return of a legendary series, packed with fifteen-odd years' worth of characters and mythology3. "Rose," by contrast, understands that its biggest audience will be brand-new, and it keeps the fan-service to a bare minimum.
====================================================================
* Doctor Who: Regeneration, Philip Segal and Gary Russell, 2000, HarperCollins Publishing.
* http://www.shannonsullivan.com/doctorwho/serials/2005a.html
====================================================================
1 Interestingly, he ends up doing almost that in Series Three's finale, "The Last of the Time Lords," from 2007, by hijacking the Doctor's TARDIS and converting it into a "Paradox Machine," whereupon he crowns himself ruler of the planet. John Simm's first Master gets a lot of flak, but give the guy props--he gets stuff done. Also, the "Master Race" idea was implemented in the two-part "The End of Time," wherein he futzes with a machine to turn everyone on Earth into copies of himself.
2 The name "Auton" comes from "Auto Plastics," the company which made the Nestene-infused goods in "Spearhead from Space." "Rose" treats this as the artifact it is, and never once refers to them by name, instead going for "living plastic."
3 I say "fifteen-odd years" because everything we take for granted--Time Lords, Gallifrey, all that--only started in the Jon Pertwee years and took hold with the Tom Baker and Peter Davison eras.
Sunday, November 10, 2019
A Happy 100th Birthday to Felix the Cat!
Today, let's momentarily forget about "Millennium" and call ourselves "The Centennial Museum," because 2019 marks the centennial anniversary of the first original cartoon character, Felix the Cat!
The kooky feline's origins are somewhat lost to history, but two people can lay claim to his creation: Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan and his colleague, Otto Messmer. He starred in countless silent cartoons beginning in the early 1920s, and eventually became so popular that Macy's displayed him as the first licensed cartoon character in their 1933 Thanksgiving Day Parade! What's more, a doll of Felix went on to become the first-ever image broadcast via television!
...Sadly, Felix's star was eclipsed by the advent of "talkie" pictures and cartoons, most notably Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon designed around synchronized sound. Its star, Mickey Mouse, soon overtook the cat in popularity, but Felix proved the old adage that cats have nine lives, for he never quite went away completely. Messmer's assistant from the old days, Joe Oriolo (as well as his son, Don), kept the flame alive through the 50s and 60s with a syndicated cartoon show, followed by a feature film in 1989 and The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat, a CBS show that lasted from 1995 to 1996. After that, well....I'm sure most people have a vague idea of who Felix is, since he's featured on retro merchandise from time to time. These days, his likeness is best (and erroneously) known from those "Kit Cat" clocks from the 50s which look a bit like Felix but are not Felix.
He, among many other characters, also rang in the New Millennium, with....
....this pair of salt-and-pepper shakers! Produced by a company named Clay Art Ceramics (I think it's more properly "The Clay Art Company of San Francisco"), they depict Felix in two different poses. I don't think he ever really had a memorable "second banana" in his cartoons to serve as the other shaker, so you're going to have to remember which is which at the table.
The kooky feline's origins are somewhat lost to history, but two people can lay claim to his creation: Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan and his colleague, Otto Messmer. He starred in countless silent cartoons beginning in the early 1920s, and eventually became so popular that Macy's displayed him as the first licensed cartoon character in their 1933 Thanksgiving Day Parade! What's more, a doll of Felix went on to become the first-ever image broadcast via television!
...Sadly, Felix's star was eclipsed by the advent of "talkie" pictures and cartoons, most notably Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon designed around synchronized sound. Its star, Mickey Mouse, soon overtook the cat in popularity, but Felix proved the old adage that cats have nine lives, for he never quite went away completely. Messmer's assistant from the old days, Joe Oriolo (as well as his son, Don), kept the flame alive through the 50s and 60s with a syndicated cartoon show, followed by a feature film in 1989 and The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat, a CBS show that lasted from 1995 to 1996. After that, well....I'm sure most people have a vague idea of who Felix is, since he's featured on retro merchandise from time to time. These days, his likeness is best (and erroneously) known from those "Kit Cat" clocks from the 50s which look a bit like Felix but are not Felix.
He, among many other characters, also rang in the New Millennium, with....
....this pair of salt-and-pepper shakers! Produced by a company named Clay Art Ceramics (I think it's more properly "The Clay Art Company of San Francisco"), they depict Felix in two different poses. I don't think he ever really had a memorable "second banana" in his cartoons to serve as the other shaker, so you're going to have to remember which is which at the table.
Friday, October 25, 2019
Superman
Halloween will be upon us in less than a week. Soon, all manner of things will roam the streets asking for treats: ghosts, goblins, witches, werewolves, and, more often than not these days, superheroes.
For every dreadful Dracula and fearsome Frankenstein's Monster, there'll be at least three miniature iterations of Thor, Captain America, Batman, the Flash, and many, many others. (I have a strong feeling that 1 in 4 will be Marvel characters, owing to Avengers Endgame.)
They'd all do well to remember the man who made this possible: Superman.
He's the guvnor, the trendsetter, the first-ever costumed, super-powered hero. (Author's note: Though Lee Falk's The Phantom was the first character to wear a distinctive costume, he had merely human strength and intelligence.)
The year was 1938. Paralyzed by the Depression and facing another world war in the years ahead, Americans needed a hero to look up to. Faster and stronger than the mightiest human, he needed the ability to shake things up and mete out justice wherever it was needed.
Enter Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, a couple of gawky teenagers from Cleveland, Ohio. The target of bullies and the butt of jokes, they found solace in the fantasy worlds of Doc Savage, John Carter of Mars, and Buck Rogers, and, upon graduating from high school, they set out to make a name for themselves. In the process they created a new word to describe their character: a Superhero. Since then, he has been the star of newspaper comic strips, Saturday-morning serials, cartoon shows, big-budget movies, a musical of all things (It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Superman!), video games (including Superman 64, oh dear, oh dear), and prime-time TV dramas.
If you want to know the full story of the world's first superhero, I would suggest no finer a source than Larry Tye's Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero (2012, Random House). Just for today, though, we're going to focus on two comics: the DC Millennium reprint of Action Comics 1, and Superman Y2K, an issue published close to and set within the year 2000.
As the maxim goes, every story has to begin somewhere. Superman's story, such as it is, begins with the first issue of Action Comics. Today it's the most valuable comic in the world, with intact copies going for prices that would make Bruce Wayne himself grimace. You see, matey peeps, comic books of the day were printed on what amounts to wood-pulp newsprint, which disintegrates over time, and an intact copy means it was really well-preserved, like, museum-quality preservation.
This reprint, issued by DC to commemorate their most important titles for the new millennium, is printed on good, solid, collectible-worthy paper, because...Who knows? Maybe by the year 3000, God willing, it'll be worth as much as the original.
Anyway, on to the actual content. For the debut appearance of a major character, there's little attention given to any kind of an origin story; indeed, how he came to Earth is given all of one page. His home planet, Krypton, is merely "a distant planet [that] was destroyed by old age." His parents--neither Jor-El and Lara nor Ma and Pa Kent--were named, their roles taken by "a scientist" and "a passing motorist."
The rest of his story, which takes up about four or five pages total, presents him as a hellion of justice:
And there you have the early Superman: a blunt instrument acting in the name of all that is good. The text and artwork lack finesse, but readers didn't want finesse--they wanted someone able and willing to batter down doors and right wrongs by any means possible. Along the way, he codified what a typical superhero ought to look like: colorful tights with contrasting briefs, like an old-time circus strongman; long, flowing cape; and big, eye-catching chest emblem. Later superheroes, such as Batman, wore an identity-concealing mask or cowl, but the Man of Steel has nothing to hide.
Well, nothing, that is, except his identity. This first issue also codified the idea of the civilian alter-ego. Cool powers like flight and X-ray vision and super-speed are all well and good, but they can only go so far in making the world a better place. Sometimes, it takes another kind of superpower: the skill to craft perfect words. A well-honed article can outrage a populace enough to demand the amendment of a law; or tug at the heartstrings enough to spur a charity event for those living in some far-off, war-torn nation. That's where reporter Clark Kent comes in: Instead of taking to the skies as Superman, he takes to the streets as Clark, keeping an ear out for potential leads on stories.
For every dreadful Dracula and fearsome Frankenstein's Monster, there'll be at least three miniature iterations of Thor, Captain America, Batman, the Flash, and many, many others. (I have a strong feeling that 1 in 4 will be Marvel characters, owing to Avengers Endgame.)
They'd all do well to remember the man who made this possible: Superman.
He's the guvnor, the trendsetter, the first-ever costumed, super-powered hero. (Author's note: Though Lee Falk's The Phantom was the first character to wear a distinctive costume, he had merely human strength and intelligence.)
The year was 1938. Paralyzed by the Depression and facing another world war in the years ahead, Americans needed a hero to look up to. Faster and stronger than the mightiest human, he needed the ability to shake things up and mete out justice wherever it was needed.
Enter Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, a couple of gawky teenagers from Cleveland, Ohio. The target of bullies and the butt of jokes, they found solace in the fantasy worlds of Doc Savage, John Carter of Mars, and Buck Rogers, and, upon graduating from high school, they set out to make a name for themselves. In the process they created a new word to describe their character: a Superhero. Since then, he has been the star of newspaper comic strips, Saturday-morning serials, cartoon shows, big-budget movies, a musical of all things (It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Superman!), video games (including Superman 64, oh dear, oh dear), and prime-time TV dramas.
If you want to know the full story of the world's first superhero, I would suggest no finer a source than Larry Tye's Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero (2012, Random House). Just for today, though, we're going to focus on two comics: the DC Millennium reprint of Action Comics 1, and Superman Y2K, an issue published close to and set within the year 2000.
 |
| The cover itself |
 |
| The "DC Comics Millennium Edition" stamp |
As the maxim goes, every story has to begin somewhere. Superman's story, such as it is, begins with the first issue of Action Comics. Today it's the most valuable comic in the world, with intact copies going for prices that would make Bruce Wayne himself grimace. You see, matey peeps, comic books of the day were printed on what amounts to wood-pulp newsprint, which disintegrates over time, and an intact copy means it was really well-preserved, like, museum-quality preservation.
This reprint, issued by DC to commemorate their most important titles for the new millennium, is printed on good, solid, collectible-worthy paper, because...Who knows? Maybe by the year 3000, God willing, it'll be worth as much as the original.
Anyway, on to the actual content. For the debut appearance of a major character, there's little attention given to any kind of an origin story; indeed, how he came to Earth is given all of one page. His home planet, Krypton, is merely "a distant planet [that] was destroyed by old age." His parents--neither Jor-El and Lara nor Ma and Pa Kent--were named, their roles taken by "a scientist" and "a passing motorist."
The rest of his story, which takes up about four or five pages total, presents him as a hellion of justice:
- He saves an innocent woman from the chair by kidnapping the real killer (how he tracked her down is never explained), breaking into the governor's mansion, tearing down with his bare hands the steel door leading to the man's bedchambers, and passing along the confession.
- As Clark Kent, he takes a called-in tip on a wife-beater; as Superman, he promptly rains hell upon the man, who faints when his knife breaks on the Man of Steel's skin.
- As Clark, he gets sent to the war-torn South American republic of San Monte, but instead goes to Washington, DC (hilariously, the caption emphasizes that his train isn't going to South America!) where he chances upon a corrupt senator and a sleazy lobbyist, who I presume are profiteering off the war. He tracks down the lobbyist and...does his thing, and the story ends on a cliffhanger.
And there you have the early Superman: a blunt instrument acting in the name of all that is good. The text and artwork lack finesse, but readers didn't want finesse--they wanted someone able and willing to batter down doors and right wrongs by any means possible. Along the way, he codified what a typical superhero ought to look like: colorful tights with contrasting briefs, like an old-time circus strongman; long, flowing cape; and big, eye-catching chest emblem. Later superheroes, such as Batman, wore an identity-concealing mask or cowl, but the Man of Steel has nothing to hide.
Well, nothing, that is, except his identity. This first issue also codified the idea of the civilian alter-ego. Cool powers like flight and X-ray vision and super-speed are all well and good, but they can only go so far in making the world a better place. Sometimes, it takes another kind of superpower: the skill to craft perfect words. A well-honed article can outrage a populace enough to demand the amendment of a law; or tug at the heartstrings enough to spur a charity event for those living in some far-off, war-torn nation. That's where reporter Clark Kent comes in: Instead of taking to the skies as Superman, he takes to the streets as Clark, keeping an ear out for potential leads on stories.
SUPERMAN Y2K
Here's a self-contained Superman story set during New Year's Eve 1999....and 1620...and 1847...and 1916. No, there's no time-travel involve. The years leading up to 1999 are flashbacks, illustrating how deeply the Luthor family is intertwined with Metropolis' history, and how far removed Lex is from previous generations...and, more importantly, why.
If you look at the front cover, it's not hard to discover that Superman's cyber-nemesis Brainiac is the source of the millennial pain. In a nutshell, he's wormed his way into LexCorp's Y2K-compliance software and is causing havoc in everything that's made by LexCorp...and this encompasses just about everything in Metropolis and beyond. A thrilling adventure with Superman and the Justice League ensues.
It's clear that much has changed since the Man of Steel's debut. Once, long ago, comic books were self-contained affairs, with complete stories that ran usually between two or three issues at most. Over time, the overarching stories spread to four or five issues across several titles, resulting in the reason why I'm not a terribly big fan of the medium! I literally have no space for all of that, whether on my shelves or on my hard drive. I like the characters very much, don't get me wrong; it's simply that my knowledge of the comics is restricted to what I can borrow from my library. (And if I do buy comics, it's usually for a feature like this.)
Fortunately, Superman Y2K is pretty self-contained, even as it features plot points from DC's ongoing lines. Lex Luthor has a small daughter (money's an aphrodisiac, I'm sure, but somehow, the thought of him having children unnerves me); Superman and Lois Lane are happily married; the Justice League is at the height of its power; and all is well with the world.
More interesting than the main story are the flashbacks I mentioned earlier. The story begins on December 31, 1620, where "alien" settlers (read: Pilgrims) encounter the Algonquin natives (and their Luthor-esque chieftain) and broker a long-standing peace. This sets up a flashback/present-day counterpoint wherein a kind, friendly Luthor of New Year's Eve Past welcomes "aliens" with open arms, only for Lex Luthor to loudly decry the presence of "the alien" in his city (viz. Superman) and treat his subjects, underlings and those who owe him anything as if they were ants underfoot; all the while making extravagant and quite unwelcome displays of his wealth, most notably replacing the "New Year's Ball" on Metropolis' equivalent of the Times Square building with a gigantic "L," a move which the entire crowd finds hopelessly tacky. Throughout these flashbacks, it becomes clear that New Year's Eve has symbolic value within the story as a time of old wrongs "be[ing] forgot and never brought to mind," as the song says, and of keeping one foot in the possibilities of tomorrow.
Yet Superman Y2K is most interesting as a Luthor story: As a wealthy industrial dynasty, the Luthors had kind hearts throughout most of their life in the Metropolis of old. In 1847, socialite Edna Luthor successfully scolds an anti-Irish crowd by reminding them that the city has always welcomed outsiders since its very beginnings; in 1916, Harris Luthor strongarms his staunchly pacifist brother Wallace into providing steel for World War I. A tearful Wallace says, "Let's go downstairs...let's drink and dance...and laugh with friends and family...for I think tomorrow...the world will be a very, very different place."
By what I can only presume is 1969 (the caption only reads "thirty years ago"), the family has hit rock bottom. Once a well-respected, well-loved man, old man Wallace Luthor is now reduced to living in a tenement on Suicide Slum, with an abusive, racist son who berates him for not managing his empire well enough while nearly strangling his toddler son Lex. ("You wanna be a good-for-nothing illegal alien, boy? You wanna be someone else's dog? That it?!") Such an upbringing taught Lex valuable lessons, for he ended up rebuilding the Luthor fortune by the sweat of his own brow within twenty years. Then, Superman arrived, a human-looking alien imbued with superhuman powers since birth. An outsider. A threat to Lex's status and hegemony, someone who can lord it over humanity without ever having to put effort into anything. Except Lex got it wrong, badly wrong: Superman serves humanity out of love, and strives to obey human laws and codes of conduct because it's just the right thing to do.
When another alien--Brainiac 2.5--shows up and usurps Lex's control (and what is absolute Y2K compliance other than a demonstration of total control?), he's rightfully pissed about it. No alien is going to take everything away from him, least of all his own daughter, whom he loves in his own unique way.
The tale ends on a cliffhanger, with a gigantic Brainiac looming over Metropolis, to be resolved in Superman 154, Adventures of Superman 576, Man of Steel 98, and Action Comics 763. I'm...considering tracking things down, because of course Superman's going to give him a right thumping. "How?" is another question, one I will answer in a later edition of the Millennium Museum.
Monday, October 14, 2019
The Year 2000 Problem
Since Halloween is almost upon us, I figured now's as good a time as any to talk about the thing that indirectly inspired the creation of this Museum, and also formed the "plot" of the Halloween 2014 celebrations:
The Year 2000 problem, colloquially dubbed "Y2K."
TL;DR version, as best as I can summarize: Complex circuitry and processors have an internal clock, which keeps track of date and time. Storage space was at a premium in the earlier days of the computer age, and programmers strove to save space wherever they could. They usually took the shortcut of abbreviating the "year" space from four digits to two. For example, 9/10/2018 would be rendered as 9/10/18. This was all well and good for the twenty or so years that we could count on the computer to assume "1980."
However, someone realized that most hardware and software would not recognize "2000," and accordingly go back to "1900," thus causing errors and glitches on a sliding scale, from mere annoyances to catastrophic systems failures.
I concluded the "Millennium Bug Signal Intrusion" arc of Halloween 2014 with Orson Welles' closing words from his radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds: "This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that 'The War of The Worlds' has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!" I chose that very carefully, because, like The War of the Worlds, the hysteria surrounding Y2K far eclipsed the problem itself.
To that end, I'm going to split this article into two parts, the first dealing with the factual problem; the second dealing with the problem as it existed in the public consciousness.
1. JUST THE FACTS
2. OH NOES! OH NOES!
I remember Y2K: The Movie, and am in the middle of tracking down a copy of it for review (to little luck, sadly). One thing I can tell you for sure is that there were a lot of emergency-preparation books, pamphlets, and videos, all of which were fairly common-sense guides for what to do in case of, say, hurricanes, mass blackouts, and other phenomena, but with a "Y2K" wrapper and perhaps some new text to boost sales. There were so many Y2K-specific books put out that they're still common about 20 years on, their price tags so far removed from their original $19.99 price tags*.
In my search for information, I came across a video on Digg.com, in which computer-management consultant Peter de Jager is quoted: "Business would come to a halt," with "billions of dollars lost." Understandable. But from there, the public imagination ran wild, and the 'Bug spun out into airplanes falling from the sky, nuclear power stations spontaneously going into meltdown, pacemakers going awry,rivers and seas boiling, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together...sorry, I couldn't resist. The point still stands, though. As for planes and nuclear power-plants, we all suddenly forgot that humans are in control of such things, and if the 'Bug affected a plane, the pilots would merely switch over to "manual" and land it safely. If a power-plant suddenly started developing problems, those in charge of its operations would, again, switch over to manual controls. Still, nothing beats a good image with a lot of hysteria to go with it.
The biggest purveyor of mass panic was Alex Jones, who started out on Austin public-access TV and then found a national platform on major news networks with the coming of the new millennium. On 12/31/99, he described on his radio show scenes of chaos vivid enough to top even The War of the Worlds broadcast. (I'm not a fan of his, and would rather not give him a direct platform. If you know where to look, the 1999 broadcast is readily available.) The show may have had one or two grains of truth, such as a nearby gas station running out of food, gas, and water, but I'd wager that it was because demand exceeded supply, as people rushed to get said supplies just in case. Choice line: "It's absolutely out of control. It's pandemic, ladies and gentlemen." Erm....I think he meant "pandemonium" there, 'cause "pandemic" usually refers to the spread of some terrible disease. Or did he? The word choice might well have been intentional, so as to add one more bad thing on top of everything else.
More discerning listeners might notice frequent use of "I have a good source," which means he was making it up from one kernel of actual information. Basic Journalism 101--if you have a good source, NAME IT. Don't say "Oh, I have a good source," 'cause that's as bad as saying "A friend of a friend told me" or those two dreaded words, "Some say..." and "Experts say..." What experts? Who says?
He described all these apocalyptic scenes with the fervor of a zealot...and then, on 1/1/2000, we woke up in the morning, many of us rather badly hung over from all the champagne and free-flowing booze from the night before. Surprisingly, the world around us was still very much intact if tilted at a 45-degree angle.
Looking back, Y2K was only one of many other concerns. There was a lot of religious end-of-the-world prophecy, which media such as End of Days and Dracula 2000 marketed on (as did the Millennium series, if to a lesser extent). Nostradamus, millenarianism, and our own technological hubris snowballed into a veritable whirlwind of terror. In my case, all of that plus the usual seventh-grade bullshit, which sort of turned the event into "the forgotten New Year's Eve." I seriously can't remember a thing about it, save for brief flashes of Blackadder: Back and Forth on Channel 11 and of being relieved that the world did not, in fact, end at the stroke of midnight.
Happy Halloween, dear readers!
(*See what I did there? I put "there, they're, and their" into one complete sentence! Boo-yah!)
The Year 2000 problem, colloquially dubbed "Y2K."
TL;DR version, as best as I can summarize: Complex circuitry and processors have an internal clock, which keeps track of date and time. Storage space was at a premium in the earlier days of the computer age, and programmers strove to save space wherever they could. They usually took the shortcut of abbreviating the "year" space from four digits to two. For example, 9/10/2018 would be rendered as 9/10/18. This was all well and good for the twenty or so years that we could count on the computer to assume "1980."
However, someone realized that most hardware and software would not recognize "2000," and accordingly go back to "1900," thus causing errors and glitches on a sliding scale, from mere annoyances to catastrophic systems failures.
I concluded the "Millennium Bug Signal Intrusion" arc of Halloween 2014 with Orson Welles' closing words from his radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds: "This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that 'The War of The Worlds' has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!" I chose that very carefully, because, like The War of the Worlds, the hysteria surrounding Y2K far eclipsed the problem itself.
To that end, I'm going to split this article into two parts, the first dealing with the factual problem; the second dealing with the problem as it existed in the public consciousness.
1. JUST THE FACTS
84% believe that it will trigger at least a 20%+ drop in the stock market -over 1800 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, given its current levels- and some business bankruptcies.
Two-thirds (66%) believe that it will cause at least an economic slowdown, a rise in unemployment, and some isolated social incidents.
Over half (56%) believe that it will at the least result in a mild recession, isolated infrastructure and supply problems, and some runs on banks.
One-third (34%) believe that it will at the least result in a strong recession, local social disruptions, and many business bankruptcies.
One-fourth (26%) believe that in additional to all the above, the Y2K problem will at least result in political crises within the United States, regional supply and infrastructure disruptions, and regional social disruptions.
One-tenth (10%) believe at least that the United States will suffer another depression (or worse), that financial markets will collapse, that the national infrastructure will be crippled, and that martial law will be declared in some local areas. (http://www.co-intelligence.org/y2k_isitreal.html)
As you can see, the Year 2000 problem sat in a sliding scale. Generally, it proved to be a whole lot of nothing precisely because it spurred programmers to prevent it from getting to the stage of total catastrophe. There were a few things here and there, as the Nostalgia Nerd points out, but nothing like what was hyped on TV and in print.
2. OH NOES! OH NOES!
I remember Y2K: The Movie, and am in the middle of tracking down a copy of it for review (to little luck, sadly). One thing I can tell you for sure is that there were a lot of emergency-preparation books, pamphlets, and videos, all of which were fairly common-sense guides for what to do in case of, say, hurricanes, mass blackouts, and other phenomena, but with a "Y2K" wrapper and perhaps some new text to boost sales. There were so many Y2K-specific books put out that they're still common about 20 years on, their price tags so far removed from their original $19.99 price tags*.
In my search for information, I came across a video on Digg.com, in which computer-management consultant Peter de Jager is quoted: "Business would come to a halt," with "billions of dollars lost." Understandable. But from there, the public imagination ran wild, and the 'Bug spun out into airplanes falling from the sky, nuclear power stations spontaneously going into meltdown, pacemakers going awry,
The biggest purveyor of mass panic was Alex Jones, who started out on Austin public-access TV and then found a national platform on major news networks with the coming of the new millennium. On 12/31/99, he described on his radio show scenes of chaos vivid enough to top even The War of the Worlds broadcast. (I'm not a fan of his, and would rather not give him a direct platform. If you know where to look, the 1999 broadcast is readily available.) The show may have had one or two grains of truth, such as a nearby gas station running out of food, gas, and water, but I'd wager that it was because demand exceeded supply, as people rushed to get said supplies just in case. Choice line: "It's absolutely out of control. It's pandemic, ladies and gentlemen." Erm....I think he meant "pandemonium" there, 'cause "pandemic" usually refers to the spread of some terrible disease. Or did he? The word choice might well have been intentional, so as to add one more bad thing on top of everything else.
More discerning listeners might notice frequent use of "I have a good source," which means he was making it up from one kernel of actual information. Basic Journalism 101--if you have a good source, NAME IT. Don't say "Oh, I have a good source," 'cause that's as bad as saying "A friend of a friend told me" or those two dreaded words, "Some say..." and "Experts say..." What experts? Who says?
He described all these apocalyptic scenes with the fervor of a zealot...and then, on 1/1/2000, we woke up in the morning, many of us rather badly hung over from all the champagne and free-flowing booze from the night before. Surprisingly, the world around us was still very much intact if tilted at a 45-degree angle.
Looking back, Y2K was only one of many other concerns. There was a lot of religious end-of-the-world prophecy, which media such as End of Days and Dracula 2000 marketed on (as did the Millennium series, if to a lesser extent). Nostradamus, millenarianism, and our own technological hubris snowballed into a veritable whirlwind of terror. In my case, all of that plus the usual seventh-grade bullshit, which sort of turned the event into "the forgotten New Year's Eve." I seriously can't remember a thing about it, save for brief flashes of Blackadder: Back and Forth on Channel 11 and of being relieved that the world did not, in fact, end at the stroke of midnight.
Happy Halloween, dear readers!
(*See what I did there? I put "there, they're, and their" into one complete sentence! Boo-yah!)
Friday, September 20, 2019
Sunoco Millennium Coins
"Fill 'er up!" In 1999, customers at Sunoco gas stations could buy one of ten collectible brass tokens depicting pivotal events in American history, events which I really don't feel the need to go into too much detail about within this article, since most of them have been or will be covered in the ongoing The LIFE Millennium series.
First, though, a brief history of Sunoco. I'm going to go over the most interesting highlights in a cursory way.
1886: Joseph Pew and Edward Emerson, partners at Pittsburgh's Peoples Natural Gas, expanded from natural gas to oil.
1890: Sun Oil Company opens for business.
1920: The first Sunoco service station opens up. From the way the site talks about it, it could only have been the first service station of its kind in the United States.
1956: You know how you can select 87, 89, and 93 at the gas pump? Those numbers represent the octane rating and the specific blend you're putting into your car. Thank Sunoco for that innovation--they invented and introduced the custom-blend pump, which saved valuable space at their service stations.
1999: Sunoco releases this coin set:
Detail shots of the coins:
1 and 2: Columbus Discovers America; Declaration of Independence
3 and 4: Signing of the Constitution; Emancipation Proclamation
5 and 6: First Telephone; First Automobile
7: Wright Brothers' First Flight
8: American Women's Right to Vote
9: Moon Landing
10: The Third Millennium
--> BONUS: What each coin looks like from the back. Fairly prosaic--it's the Sunoco logo, with the words, "THE SUNOCO MILLENNIUM COIN SERIES," "1999," and the coin number.
First, though, a brief history of Sunoco. I'm going to go over the most interesting highlights in a cursory way.
1886: Joseph Pew and Edward Emerson, partners at Pittsburgh's Peoples Natural Gas, expanded from natural gas to oil.
1890: Sun Oil Company opens for business.
1920: The first Sunoco service station opens up. From the way the site talks about it, it could only have been the first service station of its kind in the United States.
1956: You know how you can select 87, 89, and 93 at the gas pump? Those numbers represent the octane rating and the specific blend you're putting into your car. Thank Sunoco for that innovation--they invented and introduced the custom-blend pump, which saved valuable space at their service stations.
1999: Sunoco releases this coin set:
Detail shots of the coins:
1 and 2: Columbus Discovers America; Declaration of Independence
3 and 4: Signing of the Constitution; Emancipation Proclamation
5 and 6: First Telephone; First Automobile
7: Wright Brothers' First Flight
8: American Women's Right to Vote
9: Moon Landing
10: The Third Millennium
--> BONUS: What each coin looks like from the back. Fairly prosaic--it's the Sunoco logo, with the words, "THE SUNOCO MILLENNIUM COIN SERIES," "1999," and the coin number.
Friday, August 16, 2019
WTTW-11 CHICAGO PBS AFFILIATE TO AIR "PRINCE: RAVE UN2 THE YEAR 2000" AT 8 TONIGHT
To all my readers who live in the Wisconsin/Indiana/Iowa/Illinois region who get WTTW-11, Chicago's PBS affiliate:
The filmed concert Prince: Rave Un2 The Year 2000 will be playing at 8:00 tonight.
That is all!
The filmed concert Prince: Rave Un2 The Year 2000 will be playing at 8:00 tonight.
That is all!
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Plans for the rest of 2019 and 2020
Yipes! I didn't expect 2019 to be quite so....eventful! It hasn't been much of a celebration, has it?
Here's what's going to happen: This party just can't be contained to one year, so I'm going to let it spill over into 2020. It's simply a matter of retaining the "20" banner a little while longer.
Trust me, it's the same as saying that [affects nasal, pedantic nerd voice] "the new millennium ack-sher-lee starts in Two-Thousand and ONE." Besides, those two years are such a blur to me that it only makes sense to combine 2019 and 2020. :)
Here's what's going to happen: This party just can't be contained to one year, so I'm going to let it spill over into 2020. It's simply a matter of retaining the "20" banner a little while longer.
Trust me, it's the same as saying that [affects nasal, pedantic nerd voice] "the new millennium ack-sher-lee starts in Two-Thousand and ONE." Besides, those two years are such a blur to me that it only makes sense to combine 2019 and 2020. :)
Monday, July 29, 2019
Millennium Princess Barbie Happy Meal
I've covered the Happy Meal in great detail with the McDonald's Millennium Teenie Beanie Baby premium, but this is a "standard" Happy Meal giveaway rather than an additional, higher-end purchase.
It's modeled after the Millennium Princess doll with the blue dress, as featured in one of the earlier exhibits, the Hallmark ornament.
It's modeled after the Millennium Princess doll with the blue dress, as featured in one of the earlier exhibits, the Hallmark ornament.
For a Happy Meal giveaway, she's pretty well-made! The dress is real cloth, which I wasn't expecting, and what's more, it's either velveteen or flocked to give it the texture of velvet. Face is well-sculpted and painted, even though she's got a little bit of the judgey-eyes going on. "'Ello! I know the choices you've made, and I find them lacking."
As you can see in the top picture, she has a base that looks like part of the Times Square Millennium Ball.
A very nice little addition to the Museum's exhibits.
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Coming soon...the VIDEO REVIEWS!
In hindsight, that "Millennium Vacation" board game would have made for a good video review.
No matter. I have two--that's TWO--board games to fulfill that purpose.
First up, coming later this year, will be the "Millenniumopoly" board game, produced by Late to the Sun Games.
Second, coming even later this year, will be...the Collector's Edition Monopoly Millennium game.
Latest eBay purchase: Millennium Princess Barbie Happy Meal. I think I've covered the Happy Meal as a part of pop culture a few years ago, but it might be good for a refresher.
No matter. I have two--that's TWO--board games to fulfill that purpose.
First up, coming later this year, will be the "Millenniumopoly" board game, produced by Late to the Sun Games.
Second, coming even later this year, will be...the Collector's Edition Monopoly Millennium game.
Latest eBay purchase: Millennium Princess Barbie Happy Meal. I think I've covered the Happy Meal as a part of pop culture a few years ago, but it might be good for a refresher.
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
"Millennium Vacation" board game
I got this at a Southwest Florida goodwill store in April 2016, and the pictures have been languishing in my laptop ever since! Well, no time like the present to get a move on...
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| In hindsight, I could've taken a better picture with my smartphone, which I didn't yet have at the time. |
Right. So, basically, the idea is, your grandparents are going to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and you and your parents have to make it "over the river and through the woods" to their place, on a great big road-trip. However, that's not going to be easy: since this is getting close to the year 2000, that means all the computers everywhere you go are going to be out of commission. Date Cards and Millennium Cards can either help or hinder you along the way.
The game has a nicely cheesy clip-art aesthetic to it, with a lot of fonts I've seen on school posters or something. Very early Microsoft Word or WordPerfect, I'd wager. As you can see, the board is designed to look like a grandfather clock, with the pendulum as the "start" space and "Grandma and Grandpa's house" as the end tile just below it, so you have to go up and down and all around. It looked...a bit of a mess, really, and the Y2K theme is all too quaint these days.
Thursday, June 6, 2019
Publix Vision 2000 Pin
Just won this on eBay for a paltry $5.
Yes, a little over a year ago I wrote a piece on the perils of going overboard with looking for 2000 stuff on eBay, but the trick is to find something unique enough to warrant buying or which I have some kind of personal history with.
Case in point, this "Vision 2000" pin. The seller wrote on the auction page that it comes from the Publix supermarket chain in Florida and that it dates to 1991.
Normally, I'd limit my focus from 1995 to 2001, but this was too intriguing to pass up. At first I thought it was some kind of green initiative. Then I did a quick online search, which led me to the 1993 issue of Computerworld magazine on Google Books, which had a feature on Publix and Vision 2000.
"In 1989, the Lakeland, Fla., food retailer embarked on 'Vision 2000,' a huge, long-term effort to boost company sales to $25 billion by the year 2000." That entailed investing around $16 billion to overhaul and streamline the grocery chain's information-services department, described at one time as "hierarchical, inflexible, narrowly-focused, slow-moving and bureaucratic." There was a tech-support department and an information-systems department (referred to as "IS" in the article--I actually had to look it up to make sure it stood for what I thought it stood for!), both of which focused on their own tasks and kept little communication between each other.
The strategy, therefore, was to merge support and systems into one department and get the employees therein to collaborate and share information and skills. With this came ongoing peer reviews. To quote (then?) IS vice-president Daniel Risener, "Peers tend to be more honest, and the employee gets a truer picture of how well he's performing and what areas he needs to improve upon."
Now, I'm not too well-versed in IT stuff, having taken only one sort-of computer class at Moraine Valley. I bring this into the Museum because it's from Publix, and I remember a lot of happy family vacations in Southwest Florida starting in the year 2000...many good memories there. Also, the "streamlining the IS department" focus of the article fits in with the advent of the Internet and the increasingly computer-driven New Millennium.
Yes, a little over a year ago I wrote a piece on the perils of going overboard with looking for 2000 stuff on eBay, but the trick is to find something unique enough to warrant buying or which I have some kind of personal history with.
Case in point, this "Vision 2000" pin. The seller wrote on the auction page that it comes from the Publix supermarket chain in Florida and that it dates to 1991.
Normally, I'd limit my focus from 1995 to 2001, but this was too intriguing to pass up. At first I thought it was some kind of green initiative. Then I did a quick online search, which led me to the 1993 issue of Computerworld magazine on Google Books, which had a feature on Publix and Vision 2000.
"In 1989, the Lakeland, Fla., food retailer embarked on 'Vision 2000,' a huge, long-term effort to boost company sales to $25 billion by the year 2000." That entailed investing around $16 billion to overhaul and streamline the grocery chain's information-services department, described at one time as "hierarchical, inflexible, narrowly-focused, slow-moving and bureaucratic." There was a tech-support department and an information-systems department (referred to as "IS" in the article--I actually had to look it up to make sure it stood for what I thought it stood for!), both of which focused on their own tasks and kept little communication between each other.
The strategy, therefore, was to merge support and systems into one department and get the employees therein to collaborate and share information and skills. With this came ongoing peer reviews. To quote (then?) IS vice-president Daniel Risener, "Peers tend to be more honest, and the employee gets a truer picture of how well he's performing and what areas he needs to improve upon."
Now, I'm not too well-versed in IT stuff, having taken only one sort-of computer class at Moraine Valley. I bring this into the Museum because it's from Publix, and I remember a lot of happy family vacations in Southwest Florida starting in the year 2000...many good memories there. Also, the "streamlining the IS department" focus of the article fits in with the advent of the Internet and the increasingly computer-driven New Millennium.
The Millennium Museum Revisited: "Ghostbusters" 15th Anniversary DVD
I'm about to touch down aboard an Amtrak train headed for Los Angeles, where I'm attending the Ghostbusters 35th Anniversary Fan Fest at Sony Pictures' backlot in Culver City, CA.
In keeping with the spirit (ha-ha) of the weekend, I will re-post the 15th Anniversary DVD review from June 2014...and, upon my return to Chicago, I'll bring the Museum forward by twenty years with the I and II 4K Ultra Limited Edition Steelbook Set, which should arrive by then.
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(NOTE: Though originally published in 2014, the main text has been "cleaned up" in the years between then and now.)
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| Ah, back in the days when I used custom tags... |
(In case you were wondering, the banner and tag image is a little something I cooked up in Paint a few days ago. It's a representation of the animated Ghostbusters title-card from the beginning of the movie, at the moment before the No-Ghost fully forms.)
2014 marks the thirtieth anniversary of a movie that needs no introduction. 1984's Ghostbusters has rightfully earned its place in the pop-culture pantheon with a tightrope act of smart-aleck laughs and effects-driven scares, an instantly-recognizable theme song, and a cockeyed take on the supernatural that pays homage to (and wittily punctures) earlier movies such as Poltergeist and The Exorcist.
Here at the Millennium Museum, we’re celebrating that anniversary by turning the clock back to 1999 with the 15th Anniversary DVD.
The packaging itself (above) represents a complete departure from all other releases that came before. The plain, black box of old, decorated with the movie's original poster, is out the window; in its place is a splashy new cover with our four heroes in front of New York's skyline, ready for battle. This movie's tagline is their slogan, "We're Ready To Believe You;" the second movie's is "Be Ready To Believe Us."
The disc itself...now, this is where it gets interesting. I do believe that Ghostbusters was one of the first ones to demonstrate what the DVD format was capable of. Immediately after the old Columbia/Tristar Home Video logo (before Sony Home Entertainment became the standard logo), viewers are presented with a wonderful animated menu based on New York City. Spirits swoop across the screen, Slimer whirls around Gozer's Temple atop 55 Central Park West, and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man takes a stroll down the street. A virtual camera pans up, down, and across the main map with each selection.
It doesn't stop there: This baby is loaded with extras, from the original “On Call with the Ghostbusters” documentary from '84, to all-new (for 1999) featurettes on cast and crew. The “Visual Effects Featurette” is a particular highlight. There are also trailers for GB I and II; Stripes; and Groundhog Day, as well as a full complement of concept art, special-effects before-and-after comparisons, pop-up production notes (taken from Don Shay's book Making Ghostbusters), and the movie's signature feature, the “Video Commentary,” which marries fully animated Mystery Science Theater 3000-style silhouettes to an audio commentary by Harold Ramis (co-writer and “Egon Spengler”), Ivan Reitman (director), and Joe Medjuck (producer). The video feature can be toggled on and off, and it adds a further dimension to an already highly-entertaining audio commentary. Harold Ramis, who very tragically died earlier this year, proved himself a thoroughly engaging raconteur on this commentary as he shared wonderful behind-the-scenes tidbits (the one where science-fiction legend Isaac Asimov grouched at Dan Aykroyd because the filming tied up traffic springs to mind) and a few digs at costar Bill Murray (never named, but it's obvious who he's talking about). As far as I know, this was one of the only titles to use the "Video Commentary"--even the more recent DVD and Blu-Ray sets eschew the visual part.
As for the movie itself, this is its first mass-market widescreen release. There was a widescreen/letterbox VHS version in the early 90s, but this was hard to come by and only available through specialty stores like Suncoast and Saturday Matinee (ah, the good old days...). The earliest VHS release was horribly cropped for average TV sets, to the point of cutting Egon and Winston out of the picture most of the time and ruining some of the jokes!
The remastering and color-grading is top-notch, with a crystal-clear picture that eliminates the slight “grain” and pale coloring of the earlier release. It's pretty much as one would have seen it in the movies back in 1984. The sound mixing is first-class; the DVD and 15th Anniversary VHS alike use Surround Sound.
And now, the million-dollar question:
Why do I list it on this blog?
Why do I list it on this blog?
Considering its 1999 release, many of the extra features reference the then-upcoming 2000 celebrations, and on the '99 Featurette, Dan Aykroyd muses that the change from 1999 to 2000 might stir up some thoughtful discussions about Ghostbusters' ideas on the afterlife and things like other dimensions and planes of existence.
One thing is certain: Its fears of apocalypse, especially in the lead-up to the climax, certainly resonated. In those scenes, people of all religious faiths—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, every faith—gathered in droves to pray for the safety of this world. All the differences between the faiths were, for a moment, secondary to the doom surrounding them. That sense of unity is what the Millennium Dream is all about, the idea that the individual groups of people that comprise humanity can focus more on what makes them alike and less on what makes them different. (During the commentary, Harold Ramis proves himself more down-to-earth about the whole thing: “All that money spent on DVDs for nothing,” he wisecracks.)
As an aside, it's worth pointing out that the front cover displays the two towers of the World Trade Center. To think that such an icon of the modern world would be erased from the landscape just one year after the dawn of a new century...This release of Ghostbusters is a testament to the innocence of 1984 and 1999 alike.
Sunday, May 5, 2019
STYX Two-Fer: "Return to Paradise"/"Brave New World"
Yesterday, I went to see Dennis DeYoung, Styx's former keyboardist and lead singer, for the May 4th performance at Rosemont Theater in Illinois. The tickets came from Chicago's PBS affiliate, WTTW-11--only $100 for a front-row seat!
It started me thinking: Styx has a place in the Museum for 1997's Return to Paradise tour (filmed in Chicago on the final night of the tour) and for the 1999 album Brave New World.
Time for a brief history lesson, in which I will make a lot of sweeping generalities from a quick glance at Wikipedia: Styx begins in Chicago (the suburb of Roseland, to be exact) in the early '60s with brothers Chuck (on bass) and John (on drums) Panozzo and their neighbor and friend Dennis DeYoung (on keyboard and vocals). The three of them went to my alma mater, Chicago State University, back when it was a teacher's school. (Class of 2011, by-the-by. I still say, to this day, that Chicago State shall always be better known for three-fifths of Styx than for Kanye West.) In 1970, the band picked up James "J.Y." Young; in 1976, Tommy Shaw. They achieved their big break with the success of "Lady" in 1972...and the rest is history.
Described by YouTube reviewer Todd in the Shadows as "pompous to the point of flatulence1" (I include this quote because it made me crack up completely when I first heard it and even now cracked up while typing it!), Styx is known for a few signature radio-friendly songs: "Come Sail Away," (my least favorite song, because WLS-94.7 insists on playing it twice a day every day) "Lady," "Renegade," and, if you're very, very lucky, "Babe," "Best of Times," and "The Grand Illusion." They had a string of hit albums through the 70s and early 80s, including Grand Illusion, Paradise Theatre, and Kilroy Was Here. This last one had a grandiose tour in which the band members portrayed rebels fighting against a neo-fascist regime. Acting turned out not to be the musicians' forte, and, at the end of the tour, the band split up until 1991's Edge of the Century, the re-recording of "Lady '95" for Styx Greatest Hits*, and the Return to Paradise Tour.
(*Styx's original label, Wooden Nickel Records, held the rights to the original version of "Lady;" within a few years' time, they had migrated over to A&M Records, necessitating a new version of "Lady" for the greatest-hits album.)
Return is notable for being the first tour since Kilroy, and (as far as I know) the last tour to feature the "Classic" lineup: Dennis, Tommy, J.Y., Chuck Panozzo, and new drummer Todd Sucherman, filling in for John Panozzo, who had passed away in 1995. All are in top form, performing perennial hits like "The Grand Illusion," "Rockin' the Paradise," "Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)," "Lady," and, for the grand finale, "The Best of Times." Edge of the Century's "Show Me The Way" gets a special place in the show for John, friend, colleague, and a hell of a drummer.
The tour was successful enough that they reunited in 1999 for Brave New World. It's an interesting album, I'll say that much. There are traces of Styx's heritage throughout, but it's steeped in that crisp, clean, mid-90s pop sound. One could easily mistake "I Will Be Your Witness," the first track, for a Backstreet Boys song. Perhaps this was deliberate: A few of the other tracks, such as "Number One," "Everything is Cool," and "Heavy Water," read as a lament for, and vivisection of, the decade. "Everything" grouses about runaway consumerism, while the more thoughtful "Heavy Water" ponders over our relationship with technology in the coming century, and wonders whether or not it will outstrip us, which the earlier track "Mr. Roboto" only briefly touched upon in 1983. There, the concern was automation and loss of jobs; here, the concern widens out to the human race's self-destruction.
Also interesting is that DeYoung gets only five songs to his name out of fourteen tracks, and one of them is an early demo for what eventually became a concept album based on Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (in other words, it has little to do with the overall "Brave New World" theme).
His final original track for Styx is "Goodbye Roseland," a quiet ballad which is at once a requiem for his father, who had passed away in 1997, and an elegy for a now-unrecognizable hometown. That we all have a Roseland of our own makes the song all the more poignant.
It could also be an elegy for a now-unrecognizable band. Styx supported the new album with a tour, but, in the tour's earliest days, he contracted a viral infection which rendered him exhausted and sensitive to light. The search for a replacement led the rest of the band to Canadian singer and keyboardist Lawrence Gowan, who had already enjoyed a successful solo career in the 80s and 90s. Styx to this day tours with new material and hits from the classic Shaw/Young catalog, and DeYoung tours with his material.
As 1999 ended one century and 2000 began a new one, so did those pivotal years do the same for this uniquely American band.
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvZPaH7QIVI
Time for a brief history lesson, in which I will make a lot of sweeping generalities from a quick glance at Wikipedia: Styx begins in Chicago (the suburb of Roseland, to be exact) in the early '60s with brothers Chuck (on bass) and John (on drums) Panozzo and their neighbor and friend Dennis DeYoung (on keyboard and vocals). The three of them went to my alma mater, Chicago State University, back when it was a teacher's school. (Class of 2011, by-the-by. I still say, to this day, that Chicago State shall always be better known for three-fifths of Styx than for Kanye West.) In 1970, the band picked up James "J.Y." Young; in 1976, Tommy Shaw. They achieved their big break with the success of "Lady" in 1972...and the rest is history.
Described by YouTube reviewer Todd in the Shadows as "pompous to the point of flatulence1" (I include this quote because it made me crack up completely when I first heard it and even now cracked up while typing it!), Styx is known for a few signature radio-friendly songs: "Come Sail Away," (my least favorite song, because WLS-94.7 insists on playing it twice a day every day) "Lady," "Renegade," and, if you're very, very lucky, "Babe," "Best of Times," and "The Grand Illusion." They had a string of hit albums through the 70s and early 80s, including Grand Illusion, Paradise Theatre, and Kilroy Was Here. This last one had a grandiose tour in which the band members portrayed rebels fighting against a neo-fascist regime. Acting turned out not to be the musicians' forte, and, at the end of the tour, the band split up until 1991's Edge of the Century, the re-recording of "Lady '95" for Styx Greatest Hits*, and the Return to Paradise Tour.
(*Styx's original label, Wooden Nickel Records, held the rights to the original version of "Lady;" within a few years' time, they had migrated over to A&M Records, necessitating a new version of "Lady" for the greatest-hits album.)
Return is notable for being the first tour since Kilroy, and (as far as I know) the last tour to feature the "Classic" lineup: Dennis, Tommy, J.Y., Chuck Panozzo, and new drummer Todd Sucherman, filling in for John Panozzo, who had passed away in 1995. All are in top form, performing perennial hits like "The Grand Illusion," "Rockin' the Paradise," "Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)," "Lady," and, for the grand finale, "The Best of Times." Edge of the Century's "Show Me The Way" gets a special place in the show for John, friend, colleague, and a hell of a drummer.
The tour was successful enough that they reunited in 1999 for Brave New World. It's an interesting album, I'll say that much. There are traces of Styx's heritage throughout, but it's steeped in that crisp, clean, mid-90s pop sound. One could easily mistake "I Will Be Your Witness," the first track, for a Backstreet Boys song. Perhaps this was deliberate: A few of the other tracks, such as "Number One," "Everything is Cool," and "Heavy Water," read as a lament for, and vivisection of, the decade. "Everything" grouses about runaway consumerism, while the more thoughtful "Heavy Water" ponders over our relationship with technology in the coming century, and wonders whether or not it will outstrip us, which the earlier track "Mr. Roboto" only briefly touched upon in 1983. There, the concern was automation and loss of jobs; here, the concern widens out to the human race's self-destruction.
His final original track for Styx is "Goodbye Roseland," a quiet ballad which is at once a requiem for his father, who had passed away in 1997, and an elegy for a now-unrecognizable hometown. That we all have a Roseland of our own makes the song all the more poignant.
It could also be an elegy for a now-unrecognizable band. Styx supported the new album with a tour, but, in the tour's earliest days, he contracted a viral infection which rendered him exhausted and sensitive to light. The search for a replacement led the rest of the band to Canadian singer and keyboardist Lawrence Gowan, who had already enjoyed a successful solo career in the 80s and 90s. Styx to this day tours with new material and hits from the classic Shaw/Young catalog, and DeYoung tours with his material.
As 1999 ended one century and 2000 began a new one, so did those pivotal years do the same for this uniquely American band.
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvZPaH7QIVI
Tuesday, April 16, 2019
A Record Book About the Turn of the Millennium
Though this one sounds similar to The Book of Millennium Records, the two could not be further apart.
A few years ago, I kept going on and on about "The Millennium is about time capsules and the preservation of history." The Record Book is a time capsule in book form.
I like the formatting: The left page of each section is for 1999, and the right page is for 2000. Surprisingly, it's intended more for older children (and teenagers and adults) than the younger ones I'd initially assumed: There are sections for politics, news, TV, and sports, things which I wouldn't normally expect children to follow (or to at least have only some vague idea about). This is most apparent in the last sections, which force some rather deep introspection: Entries include "Greatest lessons learned this year" and "Personal accomplishments."
The section "The Conversion" presumably refers to going from 1999 to 2000, but I suspect it's more of a reference to the Y2K problem. There are sections labeled "Preparations made before the conversion," "Supplies acquired," "Expectations of the conversion," "What actually happened," and "What were the effects?"
The last few sections are reserved for pictures taken in '99 and '00; descriptions of how the reader spent New Year's Eve on those years; and goals for the new millennium.
The back page lists other Millennium products sold by the manufacturer, Havoc Publishing, including a photo frame and keepsake box. The company also sold record books for subjects like weddings and pregnancies.
Monday, March 11, 2019
"...The marvelous surprises that await you..."
The Easter season is almost upon us, and you know what that means: The shelves will be stocked with lots and lots of brightly-colored candy. Cadbury Creme Eggs. Marshmallow Peeps and Bunnies. Malted-milk Robin's Eggs. Chocolate bunnies, hollow and solid, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, peanut-butter filled, endless varieties.
This next article is about a now semi-defunct brand that had a big impact on me around the early-to-mid 2000s.
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| Courtesy Pinterest PROLOGUE |
As far as I know, Wonka never really had any notable Millennium celebrations; it's more that a brand which had existed two decades before went into overdrive at the time I normally cover anyway.
PART ONE: A BRIEF HISTORY
In 1971, Quaker Oats wanted to get into the candy business. There were already Hershey's bars, and Mars' M&Ms, and Nestle's Crunch and Baby Ruth bars, and the market seemed pretty crammed. Someone at Quaker had the bright idea of financing a movie to advertise a candy bar, and the obvious vehicle was Roald Dahl's children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The candy bar in question was, of course, the Wonka Bar, so the name Charlie and... had to become Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to better advertise the candy. I remember this quote from the 30th Anniversary DVD's featurettes (paraphrasing here): "They had a disposable movie and a candy bar that would last forever. But something was wrong with the formula, and the bars melted on the shelves. So they got a disposable candy bar and a movie that would last forever!"
Quaker abandoned the trademark, selling it a few years later to Chicago-based Breaker Confections, which manufactured now-familiar sweets like Shock Tarts, Tart-n-Tiny's, Dina-Sour [sic] Eggs (later to become Runts Easter Eggs), and such. In 1980, Breaker became The Willy Wonka Candy Factory, which Nestle purchased in 1988. An excellent website called Collecting Candy has a lot of Wonka wrappers, ads, and other ephemera spanning from the brand's earliest days in the mid-70s to the present day. Strangely, the brand started out heavily chocolate-based with Wonka Bars and Scrumdiddlyumptious Bars, but gradually abandoned this in favor of tangy and fruit-flavored confections--presumably these were far more cost-effective.
PART TWO: THE GOLDEN TICKET IS MINE
And then, in 1996 or 1997, I became acquainted with Wonka. Nerds, Bottle Caps, Everlasting Gobstoppers (in real life, nowhere near everlasting, but the name stuck), Tart-n-Tiny's, Shock Tarts, Runts...The brand name had an effect that no other did: You could sort of imagine the candy actually coming from Willy Wonka's factory. For example, Runts grew on trees in the Chocolate Room, and the Gobstoppers came from the Inventing Room. Of course, that's not really how it works, but the idea was too good not to believe in. (At one point, I'd worked out an idea based on those "Fruit Gushers" snacks, based on the evil "Vermicious K'Nids" from the book. Here's a mockup of what that might have looked like.)
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| I use artistic license here--the design lends itself more to a 90s sensibility than the more unified early 2000s look. |
1999-2001 saw the lead-up to the 30th anniversary of the movie, and Nestle really ramped up the brand-awareness with new products such as "Fruitastically Chewriffic" Oompas, Nerds Rope, Lik-m-Aid Fun Dip (a case of reviving an existing though long-dormant brand), and, of course, the Wonka Bar. There was a Golden Ticket sweepstakes, but every bar had a Golden Ticket (a golden wrapper, but still), and the grand prize was, I believe, scholarship money. Yay. (NOTE, 3/4/19: I just remembered that there was indeed an Easter egg similar to Cadbury's in the mid-2000s, and you could pretend that, if not a golden goose like in the movie, then maybe a golden hen had laid it!)
There were "Invention Room" toys, battery-powered contraptions that could dispense Nerds or Tart-n-Tiny's and mix Pixy-Stix flavors. There were "Beanie Babies" in the shape of the Oompa-Loompa characters. And then there was Wonka.com, a grand and glorious website that made you feel as if you were going level by level through the factory itself. On each level there were games: Nerds Rope Follow-the-Leader; Gobstopper Gobbler; Laffy-Taffy-tris; Wonka Air Hockey; Chocolate Pipe Madness, and dozens of others. I found all of these games online a couple of days ago, but I won't post the link here. However, if you went to YouTube, searched for "Willy Wonka games" and did a bit of digging around in the comments, there's really nothing I could do to stop you.
(Side note: There was a Wonka.co.uk as well, which had different games and a little more of a narrative surrounding it. There was a gremlin in the factory or something, and you had to find it by playing different games, like the famous "shell game." I only visited it about once or twice in late 2000, and it was less fun than the US version.)
There were "Invention Room" toys, battery-powered contraptions that could dispense Nerds or Tart-n-Tiny's and mix Pixy-Stix flavors. There were "Beanie Babies" in the shape of the Oompa-Loompa characters. And then there was Wonka.com, a grand and glorious website that made you feel as if you were going level by level through the factory itself. On each level there were games: Nerds Rope Follow-the-Leader; Gobstopper Gobbler; Laffy-Taffy-tris; Wonka Air Hockey; Chocolate Pipe Madness, and dozens of others. I found all of these games online a couple of days ago, but I won't post the link here. However, if you went to YouTube, searched for "Willy Wonka games" and did a bit of digging around in the comments, there's really nothing I could do to stop you.
(Side note: There was a Wonka.co.uk as well, which had different games and a little more of a narrative surrounding it. There was a gremlin in the factory or something, and you had to find it by playing different games, like the famous "shell game." I only visited it about once or twice in late 2000, and it was less fun than the US version.)
CHAPTER THREE: AN ALL-TIME HIGH...AND THEN A FALL
The brand expanded further into the 2000s with the XPloder Bar, Donutz, Nerds and Shock Tart Gumballs, Puckerooms (sour mushroom-shaped gummies), and Wonka Randoms, an attempt to bring a British candy to the States, and with the new treats, there were new games on the official site. The brand eventually diversified into frozen treats and higher-end chocolate bars and candies called "Wonka Exceptionals," a way to get in on Ghirardelli's upscale market. Now there was a chocolate bar so delicious and so smooth, you'd swear it had been mixed by waterfall!
Sadly, the good times were not to last: In 2015, Nestle abandoned the brand and re-dubbed the candies under the "Nestle Candy Shop." I haven't bought any Nestle-made sweets in a long time for a few reasons, chief among them the loss of the Wonka brand. Then again, it's understandable why the brand had to go: Nestle had to pay royalties not only to the Roald Dahl estate for the name but also to Warner Bros., because their designs had taken inspiration from the 1971 movie from the brand's inception. The Candy Shop sticks mainly to Gobstoppers, Runts, Nerds, Spree, Bottle Caps, and SweeTarts. Most of the seasonal variations--Spooky Nerds, Gobstopper Hearts, Runts Easter eggs--have fallen by the wayside as well.
Yes, the candy is still functionally the same, and yes, it's just a brand name slapped onto some junk food, but it made a boring, humdrum world a little more magical and colorful because of the association. That world is just a little poorer without it.
...And the less said about that infernal "Tom and Jerry in Willy Wonka," the better. Dear, oh, dear.
Sadly, the good times were not to last: In 2015, Nestle abandoned the brand and re-dubbed the candies under the "Nestle Candy Shop." I haven't bought any Nestle-made sweets in a long time for a few reasons, chief among them the loss of the Wonka brand. Then again, it's understandable why the brand had to go: Nestle had to pay royalties not only to the Roald Dahl estate for the name but also to Warner Bros., because their designs had taken inspiration from the 1971 movie from the brand's inception. The Candy Shop sticks mainly to Gobstoppers, Runts, Nerds, Spree, Bottle Caps, and SweeTarts. Most of the seasonal variations--Spooky Nerds, Gobstopper Hearts, Runts Easter eggs--have fallen by the wayside as well.
Yes, the candy is still functionally the same, and yes, it's just a brand name slapped onto some junk food, but it made a boring, humdrum world a little more magical and colorful because of the association. That world is just a little poorer without it.
...And the less said about that infernal "Tom and Jerry in Willy Wonka," the better. Dear, oh, dear.
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