The Batman vs. Wackula

(Photo source: Dean Trippe)

I don't care for Twilight. Neither does the Twitterer known as The Goddamn Batman. And now, here are the best of The Batman's 140-character tirades against a vampire who's so goddamn banal he makes The Count from Sesame Street look intimidating.

June 24, 2010

June 30, 2010

July 2, 2010

June 5, 2011

November 15, 2011

November 16, 2011

UPDATE: November 17, 2011 (this tweet appeared a couple of hours after I first published the post)

BBC's Luther may be as close as we can get to that TV version of Gotham Central some of us GC readers always wanted to see

The BBC One cops-vs.-serial killers procedural Luther, which concludes its second season on BBC America tonight, isn't a perfect show, but it's more enjoyable than most procedurals, due to an imposing and lively but never hammy turn by former Wire star Idris Elba (an actual lead of color who still has his show!) and a distinctive, not-so-generic look.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The '60s Batman had the Dutch angles and Homicide: Life on the Street had the jump cuts and washed-out color scheme (something Homicide phased out in its later and less interesting seasons). Luther likes to take its actors and place them at the bottom left and right corners of the screen so that they're surrounded by lots of negative space. If I recall correctly, a Luther crew member said the crew favored this framing effect because it makes it appear as if comic book-style thought bubbles are about to surface above the actors' heads.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The framing effect, which was more prominent in Luther's first season (did some Beeb higher-up put NBC exec-vs.-Homicide-style pressure on the Luther crew to do less of it?), also enhances the show's sense of dread and unease. It dwarfs the actors and manages to make the tall Elba look as small as the runty white psychos he's been chasing this season (at times, Luther feels like a serious version of Chris Rock's post-Columbine stand-up routine about crazy white kids who scare the shit out of him, like the goofily named Trenchcoat Mafia).

Luther evokes dread and unease more effectively than most shows. The mute, hammer-wielding LARP-er who terrorized working folk in the penultimate episode of Luther's second season is scarier and more menacing than anything during Luther's American ratings competition, FX's trying-way-too-hard-to-be-scary American Horror Story. The LARP-er's muteness and the episode's preference for filming his killings from a distance or having them take place off-screen--we're subjected only to gruesome hammer-to-skull sound effects--both make his acts of violence more disturbing. And though it's resorted to the tired and annoying device of children in peril that's been used by torture-porn procedurals like Criminal Minds, Luther rarely feels as sadistic as that show (below an A.V. Club piece about Criminal Minds and its short-lived spinoff Suspect Behavior, a commenter astutely noted that "Middle America eat [sic] this crap up with a spoon. It genuinely baffles me that middle aged and conservative Americans have made this show such a mainstream hit.").

That quality of being unnerving without getting sadistic or graphic recalls Gotham Central, the much-missed DC Comics crime title that writers Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka told from the point of view of Gotham City homicide detectives who resent Batman (Gotham Central was a bleak book, but it wasn't as sadistic as most of DC's puerile attempts at edginess, perhaps because Brubaker and Rucka write like grown-ups instead of horny and torture-porn-obsessed adolescents). From "the operatic theatricality" that crime novelist and Luther creator Neil Cross once said he's brought to DCI John Luther's adversaries to that aforementioned framing effect that creates the illusion of thought bubbles, the larger-than-life Luther is basically a comic book--or as John's teenage charge Jenny Jones (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) would prefer, graphic novel--but it's a very good one, which Gotham Central was.

There was once talk of turning Gotham Central into a TV series, which would have been nice to see, although I don't think there are any showrunners who would have been able to master the tricky balance of supervillain theatrics with much more grounded police detective business that even Rucka occasionally had trouble pulling off in the comic (for instance, the gaudily dressed heroes from the Teen Titans stuck out like a sore thumb when they were awkwardly integrated into the not-so-gaudy Gotham Central).

But after watching how Luther handles John's bordering-on-superhuman investigative skills or the theatricality of both John's adversaries and his sociopathic adversary-turned-ally Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) without looking goofy and lame, I think Cross would be the perfect showrunner for a TV version of Gotham Central if it ever becomes a possibility again.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

If that TV adaptation never surfaces, then think of Luther as a pretty good Gotham Central spinoff in which Elba is terrific as deceased Gotham detective Crispus Allen, who's reimagined himself as a David Bowie-loving(*) British supercop in some sort of crime-ridden afterlife that's a cross between the original Life on Mars and Lost's much-maligned sideways universe.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

(*) You gotta love a procedural that has a lead who idolizes Bowie and, as it's implied in one episode, uses his music to help him think, although why Luther didn't choose a Bowie track as its theme music--it went with Massive Attack's "Paradise Circus," which actually isn't too shabby--is as puzzling as any of John's cases.

Every day I'm shufflin'

Even though trying to keep track of the nearly 64 hours of music that are stored in A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" playlist (plus the two hours of music that make up AFOS' "Rock Box" playlist) can occasionally be a hassle, running AFOS(*) is a pretty simple task. I just hit "Shuffle" and Live365.com does the rest.

(*) It's AFOS. No bloody FOS or FFOS. It's always been AFOS. I've always wanted to shorten it to just AFOS because the acronym AFOS can stand for many different phrases besides A Fistful of Soundtracks, and I once jotted down a list of 12 of them (examples: "Ample Focus on Scores" and my personal favorite, "Asians Fucking Owning Shit"). The current iTunes Radio description of "Fistful of Soundtracks" is nine years old (it's taken from a summary of AFOS that I typed into Live365.com when I first launched AFOS over there in 2002, back when Live365 wouldn't let radio stations have names longer than 22 letters for some stupid reason). iTunes has never bothered to replace the old description with a present-day one.

Sometimes, weird things I have no control over start to happen on AFOS when it's in shuffle mode.

Mel Gibson, who's so famously fond of Jews, gets followed by a Jew.

Yeah, I like "Eye of the Tiger" too, Live365, but I don't like it as much as you do apparently.

Same thing with the movie Wild Things...

... or the end credits music from Thor.

Two different incarnations of Batman getting streamed back-to-back always amuses me...

... as does Angel, Batman and Zorro getting streamed in the same hour. (Angel is like the Batman of the Whedonverse. Batman was modeled partly after Zorro. Also, in DC's pre-"New 52" continuity--I'm not sure if it's been changed in the current continuity--Bruce Wayne lost his parents to a mugger after they attended a Mark of Zorro screening. If it were a Legend of Zorro screening, all three Waynes would have lost the will to live and killed themselves afterward.)

Live365 occasionally does screwy things to the Bollywood-centric "Chai Noon" block. Das racist!

Shuffle mode sometimes results in nifty unintentional double shots or triple shots like:

Brian Tyler Fast and the Furious sequel theme double shots.

Pam Grier movie theme double shots.

Jim Kelly movie theme double shots.

Themes from movies about Bruce Lee movies getting streamed in the same hour.

Battlestar Galactica/Star Trek double shots.

Galaxy Quest/Star Trek double shots.

Trek/Galactica/Galaxy Quest triple shots.

J.J. Abrams/Michael Giacchino collabo triple shots.

Christopher Nolan/Hans Zimmer collabo double shots.

End credits music quadruple shots.

"Movies with Run in the title" double shots.

"Unexpectedly gory L.A. movies" double shots.

Live365 once caused a weird pattern in which a theme from a Spike Lee Joint ended up getting followed by a Cowboy Bebop track--twice in a row. I hope someone on Deviantart was listening to AFOS during that hour and thought about drawing a Spike Lee/Spike Spiegel mash-up someday. Make it happen, Internet!

Wilfred the Matt Damon-loving dog must have tried to sabotage Live365 during this hour.

The dopest part of DJ Jazzy Jeff and Mick Boogie's Summertime 2 mixtape: The unexpected appearance of Stevie Wonder's "Love Light in Flight"

(Photo source: Tommer G)

Thanks to the High Fidelity scene in which Jack Black disses the sappy and overplayed Woman in Red theme "I Just Called to Say I Love You," Stevie Wonder's Woman in Red soundtrack has become a punchline, much like Prince's Batman song soundtrack, which was the subject of a similar gag in Shaun of the Dead. Another thing that both those '80s song soundtracks have in common is that though those albums aren't exactly career highlights for either artist, they aren't exactly awful either. They're redeemed by two or three underappreciated tracks.

"Love Light in Flight" is one of those tracks, and it's a song I hadn't heard since 1984 or 1985--until I recently stumbled into it during DJ Jazzy Jeff and Mick Boogie's Summertime 2 mixtape and instantly smiled, which is why I just added "Love Light in Flight" to A Fistful of Soundtracks' '80s block "Soda and Pie" (Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at noon).

"Drums, please!"

"Oh man," I thought to myself while bumping Summertime 2, "I remember 'Love Light in Flight.' It so takes me back to when I was a Ghostbusters-loving kid in '84!" It's such a damn smooth track--plus it's full of aviation imagery, which would have made it perfect for the flight-themed "Up, Up and Away" episode of the terrestrial radio incarnation of A Fistful of Soundtracks that I aired on July 22, 2001.

Suddenly, Gene Wilder is faced with a crippling decision: Kelly LeBrock or the sheep that's waiting for him at home?

"Love Light in Flight" is the one hit song from The Woman in Red that's neither overplayed nor preachy (that would be the well-meaning but clunkily written "Don't Drive Drunk"). Camille Paglia may be a pretentious, Sarah Palin-loving weirdo (her Salon Oscar telecast recaps were always worthy of an Onion parody), but she's right that "Love Light in Flight" is a sublime tune.

"Gentlemen, let's broaden our minds! Lawrence?": La-La Land reissues Danny Elfman's classic Batman score with additional cues

It's a great week to be a fan of the Batman movies. Christopher Nolan confirmed that Christian Bale will reprise his impression of Froggy from The Little Rascals for their third Batman installment together, and La-La Land Records announced yesterday that it's releasing an expanded reissue of one of my all-time favorite film scores, the rousing 1989 Batman score by Danny Elfman (his third feature-length score for the director he's worked with the most, Tim Burton). That score was a revelation for those of us who were more familiar with Elfman's Oingo Boingo joints than his film music or whose only exposure to his original scores was the Boingo-esque music he composed for the Sledge Hammer! opening titles, Beetlejuice and Midnight Run (I hadn't seen Pee-wee's Big Adventure yet). The Batman score introduced to us a whole new side to the man behind "Dead Man's Party," "Little Girls" and the Weird Science theme.

The two-CD set will debut as an exclusive goodie at La-La Land's booth at next week's San Diego Comic-Con shortly before the label makes it available to everybody on July 27. The reissue will contain an hour and a half's worth of previously unreleased material. Even the brief library music-style cue Elfman wrote for the Joker's Smilex commercial will make it to the expanded edition. The tracks I'm looking forward to the most are rejected cues like an alternate version of the main title theme.

I wonder what the Goddamn Batman would have to say about this eagerly anticipated release on his Twitter page. He'd probably tweet (in two parts, of course), "Threw away Robin's Twilight soundtrack CDs from the CD changer to make room for the never-before-released workout music Elfman wrote for me. Robin, your Twilight CDs are melting inside the Batcave furnace if you need them."

The Batsuit, back in the days before someone with a nipple fetish ruined it.

Dr. Horrible vs. Batman

TV star Neil Patrick Harris clearly has musical talent, given his song-and-dance appearances on everything from The Emmys and Sesame Street to Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and even the 100th episode of How I Met Your Mother. Last fall, Cartoon Network series Batman: The Brave and the Bold recruited NPH to play Music Meister, a bad guy whose hypnotic voice forces everyone around him to sing and dance to his whim -- including Aquaman, Green Arrow, and Black Canary, plus an assortment of familiar baddies. They even released a soundtrack album.

Batman: the Brave & the Bold "Drives Us Bats" Music Video


Speaking of Dr. Horrible, here's when he interrupted the Emmy Awards ...


Related links:
Rock out with MANNIX! (Neil Diamond, Buffalo Springfield)
Unaired '60s BATGIRL pilot
Opening Theme: BATMAN 1966 w/ The Odd Couple
Opening Theme: SPIDER-MAN LIVE ACTION 1970s
Opening Theme: SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN
Opening Theme: SPIDER-MAN 1967

Mighty love: A look back at Ralph Bakshi's adventurous and long-lost Terrytoons reboot, now on DVD

This is a revised version of a June 5, 2009 post--updated to include mentions of the Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures complete series DVD that came out yesterday.

I never thought I'd see the day. Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi's hilarious late '80s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures reboot of Terrytoons' opera-singing rodent superhero finally got an extras-filled DVD release from CBS/Paramount, delighting animation fans and '80s kids like me who, back in '87 or '88, thought, "There's gotta be a better cartoon than Transformers, G.I. Joe and all the other lamer ones starring toys," and then caught Mighty Mouse: TNA one Saturday morning and said, "Hey man, we just found it."


The amusingly over-the-top and off-kilter Bakshi Animation fanfare that opened every 11-minute Mighty Mouse: TNA story signaled this was not another saccharine and sanctimonious cartoon kingdom like the ones inhabited by the Care Bears, Teddy Ruxpin, My Little Pony and the Little Clowns of Happytown. The Bakshi/John K. Mighty Mouse brought back some characters from the Terrytoons shorts (Pearl Pureheart, a less prominent Oil Can Harry) and introduced several new ones, like MM's lonely orphan buddy Scrappy Mouse, a bald villain named Petey Pate, the Batman spoof Bat-Bat--a precursor to both the Tick and Die Fledermaus--and the Cow, Bat-Bat's bovine nemesis.


The show also ditched the obnoxious opera singing from the old shorts and gave MM a secret identity for the first time. When MM wasn't busy rescuing Pearl, Scrappy or the other citizens of Mouseville, he disguised himself as a plain-voiced construction worker named Mike the Mouse, a new conceit that actually made MM a more relatable character. In the show's much more anarchic and absurdist second season, the writers apparently lost interest in the Mike persona and had MM appear as his caped self all the time, even when he got married to Pearl at a ceremony that was attended by all the other Terrytoons characters.

Nineties cartoons like Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs jumpstarted the whole meta-toon trend of poking fun at rival cartoons. But Mighty Mouse: TNA actually went meta years before--and with funnier and wilder results--in the classic "Don't Touch That Dial" episode, which launched an unprecedented attack on cookie-cutter '80s cartoons and viewers' short attention spans. The show's writers and animators admired the '40s and '50s Looney Tunes shorts (the Termite Terrace crew was in their comedic prime during those decades, but several of their shorts were also pretty racist-ass, to borrow a word from a recent tweet by Geo of Blue Scholars about Looney Tunes marathons). Throughout the series run, the Mighty Mouse: TNA staff succeeded in recapturing the irreverent spirit of those '40s and '50s cartoons, and in "Don't Touch That Dial" and an earlier ep, "Mighty's Benefit Plan," they couldn't resist expressing their hatred for the shabby state of mainstream animation at the time.

In the first-season ep "Mighty's Benefit Plan," the writers skewered one particular '80s cartoon, NBC's Alvin and the Chipmunks revival. They reimagined the Chipmunks as "Elwy and the Tree Weasels" (the band's biggest hit was called "Twitch and Writhe"), and in a series of gags they somehow Jedi mind-tricked CBS censors into ignoring, they turned David Seville into a disgusting-looking, Cheerios-craving pseudo-pedophile--an eerie foretelling of creepy teen pop Svengalis like Lou Pearlman and Joe Simpson.

Mr. E (Photo source: Jeffrey Pidgeon)

In season two, instead of targeting just one show, the writers decided to go after a whole bunch of shows with "Don't Touch That Dial." The ep follows a Sgt. Bilko's Cereal-eating, diaper-clad kid viewer as he channel-surfs after MM's latest adventure bores him. Evicted from his own show by the impatient kid's remote, MM gets zapped into lame cartoons that resemble The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Real Ghostbusters, Rocky and Bullwinkle (with Rocky Balboa instead of Rocky the Flying Squirrel) and Scooby-Doo (complete with canned laughter and a Scrappy-Doo-esque sidekick named "Mr. E," a mash-up of Mr. T and Ed Sullivan who tells MM to get away from his "really big shoe" and stop taunting his "ethnically mixed buddies"). Long before the writers of The Simpsons, Futurama, Arrested Development and 30 Rock were inserting gags that viewers have to freeze-frame, "Don't Touch That Dial" snuck in a great split-second shot of MM getting zapped into a nameless cartoon starring a mash-up of Popeye and a Smurf ("Popeye Smurf").

Not everything in Mighty Mouse: TNA worked. Scrappy, voiced by the late Dana Hill, the Patrick Troughton of Audrey Griswolds, was an annoying audience surrogate who became even more annoying when a cost-cutting Bakshi would string together clips of old Terrytoons shorts and have an offscreen Scrappy snark at the footage for the entire 11-minute segment. Mighty Mouse invented MST3King about a year before MST3K did! (When he was asked in a 1988 interview about the 11-minute montages of old Terrytoons clips, John K. said, "Why waste money on those things? Nobody's going to watch them anyway.") Though these segments weren't very funny--and listening to Scrappy's voice for 11 minutes straight is like being treated to a concerto by the Nails on Chalkboards Philharmonic Orchestra--they showed how much of an improvement the Bakshi/John K. reboot was over the original MM cartoons, which were rather sucky. No wonder the show's writers and animators turned to Looney Tunes instead of Terrytoons for comedic inspiration.

It's a shame this little-seen show has been remembered mostly for the uproar caused by the religious right--they thought they saw MM snort coke from a flower--and not often enough for moments like the ep that pitted MM against a giant, evil and nameless parade balloon that was clearly Pee-wee Herman (a funny reference to another CBS Saturday morning show at the time), the Elwy show and "Don't Touch That Dial," the most entertaining 11 minutes of small-screen animation from the '80s. Though it lasted only two seasons, Mighty Mouse: TNA was popular enough to spawn an early '90s Marvel comic that brought Bat-Bat, his sidekick Tick the Bug Wonder, the Cow and the show's other new characters to the funny pages.

For a while, a Mighty Mouse: TNA DVD seemed unlikely because according to Jeffrey Pidgeon, an artist who worked on the show, "the rights are owned by five different people who don't exactly like each other." I don't know who sorted out the legal mess, but I like to think a mouse in yellow tights was somehow involved.