The big alley

So it's San Diego Comic-Con time again, huh? Screw the overcrowded and stress-inducing Comic-Con. Here at A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog is an Artists' Alley where, like the Artists' Alley down at SDCC, you can find lots of stunning-looking art, but the alley here is a little nicer. It's not crowded, it doesn't smell as strange and there aren't any guys wearing those stupid-looking mandals because they think America wants to see their ugly toes on national TV. (For Christ's sake, you're a grown-ass man. Dress like one. They're called shower shoes for a reason: they're meant only for the shower. The only people who should be wearing open-toed shoes are ladies and Spartacus extras.)

During the week of last year's Comic-Con, the AFOS blog posted several great examples of TV show-inspired artwork. Here's some more standout TV-related art.

30 Rock/League of Extraordinary Gentlemen mash-up by Alex Ross. I'm looking forward to the inevitable mash-up of Warren Ellis' Ministry of Space and Astronaut Jones.

Return of the Jedi/Community "For a Few Paintballs More" episode mash-up by Victor Perfecto.

Daria by Ming Doyle.

Fozzie Bear stops by Marc Maron's garage, by Skottie Young. I enjoyed Maron's controversial exchange with Dan Savage about Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum on Real Time with Bill Maher last week.

Detective Nick Yemana from Barney Miller by Pete Emslie.

The Wire as a Hanna-Barbera cartoon by Paul Sizer.

Omar from The Wire by Steve Lieber, illustrator of one of my favorite Greg Rucka creations, the Whiteout comic.

McNulty and Bunk in a Wire/Simpsons mash-up by Lieber.

D'Angelo Barksdale's classic chess lesson scene in another Wire/Simpsons mash-up by Lieber.

Boondocks/Simpsons mash-up by Nattalia Alonso.

The 11th Doctor and Amy Pond from Doctor Who by H. Caldwell Tanner.

Doctor Who/Calvin and Hobbes mash-up by James Hance.

Doctor Who/Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! mash-up by Bob Canada.

Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends by Bill Walko. The Amazing Friends cartoon didn't have the greatest animation. But it was lots of fun, whereas director Marc Webb's Amazing Spider-Man reboot, which dropped its teaser trailer this week, appears to be the opposite of that.

Mad Men/X-Men mash-up by Ray Ocampo.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine by Ocampo.

Futurama/Transformers mash-up by spacecoyote.

One of two covers for a Honey West/Kolchak: The Night Stalker crossover in Moonstone Books' Phases of the Moon miniseries, by Thad Rhodes. Private eye Honey West first appeared in a series of pulp novels by G.G. Fickling (a pseudonym for the husband-and-wife duo of Skip and Gloria Fickling) and was played by the late Anne Francis in the '60s detective show of the same name.

Sanford & Son by Dan Zettwoch.

My favorite Ron Swanson expression from "The Bubble" (the Parks and Recreation episode where Chris Traeger makes some changes to Ron's office and Ron is clearly thrilled about them), by Phil Noto.

Thundarr the Barbarian by Noto. This cartoon destroyed Earth in its opening titles. I saw the world get torn apart by Ruby-Spears every Saturday morning when I was four years old, and I've been fucked up ever since. Thanks, Ruby-Spears!

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: The John Gregory Orchestra, "It Takes a Thief"

Song: "It Takes a Thief" by The John Gregory Orchestra
Released: 1972
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: British bandleader/arranger John "Chaquito" Gregory's cover of Dave Grusin's slick It Takes a Thief theme lacks the funky bass playing and urgent percussion that I love so much about Grusin's third-season arrangement of the theme. But Gregory's rendition, which can be streamed here, is the only cover of the theme that's available (it's also the only recording of the theme that's available), so it'll do.

The It Takes a Thief theme is my favorite Grusin tune. It's the perfect opener for a '60s espionage procedural I've often found to be more enjoyable than most '60s American spy shows because it has a criminal as its hero, which is more interesting to me than the company man types who were frequently the leads in '60s spy shows. Plus, as Alexander Mundy, Robert Wagner was the epitome of cool and quite skilled with the show's moments of light, not-too-campy-like-the-worst-seasons-of-U.N.C.L.E. comedy. This ease with comedy was a skill that the future Number Two later put to great use when he literally made a mess of his debonair image in the funniest thing he ever did, the 1989 SNL "Sloppy Eater" sketch (Parks and Recreation has got to find a way for Rob Lowe to work in his amusing and dead-on Wagner impression, which he's done in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and on talk shows).

In 2006, Universal announced that Will Smith was attached to a big-screen version of It Takes a Thief, which hasn't been made yet. Nah, I can't see him playing a smooth thief like Mundy. Smith is more entertaining when he's playing a fish-out-of-water hero like in the original Men in Black and Hancock and is less entertaining when he tries to be suave. Mundy is more of a Taye Diggs or Idris Elba role or a role for Michael Weatherly, whose onscreen dad on NCIS happens to be Wagner himself.

Pushing for more Asian Americans as leads on screen or in fiction is an uphill battle that I continue to be passionate about, so why not think outside the box and get Sung Kang from Justin Lin's Fast Five, who looked like he was channeling Mundy in that surprisingly good heist flick, to play him? Just rename him Alexander Moon.

Then again, why make an It Takes a Thief movie when the USA show White Collar is currently doing a better job at channeling Wagner's old show than whatever the movie version would have attempted to do?

Catchin' Rec

Last March, the Parks and Recreation opening titles got Return of the Jedi-ized by a Parks and Rec fan. Now someone else has redone the titles in a big way. As part of promoting tonight's return of the much-missed Parks and Rec (it feels like it's been gone for ages--the extended absence was mostly due to star Amy Poehler's pregnancy), cast member Aziz Ansari has dropped an amusing remix.



The music in the Parks and Rec cast's CollegeHumor video is an actual hip-hop track from last March that sampled Gaby Moreno and Vincent Jones' great little Parks and Rec opening title theme ("Hampden Parks" by e-dubble).

TV arty

Screw the overcrowded and stress-inducing San Diego Comic-Con (which begins today). Here at A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog is an Artists' Alley that's far less crowded or funny-smelling than the one down there. It consists of the niftiest TV show-inspired artwork I've found on the Web.


Treme by illustrator and Fistful of Soundtracks listener Owen Freeman (for a WaPo article about the show).


Phil Dunphy from Modern Family, Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation and Michael Scott from The Office by Freeman (for a WaPo critique of mockumentary sitcoms).


Dr. Girlfriend from The Venture Bros. by Darwyn Cooke. [Via Almost Darwyn Cooke's Blog]


Futurama/X-Men mash-up by gottabecarl.


The Simpsons by Lelpel.


Spaced/Scott Pilgrim vs. the World mash-up (made through the Scott Pilgrim movie site's avatar creator) by Dark Bunny Tees.


"Sushi Off a Friend," an A-Team/Greatest American Hero mash-up by Scott Campbell.


Leverage by Kweli.


The 11th Doctor and Amy Pond from Doctor Who by Blair D. Shedd, one of the illustrators of IDW's Doctor Who comics.


Twilight Zone by Ken Garduno.


Twilight Zone's "To Serve Man" ep by Garduno.


The Colbert Report by Sean Pryor, with Colbert surrounded by Douglas Rushkoff (far left), Jon Stewart and the recently deceased Harvey Pekar (from Pekar's SMITH Magazine comic "Kibbitzin' About How Life Got Incorporated").

My beef

Scrubs was one of my favorite shows for its first few seasons on NBC. You gotta love a show that gave us an episode like the tokenism-mocking "My Fifteen Minutes" or "My Screw Up" and had the balls to pull off 916-CALL-TURK (when I dialed up that number, I got Bill Lawrence himself and then during another call, "Nervous Guy"). During its first season on ABC (which actually produced Scrubs since its 2001 debut on NBC and was so pleased with its ratings last year that it ordered another season), Scrubs experienced a creative resurgence. Denise (Eliza Coupe), a.k.a. "Jo" (because her butchiness reminded J.D. of Jo from The Facts of Life), is a great addition to the show.

While I'm somewhat glad to see the slightly rebooted Scrubs back on the air, I wish the show delayed J.D.'s return. "My Finale" was such a perfect farewell to Zach Braff and J.D. that seeing Braff immediately again as a lead (but not the lead due to the emphasis on the new medical school setting) undermines that episode. I wouldn't have minded a Scrubs (or as I like to call it, AfterSCRUBS) with Donald Faison as the lead because he's such a funny presence as Turk and because that would have slightly fixed my major problem with AfterSCRUBS so far: the lack of diversity.


I always enjoyed seeing the likes of Charles Rahi Chun, Lela Lee and a pre-Heroes Masi Oka pop up on Scrubs. Last season, Sacred Heart had three Indian interns. That was especially cool to see. I know Aziz Ansari is a busy man (and Tom on Parks and Recreation is a far more interesting douchey character than Ed), but they couldn't bring back Sunny, the Indian girl who wasn't afraid of the Janitor and made out with Jo to mock J.D. and Turk's guy love? I liked her despite her eternal perkiness. The Sacred Heart med school is all-white now? Sacred Heart Hospital wasn't this white. Yeah, I know there were Asian extras at the school, but c'mon, man.

And after all these years of medical shows, I have yet to see a Filipino nurse or doctor as a regular (the Filipina receptionist from Elliott Gould's E/R--"Stay back of the white line!"--doesn't count). We fucking run Kaiser, so why the hell are we missing from these shows?