“Wait, Rang-A-Tang, that building’s on fire, too. Don’t take him there!”
Blue Ribbon Comics #2
MLJ Magazines, Inc (December, 1939)
I don’t know if it’s the anthology nature or lack of insanity, but some of these are getting hard to remember because I do so many every Friday. Then again, most of these characters are hard to remember and you begin to realize why they never stood the test of time. I looked up last issue’s review and I was kind of neutral. Hopefully this second issue does a better job. Let’s dive in and see.
Notice that, while Gary often comments on the culture war and how it affects sci-fi and fantasy, he notes that being “woke” is only part of the problem. We need to acknowledge this more, because the other mistakes Hollywood has made are part of the reason the activists took over so much of pop culture, following those who didn’t care about the source material because of their own ego and snobbery with little to no concern for the people who made popular the brands they usurp or why it was popular. If that wasn’t an issue, the culture war wouldn’t be bleeding into stories.
The original Tron movie was created at a time when computers were still a new and scary thing. So it was a story in which a man was digitized and brought into a computer world. The video game Tron 2.0 and a tie-in game, Killer App, would go there again. Tron: Legacy would introduce The Grid, a virtual world that made more sense now that computers are such a part of our normal lives, and it would be the focus of the short-lived and incomplete animated series Tron: Uprising. This and other tie-in media has created a franchise that has survived by being sparse.
Now we have a third movie coming up. From the trailer, it looks like Tron: Ares either has Clu winning or someone winning in his place by getting the digital armies of The Grid into our world and causing mayhem. There isn’t much of a story available now, but let’s take a look.
“This BW site is really cool!” (Hey, how often do I do that?)
Collective Of Heroes
Free Comic Book Day 2015
From what I can tell this is a digital book promoting an aggregate site for different superhero webcomics. I would link to the comics previewed here, but the list isn’t very well maintained. Some of the links don’t work, one went to a completely different comic, and the lineup in the comic includes things no longer on the site. So this will just be a look at the various comics previewed here.
Police Squad was a short-lived parody of 70s cop shows, with TV Guide specifically calling out the works of Jack Webb (Dragnet and the original Adam-12) and Quinn Martin, and there’s a lot of the later’s intro flavor in the show’s. Wikipedia credits The M Squad, and Felony Squad. You can see the pattern, I guess, but I have not seen either show. I got to see Police Squad on A&E back when it was still standing for Arts & Entertainment, and it’s rather funny. They went on to make the Airplane movie parodies. In 1988 the show was revisited in The Naked Gun: From The Files Of Police Squad, though the two sequels focused more on “Naked Gun” than “Police Squad” for titles. The movies brought Leslie Nielsen, but no Alan North, who was still alive, or Rex Hamilton, who passed in 1985. (No clue if he was at the theater at the time.) The only other returning actors were Ed Williams as forensic scientist Ted Olsen and the so tall his head was never on frame Ronald Taylor as Al.
The movies renewed interest in the show, but after Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult the series went back to obscurity, though not to the point it had been. (Personally I couldn’t get past the…clinic scene. If you saw the movie, you know what I mean. If not, I envy you.) With Neilsen having passed away we get a new Frank Drebin for a new generation, the son of the original following in his father’s footsteps. And given the world this franchise takes place in, they’re probably clown shoes. Let’s watch the trailer and ask if Liam Neeson is young enough to be Leslie Nielsen’s son or if the similar sounding names was too much to resist.
BW Media Spotlight 
BW’s Daily Video> How Hollywood Destroyed Fandom
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Notice that, while Gary often comments on the culture war and how it affects sci-fi and fantasy, he notes that being “woke” is only part of the problem. We need to acknowledge this more, because the other mistakes Hollywood has made are part of the reason the activists took over so much of pop culture, following those who didn’t care about the source material because of their own ego and snobbery with little to no concern for the people who made popular the brands they usurp or why it was popular. If that wasn’t an issue, the culture war wouldn’t be bleeding into stories.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on April 11, 2025 in Comic Spotlight, Movie Spotlight, Streaming Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged commentary, Doctor Who, geek culture, Nerdrotic, stories and culture.
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