The comic world was hit with sad news over the weekend with the announcement of famed artist Ernie Colon (this is from one of his earlier works, as is the featured image for this article) had lost his battle with cancer at 88. Condolences to his family and friends. I think the latest work of his I reviewed was Richie Rich: Rich Rescue in the early 2000s so he stayed working a long time. You have to admire him for finding what he loved and keeping with it.
Remember, the book is in public domain. Download or read the ebook online legally and for free at Project Gutenberg, Google Books or the Internet Archive, or check out the audiobook from LibriVox. You can also use a print copy. In either case my copy may not match up with yours chapter-wise. Follow along with the very-long subtitle. For this chapter:
Giving an Account of Robin Hood and His Adventure With the King’s Foresters. Also Telling How His Band Gathered Around Him His Good Right-Hand Man, the Famous Little John.
The preface of this book has Pyle warning the readers that this is not a fantasy land but a land of fancy. If you don’t want to see a fun story of people making merry, then close the book and go do something in the mundane world. I can’t speak for the 1800s but considering the cynical concept of “realism” that permeates even Robin Hood stories as of late you have to have guts to make that declaration. Well, since fun stories with happy people battling evil forces is what I go to fiction for let us see if we get that here. The prologue in this book is like my last one, the length of a chapter, so we’ll be spending our first installment just on that as we set-up the story to follow.
“Sorry, Batman, but I owe him money.”
Batman: Gotham Adventures #41
DC Comics (October, 2001)
“A Tale Of Joe”
WRITER: Scott Peterson
PENCILER: Tim Levins
INKER: Terry Beatty
COLORIST: Lee Loughridge
LETTERER: Albert T. de Guzman
ASSISTANT EDITORS: Harvey Richards & Nachie Castro
EDITORS: Jan Hilty & Bob Schreck
Some of you older folks may remember Mumbly, the leader of the villainous “Really Rottens” from Laff-A-Lympics. Except he was a hero on his own show, The Mumbly Cartoon Show where I think he was a secret agent or something. The intro calls him a detective. Anyway, here’s that intro.
I stumbled upon this (I saw one of the shorts maybe once years ago but not the opening) and recognized the intro rather quickly.
Hanna-Barbera of course got their start doing cartoons like Tom & Jerry for MGM, and obtained the characters when the movie company shut down their animation division. (Now they’re owned by WarnerMedia after Ted Turner’s Time Warner bought the Hanna-Barbera library for his Cartoon Network and AT&T ended up recently buying Time Warner.) This show aired in 1975 while Mumbly’s show aired in 1976. Could they really not come up with a new theme song? The look of the intro even looks like The Tom & Jerry Show‘s intro in the first few second. Now I wonder if any other shows reused that intro?
This wasn’t worth a full article so I thought it was something different for the morning post.
There’s more to entertainment than movies, TV, web shows pretending to be TV, and the occasional music.
I’m a bit late tonight because a party I thought was next week was yesterday and it messed me up a bit since I’m still not on a proper normal schedule yet. I didn’t get to do the Clutter Report project I wanted to this week so I’m shooting for next week. As for the title, they do have limits on what they can discuss and show on the program. Broadcast rules, you know. And yes, they still talk about the usual topics as well in this scenario.
Tomorrow we begin our Chapter By Chapter look at The Merry Adventures Of Robin Hood, and I will include links to the public domain download and audiobook in each installment so you can join in. I would love to hear other peoples’ thoughts on the stuff I review, both agree and disagree. It happens so seldom. On the plus side I’ve only had to block a conversation once, but it was also the only conversation and went way off topic for some reason.
We’re also getting close to the end of this year’s Free Comic Book Day haul. I missed this weeks so I’m going to do an extra FCBD review next Sunday to get caught up. By now Today’s Comic is practically “Yesterday’s” Comic so until I can get regular new comics I want to just get back to old stuff. I will be commenting on the latest rumor from Forbes about DC comics if you’ve heard of it. If you haven’t, then I’ll tell you about it this week or you can do a search and we’ll talk about it then. Have a good week everyone!
Let’s have a little fun tonight. There are two versions of LEGO movies out there. One is the theatrical “universe” that builds off of the concepts of the theatrical LEGO movies. The other is based more on parodies and the toys themselves rather than a world being imagined by a kid playing with LEGOs, which worked in the first The LEGO Movie, didn’t do so well in the spinoffs, and I haven’t seen the second main movie to comment. I kind of prefer the LEGO direct to video and TV versions of the LEGO parodies since they’re straight up parodies of the source material. LEGO Batman: The Movie is better in my opinion than the theatrical The LEGO Batman Movie.
Since LEGO has a license for toys based on both DC and Marvel properties they’ve done specials based on those properties. For Disney XD they’ve made a series of half-hour specials featuring the Marvel heroes. Tonight I’m bringing you (if it’s still up) LEGO Marvel Spider-Man: Vexed By Venom, a special that features the plastic web-head dealing with Green Goblin (played by former Spidey VA Josh Keaton) and Venom, who want to destroy the city. He will have help from LEGO Ghost Spider, but will that be enough? Also we get giant robots because giant robots are awesome. Enjoy!
Why doesn’t Power Pack have a show on Disney XD?
Full disclosure going into this. I’ve never really been interested in the Thor series and only find the character interesting when appearing in something that does interest me. This includes the various Marvel Cinematic Universe movies versus appearing in the Avengers movies. I have nothing against them and I’m sure great stories abound. I’m just not interested in them.
I am, however, a proponent of getting an adaptation and the characters in general correct for the sake of the audience. I believe you can please the fanbase without losing a new audience. It takes some effort but it is possible. It has been done in the past, but we have a generation of creators who don’t seem interested in anything beyond the base concept. This is, as I keep reminding folks, not a slam on the quality of the work itself. My usual example, the Battlestar Galactica remake, was a quality show but a terrible adaptation. Is the concept faithful to the original story.
From what I’ve heard Thor: Ragnarok was a fun movie but got so many of the characters wrong from the source material, and it certainly didn’t match the tone. This is not a complaint about director Taika Waititi, who is now set to make the next movie, Thor: Love And Thunder. A lot of people praised the movie for being more fun than the other two in the series, but it came at the cost of adaptation errors. The only one I can confirm is the Grandmaster making quips and being a bit out there. Tonally it was not right, or so goes the complaints I’ve heard. Naturally the fans of the character that has been around and enjoyed since the 1960s were not happy with the tonal shifts. If the first two movies were too dark this one was too light, and Waititi’s only benefit was being a better director than Joel Schumacher when he tried to do the same to Burton’s Batman.
A series of tweets collected by Bounding Into Comics highlights Waiti’s mindset going into this and his reaction to the fans. I’ve seldom see someone try so hard to make things worse since She-Ra & The Princesses Of Power told Teen Titans Go! to hold her root beer (they’re all underage to be drinking) but we’ve seen live-action Hollywood’s reaction to the source material versus their own vision. I’m not here to drop bricks on the director just because I disagree with his perspective. I think the benefit of not being a Marvel Thor fan allows me to have a cooler head about this. However, if fans are going to debate a director’s approach we need to understand where they’re coming from…before telling them they’re wrong.
The Clutter Reports (my other site) Atop The Fourth Wall Crisis On Earth Prime Lean Into Artcast Bully Says “Comics Oughta Be Fun” Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery
Cartoon Hero’s Lair SF Debris Four Million Years Later
