You may never have heard of Thurl Ravenscroft, but you’re almost certainly heard him many, many times in your life. He was Tony the Tiger, the voice behind “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” and about a hundred Disney characters.
This is an interesting interview with him.
He died in 2005.
The cat is now officially out of the bag:
Quick thoughts:
Only theme here is that these are the last books I bought at Armadillocon:
Robin Williams on Craig Ferguson from 2011. That’s the title on the video. I wouldn’t make that big a claim, but it is pretty damn funny.
Here’s a nice book that may have two different fandoms scrambling to grab a copy:
Gaiman, Neil. Doctor Who: Nothing O’Clock. Borderlands Press/Gauntlet, 2018. First edition hardback, #109 of 500 signed, numbered copies, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket, still in publisher’s shrinkwrap. Bought from the publishers at the usual dealer discount.
Please note that I’ll have copies of this for sale in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog (currently in preparation).
Including the KTMA intro, which I had never seen before. It’s a chance to see and hear just how the intro has changed over the years.
This news just broke via MST3K Kickstarter mailing list: They’ve been reviewed for a 12th season by Netflix!
Comedian, actor and director Jerry Lewis has died at age 91.
It’s hard to evaluate the work of someone who absolutely dominated their field for an extended period of time and then almost immediately went out of fashion. Lewis was far and away the most successful comic actor of mid-century America, appearing in an extremely successful series of movies with Dean Martin, then having a successful solo career as both a actor and director.
But after The Nutty Professor, it was a long, long slide. Between 1963 and 1980, you had Rowen & Martins Laugh-In, Lenny Bruce, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Richard Pryor, Saturday Night Live and Robin Williams, yet in Hardly Working (intended as a “comeback” film), Lewis was doing the same tried physical shtick. (Roger Ebert called it “one of the worst movies ever to achieve commercial release in this country.”) In between he directed the amazingly ill-conceived and incomplete The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown (Lewis) entertaining children on the way to the gas chamber in Auschwitz. Surviving footage suggests it is every bit as awful and cringe-worthy as you’d imagine.
In the meantime, he taught an acclaimed directing class at USC attended by (among others) George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and was a familiar face for decades of television viewers for his Muscular Dystrophy Labor Day Telethon. And he turned in the occasional fine dramatic performance, such as in The King of Comedy.
For someone who smoked as much as he did, had as many health issues, and battled prescription drug abuse, 91 is a very rip old age indeed.
Here’s a very early footage of Lewis and Martin from what I think may be the very first MDA telethon:
Here he is making his appearance as nutty professor alter ego Buddy Love:
And here’s a long, interesting piece on Lewis I linked to once before.
Here’s a blast from the past: A young Joel Hodgson appearing on David Letterman before creating Mystery Science Theater 3000.
No wonder Letterman had him on: they both share some of the same goofy Midwestern sense of humor…
Blimp catches fire and crashes at the U.S. open.
Now let me apologize for even mentioning golf…