Time To Grow Up, Toys R Us "kids"..

You could say the writing was on the wall when their magnificent Times Square location was closed 3 years ago, but it's now officially the end of the Toys R Us retail chain, following the slowest liquidation sale I ever did see. It really did feel like the last two months they were offering everything at only 10% discount.

Did I get to buy anything good?

Well, it's not like that ferris wheel was ever available to own..

I brought the "Toys R Us Exclusive!" Funkopop Fraggle Rock figure of Sprocket the dog, because it just looks fantastic (at 20% off) and the DVD of Woody Woodpecker: The Movie (at 10% off)..that was in the early days..I had a hunch that by the time they got to 50%, I would be staring at empty shelves. They had an iron grip on the Lego merchandise - I wouldn't be surprised if they just boxed those up and shipped them to some outlet mall chain or Family Dollar or whatever. I was curious about buying the updated version of Clue that replaced Miss White with Dr. Orchid, but I wasn't committed to keeping track of anything. Prior to this liquidation, I had gotten into those Funko "Mystery Minis" mini-figures of characters from The Disney Afternoon and wound up with three Negaduck figurines.

Toys R Us was never particularly good at sales...it was only by comparison to the mom-and-pop toy stores, the Kmarts, the Targets, the comic shops...then it looked like they offered better deals by a narrow margin. Plus, unlike the comic shops and mom-and-pops, you could get your money back or make exchanges without difficulty. I don't think the mom-and-pop shops will re-emerge as the main place to shop for toys and games, but there's something about Toys R Us' pricing  strategies that eventually kept them from meeting their quota in the wake of increasing options to shop online or go to other stores. As a kid, I remember Kay Bee Toys and Lionel's Kiddie City toy stores were more popular because they had better prices on popular toys and video games, whereas Toys R Us usually only had lower prices on racecar test tracks and plastic toy dinette sets. They did have good prices on Hot Wheels and Matchbox toy cars; tourists would buy them a lot, as they were actually more expensive in countries outside the U.S.

Because the name of the store is such a recognizable brand across the globe, I wouldn't be surprised if the brand was acquired and the stores were revived, albeit in a smaller scale, possibly as a chain of upscale boutique toy shops..yeah, that's certainly not the same, plus it depends on whether or not the marketplace for upscale plastic toys, but I'm picturing something that can survive between the gentrified boutique and seedy-looking videogame stores.

Should it only be about selling toys? With Kids R Us and Babies R Us it looked like they were testing the waters before just sticking with the Babies department before the 90's ended, but I suppose the word "Toys" in the name kept them from thinking outside the box and feeling like they were overreaching if they were to add a "Home Furnishings"/"Intimate Apparel"/"Food" department...then it would really look like a Kmart.

And bring back Geoffrey the giraffe...they'd been kinda non-committal by keeping giraffes in their marketing material for the last decade or so, but it always seemed like Geoffrey had been retired, yet he was prominent during the chain's heyday...food for thought.

So...have I watched the Woody Woodpecker movie?

To be continued...

Froggy Went A-Discordin'...

"...because that's the way the boss would want it."

Steve Whitmire's debut as the voice and puppeteer behind Kermit the Frog was in an hour-long TV special, The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson, which aired a few months after Jim Henson passed away and was obviously meant as a turning point to allow what had become a franchise to move forward, firstly by introducing a new Kermit. 27 years later, you could say that it has...and hasn't.

The story of how Whitmire became Kermit is, to me,  just as sketchy as the story of  how and why he was officially fired this past weekend by the Disney Company, which owns the Muppets. I always assumed that none of Henson's peers at the time - Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt (who was actually in ill health and passed away in 1992) - were keen on taking over as Kermit...and Steve Whitmire stepped forward. He always got the body language of the character right..but the voice and characterization veered more towards characters that Whitmire created and was adept at playing: Rizzo the Rat, Wembley Fraggle, Bean Bunny, Jake the polar bear. It certainly was necessary for him to reinvent Kermit a little to get a natural performance out of the puppet, so Kermit did become a slightly different character..maybe more neurotic, a little melancholy..kind of quiet...more of a milquetoast. I would say Jim was more adept at improv, which is why Kermit became a popular guest on TV talk shows...so, yeah, whenever you saw the Muppets appear on TV specials in the 1990s and 2000s, it was grounded in memories of the past. Whitmire's Kermit tended to just..run out of things to say that sounded like things Kermit might say.

And that's why I enjoyed the early episodes of The Muppets - the season-long sitcom that experimented with bringing the Muppets up to 2015 with all the necessary subtlety of a sledgehammer. The early showrunners aimed high and got burned when the ratings were lackluster and parents complained, perhaps expecting primetime episodes of Sesame Street and getting something edgier. For a few months, it felt like the Muppets were back...and then it was over.

My favorite characters of Steve's were Bean Bunny and Sprocket, the dog from Fraggle Rock. Rizzo was often paired with Dave Goelz's Gonzo, and that pairing made for a fun double act that made up for the absence of the Kermit & Piggy, Kermit & Fozzie scenes in most of the Muppet productions that followed. In fact, there's a lot more of Gonzo and Rizzo in later Muppet productions from the 90s. They've tried to recreate those routines recently, now with Eric Jacobson as Fozzie and Piggy. Jacobson's Miss Piggy sounds like it needs more practice, but his Fozzie Bear is perfect.

Reading between the lines, I say this shake-up happened because the Muppets were underperforming in comparison to the other Disney acquisitions - Lucasfilm, ABC, Marvel, Pixar - and a scapegoat needed to made. 27 years later and now you agree with the people online who thought his frog wasn't on-point with Henson's? Was it because he was the seasoned veteran among a bunch of newcomers and that respect allowed you to turn a blind eye to make any aboutface change..?

I do remember it being particularly odd that Kermit was relegated to an occasional supporting role in "Muppets Tonight" and was replaced with a character named Clifford as the show's emcee. That was the 90's incarnation of "The Muppet Show". It didn't work because it featured mostly new Muppet characters that had no built-in fanbase. Where's the figurehead? Was that an early indicator of a lack of confidence in Steve's Kermit? I could be wrong..but the statements made by Henson family members over the last few days imply a sense of relief after a long slow burn; Whitmire had long fallen out of favor with them..and they were happy to support their corporate parent company with the decision.

I need to rewatch Muppet's Most Wanted. I can't remember if the doppelganger frog, Constantine, played by Matt Vogel, did an approximation of Kermit's voice in any scenes, or was just with the Boris Badenov, "Moos end square-rel"-talk thoughout. Ah, the irony. Vogel is the new Kermit after playing an imposter Kermit. And his debut is coming soon on social media.

Confidentiality...I believe a lot of Kermit's best moments weren't really on The Muppet Show, because he was usually playing the straight man to the zanier characters, but on Sesame Street where he really shined, dressing up like Inspector Clouseau and buying "Kermit the Froog" t-shirts and having odd chats with Grover, who would call him "Froggy-Baby". Those segments used to be rerun on Sesame Street constantly up until the 2000s, when the Disney acquisition put a stop to it, but I wouldn't mind seeing some of that Kermit return.

It's not that easy, being a corporate mascot...ask the mouse.

"Do You Have Miss Piggy?"

Wes Anderson should try directing a Muppet movie. The thought came to me after watching The Grand Budapest Hotel  and Muppets Most Wanted... then staring at random images from both films...they're the same. Anderson's films have always had an unreal, caricatured look to them (with the exception of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, because they were made on a shoestring)...

Kermit as Ralph Fiennes,  Miss Piggy as Tilda Swinton,  Fozzie as Owen Wilson, Sam Eagle as Bill Murray, The Great Gonzo as Adrian Brody, Walter the Whatnot as that bellboy, Tina Fey as Cloris Leachman - I could go on, but then this joke would get old.

I enjoyed both films, by the way. I couldn't help but notice that the Muppets' target demo may be all-ages, but I noticed the audience I was sitting with in the theatre were all adults - including the fifty-something gentleman who brought an Animal plush doll with him...makes sense, since the theatre in question (the AMC theatre at Times Square) offered showings of Muppets Most Wanted AFTER 10 pm...

I wonder... did he have Miss Piggy?

The Terrific 10 of 2013

Here we are -  a list of ten neat "things"  I liked in 2013, all funnybook/pop culture related/available in better-than-average comic shops, with emphasis on "things"  because the #1 on this list was not a comic book, yet it was the most "comic book" of all. So, without further  ado...

10. Tales of A Sixth-Grade Muppet: When Pigs Fly -  coinciding with the release of The Muppets and subsequent revival of that franchise's film franchise was a series of novels written and illustrated by Kirk Scroggs  (in the style of the Diary of A Wimpy Kid  series) about the Muppets consoling a boy after he is suddenly transformed into a Muppet...and still has to go to school anyway. There were four books in all, but the final installment is the best, because it jettisoned the sitcom kiddie novel trappings in favor of high fantasy - most of it is set inside the USS Swinetrek ... the ship from the Pigs In Space sketches on The Muppet Show. Suddenly the series feels like a Roald Dahl book...and that's a good thing.

9. House of Fun #1 - Evan Dorkin gave his humor comic Dork!  a name change when he moved it to Dark Horse, naming it after his & wife Sarah Dyer's website, HouseofFun.com, and adding color! Perennial favorites Milk and Cheese are also present, along with a new Eltingville Club story and recurring sitcom-spoof The Murder Family, plus a lot of great stuff.

8. Superior Spider-Man #5: I'm happy to say that I've been enjoying the adventures of "Otter" (Doctor Octopus swapping minds with presumably dead Peter Parker and assuming the latter's life and superhero identity for the past year of Spider-Man comics,  hence the change-of-adjective in the book's title), largely because Marvel's stance on who Peter Parker/Spider-Man is  for the last decade has resulted in comics that didn't interest me, but this stuff, with Otto as Spider-Man...feels like the Spider-Man comics I read when I was a kid in the late-80s and 1990s...and in that sense, this is classic Spider-Man - not Steve Ditko or John Romita Sr., but David Micheline & Todd McFarlane, Howard Mackie & John Romita Jr., Todd Dezago & Mike Weiringo, Tom Defalco with Pat Olliffe & Ron Franz, and J.M. Dematteis with Sal Buscema or Luke Ross. YES...that was my Spider-Man: decadent,  domesticated, happily married  (Yes! He was happy!) not particularly accessible,  but the only time Spider-Man was accessible (in my humble opinion) was his origin story in Amazing Fantasy #15 .
Anyway, I chose issue #5 of Superior  for this list because it's an early standout issue - that cover alone lets you know the kid gloves are off fairly early in the game; writer Dan Slott's greatest accomplishment throughout this past year was to present "Otter" as a fully-realized character and not a placeholder.  I look forward to seeing how this storyline wraps up (as hinted) in the Goblin Nation storyline.

7. The All-New Ghostbusters #1: rumors of a new sequel to Ghostbusters have hinted at a lot of things, most prominent the rumor that a new team of GB's will appear alongside the old guard ( I heard Jonah Hill and Emma Stone have been cast ). Anyway, IDW had some fun with these rumors by relaunching their Ghostbusters comic with a new #1, featuring a new team made up of recurring characters that had been introduced in recent storylines, led by Janine the receptionist for a half-dozen issues before the "good ol' boys" came back. I'm sure Dan Ackroyd and Ivan Reitman have their own ideas, but this was fun.

6. Doctor Who vol. 2 #12 : this issue marked the conclusion to "Sky Jacks", a fun four part arc that brought Clara Oswald into IDW's Doctor Who comic book series. Those among you familiar with the concept of the Tardis - the Doctor's "bigger-on-the-inside" time machine, will REALLY love this one, since the show doesn't really have the budget to show a WW2 bomber flying inside it. :)

5. The House of Mystery: my blog, my list, my rules - the public library had all 8 volumes of the DC Vertigo revival of DC Comics' code-approved  Silver Age horror series, written mostly by Matthew Sturges (with Bill Willingham contributing material here & there) from a few years back. It starts off rocky, with the tone of contributions by Willingham clashing with Sturges' storylines before the latter takes over writing all the material,  allowing it to find its groove before the announcement of its cancellation forces a rushed conclusion. I noticed how (or maybe it's just me seeing things) Sturges scripts seemed to switch influences midstream from Joss Wheddon to Russell T. Davies and ending with Steven Moffat. Very timely. I loved it. I DO strongly recommend you skip Willingham's story in the premiere issue about the girl getting pregnant with the mosquito boyfriend...what was Bill smoking that night when he thought that up?

4. Superheroes! Capes, Cowls and The Creation of Comic Book Culture : you may recall a post from last fall, in which I reviewed a documentary on PBS about comic book superheroes (DC & Marvel  Comics superheroes,  mostly) and I thought the thesis inferred from watching it was that you didn't need to read the comics to enjoy the characters, because they had become subsumed within mainstream pop culture, perhaps in a cynical way...and they left out stuff! :)  Laurence Maslon, who worked on that documentary and cowrote this  companion book, had read my review, and left his comments,  including a suggestion that I check out this book - I'm glad I did. The book presents a stronger case for the film's argument that the genre has become ingrained within our pop culture landscape...and I believe that's because the authors - Maslon with Michael Kantor - offer new voices. With the exception of Jim Steranko talking about his work on Nick Fury, and Neal Adams (taking a break from defending his work on Batman: Odyssey , for a change), I had heard a lot of those guys in the film on older interviews giving the same answers they always give in documentaries and books/magazines about comics, so the programme was likely a success among newer audiences. This book was well-written and deserves a place on your bookshelf.

3. The Joker: The Clown Prince of Crime: Miracles happen. Small miracles, at least. Who knew that DC Comics would actually release all 9 issues of The Joker's late-70s solo series in a handy, affordable (!) trade paperback - in color!!  This was the treat of the year.

2. Jim Henson: The Biography: Brian Jay Jones's excellent book about the man who created the Muppets is fantastic and heartbreaking at the same time; the last 1/3 of the book reads like a workaholic's fever dream, as Jones chronicles every single project that Henson was working on during the last few years of his life and how his multitasking had spread him too thin creatively, resulting in a string of flops (The Jim Henson Hour in particular,  which is sad, because I do remember watching that show and missing it when t was yanked). If there was never any doubt about how creative the man was, Jones does shed light on his faults, perhaps eerily foreshadowing his untimely demise due to a bacterial infection that may have been preventable,  because, as I insist that you should read and see, the man was always busy. He was a genius - he could never stay idle and content where he was; he had an entrepreneurial spirit and optimism that kept him going...even when his final days were spent as the eye of a tornado that he thought he was calming by adding another gust of wind.  Sad, brilliant,  joyous and heartbreaking - the epitome of "gone too soon".

1. Doctor Who: The Day of The Doctor: THIS ...was the best "thing" of 2013. I really didn't care about what Marvel was doing, or DC Comic's 3D "wiggle" covers or Zombo the Clown (Jeff Lester's favorite) or Dark Horse's Battlestar Galactica-esque interpretation of George Lucas's pre-1st draft scribbles of "The Star Wars"...and nobody could've anticipated just how fantastic Doctor Who's 50th anniversary special would be. I've already written about the special before...but I may have neglected to add that this was the best thing of 2013.

And now you know.  :)

The Nifty 9 of 2012

It's time for a list of the Nifty 9 - reading material you can find in a better-than-o.k. comic shop that premiered this year:

(In no particular order...)

1.  Jim Henson's Tale of Sand:   I found out about this book after it won the Will Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel. This GN, an adaptation of an unproduced screenplay written by Henson and Jerry Juhl, is a psychedelic romp through Monument Valley in which an average everyman tries to match wits with his better-prepared, urbane doppelganger while on a quest to "follow the map", have a cigarette, win the woman of his dreams, dodge the mad sheik's army, stay out of the director's shot, be the town hero and cross the dessert while heeding the warning:  "don't trust the map."

2. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye #1: the quick-changing robots get the Justice League International treatment, beginning with this issue. Those of you only familiar with these characters (yes, characters) via the Michael Bay films will experience shell shock.

3. Case Closed - Volume #42: this manga series about a teen detective who turns into a kid detective and has to slowly solve the mystery of the clandestine organization behind his transformation, has been going strong for over 15 years, even if any hope for futher episodes of the anime spin-off being brought over to the USA seems unlikely. Anyway, this is the one - the volume I would recommend to someone who would be curious to try it. It's got some strong arcs and characterization, along with appearances and revelations from the semi-recurring characters that tend to pop in and out.

4. Doctor Who - Shada: this was the best read of the summer. Gareth Roberts had to rise to the challenge of cobbling together every draft, fragment and scribble of Douglas Adams aborted Doctor Who epic and reshape it into a proper full-length novel. Well, he did it. He really, really did it. My only question is: What will you do for an encore, Gareth? ... it just so happens that Tom Baker had written a script for a DW film that would have featured Vincent Price as the villain - titled Doctor Who Meets Scratchman, the film was almost put into production before the financing fell apart. When I had asked him on Twitter about it, Roberts reply was, "Good Idea." ...

5. The Secret History of D.B. Cooper: Oni published this series that offered a fanciful look into the life of that mysterious skyjacker whose fate has never been solved. The artwork is very Mike Mignola/Darwyn Cooke-ish, right down to the red gummi bear sidekick.

6. Idolized #0: From Michael Turner's Aspen MLT. The special premiere #0 issue of this comic starts off well. It's about the winner of a reality show in which super-powered wannabes compete for a rookie spot in an established team, The Powered Protectors, but there are hints that the protagonist is going to be their bad penny. BTW, this series is also notable for being the only comic book series I can remember that offered variant photo covers (in which they get a model to pose in costume as the lead character) that weren't bikini pin-ups in disguise. Vampirella, Glory, Ally Kat, The 10th Muse - all cheesecake.

7. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye, #5: this standout issue is the conclusion to a medical mystery (yes, robots solving medical mysteries!) featuring fan-favorite Ratchet, is very entertaining, with an ending that's a laugh riot. There's a good reason the title of this chapter is not revealed until the last page...spoilers. ;)

8. Burt Ward, Boy Wonder:  the problem with small press companies is that you never know if the premiere issue is the only issue, or in this case, a sneak peek offered on Free Comic Book Day. This was supposed to be a spin-off of a popular series of their hit Misadventures of Adam West series, in which Sir Adam West gets involved in different kinds of adventures in different genres (usually nods to gigs-that-might-have-been, like playing James Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service or a Western film without the Three Stooges or a serious Caped Crusader and even appearing as Indiana Jones or The Mad Hatter). Here, Ward gets his own turn. First we get an update of his life right now - running a non-profit animal rescue shelter and walking two amiable pooches around the location of the batcave from the 60s Batman TV series. Then we see him chase a mysterious masked man (looking suspiciously like The Red Hood) into said cave,with the dogs tagging along. Just as John Carter wound-up whisked into Mars,  Ward and  the dogs wind up on another planet. It sounded like a fun adventure - we'll have to wait and see if and when it resumes. An ad featuring a spin-off series about Julie Newmar was also solicited, but has not appeared on stands yet.

9. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Century, Part 3: 2009: And this is the one to recommend to everyone - be it the folks who are curious try it or the ones who found past installments inaccessible, and not just because they'll get the references to 30 Rock, Burn Notice, Lost, Heroes, 24, Centurions, Emma Peel, Mary Poppins, Harry Potter, Children in Need, The Dark is Rising and Wizards of Waverly Place - this is the best comic book of the year. 'Nuff said. 'Nuff said.

So there you have it - a Nifty 9 bon-bons from 2012. I'll see you in 2013. :)

A Lost "Last"/ Last "Lost" Tale...

I'm posting this link to one of the blogs I follow:

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of...: The Witches: The Real Deal.: BEWARE! SPOILER ALERT! The scariest film I ever watched as a child was Nicolas Roeg's The Witches (1990). There were many scenes in films...

I had commented that "The Witches" was one of the last projects Jim Henson worked on before he died, but in truth, it was one of the last he oversaw. Henson was a very, very, very busy man for most of his adult life. In some alternate reality, he's the guy on Ed Sullivan's show who spins dozens of dinner plates. There are a lot of things that never saw the light of day and exist only on paper in file cabinets. For example, "Tale of Sand", a screenplay for a feature-length film which he co-wrote with Jerry Juhl.  It was adapted into a graphic novel with art by Ramon Perez and won an Eisner award. It is not the last screenplay that he worked on, but it was "lost" for a while.

We do love discovering lost things, don't we? We all thought "Oh, The Places You'll Go!" was Dr. Suess's last book, but then his wife found "Daisy-Head Mayzie", "My Many Colored Days" and "Hooray For Diffendorfer Day!". We thought "Go Slowly, Sands of Time" would be the last Disney Duck tale written by Carl Barks, but then came "Hang Gliders Be Hanged", "Horsing Around With History" and "Somewhere to Nowhere". We thought "Curtain"  was the final Hercule Poirot novel, but then Charles Osborne adapted the play "Black Coffee". We thought "Shoscombe Old Place" was the last Sherlock Holmes story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but then came "The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", which collected all the apocryphal material we never thought existed. We thought "Salmon of Doubt" was all the material Douglas Adams had left behind, until Gareth Roberts adapted "Doctor Who: SHADA" into a full-length novel that is required reading for anyone curious about Doctor Who now.There's always something "lost" - never "last", or "One of the last", or something to be rediscovered...


In the 60's Jim Henson directed, wrote and starred in a short live-action film , "Timepiece", which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short. The film is a series of jump-cuts to different sequences, all featuring Jim: Jim as a caveman running in the streets, Jim as a housepainter painting an elephant pink, Jim in a top hat and tuxedo jumping off a high diving board and into a pool, Jim as an escaped prisoner in stripes on the run, etc.. Then there's "The Cube" an hour-long drama that aired on NBC around the same time as Timepiece. "The Cube" is "Portal" without the portals - a man is stuck inside this white cell while others enter and exit freely, even interacting with him briefly. Both films have the potential to be pretty dark, but Jim seems to be enjoying it, so we're enjoying these meta-parables along with him.

"Tale of Sand" is "Timepiece" and "The Cube" for the widescreen. "a surrealistic comedy-drama", the introductory note describes, with most of the screentime set in the Southwest - the same battleground where Chuck Jones imagined those private battles between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. There's very little dialogue. The protagonist of "Sand" is Mack, an everyman who walks into a densely populated western town with the diverse townsfolk celebrating his arrival. He is drafted by it's kindly Sheriff into a quest: it is not clear what that quest is. He is given a map and a rucksack full of supplies, is instructed to follow the map, but don't trust it, then sent on his way.

Throughout the journey, Mack is pursued/bedeviled by "Patch", a tall, dark, suave, well-dressed, wealthy and better-prepared antagonist, who is always handy with a bribe and almost-always accompanied by a mysterious blonde vixen. Strange things happen: signs pop up, wild animals pop up, buildings that are smaller on the outside/bigger on the inside turn up. Mack meets more enemies than friends and his quest devolves into a chase. Toward the end, the tale unravels and we start to get answers...maybe.

Had "Tale of Sand" been filmed, it probably would have been filmed earnestly at a quarter of the budget it demands, yet come off as a camp psychaedelic experience to anyone who saw it - it would have been "a groovy trip" spaghetti western. As a graphic novel, we get a chance to taste the images more and look for the meaning of what's happening - that is, if you would like it to have a meaning. It's not casual spending and I'm lucky the library had a copy, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to read it (it's not in any comic shops I've been to). It's worth a look.