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Archive for February, 2008

Sunday Cinema Presents The Batman in: The Celluloid Ipecac!

Posted by scott on February 10th, 2008

The latest in our continuing series on the 1943 continuing series The Batman. This week: Chapter 6, The Poison Peril

The Narrator catches us up on the recent doings of “Daka and his Jap spies,” which is a bit confusing, since everybody who works for Daka is actually a middle-aged white guy, including Daka himself. To me, this somewhat weakens the otherwise robust verisimilitude of The Batman serial. Perhaps, if your goal is to exploit racial prejudice against a wartime enemy, it would make it easier if the government didn’t round up any fellow citizens who resemble those foreigners, and ship them off to detention camps, because that pretty much limits your casting options to tubby Irish guys from Queens. Anyway, just a little something for Michelle Malkin to chew on, along with her Raisinets.

Last week, two zombie mechanics stole an experimental plane, and the Army shot it down, even though they knew the Batman was on board, and that he was working for the War Department. Why? I’m guessing it was to pre-empt some embarrassing publicity (although the government Didn’t Ask — let’s face it, when your agent is a tights-wearing bachelor who lives with a frequently pantsless boy and a manservant who’s slightly less butch than Waylon Flowers — he doesn’t really have To Tell, does he?

So how did the Batman escape this time? Did he have Bob Vila and master carpenter Norm Abrams come in and do a little remodeling on the sequence, adding ceramic ring-top cabinetry pulls with a pottery style glaze and a new shot of the Batman pulling a parachute out of his ass? Did his cape turn into a hang glider? Was he Raptured just before impact? I mean, we saw the plane do a power dive straight into the ground, so he had to have pulled off some lame stunt in order to survive.

Nope. He couldn’t be bothered. He just crashed. But fortunately, this was not to be The Day the Cheap Library Music Cues Died, because The Batman shook it off and sauntered out of the wreckage, causing Don McLean to sigh and crumple up the tribute song he was halfway through.

Since aviation fuel isn’t volatile or anything, Batman drags the zombies to a safe distance of about 3 feet away. Suddenly, the radio-controlled colander falls off one of them, and the Batman jerks upright like a marionette and throws his arms out wide in what would have been a perfectly pantomimed indication of surprise if he were Lillian Gish and this was 1912.

Troops run toward the downed plane, and The Batman absconds with the brainwashing colander, which might have cleared the two mechanics of treason, but oh well…

Meanwhile, back at the lair, one of Daka’s Caucasian Japs (the original inspiration for Norman Mailer’s White Negro – not a lot of people know that) radios that the plane they were trying to steal has crashed. Which I guess is very interesting if you’re following the plot, but personally I was distracted by a close-up of J. Carroll Naish as Daka, showing what appears to be a painfully inflamed, puffy-eyed allergic reaction to his racist make-up. Sort of like what happened to Buddy Ebsen after he was originally cast as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (and I have to say, it served him right for trying to revive the shameful minstrel show practice of performing in Silverface).

Daka radios the Japanese submarine from the last episode to report that his streak of failures continues unbroken, and that he next plans to fail to steal the blueprints for the plane he just failed to steal.

Dazed and confused by Daka’s seemingly effortless ability to screw up, the sub commander accidentally surfaces in the middle of a squadron of U.S. destroyers. Oops. He recoils from the periscope and turns to the only other guy on the submarine and orders him to “Flashdance!”

Well. That’s what it sounded like. Let me rewind.

Okay, my bad. He actually yells “Crash drive!” The sub’s single sailor instantly snaps into action by performing one of those plate-spinning routines from the Ed Sullivan show.

Back at not-so-Stately Wayne Manor, Linda is in the sitting room containing the secret passage to the Bat Cave, while Alfred is in mid-tizzy, stammering that Bruce and Dick could be anywhere! The beach! The steam room! Fire Island! And managing to hit a pitch and frequency of twee so high that only dogs can hear him femming it up.

Suddenly, Bruce and Dick emerge from the grandfather clock behind Linda, imperiling their secret identities, just as Alfred feared! Of course, blowing their secret identities would require that Linda actually notice that a grown man and a boy are squeezing their way out of a clock four feet away from her, and since she doesn’t seem to have noticed that she’s been getting abducted three times a day, they’re probably safe.

Meanwhile, at the lair, Dr. Daka receives a visit from the League of Extraordinarily Bland Gentlemen, who show him a screaming newspaper headline about a Japanese submarine sunk off the coast. Daka slams down the paper and snarls, “Another disaster! Due to the interference of The Batman!”

Okay, granted, our hero has managed to foil – if only inadvertently – most of Daka’s schemes, but the submarine was sunk by the U.S. Navy, not the Dynamic Duo, and I’m beginning to think that this whole blame-the-Batman thing is becoming Daka’s answer to everything. Next week I expect to hear the sinister spymaster bellowing from the bathroom, “Hemorrhoids! Due to the interference of The Batman!”

Daka orders his minions to cease trying and failing to steal the aircraft blueprints, and instead to immediately concentrate on failing to kill The Batman. One of the Doctor’s posse observes that Batman seems to be interested in Linda Page, but she really likes Bruce Wayne, suggesting that the thugs and quislings who who have joined with our enemies and labor in the shadows to destroy America spend their leisure time reading Sweet Valley High novels. This prompts another of the traitors to say, “Hey, you don’t suppose this Bruce Wayne and The Batman could be one and the same person?”

Daka instantly slaps him down. “Don’t be absurd! That simpering idiot could never be The Batman!”

Um, so how does Daka know Bruce Wayne? Granted, Bruce is a wealthy man about town, but given that Daka didn’t know his own submarine had been sunk, despite it being front page news, he apparently doesn’t get the newspaper. Or maybe he does, but just for Winchell’s column, with maybe a quick glance at the box scores and Thimble Theater.

Daka sends one of his men to Linda’s apartment, first scribbling down the address from memory, which is kind of creepy. (I just hope this chapter doesn’t end with Daka standing below Linda’s window, holding a Victrola over his head that’s playing “In Your Eyes.”) He orders his lackey to pose as a telephone repairman, and “install a Dictaphone.” Later, we see Daka and his Hollaback Boys electronically eavesdropping as Linda entertains a bearded, crusty old prospector played by Charles Middleton, who was Emperor Ming the Merciless in the infinitely superior Flash Gordon serials. And Ming thoughtfully brought Linda a hostess gift: exposition. It seems that years ago, Linda’s Uncle Martin “grub-staked” Miner Ming, and by a not really amazing coincidence, he’s just hit a motherlode of radium.

Then Bruce and Dick show up, and it turns out that Ming is an old friend of Bruce’s, too. (Is Gotham City the size of Mayberry? Everybody knows everybody in this burg!) They give the old prospector a ride back to his hotel, then Dick reveals that back at Linda’s he found a microphone under her desk. Bruce says that the Batman and Robin had better keep an eye on things and Dick breaks into a radiant smile and chirps, “Swell! Let’s get into our outfits!”

You know, I don’t think it’s even really about the crimefighting anymore. It’s all about the outfits.

Daka’s thugs break into Ming’s room and try to force him to give up the location of his radium mine. Batman and Robin intervene, and there’s another bout of lethargic roughhousing, which concludes, as always, with the bad guys escaping.

The next day, Bruce and Dick are in Wayne Manor’s only room, having breakfast in their jammies while Alfred stands around flaunting his eerie resemblance to John Waters. Ming rings them up, and says that Uncle Martin called and asked for a meeting. It sounds dangerous, so Bruce volunteers to go in Ming’s stead, then orders Alfred to dress like Ming and go in his stead. Alfred demurs, saying he doesn’t feel very “top hole,” and I have to say, I believe him – he doesn’t much seem like a top – but Dick slaps another beard on him anyway.

They meet the thugs at a warehouse with several nice features – beamed ceilings, convenient swinging ropes, and an above-ground children’s wading pool full of acid. A lame fight breaks out, and Alfred and Robin wind up locked in a cardboard vault. Batman struggles to disarm one of Daka’s minions, but succeeds only in shooting holes in the acid-filled Doughboy Pool, before pulling some live wires out of the wall and getting knocked unconscious.

The thugs proceed in an orderly fashion to evacuate the warehouse before the acid reaches the sparking wires (Daka’s monthly fire drills at the supervillain lair really pay off here). The electricity causes the chemical fumes to explode, and the roof caves in on the cold-cocked caped crusader.

Just us next week for Chapter 7: The Phony Doctor! (The Bill Frist Story)

If Robert Capa Had Been Born 60 Years Later…

Posted by scott on February 7th, 2008

Sunday Cinema Presents: The Batman Vs. Dick Cheney!

Posted by scott on February 4th, 2008

Chapter Five: The Living Corpse!

Last week, The Batman was in the cab of a speeding armored car, violently attempting to get to second base with the driver as the car swerved off a treacherous mountain road. When last seen, the runaway vehicle was plunging hundreds of feet to the valley floor, delivering all inside to a certain doom. How could our hero have possibly escaped this time?!

The answer: He couldn’t. And he didn’t. He perished in a fiery crash, and you’re all witnesses.

But it turns out that The Batman was rescued in the nick of time by the dedicated archivists at Eastman Kodak House, who apparently discovered a previously unknown director’s cut in the basement of a Slovakian tannery. This week, as the same sequence unspools, you will note that the Eastman technicians restored a brief, but crucial shot of The Batman leaping to safety. I think the lesson here is pretty clear: if you’re the kind of person who falls to his death on a weekly basis, try not to piss off film preservationists.

So anyway, thanks to Batman: The Special Edition, our hero jumps off the truck a split second before it turns into a collectible miniature and falls off a paper-mache mountain. The Batman lies facedown in the dirt for awhile, allowing us to observe that the seams in his cape are as thick as French braids. (Probably all the real cape-making material was needed at the front, so The Batman’s was sewn together out of recycled superhero costumes collected in a Cape Drive by patriotic newsies.)

Robin pulls up in the Cadillac and shouts, “Are you alright, Bruce?” Oh great. Thanks. The Batman goes to all the trouble of putting on this asinine get-up just to protect his identity and you have to go and blow it! Why don’t you take out a personal ad in the Village Voice? “Saw you fighting gangsters. I was bare-legged, with short-shorts and opera gloves. You were dressed as a bat. Call me.”

Back at the lair, Dr. Daka gets a call from a Japanese submarine that has just returned from a secret mission to Staples, where they bought lots of impractical office furniture for the conning tower. The captain reports that he has also brought Daka “a package from Japan,” but can’t deliver it to him directly, because it contains used schoolgirl panties and tentacle rape anime, and he’s kind of embarrassed. Instead, with typical Oriental cunning, the captain plans to smuggle the package into the country by taking it to “Smuggler’s Cove,” which is apparently the last place the authorities would ever think to look for smugglers.

Meanwhile, the government sends Bruce a message written with invisible ink, ordering him to get a job at the “Lockwood Aeronautics Company,” because they think The Batman would look funny in bib overalls and carrying a lunch pail.

That night, a group of professional Mr. Mooney impersonators deliver the package — a huge, black lacquered, silver-trimmed coffin — to Dr. Daka. Inside, along with copies of Upskirt! Magazine and the complete Overfiend collection is a dead Japanese soldier. Daka appears to revive the corpse by accessorizing it with a pair of Hercules Power Wristbands, but it’s hard to tell, since the whole sequence is shot out of focus. The resurrected soldier rises from the coffin, tells Daka to steal a plane with a super-secret new engine from Lockwood, then lays down again and re-dies.

How can the Japanese spy ring possibly evade the tight wartime security and break into Lockwood Aeronautics? It seems impossible, but Daka has a plan. It involves two mechanics from Lockwood happening by sheer random chance to wander down to the abandoned Little Tokyo section of town before their shift, and deciding to hang around until a carnie offers them free tickets to the Japanese Cave of Horrors so they can take the ride and get kidnapped. So yeah, it was impossible. (Look closely, and you’ll see that one of the mechanics is played by future Ed Wood regular Kenne Duncan. But don’t look too closely, because his nickname amongst the Wood stock company was “horsecock,” and you’ll poke your eye out!)

Hey, I just realized, except for the instant replay from last week’s cliffhanger, we haven’t even seen The Batman this episode. And we didn’t actually see much of him in the last one, either. Is he pregnant? Is it like when Gillian Anderson got knocked up during the second season of The X-Files, and The Batman’s going to start wearing big overcoats all the time and carrying file folders and briefcases to hide the bump?

Anyway, the mechanics’ car gets stuck in the middle of the Japanese Cave of Horrors.

“Good thing we got in free,” the first one quips.

“This thing is strictly from hunger,” agrees Kenne. Then Dr. Daka appears in a kimono, and for some reason they’re instantly charmed (I assume Daka enticed the two mechanics by performing “I Enjoy Being a Girl” from Flower Drum Song for them, and they just didn’t have the budget to show it). They follow him into the lair like a couple of horny sailors, where they are immediately overpowered by two middle-aged zombies. Cut to the lab, where Daka has placed the captured men under his mind-control hair dryers, and is giving their brains a rinse and some highlights.

The next day, Bruce and Dick, disguised as war workers, infiltrate the Lockwood plant. Meanwhile, Daka sends the zombified mechanics to steal the experimental plane, which Bruce is hiding in for reasons which are apparent to nobody. Dick follows the zombies into a shed near the airstrip, arriving just in time to see them knock out the genuine flight crew. Instantly, Dick changes into an older, chubby stunt double, but it doesn’t seem to help, and the the zombies beat him up.
With Dick cold-cocked, the mechanics instantly hop to it and change clothes with the flight crew, moving swiftly and efficiently, their eyes keen and alert as they constantly scan their surroundings. Then they suddenly remember they’re zombies, and shamble slowly out of the room.

The plane takes off, with Bruce hiding in the rear compartment. Since a flight was scheduled, he has no reason to assume that anything is amiss, but can’t resist changing into his Batman costume anyway. So now the nature of our hero’s motivation becomes a bit more clear. It’s not a thirst to avenge the murder of his parents that drives him, but more the sort of compulsion that drives a crossdresser to wear boy shorts under his coveralls at Aamco.

Suddenly, Dick radios Bruce that the two men flying the plane are imposters. The Batman replies, “Call it into headquarters!” and whispers that he’s going to remain hidden for the duration of the flight so he can discover where their base is located. A second later, however, he bursts from hiding and announces his presence. Why? Well, according to Glen or Glenda?, most transvestites have a secret urge to be discovered, and Bruce simply couldn’t overcome his desire to swan around in baggy tights and be gawked at by zombies.

The two mind-controlled minions forget about flying the plane and go into the rear of the fuselage so they can wrestle with their guest. Meanwhile, an Army officer orders the plane shot down, and immediately, stock footage of heavy artillery from World War I snaps into action. Bursts of flak set the stolen ship on fire, and it plummets to earth and crashes onto some unlucky bastard’s workbench in the Special Effects Department at Columbia Studios. Great. This always happens at 4:45 on a Friday.

So. Again. The Batman ends a chapter by falling – this time in a crippled aircraft. Any guesses how he cheated death (and the audience) this time? Tune in next week for Chapter 6: The Poison Peril!

It’s Fetus Adoption Day!

Posted by scott on February 3rd, 2008

You may recall last week when we were talking about the latest fad that’s sweeping our nation’s Flaming Youth: “spiritually adopting” a third party embryo, and giving it a name and a personality:

the eighth graders jumped up, eager to compare notes.

“I named my baby Kyle Patrick,” one shouted.

“Mine is Antonio!”

A few Wo’C commenters, including Thursday, were caught up in the excitement:

“Mine is a ninth level Paladin!”

“Oh, yeah? Mine can fly!”

“Mine had the batteries run out and he died.”

“HA HA! Jimmy killed his baaa-by! Jimmy killed his baaa-by!”

“Mine is hydrocephalic, and she’s gonna make my living conditions so desperate that my wife’s gonna leave and I’ll kill my kid in a drunken fit of resentment and bitter rage before she’s five!”

“Mine’s named Suzie, but I don’t wanna get married, so I’m gonna kill her mom before Suzie’s born.”

“Mine’s President!”

But despite the best efforts of America’s Uncoolest Teens, there are hundreds of thousands of fetuses forced to gestate every day without benefit of spiritual parentage. Perhaps it’s no surprise; after all, secretly taking remote control of a zygote using nothing but Jedi mind tricks and the power of National Right to Life Committee talking points is a major obligation. Think about it — you would be spiritually responsible for your adopted child from the moment it’s conceived until just before the moment it’s born, at which point you really need to get onto the next blastocyst, because those cells aren’t going to divide themselves, you know. But it’s not merely the burdensome womb-watching that can discourage potential phantom foster parents, it’s the difficulty of bonding with a child who’s so small that if you played catch with him he wouldn’t even leave a visible stain on the horsehide. Why, in this great country of ours with its wealth of consumer choices, can we not pick our little Antonios and microscopic Kyle Patricks the way we select lobsters from the tank at an upscale seafood restaurant?

Well, now we can. Introducing, FetusMart™

I adopted a cute lil’ baby jesus fetus from Fetusmart! Hooray fetus!

Go, browse, make your selection from their many types and flavors of fetuses, and start your hostile takeover of a stranger’s uterus today!

B.A.D. Day At Blogrock

Posted by scott on February 3rd, 2008

Reasonable Conservative Jon Swift and Seemingly Rational Kangaroo Skippy have asked us to drive our Chevy to the levy in solemn remembrance of The Day the Blogroll Died. Yes, it was exactly one year ago that Atrios, deciding the blogtopian ecosystem was getting a bit untidy and could use a bracing splash of monoculture, declared that all the world should be taxed. No. Wait. That was Caesar Augustus. Check that. He announced “Blogroll Amnesty Day,” which immediately earned a spot in the “I Don’t Think That Word Means What You Think It Means” Wing of the Museum of Disingenuousness, right between the “Clear Skies” exhibit and the “Healthy Forests” food court, since by “amnesty” he actually meant “massacre,” although it sounds better in the original Aramaic (“Slay all their kine, they go down to slaughter, Woe is on them for come hath their day and their site meter shall be as a desert”)

As our friend Actor212 observes at Simply Left Behind:

Studies have shown (and this was PRE-BADay) that “A” list bloggers tend to link to other “A” list bloggers nearly exclusively. This sets up an echo chamber of thought, one that resonates and creates a feedback loop that makes it hard to sort reality from a rumour that’s shot around the world three times.

Worse, other blogs, like (I’m ashamed to say) Jesus’ General, then PZ Myers and Pharyngula followed suit, until the Great Orange One himself, Kos, pulled his blogroll as well. This was, for many, the last straw. The unintentional (or perhaps intentional) consequence of BAD was to eliminate an awful lot of blogs from an awful lot of exposure.

But then, as Jon points out, the self-correcting nature of the blogosphere kicked in the door and sprayed the room with Teflon-coated epiphanies!

Though Atrios has stubbornly refused to acknowledge that he made a mistake, some bloggers who initially joined him, backtracked. Markos of the Daily Kos instituted a second blogroll that consisted of random links from diarists. PZ Myers of Pharyngula now has real Blogroll Amnesty Days where he invites anyone who has blogrolled him to join his blogroll. And in the wake of the bloodletting quite a number of smaller blogs, like my friend skippy the bush kangaroo, changed their own blogroll policies and now link more freely to others.

Now I have no desire to pull up a chair and add my tears to the pity party, because even though Atrios struck World O’ Crap from his blogroll, he’s been good enough to link here a number of times, mostly back when s.z. was writing every day and it was actually worth reading. But I do like the idea of smaller blogs coming together to celebrate our many quiet virtues, for what we lack in readers and advertisers, we make up for in sheer numbers, and history shows that when the downtrodden multitudes unite in a common love of humanity, justice, and equality, such a force leads inevitably to a social and intellectual revolution, or straight to regicide. And frankly, I’m cool with either one.

To quote Jon Swift again:

Ironically, Blogroll Amnesty Day had a net positive effect for the blogosphere as a whole. I discovered a number of great blogs and made new friends and I am sure that is true for others as well. And so instead of remembering February 3 as a day that will live in infamy, let’s turn this day into a celebration of the power of smaller blogs. Let’s recognize that building an inclusive community of diverse voices is what the blogosphere should be about, not creating a new elite to replace the old mainstream media elite. This year there were a number of stories that the big blogs missed that were being covered by smaller blogs such as the Jena 6 and the situation in Burma. I hope someday that Atrios and other A-List bloggers will join us in recognizing that they could learn a lot from reading smaller blogs rather than getting all of their news from a few limited sources. And instead of attacking big blogs or each other, I hope smaller blogs will take this opportunity to expose themselves to other voices that often don’t get heard.

So let us expose ourselves and praise this day our bloggy brethren and sistren. The rules of the celebration require us to list 4 or 5 blogs, lower on the food chain than ours, which we believe to be deserving of greater attention. Since I suspect most of the smaller blogs we read regularly still pull in higher traffic than we do, I’ll just list a few that I love. (s.z. would be joining us with her picks, but it’s Adoption Day and she’s over at Petsmart attempting to fob off her kine.)

Bats Left, Throws Right. You’re probably checking him daily, and if not, get thee hence. Along with Roy at Alicublog, Doghouse Riley turns out the most intoxicatingly trenchant snark on the internet, offering long, discursive jeremiads that move faster and sting harder than a cracking bullwhip. He’s immune to the national Alzheimer’s that allows people like Jonah Goldberg to pass themselves (and their gas) off as historians, and most important of all, he uses his tongue prettier than a Kansas City whore.

Welcome to Pottersville. Sample paragraph from the State of the Union review: “Instead of “Madame Speaker, Vice President Cheney, Members of Congress, distinguished guests and fellow citizens”, he might as well have started it out with, “Hey, Vern…”

‘Nuff said.

Pen-Elayne on the Web. Fun, breezy, eclectic, a great mix of the personal and the pop cultural.

Mark of the Beast. If deliriously profane fury could be bottled, the best cask-strength stuff would come from this Louisiana-based distillery run by our friend Anntichrist S. Coulter and her stable of enablers. Caution: Not to be taken internally.

Just Another Blog From L.A. isn’t, since it’s provides a ruefully funny running commentary from a homeless writer blogging from the public library. The subject is mostly local and national politics, but from a perspective far removed from the Villagers’ presumptions, and with the occasional whiplash-inducing detail on life as it’s lived with chronic depression and no permanent address.

If anyone out there has blogrolled us and we’ve failed to reciprocate, please send me an email and I’ll correct the matter asap. Thanks to all of you who take the time to stop by and sample our ramblings. And to our fellow bloggers, may your traffic soar like the mighty eagle, and may you get a good seat with an unobstructed view of the guillotine, come the Revolution.