It's a term I'd either forgotten or had never heard until recently. Either way, it refers to those movies that are sort of like anthologies but not quite. "Hyperlink" films tell multiple, basically self-contained stories, but the characters in those different stories know each other and occasionally interact. Some characters even take part in more than one story per movie. Think of Pulp Fiction (1994), Magnolia (1999), Nashville (1975), Crash (2004), and many more. In Pulp Fiction, for example, there are three different stories ("The Bonnie Situation," "The Gold Watch," and "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"), and John Travolta's heroin-shooting hitman is a factor in all three of them.
Toward the end of his career, director Garry Marshall (1934-2016) got way into hyperlink cinema. He made three of these movies back-to-back, the first being Valentine's Day (2010). The setup is very simple: it's Valentine's Day in Los Angeles, and we follow the romantic ups-and-downs of various characters, all played by major movie stars. It's actually kind of mind-boggling how many Oscar winners there are in this one, extremely slight romcom.
Scott Mitchell Bernstein and Crystal Bernard on Happy Days.
In the early years of The Simpsons, there was a recurring character named Herman. You might remember him: a shifty-eyed, one-armed military antiques dealer with a voice (provided by Harry Shearer) vaguely reminiscent of George Bush, Sr. He seemed to be a pal of Grandpa Simpson (Dan Castellaneta), who sought his advice even though he considered Herman to be "completely out of his mind."
Herman never went away totally -- you might still see him in crowd shots, for instance -- but he's long since ceased to be a regular presence in the main characters' lives. Why? Well, this video speculates that the problem may have been the way Herman was used in the 1996 episode "22 Short Films About Springfield." During a brief Pulp Fiction (1994) parody, Herman stood in for that film's perverted pawn shop owner, Maynard (Duane Whitaker). After that, Herman was just too creepy and unsettling to be a regular part of The Simpsons anymore.
Back in 1982, Happy Days did something similar with one of its characters, bumbling nerd Melvin Belvin (Scott Mitchell Bernstein). The show introduced Melvin in the November 1981 episode "Fonzie the Substitute," and he continued to pop up occasionally during the show's ninth and tenth seasons. He didn't make it to the show's eleventh and final season, though. Again, the problem may have been a single episode. In Melvin's case, it was "Such a Nice Girl" from November 1982. In that story, Melvin goes on a date with naïve, inexperienced K.C. Cunningham (Crystal Bernard) and is so overcome with lust that he almost assaults the poor girl. Luckily, K.C. fends off Melvin's advances, but the formerly harmless nerd was now branded a potential threat and lost whatever charm he may have had. Melvin only appeared in one more episode after that before disappearing for good.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we talk about "Such a Nice Girl" and the way the sitcom deals with the issue of sexual assault. As you may expect, the conversation gets a bit darker than usual.
Context is everything. Bil Keane's heartwarming Family Circus is a single-panel feature, meaning that we really only get to see a few seconds of the characters' lives at a time. Maybe if we saw what happened right before and right after, we'd have a different view of the proceedings. So it is with today's cartoon. Jeffy is really only there to be a sounding board for Dolly. But what if the larger, more interesting story were all about Jeffy? That's what I've tried to convey here.
Speaking of recontextualizing the funnies, here's my pitch for a spin-off of Crock. It'd be about the adventures of a imaginative, rambunctious boy and his best friend, a sassy talking vulture. You might think this looks a little familiar, but trust me -- it's all original, baby.
Nothing second-hand about this.
And just to round things out, here's a little comic I pieced together out of panels from Mark Trail and Rex Morgan, M.D. Enjoy.
I'm always up for scenes of Mr. Burns doing sick stuff.
Note:This was an article of mine that was recently cut from The A.V. Club. It turns out, they'd already covered this topic. Whoops. Anyway, I thought I'd get some mileage out of it by posting it here. Enjoy or don't. Your call.
Very early in the run of The Simpsons, as revealed through DVD commentary tracks, the writers and animators on the show discovered that the relatively recent advent of VCRs made it possible for them to reference motion pictures in an extremely accurate and detailed way. A 1990 episode called “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge,” for instance, includes a parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho that borrows shots and angles directly from the original movie. Over the decades, The Simpsons referenced countless motion pictures with a similar or even greater level of fidelity. The writers sometimes joke that Citizen Kane and The Godfatherhave been spoofed so often on the Fox animated series that those movies could be reconstructed entirely out of Simpsons clips. That may or may not be true, but “ginger communicologist” Celia Gómez of Madrid, Spain has uploaded to Vimeo a highly compelling supercut called “The Simpsons’ Movie References” that helpfully juxtaposes scenes from the show with the classic movie moments that inspired them.
Citizen Kane and The Godfather both show up here, as expected, but so do Pulp Fiction, Dr. Strangelove, Basic Instinct, Risky Business, Taxi Driver, The Shining, and more. It may often seem that the show prefers to spoof movies that are already decades old and well familiar to most viewers, but that’s not always the case. When trying to convey the artificially enhanced nirvana that Homer experiences while eating a Ribwich from Krusty Burger in “I’m Spelling As Fast As I Can,” the animators chose to quote Darren Aronofsky’s drug-fueled nightmare Requiem For A Dream, then only three years old and not quite a mainstream, across-the-board hit. Considering that it takes about a year to complete an episode of The Simpsons, that makes this scene almost avant garde.
You know any of them old jokes? No, but I know an old theory.
It's all about Travolta, man!
I don't know why this popped into my head today, but I started thinking about a theory of mine concerning the movie Pulp Fiction. This was an idea I started toying with back when the movie was new in 1994, and it never got any further than some primitive, now-obsolete Usenet discussion groups. In those bygone days, I was probably frequenting alt.fan.tarantino or something similar. I think this idea of mine found some traction there, but it probably only amounted to a single stranger saying it was "kind of interesting." That was enough for me back then. Likes and RTs hadn't been invented, so we had to make due with what was available.
Anyway, my theory was that Pulp Fiction, at least the parts concerning the Vincent Vega character, was a movie-length tribute to the career of star John Travolta. It starts with the character's name. Vincent was also the name of Travolta's character on Welcome Back, Kotter. The "Vega" part was simply an acknowledgement that Travolta was a superstar. The actor became famous through television but never did another recurring role on a series after Kotter. That's why Vincent claims never to watch television. He knows he's not on it anymore, so what's the point? And his offhand question to Jules, "What's a pilot?" is a punning acknowledgement of Travolta's own well-known love of aviation. The actor is a certified pilot with five aircraft and a private runway.
Synonymous with disco.
Okay, now we get into more specific nods to iconic Travolta roles. Uma Thurman's Mia Wallace actually calls Vincent "cowboy" at one point, obviously bringing Urban Cowboy to mind. Also, when she's trying to lead Vincent to the intercom in her home, Mia says "disco" when he finds it, referring to the genre of music with which Travolta became synonymous after Saturday Night Fever. Having Vincent and Mia win a dance contest, meanwhile, is another obvious Fever parallel. A less-obvious one is when Vincent's partner, Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), decides to give up being a criminal, which he refers to simply as "the life." This is analogous to a sub-plot from Fever in which Travolta's character, Tony Manero, has a brother who is leaving the priesthood. And where does Jules live? Inglewood, CA, a near-perfect sound-alike for Travolta's own home town of Englewood, NJ.
Pulp Fiction references Grease a few times, too. Not only do Mia and Vincent visit the 1950s nostalgia-themed eatery Jack Rabbit Slim's, which he calls "a wax museum with a pulse," but Vincent also says that he'll be "a fucking grease spot" if Mia overdoses while in his care. And then there is Mr. Vega's antagonistic relationship with boxer Butch Coolidge. To say the least, Butch and Vincent get along poorly throughout the entire movie. This, I suggest, is an in-joke referring to the fact that Bruce Willis provided the voice of the baby in Travolta's Look Who's Talking from 1989.
Anyway, that's my theory, which is mine. There's not much more to it than what I've already described in the paragraphs above. I just wanted to record it here for posterity. Thank you for indulging me.
Dashiell Hamster. Does what it says in the description.
See, this is the kind of joke I find funny, but that no one else ever seems to like. I dunno. Maybe it's just me. But the thought of a hamster dressing up in a suit and sitting down in front of a wee little typewriter, miniature bottle of booze on his desk, tiny cigarette dangling from his mouth... to me, that's comedy. A hamster writing The Thin Man: how is that not hilarious?
I went on a pulp/detective reading jag a few years back. Cycled through all the usual suspects: Chandler, Hammett, Cain. All good, but Jim Thompson remains my favorite because he didn't give a shit what people thought. Or at least that's the impression he gave off. After Thompson, reading any of those other guys was like switching from whiskey to sarsaparilla.
But still, Hammett's no slouch. Loved Red Harvest especially. So did Kurosawa, who ripped off the plot for Yojimbo. Usually, the ripping off goes the other way in popular culture. Anyway, here's a picture of a hamster in a suit. Enjoy.
A new book about (among other things) the writing career of Ed Wood.
"Dear sir or madam, would you read my book?"
-The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"
About a year ago, by my estimation, I was approached by the editors of an upcoming book about pulp fiction to contribute a chapter about Edward D. Wood, Jr. I would have gladly done so for free, but (happily) this was a modestly-paying gig -- the only time, in fact, I have ever been paid to write about Ed Wood. Trust me, it doesn't come anywhere near what I've spent on books, DVDs, posters, and (let's not forget) a trip to New York City as part of this project. But, still, it's nice to be asked, you know? At the suggestion of the aforementioned editors, Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette, I focused my attention on Eddie's 1967 girl-gang potboiler, Devil Girls. I put quite a bit of work into the resulting chapter, but I never mentioned it here because I didn't know the current state of the book. Well, now I am happy to announce that Beat Girls, Love Tribes, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950-1980 is due to be released on November 10, 2015 from Verse Chorus Press. That link in the previous sentence will take you to the book's Amazon page. I get nothing from the sale of the book, by the way. I'm not even sure I get a free copy. We'll see.
Incidentally, because I'm in the mood for some shameless self-promotion, here's some other Joe Blevins-related crap fine quality merchandise you can find on Amazon:
