Sure, I've got Halloween content at my blog! How much do you need?

"They're like the Blue Angels of dance!"

October is here, and you know what that means. Yep, it's time to clean all of those dead woodchucks out of the crawlspace again and maybe mail a couple to old enemies from high school. But it's also the time of year when people's thoughts turn to ghosts, goblins, witches, and werewolves. Actually, if they're heterosexual men, their thoughts probably turn to women in scanty costumes which make them look like Chechnyan prostitutes, but that's another story. Wherever your thoughts may be turning, Halloween is just a couple of weeks away, and instead of actually getting off my lazy ass (or, to be more accurate, spending more time on my lazy ass) and producing new Halloween-appropriate content for this blog, I thought I'd point out that there is already a metric ton of Halloween content at Dead 2 Rights, more than you'd ever get through in a single lifetime. In the spirit of a greener Planet Earth and a brighter tomorrow, then, I'd like to do some recycling.

JOE'S KICK-ASS HALLOWEEN STUFF THAT HE'S ALREADY WRITTEN

This is delightful, right?

• Of course, the conversation begins with Joe's Halloween Dictionary, based on an assignment that I did in the third grade. I don't actually have a lot of souvenirs from that era of my life (the mid-1980s), but I did manage to hold onto this little hand-drawn booklet. And one year, I decided to scan each and every page of it for your amusement. Is it delightful? Judge for yourself. 

• Then there's my, uh, unique interpretation of the definitive movie of the season, John Carpenter's legendary Halloween from 1978. In the article, I posit that there may be more to Donald Pleasance's creepy "Loomis" character than meets the eye. And, hey, if you're into screwy fan theories about classic horror movies, I have more of that. Way more.

• And then there was the time that I yakked on and on about "Monster Mash" by Bobby "Boris" Pickett. It was my blatant attempt at doing a BuzzFeed/Cracked-type listicle. It didn't do a thing, traffic-wise, but it's still a fun read. Theoretically.

• You can't have Halloween without zombies, and this used to be a zombie blog back in the olden, golden, molden days. In fact, I had an entire series of cartoons about one of the overexposed, undead buggers. If you just want to skip to the better Zomby panels, here is a good place to start. Speaking of classic monsters, a few years ago, I investigated why so many of the great ones seem to have such lousy websites.

• More recently, I visited two real-world costume shops and countless web sites in my search for celebrity Halloween masks. What I learned was disillusioning, but I reported my findings here nevertheless. And Google is still giving me lots of disturbing ads for disturbing Halloween masks, so I truly do suffer for my art.

Bonkers bonks you out!

• And what is Halloween without sweet, sweet candy? Pretty lousy, is what. Candy has been a long-time preoccupation of mine on this blog, so I have posts about Bonkers, Summit Bars, Fruit Stripe Gum, Twix, York Peppermint Pattie, and just plain old sugar. In case you're wondering: yes, I am somewhat overweight and have had lots of cavities. Does that information make you happier?

• Some of my favorite little Halloween items at Dead 2 Rights were things tagged onto posts of Zomby cartoons. Like this thing about a ridiculously joyless '70s Halloween safety film from Centron. Or the anti-Halloween rantings of Carol Kornacki.

• It seems almost redundant to point this out, but plenty of articles in the Ed Wood Wednesdays series are Halloween-friendly. Try this one or this one or even this one, which is about how my interest in Edward Davis Wood, Jr. can be traced to a Halloween movie marathon from 1992.

So as you can clearly see, I have hardly been negligent in my coverage of the Eve of All Hallows. There are plenty of articles here which could be described as spooktacular, frightmarish, or even pants-shittingly-scary. Just go searching through the archives. Who knows what will turn up? 'Til we meet again, happy haunting. Whoops, I mean happy hunting. I don't know why I said haunting the first time.

Hey, it's my second thing for Splitsider!

My latest piece for Splitsider is about trucker tapes.

Just a little heads up, in case you somehow missed it. The website Splitsider, which is about the world of comedy, ran another one of my articles. This one is called "The Raunchy, Underground World of Trucker Tapes," and it's the fruition of a long-time obsession of mine. I've gotten some nice comments about it online through Twitter and Facebook, which is gratifying. I don't know how I became interested in trucker comedy, probably because of a few scattered references to "filthy trucker tapes" on MST3K. But I knew I wanted to turn it into an article when I started looking into the career of a comic named Gene Tracy, aka "Mr. Truckstop." There are hours and hours of this guy's stuff posted to YouTube, and I've spent way too many late nights listening to it -- not as comedy, really, more as sociology. I think one thing which fascinated me was the fact that Tracy's audiences were rowdier than what you'd normally expect on a comedy album. You get the sense that any one of his gigs could have turned into a knock-down, drag-out melee at a moment's notice if, say, somebody spilled his beer on somebody else's shoes. In other words, there's a danger to those performances. But I was also interested in the fact that truckers have their own little universe of comedy stars, performers virtually unknown to the rest of the world.

"Nice marmot."

I left the candles and Scrubbing Bubbles mascot as is, to preserve the sense of gentle whimsy.

The original magazine cover and the 1970 LP.

An image as instantly powerful as the one above should not require any explanation, but I will provide one nevertheless. Back in September 1956, a now-defunct magazine called Man's Life ran a cover story with the extremely memorable headline "WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH," accompanied by an illustration of a shirtless man actually being gnawed upon by angry weasels. The original story by Mike Kamens is available online if you'd care to read it. 

Meanwhile, those four magic words made such an impression on experimental rock weirdo Frank Zappa that he used the phrase as the title of a cacophonous, mostly-live album by his band, the Mothers of Invention, in 1970. That album's gory cover, with a ghoulishly memorable painting by Neon Park, has become an icon in its own right, even being included on Rolling Stone's list of the greatest LP covers of all time. 

Anyway, I thought I'd take the hapless adventurer from the original Men's Life cover and transplant him to a more domestic setting, specifically the bathtub of one Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski from The Big Lebowski. As Lebowski fans know, the Dude has his own memorable run-in with an angry ferret, though he famously misidentifies the creature as a marmot. Gaze upon this image, dear reader, and reflect that however badly your Monday may be going, it cannot compare to this fellow's day. Count your blessings then, scarce though they may be.

What if Cousin Eddie from 'Vacation' had been played by Karl Marx?

"I don't know why they call it Hamburger Helper. The hamburger must learn to help itself."

Actor and stubborn individualist Randy Quaid has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. The much-arrested, 65-year-old Quaid, who has appeared in such films as The Last Picture Show, Independence Day, and Brokeback Mountain, was detained once again on Friday as he tried to sneak across the Canadian border into Vermont. The actor and his wife had been living as refugees in the Great White North since 2010, when they fled the United States to avoid prosecution on various charges, including burglary and vandalism. 

Recent photos of Randy Quaid show that he does not look like the busy character actor he had been in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. He now sports a bushy, white beard and long, straggly hair, making him look uncannily like German philosopher Karl Marx, whose ideas gave birth to the Communist Revolution. 

This, naturally, got me to thinking. What if Randy Quaid's most famous character, uncouth redneck Cousin Eddie from the National Lampoon's Vacation franchise, had been played by Karl Marx himself? It actually makes sense. Poor, downtrodden Eddie is exactly the kind of pissed-upon prole Marx was trying to reach. In that spirit, I present this little gallery of images of Cousin Eddie matched up with appropriate quotes from Karl Marx. Please do enjoy.

Note: If it makes these captions funnier, please add the word "Clark" to the end of each one, e.g. "WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE, CLARK!"

Some thoughts from a Coen fanatic on the new 'Hail, Caesar!' trailer

George Clooney can't remember his lines in Hail, Caesar!

A new day has brought with it a new trailer for the Coen Brothers' upcoming film, the 2016 comedy Hail Caesar! As a long-time Coen superfan who has seen all of their films multiple times and written about them extensively, I'd like to share my thoughts about what stands out from this new, two-and-a-half-minute trailer. If that sounds good to you, then let us proceed.

• The brothers like to work with the same actors repeatedly, so there are lot of familiar faces here: Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men), George Clooney (O, Brother, Where Art Thou?), Frances McDormand (Fargo), Scarlett Johansson (The Man Who Wasn't There), and Tilda Swinton (Burn After Reading). The IMDb says Fred Melamed from A Serious Man is in this thing, too. No Buscemi or Goodman this time, though.

• Big-deal newbies include Ralph Fiennes, Channing Tatum, and Jonah Hill. The IMDb has a few more interesting names in its cast list: Dolph Lundgren, Fisher Stevens, and Christopher Lambert. Jonah Hill, it should be noted, seems to have inherited Barton Fink's glasses.

• It's another kidnapping flick, the Coens' fourth at least, after Raising Arizona, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski. Those boys do love them some kidnapping. Like Lebowski, this one even has a close-up of a ransom note.

• Another Coen staple: what I call the Big Stash O' Cash. The brothers love to have suitcases, briefcases, envelopes, and bags full of money in their films. Here, it's a tasteful brown leather briefcase, stuffed with $100 bills.

• Hey, this film takes place at Capital Pictures, presumably the same fictional movie studio from 1991's Barton Fink. Studio bigwig Jack Lipnik (Michael Lerned) is not in evidence, though, which is troubling because -- if my interpretation of Fink is accurate -- Lipnik is the Coens' stand-in for God. I guess God died during World War II. Hail, Caesar! seems to be set in the 1950s, even though the trailer uses "Rumble and Sway" by Jamie N Commons from 2013.

• Tilda Swinton is playing gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, which gives her the chance to snoop around the way Manhattan Argus reporter Jennifer Jason Leigh did in The Hudsucker Proxy. One of my pet theories about the Coens' films is that Leigh's character in Hudsucker, a sharp-tongued, fast-talking redhead, is an archetype who recurs in their later films: via Julianne Moore in The Big Lebowski and (yes) Tilda Swinton in Burn After Reading. They all have that same, slightly snooty, not-quite-British accent.

• Scarlett Johansson seems to be playing an Esther Williams-type star, which allows the brothers to do the kind of old-school production numbers they previously sent up in The Big Lebwoski.

• Another weird Coen staple: the kidnappers seem to have a comically tiny little dog, like the ones from Intolerable Cruelty and, again, The Big Lebowski.

And that's basically what I noticed on my first viewing of the Hail, Caesar! trailer. The usual behind-the-scenes team, including cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Carter Burwell, are on board once again. The film comes out next February, which seems to indicate that maybe Universal doesn't have a great deal of commercial faith in it. Doesn't matter. I'll be there anyway. Hail, Caesar!

P.S. - Back when I was in the Flushing High School marching band, we had a little cheer we'd do during the football games. It went like this:

Leader: Hail, Caesar! 

Crowd: Hail, Caesar! 

Leader: Hail, Flushing! 

Crowd: Hail, Flushing! 

Leader: Hail, [insert name of opposing team]?!?

Crowd: Hail no!

The complete and utter horror of... FOO TI FUM!

That crudely-rendered monster is Foo Ti Fum. The city he's terrorizing is Portland, Oregon.

My cousin's favorite gum

When I was growing up in Michigan, my uncle and his family lived right down the street from us, so my cousins were regular visitors to our home, especially during the summers. My uncle's youngest son, Derrick, was practically a brother to me in those days. He was one of those kids who, like the tykes in Family Circus, was always mispronouncing words in a way which grownups found cute. Derrick had a genuine love for Fruit Stripe gum back then, which I could never understand because, even at that age, I knew that Fruit Stripe was a total ripoff. A few seconds of flavor, then nothing.

Well, anyway, Derrick could never manage to say "Fruit Stripe gum" correctly, and it always came out sounding like "Foo Ti Fum." And that particular turn of phrase lodged itself into my mind and stayed there, long after I moved away from Michigan and my relatives. When I learned of a Marvel Comics character called Fin Fang Foom, I began to think of "Foo Ti Fum" as a similar character, a huge, snarling monster with the exact color scheme of the Fruit Stripe gum packaging.

This thought became so deeply rooted in my mind that, in moments of extreme boredom, I would actually Google "Foo Ti Fum" hoping to see pictures of this totally nonexistent character. Of course, nothing came up. Well, I finally decided to fix that. Here is a genuine article about Foo Ti Fum with a picture to go with it. If I ever Google the beast's name again, this will appear. That's good enough for me.

Finally, a mock trailer for 'Jaws 19' as prophesied in 'Back To The Future II'

Remember when Jaws seemed to be Hollywood's most-unkillable franchise?

There is one sequel of which the Internet truly cannot get enough. And, no, it's not anything from the Jaws franchise. The sequel I mean is less sharky and more time-travel-y. And I'm part of the problem, since I've written about it online myself, with Craig J. Clark aiding and abetting.

Originally released in November 1989, Robert Zemeckis’ Back To The Future Part II was set in the then-far-distant year of 2015. Well, actually, only a third of it was. The other two-thirds took place in 1985 (or, for the purists, “1985-A”) and 1955, respectively. Still in all, the Internet has been obsessed lately with which of the sequel’s prophecies about 2015 have and have not come to pass, despite the fact that Zemeckis and his writing partner, Bob Gale, have freely admitted that movies about the future always get the details wrong, even Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Did Back To The Future Part II avoid the curse? Much of this discussion has revolved around hoverboards, which stubbornly remain impractical. The Chicago Cubs are at least in playoff contention, however, and Pepsi is doing its darnedest to make Pepsi Perfect a reality, too. The film itself is even returning to theaters this month.

But what of Jaws 19, the Spielberg sequel which was supposed to be playing in 2015, according to Back To The Future Part II? Regrettably, that fishy franchise conked out with its fourth installment, the infamous Michael Caine vehicle Jaws: The Revenge in 1987, and was never revived. Gladly, however, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment has provided its own mock trailer for the never-to-be Jaws 19, which also updates viewers on what went down in Jaws 5 through Jaws 18. It turns out that the franchise went through some weird, weird phases after the fourth film. Along with the expected prequels and reboots, the intermediate Jaws films also did some some genre-hopping, including multiple attempts at both erotica and science fiction. Of these wished-for sequels, perhaps none is more intriguing than Jaws 17: Fifty Scales Of Grey, in which the titular shark “learned about love from a mysterious stranger,” presumably before devouring said stranger. Jaws 19 has more of an ecological bent. “The oceans are disappearing,” says the announcer, “and to save their home, the sharks must attack! Jaws 19. This time it’s really, really personal.” So that’s what Marty McFly could have seen if he and Doc Brown had gone to the movies in 2015 Hill Valley.

Hey! It's my first thing for Splitsider!

A tense moment from The Ren & Stimpy Show.

So far, I've been incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to write for websites that I personally read and enjoy. I'd been a daily visitor to the A.V. Club website before I became a contributor there. In recent years, Splitsider -- a site specifically devoted to the comedy world -- has become another favorite of mine. And now I've gotten a piece published there, too, which is an honor. It's an essay about the underlying themes of The Ren & Stimpy Show called "Ren, Stimpy, and the Horrors of Manliness," and it's one of my favorite things I've ever written. The idea for this article has been bubbling in my mind for at least a year or so, and now that Ren has returned to TV via TeenNick's late night programming block, The Splat!, it seemed the right time to do it. Maybe I'll write other pieces for Splitsider in the future. That would be nice.

Actually, given my hyper-verbose style of writing, this piece could have gone on literally ten times longer than it did. I was writing about masculine archetypes on The Ren & Stimpy Show, and I thought about discussing the role of female characters on the series. But I stopped myself from writing about that because it would have made the story too long. It was a personal sacrifice to actually make the article a readable length. I never had to do that with the Ed Wood Wednesdays articles, which is why they tended to stretch on to 5,000 words or more apiece. I think, if you added them all up, my articles on Blood Splatters Quickly are actually longer than the book itself. What can I say? When I care about the stuff I'm writing about, the words just pour out.

P.S. - In case you missed it on Twitter or Facebook, here's my mashup of the Spider-Man newspaper comic and Futurama. I swear, the dialogue is taken verbatim from the comic.

Gaston and LeFou could have this exact same conversation.

And here's a Spidey parody I don't think I ever posted here before:

Admittedly, this joke is stolen from one of those G.I. Joe public service announcements.