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Dick Tracy, 3/18/22

Coffyhead claimed that the coffee over at Bean Howz was “stale,” but I think the truth is that, like any addict, his need for coffee stimulation is only getting more intense over time. The stuff for normies that coffee shops sell has to meet the standards of the local health department, and that won’t cut it for him anymore. He’s got to go meet his street-corner “connection,” a guy who’s got a black-market espresso machine set up at Fletcher and Main that does things to a coffee bean that science cannot fully explain and definitely can’t recommend.

Crock, 3/18/22

For a long time, the go-to irritating but correct move when discussing the Cinematic Wollstonecraft-Shelleyverse has been to huffily reply “Actually Frankenstein was the doctor, you’re referring to Frankenstein’s monster” when anyone calls a shambling assembly of corpse parts reanimated by forbidden science “a Frankenstein.” But we’ve been doing this so long that it’s thoroughly played out. I’m urging my fellow pedants to move on to a new focus of correction: pointing out that the Bride, as iconically performed by Elsa Lanchester, was costumed and made up to be strange looking, but was not intended to be seen as “ugly” the way Boris Karloff was as the Monster, and was in fact quite striking and attractive. Therefore, jokes like the one in today’s Crock are based on a false premise. Please join me in this new movement!

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Hagar the Horrible and Hi and Lois, 3/17/22

Most people would say that the Irish Potato Famine is the worst tragedy that has befallen the Emerald Isle; an extremely not-fun fact is that the population of the island of Ireland is still 20% short of where it was in 1848. Mostly forgotten, but no doubt similarly traumatic, were the waves of Viking attacks that battered Ireland for much of the 9th and 10th century, leading to widespread death, destruction of cultural heritage, and even the establishment of short-lived Norse kingdoms that disrupted Irish political life. And sure, nobody ever accused Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC of being “woke,” but it’s truly offensive on St. Patrick’s Day for Hagar the Horrible to do a joke about some Vikings making an object of fun out of a furious and disheveled looking Gael, whose tavern they have presumably forcibly commandeered. More subtle anti-Hibernian sentiment can be found in Hi and Lois, where Hi’s drunken neighbor seems to be claiming an Irish identity, despite the fact that his name, which literally means “Stone of Thor,” is pure Norse. For shame, sir! For shame!

Curtis, 3/17/22

There was a great essay I read recently about the omnipresence of the “trauma plot” in modern storytelling, in which there’s basically a Big Reveal about a character’s Painful Past that Explains Everything about why they’re Like This. The essay specifically takes on the new movie version of Death On The Nile, in which it’s revealed (and, uh, spoilers I guess) that Poirot has (a) turned to detective work and (b) grown a silly mustache because of his suffering in the trenches during World War I, whereas Christie’s original detective watches and learns about people and what they do because that’s the sort of thing he enjoys, which is one element of what we used to call “having a personality” but doesn’t create a dramatic back story per se. This is a long way of me saying that one of the things I’ve always loved about Curtis is its cheerful sitcom sameness. Curtis perceives his dad as cheap because the family is lower-middle-class and Curtis’s ideas for how much money he as an 11-year-old should be given are unrealistic! I don’t want to know about how Greg’s beloved grandmother used to smoke and now he can’t quit because the smell reminds him of the times they stayed at her house after his dad got evicted again! I swear, if we learn a single thing about Derrick and “Onion”‘s sad home life I’m going to be furious.

Family Circus, 3/17/22

One of the conceits of the Family Circus is that Big Daddy Keane is simultaneously the patriarch of the family within the strip and also the artist and writer of the strip itself, which is why the strip occasionally gives him “time off” and “Billy (age 7)” fills in. I guess the fact that half the kids (where are the other two?) have been dumped at his mother’s means that he’s on vacation, which tracks with the complete lack of jokes this week. Like, the last couple days were just about the kids being really annoying to their grandmother’s downstairs neighbors, because they don’t understand the concept of apartment buildings? Anyway, I don’t think there’s a joke today either, but Grandma and the maintenance man are definitely fuckin’, that seems pretty obvious and the kids are right to say it.

Dick Tracy, 3/17/22

In the first draft of my commentary on yesterday’s Dick Tracy, I speculated that the villain’s name would be “Tastebud,” which I decided was too on the nose even for Dick Tracy and changed to “Tayste Budd” before I posted it. I apologize for failing to keep up with just how extremely on the nose Dick Tracy actually is.

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/16/22

Harold Russell, a double-amputee Army vet with no previous acting experience, starred in The Best Years Of Our Lives, an (extremely good!) 1946 movie about WWII combat veterans coming home to the United States and the difficulties they had adjusting to civilian life, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for it. (Earlier in the same awards ceremony, he had been given an honorary award for “bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures,” because the Academy Board of Governors assumed that he wouldn’t win the award he’d been nominated for.) He never found consistent work as an actor after that, though, and years later, he ended up auctioning his Best Supporting Actor statue off — he said at the time it was to pay for his wife’s medical care, but a later story put out by the Academy’s executive director was that “his wife wanted to take a cruise. He had a new wife who knew he had a spare Oscar.” Anyway, the point is, this has always struck me as a pretty sad story about why someone doesn’t have the Oscar they won that represents the high point of their career, but it’s clearly like a BAZILLION times less depressing than Marianne, whose win for a role in a commercial flop that nobody liked should be one of the most surprising in Oscar history since, well, Harold Russell’s, cheerfully showing up at the house of the man who sullenly refused to write this movie and just handing it over to him.

Dick Tracy, 3/16/22

Maybe my brain just doesn’t work as well as it used to but it took me way too long to parse the name of this establishment as a whimsical misspelling of “[Coffee] Bean House” — I guess I kept trying to make be “Bean How’s,” for some reason. Anyway, I still feel like it’s kind of an uncanny valley coffee shop name, like the place I go to near me that’s called “Coffee Memes” that just has a generic Instagrammable minimalist LA coffee shop aesthetic with exactly zero memes on display. What I’m saying is, probably this guy is a deformed villain named Tayste Budd whose whole thing is that anything but the most exquisitely prepared food or drink disgusts him, but I’d be willing to believe this is just a real half-assed coffee shop where even the best espresso is extremely bad.