Month: August 2009

literature

Iron Man on Ice Coming Soon

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There are so many different and funny ways of announcing that Disney is buying Marvel for $4 billion. I was trying all morning to think of something catchy to say like how io9 wrote “The House of Mouse eats the House of Ideas” but sure enough my good friend and frequent lead generator for this blog Mr. Neu trumped me and gave me the title for this post.
I wonder if the Marvel Islands of Adventure theme park is going to be shut down now as its run by Universal and not Disney. I wonder how badly the X-Men would crush Captain Hook and his band of pirates. I wonder what the Incredibles would look like if that movie was remade with the actual Fantastic Four replacing the pseudo-F4 that starred in that movie. I can go on and on but I won’t – I’ll just wait to see how this plays out .
The goal of the sale according to the call that was held to announce the sale “is not to rebrand Marvel as Disney but to shine a spotlight on the Marvel brand.” I sincerely hope that is the case.

literature

Butterflies In The Sky No More

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It is with great sadness that I report that a beloved television show of mine is ending its run today. After 26 years, “Reading Rainbow” is going off of the air.
My all time favorite episode was about the book titled Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport. Another great episode was about The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash and on the theme of eating, I really loved the Gregory the Terrible Eater episode which was about a very picky goat who would only want to eat fruits, vegetables, eggs, and orange juice, and refused the usual goat diet of shoes and tin cans.
Reading Rainbow debuted in 1983 – a tremendously formative year for me (I was six) as “Return of the Jedi” debuted in the theaters and GI Joe and He-Man also debuted on TV. Put it this way, while I’ve seen a lot of things in 2009, I don’t think anything thing I’ve seen had the transformative effect that one of those shows I listed above had on me, lest the power of those four shows combined.
It seems that no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights and while the funding crunch is partially to blame, the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming.
The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading — like phonics and spelling. I know the basics are important but I still feel compelled to say “boo.”
“Reading Rainbow” will live on in repeats and on DVDs and really, just as the show always told us, we shouldn’t be watching television anyway. Take a look – its in a book. Reading Rainbow.