Television Separated At Birth

All I’m saying is, once Walter shaves off that beard, the resemblance to Julia Child becomes a lot more obvious.

Drop The Big One And See What Happens

I don’t remember ever being actually worried about a nuclear war.

This may be a sign that I was simply a very unaware, optimistic child, of course. But I really don’t remember any of the Cold War, Oh-My-God-We’re-About-To-Die paranoia from the 1980s that I often read about as if I wasn’t alive during that time; I remember seeing parts of things like Threads and thinking “Oh, that’s doesn’t look too much like fun,” but it never really seemed… real, I guess? Or real enough to be an actual possibility.

It’s not that I was entirely unaware of the idea that there was the possibility that America and Russia could go to war, and that if they did, we were right in the middle and that that was not necessarily a place anyone would want to be. I simply didn’t think that it would ever happen, for whatever reason; I had this idea that just the idea of war was bad enough, or scary enough, that it made real war unnecessary. That makes me sound much smarter than I actually was, more aware and cynical than the me I was then, so I’ll throw that into relief by admitting that I also had this feeling that war was something that modern society had moved past, after past conflicts (Ha! If only).

Because of this latter mistaken idealism, I remember the sharp taste of disillusionment when the first Iraq War started, a kind of hollow “this will never end” take that had me worried that mandatory military service would get reinstated just in time to get me, and that I’d end up out of place in a warzone a teenage pacifist waiting to get killed by someone with less moral qualms. But even that me, the one quietly convinced that war would never end and we would always be in conflict with someone, was never worried about the idea of some giant atomic apocalypse. It was the smaller, longer death that concerned me, then. Nuclear war was still the stuff of movies and ill-considered fantasy.

One day, someone’s going to drop the big one, and I’m going to be thinking “Aw, really? That’s so Terminator cliche” just before being blown to atoms.

Broadway Is Dark Tonight

(Because at least part of this weekend was spent writing the Onomatoepia newsletter, here’s the essay from last month’s, as way of apology.)

It should be noted, even though the world collectively forgot to be shocked by the news at the time, that Spider-Man: Turn Out The Dark (also known as “That Spider-Man Musical With The Worst Name Imaginable, Seriously Bono, We Don’t Care If You’re In U2, That’s A Ridiculous Name And Even You Know It And By The Way, Stop Selling Out And Appearing In Advertisements For Everything Under The Goddamned Sun, Wasn’t Having Your Own Special iPhone Brand Enough For You People And, Really, We Were All Being Polite And Pretending To Like ‘Vertigo’ Because You Haven’t Done Anything Good In Years” – although that title was only ever unofficially used in the trade magazines as it was thought to be too long for a theater marquee) has been forced to shut down pre-production after running out of money and is now no longer expected to open in February 2010 as originally planned. There are many reasons for this – some of which we’ll go into in this special edition of Fanboy Rampage Goes To Broadway – but the main one is, undoubtedly, the simple fact that it was a musical based on a superhero, something that historically has never done well.

Thanks to the internet, many people now pretend to be aware of such Broadway misses as It’s A Bird… It’s A Plane… It’s Superman! and What’s The Smell Of Fish, Oh It’s You, Aquaman – Most fondly remembered these days for giving the young Stanley Tucci his first professional acting role, as Squiggle The Baby Porpoise, of course – but the rain-splattered streets of New York’s fabled theater district is covered with the corpses of many other failed attempts at bringing the magic of the superhero genre to the stage. Tonight, we’ll list just some of the more high profile of these miserable failures for your musintertainment. Join us – After this break!

Shall We Bat?

The partnership of Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin produced many popular movie musicals from Cover Girl to… well, Cover Girl, but a little known fact about the musical careers of both men is that, following the initial success of National Publications’ “Batman” character after his 1939 introduction, creator Bob Kane teamed with the songwriters with the idea of taking Bruce Wayne to Broadway. Initially announced as “an evening of dramatic entertainment punctuated by beautiful music and romance,” the playfully-titled Who’s That Masked Bat? was to feature a story “written” by Kane – Experts who’ve looked over the remaining notes believe that it was, unsurprisingly, actually the work of Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson – with five songs by Kern and Gershwin.

The show, sadly, didn’t even make it to the end of the writing process; Kern, already warned by his doctor to stick with Hollywood as the process of working with artists in such a confined space as a theater caused him multiple heart attacks, withdrew from the project following a series of arguments with Kane over whether or not Bruce Wayne should reveal his secret identity to Selina Kyle’s Catwoman character during the climactic number “Darling, I Have Something To Tell You (We Both Lead Double Lives That Bring Us Into Such Repeated Contact That It Must Either Be Fate Or Crappy Writing),” and the entire project was forced to be shelved when Gershwin’s brokered peace between the two was surprisingly ended by Kern’s death in 1945.

(Much criticized at the time, few comic fans realize that Jeph Loeb’s “Hush” was actually based upon the unproduced show, complete with Kern’s much-hoped-for reveal. The idea to adapt the show wasn’t Loeb’s, however, but instead something that artist Jim Lee came up with when Loeb missed several deadlines upon visiting a psychic and being told that he would one day write Marvel Comics’ Ultimatum. It took Loeb months to come out of the entirely understandable shock upon learning that terrible truth.)

This Is The Dawning Of The Age of Galactus

Buoyed by the surprise success of their hippiecal Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical when it opened on Broadway in late 1967, writers James Rado and Gerome Ragni looked around the shifting American culturescape for material for a follow-up that would have a similar pop-cultural impact while also allowing them to deal with even more “out there” themes and imagery. This coincided with Marvel’s Stan Lee opening his heart to the idea of selling out just a little bit more, and Lee, Rado and Ragni collided in a cloud of smoke, dreams and bullshit before announcing to the world that Broadway would soon tremble before the might of Spider-Man: The All-Singing All-Swinging Pop Art Musical.

The plot for Spider-Man was simple; Rado and Ragni convinced Lee to allow them to expand upon the classic origin story to allow for a poignant lament on the inescapable nature of destiny by the radioactive spider that bit Peter (“Got These Fangs For A Reason”), a nude bedroom number between Uncle Ben and Aunt May (“Don’t You Know I Love You Despite Your Wrinkles And Unexplained Health Problems That Will Plague Our Nephew For Years To Come”) and, most unexpectedly, an extended “freak-out” following Peter discovering his powers that changed his chosen career from pro-wrestling to go-go dancing at the Coffee Bean (featuring the classic “That Boy (Ain’t No Woman, But He Sho’ Knows How To Move),” later a radio hit for Billy Preston and Syreeta). The villain of the piece wasn’t a familiar Spider-villain, but instead a new creation of the writers, The Man, said to personify everything that was, like, squaresville and old-fashioned about America at the time. In a controversial (and ultimately excised before the show premiered) scene, The Man admitted to Spider-Man that he thought that Vietnam was groovy, and that Paul McCartney was an underrated but essential part of the Beatles’ cross-generational appeal, offering a comforting familiarity for older listeners that eased their entry into some of the more outre songs provided by an increasingly erratic John Lennon; unsurprisingly, it was the latter opinion that was deemed too much for the target audience, and Ragni and Rado agreed to replace the exchange with a dance number where Spider-Man showed his disapproval by taking off his shirt and screaming at the sky.

Despite the title, Spider-Man wasn’t the only Marvel character to appear in the show. Mr. Fantastic, the Thing, Professor Xavier and Captain America all made cameo appearances, with Cap demanding that he be replaced by a native American to truly personify America’s spirit before breaking down and weeping. In a final scene that many thought unnecessary, Peter Parker learned that while we were all beautiful people, the planet was about to be eaten by Galactus and so everyone should live life as if every day was their last, a lesson followed by a reprise of Hair‘s infamous “everyone gets naked and has a love-in on stage” finale.

With music written by The Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian, Spider-Man opened in early 1969 to rave reviews. It was only when Stan Lee visited the show and realized what had happened to his beloved and, by this point, much-licensed characters that he sued the show’s producers for slander, libel and words he’d never heard in the Bible and managed to get the show closed and expunged from the public’s memory (That last part came from a deal with Mephisto. You don’t want to know what he whispered in his ear).

To this day, you can occasionally find small underground revivals of the show in rep theaters across America, closely followed by those responsible for such revivals mysteriously disappearing and never being spoken of again.

Razzle Dazzler

While many are familiar with the origins of Marvel Comics’ Dazzler – Namely, a Hollywood producer, record executive and Marvel Comics editor got drunk in a bar one night and decided to make a superheroine who could be played in a movie by Donna Summer and have records released in the real world, but then everyone sobered up apart from the Marvel editor – far fewer know the true story behind Jim Shooter’s Dazzler The Movie graphic novel, in which Dazzler falls for the most thinly-veiled Frank Sinatra analog that you could legally get away with, gets fat (except she doesn’t), starts smoking and then realizes that she’s not going to do it anymore. Or something. As you can tell from its inclusion here, it was originally going to be a Broadway musical.

The 1980s were a weird time for Marvel Comics. As the company grew in stature, it started looking for new outlets with which to unleash the creativity that had resulted in such books as Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man, The West Coast Avengers and New Mutants. Sure, there were the Saturday morning cartoons like Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends and The Incredible Hulk, but Shooter – the company’s gargantuan editor-in-chief at the time, and a man who’d gotten his start in the industry at age 14 and therefore had no experience of the real world – was convinced that there had to be more. Before too long, the publisher was working with toy manufacturer Hasbro to co-create the Transformers and GI Joe toylines in a deal that would see them make absolutely no money whatsoever from the subsequent multi-million-dollar movies each franchise would generate, but that wasn’t enough for Shooter. He wanted mainstream.

It was a wish that almost came true. As anyone who’s seen respected documentary The Muppets Takes Manhattan knows, the Big Apple is full of con artists pretending to be Broadway producers, men who’ll “love” your idea as long as you can invest a certain amount of money in the production yourself, just to “get it started.” Sadly, James Winston Shooter turned out to be as good a judge of character as Kermit T. Frog, and so it was that he invested the entirety of Marvel Comics’ profits in the promise of a Dazzler Broadway show that he, he had been informed, would have to write by Monday and, if possible, include a starring role for the “producer”‘s good friend Frankie Sinatra. With stars in his eyes and ants in his pants, Shooter turned out a script in record time, only to discover that the producer had disappeared with the money, leaving the editor-in-chief with the best thing he’d ever written – Well, in his opinion, but bear in mind that this is the man who created Star Brand – and a bankrupt company. What could be done?

The answer, according to Shooter, was to turn the script into a comic, and show the world what comics were really capable of. It was the 1980s, after all, and books like Maus, Raw and American Flagg were showing mainstream critics just what the medium could really do, so why not blow them all away with the newly-renamed Dazzler: The Movie? Shooter knew that only the graphic novel format would suit such a groundbreaking book, and that it deserved the best art team possible – but, sadly, they weren’t available, so he went with Frank Springer and Vinnie Colletta. Rushed into production to save Marvel from years of financial woes that would involve the publisher being bought and sold all over the place before finally having to declare bankruptcy, Shooter saved himself from guilt and thoughts of foolishness over his actions by knowing that this book, more than any other, would define the cutting edge of comic storytelling for years to come.

The rest is history.

Spider-Man: Turn Off The Electricity, Please.

And so, finally, we come to the most recent casualty of the war between comics and Broadway, Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. Those involved with the production have claimed that they don’t know what went wrong, but I think it’s fair to say that “Spending all of your $40 million budget six months before the show’s supposed to open” and “Hiring movie actors with no Broadway experience” should probably be warning signs of some kind. Also, that name – which, in case the Scrabble buffs at home haven’t worked it out yet, happens to be an anagram of “This Show Is A Terrible Idea,” only with some other letters.

It’s hard to say whether or not this final failure will convince the world of that business we call “show” once and for all that superhero musicals are a bad idea – As you read this, Warners are working on The Wonder Woman Look-At-Those-Gams Revue for a late 2012 opening, featuring the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes as Diana’s Amazon high-steppers, after all – but we can all hope so. Although, if any Broadway producers happen to be reading this, I do have a script for a Green Lantern show that would knock your socks off. Just picture it: Thirty-six dwarves, painted blue, singing in harmony about needing to impose order on the world…

In A World That’s Ugly And A Lie, It’s Hard To Even Want To Try

I’ve been sick and snowed under with work. Normal service will resume tomorrow, but in the meantime, here’s a little reminder of the 1990s to tide you over.

Threat Level: Phlegm

I remember, when I was in primary school – I can never remember what the American name for that is: Elementary, maybe? – being given mini-essays to write all the time, to turn us all into amazing writers and/or to make us realize that everything in the world was interesting and wonderful and, in the words of the Small Faces, all too beyoo-ti-fu-uh-uh-ul. Looking back, it was both smart and fun although, at the time, it was just homework, and much less fun for that.

I remember, with disturbing clarity, being told one day to write about being sick, and what had happened the last time I had been so sick I’d had to take a day off school; I must’ve been six or seven at the time, and the request just confused me: When I’m sick? That’s when I lie in bed all day and feel sick and am occasionally actually vomiting sick, and watch really bad daytime television. How am I supposed to write about that?

(To be fair, the daytime television really came later, when I got to high school and suddenly the BBC decided that they should show things like Neighbors and Diagnosis Murder after lunch, which was pretty much all I could handle at that time. Occasionally, I’d get bored of that and listen to Radio 1, even though it was pre-good Radio 1 back then, all Gary Davis and Simon Bates. When I was six or seven, I’d spend days off school sick in my grandmother’s bed or on the couch, being brought jam sandwiches and Lucozade.)

The writing advice I was given was to concentrate on how I felt. I can’t even remember the name of the teacher who told me this, but the advice I remember exactly: Write about how it felt to be sick, like I’d never get better, and how all the food tasted funny, but how good it was to lie in bed all day anyway. End by saying something about how the bed never felt as comfortable again. None of this was in anyway close to how it felt, for me, to be sick, but I remember thinking, well, clearly this is what she expects to read, and so I wrote pretty much an extended version of what she’d asked for, complete with an ending telling the reader that it was funny how the bed never felt as comfortable again, and got a gold star for my efforts.

Maybe it was at that point I realized I wanted to be a writer, in some sense.

I’m sick, as I write this; the bed isn’t any more comfortable, and daytime television has been replaced by TiVo and the internet. But everything else feels just as crappy as it did back then.

Is It Just That I’m Much Too Much For You?

Elastica were one of those bands that somehow transcended Britpop despite being right there in the center of the whole thing. Maybe it’s because “Stutter,” their first single, came out before Britpop really got going, back when the music papers were calling it “New Wave of New Wave” – I remember hearing it on the radio and completely loving it not because of the song, but because of the noise that opens it for the first five seconds before the song actually starts – or maybe it’s because, by the time their second album came about, Britpop was just a distant memory. It’s like they sidestepped being completely tagged with the Britpop label by ceasing to exist for all that time.

Of course, Elastica were the coolest band of that era, in a lot of ways. Part of it was Justine’s drawl, her doesn’t-give-a-fuck attitude that was weirdly sexy as the band ripped off Wire and anyone else they wanted and made it into an Elastica song with the spikey guitars and vomit noises and bored singing. They seemed at once both part of and out of step with everything that was happening culturally, and that was kind of their charm. Well, that and the fact that three of them were pretty cute (Sorry, Annie); they were like the indie Spice Girls that way.

(Here’s my embarrassing Elastica confession: Awhile after the album came out, my then-girlfriend and I were getting somewhat “intimate” when someone – probably me, although it’s equally possibly her; I’m simply taking responsibility because it seems dumb enough to be me in retrospect – decides that Elastica should be our fuck music. The two of us agreed that the album was curiously sexy and exciting and whatever, after all, so why not soundtrack our sex with it? Within maybe a minute of trying, we knew why; the burping and vomit noises we’d only semi-noticed before would turn out to be at first distracting, and then offputting, and we’d end up laughing instead of other, more vigorous activities.)

By the time The Menace, the band’s “difficult second album” appeared – five years after the first – the world had moved on, and part of that world seemed to have been the band’s mojo. It’s a sloppy, incomplete album, and more than half of it is the kind of thing you’ll never listen to twice. But there are parts where the old… ease, perhaps? not caring? their something shone through, and it felt like old times again. And then I caught sight of myself in the mirror, and realized that it really was five years later after all.

And With Us On The Call Today

Of all the parts of my former jobs that I don’t miss, conference calls would be pretty far up on the list. I’m someone who still finds speakerphone an entirely uncomfortable experience – You’re just talking into thin air, people! – so the idea of doing conference calls somehow always freaked me out; we’d be there, two or three of us in a room, on speakerphone to a client somewhere, and it would always seem like this strange half-real, half-virtual conversation that felt like watching a movie that was entirely performed in mime. There would be non-verbal cues within the room as we tried to decypher and anticipate what we were hearing, notes written and passed around as we, inevitably, played defense and not get into whatever trouble was on offer that day.

(I’m writing this, and thinking: That makes my old job, and my old company, sound inept and like a disaster permanently happening. Which isn’t entirely true, and on the occasions when it was, it was often true for reaons outwith our control. Nonetheless, even when things were going well, we’d somehow always end up getting into trouble from clients. The VP of sales would always appear after these calls, where we’d know that we were doing everything right and succeeding despite being told that we weren’t doing enough by the clients, and sagely announce that the clients were more than likely completely clueless and that’s why they came to people who did this for a living. It helped, for about two seconds.)

But the worst part about the conference calls was always the part where not everyone was on the call, and you’re there, stuck making smalltalk before you can properly start. The feeling of dread mixed with the need to say something would always result in the most awkward, uncomfortable conversations where I’d always say the wrong thing, much to the amusement of everyone else on the call. I’d never know what the right thing was, though, and so my mouth would take over and suddenly I’d almost always feel the need to apologize before moving on.

There are countless reasons why I didn’t belong in corporate America, but the threat of the conference call was always one of the biggest.

Dear Ones Like You Are The Best I Do

It says a lot, perhaps, about where I came from that I got more excited finding out that there’s a new Big Star retrospective, complete with demos and alternate mixes of the songs from their first three (in other words, real) albums, coming out this month than I did about all of the Beatles reissues.

(For those who have no idea what I’m talking about but are excited at the idea: It’s called Keep An Eye On The Sky, and it’s a four-CD boxset that’s pretty much a Beatles Anthology for Big Star.)

I blame it on almost-local boys Teenage Fanclub, but ever since I discovered Big Star, I’ve been convinced that they’re a west coast of Scotland thing, this obscure but essential band that escaped most everyone and yet are somehow well know enough that drunks can sing word-perfect versions of “The Ballad of El Goodo” (As I once heard, amazed, on a train between Glasgow and my hometown). It makes some sense, really; there’s a sentimentality and a fatalism that seems particularly Glaswegian about Big Star’s music, especially on the second album, on which Alex Chilton goes between swagger and sweetness in a way very few have since been able to.

(Never mind “Daisy Glaze”‘s tale of drunken, self-destructive aggression, which could be sung by far too many people from my youth: “You’re gonna die/ you’re gonna die/You’re gonna decease!” indeed.)

Big Star were, of course, the little band that couldn’t; the band who took the Beatles and soul and put them together to come up with commercial failure that, years later, people still discover through cover versions or random happenstance and decide how they could’ve lived their lives without them. My favorite album of theirs is still, probably, Third/Sister Lovers, one of the saddest (on many levels) albums ever. It was the first thing I heard of theirs, following up – I think, although I might be misremembering – on a namecheck in a Teenage Fanclub interview and finding the CD in the local library like it was fate, and songs like “Nighttime” and “Stroke It, Noel” (renamed in a spirit of contrariness by Alex Chilton’s self-destructive nature, but still a heartbreakingly beautiful song) seemed perfect, scarily so. Their first two albums are more raucous affairs, from when they were happier and expected the world to come their way, and both almost as good as the somber and fragile Third, but it’ll always be Sister Lovers that I’d take to that desert island if forced there at gunpoint.

Occasionally, I wonder about all the other Graemes in all the other parallel worlds that exist out there according to a million things I’ve read or watched; somewhere amongst them, there are Graemes who didn’t grow up where I did, and who didn’t discover Big Star. There are some reasons why I’m better off than them, I realize, when I think of that.

Paper Pervertery And Other Stories

Looking at that Amazing Spider-Man cover I put up yesterday reminded me that, once upon a time, I used to have a crush on John Romita’s version of Mary Jane Watson. To be fair, Stan’s dialogue had a lot to do with it; while it was constantly stilted, unrealistic and embarrassingly obviously the work of an old man trying to be “hep,” there was still something charming about it, and I maintain that anyone who didn’t at least slightly fall for the character after her seminal introduction must need their head examined.

But thinking about my crush on Mary Jane reminded me of my other comic book crushes; the way that the teenage me had a thing for Rogue from the X-Men – The inner angst! The accent! – and the pre-teenage me was enamored by Veronica from the Archie comics, previewing ill-fated relationships with rich, emotionally cold, heiresses to come. Falling for fictional characters was a regular thing of my youth, my hormones leaking out all over the place and finding new directions to go in.

As I got older, the rarer my comic fancies got (and the more they resembled real people in my life; I still believe that one of the reasons I think Peanuts’ Peppermint Patty is so awesome is because she reminds me of a particular person I once knew), and today, I can’t even remember the last character I had an out-and-out crush on (Maybe Rose Walker from Sandman?). On the one hand, that’s kind of good, I guess – Grown men probably shouldn’t dream about dates with four color figures that don’t exist, after all – but on the other, it feels more than a little sad.

That said, Romita’s Mary Jane really knew how to shake the stuff her creators had given her, didn’t she?

Running Late

A combination of deadlines and braindeadedness mean that I’m stuck working and having no time to blog as usual today… But instead of not posting anything, I decided to share this mindbending image with you and ask someone who’s read this comic – What the hell is Mary Jane actually doing here? I mean, I know she’s meant to be dancing (and not having some kind of seizure, which is actually looks like), but she’s on a stage? In front of a crowd? Is this some kind of previously unknown “My Girlfriend – The Stripper!” subplot that I’m unaware of?