Last Wednesday, I saw a preview of the new movie 2012 at the Birmingham Palladium. Having not seen or read anything about the movie, I wasn't sure what to expect. I'm pleased to say it wasn't a religious-themed "end times" piece of propaganda. Instead, it was a disaster film, like those 70s movies Airport, The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, just on a wee bit of a larger scale. And possibly unlike those films (I don't think I've ever seen the first two in their entirety, and it's been decades since I've seen the third), 2012 has a thread of optimism about the survival of the human species.

 

      Last week, the great Bill Cosby- my favorite stand-up comedian- was honored with the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. It's a well-deserved honor. In many ways, Cosby set the standard.

If you haven't noticed, books are making an interesting comeback.

   

     Portmeirion, setting for the original version of The Prisoner.- Photo copyright 1988 Patrick Keating.

 

    "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered!"- the Prisoner (Patrick McGoohan)

     

  Bloom County fans take note. IDW is releasing the entire run of that great 1980s newspaper strip in five volumes through its "Library of American Comics" imprint. Volume 1 of Bloom County the Complete Library was published earlier this month, and collects strips from 1980 to 1982.

 

‘WILD PALMS' was released on DVD in 2005. It has yet to be given the "special edition treatment." 

The year was 1993 and the landscape of television was very different than it is today.

 

Controversial filmmaker Oliver Stone teamed up with novelist/screenwriter Bruce Wagner to create a miniseries for ABC called "Wild Palms." An interesting pairing to say the least. One was known for creating technically brilliant, though often "fictionalized" films surrounding the Vietnam era (he won an Oscar for "Platoon"). The other, an L.A.-based novelist, who wrote about the world of Hollywood, and up until that time, his most famous work for the screen was "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 Dream Warriors."

 

LEVAR BURTON'S "Reading Rainbow" inspired a love of reading and learning for 26 years.

I had to wait a couple of months before it really soaked in - "Reading Rainbow" is gone.

The truth is, like "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" and other Public Television staples, "Reading Rainbow" will live on through repeats, for awhile at least. That is, until it actually dates itself and is pushed into the vaults to be rediscovered in another format (perhaps a retrospective DVD release?). I give it maybe another decade.

 

     In 1964, Random House began publishing what I consider one of the best juvenile mystery series: The Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators Mystery Series.

     A lot of things make this series, now 45 years old, worthy of note. Not least of which, on a personal level, The Three Investigators probably ignited my love of reading and my decision to be a writer.

 

Last Friday, Dollhouse, the latest series from Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, began its second season on Fox; and it may have found its footing at last.

Here's hoping it's not too late.

 Anthony Rogers first appeared in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories magazine, in Philip Francis Nowlan’s novella “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” He would return in “The Warlords of Han” in March 1929, but not before John Flint Dille, president of the National Newspaper Syndicate of America, had convinced Nowlan to adapt his story for a newspaper strip. That strip first appeared on Jan. 7, 1929— initially written by Nowlan and illustrated by Dick Calkin— and ran until the late 1960s. And it made Anthony a household name.

    What? You’ve never heard of Anthony Rogers? Maybe you know him better by the name given him for the strip: Buck Rogers.