It was nice to hear Russi Taylor back as young Donald. She does the Donald voice better than Tony Anselmo does, frankly. It’s true enough to the quacky/raspy quality of Donald’s voice, but you can actually understand the words.

I was wondering why they put this episode in 1951, but I’ve learned that FX creator Eiji Tsuburaya pitched a giant-octopus movie in that year (it would’ve been attacking ships at sea). This blog post argues that Tsuburaya would’ve been a better fit for the episode than Honda. Although I guess the idea was to go for a…

Correction noted. Still, the Addamses broke with the sexless conventions of the sitcom couples of their day.

It’s an oral history because it’s compiled from interviews and personal accounts rather than the study of pre-existing written texts or documents. The term refers to the sources the historical study is based on, not the format of the study itself.

The Addams Family was always subversive. In the sitcom, it was the “weirdos” scorned by society who were the loving, happy, well-adjusted ones while the “normal” people looking down on them were petty, neurotic jerks. They also pushed the envelope -- Gomez and Morticia were the first sitcom couple to show open…

That’s right. The Japanese phrase he uttered at the end, “Kaiju-O” (King of Monsters), was the subtitle used for the Japanese release of the American recut. I don’t think the original film ever referred to Godzilla as a “king” of anything — if anything, it portrayed Godzilla more as a divine force, worshipped as a god…

Good point.

Sure, Earth-1 has a different history from ours and that lets us excuse a number of things. Still, it seems an odd choice to build a story around a real historical figure and then play fast and loose with the facts around them. In the case of the Hedy Lamarr episode, I could understand why they changed her first Hollyw…

Yet it was very inaccurate in other ways. Honda was on the Chinese front when Hiroshima was bombed, and the original idea for Godzilla didn’t come from him, it came from producer Tomoyuki Tanaka in 1954, partly as an emulation of Harryhausen’s 1953 The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and partly as an allegorical protest of …

That’s just playing word games with individual words taken out of context, so that the actual meaning is ignored. As I said, the words “fop” and “dandy” have always been used to refer specifically to someone who is vain about their physical appearance, their clothing, and their status in society. Someone like Trelane…

It wasn’t just the costumes (though they were certainly part of it), it was the whole visual style — the camera work, the slow motion, the highly processed and unrealistic look typical of Snyder, the exaggerated fight choreography, all of it. I felt it should’ve been done in more of a cinema verite style, something…

What’s dumb about a power-enhancing drug that kills its users? That’s pretty plausible -- that forcibly pushing someone beyond their normal limits could burn them out fatally. And it reflects their contempt for the lives of the superpowered people that they’re willing to throw away their lives like that.

I thought Push was a terrific superhero movie. I didn’t find its worldbuilding confusing; I found it rich, coherent, and begging for a further exploration, either in sequels or in a TV-series spinoff. Although a series probably couldn’t have benefitted from the movie’s fabulous use of Hong Kong as a location.

“Newt Scamander, the foppish dandy of a protagonist...”

“This show really is Charmed-by-way-of-Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

This is my problem with the usual portrayal of the Joker as “insane” and unfit to stand trial, which is why he ends up in Arkham instead of prison. Legally, “insane” essentially means not being sufficiently aware of reality to understand the criminality of one’s actions or competently defend oneself in court. The…

Heck, I wish they’d downplay it just so I could understand what he was saying most of the time.

But how could Donald ever disguise his voice? That’s a concept that could only work on the page.

According to Don Rosa’s Duck family tree, Fethry Duck (a character created for non-US comics and never used in Carl Barks’s stories) is the son of Donald’s uncle Eider Duck and his wife Lulubell Loon. So I guess he’s half-loon.

Funny, I thought this was a stronger episode than usual. Perhaps because it did such a good job of really conveying an air of adventure and wonder for once rather than just paying postmodern lip service to the idea. The animation on the hydrothermal vents and the giant krill was beautiful, the music was almost as…