The only thing I think you failed to touch on is the costumes. My grandmother, at least, always loved to see what the female performers would be wearing. Though maybe that was just her.

The only thing I think you failed to touch on is the costumes. My grandmother, at least, always loved to see what the female performers would be wearing. Though maybe that was just her.

Great piece, Todd. Though I think it's kind of perverse that you know so much about this show. ;)

Great piece, Todd. Though I think it's kind of perverse that you know so much about this show. ;)

Allow me to submit: "Grease." The title song (sung by Frankie Valli, written by Barry Gibbs) is funky-smooth as hell, and the animated credits sequence is pretty charming and even funny. And both do a far better job of marrying together the cultural sensibilities of the 50s and the 70s than the movie that follows,…

Allow me to submit: "Grease." The title song (sung by Frankie Valli, written by Barry Gibbs) is funky-smooth as hell, and the animated credits sequence is pretty charming and even funny. And both do a far better job of marrying together the cultural sensibilities of the 50s and the 70s than the movie that follows,…

Bravo, Todd.
This is the kind of stuff that keeps me coming back to the A.V. Club - insightful commentary on the pop cultural landscape that is both well-written and well-argued and that finds interesting connections between phenomena that might otherwise seem unrelated. Thanks for this essay, Todd, I really enjoyed…

Snot - Please don't personalize my comments into ad hominem attacks when that's wasn't what they were. I specifically said that I was disappointed with Todd's reviews, not Todd himself, and that I thought the reviews themselves didn't grasp (or rather, attempt to grasp) the topics I mentioned. I have no doubts about…

Fig tree: fair enough!

Underwhelming reviews
Todd,

Also, not remotely the first drummer for Springsteen. Not even the first drummer of the E Street Band!

Pico — I don't have anything at all against the word "intertextuality" itself! Just the way it tends to get to get thrown around by the kinds of folks who write those papers you mention…

i and 1 - No, I simply wondered if any other AV Club readers had felt similarly recently, and wanted to point out that some of Noel's initial claims don't really hold up.

Gov. Dukakis - I guess I wasn't clear in what I meant. The "Pitchfork" model is precisely what I don't care for, but that's what I see in a lot of articles on the AV Club these days. Noel doesn't even mention the word "Simpsons" until his fourth real paragraph. And the paragraph preceding that one (the one I quoted…

Am *I* an asshole?
More and more over the past months, I've found myself excited by the topic of an AV Club article only to quit reading only a couple of paragraphs in. It happened again here, and for the same reason it usually does. The author begins with some sort of sweeping argument that is supposed to signal to…

I Forget: The interview was with David Wain (although I forget now where I read it). You're right, he basically said that MTV gave them a surprisingly large licensing budget, but many of the rights holders of the music used in the sketches just told them to take a hike for whatever reason. A real shame — just add it…

I was very disappointed by the dubbing, too, but I think it was unavoidable. They surely filmed the original sketch with the background music ("Sexual Healing") playing right in the studio. Since they couldn't get the licensing rights to the song, the whole audio track likely had to be scrapped. Given the shitty…

You're certainly right on that first count. Business is business, but it's a shame the company never realized the full potential of Gladys Knight, even as her appeal became more and more apparent.

Lexicondevil, I think you're being a bit liberal with your timeline. Yes, both Mary Wells and Gladys Knight recorded with Motown. But Mary Wells' tenure at the label was over by the time The Supremes first hit it big with "Where Did Our Love Go." She had left Detroit just a few months earlier, having run off to…

There are two competing stories about the discovery of the Jackson 5, as far as I know. One has Gladys Knight discovering them at a local concert in the Midwest. The other credits Bobby Taylor, who released a few singles on Motown around the same time and produced the few sessions the Jackson 5 did in Detroit…