I'm pretty sure that theaters showing Shoah during its initial run typically split the movie in two. I saw it over two consecutive nights; the same theater also showed it on weekends in one go, with a lengthy (perhaps 2 hours) intermission between the two parts. It was a repertory theater that normally would show a…

The description of Shoah is accurate but incomplete in one respect: None of the footage is archival. It was all filmed in the present day (early 1980s, approximately). That is why it's got a unique power that other Holocaust documentaries don't have.

Y. O. Petard: You were assigned "Born of Man and Woman" in grade school? Where was that?

Small clarification about his first published story: " …'Born of Man And Woman,' … The tale of a freakish child beaten and trapped by his parents…" It wasn't merely a tale; it was told from the point of view of the child, in its own stunted, apostrophe-less version of English, which makes all the difference. The whole…

Your list of dates of production of Get Smart and its spinoffs missed one: the theatrical feature The Nude Bomb, 1980. I think you've got all the others, though. The original TV show might be the only property on this list to inspire a series of paperback novels aimed at teens and preteens (by William Johnston); I…

Series 4 is only 6 episodes, not 13, and that's for the best. Holy Grail was being made the same year and they shouldn't have bothered with the series any longer, especially without Cleese in front of the camera.

I was a big Lou Grant fan, and still am. I have to assume that the biggest reason it got off to a great start (despite having to replace the female reporter after 3 episodes) was the contribution of Gene Reynolds, who co-created the series along with Brooks & Burns from MTM. Reynolds had come over from MASH where he…

Roswulf: Sure, it was great fun. It was my first Broadway musical (we lived about 90 miles from NYC) and i liked it enough to get my program autographed by Bob Holiday (Superman/Clark), Patricia Marand (Lois) and Michael O'Sullivan (Dr. Sedgwick).

Well, I actually saw it in April 1966 (I was 9) and yes, there was no way to have Superman fly other than via crude hook and cable. But the show was billed as "a new musical comedy" - the non-awe-inspiring flying was hardly the reason the show didn't last more than a few months.

Not Tim Burton's doing. The same is true in the book. Violet is permanently purple, Veruca and her parents are covered in garbage, and Mike is "ten feet tall and thin as a wire." Augustus, however, is "thin as a straw" from having been squeezed through the pipe; no mention of self-cannibalization.

To be fair, at least one song was about Clark Kent - "You've Got Possibilities," probably the most enduring song from the show.

From my (musically) favorite section of Thick as a Brick, near the end of side 1:

As a fan of the original 1964 Knopf edition of Charlie with the marvelous black-ink illustrations by Joseph Schindelman, I was pleasantly surprised when I first heard that the Burton movie was going to use the book's title. That almost pleased me more than the eventual movie did.

Zero Mostel would have been 98 this year.

Comments about radio stations reminded me of the glory years of WSAN-AM, Allentown, PA (1970 to about 1975). They were, I guess, an album-oriented rock station but would mix in all sorts of other things, including Monty Python LP tracks before the TV episodes first appeared in the U.S. (They'd also play Firesign…

My parents were cool, more than I could have realized at the time. First they got a car with a factory 8-track player, not an inexpensive option in those days (it was a 1967 Pontiac Executive wagon and the first year for the option); then they bought tapes that I still own, although playing them 40-45 years later…

At the time, Garfunkel did have an active recording career - first as merely "Garfunkel" for one album, Angel Clare, and a single, "Second Avenue" (which was amusing played at 33 1/3), and then as Art Garfunkel starting with the Breakaway album. The latter included "My Little Town" - that is, it appeared…

Which version? When it was in theaters, the newspaper ads listed different ones at different times - you could see Clue (A), (B), or (C).

On the contrary: The best he's been in other writers' work is as Hank Scorpio in The Simpsons and as the campaign aide in Taxi Driver.

The story was "Prominent Author" (If, May 1954), first anthologized in A Handful of Darkness, a British PKD collection from 1955 - one of his very earliest published books. See www.sffaudio.com/?p=34562 (which has an illustration from the magazine).