Burns' style was already successfully parodied around 15 years ago on Late Night with Conan O'Brien - might have been when Andy was still on the show.

By what standard is "Abraham, Martin and John" "cornball"? It's too sincere to be called that. Ask anyone who remembers the losses of both Martin and Bobby (who turns up in the final verse). The record was a self-evidently genuine emotional response to very current events, and that's why it was a hit. Not, of course,…

I went to the British link suggesting that "Ballad" was somehow influenced by Dick's 10-years-earlier novel The World Jones Made. I've read that novel (and many other PKD novels) more than once, and the argument that there's any relation to the song is utterly unconvincing.

I'll bet she Rhued her decision to stay.

With all respect to the effort that went into it, I'd have enjoyed "All Good Things" more if they'd done without all the convolutions and simply extended the final poker-table scene to 2 hours.

The assertion about Dylan's "Forever Young" is just wrong; writing "the two versions feel, together, like one long song" displays ignorance of the fact that the slow version of "Forever Young" ends side 1 of the LP, whereas the faster, countryish version (i.e., the theme from the NBC series Parenthood) begins side 2. N…

Wasn't the copy-machine-as-lie-detector bit first used in Homicide (the NBC series based on Simon's nonfiction book)?

I watched the Beverly Hills Buntz pilot in '87, which probably was the key reason the series sold; they got Hal Ashby to direct it, whose film career was pretty much behind him at that point but still had talent. But as much as I liked Franz as Buntz on Hill Street, I'd liked him even better as (the late) Sal…

They did likewise for a few of the movies that followed, up through Go West.

Joe Adamson (Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo, 1973) gives Room Service only a page or two, correctly identifying it as not a true Marx Brothers movie - it was based on a preexisting stage play and rewritten (with a few changes in character names) to sort of resemble a Marx Brothers picture, not very…

Look, the whole point of movies like this is to make a quick profit and get out of town before bad word of mouth spreads; it only works if your costs are low to begin with, and (despite the praise given to them in the review) I never heard of any of the actors before, so they probably weren't costly.

Super-stretching ability doesn't necessarily equate to an uninteresting lead character. As a kid I came across a then-new issue of DC's The Elongated Man, where the hero (named Ralph!) is so cool he doesn't even need his alternate identity to be secret. He's married, too, I think.

It's his best work in film, I'd say.

I could dig it - Tony Bennett covering "25 or 6 to 4."

All of us, in a way, made up Tuttle…

Fun fact: Keillor and Prince are only 16 years apart in age.

Eh, I prefer the era when Prince mocked rappers (around the time of the then-unreleased Black Album).

Archie became a superhero once before, decades ago (look up "Pureheart the Powerful"), so I hope they don't go in that direction next.

Even alleged professionals get such things wrong. I once saw Peter Jennings (during ABC evening news' notable-person-of-the-week feature) describe Garrison Keillor as having grown up in "ANN-ika," Minnesota (i.e., Anoka).

One thing I love about Flood is the title track lyric "It's their brand new album for 1990!" This reminds me of the hood or trunk ornament of certain old cars that proudly mentioned the car's model year: "1956 Buick Special" for example. I guess the title song of Flood is a hood ornament of sorts.