"Atlas Shrugged" is primarily a comfort to SOBs who desperately want to believe they're not SOBs.

It's been a while, but I do remember Green Lantern feeling the need to ask Warhawk who his mother is. Warhawk replies with a matter of fact "Isn't it obvious?" and Static Shock starts riffing on Shayera not enjoying laying an egg. At the time I wondered if he was kidding.

The cycle of Marvel films leading up to Avengers has explicitly rejected the whole concept of "secret identities." You've got an immodest zillionaire, a famous WWII hero, a visiting god, and a fugitive everybody knows is the Hulk. Plus a couple of intelligence agents who don't seem to have much in the way of cover.

I recall a very unsubtle short story that had a celebrated actor, facing death, arranging to die onstage to raise money for his family. Fans — crass vultures, actually — pack the house, waving souvenir flags with photos of his most famous characters. As they wait for the moment, a doctor in attendance announces…

Nice little footnote, but I expected a little more debate at the end: Fry got to grow old with Leela — not a given if they restart time and he has more opportunities to screw up. You think she'd be the one to ask and maybe need to persuade him.

Actually, the movie ends with the bum being taken back into the family — He's been domesticated. I use the word bum because he's about as realistic as Red Skelton's hobo with the cigar and crushed top hat.

Oh, and Tommy Kirk as the son and pre-West Side Story Rita Moreno as the maid.

Think of it as a bizarro take on old-school Disney live-action comedies. Nick Nolte replaces the comical animal / ghost / wacky teen who upsets the household, causes mild slapstick at a party but is ultimately beloved by all. Note how even as a bum, he moves through a clean, upscale and almost Disneyesque world. A…

A big part of it is that the bum's dog — named Kerouac, suggesting the bum is already romanticizing himself — abandons him for a pretty lady with a bag of treats. Despair over being hungry and homeless is too real, too basic. Despair that even your pretentiously named dog is ready to sell out is comic.

Anybody here familiar with "Bear for Punishment," the Chuck Jones cartoon about the Three Bears celebrating Father's Day?

"NNY Bus Terminal and Strategic Urine Reserve"

I'm trying to remember a time when I didn't get the idea of sequential pictures. I remember being unable to read "Travels of Babar" and the Sunday funnies, but grasping that each image recounted something later.

That's sort of the green elephant in the room. All the TV & movie attempts to build Oz franchises on the interest Maguire ignited . . . Will they kill any chance for a movie of "Wicked" and/or its musical adaptation, or will they be blown away by the arrival of the semi-original? And do musical and non-musical…

Pretty soon it'll be Charles Dickens' turn . . .

"Face in the Crowd" was about a guy who was corrupt from the get-go. The joke was how quickly and naturally a two-bit con man could master television, advertising and politics.

If memory serves, she singles out "timing" as what they liked.

If memory serves, one of his big jokes is a chestnut that says his mother's been dead for years. And we know his mother is alive and screaming at him, living in her basement. The jokes are as fake as everything else in his life, although his concept of what's funny is a bit scary.

Still not sure if the joke wasn't Amy unwittingly yelling "Lay me!"

"Is it me maybe?" Love how Zoidberg is disappointed that he's the real one.

Actually, what killed the Disney hour was mostly obsolescence. It was the last of the 50s anthology shows standing. It was a generalist in an age of niche marketing and specialized programming.