Actually a good number of them are still around and remembered. The ones worth remembering will continue. Most will disappear. Same as much of the Songbook era was shit that has been rightly forgotten, with the best and most essential songs remaining in public consciousness.

I'll give MacFarlane this: the 1910s through the mid-1960s are to American musical history what the Baroque or Romantic eras are to European musical history: the Great American Songbook era. Forty years of development which spawned jazz and jazz-derived music in an extraordinary burst of prolific energy. Ragtime,…

Since I'm apparently the guy who asks these sweeping questions: greatest movie sex scene of all time?

Anyone who mentions Genghis Khan deserves to have their day improved by Germany's dancing Genghis Khan impersonator singing the theme to the Moscow Olympics:

There's a movie called "The Wild Party," which takes its name from the macabre Joseph M. March novella-in-poetry, but is actually loosely based on the Fatty Arbuckle case. James Coco is quite good as the pseudo-Arbuckle.

"Candy's a dandy, but liquor is quicker." This, and all his other free-association, almost compulsive quoting sprees in "Willy Wonka."

The sad truth about our reality is that the DCEU image of human interaction may be the more realistic one.

I remember his cameo appearance in the Kanto-based original Pokémon games.

Deathstroke has never done much for me as a character. The only time I've really cared for him was in his incarnation as SLADE on the Teen Titans show, when he was explicitly set up as the anti-Batman: secret identity, endless mind games and traps, the devil on Robin's shoulder. Having a character about whom there was…

True Showbiz Tales #18: Besides writing and acting, I've played off and on for a few years with a band called Five Minutes to Showtime, which is about the most 2010s name a band can have. Before that, I was in All Systems Go (very 2000s name), Bears on Stilts (kinda 90s), and Crack My Balls With A Sledge, which was…

She got the older boyfriend and the boob job. Next is the angry, Alanis Morissette-esque rock album.

One of the greatest theatrical experiences I ever had was seeing "Assassins" by Stephen Sondheim at the Studio 54 theatre with an all-star cast. Denis O'Hare of "True Blood" and "American Horror Story" was Charles Guiteau, and he absolutely stole the show. His Guiteau was a happy-go-lucky buffoon with delusions of…

Garfield gave me and my family only one laugh but it's held up twenty years. The Garfield Halloween special has a moment where Garfield, excited at the promise of candy, drops his lethargic grumble and adopts a wheezing, rapid exclamation of "candycandycandycandycandy" like a cokehead. For two decades now, any…

The tales of Lot and Job border on extended black comedy. Lot haggling with God for the lives of the Sodomites and Gomorrheans is possibly the most Jewish thing ever written.

Did Mary handle the stress of pregnancy well? All I know is she was on Joseph's ass all the way to Bethlehem.

Herschel goes to his doctor. Doctor says, "Hersch, you're not getting any better."

A lot of people, and a lot of purists, prefer that director's cut ending, but it doesn't work for me as well as it does on stage. The stage version builds to a fairly hilarious punchline of an ending: the Audrey IIs eat the theatre you're in! The deceased cast reappear as plant zombies and Audrey II breaks the fourth…

I want a SANDY Pearlman show: a darkly comic post-apocalyptic horror adventure based on the sci-fi iconography of his poetry (which most famously formed the basis for Blue Oyster Cult's "cosmic weirdness" period).

I was going to say, "and he also wrote 'Oh! Carol' about his crush on fellow fledgling studio-songwriter Carole King, then forgot to check how her name was spelled before publishing it," but I always get Paul Anka confused with Neil Sedaka.

Anyone who remembers the batshit-insane "Alice in Wonderland" TV movie from the 90s will know that the second verse of Twinkle Twinkle goes something like: