Quidditch is a piss take on cricket in particular, meant to heighten the perceived absurdity of both things. It was an early addition to the series, and one of the very few bits of genuine satire in the depiction of the wizarding world as parallel to the muggle world.

Once in a while you get a work so singular it simultaneously creates and destroys its own genre. The Greasy Strangler is one example. A somewhat less dubious one is "Tumbleweed Connection" by Elton John, which pretty much invents vaguely apocalyptic British southern country-rock, and nobody ever touches it again.

Oi! That doesn't rhyme!

It's a little more complicated than that. Presley had a huge natural talent and charisma, a versatile singing voice, and little to no serious creative filter or specific ambitions. He could sing rhythm and blues "like a colored," but he could do country, gospel hymns and middle-of-the-road balladeering as well. More…

Elvis Costello is the more interesting figure.

I recommend the duology on Frank Sinatra as well; apparently Sinatra, for being a relatively neutral-to-decent-ish person himself managed to be one of the most toxic people of all time. Pretty much everyone and everything he touched turned to shit because of his proximity to it, despite his own successes.

"That ain't drugs, that's medicine." You can take the boy out of white trash, but you can't take the white trash out of the boy.

Coming to Murakami after diving into David Lynch makes it feel a little different; the touchstones of their "dream realities" are so very much the same, with improbable hotels, physically distinct or maimed individuals speaking cryptically, blurry boundaries between worlds, jazz music and coffee.

In the musical HAIR, there's a song called "Colored Spade" in which a proto-Black Panther character lists all the racial slurs he was ever called. About ten years ago, a friend of mine tried to do the same thing for white-trash slurs, and one of them was Muppetfucker, allegedly referring to the look you get after…

I know Nadsat is nominally a fusion of Russian and British Cockney influences, but I always wondered how closely it was inspired by the specifics of Polari, as they seem almost like fraternal twins.

"Don't take that photo! We can't invade Spider-Man's privacy like that!"

Roll for initiative.

The "angry proactive New Yorker" bit was added to the first Spider-Man after 9/11, specifically to avoid evoking the helpless fear and awe that the terror attacks caused NYC in real life. It worked so well in the context of Spider-Man's interactions with New York that it was mirrored in the second film, and then…

Chicks dig giant robots
(Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh)
NOICE

This whole election cycle has just been "Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish" down to small details, complete with Clinton as Mary Bailey.

Look at the flowers, America.

Weird less-commercial corners of autism have a history of difficulty being used as a metaphor; look at TOMMY for another story that reads very clearly as being a parable about autism, until it goes weirdly off the rails.

The answer: inside baseball. Menken and Ashman weren't Disney Studio songwriters at first, they were successful stage composers, well-known at that point for their stage show and movie "Little Shop of Horrors." Menken and Ashman LOVED "island music" and calypso rhythms: the stage version of Little Ship included a…

The stage show traditionally has Sebastian in a red zoot suit, with a big lobster claw on one hand and a top hat or fedora with eyes and antennae. We went with that costume for consistency's sake, but costumers almost made Sebastian a kilt in his colors to wear for the wedding scene, fully expecting it would stop the…

In Disney's Little Mermaid, location has been obfuscated in a way no other Disney Renaissance musical would ever try (though Hercules used ancient Greece as the state of New York fairly successfully).