Wow, what is you and Rueful Countenance’s damage, HeasyDragon? Did you think she’d sleep with you because you’re a nerd and she’s supposed to have nerd appeal...?

It’s also an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick nominally-SF novel about the drug subculture in Sixties San Francisco.

Oh, yeah!

Joel’s American Politics 101: “Some people wanted to own everything, and other people didn’t want anyone to own anything at all.”

Well, that’s the only explanation that makes sense to me! I mean, sure, All Quiet on the Western Front won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars...in 1930.

Cliff Richard is somebody who isn’t into drugs, destructive behavior, and has been a practicing Christian since 1964. While he insists he’s not gay, and has supposedly had relationships with women, he lives with his “charity and promotion schedules manager, Bill Latham and Latham’s mother.” He’s more a pop legend than…

Artur Brauner did starting in the 1960s—he produced The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse which Fritz Lang directed, then since Brauner had the rights and Lang wasn’t interested in directing any more, went on to produce a six-film series starring Wolfgang Preiss as Mabuse (except for Jess Franco’s The Vengeance of Dr.…

No, we’re taking pity on Michael Fassbender and not mentioning it.

Hey, I’m a Nero Wolfe guy, too!

Darryl Zero and Ira Welles only appeared in one film each, and nobody ever talked about bringing them back.

Well, not really—the “Pink Panther Theme” was used for all Depatie-Freleng Pink Panther standalone cartoons. “The Inspector” (who is, yes, Clouseau) only ran into the Pink Panther in the opening credits of Pink Panther movies—the rest of the time Friz Freleng & Co. would have The Inspector have ridiculous adventures…

The list ignored all the “second feature” detective series of the Thirties-early Fifties when television took over the characters.

I don’t know—Ralph Bellamy did a pretty good job as Ellery Queen, even if it was a different take on the character than Jim Hutton’s.

There’s a fair bit of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin on radio and television: Sydney Greenstreet played Wolfe on the radio with a revolving door of Archies, as did Santos Ortega and Francis X. Bushman; Thayer David played Wolfe and Tom Mason was Archie in the TV Movie Nero Wolfe, based on Stout’s The Doorbell Rang;…

The first time I saw Richard Belzer was during his brief “hunk” period in the early-mid Seventies, which was how The Groove Tube director Ken Shapiro used him in the centerpiece “movie” The Dealers. (Interestingly, Shapiro never used the more conventionally handsome Chevy Chase in that capacity.)

Mike Stoklasa, Rich Evans, Jay Bauman -

Yes, Dame Judi!

You really had to squeeze to fit Xanadu in, didn’t you? By any metric other than Gene Kelly’s performance as Gene Kelly, who can still keep up with The Kidz though he was pushing Seventy (only challengers he has are Fred Astaire and Amitabh Bachchan), the movie’s crap.

Dahl was a racist asshole, and a misogynist to boot—as anybody who’s read his adult novels like My Uncle Oswald, a charming picaresque about a man who creates a date rape drug(!), can attest to.

Hardly a new thing: The first Sherlock Holmes stories I read were “For Boys” and edited by the late ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE editor Chris Steinbrunner to remove the use of “Damned”, Holmes’s injectable cocaine habit, and almost everything about Tonga—the Burmese Pgymy with a blowpipe and lethal darts in <i>The…