The central idea of "A World of His Own" was ripped off for Delirious, the early-1990s John Candy movie. What a waste that so much of Candy's limited time and effort went into such unfunny scripts as that one.

Leitmotifs? You're saying that what Wagner did 150 years ago should set the standard for TV series music?

Ineffective with respect to the storytelling, yes. The situations and dialogue involving Jake and Elwood were kind of slapdash, and any energy that was generated depended far too much on car crashes, impossible leaps into the air (in the James Brown scene), etc. The end of Aretha Franklin's scene was so disappointing…

I want TV drama series to have expressive music with harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic interest again, such as you'd routinely find in dramas from the early to mid-1960s (The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Mannix, etc.) all the way up through the early 1980s (Bruce Broughton's music for Dallas) as well as the longer-form…

"Were the '70s just a perfect, once-in-a-lifetime dovetailing of artistic freedom and inspiration in American film?" YES. By the end of the decade, the pressure to produce blockbuster hit movies (apparently initiated by the success of Jaws and Star Wars) for summer or November/December release had begun to lead to…

In the mid-1970s when I was in college, I bought a David Steinberg comedy LP, a concept album called Goodbye to the '70s, which takes place in a United States taken over by Arab oil sheikhs. Not funny at all, unfortunately.

"When in Rome" is indeed an amazing song. The original studio version is on the album "Tape from California" (1968). Other noteworthy songs on that album are "The War Is Over," "White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land," and the title track.

As far as I'm concerned, it came AFTER the end of his greatest creative run (especially when you count the various mid-'80s bootlegs) and marked the beginning of a long downhill slide. It's enough to make me wish Tim Burton's Batman movie(s) had never been made. Lovesexy, the previous year, was the last uniformly good…

It's simple: Even Keanu Reeves knew enough not to get involved with the second one. (He was "replaced" by Jason Patric, who has long deserved better roles.) Sandra, however, chose to reprise her part - not exactly an example of smartness.

I take credit; I cursed NBC when they canceled Star Trek in 1969.

The evil-Enterprise opening credit sequence for the two-part "In a Mirror Darkly" is the ONLY worthwhile footage produced in all four years of that misbegotten series.

That's 11 years and a few months older, not 15-plus, from early 1994 to spring 2005. What stuck out for me most wasn't the actors' age, but Sirtis' difficulty in recapturing Troi's accent - or perhaps she just didn't care and/or the episode director didn't care either.

Yea, brother…