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Monday, November 25, 2013

Wreck-It Ralph

Can I just state how excited I am to be presenting this week's edition of the Monday Matinee?  For one, I'm doing a movie that actually came out within the past year!  For another, the movie deals with a couple of subjects that I have extensive knowledge in.  And, the third and best reason of all?  It happens to be a movie that I got on sale!

And as we all know, I love getting a good bargain!

Okay, so you all know how insanely expensive movies with the Walt Disney logo can be, right?  I mean, when "The Little Mermaid" was re-released on Blu-Ray a few weeks ago, the cost of the movie was a stunning thirty bucks.  I mean, seriously?  Who the heck would pay thirty bucks for a movie that is almost a quarter-century old.  I mean, compare that with "Turner and Hooch" which came out the same year.  You can get that movie for less than five bucks in some retail outlets.

What, does the name Disney mean that the movie automatically gets jacked up in price?  I mean, yes, I have to admit that there are a ton of Disney classics that are worth owning on DVD or Blu-Ray, but I also have the opinion that Disney films (and all kids films for that matter) should be more affordable, so that more children can have the opportunity to watch them whenever they want.

So, imagine my surprise when I was at work today and I happened to come across a display of Disney movies where they were bundled up into two packs.  Keep in mind that most of the movies that were featured were Disney films released over the last five years, such as "Bolt", "The Incredibles", "Cars 2", and "Mater's Tall Tales".  The point is that paying twenty-five bucks for two Disney movies is an incredible deal.  Why would you pay $24.97 for one film, when you could pay $12.50 instead?  I call it a no-brainer.

Now, one of the films that was included was "Toy Story 3", which is fine.  Although I have already seen it, it's nice to have a copy of it on hand if I feel a need to watch it.

The other movie?  Today's blog topic.



Truth be told, I had been looking for an excuse to do a blog entry on "Wreck-It Ralph" for quite some time.  The movie was only released in theatres a year ago this month, and released on DVD shortly before I began working in the electronics department, so it's probably one of the more recent movies that I've ever done in this space.



It's also a movie that combines two of my favourite things...video games and underdogs.

Now, I have to admit that when I was a young kid, I got hooked on video games quite early.  I think like most people my age, their first introduction to video games was at a video arcade or a convenience store.  I know that when I was a kid, I always wanted to go with my mom to the nearest Quickie store, because at that time, there were always three or four video arcade games that were just waiting for me to insert a quarter into.  Super Mario Brothers was always a favourite as was Pac-Man.  And, I may have told the story before about how I embarrassed the hell out of a couple of high school students when I kicked their butts in a rousing game of "Bubble Bobble".

(At the time, I was only in the third grade!)

And, like most people who played video games, they were made all that much harder when you had to battle the game with a mean, dastardly antagonist.  Whether it was a barrel-throwing monkey, a fire-breathing turtle, or gigantic hamburger buns falling down on top of you, it certainly made your adrenaline rush as you tried to make every minute of that game count!  I mean, I can't even begin to tell you exactly how many lives I've made Mario and Luigi lose while trying to save Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Brothers, or how many rings I've lost along the way while navigating Sonic the Hedgehog through all those wacky courses!  It's just one of the challenges of any video game.  And, you all have to agree that if you play a lot of video games, it is ever so satisfying to finally complete that one challenge that plagued you.

Even if it meant...cheating...just a smidgen.

Come on.  I know you all did it.  I know some of you had the "Game Genie" in which you could enter codes in that could amp up your game and make it a lot easier to complete.  Whether it was the infinite lives glitch, or the make your opponents slower glitch, or starting the game at level 72 glitch, the Game Genie helped out in a big way.  And, I'm all for the glitches that actually help your game, such as magically transporting from an unsafe area to a safe area, for instance.

It's when the glitches end up completely wrecking your whole game that cause frustration.  After all, I speak as someone who had the experience of losing an entire save file of Final Fantasy VI because I wasn't aware of Relm's Sketch Bug.

NOTE:  Only hardcore gamers will know what I just talked about above.

As a result, glitches in games get a really bad rap.  Now, if you're playing a home console game, your choice is easy.  You either buy another copy of the game, or you never exploit glitches in your current game.  But if glitches occur in arcade games, they are almost always put out to pasture, collecting dust in landfills all over the world.

Well, Wreck-It Ralph combines all those things into one movie.  It has an antagonist who really wants to be a hero, and a glitch who is shunned by all of video gaming society.



I mean, you have to feel for Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly).  All he ever wanted was to be liked by everyone, and all he ever wanted to do was be seen as a hero.  Of course, it's kind of hard to feel that way when you're the primary antagonist in a video game known as "Fix-it Felix Jr.".

You see, the game is sort of like a combination of "Rampage" and "Donkey Kong".  Fix-it Felix (Jack McBrayer) uses his magic hammer to fix the damage to the building caused by Wreck-it Ralph, who breaks windows, smashes doors, and uses his enormous fists to smash holes in the wall.  Throughout the course of the game, Felix has to repair all the damage, getting power-ups in the form of pies baked by the building's residents, while dodging the debris that Ralph rains down from above.  After Felix successfully completes each level, the people in the building throw Ralph off the roof.

Now, an interesting take on this video game is that when the arcade lights dim, Felix and Ralph actually get along great.  After all, they have worked together for thirty years.  But Ralph is always the outsider looking in from his garbage dump home fashioned out of broken bricks and dirt.  Although Ralph likes Felix, he is very jealous of the fact that the people in the building shower him with praise, riches, and hero medals, while all Ralph ever gets is constantly thrown off of a building.



Ralph has the idea that if he can somehow get a medal just like the ones that Felix collects, then he will be able to finally gain acceptance from the people in his own video game.  And as it so happens, there's another game in the arcade that can help him do that.

You see, when the arcade closes, the video game characters are free to visit other video games in the arcade.  The connecting spot is a place known as "Game Central Station".  And, as luck would have it, the "Hero's Duty" game is just a stone's throw away.  In that game - a first-person army shoot 'em up - anyone who passes all the tests will get a medal.  Of course, seeing Ralph try to navigate his way through a "Call of Duty" knockoff game is quite hysterical.

This is all fine and good.  But what Ralph had forgotten was that if a video game character stays away from his home game too long, it can cause games to not function properly.  And when games don't function properly, they become shrouded in an orange-red glow (caused by an Out of Order sign).  And if the orange-red glow remains too long, the game could be unplugged, and everyone residing in the video game will become homeless.  Just ask the poor Q-bert character who hangs around Game Central Station on any given day.

Needless to say, Felix decides to save the day, and sets out towards the Hero's Duty game in hopes of bringing Ralph back to restore the game back to its former glory.  On the way, he encounters and falls in love with one of the main characters of Hero's Duty - Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch) - a tough as nails female soldier whose tragic backstory explains her hard exterior (as well as her conflicting feelings for Felix).  And Felix and Calhoun team up to try and find Ralph, who went missing shortly after Ralph earned his medal.

Meanwhile, Ralph finds himself in the video game "Sugar Rush", a game that could best be described as a hybrid of "Gran Turismo" and "Candy Crush".  It's a game in which sixteen competitors could race against each other around a series of sugary sweet tracks that put a Katy Perry video to shame.  The game is ruled by King Candy (Alan Tudyk), and the racers all race together in perfect harmony.

Well, all except one, that is.



Ralph ends up getting his medal stolen by a girl named Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman), and the reason why Vanellope stole the medal was so she could use it to enter the race.  All Vanellope wanted to do was drive a sweet covered car and compete against everybody else.  The only problem was that Vanellope was a glitch.  Every few seconds, she would turn blue and randomly appear in pixellated format.  And every time she glitched, she would transport from one area of the game to another.  None of the other racers wanted to race with a glitch, and they bullied her endlessly - even going as far as destroying the car that she built herself with her own bare hands.  And, if you thought that King Candy would be sympathetic, think again.  He refuses to let Vanellope race under any circumstances.  What his motivations are behind it...well, I won't say.

Of course, Ralph witnesses the sour patch kid racers destroying Vanellope's car and he uses his huge size and powerful fists to scare them away.  Ralph then decides to become an ally to Vanellope, and together the two design and build a brand new race car for Vanellope to use in the race.

Of course, Vanellope has never driven a real car before, so Ralph attempts to teach her how in a rather...humourous manner.



Of course, when King Candy hears the news that Vanellope has built another car and plans on entering the race, he freaks out, and decides that she has to be stopped.  And in order to do this, he feels the need to manipulate Vanellope's biggest supporter by promising him the one thing he wanted the most.

I won't go into too much detail with the plot after this point.  I hate spoiling movies.  But I can offer you these clues if you haven't seen this film yet.

Clue #1 - Apparently the key to winning the final race is the combination of Diet Coke and Mentos.

Clue #2 - King Candy isn't the benevolent ruler you might expect him to be.  Instead, he's got a thirty year grudge to settle.

Clue #3 - It's funny how Vanellope is constantly made to feel as though she is not supposed to be a part of "Sugar Rush" when her image appears on the outside of the game.

Clue #4 - When Ralph appeared in the game "Sugar Rush", he brought along a companion with him...and that companion causes "Sugar Rush" to become a glitch filled mess!

Clue #5 - Glitches cannot leave games.  And when Ralph discovers this fact, he is forced to make a decision which could spell doom for both Sugar Rush and Fix-it Felix Jr.

And, here's some interesting facts about the movie as well.

Fact #1 - Did you know that there are some actual Fix-it-Felix Jr. games in existence?  They can be found at Disneyland!

Fact #2 - All the main characters of the film were animated to look exactly like the voice actors playing them.

Fact #3 - You know how video games show the high scores of the players playing them?  Notice how the top scorer of the game received a score of 120,501 points?  Written out as 12/05/01, you have the date of birth of Walt Disney (December 5, 1901).

Fact #4 - Several video game characters appear from the games "Tapper", "Q-bert", "Sonic the Hedgehog", "Super Mario Brothers", and "Pac-Man", amongst others.

Fact #5 - Anyone else find it amusing that the donut cops in the game are named after two donut chains in the United States?  I suppose Sgt. Tim Horton was working as a traffic cop in "Frogger" while Winchell and Duncan were getting all the glory in Wreck-it-Ralph.

Fact #6 - Look closely at the graffiti written all over Game Central Station.  There are references to "Zero Wing" and "Final Fantasy VII" hidden among the paint blotches.

Fact #7 - Mario was supposed to be included in the movie, but production couldn't figure out how to add him into the film.  It is rumoured that if there is a sequel, Mario will be included.

Fact #8 - There are at least three hidden references to Mickey Mouse scattered throughout the film.  See if you can spot them all!

Fact #9 - Did you spot the Contra code being used in the movie?  You know, the UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A START code?  I laughed my head off when that scene came up in the film!

Fact #10 - The closing song of this movie charted at #78 on the Canadian charts!


Sunday, November 24, 2013

Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of...)

Well, it's the final Sunday in November, which also means that it is the final Sunday which focuses on 1990s music...

...well, for now, at least.

And, to end this blog entry off right, we may as well feature a song that hit the charts just as the nineties were coming to an end.

Now, I don't know about any of you out there, but if you lived through the year 1999, you'll know that it was one incredibly topsy-turvy year. Everyone was getting rich off of the dot com bubble (which promptly popped a year or two later), Susan Lucci finally won a Daytime Emmy award, and Ricky Martin was shaking his bon-bon as the music scene exploded with a Latin flavour. On the flipside, JFK Jr's plane crashed, Columbine High School was the site of a deadly school shooting, and refugees from Kosovo were trying to find a new place to call home.

Certainly 1999 was an interesting year in my own life. It was the year that I turned eighteen, and it was also the year that I could have graduated high school (and probably should have), but decided to stay for a thirteenth grade because for some reason, being a part of the Class of 2000 seemed cooler.

Oh, how immature I was.

That's not to say that 1999 wasn't all that horrible. In fact, I remember 1999 being one of the better years of my life. I think that during the middle part of the decade, I put way too much stock in getting people to like me, and by the end of the decade, I decided that I just didn't care anymore. I also started to get back my academic swagger after abandoning it for a while because of the fact that I let getting picked on and being bullied affect my school life so much that I stopped caring about homework. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for me to get my grades up to the point where I would be accepted by Harvard, Yale, or Princeton...but you know what? I never really wanted to go to those schools in the first place!

In 1999, I remember that I really liked a lot of the classes that I was taking during that year. I loved my English Media class, because it was more or less a film studies class (which, for a pop culture addict such as myself was a dream come true). I hated my physics class so much that I dropped it after three weeks and ended up with a free period. Of course, dropping physics also ensured that I had absolutely no final exams that semester, which was MUCH welcomed!

And, another class that I remembered taking at the tail end of 1999 was World Issues. One of the reasons why I loved that class was the fact that our teacher really made world issues easier to understand...by rarely talking about them! Seriously, our teacher had the idea that learning would be more fun if we had fun in class. And, if that meant playing games, listening to music, or doing less-than-serious projects in class, it was all worth it.

(I suppose I should also mention that my world issues teacher retired in 2000. That might have had something to do with it.)

But I still remember working on a project in which we had to do a retrospective of 1999 (I was in that class during the first semester of Grade 13, which ran from September 1999 until January 2000), and the two girls that I was partnered up with and I did a retrospective of the year to the tune of the 12 Days of Christmas. Needless to say, we were kind of glad that the teacher wasn't judging us on our singing abilities, because I'm certain that our group would have received a permanent ban from “American Idol” (well, had American Idol existed back in 1999). But some of the things that we included in our song were the craze known as Pokemon, Wayne Gretzky's “99” retiring, and three French-only signs following the news that Francophones in Quebec were demanding the complete eradication of English from the province.

(Sad to know that almost fifteen years later, some things never change.)

Oh, and whenever we got to the part where in the Christmas song was sung as “five golden rings”, we would instead sing the words “Mambo #5”.

And, wouldn't you know it? That happens to be the subject of today's Sunday Jukebox!



ARTIST: Lou Bega
SONG: Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of...)
ALBUM: A Little Bit of Mambo
DATE RELEASED: April 19, 1999
PEAK POSITION ON THE BILLBOARD CHARTS: #3

Interestingly enough, although the song just missed the top spot on the Billboard charts, it did reach the top of the charts in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and in Lou Bega's native Germany.

TRIVIA: In fact, Lou Bega's song did so well in France that it stayed at the number one position on the charts there for TWENTY WEEKS. I don't know any Billboard single that topped the charts for that length of time!

On the flipside, it could also be considered to be one of the most annoying songs of the last few years. I know that when I was eighteen, I had more than my fill of this particular single.

And, surprisingly enough, this was NOT a one-hit-wonder for Lou Bega. He had another single chart in 2000 called “Tricky Tricky”. Which is actually a song that I like better, to be completely honest.



However, since Lou Bega's bigger hit was “Mambo No. 5”, then that is the song that we will focus on.

Now, on the surface, “Mambo No. 5” did well on the charts because there really wasn't any single released in the late 1990s that sounded anything like it. It was a single that blended contemporary dance-pop music with old-fashioned mambo music. In fact, the song itself is called Mambo No. 5 because it samples the mambo and jive song of the same name that was originally recorded by Damaso Perez Prado fifty years before Lou Bega's single was released.

Here. Have a listen to the 1940s version of Mambo No. 5. You might hear some similarities.



NOTE: Do not ask me where Mambo No. 1, Mambo No. 2, Mambo No. 3, or Mambo No. 4 went. I don't even know if those songs even exist.

Now, the original Mambo No. 5 was an instrumental piece which encouraged people to get up and jump, jive, and wail. But Lou Bega's version was more...sexy in nature.

Or, sexist, depending on what your perspective is.



Basically the whole song is about Lou Bega wanting to find a way to get a girl to fall in love with him and spend some quality time together. The problem is that he can't decide which girl he wants.

So he has this idea. What if he decides that he wants to have a little bit of everyone? A little bit of Monica, a little bit of Erika, a little bit of Tina...etc.

I mean, yeah, you could make the argument that Lou Bega really wants a girl who has the best qualities of eight or nine other girls to have the perfect girlfriend. Or, you could also make the assumption that Lou Bega fears commitment and would rather play the field.

Of course, neither one actually makes the singer of the song look all that great. Not that I'm accusing the real Lou Bega of being a player, of course. I don't know the man.

I will say that the music video was definitely memorable though. Director Jorn Heitmann mad Lou dancing along with 1920s and 1930s era flappers as the video shifted from black and white to colour imagery, as well as images of movie scenes from the 1930s and clips of big bands and people playing trumpets.

And, I suppose that you know a song is a hit when the Disney Channel likes it enough to make a video of their own based on the single. Mind you, for the video to be considered Disney ready, the lyrics of the song certainly wouldn't fly. After all, any references to beer, gin and juice, and flirting were huge Disney no-no's. So, the lyrics were changed, and instead of the names of random women, they were replaced with the names of Disney characters.

And to close this blog entry off...I'll present the Disney version below.




Starting next week...the beginning of A Pop Culture Addict's Advent Calendar: Year Two”. And, with the commencement of the advent calendar, the holiday songs begin. Hope you like Christmas music. We'll be listening to it the next four Sundays!

Saturday, November 23, 2013

The Sesame Street Treasury

Today's Saturday Smorgasbord is going to feature not one, not two, but FIFTEEN different books.

And, right off the bat, I know what you're saying. What kind of a book series contains fifteen different books? Not even Harry Potter and the Twilight series ran for fifteen books combined!

Don't you fret though. Although this blog entry will be featuring fifteen volumes of the same series, I will not be making this blog entry fifteen different pages. Trust me, I don't have the time to make that happen this weekend! But what I can promise you is that I will be featuring a blog entry that has quite a lot of information, a lot of fun, and who knows? Maybe some of you reading this entry grew up reading this book series yourselves and will be reminded of just how awesome it was!

We all have our favourite books as a kid. I mean, I don't know any kid who didn't like at least one of Dr. Seuss' masterpieces. I should know. My mother signed me up for the Dr. Seuss book program when I was in the first grade and I received all the classics from “The Cat in the Hat” to “Green Eggs and Ham”. I think I might even still have a couple of those books. The only book that I never got that I wish I had was “Oh, The Places You'll Go”. That was the one book that I never did get. But, hey, I suppose I could always raid a bookstore in the beginning of May to get it.

Then there was a childhood book that apparently I used to get my parents, two sisters, and some random strangers to read to me a hundred thousand times a day. I made them read that book so much that the whole thing fell completely apart! And, apparently to find another copy of that book now, you'd have to shell out five hundred smackers to get it!

(But, I won't be talking about “Hello Kitty Can Count” here. On retrospect, it's kind of an embarrassing book to admit to liking...but on the other hand, I was only a year and a half then.)

But would you believe that one of my all-time favourite book series combined puzzles, games, recipes, and what was then my all-time favourite television show?

The year was 1983. Although I was only two years old then and couldn't really communicate by way of speech (I didn't speak any words of actual English until I was three years old – prior to that, I was fluent in baby gibberish), but I always remembered being read to as a child, and when I was old enough to read books by myself, I usually gravitated towards books that had funny and colourful pictures.

I think that's one reason why I was so fascinated by the Charlie Brown 'Cyclopedia and the Charlie Brown Dictionary. They had colourful pictures that illustrated what words meant, and how things worked. I wouldn't be surprised if that dictionary helped me enrich my word power by the time I got through school.

(On another note, I really wish I still had my Charlie Brown Dictionary. Unfortunately, those things are not cheap either, if eBay is any indication.)

And, I think it's also why I was so fascinated by this book series, which was released in 1983, and which had some of my all-time favourite television stars in the world.

Well, okay, so most of these television stars had fur and big eyes. They were still stars in my book.



And, they certainly were the stars of the fifteen-volume book series known as “The Sesame Street Treasury”.

Now, here's something that made “The Sesame Street Treasury” really special. If memory serves me, the books were released over a series of several weeks, with a book released per week. And, if you thought that you could find these books in a book store or a library, think again. These books could only be purchased at supermarkets.

Believe me, I remember being a really young kid going to the supermarket that my mother shopped at weekly (which back then was a now defunct store known as O.K. Economy), and the Sesame Street books were prominently displayed at the front of the store next to the cereal displays. According to my mother, she bought me the first book of the series not knowing just how many books there would be, and when she discovered that I liked the first book, she was extremely worried about how she could afford the other twenty-five letters of the alphabet!

But, fortunately, Sesame Street found a way to make owning the books more cost efficient, and they managed to squeeze twenty-six letters into fifteen volumes. So, The Sesame Street Treasury taught you your ABC's, as well as how to count to fifteen. That was actually quite good, considering that back in 1983-era Sesame Street, kids only learned how to count to twelve. Just ask the pinball machine of the era.



I actually like the way that the books were presented, as the cover kind of resembled the way that each episode of Sesame Street ended. You know what I mean? At the end, you'd have a Sesame Street character saying “Sesame Street is brought to you by the letters I, J, and by the number 7”.



Oh, look...check out volume seven above! It also is brought to us by the letters I, J, and by the number 7!

And, depending on what book you had, you would find that the book would devote several pages that featured the letters and number that was written on the cover. Like, here's a story about the letter “M” that was featured in Volume 9 of the series below.



Or, how about we take a look through volume twelve of the book, where we see the Count von Count teaching Ernie and Bert all about the number twelve?



You see? These were wonderful learning tools for preschool aged children to learn their letters and numbers.

But was that all? Oh, no. There was more. So much more.

For instance, did you know that some of my all-time favourite recipes could be found inside the pages of the Sesame Street Treasury? I know that it might sound cliché to have Cookie Monster presenting a recipe page, but the truth be told, there were fantastic recipes for baked goods inside. Of course, most of these recipes required you to have cookie dough from Cookie Monster's own personal recipe book, so I did a little search and found the recipe for the cookie dough online. Here it is, found in volume one of the Treasury.



And once you had the recipe for the cookie dough, you could use it to make the other cookies that were featured in subsequent volumes. Like the Surprise Cookies, for instance. Seriously, try this recipe out. They are fantastic!



Of course, if you got sick of cookies, there were other recipes included in the books as well. Here's a recipe for “Tele-Grahams” below.



TRIVIA: Did you know that all of these recipes were featured in the Sesame Street Cookbook originally? It's true!

The book series made sure that kids could read and write English...but the book series also taught two other languages. In all fifteen books, there were a couple of pages devoted to teaching kids some basic Spanish vocabulary. We learned how to say colours, numbers, animals, clothing items, and other household items in Spanish through the brightly coloured illustrations inside.

And Linda Bove also made appearances in the Sesame Street Treasury as well, with pages showing us how to speak in American Sign Language. As Linda was the only deaf cast member on the series, she could only communicate through sign language, so it was kind of cool to try and learn sign language too. Have a look at one of the pages below.



And, there were also a whole bunch of stories that were included in the book as well. Most dealt with the letter and number that were featured in the book itself, but some were Mother Goose rhymes. And, what was interesting was the fact that the Mother Goose rhymes were taken from a 1981 Sesame Street calendar!


So, that's all that I really have to say about the Sesame Street Treasury. I hope I jogged your memories and I hope that you enjoyed the look back!

NOTE:  Tomorrow's Sunday Jukebox might be presented a little bit differently.  I'll let you know why when I get around to doing it.

Friday, November 22, 2013

Al Bundy's Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Before I continue with today's blog entry, I just wanted to take the time to thank those who offered comforting hugs and words of support.  Admittedly, the past few days have seemed like such a blur, and there have been moments in which things just didn't make a lick of sense.  But I'm beginning to feel a little better, and I think that I'm in the right frame of mind to start talking about the one thing that initially put this blog on the map.

That thing of course is pop culture.

I know that I'll be okay.  Now I just want all of you to hold my friend's family in your thoughts.  They are going to be the ones who will need all the love and support now.  I don't even want to think about what they must be going through.

Although nothing will ever quite feel the same again, and although I will forever miss my friend, life does go on, and I know that if he were here right now, he would give me a nice swift kick in the rear end and tell me to get busy writing again!  Well...in the figurative sense, anyway.

So, let the pop culture tidbits flow, I say!

And to begin this look back on the television schedules of yore, I will talk about two home truths that I learned about myself over the course of thirty-two and a half years of living.  And depending on what your own life experiences have been like, you may agree or disagree with me.  But these are the two things that I have learned over three decades of living.

Absolute truth #1:  The 1980s were the epitome of the schmaltzy, sweet, sugary sitcom that were so sugary sweet that they would give you a mouth filled with cavities quicker than a triple fudge ice cream sundae coated with marshmallow fluff and caramel.   "The Cosby Show", "Full House", "Growing Pains", "The Hogan Family", "Who's The Boss", and "Family Ties" were all classic shows of the decade, and I absolutely loved watching every single one of them...but upon retrospect I realize just how absolutely perfect they were.  I mean, let's face it, the only time the kids ever got in trouble were when they didn't do their homework, snuck out of the house without permission, or backed a car through the kitchen window!

And even more shocking is that crashing through a house in a vehicle didn't even net you any sort of punishment either!  Why would the kids be punished when they live a life of perfect utopia?  A life in which they never have to worry about money, or have screw-ups for parents, or have even a single hair out of place from the mousse infused styles that defined a generation.

So, I suppose that if you had a sitcom that had families acting less like saints and more like sinners in the 1980s (which was surprisingly a very conservative decade given that it was sandwiched between the swingin' seventies and grungy nineties), that would be one way to get a lot of attention.

Absolute truth #2:  Those who claim that high school was the best time of their lives are either lying to your face or are clinging onto the last bit of notoriety they had while in school.

Well, okay...maybe in some cases, this isn't true.  There are a lot of people who loved their high school experiences and went on to become successful adults.  But just going by my own experiences, it's funny how some of the more popular kids in school turned out to be not so popular adults as we grew older.  I know of at least a couple of people from my school days who bullied me in order to impress other kids in the class...and those people actually ended up serving time behind bars for a series of petty misdemeanors.

I mean, I certainly don't look back on my school years with much fondness.  In fact, I sort of left high school feeling like I had just busted out of prison.  And right now, I think that things are okay with me.  Not perfect by any means, but at least I didn't end up in jail!  And, I certainly am not holding onto a dream that died years ago because of something I did that made me famous at school.  If anything, the things that people remembered about me in school were more infamous than famous.

But it's amazing how some people go through life only having one shining moment in their entire lives, and never let go.  It's like a child who is so desperate to hold onto a helium balloon that they grab onto the string as tight as they can...even though the balloon was punctured some time ago.  It's kind of a sad image to picture, isn't it?

So, what if I told you that today's sitcom combines my two absolute truths?  A show that went completely against the 1980s conservatism and sweetness whose star was a washed-up louse still clinging to his high school days of yore?

Well, here's the show's opening credits.



Yes, we're going to be discussing a show that launched so many complaints during its couple of years on the air that several groups protested to have the show yanked off the air.

And yet, "Married...With Children" lasted a grand total of eleven seasons on FOX.  Go figure.

The show - which ran from April 1987 until June 1997 - kickstarted the careers of several A-list Hollywood actors and actresses.  Christina Applegate became a television and movie star, as well as a breast cancer survivor and advocate.  Katey Sagal had one hit show after another from "Married...With Children", to "8 Simple Rules", to "Sons of Anarchy".  And, even notorious show killer Ted McGinley didn't have any effect on the show's popularity, as he joined the cast a full seven years before the show aired its final episode!

Of course, the star of the show happens to be the one actor who appeared in all 259 episodes of the series.  The one who currently stars in the sitcom "Modern Family" as Jay Pritchett.



Yes, Ed O'Neill has had incredible success over the past three decades, earning a star of the Walk of Fame in 2011, and winning three Screen Actors Guild awards.  And seeing him in interviews, we can safely make the assumption that Ed is a classy and debonair guy.

Which makes it all the more amusing that the role that made him famous was one in which he played the part of a man whose dreams died a slow death and he was left as a glum, miserable, smelly shell of a man.

When I say the words "Al Bundy", you wouldn't exactly match that name with the definition of success.  In fact, if people were given report card grades, Al would forever be wearing the scarlet letter of shame.  Only, instead of the letter "A" for adultery, it would read "F"...for failure.

But when you consider that Al's only claim to fame was a high school football game, and that his life after that football game went completely down the toilet, you could understand his bitterness...somewhat.

You see, when Al was a high school student in the mid-1960s, he was a popular high school football star.  And he wasted no time in telling everybody of this fact.  I mean, you could almost have a "Married...With Children" drinking game every single time that you heard Al mention how scoring four touchdowns in a single game was the greatest highlight of his whole life.

Keep in mind that Al was seventeen when this iconic football game took place, and when the series began, Al was in his forties (actor Ed O'Neill was 40 when he was cast in the role).  So, what happened in between those twenty plus years in between the time in which he was the star of the football team, and when he became a washed-up shoe salesman who absolutely despises his job, his family, and his neighbourhood?

Well, how about the fact that an injury caused his dream of playing pro football to die forever?  A broken leg prevented him from playing football ever again.  And certainly a lot of people who were forced to give up playing sports due to injury probably felt the same way.  But, those people still find a way to live productive lives and find happiness in other ways.

TRIVIA:  After all, the exact same thing happened to Ed O'Neill, who was involved in college football.  He tried out for the Pittsburgh Steelers, but was cut during the training camp, which set the stage for Ed enrolling in another school to study acting!)



But then Al met Peg (Katey Sagal), and things once again spun out of control.

It certainly didn't help matters much that when Al proposed to Peg, he was plastered out of his mind.  And, it especially didn't help much that when sober, Al didn't find Peg attractive physically or had zero emotional connection with her whatsoever.  But then again, when you consider the fact that Peg was a lazy housewife who sat on the couch eating bonbons while watching Oprah Winfrey while coming up with ways to spend what little money Al made while slaving away at the shoe store.

But surely Al could find some comfort in the fact that he had two children that any person would be lucky to have...right?



Well, I suppose if you wanted a ditzy blonde daughter like Kelly Bundy (Christina Applegate), who basically threw herself at every biker, gang member, and scuzzbucket that ever crossed her path, congratulations!  You win!  And, I suppose if you wanted a horny, creepy son like Bud Bundy (David Faustino), who basically threw himself at every inflatable doll that was on the market, congratulations!  You hit the jackpot!

Wow...let's see.  Married to a woman who he doesn't love...a daughter who acts like a brainless boy crazy zombie, and a son who has his own set of social distortions.  What could get worse than that?

Oh, yes.  The shoe store.  And, rather than talk about the disasters and horrific things that Al had to go through at that shoe store, why don't I just show you by clicking below?



Well, okay...maybe in some aspects, Al brought a lot of that misery onto himself by being a jerk who has obvious hatred for women who happen to be in the plus size range.  No, actually, scratch that.  Al is a jerk, who purposely attacked his customers because they didn't happen to be of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue quality.  But, here's an interesting rhetorical question to ponder.  Do you think that Al would have been nearly so cold with his customers had he been completely happy with his home life?  It's hard to say, really.

Of course, that's not to say that life completely sucked for Al.  He found ways to enjoy himself and have fun.

For instance, Al had his favourite television show, "Psycho Dad".  I never really did figure out what Psycho Dad was all about, but based on some of the clips that we saw (as well as the fact that there was an entire episode dedicated to Al and his friends protesting its cancellation in Washington D.C.), it was almost designed as a parody of "Married...With Children" itself.  After all, there were many, many people who wanted the show yanked off the air for its raucous content and sexist overtones.



And, of course, Al had his...well...not-so-secret club.  The club's official name was the "National Organization of Men Against Amazonian Masterhood", or "NO MA'AM".  And, to say that it was a sexist club would be like saying that rain is wet.  Al, his neighbour friend Jefferson D'Arcy (Ted McGinley), and a group of men who worked at the shoe store, or hung out at the nudie bar with Al, formed the group midway through the series run, and the goal was to fight the increasing influence of women in both corporate and political America.

Of course, these activities included drinking beer, looking at porn, and complaining about their wives.  But I suppose if you want to consider kidnapping Jerry Springer and protesting a breastfeeding sit-in at the shoe store that Al works at...then, I suppose they've done their job.

And then there's his adversarial relationship with the neighbourhood...in particular with next door neighbour Marcy Rhoades D'Arcy (Amanda Bearse).  Although Marcy is best friends with Peggy, and seems to be cordial to Kelly and Bud, she can't stand Al.  You see, Marcy is a staunch feminist who has a superiority complex when it comes to how women should be treated.  She is not even for equality.  She demands that women be put up on a pedestal and that men should kiss their feet.

(Which is actually kind of amusing when you consider that Amanda Bearse is a lesbian in real life.)

Now, Marcy and Al have never really gotten along with each other, and that hatred grew even more when Marcy married Jefferson after her first husband Steve Rhoades (David Garrison) dumped her.  You see, Jefferson became best friends with Al, leaving Marcy to get infuriated whenever Jefferson hung around with Al.

Would you like to see some of the barbs and jabs that Marcy and Al traded with each other over an eleven year period?  Have a look!



And, that's your quintessential Al Bundy.  A man whose life was built on a foundation of broken dreams and bitter promises.

But you know something?  Throughout it all, while Al wishes that everything could have gone a lot better for him than where he eventually ended up...I do think that a small part of him found some comfort in the fact that he had secured himself a life that some people only dream of - well...a reasonable facsimile anyway.  I mean, don't most people want a partner who will never leave them, and at least a couple of kids?  Al had all that.  Sure, they didn't turn out to be the kind of family he really wanted, but they were a part of him.  And, in an episode in which Al loses his beloved Dodge, he spends an entire episode looking for the car because of a valuable possession that was left inside the trunk.  What could the possession be?  A case of beer?  A nudie mag from the 1960s?  The entire box set of "Psycho Dad"?

Nope.  It was a family photo.  Think about that for a moment.




Thursday, November 21, 2013

Video Blog - Understanding the Present Through The Past

I realize that the title of this Thursday blog entry might seem somewhat confusing.  But that's exactly what this particular diary entry is all about.  There are two videos that I will be posting in this particular diary entry.  The first video was filmed a few hours ago, and it's basically a rehash of recent events.  



November 21, 2013



Okay, so from this video, you can tell two major things.  Firstly, this video was filmed just a few hours ago, as you can tell from the video, I'm still trying to adjust to things.  The last 48 hours have been an absolute blur, and I think that the next few days are going to be somewhat the same.  Of course, everybody grieves a loss in their own way, and my way of grieving is talking about it.  It actually makes me feel better to do exactly that.

And secondly - I really do have that many comic books.  And yes, I am a self-confessed comic book geek and make absolutely zero apologies for this fact. 

And, I guess if there's one lesson that I can take from the whirlwind of emotions that I have been feeling over the past couple of days, it's that life does go on.

Ironically enough, I think that I came up with that conclusion when I filmed the second video that you will see almost immediately after this one.  Now, as I said in video #1, video #2 was filmed four days ago, before everything happened, so this explains the change in mood.  But listen very closely to the video.  It was actually intended to be the one I would have posted anyway, and there's a lot to be said about it.  I do apologize once again for the length...I tend to be a chatty...um...Charlie when I get fixated on a subject.  I'll work on that for next week, okay?



So, the lesson that I can take away from what happened is to live life.  Until recently, I've realized that I haven't really done much living.  And, perhaps having my past self (granted my past self of four days) reminding the future self will help out in that regard.

That's really all I have to say for now.  Join me next week for the next video blog...where if all goes well will be filmed on location!

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

No Pop Culture...Just Words

I know today is supposed to be the day where I draw a Clue character's name out of the bag, and I choose the topic for the Whatever Wednesday.  But, to tell you the truth, my heart's just not into it this time around.  

Yesterday, I received word that one of my dearest friends had passed away, and all this time, I've been trying to make sense of it all, but for whatever reason, none of it makes any sense at all.

And, today I want to use this space to talk about just extraordinary a man he was, the impact he had on my life and the lives of those who had the pleasure of working with him, as well as a couple of funny anecdotes about him that I will always remember for the rest of my life.

Don't think of this as a eulogy.  Instead, think of it as the story of a dear friend whose life was cut far too short.  

His name was Graham.  He was 43 years old.  And I had the wonderful fortune of meeting him and working with him in the dairy department for six years.  Even though this past year sent us off in different directions (me to electronics, him staying on the food side), we still found a way to communicate and connect with each other.  We would often talk about everything and anything, and when you saw him on the sales floor or in the lunch room, he always had a kind word to say, or cracked a joke that made everyone in the room chuckle.

I mean, Graham had this fantastic sense of humour...and it was displayed in such a way that the more he respected you and liked you, the more he traded barbs and sarcastic jabs with you.  Believe me, I have been on the receiving end of many Graham barbs.  And, you know what?  I'm probably going to miss those the most.

I mean, Graham was just the type of guy who would give you the shirt off of his back to help you.  In fact, I think I remember one instance when we were both working in the frozen foods section, and someone had swiped the jacket that I used to go inside the freezer.  He - without thinking - immediately took off his jacket so that I could wear it so I didn't freeze.  And, that was just the kind of guy he was.  I always remember him rolling up his sleeves and pitching in to help out, regardless of the area that he worked in.  

But on a personal level, Graham became one of my best friends that I have ever had in my life.  Now that he's gone, I kind of regret the fact that I never got the chance to tell him that.  I mean, I suppose when you have a strong friendship and working relationship as Graham and I had, you don't really need to tell each other how you feel about them.  They just know.

And, certainly there were instances in which Graham and I shared moments of true friendship.  Friendship that goes beyond switching shifts and going out for the occasional brewski.

I know I've talked about how I had the surgery from hell two years ago, and how my recovery was made so much easier by my co-workers as well as my closest family members.

Well, I have a story to tell you about that, and it involved Graham.  You see, my surgery was incredibly complicated, and for the first few days after my surgery, I was in the ICU.  

(Well, okay, I was technically in a "Step Down" bed that was located in the ICU.  It was still a very scary place to be.)

Now, as most of you know, in most cases, only direct family members are allowed in the Step Down unit for visitation.  So, imagine my surprise when Graham happened to find a way into the Step Down unit and paid me a visit in my room!

Keep in mind that when that hospital visit took place, I was attached to a machine that doled out morphine shots as if they were Pez candies, and I was attached to a catheter.  Certainly not my best look.  And, yet, Graham's main concern was to find out if I was okay, and he wanted to know if I needed anything, and I just thought that it was one of the coolest things that he had done.  

I still have no idea how he managed to get past the guards in order to visit me in the ICU.  And, now that he's gone, I don't think that I'll ever know the answer.  But the fact that he cared enough to visit me in the hospital that day...I mean, it meant a lot.

It just showed me that he was one of the best friends a guy could ever have.  And now that he's gone, I feel like there's a part of me that is always going to be missing.  I felt the same way when I lost another co-worker fourteen months earlier.

The one thing that I can honestly say was that Graham was one of my best friends...and I'm going to miss him dearly, as I'm sure that everyone else who worked with him will attest to.  My thoughts and prayers go out to him and his family during this rough time, and I hope that wherever he might be, he is at peace and no longer in pain.




In Loving Memory of Graham Darke
1969-2013

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

November 19, 1919

Welcome to another edition of the Tuesday Timeline for the month of November! Today's special date is November the nineteenth, and as promised, I have selected one topic to speak about. And, today's subject is a rarity, as this person has entertained people of various generations for nearly seven decades!

But before we go ahead with that discussion, we probably should talk about the other happenings of November 19 in the events portion.

(And, before we go into that, here's an interesting fact. Did you know that the date of November 19, 1999 is the last date within our lifetimes that can be written numerically in nothing but odd numbers? Just try it. 11/19/1999.)

Not that today's date is November 19, 1999. Just a little bit of interesting trivia.

And now...on with the events.

1493 – Christopher Columbus lands ashore on an island which he bestows the name “San Juan Bautista”. The island nation is later renamed “Puerto Rico”

1816 – Warsaw University is established

1847 – The Montreal and Lachine Railway – Canada's second railway line – is opened

1863 – Abraham Lincolm delivers the Gettysburg Address

1881 – A meteorite lands near the village of Grossliebenthal, near Odessa, Ukraine

1916 – Goldwyn Pictures is established by Samuel Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn

1917 – Indira Ghandi (d. 1984), the third Prime Minister of India, is born

1943 – Six thousand Jews are murdered following the liquidation of the Janowska concentration camp by Nazis during World War II

1946 – Afghanistan, Iceland, and Sweden join the United Nations

1954 – Prince Rainier III establishes Tele Monte Carlo – Europe's oldest private television station

1959 – Ford announces the discontinuation of its widely unpopular Edsel automobile

1967 – Hong Kong establishes TVB – the world's first wireless commercial television station

1969 – Pele scores his one thousandth goal in the sport of football (soccer)

1979 – Ayatollah Khomeini orders the release of thirteen female and black American hostages being held captive at Tehran's American embassy

1985 – Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev meet for the first time in Geneva, Switzerland

1988 – Author Peggy Parish (b. 1927) – best known for her “Amelia Bedelia” books dies at the age of 61 due to a brain aneurysm

1990 – Milli Vanilli is stripped of their Best New Artist Grammy Award following the discovery that the duo never sang on any of the songs on their album

1997 – Kenny and Bobbi McCaughey welcome septuplets into the world; the very first to survive infancy

1998 – Vincent van Gogh's “Portrait of the Artist Without Beard” sells at auction for a cool $71.5 million

2007 – Dick “Mr. Whipple” Wilson (b. 1916) passes away at the age of 91

2010 – Twenty-nine people are killed in New Zealand's worst mining disaster in nearly a century after the first of four explosions occur at the Pike River Mine

And, November 19 is also a date in which the following famous faces were born; William Russell, Larry King, Kurt Hamrin, Dick Cavett, Ted Turner, Dan Haggerty, Calvin Klein, Ahmad Rashad, Robert Beltran, Kathleen Quinlan, Sam Hamm, Eileen Collins, Ann Curry, Glynis O'Connor, Terrence C. Carson, Allison Janney, Meg Ryan, Jodie Foster, Terry Farrell, Rocco DiSpirito, Jason Scott Lee, Erika Alexander, Sandrine Holt, Billy Currington, Savion Glover, Jack Dorsey, Kerri Strug, Matt Dusk, Adele Silva, Jeannie Ortega, and Tyga.

Wow...what a lot of famous faces celebrating a birthday today, huh?

But there's one name that I left off. Because that name happens to be the subject of today's blog. And would you believe that he was born 94 years ago today...and he's still alive today?



Let's see. If my math is correct, that would put his birthdate at...November 19, 1919.

Wow, oh, wow, that's a lot of nineteens in one date of birth! I suppose it might be considered a lucky number for today's birthday boy!

As for what he is best remembered for...well, that could be a wide spectrum of answers, depending on what part of the twentieth century you grew up in. As a child of the 1980s, I best remember him for doing the voice of a duck who had more riches than he knew what to do with. Some may also remember him doing the voice of a Smurf who was afraid of...well...almost anything and everything.

But if you were a child of the 1960s, you might remember him best as the only man in the world who could be friends with a horse that had the gift of gab.

Who am I talking about?

Now, if I told you that the subject of the blog was a man by the name of Angus Young, you'd probably look at me as if you don't know who he is.

What if I told you that the subject of the blog is a man by the name of Alan Young? Well, I see some of you might know who that is, but others might still be confused.

Okay, let's try this. What if I said that the blog topic was Wilbur Post, the man who could have whole conversations with a talking horse? Or, if I told you that the subject of the blog was Scrooge McDuck, the main character of “Mickey's Christmas Carol” and “DuckTales”? Then you might be interested.

Now, here's the kicker. What if I told you that Angus Young, Alan Young, Wilbur Post, and Scrooge McDuck...were all the same person?

Shocker, I know.



Perhaps I can untangle this sticky web while talking about the life and times of Alan Young, by talking about his most well-known roles, as well as other projects that you might not have heard of.

Okay, so Alan Young is the name that he goes by now. But when he was born 94 years ago in the community of North Shields, Northumberland, England, he was actually given the birth name of Angus Young. He was the son of John Cathcart Young and Florence Pinckley. The family moved to Edinburgh, Scotland when Angus was still a toddler, and by the time he was six, the family settled in West Vancouver, British Columbia.

Now, here's an interesting fact about Angus Young. Did you know that when he was a little kid, his health greatly influenced his future career plans? You see, Angus suffered from childhood asthma which was so severe, it left him bedridden for days on end.

And, for those of you who might not believe that asthma can knock you off your feet for such a long time, I can attest that as someone who too was diagnosed with asthma at the age of seven, I know exactly what he went through. After all, I was hospitalized for a week in 1988, missed a whole week of school in 1989, and missed almost two weeks of classes in 1992 as a direct result of it.

Angus Young's asthma was reportedly so bad that when he wanted to enlist in the Royal Canadian Navy, he was turned away because of it. Same deal with the Royal Canadian Armed Forces. His asthma prevented him from fighting for his country.

However, there was a silver lining in that dark cloud. True, his asthma prevented him from becoming a soldier in the army. However, because of his asthma, he developed a love for radio programming, and Young believed that one day he could get a job in the radio industry. And that's exactly what Young did, reportedly earning his first radio job at the ripe old age of thirteen!

But before Angus Young could become a radio broadcaster, there was something that he needed to do. He needed to change his name. It wasn't because he wasn't proud of the name he was given. He quite liked it. But as he explained in his 2007 autobiography, he made the decision to legally change his name to Alan Young at the age of twenty, because some insensitive people made fun of it – even going so far as calling him “Agnes”! So, by 1940, Angus Young was left in the past to be replaced by Alan Young – future radio broadcaster for the CBC.

By the time that Alan Young had turned twenty-five, he had already made the move to American radio, and by 1946, he began to turn his attention towards television and film. He hosted his own television program, “The Alan Young Show” for three seasons, and he appeared in several films including 1946's “Margie”, 1949's “Chicken Every Sunday”, 1952's “Androcles and the Lion”, and 1960's “The Time Machine”.

But it wouldn't be until the year 1961 when Alan Young was in his early 40s (a time in which most actors find it harder and harder to win roles in the film and television industry) that he would have his greatest success. And would you believe that his co-star was a talking horse?



The name of the show was “Mister Ed”, and the show actually ran longer than I thought it did. Would you believe that it ran for five years between 1961 and 1966? I doubt that in today's television cesspool, we'd even have this show last an episode, let alone five seasons.

Still, there was something about “Mister Ed” that worked. And Alan, as the character Wilbur Post – a bumbling but kind-hearted architect who was the only one that could understand and communicate with his beloved palomino horse (voiced by Allan Lane). And, naturally, this lead to a whole lot of confusion, especially since Wilbur's friends and close family members could NOT understand Mister Ed at all.

Would you like to see some examples of Alan Young as Wilbur Post in “Mister Ed”? Well, you can if you just click on HERE, HERE, and oh yes, HERE. Those links will take you to three different episodes of “Mister Ed”. I hope you enjoy them, because as we all well know on YouTube, videos have a tendency to disappear just as quickly as they appear. Enjoy them while you can.

I should also note that even though “Mister Ed” made Alan Young a star, it was definitely not the only television show he appeared in. He's made guest appearances on “The Love Boat”, “Murder, She Wrote”, “Sabrina, the Teen-Age Witch”, “Hang Time”, “Party of Five”, “ER”, and “St. Elsewhere”. And, in 1994, he even appeared in the movie “Beverly Hills Cop”, playing the part of a theme park owner that sort of resembled Walt Disney.

Ironic, given that one of Alan Young's most prolific (and longest running) roles to date happens to be a Disney creation!

Now, prior to his work with Disney, Alan Young in his later years opted to go into voice acting, and he held some roles on some prominent 1980s cartoons. He voiced the role of Scaredy Smurf and Farmer Smurf on “The Smurfs” from 1981-1986, and he enjoyed a four year run voicing bit characters on the NBC Saturday Morning cartoon, “Alvin and the Chipmunks”.



But thirty years ago, in 1983, Alan Young was hired to voice a role in the Disney animated special “Mickey's Christmas Carol”. Although the character of Scrooge McDuck was created long before the television special aired (and even though sources state that Alan Young voiced the character before this special was even thought of), it is widely speculated that this was the cartoon special that cemented Alan Young as the permanent voice for Scrooge McDuck.

After all, the character of Scrooge McDuck spoke in a Scottish accent – which was perfect for Alan Young, since Scotland was where he spent the first six years of his life. Picking up the accent again was like second nature. And for what it's worth, I always remember this special as the one in which I adored Scrooge. I mean, sure, when he was introduced he was a miserly, self-centered duck who only cared about himself. But that was what we were supposed to think. It was loosely based off the Charles Dickens classic tale “A Christmas Carol” after all. But Scrooge's performance was so memorable that Disney decided to make a cartoon spin-off which starred Scrooge McDuck taking care of Donald Duck's three nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie.



Of course you know by the catchy theme song that the cartoon was Disney's “DuckTales”, a staple of the Disney Afternoon cartoon block for years. The series ran initially from 1987-1990, and spawned 100 episodes and a feature-length film. I'd talk more about this cartoon series, but I think I'll hold off until I actually do the blog entry on DuckTales at some point in the near future.

The point is that by the time “DuckTales” began airing on television, Alan Young was already in his late sixties – an age in which most people begin retirement. But if you think that Alan Young was content with retirement, think again. After all, Young has been voicing the role of Scrooge McDuck for over thirty years now. Even as recently as 2013, Young is still performing as Scrooge McDuck – voicing him in the latest installment of the “Kingdom Hearts” video game series!

Yes, at the age of ninety-four, Alan Young is showing no sign of slowing down. Not bad for someone who was bedridden for four months at a time because his asthma prevented him from getting out and doing more as a child.

He's certainly making up for lost time now as he celebrates birthday number ninety-four.



Well, as Huey, Dewey, and Louie would say...”HAPPY BIRTHDAY UNKA SCROOGE!”