Joining Film Fight, Hungary Tries To Go Hollywood

Thursday, August 26th, 2004

Joining Film Fight, Hungary Tries To Go Hollywood describes recent efforts to build up Hungary’s film industry — and gives a bit of Hungarian film history:

In Hollywood’s early days, Hungarians helped build the movie business. Adolph Zukor founded Paramount, William Fox (born Wilhelm Fried) started 20th Century Fox, and director George Cukor blazed a trail from ‘The Philadelphia Story’ to ‘My Fair Lady.’ In Hollywood legend, a sign on one studio door once warned, ‘It’s not enough to be Hungarian, you have to have talent too.’
[...]
Hungarians were part of a wave of Eastern European immigrants, many of them Jewish, who found success in Hollywood beginning in the early 1900s. Kept out of other occupations by prejudice, they were able to make their mark in a brand-new business: the exhibition of short films in storefront theaters called nickelodeons.

Throughout the 1920s, Paramount’s Mr. Zukor and his rivals made trips to Europe, scouting for talent, such as Hungarian Michael Curtiz, who directed “Casablanca.” Hungary was among the European nations where a domestic film industry was already flourishing, partly through government support. Hungarian directors and writers benefited from training at formal film schools. Cinematography students were required to study painting, sculpture, classical literature and music.

Hungary’s film industry continued to thrive under Communist rule, with plenty of state-funded work. Vilmos Zsigmond, who studied cinematography at the Budapest Academy of Drama and Film went on to shoot “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “The Deer Hunter.”

But in the 1990s, the fall of communism and aging film studios sent the domestic industry into a tailspin.

Why is Hungary pushing film? Politics:

The European Union, which Hungary and the Czech Republic joined in May, tries to prevent its members from propping up industries with government aid that creates an uneven playing field. But films and television receive a “cultural exception” originally won by France to protect its heavily subsidized film industry. That has opened a rare door for government incentives and spurred a studio-building boom. EU nations now use the exception to compete for Hollywood action flicks as well as home-grown art films. Many countries also hope that movie exposure will boost their image, triggering tourist dollars.

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Net Publishing Made Profitable

Friday, August 13th, 2004

Net Publishing Made Profitable explains “extreme publishing”:

After 13 years of experimenting, veteran Net publisher Adam Engst has finally stumbled on a good business model — fast-turnaround e-books. [...] From the get-go, Engst has pioneered just about every revenue model on the Internet — ads, subscriptions, sponsorships and the now-ubiquitous tip jar — with mixed success. [...] But now Engst thinks he’s finally cracked it. Since last fall, Engst has published a series of rapidly produced e-books using a system he calls “extreme publishing.”

The nine books in the Take Control series range in topic from customizing Mac OS X to setting up a wireless network.

The books are written by a small stable of independent authors, who receive 50 percent royalties, a rate unheard of in traditional publishing. Edited collaboratively over the Net, the books are published “within moments of going to press” as small, downloadable PDF files.

Costing $5 or $10, the books come with free updates for readers — the electronic equivalent of second and third editions. The books are nicely laid out and designed to print well on home inkjets. They include lots of links to information on the Web.

Crucially, the books are timely. Print books, on the other hand, especially computer-oriented reference texts, are often out of date by the time they hit store shelves.

So far, Engst has sold about 20,000 copies in the Take Control series. The series’ best seller, Upgrading to Panther by Joe Kissell, has sold about 6,300 copies, a respectable number for a niche publisher.

Someone needs to explain to Engst that “extreme” is extremely dated.

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Learning Japanese, Once About Resumes, Is Now About Cool

Thursday, August 5th, 2004

Learning Japanese, Once About Resumes, Is Now About Cool describes the “new” Japanese-language student (not so new in So Cal, by the way, where animé obsession goes back more than a decade):

When Yuki Sasaki began working in the Japanese-language program at the University of Georgia in 1995, most students were international business majors interested in studying things like polite Japanese expressions and the ins and outs of Japanese business-card exchange.

Nine years later, Ms. Sasaki says her students are a different sort. They ask for help in translating Japanese pop-song lyrics and talk excitedly about the Japanese cartoon character Card Captor Sakura. And they blurt out colloquial Japanese expressions, like baka! (stupid), that they have learned from comics.

‘It’s amazing how you can see the changes happening right before your eyes,’ Ms. Sasaki says. Japanese pop culture, she says, ‘is their passion.’

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Punk at a Moment’s Notice

Wednesday, August 4th, 2004

Punk at a Moment’s Notice explains guerrilla gigging:

The lifeblood of a resurgent London music scene, guerrilla gigs came to prominence when one of the capital’s hottest new acts, The Others, last month commandeered two London Underground carriages to perform an impromptu set for 200 fans.

While better-established bands might have needed several months and a costly marketing campaign to pull it off, The Others summoned the crowd in just a few hours, with a cryptic message to the band’s Web forum members to meet at a local pub.

Once assembled, fans used SMS messages to tip off friends across town before moving to a nearby tube station to pack an eastbound train for a furious 30-minute set — belted out using a megaphone while onlookers crowd-surfed in transit.

The Others are proud that they know their fans:

“We actually know our fans,” The Others vocalist Dominic Masters told BBC Radio 1 recently, after scrambling users of his message board to a riotous, unauthorized performance in the national broadcaster’s reception area.

“On our website, we’ve built this affiliation where they’ve got my telephone number on every posting. I’ve got about 500 kids’ names who I talk to, and there are about 1,000 with their e-mail addresses on the website.”

I’m afraid though that The Others, like all rising punk bands, are about to find out that A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. As it grows, it changes:

Less is different — small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can’t be supported when you’re talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.

As Clay Shirky points out, a psychologist named Bion long ago recognized three patterns in group interactions — and you see all three of these patterns in any musical subculture:

  • The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, “A group met for pairing off.” [...] You go on IRC and you scan the channel list, and you say “Oh, I know what that group is about, because I see the channel label.” And you go into the group, you will also almost invariably find that it’s about sex talk as well.

  • The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.

  • The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that’s beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying “You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn’t need that much description about the forest, because it’s pretty much the same forest all the way.”

    Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: “This is for discussing the works of Tolkein.” Go in and try and have that discussion.

I only like old Others.

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Help Wanted: Boys’ Reading

Friday, July 23rd, 2004

Laura Sokal of the Learning Disabilities Association of Canada examines why boys don’t read in Help Wanted: Boys’ Reading. Some key points:

  • Boys’ reading performance lags behind girls’ by approximately 1.5 years.

  • The average child is read to for approximately 1,000 hours before beginning school.
  • Boys view reading as feminine. Mothers read more often to children than do fathers, and early years educators tend to be females. When fathers take an active role in children’s reading, children demonstrate an increased interest in reading.
  • Girls like to read story books and boys like to read texts such as manuals in order to find out how to do something.
  • Only one third of school libraries carry the types of books boys prefer — scary stories, cartoons, magazines and stories with themes such as war. Children who begin reading these types of “soft” literature branch out into reading other genres of literature.

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The NEA’s News from Nowhere

Friday, July 23rd, 2004

Americans are reading less. The NEA’s News from Nowhere declares that “not so long ago, the death of reading would have been celebrated”:

While the NEA deplores what it perceives as ‘a culture at risk,’ such news must have William Morris grinning in his grave. The ‘unbooked’ world that Morris dreamed about in his 1891 utopia, News from Nowhere, approaches, at least in this one notable detail.

Morris is one of the more intriguing figures of his era. A designer of great talent, he established the Arts & Crafts movement whose furniture is now worth its weight in gold. A writer of considerable creativity (if perhaps not much of a stylist), he invented the modern fantasy genre with such works as The Wood Beyond the World. A political thinker of great energy, he mounted a lifelong cultural critique of capitalist society. He thought true art was impossible under capitalism, and he much preferred the pre-industrial world (hence his interest in fantasy and enchantment, and in traditional craftsmanship). In News from Nowhere, he posits a post-capitalist world where labor provides the gratification assigned, in his lifetime, to art. In Morris’ utopia, there’s no longer any desire to read fiction because the “bourgeois individualism” it celebrated has been discarded.

Morris, then, hated fiction-reading because it was in the way of the socialist revolution he so ardently desired. As it happens, not many of Morris’ intellectual contemporaries cared for his particular kind of utopia: H.G. Wells, for one, lampooned Morris’ vision in his 1895 novel, The Time Machine, where the decadent above-ground world of the Eloi is intended in part as a parody of Morris’ idea of paradise.

I didn’t didn’t realize Wells’ Eloi had such a clear origin. Anyway, Well’s complaint about mass literacy is surprisingly familiar:

But Wells did agree with Morris about one thing: Mass literacy was a problem. If popular literature was an ultimately sociopolitical problem for Morris, it was an intellectual issue for Wells: The demand for reading material by great hordes of the lower classes was generating a tidal wave of bad literature and marginalizing fine culture.

Mass literacy turned “literature” into network television.

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The man who invented the future

Thursday, July 22nd, 2004

In The man who invented the future, Scott Thill interviews Alan Moore, “who reinvented the comic book as the cutting-edge literary medium of our day.” The interview, unfortunately, starts with a prolonged — and surprisingly simplistic — leftist diatribe on the war in Iraq, the Bush dynasty, etc. Eventually it moves on to Moore’s take on literature and the literary establishment — which, while I may agree with it, certainly has a “sour grapes” taste to it:

Over here, the literary establishment is still running, as back in the days of Jane Austen, on the novel of manners, which she more or less invented. And, of course, they’re about the social intricacies of the middle class, who were also the only people at the time who could read or afford to buy the books. They were also the people who made up the book critics. And I think that, around this time, critics were so delighted by this new form of literature mirroring their own social interactions that they decided that not only was this true literature, but this was the only thing really that could be considered true literature. So all genre fiction, anything that really wasn’t a novel of manners in one form or another, was excluded from that definition.
[...]
I recently saw a program about the history of the novel on TV over here — it was a short series and it was ridiculous. I predicted before the thing was actually shown that there would be nobody representing any form of genre fiction whatsoever — and I was, for the most part, right. They managed to get through the 18th and 19th centuries without a mention of, say, the gothic novel. Fair enough, perhaps the gothic novels weren’t as extraordinary as literature, but they also didn’t mention Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” which is an incredibly important book for all sorts of reasons. But I guess it has become what they would term genre fiction, so it is amongst the literary damned. My only mistake was that I said I didn’t think there would be a mention of H.G. Wells, but my girlfriend told me they did mention “The History of Mr. Polly,” which is one of the few works by Wells that I have not been able to get through. To completely ignore “The War of the Worlds,” “The Time Machine,” “The Invisible Man” and all his other work shows you the way that the literary critical establishment tends to regard even people in so-called lower literary genres. So if you are working in comics, which is considered a whole lower medium, well, let’s just say that I’m not anticipating being given the Booker Prize anytime soon — and I’m immensely glad of that.

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WSJ.com – Despite U.S. Clamor, These Little Piggies Stay Home in Spain

Tuesday, July 20th, 2004

I knew Americans were smuggling in unpasteurized European cheeses; I didn’t know they were sneaking in Spanish ham. From WSJ.com – Despite U.S. Clamor, These Little Piggies Stay Home in Spain:

It’s against the law to import jamon iberico because Spain doesn’t have a single slaughterhouse certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Still, the ham ranks as a national treasure in its home country, on a par with Italy’s truffles and Russia’s caviar. Rows of ibericos — swaddled in yellow fat, crusted with a thin film of protective mold and sporting occasional strands of wiry black pig hair — dangle from restaurant ceilings nationwide, with hoofs still attached.

Yeah, sounds delicious…

The only Spanish meat products exported to the U.S. now are made from animals slaughtered at USDA-certified plants outside Spain. That includes jamon serrano, a less prestigious ham that is similar to Italian prosciutto.

That’s when the USDA’s zeal for regulation collided with the Spanish passion for tradition. Jamon iberico is produced in just one region of Spain, mostly by small producers who adhere strictly to time-tested methods. They use only one breed of swine, a black-hoofed Iberian pig indigenous to southwest Spain’s Mediterranean forest ecosystem — where today they still range freely, fattening themselves up on grass, roots and mushrooms.

And acorns. The most desirable hams — about 15% of production — come from the pigs that eat as much as 2,000 pounds of acorns in the two or three months before their slaughter. After butchering, the hams are rubbed with salt and then hung to cure for one to three years.

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Not Funnies

Monday, July 12th, 2004

Not Funnies suggests that the comic book may be the new novel:

You can’t pinpoint it exactly, but there was a moment when people more or less stopped reading poetry and turned instead to novels, which just a few generations earlier had been considered entertainment suitable only for idle ladies of uncertain morals. The change had surely taken hold by the heyday of Dickens and Tennyson, which was the last time a poet and a novelist went head to head on the best-seller list. Someday the novel, too, will go into decline — if it hasn’t already — and will become, like poetry, a genre treasured and created by just a relative few. This won’t happen in our lifetime, but it’s not too soon to wonder what the next new thing, the new literary form, might be.

It might be comic books. Seriously.

The article dwells on literary, underground “comix” by obsessed outcasts before moving on to “smart” but (more) mainstream comics:

One solution to the drudgery of cartooning is to get others to do it for you. Companies like Marvel and D.C. essentially produce comics on an assembly line: one person thinks up the story, someone else draws it, another inks it, yet another colors it and so on. Most graphic novelists tend to be dismissive of such products, but a couple of people have emerged from the factory system and attained something like auteur status — as writers whose comics are worth paying attention to no matter who draws them. Neil Gaiman, creator of the enormously successful ”Sandman” series, is one such figure; another is Alan Moore, creator of ”Watchmen,” ”From Hell” (a story about Jack the Ripper) and ”The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.”

Moore is an extraordinary gentleman:

Moore, who is 50, looks like a comic-book character. He has a long beard, shoulder-length hair and likes to dress in black. He also dabbles a little in the occult. Moore lives alone in Northampton, England, where he was born and grew up, and is a famous recluse. ”I’m a stranger to the other end of the living room,” he likes to say. Moore actually draws perfectly well. (His early strips, like ”Roscoe Moscow,” a detective parody, are more than passable Crumb knockoffs.) But in the early 80′s, when he was a young man struggling to support himself, a wife and a baby, he realized that he couldn’t draw fast enough to keep up with his deadlines. He decided to become a writer instead and began sending out scripts on spec.

Moore doesn’t just write; he researches:

Moore is a tireless researcher; when he took over the moribund ”Swamp Thing” series from D.C. in the early 80′s, he read botany books, listened to Cajun music and studied the geography and ecology of the Louisiana bayous. Of all the graphic novelists, in fact, Moore may have the purest and most inventive literary imagination. He also writes poetry and has published a novel (the old-fashioned kind, without pictures). His ”League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which is far more interesting than you would ever guess from the movie, is an extremely clever literary pastiche of Victorian England in which all the characters (even the prime minister, Plantagenet Palliser) are taken from other Victorian novels — Bram Stoker’s ”Dracula,” H.G. Wells’s ”Invisible Man,” Stevenson’s ”Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and Jules Verne’s ”20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” to name just the most obvious. Right now, he is working on a pornographic graphic novel, ”Lost Girls,” in which the main characters are the Alice of ”Through the Looking Glass,” now known as Lady Fairchild and a laudanum-addicted lesbian; the slightly repressed Mrs. Harold Potter, nee Wendy Darling, from ”Peter Pan”; and the randy Dorothy Gale, from ”The Wizard of Oz.”

I’m not at all surprised by this:

Moore was kicked out of school at 17 for using and selling LSD. ”It was a fair cop,” he says now, meaning that he deserved to be expelled. ”The headmaster called me a moral health hazard, and he was probably right.” But the headmaster also took steps to make sure he couldn’t get into any other school, and Moore, who says he is still ”embittered by the entire educational system,” became a fierce and ambitious autodidact.

Part of his education was comic books, at first black-and-white English ones (which he says ”were just something we had, like rickets”) until, in the early 60′s, at an open-air market, he came across full-color American comics. ”I related to them very strongly,” he says. ”They were about America, which seemed to me to be like the future, like science fiction. Even without those fantastic characters, the whole country seemed to me an exotic landscape, like the Emerald City, and those comics lifted me right out of the streets I grew up in.”

He added: ”We all live, you know, on a kind of fictional planet — the place we have with us ever since we started listening to stories. We spend a lot of time in these imaginary worlds, and we get to know them better than the real locations we pass on the street every day. I think they play a more important part in our shaping of the world than we realize. Hitler, for example — we know he read a lot of Bulwer-Lytton. Osama bin Laden used to read quite a lot of Western science fiction. That’s why comics feel important to me. They’re immense fun as a game, but there’s also something more serious going on.”

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Spider-Man gets Indian make-over

Tuesday, June 29th, 2004

According to Spider-Man gets Indian make-over, the popular American character is getting reinvented for the Indian market:

The character will no longer be known as Peter Parker — but will become the young Pavitr Prabhakar.

He will also have a more modest costume, wearing a dhoti, the loincloth worn by men in India.

There will initially be four comic books produced, released to coincide with the Spider-Man 2 movie. The first film was a huge success in India.
[...]
When the first Spider-Man movie opened in India, it took 67m rupees (?940,000) in its first four days of release — and made more in its first weekend than any Hollywood movie yet released in India.

If the first Spiderman movie was a huge success, why are they “transcreating” the character?

“Unlike traditional translations of American comics, Spider-Man India will become the first-ever ‘transcreation’, where we reinvent the origin of a Western property.”

Spider-Man would become an Indian boy in Mumbai and dealing with local problems and challenges, he added.

Spider-Man India will interweave local customs, culture and mystery to make it more relevant to the readers, set against the backdrop of monuments including the Taj Mahal and the Gateway of India.

The Green Goblin villain will be replaced by Rakshasa, an Indian mythological demon that has shape-shifting abilities.

If you’re going to change the character’s costume, setting, and enemies, why not create a new character?

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

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Spike TV Enlists for ‘Ultimate Fighter’

Monday, June 28th, 2004

I may finally have a reason to watch Spike TV. From Spike TV Enlists for ‘Ultimate Fighter’:

Spike TV is stepping into the ring with Ultimate Fighting Championship for a series about the martial arts sport. The male-oriented cable network has ordered 13 hour-long episodes of ‘Ultimate Fighter’ to begin airing in January.

Set to start shooting in September in Las Vegas, ‘Fighter’ will chronicle a competition among 20 athletes to earn a shot at a spot in the UFC league. Mixed martial arts involves fighters of different weight classes battling each other using techniques from karate, judo and kickboxing.

The Spike deal represents a turnabout for UFC, which cable operators dropped from pay-per-view during the late 1990s because of controversy over its violent action. Since coming under new ownership in 2001, the sport has remade itself in a bid for mainstream viewers.

UFC president Dana White believes that the Spike deal will expose the sport to new fans. ‘This is huge for us,’ he said. ‘It will take UFC to the next level.’

Robert Riesenberg, one of the executive producers, said he expects to sign up advertisers from several categories — ranging from energy drinks to athletic shoes — that would help finance the series in exchange for product integration and off-air extensions of UFC in everything from radio and Internet advertising.

By the way, stepping into the ring? It’s the octagon, people.

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You Always Get to be the Terrorist!

Friday, June 25th, 2004

The Northeast Intelligence Network shares a creepy story:

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. A video located today on Sheik Abu Hamza’s website, www.shareeah.org, features four children, doing what as children the world over do: pretending. But what is completely unnerving about this video is what they are pretending.

One young boy kneels in front of three other children, in the same manner of the condemned man; Three other children stand behind him in the same way that the terrorists stood over the men prior to their beheading. The three standing children are armed with pretend weapons. One of the three children is a girl. The tallest of the three standing children pretends he is Zarqawi, and reads a list of demands.

The film clip ends with the pretend beheading of the kneeling child.

Chilling.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)

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Rise of the Machines

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004

A part of me groks the intro to Rise of the Machines:

Alex Proyas never got a high school diploma — a fact he blames on Isaac Asimov. It was Asimov’s short story “Nightfall” that derailed Proyas’ academic career. “It’s a wonderful vision of how the world can suddenly descend into anarchy,” says Proyas, 41, describing the chaos that ensues in “Nightfall” when all six of a planet’s suns set for the first time in 2,049 years. “I tried to convince my English teachers to assign us some science fiction, but they wouldn’t. It opened a rift between my creative desires and what the system wanted me to explore.” So Proyas quit school and took his education upon himself, reading the works of Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick.

When I was in junior high, I received a copy of Asimov’s I, Robot. It was my first dose of “real” science fiction — well, aside from The Twilight Zone. It was just “thinky” enough to enthrall me.

But I didn’t drop out of school.

Nightfall also captured my attention. Unfortunately, the Nightfall movie was one of the most awful movies I’ve ever seen. It’s the first movie I can remember debating walking out of.

Anyway, who’s Proyas? You may or may not recognize the name.

It makes sense then that Proyas’ career as a film director has been defined by fantasy. His 1994 movie The Crow, based on the James O’Barr comic book, immediately gained cult status after Brandon Lee (the only son of kung fu master Bruce Lee) was killed in a freakish accident on set. In 1998, he directed Dark City, a visually rich and haunting movie about the surreal wanderings of an amnesiac accused of murder.

I can heartily recommend both The Crow and Dark City.

This July, Proyas turns again to his favored genre with I, Robot, an adaptation of Asimov’s nine-story collection of the same name. “This is the definitive movie about robots,” says Proyas. “It’s the most faithful cinematic reworking of Asimov’s stories to date, true to the spirit and ideas, yet reenvisioned.”

Suddenly, I’m not expecting another Wild, Wild West. This could work!

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The Good Bad Boy

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

You probably think you know the story of Pinocchio. Not likely. From The Good Bad Boy:

Originally, Pinocchio was published as a serial in the newspaper Il giornale per i bambini (“The Paper for Children”). It appeared in eight parts between July and October of 1881, and then in eleven more installments from February 1882 to January 1883. The form of the story was that of a picaresque novel, in which, perhaps because of the pressures of time, some of the chapters are more original and better integrated into the whole. Some of these episodes — for example those in which Pinocchio meets a giant serpent, is caught in a trap and made to serve as a watchdog, rides on the back of a pigeon, and is mistaken for a fish by a monstrous green-haired fisherman — are often left out of the condensed English-language versions.

The Disney film omits even more of the story, and changes it drastically. Geppetto, Pinocchio’s foster father, appears to be a prosperous toymaker, and the town where he lives looks Swiss or Bavarian: his workshop is full of music boxes and cuckoo clocks. In the original story, however, Geppetto is a desperately poor Italian woodcarver. When the film begins Pinocchio is a lifeless wooden toy; he comes to life only when a fairy grants Geppetto’s wish for a child. In the book Pinocchio is alive from the start. Though he is only a nameless stick of firewood in the shop of the carpenter Master Anthony, he can already speak and move. When Master Anthony strikes the stick with his axe, it cries out “Ouch! You hurt me!” The carpenter is terrified, and offers the piece of wood to his friend Geppetto, who wants to make a marionette. It continues to act up, mocking Geppetto, and striking Master Anthony, provoking two fistfights between the old friends.

When Geppetto gets home he begins to carve the marionette. But as soon as Pinocchio’s mouth is finished he laughs at Geppetto and sticks out his tongue, and once he has arms he snatches Geppetto’s wig off his head. When his legs and feet are finished, he runs away.

From the start, Collodi’s Pinocchio is not only more self-conscious but far less simple than the cute little toy boy of the cartoon. He is not only naive, but impulsive, rude, selfish, and violent. In theological terms, he begins life in a state of original sin; while from a psychologist’s point of view, he represents the amoral, self-centered small child, all uncensored id.

The original Pinocchio kills the talking cricket who gives him advice. And he’s not an idealized five- or six-year-old; he’s a rebel, more like Twain’s Tom Sawyer

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Eye of the Tiger

Thursday, June 17th, 2004

I just got a good chuckle out of the new Starbucks Doubleshot ad featuring Eye of the Tiger — or a variant thereof:

Embracing a “life’s soundtrack” creative direction, a new DoubleShot Expresso TV ad from Starbucks features a 80s rock tune familiar to Rocky fans and workout music listeners everywhere. The “Glen” TV commercial opens with a man in his kitchen having a DoubleShot drink, only to have the band Survivor appear in his living room chanting “Glen! Glen Glen Glen!”. The band continues to follow him throughout his morning, offering a personalized version of their Rocky III soundtrack anthem “Eye of the Tiger“. New lyrics include: “Middle management is right in his grasp. It’s a dream he will never let die.” (Somewhat related 80s music note: The ad features actual members of the band Survivor, including lead singer Jimi Jamison. The band’s original lead singer, Dave Bickler, is the singing voice behind Bud Light’s “Real Men of Genius” tv ads.)

I even found a Quicktime copy on-line. It’s hard to beat these lyrics:

Glen!
Glen, Glen, Glen!
Glen, Glen, Glen!
Glen, Glen, Glen!
Glen’s the man
Going to work
Got his tie
Got ambition
Middle management
Is right in his grasp
It’s a dream
He will never let die
Glen’s the man of the hour
He’s the king of his cube
[...]
He knows one day
He just could become
Superviiiiissssor!

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