Archive for April, 2007

Mary Young Pickersgill

by Glenn Vance on April 25, 2007 in History with No comments
Mary-Young-Pickersgill

It was 1814, and the United States and Great Britain had been at war for two years. The city of Bal­ti­more had been prepar­ing for an even­tual attack, but sit­ting in the way of the British was Major George Armis­tead, com­man­der of Fort McHenry1 and his bunkered forces in Chesa­peake Bay. Know­ing that an attack would come from the sea, Major Armis­tead com­mis­sioned Mary Young Pick­ers­gill, a local Bal­ti­more flag maker, to sew a flag for the fort “so large that the British will have no dif­fi­culty see­ing it from a distance.”

Pick­ers­gill had learned flag mak­ing from her mother, Rebecca Young, who made ensigns2 and con­ti­nen­tal stan­dards dur­ing and after Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. After mar­ry­ing and mov­ing to Philadel­phia, Mary returned to Bal­ti­more, wid­owed and with a small child. She estab­lished a flag-making busi­ness out of her home. Through her trade she sup­ported her fam­ily by design­ing, sewing, and sell­ing “silk stan­dards, cav­alry and divi­sion colours of every descrip­tion.” She cre­ated sig­nal and house flags for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and mer­chant ships that vis­ited Baltimore’s harbor.

When asked by Major Armis­tead to sew the flag, she cre­ated in just 6 weeks an Amer­i­can flag mea­sur­ing 30x42 feet with the help of her daugh­ter, two nieces, and two ser­vants. Each stripe was two feet wide and each star was two feet from tip to tip. As a result the flag could be seen from sev­eral miles away from the fort.

When the British attacked Bal­ti­more, Fran­cis Scott Key, a lawyer aboard the British ship HMS Ton­nant, saw Pickersgill’s flag while he was held cap­tive and was inspired to com­pose the poem that became the national anthem of the United States. Pickersgill’s flag, being restored, is the cen­ter­piece of the redesigned National Museum of Amer­i­can His­tory at the Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion.3

  1. Named after James McHenry, a Scotch-Irish immi­grant and surgeon-soldier who became Sec­re­tary of War under Pres­i­dent George Wash­ing­ton, Fort McHenry was built to defend the port of Bal­ti­more from future enemy attacks after Amer­ica had won its inde­pen­dence. It was posi­tioned on the Locust Point penin­sula which juts into the open­ing of Bal­ti­more Har­bor, and was con­structed in the form of a five-pointed star sur­rounded by a dry moat. [↩]
  2. An ensign is a dis­tin­guish­ing flag of a ship or a mil­i­tary unit, or a dis­tin­guish­ing token, emblem, or badge, such as a sym­bol of office. [↩]
  3. The mate­r­ial for this piece came from the Mary­land Women’s Hall of Fame and Wikipedia. [↩]

The Sad, Sorry State of Star Wars Toys

by Glenn Vance on April 24, 2007 in Toys with No comments
chewbacca

Look at the pic­ture to the left. What is it? Is it the Mil­len­nium Fal­con? Or is it Han Solo’s pal Chew­bacca? Is it both? And what have they done to Chewie’s crotch?

What hath Has­bro wrought?

What you’re look­ing at there is a Star Wars Trans­former, the lat­est in a loooooooong line of Kenner/Hasbro toys that attempt to cap­i­tal­ize off of the (fast fleet­ing) mem­ory of Star Wars in the minds of today’s chil­dren. How can you sex up a line of toys spawned by a 30 year old film for Gen­er­a­tion Wii? Try synergy.

Michael Bay, the rich man’s Uwe Boll, is helm­ing a big screen live action star span­gled ver­sion of the Trans­form­ers that will be hit­ting mil­lions of the­aters near you in the com­ing weeks. Will kids want Trans­form­ers toys after see­ing this film by the man that gave us Pearl Har­bor? It’s hard to say, but I think Has­bro has seen the writ­ing on the walls and know that their 30 year old main­stay is not aging well.

One only has to look at the cur­rent Star Wars site that Has­bro main­tains to see how lit­tle they have left in their arse­nal. First off, kill the music, Has­bro, because you couldn’t have made it much louder. Once you get past the ear-splitting theme music and into the sec­tion that includes the toys by cat­e­gory the bore­dom begins. What is Darth Vader doing rid­ing a motor­cy­cle? It’s pathetic and silly. From the site –

As out­laws, rebels and rene­gades take to the road in a galaxy far, far away, the Star Wars CUSTOMS shop designs and builds awe­some chop­pers with expert pre­ci­sion. These chop­pers are built to the exact spec­i­fi­ca­tions of their own­ers, each with a few spe­cial modifications.

You want speed? You got it. Horse­power? Ditto. Atti­tude? Plenty to spare.

So hop on and hold tight as this cus­tom chop­per cruises all over the galaxy!

Rev it up and let it go for smooth rid­ing action! Detailed chop­per comes with lightsaber.

I guess “If you like Amer­i­can Chop­per, you’ll love Star Wars CUSTOMS!”

Next up is ATTACKTIX, which I think are some sort of nerd-pleasing role play­ing game pieces that can actu­ally shoot/fight/etc.. The prob­lem is that some of the pieces have weapons the size of the char­ac­ter car­ry­ing said weapon. And the pic­ture on the main page of Chew­bacca with a huge wavy hand is not comforting.

Last up is the FORCE BATTLERS, large, car­toony fig­ures that barely resem­ble the char­ac­ters you love (Chew­bacca) or ones you couldn’t care less about (Gen­eral Griev­ous, Jango Fett, Emperor Pal­pa­tine). Each comes with weapons that were prob­a­bly never used by the char­ac­ter (Chew­bacca has a freak­ing shield!) or silly weapons (Pal­pa­tine comes with, get this, balls of energy).

Granted, Star Wars fig­ures were always the hall­mark of the toy line, and Has­bro has come a long way in updat­ing the fig­ures we 6 and 7 year olds horded on the play­ground, but how many times should I buy an R2-D2 fig­ure? Thee or four times? Sure, the lat­est one looks like the real deal and is very detailed, com­pared to that clunky clicky one that I had as a kid.

But then it comes down to eco­nom­ics. Does Has­bro need my money? Star Wars fig­ures aren’t like buy­ing con­sum­ables like milk and bread; you hang onto them and put them away in air­tight bag­gies, pray­ing for that day that some­one will pay you 100X what it was worth when you bought it.

Has­bro, let Star Wars die. You’ve kicked your dead Tauntaun enough. Let it go.

Brush With Local Greatness, Vol. 2 : Ken Bethea of the Old 97’s

by Glenn Vance on April 17, 2007 in Brush With Local Greatness with No comments
Ken-Bethea

When I got to Ken Bethea’s house, I didn’t know where I was. My son had got­ten invited to a birth­day party for a lit­tle girl in his Mother’s Day Out pro­gram and all I saw was her first name, sans last. The house, located near ours, is prob­a­bly 40 years old and is homey, but it was the lit­tle things that I started to notice. Old 97’s posters, framed over an old piano, were the first clue. A gui­tar in the cor­ner, pic­tures of a guy that I rec­og­nized from CD inserts. But the dad of the lit­tle girl in the MDO pro­gram looked older, a lot older, and I sur­mised that his brother was Ken Bethea, the gui­tarist for one of the few musi­cal acts to break out of the Dal­las club scene, the Old 97’s.

My wife, the ballsy one, asked the dad if his brother was in the Old 97’s.

“I don’t have a brother,” he said, sort of stand­off­ishly. “And I’m in the Old 97’s.”

So that was it. The pic­tures were of Ken and his wife, but before the gray­ing hair. Case solved!

He was genial enough. While we both chomped pizza and cake we talked about “Heroes” and a group watch­ing party that a local comic book shop puts on at the Mag­no­lia every Mon­day night. He talked about a Chili’s ad that they had done (a lot of money for one day’s work) and were happy with and how they were going to tour the fol­low­ing week. Maybe it’s just the way he talks, but he kind of had that “bask in my glow” way of speak­ing, and some of the other dads who were there were giv­ing him those puppy dog eyes, which I thought was kinda gay, but, think­ing about it, Ken has attained a dream that all men at some point in their lives dream — he plays gui­tar in a band that tours and puts out albums that you can buy on Ama­zon. And the band is mar­gin­ally famous.

I wasn’t going to tell Ken that I had all of their albums up until Fight Songs (which bor­dered on being too poppy for my tastes) and sing their songs loudly as I drive because I didn’t want to be one of those peo­ple that slob­bers all over celebri­ties. He’s not flashy like lead singer Rhett Miller, who I remem­ber from high school when he went to ESD and dated a girl in my class. It looks like Ken leads a pretty sim­ple life, with his wife and 2 kids. We just chat­ted and it was alright. Pretty nice guy.

It ended kind of weird though. I have one other tan­gen­tial link to Ken — he dated a friend of mine’s wife. Not when they were mar­ried, of course, but before all of the mat­ri­mony stuff. When he found out that we knew him through our friend, he started telling a story to us about when he dated her. Ken said it was dif­fi­cult going out with her, since he had the band and would be back in Dal­las for a week before head­ing out on the road again for another month or so and he didn’t really know if he should call her his girl­friend or not. It all ended badly and he felt more than a lit­tle respon­si­ble for the whole mess, which, accord­ing to our friend, he did cre­ate. He said to say hi to her when we saw her.

When you know these peo­ple as peo­ple the high sheen of what they do seems to come off a lit­tle bit and you real­ize that the peo­ple that Enter­tain­ment Tonight and gos­sip rags hold up as famous are just peo­ple who want to have lives also, and they screw up rela­tion­ships and stuff like that too.

But he does play a pretty mean gui­tar. And I like the pil­low that says “Buenos Dias” on it in their house. Where can I get one of those?

Bwana Devil, the First Color, American 3-D Film

by Glenn Vance on April 13, 2007 in History with No comments
Bwana-Devil

Bwana Devil, a 1952 film writ­ten, directed, and pro­duced by Arch Oboler, is con­sid­ered to be the first color, Amer­i­can 3-D fea­ture film. It starred Robert Stack (of “Unsolved Mys­ter­ies” fame), Bar­bara Brit­ton, and Nigel Bruce. And on top of all that it started the 3-D film boom!

Some legacy, huh?

Screen writer Mil­ton Gun­zburg and his brother Julian thought they had a solu­tion for the declin­ing atten­dance with their Nat­ural Vision 3-D1 film process. They tried to shop it around Hol­ly­wood, but no one really had any inter­est. Colum­bia and Para­mount passed on Gunzberg’s pitch. 20th Cen­tury Fox intro­duc­ing Cin­e­maS­cope and weren’t inter­ested in throw­ing another view­ing expe­ri­ence into the mix . Only one man, John Arnold, who headed the MGM cam­era depart­ment, liked it enough to con­vince his bosses to pur­chase an option on the tech­nol­ogy, but they let their option lapse.

To the Gun­zbergs, it appeared that the Nat­ural Vision tech­nique of film­ing was doomed and they were back to square one until a man named Arch Oboler wanted a meet­ing with the them. Oboler, pro­ducer and writer of the pop­u­lar radio show, Lights Out2, was impressed enough to option it for his next film, The Lions of Gulu.

The film was based on a well-known event at the time, the killing of more than 120 work­ers build­ing the Uganda Rail­way for the British at the turn of the cen­tury. The inci­dent was also the basis for “The Man-eaters of Tsavo”, a story writ­ten in 1907 by J.H. Pat­ter­son, the hunter who tracked and killed the animals.

Bwana Devil pre­miered on Novem­ber 26, 1952 at the Para­mount The­atres in Hol­ly­wood and Los Ange­les, CA. The crit­ics hated it but it was a smash with audi­ences. Local pre­mieres fol­lowed in San Fran­cisco on Decem­ber 13, Philadel­phia, Dal­las, Hous­ton and San Anto­nio open­ings on Decem­ber 25 and New York on Feb­ru­ary 18, 1953.

United Artists bought the rights to Bwana Devil from Oboler for $500,000 and a share of the prof­its put the film into wide release in March. After other stu­dios saw the big prof­its that UA was bring­ing in with Bwana Devil, other stu­dios raced to release their own 3-D films and a cool, albeit short lived, trend was begun.3

  1. Nat­ural Vision 3-D is shot with a spe­cial cam­era rig com­prised of two cam­eras, pro­duc­ing a “left eye view” and a “right eye view.” The two result­ing film strips are put together to form one film strip. [↩]
  2. Lights Out was a radio pro­gram fea­tur­ing “tales of the super­nat­ural and the super­nor­mal.” At the time it was immensely pop­u­lar, and was one of the first hor­ror pro­grams. [↩]
  3. An expla­na­tion of the Nat­ural Vision 3-D process came from Dimen­sion 3 and the rest of the infor­ma­tion for this piece came from Wikipedia. [↩]
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