If you felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, it was because something terrible has happened.
That’s right, Glen W. Bell Jr., the founder of Taco Bell, died.
Truly, a day that will live in infamy. And to anybody who says Taco Bell isn’t healthy? Dude was 86.
Somewhere roughly around 10 years ago, my friend Rody introduced me to a book named A Game of Thrones. I had never heard of the author George R.R. Martin, but I immediately fell in love with the book. Luckily for me, it was the first book in a series known as A Song of Ice and Fire (which is still on going by the way).
This series flat out blew my mind. It the the best fantasy epic I have ever read and I have recommended it to many people since then. It is hard to explain what makes it good exactly, but I will say this: do not become attached to any character, no matter how main they may seem. The world and characters (and there are many, many characters) are so completely fleshed out that you get a sense that things are happening to other characters and other parts of the world while your attention is regrettably focused on just one thing. The books are simply amazing.
After enjoying these books so much, I naturally sought out other works by the same author. This led me to discover that George R. R. Martin was the editor of the long running series Wild Cards. I had indeed read a few Wild Cards books years ago and positively loved them. Score another for Mr. Martin!
I would like to get my hands on the entire set (and it is vast, about 20 books, many of them out of print) but I have been holding off on it because I don’t have the time to read them all at the moment.
At some point I picked up A Song for Lya and it didn’t disappoint. Every story in the bunch was good, and the titular story was especially awsome. It only spurred me on all the more.
So next, I mentioned in passing that managed to get my hands on the audio book format of Dreamsongs volumnes I and II, a retrospective on Martin’s career.
I cannot gush about these books enough. If nothing else cemented R.R. Martin as a master of his craft, this certainly puts him over the top. I don’t even know which was better, the many stories contained within or the fascinating pieces about his writing career. Now, keep in mind these are some HEFTY books, something like a total of 1,500 pages or, to put it another way, about 4.6 pounds. Even the audio books are large, somewhere around 32 hours. And I haven’t even gotten to Dreamsongs volume 3 yet! They are roughly chronological, so volume I covers his very early career including things from when he was a kid or while he was in college, mostly shorter stories and sci-fi. Volume II is later and includes some of the longer works and things like a couple of excerpts from Tuf Voyaging (which was originally individual short stories anyway). All genres of his career are represented from sci-fi to fantasy to horror. Absolutely get ahold of this book(s), you will not be disappointed.
In particular, I will call your attention to a story named Sandkings, which is one of the collected stories in the book. What a story, my goodness. Soooo good! But I knew right away that I had heard it before, or in this case seen it. There was a revival of the show Outer Limits that I used to enjoy and it was kicked off with a special double episode which was so good that I have never forgotten it. Guess what, the episode was entitled “The Sandkings” and it was a retelling of this very story. So score #3 for Mr. Martin, yet another thing I thoroughly enjoyed and did not know was by him! I found the story better than the T.V. version, but I can completely understand where they were coming from with the edits. They actually did a really good job with the adaptation. I highly recommend finding this story in particular. I have seen it on the web, but I won’t link to it here because I’m not sure it is authorized.
If I have any knocks on G.R.R. it was that I didn’t really enjoy The Armageddon Rag. Apparently, I was not the only one. To be fair I wasn’t really the target audience, since it is about the music culture of the ’60s and what had happened to it by the ’80s. Not really my generation. Another common complaint is that the Song of Ice and Fire books have been taking longer and longer to come out, sometimes years after the original release date. George has addressed this quite thoroughly on his blog and he makes some good points. I agree it is annoying, because I can’t really remember what happened in some of the older books anymore, but as far as I am concerned as long as they are of the quality of the earlier books, nobody has any right to complain.
One note on his blog, the title is “Not a Blog” and he more or less means that. It is mostly talk about merchandising and occasionally about the Giants. Don’t expect what he had for dinner posts.
So, in summary, George R.R. Martin? Awesome. Two thumbs up. I endorse any of his writing and I highly recommend any fan of speculative fiction give him a try. Maybe, like me, you already have and enjoyed it, though you didn’t know it at the time!
Now, it goes without saying that everybody loves LeVar Burton.
I haven’t spent much time contemplating LeVar Burton, that is, until this weekend. Now when you mention LeVar Burton, certain characters come to mind. For me it is Reading Rainbow (side note, did you know that was still on until 2005?) but I couldn’t fault you of thinking of Roots or Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which he was best known for wearing a hair clip on his face:
Think about that, three different genres, three different iconic characters (well Reading Rainbow wasn’t a character, but still). Most actors work their whole lives and never have one iconic show or character they are identified with. But, did you also know he was on Captain Planet? He was one of the planeteers! Who knew? (Incidentally, he was Kwame, a.k.a. Earth) Sure that is not as famous as the other three, but it is another different genre and certainly recongizeable to people of my generation.
This reminds me of something I’ve said about Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger. 5 Mr. Universe titles and 7 Mr. Olympia titles, the definitive action star, and governer of the most populous state. He has reached the pinacle of three totally different careers! In any one of those careers, people toil their entire lifes and never get to the top.
Now, I haven’t seen LeVar in anything else recently. If you look at the timeframes, he was doing Star Trek, Reading Rainbow and Captain Planet simultaneously, so maybe he is taking a well earned break. Or maybe you jerks in Hollywood are ignoring this wonderful actor, this master of his craft, and stereotyping him into one of his many successful characters. You want to talk about range? Come on! He’s not just one thing, living on the characters of his past!
That being said, here is the reason I was thinking about him. It is a video of him singing the Reading Rainbow theme song at Diggnation in L.A.
And, what the heck, just for completion’s sake:
EDIT: I watched an episode of The Soup which aired before I wrote this, and who should randomly turn up but LeVar Burton? I guess his publicist must be pushing him to get out there more and it must be working, since I wrote a blog post on it…
Not too long ago, I wrote a post about a childhood hero of mine, Commander Mark Kistler. So, imagine my delight and surprise when I should receive a comment from the man himself on that post!
This is a win-win. From his comments, it sounds like he is happy to hear he made an impact on people and that people are still thinking of him. And obviously it is awesome for me to get a personal comment from someone that I would never have expected to have any contact with.
So, thank you Internet (and Mr. Kistler) for making my day!
One thing about having a baby is that it forces you to remember a lot of things from your childhood that you thought you forgot. So naturally every time Evie was playing with a frog I had to rasp, “FROGGY’S PAAAAAAAAD!”
For whatever reason, we didn’t have a local Bozo the Clown, instead we had our own equivalent named Happy the Hobo. It was essentially the same thing as Bozo. The show was called Happy’s Place and kids could come on the show to be in the audience. They would show cartoons and, in between, the kids would play games, etc. At one point all the kids got to come and stand in a long line and Happy (Mike Fry) would ask each kid a question. So, you were guaranteed to be on T.V. if you came. There was also a vaguely frog-shaped puppet named Froggy who mostly hosted a morning cartoon show on the same set. Being on Happy’s Place was sort of a local rite of passage. You can see a few videos here.
Happy was a local celebrity, nay, a god. He was the real deal too, I remember seeing him do back flips and stuff in the parade. He juggled, he made jokes, he did it all. His show had ALL the best cartoons. Any kid would have taken a bullet for him. One day he fell off the roof of the Happy Mobile and blew out his knee (apparently it is a rumor that he was doing a handstand at the time).
We were only on Happy’s Place one time, but my mom has the tape so I have seen it many times. I was wearing an iron-on Tyrannosaurus Rex shirt and Happy asked me if I would ride one. I snottily responded, “If I saw one.” My sister was sort of camera shy and giggly and Happy commented on that and had her giggle. My brother, however, stole the show. He was very little, maybe 3 or so, and wearing his very favorite California Raisins‘ tee-shirt. Happy asked him about it and he spontaneously burst into song: “I uuuuurd it troo the gape bine!” You could see that Happy totally didn’t expect it and quickly looked to the camera man (probably the only adult around that he knew) for confirmation with a smile on his face. It’s fantastic, I wish I had it on youtube.
So anyway, next came Cousin Happy and then a 3rd Happy the Hobo. Now, I don’t know that they were bad Hobo’s, but I didn’t like them. Perhaps I just got too old for the show. Perhaps the shoes they had to fill were just too big (get it, like clown shoes?) Perhaps it was just a job to them and their hearts were never in it. But all in all, I thought I was done with Happy’s Place. Then along comes Happy #4, Adrian Guenther.
Happy #4
In this incarnation, Happy was a little different. He was still a juggler, but he was a little goofier than the original Happy. Two additional characters came on board, Chester T. Fox (I assume because the show was on the Fox network) and Lawn Boy. Both were great additions to the show. Now that there were 3 people, they did more skits. Maybe it was because I was older, but I got the distinct impression that a lot of things they did they did because they thought they were funny. I’m not sure the kids were always in on the joke. It always just seemed like they were having so much of their own fun that you couldn’t help but enjoy it.
There were two promos (or maybe it was the intro?) that played over and over again that influenced my life. One was Happy telling Chester, “That’s nacho cheese!” (I realize that as I type that, the joke only makes sense out loud) which I found just hilarious. The second was Happy (after being tricked by Chester) saying, “You’re not a fox, you’re a weasel!” This single quote led to a roughly 6 month campaign by me and my brother to convince our dog that she was in fact, not a dog but a weasel.
So anyway, like Commander Mark, if this should ever reach the eyes of any of the people involved in the show I just want to say that you made a lot of kids happy. I hope you all got rich off the show, though I highly doubt it. But even if you didn’t, your work was not in vain.
If there are any readers out there who have Happy’s Place memories (hmm, I don’t think there really is), feel free to share!
P.S. While researching for this post, I came across another blog post about Happy’s Place. People really got into the comments with memories, etc. about Happy’s Place and other local celebrities so it is quite the trip down memory lane. There are even a few posts from the guy who was the voice of Froggy and from 4th Happy!
Shane Halbach 