Gooder Than Hell!

There was some brouhaha (a great word) that coincided with the premier of the latest Pixar film “Up,” about the fact that Pixar has made ten awesome films but none of them have had a main character that is a female.

Let me put this to you, Linda Holmes and all the other presumptive bloggers that picked up on this: How do you know WALL-E is not a female?

I re-watched the film recently, and unless I am missing something, there is nothing in the film that explicitly details that WALL-E is a male robot. Eve is quite clearly female, yes, but WALL-E could easily be a girl.

So, if I am right about this, then Pixar has not only flipped the whole debate on its ear – since the people making the complaint are the ones who assumed him to be male, because what else could he be? – but they have introduced the first same-sex relationship in a Disney film.

No, I’m not talking about the DJ or producer or whatever he is, I’m talking about the world’s greatest – and shortest – secret agent!

With his trusty hamster sidekick Penfold, Dangermouse kept children of the 80s and 90s delighted with 10 seasons of that wonderfully British mix of silly and smart. Think James Bond plus Maxwell Smart plus Bugs Bunny. What could be better?

Thankfully, the whole series is now available on DVD, and it’s a joy. My kids (2 and 5) are spellbound by it; it has the added benefit of spellbinding me, too, on a different level. Pure fun!

Check out this full episode of “Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind”:

Boy, what a treasure this is. In the early 1970s, the staff of Mad magazine was commissioned to do a pilot for an animated TV series. Evidently, the person doing the commissioning didn’t really read Mad, and was shocked by the irreverent and “offensive” tone. So the 22-minute special was pulled, and is the stuff of comedy/animation legend.

Bootleg copies exist out there, of course, but we were lucky enough to find the opening credit sequence and the first five minutes on YouTube. Here’s a bunch more background information on the special.

Put a lot of thought into what exactly would be this site’s first sweet-ass thing … and for some reason, kept coming back to the awesome movie/fable “The Point,” written by Harry Nilsson and narrated by either Alan Thicke or Ringo Starr, depending on how old you were and where you lived when you saw it. Here are the first few minutes.