George Carlin (1937-2008)

I was so busy trying to come up with intentionally lousy cop movie dialogue (for a fake movie trailer that's part of a graphic novel script I'm working on) that I didn't learn about the following sad news until late at night.

"George Carlin Dead at 71."

The first thing I thought to myself after reading the news were seven certain words.

I'm more of a fan of Carlin's later, angrier albums like You Are All Diseased and Complaints and Grievances than the breakthrough routines from his earlier hippie period. Some longtime Carlin fans find his later period to be one-note or problematic, but several of my personal favorite Carlin routines, like the anti-House of Blues rant, emerged from this later era ("If white people are gonna burn down black churches, then black people oughta burn down the House of Blues"). (I hate to admit it, but prior to his '90s and '00s stand-up albums, my first exposure to Carlin was his thankless role as a Time Lord a time traveler from the future in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.)

As a tribute to this brilliant comedian, all Morning Becomes Dyspeptic episodes that feature excerpts from Carlin's albums will be streamed all week long (except on Friday, for complicated reasons that have to do with the MBD announcer's prerecorded outro on Friday editions). MBD airs every weekday at 1am and 8am on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel.

And unlike my old college radio show where I played excerpts from my favorite comedy albums in between hip-hop breaks--but the station's daytime airplay rules required me to edit out all the comics' profanity--all of Carlin's routines during MBD are uncensored. Just as Carlin would have wanted.

"Where's the polar bear, Jon?"

First-time Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac cracked me up when he compared the Clinton/Obama rivalry to a Lifetime movie starring Joanna Kerns and Meshach Taylor. Jon Stewart also cracked up from hearing the words "Joanna Kerns and Meshach Taylor," but he held it together.

Yeah, I couldn't believe it either. Michael started working for the Others, or NAMBLA.

Even-numbered Indiana Jones movie curse? (Part 2)

"Screenwriter David Koepp looked at all the film's previous drafts, and kept what he felt were good ideas. He tried not to make his work a 'fan script,' avoiding any trivial references to the previous films. He noted that the story would have to acknowledge Ford/Jones's age, and also aimed for the mix of comedy and adventure from the first film, trying to make it less dark than the second film and yet less comic than the third film." [IMDb]

I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on opening day, but I kept my thoughts about the movie to myself until now. The Crystal Skull screenplay sounded great on paper. So why doesn't most of the movie live up to the above IMDb description of what Koepp was intending to do?

From the opening credits to the all-practical, CGI-free motorcycle chase, Crystal Skull holds promise. It acknowledges Dr. Jones' age, and there are some clever, witty touches that must have been Spielberg's ideas: the suburban neighborhood that's revealed to be a bomb testing site, Indy's anxiety about turning into an anachronism, which is reflected in the McCarthyism references and the film's only great CGI-created image--Indy gazing up at the mushroom cloud--and finally, a brief diner brawl straight out of a '50s B-movie. Spielberg's current favorite cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, filling in for a retired and now-blind Douglas Slocombe, is even faithful to the legendary Slocombe's bold, crisp pre-CGI cinematography from the previous Indy installments. But then the film moves to the jungle and lets the fakey CGI take over, allowing Kaminski to resume his trademark washed-out color schemes from later Spielberg films like Minority Report and War of the Worlds. The washed-out cinematography works for those more somber films but not for an Indy adventure. All it does is worsen the artificial, soundstagey look of this installment.

Crystal Skull goes downhill once Indy starts to deliver tedious exposition about the skulls to his new sidekick Mutt inside the mental asylum. My eyes glazed over like they do whenever I struggle through reading the opening scroll of The Phantom Menace. From there, the film abandons much of what was wonderfully established in the first half, particularly the references to the Cold War era and Indy's age. If it weren't for the 1957 setting, the rest of the movie could be set in 1987, for all I care. Indy, who utters a certain Star Wars catchphrase for the first and hopefully last time in the series, turns into an infallible superman (this is where the hand of Raiders co-writer Lawrence Kasdan is sorely missed--think of the self-deprecating lines he could have given to this older, frailer Indy). A potentially exciting sword duel between Mutt and Natasha Fatale 2.0 that was obviously shot against a green screen devolves into a rehash of the similarly green-screened light saber fights from the last two Star Wars prequels. The action is disrupted by a lame, overly cutesy Temple of Doom-ish interlude involving a Tarzan-like Mutt and monkeys with greaser hairdos. It's all evidence that Lucas' hand dominated the film's second half.

The best part of the second half is the too-brief interplay between Harrison Ford and his Raiders leading lady Karen Allen. "I don't know how Allen and Ford feel about each other in real life, but boy do they look thrilled to be back together in the movie. At any rate, Indy and Marion are clearly thrilled... It's the rejuvenating moment we've been waiting for and then...nothing comes of it," notes blogger Lance Mannion, who effectively sums up the merits and weaknesses of Crystal Skull in his post.

One of the gazillion Indy clones that have emerged since Raiders better captured the spirit of that first Indy installment than the current real thing. After he co-wrote Last Crusade, the late Jeffrey Boam went on to co-create The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. with Lost showrunner Carlton Cuse. That cult show--a winning mash-up of Boam's own Indy sequel and the '60s Wild, Wild West--integrated extraterrestrial-related intrigue into a period setting more entertainingly than Crystal Skull does.

The last thing I wanted was a retread of Temple of Doom. The second-to-last thing I wanted was a schizophrenic Indy installment, and that's what Crystal Skull is.

Alexander Courage (1919-2008)

"I have to confess to the world that I am not a science fiction fan. Never have been. I think it's just marvelous malarkey, so you write some marvelous malarkey music that goes with it."--Alexander Courage

Another legendary Silver Age composer best known for his TV work has passed away. Alexander Courage, the composer of the original Star Trek's famous fanfare, died May 15 at the age of 88. Courage's fanfare hasn't lost any of its power, despite the countless permutations since the pivotal Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which was the first Trek project to utilize the fanfare since the NBC show's 1969 cancellation.

The fanfare is expected to reappear in Michael Giacchino's score for the 2009 big-screen relaunch of Trek. "To me, that fanfare, boom, that says it all right there," said Giacchino in a SciFi Wire interview. "And this film is about everything that came before that. So, yes, I want to keep that."

Courage also wrote the '60s series' bongo-driven main title theme, which the fanfare has eclipsed in popularity--the composers who worked on the first 10 Trek feature films and The Next Generation quoted the fanfare more often than the title theme. The wordless siren song was considered bold and hip when it first hit the airwaves, while some found it to be hokey, like composer Gerald Fried, who wrote what has to be the '60s Trek's third most popular theme, the "fight theme" that originated in the "Amok Time" episode. Fried once told me in a 1999 interview that he wasn't much of a fan of Courage's operatic title theme, which resembles a South Seas melody.

Outside of the Trek TV series, Courage wrote scores for episodes of Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Waltons, filled in for John Williams on most of the score to Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and served as an orchestrator for Williams, Andre Previn, Adolph Deutsch and Jerry Goldsmith.

Geek Monthly editor-in-chief Jeff Bond, who's also the author of The Music of Star Trek, has posted a detailed obit on TrekMovie.com.

A clip from an entertaining documentary about Courage:

Earle Hagen (1919-2008)

Best known for composing themes for sitcoms like The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show and That Girl, Earle Hagen died at the age of 88 on Monday.

Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times once mourned the death of the original TV theme song (he blames its demise on the CSI franchise and House, which both rely on preexisting pop tunes for their opening credits, and ER, which shortened its opening theme from 49 seconds to eight seconds in 2006). We've also lost many of the legendary Silver Age composers who wrote several of the best of these tunes (Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein and now Hagen).

In a TV Guide article about TV theme composing that I fortunately saved to my computer before the magazine's site took it offline, Hagen recalled how he came up with his most famous theme, "The Fishin' Hole" from Andy Griffith, which went through several different orchestral incarnations that he intended for a 50-piece band until he settled on a more minimalist tune--the perfect opening for a small-town sitcom:

Composer Earle Hagen fiddled with the melody for months before genius struck: "I thought, 'Hey, I ought to be able to whistle that.'"

Why not go there in the first place? Because the creative process is like peeling an onion, says Hagen, 83. "Half of coming up with something good is throwing away what's not. For Andy, I sat at my desk, thought about [the music], worked it out on paper — and threw it away. That happens a lot."

Few composers have scored as often as Hagen, who, over 33 years, generated a trove of TV themes...

Yet none proved more difficult to deliver than the feel-good, finger-snapping tune that would put Mayberry on the map. "Andy was the nightmare," Hagen says. The man who wrote a rhythm and blues classic ("Harlem Nocturne") was stumped by a show about a down-home sheriff and his bumbling deputy. But by simplifying things, Hagen finally nailed it. With a tape recorder running, he whistled the theme as his then 11-year-old son, Deane, snapped his fingers.

Nearly half a century later, the song moseys along, on lips everywhere. "Andy says he still can't go anywhere without somebody whistling it," Hagen says. "It has become a part of America."

The same could be said about Hagen's other themes. My favorite Hagen main title themes are from I Spy and The Mod Squad.

Most hour-long '60s dramas either recycled their score music (Star Trek) or relied on library music cues (The Fugitive) to save money. The big-budget I Spy was different. It was one of the few '60s dramas in which every single episode received an original score from teaser to tag. Hagen once said composing the music for I Spy was like scoring an hour-long movie each week. He raised the bar for TV scoring--he was the '60s equivalent of present-day composers like Lost's Michael Giacchino and Battlestar Galactica's Bear McCreary, who stand out from other TV composers by writing an insane amount of original music each week and relying on 40- or 60-piece orchestras instead of less expensive (and less interesting-sounding) synths.

In 2002, Film Score Monthly released a terrific compilation that featured Hagen's never-before-released cues from I Spy, including the stereo version of the supercool main title theme.

The Mod Squad theme, which is often performed by the Max Weinberg Seven in between segments on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, is awesome too:



(Poor Julie can't run. Pete and Linc have to help her up. Despite her Roger Moore-like inability to run, Rashida Jones' mom remains the hottest hippie on TV.)

Hagen also penned the frequently covered 1939 jazz standard "Harlem Nocturne," which the '80s Stacy Keach version of Mike Hammer adopted as its opening theme. Here's one of my favorite versions of "Harlem Nocturne," done by Jim Campilongo & the 10 Gallon Cats: