October is Filipino American History Month...

... but to me, Fil-Am History Month is every month.

However way you observe FAHM, it's the perfect time for me to put the spotlight on comics that were drawn by Filipino talents, whether they're American or non-American. Several Pinoy illustrators have lent their pencils to Marvel and DC titles, such as former Flash artist and Secret Identities contributor Greg LaRocque (who, like many Filipino artists this month, did a wonderful gesture by auctioning off comic art to raise money for typhoon relief) and Secret Invasion artist Leinil Francis Yu.

I don't have any of Yu's Marvel work in my collection, but I dug up from my shelves the 2005 Batman/Danger Girl crossover special he collaborated on with inker (and komiks art historian) Gerry Alanguilan:

The superhero artwork by these Filipino artists frequently looks spectacular, but as Budjette Tan noted in a 2003 Comic Book Resources column about the abundance of Filipinos in the American comics industry since the days of Alfredo Alcala and Whilce Portacio, "so few are writing and drawing about who they are and where they are from." The autobiographical comic strips by Bay Area cartoonist Rina Ayuyang are an example of a Filipino creator writing and drawing about the Fil-Am experience for a change.

I first caught some of Rina's underground comics at a Cartoon Art Museum exhibit earlier this year and liked what I saw. Her Whirlwind Wonderland compilation, which she debuted at APE last week, is one of several books I grabbed at the expo.

Good thing I brought my copy of Whirlwind Wonderland with me while I was at my parents' house. I had my mom translate for me the Ilocano-speaking auntie's dialogue that went untranslated during a strip in which Rina can't understand what her relatives are saying. For instance, "Pagtartarabahuam? Taga ditoy ka kadi? Ilugan nak to man nga agawid no malpas ti pangaldaw?!" means "Where do you work? Are you from here? Can I get a ride so I can go home after we eat?!"

I'm bored with the superhero genre these days (my current favorite superhero comic is an anti-superhero title, Dynamite's The Boys, in which Garth Ennis takes the piss out of supers), but if I ever feel like creating a Fil-Am superhero, instead of an inability to see through lead, I'd make his weakness be an inability to understand his Ilocano-speaking aunties.

Shows I Miss: Cheap Seats

In some ways, the Sklar Brothers' hilarious Cheap Seats, in which Randy and Jason snarked MST3K style on old footage from both the ESPN and ABC Sports vaults, was more watchable than the classic Minneapolis-based comedy show that influenced them. It was faster-paced than MST3K and only a half-hour long. At two hours, MST3K could occasionally be tedious viewing--especially when the B-movie was so unwatchable not even Mike and the Bots' jokes could make it watchable.

I particularly liked it when Randy and Jason would make music references even the MST3K writers probably wouldn't have understood (like their observation that a mustached, helmet-haired Scrabble tournament champ looks like he stepped out of the "Sabotage" video). It's too bad the show, which ran from 2004 to 2006 on ESPN Classic (a channel that at one point, attempted to ruin its best show by stupidly adding a studio audience to the Cheap Seats set), will never see the light of day on DVD. I assume that's due to footage and music rights issues. There are so many Cheap Seats gems like the "Sabotage" running gag during the Scrabble tournament footage, the Cheap Seats/MST3K crossover and the "Pam Poetry" odes to a blond '80s ESPN rodeo commentator named Pam Minick that I want to revisit without having to hunt for them on YouTube.

"I bring the juice! You bring the gin-ick, Pam Minick!"

Memorable quotes from commentary tracks #4

Limey screenwriter Lem Dobbs: When I read reviews that say "style over substance," uh...

Limey director Steven Soderbergh: You blame me.

Dobbs: Uh yeah, I blame you.

--from a discussion of critics' responses to The Limey during the Limey writer/director commentrak

Vic Mizzy (1916-2009)

Recently on the blog, I brought up how the old-fashioned TV theme is a dying art form, so I was surprised to learn from Film Score Click Track's Jim Lochner that one of the kings of the old-school TV theme, Addams Family and Green Acres theme composer Vic Mizzy, died Saturday at the age of 93. The last major piece of music from Mizzy that I heard was a novelty song about Spider-Man he recorded for the Spider-Man 2 DVD's bloopers montage.

Lochner's more of an expert on Mizzy's credits than I am (his obit contains a full audio clip of Mizzy's memorable main title theme from The Ghost and Mr. Chicken). However, as a child of the '80s, when baby boomers' nostalgia for the TV shows and rock music they grew up with was at its most overbearing, I heard the Addams Family theme everywhere, from Harry and the Hendersons to a local radio ad campaign for Winchester Mystery House that reworked the song's lyrics to focus on Sarah Winchester's not-exactly-scary crib. My inability to get sick of hearing that Mizzy ditty is a testament to his witty songwriting.

Making up new lyrics for the Addams Family theme was a playground pastime. A popular new version was "The Addams Family started/When Uncle Fester farted/That's how they got retarded/The Addams Family." The not-as-twisted-or-funny lyric that I came up with was "Their house is an exhibit/When people come to visit."



Attaboy, Victor!

The funky score music in Amitabh Bachchan's Don sounds an awful lot like Together Brothers and Police Woman

This weekend, I finally got around to watching Amitabh Bachchan's 1978 Bollywood classic Don, which contains a musical number that Black Eyed Peas sampled in the first few seconds of 2005's "Don't Phunk with My Heart," and I was amused by how Don's score composer duo Kalyanji Anandji seemed to enjoy copping other musicians' works as much as BEP did with KA's hit songs.

In this clip of karate-trained Roma (Zeenat Aman) disguised as a ditzy nurse, KA's theme for Roma...

... is basically Barry White's main theme from the 1974 blaxploitation flick Together Brothers, better known as the tune Quad City DJ's sampled in 1996's "C'mon N' Ride It (The Train)."

Also, the duo's theme for tightrope walker/safecracker Jasjit (Pran), or as I like to call him, Indian Dudley Moore Dressed Like a Gay Johnny Cash, is a note-for-note rip of Morton Stevens' Police Woman theme. Every time Indian Dudley Moore's on-screen, I keep expecting him to make like Angie Dickinson and disguise himself as a hooker.

This was a few years before E-mu invented the Emulator sampler, so the Indian musicians recreated the tunes instead of sampling them. The illegal use of themes from other films or shows is a staple of '70s Asian action flicks ranging from Don to King Boxer/Five Fingers of Death (Lo Lieh is gonna get Ironside on your ass). Barry White must have been too chill or too stoned or too unable to squeeze himself out of his bubble chair to care.