"The Best of Jimmy J. Aquino on Twitter," Part 3

My archive of earlier tweets from my Twitter page continues.

Previously on A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog: Parts 1 and 2.

In a set of tweets from April, I liveblogged 1991's The Rocketeer.

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I've been rewatching Rocketeer as research for uh... something. Last time I saw it was when it aired on Disney Channel in the early '90s.
4:31 PM Apr 25th from web

3 Disney employees need to be pimp-slapped: Miley the racist ho, the equally racist Joe Jonas and whoever handled Rocketeer's DVD transfer.
>4:33 PM Apr 25th from web

It's nice to finally see Rocketeer in WS, but Disney's transfer is so janky I had the same expression I get when I hear Miley Cyrus sing.
4:34 PM Apr 25th from web


The Rocketeer DVD's non-anamorphic, grainy transfer doesn't do justice to Hiro Narita's cinematography and Jennifer Connelly's cleavage.
4:36 PM Apr 25th from web

Why do many of my favorite actioners (Rocketeer, the original Taking of Pelham, Johnnie To's The Mission) get the crappiest DVD transfers?
4:37 PM Apr 25th from web


Billy Campbell--TV's go-to guy for middle-aged scumbags when Eric Roberts is busy acting in rap videos--looks like he's 12 in The Rocketeer.
4:39 PM Apr 25th from web

I forgot that Locke was in The Rocketeer. Because it's a Disney film, Terry O'Quinn's Howard Hughes doesn't collect jars of his own piss.
4:42 PM Apr 25th from web

Though I think Timothy Dalton is underrated as 007, @nathanrabin is right on about him being more compelling as Neville Sinclair than as JB.
4:47 PM Apr 25th from web


One of the funniest scenes in Rocketeer is when Neville tries to spit game at Jenny, and she notices all his lines are from his movies.
4:51 PM Apr 25th from web

Jennifer Connelly's Jenny Blake: hottest-looking film geek ever.
4:52 PM Apr 25th from web

A lot of H!ITG!'s in The Rocketeer: Margo Martindale, Jan from The Office singing at a '30s club, Midnight Run "Hopalong Cassidiche" guy...
4:59 PM Apr 25th from web


Am I the only one who thinks Rocketeer--which tanked in '91--has aged better than the more popular actioners from that summer (T2, RH:POT)?
5:01 PM Apr 25th from web

In Living Color did a then-amusing Latino version of Rocketeer after the film came out. I remember his leafblower doubled as his jet pack.
5:03 PM Apr 25th from web

@pfunn If there'll ever be a Rocketeer double-dip, it needs an extra pointing out each of the film's countless references to Old Hollywood.
5:12 PM Apr 25th from web in reply to pfunn



A couple of clickworthy pieces on The Rocketeer, by @nathanrabin (http://tinyurl.com/d35dvz) and Scott Tipton (http://tinyurl.com/dah5o6).
5:14 PM Apr 25th from web

In his obit for Dave Stevens, @evanier said that after Rocketeer tanked, DS lost interest in doing more Rktr comics, which was unfortunate.
5:16 PM Apr 25th from web


The Rocketeer got me pumped over IDW's Rocketeer reprints, which I'm dying to read b/c I want to research more about Dave Stevens' creation.
5:18 PM Apr 25th from web

From April '08: A FISTFUL OF SOUNDTRACKS: THE BLOG: What if Rick Berman continued making #StarTrek movies?: http://tinyurl.com/cznosm
2:38 AM May 6th from web

I was searching my parents' garage for some old Starlog issues that contained articles about The Rocketeer and Gerald Fried and...
10:16 AM May 8th from web

...in my parents' garage, I stumbled into some '80s G.I. Joe comics by Larry Hama, whose work all of us Secret Identities creators admire.
10:17 AM May 8th from web

A fistful of classic Larry Hama G.I. Joe comics = some kickass bathroom reading. (Tweet number 300. This! Is! Cobra-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!)
10:19 AM May 8th from web

Among the G.I. Joe comics I unearthed from the garage: G.I. Joe #61 (July 1987), which has a dope Mike Zeck cover: http://tinyurl.com/p8nkqq
10:21 AM May 8th from web

G.I. Joe #61 is about the rescue of a U.S. reporter accused of espionage, an eerie precursor to the imprisonment of Laura Ling and Euna Lee.
10:22 AM May 8th from web

G.I. Joe #61 makes me wish for a special ops unit to sneak into North Korea and get Laura Ling and Euna Lee the hell out of there.
10:22 AM May 8th from web

Though I enjoyed Abrams' #StarTrek, I'm sick and tired of time travel and madmen trying to destroy Earth a la Khan, Kruge, Soran & Shinzon.
10:14 AM May 12th from web

Trek VI & Casino Royale proved you can have villains who aren't concerned w/ global domination & yet it still feels like plenty's at stake.
10:16 AM May 12th from web

An article from my past as a journo: De Niro and Brando sleepwalk through The Score: http://tinyurl.com/ocp3yv
10:24 AM May 12th from web

Favorite #StarTrek in-joke: Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" during prepube Kirk's joyride is a nod to Shatner's TAS "sabotage" pronunciation rant.
3:26 PM May 12th from web

Why so few Filipinos during JJA's #StarTrek? "Must have been a Pacquiao fight going on that day," jokes @moonielantion: http://bit.ly/xKLUv
3:28 PM May 12th from web

To be continued.

Around the Internets: 03/20/08

- A prequel to the original Trainspotting novel is in the works, while the long-planned prequel to Battlestar Galactica has finally been greenlit. Haven't Irvine Welsh and Ronald D. Moore heard Patton Oswalt's brilliant bit in which the comedian/script doctor breaks down what's wrong with prequels like the last three Star Wars movies and imagines an encounter with George Lucas during the time he wrote them ("Well hey, you say you're a Star Wars fan. Do you like Darth Vader? In the first movie, you get to see him as a little kid... and then he gets taken away from his mom and he's very sad...")?

- Composers like Hans Zimmer, Anne Dudley and La Vie en Rose's Christopher Gunning complain that present-day film scores are too bland-sounding in an article for London's The Times. Zimmer asks, "Where is the next Jerry Goldsmith?" Uh, Hans, his name is Michael Giacchino. Zimmer adds, "So many scores sound like nobody really thought about them." Yeah, the likes of Jon Brion, Howard Shore, Alexandre Desplat and Terence Blanchard put very little thought into what they write.

- Awesome! Someone's finally posted "The Huey Freeman Hunger Strike," one of two recently banned episodes of The Boondocks. "Hunger Strike" resurrects one of the old strip's most memorable threads, Huey's gripes with BET's offensive programming.

Word on the street is BET threatened legal action against The Boondocks' distributor, Sony Pictures Television, and Adult Swim if the latter aired the two BET-bashing eps. I guess BET's henchmen didn't act fast enough to stop Canada's Teletoon channel and its Adult Swim-like Detour block from premiering "Hunger Strike" last Sunday (the other BET-bashing ep, "The Ruckus Reality Show," is set to air on Detour this Sunday).

"Hunger Strike" is one of the funniest eps of The Boondocks' second season, despite the series' continuing uncertainty over how to make Huey as dynamic a character as he was in the strip (Huey's intellectual nature played better in the strip than on the animated series, whereas the not-as-cerebral Riley thrives in the animated format--his eps are more fun to watch than the Huey-centric ones).

Huey's stand against BET is overshadowed by the hijinks of Rev. Rollo Goodlove. Cee-Lo does his second Boondocks guest shot as the self-serving Goodlove, and he gets to sing "Go-Go Gadget Gospel" from his first Gnarls Barkley album, during a musical sequence that goes on a bit longer than it should. Scrubs' Donald Faison, who voiced another character in an earlier Boondocks ep, provides the sped-up voice of "Weggie Rudlin," who proposes a BET "ho-ward show" to honor the best video hos. Weggie is the series' jab at its former executive producer, current BET president Reginald Hudlin, whose name still shows up in the Boondocks credits due to contractual obligations. The Boondocks writers also throw in some amusing in-jokes about past BET personalities like Sherry Carter and Tavis Smiley (who voices himself) that will probably sail over white viewers' heads.

The ep's best lines come from the Dr. Evil-like CEO of BET ("You've fired everyone that could read? I love it!") and Uncle Ruckus ("BET forever!! BET boombaya!!") I love how Star Wars fan Aaron McGruder asked 9th Wonder, the series composer, to model Ruckus' theme music after John Williams' tuba theme for Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi.

- I would cringe while listening to many of the train wreck questions fanboys and fangirls would toss at the celebrity speakers during panel discussions at the 2007 WonderCon and the '07 San Diego Comic-Con, so I love this Mark Evanier complaint about the attention whores who abuse the open mic at panels:

One time, I was interviewing Ray Bradbury. The first guy at the mike — who'd been poised there since before Ray and I arrived on stage — just wanted to say how much Ray's work had inspired his own, beginning efforts and he wanted to read aloud a passage from one of those stories to demonstrate this. If I hadn't stopped him, he'd have turned the rest of the hour into a books-on-tape recital.

- Poplicks.com says Obama's stunning speech about race was effective, but they wish he could have done more with it.

- Comics 101 remembers Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens, who passed away March 10. The secret of how the Rocketeer managed to fly around without burning his ass off dies with Stevens.