That viral pic from Tumblr of Christina Ricci as Morticia Addams isn't real, but it proves why Morticia is the part she was born to play, baby

Christina Ricci in Lizzie Borden Took an Ax

I've stayed away from Asian Twitter ever since two different camps within Asian Twitter came to blows over #CancelColbert--the dumbest-looking campaign against a fictional TV character since Dan Quayle's outrage over Murphy Brown's choice to become a single mom--and all that arguing between Asian Americans over #CancelColbert made me want to stick my head in the oven, so I've spent most of my lurking time on Twitter over on Black Twitter. Does the fourth half of that last sentence make any sense? Shit, it probably doesn't.

Black Twitter is sometimes a more enjoyable place to be than any other part of Twitter, mainly because of Desus Nice's consistently funny tweets about either hip-hop, sports, white people's bullshit or an America where "President Trump starts WW3 with Mexico and China." Desus has parlayed his 140-characters-and-less wit into both a career of writing for comedy shows on MTV2 and a popular, now-defunct comedic webseries with "all-caps rap reviewer" The Kid Mero that returned to the Internet earlier this month in the form of the newly launched podcast Bodega Boys. Emmy night and the following day are interesting examples of the differences in trending topics between Black Twitter and White Twitter, or as I like to call it, Facebook.

So Black Twitter has been all about the new Drake/Future mixtape, the enthusiasm over Uzo Aduba, Regina King and Viola Davis all winning Emmys for acting and black viewers' frustrations over a Twitter rant about Davis' candid and rousing Emmy acceptance speech that was posted and quickly deleted by a drunken white actress from General Hospital. Black Twitter shouldn't be surprised that the lady from General Hospital would post racist opinions about Davis' Emmy win for her role on How to Get Away with Murder: she's a Cassadine. Of course she would say such things.

How do I know all this shit about the Cassadines? I used to watch General Hospital in between UC Santa Cruz classes. I lived in a nice off-campus apartment building where none of the neighbors on my floor were weed dealers or were into sharing their weed, so I never really was heavily into weed like most other UCSC students. That also meant that when I wanted a good laugh at about 2pm before I'd slink back to class or the campus paper, I was too lazy to go score some weed downtown. Instead I would get a couple of good laughs at 2pm by just switching on General Hospital to chuckle over either three things: the show's G-rated and overly romanticized portrayal of the Mafia, two or three years before The Sopranos premiered and its popularity caused General Hospital to be completely changed into Sopranos lite; the fact that every outdoor conversation at night would take place on the same exact foggy Port Charles dock set; or one of Anthony Geary's genuinely funny and often unscripted one-liners during the feud between the evil Cassadines and the slightly less evil Spencers. That's how I know who the Cassadines are.

Anyway, while those are the trending topics on Black Twitter, White Twitter is preoccupied with much weirder things: viral footage of a subway rat carrying a slice of pizza (apparently he's got a few ninja turtles he needs to feed), gossip over David Cameron once inserting his dick into a dead pig as if he were in an episode of Black Mirror and a photo of Christina Ricci dressed up as Morticia Addams, the mother of Wednesday, the character Ricci charmingly brought to life in the two Addams Family movies. Yeah, that's white people in a nutshell.

Wait a minute. [KRS-One voice.] Rewind. Someone posted a pic of Ricci as Morticia? Has that person been reading my mind lately and glimpsing a hot fantasy I once had about present-day Ricci in a Morticia outfit? I'm no Goth, but I would love to see Ricci play Morticia in an Addams Family reboot. Also, why is the Photoshopping job on that Tumblr pic kind of shitty, and why does it remind me of Lena Headey's face getting poorly grafted onto her body double during Cersei's walk of shame? How's it possible that there are people who were actually convinced the photo is real?

(Photo source: Mystical Enchantment)

(Photo source: Uproxx)

Ricci most recently starred as Lizzie Borden in both a Lifetime movie and a short-lived Lifetime show. An ideal future role for her would have to be Morticia or a grown-up Wednesday. The Addams Family, the show that was based on the only New Yorker cartoons that are worth a damn, has already been rebooted three different times in live action and once in animation (as well as turned into a Broadway musical starring Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia and Nathan Lane as Gomez). I hate most reboots, and the unwatchability and suckitude of the last two live-action Addams projects are a good reason why I dislike most of them (the Addamses are too big to be in something as small as a chintzy direct-to-video movie). But it's not surprising why a certain segment of Hollywood keeps wanting to resuscitate the Addams fam.







The Charles Addams characters' brand of dark humor--they're misfits mocking the lily-white and squeaky-clean suburbia of '50s and '60s sitcoms like The Donna Reed Show and then later on during the era of the Barry Sonnenfeld movies, America as envisioned by those who worshiped the Bush Sr. Administration--is timeless and always appealing, especially to misfits and outcasts who don't care for how dull, unpleasant and, well, hateful that kind of suburbia or America can be. At a time when a hatemonger like Donald Trump is trying to stoke the racist anger of that kind of America, maybe we need the Addamses on the screen again to take that America down and shoot arrows at it a la Wednesday and Pugsley during that Thanksgiving play they rewrote in Addams Family Values.

All an Addams reboot needs besides Ricci are a director who's incredibly focused--and doesn't let the art direction become the only good thing about the movie but still manages to infuse a strong visual sense--and a writer who's as sharp as Paul Rudnick, a script doctor on the first Addams Family flick and the sole credited writer of Addams Family Values, the sequel that was a perfect marriage of quip writer and teen performer delivering those quips (Rudnick/Ricci). Shit, on second thought, they should just bring Rudnick back, unless he'd rather stick to ghostwriting the film reviews of Libby Gelman-Waxner.

(Photo source: Go Fug Yourself)

(Photo source: Go Fug Yourself)

I want more than just Ricci channeling Morticia on the red carpet, man. I'd like another Rudnick-penned Addams movie, and I'd like her to be an Addams again. Ricci may have scared away Lifetime viewers while wielding Lizzie Borden's ax, but as an Addams wielding an ax, she'd definitely get our attention again.

Marc Shaiman's "The Tango," the instrumental highlight of Addams Family Values, isn't currently in rotation on AFOS (it was removed from rotation in 2012 due to limited station hard drive space), but it ought to be.

Get to know "The Big Score" by Richard Sala

At their house, my parents want me to get rid of stuff I've left behind there and don't use anymore, like stacks of manila folders I stored inside their house's overhead cabinets. The folders contain press kits for albums like DJ Kool's Let Me Clear My Throat CD and movies like The Big Lebowski; old scripts of segment intros I typed up for the terrestrial radio version of AFOS; and newspaper/magazine article cutouts I enjoyed reading and had saved so that I could read them again someday (whatup, early 2000s Mercury News interview with De La Soul about the Art Official Intelligence "trilogy") or use one of them as the basis for some script for either TV, a film or a comic. For example, there was a folder from the early 2000s that I labeled "Jigsaw." It consisted of articles about crime in San Francisco I collected and saved as research for a San Francisco crime show idea I wanted to call Jigsaw (for a while, I wanted to create the Sucka Free equivalent of Homicide: Life on the Street and populate the cast with a few Asian American detectives).

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I was only able to empty one cabinet by throwing away a whole bunch of cutouts I don't need to save anymore--like the Jigsaw clippings (yeah, I don't think that show's ever going to get made). But there are some items from the folders in that cabinet that I don't want to dunk into the basura, so I've taken them along with me. They include a few issues of Scud: The Disposable Assassin I've held onto since college--one of those issues was written by a pre-Channel 101/Community Dan Harmon!--and a comic strip I snipped from a 1994 issue of Pulse! magazine.

Pulse! was a music review magazine the now-defunct Tower Records published and handed out for free in its stores. The final page of each Pulse! issue always featured a music-related comic strip. My favorite of those Pulse! strips is "The Big Score" by cartoonist Richard Sala, whose serialized 1991 "Invisible Hands" mystery shorts during Liquid Television were a favorite of many fans of the MTV animation anthology show. (Sala's horror comics are full of old-fashioned movie monsters and hot heroines. Cartoon Network is too dunderheaded to allow it, but I'd rather see the network's Adult Swim/Williams Street department produce a new Scooby-Doo animated series with character designs by either Sala or someone equally offbeat and not-so-kid-friendly instead of CN and Warner Bros. Animation rehashing the same old Scoob for kids.) "The Big Score" takes place in a noirish nightclub and cleverly replaces all the dialogue with names of classic crime movie scores that Sala thinks would be appropriate for each moment.

"At the time I was listening to a lot of movie soundtracks, particularly the cool, atmospheric soundtracks of thrillers and spy movies, which I found to be inspiring background music to play while I wrote," said Sala in a 2010 blog post about "The Big Score." I don't have a Mac-compatible scanner with me to digitally preserve "The Big Score," so good thing Sala--whose latest work is the digital-only Fantagraphics graphic novel Violenzia--scanned his own 1994 strip and posted it on his blog.

(Photo source: Richard Sala)

Thanks to YouTube and Spotify, I can now take that 1994 strip and post it alongside the exact same audio Sala envisioned when he drew it. Vertigo and Our Man Flint are the only film titles from "The Big Score" that contain themes that are currently in rotation on AFOS. I've streamed cues from Touch of Evil, The Ipcress File, Experiment in Terror, Arabesque and Psycho on AFOS before, and after first catching Kiss Me Deadly on TCM, it's hard to forget that batshit crazy Robert Aldrich flick, but I'm not familiar with the other movies Sala references in "The Big Score." I actually still haven't seen The Third Man. There are a couple of Ida Lupino flicks mentioned in there that I need to check out after hearing Greg Proops devote an entire segment to her work during The Smartest Man in the World.

Panel 1: Touch of Evil

Panel 2: The Ipcress File; The Third Man; Experiment in Terror; On Dangerous Ground

"Ask for Babs (Universal 100th Anniversary Mix)"

To mark its 100th anniversary, Universal unveiled a revamped version of its globe logo (The Lorax is the first Universal release to open with it) and got frequent Fast and the Furious sequel composer Brian Tyler to update Jerry Goldsmith's rousing 1997 Universal logo fanfare with a choir and additional percussion.



What was originally supposed to be just a blog post I was going to do about Tyler's spiffy arrangement of the Goldsmith fanfare evolved into the mix below. Because of Universal's centennial, I've put together a mix--my very first one, in fact. It consists of favorite tunes that were written for Universal films or TV shows.

Ask for Babs (Universal 100th Anniversary Mix) by Dj Afos on Mixcloud

It's hard to find original score material from Universal films or shows that's as dance floor-friendly (or full of rhythm that makes my head nod) as J.J. Johnson's "Willie Chase" from Willie Dynamite or David Holmes' "Rip Rip" from Out of Sight, so I had to really dig deep into my station library.

Universal smash hits like the Bourne franchise and 8 Mile are represented on the "Ask for Babs" mix, as well as Universal releases that didn't exactly set the box office on fire but are great or good films and have gained--and I hate this term because cults are creepy--cult followings (Midnight Run[*], Scott Pilgrim vs. the World). The mix also includes material from some Universal films I've never seen (like the not-on-DVD 1969 curio The Lost Man, which has a couple of problems that bother the African American cinema blog Shadow and Act: "It's not good" and as a black militant, Sidney Poitier "is simply miscast in the role, and clearly looks uncomfortable"), but I love the music that was written for those films.

Determining the ways each track would transition into another and basing the order of the tracks on certain connections between them were particularly fun. I blended Vic Mizzy's Ghost and Mr. Chicken main title theme with 30 Rock's fake novelty song "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah" to show how much 30 Rock composer Jeff Richmond must have been inspired by Mizzy's Ghost and Mr. Chicken score. Tracy Morgan is followed by The Roots' original track for the Best Man opening titles because both Morgan and The Roots are employees of Lorne Michaels. I had a Touch of Evil score cue follow the Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story main title theme because Dragon was about Lee having to put up with yellowface/brownface, and Touch of Evil was full of brownface. Plus, Lee starred in The Big Boss, and the Touch of Evil cue is called "The Boss." "Lose Yourself" from 8 Mile segues into the best original theme from Out of Sight (the theme for Don Cheadle's Snoopy character) because both movies involve Detroit. Fast Five, the best of the Fast and the Furious films, was placed next to The Rockford Files because, uh, car chases.

Except for Quincy Jones' cowbell-licious re-recording of his own Ironside theme (a staple of vintage kung fu movie soundtracks that Kill Bill introduced to a new generation of moviegoers), the excerpts of beatmakers sampling Knight Rider and Public Enemy's classic sample of Queen's Flash Gordon theme, I didn't want this mix to contain covers of Universal film or show themes like the Lalo Schifrin disco version of the Jaws theme. I wanted it to be all-original music, but edgy, propulsive or funky original material instead of strictly symphonic material. So that meant crime-jazz-era Henry Mancini (Touch of Evil, Charade) instead of NBC Sunday Mystery Movie theme/A Warm Shade of Ivory-era Mancini, and no Jaws, Jurassic Park, E.T., To Kill a Mockingbird, Spartacus or--*yawn*--Out of Africa (although some of Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future theme turns up at the beginning). Yeah, Jaws was Universal's biggest cash cow shark for a while, and the Jaws theme was a great achievement in John Williams' career, but it doesn't make my head nod (there is, however, a brief soundbite of Jaws, which like all the other soundbites during the mix, comes from a Universal film or show).

My only disappointment with the "Ask for Babs" mix is that I so wanted John Barry's Ipcress File main title theme and Iggy Pop's Repo Man theme to be part of the mix, so I tried editing them into the mix, but all my editing trickery just couldn't get either of them to fit in well. Sorry, Harry Palmer and Harry Dean Stanton.

[*] Director Martin Brest's last enjoyable film is neck and neck with Do the Right Thing for my favorite film that was released by Universal. It features my favorite Danny Elfman film score. And years before lengthy bits of improv were an integral part of Judd Apatow-produced Universal comedies like Bridesmaids, there was the duo of Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, ad-libbing most of their interplay and most of the brilliantly underplayed Red's Corner Bar sequence.

1. Nigel Godrich, "Universal Theme," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
2. Alan Silvestri, "End Credits" (from Back to the Future Part III), Hollywood Soundstage: Big Movie Hits Volume I, Varèse Sarabande
3. Rose Royce, "Car Wash," Car Wash, Motown
4. Public Enemy, "Fight the Power," Music from Do the Right Thing, Motown
5. J.J. Johnson, "Willie Chase," Willie Dynamite, Hip-O Select/Geffen
6. Giorgio Moroder, "Tony's Theme," Scarface, Geffen
7. Jan Hammer, "Chase," Miami Vice: The Complete Collection, One Way
8. Stu Phillips, "Knight Rider," NBC: A Soundtrack of Must See TV, Tee Vee Toons
9. Timbaland and Magoo, "Clock Strikes (Remix)," Blackground
10. Busta Rhymes, "Turn It Up (Remix)/Fire It Up," Elektra
11. Punjabi MC, "Mundian To Bach Ke," Sequence
12. Johnny Harris, "Odyssey (Pt. 1)" (from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), Sunshine Sound Disco
13. Danny Elfman, "Main Titles," Midnight Run, MCA
14. Oingo Boingo, "Weird Science," Best O' Boingo, MCA
15. Nigel Godrich, "Chau Down," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
16. Dan the Automator, "Ninja Ninja Revolution," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
17. Randy Edelman, "Dragon Theme," Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, MCA
18. Henry Mancini, "The Boss," Touch of Evil, Varèse Sarabande
19. Henry Mancini, "Main Title" (from Charade), Music from the Films of Audrey Hepburn, Big Screen
20. Vic Mizzy, "Gaseous Globe," The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, Percepto
21. Vic Mizzy, "Main Title," The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, Percepto
22. Tracy Morgan & Donald Glover, "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah," 30 Rock, Relativity Music Group
23. The Roots feat. Jaguar Wright, "What You Want" (from The Best Man), Home Grown! The Beginner's Guide to Understanding The Roots Volume One, Geffen
24. Quincy Jones, "Main Squeeze" (from The Lost Man), The Reel Quincy Jones, Hip-O
25. Quincy Jones, "Ironside," TV Land Crimestoppers: TV's Greatest Cop Themes, Rhino
26. John Powell, "Jason's Theme," The Bourne Identity, Varèse Sarabande
27. Brian Tyler, "Tego and Rico," Fast Five: Original Motion Picture Score, Varèse Sarabande
28. Mike Post, "The Rockford Files," Synth Me Up: 14 Classic Electronic Hits, Hip-O
29. Richard Gibbs, "Main Title (UK Version)," Battlestar Galactica: Season One, La-La Land
30. Queen, "Flash's Theme," Flash Gordon, Hollywood
31. Public Enemy, "Terminator X to the Edge of Panic," It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Def Jam/Columbia
32. Stevie Wonder, "Jungle Fever," Jungle Fever, Motown
33. Eminem, "Lose Yourself," 8 Mile, Interscope
34. David Holmes, "Rip Rip," Out of Sight, Jersey/MCA
35. Brian Tyler, "The Perfect Crew," Fast Five: Original Motion Picture Score, Varèse Sarabande
36. Oingo Boingo, "Goodbye Goodbye," Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Full Moon/Elektra

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!