Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

After 86 years, the final Little Orphan Annie strip will appear on Sunday.

After 39 years, the final Doctor Demento Show will be broadcast this weekend.

Not a good weekend for American institutions.

I see that animation emperor Joseph Barbera has died. Fans of animation history may be interested in extensive 1997 interview with Barbera on Google Video. (The link is to the first of seven installments, totaling hours of memories.)

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation has placed lots of oral history interviews with aging TV people into Google Video, so look around if you'd like to see more. Mister Rogers. Andy Griffith. Betty White. Elma (Mrs. Philo) Farnsworth. George Takei.

Peculiar thing showed up on C-SPAN this weekend: cast and producers of the TV series 24 on stage at the Heritage Foundation. Three producer-writers, three actors, two tank-thinkers, moderated (I hope he won't be offended if I use that word) by Rush Limbaugh. The Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, gave an introductory talk and answered audience questions.

I gather that Virginia Lamp Thomas, a Heritage Foundation official, had a hand in lining up the event; her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, was in the front row of the audience sitting next to her, and several quips were directed to him.

Everybody reveled in love for the action-packed, terrorist-bashing, America-loving, down-counting show.

I found the event a bit creepy. I am trying to decide whether I would find it equally creepy to see, say, the NASA Administrator on stage with the cast of Star Trek, or whether I am simply a hypocrite.

Remember when I posted about the 1923 Fleischer animated film explaining special relativity?

According to Richard Godwin, his ever-eclectic company Apogee Books is coming out with an edition of Garrett P. Serviss's The Einstein Theory of Relativity. It comes with a DVD that includes not only the animated relativity movie, but also the Fleischer film Evolution, which stirred up controversy in the 1920s and which features stop-motion dinosaurs by Willis O'Brien.

(The relativity film is really Die Grundlagen der Einsteinschen Relativitäts-Theorie, directed by Hanns-Walter Kornblum, repackaged by Max Fleischer for the U.S. market. I think he may have added some footage to the German movie.)

Fifteen bucks gets you the Serviss book and both movies. Wow.

(I don't know whether the films are the seven-reel classroom versions or the four-reel, 40-minute theatrical cuts; I suspect the latter. Will have to ask Richard.)

Yes, this is the same Garrett P. Serviss, a tireless popularizer of science, who penned an unauthorized sequel to War of the Worlds, namely Edison's Conquest of Mars. Which you can also buy from Apogee! Two-fisted adventurers Tom Edison and Lord Kelvin reverse-engineer the alien spacecraft and death-rays, build their own fleet, and take vengeance back to the Martians, while rescuing pretty girls in the process.

Edited to Add: I'll embed a Youtube clip, only 20 minutes long. Disappointingly, this version ignores the most interesting parts of Einstein's relativity.

Winsor McCay made an animated film of The Sinking of the Lusitania in 1918.

Max Fleischer and his studio made The Einstein Theory of Relativity (with Garrett P. Serviss!) and the controversial Darwin's Theory of Evolution in 1923.

Have you seen these? I am intrigued.

A sudden boon has been granted us.

Short version: RSVP by 2 PM Thursday, get yourself down to Navy Pier by 7 PM, and you can see the new 3D IMAX movie about the Mars Exploration Rovers. Free.

Jim Plaxco, space activist and webmaster of
<http://www.chicagospace.org/>, passes this along.

( Details of the Roving Mars event )

The IMAX site:
<http://www.imax.com/imaxweb/filmdetail.do?type=comingsoon&movieid=code__.__8>

About the film:
<http://www.space.com/adastra/adastra_rovingmars_060125.html>

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/movies/25mars.html?_r=1>

Useful coupon for $10 off parking at Navy Pier--<http://navypier.com/pdf/parkingcoupon06.pdf>> (Ordinarily, parking is $19 for one to three hours.)

See you there, Mars buffs!

Who discovered Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and why didn't he or she get the disease named after him or her?

This coming Thursday, 22 September, in Chicago, you can attend an advanced screening of the new movie Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D. The film re-creates moments in the Apollo moonwalks in the wide-screen, three-dimensional IMAX projection process. As the filmmakers say, "Only twelve have walked on the Moon. You're next."

I've been helping to organize this event, which will raise funds for the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and the National Space Society. Captain James Lovell, of Apollo 13 and Apollo 8, was kind enough to provide us with an invitation letter, which I'll append.

The Navy Pier complex is in downtown Chicago, at the lake, at 600 East Grand Avenue.

Visit http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2233 to obtain tickets for the preview.

Watch a trailer at jttp://www.apple.com/trailers/imax/imax_magnificent_desolation.html.

Extensive notes on the film's production may be found at http://www.imax.com/magnificentdesolation/site/downloads/notes.pdf.
( Invitation from astronaut James Lovell )

You guys are amazing. I had to follow up on all those tidbits about the Chanute play, so I hit the library tonight and looked up a 1987  Chicago Tribune article about it.

Octave Chanute was an accomplished civil engineer, and a key pioneer of American aviation:

He was a co-author of the plans for the elevated transit system in Manhattan, he built the first bridge over the Missouri River, he was the chief engineer for the Chicago & Alton railroad and a number of others and he built the Union stockyards in Chicago and Kansas City.
[...]
When Orville and Wilbur Wright made their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903, the superstructure of the plane they flew was, to a large degree, designed by Chanute, who had developed it through hundreds of experimental glider flights off the sand dunes near what is today Gary, Ind.

Thomas Boyle, a Chicago real-estate guy who loves to write songs, developed a musical about Chanute:

Boyle went to Warren Casey, a proven musical ace, for guidance. Casey is one of the co-authors of ``Grease,`` the most successful musical comedy in history; the show, as we all know, was written and made its debut here and Casey still has a home here.

There's the Grease connection we were wondering about.

Casey also suggested Boyle take his first draft to the Playwright Center, which Casey had helped to found, and give it a reading there
[...]
Boyle raised $150,000, then teamed up with director David Bell, who revised the book with Boyle. Together, they presented ``Chanute`` in December, 1981, at the World Playhouse on South Michigan Avenue, which now is the site of the Fine Arts movie theaters.

The show ran eight weeks, but the reviews were not raves. The Sun-Times critic wrote, ``The score might have a future, but the show--no,`` and The Tribune`s Richard Christiansen described it as ``a sometimes sweet, touching work of faith and optimism that runs on too long on too little material . . . ``

(Unfortunately, the library's database didn't go back further than 1985, so I didn't get to read the original reviews.)

In 1987, he was ready to seek backers for a revised version of the show:

He says he`s confident. ``The first show was really more of a revue than a real musical comedy,`` he says. ``We had only six parts and six pieces in the orchestra. The new show has been completely rewritten. It will have 20 in the cast, including dancers, and a full, 20-piece orchestra.

In December 1991, the new show, "A Chanute Christmas," opened at the Avenue Theater in Chicago. I didn't manage to find any reviews of it.

Other tidbits: Thomas Boyle is the son of the late Congressman Charles A. Boyle, and the uncle of actress Lara Flynn Boyle of The Practice.

Pulled A Wizard of Earthsea down from the shelf and re-read it over the weekend. K and other family members have expressed interest in the trilogy, having seen trailers for the upcoming miniseries.

I haven't re-read this in probably twenty years, though I had read the series at least twice in the past.

My gut reaction is now confirmed:

The idea of making a TV movie out of this book is just nuts.

Doubly so for the Sci-Fi Channel.

(SFC has, I hasten to add, at times bankrolled some pretty good work. But it's very hard to believe the subtleties of Earthsea will not be left behind when the wizards, spells, dragons, and chase scenes appear on screen. Why don't they option some Retief stories?)

From their site:

An angry, headstrong youth, whose magical power could rival that of the greatest wizards....

A beautiful young priestess, introduced to evil....

A warrior king who wields words and weapons with equal force....

All on a world of islands and incantations, mystics and maidens, prophesies and power. All on a world called EARTHSEA.

If this miniseries proves to be any good, it will be a miracle.

For an opinion about related matters, see here.