The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray
A Monumental Study of the World’s Greatest Actor
Paperback | Kindle
By Robert Schnakenberg
Quirk Books
Release date: September 15, 2015

A great, small coffee table tome has just been released called The Big, Bad Book of Bill Murray, touting and lauding all things about (who else?) Bill Murray, the comedy monarch who has endeared himself to scores of generations with his snappy, sloppy, and slick persona through films such as Meatballs, Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Stripes, Groundhog Day, Lost in Translation, What About Bob, The Life Aquatic, and scores of others, right up to the upcoming Rock the Casbah this Autumn. And like the man itself, this full-color paperback from Quirk Books is sprawling, unconventional, hilarious, and wonderful.

Carol Burnett Show: The Lost Episodes
6-DVD set
Starring Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Tim Conway
TML Entertainment
Release date: September 15, 2015

The Carol Burnett Show was a sprawling, hilarious variety program which was a staple of television during the late 1960s to the 1970s and hosted a virtual A to Z of guest stars, not to mention a highly talented and memorable repertory cast of regulars. All these years later, Carol Burnett Show: The Lost Episodes is being released as a 6-DVD set, which showcases the Queen of Television comedy.

For decades in syndication, scores of audiences watched, watched, and watched again the half-hour program which siphoned down the original hour-long episodes which aired from mainly the show’s second half of its run on CBS. Entitled Carol Burnett and Friends, it was to many that Carol Burnett and her zany cast of regulars (Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, and Tim Conway among them) performed in scores of sketches and variety numbers, many of which satirized popular culture and showcased a wide array of characterizations, ranging from the sublime to the absolute ridiculous.

Today is the 75th birthday of one of the great characters in the history of the animated genre, and in many ways, one of the greatest comedians of all time, the irrepressible Bugs Bunny, whose slick, extremely sharp and cunning personality, in which he employed a take-no-prisoners approach in the most side splitting ways to mow down his numerous adversaries in countless animated shorts, has endeared him to countless generations of fans to this very day.

Without question the top draw and flagship character of the myriad of many colorful ones to come from the legendary minds of Warner Brothers’ cartoon division (and realized by men like animation pioneers Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, Robert McKimson, and Chuck Jones), Bugs Bunny is a reflection of a Groucho Marx come to life. A vivid radical, break-all-the-rules, set new ones and smash those as well, and live every nanosecond as unorthodox as possible and on the fringes of the fringes of life, in which he did whatever it took to destroy his many adversaries (Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, etc). Bugs did it all for simply hitting the bullseye of achieving a level of self fun which stretched to the apex on a mission to simply eradicate boredom, and in which by doing so, he ultimately did the same for us as well.

Dick Van Patten, congenial actor, whose calming presence and everyman looks endeared him to a career in Hollywood which included playing character actors and sometimes leading roles, arguably the most remembered of which was the loving and fair dad on the light dramedy Eight is Enough, has died of complications from diabetes at the age of 86 in Santa Monica, California.

There seemed to be an ease about gazing at Van Patten on the small and big screen, no matter what the role or genre he appeared in. Starting his career on Broadway back in 1935, Van Patten had appeared on one of television’s very first long running programs once that medium began to flourish, titled Mama, back in 1949. It led to countless appearances on the small and large screen thereafter, especially during the 1970s, with a resume that almost resembled an A to Z of TV during that era including appearances on programs as diverse as Sanford and Son, Banacek, The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon, Emergency!, and Happy Days to name but a scant few.

The Blues Brothers, an audacious, hilarious, over the top, high budget, quirky, zany R-Rated musical film, which showcased the exploits of one Jake and Elwood Blues, two caucasian blues musicians decked in black hats, sunglasses, and loosely fitting yet snazzy suit and tie combos, celebrates its 35th anniversary today.

The film, one of the earliest cinematic tie-ins to come from the long running comedy-variety program from Saturday Night Live (where the characters musically made their debut), remains a high octane cult favorite to legions of fans around the world to this day for many reasons: The crazy quilt plotting and pacing by director John Landis, off-the-wall characters that range from sinister country folk to Nazis that hail from Illinois (the film is set in Chicago), and the music, which is red hot blues and R&B standards sung by the likes of heavyweights of that genre like John Lee Hooker, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway and Ray Charles. Also of course, the performances of the lead characters, Dan Aykroyd (who co-wrote the script with Landis), and the late, great, cherubic, rough-around-the-edges king of the irreverent and brash comedy castle, John Belushi.