May The Cake Be With Him!

Happy Birthday to Mark Hamill, who turns 70 years old today! Yeah, that's right, SEVENTY! Jesus Christ, Luke Freakin' Skywalker is now a whopping seven decades old.

I need to go lie down in a dark room.

Happy Birthday To Betty White!

Wow, some actual good news for a change. Happy Birthday to national treasure Betty White, who turns 99 years young today!

Wow, she was quite the looker back in the day! Seems like she's been elderly for so long, it's hard to remember she was once a young woman.

Here's another pic of her from 1955. Amazingly, her show biz career's spanned an astonishing 80 years! Holy cow! Her career's older than the credit car, Super Glue, Teflon, Hula Hoops, Barbie Dolls, the polio vaccine and bar codes!

Happy Birthday, Betty!

Happy Birthday To Roger Corman!

Happy 93rd Birthday (April 5th) to Hollywood schlockmeister Roger Corman! He's the legendary producer who gave us such films as The Beast With A Million Eyes Teenage Cave Man, The Brain Eaters, A Bucket Of Blood, X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes and of course The Little Shop Of Horrors, among many, many others. 

In fact, Corman's produced well over FOUR HUNDRED movies since 1954! And a couple of them were actually good! I kid, I kid. I love Corman and his work. His films may not be high art, but they're always entertaining, and in the end, isn't that a movie's job?

In addition to his role as a producer, Corman's also a director, writer and even an occasional actor!

Corman specialized in making movies as cheaply as humanly possible, often shooting an entire film in just a couple of days. He'd often reuse sets, costumes, props, music and effects in several films in order to save money.

His methods apparently worked, as his movies almost always made a profit— which he would then use to fund his next project.

Corman's also famous for giving quite a few major directors and actors their first gigs, including Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, James Cameron, Robert De Niro, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante and Sandra Bullock.

Happy Birthday, Roger!

Happy Belated Birthday Stan Lee!

December 28th was the birthday of one Mr. Stanley Lieber, better known to the world as Stan Lee.

Stan Lee is probably the only comic book creator in existence who's recognized by the general public as well as the world of fandom. Lee, along with artist Jack Kirby, created most of what we know as the Marvel Universe back in the early 1960s.

For the first time in comics, Marvel's superheroes actually seemed like real people, rather than stiff mannequins (I'm lookin' at you, Superman). Stan Lee's heroes had relatable flaws and even (gasp) bickered with one another from time to time.

Stan Lee never talked down to his audience either, which may be one factor that explains his enduring popularity. He regularly used words that sailed well above the heads of his grammar school readers (like me), prompting them to crack open a dictionary to learn what words like "annihilate" meant.

Back in the day I naturally assumed that Stan Lee wrote every monthly comic that Marvel published. Of course the fact that every book was emblazoned with a line proclaiming "Stan Lee Presents" probably helped reinforce that notion. In a similar vein I also used to think that Hanna-Barbera was a woman who wrote and drew all the Flintstones and Jetsons cartoons.

I almost met Stan Lee ten years or so ago. I was at Wizard World in Chicago and saw him sitting at a table. I was walking over to him to tell him how much I enjoyed his work when suddenly an ill-mannered, foul-smelling stereotypical fanboy cut in front of me and plopped a stack of at least a hundred comic books on the table in front of Stan, demanding that he sign each and every one. Not wanting to wait in line for an hour behind such a basement dweller, I walked off. So close!

I hope Stan Lee has even a small inkling of what his work has meant to me over the course of my life. Because of him (and Jack Kirby) I tried my hand at making my own comics as a kid. I probably wouldn't be an artist (and fledgling writer) today if not for him.

So Happy Belated 89th Birthday, Stan Lee! Here's to another 80 or 90 years!

 

Just for fun, here's a shot of Stan from the 1970s, when apparently everyone looked like a porn star.