Disqus - Latest Comments for DwDunphy

Re: Republicans 'dreading it' with 'clock ticking' towards 'stumbling into a shutdown': report

DwDunphy — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 11:59:35 -0000

Please stop. We've seen this thousands of times now. They all say, "Oh my God, we can't do this, what do we do?" At the last minute, Trump tells them to do it, and they do it. Over. The Dems look to score points off a major economic failure from the GOP, then, nothing. Trump says "eat," and the GOP eats. When does this end with you guys?

Re: One Season Wonders: Willow Did Everything Right and Got Cancelled Anyway

DwDunphy — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 16:49:22 -0000

The show was pretty bad. It failed on two crucial fronts: pulling back the original fans and bringing value to the back catalog, being the original Willow movie. That second one is key. Without the new show, the older movie hasn't a hook for the modern audiences. And yes, server farm real estate is absolutely a thing. If your content is not bringing heads and you're leaving a series on there simply to sit, you are a poor asset manager.

There is nothing wrong with showing diversity in modern storytelling, but as we saw in another Lucasfilm series, Star Wars: The Acolyte, the main consumer is not interested in that as much as the brass seem to think they are. It all comes off as the most cynical realization of the South Park scene where Cartman as Kathleen Kennedy demands all the superheroes be made lesbians. That was supposed to be a joke, not a mandate, but here we are. Lucasfilm would have been better off attempting to adapt the Chris Claremont (X-Men) Willow novels than this.

There is a story ready and waiting to be told with all new characters in new worlds that look a lot like ours, and Lucasfilm has the capacity to make them, but instead use cut-and-paste stereotypes shoehorned into recognized properties and blow up both the established properties and the very best of intentions.

In the end, you need to make product that sells. That brings the subscribers, the money, and that is what keeps the Board and the stockholders happy. Willow the TV series committed the greatest crime one could in the modern entertainment landscape: It capitalized on a known I.P. and still blew it.

Re: DC’s Geoff Johns Latest Victim of Hollywood Con Queen

DwDunphy — Sun, 04 Aug 2019 15:34:03 -0000

"We also don’t know how the Con Queen has become so adept at impersonating superhero industry executives..."

It's called DVD extras. We've had them for, oh, thirty years? Gives people a chance to learn how to mimic someone's voice?

Re: THE LAST STARFIGHTER Sequel Being Developed - Nerdist

DwDunphy — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 05:21:23 -0000

Never trust a writer whose descriptor of choice is "amazing."

Re: In a summer with no bombs … box office explodes

DwDunphy — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 07:10:11 -0000

The MoviePass credit seems the most logical assumption. What makes a winner versus a loser? People decide to take their small money and spend it on a single show, since up until MoviePass there was no way to take that same small amount and see multiple shows. Choices had to undercut risk. "Will this suck? I don't want to spend my whole $20 on a sucky movie."

MoviePass mitigated risk. You could see all the movies and decide later if it was good or bad, not before. It was box office steroids. But now that it looks like MoviePass is going to go under, the litmus test will be the Christmas movie rush. If we go back to clear winners and losers, we'll definitively know why.

Re: Summer brought to you by: Song of the summer

DwDunphy — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 08:44:56 -0000

Going out on a limb to say that this summer's song is the inescapable "The Middle" by Zedd, Maren Morris and Grey.

Re: The Ultimate Tribute to WPIX.

DwDunphy — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 19:08:00 -0000

WPIX also did one other thing I've never seen other stations do. Late at night, they'd run uncompleted commercials, like the Honey Nut Cheerios commercial without the honey bee animation composited in. You'd hear the voice and see the spoon magically flip into the cereal bowl, but not see why it happened.

Re: The Ultimate Tribute to WPIX.

DwDunphy — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 19:04:57 -0000

Every day. It was Voltron after Heathcliff.

Re: The Ultimate Tribute to WPIX.

DwDunphy — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 19:04:22 -0000

Good stuff. You came to it a little bit later than me, but WPIX always was a little bit weirder than the rest (for the better). The week-long Godzilla movie festivals and Thanksgiving "Big Monster" marathons were particularly fun. When there was a mild resurgence of 3-D movie fever, they were on WPIX. There was the totally strange "video games over the phone on TV" phenomenon TV PIXXX (https://www.youtube.com/wat... and the strangely attractive hippie chicks and puppets of The Magic Garden. Good memories. We'll not see a station like it again.

Re: Dw. Dunphy On… The Millennial Problem

DwDunphy — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 15:43:10 -0000

Amazing, isn't it, how quickly and stealthily we became our parents, blaming the newest generation for everything falling apart?

I'm not a total cheerleader, mind you. There are younger people out there who absolutely typify the spoiled, entitled stereotypes. But I think that the effort to make a subsection into the example of the whole is unfair and inaccurate.

Not a fan of the "Millennial Whoop" though.

Re: Introducing Isn’t That Awful, the Podcast

DwDunphy — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 18:47:24 -0000

Although, in the end, they did. This furthers my proposal that the movie is as much a parody as Spaceballs. It's just not very transparent about that motivation.

Re: Song-engineering by committee

DwDunphy — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 18:59:38 -0000

In a modern consumption framework where music is virtually free and only the streams that run into the millions of plays earns anything, I understand this from a purely pragmatic viewpoint. But it can't be called "music" anymore if it is machine-tooled in such an artificial, CAD-enhanced way. What we have is the audio equivalent of 3D printing.

Re: The Comic Shop Down $21,000 In Marvel Comics Sales Alone For 2017

DwDunphy — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 17:53:45 -0000

At least for Marvel and D.C., a whole new generation of readership, formed because comics were a point-of-purchase store item versus a niche product of a boutique-type shop, is lost.

Re: The Comic Shop Down $21,000 In Marvel Comics Sales Alone For 2017

DwDunphy — Mon, 01 Jan 2018 21:43:16 -0000

Marvel has to get back to the newsstand.

Re: A Christmas Story Live ratings flop as viewers slam remake | EW.com

DwDunphy — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 20:35:38 -0000

It's comforting to know that it is so easy to ruin peoples' lives. Plus, I had no idea that all the remote controls in America disappeared in some mass techno-Rapture.

Re: How Bad Can It Be?: “Star Trek: The Animated Series”

DwDunphy — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 07:33:23 -0000

And proud of it!

Re: How Bad Can It Be?: “Star Trek: The Animated Series”

DwDunphy — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 20:51:10 -0000

You're eight years too late. I will send you a calendar for Christmas.

Re: Marvel Comics Rumored To Be In Some Serious Trouble

DwDunphy — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 20:28:01 -0000

I do agree in part. But books were cheaper then too. And the movies weren't that big a deal. Maybe I'm too sensitive to overkill but, surely, Marvel is not sensitive enough.

Re: Marvel Comics Rumored To Be In Some Serious Trouble

DwDunphy — Mon, 04 Sep 2017 16:43:36 -0000

This article best illustrates the problem: too many books. Too many freaking books. Too many godforsaken freaking books. And every one of these will be roped into another unnecessary event that strongarms the reader into buying them all, supposedly. Instead, the response is, "Oh, take all of your books and shove them," which I believe is what we are seeing.

The solution, if there is one, is a moratorium on 70% of the line. Now that will be a painful move. That means there will be only one Spider Man book, only one X-Men team, and so forth, but they desperately need this. Things are spread so ridiculously thin right now.

I as a now-casual reader am not going to get looped into a character that acts as a sort of Ponzi scheme. If you give me one year, one character, on one book, and a reason to care, I might be persuaded to try again.

Marvel has played a game of real estate, not of storytelling. If they insist upon taking up the majority of the comic shop shelf space, my response is not to buy them all. My response is to stop going to the comic shop. I think that is a rational, and apparently duplicated course of action.

Re: The Weird Reason The New Flatliners Isn't Really A Remake

DwDunphy — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 06:06:53 -0000

This will only work if, in fact, it is revealed at some point that Sutherland's characters are the same. Aside from all the previously hashed-out issues with the Ghostbusters reboot last year, I think people were definitely put off that the previous actors made cameos in the new version, but not as their characters. The makers of the new Flatliners risk doing it all over again, but when has history ever burdened a Hollywood decision before?

Re: Dw. Dunphy On… Adam Again’s “Perfecta”: The Album That Killed CCM

DwDunphy — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 22:13:42 -0000

Thank you, Jeff. I hope the campaign is a success. I'll be incredibly disappointed if this album cannot gather the necessary support. That will say something about this whole thing that I don't really want to believe.

Re: The Big Takeover: Greg Lawless (Adam Again) remembers "Perfecta"

DwDunphy — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 05:58:18 -0000

It's a perfect album about imperfection and humanity's awkward walk through this world. The album really deserves a shot from anyone who missed it in the '90s. It's a "woulda, coulda, shoulda" in the alternative rock canon, and I hope people jump on the Kickstarter campaign and make it happen.

Re: World’s Worst Songs: “Coward of the County” by Kenny Rogers

DwDunphy — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 11:59:02 -0000

I won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Re: Dw. Dunphy On… The “Magic” Disappearing Act: Bruce Springsteen and the Short Legacy Tail

DwDunphy — Wed, 24 May 2017 10:49:14 -0000

I see I have touched a nerve. It is not a radio station's job to indulge nostalgia to the detriment of all else. It is their job to play music that people will listen to which will sell advertising. The current business model believes you have to yank that memory wire all the time, but that resolution comes without having made a fair attempt to mix old and new from established artists. You can't say that doesn't work if that isn't attempted, and if you look at the pitiful playlists of rock stations across the country, it is near-empircle that they haven't.

No one is saying radio stations have to be completist. I am saying they do have to be far more representative of the artists from which they're making a living from. That means, yes, radio stations ought to play latter Springsteen. They should play songs post-Load from Metallica. Do you realize that Rush received some of their biggest accolades for Clockwork Angels from media that disregarded them for the entirety of the band's existence, and yet the band seems invisible after "Time Stand Still"?

Further, focusing on New Jersey radio, I absolutely believe that we should be playing more Jersey artists and not being exclusionary. Nicole Atkins was on Columbia and got nothing. The Smithereens had significant hits and regularly get nothing. Your argument on all these levels seems to be: "Leave them alone. The system is fine as it is." One man's petition for context is another man's assessment that this is an excuse.

If I am to be knocked for anything here, I'll happily accept I feel New Jersey radio stations should support New Jersey artists, unreservedly. I think that is the only responsible thing to do. I hear all the time that the days of the Asbury Park music scene are behind us. Well, of course! How could it not flounder when the states' own radio stations won't support their own. It is easy to get lost in the nostalgic haze of the past. That haze is the residue of focusing solely in the past while putting the torch to future opportunities.

The system as it is has fostered a culture that further creates situations where artists, old and new, have no financial incentive to create. This system institutionalizes the Endless Oldies Tour mentality and further engenders the false impression that these artists don't do it now because, somehow, they can't.

Again, you are invested in this concept that the way things are is somehow optimal. As someone who has experienced radio, a vital music discovery tool, degrade into a regurgitation machine, I simply cannot agree with you.

Roger Waters has a new album coming out soon. Radio likely won't play anything from it, but they'll play "Comfortably Numb" again. That's wrong.

Re: Dw. Dunphy On… The “Magic” Disappearing Act: Bruce Springsteen and the Short Legacy Tail

DwDunphy — Wed, 24 May 2017 09:57:24 -0000

One rebuttal: I mentioned four titles. That's not an indication that I only have four of the albums -- those are simply the four I chose to focus on. But no, I am not a completist by any stretch.