Word: comically
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Rummaging through the museum's collection is rewarding on both levels -- nostalgic and scholarly. A Woody Allen TV special from 1969, for example, provides a rare glimpse of Allen in his transitional phase from stand-up comic to film innovator. One segment is a brilliantly realized silent-movie short, with Allen as the Chaplinesque hero and a young Candice Bergen as his co-star. But the show's most startling revelation is a guest appearance by the Rev. Billy Graham, who joins Allen for a lighthearted but essentially serious discussion of God, morality and premarital sex. It is fascinating simply...
Some resistance remains: many newspapers are still reluctant to run more than one black comic strip an issue, even though black artists cover the same gamut of styles and story lines as their white counterparts. "You have to fight a certain amount of response that we already have a black strip," says Sarah Gillespie, director of comic art at United Feature Syndicate, which distributes Jump Start. But the favorable response to the breakthrough artists is having a ripple effect. Earlier this year, Gibson Greetings began marketing a line of cards featuring Armstrong's likable Joe and Marcy. Barbara Brandon...
...show's dark tone has apparently given ABC executives some nervous moments. They reportedly asked Bochco to redo the first episode, adding some comic relief; it now contains a subplot about a woman seeking a divorce because her husband thinks he's Elvis. Other problems remain. Civil Wars has too little of interest going on outside the courtroom (no romance so far between Hemingway and Onorati), and its "lighthearted" moments are rather distasteful. One running story involves Hemingway's law partner (Alan Rosenberg), who has a nervous breakdown in the first show and returns later to do kooky things like...
...stared at. They can get away with this affront to dullness because they are for kids, whose eyes have not yet been educated to squint, and because they have the cartoonish spirit. Beauty and the Beast, a fairy tale, is Disney's 30th animated feature; The Addams Family, a comic ghost story, is a flip book based on Charles Addams' drawings. Both films are defiantly artificial, with fancy musical numbers and design schemes that carry not only the mood but most of the humor. And both movies have talking furniture...
With an emotional resonance rare in movies and a pleasing score by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, Beauty and the Beast gets the comic leavening it needs from a nice modification of the Seven Dwarfs. The prince's household staff, who labor under the same curse, have been changed into candlesticks (Jerry Orbach), teapots (Angela Lansbury), clocks (David Ogden Stiers) and armoires (Jo Anne Worley). In the Be Our Guest number, watch closely for the swimming spoons, the dishes stacked in Eiffel Tower formation, the tankards in chorale. The voluptuousness of visual detail offers proof, if any more were needed...