Happy Father’s Day!
Big Daddy Batiuk decided that today, we get to create our own strip.
Here’s my version!
Okay. So it is really just an error that, as of the writing of this blog post, has been up all day and never corrected.
It’s not the only error born of laziness from this week.
For example.
Wait…
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiitttttttt…..
You mean to tell me, Summit Beach Park was…ALSO…a real place?
OH FOR PETE’S SAKE
Sigh.
I want this to be a lesson to all of you out in readerville: never take the apparent depth of the ad-hoc ‘research’ that we do on this blog as a completeness of perspective.
I was one quick Google search away from avoiding an unforced error. And for a moment, when I read iansdrunkenbeard’s post, the dumb egomonkey part of my brain wanted to smile and nod and play along like OF COURSE I knew that Summit Beach was also a real place. But I decided to fess up. Because it’s an important lesson.
I had taken what I’ve learned about the way Batty operates and my own experiences and presuppositions and decided that Summit Beach was fictional. Because from my more modern perspective it seemed far fetched to me that in real life, less than 30 miles from each other, there would be two waterside amusement parks, with roller coasters and midways and boat docks, and named dance halls that burned down.
But I was wrong. The 1900’s through the 1950’s was a different time. A time of more local amusements. A time when you could have a crowd of ladies dancing arm in arm with each other and no one would ever assume that meant the Wisteria Ballroom was a lesbian hotspot.
Does this mean that I was completely wrong, and that the Chippewa Lake Amusement Park was in no way an inspiration for all the Lucy/Lil/Eugene shenanigans? No.
Not according to this lovely little youtube video I found… (From the ironically tited DinkLife channel)
The location of Summit Beach Park was redeveloped as housing in the 60’s. So, unlike the Summit Beach of the Funkyverse, there was no abandoned park lingering on and decaying for decades that Lucy or Eugene or Lillian could wander around. That part of the afterlife of Chippewa Lake Park was stolen for the fiction.
But, while the Starlight Ballroom burned down in 2002, the real life Wisteria Ballroom met a firey end much earlier.
(Don’t think about how Pam is canonically 76. It will only hurt your brain)
And yes, the Summit Beach Dance Pavilion and Roller Rink looks much closer to the comics.
Interestly the entrance sign used for the park sometimes would revert to an older reference. An Ayers error!?
Also of note, remember a couple years ago, where Eugene went to a somehow now open Summit Beach and tried to drown himself with a dilapidated canoe?
That also is seemingly based on real life now. As just this summer, after years of planning and a couple seasons of construction, there is now a small park with concessions, a pavillion and complete with kayak rentals open at Summit Lake again.
That’s nice.
Son of Stuck Funky 
The man does have a fairly good grasp on local geography .
Well he has to have a good grasp of something and it sure as hell ain’t storytelling and continuity so I guess early to mid-century northeastern Ohio amusement and recreational centers is it.
There are four magic words that make a place sacred: MY DAD WENT THERE.
Yeah he loves obscure nostalgia, it makes him feel smarter and more refined than everyone else. Of course he never does anything interesting with any of it.
Arcamax.com had the same problem with the Luann strip (no black ink being used) two weeks in a row.
Speaking of Luann, today’s strip is a great example of Schrodinger’s Legacy Strip. According to the comments it’s perfectly appropriate for this in a legacy strip that (judging by its writing) is ostensibly aimed at eight-year-olds, because it’s simultaneously aimed at an audience looking at retirement in the rear-view mirror. Who is this for? is the question all of gocomics dare not ask.
Sorry for the digression but the Crankshaft storyline is just dismal.
This is the part where I stammer, “But…but…I thought you knew!”
I love your parody strip, CBH! This is all I could come up with:
I read that on a good day 30,000 tickets would be sold to ride The Whip at Summit Beach.
Oh, uh, yeah. Used to be there were amusement parks pretty much anywhere you had a reasonable-sized town. If nothing else the local electric company would build one, so there was something to use electricity in the evening when demand was lower (as it’s hard to change the amount of electricity you’re producing, but every watt you produce has to go _somewhere_ right away) and as advertising. Or the trolley company (often the same as the power company) would build one so there was someplace to _go_ besides work and the trolleys could be carrying fare-payers.
There were several waves closing nearly all of these parks, like (in the 1930s) it being the 1930s, or (in the 1950s-60s) being expected to integrate the races, or (in the 1970s-80s) regional parks like Disney or Six Flags Over Spaces drawing people not just from one town but from a three-hour driving radius.
6/22: The disjointed mess of a storyline just got stupider.
It’s like a tedious, badly-written fetch quest in a video game. The game is making you solve some random problem, because doing so will give you a piece of the Win The Game Mechanism. Now we just have to collect the sheet music to Sunrise Over Kilimanjaro – which we had at the very beginning of the story – and then we can finally find out where Eugene is moving!
Note also that Dinkle barely gives a shit, even though he’s the only person who should. Which is another trope of overproduced AAA-wannabe games: having to lug a bunch of useless characters everywhere you go. The studio hired a bunch of expensive voice actors, and they need something to voice! So these four dipshits are spending all week finding the fifth dipshit.
And look at Lillian’s face. Look how proud of herself she is for noticing something I noticed 16 days ago.
It doesn’t pay dividends to assume she has brains. The whole romance story depended on her being as dumb as dirt.
Oh man. I can’t believe this storyline is dragging on for another week. I mean, I can believe it, but I don’t want to believe it.
I’m still a bit hung up on Dinkle, whose life has ostensibly been all about music, would have kept vinyl records (much less ones his father’s music is recorded on) in a storage unit that wasn’t climate controlled.
I haven’t been playing BJ6K’s betting game thus far, but I am wondering on what the odds are on this ore-digger of a story arc ending after they fetch whatever item Eugene has. Gotta be low at this point, right? Will this story eventually reach Lefty? Crazy? Ruby Lith? Liking old music was one of Ruby Lith’s two traits, as I recall.
I think it makes total sense that Dinkle would store his father’s records in a non-climate controlled unit. He doesn’t care about preserving them, because he had little connection to his long-dead father. He’s storing them because of some combination of laziness, obligation, and the inability to throw out old junk.
What doesn’t make sense is: why is Dinkle even bothering with this? Much less Lillian, Ed, and Ralph, who have even less reason to care. But this story contains Tom Batiuk’s four favorite words:
And Then He Died.
“My dad, whom I’ve spent two weeks expressing my contempt for, was going to perform Sunrise Over Kilimanjaro… AND THEN HE DIED.” (scary organ chord) That’s all the motivation a Funkyverse character ever needs. The pace picks up once somebody hears there’s an artifact of a dead person lying around somewhere. We’ve gotta find that sheet music, because AND THEN HE DIED! (scary organ chord)
The story could have spent the last two weeks having Dinkle describe his complex relationship with his father, or maybe he how influenced Harry’s own musical direction in life. And, why this unheard record is so important to him. Instead, we watched a bunch of disinterested characters announcing the stage directions to each other. “Oh, I know who would have this record!” (INT: Ralph Meclker’s house. The phone is ringing.) “Oh, I can help with Sunrise over Kilimanjaro!” (INSET: flashback photo of Eugene.)
I agree that it makes sense for Dinkle as the character we know, the pompous megalomaniac. But I think it clear that TB doesn’t see Dinkle as that kind of character (even if he still is that kind of character) when he wants to go off on tangents like this. He’s out here undermining his own character’s alleged traits to pad the story. Classic TB, for better and for (much worse). This is quickly becoming an arc on par with an Atomik Komix bullpen visit on the TB-meter, I’m half intrigued to see how deeply dumb this will get.
Aside from a few VERY broad strokes (Dinkle is a band leader; Crankshaft is a bus driver; Lillian is an author/bookstore owner; other women are mostly doormats, or nags, or naggy doormats, or Dead St. Lisa) Batiuk doesn’t see any character as ANYTHING, except as a vessel to serve whatever terrible story idea he’s trying to vomit out. So if tomorrow he needs Dinkle to be a frustrated accountant, and Crankshaft to have been his last client before Dinkle turned to music … than that’s what they will be, whether it fits in with any continuity or not.
Personalities, such as they are, are similarly subject to change without notice.
The man started out plagiarizing Archie Comics so that’s going to keep on happening.
I totally get it. It could be dreck but AND THEN HE DIED.
I don’t think they need to get anything from Eugene? The sheet music was in the box that he foisted off onto Lillian, so she should already have it. What’s probably going to happen is that they’ll take the sheet music and have the Bedsore Manor band perform it for Harry or something. (Of course, it’ll still take the entire week to get to that point.)
(I mean, if they had to get something from Eugene, then we’d probably find out where he was moving to, a fact obviously not important enough for Batiuk to divulge three weeks ago.)
Eugene is committing (has already committed?) suicide. So he’s just trying to get rid of some old stuff and clean up a few things before he ends his miserable life.
And the Pulitzer people can just go suck on that.
(And no, I don’t mean that Eugene is a metaphor for Batty.)
It feels like he’s kind of given up on actually doing much of anything with the Funky characters after the wet fart that was The Burnings. I guess there’s PBM but that’s less of a character and more just a concept of a joke with feet. If they didn’t show up in that first year or two while he was in that post-Funky afterglow then he’s done with them. Hell, remember how we were supposed to be getting new stories with those characters on his site? And what’d that come out to? One week of new strips dedicated to rehashing DID U KNO DONNA WAS ELIMINATOR!? which made no sense because it had already been established that Donna had dismissed the helmet as just a trinket which had disappeared when a cat wandered into it.
It’s kind of sad really. This man dedicated 50 years to those characters and once he was done he threw them aside like a kid who was bored of his toys. It feels like we care about his work more than he does.
At least he isn’t writing God-awful kids’ books about a suburb filled with ineptly designed robots like Lynn Johnston did.
The sad thing is… we really do care about his work. We’re probably his biggest and most demanding fans, even if our interesting is cloaked in snarking and hate-reading. Most of us are here because Funky Winkerbean once meant something to us. And we’re saddened at what it’s become, and the entire comics page along with it.
If it delighted people like his dad, he’s interested.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 22 of In The Name of The Father
Dinkle: Ed. Listen to me, kid. I need you to go break into Eugene Roberts’s house and see if he has a copy of “Sunrise Over Kilmanjaro”.
Ed: DID YOU JUST CALL ME “KID”!? I’M AT LEAST 20 YEARS OLDER THAN YOU!
I’m not surprised Dinkle kept his father’s records in a storage locker that’s not climate controlled. I’m surprised they’re not still in pristine condition. Apparently old records aren’t as durable as komix books.
6/23: So no Eugene. All we get is Batiuk not understanding how the performing arts work and also not seeing that in real life, Sunrise Over Pulled It Outta My Butt would be at best a curiosity. Meanwhile, Greg Evans has morphed into Brooke McEldowney.
I’m picturing one of those 70s cop show-style endings, where the cast freezes on some joke and the credits roll. “So, Eugene, you never told us where you’re moving to!” “I’m hanging myself tonight!” Laugh. Freeze. Credits roll. Police Squad (forerunner of The Naked Gun movies) had a field day with these.
Now that’s called writing.
Damn straight. NBC’s official reason for canceling Police Squad! was because it was too smart for the audience. Personally, I think audiences got a lot dumber – or more willing to accept dumb comedy – between 1982 and 1986.
Wow, that is hysterical! Thanks so much for posting that, BJ6. I’m going to pass it on.
ABC, not NBC. NBC at the time was overseen by Grant Tinker, building a network with shows like Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, and Cheers. (Also the last season of Taxi, which they picked up after ABC cancelled that show.) Though not all NBC programming was prestigious, NBC wasn’t afraid of smart TV, or of letting a show take a little time to find an audience. ABC, meanwhile, was limping along under Tony Thomopolis, who cancelled Police Squad! because it required viewers to actively watch the show — and Thomopolis felt viewers didn’t do that. (Or at least that ABC viewers didn’t do that. ABC was the network of Three’s Company, Laverne & Shirley, Joanie Loves Chachi, Fantasy Island, etc. … shows that were popular once, but were never noted for their demanding complexity.)
Another factor in the cancellation of Police Squad!: the ZAZ team had announced that they were leaving the show after the first six episodes. The reason? It was simply too hard to come up with a weekly series as densely packed with material as Police Squad! Six episodes was a real strain — a 22 episode season might have killed them,
Thanks for the correction. I was mostly working from memory about Police Squad! It had six great episodes, but a lot of the jokes got reused in the Naked Gun movies.
Yup, I actually prefer the TV series to the movies.
They elected Ronny Raygun, didn’t they?
Evans has been a McEldowney-lite for some years now (who is Toni Daytona, if not Edda Burber without an imagination?), but he does indeed seem more willing to push the envelope nowadays in the ways McEldowney has done for many years. Even so, I wouldn’t put it past Evans to pull his typical “Tales Of Ribaldry” stunt tomorrow and put an end to these proceedings while giggling about how he got away with another one.
I’d ask where the editors are but know better.
Too bad about “Sunrise Over Kilimanjaro”, Dinkle. Maybe your father shouldn’t have ended his last concert with “New Moon Behind Chimborazo”…
Little realizing that we’re the only ones who notice.
Add to the list of things Batiuk doesn’t know anything about: the difference between sheet music and band charts. Eugene’s “Sunrise Over Campobello” is one side of a single page (which, judging by today’s illustration, changes sizes depending on whether Lillian or Dinkle is holding it. Btw, any beady-eyed nitpickers eagle-eyed enough to figure out what music Ayers pasted in there?)
A band chart would require different score for each instrument (and multiple copies – three saxes = three copies etc.) and a “conductor’s score” with scores for all instruments on each page. All of these would be multiple pages long. It would essentially be a book. Maybe this is just the conductor’s score – which in theory would let them copy out each part for the Bedside Manor Symphony. But again – one page? es a nifty rundown of band chart layouts – note that the first page of the conductor’s score contains a total of six bars – 1/6 of a typical 1940s 32-bar song, if you don’t include a verse (or the fact that most bands would play at least two differently-arranged choruses.) So I guess research is only for old photos of long-lost dance pavilions.
Anyone want to lay odds on us getting any explanation of how Eugene got hold of what obviously was an unpublished big-band chart?
Ugh; editing error left out the link: https://www.evanrogersmusic.com/blog-contents/big-band-arranging/score-layout
Tell you what, I’ll pay 20 to 1 on “Eugene explains where he got the sheet music to Larry Dinkle’s magnum opus.” Because I doubt THAT is happening.
Wednesday’s “joke” is “Baseball fields are for band practice”. I just… I can’t…
He’s still going to say he has nothing in common with the unknowable mystery that is his father.
Dinkle can read his father’s word but he won’t admit to being a lot like him.
Oh, it’s far worse than that. Tom Batiuk doesn’t even see the similarity between what Larry Dinkle is doing, and his mother’s behavior that he’s so bitter about. Kids can be just as passionate about playing baseball as they are about comic books, Tom. Probably a lot more of them were, especially in the 1930s. Being thrown off a baseball field by a bunch of rude adults for no coherent reason would be upsetting! If 8-year-old me told my father I was thrown off a public baseball field by a bunch of adults who had no authority to do so, he would bopped him one.
And all this is being done to echo the “football fields are for band practice!” meme, which is another form of Dinkle acting exactly like his hated mother did. But it’s funny, because it’s not happening to HIM. What a psychopath.
Drawing parallels like that doesn’t make sense to him.
Warning: Match To Flame 245 is up. You’ll need a strong stomach for this one, as TB tells us about his fabled research process and how it contributes to the brilliancy of his finished work. The gap between the reality of this man’s talent and his perception of it makes the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the sidewalk….
https://tombatiuk.com/komix-thoughts/match-to-flame-245/
This part was interesting:
The current shopping agreement holder at the time on Crankshaft, Richard Crystal
I figured it was the actor George Kennedy who bought them. But this does confirm my suspicion that Les’ “shopping contract” was just a re-telling of Batiuk’s own experience. Because Lord knows he’s not going to research anything else.
Richard Crystal is Billy’s brother, and has hustled out a career as a screenwriter/producer/dealmaker. Not a huge industry player, but not a nobody either. Kind of a B-level guy. Crankshaft is probably just one of dozens (maybe hundreds) of relatively obscure properties he optioned for a low fee. The approach is like panning for gold … you mostly get bucketfuls of sand, but every so often you might chance across a profitable nugget.
Ugh… and right before breakfast…
Batty’s “research” posting is the very definition of the difference between knowing about something and actually knowing it.
Did GoComics redo their comment software again? Checking the recent strips on their site it seems like there’s no comments on any strips bar a few today.
Guess we’re used to these sites wiping the snark history just because of shiny new updates (and with the paywall it’s less accessible than ever), particularly with Comics Curmudgeon not keeping their comments long-term, but damn it feels pretty soon for that site to have done it again.
GoComics did just post some big revision to their comment system. They claim that essentially all comments will migrate over to The New System: https://gocomics.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/41321885415063-Comments-What-s-Changing-and-What-to-Expect
‘Essentially’ because apparently GIFs aren’t supported in the new system and will not be, and they’re allowing for the possibility their snapshot might miss something.
But yeah, the only place that’s going to keep the comment history for a comic strip is a fan site or Usenet.
Yep. No comments on any of the strips, no commenting facility on any of the strips. I have already exchanged one email with the AI masquerading as the “The Small-But-Trying-Really-Hard Team.” It recommended the usual thing, removing all GC cookies and restarting the browser. This occasionally works but did not today. I think they turned off the old system before verifying that the new one worked… especially given that if you look carefully at the use of tense and dates in the “we’re moving to a new commenting system” announcement, it seems they made the announcement on Wednesday of a change on Thursday but phrased it in past tense as if it was already completed.
As of this morning, I have found one browser on one computer that can successfully reach the GC commenting function. Apparently a few others have fought their way through the jungle, only to find that the comment moderation is turned up beyond the old CK nannybot levels. I could not get anything to post; even a simple “testing one two three” was flagged as “not meeting standards.”
Their AI responded to my second trouble report yesterday with a list of browser/extension/ad-blocker combinations that are known to work. It is not a long list. It seems highly likely they never tested this beyond whatever system the programmers at GC are actually using themselves, assumed it worked, and kicked it out the door. I am unable to reach the commenting system despite having a browser/extension/blocker combination they claim works.
My latest trouble report asked how I could delete my account completely. Of course, there is no way to do this, as they never considered that anybody might find their service bad enough to want to erase from it completely.
Meanwhile… apparently Larry Dinkle was a drunkard as well. Or Tom has just decided that he was (maybe this will get him that P. U. Litzer prize). All we know so far is that Dinkle could smell alcohol on his breath, which tells us nothing really. It would not be surprising if Larry had alcohol or drug problems, of course. Last week, one commenter who seems to take everything absolutely literally (and who has apparently not yet made it through the jungle to the site) went after somebody for suggesting Larry might have a substance problem. A little digging turned up a site where a guy had looked at the Wikipedia biographies of several thousand famous musicians (well, musicians famous enough to have Wikipedia entries) and counted the number whose bio mentioned substance abuse issues. In the 40s, when the Larry Dinkle Orchestra is supposed to have played, it was about one in eight. The more you know…