Tag: Hollywood

Buster Brinkel

Don
June 23, 2019 at 12:36 pm
I didn’t know the special effects were that impressive back in those days; it’s amazing how that window shifted about four feet to the left just before the building landed on him.

Professor Fate
June 23, 2019 at 12:36 pm
Well for one thing the way the joke is shown in the comic strip the stunt would have at the least badly injured if not killed Butter…Lord is this arc going to be painful.

As we saw last Sunday, “silent film actor” “Butter” Brickle tried, and as confirmed in today’s comic, failed, to replicate Buster Keaton’s most famous film stunt. Forget about a falling papier-mache wall landing on you and hurting your neck: Blonde and Blonder here are in imminent peril of being crushed to death under all that panel 2 exposition!

If you think a sore neck is bad, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, on whom Brickel is probably based, suffered second degree burns to both buttocks after sitting on acid-soaked rags at the garage where he was having his Pierce Arrow serviced.

More Lips in This Strip Should Be Sealed

I’m a little more shocked that Crazy apparently has all of Butter Brinkel’s films on CD/DVD stacked up in what look to be jewel cases. And he’s just handing these rare treasures to Cindy stacked haphazardly, and not in a box or anything.
It’s pretty hilarious to me that Cindy is swearing Crazy to silence. I mean, why? You would think she’d want to build hype and buzz around her documentary. Is she afraid someone else is going to steal her idea? (Ha.) Or is she afraid this is going to damage her reputation? (Again, ha.)
By far the best/dumbest part of this strip, and the storyline as a whole- these “films” were apparently burned onto a CD or DVD. Meaning somehow Crazy either made digital files of them from the original film, or maybe a VHS release himself, which seems unlikely, or downloaded them off the internet somewhere. Meaning there’s literally no reason he couldn’t just have sent the files to Cindy directly, or barring that, made copies of the discs and mailed the discs to Cindy. I thought for sure it would turn out he somehow had the original theatrical reels of the movies, that would understandably be fragile, which would explain why Cindy had to spend thousands of dollars to fly cross-country. But yet again, I was giving Batiuk too much credit.

No, The Other Butter Brinkel

“So what’s the catch?” “I want to produce a documentary!” How is that a catch, exactly? I stopped wondering if Batiuk actually proofreads his own work a long, long time ago, since it’s incredibly clear he barely gives his work a passing thought anymore. Like, I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be “tried for THE murder of Valerie” and not “tried for murder of Valerie”, because nobody talks like that.
I would love to see Cindy’s job description. I think he saw her sitting in front of a camera once, but since then she’s basically just made documentaries and done whatever she feels like for her job, somehow. I mean, I know Batiuk gets paid for doing whatever crap he feels like, but most people don’t.
One of my least favorite things about Batiuk’s writing (I feel like I type that on a weekly basis) is his “funny” names. Butter isn’t in quotes, so I’m guessing it’s not a nickname, and some guy born in the late 1800s was actually named Butter by his parents.

This Comic is All Catch

It took me a little while to realize that’s supposed to be Cindy, what with the prominent bags under her eyes and the abrupt change in hair color, much grayer than it used to be. I wonder if the artist realized that Cindy and Jess, visually, were both basically just “hot young blonde” and realized Cindy needed to look older for some reason.
What is Jess even doing in Hollywood anymore? Is she still working on the stupid documentary about her dad? I think if she missed her family so much, she could do the work back in Ohio, since apparently all it consists of is sitting in front of soundboard and computer monitors with no mouse or keyboard in sight next to a Buddy Blog “journalist” for some reason.
And why does Jess think there’s some catch? The people in this comic fly back and forth between Ohio and California at the drop of a hat.