Tag: Vera Nash

Valium-tine

While Jeff Murdoch apparently violates Twitter’s character limit in today’s strip, Director Martin Johns violates general decorum by thinking Jeff’s tweet is worth reading out loud to these Hollywood types lounging about in wicker chairs.

Prescient SOSFer erdmann hypothesized yesterday that this would lead to the premiere of Starbuck Jones at “that damn Crankshaft theater”. Today’s strip all but confirms that, and I can tell you that the next several strips will not dispel the idea. If you consider this to be a spoiler then you haven’t read Funky Winkerbean for very long.

In other news, Cindy has lost her right foot. Oh, and Jeff Murdoch is apparently both old enough to have seen and remember original-run Starbuck Jones movie serials (before Cliff was blacklisted sometime in the early 1950s) and young enough to have also been attending Kent State in 1970 (on a John Sebastian impersonator scholarship, apparently). To be fair, there is a window of time in which that works, but it is narrower than Crankshaft’s mind.

Cinema Sins of the Father

SosfdavidO here, with the biggest shovel I could find because even for Tombat’s writing, today’s strip reeks of absolute bullshit.

So what age is Mason now? I’m going to be kind.. KIND, mind you, and peg him at 32. He’s probably more like 35 but for the sake of argument, he’s 32.

Now it’s time for some simple math, courtesy of Wikipedia.

List of Serial Movies by Decade

Perusing the list, one can see that the last gasp of serialized movies happened the mid-50s and the end of the space soap operas like Starbucks Jones ended around 1953, when all of America collectively got a cowboy fetish.

So if Cliff was 32 in say, 1952, that would mean he was born in 1920. NINETEEN F***ing TWENTY. That would make him just shy of 98 years old. Does the grey haired dude in panel 2 look 98? Or even 78!?

Maybe it’s the whole thing is CG and Cliff just had to croak out a few lines but even looking at him strolling around the streets without as much as a walker is some Grade A Bullshit Tommy is slinging there.

Maybe we can pretend the time jumps that hit Westview every couple of decades work in reverse wherever the hell Cliff Anger came from. Was that New York?

Sizzle Lean

SosfdavidO here, fresh off my rant from yesterday about how unlikely it is that Darrin, who had only a passing interest in art in high school, is suddenly Hollywood’s Golden Boy when it comes to story-boarding.

Deep breath…

My disbelief extends well into today’s strip, where with only a off-hand passing mention we’re supposed to believe Cindy is hard at work on a documentary movie about the original Starbucks Jones actor.

Sure, it’s been mentioned she was working on it before, but land sakes, this is a major life event for Cindy and she seems to devote 2 hours a year to it at most. Will this movie ever see the light of day? Just how many damned movie projects are getting juggled in this dopey strip now, anyway? I know there was a Lisa movie that got canned, then a John Darling movie, now the Cliff Anger movie and Starbucks sequels… like, whoa, Tombat went from hating Hollywood to it’s biggest fan. What gives? Probably the rise of super hero movies being every other damned movie at this point.

Anyhow, back to this stroll along Exposition Drive…

Exclamation Point!

“Amazing” is one of those words that’s completely lost its meaning from overuse. What amazes me is that Jess is still standing there holding up that giant video camera. Something else that amazes me about today’s strip is how Cindy checks her phone and the first thing she sees is the tabloid headline and photo of Masone and Marianne. Did somebody see it and send it to her? Does she subscribe to “DMZ’s” mobile alerts? No matter. Batiuk has spent months establishing Cindy’s insecurity and self-doubt, and almost as much time setting up a showdown between her and Mason’s sexy (though sweet and innocent) co-star. Shit’s about to get real, yo.

St. Anger

So having served his six months in the joint, Cliff decided his acting career was over and retreated to New York to spend sixty years awaiting rescue by those meddling Westview kids. Thankfully, other blacklistees, such as Lena Horne, Orson Welles, Arthur Miller and others, managed to pick up the pieces and go on to continued success. Cliff basically blacklisted himself.