TODAY IN NETWORK AWESOME MAGAZINE

The club CBGB’s (which stands for ‘country, bluegrass, blues’ – and its sub-title OMFUG - ‘other music for uplifting gourmandizers’) was opened in late 1973 in the New York. Located in the Lower East Side of Manhattan on The Bowery, it quickly became the place to be for anyone interested in the new music scene of the city. At the time The Bowery was a pretty seedy and dangerous place to be; mainly populated by muggers, pimps, prostitutes, homeless, drunks and derelicts, it was a place no-one really cared about by all accounts and was synonymous with ‘skid row’. However, the rent was cheap, it wasn’t in a residential area and the locals were too out of it to care either way. The founder and owner of the club, Hilly Crystal, originally opened it for country, bluegrass and blues music; however he soon adopted a ‘Rock Only’ policy and began booking new bands. Among these bands were many who went on to later, bigger mainstream success, including; The Patti Smith Group, Talking Heads, The Ramones and Blondie just to name a few....

“Coughlin’s Law: anything else is always something better.”

The same could be said of Cocktail: anything else would go down better. For a movie about the bars, business, and relationships, it seems to understand very little about the basic underpinnings of bars, business, and relationships. At the same time, it has an amazing lack of self-awareness about the aspects it hits dead on. The movie is itself a kind of a flair bartending, parading out Tom Cruise and his cute (albeit sometimes manic) smile to distract you from the fact that you’re drinking the film equivalent of an underpoured, over-iced cocktail that’s all tonic and no gin. And while it might fail to get you drunk and goes down about as smoothly as a shot from the rails, as anyone knows, there are still some good times to be had at the bottom shelf.

Regeneration, like many great concepts in fiction, was created entirely by accident. The show had already replaced all of its original cast members except for the Doctor himself. The popularity, particularly "Dalekmania," was still riding high when William Hartnell, who was 55 going on Infinity, said he was going to have to step down. I'm sure that the producers would have loved to recast the doddering old fool who didn't know his lines, but it seemed a little hard to sell the replacement of an entire character. Think about a television show, movie, or other franchise that replaced its main character and succeeded. Most likely you went through a list of television shows like That 70's Show, All in the Family, or Happy Days and realized that they all sucked after their lead actor left. What about Julianne Moore taking over Jodie Foster's role in Hannibal? Or when they replaced Vin Diesel with Ice Cube in the second xXx movie?

Beyond a few broad, core truths (the Nazis are Evil, the Axis are a Threat), propaganda is by its very nature filled with falsehoods, exaggerations, and lies. It reveals far more about the country that created it than its actual target. In the following cartoons, which cast the most popular animated characters of the time into situations both comic and nightmarish, the concerns of World War II America are laid bare: it's scared, defiant, and strangely obsessed. 

Episode ONE

Immediately post-credits, we're told by the narrator that the setting of this story is of no vital importance. Don't let that fool you, because it's only a coy misdirection. While the narrator tersely ushers our attention towards the hero, observe the scenery. The eponymous hero, not yet introduced, can be seen in the middle ground, a slender black gash across pale desert hues, erect upon a wind-crescented tor. In the far distance, the sinking edifices of an ill-fated settlement rest their faces on their arms, at last sleepily succumbing to desert dust. A mean sun, naked, glares across the turquoise void, sends hateful rays piling more hateful heat onto a land already interred. The scene steps towards a close-up of that defiant figure, setting the viewer eye-to-irisless-eye with the stoic grimace of a man with a mechanical arm, a man who was known as---