New Books and DVDs

Only one more season to go!

This 1933 all-star cast version features odd effects and grotesque masks, and a bit of Fleischer animation on "The Walrus and the Carpenter." Memorable to me mainly because I watched part of it on a Christmas visit to my grandmother's when I was about six.

The last (as far as I know) volume of the Simpsons' Library of Wisdom that I needed for the collection. Not the Groening teams best offering.

A pithy collection of gnomic utterances from movies and books, with meditations thereon of the teachings embodied.

Collection culled from the works of Chesterton of short and stunning summations on a variety of subjects. Example: "Umbrella: an unmanageable walking stick or an inadequate tent."

The first (of what I am sure will be many) movie tie-in that I have purchased, and perhaps my fourteenth copy of The Hobbit. Includes the line illustrations and maps, and as a bonus the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring.

A previously viewed copy; at last I'll see what all the uproar was about.

Got it for a dollar at a Good Will store, and money well spent. Imagine Narnia and Harry Potter crossed with Brideshead Revisited and Less Than Zero.

Not the first year the strip was published, but apparently the first they're publishing in collections. Volume Two is already out.

Dwa-a-ah!

This week I got the box set of Seasons Three and Four of Duckman, completing my collection. Duckman ran from 1994 through 1997 on the USA Network, and featured the adventures of Duckman (voiced by Seinfeld's Jason Alexander), Private Dick and Family Man. He was a feathered bundle of nerves, a ranter with a raging libido and little skill in his chosen field of private investigation, where he was aided by the omnicompetent, Joe-Friday-sound-alike pig, Cornfed. He balanced dealing with his fractured family (sister-in-law shrew Berenice, the flatulent, comatose Grandma-ma, dimwitted son Ajax, and two-headed bitterly intelligent sons Charles and Mambo) with fending off the plots of foes such as arch-nemesis King Chicken ("Moo-hah-hah! Buck-buck-buck!") and Agnes Delrooney ("Insane killer by day, psychotic murderer by night!").

I love this show and am glad that it is finally available. It is a hilarious keepsake of all the angst of the time, from New Age to televangelism to daytime talk shows to political correctness; Duckman took all that they could fling at him, and still managed to come up with a shaky but sane answer to them all. It was the days when The Simpsons was still new, and animated shows would emerge and be gone like the Loch Ness monster in the mist. Duckman managed to persist for four seasons, which was a kind of a record, and was, as they mention in one episode themselves, "critically acclaimed if little watched." Guest voices of the 'Nineties are a joy to identify, with people as diverse as Tim Curry, Ben Stein, Chris Elliott, Andrea Martin, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Eugene Levy joining the cast. The episodes swing from satire and fables to movie parodies; years before Stewie and Brian took "The Road To Rhode Island", Duckman and Cornfed took "The Road To Dendron."

This boxed set cost $39.99 for seven discs. And it is worth every penny of it.