Podcasts about batman tv

Dinner dinner dinner dinner! Etc. Announced just six months before it landed in cinemas, the much-loved 1966 production Batman: The Movie was a masterclass in moving fast. Shot while the first series of the Batman TV show was still playing, it was written in two weeks, filmed in a month, and premiering in Texas as a result of some help with a boat... Also filmed in a month? Jason Reitman's 2011 feature Young Adult, starring Charlize Theron. Written by Diablo Cody, Reitman was all set to go with a different film until the Young Adult script came in. Even then, he had a key condition to getting the movie made. Stories of both are told in this episode... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Musician and Oscar winning actor Jeff Bridges joins us to unpack his Record Store Day 2025 release, Slow Magic 1977-1978 (Light In The Attic Records), in a wide-ranging musical conversation that finds Bridges recalling moments from his entire career.  "The Dude" (from The Big Lebowski) abides us with tales of his famous acting family (father Lloyd, mother Dorothy, and brother Beau), growing up with Bonnie Raitt, and his award winning work with T Bone Burnett (producer of the Crazy Heart soundtrack and Bridges' self-titled 2011 album), and even recalls Rocky's Burgess Meredith (the original "Penguin" from the 1960s Batman TV series who performs spoken word poetry on Slow Magic).  The Record Store Day Podcast is a weekly music chat show written, produced, engineered and hosted by Paul Myers, who also composed the theme music and selected interstitial music.  Executive Producers (for Record Store Day) Michael Kurtz and Carrie Colliton.   Record Store Day 2025 is April 12th. For the most up-to-date news about all things RSD, including The List, visit RecordStoreDay.com)   Please consider subscribing to our podcast wherever you get podcasts, and tell your friends, we're here every week and we love making new friends.

Today we welcome Simon Donald, co-founder of Viz to the podcast for a chat about his comic beginnings, his post-Viz stand-up career, moving to North London, and why Americans will never understand us. Simon also explains how swear words found their way into the English vernacular, and why class plays a pivotal role in how they have been policed ever since. We then chat about the various incarnations of Viz characters on the small screen, culminating in The Fat Slags movie, which was made without his, or anyone at Viz's involvement or approval. Hear the real-life story behind the inspiration for Sid the Sexist, why the 1960s Batman TV show contained such bizarre dialogue, and the last-minute change at Viz HQ that led to the creation of the hugely successful Roger's Profanasaurus.All music written and performed in this podcast by Steve Otis Gunn.Please buy my book 'You Shot My Dog and I Love You' available in all good book shops, online and directly.Podcast Socials:Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tvtimespodYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@tvtimespodInsta: https://www.instagram.com/tvtimespodBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/tvtimespod.bsky.socialSteve's Socials:Insta: https://www.instagram.com/steveotisgunnFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/steveotisgunn.antisocialSimon's Socials:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/simondonald.comedyYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HimOffTheVizProduced by Steve Otis Gunn for Jilted Maggotwww.jiltedmaggot.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Just like the classic 1966 Batman TV show, the Burt Ward interview is a two-parter! This episode is a continuation of Episode 406 and picks up where that episode ended. Burt Ward played Robin/Dick Grayson in the 1966 Batman TV series, alongside the late Adam West in the famed television series that became the #1 rated TV Show in the world. He later became a hero of a different sort, creating and operating with his wife, Tracy, Gentle Giants Rescue and Adoptions, the world's largest giant breed dog rescue during the last 30 years, saving more than 15,500 dogs and hundreds of cats, finding each one a safe, forever home. He also has created with Tracy Gentle Giants Natural Non-GMO Pet Food and Gentle Giants Special Feeding and Care program for dogs and cats that has them living as long as 30 plus healthy, active years with a wonderful quality of life. In this episode, Ward discusses the process of filming Batman and Batman: The Movie. He also talked extensively about the years after Batman and discussed reprising the role in Legends of the Superheroes, and the two animated features based on the show. “Return of the Caped Crusaders” and “Batman vs. Two-Face,” as well as his cameo in the 2019 DC Crossover “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” He also discussed the life and legacy of the late Adam West. He spoke about his relationship with West, and how that friendship endured until the latter's passing. He also details his passion for animals. Finally, Ward discusses the legacy of the Batman TV show in the evolution of the superhero genre.

"Holy Podcast Batman!" Superhero icon Burt Ward played Robin/Dick Grayson in the 1966 Batman TV series, alongside the late Adam West. He was an aspiring young actor at UCLA whose first acting interview landed him the role of Robin the Boy Wonder in the famed television series that became the #1 rated TV Show in the world. He later became a hero of a different sort, creating and operating with his wife, Tracy, Gentle Giants Rescue and Adoptions, the world's largest giant breed dog rescue during the last 30 years, saving more than 15,500 dogs and hundreds of cats, finding everyone a safe, forever home. He also has created with Tracy Gentle Giants Natural Non-GMO Pet Food and Gentle Giants Special Feeding and Care program for dogs and cats that has them living as long as 30 plus healthy, active years with a wonderful quality of life. In this episode, Ward explains in wonderful detail his passion for animals. He also discussed how he met Adam West, and how the fame from being Robin enhanced his life. He also talked about his relationship with West, and how that friendship endured until the latter's passing.

On the 186th edition of Batman-On-Film.com's THE BOF SOCIAL HOUR podcast, BOF's Founder/EIC Bill "Jett" Ramey and Senior BOF Contributor Peter Verra review/recap/discuss the finale of THE PENGUIN, "A Great or Little Thing".

MONSTER PARTY SALUTES A GLORIOUS EIGHT-DECADE CAREER! JAMES GONIS, SHAWN SHERIDAN, LARRY STROTHE, and MATT WEINHOLD, celebrate the works of one of the most talented and prolific character actors of our age. Take a journey with us into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop... THE WORLD OF H.M. WYNANT!!! H.M Wynant is an actor who, although you may not be familiar with his name, you have probably seen hundreds of times. He has an IMDB bursting list of credits and has appeared in almost every radio, stage, television, and film genre. His massive resume features numerous westerns including  BONANZA, WAGON TRAIN, MAVERICK, SHOTGUN SLADE, and THE BIG VALLEY, popular dramas like PERRY MASON, 77 SUNSET STRIP, THE ROCKFORD FILES, QUINCY, DALLAS, and THE WEST WING, the spy shows I SPY, THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, and GET SMART, and even the somewhat controversial WWII comedy, HOGAN'S HEROES. Yes, he almost sent Colonel Klink to the Russian Front!   Wynant has also worked with a veritable "who's who" of Hollywood legends including Charles  Bronson, John Carradine, Clint Eastwood, Errol Flynn, Samuel Fuller, Clark Gable Katharine Hepburn, Burt Lancaster, Bruce Lee, Sal Mineo, Laurence Olivier, Elvis Presley, Phil Silvers, Rod Steiger, and a whole "Walk of Fame" more! So you better believe he has some stories to share!    But this is MONSTER PARTY, and what guest would be worth his salt with a slew of genre credits?    Wynant drove Ricardo Montalban to suicide in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, managed to keep a plane in the air while battling supernatural forces in THE HORROR AT 37,000 FEET, helped Mr. Freeze (Eli Wallach) take on The Caped Crusader in the 60's BATMAN TV series, and infamously freed The Devil to wreak havoc in the world in the classic episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, THE HOWLING MAN.   Providing us entry into THE WORLD OF H.M. WYNANT is a past guest with an amazing resume of his own. He's an acclaimed author, playwright, graphic novelist, screenwriter, and film director, who happens to have written the definitive Wynant biography, H.M. WYNANT: YOU MUST BELIEVE! Please welcome back... STEVEN PEROS! (THE CAT'S MEOW, FOOTPRINTS (with H.M. Wynant), THE UNDYING, STOKER & WELLS: ORDER OF THE GOLDEN DAWN, GIANT BUG CINEMA, GIANT BEAST CINEMA)   SO GRAB HOLD OF YOUR "STAFF OF TRUTH" AND GET TO LISTENING!  

On the 184th edition of Batman-On-Film.com's THE SOCIAL HOUR podcast, BOF's Founder/EIC Bill "Jett" Ramey and Senior BOF Contributor Peter Verra discuss/review/recap episode 7 of THE PENGUIN, "Top Hat".

Welcome to the Big Kid Show! In this episode, your host Big Nic, along with Mr. B and Mr. Mark, dive into a thrilling game of Rank'em. This time, they are ranking the best Joker roles played by some of your favorite actors. The Joker, Batman's nemesis, has been portrayed by various actors over the years, each bringing their unique take to this iconic supervillain. From the classic portrayal by Cesar Romero in the 1960s Batman TV series to the groundbreaking performances by Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, Jared Leto, and Joaquin Phoenix in various films, the Joker has left an indelible mark on pop culture. Join the Big Kid Show as they countdown from number five to number one, discussing each actor's portrayal in detail, sharing fun facts, memorable quotes, and personal insights. Whether you're a die-hard Batman fan or just love great performances, this episode is sure to entertain and inform. Don't miss out on this exciting episode of the Big Kid Show! Thank you for listening and being part of the Big Kid community. We love you all - Peace and love, peace and love!!! Follow the Big Kid Show on X (Twitter) @thebigkidshow  Follow Sweet Water Mark on X (Twitter) @markf1307 Follow Big Nic on X (Twitter) @TCGNIC Thanks to Cincinnati, Ohio band Two-Bit for providing the BiG KiD theme music - "Simple Life". Find that song and more on their album "Acoustic?" available on Apple Music and Spotify. https://music.apple.com/us/album/simple-life/1375551763?i=1375551788  https://youtu.be/5-Aw8Qw8nf4  

National talk like a pirate day. Entertainment from 2004. George Washington's farewell address, New Zealand 1st to give women right to vote, 5000 year old frozen iceman found. Todays birthdays - Adam West, Bill Medley, Mama Cass Elliot, Jeremy Irons, Lita Ford, Trisha Yearwood, Jimmy Fallon. Jake LaMotta died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard    http://defleppard.com/Talk like a pirate - Tom Mason & the Blue BuccaneersGoodies - Ciara  Petey PabloDays go by - Keith UrbanI am woman - Helen ReddyBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent      http://50cent.com/Batman TV series themeYou've lost that lovin' feeling - The Righteous BrothersDream a little dream of me - Mama Cass EliottKiss me deadly - Lita FordShe's in love with the boy - Trisha YearwoodExit - In my dreams - Dokken    http://dokken.net/Follow Jeff Stampka on facebook and cooolmedia.com

We continue our look at actors who played villains in the 1966 Batman TV series. In our final week, we focus on Zsa Zsa Gabor, who played Mine Read more ...

We continue our look at actors who played villains in the 1966 Batman TV series. This week, we focus on Tallulah Bankhead, who played the Blac Read more ...

On today's show the Billy ranks all the Metroid games in order of what ones you should play first!  Additionally, they dive into the closure of GameInformer and what that means for physical media.  Later in the show Maze gives his take on why you should watch the new Batman TV show and Tim dives into Thank Goodness You're Here (a sleeper for GoTY).  All of that and a ton more on VGP!

We continue our look at actors who played villains in the 1966 Batman TV series. This week we focus on Liberace, who played music-based villai Read more ...

We continue our look at actors who played villains in the 1966 Batman TV series. This week, we look at Vincent Price, who played the recurring Read more ...

We continue our look at actors who played villains in the 1966 Batman TV series. This week we turn our focus to Eli Wallach, a legendary chara Read more ...

We continue our look at actors who played villains in the 1966 Batman TV series. This week our focus is on Milton Berle, who played Louie the Read more ...

Burt Ward, the original "Robin” from the Batman TV Series, and his wife Tracy, have rescued more than 15,500 dogs and hundreds of cats in the last 30 years and they created Gentle Giants Natural Non GMO Ingredients Pet Foods to help all precious pets live longer and healthier. Dogs eating Gentle Giants Natural Non GMO Ingredients Dog and Puppy Food and following Gentle Giants Special Feeding and Care Program are living as long as 30 healthy, active years with a wonderful quality of life. They have also created Gentle Giants Natural Non GMO Ingredients Cat and Kitten Food to help cats live long, healthy, active lives, too. Learn more at GentleGiantsDogFood.com and GentleGiantsPetProducts.com.  Big thank you to TV legend and humanitarian Burt Ward for coming on my show for an interview! Burt Ward discussed his Gentle Giants Special Feeding and Care Program, getting the role of Robin in the classic Batman TV show, and him and his wife Tracy being awarded by the President of the United States Joe Biden earlier this year for their charity work with rescuing animals. He talked about his close friendship with Adam West, being friends with Bruce Lee, and working with Vincent Price. He got into selling out arenas with Adam West, why the show didn't get picked up by NBC, and the dangerous stunts he performed on the show as Robin. Stay tuned for his Super Heroes To The Rescue and Gentle Giants TV programming that he has on the way! Follow Gentle Giants Dog and Cat Food on Instagram: @gentlegiantsdogfoodandcatfood and Twitter: @gentlegiantsrsq Follow me on Instagram and X: @thereelmax Website: https://maxcoughlan.com/index.html. Website live show streaming link: https://maxcoughlan.com/sports-and-hip-hop-with-dj-mad-max-live-stream.html. MAD MAX Radio on Live365: https://live365.com/station/MAD-MAX-Radio-a15096. Subscribe to my YouTube channel Sports and Hip Hop with DJ Mad Max: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCE0107atIPV-mVm0M3UJyPg. Burt Ward on "Sports and Hip-Hop with DJ Mad Max" visual on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp3k5bohhOc. 

We continue our look at actors who played villains in the 1966 Batman TV series. This time we turn to Ida Lupino, who played Cassandra Spellcr Read more ...

Burt Ward, the original "Robin” from the Batman TV Series, and his wife Tracy, have rescued more than 15,500 dogs and hundreds of cats in the last 30 years and they created Gentle Giants Natural Non GMO Ingredients Pet Foods to help all precious pets live longer and healthier.  Dogs eating Gentle Giants Natural Non GMO Ingredients Dog and Puppy Food and following Gentle Giants Special Feeding and Care Program are living as long as 30 healthy, active years with a wonderful quality of life.  They have also created Gentle Giants Natural Non GMO Ingredients Cat and Kitten Food to help cats live long, healthy, active lives, too. Learn more at GentleGiantsDogFood.com and GentleGiantsPetProducts.com.  Little did aspiring actor Burt Ward know that learning martial arts in addition to his mental and athletic prowess would change his life forever. As a teen-age, Burt had all the makings of a true boy wonder. As an all around athlete, strong in martial arts, wrestling, track, tennis and golf, combined with a sharp intellect, playing "first board" in chess for Beverly Hills High School, achieving the top 3% in the U.S. in math and science tests at UCLA, and becoming the world's fastest reader - Burt tested before the American Medical Society in Beverly Hills, California and was clocked at 30,000 words per minute with 90% comprehension (the average reader reads 240 words per minute with 40% comprehension). Burt was featured in an article entitled, "Will the Real Boy Wonder Please Stand Up" and subsequently appeared on the national television educational show "Read Right."  After signing with a Hollywood agent, Burt's first interview was set up at 20th Century Fox Studios, and a few weeks later, Burt was called back for a screen test with Adam West. Holder of a brown belt in karate at the time, Burt showed off his athletic ability for the producers by demonstrating some falls and tumbles, and even broke a one-inch pine board with his hand.  Burt was friends with Bruce Lee. A special piece of movie trivia is that Bruce Lee's first filmed fight scene of his career was fighting Burt Ward.  Executive Producer William Dozier commented about Ward's tall size in comparison to Adam West, and the new Boy Wonder prospect replied, "I promise you, sir, I won't grow anymore." Dozier laughed and told Burt that he would hold him to that. It wasn't until six weeks after the screen test that Burt learned that he had won the coveted role of Robin, the Boy Wonder in the new "Batman" TV series for ABC-TV. He was everything they wanted. All he had to do was just be himself. Batman Was an Overnight Sensation!   Want to watch: YouTube Meisterkhan Pod (Please Subscribe)

Send us a Text Message.Julie Newmar + Don Knotts !! The mis-match of the century!! Now The Love Boat has had pretty much every cast member from another of our old favorite TV shows, Three's Company!That's right, Catwoman from the original Batman TV show and Classic TV's own Barney Fife / Mr. Furley .  Seduction. Impersonation. Pregnancy?Another plot touches on The Holocaust. Heavy. Are we even on the right show for this?...plus a whole lot more...Visit LoveBoatExposed.com to dive deeper, and connect with the show; send us a message or record a voicemail for air. Make sure to subscribe - we're on all your favorite podcast platforms! rsmedia.group creationsFair Use Act DisclaimersInformation contained on this podcast and all related materials is for criticism and commentary, as well as for research and educational purposes. Under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

We continue our look at actors who played villains in the 1966 Batman TV series. This time, we turn to Art Carney who played the Robin Hood-inspired cr Read more ...

Welcome back, Bat-fans! In today's episode, we dive into the exciting details of Bruce Timm's latest project, "Batman: Caped Crusader." This new animated series isn't just a retread of the classic "Batman: The Animated Series." It's a bold, fresh take on the Dark Knight, drawing inspiration from old pulp heroes and setting Gotham City in a Noir-flavored 1940s. We'll discuss how Timm's vision transforms Batman into a more remote, superhuman figure, and how this opens up the spotlight for characters like Alfred, the Gordons, and Montoya. Don't miss the exclusive trailer debut and insights into the series' creation, voice casting, and unique villains. Hit that like button, subscribe, and let me know in the comments what you're most excited about in "Batman: Caped Crusader." Tags: Batman, Caped Crusader, Bruce Timm, new Batman series, Batman animated series, Gotham City, Hamish Linklater, Dark Knight, 1940s Batman, pulp heroes, Alfred, Gordons, Montoya, Noir style, Batman TV show, Batman trailer, Batman voice actor, Batman rogues gallery Hashtags: #Batman #CapedCrusader #BruceTimm 4o

    We continue our look at actors who played villains in the 1966 Batman TV series. This week, we turn to Cesar Romero, who pl Read more ...

We continue our look at actors who played villains in the 1966 Batman TV series. For this week’s episode, we’re taking a look at Van Read more ...

We continue our look at actors who portrayed villains in the 1966 Batman TV series. This week we turn to Burgess Meredith, who played the Penguin and w Read more ...

We begin a series looking at radio performances by actors who played villains in the 1960s Batman TV series. This week, we focus on Barbara Rush, who Read more ...

On the 162nd edition of Batman-On-Film.com's THE BOF SOCIAL HOUR podcast, BOF's Founder/EIC Bill "Jett" Ramey is joined by Senior BOF Contributor Ryan Lower discuss the news that the new animated Batman TV series, BATMAN: CAPED CRUSADER, will debut on August 1, 2024!  Also, they talk about the details of the show that have been revealed.

On the 45th edition of Batman-On-Film.com's BATMANIMATION podcast, BOF's Founder/EIC Bill "Jett" Ramey is joined by BOF Contributor Patrick Johnson for a BOF Rank 'Em of animated Batman TV musical themes.

Author and researcher Lon Strickler will join us tonight to discuss reports of a winged creature in the Chicago skies.The presence of strange winged beings is as old as the human imagination. In the late Summer of 2011, reports of Mothman-like flying humanoids began to surface in the city of Chicago. After three brief sightings, there were no further accounts. Then, unexpectedly, in early 2017, a smattering of encounters emerged from different locations throughout the Chicago metro area until fifty sightings were reached before the end of the Summer. Why Chicago? Why now? This book will examine the witness accounts and the investigator's thought processes as these incidents were brought to our attention. The sightings continue… but we are determined to find the truth. In West Virginia folklore, the Mothman is a humanoid creature reportedly seen in the Point Pleasant area from November 15, 1966, to December 15, 1967. The first newspaper report was published in the Point Pleasant Register, dated November 16, 1966, titled "Couples See Man-Sized Bird ... Creature ... Something".[1] The national press soon picked up the reports and helped spread the story across the United States. The source of the legend is believed to have originated from sightings of out-of-migration sandhill cranes or herons.[2][3]The creature was introduced to a broader audience by Gray Barker in 1970,[4][5] and was later popularized by John Keel in his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies,[6] claiming that there were supernatural events related to the sightings and a connection to the collapse of the Silver Bridge. The book was later adapted into a 2002 film starring Richard Gere.[7]An annual festival in Point Pleasant is devoted to the Mothman legend.[8] On November 15, 1966, two young couples from Point Pleasant—Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette—told police they had seen a large white creature whose eyes "glowed red" standing at the side of the road near "the TNT area," the site of a former World War II munitions plant.[9][10][11] Linda Scarberry described it as a "slender, muscular man" about seven feet tall with white wings and said that she could not discern its face due to the hypnotic effect of its eyes.[12] Distressed, the witnesses drove away at speed and said the creature flew after their car, making a screeching sound. It pursued them as far as Point Pleasant city limits.[9]Other people reported similar sightings during the next few days after local newspapers reported it. Two volunteer firemen who saw it said it was a "large bird with red eyes." Mason County Sheriff George Johnson commented that he believed the sightings were due to a huge heron he termed a "shitepoke." Contractor Newell Partridge told Johnson that when he aimed a flashlight at a creature in a nearby field, its eyes glowed "like bicycle reflectors." Additionally, he blamed buzzing noises from his television set and the disappearance of his German Shepherd dog on the creature.[2] Wildlife biologist Robert L. Smith at West Virginia University told reporters that descriptions and sightings all fit the sandhill crane, a large American crane almost as tall as a man with a seven-foot wingspan featuring circles of reddish coloring around the eyes. The bird may have wandered out of its migration route and was unrecognized initially because it was not native to this region.[2][3]Batman and his antagonist, Killer Moth, are varyingly cited as influences for the term "Mothman."Due to the popularity of the Batman TV series at the time, the fictional superhero Batman and his rogues gallery were prominently featured in the public eye. While the villain Killer Moth did not appear in the show, the comic book influence of both him and Batman is believed by some to have influenced the coinage of the name “Mothman” in the local newspapers.[13] Do you frequently miss episodes of Mysterious Radio? Don't worry; here are some tips to ensure you never miss out again:1. If you haven't already, follow or subscribe to the show to receive updates on new episodes. Even if you have already done this, it's a good idea to click the option again to ensure that you are still subscribed. This is especially important!2. Turn on notifications for new episodes in your podcast app.3. Make sure that your device allows notifications from your podcast app.4. If your app has the option, swipe down to refresh the list of episodes.

Episode 5 - Murdock and Marvel: 1967 This year we begin to see the backlash against superheroes as the Batman TV show enters its 3rd and final season, and many comic companies began to feel the effects of a contracting market and superhero fatigue.  Preshow Announcement: Murdock and Marvel moves back to Wednesday Starting Next Week Marvel Unlimited Show will be moving to Fridays The Year in Comics Key Happenings Best Selling Books... and Marvels The Year in Marvel While the rest of the comic world was losing ground, the Marvel Comics juggernaut kept rolling.  Marvel's sales continued to surge, and many Marvel books were now ready to challenge DC's top offerings. New Titles New Characters Big Moments Who's in the Bullpen ROOKIE OF THE YEAR: Herb Trimpe The Year in Daredevil  Appearances: Daredevil Issues #24-35, Strange Tales #156 and Daredevil Annual #1 Stan Lee and Gene Colan are credited with all of these stories   After helping Ka-Zar, the Jungle Lord at his Castle in Europe. Daredevil returns to New York   Spider-Man sends a letter to Murdock revealing he knows that Murdock is Daredevil – that letter is read by Nelson and Page – so to cover, Murdock invents a twin brother, Mike Murdock, who is actually Daredevil.   We learned that the Masked Marauder was Mr. Farnam, Nelson and Murdock's office landlord.    Daredevil takes on the Emissary of Evil (headed by Electro) in his first Annual.  Marauder joins forces with Stiltman (yes, we had a return of Stiltman) but the two together still aren't enough to take down Daredevil (who got lent a hand from Spider-Man) Marauder is killed in the process.   Daredevil, while giving a lecture at Carter College, fights an alien race of beings called the Queega who have come to earth to take its natural resources.   Daredevil decides to dress up as Thor to flush out some bad guys he recently defeated and ends up fighting it out with the real god of thunder.   Mr Hyde realizes that Daredevil is blind after he really does become blinded by the villain's plan   Daredevil must save some precious jewelry at the 1967 World's Fair in Montreal   Daredevil finishes off the year facing off with the Trapster who's out to get The Fantastic Four. Sue Storm ends the issue as the bait for a bomb in this cliffhanger. New Powers, Toys or Places This Week's Spotlight: Daredevil #28 May 1967 “Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Planet” Recap Why We Picked This Story The Takeaway Comics can't survive on superheroes alone. Questions or comments We'd love to hear from you!  Email us at questions@comicsovertime.com or find us on Twitter @comicsoftime. ------------------ THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING CREATORS AND RESOURCES  Music: Our theme music is by the very talented Lesfm.  You can find more about them and their music at https://pixabay.com/users/lesfm-22579021/.  The Grand Comics Database: Dan uses custom queries against a downloadable copy of the GCD to construct his publisher, title and creator charts.  Comichron: Our source for comic book sales data.  Man Without Fear: Kuljit Mithra's Daredevil site contains a staggering collection of resources about our hero, including news, interviews and comic details.    The American Comic Book Chronicles: Published by TwoMorrows, these volumes provide an excellent analysis of American comics through the years.  Because these volumes break down comic history by year and decade they are a great place to get a basic orientation on what is happening across the comic industry at a particular point in time.  Joshua and Jamie Do Daredevil: A fantastic podcast that does a deep-dive into Daredevil comics.  This ran from 2018-2020, and covered most of the first volume of Daredevil, and was a fun way to get an in-depth look at each issue of Daredevil from 1-377.  My Marvelous Year: This is a reading-club style podcast where Dave Buesing and friends chose important or interesting books from a particular year to read and discuss.  This helped me remember some fun and crazy stories, and would be a great companion piece to Murdock and Marvel for those who want more comic-story-specific coverage.  BOOKLIST  The following books have been frequently used as reference while preparing summaries of the comic history segments of our show.  Each and every one comes recommended by Dan for fans wanting to read more about it!  Licari, Fabio and Marco Rizzo.  Marvel: The First 80 Years: The True Story of a Pop-Culture Phenomenon.  London: Titan Books, 2020.  This book is sort of a mess, as the print quality is terrible, and Titan doesn't even credit the authors unless you check the fine print.  It's like this was published by Marvel in the early 60s! But the information is good, and it is presented in an entertaining fashion.  So its decent, but I would recommend you see if you can just borrow it from the library instead of purchasing.  Wells, John.  American Comic Book Chronicles: 1960-1964.  Raleigh: Two Morrows, 2015.  Not cheap, but a fantastic series that is informative and fun to read.  Wright, Bradford.  Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.  This is the revised edition.  Marvel Year By Year: A Visual History.  New York: DK Publishing, 2022.  The academic in my rails at using information from any work that doesn't have an author credit, but this is a decent (if very surface) look at each year in the history of Timely / Marvel from 1939 to 2021.    Cowsill, Alan et al.  DC Comics Year by Year: A Visual History.  New York: DK Publishing, 2010.  Because its nice to occasionally take a peek at what the Distinguished Competition is up to.  Dauber, Jeremy.  American Comics: A History.  New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2022.  An excellent, relatively compact history of the domestic comic industry from its 19th century origins through to recent 21st century developments.  An excellent successor to Bradford Wright's Comic Book Nation. 

Episode 4 - Murdock and Marvel: 1966 1966 saw America sink even deeper into Vietnam, with war deaths tripling from 1965 to 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, and the first artificial heart surgery was performed.  It was a big year in American pop culture as well, with both Star Trek and the Batman TV show debuting and the Beach Boys releasing their “Pet Sounds” album.  On the Daredevil front, our hero entered his first full publication year, with a full 12 issues for Duane to revel in!  Preshow Our first No Prize award Moon Knight Back Catalog The Year in Comics New Comics, Creators & Characters Big Moments Best Selling Books... and Marvels The Year in Marvel Starts and Ends New Characters Big Moments Who's in the Bullpen ROOKIE OF THE YEAR: Jim Steranko The Year in Daredevil  Appearances: Daredevil Issues 12-23, Amazing Spider-Man Annual #3 and Amazing Spider-Man #43  New Artist for books 12-19: John Romita Sr.   New Artist for books 20-23: Gene Colan   More multiple book story arcs this year.   Murdock leaves New York via a Cruise that gets boarded by Pirates and is kidnapped to the Savage Lands where he befriends Ka-Zar and Zabu   Referenced DD and Spider-Man's first teamup in Spider-Man #16 during issue 15   Foggy decides to impersonate Daredevil to impress Karen. Hilarity ensues.    Interesting Note on Issue 18 “There Shall Come a Gladiator”. Stan Lee only wrote the first 7 pages of this book with “Dandy Denny O'Neil” to finish the story because Stan had to leave for vacation.  Matt Murdock is abducted by the Owl and brought to his island hideout to defend a Judge who previously sent him to Prison. As Daredevil, he saves the Judge and flies them both off the island just as its volcano erupts.  Murdock decides he's going to tell Karen how he feels about her. Even if it means it hurts Foggy. Though that never actually happens before the year ends.  Daredevil finishes off the year with a final battle with recurring villains The Masked Marauder and the Gladiator.  New Powers, Toys or Places This Week's Spotlight: Daredevil Issues #22 November 1966 “The Tri-Man Lives!” and #23 December 1966 “DD Goes Wild!”  Recap Why We Picked This Story The Takeaway Batmania and Endgame. The dangers of getting too big into pop culture. Questions or comments We'd love to hear from you!  Email us at questions@comicsovertime.com or find us on Twitter @comicsoftime. ------------------ THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING CREATORS AND RESOURCES  Music: Our theme music is by the very talented Lesfm.  You can find more about them and their music at https://pixabay.com/users/lesfm-22579021/.  The Grand Comics Database: Dan uses custom queries against a downloadable copy of the GCD to construct his publisher, title and creator charts.  Comichron: Our source for comic book sales data.  Man Without Fear: Kuljit Mithra's Daredevil site contains a staggering collection of resources about our hero, including news, interviews and comic details.    The American Comic Book Chronicles: Published by TwoMorrows, these volumes provide an excellent analysis of American comics through the years.  Because these volumes break down comic history by year and decade they are a great place to get a basic orientation on what is happening across the comic industry at a particular point in time.  Joshua and Jamie Do Daredevil: A fantastic podcast that does a deep-dive into Daredevil comics.  This ran from 2018-2020, and covered most of the first volume of Daredevil, and was a fun way to get an in-depth look at each issue of Daredevil from 1-377.  My Marvelous Year: This is a reading-club style podcast where Dave Buesing and friends chose important or interesting books from a particular year to read and discuss.  This helped me remember some fun and crazy stories, and would be a great companion piece to Murdock and Marvel for those who want more comic-story-specific coverage.  BOOKLIST  The following books have been frequently used as reference while preparing summaries of the comic history segments of our show.  Each and every one comes recommended by Dan for fans wanting to read more about it!  Licari, Fabio and Marco Rizzo.  Marvel: The First 80 Years: The True Story of a Pop-Culture Phenomenon.  London: Titan Books, 2020.  This book is sort of a mess, as the print quality is terrible, and Titan doesn't even credit the authors unless you check the fine print.  It's like this was published by Marvel in the early 60s! But the information is good, and it is presented in an entertaining fashion.  So its decent, but I would recommend you see if you can just borrow it from the library instead of purchasing.  Wells, John.  American Comic Book Chronicles: 1960-1964.  Raleigh: Two Morrows, 2015.  Not cheap, but a fantastic series that is informative and fun to read.  Wright, Bradford.  Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.  This is the revised edition.  Marvel Year By Year: A Visual History.  New York: DK Publishing, 2022.  The academic in my rails at using information from any work that doesn't have an author credit, but this is a decent (if very surface) look at each year in the history of Timely / Marvel from 1939 to 2021.    Cowsill, Alan et al.  DC Comics Year by Year: A Visual History.  New York: DK Publishing, 2010.  Because its nice to occasionally take a peek at what the Distinguished Competition is up to.  Dauber, Jeremy.  American Comics: A History.  New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2022.  An excellent, relatively compact history of the domestic comic industry from its 19th century origins through to recent 21st century developments.  An excellent successor to Bradford Wright's Comic Book Nation. 

  Super Bowl LVIII is here and the guys welcome BOF Editor in Chief and HS Football coach Bill "Jett" Ramey to help them breakdown the big game and share what he will be cooking up for the festivities!   Of course, the normal weekly fandom fare as served as they discuss James Gunn speaking on the state of the DCU and his brother giving a little insight as to when Creature Commandos will be released.  They have also cast a new Supergirl as Milly Alcock is named as Kara Zor-El.  Plus, Matthew Vaughn gives his thoughts on Deadpool 3, the Christopher Nolan/Cillian Murphy connection, Robert Downey Jr, and we finally know why Adam West chose to don the cape and cowl for the 1960's Batman TV series!

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On the 41st edition of Batman-On-Film.com's BATMANIMATION podcast, BOF's Javi Trujillo and Patrick Johnson discuss "This Little Piggy" from JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED.

MOST FAMOUS EPISODE? Last week was the 55th anniversary of perhaps the most famous episode of Star Trek, which is really saying something. It's a middle of season three episode wherein the Enterprise takes on two passengers -- one half black on the left side of their face and half white on the white; the other half white on the left and half black on the right -- that leads to an allegory or parable about Civil Rights era America. Is it overwrought or filled with thought? The grades begin at (32:18). Our Two Hander theme month continues with an episode that features guest star Frank Gorshin (aka TV's The RIddler from the 1966 Batman TV series), which allows our hosts to wonder about a famous story from Adam West's memoir in which he and Gorshin attend an orgy in the Hollywood Hills. Were you or someone you know there? We want to hear about it!But also, we want to hear your thoughts about the show. Email address dropped at episode's end. If you're enjoying the show, consider rating and reviewing us on your podcast platform of choice.

Please hit Subscribe/Follow and level a 5-star revue Click here to save on High-End Clothing. Click here to donate to the show. Click here to go to The Mothman Museum.     In West Virginian folklore, the Mothman is a humanoid creature reportedly seen in the Point Pleasant area from November 15, 1966, to December 15, 1967. The first newspaper report was published in the Point Pleasant Register, dated November 16, 1966, titled "Couples See Man-Sized Bird ... Creature ... Something".  The national press soon picked up the reports and helped spread the story across the United States. The source of the legend is believed to have originated from sightings of out-of-migration sandhill cranes or herons. The creature was introduced to a wider audience by Gray Barker in 1970, and was later popularized by John Keel in his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies, claiming that there were paranormal events related to the sightings, and a connection to the collapse of the Silver Bridge. The book was later adapted into a 2002 film, starring Richard Gere.[ History On November 15, 1966, two young couples from Point Pleasant—Roger and Linda Scarberry, and Steve and Mary Mallette—told police they had seen a large black creature whose eyes "glowed red", standing at the side of the road near "the TNT area", the site of a former World War II munitions plant. Linda Scarberry described it as a "slender, muscular man" about seven feet tall with white wings, and said that she was unable to discern its face due to the hypnotic effect of its eyes. Distressed, the witnesses drove away at high speed, and said that the creature flew after their car, making a screeching sound. It pursued them as far as Point Pleasant city limits. During the next few days, other people reported similar sightings, after local newspapers reported it. Two volunteer firemen who saw it said it was a "large bird with red eyes". Mason County Sheriff George Johnson commented that he believed the sightings were due to an unusually large heron he termed a "shitepoke". Contractor Newell Partridge told Johnson that when he aimed a flashlight at a creature in a nearby field, its eyes glowed "like bicycle reflectors". Additionally, he blamed buzzing noises from his television set and the disappearance of his German Shepherd dog on the creature. Wildlife biologist Robert L. Smith at West Virginia University told reporters that descriptions and sightings all fit the sandhill crane, a large American crane almost as tall as a man with a seven-foot wingspan featuring circles of reddish coloring around the eyes. The bird may have wandered out of its migration route, and therefore was unrecognized at first because it was not native to this region. Due to the popularity of the Batman TV series at the time, the fictional superhero Batman and his rogues gallery were prominently featured in the public eye. While the villain Killer Moth did not appear in the show, the comic book influence of both him and Batman is believed by some to have influenced the coinage of the name "Mothman" in the local newspapers. Following the December 15, 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge and the death of 46 people, the incident gave rise to the legend and connected the Mothman sightings to the bridge collapse. According to Georgian newspaper Svobodnaya Gruziya, Russian UFOlogists claim that Mothman sightings in Moscow foreshadowed the 1999 Russian apartment bombings. The Mothman Prophecies (2002) is a major motion picture, loosely based on the 1975 book of the same name by John Keel. In 2016, WCHS-TV published a photo purported to be of Mothman taken by an anonymous man while driving on Route 2 in Mason County. Science writer Sharon A. Hill proposed that the photo showed "a bird, perhaps an owl, carrying a frog or snake away" and wrote that "there is zero reason to suspect it is the Mothman as described in legend. There are too many far more reasonable explanations."

On the 39th edition of Batman-On-Film.com's BATMANIMATION podcast, BOF's Javi Trujillo is joined by Patrick Johnson to discuss the episode "Holiday Knights" from THE NEW BATMAN ADVENTURES.

#477 Magic Bullet - Here's a bonus remote podcast (because we're not doing enough at the moment) with superstar actor and director and now podcast documentary (if you will pocumentary) maker, Rob Reiner. With limited time, they discuss which of his films is the greatest of all time, what you need to make a perfect improvised movie, the first toilet flush on US Prime Time TV and appearing in the Batman TV series. But mostly they talk about Rob's fascinating new podcast series “Who Killed JFK?” and the flimsiness of the official account of the assassination, why it means so much to Rob and why it's important to get to the truth. Plus what it was like sharing a duplex with Albert Brooks and the moving story of remaking the Princess Bride with his dad, Carl.Listen to Who Killed JFK? here, or wherever you get your podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/who-killed-jfk/id1714611578.See RHLSTP on tour. It's such fun. http://richardherring.com/rhlstpSUPPORT THE SHOW!Watch our TWITCH CHANNELSee extra content at our WEBSITE Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/rhlstp. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The kind of film where the lead character attempts an autopsy wearing a bikini: glamorous, camp, a bit low rent. In the podcast we discuss how the film is influenced by the James Bond craze, the Batman TV series, the wrestling phenomenon then at its height in Mexico, and a history of horror cinema. There's a mad scientist who laughs an evil laugh, his assistant is called Igor, there's a Promethean attempt at creating people à la Frankenstein except this time it's a fish, Pisces, presumably to make the most out of the Alcapulco setting, a bit like The Creature from the Black Lagoon but in a prettier setting (and this seems to have in turn influenced Del Toro's creature in The Shape of Water). It's an aspirational film: there are fancy cars and apartments, great clothes, speedboats, the latest in consumer items (the record player is to die for). It's also a curious mixture of feminist aspiration (the wealthiest woman in the world, sisterly, super-smart and able to fight) with misogynistic realities (The Batwoman's function is predominantly to wear a bikini and be looked at whilst solving crime). We end by noting that the film is credited to Rene Cardona as director but it's ‘a film by' producer Guillermo Calderon Stell and we discuss how it fits in to the extended Batman universe. The last of our podcasts on the wonderful MUBI programme: Spectacle Every Day: The Many Seasons of Mexican Cinema.

Batman, an enduring emblem of pop culture, has seen many faces since his creation in 1939. Over the decades, various actors have donned the cape and cowl in live-action films, each providing a distinct flavor to Bruce Wayne's character. Here's our revised ranking of the top 5 live-action Batmans, reflecting on their roles, contributions, and influence on the Batman legacy. 1. Christian Bale (The Dark Knight Trilogy, 2005-2012) Christopher Nolan's trilogy breathed new life into the Batman narrative, introducing a Gotham that was as gritty as it was grounded. Christian Bale's portrayal of the Dark Knight was layered, portraying a troubled hero, an astute detective, and an affable billionaire. Bale's deep dive into Bruce Wayne's mind made his interpretation unforgettable. Prior to Keaton, Batman's portrayal in live-action was largely light-hearted. Under Tim Burton's direction, Keaton's Batman was dark yet intriguing, balancing between the introspective Dark Knight and an unconventional Bruce Wayne. Initially a controversial choice, Keaton defined the character for a generation. Although a recent entrant in the Batman canon, Pattinson's detective-driven portrayal of the Dark Knight offers a fresh perspective on the character. His nuanced performance, focused on the detective roots of Batman and the psychological elements of Bruce Wayne, quickly made him a favorite among many fans. While Adam West's Batman is considerably more light-hearted than recent versions, its influence in the 1960s is undeniable. West's performance, a blend of charisma, humor, and sincerity, introduced a lively and comedic Batman, celebrated to this day. Succeeding Keaton, Kilmer's Batman served as a transition from the somber tone of the initial movies to Joel Schumacher's more flamboyant vision. Kilmer added a reflective and psychological layer to the role, especially evident in his dynamics with Robin and his internal struggles. Honorable Mention: Ben Affleck (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, 2016; Justice League, 2017 & 2021) Every actor on this list has enriched the Batman narrative, molding and remolding audience perceptions of this iconic hero. While the debate on “who is the best Batman” might never end, these performances have unquestionably cemented their places in the Dark Knight's rich legacy. 2. Michael Keaton (Batman, 1989; Batman Returns, 1992; Flash, 2023)3. Robert Pattinson (The Batman, 2022)4. Adam West (Batman: The Movie, 1966; Batman TV series)5. Val Kilmer (Batman Forever, 1995)

On the 33rd edition of Batman-On-Film.com's BATMANIMATION podcast, BOF's Founder/EIC Bill "Jett" Ramey is joined by BOF Contributor Patrick Johnson to discuss the 1968 episode "Partners in Peril" from THE ADVENTURES OF BATMAN -- the very first animated Batman TV series.

Hosts Mat Bradley-Tschirgi, Thrasher, and Alex Miller start their discussion of the Adam West Batman features with 1966's Batman: The Movie. Stars Adam West, Burt Ward, Cesar Romero, and Lee Meriwether. Released between the first two seasons of the Batman TV show, Batman: The Movie features Batman and Robin against a supervillain team-up of the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, and the Catwoman. Although it's a bit overstuffed with plot, there's good setpieces here. A subplot with Batman falling for Catwoman undercover in a Russian guise as Kitka has some nice heat to it. Some episodes of the Batman TV show are better than this film, some are worse. It's not going to knock your socks off, but iconic scenes like "Bat Shark Repellant" keep up the fun. Sequelcast 2 and Friends is part of the Tokyo Beat Podcast Network. Get 15% off EPOS Gaming Audio headsets with code EPOSFRIEND15 at checkout at www.eposaudio.com/gaming Follow the show on Twitter @Sequelcast2 Buy Mat's books (The Films of Uwe Boll, Podcast You Nerd!)  Buy Thrasher's tabletop RPG supplements from DriveThruRPG Watch award-winning filmmaker Alex Miller's YouTube series The Trailer Project Theme song by Marc with a C Happy Bee Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

160 - Linda Gaye Scott Interview, Westworld (1973), Little Faust's and Big Halsy, Batman TV Series Steven was able to interview the amazing and entertaining Linda Gaye Scott! Ms. Scott has been in numerous films and TV shows. She also does an incredible podcast, Linda's Bumpy Ride on a Bumpy Road. You can follow Linda on Facebook and on her website https://www.lindagayescott.com. Please leave comments on our Facebook page or email us at DieCastMoviePodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

On the 25th edition of Batman-On-Film.com's BATMANIMATION podcast, Senior BOF Contributor Ryan Lower and BOF's Founder/EIC Bill "Jett" Ramey discuss "The Pest" -- the very first episode of 1977's THE NEW ADVENTURES OF BATMAN animated series.

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

Al has a problem saying ‘Pau Gasol' of the Lakers. It reminded Jerry of the Batman TV show.

When the Batman TV show set off Batmania in 1966, a wide variety of toys and other tie-in items, not all of them licensed, hit the market. Since licensers seldom made style guides in the ‘60s, rights to the actors likenesses weren't available, and some of the onslaught of Bat-crap came from overseas makers who thought Batman's costume would look better in orange, the results are highly entertaining. This time we look at Chip Kidd's 1996 book Batman Collected, a history of Bat-merch from 1938 to 1996. Y'know, we STILL want that Mego Batcave Playset. Plus, the Sheet Music Boss piano tutorial version of the Batman theme, Adam West's reaction to the film Batman and Robin, and your response to our “Women in Season Two” wrapup!   The fruitless search for a guest (see page two for Ben Bentley's explanation of why the rights to Adam and Burt's likenesses weren't available)  

Batman cameos, RIP Ivanna Trump, Ian Astbury watch, HBO's The Anarchists, AOC heckled, Ray Epps breaks his silence, California water hogs, 550 women sue Uber, Maz joins us, and a list of things Boomers still think are cool.Drew brought in a list of things that he and "all baby boomers think are cool". Ian Astbury of The Cult is supposed to be on the show today. Time to play the waiting game.RIP Ivanna Trump. She was found dead at the bottom of a staircase in New York today.Donald Trump is going to start his 2024 Presidential campaign this fall.Ozzy Osbourne is appearing at the Comic-Con in San Diego to promote a new album.The Anarchists documentary on HBO shows how some anti-government folks tried to make their own community in Acapulco.Some people are saying that the James Webb telescope pictures are just Bob Ross paintings.The Harper Woods standoff murderer was recently bonded out.Drew's buddy is a bail bondsman, but not like this guy. Everything Marc knows about bail bonds he learned from Midnight Run.The shootout in Ray Township was between an ex-husband and a new boyfriend. The victim was 49-year-old Kim Mollicone.A pedophile from Taylor gets 25 years after sexualy exploiting over 100 kids.The woman killed in a 4-person murder/suicide in Houghton Lake had recently been denied for a PPO against her husband turned murderer.Alex Murdaugh's murders of his wife and son might have been caught on cell phone video.CBS exposed that the rich and famous in Southern California are abusing their water privileges.Boosie Badass becomes Baby Badass after his buddy was pulled over.Despite people losing their minds over it, transgender pregnancy isn't that common.Drew hates schools.Maz joins us to talk about how he wants more kids, Brittney Griner staying in Russia, the terrible Detroit Tigers, and defending Derek Jeter. Tom tries to sell Drew on the Home Run Derby with zero luck.We go down an old TV rabbit hole that includes Mr. Ed playing baseball, the Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island, and the ridiculous window cameos on the old Batman TV series.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was trolled on her way to the Capitol for her "big booty".Something called Styles P was not happy that the police arrested a woman outside his juice bar.550 women have filed a civil action suit against Uber for sexual harassment by drivers.A Pittsburgh bar just shuts down and calls it quits after one NSFW video circulates on the internet.Trudi is going to hang out with her college roommate Saturday.Thunder Over Michigan hits Willow Run this weekend.Ray Epps breaks his silence with the failing New York Times.Social media is dumb, but we're on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (Drew and Mike Show, Marc Fellhauer, Trudi Daniels and BranDon).

Longtime DC Animation Director/Producer/Artist Rick Morales brings his extensive background to the Hall of Justice. Morales started his career working on the iconic Justice League and Justice League Unlimited animated series in the early 2000s. Since then, he has helmed a number of projects including Green Lantern – The Animated Series, Young Justice, and countless DC Universe animated features. They include the two Batman animated projects that continue the story from the classic 1966 Batman TV show. In this episode, Morales spoke about working with Adam West and rewatching the series as “prep work.” He talks about his beginnings and brought up his mentors, some of whom have been on the podcast. Follow Rick on Twitter @RickJMorales.