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Hey folks, Harry here... Pretty much, my entire life... I've known the name of Ollie Johnston. One of the most beloved animators of all time - he is credited to giving Disney's characters a lot of the warmth we love about them. Before Ollie - Disney characters rarely touched unless they were slapping each other or kicking one another in the ass. Ollie brought the more human relationship to bare focusing on the warm connections that we humans have... the act of holding hands, putting an arm around one another.
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Hey folks, Harry here... Man, the world is knocking off some of my favorite old school talent. Richard Widmark... and now, JULES DASSIN. Last year, when I threw Half-Ass-A-Thon I screened Dassin's classic trippy as hell film TOPKAPI, which is being remade as the sequel to the THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR - and will never ever touch the brilliance of that original film.
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Hey folks, Harry here... This past year at Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9, I showed my personal favorite Richard Widmark film. A little movie he shot with Sam Fuller called PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET - I liked showing it knowing he was still alive... somewhere out there in the world. His Skip McCoy is one of the greatest heroic cads in the history of cinema. A pick pocket that's a Minnesota Fats with the pool table of life, knowing all the angles, or at least thinking he does. I've often said that Richard Widmark was a Warner Brothers character brought to life...
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Hey folks, Harry here... Today's a sad day - we lost Anthony Minghella earlier today - and now we've lost one of the most brilliant minds in science fiction, Arthur C Clarke. For many of us - he'll be the man that worked with Kubrick in creating the science fiction Masterpiece... 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY - but for fans of the written word he was so much more.
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Hey folks, Harry here... I'm a bit under the weather... took a big dose of Nyquil and woke up 15 hours later in a daze. It's a beautiful day outside and as I've been going through the 800 or so messages that have accumulated since I last logged in - I read a notice from a friend of mine, Michael Kaluta. He received a call from Dave Stevens' mother that Dave passed on yesterday. She said it was a blessing, as Dave had been suffering a lot of pain, due to chemo and had no prospects for it "getting better".
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Gary Gygax passed away at his home in Wisconsin yesterday. He was co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, and the person most directly responsible for the invention of the role-playing game.
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Hey folks, Harry here... it falls upon me to write this OBIT - because well, I'm the one that loves FIRES ON THE PLAIN. I am not an expert on Kon Ichikawa. I won't pretend that I am, but around 13 years ago, my father and I were driving back from a dinner on the south side of Austin, and decided to check the cheapie bin at the BLOCKBLUSTER VIDEO around the University of Texas campus. You know the drill, you dig through their previously viewed weeding out of titles and you find gold. This was back in the videotape era -
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Hey folks, Harry here... As many of you know... I was born into geekdom. My parents owned the first Pop-Culture Memorilbia Store in Austin, Tx... N.E. MERCANTILE COMPANY. It sold movie posters, animation cels, original art, props and comic books, pulps and all sorts of paper ephemera. From the youngest of ages - I have loved talking duck characters. I knew the Disney Ducks, the Warner Brothers Duck... and from the world of comics... the cigar-chomping, master of Quack-Fu himself.... HOWARD THE DUCK.
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Harry here... Heath Ledger was found dead in a Manhattan Apartment today around 2pm according to the NYPD and CNN. At this point - my take on this is... Please don't fucking be true.
I first met Heath Ledger 8 years ago on the set of A KNIGHT'S TALE - he was impossibly young, handsome and charming. He went on to become one of our absolutely most talented and promising actors.
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Harry here... Nobody has written up an Obit on Brad Renfro because frankly... it's not a story any of us wants to write. Here was a kid actor that showed an awful lot of promise. I remember watching APT PUPIL the first time in my living room with Josh Hartnett and Elijah Wood and Laura Harris as the two boys went through jealousy pains because they each desperately wanted that role - and they loved what Brad did with it.
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Hey folks, Harry here... often times here at AICN, I'm called upon to eulogize the passing of a talent that had made films, cartoons, television shows or comic books that I was a fan of... or at the very least appreciated. Once in a very dark moon
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Principal Richard "Dick" Vernon, Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson, Coach Wayne Hisler and, most importantly, Duke and Duke bagman Clarence Beeks -- four of 1980's cinemas greatest assholes, all brought to blustering, indelible life by the great
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Hey folks, Harry here... Uncle Bill is gone. Hong Kong movie fans are bowing their heads for a moment of silence for Tung Piu. I've been a huge fan of Jackie Chan's films since the early early 90s when I finally got to see them. Prior to that,
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Uncapie here - Some sad news. Even sadder as I had just met the man in December at Mr.
Robert Wise's tribute. Mr. Franciosa was a gentleman and in good health at the time
I met him. He enjoyed talking about his work and was interested in meeting
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Hey folks, Harry here... The world's greatest gag-man, Joe Ranft has passed away. Years and years ago when I was invited up to the wonderful world of Pixar - the man I spent the most time pal-ing around with was Joe Ranft. I never laughed so hard
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Hey folks, Harry here in Minneapolis at Convergence. It is ironic that I'm at one of the wonderful science fiction - fantasy conventions when I find that one of the great B-movie monsters is dead. The HIDEOUS SUN DEMON, Robert Clarke passed away a
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Hey folks, Harry here... As some of you know - I'm a tad of a Tigger freak... I even have a full body Tigger costume. While many would think I'd have more in common with Winnie - Tigger had more of an outlandish outwardly energetic manic personali
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Hey folks, Harry here... I felt we had some readers that felt like writing about these three voice giants, that knew more about their lives than I. To be honest, I never knew the name of the voice behind Fred Flintstone... kinda odd that one. Bu
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Father Geek here with a hefty update from Elston packed full of the latest confirmed news from Hollywood to Cannes, buuut before I turn you over to our man Gunn I'd be amiss if I didn't mention a rash of entertainment related deaths from the past wee
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Father Geek here with Baaaad news...Frank Gorshin, the Riddler on the
"Batman" TV series, has died at age 72 Tuesday at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in California of complications of lung cancer, emphysema and
pneumonia.
Gorshin ea
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Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Dr. Hfuhruhurr is a good friend of mine, and he frequently invites Obi-Swan and I to idle away good hours at a local cigar club where he?s a member. One of the great joys of that club has been sitting and talking with any number of unusual Hollywood figures, like Temuera Morrison or John Millius, getting lost in conversations that just meander about any number of topics.
Some of the greatest evenings we spent up there were in the company of George Pan Cosmatos, director of TOMBSTONE and RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART 2. He was a gentleman, a collosally entertaining storyteller, and a generous soul. Anything I could write about him, Dr. Hfuhruhurr already said better in the e-mail I got just a few minutes ago:
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Father geek here with the sad news that Dale Messick, whose long-running newspaper comic "Brenda Starr" paved the way for her entry into the male dominated world of comic art, has died at the age of 98.
Her strip ran in 250 newspapers at its heig
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Father Geek reporting in with sad news... Science fiction and fantasy authoress Andre Norton, who wrote the hugely popular "Witch World" series, has died at the age of 93 in historic Murfreesboro, just outside Nashville, Tennesse.
Father Geek h
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Father Geek here with sad news... John Carpenter's longtime writing-producing partner 54 year old DEBRA HILL has died. I've met Debra several times here in Austin when she would come here on business or to attend film fests or to visit long time frie
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