Recent Comments

1. over 13 years ago on Gasoline Alley
   Of course Arbuckle was working as a director under an alias during the 20’s. I have often wondered if there were ever plans for a GA silent movie or animated cartoon. They were alreday doing toy and game tie-ins about the strip, so we know the strip was pretty hot property. There were two GA films done in the early fifties, and you can find them on Nedtflix,but as far as I can tell no one made a silent GA. I could picture Wallace Beery or Oliver Hardy (sans toothbrush moustache) as Uncle Walt and Jackie Coogan as Skeezix.
2. over 13 years ago on Gasoline Alley

   Hey 436rge, I would lov e to see a plot line like this: Several canisters of silent film, some stills and a yellowed screenplay turn up at an estate auction or possibly on a show like “Antiques Roadshow.” The working title: “A Boy Called Skeezix,” and the man playing Uncle Walt is none other that Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.” He has apparently used his on money to start the project and cast himself as the ultra-good guy Walt in an effort to make a comeback. That is as far as I got.

3. over 13 years ago on Lio

   I just recently started followin Lio. I can just imagine someone like Tim Burton making a film of Lio.

4. almost 14 years ago on Gasoline Alley

   I’m hard of hearing. If I am not using my hearing aids, I need the sound loud. (Sometimes my ears get sore from wearing them and I have to leave them out for a couple of days.)To keep my family from being blown out of their seats, I keep the volume at less than half and switch on the closed captions. So how about closed captions? I wonder what happened to Rachel. It seems to me that Walt did slip a couple of times and called Gertie “Rachel.”

   Who knows, maybe Gertie and Rachel are related.

5. almost 14 years ago on New Adventures of Queen Victoria

   FT is Firesign Theatre–a surrealistic ,american,comedy troupe that began performing and making albums in the las 60’s. They are still performing together. “I thing we’re all Bozos on this bus” and “Everything you know is wrong” and “Take off your shoes for industry” are popular catch phrases among FT fans.

6. almost 14 years ago on Gasoline Alley

   Well, he will have a spare in case he mislays one.

   This year my mother who has Alzheimer’s is getting an electric singing tea kettle. Hopefully, it will keep her from boiling coffee water on the gas stove. She has boiled pans dry and ruined a stovetop tea kettle as well by leaving them ont the burner tool long. . It should be a lot safer for her.

7. almost 14 years ago on Gasoline Alley

   Skeezix is at least 85, and he had some serious noise exposure while fighting in WWII. I realize that hearing aids are not a detail you usually include in a comic strip, but a man with a profile like Skeezix probably needs them. It could be a sublplot. I had to go through a lot of humorous mishaps and misunderstandings before I got mine.

8. almost 14 years ago on Gasoline Alley

   My mother has advanced senile dementia, and after a few months I have a handfull of stories like this one. You have to laugh or else you will break down crying.

9. over 14 years ago on Gasoline Alley
   Devonshade has a point. Today it is okay to make fun of poor, uneducated white people. It does not make it right. Of course, in the early days of the strip, there was Rachel, Mandy and Plato. The three black domestics were portrayed in a stereotyped manner that was pretty typical of the time. To be fair, Skeezix’s nanny Rachel was portrayed as smarter and wiser than her thick dialect would lead you to believe. The black characters in the old Frank King strip may not have been well educated, but they were honest, decent, likeable people. There were some shady characters in the old Frank King strip, but they tended to be upper class; one of them was a genuine titled aristocrat. Sometimes I ownder why I read the strip. It is short on the type of humor and character development that made it so good in the past. I eagerly await the publication of the next volume of Walt and Skeezix.
10. over 14 years ago on Gasoline Alley
    I once foiled a lunch theif with a ham and cheese sandwich sprinkled with (unused) kitty litter. The bag lunch dissapeared, but it was the last lunch to disappear from the break room fridge.