Fantagraphics Comics was almost broke two years ago, but a project to publish the complete Peanuts cartoons was a big hit and turned the company around. Now it’s made a deal to publish the complete Dennis the Menace in 25 columes ove 11 years…
Tag: 08.26.05
Wal-Mart Locks Up Exclusive Disney Rights
Earlier this month Wal-Mart signe exclusive deal with Garth Brooks to sell his music. Now “the Walt Disney Co. is giving Wal-Mart exclusive sales rights through the end of the year to the animated holiday feature film “The 3 Wise Men,” which debuts on DVD November 1. As the market for DVDs becomes increasingly competitive, big retailers are aggressively vying for exclusives — and, in more and more cases, getting them. Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer with close to 40% of the home video market, is in the catbird seat, studio sources say.”
BBC To Put TV Programs On The Internet
The BBC is planning to simulcast programs on the internet. “A simulcast of BBC One or BBC Two, letting UK viewers see programmes on the web at the same time as they go out on TV, is being planned. Proposals to make clips available on mobile phones are also being speeded up.”
Oh, We All Love A Great Pirate Yarn (Don’t We?)
Readers have been served a double helping of pirate books in the last couple of months, for reasons that defy analysis. The cowboy and the gangster, twin pillars of America’s self-image, continue to inspire screenwriters and novelists, although the cowboy, these days, seems to be limping as badly as Walter Brennan. But what can explain the allure of pirates?
A Rationale For The Complete Webern
The UK’s Radio 3 is playing the complete works of Anton Webern in one session. “No amount of historical importance and peer endorsement will persuade anyone to love Webern. Nor will the copious amounts of ink spilt by the theorists who’ve shown just how beautifully ingenious his music is, as full of mirror-forms and symmetries as the rock crystals Webern loved to collect on his Alpine walks. But in any case, I suspect Radio 3 controller Roger Wright doesn’t want to lecture us. He just wants us to love Webern’s music as it deserves. That will be a tough call…”
Untangling Tippett
Composer Michael Tippett’s music went out of fashion after he died in 1998. But “the fact is that, at his best, Tippett is a highly individual composer and a hugely important figure in 20th-century British music. His interest in the culture of other countries and his endless fascination with literature and the workings of the mind helped to keep him looking some 15 years younger than his true age. Rather than compare him to Britten, we should celebrate the fact that the two composers had such utterly contrasting minds.”
Charlotte Church, Pop Princess
Charlotte Church has completed her transition from precocious child to pop princess. Church accepts that she should be more careful about looking after her voice than she is, but not to the extent that she’s going to do anything about it. “I love my voice and if I lost it I would be devastated, but I just don’t want to live my life like that. I am thinking of giving up smoking for general health reasons, and it was really embarrassing last weekend when I had overdone it and couldn’t sing at all, which meant that I had to mime at a big outdoor festival. I felt really bad about that.”