It’s a true shame.  Movie trailers will never be the same again.

And Ain’t It Cool News has a blurb about him and links to a bunch of videos.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. - Bill Melendez, the animator who gave life to Snoopy, Charlie Brown and other “Peanuts” characters in scores of movies and TV specials, has died. He was 91.

Melendez died Tuesday at St. John’s Hospital, according to publicist Amy Goldsmith.

Melendez’s nearly seven decades as a professional animator began in 1938 when he was hired by Walt Disney Studios and worked on Mickey Mouse cartoons and classic animated features such as “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia.”

He went on to animate TV specials such as “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and was the voice of Snoopy, who never spoke intelligible words but issued expressive howls, sighs and sobs.

Melendez was born in 1916 in Hermosillo in the Mexican state of Sonora. He moved with his family to Arizona in 1928 and then to Los Angeles in the 1930s, attending the Chouinard Art Institute.

Melendez took part in a strike that led to the unionization of Disney artists in 1941, and later moved to Warner Bros., where he worked on Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck shorts.

In 1948, Melendez left Warner Bros. and over the next 15 years worked as a director and producer on more than 1,000 commercials and movies for United Productions of America, Playhouse Pictures and John Sutherland Productions.

At UPA, he helped animate “Gerald McBoing-Boing,” which won the 1951 Academy Award for best cartoon short.

Melendez met “Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz in 1959 while creating Ford Motor Co. TV commercials featuring Peanuts characters.

The two became friends and Melendez became the only person Schulz authorized to animate his characters.

Melendez founded his own production company in 1964 and with his partner Lee Mendelson went on to produce, direct or animate some 70 “Peanuts” TV specials, four movies and hundreds of commercials.

The first special was 1965’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” The show reportedly worried CBS because it broke so much new ground for a cartoon: It lacked a laugh track, used real children as voice actors, had a jazz score and included a scene in which Linus recited lines from the New Testament.

However, the show was a ratings success and has gone on to become a Christmastime perennial.

Melendez created Emmy-winning specials based on the cartoon characters Cathy and Garfield, and was involved in animated versions of the Babar the elephant books and the C.S. Lewis book, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”

He also was co-nominee for an Academy Award in 1971 for the music for “A Boy Named Charlie Brown.”

In all, his productions earned some 19 Emmy nominations, including six awards.

Melendez is survived by his wife Helen; sons Steven Melendez and (Ret.) Navy Rear Adm. Rodrigo Melendez, six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.

Singer-turned-actor Jerry Reed, known as “The Guitar Man” of country music, has died aged 71.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Reed released more than 40 albums over a long career that started when he was just 18.

After scoring US hits like Amos Moses and When You’re Hot, he broke into cinema in the 1970s, appearing in all three Smokey and the Bandit movies.

The star, who had quadruple bypass surgery in 1999, died on Monday of complications arising from emphysema.

He had recently been cared for in a hospice, Country Music Television in Nashville reported.

Sony BMG Nashville Chairman Joe Galante called Reed a larger-than-life personality.

“Everything about Jerry was distinctive - his guitar playing, writing, voice and especially his sense of humour,” Galante said.

“I was honoured to have worked with him.”

Reed’s booking agent, Carrie Moore-Reed (not a relation), called the singer-songwriter “one of the greatest entertainers in the world”.

In the US, Reed had a string of hits that ran from 1967 to 1983, and won a Grammy for his 1971 single When You’re Hot, You’re Hot.

Two further Grammys came for his collaborations with Chet Atkins - and the guitarist went on to play and tour with the likes of Joan Baez and Ringo Starr.

Burt Reynolds presents his friend with a surprise guitar-shaped cake in 1980
Although he never had a hit in the UK, Reed’s music will be familiar to many through soundtrack songs like Texas Bound and Flyin’, which appeared on Smokey and the Bandit II.

Elvis also covered Reed’s Guitar Man during his iconic 1968 Comeback Special, and the star played in his trademark “claw-lick” style on the studio recording.

In the mid-1970s, the singer teamed up with friend and actor Burt Reynolds, appearing in The Snowman, as well as his the Bandit series, where he played truck driver Cledus Snow.

Reynolds later gave him a shiny black 1980 Trans Am like the one they used in the films.

Modern audiences will also know him as the angry coach in Adam Sandler’s comedy The Waterboy - but his main passion was music, and he continued touring into the 1990s.

Singer-guitarist Brad Paisley said Reed was one of country music’s most influential players.

“Anyone who picks a country guitar knows of his mastery of the instrument - one of the most inspirational stylists in the history of country music, a complete master,” Paisley said.

“I’m in debt to him for paving the way for myself and the other guitarists of today.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JbaM1xNIis

I think they did land a man on the moon.  Nevertheless, I’ll be watching this episode.

For those of you just as excited as I am about the tv series being adapted from Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule, here is the trailer for the series. It’s slightly corny but I don’t care. I can’t wait!

First up is trailer two for Hellboy 2: the Golden Army.  (Trailer one has been out for a while and is a teaser.  Trailer two kicks it up a few notches and makes it look even better.)

I enjoyed Hellboy so much.  It was a really fun movie.  And, having never read the comics/graphic novels, there wasn’t any potential disappointment from preconceived notions for me.  And this movie looks like it will be just as good and as much fun.  If not more so.

KNOCKING THEM OUT

Jack Dempsey(1895-1983) was an American boxer who was boxing history’s 9th world heavyweight champion.  He held the title from 1919 to 1926. Dempsey’s aggressive style and punching power made him one of the most popular in boxing history.  On his way to the title Dempsey won nine straight fights in 1917 and 21 out of 22 in 1918, 11 of these by first-round knockouts.  In 1919 he won five bouts in a row by knockouts in the first round on the way to fight for the title on 4 July 1919 against Jess Willard. 

Few gave Dempsey a chance against Willard, a big man 50 lbs. heaver and six inches taller.  Many called the fight a modern David and Goliath story.  Minutes before the fight Dempsey’s fight manager, Jack Kearns, informed Dempsey that he had wagered Dempsey’s share of the purse.  He had bet his share of the purse on Dempsey winning with a first round knockout. As a result, the first round of the fight was one of the most brutal in boxing history.  Dempsey dealt Willard a terrible beating and knocked him down seven times in the first round.  Willard had a broken cheekbone, broken jaw, several teeth knocked out, partial hearing loss in one ear and broken ribs.

Some of the most intense minutes in boxing history are found in the fights of Jack Dempsey from 1919 to 1926.  On September 23, 1926, at Sesquicentennial Stadium in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, the largest crowd ever, 120,757, saw the 31-year-old Jack Dempsey lose his title to Gene Tunney in a 10 round decision on points.  Explaining his battered face to his wife Estelle, Dempsey said--in one of boxing’s most famous lines: “honey, I forgot to duck.”

I have taken a special interest in these seven years of boxing history for three reasons.  Firstly, I have always had an interest in boxing since my father and I watched fights on TV from 1954 to 1962.  In March 1962 Kid Peret was killed in the ring by Emile Griffith and my dad and I watched no more fights.  Our shared interest in boxing perhaps began with Rocky Marciano’s sixth-round knockout of Rex Layne at Madison Square Garden on 12 July 1951 or with the September 29th 1952 fight between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott the then heavyweight boxing champion. This fight was what boxing experts have considered to be Marciano’s defining moment.  But my father and I had to wait until 1954 to watch our first boxing match since those first two famous fights in my young life were not televised.  The first fights we watched took place over 50 years ago and my memory of them is naturally somewhat rusty.  From about 1954 until 1962, when Kid Peret died from his fight with Griffith and on the eve of my pioneering life for the Canadian Baha’i community, my dad and I watched the big championship fights and many Friday night fights on TV sponsored by the Gillett Company. 

The second reason that I took a special interest in boxing was that just last night1 my interest was reawakened.  I saw the first part of a four part television series on the history of the greatest fighters in boxing.  The series was entitled 1The Fight: The Rules of the Ring1 and was being televised on SBS TV on four consecutive Tuesdays from 1:00 to 2:00 a.m. beginning 29 July 2008.  Thirdly, I found an interesting correlation between the history of the religion I have been associated with for 55 years(1953-2008) and boxing history during those seven years(1919-1926).2 This prose-poem explores that correlation, its comparisons and contrasts.  -Ron Price with appreciation to Loni Bramson-Lerche, “Development of Baha’i Administration,” in Studies in Babi & Baha’i History: Volume 1, editor Moojan Momen, Kalimat Press, Los Angeles, 1982, pp.255-300.

While Dempsey was knocking them out
and heading for the title, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
was knocking out His Tablets, getting
them ready for their great unveiling in
1919 just before Dempsey got the title.

They both kept knocking them out1 in
the ring and on paper--slowly--not so
slowly.  While Dempsey defended his
title this movement connected loosely
became fully organized building blocks
of a future world government at local
and national levels, united in doctrinal
matters and focussed on teaching as its
main aim in all that it did and tried to do. 

The fight was on and a national
consciousness was emerging for
the war with those right and left
wings of the hosts of the world
and a carrying of the attack to
the very centre of the powers
of the earth by God’s Hosts in
a fight that would keep humanity
busy for, perhaps, several centuries.2

1 Some 100 tablets were revealed by ‘Abdu’l-Baha for the American Baha’is. See H.M. Balyuzi, ‘Abdu’l-Baha: The Centre of the Covenant, George Ronald, Oxford, 1971, p. 434.
2 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, Wilmette, 1977(1919), p. 48.

Ron Price
29 July 2008

After watching the two part series “Augustus” on SBS TV(17 and 24 June 2008--11:40 p.m. to 1:15 a.m.) in the last two weeks as another academic year was coming to an end in school systems across the northern hemisphere; after teaching Roman history at a post-secondary technical college in Western Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s; after studying Roman history in high school as part of the grade eleven curriculum in Ontario in 1960-1961 and in the first year of my liberal arts degree in university in 1963-1964 forty-five years ago; after taking an interest in the field of classical studies since those 1960s, albeit a peripheral one among the many subjects that were part of the general and interdisciplinary studies I taught and the general studies in the social sciences and humanities that I read—after all this, in the early evening of my life, as the years of my late adulthood crept along incrementally more quickly, it seemed, with every passing year, I felt like writing this prose-poem.  I wanted to try to fit Augustus, Octavian as he was also known, the first Roman Emperor, into a historical context relevant to today, at least relevant to how I had come to see the comparisons and contrasts between Augustus and his time as well as my time, my age and my life.  -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 27 June 2008.

Rome had conquered the world,
well, a big chunk of it in the middle
East, north Africa and what is now
Europe, in the quarter millennium
from 250 BC to the time of Christ.

Was it a set-up?  Setting the world
up for the periodic intervention of
the divine into human affairs, giving
a stage for the spread of the message
that would and did change that mise
en scene forever.  And are we being
set up again, in our age and time in
the midst, now, of this greatest of
spiritual dramas in the world’s history,
so very unbeknownst to the generality
of men, creeping, as it now is, along
the edges of society as that message
did 2000 years ago before it captured
western civilization for a 1000 years?

The most precious Being ever to appear
in the world of creation appears from time
to time and the light of the Unseen shines
above the horizon of celestial might only
to be denied, opposed and disputed with
in vain words to try to invalidate His claim.1

1 Baha’u’llah, Kitab-i-Iqan, Wilmette, 1950(1931), p.5.

Ron Price
27 June 2008