No Dr. Pepper? Axl Rose To The Rescue

Do you remember how Dr. Pepper promised a free can of soda pop to everyone in America if Guns ’n’ Roses actually, finally released the 15-years-in-the-making Chinese Democracy album in 2008? And do you remember how everyone, including Weather Station 1, predicted the disc would never arrive and Dr. Pepper had made a pretty good marketing move that wouldn’t cost them anything?

Backfire.

Chinese Democracy has finally been released. I think it sounds like a roomful of cats with their balls caught in mousetraps, but that’s just me. A lot of people really like it. Many don’t. Here’s a cool podcast about it.

Anyway, Dr. Pepper was suddenly forced to live up to that promise. And they messed it up. The website they launched to process the giveaway went down, and now there are millions of Americans crying about not getting the free can of Dr. Pepper they really, really wanted.

So the company just received a letter from someone called Alan Gutman, lawyer for Guns ’n’ Roses. It went like this: “The redemption scheme your company clumsily implemented for this offer was an unmitigated disaster which defrauded consumers and, in the eyes of vocal fans, ‘ruined’ the day of Chinese Democracy‘s release,” Gutman wrote. “Now it is time to clean up the mess.”

Gutman then goes on to ask for full-page apology in The New York Times, L.A. Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, more time for sugar-rush cravers to get their free pop, and of course, cash: “An appropriate payment to our clients for the unauthorized use and abuse of their publicity and intellectual property rights.”

Ah … I knew there was going to be money mentioned in there somewhere. Gutman makes a valid point: “Had you wished to engage in a commercial tie-in with our clients, you should have negotiated a legitimate relationship,” he wrote. But really, it was all in fun, as Dr. Pepper keeps saying.

The offer was extended, by the way. People will get their free pop. But that was happening before Axl sent Gutman in as his soda-pop pit bull. As for the rest of the band’s demands? Who can say. All I know is the marketing people at Dr. Pepper couldn’t have asked for better ink.

Josef Fritzl, “Buddhist”

Josef Fritzl says he’s converting to Buddhism. Reports out the Austrian jail where he’s awaiting trial indicate the dungeon-master pedophile rapist spends all his time studying the ways of the Far East and hopes to use his newfound peaceful spirituality to reconcile with his wife, Rosemarie. Something along these lines:

“My darling, I know I strayed, but I have found a new inner light and want to share it with you.”

This is the same guy who recently proposed turning the cramped three-room dungeon he built under his home in Amstetten, Austria, the pit where he kept his daughter and three of the children she had with him for 24 years, into a tourist attraction, charging admission fees and raising money “to help the family.” The family, which includes seven children with wife Rosemarie and six with daughter Elisabeth, said “no thank you.”

Nobody’s buying this conversion nonsense, of course, which leads me to the Weather Station 1 quote of the year, which came from one of the prosecutors preparing to put the pig away for the rest of his life:

“It’s a bit late in his life to present himself as a man of peace,” the unnamed lawyer said. “If he ever gets reincarnated, what would he come back as? Even making him a worm would be an insult to worms.”

Indeed. Fritzl is also reportedly terrified of going to a real prison after he’s sentenced, because there’s some kind of serial killer there who makes a habit of killing pedophiles and eating their brains, and he’s told authorities he has his eye on Fritzl.

Again, what exactly is the problem there?

Bad Old TV

Back in the days before DVD boxed sets … hell, back before VHS home recorders, TV producers didn’t imagine that you’d ever see their product again. TV shows were meant to be shown once, maybe twice, perhaps, in a long shot, in syndication. And those shows were watched on TVs with the kind of picture quality that made you really squint to see how much the price tag read on Minnie Pearl’s hat.

But then came digital remastering, and DVD, and HD, and Blu-Ray, and we’re watching all those old shows again, and we’re all saying “wow, they really didn’t care about special effects back then, did they?”

Case in point: I am watching Walking Tall: The Complete Series, the DVD set of the short-lived 1981 series spun off from the movies. Bo Svenson plays Sheriff Buford Pusser, a real-life cop hero. It isn’t a bad show, but it isn’t a great show. I think it was just too smart and too advanced while being marketed as a Dukes of Hazzard sort of thing. It lasted just seven episodes, which means it fits on two DVDs. I’ve always been a fan of the original Walking Tall movie (the remake with The Rock was okay, the one with Hercules bit nut hard), but I’ve never seen the series.

So in the opening sequence of the first episode, a kid goes wild on PCP and drives in an unlawful fashion. The shots of the runaway car show us that (a) the car is equipped with roll bars and (b) the driver looks nothing like the actor playing the kid, and is in fact old and fat.

Example: I have the first season of Knight Rider on DVD. Do you know how they made the car drive itself? A simple trick. The driver’s seat was removed, and the stunt driver sat in its place, wearing a “seat suit” over his body with a peephole to see. It fooled us in 1983. Not on DVD. You can see it clear as a whistle.

Think this has gotten better? Nope.

Example: Every Star Trek fight scene. And that hasn’t worn off; I’ve just watched the latest HD trailer for the new movie, and if you stop it at the Sulu fight scene, you clearly see that the guy in the sword fight isn’t John Cho.

Anyway, I like watching the old shows, and I like seeing all the flaws. I like it when the back yard actually shifts under the Brady kids’ feet. I like the idea that Gilligan’s radio never runs out of batteries, and the Howells, apparently brought all their money with them in trunks. I like how the Duke boys never had to adjust their suspension, ever. It’s part of the fun.

Oh, I just noticed that a really young Eric Stoltz buys some drugs on this episode of Walking Tall. The drug dealer is Freddy Krueger. And the young deputy later played Griff on Married With Children. Now that’s a CV.

Batman’s About to Die

At some point, very soon, Batman will bite it. Dead, killed, slain, whatever. It’s all over for Bruce Wayne.

Details are sketchy, but what comic book fans do know is that there will be a “war” for the right to take over the job, to step into the black mantle of the bat. Dick Grayson (the original Robin, now operating as Nightwing), Jason Todd (the resurrected second Robin) and Tim Drake (the current Robin) are mentioned as likely candidates, but knowing DC it could really be anyone.

Batman has been a big deal in my house lately. My five-year-old is on a major Bat-bender, and that’s fine by me, as you can well imagine. (This is the same kid who told his teacher he and I came to Earth on the Enterprise).

It took him a while to get his head around the idea that Batman doesn’t have any super-powers. He just didn’t believe it. Of course, all he really knows about Batman is that Lego game and a few episodes of The Animated Series; I’m hesitant to let him watch any of the Burton/Schumacher films, and no way he’s seeing Batman Begins or The Dark Knight.

Bruce Wayne has been running around in tights and cape for 70 years. Think about that for a moment. And the basic story hasn’t changed: a boy sees his parents murdered, then trains for years to become the ultimate crimefighter, and dons the bat costume to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers. Bob Kane wrote this in the 1930s, and Christopher Nolan told the same (but updated) story in 2005′s Batman Begins. It’s a perfect little origin story, as timeless as Robin Hood, King Arthur, Tarzan and Superman.

I’m not clear on why Bruce Wayne is being killed off in the wake of the character appearing in, oh, the biggest movie of all time (Dark Knight). But truth be told, there’s no way he’s staying dead. Superman didn’t stay dead. Green Lantern didn’t stay dead. Green Arrow didn’t stay dead. Bruce Wayne had his back snapped in the 90s, and a guy named Azrael took over the Bat-job, but then Bruce was healed and got back to work … nobody ever stays off the job in comics.

There used to be a saying: Only Bucky stays dead. Bucky was Captain America’s WWII sidekick, and he died in the closing days of the war. Marvel Comics insisted for decades that Bucky would never be revived the way every other character was (think Jean Grey).

Well, Captain America was killed earlier this year. A sniper shot the star-spangled Avenger dead. Soon, another man was fighting evil in the Captain America suit, with the Captain America shield … and it was fucking Bucky. Meanwhile, hints abound that the original didn’t die, or was cloned, or revived, or something, and it won’t be long before Steve Rogers is Captain America again. Maybe Bucky can die for good this time.

Shaking characters up like this is an interesting tradition. At one point in the 1980s, Marvel had different characters in the Iron Man, Captain America and Thor roles, with the originals off doing something else. It’s never permanent. It gets attention, it boosts sales for a bit, and then everyone gets excited when “the original” comes back. Think New Coke, Classic Coke, and you get what I’m saying.

So it’s pretty clear Bruce Wayne will be back in the cape and cowl before too long … probably before the next movie. Meanwhile, I’m hoping they give him a good, heroic death.

And I think the new Batman should be either Oliver Queen (Green Arrow), who would be a sensible, logical choice to assume the role of a detective, guardian and hero, or Ambush Bug, who could actually make me buy the comics again. Ambush Bug cracks me up.

Speaking of cracking up, I’m going to leave you with this panel from a 1960s Justice League of America comic, in which Batman makes the ultimate slip about how Robin fits into his world.