Wimpy is for Hamburgers, Not Americans

I’ve always thought of myself as a tough American male. Granted, I never went into the military service, nor have I ever fired a gun heavier than what the good Lord gave me at birth; but I’ve driven the freeways of Los Angeles at night, fought off the wheel-chaired crowds on Black Friday, and suffered through enough blind dates with professional virgins to produce stigmata.

Toughness. I’ve walked the aisles of gun shows in fatigues with an unsmiling face and clenched fist looking for semi automatic super-soakers; been tattooed by near sighted artists (I still have URE MOMA in a place only a double jointed gymnastic could wash properly); and researched enough urban lingo to ask a white clerk in a Sioux Falls, South Dakota Wal-Mart whether the store sold 50 Cents' Straight to the Bank as a single.

Toughness. I gave rocks to peaceniks next to me to throw at National Guardsmen during my years at Wisconsin, had my girlfriend purchase condoms when the check-out counter was manned by a female, and refused to purchase a Rolex on the streets of New York unless the guy from Somalia produced a bill of authenticity.

Toughness. I’ve attended enough court-ordered opera and ballet performances to qualify for anger management credit and sat through every foo-foo French film where two women kissed each other in bath tubs for no apparent reason. I’ve run up the Laurel and Hardy stairs in Silverlake, yet refused all CPR or hospitalization care afterward. I’ve walked down Hollywood Blvd at 1 AM looking for the John Bunny Walk of Fame star (1715 Vine). I know from toughness.

So I was somewhat confused by my sudden wave of wimpification this morning. I actually passed on my normal breakfast of a burnt piece of toast and a rotten egg. Then I remembered I had fallen asleep in front of the television last night watching Fox News.

Fox News has saved me from being a non-muscled star on MSNBC’s Lock-Up for years. Whenever too much testosterone courses through these old plaque-congealed arteries, I don’t rush out and shoot up the neighborhood or pick fights with older arthritic women waiting in line at the local salad bar. I sit down with a glass of saltpeter and watch Fox News, where every segment concerns Armageddon in your backyard, toxic threats in your front yard, and human malignancies coming at you from every direction. I get so shook up I forget to leave my apartment. The 24/7 fear factor is so acute that yesterday I had 48 cases of beer delivered to sustain me throughout the long Memorial Day weekend.

Today’s scare de jure is the closing of Hotel Gitmo and how western civilization will collapse like Rome against Odoacer in 476A.D., if these prisoners end up on real American soil. Last week, the cause of our extinction was Swine Flu, the week before it was Obama and socialism and before that it was Obama and --- (fill in the blank). Where to put all the un-indicted co-conspirators picked up God only knows where for who knows what reason has everyone in Congress pulling out their out-sourced backbones and scrubbing away their Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, and George Patton July 4th State Fair vocabularies.

Not since post Larry Craig, when both genders in Congress refused to use public urinals within a 500 mile radius of the Twin Cities, has their been so much male wimpiness and outright terror amongst our representatives. I thought guys from Montana and Nevada and Kentucky were born with steel ones. I dissected a frog in ninth grade with larger "nads" than these guys. Then I was told by Mr. Olson, my biology teacher, that what I was examining were ovaries.

Men who look manly enough to whip any Waldorf salad with or without croutons; who are virile enough to stand tall and justify not giving the average American the same sort of health benefits they automatically receive; and who bathe daily in the poisonous waters of Lake Pharisaism, with its dual undertows of hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness, suddenly become like a bunch of frightened three year-olds in a bedroom without a night light.

A 24 hour marathon session of Lock-Ups is video proof that our current Supermax prisons are simply too laid-back to hold these Gitmo ghouls. The current prison population of rapists, murderers, skin-heads, pedophiles, arsonists, and Central American drug lords is no match for any group that can withstand 24/7 viewings of American Idol audition tapes from Sheboygan. These toughs make Lex Luthor and the Joker look like comic book villains. Only New York cabbies act tougher and are angrier.

Now I’m not Brandeis, but doesn't securing any of these cutthroats in anything other than a military prison or naval brig force us under law to go through all of that bothersome Perry Mason/Judge Judy stuff. Why bother? Who are they going to complain to? I don’t even want to do jury duty unless I can give someone the chair.

I remember some pantywaist bleeding heart liberal from Arkansas telling me decades ago that he used to live close to an WWII German POW’s camp. Hogwash, I told him. Then I did some investigation and discovered that during the Second World War this country housed some 400 thousand Axis POW’s in about 500 separate camps.

Several Christmases ago, instead of receiving from my Wisconsin admirers another polar fleece sweater for the sub-zero Los Angeles winters, what should Santa deliver but a fascinating book about my home state: Stalag Wisconsin by Betty Cowley. Who would have thunk that America's Dairyland held sway to over 20 thousand German and Japanese soldiers in 38 branch camps? A number of these men refused repatriation after the war, deciding instead to wait in line to secure perpetual season seats at Packer games.

Lately we've been told that Nazis and Fascists were weak-kneed weenies compared to the Al-Qaeda threat. WWII produced the “greatest generation” where big balls became so mandatory that even capons and mules were required to grow a pair. But followers of an organization that can wreck the world of English spelling by simply refusing to follow a Q with a U shakes the very foundations of who we are. We're not equipped for such psychic intimidation. Is it any wonder after 9-11 our generation was told to go on vacation or the terrorists would win? Instead of Pearl Harbor, we went instead to Sag Harbor.

As none of our super-max prisons are anything other than playgrounds, perhaps Congress might favor these guys on American soil if we wrapped everything up with a little bit of historical bunting and made a profit out of it: Quarantine them in an Andersonville or a Camp Douglas. These names are more American than Guantanamo. The possibility of a privately run gift store enhances its marketability, as would daily tour groups where tourists could feed the prisoners non-pork products. I think Fox and Friends would kvell over this suggestion except for the pork products stuff.

Excelsior! Turn me sideways and slap me with marmalade. Thank goodness for my comic book collection. I knew something was not right in tough guy land. Why would NRA members of Congress act and sound as if none had ever held a fully automatic weapon in their hands? Or lose their courage like some punk asses waiting to ride the Cyclone at Coney Island? Or put their cojones in moth balls (is that redundant?)? What weren't we being told?

It’s now become as clear as the picture of these ovaries I just downloaded. The pundits with their pint-sized pecs, consistently so wrong on so many subjects for so long a period of time have been sending us masked signals: Beware these imprisoned aliens for good reason. The answer like all of life's meanings emanates from both the Marvel Universe, X-Men in particular and Tolkien.

Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp is a government front, a rouse, a black ops illusion. Blow away the smoke. Gitmo is actuality Genosha, the existence of which was first broken in Uncanny X-Men #235 (October 1988) by investigative reporters Chris Claremont and Rick Leonardi. The characters the ACLU want loose to traipse along the boarded up shops of Main Street aren’t ordinary run of the mill super terrorists. They're far worse than that. In the language of Arda, Al Quada means "mutant".

Yes, those mutants with the X chromosome. Unless kept behind mutant secure bars (none of which currently exist in any Supermax), these forces would align themselves with the likes of Magneto, Mr. Sinister, and possibly even Apocalypse and go after the Justice League of America or the snot-nosed Teen Titans. Well screw that. Other than Batman, there isn’t a single member of the JLA team that has a decent movie franchise going so what sort of fight would that be.

Gitmo isn’t a prison run by the Navy or Marines. The individuals keeping us safe from thugs that can read our minds, dissolve metals, shoot lasers from their eyes, levitate buildings, turn rivers into concrete among other powers are thankfully named Punchout, Pipeline, Wipeout, and Hawkshaw. Thank God for the Press Gang and the Magistrates. They might not be as tough as Seals or Army Rangers, but they have really cool names.

Now that I've put all the pieces together, I feel less sweaty about my future. I understand why Congress, the President, Fox News and the bubble safe Washington punditry class want to keep Genosha open. They're not protecting us from mortals. They're protecting us from bad mutants. I can't wait to call up Moira MacTaggert and tell her of my conclusions. Perhaps afterwards we can head off to the Troubadour. I hear the Acolytes are performing tonight their number one hit, "Legacy Virus". But first I have to reseal my Days of Future Past and Fall of the Mutants issues for they do speak the truth.

Disney Has Found Its Eighth Dwarf

Once upon a time there were some miners named Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, and Doc, and, of course, Dopey. They were the Seven Dwarfs that helped to create the Disney Empire. They were short. They were industrious. They were male.

Today, Disney uses a new group of dwarfs to help fashion their empire. They don't have funny iconic names, but they do have eyes that see the obvious and ears that hear the sound of checks being written out to them.

Disney was one of the few animation studios that missed my talented demeanor and droopy-eyed approach to programming, especially boy-centric programming. Now it appears that that boat hasn't so much left me at the dock as sunk in the harbor. Us old diggers who rooted out transcendent ideas as if they were subterranean fungi are now as current as, let me see, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride or the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Submarine Voyage. A new breed of creative development executives now gallops across the company's TV landscape: the raging anthropologist and the wily psychologist. Their job: to find out where Disney's lost boys have gone.

The Toon Disney into Disney XD transformation is too complicated and messy to explain in a family friendly blog. I try to remain upbeat and entertaining throughout my writings here. Some news items simply set me down into my own inner space adventures. I'll let this article and this article act as an E ticket ride to bring the reader up to snuff.

I produced more methane reading this particular New York Times article than half the dairy herds in Wisconsin emit in a week. Maybe that's the reason I don't bring newspapers to social events. Apparently Disney TV can't attract boys to its live action and animation programming because… well that's what these new hunters and gathers have been called in to find out. Disney XD has lost its XY.

Disney owned the boys TV market at one time, with Davy Crockett and Zorro and Spin and Marty and The Hardy Boys; but that was so long ago most of America's Interstate Highways were still being numbered odd or even. Those programs were all action-packed, and adventure-oriented, with great characters, plenty of bonehead humor and storylines that made you wish you were part of the proceedings. I wonder if Walt Disney ever asked any of his subordinates to gather themselves up some focus groups to see how long a raccoon tail Davy Crockett's hat should have?

I was part of the Fox Kids team in the '90s that reinvented Saturday morning, developing programming that attracted both genders quite easily. We blew away the competition with Batman, X-Men, Spiderman, Goosebumps, and a re-versioned Beatlejuice. We created the fabled 6-17 demographic, the first time ever that a salesman could sell advertising to such a vast kid market skew. None of us were professional academics, brand consultants, marketing mavens, or long term strategic thinkers. We were rank and file executives who knew story, understood our audience, and most importantly, worked around equally talented writers, storyboard artists, directors, and voice talent. The only time I ever heard the word "focus" was at my ophthalmologist.

Yet now the Rosetta Stone for attracting boys is a ratty Black Sabbath tee shirt. Black Sabbath has been around longer than Stonehenge. I'm not following how Ozzy Osbourne biting off the head of a bat helps configure a show for Disney, but then I don't have a degree in marketing.

If Aaron Stone succeeds, it is not because he is a mediocre hoop player, but rather because he's a normal kid thrust into the role of a superhero – an example of wish fulfillment attractive to both genders. I'm still dreaming of being bitten by a radioactive spider, though lately the only things biting me are villainous creditors.

Forgive me, Lord, for I am about to sin, but I don't know any man who would ever utter something as blatantly moronic as this line: “Winning isn’t nearly as important to boys as Hollywood thinks.”

Really!!!!!Get back to me with various examples because my testosterone-fueled mind can't conjure up one.

Oh, and one other item from this insipid article merits some commentary:

You, the executive VP of Research at MTV: Don't rewrite history! What were you, two years-old when Fox Kids was handing the competition its lunch on barbed wire doilies? We wrote the history on revamping a day-part that was by that time deader than heaven on a Saturday night. You guys just added additional chapters to the logic already established.

Defending Wolverine and the X-Men

Watching last night’s premiere of "Wolverine and the X-Men" reminded me once again of an egotistically stupid argument I had nearly twenty years ago. It forever ruined a friendship.

By early 1993, the Fox Kids Network (FKN) was well on its way to becoming the number one place for kids on Saturday morning. From a rather forgettable beginning in 1990, FKN had, with careful programming choices and a keen understanding of the changing children’s marketplace, catapulted itself into a position of ratings dominance over the other three broadcast networks. Two shows truly magnetized the viewers to FKN: "Batman, the Animated Series." which premiered in September, 1992 and "X-Men: The Animated Series." which began its the regular episodic run in January, 1993. I was the network executive in charge of both of them. "Power Rangers" would not make its juggernaut presence felt until September, 1993.

The success of FKN defied the pundits. They argued that the idea of a fourth network on Saturday morning was a very foolish, financially stupid proposition. Fox Television was having enough worries in the late 80's with their prime time schedule: Why add to their headaches with series from a time period already smelling like a musty relic?

Kids had been abandoning Saturday morning for years; advertisers were putting their top dollars into the toy-based children's syndication marketplace. Rumors abounded that all three networks were tired of the kids business and wanted out. The overall ratings were decreasing from year to year; the chronic lack of any substantial hits made jettisoning this daypart that much more appealing.

Pitching children’s programming to the three networks during the 70s and 80s was akin to being pistol-whipped, hog-tied, body-slammed, ridden hard and hung out wet -- and then saying "thank you" afterwards. Independent producers pitched to executives who had been glued to their positions for centuries: While pleasant enough individuals over a martini, they all failed to recognize the changing landscape brought on by syndication, video games, and the slow inexorable rise of cable. Kids were doing other things on Saturday mornings than waiting around to watch cartoons.

While "Scooby Doo" might have worked in the 70’s to attract viewers, it was more Scooby Don't by the mid to late 80’s: Don’t bring us anything that was too boy, too girl, too hip, not hip enough, too well-known, too unknown, too personality driven, not personality driven enough. In the end, the program homogenization was so safe one could store the family jewels within it.

Thanks to the National Association of Broadcasters decision to disband its Code Authority Board in 1983, advertisers suddenly found themselves bereft of any moral scruples, let alone any self-regulating obstacles to introducing toys, candy, and other enticements into the now free wheeling marketplace of children’s programming. A once-a-week offering of "Dungeons and Dragons" or "Muppet Babies" or "Saved by the Bell" was not competitive when advertisers could get more eyeballs with a Monday through Friday series of "GI Joe," "Gobots," "My Little Pony," "Jem," or "Strawberry Shortcake."

Throughout that time, parents and pressure groups were constantly confusing the toy-based syndication programming seen Monday through Friday -- and conveniently airing right before and right after school -- with that of Saturday morning fare.

Well enough of the boring minutiae. The argument was all about the X-Men in general and Wolverine in particular. What better place to have a donnybrook than at a festive children's television industry luncheon? Over some rubber chicken and rock-hard boiled potatoes, the conversation turned to the Fox Kid's Network's sudden rise in popularity.

I knew why we were successful: The design of our comedy shows was hipper, the writing was funnier, the editing was brisker. The action shows were beautifully constructed, wonderfully animated, and the story-telling was sophisticated and multi-layered. Our programs were classier and had more kid appeal than the retreads on the other networks. I thought the case was obvious.

No, my friend argued, the reason Fox was winning the Saturday morning ratings war was due to the lack of any decent broadcast standards and practices. The action shows on FKN were all but running red with blood and gore. Wolverine was a psychopath who had no business being on Saturday morning kids' television: What were we trying to do, turn every boy into a unbridled lunatic? The Fox success was based on how much we had bent the normal network rules of censorship. She questioned whether we had even hired any broadcast standards people at all.

She called "X-Men" a cheat, a show her network would never put on the air. The stories were too adult, too frightening, and incomprehensible for children. The irresponsibility of airing this program and saying we had a legitimate Broadcast Standards and Practices (BS&P) department was, to this person, a mind-boggling lie, and she said I should be ashamed of myself.

Of course we had a BS&P department. Fox Broadcasting was a legitimate network. Rupert Murdoch would not have had it any other way. The key difference was our BS&P officials had not been born in the 19th century. They weren't old biddies scared of their bloomers flapping in the wind. Our BS&P people were younger, smarter, and far more attuned to the goings on in the marketplace than their ancient counterparts at the other three networks.

Did they let us get away with more? Hardly. We could stage action sequences more forcefully and have our heroes in more jeopardy and dispatch our villains with more clever means; but no, there were no punches to faces, no torture sequences, no ongoing cries of pain by either hero or villain, no dispatching anyone permanently, no blood ever, no pointing of realistic armaments at anyone, no first person shooter points of view, and definitely no blowing up anything other than robots and vacant buildings. Any planes, trains, and automobiles involved in mayhem were empty upon impact -- piloted by robots, or safely brought down with no loss of anything except animation time. The list was endless. We knew the rules. We played by them. We made exciting programming viewed by millions.

I found her remarks stunning. Her network was spiraling downward faster on Saturday mornings than my GPA did during science classes. The shows on her network had, over years, become formulaic, slow, and tediously timed and edited. I told her that no animated human characters were hurt during the making of any of our boys' action adventure shows. She did not seem amused.

Even back then I was more worried about the continuing presence of 24/7 cable concerns like Disney, Cartoon Network and NICK, not the feeble competition of the other broadcasters. Cable was the wave of the future for children’s programming. Funny I wasn’t smart enough to ever get a position with any of the new comers.

I tossed out a few quips to lighten up the conversation: Her programming was so bad it drove kids outdoors faster than anything other the San Francisco Earthquake. Her shows were so bad kids begged their parents to drive them back to school. Watching her schedule could bring any kid down from a sugar rush. Okay, none of my quips were A material; they were churlish, I admit; but I was working extemporaneously and when I do, I rarely think before I speak.

Cooler heads eventually prevailed and we went back to eating and networking.

We never spoke again after that day.


Coming soon: My thoughts on the NICKTOONS, "Wolverine and the X-Men" series.

Sidney Iwanter begins to blog

I’m a boy who spent his formative years bicycling around taverns, drunks, prostitutes, late night poker games, homeless bums, abandoned buildings, scrap yards, poultry slaughter houses, algae-filled lakes, and murder sites, all the while bothering lonely old Mediterranean and Eastern European immigrants with chants of "feed me please." "Greenbush" was the name of the area, an old world refuge for some, but a smoldering eyesore to those who really mattered in Madison. Located an embarrassingly close distance from the State Capitol Building, The Greenbush Area beckoned to be redeveloped.

By the time I began pedaling the streets and back alleys and learning how to spit professionally on sidewalks, little greenery remained outside of the well-tended backyards of fruit trees and vegetable gardens. Most bushes especially along West Washington Blvd were soaked brown or dead by the pee of the intoxicated. The park across the street was vile and dangerous, filled with unsavory people performing acts that I still can't locate videos of to download. Lake Monona had more dead fish wash ashore on a daily basis than were caught by local fishermen. The Brittingham Park Shelter never smelled anything short of a dozen clogged outhouses. I peed in the park bushes rather than step inside that building. Yes, I admit it. I helped deforest the Greenbush enclave as well.

The Greenbush was eventually redeveloped in the late 1950s (my family migrated several blocks west at the end of that decade). By the early 1960s,the destruction of the community was complete, with most buildings razed and the old time occupants tossed into the wind like so many dead leaves.

But this blog is not about the Greenbush neighborhood, although psychologically speaking I don't really believe I ever walked away from the place. I hope one day some enterprising Ph.D. student meanders through the old files and photos and compiles a true history of that area bordering West Washington, Regent and South Park. For those who can't wait there is always the Greenbush Cultural Tour website as well as well as the 32 page pamphlet entitled "The Spirit of Greenbush" which can be borrowed from the Madison Public Library.

I've set this blog up for several reasons. One, I think it's really cool. I can pontificate and bloviate and hyperventilate about subjects I know nothing about and be part of the blogging "in crowd" -- even though the "in crowd" now numbers in the tens of millions.

Secondly, I plan to place online all my concepts, proposals, and show ideas now languishing on my hard drive. It does me no good to keep them hidden, locked away in some digital attic like the first wife in Jane Eyre. I've spent most of my adult life in children's television programming as part of a team developing some great shows like X-MEN, BATMAN, SPIDERMAN,and GOOSEBUMPS along with some terrible ones like...well never mind. Companies are disappearing. Markets are shrinking. Consolidate or die. The motto is no longer 54-40 or fight. It's go global before going postal.

These live-action and cartoon ideas are open to anyone who wants to read them. Don't worry. The PDF files are not fifty page behemoths, the likes of which I read by the carload when I was both a development executive and network programmer. Those days are long gone. Today, we are all dues-paying members of the ADD society or paid in full subscribers to short-term attention span theater. So they are short, sweet, and hopefully enjoyable.

Am I scared of being ripped off? No: They're all copyrighted. I’m more frightened of a committed relationship than intellectual property theft. I suppose villains can abscond with my concepts, call them their own, and make zillions of dollars in licensing and merchandising off of them. But this is a sadistic game. Doing that would deprive producers of opportunities for kicking me around and forcing me to rewrite everything a dozen times. Just like I used to do.

By exploiting my ideas this way, I can remain out of the room and forestall watching executives fall asleep, play with their Blackberries, yawn, spill coffee on themselves, put on make-up, receive calls from frantic nannies, boyfriends,and upper level management. I would no longer need to correct anyone hailing me as either Seymour or Stanley because my first name, like the city in Australia, is so difficult to pronounce.

I started in children’s programming when there were but three broadcast networks. I am thankful for this occupation, for it has allowed me to remain an emotional twelve-year old for much of my adult existence. Is it any wonder that my favorite book is Peter Pan? Friends will definitely attest to that -- and then not invite me anywhere for fear I will embarrass them in restaurants where cutlery is mandatory.

I still view the world as a 7th grader, forever chased down high school hallways by a principal out to lock me away in the big house for crimes no one has any proof I committed. Accusing me of exploding the boy's toilets with a cache of M80's. Now why would I do that? Probably for the same reason I know a simpleton stupid enough to see what would happen when a warm tongue licks a street lamp pole in 20 below temperatures.