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 "The Bounty Hunter" |
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 Megacon 2010 |
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 Saturday Horrors on USA Network |
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 A Shift in Focus |
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 Poetic Justice .... Movie Notes .... If I May Brag For One Moment .... .... .... .... .... .... Mike's Record Shelf
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Assistant Editor / Co-moderator: Terence Nuzum
Established A.D. 2000, March 19. Now in our eleventh calendar year!
Number 521 (Vol. 11, No. 12). This edition is for the week of March 15--21, 2010.
Ten Years Later I've told the story so many times. But here, during the week this online publication actually turns ten years old, I guess it bears repeating.
I secured the domain name of "CrazedFanboy.com" in mid-December 1999, before I even owned a computer. I knew nothing about building websites and very little about the internet itself. Heck, even email was a bit of a mystery.
Then one magic day, Steve whipped up what in retrospect was likely an MS Word document, made up to look like a website homepage...with "Crazed Fanboy" at the top. NOW I got it! My vision started to coalesce. I used Adam's computer to purchase the domain Crazed Fanboy (the name came out of nowhere, really, I might've seen the term in a comics fanzine caption or something). All this was in November-December '99.
By February of 2000, I was on AOL with my own computer. The first "The World of Nolan, Friends and Family Homepage" debuted on or about February 15th, using the AOL web-building tool called Easy Designer. It was hosted on AOL Hometown that, sadly, is no longer in existence.
By March I started fooling around with the idea of an online magazine. I always loved fan magazines and thought it would be a natural progression to do a magazine-like website, but I never thought it would go any further than some crude experiments for a few weeks while I got the hang of it. Nolan's Newsstand was born right about March 19th (the date reverse-engineered from server timestamps of the day) with Mike Smith (The Rant) and Matt Drinnenberg (The Rail) already onboard. By issue number 16 we had become Nolan's Pop Culture Review. PCR (as it's known for short) became permanently hosted on Crazed Fanboy by 2003. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Of course, I didn't go the next ten years alone. The contributions of the wonderfully talented people who helped me build this website are housed in the Archives forever. To those who were there at the beginning (Mr. Smith), or near the beginning (Mssrs. Moriaty and Nuzum), and are still here today, I am especially indebted. ED Tucker, Lisa Scherer, Chris Woods, and Jason Fetters, the latter-day saints of Crazed Fanboy, have helped forge an even stronger homebase for you, the loyal reader, to continue your explorations of fandom and popular culture.
Chris Woods' weekly PCR Memorable Moments at top left of this section should help illustrate to new readers some of our best issues. For long-time readers, it'll be a re-visit to favorite stories. There's a lot of good stuff in there.
Thanks, everyone. Here's to the next ten years!
Trying to leave the PCR 10-year anniversary at pagetop is why I'm putting these latter, end-of-the-week additional thoughts underneath. I mean no disrespect temporarily reversing my usual latest-on-top protocol.
Peter Graves left us almost a week ago at age 83. A legend in fan circles for justifiably obvious reasons, like TV's Mission: Impossible and Hollywood's Airplane movie. I've always felt an actor with the tremendous amount of credibiity like he had, deserved, as was frequently given, narrating assignments, which, to me, ratcheted up a serious notch the credibility of the program material he was narrating. Anything from A&E's Biography to lighter-hearted paranormal fare like The Mysterious Monsters (1976, the latter-type spoofed on SNL by Phil Hartman), always benefitted from the ultra-serious basso profundo voice of Peter Graves. To my memory, only Rod Serling, Walter Cronkite, and later, Robert Stack could boast equal credentials at making the blending of fact and speculation so fun and interesting. Peter Graves will be sorely missed.
The Letter by The Box Tops was one of the first songs I learned to play on guitar and sing along to. I confess that, outside of that, at the time of his greatest popularity, I was only at best a casual fan of Alex Chilton and his bands The Box Tops and Big Star. My memory is one of an edgy pop-folk singer (not my thing), but I appreciated his John Lennon-like vocal qualities in his years with Big Star. And his anthemic "In The Street" that wound up being the theme for That 70's Show became a latter-day favorite of mine (and Cheap Trick covered it nicely). He had a lot of fans among the alternative set and his influences will echo for a long time. He was 59.
Which brings me to Fess Parker, ol' Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone himself (himselves?) who just passed on to the great frontier in the sky at the age of 85. Though Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone were basically the same character (basically Parker himself wearing a coonskin cap) they played out in two different eras in history and two different decades on TV, although not by all that much in either case (TV's Crockett mid-50s, Boone mid-'60s). While an adult baby-boomer (like Ye Olde Editor) may confuse the two shows occasionally due to their similarities, no boomer worth his salt could forget the themes to both shows. Daveeeeeeey....Daaaaavey Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier..., or Daniel Boone was a man....he was a biiiiiiiiig man. Wow, even the sustained vowels are similar! (Though at 6' 6", Parker was a big man!) In any event, for those who want to know...I never owned a coonskin cap. Or if I did, I don't remember it. I recently re-discovered Daniel Boone through RetroTV. It has Disney-like qualities, but unlike Davey Crockett was not produced by Disney but by Parker himself under the name "FessPar Productions" in both black & white and color episodes. Ed Ames played his Indian buddy with an English accent, haha, but Michael Rennie would occasionally show up as Redcoat Major Peter Wellington. Cool stuff. Parker left show business after 1974's The Fess Parker Show to pursue other interests like wine-making and resort development. He was a part of TV's Golden Age and will be sorely missed.
The Tenth Anniversary of PCR
R.I.P. Peter Graves, Alex Chilton, and Fess Parker
Readers' Comments
NOLAN'S POP CULTURE REVIEW CELEBRATES TEN YEARS ON THE WEB THIS WEEK! MARCH 19, 2000--MARCH 19, 2010
POSTED BY NOLAN B. CANOVA, TUESDAY MARCH 16, 2010
Other than seeing a bit of WebTV with some close friends, my only "tutoring" up to that point had been by way of Steve Beasley and his brother Adam. They let me mess with their computers and surf the internet just long enough to get a feel for what all the fuss regarding computers and viewing websites was all about. For about two weeks, I surfed quite a bit, entering into the browser every URL I'd ever memorized from radio, TV shows, and magazines. I liked it a lot.
As submitted by PCR writers, compiled by Chris Woods
CRAZED FANBOY'S ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY
From 2001, Crazed Fanboy and PCR's one year anniversary issue. Also featuring Deadguy's Dementia by Mike Scott where he talks about horror and sci-fi movie news and Terence's Tirade from Terence Nuzum where he talks about his battles at Public Access.
R.I.P. PETER GRAVES, ALEX CHILTON, AND FESS PARKER
POSTED BY NOLAN B. CANOVA, FRIDAY MARCH 19, 2010
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