rubbercat.net

March 26, 2012

slimeIn all the recent furor over pink slime, we’ve completely neglected green slime! Here is former You Can’t Do That On Television co-creator Geoffrey Darby describing the origin of the green slime that became synonymous with Nickelodeon:

We went to the cafeteria and got them to give us a bucket of slop.

We said, “We want you to take all the stuff that’s left on plates over the whole day and put it in this bucket.” And then we were going to dump it on the kid so that it looked like if he pulled the chain, sewage would come out.

We didn’t get around to shooting the scene because you can’t go into overtime with children. It’s against the law. If you don’t get the scene, you don’t get the scene. We didn’t get it shot.

So we put the set up again the following week to shoot that one scene…

slimeThe prop man came to me – literally, this is a completely true story – and said, “There’s a problem.” The problem was that he didn’t get a new bucket of slop. He just kept the old one back stage. There was about eight to ten inches of green crud. Growing. It had grown on the top of this bucket of… stuff. There was mold.

So, we had to get the scene, right? We couldn’t get more slop, because we couldn’t! I said, “Dump… it… on… the… kid… anyway.”

And that’s how green slime was invented.

Mathew Klickstein of Splitsider has been doing a series of posts on the origins of early Nickeldeon shows – “Nick of Time” I guess is the title – including interviews with the people behind Doug, Pete & Pete, and Clarissa Explains It All. You should definitely give them a read.

March 26, 2012

RUBBERCAT.NET/SIMPSONS

Simpsons scoop of the month… I managed to confirm that comedian and former Simpsons writer Dana Gould is NOT a murderer.

March 19, 2012
the war on pundits

New Anthropomorphic Republican Talking Duck comic: The War On Pundits
March 19, 2012

I’m going through my collection of old saved magazines, trying to cull it down to something reasonable. Some findings:

  • There’s a Newsweek from 2002 that mentions myspace.com – not MySpace the social network, but its previous incarnation as an online storage locker.
  • It’s cool how many cartoonists whose work I was introduced to by the pages of Nickelodeon Magazine: Kaz, Tony Millionaire, Sam Henderson, Michael Kupperman, Johnny Ryan, Ellen Forney, R. Sikoryak, Kim Deitch, among others. Here’s a Kupperman strip from 1998… I knew I remembered Citobor from somewhere prior to Snake ‘n’ Bacon’s Cartoon Cavalcade
  • I still have a big collection of teen girl magazines that I was using as source material for an abandoned zine project. I’m hesitant to throw them out in case I ever decide to resurrect that project, or to use in other projects. And I’m not sure if teen girl magazines even exist anymore so it’s a finite commodity. We’ll see.
March 14, 2012

New York Times: AOL Slashes Staff at AIM Unit; Wider Cuts Expected:

Two employees familiar with the Instant Messenger group operation said the company now has close to $50 million a year in revenue from the product.

AIM makes money? News to me. I know the regular clients have ads but I assume a significant percentage of users now use a multi-protocol client without ads like Trillian or Adium or Digsby or Meebo or iChat. Though Apple probably pays licensing fees to include AIM in iChat.

March 13, 2012
rubbercat.net traffic for March 2012

Well, this rubbercat.net/simpsons article from September got linked on reddit yesterday, and the huge influx of traffic brought down the whole site for a while. I had to shell out some money for additional bandwidth (:-(). A first.

March 10, 2012
Fun Facts Gleamed From Wookiepedia

There’s a planet named after Jon Stewart and a guy retroactively named after Conan O’Brien, and this is Canon

March 9, 2012

MOVIE TRIVIA!!!

The Matrix (1999) was originally conceived as a Muppet Show sketch wherein Kermit and the gang discover they’re being controlled by strings
March 6, 2012

minutemanRemember W Ketchup? It’s a brand of ketchup that came out in 2004 when John Kerry, husband of a Heinz heiress, became the Democratic nominee, so conservatives could have a ketchup that aligns with their political ideology. Yesterday, I wondered aloud whether it’s still around, and to my surprise, it is. Not only that, but they recently endorsed Ron Paul for president. We live in a world where condiments make presidential endorsements. I’ll wait for Miracle Whip to weigh in before I make any decisions.

March 5, 2012

The Huffington Post:

AOL, the parent company of The Huffington Post, has become the eighth advertiser to pull its money from Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated radio program since he called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, who spoke out in favor of contraception coverage, a “slut” and a “prostitute” last week, according to a high-level Huffington Post source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, but with a distinctly Greek accent.

Heh, heh… nicely played, I get the reference… I know exactly who that source is: AOL founder Steve Case

March 4, 2012

Did you know that CNN has a thing called CNN Airport that they play in airport terminals? Imagine having a layover at the airport and watching CNN and then right before a commercial break Wolf Blitzer teases an upcoming news story that you’re interested in hearing about, like for example the death of Andrew Breitbart, and so you stay watching for 20 minutes before realizing that the story will never come because this isn’t actually CNN, it’s just occasionally CNN interspersed between a bunch of worthless commercial-like “interest” stories about travel destinations, and so you’ve just wasted 20 minutes of your valuable time, and you can’t check the internet to read about the news because for some inexplicable reason the airport doesn’t have free wi-fi and there’s no way you’re going to plunk down 5 whole bucks for an hour’s worth of internet. Anyway, how’s by you?