Word: cartoon
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...miraculous has become mundane. Nothing new there: it is in the nature of pop culture to allow the vagrant innovation, then stretch it into a trend by pounding it into a formula. In the Disney cartoon "renaissance," the excitement of the first ones, from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King, ultimately faded, whether the studio stuck to the master plan (as in the 1997 Hercules) or tried to stretch it (as in the new Atlantis the Lost Empire...
...kills rogue male villain, vindicates visionary dead male ancestor. (Can't an action hero ever have a mother fixation?) Atlantis adroitly mixes 2-D and 3-D animation but is short on emotional heft and depth. It would be Disney's rotten luck this summer if its big-budget cartoon loses the tween market to an inferior live-action film with a boy-pleasing secret ingredient. Tomb Raider is Atlantis...
...officially end in August when Bozo, the country's longest-running kids' TV character, goes off the air in Chicago, the last city where he still takes pratfalls. With its relentlessly slapsticky approach to entertaining kids, and competition from edgier children's fare on channels like Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network, "this type of programming is a dinosaur," says Joey D'Auria, a former stand-up comic who has played Bozo on Chicago's WGN since 1984. The station's general manager, John Vitanovec, calls cancellation of the low-rated show "strictly a strategic decision...
...voice was no Bronx cheer; he was soft-spoken and thoughtful and said that he never heard Archie Bunkerisms growing up in his well-off childhood home. An accomplished journeyman stage and film actor, O'Connor made Archie into a character - dry and operatic, hateful and touching - where a cartoon would have sufficed. It would have been easy to make Archie a caricature (and he was one) or a straw man (he was that too). It would have been easy to make audiences laugh at him or dislike him. Dozens of actors could have made Archie Bunker a punch line...
DIED. HANK KETCHAM, 81, creator of the impish cartoon character Dennis the Menace and his crotchety neighbor Mr. Wilson; in Pebble Beach, Calif. Ketcham conceived the strip in October 1950 after his own mischievous four-year-old, named Dennis, caused his exasperated mother to exclaim to Ketcham, "Your son is a menace!" (Father and son were later estranged.) In 1951 Ketcham began drawing the strip, which ran for 50 years in 1,000 newspapers and 48 countries...