Word: greats
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...make money; when he died in 1931 he left an estate of more than $2 million. Not bad for the depths of the Great Depression, but a puny sum compared with what a good businessman could have realized from Edison's inventions. Part of the reason for Edison's failure to capitalize on his own ideas was his fanatic resistance to any attempts to modify them. He insisted for too long that his cylinders made better recording devices than the more practical discs, and, because he had worked with direct current, he fought the introduction of alternating current...
...money was his extravagance. He excelled at raising venture capital (J.P. Morgan helped to bankroll his effort to invent the electric light), but had a genius for spending even more than he raised. Not on himself; his oddball personal habits were far from extravagant. But no sum was too great to lavish on his laboratories; Edison ordered the most expensive materials on earth, like platinum, by the pound. He was also the creator of the modern research and development lab, which he called an "invention factory." He was the first to hire a team of scientists and technicians...
Outlandish as it may seem, it is possible that some day Animator Chuck Jones may come to be regarded as the American Buñuel. Like the Spanish master, Jones finds his great subject in obsession, and he understands that finally, all truly memorable comedy results from observing creatures caught helplessly in the grip of irrational, inexplicable passions. Buñuel's obsessives are all sexually motivated; Jones' great creation, Wile E. Coyote, has a loftier theme: the annihilation of that uncannily shrewd nemesis the Road Runner...
Like Laurel and Hardy (to invoke just two other great names), this team specializes in a comedy of severely limited means. There is basically only one gag: the Coyote thinks up ever more elaborate schemes to fell the bird that never wert, and the attempts always backfire. But what makes old Wile E. an immortal figure is what is known in the trade as "character animation"-those marvelously rendered expressions of confidence, cunning, determination, frustration and panic as he finds either the huge rock falling on him or himself falling off the cliff, while the bird scoots off across...
...Bugs as a host-narrator. His specialty was one-liners, and a mouthful of words ill suits his style. But why quibble? Jones was a latecomer to the unpretentious, slam-bang Warner Bros, animation department, and if he did not invent most of the studio's great cartoon stars, he brought the house manner to its finest flowering, less elaborate than Disney's, but often far funnier. This modest retrospective provides a fine occasion to salute an American original working in a medium that will never get its critical due, but continues to exercise a mighty claim...