Word: melman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...baby boomers, the most marketed-to generation on record, are suddenly being ignored. They're still influencing design too, just not like they used to. With the kids off to college, "they're not buying a five-bedroom home in the suburbs anymore," says Steve Melman, director of economic services at the National Association of Home Builders. What they do increasingly want: compact, one-story homes that are easier to get around. KB is offering twice as many single-story layouts as it was a year...
...Escape 2 Africa, which is the surest money-getter this year short of an email to Obama supporters. The first film sent four denizens of New York City's Central Park Zoo - Alex the lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer) - across several seas to an island off Africa. Madagascar was Oz with even more monkeys. It was smart, sitcommy and nicely congested. The sequel is more of the agreeable, strenuous same...
...other zebras on the veldt, or at least he does to Alex - a critique of racial stereotyping that the movie doesn't push too hard. Gloria flirts with a studly hippo (voiced by a Barry White-esque Will.I.Am, who also provides a couple of sprightly songs) before surrendering to Melman's mopey, wussy devotion...
...Here's what you have to ask about scene stealers: Are they funnier than the star characters because they're not on screen as long? Alex, Marty, Gloria and Melman all have the heavy lifting of story lines; Julien and the penguins (and a couple of cranky monkeys who serve as the movie's Statler and Waldorf) have only to shake their shtick, deliver their bright lines and get off. (Also, they're smaller in stature, hence cuter.) Liberated from the burden of consciences or backstories or any recognizable feelings; they have no obligation to audiences other than to make...
...LONG AFTER DAVID Letterman discovered him in a student film, Calvert DeForest, reinvented as Larry (Bud) Melman, introduced the comic's first-ever late-night show on NBC in 1982. The earnest ex--file clerk went on to become Dave's fumbling, inadvertently hilarious lucky charm. Before retiring in 2003, he covered the 1994 Olympics in Norway, mock hawked products like Toast on a Stick and greeted tourists with hot towels at New York City's seedy Port Authority bus terminal...