Word: reasonlies
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...Another reason for Edison's inability to hold on to 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...
...trying to invent a device that would permit telephone messages to be sent over telegraph lines, and was astonished to discover that the apparatus could record his own voice. Partly because the phonograph came so easily, he distrusted it enough to fail to capitalize on its moneymaking potential. (Another reason was that he had poor hearing and no real appreciation of music, and did not realize what a bonanza could be reaped by recording melodies...
...worse; the lawyers are all self-serving hypocrites; the cops all regard suspects as "scum." When criminals go to jail-usually on trumped-up charges-they invariably get murdered shortly after incarceration. Indeed, if the American hero of Midnight Express had come from Baltimore, there would have been no reason for him to escape the Turkish prison and return home...
...subtlety of this work is much better appreciated on the large screen than it is on the small, and for this compilation, Jones has cut pieces from 16 Road Runners together into a seamless super-chase. It is reason enough to attend this movie, but there are others. Among them are two classic Jones-supervised shorts, What's Opera, Doc?, a send-up of Walt Disney's Fantasia in which Bugs Bunny makes a ravishing Brunhilde opposite Elmer Fudd's stalwart Wagnerian hero. In Duck Amuck, Daffy Duck, whose specialty is egocentricity, suffers the indignity of having...