Word: spielbergisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...daytime TV, where crudely animated action toys have long dominated the scene, the level of competition -- and quality -- has never been higher. Steven Spielberg and Warner Bros. have joined forces to produce Tiny Toon Adventures, featuring kiddie counterparts of famous Looney Tunes characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. The weekday series, debuting in September, is animated in the witty, wildly elastic style of such cartoon pioneers as Bob Clampett and Tex Avery. Disney is adding two more cartoon shows to an afternoon lineup that already includes DuckTales and Chip 'n' Dale's Rescue Rangers, TV's two highest-rated...
...years, and Disney is readying a Mickey Mouse featurette for later this year. Meanwhile, the American Multi- Cinema theater chain has begun showing old Looney Tunes shorts in all 1,700 of its movie houses. "For the past two decades I thought of animation as a desert," says Spielberg. "Suddenly what was a mirage has become an oasis...
...disappeared from movie theaters, while TV bastardized the genre with schlocky "limited animation." The current revival was sparked by Walt Disney Studios, which has more than tripled the size of its theatrical-animation unit since 1984 and ventured into TV cartoons for the first time. The busiest newcomer is Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, which has produced cartoon features like An American Tail and maintains an animation unit of more than 300 in London. Even Hanna-Barbera, the K mart of TV cartooning (The Flintstones, The Smurfs), is upgrading quality with such features as The Endangered, an ecological adventure film that...
...core, Arachnophobia is a film about the effects of an extraordinary phenomenon on a small American town. The theme is clearly reminiscent of Spielberg's Jaws, Close Encounters of a Third Kind, E.T., and even further back, of Hitchcock's The Birds. Like all those films, Arachnophobia tells this story primarily through the trials and tribulations of a single male character; Roy Schnieder in Jaws, Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, and Rod Taylor in The Birds. Here that role is filled by Jeff Daniel, who plays Ross Jennings, an Ivy League-educated doctor who moves his family to little Canaima...
Jennings, like Hitchcock and the best of Spielberg's heroes, is an ordinary man driven to heroism only because of unusual circumstances. He is the reluctant hero seeking to protect his family and his newly adopted hometown, motivations which make the flimsly premises supporting this summer's blockbusters seem far-fetched and ludicrous in comparison. Rather than a series of explosions, shatterings of plate glass, or sickening gore, Arachnophobia uses the little things one can't take for granted today, believable characters and good old-fashioned fear, to keep your attention...