5:15PM - Well, here's the one update a month, as promised. Or not.

OMG!! It is another update. Whee! I’m on a roll, aren’t I?

11:24PM - Look! It is another update!

Okay, so I lied. It won’t be another six months until I update this. Now, this doesn’t mean that lying to you guys is habitual. . .it just means that I thought that with everything going on in my life presently, I thought that something as comparatively minor as an LJ blog might disappear into the deep dark recesses of memory, perhaps to never be retrieved. Well, thanks to my handy-dandy chart system in Word, I won’t have to ever worry about forgetting that I have a LJ account with my name on it.

It seems like a long shot to me, but I think that I may be able to update more than once or twice a year. I might even be able to update twice a month!

Current mood: cheerful

9:48AM - Oh, gee, an update! At last!

Oh, look, I have finally updated! It is an update. But, readers, don’t get your hopes too far up. This update will probably be the final one for another six months to year. Or maybe a month—I haven’t made up my mind on it yet. Too much going on. Like my affair with a recently started writing website named gather.com. Or maybe enochallen.com. Or maybe my film projects. Geez, everything’s whirling around. . .I think I see Yogi Bear. Hi, Yogi. Can I have some of your lunch?

Okay. So, I must get busy. Bye for now.

Current mood: chipper

4:30AM - All the crappy HTML/syndication feeds you've been seein' here, as of late

Guys, don’t worry. This is all an experiment, to see if I can syndicate the contents of my site to other locations on the ‘Net. If this is possible, than I can be really lazy (otherwise known in tech and industry circles as “efficient” and “streamlined”, upscale terms which are all poppycock in my honest opinion) and just update one site, then copy & paste the rest. These Live Journal postings are pretty much an eyesore, though--but they don’t look as bad as I expected it to look. So, when I get some free time (heh), I will devise of a creative solution to this self-conceived dilemma.

Feel abso-fucking-lutely free to e-mail me at allenfs@aol.com to tell me “I hate your attempt at syndication, it looks terrible, make an original post to EA Perspective or none at all!” or something to that effect. If I get enough of these flaming e-mails, I will scratch the entire endeavor. I mean that.

4:29AM

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More news.

Dini post

Friday, July 22, 2005

4:27AM

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Saturday, July 23, 2005

SPECIAL ARTICLE: The Dini/Wikipedia affair, complete and
finally online!!!

(Illustration by Jeremy Scott)







(This is a repost of a article which initially appeared
here on July 12, 2005. I wanted to repost this for the
websurfers who haven’t had a chance at seeing this. For
future readers, the article will be linked at the left of my
blog and any of you having problems getting this article
should e-mail me promptly at
allenfs@aol.com. I’ll do
the best I possibly can at fixing the problem.)




At last, Paul Dini’s
biography has been added to wikipedia.com and here’s
the

link

. But I will still be going
forward with this article.



Wikipedia is famous for being an online encyclopedia
which anyone can edit. However, I have never bothered,
because the website does not allow you to claim credit for
your efforts. If you receive no monetary compensation for
writing, the most satisfying consolation prize is a credit
for having conceived the piece. Another thing--I have no
control over editing the article’s content, so theoretically
someone can just come in and royally screw it up (maybe
calling Paul Dini a transvestite porn queen with a penchant
for eating ham sandwiches, for all I know--you can totally
write your own revisionist history for anyone included in
Wikipedia, no one is immune to tampering--not that I
encourage nor endorse digital vandalism). Therefore, I would
much rather spend twenty pages bitching about it.



It should be understood that none of the people who
interviewed Paul Dini, who I e-mailed for the article,
responded by the self-imposed deadline that I had set for
myself. So this article had to be cobbled together from
extensive research--interviews, even articles that Mr. Dini
himself had written--and rigorous, thorough investigation.



First, some basic facts which everyone who knows Paul
Dini should know (and if you don’t, read below):




Paul Dini was born in NYC on 8/7/1957. His favorite
activities during early childhood were reading comic strips
such as Peanuts, Pogo
and Gordo.
He also read humor books like Uncle Scrooge, Casper,
Sugar & Spike
and Fox & Crow.
In his teen years he dug Archie, Conan

X-Men, Zippy, The Freak Bros,
and Mr. Natural.



Here where we get into the heavy stuff. About 90% of
the above paragraph came from a 2000 interview conducted by a
young lady named Jennifer Contino. Paragraphs throughout the
article (including the ones below this one) will contain
Dini’s words from Contino’s article.



“I read just about everything I could get my hands on
when I was a kid. . .I read all the basic juvenile mysteries
like
The Hardy Boys,
Happy Hollisters, and
Tom Swift, then all the standard kids classics like
The Jungle Books,
Lord Of The Rings, most of the Dickens and Mark Twain
books, and a few years later, the James Bond novels. Around
twelve, I really liked a writer named Ernest Thompson Seton,
who wrote
Wild Animals I Have Known, and several other books. .
.all the stories were fascinating though usually tragic
portraits of animals Seton had observed in the wild. It was
basic boys’ adventure stuff, but it did fuel my desire to go
out and photograph animals, which I try to do a couple times
a year if I'm not chained to my desk.”



During Dini’s years at boarding school, “I'd write
weird letters to family and friends, making up bizarre
stories. . .highly fictionalized accounts of what happened to
me and assorted friends and enemies. My mother encouraged me
to be a writer. Thanks, Mom.”



A reason why Paul Dini initially wanted to be an actor:
“ACTRESSES!” Reason why he gave acting up: “Couldn't get
any.” ;)




As Emru Townsend wrote at Purple Planet Media in May of
1999, “When Paul Dini joined Warner Bros. in 1989 to work
on Tiny Toons,
he probably had no idea that he'd end up penning the
adventures of his boyhood hero, Batman.”



Some of the shittiest work, by Dini’s own admission, he
has ever done was for the
ultra-pinch-a-penny-but-make-a-dollar Filmation version of
Mighty Mouse back when he was still a sophomore in
college in 1980.



“I had the opportunity to come out and do some writing
for that animation studio and put school on hold for 10
months while I went out and tried to make it as a TV writer.”
(Taken from a transcript of a chat session which occurred at
http://www.harley-quinn.com/paulchat.html some years ago.)



“In '82, I moved out to California full-time and I
jobbed around LA writing for various animation studios, just
trying to get my feet wet; I was writing just anything I
could. So I wrote a lot of really forgettable, awful
cartoons. (Taken from an interview conducted by Jimmy Aquino,
as are selected following passages.)



“Do you watch
The Simpsons? Did you see the episode about Poochie
the Dog? There's every network executive in there. You
have creative people sitting in a meeting, and then you got
some network executive come in. The executive will say,
‘Let's have the character be a little more with-it, a
little more hip, a little more today, a little more
contemporary, a little like “Hey dude, hey wow!”’ [These are]
executives at other networks, like the Big Three networks,
and to a smaller degree, Fox. This is the thing that plagued
animation writing when I started, which was the early
'80s. You had all this shit on TV -- it was like
Smurfs,
He-Man,
She-Ra. . .these executives [came] in, and they just
say, "We want this character more fun, more appealing to
girls, more this, more that." In their way of thinking,
animation is supposed to be something that's not
interesting or fun to look at, or God forbid, you should
laugh at. They want it to be comforting for kids, so a kid
will watch, smile, and stare happily like a little drone, in
between Fruit Roll-Up commercials. That's basically what
they look for, for shows like that. . .



“So there was just this wasteland of crap, until the
late '80s. And then things began to change just a little
bit. . .a little more creativity began getting back to the
cartoons. . .the thing that really hurt animation is that the
producers doing the stuff over the last 20 years were these
stinking cowards who'd go into these meetings, suck up to
the programmers, and just do whatever they want. They're
people who have no love for cartoons; they don't even
like cartoons. They're just in the business of making
them.”



About Dini’s first meeting with Bruce Timm: “I first
met Bruce Timm when we were both working on an ill-fated
Benny & Cecil revival about twelve years ago. .
.in the beginning there was a lot of crazy energy going into
the show and everyone was really psyched for doing a funny
cartoon again. . .it would have been a great series if it had
been given half a chance, but the network fucks destroyed it
out of fear it might give kids brain seizures for being too
cool.”



Back to Dini’s early career.



Paul states in his own words: “I was working for George
Lucas. I had spent four years at Skywalker Ranch, working on
a couple of animated shows that he did, called
Droids and
Ewoks. . .Prior to that, I had freelanced a couple of
jobs in L.A. for various studios, and I submitted some work
to Lucas and they liked it a lot, so I was chosen to go up
and work with a number of people including George and the
animators on developing the series concept for
Ewoks and
Droids. Then I went on to write the two seasons of the

Ewoks cartoon. . .”




Ewoks was a forgettable 1980’s cartoon, like
Droids. It was co-produced by the Canadian animation
company Nelvana and broadcast on ABC (thanks


http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/e/ew/ewoks_(cartoon).htm

) from 1985 to 1987.
Droids aired roughly around the same time, from
September 1985 to November 1986--afterwards rerunning all of
the previous episodes to death.



In this RevolutionSF interview written by Jayme Lynn
Blaschke, Dini elaborates on how much he was creatively
stunted by the network: “. . .we were dealing with a regime
at the network that just wanted safe children's
programming. Every time we wanted to stretch it a little bit,
they would kick up a fuss over it. . .With
Ewoks and
Droids, we tried to give it as good a look as we
could, and tried to make it feel special as part of the Star
Wars universe. But. . .you're dealing with the corporate
mentality that just wants to do everything safe and sweet. .
.Ultimately it became a battle that was just not worth
fighting. It became, ‘Okay, let's just try to do the show
the best we can. Maybe it'll be good.’”



An interview with Wayne Chinsang has Dini chucking up
even more about the claustrophobic atmosphere which he was
subjected to while working on
Ewoks and
Droids: “We were doing something that was shepherded
every step of the way by the censor ladies at the network,
and it was gone over by the child educators, and that is a
ghastly, ghastly way of working.”



On George Lucas’s involvement with
Ewoks and
Droids: “. . .He'd read over storylines and make
comments on the scripts from time to time. Usually it was all
pretty supportive. He sort of set out what he wanted. . .then
stood back and let the writers and artists run with them.”





We also know that the Paul Dini-penned episodes of
Ewoks had titles such as
Wicket's Wagon,
The Cries of the Trees,
Blue Harvest and
Asha. Of the four,
Asha is quite possibly the lone
Ewoks episode with the most powerful and emotionally
resonant story line. It has to do with Kneesaa (the younger
sister of the title character) learning that her sister is
still alive, and was raised by a family of Korrinas. Asha has
also become a wild creature. (For more information on this
Ewoks episode and others, click


here

and


here

.)



One of the two remarkable facts about
Droids is that the show didn’t get cancelled before it
did. That none of the insipid and uninspired storytelling
(not to mention that Nelvana, having graduated from the Jay
Ward School of the Arts by recycling backgrounds, using and
reusing stock footage and even importing entire soundtracks
from other shows for use in “scoring” some episodes) is Paul
Dini’s fault should be immediately evident in the way that
the show’s narrative was structured. No doubt, the Stingy
McStingster squeezing-a-penny-until-it-melts-in-your-hand
practice of producing budget animated shows back in the 80’s
can be creatively limiting for
any writer working under such conditions.



The second remarkable fact is that, despite all of
these hurdles and road blocks there were actually some decent
stories to be found in the very, very short collection of
Droids episodes (the ones where Paul Dini was
involved).





Dini says about his initial experiences working on
Tiny Toons, a classic animated series in its own
right: “You know, the first season of that was kind of fun --
just working on everything with the different writers and
artists. . . It was all a blast and a learning experience
because the chains were off as far as the network goes. Fox
was very supportive of the show.”



About the content of the episodes: “There were a couple
of cartoons that. . .really shine. They're just really,
really pretty to look at and they were a lot of fun to work
on. . .Sometimes we'd hit a stride and write about
certain characters, whether it was Elmyra or Plucky or
Buster, and we'd be just coming up with ideas, one after
the other. We'd be creating our own cartoons and showing
them to the other writers and directors and saying,
"Hey, how about this?" or we'd be jamming up
stuff together and making each other laugh. . .I think the
fact that we were having fun showed through in the individual
cartoons. By and large, it was a good experience. It set the
stage for everything else.”



On
Animaniacs: “I did a little bit of guest writing here
and there [but] I never really worked on it to any great
degree. I'd come up with a weird idea, ‘How about this?
How about that?’ and they'd say, ‘Oh yeah! Can you write
up something?’ So I'd write up something funny, a short
cartoon, or a bumper or something. . .but other than
contributing a little bit. . .I really didn't have much
to do with
Animaniacs.



_____________________________________



Paul Dini’s efforts on the legendary
Batman: The Animated Series has been talked and
discussed ad nauseum, but usually missing from those
exchanges are the little details on the genesis of the
series, which Paul Dini sums up in one sentence in an
interview with Jennifer Contini: “Jean MacCurdy told us we
had eighteen months to get it on the air.”



There’s more to it than that, though.



(The following four or five paragraphs are excerpted
from an interview conducted by Jimmy Aquino.) “Bruce [Timm]
wanted to do a very dark-looking, edgy show, where he was
going to take and refine the look of the characters down to
their bare minimum, and Eric [Radomski] wanted to do
something that was set in a nightmarish, dark cartoon world -
very stylish, very retro, and very Deco-looking. . .Jean
[MacCurdy] knew that I loved the classic superheroes, and I
really wanted to do a very dark and funny take on
Batman. I thought that any other time Batman had been
animated before, the elements were just dismal.



“Warners TV Animation, at the time, was kind of
exploding, because
Tiny Toons had been this hit, and it really surprised
us at how successful it was for its time. I remember being
called back on a couple of
Tiny Toons projects around that time, and I didn’t
want to give up on
Batman, but everybody was yelling for me to work on
different projects at once. . .By the time I finished my
commitment to Spielberg on Tiny Toons, I was able to run
right back [to] Batman around the 12th or 14th episode and
write the Mr. Freeze story ["Heart of Ice"], which
was the first one I wrote, and in some cases, the best.”



Dini on crafting the Mad Hatter character: “I try and
think of the characters as real. . .I think the villains are
really consumed with personal pain, and that pain sort of
stimulates a sense of the theatrical and the wicked in them.
. .I based [the Mad Hatter's first episode,
Mad as a Hatter] on a really tragic story that
happened in Silicon Valley about five years ago, about this
guy who was a brilliant but shy computer designer and had a
fixation on a woman, and he shot everybody in the office. .
.When he came up with a way of controlling people, suddenly,
they were able to do his will, and he loved it, and he was
able to bring his fantasies of Wonderland and living happily
ever after to life. But the main reason he did it was he was
in love with somebody, and he didn’t want to use that power
to control her because he knew that he'd lose her, but
ultimately, he had to. That drove him over the edge and drove
him crazy, so there's an element of sorrow to that
character - unrequited love taken to the nth degree.”





As anyone who has ever written anything longer than a
7-minute short to be aired on TV knows, the BS&P (short
for Broadcast Standards & Practices for the uninitiated)
can be and continues to be a royal pain in the ass. In
reference to
Batman: TAS, Dini says they never were a
major problem. “Because we do get notes from Broadcast
Standards at Kids' WB, but for the most part--and this is
[also] true for the folks at Fox--they really did understand
the nature of the show we were going to do, and allowed us to
proceed without terrible restrictions.” Without
terrible restrictions--this probably means that
instead of getting 100 calls an hour from the censor folks,
Dini & Co. lucked out in getting 99. But,
“everybody's been on board with the idea that we're
doing an action/adventure show, that we take chances, that we
bend and break the rules of what can be done on Saturday
morning and daytime television. So it hasn't been that
big of a problem, especially not on Batman and Batman Beyond
for Kids' WB.”



Indeed, when
Batman: TAS finally made its way to Kids’ WB, the
notes became nearly non-existent. It was a renaissance in
animation, much the same way that the premiere of another
animated show that was kindred in spirit,
Gargoyles, changed the face of animation. It would be
another four years before such a startling event could be
matched with the premiere of another landmark series in
animation (and the only
Batman-related series which Paul Dini was not a major
part of),
Justice League. There is not a soul who could claim to
be a true animation-lover who would deny that Dini’s
accomplishments acted as a blueprint for the tone and
narrative structure of
Justice League and all of its spin-offs, now and
forever.



As for creative input on the revamped
Batman show for Kids’ WB: “[WB executive] Jamie
Kellner [had] suggestions; he [wanted] to see more of Batgirl
or Robin on the show. On the other hand, there’s nobody
really reading the scripts at the WB saying, ‘Hey, Robin
wasn't in the show this week. Rewrite that episode. Stick
him back in.’



“The artists have a lot to say about the show, like
Bruce Timm, who is very vocal with what he thinks about the
scripts. We'll have sessions with him, where he wants
stuff rewritten or redone. Glen Murakami. . .has also got his
input. The storyboard guys will get together and talk. If
there's something that's bothering them, they'll
come to me or to Alan, and we'll sit and discuss it.”



As for
Superman: “We didn't want to be boring with
Superman and just give you plain old Superman. We wanted to
give the guy a little bit more depth. We wanted to get into
his head just a little bit more, and at the same time, we
wanted a show with something that made the character purely
heroic.





"Superman is Clark Kent; that's who he is.
He's a very human guy, and that extends to every element
of him, as Superman and in his off-hours. We never liked
playing him stiff. We like showing moments where he can be
hurt emotionally, as well as physically. We don't like
playing him like a square-jawed monk who just sits around and
spouts rhetoric about how people should behave themselves.





“In one episode. . .we have him rescuing a little kid.
He stands there with his hands on his hips, and he says, ‘You
know, it's alright to play around with your friends, but
you shouldn't do things on a dare because that will only
lead to trouble. Goodbye, kids.’ He flies off, and one of the
kids goes, ‘What a dork!’



About writing Mr. Mxylptlk for
Superman: “Mxy was fun to write. We all sort of
dreaded using Mxy on the show, and we knew we'd have to
do him eventually. . .basically, I just made him a little
shit. A mean little creep who just wants to screw around with
Superman for the sake of screwing around with him. . .every
time he shows up, Superman beats him, and he goes off
swearing to the 5th Dimension and plots for three months
about how he's going to beat him again, and he goes back,
and Superman beats him again.”





A
Green Lantern show was pitched to the WB around the
same time that
Duck Dodgers was in development. “It looked like
Duck Dodgers was our best bet to get a series going,
but there was some hesitation back and forth on whether they
would pick it up or pick up another show. . .I'd done an
initial development on the
Green Lantern Corps, and Spike [Brandt] and Tony
[Cervoni] took those ideas and started doing a lot of
designs, which were kind of a looser interpretation of a lot
of those characters than had been seen before.



“We wanted to do a story about a young man from Earth
who gets his hands on the Green Lantern ring, and about how
he is the fish out of water among all these aliens. . .It was
not going to be like the Bruce Timm
Batman universe. We wanted to open it up a little bit
and take a lighter tone, at least visually, with it.



“But then what happened was Cartoon Network saw it and
liked it, but they liked
Duck Dodgers too. Basically, when it came time to
select a show, they went with
Dodgers, and that's what we did.”



What has emerged in Paul Dini’s writing, what others
have noticed, is that he isn’t over-reliant on words (like
some writers are--myself included) to tell a story. “The
emotion is conveyed by the animation, the music and the
posing of the characters. . .I think those are things that
are really important for aspiring animators and writers to
look at as a way of telling a story dramatically. So often
I'll watch action-adventure shows, and where all of them
falter is that every beat of action has to be explained and
talked about. . .A hero will say, ‘Look! The bad guy's
coming!’ Well, you can
see the bad guy's coming. ‘We've got to stop
him!’ Yeah, of course you've got to stop him --
you're the
hero! All of those things that have become standard
clichés of action animation writing. . .I don't know how
they really got started. Maybe it was just to overcome cheap
animation on TV.”





Dini is, by his own admission, in love with Texas. His
comic book (also called a graphic novel by some toon
bloggers),
Mutant, Texas, reflects Dini’s passion of outrageous
western tall tales and western movies--hell, Western Culture
in general. “Everybody I know from Texas has this sort of
sense of fun and confidence to them, so I tried to infuse the
characters [in
Mutant, Texas] with as much of that as I could. . .a
lot of Texans who read it thought it was a lot of fun.



“A lot of this was just a nod back to rather clichéd
but fun western imagery. I mean, how many times have you seen
a cactus wearing a cowboy hat? You expect it after a while.”



On his other similarly-themed creation, the mythical
figure
Jingle Belle: “
Jingle Belle means a way for parents to relate to
their kids. It's less of a Christmas story than it is a
comment on the way I see a lot of contemporary parents'
relationships with their children. . .I was thinking, ‘What
if Santa had a kid? What would he or she be like?’ I fixed my
attention on a girl, and thought if he had a daughter, what
if she was a brat, and had just had enough of the Christmas
spirit? Like a lot of contemporary children, she'd been
spoiled as a kid by her parents and now that she's a
teenager, when the question of discipline comes up she rebels
against it. I felt a lot of people could relate to that. .
.the book
Dash Away All was the first long novel I'd done
about her. It's the story of what happens when Jingle
Belle has to take over delivering the presents one Christmas
eve. . .she's gone on the sleigh ride before, and now
that she's a teenager, she's bored with it.
She'll watch her DVD player or talk to her friends on her
cell phone or just sleep while Santa's delivering the
gifts. She doesn't really pay attention, and if she goes
at all, she's dragged into it. Her mom says: ‘You can
either help me clean the house, or go with your father.’ And
she's like, ‘I'll go with Daddy and I'll help,’
but all she does is sit there and complain or screw off or
something.”



“In this story, she has to go solo and deliver the
presents by herself. What's even worse, she doesn't
have the reindeer to help her. . .[and] tradition demands
that a Claus family member and an animal-driven sleigh drop
off the presents. . .she has to train these [substitute team
of animals] -- none of whom are really good at this job, or
like each other -- to get along together and make this
flight.”



Dini on the
Jingle Belle motion picture project: “It looks like
Revolution Studios will be going ahead with the movie.
They're developing it actively right now [but]. . .I
can't say. . .exactly when it's coming out, but they
are actively pursuing it and everybody over there is very
excited about getting it going.”



Dini also has a passion for the little-known
profession, cryptozoology: “To me it just strikes a fun,
romantic chord. The idea that you could go off to a corner of
the earth and discover [an animal] that is big, lurking in a
jungle or a cave that no one has ever seen before -- I think
that's a tremendous amount of fun. . .it's a chance
to forge a connection to something that may or may not exist
and bring something new to the world.



“I've gone around the world a couple of times and
photographed rare animals and come up against some things
people had thought extinct and got a look at them -- or a
fleeting glimpse in some cases -- and that's exciting.
Some people collect plates. I do that.”



(Excerpt from Jennifer Contino’s article, posted to
Comic-Con.com’s forum board.) As is Dini’s nature, he is none
too afraid to tackle the challenge of working with narrative
properties which are strange (or at the very least,
unfamiliar) to him. “Doing this gives me the chance to put a
unique twist on not only
Witchblade, but two of the Cow's other great lead
characters, Magdalena and the Darkness. . .I like writing
strong female characters and Sarah [Pezzini] is one of the
most interesting and original heroines in recent history.”



Dini on his experience working with
Top Cow, the publisher of the ongoing
Witchblade chronicles: “I love it! They are great
people who really enjoy the characters they work with and the
people who write and draw them.”



An extra on the DVD of
Comic Book: the Movie, directed by Mark Hamill (the
movie, not the
interview) contains a Dini interview in which he talks
about characters such as Commander Courage and Laser-Disco
Commander from his
Codename: Courage screenplay: “You know, I really
don’t want to put in Laser Disco Commander Courage, I
really don’t want to, but--and if it was up to me, I
wouldn’t. . .there’s a potential tie-in with Christina
Aguilera, that--the music division of the studio is working
on, and I’m--they’re saying there’s potential for a video,
and we wanna play ball, sooo--maybe it’ll just be in the
video, but certain--but it looks like the Laser-Disco might
be a part of the product line--
not the first wave, but when they’ll refresh it, like
a year down the road. . .”



(For those with a high-speed Internet connection,
here’s the

link

to the interview--the text
is taken from most of the second half of the piece. If you
are on dial-up, I‘d say don‘t bother--unless if you‘ve got
the hour or so it takes to load it up.)



Another project mentioned earlier in this article was
Paul Dini’s
Jingle Belle feature. In this excerpt from the Dark
Horizons website, Paul tells Garth Franklin the
Jingle Belle screenplay is almost done. “[Dini]
expects the movie to come together by either the fall of ‘05
or ‘06 depending on [Revolution] studio's time table,”
the website says. But Dini’s part of
Krypto the Superdog has been completed and he felt it
was some of his best work. Episodes of
Krypto the Superdog which Paul Dini wrote or co-wrote
include
A Bug's Strife,
Diaper Madness,
The Dark Hound Strikes! and
Streaky's Super Cat Tale.



Upon its premiere (if you could call it that) on
Cartoon Network, reactions to
Krypto couldn’t possibly be any more mixed. “I'm
going to give it a chance, but it looks like WB's
superhero animation is quickly going to hell in a hand
basket,” said one
rotten tomatoes.com blog poster.



According to Dini, Cartoon Network is more corporate
now with their successes with Adult Swim. Shows that can be
cheaply produced, like
Aqua Teen Hunger Force, seem to be new trend at the
network. Uh-oh.




(c) Misty Lee.





In a most unusual fashion, on February 12th 2005 Paul
Dini proposed to his longtime girlfriend Misty Lee at the
Santa Barbara Natural History Museum.



“I decided to do it in the more private confines of the
museum garden,” Dini enthuses on the news portion of his
Jingle Belle website. “I led Misty to the garden’s
beautiful flower-ringed amphitheatre, took out the ring box,
got down on one knee, hit the hand holding the ring box on my
upraised knee, dropped the ring box, groped for it while
mumbling something inarticulate that sounded like the
Tasmanian Devil begging for a date, and handed Misty a Necco
conversation heart with the words ‘Marry Me’ on it that I had
saved for just such an emergency. When she stopped laughing
(more out of a nervous ‘Oh my God, he’s really doing it!’
reaction than ridicule, bless her) Misty performed her
greatest magic trick ever and turned me into the world’s
happiest man by saying ‘Yes.’”



My initial reaction to this bit of news was one of
shock and awe. I decided to investigate, to see whether this
was one of Dini’s sleight-of-hand tricks, a postponed April
fools’ joke for his devoted readers. To state the obvious,
what you see below is what I came up with.



I went to Paul’s fiancée’s website--or rather,
online journal for the uninitiated--to see if I could
verify Dini’s statement. Lo and behold, click


here

.



Misty Lee, going under the Internet codename Shimaera,
disseminates a lot of interesting information about the
relationship she has with Paul Dini--and she also offers
readers some unique insight into her own quirky, appealing
personality. You won’t see this on Wikipedia. Wait a minute .
. .



Yeah, you will. After I wrote the aforementioned
sentence, I checked the Dini Wiki article to see if it said
anything about Dini’s engagement to Lee. It does, in one very
unspecific and short sentence. The more I mine the Internet
for info on Dini, the more I come up with.



Misty Lee’s journal is a veritable treasure trove,
chock full o’ Dini details and little nuggets of wisdom. That
this website is updated more often than Dini’s should come as
no surprise to those who follow his schedule. That’s also not
saying much, since it seems that Dini updates his
Jingle Belle website like three times a year. Maybe
four. Misty got him beat by at least eight more updates. (Of
course, readers, I’m being facetious.)



(Two hours, fifteen minutes later.) Now, I will have to
eat my words. The odyssey of Dini-fact finding continues.
Judging from the amount of posts

this

gets, hardly anyone seems to
know that he maintains such a journal. While I will not want
to be the one who outs him, that piece of info was too good
to keep under wraps. This is, of course, equal to finding the
lost writings of Marlon Brando on some long-defunct website
at the farthest corner of cyberspace.



If any of the aforementioned can be believed, Dini also
responds to comments made on his postings. I must now make
you aware, however, that I am not responsible for the
validity of any of the information contained in this article,
though I have done my best to do what Jayson Blair and
Stephen Glass never did--which was to report the unexpurgated
truth as I see it. Since I am not a journalist, I am not
encumbered with the obligation to retain total objectivity in
my writings. I can be as subjective as I want, which is the
fundamental license granted to a blogger, even to the point
of being prejudiced on some issues. You may see some
political bloggers exercising this very right. I have not
done all of this typing to imply that anything you’ve read
was a total fabrication, or that I intended to make this
article any longer than it is. The information as it is
related to Paul Dini’s life has been analyzed and
fact-checked for any and all inconsistencies, for my
objective is to render an accurate (or semi-accurate) account
of Dini’s life and career, such as it is, while endeavoring
to entertain and engage the reader. And to make you forget
that your eyes are tired and that you may be suffering from
advanced muscle fatigue, if you have been following this
article from the beginning.



________________________________



We are rapidly approaching the conclusion of this
article. July 8th, Mr. Dini posts an update to his journal
entitled
San Diego Countdown pt. 1. Here’s an excerpt--



“Well, here we are heading into the middle of July
which means it is almost time for that great intergalactic
freak show, the San Diego Comic Con. Forgive me, but the name
"Comic Con International" always sticks in my craw
as phony and pretentious. It has been known as simply
"San Diego" for over thirty-five years and will no
doubt be referred to as such for another thirty-five.



I have posted my signing schedule for this year over at
my
www.jinglebelle.com site, so I won't be repeating
it here just yet. Rather, I'm going to talk about a
certain pesky convention mainstay that I and a number of
other professionals run into each year. . .”



There’s more, but rather than ruin it for you, just
click


here

. Then come back and finish
the article. Please.



When I first posted the alert of the absence of a Paul
Dini biography from Wikipedia, I had amassed a certain amount
of information about notable people whose biographies
appeared on Wikipedia before Paul Dini. What I uncovered
might shock you as much as it has shocked me.













Misty, from
Pokemon: How sad is that, a fictional character from
an animated series getting a bio before a legendary real-life
character? This world is going to hell faster than a speeding
bullet. I am overcome with a mixture of bewilderment and
extreme concern for the state of the human condition. (
Misty Image (c) 4Kids Ent.)











Angel Long, English porn actress.




Anna Ohura, large-breasted Japanese adult model from
Hokkaido, Japan, born 1980.




Ariana Jollee, prolific (aren’t they all) adult film
actress from Long Island, NY. Born 1982.




Avena Lee, another Asian\Thai porn actress, born 1982
in Las Vegas.




Storm, character in the uncanny
X-Men. Okay--maybe she deserves to be profiled.




Dazzler , aka Alison Blaire. Comic book character,
member of some otherworlds team of
X-Men. Has the ability to convert sound to light.
She’s a gal you’d want to invite to a party. I can’t believe
this.




Sunpyre, or Leyu Yoshida, fictional character born in
Chugoku region, Honshu, Japan to a mother affected by the
radiation fallout from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Flight, plasma blasts, ability to view infra-red and
radiation immunity are her various powers. Has a brother,
Sunfire--also a mutant. Sunpyre had been killed for
a while, but now she’s seems to be alive and well in recent
comic book issues. Got better coverage than Paul Dini. Also a
shame.




Cable, fictional comic book character aka Nathan
Christopher Summers--powers include teleportation, telepathy,
telekinesis, and astral projection. Fathered by Scott Summers
aka
Cyclops and a duplicate of Jean Grey. Appeared in a
few episodes of the
X-Men animated series. And this qualifies him for a
single-page treatment in Wikipedia. Give me a
friggity-friggin break.




Forge, holy shit,
Forge. Mutant ability--invention. Fictional character
who gets a lengthy single page profile, even though he’s a
character who least deserves it. I can see Rogue, or
Wolverine, or Storm--but Forge? Over Paul fuckin’ Dini?




X-23, aka Laura Kinney (rhymes with, and is almost
spelled like, Linney), fictional female counterpart to
Wolverine, a minor character in every respect--
given the single page, full-length Wikipedia
treatment, the article having exceeded even the length of
other Wiki articles on real-world notable individuals.



Finally,
Christopher Sabat, not a comic book character but a
voice actor for anime imports, whose Wiki entry is especially
insulting given the fact that next to
no one knows him. Next to
no one. Outside of his parents, his agent, his
employers and his co-workers,
no one. Yet, he gets a more substantial bio than Paul
Dini. Or, for that matter, Bruce Timm.



I have thoroughly made my case now, that Paul Dini has
been given the Bill Finger treatment by many online and
print-based encyclopedias claiming to contain a vast and
comprehensive repository of data on the life of notable
individuals. I’m not bloviating here, folks, I’m just telling
it like it is. I realize that the monumental amount of effort
put into writing this massive piece will likely not change
anything, and perhaps will likely be forgotten, but I also
realize that no major war against obsolescence (waged by an
individual, of course) has been won by accepting the terms
outlined herein.



There is some small chance that future readers of my
website will come and discover what their own eyes have never
seen, and what their minds have wished they saw. And that is
one of the most comprehensive yet incomplete biographies of a
living national treasure, a life which has contributed so
much to the art of animation and comic books and will make
yet another lasting contribution to 21st century pop culture
with his upcoming feature films and animation projects.
Therefore it can be safely said, as I am sure you will agree,
Dini’s impact on the psyches of Generations X and Y is
inestimable.



I rest my case. For now.



----------------------------------



The following articles are the source material for many
of the excerpts contained in this article. With grateful
acknowledgement to the authors of these entertaining and
insightful interviews.





http://purpleplanetmedia.com/eye/inte/pdini.shtml






http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.html?id=2352







http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/pulse.cgi?http%3A//www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi%3Fubb%3Dget_topic%26f%3D36%26t%3D001040






http://www.comicbookthemovie.com/minidini.shtml







http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/oddball/index.cgi?date=2001-04-16






http://www.harley-quinn.com/paulchat.html






http://anp.awn.com/pauldini.html







http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/apr00/dini.shtml






http://www.darkhorizons.com/news04/041109d.php






http://www.tlchicken.com/view_story.php?ARTid=2896






http://anbat.toonzone.net/essays/taopd.html







http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/pulse.cgi?http%3A//www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi%3Fubb%3Dget_topic%26f%3D36%26t%3D000050






http://wf.toonzone.net/WF/heartofice/interview/







http://www.slushfactory.com/columns/content/EpFpulFyFAtajWuqEg.php







http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20949~2606894,00.html






http://www.livejournal.com/users/shimaera/






http://www.livejournal.com/users/kingofbreakfast/





My apologies to anyone left out. Any grievances can be
sent to my e-mail address:

allenfs@aol.com

. I will respond, no matter
how graphic the grievance.

# posted by Enoch Allen @ 3:40 PM

4:23AM

More about
Flutemaster

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Another post centered around The Dini

WB, are you listening?

Monday, July 25, 2005

The Follow-Up, such as it is

4:10AM

11:23AM - Updating, finally!

Been busy for the last two weeks. I will find some time to update this blog. For now, every couple of days, I’ll write a sentence or two exclusively for this blog, to give the illusion of frequently updating.

Been working on Flutemaster article for my Blogger weblog, as well as a couple of screenplays. Not to mention my 35mm project. Bear with me, guys (I always seem to be saying that nowadays!).

2:34AM - Reprint from E. Allen's P.O.V.

To those of you saying that I need to get a life--you can kiss my animation-loving, Utica-bred, Brooks Institute educated, country-music hating, rap-freestyle-analytical-convoluted-Madeleine-L’Engle-reading ass.


Wesside!!!!!

8:54PM

Lots of people talking about Tom Cruise’s latest antics. They just won’t seem to let it die. Unbelievable.

For even posting this on my blogsite, I am chastising myself. I am not known for doing what everyone else does. However, I felt the need to call attention to this astonishing trend in human behavior. Years from now, psychoanalytic researchers will compile this data and publish it in a report [probably] called, “A Brief History of Celebrity Bashing: People Who Do It And Why, 2000-2030”. Or something like that.

Just a brief attempt at predicting the future.

More to come . . .

6:47PM - Lack of updates

Though I am not one to make excuses, I apologize for the slow updates. In between writing stories, beating deadlines and investigating the absence of a Paul Dini biography at Wikipedia, my hands have been tied 1,000 ways to Sunday. Updates will increase in the near future, dear readers, but for now I only ask that you bear with me. It’s not easy posting constant updates to three weblogs.

But, what can I say? Writing is my life’s passion. Thanks for reading.

2:45AM - Alert!

I now must call attention to an issue of monumental importance.

Paul Dini’s biography does not appear at wikipedia.com.

This is a startling revelation, which will be expanded upon in a short while. This announcement will also be made at my other weblog at allenpov.blogspot.com.

Stay tuned . . .

5:55PM - Haute Tension

Slow news today, guys. Things probably happened that I don’t know about yet, so look for some updates to be forthcoming.

I think High Tension (Haute Tension in France) looks interesting. Mucho blood coupled with female masturbation--what an unbeatable combo! Cecille de France (gal who starred with Steve Coogan and Jackie Chan in Around the World in Eighty Days , hell of a change of pace) looks so different in this film from the Disney picture she was in with Chan and Coogan--and I believe she acts a whole lot different, also. Heard that the MPAA was thisclose (note the lack of space between this and close) to slapping Tension with an NC-17. It is obvious that Tension not only earns the R, but pushes it with a ferocity not seen since Saving Private Ryan.

In other related news, Ebert gives one * to Tension but three *** to The Honeymooners.

Err . . .

7:41PM - Miyazaki's latest

Howl’s Moving Castle clears $200 million overseas; here, with the kind of release and publicity Disney is giving it, Howl will be supremely lucky to make a tenth of that. After all, Spirited Away took in less than $10 million in the US. Yet, it captured the Academy Award.

I hope Miyazaki’s latest feature gets both boffo box office and Oscar gold. It may not rank among Miyazaki’s best, but, as I’m sure many of you who know Miyazaki’s work, Miyazaki’s worst is far better than many of the best animated films coming out of studios stateside.

7:12PM - Hello!

Welcome to The EA Perspective, an online weblog established because I was bored. Or maybe I’m a one-man corporation who wants to con working people everywhere out of their hard-earned, American money. Anyhow, this web log won’t be updated as much as my blog over at allenpov, but it will be updated on a semi-regular basis.


This blog will even contain much of the same news that allenpov contains, but I will keep simulposting to a minimum in an effort to keep the blogs distinct from each other. There will be some content which can only be found here, and vice versa for the other website. Anyone who knows me knows that I appreciate feedback, so here’s my e-mail address for those who cannot find it on this page: allenfs@aol.com.


That’s it for now. A final reminder: you can find updates from me on an irritating basis at allenpov.blogspot.com. That blog also contains much, much more content.


Thanks for reading!


ENOCH ALLEN