Animated Views Celebrity Obituary Thread

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GeorgeC

Post by GeorgeC » October 6th, 2011, 2:31 am

James,

I'm a fairly honest guy but my tolerance for the fools in the "fourth estate" and the fairy tales they weave is growing less day by day... I generally hold my tongue in these circumstances, BUT --

My patience for the stupidity of media and their "crowned elite" is growing less by the day... These are the people who @#$@##$!ing our world up if you haven't noticed!

The Steve Jobs of the world DO NOT make it materially (let alone spiritually) better. Instead, they do a great job in convincing masses of people they have to buy a bunch of over-priced crap that's unnecessary and not essential to their livelihoods!

At the end of day, I don't see a guy like this or Bill Gates as being great human beings.

What I have seen them do is (again!) convince people they need to spend money on junk that's worthless the next year when generation z.0 of said-junk comes out.... They've facilitated a situation in the world where there are many people convinced that the "electrons" they run across on Facebook are their friends and that chatrooms are substitutes for meeting people face to face!


Sorry, nothing to celebrate here.



P.S. -- I do take factual errors and generalizations of history very seriously.

See, I'm a student of history and I know damn well that at least 1 in every 4 stories has been twisted up because the people who write news articles and the history books don't double-check their sources. That's how myths and lies become fact.

There's also bias... Those of strong ideological bends craft history and conveniently write books to make heroes look like villains and criminals into victims.

Many people today are only aware of Andrew Carnegie as a philanthropist who endowed universities and libraries with his money when he died. Of course, that's how he wanted his image crafted after he died --- the generous steelman! What they don't now -- or bother to research -- is how ruthlessly he acquired his fortune and the literal skull-crushing he ordered to break up strikes at his steel mills.

I have yet to read about a billionaire/industrialist who DIDN'T bury or roll over bodies to acquire fortunes that big... or anyone in that position that didn't have a massively oversized ego, either.

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Post by Vernadyn » October 6th, 2011, 2:55 am

Don't mean to take away from Jobs' entrepreneurial accomplishments -- it's in the eye of the beholder whether he really made the world a better place --, BUT he didn't found Pixar.
I know--that's why I wrote that he "help[ed] establish" it. Perhaps I should have been more clear in that by "establish" I meant more the sense of that he helped get it going (financially) by buying it from Lucas. That's why I didn't write that he helped found Pixar, since he wasn't there at the beginning. I wanted to be brief, because I knew that someone would write a beautifully crafted news item on the AV front page. :)

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Post by James » October 6th, 2011, 7:36 am

You're welcome to your beliefs on all the rest of course, but before this line of reasoning takes hold here, he did found Pixar. "Found" does not necessarily mean you started something from nothing.

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Re:

Post by EricJ » October 6th, 2011, 7:54 pm

James wrote:You're welcome to your beliefs on all the rest of course, but before this line of reasoning takes hold here, he did found Pixar. "Found" does not necessarily mean you started something from nothing.
Pixar was, if anything, "founded" by George Lucas (or at least Lucasfilm), but didn't quite know what to do with it except for various special-FX.
Lucas needed money for Skywalker Ranch, and when "Labyrinth" didn't deliver that cash, Jobs bought the Pixar "liability" off their hands.
That he let John Lasseter work on it as an art-short pursuit as well as movie/TV work takes the Vision Thing. :mrgreen:

And while George is trying to get easy applause with the Mac-bashing, Jobs did have one vision, which is right up there with Henry Ford: EVERYBODY should have new tech at the same time...Nothing kills a new tech like elitism.
The minute anything new was introduced--like CD burning, home-video DVD-R, MP3 players--Windows PC's insisted on expensive peripherals that cult-techies would argue over, while Apple included them as standard on their mass-market model, so common folk just learning the computer would learn to use them at home.
That, in case anyone's ever wondered, is HOW a new "replacement" technology, like MP3's, or DVD's, or using the Internet to buy airline tickets, replaces that which came before it--After normal people all find their thinking has been changed for good.

(Me, I'm old enough to remember post-Jobs Apple before the iMac: Even Apple users had no clue what computers were coming out, or how to tell a Quadra from a 10th Anniversary Edition, and if normal people didn't either, don't look at us.
When Jobs came back, he had one idea: Normal people should know what to buy--A candy-colored iMac with everything basic for the home, a notebook for school, a fancy tower for the office, and the only choices being size and memory...THAT'S IT.
Seemed to work, too. )

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Post by James » October 6th, 2011, 8:24 pm

My goodness this is crazy. George Lucas no more founded Pixar than an art supply shop creates masterpieces. Jobs bought a lump of clay from Lucas and transformed it into something totally different and original.

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Post by estefan » October 7th, 2011, 5:35 am

It should also be noted that Steve Jobs was losing money on Pixar for years. Most any other CEO would have shut down them down immediately due to lack of profitability. However, Jobs kept supporting this little computer software company, because maybe, just maybe their dream of making computer-animated features will actually come true. And even when he returned to Apple in the late '90s, he stuck with Pixar.

Jobs is not the reason the films coming out of Pixar are so fantastic, but he's the reason they exist.

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Post by Ben » October 8th, 2011, 4:10 pm

Okay, let's clear this up...

Before Steve Jobs, John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, there was no "Pixar".

What became Pixar was The LucasFilm Computer Animation Project Division, or whatever it was called. And that was just John Lasseter.

Jobs bought that division and Catmull entered the frame (either already there or from Jobs' side? I never remember), but even then Pixar did not exist!

The new group couldn't call themselves something with "LucasFilm" in their name, so they came up with a new one.

Therefore, clear as anything, Steve Jobs was a founder of "Pixar": he was there and probably had major input into the name, and certainly had the major input of paying for the company for so many years, sustaining losses and keeping the faith so that it could eventually thrive.

But...a founder he was.


Having only just "moved over" to Apple products recently I'm still way too new to the stuff to get evangelical about Jobs, but no-one can deny that what he did was make cool technology cooler. And although it was fairly obvious that his withdrawal from Apple, Pixar and Disney in recent weeks was because he didn't have long left, it's still a real shocker that it did turn out to be weeks. One would have thought he had a few years, a good few months at least, and the world has lost a modern innovator without question.

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Re: RIP Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Post by Dan » October 9th, 2011, 3:59 pm

Catmull was pretty much running The LucasFilm Computer Animation Project Division and, according to their statements on The Pixar Story, Ed hired John on the spot when he heard John was no longer working at Disney.

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RIP Joe Frazier (1944-2011)

Post by Dan » November 8th, 2011, 9:02 am

"Smokin' Joe" Frazier, a former World Heavyweight Champion of boxing best known for the trilogy of matches with Muhammad Ali that have been widely regarded as some of the greatest boxing bouts of all-time, passed away last night at the age of 67. Joe was diagnoised with liver cancer in late September that within weeks metastasized and had since been under hospice care until his passing.

With a professional record of 32-4-1, Frazier won the gold medal in boxing in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, defeated Jimmy Ellis on February 16, 1970 for the WBA and the vacant WBC and NYSAC World Heavyweight Championships (though the latter wold be terminated almost immediately) before losing the belts to George Foreman on January 22, 1973.

On March 8, 1971, Frazier defeated Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden by unanimous decision in a match that had been called even beforehand "The Fight of the Century." It would be Ali's first professional loss and would give birth to a rivalry between the two. Their second match was intended to be a title match, but Fazier would lose the belts to Foreman. Ali would win the second fight by unanimous decision on January 28, 1974. Ali would go on to defeat Foreman for the belts in "The Rumble in the Jungle" in Kinshasa, Zaire, setting up the rubber match between Ali and Frazier in Quezon City, Philippines dubbed "The Thrilla in Manilla" on October 1, 1975. It was considered the toughest bout either men had as they were literally throwing punches from the get-go and the temperature in the location was well over 100 degrees. Ali would win by technical knockout one minute before the end of the fourteenth round. Frazier would retire after losing his next match to Foreman, though he made a comeback bid in 1981 that ended in a draw.

Among the numerous endeavors Frazier ventured in, he made two appearances on "The Simpsons." The first was 1992's "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" in which a claim was made that Barney had beaten up Frazier in Moe's Tavern until Frazier's son reminded them of the actual outcome through flashback. He would make a return appearance in the 2006 episode "Homer's Paternity Coot."

Ali was reached immediately after Frazier's passing and stated, "The world has lost a great champion. I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration." Foreman added on Twitter, "Goodnight Joe Frazier. I love you dear friend."

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Jan Berenstain Dies aged 88

Post by ibrmacf » February 28th, 2012, 1:20 pm

Mrs. Berenstain, who along w/her late husband Stan co-wrote the beloved stories of The Berenstain Bears, had died:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/27/us/berens ... =allsearch

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Re: Animated Views Celebrity Obituary Thread

Post by James » September 14th, 2021, 5:08 pm

Norm Macdonald dead at 61. Off the top of my head I remember he was in Farely odd parents, but I bet there were others. On the phone so can’t look it up easily right now. He was one of my favorite comedians. Gonna suck not having him around.

https://deadline.com/2021/09/norm-macdo ... 234833212/

Edit: “… he lent his voice to animated projects including Mike Tyson Mysteries, The Orville, Dr. Dolittle, FairlyOddParents, the videogame Skylanders Academy and others.”

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Re: Animated Views Celebrity Obituary Thread

Post by Daniel » September 14th, 2021, 8:00 pm

The original voice of Death from "Family Guy", too. Legend. Awful news. :(

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Re: Animated Views Celebrity Obituary Thread

Post by Daniel » September 30th, 2021, 2:01 am

Disney Legend and actor Tommy Kirk dead at 79. Very sad news. He was everywhere back in the day.

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Re: Animated Views Celebrity Obituary Thread

Post by Ben » September 30th, 2021, 2:58 am

Posted it last night on the front page. Very sad for folks of certain generations. :(

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Re: Animated Views Celebrity Obituary Thread

Post by Randall » September 30th, 2021, 10:06 pm

Yeah, sad to hear. For a few years there, he had quite a career going. Still nice to revisit those 50s/60s films.

Shout out to Pajama Party!

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