Animated Views Celebrity Obituary Thread

[GeorgeC]

....

He was very much a big deal in the US, Ben...

He was someone a LOT of Americans grew up with.

Look, I think pro-wrestling is ridiculous, too, but there were certain guys you could never get away from for very long. They always popped up in the movies and TV in the strangest places and sometimes not so strange. Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant are the other two big wrestling names that were never gone for long, either, even after their "glory days."

Savage was in Spider-Man (2002) as well, not that half of us recognized him by sight in that film. Once he opened up his mouth, though!

As funny as it sounds --- even to me ---, Randy Savage's death hits harder for more people of generation than Elizabeth Taylor's did.

Her? Nobody was surprised she passed away! She had health problems on and off for decades. I think people were more surprised she passed away this LATE in her life. Her personal life was, to put it bluntly, tabloid circus fodder of the lowest and highest calibers, and she was better known for that than any of her films in the last 40 years of her life.

A 58-year-old guy dying on the road is a bigger shock to more people than *words I really want to say omitted out of respect for her family* Dame Taylor dying in a hospital ward. It's honestly a lot more shocking for me to see someone under-60 die suddenly than someone in their late 70s and early 80s.

[Ben]

Taken your points on board, George, but please also make a mental note of mine too: we don't really need new RIP posts for everyone that pops their clogs (when we did the Forum update, there was even a move to "bury" these types of posts because we got too many of them).

[EricJ]

I'll side with Ben: As I remember losing at least one, if not two, of my old Usenet groups to a malingering invasion of solitary motivated K00K posters who believed it was their sacred duty to publish every celebrity obituary of note that came across Reuters that morning, topic or not. (AND birthday reminders, when they popped up on "Born Today" columns!)

The idea, as much as I can guess, is most posters who don't really understand how group conversation takes place believe that's the bulletin we'll "all be talking about"--because that's what YahooNews told them--but it invariably has the opposite effect: Obit posts end up being the weeds that strangle the healthy posts from overcrowding, and soon the K00k is left with an empty sandbox to play in all by himself. (Which is what seems to be happening to the Headline forum.)
It's the biggest red-alert sign of the K00k there is on the Net, and it's never failed to spot one yet. Call it "mean", but how many symptoms have we racked up so far?

[Ben]

Well, apart from the "siding with Ben" part, I don't get why you felt you had to weigh in totally inappropriately here, Eric, and with such venom ("mean" just isn't the word).

This has, as far as I am concerned, overstepped the mark for the final time. We're just discussing your future here internally, but let's just say it's looking pretty bleak.

[EricJ]

Sorry if it seemed like the personal grudge but I wasn't kidding: I HAVE seen groups die out from under the readers from an attack of Obituary Scouts, firsthand. It happens.
Just old traumatized war experience, but you have to understand my concern; it's real.

[GeorgeC]

Oh, for heaven's sake, GROW UP, Eric!

You have made me your "personal project" for as long as I can remember...

Don't want that attention, and frankly I could do without YOU, too, on the board, too.

As annoying as some of the kids are with opinion threads and Pixar Vs Dreamworks Vs that, with only a couple of exceptions (that I can't even count using 5 fingers!) do they actually go after ONE PERSON....!

I think you know what you're doing by now. You don't LISTEN to the mods and anybody else with half a brain full of common sense...

It's a joke that you mentioned "siding with Ben," too. Aside from me, he's been the one you've been after the most and he's a MOD!

[ibrmacf]

The great actor, Peter Falk, best known as "Eh, just one more thing" Columbo has died at age 83 and am sure will be greatly missed. In terms of animation, he provided the voice of Don Feinberg in Dreamwork's "Shark Tale". More here:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/SHOWBIZ/celebri ... index.html

[Ben]

...and a great, rambling cameo in The Great Muppet Caper!

He was also a terrific Bogey clown in The Cheap Detective (very funny Neil Simon spoof that beats many others for laughs) and of course as Jack Lemmon's hapless assistant in The Great Race.

Great actor and apparently a really great guy. Although he hadn't done anything lately because of very unfortunate illness, I'll still miss him. Luckily we have hundreds of hours of Columbo to remember him by, and that's no bad thing.

[GeorgeC]

http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/07/12/sherw ... artz-dead/

... and my childhood dies a bit more!

Sherwood Schwartz, who created two of the most iconic TV series in history, "The Brady Bunch" and "Gilligan's Island," passed away earlier this morning. He was 94.

******************

I really haven't watched either of these shows in years although I have enjoyed the first two Brady Bunch motion pictures spoofs made back in the 1990s. If you're going to make fun of something, this is the way to do it!

Revivals/attempted revivals of Gilligan's Island (reality series a few years back) haven't so good... The reunion TV movies for BOTH series were bad!

His son and nephew do say that the Gilligan's Island movie is still moving on ahead...

[Dan]

Cliff Robertson, who played Uncle Ben in the Sam Raimi directed Spider-Man films and won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1969 for playing the title character in "Charly," passed away today, September 10. He had just celebreated his 88th birthday yesterday.

http://www.hitfix.com/articles/oscar-wi ... rtson-dies

[Vernadyn]

Jobs is more known for Apple, but he did help establish Pixar. This is unexpected, even with his recent resignation as Apple's CEO.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/05/us/ob ... bs/?hpt=T1

A pioneer passes.

[Randall]

This is a real bummer. Whether you like Apple or not, he revolutionized our world. He's may be the type of person who will only become more legendary as time passes.

[Dan]

This is really sad news to hear. Truly one of the more revolutionary figures in the past thirty years. He's going to be deeply missed.

[GeorgeC]

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.

He acquired it from LucasFilm. If you want to be technical, Pixar had three founding officers when it was incorporated after the purchase in 1986 -- Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and Steve Jobs. Prior to this, the LFL division was called Graphics Group and it was only part of the LFL computer division.

There's a bit of a tendency in media to make it looks like accomplishments are all the work of one person. Sorry, but there were teams of artists and financiers behind Jobs just as there were in Walt Disney's case.

I have mixed feelings about Apple, myself, but no question Jobs hyped the product like nobody else since -- well, Walt Disney!

[James]

And he didn't found Apple. Technically they bought the parts for their first computer at Radio Shack. And before that they were all component elements.

C'mon George! I really like you so don't take this the wrong way, but this is silly. Even Pixar uses the term "founder". And of course he didn't do it alone. But on the day of a guy's death it's OK to focus on the individual.