Fleegle, Drooper, Snorky and Bingo

It is not a law firm. Flashbak takes a look at six bad TV-show comic book adaptations. Only six? Here are two more. Oh, this horrid thing:

Hanna-Barbera gets admiration in some quarters for keeping animation going during a dry spell, but nearly everything they did after the classic Tom & Jerry cartoons was awful, unimaginative, witless dreck. Yes, that includes most of the Flintstones. Maybe most of the Jetsons too; aside from the credits, the "Jet Screamer" and "Uniblab" episodes, it was tiresome.

This isn't exactly a TV-show adaptation, but notable for its wincing attempt to insert Bob Hope into the groovy generation demographic:

Has it all, doesn't it? Groovy kids AND monsters. Why, when kids learned that BOB HOPE was part of the fun they couldn't slam their 12 cents down on the counter fast enough.

PUFFERY To add to my series of utterly arresting opening lines, I was googling around for information on Duncan OK hotel. It led to Ron Howard's Twitter account where someone asked him if he knew the name of the mynah bird in the lobby. This led to Googling Ron Howard, as well as a Vanity Fair story about a murder in Duncan. (He grew there, and his grandparents ran the hotel.) The story looked good, but since I was doing other things the offer of an audio version seemed appealing. If I bookmarked it or sent it to Instapaper or Pocket or Reading List or any of the other bins into which you drop scraps, I'd never read it. Alas, it was five dollars. Here's the reason I bring it up: Vanity Fair's audible.com page contains the most chest-puffing description attempted by any magazine in the history of the medium.

Hah! No. You have to love the assertion that the planet's most Influential and important audience will not accept a story if it's not in Vanity Fair.

And no, I didn't find out the name of the bird in the lobby of Ron Howard's grandparent's hotel.

I recommend listening and not looking at that picture; it's disturbing.

The money, I suspect, will also go to the song's co-writer, whose style is all over that track. The opening notes and beat and the sort of space it inhabits, to be a bad pretentious rock critic, is all Jeff Lynne.