Daily Archives: January 23, 2006

2 posts

RIP Norm McCabe

Just a quick post to note the passing of Norm McCabe, who died on 18 January aged 94. McCabe was the last of the directors from the Warner Bros animation studio in its classic era: a handful of animators are left alive (Bill Melendez pops up looking very sprightly in interviews on the Looney Tunes DVD sets, for example) but now all the directors and notable story artists are gone.

I’m not terribly familiar with McCabe’s cartoons: he certainly wasn’t a major director, and like Arthur Davis only got a short spell as director (he left the position for military service). Unlike Davis, who is pretty well regarded by Warners fans, his cartoons aren’t very frequently revived. However, like Joe Grant, the guy had staying power: he was doing work on Tiny Toon Adventures in his eighties.

A little more about McCabe can be found here, here, and here.

Brokeback Mountain and al-Qaeda: The Hidden Connection

It’s really too soon to be editorialising on Brokeback Mountain again – particularly as I haven’t seen it and probably won’t have a chance to review it this weekend. There almost isn’t any point arguing about this – from what I can gather, the film doesn’t seem to say anything terribly controversial: when Fred Nile decries it, he’s really just suggesting that he thinks a film about gay cowboys shouldn’t exist, and if someone’s that far gone there’s not really much arguing that you can do with them. So I should just move on.

Continue reading