Pop Culture Diary: This Week's Reviews, Reads and Roundups

What I've Been Into...

"The Muppet Show." An eye roll, a groan, a small chuckle: It's "The Muppet Show," all right. This nostalgic new episode of the oddly beloved 1970s series is pretty much just like the original: Not very funny, quite dumb and, yet, strangely charming.

Sabrina Carpenter is the guest star and plays well with puppets. Seth Rogan (an executive producer of this exercise) and Maya Rudolph make cameos, but I have pretty much the same opinion of things as the old dudes in the balcony.

Yet they still watch this stuff and, if this new "Muppet Show" became a regular thing, I probably would, too. And, like them, I'm not sure why.

I'm sure the inclination is mostly nostalgic (I'm a first-generation "Sesame Street" kid) and, like most people it seems, have a guilty pleasure for dumb jokes, plus it's fun to see famous humans interact with the cast. Silly, but it's not hurting anyone, I suppose.

"I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not" (2026) This is an excellent, no-punches-pulled profile of a once-loved, now problematic figure from our collective past.

Who didn't love the Chevy of SNL, the "Vacation" films, "Fletch," and even "Community"? But the more we learned about him, especially about his coke-fueled ego trips, diva behavior on TV and movie sets and, most of all, his casual racism, he became harder and harder to like.

The interviewers here, and those interviewed, including Chase, himself, don't hold back talking about all of this stuff. Without fishing for sympathy, the film details a troubled childhood along with the troubling behavior.

Does the former justify the latter? Not really. Chase is now an 80-year-old guy who, for most of his life, has had it a helluva lot better and easier than most of us, and he should know better. But, after watching, I feel more sorry for him than anything else.

Sunday Reads

Via Pulp.net, a vintage interview with artist Graves Gladney, who illustrated covers for The Shadow and more.

Yes, the cover I did with The Shadow about to strike a skeleton from behind with a Model 97 Winchester, I liked very much because I articulated the skeleton so that it was apparently — absurd of course with its bony appendages — pouring out a poisonous potion. I liked it because I remembered Walter Baumhofer, who was the king of pulps, had done several covers with skeletons that were so absurdly articulated that I really had to laugh.

So when it came to my turn, I really sat up a skeleton, and made the damn thing right and made it work. Of course, as anyone knows, when the human body is reduced to its bony parts, the tendons, which connect them, having been gone, it would be just a pile of bones, so it must be re-articulated, so the whole concept was totally absurd. Nevertheless, you can, by a system of wires — it’s done all of the time — pose a skeleton so that it is apparently performing the same functions of a normal body, and this also seems to be very eerie and frightening to the public. That was a good cover.

Another one that I did was called “The Scent of Death,” with an old woman selling flowers on a street corner, and in her shadowed head was a skull. They liked that, too. That latter cover was hung in the editorial offices of Street & Smith for years as an example of what they considered as good pulp painting and as an indication to aspiring newcomers of their own tastes.

Here's a nice career overview of the late, great Catherine O'Hara via Criterion's The Daily.

Talking to E. Alex Jung in Vulture in 2019, O’Hara recalled, with her typical humility, feeling “very intimidated” to find herself on the set of Heartburn (1986) with Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Stockard Channing, and Miloš Forman. “And that’s Mike Nichols, God bless him, just picking out some little creature that he thought, Ooh, this’ll be fun to throw this into the mix.”

Tim Burton cast O’Hara in Beetlejuice (1988) as Delia Deetz, a self-possessed but talentless sculptor and stepmother to Winona Ryder’s Lydia. Just after Beetlejuice became a resounding hit, Burton told Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times that “Catherine’s so good, maybe too good. She works on levels that people don’t even know. I think she scares people because she operates at such high levels.”