The 200th Post!
I can’t begin to express how much it means that you readers to take time out of your Sundays to read my blog. I submitted my first two blog posts, my introductory post and my first official post on Ben Wright (voice of Roger in 101 Dalmatians (1961) and Grimsby in The Little Mermaid (1989)) on May 25th, 2015, which means that by tomorrow it will have been five years since I started writing this blog which is very hard to believe!
Looking back on this epic journey, I know I have had a ball with every post that I’ve written. On some pieces I wrote information on subjects that I’ve known about for quite a while, and on others I wrote things that I didn’t discover until I researching them. Amazingly, a lot of those pieces got more reads than I ever could have expected—and in honor of the fact that today will be my 200th post—I thought we could re-explore what made those pieces interesting. Here are the “top-read” blogs from the last five years:
On March 24th, 2019, I posted the blog “Women Directors: Great Work for a Long Time.” In that blog, I explored how women directors have been directing movies for almost as long as men, but haven’t always received the attention they deserved. From Penny Marshall (dir. of Big (1988), A League of Their Own (1992)), to Nora Ephron (dir. of Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998)) to Greta Gurwig (dir. of Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019)), moviegoers benefit greatly from their contributions, and I’m encouraged that female directors are starting to have an equal voice in the movie-making industry.
On September 30th, 2018, I posted a piece called “Maurice Chevalier: The Real Lumiere.” This blog acknowledged the legacy of Maurice Chevalier, who was a popular entertainer in both France and America. He appeared in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s (MGM’s) Gigi (1958) and Disney’s In Search of the Castaways (1962) and Monkey’s Go Home (1967) and—my personal favorite— he sang the opening title song in The Aristocats (1970). And after his passing his trademark “boater hat, tuxedo, and cane,” look served as the inspiration for the character of Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast (1991).
On March 31st, 2019, I we looked at “Carl and Rob: Like Father, Like Son.” This blog was about the legacies of Carl and Rob Reiner, who have both written and/or produced/directed television shows and films that have made us laugh. Carl gave us The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966) and the films The Thrill of It All (1963) and Enter Laughing (1967) while Rob broke ground inventing the “mockumentary” genre with This Is Spinal Tap (1984) and then The Princess Bride (1987) and When Harry Met Sally (1989) which he collaborated with Nora Ephron. Few father and son pairs bring that kind of magic to screens.
On August 24th, 2018, I published the blog “Joe Johnston: Visual Effects Turned Directing Wizard,” a blog telling the story of Joe Johnston, a man who began his career as a storyboard artist on Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) and provided the final designs for the characters of Boba Fett and Yoda, along with the vehicles: “Millennium Falcon, X-Wings, Y-Wings, Imperial Star Destroyer, Death Star, and the AT-AT’s.” He also was on the visual effects design team for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) which won him and the rest of the team a well deserved Oscar. He ultimately worked his way up to directing, and started that part of his career, directing Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) and The Rocketeer (1991). No doubt he is a true movie-making wizard.
It has been incredible these last five years getting to share these bits of information to you readers. Whether you have read all 200 of my posts, or just some of them, I will be forever grateful you all for reading them and I look forward to sharing more information with you in the future. Thanks again!
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