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"Thus Spake Kishibi Rohan": A Boytoy with Magical Powers in Japan or France
I don't usually watch anime. The visual iconography is too hard to understand, and there are too many references to other other animes and mangas from 50 years ago. For instance, take Thus Spoke...
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"The Crew": Behind the Scenes in a Race Car Crew
Amazon Prime's "Movies We Think You'll LIke" this morning is absolutely disgusting. Not only "winning hte girl of your dreams" plots, but the icons are all about breasts. What algorithym could...
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The New "Are You Afraid of the Dark": Are They Afraid of Beefcake?
Everything old is new again on Nickelodeon. The venerable children's network is brushing off several long-lost shows and giving them a 2019 treatment:All ThatThat's So RavenMighty Morphin Power...
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David Soul
David Soul never quite made it as a teen idol. Maybe because he wasn't visible enough. He appeared on The Merv Griffin Show in 1966-67 wearing a mask (so people would like him for his music, not his...
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The Top 12 Greek Myth Mash-Ups of "Atlantis"
In the first episode of Atlantis, (2013-2015), Jason (Jack Donnelly) goes off in a submarine to search for his missing father, and ends up in ancient Atlantis, where he tries to discover the mystery of...
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"Two Sentence Horror Stories": Being LGBT Means Perpetual Victimhood
Two Sentence Horror Stories is a horror anthology on Netflix (each episode is actually about 20 minutes long). The icon is so extremely disgusting that I've been staying away, but I'm running out of...
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"Tell Me Your Secrets": Lesbian Victims of Predatory Men on the Bayou
Tell Me Your Secrets, a tv series hyped as "mesmerizing" and "riveting." All I know is that it's a drama about "three characters with a mysterious bond." What are their genders? Are any of them...
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More "Two Sentence Horror Stories" LGBT Representation: Religious Gay Guy...
I couldn't believe it -- I selected another episode of Two Second Horror Stories at random , "Fix," and here's what I found:Scene 1: After a dream involving an old man on a swing, Jackson (Kevin...
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Tim Matheson
During the 1960s, Tim Matheson voiced some of my favorite cartoon adventurers -- Jonny Quest, Sinbad Jr., Jace on Space Ghost, Young Samson -- all with strong homoerotic friendships.I didn't actually...
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Zandor, Tor, and Chuck: Saturday Morning Muscle
When I was a kid in the late 1960s, it was hard to find beefcake on tv. Wild Wild West and Tarzan were reliable, there were shirtless teens on Maya, and otherwise you had to hope that an episode of...
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What's Gay about Beany and Cecil?
Beany, a grinning 10-year old boy with blond hair, freckles, and a magic beanie that allowed him to fly, first appeared as a puppet on the local Los Angeles tv series Time for Beany (1949-1954). A...
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"Ginny and Georgia": "The Gilmore Girls" with More Sex and Murder
When you log on to Netflix, a promo immediately starts blaring at you: a high school girl takes down the teacher for assigning 16 books this semester, but only two by women and one by a person of...
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Looking for Muscles on the Carol Burnett Show
Variety shows are out of style now, but in the 1960s, they were all the rage. At least among the adults. In 1969, they could watch 9 hours of variety per week: Leslie Uggams, Carol Burnett, Red...
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"The Tuche Family": Nine Interconnect Stories, Swimming Pool Fatigue, and Two...
I was in a hurry to get something playing on Amazon Prime before my cereal got soggy, so I click on the first movie with a blurb that I hadn't seen before: The Tuche Family. No idea what it is about,...
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"The Tunnel": Can I Give a Grade of Minus 800?
The Tunnel: On the border between France and Britain in the trans-channel tunnel, a woman's body is discovered. Why is it always a woman's body? Do they think that women are especially weak and...
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"Pixie": Irish Priest Gangsters and a Gay Couple, But No Pixies
For movie night this week, we saw Pixie (2021). The title makes you think of a children's fantasy about pixies, but it's actually an Irish gangster comedy. Pixie (Olivia Cook), the free-spirited,...
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"Don't Read This on a Plane": A Cook's Tour of the Most Stunning Bookstores...
Jovana Fey has just published her third novel, entitled Don't Read This on a Plane (because it's about a plane crash?), and is about to start a big three-week European book tour (wouldn't it need to...
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Davy Crockett and the Coonskin Cap Craze
During the mid-1950s, there was a craze for "coonskin caps" among the first generation of Baby Boomer boys: a faux-fur cap, round and furry, with a long tail, striped like a raccoon.The next generation...
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February 15th, 1981: The Best Night of TV Beefcake
February 15th, 1981. A Sunday night during my junior year at Augustana College. The day after Valentine's Day. Last year I wa with my first boyfriend, Fred; we couldn't go out, of course, but he...
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"Invisible City": The Dark Underbelly of Rio de Janeiro, with Pixies
Selections on Netflix have been awful lately -- a lot of men and women falling in love -- and today is no exception. The tv series Invisible City has my favorite groan-inducing sexist cliche, a...
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