Friday Night’s All Right for Making an Old Witch Smile

Nakia is a super-nice and charismatic guy that I’ve been fortunate to hang out with a couple of times, and he’s got a new song and video out called “Dream Big” that you should check out.

My friend Graham Annable has a new sketchbook available on his store Gricklemart. While there, consider the Ghost Writer mug, with a spectral entity re-enacting his favorite moment from Raising Arizona.

There’s an interesting thread from Angus Johnston on Twitter that gives a convincing counter-argument to a recent story in the New York Times. In short: the environmental impact of a cotton bag is almost certainly not as severe as the article, or the study on which it was based, would have you believe, by several orders of magnitude. The most significant takeaway, I think, is don’t use tote bags made of “organic cotton.” Is that a New York City thing?

There are now more episodes of the Behind the Attraction series up on Disney+. The show is a lot more goofy than I’d expected; I like that it’s a counter to the sometimes overly self-serious The Imagineering Story, but it seems light on details and heavy on lionizing individual employees of Imagineering. I have to admit I mostly like it because of Paget Brewster’s narration, although I can’t help but wish she were able to let loose as much as she did on Drunk History.

Something on Disney+ that I’m absolutely not conflicted about: The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse. I’ve already gushed about the Paul Rudish-led series of Mickey Mouse shorts, but this new series is even weirder. The most recent short, “Game Night” does great stuff with Mickey & Donald’s relationship, and the one previous, “Once Upon an Apple,” had more laugh-out-loud moments crammed into 8 minutes than I’ve had in months.

Speaking of that short, the only two voice actors credited are Tress MacNeille, who’s pretty much universally regarded as one of the greatest voice actors ever, and Chris Diamantopoulos, who just annoys me. His take on Mickey Mouse (and the magic mirror, in that short) has re-invigorated one of the most valuable characters in animation, if not all of fiction, and he does it singing, in different languages, and with accents. It seems like a grievous cosmic injustice that he could be such a good voice actor and also look like that.