#marckarzen

[arlenschumer]

The GREATEST PILOT EPISODE in TELEVISION HISTORY is on ME-TV tonight @ 12:35am est: “The place is here...the time is now...and the journey into the shadows that we’re about to watch could be our journey…” —Rod Serling’s opening narration to The Twilight Zone’s pilot episode, “Where is Everybody?,” October 2, 1959 (directed by Robert Stevens). In “Where is Everybody?,” an amnesiac played by Earl Holliman wanders through a strangely deserted town and decries, “I’ve looked and I haven’t seen anybody around...maybe they’re all asleep or something, but literally, there hasn’t been a soul,” Serling himself observing the sleeping giant that was America in the Cold War conformity of the Eisenhower Fifties? Holliman turns out to be an astronaut in training (torn from the day’s headlines, following the April ’59 naming of the Mercury Seven astronauts by NASA) who, following 484 hours in an isolation tank to prepare him for solo space travel to the moon (three years before JFK’s moon speech), cracked from loneliness and began to hallucinate what we, the audience, thought was the “reality” of the episode—the first Twilight Zone twist ending and still one of its metaphysically best, its narrative structure upending the tacit agreement between storyteller and audience that what you’re being shown is “real.” A true pilot episode (and the greatest in the history of television) in that it included virtually all the existential and surreal motifs that would become associated with The Twilight Zone—isolation, fear, confusion with mannequins, hallucinogenic delusions that seem all too real—“Where is Everybody?” is finally a harrowing visualization of one man’s alienation from reality, indeed from one’s self, which would prove to be the defining, existential crisis facing man in the second half of the 20th Century, a time when the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge—the atomic bomb—first coexisted. #rodserling #thetwilightzone #twilightzone #whereiseverybody #earlholliman #tv #television #tvhistory #televisionhistory #arlenschumer @dgareps @marckarzen @dbbushman @adamschumer @richard_syrett https://www.instagram.com/p/CiP75FBrAz8/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[arlenschumer]

This Wednesday, March 23 @ 6:00pm est: LATE NIGHT with DAVID LETTERMAN free webinar! 2022 marks the 40th Anniversary of the debut of “Late Night with David Letterman,” the NBC nighttime talk show that put the young comedian from Indiana on the pop culture map, one who would shape the style and tone of late night television for decades to come! On the occasion of “Late Night”’s 40th, photographer Marc Karzen, who shot all of the show’s “bumpers,” the still graphics of New York City scenes branded with the words “Late Night with David Letterman,” has published a handsome coffee table book containing the “greatest hits” of the “bumper” crop—and pop culture historian Arlen Schumer (author/designer, The Silver Age of Comic Book Art) will showcase Karzen’s book in this new webinar! Schumer was one of the handful of graphic designers who hand-lettered the type treatments of “Late Night with David Letterman” integrated inventively into Karzen’s photographs, and thus will provide a first-person account what it was like to work on the groundbreaking late night show! ZOOM MEETING: https://bit.ly/3MoC0Db MEETING ID: 864 9710 7532 PASSCODE: 567719 #davidletterman #latenightwithdavidletterman #lettermanbumpers #marckarzen #arlenschumer #tv #television #tvhistory #televisionhistory @dgareps @dbbushman @adamschumer @richard_syrett @marckarzen https://www.instagram.com/p/CbaY5QdL0Qt/?utm_medium=tumblr

[arlenschumer]

TONIGHT on ME-TV at 12:35am EST, one of GREATEST episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE: "MIRROR IMAGE" (written by Rod Serling, directed by John Brahm, originally broadcast February 26, 1960) Dead bodies, dummies, doppelgangers, duplicates—The Twilight Zone was rife with them. Serling’s “Mirror Image” is concerned with “...different planes of existence, about two parallel worlds that exist side by side; and each of us has a counterpart in this world, and sometimes...this counterpart comes into our world...” Taking place in a nondescript bus station, peopled by drab figures immobile in the stark Americana like an Edward Hopper painting brought to life, “Mirror Image” is also the most Hitchcockian of Twilight Zones—the suspense as palpable as the rain that beats down throughout the episode. Vera Miles, who would go on to co-star later that year in Hitchcock’s Psycho, gives the female equivalent of the intense Twilight Zone performance, her eyes glazing over as she unravels before our eyes to co-star Martin Milner (who would gain ‘60s TV fame later that fall in Route 66, then as one-half of the Adam 12 police duo in 1968). And like so many Twilight Zone episodes that would either serve as influence, paid homage to, or outright ripped off by TV series and films ever since, “Mirror Image” supplied writer/director Jordan Peele (of the 2017 film Get Out and CBS All-Access’ new Twilight Zone that lasted 2 seasons) with the foundation for his 2019 horror film, Us, that takes the “Mirror Image” premise and elaborates on it in full, terrifying detail. #rodserling #twilightzone #thetwilightzone #mirrorimage #veramiles #martinmilner #arlenschumer #tv #television #tvhistory #televisionhistory @dgareps @dbbushman @marckarzen @richard_syrett @adamschumer https://www.instagram.com/p/Cc5bVKqLip5/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[arlenschumer]

This Wednesday, April 27 @ 6:00pm EST: DOC SAVAGE BY JAMES BAMA free webinar! ***R.I.P. JAMES BAMA (4/28/26-4/24/22)*** The series of 62 Doc Savage paperback covers that legendary illustrator James Bama painted for Bantam Books between 1964 and 1972 represent an apex in realistic figure painting of not only the 20th Century, but the entire history of the human figure in art, fine or commercial. For Bama’s Doc Savage character—crowned with that sci-fi widow’s peak, clad in that impossibly-shredded shirt, riding jodhpurs and calf-high boots—remains, to this day, one of the most staggeringly heroic, idealized masculine figures ever visualized in any age, by any artist, in any medium. And now pop culture historian Arlen Schumer (writer/designer, The Silver Age of Comic Book Art) has created a free webinar that takes you through Bama’s creative process, from his reference photos of the great illustrators’ model Steve Holland, who posed as Bama’s Doc Savage for all 62 covers, to many of Bama’s original paintings, shown free of all the trade dress elements of the paperback covers! So even if you have all the Bama Doc Savage books, or you’re already a fan of Bama’s work, you’ll see his incredible Doc Savage covers as if for the FIRST time! ZOOM MEETING: https://bit.ly/3Owfn0q MEETING ID: 830 4551 3898 PASSCODE: 698207 #jamesbama #docsavage #steveholland #arlenschumer @dgareps @dbbushman @adamschumer @richard_syrett @marckarzen https://www.instagram.com/p/Ccx0tH8LLzC/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[arlenschumer]

In honor of EARTH DAY, my portrait of its greatest (young) defender: GRETA THUNBERG!! arlenschumer.com #gretathunberg #thunberg #earthday #earth #portrait #teenagegirls #sweden #swedishgirl #arlenschumer @dgareps @dbbushman @marckarzen @adamschumer @richard_syrett https://www.instagram.com/p/Ccp8wEOL2eZ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[arlenschumer]

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20 @ 6:00pm EST: “JEWS & COMICS: a Past & Present History” free webinar! One day in 1933, printing salesman Max Gaines (nee Ginzburg) came up with a novel idea for newspaper promotion: he took pages of some tabloid-sized Sunday newspaper comics, folded them over twice, and stapled them on the side—creating the comic book as we know it! That same year, two 18-year-old aspiring newspaper cartoonists from Cleveland, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, created a character whom they hoped to sell to the very newspaper syndicates who worked with Gaines: Superman! Thus began the history of comic books and superheroes, largely created by American Jews like Gaines, Siegel and Shuster, and so many others that followed! So join comic book and pop culture historian Arlen Schumer (author/designer, The Silver Age of Comic Book Art) as he explores the specific Jewish creation of the American superhero and its antecedents in older, ancient myths—from the Golem to Ben Grimm, as it were—and how they sparked a 20th Century American pop culture explosion that has only gained in prominence and popularity here in the 21st Century! ZOOM MEETING: https://bit.ly/3vp8hT0 MEETING ID: 827 7021 5848 PASSCODE: 958517 #jews #jewish #judaism #jewishhistory #hebrew #israel #arlenschumer #comicbookhistory #superheroes #captainisrael @dgareps @dbbushman @marckarzen @adamschumer @richard_syrett https://www.instagram.com/p/Ccfrtq8rVgs/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[arlenschumer]

THE CITIZEN KANE OF TELEVISION airs tonight at 12:30am EST on ME-TV: "WALKING DISTANCE," the 5th episode of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, originally broadcast on October 30, 1959. If time travel was a cornerstone of The Twilight Zone, a dimension creator Serling described as “timeless as infinity,” a strong case can be made for his first-season “Walking Distance” being not only the best time-travel episode of the series, but the best episode of The Twilight Zone, period. Everything about it is literally note-perfect: Gig Young’s sensitive performance for the ages as Serling’s stand-in, a thirtysomething ad man burned out from years in the Madison Avenue rat race, looking for some kind of respite and finding it in a literal return to his childhood home (”Homewood”), photographed for posterity by Twilight Zone Director of Photography George T. Clemens in a series of arresting, character-revealing close-ups; Serling’s beautifully-worded script, full of an aching, nostalgic longing for his own childhood... “I had been living in a dead run, and one day I knew I had to come back here. I had to come back and get on a merry-go-round and eat cotton candy and listen to band concerts. I had to stop and breathe and close my eyes and smell and listen” ...the subtle direction by Robert Stevens (whose only other Twilight Zone episode was the equally-brilliant pilot, “Where is Everybody?”), featuring a special effects-free through-the-looking-glass entry back in time, and an incredibly stylized carousel climax (even better than Hitchcock's in Strangers on a Train); and finally, Bernard Herrmann’s truly haunting and evocative score, a wistful whine of strings that underscores all the yearning and melancholy associated with the futile quest to recapture youth. “Walking Distance” has subsequently become the benchmark against which all such time-travel episodes, TV shows and films—The Time Machine, Somewhere in Time, Back to the Future, Big, Peggy Sue Gets Married, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Midnight in Paris—are measured. But never bettered. #rodserling #twilightzone #thetwilightzone #arlenschumer #walkingdistance @dgareps @marckarzen @richard_syrett @dbbushman https://www.instagram.com/p/CcLegCEL9ml/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[arlenschumer]

Video of my recent SUPERMAN Fleischer Cartoons webinar is up on my YouTube channel: YouTu.be/xYp9AwLDowE #superman #supermancartoons #maxfleischer #maxfleischersuperman #fleischerstudios #cartoons #animation #cartoonhistory #animationhistory #dccomics #supermananimatedseries #comicbookstyle #comicbookhistory #arlenschumer @dgareps @marckarzen @dbbushman @adamschumer @richard_syrett https://www.instagram.com/p/CcGO_osrhHv/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[arlenschumer]

The GREATEST PILOT EPISODE in TELEVISION HISTORY is on ME-TV tonight @ 12:35am est: “The place is here...the time is now...and the journey into the shadows that we’re about to watch could be our journey...” —Rod Serling’s opening narration to The Twilight Zone’s pilot episode, “Where is Everybody?,” October 2, 1959 (directed by Robert Stevens). In “Where is Everybody?,” an amnesiac played by Earl Holliman wanders through a strangely deserted town and decries, “I’ve looked and I haven’t seen anybody around...maybe they’re all asleep or something, but literally, there hasn’t been a soul,” Serling himself observing the sleeping giant that was America in the Cold War conformity of the Eisenhower Fifties? Holliman turns out to be an astronaut in training (torn from the day’s headlines, following the April ’59 naming of the Mercury Seven astronauts by NASA) who, following 484 hours in an isolation tank to prepare him for solo space travel to the moon (three years before JFK’s moon speech), cracked from loneliness and began to hallucinate what we, the audience, thought was the “reality” of the episode—the first Twilight Zone twist ending and still one of its metaphysically best, its narrative structure upending the tacit agreement between storyteller and audience that what you’re being shown is “real.” A true pilot episode (and the greatest in the history of television) in that it included virtually all the existential and surreal motifs that would become associated with The Twilight Zone—isolation, fear, confusion with mannequins, hallucinogenic delusions that seem all too real—“Where is Everybody?” is finally a harrowing visualization of one man’s alienation from reality, indeed from one’s self, which would prove to be the defining, existential crisis facing man in the second half of the 20th Century, a time when the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge—the atomic bomb—first coexisted. #rodserling #thetwilightzone #twilightzone #whereiseverybody #earlholliman #tv #television #tvhistory #televisionhistory #arlenschumer @dgareps @marckarzen @dbbushman @adamschumer @richard_syrett https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb-YF3QrvfV/?utm_medium=tumblr

[arlenschumer]

BACK IN THE VILLAGE VOICE! My new illustration for Editor/Art Director R.C. Baker: https://bit.ly/3x0z2PV #villagevoice #thevillagevoice #film #1972 #thegodfather #marlonbrando #theposeidonadventure #genehackman #ernestborgnine #cabaret #lizaminnelli #deliverance #burtreynolds #arlenschumer @dgareps @marckarzen @adamschumer @richard_syrett https://www.instagram.com/p/Cbz1lnSL5wW/?utm_medium=tumblr

[arlenschumer]

This Wednesday, March 30 @ 6:00pm est: THE FLEISCHER SUPERMAN CARTOONS free webinar! The 17 Superman cartoons produced between 1941-3 by the Fleischer Studios (of Popeye, Betty Boop and Gulliver’s Travels fame) are considered by animation historians to be the greatest realistically animated films ever made, and the greatest iteration of the Superman comic book character in any medium. These Superman cartoons had the same smooth-flowing, higher-quality look and feel of the great Disney cartoons, due to the Fleischers’ innovating the rotoscoping technique of animating over live action film. You could feel Superman straining to exercise his super-strength, struggling against bigger opponents, be they man, machine or (giant) animal; you could feel his physical effort as he literally leapt “tall buildings in a single bound”! So join comic book and pop culture historian Arlen Schumer (author/designer, The Silver Age of Comic Book Art) as he presents a multimedia webinar about the 17 Superman cartoons’ “Greatest Hits”—along with their behind-the-scenes production art, advertising and promotional materials! ZOOM MEETING: https://bit.ly/3KCs86W MEETING ID: 847 6420 9647 PASSCODE: 950244 #superman #maxfleischer #fleischersuperman #maxfleischersuperman #dccomics #cartoons #animation #cartoonhistory #animationhistory #arlenschumer @dgareps @marckarzen @dbbushman @adamschumer @richard_syrett https://www.instagram.com/p/CbpxbErLxmj/?utm_medium=tumblr

[arlenschumer]

This Wednesday, November 10 @ 6:00pm EST: "TWILIGHT ZONE NOIR: Film Noir on TV” free webinar! The French word "noir" means “black,” used by post-World War II French film critics to describe a burgeoning genre of (mostly) American films, all shot in high-contrast black andwhite, that dealt with a dark and unstable universe of crime, brutality, femmes fatale, existential despair, and the ultimately doomed struggle to escape one’s tragic past and/or future fate. That description of film noir could also be applied to most episodes of the legendary black and white American television anthology series The Twilight Zone (1959-64), since series creator and chief writer Rod Serling described his conceptual creation in similar words (that could equally define film noir) as “...the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge." In this new, free webinar, Twilight Zone historian Schumer (arlenschumer.com/twilight-zone) will take you through a trenchant tour of Twilight Zone Noir video clips and interstitial still images from classic Twilight Zone episodes that deal with the very noirish themes of isolation, death, paranoia, identity and the nature of dreams versus reality. You’ll see those classic Twilight Zone episodes through a film noir lens that will make you see them as if for the first time! ZOOM MEETING: https://bit.ly/3CubwuI MEETING ID: 872 7061 0651 PASSCODE: 662008 #thetwilightzone #twilightzone #rodserling #arlenschumer #filmnoir #filmnoirphotography #filmnoirstyle @dgareps @fredseibert @dbbushman @adamschumer @tommyzotos @marc_zicree @marckarzen https://www.instagram.com/p/CWBVEqRrqrL/?utm_medium=tumblr