Obituaries

[Mongrel]

Damn. ;___;

Why you wanna make me cry, Bill?

[Büge]

MAD Magazine's Mort Drucker

[Mongrel]

Aw noooooooo.

Dammit.

I mean, he was 91, but still. Dammit.

[Thad]

A fucking legend.

I liked this bit of the obit:

Mad’s 1981 parody of “The Empire Strikes Back,” “The Empire Strikes Out,” prompted the Lucasfilm legal department to send a cease-and-desist letter demanding that the issue be recalled. “Mad replied by sending a copy of another letter they had received the previous month — from George Lucas, offering to buy the original artwork for the ‘Empire’ parody and comparing Mort Drucker to Leonardo da Vinci.”

[Lottel]

Rick May, voice of the Soldier. Covid

(Sorry it's a link to a Twitter with a screenshot of Facebook but it's all I could find, did find it on the Facebook page as well though)

[Thad]

John Conway, inventor of the Game of Life, has died of COVID-19

(That's the cellular automata Game of Life, not the board game.)

[atog]

Pretty much every movie coming out between 1976 and 1989, I only ever "saw" through the slightly off-kilter eyes of Mort Drucker and MAD Magazine. Everything from "Star Blecch" to "Invasion of the Booty Snatchers" to "Staying Awake"

Just learned about Soldier today. Came here to post it but it was already old news. 'That Soldier is no longer one of ours!'

And one of the few computer games moments my mom and I shared (she was already starting to suffer from mild dementia even before I left home) was the mini version of Life that ran on the old Windows Games basic install. The one where at the end, if you had any surviving colonies, you won the "Noble Prize". That became a buzzword for dubious achievements in science and technology.

When later I showed her how it could be used to model such things as animal coat patterns and neural tube developmental biology, she was floored.

[Thad]

Brian Dennehy.

[Mongrel]

Aw shit.

[Thad]

Irrfan Khan.

[Niku]

[Thad]

Jerry Stiller, age 92; natural causes.

[Yoji]

And because misery loves company: Paul Vasquez, aka the Double Rainbow Guy, gone at 57
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.co ... index.html

[Thad]

Mary Pasko, comic and TV writer. IMDb credits include GI Joe, the original My Little Pony, Max Headroom, the original TMNT, Batman: The Animated Series (including Mask of the Phantasm; he's one of the four credited writers of the screenplay, alongside Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, and Michael Reaves), and The Tick (the animated one).

[Büge]

Fred Willard.

[Thad]

Such a funny and lovable man.

And I believe he was the first one to use the phrase "I don't think so!"

[Büge]

Denny O'Neil.

[Thad]

Aw. 81, so he had a good run, but sorry to lose him.

Something I posted about O'Neil in the Fun Facts thread back in 2018:

Denny O'Neil named Optimus Prime. (EDIT: Better link; now goes to a Comic Book Legends Revealed column instead of a line on O'Neil's Wikipedia page.)

Those of you who are comics fans know who O'Neil is. Those of you who aren't may not, but you've seen his work in some form or another. O'Neil and artist Neal Adams are probably the most celebrated Batman team of the 1970s, and created Talia and Ra's al Ghul. They also did Green Lantern/Green Arrow, which is still largely considered the high-water mark for both characters and is best remembered for its social conscience. It was often clumsy -- I believe it was Chris Sims who described it as a series about how Green Lantern didn't know racism existed and Green Arrow didn't know drugs existed -- but that they were even trying in a DC comic was a pretty big deal back then.

O'Neil is one of the people most responsible for Batman's depiction over the past 45 years (to a large extent, Frank Miller was following the groundwork laid by O'Neil and Adams). Those of you who don't know him from comics might know him as the writer of the Batman: TAS two-parter The Demon's Quest, which adapted (and, for my money, improved upon) the O'Neil/Adams story of the same title that introduced Ra's al Ghul.

[Büge]

Vera Lynn.

[Mongrel]

Wow, chalk that one up to being amazed she was still around. Bad time to go, but good on her for a hell of a run.