True, and Asner does refer to many of those roles you listed. However he also referred to very slow periods where he only got maybe a couple of jobs per year or so. I’ve already returned the book to the library so I can’t refer back to any of his exact statements, not from memory. If if see it still on the shelf the next time I’m in, I’ll try to grab a quote or two to share with you. (I do recall the interviewer asking him what was his favorite animation voice acting role aside from Up and Asner responded, “Probably Granny Good” (Granny Goodness on “Superman: The Animated Series”), David Young
I wouldn't call that atypical for a working actor. It might seem slow by the standards of someone who'd been on two long-running hit series in a row, but calling it "blacklisting" feels like a privileged person's sour grapes.
I heard Ed Asner as Jameson while watching the 90's Spider-Man show last week. Even as someone who saw J.K. Simmons' outstanding performance in the role first, I really like what Asner did with the part. I am rereading Star Trek: The Art of the Impossible for the umpteenth time. That was a very exciting time in TrekLit, as we had the Lost Era novels coming out in addition to the DS9 10th anniversary titles of the relaunch like Unity and Rising Son. Books that I am reading for the first time include Death's End and the last two books of the Thrawn: Ascendancy trilogy.
That was the show that made me a fan of Spider-Man, so Asner will always be the definitive Jameson for me.
Superman: Last Son of Krypton by Elliott Maggin. Which I've actually never read before, despite its decades-old reputation as one of the very best Superman novels.
Wow, I'm glad you're finally filling that gap. A truly amazing book. Very much a part of the pre-Crisis, Bronze Age Superman continuity that Maggin was writing for in the comics, but deepening and enriching it in fascinating ways. There is a comic of that name, apparently, but Greg is referring to Elliott S! Maggin's 1978 prose novel which was published as a tie-in to Superman: The Movie, albeit telling a completely different story (based on Maggin's rejected pitch for the movie, which would have been so much better than the movie we got). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman:_Last_Son_of_Krypton
When you are done with the book, check out Maggin's sequel: Superman:Miracle Monday. It is definitely worth a read as well. As much as I enjoy his take on Superman, I really enjoy his version of Lex Luthor.
The bit in Last Son of Krypton about Lex in prison is probably my favorite piece of Lex Luthor writing ever: "One night, in a loose moment, Luthor figured out how to melt the plastic cap of the pen, let a certain amount drip into the ink refill, extract a substance from the glue that bound the legal pad, wrap it all in half a sheet of yellow paper and make an explosive powerful enough to blast out a wall of his cell. Luthor would never do that, of course. If he did, the next time he was in jail the warden wouldn't give him his pen and pad."
I'm heading back to an old favorite - Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space series - since he surprise released a new novel in that series this month. If you've never heard of it, it's one of the all time great space opera future histories, with a general sci-fi awesome/weirdness level that starts just about where the Expanse ends and builds upwards from there. Recommended if you like long-ass epic sci-fi stories of any kind, and especially if you like the Expanse and are experiencing withdrawal after the excellent last book in that series this month. I recommend reading in chronological order; see wikipedia's Revelation Space Universe page.
I have read Revelation Space universe. And liked most of the stories, and a some were really good. Next year I hope to finish the Expanse books, maybe I give more of his books a try
Joyeux Noel by Marion Harmon at the moment. Preferred some of the previous ones in the series, but we'll see how it goes.
Hooked on a Feline by Sofie Kelly. A complex mystery with 2 different crimes trying to use science to solve both of them and put the puzzle pieces together to solve them.I finished reading this book and it was a really good mysery novel. When I get some free time I hope to read the Star Trek Coda books soon.
I loved Interview With the Vampire, but at a certain point the gay subtext was suffocating, in that I, a straight man, was just ready for those hot Victorian vampires to just screw already and they never did.
I first read the book at seventeen. Dare I admit the gay subtext largely flew over my head back in 1977? Reading it again, not sure how I missed it!
I just finished reading Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Inside the Art & Visual Effects (2020, Titan Books) by Jeff Bond and Gene Kozicki. I highly recommend this book for both fans of Star Trek (the 1979 film specifically) and also for aficionados of how motion picture visual special effects are made (or, at least, were made on now classic films like this). This is a very nice “coffee table” type book with the requisite ample supply of nice big photos (conceptual art, photos of technicians creating the Enterprise, V’ger, Klingon battlecruiser, and other shooting models, pictures of the actors on set, etc.). This is a nice history of the entire project, the art and visual effects needed to bring the first Star Trek movie to theaters (reviving the franchise and setting the visual tone for all Star Trek film and television projects to follow even to today). Included in this history is the well known events (well known to Star Trek fans, that is) of how one visual effects studio was hired at the start of production (Jack Abel & Associates) only to be fired after not being able to produce any useable visual effects sequences on film after a year of work and after spending millions of dollars of the film’s budget. Star Wars visual effects veterans Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra then had to be brought in the create nearly all of the movie’s visual effects in only six months or so (the studio having an ironclad contract with the major movie theater chains as to when the movie would come out, a date that could not be changed without losing millions of dollars in fees). Trumbull’s and Dykstra’s companies had to work around the clock shifts to get all of the work completed in time and the finished film was “still wet” as they say when delivered for the big premiere in Washington, D.C. on December 6, 1979. The book begins, however, with how the project initially began life as an earlier film script in 1976 titled “Star Trek: Planet of the Titans” and then a planned hour long weekly television series titled “Star Trek: Phase II”. A lot of conceptual art had been created for both of these projects and actual physical studio models and interior Enterprise sets had been constructed for the television series when that idea was then scrapped in favor of a film again (thanks largely to the success of both Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind). The level of technical detail is high enough to explain how various scenes were shot and the technical challenges that had to be overcome, but not so much as to be overwhelming to most of us readers who are laymen to the film and television visual effects trade. Also very interesting is learning about scenes that were originally envisaged differently from what was shot and, even more so, entire sequences that were shot but weren’t used in the film (like an entire chapter about the shooting of the “Memory Wall” sequence that would have seen both Spock *and* Kirk enter into the inner chambers of the V’ger spaceship in their EVA suits and Kirk get attacked by V’ger’s defenses. Shot practically on a stage over the course of several days, the practical effects (Shatner and Nimoy hanging from wires, the “antibodies” that would swarm and cover Shatner, etc.), just wasn’t working as originally envisaged. (This was while Abel was still doing the visual effects.) They decided to scrap this and when Trumbull and Dykstra took over they (I can’t remember which) decided to go in an entirely different direction, the one we see in the finished movie of only Spock entering into V’ger and witnessing its psychedelic light show. The last chapter in the book looks at how director Robert Wise became involved in revisiting Star Trek: The Motion Picture for the Director’s Cut DVD release in 2001. Doing so enabled them to go back and redo some of the visual effects sequences for the DVD as they had originally been envisaged (but which they were unable to achieve in 1979 for various reasons, mostly a lack of time due to the film’s preset release date and the rush to get everything done in time). Again, highly recommended. The authors conducted new interviews with as many of the relevant individuals as possible and quoted (with permission) from Preston Neal Jones’ book, Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (2014) (another book that I’m still in the process of reading) for interview quotes with those important to the subject who are no longer living. I checked this book out from the public library (after asking them to buy a copy) but this is one book that I will eventually have to get a copy of my own. I gave this book five out of five stars on GoodReads. David Young