#programming note

ETA: Guys, more videos are coming in on the daily. Reruns paused for at least a few days. 🎉

Actually, if you want to talk about another series or manga, that would be nice too! Anyway, if you don't continue, I just wanted to say thank you.

Thank you so much for the compliments! I do not review or critic professionally (though I'm open to offers...), although I do in a manner of speaking write for a living.

And yeah, I think I'm going to keep things up somewhat? I don't think I'll go back and watch the OG anime, but I absolutely plan on keeping close tabs on the new series, especially as we get closer to the point where the manga got compressed and new material might be forthcoming. Maybe I'll make episode recap posts if I have some time on my hands...

...although who knows if I will, because there is additional blogging content planned. Another manga by another author would probably be a stretch, but I'd like to cover (and I think my audience would be receptive to) the rest of Tite Kubo's published works, namely:

The Bleach pilot chapter

Burn the Witch

Zombie Powder

The Hell Arc one-shot

It's finally time, once again, for the only good year end list (ours.) Join MG and DV over the next few weeks as we count down our 50 favorite songs of 2023. Continuing the tradition from previous years, it will be a countdown unlike any other!* Full of chaos and fun juxtapositions and some weird themes as we try to make sense of what was frankly yet another fucked up year.

Having already missed out on Columbia Pictures' 100th anniversary this last January, I wasn't about to ignore yet another - and arguably more historically important - anniversary upcoming.

The upcoming marathon will be tagged MGM100 and will appear Tuesdays and Wednesdays this month (beginning later this evening). Featured films will be posted/queued in roughly chronological order.

This April marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), the result of a merger between three silent film-era production companies in Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures. Within a decade, MGM became one of the major Hollywood studios*, boasting that it had contracted "more stars than there are in heaven".

By the end of the 1930s, it was undoubtedly the biggest, most stable, financially successful, and most powerful of all of those studios. Some of the most lavish productions in film history were shot on its Culver City lot (which is now Sony Pictures Studios for Columbia's use, as well used by the American versions of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune) and MGM's reputation for being the home of the greatest Hollywood movie musicals (1939's The Wizard of Oz, 1952's Singin' in the Rain) was unrivaled. Not until the Walt Disney Studios of the 2010s would Hollywood ever see a studio so dominant in the industry.

The good times did not last. Following the spectacular Ben-Hur (1959), MGM embarked upon a misguided financial strategy of releasing one big-budget epic film ever year and releasing fewer movies per year. Upon Kirk Kerkorian's purchase of MGM in 1969, Kerkorian decided to slowly convert MGM into a real estate and hotel and casino company and approved of the near-complete disposal of the studio's music library - thrown into a landfill now underneath a golf course.

MGM ceased being a major studio in 1986 upon Ted Turner's purchase of the studio and decision to almost immediately resell the studio back to Kerkorian (Turner, crucially, kept the rights to the pre-May 1987 MGM library, which formed the original basis of Turner Classic Movies, TCM). Multiple financial crises since 1986 (including a 2010 bankruptcy) have seen MGM fall even further from its once-lofty perch. Amazon purchased MGM (including the less cinematically interesting post-May 1987 library, although this includes the rights to the Rocky and James Bond series) in October 2023; only time will tell what Amazon plans to do with the studio.

***

So please join me this month as my blog features a celebration for a century of MGM. From epics such as Ben-Hur (1925 original and 1959 remake) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); romances such as Waterloo Bridge (1940) and Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022); comedies such as The Thin Man (1934) and American Fiction (2023); animation such as the Tom and Jerry series and The Secret of NIMH (1982); and musicals such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Victor/Victoria (1982), MGM's history is among the richest of any studio out there. I certainly hope you enjoy the marathon coming to your dashboards soon!

Thanks a whole lot for asking this question — the Bad Advisor had not realized that there are actually a couple of different ways to submit questions on Tumblr! (Or maybe on 'new' Tumblr? Or is this old Tumblr? Who knows, Tumblr is not the social media platform about which the Bad Advisor is most knowledgable, but here we are.)

ANYWAY. This "ask" form will allow folks to submit questions of longer than 500 characters, whereas this ask form seems to limit characters. The "submit" form also allows for longer content, though folks should know that the Bad Advisor prefers the "submit" function to be used for links to folks seeking bad advice elsewhere on the internet (i.e., "Can you believe this asshole in Miss Manners today?").

Cheers, y'all! Keep the asks coming.

I didn't delete anything, anon. I did, however, limit my fics on AO3 to registered users so if you're logged out, they won't show. Log into your account and they will all be right where they have always been.

I explained why I did this here, but long story short, AI is ruining everyone's fun yet again. My hope is that this is a temporary measure and as soon as we get some kind of legislation protecting artists from their work being scraped without permission, I'll be able to make everything public again. Just a quick scan through the SPOP tags on ao3 reveal I'm far from the only person who's done this.