Posted 9:39 AM by Gene

A SI SAP SEZ:

Barbera, Tuesday's news reports said, died at home in Los Angeles of natural causes with his wife, Sheila, by his side.

If Snuffles the dog had been there, he no doubt would have floated heavenward with Barbera's spirit while Snagglepuss delivered the benediction:

"Exit, stage left, even."

This genuinely CRETINOUS writing points out how the idiot news biz is thoroughly afflicted with BOOMERITIS -- and this SI SAP ADMITS to it. (That's said to be a "disease" of the body; it's also a disease of the head.) "LEGEND!" "BELOVED!" "GIANT!" I really don't want to make a thing of this, but dammit the hacks are obsessive: back in '69 the New York Times Magazine ran a scathing 3,000-word criticism (link only; it's part of TimesReject) of these legendarily beloved giants -- this at the time Sesame Street premiered, a show Bill and Joe and their friends willed into being with their incompetence. We forget the legendarily beloved giants' output was so bad that after the assassinations of '68 there was quite a bit of pretentious hand-wringing about their influence, so much so that Bill and Joe put on something called The Banana Splits to mollify them, and arranged a huge PR campaign about its "revolutionaryness" -- the "revolutionary" live-action sequences (designed not by the legendarily beloved giants but by the KROFFTS) merely bookending more animated recyclables. This industry refuses to call a spade a spade; even LEONARD MALTIN blasted their TV work, and that says something.

And on top of this mass buncombe the hacks are getting into their Waffen SS mode praising CLINT's Os-CAR® nominee. THE GREATEST DIRECTOR EVER is a cynic: he has the American side of his thus-far money-losing duology of the war going first to get that out of the way -- then brings out a PC Japanese take in time to get the prostrated Academy-Award®-nominating raves of hacks not a one of whom ever served in any uniform, even as a security guard. The non-stop ad-blurbist groupthink is reason enough newspapers deserve their current misery -- but those mangy alley cats haven't gone through three lives yet.

P. S. Hed from a TRIB ad-blurbist's blog:

Joe Barbera, perfector of the endlessly repeated animated backdrop, dies

NUF SAID.

P. P. S. It appears the author of that Times Magazine piece went on to become some sort of ESPNCorp scribbler, but heck the truth comes in various shapes and sizes.