No More Shining Future

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One Hundred Men and a Corpse

Deanna Durbin, the Canadian Shirley Temple, has died at the age of 91. Like Temple, Durbin was a singing and dancing child movie star during the Depression, so successful that she saved Universal Pictures from bankruptcy. Like Temple, she disappeared from public view after her young adult career failed to match her child star days – Durbin by moving to France, Temple by working at the UN. Durbin hit start status with her first film, Three Smart Girls and played wholesome, spunky, can-do kid sisters and daughters who would fix their adult’s screw-ups. in a total of 21 movies over the next 12 years before abruptly retiring. In 1938, she got a mini Oscar for “significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth.” At her peak in 1946, she was the second-highest paid woman in America – at $323,477, just $5,000 behind Bette Davis.

He Stopped Living Here Today

(An epitaphany shared with Monty)

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He Stopped Loving Everything Today

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Yabba Dabba Do the King is Gone and So are You

(Kudos to Michelle)

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Playing Possum

(Additional accolades for Michelle)

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He Don't Need a Rockin' Chair...But He Will Need a Casket!

(Plus more props for Michelle)
George Jones, who didn’t need to wear a cowboy hat to prove his bona fides, has died at the age of 81. Unlike modern acts, Jones only played both kinds of music, country and western, eschewing any attempts at cross-over success. Nicknamed Possum for his close-set eyes and pointed nose, then No Show Jones for the concerts he never showed up for while on his drug- and booze-fueled binges – the latter nickname later serving as his vanity license plate. Sometimes, not showing up would have been preferable, as when he got so plastered on booze and pills that he could only speak and perform concerts in a Donald Duck voice for days on end. Or the time it took him 83 takes to record White Lightning because he was drinking throughout the session. Or the time he drove his lawn mower 8 miles to a liquor store because his wife hid his car keys, a scene immortalized in song and music videos. Or the drunken fight with wife Tammy Wynette that left him in a straitjacket for 10 days. On the rare occasions he was sober, he was a star, as the Country Music Hall of Fame Hall of Famer recorded 14 #1 country hits, was named Male Vocalist of the Year 4 times, won 2 Grammys plus a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award and was named a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2008.

DOA Today

Al Neuharth, the man who tracked America’s feelings on nuclear war and puppies with equally colorful bar graphs and charts, has died at the age of 89 from injuries signed on a recent call. As the head of the Gannett empire, Neuharth helped ruin the newspaper industry by putting profits ahead of good journalism by plumbing new depths in shallow news. Not that his newspapers hadn’t long since given up good reporting in favor of 4 paragraph news nuggets that lulled readers into believing they knew what was going on in the world while never being more uninformed.

Pull Down Your Pants and Slide on the Ice

Allan Arbus, best known as the 4077’s most frequent visitor, has died of congestive heart failure at the age of 95. As Sidney Friedman, Arbus was a semi-regular guest star on MASH, playing poker, treating shell-shocked troops, and, in the series finale, helping Hawkeye tell the difference between chickens and babies. He even got his own edition of the series’ famous letter-writing episodes with Dear Sigmund. A successful fashion photographer with his wife Diane, Arbus didn’t begin acting until he was in his 40s. Gigs in cult classics like Robert Downey Sr’s Putney Swope and Greaser's Palace (as a zoot-suited Jesus), made him a clear choice to play a military psychiatrist. Other gigs included getting killed in The Omen II and a bunch of TV gigs, most recently as Larry’s Uncle Nathan on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

How Dead He Art

George Beverly Shea, God’s musical director, has died at the age of 104. The wannabe Mountie turned Grammy-winning gospel singer appeared before more than 200 million of the deluded at Billy Graham revival meetings around the world. Early in his career, Graham realized he was tone deaf in more ways than one, and elected not to lead his followers in song, creating the opening for Shea. The long-time Friend of Billy also appeared regularly on Graham’s weekly radio broadcast “The Hour of Decision,” and like Billy, couldn’t get enough of the presidents, singing for Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and George Bush The First. With more than 70 albums, including the 1966 Best Gospel Grammy winning “Southland Favorites,” Shea was one of the most prolific gospel singers in history, winning a Lifetime Achievement Award Grammy in 2011. He was probably best known for “How Great Thou Art,” which he once sang for 108 consecutive nights at a New York City revival, right alongside Graham, who was fittingly also singing his same old song every night.

School’s Out for Summerall

Pat Summerall, who overcame being born with a backward leg, toy NFL kicker helmets and alcoholism only to spend 21 years covered with John Madden’s spittle, has died of cardiac arrest at the age of 82. With the New York Giants, Summerall played in 3 NFL title games in 4 years – all losses. His personal highlight came in 1958 when he hit a late 49-yard field goal in a snowstorm at Yankee Stadium that beat the Cleveland Browns in the season finale and forced the two teams into a playoff for the Eastern Conference title. The Giants also won that game before losing the Greatest Game Ever Played to the Baltimore Colts. Summerall was the rare ex-player who ended up as a play-by-play man rather than a color commentator, but his style seemed more suited to the golf tournaments he broadcast in the offseason than the gridiron. His sedate style worked well in his teaming with Madden, largely because his broadcaster partner tended to use up all the oxygen in the room, as well as large chunks of nitrogen and argon. In his career, he brought the same hushed tones to the NBA Finals in 1974 and was the man to let Bobby Orr’s father know his son had won the Stanley Cup for the Bruins in 1970. After stints covering the NFL for NBC, CBS and Fox he retired, making it a semi-retirement when he began broadcasting Cowboys home games and the Cotton Bowl in his hometown of Dallas.

I Find Your Lack of a Pulse Disturbing

Richard LeParmentier, best remembered as Admiral Motti, who learns the hard way that Darth Vader’s sorcerer’s ways were a little more dangerous than his battle station, has died at the age of 66. In a charming bit of overzealousness, LeParmentier had actually auditioned for the role of Han Solo. He also played Eddie’s friend in the cartoon noir Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

He’s Lumpy, He’s Lumpy, He is Dead

Frank Bank, Springfield’s inept bully, has died at the age of 71. In Leave it to Beaver, Lumpy’s attempts to intimidate Beaver and his friends always end up with him looking the fool, as the idyllic town suppresses mean thoughts as ruthlessly and completely as it does minorities.

Winters Discontent

Or

A Dearth of Mearth

(An epitaphany shared by Don and Phil)
Jonathan Winters, best remembered as Gunny, Randy Quaid’s father on Davis Rules, has died at the age of 87. Winters emerged as a stand-up, eschewing jokes for more character-based, stream of consciousness humor that left TV hosts and straight men in the dust as he introduced audiences to sweet/tart grandma Maude Frickert and Midwestern Everyman Elwood P. Suggins. Or he might re-create Hollywood movies, complete with sound effects, or be the one prop comic you didn’t hate, creating comic gems with just a pen and pencil set and a hat. While this made for hilarious late night appearances with Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and David Letterman and memorable set pieces in films like “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” “The Loved One” and “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” no sitcom could sustain him, until he landed a spot alongside his comedic progeny Robin Williams on Mork & Mindy in its shark-jumping final season. He even tried his hand at sci-fi, appearing as late pool great “Fats” Brown, who lost to Jack Klugman in the Twilight Zone episode “A Game of Pool,” but Winters outlasted Klugman by 5 months in the game of life. 

 

Funeral Blanket Bingo

Or

The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini

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M-I-C - See you in Hell...

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No Mo' Annette

(Props to Don)
Annette Funicello, the first Disney-created star, has died of complications from multiple sclerosis at the age of 70. Selected by Walt Disney himself while he was creepily watching children’s theater productions, Funicello quickly became one of the most popular Mouseketeers on the Mickey Mouse Club, receiving 6,000 letters a week, many of which today would serve as the basis for an episode of Criminal Minds. Once the ‘A’ and ‘E’ started working their way around to the sides of her sweater, she embarked on a singing career with the timeless classics “O Dio Mio,” “Tall Paul” and “Pineapple Princess,” laying the groundwork for future multitalented Mouseketeers Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Funicello went on to foster the chaste-est love ever with Frankie Avalon through a slew of Beach Party movies that were as great a contribution to cinema as her singing endeavors had been to music, and were scandalous in their shameless depiction of her uncovered navel over Walt’s objections.

A Little Spring De-Thatching

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Conservatively Cadaverous

(Props to Chris Nicholas)

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Ding, Dong! The Witch is Dead

(Additional accolades to Chris Nicholas, quoting the streets of London)

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Tramp The Dirt Down

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Labour’s Loathed Lost

Margaret Thatcher, the sex-starved boa constrictor of English politics who was once offered Jacques Chirac’s balls on a tray, has died at the age of 87. Like Ronald Reagan, her conservative partner in international crime during the 1980s, a long career of mental strain to elevate the Soviet Union into something more than an outdated, failing monolith and to convince herself that relentless oppression of the working class and tax cuts for those least in need of them was the best means to a healthy economy left her with significant dementia in her later years. Elected as a Member of Parliament in 1959 and elevated to a Cabinet post in 1970 where she took away free milk for school children, Thatcher would become the only woman Prime Minister in the history of the United Kingdom, and her tenure from 1979 to 1990 is the longest of any Prime Minister in the 20th century. After her election in 1979, she took on the struggling UK economy by emphasizing deregulation, privatizing state-owned companies and diminishing the power of the trade unions, resulting in worsening recession and high unemployment. To boost her popularity, she took on Argentina and held onto the Falkland Islands, earning her a second term in 1983. She fought efforts for Scotland and Wales to develop their own Parliaments and her battle with the miners union cost the UK £1.5 billion, tens of thousands of jobs and devastated communities. International highlights included not supporting efforts to isolate the South African government in order to end Apartheid while supporting the genocidal Khmer Rouge’s bid to hold its UN seat after it had been evicted from Cambodia. By 1990, her combative nature, the Conservative’s 18-month losing streak to Labour and the lack of a 3rd World Nation’s navy to destroy, Thatcher was forced to resign as PM.

Beneath the Valley of the Dolls

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Thumbs Down

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The Balcony is Closed

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I Hated, Hated, Hated Writing this Obituary

Roger Ebert, the man responsible for the two greatest travesties in daytime television history, has died of cancer at the age of 70. Ebert helped create the Empress of the Universe by suggesting that then local host Oprah Winfrey could make a killing if she syndicated her show nationally. When Jerry Springer told him he was thinking of doing the same, Ebert did not kill him on the spot, unleashing two decades of belligerent trailer trash skanks and philandering illiterates whose calls even Maury Povich’s bookers wouldn’t return. Ebert also reviewed a few films, starting at The Chicago Sun-Times, earning a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for criticism, employing a combination of encyclopedic film knowledge and withering sarcasm. Saying of the 1994 film North: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.” After Rob Schneider dismissed Los Angeles Times movie critic Patrick Goldstein’s harsh review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo because Goldstein had never won the Pulitzer Prize, Ebert weighed in that having won a Pulitzer Prize, he was qualified to tell Schneider “Your movie sucks.” He later took his act to TV alongside rival columnist Gene Siskel from The Chicago Tribune, first at PBS’ Sneak Previews, then the syndicated At the Movies. Proving that those who can’t do criticize those who can, Ebert rolled up his sleeves and wrote the screenplay for sexploitationist director Russ Meyer’s execrable titty flicks Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens and Up!

No Reflexes

Or

A Matter of No Feeling

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Come Undone

Milo O'Shea, who as Durand Durand learned that Jane Fonda had no shame long before she started climbing on Vietnamese anti-artillery units or marrying Ted Turner, has died at the age of 86. In addition to playing to stereotype as a string of priests, matchmakers and drunks, O’Shea tended to one side of the law, in attempting to fleece Rose on The Golden Girls or tutoring Dana Carvey in the way of the con in Opportunity Knocks, or the other as the trial judge in Paul Newman’s The Verdict, or playing liberal lion Chief Justice Roy Ashland on The West Wing.

Turn out the lights, the Pardee’s over

Jack Pardee, the Don King of NFL head coaches, has died of gall bladder cancer at the age of 76. Pardee started in Coach Bear Bryant’s infamous “Junction Boys” camp at Texas A&M and after being one of only 35 (from 100 who entered) to survive the 10 days of brutal drills in oppressive heat, he emerged as a College Football Hall of Fame linebacker and fullback. After a 13-year pro career that included 2 All-Pro seasons, he had stints coaching the Chicago Bears, returning the Bears to the playoffs for the first time since George Halas, and Washington Redskins, where he won Coach of the Year honors, but never made the playoffs. He returned to the college game as a coach at the University of Houston, employing a Run and Shoot offense that netted Andre Ware a Heisman Trophy. In the NFL, he made the playoffs 4 years in a row with the Houston Oilers, making Warren Moon a star, but is probably best remembered for arranging sideline fisticuffs by putting Buddy Ryan and Kevin Gilbride on the same coaching staff. In addition to the NCAA and NFL, Pardee also was a head coach in the USFL (1984-85 Houston Gamblers, 1986 New Jersey Generals), World Football League (1974 Washington Ambassadors/Virginia Ambassadors/Florida Blazers) and the Canadian Football League (1995 Birmingham Barracudas), making him the only man to get second-guessed in such a varied collection of sports leagues.