here is how keira knightley in bend it like beckham can still win the ballon d'or
I’m writing a project on history, so I just thought I’d share some videos I found with you.
What do all three of these people have in common? Well, all of them are big American television hosts: Fred Rogers, Johnny Carson, and Oprah Winfrey. And I’m currently researching them.
They may not give us insight on how to run entertainment in the present. But they give us insight into how the world functioned in the past. And they can teach us something about power.
I know you may not want to read this post. After all, these are very mainstream people, it may seem boring. But I’ll let you know that this post is not boring. Because these people are interesting. And they lived in interesting times.
Let’s start with Oprah Winfrey: because she was the first person I researched.
1. Oprah’s Interview with Michael Jackson
(video is 3:25 in length)
The year is 1993. Oprah has just been hosting The Oprah Winfrey Show for seven years now. And in a rare prime-time event, she interviews Michael Jackson on her show for Americans all across the nation to see.
The interview itself is interesting. Michael Jackson confesses that he dislikes the idea of being portrayed of as a white person, when he believes he’s “a black American”. He says the color of his skin started to change “sometime after Thriller”.
He claims that what he’s been doing that’s resulted in the drastic change in his skin tone is that he was using makeup to even it out, and denies “taking anything” to change the color of his skin.
This interview is the most watched interview ever, with an audience of 36.5 million people that watched it from home. It really shows the popularity of Michael Jackson—and the power of Oprah Winfrey.
You see, you may not have heard about Oprah Winfrey much anymore, but she was once the most powerful woman in the world. During its 1991-1992 season, The Oprah Winfrey Show had 13.1 million daily U.S. viewers.
A survey back in 2003 estimated that 73% of American adults “had a favorable view of Winfrey”. Her outreach was so wide that every time she showed a new book on her segment, Oprah’s Book Club, it would instantly become a bestseller.
Forbes named her the “world’s most powerful celebrity” in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2013. She became the world’s first black billionaire in 2004, and remained the only one until 2007.
Michael Jackson died in 2009. If he was still alive today, he’d be 62. But Oprah Winfrey is still alive. She’s worth $2.5 billion, the richest self-made woman in the world.
2) Johnny Carson Invites Frank Sinatra
(video is 4:52 in length)
The year is 1976. Johnny Carson is in the height of his career, who’s soared to become an American icon in the 1970s. And here he brings Frank Sinatra, the famous singer, onto his talk show The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
Johnny Carson begins with a funny yet intriguing question to Frank Sinatra: “when you’re in a romantic mood, and you’re trying to make out, whose records do you put on?” The audience laughs.
Then Don Rickles walks on stage. Don Rickles is a famous comedian that’s a comedic favorite in the eyes of Johnny Carson and a long-time friend to Frank Sinatra. (Don Rickles is also the voice of Mr. Potato Head in the Toy Story movies.)
Don Rickles is happy to see Frank Sinatra because “I’ve never met him before”. Then Rickles jokes with Sinatra about the Mafia, since Frank Sinatra is Italian. (Remember, this is the 70’s, the Mafia was still big around this time.) Then Don Rickles kisses Frank Sinatra. Twice.
This clip is not very important. I mean sure, there’s Frank Sinatra, and the clip is very funny, but it has no historical significance nor modern effect. It is, however, a breath of fresh air, for people in the present to look at humor in the past. There’s something about this that just doesn’t exist anymore.
A quick Google search of “most influential television hosts” yields Johnny Carson at the top of the list. Yet you’ve probably never heard of him. Why? Because the audience he catered to is all grown up now.
You see, late-night talk shows like The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson lend themselves to a uniquely adult audience. Let’s say a person watched this episode on television when it first aired, which is not unlikely. Suppose they were 26 years old then. Now, they’d be 70.
As a result, you may not know just how much of an effect Johnny Carson had American comedy culture.
Some comedians kickstarted their careers by appearing on Johnny Carson’s show and getting Carson to laugh at their jokes. Examples of comedians that did this include Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, and Ellen DeGeneres.
Furthermore, his style of humor was so contagious that many comedians today credit Johnny Carson as an influence. Examples of these comedians include David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Fallon.
Johnny Carson and his show had a massive influence on the modern comedy world. In total, at least thirteen comedians started their careers through him, and at least twenty-three comedians credit Johnny Carson as an influence.
Today, everyone in this clip is now dead. Johnny Carson died in 2005. Frank Sinatra died in 1998. And Don Rickles died in 2017. (That’s why movie producers were panicking over Toy Story 4 in 2019.) But Johnny Carson’s influence lives on.
3) Mr. Rogers Wades with Officer Clemmons
(video is 3:03 in length)
The year is 1969. Fred Rogers is filming the fifteenth episode in color on his children’s show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And he and Officer François Clemmons are about to break one of the times’ color barriers.
In this scene, Officer Clemmons has had a hard long day of being a police officer, and it’s a hot summer morning. So Mr. Rogers invites him to put his feet in the water with him and relax for a moment.
Officer Clemmons cools his feet down in the wading pool with Mr. Rogers. However, just a moment later, Officer Clemmons cuts his time short with Mr. Rogers so that Clemmons may return to his job.
Mr. Rogers is very understanding of this. He says that “sometimes just a minute like this will really make a difference.” Officer Clemmons dries his feet, they sing a song, and they part ways.
Fred Rogers played a very large role in the production of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He was the creator, showrunner, and host. He wrote all the episodes and created all the characters. He wrote and sang in most of the songs, and played most of the puppets.
And this scene was intentional. Mr. Rogers didn’t “accidentally” stumble into integration or topics about racism. As François Clemmons said in an interview in 2016, “thaaat’s not Mr. Rogers! It was well planned and well thought out.”
Mr. Rogers had an idea of what he wanted to teach to his prekindergarten television audience. He wanted to embed in his TV show, ideas that came from the complicated real world outside his show.
While children were learning in his show about how to control their anger and how to be kind to others, adults were hearing on the news about black people being driven out of integrated pools by white people, pouring cleaning chemicals into the water.
Policemen were white, and they were arresting black people in mass numbers for civilly disobeying. This is the 1960s, remember, and it was a very hostile world for black people in America.
Fred Rogers heard about all this, and that’s the reason why he made François Clemmons a policeman on their show. That’s why they did this scene together.
At its peak, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was broadcast to 1.8 million homes across America. All these families heard the various different themes that Mr. Rogers put in his show.
Fred Rogers died in 2003, two years after the last episode of his show. François Clemmons is still alive, at the age of 75. A documentary and a drama film have since been made about Fred Rogers’ Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.
Besides, Fred Rogers is just a genuinely good guy. He became a part of so many children’s lives across America, teaching them many life lessons. And isn’t that enough?
Well, that’s the end of this post.
Why did I show you this? After all, I really never needed to. I could have just as easily kept it to myself for the history project. Well, it’s because I was interested in this.
I watched these clips and realized I had no idea what the world was like back then. And you hadn’t watched these clips yet, so you probably have even less of an idea. So I wanted to show them to you.
You can see how different a world the people before us grew up in. The people who saw this were Baby Boomers and Generation X, they were your parents or grandparents. And this could have been the source of entertainment they saw when they were growing up.
And you can see how powerful these people are. Let’s be honest, no one here on Tumblr has power. No one around here has a lot of money. We fund Kickstarters to fundraise people’s surgeries. We donate to charities to help people elsewhere around the world.
These are people who influenced the livelihoods of millions of people across a third of a continent. Oprah Winfrey is worth billions of dollars. Johnny Carson influenced an entire generation of comedians. And Mr. Rogers made an entire generation’s childhoods.
These are the people who are actually called “powerful”.
And finally, one last note. I’m not a historian. I’m a storyteller. It’s why I’m not concerned with citing my sources. (That doesn’t make what I said here any less true, though, know that everything I said here is factual. You can look it up and see for yourself.)
I wanted to share stories with my friends and with the world. So that’s why I made this post. So they can see it now. And you can see it too.
Andrew Garfield as Jonathan Larson + Stephen Sondheim as himself tick, tick… BOOM! (2021) When I screened the movie for Sondheim, he e-mailed me and said, “You treated me very gently and royally, for which I am grateful.” But he said, “One thing: the last voice mail message to Jon, it sounds a little cliché. ‘I have a feeling you’re going to have a very bright future.’ I would never say that. Can I please rewrite what Sondheim says in the voice mail? I’ll record it if you can’t get the actor back.” - Lin-Manuel Miranda on his Stephen Sondheim re-write.
“When I showed [Stephen Sondheim] the finished film, he said, ‘You treated me gently and royally, for which I’m grateful,’” says [Lin-Manuel Miranda]. “And then he wrote me and said, 'But the last phone message to Jon, the language feels a little trite. I don’t feel like I would ever really say that. Can I rewrite it?’ I was like, 'Gosh, a rewrite from Stephen Sondheim — do I accept this?’”
There was only one problem — [Bradley Whitford] had already wrapped his work on the project and was unavailable to re-record it. Sondheim offered to record the new version for Miranda, and it’s his voice that audiences can hear in the final cut.
“It makes me weep to even think about,” gushes Miranda. “Because he was such a mentor to Jon and generations of songwriters. But yes, he rewrote that message and recorded it himself and just sent it to me." (x)
this movie is so fucking creepy jesus fuck
tripster-and-the-mad-hatter
It’s by Tim Burton, what did you honestly expect?
Actually, it’s Henry Selick, who was the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas. The book was written by Neil Gaiman, though, and is far…far….worse.
Sorry, I’m about to geek the hell out.
The movie is captivating, but the book is twenty kinds of terrifying, even now, ten years after I first read it. As disturbing as the movie may have been to some, the things Selick added really serve to cushion just how horrific the story really is.
First of all, the character of Wybie does not exist in the book. Coraline is facing all of this nearly alone, with her only help coming from the sly comments of the cat, a warning from the circus mice, and the stone given to her by her neighbor, presented with no comment but that it “makes the unseen seen.”
Second, the Other Parents are never quite as warm (and, dare I say, normal) as they are in the gifs above. They’re described as having paper-white skin and the Other Mother’s hair is said to move on its own, and her long, red, claw-like nails don’t ease any uncertainty that she is absolutely, positively up to no good. The first time Coraline meets them, they (and the rest of the Others) seem to be playing roles (for whatever reason, Coraline does not seem to pick up on this), like they all know what to say and what to do and are simply waiting for Coraline to make her move in their terrifying play world. This is shown to be partly true when the Other Parents tell her they know she’ll be back soon after she refuses the buttons - this time, to stay.
Third, the Other Mother commits atrocities that really should not have been in a book for anyone not fully grown up. She physically deforms the world around Coraline to slow her progress in their game beyond any mild traps the movie portrays, and, instead of turning the Other Father into the wandering pumpkin-thing seen in the film, she simply ceases to use him and throws his body away in the cellar, leaving him to rot with whatever bit of sentience he has left. She begins to lose her touch, as Coraline gains the upper hand. Her world doesn’t just become a nightmare - it falls apart completely. No creepy but oddly cool bug furniture here, just the house that now appears to be a child’s drawing. Whatever the Other Mother is (a beldame, but something tells me she’s much more ancient and powerful than that), she does not give half a hump about what she has to do to ensnare Coraline. Destroy the supporting characters of her twisted creation? Done. Allow herself to be dismembered to ruin Coraline’s life in the normal world? Not even gonna bat an eyelash.
On a final, personal note, imagine eight year-old me, ignored by my parents, absorbed in the story and identifying with Coraline from the start. Imagine me finishing this bloodcurdling book and immediately thinking of my basement, where there is still a locked door that my grandmother swears up and down is nothing more than a storage room, but has not once in my (or my mother’s) lifetime unlocked.
Can you see why this book still scares me?
Fun fact I learned from seeing neil gaiman speak: when he first wanted the book published, his editor said it was too scary. He suggested she read it to her young daughter, and then decide. So she did, and her daughter wasn’t afraid, and it was published. Years later, Gaiman was sitting next to that daughter at an event and told her this story, and she said “oh I was terrified I just didn’t want to tell my mom”.
Coraline WAS too scary to be published, but exists anyway because a girl lied to her mother.
@neil-gaiman, is this true about the publisher’s daughter?
It was my literary agent, Merrilee Heifetz who read it and said “you can’t seriously expect this to be published as a children’s book.” So I suggested she read it to her daughters. And she called me back a week later and said “They love it and they weren’t scared at all. I’ll take it to Harper Children’s.”
A decade later, at the Opening Night of the Coraline musical, I was sitting next to Morgan, Merilee’s youngest daughter, and told her how her not being scared had made the book happen. And she said “I was terrified. But I needed to find out what happened next. So nobody knew.”
So, yes.
This website can be toxic at times, but the fact that people can just tag Neil Gaiman to get his input, like a sorcerer invoking a benevolent spirit, is definitely a bright spot.
at this point, they’re in buckingham palace hooking the queen’s nipples up to car batteries in an attempt to reanimate her
Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?
Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.
Kiran Desai. The Inheritance Of Loss.
all those terms for when you dont really like something but someone else does and you respect that… youve heard of “not my cup of tea” and “whatever floats your boat” and now its time for this phrase to shine
I fully believe the queen is dead and they just don’t wanna deal with a funeral before Christmas so they’re keeping her on ice (aka life support) till spring.
apparently the entire country has to do a 12 day long mourning and the BBC is legally banned from putting on any comedy show during that week AND they have to shut down the London stock exchange for one whole day... now I'm not saying they're weekends at Bernie's-ing that colonizer to keep the stock exchange open, but....
This is Doris Pollas, the cofounder of the organisation now known as lgbt+ Denmark which by being founded in 1948 is one of the oldest if not the oldest queer organisation in the world.
Doris lived in a farm in Jutland as a child. She was always butch and figured out she was a lesbian in her teens. When she heard about a club in copenhagen where boys kissed boys and girls kissed girls she went just some months after and it was through that club she started a paper connecting queer people all up to seventies and co founded lgbt+ Denmark.
She is now 97 year and wishes for every queer person to have an as loving and accepting family as she did.
I don’t see a lot of older gays from my country, so learning about Doris, a masc lesbian, was really nice.
desiblr? can we make it happen?
@astra2111 @sassychaostrash @raaabta @maccharfucker @mydogisgaytoo @jugn00 @roseusnoctua and like everyone else as well
