That chart is a classic case of "extremely truncated bottom" (that I learned in school with the help of the book "How to Lie with Statistics"). If you look closely, it occurs 688 times over 400 years as opposed to 684 times for Saturday the 13th, a difference of 4 times, or ONCE every hundred years, also known as "statistically irrelevant". And remember kids, Irrelevant Never Forgets.
That list exists for the sole purpose of starting fights... WKRP at only #47?!? No Adventures of Pete & Pete? NO MY MOTHER THE CAR? (the theme song WAS the best thing about that show - come on, to include Small Wonder and not that?) And including previously-popular songs that got re-purposed as TV themes doesn't seem quite right (Frank Sinatra is still spinning in his grave over Married With Children). If the author ever gets around to doing a separate list of Top Lyric-less Theme Music, I don't think I'll want to know about it... unless Star Trek TNG, Get Smart and M*A*S*H are in the Top Five.
For a moment, I wondered what the Neatorama bloggers would send in... but now I realize it would end up with half of congress wearing "Game of Thrones" and "Breaking Bad" t-shirts... not that there's anything wrong with that ;)
I spent most of my adult life within a short jaunt of Trader Joe's locations around L.A. and am a big fan. It was THE place for good cheese that wasn't TOO expensive, had various frozen semi-ethnic goodies well before other places, the best prices for frozen shrimp (until recently), and some of my cheap-wine drinking friends swear by the "Two Buck Chuck". My one experience with Whole Foods was in the mid-90s when Kroger was combining chains in L.A. and left an empty Ralphs market in Pasadena that WF took over and that shopping trip was total sticker-shock. I also love TJ's advertising - the Fearless Flyer is my favorite junk mail, mixing pitches for seasonal products with self-effacing humor and very-old illustrations (a sample of which is on TJ's website: http://www.traderjoes.com/fearless-flyer/index.asp )
One other thing: way back in the 1970's when I was in College Radio and trying to break into Commercial Radio, their radio advertising was all "live copy" with wordy product descriptions, puns and tongue-twisters that half of L.A.'s radio people loved and the other half hated. I got copies of a few of the scripts and included one in every audition tape I made, just to show I could do it.
Also of note (at least to me) is the voice of Powdered Toast Man was done by Gary Owens, the original voice of Space Ghost in the 1960s (as well as a bunch of other Hanna-Barbera heroic characters), the hand-over-the-ear announcer on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, the voice-over pitchman for a million commercials AND host of an afternoon radio show in L.A. for over 20 years (which, for a few of those years, I wrote for... he even gave my joke-writing skills a tongue-in-cheek endorsement in a radio trade paper, calling me "funnier than Jack Lord and Lorne Greene combined"). So, please, NEVER mention Ren & Stimpy without "and Gary Owens as Powdered Toast Man".
I rarely take issue with Eddie Dreesen's articles, but he regretfully omitted the names of the masterminds behind the Golden Age of Popeye Cartoons, Max and Dave Fleischer, which was why his debut was in "a Betty Boop cartoon", even though the story was mostly Popeye. (Mae Questel, the voice of Betty Boop, also voiced Olive Oyl in the early cartoons) Fleischer Studios was one of the most successful cartoon studios in the 1930s, thanks to Betty, Popeye, "Bouncing Ball" sing-alongs and the first cartoons featuring Superman. A big reason Jack Mercer's "ad lib mumbling" for the character was possible was because at first the Fleischers didn't pre-record the voices, but rather made the actors lip-sync to the produced animation, which Mercer made the most of. Paramount started out just distributing the cartoons, but ended up acquiring the studio and firing the brothers in 1941. It was then that, IMO, the Popeye cartoons started going downhill.
And the main reason the 1960s Popeye TV cartoons were so inconsistent, weird, and frequently awful was that King Features farmed out the production to four totally different animation producers: Jack Kinney, a long-time Disney animator who had made Goofy cartoons and the wartime propaganda cartoon "Der Fuhrer's Face" Larry Harmon, creator and animator of Bozo the Clown Halas & Bachelor, British animators best known for an animated version of "Animal Farm" and Gene Deitch, whose checkered career included Tom Terrific on the Captain Kangaroo show, the Oscar-winning short "Munro" and an also extremely strange later version of Tom & Jerry. Some serious talent there, but all totally wrong for the spinach-chomping sailor.
Considering all things are relative, we have to analyze a little HOW relative. The U.S. score of 7.0 is about 90% of top rated Switzerland's 7.8. By comparison, bottom rated South Africa is at 57%. Things certainly could be worse... of course, we have people working on it...
(to which I replied on Bizarro's blog: "I wonder if Mr. Tufnel also suffered from hyperelevension…")
And if you look at the ends of the row, the arm on the Apple Cinnamon Chex lines up with the person on the Honey Nut Chex to make a complete circle...
But the SINGLE MOST PERFECT Comic Book Character of ALL comic books? That's easy. The Tick.
My life is a fake band in a Saturday Morning Cartoon.
One other thing: way back in the 1970's when I was in College Radio and trying to break into Commercial Radio, their radio advertising was all "live copy" with wordy product descriptions, puns and tongue-twisters that half of L.A.'s radio people loved and the other half hated. I got copies of a few of the scripts and included one in every audition tape I made, just to show I could do it.
And the main reason the 1960s Popeye TV cartoons were so inconsistent, weird, and frequently awful was that King Features farmed out the production to four totally different animation producers:
Jack Kinney, a long-time Disney animator who had made Goofy cartoons and the wartime propaganda cartoon "Der Fuhrer's Face"
Larry Harmon, creator and animator of Bozo the Clown
Halas & Bachelor, British animators best known for an animated version of "Animal Farm"
and Gene Deitch, whose checkered career included Tom Terrific on the Captain Kangaroo show, the Oscar-winning short "Munro" and an also extremely strange later version of Tom & Jerry.
Some serious talent there, but all totally wrong for the spinach-chomping sailor.