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Ready for some lightness in what's been a grim week? Let's start out with Martin Grams and his link to this interview with Mickey Mouse, which I should think would bring a smile or two to many a face out there.

At A View from the Junkyard, Roger looks at the A-Team episode "Labor Pains," which once again demonstrates that unregulated capitalism makes for great bad guys. If that sounds strange coming from me, keep in mind that the best regulation for any kind of -ism, as Whittaker Chambers once pointed out, is that of morality. Whose morality? Well, that's a topic for another day.

Some interesting tidbits over at Television Obscurities include this brief NBC promo for the 1972 Fall Season, as well as some audio from CBS News's dramatic coverage of the funeral of General and former President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1969, an event that marked the further closing of the window to an era.

At the Secret Sanctum of Captain Video, it's a look at "Planet of the Robots," a story from the comic strip adventures of Star Trek, courtesy of the British weekly comic magazine TV Century 21. The story ran in 1969, before the series had even premiered over there.

Commemorations of two different types from Terence at A Shroud of Thoughts: first, the 70th anniversary of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, the first "adult" television Western; second, the passing of Mark Volman, founding member of The Turtles, who died at age 78. We're all aging at the rate of 60 minutes per hour, but sometimes it seems the clock runs very fast.

At Mavis Movie Madness, Paul pays tribute to actress Polly Holliday, who died earlier this week; she's the wonderful Flo from the sitcom Alice, who then moved on to her own sitcom, a successful show that fell victim to circumstances beyond its control. 

At Cult TV Blog, John takes a look at a genre we don't discuss often enough, the documentary: it's "The Apartheid Killer," an episode of the BBC's Africa Eye series, and it describes the consequences of living in "a community where you have either suffered from crime or have benefitted from it."

And in case you miss my weekly (daily?) promotions, here's a very nice mention of Darkness in Primetime and It's About TV at The Saturday Evening Post, courtesy of friend of the blog Bob Sassone. Now I can say I've appeared in the same magazine as Norman Rockwell!

Also, my latest "Two Minute Author" video is up, and even though I came in at just under four minutes this time, I think you'll like it; it's a look at how the Hollywood Blacklist influenced many of the shows I write about in the book. Directors, writers, and actors were all involved at one time or another, and you can see the effects in the stories and the performances. TV

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