Barbie, long a brand that epitomizes wholesome, American values, has switched gears with the announcement of a new line of dolls in the likeness of 1980s pop music icons. Women, who were little girls during that decade of greed and outrageous fashion, assuredly will approve. Gay guys, who secretly worshipped both pop stars and Barbie dolls, will scream like little girls.

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Gay icon and scary woman Grace Jones is on tour. Relics of the 1980s continue to tour – look at Depeche Mode and the Pet Shop Boys – but I am especially excited about Ms. Jones coming to town. The onetime fashion model turned Warhol muse turned chanteuse has remained remarkably youthful in appearance over the years. Though she does have the vocal chops, you don’t necessarily go to a Grace Jones show for the music. As the above video from 2002 shows-it’s all about the costumes.

Aretha, you got nothing on that hat. Grace Jones tour dates are here.

This is great: Someone has done a side-by-side comparison of two identical scenes in the first two BACK TO THE FUTURE movies. As I Want Stuff explains,

In the years between Back to the Future and Back to the Future II, Michael J. Fox visibly aged and the actress playing his girlfriend was replaced by Elizabeth Shue. Thus, to show the closing scene from the first film as the opening of the second, it was necessary to completely reshoot it.

It’s impressive how carefully director Robert Zemeckis and his crew remade the scene, but of course the differences are obvious. Check it out:

[via Mark Frauenfelder.]

Jon Fine of BusinessWeek has a great post about one of the earliest-known examples of product placement in a music video: the pen company Paper Mate’s sponsorship of Autograph’s 1984 video for “Turn Up the Radio”:

Yes, this actually happened: In 1984 Paper Mate found an unknown poodle-rock band called Autograph, gave ‘em some bucks, and got their product a starring role in said band’s debut video. Paper Mate even teamed up their pens with the band in some promotional posters too. …

I was going to make fun of this in a brutal fashion, for all the obvious reasons–how ’bout that dude gliding across the stage whilst flashing a transistor radio! how ’bout an era in which “heavy metal” and “hard rock”
encompassed bands with as much tooth as a pop-tart?–and cite this as a classic example of a Failed Product Placement. But this video got a decent amount of airplay on MTV, and Autograph’s debut album ended up going
gold.

Here’s the video. I have a vague memory that I actually knew the pens were product placement:

Read the rest of Jon Fine’s post here.

Howard the Duck #8 art by Gene Colan. Trademarks & Copyright © 1977 Marvel Characters, Inc.

On Slate, Keith Phipps explores how the gruesomely bad film version of Howard the Duck almost destroyed the reputation of the excellent comic book that inspired it. The movie was finally released on DVD last month.

What little mystique Howard the Duck has earned over the years can be traced to its unavailability. That mystique is likely to fade soon after viewers drink in the film’s opening scene, which finds Howard lounging in his Duckworld apartment, reading a copy of Playduck beneath a poster for Splashdance. It’s ‘80 blockbuster filmmaking at its most thoughtless, all laser beams and quips. [Steve] Gerber’s original, which has been collected and reprinted a couple of times (including last year in a handsome, if expensive, hardcover), remains as crankily original as ever. More people may know about Howard from his misadventure in filmmaking than his genre-busting adventures in the comics, but, thankfully, the latter are still right there on the shelf.

Phipps’s entire essay is here.