George Case's Blog, page 2

Plane Talk

One of my enduring pet peeves is the muddled language used by reporters and news outlets to describe military aircraft. Particular models deployed in war zones or crisis situations are often characterized under generic terms, like “jet fighters” or “military bomber planes,” that are at best vague and at worst flat-out inaccurate. For journalists, editors, […]

Weak Previews

The short rejoinder to the title of Matt Singer’s 2023 book Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever is: Not in a good way. Singer charts a breezy and upbeat portrait of the two Chicago newspaper critics who became celebrity TV movie reviewers with a patented on- and (to a lesser extent) off-air […]

Many a Jest is Taken For Truth

For me, the rewards of reading Phil Tinline’s Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today (2025) include its citation of my own Calling Dr. Strangelove in the bibliography and its quote from my contribution to the Encyclopedia of American Political Humor, but they […]

Reunited, and It Feels So…Bad

Most of us have had the opportunity to take part in alumni or other organized reunions – meeting up with former classmates, teammates, workmates, or squad mates after many years’ separation. The affairs can be pleasantly nostalgic or emotionally awkward, but at least they are more or less private. Popular culture, however, is replete with […]

You Looked So Cool and Casual

In 2020 a longstanding mystery was solved by Rolling Stone journalist Kory Grow, who tracked down and interviewed the woman posed in a witchy outfit on the jacket of the classic 1970 record Black Sabbath, the veteran British rockers’ debut.  The model, one Louisa Livingstone, had never before been identified – some had speculated she […]

Revisionism Revisited

Politics, and the passage of time, have made revisionist history around World War II newly topical. Last year the prominent American pundit Tucker Carlson hosted a podcast with Darryl Cooper, himself a popular podcaster, who has claimed that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War.” Churchill’s record as an unrepentant Anglo […]

Class Act

It was poignant to note the April 13 death of English actress Jean Marsh at age 90, just when I’ve been rediscovering the classic television series she co-created and starred in, Upstairs, Downstairs. The show, which originally aired in Britain from 1971 to 1975 and became popular internationally, was essentially a handsome soap opera about […]

Populism and Pop

A recent episode of publicity and show business spilling over into the field of sober editorial commentary concerns not a blockbuster movie, a banned book, or a brand of beer, but a country music single.   The controversy over Jason Aldean’s 2023 hit “Try That In a Small Town” – the song and its video […]

A Little R(egan) & R(osemary)

Probably the two most influential horror stories of the last sixty years – and maybe the two most influential stories period – are Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Both began as popular novels that modernized the occult themes of witchcraft and demonology, formerly all but dicarded in a secular age; both were soon adapted into […]

Beware the Biopic

With the movie industry increasingly vulnerable to new media and new tastes, Hollywood is increasingly dependent on the financial security represented by intellectual property, or IP. IP is the catalogue of pre-existing, pre-sold stories and characters which can be profitably adapted into film: sequels, prequels, re-boots, and “re-imaginings,” as well as franchises based on popular […]