B^2 ongoing primary battle coverage disrupted?

Looks like Dear God Damn Diary has collected a cease-and-desist letter from one Angela Gordon, representing United Features Syndicate, for posting the execrable earworm ‘Hey Ya.’

While we at mike.whybark.com applaud the effect of this letter, which is to minimize the possibility that we’ll experience the inescapable urge to perforate our eardrums with the tiny little pencils once distributed by national magazines with appeals to subscribe (back in the seventies, when every day was like a rotting tooth in the mouth of a week-old corpse), we are sadly constrained to note that Ms. Gordon’s thuggish eviction notice was intended to protect not the innocent listener (oh, how we mourn for the pursuit of the public good in our vaunted corps of legal professionals) but rather to protect the valuable intellectual property created by the happy collaboration of Charles M. Schulz and Bill Melendez in the form of an animated television special celebrating the birth of an important religious figure as reflected in the lives of a group of children originally seen in the comics section of nationally distributed newspapers but which I do not refer to by name out of my deep concern, (undoubtedly only expressed with greater assiduity by Ms. Angela Gordon on behalf of United Features Syndicate) for the protection and maintenance of the property rights of United Features Syndicate, as the name is clearly marked in the cease-and-desist letter with the registered symbol.

It’s my sincere hope that while this deserved slap in the faces of all callous underminers of our nation’s and the world’s regime of intellectual property rights will in no wise distract B2‘s mission of providing us with informative, sober, thougtful insights into the current high-powered primary battle.

Army of Darkness: Jackson Source?

Happened across Sam Raimi’s ’93 classic Army of Darkness last night and chuckled my way through it.

In the sequence where the Deadites attack Arthur’s castle, I was struck by the similarities between it and Jackson’s Helms Deep sequence from The Two Towers. Not in scale of course; but both are night sequences, certain shots from the Raimi film appear to anticipate much larger and more polished shots in Helms Deep, and there were enough rough paralells that I began to muse on the topic.

Consider Jackson’s 1992 Dead Alive. Though much more over the top than AOD, it also takes the slapstick approach to horror as a genre. An aside: what is up with the goatse reference on that poster?

Fast forward to three years ago. Note that Raimi’s Spider-Man actually beats each one of Jackson’s LOTR films at the box office. It also entered release as Jackson was probably fine-tuning TTT.

Finally, I think it should be noted that many of the folks that worked on LOTR worked for Raimi even longer than they worked for Jackson: Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules were shot in NZ for the series’ entire run.

So I think a reasonable case can be made for the two filmmakers being aware of each others’ work. I suspect they like each others’ stuff, actually. But did Jackson insert certain sequences into Helms Deep as a tip of the helmet to Raimi?

Cursory Googling did not yield others wondering about this. A similar lack of attributed quotes by Jackson on this specific proposition or on Raimi’s work in general leads me to guess that no-one’s spent time with Jackson talking about Raimi’s work of late.

I shall add it to my list of questions for the bearded one!