This might be one of the strangest animated crossovers ever put on screen, and somehow it still works in that chaotic, offbeat UPA way. Magoo Meets Boing Boing throws together two completely different cartoon worlds by pairing the near-sighted Mr. Magoo with Gerald McBoing-Boing, the boy who speaks in sound effects. Directed by Abe Levitow and released theatrically in 1959, the short came at a time when United Productions of America was struggling to recapture its earlier success. The concept felt like a last-ditch idea: combine two of the studio’s most recognizable characters and hope audiences respond. The story leans fully into absurdity, with Magoo babysitting Gerald, mistaking him for a dog, and misinterpreting his sound effects as real emergencies, including a “fire” that only exists in Gerald’s noisy imagination. What makes it even more interesting is that this crossover did not come out of nowhere. Years earlier, the characters had already appeared together in Dell Comics, wh...
A work of unparalleled candor and splendorous beauty, The Lyrics celebrates the creative life and the musical genius of Paul McCartney through 154 of his most meaningful songs.
From his early Liverpool days, through the historic decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his long solo career, The Lyrics pairs the definitive texts of 154 Paul McCartney songs with first-person commentaries on his life and music. Spanning two alphabetically arranged volumes, these commentaries reveal how the songs came to be and the people who inspired them: his devoted parents, Mary and Jim; his songwriting partner, John Lennon; his “Golden Earth Girl,” Linda Eastman; his wife, Nancy McCartney; and even Queen Elizabeth, among many others. Here are the origins of “Let It Be,” “Lovely Rita,” “Yesterday,” and “Mull of Kintyre,” as well as McCartney’s literary influences, including Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, and Alan Durband, his high-school English teacher.
With images from McCartney’s personal archives—handwritten texts, paintings, and photographs, hundreds previously unseen—The Lyrics, spanning sixty-four years, becomes the definitive literary and visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.