It’s a new week here at BCB After Dark: the grooviest hang for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Thanks for stopping by. It’s always nice to see a familiar face. There’s no cover charge and the dress code is casual. We still have a few tables available. The hostess will seat you now. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last week I asked you if you’d rather the Cubs re-sign Kevin Gausman or Matthew Boyd for next season. With the caveat that Gausman has made some noise about retiring, 48 percent of you would rather Gausman be back next year. One-third of you think Boyd is the better bet to re-sign and the rest of you think that the Cubs shouldn’t re-sign either one.
Here’s the part with the jazz and the movies. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. But if you don’t, you can skip it. Or you can skip the baseball part. You’re our guest.
We’re honored to feature another episode of Jazz Casual, the NET (forerunner of PBS) program hosted by jazz writer Ralph Gleason. Tonight’s featured performer is saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley. He’s got a heck of a band backing him up with his brother Nat Adderley on cornet, Joe Zawinul on piano, Sam Jones on bass and Louis Hayes on drums.
This is from 1961.
I went to see Coyote vs. Acme this weekend and I thought about that writing up, but I also watched the 1956 Douglas Sirk-directed melodrama Written on the Wind, and I know you’d rather I write about that. So . . . what’s that?
You know that there are a lot of people out there already who are writing about Coyote vs. Acme?
But Dorothy Malone won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Written on the Wind. Will Forte is not winning an Oscar.
OK, fine. Tonight we’ll talk about Coyote vs. Acme.
Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Coyote vs. Acme is a terrific film. Not only is it funny, which is what is most important, but it’s also fresh and different. It’s a sharp satire of modern life with an existential twist. I had to sit through five or six previews for animated family movies before the film started (which is sad because there were no children at the showing that I saw) and during the last preview I turned to my wife and said “My god. They’re all the same damn film.” Well, Coyote vs. Acme isn’t the same movie as every other family film on the market. It’s got a point of view that’s all its own. I know that Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is the gold standard for any animated/live action hybrid movie. I re-watched Roger Rabbit last week and I think Coyote vs. Acme belongs in the same breath as that classic. It’s that good.
In case you don’t know the history of the film, it started as an article in The New Yorker way back in 1990. There were several attempts to make a film out of it over the next 25 years, but they were always blocked by Warner Brothers, who owns all of the rights to the Loony Toons cartoons. About ten years ago, director James Gunn convinced Warner Brothers to make the movie. The fact that Warner Brothers was actively trying to lure Gunn away from Disney at the time was probably what convinced them.
So the film was made with a script from Samy Burch and directed by Dave Green. It was finished, shown to test audiences and it scored highly. But then Warner Brothers was bought out by Discovery and new CEO David Zaslav decided that it was one of three films, along with Batgirl and the animated Scooby-Doo film Scoob! Holiday Haunt that would be written off as a tax loss. To get that tax write-off, these films could never be shown to the public.
Batgirl was unfinished and still needed tens of millions of dollars of CGI effects and re-shoots before it was completed. It was also, according to those who’d seen the rough cut, terrible. The Scooby-Doo movie was almost finished, but no one thought it was much more than the kind of direct-to-video kids film.
But people had seen the completed Coyote vs. Acme and publicly said how good it was. So there was a campaign to get Warner Brothers Discovery to reverse its decision and release it or sell it to another distributer. That went on for over a year as many platforms offered to buy it, but WBD wanted to make a lot more than the $30 million they’d get as a tax write-off. Eventually, tiny independent distributer Ketchup Entertainment agreed to buy the film for $50 million.
We need to thank the people at Ketchup. Will Forte stars as Kevin Avery, a cynical, downtrodden cartoon accident lawyer. He’s takes the cases of cartoon characters who are injured in one way or another and settles with the giant Acme Corporation for a few hundred bucks every time. Since they’re cartoon characters, they aren’t permanently hurt when they get hit with a falling anvil, so each case is only worth a few hundred bucks. For Acme, that’s pocket change so they pay them out immediately.
Wile E. Coyote sees one of the ads for the law firm of Avery, Jones & Maltese (named after three legendary men behind the Loony Toons cartoons) and decides to make a claim. But Wile E. doesn’t just have one claim. As anyone who’s seen a Roadrunner cartoon knows, he has thousands of claims against Acme products that malfunctioned. On top of that, Wile E. Coyote refuses to settle. Against Kevin’s strong advice, he refuses every settlement offer, pitching this tiny strip mall law firm against the most powerful conglomerate in the entire world.
On Mr. Coyote’s side is Paige Avery (Lana Condor), Kevin’s intern and niece. She has all the “let’s change the world” energy of someone fresh out of law school. She’s the only one in the office who wants to win this case.
Acme is represented by John Cena playing Buddy Crane, a far more successful old law school classmate of Kevin’s. Buddy is a bully, as is the entire Acme corporation. He’s constantly belittling Kevin and trying to get them to settle. In lieu of a settlement, he’ll settle for destroying Avery, Jones & Maltese. Buddy is the villain, but Cena has some terrific comic chops. His interrogation of Tweety Bird in Tweety’s lisp, for example, is laugh-out-loud gold.
Coyote vs. Acme plays out as a legal conspiracy thriller and we soon find out why Acme is so eager to settle. There’s a wonderful sub-plot involving “Peter Lorre” (one of the many stars of the ‘40s that the Loony Toons cartoons used to put in their stories) and Tweety’s Granny. Dr. Lorre is the cartoon threatening to expose “Project Sisyphus,” which behind everything that Acme does.
There’s a ton of wicked satire in the film about how the system is rigged against the little guy by corporations that own everything, including the government. You have to consider the anti-corporate message and especially the anti-conglomerate message could not have gone over well with David Zaslav. Acme is all-powerful because they own everything. There’s no way to beat them. But Coyote vs. Acme does get in a shot by calling Warner Brothers “A wholly-owned subsidiary of the Acme Corporation.” Maybe that’s victory enough.
That brings back that “Projects Sisyphus,” or the Greek myth of a man condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for all of eternity, only for it to roll back down when it approaches the top. You should be able to see the parallels between Sisyphus and Wile E. Coyote, who is condemned to endlessly chase the Roadrunner and never catch him. But it also takes a cue from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, who argued that meaning is not gained through victory but through the struggle. To slightly mis-quote Camus, “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Wile E. Coyote happy.”
Not only is Wile E. Coyote Sisyphus, Kevin is as well. At the beginning of the film, he’s dead inside. It is only through taking on an impossible task that he can never win (along with the encouragement of his perky niece) does he find meaning and ultimately, happiness. Forte’s Kevin is the one character (well, maybe Wile E. Coyote) who has a real growth arc in the film and he pulls it off.
Coyote vs. Acme is primarily a comedy and not a philosophical tract, and it delivers in the comedy department. If you laugh at all the cockamamie devices that blow up in Wile E. Coyote’s face, they’re all here and more. Most of the Loony Tunes characters make an appearance and they all get to do their schtick. In fact, if you’re a Loony Toons fan, there are a ton of inside jokes that fly by so fast and furious you’ll probably miss some of them.
And that’s maybe the one sad part of Coyote vs. Acme. As I noted, there were no children that I saw at the showing that I saw, although admittedly it was a Sunday morning showing that was half-full. Four generations grew up watching these cartoons in the theaters or on television, but they are mostly unfamiliar to today’s kids who grew up on YouTube and a constant supply of new cartoons. Coyote vs. Acme is certainly funny enough even if you aren’t familiar with the Loony Toons universe, but it really goes to another level if you get the references.
Coyote vs. Acme is a little guy film that somehow took on an all-powerful corporation and won. No matter how much money it makes at the box office, Coyote vs. Acme is a winner.
Here’s the trailer for Coyote vs. Acme.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the other stuff.
The Springfield Cardinals, the Cardinals Double-A affiliate, announced they were changing their name for 2027. This continues a trend of minor league teams abandoning traditional names, especially ones tied to their parent club, in favor of unique and often offbeat nicknames.
So as of next year, there will be just nine teams left that share a name with their parent club.
Worcester Red Sox (Triple-A)
Dunedin Blue Jays (Low-A)
Iowa Cubs (Triple-A)
South Bend Cubs (High-A)
Syracuse Mets (Triple-A)
St. Lucie Mets (Low-A)
Fredericksburg Nationals (Low-A)
Palm Beach Cardinals (Low-A)
San Jose Giants (Low-A)
Dunedin, St. Lucie, Palm Beach and San Jose are owned by their parent club.
There are two others, the Reading Fightin Phils and the Lakeland Flying Tigers, that have names that sort of micmic their parent club.
The trend away from sharing a name with the parent club are driven by a few factors. The biggest was the affiliate “musical chairs” that used to happen before the minor leagues were re-organized in 2021. If a team called themselves the “Pirates” and then all of a sudden they were an Orioles affiliate, that was a problem. It’s not much of a problem anymore, but it was a big reason the trend started in the first two decades of this century.
Teams also want their own identity and branding to tie themselves to their community. On top of that, a lot of fans attending minor league games really have no idea what the minor leagues are, believe it or not. Gwinnett said one reason they changed their name from “Braves” to “Stripers” was because they found that many fans believed that it was actually the Atlanta Braves who would be playing in Gwinnett. Admittedly, these were probably not baseball fans who are just going with a larger group. But those people buy tickets and concessions.
Of course, the biggest reason why teams change their names is that they sell merchandise. I own a Smokies hat (Tennessee, not Knoxville) and a Myrtle Beach cap. I own Eugene and Boise caps from when they were Cubs affiliates. I haven’t bought Iowa and South Bend caps because they’re too similar to the Chicago Cubs hats I already own. Teams have “alternate” identities because they sell. Cute and goofy nicknames are also popular with children, who are the next generation of fans that the minor league should be trying to grow.
(They’re also popular with late-night talk show hosts.)
The Cubs affiliates have clearly resisted this trend. In fact, when South Bend went from a Diamondbacks affiliate to a Cubs affiliate in 2015, they changed their name from “Silver Hawks” to “Cubs” to further tie themselves to their new parent club. Iowa did the same thing back in 1982, going from “Oaks” to “Cubs,” but that was at least a decade before the off-beat name trend started. What’s more interesting is that the I-Cubs have resisted this trend and has kept their name the same for 44 years, even if they have had multiple “alternate” identities over the years, including throwback “Oaks” games.
(When the I-Cubs were founded, they were an Oakland affiliate, which helps explain the name, although they kept it through their stint as a White Sox affiliate and one year as a Cubs affiliate.)
So should the Cubs two affiliates change their name? Should one of them? Neither of them? Personally, I find it a bit frustrating to deal with Iowa and South Bend and having to call both of them the “Cubs” and keeping them and the parent club straight, although fortunately Iowa can be called the “I-Cubs.” (“SB Cubs” has never caught on.) It would make my life easier if South Bend went back to Silver Hawks or anything else, but they don’t ask me. I’d probably also be more likely to buy a cap if they were more different from the major league team’s. Do both need to change? Probably not. In my mind Iowa has seniority, but South Bend probably doesn’t see it that way.
So should Iowa, South Bend or both change their name? And if so, what? Give your suggestions in the comments.
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