The Ghost Walks...Into Oaklyn

Started out the morning with more Popeye shorts. Some of the supporting cast from the comic strip joined in for the next round of shorts as the Fleischers moved their studio from grimy New York to sunny Miami. Some of the characters, like Eugene the Jeep (a dog-like critter that can disappear and reappear at will) and the Goons, were pretty bizarre. Others, like Popeye's rough old father Poopdeck Pappy, made slightly more sense. Pappy's introductory short, "Goonland," looks a lot like the 1980 movie - Popeye is in search of his very old father, who doesn't recognize him when he does find him.

Others played with the "Popeye and Bluto fight over Olive" formula. All three try to make themselves more "refined," as per their fan club's orders, in "It's the Natural Thing to Do"...with predictable results. Popeye's fondness for animals helps to show a bull that he doesn't have to fight in the ring in "Bulldozing the Bull." He has less luck freeing pets from Olive's shop in "Leave Well Enough Alone." The third two-reeler also showed up at this point. Olive beats Warner's "The Scarlet Pumpernickel" by a decade by "penning" Popeye's next featurette, a more straightforward adaptation of "Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp" than Disney's version.

Finally headed out to run some errands around 11:30. Much to my surprise, despite all the fuss, we once again only got about 2 inches of snow. The day was sunny and bright, with only a few cottony clouds in the sky. Even as I strolled to the bank, the warm sun was melting a lot of the snow. Anything that was in the shade was icy, though, and the wind was fierce.

I deposited my paycheck, then decided to take a lot at the House of Fun a few doors down on the same block. I hadn't been there since Lauren visited last May. I had such a hard time choosing between the many, many items stuffed on shelves and laying on the floor. I considered a leathery Felix the Cat doll, an original Atari 2600 console (the games were really cheap), or a book on 80s toys. I had such a hard time deciding, I ultimately just walked out with a DVD copy of the 1996 movie The Phantom.

(The other thing is, I'm going to save some money for a new laptop. I've had the Compaq I'm using now for 4 years, since 2009...and my best friend Lauren owned it for 3 years before that. I don't want anything fancy. I just want something I can download music, use the internet, and write on.)

I stopped at Capitol Pizza, which is a block from The House of Fun, for lunch. I had a slice of cheese pizza and a slice of mushroom pizza with a can of Fresca. For once, they had something interesting on their widescreen TV. The usual CNN had been replaced by Comcast Sport Network's showing of today's Flyers home game. I joined them just as they scored against the Carolina Hurricanes and pulled ahead 2-1. The Hurricanes evened up the score as I was leaving. (Apparently, it went into overtime after I left; the Flyers just pulled off a 4-3 win.)

Spent the rest of the afternoon at home. For one thing, I really needed to clean. The bathroom and kitchen weren't quite as bad as when I did them last month, but they had to be done. I never did get to vacuuming  I'll have to do that tomorrow.

I ran Popeye while doing the kitchen, then switched to The Phantom while making White Chocolate Chip-Strawberry Cake and Chicken Stir-Fry for dinner. As with The Shadow and John Carter, this is a cult adaptation of a seminal, prototypical sci-fi franchise. "The Phantom" was one of the earliest superhero comics. Kit Walker is a young man who is the 21st in a line of superheroic do-gooding characters whose ancestors befriended an Asian Indian tribe. Kit (Billy Zane) has to foil the plot of the evil tycoon Xander Drax (Treat Williams), who wants to find three skulls that will grant him ultimate power. Diana (Kristy Swanson), the feisty niece of a newspaper owner who is doing a series of articles on Drax's underhanded business deals, wants to find the skulls first. Both she and the deadly female pilot Sala (Catherine Zeta-Jones) want to find out more about this mystery man in the purple suit...

Ultimately succumbs to the same problems as The Shadow, another 90s movie version of a 30s character - poor casting choices weaken a nifty, Indiana Jones-esque story. Zane is a bland leading man; Swanson and Jones are slightly better as the strong-willed woman Walker has fallen for and the vampy aviatrix.