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<TITLE>Re: DCML digest, Vol 1 #852</TITLE>
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Shad Z informs us:<BR>
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Anna Nichole Smith is a modelŠIn America, she is better known recently for <BR>
</BLOCKQUOTE> marrying an aged Texas oil tycoon, who died a few years after the wedding<BR>
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She was also Playmate of the Month for May 1992 and Playmate of the Year for 1993 in the U.S. edition of Playboy magazine. Interestingly, in most media coverage of her in recent years this aspect of her, shall we say, career, has largely gone unremarked.<BR>
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She did do a remarkably witty turn as herself in one of the first episodes of "The Naked Truth", a 1995 TV sitcom starring Téa Leoni as an aspiring paparazzi. And Téa Leoni later starred in "Deep Impact", the sister evil asteroid movie to "Armageddon", reportedly Disney's top box office draw for 1998; her co-star in "Deep Impact" was Maximilian Schell, who starred in Disney's 1979 attempt at a "Star Wars" cash-in, "The Black Hole".<BR>
(Not a bad movie, really, suffering mainly from trying to do Disneyesque things in a dark live-action setting over a plot that had some truly bizarre moments of incoherence. Rather like "The Moonspinners", actually.)<BR>
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Later, in 1985, Disney released "The Black Cauldron", an animated fantasy film based on the novel of the same name by Alexander Kent. This movie ‹ which I've never seen, in spite of my fondness for the book ‹ soon ran afoul of a wave of nervousness experienced by Disney over the use of the term "black", and was for a time retitled "The Magic Cauldron". This, along with Disney's flop sweats over the use of the name "Black Pete", led us at Gladstone to speculate in rare idle moments if Disney would eventually retitle "The Black Hole" to something like "The Magic Hole" or "The Bad Hole". They didn't; perhaps cooler heads at Disney pointed out that such variations would not improve the situation.<BR>
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And that's "Six Degrees of Disney Comics" for today.<BR>
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Gary
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