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| -Obits- |
| All the News That Seemed Unfit to Print |
| 2007-08-08 |
| The WaPo gives Weekly World News a decent sendoff. |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #4 "Did we quit when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?" - I'm sure they're no deader than Star Trek. The Web is a very large place. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2007-08-08 21:48 |
| #3 My Grandmother read the old "GRIT" newspaper, and believed every word printed there. Dad and I gave up trying to convince her that some of the stories were there just to get readership. And IT was much better at printing reasonable stories than most of the other weeklies, especially the tabloids. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2007-08-08 17:07 |
| #2 "It is my belief that in the '80s and into the '90s, most people believed most of the material most of the time," says Derek Clontz. Hell, my grandmother believed that stuff all the time, back in the '70s. I can't remember which tabloid it was, but she even believed the "WWII Bomber Found on Moon!" story. Well, it was in the newspapers, wasn't it? |
| Posted by: Angie Schultz 2007-08-08 15:00 |
| #1 I'm really gonna miss Bat Boy. (sniff!) Lind witnessed the birth of Bat Boy, who became the tabloid's most beloved character and the subject of an off-Broadway musical. It happened in 1992, when Dick Kulpa, WWN's graphics genius, was playing around with Photoshop, trying to turn a picture of a baby into a picture of an alien baby. He gave the kid pointy Spocklike ears, big wide eyes and fangs. Ivone looked at it and said, "Bat Boy!" and Eddie Clontz turned to his brother Derek and said, "Do it!" Derek concocted the story of a creature, half bat and half boy, captured in a cave in West Virginia. "BAT CHILD FOUND IN CAVE!" was the headline on the first story. But there were more, many more as the little tyke escaped and was recaptured again and again, constantly fleeing from the FBI and a brutal bounty hunter named Jim "Deadeye" Slubbard, who vowed to stuff him and hang him over his fireplace. "Eddie fell in love with Bat Boy," Lind says. "He was one of the most in-depth characters we dealt with. He could be mean, he could be spiteful, but he could also be kind. And every once in while, he would be captured by the FBI and held in an undisclosed location near Lexington, Kentucky." One day -- Lind swears this is true -- Eddie Clontz got a call from an irate FBI agent complaining that the bureau's switchboard was swamped with calls demanding that they free Bat Boy. "Eddie said, 'I'll never do it again,' " Lind says, "then he hung up the phone and went on to the next Bat Boy story." In the spirit of Eddie Clontz, we won't risk ruining that story by fact-checking it with the FBI. |
| Posted by: Mike 2007-08-08 14:33 |