500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
It is embarrassing, but I once had a crush on Wilma Flintstone. It was a long time ago; I was young, she was prehistoric. I can still see the full moon hanging in the sky like a ripe melon, a nearby dinosaur nuzzling some leaves, Wilma sneaking out while Fred was bowling with Barney, Mrs. Robinson in an animal-skin skirt. I thought Wilma was really hot. Until I met Cheetara, the hottest cat in ThunderCats.
But wait, before I start hyperventilating about a cartoon cat-woman, let’s think of the qualities of a few real life action heroes, like the sainted self-promotional action figure of Ariana Huffington, the righteous always-on-the-money blowhard action figure Jerry Brown, the nerdy superhero Bill Gates, with his dazzling power to donate. These people are changing the world, and sometimes they seem bigger than life. But they are morally complex, with multi-layered, sometimes contradictory personal histories, and that’s why they don’t become shrink-wrapped as action figures, while Superman does.
Even so, while Superman started out as a simple do-gooder from another planet, over the years his long-simmering relationship with Lois Lane has many wondering if he’s in the closet. Yes, he did marry Lois Lane eventually, but Rock Hudson was married to a woman, too. It doesn’t matter if Superman is gay if he does a good job fighting crime, just like it doesn’t matter if Batman is bi, and Speed Racer is still a fast driver, even if he can’t go to bed with a woman without taking off his shiny white helmet. (“Honey, stop hitting the headboard, it’s making too much noise.”)
I’ve read about a guy who’s willing to do Ariel, The Little Mermaid, even though she’s a minor with a fishy smell. He thinks Storm from X-Men would be a good conquest, and he would totally hit on Scarlett from G.I. Joe. A blogger who goes by the nom-de-net of Cheeezey has a gallery of Cheetara images that he’s screen captured. That’s devotion.
On the other hand, I can’t imagine ThunderCats superhero Lion-O getting ready for a big date, not if he has to lug along his Sword of Omens. (“Lion-O, darling, you cut the roof of my convertible again.”) There are some deep-thinking T-Cats analysts who contend that Lion-O doesn’t need to date anyone anyway – his “Thunder, Thunder, Thunder, ThunderCats” bit with the sword is orgasmic all by itself. 
Ever since the first caveman created an animation cell for a popular character, which I think was around 1923, cartoon characters have been with us, and comic book heroes before that. We are remarkably willing to invest great energy in imaginary beings. But though they are all as weightless as a thought, they aren’t ordinary, they are heroes. We are always looking for heroes. They don’t have to be real to do the job we need them to do, which is to point the way through a moral morass. Not being imaginary, Ariana, Jerry and Bill have it a lot harder, the more so since their superpowers are courage, believing in California and giving away money.
Follow me on Twitter.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
What’s small group activism? A writer and a yoga teacher head down to the Gulf to save sea turtles. That’s small group activism. Really small. Just two guys on a mission. They want to charter a boat, haul slimed turtles from the sea, clean them up and transfer them to the right facility.
Here are their qualifications:
Brock Cahill teaches yoga at Yogis Anonymous. He has a passion for the sea and especially sea turtles.
Peter Lawrence also cares deeply about the sea and is an accomplished novelist and screenwriter.
That’s it. Nothing else on their resumes, except that they are tapping into what they believe to be a huge movement of those who are turning away from bureaucracies because they don’t trust them anymore, and are turning instead to small, focused, local action by individuals.
Will you believe BP when it announces that the spill is capped and the bad days are done?
The news folks will gobble that up as fact. Not so, however, with small groups on the ground. Recovery in the Gulf is years away. The crime scene is being run by the criminal – BP – so the crime reports are suspect. BP is using a chemical called Corexit to disperse the oil. It is likely harming the Gulf and causing cleanup crews to report respiratory distress, dizziness and headaches. As Peter wrote in his email, “Of that chemical, it’s enough to say that BP owns its manufacturer and its use is banned in the UK. Lucky the Brits can use up their stockpiles in their one-time colony.” Brock reported that another small group of activists led by documentary director Josh Tickell experienced burning eyes and skin rashes after exposure to Corexit. 
Corexit is “effectively sinking the oil down into the water table where it will be much harder to clean up, and honestly, much harder on all the life in the sea. But it will look better from a satellite picture! Oh man. Shortcuts suck.” – Brock Cahill
I know Brock Cahill because I’ve taken his yoga class. I know Peter because long ago and far away I worked for him when I wrote scripts for a superhero cartoon called ThunderCats. They are both superheroes to me now, and not just because Brock can do yoga poses that I cannot pronounce and Peter is a great writer. They are superheroes because they both recognize that large media organizations have lost sight of their mission to investigate and report, fearlessly. Now the yoga teacher and the writer need to get the job done. Fearlessly.
As I write this, they are on site in the Gulf, figuring out exactly what can and can’t be done, how to circumvent the bureaucracy of the clean up and achieve Brock’s mission – direct action to save sea turtles. They’re raising money for a boat and assembling a volunteer crew. “We’ll have a marine biologist on board,” Peter wrote. “We’ll be properly equipped…” to save as many turtles as possible.
“We’re independent and determined. This is our world just as much as it is BP’s, Big Oil’s or the government’s which, last time we looked, was financed and elected by us. That is, by individuals exercising democracy. We will not take no for an answer,” Peter wrote.
You can follow Brock Cahill on Twitter for updates. He posts to his blog and Facebook page often.
Photos courtesy Brock Cahill
A writer from the UK contacted me recently with the news that he is writing a book about ThunderCats. I wrote four scripts for the series, which later became a beloved media fetish object. (“Honey, what are you doing with that plush toy?”) The writer wants me to reminisce about cartoons and recall stories of my writing cohorts. Well, some are dead, others had out of body (and mind) experiences, and still others are perfectly happy today, procreating, creating fiction and shopping.
There was Bill Overgard. I met him once: I remember only a leather jacket and a puff of smoke; a man of mystery. I had no idea he was a comics icon, a veteran of 31 years of drawing Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, and a protégé of Milton Caniff who assisted Caniff on Steve Canyon. Bill wrote screenplays and novels, and when his scripts for ThunderCats came in I had no clue how we were going to get the animators to turn his adventurous works of literature into cartoons.
Every ThunderCats script was reviewed by a psychologist to be sure it would be a positive experience for the young viewer. It worked! If you check the statistics during the period the cartoon aired, you’ll see that murder rates went down, school attendance went up and SAT scores went through the roof. When kids weren’t scoring really high on their SATs or busy not committing crimes they were peeing their beds, scared to death with nightmares of Mumm-Ra, the bad guy of ThunderCats.
When I look back I wonder: Why did I get that job and why was it useful? Why did my writing journey include furry superheroes? Here’s a little story:
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, went to Reed College for six months and then dropped out. He slept on the floor in friends’ rooms and returned coke bottles for the five-cent deposit. He decided to take a calligraphy class. He learned about serif and san serif typefaces, the varying amount of space between letters and what makes for great typography. He found it fascinating and had no hope of it ever having any practical application in his life.
Ten years later he was designing the Mac computer and it all came back to him. The Mac became the first computer with beautiful typography. Other manufacturers copied the Mac and that’s the reason we have all these fonts and we’re not writing in courier; because Steve took calligraphy.
It’s easy, of course, to connect the dots looking backward. Going forward, well, we’ve built life’s road and we’re walking along it. We’re always preparing, but what are we preparing for?
My ThunderCats journey didn’t have a map. In 1986 we’d just had our first child, I needed a job, my father knew a guy who knew a guy and I found myself in a room with Jules Bass, Arthur Rankin and Peter Lawrence. I couldn’t have predicted how they would teach me about visual thinking, a skill I use every day, and also about being a superhero, a necessary thing for any journalist.
If you enjoyed this post you can subscribe by email or subscribe in an RSS reader. For more information about how to subscribe, please click here.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Spiritual seekers may spend decades working to detach from their ego. Buddha meditated under a Bodhi tree for 49 days when he did it. But I think I’ve managed it in just .2 seconds. All I had to do was Google myself. There are 8,900,000 different results for Lee Schneider. I can already feel my sense of self slipping away into 8.9 million little pieces. In yoga we’re often reminded that it’s a good thing to surrender the ego. Buddhism teaches that the self is only an illusion. But what does that really mean?
As I examine myself under Google’s microscope, I can verify that I was once a writer of “ThunderCats” cartoons. How did I juggle that with my job as project manager at the Computer Sciences Corporation in Dallas/Fort Worth? It seems like a good living, I just don’t remember going into the office this morning.
Then again, I do move around. This week I’m living in Alexandria, KY, Morrison, CO and Batavia, OH all at the same time. Perhaps, upon dissolution, my ego is now able to be in several places at once. In his book “Autobiography of a Yogi,” Paramhansa Yogananda described one Swami Pranabananda who was able to do this. That seems like pretty advanced yoga and I don’t think I’m there yet. I’m not even doing handstand anymore.
When I started this blog I said I would never join Facebook. But it looks like I have anyway and I really like horses. 
I also like to Twitter, have 124 followers and live in Boston. Whole chunks of my life are kind of different from the life I thought I was living. For instance, I married Elyssa Korez on December 20th, 2008. Sorry, I don’t remember that wedding at all. 
Thing is, I’m getting married again in Los Angeles on June 20. Could I be practicing polygamy? I don’t remember being Mormon but then I don’t remember signing up for the Navy Reserves in Auburn, Washington either. 
I don’t know how I fit the Reserves in with my job as a photographer of tall ships. I published a calendar of them in 2002. It’s for sale at Amazon, anyway, and it has my name on it.
In Buddhism it’s said that attachment to ego leads to suffering. Right now, I’m getting the opposite effect. As my ego splits apart I’m hyperventilating.
If people are looking for me online, they might connect with one of my other selves instead of the one typing this right now. What is my name good for if so many others are using it? I need to run an online background check on myself to get back in touch with who I really am, but that costs $39.95.
Maybe finding myself isn’t as easy as clicking on a link. Maybe I’m not ready to completely surrender my ego, but if I nudge it out of the way a little I might have better access to the interior life that goes on whether my Google ranking looks good or not.
