Written by Jon Williams
The music world lost a legend last week with the passing of
the Queen of Soul, Aretha
Franklin. She was 76.
While Aretha’s mother passed at a young age, her father was
a well-known minister, giving her exposure to influential gospel singers of the
time, including Mahalia
Jackson and Clara
Ward, both of whom served as role models. Aretha began touring and
performing with her father when she was just 12, and her first single was
released when she was 14. She stuck with gospel until she was 18, at which time
she moved to New York with hopes of breaking into the pop music world. Her
first secular album, Aretha: With the Ray
Bryant Combo, was released early in 1961, just before her 20 th
birthday.
The rest, as they say, is history. She went on to have one
of the great careers of all time, recording such iconic, instantly recognizable
hits as “Respect,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” and “I Say a
Little Prayer,” among so many others. In 2008, music authority Rolling Stone named her the greatest
singer of all time. With a career that spanned more than five decades, her
influence is legendary, inspiring generations of singers and musicians with her
talent and powerful performances. Some of these notable names include Whitney
Houston, Beyonce,
and Jennifer
Hudson, who Franklin herself chose to play her in an upcoming biopic.
We join the music and pop culture worlds in mourning the
monumental loss of Aretha Franklin. SmartBrowse her name on our website to find
a number of collections of her music, as well as a few related audiobooks and
films (including her incredible performance in the classic comedy The
Blues Brothers). Patrons can also check out her wonderful music,
including a broad collection of original albums, on hoopla
digital.
Written by Jon Williams
In an age of reboots and revivals, it takes a piece of
seriously big news to command the attention of the pop culture landscape.
That’s exactly what happened recently when first rumours started to swirl and
then actual confirmation happened that Patrick Stewart would return to the role
of Jean-Luc Picard in a new Star Trek
series being developed. The series will explore the further adventures and
later life of the beloved man who once commanded the bridge of the iconic
starship Enterprise.
Although he had already been acting for many years, many
people, especially in the United States, had their first exposure to Stewart
when Star Trek: The Next Generation
debuted in 1987. That show breathed new life into a popular franchise that,
nevertheless, had been off television for nearly twenty years. It worked; the
show ran for seven
seasons and then, like the original series before it, spawned several big-screen
adventures, with Stewart continuing to lead the cast from the show. All in
all, he ended up portraying Jean-Luc Picard for fifteen years. It’s been
sixteen years since the last time, in the 2002 movie Star Trek: Nemesis, and fans are
eager to see what has become of the intrepid captain in the meantime—just as Stewart
is himself, calling the opportunity to return “…an unexpected but
delightful surprise.” Although he was initially skeptical of performing in a
sci-fi television show, he eventually came to appreciate the reach the show had
and the impact it had on fans’ lives.
Seeming to confirm his initial skepticism, though, for a
time the popularity of Star Trek: The Next Generation hindered him from landing
other roles, as filmmakers felt that having “Captain Picard” show up in their
project would distract the audience. Stewart finally got around this by jumping
into a similar part in another sci-fi franchise. In 2000’s X-Men,
he portrayed for the first time Professor Charles Xavier, who runs a school to
teach youngsters with freakish abilities (called “mutants”) how to control and
use them responsibly. As with Star Trek,
the role lingered, with Stewart playing Professor Xavier in a total of seven
movies, most recently (and for the final time) in 2017’s critically acclaimed Logan.
Despite the typecasting, Stewart’s talent has won out,
allowing him to carve out quite a nice and well-rounded acting career for
himself. Prior to Star Trek he had roles in such films as Hennessy,
his 1975 film debut, Excalibur,
and Dune.
He showed off his comedic side as King Richard in the 1993 spoof Robin
Hood: Men in Tights, just before his Star Trek role jumped to the big screen in Generations.
On television, he has brought a number of literary and theatrical classics to
life, including I,
Claudius, Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Hamlet,
and Macbeth,
to name just a few. And with his deep, distinctive voice, it’s no surprise that
he’s also done quite a bit of voice acting. He recently had a memorable role in
The
Emoji Movie, and has also lent his voice to such favourites as The
Prince of Egypt, Chicken
Little, and Gnomeo
& Juliet. He maintains a recurring role on the long-running
animated series American
Dad!, and his association with creator Seth MacFarlane led to him
serving as the narrator for both Ted
and Ted
2. He also narrated the Tim Burton classic The
Nightmare Before Christmas.
Patrick Stewart is an actor whose performances are always
incredible, and the news that he’s returning to Star Trek is sure to put his work in the spotlight as never before.
Make sure you have The Next Generation
shows and movies on your shelves for patrons to discover or relive, and
SmartBrowse his name on our website to see a full list of what we have to offer
from his impressive career. And for more Star
Trek, be sure to pre-order the first season of Discovery,
available in November, before the second season premieres in early 2019.
Written by Jon Williams
The calendar may have just flipped over to August, but as
far as we’re concerned, it’s never too early to start thinking about Halloween.
You can look forward to plenty of Halloween media ideas from us between now and
October, and what better way to kick it off than with a master of the creepy
tale, a man whose work has been the basis for countless pleasant shivers in the
dead of night? After an early career writing humour aimed at kids, R.L. Stine
eventually came to the conclusion that he’d rather frighten them. His first
kids’ horror novel, Blind Date, was
published in 1986, and the rest is history. According to his website, he’s
written well over 300 books in the intervening 32 years, including a number of
wildly popular series.
By far his most well-known series is Goosebumps. Begun in
1992 with Welcome
to Dead House, the classic series ran through 1997 and comprised a
total of 62 books. Goosebumps has taken on a life of its own with a number of
spinoff and companion series, some of which continue to this day. One of those
is called SlappyWorld,
featuring Slappy, a ventriloquist’s dummy come to life with scary stories of
his own to tell. Slappy made his first appearance very early on, in 1993’s Night
of the Living Dummy, and became a primary antagonist in the 1995
follow-up. From there he took on a life of his own, so to speak, appearing
in several
HorrorLand books (yet another Goosebumps-adjacent series) before spawning
his own series in 2017’s Slappy
Birthday to You. There are currently five books in the series, with Escape
from Shudder Mansion just releasing late in July, and more to come.
Of course, popular as it was and still is, Goosebumps was
not Stine’s first book series. That honour goes to Fear Street, which started in
1989 with The New Girl. Recent titles
in this series include Party
Games and Don’t
Stay Up Late. Also released in late July, You
May Now Kill the Bride is the first book in a new Return to Fear Street
series. And Fear Street fans can look forward to renewed interest in the
series, with Fox recently announcing plans for three theatrical films to be
based on stories from the books.
And although Stine has made his name in the world of
publishing, he is certainly no stranger to the screen. As his writing career
was gaining traction in the early 1990s, he helped create and wrote for the
children’s TV series Eureeka’s Castle.
Shortly thereafter, Goosebumps
was turned into an anthology TV series that ran for four seasons. In 2007, the
movie The
Haunting Hour: Don’t Think About It was made, loosely adapted from a
book of Stine’s short stories, and that too was spun off into a
successful anthology series, winning a number of Daytime Emmys among other
awards. And in 2015, Goosebumps
became a feature film starring Jack Black as R.L. Stine himself. A sequel, Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, is due
in theatres in October.
R.L. Stine has been giving young readers the creeps for more
than thirty years now, and in so doing, has inspired generations of kids to
develop a love of reading that has carried them into adulthood (and adults who
grew up reading him as kids should check out Red
Rain, his grown-up horror novel written in tribute to longtime fans).
As his popularity expands with each new book and movie, continue to share his
work with eager young readers and listeners. You can search his name on our
website for all his works we carry in audiobook
and Playaway,
and point your patrons to hoopla, where they can find a wide selection of his
books in both audio
and eBook.
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