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    Nickelodeon and Disney Stars Find a Second Act on Podcasts

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    The cast of the Nickelodeon series “Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide” are among the stars of 2000s teen sitcoms who are using podcasts to connect with their Gen Z and millennial fan bases.For three years starting when he was just 12 years old, Devon Werkheiser dispensed advice for bearing the indignities of middle school as the title character in the Nickelodeon series “Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide.” Two decades later, he said, people still recognize him as Ned Bigby.“There was a time when I wanted to transcend ‘Ned’s,’” Werkheiser said, “but maybe it’s the answer in getting me where I want to go.”Now 33, he’s made peace with his past and is still giving tips to his peers, only he is using a more modern medium. In “Ned’s Declassified Podcast Survival Guide,” he and his former “Ned’s” castmates Lindsey Shaw and Daniel Curtis Lee dish about the show, which aired from 2004 to 2007, and open up about past personal and career struggles.The three are among a cohort of former stars, many from Nickelodeon and Disney Channel shows from the 2000s, who have started podcasts as a way of connecting with a nostalgic Gen Z and millennial fan base. In doing so, they are embracing roles that they played as children and teenagers — characters that some had spent years trying to move beyond, with mixed success.“Part of the truth is, if any of our careers were maybe further along, maybe we wouldn’t be doing podcasts,” Werkheiser said in an interview. “There are comments that speak to that as if we don’t know.”Since the “Ned’s” podcast debuted in February 2023, several exchanges have caused a stir among its 717,000 TikTok followers. Shaw, who played Moze on the show, spoke about her past struggles with substance abuse. Werkheiser gave an emotional account of his time on the set of the troubled Alec Baldwin western “Rust.” And he and Shaw punctured the innocent image of their old show with an awkward exchange about their fumbling offscreen sexual encounters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ice Spice at the Grammys: Y2K Brand Baby Phat Makes a Comeback

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      A major moment at the Grammys showed how far the streetwear brand Baby Phat has come — and how it helped change what constitutes high fashion.Ice Spice was born on Jan. 1, 2000, so it seems fitting that her personal style has often involved Y2K fashion. The rapper leaned heavily into the era at the Grammy Awards on Sunday, wearing custom Baby Phat. She arrived in a fur-lined denim jacket and a matching maxi skirt that trailed behind her as she walked the red carpet.Baby Phat was started by Kimora Lee Simmons in 1999. The label, rooted in hip-hop culture, largely influenced women’s streetwear in the decade that followed. Baby Phat was worn by celebrities like Missy Elliott, Lil’ Kim and Jennifer Lopez and was beloved by women and girls of color for its celebration of Black identity and style. Its items were relatively affordable yet still had an aura of glamour.But in its heyday Baby Phat never had a big presence on red carpets. The brand’s aesthetic — a mishmash of fitted denim, fur, oversize logos, chains and jewels that Ms. Simmons described as “ghetto fabulous” — was not exactly reflective of high fashion in the early 2000s.Since then, though, streetwear and hip-hop have only become more influential at even the most rarefied houses. That was on display at this year’s Grammys, where Lil Durk, Peso Pluma and Beyoncé were among the stars who wore items designed by Pharrell Williams for Louis Vuitton.Ms. Simmons developed Baby Phat as an expansion of Phat Farm, a brand owned by her ex-husband Russell Simmons, who sold both labels in 2004. Ms. Simmons, who left Baby Phat in 2010 only to buy it back almost 10 years later and install herself as chief executive, said that Ice Spice’s wearing the brand on a major red carpet was “a full circle moment” that would help Baby Phat finally get the recognition it deserves.“We don’t always get our shine,” said Ms. Simmons, 48, who is Black and Asian. “But I do it for the culture — make no mistake.” She added that Baby Phat’s Grammys appearance 25 years after the brand’s founding was a testament to its enduring appeal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two 2003 LPs Changed Ben Gibbard’s Life. He’s Taking Both on Tour.

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      Being an indie-rock musician was largely its own reward from the 1980s to the turn of the 21st century. But as Ben Gibbard learned firsthand, in the early 2000s, things started to shift.Since the late 1990s, he had served as a lead singer and guitarist in Death Cab for Cutie, an indie-rock band known for its chiming guitar lines and wistful lyrics. A chance meeting with the electronic musician and producer Jimmy Tamborello led to a creative spark, and the two formed a group called the Postal Service, named after the nature of their analog partnership: Tamborello, who was living in Los Angeles, sent his airy instrumentals north to Seattle through the U.S. mail system, so Gibbard could add his vocals.The group expanded to include the singer Jenny Lewis, and when its only album, “Give Up,” was released in February 2003, its romantic tunes set to stuttering beats and bloopy synths became a sensation. It remains the second best-selling record in the history of the indie label Sub Pop — just behind Nirvana’s “Bleach” — and went platinum in 2012.In the fall of 2003, Death Cab put out “Transatlanticism,” a lush, sweeping record exploring the pleasures and pains of a long-distance relationship that was heralded as a creative high point. With buzz from “Give Up” still reverberating, Death Cab for Cutie landed a few key placements on the inescapable teen soap “The O.C.,” and a year later inked a deal with Atlantic Records.Gibbard, 47, will be celebrating both anniversaries on a two-month tour starting Sept. 5, where Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service will perform both albums in full. In a recent video call from his Seattle home, he discussed one of the most creatively fertile periods of his life, how it feels to become the guardian of a younger generation’s nostalgia and his role in indie rock’s early 2000s commercial renaissance. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You first reunited the Postal Service in 2013 for a 10-year anniversary tour. Did you expect to be doing this again?No, I didn’t. We had done that tour primarily because by the time the Postal Service was done touring in 2004, we realized that the record had taken on a life of its own after we had all gone back to our other jobs. When we were coming up on the 20th anniversary of “Transatlanticism” and “Give Up,” it made sense that Death Cab would do something to mark the anniversary of what is our breakout record, and what has universally been determined to be our best record. After doing the math, I realized that Death Cab usually plays for two hours, and both of those albums are 40-something minutes. So while it would appear to be more work for me, the total number of songs would be fewer than a normal set.From left: Jenny Lewis, Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello of the Postal Service onstage at Coachella in 2013. The band toured that year to celebrate its album’s 10th anniversary.Chad Batka for The New York TimesIn 2013, you said one of the motivations for reuniting the Postal Service was for you to take ownership of the band and its legacy.I’ve always had a complicated relationship with that record. When “Give Up” came out, it very quickly surpassed where Death Cab was, sales-wise. It became this ubiquitous cultural phenomenon. Everyone in Death Cab was supportive of me, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel some tension around the success of the Postal Service.I want to be very clear that I’m not trying to cry with two loaves of bread in my hand. It was humbling and moving to see the response to “Give Up.” At this point in my life, I’m of the opinion that if you’ve made one thing that has an impact on another human being, you’ve succeeded. And the 2013 tour allowed me to be in those songs again. Being in front of people who love that album closed a circle that I needed to close.Both “Give Up” and “Transatlanticism” sold over 500,000 copies, blowing the ceiling off expectations for an indie band. What did it feel like to be at the center of a transformation of the scene?To someone becoming a sentient music fan in the late ’80s and early ’90s, selling 50,000 copies was indie-rock gold and platinum. The dream in 1997 and 1998 was only to not have a job while on tour. In 2003, a lot of people of my generation found themselves in music supervision in TV, movies and commercials and could suddenly say, “I don’t want to use Paula Cole in this teen drama, let’s use Death Cab, or Bright Eyes, or Modest Mouse.”I think that was what started the drive of indie rock into the mainstream — or at least as close to the mainstream as it could get. People in decision-making positions wanted to use the music they loved, at a moment, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when mainstream rock ’n’ roll was the worst it’s ever been. People who like classic rock, or were into the Cure or Depeche Mode, said, “You know what? There must be an alternative to Creed.” There was a thirst for a change, and as the internet started disseminating pop culture, suddenly there was an avenue to find out about it.So I was pleased that the music we were making was reaching a larger audience. But I was also a 28-year-old who wasn’t used to the attention that comes from both adoration and scorn. I’m not going to say it was an incredibly difficult time in my life, but it’s only now, 20 years later, that I’m able to have a real appreciation for what these records accomplished and what a unique situation we found ourselves in.You often talk about how making “Give Up” was loose and enjoyable. What about the Postal Service stopped feeling so easy?I felt very self-conscious. I was already dealing with the weight of expectations on “Transatlanticism.” My ability to write both of those albums concurrently was predicated by a year-ish long break Death Cab took from touring. We had almost broken up, and we had a meeting where we decided to take some time away. During that break, there wasn’t nearly the same sense of expectation to the songs I was writing. Yes, there were fans of Death Cab who I’m sure were anticipating a new record, but in 2001 and 2002, the band still felt very small. But by the time that “Give Up” was out and had gone gold, and we’re touring “Transatlanticism” with Pearl Jam — we literally signed with Atlantic Records backstage at a Pearl Jam show — I was feeling a ton of pressure from my main gig.Eventually Jimmy and I had a conversation where we were like, “Hey, this isn’t happening, is it?” He was the perfect partner. Jimmy is the most easygoing dude in the world. If I had made “Give Up” with someone who was a little more success-oriented, or career-oriented, it would’ve gone very poorly.Gibbard, right, onstage with Death Cab for Cutie in 2004. ”There was a thirst for a change, and as the internet started disseminating pop culture, suddenly there was an avenue to find out about it,” Gibbard said of the band’s rising profile in that era.Karl Walter/Getty ImagesWithout radio or MTV, how did you become aware that you had an indie hit in 2003?With Death Cab it was more cut and dry. For a long time, and with good reason, there was no mention of Death Cab without “The O.C.” That was our MTV, that was our radio, and that made more sense to me. It made sense that as we were being beamed into people’s homes on network television, our band’s profile would grow. And so, you’d just walk into places and hear the record. You’d hear it in coffee shops, or coming out of people’s cars. I could feel it jumping outside the insular circles of indie rock. But we weren’t famous. We weren’t pop stars.I think a lot of people know some of the music I made, but they don’t know anything about the band, or who’s in it or what I look like. That’s been an absolute godsend; to have the success that we’ve had, without the visibility.The Postal Service process got a lot of attention: Jimmy would send you instrumentals on burned CDs through the mail, and you’d add vocals.In 2001 and 2002, I’m sure people were figuring out how to send files back and forth. We just weren’t technologically advanced enough to have that knowledge. We were both definitely aware of the novelty of it. I’d get an email from Jimmy being like, “Hey, I put a CD in the mail, it’ll be there in a couple of days.” So I’d get a sense of anticipation, waiting for it to show up to my house. I’d get it, put it in my CD player, and walk around coming up with ideas. I don’t necessarily think the anticipation directly correlated to the creative process, but everyone I knew was tickled by the idea of it.Going on an anniversary tour is engaging pretty plainly with the culture of nostalgia.One of the most important things for bands and artists who span decades is that you continue to try to make new things, and find new creative ways to express yourself musically, while also having self-awareness for why people are here to see you. To honor your own past.I’m first and foremost a fan of music, and it’s frustrating to see a band you love — that was formative for you — only for them to say, “Yeah, we’re playing a new album and four old songs.” I’ve always tried to serve that balance. It is most likely that the records that will be on my tombstone have already been made, but I’m also dedicated to making new things that can stand alongside the things that people love. I want our new music to remind people why they love our music. A lot of our music has marked time in people’s lives. It’s not because we’re so amazing, it’s because we make music. And music marks time. More

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      Magoo, Rapper and Former Timbaland Collaborator, Dies at 50

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      Melvin Barcliff, who rapped under the name Magoo, was a teenager in Virginia when he joined a hip-hop scene that still influences music today.The rapper Magoo, a foundational member of a groundbreaking hip-hop scene that emerged in Virginia in the 1990s and that included his collaborators Timbaland, Missy Elliott and Pharrell Williams, has died at 50.Magoo, whose birth name was Melvin Barcliff, died this weekend in Williamsburg, Va., according to his wife, Meco Barcliff, and a statement from his family. Barcliff said that he had no known health problems other than asthma, but that he had not been feeling well in the past week. The coroner’s office was still investigating the cause, she said.Magoo was a child when rap music was first broadcast on the radio, and he credited it with helping save him from a difficult early childhood in Norfolk, Va. At first, he thought hip-hop was something he could dance and listen to, but was made only by people in the Northeast, he said in an April 2013 interview for the hip-hop oral history collection at the College of William & Mary.As rap music began to drift from the coasts and Atlanta to radios and record stores in Virginia, Magoo realized at 14 years old that it was an art form he could practice, too. At Deep Creek High School in Chesapeake, he made friends with other teenagers who also wanted to rap including Timothy Mosley, also known as Timbaland, who became a renowned music producer.Magoo and his associates in the Virginia Beach area, including Pharrell Williams and Missy Elliott, would go on to exert a heavy influence on music in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Magoo and Timbaland formed a duo and between 1997 and 2003 put out three albums. “Welcome to Our World,” their first collaboration, included the track “Up Jumps da’ Boogie,” featuring Elliott and Aaliyah, which reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, their highest charting effort. Critics noted the project as a step in Timbaland’s development as a producer, and compared Magoo to Q-Tip, one of the rappers in the Queens group A Tribe Called Quest.On Monday morning, Timbaland posted on Instagram several videos and photos of the two together and said in one caption: “Tim and Magoo forever.”Elliott wrote on Instagram on Monday that she met Magoo when they were teenagers and that he gave her the nickname “Misdemeanor,” telling her it was because “it’s a crime to have that many talents.”Though Magoo faded from the spotlight as his early collaborators’ stars continued to rise, Barcliff said that her husband had always preferred to be behind the scenes.She said that they separated five or six years ago but that they were still family.The couple met on Aug. 10, 1996, at a club, she said. Even though Magoo was a great dancer, she said, she would learn a few months later that he did not like to go out because it was too much like being at work. “That’s when I found out: No more clubbing for me,” she said.Magoo met Tim Mosley, also known as Timbaland, in 10th grade. They were part of a group of friends who started rapping together in the 1990s.Johnny Nunez/WireImage, via Getty ImagesBarcliff said that she had a 2-year-old daughter, Detrice “Pawtt” Bickham, when they met, and that Magoo raised her as his own. As a family, they loved going to theme parks, including Busch Gardens and Kings Dominion.Magoo’s survivors include the aunt and uncle who raised him and whom he considered his mother and father, Magdaline and Hiawatha Brown, and his two sisters, Portia Brown and Lynette Hawks.In the William & Mary interview, Magoo said that his aunt, who went by Mag, inspired his rap name, Mag-an-ooh, which he then shortened.He said in the interview that his aunt took him in when he was 4 years old. He said he most likely would have been taken into state custody without his aunt’s care and he “probably would have ended up away from family and wouldn’t have been in the position to become what I was able to become.”He treasured the memory of the first time he heard a rap song, he said. He could still remember where he was standing, in another aunt’s house, when he heard the track, “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang.“It just changed my whole perspective on life because, like I said, I was, 6 or 7 at the time,” Magoo recalled. “I was only three years away from being with my real mother who had abused me, so I hadn’t completely get over that abuse, but rap music became my blanket.”Alain Delaquérière More

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      Sum 41 Says It Will Disband After Final Album and Tour

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      With catchy songs like “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep,” the Canadian band was part of a pop-punk wave that included Blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte and others.The band Sum 41 announced on Monday that it was breaking up after 27 years, unleashing a well of nostalgia for the early 2000s, when pop punk seemed ubiquitous on MTV’s “Total Request Live” and in memorable scenes in blockbuster movies.The Canadian group, fronted by the spiky-haired singer Deryck Whibley, was part of a pop-punk wave that included Blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte and Avril Lavigne. Their hits included “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep,” which fans loved to belt out in their car or jump up and down to at shows.The band’s music was also featured in popular movies from the early 2000s, among them “Spider-Man,” “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and “Bring It On.”In a statement on Twitter, Sum 41 did not explain why it was disbanding. It said it planned to finish its tour this year and that it would release a final album, “Heaven :x: Hell,” and announce a final tour to celebrate the end of its run.“Being in Sum 41 since 1996 brought us some of the best moments of our lives,” the band members wrote. “We are forever grateful to our fans both old and new, who have supported us in every way. It is hard to articulate the love and respect we have for all of you and we wanted you to hear this from us first.”News of the band’s decision led fans to mourn the end of an era. While many punk fans scorned Sum 41 and other groups like it as safe and conventional, pop-punk fans said the music was part of the soundtrack of their youth.“Fat Lip” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart after Sum 41’s breakthrough album, “All Killer No Filler,” was released in 2001. And decades later, fans still packed Sum 41’s shows clad in fishnet stockings or dark skinny jeans and heavy eyeliner, accented with tricolor wrist sweatbands.“Sum 41 is most definitely on the Mount Rushmore of early 2000s pop punk,” said Finn McKenty, the creator of the YouTube series “The Punk Rock MBA,” which features an episode on “The Strange History of Sum 41.”“To be able to ride the wave of the MTV-type hype that they had and turn that into a career with real longevity and respect is a rare thing that they were able to pull off,” Mr. McKenty said.The band’s music seemed to capture the spirit of suburban teenage high jinks.In an interview with Billboard in 2021, Mr. Whibley said that when the band, which formed in suburban Toronto in 1996, was trying to gain notice, its members filmed themselves “doing stupid stuff like drive-by water gunning people, egging houses, and cut it with some film of our shows.”The band’s manager then sent a three-minute version of the video to record companies.“And then, it was a matter of weeks,” Mr. Whibley said. “Every label in the U.S. was trying to sign us, and it turned into a big bidding war.”Mike Damante, the author of “Hey Suburbia: A Guide to the Emo/Pop-Punk Rise,” said that Sum 41 was one of the first popular pop-punk bands to fuse metal and hip-hop and that it was disbanding during “a really nostalgic time period for this time in music.”In recent years, Sum 41 had toured with Simple Plan and The Offspring.Mr. McKenty said the band had recently been producing music that was “as good or better” than its music from the early 2000s.“I always like to see people go out on top, rather than go out sad,” he said. More

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      ‘Treasure Planet’ at 20: Disney’s Failed Space Odyssey Deserved to Soar

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      This maligned flight of fancy contains a trove of underrated accomplishments worthy of reappraisal.Retro futuristic sailing ships and dazzling action scenes failed to entice audiences when Disney’s “Treasure Planet” opened in theaters on Thanksgiving weekend 20 years ago.The interstellar adventure followed an angsty teenager, Jim Hawkins (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his deceitful cyborg mentor, John Silver (Brian Murray), and a crew of aliens and anthropomorphic animals across dangerous space phenomena and celestial bodies to find riches in a remote location. The stellar voice cast also featured Emma Thompson as the strict Captain Amelia and Martin Short as the talking robot B.E.N.For the directors Ron Clements and John Musker, who were responsible for some of the studio’s most profitable animated releases including “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin,” this outer space retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s seminal novel “Treasure Island” had been a beloved brainchild for 17 years before its fateful release in 2002.Over the five-day holiday weekend, the space odyssey took in only $16.7 million at the domestic box office, on a budget of $140 million, as well as plenty of unfavorable reviews. Analysts scrambled to determine the cause of such a cataclysmic financial disappointment.Some experts considered it a casualty of an oversaturated family market (“Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” and “The Santa Clause 2” were still occupying screens), or perhaps it was a victim of a self-serious marketing campaign with a troublemaker animated protagonist.At the time, the Variety critic Andy Klein praised the visuals as up to the “studio’s best,” but felt the “film’s total appeal may be undercut by a script that rarely feels inspired.” Roger Ebert wasn’t taken with the adaptation, writing that “pirate ships and ocean storms and real whales (as opposed to space whales) are exciting enough.”Other experts thought of it as further proof of young viewers’ resistance to animated features in the science fiction genre after the stumbles of “Titan A.E.,” released in 2000, and “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” which debuted in 2001. And still some blamed video games for having captured the attention of preadolescent boys — the perceived target audience. The most concerned went as far as to suggest that Disney should rethink its entire investment in animation. (As we now know, the studio didn’t yield, but two decades later its $180 million sci-fi saga “Strange World” stumbled on the same weekend, bringing in only $18.6 million this past Thanksgiving.)The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Despite the troubled history of “Treasure Planet,” this maligned flight of fancy contains a trove of underrated accomplishments worthy of reappraisal. Both its technologically advanced visuals and the poignancy of its interpersonal conflicts make it a bright anomaly in the constellation of early 2000s animation that deserved to soar.Told in a world where 18th-century designs and futuristic stylization collide, this is the story of a teenage hero evolving from a boy into a man. Constantly straddling the line between the old and the new, in form and in narrative, Musker and Clements steered the literary classic into the new millennium and beyond the stars.The interstitial essence that defines the film is also reflected in the craftsmanship behind it. An unsung triumph of technical innovation, “Treasure Planet” marked a turning point in the use of 3-D computer graphics in Disney animated features.The veteran animator Glen Keane’s work on John Silver highlighted this transition. The pirate’s body was animated by hand while his bionic arm came to life via computer-generated imagery.Most of the characters, with the exception of the robot B.E.N., were hand-drawn and inhabited virtual sets conceived through a process known as “deep canvas,” which allows artists to draw detailed 3-D environments, for a striking hybrid aesthetic.A sequence where the main vessel, RLS Legacy (named after Robert Louis Stevenson), must traverse a dangerous supernova serves as imposing example of one of the many instances in which this visionary combination of modern tools and old-fashioned handmade animation astounds. The traditionally animated sailors face the realistically rendered fiery supernova as it becomes a black hole for an action-packed set piece full of interplanetary explosions.Among the final Disney productions to implement substantial 2-D components, “Treasure Planet” was caught between the past and the future of animation.By the early 2000s, the advent of 3-D computer graphic animation as preferred cost-cutting approach over hand-drawn animation had begun to take hold with competitors like DreamWorks, who found success with the Oscar-winning “Shrek,” or Blue Sky Studios, with its box-office hit “Ice Age.”Outside of its irreplicable conception, “Treasure Planet” also tapped into adolescent woes that powerfully spoke to many teens because it treated the flood of emotions young people grapple with as legitimate. The hero here was rough around the edges.For their intergalactic coming-of-age tale, the directors turned Hawkins into a rebellious 15-year-old with a braided rat tail who surfs the skies on a solar-powered board. His father left when he was a child and his loving but worried mother can’t seem to get through to him. To find himself and mature, this brooding heartthrob must leave on an epic quest.Back when it hit theaters, observers may have deemed this version of Jim an unsympathetic lead, but it’s precisely his temperamental attitude, defiance toward authority and guarded vulnerability that make his unconventionally heroic character profoundly relatable.Though not a musical, “Treasure Planet” features a touching montage to the tune of the singer’s John Rzeznik’s “I’m Still Here,” a song written for the film, that bridges Hawkins’s abandonment trauma and his burgeoning relationship with Silver, a figure filling that paternal void.That aching search for validation — the need for a flawed role model to tell you how proud they are of you — comes across with a deep emotional maturity in Musker and Clements’s passion project, written with Rob Edwards.Months after its disastrous stint in cinemas, “Treasure Planet” received an Academy Award nomination for best animated feature, an accolade that, according to reports, came as a surprise to those at Disney. The worldwide gross was a meager $109.5 million. That it was met with disinterest in its time is a tragic outcome for one of the most indelibly out-of-the-box efforts Disney has ever produced.Still underappreciated but not entirely forgotten among those who would discover it on home video growing up, the movie embodies the pioneering spirit of honoring, but still surpassing, what was done before in order to reach new heights.That’s what Hawkins and his band of extraterrestrial misfits are after, and exactly what the pair of seasoned storytellers that brought them to life did with the source material, warts and all. More

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      Let’s Look Back on 2021, When We Couldn’t Stop Looking Back

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      There’s now a thriving cottage industry for content that re-examines the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. Is that a good thing?Time is an abstract and collectively imaginary concept, and often our brains must latch onto contemporary metaphors to fathom its churn. So I will say, with all due respect to our (gulp?) probable future president Matthew McConaughey, this was the year I no longer felt that time was a flat circle.I found it to be moving more like a social media feed, dominated by freshly excavated and somewhat randomly retweeted remembrances of the recent past. A bit of cultural flotsam from the last 25 years would suddenly drift back up to the top of our collective consciousness and spread wildly, demanding renewed attention in the context of the present.Sometimes this was harmless fun — a welcome distraction from the fact that, this being Year 2 of a global pandemic, the actual present was depressing and exhausting to think about for too long. So everybody started watching “Seinfeld” and “The Sopranos” again. Taylor Swift released note-for-note replications of two old albums, allowing everybody a brief opportunity to get mad at an ex-boyfriend she had stopped dating a solid decade ago. “Bennifer,” the most gloriously of-their-time celebrity couple of the early aughts, were back together, baby! It was almost enough to make you want to live-tweet a contemporary rewatch of “Gigli” and declare it an unfairly maligned and subversive take on sexual fluidity, or something. (I said “almost.”) In 2021, the turn-of-the-millennium past was back in a big way, even if the eyes and ears through which we were taking it all in had grown older and — just maybe — wiser.Documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears” helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series.Brenda Chase/Online USA, Inc.,via Getty ImagesA word I sometimes noticed bandied about this year when talking about pop culture was “presentism.” Like so many other terms whose meaning has been distorted and hollowed out by contemporary, social-media-driven use — “problematic,” “intersectionality,” “critical race theory” — it began its life as jargon confined mostly to college classrooms and undergraduate term papers. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “presentism” is a philosophical term describing “the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.” To translate that into pop-culture speak, it is the modern tendency to look at an old video of David Letterman grilling Lindsay Lohan on late-night TV and feeling compelled to tweet, “Yas queen, drag his ass!”But this year some of these reassessments went refreshingly deeper, and they were long past due. What’s the opposite of partying like it’s 1999? Recycling the empties, dumping out the ashtrays and soberly assessing the damage to property or — worse — people? Whatever it was, there was suddenly, and very belatedly, a lot of it going on in 2021.All year, headlines and trending topics were monopolized by old, familiar names suddenly being scrutinized under new lights, using language and means of critical thinking that had gone mainstream in the wake of both the #MeToo reckoning and last summer’s protests for racial justice. The lines separating heroes and villains, victims and monsters, were being redrawn in real time. Flashbacks to salacious media coverage of the late ’90s and early 2000s were reminding people how horribly both Britney Spears and Janet Jackson had been treated in the court of popular opinion, and how Justin Timberlake’s white male privilege had allowed him to skate through both of these controversies unscathed. (The New York Times released documentaries about both Spears and Jackson.) In a New York courtroom, the victims of R. Kelly were telling the same stories they’d been telling for years and finally being heard, if damnably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted in plain sight, while far too many of us turned away..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}So many of these conversations were so long overdue, kicked down the road because of how difficult it is for masses of people to face hard truths. But documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears,” “Allen V. Farrow” and “Surviving R. Kelly” (from 2019) helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series, using a familiar narrative vocabulary to sharpen viewers’ understanding of familiar events they thought they knew all about. As uncomfortable as most of these documentaries were to watch, their mass consumption helped shift public opinion, set the terms of cultural conversation, and in some cases maybe even expedited justice.Victims of R. Kelly were finally heard this year, if regrettably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted for years in plain sight.Tannen Maury/EPA, via ShutterstockBut not every reconsideration felt as vital as the next. By now it feels like there is also a thriving and somewhat formulaic cottage industry for content that reconsiders the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. In September, Rolling Stone released an updated version of its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list, a fascinating and (given the racial and gender biases of its previous iterations) even noble endeavor whose critical perspectives will nonetheless, in time, look as dated and of-their-moment as those of the one it replaced. A month later, the online music magazine Pitchfork caused a brief furor when it “rescored” 19 of its old reviews, seemingly to reflect changing public opinions. (I worked there from 2011 to 2014, and one of the rescored reviews was mine.)Operating from a similar point of view, HBO has released several music documentaries in partnership with the entertainment and sports website The Ringer that invite the viewer to relive massively popular ’90s cultural phenomena (the rise of Alanis Morissette; Woodstock ’99) through the seemingly more enlightened perspective of 2021. (I worked at The Ringer from 2016-19.) Directed by the filmmaker Garret Price, “Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage” first came to HBO Max in July. The documentary makes the case — through repeated and rather heavy-handed montages of Columbine, the Clintons and music videos featuring angry young men in cargo shorts — that 1999 was a very particular time in pop culture, seemingly alien to anyone who didn’t live through it. The economy was prosperous and so bands were apolitical, raging against nothing in particular, or so we were told.“The intention was to do something contemporary,” the Woodstock promoter Michael Lang says at the end of the film, summing up the hubris of the original festival’s turn-of-the-millennium update. Woodstock ’99’s catastrophic failures — countless sexual assaults; several preventable deaths; massive, horrifying crowds of white people gleefully rapping the N-word — are presented in the documentary with a comforting assurance that this was the kind of thing that only could have happened in the wacky, angsty late ’90s. Never again! Right?It is surreal to watch this documentary in the aftermath of November’s Astroworld Festival tragedy, which led to 10 deaths. The parallels to Woodstock ’99 (or, since time is still kind of a flat circle, the 1969 Altamont Free Concert) are haunting, with security forces that were inadequate to control such large crowds. The past, it seemed, wasn’t even past.At one point in “Woodstock 99,” the music critic Steven Hyden reflects back on the aura surrounding the original 1969 festival, and how much of it was constructed by the idyllic documentary “Woodstock.” “The problem is that instead of learning from mistakes that were made, we instead created this romanticized mythology in the form of the documentary,” Hyden said. “People watched the film, and they chose to believe that’s the way it really was.”Todd Haynes’s “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality. Apple TV+I wonder if something like the opposite is happening now: The allure of presentism is causing people to romanticize contemporary perspectives at the expense of an excessively vilified past. It’s uncomfortable to dwell in gray areas, to admit imperfections, to acknowledge blind spots — better to have a 100-minute documentary or four-part podcast to allow us to tidily “reconsider” something that we got wrong the first time around, so we never have to think too hard about it again.But to believe the linear, one-dimensional narrative that Woodstock ’99 or misogynistic media coverage of Britney Spears can only be visible in hindsight is to gloss over the fact that plenty of people felt uncomfortable with these phenomena while they were happening. To dutifully perform belated horror at how tabloids wrote about Spears in the early 2000s, how macho rock culture was in the late ’90s, how blithely racist white people who listen to hip-hop used to be, is in some ways to believe a comforting fiction that all of these problems have been solved once and for all.The past was imperfect, yes, but so is the present. Inevitably, the future will be too. The lesson to be taken from all these reconsiderations is not necessarily how much wiser we are now, but how difficult it is to see the biases of the present moment. If anything, these looks back should be reminders to stay vigilant against presentism, conventional wisdom and the numbing orthodoxy of groupthink. They invite us to wonder about the blind spots of our current cultural moment, and to watch out for the sorts of behaviors and assumptions that will, in 20 years’ time, look nearsighted enough to appear in a kitschy montage about the way things were.The best movie I saw this year broke this cycle, essentially by presenting another, more harmonious way the past and present coexist. Todd Haynes’s remarkable and immersive documentary “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality — a little bit like Andy Warhol did in his own slow, strange art films.I was not alive in 1967, the year the Velvet Underground released its debut album, but for a heady and hypnotic two hours, I could have sworn I was. Split-screen images suggested the validity of multiple truths. The music’s blaring brilliance rained down self-evidently rather than having to be overexplained by talking heads. Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico and Moe Tucker all seemed, at various moments, to be both geniuses and jerks. Neither glorified nor condemned, 1967 came flickering alive and seemed about as wonderful and awful a time to be alive as 1999 or 2021. Or, it stands to reason, 2022. More

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      Paris Hilton Has a Podcast, With a Twist

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyParis Hilton Has a Podcast, With a TwistThe aughts fixture and proto-influencer’s new show with iHeartMedia aims to stake out a middle ground between podcasting and social media.Paris Hilton, photographed at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif., is getting into the podcast business with a new company, her own show and an unusual spin on a format that seeks to create an audio equivalent to social media.Credit…Rosie Marks for The New York TimesFeb. 4, 2021Updated 3:17 p.m. ETPodcasting holds a strong allure for would-be media disrupters and visionaries. In the still-developing medium, they see wet clay, capable of being molded into an ideal vessel for long-form narrative journalism or fiction or game shows or musicals or memoir.Add Paris Hilton to their ranks. Hilton, master of an earlier mass-communications era in the tabloid-fueled early aughts, is getting into the podcast business with a new company, her own show and an unusual spin on a form that will seek to create an audio equivalent to social media.“This Is Paris” will debut on Feb. 22 in partnership with iHeartMedia, the radio giant that has become one of the largest distributors of podcasts, with more than 750 shows collecting more than 250 million downloads per month. Aimed at Hilton’s over 40 million followers across social media platforms, the new show will offer a mix of personal content and conversations with her family, friends and other celebrities. It will be the flagship of a planned slate of seven shows to be produced by Hilton’s company, London Audio, and the iHeartPodcast Network. The other programs, featuring different hosts, will be released over the next three years.“I’ve always been an innovator and first mover when it comes to reality TV, social, D.J.ing, and now I really believe that voice and audio is the next frontier,” she said in an interview.A key feature of her podcast will be its use of a format that Hilton is calling “Podposts”: short (between one and three minutes), stripped-down dispatches meant to mimic the cadence and tone of posts on social media. The “This Is Paris” podcast feed will host longer (around 45 minutes), more traditionally produced episodes weekly, with intermittent Podposts filling in the gap several times per week.Since the end of the Fox show “The Simple Life” (with Nicole Richie) in 2007, Hilton has branched into other industries like fashion through her company, Paris Hilton Entertainment.Credit…Michael Yarish/Fox“I really believe that it is like another form of social media,” Hilton explained. “I do so many things — being a D.J., a businesswoman, a designer and an author — so there will be a lot for me to talk about.”Preplanned categories of Podposts will be inspired by Hilton’s famous catchphrases, including “That’s Hot” for product recommendations, “Loves It” for culture recommendations and “This Is my Hotline,” in which Hilton will respond to voice mail messages sent in by listeners. Conal Byrne, president of the iHeartPodcast Network, said the company is currently looking to partner with brands for sponsorship at different levels.“Her power to recommend products to her fans that she believes in is just about unrivaled,” Byrne said.Since the end of “The Simple Life,” her reality television series with Nicole Richie, in 2007, Hilton, who will turn 40 this month, has branched into a wide range of industries through her company, Paris Hilton Entertainment. Its assets include 45 retail stores and 19 product lines across categories like fragrance, fashion and accessories. Before the coronavirus pandemic, Hilton was a sought-after D.J. around the world, for which she has been paid a reported $1 million per gig.In this new deal, iHeartMedia will fully fund the slate of shows produced in partnership with London Audio at a budget of multiple millions of dollars. The two companies will be joint partners in each show and split all revenue streams. After “This Is Paris,” the rest of the slate is expected to be geared toward subjects including beauty, wellness, dating, philanthropy and technology, with Hilton and Bruce Gersh, the president of London Audio, serving as executive producers.“This is a medium that has so many dimensions and really allows you to connect to an audience in a unique way,” Gersh said. “Paris wanted to jump in wholeheartedly.”In addition to the flagship podcast “This Is Paris,” Hilton’s deal with iHeartMedia calls for the creation of six other shows over the next three years.Credit…Rosie Marks for The New York TimesHilton, who named “Bill Gates and Rashida Jones Ask Big Questions” and Kate and Oliver Hudson’s “Sibling Revelry” as among her favorite shows, immersed herself in the medium while grounded at home in Los Angeles during the pandemic.“Usually, I’m traveling 250 days a year and working constantly,” she said. “During this whole year in quarantine, I’ve had more free time than I’ve ever had in my career. So I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts and getting really interested. When I’m cooking or working or doing my art, I always have them on in the background.”Podcasts have become a favored outlet for celebrities seeking to engage with fans in more depth than is possible in a typical post on Instagram or Twitter, while avoiding the scrutiny and vulnerability that comes with speaking to the press. Name recognition is a powerful advantage on the platform — shows by celebrity podcasters like Dax Shepard, Jason Bateman, Anna Faris and Bill Burr appear regularly in the top 50 of the Apple Podcasts charts. (In addition to the Hilton deal, iHeartMedia has struck joint partnerships with Will Ferrell and Shonda Rhimes for slates of shows.) And podcast audiences tend to be a relatively friendly bunch: There are no comments sections to elevate unpleasant behavior, and podcasts by their nature require a level of active engagement that discourages drive-by detractors.“I think once people understand that this is a platform where they can directly interact with their fans without any kind of middleperson, it becomes a very attractive proposition,” said Tom Webster, senior vice president of Edison Research, a media research firm.Webster added that Hilton’s Podposts concept reminded him of the proto-podcast field of audio blogging, in which writers for websites like The Quiet American and The Greasy Skillet posted short audio diaries. “It allows them to stretch out into their personal interests in a way they don’t get to in their day job,” he said.In last year’s YouTube documentary “This Is Paris,” Hilton said she was abused by administrators at a private boarding school she attended as a teenager, an experience by which she remains traumatized.Credit…YouTube“This Is Paris” shares a name with Hilton’s YouTube documentary, released last fall. In that film, which has nearly 20 million views, she distances herself from the blithe, ditsy persona with which she has been identified since emerging in the glare of paparazzi bulbs two decades ago. Hilton also says that she was abused by administrators at a private boarding school she attended as a teenager, an experience by which she remains traumatized.The podcast is meant to follow in the same candid vein. Hilton is recording it at a home studio (built for her music projects) and using her much-discussed natural voice (which, to my ear, is deeper than her most girlish trill but not a dramatic departure).“She talks in a way that’s very relaxed and accessible, as opposed to someone who is putting on a performance,” Byrne said. “Right away she was a natural at making it feel like a one-on-one phone call and not a one-to-many media asset.”For Hilton, recording the pilot for the show did feel uncomfortable at first — unlike on social media, there were no glamorous photos or videos to hide behind. “It’s only about the knowledge you’re bringing and what you’re saying with your voice,” she said.But soon she fell into a groove. After a lifetime of being the subject of interviews, she’s been enjoying “turning the tables” as the one asking questions. Compared with her old jobs, the commute isn’t bad either.“I love being a homebody,” she said, reflecting on her new chapter. “I’ve worked so incredibly hard to build my empire — now I get to finally enjoy it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More