Block Buster!

"Block Buster!" (also sometimes listed as "Blockbuster!") is a 1973 single by The Sweet. Written by Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, and produced by Phil Wainman, "Block Buster!" was the band's sole UK No. 1 hit. Released in January 1973, it spent five weeks at the top of the UK Singles Chart, and also made #1 in the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand, Austria and Ireland, and #3 in Finland, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway. Outside Europe it fared less well as it peaked at #29 in Australia and at #73 on the American Billboard Hot 100.

Music and lyrics

Its riff was considered markedly similar to fellow RCA act David Bowie's "The Jean Genie", released shortly before, but all parties maintain that this was pure coincidence.

TV performances

Some controversy rose after the band's performance of the song on the British television program Top of the Pops at December 25 1973. In this performance, Sweet's bassist Steve Priest wore a Swastika.

References

Blockbuster (book)

Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer is a 2004 non-fiction book by British film critic Tom Shone published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, ISBN 0-7432-6838-5.

Based on interviews with leading Hollywood filmmakers, actors and production staff it examines the revolution in Hollywood movies brought about by Jaws, Star Wars, Alien and other summer blockbusters and how they became a global phenomenon.

The tone and approach of the book is not one of film criticism as such but rather an analysis of how the blockbuster era came into being, and the processes which drove the producers, directors and film executives concerned from 1975 to 2004. It sets itself firmly on the side of the audience and values entertainment and thrills rather than high culture, and does not shy away from equating creative success with commercial success.

In the book Shone considers that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg's reinvention of blockbusters as fast-paced entertainment reinvigorated the American film industry and deserves greater artistic and critical recognition. These two filmmakers are the most prominent of the many interviewed for the book and receive the most coverage. Director James Cameron is also featured extensively but was not directly interviewed.

Blockbuster (entertainment)

Blockbuster, as applied to film, theatre, and sometimes also video games, denotes a very popular or successful, usually big budget production.

Origin of the term

In film, a number of terms were used to describe a hit. In the 1970s these included: "spectacular" (The Wall Street Journal), "super-grosser" (New York Times), and "super-blockbuster" (Variety). In 1975 the usage of "blockbuster" for films coalesced around Steven Spielberg's Jaws and became perceived as something new: a cultural phenomenon, a fast-paced exciting entertainment, almost a genre. Audiences interacted with such films, talked about them afterwards, and went back to see them again just for the thrill.

Blockbuster films

Before Jaws set box office records in the summer of 1975, successful films, such as Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, Gone With the Wind, and Ben-Hur, were called blockbusters based purely on the amount of money earned at the box office. Jaws is regarded as the first film of New Hollywood's "blockbuster era" with its current meaning, implying a film genre. It also consolidated the "summer blockbuster" trend, through which major film studios and distributors planned their entire annual marketing strategy around a big release by July 4.

Over the Hedge

Over the Hedge is a syndicated comic strip written and drawn by Michael Fry and T. Lewis. It tells the story of a raccoon, turtle, a squirrel, and their friends who come to terms with their woodlands being taken over by suburbia, trying to survive the increasing flow of humanity and technology while becoming enticed by it at the same time. The strip debuted in June 1995.

Main characters

RJ

A raccoon con artist, RJ takes pride in being extremely lazy. He apparently envisions himself as an intellectual; however, his "facts" are obviously false. He loves to ransack human homes, as well as watch them and their televisions through the windows. While he enjoys commenting on human life, most of his statements are false as well, although he has studied humans and knows their ways of getting food, and even has slightly imprinted on them. He was shown to care for Clara even before she was born, (after he learned that babies can hear some things outside of the mother from Verne) by reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame and singing a horrible version of "Stairway to Heaven". He is sometimes shown without a brain, using his brain cavity to store his "hanky", and breath mints. He is shown to have the ability to expand to fit a massive amount of food, and is known as "that horrible raccoon kid" on Halloween. He claimed in one strip that he is an immortal god, and once "confessed" to Verne for "lighting the fuse" to the Big Bang, which he explained was because "The matches were right there, and the sign said "Don't light this fuse!!!", so...". He also said that the universe "will have to reschedule the time when the Sun will burn out", as he has "a tail rinse that day".

Stella (yacht)

The Stella is a 'one-design' Bermuda rig sloop yacht, designed for cruising and racing by the noted yacht designer CR (Kim) Holman in 1959. The design was to the requirements of a customer who had seen the Nordic Folkboat and decided that the English east coast needed a similar vessel but modified for North Sea as opposed to Baltic conditions and a competitive racer on handicap. The prototype: Stella No. 1 La Vie en Rose was built to win the 1959 Burnham (on Crouch) week, which she promptly did. Clinker built of mahogany or larch on oak frames.

The restoration of Amulet, a Stella class yacht originally built in Fort William in 1964, is described by Bob Orrell in the book Amulet: A Charm Restored and Sailed to the Western Isles.

Fleets exist in the UK (estimated 100 built) and Australia (approximately 20 built).

Key dimensions

Stella (software)

Stella, a computer program available in three versions (Great Stella, Small Stella and Stella4D), was created by Robert Webb of Australia. The programs contain a large library of polyhedra which can be manipulated and altered in various ways.

Polyhedra

Polyhedra in Great Stella's library include the Platonic solids, the Archimedean solids, the Kepler-Poinsot solids, the Johnson solids, some Johnson Solid near-misses, numerous compounds including the uniform polyhedra, and other polyhedra too numerous to list here. Operations which can be performed on these polyhedra include stellation, faceting, augmentation, dualization (also called "reciprocation"), creating convex hulls, and others.

All versions of the program enable users to print nets for polyhedra. These nets may then be assembled into actual three-dimensional polyhedral models of great beauty and complexity.

Stella 4D

In 2007, a Stella4D version was added, allowing the generation and display of four-dimensional polytopes (polychora), including a library of all convex uniform polychora, and all currently known nonconvex star polychora, as well as the uniform duals. They can be selected from a library or generated from user created polyhedral vertex figure files.