The Kid

By Mark | February 28, 2009

jackie-chaplin Linette and I watched Chaplin’s brilliant film “The Kid” last night with Clementine, and had a wonderful time… except for the part where the evil men from the children’s asylum come to kidnap the adorable little Jackie Coogan.

It’s still hard for me to believe that he (Coogan) grew up to be that shyster in the neck brace who took the Brady Bunch to court, or, for that matter, Uncle Fester.

And, speaking of old classics, I’d like to thank whoever out there sent me the book “Columbo Phile” through the print-to-order site Lulu. As, last I’d heard, it had been out of print (copies were going on Amazon for several hundred dollars), I was incredibly happy to find it in today’s mail. It’s something I’ve dreamed of having for a long time.

This entry was posted in Art and Culture, Pop Culture and tagged Brady Bunch, Charlie Chaplin, Columbo, Columbophile, Jackie Coogan, The Kid, Uncle Fester. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

6 Comments

Mark

Posted February 28, 2009 at 10:20 pm | Permalink

What, no one wants to talk about Jackie Coogan?
Mark

Posted February 28, 2009 at 10:22 pm | Permalink

I didn’t realize it until watching the documentary that accompanied The Kid, but Coogan’s dad had a bit part in the film. He plays the pickpocket in the flop house.
Mark

Posted February 28, 2009 at 11:04 pm | Permalink

I found this, from Wikipedia, interesting.

As a child star, Coogan earned as much as $4 million, but the money was taken by his mother, Lilian, and stepfather, Arthur Bernstein, for extravagances such as fur coats, diamonds, and cars. He sued them in 1935, but after legal expenses, he only received $126,000. When Coogan fell on hard times, Chaplin gave him some financial support.

The legal battle did, however, bring attention to child actors and resulted in the state of California enacting the California Child Actor’s Bill, sometimes known as the Coogan Bill or the Coogan Act. This requires that the child’s employer set aside 15% of the child’s earnings in a trust, and codifies such issues as schooling, work hours and time-off. Jackie’s mother and stepfather attempted to soften the situation by pointing out that the child was having fun and thought he was playing. However, virtually every child star from Baby Peggy on has stated that they were keenly aware that what they were doing was work.
Hackie Coogan

Posted March 1, 2009 at 2:51 pm | Permalink

A friend of mine recently asked about the case where a Flash app needs to interact with a .NET back-end via web services. I told him that Carlo Alducente wrote a nice WebService class to facilitate this, but when parsing SOAP responses with ActionScript 3.0, dealing with namespaces can be a bit of a PITA. For simple schemas that don’t actually depend on the namespace to ensure unique node names, you can work around this by using a wildcard for the namespace.

var myXML:XML =

Mark Maynard:
specializes in painted French style furniture.
is hung like a hamster and twice as mean.
has a vast quantity of knowledge regarding bass fishing, catfish fishing, and panfish fishing.

;

// Here’s the code to get at your data:

trace(myXML..*::question.@id) // –> 1

trace(myXML..*::inquery) // –> “Mark Maynard:”

trace(myXML..*::choice.(@iscorrect == “true”).@id) // –> 456

trace(myXML..*::choice.(@id == 456).text()) // –> “is hung like a hamster and twice as mean.”

trace(myXML..*::choice.length()); //–> 3

// If you want to loop over the choices, do it like so:

for each ( var option:XML in myXML..*::choice ){
trace(‘choice id: ‘ + option.@id + ‘ text: ‘ + option);
}

Just thought I’d share that in case it helps anyone else.
Mark

Posted March 1, 2009 at 10:40 pm | Permalink

Hung like a hamster and twice as mean, if it isn’t already, should be on a tombstone somewhere.
Paw

Posted March 2, 2009 at 3:12 pm | Permalink

Chaplin, I have read, met one of his wives when she was 12. And Coogan’s first film, I believe, preceded this one by a few years. It was called Skinner’s Baby.