Pop culture roundup: Yé-Yé girls! Mark Lamaar! Al Jaffee! Superman!

Here's a video promo about 1960s French "Yé-Yé girls" - the name given to that nation's top female pop stars of the era, including likes of France Gall, Sylvie Vartan, Françoise Hardy, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin and others.





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Read a lengthy interview with radio announcer/comedian Mark Lamaar, presenter of the much-missed "God's Jukebox" music program on BBC Radio 6. Also, pics of Lamaar's amazing record collection.
"I casted too wide a net because to say that you’re going to specialise in everything from the twenties to the present was crazy! To get up every day for five years and think about what you’re going to hear for eight hours at a time, for a music fan that’s like a punishment. I never thought during those five years that I’m just going to put on some Ray Charles, I never once did that and I really missed Ray Charles! As a fan that’s what you want to do, but as a job I took on this mantle of responsibility, and I’m glad that I did but I’m in no rush to do that again. The day after I finished, I put on a Sam Cooke CD and when it finished I put it on again and it just brought me so much joy because I hadn’t listened to a single record twice in five years. So that’s why I’m not missing radio as much as I should, and it’s not like I won’t ever do it again, but for the moment I’m really happy playing Sam Cooke twice [through]. I think if I did a radio show again, I’d be much lazier as I’ve got an almost endless catalogue of favourite records that I can play.

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Cartoonist Al Jafee, creator of those cool "fold-ins" for Mad Magazine, has decided to donate his personal archives to Columbia University.
The Jaffee archives cover a lot of creative ground. His stepdaughter, Jody Revenson, has been organizing his studio for the past two years, doing battle with his pack-rat tendencies and coaxing a coherent chronology from piles of sketches, tracing paper and scattered freelance assignments, like the animal posters Mr. Jaffee did in the late 1960s for the typesetting company Inforex.
From this morass, she has earmarked several caches for the first delivery to Columbia. The library will be getting Mad fold-in cartoons at all stages of development, from the first “thumbnail squiggle,” as Mr. Jaffe described the first step in the fold-in process, to the large sheets of tracing paper with sketches in colored pencil, to the final painted board.
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You can now get Superman license plates in Ohio, home to the Man of Steel's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
The plate includes the iconic Superman insignia and the phrase “Truth, Justice and the American Way” and is available for purchase only for Ohio vehicles.

The cost of the special license plate will be $20 in addition to the normal registration fee of $34.50, plus local taxes. About half of the $20 fee will go to the Siegel and Shuster Society for future projects.
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Good news for fans of the fabulous Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings: The band's latest LP, "Give the People What They Want," which was delayed to Jones' cancer treatment is set for release Jan. 14. And, better yet, Jones is reportedly in much-improved health. Here's a video for a tune off the new album:



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Get the skinny on a new, three-part mini-series about American superheroes starting Oct. 15 on PBS.
Narrated by "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" alum Liev Schreiber, the doc is broken into three hour-long segments: The genre's origins and Golden Age from 1938 to 1958 in "Truth, Justice and the American Way;" "Great Power, Great Responsibility" covering the dawn of the Silver Age and beyond from 1959 to 1977; and "A Hero Can Be Anyone," looking in part at the impact of movies and TV on the genre from the release of the first "Superman" film in 1978 to the present.


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