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No. 85: "'Rosebud' was his sled!" "AAUGH!"

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/dinosaur/?comic=85

Strip by: Colin Foster

Text: T-Rex’s movie reviews!
Text: This week: Citizen Kane!
T-Rex: One word: Boring!
Utahraptor: Agreed!
T-Rex: Orson Welles has no future in cinema!
Utahraptor: Or art of any kind!
Text: This has been T-Rex’s Movie Reviews!
Text: Sponsored by the Hearst Corporation

The author writes:

"Citizen Kane" is, of course, one of the movies most frequently cited as the best ever made. The film is a thinly veiled take on William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper magnate at the time, who wasn't pleased at the film portraying him as a power-abusing, sad old man. Reportedly, he was even more furious at its portrayal of his mistress Marion Davies, whose analogue in the film is a singer Kane forces to become the lead in an opera despite her neither wanting to nor having the ability. (Hearst did get Davies roles in movies, but reportedly she wasn't bad at it.)

In truth, Hearst's attacks on the film were in the form of printing libelous stores about director and star Orson Welles and refusing to advertise or review the film in any of his papers. So the likelihood of him sponsoring a show criticizing the film would not have been likely, and it would have been even less likely that he would have had dinosaurs doing so.

Fun fact: I had to keep myself from saying "of course" throughout this annotation, because as a film school dropout, much of this information is common knowledge to me.