Birdman

Superhero? Attorney at law? We report, you decide!

Today’s New York Times Spelling Bee letters:

A, B, D, I, N, R, and center M (all words must include M).

Merriam-Webster says…

Silly little dictionary! Don’t you know birdman can’t possibly be a word if the New York Times says it ain’t?

For further fascinating facts, check out the Spelling Bee Master.

What’s your favorite dord* from today’s puzzle?

My Two Cents

Definition number 1, above, isn’t very helpful. “A person who deals with birds.” Is that someone who stashes a dozen exotic parrots in a suitcase and tries to slip them through LaGuardia Airport? I think — technically speaking — that would be “a person who deals in birds”.

So is a birdman someone you call when the local finch gang is giving you trouble? The Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood of the aviary criminal world?

Or is it just your creepy old neighbor who breeds homing pigeons on the building rooftop because he knows the zombiepocalypse will arrive any day now. Any day!

Flying suits

No, not characters from the USA Network hit series sitting in first class of an Airbus-380.

I’m talking about thrill-seeking humans who slip into a wearable parachute and zoom around at three billion miles per hour after diving off cliffs.

The above photo is of Franz Reichelt, an Austrian-born French tailor who jumped off the Eiffel Tower in the first recorded birdman flight. His wingsuit was a bit crude, which offered a big disadvantage. Namely, death.

That scared the French for some 80 years, until Patrick de Gayardon improved upon the design Vietnam vet John Carta had been using. Carta is best known as the base jumper who parachuted onto the roof of the World Trade Center in 1981 and jumped from the Verrazano Bridge a year later. He survived both times, but was killed in 1990 during an aerobatic performance.

Gayardon launched the wingsuit craze that has lasted to this day. Unfortunately, his daring-dos also cost him his life, and he died in 1998 during while testing modifications to his wingsuit.

Hmmm… I’m starting to see a trend here.

Okay, here is a photo of two modern wingsuit divers.

They survived. Well… I’m pretty sure they almost certainly most likely did.

Ready! Set! Action!

Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)

Birdman and the Galaxy Trio (1967–1969) & Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law (2001–2007)

Birdman (2014)

Geez! It’s right there in the titles of two films and two television cartoon shows. How much more obvious does it have to get for the New York Times to recognize the word.

I’ll grant that only the first birdman title refers to a non-superhero. But still, it’s a biopic about Robert Stroud, who, after manslaughtering, assaulting and murdering, became a federal prisoner, author, and respected ornithologist. He ended up with around 300 canaries while he was imprisoned at Leavenworth, and managed to smuggle out of prison his book, Diseases of Canaries, which was published in 1933. This guy even found a cure for a family of fatal bird diseases!

In 1942 Stroud was transferred to Alcatraz, where he was not allowed to keep any birds at all. He died in 1963 at a federal prison in Missouri. So why was the movie called Birdman of Alcatraz? Probably because Hollywood promoters figured that it would draw better than No Birds for You at Alcatraz.

The 2014 Birdman movie, directed by Alejandro Iñárritu, won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. It’s also well-known for being filmed with the illusion of an (almost) single shot. This was before the acclaimed movie 1917 (2019) by director Sam Mendes, which also gave the appearance of having only two very long continuous shots.

I like the reasoning Iñárritu gave for shooting Birdman that way: “we live our lives with no editing”.

However, the birdman that pops into my mind the minute I hear the word is the one and only Hanna-Barbera superhero…

Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirdman!!!!!

That was his drawn-out, ready-for-action call as he flew in the air with his sidekick… a purple eagle. What can I say. The 60s were all about psychedelic drugs and animals.

Birdman was created by cartoonist Alex Toth, who in 1990 was inducted into the short-lived Jack Kirby Hall of Fame. Toth, who started out illustrating comic books, later created animation for iconic Saturday morning shows such as Super Friends, Fantastic Four, Space Ghost, Sealab 2020, The Herculoids, and, of course, Birdman.

Fun factoid: my old home in New York belonged to a woman whose last name was Toth, so I like to tell people that I lived in the house that Alex occasionally visited as a kid. And you can’t prove me otherwise.

Raymond “Ray” Randall is just a regular guy, except for the fact that he’s been given magic powers by the ancient Egyptian sun god Ra. He can fly, thanks to some wings that popped out from his back, he can shoot solar rays from his hands and he can create a solar shield to deflect bad guys’ bullets and assorted laser beams. Calling himself Birdman, he lives inside a fake volcano with his pet purple eagle, Avenger.

Birdman fights against an assortment of baddies with the help of his contact at Inter-National Security, Falcon 7. Falcon 7, of course, wore an eye patch and seared an eye-patch-wearing son, Alex Cord, who later helped Airwolf in the 1980s.

Who knew eye patches were hereditary? Also, for some reason TV went from color back to black and white during those two decades.

Anyway… Birdman’s sole weakness is that he needs to recharge his powers every so often, usually by direct exposure to the sun. Of course, by kiddie cartoon logic and plotting, this means that in every single episode the villain finds a way to exploit that weakness. I repeat. Every. Single. Episode.

And who saves Birdman each and every time? Falcon 7? General Stone — a military leader who appears every so often? Anyone at the Inter-National Security agency? (Of course not; all they’re good for is disavowing.)

A resounding no! No, no, no! None of the above. It’s all up to the purple pet eagle, Avenger. Who always comes through, by the way. In other words, Birdman is saved by a bird, man.

And he never seems embarrassed by it.

Speaking of the sun god Ra I mentioned earlier, the one who gave Raymond Randall his superpowers… Well, it turns out that Ra was also a birdman of sorts. Although snotty Ph.D.’s in Egyptology prefer to describe him as an “avian humanoid”.

Here, see for yourself.

Maybe Avenger, the purple pet eagle, was Ra in animal form. Maybe Birdman and Ra had something going on, something neatly and subtly coded in by the genius of Alex Toth… who as a kid used to visit the house in which I later lived… with my huge comics collections.

It all comes full circle!

To make a long story even longer, Birdman disappeared for about three decades. then suddenly he popped up as a lawyer on Cartoon Network’s late-night Adult Swim.

He had changed his name to Harvey Birdman and now called himself “an attorney at law”, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. It was clear he had gotten tired of Avenger the eagle saving his ass all the time and no else supporting him in his crime-fighting endeavors. Plus, being a superhero doesn’t pay well, as Peter Parker can attest.

So Harvey Birdman took up the cause of defending in court other Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters from the 1960s and 70s. He made millions and retired a few years later to an indisposed volcano on an undisclosed island somewhere in the Pacific.

Anyway, despite me providing ample proof of the existence of both Birdmen with a capital B and birdmen with a lowercase b, the editors of the Spelling Bee puzzle still decided that birdman is a dord.*

By the way, here is the intro to the original Birdman cartoon. His shout-out to himself happens around 0:44.

You can check out my previous entry on another dord* here:

*What the heck is a dord, you ask? Here’s the answer: