Thoughts on James Earl Jones, and other obituaries

So James Earl Jones died yesterday at the age of 93. I was thinking about his most famous roles, and wondering what TCM could show for a programming tribute. It was a bit surprising to me that there's a relative paucity of movies, with a lot more TV and straight-to-video stuff. Jones provided the voice of Darth Vader, but I don't think there's any way TCM could possibly get Star Wars now, even if it did get aired once several years back when TCM did a salute to 20th Century-Fox. I recall being quite surprised at the showing, since it was after Disney acquired the Star Wars franchise. Jones also provided his voice to The Lion King, but Disney animation is going to be a giant no go for TCM any more. Even when they had Leonard Maltin doing the Treasures from the Disney Vault series, feature animation was mostly non-existent.

So what could TCM show? There's certainly The Comedians, which without looking it up I'm pretty certain is MGM; if my memory serves it's one of the movies mentioned in that hilarious Lionpower promotional short. He was also in Dr. Strangelove. I'd love to see TCM show Sneakers, in which he has a smallish but important role, as well.

It was a week ago that James Darren died. I didn't realize quite how many movies Darren was in as a young man, although he was under contract to Columbia. TCM seems to have some ability to get the rights to run those pictures, although it's not quite as easy as stuff from the old "Turner library". I haven't seen anything about a tribute to Darren, although it wouldn't surprise me if he's the sort of person that gets a movie in December when TCM has its night saluting people who died over the course of the past year.

And, finally, I should probably mention the pasing of Will Jennings, who died last Friday aged 80. If you don't recognize the name, it's because he worked behind the camera. Or at least, off-camera, since he was a songwriter so technically not quite so directly involved in the movies. Except that he won two Oscars, for writing "Up Where We Belong" from An Officer and a Gentleman and that horrid "My Heart Will Go On" from the equally horrid 1997 version of Titanic.