I shall honor the recently dead Christopher Lee by posting these pictures of him laying down the law while clutching a ridiculous over-sized vegetable pod and some manner of questionable imp looks on. If there were pictures of me in the same situation I would want people to know while I was still alive, however.
I do not think there is anything sad when a world famous celebrity gets dead at the age of 93, however, especially ones that have appeared in over two hundred films.

If Casey Kasem’s death was sad, it was because there was an unresolved dispute in his family, and the man’s final days were probably stressful, with lingering stress for those who could not fix the problem. It is NOT sad because it made Shaggy “Norville” Rogers, who is a fictional character, cry Mountain Dew Baja Blast-colored tears, when he went to some oddly sparse cartoon graveyard where nobody else is buried.

Much stranger are scenes showing just Scooby Doo weeping at the weird cartoon grave, as if the voice actor dying means the character is dead, even though four people apart from Casem have voiced Shaggy since 1998 in [wholly unnecessary] newer cartoons, and the initial Scooby Doo voice Don Messick has been dead since 1997, with Frank Welker doing the replacement, and he also has always provided the voice of Fred. It might be appropriate to show Fred rubbing his hands in treachery as he plots to take over more of the cast. In a weird cartoon graveyard.

With Messick’s death predating deviantart, I was sadly able to turn up far fewer creepy drawings of his gravestone, which is nonetheless a considerable achievement considering that he was cremated. Kasem meanwhile was buried in Oslo, Norway because his wife was crazy, which as far as I know is accurately depicted in the crude green-carpeted voids seen in these drawings. In another twist, Shaggy is alive again.

Just kidding, they are both actually dead. Gosh it is almost as if cartoons are not real people and thus are neither dead nor living and this sort of illustration has very little reason to exist.

A true mystery: Shaggy and Scooby at Casem and Messick’s imaginary graves, but this time there are two additional graves whose inscriptions cannot at this time be read. Is the implication that man and dog are next, with no reason to go on never-having-lived? Or has this person who couldn’t even be bothered to crop the digital camera picture of this lightly-stained ten minute drawing so that it is at least the center of attention put more effort into rendering a populated graveyard than any of the people who sprang for crayons?

My favorite shows Scooby Doo AND Bat-Man –who of course know each other; this partnership is not in itself notable– at a Kasem grave, Kasem having voiced Batman’s assistant Robin in Hanna Barbera cartoons. Even though those versions of Robin and Batman were based on the ones from the 1966 non-cartoon television series, which starred Burt Ward as Robin, who is not dead yet. Meanwhile, Olan Soule, the first voice (and my preference) of animated Batmen, has been dead since 1994. And once again the live Batman, Adam West*, yet lives. All the while, creepy oversized ghost heads float nearby with contented expressions showing they are oblivious to or quite proud of the suffering and confusion they have caused.

*West himself took over the animated Batman’s role later, but he and Scooby were no longer on speaking terms.

In other news, Ken Spears and Joe Ruby, the writers who actually conceived the Scooby Doo concept and characters, and presumably introduced Scooby Doo and Batman to each other, are also both still alive. Maybe they can get a pair of typewriters to cry at their hastily engraved resting places later.

There were a staggering meepload of these for Robin Williams. But in a week/month/year of tributes to a supposed comic genius, the hardest I laughed was coming across this, cartoon characters at a grave for a man they can’t plausibly have known existed, who was cremated, and didn’t actually voice them. Shouldn’t the grave say something like Cloppin Fillyums on it, given the alternate allegorical stupid horse-pun-based universe they inhabit?

Um technically a filly is a young female horse soooooooooooooooooooo I am worn out by the succession of Os and can’t finish my sentence? I’m talking down to you in an authoritative manner while pretending to be unsure of myself by typing out thought grunts and ending my statement with a question mark? Um?
That is true; otherwise this scene is completely serious and logical. But according to the image description, which regrettably was written, and regrettabler glanced at by me, the person who posted it didn’t even draw it; the person just assembled the elements from other drawings from other people, and only accomplished this much. So even if we are lost enough to imagine these characters are real and an acceptable vector for our own emotions on completely unrelated topics, at best they are faking it in front of a green screen on some other occasion. The animated franchise with the greatest potential for instant dork fame after spending the least amount of time learning to draw like it, and this person couldn’t even manage that, and still gets more recognition weekly than I ever had for almost any one thing my entire life. I felt bad making fun of the artists earlier, who clearly were not getting much respect as it was, but this kind of self-sustaining garbage is hard to coexist with calmly, even after five years.

But at least Robin Williams gets some scenery and a stylish mound, and a cheerfully inappropriate font.

That was rather odd, but could we possibly get a bootleg pikachu leaking Tide detergent onto a creepy cartoon grave that you stuffed five dead people into, four of whom certainly never had anything to do with Pokaymon plus one I never heard of?

I knew I could count on you.

I think these originated with Mel Blanc’s death and a widely-circulated drawing of Bugs Bunny and the et als, whose most distinguishing traits are the myriad ways they show no respect to anyone, looking mopey beside a spotlit microphone with the heading “SPEECHLESS.” To this day, prints of it are sold as if they haven’t been being cranked out for 25 years for apparent profit for the Time Warner company to people who would gladly pay to remember someone who made them glad with something that wants to force them to be sad. It seems the only thing better than institutionalized misery is spending money to take part.

This one for KC Case ’em at least makes a dorky joke on the topic that clashes with the intended air of reverence.

When Leonard Nimoy got dead I saw online remarks from people saying things like “I was driving when I heard and I had to pull my car over and cry for a while,” like this was someone they had met and knew very well, who had made a direct, personal investment in their lives. I am told he participated in his cult fan-dom, and had a “fatherly aura,” but he hardly left a great deal of business unfinished in his life. This level of attachment to celebrity is lost on me.

I remember when George Carlin did it, there were months of tributes to him, and I did not really see the prolonged public justification. But I accepted that; I did not seek out standup comedy, generally, and most of the tributes were from people who had worked with him or seen him perform who just happened to have high-profile television jobs but didn’t feel like doing him any favors while he was alive. I also remembered that when Bernie Mac went dying there was hardly anything within my radius, but I accepted that I mainly watched shows with mainly white people on them. Steve Jobs, alright, I never liked Apple-computer-brand stuff. Even my i-pod, which I did like, felt needlessly hard to use just to seem innovative. Literally, Apple’s slogan of the period was “Think Different.” No need to think better, just arbitrarily turn practical 2-direction control into a wheel and give it a plug that nothing else already uses or potentially will ever be able to use. And try to force me to reconfigure my operating system outside the i-pod while you are at it.

But with Robin Williams: he himself, not just people who knew him, was in films, and on television, stuff that I saw, and the effect of his death on me was about the same as any others I mentioned. I saw tributes from people of my approximate social status to the effect that they felt like they lost a family member or a piece of themselves forever even though the stuff he did has been preserved in the exact same form it was first encountered in (unless you saw him perform live, which none of these people have (maybe they WANTED to, and now know they cannot ever, but how much emotional difference does that make?)). So now I know I do not belong. It was not the society-wide media-mandated mourning of the World Trade Center attack, but this was just one person, who had made quite a bit of money and, at the very least, knew he was about to die, and not a few thousand done in without warning.
In this country. Who cares if hundreds of thousands die or are driven from their homes somewhere else? Nobody is expected to care about everyone else in the world; it would probably kill any of us if we tried. But certainly we should take stock of what we are losing our marbles over. I have breakdowns all the time due to very personal things; in fact they rarely involve any unconnected figure’s hardship. I could not mentally afford that. It would never let up. I can’t even handle birthdays.

I was wondering what yet-living public figure has made the biggest impact on my life. But they, at least the ones we make celebrities out of, almost always work in groups, and rarely produce a totally unique, non-imitated/imitating product, and no singular product sums up my life, or would cease to sum it up if one of the people who made it stopped living. And I say that as someone with very little social contact, who theoretically should have all the more reason to fill my empty life with far off Hollywud horsegoatradish.

Back to Williams, it WAS sad to me, because it was a suicide, and in fact I never had any ability to relate to Williams prior to knowing he had a depression issue –yes, I have also acted like an idiot for attention, but with far less encouragement– and could barely stand him at all until he took on a more subdued persona post-heart surgery, but he will not quickly be forgotten if we don’t rush to say he won’t be.

And Leonard Nimoy has contributed to about 536 Starry Trek-related productions, probably enough where if you watched them all in order you would have forgotten the first one by the time you got to the end and you could start over. He lacked the potential that Robin Williams had to take on future significant projects, and hardly needed it by the time of his not-quite-deadness. And I am not advising to forget the creations and participations of people who appeal to you, but to quote somebody I hated during My Childhood, take a chill pill, get a grip.

In fact I did not see anybody freaking out over Christopher Lee but apparently I deleted this text from an earlier post, presumably the one I just linked at, and this seemed like my best chance to use it. For the love of MacGuffin, if you like something somebody did 20 years ago, please tell them before they die, because afterward that is going to be a lot less important to them, and undoubtedly someone else you know could use the attention more by that point. And please don’t put me in a box in the ground in a sad grave. ESPECIALLY if you like what I did while alive, don’t ruin your or anyone else’s day unless you truly have to. Put me in one of those cadaver museums or feed me to needy owls, or something useful.