Tom Jones International

Since there’s been so much controversy lately over reviews of Tom’s shows, our “Question of the Month” for November is:

If you were the critic — a professional, honest and objective critic — how would you review Tom’s show?

TOM JONES SINGS THE DUCK DODGERS THEME!

Duck Dodgers was broadcast on the Cartoon Network from August 2003 to November 2005. Much to our surprise, lots of fans have never heard of the show or heard the theme.

So, we’ll rectify that situation forthwith:

Set in the “24th-and-one-half century” the promo for the show tells us, “It’s 351 years in the future. Earth needs a hero. Until then, Duck Dodgers will do.”

“Duck Dodgers is a hapless soul who was frozen inside a spaceship in the 21st century and came out 351 years later. Through his scheming and lies, Duck has convinced the Earth’s Defensive Protectorate that he is a hero from the 21st century and has been given a spaceship and a crew. Together they form a ‘galactic force’ that must team up against Earth’s major enemy, Mars, and its Martian Commander X-2. The series comes from Looney Tunes cartoons and features Daffy Duck, Marvin the Martian and Porky Pig.”

The one episode in which Tom was featured was called Talent Show A Go-Go. The story was that, in order to win an intergalactic talent contest, Dodgers borrows the greatest singing voice of all time: the velvet pipes of Mr. Tom Jones!

There is nothing quite as funny as Tom’s voice singing It’s Not Unusual coming out of Daffy Duck and, conversely, Daffy’s voice coming from Tom. If you have a copy of this show, please let us know.

On the SciFi Channel website one person wrote: “The opening for Duck Dodgers is just terrific. The theme song, written by Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd, is performed by Tom Jones and The Flaming Lips….The real find here is that, not only is Tom Jones alive, he can still sing. Catch the first few minutes for the theme song alone.”

Here is Tom singing a bit of the Duck Dodgers Theme

Meanwhile, you can see an original, vintage 1950s Duck Dodgers cartoon at the Looney Tunes website.

OK: We apologize, but there was a good review by a woman named Deborah Anderson that was published November 1 in the Evening Times of Glasgow. We made a note of it and meant to post it, but time got away from us. It is on tomjones.com (uncredited to the writer) and is only available now on the paper’s site to those who wish to pay.

Ms. Anderson —as her short, but sweet review makes clear — somehow did not see the same show as Mr. Gordon (below). Guess she was more fortunate than he. (posted November 5)

Jeez! This review of Tom in Glasgow from The Scotsman defies description. “Turkish pimp?” “Freeze-dried band?” Jeez again! We’re just posting it in the interest of honest and full disclosure. Just skip it. If you cannot resist reading it and if you want to respond, you can comment on the “review” where it might do some good — with this link.

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TOM JONES




**




CLYDE AUDITORIUM, GLASGOW/ BY BARRY GORDON/PUBLISHED FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3




BACK in the days when wearing Brut aftershave was considered perfectly acceptable, a Tom Jones concert consisted of black leathers, gold medallions and several hundred pairs of Marks & Spencer’s frilly knickers.




These days, the tight breeches, billowing shirts and women’s underwear are a thing of the past, but something else was also oddly amiss from the first night of Jones’s two-night stint at the Armadillo — his sense of humour.




Sporting a purple suit, spirit-level-trimmed goatee and a Tango-orange complexion, Jones looked like a Turkish pimp. New jokes surrounding old songs were decidedly thin on the ground, the 66-year-old operating on cruise control for his entire 100 minutes on stage.




Following a rather pedestrian Delilah, it wasn’t long before zealous grannies in the front row began to thrust their wares at him. If Jones didn’t rebuff them with casual indifference, he was certainly too lazy in attempting to catch their handkerchiefs tossed from the lip of the stage.




Whistle-stop tours around blues (Howlin’ Wolf), folk (Van Morrison) and boogie-woogie (Jerry Lee Lewis) finally cajoled some soulful emotion from Jones’s freeze-dried band, and then he tugged at the heartstrings with Green Green Grass of Home, but the whole was unattractive and outdated. Overall? Unfashionable and a bit smelly. A bit like Brut aftershave, really.