[cosine]

Joy Harmon died yesterday. Remember the car washing scene in Cool Hand Luke?

[Matt]

SaRenna asked me to post this here and not in her main thread so it might stay happy and light.  https://x.com/SaRennasNinja/status/2048058915292598604

[MaxBigfoot]

Oh my god, this is devastating news!  She's an icon, and I am saddened greatly by knowing she won't be around any more.
Matt, I am so sorry for you and everyone else she knew personally.   

[rtpoe]

Roger Sweet (1935-2026)

https://www.avclub.com/obituary-roger-sweet-he-man-masters-of-the-universe

An Ohio native who graduated from Chicago’s Institute of Design in 1972, Sweet moved out to California to work at Mattel after college. While there, the company turned down a contract to produce the toys for Star Wars because of the $750,000 up-front licensing fee. The company had its Preliminary Design Department, where Sweet worked, designing some male action figure ideas to make up for the missed opportunity. Amid his fellow artists submitting ideas like “Robin and the Space Hoods,” Sweet submitted an idea called “Monster Factory,” though he admitted in a 2005 interview, “it was actually a barbarian fantasy.” As for the name, Sweet brainstormed as many as 50 names, including Mighty Man, Megaton Man, Strong Man, and Big Man. When he got to He-Man, a “bell rang in my head[…]it’s just one in a million.” Though he considered himself a “flyspeck on the elephant’s rear end in relation to all the work and talent that other people put into this line,” he supplied “the seed from which the Masters tree grew.”

“I originated and named He-Man,” he said in 2019. “I originated the three prototype models that brought He-Man and Masters of the Universe into existence.”

His widow is hoping to get Amazon MGM Studios to dedicate their upcoming movie to him and Mark Taylor, who created Skeletor.

[rtpoe]

JOE SEDELMAIER (1933-2026)

Born in Orrville, Ohio, Sedelmaier originally aspired to be a cartoonist and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1955. After working as an art director for the firms Young & Rubicam and J. Walter Thompson, he opened his own film production studio in 1967.

In 1974, he landed his first major commercial, "Orgy":


With his "unique approach to casting, dialogue and framing as well as his philosophy – ‘You’ve got to entertain to sell’ — broke the mold in television advertising," as his son J.J. Sedelmaier said, "His work helped redefine commercial storytelling, favoring real faces, authentic oddity, and sharply observed humor over polished perfection," he became a star in the advertising world and the face of what Esquire called “the renaissance of the American commercial.” They even put Sedelmaier on the cover of Esquire, underneath the headline, “When you absolutely positively want the best.” The slogan references the first of Sedelmaier’s most iconic ’80s commercials, “Fast-Paced World”:


The ad’s steady, over-the-table shot composition and non-professional actor gabbing on the phone presaged his most famous work: The 1984 Wendy’s ad, “Fluffy Bun,” or as it’s more commonly referred, “Where’s The Beef.”


The ad spawned two follow-up spots, a novelty record, and an answer in the form of a Prego ad. “I found it, Peller says of “The Beef.” “I really found it.” “Where’s the beef?” even became a linchpin of that year’s Democratic primaries, when candidate Walter Mondale used the line to mock his rival Gary Hart’s policies. By the end of the year, Sedelmaier was the subject of a 60 Minutes segment about his work entitled, “It’s a Sedelmaier.”

Sedelmaier did aspire to direct feature films, and nearly helmed the 1983 Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Easy Money. but dropped out after a disagreement with the comic over the script. Twenty years later, his short film, OpenMinds, was selected for the Sundance Film Festival.

Sedelmaier was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 2000 and the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Fame in 2016. To him, commercials were not interruptions but miniature films about human behavior. “They were little films about people—funny, awkward, vulnerable, unforgettable people. He changed advertising because he understood human nature,” a family representative said.

"Fashion Show", 1985:


Joe, date unknown:

[wolpertinger]

DAVID HOCKNEY (1937 - 2026)



David Hockney (9 July 1937 – 11 June 2026) was an English painter, stage designer and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

In November 2018, Hockney's 1972 work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's for $90 million (£70 million), becoming the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction. It broke the previous record which was set by the 2013 sale of Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog (Orange) for $58.4 million. Hockney held the record until May 2019 when Koons's Rabbit sold for more than $91 million.

[rtpoe]

PAT OLIPHANT (1935-2026)


Born in Adelaide, Australia, he was introduced to drawing by his father, a government draftsman. At 18, he landed a job as a copy boy at the Adelaide News. After leaving that paper for the rival Advertiser, he started doing minor illustrations - maps and photo retouching. He soon moved up to being their editorial cartoonist.
When editors disagreed with some of his cartoons, Mr. Oliphant began adding a tiny character at the margins, Punk the penguin, to voice his forbidden political views.

Bored with Australia, he moved to the US to join the Denver Post in 1964, and within a year his cartoons were syndicated internationally. In 1967, he prepared a batch of cartoons to submit for that year's Pulitzer Prize. He included one that he personally hated, but thought would appeal to the jury's politics. When it won, he was enraged. For years afterward, he condemned the Pulitzers, never again submitting his work for a prize that was awarded, in his view, more on the basis of politics than skill. “It’s a fraudulent award,” he said.

He moved to the Washington Star in 1975 and, six years later, struck out on his own, working independently without being tied to a single paper. At the height of his popularity, his work appeared in more than 500 newspapers, influencing fellow Pulitzer winners including Tom Toles, Tony Auth, Ann Telnaes and Jeff MacNelly.

He retired from cartooning in 2015, as his eyesight began to fail. But two years later, he made a brief reappearance with two editorial cartoons that were published online by the Nib, mocking President Donald Trump. “We thought that Watergate was a unique condition. But it sort of pales in comparison to what we’ve got now,” Mr. Oliphant told the Santa Fe Reporter that year. He had found a dream subject in Trump, he said, but his eyes made it all but impossible to draw. “I’ve been in this business 60 years. And I’ve waited 60 years for this [guy] to come along. And I can’t do anything about it because of my eyes.”

“He saw himself as participating in the long tradition of political caricature, going back especially to Delacroix, to Daumier, these major figures of the 19th century,” said Molly Schwartzburg, a Harvard University curator of printing and graphic arts who helped organize a 2020 exhibition of Mr. Oliphant’s work. “His work has a sort of intellectual history that brought an aesthetic seriousness to political cartooning in the 20th century. He’s a trenchant critic of the hypocrisy of politics, and he’s always seeing exactly what the politicians are up to.”

L: Oliphant in his studio, date unknown.
R: The presidents he's spoofed