The Inside the NBA guys have a lot of fun yelling at each other over stuff. Our latest example of this came on Tuesday evening before TNT kicked off the 2021-22 NBA regular season. Things started with the first third of the NBA’s 75th anniversary team being released, and after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar unsurprisingly made the list, Ernie Johnson had a simple question for Shaquille O’Neal: If you were to rank the greatest centers in Los Angeles Lakers history, how would that look.
Shaq put Kareem No. 1, which, no complaints there. He then placed himself second and Wilt Chamberlain third, and Charles Barkley responded by blowing a gasket. In response to that, Shaq started screaming. A lot of screaming! It was pretty good.
“Oh, you’re not better than Wilt!” Barkley screamed. “Stop it!”
“I got four…” Shaq said, in reference to the number of championship rings he won with the team. He then pointed to the statue of himself. A lot more screaming happened between the two, more than we usually see on Inside, and then, Kenny Smith jumped in.
“You better than Wilt?” Smith asked, presumably because he was enjoying this whole display.
“Yeah, I’m better than Wilt,” Shaq said. “I’d bust Wilt’s ass. Yeah. Hell yeah.”
Despite the season only just officially starting, the Inside crew is already in midseason form.
The NBA is going all out to celebrate its 75th anniversary season, with a special logo, ad campaigns, photo shoots, and, maybe most interesting for fans, a new list of the 75 Greatest Players of All-Time. The league did this for the 50th anniversary, with a special presentation at All-Star Weekend, having players past and present come together to show the strength of the league then and now.
What will be interesting is to see if any players from the NBA at 50 end up being left off the 75th anniversary list, or if it will simply be the addition of 25 new names. Over the first three nights of the season, the league will unveil the 75 Greatest Players list, which began with Tuesday’s TNT broadcast and will continue on ESPN Wednesday and then again on TNT on Thursday to finish off the reveal.
The list is just that, a list, without any rankings, which is probably smart coming from the league (and is how the NBA at 50 list was done), but you can rest assured folks will end up ranking them anyways. The names seem to be in no particular order, alphabetical or otherwise. Here are the first 25 names unveiled on Tuesday night.
Bill Russell
Hal Greer
Dirk Nowitzki
Bob Pettit
Oscar Robertson
Giannis Antetokounmpo
Kevin Durant
Elvin Hayes
Jerry Lucas
Willis Reed
Nate Archibald
Bob Cousy
Dave Cowens
James Harden
Hakeem Olajuwon
Kevin McHale
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
George Mikan
John Stockton
Steve Nash
Charles Barkley
Moses Malone
Julius Erving
George Gervin
David Robinson
Since the first listening session for Kanye West’s tenth album Donda, the rapper has spent most of his time in the spotlight wearing an assortment of masks. Perhaps it’s his attempt from to place a wall between himself and those watching him. The rapper took things to next level on Tuesday. While in New York City, he wore a prosthetic mask — which was made to look like a Caucasian woman with smoky eye shadow — that covered his whole face, while meeting with former Trump attorney Michael Cohen.
It’s unknown why Kanye was meeting with Cohen, but in a conversation with Page Six, Cohen did share why West was wearing the mask (although not why he chose one that looks like caucasian woman). “The purpose [of the mask] was so that people would not recognize him,” he said. “The first 10 minutes we sat down, he was mobbed by people … who wanted photos, and to say hello. So he put on this mask to give him some anonymity, which interestingly enough, did not really work.”
This comes as Kanye is going to officially change his name to “Ye.” Judge Michelle Williams Court signed off the change after he filed a petition to The Los Angeles Superior Court on August 24, citing “personal reasons.”
We’re closing in on our second year of the pandemic era, and it’s been a wild ride for conservatives. First they, led by then-president Donald J. Trump, tried to ignore it. Then they downplayed it. Then they attacked all the life-saving measures (masks, vaccines) that could bring it to an end. (Some even told their followers to harass people wearing masks.) How could they ever top opposing an actual cure to a highly contagious disease? One far right pundit seems to have come up with a solution: Get COVID on purpose. That’ll own the libs.
As per The Daily Beast, conservative radio host and commentator Dennis Prager — who’s 73 and who sometimes teams up with libertarian comic Adam Carolla, including on one of those right-wing documentaries that occasionally come out — revealed a couple things on Monday. One, he tested positive for COVID, and without a vaccine in his system. Two, it was all part of his master plan.
“It is infinitely preferable to have natural immunity than vaccine immunity and that is what I have hoped for the entire time,” Prager asserted on his show, which he recorded at home as he quarantines. “Hence… I have engaged with strangers, constantly hugging them, taking photos with them knowing that I was making myself very susceptible to getting COVID… [It is] what I wanted, in the hope I would achieve natural immunity and be taken care of by therapeutics. That is exactly what has happened.”
How did Prager ensure that he would catch a highly transmissible and fatal disease whose severity can be largely eliminated by taking a free and widely available vaccine? By hugging “strangers in the thousands, literally in the thousands, while not being inoculated.”
He then rattled off the army of sometimes questionable medication he’s been taking, including, yes, ivermectin, the horse medication that can be taken by humans but which is not proven to combat COVID. He’s also taking what has become known as “Zelenko Protocol, the cocktail of dodgy medications that includes the Trump-shilled hydrocloroquine (which is also not proven to combat COVID). He was also administered monoclonal antibodies, which is more expensive, more time-consuming, and less effective than, you know, taking one of the three COVID vaccines.
Prager told The Daily Beast he was “not comfortable getting an experimental vaccine produced with brand-new technology that had never before been deployed in humans on a mass scale without long-term safety data.” What he was comfortable doing, however, was taking medication that has only been approved for emergency use by the FDA (monoclonal antibodies) and a pile of other questionable medications that have been compiled by one Vladimir Zelenko, a family practitioner and conspiracy theorist.
“I certainly don’t gamble with my health,” Prager told his listeners. “But I so believe science and the science of ivermectin, not the lies of The New York Times.” (Again, the “science of ivermectin” is that it doesn’t treat COVID, even according to the company that produces it, partly as a dewormer for farm animals.)
Anyway, hope listening to conspiracy theorists and not doctors was worth it. Prager told the Beast that after testing positive, he experienced “a great deal of chills. Also he and his wife have both lost their taste of smell.
Prager’s decision to put his life in danger was seen by some as the next step in COVID denial.
Dennis Prager saying he got covid on purpose is a sign conservatives are beginning to enter the “covid is actually good” stage of derangement https://t.co/74QOuEpUM5
Others reminded him that monoclonal antibody treatment is more “experimental” than FDA-approved vaccines.
So … Dennis Prager who rages against the Covid vaccine, was fine receiving alternative monoclonal antibodies that have only received EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) from the FDA??
Rich white conservative men like Rogan and Prager refuse vaccination, get COVID-19, and then reveal they’re taking every drug known to man to get healthy—including some only the rich can get, some the FDA hasn’t greenlit, some that do nothing. Then they recover and sow confusion.
And others pointed out that Prager is endangering the lives of all of his gullible listeners, who may not be able to afford the army of medication that he (and Joe Rogan) put into their bodies.
There are now roughly 90,000 people in graves because they have followed people/counsel like this. What an awful, lethal legacy to leave. https://t.co/H8HdBSxo7n
Like you, we love burgers. We’re so crazy about them, in fact, that we’re willing to rank fifteen against one another. We’ll even go so far as to debate burgers down to the patty. At this point, we’re certifiable burger pros ready to gorge ourselves with the best of them. Eat your heart out, Alvin Cailan.
But just when it felt like we’d ranked all the fast food burgers out there, we realized that one category was still slipping through the cracks. A certain type of burger that until now has defied categorization, calling out to be ranked.
No, not plant-based burgers, we hit those; in fact, we’re talking about the polar opposite of those clean new-age meat alternatives. We’re talking about mouthwatering meat bombs that promise indigestion. The gaudiest, wildest, most overloaded, and indulgent burgers in the entire fast food space.
What defines an “overly decadent” burger? It’s like that famous ruling on porn, “I’ll know it when I see it.” It’s a sandwich so excessive in its construction that eating it feels like a borderline dare. Seriously, we’re not sure these burgers are actually functional fixtures on the fast food menus they appear on. They’re “sometimes” orders.
But nevertheless, someone has to rank them. Clearly, it should be us. So without delay, here’s our ranking of the best overly decadent fast food burgers, from complete trash to fast food gems.
9. Burger King — Garlic Bacon King
Burger King
Calories: 1137
Total Fat: 74.8g
The Burger
See why this burger ranking is so vital? How else would you find out if Burger King’s Garlic and Bacon King was worth ordering? It defies categorization! It’s bad. Grabbing our last place spot, as they often do, Burger King’s Garlic and Bacon King is one of the weirdest fast food cheeseburgers I’ve ever eaten.
The burger features two quarter pounder meat patties with two slices of cheese sandwich between them, a few strips of bacon, and chopped chunks of garlic topping the thing, which sits on mayo-slathered sesame seed buns. The garlic is, as you might predict, incredibly fragrant. But not in a good way, this stuff f*cking stinks. The texture of the garlic is also puzzling, it’s mushy, yet dry; chewy but not crunchy.
No joke: it’s the worst use of garlic I’ve ever tasted in my life.
The Bottom Line:
Burger King already has a Bacon King sandwich, why they thought it needed a serving of weird chopped garlic is beyond comprehension. We think they were going for something gourmet here, but it tastes more like the sort of burger you’d only find in nightmares.
8. Jack in the Box — Bacon Cheddar Loaded Double Cheeseburger
Jack in the Box
Calories: 910
Total Fat: 37g
The Burger
Leave it to Jack in the Box to give us not one, two, three, or four, but five different bacon cheeseburger options. If you ask Jack in the Box what’s in the box, they’d simply reply “bacon.” To be honest, I’m not psyched about this burger, I’m only including it because the sandwich that I wanted to include, the Stacked Bacon Breakfast Sandwich, isn’t actually a cheeseburger — so I had to disqualify it.
That one is definitely worth eating. This one, on the other hand? Not so much.
Featuring two beef patties, bacon, cheddar cheese, lettuce (on top of the burger, blasphemous) and cheddar ranch sauce on a cheddar ranch bun, the Bacon Cheddar Loaded Double Cheeseburger looks like it promises big flavor, but instead it’s — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — too cheesy to be enjoyable.
The cheddar ranch sauce is sharp and sour, I never want to eat it again, and while the cheddar bun is at the very least interesting, it found it more distracting than anything else. It’s rare that I’ll ever find anything too cheesy to enjoy, but Jack in the Box accomplished the impossible.
Too bad that’s not a good thing.
The Bottom Line:
Jack in the Box already has four other bacon cheeseburgers and this is the best they could come up with? Take it back to the lab Jack.
This burger is a frustrating one. On one hand, you can’t deny its decadence, three patties of 1/2lb beef is decadent by every measure of the word. But at the same time, it’s sooooooo boring. No bacon, no strange sauce, no premium gourmet ingredients to set it apart as something special, it’s just a big-ass triple cheeseburger. Most frustrating of all, it’s actually pretty damn delicious too.
Fat Burger’s meat is juicy and very flavorful, seasoned with what tastes like a mix of salt and black pepper, but that’s all we can say about this burger.
The Bottom Line:
It’s good, not great, and not interesting enough to head out to Fat Burger for. We know Fatburger has it in them to create something truly next level, but it seems for now they rather put that power in your hands than take up the task themselves.
6. Carls Jr. /Hardee’s— Western Double Bacon Cheeseburger
Carl
Calories: 1020
Total Fat: 54g
The Burger
We have a lot of respect for Carl’s Jr’s Double Western Cheeseburger. It’s been around for so long that it’s arguably the burger that put the idea of the overly decadent burger on the map. The Double Wester Bacon Burger walked so Smash Burger’s Smoked Brisket Burger could run.
This burger is constructed with two charbroiled patties, two crispy strips of bacon, two slices of American cheese, two large panko-breaded onions rings, slathered on both sides with tangy barbecue sauce. It’s one of the crunchiest and messiest burgers in the game and it’s addictive and delicious enough to be your favorite burger from Carl’s Jr. but it’s held back by being, well… from Carl’s Jr.
Better meat patties would go a long way in pushing this burger up a few spots on our ranking. Unfortunately, Carl’s Jr’s charbroiled patties aren’t the greatest. They’re dry and strangely grainy with a dirty-burnt flavor that tries to masquerade as charbroiled but tastes more like someone burnt the patty in a toaster oven.
The Bottom Line:
As decadent as they come but this sandwich is held back by the quality of its meat. If you love Carl’s Jr, you’ll love this, but if you’ve never been, it’s not a reason to go.
Calories: 670 (For A Regular Double Double, In-N-Out doesn’t have Nutritional Facts for Secret Menu Items)
Total Fat: 41g (For a Double Double)
The Burger
We debated whether we should include In-N-Out’s Animal Style burger, or the gargantuan 4×4, which utilizes four meat patties stacked with four layers of American cheese. Considering any burger can be ordered Animal Style at In-N-Out, we’re just going to go ahead and lump these together.
In-N-Out’s small and unshifting menu is arguably one of the chain’s many strengths. But while the Animal Style is good, and a favorite amongst many, it doesn’t really capture that mad burger decadence we’re looking for — so this is probably the lowest-ranked an In-N-Out burger will ever be scored by us.
The Animal Style consists of extra spread smeared across both buns joined by all the usual burger fixings: lettuce, tomato, and cheese, with a hefty serving of grilled onions, pickles, and a mustard-cooked beef patty. It ups the flavor to a considerable degree with a powerful mix of salt and tang in each bite, followed by a bit of sweetness from those grilled onions and so much sauce that it’ll drop in globs from your burger to the tray (don’t eat this in a car).
For a hack that takes this already excessive burger to the next level, ask them to add chopped chilis on top.
The Bottom Line:
Whether you’re keeping things light with a single or going HAM with a Double Double, 3×3, or 4×4, Animal Style makes each burger a substantially more filling and delicious meal. Still, it’s not quite as excessive as we’d like.
For Wendy’s, we had to choose between the triple-stacked Bourbon Bacon Cheeseburger or the triple-stacked Big Bacon Cheddar Cheeseburger. Both are so insane that they’ll make your heart explode just looking at them, but we’ve got to give the edge to the Bourbon.
Bourbon beats Cheddar, that’s not even debatable.
This triple cheeseburger features three quarter-pound patties of meat, three slices of American cheese, crispy onions, and a bourbon bacon sauce that tastes like a sweeter, smokier and more complex version of bbq sauce with a much thinner consistency. Wendy’s used real bourbon for this sauce and we appreciate the commitment.
Overall the burger tastes like a leveled up version of Carl’s Jr’s Western Bacon Cheeseburger, the crispy onions are battered in a deliciously seasoned batter, which tastes iike a mix of black pepper and paprika to my taste buds — though, to be honest, it’s a little hard to pinpoint the flavors of this burger.
Regardless, this packs a whole lot of sweet and savory flavors, and everything compliments one another. This is a real winner.
The Bottom Line:
One of Wendy’s best cheeseburgers. It’s excessive, yes, and big enough for you to share with up four people. This is the type of burger you go out on if you’re planning on giving up eating meat for a while, which after this article, might be us. What a way to go.
Shake Shack’s Double Black Truffle Burger is a new limited-time menu item at the Shack and it’s dangerously close to becoming our current favorite fast food burger, regardless of category. In fact, the only thing keeping this burger from scoring our number one pick is the fact that despite its use of black truffle sauce and deep-fried shallots (not onion rings), it isn’t that decadent.
A few more layers of random meats would probably do the job, but let’s not mess with perfection. Creamy and salty Gruyere cheese works in harmony with the Shack’s savory meat and umami truffle-packed sauce, with the crispy shallots acting as some much-appreciated crunch with a subtly spicy aftertaste that lingers nicely between bites.
Black truffle-based sauce and crispy shallots are the sorts of premium ingredients that Shake Shack’s gourmet meat always deserved. Here is hoping this remains a permanent menu item.
The Bottom Line:
Black truffles and crispy fried shallots, is this a Michelin Star restaurant or a fast-casual joint? We’re happy that Shake Shack is blurring that line.
Now, this is what we’re talking about! Eating this burger and being able to talk about it is all the justification we need for creating this ranking. This is decadence at its finest: a tiny four-ounce smash patty is joined by gochujang marinated pork belly, Korean slaw, pickles, and Umami’s signature sauce.
Yes, you read that right, f*cking pork belly on a burger!
This is one of the juiciest burgers I’ve ever tasted, each bite of savory goodness is greeted with a blast of spice and tang that settles into mouthwatering umami-induced sensations across your taste buds. A four-ounce patty might sound unsatisfying, but any more beef would push this burger into the unpalatable territory.
Aside from having pork belly in this burger, this is one of the easier burgers on this list to eat. You’re not going to feel like your stomach is going to explode after eating this thing, it features a surprisingly small form factor, think a slightly bigger White Castle slider with premium ingredients. Since it’s one of Umami’s newer menu items, we don’t currently know how many calories and fat are in a single burger, but we’re willing to bet it’s nowhere near 1000 calories, as some of the monsters on this list.
The Bottom Line:
A must-order — it’s f*cking pork belly on a cheeseburger, need we say more?
Hearing about this new burger from Smash Burger gave us the idea to write this article in the first place, so it’s only fitting that when we finally tasted it, it managed to snag the top spot. Featuring two Angus beef patties, smoked cheddar, bacon, pickles, BBQ sauce, and layers of tender smoked brisket on a brioche bun.
First of all, let me just say, brisket on a burger? Genius move. Smashburger’s brisket isn’t even that mind-blowing, it’s bursting with smokey and sweet flavors, the texture is a little drier than I’d like it to be, but it doesn’t even matter because overall the whole thing tastes so damn delicious that it doesn’t even matter that you’re not getting the best brisket in the world.
The cheddar has a nice balance of sharp and nutty flavor and is perfectly layered between the patties as well as the brisket and bacon. Each pickle is thick and full of sour tang, and if the thing couldn’t get any more smokey, it’s also topped with sweet barbecue sauce. This burger is so packed with umami that Smash Burger might as well change its name to Umami Burger.
Be warned though, this burger edges towards dangerously sweet territories, if you can’t handle sweet with your meat, look to our tangy second choice instead.
The Bottom Line:
Decadence at its finest. Smokey, complex, with a flavor so damn addicting that it’s enough to make you forget that you’re going to instantly regret eating this burger once you’re done with it. This is fast food’s most decadent burger, hands down.
Kevin Durant is going to go down as one of the greatest basketball players of all time whenever his career ends. Before that happens, though, Durant received an award for the level of excellence he has achieved as a player in the Association by making it to the 75th anniversary team that the league is announcing this week.
While the list will be revealed over the next three days in segments of 25 players each, Durant was among the players who saw their names included on Tuesday before the season tipped off on TNT. In the aftermath, Stephanie Ready of TNT caught up with Durant to ask him his thoughts on being named one of the 75-best players to ever step on the hardwood.
“It means everything to be honest. … To be amongst the greatest that this game has ever seen, just to be in the same company is pretty sweet.”
“It means a lot, it means everything, to be honest,” Durant said. “You wanna leave your mark in this league, in the game of basketball itself. And to be amongst the greatest that this game has ever seen, to be in the same company, it’s pretty sweet, so. As a kid, I’d seen the 50th anniversary [team], and always dreamt of having one of those jackets on and being amongst that group, and being in that brotherhood. So, it feels good to be a part of it.”
Durant will look to follow up his inclusion in the team with a big performance in the first game of the 2021-22 NBA season, as he’ll lead the Nets into Milwaukee to take on the defending champion Bucks.
The lead-up to the NBA season has been dominated by the Philadelphia 76ers and their ongoing standoff with Ben Simmons. Things appeared to go to another level on Tuesday, as Simmons was suspended for conduct detrimental to the team after kicking him out of practice. From there, Joel Embiid seemed to let his frustrations boil over by saying it’s not the job of anyone on the team to babysit Simmons, among a number of other things that serve as a reminder that this is more than just a staring contest between a front office and one player who wants a fresh start.
Unsurprisingly, a Simmons conversation took place during TNT’s pre-game broadcast on Tuesday evening. Charles Barkley, who has not been shy about how disappointing he finds this entire situation, expressed his belief that everyone in Philly is at fault for how things have gone, even though “Ben Simmons deserves No. 1 [of] the blame.”
“The Sixers deserve some blame because they already let this guy not improve and get one coach fired,” Barkley said. “So they deserve some blame for that. They threw Brett Brown under the bus. And the third thing is, Doc Rivers. Last year, we had him on — ‘You guys want me to take Ben Simmons out the game?’ Yeah, we do! If he’s just gonna stand around and not shoot the basketball, then yes we do.
“So there’s plenty of blame to go around,” Barkley continued. “But the No. 1 blame goes to Ben Simmons. Kenny, Shaq — your coach, your mom and dad, you should want to be a better basketball player because that’s your profession, that’s your job. Your coach is important, your mom and dad’s important, but I wanted to be a great basketball player for myself, first and foremost.”
Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal have made clear their disappointment in Simmons throughout this offseason, citing how he’s not as interested in improving as they want him to be.
In advance of the 2021-22 season, the Sacramento Kings largely retained the key pieces of their 2020-21 roster. De’Aaron Fox and Tyrese Haliburton headline the squad in the backcourt alongside lottery pick Davion Mitchell, and the Kings have solid pieces in the frontcourt with Harrison Barnes and Richaun Holmes. At times last season, Sacramento was feisty and competitive and, on the right evening, the Kings looked to be a team on the rise. However, much of the team’s progress took place in the relative absence of former No. 2 pick Marvin Bagley III, who is set to enter his fourth season in the NBA.
With that in mind, the Kings are in an interesting position with Bagley III, particularly after retaining Holmes and spending resources to land depth in Tristan Thompson and Alex Len up front. Many have wondered what Sacramento’s plan is for Bagley III, who is scheduled to earn more than $11 million this season before hitting free agency, and Bagley III’s agent Jeff Schwartz didn’t hold back in addressing the situation on Tuesday.
Schwartz, in a statement released by Excel Sports Management, ripped the Kings for their “mismanagement” of Bagley III, and he also revealed that Sacramento does not plan to deploy Bagley III in their rotation to open the season.
“Sacramento has informed Marvin Bagley he is not in the opening night rotation, which is completely baffling,” the statement reads. “It’s clear they have no plans for him the future, and yet, passed on potential deals at last year’s deadline and this summer based on ‘value.’ Instead, they chose to bring him back but not play him, a move completely contradictory to their ‘value’ argument. This is a case study in mismanagement by the Kings organization.”
On one hand, Schwartz has a clear and vested interest in Bagley III seeing the court, particularly as the former Duke standout attempts to find his next contract after the season. Through that lens, it is easy to see the frustration that might set in, particularly amid various reports that Bagley III has been on the trade block at multiple times over the last several months.
At the same time, this is a step that isn’t often taken in a public setting by an agent, as Schwartz was very aggressive in criticizing the Kings. Bagley III has clearly disappointed on the floor when compared to expectations and, with an eight-figure salary, it isn’t necessarily an automatic that he could moved in the near future. Perhaps the goal is to push the Kings into dealing Bagley III but, in the process, Schwartz also may hurt Sacramento’s leverage by bringing to light that Sacramento seemingly doesn’t see a present or future between the two parties.
Los Angeles’ David Sabastian is the latest artist to take over the UPROXX Sessions mic, bringing an upbeat performance of his song “Bad B*tch Holiday” to life. Decked out in black leather and shades, the rapper/part-time fashion designer switches from clipped, energetic rapping to full-throated crooning on the song, which he also released a video for earlier this month featuring narration by none other than Saweetie.
Sabastian has lurked Los Angeles’ underground scene for some time, designing for prominent stars of the music industry and producing music independently before being picked up by Warner Records in late 2020 and announcing his debut EP, Sistas, aiming for release this Friday, October 22. Get familiar now.
Watch David Sabastian’s UPROXX Sessions performance of “Bad B*tch Holiday” above.
UPROXX Sessions is Uproxx’s performance show featuring the hottest up-and-coming acts you should keep an eye on. Featuring creative direction from LA promotion collective, Ham On Everything, and taking place on our “bathroom” set designed and painted by Julian Gross, UPROXX Sessions is a showcase of some of our favorite performers, who just might soon be yours, too.
David Sabastian is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
While there’s no shortage of love and appreciation for late comic book legend Stan Lee, fellow icon Jack Kirby hasn’t always been so lucky in regards to getting the attention he deserves. Despite creating many of the world’s most famous heroes and supergroups (The Avengers, The Fantastic Four, Captain America, Black Panther, Thor, and The X-Men, for starters), compared to his colleague, Kirby has always been less of a household name for folks who aren’t deeply committed to comics. However, at last night’s Eternals premiere, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige was quick to give credit where credit was due.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Feige reportedly told the outlet Marvel’s latest film is a “love letter” to the late and great Kirby, and what “one man was able to do with a pencil, sitting at a little desk on the east coast.” Feige continued to gush about the creator as well as Eternals vision, telling reporters:
“We are very, very proud of it [Eternals].Yes, it’s ten characters nobody has heard of. But it is the heart and soul of what Jack Kirby brought to our universe.”
Feige’s love of Kirby comes as no surprise considering the first Marvel film Feige ever worked on was 2000’s X-Men, the first major film adaptation of one of Kirby’s works. However, in a world where Marvel and comic creators haven’t had the greatest of relationships as of late, it’s nice to hear one of the studio’s biggest names paying respect to an artist.
Unfortunately, Kirby passed away back in 1994, shortly before the premiere of X-Men and long before the birth of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” as we know it. Feige says the fact that Kirby was unable to see any of what the Marvel Universe had become is one of “the current timeline’s” biggest “bummers.” However, it feels like we can safely say that Kirby — a man known for encouraging diversity in comics and creating groups of characters frequently viewed as “outsiders” by society — would most likely be all about the Eternals movie and Marvel Studios taking a chance on “ten characters nobody has heard of” to make a different kind of superhero movie.
Eternals, the latest entry in the MCU boasting a star-studded cast featuring Gemma Chan, Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Kit Harrington, and more, hits theaters November 5.
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