There's nothing to specifically snipe Havrilesky about this week, aside from her deciding to use Yahoo to find some rap lyrics. (Even non-hip too-white me is closer to understanding urban music than the nail-salon queen.) More important is the unfortunate truth that reality shows express that German word that "Avenue Q" taught us how to pronounce correctly.

When you review a medium, you have to review everything, including works you might find distasteful. "The Amazing Race" and "Survivor" are programs on the ethical level of torturing cats. It doesn't matter that the "cats" volunteered to go into the torture trap, for the promise of fame and rewards. The essence of the experience is the torture presented for the audience's sarcastic laughter. It isn't simply sadism, though, because some people accept these shows as life lessons in betrayal, creative cheating, dirty tricks.

Of course, that's the way certain hierarchies work. (How else did someone like Brian Seacrest become famous?) It'd be a lousy argument to say that these are awful lessons to teach children, especially since neither "Race" nor "Survivor" are specifically kid shows. But these lessons have been soaked up eagerly by adults, who have grown more cynical and colder to each other over the last few decades. (Dare I say during the last few Republican administrations?)

And yes, communication theory says that the reality shows might not be inducing this cruelty, that it might also be reflecting it. But I see it as an electronics tech would, as a feedback loop, with each side adding more energy to the recycling ugly signal until you get a horrible whine. One might attenuate this noise by inserting a filter in the signal path - a metaphor for remaining conscious of what impulses this stuff represents. Nobody needs to cut the circuit (censor the content), just use your moral sense as a parametric equalizer.

Since I didn't see "Tsunami," I can only speculate that it tried to be a realistic depiction of human tragedy. It would have to be exceptionally nuanced and well-produced to outdo the surrealism and histrionics of the reality shows. Maybe the only way it could beat "Survivor" for today's audiences would be to show more open, festering wounds, severed limbs and gushing blood, or as they used to say back in cinema class, "Soldier Blue" level gore.

She seems to be bothered that "Dream Girls" is not a biography of the Supremes and Motown. True, that would be an involving drama. Unfortunately, it's a movie we may not see for decades, because there are too many living people whose lives would be depicted in such a story.

I saw a road show production of the musical years ago, and while I thought the music was very much in the right tone, the story didn't impress me. It seemed as staged as "42nd Street," with the big difference being a slight touch of black determination. (I recall a song about how the whole aim of the music was to show whites how good it feels to be black and singing your heart out.)

It's bewildering why it took so long for this musical, which was fairly conventional, to make it to the screen. Did it take this long for Hollywood to get bankable black performers to get the film into production? Were the studios worried about finding an audience willing to watch a film about this aspect of black life? Didn't they hear of "The Cotton Club?"

After briefly mentioning the Hamner screenplay, did anyone refer back to the animated film in question? Yes, it had defects. It was Hanna-Barbara's attempt to hit the big time, to do a theatrical animated feature with some degree of quality. And sadly, by that time, they were too used to churning out animated sausage for TV to pull it off.

But they did a lot that was right. The voice talent was superb, with Debbie Reynolds as Charlotte, Paul Lynde as Templeton, the gentle-voiced Henry Gibson for Wilbur and Rex Allen providing the folksy narration he used in dozens of Disney productions. And H-B tried for a different look, something close to watercolors in the background. The animated film stands on its own, arguably the best thing H-B did for theatres.

But this film had to be remade, because so many production companies invested so much in CGI animation, and nothing in original scripts for CGI animated films. The crowds didn't flock to "Doogal" or "Monster House" or any of a dozen other "instant children's classics." And just as live-action film has been swamped by unwanted and uninteresting remakes, so has animation. (Disney, once the gold standard animation studio, sank to doing direct-to-video follow-up films that animation fans have dubbed "cheapquels.")

In the commercials that have pushed Templeton as the character with the Daffy Duck ego, trying to claim the movie for his own, I couldn't help but think of how the late, lamented, troubled Paul Lynde brought joy to the role, and wonder why he had to be dumped down the memory hole for this tarted-up copy.