DDP 2024: THE IRON LEGUME
So that’s 2024 then. The year in which Scott Thorson would’ve been a better deadpool pick than Jimmy Carter, and Jimmy Carter would’ve been a better candidate for the Democrats than Biden or Harris (but no Democrat was winning over the decisive Hannibal Lecter fanboy demographic). I wrote this before Jimmy Carter died, but Thorson was still a point higher in value, so it’s technically still true!
Also, the Tories got wiped out, yet ironically enough the big winner in the DDP was one Thatcher.
The late, great, Jimmy Carter
First things first, one last batch of 2024 folk downed by the Reaper like a health insurance CEO:
We lost basketball coach Lou Carnesecca, Irish Eurovision contestant Dickie Rock, and Wimbledon champ Neale Fraser. Debut team I died once. It was awful didn’t have a single hit until Helen Gallagher, but they managed two unique hits hours apart in baseballer Rocky Colavito and mentalist The Amazing Kreskin. Arnold Yarrow was the longest-lived Doctor Who alum and Gerd Heidemann was a key promoter of the forged Hitler Diaries. George Eastham was member of the England international squad during the 1966 World Cup (albeit didn’t play in any matches) and footballer Steve Smith was our annual rescue from the SPOTY in memoriam. Art Evans was a McClane ally in Die Hard 2, a film that had seen multiple alumni fall in 2024 while Bruce Willis remained untouched. India lost director Shyam Benegal and former prime minister Manmohan Singh. The final deaths of the year were Australian rules footballer Michael Turner, Alice star Linda Lavin, “Catwoman” plastic surgery disaster Jocelyn Wildenstein, and Beeb radio stalwart Johnnie Walker, whose recent retirement meant he’d have been a popular lad hereabouts had he another 24 hours in him.
Additionally, Steve DiMeglio is dead with QO but there is uncertainty whether he died in 2024 or 2025 as of this writing. If the latter, he’s a hit this year, if the former, alas for his pickers the scoring window has closed. John Capodice died on 30 December, but unfortunately for the team who picked him his QO didn’t come until 2 January.
And last but not least, a man who needs little introduction, not in the least because I already mentioned him. Jimmy Carter was but a humble peanut farmer from Georgia whose deep faith and moral conviction appealed to an American populace jaded by Watergate, and he won the presidency in a squeaker against Gerald Ford. His presidency struggled with inflation, an energy crisis, and killer rabbits, but still with noteworthy accomplishments such as negotiating a peace treaty involving Israel (imagine that happening nowadays!). If middling as a president, he was easily the best man to hold the office, and his post-presidency was dedicated to human rights advocacy, building houses, and eradicating the Guinea worm. It looked like that long and productive life was ready to close when he entered hospice in early 2023. And even readier when he outlived his wife and looked like a ghost at the funeral. Yet he had a busy 2024, juggling chainsaws and vanquishing Mister Sulu while living rent free in Mango’s head. And now the substitution nightmare we were all fearing in the final hours of 2023 has become a reality a year later. He also fulfills my final longterm deadpooling goal of getting a DDP hit with a US president, albeit his obviousness as a pick dulls the impact somewhat!
He’s deadpool hosting’s greatest monster!
So all congratulations are due to It’s A Grim World After All, AKA Thatcher on the DeathList forums. As a deadpooling year, it frankly had all the value of a Hawk Tuah cryptocurrency, arid for both headliner celebs and deadpooling staple foods. Even if we did get Carter in the end, other sitting ducks like Chomsky, Mongo, and Michael Tilson Thomas made it through. Thatcher’s 122 points was the smallest total in the Drop 40 era, but even in the leaner years the victories are well earned.
The competitive pack had a bountiful January, with Derek Draper, Brian Barczyk, Jason Smith, and Stuart Gray all falling. Thatcher did not pick a single one, waiting until February to score with Jonnie Irwin, Toby Keith, and the totally natural death of Alexei Navalny. It was instead 2023 champ Banana who was looking invincible, especially after a unique under-thirty hit with a softball player. Joe Shannon’s failure to QO showed a crack in Banana’s armor, as did the surprise omission of canoner Simon not-that-one Cowell. Thatcher ultimately cobbled the lead through a bunch of “could die tomorrow, could die five years from now” picks such as Shannen Doherty, Frank Field, and Dario G. Dikembe Mutombo gave him the lead, which was buttressed by Janey Godley. Thatcher didn’t pick Jimmy Carter, which would’ve been a perfect symbolism of the year if Jimmy didn’t ruin that by fucking dying. But Thatcher’s lead was enough that it didn’t matter.
The silver… and bronze… went to a joint three teams who all finished on 119 points – regular contenders Banana and David Quantick’s Showbiz Pals, and dark horse The Sound of the Underground. The theme team league was won by Elton Welsby’s Sporting Triangles, Octopus of Odstock’s sports theme, who took the lead with SPOTY In Memoriam’s acknowledgement of Steve Smith. It capped off a solid year for the eight-legged one, whose main team finished in 5th. Rookie of the Year went to Tombstone Ticklers, who finished joint 17th.
If the year felt lackluster for celebrity deaths, the hit rate remained as robust as ever with a record-breaking final body count of 315. Drop 40 droppers not already mentioned include Bob Newhart, Franz Beckenbauer, Glynis Johns, and Rob Burrow. Music deaths included Quincy Jones, Kris Kristofferson, Duke Fakir, Dickey Betts, Phil Lesh, Francoise Hardy, Richard Tandy, Tito Jackson, John Mayall, Damo Suzuki, Henry Fambrough, Seiji Ozawa, Richard M. Sherman and the feck they were still alive yesteryear trio of Duane Eddy, Frank Ifield, and Clarence “Frogman” Henry. The world of film farewelled James Earl Jones, Maggie Smith, Norman Jewison, Roger Corman, Donald Sutherland, Shelley Duvall, Timothy West, Gena Rowlands, Dabney Coleman, Anouk Aimée, Louis Gossett Jr., M. Emmett Walsh, and Janis Paige. UK TV and radio lost William Russell, David Graham, Ian Lavender, June Spencer, Kenneth Cope, John Savident, Michael Jayston, Ysanne Churchman, and Hairy Biker Dave Myers, while the US lost David Soul, Martin Mull, John Amos, Joyce Randolph, Richard Lewis, and media personalities Richard Simmons, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Phil Donahue, Peter Marshall, and Chuck Woolery, and stage lost Chita Rivera. Sport deaths included Willie Mays, Stan Bowles, Joe Kinnear, César Luis Menotti, Mario Zagallo, Ray Reardon, Craig Shakespeare, and Chi Chi Rodriguez. Also OJ Simpson, did he do anything else since that stellar NFL career? Political goodbyes included Brian Mulroney, John Prescott, Ethel Kennedy, Dries van Agt, and Alberto Fujimori. Other deaths include Peter Higgs of boson fame, fashionista Iris Apfel, writers Alice Munro and Lynne Reid Banks, and Philip Zimbardo behind the controversial Stanford prison experiment.
And I already mentioned it, but we really did lose Scott Thorson this year. I’m still in disbelief.
*Billy Joel voice* Liberace……….goodbye
Those picked in years past but not 2024 included One Direction’s Liam Payne, DJ Annie Nightingale, Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, composer Laurie Johnson, Apollo Creed actor Carl Weathers, utter fecker Joe Lieberman, conjoined twins George and Lori Schappell, philosopher Daniel Dennett, basketballer and NBA logo basis Jerry West, Shifty Shellshock from Crazy Town, actor Bill Cobbs, actress Barbara Leigh-Hunt, cult picks of aughties deadpooling Shih Ming-Teh, Chuck Strahl, and Senator Tim Johnson, and England manager/2025 canoner that never was Sven-Goran Eriksson.
You’d think that a supercentenarian who worked on Lawrence of Arabia would have found his way to a DDP team or two, yet Norman Spencer was never picked due to haziness as to whether he was still alive. Literacy activist Ruth Johnson Colvin was also well past 100 and QOed, but similarly ignored by our collective. Other never pickeds include musicians Eric Carmen, Steve Albini, Paul Di’Anno, Mike Pinder, Doug Ingle, Greg Kihn, and Fatman Scoop, actresses Olivia Hussey and Pamela Salem, Dragon Ball Z creator Akira Toriyama (the death of the year for many of my friends), leading marathoner Kelvin Kiptum, radio DJ Steve Wright, Tory deputy leader Michael Ancram, “eating nothing but McDonald’s for a month will make you fat, no shit” documentarian Morgan Spurlock, Pop-Tarts inventor William Post, world leader helicopter crashes for Chile’s Sebastián Piñera and Iran’s Ebrahim Raisi, My Lai massacre scumbag William Calley, footballer Gigi Riva, Wally Amos off Famous Amos cookies, and drol heroes Ma Shitu and Zhang Lixiong. And Kabosu the doge could have never been picked as an animal, but still.
But two names, never picked in the DDP, stand out as the saddest of the year on a personal level. Mary Weiss was a legend of 60s girl groups as the street-savvy frontwoman of the Shangri-Las, narrating teenaged heartbreak to “Leader of the Pack” and “(Remember) Walking in the Sand”. Rachael Lillis had been a major part of my childhood as the voice of Pokémon characters Misty, Jessie, and Jigglypuff, on top of dozens of other characters in the series. It’s a shame to lose the greats while we still have to deal with Jean-Marie Le Pen and Sidney Cooke.
A spunky female singer usually is my death of the year… a close call between the Shangri-Las or Jigglypuff
The List of the Lost was dotted with little-known 97-year-old German actors, but also a few Ronnie Hellströms who were worthy of an obit. Jorge Toro scored a key goal in the 1962 World Cup’s Battle of Santiago. Bernard Pivot was a popular cultural host in France whose shows inspired James Lipton to create Inside the Actor’s Studio. Josip Manolic was Prime Minister of Croatia during its independence. Jimmy Gilmer had the biggest US pop hit of the year in 1963 with “Sugar Shack” (albeit its pop culture footprint is small today). Denys Graham was a regular in British war films, and Muazzez İlmiye Çığ caused a furore in the archaeology world when she hypothesised that the headscarf was Sumerian, not Muslim, in origin. Also the Russian actress Anastasia thingy was never going to obit, but was still a minor deadpool running gag worth a shout.
So if the US is stuck with Trump, the DDP is stuck with me. One is a little more tolerable, I hope. Despite announcing in mid-2024 that it would be my last year hosting the DDP, no one had any appetite for the long, arduous road of copy-pasting the Wikipedia article of some painter from Tuvalu. But it will be a much more streamlined front page from here on, to stop me from going full Napoleon XIV. The DDP 2025 already has Chad Morgan, Agnes Keleti, and Sally Oppenheim-Barnes as confirmed hits, and time will tell if Jimmy’s late exit was a Lemmy-esque harbinger of the 2025 enema to come…
Play us out, Duke…