The dummy had no stories, mind you. Maybe a headline or two — “On the Road,” or “When Blues Get Hot” — and all the photos were from stock. Guys in pickups, hoisting tallboys. Guys in pool halls, sizing up the kind of sultry, tight-jeaned babes you only see in beer commercials. Guys rafting, surfing, biking and, oh yeah, smoking. The text was dummy text — “loeahkh fenasnmn xzoehrnl” and words to that effect — and there were no ads. They didn’t need them. The whole magazine was an ad.

I left before that magazine became a reality (and before Satan took my soul) but about two years later I saw something very similar. It was called Maxim and it had been transplanted from the U.K. where it and its brethren — known as “lad mags” there — were doing quite nicely. The United States followed suit and by May of this year the American Maxim had over 100 ad pages per issue.

The product of Dennis Publishing (whose owner, Felix Dennis, once appointed a hamster as interim editor, figuring it could choose photos of chicks as well as the next fellow), Maxim followed a simple formula. Lots of pictures of scantily clad women busting out of underwear and lingerie, accompanied by slim articles about the women (often models, B-movie or cable TV actresses). Consumer stories about tools and toys. And guy tales of sex — getting some, getting none, bad dates, a-funny-thing-happened-while-I-was-fucking-this-chick stories. Mike Soutar, the editor of U.K. lad mag FHM, attributed Maxim’s success here to the aridness of its competitors. “It’s like the first person in the desert with water,” he said, though he may have meant milk. Maxim, it turned out, was Latin for “big tits.”

This did not win it respect among the other men’s magazines. “That whole magazine is aimed at losers,” Art Cooper, editor of GQ, snarled. “Their advertising is beer, underwear and condoms. I always wonder why there is so much condom advertising because their readers are all masturbators.”

You may recall that Onan’s sin was spilling his seed on the ground, so perhaps the readers are sanctimonious masturbators, but no matter. No one argues with success, and soon all of the men’s mags were paying respect to Maxim with the sincerest form of flattery. Suddenly, big-breasted babes were jumping out of every men’s magazine you could find. The competing editors expressed surprise when the trend was noted, of course; they spat when the name Maxim was uttered and denied dumbing down to fit the Maxim model. But the pressure was on. As Maxim’s readership grew — the thing boasted a circulation of over a million — the others seemed to stagnate. GQ was hovering in the 800,000 range, Esquire was about 600,000 — only Men’s Health, which has done more to fetishize the male body than anything since “Scorpio Rising,” bested it, with an estimated 1.6 million copies sold in May.

Condi Nast decided that it would steal away Maxim’s canny editor, Mark Golin. After months of denying that changes were afoot, the company tapped Golin for the job of editor at the languishing Details (though the announcement was made in March, he was bound by his Maxim contract until this summer), sending editor Michael Caruso packing. Maxim brought in the aforementioned Mike Soutar, onetime editor of FHM (formerly For Him Magazine). The great sucking sound continues across the Atlantic, leaving us to wonder: Who will edit Britain’s trashy glossies? Suddenly Art Cooper had to face bumping into the man he once called a one-trick pony in the new Condi Nast building and Mike Soutar had to learn to call a lift an elevator.

But a funny thing happened since those hirings and firings: The lad mags began tanking. As reported in the New York Times earlier this month, FHM’s circulation declined almost 10 percent from June 1998 to June 1999. It’s now about 700,000. (Circulation had grown over 50 percent in the previous year.) And Loaded, another laddie, was in even worse straits, dropping almost 15 percent in circulation. Even Maxim U.K. felt the sting, dropping 3 percent of its circulation where it had risen by over 60 percent the year before.

Now come the October issues of Details and Maxim by new editors Golin and Soutar, respectively. These are the first that they fully had their hands on, and the question is raised: Are they too late? Has the moment for a suds-and-buds revolution already passed? Is the fall-off in interest in lad mags in the U.K. a portent of things to come here? Or will it fail to translate, sort of like Mr. Bean?

Those who had the long knives out for Golin’s first issue of Details will be disappointed to find no radical departure as yet. Ever since Si Newhouse bought the downtown publication from Annie Flanders 10 years ago, Details has struggled for an identity. Some Condi Nasties like to point to James Truman’s tenure as editor in chief in the early ’90s as a sort of golden age for the monthly, though truth to tell, it was a little wobbly coming out of the gate. An odd mix of harsh reality (photos of a just-executed prisoner and a purportedly tortured lab monkey) ran side by side with music and movie coverage and photo spreads of fine young cannibals in sharkskin suits.

Within a year or so it had found its niche and its audience, though this was seemingly accomplished by putting Christian Slater on the cover of every other issue. The trajectory of the actor’s career mirrors, perhaps, the success of the early Details formula. Truman left to become editorial director of Condi Nast and a succession of editors tried to duplicate his success with decidedly mixed results in the eight years since.

Golin makes a nod to the magazine’s checkered past in his initial editor’s note, ID’ing himself as “#5-in-Chief” (as in fifth editor and leave your hat on). It’s a cheeky move, the first of many, and it’s plain he wants humor to be paramount in Details. How funny you actually find it will depend on your taste (and perhaps your age). Questions of male identity haunt even the fluffiest pieces. A colorful spread featuring cereal boxes from around the world notes that Russia’s Grech “bills itself as ‘a real breakfast for real men,’ [though] a photo on the back of the box shows a father sweetly playing with his child. Hmmm.”

Meaning real men don’t play with their children? Or play with them “sweetly”? Susan Faludi could have a field day with this stuff — and, in fact does, writing about the plight of Details and the Maxim influence in her new book on men, “Stiffed.” More troubling are some of the columns that seem edited into oblivion. Golin worked under Bonnie Fuller, formerly of Cosmo and now at Glamour, and her style of strip-mining copy (no big words, little background, no math) seems to have stuck with him. (In the interest of disclosure let me say that my wife worked at Glamour before Fuller and left after her arrival.) A column by Stephanie Dolgoff (the next Anka?) describes her attempts to find a guy to experiment with her using “a Viagra-like cream” for women. Would naming the cream be so hard? And a column by actor Bruce McCulloch (essentially a long promo for his new movie, “Dog Park,” which he directed and stars in) refers to Kids in the Hall without first establishing he had been in the Canadian comedy troupe. Careless editing, or a deliberate assumption on the new editor’s part that readers don’t want to be slowed down by, well, details, no matter how salient?

There are meatier pieces, including a hair-raising feature on hepatitis C in Hollywood and another on the difficulties of selling a house someone was murdered in. And “50 Things We Learned from the Movies” (“In France a Quarter Pounder is called a Royale with cheese,” and so on) is exactly the kind of trivia fest some young readers crave, all in short, bite-sized bits. Whether these were in the works when Golin came and represent the old Details or this is the kind of mix he’s looking for remains to be seen. The much vaunted redesign (courtesy Rhonda Rubinstein) doesn’t seem that radical, though the features are more distinctive (a big bonus for those of us who look at so many magazines that we don’t want to need a map to find the editorial). The tagline “For Men” has been restored to the cover, just in case there was any doubt. And despite the cover, featuring Milla Jovovich in a see-through slip, you’ll find precious little cleavage in this issue.

Which you certainly can’t say about the October Maxim. From the nearly-nude Melissa Joan Hart on the cover (who sprawls provocatively over an eight-page photo feature/interview inside) to the panty-wrestling Jaime Pressly and Tia Carrere (together in their undies for the first time!) to the pictures of Alison Armitage in her see-through underpants (she’s the star of “Acapulco H.E.A.T” and, no, I’d never heard of it either), Maxim knows what its boys like. Columns are sensationalistic (the dangers of pro-sports betting) and the regular service section (entitled “Grinder Torture Test”) is downright manic. Chainsaws are tested on sides of beef and sofas in the October issue, while hiking boots are offered to a Rottweiler named Bruno for the chomp test.

The overall effect is like Argosy on acid. That may be just what Brit-import Soutar is looking for. It’s hard to take the whole thing seriously (and it would certainly be a mistake to), but no one’s ever going to confuse it with GQ. “The phrase we came up with is, ‘Maxim is the magazine that says it’s OK to be a guy,’” Soutar told the Los Angeles Times in May. He’s hired Steve Perrine (late of Men’s Health) and Steve Kaminsky (Men’s Journal) to make it American. (Are chain saws even legal in the U.K.?)

A lot of the writing seems clichid and amateurish to me but that too may improve. When asked about the decline of the lads’ mags, Soutar called it “a timely reminder that we need to keep evolving,” and perhaps that evolution will include better stories. (The big investigative piece here concerns the death of a member of Iron Butterfly.) The problem with editing either of these magazines is identifying the audience and then keeping it. According to Soutar, the dilemma of males in their 20s is “when part of you wants to settle down and get a mortgage but part of you thinks your mates are more important and you want to shag anything that moves.” That’s a tough one, OK. But when your days of shagging anything are through, what are you going to read?

It may just be that magazines like Maxim and Details will have an ever-changing readership, with new lads rising to replace the old. Like the brides-to-be who start picking up Brides and the new parents who subscribe to Parenting for a few years, their audiences may be more ephemeral than the titles themselves.

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Dining Out on Rupert

In his review Wednesday of the midtown Manhattan restaurant Beacon, New York Post food critic Steve Cuozzo wrote, “A high-ranking New York magazine editor, at the banquette next to me at Beacon, is comparing the corporate cultures of two media giants: It’s like Jeane Kirkpatrick said: Time Warner is authoritarian, but Disney is totalitarian.”

Call it shoddy note-taking, selective listening or plain old censorship but that New York magazine editor was a guest of mine at that lunch and I happened to be taping him. What he really said was, “It’s like Jeane Kirkpatrick’s distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian governments. Rupert Murdoch and Time Warner are authoritarian — loyalty, blah blah blah. But Disney is totalitarian. Everything has to serve the prime directive …”

Does the exclusion of Murdoch’s name have anything to do with his owning the Post? What an authoritarian concept.

A collaboration between Disney and Blue Cross and Blue Shield to help teach kids to “fight bad habits,” the Epcot attraction and tie-in app and Web page featured buff, virtuous characters Will Power and Callie Stenics squaring off against nemeses like the lazy, grotesque “Lead Bottom” and the self-explanatorily named “Glutton.” Apparently, when a company famed for its meticulous crafting of exactly what children want and one of the largest health insurers in the nation pool their talents, they come up with “Fat people are bad.”

Earlier this month, Tony Jenkins, regional market president for Blue Cross and Blue Shield, told the Orlando Sentinel that “Our challenge was to tell that story in a fun, engaging way, which is what Disney does better than anyone.” So imagine Disney’s surprise when some patrons did not take kindly to their “fun, engaging” message. As Weighty Matters blogger and assistant professor of family medicine Dr. Yoni Freedhoff told the Calgary Herald, “It’s so dumbfounding it’s unreal. I just can’t believe somebody out there thought it was a good idea to pick up where the school bullies left off and shame kids on their vacation.” On her “Dances With Fat” blog, Ragen Chastain condemned the “Disney Fat Shame Ride” and admitted she “couldn’t stop the tears” when she’d heard about it. And nutritionist and author Marion Nestle tweeted, agog, “You can’t make this up.”

It didn’t take long for the Magic Kingdom to do some hasty damage control, taking HabitHeroes.com “down for maintenance” and closing the exhibit just three weeks after it launched. The mouse is currently remaining conspicuously silent on whether it will return.

With 12.5 million children and teens now obese, the health problem in this nation is a real and growing one, one that will play in serious long-term health problems like diabetes and heart disease and short-term ones like bullying. Kids – and parents – need direction and encouragement to make healthy eating choices and develop an active lifestyle. But like Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s similarly in your face campaign, the Habit Heroes approach compounded the problem by making it seem like emotional, cultural, genetic and economic factors can be overcome with simple “Will Power” and a few broccoli spears. Worse, it demonized the obese, equating size with poor habits. Kind of ironic for a place that entices visitors to “Satisfy your sweet tooth at Storybook Treats” or “Wake up with treats like freshly made funnel cakes and delicious waffle sandwiches.” You want to promote good heath? Start by looking at your own sugar and animal fat-laden menus. And go on by respecting children of all shapes and sizes. Because they’re the ones who trust in the mouse to see them not as Lead Bottoms and Gluttons but as princesses and pirates. As beautiful.

Sterling Holloway, who provided the classic Pooh voice in the ’60s, has been dead almost 20 years, but Jim Cummings (who also voices Tigger) has amiably filled the role in numerous lower-budget Disney productions and sounds uncannily similar. With John Cleese as narrator, Craig Ferguson as Owl and Jack Boulter as Christopher Robin, this production also has the right degree of authentic British-ness. (It’s somehow fine with me that Pooh, along with Bud Luckey’s Eeyore, sounds a bit more American.) But the real star of “Winnie the Pooh” is the imaginative animation, which features not one but two classic Disney surrealist sequences and a bit of playful postmodernism: Pooh frequently interacts with Cleese’s narrator, or wanders out of the Hundred Acre Wood into the paragraphs of the book, accidentally bringing letters and punctuation marks back with him.

Of course the Mouse has been relentlessly cashing in on A.A. Milne’s dimwit ursine hero ever since acquiring the rights from Milne’s widow in 1961, and much of that output doesn’t bear (ha!) thinking about: Piglet and Tigger got their own spinoff movies; there were Christmas and Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day specials and a seemingly endless series of tot-oriented “Winnie the Pooh Learning” and “Winnie the Pooh Playtime” titles. Let’s not even bring up “Franken Pooh.” Well, you can forget about all that stuff; Anderson and Hall have banished the insipid primary colors, not to mention the third-rate outsourced animation, and this film has the lovingly crafted, storybook feeling that was once Disney’s specialty.

“Winnie the Pooh” feels like a turning point in the brief tenure of Walt Disney Animation Studios head John Lasseter — whose other company, Pixar, effectively destroyed Disney’s old in-house animation unit. Lasseter has said frequently that Disney Animation should have its own identity, one that draws on the company’s glorious past and doesn’t simply ape Pixar’s success, and maybe now we can see what that means. “Winnie the Pooh” doesn’t look or feel anything like a Pixar movie, and it is specifically not trying to be a “kidult” crossover success, after the fashion of almost every Pixar production. But it also feels mercifully free of the combined calculation and sloppiness that have plagued so many Disney features in recent years, and one could argue that the painstaking attention to animation and storytelling reflect Lasseter’s stewardship.

Let’s take to the way-back machine for a minute. Ever since the Walt Disney Co. began its partnership with Pixar, then an upstart digital-animation studio run out of an industrial park in Emeryville, Calif., the Mouse’s own in-house animation unit has struggled to keep up. Actually, that’s being euphemistic; what really happened was that Pixar kicked Walt Disney Feature Animation’s butt so badly that the division was ultimately dissolved and renamed. In 1995, “Toy Story,” the first Disney-Pixar release, grossed $354 million worldwide, which represented at least a tenfold return on its production costs. Walt Disney Feature Animation also had a big hit that year with “Pocahontas,” which premiered outdoors in New York’s Central Park and went on to its own $300 million-plus worldwide take. (Mind you, it also cost several times more to make than “Toy Story” did.)

Not even Lasseter, who co-founded Pixar and directed “Toy Story,” would have predicted 16 years ago that Pixar would go from one massive success to the next, becoming one of the most beloved brands in entertainment history, or that “Pocahontas” was the last big hurrah, or next-to-last, for Walt Disney Feature Animation, which had created such massive hits as “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King.” When Pixar released “Toy Story 2″ in 1999, another huge worldwide hit, WDFA’s big release was “Tarzan,” a wildly expensive production (not to mention an entirely forgettable film) that probably ended up in the red. Disney’s in-house studio had one more sizable hit, with “Lilo & Stitch” in 2002. But that movie earned $100 million less than Pixar’s “Monsters Inc.” had a year earlier and took in less than one-third the worldwide gross of Pixar’s huge 2003 hit, “Finding Nemo.”

At that point the writing was on the wall: Pixar engaged an enormous public with cutting-edge animation technology and appealing characters and stories, and reaped untold billions in box-office receipts, tie-in merchandise and ancillaries. Disney’s in-house animation studio, on the other hand, was an embarrassing albatross. There were straight-to-video quickies, cashing in on existing properties in the most unfortunate Disney tradition: “Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas” and “Mulan II” and “Tarzan II” (with “new songs by Phil Collins,” apparently meant as an inducement). The last release under the aegis of Walt Disney Feature Animation was “Chicken Little” in 2005, a work of supremely crappy-looking fake-Pixar animation that features 11 credited writers and Zach Braff in the title role. I would have been happy to completely forget that movie’s existence. (In fact I had, until now).

Lasseter has been at the helm of the reconstituted Walt Disney Animation Studios for almost five years, while continuing to run Pixar, and the results of this seemingly contradictory role are still a bit unclear. The first two Disney features made on his watch, “Meet the Robinsons” and “Bolt,” felt way too much like Pixar movies, with substandard animation and the rough edges sanded off. I’m aware there’s a critical constituency for both films, but that didn’t extend far into the public, and both were box-office flops. With the hand-drawn “Princess and the Frog” and the digital “Tangled,” Disney tried to breathe new life into its classic tradition of adapting fairy tales. Neither performed as well as expected, but they displayed more craft, integrity and audience appeal than any other Disney animated feature in years. (“Tangled” was reportedly so expensive to make that even its worldwide gross of almost $400 million might not have returned a profit; “The Princess and the Frog” failed to click with American audiences but did well overseas.)

It’s almost not worth mentioning that “The Princess and the Frog” was artistically and financially eclipsed by Pixar’s “Up,” and that “Tangled” was obliterated by the astonishing billion-dollar worldwide gross of “Toy Story 3,” the biggest animated feature in history. The same thing is likely happen again this summer; even though many Pixar-friendly critics have turned against Lasseter’s “Cars 2,” audiences don’t seem to mind. But coming as it does after those two films, “Winnie the Pooh” feels like more than a small summer surprise that will utterly charm 3-year-olds and 93-year-olds. It feels like a Walt Disney animated film, in the best possible sense of that term, and another significant step toward restoring that company’s dignity and sense of purpose.

It’s Pixar Animation Studio’s first fairy tale fantasy, and it marks yet another change of pace for the venerable dream factory. “What we want to get across [with the teaser] is that this story has some darker elements,” director Mark Andrews tells EW. “Not to frighten off our Pixar fans — we’ll still have all the comedy and the great characters. But we get a little bit more intense here.”

The film will use the voices of Emma Thompson, Billy Connolly, Julie Walters, Kevin McKidd, Craig Ferguson and Robbie Coltrane, and stars Kelly Macdonald as Merida.

2. A tribute to Ryan Dunn that will last a lifetime

“Jackass’” Wee-Man, (aka Jason Acuna) cuts through all the anger and flame wars surrounding his friend’s death and gives him a uniquely touching memorial.

 3. Southwest Airlines pilot loses it on the mic

I don’t know if it makes it better or worse that this guy’s homophobic tirade was supposed to be a private cockpit conversation instead of being broadcast across the entire Texas airspace. Maybe he should get a job doing standup in Nashville?

4. Culture clash

Amazing footage, just uploaded to YouTube yesterday, of a tribe in Papua New Guinea meeting a white man for the first time in 1976.

5. Trippy Disney mashup

Pogo, the foremost expert and creator of Disney remixes, has come out with his latest creation. “Bloom” focuses not on one specific film, but several different animated classics.

Other times, you’re shoving your post-Hannah Montana B-cups in my face so hard that I can almost hear you screaming, “I’m an adult now! Take me and my breasts seriously!” For example: your music videos for “Can’t Be Tamed.”  Or “Who Owns My Heart.“  Or when you pretended to kiss one of your female dancers on “Britain’s Got Talent.” And that’s not even mentioning those party shots of you involving lap dances, salvia and more half-naked, girl-on-girl kissing. Which has less to do with your sexuality, Miley, and more with the fact that you were 17 and acting like Paris Hilton on a bender.

So please forgive me for feeling weird about these new, semi-innocuous stills for your latest film “So Undercover.” If it weren’t for your dramatic history with underwear, these photos wouldn’t seem so bad. But with you Miley, the pictures carry three years of associated guilt and anxiety that the government is going to come arrest me for having child pornography on my computer.

You’re 18 now, which is the age when the sexy vs. too sexy debate usually begins to get interesting for Op-Ed writers and TV pundits. But you’ve been scandalized and scandalizing for awhile now; you’ve made your stance clear about rebelling from your Disney image, and at this point it’s barely news when you walk out of your house in only lingerie. If anything, these photos for “So Undercover” are way more conservative than the bra and short-shorts you’ve been wearing to the supermarket for the past 24 months. (The Supermarket is a hot new club in London, FYI.)

But it still feels weird. Legal, but weird.

Then again, maybe I should just be glad you’re so fond of underwear that you literally spend $3K at a time shopping for panties and bras. It will really cut down on the number of paparazzi upskirt photos we’ll have to see in the future.