1999 prequel that grossed over billion dollars familiarly / FRI 10-20-17 / Symbol for member of Anonymous / Arabic name that sounds like reply of agreement / Frequent locale in comic strip Andy Capp / Big name in digital security

Constructor: Peter Wentz

Relative difficulty: Medium


THEME:none 

Word of the Day: HODA KOTB (56A: "Today" co-host beginning in 2007) —

Hoda Kotb (/ˈhoʊdəˈkɒtbiː/HOH-də KOT-bee; Arabic: هدى قطب‎‎ Hudā QuṭbEgyptian Arabic pronunciation: [ˈhodæ ˈʔotˤb], born August 9, 1964) is an Americantelevision news anchor and TV host known as the co-host of NBC's Today Show's fourth hour with Kathie Lee Gifford. An Egyptian American, she won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2010 as part of the Today Show team. Kotb is also a correspondent for Dateline NBC. (wikipedia)

Pretty nice work. I have a few ... issues (see below ... and every day, I guess) but overall it was satisfying: wide-ranging, currentish, and amply tough. That SE corner in particular really made me work. I am very aware of who HODA is, but I know her only as ... HODA. "HODA& Kathie Lee..." That last name ... I don't even know how to pronounce it. Now that I look at it, I've definitely seen it before, but I'm all of a sudden very aware of how I *know* the last names of the all the other one-named talk-show celebrities (I think), but have never even heard hers said out loud. Why don't people say her name? Have they been saying it all along and I've just been mishearing it as something else? Say her name! Anyway, she is famous and I am not sufficiently attuned to daytime television, so the KOTB part took Work. That corner had a lot of names, including a non-specifically-clued YASIR (49A: Arabic name that sounds like a reply of agreement)  (I considered YEMEN .... like "yeah, man"? ...) and our good old friend LAO-TSE, who somehow remained completely inscrutable to me until the very last cross (which was the "T" in KOTB). I also misread "service" as "device" in 42D: Digital storage service (iCLOUD), so that was semi-baffling. Oh, and lastly, I confused my Bucks and went with OWENS over O'NEIL at first (41A: Buck ___, first African-American coach in Major League Baseball). Good thing LOU Gramm was a gimme. That is one name-y corner!



Bullets:

• 15A: 1999 prequel that grossed over a billion dollars, familiarly (EPISODE I)— yeeeeesh no. I mean, OK, in some contexts, sure, but no. "Familiarly" would be "PHANTOM MENACE." So weird to put forth this answer as the actual title, even "familiarly." Or maybe there's some Latin-speaking "Star Wars" subculture and this answer is EPISO DEI, i.e. the ... something ... of God.
• 3D: Chucklehead (DIMWIT)— ah, the super-dated slang clue. Fittingly, I had NITWIT.
• 40D: ___ ape (gibbon) (LESSER)— I thought this was going to be someone's name. Like, maybe someone named LEVIN discovered the ape and it's now known as a LEVIN'S APE. Something like that.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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