Japanese lunch box / WED 3-20-19 / 1931 boxing movie for which Wallace Beery won Best Actor Oscar / actress Joan whose last name consists of two different conveyances

Constructor: Erik Agard, Amanda Chung and Karl Ni

Relative difficulty: Medium (4:08)

THEME: DISAPPEARING INK (56A: Liquid evidenced by the answers to this puzzle's starred clues?) — letter string "INK" disappears one letter at a time, with each successive themer:

Theme answers:

• I CAN'T SLEEP A WINK (16A: *Insomniac's complaint)
• KITCHEN SIN (23A: *Leaving dirty dishes on the counter, say)
• HOT P.I. (36A: *Sexy detective)
• MAKES YOUTH (46A: *Works like an anti-aging serum) (from "makes you think...")

Word of the Day:"THE CHAMP" (8D: 1931 boxing movie for which Wallace Beery won a Best Actor Oscar) —

The Champ is a 1931 American pre-Code film starring Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper and directed by King Vidorfrom a screenplay by Frances Marion, Leonard Praskins and Wanda Tuchock. The picture tells the story of a washed-up alcoholic boxer (Beery) attempting to put his life back together for the sake of his young son (Cooper).

Beery won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance (sharing the prize with Fredric March for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Frances Marion won the Academy Award for Best Story, and the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director. (wikipedia)

Unsurprisingly, DISAPPEARING INK has been a theme revealer a whole bunch of times over the years, but it's never been a executed in quite this way, as far as I can tell. There's one where "INK" is missing a bunch of times, and another where the clues actually proceed INK, IN, I, -, but none where the INK fades one letter at a time. Now, I don't really know how DISAPPEARING INK works, and I doubt it fades one letter at a time, but still, I like the idea of its literally disappearing as the themers progress. MAKES YOUTH is kind of rocky: you really have to screw with the base phrase to get a new phrase (dropping the INK and fusing two words together), and also MAKES YOUTH ... just isn't a meaningful phrase. "Here, this ... MAKES YOUTH!" I mean, maybe if you're not a native speaker and you are selling snake oil, this is how you would say it, but the other answers crackle just by breaking off letters, their wackiness simple and punchy. MAKES YOUTH definitely makes you think, but not really in a good way. Still, overall, theme approved.


The grid is very clean, fill-wise, but kind of unpleasant to navigate, since it's riddled with a ridiculous number of black squares (40), making the middle into a swiss cheese. This results in a ton of 3- and 4-letter answers, and a very fussy grid to navigate overall. Kudos to the constructing team for having so much short fill and very little gunk. Looks like they dropped a bunch of Downs through three themers, which really locks you in as a constructor, and the offset* 2nd and 5th themers are also unusual, and probably have something to do with the weirdly pock-marked look of the grid (*I mean "offset" here in the sense of neither centered nor flush right/left). It's structurally bizarre, which is weirdly visually distracting to me, but you do what you gotta do to get a clean grid, I guess. Overall it felt pretty easy, with all the difficulty coming in figuring out the wacky themers. Had SLIP before TRIP at 1A: What you might do if you skip a step, and that was probably the hardes thing in the grid, for me. Oh, that and "OKAY, DEAR," which is truly nonsense. It's YES, DEAR or gtfo.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. the clue on 1D: Group making a reservation? (TRIBE) did not sit right with me. It's true enough, but using forced relocation of Native Americans to achieve your cutesy restaurant wordplay clue felt tone-deaf. I don't feel super-strongly about this. It just rubbed me the wrong way.

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