Gaucho's weapon / MON 1-27-20 / Utah city of more than 100,000 / Avian hooter / Culinary concoction much used in French cuisine / Title role for Jude Law in 2004 remake

Constructor: Timothy Polin

Relative difficulty: Medium (actually slow for me at 3:17 because of a couple wrong short answers)

THEME: MOUSTACHES (60A: Archetypically villainous features possessed by the answers to the starred clues) — sigh, whatever

Theme answers:

• DR. FU MANCHU (18A: *Sinister genius in a series of Sax Rohmer novels)
• YOSEMITE SAM (23A: *Quick-tempered, gun-toting, rabbit-hating toon)
• SNIDELY WHIPLASH (38A: *Dudley Do-Right's enemy in old TV cartoons)
• CAPTAIN HOOK (51A: *Chief pirate in Neverland)

Word of the Day: BOLA (17A: Gaucho's weapon) —

: a cord with weights attached to the ends for throwing at and entangling an animal (merriam-webster.com)

This is a weak theme with terrible fill. Seriously, the short stuff is overwhelmingly yuck. Inexcusably hackneyed and tired. And the theme, sure, if you are an older person who likes remembering ... things  ... then yay, there's SNIDELY WHIPLASH, I guess, but the very premise of this theme is absurd in 2020. Or even 1980. Tom Selleck would like a word, is what I'm saying.


I guess this puzzle is fueled by pop culture nostalgia ... of some kind. I don't get it. MOUSTACHES is a dud of a revealer. Also, in American English, it's more (or very) commonly "mustaches." Look it up!

So much of this puzzle is "of old." You can start with the entire set of themers. But then "I'M A PC" is old (and not even iconic, frankly), the very idea of an AD WAR, or a HI MOM sign, seems old. Even the remake of the old movie feels old (7D: Title role for Jude Law in a 2004 remake) (ALFIE). But mostly the fill just feels stale and tired or odd. A single MADLIB? The absurd "laugh"TEHEE. ATON of ETTA and ONAIR and EST SHO ETAIL PSST ACCT YEP OUTTA SOPH AGLOW SWM ALMA. The best thing in the grid is IDLE THREAT, which I had a ton of trouble getting because I had ASAP at 47A: "Right away!" ("STAT!"). Man, it really hurts when you make a mistake you would never have made if you didn't have that *one* letter in place (in this case, the "A") that just happens to be shared by the correct answer and your wrong answer. Anyway, stared at IDLE P- for too long before realizing the "P" was wrong. Weird that the thing that held me up the most was the thing I liked the most, but there you are. Not much else to say. A shrug of a theme with a dud of a revealer and fill from Olde-Timey Mediocrity Land. I will admit to being in something of a bummer of a mood because of the death of LAKER legend Kobe Bryant and his 13yo daughter, Gianna, as well as another family, in a helicopter crash on Sunday. News that Kobe died stunned me. News that his daughter also died broke me a little. I don't have anything profound to say about all this. Just trying to give context to my solving / blogging mood. Take care, everyone.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

UPDATE: On second thought, maybe "villainous" isn't soooo wrong...

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