1957 title role for Frank Sinatra / MON 12-21-20 / Old NASA moon-landing vehicle / Classic computer game set on an island / 1960s hippie gatherings / Great Dane of cartoons informally

Constructor: Sarah Keller and Derek Bowman

Relative difficulty: Medium (somewhere in the 2:50s)

THEME:"SAY WHAT?" (71A: "Huh?" ... or a possible response to 1-, 19-, 25-, 48- and 57-Across — themers are ... what? Types of talk that are either incoherent or wrong or pointless or some combination, I guess:

Theme answers:

• BLATHER (1A: Prattle)
• MUMBO JUMBO (19A: Nonsense)
• JIBBER JABBER (25A: Worthless talk)
• GOBBLEDYGOOK (48A: Unintelligible jargon)
• BALDERDASH (57A: Twaddle)

Word of the Day: EVA MARIE Saint (6D: Actress Saint of "North by Northwest") —

Eva Marie Saint (born July 4, 1924) is an American actress. In a career spanning over 75 years, she is best known for starring in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) and in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). The former won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Upon the death of Olivia de Havilland in 2020, she became the oldest living and earliest surviving Academy Award winner and one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.

This is roughly the Monday equivalent of yesterday's puzzle: a loose list of vaguely related things, all of them redolent of times of yore, and then a grid that's creaky and, like the themers, has a cultural center of gravity somewhere in the middle of the last century. Look, I *love* EVA MARIE Saint, and she's welcome any time, but come on. SCOOB (!?) is what passes for a "current" cultural reference in this thing. "ZORBA the Greek" ... Paul ANKA ... LOVE-INS ... RED (!) CHINA ... "PAL JOEY" ... even the HIP stuff reeks of one-hit wonder datedness (BAHA Men, PSY). G.B. SHAW is a real yikes (only one step up from GBS, which thankfully you don't really see anymore — it seems to have been well and truly exiled along with RLS, EAP, and other literary monograms once thought worthy of grid space). Even the video game is old ("MYST"). Even the "Internet" slang is old (THE WEB!). BAD! SAG! Again, this isn't about bygone things per se, which are obviously an important part of anyone's knowledge base. It's just over and over and over, relentlessly, the presumed knowledge in this thing (and so many NYTXWs) belongs to those who are 65+; there's an arrogance, really, to the idea that you don't even have to acknowledge that other things have happened lately. It's deeply exclusionary of younger solvers. And again, I'm talking about degree here. Balance. There is no balance here. No generational balance. It's just dust. Everywhere. And the theme accentuates this, as most of these terms (which, by the way, have very little in common except kooky-sounding names) are now quaint and used only ironically, if at all. I mean, really, BALDERDASH? Actually, I might use BLATHER or MUMBO JUMBO. But the others, man, I don't know...