After seemingly endless public fighting and controversy, Conan O’Brien has departed NBC’s “The Tonight Show.”

First hosted by comedian Steve Allen in 1954, “The Tonight Show” has seen many lead the talk show. From Allen and Jack Paar to the venerable Johnny Carson and now O’Brien, the program is full of comic history. Jay Leno reigned as king of “The Tonight Show” from 1992-2009 after nabbing, some would argue “stealing,” the show from David Letterman upon Carson’s retirement.

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for the show, with ratings dropping and that ill-fated format switch in 1957 to a news-type program. However, there has been a sense of dignity about hosting the legendary broadcast, until now. Who wants a washed up comedian, Leno, to return to late-night with his tail between his legs, besides Jeff Zucker?

With O’Brien departing and Leno set to return as host March 1, NBC is certain to face an uphill climb as it tries wooing back viewers and re-building the dignity of its storied program. Any TV viewer that ditched “Tonight” once O’Brien took over shouldn’t be that hard to get back, pending they haven’t died of old age. No, NBC shouldn’t be concerned about that demographic. It should, however, be nervous about the 18-to-49 demographic — a group O’Brien plays well to.

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Just last week I stumbled upon an email invitation from my high school reunion committee. It’s been 10 years since I departed Saugus High, a mostly white-bred school in an innocuous Los Angeles suburb.

I’ve yet to decide if I’ll be making a trip back to California for this little shindig. It’s not that I had a bad experience. In fact, I had a pretty lackluster time. I came, I saw, I went. Most of my memories are linked to pop culture happenings that coincided with my time at Saugus.

Highlights included sleeping outside a theater to see “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” (George Lucas still owes me a refund), seeing U2′s Popmart Tour, getting addicted to Broadway’s “Rent,” following NBC’s “Friends” and being swept away by “Titanic.”

Then, just before graduation, a little movie struck a chord for me. “10 Things I Hate About You” made high school angst and confusion entertaining.

“10 Things” starred a then unknown Heath Ledger, playing the mysterious stranger Patrick Verona. Julia Stiles broke out as a bitchy post-feminist leader. Larisa Oleynik played Stiles’ rebellious sister. And David Krumholtz, Larry Miller and Allison Janney helped give the film a potent youthful ensemble.

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Whenever I bring up leading “Saturday Night Live” ladies, nearly all of my pop culture obsessed friends proclaim Tina Fey is the best and brightest.

There is no disputing that her comic skills are untouchable when it comes to writing — “30 Rock” is perhaps the best comedy on TV right now. And her time on SNL yielded some fantastic skits, most memorably anything featuring the dim witted Sarah Palin.

However, when it comes to acting, beyond the confines of sketch comedy, only one woman has displayed serious dramatic talent, of late.

Out of the most recent SNL ensemble, Maya Rudolph, now starring in the film “Away We Go,” surpasses her late-night cohorts, including Fey and Amy Poehler, with an inspired and often touching performance.

Feature films have not been kind to Poehler, nor to the slightly frightening Rachel Dratch. The two SNL stars recently headlined in the disastrous “Spring Breakdown.”

While Fey and Poehler teamed up for the equally unfunny “Baby Mama.” Other credits these ladies should omit from their resumes are such films as “Hamlet 2,” “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,” “Artie Lange’s Beer League” and “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.”

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I randomly flipped on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” the other day and quickely recalled a gathering I attended a few years back where Andreas Deja, a Disney animator, spoke about bringing the zany rabbit to life.

Deja had joined the Disney animation department in 1980, where he actually had a chance to meet many of the “Nine Old Men,” that historic group that set the standard for all animated films to follow.

Throughout his career, Deja had the opportunity to create such memorable characters as King Triton in “The Little Mermaid,” Gaston in “Beauty and the Beast” and Jafar in “Aladdin,” just to name a few. Besides the classic nature of those often fantastic creations, they shared one extremely important quality — they were all hand-drawn creations.

It’s something the future crop of Disney films can’t claim to have. That is, until now. Deja and the Disney gang have brought to life another classic story, “The Princess and the Frog,” in full hand-drawn glory.

In 2006, Walt Disney Studios triumphantly announced it would resurrect the lost art form. Up until then, such practices had all but faded away as Pixar and other studios segued into the land of computer-generated “animation.” It was Edwin Catmull, Disney Feature Animation and Pixar president, that touted such a return.

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If television uber-fans have taught the networks anything, it’s that they are unwilling to let ratings dictate when a show gets axed.

The CBS series “Jericho” was dying a slow death in 2007 at the hand of the Nielsen ratings, but an online movement resurrected the doomsday-scenario drama. Fans shipped bags of peanuts to network executives, an homage to a “nuts” reference made on the series.

Such wild behavior actually got “Jericho” back on the air, if only for a short while. It was quickly canceled, again. Executives must learn from this mistake. Toss a geek a bone and they will beg for scraps every time a show’s fate looks grim.

Another case in point is NBC’s hit-or-miss action comedy “Chuck,” starring Zachary Levi and Yvonne Strahovski. When the series debuted in 2007, it attracted more than 9.2 million viewers. It saw a drop of more than a million for the rest of the season, but was pulling in a respectable weekly score, averaging more than 7 million. As the second season began, however, viewers started to jump ship. This season’s opener only had 6.6 million viewers.

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