Bygone Mach 1 breaker for short / WED 5-11-22 / Former L.A. Laker Odom / Jazz piano style played by Fats Waller and Mary Lou Williams / Island like Kiritimati / Tot's mount / Windy City rail system in brief / 1908 boxing film for which De Niro won Best Actor / Banjo spot in song

Constructor: Michael Paleos

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: PARTY ANIMALS (57A: They're always ready for a good time ... or a description of 18-, 25-, 35- and 49-Across) — familiar names / titles / items that sound like animals partying:

Theme answers:

• ROCKING HORSE (18A: Tot's mount)
• WILD TURKEY (25A: Jim Beam competitor)
• DRUNKEN CHICKEN (35A: Chinese poultry dish marinated in wine)
• RAGING BULL (49A: 1980 boxing film for which De Niro won Best Actor)

Word of the Day: LAMAR Odom (52A: Criticize harshly) —

Lamar Joseph Odom (born November 6, 1979) is an American former professional basketball player.^[2] As a member of the Los Angeles Lakers in the National Basketball Association (NBA), he won championships in 2009 and 2010 and was named the NBA Sixth Man of the Year in 2011. [...] Odom played on the United States national team, winning a bronze medal in the Olympics in 2004 and a gold medal in the FIBA World Championship (later known as the World Cup) in 2010. // Odom was married to Khloé Kardashian from 2009 to 2016. During their marriage, Odom made several appearances on the reality television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians. He and Kardashian also had their own reality series, Khloé & Lamar. (wikipedia)

• • •

Wow, almost got the third appearance of AM-N RA in four days, but instead we get the near-miss RAMONA (44D: ___ Quimby, Beverly Cleary heroine). Close call. Too close. I really like this theme, but unfortunately I didn't see the theme until the very end. The part before the end—you know, the part where you put all the letters in the little boxes—that was a lot (lot) less enjoyable. The puzzle really lost me, fill-wise, right about here:

Well not there exactly. A little earlier than that, when I wrote in ELI and before I'd really acceded to the singular WILE, which I very much did not want to do. Not sure why singular WILE is so grating today. It's not like it hasn't appeared in puzzles before. But it has big singular-KUDO energy for me now. If you asked me to name a [Illusionist's skill] I could name a dozen things before I'd name WILE. In fact, I'd never name WILE, because as far as I know I have never ever used or even thought of that answer in the singular (outside of the occasional crossword). GUILE sounds more correct than WILE. WILE is the first name of an animated Coyote or (to me) it's nothing. But seriously I was done before that, with ELI, after having slogged through TOG (another only-ever-see-in-xwords) and IDNO and SEETO and ARI and AEONS and INCAN and even with the very promising DRUNKEN-something waiting for me to fill the rest of it in, I felt fatigued, early. 

Then came ATOLL TTOP IOS UTICA ESTEEMS and by FOGEYS (apt!) all the solving joy felt like it had been bled out of me. I liked ONCE OVER, but I got almost nothing else from the top of the grid except exhausted. And then I get down to longer answers in the SE and I get ... NET SALES? That answer makes ESTEEMS look spicy. Just the dullest collection of common letters you're ever gonna see in an 8. AMEN NOS ENT DAS in the SW ... it all feels like gross crossword negligence. Here you have this very clever and (by its very nature) lively theme, and you just bury it in this gelatinous goop ... this SBARRO-esque, INEDIBLE fill inundation. Keep the theme, in its entirety, strip everything else out, start over. Then, you might get somewhere. Don't do this to your clever theme. Don't bury it in cold gravy.

TTOP!

The puzzle is oversized and yet I never felt the extraness because it was so incredibly easy. The second Monday-level puzzle in a row after a pretty non-Monday Monday ("MONDAY, MONDAY" being a potential theme answer that the *Sunday* puzzle somehow neglected to include, but that's really truly neither here nor there). The reason it's 16-wide is to accommodate the 14 that sits at the center (the puzzle's best answer). 14s can't sit dead center in a standard 15-wide grid, so here we are. It's a reasonable, not uncommon accommodation. I like how different all these "animals" are—a toy, a bottle of whiskey, a plate of food, a Scorsese film; it's a really nice, varied assortment. Again, the main reason I'm mad at the fill is because the theme is so good, whereas the fill HARASSES you, looking like something that the cat EGESTS. I'm definitely exaggerating, but not a lot. I think I'll stop there. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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