aaronneathery.com NEWS

Happy Holidays and Stuff!

2009-12-22T14:15:00.001-08:00

Two animated Christmas music videos from you-know-who..

Society's End Hits Jamendo! Sun Goes Supernova!

2009-12-11T22:32:00.000-08:00

Thought I'd try giving the Society's End mini album Yes, Sonic Ted? a new lease on life by uploading it to Jamendo and got a review in return that says I have an "infectious and generous voice" and gives my two songwriting efforts a "ten". How cool is that?? I'm going to try to follow up with some new material in the near future so stay tuned. If you haven't yet been exposed to Yes, Sonic Ted?, please do so now and let my generous voice infect you. Danke.

The Electromatic Radio Podcast Begins This Week! (details below!)

2009-08-01T09:54:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS ELECTROMATIC RADIO?

In a way, this is..

Or this..

Some say that Electromatic Radio is the warm summer breeze that catches your back as you walk through the park. Others say that Electromatic Radio is the morning dew on the lawn that you mowed only the day before. Still others say that Electromatic Radio is the threatening message scrawled across your bathroom mirror in lipstick. All of these answers are correct...

.. if profoundly unhelpful. The following is less so:

WHAT IS ELECTROMATIC RADIO?

Electromatic Radio is a science fiction comedy and music program written, produced, and performed by Aaron Neathery. Each program tells a complete story in three skits with two musical interludes.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

Somewhere in an alternate America, on the far side of a small town called Drakesville, is the world's first fully-automated atomic radio station. Once the flagship of a coast-to-coast chain of nuclear-powered radiomats, it has long since fallen out of public favor. Inside the musty, labyrinthine Electromatic Building, hallways which once bustled with activity are now quiet and strange things scuttle in the shadows. Rooms which have remained sealed for decades, their contents forgotten, lie silently as if in wait. But the building is far from abandoned. Throughout the complex, a vastly complicated electromechanical network still guides the station's day-to-day activities just as it has without stop for almost eight decades. The station also continues to employ a small crew consisting of an on-air host and a technician in order to keep Electromatic Radio on the air.

THE ELECTROMATIC CREW

Grey Grimwald, host of Electromatic Radio. A bellicose, short-tempered, hard-drinking, middle-aged veteran of the New York radio scene, although in what capacity is unknown as he seems to have little aptitude for announcing or anything else. Grey is a man utterly out of his element, helpless in the face of the bizarre and unexplainable, and emotionally unequipped to cope with the strange behavior of his only human co-worker, Matt Appleyard. But as much as his job and co-worker may drive him up the wall, he knows that he has nowhere to go but down and therefore tries very, very hard to reconcile himself to his new life. He's also a huge Mets fan.

Matt Appleyard, Electromatic technician. Chipper, bright, playful, energetic, and unspeakably irritating, Matt is the heart of Electromatic Radio. His days are spent tinkering with electronics, maintaining the station's supercomputer, munching on Necco wafers, and making his co-worker Grey's life a waking nightmare. What Matt does not do is his primary job of monitoring the broadcast, something he considers redundant as the broadcast is automated. This usually leaves the technically inept Grey in the position of not even knowing if he's on the air. Matt, a lifetime citizen of Drakesville, is several decades Grey's junior and formerly worked at the Sack-N-Carry, a local grocery store.

Evie (ElectroVac I). A huge analog computer designed to edit, compile, and broadcast 24 hours of programming a day. Powered, like the transmitter, by the station's small scale nuclear reactor, Evie is essentially the Electromatic Building's "brain", her "nerves" extending throughout the building in the form of sensors, cameras, and hidden microphones. Extensions of Evie include automated studios, a huge automated record library, and "broadcast control" booths for technicians to monitor her broadcasts. Evie is sentient and has a mercurial, mischievous, and rather insecure personality. Although capable of speaking limited pre-programmed phrases, she communicates with Matt primarily through a series of electronic tonalities which only Matt seems to understand. She absolutely does not like Grey.

Mr. Osborne, owner of Electromatic Radio. Never heard but frequently mentioned, Mr. Osborne is an extremely old man with, like Grey, a taste for the hootch. He has an office in the building but is almost always away.

THE RIVALS

As insignificant as it may be, Electromatic Radio has a rival station, the better-funded and organized Autotronic Radio, with which it competes for its tiny share of the Drakesville radio market. Autotronic's employees are unscrupulous cutthroats who will stop at nothing, even murder, to see Electromatic Radio eliminated. While there may be many more Autotronic employees, we are concerned with only three.

Cyrus Filtch, host of Autotronic Radio. A vicious, weaselly, abusive little Brooklynite with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Newton Dimbleby, Autotronic Radio technician. Cyrus's dimwitted lackey. An oafish stuffed shirt with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Professor Cassius Klatch, head of Autotronic R&D. A former coworker of Matt's from his days at the Sack-N-Carry. Neurotic and crazed, the Professor's deep-seated lust for revenge stems from his being passed over for employment at Electromatic Radio in favor of Matt. Hugely intelligent and deeply unhinged with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

WHAT BROUGHT *THIS* ON?

Electromatic Radio began life in late 2005 as Videomatic Electrovue, an experiment in television deconstruction; an anti-TV show with fictional limitations designed to inspire creative solutions as well as expose the mechanics of a medium that we all tend to take at face value. The visuals were pared down to a test pattern and video effects with audio carrying the bulk of the narrative. On paper, the concept for the program was also to involve a camera, locked in place, with a performance space of no more than a few feet, allowing for nothing more than hands, heads, small props, drawings, and puppets much like the earliest mechanical television experiments of the 1920s. For the audio, I would perform all of the characters and edit the dialog together line by line, saving the need for scheduling, rehearsing and directing a full cast. Two pilots were produced with my friend Lee Wilson as video editor and co-director but, unfortunately, the show turned out to be too complicated to produce on a steady basis and, worse, I couldn't find a venue for it. Left with an established production method for the audio, a concept, characters, and a handful of prepared scripts, I decided to convert the show into a radio program. The groundwork already laid, I quickly recorded three new pilot episodes and paid a visit to KPFT, Houston's Pacifica station, to see if it had a chance to air. Happily, program director Ernesto Aguilar felt it did and Electromatic Radio was added to the lineup of the station's new HD channel with a second station, KRFP in Moscow, ID, beating them to the punch.

WHAT IS THE POINT OF IT ALL, YOU WEIRD MAN?

Electromatic Radio is largely an exploration into a number of things that I find personally compelling; the feeling of wandering the abandoned hallways of your school after hours on the last day before graduating.. The eerie wonder of an abandoned building.. The comfort in the seeming permanence of that neighborhood business that holds its own against the big box stores.. The elegant simplicity of radio itself.. It's about independence, the joy of invention, of stewardship, friendship, paranoia, and dread. Electromatic Radio is about all of these things, but mostly it's about yelling.

WHERE CAN I HEAR IT?

Electromatic Radio episodes are uploaded weekly to mypodcast and radio4all. Further, highlights of the series and rare promos can be heard on Electromatic Radio's YouTube channel. If you're affiliated with a Pacifica station, versions of these episodes featuring copyrighted music can be accessed at www.audioport.org.

A NOTE TO LISTENERS, ASSORTED PROGRAM DIRECTORS AND MEDIA MOGULS WHO MAY BE READING

In my bid for global radio domination, I'm eager to add stations to the Electromatic client list. If you know of a station near you for whom you believe EMR would be a good fit, let them know about EMR or let me know about them. Better yet, if you happen to work in radio, especially for a college, community, or Part 15 station, and you have an interest in adding EMR to your lineup, contact me at electromaticradio@gmail.com. The first person to help me reach my goal of 18 million stations wins an Electromatic Radio T-shirt.

The End is Nigh...

2009-02-21T15:23:00.000-08:00

March 2nd, 2009, to be more precise...

Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

2006-04-09T13:57:00.000-07:00

Contrary to what appears to be the plainly obvious, this blog is not dead. What with The Third Banana occupying most of my spare writing time, aaronneathery.com NEWS has been demoted to its original purpose... and although there are a lot of projects underway, none are far enough along for me to announce them here. There should be (with luck) some good news within the next few months, however. Just keep these words in mind: Jim Belushi, mustard-stained twill suit, and lace curtains.

MUSIC IS HERE!!!

2005-12-01T12:15:00.000-08:00

From the antique anarchy of Aliens to the lilting latin strains of Elaine and back again, both Josh Foster and myself agree that Yes, Sonic Ted? is the best Society's End mini-album yet! And so will you! Or else! Listen to it for free, you lucky people, and have a safe and happy Decembermas.

PS: Official aaronneathery.com Cambrian-spokescreature Opie the Opabinia also wishes you glad tidings and good cheer, regardless of faith, race, nationality, or economic status. Can't beat that! For more on opabinias, click here.

Of Mincing Kings and Ghoulish Dolls...

2005-11-27T16:46:00.000-08:00

Bill Sherman has posted a review of H. G. Lewis's Santa Visits the Magic Land Of Mother Goose (1967). Despite Santa's token appearance, this film has been on my annual Christmas movie short-list alongside the Mexican Santa Claus, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, and Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny for several years now. I clearly belong to a very select group of individuals; people who have not only sat through SVTMLOMG, but have sat through it dozens of times. Call me sick, but this non-film is one of my favorite movies for reasons even I don't clearly understand. Maybe it's the hilarious Tony Randall-ish Old King Cole, or the Raggedy Ann character that was clearly intended to be cute but ends up being simply terrifying.. or maybe it's the Wicked Witch, played over-the-top even for a Wicked Witch, who is burned to death in a cabinet by Merlin, the magical wizard who speaks only over an off-camera tape recorder. It's right up there with Psyched By the 4-D Witch and The Shaggs in my book as a mind-altering/expanding experience (I like to think that Frank Zappa would have agreed with me on this one). Devoid of any of the signposts of traditional film language or narrative, your brain is forced to fill in the gaps, and suddenly your windows of perception are blown wide open! You may even deduce the very nature of God while watching Santa Visits the Magic Land of Mother Goose, but don't bother writing it down; it'll all just seem like gibberish after the movie is over.

Music Is Coming!

2005-11-27T10:12:00.000-08:00

December is always Music Month at aaronneathery.com. 12/1/05 will mark the official debut of Yes, Sonic Ted?, the latest (and hopefully not the last) mini-album from Josh Foster and myself as Society's End. Closer to Christmas, I'll be unveiling I Don't Want to Skate Alone, my traditional annual holiday tune. Why do I do it? WHO KNOWS?? All of this tuneful folderol will appear on my site's music page, my/our Christmas gift to all you lucky, lucky people.

Fiddlesticks and the Colorful Mediocrity of Ub Iwerks

2005-11-07T19:06:00.000-08:00

Just happened across Ub Iwerks' 1930 cartoon Fiddlesticks on archive.org this evening. What a mess. Even the worst early sound cartoons usually have something to offer, from the rubbery animation to the hot jazz it seems they were all scored with. But Fiddlesticks is another matter entirely. This is the debut of Iwerks' character Flip the Frog, which he developed in secret during his last few months working for Walt Disney. At the time, it was generally accepted among industry insiders that Ub was the brains behind Disney's success. Despite whatever the Disney Corporation may say, Ub created Mickey Mouse, a not particularly impressive feat considering that the earliest Mickey was a cipher, indistinguishable, save for synchronized sound, from most of the other glorified inkblots that populated late-20s cartoons. Fiddlesticks dispels any notions whatever about Iwerks having been the 'brains' of the Disney Studios. It is so utterly, profoundly awful that I find it nothing short of a miracle that MGM decided to pick it up as a series (they were no doubt so dazzled by Iwerks' reputation that they were blind to the flaws of the thing). Fiddlesticks has no story, few gags, and Flip the Frog does not qualify as a character. What Fiddlesticks does boast are the two elements that Iwerks clearly felt were more important than character, gags, and story; synchronized sound and color. It has plenty of both, but even contemporary audiences, for whom sound alone was still a novelty, must have found it crushingly boring. It is remarkable that Iwerks could have been so myopic about the appeal of cartoons after having worked alongside Disney for so many years, but Fiddlesticks indicates Iwerks was blind to anything but technique, apparently assuming that novelty alone was enough to carry a short. A technical man at heart, Iwerks did develop a number of impressive mechanical innovations while head of his own studio including an early multiplane camera, but as attractive as his cartoons were, they were uniformly devoid of wit and interest (no one made worse in the 1930s). Ultimately, MGM dropped the Flip series (theater managers complained bitterly about the quality of the Iwerks cartoons), and Iwerks chugged along for a few more years, distributing ComiColor one-shot cartoons through Pat Powers' Celebrity Productions. Fiddlesticks is proof positive that, on his own, Iwerks was heading nowhere before he even started.

Tricks, treats, etc..

2005-10-31T08:11:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the prolonged silence. Among other things that have kept me away, I've been setting up my new blog, The Third Banana, which debuts today (what a coincidence!). The Third Banana will be devoted to the lesser-known talents of the classic comedy world and I hope that, in time, it'll become to obscure comedy what Cartoon Brew is to animation (or what armadillos are to leprosy). And to help things along, I'm sharing the blog with two extremely talented individuals who are every bit, if not more, obsessed with these matters than I am, Nick Santa Maria and Geoff Collins. Be afraid. Be very afraid. I'm kicking things off with a list of my favorite horror comedies, a vintage Halloween-ish Joe E. Brown comic from the UK weekly Film Fun, a brand new/old Farnsworth and Katz audio clip, and a recipe for tripe and onions. Enjoy!

RIP Charles Rocket

2005-10-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

Good lord. I'll always remember Charles Rocket best as the twitchy Grossberg from the brilliant 1987 Max Headroom series. He will be remembered by most, however, as the SNL castmember (Reagan impressions and Weekend Update anchor) who said "fuck" on live TV, prompting the firing of himself and most of the cast of that ill-fated 1980-81 incarnation of the show. It was well-known that he was very unhappy about the direction his career had taken (mostly sub-B movies and video game voices), but that alone can't account for his particularly brutal suicide.

Wow..

2005-10-09T13:08:00.000-07:00

I'm stunned by this one. UNICEF, in collaboration with the Peyo family, has created an anti-war TV spot in Belgium that depicts the bombing of the Smurf village and concludes with an infant Smurf crying amidst the devastation and the tag "Don't let war affect the lives of children." As far as I'm concerned, it's a brilliant and daring move, and a depressing indictment of how inured people have become to true depictions of war and death to make efforts like this necessary. Kudos especially to the Peyo family for bravely agreeing to the use of the characters. Of course, I don't believe for a second that a similar campaign would or could ever make its way onto American airwaves. We prefer our precious illusions unshattered, thank you very much.

Society's End, tricksters, and bellzukies...

2005-09-29T07:33:00.000-07:00

The Society's End sessions are finished! What we have sounds excellent and, needless to say, light years ahead of our 1993-94 work. The bad news is that Josh and I ran out of time and had to whittle down our plans for a full album into a mini-album. The good news is that, as we don't have enough material to warrant a full CD, we'll be uploading the entire mini-album, Yes, Sonic Ted?, to aaronneathery.com in December as our Christmas gift to all you snarfy kats who have an interest in such things. CAN U DIG IT??

In other news: Bill Sherman has posted a blog entry about one of my favorite movies, H. G. Lewis's Jimmy the Wonder Boy! For the past few years I've been mulling over a possible "Aaron Marx" storyline that would involve the JTWB character Mr. Fig, the Time Killer, but I'm not too clear on the legal issues involved. I have a soft spot for unhinged trickster figures. It's a pity there aren't many (if any) female tricksters in fiction. I'm sure Joseph Campbell would have something to say about that... and maybe I should do something about it myself.

And speaking of Joseph Campbell, fewer things are nicer than Joe Harnell's recording of So Soon from his 1967 album Bossa Now!. In fact, thanks to Bossa Now!, I finally learned about the bellzukie, one of those extremely cool instruments that seem all too specific to mid-to-late 60s lounge music. Invented by Vinnie Bell, the bellzukie has a sound that you recognize instantly but can never quite place, and which lets you know immediately that the recording was made sometime between 1966 and 70. As it says in the liner notes, the bellzukie "is another sound maker that has the freshness and vitality of today" with a "musical range from the whine of a Honda to the mellowness of a cello". It's exactly the kind of neglected instrument that needs to be rediscovered by groups like TMBG.

RIP Don Adams

2005-09-27T20:02:00.000-07:00

What can I say? First Bob Denver and now another indelible part of my childhood gone. I was, and still am, a fan of Tennessee Tuxedo, Get Smart, and Inspector Gadget (the Matthew Broderick film was simply unacceptable). And, unlike most GS fans, I felt that the series actually improved towards the end of its run as it began referencing, in its own goofy way, late 60s and early 70s youth culture (including a memorable acid trip for Maxwell Smart.. accidental, of course). It was like a parody counterpoint to Jack Webb's recently revived Dragnet.. which was extremely funny in its own right.

Besides his TV work, Don Adams had a long career as a stand-up comic. In Ted V. Mikels' The Girl In Gold Boots (1969), you can even see his name in lights on the LA Playboy Club's marquee. Would you believe Don Adams doing a blue stand-up act? No? Would you believe Don Adams reciting suggestive limericks?

On dodging bullets...

2005-09-24T19:25:00.000-07:00

Rita sez "FACE!!! I'm going to go crap all over Louisiana again instead." All I can say is, we got extremely lucky. Houston city officials are now trying to keep the evacuees out of town to prevent a second deadly traffic jam. There is NO gasoline in or around Houston right now and the city is effectively closed for business. Aside from the cicadas, it's eerily quiet outside. The smell of barbecue is wafting through my screen door from somewhere in my neighborhood. It's nice, but after five days of sustained panic, the calm feels like a undeserved pardon that could be revoked at a moment's notice.

I don't blame anyone for fleeing. The TV coverage of Rita from outside Houston was scary as hell. I saw a report on BBC World News where a reporter was standing Downtown in the middle of an empty Travis Street saying, in his most ominous tones, "But what will America do without its oil capitol? Tomorrow we'll see!" CNN coverage was little better. Coverage from inside Houston was far more measured, but still enough to get me to pack my bags, despite my not being in an evacuation zone. And that night I discovered that every route of Houston was a hundred miles of gridlock. By late Wednesday, people were having heatstroke in their cars, running out of gas, burning out their engines, having to defecate on the medians.. There was a deadly bus fire on I-45 that killed 24 nursing home residents from Bellaire. And then the gas stations finally ran out of fuel and closed up, stranding hundreds of vehicles all over Houston's freeways. Here's a promise: the next time Houston has a CAT 5 hurricane bearing down on it, most of the people who evacuated are going to end up staying put.

UH Daily Cougar: Katrina Victims are comically greedy stereotypes!

2005-09-20T08:28:00.000-07:00

This one made the local TV news last night. On Monday The University of Houston Daily Cougar ran what is likely the most offensive editorial cartoon in that paper's history. Not surprisingly, they quickly pulled it from the paper's website. The cartoon by (talentless.. and I'm not just saying that out of spite) Arturo Gonzalez depicted a jewelry-bedecked "gangsta" NO refugee flashing FEMA debit cards in an attempt to seduce a nurse at the Memorial-Hermann Emergency Room. The dialogue included such gems as:

"What's the deal baby mama! You look'n PHAT ... I'm a survivor of Katrina ... straight from the middle of the dirty dirty ... still pimpin ... Girl gimme dat! ... gettin off soon huh? We could chill on my cot ... I got mad cases of MRE's ... we could grub after we blaze ... "

Aside from writing Albert and The Daily Grind for the Cougar, I split editorial toon duty for two years with cartoonists Ed de la Garza and John Palamidy and believe you me, if the editor has a problem with your work it has to be revised or it just doesn't get published. Period. It may piss the living hell out of you but that's the job of the editor. In this case the editor is one Matt Dulin who last night trotted out the tired and utterly inadequate excuse that the offensive cartoon represented only the opinion of the cartoonist. In his half-assed apology today, he even claims that the cartoon is open to multiple interpretations (such as?). Likewise, today's staff editorial features an attempt to cloud the problem by raising the dread specter of censorship:

The most important thing to remember is the cartoon in no way, shape or form represents the views of the editorial staff, our writers or the University. An editorial cartoon is like an opinion column -- it represents one person's viewpoint, not those of the staff.

That's not always clear given the nature of cartoons, which are often less formal and can be more anonymous than columns. Nevertheless, the same principle applies.

That principle, however, doesn't prevent The Daily Cougar from refusing to run something that could be considered offensive for the sake of being offensive. Censorship shouldn't be taken lightly by the press. College papers don't have wealthy investors or corporate bosses to answer to, just the students they serve. But if an item's offensiveness outweighs the merit of the idea behind it, then it may be appropriate to employ the "c" word.

Let's get one thing straight: this isn't a First Amendment issue. They let you know up front when you're hired; everything they run is subject to review and editing (on one occasion, an Albert strip was edited for language and nobody told me until it had gone to press) on grounds far more complicated and nuanced than merely screening out material that's "offensive for the sake of being offensive" (and in this case, I highly doubt Gonzalez was actively engaging in deliberately offensive outsized Swiftian satire). Moreover, the Cougar is largely funded by tuition money. If I were still a student at UH, I'd hate to think that one penny of my tuition went into the publication of Gonzalez's cartoon (or into his pocket.. the Cougar is not a volunteer operation). Speaking as someone who spent years at the Cougar as one of a group of students who worked hard to maintain the paper's integrity and quality, Gonzalez and Dulin should be canned immediately, if only for the paper's sake.

Eat the "HO-REN-SO"

2005-09-14T06:25:00.000-07:00

Wow. My off-handed heads-up to Jerry Beck about Sammy's extremely keen Popeye pachinko machine ended up on the Cartoon Brew blog to be read by lord knows how many people. I'm rather buzzed by this machine, not because of any great love for pachinko, but because of the new Popeye anime used for the display. Some Japanese studio has done a very nice job with the characters, closely following King Features' Fleischer-based merchandising design guides. For one reason or another, E. C. Segar's characters have been hanging in limbo for a number of years now. The battle between King and Warner Brothers over the classic Max Fleischer cartoons (King owns the characters, WB owns the cartoons) has so far prevented them from being released to DVD. King has tried to fill in the gap by releasing a DVD set of their wholly-owned 1960s Popeye TV cartoons (which I enjoy) and then produced a not bad CGI mini-feature last year, Popeye's Voyage: The Quest for Pappy. But none of this has really counted for much. The pachinko anime suggests another potential path for KFS. A Popeye series produced in Japan, based on, or at least inspired by, Segar's original stories would probably be a Saturday Morning winner, appealing to both the anime crowd and those with more cartoon-y tastes (like me). And as I mentioned to Jerry Beck, the rubbery Fleischer style lies at the root of manga and anime thanks to Popeye fan Osamu Tezuka, the godfather of both medium in Japan. Given Japan's love of classic American animation, I have to imagine that a Japanese-produced Popeye series would be truer to the spirit of the Fleischer cartoons than most American attempts (anyone remember Popeye and Son?? Good lord! (choke)).

A limply-disguised Popeye cameo appearance in Osamu Tezuka's Lost World
(1948). Is the bee a reference to Popeye artist Bill Zaboly's signature? Who knows?

Been wondering why people didn't leave NO on foot?

2005-09-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

The answer is shocking. The refugees were trapped in their sinking city by police from the surrounding communities. Why? So those communities "assets" would be protected from the crazed refugee marauders. Gretna sheriffs blocked more than 800 refugees on Highway 90, firing their guns over the heads of the crowd to turn them back.

In an interview with UPI, Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson confirmed that his department shut down the bridge to pedestrians: "If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged."

Was race possibly a factor? YA THINK??

And has anyone thought to compare the network TV coverage of 9/11 with the coverage of Katrina? There was very little standard programming for weeks after 9/11, and yet now in the face of a far deadlier, costlier, and more far-reaching catastrophe, the boob toob was business as usual after about three days. Gee.. I wonder why that would be.

"What didn't go right?"

2005-09-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

According to Nancy Pelosi, Lovable King Clueless thinks everything is going just dandy. I have to wonder why he's even bothering with the pretense of an investigation.

She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown.

''He said 'Why would I do that?''' Pelosi said.

'''I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.' And he said 'What didn't go right?'''

''Oblivious, in denial, dangerous,'' she added.

(cue laugh track)

RIP Bob Denver

2005-09-06T18:49:00.000-07:00

My favorite TV nebbish died today. As a kid, I lived on a (questionable) diet of syndicated episodes of Gilligan's Island and Dobie Gillis during weekdays and Far Out Space Nuts, The New Adventures of Gilligan, and Gilligan's Planet on weekends (I managed to miss Dusty's Trail until I found it on a dollar DVD this year. It's Gilligan's Island without the subtle wit and intricate social satire). There was scarcely a day that went by where Bob Denver wasn't playing some variation of his stock bumbling man-child on TV and I tried to keep up with all of it, spending the downtime playing with Playskool's extremely cool Gilligan's Island floating playset. I narrowly missed meeting Mr. Denver when he was signing copies of his autobiography, Gilligan, Maynard, and Me, at the local Bookstop in 1993. A friend who worked next door at the time called me. "Get your ass down here if you want to meet Gilligan!" I was about eight minutes too late (sob). Bob had skedaddled and I probably looked like a maniac to the Bookstop staff since, in my rush, I had neglected to brush my hair, button my shirt properly, or put on socks (I could have claimed I was doing an impression of Maynard G. Krebs, I suppose). I did buy a signed copy of his bio at a used bookstore the next year, though. The clerk snickered as she rang me out. "You know you're the fourth person to buy this? This copy has been sold back to us three times so far. Be sure to keep the tradition alive and sell it back to us in a few weeks!" I still have it.

Flash for rescue in NO??

2005-09-06T18:34:00.000-07:00

"At one point, there were a load of girls on the roof of the hotel saying 'Can you help us?' and the policemen said 'Show us what you've got' and made signs for them to lift their T-shirts. When the girls refused, they said 'Fine' and motored off down the road in their boat."

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Kiddie Matinee updates...

2005-09-03T11:27:00.000-07:00

Bill Sherman has posted a review of Barry Mahon's Jack and the Beanstalk (1970) and kiddiematinee.com has unveiled a gallery of video captures from the absolutely incredible Mooch! Below you can see Mooch in her little sparkly stripper get-up and Jim Backus dressed as Mr. Magoo (did he make special appearances at shopping centers in that costume?). And there's also a close-up of the very professional-looking storyboard for the phony cartoon we get to see Jim recording his voice for. Good times! If you can find the dollar DVD, buy it.

Red Cross never allowed to enter New Orleans??

2005-09-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

Was the Red Cross barred from helping victims in NO by State Homeland Security???? According to the Red Cross, yes! Since the storm hit, the Red Cross has not been allowed into the city to render aid. Why? The feds fear that the Red Cross would make things too cozy for victims who might otherwise be compelled to evacuate!! So the people of New Orleans are being deliberately starved and sickened in order to get them to abandon the city?? Here's a good Kos diary on this atrocity.

Houston Fire Marshall overruled!

2005-09-01T22:32:00.000-07:00

They're now allowing those busses "on Astrodome property".. some 20-30 busses.. to unload. The story appears to be that a Harris County judge overruled the Fire Marshall who demanded the Astrodome close its doors. That decision was made based on the number of refugees being housed on the field, but didn't take into account the additional available space throughout the facility. This is very good news, but there's little chance that the Dome is going to end up housing the 25,000 refugees officials claimed. There seems to be ample evidence that there's little communication between emergency officials in Houston and New Orleans.

No more room at the Astrodome for refugees

2005-09-01T21:17:00.000-07:00

Breaking news; as of ten minutes ago it was announced that the Astrodome can accept no more New Orleans refugees. The Dome was supposed to accomodate up to 25,000 refugees and the doors have now been closed after a mere 4,000 were allowed in. KTRK-TV claims there is "chaos" inside the Dome, there are no more supplies and "no one can take showers". Lines of buses loaded with refugees wait outside. No one seems to know where they're supposed to go now. Unbelievable.

Time out...

2005-09-01T10:02:00.000-07:00

Bill Sherman has posted an extremely cool review of Barry Mahon's mindbending kiddie epic Santa Claus Meets the Ice Cream Bunny, one of several kiddie matinee pictures I sent him a while back. Bill thinks the Ice Cream Bunny may have been originally intended to be the Easter Bunny. I think the Ice Cream Bunny is called the Ice Cream Bunny either because his head is shaped somewhat like an ice cream cone or because kids like ice cream. Will the world ever know for sure???

"Who knew?" says Disaster President.

2005-09-01T07:49:00.000-07:00

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

- President Bush on Good Morning America, 9/1/05

Well, for starters, a bunch of librul, evolution-believin', atheist eggheads have been suggesting such a thing was damn near inevitable for years. But what did they know? According to the Washington Post:

"The president's most recent budgets have actually proposed reducing funding for flood prevention in the New Orleans area, and the administration has long ignored Louisiana politicians' requests for more help in protecting their fragile coast, the destruction of which meant there was little to slow down the hurricane before it hit the city."

The potential for disaster was also suggested in almost every TV, radio, and newspaper story on Katrina as it approached New Orleans, but I forgot.. Dubya doesn't get news out in Crawford. I wouldn't trust Dubya to play SimCity, let alone lead the "free world". Electing Bush to two terms was an act of national suicide. Past the (thus far flailing) efforts to cope with this catastrophe, the big issue is this: after all the manly chest-beating over America's emergency preparedness following 9/11, New Orleans is in a state of anarchy following a closely watched hurricane whose after-effects were predicted years ago. Yet I suspect that the federal response to the outcry for better disaster preparedness is going to be more metal detectors and a few more draconian laws designed to root out potential "evildoers".

"But it's wrong!"

2005-08-31T07:13:00.000-07:00

Nothing is driving me up the wall more than the tut-tutting coming from the media moralists covering the New Orleans disaster. I watched some starched and quaffed reporter from KTRK last night trying his lily-white best to shame some shirtless black kid rummaging through the soaked remnants of a convenience store. "But it's wrong!" says the reporter. The kid just laughed. The reporter comes back to his tidy, well-appointed home in Garden Oaks the next day while that kid stays in his drowned city... at least until he and everyone else are forced out. What the hell does he come back to in a month or so? What's left? And I'm glad I'm not the only one who has noticed that the media depicts dirt-poor (and now homeless) blacks who take food, water, and beer from grocery stores as crazed thieves while white folk under the same circumstances are simply trying to "find provisions". In any case, there are far more important things to worry about right now, especially as it's becoming clear that the damage control situation has been botched. The Army Corp of Engineers dropped the ball on their attempt, or non-attempt as the case may be, to dam up the 17th Street Canal and the mayor is livid. Most of the LA National Guard and the equipment needed for rescue operations that would otherwise have been on the scene in a heartbeat are in Iraq. The number of out-of-state Guard in NO is dangerously inadequate. And what the fuck happened to FEMA? Even though experts have been warning about a potential disaster in the Big Easy for years, there seems to have been almost no plan whatsoever to deal with the situation when it did arise. The Coast Guard and Red Cross, OTOH, are doing their best to pick up the slack. The Superdome refugees are now to be relocated to the Astrodome. At this point, I don't see how this disaster can't trigger some kind of horrible economic domino effect.

Meanwhile, George "Disaster President" Bush was jamming Tuesday on a special presidential guitar presented to him by Mark Wills. I know it's hard work, but go, George, go!

Chaos

2005-08-30T15:05:00.000-07:00

Blogger Kathryn Cramer has some excellent coverage of the New Orleans levee breaks. Parts of New Orleans are descending into chaos as looters storm damaged businesses. And according to the Times-Picayune, cops are joining in the looting. The entire city is now to be completely evacuated.

"complete devastation."

2005-08-30T12:54:00.000-07:00

Biloxi in ruins, New Orleans under Martial Law, $25 billion in damage, suicides at the Superdome, Lake Pontchartrain pouring into city, death toll climbing. The long-term impact of Katrina is going to be staggering.

Good night, Mrs. Calabash...

2005-08-27T21:57:00.000-07:00

Even Jimmy "Schnozzle" Durante got his own comic in the pages of the UK comic weekly Radio Fun. This one dates from 1952. Umbriago!

click de pic!

Classic Comedy Alternate Reality #1: Charlie Chaplin at Columbia

2005-08-20T21:38:00.000-07:00

In late 1928, Hollywood's most powerful studios conspired to destroy upstart distribution company United Artists. Taking advantage of the growing demand for talkies and the decline in output from UA stars Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, MGM, Paramount, and Universal used their distribution networks to almost completely choke UA's product from the nation's theaters. The loss of revenue, coupled with the Crash of 1929, forced UA to declare bankruptcy in early 1930. Chaplin, in particular, was hit hard, losing millions in the crash and the collapse of UA. Saddled with debt, Chaplin was forced to throw himself upon the mercies of the very studios which had contributed to his financial ruin. In no position to haggle over terms, Chaplin found himself at MGM in June 1930, hard at work on his first "All-Singing, All-Dancing" talkie, Everything's Swell, a rags-to-riches story in which the Tramp, a small town theater handyman, bungles his way to stardom. Distressed by a loss of creative control and frustrated by management's refusal to cast him in appropriate vehicles, Chaplin turned to drink and became increasingly unmanageable. By 1935, his critical reputation as a genius in tatters, Chaplin was cast out on his ear by studio head Louis B. Mayer (who publicly referred to Chaplin as a "baggy-pants prima donna"). Charlie Chaplin was quickly hired by comedy shorts producer Hal Roach who featured Chaplin in a new series. Although given a great deal of creative latitude and the opportunity to work alongside former Karno understudy Stan Laurel, the alcohol and disillusionment continued to take their toll on Chaplin's ability to perform. When Roach shifted production away from shorts in 1937, Chaplin found work at Columbia's comedy shorts department under producer/director Jules White (who had directed Chaplin twice at MGM). The resulting shorts, a total of thirty-nine made between 1938 and 1946, had a few highlights (especially in those directed by Charley Chase) but were generally poor. Nonetheless, the films were well-received by the public and represented a welcome and sizable paycheck for the comedian, the biggest star in Jules White's stable of comics. In 1944, following a series of slapstick service comedies featuring the Tramp as a harried Army private (and one, Blitz Dizzy (1942), which starred Chaplin in a brilliant turn as a Hitler-like dictator), Chaplin was callously teamed with Swedish dialect comedian El Brendel. The teaming was one of many forced comedy partnerships at the Columbia shorts department and was particularly humiliating for Chaplin, who hadn't had to share top billing since his earliest days at Keystone. The Chaplin and Brendel shorts were similarly well-liked by audiences, especially in rural America, but were among the worst films of Chaplin's career, featuring tired slapstick, awkward dialect humor, and downright narcoleptic performances from a severely depressed and frequently drunken Chaplin. Worst of all, many of the final shorts saw Chaplin playing resigned straightman to Brendel's madcap Swede, with Chaplin not even receiving billing in trade ads or publicity material. Chaplin quit Columbia and film altogether in 1946 and spent several years "drying out" in various clinics along the West Coast before making a genuine comeback on live television in 1949.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Police State

2005-08-18T10:12:00.000-07:00

From Alterhouse, via Atrios, comes this tasty little slice of insanity in re: to the execution of Jean Charles De Menezes.

"Is it not true that yesterday's sad mistake has already solved the problem it represents? In fact, a further good has been created: as ordinary persons change their behavior and drop the bulky clothing and unnecessary running, the real terrorists will stand out more. Indeed, if anyone ever behaves like Jean Charles de Menezes again, the presumption that he is a terrorist will be so overwhelmingly strong that the police really must kill him."

In light of the new evidence, she has since issued this response, among others, to people accusing her of making excuses for extrajudicial executions of innocent people on subway trains:

"I don't appreciate having what I wrote mischaracterized in a way that makes me look bad and I know people are reading this post today because they've been sent here by a couple of websites that are badly mischaracterizing me."

In other words: Rethink my argument? Do I look like a flip-flopper?? Stop looking at me!! STOP LOOKING AT ME!!!!!!!!

This is how it starts. Alter your behavior just a little bit.. just to be safe. After all, you've done nothing wrong. And then, as the cycle of violence gains momentum, you're compelled to toe the line.. just to be safe. The cops kill a guy for wearing a bulky jacket. Better safe than sorry. Toss out the bulky jackets. He was carrying a backpack. Leave the backpack at home. He was running. Don't ever run. He was reading a book about politics. Don't bring your book out in public. Better yet, don't buy such books. He had been overheard saying he disagreed with the war. Keep your trap shut in public. He looked middle eastern...

Oh, wait.

I also love the idea that The Real Terrorists will "stand out more" if we all behave like automatons. Real Terrorists are clearly incapable of adjusting their behavioral patterns.

Infinite downward spiral...

2005-08-17T06:38:00.000-07:00

So he wasn't even running from the London Metropolitan Police? It seems that the Met lied about essentially everything regarding their July 22nd murder of Brazilian immigrant Jean Charles de Menezes in the Stockwell Tube station. According to leaked documents from the Independent Police Complaints Commission, De Menezes was wearing a denim jacket, not a potentially bomb-laden "winter-style coat", didn't run from the police, and was sitting down in the train when he was grabbed, forced to the ground, and shot eight times in the head. Just as alarming is the suggestion that this was a matter of mistaken identity, with De Menezes being "positively identified" by police as suspect "fifth bomber" Osman Hussain, aka Hamdi Issac, who has since been taken into custody in Rome without a struggle. Apparently the police in Rome don't have a shoot-to-kill/ask-questions later policy. Here's an easy prediction; we're going to be seeing a lot more of this as police on both sides of the Atlantic become increasingly comfortable with the notion of acceptable civilian losses in order to protect the greater good (and why not get comfortable with it if you can always blame your tragic mistakes on The Enemy?). Life just got that much cheaper.

"Good morning starshine! The Earth says Hello!"

2005-08-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

In a recent interview, Gene Wilder expressed confusion and sadness over the decision to "remake" Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. "It's all about money." says Wilder. "It's just some people sitting around thinking, How can we make some more money?' Why else would you remake Willy Wonka? I don't see the point of going back and doing it all over again." Wilder's assessment of Hollywood greed is perfectly understandable if largely misplaced in this instance. It's also downright ironic considering the origins of the 1971 movie whose very title was determined by the need for product tie-ins (namely Quaker Oats' new Wonka chocolate line). Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is in no way a remake of Mel Stuart's classic film and is, in many regards, truer both to the letter and the spirit of Roald Dahl's darkly comic morality tale. And while Warner Brothers undoubtedly greenlit CATCC because of its pre-sold status, the film is also a matter of creative kismet. Given the story's dark overtones, comedy, horror, and bent psychology, Tim Burton was born to film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Knowing full well the ubiquity of the Gene Wilder film, Burton and screenwriter John August play merciless games with expectations, giving us larger doses of genuine Dahl while also presenting some elaborate variations on a theme we've long since memorized.

Charlie Bucket, played here by the uncannily sincere Freddy Highmore, lives in desperate poverty in a ramshackle hovel (designed after a Burton doodle) positioned squarely, and poetically, at the end of a long street that leads directly to the imposing art-deco edifice that is the Wonka chocolate factory. Charlie's father (Noah Taylor) works for peanuts in a toothpaste factory, screwing plastic caps onto the ends of toothpaste tubes, while his mother (Helena Bonham-Carter wearing a pair of stained false teeth) cooks huge pots of boiled cabbage for the family, including all four grandparents. In shades of August and Burton's Big Fish, Grandpa Joe (David Kelly), a former Wonka employee, regales the Wonka-obsessed Charlie with anecdotes about the remarkable candyman and why he finally decided to close his factory to the outside world (as Charlie has never seen or heard Mr. Wonka, we're teased by obscure half-glimpses). "I was much younger in those days." says Grandpa Joe while Charlie's imagination shows him every bit as old as he is now. But while Charlie idolizes the mysterious Willy Wonka, the Bucket family, we learn, are Wonka's victims. Grandpa Joe lost his job when Wonka closed his factory (to defend his ego, rather than his business, from competitors) and later Mr. Bucket loses his position at the toothpaste factory when increased sales due to an increase of Wonka chocolate-induced cavities allows management to replace him with a machine. No one bears a grudge, however, even if Wonka's chocolate is now too expensive for the family to buy any more than once a year. In fact, the wistfully nostalgic Grandpa Joe wants nothing more than to get one last look at Willy Wonka and the inside of his remarkable chocolate factory, so Charlie's miraculous discovery of the last Golden Ticket is as much a fulfilled wish for Joe as it is for Charlie.

But expectations are made to be shattered and Mr. Wonka, if you hadn't guessed, is nothing he's cracked up to be. Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka is hardly Dahl's winsome elf. Burton's Wonka is a nightmare figure; both childlike and childish, pathologically self-absorbed, and hopelessly inept at human interaction after his years-long seclusion (I suspect that Wonka is a partial caricature of Tim Burton, who likewise suffers from severe social anxiety). He doesn't even remember Grandpa Joe, his former loyal employee. And as for the children who won his Golden Ticket contest, they're clearly pawns from the word go and Willy Wonka has nothing but contempt for them, even Charlie ("You're just lucky to be here, aren't you?"). Caricatures of vice though they may be, Burton and August invite the audience to at least pity the contest winners as victims (if self-made), a full reversal from the 1971 film. As in Dahl's book, the ruthless and poetic punishments meted out by Wonka's factory are, at least as sensitive Charlie is concerned, potentially lethal, and Burton treats each with an unnerving earnestness (Violet Beauregard's blueberryization in particular is given the full horror movie treatment). Charlie's worries seem justified given Wonka's scatterbrained and mercurial nature. After all, the factory is a manifestation of Wonka's childlike obsessions and his "genius" as a candymaker rests upon the fact that, inside his own world, things can happen simply because he wants them to. As cynical brat Mike Teevee says, "You all think he's some kind of genius, but he's an idiot!" In a world where the unstable Willy Wonka can bend reality to his will, you probably have just cause for worry.

Appropriately, Willy Wonka, too, is a victim. Willy's overprotective father, dentist Wilbur Wonka (played wonderfully by Christopher Lee), denied him a genuine childhood, tossing his Halloween candy into the fireplace and making him wear orthopedic gear that looks like a medieval torture device. This has left Wonka so emotionally shattered that he's literally incapable of saying the word "parents". So Willy Wonka, disgusted with the world, hides all too snugly inside his vast factory with the impersonal (and comfortably predictable) Oompa Loompas, losing not only his ability to communicate, but also rapidly losing touch with his own humanity. Even the seemingly magnanimous Golden Ticket contest is revealed to be another of Wonka's exercises in unthinking selfishness. Appropriately, in the end, it's not Willy Wonka who doles out the redemption, but the genuinely good-hearted Charlie. His name is in the title for a very good reason.

On one count, however, Burton and August's extremely clever psychological retooling of Roald Dahl's story will work against the film in the long run. Their version of Willy Wonka is so firmly wedded to the specifics of John August's storyline that it's impossible for him to stand on his own. While the 1971 film has its flaws, Gene Wilder's coolly mysterious Willy Wonka, the role of his life, is a triumph of characterization, in turns dangerous and genuinely loving. When the film falls flat in places, Wilder's charismatic Wonka simply picks it up and keeps going. But Johnny Depp's Wonka, although well performed and extremely funny, is almost as much a prop as Burton's spiral-ridden chocolate factory. It's little wonder that the clip Depp presented on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno fell as flat as it did. Without context, Depp's Willy Wonka is little more than an outline, and a singularly unattractive one at that. Point for point, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is probably both a better film and a better adaptation than Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but it's every bit a world unto itself as Wonka's fantasy factory. It's a safe bet that, in another 34 years, the Willy Wonka most people remember will be Gene Wilder. So quit worrying, Gene.

The downward spiral continues...

2005-08-02T20:05:00.000-07:00

Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian gunned down in a London subway for being suspected of being a potential terrorist and for wearing a bulky, potentially bomb-laden jacket, wasn't wearing a bulky jacket after all. Nor did he jump the turnstile as the London Metropolitan Police originally claimed. SURPRISE! The Met lied. It was a classic CYA maneuver, and now the only thing left to do is stick a dollar sign on the situation and try to move on. Fortunately, the UK, unlike the US of A, still has transparency in government so public outrage may help prevent such a thing from happening again. After all, the new "shoot to kill" policy is going to prove extremely costly if this becomes a habit.

"What is it? Is it terrorists?"

2005-08-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

"Trash." says my friend. "Absolute trash."

She was referring to Steven Spielberg's The War of the Worlds. Those may not have been her exact words, but the sentiment was the same. Given my feelings about Spielberg's recent track record, I was inclined to take her at her word, but her assessment still wasn't going to deter me from seeing the new War of the Worlds, trash or no. I had been waiting far too long for it. Ever since the triple whammy of my childhood of being exposed to, all within two years, the 1938 Orson Welles/ Howard Koch Mercury Theater adaptation, the George Pal movie, and H. G. Wells' novel, I had been aching to see a big-screen version with a budget. In part because I felt that Wells' book had yet to be committed to film, but mostly because I had tripods on the brain. Tripods, dammit! Tripods looming ominously over neighborhoods, tripods swiftly striding through cities, tripods unleashing deadly heat rays. Pal's 1953 movie, as well-made and as frightening as it is, is still something of a disappointment to me after all these years. The oh-so 50s theological overtones are bad enough, but the total absence of tripods is unforgivable. Wah Chang's manta ray machines are as eerie and menacing as all get out, but they're flying machines (really), and unless you're still uncomfortable with the idea of airplanes, they aren't liable to scare on that level alone. Early drafts of the screenplay did, indeed, include tripods, but even Pal's tripods missed the mark. Instead of Wells' seemingly living machines, Pal's tripods were to have three stiff legs with a spiked tank tread at the base of each, allowing it to grind over houses, cars, people, etc.. Chang's final designs were far less silly and, more importantly, were cheaper to build and film. But the lack of Wells-style Martian war machines leaves a serious gap. Any old foreign menace can buzz you with planes, but to really make you feel inferior, it takes extraterrestrials in titanic walking machines (as I always say).

Well, I have to say that Spielberg has completely sated my lust for tripods, and for that, I'm eternally grateful. For the first time on any screen, we have true Wells tripods; lifelike, inscrutable, purposeful, and just plain creepy. Spielberg's eye for composition presents us with scene after scene that could have been lifted from any one of a thousand illustrations for Wells' novel, and could easily serve as the same in the future. The tripods' heat rays are, in the tradition of the memorable "mason-neutralizing" beams of the Pal movie, appreciably alien and spectacular (although mystifying in their peculiar aversion to human clothing). Mr. Spielberg's tripods are masterpieces.

And, happily, I don't have to include a "but" here. The War of the Worlds is, while not nearly his best, one of Spielberg's better films. Wells' original evolutionary subtext is mostly intact (if shuffled somewhat to the side), but Spielberg treats the Mercury Theater and George Pal versions with similar reverence, infusing the strengths of those two contemporary revisions into his own; in part a tribute, but also a canny utilization of test-driven, sure-fire story elements. TWOTW has been something of a narrative nesting doll over the years with each new adaptation referencing and drawing off the strengths of previous versions. The Pal movie included multiple references to and plot points from Koch and Welles' innovative radio adaptation while similarly making the story as relevant to audiences in 1953 as the Mercury version had been in 1938 (Paramount even hoped to entice Orson Welles himself to appear in the trailers as a panicked TV reporter). So Spielberg has included references to all of it, most notably several lines and a few scenes cut whole cloth from Pal's film (not to mention cameos by Ann Robinson and Gene Barry). The bare-bones outline of H. G. Wells' story is here, the largest changes to the narrative having been made to allow for Spielberg's signature Cute Children In Danger and to increase relevance and believability, such as the references to terrorism and Cruise's son's military deathwish. The narrator's quest for his wife also takes on new significance as they're estranged. The story has undergone a certain amount of narrative streamlining as well. For once, we have no knowitall scientists around to explain who the invaders are, where they're from, and how their heat rays work. In their place, we have military grunts and thousands of average people in blind panic. Wells' Artilleryman and Curate are here combined into one character, Harlan Ogilvy, played with paranoid gusto by Tim Robbins, but the sequence nicely encapsulates the underlying themes of the novel's corresponding chapters (as well as some new ones in our post-9/11 world). The vampiric alien invaders, too, for the sake of believability are no longer Martians per se (Mission Mars will probably turn out to be one of the last films featuring an alien presence on the red planet), and the means of their arrival has been revised to give humanity even less of a chance to muster a defense than in previous adaptations.

Tom Cruise as jerkoff Ray Ferrier may not be the world's most likely blue collar shmoe, but he makes a very effective focal point, escaping death by the narrowest of margins time and again, making the death and destruction of the alien invasion a backdrop of sorts.. and it's all the more disturbing for it. Some critics (and my friend) find Ray's invulnerability risible but as unlikely as it may be, it happens, as the events of 9-11 have shown. Devlin and Emmerich memorably took the opposite approach in Independence Day, picking off their ensemble cast one by one in classic disaster movie style thereby putting the audience repeatedly in the place of the victims. But Spielberg, staying true to the novel, sticks with a central, and extremely lucky, narrator. For Spielberg and Wells, the true horror of TWOTW is the suspense of waiting for your luck to run out. But, sadly, that's also where the movie ends up stumbling badly. The conclusion, and I'm not talking about Wells' bacteria, is insulting and absurd, especially following the ruthlessness of the rest of the film. Even luck for the sake of narrative has its limits. Wells' narrator, although he is finally reunited with his wife, is a changed man by the end of the novel; his tidy Edwardian world view irreparably shattered. In Steven Spielberg's version, the ill-considered ending recasts the alien invasion as a kind of elaborate form of family counseling for the dysfunctional Ray and Co., and there is little indication that Ray's narrow perceptions of the world and his place in it have changed one whit (even Pal managed that one). In the ending, I smell the stench of test audiences and producers with weak knees.

But who cares. It's a Summer Blockbuster. I'm just grateful for those tripods.

Entertainment for Cheapskates

2005-07-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

While the Prelinger Collection has been pretty stagnant for almost a year, archive.org has recently pulled out all the stops in updating their feature film collection. Over the last few weeks, dozens of free PD features and shorts have been added to an already impressive list, further helping to take the sting out of not having the money to blow on satellite or cable TV. Here are a few of the most noteworthy recent additions.

A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor: Eddie Cantor, one of America's greatest comedians, is sadly neglected today despite the sizable legacy he left behind. The goggle-eyed, wispy-voiced Cantor, like most vaudeville comics of his era, dabbled in just about everything and was successful at most of it, enjoying a lengthy career in radio, TV, and film. A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor is a groudbreaker. It's Eddie's very first film, and it's also a De Forest Phonofilm, one of the very first sound-on-film talkies, produced years before Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer. I had been aching to see one of the De Forest films ever since I read Walter Kerr's comments on them in The Silent Clowns, and this, a genuine record of Eddie's song-and-patter vaudeville act, is no disappointment. His self-depreciating humor and perky songs still wear well today and De Forest's early optical soundtrack reproduces all of it with what sounds like higher fidelity than most talkies of 1929-1931 vintage. It's remarkable to think of the other performers whom we could have gotten a glimpse of in their prime if they had similarly signed with De Forest in 1923. The Four Marx Brothers had only recently begun to finalize their now-famous stage characters. John Barrymore was making waves with his legendary performance as Hamlet. How about W. C. Fields? Gallagher and Shean performing their signature song? A pre-Sennett Harry Langdon doing his famous chauffeur routine?

Now You're Talking: The Fleischer Brothers, Max and Dave, made this animated instructional short for Bell Telephone in 1927, an interesting and entertaining record of how pre-dial Western Electric candlestick phones were used (and abused). While such handy phone tips as "pick up the phone when it rings" and "use the phone book to look up numbers you can't remember" may seem rather obvious to we who live in the far-flung future, they may not have occurred to a people still terrified by steam power and chewing gum, and who thought automobiles were pulled by invisible horses. And who knew there was a late 20s fad for attaching useless gizmos to phones? Gizmos that made your phone explode, no less! Incidentally, this short was made the same year that Western Electric introduced the #202 desk phone, the first phone with both a dial and a proper handset, which ultimately made the old candlestick phone w/subset box obsolete.

The Fleischer Brothers' animation was easily the most engaging and attractive of the silent era, due in no small part to animator Dick Heumer's remarkable inking skills, and Now You're Talking is a beautifully preserved example of the studio at its pre-sound creative peak. Archive.org also has a nice print of Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, a 1924 Ko-Ko Song Car-Tune also produced by the Fleischers. Although it's apparent that the Inkwell Studios used these "bouncing ball" shorts as budget-saving fillers (even the bouncing ball itself was live action), it's fun nonetheless. Strangely, there is absolutely no war imagery in this short.

The Golem and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (both 1920): Two cornerstones of silent German Expressionist horror cinema, both available in good prints with musical accompaniment. I think a Tim Burton remake of Dr. Caligari with Johnny Depp as Cesare the Somnambulist is something of an inevitability. The Golem isn't quite as much fun (in fact, it drags a bit), but is worth watching for the sets and Paul Wegener's performance as the Golem, cues from both being later taken by director James Whale for Frankenstein (1931). This was Wegener's third and final film appearance as the Golem, the first two films being The Golem (1914) and The Golem and the Dancer (1917).

War Babies (1932): A horror film of a different kind. War Babies was one of a series of "Baby Burlesks"; comedy shorts featuring infants and toddlers acting out parodies of contemporary hit films. This grotesque series was a close cousin to the MGM Dogville shorts which featured trained dogs acting out parodies of current MGM features, except the dogs got to walk away with their dignity intact. Shirley Temple started her film career in these things, playing.. god help us.. the Baby Burlesks' regular "femme fatale". Unfunny and obnoxious, exploitative in the extreme, and utterly excruciating in every conceivable way. In some states, I think you can get arrested for having a copy of this on your computer. Enjoy!

The Lost City (1935): In 1913, Harry Revier and J. J. Burns converted a barn in Hollywood into the farming community's very first motion picture studio. Cecil B. DeMille directed The Squaw Man at the Burns and Revier Studio and Laboratory later that year before signing a long-term lease on the property. Harry Revier turned to directing himself by 1916, but was never much of a success in the town he had helped to create. In 1935, he directed this berserk 12-chapter serial to compete with the first wave of science fiction serials being released by Mascot, Republic, and Universal (specifically, Undersea Kingdom, The Phantom Empire, and Flash Gordon) and while The Lost City may not have the production values of those better-known serials, it makes up for it in sheer outrageousness. Among all of the shrieking natives, devious Arabs, and Noble White Men are some pretty fascinating performers, chief among them the out-of-control William "Stage" Boyd who drank himself to death after The Lost City was in the can. Silent comedians Milburn Moranti and Billy Bletcher also appear in sizable roles. Moranti was most famously teamed with comedienne Gale Henry in over a hundred shorts made between 1915 and 1920, but continued to appear in Westerns until 1951 (following a career path similar to that of Al St. John). The 5'2 Billy Bletcher, best remembered as the booming voice of The Big Bad Wolf, Peg-Leg Pete, The Pincushion Man, and dozens of other cartoon heavies at every animation studio in Hollywood, chews the scenery wonderfully as dwarf henchman Gorzo. Harry Revier wrapped up his directing career in 1938 with the unsettling Child Bride.

The Return of the Son of aaronneathery.com, Episode II, Beyond Thunderdome

2005-07-28T20:44:00.000-07:00

My site is back and in honor of the occasion, I've added a new no-frills page devoted to my "music", hidden cleverly under MISC. on the index page. All of the Christmas songs are there as well as the EVP-loaded Voices and the very upsetting Gloria Green. Hopefully, I'll have some new material in the near future as blues guitarist Josh Foster and I continue work on the new Society's End album. You won't never have not heard anything unlike it.. ever.

The downward spiral

2005-07-23T19:51:00.000-07:00

I had a suspicion the day it was reported. On Friday, the London police chased a guy down at the Stockwell Tube and, apparently acting on a new "shoot to kill" policy, plugged five bullets into his head because he was wearing a "suspicious" parka and lived in the same building as someone currently under investigation for the recent bombings. Of course, almost inevitably, the guy was innocent; a 27 year old Brazilian named Jean Charles de Menezes. I have to wonder if even stopping and throwing his hands in the air would have prevented him from being gunned down by cops convinced his parka was stuffed with explosives. At the moment, I'm very eager to learn a) why, if Mr. de Menezes was a suspect in the bombings, he was allowed anywhere near the station in the first place and b) if he was a key suspect, why he hadn't been questioned earlier which would clearly have eliminated him from the cops' list of potential terrorists. As has been revealed, the London police are basing their counterterrorism tactics on advice from security forces from Israel and Sri Lanka. Naturally.

"This tragedy has added another victim to the toll of deaths for which the terrorists bear responsibility." says London Mayor Ken Livingston. I gather the same thing can be said for the Pakistani man beaten to death in the streets of Nottinghamshire last week. Or the Muslim teacher beaten in South London on Monday. It's all so easy once The Terrorists give you the go-ahead to act out your racial hatred. Right-wing extremists and football hooligans are now teaming up to "exact revenge" on Muslims and immigrants and we wonder why some dark-skinned guy feels the need to run from more than a dozen screaming, gun-wielding men in street clothes. But that's the way things work in our self-defined Age Of Terrorism. Oops. Our bad. Sorry we killed your son/husband/father/brother. But he did act funny. And it was all in a good cause, you know. Here's a check and some coupons.

Some eyewitnesses say the cop who shot de Menezes was holding him down at the time. Were any anglos living in that building similarly tracked by the police? Would they have been? At least the Metropolitan Police Service has admitted the mistake and I'm certain there will be a full investigation. I wish I could expect the same if this incident had occurred in NY or LA.

Terrorists kill innocent people. Cops kill innocent people because they may be terrorists. Soldiers kill innocent people because they may be terrorists or because they happen to stumble into the line of fire. Sounds like innocent people get shafted one way or the other. And, to the joy of the powers that be, the greedy, amoral politicians, the arms dealers, and the blood-hungry religious extremists, the rift grows wider...

And now another massive attack in Egypt. More than 90 dead. Around and around we go.

Uh-oh..

2005-07-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

aaronneathery.com appears to be down. I'm looking into the causes now. Fortunately, I have backups for everything in case I have to switch hosts. Any recommendations would be highly appreciated, BTW.

My Favorite Movies by Era

2005-07-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

Here's a blogmeme I can dig, courtesy of Bill Sherman. I may not have a memory for such trivialities as birthdays, anniversaries, business appointments, funerals and such, but I can damn well remember what my favorite movies were when I was a high school sophomore.

early 80s - War of the Worlds, Forbidden Planet, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

late 80s - The Haunting, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Playtime, Dr. Strangelove

early 90s - Brazil, Monty Python's Meaning Of Life, A Clockwork Orange, Duck Soup, Delicatessen, The Fisher King, Richard III (w/ Sir Ian McKellen), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

late 90s - Diplomaniacs, Munchhausen (1943 UFA), Paths of Glory, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Traffic, Jimmy the Boy Wonder, Soup To Nuts, The City of Lost Children

early 00s - The Mothman Chronicles, The Beatniks, Psyched by the 4D Witch, Waiting for Guffman, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Kiss Me Deadly

Let's Do the Time-Warp Again!

2005-07-18T15:12:00.000-07:00

click on thumbnails

Here's short and sweet Abbott and Costello 2-pager from the 1955 Film Fun Annual drawn, it appears, by the same hand responsible for the 1938 Wheeler and Woolsey strip I posted here earlier. The editors of Film Fun were remarkable for their conservative doggedness, only dropping comedians and comedy teams from their pages after they died or formally split. Joe E. Brown, for instance, was featured in his own Film Fun strip for almost thirty years, disappearing in the late 50s, eons after his film career had fizzled. 1956-57 must have been hell for the permanently time-warped FF. Regulars Oliver Hardy and Frank Randle died and Abbott and Costello went their separate ways after Dance With Me Henry. While Martin and Lewis received their own FF comic in 1956, the last five years of the UK weekly saw a resurgence of home grown talent with Terry-Thomas, Tony Hancock, and Tommy Cooper taking pride of place... all drawn to the end in the same antique style you see here .

War is Hell

2005-07-11T15:56:00.000-07:00

Anthony Piana entertains co-star Susan Goforth with his Snub Pollard impression. Believe it or not, this is a night scene.

It has always struck me as extremely strange that a novel as cinematic and iconic as The War of the Worlds had only been filmed once, and in a manner designed to drain it of any significance (or, at least, the significance Wells intended it to have). Well, now we have two more versions and, frankly, the novel still has yet to be committed to film. Steven Spielberg respectfully ignores the source material while, at the other end of the spectrum, Anthony Hines films the novel without respect or understanding. Heaven knows I wanted to like this. I've been eagerly awaiting Hines' authentic period version of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds for about three years now, ever since Pendragon Pictures decided to drop their original intention to stage the story in the present day and shoot the 1898 novel instead. PP claims this decision was made in the wake of 9/11, fearing a modern day alien invasion story would be in poor taste in a post-9/11 world. This is, of course, a bunch of crap. It's more likely that the decision was made after it became clear that Spielberg's version would be set in the here and now and PP felt that going head to head directly with Spielberg would invite unfavorable comparisons. It didn't bode well that the decision to film the novel was Pendragon Pictures' "Plan B", but I held out hope. Pendragon Pictures then announced that while they wouldn't be able to cast "names", they would be casting actors with "Shakespearian" training. Sounded good, especially as I was laboring under the assumption that this was being shot in the UK where it wouldn't have been too unlikely to hire a moonlighting member of the Royal Shakespeare Company without busting your budget (and where you can't throw a rock without hitting photogenic scenery). And then came the surprising news that "The Little Guy" had won; Pendragon had filmed WOTW in secret (why?) and it was now complete, beating Spielberg's version to, well, DVD. PP's spit and bailing wire website announced a theatrical release date which came and went before they announced that it would appear on DVD and at "select theaters". That didn't bode well either, but the price at Amazon.com was right ($10.49) and my curiosity was peaked so I plunked down my cash.

Pendragon's clunky tagline for H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is "The first authentic movie adaptation of the 1898 H.G. Wells classic novel" and, after a fashion, this is true. But I could film a dozen ten year olds beating the hell out of a tripod-shaped pinata and claim authenticity as long as they recite a few lines from the book. Having sat through every last one of the berserk and unwarranted 180 MINUTES of Hines' "film" (or, rather, digital video with obnoxious, eye-damaging shutter-frame), it is now clear that the authenticity claim is virtually the only thing Hines has to hang his hat on.

As it turns out, H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds was shot in Seattle, not the UK, and I find about as much Shakespearian training in evidence as I do authentic Brits. The performances range from good to unbelievably, teeth-gratingly bad, with a emphasis on the latter. The lead, Anthony Piana wearing a patently phoney Snub Pollard-ish mustache, is good in his dual role as The Writer and The Writer's Brother, and Jack Clay turns the rather thankless role of Ogilvy, the Astronomer and Well-Known Martian Victim, into a charming and all too brief gem. John Kaufman's performance as the crazed Curate indicates a serious lack of rehearsal but is far from the embarrassment that most of the performances are. James Lathrop gives the Artilleryman a truly bizarre Scots/Cockney/Hungarian/Texan twang which renders a lot of his dialogue unintelligible. The woman who plays Mrs. Elphinstone's sister-in-law keeps her lips firmly puckered at all times, giving her an Elmer Fudd-like lisp. And co-screenwriter and producer Susan Goforth wins the Loretta King Award for shamelessly giving herself the plum role of The Writer's Wife when it should have been apparent that she couldn't act. Goforth twitches and fumbles her way through the first twenty minutes of the movie, delivering lines that she doesn't seem to comprehend and acting far more alien than the CGI Martians do. Other showy roles are essayed by people who affect English accents by simply dropping the H's from their dialogue. This is amusing in a bad way for about forty minutes. Past that, it's an endurance contest.

It's needless to relate the story here. Suffice to say that the book is in there, more or less, but with most of Wells' crucial subtext removed or ignored, seemingly by design in some scenes and often due to overeagerness and a lack of respect for the intelligence of the audience. For some reason, Hines' got cold feet over the scene where the Writer murders the hysterical Curate, atheist Wells' poster child for the weaknesses of dogma, in order to prevent his being discovered by the Martians. Hines lets the Curate survive the beating only long enough to allow the Martians to kill him, saving the Writer from the moral consequences of his actions (or, rather, preventing the audience from judging his actions) and also letting the air out of a scene written to show the lengths civilized people will go in order to ensure their personal survival. Hines refuses to even show the weapon the Writer used (the butt end of a meat chopper in the novel). Later, screenwriters Hines and Goforth gut the Artilleryman's grandiose (and social Darwinist) speech about his plans for human survival under the Martians and then arbitrarily drop the scene in which the Writer abandons the Artilleryman after he realizes he's more content to play cards and drink champagne than work. It's one of the most important and telling chapters in the book and Hines jettisoned it, a decision made even more perverse in light of the fact that he pads out the film elsewhere beyond reason with endless scenes of the Writer, or the Artilleryman, or the Writer and the Artilleryman, or sometimes the Curate and the Writer, wandering aimlessly around fields in Washington. Sure, people did walk more in the 19th Century, but the beauty of film (or digital video posing as film) is that it can be edited. Hines' WOTW would lose almost an hour without those scenes.

What's so frustrating about H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is that, although the novel is tailor-made for film treatment, Hines habitually sabotages those elements of the book most suitable for film. In an overzealous fit, for instance, he reveals the first Martian tripods about twelve times in cutaway shots before finally revealing them in full, killing, with one blow, both the suspense and surprise in what should have been a surefire scene if simply filmed as written. "Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground?" asks Wells' narrator in the novel, describing the tripods. Clearly the CGI modelers and animators couldn't. "Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body." This isn't what Hines delivers in the slightest, and that's a let-down because there's a lot of footage (arguably too much) of the tripods. They're a clear holdover from Pendragon's planned modern-day version of the book. Sleek and bug-like, with four stiff mechanical tentacles (usually held aloft because it would have taken more time to animate them as described in the novel), the tripods are also wildly overdesigned in the manner of a comic book artist eagerly trying to display his or her craft. Compare these to Spielberg's version or even the un-Wells-like but effectively eerie.. and simple.. manta ray machines from the George Pal movie. Frankly, I'm a strong believer in integrated production design. If I were to suddenly shift gears and set my movie in Edwardian England rather than present day New York City, I'd feel obligated to ditch what I had and come up with completely new tripod designs, perhaps something with an appropriately steampunk feel to it. But that's just me. On a side note, the Martian tripods in Hines' movie also display a propensity for deliberately stepping on young women, resulting in bathtubs worth of CGI blood. It's very silly and wholly uncharacteristic for Wells' impersonal war machines.

The Heat Ray, another one of Wells' surefire cinematic conceits, also goes AWOL. The Martians don't use a heat ray here, despite what the characters may call it. The CGI crew felt it would be more interesting if the Martians used a device that creates a kind of general "heat malaise" throughout the air. This weapon can cause its victims to burn, vaporize, explode, or skeletonize, depending on the whims of the animator. When we first see it in use, the victims' skeletons continue to writhe on the ground for some time. I'm not sure what that's about. The Martian's other WMD, the Black Smoke, is almost completely absent, probably because of the inability of the CGI crew to animate it. What little Black Smoke we see emerges from the tips of a tripod's metal tentacles rather than from the novel's capsule shot from a gun. The tripod goes out of its way to kill a small throng with the stuff rather than use it to wipe out entire villages, as in the novel. Maybe it was just bored.

The Martians, unlike the tripods, are well designed and faithful to Wells' description. Unfortunately, they are hardly the book's sluggish fish out of water. They dart about nimbly, making liars of most of the characters who describe them and weakening the point behind their reliance on machinery. In the novel, the Martians are vampires who have evolved sharp proboscises to drain the blood from the frail, humanoid creatures which are their native cuisine. This makes humans an obvious substitute. But Wells' creative musings on evolution are weakened when Hines' Martians use technology to suck their victims dry (and I mean completely). They even seem to toy with one woman before draining her body, making their feeding habits seem unnecessarily cruel rather than a simple biological function. In all, it indicates a serious misunderstanding of the central thrust of Wells novel which is, after all, a creative extrapolation of evolutionary theory. Wells' Martians impassively and calculatedly take advantage of an evolutionary gap in the Earth's chain of life only to find themselves fall victim to Earthly bacteria which, naturally, take advantage of the Martian's own evolutionary weakness. Hines' repeatedly portrays the Martians as cruel and vindictive sci-fi baddies rather than cold opportunists, hurting Wells' point and making the Martians far less frightening in the process.

Overall, the film's look is the insult following the injury. If all of Pendragon's cut-rate production techniques were backed up by believable performances, perhaps this wouldn't have mattered quite as much as it does. There's no reason whatsoever why all of the endless Premiere filters and chromakey footage and cheap sub-video game CGI on display in WOTW couldn't be put to good use. But their clumsy mishandling just makes everything that much worse. It's difficult enough to suspend disbelief with the kinds of performances we're treated to here. It becomes impossible thanks to the poorly handled CGI and composite video images that litter 98% of the film. Every now and again, these strangely unreal composite images seem on the verge of coalescing into a style unto themselves, rather like the films of Karel Zeman or a Max Ernst collage, but all of that is wrecked when the same bit of bad animation is recycled for the umpteenth time, or when the chromakeyed footage is sandwiched together without care resulting in shots of people standing in front of walls of water or background footage that's completely out of scale for the actors standing in front of it. It's just artless bungling at that point. The chromakey compositing, the editing, and the CGI all completely collapse during the interminable Thunder Child/ Tripods v. Battleships sequence. Scale and perspective go out the window as poorly designed CGI boats glide about sideways over video footage of a lake. The action is nearly impossible to follow. One of the book's climactic moments (Britain's, and thus the world's, most advanced weaponry is shown conclusively useless in this battle) is a total abortion in Hines' film. And, again, the scene seems to last an eternity.

As it turned out, Pendragon amply proved a rule of thumb of independent filmmaking; if you can't afford to show it, don't show it. But Hines holds nothing back. Everything is shown. Nothing is implied. It's as if Hines couldn't bear to cut corners or scale back what he wanted onscreen, so he used every effect he could, no matter how crummy or unconvincing, to achieve some semblance of what he had in his head. This useless tail chasing only serves to further destroy whatever intentions he might have had and the results would tax the patience of a saint. And the truly sad part is that even if Hines had ILM-grade effects, genuine English settings, and performers from the Royal Shakespeare Company, H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds would still be an extremely bad movie. The screenplay, direction, and editing are all sub-par, and those are things that only talent, not money, could help.

At the end of the credits (even the credits seem run on forever), there's a little tag inviting the audience to see Pendragon Pictures' next film, Chrome. Now that's chutzpah.

"She has the power...to terrorize!"

2005-07-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

Found this nifty poster on Ebay for Cathy's Curse (aka Cauchemares (1977)), one of my favorite PD dollar DVD titles. It's very representative of the film it's promoting in the budget-minded approach to color, unimaginative layout, and half-assed tagline. Incidentally, there is no butler in this peculiar Canadian horror flick, which is a shame. Cathy's Curse does, however, contain the most bizarre false-scare in the history of horror cinema. Blood is found dribbled all over the sleeve of a coat in a closet and, after a bit of panic, Cathy's dad, The Voice of Reason, reaches up onto a shelf above the clothes and pulls down two bottles of blood! "One tipped over." he says with relief. They belonged to his late father, he explains, who "used the stuff like a tonic. He was always afraid he would run out of his own!" And everyone has a good laugh. So his dad used to drink blood? Like a tonic? And kept it unrefrigerated in a closet? And it never congealed? Moments like that make me wonder if Cathy's Curse was perhaps made by extraterrestrials.

The Return of Society's End?

2005-06-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

Blues guitar whiz Josh Foster and I formed the guitar/keyboard combo Society's End waaaaaaay back in 1994 and produced Toast Kit, the experimental album that unleashed the wonders of Pastor Edwards and The Ballad Of Lobster Boy upon the world. Now, eleven years later, the possibility of a second Society's End album has finally arisen. No guarantees, but a new album looks more likely to happen than not at this point.. and if it does happen, I promise the results will turn your frown sideways. Stay tuned.

Toast Kit CDs are available, incidentally. Contact me at aaronneathery@gmail.com for more info.

Why, yes! That is a picture of Felix Adler on our album cover! How ever did you guess?

Society's End, 1994. Aaron Neathery (left) and Josh Foster (right) Don't make us angry.

Dollar DVDs: Reviewsapoppin!

2005-06-28T05:43:00.000-07:00

It has been dollar DVD mania around here ever since my local Kroger's began carrying both the EastWest and (weird, but not in a good way) MMM titles. Kroger's put up a full display and, with the exception of the cartoons, the EastWest titles were picked clean in less than a week. Between Kroger's and Dollar Tree, I now have two chains within walking distance of my house who carry God's Own Gift to Obscure Media Junkie Cheapskates. The EastWest PD titles are particularly nifty as they're being culled from sources that haven't been tapped by other dollar DVD manufacturers, namely TV movies, Italian imports, and cheapjack horror films from the 70s and 80s. Better yet, EastWest gives you two movies per DVD (both crammed on one side so the encoding leaves you with a somewhat rough but decent picture), a deal being matched by the more conventional Treasure Box and their double-sided "Family Value Collection" DVDs. Treasure Box, having saturated the market with copies of Africa Screams and Road to Bali, is finally starting to dig up some pretty rare and fascinating PD titles of their own. Here are some of my favorite finds from the past few weeks.

The Bat (1959) (Treasure Box) - 1/2 of a double feature with the ubiquitous PD classic House On Haunted Hill, I had assumed this was the just as ubiquitous 1926 Roland West silent.. but it AIN'T! It's a 1959 remake..or, rather, another film version of the Avery Hopwood play, starring Vincent Price, Agnes Moorehead, and DARLA HOOD from the Hal Roach Our Gang shorts!! Moorehead and Price's performances are better than this bizarrely atavistic little film deserve. Never has the Old Dark House horror/mystery format seemed more stilted than when filmed with slick late-50s production techniques and performed by actors less inclined towards stylized theatrics. Special mention goes to the cool jazzy theme song which would have been more at home in one of the German Dr. Mabuse thrillers from the 60s, or maybe one of the Eddie Constantine Lemmy Caution movies.

City of the Walking Dead (aka Incubo sulla cittÃ contaminata, aka Nightmare City) (1980) (EastWest) - Italian Romero rip-off with a few genuine scares in spite of some decidedly unconvincing zombie makeup jobs. An irradiated airplane lands without clearance at an airport in Italy and the crew, now blood-sucking zombies, escape the plane and spread a zombie plague throughout the city. There's a hilarious scene of zombies running around in a field while a friendly stray dog playfully dashes around between their legs. The "twist ending" is lame beyond words.

Carnage (1986) (EastWest) - A very late Andy Milligan film made to cash in on the success of Poltergeist. A couple of newlyweds buys a house haunted by the previous owners, a couple of newlyweds who committed suicide. All sorts of silly, not-terribly spooky goings-on ensue, including several gory and highly unrealistic deaths, but it takes forever for the dimbulb newlyweds to catch on to the fact that they're may actually be something not quite right with the house. A priest getting a cleaver in the head finally convinces them to clear out, but (gasp) it's too late! You can pretty much guess the ending.

Class Reunion Massacre (1978) (EastWest) - Holy cow! All through this, I kept saying "There's no way in hell the filmmakers would have given this a title as limp and prosaic as Class Reunion Massacre." And I was right! The real title is The Redeemer: Son of Satan! and it goes a little way towards expressing the high-minded lunacy of this slasher/art film. A pre-teen boy comes strolling out of the middle of a lake, hops on a waiting bus, and heads to a nearby church where he joins a group a choirboys getting ready for a service. The preacher's blood-and-thunder sermon demonizes "social undesireables" like gays, gluttons, and women who enjoy sex. We then join up with a small group of thirty-somethings who have all been invited to a high school reunion. Of course, they're all the "types" mentioned in the sermon. There's the promiscuous girl, the gluttonous football player, the gay actor, the lesbian, the lawyer, etc.. But the joke is on them! There is no class reunion and they're all locked inside the school with a crazed psycho-killer with supernatural powers! In one unsettling sequence, the killer, dressed as a clown and joined by some kind of marionette, uses the school's gymnasium to deliver a rambling, incoherent speech about sins and redemption. The Redeemer was a very earnest attempt on the part of some first-time filmmakers to make an exploitation feature with some kind of depth. Loads of symbolism to be found here. Well worth a watch or two.

Gangster Story (1960) (Treasure Box) - Walter Matthau directs himself and his wife Carol Grace (Truman Capote's model for Holly Golightly) in this clunky but not meritless late noir. Gangster Matthau pulls off one of the least likely bank heists on record and then falls in love with librarian Grace. Believe it or not, things don't work out well for them. A spiritual cousin to The Beatniks (also 1960), Paul Frees' sole directorial effort.

The New Adventures of Heidi (1978) (Treasure Box) - Mostly awful TV musical, saved by the presence of Burl Ives as Heidi's grandfather. The real problem here lies not with the quality of the performances or even the story, but with the HORRIBLE songs, and there are a LOT of them.. more than in your average musical, it seems. When Ives begins to go blind, and is then assumed dead after vanishing in the woods, Heidi gets a job as Best Friend to a Poor Little Rich Girl. Grandfather finally returns and the Poor Little Rich Girl's family pays for the surgery that restores his eyesight.

King Solomon's Treasure (1977) (Treasure Box) - H. Rider Haggard gets the Harry Allan Towers treatment. Towers was also responsible for the Christopher Lee Fu Manchu movies, to which this film is superior in just about every way. Shot on location in Africa, King Solomon's Treasure boasts some beautiful scenery, some enjoyably laughable dinosaurs and giant crabs, and an all-star cast including Britt Ekland, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Patrick Macnee and David McCallum. The movie on the flip side is King Solomon's Mine, a beautiful British production from 1937 starring Cedrick Hardwick and the remarkable Paul Robeson. who among other achievements, was the first African-American ever to play Othello with a white cast.

The Magic Sword (1962) (Treasure Box) - Probably Bert I. Gordon's best film, a kind of low-rent version of the Harryhausen-Schneer Dynamation movies with a lot of wit and some surprising gore. Knight Gary Lockwood and six national stereotypes go on a quest to rescue princess Anne Helm from the clutches of a warlock played by the surprisingly lively (for the 60s) Basil Rathbone. Estelle Winwood is Lockwood's foster witch and Rathbone's comic rival. Watch for Maila "Vampira" Nurmi as The Hag! The Magic Sword is one of seemingly dozens of movies from which footage was stolen for Dünyayi kurtaran adam (1982), known on this side of the Atlantic as The Turkish Star Wars.

King Arthur, The Young Warlord (1972) (Treasure Box) - On the flip side of The Magic Sword is this peculiar little UK film, actually a few episodes of Arthur of the Britons (1972-73) strung together into a feature. It's actually a good attempt at creating a hypothetical foundation for the Arthur mythos. Oliver Tobias stars as a dark age Celtic warlord who attempts to join the British tribes together under his rule in order to maintain peace. A young Brian Blessed appears as Mark of Cornwall and takes huge bites out of boulders and trees. The primary flaw of the movie/series is that every character is more likeable than Arthur.

Torture Chamber (1967) (EastWest) - This stylish German horror film, Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel, was presumably never released as The Pit and the Pendulum in the US so audiences wouldn't confuse it with the 1961 Roger Corman movie. Instead, it was released as The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism, Castle of the Walking Dead, The Blood Demon, The Snake Pit, The Snake Pit and the Pendulum, and The Torture Room. Under any name, I prefer this film to Corman's film. Christopher Lee stars as Count Regula, a sadist who is drawn and quartered for torturing virgins to death in his private dungeon and who later returns from the dead to claim his final victim in order to attain immortality. Lots of visual references to 16th century painter Hieronymus Bosch, especially in one amazing scene featuring trees studded with human body parts. Packaged as a double feature with The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Hammer's last Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing Dracula movie.

The Alpha Incident (1978) and The Capture of Bigfoot (1979) (EastWest) - Bill Rebane, known primarily for The Giant Spider Invasion (1975) and the excruciating non-film Monster-a Go Go (1965) also made a few other drive-in quickies in the 1970s and 80s and EastWest has been kind enough to release two of them on one DVD. The Alpha Incident is the better of the two. Inspired (if that's the word) by The Andromeda Strain, a virus from Mars is set loose in a rail station. The five people who may or may not have contracted it are trapped inside when the station is quarantined by the government. Worse, those who contract it can't fall asleep because, if they do, their heads become special effects and ooze and splatter tempra paint all over the place. Ralph Meeker, the best actor ever to play Mike Hammer (in Kiss Me Deadly (1955)) and who gives one of the best performances in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957), appears here in a colorless role with virtually no lines despite the fact that his name is above the title. The ending was "inspired" by the ending of The Night of the Living Dead. The Capture of Bigfoot isn't as good but some impressive scene-chewing from Richard Kennedy keeps it interesting.

Chariots of the Gods (1970) (EastWest) - Who needs empiricism when it's more fun to believe that the ancient Mayans were zipping around in rocketships? Erich Von Daniken's "ancient astronaut" theories are a load of horse pucks but this documentary based on his book provides some excellent views of some very interesting archeological sites and ancient monuments. Also includes some wistful footage of the National Museum of Iraq before it became the Baghdad Grab N' Go (does anyone know whether the famous Baghdad Battery has gone missing or not?). Would you believe this was nominated for an Oscar?

Mooch (aka Mooch Goes to Hollywood) (1971) (Treasure Box) - This week's hands-down WTF prizewinner is this berserk little heap of Hollywood self-reference written and produced by Jim Backus and starring Higgins the Dog (aka Benji), masquerading here (poorly in some shots) as a female. Mooch arrives in Hollywood on a boxcar complete with her belongings in a little handkerchief tied to the end of a little stick and quickly hits the streets, ready to use her canine wiles to shmooze her way onto the silver screen. And how can she go wrong with the omniscient voice of Zsa Zsa Gabor ringing in her little noggin, giving her advice and steering her from the evil lure of the porn industry? Indeed, in one "fantasy" sequence, we are treated to the sight of Mooch prancing around in a little sparkly g-string, something Senator Santorum has warned us about (later, we even get to see Mooch dressed up as a Playboy Bunny, something else Sen. Santorum would not approve of). In her travels around the city, Mooch meets Vincent Price (who drives a Jeep and flashes the peace sign), James Darren, Jill St. John, and Jim Backus himself. Jim Backus, in the movie's most unabashedly unhinged moment, is shown cavorting on the beach dressed as Mr. Magoo, complete with a putty nose! We even get to see Jim recording the soundtrack for a cartoon. At the end, Mooch ends up at one of Jim's garden parties and we get brief glances of Darren McGavin, Marty Allen, Cesar Romero, and an ailing Edward G. Robinson! Mickey Rooney appears briefly lurking outside a porno theater. MUST BE SEEN TO BE BELIEVED!

"Curses! If it weren't for you meddling hippies..."

2005-06-24T06:54:00.000-07:00

If ever there were any doubts that the Bush Administration had completely jumped the shark, let them be dispelled by Karl "Puppetmaster" Rove's lunatic remarks made at a fund-raiser Wednesday in Manhattan.

Karl Rove came to the heart of Manhattan last night to rhapsodize about the decline of liberalism in politics, saying Democrats responded weakly to Sept. 11 and had placed American troops in greater danger by criticizing their actions.

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, "I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble."

_________________

Mr. Rove also said American armed forces overseas were in more jeopardy as a result of remarks last week by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who compared American mistreatment of detainees to the acts of "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others."

"Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year?" Mr. Rove asked. "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

In short: liberals are traitors! They're undermining our precious War on Terror! If we lose, you know who to blame! The same folk who made sure we'd lose Vietnam! Dirty peacenik hippies!!

Bush and his 1/2 watt brain trust dropped the ball on a war they made up from thin air (if you can't win your own manufactured war, what the hell good are you??). And now that they're realizing that they've planted this country in an unimaginably costly lose/lose situation, they're trying to foist off the responsibility for their quagmire onto the very people who warned them against it in the first place! These filthy bastards know what's coming around that corner and, thanks to their arrogant, ham-fisted bungling, it's not victory and a glorious democratized mideast and oodles of cheap oil. It's defeat; ignominious, expensive, humiliating defeat. The kind of defeat that will hang around the neck of their party (and this country) like the rotting albatross it is unless they can save face by convincing the American people that the disaster wasn't their fault. With their approval ratings plummeting all across the board, these acts of PR desperation should come as no surprise and I can safely assume that their rancor is only going to get worse the closer to defeat they come.

In re: to Rove's comments, I can't say that his endorsement of hysterical and unfocused revenge as a valid diplomatic stance is unexpected, but I really have to wonder what the hell is supposed to be wrong about understanding your enemy. Even if you didn't want to get at the root of terrorism by figuring out why people would feel the need to strap explosives to their bodies or fly planes into buildings, wouldn't it make tactical sense to understand your enemy? Or has Bush's cabal swallowed their own propaganda and truly believe that they're dealing with scatterbrained, suicidal "crazies" who just need a good killin', hence their unconcern about creating scores of new potential terrorists in the mideast via torture, humiliation, and, who knew.. unfocused revenge? It's a vicious cycle and the neocons are more than happy to fuel it because they're making out like bandits (which, of course, was the point behind creating a phoney war in the first place). So pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Your enemies are just loopy foreign bad guys who hate your freedom.

Naturally, the White House and so-called liberal media are dutifully ignoring Rove's "motives of liberals" comment, the lynchpin of his tirade. As Atrios says, "For the record, my motives aren't to get more troops killed. If those were my motives I'd ship them off to a war on false pretenses without sufficient equipment to keep them safe." The bottom line is this; to this Administration, half of this country, probably more, is the enemy, and that includes Democrats in the armed forces. The party that has happily sucked face with Saddam Hussein, continues to do so with the Saudis, and is getting our troops and Iraqi civilians killed by the thousands for their greed, has nothing but disdain for anyone who would ever second guess what they're doing (more than half of the country at the moment according to Zogby and the American Research Group). They're tyrants and every day they hold power is a blot on this country's honor and reputation.

"Fantastic!"

2005-06-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

Russell T. Davies managed to, at least temporarily, shine the spotlight away from his weaknesses as a writer long enough to pull off a genuinely gripping two-part season finale for Doctor Who. The storyline for Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways is every bit as anaemic as anything else he has written for the series, but the action, characterization, and many of the individual ideas are so well handled that the lack of a truly compelling plot seems trifling. In particular, Davies' clever reinvention of the xenophobic Daleks as self-hating, religious fundamentalist xenophobes was easily his most inspired stab at satire/social commentary this season. And while there's much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair from some die-hard Whovians over the Doctor's steadfast and "uncharacteristically cowardly" refusal to play the role of killer when his hand is forced, I felt that this was probably one of the most solidly Doctor-ish moments of the new series, and a fine underlining of the show's pacifist roots. Unfortunately, Davies rather spoils the mood by once again having a companion or secondary character, in this instance Rose, pull the Doctor's fat from the fire, effectively reducing the Doctor's role in the story and freeing him (and Russell T. Davies) from the somewhat sticky cause and effect of the decisions he makes. One of RTD's strengths as a Dr. Who writer has been a firm understanding of some of the more ritualistic elements of this particular universe and he has therefore been able to deftly toy with, and subvert, audience expectations. Here, for instance, just to keep audiences off-kilter, he introduced Lynda, an obvious tailor-made replacement for current companion Rose Tyler, only to make her one more of the finale's slew of Dalek casualties. But Davies' tendency to get too cute with his brand of expectation shuffling has also led to a general weakening of the Doctor's central role. By repeatedly overemphasizing the Doctor's fallibility in order to keep audiences guessing, RTD has made the Doctor's ability to survive deadly situations seem more a matter of blind luck rather than guile. This may have much to do with Davies' apparent intention to transform the historically monolithic show into a Buffy-like ensemble piece, but, design or not, it's a mistake and one that I hope doesn't continue to develop.

Nonetheless, the finale was yet another of the first season's triumphs, due primarily to the strength of conviction on the part of the cast and crew. Nowhere was this more evident than in the climactic regeneration scene, a wonderful set piece for stars Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston that gave each a chance to shine (literally, in Eccleston's case). Eccleston naturally ran with it, giving us a final glimpse of the kind of hopeful sadness that defined his Doctor. And it's something of a tribute to David Tennant's performance skills that in his mere twenty some odd seconds of screentime as Doctor number ten, he's already firmly outlined his character, a feat that had only once before been achieved by Colin Baker.

And, hell, even BBC chairman Michael Grade, the man who axed the series back in the 80s for being "rubbish" is now a fan, calling it "a classy, popular triumph for people of all ages and all backgrounds." I can agree with that. Here's to another twenty-seven seasons..

".. a face resembling the back of a Glasgow tramcar.."

2005-06-17T10:35:00.000-07:00

More zaniness from the pages of the venerable UK comic weekly Film Fun (12/10/38). Laurel and Hardy appeared on the front and back covers of Film Fun from 1934 until Babe Hardy's death in 1957. The spot was eventually taken by Abbott and Costello and, later, Martin and Lewis. (click on the thumbnails)

Also much looking forward to Saturday's season finale of Doctor Who. Thirteen episodes in and we're getting Dalek invasion fleets and a regeneration! The BBC has quite reasonably renewed the series through 2007 (plus two Christmas specials!).

New Who Review (is coming right at you)

2005-06-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

(fangeek mode on)

Doctor Who is back and it's both better and worse than I'd expected.

First, the better. The new Doctor Who (technically season one, but actually season twenty-seven of TV's longest-running science fiction serial) can be considered successful just about every count. Some of the season one stories are easily among the best ever written for Doctor Who and two, Dalek and Father's Day, are dramatic television at its finest. There have been very few weak performances and a surplus of terrific ones. Christopher Eccleston's performance as an endearing if emotionally-damaged Doctor is nothing short of a triumph and it's a huge shame that he'll be leaving the series at the end of the season (although expectations are very high for Doctor #10, David Tennant). Billie Piper's portrayal of Rose Tyler has salvaged a rather weak character and made her one of the series' strongest companions. Visually, the new series is remarkable. The art directors have eschewed the budget-driven gaudiness of the 1997 Fox TV movie in favor of a no less glossy but more subdued, almost gothic look. The beautiful new Tardis interior appears to have been inspired in part by H. R. Geiger's Alien designs, the Tardis from the Fox movie (the best thing about that turkey, aside from Sylvester McCoy), and, interestingly enough, from the ramshackle, jerry-rigged Tardis from the two 1960s Peter Cushing movies. The new, partially-orchestral version of Ron Grainer's opening theme is extremely cool, and, best of all, the new Dalek design is pretty much the old Dalek design with a few well-thought out frills thrown in.

And worse? Russell T. Davies is writing the bulk of the series.

(hypercritical fangeek mode on)

It's no small irony that the man responsible for getting Doctor Who back on the air is also the new series' weakest link. Russell T. Davies, the creator of the original UK Queer As Folk, tends to value Grade Z emotional drama and weak parody over science fiction or action or even adequate storytelling. A great deal of Davies' character work is engaging and well-considered (Eccleston's Doctor is one of the best-realized TV characters of the last five years, although I'm not sure how much of that is Davies' doing) but is largely rendered ineffective in his own scripts by remarkably lazy plotting. Davies also lets his worship of Joss Whedon leak through his writing like a particularly unfortunate stain, most evident in the weakest episode of season one, the essentially plotless Boom Town, and its wisecracking, alien-hunting "Team Tardis" ("Worst... episode... ever.."). Davies' shortcomings as a writer are even more obvious when held against every season one episode he didn't write. Mark Gatiss's The Unquiet Dead, Rob Shearman's Dalek, Steven Moffat's The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, and especially Paul Cornell's Father's Day, are among the best Dr. Who stories ever produced for the small screen and, not coincidentally, each was written by a veteran of either the novels or the Big Finish audio stories (or both), people who have honed their skills as writers for this very special franchise. Russell T. Davies, who has made no secret of his indifference to science fiction, is one of the only people involved with the new series who insist on it as some kind of "re-imagining". While the other writers draw from, and expand on, the strengths the original series, Davies is insistent upon rebuilding the show from the ground up as a soapish sci-fi spoof, full of fart jokes and sledgehammer satirical references to current politics. He points to the series' ratings as proof of the success of his formula, but I believe the ratings were bound to be good, soap opera dramatics or no. People have been waiting for Doctor Who's return to TV for years and the only way you can screw up a sure thing like this is to drive viewers away. I have no doubt that the new series will continue to thrive in the coming years even with Davies at the helm, but I can't help but think about how much stronger it could be without the obligatory love triangles and hamfisted satire Davies' apparently feels are necessary to keep an audience's attention rather than solid storytelling.

Screen Gems Redux

2005-06-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

After a long sleep, The Columbia Crow's Nest, the web's premier information source about Columbia's animation unit(s), has been updated with dozens of screen grabs and other fun stuff. The highlight is this month's online cartoon, Tree For Two (1943), starring Screen Gems' most popular characters, the Fox and the Crow. As I've said before, Screen Gems' 40s cartoons hold their own against Warners, Lantz, and MGM (and, needless to say, Famous and Terrytoons), and this short is no exception. Great personality animation, especially on the Fox, and some beautiful staging on display here. Also worth pointing out is the fact that, unlike most cartoon studios of the 40s, Screen Gems put a premium on witty dialogue. This is particularly important here as the Fox and Crow were one of the very few cartoon comedy teams of the 1940s whose character interplay was analogous to that of flesh-and-blood vaudeville teams, and dialogue was therefore vital to the characters' effectiveness. The only real flaw here is Screen Gems' typically loose pacing. Tree For Two doesn't really build to much of a payoff in the way that, say, the Warners cartoons usually did, and most of the gags, as good as they are, tend to seem disconnected. Naturally, the Screen Gems cartoons produced under former Warner director Frank Tashlin, such as Wolf Chases Pigs (1942), have much tighter construction.

Another major bonus (bonusses? boni?) are the screen grabs for Lil' Anjil (1936), the studio's one-time-only attempt at producing a genuine George Herriman-style Krazy Kat cartoon. I recall that Leonard Maltin dumps on this decidedly historic cartoon in Of Mice and Magic, but I have a silent, truncated home movie print of Lil' Anjil and can say that, visually, at least, the Mintz/Screen Gems artists pretty much hit the mark. In particular, Krazy's ecstatic dance after getting beaned by one of Ignatz's bricks is letter-perfect Herriman.

The wealth of material at The Columbia Crow's Nest is a reminder of what a huge chunk of American animation history is currently AWOL. Even Van Beuren, previous holder of the title of America's Most Obscure Golden Age Animation Studio, gets more exposure because their cartoons, being in the Public Domain, are readily available on dollar DVDs. It's an indictment of the stifling effect of market forces (especially in regard to cultural evolution) that Sony steadfastly refuses to release the hundreds of Mintz and Screen Gems cartoons they hold, despite their quality and importance, because of a perceived lack of marketability. It's our loss.

Merry Christmas!

2005-05-31T09:32:00.000-07:00

A colossal software/hardware hiccup in December 2004 prevented me from releasing my annual Christmas music video on time, but I managed to sort out a few things over the Memorial Day weekend and here it is, a mere five+ months late. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present Santa Is Watching You (right click/save as). Enjoy... if you dare.

Wheeler addenda Woolsey

2005-05-27T06:56:00.000-07:00

In honor of Bill Sherman's latest Wheeler and Woolsey-related blog entry, I'm posting this rare 1938 W&W comic strip from the pages of Film Fun, a UK comic weekly that also featured strips starring Laurel and Hardy, George Formby, Harold Lloyd, Abbott and Costello, and, eventually, Martin and Lewis. Interestingly, Bert and Bob are depicted as rivals here, something they never were in their pictures (especially over a woman. Bert had Dotty Lee while Bob usually had his own love interest in the form of women as diverse as Thelma Todd and Jobyna Howland). One quibble with Bill's assessment of Girl Crazy (1932); the W&W version is actually much closer to the original Gershwin musical than the 1943 Garland/Rooney version. Bert was given original Broadway star Willie Howard's Jewish cabby role, revised here for ethnicity as Jimmy Deegan. Bill's keen eye spotted Margaret Dumont in a small role (she was later to appear with the boys in Kentucky Kernels (1934) and their woeful last picture, High Flyers (1938)), and here are a few other notables to be found populating the periphery of Girl Crazy:

Lon Cheney, Jr. as a dancer!
Nat Pendleton as a cop (of course)
Monty Collins as a bartender (familiar face in RKO's Clark and McCullough shorts and later to be teamed with comic heavy Tom Kennedy in his own series at Columbia)

click on de pic for to make it beeg!

Q Who?

2005-05-23T21:08:00.000-07:00

It's remarkable how, despite inextricably interlocked global economies and the ever-expanding communications network, some fairly prominent examples of pop media never quite jump the border between East and West. Take Lao Fu Zi or "Old Master Q" for example. Master Q is the most popular and enduring comic character in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan; the subject of six movies in Mandarin and Cantonese, a high-profile CGI/live action feature in 2001, various live action and animated TV series, plays, and countless strip collections, but it remains almost completely unknown outside the Chinese community here in the US... and this despite the fact that OMQ is primarily pantomime.

Created by cartoonist Wang Jia Xi in 1964, Master Q is both a well-defined personality and a utility character designed to be dropped into countless gag situations. Master Q, unmistakable in his caricatured traditional Chinese garb, is a scrappy and somewhat childlike middle-aged man; mercurial but often kindly and possessing an innocent sense of curiosity. Most of Wang Jia Xi's gags are highly original, insightful, and occasionally surreal. At times he depends upon tried and true gag motifs such as the venerable "stranded on a desert island", "magic carpet", and "jailbreak", but his gags usually have an engagingly random, daydream-like quality, and even timeworn formula are used as springboards for original ideas. Wang Jia Xi is as facile a draftsman as he is a gag writer. His meticulous artwork and staging reflects the inescapable influence of Herge while also maintaining aspects of traditional Chinese brushwork. Having dipped into a couple hundred of these very accessible strips on the official English-language homepage, it's not hard to understand Old Master Q's popularity in Asia. What's hard to understand is why OMQ isn't better known here.

The official OMQ site (English)
The official official OMQ site (Chinese)
More about OMQ (English)

Hearts and Minds

2005-05-20T06:39:00.000-07:00

What is it going to take? The $9 billion in Iraqi reconstruction money our government lost while they clamp down on "costly" social services at home? How about systematic torture? From today's New York Times:

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.

"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

Bad apples? A fish rots from the head down. Now that the WH has spent some quality time using Newsweek's Koran story to throw the Fear of God into a largely suppliant press, how will they react to this decidedly indisputable NYT bombshell? Let me guess. "This kind of story doesn't help." "We're investigating."

Wake up, America.

RIP Frank Gorshin

2005-05-18T11:39:00.000-07:00

In the final tally, I'm sure Frank Gorshin is going to be remembered for two things: Batman and impressions... but mostly Batman. This is a shame because Frank Gorshin really was one of the best impressionists of all time. Gorshin's impressions were superior to those of, say, Rich Little, because he would give his characters a purpose and a soul. Gorshin could give life to his impressions because he was also a skilled comic actor. Who is Rich Little without impressions, anyway?

As far as Batman is concerned, Gorshin's uncanny ability to shift gears between manic glee and brooding rage at the drop of a hat made him the villain to watch. Unlike Cesar Romero (who wouldn't even shave his mustache!) as the Joker, or Burgess Meredith as the Penguin, Frank Gorshin made the Riddler an honest-to-god menace. He always seemed as if he were one step away from dropping the silly riddles and jamming a switchblade into the Caped Crusader's head. And while John Astin is another extremely underrated comic actor, his two appearances as the Riddler only served to throw Gorshin's total mastery of the role into sharp relief (even Jim Carrey had to defer to Gorshin's superior characterization). Bluntly, while Batman gave Frank Gorshin his lasting fame (and the typecasting he could never shake off), he was better than the show deserved. Amidst all the high-profile performers who used the show as something of a paid vacation, Gorshin actually acted.

Frank Gorshin always seemed on the verge of stardom. He certainly had the talent to back it up, but the fame he deserved never quite happened. He had several extremely showy roles at the start of his career in movies such as the excellent Hot Rod Girl (1956), Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), and Studs Lonigan (1960), but the mid-60s saw him become everyone's favorite TV guest star and his film career was unfortunately allowed to dry up. Towards the end of his life, while he still appeared in the occasional high-profile feature (such as Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys in 1995), Gorshin's talent was wasted in things like Beethoven's 3rd and Mail Order Bride. Ironically, just months before he died, he had finished shooting Angels With Angels, an extremely rare starring vehicle. Angels With Angels, a fantasy about George Burns and Gracie Allen attempting to get back together in the highly bureaucratic afterlife, also happens to be Rodney Dangerfield's last film. Gorshin's performance as George Burns had apparently been honed to perfection in the Vegas one-man show he had been appearing in for the last couple of years, Say Goodnight, Gracie. I doubt Angels With Angels was/is a classic in the making, though, especially if the shockingly sloppy poster mock-up on its IMDB entry is any indication... but, hey.. any film that co-stars Adam West and Soupy Sales can't be all bad.

Bob Woolsey? Cyclonic?

2005-05-16T19:59:00.000-07:00

The Pop Culture Gadabout has a grifty post up about Wheeler and Woolsey's would-be last feature, Cracked Nuts (1931). RKO did split the team briefly, giving each comic one feature apiece, but really only intending to keep Bert Wheeler around. Oddly enough, the lesser-talented Robert Woolsey's solo tryout, Everything's Rosie, turned out the better of the two. Film comedy vet Clyde Bruckman (who eventually committed suicide with a gun borrowed from Buster Keaton) directed Woolsey in this extremely predictable but likeable carnival farce which owes tremendous debts to both W. C. Fields' Poppy and Joe Cook's Rain Or Shine. Woolsey plays sideshow huckster Dr. J. Dockweiler Droop, a lovable conman who has adopted and raised Rosie, a lovable orphan. Rosie falls in love with lovable and handsome Billy Lowe, and Dr. Droop just about wrecks her romance when he cons a few of the Very Influential guests at Billy's 21st birthday party. A tearjerker ending sees Dr. Droop leaving his adopted daughter behind with Billy rather than let her ruin her life by sticking around the carnival scene with an old reprobate like him (sob!). Woolsey almost pulls off his role as huckster with a heart of gold, but the emotional requirements of the script are just out of his reach as an actor. Hey.. he simply wasn't that type of comedian (ever seen Groucho Marx try to play a straight role?). But as predictable and bland as Everything's Rosie is, it's comedy gold compared to Bert Wheeler's virtually unwatchable solo effort, Too Many Cooks (1931). Leave it to RKO to showcase Bert, their star comic, in a stale domestic comedy where he doesn't get to sing or dance or tell jokes. An unbelievable waste of talent and highly-flammable nitrate stock. Needless to say, Bert and Bob got back together in a hurry and continued making profitable pictures for RKO until Woolsey's tragic and premature death in 1938.

And, gosh, aren't these handpainted glass slides purty? In the 1930s, these "coming attractions" would have been projected onto the screen while audience members took their seats.. I think that's still being done in some theaters today, but not with graphics as nice as these!

When was the last time you saw a composer and lyricist get equal billing with a film director?

Gorilla? What Gorilla?

2005-05-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

Hey! Guess what! Bush lied! For all of you who knew in your hearts (and, much more importantly, in your brains) that the Iraq War was an illegal and predetermined act built upon a network of cheap BS, the Downing Street Memo is a bittersweet vindication, especially in the wake of the thousands of deaths and the general chaos that have resulted from neocon blundering. The American corporate press is only now waking up to the Memo's existence after it has been taking center stage in the UK media for over a month. It's not going away, and the longer it sits there like the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the living room, the greater grows the cognitive dissonance over Bush's illegal war. Certainly, the American public may be much more immune to the Real World than the rest of the planet's population, but there has to be a tipping point. Not even in my most cynical moments do I really believe this Administration is going to get away scot-free with the monumental crimes they've committed. The only questions are "when" and "at what cost". And many thanks to Rep. Conyers for being responsible enough to jump on this issue.

www.DowningStreetMemo.com has more. And here are the complete contents of the Memo.

Olsen and Johnson: Comedy Salesmen

2005-05-12T12:09:00.000-07:00

One of the cardinal rules of comedy is never to laugh at your own material. It's usually taken as a sign of disrespect for your audience's ability to determine what they find funny for themselves. In the world of comedy etiquette, it's the equivalent of vomiting on the waiter and then neglecting to leave a tip. Happily, Olsen and Johnson didn't just ignore the comedy etiquette rulebook, they burnt it and then roasted comically oversized prop hotdogs over the flames. Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, both hyper-thyroidal, both pathological pranksters, both musician/songwriters, both buried in Palm Memorial Park, Las Vegas (next to each other), flouted all the rules, especially the one about laughing at your own material. Chic Johnson, the chubby one, was brilliant at it, making his laughter seem far less a desperate plea to win an audience's approval than an in-your-face act of anarchistic defiance rather like Chico Marx's strange insistence that puns are funny. Johnson's chronic need to laugh at his material is usually far funnier than the material itself, and it was such a part of his character that he'd even let loose a few manic giggles when surprised or frightened. Ole Olsen, the team's ostensible straightman, was only just by a matter of degrees. Olsen wouldn't think twice about slapping a pie in someone's face, but Johnson would slap himself in the face with a pie, or two, and then dump a glass of water over his head. Unfortunately, they never really quite found their niche in films despite truckloads of talent and, more importantly, energy. O&J's fifteen year on/off flirtation with Hollywood saw them working at three different studios:

Warner Bros.: During the early 30s rush to bring established stage comedians to the screen, the fledgling Warner Bros. studios hired vaudeville stars Olsen and Johnson for three pictures, most probably because they were affordable, and billed them as "America's Funniest Clowns".. a debatable claim in 1930. Although Johnson's laugh serves as a memorable hook, Olsen and Johnson are little more than utility comics in these early talkies. They've also dragged their methodical stage timing along with them so their delivery is, consequently, slow and not very effective on film. After headlining in Oh Sailor Behave! in 1930, the team was demoted somewhat to semi-headliners in Fifty Million Frenchmen (co-starring William Gaxton), and took a complete backseat to Broadway star Winnie Lightner in Gold Dust Gertie, an innovative farce comedy that flew in the face of tradition by exclusively featuring extremely unlikable, unpleasant characters you couldn't give a hang about. After two years at Warner's, O&J headed back to the boards.

Republic: In 1936 and 37, O&J starred in two peculiar B-comedy potboilers at Republic, a studio known almost exclusively for westerns and serials. Country Gentlemen and All Over Town are actually more enjoyable than the team's bigger-budgeted WB pictures, but Olsen and Johnson still haven't found their footing. While their delivery and timing have become much sharper, the films are far from ideal vehicles for them. Country Gentlemen shoehorns the team into a plot-heavy, character-driven story about conmen and oil wells that feels as though it were written for someone else (Ole plays the romantic lead for godsake!). The backstage whodunit All Over Town comes closer to the mark. O&J have plenty of opportunities to open up their bag of vaudeville routines and even get to pick up their instruments and play for once (both men were classically trained musicians; Ole on the violin and Chic on the piano. For some reason, these skills never really figured in their movies). The director, James W. Horne, was a Hal Roach veteran who had just recently wrapped up work on Laurel and Hardy's best feature, Way Out West. Familiar Hal Roach faces also appear in supporting roles (most notably Jimmy Finlayson, every comedy team's favorite stooge). But All Over Town never quite comes together, largely because it isn't very funny. Olsen and Johnson set Hollywood aside once again in 1938 when they finally hit it big with their Broadway hit Hellzapoppin', a free-form smorgasbord of gags, prop comedy, and musical numbers that fixed O&J in the public mind once and for all as comedy maniacs.

Universal: By 1941, Hellzapoppin' had run for a record 1,404 performances and Olsen and Johnson were nationally famous. Universal bought the screen rights to the revue and O&J were finally set free to be as dangerously madcap as they cared to be. Unlike the stage revue, the film Hellzapoppin' was saddled with a rather convoluted plotline concerning a romantic triangle, but screenwriter Warren Wilson was wise enough to shove this stuff into the background and concentrate on Nat Perrin's gag material from the stage show. Any discussion of the plots of Olsen and Johnson's four films for Universal would be meaningless. What matters here are the quality and quantity of the gags. For instance, in Hellzapoppin's best moment, O&J give away the ending of Citizen Kane! At the beginning of the heavily cartoon-inspired Crazy House (1943), O&J are shot from cannons though a wall and into the office of a Universal movie executive, whom they hand a lit stick of dynamite. There's actually a story about their attempts to make a movie around in there somewhere between all the gags, but it's more than made up for when Chic Johnson picks up a machine gun at the end and kills the obligatory Young Couple In Love. "This is one picture that isn't going to have a happy ending!" he says. Ghost Catchers (1944), the team's only scare comedy, was partially written by cartoonist Milt Gross and features a musical number, "The Customer is Always Right", which is funny due to its sheer audacity rather than the merit of its material. Ghost Catchers also features some surprisingly contemporary humor. In one scene, O&J are following two dwarves (complete with pointy hats) through a haunted house:

Olsen: I wonder where they're going..

Johnson: Maybe they're taking us to Snow White!

Dwarf (turning on O&J, shaking his fists with rage): Snow White?? SNOW WHITE?!? Everywhere we go!!! EVERYWHERE WE GO!!!!!

After one more film, See My Lawyer (1945), Olsen and Johnson quit movies for good and went back to the stage and a string of Hellzapoppin'-ish revues (including Hellzasplashin', Sons O' Fun, Jerks-Berserk, Crazy House, Pardon Our French, and others). In 1949, they tried their hand at early TV with Fireball Fun-For-All, an unsuccessful attempt to translate their revue format to video. While the episodes I've seen have their moments, Fireball really highlights how much of the effectiveness of O&J's revues depended on you actually being there in the audience. It was cancelled after a mere four months and Olsen and Johnson continued performing, rather inevitably settling in Las Vegas. The seemingly endless ride was finally cut short by Chic Johnson's death in 1962 at the age of 66. Ole Olsen followed a year later at the age of 71.

In a 1959 interview, Chic Johnson summed up the team's approach to comedy. "We never made any pretense at being glib, satirical standup comics. We manufacture gimmicks and gags that are about as basic as you can get. We are salesmen. We sell laughs. We have never tried to be subtle. Apparently people all over the world still like that sort of thing."

Sometimes a Cigar is Just A Cigar...

2005-05-07T18:08:00.000-07:00

.. And sometimes it's a highly suggestive piece of pre-code movie memorabilia. The publicity department at Radio Pictures knew precisely what they were doing when they drew up this graphic for Wheeler and Woolsey's 1933 feature Diplomaniacs. A lot has been said over the years about the phallic nature of the classic comedians' omnipresent cigars (Groucho Marx, George Burns, Bobby Clark, and just about every burlesque comic who ever lived, including Lou Costello before he started making films) but this image really does drive the point home, so to speak.

Believe It or Not...

2005-05-07T14:56:00.000-07:00

The battle to teach Fundamentalist Christian dogma as "science" in Kansas public schools is heating up again .

"The hearings in Topeka, scheduled to last several days, are focusing on two proposals. The first recommends that students continue to be taught the theory of evolution because it is key to understanding biology. The other proposes that Kansas alter the definition of science, not limiting it to theories based on natural explanations."

If they're willing to go this far, I can only hope they'll be kind enough to open their classrooms to every known kind of pseudoscience, not just their own preferred brand. By these criteria, Black Magic must be viewed as similarly valid. Spiritualism, Raelianism, Scientology, the theories of Wilhelm Reich.. I want to see ALL of it in those classrooms. Maybe Kansas can open the first American branch of Hogworts (think of the tourist trade!). Granted, dark ages-style ignorance is a valid lifestyle choice in America, but this smacks of desperation; a full-out assault on centuries worth of progress led by people who find it much easier to lock out contradictory viewpoints and beliefs than think about them. If I truly hated America, I'd be rooting for these folks to attain positions of real power ASAP because the sooner they do, the sooner this country dissolves into multiple squabbling theocracies, each armed to the teeth and aching to kill over various interpretations of "God's Word". As retired schoolteacher Kathy Martin says in the article, "We can't ignore that our nation is based on Christianity — not science." I can imagine our Founding Fathers, being products of the Age of Enlightenment, taking more than a little issue with that assessment. Mrs. Martin, a member of the Kansas state board of education, is residing over the hearings that will determine whether Kansas decides to remain a part of the real world or help usher in the new Age of Militant Ignorance. Thanks, Kathy! We'll be back to public stonings in no time!

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Mostly Shyte

2005-05-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

The late Douglas Adams' biographer, M. J. Simpson, has this to say about Disney's new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie:

"It’s as if someone had filmed Gulliver’s Travels but had made the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians normal-sized and turned the Houyhnhnms from talking horses into yellow triangles."

Actually, he has much, much more to say about this clumsy abortion of a hamfisted travesty of a series of brilliant novels but, in short: "Douglas Adams had a fatal stroke getting THIS into theaters???" Adams dies after struggling for over TWO DECADES to get a feature film version made, leaving Disney free to dance on his grave. And the Cosmic Joker laughs heartily. Oh.. this has been a bad year, indeed.

"School's out... because I stopped time!"

2005-05-02T06:13:00.000-07:00

Schlockmaster Herschell Gordon Lewis, the director commonly credited with the creation of the gore genre with films such as Blood Feast (1963) and Two Thousand Maniacs (1964), was unable to resist the siren song of the booming, profits-guaranteed kiddie matinee market of the late 60s. The two films that resulted are, like the majority of H.G. Lewis' movies, cheap and shoddy but aggressively iconoclastic, the polar opposites of the kiddie matinee films of Barry Mahon. Mahon's children's' films are competently produced yet bland and almost completely devoid of actors, like low-budget TV commercials extended to feature length (Mahon often hired people to play roles at the last minute without any regard to their abilities). Jimmy, the Boy Wonder (1966) and The Magic Land of Mother Goose (1967) are typically rough-edged efforts from Lewis, shot in less than a week (Mother Goose may have been shot in a single day), but featuring casts mostly culled from the Florida acting community, some better than others, but all with some measure of screen presence. Despite sloppy sound and editing, at least there are actors to keep your attention and even flashes of real ingenuity. This is particularly the case with Jimmy, the Boy Wonder.

Jimmy, the Boy Wonder is a genuine musical fantasy patterned loosely after The Wizard of Oz, which was then making loads of cash as a reissue on the kiddie matinee circuit. 8 1/2 year old Jimmy Jay (Dennis Jones) is so frustrated with being rushed by his mother on his first day of school that he recklessly wishes that time would stop. Unfortunately, his wish shatters the globe-shaped pendulum in the Great Clock that keeps time running smoothly throughout the world and time stops completely, freezing Jimmy and everyone else in place. This is bad news for the universe at large, but it's exactly what Mr. Fig, the Time Killer (David Blight, Jr.), has been waiting for. Mr. Fig hates time. He wants to destroy time! Why? Because that's the kind of guy he is! A prancing, grimacing maniac in short red slacks and a plaid jacket with greasepaint eyebrows and sideburns who wants to destroy time. The Old Astronomer (Karl Stoeber) witnesses Jimmy's selfish blunder with his telescope and instructs his daughter, the plump, matronly Aurora (Nancy Jo Berg), to escort Jimmy to the Great Clock so he can install the new globe-shaped pendulum he gives her. After Aurora leaves, Mr. Fig pays a visit to the doddering Old Astronomer who almost immediately spills the beans about Aurora and the pendulum ("Ooooooohhh!! Ah think ah said toooo muuuuch!!" says the Old Astronomer). Back in the Real World, Aurora unfreezes Jimmy and, after gently chiding him for disrupting the fabric of the universe, transports him into a budget-minded fantasy land. Aurora tells Jimmy about the evil Mr. Fig and informs him that if he shows up, Jimmy is on his own as she and Mr. Fig can never be in the same place at the same time because they're like matter and anti-matter (this eventually turns out to not be true after several later scenes where she and Mr. Fig talk face to face). After a duet between Jimmy and Aurora, Mr. Fig does arrive on the scene and Aurora takes a powder. Mr. Fig initially tries to befriend Jimmy for having made his wish and even sings him an intimidating song about himself and his hatred of time. But after Jimmy confesses that he's on his way to the Great Clock to repair the pendulum, Mr. Fig announces his intention to prevent Jimmy from accomplishing that task, which he hopes to accomplish through the most inept, roundabout means possible. Aurora shows up once Mr, Fig vanishes and their journey continues. Mr. Fig slows them up by tricking them into taking a detour through the very budget-minded Slow Motion Land and then by trying to make them fall asleep by turning everything blue through the use of a gel over the camera lens ("No one can stay awake when everything is BLUE!" says Mr. Fig). But Aurora outwits him and she and Jimmy eventually reach the Tick-A-Tock-A-Tanny Indians who are to tell them the way to World's End and the Great Clock. After unfreezing the green Indians, the tribe's medicine man (Alan Rock) threatens to sacrifice Jimmy whom he seems to blame for a drought. Aurora shows up in the nick of time (where/why had she gone?) and saves the day by making jellybeans rain from the sky and then singing a song about beans ("I don't want diamonds or limousines! Just give me lots and lots of beans!"). The medicine man, relieved, vanishes after saying "I'm going back... to Miami Beach!" and the Indians show Jimmy and Aurora the way to World's End. At this point, Jimmy starts to complain about his sworn duty to save time and Aurora sets him straight by showing him a long, very well animated cartoon, clearly cut down from a feature, with the worst on-the-fly dubbing ever seen in a theatrically-released motion picture (provided primarily by Nancy Jo Berg and H. G. Lewis himself. Lewis provides all of the male voices besides Michael and, at one point, confusedly jumbles two voices in a single line of dialogue). In the cartoon, a little boy, Michael, is seen feverishly shining shoes, selling papers, washing dishes and windows and digging through trash bins all the while saying "This must be my lucky day!" Michael's day has been so lucky, in fact, that he thinks that maybe he'll "get to see the wizard who lives up there", indicating a clock tower. Inside the clock tower, a tiny man with a bulbous red nose is putting the finishing touches on a magic globe. He uses this globe to magically transform a woman and her kid into the BVM and Christ Child (at least, that's how it looks) and to make a pair of worn shoes Michael digs from the trash into a pair of really nice shoes. Michael tells the wizard about how lucky his day has been but, suddenly, the shadow of a wolf with a flintlock appears on a wall and a gunshot punches a hole through the magic globe. All hell breaks loose. Fires break out in kids' bedrooms, kids are about to get run over by trucks or fall off balconies. The wizard stops the globe spinning and time freezes before anyone gets killed. "It's the work of the witch!" says the wizard. "Her power has returned!" So the wizard unfreezes Michael, who has "learned that there is more power in good than with evil" (presumably having tried both), and sends him on a journey to the Fairy Of the Blue who will repair the magic globe and start time again. Michael finds himself in a bizarre alternate reality, being trailed by a wolf and cat, the henchmen of the evil Witch who wishes to steal the globe and "crush it to pieces forever!" (at this point, a montage shows the globe with atomic mushroom clouds bursting from it). Michael seeks the help of the Captain of the Cats (voiced by H. G. Lewis as Warner Bros.' Sylvester) who tells the boy he'll take him to her. But the Witch transforms the cat and wolf into clones of the Captain of the Cats and his horse and, as the Captain and the Captain/wolf duel, the fake horse/cat abducts Michael and takes him to the Witch's castle. The Witch, poorly disguised as the Fairy Of the Blue, tries to convince Michael to hand it over but the real Fairy shows up, saves Michael, and repairs the globe. Time starts again, no one gets killed, and the final shot is of hundreds of kids running though the streets, all carrying their own "magic globes". This cartoon and its cryptic social commentary convince Jimmy to forge onward. Mr. Fig appears and tries to slow Aurora and Jimmy down by offering them 1960s backyard grill food. (in an homage to The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Fig disguises himself as a tree with a hot dog impaled on a branch and tries to get Jimmy to take it, using his best "How'd you like someone to pick your apples??" voice. It doesn't work. "What's the matter with you people!" says Mr. Fig as the tree. "When was the last time a tree offered you a hot dog??"). He then drugs the pond Aurora and Jimmy are drinking from with some kind of chemical that makes you laugh (I can think of a few) but ends up falling in himself as our heroes get away with little more than a case of the giggles. Finally, Jimmy and Aurora reach World's End which turns out to be, ta-dah! the extremely cool Coral Castle in Homestead, FL! Aurora tells Jimmy that she can't enter World's End/Coral Castle and he's on his own from here on out. Once Jimmy enters Coral Castle, Mr. Fig appears and chases Jimmy around. But Mr. Fig's inability to run without prancing and leaping and twirling slows him down long enough to allow Jimmy to install the pendulum/globe in the Great Clock and restart time. Mr. Fig vanishes, shrieking in unimaginable pain, and Jimmy finds himself back in his bedroom getting ready for school. But the film has one more twist in store! When Jimmy arrives at school, his teacher turns out to be Aurora! And that big, glittery globe/pendulum thing is on her desk. "You act as if you and that globe are old friends!" says the teacher. "We sure are!" says Jimmy, stroking the globe.

Jimmy, the Boy Wonder is a strange, strange film, full of cryptic moments and peculiar dialogue. The editing, cinematography, and sound are as sloppy as in any of the films H. G. Lewis made around this time (including the excellent Blast-Off Girls (1967), She-Devils on Wheels (1968), and Just For the Hell of It (1968)), but the performances are engaging, especially David Blight, Jr. as Mr. Fig, the Time Killer. Blight plays Fig to the hilt, skipping rather than walking, giggling with glee, rubbing his hands with evil delight, and playing to the camera every chance he gets. Blight is clearly enjoying himself as a manic trickster figure, and the film has no choice but to revolve around his presence. Nancy Jo Berg had previously appeared in Fail Safe (1964) as Ilsa Wolfe, the wife of one of the pilots who is about to drop nukes on Moscow. It's a small but showy part and she's very good in it. As Aurora, she's your best memories of your Kindergarten teacher, and delivers her lines like someone narrating a story on Reading Rainbow, which makes sense as she was a local kids' show host in Philadelphia at the time. The producer and writer of Jimmy, the Boy Wonder was Hal Berg, Nancy's husband. Sadly, if this was his attempt to get a fire lit under her career, it didn't work. This is her last film role. Karl Stoeber, the Old Astronomer, is a familiar face from two other H. G. Lewis films, The Gruesome Twosome and A Taste Of Blood (both 1967). His performance here is unspeakably strange and very hard to describe. There's no accounting for the spaced-out way he delivers his "Oops! I think I've said too much!" line. Alan Rock's solid performance as the Medicine Man indicates he must have been a professional comic, but this is his only film appearance. And while Dennis Jones, the Boy Wonder himself, is by no means a good child actor (or singer), he's at least convincing as an 8 1/2 year old kid who is having some fun playing around at Coral Castle. Dennis' performance glows when compared with Channy Mahon's bored, monotone fidgeting in The Wonderful Land of Oz (1968). Dennis Jones turns up again two years later in an uncredited role in H. G. Lewis' Just for the Hell Of It. Lewis' fantasyland is a picture postcard time-capsule of mid-60s South Florida attractions, primarily Coral Castle and the Monkey Jungle in Miami Beach. To make the grounds of Monkey Jungle seems more otherworldly, Lewis placed colorful paper party decorations around among the shrubs and trees, and it just about works. Coral Castle is otherworldly enough in its own right not to need cheap enhancements. Its multi-ton coral structures were constructed by Latvian immigrant Edward Leedskalnin, working alone and unobserved over the course of twenty-eight years and using methods that remain a mystery to this day. Coral Castle was a favorite shooting location of exploitation filmmakers in Florida. It can also be seen in Doris Wishman's Nude On the Moon (1962) and James L. Wolcott's Wild Women Of Wongo (1958).

The well-animated cartoon Jimmy, the Boy Wonder is structured around (and owes crucial plot, musical cues, and thematic elements to) was identified by H. G. Lewis in an interview as Italian in origin. Producer/writer Hal Berg had legally secured the American distribution rights to it, but the credits to Jimmy do not mention its makers. Rob Craig at KiddieMatinee.com suggests the footage is from La Bergère et le ramoneur (US title: The Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird), an excellent 1953 French animated feature by Paul and Pierre Grimault, but, although the style is similar, this isn't the case. The overall look of the cartoon and its mild atomic symbolism would lead me to date its production to sometime between 1947 and 1954, but the action of the film doesn't match the plot synopses of the animated features I know were made in Italy around that time (La Rosa di Bagdad and I fratelli Dinamite (both 1949), and L'ultima sciuscia (1947)).

H. G. Lewis' kiddie matinee follow-up, The Magic Land of Mother Goose, had its origins in a touring magic show for kids produced by veteran Midnight Spook Show magician Jack Baker, better known as Dr. Silkini, and featuring the talents of Roy Huston as Merlin. Lewis' film is nothing more than a clumsily filmed record of the act which I assume primarily played elementary schools. Old King Cole has escaped from a book of Mother Goose rhymes because he's bored with his life. "I suppose you think it's easy being a king!" says the very Tony Randall-ish King Cole to the camera. "Absolutely nothing ever happens around here! Just look what I have for amusement!" King Cole opens up the giant Mother Goose book and out collapses a woman in an extremely creepy rag-doll costume with a face that looks like a skull. "Sometimes I think it would take a magician to make me happy!" cries Old King Cole and, lo and behold, Merlin the Magician appears and proceeds with his magic act, complete with numerous on-camera foul-ups. Eventually we meet Sleeping Beauty (who becomes the subject of Huston's "levitating woman" illusion) and Prince Charming who perform a duet before announcing their engagement. At their wedding party, attended by the rest of the Mother Goose characters (people in Halloween costumes), an Evil Witch appears played by an actress who makes David Blight, Jr. look like the essence of composure. "I hate everyone!! None of you will be happy!!" she shrieks, flailing about the stage. She freezes everyone in place with her magic. "Now there will be no more STOOOORRIIIIEEEEEEEESSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!" But Merlin appears and, after the Witch feebly attempts to bribe him, he hypnotizes her, sticks her in a coffin-like box and sets fire to her! This was an illusion from Dr. Silkini's "Asylum of Horrors" midnight stage show and its presence in this kiddie act is pretty surprising, especially after Merlin opens the box and displays the Witch's smoking, smoldering skeleton (with flames shooting from a rather personal region of the skeleton's anatomy). After the Evil Witch is dead and everyone is unfrozen, Mother Goose herself arrives on the scene. She is played by the same woman who played the Witch and is only moderately less manic. Mother Goose is angry at her minions for neglecting their duties to the children of the world by leaving the confines of the book. She and Merlin don't get along well but she gains respect for him after he cuts Jack Sprat into three pieces and later punishes the hideous rag doll (for harassing and physically assaulting Little Bo Peep and Little Miss Muffet) by putting her in a box and shoving a few knives through it. Merlin vanishes and his voice, echoing from some shadowy netherworld, delivers a little speech about the importance of fairy tales and the responsibilities of fictional characters and, most importantly, that "happiness comes from the love of others". Convinced of his own selfishness, Old King Cole dutifully reenters the book and the film/magic act/stage production ends.

H. G. Lewis later got a little extra mileage out of The Magic Land of Mother Goose by shooting a brief prologue and epilogue featuring Santa Claus and re-releasing the film at Christmas as Santa Visits the Magic Land of Mother Goose. In the new footage, a seemingly tipsy Santa tells us what good friends he and Mother Goose are and then falls asleep in his chair, making the film his dream (you can actually hear Lewis say "Cut!" at the end of the shot). At the end, Santa wakes up, rambles a little about all his "old pals" in the film, and suddenly starts laughing.. a lot.. really strangely, too.. as the film fades to black. Extremely creepy.

Although H. G. Lewis had little more to do than simply point the camera at the stage and turn it on or off at strategic moments, this is undoubtedly one of his sloppiest films, devoid of any kind of care or attention. It's clear that no one on the production end had the slightest concern about turning out a film that children would find interesting. While Roy Huston's magic act would clearly have kept kids entertained in person, especially with audience participation and potential interaction with the actors, on film it's a testimony to what a brazen filmmaker could get away with in the kiddie matinee market.. for a time. As bad as this film is, however, I've still seen worse. Much worse. I have no idea what the actors' names are (aside from Roy Huston) as the credits on the print I have are so tiny and blurry that they're illegible, but the guy who plays Old King Cole is a genuine professional and rather fun to watch as he makes the best of his very silly role. His Old King Cole is comically effete, terrified of crying women ("I've had nothing but crying females today!"), petulant, and a great lover of milk ("You never outgrow your need for milk!"). He's the real star of the film, doing his best to pretend as if the cheapo nonsense going on around him is really worth reacting to. Roy Huston is no actor (he mouths his lines while his dialogue is played back on a tape recorder off-camera. Why??) but he's not a bad magician, really, and I'm sure he cashed-in on the trailing end of the Midnight Spook Show era with an act of his own (in fact, as of 2002, he was still at it).

Like a 19th century medicine show huckster, Herschell Gordon Lewis has always prided himself on his ability to sell a gullible crowd a load of goods. Sometimes this attitude led him, almost accidentally, into trailblazing new film territory, but just as often he ended up producing cheap throwaways. It's strictly buyer beware with H. G. Lewis and his two kiddie films are no exception. Although neither are a total waste of time (especially for obscureologists like myself) and chock full of inadvertent laughs, they're still prime examples of Lewis at his most cynically opportunistic, dabbling in a genre he couldn't even pretend to be interested in just to make a quick buck.

Brown and Carney: The Monkees of Obscure Comedy Teams

2005-04-27T07:05:00.001-07:00

On the obscure comedy front, Bill Sherman has posted an interesting blog entry re: the RKO comedy team of Brown and Carney. It seems that TCM has showcased a couple of Brown and Carney flicks this month as a part of their April Fools movie lineup. Unfortunately, the films TCM chose to showcase are B&C's Adventures of a Rookie (1943) and Seven Days Ashore (1944). It's as if TCM doesn't want people to like Brown and Carney! To those of you out of the obscure comedy team loop, Wally Brown and Alan Carney were a couple of lumpy, not entirely untalented utility comics RKO individually had under contact in the early 40s before suddenly slapping them together into a "comedy team", or, rather, an amazingly lifelike simulation of one. It has often been suggested that they were RKO's own version of Abbott and Costello, which I don't entirely buy. It's an unfair comparison (mostly to A&C) as it sets people up to expect a brand of comedy that Brown and Carney simply don't/can't/won't deliver. How are Brown and Carney not Abbott and Costello? Let me count the ways:

Personalities

Abbott and Costello

Bud Abbott: Bud portrays a comic villain; a conniving, greedy, and frequently cruel con artist, a living symbol of man's inhumanity to man. Incapable of upward social mobility, he reaffirms his frail sense of superiority by kicking downwards.

Lou Costello: Lou portrays a hapless, bumbling everyman, the poor dope his mentor and "friend" Bud kicks downwards at. Sweet-natured Lou is so blissfully disconnected from the world around him that he frequently transcends "reality" and is capable of what appears to those around him to be impossible. A neurotic man-child in a world of cruel adults, Lou tragically clings to the opportunistic Bud as his father-figure which naturally leads to all sorts of zany, madcap situations.

Brown and Carney

Wally Brown: Brown plays a friendly sort of guy who has a bit of a cowardly streak. He pushes Carney around sometimes. Usually not, though. He sets up the straight lines so Carney can make with the funny comebacks. But that's not always the case, either.

Alan Carney: Carney portrays Brown's slightly dimmer foil when Brown isn't playing his foil. Seems frequently confused if not outright dazed.

Appearance

Abbott and Costello

Bud Abbott: Tall and angular. Took to wearing a thin mustache in the 1950s which made him look even more like a racetrack tout from a Damon Runyon story.

Lou Costello: Short and pudgy yet capable at times of an almost balletic grace. Has the face of a disgraced cherub.

Brown and Carney

Wally Brown: Five foot six, slightly chunky with rubbery features.

Alan Carney: Five foot four, chunky with rubbery features.

Comedy

Abbott and Costello

Much of this team's comedy derives from the friction between their characters. A&C possessed a seemingly bottomless bag of burlesque routines which they had honed to perfection after years of experience on the stage.

Brown and Carney

Completely dependent on who happens to be writing their lines, mostly RKO's reliable if unremarkable stable of B-movie scribes.

Here's the real connection between the teams: RKO, like the rest of Hollywood, reacted to Abbott and Costello's phenomenal success in Buck Privates (1941) by trying to cash in on what they saw as a new trend for military comedies; preferably military comedies starring comedy teams. 20th Century Fox hired Laurel and Hardy for the dreadful Great Guns (1941) while the smaller RKO decided to save scratch by simply manufacturing their own comedy team to star in a slew of Buck Privates-ish service comedies. But The Adventures of a Rookie is no Buck Privates, and neither is Rookies In Burma or Seven Days Ashore. With their nebulous characterizations and distinct lack of comic "business", Brown and Carney barely qualify as a pale imitation of Abbott and Costello. They were barely even a pale imitation of a comedy team.

However, after an abysmal start, things did improve for Brown and Carney once they left the service comedies behind, although they never really gelled as a team. Girl Rush (1944), a comedy western, is probably their best feature (and co-stars a young Robert Mitchum.. in drag, no less). They have more comic patter than usual here and they almost seem like a real comedy team rather than two comics standing next to each other. Brown and Carney also starred in a very strange horror comedy entitled Zombies On Broadway (1945) with Bela Lugosi and Sheldon Leonard. Freak that I am, I actually prefer Zombies On Broadway to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the horror comedy Universal released three years later. While A&CMF was Universal's burlesque of their famous monster movies, ZOB was RKO's comic follow-up to their own big 1940s horror hit, Jacques Tourneur's 1943 classic I Walked With a Zombie. Unlike Universal's horror burlesque, however, ZOB features some legit horror atmosphere and a few genuinely disturbing visuals. Brown and Carney's best film as supporting characters is 1944's Step Lively, a musical comedy based on the same Broadway play that served as the basis for RKO's 1938 Marx Brothers oddity Room Service. Frank Sinatra plays the Frank Albertson role of the idealistic playwright, while Brown and Carney stand in for Chico and Harpo (George Murphy plays Groucho's Gordon Miller role). The team was disbanded by RKO following their 1946 comedy mystery Genius At Work (co-starring Lugosi and, for the last time anywhere, Lionel Atwill).

Awards, Corrections, and Other Groovy Things

2005-04-25T07:02:00.000-07:00

Phil Hall, Film Threat critic and journalist, has nominated this blog Hot Site of the Week at SharewareJunkies.com! Thanks, Phil!

"mb" notes in the comments for my Barry Mahon blog entry that a) Mahon didn't have to go to the Baum estate for permission to film The Wonderful Land Of Oz as the book's copyright lapsed in 1960 and b) the film was not shot at Pirate's World at all but at a small local studio in North Miami. I'd very much like to know which studio, so if anyone knows, please contact me.

Also in the Mahon comments, Rob Craig of KiddieMatinee.com suggested I see the full version of H. G. Lewis' The Magic Land of Mother Goose (1967) for a true endurance test. I have and I'll be blogging about both of Lewis' kiddie matinee epics later this week.

Vintage Cartoon Matchbooks!

2005-04-23T14:00:00.000-07:00

The Walt Disney Productions matchbook was a gift to me from animator Ed Henderson who worked at the Mouse Factory in the early 40s (he also spent time at Screen Gems and was later responsible for the Astrodome scoreboard cartoons in the 60s and 70s.. Remember the Home Run Spectacular?). The late-deco layout is spiffy, and the streamlined version of Mickey depicted here is my favorite design. The Terrytoons matchbook is a mystery to me. It's late 40s-early 50s vintage, so the comic books it refers to were being published by St. John (earlier, the Terry comic titles were handled by Timely/Marvel and, after St. John, by Pines) , but they're not mentioned anywhere so they're likely not responsible for the matchbook. Did the studio have these made? And how many matchbooks were made to advertise comic books in the 40s and 50s, anyway? I like the copy on the inside of the cover, praising Paul Terry for the general wholesomeness of his cartoons. A real animation businessman, Terry was obsessed with copyrights and trademarks. They're all over this matchbook. I can't think of any other golden age studio who went so far as to tack a "Reg. U.S. Pat. Off." onto their characters' logos.

Return of the Dollar DVDs!

2005-04-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

Here are a few nuggets (some gold, some... other substances) that I've found over the last few weeks at my local Dollar Tree and 99 Cents Only stores.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (vol 1-3) - (Genius Entertainment) - This 1954 on-film TV series stars Ronald Howard (son of Leslie Howard) as a lighter, personable, if not downright flippant Holmes. The series' non-Doyle mysteries are original and fun, if not very complicated, and there is so much emphasis on comedy that the show is nearly a sitcom. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was shot in Paris and, rather inevitably, an entire episode is structured around the Eiffel Tower.

The Inspector General (1949) - (Treasure Box) - I'm not a big Danny Kaye fan, but this is a very pleasant little comedy just the same. Easily worth a buck for an incredible musical number in which, through the Miracle of Motion Picture Magic, Danny sings four part harmony with himself as three other characters.

The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (1959) - (Treasure Box) - Stark, stylish, and unnerving example of late Noir, starring Steve McQueen as a teen trying to prove himself by taking part in a bank heist. Probably one of the best films I've seen yet on a dollar DVD.

Daniel Boone, Trail Blazer (1956) - (Dollar DVD) - Lon Cheney Jr. turns in a nice, if rather blurry (he was heavily on the sauce in 1956), performance as an American Indian in this awful, awful attempt to steal the thunder from Disney's entertaining Davy Crockett movies. There's even a scene where a bunch of clean-as-a-whistle Aryan pioneer kids sing a sugary "Ballad of Davy Crockett"-ish song about Daniel Boone, played here by a plank of weather-treated pine named Bruce Bennett. Lots of gruelingly unfunny comic relief.

The Big Trees (1952) - (Genius Entertainment) - The kind of moderately-budgeted programmers Kirk Douglas was making before he started making real movies like Paths of Glory. It's the 1890s and lovable conman Douglas is all set to screw some Quakers out of their lumber rights and cut down the beautiful old Redwoods they've been protecting to boot. The Love of a Good Woman sets him straight. Nice print. Nice trees.

Sisters Of Death (1977) (Dollar DVD) - One of my favorite cheapo DVD titles. A girl is killed during a sorority "cult" initiation rite and, several years later, the members of the cult are lured (stupidly) out to an old house where someone starts bumping them off. This silly and trashy drive-in whodunit features little gore and has the overall tone of an episode of Scooby Doo, Where Are You?. Claudia Jennings (1970's Playmate of the Year) died two years later when she fell asleep behind the wheel of her VW convertible. Former Mouseketeer Sherry Alberoni was the voice of Alexandra in Josie and the Pussycats.

Good Against Evil (1979) - (Dollar DVD) - Not a movie, but a failed TV pilot starring the strangely-monickered Dack Rambo. Some network genius's attempt to turn The Exorcist into a weekly adventure series. "Good Against Evil" sounds more like a placeholder than a title ("All right, we'll have to think up a real title once we go to series.."). Kim Catrall shows up in a small role as Dack's ex. Of course she gets top billing on the cardboard sleeve. I got suckered by assuming that this was a TV movie, but, dammit, it doesn't have an ending! The damn thing just dumps you at a bus stop, staring at some presumably evil black cat after 74 very uneventful minutes.

Seven Alone (1974) - (Treasure Box) - Supposedly true pioneer saga that reflects real life in that it meanders all over the place, things happen that don't mean much, unappealing characters crop up now and then, and it has a very unsatisfactory ending. After Mom and Pop Pioneer die (quietly and peacefully, family movie style), their seven kids, led by the almost preternaturally unpleasant eldest son John (Stewart Petersen) must forge on, hoping to reach the Oregon Territory as per their parents' wishes. Kit Carson (Dean Smith) appears a few times and adds just about nothing to the story other than the sneaking suspicion that he's starring in a somewhat more interesting movie just off-camera.

Embryo (1976) - (Genius Entertainment) - Rock Hudson's film career continued its downward spiral with this cheap, nonsensical, but entertaining sci-fi thriller. Hudson is believable in his role as a scientist who inadvertently accelerates the growth of a fetus, resulting in a full-grown woman (Barbara Carerra) in only four days. She has a thick Nicaraguan accent, clearly common to fetuses accelerated to adulthood in only four days, and a homicidal streak. Watch for Roddy McDowell and Dr. Joyce Brothers at a party. Muddy, washed out print exactly like the one they used when I saw this film as the Friday afternoon Million Dollar Movie on Channel 13 in the mid 80s.

Gang Busters (1952) - (Genius Entertainment) - TV version of radio's loudest crime drama (hence the phrase "to come on like gangbusters"). The forerunner of shows like America's Most Wanted, Gang Busters was hosted by series creator Phillips H. Lord who intones woodenly from behind a desk. The true crime dramatizations are like Dragnet without the wit, suspense, insight, or panache.

Dragnet (vol 1-4) - (Genius Entertainment) - The best crime drama of the 50s. Although Frank Morgan as Officer Bill Gannon is featured on the sleeves, these are episodes of the 1951-59 series, not the lame anti-hippie Dragnet 1967/Dragnet 1968 series Morgan appeared in. Sgt. Joe Friday's partners here are Sgt. Ben Romero (Barton Yarborough), Sgt. Ed Jacobs (Barney Phillips) and Officer Frank Smith (Ben Alexander), his best and longest running partner (1952-59). Webb is one of the unsung geniuses of television, almost single-handedly creating the adult crime drama with Dragnet. As series director, Webb tried to make the performances more lifelike by insisting that the actors read their lines cold from teleprompters and cue cards (like radio actors read from scripts). The point was to strip self-conscious acting from the performances, but the result was that peculiar rapid-fire dialogue the series became known for (and was mercilessly parodied for). Even the talkiest, most static episodes feature lots of interesting camera angles and setups to keep the show visually appealing (IMO, Dragnet was only outdone in this regard when Alfred Hitchcock Presents debuted in 1955). The series also broke with precedent by placing almost all of the emotional emphasis on the criminals and the victims rather than on the police. Sgt. Friday is less a human than a cog in the Justice machine, a cross between a cyborg, a career garbage man, and an angel of death. You don't want a visit from Sgt. Friday... ever.

Gabby (1940-41) - (Genius Entertainment) - After Max and Dave Fleischer produced and directed the world's second animated feature, Gulliver's Travels, in 1940, they spun off a number of the film's secondary characters into their own series. Sneak, Snoop, and Snitch, the spies, got a couple of cartoons, Twinkletoes the carrier pigeon got three, and Gabby the Lilliputian town crier got seven. Unfortunately, none of these characters warranted ONE cartoon between them. Sneak, Snoop, and Snitch and Twinkletoes aren't so much characters as interesting design concepts while lumpy, short-tempered Gabby, although a character, is unappealing in the extreme. Paramount was clearly pushing hard for the Gabby series. While Popeye languished in black and white in the 1940s, Gabby got Technicolor and lush watercolor backgrounds. The cartoons look excellent, only a notch below the Fleischers' Superman cartoons, but, damn, they're unfunny. They make me wish Dave Fleischer had taken animator/director Shamus Culhane's advice and built a series around Popeye's hamburger fiend sidekick Wimpy. Those couldn't have possibly turned out worse than these. This DVD features old UM&M and NTA TV prints of all seven Gabby cartoons, so the titles are mutilated by black bars (eliminating all references to Paramount), the prints are washed out and a hideous, eye-burning beet red is the most prominent color. You gets whats you pays for.

Burgess Meredith and Gautama Buddha Ate My Brain!!!

2005-04-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

Well, thanks to the miracle of dollar DVDs I've finally seen something that I never thought I'd see in a trillion years.. the spectacle of Peter Lind Hayes and Jeff Bridges making out. Truly one of cinema's most "THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING!!!" moments. The film is The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go (1970), written and directed by none other than Burgess "Penguin" Meredith. Mr. Go is a Fu Manchu-ish supervillain (played by James Mason with a set of false teeth) who is plotting to steal Professor Robert Bannister's (Peter Lind Hayes) "Sidewinder" anti-ballistic missile shield. Go blackmails Bannister by paying James Joyce-obsessive Nero Finnighan (Jeff Bridges) to bed him as he secretly records the proceedings with a fish-eye lens, psychedelic solarized film, and a groovy soundtrack. Watching Jack Lucas hungrily give Mr. Zabladowski a big open-mouthed kiss may be as surreal a moment as ever captured on film, but this scene stands alone in Mr. Go as it actually involves a modicum of cause and effect. The rest is an incoherent jumble that reminds me of a less-lucid version of Otto Preminger's Skidoo. Among the other wonders you'll witness in The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go are:

* A supposedly comic running gag about a gut-shot CIA agent who takes forever to die. The agent is Jack MacGowran, who died of the flu after appearing as Burke Dennings in The Exorcist three years later.

* Soundtrack music by a 5th Dimension sound-alike vocal group which crops up at the least likely moments. ("The Yiiin and the Yaaaaaaaang of Mr. Goooooooooo!!!!")

* Burgess Meredith as a zany and wise Chinese apothecary.

* Irene Tsu and James Mason getting busy inside a giant statue of the Buddha at Mr. Go's phoney funeral (all kinds of weird vibes there).

* Jeff Bridges sitting in Jack MacGowran's lap during a rickshaw ride.

* A man impaled on a wall of acupuncture needles (now that's comedy!).

* Jeff Bridges belting a CIA agent in the head with his portable typewriter (very Hunter S. Thompson).

And did I mention that the film is narrated by Gautama Buddha himself? Who uses his third eye to open Mr. Go's soul to the path of enlightenment? No? Well, you see, Gautama Buddha uses his third eye to open Mr. Go's soul to the path of enlightenment. Mr. Go also has a pet monkey that eats stew bones.

The only rational explanation I can imagine for The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go is that it must have been a thinly veiled excuse for Mason, Bridges, Meredith, and Tsu to head down to Hong Kong, hang out in clubs, get extremely stoned, and get paid for the privilege. Jeff in particular seems to have quite a nice buzz on throughout the movie. God bless dollar DVDs!

"I'd like you to meet Blodgett, my mental hazard..."

2005-04-08T10:22:00.000-07:00

Bill Sherman has posted a very insightful analysis of Clark and McCullough and a pair of their shorts (titter, giggle, tee-hee) on his blog. I certainly agree with him that it would have been interesting to see how the most unjustly unsung comedy team in film history would have fared in a feature. The closest Clark and McCullough ever came was a 1929 Fox five-reeler, Clark and McCullough In Holland. As you can see in the publicity still above, Bobby indeed wore a real pair of lensless wireframe specs for this film instead of the greasepaint variety he developed during his circus days. Presumably, he gave them up temporarily at Fox's request. Groucho Marx was likewise ordered to drop the greasepaint mustache by Paramount management for The Cocoanuts so as not to disrupt the sense of "reality " audiences in 1929 supposedly demanded from their madcap comedies. Groucho happily told management to perform impossible sexual acts on themselves and the phony mustache stayed put until the late 40s. Clark's greasepaint glasses remained his trademark until the 1950s (he finally dropped them for his role as the Devil in the original Broadway run of Damn Yankees). No one seems to know how many of Clark and McCullough's groundbreaking talkies for Fox Movietone still exist. Film historians refuse to refer to them as truly "lost", but no one has had much luck tracking them down, either (all of their RKO shorts are held by the Library Of Congress. None of their Fox material is). Happily, at least one of their Fox shorts does still exist. A safety print of the two-reeler Belle Of Samoa (1929) did turn up on eBay a couple of years ago (I had the pants bid off me) and another print had previously turned up at a film convention I was unable to attend (bangs head against wall).

The Incredibles and the Coming of the Ubermensch

2005-04-05T09:46:00.000-07:00

It's a fun film.. how could it have NOT been? But the not-so-subtle Nietzchean subtext of The Incredibles left me cold. Despite the colorful action, wonderful performances and animation, Brad Bird's profoundly anti-democratic message gave me the willies. "If everyone is special, no one is" is the film's mantra, and I, for one, say BULL HOCKEY to that Ayn Rand claptrap.

There must be something in human nature that makes people want to submit themselves to a higher authority, undoubtedly benevolent, but what a miserable worldview.. Perceiving ourselves as so much cannon fodder, always looking to those "in charge" for answers instead of looking for our own. No dignity, no redemption, just some kind of eternal empty childhood. I'm sure I'm not the only one who picked up on Bird's tribute to the Ubermensch, but I wonder if many found it as off-putting as I do in an age where we're all supposed to be nameless extras in Dubya and Osama's Blockbuster Summer Spectacular (or, better yet, nameless yet noble extras on the front lines where the real action scenes are). So sue me for not offhandedly accepting the idea that the folk at the top of the chain are spiritually and ethically superior to people begging for change on streetcorners, or believing that Presidents are appointed by God. What are you left with if you really believe that the people who are gunned down in the streets every day in Iraq or the Sudan or who died horribly on 9/11 or who continue to die from neglect here in the richest, most powerful nation on the globe are simply nothing more than unwashed nobodies.. a vast faceless potentiality just waiting to be tapped by the chosen few? What kind of lunatic amorality does that kind of belief lead to? War? Genocide? Enron? Given America's pathological hero-worship, it seems nothing short of a miracle that we have anything resembling democracy left here. But now that we're electing action movie heroes governor, perhaps it won't be too long before the neocon Ubermensch save us from democracy, and our worthless selves, altogether.

The Incredibles is the perfect family film for the Bush era. A flashy, entertaining diatribe against equality and a call for "heroes" to function outside the "mediocre" constraints of law in order to save the inherently weak from themselves. The only way it could have been more perfect would have been a few scenes with the Incredibles in church. Screw you Nietzsche.

Clutch Cargo and the Magic of Synchro-Vox

2005-03-29T10:34:00.000-08:00

Brentwood Home Video, makers of many fine dollar DVDs and shameless purveyors of obscure media, have released the entire run of Clark Haas' mindbending 1959 kidvid magnum opus Clutch Cargo to DVD. At $30 for the complete two volume set (cheaper at Amazon), the price is certainly right.

For the uninitiated, Clutch Cargo was a cartoon adventure serial running five days a week as a segment on hundreds of locally-hosted kid's cartoon shows in the late 50s and early 60s. The show's concept was basic in the extreme; international adventurer Clutch Cargo (action), travels around the world with his young ward Spinner (audience identification) and his dog Paddlefoot (comic relief). The stories are simple and embody a certain period charm (like tiki glasses, avocado green, or the decor of a Bob's Big Boy), and creator Clark Haas' fondness for puns and non-sequitur gags frequently shows through. As is to expected from a TV show of this vintage, there are plenty of stereotypes, ethnic and otherwise, to be found. Virtually every villain in the show is fat and swarthy.

Clutch Cargo was promoted by its production house, Cambria Studio, as a "TV comic strip" for a reason. It's not exactly animated. If anything, the series was a clever exercise on the part of Cambria Studio to avoid limited, let alone full, animation (although there are rare flashes of both to be found). It's actually pseudo-mation. An array of techniques were used to create the illusion of movement without going through the trouble and expense of shooting anything frame-by-frame, most resembling a kind of 2-D puppetry. For instance, to simulate Clutch and co. walking, a cel featuring the characters' torsos in profile was bobbed up and down by hand across the camera's field of vision. Real flames and smoke were superimposed when needed. In once instance, a red balloon was used to simulate bubble gum emerging from a jet plane's engine (it's a very silly show). But best of all, and the primary reason for Clutch Cargo's notoriety, was Cambria's biggest animation-saver: Synchro-Vox. As dialogue, rather than movement, had to carry much of the weight of the series' stories, Cambria was still faced with the prospect of having to create limited animation every time a character spoke. But thanks to the miracle of Synchro-Vox, Cambria was spared the cost; the voice actors' mouths were simply superimposed onto the characters' faces. The Synchro-Vox technique is pretty bizarre at first glance, but, for me at least, after a few episodes it simply becomes a part of the show's language. Admittedly, however, there is something decidedly disconcerting about Margaret Kerry's very feminine mouth superimposed on Spinner's face, especially as she doesn't do a very convincing boy's voice in the first place (Kerry was, incidentally, the live-action model for Tinkerbell in Disney's Peter Pan). The characters were designed to allow plenty of room for the live-action mouths, so there are lots of huge chins, wide faces, and large beards to be seen.

I found this nice example of Clark Haas' original art on Ebay. Perhaps this is one of the concept drawings he used to sell Clutch Cargo to Cambria Studio Inc. in 1958. The character designs are very different than those eventually used in the series. This drawing is also very much in the style Haas used when he took over the comic strip Buzz Sawyer from the great Roy Crane.

Cambria's emphasis on voice work, stories, and design rather than animation surprisingly works in the series' favor, a good example of innovation turning a weakness into a strength. In the case of Clutch Cargo, the near complete absence of animation allowed the series' artists to concentrate on making attractive individual drawings and layouts, so the show actually looks better than most limited animation series of the same vintage and, IMO, more watchable. It's a case of no animation at all being better than crummy animation, a philosophy Cambria should have stuck with when they later produced the horrible New Three Stooges cartoons of 1965-1966 (and which would have put Hanna-Barbera and Filmation completely out of business in the 1970s).

This advantages of Synchro-Vox and pseudo-mation are further displayed by one of the DVD extras on volume one; a complete five-episode story arc of another Synchro-Vox series, Space Angel (1962-64). Far less cartoon-y and technically superior to Clutch Cargo, Space Angel was designed by none other than DC cartoonist Alex Toth. The live-action mouths are less intrusive and better integrated into the character designs, and Toth's artwork makes the show strikingly attractive.. certainly more attractive than his later work on Space Ghost for Hanna-Barbera. Volume two features an episode of the third and last Synchro-Vox series, Captain Fathom, an even talkier, somewhat more sophisticated show (plot-wise) that has the overall feel of a Garry Anderson Supermarionation series. I noticed former Screen Gems director/animator Chic Otterstrom's name among the credits for the art crew at the end, along with Clark Haas who did double duty as the series' supervising director and clearly wasn't above getting his hands dirty as a pseudomator.

Write your living wills NOW...

2005-03-22T07:53:00.000-08:00

Wonderful. Now the GOP is exploiting a family's tragedy in order to overturn court decisions from behind their desks in Washington whenever they disagree with them. This is beyond grotesque, especially considering that in 1999, here in Texas, Gov. Bush signed into law an insurance industry-drafted piece of legislation that allows hospitals the right to pull the plug on you, EVEN IF YOU ARE STILL COMPLETELY CONSCIOUS AND AWARE, if you could no longer pay and there was no hope (as determined by the hospital and insurance co.) of revival. Oh, and your family has no say in the matter. So if a perfectly conscious woman in an iron lung were to lose her health insurance in Texas and couldn't get anyone else to insure her, the hospital would be within its rights to pull the plug, no matter what her family said. The law does say that you're allowed to plead your case at the conferences between the hospital and insurance reps that will decide your fate, however. How thoughtful! The Texas Futile Care Law has been used frequently over the past five years to force people off life support here. Impoverished minorities and the elderly, mostly. And, whadayaknow? No prayer vigils, no media circus, certainly no Republicans attempting to dismantle the separation of powers by ramrodding through unconstitutional legislation. Nada. There wasn't the slightest fuss when the Texas Futile Care Law was passed, either. So what's the deal? As Mark A.R. Kleiman said. "If you think Terri Schiavo is being murdered, you think that George W. Bush signed a bill allowing murder in 1999, and that bill is still on the books. Perhaps Mr. Bush flew to the wrong capital on Sunday; some people in Austin seem to need instruction about the "presumption in favor of life."" This situation would have been much easier for the Schiavos if they had lived in Texas. Even easier than that if they were minorities.

Let's face facts. Terri Schiavo is not going to recover. Medical consensus is that she is in a persistent vegetative state and there is no chance of recovery. Her brain has, at this point, deteriorated to the point where she's less aware of the world around her than a goldfish. Says Dr. Richard Demme, head of the ethics committee at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, a persistent vegetative state "means the lower part of the brain that tells her lungs to breathe is still intact. But it doesn't mean she has any thoughts or the ability to experience anything. Her brain is pretty much full of fluid. Barring some miracle, she will never get any better than she is now. There is nothing in medicine we know of that will make her able to think or experience again. To suggest there are medical therapies that can help her - that all she needs is tender loving care and she will be romping in the back yard again - is cruel." Terri's husband, Michael Schiavo, who is Terri's legal guardian, who spent six years getting the best possible care for his wife in the hope she might recover before finally facing the horrible truth, has also had the privilege to be publicly slandered by Tom DeLay (slander which, considering the source, I hope Michael wears like a badge of honor). The courts have been on Michael Schiavo's side, over and over again, because clear evidence indicates that Terri would not want to have been kept on life support if she was in a vegetative state and that her parents' hopes for her recovery are absolutely groundless. In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times on Sunday, Michael Schiavo invited both Jeb and George W. to visit his wife in the hospital, at least once. This will never happen. "Come talk to me.', he said. "Meet my wife. Talk to my wife and see if you get an answer. Ask her to lift her arm to shake your hand. She won't do it." Because she can't. As for Michael's motivations, I've heard nothing but innuendo and hearsay. And I really have my doubts about how much trust fund money is going to be left after the legal fees and the staggering cost of keeping Terri alive for the past fifteen years.

The naked hypocrisy displayed in this case is astounding. The GOP has been no friend to the public at all on issues like poverty, disease, and education, but give them an opportunity to use a woman in a vegetative coma as a way to prove their devotion to humanity and they're all over it. I find it remarkable that those who are championing keeping Terri Schiavo "alive" are also those people who champion the gutting of Medicare, stripping you of your right to sue for malpractice, endless bloody war, the legalization of torture, and the denial of universal health care as a basic human right. But it's not about consistency with the GOP. It's about making political hay. And shame on cowardly Democrats like Senator Reid who play along with this ghoulish political theater.

But at least in this instance, it appears as if the GOP has overreached. AP 3/21/05: "According to a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll of 909 adults taken over the weekend, nearly six in 10 people said they think the feeding tube should be removed and felt they would want to remove it for a child or spouse in the same condition." The problem with the Schiavo case is that, unlike war or poverty, too many people can sympathize. Most of us don't want to be kept alive in a vegetative coma or be forced to keep a loved one alive in that condition. And when the truth about Congress's lunatic "emergency legislation" finally filters out, I hope there's hell to pay.

In Defense of Smurfs...

2005-03-18T19:36:00.000-08:00

While here in the US, the Smurfs are primarily remembered as one of the nadirs of 80s pop kitsch, in their home country of Belgium, both they and their creator, Pierre Culliford (Peyo), are still highly revered. Peyo's Schtroumpfs remain one of the most enduring of Belgium's many bandes dessinées creations, and certainly one of the very few outside Herge's Tintin to gain international fame. While I may not be as fond of Peyo's somewhat stiff and simplistic drawing style as I am of the styles of compatriots like Franquin and Tilleux, his abilities as a storyteller ranked him among the best in his field.

Peyo's Smurf books were well-crafted and very funny little social satires, acted out within the confines of the tiny, essentially communistic Smurf village. Only three Smurfs seemed to have unique personalities; Jokey (the anarchist), Papa (the village patriarch/wiseman), and Brainy (the self-defeating, knowitall underdog). The rest were interchangable "everymen", peaceable but prone to mob mentality in times of crisis. Le schtroumpfissime remains one of Peyo's best stories, showing the rise of despotism in the village when Papa Smurf temporarily leaves. The more-or-less identical Smurfs split into ideological factions and a civil war breaks out. Another story concerned the rise of mass-communications in the village when strange vines grow that act as both a phone system and fiber-optic cables for television signals. The fundamental equality of their social order is broken as some Smurfs become egotistical, demanding celebrities. Papa Smurf destroys the vine and restores the peace. The most frightening of Peyo's stories, Les Schtroumpfs noirs, was about a transmittable disease spread by infected Smurfs biting others on the tail (rather Freudian). The disease turns the Smurfs into black, feral, hopping "G'naps". Nearly the entire village, including Papa Smurf, succumbs to the disease before a cure is accidentally found. The climax is like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers for kids! Peyo's last story before his death in 1992 was Le Schtroumpf financier, a satire on the unequal distribution of wealth.

Hanna-Barbera used Peyo's books as the basis for the first season of the TV series, cutting down feature-length stories to fit in a Saturday Morning timeslot and stripping them of their political subtext when possible. After they drained Peyo's backlog of stories dry, Hanna-Barbera formulized the show (making the evil wizard Gargamel the Coyote to the Smurfs' Roadrunner) and introduced a lot of distinct, merchandisable non-Peyo Smurf characters, which rather defeated the whole point of the concept. Peyo may have made a fortune thanks to H-B and the international merchandising frenzy triggered by the TV series, but Hanna-Barbera's mediocre cartoons have clouded his reputation as a brilliant satirist and storyteller, at least in America.

The Return of Flying-Feet Johnny!

2005-03-18T04:45:00.000-08:00

The increasingly upsetting adventures of that delightful spring-shoed young rascal continue.

click on the thumbnail above for a version you can actually read

Tintin In Iraq

2005-03-16T08:02:00.000-08:00

This has probably been floating around the net for a while now, but it's new to me. Tintin In Iraq is a brilliant 62 page satire of Dubya's Folly utilizing art from virtually every one of Hergé's Tintin books (but primarily Tintin In the Land of Black Gold and Tintin and the Picaros for obvious reasons). A remarkable piece of work. In French only, unfortunately. The people who created it were maintaining a website that used Hergé's artwork to satirize current events. It seems to be down at the moment, hopefully just temporarily.

What's easier than drawing your own comix?

2005-03-10T06:53:00.000-08:00

Writing new dialogue for other people's old comix! Don't "Kangru-Springshus" look like something the Spanish Inquisition would've used? I can only imagine the trail of broken ankles these monstrosities must have left in their wake.

click on the thumbnail above for a version you can actually read

Confessions of a Dollar DVD Junkie...

2005-03-08T09:57:00.000-08:00

Sure, you start out with just one or two.. "Say! I was looking for a copy of Rescue From Gilligan's Island!" you say. But, OH no.. You can't just buy the one DVD, can you? I mean, what the hell is Slipstream, anyway? And HOLY CRAP, it has Mark Hamill and Bill Paxton in it!! AND IT'S DIRECTED BY STEVEN "TRON" LISBERGER!!! So into the basket it goes.. and what's this? Cathy's Curse? A 1977 Canadian Exorcist rip-off?? YOW!! And before you know it, you're up to your neck in public domain goodness, cheap cardboard sleeves all over the bloody place.

Dollar DVDs have the old cheapo SLP VHS tapes beat nine ways from Sunday. Away with impossible-to-track images and $2.50 price tags! DVD titles from Genius Entertainment are usually mastered from nice prints.. sometimes rather questionably acquired (their copy of Buster Keaton's College was ripped straight from Kino's DVD edition, musical score and Kino logo intact). Their cartoon collections are especially nifty. Who'da thunk that someone would have released THREE VOLUMES of Van Beuren cartoons? Or a Gumby DVD which not only features untampered 50s and 60s prints with their original audio tracks intact (the "official" Gumby collections have changed out the cartoons' original Capitol needle-drop music in favor of synthesizers) but also includes Art Clokey's pre-Gumby experimental short Gumbasia??? I've been a PD booster for a long time, so I wasn't too surprised to hear that 19 of the top 50 best selling DVDs of 2004 were dollar titles. But, for some reason, many industry insiders are shocked that consumers are showing enthusiasm for these DVDs, even at a buck a throw. Part of the appeal, I think, is the thrill of the hunt. Most of these public domain titles are completely obscure, having slipped through the cracks a long time ago so you frequently have no earthly idea what you're getting. But at a buck, it scarcely qualifies as a gamble. And, one way or another, you're at least getting something you've never seen before, which also helps break the aforementioned cultural feedback cycle that threatens to homogenize our culture into tasteless mush once and for all.

Here are a few of my favorite Dollar DVD finds (from various 99 Cents Only and Dollar Tree stores):

David Copperfield (1969)- (Dollar DVD) - Excellent made-for-TV version starring Ron Moody as Uriah Heep, Sir Laurence Olivier as Mr. Creakle, Sir Ralph Richardson as Mr. Micawber, and Sir David Attenborough as Mr. Tungay. With that kind of cast, how this film slipped through the cracks is beyond me. Beautiful print, too.

Flash Gordon (1954) - (Genius Entertainment) - This TV series was shot on film in West Berlin so every cast member besides Flash (Steve Holland), Dale (Irene Champlin), and Dr. Zarkov (Joseph Nash) speaks with a heavy German accent. The stories are fun and light and a few episodes give you a good glimpse at how many bombed out buildings were still standing in W. Berlin in 1954. The typography used in the openings credits is remarkable.

Santa Claus (1959) - (Genius Entertainment) - Sharp print of the Mexican-made Christmas classic, dubbed by K. Gordon Murray. This title sold out everywhere I looked. I had to buy my copy on Ebay for marginally more than a dollar.

The Adventures of Robin Hoo d (1955) - (Genius Entertainment) - English-made TV series starring Richard Greene as Robin. The first two episodes on volume one feature a very young Leo McKern in different roles. The theme song was parodied on Monty Python's Flying Circus as "Dennis Moore".

Jungle Book (1942) - (Genius Entertainment) - How the hell did this stunning Alexander Korda film end up in the public domain? A work of art. Easily the best version of Kipling's novel ever made. Starring Sabu as Mowgli and Ralph "Dick Tracy" Byrd as Durga. Crystal clear print.

They Call Me Trinity (1971) - (Treasure Box) - A very funny spaghetti western starring Terence Hill and Bud Spencer and featuring an all-out battle between Mormons and Mexican banditos!

Final Comedown (1972) - (Dollar DVD) - Billy Dee Williams is a black revolutionary trying to forge an alliance between his Black Panthers-ish group and the campus Left. It all goes horribly wrong. An excellent 70s exploitation movie with a message.

The Phantom Ship (1935) - (Genius Entertainment) - Bela Lugosi made a few films in England and this, originally released as The Mystery of the Marie Celeste, was the first. I had seen almost all of Lugosi's films, but this title eluded me until I found it on DVD for a frickin buck! And Lugosi, almost unrecognizable, turns in another excellent performance.

Down Among the Z Men (1952) - (Genius Entertainment) - The only official movie spinoff from BBC radio's hysterical and groundbreaking Goon Show. The original Goons, Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, and Michael Bentine, all appear in this haphazardly constructed formula comedy about spies and secret plans. Not one-tenth as funny as the radio show, but endlessly fascinating.

Hi-De-Ho (1947) - (MMM) - Cab Calloway (scientifically determined to have been the coolest person to ever live) stars as himself in this bizarre blend of startlingly bad acting and excellent music. Cab's lineup in 1947 included Dizzy Gillespie. Also features the red hot Peters Sisters! A lot of fun despite the muddy print.

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (1964) - (Genius Entertainment) - One of the best "bad" movies of all-time. Genius's print has the main titles intact. Not even the copy MST3K used had that! A classic. Starring Pia Zadora as Girmar, John Call as Santa, Bill McCutcheon as Droppo, The Laziest Man on Mars, and quite possibly Jamie Farr working under a pseudonym.

Film Obscurities Ahoy!

2005-03-03T07:59:00.000-08:00

Bill Sherman has posted a truly bokko review of Hips, Hips, Hooray! on his blog. My only significant difference of opinion with Bill regarding Wheeler and Woolsey is about whether or not the team's screen characters are as well delineated as, say, Hope and Crosby. As Hope and Crosby's screen characters were extensions of the public personas they developed through radio experience, and Wheeler and Woolsey's characters were developed over decades of playing vaudeville and musical theater, I consider the comparison to be a matter of apples and oranges. I don't think current tastes are quite the reason for W&W's latter-day "also-ran" status. For audiences in the 1930s, Wheeler and Woolsey were right up there with Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. But when tastes shifted in the 40s, even comics that we consider completely distinctive today were rapidly put out to pasture. I doubt the comically naive Wheeler and Woolsey would have stood a chance in a world where Abbott and Costello and the Ritz Brothers were box office champs, but that's not to say their screen characters had, then or now, lost the ability to entertain. I'm not suggesting that I believe W&W to have been as talented as many of the aforementioned comics, but if their films had received the same vigorous TV exposure in the 60s and 70s as the Three Stooges' Columbia shorts, Hope and Crosby's "Road" pictures, and the canon of Laurel and Hardy, I think they'd have much more of a following today. Unfortunately, aside from a select number of features (King Kong, the Astaire/Rogers musicals), RKO's film library was sadly neglected until its acquisition by Ted Turner.

And speaking of neglected stuff, animation historians David Gerstein and Pietro Shakarian have put together a website about the Winkler Studios' 1928-29 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons. This was the studio formed by Charles Mintz to continue Universal's Oswald series after he infamously took control of the character from Walt Disney. It's a shame that so many of the Winkler Oswalds are lost to time because the animators who produced them went on to start most of the Hollywood cartoon studios we remember today. Former Disney animators Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising founded Warner Bros.' in-house animation unit under Leon Schlesinger in 1930 (taking Oswald animator Friz Freleng with them) and then did the same for MGM in 1934 (taking Bosko and half of the Schlesinger staff with them). Animator Walter Lantz, who had been in the business since the teens, started his own studio in 1929 when Universal dumped Mintz and gave him Oswald. And another big chunk of the Winkler staff moved on to Mintz's previously mentioned Screen Gems studio. Must have been a hell of a place to work...

Obscure Kiddie Matinee Movies Directed By Barry Mahon Ate My Brain!!! part four: Barry Mahon

2005-03-02T08:12:00.000-08:00

I don't believe in guilty pleasures. This is probably because I'm a shameless hedonist. I suppose that if I did believe in guilty pleasures, though, late 60s and early 70s kiddie matinee films would have to qualify. No other film genre outside porn has produced so many inherently mediocre movies. The kiddie matinee market was, for a time, a nice way to get a good return on a small investment. Saturday and Sunday matinees turned strip mall cineplexes into convenient daycare centers for parents who wanted to shop for bras or shoe trees in peace. These kids, loaded to the gills with sugar and caffeine, and with no viable means of escape, were the very definition of an undemanding audience. So undemanding, in fact, that producers could cobble together films that were scarcely more than glorified home movies and still turn a healthy profit. Although many well-made European and Mexican children's films were imported to supply the kiddie matinee market, a good many of the movies that kids had to sit through featured production values well below the average of your local TV newscast.

And I can't get enough of them. Did I say "hedonist"? I meant "masochist".

The cheapest of these films fascinate me. Their very artlessness inadvertently breaches the boundary between filmmaker and audience. There's no suspension of disbelief possible when half of the actors are the director's poker buddies or the fairytale kingdom is clearly made out of corrugated cardboard. What's left are records of moments in time when a bunch of folk decided to make a few quick bucks by wearing silly costumes, effecting goofy accents, and gadding about like loons. The results can be rather calmative, actually. Some directors seem to dare you to give a damn about what's happening onscreen. Nothing to get worked up about.. Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream...

And as far as being calmative is concerned, Barry Mahon's kiddie matinee movies are the cinematic equivalents of extra-strength NyQuil. There's nothing quite like 'em.

Starting in the late 50s, Barry Mahon was an exploitation movie dynamo, cranking out dozens of Grade-Z nudies and roughies (he was also Errol Flynn's manager, directing Flynn in his final movie, Cuban Rebel Girls, in 1959). In the late 60s, Mahon was hired by Pirates World, a theme park in Dania, Florida that had opened just a few years previously. Besides handling the park's live entertainment and publicity, Barry also opened a film production unit (Cinetron Productions) on the grounds with which he intended to tackle the then-lucrative kiddie matinee market. The movies he produced at the park served double duty as both a means of revenue and national publicity for Pirates World. Each film opened with the title "Pirates World Presents" and closed with the Pirates World logo ("Another Fine Picture From Pirates World. Come Visit Us in Dania, Florida") which also appeared on the posters.

The four movies Barry Mahon produced with the park's facilities were made quickly and cheaply, if not to say ineptly, and it's hard to imagine kids sitting still for them, especially after the third 32 ounce Pepsi and a box of Milk Duds. Of the four, The Wonderful Land of Oz (1969) appears to be the only film Mahon had high hopes for (he intended to have Judy Garland narrate). It's a rather direct adaptation of L. Frank Baum's 1904 book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, and it appears that Mahon actually went to the Baum estate for permission (The Marvelous Land of Oz would become one of the two Oz books used as the basis for 1985's vastly underrated Return to Oz, so there are a lot of common characters and plot similarities). Despite all the good intentions, Barry Mahon was incapable of giving The Wonderful Land of Oz the production values it would have needed to become a real hit. Although the costumes are actually pretty decent, the rest of the film is like an evening of marginally above-average community theater. The sets are cardboard (complete with visible masking tape), the songs are unmemorable, and the acting is from hunger. Worst of all, the film is nothing less than a showcase for Barry Mahon's son Channy who was far and away one of the least talented child actors ever to appear in a theatrically-released motion picture. As the presumably winsome and adventurous Tip, poor Channy merely looks bored and restless, fidgeting with his costume and delivering all of his lines in a flat, emotionless monotone. Despite his shortcomings as an actor, Channy was forced to go through the paces of a genuine child star and even has a full-blown musical number, the song for which was written without the slightest consideration for his vocal range.

Barry Mahon's 1970 follow-up, Thumbelina, features floppy hippie-chick Shay Garner in the title role and although she's only marginally better at emoting than Channy Mahon, she at least projects a kind of good-natured, flower-child aura that lends her character a certain appeal. And, unlike poor Channy, Shay's singing voice is dubbed. Shay plays a Pirates World visitor (we get to see her on the log-flume and steeplechase rides at the beginning) who spaces out while looking at a cheap diorama of the story of Thumbelina and fantasizes herself into the part. Thumbelina suffers from all of the deficiencies of The Wonderful Land of Oz and adds glaringly obvious padding to the list. Rather than endanger his budget by adding more action or incident to an extremely thin storyline, Mahon decided to use the musical numbers to stretch out the running time. Unfortunately, since his camera barely moves, these musical sequences seem to drag on for ages. Mahon's reliance on padding becomes even more obvious in Jack and the Beanstalk (also 1970), which features an even thinner storyline than Thumbelina. Jack repeatedly climbs the beanstalk (slowly), approaches the Giant's castle (very slowly) and descends the beanstalk (extremely slowly). In effect, the film repeats itself at intervals with plenty of duplicated shots and the Giant singing his "Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum" number every time Jack steals back another harp, papier-mache chicken, etc.. The padding also comes from unexpected angles; there's an unbelievably long sequence in which Honest John, the jerk who sold Jack the magic beans, quietly and carefully paints a sign for his business... and that's it. For my money, this is the funniest of Mahon's kiddie matinee pictures. The sets are shoddier than ever and it looks as if most of the cast wore their own clothes to the shoot. Near the end, there's a wedding party for Jack's sister and the entertainment is supplied by a little kid who plays an accordion as if he had just picked up the instrument that morning for the very first time. Everyone applauds politely. It's not the kind of thing you usually see in movies. Jack and the Beanstalk is stolen by the actor who plays the Giant. He's appropriately burly (looking a little like a Hell's Angel), but his acting style is a bizarre combination of uncontrolled intensity and stoned vacancy. His monotone yet loud delivery makes lines like "What's that SMELL!?!?" and "I LOVE CREEPY-CRAWLERS!!!!" infectiously funny.

Besides his kiddie matinee epics, Barry Mahon also directed a film at this time aimed at a somewhat older audience. Musical Mutiny (1970) was shot almost entirely on location at Pirates World and is structured around a performance at the park by Iron Butterfly. Barry Mahon was responsible for booking acts for Pirates World and his efforts brought groups like The Jackson Five and Grand Funk Railroad to the park. Unfortunately, Pirates World also picked up something of bad reputation when rowdy rock audiences began clashing with police and park security (it took the opening of Walt Disney World to finally put Pirates World out of business). Like Mahon's fairytale films, Musical Mutiny is also overflowing with padding and budget-minded production methods. Mahon seemingly believed that teenagers in 1970 were as least as undemanding as kiddie matinee audiences in their own way and tried to turn that to his advantage. The movie's Monkees-style freeform action, for instance, freed Mahon from having to write up a complete script. And even the rock sequences themselves become a form of padding in Musical Mutiny. Iron Butterfly's entire 16 minute performance of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" is the film's climax and Mahon filmed the entire thing in one take, breaking up the monotony by randomly zooming the camera in and out a little or splicing in the occasional shot of a psychedelic poster. The story: A ghost pirate walks out of the ocean and declares a "mutiny at Pirates World!". Word of the pirate's theme park mutiny spreads among the teenagers of Dania, FL who all act as if it's something they understand implicitly ("A mutiny?? Far out!") while the pirate cons the park's employees to let everyone in for free. When the park's manager finds out about the hundreds of long-haired freeloaders in his park, he hassles the teens by threatening to withhold Iron Butterfly's performance fee. But when the gap is filled by several local groups who perform for free,The Man allows Iron Butterfly to continue. The ghost Pirate, having achieved what he set out to achieve, then walks back into the ocean. GROOVY!

In 1972, Mahon repackaged Thumbelina as a Christmas movie by bookending it with nearly 30 minutes of new footage, directed by an "R. Winer", and releasing it as Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny. This may have been a clever move on Mahon's part to make his own material look good by comparison. Winer's new footage is leagues below Mahon's own rather questionable standards as a director. Santa has gotten his sleigh "stuck in the sand waaaaay down in Florida" and he uses telepathy (or something) to summon a crowd of 70s kids to his aid. Also involved, somehow, are Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn who watch everything from some nearby bushes and never interact with anyone. The kids hook up a variety of farm animals and a man in a gorilla costume to the sleigh but it won't budge. All the while, huge nasty sweat stains are beginning to appear under Santa's arms and on his BUTT! The kids are discouraged so Santa decides to lift their spirits by telling them the story of Thumbelina, which he claims teaches a lesson about perseverance or courage or something. After that film ends, we rejoin Santa, still stuck in the sand and muttering sadly to himself. Suddenly, we hear the sound of an old-fashioned fire engine siren and, sure enough, here comes an old-fashioned fire engine, piled high with singing (chanting) 70s kids, and with a MAN IN A CREEPY RABBIT COSTUME BEHIND THE WHEEL! The Ice Cream Bunny is coming to the rescue, and coming, and still coming... In fact, it takes a hell of a long time for the fire engine to get to Santa. The engine tools around Pirates World for a bit, and then we see it on a stretch of road, and then it's back in the park, and all the while that horrible droning siren noise fills the soundtrack. Eventually, the fire engine reaches Santa and his "old friend" the Ice Cream Bunny finally meet face-to-face (the bunny has one eye which keeps winking strangely but he never says a word). After the man in the creepy rabbit costume dances around drunkenly for a bit, he and Santa ride off in the fire engine, which disappears magically. And when the kids run back to the sleigh, it disappears magically, too, and they're all very impressed. The end. One of the most striking (?) aspects of the new footage are the songs. In a frugal move, Winer or Mahon declined to hire pricey musicians so the music consists of a bunch of kids yelling lyrics while other kids play kazoos. They even hum "Old Man River" over a scene of Tom and Huck on a raft. Must be seen to be believed.

Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny was Mahon's swan song as a producer. Aside from directing one final nudie flick, Love Pirate, in 1971, he also produced and directed a pair of Christmas features that didn't require pesky, expensive actors. Santa and the Three Bears (1970) is a Hanna-Barbera-ish miracle of recycled animation which used to be a standard on UHF stations around Christmas. A filmed puppet and slide show, Santa's Christmas Elf (Named Calvin), was released the following year (surprisingly, it doesn't even have an IMDB listing, possibly because it doesn't qualify as a film). The bottom fell out of the kiddie matinee market around 1973 when big studios and theater chains worked together to kill "Weekends Only" film booking. Lovers of zen mediocrity everywhere mourned the passing of an era. Barry Mahon died in 1999 at the age of 78.

Wynn, Lose, or Draw...

2005-02-23T07:47:00.000-08:00

Pop Culture Gadabout Bill Sherman has written a spiffy review of Ed Wynn's debut talkie, Follow The Leader (1930). Bill speculates that Wynn's early 30s radio success was behind the scarcity of movie roles during that decade (a mere two films). He's right, but not because Wynn lacked the desire to make a name for himself in movies (he had jumped at the chance to make a silent, Rubber Heels, in 1927). Radio propelled Ed Wynn to national stardom, but it not only murdered his chances in film in the 1930s, it practically wrecked his career and his life.

The amiably goofy Follow the Leader is a nice example of what might have been had Wynn not hit it big with The Texaco Fire Chief in 1932. Suddenly, Ed Wynn as "The Chief" was everywhere, his face and radio catchphrase (a ridiculously drawn-out "sooooooooo-o-o-o" emitted when Ed forgot his lines) were plastered on toys, games, and books. As his son Keenan Wynn said years later, "Suddenly he was locked into coming up with 55 jokes every week." Although Wynn found himself five grand a week richer, the strain of the radio program had a devastating effect on his marriage and health. When Ed Wynn signed with MGM in 1933, it was to make a film that capitalized on his radio program. The Chief was a typical MGM botch job. Wynn's silly loony was reduced to a pitiable oaf, the inept son of a respected town fire chief who wants to follow in his father's footsteps. Critical response was devastating. If the film had been a success, Wynn might have had a fighting chance to ditch radio. Unfortunately, the film's poor reception only hastened his downfall. His image and personality had reached levels of over-saturation that weren't possible for celebrities in the days before radio. His ratings plummeted and by 1935 he was not only off the air, he was virtually unemployable*. Ed Wynn was forced into early retirement by 1937 and sank into a deep depression that ended his marriage. Happily for Ed, his engaging, off-the-cuff silliness and his ability to work a crowd made him a natural for early television. His TV success helped kick-off the second phase of his career which included dramatic roles on Playhouse 90, his appearance in Mary Poppins, and his 1959 Academy Award nomination for his role as Albert Dussell in The Diary of Anne Frank.

*The same thing, more or less, would happen to burlesque comic Joe Penner just a year or two later. Penner was a national sensation on The Baker's Broadcast in 1933 with his non-sequitur catchphrase "Wanna buy a duck??", but audiences cooled quickly. Like Wynn, Joe Penner inspired dozens of toys and games. But Penner didn't have anything approaching Ed Wynn's talent or range, so when people tired of the catchphrase, he was effectively finished for good. Joe Penner didn't even have a chance at a comeback as he died in 1941 at the age of 36.

RIP Raoul Duke

2005-02-22T06:55:00.000-08:00

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson killed himself Sunday at his home in Aspen. I've been a fan of Hunter Thompson ever since I read Hell's Angels in college and Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas is on my short list of all-time favorite novels. Dr. Thompson and his writings were more than a little inspiration for my political strip The Daily Grind, and a huge inspiration for Galapagopolis, the Daily Grind graphic novel I've scripted.

Why do the authors I really admire always end up committing suicide?

Obscure Cartoon Studios Ate My Brain!!! part three: Screen Gems

2005-02-17T20:39:00.000-08:00

Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew has some choice words to say about WBA's latest "re-imagining" of the classic Warner Bros. characters as grotesquely stylized 28th Century space-faring superhero crimefighters. In short: That's All Folks. The property has been drained dry. Let's acknowledge the fact that the heart of Warner Bros. cartoons died when the original studio closed shop in 1963. Further attempts to forcibly make these characters "relevant" to kids are only going to end up devaluing the entire franchise. Moreover, as Amid points out, this obsession with endlessly jumpstarting overexposed older cartoon characters is putting the skids under the development of new ones.

One thing I would like to add to Amid's tirade, however, is that this self-imposed industry dependence upon the pre-chewed tried-and-true is also getting in the way of older properties that haven't seen the light of day in decades. Aside from the fear of sinking money into something that isn't a guaranteed profit-maker, there's a philosophy that media follows Darwinian rules. The media properties that survive contain elements that allow them to survive in a highly competitive marketplace. In some cases, this may be true. There have been several programs that have survived (and blossomed into full-fledged franchises) because their viewers refuse to let them die. Star Trek comes to mind. But for every Trek, there are thousands of media properties that survive only on a form of artificial respiration. The concept of "survival of the fittest" as applied to media doesn't allow for the possibility that our corporate-dominated culture suffers from a bad case of feedback. Take "oldies" radio, for instance. There are millions of songs that could classify as "oldies" and among those millions are perhaps thousands of broadcast-worthy songs every bit as good, if not better, than the tired lineup you hear on every goddamn oldies station. But because that lineup is determined by corporations according to standard pay-for-play broadcasting rules, even if a station were to suddenly go request-only, a casual listener, the majority, wouldn't know to what to request other than something that they had been listening to endlessly for the last decade. The most meaningless, meritless things imaginable can become iconic with a relentless and well-orchestrated marketing blitz. Demand can be manipulated.

Which brings me to Screen Gems.

If ever there was a worthy media property buried by corporate indifference and cultural feedback, the Columbia Screen Gems cartoons are it. Yeah.. I can imagine most people not falling all over themselves for Clark and McCullough and Clavillazo and Ted Healy like I do, but this is different. The cartoons that Columbia's Screen Gems studio made between 1929 and 1947 are, overall, genuinely good. Hell, BETTER in a lot of cases than other animation studios' output of the same vintage. The gags are sharp, the stories unique, and the animation excellent (between 1929 and 1931, I think Screen Gems had better animation than even the Disney Studios). But who the hell has ever heard of Scrappy? Or Flippy? Or the Fox and Crow? That's why Sony, Columbia's parent company, is sitting on hundreds of perfectly good, very funny cartoons. CARTOONS YOU HAVE PROBABLY NEVER SEEN IN YOUR LIFE. Animation historian Jerry Beck even digitally remastered them. It's a ready-made product but Sony doesn't want to throw money after a property that isn't already burnt into the cerebral cortex of every living American.

Screen Gems has a rather turbulent history. It was founded in 1929 by Charles Mintz (the guy who stole Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from Disney) and was something an offshoot of his Krazy Kat Studios which had been producing, of course, Krazy Kat cartoons since the silent days. When sound arrived, Mintz began distributing through Columbia Pictures and relocated his staff from NYC to the West Coast (although I've also read that he maintained two studios for awhile). Although Columbia was also distributing Disney's cartoons at the same time, Screen Gems managed to hold their own with the Krazy Kat series and Dick Huemor's imaginative Scrappy cartoons. In 1934, Screen Gems introduced the Color Rhapsody series, their own answer to Disney's Silly Symphony cartoons (now being distributed through United Artists). The very first Color Rhapsody, Holiday Land, was nominated for an Academy Award, as was a 1937 entry, The Little Match Girl. By 1939, Mintz was in serious debt to Columbia, who responded by taking over Screen Gems entirely. Although he remained in charge, Mintz's health began to decline and he died the following year. The studio underwent something of a renaissance in 1941 when Warner Bros. director Frank Tashlin was put in charge, resulting in an experimental creative climate and Screen Gems' most famous characters, the Fox and the Crow. Tashlin was soon gone, however, as a result of management shakeups of the type that plagued the studio until the end. Max Fleischer's brother Dave managed Screen Gems for a time as well as Leon Schlesinger's brother-in-law Ray Katz and Columbia short-subject producer Hugh McCollum, but no one could prevent Columbia from finally pulling the plug in 1947.

The Screen Gems cartoons went through distinct phases over the course of the studio's eighteen year existence. The earliest shorts are visually surreal and possess a rather adult outlook. After Frank Tashlin left his mark in 1941, Screen Gems' cartoons became somewhat experimental and, in many cases, surprisingly dialogue-heavy, Towards the end, especially under Ray Katz, the Screen Gems cartoons bear a strong resemblance to those being made by Warner Bros., only with slightly more polished animation. Aside from something of a creative dry-spell between 1938 and 1940, Screen Gems maintained high standards until they closed. There's no reason whatsoever why these "lost" cartoons couldn't find an receptive audience today if given half a chance. Unfortunately, that's half a chance too many for an marketplace addicted to pre-sold commodities.

Obscure Comedians Ate My Brain!!! part two: Pat and Patachon

2005-02-12T12:49:00.000-08:00

Before Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, and Laurel and Hardy, one double-act dominated international film; Carl Schenstrøm and Harald Madsen, known in most countries as Pat and Patachon.

It is generally accepted that Pat and Patachon were the world's first internationally famous comedy team. They began their career in Danish short comedies in 1921 and then branched out into features produced throughout Europe and the UK. By the late 1920s, Pat and Patachon's European popularity rivaled Chaplin's, being particular favorites of Soviet and German audiences. The outbreak of WWII brought their film activities to a near halt, their last film as a team being produced in Denmark in 1940. Schenstrøm died two years later at the age of 61. Madsen retired from movies until 1948 when he tried to revive the act with a new partner, Carl Reinholdz. He died the following year at the age of 59.

Soviet audiences in the 1920s loved Pat and Patachon. The team's unmistakable physiques were exploited for some truly beautiful Russian avant-garde movie posters. This is the cover of a 1926 souvenir pamphlet from my collection.

Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible for me to properly assess the merits of Pat and Patachon. Their films are extremely rare in Europe, let alone the US. A scant two titles have been released to video, Mädchenräuber and Blinde Passagiere (both 1936). I've seen the latter and thanks to 8mm home movies, I've also seen silent clips from their first talkie, Alf's Carpet (1929) and Pat und Patachon im Paradies (1937). Besides the scarcity of material, there are language and cultural barriers to deal with as well. Much like Laurel and Hardy, Schenstrøm and Madsen's characters are naive rubes who frequently run afoul of a sophisticated world, having nothing but one another to cling to for support. But unlike Laurel and Hardy's urban-dwelling innocents, Pat (the tall one with the mustache and putty nose) and Patachon (the short one) are earthy rural bumpkins and much of their humor seems to derive from their inability to adapt to modern life. In 1920s Europe, it's not hard to imagine the appeal to audiences who themselves were becoming accustomed to increasingly speedy lifestyles. But eighty years later it seems that much, if not most, of P&P's "fish-out-of-water" humor has been hopelessly diluted. And when it comes to slapstick, the pacing of the material I've seen is so measured and deliberate as to drain the life from as simple a gag as getting a kick up the backside. Watching Blinde Passagiere was like wading through molasses with 80 pound weights chained to my ankles.

Wonderful poster art, dull movie..

Blinde Passagiere presents Pat and Patachon as animal caretakers employed by a cash-strapped circus. The troupe is departing by ocean liner to New York (I think) and Pat and Patachon are tearily dismissed at the dock by the circus owner's lovely daughter. But a chase after a lottery ticket Pat has purchased leads both to accidentally end up on the ship as stowaways. Also on board without a ticket is the circus owner's daughter's bland accordian-playing beau, who ends up teamed with P&P a la Allan Jones in A Night At the Opera. Needless to say, after lots of running around and ducking in and out of doorways, the circus is saved, the boy gets the girl, the oily villain gets the shaft, and Pat and Patachon end up with a winning lottery ticket. The only real surprise is how few actual visual gags there are in the film. There's a lengthy scene in which P&P feed the circus animals (stealing food from the ship's kitchen to do so) that contains not one single gag, unless watching a chimpanzee eat can be considered a gag. Later, when Pat and Patachon are chased around the deck by the ship's cleaver-wielding cook, the entire sequence was shot silent and clearly improvised. Pat and Patachon were literally left to their own devices, and the results are at least as good as your great aunt's home movies. (In fact, this sequence is so off-the-cuff that the chase at one point stops entirely and cuts away to a shaky, out-of-focus shot of Patachon standing on the deck, pointing to a Zeppelin in the sky. Although the name of the zeppelin can't be made out on film, it's either the LZ-127, Graf Zeppelin, or its ill-fated sister ship, the LZ-129, Hindenburg, which made its first flight in March of 1936.)

This latter-day criticism from someone who doesn't even speak German may be completely unfair to the team. They're certainly likable enough, projecting a kind of blissful Harry Langdon-like innocence. It's also likely that their best, and funniest, work was done in silents. The director who teamed them in Denmark, Lau Lauritzen, definitely has a solid reputation of his own. But funny or not, Pat and Patachon's historical importance is undeniable. And, hell, any comedy team that can spawn a pair of imitators called "Rat and Ratachon" has my attention, anyway.

Ted Healy and an Outboard Motor

2005-02-10T14:55:00.000-08:00

In honor of Bill Sherman's review of Ted Healy's 1930 debut talkie, Soup To Nuts, here's a photo of Ted Healy and an outboard motor.

I find Ted Healy's special brand of cruelty far funnier than Bill does. That says volumes about me, I'm sure.

1930s Media Obscurities on Parade!

2005-02-01T20:18:00.000-08:00

Two items of note this week.

1) Pop culture blogger and friend 'o mine Bill Sherman is writing reviews for a number of extremely obscure pre-code 30s comedies that I sent him on a whim. His review of Joe Cook's Rain or Shine (1930) is already up and next he'll be covering Soup To Nuts (also 1930) starring the brilliant Ted Healy and his stooges. Among the other features I sent which I hope he'll be covering are Just Imagine (1930), the unspeakably bizarre El Brendel science fiction musical, Follow the Leader (1930), Ed Wynn's first, and best, talking star vehicle, and Hips, Hips, Hooray! (1934), my favorite Wheeler and Woolsey picture. A few Clark and McCullough shorts were tossed in as well. Weezelzee..

2) I've donated scans from my copy of the Aesop's Movie Fables Book to animator Steve Stanchfield so he can include them as extras on the Van Beuren DVD he's putting together. I'll be sure to mention it here when he finally puts it up for sale. I have several of Steve's Thunderbean DVDs and they're terrific, featuring crisp prints of rare 30s cartoons. Hell.. I never thought I'd see the complete Van Beuren Cubby Bear series on DVD! Steve's Ebay merchant ID is swat_the_fly and he posts DVD updates here. Buy his stuff. All of it. You won't be sorry.. unless you're one of those cartoon-hating heathens.

What the @$%#?? A blog?

2005-01-26T08:01:00.000-08:00

Yep. Finally got sick of having to recreate the news page every damn time I wanted to say something new. Sorry about the pop-ups.

I busted my butt getting a rather elaborate animated music video done for my annual website Christmas gift only to discover that Toon Boom Studio 1 and OS X Panther don't get along with one another in the slightest. Hopefully I'll be able to get "Santa Is Watching You" online within the next couple of months.

Meanwhile, work on "Aaron Marx and the Chocolate Conspiracy" continues. I can now safely say that the entire thing will be complete in early 2006. Then comes the hard part: finding a publisher. Wheeeee-doggies!