One great thing about looking through old magazines is reading about something we now know to be a big deal, before anyone knew it was going to be a big deal. I was thumbing through the spring 1979 issue of Cinefantastique - one of the most consistently outstanding sci fi film and tv magazines until it ceased publication in 2006. I bought the issue because of the lengthy cover story about Forbidden Planet (a film that I occasionally become obsessed with to this day).
The Forbidden Planet article was fascinating, but also fascinating were the tiny little blind items sprinkled through the magazine about upcoming genre films. In one of the margins was this modest little tidbit...
The Empire Strikes Back in 1980
Shooting title of the Star Wars sequel is "The Empire Strikes Back" which began filming on March 5 in Finse, Norway, on locations which will double as for an ice-covered planet. Directing is Irvin Kershner from a script by Larry Kasdan and the late Leigh Brackett. The recent casting a black actor Billy Dee Williams is a revealing move, executive producer George Lucas' token gesture to those who objected to Star Wars' lily-white universe.
Makeup artist Stuart Freeborn, assisted by his wife and son, is creating a mechanically-operated puppet, described as a 3 1/2 foot tall alien who looks like a "wizened old man, human-like, very ancient and wrinkled. Motivated via a series of offstage wires, this creature is important in teaching Luke Skywalker about the mysteries of "The Force".
A miniature land vehicle to be used with animated people inside it is part of the stop motion effects to be supplied by John Berg and Phil Tippett. The film will be released by 20th Century Fox in 1980.
Not exactly breathless with excitement, are they? This may seem a timid description of the sequel to "Star Wars", but audiences really didn't know what to expect. This issue is from 1979, only 2 years after the release of "Star Wars". After the success of the first film, Lucas opened up a bit about Star Wars being just one chapter in a "saga"... but in the movie biz that's just called a "sequel", and sequels didn't traditionally perform as well as the original. For this reason, even after the dramatic worldwide success of Star Wars, Lucas had difficulty raising the money he wanted for Empire. Few wanted to bank on a sequel to what they saw as a fluke hit (releasing blockbuster films in the summer wasn't even popularized yet), especially when the sequel was going to be so expensive.
We all know what happened. "Empire" turned out to be the best film in the series (remember how innocent we all were when we thought that "Return of the Jedi" was the suckiest Star Wars movie?), and Lucas could go on to make any movie he wanted. Like "Howard The Duck", but that's another story.
Confirmation of Star Wars' staying power was still a year away from that issue of Cinefantastique. Before modern-day spoiler alerts, internet script leaks, and trailers that ruin any sense of surprise or suspense, back then we had to rely on genre magazines to report on even the tiniest morsels of info about these films that would go on to change the movie business forever.
In the early days of Retro Thing, we wrote about Cool Rockets, model maker Jeff Brewer's series of superlative rocket powered sculptures. Originally inspired by the 50s, Jeff has gone back further in the past to bring us farther into the future. His newest models are from the world of Buck Rogers, that wild 1920s comic strip that helped give birth to science fiction.
I got to see the Buck Rogers battle cruiser and the Asterite craft recently, and they continue the tradition of high quality coming from Brewer's spacedock. Hand-finished and poised for liftoff, each ship is fueled up and ready to go on those post-depression adventures of the funny pages. While his prior Cool Rockets were imbued with a spark of attitude (several of the designs looked ready to flex and spring into action), the Buck Rogers ships play it straight, serving as a tribute to those designs that launched so many imaginations so long ago.These Buck Rogers rocket sculptures are limited to a thousand pieces, so they won't be in our orbit for long. You can click below to find one on Amazon, and you'll be helping out Retro Thing along the way.
You can point your joystick a whole lot of directions to try to target the exact cause of the Great Video Game Crash of the early 80s. Home computers were on the horizon, reaching a level of sophistication that 70s era game console hardware couldn't touch. There were a couple of high profile failures at Atari in the form of that poor anemic Pac-Man, and the much maligned E.T.. Then there was the avalanche of atari 2600 shovelware littering shelves.
The Atari 2600 didn't have any sort of built-in security, so anyone could figure out the workings of the system and develop a game for it. [Nintendo was able to reboot video gaming a few years later by building a lock-out chip into their NES system so only licensed games bearing the "seal of quality" would run.] The tremendous profits that Atari was raking in attracted developers who were less invested in creating cool games, than they were in cashing in on the fad.
Genuine games from Atari cost $30-40 back then, but this new breed of budget releases were hitting shelves at $10-20 driving the overall market down. Many of these poor games made the Atari 2600 look even longer in the 8 bit tooth, weakening confidence in the market.
Here's a TV commercial from the mid 80s that bundles together several third party games (with doubtful claims of the games' value) into a mega-bundle deal for $19.95. The Game Crash may have been over, but there was still a lot of crap game inventory to blow out. It's a long ad too - 90 seconds to offer UHF audiences everywhere (at least in Chicago) about this Five Pack of not-so-great games. Even at this price, it wasn't that great of a deal. My local Zayre was already selling these titles at 88 cents a piece at that time.
No cash grab is complete without reaching the largest audience possible, so here's another version of the ad (that's even 30 seconds LONGER!) en Español as it was broadcast in Chicago on Sunday June 9th, 1985.
"The decade that just ended, may mark the finale of television as we
have known it, an industry dominated by three corporate mastodons,
geared to the mass market. Crowding the horizon are new creatures -
videocassettes, videodiscs, pay television, satellites, a growing
public-television system, ad hoc networks, superstations."
"The television of today will probably be transformed into the home
video center of tomorrow which will harness the new technologies into
one all-purpose unit. Even Ma Bell is steadily creeping forward to grab a
piece of the telecommunication action."
"For the first time since television entered our homes, the
territory monopolized by the three networks is in danger of shrinking.
The question now is whether the interlopers, if successful, will
transform the wasteland into a forest of genuinely diverse vegetation or
litter it with more of today's trash."
- From the introduction to "Up The Tube", Sally Bedell's 1981
book on the 70s TV landscape under TV network executive Fred Silverman.
Except
for the references to videocassettes and video discs, this could almost
be an assessment of TV today. Sure there are some shining spots, but
network tv is slowly fading to black. I just started reading this book
telling the story of Fred Silverman's amazing career which winds its way
through network TVs most powerful days. As with so many historical
accounts, I find myself scratching my head at how many similarities
there are to today.
It's also interesting to see Bedell's prescient view
of TV's future, though some parts of her prediction took until recent
years to take root. The very idea that a telecommunications company would be involved with broadcast content must have seemed outlandish in 1981. The past few years have seen a number of old media/new media conglomerations like AOL-Time-Warner, and MSNBC. Apple's content deals pave their long-rumored path to the living room... and even stodgy old Intel has their sights set on television. Not content to merely power other people's products, Intel wants to provide content just like a broadcast network. Rumors are that they are engineering a product that operates less like a computer or DVR and more like... you guessed it... television.
The national and international views made possible by television
back in the 50s is still one of the best tricks ever in retro
gadget-dom. It's just unfortunate that executive bravado, lowest common
denominator programming, and just plain ignorance of what the audience
wants is pushing network TV further and further on the back burner, displaced by technology companies. It seems like when broadcast TV strikes paydirt, it's in spite of what network
execs do, not because of what they do.
Broadcast TV's stubborn evolution/diminishing relevance is edging closer and closer to Bedell's
prediction from 30 years ago. So for about half of TV's existence, this
prediction has been on the table, and now that it's here, TV executives
are caught as if by surprise? What I'd like to know is just how much
longer the old guard can hold out...
On December 26, 2012 we lost Gerry Anderson, prolific creative force behind countless classics of UK television. Though his shows and techniques may seem a little homebrew these days, there was nothing as thrilling or as "realistic" anywhere else. Whether you were a fan of his innovative "Supermarionation" puppet series like Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, or his later live action output such as Space:1999 or UFO (one of my personal favorites), his unique vision has lasted through generations of TV audiences, and still influences the world of special effects.
Anderson got his start in the 1950s with a number of black and white series for children. While his career goal was to produce live-action films for the cinema, his earliest work in the entertainment industry was as a children's TV producer for British television. Looking for a more economical way to do cartoons, he hit upon the idea of using puppets. Puppets on TV weren't unusual back then, but it wasn't long before Anderson's puppet shows stood out from the stringed-up crowd. Puppet shows were often shot in a single long take, like watching a live show on a stage. Anderson used the tools of cinema - editing, varying shot sizes - all to make his puppets into TV stars. His team also created an innovative method for animating the character's mouth in precise synch to the pre-recorded soundtrack- a huge innovation. On one series, when he saw how much excitement an on-set explosion added to a scene, Anderson added elaborate special effects to every episode of every series.
His 50s and 60s TV series inhabited the world of science fiction. Not only because hearts and minds were on the high-tech space race of the time, but he theorized that the future's inevitable moving walkways and jetpacks would keep the puppets from having to walk around too much (still a difficult illusion for puppeteers to pull off). After successfully selling his series Fireball XL-5 and Stingray to the US, Anderson created the epic 60 minute episodes of Thunderbirds - his most famous series. It's safe to argue that the massively popular (and massively impractical) craft of Thunderbirds were the real stars of the show. The follow-up series Captain Scarlet introduced more realistically proportioned puppets which were both amazing - and amazingly creepy.
Finally realizing his dream of live action adventure (after helming a handful of feature films), the 70s brought a pair of innovative live action shows - the infamous Space:1999, and the virtually unknown UFO (that I adore for all the wrong reasons). 1999 featured amazing special effects for TV, astonishingly comprehensive design for the sets, fashion designs for the crew... No wonder it was the most expensive series on television at the time (though a ratings disappointment). UFO was the precursor to 1999, a show that seems to be about who can make the cruelest command decision that will result in the most collateral damage - but that's a story for another time.
In the 80s, Anderson returned to kid's TV with Terrahawks (he was not involved in the Japanese cartoon Thunderbirds:2086). The 90s saw a new live-action series called Space Precinct, as well as a revival of sorts of his puppet series. One peculiar repackaging called "Turbocharged Thunderbirds" in the US had human hosts that followed the goings-on of the characters on... um... "Thunderworld". Another 90s attempt to modernize Thunderbirds saw the 60 minute episodes edited down to 22 minutes (first to go... shots of the puppets smoking cigarettes!), with new dialogue tracks and sound effects (but the original 60s music soundtrack for some reason) dubbed in.
Anderson himself was constantly busy with new ideas & innovation even after his 60s heyday. Dick Spanner was a stop-motion animated series, and he was an early entrant into full computer animation with an all CG reboot of Captain Scarlet in the 2000s. While he remained at arms length from the 2004 Thunderbirds feature film that played like a knockoff of Spy Kids, he was still out there promoting his old series and developing new ideas.
It's not hard to find examples the effect Anderson's shows had on the special effects industry worldwide. Many of his top people were poached for 2001: A Space Odyssey in the 60s. In the 70s one of his top FX artists, Derek Meddings, went on to be a remarkably in-demand miniatures and effects expert creating astonishing visuals for the original Superman feature film and several installments of the James Bond series. In the 90s til today, Ron Thornton (a gent I've had the good fortune to speak with a number of times) is a master of computer graphics special effects. He and a small team of dedicated effects artists used their Amiga computers in the early 90s to create the amazing special effects of space opera Babylon 5 - the first weekly TV series to have fully CG special effects that looked as good as anything in feature films. The methods he used to "dirty down" clean computer generated models comes right from the "lived-in tech" techniques from Anderson's many series.
It's no exaggeration to say that we've lost one of the fathers of modern film and television special effects. I first saw his series at 6 in the morning on local television in the 70s. Trust me, it's got to be something special to get me out of bed that early. Even in those post Star Wars years, the level of attention to detail Anderson's crews lavished onto what were ostensibly kid's shows is still breathtaking. Oh yes, those shows are quirky, but Anderson's work amazed us then, and in so many ways continues to amaze us now. You knew from the very first time that you were watching something special. We salute you, Gerry Anderson.
Longtime readers will know that I'm a huge fan of Ernie Kovacs, TV genius & pioneer. Everyone pretty much agrees on how amazing Ernie was, but what a lot of people don't realize is just how amazing his wife Edie Adams was too. She's that gorgeous lady at the Hungarian's elbow (usually singing) in much of his television output. The lady who was equally at home as an opera singing grand dame, as she was a dame getting hit in the face with a pie. The amazing lady who had the foresight to save all of those classic TV shows when their destiny was the dumpster.
It might have been easy for someone else to get lost in the shadow of Ernie personality and legend, but multi-talented Edie had a significant career of her own; Broadway, movies, TV, and of course her long stint as the Muriel "why-don’t-ya-pick-one-up-and-smoke-it-sometime?" cigar girl.
She pressed a few albums in her time, but never released a Christmas album until now. This new CD is a collection of Christmas music from Kovacs' live morning TV show in the 50s - "Kovacs Unlimited". These are simple & unadorned arrangements of Christmas classics (along with some less shopworn tunes) as she performed them on live TV. These recordings come from acetate records of these live performances, so by all accounts it's a miracle that we can hear these songs today.
For audio purists out there, yes... you will hear some surface noise from these 60 year old acetates, but the restoration of Edie's voice is tremendous. Any extraneous noise doesn't matter to me in the least. The performances have that vitality that only live TV can create (you can even hear Ernie and crew chatter in the background on a couple cuts).
I thoroughly enjoyed this CD, one of the rare times my love of old TV can share space in my heart with love for these old classics. If you can't find the Edie Adams Christmas Album at your local record store (the CD's liner notes are worth getting the physical disc), you can download selected tracks or the whole album right away from Amazon.
Here's a look at The Doctor's first journey, from the 4-part series 'An Unearthly Child," shot at Ealing Film Studios.
The TARDIS first materialized onto TV screens across the UK on November 23, 1963, exactly 49 years ago today. Seven hundred and eighty nine episodes later, she's still as unpredictable (and noisy) as ever. Somebody really should take a look at those temporal dampeners.
We are pleased to bring Retro Thing readers the following public service. Retro Thing will finally unravel the mystery of the four different pieces of media named something like "Ghostbusters". That's right... four... and we'll be ignoring the 1940 Bob Hope movie "The Ghost Breakers", and the 1946 Bowery Boys comedy "Spook Busters" just to keep things simple, okay?
In 1975 I had a favorite Saturday morning live-action CBS-TV show called "The Ghost Busters". Even as a kid I could tell it was spectacularly cheap (from time to time the networks experimented with kid oriented live-action programming on Saturday mornings to try to get away from expensive cartoons. The problem was... kids liked cartoons). The show starred Larry Storch and Forrest Tucker of F-Troop fame. The third member of their party was a gorilla "trained" by Bob Burns (really Bob Burns was inside the suit - a story for another time). A weekly show with spooks and monsters? what could be better than that?
The episodes are all remarkably the same. The trio would leave their shabby office to receive their supernatural assignment at a local junk shop. Whatever secret object they picked up had a tape recorder hidden inside with their instructions (voiced by Lou Scheimer, one of the show's producers), a la Mission Impossible. The tape self destructed a la Mission Impossible, but always in the hands of the Gorilla who always forgot to simply let go.
Their mission took them to the old graveyard, or the old castle at the edge of town... or both (must have been sweeps week). I'm really not joking at how few sets there were. They'd do battle with some 70s luminary like Ted Knight or Jim Backus, but only after some silent-move type slapstick. Finally, they'd dispatch the evil spirit back to the afterlife with their Ghost Dematerializer.
Sounds a little familar, doesn't it?
Remember that this was 1975, nearly a decade before Columbia's big-budget "Ghostbusters" (note the difference in spelling) hit theaters. The CBS show was shot entirely on video, like a sitcom, and was created by Filmation. You know Filmation as the creators of Fat Albert, the Star Trek cartoon, He-Man, and tons of other quasi-animated fare. I say "quasi" as they specialized in low budget TV animation. Their stock-in-trade was limited animation, rotoscoping, endless walk cycles... you catch my drift. In the 70s they experimented with live action. Their other efforts were shot mostly on film, but this 15 episode opus was shot as cheaply as possible. I remembered it well into adult life, and no one ever believed me that there was a rickety old TV show called "The Ghost Busters".
Now spirt yourself forward to 1984. Columbia is about to release "Ghostbusters", a tale of a trio of guys (no gorilla) who are more or less ghost exterminators. Filmation also thought this sounded familiar, and this earned them a licensing fee from Columbia for the name. The movie became a major hit, and Filmation put a new version of their Ghost Busters series into the pipeline. At first, they hoped to do the official TV adaptation of the Columbia film (Filmation did tons of movie tie-in cartoons), but Columbia had other plans. So Filmation created a new cartoon starring the offspring of their old 1975 characters (yes, yes... with gorilla). This series was called "Ghostbusters" (now one word).
Columbia partnered with animation house DiC to create a cartoon based on their jump-suited ghost exterminators. The ghostly sidekick "Slimer" joined the team in this all new show called "The Real Ghostbusters". Problem solved, right? This is the cartoon everyone remembers, as well as a toyline that far outlasted the TV series it was based on.
[Okay, here's some Real Ghostbusters trivia for no good reason. None of the original Hollywood actors voiced their cartoon counterparts in "The Real Ghostbusters". Bill Murray complained that his character's voice artist, Lorenzo Music, sounded too much like Garfield the cat... and with good reason. Music voiced the lasagna-loving, Monday-hating feline in cartoons. BIll Murray was later the voice of Garfield in the 2006 feature film.]
If you'd like to see the original Ghost Busters series, and I don't recommend it, just poke around on YouTube. I did buy the DVDs, and the show looks as good as it ever did (because it was shot on video, Ghost Busters looks far more like a Krofft TV show than a Filmation TV show). Since it was a childhood favorite of mine, I plunked down the money for the DVDs. Instead of a trip down memory lane, I was sort of mad at my younger self for making such poor TV choices. I probably missed some perfectly good Scooby Doo time just to watch a gorilla blow up... which I hasten again to point out sounds much better than it really is.
I've always been on the fence about Disney cartoons. I'm speaking of course of the short animations created mostly while Disney was alive. Uncle Walt surrounded himself with some of the best and most innovative in the business, but lots of times all of that quality didn't come together to tell much of a story. The features are mostly breathtaking, but some of those shorts simply don't have much to say.
So many Disney shorts are idyllic bucolic romps that are pretty to look at, but aren't terribly satisfying otherwise. But there's an element of Disney that even ardent fans seem to forget. Disney was great at scaring the Bejeezus out of children. Think of the terror in your heart at the sight of any number of evil queens, witches, and you just try to choke back the tears at the terror of that fire in "Bambi".
While there are lots of classic Disney shorts that I would dismiss as little more than technical achievements, there are still many many animation classics in the Walt Vault. Perhaps none moreso than "The Skeleton Dance". It's (astonishingly!) from 1929, and is a lovely little bit of morbidity of the macabre goings on in your local cemetery. You always knew that these kinds of post-mortem monkeyshines went on under the full moon, didn't you?
The terrific music is thanks to Carl Stalling (yes... THAT Carl Stalling - He was Disney's first musical director). I twas he that suggested creating a cartoon where music was the whole point - sort of a mood piece - so the "Silly Symphonies" series was born. Check out the sheer number of elements in the cartoon that are syncopated to the music. Don't forget that in those early days of animation, lots of animators were musicians (check out some of the wild music of Disney's in-house band "The Firehouse Five"). Timing those early cartoons was usually plotted out on musical bar sheets, which is why early animation has that characteristic look of everything moving to a beat. This is also the first cartoon to use non-post-synced sound.
You'll see lots of other typical earmarks of early animation, including lots of repetition (the more ya loop, the less ya draw) and figures suddenly turning all rubbery. I love it, and so did Disney. So much so that that we see several of the same moves again in Mickey's adventure in "The Haunted House" released later that same year (Watch for the somewhat head-scratching Al Jolsen gag about 2 minutes in).
These are great cartoons for ths time of year (even though "The Skeleton Dance" was released in August, "The Haunted House" in December). It's a nice reminder that Halloween is for spookhouse fun, not just blood and gore. I love ghosts and witches, but when I walk down the Halloween aisle of a store and see stick-on bloody hand prints, I really do long for some graveyard mischief instead.
Worldwide hit TV series M*A*S*H was first broadcast 40 years ago today. The show teetered on cancellation throughout its first season, but then grew into one of the most popular shows on television (like stablemate "All In The Family" which it was often paired with on CBS). The series finale "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" 11 years later was the most watched television broadcast at the time, with an audience of 125 million dewey-eyed fans.
There are so many lessons to learn from M*A*S*H, a show that somehow balanced heart-wrenching drama and bawdy comedy. One that has always resonated with me isn't so obvious. It's that maybe cancelling a promising idea after 2 episodes isn't always the best policy. If today's network hatchetmen were in power in the 70s, you'd never have seen M*A*S*H beyond the first season. Same with "All In The Family" (which had soft ratings until summer reruns made it a hit). Can you imagine if the only examples we had of 70s TV potential was Three's Company and The Gong Show?
Another lesson is that not every TV show is a rich vein of tie-in merchandise. Even M*A*S*H couldn't dodge the shrapnel of a lot of lousy cash-in crap. I don't mind lunchboxes and posters, and the like... but M*A*S*H action figures? What kid is supposed to enjoy these? I guess it's like playing with army men, except the more tragic side of the equation. The figures are of the main cast, with one variant; you can get Klinger in fatigues or in a dress. Tri-Star rolled out these figures in 1982. Klinger had stopped the "bucking for a section 8" drag routine years before, but even so... is this the first action figure depicting a cross-dresser?
Back in the early 80s, 20th Century Fox was raiding their licenses to cash in on the video game craze. They made some mighty odd choices. There's Alien, a Pac-Man clone based on an R-rated movie, and there's M*A*S*H - a mash-up (forgive me) of Defender and the classic board game Operation. Oh, and an even more depressing chip-tune rendition of the show's theme song "Suicide is Painless". This came out in 1983, the year that M*A*S*H went off the air, right in the thick of the video game industry crashing. You can suffer through this on either your Atari 2600 or Colecovision.
So we learn that even one of the best ideas in television history isn't immune to a constant barrage of really rotten ideas all around. I doubt that even Radar's strange pre-cognition could see these lousy concepts coming...
About a year ago, we featured a stop-motion remake of the opening title sequence from the classic Jonny Quest (1964) cartoon series. It generated a significant buzz on the Intertubes and Roger Evans has decided to kick things up a notch by remaking a full 20 minute episode of the show in stop motion.
Roger has been an enthusiastic low-budget filmmaker for decades and you may know him as the founder of Moviestuff, a company that produces a range of 8mm and 16mm film scanners. He has the technical chops and determination to pull this off.
Here's his plan: "I will break one 20 minute episode down into separate cuts and do a frame count of their length and use those cuts as illustrated guides to what the animation should look like and how they should move. Like the title sequence I have already produced, the separate sections will then be cut together to match the original sound track, thus preserving the original feel of the show but with the added value of being in dimensional stop motion."
Above, one of the original opening shots. Below, Roger's stop motion title sequence from 2011:
So, what are you waiting for? This is the kind of over-the-top project that Kickstarter does best. To learn more and pledge your support, visit the official Jonny Quest Episode Kickstarter page. Tell 'em Race Bannon sent ya.
Stop reading this post. Watch the video first. You'll feel giddy, glowy, and laugh out loud happy. I guarantee it. Watched it? Good. It's a fake.
The 1926 Fotoplayer is a real instrument, and Joe Rinaudo really plays it with the vim you see. YouTube user "adnmusic" added the very credible sounding cacophony that could have backed an old timey version of "Sweet Child O' Mine". The Fotoplayer uses perforated rolls like a player piano, but with tons of extra (wait for it...) bells and whistles.
Movie theaters of the silent era installed Fotoplayers so that a non-musician (remember the piano rolls provided the main music "track") with a minimum of four hands could accompany the mute movies of the times. When I used to teach film history, I thought it was important to make clear that silent movies were never really silent movies. There was always some kind of accompaniment (sometimes live, sometimes on records) to liven up the flickers. It is only in an academic atmosphere like film school that we watch these movies in clinical silence.
Rinaudo painstakingly restored his Fotoplayer, taking thousands of hours to repair and fine tune the many, many moving parts. You can glimpse the drums, xylophone, and the many pull-cord sound effects in action with Joe's real performance in the genuine video below. Fewer than 50 Fotoplayers survive today, with only 12 in working condition. It's a privilege to see one in action, and it can still bring a smile to the face... even if it's not playing Guns N' Roses.
Longtime readers of Retro Thing may have picked up on my life-long admiration of Ernie Kovacs, early tv comedy pioneer and genius, no less. Kovacs invented many characters throughout his TV career. One of the most enduring is Percy Dovetonsils, a lithping dandy of a poet who'd bestow his oddball odes on a sometimes bewildered audience.
Percy painted a fine monochromatic picture with his tiger striped smoking jacket and cigarette holder, all while stealing sips from a large martini. Besides the outrageous lisp and wardrobe, it's Percy's eyes folks remember best. What started out as goofy novelty store glasses with painted on half-asleep eyeballs, became just as much a trademark as Percy's self-congratulatory little giggles.
Today it would be easy to point at Percy as being a rather politically incorrect character. Then there are those TV historians who point at Percy as being TVs first openly gay character. The performance is a collection of 50s stereotypes, but charming in a way. I'll leave this issue to the TV historians and sexual revolutionaries to debate. All I know is that Percy is clearly very happy with who he is, bless him.
Percy was one of Kovacs' most popular creations, and Ernie recorded a volume of poems for Vanguard Records back in 1961, along with notes and mockups for the LP's cover. The album never progressed beyond that point, as a tragic auto accident claimed Kovacs not long after. The unreleased album became the thing of rumors and was thought lost forever. Kovacs. We're fortunate that archivist Ben Model discovered the studio tapes recently, and after adding a piano score (Model is an accomplished accompanist for silent movies) the album is available for the first time today!
You can find "Percy Dovetonsils Thpeaks!" on CD, (delicious!) vinyl, or digital download (purchase of either CD or LP also includes full album digital download as well as many extra tracks unavailable anywhere else). I just had to get the LP - the first 1000 are in luscious lavender.
It may have taken decades to dust off the poems within the frilly covers of Percy's collected works, but I daresay it's been worth the wait. Omnivore Records has put together a really classy package. If you use the links below to purchase the CD or LP on Amazon, you'll be helping out Retro Thing as well as showing your love for these thuperb thonnets. Thankth!
Despite not being a car guy, this is a challenge even I'm interested in. The online show "Super Power Beat Down" brings together two Bat-fans for some gut-churningly nerdy smack talk (for example, when extolling the virtues of the '89 Batmobile, the guy talks about its armor shielding as a benefit, which was merely an optical effect *ahem*), followed by a race between the two cars.
The smack talking blurs between the reality of the two actual vehicles and their story elements a little too much (and the segment overall would benefit from a tighter edit - double *ahem*). Really what we're talking about is whether a chopped and converted Corvette from the 60s can take on a fiberglass encased Camaro-something-or-other chassis from 1989.
We have to point out that these cars are not the originals (for example the original Batmobile was a modified Ford prototype vehicle), but more recent reproductions. Nonetheless, you can guess whom we're rooting for.
Remember that day in school when all the girls were marched into one room, and the boys into another to watch special "so I guess you're growing up now" films? Happened a couple times to me. While the girls were off watching a film on menstruation (which most of them had conquered by then), we boys were subjected to a hopelessly outdated film with way too many naked men having a way too frank discussion in a gym shower room (no, it wasn't THAT kind of movie).
Later I remember all of us seeing a filmstrip in health class that discussed venereal disease. As the accompanying cassette bleeped off the first few frames, my eyes locked on the large "Walt Disney" logo. I couldn't help but point to the screen and say, "I'll bet that Mickey gave a dose to Minnie... that dirty rat..."
I miraculously did not serve detention that day.
We've got the original film here, but the film strip is what I remember. The movie doesn't depict those lovable Disney characters and their orgiastic troubles, as I'd hoped. Rather they portayed the various V.D. attackers as columns of lumpy, germy, soldiers. The general (is that Keenan Wynn's voice?) issues orders to his boys, outlining the plan of attack.
The animation isn't exactly what you might expect from the Disney studios. The film uses the "limited animation" technique as a way to save time and money in production. It was the early 70s, after all, and animators were using these kinds of shortcuts even in the features.
Having watched "VD Attack" again recently, I found it offered a good discussion of a vitally important issue. Sometimes educational films get so caught up in being entertaining, it undermines the message. Except for the great big Disney logo at the start of the film that got us all laughing, the film made an impact even on a group of unruly high school students, and at least one smart mouth (yes, I can still quote lines from that one viewing decades ago).
Disney's role in educational films dates back to the 1940s when the studio was in some financial trouble. "Fantasia" had been a spectacularly expensive project that ultimately failed at the box office. WWII left Disney unable to screen product in other countries, cutting off a vital source of revenue. Starting in 1945, Walt took in outside work for the armed services as well as the creation of a series of corporate sponsored films for the American public school system.
"The Story of Menstruation" was paid for by the company we know now as Kimberly Clark - makers of Kotex products - and for ten minutes prepares girls for the changes that are to come (though the film does not demonstrate the actual use of Kotex products - that awkward talk is still reserved for mom). A consulting gynecologist ensured that the film concentrated more on biology than marketing. This was one of the first commercially sponsored film distributed to high schools, and even earned the Good Housekeeping Seal. The information is very good, the serious matronly voice over isn't too stern or too trivial, and the film is a showcase of how animation is a great way to explain complex and sensitive concepts. The music sounds a bit maudlin and syrupy, but that's not uncommon in movies of the time. After the film, the girls received booklets called "Very Personally Yours" with built-in marketing of Kotex products - all with no mention of the use of tampons; the product of rival Tampax.
There's really not much to snicker at in most of the film (though the baby girl at the start of the film sure wears a lot of lipstick). The film offers a rational explaination that's thorough enough to answer a lot of important questions, and the narrator has just enough professional disinterest to not incite panic. However, around the six minute mark, things get a little strange. Asking girls to keep track of their periods on a calendar is fine (I guess?), but referring to it as "past performance" doesn't just make me feel weird, right? Kewpie doll women clean house by sending a chair smashing through the floorboards, and also ride a horse so vigorously as to shatter its spine. At 7:30 the narrator admonishes "don't let it get you down... after all, no matter how you feel, you have to live with people".
I felt sort of encouraged that even though this movie is over 60 years old, the core facts do connect. The film is as frank as it needs to be without being scary. No matter what else you've heard (or perhaps experienced), just remember the narrator's reassurance that “There is nothing strange or mysterious about menstruation.”
Both films have fallen into the public domain. Disney doesn't tend to lay claim to these educational titles very often. Educating young people is important, but I suppose if you can't make a ride out of it at Disneyland...
This peaceful full color Parisian street scene was shot on July 19, 1914 - only a few days before the outbreak of WWI.
Shooting title of the Star Wars sequel is "The Empire Strikes Back" which began filming on March 5 in Finse, Norway, on locations which will double as for an ice-covered planet. Directing is Irvin Kershner from a script by Larry Kasdan and the late Leigh Brackett. The recent casting a black actor Billy Dee Williams is a revealing move, executive producer George Lucas' token gesture to those who objected to Star Wars' lily-white universe.
