EricJ

Yeah, I remember, when did that happen? Wasn't it around, like Memorial Day, or thereabouts? This is now the second age-ambiguous David Guercio "Is TCM going to show more golly-neato stuff like cartoons?" question in one week that I've had to answer with ".....Nnnnno." Think they had some crazy idea to program a "Workers" theme for Labor Day. Unless it was some marathon that they could pre-program, and let the staff take the long weekend off, like most cable channels. In fact, Johnny Carson reportedly turned down the role, thinking audiences would be confused, so, ahem, MARTIN SCORSESE cast Lewis instead. Otherwise, as for Lewis's own comedies, "The Nutty Professor" is still his most disciplined and focus/reined-in one yet. And yes, I've already done the thread about how Jerry's obnoxious Buddy Love alter-ego was "really" Frank Sinatra, not Dean Martin, and if you go in knowing that, his performance is either hilarious or scary, or both.

(Aww, I thought this was going to be a thread about movies that bait-and-switched you from the trailer/marketing, like Disney's "Tomorrowland"!)

Arch Obler's The Bubble (1966 - Obler also gave us "Bwana Devil") is, like "Bwana", a horribly amateurish film, but has one shot that will make you a believer in 3-D. If it had been a better movie, I'd have kept the disk around during the 10's, just to shut up all those angry home-theater cheapskates who whined about "greedy studios" trying to sell us Blu3D, and that nothing "popped out" like in Panasonic's ad for Avatar on disks. But yes, Charles Bronson popping up out of the third row in in "Wax" does still make you jump every time. Haven't gotten around to seeing any of the other Smilebox Cinerama-restorations from Flicker Alley, as they mostly do the Cinerama company's own independent travelogues. Warner owns most of the MGM Cineramas, like "Battle of the Bulge" and "Ice Station Zebra", and you know the possibility we have of seeing those restored on disk.

Unfortunately, religious and right-news channels DEPEND on satellites, because, due to the First Amendment, FCC rules only apply to sponsored broadcasting, and not to broadcasters that own their own independent "pirate" hookups. Which is why a lot of broadcasters that don't want to bother with all that "Fair and balanced" nonsense are so determined to get one. ...That's what you get with the dish, rather than the cable or the stream. (The Satellite Wars among the televangelists was offered as one interesting theory behind why Jerry Falwell was so quick to join in the public dogpiling on Jim & Tammy Bakker, in Fenton Bailey's The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000) doc.)

And the sad fact is that "Tom Thumb" is still playable on TCM, but Warner considers "Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm" beyond hope of restoration. So we get stuck with George Pal's rough, sloppy first-draft of the fairytale movie he wanted to make, instead of the more polished finished-product.

After seeing Dr. Jacoby in the Showtime "Twin Peaks" revival, I'm not sure either... 😵

Our system didn't carry it, but seemed a bit out of date to begin with: Like "4K streaming!", "HD channels" were a big thing back in '08-'10, when everybody bought their slick new HDTV flatscreen (as per FCC regulations), but nobody could find any programming for it, unless you lived nearby a big-city PBS free-broadcast station*. Upper-tier channels started "HD networks", some of them just badly upscaled, but by '10-'11, just about everything on broadcast and cable was HD, and whether MGM HD could stay in business was a matter of whether it could corporately compete with HBO and Showtime now going HD. Most of MGM's content sinking into semi-public-domain probably give some idea of the channel's fortunes too. It's probably lingered around the big Comcast and satellite services as a zombie channel all this time, and Warner's reshuffle happened to fall in line with the contract renewal. ----- * - I remember being an early '09 HD-flatscreen adopter, back when there was almost nothing in true HD outside of what local PBS stations were producing, or importing from overseas--If a San Diego station produced a flyover-scenery special, or a Virginia station did a documentary on Pocahontas, we'd see it in Boston. For almost an entire year, every single night, at the 2am end of broadcast day, our area PBS HD-affiliate aired the half-hour promotional HDTV demo film with Bob "Triumph of the Nerds" Cringely explaining the history of how color TV changed broadcasting, and interviewing Julia Child and Mister Rogers about the technological possibilities of four-channel digital streams. For early adopters, if you were up at 2am, it became a Rocky Horror-like holy RITUAL to gather and keep the faith.

Thanks to big sisters in the 70's, and a Live album which consisted almost entirely of cover songs, the Cowsills were MY first introduction to "Hair", the Mamas & the Papas' "Monday Monday", the Beach Boys "Good Vibrations", and the Left Bank's "Walk Away Renee", thank you very much. The real Cowsills had also already had a variety special/pilot with sketches portraying them as a sitcom-family band, but when it went to full sitcom, nobody at the network wanted to deal with Bud Cowsill, stage-dad from Hell. (Couldn't help looking up that Amazon documentary too, huh? )

(The right people will know it. ) Then again, for "classics", there's always:

"What, you think he should have married the girl?"

...I take it you're asking over the recent "Doctor Who with a suitcase??" rants re "Fantastic Beasts", on the IJW thread? You can have an anti-hero like Travis Bickle or Philip Marlowe, or Kirk Douglas in "Ace in the Hole", if he's honorably anti enough, or so committed to his own particular pursuit that you "just gotta admire him" in pursuing it. Just so long as the character can involve us all the way to Act 3. There's an old writing-teacher-ism that there are basically TWO protagonists conquering their battles in classic stories: Rocky Balboa, and Ebenezer Scrooge. One fights the odds against him, to try and achieve his goal to the top of the steps through struggle and effort, and the other fights the world around him to stay the same, and refuses to see his own doubts that he himself may be his own problem, until he may or may not see the light at the end. OTOH, telling a story about Han Solo or Anakin Skywalker, in a story that should be about Luke, is a recipe for disaster.

Ever since the streaming era--and viewers' big move to "cut the cord" and thumb their collective noses to cable AND commercial free-TV--networks have pretty much given up and accepted that nobody watches free-TV anymore...Now, networks openly say "Stream the latest season on Hulu/our website!", and airing a show on Wednesday night is just a legal obligation to satisfy their sponsors. Apart from sports and awards, there's literally no reason for the networks to even try to assume the nationwide public will all be sitting down on the same night to watch the same sweeps-week show, to satisfy the sponsors...Unless, of course, it was live as-it-happens coverage. Like sports, or awards. Otherwise, the networks' corporate masters don't see any need to disrupt the precious air time of their marketable corporate-property series with a one-time special disruption--Unless, like airing Charlie Brown every Christmas, it can satisfy some other corporate property.

All three have been done to death (and the Matthew Broderick "Music Man" is still considered a "failure" that killed off the last wave of post-Bette Midler TV musicals). But the 90's Disney-ABC "Annie" is more considered the official "do-over" for the 1982 theatrical mess, by going back to the stage version; that was a special case. As for why "Hair", think--in networks' search for redundant "familiar" musicals that already had well-known movie versions--they got the stage musical confused with Milos Forman's more off-book 1979 movie. There are a LOT of reasons why you couldn't show the original stage version on network TV. 😮 (One of them having to do with the old Benny Hill joke about how an actor's face on screen is more expensive salary than an actor's hand or foot--"They could never afford to show 'Oh, Calcutta'!") There are two audiences for the live musicals, and they've got two polar-separate networks to show them: NBC, "the network that gave you Peter Pan!", hit the audience that misses variety shows as a kid, and just wants family-friendly theater again. Rent aired on Fox, which is kissing up more to the fact that women and gay audiences are currently the largest core-fangirl demographic for free broadcast-network TV, and thinks you can catch more flies with Rocky Horror, Billy Elliot or Mamma Mia than with The Wiz. Guess which one aired AIDS: the Musical. Amazon Prime, at the moment, has a double-paywall premium-streaming service for "BroadwayTV", where most of the direct-to-cable Showtime Broadway productions from the 80's ended up. It's stuff you've seen before (like the PBS Stephen Sondheim musicals, that wretched direct-video "Memphis" mess that inexplicably got a Tony in the 00's, and the entire run of BBC Jonathan Miller Shakespeare plays from the 80's), but think they've got both new and old Sweeney, and they're less gay than Rent.

...And then I'll get a hefty fee? (Of course, that was also the plot of Fox's Atari-era "M.A.S.H" videogame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxpJ2T1HOuA )

...What, after all that time in magical Hogwarts castle, 1920's NY office buildings weren't gray enough for you?

And while we're at it, can someone remind me how to REMOVE previous uploaded photos from the limited memory space in my account?

"Tinkers"...THAT'S who I was trying to think of! One never-again-explained minute on screen, and an unsettling Peter Capell steals a big lasting footprint on Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971): ("...And nobody ever comes out!")

"Irrelevant" is certainly the word for the Fantastic Beasts, quote, "franchise" by now, and you nailed one of the reasons why Warner couldn't just "make up" more Harry Potter stories without Harry, even if they went out and hired JK Rowling to do it. The first reason being the big problem that took down "Spinoff side-stories" like Solo: a Star Wars Story over at Disney--It's NOT the main character's STORY. Warner gushed over the fact that JK was creating a "new American Wizarding universe", and JK was so intimately close-to-her-own-material with these volumes and volumes of backstory she'd created, they'd forgotten to give us any new character we could even remotely care about, except for flashbacks to the ones we already had in better movies. Least of all a plucky young character that kids could identify with, but the minute any fan said that, out came the hordes of second-generation high-school/college fangirls saying "But it's NOT a 'kids story' anymore! It's a richly-textured complex universe, with shocking revelations about our characters' pasts!" (Meaning, they squee'ed over the fact that Dumbledore was their new GBF and now they really could ship him with Johnny Depp.) And that was assuming there was anything even remotely likable or appealing about Wizarding in America. (Or, rather, the British stereotype version of Prohibition-era America they got from old movies, where everyone wears pinstripe suits and says, "Oh yeah? So's yer ol' man!", and every single female talks like Lena Lamont.) We get a quirkily antisocial Doctor Who, hobby-nerd to the point of near-autistic...and his MAGIC SUITCASE, kiddies!...tracking down a dozen variations on the same big expensive CGI beastie that JK knew the name of and didn't bother to tell us--And, like Harry had Ron & Hermione, our hero Newt has Stressed-out Bureaucrat, and Fat NY Guy Named Kowalski. Watching the first Fantastic Beasts, I found myself channeling Tom Hanks in the toy-company scene from "Big": "I don't get it...What about this would kids find fun??" Bottom line: Even if you could sell a movie with "Grindewald" in the title, it just shows how far JK had her head up her franchise--And how Warner didn't care, just so long as they didn't have to admit that, like Frodo destroying Sauron's Ring, Harry defeating Voldemort in Deathly Hallows Pt. 2 sent everyone home and forced the studio to have to go back to work for a living.

So much that you forgot to tell us who the outright-awful "He" was (Ben Mankie?)..."He" who, who he, pray tell? I keep trying to watch Marty every time it turns up on the Streaming Orphans, but haven't gotten around to it yet, and I'll admit I'm more curious for the Borgnine original than I was for John Candy's 1991 remake. At least heterosexual people like me have an excuse not to know the slightest Spongebob reference. 😛 (And if it was Cartoon Network, I'd understand their deep-seated neurotic issues with "Superfriends"'s Aquaman--as we saw displayed in the recent movie--but Nickelodeon?)

It was in the case of "The Hurt Locker", which opened at little art theaters the same weekend every kid was rushing to the mall cineplex to see "Transformers 2", and caused critics to meltdown, including Roger Ebert literally proclaiming the "death of culture". (Which he did frequently on his private blog, to a degree that would embarrass Bill Maher.) "Why didn't you see 'Hurt Locker'?" was the big battle cry of 2008, and no suspense about who was going to win that year. Ten years later, though, and after '08, the question isn't whether voters are SEEING the indies, it's about why they're not putting anything ELSE on their ballots. And the answer is because, in most cases, they only have time to vote early nominations by buzz and reputation formed on the Golden Globes and critics' awards, and now even the Globes only pays attention to the critic-buzzed Indie films. Except when they get handed a big package of studio publicity about a movie's "surefire Oscar buzz", as Disney went into overdrive concocting for "Mary Poppins Returns", and even convinced the Globes that it was going to happen.

Nice to see they remembered Sir Ector from Excalibur (1981):

Nnnnnnnnno. 😐 (And Disney only got the Leslie Nielsen version from the same clearance-sale package of would-be Classic Media projects that gave us the name-only live-action Underdog, Brendan Fraser as George of the Jungle, and Christopher Lloyd as My Favorite Martian. At 90's Disney, Everything Happened in Threes.) However, "Magoo's 1001 Arabian Nights" is finally available on DVD, for those who patiently waited: https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Magoo-Theatrical-Collection-1949-1959/

And don't break into vending machines, or you'll have to answer to them! 😠 (Seriously, I tried making Coke ice cream floats, but found that the calcium in the milk acts like an antacid, takes the bitter acidic edge out of cola, and leaves it sweet/tasteless...Think I'll stick to root beer with my vanilla.)

"The bowels of Perdition"...Yeah, and I hear it's warm there, too. 😛

Charles B. Griffith had a talent for writing Corman's "funny" films, like Little Shop of Horrors, Creature From the Haunted Sea, and Death Race 2000. Without the stingingly nasty parody of beatnik culture, ABoB would otherwise play as a complete relocated remake of "Little Shop of Horrors", but Miller had that edge that could turn a poor accidental-murderer nebbish into a more believable creepy-loner one by the climax, once he thinks he's in "business". And darn, wouldn't you know I'd forget about Miller's bit part as the Last Normal New Yorker that Griffin Dunne meets in After Hours.