EricJ

I know you turn to unusual sources, but I HAVE to ask where you've been digging up 70's ABC TV-Movies of the Week.

Have you ever wondered why "she" was never seen in public without trendy fashion sunglasses everywhere, for the first three or four years of her popularity? It's not exactly uncommon among the community, for one of the glaringly obvious physiological reasons that makes comic bad-drag LOOK like bad-drag. (Standing up for every national gay-charity cause, big-budget paeans to Barbara Streisand, and stage names that indirectly hint to 70-disco drag-queen-national-anthems might also be considerable red-flags...)

Well, people thought Lady Gaga was female in the recent "A Star is Born", and with the same eyes, mouth and jawline.

Even despite the revealing shot of "introduced" Jessica Lange, I continue to be zoologically amazed that fellow-primate gorillas have fingernails... 😮

Actually, there's one thing the audience and critics' collective memory never let Charles Grodin forget, to the end of his career:

If you mean the recent animated mess, the filmmakers seemed to go in less with Seuss's idea of "Having the wrong idea about Christmas", and more of a wishful 21st-century urban "Gee, folks, doesn't Christmas ANNOY ya every year? Wouldn'tcha LOVE to be like the Grinch, and spill everyone's stupid red cups of Starbucks coffee all over their stupid plaid dog-sweaters?? " Er, somewhat unclear on the concept. Usually wherever there's a discussion of grownup Christmas fatigue, there's usually also the showoff-Atheist brigade, invoking their usual litany of cheap jokes at the expense of the common man that annoys them. The "hero-worship" of pre-reformed Scrooge or the Grinch usually falls into a lighter non-denominational form, but it's still the same idea of thinking you can deal with your own personal frustrations by joking your way to sympathy and making self-centeredness look cute and rewarding. Although the Sim Scrooge is at least a little more sympathetic on his own, since, his own Christmas Past issues aside, he seems to be weary not so much of Christmas, as with the constant interruption by the outside world that "has no right to be merry". He's not so much "mean" as just trying to isolate himself from it, and giving that little disbelieving chuckle ("You want the whole day off?--huhuh! You say that every year!") every time he sees "deluded" folks being happy and showing goodwill.

I wouldn't call Barry Gordon "neglected" for most of the 60's--not least as the wisecracking chip off of the ol' Jason Robards in A Thousand Clowns (1965)--but it was years before I found out his name.

Okay, SOMEBODY has to be old enough or Noo-Yawk-raised enough to know this, because it's been driving me crazy: 😡 All the obits have mentioned the L&S opening, and linked to articles about "Where did 'Schlemiel, Schlimazel, etc.' come from?" Most of which just say "Well, there was a Yiddish folktale about Schlemiel and Schlimazel..." Er, no. Accdg. to stories, the show opening was supposed to show that the two girls had been friends from childhood--They wanted to use some kind of girls' sidewalk-rhyme as they walked down the street; Cindy Williams only knew "Step on a crack...", but Penny offered to use the one straight out of her own Bronx childhood. I remember the two of them telling that story on NYC's "Wonderama" in the 70's, and then doing a full performance of the whole uncut Hassenpfeffer Incorporated, for kids who hadn't grown up with that...Naturally, this is nowhere to be found on YouTube. Does anybody at least have NY grandparents who remembered the whole rhyme, if not out of their own urban street days?

If it was an apple peeler/spiral-slicer, they're still for sale. https://www.amazon.com/Vremi-Peeler-Slicer-Machine-Suction/dp/B01N4B3Z0P/ (And yes, it can core a apple, o Chef of the Future...)

Please excuse my 80's childhood if I start hearing Billy Crystal every time someone intimately discusses what happened on Jeopardy that week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLi0vrpkAQE

Marilyn, or Lina Lamont?

Is that the version with the William Castle-esque "Mystery Break", that asks us who we, the audience, think did it? Okay, TWO improvements.

Well, we didn't expect China would be working on a Winnie the Pooh anime... Still, if Karl had spent more time enjoying sports in his younger years, it might have helped him more later on in life:

Yeah, and I've still got a curiosity to see why dogs go so crazy for Milk-Bones, but I haven't indulged it yet... 😛 Just remember, the 90's-00's Tim Burton name on the label is its own warning, as it was for "Dark Shadows", "Big Eyes", "Planet of the Apes", or the Frankenweenie remake.

Variety pointed out that while it does have charming moments, every would-be charming moment is very calculatedly made to put us EXACTLY in mind of the original '64 movie: https://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/mary-poppins-returns-review-emily-blunt-1203085530/#article-comments "Oh, look at the dancing lamplighters, they're just as good as the chimney sweeps!" And the idea of doing a Mary Poppins sequel isn't new: It was the thirty-year Ahab obsession of Michael Eisner's regime, back when the new heads took over in the late 80's, and had to do a New Eisner-era sequel to an Old Walt classic, to show that the studio hadn't been taken over by a ruthless conqueror. Problem was--back in the days before VHS vidquels--the only Walt-era movies open-ended enough to do sequels to were Fantasia, The Rescuers and Mary Poppins. And we got two out of three. What probably got the movie out of limbo is the same Disney studio push for "house franchise" that's been giving us all those darn live-action remakes: John Lasseter technically outlawed direct story sequels to past classics in the 00's, which means Disney can't do sequels, "reboots" or prequels to their animated movies, at least not in animation. But thanks to "Saving Mr. Banks", they've now hit on the idea that they can make live-action movies about adults who grew up with the original Disney characters, like grown-up Christopher Robin, or grown-up Jane & Michael Banks.

Please keep in mind that means absolutely nothing to non-MST3K fans. NOTHING. Except that he was probably playing another cliche' army guy like he did in "The Living Daylights", like any other working B-character actor. Even jokes about those never-ending Slim Whitman 1-800 record-collection ads on cable were "Who still tells those??" old by the early 90's. If it had just been Jack Nicholson hamming up a "Can't we all just get along?" joke--which you also rarely heard outside of black sitcoms by the end of the 80's--that would have been facepalm enough, but noooo... Sylvia Sidney as a wacky senile grandmother, because Ruth Gordon was dead and Maureen Stapleton was busy (and because Sidney had already appeared in "Beetlejuice" and Burton only uses the same repertory actors over and over)?--No, no, we need MORE innovative satire! Mars Attacks is a true Tim Burton Original, in the fact that it could only have been created by the proverbial Guy Who's Convinced He's a Hoot. 😓

Actually, that's been the only original Tim Burton movie since "Edward Scissorhands", 28 years ago, and as noted, it's a steaming mess. (Every single one of his other post-Batman movies were either hand-me-downs from other directors who turned their projects down, were repurposed earlier projects by the studios, or, like the stop-motion movies, he just plain didn't do.) Accdg. to stories, he dealt the cards out onto a tabletop, shuffled them around into some sense of narrative order, and wrote the storyline. And if there's a "Slim Whitman" card in the Topps set, I'm sure it's a rarity.

Pretty much the entire Marshall family was involved with "The Odd Couple", after Garry was brought in to reboot the film-sitcom into a live-audience sitcom (like he more successfully did with "Happy Days"). Penny was no actress back then, but she did have enough comic timing to make a breakout character:

TCM used to show the John Cleese SOTM intro for Fields, and you can see a bit of Basil Fawlty's antisocial slow-burning frustration in the almost ten comedy-of-torture minutes of just trying to get to sleep despite the idiocy of the outside world. When Fields finally chases the insurance salesman out the door with an axe, at that point it oddly strikes us as what WE would have done. And that, of course, is the idea. If you never got the joke about Mike Myers' SNL "Sprockets" character Dieter, just watch an early 70's Werner Herzog film, back when he was still making German "art" instead of documentaries. All of a sudden, the sketches will make sense.

I believe "Sit down, Mr. Muckle!" was uttered more times than "Kumquats". Although I know how disillusioning it may be to discover that Fields often used funny words for gags. And go on any film-buff discussion of film comedy, and say that the entire scene of Fields' attempt to sleep on the porch (Carl LaFong included) was "unfunny". Oh, wait, you just did.

Still, as foreign Christmas commercials go, they have a long way to beat the classic: And don't forget Payback time... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8WBStu4STY

I sense that's not the restored 1927 score, but eh, Moroder's version was still better. (And threw in a bit of Freddie Mercury, as well.)

She did have the Jacko moves, for large Thriller-like group choreography:

In '77-'78, we had Coming Home and The Deer Hunter for Oscar pictures, as we were just then getting our delayed-reaction to dealing with the Vietnam-vet issue. By the time we got through the we-love-our-vets Reagan 80's, Platoon came in at the end in '87, and wrapped up the whole "therapy session". Most of those named came from '81-'82, which wasn't the last days of the Big Artistic Oscar-Bait, but the infamous '81 "Most Depressing Christmas Ever" (Pennies From Heaven, Reds, Ragtime, Taps, Ghost Story) did basically close the door on Important 70's Movies in time for populist Big 80's Movies. (And yes, "The Right Stuff" is still a great American movie, but reporters just wouldn't shut the **** up about Sen. John Glenn's danged election campaign, which was one real reason it scared Oscar voters out of Best Picture.) One interesting theory is that Heaven's Gate may have part CAUSED our industry for "Entertainment news", and our fascination with box-office numbers: Up to that point in '80-'81, movies opening wide on the same day was still a new invention, but it was around that historical cutoff line--when we were not only wondering whether E.T. would finally outgross Star Wars, but just how much self-indulgent Michael Cimino would karmically lose on his big expensive train set--that the 70's "Hollywood gossip" of Rona Barrett ("What does this reporter know about Dick & Liz's secret fling?") became the 80's Entertainment Tonight update of on-set production reports and box-office profits & losses. We started to trust "glamorous Tinseltown stars" less and less, and concentrate more on where the industry was going and how much more properly "our" ticket money was being spent.

It's unlikely they're going to show Disney's Cinderella. As for The Shining, "Ready Player One" has now cemented its status as a Big 80's Pop-Cult Movie (despite the fact that most people only know three lines from it), and one of the six or seven "cult" titles that Warner wants to shove down our marketing throat over the next two to three years in absence of Batman or The Hobbit. So, yeah, they wouldn't miss an opportunity, although, yes, late at night.