EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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It only became a "Genre" when Dreamworks tried to put out two a year, now that they thought stealing Pixar's act was "easy".
And then when everyone else at Fox, Sony, China, and a dozen other struggling other little animator-studio startups thought imitating Dreamworks was "easy" ("Madagascar" and the Ice Age movies are a lot more popular in other non-English-speaking countries than in the US), it became one cliche' to write the exact same script over and over. And nothing creates a "genre" than default cliche'.
Now, of course, Dreamworks has gone out of business, and ding-dong the Ogre is dead, so Brad's feeling nice and confident again about good CGI movies. I still feel as if I'm going to be disappointed by Incredibles 2, though, as "Unemployment", "Career marital troubles", and "More demon-baby" weren't top on my list of what Cool Stuff we were going to get in that sequel after fifteen years. ?
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33 minutes ago, LawrenceA said:
In Society (1944) - The script seems very piecemeal. The highlight of the film for me was a sequence with A&C walking down a sidewalk trying to sell hats. It seemed very much like one of their old vaudeville bits put to film, and it's very funny.
The Susquehanna routine (Susquehanna Hat Company??) IS one of their old bits, and burlesque, not vaudeville. With movies and radio replacing the burlesque theaters, A&C knew the value of preserving their old Minsky's routines in permanent form. Seeing as they'd already enshrined the burlesque-staple "Nuthouse" routine in Ride 'Em Cowboy (1942).
After Bud Abbott died, his nephew, director Norman Abbott, discovered an old trunk of routines, sketches and burlesque lore that Bud had saved for revivals, and used it to develop the 70's Broadway musical "Sugar Babies", with Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller. Those who know the difference between Vaudie and Burley-Q can appreciate all that A&C did for cultural history.
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16 hours ago, CinemaInternational said:
Speaking about Dinosaur, it is the only one of the now -official 56 Disney (not including Pixar) animated films that I have not seen. I definitely remember all the trailers on the VHS tapes, but I never bothered with seeing the film.
Back before Michael Eisner started picking public feuds with Pixar, Dinosaur was Disney's first "Pixar-killer" attempt at an in-house CGI studio, formed out of the 90's SFX "Secret Lab" department that gave us all those wacky CGI-FX characters in "George of the Jungle" and "My Favorite Martian".
I remember Disney's first showing the dazzling CGI dialogue-free opening as a teaser trailer before "Toy Story 2", and most of us in the audience thought it was going to be some "art" piece like Pixar's dialogue-free shorts. And then we saw the ads and learned that the characters....talked. And not only talked, but that, in the suspiciously Lion King-like story of a hatched dino being raised by lemurs, the character's best lemur pal was his suspiciously Timon-like wisecracking sidekick, audience disillusionment rocketed off the charts. ? I'm not even going to say the line that became permanently associated with the movie, but Disney was so happy that we remembered it from the trailer, they stuck it into every single clip ever shown with this movie. Go ahead, mock our pain.
The reason most of us don't remember it was that it was never "officially" considered one of the Disney Animated Classics, until the early days of Blu-ray thought it could only release CGI animation (why would we want to see high-definition paint brushstrokes?), and apart from Pixar, all Disney had for CGI was Dinosaur, Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons. So somebody had their membership upgraded quickly.
3 hours ago, NickAndNora34 said:Lilo and Stitch is also fantastic, in my opinion.
Lilo is a good character, and Stitch is a good character, but as for the original movie, the opinion of Disney's animators was reportedly that director Chris Sanders couldn't direct you-know-what into a corner without partner Dean DeBlois. And frankly, it showed--The characters finally gelled in the direct-video "Glitch" sequel and the Disney Channel TV series, but the original movie is all over the map, goes out of its way to get us emotionally involved with the wrong character (if we're concerned about the "token Normie" big sister getting a job and keeping her family together, why do we even CARE about the little psycho and her slobbery hellbeast ruining it for her?), leaves us confused for 3/4 of the movie who the main antagonist even is, and was in desperate need of at least one more script draft.
They didn't get too many before going out, back in the days before Lasseter started cracking the whip in the story department.
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On 5/7/2018 at 8:07 AM, Sepiatone said:
Something's going on with my PC now that leaves me unable to see and hear any YouTube clips. So I'm missing a lot of those here.
Had that for a while on older Mac systems once in a while--Turned out something had bugged up the Flash-video plug-in, and if I played a saved desktop clip on a working player-app, it temporarily knocked it back into play (until I started up the browser again).
Also, that's as a Mac user, so can't help you poor PC victims...Still, if it's any help, at least you know which area to look at fixing.
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7 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
I hated The Good Dinosaur. That movie was awful and coming off the heels of Pixar's excellent Inside Out, 'Dinosaur' paled in comparison. It is probably Pixar's worst film.
And even that was quality (but not by much) compared to Disney's first attempt at CGI, Dinosaur (2000), which for years held the Worst record until Chicken Little came out--If you don't remember it, there's good reason:
And I'd be remiss in forgetting Treasure Planet (2002), a fairly darn good film that, like Hercules, has since been rediscovered on disk, despite being the subject of a lot of misplaced audience anger at the time, and misinterpreted for its bad marketing and even worse box-office fallout. If you don't remember that one either, blame a lot of hysterical Lilo & Stitch fans for that.
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2 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
A Canterbury Tale (1944) - British drama from Eagle-Lion and the Archers, writer-producer-directors Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger. A trio of (then) modern day pilgrims meet at a train station in Kent on their way to Canterbury:
At the beginning, the movie pastes in a prologue of the Chaucer characters, trying to suggest this is a "modern-day pilgrimage", but the entire story is basically a sort of British-wartime "Local Hero", with the stars-and-stripes Yankee sergeant confused on his mission, but pleasantly charmed and baffled by the way local village folks deal with day-to-day eccentricities.
A simple-hearted piece of British-homefront morale cinema, at the time when Powell & Pressburger had the near-monopoly on it.
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23 minutes ago, Feego said:
I have that Blu-ray release, and the two films are definitely on separate discs. It's a four-disc set, with each film contained on its own Blu-ray disc and DVD. But yes, the physical discs were missing many of the bonus features that were originally released in the Fantasia Anthology DVD set years before, and I'm not too optimistic that they will ever resurface in physical form.
Disney was starting to recognize the problem with "Disk clutter" by the time Blu 3D came along, and trying to cut back on expensive production. (That was one issue that caused that solo Blu3D disk of "Oz, the Great & Powerful" that raised up such a cry among paranoid Disney haters, it almost killed off Blu3D singlehandedly, and certainly did at the studio.)
They'd invented the idea that Blu-ray "had" to include the DVD--or two, for a double feature--and before Movies Anywhere, were still stuck including the Digital Copy on a separate CD-Rom disk for downloading...Which meant that any Blu release was at least a 3-disk and sometimes 4 or 5. Before they came up with the idea of finally dropping the DC disk, the first disk they tried skimping back on was the Bonus Features disk, either giving us five-minute featurettes, or trying to put them all online, which they did with Lion King and Pocahontas at the time too, IIRC. I knew enough to keep my "Fantasia Anthology" DVD, since there was no way I would be watching "Toot, Whistle, Plunk & Boom" on a grainy postage stamp. ?
If anyone has the recent Signature version of Lion King, I take it the Virtual Vault was not included this time around?
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5 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
Looking over the list of animated Disney films (because I'm missing a lot of the live action and I don't think I necessarily need all of those. I do have all the Hayley Mills movies however)...
All I need is:
-Fantasia (Even though this movie is incredibly dull, I would need to purchase a copy to have a truly complete collection)
-The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (I had this movie but it was damaged in my basement flood. So I technically have it, but the case and cover art are all moldy with old sewage and rainwater)
If you can get the 2-disk Ichabod Blu-ray, they'll throw in Fun and Fancy Free on the second disk, and Reluctant Dragon as a bonus feature on Disk 2. There was definitely a sense of trying to get all the short-anthology package films "out of the way at once", since there were only seven of them in the 40's, and the others (Saludos/Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music/Melody Time) could likely be paired off on their own at some future date.
There's some question whether Fantasia is on the Vault list or not, but it disappeared after its last Blu-ray, so we'll take that as a yes. Hopefully it'll be a better version than last time, which tried to cram 1940 and 2000 on one disk, and Disney has since abandoned the BD-Live "Virtual Vault" they thought was going to solve the problem of making more bonus-feature disks.
QuoteWith the exception of Pixar, I think Pocahontas is the last animated Disney film that I saw in the theater. I don't even think I've seen any of the other films past that one. Except I take that back, I watched The Emperor's New Groove on the bus on a band trip in high school once.
Yes, Pocahontas did rather disillusion us after the first four of the 90's Renaissance, and left all the rabid Lion King fans puzzled and confused. There was some halfhearted effort to proclaim Hunchback of Notre Dame "bold" and "artistic", but think now we know why the audience threw such a tantrum over Hercules when it came out in theaters the next year afterwards. Something was just sort of building out of all that feeling of betrayal, and Lion King fans had no one to blame but themselves.
(And hopefully you've at least seen the Disney films since Groove--
I'm firmly in the Frozen-is-Evil camp, but Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph and Meet the Robinsons are the cornerstones of the 21st century's Third Disney Renaissance. When I got a hug from Vanellope Von Schweetz at the Disney Parks, it's since become the main banner on my Twitter page. ? )QuoteI'm also interested in seeing The Black Cauldron. I've heard that it is considered one of Disney's worst films, but it now has taken on a bit of a cult status.
It's ONE of Disney's worst films now that we have Dinosaur, Atlantis and Chicken Little, but before then, it was the worst, beating out Robin Hood. If some fans are about to throw fits that I implied Robin Hood was not universally loved, that gives you some idea how childhood DVD colors our memories--Black Cauldron is seen as "cool and culty" by little kids that thought they were watching a Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, but Richard Rich was no Disney director. One viewing of The Fox & the Hound will prove that.
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2 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
Does anyone remember the Disney commercials telling you to buy such and such re-released VHS before it goes "back into the vault" ?
Don't have to, it's still in effect: Of a classic list of eleven, two are taken out of the "Vault" every year for one-year limited sales, to keep up their value. It's been that way on into the days of Blu-ray.
If you hurry, you can still get Bambi, Lion King and Lady & the Tramp on Disney "Signature Blu-ray" collection, with Peter Pan to follow in June. Think you missed last year's Snow & Pinocchio by now, though, so good thing you found the used.
2 hours ago, speedracer5 said:I recognized the conductor in Fantasia from a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
"Leopold!...Leopold!..."
3 hours ago, BagelOnAPlateOfOnionRolls said:That means you will be watching High School Musical 3: Senior Year but not High School Musical or High School Musical 2.
And consider yourself not missing much.
Of the direct-videos, there's plenty to skip--Although if there's time enough to watch Mulan II, Pocahontas II: Voyage to a New World, Cinderella III: a Twist in Time (which story was actually taken from one of their Cruise-ship musicals) and Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch has a Glitch, they're probably the better of the bunch, and the afternoon-cartoon TV pilot Atlantis II: Milo's Return is miles ahead of the flailing hot-mess we got in theaters...Sometimes, as with Tarzan, Hercules and Lilo, a Disney Channel TV spinoff is just the second script-draft the original movie needed.
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11 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
I think the RIFFTRAX edition of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL is now 10 YEARS OLD (!) and was one of their earliest ventures (along with PLAN 9 and NIGHT OF THE LIVIGN DEAD) I think they were maybe still finding their footing on this one, I've watched maybe 30 or more of their "experiments" since, and am just as hooked as I ever was on MST3K (haven't checked out the NETFLIX version yet.)
THE FACT THAT they are able to do movies with graphic violence, swearing and nudity (as well as the fact that they're not bogged down by the Host segments) has actually helped tremendously.
it also helps that they've been doing a lot of direct-to-video crap from the 90's, which speaks to me as we stole pay-per-view when I was a kid and I used to watch a lot of those back in the day.
RiffTrax started out as Legend Films latest PD-vulture attempt to sell new public-domain colorizations--and not very good ones--of their scifi-horror PD titles: HoHH, Night of the Living Dead, Little Shop of Horrors, Plan Nine, Catwomen of the Moon, etc. Michael J. Nelson was out of a job, and billing himself as one of the "creators" of MST3K (or maybe something else, since he technically wasn't), and landing book jobs and Cracked.com gigs from folks who believed him...Like cheap PD-vulture video companies who believed they'd create "MST3K episodes" of their own if they caught one of the guys by the toe. It was only after RiffTrax broke free from their masters' leash that they went into the easy gags they wanted to, namely poking at annoying fans of Twilight, Hunger Games, Avatar, and the Tolkien movies...Yuk yuk. Don't step on that low-hanging fruit, you might squish it. ?
Nowadays, getting public-domain means they can only GET direct-video-crap from the 90's, although they've discovered that bizarre educational shorts are attracting more audiences than the cheap high-school "Nerd-movie" Avatar and Last Jedi-hate gags.
11 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:if i have any complaints about RIFFTRAX it's that they are very lazy in their live shows, just repeating the same jokes from the VOD's and that there is an occasional strain of tiresome (and sometimes malicious) in-joking between the three, but at the same time, some of that is very funny.
They've also discovered they got a, ahem, lot of new cult fans for the public-domain "Reefer Madness" live shows, and have started rewarding their new loyal minions. (Eg. a character might look at a clock--"Look, it's 4:20!"). And yes, the narcissistic Malicious Mutual-Rib-Nudging has pretty much taken over the riffing completely: Look, we know Bill Corbett runs every single joke into the ground because he possesses no remote sense of comic timing and is too desperate for taste, does deliberately annoying his two pals (AND us) have to be his new self-aware "shtick" in every episode?
Basically the "real" MST3K talent all migrated over to Netflix's new MST3K: the Return revival, although that one's still trying to find its footing away from 70's-80's Roger Corman/New World and stranger 90's direct-video.
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Yes, the double "Ki-kishhh!!" definitely sounds like TV library...
Speaking of classic monster effects, after high school, I used to volunteer at a nature sanctuary with wolves and coyotes, and not once did I ever hear a howl that sounded anything remotely like the stock "Ur-ur-urroooo!" you hear when TV and movies want to show old Transylvanian castles. Maybe those Children of the Night were a more specific local variety.
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5 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
I just cant stand HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (not even a particular fan of the rifftrax version) but I think that it is very much a generational thing. People who are a little bit older than me maybe saw the film as a kid in the theater or Saturday morning matinees or on television at Halloween, and have fond memories of it thusly.
(I also don't care for STRAITJACKET or MR SARDONICOUS, although the latter has interesting moments)
The Rifftrax version is pretty awful even if you like Castle or MST3K (dear gods, the surviving guys have gotten lazy as of late, and the Netflix series with the "other" crew is better), but HoHH is strangely watchable just for being the "definitive" Vincent Price, Elisha Cook, and yes, William Castle.
Unlike even Roger Corman's best Vincent Price Poe epics, there's Castle's own sort of onscreen "wink" to his audience about his shameless B-movies (much like Margaret Hamilton's wink at the end of 13 Ghosts), that has a smarter, giddier enthusiasm about putting clever twists and audience button-pushing in the scripts. There's always the theory that Alfred Hitchcock was intentionally trying to one-up Castle with his "No one will be admitted" gimmick for Psycho, versus the suspiciously similar Hitchcockian plot twist in Castle's Homicidal a year later, with its Castle gimmick of "Your money refunded if you're too afraid to watch the ending!"
(Never mind that the Straitjacket plot suspiciously resembles Richard Franklin & Tom Holland's story for "Psycho II".)
5 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:frankly, I really wish that Castle had been an actor instead of a director. His cameos are often the liveliest parts of his films.
I always thought "Why did they have John Goodman play him in 'Matinee', when Castle was almost a ringer for Frasier's dad?"
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6 hours ago, Bethluvsfilms said:
THE SIMPSONS stopped being funny to me as well years ago. As far as I am concerned the golden years were 1990 to 2000.
Everyone disagrees, but if they had to pick one, the general consensus has enshrined the Monorail episode as the Last True Old-School Funny Simpsons Episode, Season 4, 1993.
The fact that Conan O'Brien left the writing staff shortly after, and Phil Hartman died in '98, didn't do the rest of the series any longrun favors either. ?
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4 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
There's been a lot of talk on here recently about FilmStruck supplanting the TCM TV channel, but I think that's very premature. FilmStruck has a long way to go to match TCM's programming variety. I like FilmStruck, but that's because I like foreign and arthouse films, and the Criterion section of FilmStruck is loaded with them. However, the majority of film viewers (and TCM viewers) have little to no interest in that kind of stuff.
One of the problems with Warner Instant Archive, before it became FilmStruck 2.0, is that they just didn't have the streaming rights to most of the classics--Warner owned the broadcast-cable TV rights to most of their library right from the very Ted Turner sale, but Streaming is a new area for legal to handle, which is why TCM On Demand never lasted very long.
By the time the disk Instant Archive double-dips some of their old retail classics they've since banished to the archive in the 10's, like Fred Astaire or James Dean, they know enough to plan ahead and work out the streaming rights to the title as a part of renegotiating the DVD rights. But for a while, seemed like you couldn't stream ANYTHING on WIA except for the public-domain stuff: Pre-Code, Bowery Boys, Hong Kong and 70's TV.
We're definitely not at the stage where you can watch any rare studio Humphrey Bogart or Bette Davis Warner movie show up on a Thursday night the way you can with an all-day TCM festival, so until they get a lot more work done, TCM will have to resign itself to being the Last Watchable Cable Channel, even as the other premiums like Starz and Showtime all try to get their own Amazon double-paywall streaming channels.
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11 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
Are you having trouble locating any of the films? I've seen Song of the South before, but I cannot find a copy to watch on YouTube. Are you skipping the ones you cannot locate? I am trying to utilize my own personal collection, the internet and the library. I'm watching Pinocchio right now!
Y'know, I never even would have HEARD of Archive.org, if one of the posters didn't keep finding all his YouTubes and rentals there:
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6 hours ago, spence said:
On 5/15/2015 at 4:53 PM, Bogie56 said:
Yeah, I remember when I used to keep hitting on that Index number of the page with Bogie's Tales of Hoffman complaint from three years ago, instead of just finding the right "Last page" >> button when opening the thread.
Hated to keep doing that every single time, but I finally learned which one to click.
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On 5/1/2018 at 2:56 PM, HoldenIsHere said:
My vote goes to Aladdin (despite his humble origins he's usually considered a Disney prince) with THE LITTLE MERMAID's Prince Eric the runner-up.
In the disastrous first draft, Aladdin was going to be closer to the original tale, where he was a little street kid, with Michael J. Fox's voice--It was Jeffrey Katzenberg who famously said "The princess wouldn't fall for him! Wouldn't she go for someone who looked like Tom Cruise, instead?"
And since it had beaten the Disney movie by a few years, there are more than a few shots in the movie, than just Prince Eric's uncanny resemblance to Treat Williams, to suggest that the Little Mermaid animators were directly influenced by the "Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre" version:
On 5/1/2018 at 2:39 PM, LornaHansonForbes said:(Actually, if ole Walt were to choke on anything it would probably be some errant ice in his throat in the hyperbaric chamber.)
(ITS TRUE)
(Ward Kimball didn't make it up as a press prank to keep reporters away from Walt's family funeral.) ?
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4 hours ago, jakeem said:
Remember the days when Broadway shows became Hollywood motion pictures?
Yes, that was before it became too expensive to make Broadway musicals, so only studios like Universal and Disney could afford to get into it with "Wicked" and "The Lion King"--
And then every other studio wanted to make them too, but all they wanted to sing about was their own cult-franchise promotion. So Fox gave us "Rocky", Weinsteins gave us "Finding Neverland", Warner gave us "Elf" and "A Christmas Story" every December, and Paramount gave us Spongebob and Mean Girls.
Question is, does anyone remember when heterosexual movies became Broadway musicals, before the days when they tried to find "metaphors" in Catch Me If You Can?
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On 11/17/2016 at 7:16 AM, Dialogfan said:
By the time Shirley Temple was a young adult, she was still adorably cute!
Fox has added her surviving late-50's "Shirley Temple Storybook" color-TV episodes to her 30's child-musicals on DVD, and...yes, she's still cute.
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On 4/27/2018 at 11:22 AM, LawrenceA said:
This Week On FilmStruck
The Brilliance of Busby Berkeley
- They Made Me a Criminal (1939)
- Small Town Girl (1953)
- Billy Rose's Jumbo (1962)
I knew he did the others, but never realized he had worked on those three before--That would certainly explain bouncy Bobby Van from "Small Town Girl".
Of course, that's not counting the uncredited work Berkeley did for MGM on Wizard of Oz's musical numbers: We know the Scarecrow's deleted "pumpkin dance", but having studied Berkeley's Warner numbers, I put to you that you can spot Busby's licks in every single musical number from Oz. If you can't spot his fingerprints all over the Tin Man's song or the Emerald City "Merry Old Land of Oz" number, you're just not looking close enough.
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On 4/29/2018 at 1:42 PM, Bogie56 said:
Monday, April 30
midnight. Network (1976). My big scene was with Peter Finch. I am the handsome dude in the audience of the Howard Beale show!
I actually just finished watching that on library Blu-ray last night. (Continuing my quest of 70's films I can quote every line from but have never actually seen cover to cover.)
I used to say that my own movie-blog posts weren't journalism or op-ed but were "my own Howard Beale rants"--But when we get Howard's third big "The network's being bought by the Arabs!" bomb-drop, I realized...my posts DID sound exactly like his, only without the big Old Testament frills. I don't know whether to consider Beale a role model or not.
And yes, I still get sentimental for the 70's days when TV was as omnipotently all-powerful as Paddy Chayevsky thought it was back then...When Faye Dunaway complains "They've stuck us in between Little House on the Prairie and Tony Orlando & Dawn!", I gave a long sigh. ?
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10 hours ago, Sepiatone said:
re: your FANTASIA opine:
What would bother me when this movie would "make the rounds" occasionally is that newspapers would advertise it's showings by printing a picture of MICKEY MOUSE from the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment, and unknowing and unwitting parents would bring their rambunctious pre-schoolers to the theater thinking they were taking their kids to see a Mickey Mouse cartoon. And of course, like you, the kids got bored and noisily whined in their discontent and the sound of the movie would be drowned out by the constant annoyed sounding "hushes" of the angered parents.
At least you got to see it with 80's Mickey-marketing--
In my day, growing up, the studio had pretty much written the movie off as a "flop" (still over Walt's complaints that the chopped-up RKO small-town release had bombed), and sent "Fantasia" into college-theater "exile" where you would always--always--see it in double-features with fellow Walt-era "flop" Alice in Wonderland. Needless to say, mushrooms and caterpillar-hookahs were featured very prominently on the advertising poster. ?
What brought it back into respectability again was the big 50th-anniversary marketing: Michael Eisner, still new in the late-80's, wanted and needed New Disney to sequelize an Old-Disney title, and Fantasia was one of the only three they thought they could work with. Eisner dug up Walt's old 40's memo of "We can drop old segments, put in new ones, change it around every year", and originally planned "Fantasia Revisited" as literally the replacement for the "unpopular" '40 film. When the 50th-anniversary VHS release advertised "The original, on sale for the very last time!....they MEANT it.
Film buffs went into full PANIC mode--I remember buying two copies, just in case one ever tangled. Preservation-supporters who thought they were buying VHS tapes to "preserve in case of the Apocalypse" now had one big fat example right in their laps, and you bought the tape whether you'd ever seen it or not. Fortunately, this was also around the same time as Disney had a creative accounting loophole that let them count same-year VHS sales in with the theatrical-revival grosses and when they released headlines that "Fantasia had outgrossed Terminator 2!", it improved the original's reputation with the company considerably.
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Even if the animation in the segment was a little too "cutesy" by the 30's-40's animators standards, the use of music in Fantasia was so perfectly timed and dead-on, I still get those perfect-movie-music chills when Iris flies over Disney-Olympia to Beethoven's "hymn of praise" theme from the Pastorale symphony.
Even if Fantasia 2000 was considered too mainstream, commercial and "new" 90's-Disney to follow in its footsteps, they did have their one big Fantasia-legacy moment when the "Rhapsody in Blue" characters start living their dreams on skates, to Gershwin's big romantic orchestral swell:
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1 hour ago, NickAndNora34 said:
2. I didn't have the energy to write about the crows lol (or the time, since I typed it up before church this morning). As you say, they are "products of their time." Do I wish they had gone in different directions? Yes. But I can recognize that these caricatures can be found to be offensive, but I am not personally offended by them, if that makes sense.
I've become a big fan of the radio Amos & Andy (it got better after it became a major CBS show in '42, and then it gets hilarious), and the crows bear an awful darn resemblance to the major A&A characters, with the lead crow a dead ringer for Andy...Although not the characters, of course, to avoid lawsuits. And yes, they're not depicted offensively, and are even the few (only?) friends the two characters do have.
When I was an NYU student roaming around Washington Square in the early 80's, I remember a little streetcorner black doo-woop group doing their own tribute to the Dumbo crows with overhead puppets of the characters (this, back when almost no one watched the movie anymore, largely because of that)--I'd thought it was clever, and when I saw them later turn up on David Letterman's show, I'd guessed they'd managed to get a decent break at that time. If anyone else remembers this, darn, I couldn't find a YouTube clip.
1 hour ago, NickAndNora34 said:Fantasia
3. I still find this a chore to get through. I would recommend re-watching it as an adult to see if your opinions have changed.
The restoration on disk with the "concert" staging and Deems Taylor has a little more highbrow appeal than the quick popular Disney version I grew up with as a kid--It's easier to understand the opening Toccata & Fugue segment with the explanation, but the "Rite of Spring" dinosaurs still nearly drag the movie to a halt.
Just about every other segment still works on a visually syncopated level with the music, though, even if the lack of story takes getting used to. I'd post the Nutcracker Suite again, if Sepiatone hadn't done it already.
I Just Watched...
in General Discussions
Posted
As Abbott tells it, when they redid the sketch for their TV series, they didn't have it written down, and they and their stage pals had to ad-lib the routine again from memory.
Bud was one of the great straight-men, in that his character was the usual burlesque "sharpie" straight-man conning and taking advantage of poor lil' Lou, and Abbott had an amazing unique talent for slipping perfectly deadpan-camouflaged "under-the-radar" jokes in on Lou--Like their famous "Got two tens for a five?" routine.
In the TV version of the Susquehanna routine, Abbott is the one who goes into the first passerby's big rant about the shoddy workmanship of Susquehanna Hats: "Look at this hatband, it's supposed to be leather? Nothing but cardboard! And this cheap, third-rate imitation straw they use, here, taste it yourself!" Costello starts to take a bite, and..."Waitaminute!!" ?