EricJ

That's because 50's-60's TV series had 39 episodes in a full season, not 26. And in Simpsons' case, it's more a case of an entire generation who've literally never been alive to know a time when the show wasn't on the air. Usually that's a compliment in Walt Disney or Ed Sullivan's case, but when you see it having practically rewritten the "Edgy" prime-time cartoon, and few generations know any other kind of sitcom or cartoon humor, it's more a case of "Oh, people, get out more! It's not some national museum you have to preserve!" It's been probably the second-most "When are they going to pull the PLUG??" series behind SNL, and it's been suspected Fox only kept it alive as an endangered species throughout those troubled late-90's/00's years just because they still expected that Movie would come out someday. If you hear rumors of a Fox Family Guy movie still floating around, that also explains a lot about the last fifteen years.

In the original Carlo Collodi book, Pinocchio is a mischievous Bart Simpson, who likes causing trouble because he can, and has to learn right from wrong--Walt didn't find the character appealing, and it took months of rewriting the story to make him more of a sympathetic naive character and give the episodic book some actual A->B plotline. In fact, Italy nationalistically HATES us for liking the Disney movie over the book. (Check out the weird '02 book-faithful Roberto Benigni version, if you want to get some idea how crazy and incoherent the original was.) Seriously. Anything from the war?...No. But get them started on Pinocchio being nice and Jiminy Cricket as a central character in the story? When Stromboli locks Pinocchio in a cage and storms out, "Shaddup, before I knocka you silly!", at that age, we're thinking, "Whoa...This is bad. No one ever says they're going to hit a Disney character. ? " As for the Fox, one story I'd read was that when Walt liked a character on storyboards, he would ham it up and start acting out the story in person as he got ideas--He started working out so much of the Fox's stylish cane-twirling, if you look at the character, he's got a distinctly Walt-like look to the eyebrows. Also, can't recall the designer's name, but Snow White and Pinocchio were the two films from one Disney artist who created the production design for stories where everything was creatively carved out of wood--Just look at the Dwarves' hand-carved furniture and Gepetto's clocks.

Just like "Cap'n Video, and his Video Ran-juhhs!" Any Quatermass collection without Pit/Five Million Years to Earth (which seems to be in limbo as one of the more guarded Hammer films, and probably out of TCM's grasp) is incomplete. I should track down the first two movies someday. The movie of Quatermass Conclusion (1979), with Sir John Mills as the prof, is not great, but the better original TV serial came out on US disk back in the 00's. And if you know John Carpenter's personal geek-love of all the Quatermass movies, "Pit" and "Conclusion" are valuable to understanding Carpenter's 80's movies--Such as "Prince of Darkness" (where, for all purposes, Donald Pleasance plays the Professor, and Carpenter credits himself on the screenplay as "Martin Quatermass, brother of the well-known scientist"), or for the world's-most-annoying-jingle in "Halloween III: Season of the Witch" that he had an uncredited Nigel Kneale write the story for.

(Not to be your nagging conscience, but...?)

And if you need help finding some of the obscure 50's-60's live-actions, may I recommend Vudu VOD rental as probably one of the most comprehensive archive of "lost" Disney films available on the Net? (Unless you know of another place to watch "The Sword & the Rose", "Emil & the Detectives", "Moon Pilot" and "Best of True-Life Adventures"?) And if Snow's "Betty Boop voice" and tendency to giggle bothers you, keep in mind, the character in the original Grimm tale was a little 10-12 yo. girl. The studio decided to make her 16 for more romantic interest (yes, she is technically the youngest Disney princess behind Ariel, Rapunzel and Jasmine), but that she still had a "child-like" way of looking at things, for the benefit of the original story. Although, of course, that contract didn't apply to MGM: "...Wherefore art thou, Romeo?"

Not a bad idea, at that. There are a few lesser-known in-between movies folks haven't seen. And if it helps, by the time you get into the War years, Disney Movie Club--which has been playing Warner Archive and offering rare MOD titles of all the back catalog Blu titles they're afraid to sell on retail--recently Blu-uptweaked that double-feature disk of Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. (Walt & El Grupo documentary sold separately...Eh, it doesn't tell you much anyway.) Darn, I read the title and thought we were in for some of the usual grownup-feminist issue-laden Disney-bashing "deconstruction" mistakes ("Snow is a male fantasy, who cleans total strangers' houses because she loves domesticity, and throws away her life sitting around to wait for strange princes to come and find her wherever she is!"), or the newly awakened discovery from actually watching the movie at close range, busting most of the pop myths, and seeing how good it was all along. Oh, well, maybe by the time we get to Cinderella. ? "She'll be buried ALIVE!" Oh yeah...She knows what she's doing. Some young fans do still inquire about the Queen's motivations, though:

If you'd seen Amadeus on stage, Schaffer's play was highly theatrical-stylized, told entirely from Salieri's viewpoint, and Mozart is resentfully depicted as even more of an unsympathetically lunatic giggling manchild-idiot. Although a few of the play scenes are intact in the movie, Schaffer and Forman completely revamped the play into a more "realistic" biopic of a genius who, well, was irresponsible and self-indulgent, although not perhaps to the degree of the movie. (The original theatrical trailer first arrived on the success of the Broadway play, and you can see it deliberately trying to play itself in more of Schaffer's original play-dialogue style.) And the contrast in Hair seemed to be more about the free, cosmic principles in all the songs--and their over-mythologized decade reputations since then--and the fact that our anarchic heroes themselves close-up seemed to be such self-absorbed a-holes who were just talking a great game at the world. Like the black character who walked out on his girl to join the movement, until she confronts him again with "Easy to Be Hard"...She gets the most sympathy in the entire movie, and even if you even remotely liked the characters in the first half, it gets a lot harder to after that.

If it hadn't been for the Blade shot, I never "woulda" remembered that the only reason a Black Panther movie even existed in studio ether even back before Marvel Studios, was that Wesley Snipes originally wanted to produce a solo out-of-context Panther movie for himself, back in the old 90's "Marvel Curse" days, after the Blade movies. (And before the tax troubles.) Again, for the obvious reason, and Snipes believing that only he was "anointed" to bring the project forward. Unless you call someone on that, and then they backpedal with, "Yes, but really, Falcon and War Machine were sidekicks, basically..." Which I'm sure Cheadle and Mackie also really appreciate.

Which hasn't really meant a danged thing since the 90's, now that tickets cost $12, movies open on the same day with 3000+ screens, and every local shopping-mall theater routinely has 10-15 screens. It was a little different in E.T.'s "Ballpark rule" day....When was the last time you even SAW "Sold Out" at a box-office window, apart from pre-Fandango'ed opening weekends where fans bought tickets online a month ahead? Good point: Both were Disney's "big" movies for February and March, and both trumpeted up their ethnic/female importances (and Wrinkle even had Oprah in it, no less), but Marvel was classy, while "Wrinkle" was just loopy. Especially if you'd read the book. Also Panther opened in February/Valentine's/Presidents' holiday, which studios are now courting as the new "medium-big" release date because they don't understand why Deadpool and Fifty Shades made all their money...But it's still February, when it's still a drought, there's nothing else in theaters, and it's usually been a month or more since we starving audiences have seen a good December movie. As opposed to Wrinkle, which was Disney's big player in the overcrowded March Geek-Week stakes, but it hit the early week when kids weren't out of school yet, and "Ready Player One" lucked out with the big Easter week. I thought it was front-loaded with all the press and "Buying theaters out for Harlem orphanages" stunts-- Mostly by a lot of activists who had never watched the other Marvel movies in their lives, still believed Panther was, quote, the "only black superhero" in existence, and thus didn't know T'Challa had more and better action scenes in "Civil War".

Wait, they have aired Million Dollar Legs, haven't they?

Juzo Itami's other comedies (including A Taxing Woman 1 & 2 ) never quite got as screwball-funny as Tampopo, but were interesting looks at the crazy complexities of modern Tokyo society. Particularly the Yakuza, which he not only effectively satirized in Minbo no Onna, but where he also provided merchants and restaurants with a series of real-life strategies to combat the Yakuza's minor-level "Refund racket" protection-bullying. A point that became less funny when Itami was found dead five years later in a suspiciously unexplained, quote, "suicide" off a tall building. ?

Then I gather you had a childhood on which not one TV station ever played THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN? You poor deprived soul... I'll grant that Astronaut was well-meaning but weak, Limpet had a concept but little plot, THE LOVE GOD? is more of a social-historical artifact, and HOW TO FRAME A FIG-G is just sad, but even for having one screen persona, Knotts deserved one classic worthy of his talent. (And to any who disagree, double-dare knock off the chip!)

And, of course, Disney's Chip & Dale "Rescue Rangers" foe Fat Cat, whose voice and design was patterned after a 60's Zero Mostel parody, right down to the balding cowlicks:

Well, think he meant that while Trump is miscast as a computer, he's perfectly cast as the rapist that Proteus IV was--After all, where exactly did Proteus grab Julie Christie?

Siskel & Ebert were utterly, albeit pleasantly, baffled by the film when it came out: They thought it was movie parody at first, with the "Western showdown" of the rival noodle shop, thought the food-sex couple was a deliberate "9-1/2 Weeks" parody, and thought that the gag where the grocery employee "stalks" the tomato-squeezer was a deliberate parody of the grocery shootout from Sylvester Stallone's "Cobra". (This was 1986, btw.) But I didn't fall into Japanese anime fandom until around '88-'90 (back when we didn't even have subtitles or dubs), and in '86, Tampopo was our first Python-like cultural thunderbolt that the reserved keep-face nation not only HAD a working sense of humor, but a rather silly one...And this, in the middle of mid-80's anti-Japanese paranoia and resentful racist jokes over their corporate image. Two or three years later, I stumbled across the screwball anime-comedies of "Urusei Yatsura" and "Project A-Ko", and the cute Studio Ghibli movies, and got quite a taste of Japan's characteristically all-out ability to poke fun at its own obsessiveness over its hobbies, but Juzo Itami's live-action arthouse comedies were our first warning sign.

Believe it or not, in 1980, The Blues Brothers ended up on ALMOST every critics' 10 Worst of the Year list--Let's just say that after a few consecutive years of Hal Needham/Burt Reynolds good-ol'-highway comedies, let alone the same summer that saw "Smokey & the Bandit II" become one of the year's biggest hits, it was a bad time for Jake & Elwood to be pursued by the Illinois State Troopers. You couldn't get a bigger straw to break the camel's back than that one. I say "almost", because two of the lone dissenters were....Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert. Chicago's favorite sons. When they gave the movie high praise for being "a salute to the soul of Chicago", and for putting James Brown, Ray Charles and Cab Calloway in the same movie, only then did shocked public opinion slowly begin to change. (The critic community hadn't been so shocked at such a "renegade" stunt since Pauline Kael had praised "The Warriors". )

Watership Down is "largely vanilla" today?? It was mainstream Great Literary Animation when it came out in the 70's on the heels of the bestseller, and now it's cult-hipstered today as "Bloody kid-traumatizing bunny-shredding". As an active (though not presidential) Tweeter-at-large, esp. in the @Filmstruck channel, I had a most rollicking Tuesday illustrating AND annotating all my own personal choices in the categories and variations FS pitched all day, and on into the wee hours of the night. Just to give folks some idea--Define Yourself: Musicals: https://twitter.com/EricJanssen001/status/986298184652722177 SciFi: https://twitter.com/EricJanssen001/status/986375894292934657 International: https://twitter.com/EricJanssen001/status/986381709057851392 Comedy: https://twitter.com/EricJanssen001/status/986401815599214592 Horror: https://twitter.com/EricJanssen001/status/986418565850062849 Cult: https://twitter.com/EricJanssen001/status/986458765720465408 ...Hope this doesn't burn out as fast as other Twitter-powered viral crazes, we've really started something impressive, here.

Interesting, to say the least, to see a young pre-Blacklist Zero Mostel being pitched by MGM as the Next Phil Silvers. I don't think I'd ever seen him in anything outside of the post-Blacklist late-60's, as Max Bialystock, Pseudolus, or Tevye (on the cast album).

Probably wasn't William Castle's Zotz, though?:

The first thing your sixth-grade Writing teacher teaches you is how to look up a thesaurus and learn that there are other, more descriptive adjectives in the English language than "Stupid". That term tends to be used more by 7-12 yo.'s, meaning "Something outside of my own personally-sheltered experience I don't want to be obligated to think about by grownups." And then, of course, there's the more concise illustration of a movie's stupidity by example. In the title's case, the reviewer was more likely calling attention to the idiotic decisions the scriptwriter forced the character to make, rather than the production or the actors. And also, let's not forget, it's user-submitted IMDb. 'Nuff said. (Yes, I already have both those MST3K episodes on disk. And so do you.)

A Dark Tower and a cowboy?--You could make a great hit movie out of that!

Some TV's have a "Status" function, which will bring up your bitrate, audio, etc.--Not sure if it works on cable, but Netflix used to have one. Usually, most free, cable or streaming broadcast HDTV is in 720p, since it's small enough to transmit, but good enough picture quality for flatscreens without being 1080p Blu-ray. Vudu and some other VOD services offer 1080p "HDX" for streaming/download, but you gotta pay for that.

Instead of the Iron Man 2 version that we got.

In fact, the Pierce Brosnan movies (with the exception of the squicky, misogynist "Goldeneye") pretty much redefined Bond's character for the "modern" 90's, mixing cold, trained MI6 cynicism with his "fantasy" persona, without giving into the deconstruction, British self-hatred or Bourne-worship of the Craig movies. Unfortunately, the Brosnan Bonds were also heavy on the goofy CGI-embellished stunts, soured Brosnan on the role, and strayed too far off the subject--Sort of like "Spectre" was accused of doing.

And Dooley "Casablanca" Wilson, who played Anderson's role on stage.