EricJ

Exactly--Why do they blame the voters for not having anything worth voting for? That's like blaming the waiter when the restaurant runs out of food.

Yep--There's your answer, all wrapped up with a nice big red bow: They're not only Columbia, but Columbia AIN'T LETTIN' EM GO. Most of the Ted Healys, and their variety appearance in "Swing Parade", fell into public domain--along with "Disorder in the Court", "Sing a Song of Six Pants", and those four Shemp shorts--and that's about all most can hope for without buying the disks. (And say, there's an idea--How about buying disks, instead of asking "When will TCM show them?" Or are certain posters trying to artificially show us how much they're TCM's Greatest Pals, or use the site as extension of their momentary inner thoughts?) When they went to Crackle, Columbia tried selling five-minute "Minisodes" of their key properties--Basically the "Short attention span" Readers-Digest condensations of Stooges, Jeannie, Seinfeld, Fantasy Island, etc. Those were designed for Those Hip Young People On the Web, don't know how those actually got into TV syndication. And if it's the officially Columbia-licensed chronological 20-disk set, indeed, you will. Growing up, we got all our shorts on TV randomly, which meant local stations and kiddie matinees mostly showed the cheaper later Shemp shorts (where the plots were more slapstick and moronic with no Curly to carry the visual gags)--But taking the arc of shorts chronologically, I could see even Shemp had his own distinct style of humor. Joe Besser, OTOH, you knew they were shutting down soon.

I remember reading one account saying that the band played it after the captain's lifeboat announcement, to keep the passengers from panicking, as they exited the ballroom. At the end of which, there was a "great clutter of instruments" as the band headed for the exit too. Still, I'll go with James Cameron's theory that they were playing it on deck, if it'll shout down the cliche'd old rich-bashing "Down with the ship" jokes from the last hundred years.

Y'know, I think we might be just a little TOO "jaunty" in our posting (like, Nipkow/spense level, if you, cough-ahem, know what I mean ) when every conversational joke has to be explained, followed by the other posters saying "....OHHHhhhh!" We're glad you know things others don't, but that's also the problem with the other two named examples.

(Preferably with a butterfly net... )

Which laughed at the same real-life "Royal theory" as used in arguably the best one, the Christopher Plummer/James Mason Holmes-vs.-Ripper Murder By Decree (1979) ...and then proceeded to use the exact same clues, and slap on an even more unbelievable screenwriter-ending. (But then, in From Hell's case, that might have been the fault of the original source comic...Alan Moore, again, stomping on more British Sacred Cows because he woke up pi**y that morning.)

Although Robin Williams was doing a perfect 30's-Fleischer Jack Mercer imitation, most of the characters in Jules Pfeiffer's script were straight out of the comic strip, who rarely appeared in the cartoons. With Bill Irwin making a few appearances as Ham Gravy, and Richard Libertini as Geezil, among others. No kiddin'? Seeing as the BC comic strip didn't start until the late 50's, that's a fair assessment to make about the '40 movie... It's not like Slayton was making a funny, 'r anything. (Although we did eventually get animated B.C.:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAOz__o4KRg )

Um............NO. Maybe we, y'know, just don't want to talk about it?

And for the sake of tender viewers, let's NOT mention that 00's live-CGI hybrid Garfield, where they had to hire Bill Murray to replace the late Lorenzo Music as Garfield's iconic voice, just as Music was the only one who could replace Murray's voice in the 80's Real Ghostbusters cartoon. It was fate.

Ah, and Negulescu is the director, I see. Clears it up. That'll teach me for not looking up my IMDb.

After John Hughes' "Dennis the Menace", Hughes--who had a tendency to make the same movie over and over until something else became a hit--was at one point thinking of doing a live-action Peanuts, thinking "How hard could it be?" Fortunately, Charles Schulz was still alive to answer. (Unlike the posthumous Schulz-free CGI movie we eventually got.) Which brings us to that Jimmy Fallon parody of the most psychotic bad decision CW ever made in trying to bring back Archie:

That, and a more coherent Titanic '52 thread already on the board (leading me to believe they aired it at some recent point), is the ONLY part of the post with which I was able to tell what the holy grade-A-US-inspected Sam Scratch you were talking about. Title especially included. Between Mozart and Cavegirl, we've gotten an influx of "jolly" female posters nudging us with in-references, but let's not lose sight of Our Friend, Mr. Context...He's here to help! Tat? Oh, that's making lace. And two small birds are a pair of t**s, as everyone knows.

True, but the documentary still depicts the leather-jacketed Rockers as listening to the "primitive" beat of "Can't Buy Me Love". After all, the Beatles just weren't Cliff Richards...

Mondo Cane was the big, big thing even without its validating Oscar nomination, just on shock value, and yes, it was the coin-of-the-realm "catchword" on anything you could slap together and call "shocking!" (Until the 70's, where, if you wanted to sell cheap forbidden thrills, you just slapped "Emanuelle" on the title.) Those lovable bottom-feeders at Amazon Prime dug up a few Mondos a month or two ago--Managed to catch "Mondo Balordo", which, apart from getting the day-dub from Karloff, didn't...seem to have a clue what it was Mondo-ing. (Cane was supposed to be "Primitive practices around the world", so, on reputation, the idea for everyone else was to stick some nude natives in the first ten minutes, and wing it after that if they wanted to keep the money-title.) Another shock-doc Prime dug up was Primitive London (1965), which, despite predating Cane, was billed as a "mondo" movie with strippers on the poster (who barely get ten minutes in the movie), as it's still a plotless conservative docu-satire look at "shocking" society in pre-swinging 1965 London--Best remembered for documentary interviews with the Mods vs. the Rockers (the Beatles are used on the soundtrack as an example of the "decadent" music the Rockers listen to), and other things that must have seemed shocking in '65, like teen idols, swinger key parties, and...gasp...nasty political themed standup comics making fun of Harold Wilson!

....Yyyyyeah. It's fun to pretend, isn't it? Ringu basically set the tone for 00's Japanese horror, in that it's basically the exact same mentality that made 70's demon thrillers so popular in the days of Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby: An "abandoned" urban culture, after a traumatic social shakeup (Watergate for us, the economic Recession for them) covering up its frustration over social blight and national malaise with hip cynical sophistication and dismissal of tradition and religion, but unable to escape the "demons", NPI, that lurk at the back of their own cultural upbringing. Just as Catholics make the best horror films because deep down they believe all this stuff, where you can't escape the devil in a new real-estate fixer-upper, Japan makes better ghost stories in a country where they culturally believe spirits can still actually be personally PO'ed at you no matter how many cellphones you own.

The one in "The Changeling" (1980) was considered the best one, until the spoiler-alert one from "The Others" (2001) redeemed a lame twist-ending.

And a bit part for Stanley Unwin, speaking characteristically incomprehensible legalese.

Despite Flash Gordon, and a few episodes of The Avengers and The Prisoner, I still remember Wyngarde mostly from a Monty Python reference: As two housewives are reading their newspaper horoscope predicting a day filled with surprise celebrities, "'In the evening, Peter Wyngarde will declare his undying love for you'....EWWW!!" I will admit, I did not know that.

Unfortunately, that's EXACTLY the new system that's been put in place since 2008: Voters select multiple nominees for their final vote, and votes are given points by ranking. And it's backfired, in that if nobody can quite agree on what's the #1 Best Picture, there's usually a consensus about what the runner-up #2 Picture is, and that often receives more votes. And consequently, more points, which is how the #2 Picture often pulls ahead of the main favorite. (See, I knew there had to be something wrong with The Artist beating Hugo and The King's Speech beating Toy Story 3!)

I am the voice in the wilderness who continues trying to tell an 80's-mythologizing smitten generation of under-30 kids with DVD players, that, oh, dear gods, did we loathe The Goonies when it came out. Desperately baffled some people into thinking Susan Seidelman was some kind of "quirky postmodern directorial voice" at the time, but thankfully Rosanne and "She-Devil" put a stop to those delusions for good and all. Seidelman was last seen directing episodes of the PBS "Electric Company" remake, and it shows. Bringing Up Baby is okay, as Depression-era screwball-heiresses go, but the "wacky rich" characters of "My Man Godfrey" need to be committed to longterm psychiatric institutions with no possibility of parole.

That, and "D**n, we almost had Best Picture with Inside Out!" has already been noted in another thread. So....the "entire trilogy" except for the first one, then? Oh, the ground's been so radioactive after Cars 2, there's just no hope for rational discussion on the series anymore. It's time to declare some amnesty, bury bodies, accept that the guilty parties have been punished, and move on.

For example, the second year Jon Stewart hosted, the vibe was "I hate the Oscars, let's make this quick, like pulling a Band-Aid"--Pretty much EVERY single form of entertainment was cut to efficiency-expert speed the awards along, and the result was like watching a graduation line at some other school where your kids didn't attend. And when they tried to passive-aggressively parody "Famous clips montages" with a parody salute to "Binoculars in film", there was a pause afterwards before the laugh, as if the audience was thinking "What? Show some more of that!" The secret to a good Oscar show vs. a bad one--hosts included--is to forget that a TV camera's even there. We're just voyeuring an awards banquet with a better-than-average entertainment budget, and if the folks in the expensive seats aren't entertained, nobody is...They're the first audience, and they get the impact before we do. Now, as for variety/musical numbers, I'll be glad I caught Cirque du Soleil's '02 "Great Moments in Special Effects". That is my sole defense-rests argument in favor of Oscar entertainment, no matter how many whiners bring up that Debbie Allen "Dance tribute to Saving Private Ryan" chestnut: Good Oscar-entertainment numbers or montages MAKE you want to look up every single movie, that's why they show them.

Especially if they make a better movie than the wretched mess that put Anthony Hopkins in "Hitchcock" (2012). It's good if you watch it by itself, but at the time, this was back when Joe Ezsterhas was still "the writer of Jagged Edge" (remember those days?), and he was pretty much running with that, even to the point that Music Box seems to be the exact same mystery--Consider if Jagged Edge had been retitled "Smith-Corona Typewriter".

Thank you for reminding me of Stellan Skarsgard's big "comic" moment from "Thor 2: the Dark World". Although PG-13, what a proud, proud moment for Marvel comic-movie fans everywhere.