EricJ

Nnnnnnnnn....no? (More like when Rob Petrie lost his thumbs to alien walnuts, and thought he'd entered the Twylo Zone.) Yes, but if you see the early Mike Wallace interview with Serling, who was best known for his Playhouse 90 awards for dramas of boxers and executives, announcing he was creating a series that would use paranormal/sci-fi settings to tell the stories, the response was literally "So, it's going to have flying saucers in it?" As if Serling was creating Captain Video, which, as everyone knew, was only for comic-book reading kids. (It's the kid, I tell ya, he started it!) And the doo-doo-doo-doo opening with the spinny-thing (it's a satellite) and the door technically didn't happen until the 4th and 5th seasons, but got impenetrably rooted in our pop-cultural head when 50's reruns became retro-icons in the mid-80's, coupled with Carol Serling's attempt to keep the rerun brand alive after Rod's death at the end of the 70's. (The 1983 Steven Spielberg/John Landis movie is arguably considered the starting pistol of the Great Rerun-Renaissance of the 80's.) After that, whatever the Zone was, we know it had to be behind some kind of door.

No, viewers couldn't understand Serling was talking about the "gray area" of imagination: They thought the Zone was some actual alternate place--or dimension, like the opening said--and we'd get jokes in sitcoms like "I feel like I've walked into the Twilight Zone". Even Jack Benny was unclear on the definition, when Rod Serling guested on his TV show:

I'm guessing Amazon Prime, as that's where I now first look when someone mentions buried Public-Domain treasures. The ol' cheapskates haven't let me down yet, and I've updated my queue accordingly.

...Hey, no fair, he knows the secret code! I never used to like the Dirty Ol' Lady, since her jokes sounded pretty much like the same double entendre over and over. But I'd watched Chickadee with a family member who used to like Bette Midler's 90's Disney comedies, and when West started teaching the class at school ("And there's Subtraction--Take a guy with a hundred, leave 'im with nothing, that's Subtraction"), we both realized, "So THAT'S where Bette picked it up from. " I went on to watching "She Done Him Wrong" when that surfaced on Netflix, and West really did know how to shape her own on-screen projects, with some drama for her character without sinking into vanity-project. She probably would have gone on to direct, if the studio had let her. Okay, that does it--I can see Chickadee giving a bad/overexposed first impression of Fields, but WHO could hate Fields based on "David Copperfield"?

Darn, there was a list of Movie Rules floating all over the Internet about ten or twenty years ago (ie. "Bad news must always come on an answering machine, even if everyone uses voicemail by now", and "Any backstage Hollywood movie studio will always have some random cowboy, nun and showgirl extras milling about, looking for their soundstage, regardless of what's actually filming"), but can't find any way to look it up. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go shopping downtown, and remember to pick up a two-foot baguette and some leeks to stick up out of the bag.

Why do I read that whole thing and instinctively hear:

The big thing when it started out was two "edgy" cartoons, "Stan Lee's 'Stripperella'", and "Gary the Rat". Oh, and the WWE, before they had their big breakup with the network, and started airing Ultimate-Fight UFC instead. Then when all of cable turned Reality Shows, since that was cheap to produce, we got "guy" reality with InkMaster. Nowadays, cable has gotten away from reality, and now cowers under HBO's mighty "Game of Thrones" shadow--Which means every network not only still has to have their "own" shows to market as a brand-war weapon, they have to Out-Bold, Out-Binge and Out-Budget each other for Envelope-Pushing Entertainment. And you can't be "Important" if you crack a smile. Which is why TV isn't any fun anymore, and we all go back to our disks of Grease, Top Gun and Ferris Beuller.

That "C" in his pocket looks portentous--Could he have been the Mr. Waverly-like HQ-base senior from a 60's spy series?

For the record, they won't show Howdy Doody, either.

That's what UPN SAID it was going to do twenty years ago, before it became better known for "Homeboys From Outer Space". (And "Voyager", because every new Paramount network has to sell itself with a Star Trek series, but CBS has that all wrapped up at the moment.) And then became CW, after their network went out of business too. Still, nice to see Spike finally bite the dust, which pretty well symbolized the Decline of Cable back in the early 00's, when it cluelessly tried to find a more demographic "guy" concept than The Nashville Network: It means more original productions they can market, because Paramount can't make money showing "Grease" on TV. IOW, not Paramount Classic Movies.

The double-exposure effects in the climax were so bad--even director Nathan Juran, who went on to do "7th Voyage of Sinbad", was publicly embarrassed at what Arkoff's time and budget allowed--I remember one Japanese fansite who thought it was intentional, and talked about "Attack of the Ghost Woman". Yeah, most only do, when they find out it was just a last-minute rewritten script for a Joan Crawford-wannabe B-pic, and not the "Feminist metaphor" that animated Dreamworks comedies thought it was going to be. (Oh, there's one urban legend we just wanna sit folks down and slap 'em in the face with the movie for it, like a wet trout...) I opened the thread just EXPECTING to see "State Fair"'s Blue Boy on the first post, and (ahem) someone giggling over a clip of Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Sweet Hog of Mine". But, makes about as much sense as anything else Nip ever inscrutably posts as an off-topic excuse for big culty graphics he Googled.

............ ............ ................What? (Y'know, back in the 50's, nobody else could understand Rod's "This is the area we call 'imagination', and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge" first-season opening, either.) One of exactly three bright spots of the "lost" one-hour Fourth Season episodes. (The other two being Jack Klugman in "Death Ship", and Earl Hamner doing his down-home style in "Jess-Belle"...Although I'm a little easier on Dennis Hopper in "He's Alive" than most.) Which usually fall off the radar of most of Fox's more familiar half-hour syndication and Netflix, but Hulu has the missing episodes, and...oh, dear gods. If you thought any episode could be worse than "The New Exhibit", just try "I Dream of Genie" or "The Bard" as to "Why TZ should not do 'Funny' episodes".

Chickadee was basically a Mae West movie with Fields in it-- West was good at scripting stories for herself, and even gave herself some complex dramatic storylines, while Fields was looser and usually just strung together classic bits for himself. Fields' bits are good, they just don't seem to play any active part in West's movie.

Dang, forgot about Carol Burnett too--Probably because we sort of subconsciously try to ignore the "funny" TZ episodes, and that was Rod's third attempt to spin off his "Guardian angel" wacky-60's-sitcom. (The first was the "Mr. Bevis" episode with Orson Bean, and "The Whole Truth", with the cursed truth-car, would have been the second sitcom episode. Mr. Bean still seems to be with us, though, and hitting 90:

I can feel it...THIS is the year we finally take down Digital. Digital or Trump, somebody's dreams of success are not going to see 2019.

In other somewhat unrelated bye-bye news, that I don't recall seeing any thread discussion upon: I'd gotten a message from Flixster movie-streaming service (formerly Warner's "Digital will replace disk" baby, before it was bought out by Fandango/RottenTomatoes) that that digital-streaming service was shutting down last August--Looking up news articles, what I was surprised to find out was that Best Buy's competing CinemaNow service was dropping digital movies that same month, and moving to streaming television while getting its last affairs in order before also shutting down. What that means is that apart from Vudu VOD, the Ultraviolet digital-locker movie service that Warner was championing is now essentially dead in the water, and even Wal-Mart owned Vudu was now tying itself in with the new Amazon/Google/iTunes trirumvirate of formerly isolated services under Disney's flag, essentially shutting Ultraviolet out of the digital market. A lot of the industry has been wondering whether that may now be the fatal blow for any hopes of Digital, quote, "replacing", quote, "dying" Blu-ray, and if its days aren't now numbered, they certainly aren't what they were in '13-'14. As one analyst put it seeing both Flixster and CinemaNow go under, "If Vudu follows, we're scr***d." ...Indeed.

Every time someone shows "The Fatal Glass of Beer" in a film-study context, out come the experts to say "Huh? It's so arch and idiosyncratic, I don't get it! Only Fields knew what genius of comedy he was trying to pursue..." I first saw Beer at a kiddie-matinee collection of public-domain comedy shorts, along with some Chaplin and Stooges, and even then I got the joke--If you know it's trying to be the same parody of corny 1900's evils-of-drink "Drunkard" melodramas as borrowed from "The Old Fashioned Way", you can appreciate Fields' Letterman-esque deadpan sarcasm toward the genre. ("Once he saw what he had done, he dashed the glass upon the floor, and staggered out the door with delirium tremens...") As for "Million Dollar Legs", my dad for years when I was growing up would quote "...(megaphone) Line up, suckers!" without having the faintest idea what movie that came from. When I finally told him, he still didn't believe me.

All the channels seem to be moving to Amazon streaming splinter-services now, and Shudder already has that audience wrapped up. SyFy seems to be one of NBC/Universal's last entertainment relics from the glory days of 90's cable, and wouldn't mind seeing that retired, either.

Story goes that Griffith just wanted to make "The Mother and the Law", a shocking statement from today's tragic headlines about poor lower-class mothers and uncaring charity bureaucracy. But, again, he was expected to live up to Birth of a Nation's hype, so the historical period was simply inserted at the last script-draft to emphasize a little extra push about how good our heroine is, and how nasty her antagonists are--See, the city charity people are self-righteous hypocrites, just like the Pharisees!... I went through a boxset of post-code Universal Horror (trying to find Captive Wild Woman), and noticed how, after that, ahem, earlier "Black Cat", most of Universal's horror in the early 40's had now been made toothless for the sake of the Code and public safety--And "horror" was now Scooby-Doo-like comedy-mysteries around old dark houses, with the "supernatural" element usually turning out to be some villainous character trying to get the inheritance. And with no monster jobs left for Bela Lugosi, he'd be reduced to playing sinister butlers and sinister groundkeepers as just red herrings to the general sinistra. I mean, Hugh freakin' Herbert...You wouldn't do that unless you were TRYING to wipe the earlier Edgar Ullmer film out of the history books, for the sake of studio image.

You can check Image's Blu-ray set of the series and see who was still around to do commentaries in the 00's--Although at the time, that included Don Rickles from "Mr. Dingle the Strong", and Leonard Nimoy from an opening bit part of "The Purple Testament". Dean Stockwell, the snotty young WWII officer who got to eat his words off a Japanese plate in "A Quality of Mercy" ("First day of the war, last day of the war, they get it...") still seems to be with us at 71, though.

Anyone who thought Chevy had stopped being funny by '86-'88 needs to see Three Amigos! and Funny Farm. Even as the (comparatively) least funny of the three, Chevy still knows how to sells gags his way, and I remember there being a unique genius to the Farm gags you normally didn't see in an 80's comedy...Sort of like the more surreal gags from Green Acres, only with Chevy timing. After the talk show, though, his career just got sad.

Weren't they already group-knighted back in the 60's, or some other accolade from Her Majs?

Reiner told Van Dyke that it was a "Stan Laurel-like" comic because that was DVD's silent hero, but it's a point-for-point Buster Keaton biography in ways that Donald O'Connor's so-called "bio" wasn't. And Buster's revival was in the 50's, going up through TV and beach-party movies all the way back to "A Funny Thing/Forum", although it was mostly the French cineastes and film students rediscovering his movies. In the 40's-50's, he was still helping consult other comics, and supposedly helped train Lucille Ball for physical comedy before her TV show. (But he could still be an anonymous face when he did that Candid Camera stunt.)

What was the first? This's definitely got the Sardonic Kubrick touch, and was already billed as "Strangelove goes to Vietnam" when it opened. ...Can we throw any recommendations of The Killing, Paths of Glory or Barry Lyndon your way? Ermey had been doing some bit parts in addition to his military-consultant jobs, but this was the role that made him a star, long before he took Sgt. Hartman mainstream in Toy Story.

Possibly, maybe Hitch's wife, or even his own idea that he could stay current with the "new horrors" of the headlines, at the time. I'm sorry, whose head are you determined that we should offer on a plate, for making a movie that wasn't as good as you expected it to be from the pedigree? One post, okay, but...