EricJ

And before anyone else is showoff enough to post it, Kirk's singing debut, in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: He could do...almost anything.

...All too painfully, thank you. 😑 Given that it flopped in theaters for being a complete factual Crock-O'-Bleep, not actually likely. And unless the filmmakers wanted to explore any "deviant psychological" reason for Hitch to make "The Birds"--which there wasn't--I wouldn't wait up for them to try.

It was one of the first mainstream movies where the "good" Woods tried to ditch his oily-creep image for a mass PG-13 audience, but still kept a little of the charm. And it's hard to think back when late-80's/early-90's Robert Downey Jr. was still a twenty-something Brat-Packer cast for his good looks and offhandedly confused-but-wisecracking demeanor.

And didn't Ned Beatty--who could play scary Doughy Corporate-Suit Guys as well as comic-stereotype ones--get a BSA nomination too, despite, quote, "working a day" on his one scene in the picture? And no matter how badly John C. Reilly tries to destroy his career by prolonged radioactive exposure to Will Ferrell, every time you remember him as "That Guy", it's for his nominated song in Chicago:

Not to mention, much of the independently-produced classic Paramount catalog--including Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Rosemary's Baby and Greatest Show on Earth--has now sunk into "Orphan" public domain along with the 80's/90's catalog, and is available everywhere on streaming. (Along with Hal Wallis' Elvis musicals and the Cary Grant wartime-Pacific comedies, but I don't think we'll be seeing those in the Oscar festival.) This is the first time it's been available for everybody (including third-party Blu/DVD disk labels like Criterion) to get their hands on it, making it a cheap new addition for TCM, who already had the Warner, MGM and United Artists/Orion orphans. If we see Dances With Wolves, Silence of the Lambs and Thelma & Louise on the Oscar programming, now you know why we got those, too.

I remember seeing it in theaters fresh off of Peter Falk and Eileen Brennan's characters stealing most of Murder By Death (1976 - which has now entered the Columbia Orphanage, and is now happily traveling the streaming markets), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0zY0fNzYf8 , and...not getting most of the film-specific Humphrey Bogart jokes. But, of course, nobody KNEW old-movie jokes back in 1978 beyond some vague knowledge that Bogart was a detective in "The Maltese Falcon", so I've wanted to watch it again to see if Neil Simon's Falcon and Casablanca jokes play better forty years later. Maybe that'll find its way into the streets too. (And if the auto censor won't let us say "cut", they've got their mind in the gutter...)

Yep, remember THIS S1-2 OP, back in the filmed days, before Silverman brought Garry Marshall back to his live Odd-Couple studio audiences? ...Those days were neither yours nor mine. 😑

Well, Jesus himself brought up the subject--When the issue of Kosher foods came up, he pointed out that what goes into a person doesn't make him unclean, only the words and deeds that come out of him. God also showed Peter a vision of animals, asking him to take his choice, and when Peter replied that some of them were "unclean", God replied "Do not call 'unclean' what I have made clean", although He was metaphorically referring to accepting the Romans Paul and Cornelius as new church allies.

Actually, that was a product of the 80's Writers' strike: The strike had gone on so long, the new network season was flirting with the idea of just refilming old already-written scripts from the 50's and 60's, starting with shows for whom the original actors were still around, like Perry Mason, Columbo and Mission: Impossible. The strike ended before they could try it, but the networks had already contracted the actors, so they produced a series of new revival series/TV-movies, including a new "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" with old Alfred segments in that new 80's miracle of colorization. Yeesh...I remember the first two seasons of Happy Days before Fred Silverman fixed it. If we have one good thing to thank him for.

I'm pretty sure "Not on TCM" is the first answer that sprung to most posters' minds...

While it had a wacky crew, I would like it known for the record that "Supertrain" was NOT "Love Boat on rails"--It was a non-anthology show that usually had one dramatic action plot per episode: As for Pink Lady & Jeff...consider how much anime has changed our culture since 1994: While the world knows what they are today, the US was NOT ready for the concept of Japanese idol singers in 1978. 🇯🇵 😲 Even so, I raise a glass to the 70's ABC schlockmeister who gave us, and my formative childhood, Fantasy Island:

Well, Moses claimed there were really 613, when he told the Israelites, "No, really, and THEN He went on to say..." At which point, he goes into several chapters of how a suddenly A-retentive God, who up to now only spoke in universal brevity, now gave Moses micro-specific Popular Mechanics instructions down to the last cubit for how to build the shrines, how to design the Lost Ark, what to make the priest robes out of, what to give in each specific category of sacrifice, and then followed by working out every particular rule for recompense if your neighbor commits a crime or damages your oxen. Oh, and He also personally appoints Moses' brother Aaron as first high priest, which is convenient...Hey, trust Moses, you're getting it right from the source! 😀

Estelle Winwood held the previous Guinness record for oldest actress in a movie, for appearing in Murder By Death at 94. ("Murder-poos!") If Betty's still doing voices and cameos, she should have broken that record for her Toy Story 4 cameo at 97, shouldn't she? Or do they not count voice work?

I'll never figure out why Robin Williams hated the idea of doing Disney's "Good Morning, Chicago" (where his Vietnam DJ comes home in time for the political conventions), to the extent of joking about it in his act. I'd have rather seen that than most of his films we got for the 90's and 00's. Also, Disney had sketches for a 90's-animated "Don Quixote", but after the reaction to Hunchback of Notre Dame, they decided to cut back on the serious literature, and worried what Spain would think.

ABC still has a lock on the movie, since the usual free-broadcast airing is the most "traditional" March Easter special the networks still take time to air. (Even though it's technically a Passover movie, but close enough.) That's like asking NBC to give up "It's A Wonderful Life" for Christmas cable-airing.

The Hindenburg (1975) - 👍 Found this one as a lucky break, among the $3 Blu-ray bin at the local grocery store. (That's odd, isn't the bin usually supposed to be JUST for old 00's Matthew McConaughey comedies, failed Tom Cruise actioners and "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" sequels? Guess this would be one of Universal's abandoned streaming-orphans, if Universal ever had 70's-80's streaming orphans like Paramount and Columbia did.) A surprise, needless to say, as I remember seeing this in the theater when I was a kid, and I still think of it as the best thing the mid-70's big-studio disaster-movie era ever created--From the studio that gave you "Earthquake", and all their Albert Whitlock matte-paintings, bless 'em. Mostly because this was near the end of the genre, when studios were trying to give disasters "prestige" by moving on to historical ones--much like "Titanic" did at the end of the Dante's Peak/Armageddon 90's--and putting their historical-epic all-star cast behind it. The biggest surprise, that critics even seem to have hated (Roger Ebert for some reason found it "tasteless" at the time) was that Richard Levinson & William Link's story treatment throws out the usual "Crumbling bridge" Poseidon-Adventure tropes, or even the "Subplots of destiny" romances of sinking ships, and instead turns it into what they know: A "Columbo" mystery. Here, George C. Scott, with his usual avuncularly bitter grumbling, plays a sympathetic Luftwaffe security officer investigating rumors of a bomb on board the combustible hydrogen-filled airship, with (since the disaster historically can't happen until the end of the trip) the passengers offering no end of red herrings and distracting suspects. Anne Bancroft offers the only romantic-subplot as Scott's old flame, real-life camp survivor Robert Clary steals half the movie as a cheerily suspicious French music-hall clown, and there's plenty of suspicious chasing up and down the metal rigging inside the balloon half of the ship as Scott tries to sort out who's suspicious enough to suspect. Director Robert Wise puts an elegant studio-budget sheen on the movie, having apparently been hired on the basis of "If you want big-budget PG-rated Nazi Germany, get the Sound of Music guy". But when the historical disaster happens in the last twenty minutes (oh, the humanity!), Wise switches the movie to mock-documentary B&W to match the newsreels, which takes away from the usual genre-camp of its goofier Irwin-Allen cousins, but still wrapping up the cast. Up to that point, though, the movie creates a dream of naively contented 30's prewar luxury travel that wasn't going to last long, and leaves you missing why it had to be lost. You actually find yourself getting a bit misty in the final shot before the credits, a flashback of the ship disappearing into the clouds and into destiny, to David Shire's dreamy-balloon theme, while the radio announcer sobs his famous broadcast on the soundtrack...Sniff. 😢

That's probably because there wasn't much left for her to princess, early on in the OT:

And don't forget his hipper, modern-day (or at least retro-60's) anime great-grandson, in Lupin III & the Castle of Cagliostro, now streaming on Netflix. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mpnse (Directed by a then-emerging TV animator named Hayao Miyazaki, which means it screens every six months on Fathom...)

I tried sitting through the Support movies, and while I realize they were trying to be nominally disguised Maverick movies, we at least had some sympathy for Bret Maverick, since he was the low non-gunfighter on the totem pole, and had to use his wits. Here, Garner's nameless gunfighter/sherriff just wanders into town, smugly makes fools of every bad guy in town like Bugs Bunny in leather, and we're thinking, "Uh, yeah...WHO IS this guy, again, and why is he so sociopathically condescending?" Now, Mel Gibson as Maverick... Still a little too twitchy and Mad-Mel, but at least he had "Butch Cassidy"'s William Goldman to write his dialogue. 🤠

Given said recent neo-Westerns, they've got to cross the bar set by Unforgiven and The Assassination of Jesse James. Which ain't easy. (Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp and Jeff Bridges' Wild Bill, for two, couldn't do it. And the 3:10 to Yuma remake was the movie that made me first learn to hate Russell Crowe...Ten minutes into the movie, and I've wanted to slap that perpetually smug-loner half-smirk off of Crowe's face ever since.)

That's okay: It doesn't have anything within a hundred MILES to do with his comic-book origins of Jack Nicholson falling into acid. Joker has about as much to do with the Batman comic as "Venom" had to do with Spiderman, and both movies existed for the same reason. (Ie., the October release date.)

The British seem monomaniacally obsessed with Life of Brian whenever Python is mentioned, and there are still remaining 80's kids who associate Python only with Meaning of Life (or at least three separate out-of-context references from it.). But those of us with Friday-night-PBS childhoods remember Terry for being the unsung funniest of the Pythons--Anybody who could homage Jacques Tati/M. Hulot in the middle of Python lunacy knew his comedy: (I would have posted the entire "Undressing at the Beach" sketch from YouTube, but the copyright owner's being a nooge about it.) Also have to give a shoutout to his post-Python work: While Sir Michael Palin did travelogues, John Cleese did Fawlty Towers, Terry Gilliam became a pretentious arthouse twit, Eric Idle wrote horrendously bad Broadway musicals, and Graham Chapman did....the Bookshop sketch on bad American variety shows, Terry Jones not only gave us some entertaining children's books, but some of the most watchable BBC documentaries on medieval history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO7YZr1U6jU

The even-numbered TOS ones (and reportedly 10 - Nemesis, until the stinky guy took over the picture) were all written and/or directed by Nicholas Meyer, which might be one factor they all suspiciously have in common...

The last time I ever heard any serious "fan rivalry" comparison of Wars and Trek was...let's see...1979. Back when Star Trek 1: the Motion Picture opened, and between 1977-1980, EVERY major sci-fi movie was compared to the first Star Wars just for showing up. Yes, even "Alien", the "Buck Rogers" pilot, and "The Ice Pirates". In the forty years since?...Nothing. Like comparing apples and bicycles. Especially if you're a Spice Runner: