EricJ

Okay, now you've got me seeing that Terry Gilliam-toon from the Monty Python sketch:

I saw the Zack Snyder version, and THAT'S why I missed the HBO series.

1. Will somebody please SLAP James Dean? 2. Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson was a sad, insane lunatic. 3. I can give you six reasons why we think The Lion King is a "classic" that have absolutely zero to do with the movie itself. And not very many do.

So please try to play up the "Creepy/silly-looking CGI" jokes in public, so that that's what ends up attached to the movie's legacy, and not studios' voodoo-chicken-bones attempt to blame everything except the movie itself. We want to make sure there's no confusion, and Universal is very frequently confused. Not much--Fortunately, his own production company had a hand in creating the '98 stage concert direct-video, as well as the Joseph/Dreamcoat one, and a Jesus Christ Superstar one that was better than that TV thing. Now and Forever--The stylistic costumes, the writhing choreography, the dreamlike Webber music...and then Rebel Wilson shows up to do bad Melissa McCarthy obnoxious-fat-girl comedy-relief that wasn't in the original.

The interstitial bits during the Joel years were funny when they facetiously did school-play-like re-enactments of the sillier, more unexplainable moments of the movies--Like the sitcom version of Jungle Goddess, the educational-film imitation in Time of the Apes, and a certain bit from Pod People that those who haven't seen will just have to watch to believe. But the Mike Nelson years seemed to not LIKE the whole experience of watching movies very much, rarely if ever parodied the movie outside of the theater except to unload their impatience with it, and tended to stick to their own random drive-by standup comic material about whatever current pop-culture trend dared annoy them. The great classic afternoon hosts (I remember watching USA Network's Commander USA the same years MST3K was first running) always knew how to share their watching with the audience in doing parodies, as the point of watching a cheesy movie wasn't to hate or loathe it for wasting your hip valuable time, but to admit that, okay, as fun as they were, sometimes the movies could be a bit odd.

IOW, pretty much everything from the Sci-FI and later Comedy Central era (most of which are also "unwatchable" for the new hosts' emphasis on snarky-aggressive fratboy humor, which went rogue and unchecked into their Rifftrax episodes)...What, no "Space Mutiny", like the rest of the second and third-generation fans? For the uninitiated, most of the founding "core" classics come from Seasons 2-5, to wit-- Manos: the Hands of Fate Mr. B. Natural (short, shown w/War of the Colossal Beast) Cave Dwellers (aka "Ator the Blademaster") Robot Holocaust (one of the two lone standouts of Season 1) Pod People (aka "The Unearthling") Santa Claus Conquers the Martians The Day the Earth Froze The Magic Voyage of Sinbad Hercules Unchained Gamera vs. Guiron

"Piffle!....It is full of piff!" - Benny Hill (Who was not above a "Me? 'Ow?" joke himself.) I've seen Xanadu. I own Xanadu on Blu-ray. I can recite whole dialogue passages from Xanadu. Senator Hooper...you're no Xanadu. Some bird and fish transformations, maybe, but those traditionally animated. Promises, promises. (Ever wonder WHY we got a flood of Oz-revisionist movies, like "Oz the Great & Powerful", from other studios in the early 10's after the book officially went public-domain?) But musical-movies are too locked by stage unions and can't be made until the producers decide the show's days are numbered, and the fangrrls aren't going to let that happen in a hurry. Thank you--I was but a few scant moments away from Googling it up myself. 😊 (Or at least saved me from posting the Logan's Run clip again.) Let's just wrap up the flood of "Razzie" jokes by saying there are a LOT of reasons why they'll likely make this the sweep-contender. Most, but not all, related to the movie itself. 🙄 (The majority of reasons can be summed up by Lorna's first posts in the thread.)

Although some remember Gay Purr-ee for the time Robert Goulet andJudy appeared on Jack Paar's show to promote it, and that pre-Letterman imp Paar decided to have a little fun with the cue cards:

And I already posted the British Irn-Bru "The Snowman"-parody ad last year (and its sequel), so have to find something new for the thread.

You're just in seasonal time for the annual viewings of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians:

Or, as Sellers reportedly said when he was offered, "'The Pink Panther'? Sounds like a gay nightclub." (Which, given Blake Edwards' particular quirky preoccupation, might not be far off.) And one more diamond theft did come back full circle as the central plot catalyst in the Trail/Curse finale, as there was now a REASON why "Roger Moore" could retire happily to the Mediterranean with Capucine.

Nobody had a way with a song like Sinatra. Except maybe for Buddy Love:

"My friends...Can you prove it WON'T happen?"

Waqs on...Waqs off.

Oh, you just need to listen to a few more of his "unknown" scores, where he got away from the Star Wars/Superman tropes, and experimented with different genres: Like Vatican and Godfather music in Monsignor, electronic in Heartbeeps, and Christmas-favorite music in Home Alone: That he did every great 007 theme, and Raise the Titanic, I could spot by ear. I did not realize, however, that he also wrote the kiddy-matinee songs (Fiona Fullerton's singing notwithstanding) for the '72 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

To answer the question, it's because almost the entire 60's-90's United Artists catalog has fallen into public domain, and you can't find a single danged streaming service that ISN'T showing Connery->Brosnan 007, Inspector Clouseau or Woody Allen. (Apparently, the Pink Panther series includes the two Steve Martin movies, from when Sony briefly owned MGM/UA.) The ubiquitous two-part "Trail/Curse of the Pink Panther" is conspicuously absent from the list, and I'd wager those get more run on broadcast-streaming services in an average week than either movie got in its one week in theaters. Or at least just "Murder By Death"?

The way I described them at the time was, the old Cecil B. DeMille quote of "Gimme two pages of the Bible, and I'll give you a picture!" Or, in Peter Jackson's case, "Gimme two pages of The Hobbit, and I'll give you a trilogy subplot, a supporting character, and a videogame-friendly action sequence!"...And he went through EVERY pair of pages in the very short book. In "Desolation of Smaug", I knew the book enough to see an entire half hour of off-topic Jackson artificial subplot newly jammed in between two of Smaug's lines from the original book. Half hour. TWO LINES.

It wasn't until "The Missiles of October" that I realized Howard da Silva even HAD any other roles beyond 1776. (Apart from narrating the "Doctor Who" recaps in the great PBS era.) And no matter how many roles Elisha Cook Jr. takes, he'll still be the "nervous leprechaun" who added the jittery creeps to House on Haunted Hill.

And...let's stop there, before we get into MY annual tirade against people who think "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music is a "Christmas" song because it offhandedly mentions snowflakes, sleigh bells and packages. 😡

I've seen Benson, I've seen his role as Faye Dunaway's GBF assistant in "Eyes of Laura Mars", and I've seen Charles Grodin's laid-back geologist in the '76 "King Kong", but even so: Rene as Constable Odo was his most amazing performance. THIS is how to act past the makeup in a post-TNG Star Trek series. (His grim, self-deprecating determination was a good counterpoint to Avery Brooks' increasingly weird Shakespearean delusions as the seasons went on, in "Deep Space Nine".)

I remember seeing Spinney at an 80's puppetry appearance--Definitely the aging-hippie type to latch onto Children Television Workshop's "radical" new idea, although he said he was never quite fond of Oscar the Grouch (too negative), but connected with Big Bird enough to shape the direction of the show. Jim Henson just imagined a big goofy suit character, but in one episode, Spinney's Big Bird had to respond to the grownups with "But whyyyy?", and the big yellow audience-identifiable 5-yo. was born. And while it would be easy to give a classic movie plug to Follow That Bird (1985)--the true spiritual successor to the first Muppet Movie- as the last great remnant of pre-Elmo/Abby Old-Skool Sesame for posterity, the 1982 "Big Bird in China" special also deserves to share that honor: They could replace Jim Henson's Ernie, and Frank Oz's Grover (Oz's still alive, he just left the group), and we may have lost Richard Hunt's classic 80's characters (farewell, Forgetful Jones), but with Sesame reduced to a handful of anthology segments on HBO, there's a sense that losing Spinney would be a good excuse to wrap things up on a 50th-anniversary high note. You can replace a character, but you can't bring 70's-80's Sesame back and compete with Dora the Explorer.

I've always had a soft spot for "Superman III" (the beginning, not the whole movie): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9BwmdEfrDk (Hey, how do we embed? Tom?)

And even then, "supposed" to be a typical English peasant, who prefers his garden and den to epic adventures, and brings that bit of common sense to all the dwarves-and-dragon nonsense. And I will say that the first half hour of AUJ, over dinner, raised our hopes that the entire Trilogy would be as faithfully book-friendly as Jackson's LOTR trilogy had been. But then the Seventh Doctor shows up with bird poop on his head borrowing one of Smaug's big classic book lines, and once they set off, the whole Trilogy immediately slams down the gas pedal and rockets off on a self-indulgent highway to hell. 🙄

Basically the Christmas movie Everybody Saw (usually on disk) As Kids, at about the same equivalent age other former kids first saw Home Alone, Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, Elf, and...Hocus Pocus. Or, in Davey's case, Deck the Halls. It's not like "Christmas with the Kranks", where the red-state Religious Right leaped on it for the wrong reasons and tried to turn it into an artificial cult-movie. Besides, consider yourself lucky, I have relatives that imprinted early on "Polar Express", and make me watch it if I come over.

I remember wanting to see this as a kid--Of course, that was back when the studio was fraudulently telling us about the new life-sized "mechanical Kong" they'd built for the movie, and implying that he'd be in more than one scene. 🤨 (And the one on the Universal Studios ride was better.) But at least now you have a better idea of who Harvey Korman's Hedley Lamarr was parodying...