EricJ
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Posts posted by EricJ
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Meanwhile over at Univ. of Massachusetts Boston, every time a student feels "woke" and wants to start an extra-curricular project, there's always another protest against the school's symbol of the Minuteman statue:
https://dailycollegian.com/2003/05/controversy-has-surrounded-minuteman-before/
"A white male with a gun...representative of white militias slaughtering natives in the New England area."
Uh, yeah, when there weren't any BRITISH SOLDIERS during the REVOLUTION in the area to slaughter!(Also that the seal, "A native with a weapon" was "racist"...Uh, might want to take that up with the State house, that happens to be the State Symbol.)
And I'm not even going to bring up the woman who raised "racism" protests against Snapple Fruit Tea in the late 90's, over an etching on the label for their bottled Iced Tea, claiming that it showed "Slaves in African headdresses being brought over on boats", and that a circle-K symbol on the label represented the company's "secret connection to the K-K-K". The company quickly countered with flimsy alibis that the circle-K was the FDA symbol for "Kosher", and that the "slaves in African headdresses" were actually American colonists dressed as Natives, seeing as the picture was actually the famous 18th-cty. painting of the Boston Tea Party...Although what the Boston Tea Party was doing on a New England company's label for iced tea was never explained.
Seriously, no wisecrack here--This is why we need a new focus on history in schools, and why Millennials have such personal issue-driven murderous contempt and paranoia of any century before the 21st: Teach your children history, or somebody a little sloppier will.
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18 hours ago, hamradio said:
Think Godzilla will be alive and kicking during the 2020's
"Long Live the King"
Uh-oh, there's going to be trouble--King Kong already used that tagline for "Kong: Skull Island", and he's not going to be happy about it!
Warner's setting up that crossover-battle-royale movie they'd been imagining ever since the first '14 Godzilla had been mentioned...
Seriously, if you've seen Warner's collection of dopey "money-lines" in the trailer ("Oh my god...Zilla!"), I'm carefully reserving my anticipation for this one. This was one of Old Mother Warner's last few all-out attempts at saving the studio, before the drought hit, and it has all the earmarks of going as embarrassingly all-in as K:SI did. When we got that "Over the Rainbow" trailer, Warner wants to attach their brandname to this movie in the worst way, and what we're seeing of the movie is starting to approach Dean Devlin level.
(And besides, any movie with Mothra but not the Twin Fairies is no true kaiju film.)
Of course. You will be able to order them from Amazon. But then 3 years later there will be attorney ads saying how you can sue because they malfunctioned.
Only if you get one of the discount brains from Curry's:
http://www.montypython.net/scripts/newbrain.php
("And then there's our Bertrand Russell Super-Silver model, that's 250 quid plus hospital treatment."
"Oo, that's a lot."
"It's color.")-
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4 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
There was some hubbub recently about her having sung hit versions of the songs "That's Why Darkies Were Born"
I thought it was because the Headstrongs married the Armstrongs!
(Oh, and are we going to ban Groucho because nobody knew he was quoting the Smith song?)
4 hours ago, LawrenceA said:The Yankees had been using her rendition of "God Bless America" during their seventh-inning stretch, but people complained about her, so the Yankees stopped using it.
Did they specifically say it was the Smith association, and not the then-current George W. Bush association?
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10 hours ago, VivLeighFan said:
The reason is because Lillian starred in The Birth of a Nation, the most racist film ever made
Oh, come on, MORE racist than Not Without My Daughter (1991)??
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3 hours ago, VivLeighFan said:
https://mb.ntd.com/trustees-vote-to-remove-actress-name-from-school-theater_325897.html
The reason is because Lillian starred in The Birth of a Nation, the most racist film ever made and I don't blame them. I'm a black person myself and I personally like Lillian Gish especially for her performances in Broken Blossoms and Orphans of the Storm but I am aware and disappointed that she starred in that film. It's extremely sad that one of the most influential films is also the most racist.
Wouldn't they rather put blame on someone who, you know, wrote and directed it??
That's like blaming Billy Idol for showing up in Adam Sandler movies.
1 hour ago, NipkowDisc said:I accept that Birth of a Nation is racist having never seen it.
I've never seen the whole thing, but I've seen the early-talkie DW Griffith short made to promote "Abraham Lincoln" (1930), where Griffith did everything but apologize for the pro-Klang plot.
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12 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
All pics are not the same. I can't get too technical as I'm not a techie, but some browsers don't seem able to "see" some picture types. All of the pictures that you've complained about for the past several months (years?) as not being visible have shown up fine on my screen. Meaning that the fault lies on your end. It could be a number of factors, from browser type, to browser version, to other graphics card issues or things that I'm not familiar with.
The short of it is, the pics not showing up for you is an issue on your computer, and not what others are doing, or else more or all of us would not be able to see them. Maybe one of the more tech knowledgeable posters can suggest things to help, but I have neither the ability nor the inclination.
And besides, most of us already DID, the last time complaints about not being able to see embedded YouTube clips came up (same poster, right?).
I don't recall what the specific problem preventing a new computer or browser was, but speaking as one who saw photo, video and browser formats change bewilderingly with computer systems in the late 90's to '00 days before MacOSX and Windows 10, I have often learned that updating is worth the headache, even when you have to pay for it.
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As for other outdated expressions, I've heard "Elly-bay" show up in a few 40's comedies and radio shows: Apparently, the proper B-word for the abdomen was briefly one of the Words You Couldn't Use in mass media during the 40's and early 50's, as it could potentially be used to hint the ways one gets a big one.
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Around the same time, there was an "Best movies of the 21st Century (so far)" by the same, or similar snootypantses, that had "Mulholland Drive" as Best Movie of the 2000's, with Tree of Life only second. But Mad Max still got in the top 10.
😓
This is one of the problems we also have with the Oscars: The National Board of Review is still in the mode of being paranoid of commercial releases, and goes out of its way to spotlight the "Independent filmmaker" and the arthouse release. Oh, but they happened to like "Mad Max: Fury Road", because Rip Van Miller, who'd been trying to make the movie since 1987, still directed in the style he had during the mainstream commercial 80's-90's, and reminded us what "old-fashioned" entertainment still looked like. (Pretty much the same reason critics gushed over "Mary Poppins Returns" trying to be a 1964 movie.) And that's the critics who didn't simply gush over the truck-grill-guitar guy, period.
It's not that Terence Malick or David Lynch are "world-class auteurs"--It's the poseur showing off of "I don't got to cineplexes, with all those superhero and 3-D!", trying to organize itself into something pretending at credibility. Basically, any list that puts Tree of Life, Boyhood, Get Out or anything by Paul Thomas Anderson near the top of the list is a list you've read before.
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5 hours ago, Hibi said:
Angela wasn't the first (or even second) choice for the part of J.B. Fletcher. And I don't think she played Marple badly.
She basically sits out all of the story with a bad ankle and lets Edward Fox do the investigation, interprets all the findings for him, and then never gives any reason for her rationalizations. The bewildered reactions from some of the characters to Lansbury's cheery deductions look oddly like they think Grandma's gone dotty again.
Compare that to Geraldine McEwan, as Christie's calculating gossip-hungry old knitter in the Granada TV versions, who knew how to ruthlessly grill witnesses for clues with old-lady-on-holiday small talk.
(That said, "Mirror"'s still one of the good "official" post-Orient Express Agatha Christie movies between the two Peter Ustinov Poirots, just for Elizabeth Taylor, the vintage-star cast, and enough old-star catty-kitsch to last Lorna a lifetime.) 😛
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17 hours ago, TikiSoo said:
Disney's manipulation of fans is obvious, aggressive & insulting to me. These movies are hyped as the "must see epic" film of the year and those who want to see every chapter are mercilessly strung along...forking over more & more cash along the way.
Again, don't blame Disney for this--They let Marvel do its own thing, and Kevin Feige (president of both Marvel Studios and the print-comic line) know their business, like they had for fifty years: If you've ever read a comic book in your life as a kid, that's EXACTLY what comic books are in the business to do--String you along so you'll pay a quarter for next month's magazine. "Next issue: 'If Doomsday Should Come'--The final battle with Doctor Doom!...Hang on till next month, true believers! Excelsior!"
It wasn't until the "Franchise mentality" of the 00's that a movie could actually get away with recreating the one spiritual mark of a comic-book story. George Lucas dreamed of a "Serial arc saga" back in the 70's and never lived to create it, and Harry Potter--which had already done it in a book series--had the reader base and the saga strategy to create
78 stories, and unite them all into one story arc. Marvel, OTOH, was used to writing two dozen magazines every month where half their characters all lived in NYC and ran into each other, and with a big enough battle, if the Avengers was fighting a bad guy in Times Square, Spiderman might have a bit of city fallout to deal with in his comic, or show up in their magazine to nag if he could help. (Which was basically the case, in "Spiderman: Homecoming"). Marvel's print magazines coined the term "Superhero universe", to suggest that there was some real alternate NYC where ALL of this was going on right now and we were only getting bulletins from it, and it was Hollywood that later abused the U-word.The "hype" over Endgame is exactly, no more, no less (well, maybe more, with 12 films rather than seven, not counting a few clinkers) than Harry Potter generated for "Deathly Hallows, Pt. 2", and that was easily more fans' doing than Warner's: They'd invested seven to ten years of their life--many were now in college who'd started in fourth grade--and wanted to see that the box was tied up for posterity with a red ribbon, and that they didn't drop the ball at the last minute like, ahem, a few OTHER franchises had (ahempiratesmatrix). In fact, I've gotten big arguments from fans over "Shut up!--Infinity War was not 'like Deathly Hallows Pt. 1'!" "Uh, hello...They rambled around arguing and looking for objects, and then the villain found his weapon and won?"
14 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:STICKS AND STONES where JOHN ASTIN takes over as SHERIFF is also pretty surprising (and inspired by THE MOVING FINGER by AGATHA CHRISTIE).
In fact, I suspect the whole idea of "Murder She Wrote" was greenlit a suspiciously short time after Lansbury played Miss Marple (badly) in The Mirror Crack'd (1980), but that you didn't have to pay Agatha's estate for an original character.
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1 hour ago, hamradio said:
Need to tie this suggestion to the PREDICTING THE FUTURE: FILMS IN THE 2020S thread. That haven't been brought to life yet.
Bad news, it may happen: As mentioned in said other thread, one of Warner's big '20 next-franchise initiatives is trying to get Scooby-Doo jumpstarted again to pump the entire Hanna-Barbera brandname, with other H-B characters making cameos, and no, we cannot rule out the possibility that Dick Dastardly may show up. (Not confirmed, but we do know Dynomutt and Captain Caveman will.)
They've also got one more brandname-pimping live-action/CGI hybrid Tom & Jerry Movie in the works, with no
PoochiePuggsy this time.
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47 minutes ago, TopBilled said:
Speaking of Tom Cruise he will be appearing in TOP GUN: MAVERICK, which reteams him with Val Kilmer 34 years after the original. The budget for this baby is $140 million.
Yep, Paramount's searching, too: They won't be going back to the Transformers or Ninja Turtles any time soon, and they're still hoping to give Star Trek one last college try, even after "Star Trek: Beyond". They've got one last memo left around from the 00's, and that was for their Hasbro division to tie another toy property in together with one last GI Joe movie.
(Not Top Gun, obviously, that's more in the category of "Nostalgia-resurrecting favorite catalog movies", the same way Warner found out they couldn't jumpstart "Blade Runner" again.)
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10 hours ago, hamradio said:
Although we didn't think much of it at the time, seems Wacky Races does hold an affectionate place in our cultural subconscious:
(Story goes, game-show producers originally hired Hanna-Barbera to create a "Kids' Saturday-morning gameshow", with kids betting on the winner...But the networks thought that would be a gateway-drug to gambling, so the plotless interchangeable cartoons were shown by themselves, and no real interest on who won or lost in the first place.)
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8 hours ago, Dargo said:
I predict THIS guy will return from the dead and will once again begin making predictions...
Hi! My name's Cassandra!
Nobody BELIEVES me when I say "Marvel superheroes movies will be dead in two to three years, after the studio discovers the mainstream audience was only following their interested in their one big pop-culture-validated binge-serial, that the studio didn't have anything big enough to follow it, and no one's heard/cared of the 'diverse' heroes they want to dig up...And now that Fox has wrapped up its competing heroes, Warner and Sony are next to give up!" But that's okay...I'm used to it by now!
(And then they start throwing around accusations of "Sexist! Misogynist! Tyrannical patriarchy!" when I bring up the divisive fan-backlash over "Captain Marvel", and ask whether it drove the fatal-blow wedge into the fans the same way Kathleen Kennedy and "Last Jedi"/"Rogue One" officially Killed Star Wars at Disney, and "Solo" paid the price. I've asked the question "Was Brie Larson officially 'the Rian Johnson of Marvel'?", and I have yet to hear an answer that wasn't diehard fan or gender-motivated, or flipping "Endgame" dollar bills in my face. Yeah, and I'm waiting for SW: Episode IX too, but after that...)
QuoteInteresting posts. Has anyone seen the list of films that are already scheduled for next year?
Ohh, yah--Settle in folks, because in '20-'22, we're in a state of flux:
For literally eighteen years, studios have had their dearest wish come true: Warner discovered Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings in '01, and a few years later Lionsgate/Summit discovered Hunger Games and Twilight, and then Disney got The Avengers vs. Thanos rolling. What do these all have in common? A) These books were already written, thus cutting out most of the screenwriter's work, B ) they were already serialized with "built-in" sequels you had to return to next year like Flash Gordon cliffhangers, C) they had audience identification from the moment the project was announced, and D) the filmmakers were filming them all at once, to deliver one every year by the clock...So, if you were a studio, you not only knew what big audience property you were showing this year, you knew for a fact what your big movie would be NEXT year. The new studio strategy was not to announce one big movie for the year, but to literally announce the next five years of big franchise tentpoles, so you knew what you'd be seeing in 2022.
Warner thought they were set for life: They had Harry Potter, Frodo and Batman! Until Harry fought Voldemort, Frodo destroyed the ring, and DC went for that Justice League movie right away...What could Warner do for an encore? MORE Harry Potter!...Okayyy, that didn't work out. MORE Tolkien!...Sorry, sorry, yeah, "Hobbit trilogy", we apologize for that. MORE Batman!...No, honestly, we've got a new script this time, and we're talking to Ben Affleck's agent, and okay, so you liked Wonder Woman better--No worry, we've got one for her, too!
Want to watch the "Addiction withdrawal" death-throes at the studios over the next three to four years? Just keep your eyes on Warner: They've accepted that their former Big Three are dead, and now Old Mother Warner is searching their bare cupboard for more audience-identification "House brand" properties they can turn into the Next Big Warner Franchise: Wonder why we're getting a Beetlejuice musical on Broadway? Wonder why we're getting another Scooby-Doo movie, with the other Hanna-Barbera characters making cameos? Wonder why we're getting a "Young Willy Wonka" prequel (mixing the Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp canons)? Wonder why the insane flippin' HECK "subliminal" Wizard of Oz lines showed up in the latest Godzilla 2 trailer ("Mothra, Rodan & Ghidrah...Oh, my") while Over the Rainbow played in the background?? Remember any classic lines from "A Christmas Story"?--Warner will make sure you do.
5 hours ago, TopBilled said:Sequels like GHOSTBUSTERS 3 and remakes like DUNE. Also movies inspired by classic televisions programs, such as FANTASY ISLAND. Plus we're getting the 25th James Bond film next April.
All from Sony: Seems like that, er, LAST attempt to make a "house brand" out of Ghostbusters (and maybe tie Jumanji, Goosebumps and Men in Black into a "crossover universe") didn't quite pan out like they thought it would, and now, like Warner, they're scouring the cupboards, trying to find their poor dog a bone.
Fantasy Island was an old Eddie Murphy memo left around from the 90's, but, hey, it's Columbia TV!...And so is one more bash at Charlie's Angels. (And so was that misfired "Bewitched" movie from a few years ago, but let's forget about that for now.) Ghostbusters 3--a "real" sequel this time, they promise--is self-explanatory, as is this summer's "Men in Black International" (Sony invented the "Paris sequel"), and one more Jumanji by Christmas.
What's going to happen to films in the 20's? Not to put it too subtly, but we're going to see studios literally EAT THEMSELVES ALIVE, until starvation forces them to realize that the Dream of '01--"Who needs those ungrateful screenwriters?...We'll make 26 movies about the Alphabet, with 'Z: the Reckoning' scheduled for May 2048!"--is officially over. It was declared dead in '16-'17 (and "Tom Cruise's 'The Mummy'" was carved on its tombstone), and it's time to wake up and hit the slush pile again: Some poor-shlub screenwriter has probably come up with a new idea, and bad news, guys, you're going to have to PAY him.
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9 hours ago, lpetiti said:
And as a side note, personally I've never quite understood the fascination with Citizen Kane. I adore the cinematography, but I've always found Orson Welles to be somewhat off-putting to me (not the character of Kane, but rather Welles himself) and the plot is just not as engaging as I thought it would be. Again, that doesn't take away from the greatness of the film, I just fail to see the fascination that many of my fellow film students had with the film.
Either you like bad-boy 40's Welles, or you don't--
Every time I meet some "Classic films? You mean I have to watch Kane, and that Swedish Death guy?" teen, I always a sneak in a recommendation about watching Kane as a current metaphor for certain overambitious but neurotically insecure tycoons who think it's their destiny to control the entire world around them, and watch everything crumble because they couldn't let their own childhood demons and crying need for personal love and acceptance go. By the time we get the big scene of Kane running for office in front of his hundred-foot poster, they get it. 😎
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1 hour ago, LawrenceA said:
There's another Spider-Man movie due this summer, which Marvel is calling an epilogue to the previous phase. As for what's next, first in front of cameras is a Black Widow solo film, probably a prequel (no spoilers!). Then there are sequels to Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, and Doctor Strange all on the slate. And then there is The Eternals, which will introduce a slew of new characters, and a Shang-Chi movie, about a Chinese martial-arts hero.
That's what they SAY is going to happen, anyway...
Then again, JK Rowling promised us five whole films about the wide, wide universe of American Wizardry.
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1 hour ago, NickAndNora34 said:
Would I be correct in assuming you are calling me a sheep, Tiki?
Better a sheep, Tiki, than a dip. 😛
And while I agree the neurotic industry search for "Record breaking box-office opening weekends!" at the literal expense of all else is one of the factors destroying the movie industry today, compared to what it was before '01...As a Marvel-movie fan, gotta admit: Unlike other Harry-Potter-envy franchise cliffhanger-finales, they didn't screw this two-part finale resolution up.
And yes, I'm looking at YOU, "Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End". 😒
And tell "Hunger Games: Mockingjay Pt. 2" the news.-
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On 4/30/2019 at 7:50 AM, Sepiatone said:
A small group of guys( me included) would talk about cartoons, animation and such at work a lot, and we had the consensus that---"Japanese animation" was an oxymoron, and that even though we felt that DISNEY provided a higher quality of animation, the WARNER BROTHERS/LONNEY TOONS were much funnier and fun to watch.
Now you know I always take offense at that-- 😡
Yes, I was in the same boat in 80's high school, having to listen to the new fans of dubbed 80's "Japanimation" afternoon space series try to sell me on "C'mon, man, you GOTTA watch Robotech/Star Blazers, it's so much more complex than American toons!" Of course, what I didn't realize was that all those 80's high-schoolers went to college, ran into other like-minded fans, scrounged VHS tapes of other series from Japanese exchange students, and the first Anime college clubs were born by the early 90's.
80's anime may not have been graceful compared to what we got by the end of the 90's, but it was those early classics like Robotech, Captain Harlock, "Project A-Ko" and "Dirty Pair: Project Eden" that later shaped our culture. In fact, the contributions of classic old-school 80's Japanese anime to American cartoondom could best be summed up in one word:
QuoteBut I remember laughing at a TOM and JERRY cartoon they were watching once, that introduced, in one cartoon, a huge bulldog in the character of a pro wrestler named, "Gorgeous Gorillawitz"!
A kind of satire on the rep of pro wrestlers in general, and a play on infamous wrestler GORGEOUS GEORGE .
FTR, that would be Droopy in Tex Avery's MGM The Chump Champ (1950): https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4i66k8
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On 4/30/2019 at 1:42 AM, LawrenceA said:
The Time Machine (1978) - 3/10
Dismal low-rent TV-movie take on the H.G. Wells tale.
One of a series of dismal low-rent "Classics Illustrated" TV-movies from Sunn Classic Pictures--anyone remember THAT name from the 70's?--as they were moving away from Mormon-based paranormal documentaries, and trying to get a network series.
I doubt I'd remember it for any other reason. 😛
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And a shoutout to the two hippest cartoons of the 80's:
ALF's animated fractured-fairytale Saturday-morning spinoff (the writer later went on to the first Shrek movie, and it shows)(ALF version of Red Riding Hood: "Oh, Grandma, why is this night different from all other nights?...Oops, wrong set of questions.")
And, of course, THE hippest of the hip--Rocky & Bullwinkle's transatlantic counterparts, back when Nickelodeon was still the Silverball network:
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6 hours ago, Dargo said:
I'm now thinking of the scene in this cartoon where Bugs makes like he's a genie ("the light brown hare") and asks Hassan if he'd like the treasure for his very own, and then does that funny little dance ("Eckity-ackity-oop-ek-ek...etc") and says "It's yours!", as just one example for why Bugs isn't all THAT upstaged by Daffy in this thing.
And Daffy's "oh, come now!" reaction: "...'Ickity-ackity-oop'??"
In the pantheon of great Chuck Jones Expressions (cartoon fans talk about the "Chuck Jones take", where a character would just fourth-wall glance his eyes over to the audience for help 6_6 ), one of my favorites is where Daffy runs into the guard Hassan--"Ah, redcap, call me a cab, boy, I'm a heavy tipper!"--Hassan chops, and Daffy realizes the jig is up: "Waaa-haa-haa-haah. (beat pause)...YAHHH!! (runs for it)"
. . . but it was later in life, long after my cartoon watching kid years, that I came to appreciate the wild slapstick hilarity of Tex Avery's cartoons, particularly once he moved from Warners to MGM. There was the "girl" and "wolf" series, such as Red Hot Riding Hood cigarjoe posted above, along with Swing Shift Cinderella and Little Rural Riding Hood.
Tex Avery was "wacky" at MGM, but in his early years at Warner doing "spot-gag" takeoffs on travelogues, he went in the opposite direction, and timed his gags perfectly under the radar to the last second.
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7 hours ago, kingrat said:
The faces in the many group scenes in Broadway Danny Rose are priceless, and the novelty acts Danny Rose tries to book will have you laughing, shaking your head, or both. For me, this is one of Woody Allen's five or six best films.
The Jersey humor seemed so uncharacteristically lowbrow and dopey, I kept wondering why Woody had made it. (I would stare jawdropped at people who claimed they busted a gut laughing at the "helium" scene.)
Until I saw the two-part documentary on Woody's career, where he paid tribute to his own manager Jack Rollins from during his early 60's nebbish-comic days--Who would hire out Woody for the craziest gigs, from panel shows, to fighting a boxing kangaroo on a TV talk show. Okay, puts it in a little bit of labor-of-love context.
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40 minutes ago, Kay said:
I never gave early Hanna-Barbera cartoons much of a chance, Flintstones or otherwise, even when I was a kid. I never thought they were funny, and the terrible animation was uninteresting and slightly insulting.
(Such a difference from the Fleischer Popeye cartoons, which were so awesomely detailed and visually absurd.)
Even though Chuck Jones complained about "animated sitcoms", H-B hit on the idea that since the cartoons couldn't really move, they at least had to TALK--And when experienced ex-theatrical animators felt they'd come "down" to TV, there was a little sense that they were smart enough to amuse themselves with humor that was above what kids would expect.
Early H-B humor (I'd put it up to anything before Baby Pebbles was born in the third Flintstones season, after which H-B started turning Saturday-morning and commercial) had--I wouldn't call it a "fourth-wall" style, in the sense of Rocky & Bullwinkle joking about their own show, but still a sense that even if you were ahead of the joke, the writers were winking that they were ahead of you being ahead of the joke: When things got too traditional-cartoon, they'd suddenly slip in a funny line-read, a sudden wiseguy insult, or just any "what?" absurdity that would simply catch you off guard out of nowhere, in case you were taking it too seriously.
Favorite example was a Yogi Bear cartoon where Ranger Smith is a nervous wreck waiting for the Park Superintendent to arrive, and Yogi plays him off of that--With five minutes to go, Yogi happens to show up at the ranger's station, and the Ranger panickedly tries to bribe him off with a picnic basket:
Ranger: "Here, Yogi, take this:"
Yogi: "But sir, I--"
Ranger: "Don't ask any questions, just take this picnic basket, loaded with goodies: Liverwurst sandwiches, pizza pies, ice-cream tortonis, just take it in the woods and get lost!"
Yogi: "Thank you, si--Ice cream what?"-
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3 hours ago, TomJH said:
You mean when I do my "Exit, stage left" impersonation of Snagglepus I'm really doing Bert Lahr?
It's amazing the "...Oh, DUH!" moments I get when I have to point out that Snagglepuss is a cowardly lion...
(Props to cartoon voice Daws Butler for also capturing Lahr's obnoxious rapid-fire style of jokes. Lahr was still around in the 60's doing the potato-chip commercials, so Butler had Lahr's barging king-of-the-forest burlesque rhythms down to a T...And an X, Y and Z...And a J through Q inclusive, even!)
QuoteAnd I have to say that I think Bullwinkle was the one doing Red Skelton's Clem Kaddiddlehopper.
My Quick Draw McGraw impersonation was always comprised of "I'll do the thinin' around here, Bubber."
Leaving aside the obvious Sheriff Deadeye, compare Clem Kadiddlehopper's "Da-a-a-isy June!" to Quick-Draw's "Do-o-o-n't you fergit it!"
But like the other Maltese cartoons, the Quick-Draw McGraw cartoons had the same early-HB subversive quality of "winking" at the audience and fourth-wall parodying themselves:
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Narrator: "With the taming of the West, the battle between the cattle rancher and the sheepherder raged on:"
(Two cowboys, on opposite sides of the same rock, a foot away from each other, take turns crouching, standing, and firing over the other's head)
Narrator: "Until a common disaster forged a shaky peace:"
(click, click!)
Cowboy 1: "Hey, I'm plumb outta bullets!"Cowboy 2: "Me too! This looks like a common disaster!"
Cowboy 1: "Whaddya say we forge a shaky peace?"
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7 hours ago, TomJH said:
For some reason I didn't watch Rocky and Bullwinkle that much as a kid, and I've always suspected I missed out on some pretty clever humour.
I'll tell you one thing, though: I can do a spot on verbal imitation of Bullwinkle.
It was never on, at any of the stations I could find it, and never hooked onto its genius until DVD.
8 hours ago, TomJH said:I was big, as a kid, on Donald Duck, Mighty Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Popeye, Caspar the Friendly Ghost and the Flintstones. With the exceptions of Bugs and Popeye (at least the early Fleischer Popeyes) I seem to have outgrown most of them now.
You NEVER outgrow the Fleischer Popeyes or the Flintstones. You only develop a new appreciation for how many of the lines you missed as a short-attention-span kid. (Eg. all of Popeye's ad-lib muttering, which explains how Robin Williams got the live-action movie.)
When we were kids, it took us years to appreciate the surreal, satiric quality of some of the Flintstones gags--We used to drive our parents crazy with the episode where the characters are watching TV, and hear:
Announcer: "Tonight's story, of a husband who runs away after his twelfth child is born, is called 'Have Enough--Will Travel'." But first, a word from our sponsor:
Sponsor: "Ladies and gentlemen...(sad Traumerei music) This program is costing me a fortune, so please...(sob!)...BUY MY PRODUCT!!"Or FTM, any of the pre-Flintstones Hanna-Barbera shorts: There was a hip subversive genius at work in some of the Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick-Draw McGraw and Snagglepuss cartoons--The latter two being written by Michael Maltese, fresh off of the classic Chuck Jones cartoons after Warner closed its cartoon division. (And if you grew up versed in vintage humor enough to recognize that Quick-Draw was imitating Red Skelton and Snagglepuss was doing an amazingly dead-on Bert Lahr, it improved your cultural comedy education.)
8 hours ago, TomJH said:Mr. Magoo
After years of growing up with only the Classic-Tales version, finally found the vintage Columbia theatrical shorts on DVD--Another bit of subversive genius, as the entire world would just coincidentally fall into place with Magoo's nearsighted delusions, and cosmically prevent him from ever finding out he was wrong.
And, since nobody's yet mentioned the Pink Panther (who else could walk to his own theme music?):
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Warner's setting up that crossover-battle-royale movie they'd been imagining ever since the first '14 Godzilla had been mentioned...
(Such a difference from the Fleischer Popeye cartoons, which were so awesomely detailed and visually absurd.)
People have voted to remove Lillian and Dorothy Gish's name from a college theater
in General Discussions
Posted
But it was cut after, during WWII. Even Chico tried to claim his persona wasn't really Italian, for the duration.
Well, since she sang "Pickaninny Heaven" in Hello, Everybody! (1933)--which wasn't exactly on old-film's radar before the Warner Archive days--it's possible nobody even KNEW Smith had sung the song until the Medved Golden Turkeys made a big righteous PC-dudgeon deal about it. (It's mentioned in "Hollywood Hall of Shame", next to Liberace in "Sincerely Yours".)
Again, it's a case of the GWBush era ramming "God Bless America" down our throats during the Gulf War, and the public looking for an excuse to get rid of it by hook or crook--If you couldn't take down Bush until 2008, at least you could try to get the fat lady to stop singing.