Hanna-Barbaric

Earl Kress's blog has the "tentative list" of Hanna-Barbera shows planned for DVD release next year. Many of these are from the cheesy not-so-golden age of Hanna-Barbera cartoons that are spoofed on Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law; in fact, one of the shows to be released is the actual Birdman show. But luckily there's at least one of the early, funny H-B shows in the mix: Quick Draw McGraw: the Complete Series.

The Golden Age of King of the Hill

As I hinted earlier, I think that King of the Hill in its early seasons was a richer, darker show than it is now (it's still good, but it's become more of a comfort-food kind of show), with creator/showrunner Greg Daniels pulling off some very interesting and even daring stories and story arcs, with the kind of thematic depth and emotional richness that even The Simpsons didn't have in its best years. Here are two clips that illustrate what the show was doing at that time.

1. The conclusion of the greatest episode of KotH, the Christmas episode from the third season, "Pretty, Pretty Dresses" (written by Paul Lieberstein, who has followed Daniels to The Office). This has the darkest premise of any Christmas episode in the history of sitcoms, or maybe any sitcom episode at all: Bill (voice of Stephen Root) becomes so depressed about his divorce from his wife Lenore that he repeatedly tries to commit suicide. Finally, Hank (voice of Mike Judge), giving him some tough love, confronts Bill with the fact that Lenore is never coming back, but instead of curing him, it pushes Bill over the edge: the only way he can get Lenore back is to become her, so he puts on her old dress and becomes convinced that he is his ex-wife. Depression, suicide and insanity -- just what you would expect in an animated sitcom episode.



2. A more lighthearted episode, season 2's "Hank's Dirty Laundry," is about Hank suffering the ultimate indignity: the video store's computer erroneously says that he rented and never returned a pornographic movie called Cuffs and Collars, and his application for a credit card is turned down on that basis. But as the episode goes on, we start to realize that Hank is less and less concerned about being falsely accused of renting pornography, and more and more concerned about the simple fact that a computer error has falsified a detail of his life. In the climactic (no pun intended) scene, an anonymous tipster gives him a collection of pornographic movies, and Hank defends his honor by becoming an expert on porn and defending himself in court. Having a character as straitlaced as Hank talk about pornography without acting out of character is a very neat trick, and Daniels and writers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger really pull it off. There's also a "B" story about Bobby Hill mistakenly thinking that his parents are going to throw him a surprise party.

Sex Symbols That Should Have Been

As you know if you've read this blog long enough, I have a preoccupation with what I call "lost starlets" -- actresses who in my opinion had all the qualities and talent required to be big movie stars, but didn't become big stars because they had the misfortune to work in a time and place where there weren't any good parts for women. Mostly this applies to actresses in Hollywood in the '60s and early '70s, like Paula Prentiss, Stella Stevens, Pamela Tiffin, Marianna Hill -- you can find the list in the archives.

But there's another category of might-have-beens: actresses who could have been major sex symbols -- international pin-up girls on the level of Marilyn Monroe or Betty Grable or Farrah Fawcett -- and who didn't quite make it to that level. For example, I always thought Vanessa Angel, Lisa of the "Weird Science" TV show and the Farrelly Brothers movie Kingpin, was going to be a worldwide sex symbol; she could have been a Farrah for the ironic '90s -- a gorgeous woman with a slightly self-mocking, ironic undertone. But she kind of fell off the radar after Kingpin.


Another almost-Farrah was Heather Thomas, of the Lee Majors vehicle The Fall Guy. She was pretty much the entire reason to watch The Fall Guy (her and Markie Post), and she was not only beautiful but charming and somehow oddly human in a way that many wanna-be sex symbols are not. A lot of times when a show or movie is pushing a man or woman as a sex symbol, they'll wind up coming off as kind of pre-packaged and artificial, but Thomas actually came off as a real person who happened to be spectacular-looking; she certainly came off much better than the pre-packaged, artificial star of the show, Lee Majors. But nothing much came of her career after The Fall Guy went off the air. The only clip of her I could find on YouTube is some kind of music video with clips from a Fall Guy episode:



Who are some actors or actresses who you thought could have been world-famous sex symbols but didn't make it to that level?

O Sommo Carlo

When Carlo Bergonzi was active as an opera singer, he wasn't a great actor, didn't cut a dashing figure on stage, and didn't have a great voice as such (he was a converted baritone and sometimes sounded like one, and he didn't have ringing high notes like Franco Corelli). And yet I can't think of a better singer of Verdi and Puccini in the post-war period; through his intelligent use of his voice and his absolutely superb phrasing -- sort of an old-school, almost golden-age ability to put a special musical inflection on a musical phrase, and not just make it sound like he's feeding us back the notes by rote -- he's always been able to give the impression that the music is coming out of him naturally, as an expression of the character's feelings.

Here's a clip of Bergonzi in his best role, Riccardo in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, in a Tokyo production from 1967.

Elsewhere...

Not sure if this is a cure for depression, but on my other blog I have a post on the shrinking running times of TV shows and how that affects the style of modern television.

One thing I didn't mention there, but which I find interesting (and have mentioned here before) is the paradoxical fact that as the running times of shows have decreased, the number of plots has increased. Back when shows had 25 minutes of content per half-hour, they usually told one story per episode, no more. Now that there's only 20 minutes per half-hour, almost every show has multiple storylines in each episode.

Too Depressed to Blog

Too depressed. Too goddamn depressed.

Paul Vance Lives!

The guy who died was an impostor who pretended to have written "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. The real Paul Vance is still alive.

That She Wore For the First Time Today

Paul Vance, composer of "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini", has died at the age of 68.

Vance and his songwriting partner Lee Pockriss wrote and produced a lot of successful songs in the '50s and '60s; they're prominently mentioned in the online article "Ron Dante Remembers the '60s."

But here's the clip that I think everybody will be remembering:

X is the New Y

I sort of made this point obliquely on the other blog, but one of the reasons I like the American version of The Office so much is that I find it gives me a lot of what I used to find in King of the Hill. KotH in its prime years had the same showrunner, Greg Daniels, and one of its best writers was Daniels' brother-in-law Paul Lieberstein, who now writes for The Office as well as playing the part of Toby. What they've brought to The Office is very much what they brought to KotH: realistic, observational humour with a satirical edge but with genuine emotion, some dark undercurrents (on KotH the darkness mostly came from the character of Bill, the most suicidal depressed loser ever seen on a mainstream sitcom) and more story arcs and status-quo shakeups than you'd get on a normal sitcom. KotH is still on, but while it's still a good show, it doesn't have much of that any more; the episodes are less satirical, there's less emotion, and the characters have become more static and unchanging. So for what I looked for in KotH, I now turn to The Office.

Anyway, the point of this is that I think it's actually quite common to turn to a new show to "replace" an older show, particularly if that show's been canceled recently. It doesn't necessarily mean that the new show has to be the same as the older one, or even very similar; after all, The Office isn't really similar to KotH in any obvious way. It just means that sometimes a show will come along that has certain qualities that a) most shows don't have, and b) used to be provided by a show that doesn't provide it any more. When that happens, the fans of one show will sort of migrate to the newer show.

For example, in 1978 it was pretty clear that Taxi was successfully making a play for the Mary Tyler Moore Show fans; the shows weren't similar in setting or characters, but they used a lot of the same creative talent and had a similar mix of highbrow and lowbrow comedy styles and a similar attitude (though Taxi was, at least at first, a little darker). Then in 1982, when Taxi was on its last legs, its fans migrated to Cheers, which not only had a lot of Taxi people working on it but sported a similar cast of lovable losers on a huge single set.

Or take Family Guy. I'm no fan of that show (as you may have heard rumoured) but it definitely has pulled in a lot of people who became disenchanted with The Simpsons and were looking for another show to give them the fast-paced comedy and irreverent attitude they loved on The Simpsons in the David Mirkin years.

Are there any shows that you turned to for the particular pleasures/qualities you used to get from another show?

Urban Horticulturist

Sorry I haven't been posting much lately. There will be some real posts here soon, I promise, but in the meantime you'll have to settle for another couple of clips while I try to put together some actual prose (after all this is a blog, not a vlog -- though I'm not anti-vlog, not a vlogophobe).

I was going on in a couple of posts about why I like the TV writing of Stephen J. Cannell, and clips from "Riptide" or even "The A-Team" don't really convey why I like his stuff (though he did provide an episode of "The A-Team" with one of the great running gags in a TV episode). So here's some prime Cannell, from an episode of "The Rockford Files," "Chicken Little is a Little Chicken" -- the episode that really established Angel (a character who was in the pilot, but was played down for the first season because the network didn't like him) as an important character on the show, and features a hilarious guest performance by Ray Danton as one of Cannell's garrulous crime bosses, Chester Sierra.

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And for a clip from Le Cinema, I wanted to highlight a scene that shows the power that music can bring to a movie -- and there are few movies that benefit more from the music than Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Wilder got the composer, Miklós Rósza, to use his own violin concerto (originally written in 1953 for Jascha Heifetz) as the film's theme music, and while the style of the music, with its Hungarian flavour, isn't exactly appropriate for a film that takes place in England and Scotland, the mood and tone of the music is exactly right. And in the final scene, where Holmes finds out that the woman he loves has been killed, the music makes the scene incredibly powerful and moving; the final shot, with Watson sitting down to write a Holmes adventure that he will not want released to the public, is just a static shot that isn't necessarily interesting in and of itself, but when you add the music, it can bring a tear to the eye; it's one of the few Wilder movies that can truly be called moving, and Rósza is a big part of the reason why.

Wisht I Coulda Been There

Jerry Beck reports from the Ottawa Animation Festival.

Weekend Placeholder

Enjoy the last six minutes of the "Phil Silvers Show" episode "The Court Martial" (co-written and directed, like all the episodes from the first two seasons, by creator Nat Hiken). "Excuse me, sir, I think he's calling for another lawyer."

"Sorry We're Late, But We Had To Go And Pick Up Hank."

In comments, Ivan G. Shreve and "Slowjack" make a good case that I've been unfair to the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Certainly it's not a bad remake, and it's easy to see why Hitchcock preferred it: the remake has better lead actors overall, is more technically assured, and most importantly, has a real emotional punch that the original version did not have. Most of Hitchcock's British thrillers, even the serious ones like Sabotage, are kind of lightweight and emotionally cool. His American thrillers tend to be more intense, more emotional, more passionate; I think part of the reason critics used to prefer Hitch's British work (and while Hitchcock was alive, it was quite common for critics to say he went downhill after he left England) is that the earlier work didn't pretend to be anything more than a thriller, whereas his '50s films seem to aspire to more, and critics at the time weren't comfortable with the idea that a thriller could have things to say.

My problem with the remake is that while it embodies some of the virtues of Hitchcock's later work, it also embodies some of the flaws: it's very long and kind of slow (more than half again as long as the original), has a lot of bad rear projection, and doesn't have very impressive acting apart from the leads. (Alfred "actors are cattle" Hitchcock was not a great director of actors; good actors could give of their best for him -- as Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day do in this movie -- but supporting actors often did indifferent work in his movies because they're not really being given characters to play, just plot functions.) And while I appreciate the attempt to bring some emotional weight to what is after all a rather dark story -- it's about a couple whose child is kidnapped, after all -- it sometimes feels like Hitchcock and writer John Michael Hayes don't know whether they want to do a dark dramatic thriller or a somewhat lighter story.

Still, there's a good case to be made for the remake, and I think Hitchcock was accurate when he said that the difference between the two versions is that "the first was made by a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional." And there are few Hitchcock scenes more affecting than the final scene, where Day saves the, er, day by singing loudly so her son (being held captive upstairs) can hear her.

I'm Everywhere

I now have a blog, "TV Guidance," at Macleans.ca.

This will focus more on contemporary TV and/or stuff with a contemporary hook (like an older series that's just come out on DVD), so it doesn't take too much away from this blog, and I'll continue to update this blog regularly. But have a look at the blog and let me know what you think (via the email form, because Macleans.ca blogs don't have comments sections).

Ros! Ros! Ros!

Rediscover the work of Amanda McKittrick Ros.

Amanda McKittrick Ros, who was born in 1860, has been accused of delivering some of the worst passages of literature ever written.

Described as formidable, she rejected her critics as being the "auctioneering agents of satan".

Now Culture Northern Ireland has challenged "lovers of awful literature" to see if they can read the longest passage from McKittrick Ros's work while keeping a straight face.

Basically, Ros is what you'd get if you crossed Emmeline Grangerford (the bad poet from Huckleberry Finn) with a schoolma'arm (which Ros in fact was). She produced so much bad writing, in verse and prose, that no one has been able to match her fabulous awfulness. A sample of her verse, via Fetch Me My Axe:

"On Visiting Westminster Abbey"

Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer,
Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust;
Royal flesh so tinged with 'blue'
Undergoes the same as you.

And a sample of her prose, from the novel Helen Huddleston:

'Now Helen, my darling, my queen, my all, had I not loved you as never woman before, I'd have allowed you to go on your way rejoicing, but, I can never, NEVER, I say, see you the wife of any other man save myself.' Helen still remaining laconic as he continued:

'The illimitable love I possess for you within this heart of mine can never suffer that blow you fain would strike it. Truly, it would kill me outright were you to reject an offer hundreds of society shams grieve because they cannot grasp. I have travelled through many foreign climes, I have seen the fairest daughters Nature can produce-or critic-crabs denounce -- but none so fair as you, my Helen.'

Still spurnful, he went on:

'You may think it dishonourable of me trying to wreck the happiness of him to whom you have plighted your vow but there is nothing unfair in love and war, the mightiness of two such strongholds banish all faintness from the human heart. I can't live without you, Helen Huddleson. Say no. I die. Say yes. I will live for you, love you, worship you, cherish you while this life lasts.'

He gazed at her wan face moulded in rigidity, a face immersed in indecision that gave him a thread of hope. He pressed her ruby lips to his, her colour grew white and red alternately, through force of her thoughts.

'Will you love me, my fond girl?' he panted. 'Will you?' She remained immobile -- taciturn.

'Ah, darling -- speak,' he pleaded plaintively. 'I am mad with excitement, wild with expectancy, awaiting those sweet lips of yours to open and act their part in conveying to me that for which I have yearned for years.' He pressed his hot forehead
with his hand.

'Will you be my wife, Helen Huddleson?' the sweat drops pebbling his brow as he anxiously awaited her reply.

She trembled violently until at last the answer came. 'Sir -- I cannot,' wringing her small hands as the negative dropped from her parched lips ...

'Then, by heaven, I'll end the scene,' drawing from his jacket pocket a pistol. 'I shall shoot you first - myself after,' holding the weapon menacingly to sever the soul and body of her he could never bear to see the wife of another.

Helen rose, rushed forward towards him screaming:

'Why, oh why, sir, damn your soul forever by such savage acts?'...

He looked upon her where she stood gasping, her bleached lips quivering, her hand upon the weapon she still regarded with awe.

He gave her a murderous stare, exclaiming in frenzy:

'Helen, Helen, 'tis all your fault. I'll give you another minute to decide, another minute to aid this acheing heart of mine you have so cruelly stabbed by your refusal to own it.'

He counted the seconds and on reaching fifty-nine she clasped him in her trembling arms-shouting:

'I will -- I will marry you, Lord Rasberry.'

She then fell fainting at his feet.

Sarah has more.

A Very Popular Commercial

Yeah, I know I post too many embedded clips in lieu of original analysis (and then I write a bazillion words about shows with Jack Ging in them), but all I have time for right now is another related series of clips. Do you remember the Dr. Pepper "I'm a Pepper" commercial of the late '70s, early '80s? Well, here it is:



This commercial was so popular that it got spoofed and referenced on a number of TV shows in the early '80s. SCTV did a parody where "Dr. Pepper" became "Dr. Shekter" (Rick Moranis):



And "Remington Steele" did a famous throwaway line that spoofed that commercial:



All in all, I'd say it was a very successful ad campaign, even when they ill-advisedly tried to do a disco version of it.

Put It Back in the Holst-Er

The downgrading of Pluto to sub-planetary status has pretty much settled the hash of the English composer Colin Matthews. A few years ago, he was commissioned to write a new movement for Gustav Holst's famous "The Planets": that composition features a movement for each of the then-recognized planets, and Matthews added one for Pluto. This movement was recorded a few years back and has now received a second recording, as part of Simon Rattle's interpretation (with the Berlin Philharmonic) of "The Planets."

The addition of a new, musically-unrelated movement to a famous work was never a good idea, so it's a good thing that the "Pluto" movement won't become a concert staple. But the odd timing -- of having a recording come out just as Pluto gets demoted -- is, ironically, gaining a lot of attention for "Pluto," as this article explains:

Matthews could have warned them about this ages ago. His programme notes for the world premiere mentioned Pluto's questionable status, "but because I had been commissioned to do it I couldn't turn around and say, 'Hey, it isn't a planet'."

And over at Classics Today, David Hurwitz has an Onion-esque take on it.

The Screaming Mimi

I picked up the first season of "Riptide", one of a number of Stephen J. Cannell productions being released by the Canadian company VEI. If you like these shows, like "Hardcastle and McCormick" and "Stingray" (coming soon, according to the booklet), consider ordering them from amazon.ca; there are no extras, but the picture quality is pretty good considering that these were fairly low-budget shows (or more specifically all the money went for the stunt work), and unlike the U.S. releases of Cannell shows, there don't appear to be any music changes.

I wasn't particularly familiar with "Riptide" before this, and after watching the first season I have to say it's not one of my favorite Cannell shows. Of course with any of Cannell's self-produced shows (even the critically-acclaimed ones like "Profit" and "Wiseguy") you have to make allowances for less-than-beautiful production values and weak guest performances. But the funny writing usually carries them through; as I've said before, what sets Cannell productions apart from other action shows of the '80s is that Cannell specialized in the injection of character comedy into otherwise standard action plots.

But to get the character comedy, you need good characters. "The Rockford Files" had great regular characters and (because it was a Universal production) had access to a lot of really strong guest performers; it therefore was Cannell's best show because it had the most opportunities for strong character comedy. Among the self-produced shows, "The Greatest American Hero" and "The A-Team" had some weak plots and guest characters, but had a strong core of distinctive and funny regular characters who could provide the basis for the comedy. (The weak Cannell stuff is the stuff where the main characters aren't funny at all; his novels strike me as falling into this category.) "Riptide" comes off as a weak effort, then, because the main characters really aren't distinctive enough to create solid comedy; in fact, two of them -- the two beach bums played by Joe Penny and Perry King -- are really the same character writ twice, and a lot of their scenes together fall apart because neither one has any distinctive character traits; without character differences, whether it's the mild differences of Rockford and his father or the huge differences of Ralph Hinckley and Bill Maxwell, you can't get a lot of funny scenes. (Though they occasionally pull off a funny scene with some overlapping dialogue, but even when arguing, they're basically two identical people.) So what you're left with instead are the plots, which are nothing much to speak of, and a whole lot of helicopter chases and cars flipping over.

The other thing I forgot is that Anne Francis was supposed to be a regular on the show, as the hard-boiled skipper of a tour boat; she was even in the opening credits for a while even though she only appeared in the pilot and one other episode. I guess the idea at the time was that a show like this needed a familiar TV name -- like Brian Keith or George Peppard -- but Francis didn't last on this one, and it became still another '80s action show with no female regulars.



TV DVD Reviews has more on the show as well as a brief review of a U.S. DVD release.

Double Plus Ungood

Because I hate you all so much, I torment you with yet another comparison of a scene from Double Indemnity with that horrible made-for-TV remake, in this case, the final scene.

The good, from 1944 (with Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson):



The bad, from 1973 (with Richard Crenna and Lee J. Cobb):



To soften the blow, here's a less lopsided comparison: the attempted assassination scene from Alfred Hitchcock's two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much. The two scenes are very similar -- they even use the same music, by Arthur Benjamin (which left Bernard Herrmann without much to do in the remake, but he does get to make a cameo as the conductor of the orchestra). But the scene from the remake is in color, is much longer -- twice as long, basically -- has more of an action-y climax to it, and makes the heroine more down-to-earth by having her not actually be in attendance at the concert (it just wouldn't do for Doris Day to actually be going to a snooty concert the way Edna Best is in the original). Hitchcock preferred the remake, but I think time has been kinder to the shorter, faster, punchier original.

1934 version:




1956 version:

Things That Aren't Scopitones, But Should Be

The scopitone aesthetic -- sleazy sexploitation presented as wholesome family entertainment -- was, as I've said, not limited to Scopitones themselves; it was an integral part of '60s entertainment, with stripteases in family-oriented musicals and all. The Matt Helm movies were full of this kind of family-friendly leering, as in this scene from The Wrecking Crew where Sharon Tate has to humiliate herself and even Dean Martin looks a little embarrassed for her -- or maybe he just hates Hugo Montenegro's music as much as I do:



Or this truly appalling number from The Pleasure Seekers, a musical number that really -- especially since the movie isn't a musical -- has no purpose whatsoever except letting Ann-Margret shake everything that's shakable:



Someone really needs to psycho-analyze '60s entertainment and explain why this weird combination of wholesomness and sleaziness became the hallmark of the era.