Who Needs Cars?

No, I'm sure Cars is good (haven't seen it just yet), but Thad has posted the Tex Avery cartoon that may have inspired it, "One Cab's Family" (with voice work by Daws Butler and June Foray). It's the story of a taxicab whose son disgraces the family by wanting to be a hot-rod. It's unusually cute and whimsical for Avery, though he does manage to get away with showing the first bare butt in Hollywood cartoons; apparently it's OK with the censors if said butt belongs to a car.

Avery would follow it up by making virtually the same story with airplanes ("Little Johnny Jet"). Maybe that'll be Pixar's next feature.

Later on, Thad will be puting up some of the "Looney Tunes" cartoons produced by Larry Doyle. Doyle was a former "Simpsons" writer who was hired by Warner Brothers a few years back when they were looking to revitalize the Looney Tunes franchise with a movie (Doyle has the writing credit on Looney Tunes: Back in Action) and some short cartoons. Doyle staffed the short cartoons with writers and directors who had worked on "Family Guy" and "The Simpsons" ("Simpsons" stalwart Jon Vitti was one of the writers) and tried to emphasize that he was bringing a hip, contemporary feel to the characters. Unfortunately the results were generally pretty awful -- bad, out-of-character writing; design and animation that is strictly TV-level and TV-style; music (by Walter Murphy, of "Family Guy") that doesn't get the Carl Stalling style at all; and so on.

Most of the cartoons were so bad that WB didn't release them. They'd have done better to stick with the people who made "Little Go Beep" instead of assuming that they needed to bring in "Simpsons" people to give the franchise a boost; the failure of Back in Action (though Joe Dante and Eric Goldberg did what they could with the project despite studio interference) and the loss on the unreleased cartoons nearly killed off the franchise altogether.

Grudge Matches I'd Like to See: John Wayne vs. Toshiro Mifune

John Wayne, who kicked ass in numerous movies but who did his best work with one director, John Ford, vs. Toshiro Mifune, who kicked ass in numerous movies but who did his best work with one director, Akira Kurosawa. The battle is not between the actual men but between the personas they embodied onscreen: which cinematic bad-ass will emerge victorious?

To make this a fair fight, this will be a fight without weapons (since with weapons, Duke's rifle will probably beat Toshiro's sword -- though Toshiro would make it close).

And speaking of Mifune at his bad-ass-ed-est, Criterion has announced A three-disc special edition of Seven Samurai for this September. New special editions of Yojimbo and Sanjuro will probably follow soon after.

Hart & Harburg Lyrics

Sorry for the lack of postings (postage?). To fill the space, here are some lyrics by two of my three favourite lyricists, Larry Hart and Yip Harburg (Carolyn Leigh completes the trinity).

Hart's lyric for one of the great Rodgers and Hart songs, "Moon of My Delight" from Chee-Chee (1928). This was one of the strangest musicals ever -- the story of a young Chinese nobleman who has no desire to be the next Grand Eunuch of Peking. The score was so fully integrated into the script that the program didn't even print the names of individual songs, and "Moon of My Delight" was too closely tied to the style of the show -- with its mix of fake Oriental-isms and colloquial slang -- to become a hit. It's a wonderful song, though, and a truly off-kilter way of writing a love song:

Verse 1

Moon of moons, when you are mine,
Bright the night will be,
But remember, when you shine,
Concentrate on me.
Moon of moons, be mine alone,
Mine alone -- don't laugh, moon!
I would never care to own
A quarter or a half moon.

Refrain

Moon of my delight,
I'm going to put a ring around you.
You'll stay home tonight,
Scintillating where I found you.
When you were a little crescent,
Your manners were as soft as wool;
Now you're getting effervescent,
But maybe that's because you're full.
Moon of my delight,
If you'd only treat me right,
We could have a satellite or two,
Moon of my delight.

Verse 2

You're my moon and I'm your earth,
Bless me with your gaze!
What are lovely evenings worth
If I lose your rays?
If you ever should depart,
I would be a mean cheese.
If you leave me, then your heart
Must be made of green cheese.

Repeat Refrain

And Harburg's lyric for "Vive La Virtue" from The Happiest Girl in the World, where the evil Pluto (Cyril Ritchard) explains to the chaste Diana (Janice Rule) why he just loves chastity -- it drives mortal men wild:

Ev'ry man, I must alert you,
When seeking a lady fair,
Always gravitates to virtue,
Still hoping it won't be there.
Man prefers a chick that is first
Instead of a hen already rehearsed.
Man, it seems has got to make sure --
Whatever he takes has got to be pure.

So vive la virtue, vive la virtue,
Makes your heart go pippety-pat.
Vive la virtue, vive la virtue,
What an aphrodisiac, that!
Let not virtue e'er desert you,
Man was made for Love à la Carte,
For he's at his best
When sharing his nest
With the pure in heart.

Vice is not averse to virtue,
Though virtue is versa vice,
And the man who would unskirt you
Won't do it unless you're nice.
This is man's ambivelent taste:
Whatever is chased has got to be chaste.
Paradox is deep in his blood:
He's after the rose, but leaps at the bud.

So vive la virtue, vive la virtue,
Up the Bacchanalian cup,
Vive la virtue, vive la virtue,
Down with things that cover it up!
Let not virtue e'er desert you,
Fie on all the cynical gents,
For the way to slay
The cunning roué
Is with innocence.

Remakes Galore

As expected, the new special edition of The Maltese Falcon (which has been announced for this fall along with some other Bogart movies) will include the two earlier versions of the novel, The Maltese Falcon (1931), and Satan Met a Lady. The 1941 version is of course the best, though the first version is worth seeing, and has the benefit of being free from Hayes Code censorship.

Packaging a well-known film with its remake, or with an earlier version, is something that's always welcome on a "classic" DVD. Sometimes the earlier or later version outclasses the better-known version, like the silent version of Ben-Hur (though I perversely like DeMille's remake of The Ten Commandments better than the silent original) or the original British version of Gaslight, which MGM suppressed when they did the Hollywood remake. And sometimes the remake isn't very good but makes for an interesting comparison: I Wake Up Screaming was remade a decade later as the less stylized but more serious Vicki, with Jeanne Crain and Jean Peters taking over for Betty Grable and Carole Landis. Fox is planning to release that movie separately, which is kind of a shame; it's not really interesting enough on its own, but it would be interesting as a way of comparing how a studio approached the same material in two different decades.

All This and Elisha Cook Jr. Too

Of all the clips I've uploaded onto YouTube, this is probably the most obviously worthwhile: the first (and best) ten minutes of the movie Hellzapoppin'. I've already said my say about Hellzapoppin' and Olsen and Johnson, so all I really need to do now is embed the clip. Enjoy:



This was, as I said, the best part of the movie -- one comedy writer, who loved the film and paid tribute to it in numberous ways, told me "once they started telling a story, the movie tanked." I wouldn't go that far; there are some good things in the rest of the picture, but the insanity of the first reel is so pure that it's a shame to see it be abandoned in favour of a conventional Hollywood structure, even if the filmmakers thumb their nose at convention a little by admitting up-front that they're selling out ("you've gotta have a story because every picture has one," the director bellows).

The best jokes and fourth-wall-breaking tricks from this section are well-known, of course, but that's because they've been lifted by so many people who came after. Not that Olsen and Johnon's jokes were original; the whole point was that they weren't original and were bringing old-school Vaudeville and Burlesque humour to shake up the stuffy world of Broadway and Hollywood. But they're unique for their near-exhausting piling of jokes on top of jokes, and any "wacky" or self-referential comedy owes a little bit to Hellzapoppin'.

More Animation Identification

Via Thad, I see that Larry Tremblay has started a blog. Larry, who Thad calls "my absolute mentor when it comes to animator identification," has some tips on how to identify the styles of individual animators, plus an analysis of the animators' styles in the Frank Tashlin cartoon "Puss N' Booty."

For All You Miller-Boyett Nostalgia Buffs

I've discovered that YouTube contains an inordinate number of versions of the title sequence of "Perfect Strangers," as re-enacted by college students. I found at least five different ones so far. Here's the best of them:



And here, for reference, is the original:



With this and that "Simpsons" live-action sequence, re-creating TV title sequences is soon going to surpass Civil War re-enactments in popularity. And, after all, there are a lot more pleasant things to re-enact than the Civil War. I would suggest that someone turn their attention to re-enacting The Hogan Family next.

Now, why "Perfect Strangers?" I think it's just one of those shows that really hooks you when you're a little kid. I know that as a child I was kind of obsessed with it. Of course, it didn't deserve that kind of following; I saw a couple of episodes recently and found it pretty bad when it wasn't just ripping off other, better, earlier comedy (Larry and Balki move a piano like Laurel and Hardy; Balki gets hypnotized in a plot directly ripped off from "The Dick Van Dyke Show"). But kids love Larry and Balki, and they especially love the fact that they had one of the few friendships on TV that seemed real to a child: instead of being friendly all the time (one extreme of TV friendships) or insulting each other all the time (the other extreme), cousins Larry and Balki liked each other but got on each other's nerves, fought to see who would get the better stuff, got into trouble with authority figures -- they were, basically, overgrown children with a childish friendship. That made "Perfect Strangers" the perfect kiddie show, and when the kiddies grow up, they remember that show fondly.

That'll Be the Day

DVD Journal has a good review of the new The Searchers DVD along with an analysis of the movie.

The A-Team: The Legend Lives On

So a British TV network did a show called "Bring Back the A-Team". The host, Justin Lee Collins, apparently makes a specialty of doing shows where he goes around trying to find and re-unite the cast of a popular TV show -- and "The A-Team" is really, really, really popular in England; I can't stress that enough. Most of the "A-Team" fan fiction and a lot of the Mr. T webcomics come from England. So Collins' fan-worship of Mr. T and Dirk Benedict and Dwight Schultz is totally believable.

Anyway, the special included the above-named actors; it didn't include George Peppard, who's too busy being dead, but it did have Marla Heasley, who was the "token female" on the show for a few months in 1984. But the one surviving regular who did not appear in the reunion was Melinda Culea. And so the legend lives on.

What I mean by that is that the Melinda Culea "A-Team" story is one of my all-time favourite show-business stories, and it's fascinating to me, in part, because it's not a very well-known or widely-analyzed story, which means I can read anything I want into it.

The story is actually pretty simple, in outline: Culea was hired to play Amy Allen, a reporter who tagged along with the A-Team and was supposed to help them line up cases and publicize their exploits. She was there for the huge success of the first season, but the writers couldn't figure out what to do with the character -- or, put it another way, they realized that there was no reason for the character to be on the show at all.

By the second season, her part had been reduced to almost nothing: a couple of lines in each episode, or a chance to deliver some exposition. She started complaining about having nothing to do, and told the producers, accurately: "if you can’t write the role better you don’t need me. You can get any number of young, pretty girls as guest stars for a lot less money than you’re paying me." She reportedly also started lobbying the writers to let her character actually participate in the fight scenes, something that is common now but never happened with female characters back then (heck, even Batgirl was never allowed to actually hit anybody; she had to get on a table and kick them). The other actors, but particularly Peppard and Benedict, didn't care for her complaints and thought she should consider herself lucky to be on a show that didn't really need a female lead.

At some point during the second season, Culea discovered she was fired, in the most humiliating way possible: she received the script for that week and found that her character wasn't in it. She told TV Guide that she wasn't sure what had happened but thought it might have something to do with "Peppard, who never liked me." Peppard, Benedict and Mr. T all had some rather snippy things to say about her when asked.

Now, was this a case of horrible injustice done to a great character or a great actress? Hardly. The character of Amy was never really needed (though she is a somewhat more consequential character in the pilot), and Culea was nothing special -- a competent but uninspiring actress, and a good-looking woman who didn't look all that good on film. There was no reason not to let her go; she said so herself: if they couldn't write the part better, they didn't need a female lead (though they did try another female lead, Heasley, for a few episodes after they dumped Culea).

And yet, the story fascinates me. Partly because I've heard the occasional rumour that there's more to what happened than was reported at the time; but even based on what was reported, it's the outline of a great story. A young actress gets her big break as the female lead in a pilot; the pilot gets picked up and the show becomes a monster hit -- but nobody writes about her, nobody writes for her, and neither she nor her character are really treated as a full member of the group. She tries to lobby for a stronger part and a stronger character, to be a full member of that group in every sense, and the star of the show turns against her. She is forced off the show and into obscurity. The end. Now, how much does that outline correspond to what actually happened? I've no idea. But that's why I'm oddly glad that Culea declined to show up for the reunion: it keeps the real details of the story as murky as they ever were, and allows one's imagination to make anything of the story that one wants -- it can be the story of how badly women are treated in the man's world of TV, or it can be the story of a veteran actor who didn't like a young woman who talked back, or it can be the story of an actress who thought she was more important to the show than she really was, or all of the above, or none. It's an inkblot showbiz story: you see in it what you want to see.

I actually tried several ways to do a fictionalized version of this story (in fiction, you don't have to worry about what really happened and can make the story mean whatever you want). I did do a short story called "Token Female," about a young man obsessed with the firing and unable to enjoy the show because of it. But I really wanted to do it as a longer story about two women: the token female on an action show, and the token female on the writing staff of the same show. The problem was that there just wasn't enough story material to do a longer version -- or, more specifically, there wasn't enough story material featuring the two women together (since they wouldn't have seen each other very much). Someday I'll find the right way to do that story, though. And anyone else who wants to try and crack it is welcome.

"Meet The Press In Hell"

I'm not sure if this "World O' Crap" post, entitled "Meet the Press in Hell", is comedy or just a straightforward transcript that NBC forgot to post. But it's funny and true.

Satan: Now I’m an old-fashioned guy. I believe in mothers, and family, and I think marriage is a sacred institution between one man and one woman for the begetting and raising of Anti-Christs. But my opponent seems to have a more “casual” view of it, since he married a prostitute.

Jesus: I did NOT!

Satan: Have you read the book?

Jesus: That was a novel!

Satan: Do you deny this story was widely printed?

Jesus: It was fiction!

Satan: Oh, I see. So 50 million people who read that book are all wrong, and you’re right. Tim, you see, this is why the people in this country don’t trust the media.

I Wake Up Screaming

Gary Giddins has a wonderful column on the DVD release of the movie I Wake Up Screaming. It's part of Fox's film noir series, and outshines a lot of the better-known titles in that series.

I Wake Up Screaming is a truly strange movie for a lot of reasons. First of all, it was made in 1941 but much of it has the look of a post-war film noir, with all the shadows, cigarettes and hats you'd expect from a noir, plus the occasional tilted camera angles and strange lighting tricks. Unlike The Maltese Falcon from the same year, which is considered an early noir but doesn't really have a lot of the noir visual style, I Wake Up Screaming looks like a movie from a later period; it's as if somebody had made Risky Business in 1978.

The other odd thing about it is that it's an early noir, full of murder, perverse obsession and a complicated flashback structure, made mostly by people who were associated with musicals: Betty Grable (though her part is overshadowed by others), director Bruce Humberstone, and writer Dwight Taylor. It's not quite as much of a mis-match as it seems at first glance, because Humberstone had directed a bunch of Charlie Chan films for Fox, and there always was a certain amount of stylistic connection between the noir and the B-movie mystery film, particularly since most noir movies were made on relatively small budgets. The film noir doesn't have the gloss of an "A" picture, though it's less simplistic and more polished than a "B" picture; it is, let's say, a "B+" picture, and that's what I Wake Up Screaming is: a really good, absorbing, inventive "B+."

Here are some screen captures which show off the beautiful noir-ish photography that Giddins talks about:

Spinach City

According to this article (as well as an online chat tonight), Warner Brothers has acquired the home video rights to the Fleischer "Popeye" cartoons:

The distribution deal covers all of the original 231 Popeye animated shorts released theatrically by Paramount Pictures between 1933 and 1957. Warner also has licensed the exclusive rights to 220 Popeye made-for-TV animated shorts produced from 1960 to 1962, 65 episodes of "The Continuing Adventures of Popeye," produced from 1978 to 1981 (and consisting of 161 animated shorts) and 26 "Popeye & Son" shorts produced in 1987.

Warner’s first Popeye DVD release is expected to street in 2007.

The Popeye theatrical slate includes 120 black & white shorts (106 of them produced by Fleischer Studios, the other 14 by Famous Studios) and 111 Technicolor cartoons (three produced by Fleischer Studios and 108 produced by Famous Studios).

Warner Home Video said it will start work immediately on preservation and restoration activities.

In VistaVision

As this Hollywood Reporter article mentions, The Searchers was filmed in the VistaVision process, a unique alternative to CinemaScope for directors who didn't want to deal with the wide-and-narrow 'Scope frame. VistaVision was mostly used by Paramount, the only studio that rejected CinemaScope; it wasn't a widescreen process (though the frame could be cropped to a faux-widescreen ratio, the optimal projection width of a VistaVision movie is about 1.85:1), but rather made its effect through the higher quality of the image it produced. At a time when many movies looked visually dull -- in part due to the problems with early CinemaScope lenses -- VistaVision blew you away with how good it looked, as Martin Scorsese explains in the article:

"I (don't have the words to) tell you what that VistaVision looked like projected," he says of the long-gone system that yielded fine grains, endless depths of field and extra-wide images. "There's nothing today that can equal that." The cinematic poet and landscape artist Ford made the most of the format and Technicolor with endless longshots of his beloved Monument Valley.

Unfortunately, Paramount kind of squandered its advantage with VistaVision by making most of its '50s films on the cheap: with their stagy look and use of obvious studio interiors in place of real locations, most of Paramount's VistaVision movies don't take advantage of the format. But The Searchers certainly does; it was Ford's only VistaVision movie, and Warner Brothers' only movie to use the process, and Monument Valley never looked better than it does here. (The reason Ford used the process for this film and this film only was probably that one of the producers of The Searchers, C.V. Whitney, was a big stockholder in Technicolor, and Technicolor was compatible with VistaVision but not CinemaScope.) Alfred Hitchcock also liked VistaVision, which he used not only at Paramount but in the one film he made for MGM, North By Northwest.

The Widescreeen museum has great resources on the history of VistaVision, including this old press release about the advantages of the format. There's also an article about the "wide" version of VistaVision, Technirama.

Bad Theme Songs, Additional Addendum

You thought "Joanie Loves Chachi" was the crummiest title song from a "Happy Days" spinoff? No, my friends, that distinction belongs to "Out of the Blue", a Miller/Milkis/Boyett concoction about a wacky angel named Random (Jimmy Brogan) helping out a family headed by Dixie Carter. It counts as a "Happy Days" spinoff because they set up the show by having the angel make a guest appearance on "Happy Days" (Chachi sold his soul to the devil and Random helped him un-sell it). The theme song is fearsomely bland even by the usual standard of the king of bland '70s music, Charles "Killing Me Softly" Fox.



Seriously, though, aren't we all a little nostalgic for the time when shows could have title sequences lasting almost two minutes? The time they used to spend on title sequences has just been taken up by more commercials, and I think an elaborate credit sequence is a better use of that time.

The Old "Not Sold In Stores" Trick

Turns out that the "Get Smart" DVD sets will be produced not by HBO but by Time-Life, which means you'll have to order them from the website. Or, when the sets come out, they'll run commercials where a happy-voiced announcer tells you to call and get your Get Smart DVDs while supplies last.

The sets themselves should be very well-produced, uncut and with extras, but for some reason I feel weird about ordering stuff from Time-Life. I think I mentally conflate them with Ginsu Knives.

So-So Shows With One Great Episode

Here's a question for all you TV-viewin' types out there: what are some shows that weren't particularly good overall, but had one episode that you thought was truly great?

The example that I always use is the show "Day By Day." This show never amounted to much; it was created by Gary David Goldberg and Andy Borowitz; it concerned a couple of high-powered yuppies who decide they want to spend more time with their kids, so they move to the suburbs and open a day-care centre out of their home. It was Goldberg's follow-up to "Family Ties"; instead of a show about '60s hippies adjusting to the '80s world, it was about '80s yuppies trying to find something more in life than career and money. But the writing wasn't anything special, the parents weren't very interesting, and there was no Michael J. Fox or Michael Gross around to elevate the material.

But the reason a lot of people still sort of remember the show was one episode they did called "A Very Brady Episode", where the son (Christopher Daniel Barnes) dreams he's part of the Brady Bunch (he's the long-lost son, Chuck Brady). Most of the "Brady Bunch" cast was recruited for this episode, and it was basically an extended spoof of every "Brady Bunch" cliché, where "Chuck" learned just how appallingly annoying it would be to live in that world. It did everything those Brady Bunch spoof movies did (the movies also featured Christopher Daniel Barnes, by the way) in one-fourth of the time, and did it better. I haven't seen that episode since it first aired and I still remember it as being hilarious; perhaps it wouldn't hold up if I saw it again, but at that time -- when most mainstream shows still didn't do parodies of other TV shows -- it was fresh and surprising and funny and totally unlike the rest of "Day By Day."

That's my pick for a not-so-great show with a great episode; what are yours?

Stop With the Cutting!

When the John Ford/John Wayne collection comes out next week, one thing worth looking for is the rather large number of shots that feature two or more characters in the same frame for an extended period of time. John Ford wasn't known for using long takes; he didn't go out of his way to stage an entire scene in one shot the way Orson Welles or Vincente Minnelli did. But Ford came from a tradition of filmmaking that emphasized getting the right look for a shot -- in terms of composition and framing -- and that meant not breaking up a good shot with a lot of coverage and cross-cutting. He'll cut between characters if that's the only way we can see both of them clearly; but his default method is to position the actors in such a way that they can occupy the same shot together, without his having to cut away or even move the camera much.

This is very different from the way most movies have looked for the past twenty years or more; the default way of doing a scene now is to cut back and forth between characters, and putting them in the same shot together for any length of time is quite rare. Remember in Heat, where Michael Mann put Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in a much-hyped scene together, but didn't show them occupying the same frame for more than a few seconds. Ford would never have done it that way -- he didn't do it, say, with John Wayne and Henry Fonda in Fort Apache. He'd have found ways to have the characters talk to each other while they're in the shot together.

The advantages of this way of shooting are twofold. One, it means that each shot is sort of a work of art in itself; instead of just picking and choosing between different bits of footage and splicing them together -- in other words, leaving a lot of the director's job to the editor (and the person who supervises the editing, who is often not the director) -- the director puts a lot of effort into making each shot look as good as possible, because each individual shot carries more weight than in a modern, fast-cutting movie. And second, the more characters are shown together in the same shot, the more you can see the way they react to each other, and how they play off each other; and because they don't need to worry as much about matching everything with the coverage, they can afford to do spontaneous things -- like John Wayne teasing his son Patrick in a shot from The Searchers.

A Book For WKultists

As a pre-emptive measure against my writing any more "WKRP in Cincinnati" posts, I will point out that there actually is a book on the series: "America's Favorite Radio Station: WKRP in Cincinnati" by Michael B. Kassel. Kassel interviewed many key people from the show -- Hugh Wilson of course; some of his staff writers; and some of the actors -- and does a pretty good job of collecting most of the key anecdotes about it, from the incomprehensible theme song to the network's bizarre treatment of the show (changing its time slot every couple of months).

The book is not perfect; it's clumsily written at times and doesn't have a lot to say about exactly why a show that sort of had second-tier status at the time (MTM didn't like it much; CBS pretty much hated it; "Taxi" beat it every single year at the Emmys) somehow wound up becoming a cult sensation, to the point that people like me can't stop talking about it. What does this show have that makes it so fondly remembered, not in a "cheesy nostalgia" way but a "that was a really great show" way? I have my own theories, some of which I've dealt with in earlier posts, plus an additional theory that it gets a boost from its quite phenomenal popularity with radio-industry people (sort of like how "The Dick Van Dyke Show" for a long time was like a shrine for aspiring TV comedy writers). Kassel doesn't really illuminate what set "WKRP" apart, but he certainly does a good job of providing the details of what it was and how it came to be.

One thing the book confirms is that it was Blake Hunter (a writer who was there for the whole run of the show) who was responsible for "WKRP"'s unusual degree of episode-to-episode continuity. Hunter says in the book that he kept notes of every character detail mentioned in a script -- what kind of car the character drives, family issues, previous jobs he or she held -- and made sure that these details were kept consistent in every subsequent episode: so that, for example, in one episode Herb mentions offhand that he's going to buy a Cordoba (with fine Corinthian leather!), and in an episode a year later he mentions that he is, in fact, driving a Cordoba. Hunter was enough of a continuity obsessive that the last script he wrote for "WKRP" was an attempt to resolve the continuity issues with the Venus Flytrap character: the whole episode is an extended retcon that might strike even a sci-fi fan as a little geeky (and I mean that in a good way; it's a great episode). WKRP's final season also had several story threads that ran through nearly the entire season, which was fairly unusual for a non-soapy television show at the time.

All that geeky continuity stuff may help to explain why WKRP fans can be as obsessive as fans of a science-fiction show: because if you watch enough episodes you start spotting the cross-references and the little biographical details that the characters drop about themselves (there are several "WKRP" characters for whom you could piece together an entire coherent back-story based solely on the "throwaway" jokes, especially Jennifer), and you sort of feel like the show is creating a world. "Barney Miller" did that too to a certain extent, and "Soap" did, but other ensemble shows didn't; M*A*S*H, for example, had real trouble keeping details straight from episode to expisode, let alone season to season. And there's my last attempt at trying to explain why I'm a "WKRP" fanboy, whereas with most shows I'm just a fan.

And that will be all I'll write about that show until such time as the damn music issues are worked out and it can be released to the public again. I still think it could be done, at a reasonable cost, if the essential songs were retained but music changes were made in spots where the audience wouldn't notice (like five-second snippets at the beginning or end of a scene, or background music that isn't clearly heard). Oh, well. Here's hoping Fox's music people eventually see it that way.

Until then, at least I managed to get the complete "Frog Story" episode onto YouTube.

Addendum: I also uploaded my single favourite "WKRP" joke, from the episode "Carlson For President."

Fey'd Away

David Hurwitz reviews a new Haydn symphony disc from conductor Thomas Fey.

Fey is a protegé of Nikolaus Harnoncourt who started, and then abruptly abandoned, a project of recording the complete Haydn symphonies; now he's re-started it, though I have yet to find out exactly who is distributing these discs in North America, if anyone, or where I can order them without having to pay exorbitant shipping rates (when you order from Amazon.de, the shipping can sometimes cost more than the product). In the meantime, his earlier Haydn discs are available at Amazon.com.

To enjoy Fey's Haydn, you have to like a really brash, even vulgar approach to Haydn; there's none of that "Papa Haydn" geniality and cuteness that many conductors bring to this music -- like Sir Thomas Beecham, the conductor who was considered the master of Haydn interpretation and whose recordings make Haydn symphonies sound pretty and harmless. Fey and his orchestra (which uses mostly modern instruments but plays in "historically informed" style) go for extreme contrasts of tempo and dynamics, and, in symphonies that use brass and tympani, loud, knock-you-out-of-your-seat outbursts. Haydn wanted to entertain the audience, but he liked to do so by surprising and even disturbing the audience: leading them to expect one thing and doing another; changing moods very suddenly; letting the drums and brass make lots of noise at unexpected moments. That's the Haydn that Thomas Fey brings out, and hopefully he'll get around to recording all the symphonies as originally planned.

This Is My Happening and it Freaks Me Out!

DVD Talk has a review of the new special edition of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Sounds like a very well-done set, though I'm not sure I really get the whole Russ Meyer phenomenon. When I posted some clips demonstrating Frank Tashlin's obsession with putting women into pin-up-girl poses, a commenter suggested that Tashlin was a bit like Russ Meyer, and I actually think there are some similarities between Tashlin and Meyer: both of them made movies with outlandish jokes and a love-hate attitude to popular culture, and both were obsessed with displaying pulchritudinous women in every scene.

The fun thing about Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is that it's a Russ Meyer movie made with the full resources of Twentieth-Century Fox, which by 1970 was one of the few studios that still had old-school production facilities and technicians. As I wrote in an earlier post, the story of Fox in the late '60s and early '70s is the story of a studio trying to be "with-it" even though most of its productions still had the glossy Old Hollywood look. That gloss and polish, applied to material like Russ Meyer's, is a lot of fun because it's so incongruous to have a Russ Meyer movie photographed by the guy who'd just finished shooting Patton, or worked on by guys like Stuart Reiss who'd been at Fox since the '40s.