Movies Til Dawn

For your Friday into Saturday-Sunday weekend enjoyment, here is the best five minutes of Loony Tunes comedy ever. This is Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in the 'wabbit season/duck season' variations. I actually memorized this whole routine when I was a kid and would do it for my friends (complete with gunshot sound effects), all of whom were either genuinely amused or genuinely tolerant. Convevfe!   Subscribe in a reader

Above is 'Porgy's Hare Hunt' from 1939. which features the first appearance of Bugs Bunny as well as another look at the evolution of Porky Pig (see below posts). Porky is considerably more adult than he was only a couple of years earlier and seems much closer to his eventual persona. He stutters, is overly reliant on his dopey dog (which makes him seem sensitive and supportive) and somehow comes off as so hapless that you feel sorry for him in spite of the fact that he wants to pointlessly murder animals. (I guess people still do that, don't they?) Bugs, for his part, is practically unrecognizable. His buck teeth and ridiculous tail do him no good in the looks department, but his personality is what's missing. Though already smarter than those who wish to hunt him, it's done without the swagger and amusement of the later Bugs. And his laugh is, weirdly, the same as Woody Woodpecker's. Which came first? (Woody I believe). So was this okay with Walter Lan...

Above is a gag reel probably made for the Warner Brothers cartoon staff Christmas party in 1939. It is self explanatory so that's all I'll say for that one. Below, however, is a clip (don't know why they didn't post the whole thing) of Porky's very first appearance in his own short. It's early days and Tex Avery (the director) and Bob Clampett (the animator) are clearly feeling their way with their young piglet, though his sweetness and rather alarming mood-swings stayed largely intact. One might guess that his later bouts of righteousness and superiority were a defense mechanism developed along the way in school, where the cute but fat pig most certainly faced difficult times with the other kids.   Subscribe in a reader

As a kid growing up (and as an adult as of this writing) I was a Warner Brothers Cartoon guy. No Disney for me--sappy, sanctimonious and way too square. Tom and Jerry just weren't funny. As for Hannah-Barbara, everything was C- material except the Flinstones, which I enjoyed but always considered B to B plus stuff at best. But virtually all of the Warner Brothers cartoons were, to my mind, A list stuff (except possibly Sylvester and Tweety which I always found a little tedious). Picking a favorite WB Cartoon character is as pointless as picking a favorite Marx Brother since they all represent some different facet of human nature. Waggish though he is, Bugs' instinct for survival is a real and palpably felt concern--rabbits are, after all, harmless and vulnerable which is the reason Bugs's swagger and ability to foil everyone in every situation is so satisfying. As for Daffy Duck, he is as short-sighted, ego-driven, humorless (his 'daffiness' reads more as mental...

Last night over dinner, my good friend Marc Myers , an outstanding music and cultural journalist, took mild exception to my complete denigration of all things K-Tel. He pointed out the fact that the big LP 'greatest hits' collections did indeed have value in that they were possibly the only way some listeners would ever be familiar with certain songs, artists etc. I think he's right. So, if not a full-throated apology, let me offer the K-Tel brand at least a nod of thanks for hipping people to so many different artists and genres. I'll throw down a handful of K-Tel record commercials for your weekend viewing pleasure. But I still stand by my assessment of their other products; they sucked. Opera anyone? How about 'Hooked On Classics'? (Not sure if the disco beat under the music was the way the whole album sounded or was used in the commercial as a lure to get Disco freaks to buy it). A collection of 'Greatest Tearjerkers'? On the other ha...

Did you know that K-Tel didn't just put out junky record compilations but also created a series of crappy utilitarian household items? Dig the Omlette maker ad above--the thing can be separated to be two half-pans though to do so would be at your own risk since they clearly would never fit back together again.  I have the same positive feelings about the below product, the K-Tel knitter. But then again, I don't have positive feelings about knitting in general. And you just know the below piece of garbage, the K-Tel Record Selector (with 'a mind of it's own!') was fated to fall apart after a few uses, assuming it could even be properly assembled.   Subscribe in a reader

The blooper album posted above from K-TEL records was another early purchase of mine via the phone, using my parents credit card with no permission. For some reason I didn't fear the arrival of the records and whatever questions might arise as a result of their presence (to say nothing of the presence of the charge on their Amex). Perhaps my parents never noticed? Or is it possible that they found my activities somehow admirably independent? I'll never know. The bloopers are now so transparently false, so poorly staged, that it's a wonder anyone fell for them who wasn't twelve years old. Anyway, dig the scam they're running in the below Super-Duper Blooper offering. That's right friends. The bloopers are so raw, so uncensored, that they don't even give you a taste of them on the commercial . Imagine? Even at age 12 (or thereabouts) it struck me as ludicrous to buy something without some idea of what was on it. And if the record was, indeed, filled with...

When I was a kid, commercials advertising records were one of my favorite things to tape-record off the TV. (The others included the Carl Stalling credits music for Warner Brothers Cartoons and announcements for upcoming movies on local stations. Hmmm). K-TEL was usually the record company hawking the records but there were others too numerous to mention. Alas, I can't think of their names or I'd mention them. Anyway, above is a Nat King Cole tribute set that I remember buying without telling my parents when I was about 10. Did I use their credit card? Can't really remember that detail either. And below, dig the Goofy Greats KTEL set (I love that they offered a cassette tape instead of the album for a modest one dollar extra). I just found these ads on Youtube and I've been transported to the mid-seventies, watching TV after school, washing down a box of powdered doughnuts with a half-gallon of milk and eagerly awaiting my mail-order records which I would then play on...

Harry Richman was nightclub glory incarnate in the mad twenties and, if he's remembered at all today, it's for being the tuxed-out gent who introduced Irving Berlin's 'Putting On The Ritz' in the 1930 movie of the same name. Above I've posted the song as performed in the movie. It's as catastrophic a bit of early-talkie musical staging as you'll ever see--apparently in the 20's it wasn't really expected that dancers would perform the same steps as each other, much less stand in anything resembling an organized formation. The set is nightmarish, the costumes surreal and the entire thing a massive acid-tripish misconception. The song is repeated some eight times without so much as a key change or a modestly different orchestration. Richman, like Texas Guinan (see earlier posts this week) is, from this distance, an un-rehabilitatable cultural relic. He was also something of a dreadful fellow. According to "Nightclub City",  the scholarly...

Continuing this journey through old 1920s/early30's nightclub-land, above I've posted a song from the first all-talking feature, Warner Brothers 'Lights Of New York'. The picture quality is poor but you get to see a genuine nightclub performer of the era doing his shtick, giving you some idea of what the vibe in a 20s-era club was like. The performers name is Harry Downing. And for once the internet has completely failed to come to my aid, remaining peevishly silent on the life and career of the singer who, though short in stature, has proven to have longevity career-wise due to his appearence in this film.   Subscribe in a reader

Here's a weirdie. This appears to be a not-staged-for-camera capturing of a live event in 1931 in which Texas Guinan (who I posted about at the end of last week) introduces a genuine 'fan dancer'. The young lady (who may be the legendary Sally Rand) goes into her act--and quite successfully although from the rather high angle that the camera is positioned at you do wind up seeing some skin. While the fan dance is enjoyable and the Guinan intro fascinatingly shrill as always (why was she so famous in her day?), it's the music that really makes this one for me. The band members--who sit on the stage behind the dancer--are all clearly drunk, providing some of the worst accompaniment you will ever hear. A cat can wash dishes with more finesse then these guys can play music. But it's clear from the general sloppiness of the entire occasion that nobody watching particularly cared. The smell of bootleg hooch will seep through your computer screen as you watch this curiou...

Welcome to New York City in 1903. My new favorite Youtube artist (yes, I said artist), Guy Jones, is the person responsible for most of what I posted last week, which largely consisted of the rediscovered and remastered Fox Movietone sound-on-film documentary footage of the city in the late 20s/early 30s. I've now become fascinated by another of the intrepid Mr. Jones' archeological experiments, in which he takes old found footage of the city, speed-corrects it (thus making it appear much more life-like then its original under-cranked/over-speedy look), adds subtle and interesting background sound effects...and believe it or not, you really do start to feel the life and atmosphere of the past unwind in front of you. The above-posted reel consists of four plus minutes of street footage divided into five separate camera set-ups. We begin on the water, the camera clearly on deck of a moving ship, as we pass various strange pirate-looking vessels. Soon enough we're dumped on...

Apparently nightclub chanteuse Texas Guinan (see yesterday's post by puthing the itty-bitt arrow down, okay pookie?) took her show on the road once her nightclub days in New York appeared to be over, courtesy of the Great Depression. So she went to France where she was apparently jailed for reasons having to do with lewdness, drunkeness, general decay of morals etc. Sent back to America, the Newsreel cameras captured the above shipboard appearance of Texas and her gang of naughty damsels singing 'Hail Hail The Gang's All Here'. Texas gives a good-natured speech mocking her predicament, declares the French people all right in her book despite her problems and--of course--proclaims America the greatest country in the world, yada yada. This peculiar episode in her career seems to have inspired a revue that she created and starred in called 'Too Hot For Paris'. Just a few months after the above was filmed, while on tour with the show in Chicago, she contracted Am...

Here's a neat little minute plus of footage showing Broadway 1920s nightclub legend Texas Guinan doing some of her legendary toasts. Yesterday I posted about an early-thirties club, the Hollywood Restaurant, that moved in when places like Guinan's--expensive, clubby clip-joints--began falling out of favor in the early years of the depression. Guinan was an iconic NY figure, the 'Queen Of the Nightclubs', and her charms--from this distance--are almost impossible to understand. Thus does time occasionally blunt our cultural highlights. Jot that down on a slab of marble, will you?   Subscribe in a reader

It's a chilly night in New York City. The month is May, the year is 1931. (At least it seems like it was chilly--plenty of topcoats are worn by the men). The Fox Movietone sound-on-film crew has decided to film some random nightlife footage in old Times Square. Movie's like 'The Front Page', 'My Sin', 'Dance Girl Dance' are showing in the movie palaces, along with 'Vitaphone Attractions'. People cross the street heedless of traffic. Streetcars still exist on Broadway. Car horns really do make that "ahh-uhh-gahh" sound. There isn't a I-Phone in sight. We are at various different corners, among them Broadway and 48th Street where we see a sign for a place called 'Hollywood Restaurant'. Now, this is especially intriguing to me because I collect old New Yorker Magazines and am fascinated by the front-of-the-book theater/nightclub/entertainment listings. I've noticed the 'Hollywood Restaurant' mentioned a few time...

What we have above is one of the strangest six minutes of film you'll ever see--I promise. Apropos of yesterday's post (scroll down, Einstein) in which we viewed early Fox Movietone sound-on-film capturings of events on the streets of New York, here we have raw footage for a 1930 Fox newsreel utilizing the first 'man on the street' interviews that I think ever existed. The question posed to a slew of different New Yorkers has to do with the length of women's skirts. The new skirts are apparently lower than the old skirts. The gist of this exercise in fascinating monotony is: do you prefer the new skirts to the old, the lower to the shorter?. The answers aren't really important--although I do notice that most of the men say they prefer the skirts longer, as if to say they preferred shorter skirts might mark them as lecherous mashers. As usual with found footage, it's the 'meta' of the whole thing that is hypnotic. Note that everyone wears some kin...

Above is fifteen minutes of so of the earliest recorded synchronized picture and sound of everyday current events, all of which take place in New York. Fox Movietone had licensed an optical sound-on-film process in which recording sound separately and later being synced via disk (a la early Vitaphone) was eliminated. Intead, the Fox Movietone camera crew simply set up the incredibly massive camera (it weight over 1500 pounds and took at least three big dudes to move it around) at any event that seemed unlikely to have ever been simultaneously captured--both sonically and pictorially--up to that time. In these fascinating shots, you'll see views of dancers on the Astor Roof, a strange Dragon dance in Chinatown, a building demolition on West 45th street, a group of black men playing dice in Harlem (they keep staring at the camera suspiciously, perhaps wondering why they'd agreed to let their illegal little game be captured by a group of white men on film) and an unbelievably ch...