Posts filed under “Popular Entertainment”
COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU.
The Phantom of the Operetta. Film version of the Broadway (Dormont) musical. When a production of The Desert Song is horribly mutilated by a tragic casting accident, Sigmund Romberg dons a mask and black cape and vows revenge. Not yet rated.
CELEBRITY GOSSIP.
CELEBRITY GOSSIP.
DR. PROCTOR.
Announcer. And now the Endurance Insurance Company of Halls Falls, New Jersey, presents…
Music: Theme, in and under for…
Announcer. Doctor Proctor! The continuing story of a noble physician at the McGinnick Clinic in Allemania, Pennsylvania, and the trials he faces while trying to do the right thing.
Music: In full to end, then segue to clinic theme and fade.
Dr. Proctor. Nurse Terse, Mr. Pfister here needs a spleen vaccine. Please have Aide Quaid wheel in the vaccination station.
Nurse. Actually, it wheels itself in. It uses SmartCart technology.
Dr. Proctor. I don’t hold with that mumbo jumbo. But here comes Miss Bliss.
Miss B. Don’t forget to have Mr. Pfister sign the vaccination authorization, Dr. Proctor. If you forget again, it’ll be double trouble for me.
Dr. Proctor. Here, Mr. Pfister. Sign on the line.
Pfister. Easy peasy, Doctor Proctor.
Miss B. Thank you, Doctor Proctor. Administrator Finistrator has been on my case.
Dr. Proctor. Glad to oblige, Miss Bliss. Now, before we go on, Mr. Pfister, we have to test for a rare condition called “green spleen.”
Pfister. Green spleen?
Dr. Proctor. Yes. Nurse Terse, prepare the green-spleen screen.
Pfister. Will it hurt?
Dr. Proctor. It’s just a quick ab jab. Not deep enough to get into the bone zone.
(Sound: beeping alarm.)
Nurse. Mr. Pfister’s green-spleen screen shows positive, Doctor Proctor.
Dr. Proctor. Hell’s bells!
Nurse (sotto voce). Should I call for Pastor Castor?
Dr. Proctor. Not yet, Nurse Terse. Mr. Pfister, you have green spleen, but I can still save you if—
Lieutenant (entering). Hold on there, doc! Stop the clock!
Nurse. Why, it’s Lieutenant Pennant from the Fraud Squad!
Lieutenant. That’s right, Nurse Terse. Doctor Proctor, Mr. Pfister here is wanted for violating the Tract Act.
Dr. Proctor. The Tract Act? How did he violate that?
Lieutenant. With a cook book he published. A recipe for “Mile-High Custard Pie,” making the most generous consumption assumption, produced results that reached five thousand three hundred seventy-five feet at the most. It’s a no go.
Dr. Proctor. Well, Lieutenant Pennant, Mr. Pfister isn’t going anywhere till I say so. He has green spleen. He needs narcotics and antibiotics.
Lieutenant. Oh, yeah? Well, District Attorney Burney got Judge Mudge to give him a warrant, so I guess I’ll be taking Mr. Pfister with me.
Dr. Proctor. Warrant, schmarrant! No way José, Lieutenant Pennant!
(Music: Theme, in and under for…)
Announcer. Will Doctor Proctor have to release Mister Pfister into the uncaring hands of Lieutenant Pennant, or will he think of something smarter than anything he thought of in this episode? Tune in next week to find out! Meanwhile, friends, have you provided for your houseplants in case you suddenly kick the bucket? The Endurance Insurance Company of Halls Falls, New Jersey, can set you up with a carefully tailored policy that will care for your plants when you’re pushing up daisies. Call your Endurance Insurance agent the first thing tomorrow morning. This is your host Barnaby Yost saying, Good night and sleep tight.
IN ENTERTAINMENT NEWS.
TONIGHT ON N.B.S.
Quirkville Redux. In this first episode of the revival of the cult favorite Quirkville, PA, former mayor Quentin Q. Quentin’s quirky little organic grocery is developing a national reputation for its prepackaged Shredded Mystery Cheese. But will Quentin blow his stack when his shop is raided by federal anti-caking agents? Northern Broadcasting System, 9 p.m. (7:38 Newfoundland).
WHY DON’T YOU WATCH MORE ANIME?
Sven Damerow, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
But why doesn’t he watch more anime?
The Picture of the Day at Wikimedia Commons today is “two Glanville fritillaries (Melitaea cinxia) on a red clover.” And then, for some reason, the caption goes on: “Today is Kaede Hondo’s birthday, she voiced Kokoro Yotsuba in Kamisama Minarai: Himitsu no Cocotama.” Doubtless the connection to Glanville fritillaries would be apparent to people who know Japanese; but since Dr. Boli does not know Japanese, he followed the link to Miss Hondo’s Wikipedia article, where he found that she has just turned thirty, and she is a well-known voice actress in Japanese anime. The article gives a long list of her credits. Here are some of the titles:
Diabolik Lovers More, Blood
The Asterisk War 2nd Season
Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High School
Kirakira Pretty Cure a la Mode
RErideD: Derrida, who leaps through time
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
If My Favorite Pop Idol Made It to the Budokan, I Would Die
Parallel World Pharmacy
Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer
The Reincarnation of the Strongest Exorcist in Another World
Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon
The Daily Life of a Middle-Aged Online Shopper in Another World
Now, for those occasions when someone asks Dr. Boli why he does not watch more anime, he has had this list printed on small cards, which will spare him the trouble of attempting any other explanation.
CELEBRATING THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.
This is good news, as it is every January 1, but it cannot be allowed to pass without a brief fit of grumpiness. Ninety-five years is an absurd length of time for copyright to persist. And remember that this is a temporary arrangement. Eventually our copyright laws will be brought in line with those in Europe and most of the rest of the world, where copyright lasts for seventy years after the death of the author.
The purpose of copyright (and patents) is defined quite specifically in the United States Constitution: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The goal is to promote science and art for the benefit of everyone. Therefore, authors and inventors should be able to earn a living from their hard work, because otherwise there would be no authors and inventors, and we could not have the benefit of their work.
But that is not the purpose of copyright that persists decades, or not infrequently more than a century, after the original publication. The plain purpose of such monstrous extensions of copyright is to create an intellectual-property aristocracy who live on the creations of dead artists and inventors, and whose distinguishing mark is that they never produce anything of benefit to society themselves.
Now, we know this is not unconstitutional, because the Supreme Court has ruled that no extension of the “limited Times” is unconstitutional as long as there is in fact a theoretical limit to the time. The decision is in line with the general tendency of the court to regard everything in the Constitution as meaningless blather unless it propounds a specific rule. But if it is not unconstitutional, it is at least obviously a development that would cause either laughter or tears to issue from the original authors of the Constitution. They stuck that explanatory phrase in there for a reason; they could just have said “Congress shall have the power to secure for limited times…” without any preface.
Enough of the sour persimmons. Dr. Boli will say only that twenty-eight years is enough time for any copyright to endure. If an author has not made money from his creation in that time, he never will. If he has made a lot of money, he needs no more; he should sit down and write something else that people like and earn our gratitude as well as our dollars.
With that out of the way, we can proceed to our celebration of what has finally entered the public domain in the United States. Dr. Boli will have more delights to point out soon, but for today he would like to introduce you to three motion pictures that have entered the public domain, because they are like nothing you will see in our own time, and—unless you have seen these particular movies—like nothing you have ever seen in your life. They are all available for download or streaming right now, free forever, unless Congress decides to revise the copyright law again and take them out of the public domain, which also is not unconstitutional and has been done before.
1. King of Jazz. This was perhaps the biggest and brightest of the musical revues that flooded out of Hollywood when sound was new. Nothing like them has been made since then, because a few of them were enormous hits, but by the time this one came out the public had tired of them, and this was one of several expensive revues that flopped. So you have probably never seen anything like it. And you may never have heard anything like it, either, if you are not familiar with Paul Whiteman’s music. Is it jazz? There’s a good way to start an argument. But stick to the question of whether Whiteman had talented musicians playing good arrangements, and the argument disappears. You get music of all sorts, dancing, comedy blackouts, and everything else you would expect from a stage revue. If you don’t like one number, you’re bound to like the next one. And as a bonus, you get the first color animated cartoon, made by Walter Lantz, who would later be famous as the creator of Woody Woodpecker.
There’s one way in which the movie is oddly like movies we do see today. It comes from the first great age of orange and teal. It was made in two-strip Technicolor, whose red and green dyes were pretty good at producing natural-looking flesh tones, but could not render blue, violet, or yellow. Today the fashion for orange and teal has passed into cinematic dogma, so once again we are seeing movies in what is effectively two-strip Technicolor, though we go through the silly intermediate stage of filming them in natural color and then running them through color-denaturing software.
King of Jazz in an excellent print at Wikimedia Commons.
2. Madam Satan. When we hear the name “Cecil B. DeMille,” we think of Biblical epics; but he made his name with bedroom farces, and in between he made pirate adventures and westerns and war movies. In the entire list of his movies, though, there is nothing quite like this: a musical-comedy bedroom-farce disaster movie. It has some surprisingly sophisticated dialogue and some hot musical numbers, and it ends with a thrilling wreck of a dirigible. Dr. Boli will add that, if you ever have a chance to see it on the big screen, you should jump at the opportunity. As for the performances, two stand out: Lillian Roth is surprisingly funny and believable as the Other Woman, and Roland Young is Roland Young. You will not be bored.
Madam Satan in a very good print at Wikimedia Commons.
3. Just Imagine. If you have ever wondered why there aren’t more science-fiction musicals, the answer is because this movie was made—a musical about the unbelievable futuristic world of 1980, where numbers take the place of names and aerial traffic cops direct busy streams of flying machines, and—most relevant to the plot—eugenics is the dogma of the land. We will not pretend that it is a great movie. It was written by DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson; and if you are saying to yourself that you thought they were songwriters, you are correct. They are completely out of their depth in trying to build a plot that will carry a movie; and by the time we get to Mars and discover that every Martian has an evil twin, we have probably given up all hope of plot. Finally, the running time includes far too much of El Brendel, the unfunniest comedian in the movies, yet inexplicably the most popular comedian of 1930. We should point out that Charlie Chaplin was alive; Buster Keaton was alive; Harold Lloyd was alive. All four Marx Brothers were alive (Animal Crackers just entered the public domain yesterday, too), and even Zeppo could squeeze more laughs out of the word “Yeah” than El Brendel could wheeze into a whole movie.
But the effects are amazing. This is a movie that can stand with Metropolis and Things to Come in its miniature effects. Though the movie itself was a flop, some of the effects were recycled in Universal serials for years to come, and the Mars spaceship was sold secondhand to Dr. Zarkov of the Flash Gordon serials. This is another movie that ought to be seen on the big screen. We also might add that nineteen-year-old love interest Maureen O’Sullivan can really act, and it is much to her credit that her reputation survived this film.
Just Imagine in a fairly good print at the Internet Archive.
COOKING FOR ONE.
Anyway, first of all, I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t take any of the blame for yesterday’s events. I’m a mature adult, and I can admit that I should have been more careful. I thought I was buying a turkey baster, but it is completely true that the box said “Turkey Blaster,” and I should have been more careful when I read the packaging. I also ought to have paid attention to the directions when they said “stand at least 20 feet from turkey,” but I honestly thought “feet” was a mistake for “inches” there.
But I really have to ask whether people should even be selling things like that. I mean, you guys saw what came out of that thing. It was like flames from here to the county line.
In fact, I consulted with an expert, namely my neighbor Skip, who served in the Gulf War in some capacity, I think maybe catering, and Skip is prepared to swear on a stack of Uniform Commercial Codes that this item was actually a military-surplus flamethrower inexpertly relabeled for consumer use. So, yeah, you gotta be careful what you order on Amazon these days, but, criminy, guys, who expects a turkey baster to go all apocalyptic on you?
Anyway, that’s life, and what’s done is done, and all that, and I guess I’m sleeping on the couch till Georgina gets over this in February or March.
So once again, I’d like to apologize to all my friends and neighbors, and especially to the Grant Borough Fire Department. Obviously I didn’t mean to burn down the firehall, but we live and learn, and the best we can do is try to figure out what we did wrong and, you know, not do it quite so hard the next time.
So, once again, this is Al, saying what Herb always says, which is, Remember, cooking is for guys, too. And if you see a fireman standing at the intersection of Main and Everett, maybe put something in the boot.
TONIGHT ON DUMONT.
The Alan Sundry Show. Special guest Mary Ellen Sheets, co-founder of the Two Men and a Truck franchised moving company, recalls the many failed business formulas that preceded her runaway success, including Two Trucks and a Man; Five Girls, One Raccoon, and a Harmonium; Ten Lords a-Leaping; Two Beagles and Eight Hundred Fleas; A Studebaker Lark with Nobody in It at All; and One Middle-Aged Mom Selling Franchises. 9 p.m. (8 Central, 10:23 Newfoundland).