Wouldn’t it be lovely if the Marx Brothers were next Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime entertainment instead of…whoever the hell it is? Well, the next best thing is watching them play a little old-school football and what better way to begin than with the climax of ‘Horsefeathers’ , which depicts a
Let’s end this weeks Fascist deep-dive on a lighter note. Here is “You Nazty Spy”, a 1941 Three Stooges short in which the Stooges are paper-hangers who are weirdly chosen to become the dictators of the fictional country Moronica. Now–the words ‘significant’ and ‘Three Stooges’ aren’t generally uttered in the
On August 18th and 19th, 1941, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met in Salzburg, Austia, to discuss the progress of the war which the US had yet to officially enter. Hitler’s personal pilot, one Hans Baur, was also an amateur movie photography buff and shot color footage of that Monday
Welcome back to Fascism Week on this blog. Today we present a short reel of color footage of Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s. The city looks beautiful but the preponderance of Nazi flags of course reminds us that things were what they were. The big takeaway here is that
Yesterday I posted a Fox Movietone newsreel depicting Hitlers inaugural event in 1932. Is it possible to continue the theme of Fascist takeovers (which for some reason seems to be on a least a few people’s minds) but on a less somber note? The answer is yes–sort of. Behold the
If the timing of my posting of this fascinating Fox Movietone newsreel seems heavy-handed, well, we live in awfully heavy-handed times. Watch as Adolf Hitler comes to power, addresses his crowds, cordially greets his new fellow government wonks and listen as the assumption is made that he seems willing ‘to
Apropos of yesterday’s post concerning my childhood love bordering on the piggish for crappy, sugary breakfast cereals, I thought I’d ruminate for a moment on the differences between Quisp and Quake. The two cereals were designed to be cohorts and in a sense the characters were co-dependent polar opposites. Frequent
As a kid growing up in the nutritionally-challenged 1970s I ate every crap cereal there was: Captain Crunch, Cocoa Puffs, Apple Jacks, Frosted Flakes, Quisp, Quake, Fruit Loops, Lucky Chamrs–you name it, I scarfed it. But…King Vitaman? Seriously? Never heard of it! While on a cereal-nostalgia binge I came across
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Godu_t3BUjwhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHRwrF8DniI Apropos of yesterdays post about Kay Francis, I did some snooping around on YT for early pre-code Kay moments and ran across a couple of clips from a 1931 comedy called ‘Girls About Town‘, directed by a young George Cukor. I’ve known the title over the years but have
Today is Kay Francis’ 120th birthday–or would have been had she not died in 1968 at the age of 63. When I was a kid in the early 1970s, the Marx Brothers revival was in full swing and theaters around L.A. often did all-day showings of the Paramount Marx output