Movies 'Til Dawn BLOG

WHEN BASEBALL BECOMES FOOTBALL

Click on the above ‘watch on YouTube’ sign and enjoy a marvelous seven minute collection of bench-clearing fights during televised baseball games. Since most people will agree (even baseball fans) that baseball is the most boring sport ever invented, these fights are cherished for their ability to wake up anyone

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GREAT SPORTS FIGHTS OF OUR TIMES

Athlete’s are athletic types, as we know. And athletic types often express themselves athletically. Hence the occasional meltdown in professional sports, wherein an organized game of athletic endeavor devolves into a street brawl that can’t be contained. Witness the above 1960 boxing match as captured by British Pathe, featuring a

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‘THE LADY LIES’; THE WEIRDNESS OF EARLY TALKIES

Early talking films are invaluable relics of a dead civilization–namely the 1920s. The acting, pacing, diction, style and behavior are as incomprehensible and different from anything we now consider normal as sitting around a cave might be with its cro-magnin inhabitants. The movies aren’t really useful anymore to us in

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7-UP: ANCHOR’S AWAY MEETS HOLDER?

Compare and contrast two different 7-Up ads from two different decades. Above, we see a retread of the famous Gene Kelly/Jerry the Mouse half live-acrtion half-animation dance routine–and quite well accomplished it is. Below we see the great Geoffrey Holder twenty-some years later shilling for the caffeine-free soda in a

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THE ‘FRESCA’ THING

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt3Mi1YAcshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PluLAxa3u2A Continuing our look at commercials for old soda brands–yesterday we watched some RC Cola ads–today lets focus on Fresca. Above are two commercials from the 1960s. In the first, the idea was to show icy, snowy weather environments in order to invoke Fresca’s icy, snowy refreshing taste. Was this

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ROYAL CROWN COLA-MMERCIALS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm_LmlFeNnMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md7DIQW01aM Royal Crown Cola was invented in the early 1900s as a result of a Georgia based general store owner having a dispute with Coca-Cola over…well, read the Wikipedia article if you’re really interested. My interest has to do with the storylines of RC Cola–as it had been renamed during

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LUCY/LYRICS/LENGTHY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fn7PKzf5tk Last week I posted various examples of TV episodic comedy show themes. I missed posting something Friday because…well, because I just missed posting something. Things happen, you know. So we’ll wrap up this theme song stuff with a little bit of ‘I Love Lucy’ history which you might or

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THE PUZZLING CASE OF ‘GREEN ACRES’

The oddly beloved comedy series ‘Green Acres’, starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor, ran an impressive six seasons on CBS, from 1965-1971. There are many fans of the show who point to its occasional forays into surrealist humor as evidence that a deeper vein of television comedy was being explored

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TV THEMES OF YORE THAT STUNK

This week I’m posting theme songs from old shows that provided the backstory to the viewer. As I mentioned yesterday, simply putting up the well known ones would be far too simple. So I’m providing a glimpse of both the flop shows and the hits. Today’s flop is ‘Occassional Wife’,

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TV THEMES PT. DEUX–PHYLLIS DILLER MEETS PATTY DUKE?

Our mission this week is to explore the theme songs of old TV comedies which contained lyrics that set-up the backstory of the show. Yesterday we wallowed in ‘The Partridge Family’ theme and frankly I thought the rest of this week would be a breeze. You know, ‘Brady Bunch’, Gilligans

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