Let’s close up this absurd week (and I’m not limiting that to just the material on this blog) with an absurd clip of two absurd personalities. This is a silent, ghostly, unknown bit of TV footage featuring Vampira (see post from earlier this week) dancing with Liberace. From the looks
In the 1970s and 80s, Ernie Anderson was the voice of ABC–the announcer whose voice was instantly recognizable and very much part of the networks brand. But the skeleton in his closet (har) was his stint on local Cleveland television station WJW as late night horror movie host ‘Ghoulardi’. From
On Monday we began a discussion of the hosts of late night horror movie shows on local television that proliferated in the 1950s-70s (and maybe beyond?). Perhaps the true legend of the genre is Vampira, a local L.A. hostess whose mid-to-late 1950s show was on KABC, the ABC affililiate. Her
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a_7Zhyst48https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEjdt_n1l-4 For years, local late night weekend television featured horror movie offerings for kids, hosted by cheeseball horror emcee’s usually dressed in capes, coming out of coffins, making strange noises intended to evoke werewolves, monsters etc. There were plenty of junkie horror movies to go around and kids loved this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfzpay0lqGwhttp://large,%20burled%20maple%20Capeheart%20radio-phonograph%20unit–similar%20to%20the%20one%20in%20Owney’s%20penthouse%20suite—stood%20in%20the%20corner,%20playing%20a%20record–Roger%20Woolf%20Kahn’s%20orchestra’s%20rendition%20of%20‘You’ve%20Got%20Me%20Crying%20Again.’ I’m closing up this week’s look at period Football stuff with a second rendition of the DeSylva/Brown&Henderson’s infectious hit 20s tune ‘Varsity Drag’. It’s performed by Abe Lyman and his orchestra and if you don’t dig 1920s music (and lets face it, few people do–you have to be a
As this week drifts on, we’re gradually getting away from my initial theme which was period football games captured on film. (This may well be a relief to some of you). Today we fall off the map completely with a terrific production number from the 1947 MGM remake of ‘Good
One of the biggest hits of the 1927 Broadway season was ‘Good News’, a musical that was the quintessential 20s rah-rah football celebration. As an artifact, the 1930 film adaptation is priceless due largely to the poor quality of the filmmaking. As you’ll see above in the show’s most famous
Behold some fascinating looks at football of the 1920s and 30s and note how incredibly similar this ancient reel of highlights is to a Sunday morning Fox NFL Pre-Game show. Indeed, the entire game seems largely not to have changed much at all from the game we know now, except
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