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
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