Celebrate the season of the arrival of public domain with Springtime (1929)! This early Walt Disney Silly Symphonies animated short film is a exploration of nature set entirely to classical music. The cartoon features flora and fauna, including charming flowers, busy ladybugs, crawling centipedes, soaring birds, and hopping frogs. Without
This year a slew of entertainment from 1929 has entered the public domain and can now be reused, re-recorded, re-edited and re-enjoyed for free. Songs, movies, books–the world is now awash in uncopyrighted cultural riches, and the family members of the creators of those works are now shit out of
What better way to usher in the holiday that celebrates munificence, family, warmth and generosity than with two videos of Woody Allen discussing death and the meaninglessness of life. For somebody who thinks that nothing ultimately matters, Woody has certainly been prodigious in his output. In fact, it could be
It seems wholly unbelievable that the delicious, nutritious and frequently super-high end fish known as the Tuna was once so obscure to Americans that the company who first introduced a canned, chopped version of it for sandwich use–Van Kamp was their name–thought it best to explain to consumers that it
Tomorrow night I’m hosting a fiftieth anniversary screening of ‘Dog Day Afternoon’, Sidney Lumet’s terrific 1975 ‘fiasco flick’ starring Al Pacino. (What is a ‘fiasco flick’ you ask? A movie about a crime that goes instantly wrong at the very opening and which you then watch in horrified delight as
Yesterday we took a look at the development of the long-playing record. So what better audio delivery system to next delve into than the much-mocked Eight Track Tape cartridge. I was first introduced to the format in 1976 when my father bought a flashy, new Cadillac Seville. The car came
According to my new best friend Artie Israel (AI): The first Long Playing Record albums–LPs–were released in 1948 when Columbia Records introduced the long-playing (LP) record format, which could hold up to 23 minutes of music per side. The first 12-inch LP was Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E Minor (ML 4001),
If ever a film cried out for a remake, it’s ‘Don’t Tell My Wife.’ Though its title may lead you to think it’s a mid-60s Bob Hope vehicle with Barbara Rush as the wife, Elke Sommer as the neighbor and Tony Randall as Hope’s gay advertising agency boss, it is
The other day we took a look at the Best Picture nominees of 1928 and I commented on the very different, staid acting styles of the era. It’s always been my contention that screen acting–maybe all acting for that matter– was changed forever with the sudden, shocking appearance of James
My father Frank De Felitta (1921-2016) was a pilot who served with the Army Air Corps during the Second World War. To honor him on this special day I thought I’d post a couple of clips specifically about the plane he flew. The C-47 was a troop and equipment carrier