To those of us who remember the Johnny Carson incarnation of ‘The Tonight Show’, the band (or the ‘NBC Orchestra’ as they were formally known) looms as an important piece of the magical synthesis of talents that produced the greatest talk show in TV history. (If you haven’t delved into
‘They Stooge To Conga’ (1943) was the 67th short subject made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Wednesday, May 6 through Saturday, May 9, 1942 and released on New Years Day, 1943. The film is generally considered to be the most hideously, nauseatingly violent Stooge
I’m finding these old color home movies highly evocative and vivid. Yesterday’s post was a trip from LaGuardia Airport to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Today we’re at the 1939 Worlds Fair in Queens, NY. This footage isn’t about the amazing buildings and exhibits. Instead it documents the Fair’s patrons, the
What are we to make of this delightful little color short film showing the arrival of a person at the Marine Air Terminal at La Guardia Airport in the mid 1940s? The film is shot quite deliberately–a moving POV of the person entering the cab is technically adventurous though clearly
In 1951 my father, Frank De Felitta, was a free-lance writer for various anthological dramatic television series. One of them, a Sci-Fi show called ‘Tales Of Tomorrow’, put out a call to a number of writers asking them to write a script that could ‘only be produced on TV and
Apropos of yesterday’s post on television from the late 1940s, here’s a short and deeply primitive clip of a show from 1947 featuring Jinx Falkenberg and Tex McCreary. Stilted and goofy though it is, it proves my point from yesterday that television programming hasn’t really changed much. I mean, aren’t
Here’s an interesting reel of opening credits and set-up sequences of the shows you were likely to see if you were watching TV in the late 1940s. Television had of course been around in various forms and incarnations for almost twenty years by then, but it was in 1947-48 that
‘A Pain In The Pullman’ (1936) was the 16th short film The Three Stooges made for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Wednesday, April 29th through Monday, May 4th, 1936 and was released on Saturday, June 27th of that year. The film belongs to a long and venerable tradition of
R.I.P. the great Burt Bacharach. Here’s a commercial front the late 70s featuring Burt and then-wife Angie Dickenson shilling for Martini &Rossi Vermouth. The dashing Burt (he always makes me think of cologne, elaborate shaving gear, highly polished Italian mens boots etc.) once provoked a famous Sammy Cahn crack: ‘Songwriters
Here is a way-too-adorable-for-words clip of Groucho Marx and his youngest child Melinda performing a Gilbert and Sullivan duet on ‘You Bet Your Life’ from 1954. The song is ‘There Is Beauty In The Belly Of The Beast’ from ‘The Mikado’. I’ve never cared for G&S until watching this clip