Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller was born on May 21, 1904, thus making today his 122nd birthday. Waller was a singular figure in the music world. Nobody had a career remotely like his–he was a brilliant composer, superb pianist, innovative jazz organist, swinging singer, delightful comic personality and purveyor of infectious joy
As many of you cinema-geek sorts probably know, the original ending of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ was a pie fight that broke out in the war room. There are different reasons given for why it was cut–the above five minute doc claims the studio was nervous because Kennedy had just
I recently re-watched an excellent, not-too-well-known noir from 1955 called ‘The Big Combo’. It was directed by Joseph Lewis who most film buffs know as the man who directed the famous one-take bank robbery sequence in the 1949 noir ‘Gun Crazy’. In ‘Big Combo’, Lewis takes his limitations–it’s clearly a
A week or so ago I posted a wonderful clip of crooner Russ Columbo from a 1934 film called ‘Wake Up and Dream’. Columbo had a meteoric rise and was riding high when he died after a gun he was cleaning discharged in his face. I tend to believe the
There are many words that come to mind when watching the above Betty Boop cartoon from 1934, ‘Betty In Blunderland’. They include surreal, nightmarish, demented, outlandish and, most importantly, fascinating. The Fleischer brothers approach to animation was madly untethered to anything resembling reality. Plot doesn’t exist, though ‘Alice In Wonderland’
Russ Columbo was an enormously popular crooner of the early 1930s, rivaling Bing Crosby in his rise to stardom. Unfortunately he went to a friend’s house one afternoon in 1934, cleaned his friend’s gun and was the unfortunate recipient of a bullet that discharged by accident, thus ending his career
What better way to greet the long-awaited eastern spring than by watching an old newsreel about the New York Blizzard of 1947. Over ninety tons of snow buried New York state beginning on Christmas night and ending the following day, having dumped twenty-six inches of snow onto the city streets
Yesterday I posted a fascinating short doc about the daunting creation of an animated film in 1938. Having seen my recent interest in the subject, YouTube quickly coughed up the above video about the methods by which characters in early cartoons went from being rigid stick figures and achieved human-style
This short doc from 1938 shows us the unbelievably intricate, detailed and tedious process used in crafting an animated picture in the era before Hanna-Barbara ruined animation with their cheap, non-moving backrounds and unrealistic body motions. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ is the subject at hand and I can’t
Today is day one of ‘Sun ‘N Fun’, a huge civil aeronautics festival held every year in Florida. (It;s not the largest though–that would be ‘Air Venture’ in Osh Kosh, Wisconsin which I’m planning on attending this July). To mark the beginning of this week’s air fest I’m posting a