Movies 'Til Dawn Blog

WELCOME TO 1967 VIA KNXT

Here’s a twelve minute reel of intros, outros, station ID’s and commercials from a 1967 broadcast over the local Los Angeles CBS affiliate KNEXT. They appear to be part of an hour long summer replacement show called ‘Away We Go’ which features an awfully enticing cast–Buddy Greco, George Carlin, The

Read More »

DOC, JOHNNY AND…BILLIE JOE?

When I was a kid I had a two-disc LP comprised of the audio of ‘Tonight Show’ segments. The Johnny Carson album was a big flop for some reason–Carson liked to joke about it–and I can’t remember quite why we had it since neither I nor my parents watched Carson.

Read More »

STAN FREBERG MEETS OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN MEETS FRANK SINATRA?

Last week I posted the ridiculous version of ‘Ole’ Man River’ as performed by Frank Sinatra in the Jerome Kern biopic ‘Til The Cloud Roll By’, wearing a white suit on a white set in a all-white world. Another version of a ‘whiten-ing up’ of the song comes in a

Read More »

GRAND PRIX–THE TRAILER

Yesterday I posted about the Steve McQueen 1971 race car epic ‘LeMans’. But before that film was made there was John Frankenheimer’s ‘Grand Prix’ (1966), a movie that from the looks of the trailer is better than the McQueen movie. Having said that, I should know better to base an

Read More »

STEVE MCQUEEN’S BITCHIN’ RIDE

I began last week by confidently stating in the first of several posts about race-car driving that I found Motorsports the silliest sport next to tractor-pulls known to man. I’ve never done a 180 on a subject as quickly as I have on race-car driving over the past week. I

Read More »

FRANK SINATRA MEETS…PAUL ROBESON?

I hereby nominate the above rendition of “Ol’ Man River” as performed by Frank Sinatra as the single most wince-inducing racist musical number ever filmed–and that’s saying a lot given the unfortunate preponderance of blackface minstral numbers on view throughout 1930s and 40s movie musicals. This is the climax to

Read More »

COMMERCIALS WERE WEIRD IN THE 90s

It’s hard for me to think of the 1990s as ‘period’. That was the decade in which I turned 30 and began having a professional life (of sorts) and feels to me relatively recent, not that far in my past. Of course that was thirty years ago–THIRTY YEARS AGO–and the

Read More »

SERIOUSLY F#!#!#-UP COMMERCIALS FROM THE 80s

Here’s a reel of alternately funny, scary, disgusting or disturbing TV ads from the golden 80s. Lots of Cocaine and AIDS nostalgia, of course, and Brenda Vaccaro shilling for Tampons while inhaling through an iron lung in between sentences is pretty messed up. Cosby makes an appearance, natch, and a

Read More »

PANASONIC MEETS…EDWARD HERMANN?

A mere five years before portraying Franklin D. Roosevelt in the network mini-series ‘Eleanor and Franklin’, Edward Hermann portrayed “one of the country’s leading bachelors” in the very amusing Panasonic Stereo commercial posted above. We are deep in the early 70s groove here and Hermann’s portrait of the era’s swinging

Read More »

STEREO SOUNDS OF THE 70s

The above 1973 commercial for a Pioneer home stereo system plays more like a current day SNL parody of a 1973 Pioneer home stereo system commercial than the real thing. Yet it’s the real thing. Did we really look, act and talk like that? The early 70s are becoming as

Read More »

Subscribe for updates

And get a free copy of my book:
"City Island" & "Two Family House" Two Screenplays

Twitter

Twitter feed is not available at the moment.