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Movies 'Til Dawn BLOG

LAUREL & HARDY FEST DAY 1: ‘A PERFECT DAY’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB-MRV0Axb8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AczHhFKw7ns&list=RDCMUCsp_AoKt3DdHb65j4ehrDug&index=1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1a_vcMVE3E&t=10s The delightful week between Christmas and New Years is here, the one in which there is no true clock to adhere to since nobody’s really anywhere or doing anything (unless of course you have a job like a real person). My preference for this cherished week has always been

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December 26, 2022 2 Comments

‘I LOVE LUCY’–THE FIRST ATTEMPT

Apropos of yesterdays animated TV credit sequences, I went searching for the original ‘I Love Lucy’ animated opening credits. I found it–but, as is often the case with YouTube, I found something even more interesting on my way. It turns out that a pilot episode of ‘I Love Lucy’ was

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December 20, 2022 No Comments

WILSHIRE BLVD. 1935

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaekCb0HPaEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NyTDmrxhDI&list=PLD8BA093BC69A2754 Here’s a nice peaceful ride down Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills in 1935. This footage was likely shot as rear-projection plates for car driving scenes–studios kept lots of stock footage of this sort on hand as driving scenes were not yet practically done on the road and were instead

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December 16, 2022 No Comments

THE PACIFIC OCEAN PARK OF IT ALL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVy-7IVPFSYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyndUDxjqLY Yesterday’s post contained some poignant footage of the long-gone Santa Monica Amusement Park ‘Pacific Ocean Park’. The footage appeared to have been shot at the end of the parks short life–it opened in 1959 and closed a scant nine years later–with views of shuttered and abandoned concessions, rides and

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December 15, 2022 No Comments

NORTH AND SOUTH IN MID-CENTURY CALIFORNIA

The YouTube artist (and I mean artist) known as NASS has posted another of their awesome videos showing old footage of a city cleaned up, remastered, with frame rate adjusted and a creative soundbed added. The result is a virtual time machine, a mesmerizing look into the past using footage

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December 14, 2022 1 Comment

W.C. FIELDS AT HOME IN LONG ISLAND

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjX16FwJezM Here’s another of the George Mann home movie items, this one of W.C. Fields clowning around in front of his house in Great Neck, Long Island. The year is 1928. Though Fields is a Broadway star, his move to California and his eventual international stardom from his movies is

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November 25, 2022 1 Comment

W.C. FIELDS ‘THE DENTIST’–BROADWAY V. HOLLYWOOD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A11EWc2_WJQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qYmFXWtdo8 Yesterday I posted about the amazing George Mann home movie footage of Broadway in the late 1920s. Mann performed in a number of Earl Carroll reviews during that decade and in 1928 he was part of the seventh edition of ‘Earl Carroll’s Vanities’ along with W.C. Fields. Although Fields

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November 22, 2022 No Comments

EARL CARROLL’S SKETCHBOOK (1929)

Here is some extraordinarily rare and truly one-of-a-kind footage shot from the backstage wings of the 44th Street Theater in January, 1930. It shows us a few moments of a variety show in-progress called ‘Earl Carroll’s Sketchbook’, which starred Eddie Cantor, Patsy Kelly, William Demerest and a dance team called

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November 21, 2022 1 Comment

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA TIME MACHINE–THE 1940s

The YouTube genius NASS (I’ve posted his/her/their videos before) has once again worked his/her/their magic on some old footage of a city from the past, in this case Los Angeles in the 1940s. Much of it appears to me to be stock footage most likely shot by a studio crew

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October 31, 2022 2 Comments

‘THE JOINT IS JUMPIN’–A FATS WALLER SOUNDIE

Here’s another Fats Waller short made for jukebox consumption in 1941 (see yesterday’s post for ‘Your Feets Too Big’). ‘The Joint Is Jumpin’, written by Waller, Andy Razaf and J.C.Johnson, is another of his hit novelty numbers and it’s given a rowdy treatment in this dramatization of what a Harlem

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October 26, 2022 4 Comments

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