This week I’m posting theme songs from old shows that provided the backstory to the viewer. As I mentioned yesterday, simply putting up the well known ones would be far too simple. So I’m providing a glimpse of both the flop shows and the hits. Today’s flop is ‘Occassional Wife’,
Our mission this week is to explore the theme songs of old TV comedies which contained lyrics that set-up the backstory of the show. Yesterday we wallowed in ‘The Partridge Family’ theme and frankly I thought the rest of this week would be a breeze. You know, ‘Brady Bunch’, Gilligans
In the 60s through the mid-70s, TV theme songs we’re often used to provide a backstory to the show so new viewers could get a handle on what the circumstances surrounding the characters were that led them to wind up on–er–TV. Actually, these storyline themes also gave regular viewers a
Continuing this weeks uncanny resemblance between Julius ‘Groucho’ Marx’s character Rufus T. Firefly in ‘Duck Soup’ and the current President of the United State, we come to the movie’s brilliant opening song in which Firefly lays out the rules of his administration. Given that our current Presidents early goals included
I try to keep this blog as apolitical as possible, steeped as I am in popular culture of another era–which may be seen by some as a method by which I avoid the present day. (By the way, if that’s what somebody thinks, they’re right). But the extraordinarily ugly events
Okay, so it’s not more bondage-from-old-movies footage. But the named ‘Django’ and the word ‘Unchained’ actually do belong with each other thanks to a repulsive Quentin Tarantino film called ‘Django Unchained.’ Thus my excuse for moving from chained women to Django Reinhardt. Above is a remarkable short film of the
Yesterday we watched a deeply strange BDSM musical number from a 1933 Eddie Cantor vehicle, staged by Busby Berkeley. Twenty-years later, the same mind that brought us slavegirls-on-parade came up with a fascinating, nightmarish concept for an Ann Miller number in ‘Small Town Girl’ (1953) called ‘I Gotta Hear That
As this week drifts on, we’re gradually getting away from my initial theme which was period football games captured on film. (This may well be a relief to some of you). Today we fall off the map completely with a terrific production number from the 1947 MGM remake of ‘Good
One of the biggest hits of the 1927 Broadway season was ‘Good News’, a musical that was the quintessential 20s rah-rah football celebration. As an artifact, the 1930 film adaptation is priceless due largely to the poor quality of the filmmaking. As you’ll see above in the show’s most famous
Today is Kay Francis’ 120th birthday–or would have been had she not died in 1968 at the age of 63. When I was a kid in the early 1970s, the Marx Brothers revival was in full swing and theaters around L.A. often did all-day showings of the Paramount Marx output