In the early 1940s, Alfred Hitchcock–newly arrived in America and missing the countryside of his previous home in England–purchased a 200 acre weekend ‘getaway’ estate in the Northern California town of Santa Cruz. Above, take the drive that Hitch (and wife Alma and daughter Pat) would have taken on the
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUYqgLPgIjc It’s ridiculous that the classic Chuck Jones 1955 masterwork ‘One Froggy Evening’ is unavailable on YouTube–Warner Brothers seems to have made damn sure of that. For what reason? Every other WB cartoon is available on YT. Is there a super-hero reboot of this one in development? Anyway, I finally
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb-gAEx9GNU Today’s 70s trailer is ‘The Long Goodbye’, directed by Robert Altman starring Elliott Gould and featuring an eccentric supporting cast including Sterling Hayden and director (and sometime actor) Mark Rydell. The sampling of scenes is threaded by the theme song by John Williams, sung by the great trumpeter-singer Jack
Enjoy a two-minute ad for the then brand-new 1977 IBM 5100, a fifty-pound computer that appears to have been invented to help people figure out what to do with their cows (you have to watch it). By the way: is she holding an I-Pad in that opening scene? Or, more
https://www.youtube.com/embed/qjxb1bpceok%20width=560/iframebr%20/ Did you know that K-Tel didn’t just put out junky record compilations but also created a series of crappy utilitarian household items? Dig the Omlette maker ad above–the thing can be separated to be two half-pans though to do so would be at your own risk since they clearly
When I was a kid, commercials advertising records were one of my favorite things to tape-record off the TV. (The others included the Carl Stalling credits music for Warner Brothers Cartoons and announcements for upcoming movies on local stations. Hmmm). K-TEL was usually the record company hawking the records but
Click on the above (or perhaps you’d be better off clicking here for mysterious reasons) and you will be treated (I guess that’s the correct word) to a whole pile of New York/New Jersey regional television commercials from the early to mid 1980s. Why do these things mesmerize me? Partly
I believe this footage of a gentle cruise down Hollywood Blvd. in the 60s shows us the fabled (and never nearly as glamorous as out-of-towners expected it to be) heading east–there are some helpful captions giving street names along the way. Unlike the previous two days posts (which I highly
In 2002, my new friend Peter Bogdanovich and I decided to make a CD of songs from the American popular songbook. We both loved the standards from the 30s/40s/50s and Peter was, believe it or not, a pretty good singer. We’d been getting together at my apartment for the past
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcRHhIRO9OI The Columbia Short Subjects department of the 1930s-50s will remain immortal, of course, for being the home of the Three Stooges. But many other comics had series of their own, most have which went straight from the theaters to the home for old crappy movies. They didn’t seem to