Wednesday, May 31, 2006

More Reruns!

Rumor has it that those of us who have DirecTV satellites are about to find the Sleuth Network on Channel 308...like in the next day or so. This would excite me if I had any interest in watching old episodes of The A-Team, Simon and Simon and The Equalizer.

• Posted at 7:58 PM · LINK

SNL Watch

NBC reruns an old Saturday Night Live episode in the wee small hours of every Sunday morning. These are uncut, as opposed to the hour-long versions that rerun on the E! Network. For a while, they were choosing recent episodes which didn't much interest me but they're now going back a little farther.

This weekend, the featured episode is the one from 5/24/86 with guest host Anjelica Huston, musical guest George Clinton and former Yankees manager Billy Martin somehow appearing in a number of sketches. This was the last episode of that season and it ends with a scene that has all the cast members (playing themselves) trapped in a fire with a cliff-hanger ending: Who will survive? (Which is to say, which cast members will return next season?) You see Lorne Michaels saving Jon Lovitz with the implication that he'll be the only one. Two others did return the following September — Dennis Miller and Nora Dunn — but the rest, including Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall and Terry Sweeney "perished," in that they did not return to the show. Some folks involved with the show felt it was not the nicest way to say goodbye to the performers who were being dismissed.

The following weekend, the episode is the one that originally aired on 2/13/88 with host Justine Bateman and musical guest Terence Trent D'Arby. Not a great show, as I recall. Neither is the one this weekend but at least they're digging up some that haven't been rerun to death.

• Posted at 7:52 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Here's a brief economics lesson from Ben Stein. I don't agree with all of it but am fascinated by his seeming break from a lot of the bromides that folks in his political camp have long touted.

• Posted at 12:59 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

The folks at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project have dug up more treasures for us. Here are several of the Chiquita Banana animated commercials that were done to be shown in motion picture houses in the late forties.

Not a lot is known about these commercials except that they were produced, beginning around 1947, by a company called John Sutherland Productions that did mostly industrial films and commercial spots. They seem to have farmed the animation work out to the Famous Studios operation in New York — the company that was doing the post-Fleischer Popeye cartoons and things like Herman & Katnip and Little Lulu.

A singer named Monica Lewis may have done the voice of Ms. Banana in these. She definitely was the voice of Chiquita when the character appeared in TV commercials in the fifties but sources differ on whether she sang for the theatricals. And now you know as much about these films as I do.

You can view or download the material here on the ASIFA site.

[UPDATE: I originally had an embedded link here but Steve Worth, who's doing such fine work for ASIFA finding and archiving treasures, asked me to remove it and direct you to their site. I am glad to do this.]

• Posted at 12:03 AM · LINK