So…what's the view like from 200 miles about the Earth? NASA astronaut Ron Garan took thousands of photos when he was on the International Space Station from August to October of this year. German artist Michael Konig then combined some of those images into this video. Take this one full screen and watch…
(A reminder: If with this or any video embed on this site you see the wrong video, you probably need to refresh your browser once or twice to get the right one to show up. You can also try clicking on the little word that says "link" at the lower right. That will take you to the archived version of the item which should have the proper video in place.)
Another interpretation of "The Lambeth Walk." This is Dalida, the international singing star who had many hits in many languages. I think this is from a special she did for French television…
And we have a bonus: Yesterday, I featured the Japanese musical star Yuki Amami performing the number in a scene from a production of Me and My Girl mounted in her country. Here she is with the cast doing the song again. This may be the finale from the show or it may be another performance done for some program on Japanese television. Whatever it is, it's "The Lambeth Walk" so I'm featuring it…
We've been featuring a musical stage number called "The Lambeth Walk" this week. Here it is from a Japanese production starring Yuki Amami, who is one of the biggest musical stars over there. For reasons I won't pretend I understand, she often stars in male roles in productions where all the roles, male and female, are played by women. This incarnation of Me and My Girl appears to be one of them. (When the musical version of Gone With The Wind played Japan, Ms. Amami played Rhett Butler.)
So here you have it…the "Lambeth Walk" number in Japanese with visual cutaways to other scenes in this production. Ain't it catchy?
And now, here's "The Lambeth Walk" as performed by Adolf Hitler and a batch of Nazi soldiers…
Seriously. In 1941 after a German leader denounced the song as "Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping," Charles A. Ridley of the British Ministry of Information took newsreel footage of goose-stepping Krauts and set it to "The Lambeth Walk" in an attempt (I'm guessing) to make those fun boys seem less menacing and more ridiculous. Or something of the sort. It is said the film was shown for Joseph Goebbels and he exploded and ran screaming from the room in anger. If so, that alone was reason enough to make it.
So here it is: Hitler in a musical, long before Mel Brooks thought of it…
A lot of the comic books I've written over the years have been drawn (to my delight) by a talented gentleman named Will Meugniot. "Meugniot," by the way, is pronounced the same way as Sal Mineo's last name.
The comic book field has, alas, been deprived of Will's work for some time now. This is because big animation firms were paying him large sums of cash to produce and/or direct projects…and they still do. But recently, he's made time in his workdays and nights for a new comic book which sure sounds good to me so I'll let him tell you all about it. Note that nowhere in this video does he do The Lambeth Walk…
Continuing our Theme Week: Tim Curry starred in the national touring company of the revival of Me and My Girl in the late eighties. Here are some clips of news coverage when it played the Pantages here in Los Angeles.
In them, you'll see a couple of the local reviewers we had in L.A. back then…like Gary Franklin, who used to predict the rating (on a scale of one to ten) he'd give a movie or play before he saw it. No kidding. At the end of a review, he'd tell you what he was going to see the next night and he'd say, "I'm looking forward to it. I'll bet it'll be a nine!" And sure enough, two days later, he'd be back on the news to report that it was indeed a nine…or that he was disappointed it was only a seven.
Anyway, watch and you'll see snippets of the "Lambeth Walk" number throughout…
Most of you are probably not familiar with Me and My Girl, a musical first produced in London's West End in 1937 as a starring vehicle for Lupino Lane. Mr. Lane was a brilliant British comedian who was imported to America around 1919 — i.e., around the time Charlie Chaplin became the highest-paid performer in the world. Someone apparently thought the way to replicate Chaplin's success was to just get another agile guy from the U.K.
Equivalent popularity did not, of course, occur. Lane was a funny man and an incredible acrobat (at least as good as Keaton, many felt) and he made a lot of very amusing silent comedies which are largely forgotten. Some of them apparently no longer exist, which further limits his fame today. Still at the time, they brought him a limited stardom which petered out not long after sound came in…when moving funny became less important than talking funny. Actually, he was fine with dialogue and songs but not anything special in those capacities. Mr. Lane returned to England, thereafter working mostly on the stage. Me and My Girl was a spectacular hit and soon, everyone in the British Isles was singing and/or dancing to the musical's best song, "The Lambeth Walk." It was a great tune — one that almost always stops the show and leaves the audience cheering.
Me and My Girl ran for 1,646 performances in London. It would have run longer but when Hitler's forces began bombing London, several theaters were destroyed including one into which the show was planning to transfer. In fact, the show became a symbol of resistance against the Nazis, especially after a prominent Kraut denounced "The Lambeth Walk" as — and I quote — "Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping." That, of course, made the song all the more popular and many artists recorded it just to thumb their noses at Hitler.
It killed in subsequent, post-war revivals, here and in England, some of which featured a revised book by Stephen Fry. It's about as rousing and fun as any song that's ever been in any musical.
Here's the best version of the number I can post here, though you'll see several different ones on this site over the next week or so. If you think you got sick of seeing interpretations of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" on this site, wait'll you see what I have in store for this one.
This video is from the 1987 Tony Awards telecast and it features Robert Lindsay, who won that year's Best Actor Tony, in the scene from a revival that was then playing on Broadway. If you look carefully, you may spot George S. Irving in the company. Mr. Irving has had one of the longest, most glorious careers on the stage…and at age 88, he's still trodding the boards. His voice would be instantly recognizable to fans of New York-based animated shows of the sixties like Underdog.
There will be more on "The Lambeth Walk" here tomorrow. And the next day and the next day and the next day…
I was going to write a piece here about the late Andy Rooney but I see Ken Levine has somehow managed to plagiarize what I was going to write before I wrote it.
The only thing he left out was that I became a fan of the 60 Minutes correspondent before he was on that show. I liked him from the moment I saw a 1975 special he did called Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington. He did a couple others like that, being generally (but not baselessly) crabby about other aspects of American life but that Washington one was the best. Much of it is dated now and I suspect he'd fault you if you tried to apply all its observations and complaints to the present-day District of Columbia and what goes on there. But much of it still seems to be valid.
Here is that special. It runs nearly an hour so you may not want to watch all of it. But if you ever wondered what Andy Rooney did besides kvetch about telemarketers at the end of 60 Minutes, here's what made him famous…
I'll bet a lot of you have never seen this. It's one of a couple of openings for The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show that ran on Saturday morning in the 1990's. The folks at Warner TV Animation kept fiddling with the opening of their Saturday AM series that ran vintage Looney Tunes, trying to make it seem "new" without losing that great theme song and Mel Blanc's vocals. The body of the show was, after all, old cartoons that nine-year-old kids had seen eighty quadrillion times…so to make something seem fresh, they kept reconfiguring the main titles.
At one point when the show was back on CBS, the execs there asked me if I had any idea how to freshen the program. All I could think of was to suggest that they get WB to dig into its vaults and see if they had any of the interstitial segments that were animated for the prime-time Bugs Bunny Show back when it was on ABC in 1960-1962. A search was conducted and the result was that they had lost most of that footage. They had a few black-and-white prints in 16mm and I believe there was a brief discussion of whether it was feasible to pull some clips from those, colorize them and throw them on the air but that was deemed impractical.
One of the lessons the big studios have learned in this era of cable and home video is "Never throw anything away." Every week, some exec at every company curses his predecessors for not doing a better job of protecting the vaults and preserving some movie or TV show that they'd now like to market somewhere but can't. One of the reasons some movies are not out on DVD is that the company that owns the copyright doesn't own a good print or negative. Sometimes, they obtain one by dealing with the kind of collector they used to call a Film Pirate and sic the FBI on.
Anyway, I am — as I so often am — off-topic. Here's a 90's opening of The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show…a nice bit of animation but no one will ever improve on the original.
I have a passing fascination with the mantle of "longest-running Broadway show" — or rather, I did.There was a time when that honor passed from show to show as one production would surpass the previous title holder and claim the mantle.That may not happen again in our lifetimes as The Phantom of the Opera now has the lead and ain't looking back.
This past weekend, Phantom played its 9,881st performance. Now, that wasn't the last one.The show is still running and shows no sign of closing. It's still running at over 80% capacity and since it has long since paid off its costs, it can probably turn a profit at anything over 50%. But if it had been the last, the next show in line for the "longest-running" title is the revival of Chicago, which as of the same date had played 6,210 performances. How could Chicago snatch the lead away from Phantom? Easy: Chicago has to run as long as Phantom does…and then run close to nine more years after that.
Probably not gonna happen.
So since there's no more ball game to watch there, let's look back on a show which once was the longest-running Broadway show of all time.The original production of A Chorus Line ran 6,137 performances but it claimed Numero Uno position on September 29, 1983 when it had performance #3,389.That bested the previous leader, which was the original production of Grease.
For the 9/29/83 performance, director Michael Bennett decided to throw the biggest extravaganza he could muster. He assembled more than 300 former and current cast members and they all participated, doing tag-team jobs in many of the roles and gathering for the finale.This was not easy and it was not cheap. In addition to restaging the show for that one night, choreographing much of it anew and rehearsing and dressing all those extra folks, it was necessary to reinforce the stage of the theater.
Want to see a few minutes from the finale? I can't embed the video but you can view it at this link. Folks who were there that evening are still raving about it and I think you can see why.
Of all the Disney musicals I've seen that were mounted for Broadway, my fave is still Beauty and the Beast. I liked it a lot more than The Lion King and a lot, lot more than Mary Poppins. Here's the opening number as performed by the company in Brazil…
