One more from Big Daddy, the group that takes songs recorded after the fifties and makes them sound like they were recorded in the fifties. This is them on some German TV show — and even though I took German in college, I have no idea what the host is saying and I don't think I want to know. But after you sit through that, you'll get to hear Big Daddy perform its version of the title song from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. (There's a lot of blank video at the beginning. Be patient.)
Day before yesterday, I linked you to a video wherein Matt Harding (of "Where the Hell in the World is Matt?" fame) confessed that the entire video was a hoax created via Photoshop and high-tech puppetry. I thought it would be obvious but to my amazement, I heard from people who either thought it was true that the whole video was a fraud or thought that I thought that. No, no, no. The "confession" was obviously the hoax…as Matt explains in the video below.
Maybe I shouldn't be amazed, what with all the people out there who believe things like "Barack Obama was born in Kenya." (Most of those same people seem to think George W. Bush was a great president. I think the two delusions are connected.) What percentage of people still think the Moon Landing was done on a soundstage at Disney?
Anyway, here's Matt Harding talking about, among other things, the hoax that his video was a hoax. Somewhere out there, some is watching this video and thinking that the real hoax is claiming that the confession was a hoax. Andy Kaufman told me that last week.
As I explained here hundreds of years ago, when Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made their early "talkies," they made some of them several times. They'd shoot the version we got here in America and then they'd go back into the same sets and costumes and bring in a (mostly) new supporting cast and shoot the dialogue scenes in German, French and/or Italian for the foreign market. Stan and Ollie didn't speak those languages but a dialogue coach would teach them how to pronounce the words, which would be written out on a blackboard out of camera range. So in the clip we have for you today, you hear the actual voices of Laurel and Hardy speaking, in this case, German.
Later on, the technology for dubbing became better and the films were translated that way for the foreign market. But we still have some interesting remnants like this trailer for the German release of the 1931 movie, Pardon Us.
I assume you've seen this. It's "Where the Hell is Matt?", which purports to be a video that a gentleman named Matt Harding shot by traveling to dozens of locations around the world…
But Matt has finally owned up to what we smart people realized right off the bat; that the whole thing was a hoax accomplished by Photoshop, robotics, green screen and other kinds of visual trickery. Here he is admitting it all…
Personally, I knew it all the time. But at least it brought us this clever parody…
On Saturday morning at the Comic-Con, we'll be doing our annual Quick Draw game…and this isn't really a plug because we're going to fill the room and turn hundreds away. So it doesn't matter to me if you attend or not.
The way it works is that we have three fast cartoonists on stage. Each has a projector device and there are huge screens so you can see what they're drawing as they draw it. I'm out in the audience with a microphone hurling challenges at them and getting suggestions from the folks who've come to see this spectacle. It's always interesting and usually very funny.
Two of the three cartoonists are always Sergio Aragonés and Scott Shaw! The third seat rotates and this year, it'll be filled by a guy I've been pestering for years to come and play. He finally (finally!) said yes.
Floyd Norman went to work for the Disney Studios in '56, in time to work on Sleeping Beauty. He worked on many of their features and on other projects for the studio since, and also branched out to other studios on occasion. He's one of the cleverest cartoonists I know…as a few thousand of you will see on Saturday. (No pressure, Floyd.)
Not long ago, he received the highest honor you can get at the Walt Disney Company short of being paid well. They named him a Disney Legend, which is a distinction given to few. Here's his acceptance speech at the ceremony…
I should have linked to this when Karl Malden left us. It's a deleted number from the movie Gypsy and it contains Rosalind Russell's unredubbed vocals, and I think that's Malden's actual voice, too. His character didn't have a lot of vocalizing to do because the role was originated on Broadway by Jack Klugman, and Klugman wasn't much of a singer. So his solo was cut and was never heard again, and they wrote the guy out of most of the musical numbers.
Oddly enough, I think I like Ms. Russell a little better in the film when her vocals aren't redubbed. My main complaint with her performance, you may recall, is that she comes off as a successful woman with star qualities…and that ain't Momma Rose. I guess this is kind of an insult and I apologize if it comes off as nasty…but she seems less a movie star when it's her singing. And of course, there isn't that disconnect I feel in the film as released, where the singing voice doesn't precisely link up with the actress mouthing the words.
So one night at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas, they have a birthday party for one of the hotel execs, Larry Katz. And they get Don Rickles, who was headlining in the showroom to come up and say a few words. Here's almost ten minutes of Don Rickles saying a few words, some of them even coherent. You hockey puck.
They have a wonderful library of comic strips and comic strip art at Ohio State University. But as wonderful as it is, it needs to get wonderfuller. They cannot properly house and display all the treasures that have been donated.
The video below will show you a little of what the collection is all about. Jean Schulz of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center has donated a million bucks to the place and also pledged matching funds up to 2.5 million. That means that if you send them a hundred dollars, the OSU Cartoon Research Library gets two hundred bucks. Such a deal. So watch the video and see if it doesn't move you to send some cash their way. That's Professor Lucy Shelton Caswell you'll see there acting as your guide. The Art Form has no greater friend.
Here's a nice piece o' video featuring my pal, Pete Barbutti, who may just be the best storyteller to ever work a stage in or around Las Vegas. Very funny man. This was shot at a private birthday party/roast for Vegas entertainer Johnny Jay in 2007. It's six minutes of Pete taking a great joke and milking it for all it's worth (and then some) as he pretends it has something to do with Mr. Jay.
The other day here, I wrote "One of these days, I'm going to find a video clip of a baby panda singing, "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang."
Be careful what you wish for on any blog that Matthew Hahn reads…
The 1938 movie Bringing Up Baby featured Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and a leopard named Baby. In some scenes, the stars interacted with a live leopard on the set but for most of the film, special effects were employed to keep the actors and the animal apart. Mr. Grant was said to be especially nervous around the large cat.
This video runs close to seven and a half minutes and it isolates many of the tricks that were employed. If you don't want to know how it was done, don't click.
A few days ago here, I introduced some of you to Big Daddy, one of my favorite musical groups. Several of you have admonished me for not recounting the Big Daddy legend so here it is…
In August of 1959, the group — which played the kind of music most groups played back then — was booked on a USO tour of Southeast Asia. Someone made a wrong turn and they wound up missing in action…captured by Laotian revolutionaries and abandoned by the United States which then had a non-interventionist neutral policy towards the region. There was also no one at the U.S. State Department who cared a lot about rock 'n' roll bands or thought it would be a shame if one disappeared forever.
They were held captive for decades…but returning U.S. troops passed on rumors and eventually in 1983, a Special Forces brigade made a daring rescue and our heroes finally returned to American soil. They had missed all that happened to music in the intervening years and didn't like what they now heard on the radio. Convinced that contemporary youth would appreciate the classic sound, they began "fixing" current tunes, rendering them in the only good style of music…the style of the fifties. And that's pretty much the story of Big Daddy as it was told in the press releases for their albums.
Here's another example of them at work. This is what they did to the Michael Jackson song, "Billie Jean."
But before we get to that: Reader William Pelletier tipped me off to something wonderful. Though Big Daddy's albums and CDs are all out of print, Amazon sells an MP3 digital download of Cutting Their Own Groove for a mere ten bucks, or you can buy individual tunes for 69 cents each. This is a very good album and you can order it — or just preview samples of its songs — over on this page.
End of plug. Here's the Big Daddy version of "Billie Jean."
I always thought Rosalind Russell was dreadfully miscast in the movie version of Gypsy. There are many arguments that could be made in support of this position but I'll make two. One is that she wasn't "musical" enough, as proven by the fact that her singing had to be dubbed. Yes, I know Ms. Russell could sing and that she sang in other films without being dubbed, and dubbing sometimes works. But to me, she feels dubbed throughout the film. She doesn't move like a musical performer or gesture as if she's one with the music.
But the bigger issue for me is that Momma Rose, as depicted in the show Gypsy, is a hardscrabble fighter who's struggling to keep food on the table, and who also is trying to live vicariously through her daughters. Momma Rose herself couldn't have been a star but she's going to do the next best thing and shove at least one of her daughters to center stage. And that's where Rosalind Russell really doesn't work for me. She just looks like a rich, successful movie star. For her to play a woman who has to struggle is like…well, imagine Warren Beatty playing a guy who couldn't get laid.
That, to me, is the Catch-22 of Gypsy: To play Momma Rose, you need a star because only a star could fill the attention-holding demands of the role. But the role is that of a woman who is not a star, which is why Ethel Merman was probably such a great choice. Merman was a star but she sure didn't look like one…and unlike Rosalind Russell, didn't come off as a person of privilege or breeding. It's a shame she didn't get the movie.
But what if she had? We'll never see that but in an interesting experiment, a fellow on YouTube imagined what it would have been like if Ethel Merman, instead of Lisa Kirk, had dubbed Rosalind Russell's singing voice in the film. It might have gone something like this…
Lin Hui is a panda in the Chang Mai Zoo in Thailand. She's on loan from China and at the end of May, through the wonders of artificial insemination, she gave birth to what has turned out to be a female. Here we see some webcam footage of mother and daughter.
I love this kind of stuff. One of these days, I'm going to find a video clip of a baby panda singing, "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang."
Back in the late eighties, I was an enormous fan of a musical group called Big Daddy, not to be confused with several other acts with similar names. This Big Daddy recorded for Rhino Records and they had a wonderful gimmick. What they did was to take current rock songs and then rearrange them to sound like fifties music. They were enormously skillful at this and in many cases, their versions of contemporary hits sounded better than the originals.
I dragged friends to their live performances and became pals with a couple of members. I even cast one of the members (Tom Lee, the guy with the great bass voice) for a couple of cartoon voice jobs. Alas, some time in the nineties — I'm not sure when — the group drifted apart and insofar as I can tell, all their albums and CDs are now outta print…though not hard to find on eBay or as used items on Amazon.
Here's a little music video that someone threw together using one of their records — their version of Barry Manilow's "I Write the Songs." Don't you like it better their way?