Category Archives: Video Links

Walt Disney meets Jack Benny. Which of them was cheaper?

Stan Lee in conversation with Michael Eisner…

This afternoon, I had an inexplicable urge to see the opening number from The Music Man as performed on a subway by students from Boston University. Fortunately, there turned out to be just such a clip on YouTube…

Here, as promised: Jon Stewart on last night's Daily Show disposes of Jim Cramer and his wonderful financial advice…

From the September 26, 1954 episode of the legendary Your Show of Shows, we have Sid Caesar and Howard Morris demonstrating the fine art of German double talk…

Here's a golden oldie — an online animated video to which I linked hundreds of years ago. But it's still funny and (sadly) still relevant…

You rarely see an interview these days in which a host asks a guest a genuine, valid tough question…"tough" in this case meaning that it punctures the guest's entire shpiel. Bill Maher did in the other night on Real Time when he had on billionaire T. Boone Pickens.

Pickens is out pushing an "energy independence plan" that would harness wind power to get us off oil. There are those who claim that this is not altruistic; that the man has set up companies that would make zillions from any such plan. Never mind that for the moment. He's also been a big supporter of candidates who actively crusade to take us in precisely the opposite direction. He was, for example, a major backer of those "Swift Boat Veterans" ads that helped keep George W. Bush in the White House. In the last three or four minutes of the interview, Maher brings up these contradictions…and Pickens really has no answer…

From just the other night: Jon Stewart and his crew eviscerate CNBC. This is one of the sharpest bits I've seen on what is always a very sharp show…

Just in case you haven't seen this: It's a computer animation re-creation of the infamous Flight 1549 that landed in the Hudson River…

The cast of Hogan's Heroes — Bob Crane, Larry Hovis, Robert Clary, Richard Dawson, Werner Klemperer, John Banner and Carol Channing — appear in a commercial for Jell-O. "Carol Channing!?"

Ten minutes of Richard Nixon and his aides discussing homosexuality, fashion design and All in the Family…

Here's an old Rice Krispies commercial that I don't remember at all. It has an Alice in Wonderland theme. I think that's Janet Waldo doing Alice's voice with June Foray as the queen, Daws Butler as Snap and Paul Winchell as the Mad Hatter. Kind of odd.

Castle Films were little 8mm or 16mm copies of Hollywood-type movies you could once purchase and run on your home movie projector. In the decades before home video recorders, that was a big deal.

Someone at the Castle Films company was very facile at trimming whole features down to one-reel lengths. Abbott and Costello Go To Mars (1953) was a 77 minute film…but Castle edited it down to a little under nine minutes and did surprisingly little damage to it.

They retitled it Rocket and Roll, perhaps because the original title was inaccurate. Amazingly, in Abbott and Costello Go To Mars, Abbott and Costello do not go to Mars. In Abbott and Costello Go To Mars, Abbott and Costello go to Venus.

I'm guessing what happened was that someone thought the Mars title was commercial and they started planning the film under that name. Then someone else decided it would be even more commercial to fill the movie with beautiful women in abbreviated costumes…so they worked that into the script, having Bud and Lou land on a planet ruled by gorgeous amazons. (One of them, though you probably won't be able to spot her in this, was Anita Ekberg.) At some point, someone decided the planet then should be Venus, so they made it Venus, even though it was too late to change the title. So what you wound up with was the biggest "misnaming" of a movie ever until some studio exec was unaware that Krakatoa was not East of Java.

This is the sound version that Castle issued. In a box in a closet downstairs, I have the 8mm silent version that I purchased around 1964. I haven't compared but I think it's the same cut but with title cards dropped in here and there…

Here we see this year's Academy Awards "In Memoriam" reel, which actually looks better on YouTube than it did on the Oscar telecast. The TV show kept trying to get shots of the set and of Queen Latifah, who was singing the song…so a number of the folks being remembered seem forgotten in distant shots. (One wonders if that's the reason the Academy put it up on YouTube and in embeddable form. Usually, they don't put up full segments like this and you can't embed them.)

As usual, there are those grousing that some who should have been in the montage were omitted. Patrick McGoohan was in some pretty good movies and George Carlin was in more than you might think…but neither was included. Nor was Eartha Kitt. Nor was composer Neal Hefti. Nor were Harvey Korman, Earle Hagen, Mel Ferrer, Alexander Courage, John Phillip Law, Irving Brecher, George Furth, Beverly Garland or Guy McElwaine. There were several studio execs and one publicist included but not Bernie Brillstein.

But the startling omission, of course, was Don LaFontaine, who not only became a superstar of movie trailers but also served as the announcer of the Oscars several years. Don may have sold more movie tickets than everyone else in the segment combined. Here's who they did include…

Here, from around 1962, is one of the first commercials for Post Crispy Critters…one of those cereals where I liked the commercials but didn't like the cereal. Sheldon Leonard provides the voice of Linus the Lionhearted while Paul Frees speaks for the giraffe.