Pop Culture from an Alternate Dimension

       This week is a full matinee from the '30s on an alternate Earth, replete with a cartoon, a comedy short, a serial, a trailer and the main attraction.  CARTOON The video for "The Ghost of Stephen Foster" by the Squirrel Nut Zippers was made to look like an old Max and Dave Fleischer cartoon. It directly references the Betty Boop cartoon of "Minnie the Moocher" and "Bimbo's Initiation".  COMEDY SHORT In 1991 Rob Reiner introduced six episodes of a television show called "Morton and Hayes". They were supposedly lost comedy shorts of Chick Morton and Eddie Hayes (played by Kevin Pollack and Bob Amaral). The shorts were played in the style of great comedy duos like Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy and the Three Stooges. SERIAL Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was Kerry Conran's love letter to the old serials. It was originally going to have cliffhangers and chapters with title cards.  TRAILER The fake trailer for ...

       I'm not sure how this fits the theme of this blog but I couldn't stop thinking about it. Instead of just a playlist of bands with colours in their names, I made it harder on myself by finding songs from them that also had colours in the titles. I wanted each band to be a different colour but allowed some repetition of colour in the title. I just couldn't pass on two different songs called "Black Night". A tip of the hat to my buddy Henry Desmond for suggesting the twofer "Heavy Metal: The Black and Silver ". Colorful Music - YouTube

       In 2011 Warner Brothers Television hired David E. Kelley to write and produce a new Wonder Woman series for NBC. He was the man behind audience and critic favorites like "Ally McBeal" and "Boston Legal". In the pilot Wonder Woman was a superhero who was also publicly known as Diana Themyscira, the head of Themyscira Industries in L. A. but she was also Diana Prince, the bespectacled average woman who lived with her cat and was unlucky in love.  Adrianne Palicki played the lead role. Pedro Pascal played a police inspector, he recently played Mister Fantastic in Fantastic Four: First Steps (he also played Maxwell Lord in Wonder Woman 1984 ).       The pilot was hyped but early reviews from critics were bad and it never aired. An early cut was leaked online and bootleg copies were sold at comic conventions. Who knows what the series could have been. Above is my interpretation if it did get a full season.

           Albums are oft put out of assorted artists covering songs of a certain songwriter. I remember when I got Red Hot + Blue in 1990, which had modern musicians doing Cole Porter tunes. Since Halloween is this Friday I wanted to do an album of songs using Edgar Allan Poe's words. The first rule I set for myself was no more than one song from any artist. Buddy Morrow, Spectral Kaleidoscope and Glass Prism did complete albums based on Poe's work. Alan Parsons also did a complete record of music influenced by Poe but did not use any actual lines written by him. Second rule was the songs had to use Poe's words. Thirdly, only one version of any poem. Lastly, I wanted it to be a variety, I could have done a complete death metal version. Songs of Edgar Allan Poe - YouTube

        Kentucky Fried Movie  hit the theaters in 1977. It was the first movie from the twisted minds of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, who went on to make Airplane!  and the tv series Police Squad. They hired John Landis to direct, who had only made Schlock  before this, but this got him hired to direct National Lampoon's Animal House . KFM was mostly short sketches skewering television and movies. The longest section was Fistful of Yen, a spoof of Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon.          There was a theater that used to show different double and triple features each night. I saw Enter the Dragon  along with Jackie Chan's The Big Brawl  but they also included the Fistful of Yen section. The downside was they played before the Bruce Lee movie so when the audience watched EtD  they would laugh thinking about the scenes spoofed with Evan Kim.       You can watch Kentucky Fried Movie ...

       Back in April I posted a soundtrack of the tv series Moonlighting for seasons one and two. I had been disappointed that the official soundtrack was missing certain songs. In choosing songs for the previous volume and this volume I realized how hard it is to choose what should be included considering the depth of great music used on the show. The original soundtrack had "Since I Fell for You" which, I believe, was recorded for the series and is used in a pivotal scene. However, I was surprised that Billy Joel's "Big Man on Mulberry Street" wasn't included since it was not only used as a centerpiece in an episode, but the episode was even named after it. I also wanted to include Sam the Sham and Pharaohs' "Wooly Bully" which was humorously used in the last scene of the final episode of season four. Moonlighting music from seasons 3 & 4 - YouTube