Pop Culture from an Alternate Dimension

       Here is another in the "what if Jeff Lynne let other members of E.L.O. have their compositions on the albums" series. This week I reconfigured the 1981 album Time. In 1981 E.L.O. bassist Kelly Groucutt was recording his debut album, Kelly, with other ELOers Richard Tandy, Bev Bevan and Louis Clark. From that album I grabbed "I'll Cry Tomorrow" and "Sea of Dreams". 1981 also saw the release of an album of "production music" called Building Tension. Half was by John Cameron and the other half by our own Louis Clark. I pulled "Unease" from there.        To make room for these I removed three songs from the original album; "Another Heart Breaks", "The Lights Go Down" and "Hold on Tight". Although that last song is a banger, it doesn't seem to fit the album. In this alternate reality it would still be released as a single, so the "coffee achievers" would still have their anthem.      I u...

       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.