Pop Culture from an Alternate Dimension

      Mel Brooks' 1974 comedy  Blazing Saddles had Richard Pryor as one of the writers. Brooks had wanted Pryor to play the lead as well. However, the studio did not want to back the film with him starring because of his various drug arrests. The role went to Cleavon Little who made a memorable character of Bart. Gig Young was cast as the drunken gunslinger but when they started shooting he had the DTs so bad they couldn't continue so Gene Wilder was hired with whom Mel Brooks made the movie The Producers . Two years after Blazing Saddles  Wilder and Pryor were in Silver Streak  and they made such a good comedic double act that they made four films together.

       The Brothers Gibb started performing as pre-teens. They had hits in the '60s, '70s and '80s. They played a variety of music but when they got the A-side to the Saturday Night Fever  soundtrack they were practically the face of disco and by that time there was disco backlash in the U.S. They did solo efforts but still wrote songs together. For this 1984 imaginary album I used Barry Gibb's Now Voyager , Robin Gibb's Secret Agent  and the soundtrack Maurice Gibb wrote for the Rutger Hauer movie A Breed Apart . It includes three songs written by all three brothers. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCHnLE0OxajGKz-QgUlenWc0ca8y_zKsV&si=SL96-He9lugUOm3Q

          It is hard to imagine the movie  Breakfast at Tiffany's  without Audrey Hepburn. Her image as Holly Golightly has been on posters, t-shirts and just about anything else you can buy. However when the author of "Breakfast at Tiffany's", Truman Capote, heard that she going to be cast in an adaptation of his book he thought she was terribly miscast. He had wanted Marilyn Monroe to play his lead character. She was offered the role but was advised against it. A young Steve McQueen was offered the male lead but was unavailable. The role that I would like to see recast is Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi. Couldn't they have gotten someone more appropriate like Alec Guiness or Marlon Brando? The original director was to have been John Frankenheimer.      If they had gone with those original choices the film could have been quite different. I believe Hepburn was responsible for Givenchy designing her character's wardrobe. Henry Mancini was ...

  Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel started singing together as kids. They put out their first album in 1964. After five albums the duo broke up. Like Wham! one person's career took off while the other's didn't.  In 1975 they reunited to record a song Paul Simon wrote called "My Little Town". It was Simon's album Still Crazy After All These Years and Garfunkel's album Breakaway . For this project I used the title song from Garfunkel's Breakaway  and his cover of "I Only Have Eyes for You" since that was the song he sang on Saturday Night Live to promote his album along with Paul Simon. I excised "Gone At Last" and "Silent Eyes" from Simon's album to make room for Garfunkel's.  https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCHnLE0OxajEkxPswE2Ww_1jNcqSpUc_c&si=rtEPSC9Nh4ccXFCA

  While working on the last post I thought about songs that reference The Wizard of Oz. I also thought about when Georgio Moroder released Metropolis  with new music by '80s artists. Somehow that merged in my mind and I considered a soundtrack with "Tin Man" by America, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John, "Time" from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, maybe something from Ozzy Osborne's Blizzard of Ozz. How about songs from Toto and Kansas? I realized I had gone WAY too far. Besides I figure I had desecrated enough movie soundtracks for now.

  The Wizard of Oz  went through many changes from start of production to finished film. Mutiple screenwriters wrote assorted drafts, the original director, Richard Thorpe was fired after a week to have all his scenes reshot by new director Victor Fleming, and the cast could have been quite different.  Before Judy Garland captured the role of Dorothy the studio considered borrowing Shirley Temple from 20th Century Fox. She was closer to age of protagonist in the book but her singing voice wasn't quite right for the songs in the movie. Another consideration was Deanna Durbin, who had a beautiful singing voice and was six months older than Garland.  W. C. Fields was first chosen as the Wizard. I think he could have been great as Professor Marvel and the various disguises of the Wizard but Frank Morgan was so good in the film I feel he was the right choice. Ray Bolger was originally cast as the Tin Man and Buddy Ebsen as the Scarecrow but Bolger wanted switch parts. Bud...

  The soundtrack to the first Guardians of the Galaxy  movie really is an awesome collection of songs. They didn't choose the obvious "space" songs. This is what it could have been if they did. I chose twelve songs, the same as on the actual soundtrack, and I stayed with songs between 1969 and 1979 like what was in the movie. David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream" was on the original soundtrack and even though it has a "space" theme I went with the more obvious "Space Oddity". The sequel started with E.L.O.'s "Mr. Blue Sky", for this project I used another song from the same album. I tried to choose a variety of styles like the actual soundtrack as well as ones that might work in the film. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCHnLE0OxajEaTSB91yLknnc8qpuFEOxF&si=LHC0KqDqyPeadQCl