Tuesday, September 16, 2014

DVR-TiVo-Or whatever recording device strikes your fancy-alert!


Brother Terry at A Shroud of Thoughts (or as we call it here in our Noo Yawk accent at Rancho Yesteryear, “A Shroud of T’oughts”) was kind enough to inform me after the last blogathon post went to press that Fritzi at Movies Silently—and brace yourselves, because I know this is going to be a stunner—will be hosting another ‘thon from November 9-11 entitled The Fairy Tale Blogathon.  The title on that is pretty self-explanatory: the topic will cover silver screen adaptations of “primal and exciting” traditional stories, to use her description.  I’ve got all I can handle on my plate right now, so I’m going to sit this dance out—but if you’re interested, skate on over and sign up.  (And bring me back some punch, okay?)

As I’ve mentioned here on the blog in the past, I record a lot of classic movies onto blank DVD’s…and because I have this weird hang-up where I don’t like to leave any blank space if I can fill it up with something, I often go looking around the schedule of The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ to see if they’ve got any one- or two-reel shorts on the menu in between movies.  In doing this, I noticed that TCM is going to run a Charley Chase comedy, What a Bozo! (1931), after its September 20th showing of Five Star Final (1931) at midnight (around 1:33am).  This is a Chase comedy that I have not seen; according to an IMDb review Charley plays a bandleader and at one point sings a portion of his theme song, Smile When the Raindrops Fall.

In other Hal Roach news, grand dames Thelma Todd & Patsy Kelly are the stars of The Tin Man (1935), a comedy short scheduled after the September 21st airing of The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), starring Edward G. Robinson and my beloved Jean Arthur.  (My very good friend Cliff Weimer—Statler to my Waldorf—has been claiming Ms. Arthur for his own in a furious Facebook debate…in my defense, I did see her first.)  Tin Man will air at approximately 10:04am; of course, the U-Verse Total Home DVR© necessitates that I record the entire block (Talking and Tin Man) but as soon as that’s transferred to physical media it disappears—POOF!—just like ServPro.

Now, I checked the TCM site a few minutes ago to make certain all my information was correct…and all mention of these two shorts has vanished, so Tee Cee Em may have called an audible on me.  I’m going to let the info in the post stand, however, just in case they change their mind.

2 comments:

Brother Herbert said...

If you go to TCM's schedule page and click on the "weekly schedule" tab they're still listed. I learned the hard way to keep checking and refreshing the weekly schedule because they don't seem to update the daily one for whatever reason.

Ivan G Shreve Jr said...

Thanks, Br'er Herbert - I did do that last night and found that they were still there, so I'm glad I decided to keep the post as it was.