“Want to get away from it all? We offer do not offer you…Escape!”

You might remember a little over a week ago that I had to call an Overlooked Films on Tuesdays audible when the DVD of the 1948 film Escape I purchased from Finders Keepers turned out to be the similarly-titled suspense thriller from 1940, with Robert Taylor and Norma Shearer.  I e-mailed Martin Grams about this, just to make sure no one else purchased it (it’s still up on the site, so if you’re thinking about buying a copy…caveat emptor, and other Latin phrases) and as he has always in the past, graciously acknowledged his mistake and pledged to send me a replacement disc tuit suite.

Well, there have been new developments.  He e-mailed me Tuesday to tell me after checking his master copy he did not have the 1948 film.  Again, he was very apologetic (hey: I have, in the past, mistakenly bought DVDs that I already own—movie libraries can be voluminous even if you do maintain a database) and offered to send me a couple of freebies to rectify the error.  (I picked out a couple of cherce titles, too.)  I felt that this notice was in order, seeing as how I did mention that the 1948 Escape would be making an appearance at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear in the near future…so I would like to correct this error by saying “No dice, Chicago.”  (Note: the 1948 Escape is available for viewing at rarefilmm.com, in case you really have a jones to watch the movie.)  I suppose I could purchase it from another vendor…but I’ve come to rely on Martin for a confident guarantee of quality; he’s very particular about obtaining the best print of a film, and is constantly on the lookout for upgrades.

Martin is also well-known for churning out a book on some aspect of old-time radio a week.  (Okay, I’m exaggerating slightly—but there is a reason why I jokingly call him “the Isaac Asimov of OTR books” …he’s quite prolific.)  In addition, Martin's the organizer for the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention (MANC), an annual event held in Hunt Valley, MD dedicated to a lot of things I discuss here at TDOY: classic movies, vintage TV, old-time radio, etc.  MANC always features a superlative line-up of guest celebrities, and offers nostalgia vendors the opportunity to ply their wares of collectables and memorabilia.  This year, MANC will take place from September 15-17…and if you’re planning on going, I hope you have a keen time.  If you’re like me and have difficulty saving pennies (an all-too familiar lament here in the House of Yesteryear), Martin asked me if I would pass this along to all interested parties:

MANC GOES VIRAL

With increased mobile viewership and faster speeds, live streaming is expanding rapidly. Anyone with high speed internet can watch YouTube videos on their smart phone, iPad, laptop or computer. So it comes as no surprise that old time radio conventions attempt to move into the 21st century with this same service. Two years ago the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention broke ground by providing live video streaming from the convention. This meant people who lived great distances from Hunt Valley, Maryland, such as California, Alaska, England and Finland could watch the celebrity panels, slide show seminars and old-time radio re-enactments live as it happened... all from the comfort of their computer screen.

DaCast was the company that provided the service but there were three hiccups. One, the system was not free. Viewers had to pay for the service. In fear that video streaming would discourage locals from traveling to the hotel, the cost was set at $20 per day. Two, the hotel did not have superb high speed upload speeds, discovered only at the last minute. Three, a number of viewers discovered they themselves did not have high speed internet at their home and therefore could not watch the streaming smooth enough to enjoy the videos. (Others had no problem with the service.) Thankfully, these complexities have been resolved.

Courtesy of Facebook, there is no costs for video streaming and practically anyone using Facebook has to have some form of high speed internet to watch videos posted on Facebook anyway. This year, from September 15 to 17, the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention will be video streaming the slide show seminars, celebrity Q&A sessions and old-time radio re-enactments "live" through the Mid Atlantic Nostalgia Convention Facebook page. Viewers can comment during the live broadcasts and celebrity guests can answer questions viewers submit. (Celebrity guests this year include Robert Conrad, Bernie Kopell, Kent McCord, Robert Fuller, Luciana Paluzzi, Britt Ekland, Debra Paget, Kathy Garver, Geri Reischl, Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, among others). The service will be provided free.

Simply visit www.MidAtlanticNostalgiaConvention.com for a complete schedule of events (Eastern Time) and to access the video stream all one has to do is click "like" at www.Facebook.com/MidAtlanticNostalgiaConvention/.

Kowabunga, cartooners!  Pretty exciting stuff.  Keep an eye out for more Finders Keepers offerings to be reviewed on the blog, and we now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

Accidentally Preserved 3: Back in Training

Undercrank Productions, the independent DVD/Blu-ray label founded by silent film accompanist/historian Ben Model, has announced that the fourth volume of Accidentally Preserved, a DVD series featuring rare silent comedy shorts rescued from obscurity by dedicated film collectors, will be coming to an Amazon Create-a-Space near you this fall.  In addition to the usual line-up of mirthmakers (this time featuring Lige Conley, Glenn Tryon, and Bobby Ray, among many others), Accidentally Preserved 4 will spotlight a couple of real (reel) rarities: a one-reel edition of an early Colleen Moore feature, The Ninety and Nine (1922), and the two-reel version of a Mae Marsh Vitagraph feature, The Tides of Passion (1925—this is all that remains of the film).

I reviewed the first Accidentally Preserved disc here on the blog back in June of 2013, and Accidentally Preserved 2 got the ClassicFlix treatment a year later.  So I guess this means that Volume 3 is back in Thrilling Days of Yesteryear’s court, and I apologize for taking so long with this—I received my copy nearly a year ago in August, and just now got around to freeing the DVD from its shrink-wrap prison.  (I owe Ben reviews of the Marcel Perez and Musty Suffer releases, too—which I will pursue on future Thursdays.)  This time around, Ben pressed upon some of his fellow collectors to contribute some of their treasures for the newest AP project (Facebook amigos like Rob Farr and Ralph Celentano), and the result was yet another eclectic compilation sure to win the hearts of silent cinema fans—an excellent example of that song lyric from A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum: “Something for everyone—a comedy tonight!”

“The first two volumes did really well, and when I ran out of films from my own collection, collectors I knew kept offering me titles from their own archives for the series,” Ben said in a press release for AP3 from September of 1915.  “Collectors liked the idea of the DVDs, and felt as I did that these obscure gems deserve to be seen in a quality physical package. While hundreds of shorts were released in the 1920s, a huge amount are missing today. What's encouraging is that more of them turn up every year. In fact, one of the films on this DVD was won on eBay last year by a silent film collector here in NYC who's in the 7th grade.”

Among the curios present on AP3: an incomplete two-reeler (only the last reel survives) from the Weiss Brothers Artclass Productions studio, Half a Hero (1930) starring Billy Barty.  It was interesting to see Billy in something other than the Mickey McGuire comedies (where he played Mickey’s Kid Brudder), but the Half a Hero excerpt is a fairly lackluster affair, and seems to have been filmed as a silent before dialogue and sound effects were added in post-production (the dialogue is mostly out of sync with the actor’s mouths).  I did enjoy the one-reel Whose Baby? (1929) a bit more; Arthur Lake—The Man Who Would Be Dagwood in movies and on radio and TV—is the star (a Horace in Hollywood comedy from Universal) of an amusing short in which his plans to make time with a pretty girl (Gertrude Messenger, on whom I have a bit of a classic film crush) are scotched when he suddenly acquires an infant; foisted upon him by a mother doing some shopping.  I was aware that Lake did a number of comedy shorts for Universal in the 1930s (I don’t think many of them survived, sadly) but had not been briefed on his career in silents (he began making movies in 1924).

"Blooooooonnnnnndie!"

AP3 also features a comedy entitled Wanted, a Nurse (1915)—one of the many popular one-reel shorts starring Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew (Mrs. D is billed as Jane Morrow in this short) that were forerunners of what we now identify as situation comedy.  Wanted, a Nurse doesn’t rely on the typical Mack Sennett hijinks but instead is a sedate little story featuring Sidney as a millionaire who fakes an illness in order to be taken care of by nurse Jane.  A Malcolm Sebastian “Big Boy” comedy (I discussed some of them here) from 1928, Hot Luck, has a funny bit in which B.B. is passed down a line of firemen (their captain has decreed that children and pets are verboten in the firehouse) and then tossed out a window—prompting his father to race down stairs and a fire pole to catch his son before he hits the ground.  But since I’m an avowed curmudgeon when it comes to kiddie thespians, the charms of the “Big Boy” series are reluctantly lost on me.

I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I wasn’t entertained by the content on AP3.  The 1921 Bobby Ray comedy Service a lá Bunk is a sprightly romp, with some inventive gags (Bobby gets to work via a little pedal car; he’s employed as a restaurant cook and he parks the vehicle in one of his ovens, taking special care to hang a “Garage” sign as he shuts the door) and Ray himself reminds me a little of Stan Laurel (it could be his derby) …which is interesting since Ray and Oliver Hardy were teamed in a few shorts produced by Billy West for Cumberland Productions in the mid-20s.  My favorite comedy on AP3 is No Vacancies (1923), which stars Jay Belasco and Charlotte Merriam as a pair of newlyweds stymied by the housing shortage.  They hatch a scheme where once they accept positions as janitor and maid for the ritzy Gibralter [sic] Apartments (“you need blasting powder to get in”), they’ll force some of the tenants to move so that they can rent the vacated apartment.

Vacancies is crammed with funny gags and intertitles (my pick is the description for one character’s wife: “The life sentence he received at the altar”): a real estate salesman agrees to help Belasco and Merriam out by sending them to an address that’s the site of an empty field.  Opening up an envelope that the agent gave him, Belasco pulls out a note that reads: “Put up a tent.”  Blanche Payson, the formidable actress who made such a memorable impression in the Our Gang two-reeler Dogs is Dogs (1931) and Laurel & Hardy’s classic Helpmates (1932), appears in this one, as does one of my favorite character actors from the world of silents, “foxy grandpa” Jack Duffy (thanks, Steve Massa, for the description).  Duffy is also in Love’s Young Scream (1928), an amusing Paramount release produced by Al Christie—whose efforts often are ignored when the discussion focuses solely on the Sennett and Hal Roach studios as the premier laugh factories of their day.

The WTF award winner on AP3 is A Citrate Special (192?), a purported “prank film” (the studio remains a mystery—and the speculation is that this was not set for release) featuring a director (character veteran Thurston Hall) who receives a dose of “croton oil” courtesy of a mischievous prop man (played by real-life property artist Martin Wolfkeil) and finds he has to answer the call of nature…stat!  (For the uninformed, croton oil was a powerful laxative sold in the 1910s/1920s.)  This one puzzled the 120 experts at the “Mostly Lost” get-together held at the Library of Congress in 2014.  (The author of Citrate is credited as Lucy Bowels, which will give you an idea of the Rabelaisian humor in this one.)

AP3’s remaining comedy is The Whirlwind (1922), starring Joe Rock.  Rock was one-half of a successful duo (with Earl Montgomery) before becoming a producer and overseeing comedies with Stan Laurel, Jimmy Aubrey, and A Ton of Fun.

A glance through the credits thanking those people who backed AP3 on Kickstarter will reveal the name of your humble narrator: I love being able to finance these projects, and I’m particularly stoked at how Ben Model has grabbed the baton when it comes to both film preservation and making these rarities available on disc at a time when they’re dismissed as “a niche market” and overlooked by the major home video concerns.  (I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but my friend Cliff of In the Balcony fame once told me of a revealing convo he had with a representative from one of the big companies: “People won’t buy black-and-white movies unless John Wayne is in them.”)  I’ll have money in hand when Accidentally Preserved 4 is released, and I’ll do my best to let you know when that disc hits the mean streets of Create-a-Space.

B-Western Wednesdays: Riders of the Badlands (1941)

The titular horsemen of this programmer are a band of malcontents led by Mac Collins (Charles Starrett), and to help deal with the Collins gang’s deviltry, Texas Ranger Steve Langdon (Charles Starrett) is transferred to a detachment commanded by Captain T.L. Martin (Roy Barcroft).  Regarding those cast members in parentheses—it’s not a typo.  First, The Baddest Villain in All of Serialdom, Mr. Barcroft, is on the right side of the law for a change.  Second, Mac Collins and Steve Langdon look so much alike they could be twins…which is why they’re both played by the same actor.

The striking “Prince and the Pauper” similarities between Mac and Steve are first discovered by Steve’s fellow Ranger, “Lucky” Barton (Russell Hayden); Lucky and his new bride Celia (Kay Hughes) have the misfortune to be on a stagecoach robbed by the Collins mob, and that’s when Barton thinks: “That Collins looks a lot like a chap I know.”  Then tragic events unfold, with Barton swearing vengeance on Steve because Celia draws her rations after being shot by his doppelganger during the robbery.

We know, of course, that Steve is perfectly innocent—in fact, he was in the company of troubadour/part-time dentist “Bones” Malloy (Cliff Edwards) when the robbery went down.  The trouble is: no one believes Bones’ story (everyone is convinced he was in on the holdup, too).  Lucky, to his credit, starts to have second thoughts about Steve’s guilt after going all out to make sure his fellow Ranger is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law…but since Langdon has been sentenced to swing, it’s going to be a race against time if Lucky and Bones are to find the needed evidence to exonerate Steve before his date with the hangman.

Riders of the Badlands (1941) was the second of eight Columbia Pictures oaters to team B-Western cowboys Charles Starrett and Russell Hayden; Hayden was well-known as a co-star in many of the Hopalong Cassidy westerns produced in the 1930s, while Starrett joined Columbia in 1935 originally to replace the studio’s reigning cowboy king Tim McCoy.  Curiously, Starrett wasn’t particularly wild about the Western genre, and originally agreed to make them for a period of two years…but he became a victim of his own success, and stayed in the saddle for Columbia until 1952, chiefly on the strength of his Durango Kid series.

By the time Badlands went before the cameras, the Durango Kid films numbered just one: 1940’s The Durango Kid.  The franchise didn’t really go great guns (sorry about that) until The Return of the Durango Kid in 1945, so it’s a shame that it didn’t start earlier because in the case of Badlands they could have had four roles for Starrett—Mac, Steve, and their Durango Kid counterparts.  (Just a thought, mind you.)

I have a special affinity for the B-product put out by the Columbia folks…probably because they were so good at it; the studio’s origins were steeped in Poverty Row programmers (Columbia at one time was known as the CBC Film Sales Corporation; industry wags joked that the “CBC” stood for “Corned Beef and Cabbage”).  I pretty much love of all the franchises cranked out by Columbia (Boston Blackie, The Whistler, etc.), and my introduction to slapstick comedy was as a result of my exposure to two-reelers featuring Andy Clyde and the Three Stooges at an impressionable age.

So I was predisposed to like Riders of the Badlands…but was pleasantly surprised that it’s a most enjoyable little shoot-‘em-up.  Starrett and Hayden make an excellent team, and Badlands gets an extra assist from comic relief Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards; he substitutes his uke for a guitar but sings three songs in his inimitable style.  The lookalikes plot (scripted by Betty Burbridge) never gets too silly, though Andrew Leal’s mom (I affectionately refer to her as “Mother Grover”) might engage in a little eye-rolling if given the opportunity.  (As a side note: co-star Hayden even used the “twin” plot for a 1947 oater released by Screen Guild Productions, Trail of the Mounties.)  Journeyman Howard Bretherton (in the chair for several of the early Hoppy westerns, as well as 1933’s Ladies They Talk About) is credited with the direction, and he does a solid job (he helmed Starrett and Hayden’s West of Tombstone [1942] for the studio as well).

Befitting a Columbia production, you’ll spot a number of the studio’s stock players including Eddie Laughton, John Tyrrell, and Ethan Laidlaw, plus familiar Westerns faces like Edmund Cobb and George Chesebro.  Young Ilene Brewer plays Collins’ daughter Flo, a character they created for Badlands to make her outlaw pop more human, I suppose…but there’s a rather disturbing development at the denouement when we learn Flo is being sent to a girls’ boarding school (accompanied by second female lead Edith Leach).  I’m assuming that her Pa paid for his crimes but that would mean that he’s taken Steve’s place in the hangman’s noose, wouldn’t it?  She seems a bit calm and rational for a kid who just lost her Dad.

I obtained Riders of the Badlands on DVD through curious means: it’s available at Finders Keepers, my pal Martin Grams, Jr.'s video website…but I didn’t actually buy this one—I recall he sent it to me gratis for one reason or another.  I’m glad he did, because it was most enjoyable…and throughout the first ten minutes of the movie I marveled at how beautiful a print it was.  (Then the “Encore Westerns” logo appeared on the screen.)

Book Review: For Art’s Sake

My introduction to funnyman Ben Turpin was initially in an overview in Leonard Maltin’s The Great Movie Comedians, in which Len discusses a few “second-string” comedians that did not make the cut in the chapters that follow.  He once had a conversation about Ben with writer-director Tay Garnett: “I have some very definite opinions: Ben lacked a great deal of being a funny man.  He was funny only when placed in a ludicrous position—particularly one of grave danger—then, playing it dead seriously (perhaps a bit overseriously), which was the only thing he could do.”

Now, I would say that I hope author Steve Rydzewksi didn’t come across this quote when he was working on For Art’s Sake: The Biography & Filmography of Ben Turpin—his loving paean to the cockeyed comic who was one of the earliest cinematic mirthmakers, having started his movie career in 1907—but Garnett’s observations are in his book, so you can’t accuse Steve of showing favoritism towards his subject.  Despite Tay’s assertion that Turpin “lacked a great deal of being a funny man,” I have no qualms about calling him a “funnyman.”  At the very least, Ben was one of the hardest working clowns to ever cavort in front of a motion picture camera…and on that basis alone, attention must be paid.

Turpin’s name probably won’t register with anyone outside of silent comedy fans or classic films in general—but I’ll bet dollars to donuts people will recognize his face even if his surname is stuck on the tip of the tongue.  Born in N’awlins in 1869 to a family who operated a successful candy store, Bernard “Ben” Turpin would later strike out on his own (after a series of jobs including shipping clerk and bellhop) at seventeen, and for many years lived the life of a hobo—riding the rails and cadging meals at every opportunity.  Eventually, he drifted into the world of show business, working in traveling medicine shows, circuses, burlesque, and vaudeville.

Turpin’s famous stage act was impersonating Happy Hooligan, the popular comic strip character introduced by cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper in 1900.  Happy was a hobo who got into various scrapes and was distinguished by his crossed eyes and a tin can he wore for a hat; since Ben bore such a strong resemblance to the character, he decided to imitate him (as did a number of other folks in show business) and found great success in doing so.  Crossing his eyes for ten shows a day, however, resulted in Turpin waking up one morning to find that his right orb had decided to stay that way; the comic consulted a doctor, who told him that it could be corrected with an operation…but that he would then have to retire his Hooligan shenanigans.  Till the end of his life, Turpin told himself he would eventually have his eye fixed once he retired from show business…yet he never did, and it was a wise decision on his part.  As Maltin states in Great Movie Comedians: “Turpin’s fortune was his face.”

Ben began his movie clowning in 1907 (while he was still the studio janitor), performing in Essanay (founded by George K. Spoor and Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson—hence S an’ A) releases to the point where he became that studio’s bread-and-butter in one-reelers like Mr. Flip (1909), the earliest recorded film instance of someone taking a pie in the mush (and that person was, unsurprisingly, Turpin).  (Mr. Flip is included on the DVD set Slapstick Encyclopedia, which I mentioned in last week’s book review.)  Turpin also worked for IMP and American before returning to Essanay; by that time the studio had hired away Charlie Chaplin from Mack Sennett, and Chaplin featured Ben in his first three comedies for his new employer.  Ben always bestowed generous praise on The Little Tramp for giving him his big break in movies; the other recipient of the comedian’s effusive thanks was Chaplin’s old boss Sennett, who hired him in 1917.  With Sennett, Turpin would eventually become a major comedy star with a salary as high as $3,000 a week; the comic departed the studio in 1925 not because of any animosity toward his boss but because he was concerned about his wife, who was in ill health at the time.

After the death of Mrs. Turpin, Ben eventually returned to motion pictures; he made additional two-reelers for Sennett in 1926-27, and also a series of comedies for the Weiss Brothers beginning in 1928 (some of these shorts are featured on the VCI DVD collection Weiss-O-Rama).  But with that pushy upstart known as sound movies crashing the party, the kind of silent slapstick practiced by Turpin was no longer in vogue, and until his death in 1940 he made only sporadic film appearances (a good many cameos in films like The Love Parade and Million Dollar Legs) despite a potential comeback in the 1935 Warner’s two-reel comedy Keystone Hotel.  (WB only agreed to produce one short in this series…and when it proved to be a smash, the studio couldn’t afford to pay the salaries of the actors for further shorts because their agents weren’t stupid.)  Ben’s last film appearance was a hilarious contribution to the Laurel & Hardy feature Saps at Sea (1940); he was going to play a role in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) but his passing nipped his participation in the bud.

In his interview with Leonard Maltin, director Garnett observed: “I guess what I’m trying to say is that in my opinion, Turpin was not a mental giant.”  Well, he who laughs last laughs best; Ben was shrewd enough to manage his money in a number of rental properties throughout the L.A. area, and while other performers in the silent era had frittered away their earnings, Mental Giant Turpin had socked away enough to live comfortably until the Grim Reaper came a-callin’.  Turpin continued to work only because he wanted to.  I’ll confess that Garnett’s assessment of Ben colored my perception of the man for many years…but after reading Rydzewksi’s book I have come away with a brand-new appreciation of the man.  Steve chronicles how Ben Turpin worked harder than many of his fellow funsters to get laughs (his litany of bumps, scrapes, and bruises would make Buster Keaton envious), while lovingly painting a picture of a man who lived without pretense…his only vice seeming to be a need to induce people to forget their troubles through the gift of laughter.

Steve Rydzewski’s For Art’s Sake is profusely illustrated, with a bulging filmography for Turpin (that Steve admits is a work in progress) and over forty years of research collecting clippings from newspapers and trade magazines in addition to anecdotes obtained from people who worked with the movies’ funniest cockeyed clown.  If I had a tiny nitpick with his book, it’s that a lot of its content is a little too voluminous; on a number of occasions Turpin’s narrative comes to a halt to feature a newspaper account or two that essentially repeats what the individual has already read (this treasure trove of information might have been better served in an appendix or two).  Rydzewski would no doubt defend this by asserting: “I chose to make the book a compilation, a chronological documentary, and decided to let Mr. Turpin and his associates tell much of it themselves rather than paraphrase.”  You certainly can’t argue with that.

“Everything I do is wrong, all wrong,” Ben Turpin related in 1924 to Neil M. Clark in an interview for American magazine.  “That's why people laugh.  I don't look right.  I don't do right.  I try to carve a roast and the dog gets most of it.  I wear the wrong kind of tie, and it comes off in the peas.  I try to propose to my best girl, and I say the wrong things.  It isn't only comic looks that make a comedian.  He's got to act comic, too!”  Fans of silent film comedy will want this essential biography of this legendary slapstick clown for their bookshelves, and For Art’s Sake is also available in a Kindle edition (for those of us starved for space).

“And now it’s time for another special feature…”

Hello, Thrilling Days of Yesteryear faithful.  Honest Ivan here again...but not to sell you anything.  When the DISH Austerity Program first went into effect in the House of Yesteryear, I was a little crabby…and I may have even whined a little.  (How do I know this?  Well, when about half a dozen people say to me “Will you stop whining, ferchrissake?” that’s a little hard to ignore.)  I had reached a point where I started to sound like Karl Swenson in The Birds: “It’s the end of the world!”

But a month into our whittled-down package…I’m beginning to think that Nietzsche guy was right.  I speculated that when I first announced the DISH news this experience might be a positive one for TDOY, in that such a removal of this distraction might provide the impetus for more prolific blogging.  At the risk of tooting my own piccolo, I have been en fuego in the month of August.  While the ‘rents search in anxiety for something with which to be entertained (Mom is so sick of Dad’s constant watching of MSNBC that I think she’s on board with Giant Meteor in November), I sit smugly in Count Comfy von Chair with my tablet, composing blog post after blog post.  I’m not going to lie to you.  Occasionally, when I get wind that a movie I wanted desperately to see is playing on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™, I tear up a little.  But it passes quickly.

This post is going to serve as sort of a guide to the “new” Thrilling Days of Yesteryear—what you can expect in terms of content and such.  Not all of what I write about will appeal to everyone, so if you have an idea of what will appear on the blog on a daily basis you can plan your visits accordingly.  (In a perfect world, of course, you would not only read every utterance you would pledge complete and unwavering fealty to TDOY…but alas, we do not live in such a Utopian existence.)

Mondays – Book reviews.  Again, because I’m under oath—or am I?—I must truthfully admit the few times I reviewed a book here at TDOY in the past is when someone graciously sent me a free copy for the blog.  (No money exchanged hands, I cannot emphasize this enough.  It’s more “quo” than “quid”—if I may indulge in a little pun.)  In most cases, there were books that I paid for myself with TDOY funds simply because it was something I was excited about reading.  Since I invested in the new computer three years ago and it came equipped with Kindle. I have found that it’s relatively inexpensive to build an electronic library if you just keep an eye peeled for book bargains.  (BookBub is a great resource in giving you a heads-up on this.)  So I’m going to make a concerted effort to read more than I have previously (the Kindle allows me to effortlessly sit in Count von Comfy and accomplish this task), and we will see where that takes us.

Tuesdays – It was Todd at Sweet Freedom who first instituted “Overlooked Tuesdays” and in the beginning, I tried my darndest to structure TDOY so that movies that don’t always receive the greatest number of electrons here in the blogosphere would be featured on “Overlooked Films on Tuesdays.”  My track record for participating, sadly, was the very definition of “spotty”; I blame this on the fatigue and ennui I experienced after completing Serial Saturdays and Doris Day(s) on Mondays.  (More on this in a bit.)  Nevertheless, I have seen the light, brother, and am committed to making certain an overlooked motion picture gets its due on Tuesdays, be it an edition of “From the DVR” or “Grey Market Cinema.”

Wednesdays – If you’re going to place a bet in the pool of “Which feature will have the shortest shelf life at TDOY”, this might be the nominee that will pay off big time.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy a good shoot-‘em-up, it’s just that the number of economically-shot oaters in the Dusty Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Archives has diminished in recent years: many of my B-Westerns were relegated to the trash can (I decided about a year-and-a-half ago that I was going to stop recording movies at anything lower than SP speed) and the others wound up on the eBay runway.  I know I’ve got some on hand; it will just require my digging through a—what I call for lack of a better word—“pile” of DVD-R discs.  Still, B-Western Wednesdays is back with a vengeance, baby—so saddle up for some good ol’ rootin’-tootin’ fun (in memory of my dear departed Facebook compadre Lloyd Fonvielle).

Thursdays – Thursdays will be devoted to “silent cinema”; it can take the form of comedy shorts that I’ve acquired over the years (my recent review of Steve Massa’s Lame Brains and Lunatics no doubt inspired this) …or “On the Grapevine,” which spotlights DVDs purchased from Grapevine Video.  There may also be silent films both unknown and well-known tossed into the mix (discs purchased from Flicker Alley and Milestone Films).  And there may be an occasional “talkie” featured as well (I’ve socked away quite a few Alpha DVDs.).

Fridays – It’s Forgotten Noir Fridays!  (Don’t tell me you’ve relegated yesterday’s post to ancient history already.)  VCI Entertainment and Kit Parker Films’ acclaimed DVD series will be examined on a weekly basis, one movie at a time.  By the way, I made a lulu of a boo-boo yesterday in my review of I’ll Get You: according to friend of TDOY/film historian Richard M. Roberts, the Lippert film library was never “orphaned.”  “Robert Lippert Sr. sold the rights to those films to the Weiss Brothers in the early 60's, where Weiss Global International kept them in perpetual television syndication into the early 80's,” Richard wrote me in an e-mail.  “When Adrian Weiss passed away in the early 00's, the rights and materials to the Lipperts and all other surviving Weiss product was sold to Kit Parker, who has made them available ever since through VCI.”  I am so grateful that Richard is around to keep me honest.

I’ve made the decision that with the exception of an occasional post (like this one) or the announcement of swag to give away, weekends will be kind of quiet here at TDOY.  (Hey, I have book reports to write.)  Which means that Serial Saturdays will be retired (though I had two chapters left in The Black Widow—if I can locate the DVD I’ll try to wrap those up) and as for Doris Day(s)…well, again—a little honesty is in order.  I have to watch these episodes in order to transcribe the dialogue…and then a second time (I generally speed this up if I’m in a hurry) for the screen grabs.  I just don’t have the intestinal fortitude for this anymore (and my recent diabetes diagnosis doesn’t help, either—Doris is awful gooey at times).  Maybe if MeTV decides to add it to its schedule (I’ve seen the traffic for Mayberry Mondays shoot up since they started airing RFD reruns, and I think I thank them for that) I may apply some paddles but for now you’ll just have to settle for memories of Leroy B. Semple Simpson.  (Andrew “Grover” Leal keeps insisting I’ve lost the Doris DVDs…this is simply not true, though I sometimes wish it were.)

So there you have it: the new Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.  (I feel like I just participated in a network upfront.)  Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and meet me back here Monday.