Midnight at the oasis

Friday morning of last week found me keeping my appointment with the cataract specialist…and yes, I do have some small cataracts but the doc says it’s nothing to set anyone’s hair on fire about just yet.  He’s going to monitor both those and my Fuchs’ dystrophy (he concurred with the retina guy…but apparently it’s not full-blown serious yet either), and in the meantime, he has prescribed for me a stronger pair of eyeglasses to deal with my vision problem.  (Yes, I know that was my initial diagnosis…but I am not a medical professional…though I did play one on the short-lived sitcom Where’s That Scalpel?)

Despite the arid desert that is the DISH austerity program (and for what I had to shell out for these eyeglasses, the program will likely continue in perpetuity) I’ve been fortunate to find the occasional oasis in our scaled-back programming.  One of the channels we have is something called HDNet Movies, which shows an array of movies old and new (mostly new) and this month of August they have a number of Hitchcock movies scheduled, including TDOY favorites like Saboteur, Rear Window and Vertigo.  The problem is that you also have to wade through drek like The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl; yesterday, my father was entranced by a little offering entitled Space Chimps.  (I swear I’m not making that up.)  What perplexes me is that when we had our former DISH package…HDNet Movies was MIA among the channel line-up.  It’s like it’s offered up as a sop to those folks who have to nickel-and-dime the packaging.

To back up this radical theory, DISH has bestowed upon us a “freeview” of MGM HD and FXM for the month of August. (I’m not kidding—I think they feel sorry for me.)  I got a gander at MGM HD when we had the U-Verse; the movies are shown unedited (and often letterboxed, which I heartily endorse) and except for an “intermission” in the middle (they take time to show you promos and coming attractions) they’re mostly uncut.  They’ve got some good stuff on the schedule; I recorded ClassicBecky fave Richard III (the 1995 version with Ian McKellen) and there’ll be some vintage offerings like The Monster That Challenged the World, Chicago Confidential, and Die, Monster, Die!  FXM’s morning schedule (which they call “FXM Retro”) does show their movies commercial-free; I availed myself of the opportunity to see Seven Thieves again the other day, and it was a most enjoyable experience.  (Sure—it’s no TCM…but you don’t turn down a glass of water when you’re dying of thirst.)

While I’m on the subject of movies, I’d kind of like to take a brief moment to plug a couple of current crowd-funding projects to restore some silent classics.  My Facebook amigo Eric “Dr. Film” Grayson is spearheading a Kickstarter effort to restore the 1918 feature Little Orphant Annie—an early film starring silent cinema legend Colleen Moore and based on the famous poem by James Whitcomb Riley.  (In fact, Riley himself makes a brief appearance in the film—at the beginning and end, and it’s believed that this is the only extant footage of ol’ J.W.)  The Library of Congress is providing their prints for this project, and their material is far superior to the current ones now in circulation.  There are a number of contribution levels on this one: if you can afford the $25 kick-in, you’ll get a DVD of the finished restoration…thirty simolians will get you a Blu-ray.

Sadly, the household budget dictated that I could only contribute to one project (I’ve not had any problems with Kickstarter, so I went with Annie)—the other is one that his Filmship is also involved in; a GoFundMe effort to restore the surviving print of the 1927 feature Little Mickey Grogan.  In many ways, this is even a more important project; it’s a rarity from the FBO studios (later absorbed into R-K-O) and the last silent feature from actress Lassie Lou Ahern—she, along with Diana Serra Cary (a.k.a. “Baby Peggy”), is one of the few surviving performers from that era.  I really regret being too tapped out to kick in for this one (fingers crossed that there’ll be some money at the end of this month and the project will still be taking donations) but maybe a few of you out in Yesteryearland have some spare change rattling around in that sofa.  I thank you.

Rethink unpossible

As you’ve no doubt noticed, there are quite a few old newspapers piled up in the driveway of the blog…and while I have been occupied with an outside project or two, the inactivity is due mainly to sloth, which may very well be my favorite of the Seven Deadly Sins.  Okay, maybe I’m being a little harsh on myself.  I’ve written a piece or two at the Radio Spirits blog—commemorating the anniversaries of Night Beat and The Adventures of Superman—and that review of Without Warning! (1952) I alluded to in my last post is now up at ClassicFlix…though this is cheating a bit; I wrote that last year.

I’ve not been idle in the movie-watching department, however; I took advantage of the Netflix trial period to catch two documentaries that I had read about in past reviews and mentally attached to my “must-see” list.  Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five (2012) was most assuredly time well-spent (my father had a dissenting opinion, and rose from his recliner about a half-hour into the movie), but I can’t say the same for Room 237 (2012)—a quirky offering that reads entirely too much into Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) (one individual posits that Shining is an allegory about the genocide of Native Americans while another argues that it’s an admission that Kubrick faked the moon landing for the television audience back in 1969).  I probably would have enjoyed 237 more if I had a higher opinion of Shining, whose cult has eluded me ever since I saw it back in the day.  I also watched a couple of movies that I DVR’d during a free Showtime weekend: Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013) features a performance from Forest Whitaker that surpasses his Oscar-winning turn in The Last King of Scotland (2006) (seriously, he’s first-rate…but the film itself has problems).  I was also amazed at how much I enjoyed Philomena (2013), which I didn’t think I would but I identified most strongly with Steve Coogan’s atheist journalist, who lends a helping hand to a woman (Judi Dench) who had her son stolen from the nuns at the convent in which she was placed after her teen pregnancy.  (I recorded this one for Mom, who’s quite the fan of Dame Judi; she loved it, and even my Dad stuck around for it.)

In the classic movie arena on Netflix, I got to see Raw Deal (1948) in its entirety; the first time I watched it back in the 90s I dozed off a couple of times due to lack of rest.  (Sensational noir with TDOY faves Claire Trevor and Marsha Hunt.)  I also enjoyed The River’s Edge (1957), which a couple of folks recommended to me via Facebook after I posted a link to a Salon.com article about the other River’s Edge (from 1986), which I revisited at about the same time (DVR’d it from the MGM HD channel).  The 1957 Edge features Ray Milland at his nastiest, though I was so underwhelmed by Anthony Quinn I was kind of hoping sexy red-headed Debra Paget would wind up with Ray.  (I always forget Paget is in House of Strangers, which I caught on Fox Movie Channel this morning.)   The bulk of the classic movies I’ve caught lately emanates (of course) via The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™, where I’ve been in the throes of a mini-John Barrymore festival with viewings of Svengali (1931), The Mad Genius (1931) and Counsellor at Law (1933; this one is a piperoo).  I’ve been trying to “clean up” the DVR of late; I caught Doubt (2008) courtesy of TCM (good performances but I wanted to hit Meryl Streep’s nun with a ruler) and Todd Haynes’ Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven (2002) via Cinemax (another movie that I thought would be cinematic vegetable but instead was a most gratifying experience).

I also mentioned in the last blog post a bit o’trouble with the AT&T U-Verse people.  We signed up with U-Verse in mid-January of 2014, and both Los Parentes Yesteryear and I knew that when our year was up, the amount of money we generously give them each month to maintain contact with the outside world would increase…so I called U-Verse to see if I could do a little shrewd horse trading.  AT&T and other cable-like folks really don’t want you to leave; when you call them and state “We’re going to cancel our service” they immediately transfer you to what they call a “retention specialist,” who’s prepared to do whatever it takes to keep you doing bidness with them.  Mostly lying their asses off.  (Oh, I forgot to explain this to Mom the day I called U-Verse, by the way; I thought she was going to have a heart attack when I said “We’re going to cancel our service.”)

The U-Verse rep explains to me that if we agree to take on their U-Voice service for a year we could expect to be paying roughly the same monthly rate for TV and Internet.  Truth be told, I wasn’t particularly wild about doing this—we use Magic Jack as our phone service (and you don’t even want to get me started on that, or we’ll be here for a lifetime)—but Mom had made it clear that it was either re-negotiate or go back to Charter.  (Talk about being in Hell with your back broken.)  So, under the auspices of it being a “second emergency landline” (the rep’s phrase—not mine) I agree to the deal, and ask how much effort it will take to get this set up.  No problemo, he says in his faux Spanish—all I have to do is plug our phone into the phone jack of the U-Verse modem the following day.

I’m sure once I got off the phone with this mook he and his fellow retention specialists had a hearty guffaw at my expense…because when I followed the instructions he gave me the set-up refused to work, and so I had to call Customer Service to find out what the hell was going on.  That is when I learned that the order to start the U-Voice had been bumped up to January 22 (I made the call on the 16th)…and what’s more, I would have to wait until U-Verse sends me another modem via UPS.  (The modem we had was, I thought, perfectly fine…but they argued we need one with a battery backup.)  The January 22 deadline came and went, and was then bumped up to the 26th.  February 7 was the next date after the 26th had passed.

In the meantime, because we’ve not started the U-Voice, the amount of our service soars to a level that generates much profanity from Ma and Pa Shreve.  I had been proactive in watching the bill online to see if it would change, and when it did I spoke to another service rep, who assured me we would not see this amount on the paper statement they send us.  Well, he lied.  He lied a lot.  (That’s where the parental swearing came into play.)  After I got the bill, I called U-Verse and spoke with a woman who told me that this was the amount we would be paying from now on.  Then I started swearing, and asked to speak to a supervisor to straighten things out.

As of this post, we have received the modem; I was able to connect it with little trouble (well, except I had to reset the wireless connection—that was a small pain in the tuchus) and in AT&T’s favor, sending them the modem back isn’t too difficult—you just drop it off at a UPS store, fill out a metric ton of paperwork, and they box it up for you.  But the U-Verse experience left a sour taste in our collective mouths here at Rancho Yesteryear; Mom has already said we’re crawling back to Charter next year, something I thought I’d never hear from her.

I saw this article at Raw Story, Salon and a few other places (it was originally published at Alternet)—it explains why the cable industry is so horrible (they single out Bombast Comcast, a company so loathsome they’ve started to refer to themselves as “Xfinity”), and tells a few jaw-dropping tales of mistreated customers.  If anyone out there in Blogland is employed in that capacity…you should really look into getting into a more honorable line of work, like cooking meth or working for the USPS.

Adventures in Netflix

Well, it did not take long for my resolution to be more productive here on the blog in 2015 to blow away into the fierce four blogosphere winds; my inactivity is due to many factors: pure dagnasty laziness, my mother’s crossword puzzle obsession, and a battle currently raging with the alleged competency that is customer service at AT&T U-Verse.  (I will talk about this another time when there aren’t quite as many swear words.)  But if I had to lay the blame for my sloth at the feet of someone, Netflix would be the clear winner.

Here’s the straight dope (from a straight dope): you may recall in 2014 that I revealed my diabolical scheme to purchase a Blu-ray/DVD player for the TV in the living room so that I could watch some of my expanding Blu-ray collection—not to mention offerings from the once-healthy-now-depleted dusty Thrilling Days of Yesteryear archives—in the comfort of Count Comfy von Chair.  The player that I procured with some Amazon gift card largesse (thanks to sister Debbie and company) is also equipped with WiFi, and when the player was delivered by the skilled and proficient USPS (I say that with a heavy dose of sarcasm, by the way) no one was more surprised than I when it proved to be a breeze to set up.  This might be due to the fact that I glanced at the instructions beforehand…but I will neither confirm nor deny this.  (Also, too: the player did not come with a USSB cord…fortunately I had prepared for such emergencies.)

So I have the player…I hook it up…and naturally, I want to test out my new toy, so I decided to sign up for a free month at Netflix.  I’ve been a Netflix customer a couple of times in the past, and I never had any controversial issues other than the fact that I rarely got around to watching some of the rental DVDs, and thusly had difficulty justifying the expense.  With the streaming, there’s no problem: I watch the movies I want, and there’s no envelopes to return or any of that hassle.  I can see why Netflix, Hulu Plus and the other services available on the WiFi portion of the player are an attractive option to folks who are declaring their independence from cable (and good for them, I say).  Los Parentes Yesteryear cannot exercise that option because they enjoy sportsball too much…and if my Dad were to suddenly be separated from his cable news I can’t promise you things wouldn’t get ugly.

So in addition to some Radio Spirits assignments and some ClassicFlix stuff (here’s a review of 1928’s A Lady of Chance that’s just gone up recently) the rest of my time has been spent watching movies on Netflix.  What do I have to report?  Let’s find out.

Fantasia (1940)/Fantasia 2000 (1999) – Previously, I was oh-for-three in attempting to watch what many people consider Walt Disney’s greatest animation achievement: the 1940 classic Fantasia.  I bought the VHS in 1991 and tried to watch it on two separate occasions, falling fast asleep within the first half-hour every time.  The videocassette eventually got sold and I later purchased the 2000 DVD release…only to start snoring a third time, again around the thirty-minute mark.  (That bit o’DVD Sominex later got sold as well.)

I thought it might have just been me; maybe I was just lethargic due to lack of rest.  But, no—while I was successful on the fourth try (though I did nod off a couple of times) to see all of Fantasia, that movie is a sure fire cure for insomnia.  I know it’s heralded for its innovations in animation; I know it made great strides in stereophonic sound; I know it’s an acid trip for some.  But honest to my grandma, I think this film may be one of the most overrated I’ve ever watched.  Maybe it’s the classical music that puts me to sleep, but I’m pretty sure it’s the repetitive nature of the segments in the movie that does the trick.  With the possible exception of the Dance of the Hours ballet (the one with the hippos, gators, etc.), every sequence in Fantasia follows the same pattern: a period of tranquility…then upheaval…then tranquility again.  You could argue that this is due to the nature of music chosen, and I probably wouldn’t offer up too much of a rebuttal except for a yawn.

This is not to say there aren’t entertaining moments in Fantasia: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice with Mickey Mouse (the cartoon that laid the groundwork for the feature) is always fun, and I like the Night on Bald Mountain sequence (though I’ll admit I giggle when I hear the music, knowing it was the theme for radio’s Escape).  But the movie as a whole is way too long for my attention span…and you’re going to think me positively mahd but I actually preferred Fantasia 2000 (1999; which I also watched) more.  (I loved the shorter running time and variety of the segments in that—my favorite is probably the Al Hirschfeld-inspired Rhapsody in Blue number.)

Canon City (1948) – This classic semi-documentary film noir had been on my “must-see” list for a long time: Canon City tells the tale of a daring prison break at the Colorado State Penitentiary in 1947, masterminded in the movie by TDOY fave Jeff Corey (one of his best onscreen turns).  Scott Brady plays the lifer who’s reluctantly dragooned into going along with a dream cast of cons that includes Whit Bissell, Stanley Clements, DeForest Kelley, Henry Brandon and Charles Russell.  Actual Colorado State Pen warden Roy Best plays himself (and was smart to keep his day job), and silver screen Dick Tracy Ralph Byrd plays a screw who’s taken hostage.  If you didn’t know this one was written and directed by Crane Wilbur you’d swear it was an Anthony Mann noir…no doubt due to the superb cinematography that’s the work of the incomparable John Alton.  You can hear Great Gildersleeve announcer John Wald as a radio commentator (the ubiquitous Reed Hadley is the narrator), and City also features appearances by John Doucette, Howard Negley and Mabel Paige as the elderly hostage who waits patiently for Corey to be distracted so that she can introduce him to the business end of a hammer.  Definitely in the running as one of the best “new” classic movies I’ve seen so far this year.

Down Three Dark Streets (1954) – Federal man Zack Stewart (Kenneth Tobey) is working three separate cases: he’s on the trail of a bandit named Joe Walpo (Joe Bassett, who guns down gas station attendant William Schallert in the first few minutes of the movie); investigating a hood (Gene Reynolds) who’s taking the fall for the participants in a stolen car racket; and looking into the matter of a woman (Ruth Roman) who’s being blackmailed by a thug for an insurance settlement of $10,000.  Stewart gets a phone tip from a woman named Brenda Ralles (Suzanne Alexander) about one of the cases…and is gunned down by an assailant when he and supervisor John “Rip” Ripley (Broderick Crawford) pay Brenda a visit.

In order to solve Stewart’s murder, Ripley will have to close each of the cases in this better-than-you’d-think procedural that also features good performances from Martha Hyer, Marisa Pavan, Casey Adams (I swear that guy’s been everywhere lately), Claude Akins and Harlan Warde.  (OTR veteran William Johnstone plays Brod’s boss, and Myra Marsh is also on hand.)  I decided to watch Dark Streets after recently seeing director Arnold Laven’s Without Warning! (1952—hopefully the review will be up on the CF site soon); the killer’s identity is pretty obvious but I liked the movie as a whole (film noir fans should definitely check it out).  (Incidentally, Laven has a bit part as a reporter in the aforementioned Canon City.)

Cop Hater (1958) – I was hoping for a hat trick with this one; I’ll dispense with the details since it was previously reviewed by TDOY cub reporter Philip Schweier on the blog.  I wanted to see it because of its 87th Precinct origins but to be honest I thought Cop Hater was a boring talkfest that only really comes to life in the final few minutes of the film (and even I thought that plot resolution strained credibility).  It was fun to see Jerry Orbach as a teenage hood named “Momzer” (those of you familiar with Yiddish will get the joke) and Vincent Gardenia has a nice role as a gimpy (and sweaty) informer.  Still, I definitely thought the short-lived TV show was better.

Carry On Cleo (1964)/Carry On Cowboy (1966) – Because there are a few movies from Britain’s “Carry On” franchise that I haven’t seen, I’ve been DVR’ing as many as I can when The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ runs them on Saturday mornings.  These two haven’t come up in the Tee Cee Em rotation yet so I gave them a look-see: Carry On Cowboy is one of the weakest I’ve seen, and I think that’s because the jokes that are often featured in these films—some so old they’re collecting pensions—are funnier because they’ve been filtered through a British accent.  Cowboy is supposed to be a Western spoof, and since most of the characters use exaggerated “Western” drawls the threadbare verbal gags just fall flat.  Here’s a quick synopsis: Johnny Finger (Sid James), a.k.a. The Rumpo Kid (which may have been the only thing I laughed at, since it reminded me of “Ramblin’ Syd Rumpo” from the BBC radio comedy Round the Horne), terrorizes the citizens of Stodge City until sanitation engineer Marshal P. Knutt (Jim Dale) comes in to “clean up the town” (yes, he’s mistaken for a lawman).  Cowboy showcases the usual members of the troupe: Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey (funny as a fey Indian), Joan Sims, Angela Douglas, Peter Butterworth and Bernard Bresslaw (it was the first Carry On film for the latter two).

Carry On Cleo is considered by many devotees to be the funniest of the series…but I’m not sure I can agree with that, even though Cleo has its moments.  Sid James plays Marc Antony (“Blimus!”), Kenneth Williams is Julius Caesar, and Amanda Barrie makes a lovely Cleopatra—but the focus is on Hengist Pod (Kenneth Connor) and Horsa (Jim Dale), two Britons captured and taken to Rome to be sold into slavery.  (I did guffaw heartily at some early scenes where Romans Caesar and Marc Antony go on about England’s beastly weather.)  Joan Sims and Charles Hawtrey are also in this one, as are future Doctor Who Jon Pertwee and The Rag Trade’s Sheila Hancock (who exits the movie far too soon) as Hengist’s wife Senna.  (No, the jokes don’t get any better.)

The Panic in Needle Park (1971) – My Facebook compadre Kingo Gondo and I were having a conversation about the DVD inavailability of this second directorial effort from Jerry Schatzberg (TCM had recently run his 1973 film Scarecrow) and even though I recorded it off Fox’s movie channel (back in their pre-commercial interruption days) I’d been remiss in giving it my undivided attention.  Al Pacino (who’s also in Scarecrow) has this one to thank for landing him the plum role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972); in The Panic in Needle Park he plays a drug dealer who falls for a young girl (Kitty Winn) and proceeds to transform her into a heroin addict (and by that token, a prostitute).  It’s controversial, to be sure—though it’s a bit tame today in light of movies that have followed; I found myself fascinated by the film (you can’t help but like the couple even though they walk on the seamy side) and enjoyed seeing future stars Raul Julia (as Winn’s ex-boyfriend) and Paul Sorvino, not to mention The Rockford Files’ Joe Santos and Hill Street Blues’ Kiel Martin.

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974) – And speaking of seamy couples…this heralded drive-in classic was one I also hadn’t seen (though I remember seeing television ads for it when it was first released): Peter Fonda (he’s the crazy one) and Adam Roarke are a pair of NASCAR hopefuls who rob a grocery store (the manager is an uncredited Roddy McDowall) of $150,000 in order to finance their auto racing ambitions.  They’re unable to shake loose hitchhiker Susan George (the dirty one), and must elude unorthodox cop Vic Morrow—who’s following in hot pursuit with all weaponry and vehicles at his disposal.

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry features mucho muscle cars and many vehicles running into things and each other; this sort of thing isn’t really my movie preference but its reputation was such I felt obligated to check it out.  Its rep is puzzling; with the exception of Roarke (and even he can be a pill at times), there’s not many sympathetic personages among the main characters…and the chemistry between Fonda’s Larry and George’s Mary is such that I kept hoping he’d run over her with that damn car.  (Any movie with Vic Morrow in it is generally going to feature him as a dirtbag, no question.)  Some folks will find the ending of this one tragic…but I sighed a sigh of relief, knowing it was all over.  (Directed by John Hough, who also did The Legend of Hell House—which might explain why McDowall is in this one.)

I hope I’ve still got the hang of this blogging thing…

Well, since I’ve been officially in slack mode for the past month I figured it might be a good time to throw something up on the blog in the form of an explanation for that slackitude.  There have been a number of important goings-on here at Rancho Yesteryear that have had a profound effect on my blogging output, and while I haven’t been able to completely iron out the kinks I’m hoping that some of the measures I’ve taken to mow the grass that’s grown will ensure a bit more activity and the return of some of our beloved (and not-so-beloved) features.

A few weeks back, my office chair decided to put in its retirement papers…and since I’m still interviewing candidates for a replacement I haven’t been able to sit down in front of the computer for prolonged periods of time.  Right now, I have two temp chairs filling in—one of which leaves my ass numb after ten minutes…the other fifteen.  I’ve got a third chair that does rather well when I have to sit and watch movies…but it comes up woefully short whenever typing and other computer-related duties need attending.  (Clearly the solution involves funding for a new chair…but that’s a bit down the road a ways.)

America’s favorite (and still wacky) elderly couple—or “Los Parentes Yesteryear,” as Brandie of True Classics calls them—have both been experiencing some mild health concerns of late; it’s nothing too serious, just the usual complaints when you’re past the “spring chicken” stage…but nevertheless, it’s a situation that I’ve had to monitor closely.  As such, I felt it was better for all involved if I relinquished my position as associate editor at ClassicFlix in order to free up time for this, and so I tendered my resignation at the end of January.  I’ve not completely severed ties with CF; I will still contribute the occasional movie review and write their “Where’s That Been? (It Must Have Fallen Behind the File Cabinet)” column on a monthly basis—you can access those reviews by clicking on the ClassicFlix logo in the sidebar on the right, and I hope to also include links to these reviews in the “Movies” section of that sidebar before too long.

I included the above picture to show you that the ‘rents are still in the pink as they pose for a birthday snap (Dad's 82nd) with their favorite grandson.

I guess the big news around the House of Yesteryear is that in mid-January, the Entertainment Committee got together and voted to rid ourselves of CharredHer Cable…because my mother had grown weary of the expense (here’s where I make the old joke that the bill was large enough to be a William).  I was appointed head of a sub-committee to look into cheaper options (my fault, really—this is what happens when you leave the room to get a refill on iced tea) and our first choice was DirecTV…but when the competent DirecTV technician came out to install the dish, he informed us that it would not be feasible due to the large amount of “forest” surrounding the house.  (We do not live in B.F.E., by the way—it's just our neighborhood is rather heavily shaded, treewise.)

Being denied DirecTV wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because on the day the tech was coming out to install (or in our case, not install) the system, the word came down that DirecTV was no longer carrying The Weather Channel…a development that displeased my mother, because watching The Weather Channel is just something old people do.  The dispute, from what I have gleaned reading accounts on the Internets, is not unlike the recent kerfuffle between Charter and Atlanta’s WSB-TV; The Weather Channel is demanding a payment increase from DirecTV, and DirecTV has responded with sand and some pounding instructions.

That’s all well and good…but this doesn’t explain the brouhaha that’s going on between DirecTV and INSP: DirecTV has removed that station from its lineup despite the fact that INSP doesn’t charge them anything to carry the family-friendly programming cable channel.  (The fact that INSP has both The Virginian and The High Chaparral would seem to me having it available to your subscribers a must.)  If you’re a DirecTV subscriber, and you’d like to make your opinion known on this issue, the details are below (click to embiggen):

Well, since DirecTV was out…we had to go with Plan B, and on January 17 we welcomed AT&T U-Verse into our home.  I’ve heard mixed reactions to U-Verse (though admittedly more than a few of them are on those Comcast Xfinity commercials…and we don’t get Xfinity in our area) but we’ve not had any problems with it so far.  We sprung for the HD option, and to say that both parents have fallen in love with it would be a mild understatement; Mom has been raving about it ever since it was installed.  There are two big pluses with the U-Verse: 1) we’ve got a DVR now, which allows me to record movies that I’d like to watch without having to stay up later than normal or set my alarm for same, and 2) both televisions—the one in the living room and my room—get the same programming…which means The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ is now available for viewing in me boudoir.  (Oh, and we get both The Weather Channel and INSP…so suck it, DirecTV.)

There were a few sacrifices made: the U-Verse system doesn’t carry our Me-TV affiliate (I’ve had a couple of people tell me on Facebook and Twitter that it’s available on their systems but it’s not made it here yet), and I also lost Antenna TV and Movies!  But on the other hand, I watched those stations only because I couldn’t get Tee Cee Em in the back bedroom.  We’re also getting the Encore channels—which means my Gunsmoke habit has started up again via Encore Westerns, and we also have access to FX Movies, IFC and Sundance.  (Most of these, sadly, are now riddled with commercials, for which I can only say: boooooo.)

Several of my friends have successfully cut the cable umbilical cord, and I say more power to them; I would love to do likewise but the ‘rents have got a sports jones that constantly needs scratched and not having cable simply wouldn’t be an option for them.  (As for Father—well, he’s bummed because The Pentagon Military Channel isn’t available in HD.)  What we’ll probably do is keep U-Verse for a year…and then if we can’t make a deal with Monty Hall when the year is up we’ll go back to Charter…and then play one off the other the way people used to do by moving from apartment to apartment when the rent was due.  (Don’t try this at home, kids.)

So, I’m hoping to get some reviews of the movies I’ve been DVRing like a madman up soon, and also pick up where we left off on Serial Saturdays and Doris Day(s) in the bargain.  Working on some outside projects kept me from cobbling together a Coming Distractions in January…but it’s the usual 31 Days of Oscar programming on TCM, so you’ve not missed much.  I do want to mention that the 31 Days of Oscar Blogathon is currently underway in the same time period (February 1-March 3), hosted by Once Upon a Screen, Outspoken & Freckled and Paula’s Cinema Club—I haven’t officially RSVP’d, but if all goes right I may put forth a post for that.

I have, however, committed to the Sleuthathon—a ‘thon that will doff our respective deerstalkers to the movie and TV detectives of yesteryear, and will be hosted by our good friend Fritzi at Movies Silently.  When I approached her about this on Twitter, I originally suggested doing a piece on my favorite small screen crime drama of all time, Naked City…and then a closer examination of the rules and regs revealed to me that the focus is just on detectives—cops is verboten.  So I had to change to an examination of the cult detective series Johnny Staccato, starring future auteur John Cassavetes.  The Sleuthathon gets underway on March 16th (it’s a two-day affair), so skate on over if you’re interested in participating.

Three other blogathons that I have not officially inked a deal with (okay, more like two) but will probably throw in once I see how my schedule looks include the Big Stars on the Small Screen Blogathon, which will be hosted at How Sweet It Was on March 20 and 21.  (Previously unknown trivia fact: the proprietress of How Sweet it Was and Once Upon a Screen are one and the same!  Think about it—have you ever seen a picture of them together?  I thought not…)

The Diamonds and Gold Blogathon, hosted by the gal reverently referred to here at Rancho Yesteryear as Our Lady of Great Caftan and the indestructible Rich from Wide Screen World, is scheduled to take place from April 12-13.  Caftan Woman’s subject is compelling in its simplicity: select an actor or actress who continued to work in films well into their twilight years…and ignore the fact that a good many of them probably had to, because 1) actors have to act and 2) some of them also have to eat.  I’ve told Her Caftaness that TDOY will review one of my very favorite silver screen Westerns, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), which features a man who continued to want to perform even after they nailed his coffin shut: Harry Davenport.  (Okay, I may have made this last part up.)

Last—but only because I grouped these by date—and certainly not least is The Romantic Comedy Blogathon, hosted from May 1-4 by Carole & Co. and Backlots, a formidable pair of bloggers that nobody can deny (whoopee!).  The title is self-explanatory; it’s a tribute to the great romantic/screwball comedies of the movies, and I do plan to participate…I just need to nail down a topic.  It’s one that’s right up the ol’ Thrilling Days of Yesteryear alley.

So if you’ve been sitting around and staring at a blank blog, wondering what cinematic subjects you could possibly explore, you have no excuse for not participating in any of these fine events.  (Well, unless you’re trapped in a cave right now.  Or dead.  But we’ll need a note from your mother.)  Okay, my ass is now telling me that my fifteen minutes is up, so I’ll leave things where they’re at and get back to the blog soon.

Classic TV Horror Host Blogathon: Svengoolie – Keeping the Tradition Alive

This essay is Thrilling Days of Yesteryear’s contribution to the Classic TV Horror Host Blogathon, being hosted by the Classic TV Blog Association from October 24-31.  For a complete list of the participants and their posts, check out the list at the CTBA here.

Back in the good old days when TV sets only had three channels, old movies were a programming staple of local stations.  They showed them in the morning, they showed them in the afternoon, they showed them in the evening…and if they didn’t have to sign off too early, they’d also stick a feature or two on The Late, Late Show.  It was the best of times…it was the worst of times.  “Worst” in that a lot of these classics were often interrupted by a plethora of commercials (there’s a scene in The Apartment [1960] that nicely spoofs this).  “Best” in that inane talk shows (I’m talking to you, Katie Couric) or insipid “reality” shows were rarely on the boob tube radar.

Friday and Saturday nights, as a rule, were reserved for movies with a horrific bent.  I mean no offense to the horror fans out there…but out of the gazillions of fright flicks churned out by Hollywood and independents since the dawn of cinema, a few of them are quite good…and the rest of them are just plain odious hunks of fromage.  And if your local station bought a package to show the good horror movies…chances are they had to screen the terrible ones as well.

That’s where the “horror host” came in.  Practically every major TV market had one, some station employee who’d dress up several times a year (even if it wasn’t Halloween) as a haint or witch or mad scientist to provide a little macabre levity during the presentation of the horror films on TV…all for a little extra mazoola in their paycheck.  Many of them went on to transcend their local origins to become pop culture icons.  A lot of us may not remember the individual generally recognized as the first horror host (whose countenance graces the banner of this blogathon), Vampira (Maila Nurmi), but you’ve probably seen her performance (which was sadly ignored when Oscar time rolled around) in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).  John Zacherle, who turned 94 this September 26, was a popular Philadelphia and N.Y.C. horror flick host (known as both “Zacherley” and “Roland”) who scored a nationwide Top Ten pop hit in 1958 with Dinner with Drac.

Even if you never watched any of these hosts (probably because you weren’t in the viewing area), their names may be familiar if you’re student of horror: Ghoulardi, Sammy Terry, Sir Graves Ghastley, Moona Lisa.  They’d crack jokes and perform skits in between the dreck they were forced to show, with audiences who were hip to their atrocious puns and black humor.  Just about anybody you talk to from the baby boomer generation can provide fond memories of spending unproductive hours in front of a TV set “turning your mind to garbage,” as my mother so colorfully (and really, in hindsight, truthfully) described it.

When I was an impressionable young lad—and this is a subject I’ve talked about on the blog before—growing up in West Virginia, there was nothing I liked more than staying up late on Saturday nights to watch WOWK-TV’s Chiller Theater…and it was even more enjoyable when the ‘rents were out for the evening, because it was sort of an act of defiance (“Sleep?  Sleep is for fops and popinjays!”).  Unfortunately, WOWK couldn’t afford a host—the program would simply begin with eerie music and a graphic of a forbidding haunted castle on a seaside cliff and then the eventual announcement of the program.

Some individuals with better memories than mine recall that WOWK (which also went by WHTN in its early days of operation) did feature brief horror-based pantomime skits between the films and commercials, with employees wearing masks and costumes.  Mark Justice, a Kentucky-based blogger,  remembers in this post that he was in WOWK’s viewing area and recalled some segments the station used that were recorded by the late Jonathan Frid, the star of the daytime gothic soap Dark Shadows (WOWK was an ABC affiliate).  But for the most part, Chiller Theater—which originally aired on Friday and Saturday nights before the station moved all the movies to Saturdays under the aegis of “Triple Chiller”—was hostless; the Mountain State would not get a regular TV horror host until WVAH started its horror movie program. Friday Night Dead, which starred longtime radio/TV personality Al Sahley as “Fat Drac”—“The King of Corpuscular Corpulence!”

I only saw “Fat Drac” a handful of times during his stint on WVAH; I was in college and most of my Friday and Saturday nights involved drinking enormous quantities of a substance we called “beer” back then.  But it was also about that time that the USA Network started their Saturday afternoon horror movie presentations, hosted by “Commander USA” (aka Jim Hendricks)—soaring super hero!  (Legion of Decency…retired.)  The show ran from 1985 to 1989, running double features on Saturday afternoons before being whittled down to a single feature on Sundays.  The Commander showed a lot of Mexican wrestling flicks and Japanese monster movies, but occasionally he’d host a goody like Cat People (1942) or I Walked with a Zombie (1943).  (There’d be an occasional non-horror movie thrown into the mix, chiefly for its cult value, like Up in the Cellar [1970] or What’s Up, Tiger Lily? [1966].)

None of the television stations in our area showed Movie Macabre, the syndicated package of horror movies hosted by Cassandra Peterson, better known to horror host fans as “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark”…but the home video releases that featured the character were popular rentals at the Ballbuster Blockbuster store in Savannah that once employed me—and I even bravely checked out her 1988 film Elvira, Mistress of the Dark one weekend out of curiosity.  (It’s not Citizen Kane, but it gave me a few chuckles.)

So despite being somewhat horror host deprived as a kid and young adult, I’ve been making up for lost time on Saturday nights at 10pm. EST…because that’s when Chicago-based Me-TV schedules horror movies hosted by Svengoolie, the alter ego of longtime broadcast personality Rich Koz.  Me-TV has the broadcast rights to most of the old Universal horror classics, both good and bad…and though I kind of found it unsettling at first to watch comedy skits interspersed with movies such as Dracula (1931) or Bride of Frankenstein (1935), I’m becoming a Svengoolie devotee with each passing week—because movies like Dr. Cyclops (1940) and The Mole People (1956) need all the help they can get.  Sure, Koz’s Svengoolie does the corny comedy that we expect from horror hosts—but he’s also got the street cred to feature interviews with personalities associated with horror films to fill up the time if the movies run short.  He aired a clip back in April of this year in which he spoke with Vincent Price’s daughter Victoria that I found positively riveting.  All this and flying rubber chickens, too.

Svengoolie has been a Chicagoland tradition since the 1970s, when he was the host of WFLD’s Screaming Yellow Theater and originally played by Jerry G. Bishop.  One of Bishop’s colleagues and a writer for the Svengoolie program was Rich Koz, who became “Son of Svengoolie” in 1979 on WFLD (the original Svengoolie closed up shop in 1973) and continued to host horror movies until 1986, when the new owners of the station (Rupert Murdoch and the evil empire known as Fox) handed him his pink slip.  Koz resurrected the character for WCIU in 1994 (the flagship station of Me-TV), and Bishop allowed him to drop the “Son of” since he “believed he was grown up enough now to no longer be just the Son.”

Classic movie fans like myself are fortunate to live in times when indulging in our passion for vintage cinema is as easy as sliding a DVD into a player or turning on TCM or FMC to see if there’s anything worth watching.  (AMC…you no longer count.)  But I love the fact that there’s still an outlet for horror hosts like Svengoolie, and that the market has even expanded to keep Elvira in business (with a new version of Movie Macabre) and introduce new folks like Mr. (Erik) Lobo, whose Cinema Insomnia is syndicated to many TV stations (Lobo got his start on a local station in Sacramento back in 2001).  It’s a nostalgic reminder of simpler childhood times, and it’s comforting to see that some outlets haven’t completely given up on showing these classic films and introducing them to a new generation.  Because let’s be honest—given the choice between an infomercial, babbling talking heads discussing politics, and cheesy horror movies hosted by even cheesier personalities…well, it won’t be much of a contest.

This Saturday on Me-TV (October 27), Svengoolie is going to show the proto-lycanthropy classic Werewolf of London (1935).  If I still had a pair of footy pajamas I’d put them on and complement the viewing with a tumbler of RC Cola and some HoHo’s.  If the television gods have smiled upon you and bestowed Me-TV on your cable company (or if you can get it with a digital antenna), why not join me in spirit?  (See what I did there?)