Author: DOuG pRATt

The Second Best Year of Our Lives

I do a lot more e-mail than blogging. Here’s a message I sent to someone after watching a movie on TCM.

Over the years, “Till the End of Time” has been overshadowed by that other 1946 feature, with Frederick March and Myrna Loy, about the trouble vets had adjusting to civilian life. Featuring Robert Mitchum in a supporting role, the studio was pushing Navy vet Guy Madison as the star.

A quick search reveals that, to the delight of women and gay men, Guy was the original Brad Pitt, with the same sort of physique. Curiously, his character’s name in “Till… Time” is Cliff, and Pitt’s character in “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” is also named Cliff. Tarantino doesn’t make movie references by accident, so I’ll assume it was intentional.

Later, Guy looked more like an older Ken Osmond who, according to Tony Dow, is having some medical problems.

The thing that makes “Till… Time” especially notable is that it exposes a post-war “America First” movement. Sleazy guys approach the vet buddies at a bar with a pitch about their organization, saying they don’t allow “Catholics, Jews, or Negroes” while a black vet the buddies have befriended is standing right there. So if you don’t know this post-war gem, add it to your watch list!

Print Editions

Gatehouse Media is buying Gannett, although at the moment there appears to be a potential snag in the deal. Not coincidentally, 7-day home delivery of my Gatehouse paper is suddenly increasing by almost 50%, from $53.20 to $78.21 per month. The safe assumption is the extra money will go towards financing the purchase, assuming it goes through. The question is, how many subscribers will cancel home delivery?

For now, the paper is still showing up on the driveway, and I’d like to share a scan from last Sunday’s comics, as modest as the single two-sided sheet is. This is one of the more celebrated of Sparky’s Peanuts installments.

Peanuts, originally published August 6, 1972

Over in the Boston Globe’s comics section last week, The Family Circus was filled with wonderful visual details. Say what you will about this feature, I admire the professionalism of the art, which is something completely lacking in, say, Dilbert.

This 300-dpi scan can’t compensate for the too-small printing size. Compare it to this beach scene I scanned and posted — yikes! — nine years ago, and compare the building in the lower right corner to the one drawn by Jimmy Johnson that I pointed out last week.

Finally, the Boston Globe recently had this tribute to MAD Magazine by A.J.B. Lane, done in the manner of an Al Jaffee fold-in. I couldn’t find it online, and as I was already hot on the scanner…

Smarter Than the Av-er-age Songwriter

Before Bill Gates became famous, to me the name Gates meant not only David Gates of the group Bread, but the manufacturer of the broadcasting equipment at the radio station where I worked. Here’s a short air check of another guy at the station, with a bit of a song from, appropriately, David Gates.

David Gates had a string of super hits with Bread, and before that his song “Saturday’s Child” was recorded by the Monkees (and studio musicians) for their debut album. The earliest song by David Gates that I know of came on a record I played to death as a kid. Hey, it was a start!