Author: DOuG pRATt

MegaMazing in Lost Vegas, MA

We found our way to where we wanted to go for a Sunday trip, but then we got lost. The Davis Mega Maze, in rural Sterling, Massachusetts is a great way to do a lot of walking, get dehydrated, and frustrated for $15 per person. You could do that for free, of course, but then you wouldn’t have the fun of walking along paths surrounded by corn that’s higher than an elephant’s eye.

David Mega Maze Gold Poker Chip

The teens, Eric and his cousin Kate, made it through the maze before we did, so the grown-ups resorted to asking for hints from a couple of the guides. This year’s theme is “Lost Vegas,” so when you get to the end you’re given a gold poker chip. To do the maze properly and really master it, you should go early and take advantage of the all-day admission to go through more than once.

The Death Of A Marxist

Groucho Marx died 30 years ago today, just three days after Elvis’ demise. Being 44 years old when Elvis was born in 1935, and having been in ill health for some time when Elvis died at age 42, Groucho’s death was no surprise.

A brief clip from Duck Soup that I posted is here. The first Marx Brothers movie was The Cocoanuts. It’s old. How old? It was released in August 1929, two months before the stock market crash!

Here are the first 7 or so minutes of The Cocoanuts. Irving Berlin wrote the music. It sounds as though Berlin had been listening to a lot of George Gershwin before writing this score.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/AUG07/Cocoanuts.flv 400 300]

The “why a duck” gag isn’t in this clip. Maybe I’ll post it later.

LD And The Birth of CD

NPR has a short feature (a featurette?) on the 25th anniversary of the completion of the development of Compact Disc. The CD format was introduced in America in 1983. Here is a brief audio snippet from the NPR featurette.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/AUG07/LDCD.mp3]

They characterize LaserDisc as having been a flop, and they call it a digital video disc. The first point is debatable and the second is simply incorrect.

Pioneer LD-V8000

LD was never a big success, but after the LaserDisc format was bought from Philips by Pioneer it found its place as a high-end niche product, and it remained in production until after DVD got going in 1998. So LD lasted for roughly 20 years, and its supplementary material, alternate audio tracks and chapter stops were a model for the DVD format.

Digital sound was added to LD around 1985, but at no time did it have digital video. It was FM analog, just like VHS, but with much higher quality. The video in yesterday’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers post was taken from a 20-year-old LaserDisc.

Home Invasion

Don Siegel directing Dana Wynter and Kevin McCarthy

My buddy D.F. Rogers and I have been watching Elvis’ TV appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show from 1956-57, and thinking how everybody except Elvis really did seem to be Pod People. This weekend the umpteenth remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is out, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to show a clip from the original movie.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/AUG07/BodySnatchers.flv 430 340]

In an interview done back in the 70’s, director Don Siegel (at left in the picture above) commented on the scene that’s in the video clip.

Allied Artists had an old-fashioned credo that horror pictures couldn’t have humor. I had a great deal of humor in the picture and though they cut out a lot, they didn’t totally succeed. As in the barbecue scene. King Donovan, Carolyn Jones, [Kevin] McCarthy and Dana Wynter have an outdoor barbecue even after they have accepted mentally that something is terribly wrong. Only when they see the pod do they panic.