Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” is no more. “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” should be removed from the Statue of Liberty.
“Basket of deplorables” is an odd turn of phrase, but Hillary was right. So was Obama when he said, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Here’s a childhood favorite from my formative years, that I featured here a couple of years ago. It’s KRONOS! This time around the movie gets the Creature Features treatment, with special hosting guest Jon Provost.
From the mind of Dr. Seuss, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. is one of those movies I’ve heard about for decades, but hadn’t gotten around to seeing. TCM has made it possible for me to correct this omission, and it’s a visual feast!
Hans Conried is perfect as the comically maniacal Dr. T. Tommy Rettig, who was Lassie’s pal on TV before Jon Provost, carries the narrative of the movie. It’s a musical, and I enjoyed the songs, but its fantastic cartoon-like images, beautifully restored in HD, are the big draw for me.
Jon Provost says that, “For the first time in 50 years of public appearances, I am meeting children who do not know about Lassie.” So it’s a good thing that Lassie will be returning to TV in the next year or two in a computer animated series. You can read more at this link.
In 1968, Snoopy attempted to enter the World Wrist Wrestling Championship in Petaluma, CA, only to be disqualified for not having a thumb. This week in Petaluma, Jon Provost of “Timmy and Lassie” voted on the world’s ugliest dog, with a boxer named Pabst being awarded the distinction.
Jon’s super-duper tell-all autobiography, written with his wife Laurie Jacobson, Timmy’s In the Well is a great read, with many Hollywood stories, concentrating on the staid Fifties into the Swinging Sixties. Timmy never did fall in a well on the TV show, but as I pointed out a couple of years ago, a cartoon version of Timmy did fall in a well, in a Kenner Give-a-Show slide, and today that slide was given the Give-A-Show Projector Blog treatment.
As promised, I recorded Jon Provost’s appearance Wednesday morning on the CBS Early Show.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/SEP/ProvostEarlyShow.flv 440 247]
This is how the program looks in FiOS HD, and I can see that I should have recorded the standard definition channel. Hey Nancy, CBS needs to start doing HD right!
