Category: All Posts

Twilight of the greaser zone

Written by Earl Hamner, Jr. of The Waltons, this episode of The Twilight Zone is a favorite of mine. It has a totally wacky premise, about aliens disguised as 50’s greaser bikers moving into a 60’s residential neighborhood, like a sci-fi version of The Wild One. Harvey Lembeck as Eric Von Zipper would have fit right in with these guys.

But it’s Shelley Fabares who makes this episode worth watching. By then, Shelley’s hit Johnny Angel was in the distant past — two years before — and she was making only guest appearances on The Donna Reed Show. Nine days after Black Leather Jackets aired on January 31, 1964, the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.

White Christmas in a Flash

A very popular online Christmas card is an animated version of the song White Christmas, from a 1954 (or perhaps ’53) recording by the original lineup of the Drifters. The animation was done by Joshua Held in 2002. This is the video he posted on YouTube.

The YouTube video has better sound than in Held’s original Shockwave Flash file, which has the advantage of better image quality. Here’s the SWF for comparison. Note: Once it starts playing there’s no pause option.

Dograt the red-nosed blogger

I’m still suffering from the flu. I woke up Saturday with a fever that was almost as bad as Friday’s. It’s come down since then, and now my symptoms are more like a cold than the flu. This Aflac commercial with an under-the-weather Rudolph, a nicely done homage to the 1964 stop-motion cartoon, is at least five years old, but I didn’t see it on TV until today.

It’s the second dead-on Rudolph recreation for a commercial that I know of. I featured this one from Verizon a few years ago.