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It’s been announced that Steven Spielberg will produce a series of Tintin movies. Tintin, if you don’t know, is a hugely popular and influential cartoon character from Belgium, created by the late Georges Remi, who worked under the pen name of Hergé.
An excellent documentary about Hergé, Tintin and I, was on PBS last year. The video player above has the first few minutes.
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Here’s some more of the bizarre Russian duo Messer Chups, with Zombie Girl on bass. I don’t know if evoking the look of Bettie Page and combining it with a surf guitar sound makes sense, but somehow it works.
With Captain America now deceased, who gets his shield? Stephen Colbert!
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Some of the pass-offs from Jon Stewart to Stephen Colbert are real gems, even when they manage to flub it. This one from a couple of weeks ago I couldn’t find on Comedy Central, so I’ll resort to posting it myself. Colbert provides some bedtime reading from Ayn (A is A) Rand.
I went through an Ayn Rand period in college, when I read both “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged”. Like the science-fiction writings of L. Ron Hubbard, I genuinely enjoyed Ayn Rand’s novels. If nothing else, they’re solid romantic soap operas. But as I did with Hubbard’s Dianetics, I decided Rand’s Objectivism wasn’t for me.
It’s generally believed that the Hitchcock movie North By Northwest with Cary Grant influenced the development of the James Bond movies. After the first Bond movie Dr. No proved to be such a hugely successful hit, in 1963 Cary Grant, almost 60, was featured in a less physical spy movie called Charade.
Henry Mancini wrote the Charade score and Andy Williams sang the theme song. Compare this to Matt Monro singing the theme to From Russia With Love, also from 1963.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/MAR07/Charade.mp3]Nice, huh? Well, here’s a Russian duo performing a decidedly different version of “Charade” at a rowdy German club last year. That’s Zombie Girl playing bass.
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There was an earlier statement of appreciation made for the theme to the old TV show Peter Gunn. It’s certainly a favorite of Bismo’s. Here’s the theme, recorded in 1958 and taken from boring, old vinyl LP. That’s Johnny Williams, as he was known then, on piano.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/MAR07/PeterGunn.mp3]The Peter Gunn soundtrack is fun and evocative of its era. Well worth getting, and it’s available cheap on Amazon. Click here. Dig that crazy, mixed-up artwork! What are those red vein things supposed to be — bullet holes in a sport coat, or something?
