Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Looney Tunes Bugs Bunny cartoon, the 1959 A Witch's Tangled Hare, (featuring Witch Hazel,) directed by Abe Levitow.
The cartoon makes many references to various plays by William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and As You Like It.
Before the start of our feature presentation, ACME Eagle Hand Soap would like to share with you a group of middle-aged British Ukelele players covering a 48 year old Kinks song -
They may seek him here, they may seek him there, but if he keeps pulling on his frilly nylon panties, he may be arrested.
We've picked a more light-heated entry from the excellent reference book, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die by Steven Jay Schneider. Today's choice is Frank Tashlin's 1955 comedy, Artist and Models, starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (in their 14th pairing), Shirley MacLaine, Dorothy Malone, Eva Gabor, and Anita Ekberg. Artists and Models was director Frank Tashlin's first film with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. He made one more film with the team, Hollywood or Bust (which was their last film together), and then made six more films with Lewis starring and producing. Tashlin became a good friend of Jerry Lewis and somewhat of a mentor to his early directorial career. The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour would like you to join us in watching this funny film, Artist and Models. So push away from the table, get comfortable and enjoy the film.
An anti-comic book attitude is all over the movie because director and co-writer Frank Tashlin hated them. During his career, Tashlin wrote newspaper comics and children's books, and directed some Looney Tunes cartoons, all of which were held in more esteem than comic books at the time. He said that as a cartoonist he had done some hack work to make money, but that things had gotten worse in the comic book era. Tashlin reportedly saw this film as his chance to slam the shoddy, cheap comics that had made a mockery of cartooning. He even admitted to a newspaper that the movie would express his feelings about comic books, that the only good comic books on the market were "the historical classics" (which at the time meant adaptation of classic books in comics form), and that he didn't see why kids wanted to read comics when "Treasure Island is so much better." To further push his attitude toward comic books, of the only two characters who read comics in the movie, one was 'a simpleton' and the other was homicidal because of it.
Demand Euphoria!
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