Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Daffy Duck Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1948 The Up-Standing Sitter , directed by Robert McKimson.
Daffy (whose voice is identical to Sylvester's but electronically sped up) invokes a phrase more closely associated with the cat: "Sufferin' succotash!"
Before the start of our feature presentation, the staff of ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour was paddling around the outbanks of the intraweb, when we came upon the interesting site - After Skool - they animate the words of some very interesting people. We thought we share with you their take on of George Carlin's more famous bits about the planet:
Remember what George said: Take care of yourselves. And then take care of somebody else.
We've picked another entry from the excellent reference book, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die by Steven Jay Schneider. Today's film is the 1963 thiller, The Birds, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, and Veronica Cartwright. Based on a novella by Daphne Du Maurier and an actual incident of a mass bird attack on the seaside town of Capitola in California in 1961. The film is a masterpiece in both suspense and disaster film making that deprives audiences of any comforting explanation or resolution to great effect. In fact, The Birds barely has an ending. The movie just… stops.
According to Hitchcock, 28,000 birds were used (out of which 3,200 were trained, 30 were considered special, and 4 were so consistently reliable they became leads). In addition to real birds, mechanical birds, animation, puppets, fake bird heads on hammers, cardboard birds, and even stuffed birds were used, interspersed among real ones. As always, The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour would like you to join us in watching The Birds. So push away from the table, get comfortable and enjoy the film.
When the children are running down the street from the schoolhouse, extra footage was shot back on the Universal soundstages to make the scene more terrifying. A few of the children were brought back and put in front of a process screen on a treadmill. They ran in front of the screen on the treadmill with the Bodega Bay footage behind them while a combination of real and fake crows were attacking them. There were three rows of children, and when the treadmill was brought up to speed, it ran very fast. On a couple of occasions, several of the children in the front fell and caused the children in the back to fall as well. It was a very difficult scene to shoot, and took a few days to get it right. The birds used were hand puppets, mechanical, and a couple were trained live birds.
Demand Euphoria!
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