ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour Today (328)

Thank you for joining us today

Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Daffy Duck Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1949 Wise Quackers , (co-starring Elmer Fuud,) and directed by Friz Freleng.



This short, which hasn't been seen since the 1990s due to its references to Daffy being Elmer's slave (and using references to African-American slavery to illustrate this).


Before the start of our feature presentation, the staff of ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour have all been following to strange story of the unsuccessful sale of the Flatiron Building - it's just down the street from our headquarters. We saw this video detailing the situation and thought we;d share it with you.



Hopefully they'll be able to sort all of this out and the building will be occupied again soon.


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 war drama, The Great Escape, directed by John Sturges, and starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough, James Donald, Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasence, James Coburn, Hannes Messemer, David McCallum, and Gordon Jackson. The film is based on Paul Brickhill's 1950 non-fiction book of the same name, a firsthand account of the mass escape by British Commonwealth prisoners of war from German POW camp Stalag Luft III in Poland. The Great Escape, now considered a classic, was one of the highest-grossing films of 1963. John Sturges had been intrigued by Paul Brickhill's book for many years and credited his success with the The Mirisch Company's The Magnificent Seven, several years earlier, for making it possible for him to film The Great Escape. A number of the cast and crew members had had real-life military experiences that helped to inform their work on the film, including Donald Pleasence, who served in the Royal Air Force during World War II and was placed in Stalag Luft 21, a German POW camp, after his bomber was shot down over France. As always, The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour would like you to join us in watching The Great Escape. So push away from the table, get comfortable and enjoy the film.



During idle periods while this movie was in production, all cast and crew members, from Steve McQueen and James Garner to production assistants, and obscure food service workers, were asked to take thin, five-inch strings of black rubber and knot them around other thin strings of black rubber of enormous length. The finished results of all of this knotting were the coils and fences of barbed wire seen throughout the movie.



Demand Euphoria!