ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour (427)

Thank you for joining us today

Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1936 Westward Whoa, (co-starring Beans,) directed by Jack King.



This is the last short to feature Beans, Little Kitty, and Ham and Ex. It is also the final short where Porky was Beans' co-star.


Before the start of our feature presentation, the staff of The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour would like to watch two brief videos. The first up, folks at The Muppet Lab explain gravity:



Not really sure who had more fun: Dr. Bunsen Honeydew or Adam Savage. Next up, an old favorite of the staffs that we happened upon again - The Peanuts gang singing Pink Floyd:



It still amazes me how two seemingly disparate things - Floyd and The Peanuts - meld perfectly together.


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 1973 crime drama The Harder They Come, directed by Perry Henzell, and starring Jimmy Cliff. Before this film's release, the collective perception of a “foreign film” was limited to the Bergmans and the Kurosawas of the world. The Harder They Come is a landmark of Caribbean cinema. The first full-length feature film shot in Jamaica by a Jamaican director with a fully Jamaican cast, it centers on a plot based on the lives of ordinary Jamaicans, making it unlike anything to come before. So push away from the table, get settled in, (smoke 'em if you got 'em,) and join us in watching The Harder They Come.



Paul Simonon, the bass player for The Clash , was inspired by this film when he wrote the song The Guns of Brixton. Simpnon explicitly references the film in the lyrics "You see he feels like Ivan, born under the Brixton sun. His game is called surviving, at the end of The Harder They Come". The song appears as the 10th track on their groundbreaking 1980 double album London Calling. Jimmy Cliff, the star of this film, himself covered the song as the 6th track of his 2012 album Rebirth.



Demand Euphoria!