Dr. Caligari's cabinet is now so crammed that he had to stow stuff in the Cupboard. Time may wound all heels but once in a while you need a cup of tea.
A family is a risky venture, because the greater the love, the greater the loss...
Today's Christmas special - A Beach Boys Christmas
Toy Drive Public Service Announcement
Little Saint Nick -
The "Run run, reindeer" line was copped from Chuck Berry's song Run Rudolph Run, where Berry sings, "Run run, Rudolph." By making the reindeer generic, The Beach Boys avoided copyright issues - Berry had to turn over royalties to his song to the creator the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer story.
The Man With All The Toys -
As a single in 1964, the song had limited success (No. 6 on the Billboard Christmas chart), but built sales over successive Christmases and is listed by Billboard in the Top 100 selling Christmas songs in history.
Merry Christmas, Baby -
In Germany, three years after the album's initial release, Merry Christmas, Baby was a surprise selection for a holiday single.
Christmas Day -
Christmas Day was Al Jardine's first lead vocal on a Beach Boys record, but in less than a year his voice would be heard again — on the group's Number One hit, Help Me, Rhonda.
Another Christmas song they got around to sing in between the verbal abuse from their father
Santa's Beard -
On Santa's Beard, the Beach Boys themselves provide the song's instrumentation. Although Brian often used studio musicians to lay down instrumental tracks for the Beach Boys to sing over, the group was quite capable of doing the job themselves.
Santa Claus had the right idea. Visit people only once a year.
Today's theme - our first guest programmer, the birthday girl.
This year, she went in a more eclectic vein:
Carol of the Bells - The Tabernacle Choir
Most people automatically associate Carol of the Bells with Christmas, but its origins tell a different story. It's actually based on a traditional Ukrainian folk chant that celebrated the season of rebirth and anticipated a prosperous New Year. In 1916, composer Mykola Leontovich borrowed the four-note melody for a new choir song called Shchedryk, which debuted in the US at Carnegie Hall in 1921. When American choir director Peter Wilhousky heard the song, he wrote new lyrics and introduced his version, called Carol of the Bells, to holiday audiences. He copyrighted and published it in 1936.
O Holy NightNat King Cole -
This carol has the distinction of being the first song ever to be played live on a radio broadcast. On December 24, 1906 a Canadian inventor, Reginald Fessenden, broadcast one of the first ever AM radio programs, and the first ever to feature entertainment and music for a general audience, from his Brant Rock, Massachusetts station. After playing Handel'sLargo on an Ediphone phonograph, he proceeded to play O Holy Night on his violin, singing the last verse as he played. He finished the broadcast by reading various passages from the Gospel of Luke, before wishing his listeners a Merry Christmas.
Ave Maria
The original words of Ave Maria (Hail Mary) were in English, being part of a poem called The Lady of the Lake, written in 1810 by Sir Walter Scott. The poem drew on the romance of the legend regarding the 5th century British leader King Arthur, but transferred it to Scott's native Scotland. In 1825 during a holiday in Upper Austria, the composer Franz Schubert set to music a prayer from the poem using a German translation by Adam Storck. Scored for piano and voice, it was first published in 1826 as D839 Op 52 no 6. Schubert called his piece Ellens dritter Gesang (Ellen's third song) and it was written as a prayer to the Virgin Mary from a frightened girl, Ellen Douglas, who had been forced into hiding.
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen Annie Lennox -
This is a traditional English carol dating back to the 16th or 17th century. It was first published in England in 1833, when it appeared in Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern, a collection of seasonal carols gathered by William B. Sandys.
Christmas Time Is Here - Vince Guaraldi Trio
Originally, this was an instrumental piece that Vince Guaraldi wrote to open A Charlie Brown Christmas. About a month before it aired, Lee Mendelson, who produced the special, decided it might work better with some words, so he wrote the lyric in about 10 minutes sitting at his kitchen table.
Mary would like to wish all the readers, both old and new, a very Happy Holiday!
Happy Holidays to us all
Before our feature presentation, The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour would like to start the evening with the 1955 Mister and Mistletoe Famous Studios cartoon, directed by Izzy Sparber and Al Eugster.
Things that make you go hmmmm - The events of the cartoon transpire over the space of five minutes, yet the nephews appear to have gotten a full night's sleep before awakening on Christmas morning.
Before the start of our feature presentation, in case you are already overwhelmed by the holidays, we found this very funny and increasingly tragic holiday short, from Letters Live, read by Lolly Adefope:
This is a reimagining of Frank Kelly'sChristmas Countdown, which we will hear later next week.
Happy Holidays! ACME wants you to join them in celebrating the holidays with your friends at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour - the official soap of our nation's bald eagles. Remember if your bald eagle's talons are filthy, do we have a soap for you! So why not sit back and relax (quick, find the most comfortable seat on the sofa,) get a snack (perhaps, some popcorn,) and a beverage and put The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour on in the background and watch this forgotten 1947 Christmas film, Christmas Eve (AKA Sinner's Holiday), directed by Edwin L. Marin and starring, George Raft, George Brent, Randolph Scott, Joan Blondell, Ann Harding and Virginia Field.
Inexplicably miscast as Aunt Matilda, an old matriarch who raised three boys, Ann Harding was younger than some of the actors who played her sons. At the time the film was released, Ann was 45 years old, and her sons - Randolph Scott was 47, George Raft was 46 and George Brent was 43.
Ike was absolutely correct, we truly need to beware ‘the military-industrial complex.’ I had been highly suspicious of the follow statistic – the US has been involved in some form of ‘armed military‘ conflicts 228 out of the 245 years of it’s existence. But I’ve tracked it across a number of different sources, for example 1, 2 & 3, and a consensus seems to be that we are a very war-like nation. So it is very easy to see how the true reason for the holidays is lost in the fog of war –
The Christmas Truce on the Western Front of 1914 –
Have yourself a Merry Little ChristmasJudy Garland -
World War II Christmas Radio Broadcasts
Christmas Eve In My Home TownEddie Fisher -
There's Peace In KoreaSister Rosetta Tharpe -
I Won't Be Home This ChristmasBarry Sadler -
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I Want To Come Home For ChristmasMarvin Gaye –
What set the Christmas songs of the Vietnam War apart was their naked honesty concerning the plight of the soldier. These guys weren’t very happy to be there – at least, they didn’t stay that way very long after going “in country.”
Bob Hope USO Christmas Special from the Persian Gulf –
(Bunkies - as our Holiday Spectacular has just begun, we will be pre-empting the usually silliness here until after the holidays. Please check out what's in store. Otherwise we'll be back with our regularly scheduled folderol, in about a month's time.)
Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1938 Porky and Daffy (co-starring Daffy Duck, of course), directed by Robert Clampett.
You would be forgiven if you thought this was the team's first paring. Their actual first pairing was in the 1937 Looney Tunes short, Porky's Duck Hunt. In that cartoon, directed by Tex Avery and animated by Bob Clampett, Daffy Duck made his debut as a nameless hunter who torments Porky Pig. Porky and Daffy is their first pairing where they both starred in this short
We all miss Alex Trebek. Someone on the staff on The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour found this clip reel of very funny moments from Jeopardy:
Who knew the Alex was that funny
We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is the 1984 comedy Stranger Than Paradise, directed by Jim Jarmusch and starring John Lurie, Richard Edson, and Eszter Balint. What began as a 30-minute short (shot in 1982) was later expanded into a three-part feature. The first section, The New World, takes place in New York; the second, One Year Later, in Cleveland; and the last, Paradise, in Florida.
This quirky, idiosyncratic film blends the feel of a Jack Kerouac-style road movie, a Waiting for Godot-like script reminiscent of Samuel Beckett, post-beatnik hipster coolness, and the deliberate pace of an Andy Warhol film. It is an intense study of alienation among bohemian outcasts and outsiders, shot mostly in a deadpan style (with no elaborate camera movements) and structured around scenes that begin and end with simple fade-ins and fade-outs to black. The film contains a total of 67 single-shot, unbroken takes - mostly disconnected and episodic. It is highly atypical of most films due to its unconventional and static nature, its unedited and uncut long takes, its series of strung-together vignettes, and its lack of a dense plot.
Although the film is a story about displacement and boredom, the film itself is far from boring. Punk rock at its core is minimalism, and Stranger Than Paradise leans fully into its own sense of hipness, with the chutzpah to support its self-assured cheekiness. Much of what we learn about Willie (John Lurie), Eva (Eszter Balint), and Eddie (Richard Edson) comes from their opinionated taste in pop culture, often illuminated by the burning glow of a television set reflecting off their expressionless faces. Though they drift aimlessly through every other aspect of their apathetic existence, they hold firm, uncompromising views about the movies and songs that define their very way of life.
Please find a comfy chair and join us here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour as we watch one of Akira Kurosawa’s favorite movies: Stranger Than Paradise.
Jim Jarmusch was dismayed to learn that all the money he paid for the rights to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ I Put a Spell on Youwent to the record company, with none of it going to Hawkins. When the film turned a profit, Jarmusch took it upon himself to track down Hawkins (who was living in a trailer park at the time) and give him some money. It was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until Hawkins’ death. According to Jarmusch, Hawkins repeatedly swore he would pay him back, despite Jarmusch’s insistence that the money was a gift.
Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1938 Porky's Spring Planting, directed by Frank Tashlin.
Porky Pig's menu is nailed to the fence by a Schlesinger-brand nail.
We here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour love yacht rock. (Many of us are old enough to have hear these bands back in their prime). So we were quite have to hear that The Doobie Brothers have reformed and are on tour again. They recently appeared on NPR's Tiny Desk Concert, so we thought that we'd give it a listen. Let's all watch it together:
That Michael McDonald has a career ahead of him
We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is the underrated 1983 comedy The King of Comedy, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro (in his fifth collaboration with Scorsese), Jerry Lewis, and Sandra Bernhard. With a budget of $19 million and strong critical reception, the film was nevertheless a huge flop at the box office. It earned only $2.5 million and played for less than two weeks in theaters. Since then, the film has gone on to become a cult classic.
The film has engendered a great deal of ambivalence among its participants. Martin Scorsese later said that making the movie was an “unsettling” experience, in part because of the embarrassing, bitter material in the script. He also said that he and Robert De Niro may not have worked together again for seven years because making The King of Comedy was so emotionally grueling. Scorsese has even stated that he “probably should not have made” the film. Robert De Niro wrote Scorsese a letter before filming to express his reluctance about casting Jerry Lewis as Jerry Langford, feeling Lewis might be tempted to ham it up and might not be able to deliver a believable dramatic performance. Scorsese argued that Lewis’s own experience as an old-school Borscht Belt and Catskills comedian - and the pathos beneath his manic film persona - would help him understand and portray the angst of Jerry Langford.
Paul Zimmerman wrote the screenplay in the 1970s, and Robert De Niro tried to get it made then, but he didn’t yet have the clout to push the project forward. Zimmerman - unlike many writers who despise seeing their work edited or altered for a screen adaptation - was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the finished film and even felt that it was better than what he had originally written. All this having been said, please find a comfy chair and join us here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour as we watch this incredible film: The King of Comedy.
In the scene where Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard argue in the street, three of the “street scum” who mock Bernhard are Mick Jones, Joe Strummer, and Paul Simonon - members of the British punk rock band The Clash.
Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1938 Porky's Party , directed by Bob Clampett.
Chuck Jones was an animator in Bob Clampett's unit at this time. His work can be identified in the scene where Black Fury gets drunk on a hair restoration tonic. Jones became a director and was awarded his own unit shortly after this cartoon was produced.
Someone on the staff of The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour found another: musical mashup from the great Bill McClintock. Let's all watch it together:
It was as though Van Halen and Donna Summer were meant to sing together
We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is the remarkable 1982 documentary Sans Soleil (also known as Sunless), directed by Chris Marker. The film is a meditation on the nature of human memory, composed of stock footage, clips from Japanese movies and television shows, excerpts from other films, and documentary footage shot by Marker. It is widely considered one of the greatest documentaries ever made.
Structured as a travelogue and narrated through letters sent by a fictitious cameraman, Sans Soleil weaves together images from Iceland, Paris, the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, San Francisco, and Japan in the early 1980s. These are interspersed with excerpts from other films, stock imagery, commercials, and footage from Japanese television. The film explores a form of time travel, with Marker drawing connections between events and people otherwise separated by time and place.
The film does not focus on any single event. It leaps from modern Japan to Guinea-Bissau to the films of Alfred Hitchcock and back again whenever Marker chooses. It belongs to that unique genre of films (stretching from Man with a Movie Camera to Koyaanisqatsi) that attempt to make the entire world of human activity their subject—to make accessible the entirety (or at least a significant portion) of the human experience, with varying degrees of success. So please, find a comfy chair and join us here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour as we watch this incredible film: Sans Soleil.
Sans Soleil was shot entirely with a silent 16mm Beaulieu camera (there isn’t a single synchronous shot in the entire film), using 30-meter reels and a small cassette recorder. The only sophisticated element—for the time—was the Spectre image synthesizer, which was borrowed for a few days.
Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1938 Porky the Fireman , directed by Frank Tashlin.
When the firetruck slides off its frame, on the sign on the wall the words "Looney Tunes" is shown.
Long time viewers of The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour know that we enjoy a good episode from the folks at Letters Live. And what makes it even more appealing - the letter read by Nathan Lane:
You know you woke up this morning, wanting to hear about masturbation from Nathan Lane.
We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is perfectly timed for Halloween - the 1982 sci-fi classic The Thing, directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell. Upon its release, The Thing received largely negative reviews. Critics praised its groundbreaking special effects but criticized their graphic nature, while others found the characters underdeveloped. Despite its poor reception, the film gained a strong cult following through home video and television, and it has since been reappraised as one of the greatest science fiction and horror films ever made.
According to John Carpenter, he takes all his failed films hard, but The Thing’s initial reception disappointed him the most. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it “too phony-looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.” Roger Ebert criticized the “superficial characterizations and implausible behavior,” dismissing the movie as merely an Alien knockoff. Carpenter was especially upset when Christian Nyby, director of the original The Thing from Another World, publicly denounced his version, saying, “If you want blood, go to the slaughterhouse. All in all, it’s a terrific commercial for J&B Scotch.”
Following the film’s commercial failure, the studio canceled its multi-picture deal with Carpenter, who later remarked that his career would have been very different had The Thing been a success. Fortunately, he found redemption in the film’s enduring cult status and its critical reevaluation over time. So please, find a comfy chair and join us here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour as we watch this still-terrifying masterpiece - The Thing.
The opening title attempts to replicate the appearance of the original film. To create the effect of the title, an animation cell with "The Thing" written on it was placed behind a smoke-filled fish tank which was covered with a plastic garbage bag. The bag was ignited, creating the effect of the title burning onto the screen.
