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Skidoo The Movie: Like Jackie Gleason On Acid

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 24, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

Because, well, it IS Jackie Gleason on acid. If you like 60′s films like The Party, The President’s Analyst, Barbarella, or Head, you’ll love Skidoo. Good luck finding a copy though.


Strangely, the poster is
available on Amazon

It had been a long time since I had thought of the game Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon. That is, until a friend recently turned me on to a production starring (among others; more on that further on) Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin, and Cesar Romero. Sounds like an episode of the Batman TV series, right? Well if you add Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Mickey Rooney, Slim Pickens, and Groucho Marx in his final appearance in film, you have Skidoo, creating one of the weirder nexuses possible in the six degrees game. I have no idea how I managed to make it this far in life without having seen this star-studded masterpiece of late sixties psychadelic wackiness. It’s like Jackie Gleason on acid, because, well, it stars Jackie Gleason – on acid. Along with just about everyone else at one point in the film. The cast alone makes this flick worth watching, but you’ll especially enjoy it if you’re into other movies from 1967/68, a couple of years when it seems someone must have been pret-ty busy running around Hollywood spiking the punch and baking brownies. Movies like Head, The President’s Analyst, The Party, Barbarella, and Casino Royale. There’s also a ton of interesting background story relating to the movie. It was produced and directed by the legendary Otto Preminger, who – in an amusing twist on the connections mentioned above – played Mr Freeze in the Batman TV series once. And only once; apparently he wasn’t too popular on set. Also worthy of note is that aside from being Groucho’s last film, he tried LSD before taking the role, feeling that it would be irresponsible to play a character named “God” in what was essentially a pro-LSD propaganda film without having tried the stuff. Good luck finding a copy of Skidoo; although it’s been broadcast on cable and bootlegged, the only copy we could find was a poorly-seeded torrent that is apparently a really bad copy of an old Beta tape. Read the rest of this entry »

Tell The Invisible Chimp I Can’t See Him Today

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 16, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Monday, August 16th, 2010

In the bizarre and bloody PR battle of carnivores vs vegetarians, things can take strange turns, like when this PETA campaign against Dodge backfires.

The carnivore vs vegetarian conflict is a bloody battleground. In a marketing war being waged with weapons like cologne that smells like meat (see the commercial here), things can often take an unexpected turn. A couple of PETA’s most reliable weapons of mass distraction are nudity or scantily clad celebrities, which was for instance effective when PETA was the winner and the American Hot Dog Association was the wiener last year when PETA dogged the AHDA by suggesting you stick something different between your buns on National Hot Dog Day. You can’t win ALL the battles though, and we think a US automaker Dodged the bullet pretty cleverly recently when PETA complained about the exploding chimp in this commercial (also below), and Dodge responded by digitally making the chimp invisible, but otherwise leaving the commercial intact. Not surprisingly, Dodge got exponentially more ad views with their strategy. We tried to contact the invisible chimp for comment, and although his agent insisted we couldn’t see him, he did say in a phone interview that he expected to be bigger than Trunk Monkey. We also had the still grieving Bubbles the Chimp on the line, who disagreed, saying “Invisible Chimp, I knew Trunk Monkey, Trunk Monkey was a friend of mine. And sir, you’re no Trunk Monkey”. Decide for yourself. Both versions of the ad below. With a bonus Trunk Monkey clip. Read the rest of this entry »

I M-M-M-M-Miss Max Headroom

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 4, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

But that’s okay. He’ll be back August 10th on DVD. Max Headroom rarely gets the credit he deserves for predicting soundbyte-driven talking heads like Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann. Or for pretty much creating Jim Carey’s shtick.

As a countercultural, club-dwelling, art movie snob in the 80′s, the most likely use of a television in my house was as a piece of furniture or a light source, i.e., in one of those typically 80′s “paint everything matte black and use old snowy-screen TVs as decor” apartments. I mean, I really, really hated television. That is, except for Max Headroom. In an era when the top-ranked shows on television included middle-America lifestyle propaganda horrors like Charles in Charge, Silver Spoons, Full House and Webster, here we had this stroke of utter genius in the form of a snarky, highbrow, digitally manipulated talking head. And in spite of this being cutting-edge technology at the time, the creators did the brilliant thing and made the special effects secondary to the writing and character, letting the quirky, fidgety persona of actor Matt Frewer shine through. You may have never noticed, but about two-thirds of Jim Carey’s shtick is lifted straight from Frewer’s characterizations for Max Headroom (see this Letterman appearance, for instance). I was more partial to the earlier British Channel 4 Music video program – I think the character worked best in short snippets – but there was also a Cinemax talk show and a British-produced ABC TV sci-fi series that lasted two seasons, in 1987-88. And guess what. The latter is coming out on DVD August 10. The other productions may never see the light of day because of the labyrinthine copyright issues due to song and cable rights, but you can find many of them as bittorrents or with a YouTube search. We’ve included a few YouTube Clips below. Read the rest of this entry »

Short Horror Films By Independent Film Studio Fewdio

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 1, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

Fewdio cashes in on the often overlooked fact that horror films are typically 90% setup to bring you studio-quality, witty horror film shorts. And they’re FREE.

The fact that so many films can be summarized in about 90 seconds is probably one of the reasons I enjoy short film so much. Why spend 120 minutes of your life doing something that can be accomplished in five? What is fairly easy to do, and is done a lot in this genre, is comedy. Which is why it was refreshing to run across Fewdio , an extremely talented and polished group of professionals who had been working in the studio system and decided they wanted to do something where they had complete control, and without a huge budget and production cycle. They cashed in on two facts that are largely overlooked regarding horror: first of all, that the best segments of horror films often stand up on their own and are strung together with setups, and secondly, that no-one was really doing quality horror shorts. As Fewdio’s Drew Daywalt points out in this Shock Till You Drop interview, it’s a very viable and largely unexplored format. As he puts it: “You end on a scare and bang, you’re out…it’s a good model to aspire to. Twilight Zone is formulated that way. Set up, continued set up, expected left turn, roll credits“. All of Fewdio’s films (and there are around 50) have fairly high production values, a clever concept, and exceptional attention to details that are often overlooked in independent productions, especially their attention to sound, probably one of the most powerful tools at a horror filmmaker’s disposal. You can watch most of their films on their YouTube channel, or buy the Nightmare House – Volume 1 DVD on their site. Watch a few below. Read the rest of this entry »

Did The iPad Kill The Kindle?

[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 30, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Not yet. But they sure forced a price drop. And changed a paradigm. Will YOU buy a Kindle now that they’re only 139 bucks?


My dream is that one day you’ll click
on my Amazon Kindle ads while
you read my writing on an iPad.

Amazon wants to rekindle their relationship with you. They’re really, really sorry they were charging you so much for just reading a book with them, so they want to offer you another chance at making things work. And this time they’re only charging you $139. That’s right, Amazon’s Kindle, which just last year was priced at $299, is now only $139. In spite of the press about how the Kindle’s sales accelerated last quarter, the fact is that the iPad made quick business of mopping the floor with the Kindle, and the only hope Amazon has is to do exactly what they’re doing, which is price-slashing. If you read that Business Week article, you might take note of the fact that while Amazon expects to sell over 3 million Kindles this year, Apple sold over 3 million iPads in just EIGHTY DAYS. We poked a lot of fun at the iPad this year, and even rounded up aspiring “iPad Killers”, but the fact is, if any of those devices really intend to do any killing, they’ll mostly be killing themselves by marketing themselves that way. In his seemingly unending genius, Steve Jobs made us think Apple was launching a new device, when what they really were doing was launching a platform and shifting a paradigm. Although I’m still anxiously awaiting a more full-featured iPad-like device from whoever builds a good one first, I’d buy an iPad hands-down over a Kindle for media consumption. But I don’t want to use an iPad or a Kindle, I want to be on them. As a media creator, this is possibly the most exciting new publishing channel since the web itself gained a wide reach, and I’m more excited than you could imagine about the possibilities; it’s the first time in a while that a platform with such broad potential reach is accessible to “the little guy”. As this Ad Age article about Virgin’s new iPad-only magazine “Maverick” points out, major publishers have their hands tied because they can’t charge less for an app than they do for the print version of their established magazines, so they have less incentive to get involved, because they’d potentially be damaging their own struggling profit model. Expect to see an explosion of new development much like iPhone apps, but with much richer content and easier distribution of content if you’re a media creator. And look for us there soon.

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