DVR-TiVo-Or whatever recording device strikes your fancy-alert!

I apologize for not catching this sooner, but if you’re fortunate enough to receive TCM on Demand, you can treat yourself to the great comedy two-reeler Nurse to You! (1935) starring TDOY fave Charley Chase for a limited time (TCM’ll snatch it off their On Demand schedule July 4th). This is not only one of my favorite Chase sound shorts,…

R.I.P, Fred Travalena

The benign figure in the photograph above—for those of you who have not made his acquaintance—is Bill Crider...author, blogger, connoisseur of fine monster movie/serial trailers and on occasion, crotchety old man. (Yes, the one I crack all the “You kids get offa my lawn” jokes about.) I’ve never met Bill in person, but I consider him a…

“Bigger. Better. Faster. Cheaper.”

This article (“Neality TV”) mentioned over at RGJ’s Television Obscurities piqued my interest this week—it talks about broadcasting impresario Neal Sabin, the mastermind behind Me-TV and Me, Too…which many individuals lucky to receive the two channels have either e-mailed or commented to me that it’s everything the once-proud TV Land used to be. Sabin describes his childhood fascination with television, which sounds…

R.I.P. Farrah and Jacko

When you’ve spent the better part of your day watching Budd Boetticher films on Turner Classic Movies, sometimes you tend to miss the important things in life. Like the news of Farrah Fawcett’s passing at the age of 62 from cancer, or the bulletin announced a few hours ago that the “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson, died of…

Early to Budd, early to rise

Since I found myself wide awake this morning shortly after 6am, I decided to mosey out to the living room for a little TCM time—particularly since the channel is continuing their Great Directors Festival with a tribute to Oscar “Budd” Boetticher, Jr., a man who cemented his cinematic fame with a series of B-westerns in…

“Heeeeyyyyyooooo!!!”

Several of my esteemed blogging colleagues have already posted their farewells to actor-announcer-Carson sidekick Ed McMahon, who’s gone on to his rich reward at the age of 86. (I encourage you to check out these tributes by Ed Copeland, Tony Figueroa, J. Kingston Pierce…and though he hasn’t put anything up yet as of this writing, I’m sure Mark Evanier will weigh in…

Best of the West

I passed this along to Bill Crider yesterday via e-mail, and in turn he posted it as an item on his mega-popular Pop Culture Blog. He gave TDOY generous credit for the finding, but I must come clean and shift the kudos to RGJ at Television Obscurities, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite vintage television blogs. In a nutshell, the Western Writers of…

Bonus HBO and Cinemax!

I’m still trying to figure out why CharredHer managed to carry over the free weekend preview to Monday (I discovered the channels were still on when I turned on the TV set to channel five hundred and something, which I had left there to tape a Cinemax showing of Heaven Can Wait [1943]) but needless to say,…

This free movie weekend was brought to you by CharredHer, part deux…

The old saw about “All good things come to those who wait” was definitely in play during the second half of the “New Movies at Old Yesteryear” mini-festival this weekend, because the remaining films I watched were all worth three stars or more: Michael Clayton (2007) – George Clooney is the title character, a “fixer” for…

This free movie weekend was brought to you by CharredHer…

In retrospect, I guess it’s a good thing that I was laid up with some unknown malady this weekend because it gave me the opportunity to ogle a bunch of free movies on the HBO and Cinemax channels (not to mention HBO and Cinemax on Demand) and get an idea of what modern movie audiences…