“Thanks to you/Skies are blue…”

On the ninth of October—a little less than two weeks from today—one of my DVD Holy Grails will finally be released.  If you’ve been making regular visits to this humble scrap of the blogosphere—even before I packed up and moved in October of 2017 because there was more off-street parking and the schools were better—you’re…

“…just to have a laugh and sing a song…”

On December 3rd last year, the CBS Television Network paid fitting homage to the woman whose 1967-78 variety hour not only proved to be the gold standard of that type of series, but the last truly great example of the genre as well.  In one of the extras on The Carol Burnett 50th Anniversary Special—which…

Adventures in Blu-ray: The Hired Hand (1971)

Three saddle tramps—Harry Collings (Peter Fonda), Archie Harris (Warren Oates), and Dan Griffen (Robert Pratt)—are on their way to California when they stop off at a desolate town identified as Del Norte.  Dan needs his horse shod, and while the trio down whiskey in a cantina, Harry informs Arch that he’s decided to return to…

“At last—America’s most beloved ‘Funnies’ family on the screen!”

This November 24, the longest running comic strip currently being published in the United States will celebrate its centennial birthday.  Technically, Gasoline Alley is the second-longest running strip of all time; the champion remains The Katzenjammer Kids, who enjoyed a staggering 109-year run in “the funny papers” (1897-2006) and is still in syndication today (though…

Adventures in Blu-ray: Television’s Lost Classics, Volume 1

I recently celebrated a birthday a little over a week ago, and my sister Kat gifted me with a copy of David Bianculli’s The Platinum Age of Television, a book that posits that while the 1950s may have been the medium’s “Golden Age,” the offerings on what the late Harlan Ellison sardonically called “the glass…

“Well, Dick…it’s time to say goodnight.”

In correspondence that Dan Rowan composed to author John D. MacDonald in 1972, the longtime Laugh-In co-host/straight man observed: “Bland and nice have set in and we could be the Nelson family doing a variety show.  Why is this?  Maybe because we have run out of things to say.”  Rowan’s ruminations about the series that was…