From the DVR: The Wonderful World of Disney

The Starz/Encore people have managed to acquire some feature film titles from Walt Disney Pictures of late, because I was afforded an opportunity to catch up with two of the studio’s animation releases that had eluded me for a good while: The Princess and the Frog (2009; I liked this one) and Frozen (2013; not…

“I’m going down the pub!”

From 1965 to 1975, British TV audiences made Till Death Us Do Part—a taboo-breaking program about a working-class family whose patriarch (played by Warren Mitchell) wasn’t shy about making his uncomfortably racist views loud and clear—one of the BBC’s most popular situation comedies.  Created by Johnny Speight, who based much of the show on his own upbringing (a situation he…

Children should be seen…and heard, to be honest

The success of importing the BBC’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus to public television stations in the mid-70s led to a “British Invasion” of sitcoms and comedy shows that, sadly, have been abandoned because these same stations are apparently unable to see offerings beyond the overexposed Are You Being Served?  I rag on AYBS a lot, but it’s mostly due to its saturation in the…

Just Folk(s)

Well, here we go ringing in a new year at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear...and just as I did at the beginning of 2018, I’m once again apologizing for allowing weeds to run rampant around the blog.  I can blame no one for this lapse in blogtiquette but myself; it seems that once the Yuletide season…

“Goodbyee…”

Kaleidoscope is a Birmingham, England-based company dedicated to the restoration of British TV programs from the 50s, 60s, and 70s that are "missing believed wiped" (networks like the BBC and ITV often recorded over videotaped telecasts as an economy measure before the advent of home video).  They're responsible for bringing back to life installments of…

“Listen to me very carefully…I shall say this only once…”

Because I decided to start a Facebook page for Thrilling Days of Yesteryear some time back, the social media behemoth takes it upon itself every now and then to remind me when I haven’t generated any new content on the blog.  (As if I wasn’t already aware of this.  Facebook must be taking guilt lessons…

Buried Treasures: Carve Her Name with Pride (1958)

It is July 1940 in London, and accompanied by her friend Winnie (Billie Whitelaw), Violette Bushnell (Virginia McKenna) invites a soldier named Etienne Szabo (Alain Saury) to her family’s home for dinner.  Violette was born to a French mother (Denise Grey) and English father (Jack Warner), and what started out as a tribute to a French…

The passings parade

This week’s edition of the “roll call of the deceased” is a little shorter than it has been in recent weeks—which, when you stop and think about it, is an encouraging sign in that while we’ve established that Death rarely takes a holiday s/he might be lingering a bit during those three-martini lunches.  The celebrity…

The passings parade

Each week here at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, I like to eat up just a little bit of blogosphere bandwidth to observe selected celebrity notables who’ve left this world for a better one—and I think the news of the death of character great Gervase Duan (G.D.) Spradlin this week hit me the hardest, because he was truly one…

The passings parade

Last week, I wasn’t able to include (as longtime TDOY chum Brent McKee mentioned in the comments) an obituary for musician Clarence “The Big Man” Clemmons because the renowned tenor saxophonist with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band played his last solo shortly after I posted the news of the week’s passings from the areas of music, TV, movies and…