At home while the worst global pandemic in years and the first to hit the United States since 1918 rages on. That means staying up late and watching TV. Cinema Insomnia is always a good choice.
Now feeling genuinely cheered up after watching Mr. Lobo and other friends from the KFJC Psychotronix Film Festival, will turn to the dulcet tones of horror host Zacherley. Robert Emmett played this ditty on KFJC's Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show earlier today. The lyrics and cheesy organ are fabulous.
How does one follow Zacherly? With a Tex Avery WB cartoons about. . . Mother Goose??? I recall a very good Disney cartoon titled The Truth About Mother Goose, but this Tex Avery Merrie Melodie is even better and offers good laughs to accompany hanging around the house!
We definitely won't start or finish this playlist for a pandemic with the movie Contagion, but will watch arguably the only funny cartoon ever made about contagion, Bugs Bunny in Hare Tonic, directed by Chuck Jones. The irony of Elmer Fudd purchasing a live rabbit for dinner from his neighborhood meat market or farmer's market is not lost upon me.
The following Felix The Cat cartoon doesn't cure any killer viruses, but does involve scientists, anthropomorphized microbes, the use of reducing and enlarging fluid, as well as Felix shrinking to molecular size and getting chased by a giant germ.
Walt Disney made a cartoon about contagion-spreading mosquitoes for the World War II effort.
Alas, there are only so many Bugs Bunny cartoons about killer viruses, and Felix adventures starring microbes, and no Fleischer cartoons featuring a rampaging contagion.
Thinking about being home-bound permanently brings to mind The Prisoner, the ambitious television series and the piece-de-resistance of actor-writer-director-producer Patrick McGoohan.
McGoohan has his urbane 007 style protagonist from his last TV series, John Drake, a.k.a. Danger Man or Secret Agent ("they've given you a number and taken 'way your name") resign abruptly from British intelligence - and then get kidnapped.
Drake wakes up living in a very controlled, very odd and very creepy "model community" known as The Village. Not only is the weirdly bucolic retirement community jam-packed with former spies who name Drake "Number 6", the spooks tail Drake incessantly, spy on him and do their very best to intimidate the former ace intelligence officer into revealing why he resigned. Not surprisingly, all this makes the fierce and fiercely independent Number 6 determined to escape, as well as obsessed with finding out who "Number 1" in this operation is.
A beguiling, brilliant and cinematic blend of spy show, 1960's Britain, science fiction, futurism and social commentary regarding how modern technological societies could perpetrate "friendly totalitarianism" within a covert surveillance state, The Prisoner holds up extremely well after all these decades.
The mix is served imaginatively through McGoohan's original spin on the kinds of expansive, genre-stretching ideas and inventive visual concepts seen, among other places, in the films of Orson Welles. Love the underlying sly wit behind all the intrepid and ingenious attempts of Number 6 to escape the outwardly benign but palpably diabolical and lethal world of "The Village."
We at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog could happily binge-watch all 17 episodes of The Prisoner in order - then follow this with documentaries about the innovative series.
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