This Blog Pays Tribute To Frank Tashlin

While still enjoying Warner Bros. cartoons (one is hardly enough), I have no choice but to bring up an all-time favorite visionary comedy creator and satiric author of wonderfully subversive children's books (The Bear That Wasn't): Frank Tashlin (1913-1972), a.k.a. Tish Tash, Frank Tash, just Tash, etc.

There is an undeniable kinesthetic urgency and sexual energy - which a fair amountof the time get censored and repressed in his live-action features - that breaks through in Tashlin's cartoons. And, like Bob Clampett, Tashlin is never, ever afraid to be outrageous.

Here are two excellent and innovative examples, from Tash's peak as one of the looniest purveyors of Looney Tunes:

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Plane Daffy


Brother Brat (1944)

I've Got Plenty Of Mutton (1944)

A Tale Of Two Mice (1945)

Happy Thanksgiving With Daffy Duck

I'm thankful for a lot of things, not the least of them Warner Bros. cartoons like this one, directed by the great Art Davis.

I'm super thankful for this Thanksgiving cartoon, featuring Daffy, Porky Pig and Tom Turkey - and directed by Chuck Jones!

Another Favorite Risqué Scopitone

Enjoy Kay Starr and the usual bevy of bopping bikinied beehived babes otherwise known as The Scopitone Dancers in "The Wheel Of Fortune".

A Scopitone Starring Jeanne Moreau?

Jeanne Moreau, a multi-talented creative juggernaut - director, actress, frequent collaborator of Francois Truffaut (check out The Bride Wore Black for a stellar Moreau performance) and the dreamy movie icon who ever-horny young Parisian men gleefully killed themselves over in ultra-cool French New Wave flicks - stars in Scopitone A-307. This early music video promotes her 1966 LP "Chansons" (a.k.a. "Douze nouvelles chansons de Bassiak"). Nice tune - and I really dig the hip jazz guitar intro.

Burt Bacharach Day

More Burt N' Elvis.

One Of My Favorite Risqué Soundies

In this hilariously racy Soundie from 1940, Joy Hodges sings this ditty from the 1912 Ziegfeld Follies.

Gags And Gals

I love Soundies.

This Saturday: Cheesy Christmas Films And The Devil-ettes

Great poster by Miles Goodrich. It will be fun to share showtime with Will The Thrill and Monica The Tiki Goddess again.

More 3-Strip Technicolor Vitaphone Musicals

I posted an excerpt from this classic two-reel musical comedy on July 24 and e-mailed links to it to a slew of my friends. So here's the very enjoyable Good Morning Eve, starring June MacCloy as Eve and Leon Errol as Adam (can't identify who did the voice of the serpent), in its entirety:

Part One



Part Two



Don't know just why I love this film, other than the inevitable cute showgirls in cuter costumes, but I do.

Vitaphone Technicolor Musical Shorts

I'm pleased, the election having at long last passed, to return to more benign posts about arcane pop culture minutia.

Movies in gorgeous 3-strip Technicolor started to make the rounds in 1932-1935. Walt Disney, ever on the cutting edge, got there first with his Silly Symphonies, the series that sparked tremendous growth in the sophistication, technique and artistry of animated cartoons while bringing the wondrous "anything goes" surrealism in Pre-Code animation to a screeching halt. A couple of years later, Vitaphone started a series of 2-reel musical comedy shorts. Three (that I know of) are Service With A Smile and Good Morning Eve starring Leon Errol, and one that sounds fascinating, What No Men, co-starring songstress Wini Shaw with the delightfully bizarre Swedish dialect comic El Brendel.


Enjoy these two excerpts, courtesy of the indispensible Turner Classic Movies, from Service With A Smile. And yes indeed, this features the same Leon Errol from the Ziegfeld Follies, the RKO "Mexican Spitfire" features and literally dozens of two-reelers, including the legendary 1938 short, The Jitters.



While these production numbers aren't on the scale, level or inspiration of Busby Berkeley's grand hallucinations, they're great fun just the same.




My next post will include a Vitaphone 2-reel Technicolor musical comedy in its entirety.

A Great Op-Ed Piece

"Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long." President-elect Barack Obama

Still way too damn lazy to blog, I'm compelled to link to a superb post-election article by Bob Ray Sanders in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. It is a reminder of what the election of Senator Barack Obama to be the 44th President of the United States means, especially to those old enough to remember or directly experienced the American version of apartheid. Let's never forget those brave individuals who sacrificed their lives, yes, in recent memory, during our lifetimes, for the cause of civil rights.

Today's Elections

"It is not the failure or success of any candidate or party that most matters but the exercise of voting rights, and, through them, our self-government. If either team prevails despite the disenfranchisement of some Americans, that victory will mean all that much less; and if your favorite wins, and then the U.S. doesn't do anything to fix its voting system (and otherwise restore this faltering democracy), that victory of his won't matter much at all, since We the People will have lost control for good."

New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008.

The "Top Ten" Worst Political Campaign Ads

Today, I'm emphatically way too damn lazy to write a blog, so here's an excellent article by Melinda Henneberger listing the 10 Worst Political Ads (or, at least, they are the worst, most appalling ads I know of) from Slate.com. Think the 2008 presidential race holds the patent on big-ass whoppers and even sleazier baldfaced lies? Think again.

To refresh our Short Attention Span Theatre challenged memories, here's one of the disgusting hit ads, pathetic loser #5, this one from the 2004 presidential slamfest. I would call it a "greatest shit" - but it's not that good.

Mosaic Records

Mosaic Records, purveyor of fantastic CD box sets and collector vinyl, has a YouTube channel, loaded with interviews and clips for ever-obsessed music geeks. Great stuff!

Billie Holiday - Fine And Mellow (1957)

More Saxxy Stuff With Ben Webster

Ben digs into the ballad Old Folks, with the impeccable Teddy Wilson on piano, in a 1970 Copenhagen performance that took place the day after the passing of the incredible Ellington orchestra saxophonist Johnny Hodges. It was no doubt an emotional and sad time for all involved, yet they transformed sadness into music that is moving, heartfelt and beautiful.

Hey, if any jazz fans read this blog, tell me where I can buy a DVD of this!

Coleman Hawkins Swings

I've thinking a lot about jazz today. If I could find a clip of iconic saxophonist Coleman Hawkins playing with The Bud Powell Trio, that would be my pick for today. Alas, I can't find such a clip, so here's something almost as good: the bluesy and ever-innovative Hawk performing Ellington's Caravan with the Jo Jones Band. Jones demonstrates his amazing abilities as a percussionist yet again here: he exudes taste, flair, originality, creativity and panache - while clearly having fun with his work.

Since one Coleman Hawkins clip simply isn't enough, here's the swingin' saxophonist's rendition of a great ballad, Indian Summer.

And now I must find that recording with Hawkins, Coltrane and Thelonious Monk playing together. Otherwise known as healing music, baby.

Burt Bacharach Day

The Fourth Presidential Debate

Has a vaguely familiar air, doesn't it?

More Marty Feldman Covers Of Tom Lehrer Tunes

Marty and Derek Griffiths perform Tom Lehrer's hilarious National Brotherhood Week on the 1974 BBC series Marty Back Together Again. While the quality of this clip isn't great (appears to have been mastered from a VHS tape that's going-going-going and soon to be gone), I can't complain, having never seen any excerpts from this series before a few days ago.



Thanks, flashbackcaruso, for posting this on YouTube!