In Search of the Shaggs - 25th Anniversary Edition

I was probably the last kid on my block to discover the Shaggs.

Frank Zappa had already declared the group “better than the Beatles;” Rolling Stone had already covered the LP and would go on to name Philosophy of the World “one of the 100 most influential alternative albums ever released.”

But I didn’t know that.

Not when, almost exactly 25 years ago, I walked into a record store and asked what, in the owner’s opinion, was the worst rock and roll record of all time.

Without hesitation, he suggested Philosophy of the World by The Shaggs.

Equally without hesitation, I went on to create a 20 minute audio documentary – just for distribution to friends – titled In Search of the Shaggs.

Link to In Search of the Shaggs 20 minute audio.

Link to The Shaggs Official Site.

Best Part - They Stopped Smelling Like Hot Dogs About Six Months Ago

The Official Guide To Disney Collectibles by Ted Hake says that the Disney Johnny Tremain Silver plastic coins (shown above in all their original dazzling 1957 beauty) were "cereal box inserts." Ah, if only 'twere true. You had to buy a package of Armour hot dogs to get one of these babies. The Gerber Plastics Corporation of St. Louis made 13 million of these, and at least seven survive. (I have doubles of Paul Revere's Midnight Ride).

And this is no silly, thought-up-on-the-moment premium. You see, in the novel Johnny Tremain, Jehu, Mr. Hancock's slave boy, gives Johnny a purse with a silver coin in it. Johnny goes from tavern to tavern, looking for the perfect place to satisfy his hunger. He finally ends up at a tavern called "The Afric Queen," where he spends the silver coin on a feast where he has both coffee and chocolate for the first time. Then, on the caffeine rush, Johnny goes out and single-handedly wins the revolutionary war.

Disney shot this scene, but didn't want to show Johnny in a establishment where liquor was served, so it was cut from the final production. All that remains is one still:

It's Your Turn, Fat Boy

"Don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle."

Know who came up with that? Elmer Wheeler. That's him at right. Elmer's company, Tested Selling Institute, headquartered for years at 321 Fifth Avenue in NYC, sold sentences. Not just any sentences, mind you. Tested Selling Sentences. Elmer was the Founder, President, and sole employee of TSI.

Elmer analyzed the waitress's classic response to a soda order - 'large or small?' - and suggested waitresses say 'large one?' instead. 7 out of 10 people, apparently, will say 'yes' in this scenario, which has since evolved throughout our culture, as epitomized by the phrase 'Fries with that?'

Elmer's biggest score was "The Fat Boy's Book," published in 1950, which went viral via newspaper syndication. Wheeler had written the book, the story goes, when he was shocked by a salesperson frantically trying to wave him into the 'oversized' section of a local department store. So Elmer lost 40 pounds in 80 days, and the rest is forgotten history.

Our buddies at Parker Brothers, at the time, were the greatest game company on the face of the earth. That would end in 1966, when they were taken over by General Mills, and subsequently spun off as Kenner Parker Toys in '85, which fought off a hostile takeover by Hollywood's New World Productions in '87 and were saved by Tonka's bid, thus briefly becoming Tonka Kenner Parker before ultimately being bought by Hasbro, which had previously scooped up Parker's old rival Milton Bradley. Some history! But in 1951, Parker was in high gear, publishing an astonishing number of new board games every year. They jumped on the Wheeler bandwagon in 1951 with "The Fat Boy's Game," a lovely little board game, especially if you enjoy 50's-style advertising clip art and 3-color printing. A really pretty gameboard in an unusual size: 9" tall by 2' wide. Here 'tis in all its 50's glory (click to enlarge and savor):

The Object of the Game: Everybody is trying to attain a perfect figure. As the various contestants become familiar with the unusual and interesting play of the Fat Boy's Game, the chances of outwitting each other are much greater and each move adds to the excitement and suspense.

But here's the best part, under the heading 'hilarious attention to detail.' Guess which set of 'tokens' below came with "The Fat Boy's Game."

Beat The Clock With H.G. Wells

Name That 1920's Vaudeville Star!

Opening at The Palace on Broadway in 1920... every vaudevillian's dream, even if you do have to apply your own makeup.

Vaudeville stars who failed to move on into film, radio and/or television are largely forgotten today, yet this woman (who never became a movie star, although she did make a feature titled Deliverance in 1918) remains well-known.

Well-known... but also unknown.

I'm recommending a book - one of the best, most informative, and most enjoyable I've ever read.

Listen to an excerpt (which reveals the identity of the vaudeville star above) and then, if you're of a mind, click here for the Amazon link.

Fixing Rampant Children's Hour Confusion

I can't believe the hundreds of e-mails I've been getting about "The Children's Hour."

If I haven't answered yours personally, my apologies, but I've been totally swamped. It seems best to try to clarify the issue once and for all right here in one definitive post. Let the debates and flame wars rage elsewhere... here are my last words on the subject.

The Children's Hour (1863) is a classic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow which describes a "sneak attack" by his three daughters, who wrest the author from his studies and demand his full attention: "A sudden rush from the stairway/ A sudden raid from the hall!/ By three doors left unguarded/ They enter my castle wall!"

The Children's Hour (1934) is a classic play (and, later, movie) by Lillian Hellman about two women who run a school for girls. They run afoul of a nasty little student who starts spreading rumors that the two women are partners in more than a corporate sense, threatening to ruin their reputations and the school.

The Children's Hour (1946) is a game by Parker Brothers featuring "Peanut The Elephant" that's aimed at children 5 to 10 years of age. The box contains three separate games - "Porky The Pig Oink Oink," a card game; "Peanut The Elephant," a board game; and "ABC Fishing," a game which tests manual dexterity.

Each of the three Children's Hours is satisfying in its own way. The current hullabaloo began when confusion between the three entertainments started creating awkward social situations where one Children's Hour was mistaken for another.

If you're worried that your planned night at the theater might actually turn out to be a poetry reading or card-table event, have no fear. Here's the definitive word on how to positively distinguish These Three (1936).

Click on the fact-filled chart at left to enlarge.

They Should Have Called The Ship "Monstromo"

D.C. Heath, Purveyor Of Disney Books Par Excellence

Carl Barks didn't get to sign his comics, and his readers referred to his stories as the ones "drawn by the good artist."

I had the same exact feeling about the D.C. Heath Walt Disney Story Books.

The first four were published in 1939: Donald Duck and His Friends, Little Pig's Picnic and Other Stories, School Days in Disneyville, and Mickey Never Fails. By the time I got my hands on these books, they had been in and out of the school library hundreds of times and were a bit worse for the wear. But there was something about these books, something I couldn't quite put my finger on.

(That's D.C. Heath on the right, by the way. I never knew what he looked like until this evening).

The drawings in the Heath books seemed to "pop." Something about them seemed so real... and so right. Being perhaps 5 or 6 at the time, I understood little about animation. But I sensed, and I'm betting hundreds of other kids did as well, that these were real Walt Disney drawings that made all the other books look like crude knock-offs... in the much the same way Carl Barks Duck stories made the non-Barks stories pale and uninteresting by comparison.

There was a simple explanation, of course: the art in the D.C. Heath books was not only prepared by the Walt Disney studio, but prepared on cels that were inked and painted just the way they were in the cartoons. (Most of them, anyway. D. C. Heath's Bambi doesn't use cels at all. And remind me to come back to Bambi some time.)


They weren't cels used in the features and shorts; they were cels made especially for the books. For once, the characters looked exactly right, exactly the way they did on the screen. For once, the color was nearly as vivid as an IB Tech print, something else I didn't know about back then. Some color films were just better than others.

And at a dollar a piece (Donald Duck And His Friends, the first in the series was 68 cents) and 100+ pages, these things must have flown off the shelves. Schools bought them because they were carefully sequenced in reading difficulty. Here They Are might have had a much more interesting title if its vocabulary had not been so severely limited. Donald Duck Sees South America, the most challenging title, is still just a bit beyond me.



My favorite was, and is, Mickey Sees The USA, which used the trailer last seen in the cartoon Mickey's Trailer (looks like a '36 Drayer and Hansen to me). Yes, a bit didactic at times, but when Mickey stops in Washington D.C., the President himself helps find the lost Pluto. After the President scolds Pluto, he asks something of Mickey, Minnie and Donald in return: "I want you to be my good-will messengers and carry my greetings to everybody in the United States. We have a wonderful country. But it's up to every one of us to make it still finer and better." Say, that guy could get elected today.

Every once in a while, a cel created for a D. C. Heath book goes up for auction somewhere. The last one I spotted was this one, the opening spread for Chapter 1 of Pinocchio.


This wasn't some book pretending to be Pinocchio, this book was Pinocchio. It still punches through 67 years of yellowing in my copy.

Which Candidate Best Represents People On Movie Posters?

Can The Three-Course Dinner Be Far Behind?

Once again, life imitates art.

Refresh your memory, if necessary, to recall how inflation suddenly struck the unsuspecting Violet Beauregard when she snatched the small stick of gum created by Mr. Willie Wonka's revolutionary non-pollutionary mechanical wonder.

The gum tasted like tomato soup, then roast beef with baked potato, and finally blueberry pie and cream.

It took awhile, but the William Wrigley Company is now selling hard candies in these three flavors:

Strawberry Cheesecake
Cinnamon Bun
Apple Pie Ala Mode

... and they're good! Can the tomato soup and roast beef be far behind?

That was meant to be a rhetorical question, but then I thought... better check. We're closer than you think. The only one of the Wonka gum elements I could not find was the roast beef with potato. The others are available.

Let me stress, because I'm not above making stuff up, that every gum or candy in this post is 100% real. I'll hyperlink them in case you want to buy some.

First up: Uncle Oinkers Gummy Bacon. Manufactured by a company called Meat-O-Matic. Sure, the strawberry flavoring tends to overpower the artificial bacon flavoring, assuming that the FDA requires a product with the word "bacon" in it to have some relation to bacon flavoring. But - unlike those other celebrity spokes-animals - Uncle Oinker can hold his head high: no pigs were harmed in the making of Uncle Oinker's Gummy Bacon.

The same cannot be said for Mo's Bacon Bar. I don't know if the pigs involved in the candy bar were harmed, but they were definitely killed, fried, and covered in chocolate. All in all, not a bad way to go. But this isn't gum that tastes like bacon, it's real bacon that's wrapped in chocolate. So I'm afraid I'm going to have to flip all the cards over and disqualify Mo's, although it sure sounds good: "Rub your thumb over the chocolate bar to release the aromas of smoked applewood bacon flirting with deep milk chocolate. Snap off just a tiny piece and place it in your mouth, let the lust of salt and sweet coat your tongue." Just don't linger over it unduly. The candy comes with a freshness date that's just three months out, and there's an excellent chance the package you find will have logged serious hours on your grocer's shelf.

I have always wondered whether Ronald Reagan's health problems were caused by jellybeans. Jelly Belly became quite famous during the Gipper years, but have lately fallen off in popularity. I wonder if that's because Jelly Belly makes the jellybeans seen at right, selling them under the name of a dummy corporation. To see these phenomenal flavors in their full glory, click on the picture to enlarge (I once again remind you that everything you see here can be bought and eaten). I have never tried "earthworm" or "sausage" jellybeans, but I take solace in knowing that once again, industry is hard at work to bring lip-smackin' meat flavor to candy.

Back to Violet Beauregard. While there seems to be no roast beef and potato candy, you sure as hell can get the first course... the tomato soup, although you might have to travel to Asia... or perhaps a local Lucky's... in order to find it. Booniverse, the blog which covers culinary curiosities, reports:

It does have an unusually powerful tomato aroma (you can smell one of these things being opened across the room) but it follows up with a nicely strong tomato taste so it is keeping its olfactory promises. Also, the tomato flavor is natural (if not fresh from the vine) tomato and not some manufactured processed tomato flavoring which is admirable. If it were any other fruit I'd give it a glowing report with all that it has going for it so far but...it's tomato.

To demand the U.S. close the gap with China (what kind of sense does it make to be able to get candy tomatoes and not tomato candy) write a polite letter expressing your interest to your senator or congressperson.

The one fully-original portion of Violet's chewing gum repast you can get, oddly, is the blueberry gum. No mention of cream, but otherwise it's the real deal - it's gum, and it's blueberry.

So here's what I did: I approximated Violet's flavor fest as best I could, by taking a blueberry gumball, carefully wrapping it tightly in one strip of Uncle Oinkers, and then melting down a piece of the Asian tomato candy and carefully coating the gummy bacon-wrapped blueberry gumball over and over until I had built up a hard candy shell. My neighbor volunteered to actually try the thing, and though she has seen neither the Gene Wilder original nor the Johnny Depp remake, after eating this one piece of candy, she became a huge Willie Wonka fan. Here's a picture of her before we rolled her down to the Juicing Room for squeezing.

Bad News, Ma... I'm Radioactive

Well... they think it was the gum. [Pause] No, Ma, gum. [Pause] G-U-M, Not G-U-N. Gum. [Pause]

Well, they're telling me it contains uranium at about the same level... Ma, would you listen? [Pause]

Why would I make this up? There's Uranium in the gum, and also radium. Radium. The stuff that makes the clock glow? [Pause] Yeah. [Pause] Yeah. [Pause]

What they're... [Pause] Ma, wouldja let me finish? [Pause] Yeah. What they're telling me is it's about the same level where if they find it in the ground, they'd have to do a clean-up. [Pause] No. And Ma... do you happen to remember that... it was like a chemistry kit you gave me?

Well, they're saying that probably didn't help either. [Pause] The guys dressed in... like the... like the Space doctors that break into the house when E.T. dies? [Pause] Yeah. Yeah. Like that. It's a little hard to hear them. [Pause] No! I'm... I'm fine! [Pause] No. Fine. Mom, I gotta ask you these questions, OK? Just so I can get out of here. Open the cupboard and get out one of the red plates. [Pause] Just do it, mom.

Does it say "Fiesta Ware" on the bottom? It does? Hang on a sec, mom.

[Off Phone a bit] Yeah, she says it's the kind with the uranium. [Pause] You think she knew you could make atom bombs with it? She liked the color! Yeah. Yeah. Hang on.

[Back on Phone] Mom, did you put the plate down? [Pause] Never mind why, just put the plate down, is all. [Pause] OK, OK, Ma... Ma... I want you to go to the bathroom. No, no, no... just to look. Just to look is all. Are you on the cordless? [Pause] Well, just walk right in there. [Pause]

OK, Ma, describe the tile to me. [Pause] Yeah, I know it's clean. [Pause] They want to know if it's a hexagon. [Pause] A hexagon. [Pause] I'll ask them. [Pause] A six-sided regular polygon where all the angles add up to 720 degrees. [Pause] I can't put him on, Ma, his head is inside this huge plastic thing. Hang on, what? [Pause] They want to know, is it green. [Pause] I said I thought yes. [Pause] Avocado? Avocado is green, right? [Pause] [Off phone a bit] Yeah, green heaxgons. [Back on phone] Mom, get out of the bathroom. [Pause] Just get out of the bathroom and close the door. Hang on, Ma.

[Off phone a bit] What? I... yeah, every so often, I guess... just for the articles, really. Why? Why do you ask? [Pause]

Really. Really!

Glossy paper, huh? I never knew that.

Tooth marks? On the ma... [Pause] oh, on the... [Pause] Yeah, that's my pencil. [Pause] Right. Right.Those? No, I just like the taste. [Pause] [Back on phone] Ma? [Pause] Yeah, gotta go. Don't wait up... I may be a while.

This is where you want to go.

Also here.

And the home page is here.

MGM's Technicolor Stills

MGM's Publicity Department was doing something right in the late 50's and early 60's with their 8 by 10 color stills. These appear to have produced them using the same process responsible for true Technicolor... the gorgeous old Technicolor... dye transfer printing. That's how they look to me, anyway - the color pops, and the consistently elegant tag lines also set the MGM stills from this period apart.

I post these examples for your consideration (and downloading - the files are huge, high-resolution images).

The stars are Julie Christie, Lee Remick, June Thorburn, and Yvette Mimieux. The fact that Alan Young and Rod Taylor, co-stars of The Time Machine, yet another of the hundred movies in my all-time top-ten, appear in the last two FOH (front of house) publicity stills is not a coincidence at all.

And that's Paul Frees, of course, as the ring that talks.

Stanley Baxter And The Fast Lady

No, that's not The Fast Lady sitting on the bonnet. It's Julie Christie as Claire Chingford in a movie titled The Fast Lady.

Below, Julie with the The Fast Lady - the 1927 Red Label Bentley that stars in Ken Annakin's 1963 comedy.


The Fast Lady is a terrific British comedy with a raft of great stars in it, an absolutely charming film which is not terribly well known here in the U.S. and is currently available on DVD only in the UK. Stanley Baxter, the film's star, is even less well known here, which would come as a shock to those in the UK, where he's a legendary comedian. In The Fast Lady, Baxter plays Murdoch Troon, a bicyclist who needs to learn how to drive in a hurry, in order to get a date with the lovely Claire.


That's Stanley Baxter on the left, and a familiar British face - Allen Cuthbertson - as the examiner testing to see if Baxter is deserving of a driving license. (Murdoch Troon is not doing so well on his driving test.)

Unlike Genevieve, there's nothing subtle about The Fast Lady.

The only thing that's "subtle," to an American audience, are the motoring references. We don't have L-plates here (the red "L" on the front of The Fast Lady in the color picture indicates that the driver is a "Learner.") Over here, we call them "Student Drivers" and they're only identified if they're driving a car that belongs to a driving instruction program.

You might get a blank stare from an American if you asked about "overtaking a lorry," because here, we "pass a truck."

So maybe that's part of the reason the film isn't better known in the U.S.. But judge for yourself: someone has thoughtfully placed the film's concluding chase scene on YouTube. I think seeing it wouldn't necessarily spoil any of your fun if you ever get to see the complete film... and in seeing this 6 minute scene, you might decide that's exactly what you'd like to do.

More to come on The Fast Lady. For now, put on your "L" plate and learn how they handle slapstick in a classic British film.

Link

Just 12 Horsepower

They're saying that this past weekend's London-to-Brighton run for veteran automobiles was the best ever.

Inspired by my favorite movie, Genevieve, I first did the run seven years ago, thanks to lots of good luck and the people you see pictured at right: Bill and Mary Ellam, in whose 1903 rear entrance Darracq tonneau I rode the 60 miles from London to Brighton in relative luxury.

The Ellam's Darracq has two cylinders and 12 horsepower. That's 12 horsepower to get you from London to Brighton… 12 horsepower to carry you up the difficult hills… 12 horsepower to create your acceleration from a dead stop in London traffic, where they do not close the roads for the veteran cars… just two cylinders to provide you with all the muscle you're ever going to have.

My snow blower is actually more powerful than many of the cars in the Run. It should also be noted that people operating a snow blower during a blizzard are doubtless somewhat warmer and more comfortable than drivers and passengers motoring in the typical London-to-Brighton Run. I distinctly remember that my face was too frozen for speech at the half-way point in Crawley.

At right: My snow blower, as it might appear on the London-To-Brighton Run. Built in 2000, this Sears Craftsman sadly misses London-to-Brighton eligibility by a full 96 years. (Photoshopped on a closed track; trick photo; do not attempt.)

My friend David Burgess-Wise wrote about my L-to-B exploits in The Automobile - to read the article, click here. If you'd like to listen to David talk about the history of the Darracq car, click here.