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Jan112007

Yvonne DeCarlo

Another of those familiar faces I grew up with, Yvonne DeCarlo of Munsters fame, died Monday, aged 84. Here is one of the more comprehensive obits for her.

The Munsters wasn’t great television — personally, I’ve always thought the show’s contemporary rival The Addams Family was smarter, sexier, and funnier — but it was reliably entertaining, making up for its pedestrian storylines with a charming cast and some fairly nifty production design. (I’ve always loved the staircase with the secret trapdoor leading down to the basement, and the two Munster cars custom-built by the legendary George Barris were the apotheosis of a 12-year-old boy’s automotive fantasies.) As Lily Munster, the wife/mother character in what was really a basic family sitcom with a strange-looking family, DeCarlo mostly served as straight-woman to Fred Gwynne’s Herman and Al Lewis as Grandpa. However, she occasionally got some good one-liners of her own, and while she didn’t display the same dangerous brand of sexuality as Morticia Addams (played in her TV incarnation by Carolyn Jones), Lily was a beautiful woman. Er, vampire. Whatever.

Looking around the ‘net, I see that Bijou Bob has a brief tribute to DeCarlo, which includes a sultry photo of her in one of her B-movie roles years before Lily Munster, and Jaime J. Weinman posts a YouTube clip of her with Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross, as well as an audio clip of her singing in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. And here is the famous opening title sequence for The Munsters, featuring Lily bidding farewell to her various family members as they head out for their day. Watch for that trapdoor I mentioned; someday, I will have one of those…

http://youtu.be/8TTIqK9nFH8

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Jan112007

The Surge

President Bush’s strategy for Iraq, 2006: Stay the course.

President Bush’s strategy for Iraq, 2007: Stay the course. Only with more troops.

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Jan092007

Genre Book Meme

Here’s another meme from SF Signal, focusing this time on genre literature. As I pondered my answers, I realized that I’m not nearly as much of an SF junkie as I used to be, or at least as I used to imagine myself to be, because it was downright hard to answer some of these items. However, much of this meme can relate to book habits in general, so it’s still worth considering, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

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Jan092007

Bruce Campbell Shills for Old Spice

Marketing people being what they are — which is, um, marketing people — and YouTube being what it is — which is incredibly popular and frighteningly efficient at spreading content across the whole of the InterWebs in a very short time — it was inevitable that the one would try to find a way to take advantage of the other in order to get more advertisements in front of more eyeballs. And thus was born “viral video commercials” i.e., ads that don’t look like ads or which have high entertainment value, so people will pass them around to their friends online and thus fulfill that whole marketing imperative involving ads and eyeballs.

Normally, I would find such methods insidious and distasteful — good lord, isn’t the average citizen confronted by enough marketing messages during the day? — but when one of these viral ads features the great Bruce Campbell (of whom I’ve sung praises before), well, I guess I have no choice but to bow and do my part for capitalism. Enjoy the following… oh, and pay attention to the painting behind Bruce as he walks. There’s a whole lot of sailcloth in that image…

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Jan092007

2007 Genre Movie Meme

Time for some memeage, courtesy of SF Signal. This one asks you to let the world know which 2007 genre films (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, and horror) you’re looking forward to. Instructions and the list after the break…

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Jan072007

That Belongs in a Museum

About every six months for the last decade or so, some well-meaning acquaintance of mine has come rushing up, breathless with the news that there’s going to be a fourth Indiana Jones film. My reaction has always been something to the effect of, “I’ll believe it when I see the credits roll…”

Well, it looks like I might have to start believing. The news broke across the InterWebs a few days ago that the three men at the creative heart of the Indy franchise — George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Harrison Ford, for those who haven’t been paying attention — have finally found a script they all like and are ready to proceed. I’ve heard variants of that one before, though, so I still didn’t lend much credence to the story until I read that there’s been an official press release issued. According to it, the cameras are scheduled to roll in June of this year with a planned release date in May of ’08.

I should be enthused as all get-out for this project. After all, the Indy movies are among my top three all-time favorite entertainment properties (along with Star Wars and Star Trek, if you couldn’t guess), and they’ve all been very important to me at various points in my life. Even Temple of Doom, believe it or not. As I type this, Indy’s scruffy viasge is smiling down upon me from a framed Last Crusade one-sheet, and it is not a coincidence that in most of the photos taken of me in England 13 years ago, I’m wearing a fedora. Yes, Indy is one of my Main Men, right up there with Han Solo and Jim Kirk.
But I can’t help but think that making another movie about him is a really bad idea.

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Jan042007

Long-Delayed Tributes to the Departed

I just learned that Mike Evans, the first actor to play Archie Bunker’s neighbor and occasional antagonist Lionel Jefferson on All in the Family (there were two Lionels, you know), died a couple weeks ago at the age of 57. As with so many others I eulogize around here, it was the damned cancer that got him. What a shame — 57 isn’t very old, and I’m sure he had lots of living left to do.

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Jan042007

Subway Hero

If I’d seen this in a movie, I would’ve said it was too far-fetched to believe: a 50-year-old man saved a 20-year-old stranger’s life after the other guy suffered some sort of seizure and fell from a New York subway platform onto the tracks. The older man — who was with his two young daughters, no less — dove onto the tracks himself and held the seizure victim down in the small space between the rails as a train roared past only inches above their heads. Neither man was badly injured, although Wesley Autrey, the hero of our story, emerged with a smear of grease on his stocking cap where the underside of the train grazed his head. The man he saved, Cameron Hollopeter, is in the hospital but I’d guess that’s as much to determine what happened to him before the train as from any damage the train did.

I’ve read the article I linked to above three times now, and I just keep shaking my head at the amazing-ness of it. How cool is it that there are people in the world who give enough of a damn (and who are fast-thinking enough) to do something like this for another human being? We all like to think that we’d be the hero ourselves if we found ourselves in a situation that required it, but how many of us would really rise to the occasion? I think I’d probably just stand there like an idiot. This story is both humbling and uplifting…

(Hat tip to Brian Greenberg for letting me know about this…)

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