Remembering Kotter and His Sweathogs

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Welcome Back, Kotter  burst onto the scene in September 1975 and was an instant hit.  The initial idea was to focus on a young newly married teacher [Gabe Kaplan] returning to teach remedial students [called Sweathogs] at his former high school where he had been a remedial student.  The show’s breakout stars turned out to be the Sweathogs.

So the focus changed.

Soon the spotlight was on the students with their teacher in a co-star or even supporting role.  The teacher’s wife usually had a scene in the shows opening and again in the closing where she got to laugh at an old joke told by teacher.  There were stories of an unhappy set.

Things became more complicated when Kaplan butted heads with the show’s producer and John Travolta [one of the remedial students] made it big in the movies.  Both Kaplan and Travolta didn’t even appear in many of the last season episodes.

The show ran four seasons and for the first two and maybe the third it was “must-see” tv.  Sadly during the the fourth and final season the audience graduated even if the Sweathogs didn’t.

The AV Club posted a piece by Noel Murray titled 10 Episodes That Show How Welcome Back, Kotter Was Like a Class in Comedy History.  While that may be a bit of an overstatement, the article did bring back some fun memories of Kotter and his Sweathogs.

39 Things We Learned from the Banned “Dr. No” Commentary

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Film School Rejects presents 39 Things We Learned from the Banned “Dr. No” Commentary  by Kevin Carr.  Here are five of my favorites…

1. The iconic James Bond theme was not in the original picture. The score had “Underneath the Mango Tree” as Bond’s theme, and Young thought “that’s a really stupid idea” because eventually they would make a James Bond movie without mango trees. John Barry was referred to him, and he wrote the recognizable theme without even seeing the film.

7. It took ten takes of Bond tossing his hat onto the coat tree to get the shot. In later films, Connery became good enough to hit the mark on the first try.

23. When the Three Blind Mice try to assassinate Bond in the parking lot, Hunt did not have a shot of the passing car’s headlight that distract them from following through because Young never shot it. In order ot make the shot work, Hunt flared the film on the actors in post production to show the flash of light.

31. Young discovered Ursula Andress in a pile of photographs on the desk of a producer. He asked if he could keep the photo and took it to Cubby Broccoli to find her for the role of Honey Ryder. They cast her primarily because of her looks and never had a formal audition or test of her acting ability.

34. Ursula Andress was overdubbed by actress Nikki Van der Zyl because her accent was too thick and the filmmakers could not understand all of her lines.

Johnny Rockets Plans 200 Brand New Drive-In Theaters

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I love drive-in movies.  What could be better than going to a double or triple feature on a nice evening and watching movies under the stars?

Sadly drive-in theaters went the way of VHS machines once VHS machines were cheap enough to be in nearly every home in America.  VHS led to Laser Disc to DVD and now Digital Download.  With each upgrade for home viewing the number of drive-in movie theaters diminished.

It looks like all that is about to change.

Johnny Rockets [a retro hamburger chain] has entered into a partnership with USA Drive-Ins to open up 200 brand new drive-in theaters by 2018.  That is beautiful music to my ears.

Let’s just hope that one of the 200 will be in my county!

Mike Torrance Goes Out on a Cliff

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Mike Torrance aka The Krayola Kidd is back and he’s brought Gabe Walker with him!

Over the coming weeks/months I’ll be posting more of Mike’s sketch card commissions.  My goal is to eventually get a card for every character Sly has played.  We’re well on our way!

You can see more of Mike’s art at his Deviant Art site. Mike is available for commissions and his prices are very reasonable.

 

The Strange Life of the Man Who Created “The Addams Family”

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Charles Addams, the creator of The Addams Family,  was a strange bird.  Although Addams had a normal childhood, his cartoons hinted at a darker side…

 …Instead of a standard coffee table, Addams used a Civil War-era embalming table. He also kept a collection of antique crossbows above his sofa, and he used a young girl’s tombstone (“Little Sarah, Aged Three”) as a perch for his cocktails…

Addams married two different women who looked like the character Morticia from his cartoons (and his second wife even had her nose fixed to look more like the character).  Addams married his third wife in a pet cemetery.

Over the course of his career…

“Addams illustrated 68 covers for The New Yorker and contributed more than 1,300 cartoons to the magazine” — His most popular creation the comic strip The Addams Family “spawned two live-action television series, two animated cartoons, and two blockbuster feature films.”

Surprisingly The Addams Family  tv show got his cartoons banned from The New Yorker and after his divorce his second wife controlled the rights to the tv series.

You get the full details of Addams interesting life if you click over to the very interesting piece Light Heart; Dark Humor: The Man Behind The Addams Family  by Bill DeMain at Neatorama.

Q & A with John Carpenter!

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I’ve been a John Carpenter fan since his classic Halloween.  Then when VHS came out I was able to go back and see Assault on Precinct 13  [which I prefer to the two].

Carpenter went on to do Escape from New York,  The Thing  and so many other cool films.  Somewhere along the way the lighting escaped the bottle.

Carpenter has the best attitude about his career, his life and his legacy.  I’d love to see him return to Snake Plissken with Kurt Russell one more time.

That’s not likely and Carpenter doesn’t talk about it in this interview, but he does talk about a lot and the interview is more than worth a read.

Source: Deadline.

James O’Barr: “The Crow” and Much More

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Sean CW Korsgaard posted a great interview with The Crow creator James O’Barr.

O’Barr discusses what got him on board the new Crow movie [O’Barr hated and had nothing to do with the sequels and was against a new Crow film]…

…We’re not remaking the movie, we’re readapting the book. My metaphor is that there is a Bela Lugosi Dracula and there’s a Francis Ford Coppola Dracula, they use the same material, but you still got two entirely different films. This one’s going to be closer to Taxi Driver or a John Woo film, and I think there’s room for both of them…

a new Crow comic that O’Barr is writing and drawing called The Engines of Despair…

…features a woman who was killed on her wedding day and comes back for revenge…

…a war comic…

…It’s a true war story from the Korean War, about a group of Marines – I was in the Marines, and I’d heard about this group called “the real 300″, Fox Company, 235 of them held a mountaintop in Korea for five days against thousands of well-armed Chinese troops in subzero temperatures. Unlike the Spartans, against all odds, they held the mountain, and 82 of them lived to tell the tale…

…and a pet project O’Barr has been working on called Sundown…

…it’s a gothic spaghetti-western that I’ve been working on for about five years in my spare time. It’s following four characters, each on a journey across post-Civil War America, each have different motives, goals and back stories, and Sundown is like any good story, about their journeys, not their destination. I’d describe it as theWizard of Oz if it had been directed by Sergio Leone…

Korsgaard’s O’Barr interview is really well done and I recommend it to all.