A week or so ago I noted the availability of absurdly cheap 50-movie DVD packs – SF, mystery, so forth. And this 100 Cartoon Classics
This afternoon Belle and I ran a double-feature matinee. First, a Tom and Jerry cartoon, "A Spanish Twist". No, not the stupid cat and mouse. The originals. Read about them here. Now visit the wonderful little site I have built just for you. Wonder of wonders! It turns out you can download the whole cartoon here.
Then we watched Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge, starring John Howard and John Barrymore. I’ve slapped up a couple of stills on J&B. Eh. The writing is ludicrously bad. There’s a scene where it could have been funny if the butler had just swallowed the chewing gum, accidentally, without then announcing ‘I’ve just swallowed my gum, accidentally.’ But in fairness, the villain does spend the entire second half dressed as Severus Snape in drag. I like the fact that there is no revenge angle whatsoever. Then we watched Orson Welle’s The Stranger. Technically, that was cheating. Belle picked it on purpose. But the print is watchable. So now you know. (Hey, it’s Saturday night and you’ve already read Kieran’s Johnny Depp joke.)
Man, those Tom and Jerry cartoons are weird. I think I’ll make a couple more little sites. Would you like that?
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Adam Roberts 05.27.06 at 12:21 pm
Would you like that? Ve-ery much. I read it to my daughter as she looked at the onscreen piccies. Well, I read her a bowdlerized version. She liked the octopus.
Mind you, re: your caption for the last frame — I query your use of the term ‘hideous’. There’s nothing ‘hideous’ about the act of love between two consenting adults, even if there happens to be a fifty year age gap between them. You old neo-con, you.
Rich Puchalsky 05.27.06 at 1:00 pm
In A Spanish Twist, the newspaper is “Westurn Onion”. A precursor?
Chris Brody 05.27.06 at 5:06 pm
The Snarkout Boys! I remember them with great fondness, as I do a few of Pinkwater’s other books. I’ve long thought, too, that “The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death” is a book title of perhaps unequalled fantasticness.
yabonn 05.27.06 at 7:38 pm
Ha! In my time, people knew how to have fun with mere internet serendipity.
Simple pleasures, like reducing people’s brain to a mush with a finnish earworm and leeks. There.
KCinDC 05.27.06 at 8:01 pm
Rich, that’s not a newspaper. It’s a telegram. That’s what Western Union used to do.
John Holbo 05.27.06 at 8:46 pm
It occurs to me that, in deference to the house-bound nature of the adventure, I ought to call this practice ‘snarking in’. Oooh, earwork and leeks. It doesn’t look to me like the Codger consents, Adam. Mind you, all Tom does is kick him through to the end of next week. So that’s alright.
I’ll make another couple little sites.
Adam Roberts 05.28.06 at 1:42 am
“It doesn’t look to me like the Codger consents, Adam.” What you’ve got to bear in mind about elderly beardy old men is that when they say no, they actually mean yes.
One piece of pedantry; this ‘Tom and Jerry’ isn’t the ‘original’ pairing, as you suggest here. The originals were a couple of Victorian city lads from Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1820). That’s where the coupling of those two names comes from.
John Holbo 05.28.06 at 12:46 pm
Thanks, Adam. I didn’t know that.
finn 05.29.06 at 4:21 pm
I honestly thought my friend Dustin & I might be the only two people on earth who read The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. Glad to know we’re not alone.
stereo is for wimps.
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