Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Actor Allan Arbus Dies at 95

Folk Legend Richie Havens Passes - AllAccess.com

Folk Legend Richie Havens Passes | AllAccess.com

While Richie Havens recorded many covers of other artist hits, he recorded of his own material as well, including the anti-war song "Handsome Johnny" (Written with actor Lou Gossett Jr.) and "No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed" (Which Yes combined with the theme to The Big Country on their Time and a Word LP).

In later years, he sang some famous jingles including this one for Cotton and Folgers Coffee.


  

Sunday, April 21, 2013

I'M THE ONLY SPITTING IMAGE FAN IN AMERICA

As a retro blogger, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I feel I have neglected posting about the decade of my teen years - the Eighties. Part of this may be due to the fact that I had rough time during my junior high and high school years. I have some bad memories of that era.

Don't get me wrong, I love quite a bit of the pop culture of the Eighties. The problem is those who felt it necessary to push me around and make my life a living Hell wanted to denigrate what music, movies, TV and clothes made me happy. They wanted me to change and like things they found acceptable.

I've noticed that the Facebook poster/banner machine has begun romanticizing certain elements of the Eighties which didn't interest me in my teen years. It is a view that the world was a happy place in the Eighties. I was getting beat up by Donny Dickweed and turned down by Eunice Moneymaker, so I didn't find the Eighties to be a great time. Also anyone watching an old TV newscast or reading a newspaper would see that there was trouble then as there is today.

If you want a funny and rather accurate look back at the Eighties, go to You Tube and look up Spitting Image. This was a satirical puppet show (Yes, I said puppet show) that ran on British television from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. No world leader nor entertainment personality was safe from being transformed into a hideous puppet with a giant head.

If the puppet's looks weren't enough to garner a laugh, the writers twisted the personalities to an extreme. Mikael Gorbachev birthmark was replaced by a red hammer and sickle. Margret Thatcher was a cigar chomping boss-from-Hell with Norman Tebitts as her leather-wearing Teddy Boy henchman. Ronald Reagan was a scatterbrained goofball with square-headed Ed Meece and vampirish (Think Nosferatu/London After Midnight) Casper Weinberger at his side. Princess Di was a Valley Girl (The Brits call them Sloan Rangers) and Prince Charles was a boring doofus, with Prince William having a voice and personality like Martin Stephens in Village of the Damned, constantly plotting against the family. Queen Elizabeth was hopelessly out of touch with reality, while her mother was a feisty grandma who drank gin and bet on horses.

Celebrities got it too. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch was constantly passing gas. Micheal Jackson wore a space helmet and got whiter (Once he turned into Diana Ross). Madonna not only changed clothes and hairstyles during songs, her nipples gave interviews. Bob Dylan was a middle aged guy writing protest songs about things that annoyed him (Losing his undershorts, cheese molding etc).

British rock icon were picked on as well. Cliff Richard was a sainted virgin. Paul McCartney was recycling the same songs over and over. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were always stoned. Ozzy Osbourne was shown to secretly be a "nice boy from Sheffield" and Boy George was catty.

According to the Spitting Image milieu, Ed McMahon and Bill Cosby were secretly running America, Sly Stallone was an idiot, Jack Nicholson never stopped smiling, tennis champ Evan Lyndel was a corpse, Richard Chamberlin's face was pulled tight with clamps, Cher was all plastic and Al Pachino, Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman couldn't tell each other apart.

The show was huge in England, but the success couldn't transfer over to America. NBC tried a few hour long TV specials. While critics loved the show, ratings were not very good. Supposedly, the "humor was too rough for Americans." Americans frequently trash the clips on You Tube, but of course, these are probably Tea Party idiots, whose idea of humor is to Photoshop President Obama's face to look like the Joker from The Dark Knight or Photoshop Rosie O'Donnell's head on to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's body. In other words, the American who don't like Spitting Image wouldn't know comedy if it bit them in the ass.

However, the place most American's became familiar with the Spitting Image puppets were through the video to the Genesis hit "Land of Confusion." There are people trashing it on You Tube and, locally, when KYTV's Ethan Forhetz featured it in a countdown of 80s music videos on KY3.com, Ozarkers were complaining about how they hated it.

Which leads me to believe, I'm the only person in America that liked Spitting Image. It's satirical comedy was an influence on the old blog. I concur with many of the British comments on You Tube, that it would be great to see a show like this on TV again. What killed Spitting Image was the cost of making the puppets. It was very expensive.

I should note that within the last two weeks, there has been a surge of hits on old Spitting Image clips on You Tube among Brits. The clips they are watching are all of the Margret Thatcher character, especially this one, with characters singing the Moody Blues hit "Go Now." Since it is spring, I'm going to throw in Spitting Image's parody of the bubble gummy dance hits of the British duo Black Label. Who could really hate that?
  
   

         

Saturday, April 13, 2013

I SHOULD HAVE BEEN A OLD LADY

With the passing of Jonathan Winters, I thought of something he said in an interview in the PBS documentary Make Me Laugh. He was talking about the character of Maude Frickert (above). He mentioned that when he was dressed as Maude Frickert, he could get away with saying just about anything.


Also in the documentary, Whoopie Goldberg discusses how she was doing an imitation of African-American comedian Moms Mabley (above) on Saturday Night Live and one of the jokes was cut from the show by Standards and Practices as being obscene, even though she had remembered Mabley doing the same joke on The Flip Wilson Show in the early 70s. Both Winters and Goldberg attributed this to the fact that Maude Frickert and Moms Mabely were perceived "harmless" old ladies.

Hind sight 20/20, if I had known that back when I started the original blog, I would not have chosen the persona of a comic book/movie serial, megalomaniac super-villain (with a crush of Paris Hilton) to do my controversial blogging on current topics. Ozarkers for some reason feared Desdinova, as if there really was a megalomaniac plotting to take over America from his hide out under Park Central Square. I have been told that some people actually called Springfield Police to ask why they hadn't attempted to arrest me before I banned talk radio with the aid of my giant robot and my raygun that turned people "gay."
 
Instead I should have been an old lady with salty opinions on current events and local media personalities. I probably could have named her after my own grandma and called her Grandma Jones (Because there are probably millions of Grandma Jones in the world). To add to what Jonathan Winters and Whoopie Goldberg theorized about Maude Frickert and Moms Mabley, Ozarkers tend to worship old people and believe they are smarter than most highly educated people. So I could have got away with saying things like, "My third husband used to spout off crazy opinions like KSGF's Vincent David Jericho, but I found the perfect thing to stop that - I gave him poison" or "That Billy Long is such a big ignoramus. Someone ought to rip his Fruit of the Looms off, while he is STILL WEARING THEM!" or "Did you ever notice the people who hate rap and hip hop are the same morons who like Hank Williams Jr and that Chicken Fried song" or "I don't know why folks around here don't like Honey Boo Boo, she got those cute little dimples. They tell me they prefer to watch Duck Dynasty. I'll be those stupid guys on that show are covered in tick and chiggers."

People would have just said "That old lady is funny. We ought to have her over for dinner Sunday after church."

Then again, my opinions are why I'm considered the Super Villain of the Ozarks!!! Mwu-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!  

Dayton-born comedian Jonathan Winters dies

Dayton-born comedian Jonathan Winters dies

From the Dayton Daily News.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

ANNETTE SINGS "IT'S REALLY LOVE" (Or Johnny Carson's Theme Song)


This is a song recorded by the late Annette Funicello. It was written by Paul Anka. A few years later, he "recycled" the tune into a jazz instrumental that became the theme song for The Tonight Show. That song is commonly refered to as "Johnny's Theme" and was the theme while Johnny Carson was the host of the show.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

PANCAKES IPOD PLAYLIST 2

Retrospace coined the phase "pancakes" as a euphemism for a prominent for of entertainment on the Internet that also starts with the letter "p." There were so many pop songs about "pancakes" that I needed a second playlist. I also see that I could make "pancake" playlist for The Rolling Stones and Prince alone. If you remember, Prince's popularity lead to the call for warning labels on music.

One of the radio stations here in the Ozarks runs a liner that says "Would you want your grandmother to hear some of the current hits played on other radio stations?" My Grandma Jones (Rest her soul) referred to a woman in a skimpy or short dress as "showing Christmas" and referring to a small amount of something as not being "enough to fill a cat's butt." Emenim and 50 Cent isn't going to upset her too much.

Here is those songs about "pancakes" that would upset the grandmas of Springfield, MO.

"Sink the Pink" - AC/DC
"Touch It" - Monifah
"Lightning Strikes" - Lou Christie (In the mid-60s, Lou Christie was banned from some radio stations)
"Sexual Healing" - Marvin Gaye
"Do Me Baby" - Prince
"Tube Snake Boogie" - ZZ Top
"Rattlesnake Shake" - Fleetwood Mac
"Shake, Rattle and Roll" - Big Joe Turner
"Skin Tight" - Ohio Players
"Fat Bottomed Girls" - Queen
"Bump N Grind" - R. Kelly
"Between the Sheets" The Isley Brothers
"One On One" - Hall & Oates
"Centerfold" - J.Geils Band
"Lets Put the X In Sex" - Kiss
"Bad Boy" - Ray Parker Jr.
"Lady Marmalade" - Labelle
"Every Picture Tells a Story" - Rod Stewart
"Something's Burning" The First Edition
"Self Control" - Laura Branigan
"Juicy Fruit" - Mtume
"The Lemon Song" - Led Zeppelin
"She Was Hot" - The Rolling Stones
"When You Touch Me" - Skyy
"Wiggle Wiggle" - The Accents (A "Litty Bitty Pretty One" rip off with racey lyrics)
"Strip" - Adam Ant
"Big Ten Inch Record" - Aerosmith
"Wonder Girl" - Sparks
"Penetration" - Iggy & the Stooges
"Muscles of Love" - Alice Cooper
"Peaches" - The Stranglers
"Turn Off The Lights" - Teddy Pendergrass
"Obsession" - Animotion
"I Touch Myself" - The Divinyls
"Hungry Like The Wolf" - Duran Duran
"Relax" - Frankie Goes To Hollywood
"Shakin" - Eddy Money
"I Wanna Sex You Up" - Color Me Badd
"Sex (I'm a...) - Berlin
"You've Never Been This Far Before" - Conway Twitty (Bom-bom-bom)
"Work With Me Annie" - Hank Ballard and the Midnighters

Remember, practice safe "pancakes."

BTW: Retrospace is looking at the scientific probability of "pancakes" happening.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

TO BE LEGITIMATE

I should have done this a long time ago during the heyday of the original blog, but I didn't think it would be important (I really never think anything is important in the grand scheme of the universe).

I have created a Mission Statement and Rules for Comments on my blog. I've been disgusted by comments I have seen left on You Tube and the local media Facebook sites as well as their public forums.

I wanted to also put down in writing what I want people to take away from this site and what I didn't want on it. I wanted to teach people to respect and enjoy pop culture as I do.

For the average person, who finds this site through Google, Yahoo or another search engine, this will not be a major concern. However, there are still flames of animosity smoldering from the days of the old blog here in Springfield (and Lebanon too), MO. There are also people in both communities who feel they should be able to use every forum on the Web to expose their obnoxious opinions. These people don't see this as a fun blog, but a threat to "the quality of life in the Ozarks" or "American family values." These people can post their hate, bigotry and hate speech on other forums here in the Ozarks all they want, but not here. I will keep their opinions off. That goes for people who hang around other websites like You Tube posting the same kind of garbage.

This is not to discourage posting but to cover myself in case any of our local activist type want to take me to court for hindering their free speech.

Of course, doing something, like this, is why I'm considered the Super Villain of the Ozarks!!! Mwu-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Thursday, April 4, 2013

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