Joe Blevins's Blog, page 32

Podcast Tuesday: "Gossip Girl"

Cathy Silvers is the secret weapon of Happy Days in its later seasons. As Jenny Piccalo, the flirty, rumor-spreading, fun-loving best friend of the more reserved, responsible Joanie Cunningham (Erin Moran), Silvers gives the aged series a much-needed shot in the arm. Jenny is wilder and more impulsive than the other Happy Days characters, and she has a sharper, edgier sense of humor, too. I'm guessing that the writers loved writing for Jenny, because this character gave them the opportunity to do more risque jokes and stories than they would otherwise do. Plus, Cathy Silvers always makes the material come alive. She seems to be having a great time making the show.
Jenny Piccalo may also be, along with Fonzie (Henry Winkler) one of the more complex and layered characters in the entire series. I'm serious. In a way, Fonzie and Jenny have some key character traits in common. On the surface, both seem to be extremely confident and outgoing. But both are extremely fragile and insecure underneath and may act out in inappropriate ways as a result. They just want to be loved and accepted, and they're terrified of losing people close to them.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast , we're reviewing the Season 9 episode "Tell Tale Tart," which focuses on Jenny and her insecurities. The plot has Joanie bonding with the new girl in school, Mikki (guest star and soon-to-be regular Crystal Bernard). Jenny is so jealous of Mikki that she spreads a nasty rumor about her. 
What kind of rumor, you ask? Well, you can find out by listening to our latest episode. And what a coincidence! Here it is, all cued up for you!

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 143: Cult Movies 3 (1988)

Danny Peary returned to the subject of Ed Wood in Cult Movies 3 (1988).
Over the course of his three highly influential Cult Movies books, originally published between 1981 and 1988, critic Danny Peary covers a wide variety of offbeat films with devoted fan followings. This makes sense, since "cult" is more of a mindset than a narrowly-defined category. Fittingly, the films Peary discusses hail from different eras, ranging from the 1910s to the 1980s, and represent a number of cinematic genres: comedy, drama, science fiction, horror, action, Western, musical, fantasy, and even pornography. Along the way, Peary also covers a wide variety of filmmakers, everyone from John Ford to John Waters.
An interesting photo collage poster.Still in all, there are a scant few cult directors whose films merit multiple essays in Peary’s Cult Movies books, including Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese,  Michael Curtiz, John Carpenter, George Romero, Stanley Kubrick (to my knowledge, the only director to inspire three essays), Russ Meyer, and our very own Edward D. Wood, Jr. That's right! Eddie's a two-time Cult Movies inductee. That ties him with his idol, Orson Welles. 
Seven years after reviewing Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) in the original Cult Movies, Danny Peary reviewed Glen or Glenda (1953) in Cult Movies 3 (1988). I'm not sure how I learned of this third volume in the Cult Movies series, but when I did, I special ordered it immediately from the same Flint bookstore where I'd previously purchased the other two Cult Movies books. As I remember, it arrived at the same time as the elaborate, oversized script book for Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979). Getting those two books simultaneously must've been one of the most exciting days of my adolescence. 
Keep in mind that I read Danny Peary's books before I ever saw one of Ed Wood's movies, so Peary's essays about Plan 9 and Glenda helped shape my perception of those films. I'm sure Peary has deeply affected the way I write about Ed Wood, even today. So does Cult Movies 3 still have anything to teach me in 2023? Let's find out.
Like all the films included in the Cult Movies series, Glen or Glenda merits a few pages of coverage. We get a cast and crew list, some publicity photos (all B&W), a plot synopsis, and an explanatory essay. The cast and crew list comes directly from Glenda's own credits. No complaints there. The seven-paragraph plot synopsis is surprisingly accurate and lucid, considering the disjointed and often surreal nature of Glen or Glenda. Good job, Danny! Bonus points for working in a reference to "Morpheus, god of sleep."
As for pictures, we get a "slightly out-of-focus shot" (the book's term) of Bela Lugosi mixing chemicals in the lab set. ("It's always enjoyable to see Bela Lugosi," says the caption, "but it's impossible to figure out what his role is in this film.") Peary also gives us a photo-collage poster for the film, supposedly from its original release in 1953. (Tagline: "Strange Case: ONE BODY--TWO SEXES.") Remarkably, Cult Movies 3 includes a publicity still from Glenda's extended nightmare sequence. I was so taken by this picture—showing a woman bound-and-gagged on a couch and being menaced by a second woman—that I included it in the very first article in this series back in 2013.
This Bear is no golden turkey, says Peary.Peary's essay starts with a broader discussion of the "bad movie" phenomenon, of which Ed Wood is only one part. Harry and Michael Medved's book The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) was fresher in people's memories back then, and it was still the driving force behind the Wood cult in those pre-Tim Burton days. Peary seems to have soured on the Medveds somewhat in the years since reviewing Plan 9, saying that he finds "worst film festivals" to be "particularly annoying" and "the equivalent of self-pleasing sports fans who do 'the Wave.'" (Peary has also written several books about baseball, so his irritation is earned.)
Overall, Peary concludes that Plan 9 and Glenda aren't really among the worst films ever made, "just the worst watchable movies." In this respect, he puts Ed Wood's movies into the same category as Phil Tucker's Robot Monster (1953) and Arch Hall, Sr.'s Eegah! (1962), among others. But Peary has some strict criteria for what constitutes a true "golden turkey." Films like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (1978) don't count, he says, because they're self-aware and trying to be campy. ("The hilarity must be unintentional," Peary insists.) Meanwhile, films like I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Bloodsucking Freaks (1976) are too offensive to be enjoyable. He also rules out movies that are too boring to be fun and cites Michael Chapman's The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986) as his prime example.
Frankly, all this "so bad it's good" stuff doesn't really interest me anymore—even though it's what initially got me into Ed Wood's movies when I was a teenager—so I was relieved when Peary started discussing the specifics of Glen or Glenda. Peary takes a measured approach here, admiring Wood's film for its sincerity and daring while pointing out the film's numerous technical and aesthetic shortcomings. On the one hand, it took genuine courage for Ed Wood to make a movie about cross-dressing and transgenderism in 1953. If you've been following the news at all lately, you know that these issues are still controversial seven decades later in 2023! Eddie not only wrote and directed Glenda, he played the title role himself! Peary gives Wood all due credit for this, even complimenting him for tackling a sensitive "taboo" subject in "a non-exploitive, non-sensationalistic way."
On the other hand, even Glenda's most fervent admirers must admit that this film is cheaply made, haphazardly assembled, and patently ridiculous in many ways, from its stiff acting and its stilted dialogue to its stream-of-consciousness editing style. Peary discusses all of these topics and more in his review of Glen or Glenda. He writes:

Like other Wood films, Glen or Glenda? is distinguished by embarrassingly bad acting, dialogue, direction, cinematography, editing, music, cheap sets, and, significantly, ugly costuming. As usual there are zany moments that are guaranteed to make you both laugh and cringe. [...] The scenes with Lugosi contribute to the film's structural problems and incoherence. Even without his mindless banter, there is enough confusion caused by flashbacks within flashbacks, the use of several narrators, stylistic changes throughout, nonsensical dialogue, and the inclusion of meaningless images (lightning, stampeding buffalo, cars on the highway) only because Wood had free use of these stock shots.

I must say that, when I finally saw Glen or Glenda a few years after reading Cult Movies 3, the film actually exceeded my expectations. Peary's review, descriptive as it is, could not have prepared me for the real movie.
Don't get the impression that this review is all mockery, though. Along the way, Peary makes some cogent points about Glen or Glenda and its approach to transgender issues. I think my favorite observation is: "This is a rare film where men sit at a table (like old-style soap opera women) and converse about their personal problems!" I also appreciated a passage that compares Ed Wood's film to the educational "civics films" that we used to show to middle school and high school students. Peary deftly points out that the "Alan/Ann" sequence near the end of the film, in which a man becomes a woman through surgery and hormone injections, is similar to the process of an immigrant becoming an American citizen.
By the way, if you have any interest whatsoever in those vintage educational films, I highly recommend Ken Smith's book, Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970 (Blast Books, 1999). And from there, spend some time browsing the Prelinger Archives . I think you'll find that Danny Peary's comparisons are quite apt.
P.S.  One interesting and slightly puzzling aspect of Danny Peary's review of Glen or Glenda is that it includes numerous quotes from the film's producer, George Weiss. Peary says he took these from "an interview with Rudolph Grey for a book on Wood." Peary does not name the book, but Cult Movies 3 came out in 1988, four years before Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy saw the light of day. Was Grey excerpting this material in movie magazines as a prelude to his book? This seems possible, since Peary also includes a quote from David Ward taken from the April 1987 issue of Filmfax. Not being a Filmfax reader, I have no idea. If you know, clue me in. Thanks.

Podcast Tuesday: "Yabba Dabba Scooby Doo"

Scott Baio and Danny Wells on Happy Days.
Something was definitely brewing on the set of Happy Days in 1982. Ron Howard was long gone and Henry Winkler had aged out of being a teen idol, but Scott Baio could elicit screams from the studio audience just by walking onto the set. When Scott joined the ABC sitcom in 1977, he was just a scrawny adolescent best known for playing the title character in Bugsy Malone (1976). Five years later, though, he was prime Tiger Beat material—an object of desire for the Clearasil set.
The producers attempted to capitalize on Baio's popularity by turning his character, Chachi, into a bona fide rock and roll singer, the kind who could make teenage audiences squeal with joy. The problem was, Scott couldn't really sing all that well. His voice was thin and scratchy, like he was just getting over a bad cold. Luckily, during his (frequent) musical numbers, he was paired with Erin Moran, who was a much more able vocalist. Still in all, though, it was difficult to take Baio seriously as a rock musician. And, true to form, his pop music career never really materialized beyond Happy Days. He put out one vanity LP in 1982, complete with an album cover that blatantly ripped off Michael Jackson's Thriller, but Baio never made a dent in the Top 40.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast , we're reviewing an episode called "Chachi's Future" in which Baio's character decides he wants to pursue music as a career. Naturally, his prospective father-in-law, Howard (Tom Bosley), is less than thrilled. Chachi even begins to doubt himself and considers becoming a janitorial supplies salesman instead. But this is Happy Days, so I think you know where the story is going.
What did we think of "Chachi's Future" ? You can easily find out by listening to our latest episode, conveniently located below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Collaborator Odyssey, Part 25 by Greg Dziawer

(from left) Rob Huffman, Greg Dziawer, Jean Marie Stine.
This week on their podcast, Sin & Sci-Fi in the '60s, Rob Huffman and Greg Dziawer talk with Jean Marie Stine, the author of Ed Wood: The Early Years (2001) and a colleague of Ed's when he was writing adult paperbacks in the 1970s. Join them for this interesting and far-ranging discussion!

You can find more Sin & Sci-Fi content right here .

Podcast Tuesday: "We're in Our Flip Era"

Billy Warlock and Ted McGinley on Happy Days.
TV sitcoms rarely age gracefully. Even if the writers don't run out of ideas (and they all but certainly will), the actors will inevitably age. This is especially a problem on shows with young characters. It's never a good sign for a long-running show when the producers bring in a new kid character because the previous ones in the cast have gotten too old. It's called  Cousin Oliver syndrome , and it has infected many long-running family sitcoms from All in the Family to Married... with Children.
The initial focus of Happy Days (1974-84) was on teenagers in high school. In other words,  it was a show about young people for young people. The producers did their damnedest to keep Richie (Ron Howard), Ralph (Don Most), and Potsie (Anson Williams) in high school for as long as possible, but these characters finally graduated from Jefferson High alongside "night school valedictorian" Fonzie (Henry Winkler) at the end of Season 4 in 1977. Then, at the beginning of Season 5 just a few months later, Happy Days added a new adolescent character: Fonzie's smart-alecky cousin Chachi (Scott Baio). Controversial as this character was—with some viewers outright hating him and others adoring him—he nevertheless became a love interest for Joanie (Erin Moran) and allowed the show to focus on high school stories for a few more years.
But by Season 9, (1981-82) even Joanie and Chachi were starting to age out of their adolescent years, so the desperate producers added yet another teen character: Flip Phillips (Society star Billy Warlock), brother of Jefferson High basketball coach Roger (Ted McGinley). I think this was a breaking point for some viewers. Roger was already an auxiliary character, and now the auxiliary was getting his own auxiliary! It was a bridge too far. In particular, I remember my father complaining about Flip and calling him "Flop," but I don't remember if he stopped watching the show altogether at that point.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast , we review Season 9's "Hello, Flip," the episode that introduced Flip to a skeptical America. Did we all judge Flip too harshly in 1982? Was Billy Warlock the Scrappy-Doo of Happy Days? Or had Scott Baio already taken that title several years earlier? Find out the answers to all these questions by listening to our latest podcast!

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 142: Graphing Ed Wood

Ed Wood stares at the peaks and valleys of his debut film, Glen or Glenda.
This whole thing goes back to Michael Bey. (Don't worry. It eventually leads to Ed Wood.) Back in 2007, Michael's hit film Transformers, based on the 1980s Hasbro toy line, had cinephiles everywhere in an uproar. Was this loud, ugly, CGI-laden toy commercial the future of movies? And, if so, what kind of future was that? 
Was this the downfall of movies?Film fanatics were especially appalled by Transformers' average shot length or ASL. That's the average amount of time that elapses between edits—cuts, fades, dissolves, etc. Michael Bey is known for his frantic, fast-paced style, so his Transformers movies have a very low ASL, somewhere around 3 to 4 seconds. Some of Bey's action sequences have an ASL of just 2.7 seconds. Bey wasn't the only director doing this— not even close —but he was the most prominent, so he became the poster child for directors with short attention spans.
This ASL controversy garnered a bit of attention at the time from Chicago film critic Roger Ebert, who wrote about it in his Sun-Times column. He, too, fretted about those ever-declining shot lengths and longed for the more leisurely-paced films of the past. I was a regular reader of Ebert's reviews and columns, so that's how the phenomenon came to my attention. I'm not sure I would have known about it otherwise, since I didn't attend a lot of big budget action blockbusters back then. (I still don't.)
Nevertheless, I was curious about this whole ASL phenomenon because it gave me a different perspective on movies and TV shows. In one of his articles, Roger Ebert mentioned a site called Cinemetrics , which housed a database of user-submitted ASL graphs for various movies. I was interested enough in this topic to submit a few graphs of my own using Cinemetrics' own handy  measurement software . The software really does most of the work for you. All you do is watch the movie normally, while clicking every time there's an edit. The software completes the graphing and calculating when you're done.
Between August and September 2007, not long after the release of Transformers, I submitted nine different ASL graphs to Cinemetrics: two episodes of The Simpsons (I wanted to compare different eras of the show), a notorious Sid Davis "educational" short, and six feature films, one of which was Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (1953) . I recently revisited Cinemetrics for the first time in years and found to my delight that those graphs are all still there! You can find them by going to the database page and searching for my last name, Blevins.
As for the Glen or Glenda graph I made over 15 years ago, what information does it yield? Hell if I know. I'm neither a filmmaker nor a statistician, so a lot of this is beyond my ken. I suppose I just wanted to see how Ed's movies were put together. Here's what I had to say about the editing of Glen or Glenda back in 2007:

A truly schizophrenic movie, editing-wise. Ed Wood alternates long takes with rapid-fire montages. There is a definite chasm between the scenes filmed with sound (lengthy static shots) and the scenes filmed silently (quick montages, often consisting of stock footage with post-dubbed narration). I must note here that this analysis is based on the Image DVD, which itself was made from a censored print of the film. Various small cuts, normally a phrase here or there, occur throughout the film. The censor clearly wanted to get rid of the word "sex" whenever possible. Whether this actually affects the number of shot changes, I do not know.

What's great about the Cinemetrics site is that you can customize the graph in a number of ways. For fun, try messing with the various settings, including "step," "degree of trendline," and "moving average range." Maybe, if you know filmmaking or statistics, these terms might even mean something to you. They don't mean much to me, I must confess. Anyway, here's how the Glenda graph looks at the sixth degree of the trendline.
A Cinemetrics ASL graph for Glen or Glenda.
I did find out that Glen or Glenda has a leisurely average shot length of 10.6 seconds. Ed's movies tend to be pretty sluggish, so this didn't surprise me. But I noticed there were three separate passages during which Glenda's ASL plunges precipitously. The first occurs about 11 minutes into the movie when Ed gives us a montage of stock shots and narration. ("If the creator wanted us to fly...") The second starts at about the 35-minute mark when Glen has a lengthy nightmare that ultimately evolves (or devolves) into a burlesque show. The third and final such passage occurs nearly an hour into the movie when Alan is transitioning into Ann. This, too, is presented as a rapid-fire montage.
Amazingly, I was not the only Cinemetrics user to graph an Ed Wood film! Back in 2008, a user named Hilary Mogul submitted a graph for Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Hilary found that the movie had an ASL of 7.8, nearly three seconds shorter than Glenda, so maybe Ed's movies were getting a little livelier as he went along. Here's how the Plan 9 graph looks:
A Cinemetrics ASL graph for Plan 9 from Outer Space.
I think you'll agree that the editing is much less, uh, idiosyncratic this time around. In terms of pacing, Plan 9 lacks the big ups and downs of Glenda. The only major dip in ASL occurs about 15 minutes into the movie. That's when we get the montage of flying saucer sightings, accompanied by Criswell's narration. You may notice that the pace picks up right near the end of the movie, too. That's when Jeff, Lt. Harper, and Col. Edwards confront Eros and Tanna in the spaceship. By Ed Wood's standards, this is a fast-paced action scene. Compare the Glenda graph to the Plan 9 graph, and you'll see that Glenda actually slackens the pace in its last few minutes!
In all, I was really heartened to know that the ASL graphs I had made back in 2007 were still available in 2023. Talk about a blast from the past! Back then, I didn't even have a blog, but it's clear that Ed Wood and his movies were on my mind already. What I really hope is that this article leads people to Cinemetrics, and they use the resources there to study Ed's movies (and other directors' movies) in a new way.

Podcast Tuesday: "Sleeveless in Milwaukee"

Ted McGinley and Henry Winkler on Happy Days.
Beauty standards change from decade to decade and not just for women. It applies to men, too. Take Happy Days, for example. The popular sitcom happened to come along during the 1970s when a new kind of male sex symbol was dominating pop culture. Instead of the tanned, blond-haired, quasi-Aryan hunks of a previous generation (think: Tab Hunter and Troy Donahue), we were getting earthier, quirkier film and television stars whose names and faces often reflected their ethnic background (think: Jewish or Italian). This was the decade of John Travolta, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Sylvester Stallone, and more. 
In other words, it was a perfect time for Jewish-American actor Henry Winkler as Italian-American mechanic Arthur Fonzarelli. Henry definitely didn't look like Paul Newman or Robert Redford, let alone Tab Hunter. He was short of stature and slight of build. He didn't have a lantern jaw or perfectly symmetrical facial features either. In some early publicity pictures, he even has a slight unibrow! But it was the 1970s and Henry's look fit the times. There's a whole episode of the sitcom Taxi about this change in the male beauty standard. Fair-haired, traditionally handsome Bobby (Jeff Conaway), an aspiring actor, sees all the good roles going to guys like his buddy Tony (Tony Danza), a dark-haired Italian-American.
I've noticed a repeating pattern in 1970s pop culture regarding male stars. Producers will often pair a light-haired "pretty boy" actor with a dark-haired, more earthy type. That way, I guess, all the bases are covered. Think of Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford in Star Wars, David Soul and Paul Michael Glazer in Starsky & Hutch (1975-1979), Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men (1976), John Schneider and Tom Wopat on The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1985), and, yes, Ron Howard and Henry Winkler on Happy Days (1974-1984).
The 1980s in many ways marked a return to the values and aesthetics of the 1950s, with newly-installed president Ronald Reagan as the new Dwight Eisenhower-esque father figure to the country. Consequently, the traditional hunks of that era made a comeback in popular culture. On Happy Days, this was marked by the addition of a new character, Roger Phillips, played by the muscular, athletic Ted McGinley. Producer Garry Marshall was specifically looking for an actor who looked like a bronzed California surfer. Ted filled that role nicely, at least once he got his hair dyed. (How Ted hated those humiliating visits to the beauty salon!) Happy Days was pretty shameless about promoting Ted/Roger as a sex symbol, putting him in short shorts or other revealing outfits as often as possible.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast , we're reviewing Season 9's "Great Expectations," an episode that largely revolves around Roger. At one point, in order to make him more attractive to the ladies at a party, Fonzie rips the sleeves off Roger's shirt, revealing Ted McGinley's well-sculpted arms. It's like Fonzie is passing the torch to a new generation of male pinups.
Does this make for a good episode of the show in 2023, however? Find out by listening to our latest episode. It's available below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 141: The strange journey of the 'Glen or Glenda' theme

William Lava smiles with pride, having learned his music is in an Ed Wood movie.
Ed Wood never had the luxury of working with a composer on his films. From one end of his directing career to the other, he had to rely on so-called stock or library music, occasionally to great effect. Who can forget Trevor Duncan's bombastic "Grip of the Law," which plays during the opening credits of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)? Or Hoyt Curtin's queasy, discordant music heard throughout Jail Bait (1954)? Today, though, I'd like to turn your attention to a bit of stock music that Ed used not once but twice: "Presenting the Doctor" aka "Secret of the Silent Hills" by William Lava (1911-1971).
The end of the line for Looney Tunes.If you know William Lava's name at all, you're probably a fan of classic cartoons. Bill is best known as the composer for Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes series from 1962 to 1969. Unfortunately, these were the dying days for that franchise, so William Lava's name is on a lot of uninspired, cheaply-made cartoons. If you've ever suffered through a lackluster Cool Cat or Bunny & Claude short, you were listening to Bill's music. 
Cartoon historians tend to take a dim view of William Lava, comparing him unfavorably to his predecessors, Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn, and dismissing his music as "mechanical." It's important to remember, though, that Bill was working under relatively spartan conditions during his Looney Tunes tenure. Theatrical cartoons were less in demand in the 1960s, largely thanks to television, and their budgets shrank accordingly. Sometimes, these cartoons would even be scored with stock cues that Bill had composed previously. The original Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies series finally petered out with the abysmal Injun Trouble (1969), and Bill himself passed on two years later at the age of only 59.
It was an ignoble end to a surprisingly varied and interesting career that merits further attention. What can you say about a man who co-wrote the theme for F-Troop (1965-67) and composed the score for Al Adamson's notorious Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971)? He was no slacker, that's for sure. A Minnesota native, Bill Lava arrived in Hollywood in 1936 and soon embarked upon a career writing music for radio, film, and (eventually) television that would keep him busy for the rest of his life. Until he became associated with animation, laboring on both Looney Tunes and Pink Panther, Bill was never confined to one genre. In his early days, he scored comedies, dramas, Westerns, and more. 
In 1940, Bill wrote the music for RKO's The Courageous Dr. Christian, the first entry in a five-film series starring Jean Hersholt (yes, the namesake of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award) as a crusading doctor. Over the opening credits of this medical melodrama, we hear a lush, orchestral theme known as "Presenting the Doctor." 

In 1951, Ed Wood brazenly purloined "Presenting the Doctor" and used it as the theme song for his soapy made-for-TV short, The Sun Was Setting. The film credits no composer, certainly not Bill Lava, but Eddie gave himself a credit for "Music Arrangement," suggesting perhaps that he personally selected this bit of stock music. He must have been especially pleased with this choice, because he re-recycled "Presenting the Doctor" as the theme to his debut feature, Glen or Glenda (1953). Decades later, Howard Shore cleverly quoted "Presenting the Doctor" in his score for the biopic Ed Wood (1994). If you own the soundtrack album (and you should), you can hear the Glenda theme in the tracks "Ed and Kathy" and "Ed Takes Control."
But "Presenting the Doctor" had a life of its own, beyond its association with Ed Wood. In 1954, just a year after Glenda, Bill Lava's familiar Courageous Dr. Christian music reappeared as the theme to CBS' canine adventure series Lassie and got a new name: "Secret of the Silent Hills. " But there was some behind-the-scenes skullduggery at work! It seems that Lassie's musical director, Raoul Kraushaar, had simply slapped his name on Bill's composition and claimed it as his own. Bill objected, naturally, and Raoul begrudgingly changed the theme just enough in Lassie's second season to avoid copyright infringement.

For some arcane reason, the slightly-rewritten Lassie theme also turned up during the opening sequence of Milos Forman's Man on the Moon (1999). I've long assumed that this was an in-joke, because Man on the Moon was written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who also wrote Ed Wood. But perhaps this is just a bizarre coincidence. Either way, the credits for Man on the Moon rightfully list William Lava, not Raoul Kraushaar, as the composer.

And there is more! Apparently, "Secret of the Silent Hills" has a set of lyrics ! The next time you screen Glen or Glenda, perhaps you can sing along. Here are the words:

One still night among the silent hills,
I learned a secret that I will share with you.
In the hush, I heard the whippoorwills reveal
The Secret of the Silent Hills.

Not a secret men scheme and plot for,
Only true words, we should not forget.
"Love can cure the world of all its ills."
And that's the Secret of the Silent Hills.

I found this detail so amusing because I've been singing along with the Glen or Glenda theme for years. My lyrics go:

Here comes Glen! He's dressed up like a girl! See him wear his angora sweater set!
Here comes Glen! He's dressed up like a girl! See him there in his angora sweater!

Okay, so maybe it's not poetry, but it's honestly what comes to mind every time I watch the opening credits of the film.
Special thanks to Angel Scott, who first pointed out that the Glen or Glenda theme appears in The Courageous Dr. Christian, thus leading me down this particular rabbit hole of movie and music trivia.

Podcast Tuesday: "Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear"

John Hart and Henry Winkler on Happy Days.
"It was before my time" is one of my least-favorite excuses for being ignorant. When you think about it, virtually everything is before your time. Even if we limit ourselves to just human history, that's about 200,000 years. The average lifespan in America is only about 77 years -- a mere blip on the radar. That means we've missed 99.999% of what humans have done. Why do we insist on limiting ourselves to the 0.001% that happens right in front of us during our exceedingly brief lives? The past has been recorded in many, many ways. We owe ourselves to find out about it while we're here.
Sure, much of human history has gone unrecorded or has vanished with time, but here's the miracle of popular culture: the memorable, noteworthy stuff (movies, TV shows, pop songs) tends to be archived and preserved for future generations. Much of it gets rereleased and re-rereleased and re-re-rereleased over a span of decades, well beyond the lifespan of its original creators. In the past, we had to rely upon physical media -- books, records, tapes, etc. -- but in more recent decades, we've been busy uploading all this stuff to the internet for instantaneous streaming. The past is more accessible than ever. Take advantage of it.
I'm saying all this stuff because, this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast , we're reviewing "Hi Yo Fonzie, Away!" In this episode from 1982, Fonzie (Henry Winkler) finally meets his idol, the Lone Ranger (John Hart). Forty years ago, this mattered. Two major pop culture characters were being brought together in the same space at the same time.
Today, despite the many hours of media he has generated (mainly radio shows and TV episodes), the Lone Ranger is in danger of disappearing from the public consciousness simply because he isn't "relevant" anymore. (God, I hate that idiotic and much-abused word.) If people today know him at all, it's from his disastrous 2013 movie. That film didn't do well at the box office, so we consigned the Lone Ranger to the junkheap of history. Who knows? Fonzie himself may join him someday.
Before all that happens, refresh your memory by listening to the latest episode of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast . It's available right now. Just click that play button below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 140: Some Woodian curiosities, nothing more...

An illustration from Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop.
How did he do it? How did Edward D. Wood, Jr., a man with an out-of-control drinking problem, remain so prolific during the most chaotic years of his life? Even in the 1970s, when he was spiraling toward oblivion at an alarming pace, Eddie was still dependably churning out short stories, articles, novels, film scripts, and more -- all written in his unique style. 
Meanwhile, I, a total non-drinker, can barely find the time or energy to compose even a single blog post a week about dear Eddie. Work has been heavy lately, and when I get home from a long shift, all I want to do is collapse. Keeping the podcast going is a hell of a lot of work, not all of it fun, but I've managed to keep doing it. That's pretty much my only semi-creative outlet these days.
Still in all, I'm determined not to let Ed Wood Wednesdays die or even go into hibernation. It's my stated goal to post something to this series every week in 2023, barring some huge disaster or emergency. To that end, I'll point you toward some of the more interesting Ed Wood-related items I've come across lately.
Jordan Todorov, my co-author on the Steve Apostolof book (still available), posted a link to a 2004 interview with artist Chester "Chet" Collum , who created the posters for The Snow Bunnies (1972), The Cocktail Hostesses (1973), and Fugitive Girls (1974), as well as the covers for Ed Wood's novels Killer in Drag (1963) and Watts... the Difference (1967). Collum is remarkably forthcoming about his career: how he worked, what he was paid, why he stopped, etc. A must-read for Wood fans.
Meanwhile, some Ed Wood fans are doing very interesting things on YouTube. For instance, the amazing Kelly Luck has created an anaglyph 3D version of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) that you can watch if you happen to have a spare set of red-and-blue glasses lying around. Being a B-movie junkie, I always have plenty of those damned things, and I can say that Kelly's version of Plan 9 works great and provides a fun new way to see this much-dissected movie. As with the colorized version, this edition made me spot new details in a film I've already seen dozens of times by now. (For some reason, I started fixating on Jeff and Paula Trent's patio furniture.)

Another great YouTube channel belongs to one Dennis Smithers, Jr . Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, Dennis is providing a real service to the Wood fan community with his so-called "circumcised cuts" of Eddie's adult films from the 1960s and '70s. What he's done is take out all the sex and nudity, leaving just the acting and dialogue. Here's his version of Orgy of the Dead (1965).

Fun, right? It does my heart good to know that Ed Wood is still inspiring his fans, all these decades after his death.