My Week In Movies - The One Where I Give Jack Black A Chance

Bye Bye Birdie (1963) I continue my mild obsession with early Ann-Margret with this staring vehicle which was designed to make her a movie star. It's a reworking of the popular Broadway show, brought to the big screen with two of it's original stage performers - the awesome Dick Van Dyke and the super awesome Paul Lynde. The cast also includes Janet Leigh and as himself, Ed Sullivan. The story follows the nation's heartbroken teenage girls as their singing idol Birdie (a bargain basement Elvis knock-off) has been drafted into the service and will be leaving showbiz. To celebrate his departure, Ann-Margret wins a spot on television to kiss Birdie bye-bye for all the girls in the U.S.A. There's plenty of dated material, but you simply can't beat the majority of the musical numbers in this film. Shot with a bright palate of colors, the zippy songs are fun and a joy to watch. Check out this super fun number on YouTube.

Gulliver's Travels (2010) As a general rule of thumb, I can't stand Jack Black. He's a one trick pony in my book, and I don't even like his one trick. There's only so many times you can use the word "awesome" in one 90 minute period before I've gotta jump ship. The only reason I came to see this film is because it is family-friendly and my kids wanted to see it. That being said, I rather enjoyed this silly reworking of the classic tale. Jack Black does use "awesome" and many variations of that word way too many times for one movie to hold - but it's silly story and good heart won me over. There is a great supporting cast including Jason Segel, Emily Blunt and T.J. Miller and not to give anything way but this breezy little movie plays by my number one rule for a good movie - end on a musical number! My biggest complaint is not with the movie itself but with the rental DVD we got from a Redbox. I kid you not, 9 1/2 minutes of unskipable commercials before the movie. I couldn't chapter past the promos, couldn't fast forward them, could not even jump to the menu. This is totally not cool! Among the mandatory viewing is a three minute Ice Age cartoon that no one should be subjected to under any circumstances. We saw it in the theatre before RIO and did not need to be forced to watch it again. It's one thing if the movie studios want to leave the bonus features off rental discs, but don't make me watch something I didn't ask for!

Ready To Go Surfing Again

I loves me some Blue Crush, the 2002 movie about female surfers. I also loves me some crappy made-for-DVD sequels to movies I love. So, I'm all in for this upcoming flick... Agee!

You "Auto" Get This DVD!

I could not have been more excited when I heard the news that Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch was heading down the road to DVD. Good gracious, that is a fine animated program that I can't wait to get my hands on! I professed my love for Wheelie in a post four years ago and now in 2011 he's coming to DVD!

Warner Bros. is doing a great job of opening the flood gates and diving into the Hanna-Barbera vault to bring some great stuff to the screen that hasn't been seen in years. If I were to make a list of H-B shows I'd like to have on DVD, Wheelie would be at the top of my list!

Here's the write-up on the series from the Warner Bros. website:

Zoom into gear with Wheelie, the world’s greatest stunt racing car, and his girlfriend Rota Ree as they outmaneuver the sneaky motorcycle gang Chopper, Revs, Riser and Scrambles in this 3-Disc, 13-Episode Complete Series Collection! Not the smartest bike in the bunch, Chopper’s schemes range from scaring Wheelie with ghost cars at the car cemetery, tricking a trail bike into spying on Wheelie and cheating at a tractor-roping competition, plus many more shenanigans that never end well for the gang. Besides outwitting Chopper in these 39 adventures (3 per episode), Wheelie aids other vehicles needing a helping wheel, like a lost scooter, a sick tow truck and a stranded bulldozer. Honk for great family fun and motor to the couch for a night of drive-in entertainment!

I'm the first one in line for a good car pun, but I don't think I even get "motor to the couch".

Here's the super-catchy theme song and you can thank me later when you are humming it in your head all day!


Anyways, the DVD comes out next Tuesday and it looks like you'll have to order it online from the Warner Bros. Studio Shop. Or you could just come on over to the WWoB offices and we'll run it in our screening room!

Hey Vern, It's More Ernest on DVD!

Golly Bob Howdy, I have been waiting for somebody to release Hey Vern, It's Ernest! on DVD. Haven't you!? You know, the Emmy award winning Saturday morning show staring Ernest P. Worrell and all his buddies and alter egos!

Once again I'm sending kudos to the dudes at Mill Creek Entertainment for making this dream a reality. All 13 episodes of the wacky show will come in one handy dandy set for the unbelievable price of Ten Bucks! Can you believe that!? I can't wait to scoop up a copy and finally put to rest my grainy VHS copies that I taped in reruns off the old Family Channel back in the early 90's.


Each episode revolves around a central theme and is filled with quick skits and jokes from Ernest and his off-screen buddy Vern along with the rest of the neighborhood: Auntie Nelda, Dr. Otto, Sgt. Glory, My Father the Clown, Existo the Magician, Earl the Barber, and of course Chuck and Bobby.


My kids have seen a few episodes and they really enjoyed them. Can't wait to sit down and enjoy `em all once again. Hey Vern, It's Ernest! The Complete Series plops on DVD January 18, 2011.

And speaking of our good buddy Ernest, if there is some reason why you don't have all these movies in your personal DVD library by now - here's the perfect chance to pick them up. Mill Creek has licenced from Disney the rights to Ernest films #1, 3 & 4; Ernest Goes to Camp (1987), Ernest Goes to Jail (1990) and Ernest Scared Stupid (1991). They are all coming out, also on January 18, in a triple feature pack. (It looks like Disney has hung onto the rights to 1989's Ernest Saves Christmas.)

In Goes to Camp, Ernest is a handyman at a summer camp who helps the camp fight against some evil land developers. I love evil land developers! In Goes to Jail, our hero is a janitor at the fictional Howard County Bank where a wacky case of mistaken identity ends up with Ernest in jail. Like in real, really, really, really, really real prison. You know, the hoose-gow, the slammer, the joint, Alcatraz, San Quentin, Sing Sing! And Scared Stupid is the Halloween entry in the franchise which I have gone on about before on this blog.

Obviously, all three are really fun films. This new triple feature DVD might be worth the purchase for die-hard fans if the films are presented in widescreen. Only Camp and Christmas got a widescreen release when initially released to DVD in 2002. Next up, I'd like to see them do a triple feature set for the very excellent Ernest Rides Again (1993) along with Ernest Goes to School (1994) and the horribly embarrassing Slam Dunk Ernest (1995).

Vintage Christmas on DVD

I've been enjoying the holy heck out of this 4 disc DVD collection, Holiday TV Classics. The fine folks at Mill Creek Entertainment have gathered up 49 episodes of vintage Christmas television programing from the 1950's & 60's, slapped it on 4 DVDs and put it out for only $9.99 MSRP. If you pick it up at WalMart it's actually only $5.00!

I love old television, especially stuff produced for the holiday season. I wasn't around in the 1950's, but it seems that Christmas meant just a little bit more back then. I guess the country had been through some rough times and the holiday season was a really special time to slow down and appreciate everyone and everything around you. Anywho, this collection of old TV shows is great for someone like me who just loves the history of television. The footage on most of these shows is top notch and the audio is also fantastic for material that hasn't been remastered or probably preserved very well.

Now, I haven't watched all 49 episodes...yet. But so far what I've watched has been very enjoyable. Most of the original sponsor cards and announcements are still in place, and some of the shows still have their original commercial breaks still intact. The Bell Telephone Company sponsors Telephone Time, which I was expecting to be a game show but was actually a dramatic anthology series which ran on CBS for two seasons. The episode on this disc is called "A Picture of the Magi," a creative reworking of O'Henry's classic tale.

I, of course, also enjoyed a holiday themed episode of Date With The Angels one of Betty White's earliest network roles. The episode take place mostly in a department store and for my money there isn't a thing much more Christmasy than a 1950's department store at Christmas! From the looks of old movies and shows that I've seen, Toy Trains were the ONLY toys available to boys in the 50's.

There are plenty of shows that you have heard of before sprinkled among the set's 4 discs. There's several episodes of The Beverly Hillbilllies, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Dragnet and The Jack Benny Program. Holiday TV Classics is a real treat for the shows that you can't readily find on DVD...or VHS for that matter: Screen Writers Playhouse, The Paul Winchell Show, Dear Phoebe, and Racket Squad - just to name a few.

I watched the Lux Video Theatre episode, which I later discovered was a redramatization of the movie Holiday Affair. I also enjoyed discovering The Bob Cummings Show, which was racy for it's time but is now as tame as a Disney Channel Show (just more entertaining.)

This is a great collection of material that will provide nights of entertainment throughout the season. Look for Holiday TV Classics at WalMart in the $5.00 DVD section. At almost 21 hours of vintage Christmas television, that's around twenty three cents per hour for your entertainment dollar. Beat that!

Let The Halloween Cartoons Begin

Halloween is just a few weeks away and the kids and I have been in the mood to kick off the holiday special viewing season. So, this past weekend we decided to relax after a day of pumpkin picking and hay rides with the annual ritual of "Pulling Out The Halloween Videos."

We started things off with a screening of Bugs Bunny's Howl-oween Special, a good ol' fashioned CBS primetime offering from 1978. As with the majority of the Looney Tunes specials, this show mixes a handful of classic animated shorts with some newer low-grade animation to form one continuous half hour cartoon. Even as a young kid, the newer bits of the cartoon stuck out like a sore thumb in the middle of the original masterpieces. Sometimes the new animation was just used to link together three or four complete cartoons, other times (such as the case with Howl-oween) the newer bits are sprinkled in and out the old cartoons to try and make it seem like one whole story. When the latter approach was used, the shows feel disconnected and choppy. Animation style, character design and voices change every couple of minutes and it makes viewing a bit difficult. It's a wonder why they didn't just collect a handful of Halloween themed shorts and air them in their entirty.

I was never really a huge fan of these chop shop Warner Bros. specials, but I watched them every time they were on because that's how we rolled back in the old days before VCRs and 24 hour cartoon channels. In more recent years, I kinda had a nostalgic yearning for some of these specials and have sought some out on video and DVD. Bugs Bunny's Howl-oween Special makes it's debut on DVD this year, having not been released since a 1994 VHS cassette. The special itself features clips and scenes from nine vintage shorts including Broom-Stick Bunny (1956), Hyde and Hare (1955) and Transylvania6-5000 (1954). One of my all-time favorite Looney Tunes shorts, Scaredy Cat from 1948, is also used luckily without too much interruption.

All in all, even though the show alters the original state of the cartoons the special is entertaining and promotes enough Halloween spirit to get everyone in the mood. The new DVD also features the complete short Hair-Raising Hare from 1946. This is the one where Bugs Bunny meets the giant orange-haired monster and does his nails. Good stuff and actually worth the price of admission alone!

In the mood for more classic animated shorts, we then popped in Tom & Jerry: Hijinks and Shrieks. I picked up this DVD at a yard sale a couple of years ago (they had it priced at $3 but I talked `em down to $2...suckers!) but we had never gotten around to watching it. This isn't an old TV special, but rather a collection of 7 top-shelf Tom & Jerry shorts from 1952 to 1965. The bad news is that only two of these shorts have anything at all to do with Halloween, the good news is that they are all pretty good cartoons. The amazing thing is that after 60+ years, these cartoons are still laugh out-loud funny to kids and grown ups alike! And quite frankly, there is no greater sound than hearing your kids crackup to pieces laughing at silly things like animals running into walls and cats getting their tail chopped off!

The two Halloween themed shorts, 1956's The Flying Sorceress & The Haunted Mouse from 1965 are both filled with sufficient levels of spooky fun to carry the other 5 titles into making this a fun collection for the Halloween season. A couple of the shorts were produced in CinemaScope and of course are presented here in pan and scan. I think a DVD of just a handful of cartoons presented in their widescreen glory for new television sets would not only be an awesome addition to the WWoB DVD library, I think it would be a big seller as well!

Both Bugs Bunny's Howl-oween Special and Tom & Jerry: Hiijinks & Shrieks are available at Wal-Mart, Amazon and for rental from Netflix. Good stuff for your pre-Trick or Treat viewing!

Good Ol' Fashioned Peanuts Special on TV Tonight

With all this talk of Snoopy and the Peanuts gang here this week, we thought we would be remiss if we didn't mention the airing of an actual animated prime-time special tonight! Remember how exciting it used to be when there was a cartoon on at night? Tonight at 8:00 EST, ABC is airing Lucy Must Be Traded, Charlie Brown - a 2003 outing for the Peanuts gang. Produced after Charles Schultz' death, the storyline for this special is actually taken from a series of comic strips from 1967 and 1988.

Here's another dorky fact straight from Wikipedia: "Of note is the fact that Peppermint Patty refers to Snoopy as "the little kid with the big nose," which is in line with the content of Peanuts in 1967 when the original strips were drawn. In the actual strip, Peppermint Patty did not learn Snoopy was a dog until 1974 and never referred to him as a "kid with the big nose" afterwards."

The excellent DVD release of this show also features 1966's Charlie Brown's All Stars, which is one of my very favorite specials and I'll be happy to recite most of it word for word...if you like. And it also has It's Spring Training, Charlie Brown from 1992 which never aired on television. The DVD is out of print, but not hard to find...or you can just watch Lucy Must Be Traded, Charlie Brown tonight on ABC!

All Hail 80's Saturday Morning Cartoons

This promises to be one of the sweetest DVD releases of the year! Saturday Morning Cartoons 1980s is a two-disc set of old school animation set to be released May 4. Warner Bros. has already put out two volumes each of cartoons from the 60's and 70's, and now they are adding another decade worth of toons to the collection. Some of this stuff is super awesome; here we go:

• Mister T - I loved this show! Mr. T ditches the A-Team and instead travels around with a gymnastics team solving crimes. Oh, that's good stuff!

The Flintstone Kids - The Bedrock gang as little kids wasn't quite as fun as the earlier adventures but it was a law in the mid-80's to turn every franchise into a baby or kiddie version. It was still a pretty good show and the end of 20 years of Flintstones spin-offs.

The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley - Martin Short's SCTV/SNL character came to Sat AM in this pretty funny show which featured a great voice cast and some live action skits spun off from SCTV classics. I can't wait to see this one again!

The Kwicky Koala Show - Even though as a flat rule I hate koala bears, this early morning show was a real gem. A throwback to the cartoon shorts of decades earlier, Kwicky was produced by animation god Tex Avery - who did the original (and side-splittingly hilarious) Droopy cartoons.

Thundar The Barbarian - My tastes always leaned towards funny animal shows, I always loved this action packed fighting show with Thundar and a bunch of other pelt-clad dudes riding around on various winged creatures and saving the world from some pretty ugly bad guys. It don't get much better than this, folks!

The set also includes episodes of Chuck Norris - Karate Commandos (which I'm pretty sure wasn't actually on Saturday mornings, it was strip syndicated for afternoons), Dragon's Liar (the cartoon based on a video game that was also a cartoon), Galtar and the Golden Lance, The Monchhichis, The Biskitts (which I believe was syndicated to Sunday mornings), and Goldie Gold and Action Jack (which I remember nothing about except it had a really cool announcer!)

If you're not like me and don't have to have every major cartoon title on DVD in your own personal collection, you should also be able to rent the two discs from Netflix. I'll definitely be pouring myself a big bowl of dry cereal and vegging out with these Saturday Morning Cartoons real soon!

Yogi Yahooeys Fan For Life

An exciting treasure from the Hanna-Barbera vaults finally made it's way to DVD this week. Scooby's All Star Laff-A-Lympics Volume 1 features four episodes from the fondly remembered 1977 - 1979 Saturday morning series. This has always been one of my favorites from the guys at H-B and I was pretty excited to see the show get a DVD release. Judging from the cover art, Warner Bros. is hoping to ride off the immense popularity of Scooby-Doo. He's featured prominently in the show's opening segment and in most of the episodes but for most H-B fans Laff-A-Lympics stands out due to it's cast of dozens of cartoon superstars.

The Laff-A-Lympics is an Olympics style event, actually a parody of ABC's Battle of the Network Stars. In each episode, three teams compete in an assortment of athletic events at venues all over the world. The teams are: the Scooby Doobies - made up of Hanna-Barbera characters from half hour mystery shows like Scooby Doo, Dinomutt, Speed Buggy and Captain Caveman; the Yogi Yahooeys - featuring the gang from H-B's classic animated shorts like Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Wally Gator and Quick Draw McGraw; and there's the Really Rottens - who look similar to other Hanna-Barbera bad guys but are mostly all original creations for this show. The teams compete in different events and are awarded points throughout the competition. Of course, the Really Rottens always try to cheat and it always backfires on them!

One of the coolest aspects of the show was the guest cameos that pop up from time to time. In the four episodes on this collection there are brief appearances from Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble and Jabber Jaw. The other fun thing about this show is how much my kids got into it! They both really got behind the Scooby Doobies and were cheering them on and hooting and yelling like they were watching something on ESPN. Myself, I'm a life long Yogi Yahooeys fan so the line was drawn down the middle of our house and the kids took great delight in seeing their team squash mine. I really like when my children appreciate the simpler cartoons from the past.

I also have to add that "Laff-A-Lympics" is a totally great title! I'm a big fan of 70's programing that incorporates the words "Laugh", "Comedy", or "Smile" into their title.

Here's a rundown of who's who on the Laff-A-Lympics teams:

Here He Comes to DVD!

I've been anxiously awaiting the arrival of Mighty Mouse on DVD. The classic Terrytoons shorts that were produced in the 1950's and 60's were a major staple of my cartoon diet growing up and I've always loved the little guy. There were a few hard to find releases of the original shorts on VHS, but all-in-all just a handful of the library was ever made available. There were also two other series where Mighty Mouse appeared; The New Adventrues of Mighty Mouse & Heckle and Jeckle produced by Filmation ran for two seasons beginning in 1979, and there was Mighty Mouse The New Adventures which was produced by legendary adult animator Ralph Bakshi which popped up near the end of the 1980's. I love all three versions of the show, none of which have been on television in quite a while. I do have a few segments of each in the ol' VHS collection, however!

It's been reported that a nice deluxe DVD set of the original Mighty Mouse cartoons is scheduled to be released with a brand new CGI-movie that Nickelodeon is producing. In the meantime, in between time, it's just been announced that Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures! is going to show up on shelves on January 5, 2010. My least favorite of the three different shows, it's still a great show with a really warped sense of humor and plenty of jokes thrown at adults to make it even more fun. It will be a welcome addition to my DVD library.

When the show originally aired, some people were uneasy that a Saturday morning cartoon for kids was being produced by a studio that formerly turned out X-rated cartoons. Some media watchdog group accused the show of featuring a scene where Mighty Mouse snorted cocaine even though it was clear he was just smelling a flower. (I've seen the clip, he's smelling a flower!) Besides, why would Mighty Mouse need to do cocaine!? He doesn't need any drugs to beat up cats! He's Mighty Mouse!? Duh!

Peanuts From The 70's

• I'll be looking forward to getting my hands on this new DVD set at the end of next month. Paramount continues it's parade of releases from the Charlie Brown vault with Peanuts 1970's Collection Vol. 1. There will be two new specials added to my collection: It's a Mystery, Charlie Brown and Play It Again, Charlie Brown. Th two disc set also features these previously released to DVD titles:
• A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving
• It's The Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown
• There's No Time For Love, Charlie Brown
• You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown