Vintage TV

Somehow we've lately been catching parts of very old TV shows (Hee Haw!) and movies (Destry Rides again with James Stewart; Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Marilyn Monroe; Tarzan the Ape Man, with Johnny Weissmuller.) Dreadful stuff. Marvelous for their time but perfectly awful now. (Well, except for Destry, which held up pretty well, I thought, as long as you were willing to suspend the laws of physics and to believe people could die of a gunshot wound without actually bleeding on the floor while they gave up their 'last words.')

Special effects are particularly interesting in old movies. In Tarzan they had a bunch of stock footage of Africa which they projected onto a screen, then placed the actors in front it and turned on the camera. Very, very odd effect; particularly when the 'background' and 'foreground' were basically occupying the same space. Some of the 'chimps' were real but one was a man in a gorilla suit - the one that got shot out of a tree, of course. The size differences were odd, to say the least. And since there is no background music to set the emotional mood of the scene in these old movies, the dialog somehow comes out as particularly stupid. The story line elements stretch the imagination too - in Tarzan, right after losing half their party to raging hippos and crocodiles, they decide they will set up camp 'here' for the night - right on the very banks of the river where the critters came from in the first place.

In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a scene on the deck of the ship had a 'view' of the ocean horizon and clouds in the evening sky that was simply painted onto a board and moved up and down to suggest the motion of the ship on the water. I guess we're actually lucky they thought of such a detail. And just watching Marilyn Monroe move parts of her face around which were never really meant to move independently from one another when she talks makes you want to twitch. (But, damn, didn't she have an interesting voice?)

Hee Haw was just fun as a reminder of the 'big hair' era of country music with such gems as "May the bird of paradise fly up your nose; may an elephant caress you with his toes; may your wife be plagued with runners in her hose; may the bird of paradise fly up your nose" and "Gloom, despair and agony on me; deep dark depression, excessive misery; if it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all; Gloom, despair and agony on me." And yes, Minnie Pearl with the price tag hanging off her hat is still fun.

We really have to get a life.