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Posts Archived Under 1940s
During the heyday of Warner Bros. animation, Bugs Bunny starred in more than 100 cartoons. Bugs first received top billing in the "Merrie Melodies" cartoon short "Elmer's Pet Rabbit," released on this very day in 1941.
But Bugs wasn't always the "wascally wabbit" we know and love today. The prototype of animation's greatest star first hopped into our lives as a cute little feller with the unimaginative name of "Happy Rabbit," who, in 1938, went up against the first Warners superstar, Porky Pig, in "Porky's Hare Hunt."
After a few anonymous appearances in "Looney Tunes" featurettes, the great director Tex Avery gifted Bugs with a name taken from fellow Warners animator Ben "Bugs" Hardaway, a catchphrase from Avery's high school days, an attitude borrowed from Clark Gable, screwball antics, and a voice that vocal artist supreme Mel Blanc infused the the street smarts of the Bronx and the smart-aleck quality of Brooklyn.
Fast talk, misdirection, and creative cross-dressing helped Bugs out of many a jam, and we whiled away many Saturday mornings cracking up as he wrangled with Elmer, Daffy, and other nemeses du jour.
Here's to you, Bugs. You had us at "Enhh, what's up, doc?"
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Directory categories:
Bugs Bunny, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, Mel Blanc, Tex Avery, Animation |
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Archived under: 1940s, Animation, Anniversaries, Bugs Bunny, Cartoons, Children´s TV, Cross-dressing, Daffy Duck, Entertainment, Looney Tunes, Mel Blanc, Movie History, Movies, Nostalgia, Rabbits, TV, Tex Avery |
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The 442nd Regiment slogging
their way through France in 1944 |
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, marked the immediate start of World War II for the United States. While all Americans rallied to the cause, things did not go well for Americans of Japanese descent. While the vast majority of Japanese Americans were patriotic and committed to winning the war, they were discharged from military service, classified as "enemy aliens," and many were relocated to internment camps.
In May 1942, however, the U.S. Army reversed its decision to exclude Japanese Americans from the armed forces and created the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, also known as the "Nisei Squadron." The 442nd, comprised of more than 16,000 men and women, fought in Europe -- most notably rescuing the so-called "Lost Batallion" -- and went on to earn the nickname the "Purple Heart Battalion" because of its bravery. Its soldiers earned more than 18,000 awards, including one Congressional Medal of Honor.
Their give-it-all-you've-got spirit inspired the regiment's motto, "Go for Broke!," which became the title of a 1951 film celebrating one of the toughest fighting units in the history of the United States Army.
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Directory categories:
442nd Regimental Combat Team, 442nd Regiment Personal Accounts, WWII U.S. Army Units, World War II, Japanese American Culture |
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Archived under: 1940s, American History, Cultures, History, Military, WWII, War |
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The Bermuda Triangle's borders are as flexible
as Silly Putty in the summer |
On December 5, 1945, a group of five U.S. Navy bombers left the Naval Air Station at Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. It was a clear day, and the war had been over for months, so no one suspected that anything would go wrong. That is, until all five planes vanished without a trace.
The disappearance went largely unnoticed until 1962, when writer Allan W. Eckert resurrected the story, looking for a supernatural explanation for the pilots' last incoherent messages: "Everything is wrong. We can't be sure of any direction. Everything looks strange, even the ocean." Even then, the story didn't take off until 1964, when author Vincent Gaddis connected the missing planes to other mysterious disappearances in the area he called "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle."
Now, to most people, it wouldn't seem odd that a vast stretch of open ocean would, over the centuries, be a place for ships to sink and planes to crash, but Eckert and Gaddis (among many, many others) aren't "most people." They see the Triangle (whose dimensions can stretch and contract as needed) as a mystical place where otherworldly forces transport victims to other dimensions or simply destroy their ships and planes, despite any conclusive evidence.
Believers in the Bermuda Triangle claim that aliens or the lost city of Atlantis cause vessels to vanish -- not their sloppy research that puts ships inside the Triangle when they were never there, or dismisses poor maintenance in favor of UFO abductions. Nor do they account for the hundreds of vessels that pass safely through its vaguely defined boundaries every week -- or for the island of Bermuda itself, which hosts thousands of tourists annually who never experience anything odder than a sunburn.
But Triangle believers don't let things like reality get in their way. Bigfoot, the Masons, the Philadelphia Experiment, UFOs, the Mayan calendar, the moon landing -- even the conversion to digital television -- are all fodder for conspiracy theorists, for whom a straight line is never the shortest distance between two points. They find it far more interesting to leap to conclusions, make wild speculations, and create connections between wildly divergent topics.
Now, we're not saying that there aren't some things that can't be explained: the Tunguska event, the identity of Jack the Ripper, the continuing popularity of Will Ferrell. But most of the time, Occam's Razor applies, and the simplest explanation is the correct one. Planes run out of fuel and crash; ships hit storms and sink. End of story. There's nothing in the "Bermuda Triangle" area that's any more unusual than any other part of the Atlantic.
Of course, considering that at least one map of the Triangle shows the entire state of Florida within its confines, it might explain certain otherwise inexplicable events.
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Directory categories:
Bermuda Triangle, Paranormal Phenomena, UFOs, Lost Continent of Atlantis, Skeptics |
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Archived under: 1940s, Anniversaries, Aviation, Conspiracies, Cover Ups, Disappearances, Military, Mysteries, Mythology and Folklore, Paranormal, WWII, Weird Stuff |
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Jack Pierce makes up Karloff
as the Frankenstein monster
(Photo by Jhayne) |
When I was growing up, I loved horror movies -- especially monster movies. I don't mean the gorefests that populate the screen today; the ones that substitute shock for real psychological terror. No, I loved the Universal monster movies that featured the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, Dracula, and, most of all, Frankenstein’s monster (or just "Frankenstein," as we called him in those days).
Most of the reason for that love was Boris Karloff. In spite of how many people he murdered, tortured, or terrorized on camera, it was obvious that, behind the character, there was a decent and funny man who projected a real humanity.
Karloff was born on November 23, 1887, as William Henry Pratt. As a child, it was expected he'd follow his brother into the British Foreign Service, but he developed a love of acting that took him first to Canada, then finally to Hollywood, where between gigs acting in silent films, he worked as a ditch digger and truck driver to pay the bills.
When sound films came along in the late 1920s, his stage training (and British accent) helped him make the transition to talkies, but he was still mired in supporting roles like "Rev. T. Vernon Isopod" or "Sport Williams." Finally, in 1931, the role of a lifetime -- the Frankenstein monster -- came along, and even though he was unbilled at the time (the credits showed the Monster as being played by "?"), he had achieved screen immortality, becoming one of the few actors to be so well known as to be billed with just one name: "Karloff."
It took Universal a bit of time to realize what an asset they had in Karloff. They lent him out to Warner Bros. for a memorable turn as a cadaverous gangster in the original "Scarface" and to MGM to star in the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. But once the box-office returns came in ($12,000,000 -- nearly $200 million today... that's before adjusting for the 25 cents audiences paid in 1931!), they took full advantage of him in such classics as "The Old Dark House," "The Mummy," "The Black Cat," and (best of all) "The Bride of Frankenstein" -- some 42 features over the next ten years.
In 1941, Karloff left Hollywood to appear on Broadway in the comedy "Arsenic and Old Lace," playing another homicidal maniac -- one who’d had plastic surgery and now looked like -- Boris Karloff. Over the next three decades, Karloff alternated between stage, screen, radio, and television, shifting easily between comedy and drama. His integrity and talent were such that, even after the many times he had kidded his "horror star" image, he was still utterly believable when he did a straight role that would scare the pants off audiences.
When he died at the age of 81 in 1967, his name was still the gold standard for the genre, (an accomplishment that no one else -- in any film genre -- has ever matched) and for some of us, it still is.
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Directory categories:
Boris Karloff, Horror Movies, Classi Hollywood Actors, Frankenstein, Actors |
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Archived under: 1930s, 1940s, Actors, Biographies, Birthdays, Boris Karloff, Celebrities, Entertainment, Horror, Horror Films, In Character, Monsters and Creatures, Movies |
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Larry Fine looking stunned,
undoubtedly by some
unexpected turn of events |
People who work in comedy know the "Rule of Three." That is, when writing jokes or creating a comedic movie, TV show, play, or even a skit, writers know how to establish a situation, confirm it, and then overturn it. If you look for it, you'll see it all the time: "A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar ..."; "an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman were arguing ..."; "a genie grants a man three wishes ..."
With that rule so well-known, it makes us wonder why there are so few three-man comedy teams. There's the Ritz Brothers (who few remember nowadays), the Marx Brothers (who originally were a quartet), the Three Stooges -- and that’s about it.
We were reminded of this apparent paradox today in noting that October 5 marks the birthday of our favorite Stooge, Larry Fine. Every Stooge fan has his favorite. (We use the pronoun "his" deliberately here, since it's well known that women just don't get -- or even like the Stooges.) Some prefer the outright lunacy of Curly; some think Shemp is the ne plus ultra of wackiness; there are undoubtedly those who think the antics of Joe or Curly Joe cannot be bettered; and we're sure Moe brings delight to many for his attempts to bring order out of chaos.
But Larry is, for us, the essential Stooge. His "normalcy" (at least in terms of Stoogedom) provides the necessary grounding between Moe's masochism and Curly's flights of fancy. The Trinity of Stooges has been compared to Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious (no, honestly), what with Moe's controlling force representing the ego, Curly the uncontrollable id, and Larry, the superego that strives for organization and peace.
Larry Fine himself was an unassuming man. He was born Louis Feinberg in Philadelphia in 1902, and after a childhood accident (he burned his arm with acid), he took up the violin, a choice that led to a career in vaudeville, where a chance meeting with comedian Ted Healy (who had originally hired the Howard Brothers -- Moe, Shemp, and Curly -- to accompany him on stage) led him to join Healy's act as the third Stooge, a role he would hold for the next four decades, until a debilitating stroke forced him to retire.
Larry's contribution to the act is invaluable. He provides an entry point for the viewer, allowing us to put Moe's harshness and Curly's craziness into context. Without him, Stooge fanatics would be left only with an authoritarian beating up on a lunatic. And every so often, Larry will say or do something so off the wall that it confirms his own existence as a Stooge.
Director Peter Farrelly has been threatening to make a new "Three Stooges" movie for years. While this may not seem a good idea at first blush (Benicio Del Toro as Moe? Sean Penn as Larry?), his views on Mr. Fine give Larry-philes reason for hope (while also providing a fine epitaph): "Growing up, first you watched Curly, then Moe, and then your eyes got to Larry. He's the reactor, the most vulnerable. Five to fourteen, Curly; fourteen to twenty-one, Moe. Anyone out of college, if you're not looking at Larry, you don’t have a good brain."
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Directory categories:
Larry Fine, The Three Stooges, Comedy Teams, Comedy, Actors |
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Archived under: 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Actors, Biographies, Birthdays, Comedians, Entertainment, Humor, Men, Movie History, Movies, Musicians, The Three Stooges, Vaudeville |
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