Kuchar movies and other underground classics -- Catch 'em while you can!

Two classy men of the Bronx.
(George and Mike Kuchar)

There are countless articles appearing each week about the availability (or non-availability) of different films. The general consensus among diehard cinephiles is that, while certain streaming services are very good at presenting arthouse and indie cinema, the best way to get and keep the films is through owning “physical media” (the new name for discs, tapes, what-have-you).

But then again, there are those films that are just simply NEVER going to appear on any streaming service. The ones that are not “economically viable” to acquire and only have a “limited audience.” Those of us who want to see these films thus have to scrounge, and when a trove of them appears on the most visible (and most visited) video site on the Net, I have to draw your attention to them.

In this case, I felt that I should do this sooner than later, even though the poster in question — a gent named “Ray Cathode” — is still in the process of building his channel. The reason I feel I have to do this right away is that he’s including one filmmaker in the bunch whose Estate generally hounds people who reproduce or post his films. (My take on this: They don’t want the secret getting out — that secret being that his films were numbingly dull until others came along and directed the films for him.)

From the above, I’m sure you can guess who I’m talking about. (Further clues would include the wearing of a wig, the state of Pennsylvania, and soup.) Including this particular artist’s films gets your account taken down – even the YT channels that used to hide his work by renaming the films and never posting his name (and removing the initial credit for a specific museum) went down.

Thus, I urge you to see the films that “Ray” has put up before any litigious pains in the ass decide to take action and remove his trove from public view. For this person (I’ve been using the male pronoun since the person is using a male name) has put up a veritable treasure chest of underground and weirdo cinema.

Mike Kuchar.

I will put the emphasis here on two gents whose work I absolutely love and have saluted before many times on the Funhouse TV show and on this blog: Mike and George Kuchar. Twin brothers from the Bronx who gave us some absolutely delightful films that exhibited a super-low-budget style that influenced many who came after them (most prominently John Waters). 

Mike was an interview subject on the Funhouse; I made two episodes out of our talk, which was wonderful — rarely have I had a guest to whom I could speak about "high" and "low" culture in adjoining sentences! I spoke to George about doing an interview, but he was busy at the time he was in NYC. To show you the kind of gent he was, he called me from San Francisco and noted that if I were to come out there he'd love to do the interview. Sadly, that was a short time before his revealing that he had prostate cancer. He left us in 2011.

I’ll link to six items below. I used to be able to make these “survey” blog posts much longer and have many more links, but embedding from YouTube is apparently now in the trash can for blogspot blogs. Despite Blogger and YouTube both being Google properties, there is no cross-pollination between the two sites anymore, and a dedicated person like myself can go insane trying to find videos that CAN be embedded at this point.

George Kuchar (and friends).

For some reason, the whole enterprise has transformed into a situation where YT embeds are blocked, providing the blogger with a black screen with a “watch on YouTube” link. As that is incredibly ugly and extremely pointless, I’ll be doing fewer blog entries that link to YouTube videos, because: a.) sites like ok.ru have a broader variety of films anyway (including several Media Funhouse episodes!), and b.) the notion of “experimenting” with HTML code to see which videos appear as full thumbnail/old-school embeds and which are black boxes with a YT link is the way to sheer madness.

In the meantime, here are five links-with-thumbnail image and one actual embed. (I guess the film in question slipped through the net.)

“Tootsies in Autumn” is an early 8mm film by Mike Kuchar that shows off the controlled chaos of the brothers’ films — they worked mostly in tandem on the 8mm films, then split to make their own solo 16mm films and, later on, many, many videos.

“Tootsies” is silent cinema reborn as brightly colored kitsch with the soul of an overripe melodrama. 

“Born of the Wind” is another early item that shows off the visual storytelling style. It was directed by Mike and shows off the brothers’ love of (again) melodrama and horror pictures. 

 

“The Craven Sluck” by Mike is a stunner – here is a sci-fi thriller that foreshadows everything in the early work of John Waters. 

Watch “The Craven Sluck.”

“Eclipse of the Sun Virgin” (1967) by George shows off his wonderfully tacky and torrid taste, with Catholic imagery, Americana, pop culture, and the tininess of urban apartments. 

Watch “Eclipse of the Sun Virgin.”

“Forever and Always” (1978) is George’s reflection on relationships. Both Kuchar brothers were gay and both did include homoerotic imagery in their films (Mike’s is mystical and idyllic; George’s was earthy and straight from the crotch), but here he depicts boy-girl love and the inevitable un-romantic thing that results from said union: kids. The site of our female lead carrying around her kids through a children’s carnival tells you all you need to know about the possible benefits of birth control. 

Watch “Forever and Always.” 

“Route 666” (1994) is a crazy and wonderful short video that reflects George’s later concerns: extreme weather (he was a “storm chaser” wannabe, spending weeks in Oklahoma each year to see the big storms come), being haunted by pop culture artifacts (in this case, a marionette with a Donald Duck voice), and indelibly kitschy imagery, taken from gift shops all around the country. 

Watch “Route 666.” 

Those are just six of the Kuchar films on the “Ray Cathode” YT channel. There are 18 more up there as of this writing. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t list the other filmmakers whose works “Ray” has posted.

A quick laundry list on the channel: Anger, Brakhage, Burroughs, Derek Jarman, Ken Russell, Werner Schroeter, Zappa, and yeah, the famous artist-turned-filmmaker (whose work might be down, but hopefully not all of the Cathode channel, by the time you read this.) Also, Ken Jacobs’ seven-hour found-footage epic Star Spangled to Death and, for the kiddies, the Satanic Panic fave “Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults.” 

Note: Thanks to “Ray” for posting all this stuff (a bit of advice: remove the Factory guy’s stuff!) and to Jon Whitehead for leading me toward it.

Welcome to America, Little Big!

I grew up revering the humorous music that was played on the Dr. Demento show — Spike Jones was and remains the king of all that, but there were many others, from those devoted to the craft (Lehrer, Allan Sherman, Ray Stevens, and then Weird Al) to those who only recorded one funny song or a smattering of ’em. Funny music videos entered the picture much later on (although the visualizations of Spike’s work in vintage movie clips and on his television show blazed the trail for that specific visual niche).

Thus, I have loved the music videos of the Russian dance-rave-punk-cartoon-satire group Little Big from the first time I saw the viral music-video (621 million views so far on YouTube alone) for their nonsense song “Skibidi.” I encountered it in late 2018, and since that time I’ve regularly checked back to their channel to see if they’ve produced another music-vid. The videos, directed by Alina Pasok with the assistance of the male lead singer and songwriter Ilya Prusikin, have embellished the songs (catchy melodies with nonsense lyrics) with indelibly silly imagery.

I noticed that the band “disappeared” from YouTube (read: no new material) the moment Russia invaded Ukraine. Little Big have a big following in Europe and over here in the U.S., but it probably was just too difficult to create catchy music and memorably weird images when a war started by their country was raging. I hoped they would return in some fashion and was recently surprised to find that they have come up with a song and an accompanying video that are resolutely anti-war and that the lead singers, Ilya and Sonya Tayurskaya, have relocated to the U.S. (in Los Angeles).

It has been noted that only Ilya and Sonya have relocated to L.A. but that they “hope” the other two members will join them. Nothing has been mentioned about music-video director Alina Pasok, who really is the fifth non-musical-but-incredibly-important member of the group, for sure. The songs and videos also wouldn’t be the same without Sergey "Gokk" Makarov as the group’s DJ and Anton "Boo" Lissov on guitar (more commonly known as “the weird guy with the black makeup on his mouth”).

I’ll also miss the very, very Russian “types” of actors who played the smaller characters in their music videos, but I have hopes that their music will remain as light-hearted and goddamned unforgettable as it has been over the last four years. If Ilya (and Pasok) are still behind the music videos, they will most certainly be worth watching.

And so, here is their latest offering, the hardcore anti-war tune “Generation Cancellation.” Ilya’s vocal here does seem to have a hint of Trent Reznor in his finest Nineties angst. Sonya only appears at the end of the video and looks quite a bit different than she had in the preceding videos.

As a New Yorker, I’m of course wary of what could happen to very creative artists from other countries landing in Los Angeles, but hopefully Little Big won’t be unduly affected by the numbing effects of the California sun. (And the U.S. economy, which is currently crashing and certain to crash even further.)

 

The comments below the video on YT are mostly positive, praising the band for taking a stand against war. However, one critic – a gent in Toronto who posts videos in Russian — noted that the images in the video were too tame in their critique and that Little Big wound up criticizing Western governments as well as Russia. I’m guessing that he is wanting them to condemn Russia unconditionally. 

Little Big, it should be noted, isn't new to criticizing warmongering. Here is their video "Lollybomb," which depicts a certain North Korean dictator having a love affair with his nuclear bomb.

The answers to the criticisms above are pretty apparent. a.) Sonya and Ilya have friends (and bandmates!) back in the Mother Country, so it would be stupid of them to solely trash Russia and incur the government’s wrath on their loved ones. Oh, and b.) Western governments have provoked wars in the past, and it’s pretty plain that the Ukraine conflict has turned into what is called “a proxy war” (think Korea and Vietnam, but in a much more grievous iteration) between the Russia and the U.S.

The Eurovision news site wiwibloggs included this translation of a Russian news story about the group:

Little Big — Russia’s Eurovision 2020 act — have explicitly come out against the war in Ukraine with their new single “Generation Cancellation.” Writing in the description of the music video, they say: “War is not over. Stop war in Ukraine. Stop wars worldwide. No one deserves war.”

[...]

In a statement, quoted by Newsweek, the band’s frontman Ilya Prusikin said: “We adore our country, but we completely disagree with the war in Ukraine. Moreover, we believe that any war is unacceptable.”

“We condemn the actions of the Russian government, and we are so disgusted by the Russian military propaganda machine that we decided to drop everything and leave the country.”

An update: As I was writing this piece, Ilya and Sonya were interviewed on BBC television and NBC (print only). The BBC piece has them saying they oppose war in general and received requests to take down an anti-war post they put up on Instagram when the invasion of Ukraine took place. They say they won’t be returning to their home country until Putin leaves office.

 

The NBC article contains no video, just quotes from Ilya given in an interview with an NBC reporter on Zoom. In the piece he discusses why he left and won’t be going back, despite loving Russia. Most importantly for fans of the band, it is noted that Ilya and Sonya “hope that the band’s two other members, who have for now stayed in Russia, can join them in California soon.”

So, to salute Little Big for their Big-ass Adventure across the seas and for their past videos, which have given me no end of pleasure, let me embed just a few favorites here. Each one of these videos has gotten several million views.

The very first LB video was “Everyday I’m Drinking” in 2013. The group was reportedly created for the video and then actually became a real functioning band. There were two little-person women, Olympia Ivleva and Anna Kast, on vocals with Ilya. Thus, a “little/big” group was born.

This video shows both their love of their homeland and their pretty sizable longing to make fun of it. Thus, we have all the usual symbols — vodka, Russian dancing, traditional costumes, and oh yeah, a bear. The band may be more of a “dance” band these days, but when it began it was more hardcore, playing thrash (counterpointing a traditional Russian melody here). Ilya’s lyrics also harkened back to the heyday of punk — as he notes here he drinks everyday because there’s “no future.”

 

By 2016-17, the group had shifted its sound almost entirely to EDM, and they started coming up with anthemic tunes that were definitely written to make the listener laugh as they danced (as with “Big Dick”). Alina Pasok’s videos also started to become more elaborate affairs with trick visuals, odd juxtapositions, and memorably weird imagery, as with this paean to women who really are very pissed off with their men.

 

Ilya has primarily written the band’s hits in English — except for the few written in gibberish (more below) and in elementary Spanish. “Faradenza” is an example of his nonsense writing. The lyrics seem to be in a sort-of Spanish, but English words and “konichiwa” slide in as well.

This 2018 music video was the definite turning point. From then to now, Little Big’s videos have been elaborate productions that are utterly ridiculous and wonderfully funny. Here Ilya plays a playboy sexbomb entrancing the senior women at a spa. The Little Big that fans outside of Russia know began here.

 

In late 2018, the band’s craziest video to date went viral in a big way (again, 621 million views to date). The lyrics are all nonsense (but that didn’t stop people from consulting those who speak Russian asking them to translate them). The video, however, was carefully planned by Pasok and Ilya, so that every new scene is a bit more absurd than the last.

Romance, shopping, seduction, a street gang dance-off, talking animals, and a cartoonlike robotic dance that became a fad for a while. “Skibidi” has it all — and that includes Godzilla (or a reasonable facsimile thereof).

 

A lot of bands would’ve been content to simply rip off their viral video with a similar song and a similar-looking video. Little Big instead did the most absurd thing possible: They rerecorded the song as a ballad, and Alina and Ilya directed a music video that contains every goddamned romantic cliché that had been seen in the early days of music videos.

The “romantic version” of “Skibidi” is thus even sillier than the original. And it continues the “saga” begun in the first video, with Sonya losing Ilya to her rival, Godzilla. This is ridiculousness that transcends borders and language. It it straight-faced lunacy of the finest kind.

 

The next move in the Little Big march of absurdity was a song written in simple English that was accompanied by a video with a clear intention — to show every idiotic person one could possibly find in a bar. Ilya and Sonya are the main culprits, but there’s a great gallery of Russian faces here, with each party explaining to us that no, “I’m not alcoholic!”

It’s one of the few Little Big videos that takes place in the real world, the kind of world that you and I live in. And it actually makes unregenerate hard-drinking sots into charming-seeming people. (In real life? Not so much…) It’s the Little Big video that separates the men and women from the boys and girls — if you like this one, you’re sure to get stuck on their music-vids and actually (like me) await their next assault on sanity.

 

The group returned to “Skibidi”-style jovial strangeness with “Go Bananas,” which barely has lyrics (Ilya just wants us to know he is “the banana man!”), but the video contains every cheap joke you can think of (rubber chickens, pies in the face, food as musical instruments). And yet the vid moves beyond the purely shticky into the world of the surreal and intentionally idiotic. The melody is catchy as hell, the action is fast and furiously idiotic, and it’s just great.

 

Back to an actual plotline of sorts. “Hypnodancer” has the band committing high-stakes capers thanks to Ilya’s hypnotizing dancing moves. There’s no explanation needed.

 

To illustrate how deeply I fell down the Little Big rabbit-hole, here is one of the most fun variety specials that they took part in, a New Years Eve farewell to the horrid year of 2020 (which they had made fun of in their delightfully caustic Xmas single/music-vid, “Suck My Dick 2020”) done in the form of an Italian musical variety show.

The whole show is a wonderfully detailed sendup of Italian entertainment from the Seventies and Eighties, with all the participants speaking in Italian for the duration and covering old hits. I can’t imagine an American comedy-music show that would get this deep into the joke (especially since Americans never learn a word of other languages).

“Piccolo Grandi” (as they were known for this show) covered the song “Mamma Maria,” a 1982 hit by the Italian group Ricchi e Poveri. Their performance is both faithful to the original and to their own style (especially with the crazy-ass dancing toward the end). They appear at 37:42. (Ilya “smoking” a pencil is a reference to the “Hypnodancer” video – and perhaps a stricture of Russian TV that people shouldn’t be seen smoking, as exists in the U.S. these days).

 

And while their Eurovision song (for the Eurovision that never was, in 2020) “Uno” and their paean to ethnic food, “Tacos” are both entertaining, I’ll close out here with another one of those Little Big music-vids that shows an upside-down world, “Moustache.” The song and music video pay tribute to hirsute women (who have carefully groomed 'staches).

 

A perfect way to close out this survey of Little Big’s catchy-and-crazy music-videos. I welcome them to our country with open arms, in the hope that they will NEVER become normal. (And/or have guest star cameos in their videos from former SNL stars or other purveyors of substandard American mainstream comedy.) Please, Ilya, Sonya (and Anton and Sergey, and hopefully Alina), stay very, very weird.

Fassbinder’s 77th birthday, part 2 — a trove of amazingly rare RWF-related films (anyone know a ‘fansubber’ or low-price translator?)

I don’t speak or read German. Thus, my deep fascination with the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder has been inhibited. I have relied over the years on the kindness of subtitlers to supply subs for his films, and am happy to report that, at the current time, you can find English-subtitled copies of every one of his features and telefilms somewhere on the Internet, except the second part of Bolweiser.

In the world of Fassbinder-lit, it’s been dire: the collections of his early writings and interviews with him have gone untranslated for a long time (18 years for the interview book so far).

Thus, you can imagine my conflicted feelings when a YouTube poster named “Raoul Révéré” began to post a host of INCREDIBLY rare films concerning Fassbinder and other German directors, albeit with no English subtitles. Révéré has posted *dozens* of very watchable copies of films made by directors whose work Americans never get to see.

The fact that they are untranslated is indeed maddening — not since the traveling festival of Fassbinder’s films in 1997 (that began as a comprehensive show of everything he directed at MoMA) has there been such a veritable flood of RWF-related material available to viewers worldwide. I thus present the following with mixed emotions, but in celebration of Fassbinder’s birthday (which is today, May 31) and in commemoration of his death (which took place on June 10).

It would be delightful if the many people who “fansub” films for free would tackle these films, but it seems unlikely. It would make sense, however, to start a sort of crowd-funding project to get these films (perhaps just one or two to start with) subtitled for Fassbinder fans who would love to see them. Count me in if such a thing can be arranged with a bilingual person who has the time and the inclination (and charges a reasonable rate for translation of movie dialogue). I can be contacted at the email found at mediafunhouse.com.

For those who would find respite in the Google “auto-translate” option for Closed Captions, I must warn you: that way lies madness. The films that do have that option on Révéré’s channel proceed — as they do in “heard” English — to produce sentences that are mere word-salad and seem to have a vague relation to what is being said (many words are “misheard” by the program), but which make no sense and ultimately undercut the viewing experience. (Read: You’re better off with whatever plot synopsis can be found online, even if it’s only a line or two.)

Back to the trove of Révéré: The specialty on this YT channel is apparent — filmmakers who follow Fassbinder in their love of Hollywood (and German post-war) melodrama and others who craft visually arresting kitsch/camp/gay imagery. The bulk of Révéré’s online trove centers around the writer-painter-filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch and Fassbinder. In the case of the latter, Révéré has posted a number of films that fit into the categories outlined above and also happen to feature members of Fassbinder’s acting ensemble in supporting roles.

Before I delve into the film directly relate to Fassbinder, here is a list of those, for the diehard RWF fan.

Directed by Robert Van Ackeren:

Harlis, aka “The Sensuous Three” (1972), with Ulli Lommel

Der letzte Schrei (1975), with Delphine Seyrig and Udo Kier

Die Reinheit des Herzens (1980), with Elisabeth Trissenaar

Directed by Achternbusch:

Die Atlantikschwimmer (1976), with Margarethe von Trotta, Kurt Raab

Die Olympiasiegerin (1983), with Kurt Raab

Rita Ritter (1984), with Armin Mueller-Stahl, Barbara Valentin, Eva Mattes

Wohin? (1988), with Kurt Raab

Hades (1995), with Irm Hermann and Rosel Zech

Das fünfte Gebot (The Fifth Commandment, 1975), directed by Duccio Tessari, with Helmut Berger and Udo Kier

“Talk Im Turm,” 1992 talk show with Helmut Berger and Fassbinder colleague (and nemesis) Rosa von Praunheim

Die Peep Show ist tot, es lebe die Peep Show! by Lothar Lambert, with Ingrid Caven and Dieter Schidor

Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht (1982), directed by Hans-Christof Stenzel, with Volker Spengler

A “missing in action” title that did have a U.S. distributor (“Promovision International”) and yet never showed up on U.S. DVD is A Man Like Eva (1984), directed by Radu Gabrea. It’s an odd picture, in that its main conceit is that Eva Mattes (who starred in Fassbinder films, including Petra von Kant and the missing (but available on the “underside” of the Internet) Jail Bait) plays RWF.

Ms. Mattes does a good impression of RWF, but the film does leave out one aspect of Fassbinder’s non-stop activity, namely drugs. One assumes Gabrea left this out to further concentrate on Fassbinder’s relationships with his performers and crew.

 

Moving closer to Fassbinder, Révéré has posted Heute spielen wir den Boß (“Today we play the boss,” 1981), the only theatrical feature directed by the composer of the immaculate music in Fassbinder’s films, Peer Raben. The film stars and is coscripted by Fassbinder's ex-boyfriend, star, and crew member, Kurt Raab. Other Fassbinder mainstays in the cast are Ingrid Caven, Rosel Zech, Harry Baer, Irm Hermann, and Gunther Kaufmann.

 

Raab died of AIDS in 1988. A documentary about his life appeared in 1989. Sehnsucht nach Sodom (“Yearning for Sodom”), was directed by Hanno Baethe, Hans Hirschmüller, and Raab.

 

There are seven documentaries on Fassbinder on the Révéré channel — alas, these as well are all in German and have no translation to any other language. Each one of them contains rare footage of Fassbinder interviews and shows him directing on-set. I leave out here the full-length interview filmed in his Paris apartment, as that has appeared as a supplement on U.S. DVD.

The first documentary is Es ist nicht gut, in einem Menschenleib zu leben (“It is not good to live in a human body,” 1995), directed by Peter Buchka. It can be found here.

Doc 2 is Ich will nicht nur, dass ihr mich liebt (“I don’t just want you to love me,” 1992), directed by Hans Günther Pflaum.

 

Doc 3 is Ende einer Kommune? (“End of a commune?”). Directed by Joachim von Mengershausen, it is probably the RAREST of the RWF docs. It was released in 1970 and shows Fassbinder and his colleagues rehearsing and attending the premiere of his first film, Love Is Colder Than Death, at the 1969 Berlin Film Festival.

 

Doc 4 is Der Kulturbetrieb braucht so was wie mich (“The culture industry needs someone like me”).

 

Doc 5 is Etwas, wovor ich Angst habe, setzt mich in Gang (“Something I’m scared of gets me going,” 1982).

 

Doc 6 is Der Mensch ist ein hässliches Tier (“Man is an ugly animal”). 

 

Lastly, Révéré has posted three films that Fassbinder acted in, only one of which appeared on U.S. VHS. The first is 1 Berlin-Harlem (1974), directed by Lothar Lambert and Wolfram Zobus. It contains RWF ensemble members in the cast: Ingrid Caven, Peter Chatel, Gunther Kaufmann, and Evelyn Künneke.

Fassbinder appears at 116:20, with Caven outside a movie theater. That scene is here.

Shadow of Angels (1976) is the most controversial project that Fassbinder was ever involved with. It began as the Fassbinder play “The Garbage, the City and Death,” which contains a character called “the Rich Jew.” It has been noted by critics that the character is not an anti-Semitic stick figure, but the play attracted protests and smears against Fassbinder in the press.

The film adaptation is akin to the bleaker films in Fassbinder’s canon (like In a Year of 13 Moons), but Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid handled direction for Shadow. Schmid is seen here introducing the film on German television. Online he is quoted as saying that the film takes place in “a Germany where no one is starving and no one is scared anymore, and the only two people who are still sensitive are the prostitute and the Jew, because both of them are outcasts.”

Below is the version put up on YT by Révéré. A subtitled copy of the film can be found at Rarefilmm, here.

 

The most amazing discovery for Fassbinder fans who enjoy watching him act in films directed by others is a 1971 telefilm directed by Peer Raben, Die Ahnfrau — Oratorium nach Franz Grillparzer (“The Ancestress”). The cast includes RWF, Margit Carstensen, Hans Hirschmüller, Kurt Raab, Irm Hermann, Ulli Lommel, Ingrid Caven, and Hanna Schygulla.

For those who would like to try to follow the plot without knowing the language, the plot of the 1816 play by Grillparzer is this (well, at least according to Grillparzer’s Wiki bio): “It is a gruesome fate-tragedy in the trochaic measure of the Spanish drama, already made popular by Müllner's Schuld. The ghost of a lady who was killed by her husband for infidelity is doomed to walk the earth until her family line dies out, and this happens in the play amid scenes of violence and horror.”

Raben’s stylized production of the play truly makes one wish this film did have subtitles.

 

And finally, a film that did play in the U.S. but has disappeared in the last 40 years. And for which we DO have a translation of the key portion (but not on the film itself on YT). The film in question is Dieter Schidor’s The Wizard of Babylon (1982), which shows the making of Fassbinder’s last film, Querelle (1982) but even more importantly features his last-ever interview, conducted the evening before he died at the very young age of 37.

There is another making-of film about Querelle, Wolf Gremm’s Letzte Arbeiten (“Last works,” 1982), so while Schidor’s behind-the-scenes look at the production of Fassbinder’s last film is very interesting, it isn’t unique. The interview most certainly is.

It’s not all that long, but the film begins (for 6 minutes) and ends (for 11 minutes) with this last interview. The important thing to know is that Fassbinder is not out of his mind on drugs. He does not look like he is dying — he simply looks very, very tired. (Which makes sense, given the output of films, plays, TV work, and writing he created from 1969 to 1982.)

His answers are extremely coherent and quite eloquent. I will include two here:

Schidor: Rainer, you’ve just concluded your 41st film, Querelle, based on a novel by Jean Genet. What made you film this radical novel by Genet after your feminist films, Maria Braun and Veronika Voss? Or, why did you postpone it for so long? 

RWF: Well, I didn’t shoot feminist films but films about human society. Querelle is a utopian draft in contrast to society. That’s what it’s in contrast to, it isn’t feminist film as opposed to men’s film. These films were to describe a society as well as possible. It’s easier to do this with women. Querelle is the draft of a possible society… which, judging by all its repulsiveness, is wonderful. Therefore, they don’t contradict each other but complement each other.... 

Schidor: You started to create a kind of German Hollywood with Lili Marleen and Querelle, which were both extremely big studio productions. 

RWF: That was once an expressed thought of mine. What I’d like is a Hollywood film, that is, a film that’s as wonderful and as easy to understand as Hollywood but at the same time not as untruthful.

The full translation of the interview was featured in the press notes put out by New Yorker films. The interview and a short essay by Fassbinder on Querelle can be found here.

So now, with the re-entry into public view of a “lost” Fassbinder documentary and its key sequence translated into English, I can conclude my celebration of the 77th anniversary of RWF’s birth.

 

Thanks to superior cineaste Paul Gallagher for his help with this piece. Thanks also to Jon Whitehead of Rarefilmm.com for letting me know about this YT channel and in discovering the print materials about Wizard of Babylon. Rarefilmm.com is here.

‘Obsolete’? Not at all. Necessary TV rarities, now on a great YouTube channel

The "Husbands" host a 
telethon: Gazzara and 
Cassavetes standing,
Falk in wheelchair (left).

At this point it is truly impossible to keep up with what is posted on the various streaming video sites. Fans, historians, obsessives, collectors, and tech-experts are flooding the Net with terrific posts of obscure movies and old TV series and specials, to the extent that one can’t possibly watch it all, nor would one want to. (’Cause most of it ain’t all that great… shhhh…)

In the case of YouTube, there are thousands and thousands of channels devoted to “TV nostalgia.” Some of them are very hard to sift through — in many cases, because the poster isn’t making use of the Playlist function on YT, in which you can separate your postings by title, theme, or topic.

One of the most intense collections of rare TV is the “Obsolete Video” channel on YT, which goes beyond the mere posting of vintage commercials – which I do like, but c’mon, how many hours of that can really be watched? – with a series of episodes and specials that haven’t been seen since they first aired. The Obsolete channel doesn’t have Playlists of its material, but it's definitely worth hitting the “Page Down” several dozen times to move through its offerings.

The gent who runs it, Rick Thomas, has an introductory video for the channel, in which he explains that his main business is the conversion (and digitization) of video footage from any format, past or present; he also repairs old video machines of any type and is looking for additional rare programming. He notes that the Obsolete channel has thus far been made up of tapes recorded for private use off TV in the Chicago and Los Angeles areas – Rick himself lives and works in Arizona.

Rick’s postings have been gobbling up my time in the last few weeks, and I wanted to present a “Ten Best” list for this post, but as I started putting the list together I realized I was going to go beyond 10 (but hopefully not to 20). Thus, let’s review some highlights of the Obsolete Video channel on YT.
*****

Since it’s nearly Labor Day, it’s fitting to start off with segments from the first and last hours of the 1974 MDA Telethon. A lot of the hour-long talk show and variety special vids that Rick has put up are actually two half-hour recordings, so around the :30 mark we often move from one episode of a given show to another. Here we move from beginning to end; click here to watch.

Since this clip can’t be embedded, it should be noted that it includes the “solo Jer” aspect of the Telethon — Jerry being sincere about the cause, introducing that year’s poster child, fawning over his guests, and accepting a big check by a corporate sponsor.

As for what can be embedded with Jerry at the helm, here is an off-kilter episode of The Tonight Show with him guest-hosting when Carson was on vacation. Many people guest-hosted Tonight, but the episodes that exist of Jerry hosting are unusual — he seemed calm in the early to mid-Sixties episodes, but was the living embodiment of flop sweat by the late Sixties.

Here is an example of that. And yes, the tape that is posted is “hot” and a mess to look at – but when this stuff initially aired, it was seen through the miasma of rabbit-eared antenna “ghosts” and other imperfections. In the part of Queens, N.Y., that I grew up in, cable TV didn’t exist until 1990, so I spent years of my life watching shows that looked like this (or worse!)

Jer’s opening song is a poor one — a standard that few folks revive — his opening joke falls flat, and the little we see of an interview with a psychiatrist-turned-politician is desperate. It is, therefore, absolutely fascinating to watch.

 

Another flop sweat host, but playing it that way for laughs, was Don Rickles. This video, which starts with Flip Wilson guest-hosting and Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows guesting, has segments from two Rickles-hosted shows. The first has Lee Marvin joining a panel of Don Adams and Muhammad Ali (!); Marvin did give good interviews, but here Rickles pounces on him, to the extent that you have Don doing humor about Lee not talking — until Lee finally talks and what he says is quite considered and intelligent.

The next Rickles-hosted segment comes as James Caan joins a panel with Bob Newhart and Karen Black (who is seen seducing Rickles on another Obsolete posting!). Black proceeds to kiss on the mouth both Caan and then Rickles, and Caan ends up telling Rickles “atrocity” stories, since he apparently used to regularly hang out with the two Dons (Adams and Rickles) before he was a star.

An even worse-looking but riveting-to-watch sample of a guest-hosted Tonight Show can be found in the middle of this video, which begins with segments from two other shows. The first has Carson hosting Tiny Tim (in his Vegas lounge-lizard phase) and Burt Reynolds hosting, with guests Kaye Ballard (who does her Vegas act) and redneck emeritus character actor Dub Taylor – who plays the xylophone!

At 20:15, a terrific example of a guest-hosted episode appears, this one a killer hosted by Sammy Davis Jr in August of 1974. Even though whoever recorded this left out Sammy’s two songs, we see: His opening banter with Ed; him interviewing the aforementioned Burt Reynolds (fresh from the set of At Long Last Love); him talking to Helen Reddy (whose first song is cut but her second song is included); him interviewing Richard Pryor at full steam (truly amazing); and then a final chat with Evel Knievel, who was at that time about to jump the Snake River Canyon.

Firstly of fascination, the network edits: While Reddy singing the word “screw” and Pryor saying the word “faggot” are both bleeped, Pryor’s album title That Nigger’s Crazy could indeed be said on the air on late-night NBC, circa ’74. Even in its edited-down version (with visuals so hazy they’re b&w), this is a great example of The Tonight Show at its best, but with a guest who was actually part of the superstar culture of the time. Johnny was the master of the laid-back chat with these people, but he was not a master performer in any format other than Tonight. (And the episodes with guest hosts have all been buried for the syndication package of the Carson Tonight — perhaps because one can see that other hosts were equally adept at running the show!) 

Yes indeed, Sammy does over-laugh at everything his guests say — but when Pryor is on fire, clearly trying to make Sammy laugh, it is sheer bliss. Richard is so busy ad-libbing he changes the end of his old routine about a preacher talking about eating a tuna-fish sandwich when God spoke to him, saying, “Hey... can I have a bite of that sandwich?” Changed here on what seems like a whim, since Richard is just gauging how much he can make Sammy lose it.

 

Still in a Tonight Show groove, here is the sketch comedy group The Ace Trucking Company doing a Halloween skit in costume. (Obsolete has a very good collection of horror-host material as well, by the way.) It’s not all that funny, but it’s a good set-piece that shows a younger group of comic actors taking over Tonight for a while. The ATC line-up included Fred Willard, George Memmoli, and Billy Saluga (of “Ooooh, you doesn’t has ta call me Johnson!” fame).

Like a bunch of posts on the Obsolete channel, this sketch has been posted more than once. Rick is so painstaking in his work that he has often posted “upgrades” of better transfers of the original tapes he’s restored. This is the best-looking version. (Still, for those of a certain age, remember what rabbit-ears TV used to look like!)

 

Before the Dean Martin Roasts took off (more on Dino below), there were several attempts to present roasts on network TV in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The Obsolete channel has two of these entries (which, of course, could pretend to be “racy” but were just super-clean in verbal content), which both seem to have aired on the ABC Wide World of Entertainment — the concept that ABC used to replace Dick Cavett. Cavett remained on board, but he switched off with Jack Paar (returning for his last shot at late night), various documentaries, comedy specials, and a concert slot for Friday nights (to compete with “The Midnight Special” on NBC).

The first roast of note here is “A Salute to Humble Howard” (1973) — Cosell, that is. The best presenters in this roast are Redd Foxx, Don Rickles (of course), and none other than Cosell’s “nemesis” Muhammad Ali. Slappy White comes off better than usual because he was put toward the end (after Rickles and Ali), so he gives up on the jokes written for him and starts throwing in ad-libs. Watch it here.

As a massive fan of Steve Allen, I was interested to see “A Comedy Salute to Steve Allen.” Here, all the jokes are indeed scripted, and it’s rather odd to see Steve on ABC (when all his successes were on NBC and CBS). Still, though, there are bits by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme (singing Steve’s “theme song”) and the great Louis Nye (as Gordon Hathaway and himself). Steve himself has particularly brutal jokes at the end (a bit more brutal than he was in earlier eras and later on, when he became prudish). His mention of the stars of Fifties TVs having “survived” is fascinating.

 

Two of the rarest, most surprising videos on the Obsolete channel show are uncut tapings of The Dean Martin Show. Dean Martin fans, at least some of us, have a love-hate relationship with the show’s producer, Greg Garrison. On the one hand, Garrison made the show possible by striking a deal with Dean where he had to do as little preparation as possible and would only have to be in-studio one day a week.

On the other hand, Garrison was a notoriously schlocky producer who made extensive use of terrible laugh tracks and godawful editing, including many, many freeze frames. The Dean Martin Show had some of the slickness of other variety shows, but it also had a really tacky “packaging” that made its comedy sketches really sink (even as they began). The tacky editing was one of the central features of the later DM roasts, where guests who weren’t present were edited in, laughs were “sweetened” with exceptionally phony tracks, and reaction shots of celebs laughing were used repeatedly, even in the same segment.

Dino and Greg Garrison.

The two examples of the uncut record of the Dino show explains why this was — in essence, Garrison wanted to honor the commitment to Dean to get him quickly on and off the set on his one day in the studio, and thus was constantly directing sketches “in frame.” Meaning he would constantly be stepping into the frame to restart or clumsily finish off sketches by appearing in front of the performers right after the final line was spoken. (I mean, RIGHT after — Garrison nearly jumped into frame as the sketches ended.)

And while some of the show was done with a live studio audience, a good amount of it was done without, including standup monologues. In the first video below you’ll see Steve Landesberg doing his standup to an empty studio, where only the crew are laughing. (Thus, it’s even more remarkable that some of the standup worked on the show — the comics were so good they could deal with Garrison’s moronic cost-cutting measures.)

What comes through as one watches these weird little shards of entertainment into which Garrison bounds, looking like a stevedore rather than a producer, is that he did NOT intrude when Dean was singing solo. Those moments truly were the best moments in the show (and the reason Dino fans do have to be grateful to Garrison, for at least keeping the DM show on the air for so long), and were clearly the moments that Dean rehearsed — Garrison’s mythology was that Dean “listened to tapes in his car” of the material, but it’s been made clear (even from other interviews with Garrison himself) that Dean did rehearse and block the musical numbers. Thus, seeing Garrison keeping a respectful distance as the solo songs fade out is very welcome.

The best part about seeing Dean’s blasé response to the show being built around him is hearing him refer to himself in the third person as “the Italian.” As in, “Where does the Italian go now?”

 

A second “raw” tape of the Dino show being assembled. Notable here? Frank Sinatra Jr. doing a cover of America’s “Horse with No Name” and one of those full-ensemble musical medleys of songs from old musicals, this time based around Pal Joey with Sinatra.

 

Another wild artifact of the Sixties-into-Seventies: the pilot for The Kopykats, a variety show featuring a group of impressionists, on The Kraft Music Hall in Nov. 1970. This show varies from the later Kopykats series, in that it features Edie Adams as the one female impressionist (Marilyn Michaels played that role in the later series) and one of the first standup impressionists (Will Jordan) and a then-very successful nightclub act (David Frye) are in the ensemble. (They were replaced in the series by Joe Baker and Fred Travalena; Frank Gorshin, Rich Little, and George Kirby were in both pilot and series.) 

The comedy (supervised by Danny Simon) is quite lame, but the fascination here are the impressions themselves, ranging from the perfected ones done by their innovators to ones that seem quite labored. The wonderful Edie gets her own solo spot, and Frye seems to get the most to do in the special — most likely because he was doing very topical political comedy at the time the special aired.

 

The joy of watching old talk show segments on YouTube comes mostly from realizing that, while late-night talk shows are absolute garbage these days, there were indeed some genuinely smart, fascinating, adult talk programs on the air besides the obvious ones (Cavett, Allen and Paar on Tonight, David Susskind). Tom Snyder may have often seemed like a rambling, discursive interviewer (best parodied by Dan Aykroyd on SNL), but when he was in peak form (as with Sterling Hayden), the Tomorrow show hosted some terrific talk.

The Obsolete channel has a number of Tomorrow segments, but the hour that immediately grabs attention is a two-parter (not sure if it’s even the same program): one half with Marlon Brando and Russell Means of the American Indian Movement; one half with Arthur Marx to discuss his dual biography of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime (Especially Himself). 

The Brando/Means segment is a very serious discussion of Native American rights, with Snyder asking a great question of Marlon – if the Indian movement asked him to “go away” since they didn’t want him distracting from their cause anymore, would he do it? (Snyder also gets to hear what Brando has actually donated to the Indians in the way of land – 40 acres in Azusa, Calif., and an apartment building in another California town he can’t remember!)

The Marx segment is fascinating because it takes place at the time that Jerry Lewis was thought to be entirely washed up, purely a presence on the show biz scene because of the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. Marx was a truly unreliable narrator (he doesn’t get key dates right — like when the duo broke up!), but his book does have some wonderfully gossipy stories in it, and it is amazing to hear he and Snyder discussing “what happened” to Jerry. (Without mentioning the personality issues that killed off his career in the late Sixties.)

 

Obsolete has put up segments from a certain New Year's show that Snyder did (on Jan. 1, 1974), but one segment (from a 1973 show) is best seen on its own. A Louisville, Kentucky Satanist conducts a “hexing” ritual with a silent lady lying on an altar (her presence is mentioned but never explained). Might’ve been the only time “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law!” was uttered on late-night TV in, well… at least that part of the Seventies.

 

For comedy LP fans, one of the great treats unearthed by Obsolete is Murray Roman’s TV Show, a pilot hosted by Murray Roman, a comedian who is best known for having written for, and been an ensemble cast member on, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Roman was actually a very special figure in comedy history – clearly “converted” by Lenny Bruce, he spoke like Lenny when doing standup but also pioneered on his albums the kind of headphone comedy that was done to a fine turn by the Firesign Theater.

Roman let his eclectic and turned-on taste rule his TV pilot. The comedy is oddball and more off-kilter than Laugh-In or the Smothers show (it has the off-beat tone of Kovacs, but without his visual innovation); the music is supplied by Donovan, folkie/actor Hamilton Camp, and Linda Ronstadt. Nancy Sinatra does a poetry reading of the lyrics to the Beatles' "Revolution" (!), Frank Zappa sits for an interview by Murray, and the show closes out with Donovan’s recording of “Atlantis” being played, with Donovan, Roman, and a group of hippie-ish young people singing along (although you can only really hear the recording). Tommy Smothers also makes a brief appearance.

This program has no IMDB listing, but according to Obsolete’s notes, it was broadcast on KTTV in Feb. 1970. An educational documentary appears after the Roman show on the tape that Rick and his crew transferred. 

 

Still in the realm of comedy, and another jam-packed show with great names from that Sixties/Seventies era, is “Comedy News,” another pilot that aired during the ABC Wide World of Entertainment late-night slot in Sept. 1973.

The cast is pretty damned impressive: as fake “anchors,” Kenny Mars, Andrew Duncan, Fannie Flagg, Anthony Holland, and Marian Mercer; as “correspondents” doing their own material, there are Bob and Ray, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, and Peter Schickele. Appearing in a final “women’s panel show” sketch (which would seem to have begun as a bit done at an improv club) are comedy writer emeritus Gail Parent and Joan Rivers.

Some of the material is dated; some is timeless. The best stuff comes from the correspondents and on the women’s panel, but Kenny Mars deserves special mention for incarnating a pompous, self-satisfied and conservative anchorman, decades before Will Ferrell.

 

There are many mind-blowers in the coffers of Obsolete. Two major ones come from a non-Jerry Lewis program, the Easter Seals Telethon. The first one is from 1975, cohosted in early scenes by Peter Falk, Wayne Rogers, Billy Davis (of Marilyn McCoo and…), and actor James Cromwell. Tony Bennett (in excellent voice, with one of his wackier wigs on) performs several numbers in-studio as the clip begins.

Diana Trask does a song and then the show kicks into higher gear for cinephiles: John Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara, Falk’s Husbands pals, appear as cohosts. Falk then participates as the referee of a rather bizarre wheelchair basketball game (!). It’s a mind-boggler to hear Cassavetes’ cigarette-smokey laugh and Gazzara’s DEEP tones while they serve as spontaneous sportscasters. (With Micky Dolenz and Donny Most on the phone bank.)

The oldies group the Penguins then perform “Saturday Night at the Movies” (after an intro by new hosts Lucie Arnaz and Desi Jr; Lucie does a slow dance to the song with Henry Winkler). A call-in of $20.00 from Garry Marshall — wow, Garry, couldja spare it? — closes out the segment, which then goes to many ads.

 

Perhaps the most mind-roasting segment yet unleashed by Obsolete (and this is a hard call) is another one from the same ’75 Easter Seals Telethon. It begins in media res, with Adrianne Barbeau dancing wildly (yes, the teen boys who loved her at the time were no doubt thrilled) with Marty Allen, who was quite the crazy dancer himself. Ben Gazzara’s dance partner at this point? Well, Charo, of course.

Falk is still the serious host, doing a pitch to call in with a pledge as the music plays. Adrianne continues to feverishly dance, as Marty Allen breaks off and cuts a rug with a person in a giant Easter Bunny suit. The bunny person grabs Barbeau and cops a feel, but she is nonplussed, as she goes from dancing into a pitch for Easter Seals. Cassavetes gives the pledge-tally for the hour.

 

***** 

As I wrote this piece, there was a basic problem: Rick kept uploading things to the Obsolete channel that I really had to include. The first of these was a full special by Bobbie Gentry, shot in Canada and recorded off an L.A. airing.

The show is terrific, as Bobbie (like Johnny Cash) wisely avoids the standard terrible variety-show sketches that blighted shows hosted by singers. Her guests are all musicians, and so we get songs from them alone and with Bobbie.

They are: John Hartford, Richie Havens, Ian and Sylvia, Biff Rose, and the Staples Singers. Hard to pick a favorite performance but Bobbie, Hartford, and Richie, singing Bobbie’s own “Morning Glory” has to qualify. She also does a spirited and well-acted version of her latest story-song, the iconic “a girl has to do what she has to do” song, “Fancy.” The end, what we have of it, is amazing – Bobbie leads a little dance party onstage while singing “The Rainmaker” as all her guests dance around as well, as they are “rained on.”

 

And you’d think that an important TV special like Free to Be… You and Me from March 1974 would’ve made it to YouTube intact, but Obsolete has posted a nearly full broadcast of it with commercials intact. Marlo Thomas and her producers assembled a great collection of talent for the 1972 LP and the ‘74 TV special, which focused on letting children know that gender differences (and those of race) don’t matter — yes, it’s corny as hell at points but charming throughout and quite important in its time.

The most enjoyable scenes include: Marlo and Mel Brooks providing the voices of boy and girl babies in a hospital discovering their genders (sketches cowritten by Carl Reiner; the puppets of the babies were made and operated by Wayland Flowers, of “Madame” fame!); a cartoon about a girl who uses her being a “lady” to get everything she wants, until she receives her comeuppance (written by the great Shel Silverstein); and a number of very touching songs, most prominently “When We Grow Up” sung by Roberta Flack and teenage Michael Jackson — the last line, convincing children that you “don’t have to change at all” is indeed quite poignant given that it is sung by MJ (who changed everything about his physical appearance systematically through the last decades of his life).

I note at least one thing missing: Rosey Grier singing “It’s All Right to Cry” (and the beginning of the “William’s Doll” song sung by Alan Alda). However, this initially aired version of the show includes a segment with Dustin Hoffman that was cut from the special when it was first released on home-entertainment formats. (It has since reappeared as a DVD supplement.) Hoffman, at the height of his powers (in the year of Lenny), reads a Brooklyn Jewish boy’s story about wanting to stop crying so much. It would seem that this is the great Herb Gardner’s contribution to the program, as Gardner’s name appears among the writers — he and Marlo were a couple at the time — and this piece has the “sound” of Gardner’s NYC realist-poetry dialogue.

 

Note: Rick has posted info on how to reach him on the videos he hosts on the Obsolete Video channel. He is looking for donations and sponsoring orgs to help him acquire more collections and restore those videos. He's doing invaluable work and we are very lucky that he's making this stuff available for free on YT.

Thanks to Jon Whitehead and Rich Brown for referring me to Rick’s YT channel.

Of comic books, colors, movies, and Jack “King” Kirby

I’ve been on a little journey. It’s taken me back to my childhood and connected me with the memory of my father, who died last February. Of all the things he left me — which I discussed in an earlier blog entry — the first was comic books, most especially those by his two heroes, Will Eisner and Jack Kirby.

I’m sure I’ll be exploring Eisner at some point in the future, but for the time being I’ve been on a Kirby Krusade, since I “inherited” my dad’s comic collection — the sad fact being that the possessions of those without a will are simply taken, although he did verbally like to say, “These are yours after I’m gone….”

Besides the sentimental attachment I have for Kirby’s work thanks to my dad’s reverence for it, two things spurred me on to reread his comics. The first was reading Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics, a coffee-table book that, as thoroughly engaging and informative as it is, left me wanting more. (Evanier has noted that the book was a preliminary to a bigger Kirby bio that he’s working on — until we get the next bio, this one is a great starting point.)

Young Kirby, taking no nonsense.

The second was attending a panel about Kirby at the Parsons School of Design in October 2016 — a presentation of the “NY Comics and Picture-story Symposium,” run by the visionary cartoonist Ben Katchor. The panel is available on YouTube (with wobbly audio, especially when the Skype guests are spoken to) here; its title was “Crossing Kirby: the ‘King of Comics’ in context of social issues and ‘fine’ art.” The panelists discussed Kirby from a number of intriguing angles, but it was the splash pages and double-page spreads shown onscreen that made me want to revisit his comics.

One thing that struck me was that those who spoke the most favored the comics my father and I had stopped buying, because they seemed to be kiddie fare that Kirby did in the wake of his ambitious and amazing “Fourth World” saga in the early Seventies and The Eternals in the mid-Seventies. Devil Dinosaur, Machine Man, and Kamandi were all touted as some of his best titles — in fact Kamandi was cited by two panelists as the one comic they’d recommend to someone who knew nothing at all about Kirby’s work.

[Note: I’ve since reread Kirby’s run on Kamandi, and it’s much better than I remembered but is far from the first thing I’d recommend to someone who doesn’t know Kirby’s work, due to its rather bizarre anthropomorphic animal aspect.]

Given my memories of those books, I was indeed surprised, but decided that I needed to travel once again to “the Kirby-verse” (a DC phrase used to hype his work). I began at the best entry point, the "Fourth World" comics — they're my recommendation if you really want to have your mind blown by some of the finest, boldest, smartest, and yes, craziest comics of all time, *and* if you can easily obtain the four books that contain these titles.

DC issued beautifully designed “omnibus” books collecting just about all of Kirby’s comics for the company in the late 2000s. The books were so popular and so under-produced that some of them sell for insanely high prices on Amazon and eBay (if you’re looking for The Demon collection, you pretty much need to break out the credit card or just find the original 16 comics in lesser shape at a lower price….).

The Fourth World Omnibus is a four-volume collection of his overlapping, early Seventies DC comics The Forever People, The New Gods, Mr. Miracle, and Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen — the latter being the finest silk purse over made out of a sow’s ear in comic history, and the home of most of the aforementioned really crazy stuff.

In that burst of 55 comics (and two later epilogues, the second of which is beautifully written but jarringly drawn), Kirby offered the best proof that it was he who gave birth to the Marvel revolution in superheroes (along with Steve Ditko — credit where credit is due). While they admittedly lacked Stan Lee’s energetic and polished dialogue and captions, the Fourth World books showcased Kirby’s flair for crafting heroes as modern gods, villains that were sometimes ridiculous (“Virmin Vundabar” was a fave of my father’s) and sometimes profoundly tragic, and situations that seemed to have spun from Kirby’s own nightmares. (One torture chamber disguised as an amusement park in The Forever People is wildly effective, even by today’s far more graphic standards.)

Rereading these comics (and catching up to the issues I missed way back when), I was struck by several things. The first is the sheer exuberance with which Kirby tossed off indelibly complex and innovative (and sometimes intentionally absurdist) ideas to the reader — assuming that he/she would fully understand.

The second is the deeply Freudian level of his comics, especially in regard to the aforementioned nightmare situations. The third “discovery” was one that has been mentioned before, but bears repeating — that George Lucas really did rip off aspects of the Fourth World comics for Star Wars (as if stealing Kirby's design for Dr. Doom’s mask for Darth Vader wasn't blatant enough). This influence should've been acknowledged by Lucas in every interview he did – Kurosawa and Joseph Campbell, my ass….

The fourth and final thing is that one of the elements that the DC editors reportedly hated about the Fourth World series became an industry standard a few years after the titles in question were all cancelled (the longest-running title, Mr. Miracle, lasted only 18 issues). Kirby chose to have his comics overlap, so that each one added to a tapestry of a greater story about an oncoming war between two different factions of “gods.”

It was felt at the time that this was too confusing or too oblique for readers, but a few years later that became the norm — to the point that it stopped readers like myself from following certain titles, since their overlapping plotlines meant you either had to spring for nearly all the titles being published by DC or Marvel at that time, or give up understanding what you were reading (which was never the case with Kirby's “overlap”).

My current rereading of Kirby's work is still in the first of three “stages” I’ve planned: first, the Seventies work Kirby wrote and drew for DC (his high water mark, in my opinion), then his “comeback” Marvel titles, and then the Sixties Marvel classics. The last category includes Captain America 100, which my dad had Kirby sign to me at a Phil Seuling comic convention in the early Seventies. Jack couldn't have been nicer, but I was terrified to meet him for some reason (weird kid). My dad was delighted to shake his hand. (Kirby's work meant a lot to him over the years.)

There is a reason I’m writing this blog post now, though, instead of after my reading “plan” is complete, or when Kirby's 100th birthday occurs later this year (on August 28th). I wanted to draw attention to the work of a YouTube poster who calls him- or herself “Kirby Continuum” and has posted over 200 videos of a great range of Kirby's art, from all periods of his career.

Sure, watching a YT video — replete with images explored with the “Ken Burns effect” in which we travel *into* the picture — is a terrible way to attempt to “read” comics (in fact they really can't be read in that fashion, except for the vids the poster has noted are “panel by panel”). I've found, though, that it's a wonderful way to review Kirby’s work, and it also clearly demonstrates that the current flood of comic book movies lack the elements that make these comics such an immersive experience, even though they are “merely” colored sheets of paper that lack CGI, 3-D, Imax, and charismatic stars playing the heroes and villains.

The Kirby Continuum poster seems to have spent an incredible amount of time making each of the videos. If you're a newcomer to Kirby’s work, you're better served by just reading the comics, but these videos are pretty wonderful for those who are already fans or who would like a quick, curated look at his work. It’s also very nice to have such a heartfelt tribute to the delirious wonder of Kirby's work on the most-watched site on the Net.

The fact that DC and Marvel may not be thrilled by the videos means that, if you are a comic or Kirby fan of any stripe, you should check them out sooner than later. Interestingly, the poster’s use of music underneath the images might be a bigger potential problem, since YouTube has a capricious and mind-bogglingly arbitrary way of enforcing its highly flexible (and often ridiculous) rules.
*****

On the subject of the modern-day comic-book movie, a little tangent is in order here. These movies are a mainstay in today's Hollywood although, for me, they capture very little of the magic of the comics they're based on. The problems are obvious. First among them is the tedium of the origin story. Comic fans do love a good origin story, but they are never, ever a favorite issue of the comic. These stories simply supply the cornerstones of the character's mythology, and are what you must move beyond to the get to the actual fun, namely the confrontations with the crazy and colorful villains — and, thanks to Marvel, the self-loathing and meditative moments of some of the heroes.

A related problem exists in the tone of the films. Since these are live-action features, the moviemakers feel they must “ground” the action in some sort of recognizable reality. It could be argued that that was part of the Marvel “revolution” in storytelling — Spiderman and friends existed in real American cities rather than the patently fake Metropolis and Gotham City. But let’s be serious about this: the action, the supervillains, the immediate donning of multi-colored costumes (in primary-colored hues) signal instantly that we are in a comic book universe, not the real one that we inhabit day to day (unless your hallucinogenics are particularly potent).

In the most magical and way-out comics by Kirby and Steve Ditko, the characters can't possibly be grounded in anything resembling our reality because the cities they inhabit are very often just wormholes to other universes (physical and metaphysical) where anything at all can, and does, happen. To add a note of mundanity to that kind of storytelling is to miss the point entirely.

The biggest problem, though, with the comic book movies that have flooded into multiplexes in the last few years is how goddamned *bleak* they look in comparison to their source material. Certainly film noir has had its place in the comic world from Will Eisner’s The Spirit onward — Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Sin City are heavily indebted to noir, as are many other great comics. But as for superhero comics, even the other great grim masterwork of the Eighties, Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen, had a BRIGHT color palette that was completely lost in translation to the movie screen. 

Moore has since mocked the grim straitjacket that Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns put on comics (most amusingly in his Supreme series). But the comic book movies embrace this noir overlay, both in tone and attempts at monochromatic color. One gets the impression, though, that these filmmakers have never seen an actual film noir (well, okay, one in their college film class), but instead have based their notion of noir on Blade Runner and other sublime modern-day recreations of the look and feel of the noir cycle.

Thus some of the mysteries relating to these movies that fascinate (and alternately, depress) me. Such as, why are SO many people going to see them, when the majority of the same people wouldn’t be caught dead looking at an actual comic book? Is the allure of Robert Downey Jr. making snarky remarks (can he actually do anything else?) while wearing fake iron armor that strong? Do couples who need a place to covertly make out really want to do it while a CGI Hulk runs amok onscreen? Are there enough people who really want to see a fucking *third* series of Spiderman movies?

Even the ads are too damned dark!

There has been much talk about how these comic book movies are killing cinema. I am of two minds about that: 1.) Cinema is pretty much already dead, with the exception of a handful of great auteurs whose work most of the American public wouldn’t go to see if their life depended on it; 2.) At their best, comic books are magical, and their onscreen equivalents shouldn’t look as goddamned BLEAK as these CGI-saturated adventure pics do.

The bright colors that adorned Kirby and Ditko’s art was part of the package and remains one of the most important parts of the brilliance of comic art (ask Roy Lichtenstein — he knew which panels to steal… er, grab). I can’t think of a worse way to describe something linked to great comic books than to say “drab,” but that is indeed what these movies are.

Much has been discussed on the Net about the “orange and teal” color scheme that predominates in fantasy/action/comic book movies these days. The blogger at "Into the Abyss" documented the look in great detail, trying to offer an explanation about why it “took over” action cinema (answer: computer color-correction). His incisive essay was supplemented by this article in the Guardian and this overview of the whole phenomenon.

I would go further than the critics who decry the “orange and teal” phenomenon. What I see when I watch these comic book movies is a mess of many muted colors. Captain America in a drab-blue costume, Dr. Strange wearing a drab-red cape, Thor looking all-over goddamned drab. And so the actors and scripters try to “perk up” the characters — in the recent Dr. Strange movie, he’s a modern-day pop-music buff who makes Beyonce jokes. The joy of reading the old Strange comics was that he *didn’t* make gratuitous comments about Iron Butterfly or Vanilla Fudge — these characters exist in “the present,” but, again, they are not in our world. Rendering them in a “realistic” fashion makes them as boring as a “snappy” neighbor on a family sitcom.

There seems to be two very potent arguments for the incredibly, mind-numbingly, bleak looks of these films. The first is that the drab color palette reflects that of many videogames. I am not a gamer, but have been fascinated by the darkness of the majority of the best-loved games (and the computer-generated android-ish-ness of the animation ). The fantasy games intended for younger players are bright and eye-grabbing, but the comic book moviemakers are looking to attract teens that enjoy the “darker stuff.”

The second reason for the bleakness of the colors is indeed the fact that computers now drive the film world. The points made in the articles cited above are all valid, but I’d underscore the fact that action and fantasy films have gotten “darker” in look since CGI has become a major factor in filmmaking.

CGI effects can be “disguised” by an utterly drab color palette, and so CGI-animated characters like the Hulk will just melt into the overall ugliness. The cinema has gone from Gertie the Dinosaur and Gene Kelly dancing with Tom and Jerry to a bunch of guys dressed up as Marvel heroes interacting with a computer-animated Hulk….

On a related note about comics adapted to other media, the 1966 Batman series was viewed by comic fans as a double-edged sword — a thoroughly enjoyable celebration of the intoxicatingly silly aspect of superheroes and villains. But it also became a thorn in the side of comic readers, since it seemed to say that comics were nothing but camp. And so the comic book movies of today (going onward from the 1989 Tim Burton Batman) adopt the post-Dark Knight Returns hardboiled pose and look — this works when a talented filmmaker like Christopher Nolan is at the helm and is just dark and dull when a hack like Jon Favreau is directing (and what exactly happened to Kenneth Branagh’s career that the one-time “new Olivier/new Welles” directed the Thor movie?).

Ah, but we still have the comics themselves. And Kirby’s are among the finest ever — I will set aside the “we hate superheroes!” position adopted by Crumb and numerous underground/alternative cartoonists. Art Spiegelman in particular has noted his disdain for Kirby. Fine, who cares? Because when someone praises funny-animal comics and slams superheroes, we’ve hit yet another perfect example of fan-geeks mocking other fan-geeks.
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Away from the dissenters and the inferior adaptations: Kirby’s “Fourth World” comics (a bizarre name that reportedly was dreamt up by DC and never truly embraced by Kirby himself) were published from 1970 to 1974. The Kirby Continuum poster has put up a review of these comics called “Fourth World Frenzy.” Again, it can’t be read in any conventional sense, but it does show off the brilliantly bombastic visuals:

If you’d like to journey through a whole issue from that period, here’s the first issue of The Forever People, “panel by panel”:

A fan-favorite issue of The New Gods and one of Kirby’s own personal favorites of all his work, “The Pact”:

Onward to The Demon, one of two terrific series that Kirby did for DC after the company killed off his “Fourth World” books (the other being “The Losers” in Our Fighting Forces). It’s been noted that Kirby didn’t really want to do a supernatural series, but what he came up with is so very distinctive that the character was resurrected by both Alan Moore in Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman in The Sandman.

The two British masters sanded off the rough edges of the character (did he always speak in verse or not? Kirby didn’t seem sure…). But the original series of The Demon is brimming with originality and nicely creepy characters and situations:

A little break from the Kirby Continuum posts and onto the man himself for a bit. Some fascinating materials about Kirby’s life and work were posted by the folks at the Kirby Museum YouTube channel. There you’ll find some truly rare audio and video of Jack talking about his life and career.

The first, most interesting clip finds Kirby discussing his childhood on the Lower East Side. While many artists romanticize their past, Jack was very clear about the fact that he hated growing up in that neighborhood. He also underscores the fact that he wanted to get out of there as soon as he possibly could. Watch the video here.

The other amazing clip is a 1987 radio celebration of Kirby’s 70th birthday on WBAI-FM in NYC. The host, Robert Knight, had a surprise for Jack, who was calling in from California — a guest caller, none other than Stan Lee! To my knowledge, this is the only recording of the two former collaborators talking to each other.

This was after Kirby had publicly aired his grievances about Stan taking credit for things that he, Jack, had created. Stan’s public pose was to feign confusion over this, but it became clear over the years that Lee wanted to take sole credit for the creation of the characters, and all of the scripting (whereas in many cases, especially in the later issues, he just wrote the captions and the dialogue).

Kirby and Lee “make nice” throughout the interview, but toward the end (around 32:00 in) Stan makes a barbed remark about having written all the dialogue, which clearly rankles Kirby. In closing, Jack thanks the hosts for their hospitality but also notes, “Now you know what it was like….” Listen to the show here.

In closing, a short “survey” of the Kirby Continuum videos. First is the most eye-catching and amazing examples of Kirby’s work, his double-page spreads:

Then, two of his most famous story arcs from the “Silver Age” (the Sixties) of Marvel. First, the “Ragnarok” plot in The Mighty Thor:

Then what could be called the turning point for Marvel — the Galactus storyline in The Fantastic Four that introduced the Silver Surfer. According to one story, Stan Lee was perplexed by the character upon first glance and asked Kirby who he was, with Jack replying that he was of course Galactus’s herald. That tale, true or not, defines the way Kirby’s mind worked — if a herald was called for, he most certainly would be a chrome-looking alien humanoid on a surfboard!

And one of my favorite issues of Captain America, a retrospective which found Kirby returning to the comic during a brilliant “Cap is Dead” plot by Jim Steranko.

For those who are already fans of Kirby’s work, the Continuum poster has put up some interesting montages of rarer drawings and sketches. One series of these he calls “Kirby conceptions”:

A rarity I’d never seen before, a comic strip version of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, written and drawn by Kirby for the May 1967 issue of Esquire magazine:

Another great example of rarer Kirby panels and sketches:

And I’ll close out with one of the most interesting oddities. Kirby wrote and illustrated an oversized comic book adaptation of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1976. It was a very odd project, as has been noted by many reviewers, because Kirby’s art is rambunctious and over the top, and Kubrick’s is quiet and measured.

He based his adaptation on the Arthur C. Clarke novel and an early draft of the script, rather than the film itself; he also chose to add a narration to scenes that are very notably without dialogue in the film. A monthly, ten-issue series came out of this project, in which Kirby spun out stories about the cavemen and astronauts who were influenced by the monolith. It was a strange series that I plan to revisit soon.
 
The most intriguing thing about both the oversized “Treasury” and the comic series is that they are two of the only items from Kirby’s Marvel work that have never been reprinted — evidently the rights lapsed to the film, since everything else Kirby even touched has been reprinted in one form or another by the folks at “the House of Ideas.”

One of the most interesting things one learns about Kirby in the Evanier biography and the various interviews that are online is that Kirby didn’t think of his work as “art.” He certainly viewed himself as a craftsman, but he preferred being referred to as a “cartoonist,” and he had an immaculate work ethic that found him working on the comics all day and all night when he was fully connected with a project.

Thus I think it’s fitting to finish with a quote from Our Fighting Forces 153, in which Kirby’s narration for a really wonderful story about a geeky sci-fi pulp-reading soldier named “Rodney Rumpkin” who gets to lead a charge against the Nazis (it’s much better than it sounds) ends with this bit of wisdom: “To all the Rodney Rumpkins: Victories are won, yesterday… Recognition must wait for tomorrow….” 

Some of the above images came from the “Fuck Yeah Kirby” Tumblr. General information about Kirby can be found at the Kirby Museum website.