There sure was a lot of junky cartoons in the late ’70s, one of which was Rickey Rocket, which appeared as a part of the Plastic Man show. Sort of like Fat Albert in space, this featured an all black cast with a homemade spaceship that had scruffy hair and a streetwise style. Some Wikipedia digging shows that the cast featured Johnny Brown who is famous for playing “Bookman” on Good Times, and John Anthony Baily as the questionably named “Sunstroke” who went on to have a career in such porn films as New Wave Hookers. I’ll at least give the cartoon credit for being fairly original and this was in the days when not all cartoons were used to be toy commercials, so that’s at least saying something.

ABC used to pad the start and end of their Saturday morning cartoons with cool stuff like Schoolhouse Rock, but back in 1978 they thought 2 suspender wearing dorks and t-shirts with their names on them would be great to feature answering questions from real kids. I hated the theme song, and even though I’d watch just about anything, I’d generally turn the channel when this duo hit the screen. Their heart was in the right place, I suppose, but kids are generally the last people that want to see a show by child psychologists!

Donna Drake, who played “Annie”, when on to have another role in the soap opera The Doctors in 1982, while Bing Bingham who played Alex went on to write the 2005 film “Faith of My Fathers” which was the story of John McCain’s days as a POW. You can visit Bing’s site here.

Alice in Wonderland is an unappealing boring movie that squanders money, talent, and time like no film I’ve seen before. There’s almost nothing to like about this film, and studios should seriously question giving Tim Burton more than 20 million to make another movie again.

First off, the film is revolting to look at. From the sets to the character design, it’s simply an ugly movie in every regard. The combination of garish makeup and CGI trickery makes some of the world’s great actors look horrific, and not in a cool way. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter looks like some sort of albino zombie with a zebra striped penciling that makes his eyes look as if they have some sort of infection. They’re even enlarged as some sort of special effect that makes them look even more horrible. It’s a stupid looking character, with stupid things to say, and no less than 3 different accents used for no discernable reason. It’s as if Depp can’t decide how he really wanted to portray Hatter, so he tried a bunch of different approaches hoping someone will like at least one of them.

Burton and his crew also manage to take Ann Hathaway, one of the world’s great beauties, and make her look like some sort of spastic female impersonator. She looks like Paul Stanley and Johnny Winter had some sort of mutant baby. It’s a hard to watch performance that showcases Ann walking around and waving her arms as if she’s in some sort of ballet.

Helena Bonham Carter takes the cake, however, as the red queen, who is portrayed with a giant head and shouts out all of her lines (50% of which are a shrill “Off with her head!”). There’s just nothing to like about her in this movie.

Some of the CGI creatures are appealing to watch at least. The Cheshire Cat is gorgeously rendered as has a deliciously wicked voice supplied by Stephen Fry. I also enjoyed seeing The March Hare, who was wonderfully twitchy and manic.

I’ll give credit where credit is due to the film’s lead character, Mia Wasikowska, who is a believable Alice who has the right mix of pluck and naiveté to pull this off. When everything crazy and mad is swirling around her, she never disappears into the background. She’s a competent actress that makes the best of the mess she was given to act in.

The story is minimal. Alice is now 20, and doesn’t remember anything of her past adventures in Wonderland. After refusing the hand of marriage to a homely rich Lord, she is lured back into the rabbit hole and meets the Wonderland characters. They want her to slay the Jabberwocky, and she eventually does. There’s really not much more to it than that.

I saw the film in IMAX 3D and frequently saw double images if I didn’t hold my head just right. If you’re expecting even a tenth of the 3D thrills and quality from James Cameron’s Avatar, don’t. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare, but you can’t help but notice how much Cameron did everything better with his film. And the budgets of these films probably aren’t too far apart. There’s scenes were Alice is walking through mushroom infested areas that look like Pandora-lite. When Alice falls down the rabbit hole, it’s a squandered opportunity to show things off in 3D, but everything’s so fast and blurry, it’s a headache to even look at.

I’m surprised that the film actually wasn’t rated PG-13. There is a beheading, Alice walks across a moat full of severed heads, the Dormouse stabs an eye out of a scary monster, a giant bird has his head crushed to a pulp with a boulder, and there’s a remarkable amount of battle-scene violence. Disney must have pulled some strings to keep it PG.

The pacing is horrible, and I found myself rubbing my eyes trying to stay awake. The music is the standard Danny Elfman autopilot soundtrack you’ve already heard a million times before. To be fair, I took my neighbor to see the screening, and she liked it, as did many people leaving the theater. But they are all wrong, and I am right. Don’t listen to them. Don’t waste your money. In a tough economy, our money deserves better films than Tim Burton’s Technicolor projectile vomit masquerading as a good movie.

They just don’t make good marble slot hole games like they used to. I clearly remember this commercial being effective enough to make me ask for it for a birthday present. It was pretty fun, but my sister rarely wanted to play it , so like most multi-player games, it just sat in my closet. The worst was getting into Dungeons and Dragons and not being able to convince my sister to play. The wait to play it with friends was too much to bear. I wonder if I would have had something like a Gameboy or a PSP back then, if it would have been a blessing or a curse? How much creativity was nurtured, or lost, by not having a handheld videogame to waste away the hours?

Wow! I’m a bit late to the Baby Laugh A Lot craze, as there appears to be several weird remixes of this on YouTube, but ho-lee crap this is one scary ass commercial.

Some of it is a bit too familiar. The opening track, “Ain’t No Grave” sounds a bit too much like the opening track on his last work, “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”, with near identical foot stomping effects. But that’s more Rubin’s fault than Cash’s, and frankly, it sounds good on both, so who cares?

These are definitely the songs of a man who knows he’s dying and is OK with it, both aurally and lyrically. His voice is aged and broken, but warm and pleasant at the same time. Not so much like a Grandpa singing from his bed, but a wise old man in his rocking chair on his porch with a shotgun in one hand, and The Bible in the other. Cash is a God fearing man, and the hymn-like structure of many of his songs makes that clear. Rolling Stone magazine quotes Rubin as saying that he wouldn’t record John Lennon’s “Imagine” because he didn’t like the line, “Imagine there’s no Heaven”.

“1 Corinthians 15:55″ is the sole Cash original on the album, and there aren’t any easy pop covers this time around, except a pleasant version of Sheryl Crow’s “Redemption Day”.  “Satisfied Mind” is a nice song about how money and fame don’t give you happiness, while “Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound” is a nice song about a wanderer looking for answers. There’s not a track on the collection I felt like skipping over, so that’s always a good sign.

The album ends with the 1936 western classic  “Cool Water”, Ed McCurdy’s “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream”, and ends with a wistful version of Queen Liliʻuokalani’s Hawaiian standard, “Aloha ‘Oe”. You can almost picture him in a canoe with June paddling of into the sunset as the song fades.

This is being billed as Johnny Cash’s last studio album, but Rick Rubin apparently has even more tracks that might be used as extras on a giant box set in the future. I can’t help but think that we’ll be hearing new Cash stuff for quite a long time, though. He was a prolific performer with thousands of concerts. His son released an album of old recordings he found in a box some time ago, too.

But Johnny’s already released about 20 times the amount of great songs that most artists aspire to, so I’m happy if this is it.

Aloha ‘Oe, Johnny.

The Crazies was a film that really didn’t need a remake. The 1973 original is not a very well known film, and aside from having a good title and a connection to George Romero, I don’t see the benefit of paying any amount of money to do it. That being said, it’s a competent and often scary movie that I enjoyed watching.

The remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead opens with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around”, and this film rips that idea off by using Cash’s “We’ll Meet Again”. The song  is a lazy choice doesn’t fit lyrically or musically and just seems to be thrown in there for street cred.

The film opens with a crazed, seemingly drunk local who interrupts the opening game of little league by stumbling on to the field with a rifle. The sheriff (played by multi-layered “Deadwood” Sheriff Timmy Olyphant) confronts him , and let’s just say, it doesn’t end well.

Turns out a plane filled with mind altering chemicals crashed into the town swamp, which disgustingly serves as the local supply for tap water. The Sheriff puts this together and warns The Mayor to turn the water off, and in a scene stolen from Jaws, he is worried about the impact to the farm business and refuses. The Sheriff then goes and turns the water off anyway, making the scene a waste of time, and pretty much everyone in the town is infected, so that’s 10 total minutes of nonsense that served no purpose whatsoever.

There are 2 very well done scenes that are genuinely scary that are at least in the 200 Scariest Movie Scenes Of All Time.

The best of which is a bit where survivors drive their police cruiser into a car wash. The Crazies come to attack them while they’re in the car and the car wash turns on. First you see them through the windows, then they get covered with suds, making you wonder where they are. The car can’t get enough traction to leave, so it’s stuck in there while arms bust through windows, and try to pull people out, foiled by the giant red scrubbing wheels. It may keep you from using a car wash ever again.

Another scene features a room full of possibly infected normal folks strapped to beds in a makeshift medical ward. The lights are flickering and you can hear the unholy metal on concrete squeal of a pitchfork dragging on the concrete. A crazy comes in and starts systematically stabbing people who can’t escape. It’s sadistic and horrible, and pretty fucking horrifying.

There’s also a couple of Sam Raimi-esque fight scenes, involving a bone saw and using a knife impaled hand as a weapon that are pretty good dark comedy.

The ending is just plain silly (wait about 60 seconds into the credits to see the epilogue), but I wasn’t bored and it was a lot better than most horror films that have been released as of late. Ultimately The Crazies is a competent, entertaining, and often scary film that’s worth a look.

Love this one a lot! “Put your balls in my top, and out my mouth they will pop!” It doesn’t get any better than that!

The commercial I was looking for actually had a fun Bobbytrap jingle, but this one would have made me laugh like crazy, too! I always imagined some poor woman getting her boobs caught in this game. It of course seems silly and immature now, but in my childhood context, I never really knew that booby had any other meeting other than breasts. I would also laugh hysterically when someone would talk about winning a Bobby Prize. That seemed like the best prize you could get!

As much as I don’t want to see a remake, this looks like a beautifully shot movie with charm to spare. If  you’re jaded, just skip to the end and listen to the 2 second song clip that’s playing when Jackie Chan catches a fly with chopsticks!

I always have dug The Spectre, and I brought back our 2007 article on the character written by Bradley Mason Hamlin directly below to remind everyone how cool he is. I was thrilled to learn that there was an exclusive short of The Spectre included in the Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths DVD. It’s done with a great funky early ’70s exploitation vibe that fits the character perfectly. The story isn’t the best, but it captures the spirit of the character, and is worth the extra $5 for the 2 disc version so you can watch it (and you get 2 Justice League Unlimited episodes, to boot). Gary Cole provides the voice for Jim Corrigan, while Alyssa Milano handles the vocal chores for the female lead. It’s a part of what appears to be a new series of that will be included as extras on future DVDs called “DC Showcase” which will feature other characters in the future. Keep up the good work, DC!

“No one suspects that Jim Corrigan is in reality the earthbound ‘Spectre,’ whose mission is to rid the world of crime …”

The Spectre: a superhero ghost who can do pretty much anything he wants, up to and including murder, as long as his motives lie within the confines of American “justice,” rather than the restricted sense of regular American “law.” The Spectre does not adhere to our mortal system of democratic rules. He judges from a higher authority.

I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff.

Talk about the ultimate fantasy character … I mean, what would you do, if in fact, you could do anything? Anything to the bad guys …

You could turn gang members blocking your safe passage home into hamburgers and feed them to hungry dogs. You could turn the local child molester into a living piece of sidewalk that will be forever trampled on and run over by freewheeling children. You could do a lot things, but I think you get the point.

However, the comic book world has certain limitations, and specifically as an art form marketed to kids in 1940—it damn well should have had boundaries to its presentation. You can’t just grow giant-size and crush somebody inside your fist …

Oh, wait a minute, yes you can.

If you’re the Spectre, and you’re getting rid of “bad guys,” you can. And he did. In More Fun Comics No. 56 (Dr. Fate on the cover) a couple of gangster goons run Jim Corrigan off the road with the intent to shoot him when he gets out of his car. Yet, emerging from the vehicle … comes the Spectre! The men jump into their comic book yellow car and try to escape, but the Spectre grows into a giant green-costumed ghost, larger and larger—until the getaway vehicle appears no bigger than a child’s toy. He picks up the little car. The men inside say (via world balloon) “Mercy—please spare us!”

“Why?” says the Spectre. “Cold-blooded killers deserve but one fate!”

The next panel: the Spectre’s closed fist.

The caption above reads:

“As the Spectre’s huge fist contracts, the car and its occupants are crushed to a pulp …”

Pulp is right, classic pulp era comic book storytelling, and I loved reading every moment of the villain’s ghastly demise. I loved watching it happen. That’s just great stuff, and frankly, I don’t mind my kids reading that sort of thing at all. Bad guys get crushed in the end. Okie-dokie.

I’m a collector of the DC Archives, Showcase Presents, Marvel Masterworks, and the Marvel Essential series, so yeah, I am a sucker for this kind of stuff—and granted while the Spectre might not be the greatest collection you can buy out of those four categories—it’s a must have for anyone who wants a real taste, and therefore a real treat, from the golden age of DC Comics’ supernatural superhero books.

The Spectre, created by Superman creator/writer Jerry Siegel and artist Bernard Baily first appeared in More Fun Comics No. 52, cover date February 1940. It’s a classic. We’re talkin old school occult superhero from the first generation of supers, and now … you can own a hardback collection of the Spectre in The Golden Age Spectre Archives Volume 1, (published in 2003) collecting the Spectre appearances from More Fun Comics Nos. 52 to 70.

Beware of bad behavior; buy this book.

-Bradley Mason Hamlin
brad@retrocrush.com

THE SPECTRE RETURNS!

In the ’70s, DC Comics needed a new star attraction for their struggling Adventure Comics title, so they brought out the long dormant Spectre for a series of tightly scripted supernatural revenge stories written by Michael Fleisher and drawn by Jim Aparo. They were collected in a full color 200 page paperback called Wrath of the Spectre in 2005, and it’s still available via Amazon for just a bit above $15.

You can totally see where the inspiration for Freddie Krueger’s over the top gory killing style comes from in these pages. As Brad points out, it’s something The Spectre has done since the ’40s, but it’s neat to see that sort of retribution dished out in a more modern context.

These days, The Spectre has become more of a force of the universe, and doesn’t seem to have time to take out the everyday scum and villainy that he cut his teeth with. We’ve got a whole new breed of criminal out there that’s just begging to get strangled with a giant gold chain, anally raped with an enormous forged credit card, or smoked inside of the world’s biggest crack pipe.

-Robert Berry
rberry@retrocrush.com

Ha, this looks pretty funny, I must admit! Deadpool is a fun character that is NOTHING like the crap version you saw in the Wolverine movie. CLICK HERE to see the entire preview with full size pictures at Newsarama. Which is about the best comic book news site on the net, by the way!

This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while. Well, if you know about Juggalos, at least!

MTV and other gossipy sites are reporting that Deadwood and Lovejoy star Ian McShane will be playing the iconic Blackbeard in the next installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. This is super exciting news, as I have long thought that McShane would make an excellent Blackbeard! We paid $50,000 to have the special effects wizards at WETA come up with a mockup photo for us, and…well, I’m guessing the guy on Craigslist that said he worked for WETA was lying to me because it looks like something Perez Hilton drew in 10 seconds while waiting in a coffee shop. Are you excited about this news? I AM, for crying out loud!

Sizzlean was available for about 10 years through the ’70s and ’80s as a failed attempt to sell healthier “bacon”. But it tasted like salty play-dough mixed with SPAM. You can’t beat bacon for tasty salty tasty goodness. It’s too tasty to be defined. It’s like saying, “I’m going to be cooler than Fonzie!” Here’s a fun commercial from 1978 featuring Carol Potter who played the hot mom in “90210″.

In 1985, they went with a “Move Over Bacon…Make Room For Sizzlean”. Why sizzle fat, when you can SIZZLEAN! Never really caught on too much, since sizzled fat is about the best tasting thing you can have. It’s like settling for a night with Karen Carpenter when Charo’s available. C’mon now!

Sizzlean was made by Swift & Co and later by Con Agra foods, which had it sporadically available as late as 2005, when it was finally discontinued (according to some unverified claim by some guy in a post I read here) who writes this hilarious testimony:

“Suffice it to say I went to great lengths in the 2000’s to get my Sizzlean fix, and when the end was near I got several dozen from a distributor. I actually posted an ad to Craigslist in various cities trolling for leads on where to get Sizzlean. Someone pointed me to this distributor, and I got as many as I thought I could get and still be able to eat them before they became inedible. I still have 6-7 packages in my freezer, one or two lost vacuum seal and “died” but most survived and tasted fine. I will probably eat the last of them over the next few months, as they are already almost 3 years old. The carcinogenic “Nitrite” preservatives seem to do their job well. By now I am probably in possession of the last Sizzlean in existence! (unless there are a few stray packages forgotten in the back of some freezers out there…)”

That’s dedication! I know of a woman who collects extinct Kool-Aid flavors, too. Hilarious!

Well…WE are that’s for sure. San Diego’s Comic-Con is great, but it’s become a super-crowded squish fest that’s very hard to enjoy. Wonder Con is the little sister event that’s become as fun as San Diego was in the ’90s. Plenty of fun guests (Kevin Smith is just one of many lined up), movie previews, and crazy people in costumes. Hell, last year I got to meet Stormtrooper Elvis! Hope to see you there, as we’ll be doing some filming for a retroCRUSH pilot there! Exciting stuff! CLICK HERE for more details about Wondercon!

Wow! Theatrical spook rock at it’s finest! I saw Ozzy and Rob a couple years back, but this is really gonna be nuts. Gotta love the nod to Herschell Gordon Lewis with the tour name, too.  CLICK HERE for more details.

Ha…found this cover for the March 1960 issue of Wildcat Adventures in a book of classic pulp mags and think it’s just fantastically crazy. But what the hell is going on? The story headline is “Playboys’ Joy-Flight To Terror” and it looks like even a crash landing on the high seas isn’t keeping these awesome dudes from boozing it up and womanizing. Is the flight crew kicking them off at gunpoint? What’s their plan? I would love to hear your theories. I’m dying to find a copy of this now, so I can read the epic tale for myself. Anyone have one?

Shutter Island is a damn fine thriller that’s smartly written, incredibly acted, and masterfully directed. There’s intrigue from the second the film starts that doesn’t stop until moments before the closing credits. In the hands of someone like M. Night Shyamalan, this movie would have really sucked, but Martin Scorsese’s eye for art and decades of masterful experience make the movie a spooky suspenseful gem.

The story set in 1953 has a great hook. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a US Marshal named Teddy Daniels who (with his partner Chuck played by Mark Ruffalo) visit an island sanitarium that serves as an Alcatraz for the criminally insane. He’s investigating a patient that seemingly disappeared into thin air, and encounters a staff full of curious and secretive people like the enigmatic Dr. John Cawley, played with creepy restraint by Sir Ben Kingsley. A storm knocks out the ferry service and keeps the two investigators on the island longer than they planned. Along the way, Daniel’s becomes increasingly spooked by the mysteries he uncovers, and his own haunted flashbacks of a horrific time as a US soldier at the Dachau Death Camp, and his wife’s unfortunate demise.

There’s a sequence with a gale force storm on the island that is simply amazing to be immersed in. Though I’m unaware of what sort of effects and trickery were used to pull it off (it could have been all CGI for all I know), it looks as if it’s the real deal. You can almost feel the leaves and cold wind blasting against your face. I haven’t felt such an eerie atmospheric scene in a movie since I watched Jem and Scout walk home at night in To Kill A Mockingbird.

The I especially enjoyed the soundtrack, which I mistook as an original score, but learned later it’s a collection of excellent modern classical pieces collected by Robbie Robertson.

The less you know about the film at this point, the better. Don’t read anything about it or let people tell you much about the story. There’s twists and turns along the way that are worth discovering on your own.

When the film was over, the audience was subdued, but I could hear the murmurs from folks about how good it was. It’s a heavy movie that’s certainly not a date film, and contains some powerfully depressing scenes that will likely hang on you for some time after you see it. But Scorsese is an artist and doesn’t waste his time on throwaway garbage.

This guy reads an email tale of salvation that’s just the theme song from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”, and a heartwarming tale of how a man named Ben Kenobi in Nigeria helped him see the light. Great stuff! And the host is actually rather adorable once he finds out he’s been had.

And he got them again! This time with a prayer request for Carlton, and some easy Rick Rolling.

One of the great things about toys from a while back was that they were made with one thing in mind, playability.  Sure, they may have had lead paint, or would blow up in a kid’s face, but they sure were fun.  Once the Consumer Products Safety Commission got their mitts on everything, it all went downhill.  Toy guns were spray-painted orange, and the sharp edges of everything have been rounded down to safe boring nubs.

Fisher Price Little People were a tremendous success, but their small size made them the perfect shape to get caught in some kid’s throat.  I used to have quite a collection of these a few years back, but couldn’t turn down the chance to sell them for a few hundred on eBay.  They were originally made of wood, then plastic, but after being declared a choking hazard by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Fisher Price decided to redesign them so they were so fat, only Linda Lovelace’s children would have to worry.

VertiBird was an incredibly fun toy. The copter would fly in a circle and go up and down when you moved the lever.  The problem with it, and other helicopter toys, was that the fast spinning hard plastic propeller could turn a kid’s eye into the opening scene of Un Chien Andalou.  You’ll notice more modern helicopter props have a ring around the outside to prevent such eye chopping action, now.

One of the more famous deadly toys was the missle-firing Colonial Viper from Mattel’s Battlestar Galactica set. In 1978, some poor kid shot the tiny red projectile down his throat and killed himself.  The product was immediately recalled, and redesigned with the missile GLUED INSIDE!  Urban legend has it that the missle-firing Boba Fett figure was never released because of this.  The parents of the 4 year old who died even sued Mattel for a whopping $14 Million as a result (read more here).

My favorite dangerous toy was the Snacktime Cabbage Patch Kid.  Looking to inject new life into the sagging sales of the toy line, a model was made that would move its mouth up and down and chew food you’d give it.  Put a plastic carrot in it’s mouth, and it’d munch it up.  The problem was, the CPKs had a particularly sick craving for little kid’s hair.  Once a long blonde lock got caught inside, the possessed devil-doll would start chewing and swallowing the hair like some zombie from Evil Dead 2, sometimes chewing all the way up to the scalp.  Needless to say, the dolls were pulled immediately, becoming highly sought after collector items to guys with really really really small dicks.

Though inflatable boxing gloves like SOCK’EM BOPPERS have never truly been recalled, they’ve long been cited as a dangerous toy by groups that want to keep kids from exercising and having fun.  Though there’s no fist to flesh contact when you’re wearing these, the problem is that you can snap a kid’s head back pretty hard, or cause them to come crashing to the floor for other injury.  That’s why, when I beat up the neighborhood kids now, I settle it with good old fashioned knives.

But the grand-daddy of dangerous toys has to be the famous Lawn Darts (or JARTS, as some versions were marketed as).  This once popular game was all the rage until a 7 year old girl was impaled in the head by an errant toss.  The grieving father took the case to court, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission argued that they had only received less than a dozen injury complaints.  After being pressed to investigate further, they found that in one year, there was 6700 injuries and 3 deaths related to the seemingly innocent toys.  The blunt metal tip, as it comes crashing to the earth, can generate a whopping 23,000 pounds per sq. inch of force, making it no problem to turn a kid’s head into a pincushion.  In 1988 they were not only recalled, but made illegal to sell, even in thrift stores.  Apparently they’re still available in Canada, but they could use some thinning of the herd, from what I’ve seen.

But you can only protect kids so much. Take all the dangerous toys away, and we’ll still fuck each other up with dirt clods, sticks and rocks.

-Robert Berry
rberry@retrocrush.com

It’s based on the same titled graphic novel by Sin City’s Frank Miller, and it’s REALLY faithfully based to it, which means there wasn’t much meat added to the story to flesh out the gorgeous fight scenes. 300 is really more of an opera or ballet than a great historical epic. It’s like a K-Tel Greatest Hits album of what you liked best from Braveheart, Rocky, Lord of The Rings, Gladiator, Spartacus with a track from Showgirls thrown in for good measure. Even the lead performance by Gerald Butler was vintage Mel Gibson. Overall, it’s just a great way to waste some time, with no inspiring message to walk away with, save the obvious “If someone invades your country, protect it.” Duh.

Yes, the “there’s no way they could have done that” geek inside of you is going to pitch fits a few times as you trouble with a hacker’s ability to perform live photoshop alterations and name changes on mug shots over the internet and manage to operate a full size tunnel digger under the busy streets of Vegas without any interference from the city. But damn if these guys aren’t so watchable doing what they do, you just don’t give a fuck.

The biggest bonus for the third installment of the Ocean saga is the lack of a female lead/romantic interest for any of the male stars in the film (Aside from a mostly peripheral role from Ellen Barkin, who at 53 can still fill out a red dress like a statue). The story is focused on the heist, and that’s about it, so it’s pretty clean, considering.

The addition of Al Pacino as ruthless perfectionist works for the most part. He’s OK to watch, but I wish he had better lines. As it is, he’s a pale copy of Deniro’s Ace Rothstein role in Casino, but he clearly owns every scene he’s in and does at least an OK job with the part. You’re just not going to remember much of anything he said or did in it, which is a wasteful shame.

The film’s most hilarious moments, and those that got the biggest audience response, feature a cameo at the film’s middle and end that show a more sensitive side to the leads that’s both ridiculous and inspired.

Julian Sands and Eddie Izzard have small but effective parts in the film as well. The other supporting cast gets just enough time to do their thing. It’s certainly a much better film than Ocean’s 12, and I know that’s not raising the bar very high. It’s not quite a “big screen experience” film, so you might just want to wait for the DVD. But if you just want to “hang out with cool guys” on screen, it’ll deliver.

I liked it and would watch it again, and many people I talked to after the film agreed. It got applause from about 30% of the full theater and the audience seemed to be talking about it positively as they walked out. Again, if you’re going to let some bullshit technology in the storyline prevent you from enjoying a film, you should probably stay away. Otherwise, it’s a pretty fun movie. I don’t know if this is a franchise that we’ll see more installments of, but this is a good palette cleanser to at least make you forget about the last one in case they do.

Wow! This is pretty damn great. Even if you don’t know anything about the comic, I think you’ll admit this is very well shot, directed, and acted. Good work all around. Let’s hope the AMC Series is as good as this.

First appearing in 1962 and used only sporadically by DC Comics since their monthly series was canceled in 1978. These shape-shifting robots were the inspiration for the T1000 in Terminator 2, and recently appeared in a super cool episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold a few weeks ago. They are easily one of the most underutilized properties in comic book history, and are just begging for a feature film to be made. CGI would make it all too easy. Won’t Warner Brothers please give it a try?

1989’s Do The Right Thing with a wonderful tribute to the immortal “Love/Hate” scene from Night of the Hunter…

…and the original scene that inspired it.

Berni Wrightson did a string of covers for both DC Comics’ “House of Secrets” and “House of Mystery” in the early ’70s, and this gorgeous zombie piece he did in 1972 for HOS #106 is one of my favorites.  There’s so much depth and eerie beauty to the piece, I can look at it over and over again and pick new stuff up each time. The way the branches frame the page, it’s like you’re there right next to that terrified (and super hot) woman looking at those ghouls getting ready to chow down. You can tell that she doesn’t know whether to scream, help (he’s still alive), freeze, or just make a run for it. Are those zombies fast enough to get up and catch her? As with most of these comics, you’ll never find out from buying and reading it.

In fact, when you actually read the interior story with Alex Nino artwork  that the cover is based on you’ll see it’s quite different. They clearly just let Wrightson sex up Alex Nino’s panel for the cover to sell more books. Luckily the story is still good whether the cover matches or not.

Got a comic book cover you really dig and would like it featured on retroCRUSH with a brief write up you provide? Send ‘em to rberry@retrocrush.com and we’d be happy to feature them.

Just a fun little scribbling to share with ya! Happy Valentine’s Day!

The Wolfman is simply a horrible movie. The art direction and look of the film is wonderful, but that’s about it. On the surface, it seems to have all the right things going for it, but it’s poorly directed, horribly written, badly edited, awfully acted, and all around sucky. Benicio Del Toro delivers his lines with the eloquency of The Elephant Man, Anthony Hopkins seems to be giggling “where’s my check?” every minute he’s on camera, and Emily Blunt is the most underwhelming choice for a female lead I’ve seen in a film for the last several years. I can only imagine the casting directors stating, “Hey…we really liked you as that boring bitchy assistant in The Devil Wears Prada…I bet if you kiss a mush-mouth dude that looks like an hispanic Moe Howard, THE SPARKS ARE GONNA FLY!

The movie has loads of bloody violence that seems played for laughs more than any actual terror evoking purpose. Violent humor in the hands of someone like Quentin Tarantino, Sam Raimi can work, but in the hands of a hack like Joe Johnson, it just feels like someone is tearing up mannequins.

Scene after scene is a giant letdown. In one promising setup, the lead character Lawrence Talbot has been institutionalized because he thinks he’s a werewolf (despite scores of witnesses that saw he was indeed one). The doctor has Talbot strapped to a stretcher in one of those great Victorian era medical rooms that has a sunken pit an an audience of colleagues. The full moon is going to appear in the window, and the doc wants to shame Talbot in front of everyone and have him admit he’s crazy. Del Toro bellows/warns, “I’m going to kill EVERYONE IN THIS ROOM!” The thought of him changing and ripping everyone to shreds is promising, but he basically just attacks two guys, escapes, and then turns into a shitty CGI werewolf that runs along the London rooftops in a sequence that looks worse than the garbage in that Van Helsing movie.

The next ludicrous sequence features Talbot walking all the way home from London, while the token female character and the inspector (played by a disposable and wasted Hugo Weaving) take the same trip on horseback and stagecoach. Even though Talbot is ambling along and waving to men cutting down trees along the way, they all manage to return to the Talbot estate at the same damn time!

Any suspense or twists are removed very early in the film, when Hopkins (Talbot’s father) reveals himself to be a werewolf, too! Why not save that for a dramatic reveal at the end? Because this film is a giant piece of werewolf shit, that’s why!

Even the Wolfman howl is stupid. It sounds like someone shouting, “Scooby-DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Please don’t waste your money on this movie.

First off, the editing is disjointed and jarring. It felt like there were missing scenes in multiple parts of the movie.  While the story seems at first faithful to the original, and to the mythology of the werewolf, it is not. Yes, that is me being nitpicky about the rules of lycanthropy, but hey, this is Universal’s The Wolfman. They should know better.

The plot is simple. Lawrence Talbot returns to his childhood home to help search for his missing brother. On his arrival, he’s told by his father that his brother’s body was just found. Lawrence promises his brother’s widow that he will find out what happened, which leads him to a gypsy camp, on a full moon, in spite of his father’s warnings. Lawrence is bitten and is rescued by the gypsies. A month later, he’s recovered and discovers his father in an underground crypt. Both transform. Yes, both. Lawrence is captured and tortured in a mental hospital…for a month, until the full moon allow him to kick some ass and escape. He then travels back to his father’s home for a final showdown…on a full moon.

The performances were uneven and character motivations seemed off. I didn’t find that Hugo Weaving’s character served much of a purpose to the plot, beyond providing an obvious opening for a sequel. Anthony Hopkins doesn’t chew the scenery, he devours it. I actually liked that, but his character ends up completely contradicting his earlier actions and emotions, just for the sake of a twist on the original film that is revealed much earlier. This “twist” doesn’t pay off until the end, which seems strange. Emily Blunt comes across as flat and lifeless, and there isn’t much chemistry between her and Benicio Del Toro.

The film drags because of the pacing. Part of this is due to the cycle of the full moon, but the way it’s handled is awkward at best. There is a scene in which between full moons (which is generally a month apart), Lawrence Talbot walks from town to his father’s house. During the same time, his brother’s wife makes the same journey. It takes them both the same amount of time. Lawrence, despite being affllicted with lycanthropy, doesn’t seem to need to shave or eat during this long senseless journey. There are more lapses in logic and plot, especially when it comes to the gypsies, who know of the dangers of the wolfman, and even basically create another one, in spite of having their camp (and most people) ripped apart by one. Why?

My final gripe goes back to the lycanthropy thing. Fire won’t stop a werewolf, and neither will decapitation. Combine the two, and it doesn’t matter.

There are more problems, but now I’ll move on to what’s good. The cinematography is stunning. The movie looks beautiful, from the sets to the costume design. The Wolfman himself looks incredible and is exactly what I wanted him to be: brutal and scary. The gore is plentiful, but the editing seems to cut away from it all a bit too fast for lasting shock value. The sound design was intense and scary. Pretty much all the werewolf scenes are suspenseful, and the final battle was unexpected, just for how far they took it.

Rick Baker’s cameo was unexpected, and I enjoyed it. On that note, his version of The Wolfman looks great, and at the same time, I thought the CG transformations worked well, except for the final one, which seemed rushed.  After seeing the film, I still think practical transformations would have worked better than the CG ones, especially in someone like Baker’s hands.

Is this a movie I could recommend? No. They missed the mark. However, it does have some things going for it. If you’re in the mood for a gory matinee, it’s worth that.

VH1 has brought back their nice “Behind the Music” series with “remastered” new versions that feature new interviews and updates from the last 10-15 years. Judas Priest certainly has one of the more interesting rock band stories to tell, from their horrible court fight against  a family that blamed their lyrics for their son’s death, to the bizarre departure of their lead singer and subsequent replacement with a Judas Priest cover band lead.  You can check this one out on Feb 13th at 10PM EST.

I found this in a stack of old school papers. Well, not really…it was my son’s math homework and I just drew a bunch of stuff on it, but I like it and stole it. He got an “F” that day, unfortunately.

I don’t throw out the word “hilarious” lightly, but this is a pretty funny sketch from the folks at College Humor. The Marty McFly guy is dead on, too!

More than 30 years after it was originally published, the bizarrely cool Superman vs. Muhammad Ali comic book from 1978 will be reprinted later this year. The Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams piece matched Superman against the world’s greatest athlete and was an instant sellout. The book has been out of print since, as licensing rights for the numerous celebrity cameos proved to be difficult to secure again. DC is bringing back a special edition with a new Adams cover and lots of behind the scenes sketches. In addition, they’ll be printing a special Treasury Edition size hardcover that matches the original giant sized ’70s version.

Simply put, Rob Zombie’s latest CD “Hellbilly Deluxe 2″ delivers the goods. A look at the tracklist with crazy ass spooky titles like “Jesus Frankenstein”, “Sick Bubblegum” and “Mars Needs Women” got my hopes up, and listening it as I drove around in the rain with the volume up high did not disappoint. Nobody does the crazy head banging monster music like Zombie does and each track on this piece has something fun to offer.

There’s definitely a formula that works with these songs, but enough diversity and damn fine music that it all weaves together like a macrame skeleton. Kickass choruses and great beats that will have you smacking your steering wheels while you cruise around town, or breaking dishes on your face with glee if you listen to it in the kitchen.

The closing track, “The Man Who Laughs” (a nod to the Victor Hugo novel/film who’s lead character is the inspiration for The Joker) is a great piece, nearly 9 minutes long, which has a drum solo that’s up there with the best drum solos ever. I’m sure this would be an amazing piece to include in his concerts.

“Mars Needs Women” is another fun one with the chorus “Mars Needs Women…Angry Red Women” nearly impossible to get out of your head. It opens with a great acoustic flourish that helps create a very diverse collection.

This CD makes me smile and makes me super happy to listen to. It’s great goofy fun that is sorely missed with bands like The Cramps an The Ramones no longer with us. Rob’s unique sound and approach to music is like a a rollercoaster ride to Hell. But a fun Hell that has marshmallows, demon girls dancing in cages with free tequila body shots.

Make sure you check out Rob on tour this summer as well. You can visit his official site for details at Robzombie.com.

Wow! What a cool story by Jeff Klinkenberg of the St. Petersurg Times in Florida. He tracks down burlesque and trash film legend Chesty Morgan and follows her around for a day to hear some amazing stories. Whether you’re familiar with her work or not, I’m sure you’ll find this to be a fascinating read! Chesty and her amazing 73 inch bust line appeared in such classic films Doris Wishman films as Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73 (where she has spy cameras surgically inmplanted in her nipples). See what the super interesting Chesty (or Lillian Stello) is up to now! CLICK HERE to read the story.

IN THEATERS FEBRUARY 12

Hey there! We’re giving away tickets to see THE WOLFMAN which opens on February 12th. We’ll be presenting a special screening in Sacramento on Tuesday, February 9th at the the Century Stadium 14 in Sacramento. Email me at rberry@retrocrush.com and I’ll randomly select X winners. It’s nice to see Universal reviving this franchise and showing those glittery vampire Twilight fans how to do werewolves correctly! I’m also excited to see Anthony Hopkins hunting down classic monsters again! You can visit the official website at http://www.thewolfmanmovie.com. THE WOLFMAN has been rated R (Restricted – Under 17 Requires Accompanying Parent or Adult Guardian) for bloody horror violence and gore.) Frankly folks, bloody horror violence is far better sweaty sci-fi violence, so what are you waiting for? NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.

I used to love reading Dynamite, and their “Bummers” feature was a highlight! You’d get $5 if they published one of your Bummers. I always had a fantasy that I’d come up with a good Bummer and be famous AND have $5, but alas, I never pursued my dream.

Are they talking about clown nuts? You can visit Stan Boreson’s site here, who is apparently the “King of Scandinavian Humor.”

Here’s a swell new photo of Jeff Bridges from the Tron Legacy movie that’s coming out next year. I’m excited to see the film, which should be a 3D orgasm of sorts, but it still makes me sad that there’s no part for Cindy Morgan, who played Yori in the original film. I get that they’d like someone else to play the female lead, but there’s got to be some way to include her. With CGI, they could even make a cameo with her digitally identical to her original form. Surely including her would be a mere splinter of a shred of the film’s budget, and would make thousands of her fans happy. Cindy’s practically a walking commercial for that movie, faithfully promoting the Tron franchise on her website and convention appearances (exclusive retroCRUSH tip, she may be at April’s Wonder-Con in San Francisco). I’m not naive to think a threat of boycott will get her in the movie, but I will tell THIS to the people of Disney (and I’m emailing the publicity people directly that sent me this exclusive picture to plug), IF you put Cindy Morgan in the film, I’ll promote the hell of it on our website. That’s hundreds of thousands of more people that will find out about your movie. How can putting even just a cameo of Cindy in this movie not be a great thing for everyone involved. Let’s make it happen! Walt would have thought it was the right thing to do.

I enjoyed watching 1998s’ Pleasantville again today. I forgot a lot about, but was surprised at how wonderful it still holds up. Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire are fantastic in it, while the writing, direction, and art design are truly magnificent. Tobey Maguire plays David who’s a big fan of a retro TV show that’s just like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver. A sequence of mystical events send he and his sister (Witherspoon) into the black and white world of Pleasantville. The inhabitants are blissfully naive to modern society’s ways, married couples still sleep in separate beds, and dates involve little more than going to a soda shoppe for weeks before moving up to hand holding. All of that gets turned upside down when Witherspoon’s slutty Jennifer character has sex with the high school heart throb. Color starts spilling into the world, and the Nick At Nite universe is turned on its head.

The movie is probably about 15 minutes too long, but it is a thoughtfully told story about living your dreams and overcoming the boundaries of what society thinks you’re “supposed” to do. Joan Allen, William Macy, and Jeff Daniels are great as Pleasantville townsfolk, and Don Knotts has a wonderful cameo as a quirky TV repairman. Former child star and current singing sensation Jenny Lewis has a blink and you’ll miss it role, and Paul “Fast and Furious” Walker plays the captain of the school basketball team. I also got a kick seeing Danny Strong in a small part, who had a memorable role as “Doyle”  in The Gilmore Girls.

Tobey Maguire is the soul of the movie. It’s clear that his work here was instrumental in him being cast in the Spider-Man films.

Give it a look again, won’t you?

Say what you want about Mel Gibson, but he’s a damn fine filmmaker and a great actor. Sure, he’s made his share of goofy films, but let’s not forget that even Clint Eastwood gave you Bronco Billy and Any Which Way You Can. With a career that’s given us Braveheart, Mad Max, Lethal Weapon 1 and 2, and even Payback, he’s certainly got a presence that’s great to watch on screen. Though he’s directed films like the underrated gem Apocalypto and the mega-hit The Passion Of The Christ, he’s been away from the other side of the camera for far too long. Edge of Darkness fixes that with a restrained performance that still has time kick ass and take names, without the typical “I’m going to kill you for doing something horrible to me” trappings.

Edge of Darkness is sort of Alfred Hitchcock meets Deathwish. At the core, it’s a revenge movie, but it’s also a thriller with some decent twists and turns. Gibson plays an almost retired Boston cop named Thomas Craven who’s daughter was shot on his doorstep, seemingly with a bullet meant for him. Of course, as he digs deeper, he finds that may not have been the case.

I really like that you see Mel Gibson with the full effects of his age on display. His hair is gray and has noticeable bald spots. Facial close ups show a highway map of deep wrinkles on his face, and scenes he shares with other actors show that he’s certainly not the tallest guy in Hollywood.

Gibson’s age also shows in the action scenes, in good ways. In one apartment fight, he’s out of breath after the first few punches are thrown. This isn’t Martin Riggs with unlimited revenge energy here. He’s a lonely honest guy who’s just fighting for what’s right in a system that’s stacked against him.

The film is based on a 1985 BBC Mini Series and has been adapted to an American setting without any trouble. The original director Martin Campbell is on hand to direct this version, which is nice.

It’s not a groundbreaking movie, and it’s not going to win any awards. But Edge of Darkness is a great reliable hamburger giving you exactly what you paid for and an enjoyable movie watching experience.

After it was released in 1978 and eventually grossed $341 Million worldwide, was it any surprise that the folks at Paramount wanted to make a sequel? Not at all. But the surprise was that even though none of the original core cast would return with the exception of some school faculty and the delightful “Frenchy” (lovingly played by Didi Conn) they decided to make it anyway. Let’s see… instead of John Travolta as the head of the T-Birds, you get…Adrian Zmed? Yep, TJ Hooker’s Adrian Zmed, who’s other major claim to fame was hosting DANCE FEVER.

And for the “lead blonde” (Stephanie Zimone), let’s get…Michelle Pfieffer.

How Madame Pfieffer, who went on to become  one of the world’s great A-List actors survived this horrible career misstep is a miracle to say the least. As her first major film role, it’s easy to see why she took the part, but had it not been for her simultaneous casting in Scarface, we may have never seen her again.

The “story” involves Maxwell Caulfield’s character “Michael”, who’s an exchange student fromn England who is going to good old Rydell High. Despite being the most handsome and muscular dude in the school, he’s labeled a nerd. In order to win over his obsession (Pfieffer) he decides to refurbish a motorcycle despite being a total bookworm, he figures it out totally on his own.

You know you’re a pussy if Adrian Zmed can kick your ass!

And why does he do this? Cause Pfieffer wants a Cool Rider! If you don’t believe me, just download the song below yourself and hear her sing all about it.

Check out some of the inane dialogue from this monstrosity:

Stephanie: Besides, there’s gotta be more to life than makin’ out.
Paulette: Y’know, I never thought of it that way!

Michael: I was wondering if you were free today?
Stephanie: Yeah. I’m free everyday, it’s in the Constitution.

Stephanie: You know all this deep junk and everything. You must think I am some kinda dummy, right?
Michael: Actually, I think you’re kinda terrific.

Can you imagine someone even taking writing credit for this? His name is Ken Finkleman who went on write another awful sequel Airplane 2 that same year. The film was the debut for director Patricia Birch, and it’s no surprise that it was her last job as director as well.

This film is full of stupid things. Like when the TBirds and Pink Ladies want to go out for a hot night of action, do you think they make out and get nasty like the crazy kids in the first film would? No…they go bowling…and SING ABOUT IT, TOO! ” CLICK HERE to watch it for yourself! It’s a truly horrible tune in every way.

Bowling as a euphemism for sex? Good thing they scrapped that elaborate Lawn Darts song and dance number. And believe it or not, the songs get worse than that. Gems like “Let’s Do it For Our Country”, and “Rock a Hula Luau” are sure to make your ears bleed.

But despite all my attacks, there’s something oddly alluring about this film. It sucks so bad you almost can’t stop watching it. Like some twisted roadkill that you can’t take your eyes off of. Until that damn “Cool Rider” song is stuck in your head to the point that you want to stick a gun in your ear and paint your wall with your own brains.

Surely if there is a GREASE 3, you better make your peace with God once and for all, ’cause Armageddon will have begun.

In the meantime, just pray to God they never make a sequel to THIS

ARTHUR as played by Dudley Moore

“Not all of us who drink are poets. Some of us drink because we’re not poets”

Arthur Bach, the title character from the 1981 film Arthur is a rich and loveable sot, with little more ambition in life than to drink and spend his cash.  We should all be so lucky.  The simple fact that he spends time with Liza Minelli alone tells you what a raging drunk he was.

BLUTO BLUTARSKI as played by John Belushi

BLUTO: “My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.”
OTTER: “Better listen to him, Flounder. He’s pre-med.”

Perhaps nobody epitomized the “college drunk” more than Bluto Blutarski in Animal House. From chug-a-lugging an entire bottle of Jack Daniels, to smashing beer cans on his forehead, Bluto had more booze in his system than blood.

DUDE as played by Dean Martin

Though Sinatra and the other Rat-Packers routinely teased Dean Martin for his drinking habits, it was his role in the 1953 Rio Bravo that brought one of the all time great alcoholics to the screen.  A masterful portrayal as a drunk gunman simply named “Dude” (and you thought The Big Lebowski did it first?), Martin showed he could act with the best of them.  He does such a good job, you can practically smell his character.

ALAN SWAN as played by Peter O’Toole

“You can watch me drink, or you can join me. One of them is more fun.”

In the 1982 underappreciated classic, My Favorite Year, Peter O’Toole plays a great drunk movie legend who struggles through an appearance on a TV variety show.  O’Toole plays Alan Swan, who is loosely based on Errol Flynn, but if you’ve ever seen any of O’Toole’s drunken real-life drunken appearances on late night talk shows, you’ll know he had no trouble with the part.

BEN SANDERSON as played by Nicolas Cage

SERA: “Is drinking a way of killing yourself?”
BEN: “Or, is killing myself a way of drinking?”

Cage played the ultimate alcoholic in Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas as a man who’s given up on life to the point where he decides to drink himself to death.  Though thoroughly depressing, his ability to consume mass quantities are a sight to behold.  A favorite scene of mine is when he’s at a grocery store and literally fills a shopping cart with booze.

HENRY CHINASKI as played by Mickey Rourke

“Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.”

Charles Bukowski’s classic character Henry Chinaski was brought to life by Rourke in the film Barfly in a masterful fashion.  Valuing a good drink more than the company of others, Chinaski is a fascinating character, who lives to booze it up, fight, write, and drink some more.  If you haven’t ever read any of Charles Bukowski’s work, I can’t recommend it enough.

QUINT as played by Robert Shaw

“Here’s to swimmin’ with bow-legged women.”

Robert Shaw was incredible as Quint, the grizzled shark hunter with rum pumping through his veins.  According to co-star Roy Scheider, Shaw drank continually through the filming of Jaws, and it shows.  From his leading of drunk sea-chanteys, to the slurred but stirring tale of a historical massive shark attack, he’s one tough drunk that I’d hate to meet in real life.  He had so much booze in his system that he was practically laughing as the shark chomped him to death.

BOB and DOUG McKENZIE by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas

“If I didn’t have puke breath, I’d kiss you.”

In Strange Brew, Bob and Dough Mckenzie did for beer what Cheech and Chong did for pot.  Their entire world revolves around beer, and after they get dream jobs at a brewery, they discover a brew that will control people’s minds.  Like that was a discovery?  As the picture above shows, those wacky Canadians have more beer bottles than they have fingers while they film their show, “The Great White North.”

WC FIELDS in nearly every film he’s ever been in

“‘Twas a woman drove me to drink. I never had the courtesy to thank her.”

“I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast.”

W.C.: “Bartender, did I spend $100 in this bar last night ?”
Bartender: “You sure did.”
W.C.: “Good, I thought I lost it.”

Ah, the loveable drunk antics of W.C. Fields.  There’s been no better in film history.  From Never Give A Sucker an Even Break, to My Little Chickadee, Fields’ disdain for children and love of alcohol made him the stuff of legend.

DOC HOLLIDAY as played by Val Kilmer

COWBOY: You’re so drunk, you can’t hit nothin’. In fact, you’re probably seeing double.
DOC: I have two guns, one for each of ya.

But my all time favorite movie drunk was Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday from Tombstone.  Under the influence throughout the film, he keeps his wits about him, and spouts off some of the most charming one liners ever uttered in a western.  He even twirls a shotglass on his finger to show-up Johnny Ringo’s gun spinning antics in an unforgettable scene.  Of all the drunks mentioned in this article, at least Holliday had the best reason to drink his life away, as he was suffering from tuberculosis and coughed blood up repeatedly in the film.  Why not drink like crazy when you’ve got that going on, eh?

Love this! Especially the subtle “Milk Milk Lemonade” joke at the end!

I saw Running in the theaters when it first came out, and aside from a few TV rebroadcasts, and some non USA DVD releases, the film has been largely forgotten in America. It wasn’t much of a hit when it came out, granted, but you’d think Michael Douglas is at least recognizable enough for Universal Studios to throw a budget copy of it out there. This is the novelization of the film. Back in the days before home video was more prevalent, there were cheap paperback versions of about every major movie released. We didn’t see a lot of first run films growing up, so checking these out from the library was a cheap way for me to enjoy the movie without seeing it.

Running is a pretty simple story about an aging runner who has dreams of running the Olympic Marathon. He overcomes many obstacles to get there, and the ending is a nice twist on the underdog story. When I went with my friend Chester Murphy’s family to see this, we were late for the first 5 minutes of the film, and decided to stay until the next showing to see what we missed. I’m so glad we stayed to see that magic footage of him running.

Director Steven Hilliard Stern wrote and directed this film. He had a pretty big resume of TV dramas including episodes of Quincy, The Hardy Boys, and McCloud, and went on to direct films like The Devil and Max Devlin, the TV film Mazes and Monsters (featuring a young Tom Hanks), and has kept busy with TV films made as late as 2004.  If you have a region free DVD player, you can pick it up on Amazon, otherwise you’ll just have to wait. It’s not  a great film, but it’s well acted and inspiring.

I was 6 years old when Mattel released these back in 1975, and they seemed like the coolest thing ever on the TV commercial. Each figure was animated when you moved a lever back and forth. My friend David Dowdy had a few of these, and though they looked neat, it was clear that the play value was about 10 minutes before you got super bored of them. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t take them off their base. And they were too expensive compared to the cheap easy play of buying a bucket of green army men. Our buddies over at Plaid Stallions have a nice feature on them, too.

I found this at a yard sale many years ago and thought the cover was just wonderful (if not coffee stained). The ironically named Ruth Belov Gross writes all about your skeleton with fun lines like, “If you didn’t have any bones, you would flop around like spaghetti.” It’s got some great artwork inside that has that sort of South Park construction paper cut out look to it. It’s long out of print, but you can find a few copies on Amazon for less than 2 bucks.

BUMPS from Bob Moricz on Vimeo.

Last night, Lifetime network showed a film called The Pregnancy Pact, about those Massachusetts teenagers that all had babies at the same time. The thing is, our pal Bob Moricz made a superior film BUMPS that was in the can LAST YEAR! Bob’s invited the internet to see it for fee, so you can watch it in the player above and enjoy it yourself! And you don’t have to subscribe to Lifetime, either!

It’s hard to believe that Dr Pepper is 125 years old today. Yep…it actually predates Coca-Cola. Hats off to Dr. Pepper for making super great tasting throwback editions that use real sugar instead of that horrible corn syrup crap. Here’s the classic retro Dr Pepper commercial featuring David Naughton. It’d be cool if they made a new one where he’s a singing werewolf.

When I was a kid, I used to have tons of fun defacing magazines and catalogs in our home. A super-model on a fashion mag would end up with a face full of buck teeth, whiskers, devil-horns, and an eye patch. I still have a great time doing this once in a while…as even this seemingly innocent Inside East Sacramento cover isn’t immune from my disease.  Back in the day, a sharpie pen an some imagination was all the Photoshop we needed!

I wish I still had a stash of X-Men comic books that my uncle left behind, that was full of drawn in nipples and vaginal lips on Storm and Dazzler. I guess before the days of internet porn, you had to make do with what you had, scribbling boobies on super heroes was about the best you could do. I once drew boobs allover Jughead in an Archie comic, and my parents sent me to counseling. Ah well…

I can only imagine what sort of banana related gizmos the fine folks at Chiquita Marketing were pitching before they settled on Banana Walkie Talkies. This was a comic book ad from 1980.

‘NUFF SAID! STAY TUNED!

Though it’s hard to believe, somebody once thought that the incredibly crude graphics from the Atari 2600 videogame system from the late 70s was just the place to showcase adult videogames. Sure there’s been sexy tease scenes and nubile volleyball players jiggling about in modern videogames, but a company Mystique made games for the Atari that were nothing short of hardcore, with unspeakable and preposterous acts so sleazy, even Larry Flynt would blush!

Mystique wrote in their promotional literature of the time, “We at Mystique feel that it’s time for video games and their adult players to come out of the closet, away from the kids, and deal with ADULT fantasies. After all, grown-ups have been known to be imaginative and competitive, as well as have fantasies.” Let’s take a look at how imaginative these fantasies really were!

To think that the Atari 2600, with its simple blocky graphics could make games that were even remotely erotic was laughable, but that didn’t stop Mystique from trying. But as you will see, it’s no easy feat to make the jump from Pong to Schlong.

Let’s examine Mystique’s debut game, Custer’s Revenge. We all now that Custer was massacred by Indians at The Battle of Little Big Horn. Well in this game, he apparently comes back from the dead to get a little redskin tail! As he runs about naked and dodges bullets with little George a’ floppin’, he gets to force himself on this naked Indian gal who’s tied up to a stake! Mystique considering adding an option where she sues him and uses her settlement to open a casino, but decided against it. So…just…wow…an Atari game that let you score points by raping Indians. The instructions to the game were equally offensive, with the outrageous tip, “P.S. If the kids catch you and should ask, tell them Custer and the maiden are just dancing.” Funny that these instructions also appear on the PS2 game, Kobe Bryant Streetball over 20 years later.

This game, Bachelor Party, captured the spirit of that pre-marriage party ritual by featuring the exciting play of a guy bouncing around a room full of naked women. It played pretty much like Breakout, but instead of a paddle and a ball, you had a container of spanish fly, and a naked dude. The instructions in this game are equally creepy, as they need to remind you, “Note that when the bachelor flies toward the women, his private part (P.P.) is in an erect state. As he returns toward the Spanish Fly, it is in a limp condition. Also note that as the bachelor travels around, The Flight of the Bumble Bee is played.”

As the enlarged graphic shows, the little purple stud is ready for action! Not only does he have a penis longer than his arm, but he’s the spitting image of children’s TV icon, Barney!

Burning Desire was one of the higher concept adult Atari games. As natives held your hot babe hostage, you had to guide the naked hero, suspended on a cable from a helicopter, to extinguish the fire by blowing your load on it, then you lower your erect cock into her mouth, which she bites while you fly away to safety (just like girls you meet in New Jersey dance clubs!).

They even made a completely separate version of the game where a woman hero was used and had to save the day by giving the poor fella a mouthful of her big orange pixelated jugs!

A Knight on The Town had you “lay” bricks across a dangerous moat so you could “lay” the big assed damsel in distress over yonder. But lord help you if you fell inside, because you’d fall victim to the terrible…

…PENIS EATING CROCODILES!

But by far, the craziest game from this genre to CUM out (get it??? HAW HAW HAW) for Atari was Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em! Remember Activision’s Kaboom, where you had to move a bucket of water back and forth to catch a ton of cannonballs dropped by a mad bomber? Well, this was pretty similar, except the mad bomber was a crazy masturbator who has the ability to shoot more loads than Peter North! You control two semen hungry blondes who run naked on the street trying to guzzle up every last drop (Which is yellow for some strange reason…perhaps he had hepatitis).

As you can see from this enlargement, the women were exquisitely detailed. Not only does this blonde bombshell have nipples longer than most people’s fingers, but you can see that she’s a natural blonde, too! The most surprising twist in this game is the animated pleasure the girls exhibit at the end of each round!

Yep! They’re licking their lips with delight!

Even though it seems shocking to realize games were made like this, they were incredibly hard to find in stores and were sold mostly through mail order. The mere thought of someone shelling out $35 to play one of these games to “get off is hilarious”. It’s probably the same guy that would make a sex doll out of Lego blocks. Atari never condoned the games, and basically refused to comment on them, hoping they’d just go away.

A rare screen shot from Atari’s unreleased, ET’S PIMP MACHINE

I had read an article many years ago about a mysterious project Stanley Kubrick was working on, called AI. At this point, Full Metal Jacket was the last film he had produced, and that was in 1987, so Kubrick fans were chomping at the bit for him to bring out another masterpiece, and a science fiction one at that. I waited and waited, and apparently Kubrick didn’t feel he, or the current state of special effects, were ready to make AI the right way, so he gave us Eyes Wide Shut instead, and died shortly before post production was through, seemingly leaving AI dead in the water.

I left Eyes Wide Shut with a bad taste in my mouth. Aside from some nice nude shots of Nicole Kidman, and a hypnotic sex party scene, the film didn’t seem to be a fitting end to Kubrick’s career. Frankly, the film pretty much sucked, with the real life romance and turmoils of Cruise and Kidman’s relationship clouding anything the film had to say.

When word came out that Steven Spielberg was going to take AI over, I was skeptic to say the least. Certainly he gave us tremendous films like Jaws, Close Encounters, and Schindler’s List, but to stack popcorn munching fare like ET and Jurassic Park against 2001 A Space Odyssey and The Shining seemed like a joke. Was he going to dumb it up? Was he going to sacrifice deep intelligent filmmaking for robots and car chases? The odds were certainly stacked against him.

And so apparently were the initial reviews. I thought it was a bad sign when the newspaper ad was topped with a quote of praise from Rex “I’ll rave about any film just to keep my name out there” Reed. Moriarty from Aintitcoolnews.com ripped it to shreds and called it a let-down, and even Roger Ebert, the critic I respect the most, seemed mildly disappointed with it. Hell, even Matt told me some of his friends walked out on it an hour into it, so I feared the worst.

But faced with a schedule that made me choose between The Fast and The Furious, and AI, I had to give it a shot. I’m glad I did.

I always like stories where we struggle with what humanity really is. From Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, where man reanimates the dead to create life, to various series of Star Trek where Data and the holographic Doctor evolve as machines, but never quite get there. If you make a machine that looks like a human, talks and moves like a human, even fucks like a human, as in the case of AI, is it human? What defines life? The missing element, explored in this film, is LOVE. While Moulin Rouge celebrates how “all you need is love” in a heavy handed and campy way, AI curses its main character, a boy robot named David (brilliantly played by Haley Joel Osmet from The Sixth Sense), with the ability to love.

A couple, who’s son’s been in a coma for years, is given David to “field test” and see if they like him. The mother, who’s a wreck and has been mourning her son’s coma for ever, activates the commands that imprints love for her in David’s circuits, bonding him to her for all eternity. It’s a dream come true, until the realities of the situation turn it into a nightmare.

David can’t understand that she’ll die someday, and he’ll be forced to live forever. And when her “real” son recovers and comes back home, he’s relegated to being “a toy”. As her affections wane, his only grow stronger. David just wants to be held and loved by his mom. Imagine if you got sick of your Furby but you couldn’t turn him off and he followed you around everywhere.

Unfortunately, once activated to “love”, the programmers can’t remove the emotion, and his mother knows that he’ll be destroyed if she takes him back to the manufacturer, so she abandons him in the forest, like the father in Hansel and Gretel, to fend for himself. It’s one of the most heart wrenching and sad scenes I’ve seen, as he clings to her screaming as she flings him aside and drives off into the night.

At this point, he begins a fairy tale quest, inspired by the Pinnocchio story he was read, to find The Blue Fairy, in hopes he can be made into a real boy, so his mom will love him back.

That’s the central question of this movie. If you can teach a machine to love, can you actually love it back? Is a mother showing love for a robot son any different than Tom Hanks bonding with a volleyball in Cast Away?

AI is a masterpiece. You’ve got beautiful eye candy that puts Bladerunner to shame, and performances from Jude Law (the robot Gigolo Joe) that are impressive beyond belief. Not to mention “Teddy”, a walking talking stuffed bear that is unbelievably cool looking. (And with this technology, a live action Winnie The Pooh film would kick major ass). And though the signature Spielberg touches are there throughout, the spirit of Kubrick has affected everything.  John Williams’ soundtrack is made more classical and haunting than his usual scores. Even the somewhat sad and cryptic ending leaves you asking questions as the credits roll, much like we saw in 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Spielberg was fortunate enough to actually meet with Kubrick and discuss AI in detail before he died. Perhaps that may prove to be AI’s undoing with so many, though, as the film is too smart for the average American moviegoer. The same audience that Spielberg helped to create, ultimately are the folks that will hate this movie.  People want happy endings with sharks blowing up that are easy to figure out.

Spielberg has solidified himself as the greatest American filmmaker with AI. It’s sad to see his comrade George Lucas sinking deeper and deeper into Star Wars toy commercial oblivion, while he continues to grow.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take the death of another great director to encourage Steven to try something like this again.

-Robert Berry
rberry@retrocrush.com

Of all the movie trends that have come and gone, there’s none I miss more than 3D. For some odd metaphysical reason that even Dr. Strange can’t explain you can take an absolutely lame ass film the likes of which Cinemax would be reluctant to show, and make it bearable in 3D.

The story of BWANA DEVIL, the first 3D movie…was actually remade almost 50 years later in the Val Kilmer/Michael Douglas film GHOST AND THE DARKNESS

The first theatrical full length 3D film was the politically incorrectly titled BWANA DEVIL. This 1952 film was composed of mostly stock footage, it gave audiences a chance to watch lions and elephants dance in their lap, while they got headaches and crapped in their seats.

One can only imagine how magical it must have been for folks to see a 3D movie for the first time. It’s too bad that BWANA DEVIL was one of the shittiest movies ever made (if Ed Wood could have made a 3D film, it would have been pretty close to this), because with the exception of Vincent Price’s HOUSE OF WAX which was released in 1953, the debut of this exciting new genre fizzled quickly, as most films focused more on the 3D gimmick, and forgot to include such movie essentials as a good story and acting.

HOUSE OF WAX was filmed by a director who couldn’t see in 3D!

HOUSE OF WAX stands out, as it’s a good film in 2D as well. Perhaps because the director, Andre Toth, only had one eye, and wasn’t able to see things in 3D anyway.

Several other 3D films were released in the 50s, like IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, and the famous CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON was even converted into 3D (easy to do with black and white, but near impossible with color), but soon they went away, not to be seen again for decades.

William Castle, who did some great films like the original HOUSE OF HAUNTED HILL (which had a skeleton drop into the audience), was a master of cheesy movie gimmicks. With his film MR. SARDONICUS, the audience could vote whether or not the villain died at the film’s end. Castle banked on the fact that he’d likely be voted dead, and only had one ending ready to use, anyway. Another great gimmick film he released in 1959 was THE TINGLER. Various seats in the audience were rigged with a buzzing effect to startle the nervous filmgoers.

The thoughtful makers of 13 GHOSTS let you decide if you wanted to see the ghosts in the movie with these special glasses. If only they could have only make these to filter out Whoopi Goldberg, the gimmick may have had a future.

But in 1960, Castle twisted the dead 3D gimmick to a whole new level with 13 GHOSTS. A great little haunted house movie that featured Margaret Hamilton (THE WIZARD OF OZ Wicked Witch), viewers received special cards with two different view windows. One that would let you see the ghosts, and one that would make them disappear if you got too scared.

Sadly, the weird gimmicks of Castle weren’t enough to save the genre, and it wasn’t until the 80s did 3d films rear up their blue and red lensed head again.

A title like this seems better suited for a porno

In 1981, COMIN AT YA was released. Though I can’t say I ever saw the film, this review from critic Leonard Maltin certainly makes me curious.

3D spaghetti Western take-off features rats, bats, and blood, all hugged to death by the camera (and often in slow motion!). No redeeming sense of humor, either. It’s films like this that killed 3D the first time around. Dimensionscope.

Despite the film’s horrible performance at the box office, other films soon followed suit. National Lampoon was in preproduction to make a JAWS spoof titled JAWS 3: PEOPLE 0 but the Hollywood bigwigs thought making JAWS 3D would be a much better way to keep the exciting franchise alive. The 1983 film featured Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett Jr., in a ridiculous plot that featured the shark wreaking havoc on the denizens of Florida’s Sea World. Aside from a few lame startle effects, the director seemed to forget that the film was in 3D.

The Best 3D Movie ever made

Not the case with the brilliantly made, and my all time favorite 3D movie, FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 IN 3D. Not only was this a kickass classic Jason movie that holds it’s own as one of the best in the series, but they utilized the 3D in an outstanding manner. Viewers were treated to Jason squeezing a guy’s head until his eyeballs popped out into the audience, 3D sex scenes, and a pitchfork sticking out of someone’s neck, right into your face. Even the fight scenes had knife-swinging shots that made you duck. If you cruise around on eBay, you can usually find 3D copies of the video you can watch at home.

Believe it or not, this movie features the film debut of Meg Ryan. While another 80s 3D flick PARASITE introduced Demi Moore to the world. Just imagine what a beautiful thing it would have been if she would have done STRIPTEASE in 3D.

Sadly the 3D effects were rarely transferred to video, so if you didn’t get to see them at the theater, that was it. JAWS 3D was retitled JAWS 3, but for some crazy ass reason, AMITYVILLE 3D was still called AMITYVILLE 3D on video, even though it wasn’t in 3D! Talk about a misleading box, check out the pix above with the very small disclaimer “Home Video Version Not In 3D”. Of course the fact that it didn’t come with glasses should have been the first tipoff, but then again, folks who would rent this movie in the first place probably weren’t bright enough to figure it out, anyway.

3D appears to be long gone from coming back to theaters, but at least they’re being kept alive in various theme parks. Though the ill fated Michael Jackson film CAPTAIN EO (which was directed by Francis “How Much Are You Gonna Pay Me To Film This Piece of Shit” Coppola) is no longer at Disneyland, it’s success has made TERMINATOR 3D, and other cool films abound throughout the country.

Now if they could only make 3D contact lenses so I wouldn’t have to put those damn things on top of my glasses, my life would be complete.

-Robert Berry
rberry@retrocrush.com

When you talk about important film directors, names like Scorsese, Coppola, and Kubrick come to mind without a second thought.  But even the most studied of film aficionados will likely forget one of the greatest innovators of film the world has ever seen.  It’s time to give Herschell Gordon Lewis his due.  You could easily argue that without HGL, you wouldn’t have Leatherface, Freddy Kreuger, or even Natalie Merchant.  Confused?   Read on…

Herschell Gordon Lewis may be one of the most versatile men in the world.  Still active in his late 70s, he is the author of some of the more successful books on advertising and copywriting, some of which have seen over 15 printings.  His consulting company is Florida is incredibly successful.

Starting out with producing mind numbing industrial films, he teamed up with his pal David Friedman in the early 60s and began churning out such classic “nudie” films as LIVING VENUS, NATURE’S PLAYMATES, and the unforgettable GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BARES.  But when these topless jigglepix weren’t getting the attention they once garnered, he moved on and pioneered a new type of movie that was never seen before.

In 1963, Lewis released BLOOD FEAST and introduced the gore movie genre to the world.  Though Hitchcock’s PSYCHO was released 3 years prior, there was nothing more shocking than a black and white scene of blood washing down the shower drain.  BLOOD FEAST, though featuring a story that’s goofy beyond belief (a caterer tried to bring the Egyptian Goddess Ishtar back to life by chopping up pretty girls), there’s so much blood in this movie, you’d swear it was a commercial for Heinz Ketchup.

It’s good goofy fun, and you WATCH THE ENTIRE BLOOD FEAST FILM RIGHT HERE, if you’re so inclined.   With a higher speed connection, the quality is pretty damn good.

Made for just $24,000, BLOOD FEAST made over $4 Million.  Lewis struck gold and followed it up the next year with what’s become one of my all time favorite movies…TWO THOUSAND MANIACS.

If you haven’t seen this film, you’re missing out on a rare treat.  Imagine if the cast of ANDY GRIFFITH got rabies and decided to kill everyone who came through, you’d have a good sense of this incredible movie.  Some Yankee kids from up north drive through the beautiful Southern Florida town of Pleasant Valley, right in the middle of their Centennial Celebration.  Little do they realize, the whole town was killed off 100 years before in the Civil War and their ghosts have returned to get some good ol’ Southern style revenge.

Tricked into thinking they are the guests of honor, these hapless goofs get killed off in some of the most creative screen deaths ever seen.

This poor lady not only gets her arm chopped off (which is so obviously a mannequin arm that it’s charming), but they eat it at a barbecue later that night.

After getting this fella all liquored up, they tie each of his limbs to a different horse, and rip him to pieces.

In a strange variation of the classic carnival dunk tank, this victim has to lie down under a giant boulder while people throw rocks at the target until it falls on top of her.  Though they made the boulder out of paper mache, it still weighed over 300 pounds, and Lewis actually laid down under it as it fell, rolling away at the last possible moment, to get the cool camera angle.

Here you see a picture featuring the horrible aftermath of a deadly barrel roll.  This guy had to lay in a big yellow barrel (with a confederate flag on it, of course) and get rolled down a hill.   Sounds safe enough, but since the townsfolk hammered a ton of spikes and nails in it before they sent him on his way, he had a rough trip.

Though the barrel has a goofy looking dummy in it as it careens down the hillside, Herschell actually got inside of a barrel with his camera and was rolled down to come up with yet another winning shot.

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS has a fun charm to it, as the mostly unknown extras seem to really be having a lot of great fun doing their job.  And the banjo hillbilly music throughout adds a nice touch.   In fact, the theme song “The South’s Gonna Rise Again”, was sung by Herschell Gordon Lewis Himself.  Of course, it’s not that he has a great singing voice, but it kept him from having to pay royalties for someone else’s performance (Listen to it right here).

The film was actually going to be called FIVE THOUSAND MANIACS, but the lack of plentiful extras in St. Cloud Florida (which no longer exists and is now a part of Disneyworld), forced Lewis to reduce the account.

But the film’s impact wasn’t lost on the group TEN THOUSAND MANIACS, who used the pioneering gore film as

The film was another hit for Lewis, and he followed it up with the third installment in what has been referred to as his “Blood Trilogy” COLOR ME BLOOD RED.

COLOR ME BLOOD RED is the tale of an artist who find success by painting with his own blood, but when he finds he has only so much to spare, he has to seek alternative sources of this gorgeous paint.   This was decades before people were painting Virgin Mary pictures with elephant crap in New York.  Herschell clearly influenced the art world as well.

Hats of to Herschell for making some of the most fun gore movies of all time!

#20: JAWS (1975)

“The thing about a shark, it’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes. When it comes at you it doesn’t seem to be livin’… until he bites you, and those black eyes roll over white.” -Quint

It’s simply one of the scariest monster movies of all time.  I still can’t swim far from shore at the beach without wondering if there’s a great white nearby ready to chomp me in half  (And believe me, these California Bay Area beaches have ‘em!).  Once I saw a documentary about sharks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium hosted by Jaws author Peter Benchley. He went on about how unfair it was that sharks got a bad rap as monsters and measures need to be taken to protect them. Too late, buddy, the damage is done. The thought of being in a cage with a great white swimming at me is more chilling than anything I can imagine. And the shark cage scenes in this film do not disappoint (In fact, some of them were filmed with a midget to make the shark look even more gigantic). The sequels are all shit, but the 1975 film still holds up well.  Robert Shaw’s standout performance as Quint is a thing of beauty, and it’s still the best thing Steven Spielberg has ever done.

#19: AKIRA (1988)

I’ve never been a giant fan of Anime (which I think translates from Japanese as Big-Eyed Tentacle Fucking Cartoons), but there’s something so amazing about Akira that I can barely describe.  Forget that it’s one of the best animated films ever made, it’s simply one of the best movies.  There’s not many cartoons that can transcend their medium and make you forget you’re even watching one.  The motorcycle chases alone are worth the price of admission, but the fight scenes and a handful of others are among the most thrilling ever captured in a movie.  Not too long after I saw this film, I was having a yard sale with my roommates and was talked into smoking weed with a process called “sink loads”.  This insane process involved lowering an empty bleach bottle with hole cut in the bottom into a bucket of water, while you burned a sticky bud in a bowl where the lid would be. As the smoke builds up, you keep pushing the bottle deeper into the water until you’ve got about 20 hits worth of pot in a very small space of air. After inhaling this unholy smoke, I instantly became psychic and could swear that I was just like Akira, reading every single persons mind at the yard sale. I had to hide upstairs with a pillow over my head to keep their thoughts out of my skull.  On July 19, a special edition DVD of the film will be released with a GOB of extra stuff for $29.90, that I’m chomping at the bit to get.

#18: USED CARS (1980)

This 1980 film is a big guilty pleasure for me.  It’s one of Kurt Russell’s first adult comedies and he does a great job as Rudy Russo, who owns a crappy car lot, and has to compete against Jack Warden’s nicer lot down the street.  They end up getting an edge by creating pirate broadcasts of super cheezy commercials that feature blowing up their competition cars, and screaming, “THAT’S TOO FUCKING HIGH!”   The cast is rich with TV character actors like Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis, and even Lenny & Squiggy make an appearance.  One of my favorite underused character actors, Gerrit Graham, is great as Russell’s partner. (You might remember Graham from the cult hit Terrorvision and as the title character in C.H.U.D. 2: Bud The Chud).  And there’s gratuitous titty shots, so you can’t go wrong with that.

#17: TOMBSTONE (1993)

And while we’re on the subject of Kurt Russell.  Damned if Tombstone doesn’t feature the coolest Wyatt Earp ever.  Russell is a great western badass in this 1993 flick, but the standout performance belongs to Val Kilmer, who’s Doc Holliday is easily his greatest screen role.  The dialogue is outstanding throughout with lines like this.

WYATT: You die first, get it? Your friends might get me in a rush, but not before I make your head into a canoe, you understand me?

COWBOY: Why, it’s the drunk piano player. You’re so drunk, you can’t hit nothin’. In fact, you’re probably seeing double.
DOC: I have two guns, one for each of ya.

WYATT: You gonna do somethin’? Or are you just gonna stand there and bleed?

JOHNNY RINGO: My fight’s not with you, Holliday.
DOC: I beg to differ, sir. We started a game we never got to finish. “Play For Blood” — remember?
JOHNNY RINGO: Oh that. That was just foolin’ about.
DOC: I wasn’t.

This was being produced at the same time as Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp, but it came out a few months earlier, beating it to the punch by a few months.  It might goof up some of the historical facts, but it’s far more entertaining than Costner’s plodding snore festival.  I so love this film that I named my son “Wyatt” from it, and even snuck in “Russell” as his middle name (telling my wife it was after my Great Grandpa, not Kurt of course…heh heh).

#16: DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

Mookie: You know, fuck you and fuck Frank Sinatra.
Pino: Fuck you too and fuck Michael Jackson.

This movie showed that Spike Lee had the potential to be one of the all time great filmmakers, however with subsequent trash released since then, it appears he shot his wad. But what a great wad it is. Do The Right Thing has everything going right for it. I especially love how Lee shows how hot it is on this fateful day. From the DJ (played by Sam Jackson) telling folks with Jheri Curl to watch out or their hair will turn into a helmet, to the kids playing with a fire hydrant and flooding a man’s car with it, to an ice cube drizzling over Rosie Perez’s perfect breasts, it all builds to a blazing climax that really taps in to a lot of the inner-city rage years before Rodney King even bought his Hyundai. My love of hip-hop was born from this film, watching Perez dance to Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” while wearing boxing gloves in the opening sequence. It left me hungry for more. Which led me to listen to more PE, who’s lyrics led me to check out Louis Farrakhan speaking in Oakland (I think I was one of 7 white guys out of about 8,000 people in attendance). Do The Right Thing reminds me of a time when hip hop was a legitimate form of expression, before it Puff Daddy and their ilk turned it into mumbling on top of hit songs from the 70s. The cast is amazing from top to bottom. With Ossie Davis, Robin Harris, Danny Aiello, and John Turturro as amazing standouts. John Savage, who plays Col. Lydecker on TV’s Dark Angel has a small fun “blink and you’ll miss it” as the guy who accidentally walks his bike over Buggin’ Out’s new shoes.

#15: RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

Burt: I thought you said that if we destroyed the brain, it would die.
Frank: It worked in the movie!
Burt Well it ain’t working now Frank.
Freddy: You mean the movie lied?

I’m sure I’ll get flamed for blasphemizing the Romero mythos like this, but I think Return of The Living Dead is the best zombie film ever made. In fact as the quote above suggests, ROTLD throws every traditional zombie out the window on it’s ass. Instead of slow plodding brain dead sleepwalkers that can be killed with a shot to the head, you’ve got wisecracking turbocharged freaks that still flop around screaming for human brains, even after they’re chopped into 100 pieces. These zombies are so clever, that when they run out of victims, they use the cops’ radios to send for more officers. The movie’s tag line, “The Dead Are Back, And They’re Ready to Party” says is it all.  The punk rock characters and attitude in the film are a kick, as well, as the dialogue below shows.

Trash: Do you ever wonder about all the different ways of dying? You know, violently? And wonder, like, what would be the most horrible way to die?
Spider: I try not too think about dying too much.
Trash: Mm. Well for me, the worst way would be for a bunch of old men to get around me, and start biting and eating me alive.
Spider: I see.
Trash: First, they would tear off my clothes…
Chuck: Hey, somebody get some light over here, Trash is taking off her clothes again.

And boy does Trash get naked. In fact, her screen-time nudity was so extended that they had to use a special flesh colored rubber patch to cover her naughty bits up to avoid an X-Rating. Sadly, the film is long out of print, and is quite a good find if you see it on video somewhere. Apparently the soundtrack (which is full of some great punk rock music) made the right pretty hard to resecure for re-releases (which is what kept Heavy Metal off of video for so many years). My favorite scene in the film features this scary-ass “Tar Zombie” that’s been locked in a steel drum full of chemicals forever walking through a door screaming, “BRAINS….MORE BRAINS!”, right before his head gets knocked off in one strong swing with a baseball bat. I still can’t figure out how they did it.

#14: SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1975)

After directing some outstanding Pam Grier films like Coffy and Foxy Brown, Jack Hill brought out on of the best exploitation films I’ve ever seen with Switchblade Sisters. The title and poster say it all. Quentin Tarantino has rereleased the video on his Rolling Thunder imprint, and the DVD full of cool stuff, including a fun audio commentary with QT and hill. Great cheezy 70s outfits, and action sequences that include a hilarious shootout in a roller rink make this movie a special treasure. According to the IMDB, “when Hill was interviewed at the 1996 re-release of the film, pointed out that it did have some authenticity – he interviewed girl gang members and rewrote the script. “But the idea of doing a realistic movie about street gangs with beautiful blondes in hot pants was preposterous, so we tried to make it a wacky fantasy.” If you like Women in Prison style films, you can’t go wrong with this gem. As an X-E aside, Robbie Lee, who plays the gorgeously cleavage-freckled leader of the gang, went on to do the voice of Q*bert’s girlfriend in the short-lived Saturday morning cartoon, as well as several characters in Rainbow Brite. Late comic legend Lenny Bruce’s daughter, Kitty, plays a donut eating fat girl named “Donut” in this gem as well. You also might notice Don Stark, who plays the big afro’d dad married to Tanya Roberts in That 70s Show, too. This film is clearly the most star-studded career launching pad since Meatballs 2.

#13: THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

“To a new world of gods and monsters!” -Dr. Pretorius

Though the first Frankenstein film is clearly a thing of beauty, I’ve always enjoyed The Bride of Frankenstein (one of the first and best sequels in film history), to be far superior. Several scenes from Mary Shelly’s novel like the befriending by the Blind Man, and of course the creation of his mate are all here. Boris Karloff’s performance adds new layers to the monster, making him both sad and scary all at once. When you consider that he broke his legs during the production, but continued one with metal braces on his legs, it’s an even more amazing performance. Elsa Lanchester is equally remarkable as The Monster’s bride, with her freaky hairdo, and frightening scream. The monster even gets philosophical at the end, pulling a big switch on the wall to collapse the castle after saying, “We…Belong…Dead!” (Of course, as Roger Ebert pointed out on a TV show a long time ago, why anyone would have a switch that would collapse the building on top of you is a pretty weird thing). Another damn good Frankenstein film that’s worth checking out if you can find it is the made for TV Frankenstein: The True Story, which is about the most faithful version of Shelly’s tale out there. But ignore the crap remake starring DeNiro, and the horrible Sting/Jennifer Beals The Bride at all costs.

#12: FIGHT CLUB (1999)

“How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” -Tyler Durden

Who knew David Fincher would turn out to be such an incredible director.  After bringing a visually amazing style to Madonna videos, his first film, Aliens 3 did little to impress.  But with a follow up one two punch of Seven and Fight Club, he showed he’s one of the best things going on.  Fight Club is deceiving film in every sense.  Marketed as a flick featuring urban gladiators who love to beat the shit out of each other in organized fights, the film has some of the most biting social commentary and bizarre head games I’ve seen.  Just take a look at some of these awesome quotes from the film.

“Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great War. Our war is a spiritual war. Our depression is our lives.”

“We are a generation of men raised by women. I’m beginning to wonder if another woman is what we really need.”

“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

“We’re designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping. There’s nothing to kill anymore, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that social emasculation this everyman is created.”

“You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”

“Losing all hope is freedom.”

Powerful stuff for sure.  I used to get my ass kicked in all the fights I had growing up, but there’s a primal thrill to the fight that this film explores beautifully.  Brad Pitt really emerges as a great “Man’s Man” actor in Fight Club, transcending the pretty boy Dicaprioesque trappings of many male actors, and becoming something uniquely cool.  And Norton’s everyman performance, especially dealing with his corporate hell and pitchfork jabbings are fun as well.  A scene where he beats himself up in his manager’s office to make it look like he was attacked is hilarious.

The 2 Disc DVD package for Fight Club is one the better uses of the medium I’ve seen.  From the box, to the book it comes with, to the TONS of extra footage and notes within, you’ll hardly find time to experience it all.  Look for a teaser trailer blooper where Pitt tells you not to smoke, then reminds you that you can drink your own pee.

#11: MULAN (1999)

Mulan is my favorite Disney film, as well as my favorite movie to watch with my daughter, Sierra.  It’s beautifully animated, and the voice cast featuring Ming Na Wen, George Takei, and many others is a treat as well.  For some odd reason, even Eddie Murphy as the streetwise dragon Mu-Shu is forgivable.  Though much of this is your standard Disney fare, it’s nice to see a female lead character break the mold of the poor little girl who gets saved from a dangerous situation and ends up marrying a handsome prince.  As The Emperor says about Mulan, “You don’t meet a girl like that every dynasty.”  In fact, as Mulan has both a Mother AND Father who for some un-Disney reason remain ALIVE at the end of the film, it’s a very different Disney film indeed.  There’s an amazing battle scene with hundreds of horses running down a snowy hill that are soon overtaken by a fantastic avalanche, but the part that really does it for me every time is the final moment when Mulan’s father, Fa Zhou, tells her, “The greatest gift and honor is having you as a daughter.”  Chokes me up just thinking about it.  This film was eventually released in China long after the US release, which was daring considering how it questioned the traditional roles of females in Chinese society, but it’s box office failure there was due instead to the massive movie piracy which had copies of the film on video months before.

#10: GLENGARRY GLENROSS (1992)

I spent about a year telemarketing for credit cards and long distance companies, and it was the biggest hell of my life.  Glengarry GlenRoss captures the misery of life as a salesmen far better than any other film.  If you’ve seen Boiler Room or The Big Kahuna and enjoyed them, you’re doing yourself a tremendous disservice by not checking out this one. You get Pacino, Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, and Kevin Spacey!  The David Mamet script is dead on.  If you’ve ever been in any kind of sales environment, you have to see it.  Check out this awesome dialogue:

“We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anybody want to see second prize? [Holds up prize.] Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”

“Your name is “your wanting,” and you can’t play the man’s game, you can’t close them, and then tell your wife your troubles. ‘Cause only one thing counts in this world: get them to sign on the line which is dotted. Got that, you fuckin’ faggots?”

“That watch costs more than you car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see pal, that’s who I am, and you’re nothing. Nice guy, I don’t give a shit. Good father, fuck you! Go home and play with your kids! You wanna work here, close! You think this is abuse? You think this is abuse, you cocksucker? You can’t take this, how can you take the abuse you get on a sit?”

“These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads. To you, these are gold; you do not get these. Because to give them to you would be throwing them away.”

“A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing, always be closing.”

Man, I heard this kind of shit non stop when I was a telemarketer.  Can you believe I was given a Salesman of The Week Award AND put on written warning for not making sales goal IN THE SAME FUCKING DAY before? You can see why this movie hits so hard for me.

#9: THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994)

“I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they’re gone. I guess I just miss my friend.”

Sure, it’s set in a jail, but The Shawshank Redemption is about friendship.  It’s also one of those rare films based on a Stephen King story (Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption) that’s better than its source material.  Frank Darabont’s script is a great salute to doing something for your fellow man, and how the human spirit can be free even if he’s locked up in jail.  Persistence, and standing up for what you believe in are represented beautifully here through the performances of Tim Robbins and especially Morgan Freeman.  If your spirit doesn’t get lifted just a tiny bit at this end of this film, you’re an alien.  Stephen King’s original story, from the book Different Seasons, it’s very good, but it takes all the surprise out of Andy Duphrene’s prison escape, by taking you along every inch of the way.  In the film version, it’s almost as much of a surprise to the viewer, as it is to the warden.  And what an escape it is.  Not only does he get out in an incredibly creative fashion, but he manages to set up himself up quite nicely once he’s out.

The IMDB has a hilarious tidbit about meddling during the film’s production. “The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals monitored the filming of scenes involving Brooks’ crow. During the scene where he fed it a maggot, the ASPCA objected on the grounds that it was cruel to the maggot, and required that they use a maggot that had died from natural causes. One was found, and the scene was filmed.”  Good lord.  These folks couldn’t care less about a stuntman falling off a roof, but God forbid a maggot gets killed.

Red: I find I’m so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.

#8: THE EXORCIST (1973)

“I’m telling you that that… THING upstairs isn’t my daughter. Now I want you to tell me that you know for a fact that there’s nothing wrong with my daughter except in her mind. YOU TELL ME YOU KNOW FOR A FACT THAT AN EXORCISM WOULDN’T DO ANY GOOD! YOU TELL ME THAT!”

To me, there’s no scarier film than The Exorcist.  I saw this when I was 9, on HBO, and just 30 minutes in to it, I was shuddering in front of the TV with the most intense fear I ever felt.  I didn’t sleep for 2 straight days, certain that the devil was going to possess me.  My dad go so pissed off at me since I kept them up at night that he banned me from watching scary movies again for nearly a year.  I still remember him saying, “You’re not even going to see Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein!”   I saw it again, when i was 18, and it still scared me.  I saw it again just last year, and guess what?

This film broke so many boundaries and crossed so many lines of blasphemy, it’s STILL shocking and offensive by today’s standards.  How anyone can watch that scene where Reagan is plunging a crucifix into her bloody crotch without cringing away is beyond me.

Regan: Your mother’s in here, Karras. Would you like to leave a message? I’ll see that she gets it!

Regan: Your mother sucks cocks in Hell, Karras

Diff’rent Strokes star Dana Plato was originally offered the role of Reagan in the film, but her mother thought it was a bad idea (though she ended up with a small part in Exorcist 2: The Heretic, anyway).  But Linda Blair nailed it.  You have to admire how she went from sweet little girl, to evil personified with such fervor.

#7: ROCKY III (1982)

Interviewer: What’s your prediction for the fight?
Clubber Lang: My prediction? PAIN!

Oh man.  Rocky vs. Mr. T is about as good as it gets for movie action.  Apollo Creed was a great opponent for Balboa in the first 2 films, but T’s performance as Clubber Lang is just plain scary.  In fact, the movie features T’s first utterance of a phrase made famous later in his career:

Interviewer: Do you hate Rocky?
Clubber Lang: No, I don’t hate Balboa. I pity the fool.

The fight scenes in Rocky III are phenomenal, and far more exciting than most real boxing matches (of course, it’s a movie, they should be).  But Rocky III has much more going for it.  You get the death of Rocky’s trainer Mickey, a great performance by Burt Young, and a new theme song “Eye Of The Tiger” that manages to be more inspiring than “Gonna Fly Now”.  As an added treat you get Hulk Hogan as “Thunderlips: The Ultimate Male”,  a pro-wrestler who fights Rocky in a charity match.

Thunderlips: To all my love slaves out there: Thunderlips is here. In the flesh, baby. The ultimate male versus… the ultimate meatball. Ha, ha, ha.

It’s a shame that Hogan didn’t ever use the Thunderlips character again, cause it was pretty damn good.  Far better than his bad guy “Hollywood Hogan” persona, that’s for sure.

#6: KING KONG (1933)

“Don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen. Those chains are made of chrome steel.” -Carl Denham

Though America has a rich history of monster movies, nearly all the great film creatures are based on literature and legends from other countries.  Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, and their ilk were all from “The Old Country”.  Leave it to us big clumsy Americans to create a savage giant gorilla to call our own.  King Kong is a uniquely cool fim, that almost 70 years later (shit, hard to believe this is that old) is STILL the best single monster movie ever made.  Attempts to remake the film in various forms have failed miserably through those subsequent years.  Through Son of Kong, King Kong vs. Godzilla, the god awful Dino DeLaurentis 1976 remake, and even a goofy cartoon (”10 Times As Big as a Man!”), nothing’s even come close.  Stop motion animation was all they had back then, and though it has it’s flaws and looks a bit shaky (notice his fur ruffling about for no reason as the animators were constantly reposing him), he still looks damn cool, even by today’s standards.  When you realize that a small 18 inch model was used for nearly all of Kong’s scenes, it’s even more impressive.  Sadly, only a metal skeleton of it still exists.

King Kong was something truly unique in 1933.  It scared the crap out of it’s first audiences.  According to the IMDB, “This original version was released four times between 1933 and 1952, and each release saw the cutting of additional scenes. Though many of the outtakes – including the censored sequence in which Kong peels off Fay Wray’s clothes – were restored in 1971, one cut scene has never been found. It is the clip in which Kong shakes four sailors off a log bridge, causing them to fall into a ravine where they are eaten alive by giant spiders. When the movie – with spider sequence intact – was previewed in San Bernardino, Calif., in late January, 1933, members of the audience screamed and either left the theatre or talked about the grisly sequence throughout the remainder of the film. Said the film’s producer, Merian C. Cooper, “It stopped the picture cold, so the next day back at the studio, I took it out myself”.”

As an aside, can you believe that Kong’s leading lady, Fay Wray is STILL ALIVE?  Yep, this September 13, she’ll turn…get this…96!  She doesn’t want her address to get out, but you can still admire this work of one of Hollywood’s first Scream Queens at THE FAY WRAY PAGES.

#5: KANSAS CITY BOMBER (1972)

OK, I won’t lie here, Kansas City Bomber starring Raquel Welch is just pure eye candy.  Watching her wear a skin tight roller derby outfit while pulling other women’s hair out just does it for me, I suppose.  This is Welch in her prime, and she’s never looked better than she does here.  Aside from drooling over Welch, it’s a pretty fun look at the classic world of Roller Derby.  There was a time in America when it was more popular than wrestling.  Look for a very young Jodie Foster in a bit part here, but you’re gonna have to find it on TV at some ungodly hour, ’cause the video has been mysteriously out of print forever.  If you ever come across a blank videotape that just happens to have this taped on it, I’d be your slave for life.

#4: PULP FICTION (1994)

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did I break your concentration?” -Jules

Quentin Tarantino solidified himself as “The Man” when he followed up Reservoir Dogs with Pulp Fiction.  Such refreshing film when it came out in 1994 with it’s inspired casting, awesome direction, and bizarre flow of continuity, it inspired numerous copycat movies and reintroduced the Maverick Director that actors would kill to work with that hadn’t been seen in Hollywood since Sam Peckinpah died.  I love this movie so much I have “PULPFIC” as my license plate.  (Now don’t go making up stories that I hit your parked car now!”)

But, as is the case with most of the films on my list, it’s THE SCRIPT that I love more than anything else about Pulp Fiction.  Like Jules’ angry Bible Speech:

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

Or Christopher Walken’s insane monologue about what a certain watch went through:

Captain Koons: The way your dad looked at it, this watch was your birthright. He’d be damned if any of the slopes were gonna get their greasy yellow hands on his boy’s birthright. So he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide something: his ass. Five long years, he wore this watch up his ass. Then when he died of dysentery, he gave me the watch. I hid this uncomfortable piece of metal up my ass for two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you.

To crazy discussions about what they call Big Macs in Amsterdam, and why Jules don’t eat swine:

Jules: Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie but I’d never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfuckers. Pig sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got enough sense to disregard its own feces.
Vincent: How about a dog? Dogs eat their own feces.
Jules: I don’t eat dog either.
Vincent: Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?
Jules: I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, it’d cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?
Jules: Well we gotta be talkin’ about one charmin’ motherfuckin’ pig. I mean he’d have to be ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’?

I love that Tarantino has been careful and selective with his post Pulp Fiction work.  He knew what a magical thing he created with this movie, and was respectful to not try and duplicate it immediately.  His patience with the wonderful follow up Jackie Brown paid off (critically, if not financially).

I can’t wait for what’s next.

#3: EDWARD PENISHANDS (1990)

Though Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands was a remarkably original and sweet Modern Frankenstein tale that has charmed many, few folks have seen the pornographic remake, Edward Penishands, which is considered by some to be the superior film of the two.  While Johnny Depp portrays the lead character as a misunderstood misfit who has scissors for hands, newcomer Sikki Nixx used a slightly different approach, by having freakish giant cocks on the ends of his arms.  I’m no porn addict, but I do especially enjoy watching a video of a woman performing oral sex.  Edward Penishands is especially rewarding as he has not one, not two, but THREE dicks that are fucked and sucked so much in this movie, he’s like a one man orgy!  Jeanna Fine is particularly good as the female lead, because she’s mostly naked and has sex like crazy throughout.  Sometimes she spreads  open and lets Edward service her with his penishands, while other times she simply chooses to suck on them.  She’s obviously got it rough, as every other woman in the world has only 1 penis on their male partner to service, that she’s able to make Edward happy with all 3 of them is an impressive feat indeed.

In all seriousness, this is truly a jaw droppingly bizarre film that you should check out if you can.  There’s a hilarious parody of the scene from Burton’s version where Edward is carving ice sculptures while Winona Ryder twirls in slow motion with snowflakes falling on her face.  But you’ll have to use your imagination to figure out what I’m talking about.

#2: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP (1982)

Another film about writing.  I loved the John Irving book, and the film, which gave Robin Williams his first serious role, to show the world he was so much more than Popeye and Mork.  Too bad he fucked it up by too many playing misunderstood wacky man-childs in most of his subsequent work.  Some of the film, especially a sub-plot about a group of women who cut out their tongues in honor of an abused girl who met the same fate from an attacker, is a bit heavy handed, but it’s a sweet tale about creativity, marriage, parenting, life, death, and forgiveness.  When I saw this with my Mom I was only 13, but I knew right away that when I had kids, I wanted to be the kind of father that Garp was in this movie.  Wrestling with your kids in costumes, and chasing assholes down the street who drive by too fast, are things I find myself doing now.  (The latter is bound to get me shot, too, I fear . . . I better start keeping it cool!)

#1: BARFLY (1987)

Wanda: I hate people.
Henry: I don’t. I just like it better when they’re not around.

If you’ve never heard of the writer Charles Bukowski, then shame on you!  He’s written some of my favorite books (Ham on Rye, Factotum, Post Office, and Women to name a few), and the screenplay for Barfly.  I’m so in awe of this film that I’m afraid to write much about it, for fear that I don’t do it justice.  Mickey Rourke has the role he was born to play as the brilliant alcoholic bar-brawling poet who gets in the most co-dependent relationship ever, with the neurotic (and luckily alcoholic) Wanda played by Faye Dunaway.  Frank Stallone even gives an inspired performance as Eddie, the bartender who’s sick of Henry’s shit.

Henry: Some people never go crazy. What miserable lives they must lead.

Henry Chinaski: That’s it.
Wanda Wilcox: That’s what?
Henry Chinaski: I’m broke. Can’t buy another drink.
Wanda Wilcox: You mean you don’t have any money?
Henry Chinaski: No money, no job, no rent. Hey, I’m back to normal.

Eddie: All you gotta do is beg for a little mercy.
Henry: Quittin’ to you would be like swallowin’ piss for eternity.

Henry: Some guys really know how to get the women.
Jim: Now, you don’t know how?
Henry: Hey, I can get one for ten minutes. That’s my limit.

Old Fart: Now look. Twenty bucks for that kind of head is outrageous.
Grandma Moses: I did ya good, old fart. I did ya good. I oughta bit your champagne cork off.
Old Fart: I’m givin’ ya fifteen bucks.
Grandma Moses: Twenty bucks. Nobody in this neighborhood can swallow paste like I can.

Tully: Why don’t you stop drinking? Anybody can be a drunk.
Henry: Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.

Bukowski’s script manages to make excessive drinking and fighting in the alleys both tragic and romantic at the same time, years before Fight Club had a go of it.

-Robert Berry
rberry@retrocrush.com

Here’s a great ad from 1980 for Gre-Gory The Big Bad Vampire Bat. Like many toys, he was big and fearsome, but also…HE’S FUN!  Much like the Pulsar action figure that pumped blood, Gre-Gory had an exposed chest with a full working circulatory system. Unfortunately, like many toys with fluid inside of them (like Real Dolls) they get all dried up and don’t work so well as the decades pass. If anyone out there has one of these in their collection, I’d love to share the picture or video here!

Meanwhile, here’s a commercial for Pulsar “The Ultimate Man Of Adventure”! My friend had this toy, and a special lab you could hook him to. He was fun to play with for about 2 minutes. Just like most men of adventure!

I’m often late to the party when it comes to enjoying TV shows. When I was a kid, with only a handful of channels, it was pretty easy to check out all the great stuff. These days with eleventy jillion networks out there, there could be 20 great shows on at the same time. There’s a point where you throw your hands up and just realize you can eventually check out any show in reruns, Hulu, or DVD if you missed it. Months ago I started watching The Gilmore Girls and am kicking myself for not realizing what an amazing show it was the first time around.

The Gilmore Girls is one of the best written and directed shows I’ve seen in quite some time. It’s funny, and the pop culture references dropped on the show are enough to make the most jaded retro junkie salivate.  At first, I thought it was just going to be one of those stand around and look cute feel good shows like Dawson’s Creek or 7th Heaven, but I was charmed and laughed from the first episode I saw.

Sure, Lauren Graham as lead character Lorelai Gilmore is fantastic. She looks/acts great and her dialogue is sharp and entertaining.  But it’s the delicious cast of supporting characters that make the show special, and recalls Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure in depth. I particularly love Emily Kuroda as the tough as nails super stern antique store owner, Mrs. Kim. Sean Gunn as “Kirk” is one of the all time best TV oddballs, while Edward Herrman and Kelly Bishop play Lorelai’s parents Richard and Emily with a skill that’s rarely matched.

There’s tons more small characters that are too numerous to mention, including Carole King who appears every so often as the music store owner. King also recorded a new version of her classic “If You Leave” with her daughter for the show’s theme.

It’s a rare show that I look forward to watching every day (possible due to syndication on ABC Family).  I’m gonna laugh or be impressed by great writing and acting every single episode. Check it out, won’t you?

Darick Robertson writes and illustrates this One Shot issue from Dark Horse comics. Though the comic is indeed “brutal” as the tagline atop the cover claims, it’s a muddy mess that takes 22 pages to tell a story that could have been done in less than 10.  We are introduced to Conan as a mercenary helping out the King of Gaul in a bloody battle the ends with an enemy blade severing the monarch’s head. The King’s son moves to assume the crown, however the popular warrior Conan is given the mantle instead. He runs the country into the ground and indulges in the pleasures of food, wine, and carnage. Then the King’s son returns and Conan realizes he was wrong and rides off. Yep, it’s as lame as I make it sound. Don’t waste your $3.50 on this one.

The Book of Eli is a horrible movie with great actors and good direction that is hobbled by a mediocre script that relies on one of the most ludicrous premises I’ve ever seen. Denzel Washington is Eli, a wanderer in an apocalyptic future that is compelled to deliver the last remaining copy of The Bible to some mysterious location in the West. We are to believe that some 30 years from now, there’s some sort of political upheaval that results in theh destruction EVERY SINGLE BIBLE IN EVERY FORM. This is a future wher people have managed to hide away old vinyl disco records, vintage iPods taht still manage to charge up after 3 decades, and copies of The Da Vinci Code, yet somehow every paper, electronic, and audio copy of The Bible ends up destroyed because the government orders it.

There’s some great fight scenes, and Denzel plays the lone roaming badass character well. It’s a character that you’ve seen before in countless other cowboy, samurai, and road warrior movies, and it’s a character that remains entertaining in this incarnation. My only complaint is that visually, Eli looks like somebody squished Wil Smith’s characters from I Am Legend and Hancock together. Quite literally, Denzel has become Hobo With A Shotgun. Fortunatley he has a wicked machete that is sharp enough to lop off body parts as if they were made of Jell-O.

If you want a 2 hour escape you could do a lot worse than this one.

My other gripe involes the “twist” ending that you’ll never see coming, and comes off as incredibly silly.

There’s also a ridiculous feat of manual labor that happens at the movie’s climax that is positively stupid.

In fact…scroll down and I’ll tell you about it if you’d like it spoiled

Eli dictates the entire King James Bible from memory to Malcolm McDowell’s character who runs some sort of humanity museum on Alcatraz Island. No typewriter, but plenty of reams of blank paper. After hand transcribing the epic work, he then manually typesets it with an old printing press and manages to have it professionally bound with a foil log. He then places the book on a shelf next to other religious works, like The Koran, and The TORAH which already had the FIRST FIVE BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT in it. Malcolm wasted a lot of time with that one!

Secondly, there’s a bait and switch done when Gary Oldman’s character Carnegie snags Eli’s Bible, which conveniently has a padlock on it. Once he manages to get it open, he sees that it’s IN BRAILLE and officially unreadable. His screams of anguish are akin to Burgess Meredith’s Twilight Zone character who is left with books but no glasses to read them. But Braille has a pretty easy symbol to letter translation, so it wouldn’t take but a few hours to crack the code, especially as Carnegie is familiar with The Bible and knows what most of it says.

Yep…Eli is blind. We’re supposed to believe he can singlehandedly dispatch mobs of people with just a knife (which borrows from the Samurai films) and can even shoot snipers from rooftops after they click their guns. Reeeeeee-diculous.

Since we started doing these mostly annual lists back in 2000, it made sense to look back at the last 10 years and recognize the truly annoying stuff that stood out with the proper perspective. Some of my original list items are silly now (complaining about MP3 players…ha!) but there’s a lot of great annoying stuff to reflect on, with many new entries from our most recent annoying year.  Here’s to another annoying decade!

100 Kanye West
Probably the most egotistical performer without the talent to back it up of all time. Sure, he makes some catchy tunes, but rapping on top of other popular songs went out with P.Diddy. Though interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech was a douchey move, it made her more popular than ever, so you can thank Kanye for her 24×7 radio airplay as well. How could he be so heartless? I’d rank him higher, but his brilliant “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” quip on that Hurricane Katrina telethon means I’ll keep him right at #100.

99 Ed Hardy Shirts
These shirts couldn’t be any doucheier if “Summers’ Eve” was printed on them. These crappily drawn tattoo designs with bedazzler effects look like Liberace teamed up with Hot Topic.

98 Jay Leno
Stay retired you unfunny bastard! Thanks for gracefully stepping aside and letting Conan O’Brien have a chance to grow The Tonight Show, oh wait…

97 Too Big To Fail Businesses
Remember when companies that took risks actually had risk involved? Nothing’s more fair in the marketplace than a multi-billion company, who cooks their books, declares bankruptcy, then gets to return to the marketplace and compete against their rivals with no debt! Say goodbye to responsibility.

96 The Atkins Diet
You can’t even eat an apple anymore without some bacon chugging ketosis-zombie telling you about the insane amount of carbs inside. It’s bad enough that they’re selling low-carb toilet paper in the grocery stores to appeal to these idiots, but they’re putting such a drain on the beef supply that I can’t buy a good steak without taking out a second mortgage on my house. I just keep thinking about the line Daniel Stern’s character said in “City Slickers” after Curly died, “The man ate bacon at every meal…you just can’t do that!” Here’s a tip, when the autopsy they performed on the guy that founded your diet shows that his veins had turned into a network of Slim Jims and Vienna Sausages, it’s time to rethink your plan.

95 “Deal or No Deal” and “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?”
How stupid can game shows get? Watch NBC announce “Flipping a Coin For Money” soon.

94 Torture Movies
I don’t know why Hollywood thinks we get off on seeing films where the characters are tortured and mutilated for 2 straight hours like the Saw series and Hostel. Though these movies are gradually being replaced with movies featuring tortuous acting by Ryan Reyndolds.

93 Elisabeth Hasselbeck
Why does being a runner up on Survivor and marrying a football player mean you have an opinion that matters? Of course, that logic can be applied to every panelist on The View, for that matter.

92 Dr. Laura Schlessinger
Called homosexuals “genetic mistakes” yet made no apologies whatsoever for the genetic mistake between her legs displayed in her amateur porn photos.

91 Head On Commercials
“Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!” “Head-On, Apply directly to the forehead!”

90 Cash For Clunkers
What a great way to stimulate car sales by encouraging people to get rid of old cars, by wastefully giving up perfectly good cars that low income people could have used, and forcing dealers to dump sodium silicate into the tank to seize the engine up and make it unusuable (and worth much less to the scrap yards). This made charity donations virtually disappear and in many cases, dealers kept prices high for people who didn’t have a clunker to trade in. We’d probably do a lot better if we had a cash for clunkers program for our tired, lame, and ineffective politicians to get sent to the scrap heap and replaced with more efficient models.

89 Taylor Hicks
If this is the best singer America can come up with in a nationwide talent search, it’s time to just give up on new music forever. It’s as if someone threw Kenny Rogers and Air Supply into a blender, then threw what little talent was there away and kept the hair and awkward dancing.

88 H1N1
With all the cool names like The Black Plauge, Yellow Fever, or even the previously used Swine Flu, the best you could come up with was the name a droid that appeared for half a second under the table of the Mos Eisley Cantina?

87 Hugo Chavez
Politics aside, the guy looks like a fucking moron. Every time I see him I just imagine a fly buzzing around in his skull with the single word “Duhhhhhh” echoing back and forth between his ears.

86 David Letterman
Though I’ve always been anti-Leno/pro-Letterman, turning his serial harassment problems with his employees into audience laughs was repulsive.

85 Bluetooth Earpieces
We’ve created a nation of people who walk around talking to themselves.

84 Barack Obama
The guy can give a speech, and he energized Americans like no politician has in an awfully long time, and on Day 1 is was the same old shit we’ve seen before by everyone else that’s had that job. Hopeless…

83 Balloon Boy
Falcon Heene had all of the world worried for hours when he climbed into his father’s home-made weather baloon that broke free and led authorities on a wild air chase for hours! I’m glad he’s safe, but I hope he’s grounded for a long time for his misbehaving ways!

82 Joseph Lieberman
From his Droopy Dog vocal stylings to his playing both sides of the fence politics, he’s a horrible horrible Senator. Is it any wonder Gore didn’t win the 2000 election with this dynamo at his side?

81 Thomas Kinkade
The absolute worst art of the decade. It’s hard to feel sorry for the poor schmucks who spent thousands on limited edition artwork that later appeared in mall stores by droves next to Hot Dog On A Stick. Plus the real irony is that Kinkade’s house is nothing like the ones in his pictures. The lawn is full of weeds and there’s broken Christmas lights hanging on the fence.

80 Kristin Wiig
The single most annoying member of Saturday Night Live since that lady who did the non-stop Jan Brady impersonation, with exception of…

79 …Jimmy Fallon
This guy never met a SNL skit he couldn’t fuck up by laughing in the middle of it. Horribly unfunny, and obviously knows really bad things to blackmail about important people, parlaying his “talent” into getting a full time late night talk show gig.

78 The Kardashians
Has the bar for “celebrity” sunk so low that merely fucking a rapper and having Bruce Jenner as a step dad is enough to deserve getting your own show? And let it be said that the marriage of Lamar Odom and Khole Kardashian was the most “I don’t give a shit” over covered moment of 2009.

77 Metrosexuality
The acid was jeans of the last decade. Look gay without the actual stress of having gay sex. Hey…ugly gay guys have been doing that for years.

76 Michael Vick
Doesn’t torturing and killing dogs piss off enough people to keep him from ever working in the NFL again? Some criminals DON’T deserve a second chance. There’s people who can’t get full time work anymore because they stole food from a grocery store, and this asshole electrocutes dogs and is on Monday Night Football after a too brief stint in jail. Our priorities are screwed.

75 Myspace
Aliens are going hack into our internet and find archives of millions of glittery pink “thanks for the add” messages and decide to kill us all.

74 William Hung
“She Bangs” was awful enough to listen to when Ricky Martin recorded it. At least we know if he ever becomes a serial killer with a biting fetish, he’ll be easy to track down because that mouth full of crooked Yahtzee dice teeth would leave an unmistakable mark.

73 Penguins
Did we really need 300 different movies starring penguins. Let alone dancing singing penguins in shit films like “Happy Feet” where the penguins belt out Stevie Wonder’s hit “I Wish” with nonsense lyrics about when they were a “Nappy Headed Boy”.

72 Livestrong Bracelets
The joke’s on us, yellow rubber causes cancer!

71 Jeff From “The Wiggles”
Could they finally replace this guy? He fell asleep in the middle of a performance no less than 498 times in the last decade!

70 Spinning Hubcaps
About the only thing more asinine than this short lived trend was the Chris Webber line of shoes that had spinners on the ankles!

69 NBC’s Delayed Olympic Coverage
With the actual events “broadcast live” up to 12 hours after they really happened, there was no reason to watch them on TV, except for looking at the loving mouth of Bob Costas

68 Tea Baggers
An only slightly less offensive name than the Taint Lickers.

67 Outsourced Telemarketers
The clever way to get around the “Do Not Call” list is to have people from India call you while you’re eating dinner now. I guess when you have gods with 8 arms it’s easier to dial quickly.

66 Arnold Palmer
Only slept with one woman the whole decade. What kind of pro golfer is he?

65 Twitter
Do we really have to use the greatest communication tool in the world to let people know that you’re taking a shit?

64 The Pontiac Aztek
Ugliest car of the decade. Looks like something from the ’80s “classic” Megaforce.

63 Steve The Dell Guy
This guy made Alex Winter look like a genius.

62 The 5,000 CSI and Law & Order Spin-offs
I can’t wait for “CSI: Fresno” and “LAW and ORDER: TRAFFIC SCHOOL” next season.

61 Dick Cheney
When he’s not shooting people in the face, he was busy reminding people incessantly how the Republicans kept us all safe after 9/11. That’s like bragging about having a spotless driving record after drunk driving into a tree.

60 RETRO CULTURE OVERLOAD
We here at retroCRUSH obviously love retro-culture as much as anything, but when VH1 is busy doing “The 100 Coolest Things That Just Happened This Morning” specials, it’s time to rethink things.

59 Terry Shiavo Hype
The round the clock coverage of both sides of the argument of whether or not to pull Shiavo’s feeding tube was shameful. A South Park episode in which Kenny was on life support summed it up perfectly…you can’t die with dignity with 8,000 cameras pointed at you.

58 Lars Ulrich
Started out the decade by geting Napster to ban more than 300,000 users for downloading Metallica songs. Meanwhile, The Thompson Twins were only able to ban 4 users for downloading their hits (This joke wasn’t funny in 2001, either).

57 Health Care “Reform”
What could have been a defining moment to give every American health care, ended up being the equivalent of a coupon for asprin.

56 James Blunt’s “Beautiful”
single most annoying song of the decade. If Lloyd Dobler would have played this song on his boombox, his girlfriend would have shot him in the face and joined a convent.

55 Rob Schnieder
It saddens me to think there’s people who were actually looking forward to see Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo. During the opening weekend, it opened at #48 and was outgrossed by an art film of Jm. J. Bullock playing solitaire.

54 Pill Commercials
Ain’t nothing these pills will fix that booze can’t with less side effects! Sure, some pills are great for some people, but we’ve created a nation of zombies that won’t do anything about the root cause conditions that fuck their lives up and look for magic capsules to fix everything. Want to lose weight? How about dieting and excercising instead of taking something that makes grease drip out of your ass! Try talking to your spouse about your troubles instead of gulping down anti-depressants. And do I really need to watch a commercial for boner pills when the Teletubbies are on? Tinky winky is boneriffic enough on his own!

53 Chris Brown
Beats Rihanna so severely she looked like The Elephant Man when he was through, and only got community service as a penalty. Tommy Chong served 9 months in federal prison for selling bongs! If you still buy Chris Brown music, you’re an asshole.

52 Letting Child Molesters Out of Prison
How many times do we have to release these monsters and cross our fingers that they won’t repeat their horrible crimes, only to see it happen again and again. If you’re sick enough to rape a kid, you deserve death or permanent imprisonment. Throw out a few thousand pot smokers and you’ll have plenty of room. Who would oppose this?

51 Anna Nicole Smith
Golddigger, horrible mother, drug addict…give her a TV show! If I wanted to watch an overweight lady fart, burp, and ramble incoherently, I’d go back to my secret peephole I drilled in the Lane Bryant dressing rooms.

50 Autotune
Remember when vocals in songs didn’t all sound like the robots in “Funkytown”? What started as a neat special effect in a Cher song became a crutch for any shitty singer to turn out a record. We’ll definitely remember this a a horrible fad in music years from now.

49 Ghost Hunters
Say what you want about their skills, they can’t even find Casper, and he’s the friendliest ghost of them all. And since when does a dust particle floating by a camera lens constitute something supernatural?

48 Farmville
This stupid Facebook page is like an agriculture based Tamagotchi for the over 30 female set. Requests to help find a home for Missing Cows resulted in 30% of web traffic for all of 2009.

47 Dane Cook
Kudos to Cook for perfecting comedy without jokes, humor, or relevance. Shouldn’t observational comedy be about stuff that you can actually observe? Jokes like “Did you ever notice when a woman lies while she’s drinking Kool-Aid, she wobbles her bottom jaw back and forth like THIS?” leave me scratching my head. Also, great work having ads for Dane Cook’s Tourgasm Comedy Tour with teeny tiny print disclaiming “Dane Cook will not appear.”

46 Barry Bonds
The personfication of everything wrong with sports today. Egocentric cheaters who will lie or do anything to get ahead. Babe Ruth was a much better athlete and the dude was an overweight alcoholic who’s only workout regimen consisted of curling Johnnie Walker bottles to his lips.

45 RIAA
From suing anonymous IP addresses to old ladies who don’t even have a computer in their house, the RIAA did very little to convince people that $18.99 Ashley Simpson CDs are a great value.

44 Osama Bin Laden
Released tons of videos taunting America from unknown rocky locations for years, yet still hasn’t made the jump to Hi-Def. Get with the times, Caveman!

43 Nancy Pelosi
Wipe off the lipstick and you’ll see we’ve inadvertantly put The Crypt Keeper 2 heartbeats away from the Presidency!

42 Twilight
Got to at least give author Stephanie Meyer credit for coming up with lamer vampires than Anne Rice.

41 The Da Vinci Code
If you hold The Last Supper painting upside down in a mirror with an x-ray, you’ll see the reflection in Peter’s glass says, “Dan Brown is a really shitty writer”.

40 Staycations
Making cute nicknames for staying home because you can’t afford to go anywhere else was just another sign of the horrible economy. Furlough Fridays sounds like a promotion at a lame restaraunt, not anything to be sad about.

39 Rush Limbaugh
I’m waiting for Al Franken to write a new version of his classic book retitled “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Racist Drug Addict!”

38 People Who Still Write Checks At The Grocery Store
Are stores really worried about making the 3 people who never heard of check cards happy by taking these things still?

37 Nigeria
By last count, Nigeria has no less than 4 million kings, princes, and bank officials with at least 80 trillion in funds that they need to get out of the country. Why Barack Obama won’t help them get this money here to bail out our horrible economy is a mystery to me.

36 Madonna
Madonna officially reached the point of “too old to stop dressing and acting that way”, shaking her pasty lizardy white ass around in videos might still do it for the Walter Cronkite generation, but nobody should have to look at that eye bleaching horror anymore.

35 Kim Jong Il
On one hand, he’s horrible in real life, but I do love the puppet version of him in Team America: World Police, so I’m torn. It’s bad enough they’re flexing their nuclear muscle, but the thought of a new version of M*A*S*H* is scarier than Armageddon! I think we need to send Alan Alda over there to bore them into surrender.

34 Jessica Simpson
Thinking Chicken of The Sea Tuna was really chicken was the least of her transgressions…her take on Daisy Duke was utterly horrible in the horrible Dukes of Hazzard remake. And while we’re on the subject, Burt Reynolds was never meant to be Boss Hogg, what the fuck?

33 Bernie Madoff and Bernie Ebbers
I think a good lesson learned last decade was not to trust people named “Bernie” with your money.

32 Fred Phelps And His Demon Spawn Church
The type of evil that would shout “God Hates Fags” at grieving families is far more evil than any evil they profess to stop.

31 David Blaine
Remember when magicians actually did magic? What kind of illusion is sitting on a pole for 5 days, anyway?

30 “Battlefield Earth”
One of the Decade’s worst movies brought the L.Ron Hubbard “classic” to life with John Travolta in a purely ridiculous outfit with tubes in his nose, shit covered dreadlocks, and an outright horrible voice. At least Barry Pepper got some work.

29 High Fructose Corn Syrup
The throwback editions of Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Dr. Pepper with real sugar remind us of how shitty corn syrup sodas taste.Thanks for the diabetes!

28 Jeff Dunham
Shitty unfunny puppets for people who can’t appreciate the subtleties of Larry the Cable Guy.

27 Botox and Lip Surgeries
Hey, ladies…here’s a tip for you. The more you begin to look like a duck, the WORSE you look!

26 9/11 Truthers
If you ever want your brain to scramble around in frustration, just talk to one of these fools that are convinced that no actual planes crashed into the World Trade Center or Pentagon, and that the government blew them up with controlled explosions and holograms to fool us all into going to war. Point out any evidence to the contrary and it’s suspect because that’s just the government controlled media trying to cover it up. Sheesh!

25 Chris Crocker
Got a bit more than 15 minutes of fame for whining on YouTube about the media’s treatment of Britney Spears. Actually, hats off to Crocker for getting that much attention for tearing up with runny mascara with a virtuoso performance that would have made the late great Tammy Faye proud.

24 Car Ribbon Magnets
Cause nothing says patriotism than ribbon shaped flags. Every time you stick one of these on your car, you’re sticking it to terrorism.

23 Fear Factor
Nothing like watching shrieking women gobble down disgusting food while swimming around in human filth. Hell, I see that every week at Hometown Buffet.

22 Tucker Carlson
Douchey talking head with a bowtie inspired a rant from Crossfire guest Jon Stewart that contributed to the cancellation of his show and removal from CNN. Way to go, Tucker!

21 Star Wars Prequels
George Lucas literally made a time machine and shit on our childhoods. Seriously…go look at the old blue Star Wars trading cards you saved in that shoebox. They are now covered in shit! Not content to squirt his Lucasness on that franchise, he topped off the decade by making a truly horrible Indiana Jones sequel. I’m holding my breath for the inevitable Willow prequel and re-imagining of Howard The Duck.

20 Sean Hannity
This talking colostomy bag is the most smarmy piece of shit that’s ever walked the face of the earth. From his nasal holier than thou delivery to his idiotic politics of hate, he’s the personfification of everything that’s wrong with Fox News. At least Bill O’Reilly is entertaining, there’s absolutely nothing to like about this guy.

19 Perez Hilton
He went from an entertaining gossip blogger to a guy that draws dicks on underage celebrity’s faces. Class act!

18 OJ Simpson
Nice to know that in America you can get away with murder, but go to prison for taking your autographed footballs back.

17 Michael Savage
Single biggest source of anti-Muslim hatred in America. This intolerant ’50s relic is a buffoon with buffoon fans who are keeping America’s average IQ far below the moron level.

16 Courtney Love
I used to be a big fan until she started shitting nonsense out of her mouth nonstop and getting enough plastic surgery to make Joan Rivers look normal.

15 Jon Gosselin
Dick Van Patten was the father of 8 kids and his show was way better.

14 T-Pain
His latest CD features songs where he both brags about how much money he has, and the free drinks he gets for dating a bartender. Listen for his new single “Bonin’ The Hot Dog On A Stick Hos for Free Corn Dogs” on the radio soon.

13 “Snakes On A Plane”
Ha ha…man this movie was so great, cause Sam Jackson says, “I want these muthafuckin snakes off this muthafuckin PLANE!” HA HAW HAHHHH! That’s great stuff! I hope letting people on the internet steer the direction of movies doesn’t continue, otherwise we’re going to be treated to I’d Hit It: The Movie and LOL: THE MOTION PICTURE soon.

12 Mahmoud Amadenijad
You know, if you’re going to be an evil leader, you should find some clothes more menacing than khaki Member’s Only jackets from 1982.

11 Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears
From Britney’s deadly baby care techniques to Lindsay’s crazy Blackberry ramblings, these two capped off the year by seeing how many times they could show off their uncovered crotches to the press. You know you’re out of control when Paris Hilton has to pull your legs closed. If they aren’t stopped soon, they’re going to mutate into a new form of skank pandemic that no amount of penicillin can stop! Do we need 50 photographers documenting every time Britney wipes wipes her ass? Of course, she doesn’t help much when she’s using her kids to wipe it with.

10 Tila Tequila’s “Shot of Love” Show
You know you’re trashy when you make Flavor Flav’s dating show look classy by comparison. At least it’s an aptly named show, because everyone will certainly need a shot of some sort once they leave the set.

9 Excessive Facial Piercings
A can take a nose ring or tongue ring on the right person, but what’s up with these people who have so much jewelry on their face that they look like they fell into a damn tackle box? Couple this with the excessive tattooing and it’s clear that we’re going to have the ugliest crop of old people in 40 years that the world has ever seen.

8 Glenn Beck
Asked a Muslim congressman to prove he wasn’t working with terrorist, and said that Barack Obama had a “deep-seated hatred for white people” What the fuck? The levels of douchery accomplished buy this guy are astounding. Just listen to any one of his fans and feel your brain drip out of your ears.

7 Paris Hilton
I remember when people who were famous just for being famous were at least confined to the set of The Match Game. Why the hell do people keep paying attention to this lazy eyed no talent jizz-gobbler?

6 Pepsi Commercial girl “Hallie Eisenberg”
Our original #1 Annoying List Winner back in 2000 read, “She’s been annoying for a while, but reached all new levels of annoyance by filming PEPSI commercials with Faith Hill and even KISS! Why doesn’t PEPSI realize that this freakishly dimpled girl discourages folks from buying their soda? Until they have a promotion where you can hit her in the face with a shovel with each can you buy, she’s just wasted cash!” Hallie ended up being OK in the years to follow with a respectable performance in “How To Eat Fried Worms”.

5 Tainted Chinese Products
Years after getting over the whole “Pee Pee In Coke” scandals of the ‘70s, China got back into the danger spotlight with lead painted toys. Of course, you have to love the outraged parents who are so concerned about the safety of the playthings in the Chicken McNuggett Happy Meals.

4 Michael Jackson
Funny how death and nostalgia can erase the fact that the guy was a pedophile.

3 “Crank That (Soulja Boy)”
The incomprehensible lyrics in this song sound like it was written with one of those magnetic poetry sets. I never thought I’d yearn for the more hardcore days of hip-hop songs like “Chicken Noodle Soup” and “Laffy Taffy”.

2 Carrot Top
Ever before has a man made my skin crawl as much as this Raggedy Ann Tranny hellspawn. From his freakishly altered eyebrows, to his unfunny whiny “comedy” style, he’s single-handedly responsible for the increased murder rate in the USA.

1 Janet Jackson’s Breast
You’d have thought it was the beginning of the Apocalypse the way America reacted to her flooby monstrosity that popped out during the Super Bowl Half-Time Show. Of course, nobody said a word when Paul McCartney made shadow puppets with his dick the following year. We have so far to go with civil rights.

Just watch it…pure brilliance!

The fine folks over at Steelhead Studio have put together a fantastic collection of cupcakes with all sorts of retro game themes! CLICK HERE to check it out and see if you can name them all. Hats off to anyone who makes a Yar’s Revenge Cupcake!

Thought you might like a sneak peak at the new shirt design we’re putting together courtesy of retroCRUSH’s favorite artist Johnny Ryan! This will be our first new shirt in over 3 years. Stay tuned!

I’ve always liked this quirky cartoon and it’s nice to see it getting the Blu-Ray treatment on the same day that WHV is going to release the Peter Jackson trilogy in Hi-Def, too. Now if they could only give a deluxe treatment to the Rankin Bass animated Hobbit, all will be well.

To celebrate the release of Daybreakers this January 8th, retroCRUSH is giving a way 2 sets of cool collectibles pictures above. You’ll get a Daybreakers poster, steel “blood” bottle, and “Blood” energy potion (not real blood, but tastier). Plus you’ll get some sunglasses with the Daybreakers logo that you’ll never wear. How do you win? All you have to do is post a comment about what your favorite vampire movie is and why. I’ll pick my two favorite answers on Thursday. Good luck! The bottles are actually pretty nice, so don’t hold back!

Daybreakers looks like an interesting mix of The Matrix and Vampire movies. The art direction looks pretty good and the cast features Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, and Sam Neill. I’m not sure if they’re screening this for critics, but I’ll let you know what I think as soon as I check it out.

In the meantime, feel free to poke around the movie’s interactive sites. There’s Bromley’s Blood Bank which lets you open an account and feed off the blood of your Facebook friends, a Capture Humans site,  and the official movie site, to learn more.

Found this in a fun 1976 Superhero Merchandise Catalog that I’ll reprint in its entirety at a later date. Gotta love the super ’70s reference that the dolls are so cute they make Donny and Marie look like Alice Cooper! For the life of me, I can’t find any trace of the actual dolls these were on the internet? Any collectors ever see one of these super babies?

Hilarious! And even more hilarious is the way too concerned and out of touch reaction by Parentdish writer Linda Freedman who apparently has forgotten what it’s like to be a kid. Freedman suggests that this sort of video makes kids not trust adults. Is this any worse than Ernie playing the trumpets while sheep dance around bothering Bert? I think if kids can handle monsters that live in Trash Cans, that Ricky Gervais being annoying during a bedtime song isn’t going to faze them much.

Saw this on a friend’s Facebook profile today, and I’m thoroughly convinced that Big Bear’s “Doin Thangs” from 1999 may be the greatest album cover of all time!

This is pretty funny, though I admit I fell for it, too! Yesterday, TMZ had an exciting old picture of JFK in the 1950s sun bathing on a boat while hot nude women partied about. It was run by “forensic experts” and other JFK-ofiles and they all deemed it as an accurate photo. Problem is…it was a fake black and white reproduction taken from a 1967 full color playboy spread. You can CLICK HERE to read the whole story on The Smoking Gun. Funny how easy it is to believe stuff like this. TMZ has since admitted that it’s a fake, but they still keep their silly “TMZ” watermark on the picture, so nobody will take credit for their photo they took from Playboy.

Somewhere inbetween the heyday of gangster rap and the wane of the era of RUN DMC style tunes bragging about how bad you are, Public Enemy emerged with a brilliant voice of protest, anger, and relevant social commentary that hadn’t been seen since Bob Dylan was recording in the 60s. The combination of Chuck D’s anger, Flavor Flav’s comic relief, and the killer studio production of Hank Shocklee’s Bomb Squad made them the greatest thing going on in music that radio was ignoring.

The opening track, “Bring the Noise” with it’s mile a minute beats and enough cool lyrics to fill 10 songs kicks things off like a smack to the head. I’ve got the song committed to memory and it’s still quite a chore to rap along with it in my car. When Chuck D rattles off “Never badder than bad ’cause the brother is madder than mad at the fact that’s corrupt as a senator soul on roll, but you treat it like soap on a rope Cause the beats in the lines are so dope!” without running out of breath, it’s a nearly Olympian feat.

“Don’t Believe The Hype” immediately follows with a message about not trusting what the media shoves down your throat that’s relevant enough to today’s environment to be prophetic. Punctuated with the chorus squelched out in the way only Flavor Flav can, the song is an outstanding end to the album’s one-two punch intro.

During PE’s heyday Flav was a perfect jester to the raging Chuck D. His influence in rap is vastly underappreciated, as many remember his goofy costumes and giant clock necklaces. His stream of conscience sounding rants were hilarious but were perfect accents to the beats. “Cold Lampin’ With Flavor Flav” is an almost nonsensical tirade that sounds like some homeless guy just got woke up from his cardboard box and handed a microphone.

The remainder of the songs are no less powerful and have great cinematic titles that Hollywood would kill to use like “Louder Than a Bomb”, “Mind Terrorist”, “Rebel Without a Pause”, “Night of the Living Baseheads”, and “Black Steel In the Hour of Chaos.”

“Black Steel” is an exciting story featuring Chuck D thrown in jail for refusing to join the Army with admittedly dubious reasons (”Cause I’m a black man, and I could never be a veteran”). After a guard falls asleep with a gun poking out of his pants (must have been staying at Mayberry Penitentiary), D snags the pistol and instigates a prison riot and escape. Right as they get to the outside gates with bullets flying, his posse, the S1-WS (a paramilitary variant of The Nation of Islam’s enforcers) blow up the guard tower with a bazooka blast and they escape into the night.

And how can you not love the intro to “Terminator X To The Edge of Panic”, in which the production team of The Bomb Squad manages to take the over the top into to Queen’s “Flash Gordon” song and sample it into a killer beginning? I don’t know how much of a real DJ Terminator X really was, but the giant silent scary guy behind the turntable was a great gimmick, nonetheless. He never talked, as Flavor Flav reminds us, “Terminator X speaks with his hands!”

The album ends with “Party For Your Right To Fight”, which is a fairly weak anthem that scrambles the chorus of The Beastie Boys’ classic battle cry, but at this point, I’m so blown away by it all that it’s the equivalent of a post sex cigarette while you sit back and reflect on it all.

I’ve gone through 3 copies of this CD through the years, but at least now I can burn a backup copy so I’ll never be deprived again.

PE followed the album up with the ambitious and successful “Fear of A Black Planet” and the mostly good “Apocalypse 91: The Enemy Strikes Black”, but “Nation of Millions” still holds up as my all time favorite album.

They certainly don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

As much as my instincts tell me to hate this movie, the trailer makes it look pretty good. Jackie Chan is certainly a great choice for the new “Miyagi”, and I suppose having an actual kid instead of a 30 year old play the title role is good! Though, I’m pretty sure Karate is a Japanese thing, so setting this in China is inspired, but weird.

As as special holiday treat, we’re proud to announce that through special arrangement with lala.com, Keith Lowell Jensen’s comedy CD “To The Moon” can be streamed for free! Yep, you can listen to separate tracks or the whole damn thing! Plus you can buy the CD through the site. Unlike most free comedy CDs (and comedy CDs in general for that matter) it’s actually pretty damn funny. CLICK HERE TO ENJOY THE MAGIC!

Jeepers! I haven’t been this turned on by a fast food commercial since McDonald’s took the Fry Guys off the air! CLICK HERE to watch it!

Avatar isn’t the best movie of the year, and it’s far from the best thing James Cameron has ever done. But it’s an exciting fun BIG movie that may be the best 3D movie experience of all time. With a story that smushes Dances With Wolves and Aliens together, there’s nothing particularly original here, but what you have is akin to Jimi Hendrix covering Beatles songs. The elements are all familiar, but they are executed with such precision and skill that it’s simply a great theater event. Avatar is the kind of movie that you can’t wait for DVD. Avatar is the kind of movie that you’ll want to experience on a giant screen. And as disgusting as it is for me to say it, this $300 million monstrosity is exactly the kind of film that Hollywood needs to save it’s ass from a future of $1 Redbox DVD rental kiosks.

I was a bit leery of the early looks at this movie. We’ve seen underdog primitive people fighting off superior forces time and time again from Ewoks vs. Stormtroopers to Japanese villagers fighting off bad guys with the help of 7 Samaurai. There was nothing about the story suggested in the previews that made me want to see this movie. And the 15 foot tall Smurf Aliens looked too silly for me to get very excited about. But the guy who brought us Aliens, Terminator 1 and 2, and Titanic had certainly earned enough credit for me to give him the benefit of the doubt. After watching it, I’m impressed.

I have not enjoyed 3D movies of late. As a 4-eyed glasses wearing geek, the experience of wearing 2 sets of shades to watch a movie is not a pleasant one. When I saw Fly Me to The Moon with my kids on IMAX, the double images were so nauseating I had to leave the theater. The 3D experience of Avatar was beautiful and seamless. I never once felt the need to take the glasses off, and didn’t feel I was watching anything less than a crystal clear picture. Avatar is a 3D movie that doesn’t rely on 3D gimmickry to tell the story. While the 3D is impressive beyond anything I’ve seen before, it’s completely organic and immersive to the film. Above all, it makes the motion capture CGI characters so much more real than the 2D version would be.

Peter Jackson’s WETA effects crew is behind the magic here and it’s gorgeous. If you thought Gollum and the various beasts in the Lord of Rings movies looked great, you’ll be impressed at the texture, depth, and realism of these creations. The eyeballs have a roundness, dimension and LIFE to them that I’ve never seen before. And the blending of “real” people and the CGI is as seamless as it gets. It’s a bit goofy to look at for about 5 minutes when you first see the Na’Vi alien bodies floating in tanks and moving around at the film’s beginning, but I had no problem buying into the universe and believing what I was watching shortly after that.

The eye candy is gorgeous. There’s a scene where the lead character (a Marine named Jake Sully who remotely “becomes” a host alien body) is walking around with the female lead Neytri in the gorgeous Pandora planet’s forest. Luminescient footprints are left behind, plants that make sounds and mushrooms that light up when you touch them, and beautiful sights abound. The 3D makes it as magical for the audience to experience for the first time as it must be for Jake. It reminded me of when the GOlden Ticket holders initially experience the candy garden in Wonka’s chocolate factory, only turned up 100%.

The acting is first rate, too. Sam Worthington does a great job in “both” of his roles as human and Na’Vi Jake. Sigourney Weaver is still a commanding presence as a botanist who also becomes a Na’Vi alien. Star Trek’s Zoe Saldana in a full motion capture performance is very intriguing as the Na’Vi princess. A supporting “evil corporate dude” role by Giovanni Ribisi is unlike any performance he’s given so far, and Stephen Lang, who was so fantastic as Ike Clanton in Tombstone gives a brilliant performance as Colonel Quaritch, the battle scarred badass Marine who is just itching for war.

Avatar isn’t a particularly deep movie, and it doesn’t have anything to say that you haven’t seen in other movies before (the climactic fight seems lifted straight out of a previous Cameron film), but it’s likely one of the best moviegoing experiences you’ll ever have.

Funny how art can work out. I painted this as a Christmas present for someone last year, but the end result was nothing like I had planned. I painted the gray areas of Vader first, and then added the heart and eyes with a super thick and wet red watercolor. Instead of letting it lay flat, I stupidly held it up and the paint dripped down, creating the eerie effect. I’m selling it for $20 if you’re interested. Just email me if you’d like it as a special present for someone you hate.

Here’s one of the great “too good to be true” ads of comic book history. The LIFE SIZE GIANT MOON MONSTER with 3 monster masks was available for an unheard of $1.25, plus you got membership in the prestigious Monster Fan Club. What kid wouldn’t want a “Horrifying” and “Exciting” and “Thrilling!” Monster?

So what did you actually get? As you’d expect, it was a 6 foot tall poster (with comic ad whore Jack Davis’ art, of course) and the 3 Monster Masks were actually just sheets of paper with pictures of masks on them, apparently for you to cut off and glue to your skin!

I was never much of a basketball kid growing up, but I thought this comic book ad from the late ’70s (with Mad Magazine’s Jack Davis handling the art chores) was fun. How cool would it be to shoot some hoops with your pals and have two of the greatest players of the era just show up and give you some tips while plugging their endorsed balls? Did Rick and Julius just randomly show up, or were they a part of some crazy labor intensive marketing approach where they blanket the nation’s playground with these demonstrations. This particular visit was already a waste of time, as the kids were already playing with a Spalding ball, so the net profits the company gets from this is ZERO!

The opening panel looks rather ominous, as if one of the kids owe them some money. They actually resemble Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction.

What also troubles me is that the kids need a lot more help with Math than their hoop skills, because that one stupid kid says Barry’s shot is “A 30-Footer” when he’s just lobbing one in from the side of the key. Hell…I could make that shot and the only endorsed ball I have is a superball from a vending machine with my initials on it!

Long before ORBITZ was a travel company with sporty pop up ads, it was a soda the likes of which the world has never seen, and likely will ever see again.

First appearing it the early 90s and made by the company Clearly Canadian, ORBITZ amazed shoppers with its bizarre gelatinous balls just suspended in mid-juice.  No matter how much you shook the bottle, the balls would just stay there and NOT sink.  As a testament to their power, I recently purchased a case of these on eBay, that’s at least 10 years old, and as you can see from the picture above, those balls are still doing just fine.

Yes, ORBITZ is an amazing drink to look at.  Some folks have equated it to a lava lamp in a bottle.  But drinking the stuff is another story all together.  The best way to describe the taste is flat Sprite with globs of snot floating in it.  Swallowing those blobs of goo is every bit as horrifying as you’d think it’d be.

There’s a website called BEVNET that has some pretty hilarious reviews of the 5 different flavors, that were apparently still available in some areas as late as 1998.

On Vanilla Orange, they write, “One of the worst tasting beverages that we have ever had. It is really impossible to enjoy a beverage that has little balls floating in it. Orange Vanilla flavored Orbitz does not really have a defined taste. They seem to be banking on its looks to get people to buy it. Stay away from this beverage.”

Regarding Raspberry Citrus, they write, “It tastes like water that came out of a vase used for flowers….the balls make it even worse.”

On Blueberry Melon Strawberry, “This is the worst tasting drink with balls in it I’ve had since that time I was tea-bagged in college!”

Who knows what Clearly Canadian was thinking, but few people enjoyed this concoction beyond the first taste.  The unopened bottles have found new life as a fun shelf ornament or fun retro-collectible.  A decade later, and the balls still swirl around and float.

Its a shining example of American marketing in action.  People will buy just about anything, if it looks cool enough.

I only vaguely remember how bad this stuff tasted.  But how could something so magically wonderful to look at taste THAT bad?  Its too bad that I only have a 10 year old bottle of the stuff, because nobody would want to drink it now.

Or would they?

I decided to use the “everything tastes good with gin” philosophy that has brought me so far in life.  Sure, ORBITZ tastes sickeningly sweet and flat, even when brand new, so perhaps that life giving nectar of gin would spice it up!  Ladies and gentleman, I proceeded to make perhaps the only ORBITZ MARTINI this millennium has ever seen!

After giving the martini a vigorous shake, I was impressed that the yellow blobs o’ mystery goo remained intact, however the added element of the gin molecule destroyed the viscosity and they all sat at the bottom of the glass.  It looked like some bizarre salmon roe martini.  Needless to say, I tried a sip, and it tasted like crap.

Perhaps some fun was still to be had with the li’l balls, however.  Using a tea strainer I dumped it into the glass and got them separated.

They were so beautiful, just sitting there.  It was as if I was holding the essence of life itself in my palm.  Each little globule was calling for me.  Beckoning me to eat them.  “Ro-bert….Robert eat us and you’ll be KING OF THE WORLD!”

I could resist no longer and I put them in my mouth.  Each gelatinous blob busting in my teeth like some twisted boil full of sugary pus.  Needless to say, I had to spit the entire mess out immediately.

Of course, there was only one way to wash the taste of this horrible concoction out of my mouth.  And since I couldn’t find any Crystal Pepsi, I settled for Old Faithful.

So I’ve got a 12 pack of this stuff, and I want to share the love!  If you’re interested in a bottle make me an offer!  Cash, DVD swap, or naked pictures of your mom knitting (weird fetish of mine, sorry).

In the meantime, if you’d like a wonderful special Wallpaper Image of ORBITZ balls in my palm surrounded by harmonious nature, just click the thumbnail image above!

-Robert Berry
rberry@retrocrush.com

To the editor of the Post

Re: Rush Limbaugh aka Brave Rush the Stout
Nine Points to Ponder

1. Since Brave Rush claims to be using only half his brain, does that make him a self-admitted half wit?
2. Would you buy a used car from Brave Rush?
3. Does Brave Rush remind you of the village bully who can dish it out but can’t take it?
4. Are Brave Rush and G “Fiorello” Liddy headed for a showdown over the noon radio time slot?
5. Would Brave Rush’s book have been better titled “The Way Things Used To Be”?
6. Will Brave Rush make it to the demagogue’s Hall of Fame or will he and his movement collapse of their own weight?
7. Have some of our better department stores designated their diaper changing area as The Rush Room?
8. If Brave Rush’s talent is “on loan from God” did God short change him?
9. Would Brave Rush and his loyal brand of brain dead dittoheads be well advised to lighten up?

Sincerely,

Robert Berry
Newport, KY

Only a couple of groaners in there, but actually some pretty sharp stuff. I’m happy to learn that my Grandpa was a lot more liberal than I gave him credit for! I have some more great stuff of his to share in the weeks to come, including a single he recorded under the name Sanddune Sanders called “Drop Dead You Meathead!”

I was looking through some old ads from a 1980 magazine to put on retroCRUSH and at first glance, this SAAB ad just looked like any other boring car ad from the time, until I took a look a closer look at the driver.

Holy crap! Is that Michael Myers behind the wheel? Why on earth did they put a mask on the driver? Maybe they airbrushed the face this way to avoid paying a modeling fee? Any ideas, ad men?

Ah, 1980 was a cool time. Gotta love this vintage Smirnoff ad featuring legendary lawyer F.Lee Baily getting sauced. I don’t know if the drunk lawyer image is necessarily the best one for clients, but he did help O.J Simpson off the hook, so maybe there’s some advantages to the booze approach.

This is so horribly shitty and unfunny I can’t believe it. Of course, that’s about every episode of Family Guy. The Robot Chicken guys already did this stuff way better, why are they even bothering? Oh yeah, it’s because Star Wars fans will buy it sight unseen and making lame Star Wars jokes is like shooting fish in a barrel. LOL There’s a scene where Peter punches his wife in the face, too!

Next to superheroes fighting crimes with Hostess products, my all time favorite comic book ad featured the mysterious Count Dante who was the “Deadliest Man Alive” and looked like Angel from The Rockford Files. A truly bad-ass picture with hot pink accents, The Black Dragon Fighting Society seemed like an incredible group of warriors to me at the time. His Wikipedia article reveals amazing things including wars with rival dojos and  an alleged connection to a $4 million bank robbery. It also blew my mind to learn that Martin Kove, who played the Cobra Kai Dojo Leader Kreese in The Karate Kid attended Dante’s Dojo in the ’70s. How cool is that? I can also credit Count Dante for helping me meet Wil Wheaton. I was wearing a homemade X-Entertainment.com shirt to the 1992 San Diego Comic Convention and he stopped to talk to me about it. Count Dante may not have been the deadliest man alive, but he sure is the friendmakeringest man that’s dead.

We’re gonna start putting a ton of cool things from the private retroCRUSH collection up for bid on eBay for your cool holiday shopping needs. Just CLICK HERE to view our latest stuff. The picture above shows a handful of what we’ve already got up.

OK, so we’re late in the game plugging this, but if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s beautiful. CLICK HERE to view it in its entirety.

Dave just sent some of our best yet from 1976 and 1977 ! Dave and his brother are the kids, and the dude sporting the killer mustache and the awesome Darth Vader iron on shirt.

Keep ‘em coming! Send yours to rberry@retrocrush.com and we’ll put them up!

Leah sends us this wonderful picture and writes…

“Hi Robert,  I think your site is great.  I really enjoy reading the articles about some of the neat stuff from my childhood and also from childhoods past.  I’d like to submit a  holiday photo.  This is me with my new Big Wheel on Christmas of 1983.  I rode that bike until the plastic cracked and the groovy graphics faded and fell off. It was a sad day when I finally had to part with it.  Love the site!  Leah”

Thanks! Send your retro holiday pictures to rberry@retrocrush.com.

I am thankful for…

Busting red paper caps on the sidewalk with a rock
Teachers who would actually play the movie backward after the reel ended
Being told by Leslie in 4th grade that I was very creative
The immature giggles I still get when I see a can of “Beanie Weenie”
Drinking the sugary milk left over from a bowl of Froot Loops
The eternal mystery of what “Froot” actually is
The crackles and pops from the beginning of a song on a vinyl record
The crackles and pops from the extra big Pop Rocks when you bite them
The death flirting goodness of a chicken fried steak
Schoolhouse Rock…the only place that truly helped me understand adverbs
Lolly lolly lolly
The gentle smack of a perfect Frisbee catch
The sweet SKIIIIZZZZZZZZZZ sound of a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot knockout punch
Watching my kids do just about anything
Beating my kids at videogames
The clinically unexplainable love my wife still has for me
Anyone taking the time to read the crazy stuff I write.

Thanks!

-Robert Berry

I’m a big time fan of the great puppet animation Christmas specials by Rankin and Bass.  From “Santa Claus is Coming To Town” to “Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer” they’ve never failed to please.  My favorite, though, without a doubt, is 1974’s “A Year Without A Santa Claus”.  Mickey Rooney returns as Santa and Shirley Booth (TV’s “Hazel”) does a fantastic job as Mrs. Claus, but it’s the incredible (and all too brief) appearances by Snow Miser and Heat Miser that make the special an all time classic!

The two brothers just don’t get along.  Just like Pat Benatar said in her song, “Fire and Ice”… “you come on like a flame, but you turn a cold shoulder!”  I don’t know why I quoted that, but it makes it look like I know what I’m talking about if you’re just skimming this for the pictures.

But who’s really the better of the two Miser Brothers?  Is it “Mister 101″ or “Mister 10 Below”?  Hopefully we can settle this once and for all, with a little help from you!

Snow Miser, aka “Mr. White Christmas”, lives in the North Pole and enjoys the cold.  He sits on an icy chair and has icicles of snot growing off his gigantic nose.  The effects of the frigid temperature he dwells in have an embarrassing shrinkage effect on his unmentionables, which make him extra cranky, but his ability to make warm beer ice cold simply by touching it make him indispensable at parties.  Snow Miser was played by Dick Shawn who also played Jack Tripper’s father on “Three’s Company”, was featured in the Michael Jackson epic “Captain EO”, and died of a heart attack while performing onstage in 1986.  How’s that for hardcore?

Heat Miser, aka “Mr. Green Christmas”, lives in the bowels of Hell itself.  While eating fire and turning everything he touches into molten goo, he basks in the fiery glory and keeps his icy brother’s snow from affecting the South by turning it in to rain.  Heat Miser was played by George S. Irving who also provided voice work as “Running Board” in the short-lived cartoon “Go Go Gophers”.

Perhaps one of the creepier (yet fascinating) aspects of the Miser Brothers are the miniature versions of themselves that are ready to dance and sing show tunes with them at a moment’s notice.  Long before Dr. Evil had a Mini-Me version of himself made to stave off loneliness, these two made multiple tiny copies that could shake a leg like nobody else!

Snow Miser had little buddies who wore top hats and danced with precision and grace.  (NOTE: To the asshole that hacked in to my web site and replaced the second picture with a shot from the “Ebony and Ivory” video, that’s very unprofessional, and if I find out who did it, I will kick your ass “in perfect harmony” and turn your face into “side by side on my piano keyboard” if you know what I mean).  Actually, if you think about it, the relationship between Heat and Snow Miser is an awful lot like Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney.

But speaking of ’80s videos, remember that scene in “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band, when you see this drum that looks really cool, and right when the sticks start beating on it… holy shit!  It’s full of milk!  Those Geils boys really knew how to prank you back in the day!  I dwell on this often, wondering why the hell they had milk on their drum.  If anyone knows the answer, email me and I’d love to hear it!

Heat Miser’s dancers were a little more versatile.  They had the hat wearing and singing/dancing part down, but they could also hop around on shovels as if they were some kind of crazy shovel-shaped hopping devices.

Finally we have the great songs.  Snow Miser has a song about himself that goes, “I’m Mr. White Christmas”, while Heat Miser sings to the exact arrangement, but merely changes the lyrics a bit.  I’m not sure which version came first, but they’re both pretty kickass as far as songs that brag about yourself go.

Well, clearly the arguments for Heat vs. Snow are compelling indeed.  So compelling that I can’t make up my mind, so I need your help!  Vote in the poll below and let me know what you think!

TAKE THE HEAT MISER vs. SNOW MISER POLL
AND ENJOY DEMOCRACY IN ACTION!

We’ve been testing it out a bit to work the kinks out and the retroCRUSH Message Boards are ready to rock! Talk about retro fun stuff with tons of cool retro people all over the world. CLICK HERE TO BE AN EARLY ADOPTER! IT’S ALL COMPLETELY FREE!

Some films have awful names, but were not included because they were merely based on books with awful names, hence no “The Divine Secrets of Ya Ya Sisterhood”.  Some films that didn’t quite make the cut where “Chu Chu and the Philly Flash”, “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things”, and Prince’s “Under The Cherry Moon.”  And special thanks to the fine goons in the Something Awful Forums for helping to brainstorm with this list.

#20 “STEP INTO LIQUID” 2003

If you didn’t see the poster, you’d think this movie was about walking into a bathroom with piss on the floor.

#19 “STOP OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT” 1992

I’m sure that, on paper, a film pairing the monster talents of Sylvester Stallone and Estelle Getty seemed like a great idea, but with a title like this, what little chance it had to get more than 5 people to buy a ticket was shot all to hell.  I’m still waiting for the sequel, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bea Arthur.  More clever, was the porn version, “STOP! Or My Mom Will Suck Your Cock!”

#18 “BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM” 2003

The title of this film comes from the special way that UK Soccer star David Beckham could curve the ball when he kicked it.  The film’s tagline is equally awful, “Who wants to cook Aloo Gobi when you can bend a ball like Beckham?”  I can’t wait for the baseball themed sequel, “Bend Me Like Piazza”.

#17 “K-PAX” 2001

I don’t know if this is a movie, some kind of menstrual aid, or a Smooth Jazz radio station!

#16 “HALF PAST DEAD” 2002

I laughed out loud when I first saw the commercial for this.  “Half Past Dead” sounds like one of the phony McBain action movies they’d show on an episode of “The Simpsons”.

#15 “BREAKIN’ 2 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO” 1984

Perhaps the worst titled sequel of all time, “Electric Boogaloo” has become the catch phrase of choice for anyone making fun of a Part 2.  The original title, “Breakin’ 2: The Quickening” was scrapped, but later picked up as a part of the Highlander film series.

#14 “K-19 THE WIDOWMAKER” 2002

For some reason, I keep thinking of “Mentos: The Freshmaker” when I see this horribly titled film mentioned.  Movies with crazy letter/number combinations like K2, U1571, THX-1138, and the bestiality classic k9-694U always make me scratch my head in disgust.

#13 “BLACKMALE” 2000

While the gang at the Something Awful forums was helping me brainstorm ideas, Mr. Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka himself reminded me of this crappily titled masterpiece.  The pun is just idiotic, though the lead actor, “Bokeem Woodbine” has a name that’s nearly as ridiculous.  You see, he’s black and he’s a male!  This same film company is ready to release the new Woody Allen film, “OLDJEW”.

#12 “EEGAH” 1962

There’s not too many films with as incomprehensible of a title as this one, which features the tale of a caveman that falls in love with a teenage hottie.  The 1962 film was also released as “EEGAH! The Name Written In Blood!”  More like written in shit…AM I RIGHT?

#11 “RAT PFINK A BOO BOO” 1966

All I can say, is “What the Phuck?”  Ray Dennis Steckler is about as nice and approachable of a guy in film you’ll ever have the pleasure of meeting, but his skills at titling his movies are only slightly worse than his skill at making them!  The film was actually supposed to be “Rat Pfink and Boo Boo” but the printer screwed up and wrote “Rat Pfink A Boo Boo” instead.  Steckler didn’t have enough cash to reprint them, so he just left it as is.  Of course, the confusion of the film’s title persists to this day, as the picture of the DVD above shows, as they try to add the “AND” back in, but spell “Pfink” differently.

#10 “BALLISTIC ECKS vs. SEVER” 2002

It takes a special kind of genius to fuck up a movie featuring Lucy Liu in skin tight leather, but somehow they do it, no thanks to the ridiculous title.  If you say “Ecks Vs. Seer” 10 times fast, you can raise the dead.

#9 “GIGLI” 2003

This movie had train wreck written all over it, largely in part to the insipid title, which had to be accompanied with a phonetic pronunciation guide in the press kits insisting reporters say it like, “Gee-Lee”.  It would have been more honest, and easier to pronounce, if they just titled the film “Shit”.

#8 “HONEY I BLEW UP THE KID” 1992

This shocking title seems more like a training film for Hamas, than something Disney would have released.  Of course, when you let the director of Re-Animator, Stuart Gordon, write a kid’s film, you’re just asking for trouble.

#7 “LEONARD PART 6″ 1987

Cosby was on top of the world in the 80s.  His show was the number one thing on TV, and people were buying Jell-O Pudding Pops like they were going out of style.  But for some reason, they just couldn’t put him in movies that anyone cared about.  The confusingly named “Leonard Part 6″ just baffled that hell out of the moviegoing public.  See, he was this spy, and this was supposed to be the 6th episode in his series of spy films, even though it was the first one.  You can only pull that sort of shit, if you throw “A New Hope” on top of it.

#6 “HOPE FLOATS” 1998

One couldn’t help but think of something else that floats when looking at the title of this film.

#5 “JESSE JAMES MEETS
FRANKENSTEIN’S DAUGHTER” 1966

This film is bad from top to bottom.  I just can’t imagine a boy in 1966 getting excited about seeing this showdown of titans.  What the hell?  Its like they just pulled 2 names out of the “Crappy Character Hat” and were forced to make a movie about it on a dare.  The same director, William Beaudine (who had a remarkably long career going back to 1910!), also directed “Billy The Kid Meets Dracula” the same year!  Yep, 1966 was a golden time for shitty cowboy vs. monster films.  It’s too bad that he died before he could finish “Doc Holliday vs. The Creature From The Black Lagoon’s Retarded Sister.”

#4 “GLEAMING THE CUBE” 1989

More a euphemism for masturbation than a title for a film, this movie took a supposed “well known” term to appeal to hard core skaters, and just made them laugh.  So ridiculous, the title was, that it was renamed “A Brother’s Justice” when it was released on network television.  And now you know…the rest of the story!

#3 “MANOS: HANDS OF FATE” 1966

Certainly, if were not for the Mystery Science Theater treatment of this film, nobody would have ever heard of “Manos: Hands of Fate” which when translated completely from Spanish means “Hands: Hands of Fate”.

#2 “ATTACK OF THE CLONES” 2002

It takes a lot to turn Star Wars fans against the great George Lucas, but months before the film was released, they rallied against the ridiculous subtitle of Episode 2 with more fury than the news that N*SYNC was going to guest star in the film.  “Prelude to Darkness” even “Nerds In Paradise” would have been a better subtitle than “Attack of The Clones”.

#1 “THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES” 1963

Yes, the same man that brought you “Rat Pfink A Boo Boo” brought you this incomprehensibly titled film.  The film’s director, Ray Dennis Steckler, originally titled the film “The Incredibly Strange Creature: Or Why I stopped Living and Became a Mixed-up Zombie”, but under legal threats from Columbia Pictures, who felt it was too close to their upcoming Stanley Kubrick film, “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”  The director actually called Columbia, outraged, and demanded to speak to Kubrick himself, who ultimately got on, and was satisfied with his new title suggestion.

Many years ago we featured The Worst Superhero Costumes, and recently showcased The Best Supervillian costumes, so it was only a matter of time before we finally got around to give the best hero duds a shake. What makes a great costume? Is it a one hit wonder design that is only around for a bit but just taps in to something cool that everyone loves? Or is it an iconic design that has lasted for many decades virtually unchanged from the original pages it appeared in? We have a pretty good mixture of all these things. The Top 15 of these are a result of voting responses from a poll we featured for retroCRUSH readers, while the bottom 5 are just some personal favorites I threw in that were likely too obscure to register with the polling masses, but needed special recognition nonetheless.

I decided to leave female characters off the list, as they’ll get their own Top 20 shortly. So without further adieu…

#20 THE PHANTOM

The Phantom’s purple outfit is one of those costumes that looks absolutely ridiculous in real life, but in the comic book medium, it’s rather striking. The Phantom first appeared in comic strip form back in 1936, beating comic book heroes starting with Superman by a good 2 years. Though there haven’t been too many purple heroes since then, you have to give The Phantom credit for being the first costumed hero to wear tights, and have a mask with blank white eyes (which they took out of theatrical version with Billy Zane) that became a staple from heroes ranging from Batman to Wolverine in the years to follow.

#19 CAPTAIN MARVEL
(ORIGINAL MARVEL COMICS VERSION)

If there was ever a superhero costume that embodied the retroCRUSH spirit, it’s the original ’60s version of Marvel Comics’ Captain Marvell (or Mar-Vell, if you must). Green and white is such a neat color combination for costumes that I totally dig. I’d have put The Spectre here, too, but he’s more or less just underwear and a cape. Jim Starlin later redesigned the costume into a neat red blue and yellow number that was made with cheap Chinese fabric that ultimately gave the good Captain cancer. Always stick with your roots.

#18 ULTRAMAN

Despite the 800 different revamps of his outfit since original ’60s TV series, I’ll always have a fond place in my heart for the original silver and red getup that Ultraman first wore. I always wanted to be Ultraman for Halloween, but always ended up getting stuck being Casper or Leo Sayer. My mother was very cruel.

#17 GHOST RIDER

How could you not totally love a guy who rides a motorcycle with a flaming skull? My good buddy and retroCRUSH contributor Bradley Mason Hamlin and I were arguing last evening about whether or not Ghost Rider even wears a costume, since he really just sort of turns into a monster, but the outfit he has, natural or not, is probably one of the more fearsome and striking of them all.

#16 THE ROCKETEER

Dave Stevens’ ’80s comic only lasted a handful of issues which spawned a very underrated movie, but it’s a gorgeous simple and striking design that looks as cool and fresh as the day it was created. The slick aviator outfit, the simple but menacing looking jetpack, and the streamlined art-deco inspired helmet is simply kick ass.

#15 THE PUNISHER

The Punisher’s costume is one of those rare outfits that would actually look cool on someone in real life. As much as Batman is supposed to strike fear in the hearts of criminals with his cape and pointy ears, he’d likely strike as much laughter into them if he actually went around wearing it in the real world. The single menacing skull on top of an otherwise black getup (which has gone from all spandex, to disgruntled high school goth coat look through the decades), tells you everything you need to know about Frank Castle. Trouble is coming.

#14 GOLDEN AGE SANDMAN

I’ll admit that Sandman perhaps looked a bit more silly back in the golden age of comics, but when he got a more grim ’90s revamp courtesy of Matt Wagner’s “Sandman Mystery Theater” the more darkly drawn version made him seem a lot more menacing, creepy, and even kinky. Sure, he’s basically just a dude with a gasmask on, but he’s scary as hell. Once I had entered a short film competition put on by The Sacramento Film Festival in which all the entrants had to show up and get the surprise theme to proceed making a 10 minute film within 10 days on. One of the guys that showed up was wearing a gas mask that looked just like this and talked through a 70s era tape deck that was strapped to his belt. I thought it was a put on, but apparently he was some guy with a mysterious disability. The festival organizer told me the film he submitted was unusable because it was just 10 minutes of him having sex with an inflatable doll. I don’t know why I brought that up, but I’d still love to figure out what that guy was all about.

#13 WOLVERINE

When he first appeared in #181 of The Incredible Hulk (or #180 if you’re a nitpicky dork), Wolverine had one of the most ridiculous costumes of them all, complete with whiskers. Now the brown themed combo used above is my personal favorite, but the yellow/blue/black versions that have appeared through the years are pretty nice, too. Wolverine also has one of the coolest masks for a costume ever made, too. Too bad they never tried to use it in any of the movies.

#12 AQUAMAN

Bradley Mason Hamlin wrote in his retroCRUSH Aquaman tribute a couple years back, “Aquaman’s costume was very aesthetically pleasing, orange shirt, black trunks, and aquatic green leggings. His gloves originally appeared yellow, but someone wisely changed them to green to match the legs. Sadly, that one change, the yellow gloves for the green, in my opinion, remained the only wise change that occurred with this classic character.” For a few issues in an ’80s limited series, Aquaman sported a pretty kickass ocean camouflage costume that disappeared about as soon as it arrived.

#11 CAPTAIN MARVEL

Captain Marvel got one of the biggest shafts in comic book history. Debuting just a couple years after Superman first appeared, he quickly became one of the best selling characters of all time, especially during war time years where comic book sold an insane amount of copies to a market of kids who were buying them because they actually enjoyed reading them, not just putting them in a plastic bag so that they’d be kept in mint condition for all eternity. Superman’s creators, DC comics, successfully sued Fawcett publications for trademark infringement and Cap was taken off the market. In the meantime, Marvel Comics stepped in and made their own Captain Marvel, and took over the retired trademark. DC ironically bought the rights to the original Captain Marvel after that but since Marvel owned the trademark, had to call his books Shazam, instead. The difficulty in marketing this character, and his long hiatus from the public eye made him very hard to sell and sales of new Captain Marvel books always seem to disappoint. But about the costume!

What a fantastic and powerful looking outfit. Like The Phantom, it looks better in a comic than it does in real life, but it’s just such a fun mix of red and yellow with the prominent thunderbolt on the chest. Hell, you could argue that DC’s Flash ripped off Marvel’s look more than he ripped off Superman.

PROTIP: Captain Marvel creator CC Beck used the face of Fred MacMurray as a design inspiration.

#10 THE FLAMING CARROT

Bob Burden’s wonderfully ridiculous Flaming Carrot certainly has the wackiest costume of all time. But despite having a giant carrot mask with a can of Sterno on top, and green scuba flippers he still manages to come off as one of most suave and cool motherfuckers to ever grace the pages of a comic strip. Martini in hand with a gaggle of bikini clad beach babes, it’s clear that despite the occasional odd glance, the costume doesn’t hold him back. His origin story perhaps provides some insight as to why he chose this awesome getup, as he read 5,000 comic books in a single sitting (on a dare) and received permanent brain damage as a result. It’s a parable for our times. Flaming Carrot remains one of the funniest comic books ever published. CLICK HERE to check out his official site.

#9 DR. STRANGE

Hands down, the coolest cape in comic book history! That being said, I also have a soft spot for Steve Ditko’s original capeless design for the character, too (below).

Both designs were expertly crafted by Ditko, and befitting of an older gentleman who lived in a world of sorcery and magic, instead of just flying around and busting through doors. An all time classic that has changed little in the 40 plus years he’s existed.

#8 SPACE GHOST

Alex Toth designed this great character back in 1966 and hit a grand slam during the original design (above). Elements from Batman and Superman are mixed with a rare white costume base that superheroes can rarely pull off successfully. Obviously there’s a lot less dirt in space. There’s a nice feature on Toth and his work if you pick up the complete Space Ghost/Dino-Boy DVD set.

#7 THE SHADOW

I was concerned as to how far into the pulp hero world I should go back, while still keeping the term, superhero. Green Hornet, for example, has a fun costume but nothing so brilliant about it to deserve “all time best” recognition. The Shadow, however, has one of the most simple and effective outfits out there, and deserves praise. Brad pointed out that The Shadow is pretty much just dressed as a cowboy, but damnit if The Shadow ain’t the sexiest spooky cowboy the world has ever seen. The red scarf over his face is a simple mask, while his black clothing accented with a red interior to his cape, make him pretty damn awesome. Check out the very underrated Shadow movie starring Alec Baldwin to see how cool the costume can really be.

#6 GREEN LANTERN

Probably no other superhero has gone from bad to good costumes than Green Lantern. The original Green Lantern, who first appeared in 1940, clearly had his Garanimals tags mixed up, with a garish red, yellow, black, and green combination that clearly demonstrated that the power ring rendered its owner Alan Scott color blind. In 1959, Gil Kane gave the character a reboot with the innovative green, white, and black number that only with slight variation has remained the same ever since. Green Lantern’s costume is a personal favorite of mine, and works well as a uniform of The Green Lantern Corp, as well. It’s certainly one of the more aesthetically pleasing costumes ever made.

#5 CAPTAIN AMERICA

Captain America’s costume is cool because it’s all about America, baby! The only thing that could only make it cooler would be to have an eagle crying in the center of the shield next to the World Trade Center Wreckage. Freedom isn’t free! God Bless America! Love it or Leave it! If you don’t speak the language, get out of our country! Bros before Hos! That which make ya may also break ya! A stitch in time saves nine. FREEEEEEEEEEEEDOM!

#4 IRON MAN

The photo from the upcoming Iron Man film above is already giving comic book geeks raging nerdgasms all over the world. After seeing countless superhero costumes fucked up in movie adaptations (Bat-Nipples, anyone?), it’s great to see those Hollywood jackholes actually sit down and get things right for a change! Iron Man has had quite a few cool suits of armor through the years, and from the secret footage I’ve already seen, it looks like they get them ALL right.

This is probably my favorite incarnation of all the Iron Man costumes. It was right when he ditched the Frankenstein looking outfits he’d been relying on and got the more form fitting and slightly devilish number you see above. It also should be noted that the legendary Steve Ditko designed this, which is funny since he’s generally more famous for the freaky metaphysical art from Dr. Strange or wacky Spider-Man villains he co-created with Stan Lee.

#3 SUPERMAN

How can you leave off Superman? This is one of the few overrides I did with the reader poll, because the retroCRUSH fans voted his costume at #11, and I say “What the fuck?” to that! C’mon folks, Superman is the costume that started all superhero costumes. And aside from a slight insignia change, it’s remained more or less unchanged since he first appeared 70 years ago. Though his mom made him the costume out of his baby blanket, so the smell of Kryptonian spit-up has been awfully hard to wash out.

#2 SPIDER-MAN

While comic books had been a decades old institution in 1962, Steve Ditko was able to dream up one of the more original and beautiful designs for any superhero. A gorgeous design that has survived the decades. It’s so nice to look at that even after a well received and badass black and white costume variant in the 80s (which later split and went to Venom) the good old red and blue looked just as good as ever when it came back. It’s amazing how well this costume works, considering it has the most un-spider colors you could possibly imagine. I used to love drawing Spider-Man on notebook paper in school. There’s something so wonderfully meditative about drawing all of that intricate webbing, like walking through a labyrinth. The webbing was so intricate, as a matter of fact, that they omitted a lot of it on the costume in the 1962 cartoon to reduce animation expense. I also like the costume because it really looks like something a teenage geeky boy would make in his room.

True embarrassing confession time. When I was a high school junior at Arroyo High School in San Lorenzo, they had a career dress up day. You were supposed to come to school dressed in your ideal career. I decided to come to school dressed as Spider-Man. Of course, this wasn’t a store bought costume, but one I made myself. It was horrible, and I can’t believe nobody beat me up. The sketch I drew above pretty much tells you the story about how horrible it looked. In order to achieve the “white eye” effect, I used an innovative approach of sliding index cards under the mask, allowing about 1/32″ of space in the inside corner of each eye to see out of. How on earth did I even survive high school, anyway?

#1 BATMAN

Among retroCRUSH readers polled, Batman was the runaway favorite by a long shot. Though Batman was conceived by Bob Kane in 1939, we have his writing partner Bill Finger to thank for not making him look like a complete dork. Kane’s original design reportedly had a Lone Ranger style mask, giant black wings, bare hands, and a mostly red set of tights. The story goes that Finger suggested the cape, glove, and mask changes, and got rid of the red (which is funny, considering Finger was responsible for the very ugly original Green Lantern costume). Batman’s costume is so badass, because it was actually designed to strike fear into the hearts of criminals. In the original and some later incarnations of the outfit, you could really imagine a thief shitting his pants after seeing Batman pop down in an alleyway. Batman’s costume is also so great because it give so much leeway for artists to interpret in different ways that best suit their style. Berni Wrightson and the late Marshall Rogers are probably my favorite Batman artists, but as you can see from the gallery below, his costume has always been a great way for artists to show us what they’ve got.

Bob Kane	Jerry Robinson	Dick Sprang	Carmine Infantino
Neal Adams	Marshall Rogers	Berni Wrightson	Jim Aparo
Frank Miller	Brian Bolland	Bill Siekiewicz	Mike Zeck
Kelly Jones	Jim Lee	Bruce Timm	Alex Ross

Something tells me in 100 years, Batman’s costume will still be the coolest of all time.

-Robert Berry
rberry@retrocrush.com

Hello Robert Berry!

First let me say that the new RetroCrush look is awesome! I really enjoy your site as it helps me relive the golden past of my youth. I would like to submit a holiday photo of me and my siblings on Christmas day 1973. Check out my surprised look opening a “Safari” set that included a rifle with strap, binoculars and of course, a canteen. I think it was bought from Sears back in the day. You’re welcome to use this photo if it helps with your montage of retro holiday pictures.

I’m a huge fan of your site and your love of the past. I wear my RetroCrush T-shirt with pride! Take care Robert Berry. You have the greatest job on earth!!

Thanks, Dana! You’re awesome! I love the vintage console TV in the background! My friend Bill Emery used to have a wide model like that had folding doors that covered the screen that we accidentally melted when we opened one against a space heater! The drippy molten look was pretty awesome for watching scary movies on in later days.

Keep sending your pictures to rberry@retrocrush.com and we’ll put them up!

In the late ’70s and into the ’80s, Marvel Comics made a substantial amount of comic books that were based on licensed characters that they did not create. And as time passed and deals expired, they were no longer able to reprint the work. You’ll notice this in collections like “Marvel Essentials” where the team up with The Thing and Doc Savage in Marvel Two In One is omitted. And though Dark Horse owns the Conan publishing rights now, and can reprint the original Marvels, they can’t bring back the swell What If? issues featuring Conan fighting Captain America in modern times.

Another fun series in limbo is the well done ROM The Space Knight. Originally a comic to cash in on a short lived pricey action figure, it lasted 75 issues and had some crossover appearances by The X-Men, Power Man and Iron Fist, Dr. Strange, and The Sub-Mariner. Marvel won’t reprint them and those particular issues are off limits to anyone else.

Probably one of the coolest series that this affects is Marvel’s excellent Micronauts saga that was written by Bill Mantlo and featured gorgeous Michael Golden art and covers. In particular was the 7th issue which featured the little dudes fighting The Man-Thing, which is still one of my favorite comic book covers of all time.

What a kick to run into comic book creator Mark Todd at the 2009 Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco and see that he did this alternate version of the cover.

Fortunately, most of the comics mentioned in this article are fairly easy to come by. Back issues from this period aren’t particularly rare, and you can often fine entire runs of a series for not much above the original cover price if you aren’t a freak about condition and just want good reading copies.

This was filmed on October 11th in less than ideal outdoor situations, but thanks to Jace Whitman for helping us make the best of it! Note to self: wearing sunglasses and a tshirt during an interview indeed does make you look like a douchebag! You can CLICK HERE and read it!

Ok…if you’re 8 or just immature like me, this commercial will make you giggle every time!

This was a pretty good jingle that’s still pretty memorable after all these years. There was no less than 10 different ads through the years that used this great tune. I wonder when Roller Disco will finally come back?

Got any great retro/vintage holiday photos to share! Send them to me at rberry@retrocrush.com and we’ll feature them here on retroCRUSH! The cool dude above is a 2 year old ME from around 1971. Gotta love those awesome pants and my kickin’ trike!

I am so excited that the latest Twilight Movie is out. Mormon vampire novels are my favorite sub genre of tween Vampire fiction, and seeing Edward Cullen and his vampire buddies steam up the screen again is a pure delight! Usually I have to hang around Hot Topic all day and talk to fellow Twilight fans, but now that TWILIGHT 2: ELECTRIC MOONAROO is out, I can finally commune with my fellow creatures of the night (nobody understands me) in the comfort of the theater.

I saw an early preview last night and it was fantastic. I am definitely on TEAM EDWARD with this one, because he is so dreamy. I don’t know what Bella thinks about werewolves, but they are smelly and icky and don’t deserve my attention. Go back out in the doghouse and stay there with your girlfriend TAYLOR SWIFT. LOL!

My favorite part about the new Twilight Movie is pretty much every seen with R-PATS in it. That’s what cool people call the lead actor, Robert Pattinson. If you’re like me and cried at the end of Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire because his character Cedric Diggory died, you’ll be happy to know that he does NOT die at the end of Twilight New Moon. In fact, he will actually live in my heart forever, regardless of what ever happens to him.

I brought an Edward doll with me to the film and he sat on my lap while we watched the movie together. It was the next best thing to going to the Hollywood premiere with RPATS himself. LOL! I don’t know what I would do if I actually got to sit by the real RPATS. I would be like flying a Unicorn over rainbows. Only that’s too happy for Goths like me so it’d have to be like a Kestral riding over dark clouds. LOL!

Anyway, if you like great movies that are great with great awesome handsome people in it that are great, you should totally see Twilight New Moon because it is a GREAT MOVIE!

You can’t talk about great movie “bad guys” without mentioning Billy Zabka’s excellent portrayal of Johnny Lawrence in The Karate Kid. As Cobra Kai’s champ du jour, Zabka was able to create an all time classic jerk that was complex enough to make you feel sorry for him. It was Zabka’s first film role and he went on to play more legendary assholes in Just One Of The Guys and Back To School. Keeping busy through the ’80s and ’90s, he made a short film, Most in 2003, which was a film festival darling that ended up getting an Academy Award nomination. Johnny may not have won the All Valley Karate Championship in 1984, but decades later he’s soaking up acclaim for his film work, never having to revisit that troubled dojo again.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE “SWEEP THE LEG” VIDEO
DO YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THAT?

That is, until he created a brilliant video for newcomer rockers No More Kings for their song “Sweep The Leg” which reunites the Cobra Kai gang, 20 years later. With nearly every living player from the original film making an appearance, it’s a hilarious and kickass video and brilliant tribute to the beloved film. What if Johnny had a second chance? What if, indeed…

Billy talked with us about the video, and indulged our fanboy questions in an exclusive interview that we’re honored to share with you.

So how did the “Sweep The Leg” video come about?

The artist from the label and I just hit it off and started hanging out. Next thing he’s talking to the guy who owns the label, we’re driving, we know the guy who owns Astonish Adam DeGraide, he freaks out that I’m in the car with him and says, “No way my other band just wrote a song today, I just got it on my desk, my email, on “Sweep The Leg”, I gotta talk to this guy.” So he showed me the song and sent it to me, I got a little kick out of it, but that was pretty much it, but I wasn’t really planning on doing anything until I started sitting down with the artist and heard all their music and got to know the label. You know The Karate Kid is kind of a sacred thing, maybe better left untouched. But I got an idea that if we do something a little fun and retro hip and cool, not take it seriously I think we could have a good time with it. So that’s how it came about.

Originally they just wanted me in the video, and I was just gonna do it, but kind of threw out that if it goes the right way, I threw out I was pretty sure I could get some of the guys involved, but I said if it goes the right way and we get the right vision executed, I’m pretty sure I could get some of the guys involved. I’m sure I could get the Cobra Kais involved, Marty Kove, maybe Ralph even. You know, Ralph would be the last one to jump on board…but it kind of grew from there. I wrote a treatment for them, and the label loved it, got my team together, next thing I know, I got everybody.

How hard was it to assemble the old gang again for the video? Have you guys kept in touch or was this a long overdue reunion?

Ralph and I connected last year over Pat’s (Morita) memorial service, you know Miyagi died last year. We reconnected there and exchanged information and everything.  The Cobra Kai guys and I have been on and off buddies throughout the years. We’ve kept in touch individually, not as a pack…we were all friends, it was a really tight group we had on that film. The times we shared, it was a pretty cool thing, so we kept in touch. It wasn’t too hard, everyone got excited. At first it was a little tentative to dish up that part of our lives, and bring it back to the surface, after we were handling it in a comedic way, everyone dug it and jumped on.

It’s a pretty faithful recreation of that final scene at the end, I was surprised at how seamless it looked when compared to the original movie.

It felt like it, honestly, when we were on the set. My art department was amazing. As soon as Marty Kove showed up, and then Pat Johnson who was the referee in the film…for the two hours that we filmed on that soundstage, it was really electric. The crowd was amazing, and you know it was just really…it just felt liked it looked, like we were just back in time somehow…then the set got torn down and it didn’t exist anymore. It was really fun.

I’ve read some message boards where people were talking about the video and they were saying like “Well…that’s the Karate Kid sequel we wanted to see!”

That’s the Karate Kid sequel that Johnny wanted to see, that’s the end of Karate Kid 1 he wanted.

Exactly

So, you know, it’s a fun alternate ending. But yeah, it could be the Karate Kid 5.

Why do you think Johnny Lawrence is such a fan favorite, why does that character endear to people after all this time?

I don’t know, honestly, I think it’s just kind of beyond me. But Johnny kind of embodies the dark side of all of us in a way. He wasn’t really a bad guy. He wasn’t Darth Vader. He was just kind of a misled character. It gave him a little license to be a bad-ass. But why it stuck so much? I don’t know, I mean cool marches on. Johnny seems to be cooler today and more liked today than he was when the film came out.

The thing is about Johnny’s character is that he wasn’t really wrong in his point of view. He had a legitimate reason for going after his character (Danny). He took his girlfriend and he used the tools that he knew. So he wasn’t all bad. That makes him kind of special. He’s human.

You mentioned being at Pat Morita’s funeral last year. How great was it to work with him during that movie?

Oh man, he was just the sweetest, funniest, most generous person you’d ever want to meet. A really beautiful guy. That was my first film, so he really held my hand through that. I remember when I first got the role I said, ‘This is my first movie, if you see anything that I do wrong, anything that I can do better, please just jump in and tell me.’ And I remember when we were doing the fence fight scene when he just jumps down and beats us all up, we were rehearsing that, and I was just kind of doing it half motion, not really intense in rehearsal. He pulled me aside and said, “Billy, Billy, Billy, when you go in there and do the rehearsals, you’ve got to give 150% cause then when the cameras are rolling, you’re like bread and butter, you’re right there!” So he really helped me. A lot of the intensity was in the actual footage came from all the hours of rehearsing and we were really amped up. So he was great to work with. Just professional, a beautiful guy.

Pat and I kept in touch the most over the years. In fact a couple years ago before he passed away last year, we talked on the phone and he was talking about wanting to do another Karate Kid, he actually wanted to a sequel where Miyagi dies and they have a proper Okinawan burial for him where they send him out to the ocean with all of these flowers on a raft.

Wow

Yeah, so he wasn’t done with Miyagi. He really wanted to do another sequel. When I cast Mr. Belding Dennis Haskins in this video, Dennis worked with Pat and knew him really well, and the one thing that made me really want to use Dennis was that he really wanted to do a fun tribute to Pat in this because he was a really good friend. So it was kind of neat to have someone in there representing Pat, in this video. But anyway, he was just a loveable guy. He was the real deal.

Now another great comedian you got to work with was Rodney Dangerfield. Did you have special experiences working with him in Back to School?

Oh yeah, Rodney was hysterical. The day I met Rodney it was in Madison, Wisconsin and we were on the campus ready to film all the school stuff. I remember getting on an elevator, getting ready to go to my hotel, and as I’m going up he’s going down and he’s wearing this robe and I said, “Hey Rodney, I’m Billy Zabka and I’m working with you on the film!” and he said, “Yeah yeah…I know who you are, how’re ya doin?” And I said, “What are you doing in the robe?” and he said, “Hey, I’m going to the sauna, I gotta get the pot out of my lungs!” (laughs) That was the first thing he said.

And at the end when he does that triple lindy on the diving board, of course they had a diving double come in, so they had this prosthetic on the double that looked exactly like Rodney Dangerfield…this 4 inch thick padding, and Rodney was just freaking out, “Hey…I don’t look like that! I’m ugly but I’m not that ugly!” Just a great guy. Really sweet guy and a lot of fun. I’m gonna miss him a lot.

We used to go to all of his stand up stuff, too. We used to go and watch him at The Comedy Store and Laugh Factory and all that. Just a good guy.

Your short film Most was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, can you tell me a little about the movie?

We filmed it in Europe. It was shot in Prague and in Poland. It’s 30 minutes long. We left right after 9/11 to make this film. It was kind of a shock of what happened…and we wanted to make a movie that showed the value of life. So we went and this story in mind, my partner Bobby Garabedian and I who directed it, we got on an airplane and went to Europe with just an idea of this movie we wanted to make. But we didn’t have a script or any money. We had no locations, we just knew it was out there somewhere. So we went on a 2 month tour through Europe and traveled through 8 countries until we landed in Prague, and then we wrote it, and cast it, and the money came last. It was really a miracle making the movie. The next thing we know we’re premiering it at Sundance and this big festival tour, we won all of these festivals. Next thing we know we’re walking the red carpet at The Oscars. It was pretty awesome.

What’s it like hearing your film read off as a nominee right before the winner is announced? That’s just got to be like nothing else.

It’s very surreal. It’s amazing. We were up until 5 in the morning watching The Academy online announcing the nominees. Just seeing your name there makes it all worth it. It was 2 years to make that film, and we invested in it ourselves. It was a lot of pride and a lot of fun….pretty cool.

You can check the movie out if you want to get it at MOSTTHEMOVIE.com.

Your father was working in Hollywood when you were growing up. I saw that he did the original Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show theme?

Yeah. You know my Mom and Dad actually met on the Johnny Carson show back in New York. My Mom was Johnny Carson’s brother’s assistant and my Dad was the Associate Director of The Tonight Show…so I was raised pretty much in entertainment. My Dad worked at NBC studios, he’s an Emmy Award winning director of soap operas. As a kid we moved out to California and he started working with Clint Eastwood in Any Which Way But Loose…those kind of movies. He did Midnight Run with DeNiro as an Assistant Director and Unit Production Manager. So I was pretty much raised in show business.

At what point did you decide that the acting business was for you?

I started doing commercials when I was 10. All my Dad’s friends had kids and they were all in commercials, so it was like the thing to do. My Dad said, “Whatever you do, don’t take it seriously. If it gets to be too serious, just go play football or something, don’t let it run your life.” So I always had that “hold it loosely” perspective, and I always had fun with it. It’s something I loved to do.

In fact, I remember when my parents first asked me if I wanted to be in commercials, I asked them if we had enough money to be on TV, because I thought you had to pay…that’s how much I loved doing it. When I found ought you got paid, I was like, “You’re kidding me! This is like the greatest job in the world.”

Were you ever approached to be in any of the other Karate Kid sequels? Or was that never going to be a part of the storylines in any kind of way?

Well, the opening of The Karate Kid 2 is the original ending of the first one.

Right

And when Kreese breaks my trophy in the parking lot, that’s actually in the script of the first one. But we never filmed that because John Avildsen, the director, felt like he had his movie and he didn’t want to shoot the scene. So the only thing I did was that opening scene of Part 2, which was the ending scene of Part 1. After that, they switched out everybody except Ralph and Pat.

Now that’s kind of an urban legend you just dispelled there because that opening of Karate Kid 2 was not leftover footage from the first movie, that was actually all new shot for Part 2?

Yeah, that was all re-shot for the sequel.

What’s the secret to playing a great bully.  Does it just come naturally? Or is there something special you do to get in character?

A lot of people, when they approach a bully role, they think, “I’m the bad guy”, but I think the key to being a good bad guy is to look at yourself as the hero. So where if the movie was told from your point of view, you’d actually be the good guy.

That actually makes a lot of sense, like the character of Johnny, especially, he was Ali’s boyfriend before Danny comes around so he obviously wasn’t a complete jerk. He has that bit of redemption at the end of the movie, as well.

Exactly. You kind of justify your character’s actions in his own world. This is how Johnny would be. Make the character three dimensional. Give him a back story. Give him something in your subconscious that’s below the radar that’s human and broken. And I think somehow, somewhere that comes out in a look, in a moment, and that character goes from being a two dimensional asshole into a three dimensional person that you can love to hate. There’s a fine line between hating somebody and really enjoying to hate somebody (laughs).

Well that’s a lot of depth to add to a character for what was your first movie role. How did you even get that kind of preparation when you’re 18 years old?

Well it’s so funny, because I’m known for my bad guys, but I’m the complete polar opposite of anything I’ve ever played before. For Johnny, I really was surprised that I got the part, because I didn’t know Karate. I never rode a motor cycle. The last thing I did before The Karate Kid was a milk commercial. I was just this nice young American kid.

When I was training for The Karate Kid I had an amazing Karate instructor taught me the right way to learn Karate and the wrong way to learn Karate. Really my martial arts training built in this attitude that I got to bring to the role. So I kind of already had the good guy in me, and he kind of just got layers heaped on top of him. At the core of Johnny, he’s really just a rightful guy. What he did was kind of screwed up, but I think you’d like to hang out with him.

What can you tell me about your upcoming films Cake and The Man In The Silo?

Man In The Silo is a short film I did for a buddy of mine that directed that, Phil Donlon, with Ernie Hudson. It’s kind of a psychological thriller short film. Cake was another friend’s (film), Will Wallace directed it. That’s about a wedding that goes wrong. I’m the ex-boyfriend of the bride that runs away from the wedding.

I did a cameo in a movie that’s out right now that I didn’t take a credit on called Smiley Face with Anna Faris. That just premiered at Sundance, and it’ll be out…I don’t know when. So those are the two most recent ones I’ve shot and I’ve got a few films in development right now that I’m looking to write and direct.

You’re certainly keeping busy there, that’s for sure.

Yeah, you know. Gotta keep the wheels turning.

Was it frustrating to have your character lose to Ralph Macchio’s character, knowing you could mop up the floor with him in real life?

(laughs) Yeah…it was real frustrating. I actually won that tournament it’s actually just the way they edited it that made me look like I lost. (laughs) No, you know…no…you don’t feel like that. It’s acting and that was the pivotal moment of the whole movie. If that final kick didn’t work, the whole movie didn’t work. The crane kick. We rehearsed that fight scene for three months. Four hours a day, five days a week, it was just like clockwork so we could make that last moment, that crane kick, pay off. So him winning, was me winning, you know? If that kick worked, then the movie worked, then we’re all gravy.

It’s a great moment, that’s for sure.

Well thanks again for taking the time to talk to us. Just to remind people that they can check out your film Most if they go to MOSTTHEMOVIE.com. And you even have a MySpace page, I understand?

Yeah, you can go to Cobra Kai Never Die on MySpace.com and join the fun.

Best of luck to you with all you have going on.

Best of luck to you and your website.

Thanks, Billy!

-Robert Berry
rberry@retrocrush.com

I was hungry, so I looked in my freezer and all I had was fish sticks and a World Wrestling Federation Ice Cream bar. No way in hell am I gonna eat fish sticks, so I guess the choice is easy. Why the hell are fish sticks in my freezer, anyway? I never have the patience to bake them the right way, I always just microwave ‘em and they end up all greasy and floppy.

Though Ice Cream alone is no kind of dinner. I better have something to drink, too. And what better than some of that fancy wine from the new Jack Tripper vineyards down in Napa. Thank god I live in wine country. I wonder which wrestler’s gonna be on that ice cream. The box shows a picture of The Rock on it. How fitting for a treat that’s half vanilla and half chocolate.

Yippeee! THE UNDERTAKER! What better character to enjoy emblazoned on an ice cream treat than The Lord of The Undead himself?  Rock on! I can’t wait to take a bite.

Holy crap…I haven’t eaten something this shitty before since they closed down SIZZLER! ACK! UNDERTAKER ICE CREAM BARS TASTE LIKE THE DEAD! I can’t eat this..what a waste of money. Maybe I can get my dog to eat it…

Hey, Loki…come here…have a bit of this scrumptious treat!

That’s it boy…eat it all up!

LOKI: RUFF! RUFF RUFF BOW WOOOOOOOOOOOOO! (translation: “Jesus Chist this Ice Cream Sucks! You feed me this shit again, and I’m gonna rip your throat out while you sleep!)

ME: Hey, Mr. T. How ya doin, my brother?

MR. T: Pretty damn good, sucka! Just tryin to clear my head with some of this fine Three’s Company themed liquor you have here. But where the heck is that Mr. Roper Tequila? Damnit! I pity the fool that stole my Mr. Roper Tequila!

ME: Well hows about eating the rest of this Undertaker ice cream bar for me?

MR. T: Lemme have a bite! (munch munch) What the hell is this JIBBA JABBA? That’s some stanky danky ice cream, SUCKA!

MR. T: Mmmmmnggghhhh! Now I’m on the crapper thanks to you sucka! I’m lactose intolerant! Damnit! I PITY THE FOOL THAT MADE ME EAT THAT UNDERTAKER ICE CREAM BAR!

(Note the scientific marvel of Mr. T’s gold filled intestines, as they pass the Undertaker ice cream bar into the toilet, unscathed, and undigested. That Mr. T is one smooth operator!)

MR. T: I’m gonna kill the sucka that made that ice cream bar! UNDERTAKAH! I’m callin you out, FOOL!
KANE: Heeeee’ssss over therrrre…
UNDERTAKER: Uhhh, I’m not The Undertaker…I’m just a plastic likeness full of sour flavored gum!

MR. T: MMMmmmmmm MMmmmmmm
UNDERTAKER: AIIIEEEE! Have mercy on my chewy soul!
MR. T: Not ’til I’m through blowin’ bubbles with your undead ass!

Whilst staying at the lovely Hampton Inn in scenic Hayward, California, I was inspired to team up with the hotel chain for an epic comic book story. They generously supplied the artistic paper for this endeavor, and I thank them mightily for their trust in my talent. Please let me know if you’d like me to team up with the fine people at Hampton Inn again to create more wonderful adventures of Herbert The Unicorn!

MANY MORE PAGES…please CLICK TO CONTINUE!!!!

Being born in 1969 was the best time to be a retro-kid. I got to grow up with the best cartoons, coolest music, and witness the full range birth and evolution of video games. Best of all, I was blessed with the gift of Sesame Street from year 1 forward. So as Sesame Street and I both turn 40 this year, why not celebrate the wonderful music that made that show so memorable? The brilliantly written tunes from the show still hold up, and I can remember the words decades later as fresh as the first time I heard them. Everyone has a favorite Sesame Street song. These are the 15 that I love the most. You can click each title to watch the video on YouTube.

#15 “MONSTER IN THE MIRROR” by GROVER
How can you not like a song with the lyric “Wubba Wubba Wubba and a Whoo Whoo Whoo?” The Ramones would have killed for a song like this to sing. In fact, they did once kill a man for the lyrics to “Pet Sematary”, and frankly it was not worth the human sacrifice

#14 “ABCDEFGHI” by BIG BIRD
I had to fit ol’ Big Bird in here somehow. This is pretty much Sesame Street’s version of “Supercalifragilistic”. Did you ever notice how much Big Bird sounds like Billy Corrigan from Smashing Pumpkins?

#13 “LETTER B” by THE BEETLES
Gotta love this one! You get a great introduction by The Count, and a spot on parody of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan.

#12 “BATTY BAT” by THE COUNT
A rare song from The Count, with the super cutest bats singing background vocals. You learn about The Count’s childhood in The Carpathian Mountains and how he developed his love for counting, too!

#11 “FUZZY and BLUE” by GROVER
A catchy Grover tune that ends up into a nice ensemble piece that even includes his orange buddies by the song’s end.

#10 “THE LADYBUGS’ PICNIC” by BUD LUCKEY
One of Sesame Street’s catchiest counting song, I love the generous use of the mouth harp and kazoo. And extra points for the lyric about “fire insurance for ladybugs.”

#9 “ELMO’S SONG” by ELMO
Elmo was one of the first “new generation” muppets, and it took me a while to warm up to him, but only the most evil, cold-hearted people could hate this super cute tune. By the way, if you listen to Raffi’s “Banana Phone” you’ll notice similarity in the melody.

#8  “DANCE MYSELF TO SLEEP by ERNIE
This is a hilarious video and song combination featuring Ernie dancing himself to sleep while Bert moans in anguish in the background. The Boogie Woogie sheep are fantastic. I love how Bert moans, “Not again…” when Ernie starts, as this is some bizarre nightly ritual that he can never escape from.

#7 “THE PINBALL SONG” by THE POINTER SISTERS
One of the catchier Sesame tunes with gorgeous vintage ’70s animation, it’s definitely one of the trippier things they’ve aired. I also dig the other counting song that featured Jim Henson himself as a chef who’d fall down the stairs at the end of each tune, holding all sorts of baked goods.

#6 “DOIN’ THE PIGEON” by BERT
So dorky you have to dig it, featuring Bert at his nerdiest. His dance is about the coolest thing ever. You definitely can see where they got the inspiration for Squidward in Spongebob Squarepants after watching this. Another classic by Joe Raposo who also composed “C is For Cookie”, “Bein’ Green”, and numerous other Sesame classics!

#5 “SING AFTER ME” by GROVER and MADELINE KAHN
I didn’t want to include the celebrity guest songs too much on this list, but I made an exception with this wonderful and sweet song. The video is even funnier when you imagine Frank Oz sitting behind Kahn with his face pressed against her ass.

#4 “NUMBER 9 CUTIE” by BUD LUCKEY
How could you not love a girl with “nine little holes in her turned up nose”?

#3 “IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREEN” by KERMIT THE FROG
One of the more melancholic tunes of the Sesame Street catalog. Jim Henson’s vocals are sad, brilliant, and wonderful. And how cool is it that Big Bird sang the song at Henson’s memorial?

#2 “I LOVE TRASH” by OSCAR THE GROUCH A song about the pure love of garbage! Oscar’s asides like “If you REALLY want to see something trashy…look at this!” are fantastic! I never realized until I wrote this that the same actor who voices Oscar handles duties for Big Bird, too. What a fantastic vocal range.

#1 “C” IS FOR COOKIE by COOKIE MONSTER
That’s good enough for me…

In the original 1945 book by E.B. White, Stuart Little is a mouse born into the little family. The HUMAN little family. As fun as this premise is, it does make you wonder what that birth scene was like in the hospital? Did she go in expecting to have a human baby and the surprised doctor pulled a living mouse out of her vagina? How does the father just accept that this is OK? Is it just some bizarre cover story for his wife’s bizarre rodent fetish? Crazy stuff indeed!

I’ve long complained that Disney has been been letting their flagship character be squandered, not putting him to any sort of meaningful or relevant use, letting him be squandered as a mere corporate logo. His scant appearances on Disney TV shows like “House of Mouse” were lame, and his modern incarnation was equally bland. That’s why I was excited to see that a 2010 videogame Epic Mickey looks to bring a bit  of the fun and badass Mickey from the Steamboat Willie days of 1928 back in action.

According to the NY Times article that broke the story…

Epic Mickey, designed for Nintendo’s Wii console, is set in a “cartoon wasteland” where Disney’s forgotten and retired creations live. The chief inhabitant is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a cartoon character Walt Disney created in 1927 as a precursor to Mickey but ultimately abandoned in a dispute with Universal Studios. In the game, Oswald has become bitter and envious of Mickey’s popularity. The game also features a disemboweled, robotic Donald Duck and a “twisted, broken, dangerous” version of Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World.” Using paint and thinner thrown from a magic paintbrush, Mickey must stop the Phantom Blot overlord, gain the trust of Oswald and save the day.

There’s such a great wealth of Disney and Pixar characters, it’d be nice to see Disney pull the trigger on a Mickey feature film that involves most of the Disney Universe, ala Roger Rabbit. But until then, maybe this videogame will do.

CLICK HERE to read the entire NYT article

I found this old ad in a ’70s comic book, and planned to do a story about the crazy show at Sea World, and I see our good buddies at Plaid Stallions already put a feature together with actual photos of the long lost weird event that’s better than anything we could have come up with. CLICK HERE and see for yourself!

My brother in law got this for me at the NAMM convention back in 2005 or so. Anyway, I promptly lost it, and just found it again while cleaning out the retroCRUSH headquarters. Oh, happy day! I’m glad it’s personalized. I always get my autographs personalized, they’re so much cooler that way, and don’t seem as fake. What’s your best autograph?