"Golden Boy" Revue

This DVD was released two months ago by Sony. The cover is actually not as awful as the ones they have been putting on their other classic movies for the last couple of years. But that isn't saying much. It's still pretty bad. The picture of Bill Holden looks like it was taken around the same time as "Golden Boy" was filmed, but poor Barbara -- somebody fished out a picture of her that looks like it was taken several years after this movie. The bad Photoshop colors didn't help, either.

Here's one of the original movie posters, which would have made a great (and cheap) cover, or at least a better one than what they used ...



If they didn't like that poster, there were many others to choose from ...






(A French edition of an American poster, but you get the idea)

Putting aside the lame cover design, the most important part of the DVD -- the content! -- was one thing that didn't disappoint. My only complaint is that the movie looked dark, as though one of the transfer engineers played with the contrast or something. I have the movie on videotape (from 1984), and there are more lighter shades of gray on the video. On the DVD, the whites were whiter, the light grays became dark grays, and the dark grays turned black. I noticed that this is a rampant problem in "restored" old movies that are being released today. I learned to fix the problem by turning up the brightness on my TV!

Sony must have finally taken a page out of Warner Bros' book, because in addition to giving us the movie, they included a startling number of extra features with it:

* "Kangaroo Kid", a cartoon that riffs on the theme of "Golden Boy".
* "Pleased to Mitt You", a comedy short with a boxing theme, featuring Shemp Howard before he (re)joined the Three Stooges
* "Screen Snapshots", a 1930 newsreel-type film that shows stars of the day mugging and clowning for the camera. Includes a young Barbara Stanwyck learning how to play golf from Ricardo Cortez.
* "Sudden Silence", a half-hour anthology episode from 1956 that marked Barbara's dramatic TV debut.

In other words, there was enough interesting material here to keep me amused for a long time. And I enjoy being amused. If you do, too, I recommend this DVD. So buy it, already!

Inhuman Relations #4

Here is a really epic comic strip that I just finished a couple of hours ago. Click to enlarge (as if you didn't know)!

Antique Perversions: Starring Betty Boop

I'm a big fan of old cartoons, which of course is no secret to all of you out there. But today while I was freeze-framing part of a cartoon from 1930 called "Dizzy Dishes" (which was the first Betty Boop cartoon), I found a surprise.





Here is the cartoon on YouTube, which is unfortunately out of sync, but otherwise OK. If you skip to around 3:12 in the video, you will see a prototype Betty as a cabaret singer. But that's not all you'll see ...









I read somewhere that the Fleischer animators used a lot of their observations about life in 1920s and 30s New York in their cartoons. That's why they are so dark, smutty and entertaining. New York must have been quite a place back then.

Another Gross Study

This week I had a lot of down time at work, so I copied some great pictures out of Milt Gross books ("Dear Dollink" and "I Shoulda Ate the Eclair"). I don't work in an office, so I had to use whatever writing implement or paper that was available, which turned out to be a ball point pen and a dusty legal pad. Not so good for this kind of thing. But here are some of the less bad examples of my efforts ...







The verdict: I'm too "conservative" to be trying to draw Milt Gross! I should stick with Owen Fitzgerald.