Good evening my friends and welcome to Crasstalk. Wishing you all a wonderful day and a great evening. Here are a couple of educational films to help you all learn to be well-mannered Crasstalkers.
Now you are ready to go out and wow the rest of the gang. Have a great night.
Hello, welcome to the re-branded Found Footage Friday as Animonday, now dedicated to animation, especially animated shorts. FFF didn’t really work out, there were never more than 10 comments not counting my own, but everyone loves cartoons, right? This will be a showcase for cartoons slightly outside the mainstream, animation you might not otherwise have seen.
I’ll start out with one of my personal favorites from Canadian animator Richard Condie. You might know him from his hilarious The Cat Came Back cartoon, but The Big Snit from 1985 is his masterpiece. A 10-minute Oscar-nominated film about Scrabble, sawing, marital strife and nuclear Armageddon. Enjoy!
You may or may not have heard of the semi-underground art rock band Negativland. I was first introduced to them through their album Escape from Noise featuring weird songs using samples from old industrial films and shortwave radio clips. There’s an especially controversial track called Christianity is Stupid but I prefer the bit of cold war paranoia, Yellow, Black and Rectangular. A few years later, their U2 EP was famously recalled by the record company after a lawsuit from DJ Casey Kasem. The EP featured outtakes of Kasem swearing and being a general ass about having to read a long-distance dedication to a deceased dog. Here is the original outtake.
David “The Weatherman” Willis, Negativland’s main source of weird samples and general absurdity, was also a budding filmmaker of the weirdness variety. Here is his masterwork, “Fetch My Cigarettes,” starring his mother and himself. It was included as part of their VHS compilation, No Other Possibility, but was an independent work. It’s only 4 1/2 minutes long, and the first minute is skippable.
“Weird Al” Yankovic has long established himself as the King of Pop Parody with songs ranging from hilariously funny to kind of mediocre to described as the band he’s parodying as better than any of their own songs.
For many years (and possibly still, but I doubt it), he did specials on MTV to promote his albums which were called AlTV, wherein he’d turn MTV into his own personal channel. While the majority of the show was Al presenting unusual and surreal videos, both his own and by others, these were interspersed with parodies of other MTV segments (back when they were primarily a music video channel), including interviews with rock stars. Al interviewed the same rock stars by brilliantly mashing up footage from real MTV interviews (sometimes using bits that would normally be edited out) with his own bizarre and sometimes even audacious questions, including asking them their, often very negative, opinions of his own albums and regularly bringing up his pet, Harvey the Wonder Hamster.
There is a Youtube playlist of over 30 interviews you can watch, but I’ll just put up a few of my favorites.
The best, and probably most audacious, one is his ‘interview’ with George Harrison:
There’s also his sexually-charged interview with Paula Abdul:
He gets up-close and personal with James Brown:
Tries to understand Keith Richards:
And starts a collaboration with Snoop Dogg:
Al appears to still be doing them on YouTube, but the classic ones will always be my favorites.
Today’s found footage post is about a film I stumbled upon accidentally (it’s in the public domain and has never been commercially released) and it may be one of my favorite movies because it’s just out-and-out bizarre. The whole thing is in Russian and even though I don’t speak Russian and there are no subtitles, it’s just so damn insane that I love every minute of it. The title in Russian is V Trinadcatom Chasu Nochi. In English, that translates as In The Thirteenth Hour of the Night, but more prosaically, it would be 13 p.m.
The pedigree of the director doesn’t seem to lend itself to such a crazy movie. Larisa Shepitko was an acclaimed female Soviet director noted for her heavy dramatic subjects. However, for some reason, she directed this film. The following is a totally fictional account of what happened and why, but I like to believe it’s true even though I made it up:
In 1969, a Commissar in charge of television discovered that there was a famous film director named Larisa Shepitko that he could force to make a film. So, he came to her and said, “you make TV movie for New Year’s Eve. Here are pop music acts. Do it in three days or we send you to gulag.” And so, this was the result.
It’s really a variety show with a thin veneer of outside storyline and while the pop acts are pretty odd themselves, the real action is the wrapper story involving a cross-dressing patriarch (matriarch?) of the Russian equivalent of a hillbilly family watching TV in their hut on fowl’s legs (a traditional Russian folk motif), joined by a mermaid and a dwarf. As I said, I speak no Russian, but from what I’ve been told, even if you do speak Russian, it doesn’t make much more sense.
As the movie is in the public domain, I uploaded the whole thing to YouTube, but for those of you who don’t want to sit through it, here are two of my favorite bits. First, a moment of cinematic insanity-
And then a musical number (not one of the pop acts), a parody of Louis Armstrong singing Hello, Dolly… except the only lyrics are Hello, Dolly.
And finally, the entire film.
I’d say that this is best seen under the influence, but I think that would actually make it worse.
Due to my personally bringing Crasstalk down last week. That’s right, I did it. Me. Muahahahahahaha!
Ahem.
Where was I?
Right, we were down last Friday, so my planned post about this didn’t go up then. Anyway, we’re still in the realm of cable access with a staple of Los Angeles community access television for years (it ended in 2008). It will be one of the weirdest things you’ve ever seen. Opinions are divided about whether or not it’s genuine or some sort of very dedicated performance art. The man behind it, David Nkrumah Liebe Unger Hart, is quite a story unto himself and a well known L.A. personality who may or may not be pretty nuts. There are terrible puppets, awful songs, women going in long, untranslated speeches in German and, of course, Jesus. I present… the Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Show!
There are many clips on YouTube, so I’ll just post a couple and you can find more for yourselves. I would give more commentary, but really, they just speak for themselves.
Hello and welcome to the first Found Footage Friday, where I present all sorts of video footage you may find surprising and entertaining. I’m going to start with something very close to home.
I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana in the 1980s. Home of Indiana University and its esteemed folklore department and a small but thriving public access cable channel. I don’t know if it was a student’s folklore project or something the department decided to do, but if you say “Haunted Indiana” to any Bloomington child of the ’80s, they will tell you how it totally scared the hell out of them when they were kids. We now look back on it with great fondness and, thanks to the internet, it is something I can share with all of you.
It’s a collection of short horror stories based on Indiana folklore, shot on a budget of two buttons and a shoelace with a soundtrack stolen from Hitchcock’s Psycho and narrated by local TV personality Mike White. Here it is in all its glory. There is not much for me to tell you about it, just watch it (it’s less than an hour long) and discover the frightening horror that is Haunted Indiana-
Haunted Indiana Part 1 – Intro
Haunted Indiana Part 2 – Haunted Woods
Haunted Indiana Part 3 – The Cable Line Monster
Haunted Indiana Part 4 – The Campers
Haunted Indiana Part 5 – Burnt (a.k.a. the boring one before the really scary one)
Haunted Indiana part 6 – Monster in the Bedroom
That last one gave hundreds of children nightmares about never waking up the next morning. I hope you enjoyed the movie that was the stuff of nightmares for one midwestern town with a population (at the time) of less than 50,000 people. The world may never known the horror of Haunted Indiana, but now you do. Welcome to our nightmare.