I thought it would be a good idea to write an actual post rather than just a product link…and even slyer to make it tie-in to his morning’s product link. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
This morning I put up a link to the latest 42nd Street Forever trailer compilation DVD, and so I thought I’d expose you guys to this delightful oddity:
(I thought of embedding the video here directly, but was afraid it would eat up too much bandwidth.)
I actually saw this film back in the day at the Pickwick Theater (about a hundred yards from where I sit at this moment), where it was featured on a double bill with Westworld. I would have been nine or ten years old. And if you don’t believe that that sort of thing beats today’s centimillion dollar cinematic offerings hand’s down…then, sir/ma’am, we must agree to disagree.
The trailer, as you can see, is hilariously pompous, and hopefully was intentionally so, even if (for shame!) the film was hawked to unsuspecting patrons by the usually reliable MGM. The part about how they couldn’t reveal the PURE AWESOMENESS that was “Anamorphic Duovision” because it requires “special projection equipment” is, I’m sure you will shocked to learn, completely and utterly a lie. Anamorphic Duovision meant the film was shown entirely in splitscreen. And yes, it was as thoroughly headache-inducing as it sounds. You’ll notice, for instance, that exactly, uhm, zero films since have taken advantage of this spectacular advancement in motion picture presentation.
The movie itself is as bad as it looks. I mean, when they think it’s a good thing to include *that* in something meant to entice folks to part with their time and money…. I speak, of course, of the featured segment of the patently horrible floorshow song sung by Tiffany Bolling, who really should have stuck to posing for Playboy and handling spiders.
As bad as her singing is, though, for me the real treasure to me is that the song showcases what might be the laziest lyrics in music history: “Wicked, wicked/that’s the ticket/you’ve got to make me feel so wicked…” Bonus points for using ‘wicked’ as the rhyme word twice in three sentences. The result sounds like they had half an hour to finish the movie, and just started shooting in an panic and told Ms. Bolling to sing whatever came into her head at the time. And check out her band!
Also notable is that Hollywood used to have much more forgiving standards for what constituted a hot chick back in the day. And yes, that’s pretty much the climatic ‘shock’ revelation highlighted in the trailer at some length. Thanks for sparing us any unnecessary shocks, coming attraction guys!
We can really only pray that this comes out as part of MGM’s Midnite Movie DVD line.
