I have box sets of Dragnet (1967-70), Ironside, Hawaii Five-O, Kung Fu and The Rockford Files that include the feature-length series pilots for each. The series pilots for Ironside, Kung Fu and The Rockford Files all premiered months before their respective series premiered. The Hawaii Five-O...
I discovered a couple of days ago that if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can create playlists from the music available on the site and play them on your computer or your kindle. So I started checking different film composers to see who they had--Ennio Morricone, Bernard Herrmann, Miklos...
Raymond Burr's centennial is coming up this Sunday and I realize I've never seen any of his later Perry Mason TV movies, 28 of them from 1985 to 1993. I'm a big fan of the original series, but I've always doubted that the later work could be any good, simply because the quality of TV writing in...
62 international critics pick the 100 Greatest American Films ever.
The complete list is in this link:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/citizen-kane-still-the-best-american-movie-ever-according-to-bbc-critics-poll-20150721
There's only seven films on that list I haven't...
That seems to be the position New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick is taking in this opinion piece in today's Post, where he calls for "retiring this relic":
http://nypost.com/2015/06/24/gone-with-the-wind-should-go-the-way-of-the-confederate-flag/
I doubt that most of us on this board...
The Classic Film and TV Cafe is hosting the "My Favorite Classic Movie" Blogathon for National Classic Movie Day, Saturday, May 16, 2015.
http://www.classicfilmtvcafe.com/2015/03/a-blogathon-in-celebration-of-inaugural.html
I went with PORTRAIT OF JENNIE (1948).
Today, May 6, 2015, would have been Orson Welles' 100th birthday. Let's celebrate by watching Orson, either something by him or something with him, or--better yet--both! There's tons of things out there that I'm sure you've never seen. I'm planning to watch MACBETH (1948) today, which I've never...
Today, April 7, marks the centennial of Billie Holiday (2015-1959), arguably the greatest jazz singer of the 20th century (which would make her the greatest jazz singer ever).
There's tons of her music on YouTube, as well as a BBC documentary about her under the title The Billie Holiday Story...
Whenever I’m confronted with different versions of a song I like, I tend to prefer one version over the others, which I usually recognize as the “right” version. Now, the “right version” can mean one of three different things to me:
1) The first version I ever heard and the one that was...
I thought I’d post this here rather than in Movies because there’s a greater degree of knowledge about TV shows in this forum.
I’m looking to make lists of TV movies and TV series episodes that played in theaters as movies, i.e. distributed and booked as self-contained movies.
The first list...
Tokusatsu is the Japanese term for live-action special effects superhero TV shows in the Ultraman/Kamen Rider/Sentai (Power Rangers) vein. Japanese TV companies have been making them regularly since "Ultra Q" premiered in 1965 and they're generally full of martial arts action, imaginative...
We’ve all heard about movie soundtrack songs being replaced on home video releases because of rights issues. I’ve actually never encountered this myself, but I’m writing a piece about unique versions of films on VHS or DVD and I wanted examples of films that had the original soundtrack on one...
I only have two classic Technicolor titles on Blu-ray: THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938) and THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939). I've only watched one, ROBIN HOOD, and I was bowled over by it. This is as close to how I've seen it look on the big screen as any Technicolor film I've seen in home video...
I’ve been curious lately to find quality releases of early color TV shows on DVD, e.g. Cisco Kid, My Friend Flicka, Sergeant Preston, color eps. of The Lone Ranger, etc. In trying to pursue this, I decided to compile a comprehensive list of every color TV series made before Fall 1966, when the...