Svengoolie Show Intro: “Calling all stations, clear the air lanes, clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
This week’s upcoming movie on the Svengoolie TV Show is the 1958 classic “Horror of Dracula.” I don’t remember ever seeing it. Speaking of classic, I admit I read some of the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) comments about the movie which features Christopher Lee as Dracula.
I’m not sure if it’s a typo or not, but one other website besides TCM say that Lee’s total time on screen for this 82-minute-long movie was only 7 minutes. The quote is:
“Ironically enough, Lee is only on the screen a total of seven minutes in Horror of Dracula yet his frightening presence is felt through the film.”
Can that be true? It got me wondering how many minutes of commercials are in a full-length film. I’m not talking about Svengoolie’s comedy bits. I get a big kick out of those! It’s the typical advertisement time I was curious about.
So, I looked this up and the counts vary, but I picked a website called TVWeek to get figures. The article is from 2014 so my guess is that the ad time estimates are even longer now, but in a typical average cable TV hour there was a little over 15 minutes of commercials. There were 237 comments, which I ignored because I figured they were the usual gripes.
And Christopher Lee got a total of 7 minutes screen time? Isn’t that almost the same time the Liberty Mutual star LiMu the Emu gets (“You’re just a flightless bird!”)?
I watched the Svengoolie TV show last night and saw the 1935 Universal Pictures movie “Werewolf of London.” You can watch the movie on the Internet Archive.
This film reminded me of another British movie, “Return of the Vampire” in which there was a comedy sketch between two grave diggers. In Werewolf of London there’s this hilarious scene in which the unfortunate Dr. Wilfred Glendon (Harold Hull) meets with a couple of old women named Mrs. Whack (Ethel Griffies) and Mrs. Moncaster (Zeffie Tilbury).
They were a couple of alcoholic landladies with rooms to let who competed with each other to rent a room to Dr. Glendon, who is trying to prevent his murderous tendencies when he transforms into a werewolf by moving out of his house. The scene is priceless, arguably the highlight of the movie, and begins at about 46.41 minutes into the film. Mrs. Whack and Mrs. Moncaster, even though they seem smitten with Dr. Glendon yet hesitate to offer him a drink, probably because they want most of the booze all to themselves.
Dr. Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) who is afflicted with “werewolfery” according to the other werewolf, Dr. Yogami. Warner Oland played Yogami, although he was actually Swedish and had played Charlie Chan in other films. They met briefly under violent circumstances while Glendon was in Tibet looking for the Mariphasa flower—although Glendon doesn’t recall that until later.
The thing about the Mariphasa is that drops from the flower are an antidote for lycanthropy. Or is it lycanthrophobia? Dr. Yogami mentions the latter twice and it shows up twice in print as well during the film. Lycanthrophobia is by definition the fear of turning into a werewolf. Lycanthropy is the process of turning into one—minus the fear factor, presumably. Whatever.
Dr. Glendon prowls around and slaughters a few victims when the moon is full but tries to avoid killing his wife, Lisa (Valerie Hobson) by renting a room above a tavern apparently, and crashes though the window of his room, possibly because of claustrophobia. This of course makes him a victim of multiple phobias and there is no one playing the role of psychiatrist; figure that one out.
Eventually, there’s a showdown between two cops and Glendon which takes the form of a 3-way thumb wrestling match between them, mainly because Glendon has an obvious case of dental caries in his fangs which causes some pain, especially when the vodka-swilling comedy duo of Whack and Moncaster try to get him plastered by pouring liquor down his gullet through a funnel.
You’ll want to watch this when you’re in a good mood and disinclined to watch anything that is consistently horrifying. There is no laugh track.
Svengoolie intro: “Calling all stations, clear the air lanes, clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
The Svengoolie show will be airing the movie “Werewolf of London” this coming Saturday night. It was released in 1935 and features something I don’t usually associate with werewolves—a special flower.
Anyway, it’s the first full-length werewolf film. This guy is not looking for beef chow mein.
Hey, I watched the Svengoolie show “The Black Scorpion” last night and I think a subtitle could have been “Stay Out of Trouble, Juanito!” Every time I woke up, that seven-year-old kid was getting himself into another jam.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is a 1957 film starring Richard Denning as Hank Scott, Carlos Rivas as Artur Ramas, Mara Corday as Teresa Alvarez, and Mario Navarro as the irrepressible Juanito. Perry Mason has a bit part as a scorpion.
Hank and Scott are geologists who get roped into investigating the cause of a disaster in Mexico City after a volcano blows its top, waking up a gang of giant scorpions who can’t stop drooling partly because they’re hungry for human flesh, but vitamin B12 deficiency can’t be ruled out. The scorpions are stop motion animation creations which look pretty good, actually.
Right away, Juanito starts messing around getting attached to Hank, opening doors for him, shining his shoes and just making a general nuisance of himself, especially when he starts ignoring his safety from the scorpions—which in turn necessitates his need for being rescued dozens of times. I think this is just attention-seeking after the first few times, one of which involves wandering around and dropping dead fireflies behind him to get the giant arachnids to follow him within shouting distance of Hank, who has to constantly snatch him away from danger.
Juanito: “Hank, help, Hank! The scorpion is about to catch me!”
Hank: “Thunderation, Juanito! What the heck are you doing down here in the cave?”
Juanito: “Save me, Hank! And then I will shine your shoes for only 11,436 pesos!”
Hank (after getting out his exchange rate calculator): “That’s 600 dollars you little hustler!”
Juanito: “Hurry, Hank, before the rate changes; and now the scorpion is close enough to drool on me!”
I found out one thing on the web about one of the items (which was tequila) that Dr. Delacruz wanted to run further tests on with the corpse of one of the scorpion’s victims. Of course, he was joking about the tequila but I guess there is such a thing as a scorpion drink from a bottle of tequila that contains a scorpion. It turns out that the scorpion shot tequila is a macho thing which the giant scorpions hate and destroying mankind is their revenge for it. Just so you know.
Juanito: “Help, Hank! The scorpion is inches away from me now that I’m in their cave after sneaking down here in the bucket with the weapons and the press cameras!”
Hank: “What on earth made you do a stupid thing like that, Juanito?”
Juanito: “I was bringing you this bottle of tequila with a little, edible scorpion in it because I know you’re a macho guy! Then you could waste your time chewing the little scorpion instead of wasting your time taking pictures of the giant drooling scorpion with the old-fashioned big clunky press camera with the huge bulb.”
Hank: “Shut up, Juanito, and bring me another bulb!
The movie could have been shorter if it had ended after the good guys exploded the rocks into the cave. But no, there was a long segment of a guy explaining in pseudoscientific language why Hank and Artur had to return after they left thinking they had finished off the bugs. The guy used a map and PowerPoint slide presentation, carefully explaining while using a laser pointer to indicate various places that provided an implausible escape route for the scorpion which did not clearly show why the giant scorpion had not been killed in the explosion. So much for PowerPoint!
But it did prolong the movie and provided more gruesome footage of scorpions snacking on various human hors d’oeuvres. None of them managed to catch Juanito.
I fell asleep very briefly only a couple of times during the film, so overall I thought it was OK. I believe there’s a sequel in which Juanito, now a teenager, challenges a giant inchworm to a thumb wrestling match.
Hey, I thought it would be fun to share an interview that somebody did of Svengoolie at the Comic-Con in San Diego yesterday. Svengoolie is played by Rich Koz and he’s been around a long time. He’s definitely not thinkinig of retiring. The only way we would have recognized him is by his voice!
Svengoolie intro: Calling all stations, clear the air lanes, clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!
I plan to watch the upcoming blockbuster Svengoolie movie this Saturday night, “The Black Scorpion” and so far, I haven’t read much about it except for a couple of lines from a synopsis or two. A volcano erupts and all of a sudden, a little town in Mexico is infested with giant scorpions.
I bet you, just like me, remember the TV series Meerkat Manor. Why would I say that, since probably none of you will fess up to it? Because meerkats eat scorpions! Not to mention the meerkats were often not much bigger than the scorpions. But could a mob of meerkats tip the scales? You’d need more than a mob to take down a bed of giant scorpions.
So, can you use bug spray on them? I mean the scorpions, not the meerkats. It turns out that scorpions are arachnids, not insects—but that doesn’t mean some bug sprays won’t work. On the other hand, you could just stick them in a freezer to kill them—not yours, of course. You’d need a freezer the size of a warehouse.
By the way, a bunch of scorpions is called a bed (see above). And so, I guess you can figure out a punch line for a Chuck Norris joke with the lead-in: What does Chuck Norris sleep on when he camps out in the desert?
I was watching a television show last night about UFOs and had to chuckle about some of the segments in which there was a lot of speculation about underground and underwater bases where extraterrestrials typically are thought to hide from us while they work on whatever it is they work on.
There was the usual discussion of the Chicago O’Hare airport UFO sighting in 2006 which, according to the official FAA explanation was a weather phenomenon known as a “punch hole” cloud. Of course, true believers don’t believe that.
The show also rehashed the remote viewing theme in which somebody describes and draws pictures of things which are said to be seen remotely, often of extraterrestrials and humans working together on antique cars.
Remote viewer: I see many objects lining the walls of a hollowed-out mountain in Wyoming.
Observer: What are the objects?
Remote viewer: They are…socket wrenches. Billions and billions of socket wrenches.
Observer: Zzzzzzzz.
I thought about that show as I was walking out to the mailbox pod early this morning. I saw a very a bright object in the eastern sky. It didn’t move. It wasn’t disk-shaped and it didn’t look like an orb. It didn’t abduct me. It looked like a star, which I decided it was. I looked around the internet and it was most likely Venus, sometimes called the morning star (it also can be known as the evening star).
That reminded me of an X-File episode in which Jesse Ventura, a former Minnesota governor (1999-2003), had a role. The episode was “Jose Chung’s from Outer Space” and it’s one of my favorites. Ventura played a man in black.
I’m not saying Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) don’t exist and I don’t know why we need to call them Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) nowadays. I’m just saying that the morning star is a beautiful thing.
The atmosphere for the Svengoolie TV show airing of the 1934 movie “The Black Cat” was nothing short of electric—as in electrical storm. I thought the mood of ambivalence in the film was firmly set for about the first half hour of the movie. That was how long the TV station weather alert was on screen, shrinking the viewing size of the movie somewhat to make room for a map of the counties at risk and the scrolling warnings about which east central Iowa counties were affected by the flood watch and guidance about what to do.
Anyway, the film is not related in any way to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same title. The movie was directed by Edgar Ulmer and starred Bela Lugosi as the Hungarian psychiatrist and ex-WWI POW (that’s right, I said “psychiatrist”), Dr. Vitus Werdegast; Boris Karloff as the satanic and necrophiliac Hjalmar Poelzig, the former WWI commander of the Fortress Marmorisch and a famed architect who built an ultra-modern mansion on top of the grisly site where thousands of soldiers were killed. Vitus and Hjalmar play chess for the souls of the aspiring novelist Peter Alison (David Manners) and his wife Joan (Jacqueline Wells) who, unfortunately get stranded there along with Vitus after the bus carrying them crashes on the way from the train station to various hotels and Disney World.
The mood of ambivalence I thought was evident, contrasting the creepiness of Hjalmar and Vitus grimly gambling in a chess match for the lives of Joan and Peter and the comicality of the two policemen interviewing the Alisons and the two heavies about the bus accident. The lieutenant and the sergeant arguing with each other in a “My hometown’s better than yours” exchange reminds me of Abbott and Costello. I recommend you see it for yourselves on the Internet Archive; it’s about 35 minutes in.
Contrast this with the hysterical cat phobic Vitus (despite being a psychiatrist) throwing a knife at one of the many black cats prowling around the house after it ejects a hairball on the floor! Or Hjalmar thumb wrestling with Vitus until the latter chooses to pick up what looks like an emery board from an array of much larger knives and bazookas on a large table—and prepares to flay Hjalmar with it. This would only make Hjalmar look even more excruciatingly well groomed, along with the precisely trimmed haircut carefully smeared with a pound of Brylcreem.
I think “The Black Cat” is a hoot. It’s a litter box full of nuggets of melodramatic ailurophobia with here and there a hairball of ambivalence but hey, nobody’s purr-fect!
Calling all stations, clear the air lanes, clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!
What do you get when you cross a black cat with a rubber chicken? Something else Svengoolie has to dodge. Keep reading for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) attempts at this joke.
The upcoming Svengoolie show movie this Saturday will be “The Black Cat” which I’ve never seen before. One of the posters I see on the internet implies that it’s based on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story of the same name.
I never read the gory story until a couple of days ago and I’m hoping the film won’t be like that. It also reminded me of a novel about animal cruelty given to me as a gift when I was a kid. “Beautiful Joe” was written by Margaret Marshall Saunders and it emphasized how people can treat animals humanely. It was a true story about a dog that was rescued from a sadistic master who mutilated the animal by cutting off its tail and ears in a fit of rage.
Just for fun I tried to find out AI would come up with when I asked it about a joke which would start with “What do you get when you cross a black cat with a chicken?”
The AI answer: “Something which scratches the furniture and lays eggs.” Other answers were “Cluck-ty cat” or “Meow-ster Hen.”
And when I asked for the AI joke using “What do you get when you cross a black cat with a rubber chicken?” AI came up with:
“That’s a classic riddle! The answer is: A lucky squeak!” And the AI goes on to explain: “It plays on the idea that black cats are considered unlucky, and rubber chickens make a squeaking sound.”
I watched the Svengoolie movie “Invaders from Mars” last night. I saw this 1953 science fiction film last year but didn’t notice the extraterrestrials wore pretty obvious green velour body suits which zipped up the back.
Anyway, the movie was directed by William Cameron Menzies and starred Jimmy Hunt as the boy, David MacLean, who cried wolf, or at least that’s what everyone, including his parents, thought of his story about seeing a flying saucer land not far from their home, in a kind of sandy outlot which tended to swallow people whole after that.
Shortly after the saucer landed, people started to go missing and when they turned up later, they acted like zombies albeit with a new and nefarious purpose in life not their own.
There were many examples of leadership. Most of the good guys including the astronomer, Dr. Stuart Kelston and psychologist, Dr. Pat Blake fit the mold: respectful, congenial, and not prone to slapping David in the mouth like somebody I could name but who I’ll just hint he’s played by a guy named Leif Erickson, a Norse explorer who discovered America hundreds of years before Columbus and evidently found the fountain of youth.
Dr. Kelston has a theory about what’s happening and even speculates about the connection of the space exploration program he’s involved in which could be causing some extraterrestrials to be leery of its ultimate purpose, which is to build tall warped looking buildings with weird music piped in. Actually, Svengoolie revealed that the settings were purposely built large because the original plan was to shoot the film in 3D.
On the other hand, the leader of the Martians was this head in a glass globe that the guys in green jump suits (the Mutants) carried around, sometimes walking backwards so as to not expose how the costumes zipped up in back. But often they had to run through tunnels, which would have been tough to do backwards. That’s when you see the zippers. They had this stiff gait sort of rocking gait which I think I remember seeing when I was a kid when I saw these scenes on TV decades ago.
Anyway, the leader who was just a head in a globe never talked but communicated telepathically with the Mutants. It was the Martian Intelligence (the head, played by Luce Potter) who did all the thinking and gave all the orders, evidently driven by fear of the humans who were getting ready to shoot into space and ruin their neck of the space neighborhood.
There’s the usual Cold War paranoia but with a focus on inserting alien probes into earthlings that made me think of the X-Files mythology. There’s a fairly frequent inclusion of military stock footage given the us vs them dynamic.
A fairly large number of the actors were also in Perry Mason episodes, which seems to happen to a lot of actors who eventually appear in Svengoolie movies. I had a little trouble remembering a very young Milburn Stone who played Capt. Roth, and who could sling semi-scientific verbiage around pretty well. I remember him as Doc in the TV show Gunsmoke.
There was a disagreement between the United Kingdom and America about the ending of the movie. Was this invasion all just a kid’s nightmare or what? The British rewrote the ending to leave out the dream theme.
Except for the Mutant dress code, I thought the movie was pretty fair.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 