Here are a few messages that seem like they oughta be up here. This first one is from Daniel Klos…
I'm sure others have already written in to tell you this, but just in case they haven't, the new 14-disc Superman Ultimate DVD Collection that came out last month from Warner Bros. has all 17 Fleischer cartoons on it, completely restored. I've bought many, many versions of these cartoons over the years on DVD and VHS trying to get the cleanest, most pristine prints I could find, but the ones on this DVD set are the best I have seen hands down. (Also the best I've heard. Several collections have tried to update these things with upgraded sound effects and the results were less than desired)
No one else wrote to tell me that so I'm glad you did. If someone wants to order that set, here's an Amazon link. Meanwhile, Dan O'Shannon sent me a message devoid of capital letters…
a little while ago, you posted a betty boop cartoon in which she impersonates maurice chevalier, and you posited that doing chevalier was mandatory for all performers at paramount (just ask the marx brothers). i smiled at the thought, but woke up today with a chilling realization: you may be right. check out jerry lewis in "the stooge" (paramount, 1952). it's the scene where dean's too drunk to go on stage so jerry goes up by himself. sure enough: chevalier. i'm beginning to think that there are more chevalier impersonations on film than there is actual film of chevalier.
I once had an interesting discussion with an impressionist friend about stars he called "gimme impressions." These were people who had one or two traits so distinctive that if you could approximate them — fairly easy to do — then onlookers would recognize who you were doing and it really didn't matter if the impression was any good at all. I've seen/heard people do Groucho with no attempt to approximate his voice or rhythms. The "impression" is just to hunch over, pantomime a cigar and maybe try to move one's eyebrows up and down. I suspect Chevalier would fall into the same category: You stick out your lower lip, mime a straw hat and attempt any sort of French accent and…voila! Chevalier! That's probably why he was so mimicked…but it does seem to also have been some sort of Paramount Pictures corporate policy.
This last one's from Bart Lidofsky…
I have deja vu about this, but, just in case: I used to have a talent (well, a skill, since it required actually using it to keep it up). I would be able to see about 10-15 minutes of a movie, and I could figure out the year it was made, plus or minus one year. There were many things I looked at for clues. Period pieces, of course, were harder (the only movie that I can recall getting really wrong was when I first saw Privilege; it was so dead on with a lot of its predictions, including style, that I thought it was made in 1972 or 1973 instead of 1967).
Which brings me to my point. For pretty much all other movies, one major clue to movies made before 1969 or after 1971 was the attitude the movie showed towards its female characters. It is difficult for those who were not news/media aware during those years (and I am certain that I am merely jogging your memory rather than informing you) how radically societal attitudes towards women were altered during that short period of time. I've since done more research, but the short version is that attitudes that were formed over thousands of years for very good and logical reasons became obsolete starting with the Industrial Revolution (and one can trace the codifying of a lot of laws in the West locking women's positions in society to technological advances which removed physical necessities for this). However, the inflation of the mid-late 60's, making two-income families more of a requirement than a luxury for the middle class, brought home that many of the attitudes in our society towards women made no sense when measured against reality.
That Girl is a wonderful example of this; as a show about a single woman during the time that the attitudes were beginning to change, it reflected some of those changes, as the series went on (I Dream of Jeannie did similar things, but the basis of the show made the changes much more uncomfortable for the comedy). Both shows ended by the time that the change had been more or less set into society; it was no coincidence.
One of the first people I worked with in the TV business was a delightful gent named Jerry Davis who, among his many other credits, produced That Girl. He used to say that two things made that show work. One was Marlo Thomas because everyone at ABC was convinced Marlo Thomas could be a star and so they pushed the series in every way possible. The other was the timing. Two years earlier, it would never have gone. But then one day, someone at a major ad agency wrote a memo that said that the thing America was yearning to see, and wasn't yet getting on their teevees, was "young women controlling their own lives." It wasn't a matter of the characters being powerful — obviously, Samantha on Bewitched (which Jerry had produced before That Girl) and Jeannie on I Dream of Jeannie were powerful…but they functioned in relation to a male. Jeannie just wanted to serve her master, Tony. Samantha just wanted to have a "normal" marriage with her mate, Darren.
The key to That Girl was that Marlo's character didn't want to just marry Donald. She didn't rule that out but there were other things that mattered to her. Every network around that time did a couple of pilots that aspired to depict women controlling their lives but, according to Jerry, the other ones all chickened out and in some way made the female an appendage of a male. She was making decisions with "him" keeping an eye on her.
I don't think the old That Girl episodes hold up all that well. There are some wonderful comedy bits and performers in them but we've evolved so far beyond that era and its view of women. You're right though that it was a great marker of its time.
Before I forget: Those of you interested in the music changes made on reruns of WKRP in Cincinnati can find out everything you want to know on this page. Thanks to John Schrank for the link.