CineSavant Column

Tuesday February 27, 2024

 

Hello!

From correspondent Lee Kaplan comes an odd item that’s been posted for 11 years already — an unaired pilot show for the 1964 TV series The Munsters, My Fair Munster.

Some of the cast is different. Beverly Owen is Marilyn Munster, who was replaced by Pat Priest about a dozen episodes in. Little Eddie is Nate Derman, billed as ‘Happy’ Derman. The pre- Lily Munster, called Phoebe Munster, is Joan Marshall, the actress that played across the gender divide in William Castle’s Homicidal, billed as Jean Arless.

The tone is also different — it appears to be imitating The Addams Family too closely, if I have their order of production correct.

It’s weird. The jokes are thin, the laugh track is a turn-off . . . but it’s still got favorites Fred Gwynne and Al Lewis … and it’s in Color.

 


 

Called out by Joe Dante is an even more arcane ’60s TV effort. Mark Evanier’s February 22 News from Me article covers a screwy one-off 1962 TV show that turned out to be an odd blip in the prime time TV career of favorite comic writer and performer Stan Freberg.

The sponsor was Chun King Chow Mein. They must have loved Freberg’s funny TV commercials for Chun King as much as we did. The TV spots featured a fire breathing Chinese dragon that roasts things and people in a supermarket. Or maybe my memory is off: here’s a Chun King Chow Mein Commercial, but with Jesse White and Arte Johnson, and no dragon. Today it would likely be considered Ethnically Insensitive.

The hour-long program is pretty free-form — the brilliant Freberg enlisted designer Saul Bass and musician Billy May to help out, plus what Evanier IDs as Freberg’s stock company of players — June Foray, Jesse White, Sterling Holloway, Arte Johnson, Naomi Lewis, etc.. A ‘Sing Along With Mitch’ parody is present … and is that a genuine Jim Henson Muppet?

The entire show pilot is linkable at Evanier’s page: The Chun King Chow Mein Hour.

 


 

And the news is already almost a week old, but my old Leone ‘research friends’ wouldn’t allow me to let this announcement pass: Paramount Presents will very soon release a 4K Ultra HD disc of Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, the opus that offers four big stars to compensate for the absence of Clint Eastwood.

The release appears to repeat extras from earlier editions. I’m already hearing grousing that it’s not a ‘full restoration’ with little bits of scenes included once upon a time in vintage German and French release cuts. We actually weren’t blown away by Paramount’s good but not glorious 2011 Blu-ray, so we’re hoping this new 4K restoration will have a fabulous picture plus killer audio for the Ennio Morricone soundtrack. After 20 or so viewings, the movie becomes a music concert with nice pictures attached.

We can hardly believe it — four features into his astronomically successful string of Italo westerns, Sergio Leone still filmed them in half-frame Techniscope, which is only a little bigger than two 16mm frames side by side. In pure form, a 4K scan ought to be overkill. We hope the colorists and encoders use good judgment when dealing with the grain issue.

The reported release date is May 14; we’ll be eager to review it.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson