Hello!

We of course follow all the doings at the 3-D Film Archive, keeping a running tally of projects in the works, like last year’s  Robot Monster 3-D, one of those weird Z-pictures that hasn’t lost its appeal — it must still be seen to be believed.

The Archive is rounding out its coverage of the 3-D legacy of the eccentric filmmaker Arch Oboler, who of course made a mint when he ignited the ’50s 3-D craze with his daring independent feature  Bwana Devil. Oboler’s semi-travelogue Domo Arigato may be shipping in a couple of months, and the next item up is a return to Oboler’s Sci-fi effort “The Bubble”, from around 1967. A truncated 3-D Blu-ray was released back in 2014; the Archive is now promoting a Kickstarter page to remaster the original full-length premiere cut of the movie starring Deborah Walley and Michael Cole.

Their kickstarter page features an original trailer for “The Bubble”. It interested me because it has no scenes from the movie, and instead gets its message across with polished radio writing with perfect timing — Oboler’s forte.

Friendly correspondent and  Major Dundee news bloodhound Chris Howard sent along this article from life.com commemorating a vintage photo spread, from when photographer Bill Ray was dispatched to Mexico to glamorize Austrian star Senta Berger.

The photo-heavy piece actually had to be taken in 1964, at least the on-location material with Charlton Heston and Sam Peckinpah. The cheesecake photos may have been in ’65, nearer the run-up to the film’s release. Did Ms. Berger’s agent work overtime to nab this exposure in a big magazine?  I honestly forget whether LIFE in ’65 would print all the pictures we see.

Between Chris Howard and myself, we figure that Senta Berger is among the last surviving participants in Major Dundee still with us, along with Michael Anderson Jr., Mario Adorf, and Aurora Clavell. Senta appears to be still working, at 83 years!

For my fellow Californians this is going to be no big deal. Friends living closer to the hills or especially out in the San Fernando Valley or West to Agoura, etc. see all manner of wildlife in or about their homes, rummaging through their garbage bins, who knows what else?  But for us here just South of Hollywood and only about 6 miles from downtown Los Angeles, the average animal sighting is maybe an opossum or a raccoon, and usually in the dead of night.

So it was a surprise to be out getting my paper at 7am this morning, and to run into this hungry fellow, chewing on something in a front yard. I’ll have to tell the neighbors to stay careful with their pets. Unless he/she has a den in some park nearby, he/she had to drift down from the hills, 1.5 miles to the north. Are these cousins of Wile E. here all the time, and I’m just too unobservant to notice?  Is that why our feral cat population has gone down a little bit?

Yes, it’s about as far from Blu-ray news as CineSavant can get, but I was too proud of snagging these pics, venturing out in my pajamas. We foolish city dwellers get our kicks where we can.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson