Hello!

Since we never post anything with the slightest political bias, today we’ve got a great educational short from 1946, with an important message. We first reviewed it on a worthy old Fantoma DVD called  The Educational Archive: Patriotism, where it led off a selection of classroom films about good citizenship, etc..

We think the disc is OOP, but its short subject Despotism is presently up on Youtube. It is inspiring.

The 10-minute Encyclopedia Britannica short is basically a lecture presentation with an animated slide show / PowerPoint describing a gradient between Democracy and Despotism. Back in 2003 I wrote:

“… an interesting part-animated examination of the difference between a free society and a despotic one, using a number of relative values to indicate how free a country is. Its main positive idea is that no country can call itself completely free, and even despotic countries may have some freedoms working. This is refreshing because the terminology used cuts out the -ism labels and gets down to hard facts. Curiously, the objective standards raised here put today’s America in the ‘at risk’ category: our information system is quickly being consolidated into one source of control, and an emergency has allowed our executive to override constitutional guarantees of illegal search & seizure, and imprisonment without trial or counsel.”

That was 2003; I guess I was referencing post- 9/11 developments. We like that the show is so dry and simple. We still find the arguments compelling … just the facts, immediately understandable, and no emotional baggage.

Last Saturday we reviewed a disc called  Fade-In. Friend and advisor Randall William Cook responded to my obvious crush on actress Barbara Loden by sending over a YouTube link to an excerpt from an old Ernie Kovacs Television Show.

Being so well informed, we were completely unaware that one of Barbara Loden’s first major gigs (outside of being a member of the Actors Studio) was as Ernie Kovacs’ regular TV assistant, sidekick and skit-player. There appear to be scores of Kovacs TV shows and specials. From personal experience I only knew (barely) his later on-screen collaboration with the great Edie Adams, his wife.

There aren’t that many opportunities to see Ms. Loden perform. Just to give us a few more minutes with her, Randy sent along this ten-minute clip of Kovacs doing a funny (and sloppy) ‘bad magician’ skit, with Barbara as his assistant and foil:

Another forward from Randy: If you enlarge the inset graphic to the right, it’s an article showing one of Kovacs’ creative comedy gags … Barbara Loden ‘starred’ as Kovacs’ very own miniature dream girl … almost a ‘Femlin?’

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson