Hello!

The Christmas spirit is alive here at CineSavant … decorating the place turns out to be lots of fun, once I get past the hauling-in-the-boxes part of the job. Meanwhile we’ll continue to pass off every kind of movie genre weirdness as appropriate for the holiday season. I mean, doesn’t  The Valley of Gwangi automatically put you in the yuletide mood?

Courtesy of the ongoing web searches of correspondent Michael McQuarrie, we’re posting a link to a tie-in comic book for the 1969 Ray Harryhausen monster romp. It’s not exactly a prime example of graphic storytelling — they skip the movie’s biggest action highlight — but it caught our attention. When new, it also cost only 15 cents.

The comic of course has no music, which means we can’t enjoy the way Jerome Moross’s music score interacts with the dinosaur mayhem. We’re told that the finished Moross tracks were completely re-edited to fit, dropping some sections and repeating others. But we think it works well. ‘Soundtrack Fred’ posted a  Valley Of Gwangi Jerome Moross Soundtrack Suite on Youtube.

Dick Dinman is back with his DVD Classics Corner On the Air podcast … this time covering a new Warner Archive disc, a remaster of the Eleanor Parker / Glenn Ford musical bio Interrupted Melody.

This is edited from Dinman’s own interview with Eleanor Parker; Dick says that he has “added a few somewhat derogatory comments from Ernie Borgnine regarding costar Glenn Ford.”  That raises my curiosity … I’ve never heard Borgnine say a negative word about anything or anybody. The one time I saw him in person, he was instantly likable from 50 feet away.

We can’t go away without noting that Turner Classic Movies’ TCM Remembers 2025 montage included dear friend and Trailers From Hell colleague Mike Schlesinger.

We’ll be writing more about Mike in a few weeks. He was a very special guy with a long list of accomplishments; I look forward to relating a few fun episodes with him.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson