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Dick Dinman’s radio show confronts the heat rays and disintegrator beams this week, with his DVD Classics Corner on the Air look at the new Criterion disc of The War of the Worlds. The featured guest interviewee is Andrea Kalas, Senior VP of Asset Management and Paramount Archives Head. Will they Survive The War of the Worlds?  The discussion gets into issues about restoring Technicolor films, things like registration of the 3 color images. A selection of Dick’s older Classics Corner on the Air shows are available at this WMPG Website.

The images are now all over Facebook but can be sourced back to the Classic Horror Film Board, where a member named ‘Rakshasha’ gave fans an early peek at the restoration of Michael Curtiz’s 2-Color Technicolor horror thriller Doctor X from 1932. That’s Fay Wray pictured, with ‘important but suspicious researcher’ Lionel Atwill and ‘irrepressible reporter’ Lee Tracy, he of comic relief fame. Rakshasha says the the refurbishing of this scary-comic classic is being performed by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and promises that more details are coming soon.

Earlier this year we were blown away by the restoration job on Michael Curtiz’ classic Mystery of the Wax Museum, as was released on a great Warner Archive disc. The news then was that COVID might have stopped work on other projects. So we hope it’s continuing apace, and we’ll be receiving another happy surprise next Spring. As the Full Moon Killer says, “Long Live the Synthetic Flesh!”

In watching the extras on his new disc of the Hammer Phantom of the Opera, the all-knowing, all-wise advisor and contributor Gary Teetzel heard something that sent him on yet another web search:

“In the disc’s featurette on Edwin Astley’s music score, it is mentioned that a ‘Liberace-like’ arrangement of the main aria written for the film’s ‘Joan of Arc’ opera had been released as a single by Coral Records. Of course, I had to seek it out. It’s mentioned that it was arranged by a guy named Stanley Paul. Well, it turns out that Paul Stanley of KISS appeared in a production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantom, so a search of ‘Stanley Paul Phantom of the Opera’ yielded a large number of links about that. But eventually I was able to find the Astley recording. Thanks to collector Kirk Henderson, we can hear it”:

“I’m pretty sure that this is the first record tie-in with the release of a new Hammer film; I’m not sure there were any others until Lust for a Vampire’s infamous “Strange Love” appeared on the B-side of a single in 1971. I’m not aware of “Black Leather Rock” or the songs from Lost Continent, The Vengeance of She or Moon Zero Two getting released as commercial singles. A cursory search of the Discogs database turned up nothing, but I suppose it’s possible that 45’s of other Hammer songs exist.”

“But my research did turn up what is apparently a private pressing by Hammer’s Phillip Martell, fascinating disc with music from Hammer’s Kiss of the Vampire, These are The Damned and She. Did Martell create it just as a keepsake to give to James Bernard?  Were they trying to interest a record label in releasing some of their scores? We may never know”:

Thank you Gary… and thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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↑ My superfluous Attack of the Crab Monsters image just above is simply a cheerful reminder to go pick up my copy today, which I’ll be doing right after posting these reviews. I’ll also be getting my own copy of the WAC Tex Avery Screwball Classics Volume 1, which will be fun too. Then it’s forward to more reviews from Criterion, KL Studio Classics, Arrow. You know the drill.

← CineSavant reviewing cohort Charlie Largent forwarded this graphic, which he found on a Twitter account called Comics in the Golden Age. I want to mention their twitter handle as well: @ComicsintheGA. The vintage comic book ad is self- explanatory; to read it you’ll need to open it in a new window so it will appear full-sized. And remember, “Insist on Harvey 3D Magazines!”

The recent 3-D Archive Blu-Ray release Africa Screams includes as an extra some excellent-quality representations of 3-D comics; the only problem I had was that each individual panel is only up for five seconds. When I freeze the image on my Blu-ray player, it adds superimposed graphics that make reading difficult. If these 3-D comics are that plentiful, a well-organized Polaroid-Anaglyphic disc might be fun!

↑ And finally we saw an announcement for a November 10 Blu-ray release of Amazon Women on the Moon, the 1987 comedy directed by John Landis, Joe Dante, Carl Gottlieb, Peter Horton and Robert K. Weiss. The KL Studio Classics disc will have a new featurette and a new commentary. Best of all, the Kino blurb promises ‘Newly discovered outtakes and dailies from Joe Dante, deleted scenes and… and … more outtakes.”

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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I’ve been wondering on and off about the long-gestating film project The Primevals, which was the subject of a big-deal Cinefantastique article back in 1978. I knew a lot of the crew who were working on its pre- pre-production, slipping away from their duties on 1941 to work nights at Dave Allen’s studio on Olive Avenue in Burbank. It was so long ago.. I think the shop took a break from Primevals to create the effects for The Day Time Ended. At that point things came to a halt, and the project stayed dormant until the early 1990s. Dave Allen eventually went overseas to shoot the live-action, and then … the company making the show just pulled the plug. Allen protégé and career animator Chris Endicott has been working on it ever since, one shot at a time. Since the editor for the show Steve Nielson is an old friend, I heard stories about clever low-tech effects solutions to avoid expensive optical work. Mr. Endicott allowed me to visit his setup around 2010, at which time I was shown a couple of sequences and learned that they had gathered up the 1995 film elements and were working on the show again. Now it looks like The Primevals is really going to be released this year in one form or another.

The Primevals IMDB page still doesn’t say that it stars Juliet Mills; I also noticed that the late Robert Cornthwaite makes an appearance. This closed Indiegogo page was a promotional effort for the show. And not long ago they came up with a nicely-produced, amusingly over-hyped promotional trailer. ‘Fifty years in the making’ — and the trailer still shows somebody yelling, “We gotta get out of here!”

The image above, through Paul Gentry, was of a test done in the very early 1970s, when the show was a partnership between David Allen and friends Dennis Muren and Bill Stromberg. I’m told that the dead man on the ground is Bill Stromberg. Was he playing a Viking? I forget. They lived in little houses on stilts, that looked pretty good. A draft of the script I read long, long ago, which had been worked over by Randall William Cook, made the show into a combo of Quatermass and the Pit and Lost Horizon. Randy penned impressive artwork of some of the monster confrontations, at least one of which went into that Cinefantastique issue dedicated entirely to a show that was still on the drawing boards (but already had a lot of miniature sets and animation models prepared). When we saw this particular photo much earlier, in a Cinefantastique or a Photon magazine, we were ready to see the show right away. Perhaps Chris Endicott will eventually tell the entire stop-and-start story of The Primevals’ production.

I still believe in the Post Office, our U.S. Postal Service. For me, the service has gotten better since the 1980s. For me it’s been a rare exception when something is late or (maybe) lost.

What with changes lately (from Washington?) I would expect our Post Office to be in revolt. How would you like it if you did a job that could only be accomplished with overtime — and they outlawed overtime and expected you to keep up?  It isn’t unusual for our local mail carriers to be delivering after dark this month… I feel like giving them a tip.

I’ve always heard griping but my experience has been good. I’ve sent dozens of packages library rate and first class in the last five years, and only one has ever been delayed … by maybe three or four days. We watched it on Internet tracking, making a loop around the country before reaching its destination.

My ‘delay’ story has a happy ending, more or less. I still get special discs for review sent to me from another site I once reviewed for. In the last week of July I was told that the new Blu-ray for Airplane! was on the way. Although the point of origin is just on the other side of Los Angeles, it took 29 days to get here, with me late on the requested review and asking not to be barred from the site. The package bore a good address for CineSavant Central.

So I will eventually have a review up here for Airplane!, but over six weeks after its street date back in July.

For my money, the USPS is a National necessity and I don’t care if it operates in the red. We don’t expect the Pentagon to make a profit, and to hell with people that want to privatize everything.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Stuff that came in the door department:

Back on April 11  the CineSavant Column reviewed a new book, Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan’s Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies. It’s the book that proposes that 1962, not 1939, has the best movies Hollywood ever made; my review goes into plenty of detail.

Yesterday arrived a hard copy of the book, as promised; I had reviewed it from a .jpg file, and it’s nice to see and feel the finished item, and to see that it is a quality hardbound publication. If only a few disc companies were this thoughtful — these folks came through as promised, even though hardly anybody’s offices in this TOC (Time Of Covid) are working up to speed.

And then, Walter Olsen of Scorpion Releasing sent along a comp copy of the new Blu-ray disc of the devil-cult horror item Night Visitor. The independently produced movie has a name cast that includes Allen Garfield, Elliott Gould, Richard Roundtree, Shannon Tweed and Michael J. Pollard. Scorpion’s disc has been sitting here for a day, but so far I’ve found enough excuses to avoid looking at my interview. I guess I’ll get to that sometime today.

CineSavant will have a disc review up  soon, which will definitely be an exercise in objective opinion restraint. What kind of disclaimer will the review need, for a picture that I edited, and a disc that I participated in as well?  Will it just be more of the self-centered coverage you’ve come to depend on here at CineSavant?  I’d better renew my prescription for those bias-blocking impartiality pills, and take another ‘No Fake News’ oath before a notary public.

And as long as we’re covering all these shameless personal angles, I might as well get a signpost event over with. Five years ago on August 25, 2015, the orphaned ‘DVD Savant’ page was invited to take a guest roost at the top-rated and indispensable Trailers from Hell site. I think it has been an excellent fit — at TFH I’ve finally achieved some control over what I write. In all that time I’ve received nothing but help and good guidance from Joe Dante’s cohorts in cinematic crime Charlie Largent and Kris Milsap. The support has been excellent, what with handsome re-designs and excellent publicity spreading the word on social media. DVD Savant morphed into the present ‘CineSavant’ in September of 2017, so I guess the page is still only in its infancy. I hope the arrangement has been agreeable for them; for me it’s been nothing but fun.

I found some of Charlie Largent’s  CineSavant logo ideas from 2015, before he came up with the almost-too-good final item.  ↑

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello! A brief but fun link today…

After an extended production period, Arnold Leibovit has his Puppetoon Movie 2 Blu-ray collection ready to ship. I reviewed his impressive first Puppetoon Movie back in 2013; this new collection contains a full eighteen cartoons, including some cel animation items from earlier in the 1930s. All but one is new to home video. The running time of the shows is just over three hours.

I especially note the inclusion of four Jasper Puppetoons — I remember them only in B&W from TV in the early 1960s. Leibovit is taking preorders now, and says that the disc should be ready to ship in December. He has a page with pre-order info, and a second URL with a bright and snappy musical Puppetoon Movie 2 Blu-ray trailer.

And Flicker Alley has announced a street date for its English language Blu-ray of the Deutsche Kinemathek restoration of Paul Leni’s 1924 Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett). The film stars three top stars of Weimar cinema — Emil Jannings, Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt, plus future director William (Wilhelm) Dieterle. Three of them play mysterious, nefarious characters: Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, Ivan the Terrible, and Jack the Ripper. It’s being presented with a full slate of extras, and the release date is scheduled for November 3rd. There’s a pre-order page for this one too: Flicker Alley Waxworks, and also an online trailer.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson