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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

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We thank correspondent Michael McQuarrie for today’s top item: a site by John Cozzoli called Zombo’s Closet. A page from June 4, 2023 features a big selection of full-resolution Hollywood pressbooks of Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy.

The first two are for House of Wax and the 1939 The Cat and the Canary. I liked the desperate sales copy in the sad, sad The Neanderthal Man, and it was nice to revisit The Valley of Gwangi — my pressbook copy is upstairs somewhere in the attic, hopefully not being chewed on by raccoons.

Now that’s terrific movie ad art!  The illustration above is not from a pressbook, but the original is on Cozzoli’s page as well, and it looked cool for our purposes. The actual link to Zombo’s Pressbooks is Pressbooks (Horror, Sci Fi, Fantasy)

Stolen from Straight from Joe Dante’s news distribution feed comes a comprehensive parade of original screen logos that once fronted films by Fox, 20th Century Fox, etc., Posted by ‘Doc Ido’s Free Repairs,’ the 7-minute montage starts in the silent era and continues through the merger, the introduction of CinemaScope, and various weird changes until the present, when the new owner of the studio dropped the ‘Fox’ altogether. Will the Doors Song no longer make sense?

We have to wonder what the future is for the vast library of Fox releases. Many Fox Blu-rays and DVDs of the past 20 years are slipping Out Of Print, and few Fox movies show up on cable or streaming … just a couple of hundred hero titles in rotation on TCM. A great many 1930s Fox pictures haven’t been seen in decades.

And we couldn’t pass up this nice bit of Disney lore on Youtube … Ben Laurence gives us an entire run-down on the history of Disney’s Abandoned 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Ride. Being a Southern Calfornia kid, I remembered the walk-through exhibit from childhood, and loved the moving submarines.

Laurence has excellent documentation of the ride here and in Florida. He explains that the park’s engineers and maintenance people hated the ride so much, they semi-sabotaged a demo when it came time for the head of the corporation to decide its fate.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Dick Dinman is back with another DVD Classics Corner On the Air podcast, discussing more Warner Archive movie history with the WAC’s George Feltenstein. We always like it when George drops hints about upcoming product.

Up for discussion this week are new releases of two restored favorites from director Raoul Walsh — The Warner Archive Collection’s Blu-ray of Gentleman Jim with Errol Flynn and Alexis Smith, plus the Criterion Collection’s 4K + Blu-ray offering of The Roaring Twenties, the classic gangster saga with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.

 Dick Dinman & George Feltenstein Salute Legendary Director Raoul Walsh.

They save some talk-time to also discuss Criterion’s upcoming All That Money Can Buy, better known to us as The Devil and Daniel Webster. We should be reviewing The Roaring Twenties very soon.

What, I can’t believe there’s that much interest in seeing more old laserdisc covers, but after posting a snapshot of one in a review last Tuesday I’ve gotten several emails asking to see more. The requests seem sincere enough …

I long ago disposed of most of my lasers. I should have sold a lot more when DVD arrived, but eventually I dumped most. I kept about sixty, some because they were so expensive I couldn’t part with them, and others simply because I liked the album artwork. I posted the cover for a United Artists 4-title Sci-fi set last Tuesday, and here are a few more.

The graphics can be enlarged or zoomed — they’re much bigger than what displays.

The Tex Avery and Val Lewton covers are pretty enough to be kept on display. I’m hanging on to the Japanese Until the End of the World disc because my friend and record biz expert Gregor Meyer found it for me ages ago at the old Aaron’s records. The Japanese theatrical cut was about 20 minutes longer than the American release cut, but much, much shorter than the full-length version that we waited 29 years to see released on disc. Gregor relocated to Chicago 25 moons ago; I’d sure like to get in touch with him again.

Just these six are a heavy load to lug across the house, but we still appreciate their record album- like covers.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Let’s see here, since I ought not to keep swiping items from David Schow and Joe Dante, I’ll use today’s Column go over what’s coming up in the CineSavant Review disc hopper. In other words, it’s a list of promising items for collectors that don’t necessarily know what’s even available out there.

Already in hand are a wealth of titles from KL Studio Classics. Just for January are Brigitte Bardot in  Please Not Now, Douglas Sirk’s  Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, Hal Ashby’s  Coming Home, Robert Wise’s  Run Silent, Run Deep, Fritz Lang’s  Scarlet Street in 4K, Norman Jewison’s  The Thomas Crown Affair, James Cagney in a remastered  Blood on the Sun.

For Radiance, we’re eager to review Yausharu Hasebe’s  Black Tight Killers, Kohei Oguri’s  The Sting of Death, and the Taviani brothers’  Allonsafa’n.

ClassicFlix has Loretta Young in  Cause for Alarm and the new set  The Abbott and Costello Show, Season Two. (For April, they’ve announced a Blu-ray of Frank Capra’s  Meet John Doe.)

The Criterion Collection has  Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, Raoul Walsh’s  The Roaring Twenties, Michael Roemer’s  Nothing But a Man; Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui and Michelle Yeoh in  The Heroic Trio and  The Executioners, Danny Boyle’s  Trainspotting in 4K, and Robert Altman’s  McCabe and Mrs Miller in 4K.

A new Criterion-related line (I guess I missed the memo announcing it) is Janus Contemporary, which is releasing Christian Petzold’s intriguing 2023  Afire this coming Tuesday.

Rarovideo (through Kino Lorber) has Jean Renoir’s classic  The Golden Coach, and Zeitgeist (also through Kino Lorber) has Marc Rothamund’s harrowing  Sophie Scholl.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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One again I’m stealing a web link circulated by Joe Dante — this is a good one, of a movie-to-movie relationship we’ve definitely noticed before, but not with all of the parallels shown here.

We’ve often pointed out similarities between 1955’s Them! and Jim Cameron’s exciting 1986 space adventure Aliens. But this over-under comparison piece makes it seem like the first movie was raided by the second for 20 top suspense set pieces: