Have a sinking feeling? Maybe it’s just Roy and my end-of-the-year discussion about “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Hang in there. We’ll attempt to raise your spirits with an idealistic start to 2021 and a New Year’s Day chinwag about “Superman: The Movie” (1978).
Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner live-streams on Facebook most Friday and Sunday evenings at 7:00 EST.
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Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…
If a ball drops in Times Square, and no one’s around to see it, is it still a new year? Call it the final conundrum of 2020.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we laugh away a very rough year with highlights from the notorious and uproarious Hoffnung Music Festival concerts.
Gerard Hoffnung was a boy when his family arrived in London, refugees from Nazi Germany. In his new home, he cultivated the persona of an English gentleman, though one with a decidedly impish bent. He attained celebrity through his work as a cartoonist, a sparkling panelist, and a public speaker. He was lauded as a brilliant improviser with a dry wit and a masterly sense of timing. He also played the tuba well enough that he was able to tackle the Vaughan Williams concerto.
Following a successful April Fool’s concert in 1956, Hoffnung embarked on the enterprise which, alongside his cartooning, ensured a kind of immortality – the first of the Hoffnung Music Festival concerts. The concerts brought together representatives of England’s finest musical talent to lampoon what, especially at the time, might have been perceived as a rather stodgy art form.
There would be three Hoffnung concerts in all. Alas, the third was presented posthumously. Hoffnung collapsed at his home in 1959, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage three days later, at the age of only 34. An untimely finish for a character who seemed his entire life to be a brilliant, fully-developed, middle-aged man, always at the peak of his form.
I hope you’ll join me tonight as we celebrate Hoffnung’s whimsical legacy. We’ll hear Sir Malcolm Arnold’s “A Grand, Grand Overture,” for orchestra, organ, electric floor polisher, and three vacuum cleaners – the work was dedicated to President “Hoover” – and Franz Reizenstein’s “Concerto populare,” billed as “a piano concerto to end all piano concertos,” among others.
It’s a lighthearted playlist calculated to put a smile on your face and lend a boost to your spirits. He who laughs last laughs best. So “Have a Ball,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Hope you’ve all been enjoying the holidays, albeit with some necessary modifications and perhaps a few compromises. Not to proselytize, but if we all do the right thing, hopefully this year will soon be little more than an unpleasant memory.
Be that as it may, in this season of merriment, Roy and I will conclude 2020 on a low note – and isn’t that saying something? – with an “in-depth” discussion of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” (1954).
This whale of a tale features Kirk Douglas as the swashbuckling Ned Land, James Mason as a brooding Captain Nemo, and a 40-foot squid as the ultimate metaphor for that great leveler, COVID. Land sings a saucy sea shanty about his affairs with loose women, and Nemo plays Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor (of course) on an organ in his decked-out submarine. Gotta love vintage Disney.
Peter Lorre and Paul Lukas are along for the ride, in this intelligent family classic that’s refreshingly free of flatulence jokes.
I hope you’ll join us for a hearty good riddance to 2020, on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. Leave your comments in the captain’s log as we live-stream on Facebook, this Sunday evening at 7:00 EST.
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It’s all true… I swear by my tattoo!
With the grand cacophony of Christmas still fresh in everyone’s ears, I thought it only appropriate this week on “Picture Perfect” to focus on music from movies about toys.
Without giving anything away, in the unlikely event you don’t already know the story’s big pay-off, “Citizen Kane” (1941) is a film flanked by toys. There’s even a snow globe in the film’s opening montage. A certain memory of Kane’s childhood provides a poignant glimpse of the larger-than-life newspaper magnate’s lost innocence. “Kane” is often cited as one of the greatest films ever made. Orson Welles triumphed in his debut as writer-director-star, even if, ultimately, his creation proved to be a bottle rocket that blew up in his face. The film also marked the Hollywood debut of composer Bernard Herrmann.
I’m not sure that “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” (1985) could be described as the “Citizen Kane” of the ‘80s, exactly, but this endearingly goofy sojourn into the surreal does revolve around the recovery of a lost toy, as Pee-Wee, the eternal boy, determines to make his way to “the basement of the Alamo” in an attempt to reclaim his stolen bike. The feature was director Tim Burton’s first. It was also his first collaboration with Danny Elfman, who is obviously a big fan of Nino Rota.
The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are better known for their contributions to architecture, industrial design, and manufacturing, but they also made short films. “Toccata for Toy Trains” (1957) was inspired by the Eames’ passion for vintage toys. The score was provided by their go-to composer, Elmer Bernstein.
Finally, in acknowledgement of the greatest toy series of our day, we’ll conclude with music from “Toy Story” (1995), the first full-length computer animated feature. The quality of the film propelled it beyond mere novelty status into the realm of instant classic, and the beloved “Toy Story” franchise has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars. Early on, it was decided by the filmmakers that they did not want “Toy Story” to be a musical, but that songs could be used to underline its emotional content. Randy Newman has provided the music for all the “Toy Story” films so far. He was recognized with an Academy Award for his work on “Toy Story 3,” for the song, “We Belong Together.”
Keep popping those aspirin. It’s “Toys Everywhere” this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYONE!!
Now come and get your peace and good will.
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