Podcasts about Merrie Melodies

Early Elmer Fudd was a very different beast than the one we all know today, and last time we saw him on this podcast, he was a small part of a spin on a classic fairy tale. Well this time he's an ever bigger part of a spin on another classic fairy tale, but does the increased size of the role do him, or the cartoon, any favors? Is this a step closer to the Elmer we know? Is it even worth watching? Listen to find out!

Are you a groovy kat? Have you got rhythm? Can you move to the beat? What if your answers to all those questions were 'no', but everyone else at your kollege said 'yes' and they're judging you for it? That's more or less the plot of this weird little kartoon. But is it worth watching? Listen to find out!

Frank Tashlin is a fascinating character, in and out of the Warner Bros animation studio multiple times throughout its lifetime. On the podcast, we've only watched his Porky shorts thus far, and so, when given free range to make a color short, with original characters, one of the last shorts he worked on before another exodus and eventual return, is the product still worthwhile? Listen to find out!

You've heard us talk about The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (if you're a member of the patreon), you've heard us talk about Rabbit Rampage for the Super Nintendo, but that's NOT all, folks! Here at last is our definitive review of the definitive Looney Tunes (or Merrie Melodies for the old heads). Is it any good? Well yes obviously. But is it REALLY good? Listen and see!

Tex Avery was the Warner Bros director that really shook up what it meant to be a WB cartoon short, and one of the ways in which he did that was an increasing focus on subverting expectations and breaking the 4th wall. He also introduced several characters to the Looney Tunes lineup, such as Egghead and Elmer Fudd. These two characters in particular have a strange history, one that's become so intertwined that modern depictions of Egghead reference Elmer Fudd's original design rather than his own. All that is fascinating, but the question remains... do the debut cartoons for these two characters still hold up so many decades later? Listen to find out!

Chris and Alex take a look at animation's historical and troubling relationship to race with this examination of the Censored Eleven, a collection of controversial Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons produced during the 1930s and 1940s removed from syndication since 1968 for their inclusion of harmful and offensive racist stereotypes. Topics include histories of animating the other, identity, and experience within the medium and legacies of minstrelsy performance; the visibility of Black culture and jazz-based parodies like Bob Clampett's Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943) against more hidden (and no less damaging) iconographies within cartoon representation; and what it means to confront such legacies of racism within the critical study of animation, and if erasing any and all mention of the Censored Eleven pretends that racism in Hollywood did not exist. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot's 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

While Warner Bros' output has been increasing in quality in the late 30s, largely thanks to new blood like Tex Avery and newly-impowered blood like Bob Clampett, one member of the old guard in particular is still around and has been a lot slower to change: Fritz Freleng. Much of his output has largely been echoing the stylings of the Harman-Ising era, a style that's more and more at odds with the rest of the studio. But Freleng DOES change, even if slowly, so how does this cartoon of his hold up? Listen to find out!

THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP: A LOONEY TUNES MOVIE REVIEW Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies were a series of animated cartoons created by Warner Bros in 1935. The very first of these characters was Porky Pig created by Friz Freleng. On April 17, 1937 animators Tex Avery and Bob Clampett created an insane little […]

THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP: A LOONEY TUNES MOVIE REVIEW Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies were a series of animated cartoons created by Warner Bros in 1935. The very first of these characters was Porky Pig created by Friz Freleng. On April 17, 1937 animators Tex Avery and Bob Clampett created an insane little […]

Concluding this series of episodes, we discuss the career of Bill Lava. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thedecibelsdeeppodcast/support

In today's episode, the life and career of Milt Franklyn. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thedecibelsdeeppodcast/support

Can Falk prevent the murder of beloved songwriter E. Y. “Yip” Harburg? Why would a fan want to kill him? Will everyone come out of it with their childhood memories intact? Listen to find out!The Assassination of Yip Harburg by the Coward Fan Mail, episode 115 of This Gun in My Hand, was written, edited and a sung-a on the tongue-a by Rob Northrup. This episode and all others are available on Youtube with automatically-generated closed captions of dialog. Visit http://ThisGuninMyHand.blogspot.com for credits, show notes, archives, and to buy my books, such as Little Heist in the Big Woods and Other Revisionist Atrocities. What physical object represents my heart and brain and courage and love of home? This Gun in My Hand!Show Notes:1. Watch excerpts from the 1936 Merrie Melodies cartoon “I Love to Singa” starring Owl Jolson.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y6CNuffBi02. Orson Welles produced a successful version of Macbeth with an all-Black cast in 1936.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_Macbeth3. Judy Garland led a revised cast in Lux Radio Theater's one-hour radio adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, broadcast December 25, 1950.https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/drama/lux/lux-radio-theater-50-12-25-726-the-wizard-of-oz4. Wikipedia has an entry on Political interpretations of The Wizard of Oz. Wild stuff. I cribbed some of their ideas.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_OzCredits:The opening music clip was from The Sun Sets at Dawn (1950), and the closing music was from Killer Bait (1949), both films in the public domain. Most of the music and sound effects used in the episode are modified or incomplete versions of the originals.Music Title: Theme to Kolchak: Night StalkerComposed by Gil MelléWhistled by RobFair use excerpt, I hope.Sound Effect Title: S15-03 Good general walla with some dishes; cheer.wavLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/675070/Sound Effect Title: G28-27-Crowd Fast Walla Applause.wavLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/438387/Sound Effect Title: R02-06-Medium Crowd Applause.wavLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/480682/ Sound Effect Title: Gun FireBy GoodSoundForYouLicense: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0http://soundbible.com/1998-Gun-Fire.htmlSound Effect Title: Real Colt 45 M1911 (shot)By CarmelomikeLicense: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0https://freesound.org/people/Carmelomike/sounds/255216/Sound Effect Title: House Front Door Inside 3.wavLicense: Public domainhttps://freesound.org/people/saturdaysoundguy/sounds/388027/# Sound Effect Title: R28-44-Women Screaming and Rapid Talking.wav License: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/479894/Sound Effect Title: Footsteps Dress Shoes Wood Floor.wavLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/allrealsound/sounds/161756/Sound Effect Title: S41-25 Car backfires; reverberant.wavLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/675723/Sound Effect Title: footsteps cellar.wavLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/gecop/sounds/545030/Sound Effect Title: Taurus G2c Dry Trigger PullLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/NoonerBear/sounds/589848/The image accompanying this episode is a modified detail of the back cover of the public domain comic book Dell Junior Treasury, Number 5 (July 1956), painted by Mel Crawford.

The conclusion of the story of Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies Composer Carl Stalling. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thedecibelsdeeppodcast/support

In today's episode, we discuss the life and career of Carl Stalling. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thedecibelsdeeppodcast/support

As we've watched the two Warner Bros cartoon series (Merrie Melodies & Looney Tunes), we've gradually seen Porky Pig become the studio's main character, the closest thing they had to a Mickey Mouse. But by this point, Mickey Mouse was arguably not even the most popular character in Disney's cartoons anymore - Donald Duck was fast taking that position. And thus, maybe it was about time for Warner Bros. to introduce their own Donald Duck! Which they would attempt... in a different cartoon that we'll get to later. In this cartoon, however, they found an unexpected star, also coincidentally a duck, who they wouldn't immediately capitalize on, but who would eventually become one of their greatest cartoon stars. That's right, it's time to meet... Daffy Duck! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/howsitholdup/support

Drunk and horny and all about Cynna's pu$$y, they sing us an all-star La Cucaracha, and Slowpoke seems to have some sort of Tabasco fetish. FIND ALL THINGS STICKY DOLL HERE ⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/stickydoll (0:00) Speedy Gonzales Call (00:48) LaCucaRacha w/ Hank Hill, Barney Gumble, and Peter Griffin (01:38) Slowpoke Rodriguez on the Call (03:34) Tabasco Sauce (04:09) Cynna's Pu$$y "If this video offends you please go to church after you watch it." -El Sancho, STICKY DOLL STICKY DOLL is a Industrial Punk Band and Funny as Fuck Podcasters. All STICKY DOLL Music is 100% BASS & DRUMS ONLY - No Guitar Official Music and Merch: http://stickydoll.com All Videos: https://youtube.com/stickydoll Watch all our Live Stream shows at https://www.facebook.com/stickydoll AND listen to our Podcast "In Bed w/ STICKY DOLL" on YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple, or wherever YOU listen! FEATURED STICKY DOLL SONG "Shiny Spikes" from the massively successful EP "Like Us. Love Us. Lust Us. Fuck Us." ⁠https://open.spotify.com/track/09dk4JRWKfzLiVGh0nea19?si=1eb2dde13b354a37⁠ #punk #goth #podcast #comedy #wb #animation #mexico #looneytunes FIND ALL THINGS STICKY DOLL HERE ⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/stickydoll⁠ Speedy Gonzales is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. He is portrayed as "The Fastest Mouse in all Mexico" with his major traits being the ability to run extremely fast, being quick-witted and heroic while speaking with an exaggerated Mexican accent.[1] He usually wears a yellow sombrero, white shirt and trousers (which was a common traditional outfit worn by men and boys of rural Mexican villages), and a red kerchief, similar to that of some traditional Mexican attires.[2] There have been 46 theatrical shorts made either starring or featuring the character. Slowpoke Rodriguez is a character from the Looney Tunes series. He is the slowest mouse in all Mexico. He is also the cousin of Speedy Gonzales, the fastest mouse in all Mexico. Despite his seeming physical deficiency, Slowpoke proves himself to be very cunning and virtually as smart as Speedy is fast. He also shows very good gunfighting and hypnotism skills, which he uses as self-defense from predators such as cats. He usually relies on Speedy to get away from Sylvester. FIND ALL THINGS STICKY DOLL HERE ⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/stickydoll

Though Tex Avery tends to be known for his more violent, slapstick and sometimes horny cartoons, the man was also capable of making cartoons that were strangely sweet. This is perhaps the most well-known example, though don't let the 'sweet' description fool you into thinking the short is devoid of laughs. Featuring a jazz-singing owl, disappointed parents, and a talent competition, this short has it all... but is it good? Listen to find out! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/howsitholdup/support

"You-ho-to-ho!"We love talking animation on the show (Mike and Kyle do, at least). Sierra Webb makes her return to You're Missing Out for the 1957 Merrie Melodies short, What's Opera Doc?  Hosts:Michael NataleTwitterInstagramLetterboxd Tom LorenzoTwitterInstagramLetterboxd Producer:Kyle LamparTwitterInstagram Guest:Sierra WebbInstagram  Follow the Show:TwitterInstagramWebsite Music by Mike Natale

Celebrating 100 years of Parabellum City, The City That Never Misses! Will Falk survive? Will Petra? Was your lack of a nickel the final nail in her coffin? Listen to find out!Parabellum City Passes a C-Note, episode 100 of This Gun in My Hand, was founded and passed by Rob Northrup -- who would like to remind you that This Gun in My Hand is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events, places, financial instruments or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This episode and all others are available on Youtube with automatically-generated closed captions of dialogue. Visit http://ThisGuninMyHand.blogspot.com for credits, show notes, archives, information on how to subscribe, and to buy my books, such as Little Heist in the Big Woods and Other Revisionist Atrocities. What will I use to get a message to the bank? This Gun in My Hand!Show Notes:1. The history of Parabellum City is inspired by the founding of Jacksonberg, aka Jacksonopolis, aka Jackson, aka Jacktown, aka Rose City, aka Prison City. They're not meant to be the same. Parabellum City is bigger. Jackson is not what I'd call a toddlin'-class town.2. Fruity ad inspired by “He Was Her Man” (Merrie Melodies, 1936). Content warning: the domestic violence they got away with in 1936 cartoons is unreal.https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x60u9yo 3. Wikipedia says “In some cities in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, the key to the city is given to the so-called 'prins carnaval' who leads the carnivals which take place the week prior to Septuagesima.”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_City#Key_to_the_City Credits:The opening music was from The Sun Sets at Dawn (1950), and the closing music was from Killer Bait (1949), both films in the public domain. Most of the music and sound effects used in the episode are modified or incomplete versions of the originals.Sound Effect Title: S18-25 Rifle shots battle.wavLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/675666/Sound Effect Title: Gun FireBy GoodSoundForYouLicense: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0http://soundbible.com/1998-Gun-Fire.htmlSound Effect Title: Real Colt 45 M1911 (shot)By CarmelomikeLicense: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0https://freesound.org/people/Carmelomike/sounds/255216/Sound Effect Title: Park ambience - mostly birdsLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/Mafon2/sounds/274175/#Sound Effect Title: R02-06-Medium Crowd Applause.wavLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/480682/ Sound Effect Title: G30-69-Outdoor Crowd Walla.wavLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/438429/Sound Effect Title: G28-27-Crowd Fast Walla Applause.wavLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/438387/Sound Effect Title: Microphone feedback.wavLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/JavierSerrat/sounds/470111/Sound Effect Title: footsteps cellar.wavLicense: Public Domainhttps://freesound.org/people/gecop/sounds/545030/The image accompanying this episode is a modified detail of the public domain cover of Key Comics Number 3, Winter 1945, art by Walter Johnson.

Hello Toonsters and Looney Tunes Fans! If this is your first time listening, welcome to the LOONIEST source for your zany cartoon news surrounding the iconic Merrie Melodies characters from news and interviews to reviews! On this special episode, it's just me, Jonathan Graves here to discuss the devistating developments surrounding the James Gunn produced, Dave Green Directed film, 'Coyote Vs Acme.' Starring Will Forte, John Cena, Lana Condor and voices provided by Emmy Award Winner Eric Bauza, this was set to release last year but was replaced on the calendar release schedule by Barbie and the film was indefinitely shelved before being (presumably) deleted this week for tax purposes. This is a business practice that I truly do not condone or support and I hope something is done to stop it from ever happening again.  

Join the gang of lovable losers as we talk, Dwayne Steeler's Masterclass in Merrie Melodies and history of Looney Tunes Watch the live stream every week, Youtube.com/@totallytoonular Join the conversation! Email us at totally.toonular@gmail.com. Send us recommendations or tell your feelings on any cartoon we've talked about. We will read your email live on air! And Subscribe to our YouTube @Totallytoonular Follow @Fantasyshed @ih8_prettyh8machine @yarn_yeti Check the YouTube KaiserBeamz Everything we based our Looney Tunes history on is this amazing documentary series! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z57_2T_WIuA&list=PLcROlJp65glTO1Z7tugNPpxiKXqQbDbdQ&ab_channel=KaiserBeamz

Call it “dream logic”; call it a time-collapsing mind meld. It came to me in a dream: a snatch of nonsense lyric and melody, an ear-worm summoned up from 60 years in the past. I didn't know what it was, why it was teasing me, or precisely where it came from, but there it was… “and, so on, so on, so forth…” What was it? I googled just that much, and up it came: “The Hut-Song,” sung by the eponymous elephant in Horton Hatches an Egg, a cartoon that I had watched as a toddler. And, digging back a bit further, I discovered that preceding that animated Dr. Suess adaptation, The Hut-Sut Song was a monster pop hit, with several cover versions - the most popular being Freddy Martin's. Thereby, not only did I jump start my memory, but I made a new discovery, as well. So, here we are: A Sunny Song from the deep recesses of my sub-conscious. I'm including both versions because the pop hit has a whole backstory to explain the indecipherable lyrics.I think the genesis of this whole mission was that I recently became a grandfather, and had been thinking about what books I'd like to read to the child. I was trying to remember the ones I read to my kids, and the ones that were read to me. I loved all the Dr. Suess books, especially “If I Ran the Circus”, and later, cogitating about what to include in the next round of Sunny Songs, this ditty bubbled up from deep within my gooey grey matter, and would not be denied. So, my next question would be: Why was Horton the Elephant singing that song? It's a house of mirrors.

Venha com a gente conhecer a origem de Looney Tunes e Merrie Melodies! Para que esse projeto continue existindo e crescendo cada vez mais, considere virar um de nossos apoiadores em apoia.se/supersoda. Escolha um valor que caiba em seu orçamento e ganhe recompensas bem legais!

Venha com a gente conhecer a origem de Looney Tunes e Merrie Melodies! Para que esse projeto continue existindo e crescendo cada vez mais, considere virar um de nossos apoiadores em apoia.se/supersoda. Escolha um valor que caiba em seu orçamento e ganhe recompensas bem legais!

Greetings Folks!  In this week's episode, I'm joined by the co-writer of Merrie Little Batman, Morgan Evans to discuss his works as well as the little scare us Looney Tunes fans experienced last week surrounding the removal of the classic Merrie Melodies catalog from Max! In a quick turn of events, we had news that the remaining short from the classic Looney Tunes series, as well as the 2011-2014 Series, the Looney Tunes Show was to be removed from the streaming service Max, only to be ratified in it's press release with word that the titles were added by mistake.  Physical Media is here to stay and this week is a great time to stock up! The Collector's Choice Vol. 2 drops on Blu-ray featuring some never before seen restored cartoons from Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones and Art Davis! Thanks to the Warner Archive for putting that together. Morgan Evans also wrote for the Tunes in the WB100 celebration episode of Teen Titans Go! so go to chat about that, but unfortunately  it's currently not available to stream anywhere. Hopefully soon it will be made public again, as it did air on Cartoon Network on Oct. 14th. Merry Little Batman: The latest project saved from termination due to the Discovery/WB merger is here thanks to Amazon Prime picking it up for distribution! The Holiday Crime Caper is available on Dec. 8th and it looks absolutley delightful! With Batman's mission to clean up Gotham, finally complete he can now focus on the next one, being a Dad to Damien Wayne, his son. When Damien loses his Father's gift, it's up to him to protect the mansion from burglars in this festive comedy! Merry Little Batman: Bringing a Little Holiday Crime to Amazon Prime. Follow our Guest: Morgan Evans @TotallyMorgan   Follow the Podcast @ThisMeansPodcast   That's Not All Folks!   

La chronique de Josef Schovanec : Vil Coyote, personnage de dessin animé de la série Looney Tunes et Merrie Melodies. Le talk-show culturel de Jérôme Colin. Avec, dès 11h30, La Bagarre dans la Discothèque, un jeu musical complétement décalé où la créativité et la mauvaise foi font loi. À partir de midi, avec une belle bande de chroniqueurs, ils explorent ensemble tous les pans de la culture belge et internationale sans sacralisation, pour découvrir avec simplicité, passion et humour. Merci pour votre écoute Entrez sans Frapper c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 11h30 à 13h sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez tous les épisodes de Entrez sans Frapper sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/8521 Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

La chronique de Josef Schovanec : Vil Coyote, personnage de dessin animé de la série Looney Tunes et Merrie Melodies. La COP28, la Conférence sur les changements climatiques, s'ouvre aujourd'hui à Dubaï jusqu'au 12 décembre. À cette occasion, on reçoit Véronique Le Bris pour son livre "100 grands films bons pour la planète" (Gründ/Arte Éditions). Ce nouveau titre de la collection a pour objectif de montrer que le cinéma est un acteur majeur dans la prise de conscience des enjeux de l'humanité. À l'image du succès de films récents comme Demain, de Cyril Dion, ou Woman at War, de Benedikt Erlingsson, ce cinéma qui mêle toutes les formes, animation, fiction ou documentaire, contribue à changer le monde en montrant les contradictions ou les luttes qui sont l'œuvre. Arte a depuis longtemps un positionnement très fort sur le sujet de l'avenir de la planète. Son site VOD propose de nombreux films qui traitent de sujets écologiques et humanistes. Ce livre est le prolongement de cette audace éditoriale. "Inspiré de faits réels" de Franck Istasse : « La grande Évasion », une méga production hollywoodienne sortie en 1963 et réalisée par John Sturges… Le talk-show culturel de Jérôme Colin. Avec, dès 11h30, La Bagarre dans la Discothèque, un jeu musical complétement décalé où la créativité et la mauvaise foi font loi. À partir de midi, avec une belle bande de chroniqueurs, ils explorent ensemble tous les pans de la culture belge et internationale sans sacralisation, pour découvrir avec simplicité, passion et humour. Merci pour votre écoute Entrez sans Frapper c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 11h30 à 13h sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez tous les épisodes de Entrez sans Frapper sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/8521 Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

One thing that hasn't been brought up much when we discuss old cartoon shorts is the music, especially by way of theme songs. They've existed, but we have yet to truly hear some of the most iconic, such as the Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies themes. Well today marks the first time we get to hear one of them, though not serving as a theme song yet. Instead it's sung by characters in the short, and if you've ever watched classic Warner cartoons, hearing it will bring a smile to your face. But is the actual cartoon fun to watch, too? Listen to find out! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/howsitholdup/support

Long ago we met Warner Bros first cartoon star, Bosko. But his star faded fast, and has aged particularly poorly, resulting in him being hardly remembered nowadays. Today we meet the first lasting Looney Tunes star, who still appears in media to this very day: Porky Pig. That's right, Looney Tunes as we know it today didn't start with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck or even Egghead (the proto-Elmer Fudd)! No, it started in 1935, with a stuttering pig named Porky, only one of several new characters being thrown at the proverbial wall in this cartoon, and the only one of the group that ultimately stuck, even if it took a few more cartoons for that to happen. But how does this very first outing hold up almost a century later? Listen to find out! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/howsitholdup/support

Rerun. A giant chicken with the mannerisms of a wise-crackin' Southern gentleman, Foghorn Leghorn first appeared in the Looney Tunes short ‘Walky Talky Hawky' on 31st August, 1946. Directed by Robert McKimson and voiced by Mel Blanc, the character – who was inspired in part by popular radio character ‘Senator Claghorn' from The Fred Allen Show – proved an instant audience favourite. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly consider whether Foghorn's Antebellum expressions put him on the soon-to-be-'cancelled' list; explain the origin of Warner's other animated franchise, ‘Merrie Melodies'; and marvel at Blanc's bed-bound professionalism… Further Reading: • ‘Walky Talky Hawky' (Warner Bros, 1946): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ9lyubmGys • ‘The Censored Eleven – Banned Cartoons' (The Museum Of UnCut Funk): https://museumofuncutfunk.com/2011/10/05/the-censored-eleven/ • ‘How Bugs Bunny Saved Mel Blanc From A Coma In 1961' (doyouremember, 2021): https://doyouremember.com/141804/bugs-bunny-saved-mel-blanc-coma ‘Why am I hearing a rerun?' Every Thursday is 'Throwback Thursday' on Today in History with the Retrospectors: running one repeat per week means we can keep up the quality of our independent podcast. Daily shows like this require a lot of work! But as ever we'll have something new for you tomorrow, so follow us wherever you get your podcasts: podfollow.com/Retrospectors   Love the show? Join  

Hear the rest of this episode exclusively on Patreon  On this episode of Beneath the Skin we discuss how early 20th century cartoonists Tex Avery and Max Fleischer influenced culture and tattooing through their work on Merrie Melodies, Looney Toons, Popeye, and so many more If you want to follow us online for more updates CLICK HERE Production by Thomas O'Mahony Artwork by Joe Painter (jcp_art) Intro Music by Dan McKenna If you would like to get in touch you can email the show on beneaththeskinpod@gmail.com

Quizmasters Lee and Marc meet for a trivia quiz with topics including Dog Breeds, Pop Duets, 80's & 90's Movies, Video Games, Sports, Science, Cooking, and more! Round One DOG BREEDS - What breed of dog (whose origins can be traced to the area that is now modern Croatia) was once used as a carriage dog to protect from banditry and later were utilized by early fire-fighting groups around their wagons as well (to calm the horses)? POP DUETS - "Ebony and Ivory" was a single released in 1982 by Paul McCartney, featuring what famous singer and keyboard player? BOATING - Sharing its name with a chain of islands in the western Bahamas, what is the term for a sun shade or rain cover that shades a portion of a yacht? 90'S MOVIES - Dr. Malcolm Crowe is one of the main characters in what movie (released in 1999)? CHILDREN'S BOOKS - Astrid Lindgren is known as the author of what 1945 Swedish children's novel that is named after its main character and has been translated in more than 40 languages? VIDEO GAMES - Which video game company released the handheld Lynx console? Round Two BOTANY - Taraxicum is the proper name of what popular flower that can be eaten (cooked or raw) and are an excellent source of Vitamins A, C, and K? 80'S MOVIES - What 1984 movie, that stars Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, was the first ever to receive a PG-13 rating by the MPAA? NFL - Which number did NFL quarterback Peyton Manning wear on his jersey for most of his career? DISNEY - Which series of cartoon short films featured the animated debut of classic Disney characters such as Donald Duck, but also served as inspiration for other animated shorts series such as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies? SCIENCE - Monocarpic and polycarpic are words that describe something from what branch of biology? COOKING - Jamaica pepper, myrtle pepper, and pimento are all names for which spice? Rate My Question SPORTS - Which country's most popular sport was invented in the 1850s to keep cricket players fit in the winter, and includes unique moves such as “handball”, “speckie” and “umpire-led boundary throw-ins”? Final Questions LYRICS TO GO - On an episode of the 1997 British TV series “an evening with,” which notable British musician showed their songwriting prowess by improvising a song with borrowed lyrics from an oven manual (provided by actor Richard E. Grant, who set the challenge)? ANCIENT GREECE - In Ancient Greek legend, a soldier named Pheidippides collapsed and died after running over 25 miles to Athens to give news of which battle? Upcoming LIVE Know Nonsense Trivia Challenges August 15th, 2023 - Ollie's Pub - 6:00 pm EST August 16th, 2023 - Point Ybel Brewing Co. - 7:30 pm EST August 17th, 2023 - Fathoms Restaurant & Bar - 6:30 pm EST You can find out more information about that and all of our live events online at KnowNonsenseTrivia.com All of the Know Nonsense events are free to play and you can win prizes after every round. Thank you Thanks to our supporters on Patreon. Thank you, Quizdaddies – Gil, Tim, Tommy, Adam, Brandon, Blake, Spencer, Rick G, Cazz Thank you, Team Captains – Kristin & Fletcher, Aaron, Matthew, David Holbrook, Lydia, Skyler, Hayden, Edd Thank you, Proverbial Lightkeepers – Elyse, Kaitlynn, Frank, Trent, Nina, Justin, Katie, Ryan, Robb, Captain Nick, Grant, Ian, Tim Gomez, Rachael, Moo, Rikki, Nabeel, Jon Lewis, Adam, Lisa, Spencer, Hank, Justin P., Cooper, Sarah, Karly, Lucas, Mike K., Cole, Adam, Caitlyn H, Sam, Spencer, Stephen, Cameron, Clay, JB, Joshua, James, Paul, Marit, JV, Jesse, Nathan, Steve, Tim, Michael, John Thank you, Rumplesnailtskins – Mike J., Mike C., Efren, Steven, Kenya, Dallas, Issa, Allison, Kevin & Sara, Alex, Loren, MJ, HBomb, Aaron, Laurel, FoxenV, Sarah, Edsicalz, Megan, brandon, Chris, Alec, Sai, Andrea, Ian, Aunt Kiki, Clay, Littlestoflambs, Seth, Bill, Marc P., Holgast, Nora, Joe, Emily, Andrew H., Joe, Cara, Nathan, Joey, Brian K., Zoe, Kristy, Kinkalot, villain749 If you'd like to support the podcast and gain access to bonus content, please visit http://theknowno.com and click "Support."

“At Border checkpoints, especially for shipping cargo, Border agents must inspect cargo for smuggled and illegal goods. However, because of what is called Gridlock a maximum of 5% inspections per cargo holds worldwide.[34] Since it can take a proper and complete inspection four to six hours, major global trade routes such as Singapore offer great opportunity for smugglers and traders alike. As the leading Cape Town Customs Official argues, if a shipping port stops and inspects every ship it would cause a total shipping grid lock, which is trade gridlock, which is also economic gridlock.[35] By under-declaring and misrepresenting, even the most surprising goods is common practice when smuggling. What popular culture doesn't communicate, is that illegal drugs and arms are not the bane of customs officers and the ultimate threat to their economy. In reality, the most commonly smuggled items are everyday items one believes to be common and thus causes higher losses in tax revenue. An anonymous shipping agent said that smuggling becomes second nature to businessmen, taking finished products and misrepresenting them to offer the cheapest possible rate. What the majority of people do not realize, is that the media and popular culture focus on criminal organizations as primary smugglers, but in reality legitimate businesses are the biggest offenders.[36] By incorporating their label on merchandise or products, it leaves bias towards their goods as the popular media portrays them as reliable. Smuggling, however, is produced through the very culture of the shipping industry and is affected by institutionalized tariffs and taxes around the world.[37]” I am not “Baby-Face Finster”, never have been and never will be. I am always and forever incapable of being a criminal disguised as a baby in the Merrie Melodies animated short film Baby Buggy Bunny. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/antonio-myers4/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/antonio-myers4/support

After another multiversal adventure last week, the Good Brothers return to the DCAU with a month of Batman: The Animated Series reviews for the month of July and it's only fitting the month kicks off with a bang as they review the all-time classic "Harlequinade." Hear the hosts discuss a plot that borrows heavily from Merrie Melodies shorts and the oddball comedy 48 Hours with light being shed on Harley's not yet established backstory and a DCAU musical number precedent being set. The hosts talk plenty about Paul Dini's brilliant comedy and Arleen Sorkin's role in bring "Say That We're Sweethearts Again" to the episode. Additionally, Cal & Liam talk Shirley Walker's score which shied away from traditional BTAS themes and leaned heavily onto the source material in only the way that Ms. Walker could. All of that and a discussion on Ms. Sorkin's incredible one liners, something one host noticed for the first time ever and much more await on this week's all-new DCAU Review! Please Consider Supporting the Podcast: Subscribe to the DCAU Review on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Google Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and please consider leaving us a 5-star review Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Podtower on YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and like the videos Buy the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Pod ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠a coffee or grab some ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠merch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Final Scores: Plot: Cal: 10/10 – Liam: 10/10 Visuals/Animation: Cal: 9/10 – Liam: 7/10 Music: Cal: 8/10 – Liam: 9/10 Voice Acting: Cal: 10/10 – Liam: 10/10 Bonus Point: Cal +1, Liam +1 Final Tally: Cal: 38/40* – Liam: 37/40* *DCAU Review Top Pick --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dcaureview/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dcaureview/support

Hello, Warner Bros, haven't checked in on you in a while. Bosko's gone now, so what have you been up to? Still mimicking Disney? Or have you figured out your own thing yet? Listen to find out! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/howsitholdup/support

What's up Doc? It's time for February's horror adjacent bonus episode! This month we take a look at HAIR-RAISING HARE (1946) from Chuck Jones and starring Mel Blanc as Bugs Bunny! We trace the origins of Warner Bros' Merrie Melodies back to Disney's Silly Symphonies and highlight a few of the people who made these cartoons possible. Context setting 00:00; Synopsis 52:50; Discussion 56:47

Episode 162 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Daydream Believer", and the later career of the Monkees, and how four Pinocchios became real boys. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, as even after splitting it into multiple files, there are simply too many Monkees tracks excerpted. The best versions of the Monkees albums are the triple-CD super-deluxe versions that used to be available from monkees.com , and I've used Andrew Sandoval's liner notes for them extensively in this episode. Sadly, though, none of those are in print. However, at the time of writing there is a new four-CD super-deluxe box set of Headquarters (with a remixed version of the album rather than the original mixes I've excerpted here) available from that site, and I used the liner notes for that here. Monkees.com also currently has the intermittently-available BluRay box set of the entire Monkees TV series, which also has Head and 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. For those just getting into the group, my advice is to start with this five-CD set, which contains their first five albums along with bonus tracks. The single biggest source of information I used in this episode is the first edition of Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees; The Day-By-Day Story. Sadly that is now out of print and goes for hundreds of pounds. Sandoval released a second edition of the book in 2021, which I was unfortunately unable to obtain, but that too is now out of print. If you can find a copy of either, do get one. Other sources used were Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz, and the autobiographies of three of the band members and one of the songwriters — Infinite Tuesday by Michael Nesmith, They Made a Monkee Out of Me by Davy Jones, I'm a Believer by Micky Dolenz, and Psychedelic Bubble-Gum by Bobby Hart. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Monkees, they were in a state of flux. To recap what we covered in that episode, the Monkees were originally cast as actors in a TV show, and consisted of two actors with some singing ability -- the former child stars Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz -- and two musicians who were also competent comic actors, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork.  The show was about a fictional band whose characters shared names with their actors, and there had quickly been two big hit singles, and two hit albums, taken from the music recorded for the TV show's soundtrack. But this had caused problems for the actors. The records were being promoted as being by the fictional group in the TV series, blurring the line between the TV show and reality, though in fact for the most part they were being made by session musicians with only Dolenz or Jones adding lead vocals to pre-recorded backing tracks. Dolenz and Jones were fine with this, but Nesmith, who had been allowed to write and produce a few album tracks himself, wanted more creative input, and more importantly felt that he was being asked to be complicit in fraud because the records credited the four Monkees as the musicians when (other than a tiny bit of inaudible rhythm guitar by Tork on a couple of Nesmith's tracks) none of them played on them. Tork, meanwhile, believed he had been promised that the group would be an actual group -- that they would all be playing on the records together -- and felt hurt and annoyed that this wasn't the case. They were by now playing live together to promote the series and the records, with Dolenz turning out to be a perfectly competent drummer, so surely they could do the same in the studio? So in January 1967, things came to a head. It's actually quite difficult to sort out exactly what happened, because of conflicting recollections and opinions. What follows is my best attempt to harmonise the different versions of the story into one coherent narrative, but be aware that I could be wrong in some of the details. Nesmith and Tork, who disliked each other in most respects, were both agreed that this couldn't continue and that if there were going to be Monkees records released at all, they were going to have the Monkees playing on them. Dolenz, who seems to have been the one member of the group that everyone could get along with, didn't really care but went along with them for the sake of group harmony. And Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the production team behind the series, also took Nesmith and Tork's side, through a general love of mischief. But on the other side was Don Kirshner, the music publisher who was in charge of supervising the music for the TV show. Kirshner was adamantly, angrily, opposed to the very idea of the group members having any input at all into how the records were made. He considered that they should be grateful for the huge pay cheques they were getting from records his staff writers and producers were making for them, and stop whinging. And Davy Jones was somewhere in the middle. He wanted to support his co-stars, who he genuinely liked, but also, he was a working actor, he'd had other roles before, he'd have other roles afterwards, and as a working actor you do what you're told if you don't want to lose the job you've got. Jones had grown up in very severe poverty, and had been his family's breadwinner from his early teens, and artistic integrity is all very nice, but not as nice as a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars. Although that might be slightly unfair -- it might be fairer to say that artistic integrity has a different meaning to someone like Jones, coming from musical theatre and a tradition of "the show must go on", than it does to people like Nesmith and Tork who had come up through the folk clubs. Jones' attitude may also have been affected by the fact that his character in the TV show didn't play an instrument other than the occasional tambourine or maracas. The other three were having to mime instrumental parts they hadn't played, and to reproduce them on stage, but Jones didn't have that particular disadvantage. Bert Schneider, one of the TV show's producers, encouraged the group to go into the recording studio themselves, with a producer of their choice, and cut a couple of tracks to prove what they could do. Michael Nesmith, who at this point was the one who was most adamant about taking control of the music, chose Chip Douglas to produce. Douglas was someone that Nesmith had known a little while, as they'd both played the folk circuit -- in Douglas' case as a member of the Modern Folk Quartet -- but Douglas had recently joined the Turtles as their new bass player. At this point, Douglas had never officially produced a record, but he was a gifted arranger, and had just arranged the Turtles' latest single, which had just been released and was starting to climb the charts: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] Douglas quit the Turtles to work with the Monkees, and took the group into the studio to cut two demo backing tracks for a potential single as a proof of concept. These initial sessions didn't have any vocals, but featured Nesmith on guitar, Tork on piano, Dolenz on drums, Jones on tambourine, and an unknown bass player -- possibly Douglas himself, possibly Nesmith's friend John London, who he'd played with in Mike and John and Bill. They cut rough tracks of two songs, "All of Your Toys", by another friend of Nesmith's, Bill Martin, and Nesmith's "The Girl I Knew Somewhere": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (Gold Star Demo)"] Those tracks were very rough and ready -- they were garage-band tracks rather than the professional studio recordings that the Candy Store Prophets or Jeff Barry's New York session players had provided for the previous singles -- but they were competent in the studio, thanks largely to Chip Douglas' steadying influence. As Douglas later said "They could hardly play. Mike could play adequate rhythm guitar. Pete could play piano but he'd make mistakes, and Micky's time on drums was erratic. He'd speed up or slow down." But the takes they managed to get down showed that they *could* do it. Rafelson and Schneider agreed with them that the Monkees could make a single together, and start recording at least some of their own tracks. So the group went back into the studio, with Douglas producing -- and with Lester Sill from the music publishers there to supervise -- and cut finished versions of the two songs. This time the lineup was Nesmith on guitar, Tork on electric harpsichord -- Tork had always been a fan of Bach, and would in later years perform Bach pieces as his solo spot in Monkees shows -- Dolenz on drums, London on bass, and Jones on tambourine: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (first recorded version)"] But while this was happening, Kirshner had been trying to get new Monkees material recorded without them -- he'd not yet agreed to having the group play on their own records. Three days after the sessions for "All of Your Toys" and "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", sessions started in New York for an entire album's worth of new material, produced by Jeff Barry and Denny Randell, and largely made by the same Red Bird Records team who had made "I'm a Believer" -- the same musicians who in various combinations had played on everything from "Sherry" by the Four Seasons to "Like a Rolling Stone" by Dylan to "Leader of the Pack", and with songs by Neil Diamond, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Leiber and Stoller, and the rest of the team of songwriters around Red Bird. But at this point came the meeting we talked about towards the end of the "Last Train to Clarksville" episode, in which Nesmith punched a hole in a hotel wall in frustration at what he saw as Kirshner's obstinacy. Kirshner didn't want to listen to the recordings the group had made. He'd promised Jeff Barry and Neil Diamond that if "I'm a Believer" went to number one, Barry would get to produce, and Diamond write, the group's next single. Chip Douglas wasn't a recognised producer, and he'd made this commitment. But the group needed a new single out. A compromise was offered, of sorts, by Kirshner -- how about if Barry flew over from New York to LA to produce the group, they'd scrap the tracks both the group and Barry had recorded, and Barry would produce new tracks for the songs he'd recorded, with the group playing on them? But that wouldn't work either. The group members were all due to go on holiday -- three of them were going to make staggered trips to the UK, partly to promote the TV series, which was just starting over here, and partly just to have a break. They'd been working sixty-plus hour weeks for months between the TV series, live performances, and the recording studio, and they were basically falling-down tired, which was one of the reasons for Nesmith's outburst in the meeting. They weren't accomplished enough musicians to cut tracks quickly, and they *needed* the break. On top of that, Nesmith and Barry had had a major falling-out at the "I'm a Believer" session, and Nesmith considered it a matter of personal integrity that he couldn't work with a man who in his eyes had insulted his professionalism. So that was out, but there was also no way Kirshner was going to let the group release a single consisting of two songs he hadn't heard, produced by a producer with no track record. At first, the group were insistent that "All of Your Toys" should be the A-side for their next single: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "All Of Your Toys"] But there was an actual problem with that which they hadn't foreseen. Bill Martin, who wrote the song, was under contract to another music publisher, and the Monkees' contracts said they needed to only record songs published by Screen Gems. Eventually, it was Micky Dolenz who managed to cut the Gordian knot -- or so everyone thought. Dolenz was the one who had the least at stake of any of them -- he was already secure as the voice of the hits, he had no particular desire to be an instrumentalist, but he wanted to support his colleagues. Dolenz suggested that it would be a reasonable compromise to put out a single with one of the pre-recorded backing tracks on one side, with him or Jones singing, and with the version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" that the band had recorded together on the other. That way, Kirshner and the record label would get their new single without too much delay, the group would still be able to say they'd started recording their own tracks, everyone would get some of what they wanted. So it was agreed -- though there was a further stipulation. "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" had Nesmith singing lead vocals, and up to that point every Monkees single had featured Dolenz on lead on both sides. As far as Kirshner and the other people involved in making the release decisions were concerned, that was the way things were going to continue. Everyone was fine with this -- Nesmith, the one who was most likely to object in principle, in practice realised that having Dolenz sing his song would make it more likely to be played on the radio and used in the TV show, and so increase his royalties. A vocal session was arranged in New York for Dolenz and Jones to come and cut some vocal tracks right before Dolenz and Nesmith flew over to the UK. But in the meantime, it had become even more urgent for the group to be seen to be doing their own recording. An in-depth article on the group in the Saturday Evening Post had come out, quoting Nesmith as saying "It was what Kirshner wanted to do. Our records are not our forte. I don't care if we never sell another record. Maybe we were manufactured and put on the air strictly with a lot of hoopla. Tell the world we're synthetic because, damn it, we are. Tell them the Monkees are wholly man-made overnight, that millions of dollars have been poured into this thing. Tell the world we don't record our own music. But that's us they see on television. The show is really a part of us. They're not seeing something invalid." The press immediately jumped on the band, and started trying to portray them as con artists exploiting their teenage fans, though as Nesmith later said "The press decided they were going to unload on us as being somehow illegitimate, somehow false. That we were making an attempt to dupe the public, when in fact it was me that was making the attempt to maintain the integrity. So the press went into a full-scale war against us." Tork, on the other hand, while he and Nesmith were on the same side about the band making their own records, blamed Nesmith for much of the press reaction, later saying "Michael blew the whistle on us. If he had gone in there with pride and said 'We are what we are and we have no reason to hang our heads in shame' it never would have happened." So as far as the group were concerned, they *needed* to at least go with Dolenz's suggested compromise. Their personal reputations were on the line. When Dolenz arrived at the session in New York, he was expecting to be asked to cut one vocal track, for the A-side of the next single (and presumably a new lead vocal for "The Girl I Knew Somewhere"). When he got there, though, he found that Kirshner expected him to record several vocals so that Kirshner could choose the best. That wasn't what had been agreed, and so Dolenz flat-out refused to record anything at all. Luckily for Kirshner, Jones -- who was the most co-operative member of the band -- was willing to sing a handful of songs intended for Dolenz as well as the ones he was meant to sing. So the tape of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", the song intended for the next single, was slowed down so it would be in a suitable key for Jones instead, and he recorded the vocal for that: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You"] Incidentally, while Jones recorded vocals for several more tracks at the session -- and some would later be reused as album tracks a few years down the line -- not all of the recorded tracks were used for vocals, and this later gave rise to a rumour that has been repeated as fact by almost everyone involved, though it was a misunderstanding. Kirshner's next major success after the Monkees was another made-for-TV fictional band, the Archies, and their biggest hit was "Sugar Sugar", co-written and produced by Jeff Barry: [Excerpt: The Archies, "Sugar Sugar"] Both Kirshner and the Monkees have always claimed that the Monkees were offered "Sugar, Sugar" and turned it down. To Kirshner the moral of the story was that since "Sugar, Sugar" was a massive hit, it proved his instincts right and proved that the Monkees didn't know what would make a hit. To the Monkees, on the other hand, it showed that Kirshner wanted them to do bubblegum music that they considered ridiculous. This became such an established factoid that Dolenz regularly tells the story in his live performances, and includes a version of "Sugar, Sugar" in them, rearranged as almost a torch song: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Sugar, Sugar (live)"] But in fact, "Sugar, Sugar" wasn't written until long after Kirshner and the Monkees had parted ways. But one of the songs for which a backing track was recorded but no vocals were ever completed was "Sugar Man", a song by Denny Randell and Sandy Linzer, which they would later release themselves as an unsuccessful single: [Excerpt: Linzer and Randell, "Sugar Man"] Over the years, the Monkees not recording "Sugar Man" became the Monkees not recording "Sugar, Sugar". Meanwhile, Dolenz and Nesmith had flown over to the UK to do some promotional work and relax, and Jones soon also flew over, though didn't hang out with his bandmates, preferring to spend more time with his family. Both Dolenz and Nesmith spent a lot of time hanging out with British pop stars, and were pleased to find that despite the manufactured controversy about them being a manufactured group, none of the British musicians they admired seemed to care. Eric Burdon, for example, was quoted in the Melody Maker as saying "They make very good records, I can't understand how people get upset about them. You've got to make up your minds whether a group is a record production group or one that makes live appearances. For example, I like to hear a Phil Spector record and I don't worry if it's the Ronettes or Ike and Tina Turner... I like the Monkees record as a grand record, no matter how people scream. So somebody made a record and they don't play, so what? Just enjoy the record." Similarly, the Beatles were admirers of the Monkees, especially the TV show, despite being expected to have a negative opinion of them, as you can hear in this contemporary recording of Paul McCartney answering a fan's questions: Excerpt: Paul McCartney talks about the Monkees] Both Dolenz and Nesmith hung out with the Beatles quite a bit -- they both visited Sgt. Pepper recording sessions, and if you watch the film footage of the orchestral overdubs for "A Day in the Life", Nesmith is there with all the other stars of the period. Nesmith and his wife Phyllis even stayed with the Lennons for a couple of days, though Cynthia Lennon seems to have thought of the Nesmiths as annoying intruders who had been invited out of politeness and not realised they weren't wanted. That seems plausible, but at the same time, John Lennon doesn't seem the kind of person to not make his feelings known, and Michael Nesmith's reports of the few days they stayed there seem to describe a very memorable experience, where after some initial awkwardness he developed a bond with Lennon, particularly once he saw that Lennon was a fan of Captain Beefheart, who was a friend of Nesmith, and whose Safe as Milk album Lennon was examining when Nesmith turned up, and whose music at this point bore a lot of resemblance to the kind of thing Nesmith was doing: [Excerpt: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, "Yellow Brick Road"] Or at least, that's how Nesmith always told the story later -- though Safe as Milk didn't come out until nearly six months later. It's possible he's conflating memories from a later trip to the UK in June that year -- where he also talked about how Lennon was the only person he'd really got on with on the previous trip, because "he's a compassionate person. I know he has a reputation for being caustic, but it is only a cover for the depth of his feeling." Nesmith and Lennon apparently made some experimental music together during the brief stay, with Nesmith being impressed by Lennon's Mellotron and later getting one himself. Dolenz, meanwhile, was spending more time with Paul McCartney, and with Spencer Davis of his current favourite band The Spencer Davis Group. But even more than that he was spending a lot of time with Samantha Juste, a model and TV presenter whose job it was to play the records on Top of the Pops, the most important British TV pop show, and who had released a record herself a couple of months earlier, though it hadn't been a success: [Excerpt: Samantha Juste, "No-one Needs My Love Today"] The two quickly fell deeply in love, and Juste would become Dolenz's first wife the next year. When Nesmith and Dolenz arrived back in the US after their time off, they thought the plan was still to release "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" with "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" on the B-side. So Nesmith was horrified to hear on the radio what the announcer said were the two sides of the new Monkees single -- "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", and "She Hangs Out", another song from the Jeff Barry sessions with a Davy vocal. Don Kirshner had gone ahead and picked two songs from the Jeff Barry sessions and delivered them to RCA Records, who had put a single out in Canada. The single was very, *very* quickly withdrawn once the Monkees and the TV producers found out, and only promo copies seem to circulate -- rather than being credited to "the Monkees", both sides are credited to '"My Favourite Monkee" Davy Jones Sings'. The record had been withdrawn, but "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" was clearly going to have to be the single. Three days after the record was released and pulled, Nesmith, Dolenz and Tork were back in the studio with Chip Douglas, recording a new B-side -- a new version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", this time with Dolenz on vocals. As Jones was still in the UK, John London added the tambourine part as well as the bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] As Nesmith told the story a couple of months later, "Bert said 'You've got to get this thing in Micky's key for Micky to sing it.' I said 'Has Donnie made a commitment? I don't want to go there and break my neck in order to get this thing if Donnie hasn't made a commitment. And Bert refused to say anything. He said 'I can't tell you anything except just go and record.'" What had happened was that the people at Columbia had had enough of Kirshner. As far as Rafelson and Schneider were concerned, the real problem in all this was that Kirshner had been making public statements taking all the credit for the Monkees' success and casting himself as the puppetmaster. They thought this was disrespectful to the performers -- and unstated but probably part of it, that it was disrespectful to Rafelson and Schneider for their work putting the TV show together -- and that Kirshner had allowed his ego to take over. Things like the liner notes for More of the Monkees which made Kirshner and his stable of writers more important than the performers had, in the view of the people at Raybert Productions, put the Monkees in an impossible position and forced them to push back. Schneider later said "Kirshner had an ego that transcended everything else. As a matter of fact, the press issue was probably magnified a hundred times over because of Kirshner. He wanted everybody thinking 'Hey, he's doing all this, not them.' In the end it was very self-destructive because it heightened the whole press issue and it made them feel lousy." Kirshner was out of a job, first as the supervisor for the Monkees and then as the head of Columbia/Screen Gems Music. In his place came Lester Sill, the man who had got Leiber and Stoller together as songwriters, who had been Lee Hazelwood's production partner on his early records with Duane Eddy, and who had been the "Les" in Philles Records until Phil Spector pushed him out. Sill, unlike Kirshner, was someone who was willing to take a back seat and just be a steadying hand where needed. The reissued version of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" went to number two on the charts, behind "Somethin' Stupid" by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, produced by Sill's old colleague Hazelwood, and the B-side, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", also charted separately, making number thirty-nine on the charts. The Monkees finally had a hit that they'd written and recorded by themselves. Pinocchio had become a real boy: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] At the same session at which they'd recorded that track, the Monkees had recorded another Nesmith song, "Sunny Girlfriend", and that became the first song to be included on a new album, which would eventually be named Headquarters, and on which all the guitar, keyboard, drums, percussion, banjo, pedal steel, and backing vocal parts would for the first time be performed by the Monkees themselves. They brought in horn and string players on a couple of tracks, and the bass was variously played by John London, Chip Douglas, and Jerry Yester as Tork was more comfortable on keyboards and guitar than bass, but it was in essence a full band album. Jones got back the next day, and sessions began in earnest. The first song they recorded after his return was "Mr. Webster", a Boyce and Hart song that had been recorded with the Candy Store Prophets in 1966 but hadn't been released. This was one of three tracks on the album that were rerecordings of earlier outtakes, and it's fascinating to compare them, to see the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. In the case of "Mr. Webster", the instrumental backing on the earlier version is definitely slicker: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (1st Recorded Version)"] But at the same time, there's a sense of dynamics in the group recording that's lacking from the original, like the backing dropping out totally on the word "Stop" -- a nice touch that isn't in the original. I am only speculating, but this may have been inspired by the similar emphasis on the word "stop" in "For What It's Worth" by Tork's old friend Stephen Stills: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (album version)"] Headquarters was a group album in another way though -- for the first time, Tork and Dolenz were bringing in songs they'd written -- Nesmith of course had supplied songs already for the two previous albums. Jones didn't write any songs himself yet, though he'd start on the next album, but he was credited with the rest of the group on two joke tracks, "Band 6", a jam on the Merrie Melodies theme “Merrily We Roll Along”, and "Zilch", a track made up of the four band members repeating nonsense phrases: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Zilch"] Oddly, that track had a rather wider cultural resonance than a piece of novelty joke album filler normally would. It's sometimes covered live by They Might Be Giants: [Excerpt: They Might Be Giants, "Zilch"] While the rapper Del Tha Funkee Homosapien had a worldwide hit in 1991 with "Mistadobalina", built around a sample of Peter Tork from the track: [Excerpt: Del Tha Funkee Homosapien,"Mistadobalina"] Nesmith contributed three songs, all of them combining Beatles-style pop music and country influences, none more blatantly than the opening track, "You Told Me", which starts off parodying the opening of "Taxman", before going into some furious banjo-picking from Tork: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "You Told Me"] Tork, meanwhile, wrote "For Pete's Sake" with his flatmate of the time, and that became the end credits music for season two of the TV series: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "For Pete's Sake"] But while the other band members made important contributions, the track on the album that became most popular was the first song of Dolenz's to be recorded by the group. The lyrics recounted, in a semi-psychedelic manner, Dolenz's time in the UK, including meeting with the Beatles, who the song refers to as "the four kings of EMI", but the first verse is all about his new girlfriend Samantha Juste: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The song was released as a single in the UK, but there was a snag. Dolenz had given the song a title he'd heard on an episode of the BBC sitcom Til Death Us Do Part, which he'd found an amusing bit of British slang. Til Death Us Do Part was written by Johnny Speight, a writer with Associated London Scripts, and was a family sitcom based around the character of Alf Garnett, an ignorant, foul-mouthed reactionary bigot who hated young people, socialists, and every form of minority, especially Black people (who he would address by various slurs I'm definitely not going to repeat here), and was permanently angry at the world and abusive to his wife. As with another great sitcom from ALS, Steptoe and Son, which Norman Lear adapted for the US as Sanford and Son, Til Death Us Do Part was also adapted by Lear, and became All in the Family. But while Archie Bunker, the character based on Garnett in the US version, has some redeeming qualities because of the nature of US network sitcom, Alf Garnett has absolutely none, and is as purely unpleasant and unsympathetic a character as has ever been created -- which sadly didn't stop a section of the audience from taking him as a character to be emulated. A big part of the show's dynamic was the relationship between Garnett and his socialist son-in-law from Liverpool, played by Anthony Booth, himself a Liverpudlian socialist who would later have a similarly contentious relationship with his own decidedly non-socialist son-in-law, the future Prime Minister Tony Blair. Garnett was as close to foul-mouthed as was possible on British TV at the time, with Speight regularly negotiating with the BBC bosses to be allowed to use terms that were not otherwise heard on TV, and used various offensive terms about his family, including referring to his son-in-law as a "randy Scouse git". Dolenz had heard the phrase on TV, had no idea what it meant but loved the sound of it, and gave the song that title. But when the record came out in the UK, he was baffled to be told that the phrase -- which he'd picked up from a BBC TV show, after all -- couldn't be said normally on BBC broadcasts, so they would need to retitle the track. The translation into American English that Dolenz uses in his live shows to explain this to Americans is to say that "randy Scouse git" means "horny Liverpudlian putz", and that's more or less right. Dolenz took the need for an alternative title literally, and so the track that went to number two in the UK charts was titled "Alternate Title": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The album itself went to number one in both the US and the UK, though it was pushed off the top spot almost straight away by the release of Sgt Pepper. As sessions for Headquarters were finishing up, the group were already starting to think about their next album -- season two of the TV show was now in production, and they'd need to keep generating yet more musical material for it. One person they turned to was a friend of Chip Douglas'. Before the Turtles, Douglas had been in the Modern Folk Quartet, and they'd recorded "This Could Be the Night", which had been written for them by Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: The MFQ, "This Could Be The Night"] Nilsson had just started recording his first solo album proper, at RCA Studios, the same studios that the Monkees were using. At this point, Nilsson still had a full-time job in a bank, working a night shift there while working on his album during the day, but Douglas knew that Nilsson was a major talent, and that assessment was soon shared by the group when Nilsson came in to demo nine of his songs for them: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "1941 (demo)"] According to Nilsson, Nesmith said after that demo session "You just sat down there and blew our minds. We've been looking for songs, and you just sat down and played an *album* for us!" While the Monkees would attempt a few of Nilsson's songs over the next year or so, the first one they chose to complete was the first track recorded for their next album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, Ltd., a song which from the talkback at the beginning of the demo was always intended for Davy Jones to sing: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "Cuddly Toy (demo)"] Oddly, given his romantic idol persona, a lot of the songs given to Jones to sing were anti-romantic, and often had a cynical and misogynistic edge. This had started with the first album's "I Want to Be Free", but by Pisces, it had gone to ridiculous extremes. Of the four songs Jones sings on the album, "Hard to Believe", the first song proper that he ever co-wrote, is a straightforward love  song, but the other three have a nasty edge to them. A remade version of Jeff Barry's "She Hangs Out" is about an underaged girl, starts with the lines "How old d'you say your sister was? You know you'd better keep an eye on her" and contains lines like "she could teach you a thing or two" and "you'd better get down here on the double/before she gets her pretty little self in trouble/She's so fine". Goffin and King's "Star Collector" is worse, a song about a groupie with lines like "How can I love her, if I just don't respect her?" and "It won't take much time, before I get her off my mind" But as is so often the way, these rather nasty messages were wrapped up in some incredibly catchy music, and that was even more the case with "Cuddly Toy", a song which at least is more overtly unpleasant -- it's very obvious that Nilsson doesn't intend the protagonist of the song to be at all sympathetic, which is possibly not the case in "She Hangs Out" or "Star Collector". But the character Jones is singing is *viciously* cruel here, mocking and taunting a girl who he's coaxed to have sex with him, only to scorn her as soon as he's got what he wanted: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Cuddly Toy"] It's a great song if you like the cruelest of humour combined with the cheeriest of music, and the royalties from the song allowed Nilsson to quit the job at the bank. "Cuddly Toy", and Chip Douglas and Bill Martin's song "The Door Into Summer", were recorded the same way as Headquarters, with the group playing *as a group*, but as recordings for the album progressed the group fell into a new way of working, which Peter Tork later dubbed "mixed-mode". They didn't go back to having tracks cut for them by session musicians, apart from Jones' song "Hard to Believe", for which the entire backing track was created by one of his co-writers overdubbing himself, but Dolenz, who Tork always said was "incapable of repeating a triumph", was not interested in continuing to play drums in the studio. Instead, a new hybrid Monkees would perform most of the album. Nesmith would still play the lead guitar, Tork would provide the keyboards, Chip Douglas would play all the bass and add some additional guitar, and "Fast" Eddie Hoh, the session drummer who had been a touring drummer with the Modern Folk Quartet and the Mamas and the Papas, among others, would play drums on the records, with Dolenz occasionally adding a bit of acoustic guitar. And this was the lineup that would perform on the hit single from Pisces. "Pleasant Valley Sunday" was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who had written several songs for the group's first two albums (and who would continue to provide them with more songs). As with their earlier songs for the group, King had recorded a demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] Previously -- and subsequently -- when presented with a Carole King demo, the group and their producers would just try to duplicate it as closely as possible, right down to King's phrasing. Bob Rafelson has said that he would sometimes hear those demos and wonder why King didn't just make records herself -- and without wanting to be too much of a spoiler for a few years' time, he wasn't the only one wondering that. But this time, the group had other plans. In particular, they wanted to make a record with a strong guitar riff to it -- Nesmith has later referenced their own "Last Train to Clarksville" and the Beatles' "Day Tripper" as two obvious reference points for the track. Douglas came up with a riff and taught it to Nesmith, who played it on the track: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] The track also ended with the strongest psychedelic -- or "psycho jello" as the group would refer to it -- freak out that they'd done to this point, a wash of saturated noise: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] King was unhappy with the results, and apparently glared at Douglas the next time they met. This may be because of the rearrangement from her intentions, but it may also be for a reason that Douglas later suspected. When recording the track, he hadn't been able to remember all the details of her demo, and in particular he couldn't remember exactly how the middle eight went. This is the version on King's demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] While here's how the Monkees rendered it, with slightly different lyrics: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] I also think there's a couple of chord changes in the second verse that differ between King and the Monkees, but I can't be sure that's not my ears deceiving me. Either way, though, the track was a huge success, and became one of the group's most well-known and well-loved tracks, making number three on the charts behind "All You Need is Love" and "Light My Fire". And while it isn't Dolenz drumming on the track, the fact that it's Nesmith playing guitar and Tork on the piano -- and the piano part is one of the catchiest things on the record -- meant that they finally had a proper major hit on which they'd played (and it seems likely that Dolenz contributed some of the acoustic rhythm guitar on the track, along with Bill Chadwick, and if that's true all three Monkee instrumentalists did play on the track). Pisces is by far and away the best album the group ever made, and stands up well against anything else that came out around that time. But cracks were beginning to show in the group. In particular, the constant battle to get some sort of creative input had soured Nesmith on the whole project. Chip Douglas later said "When we were doing Pisces Michael would come in with three songs; he knew he had three songs coming on the album. He knew that he was making a lot of money if he got his original songs on there. So he'd be real enthusiastic and cooperative and real friendly and get his three songs done. Then I'd say 'Mike, can you come in and help on this one we're going to do with Micky here?' He said 'No, Chip, I can't. I'm busy.' I'd say, 'Mike, you gotta come in the studio.' He'd say 'No Chip, I'm afraid I'm just gonna have to be ornery about it. I'm not comin' in.' That's when I started not liking Mike so much any more." Now, as is so often the case with the stories from this period, this appears to be inaccurate in the details -- Nesmith is present on every track on the album except Jones' solo "Hard to Believe" and Tork's spoken-word track "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky", and indeed this is by far the album with *most* Nesmith input, as he takes five lead vocals, most of them on songs he didn't write. But Douglas may well be summing up Nesmith's *attitude* to the band at this point -- listening to Nesmith's commentaries on episodes of the TV show, by this point he felt disengaged from everything that was going on, like his opinions weren't welcome. That said, Nesmith did still contribute what is possibly the single most innovative song the group ever did, though the innovations weren't primarily down to Nesmith: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Nesmith always described the lyrics to "Daily Nightly" as being about the riots on Sunset Strip, but while they're oblique, they seem rather to be about streetwalking sex workers -- though it's perhaps understandable that Nesmith would never admit as much. What made the track innovative was the use of the Moog synthesiser. We talked about Robert Moog in the episode on "Good Vibrations" -- he had started out as a Theremin manufacturer, and had built the ribbon synthesiser that Mike Love played live on "Good Vibrations", and now he was building the first commercially available easily usable synthesisers. Previously, electronic instruments had either been things like the clavioline -- a simple monophonic keyboard instrument that didn't have much tonal variation -- or the RCA Mark II, a programmable synth that could make a wide variety of sounds, but took up an entire room and was programmed with punch cards. Moog's machines were bulky but still transportable, and they could be played in real time with a keyboard, but were still able to be modified to make a wide variety of different sounds. While, as we've seen, there had been electronic keyboard instruments as far back as the 1930s, Moog's instruments were for all intents and purposes the first synthesisers as we now understand the term. The Moog was introduced in late spring 1967, and immediately started to be used for making experimental and novelty records, like Hal Blaine's track "Love In", which came out at the beginning of June: [Excerpt: Hal Blaine, "Love In"] And the Electric Flag's soundtrack album for The Trip, the drug exploitation film starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and written by Jack Nicholson we talked about last time, when Arthur Lee moved into a house used in the film: [Excerpt: The Electric Flag, "Peter's Trip"] In 1967 there were a total of six albums released with a Moog on them (as well as one non-album experimental single). Four of the albums were experimental or novelty instrumental albums of this type. Only two of them were rock albums -- Strange Days by the Doors, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones Ltd by the Monkees. The Doors album was released first, but I believe the Monkees tracks were recorded before the Doors overdubbed the Moog on the tracks on their album, though some session dates are hard to pin down exactly. If that's the case it would make the Monkees the very first band to use the Moog on an actual rock record (depending on exactly how you count the Trip soundtrack -- this gets back again to my old claim that there's no first anything). But that's not the only way in which "Daily Nightly" was innovative. All the first seven albums to feature the Moog featured one man playing the instrument -- Paul Beaver, the Moog company's West Coast representative, who played on all the novelty records by members of the Wrecking Crew, and on the albums by the Electric Flag and the Doors, and on The Notorious Byrd Brothers by the Byrds, which came out in early 1968. And Beaver did play the Moog on one track on Pisces, "Star Collector". But on "Daily Nightly" it's Micky Dolenz playing the Moog, making him definitely the second person ever to play a Moog on a record of any kind: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Dolenz indeed had bought his own Moog -- widely cited as being the second one ever in private ownership, a fact I can't check but which sounds plausible given that by 1970 less than thirty musicians owned one -- after seeing Beaver demonstrate the instrument at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Monkees hadn't played Monterey, but both Dolenz and Tork had attended the festival -- if you watch the famous film of it you see Dolenz and his girlfriend Samantha in the crowd a *lot*, while Tork introduced his friends in the Buffalo Springfield. As well as discovering the Moog there, Dolenz had been astonished by something else: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Hey Joe (Live at Monterey)"] As Peter Tork later put it "I didn't get it. At Monterey Jimi followed the Who and the Who busted up their things and Jimi bashed up his guitar. I said 'I just saw explosions and destruction. Who needs it?' But Micky got it. He saw the genius and went for it." Dolenz was astonished by Hendrix, and insisted that he should be the support act on the group's summer tour. This pairing might sound odd on paper, but it made more sense at the time than it might sound. The Monkees were by all accounts a truly astonishing live act at this point -- Frank Zappa gave them a backhanded compliment by saying they were the best-sounding band in LA, before pointing out that this was because they could afford the best equipment. That *was* true, but it was also the case that their TV experience gave them a different attitude to live performance than anyone else performing at the time. A handful of groups had started playing stadiums, most notably of course the Beatles, but all of these acts had come up through playing clubs and theatres and essentially just kept doing their old act with no thought as to how the larger space worked, except to put their amps through a louder PA. The Monkees, though, had *started* in stadiums, and had started out as mass entertainers, and so their live show was designed from the ground up to play to those larger spaces. They had costume changes, elaborate stage sets -- like oversized fake Vox amps they burst out of at the start of the show -- a light show and a screen on which film footage was projected. In effect they invented stadium performances as we now know them. Nesmith later said "In terms of putting on a show there was never any question in my mind, as far as the rock 'n' roll era is concerned, that we put on probably the finest rock and roll stage show ever. It was beautifully lit, beautifully costumed, beautifully produced. I mean, for Christ sakes, it was practically a revue." The Monkees were confident enough in their stage performance that at a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl they'd had Ike and Tina Turner as their opening act -- not an act you'd want to go on after if you were going to be less than great, and an act from very similar chitlin' circuit roots to Jimi Hendrix. So from their perspective, it made sense. If you're going to be spectacular yourselves, you have no need to fear a spectacular opening act. Hendrix was less keen -- he was about the only musician in Britain who *had* made disparaging remarks about the Monkees -- but opening for the biggest touring band in the world isn't an opportunity you pass up, and again it isn't such a departure as one might imagine from the bills he was already playing. Remember that Monterey is really the moment when "pop" and "rock" started to split -- the split we've been talking about for a few months now -- and so the Jimi Hendrix Experience were still considered a pop band, and as such had played the normal British pop band package tours. In March and April that year, they'd toured on a bill with the Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens, and Englebert Humperdinck -- and Hendrix had even filled in for Humperdinck's sick guitarist on one occasion. Nesmith, Dolenz, and Tork all loved having Hendrix on tour with them, just because it gave them a chance to watch him live every night (Jones, whose musical tastes were more towards Anthony Newley, wasn't especially impressed), and they got on well on a personal level -- there are reports of Hendrix jamming with Dolenz and Steve Stills in hotel rooms. But there was one problem, as Dolenz often recreates in his live act: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Purple Haze"] The audience response to Hendrix from the Monkees' fans was so poor that by mutual agreement he left the tour after only a handful of shows. After the summer tour, the group went back to work on the TV show and their next album. Or, rather, four individuals went back to work. By this point, the group had drifted apart from each other, and from Douglas -- Tork, the one who was still keenest on the idea of the group as a group, thought that Pisces, good as it was, felt like a Chip Douglas album rather than a Monkees album. The four band members had all by now built up their own retinues of hangers-on and collaborators, and on set for the TV show they were now largely staying with their own friends rather than working as a group. And that was now reflected in their studio work. From now on, rather than have a single producer working with them as a band, the four men would work as individuals, producing their own tracks, occasionally with outside help, and bringing in session musicians to work on them. Some tracks from this point on would be genuine Monkees -- plural -- tracks, and all tracks would be credited as "produced by the Monkees", but basically the four men would from now on be making solo tracks which would be combined into albums, though Dolenz and Jones would occasionally guest on tracks by the others, especially when Nesmith came up with a song he thought would be more suited to their voices. Indeed the first new recording that happened after the tour was an entire Nesmith solo album -- a collection of instrumental versions of his songs, called The Wichita Train Whistle Sings, played by members of the Wrecking Crew and a few big band instrumentalists, arranged by Shorty Rogers. [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "You Told Me"] Hal Blaine in his autobiography claimed that the album was created as a tax write-off for Nesmith, though Nesmith always vehemently denied it, and claimed it was an artistic experiment, though not one that came off well. Released alongside Pisces, though, came one last group-recorded single. The B-side, "Goin' Down", is a song that was credited to the group and songwriter Diane Hildebrand, though in fact it developed from a jam on someone else's song. Nesmith, Tork, Douglas and Hoh attempted to record a backing track for a version of Mose Allison's jazz-blues standard "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] But after recording it, they'd realised that it didn't sound that much like the original, and that all it had in common with it was a chord sequence. Nesmith suggested that rather than put it out as a cover version, they put a new melody and lyrics to it, and they commissioned Hildebrand, who'd co-written songs for the group before, to write them, and got Shorty Rogers to write a horn arrangement to go over their backing track. The eventual songwriting credit was split five ways, between Hildebrand and the four Monkees -- including Davy Jones who had no involvement with the recording, but not including Douglas or Hoh. The lyrics Hildebrand came up with were a funny patter song about a failed suicide, taken at an extremely fast pace, which Dolenz pulls off magnificently: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Goin' Down"] The A-side, another track with a rhythm track by Nesmith, Tork, Douglas, and Hoh, was a song that had been written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who you may remember from the episode on "San Francisco" as being a former songwriting partner of John Phillips. Stewart had written the song as part of a "suburbia trilogy", and was not happy with the finished product. He said later "I remember going to bed thinking 'All I did today was write 'Daydream Believer'." Stewart used to include the song in his solo sets, to no great approval, and had shopped the song around to bands like We Five and Spanky And Our Gang, who had both turned it down. He was unhappy with it himself, because of the chorus: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] Stewart was ADHD, and the words "to a", coming as they did slightly out of the expected scansion for the line, irritated him so greatly that he thought the song could never be recorded by anyone, but when Chip Douglas asked if he had any songs, he suggested that one. As it turned out, there was a line of lyric that almost got the track rejected, but it wasn't the "to a". Stewart's original second verse went like this: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] RCA records objected to the line "now you know how funky I can be" because funky, among other meanings, meant smelly, and they didn't like the idea of Davy Jones singing about being smelly. Chip Douglas phoned Stewart to tell him that they were insisting on changing the line, and suggesting "happy" instead. Stewart objected vehemently -- that change would reverse the entire meaning of the line, and it made no sense, and what about artistic integrity? But then, as he later said "He said 'Let me put it to you this way, John. If he can't sing 'happy' they won't do it'. And I said 'Happy's working real good for me now.' That's exactly what I said to him." He never regretted the decision -- Stewart would essentially live off the royalties from "Daydream Believer" for the rest of his life -- though he seemed always to be slightly ambivalent and gently mocking about the song in his own performances, often changing the lyrics slightly: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] The Monkees had gone into the studio and cut the track, again with Tork on piano, Nesmith on guitar, Douglas on bass, and Hoh on drums. Other than changing "funky" to "happy", there were two major changes made in the studio. One seems to have been Douglas' idea -- they took the bass riff from the pre-chorus to the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Rhonda"] and Douglas played that on the bass as the pre-chorus for "Daydream Believer", with Shorty Rogers later doubling it in the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] And the other is the piano intro, which also becomes an instrumental bridge, which was apparently the invention of Tork, who played it: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] The track went to number one, becoming the group's third and final number one hit, and their fifth of six million-sellers. It was included on the next album, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees, but that piano part would be Tork's only contribution to the album. As the group members were all now writing songs and cutting their own tracks, and were also still rerecording the odd old unused song from the initial 1966 sessions, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees was pulled together from a truly astonishing amount of material. The expanded triple-CD version of the album, now sadly out of print, has multiple versions of forty-four different songs, ranging from simple acoustic demos to completed tracks, of which twelve were included on the final album. Tork did record several tracks during the sessions, but he spent much of the time recording and rerecording a single song, "Lady's Baby", which eventually stretched to five different recorded versions over multiple sessions in a five-month period. He racked up huge studio bills on the track, bringing in Steve Stills and Dewey Martin of the Buffalo Springfield, and Buddy Miles, to try to help him capture the sound in his head, but the various takes are almost indistinguishable from one another, and so it's difficult to see what the problem was: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Lady's Baby"] Either way, the track wasn't finished by the time the album came out, and the album that came out was a curiously disjointed and unsatisfying effort, a mixture of recycled old Boyce and Hart songs, some songs by Jones, who at this point was convinced that "Broadway-rock" was going to be the next big thing and writing songs that sounded like mediocre showtunes, and a handful of experimental songs written by Nesmith. You could pull together a truly great ten- or twelve-track album from the masses of material they'd recorded, but the one that came out was mediocre at best, and became the first Monkees album not to make number one -- though it still made number three and sold in huge numbers. It also had the group's last million-selling single on it, "Valleri", an old Boyce and Hart reject from 1966 that had been remade with Boyce and Hart producing and their old session players, though the production credit was still now given to the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Valleri"] Nesmith said at the time he considered it the worst song ever written. The second season of the TV show was well underway, and despite -- or possibly because of -- the group being clearly stoned for much of the filming, it contains a lot of the episodes that fans of the group think of most fondly, including several episodes that break out of the formula the show had previously established in interesting ways. Tork and Dolenz were both also given the opportunity to direct episodes, and Dolenz also co-wrote his episode, which ended up being the last of the series. In another sign of how the group were being given more creative control over the show, the last three episodes of the series had guest appearances by favourite musicians of the group members who they wanted to give a little exposure to, and those guest appearances sum up the character of the band members remarkably well. Tork, for whatever reason, didn't take up this option, but the other three did. Jones brought on his friend Charlie Smalls, who would later go on to write the music for the Broadway musical The Wiz, to demonstrate to Jones the difference between Smalls' Black soul and Jones' white soul: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Charlie Smalls] Nesmith, on the other hand, brought on Frank Zappa. Zappa put on Nesmith's Monkee shirt and wool hat and pretended to be Nesmith, and interviewed Nesmith with a false nose and moustache pretending to be Zappa, as they both mercilessly mocked the previous week's segment with Jones and Smalls: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith and Frank Zappa] Nesmith then "conducted" Zappa as Zappa used a sledgehammer to "play" a car, parodying his own appearance on the Steve Allen Show playing a bicycle, to the presumed bemusement of the Monkees' fanbase who would not be likely to remember a one-off performance on a late-night TV show from five years earlier. And the final thing ever to be shown on an episode of the Monkees didn't feature any of the Monkees at all. Micky Dolenz, who directed and co-wrote that episode, about an evil wizard who was using the power of a space plant (named after the group's slang for dope) to hypnotise people through the TV, chose not to interact with his guest as the others had, but simply had Tim Buckley perform a solo acoustic version of his then-unreleased song "Song to the Siren": [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Song to the Siren"] By the end of the second season, everyone knew they didn't want to make another season of the TV show. Instead, they were going to do what Rafelson and Schneider had always wanted, and move into film. The planning stages for the film, which was initially titled Changes but later titled Head -- so that Rafelson and Schneider could bill their next film as "From the guys who gave you Head" -- had started the previous summer, before the sessions that produced The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees. To write the film, the group went off with Rafelson and Schneider for a short holiday, and took with them their mutual friend Jack Nicholson. Nicholson was at this time not the major film star he later became. Rather he was a bit-part actor who was mostly associated with American International Pictures, the ultra-low-budget film company that has come up on several occasions in this podcast. Nicholson had appeared mostly in small roles, in films like The Little Shop of Horrors: [Excerpt: The Little Shop of Horrors] He'd appeared in multiple films made by Roger Corman, often appearing with Boris Karloff, and by Monte Hellman, but despite having been a working actor for a decade, his acting career was going nowhere, and by this point he had basically given up on the idea of being an actor, and had decided to start working behind the camera. He'd written the scripts for a few of the low-budget films he'd appeared in, and he'd recently scripted The Trip, the film we mentioned earlier: [Excerpt: The Trip trailer] So the group, Rafelson, Schneider, and Nicholson all went away for a weekend, and they all got extremely stoned, took acid, and talked into a tape recorder for hours on end. Nicholson then transcribed those recordings, cleaned them up, and structured the worthwhile ideas into something quite remarkable: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Ditty Diego"] If the Monkees TV show had been inspired by the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges, and by Richard Lester's directorial style, the only precursor I can find for Head is in the TV work of Lester's colleague Spike Milligan, but I don't think there's any reasonable way in which Nicholson or anyone else involved could have taken inspiration from Milligan's series Q.  But what they ended up with is something that resembles, more than anything else, Monty Python's Flying Circus, a TV series that wouldn't start until a year after Head came out. It's a series of ostensibly unconnected sketches, linked by a kind of dream logic, with characters wandering from one loose narrative into a totally different one, actors coming out of character on a regular basis, and no attempt at a coherent narrative. It contains regular examples of channel-zapping, with excerpts from old films being spliced in, and bits of news footage juxtaposed with comedy sketches and musical performances in ways that are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes distasteful, and occasionally both -- as when a famous piece of footage of a Vietnamese prisoner of war being shot in the head hard-cuts to screaming girls in the audience at a Monkees concert, a performance which ends with the girls tearing apart the group and revealing that they're really just cheap-looking plastic mannequins. The film starts, and ends, with the Monkees themselves attempting suicide, jumping off a bridge into the ocean -- but the end reveals that in fact the ocean they're in is just water in a glass box, and they're trapped in it. And knowing this means that when you watch the film a second time, you find that it does have a story. The Monkees are trapped in a box which in some ways represents life, the universe, and one's own mind, and in other ways represents the TV and their TV careers. Each of them is trying in his own way to escape, and each ends up trapped by his own limitations, condemned to start the cycle over and over again. The film features parodies of popular film genres like the boxing film (Davy is supposed to throw a fight with Sonny Liston at the instruction of gangsters), the Western, and the war film, but huge chunks of the film take place on a film studio backlot, and characters from one segment reappear in another, often commenting negatively on the film or the band, as when Frank Zappa as a critic calls Davy Jones' soft-shoe routine to a Harry Nilsson song "very white", or when a canteen worker in the studio calls the group "God's gift to the eight-year-olds". The film is constantly deconstructing and commenting on itself and the filmmaking process -- Tork hits that canteen worker, whose wig falls off revealing the actor playing her to be a man, and then it's revealed that the "behind the scenes" footage is itself scripted, as director Bob Rafelson and scriptwriter Jack Nicholson come into frame and reassure Tork, who's concerned that hitting a woman would be bad for his image. They tell him they can always cut it from the finished film if it doesn't work. While "Ditty Diego", the almost rap rewriting of the Monkees theme we heard earlier, sets out a lot of how the film asks to be interpreted and how it works narratively, the *spiritual* and thematic core of the film is in another song, Tork's "Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?)", which in later solo performances Tork would give the subtitle "The Karma Blues": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Long Title (Do I Have To Do This All Over Again?)"] Head is an extraordinary film, and one it's impossible to sum up in anything less than an hour-long episode of its own. It's certainly not a film that's to everyone's taste, and not every aspect of it works -- it is a film that is absolutely of its time, in ways that are both good and bad. But it's one of the most inventive things ever put out by a major film studio, and it's one that rightly secured the Monkees a certain amount of cult credibility over the decades. The soundtrack album is a return to form after the disappointing Birds, Bees, too. Nicholson put the album together, linking the eight songs in the film with collages of dialogue and incidental music, repurposing and recontextualising the dialogue to create a new experience, one that people have compared with Frank Zappa's contemporaneous We're Only In It For The Money, though while t

On this special edition of the Podcast: Composer and Conductor George Daugherty swings by to talk about the Debut of Bugs Bunny at the Symphony opening in Las Vegas this weekend, which will catapult a full world tour of the classic 'Looney Tunes' cartoons alongside a Live Orchestra for fans and families to enjoy! We discuss how Bugs Bunny on Broadway humble beginnings; the legacy of Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes composers Milt Franklyn & Carl Stalling; with many detours along the way! The chat also features first hand stories between George and the original directors of those classic cartoons! “What's Up, Doc?” A brilliant blend of classical music and classic animation! He also shared with us an exclusive look at the cue sheet written by Chuck Jones for What's Opera Doc! This was written prior to anyone drawing a single frame of animation for the short!!!!! Incredible! Check out website: BugsBunnyattheSymphony.net for FULL TOUR SCHEDULE DATES! Bugs Bunny At The Symphony has toured the world, and now makes its Las Vegas premiere with The Las Vegas Philharmonic. The world's most iconic Looney Tunes — What's Opera, Doc?, The Rabbit of Seville, Corny Concerto, and more than a dozen others— will be projected on the big screen, while their exhilarating original scores are played live by the orchestra. This iconic concert spotlights beloved favorites as well as five brand-new animated shorts, and their classically-infused music. Conducted by George Daugherty. Created by George Daugherty & David Ka Lik Wong.

Today on the Rarified Heir Podcast we are talking to siblings Stan Warnow and Deborah Scott Studebaker whose father was the composer, musician, innovator, band leader and inventor Raymond Scott. While you may not know the name Raymond Scott, you absolutely know his music. That's because while he may not have composed for cartoons, his music is the DNA of most if not all, Looney Toons & Merry Melodies Warner Bros. cartoons. Believe me, you know the song “Powerhouse” & “The Toy Trumpet”.Now if that's all Raymond Scott was known for, that would be a pretty great legacy. But he also composed for big bands, recorded jingles for the likes of Proctor & Gamble and Hamm's Beer, was the orchestra leader on the radio and television show “Your Hit Parade”,  invented the Clavinex & Electronium (precursors to the modern synthesizer) and much more. He was a man more comfortable with “the work”, than the fame or celebrity that came along with it. He was happier in his workroom than he was on camera. So exacting was his vision that he often alienated musicians and singers with his demanding ways. Yet his genius was hard to overlook as none other than Barry Gordy of Motown hired him in 1971 after seeing the Electronium in action to become the Director of Motown's electronic music and research department in Los Angeles. The man had ten careers or perhaps only two, as Deb explains. We also talk about to Deb about her mother, entertainer Dorothy Collins who was a nightclub performer, starred on Broadway in Steven Sondheim's Follies and on television on Candid Camera & Hollywood Palace among others. It's a wild ride discussing the very earliest electronic music, the music that defined all of our youth, and a man so driven by his passion, he essentially invented the fax machine decades before it became a reality. Enjoy, the latest episode of Rarified Heir Podcast. Everyone has a story.

Order and disorder, a freeform haze of garbage guitars, shorted electronics, found detritus, collage, linear songs, sounds from strange lands. Contact me at btradio85@gmail.com.PLAYLIST:WHITE HEAVEN - Silver Current - Live In Tokyo 1996 (Pedal, 2022)THE POLES - Over and Beyond and Through - 7" (NL, 1979)RODODENDRONS - Down and Out - Demo (cs, RoachLeg, 2022)STRAPPING FIELDHANDS - I Told Her - V/A: Spirit of Clive: A Tribute to the Music of Clive Palmer & COB (BC, 2022)VIVIAN STANSHALL & BIG GRUNT - 11 Mustachioed Daughters - 1970 Marty Amok TV AppearanceSMELLY FEET - You're A Person - Smelly Neu Pollution (1981, re: Minimum Table Stacks, 2022)SHIRLEY COLLINS - Space Girl - V/A: Rocket Along (HMV, 1960)TAKIS - Musicales - 7" (Les Disques Pierre Cardin, 1974)MIDNIGHT MINES - Survivors of the Volcanic Age - Scratching the Beat Surface (BC, 2022)SHIT AND SHINE - DRM Plus T - Unreleased Shit Part 2 (BC, 2022)SAFA - Bel Abbes - Ibtihalat (UIQ, 2022)RADIANT - Aspettami - ORA (Jarane, 2022)KID CONGO POWERS & THE NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE - Garbage Man - Live In St. Kilda (BC, 2022)MARKOS VAMVAKARIS - We Were Smoking One Evening - Death Is Bitter (Mississippi, 2022)CONCENTRATION - Grün im Gesicht - Aren't You Gonna Introduce Me To Your Friend? (Avon Terror Corps, 2022)GENE SIMMONS HAS A MEAL NOT TO HIS LIKINGMOG STUNT TEAM - UFO's Calling - I'm Gonna Do It Until the Day I Die (NL, 2022)PADKAROSDA - Bujkál Benned Valami - Sötét Végek (World Gone Mad, 2022)DJ INTEGRITY - AbsoluteSTRESS شریر - V/A: Yes Yes: A Comfortable Compilation (Garden Seat, 2022)J.ROCC - L.A. Anthem (feat. LMNO & Key Kool) - A Wonderful Letter (Stones Throw, 2022)SOPHIE SLEIGH-JOHNSON - Advantage, Chisnall - Nuncio Ref! (Crow Versus Crow, 2022)SALAMANDA - Mat Cat Party (feat. Ringo the Cat) - Ashbalkum (BC, 2022)THE MOD 4 - A Puppet - V/A: Ghost Riders (Efficient Space, 2022)ENSTRUCTION - Yellow Waxy Buildup - Instruction For Children (cs, Sound of Pig, 1986)TSAP - Crimes Against Time - Crimes Against Time (Altered States, 2022)SHOP REGULARS - Neutral Sammy - Merrie Melodies 04 (cs, Merrie Melodies, 2022)FRANK BAUGH - For Ukraine - V/A: The Gold and Purple Sceptre (cs, Saga House, 2022)WUKIR SURYADI - Side A: Tiga - Menolak Tunduk/Refuse to Submit (WV Sorcerer Productions, 2022)ANIKA - Masters of War - Anika (Invada, 2010)ABLE NOISE - To Appease - V/A: Thorn Valley (World of Echo, 2022)

Join Caitlin, Ira, and special guest Eric Colossal as they reserve box seats to Chuck Jones' 1957 Merrie Melodies short film, What's Opera, Doc? It's a night of Norse Myth and Rabbit Murder with our old pals, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. When you're finished listening be sure to check out Eric Colossal's comic, Rutabaga and game, Knockout City.~Hosted by Caitlin Cadieux and Ira Marcks@feelingcartoons (Twitter)@feelingcartoons (Instagram)cartoonfeelings.com (Episode Archive)cartoonfeelingspodcast@gmail.com (Write Us Feelings/Questions)

It's time to meet Warner Bros.' last attempt to create a cartoon star for their new Merrie Melodies series! This guy at least looks different from the others, less Mickey Mouse and more Goofy, despite Goofy not coming into existence until later that same year! But really, it's the lanky bodies they have in common, and little else. Ol' Goopy seems way more competent than Goofy ever manages to be, and in this cartoon he's having a grand old time playing piano and singing at a club. Is the cartoon itself also a grand old time, or is it and Goopy best left forgotten? Listen to find out! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/howsitholdup/support

The Butter Crew wasn't able to assemble this week, which left Dave (Daves?) to his own devices! Join him as he tumbles headlong into the 1953 Merrie Melodies short Duck Amuck! Is this one of the best and most experimental shorts of the Looney Tunes catalogue? Can an iconic character such as Daffy Duck be recognizable even when stripped of not only their voice, but their physical form? Is Dave ok, or has discussing this classic cartoon warped his brain irrevocably? Tune in and find out if "it makes sense if you think about it"!

Another Merrie Melodies short, and another attempt at a starring character. This time it's Piggy, who is NOT a forerunner of Porky. We're unfortunately a long ways away from Porky. But how's this older pig character, and more importantly, how's his cartoon? Does he, in fact, know what he's doing? --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/howsitholdup/support

Alexis Hejna and Mark Radulich are back again and this time they present their Looney Tunes Cartoons Season 4/Valentine's Extwavaganza! Looney Tunes Cartoons is an American animated television series developed by Peter Browngardt and produced by Warner Bros. Animation, based on the characters from Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. The series made its worldwide debut at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival on June 10, 2019. The fourth season premiered on January 20, 2022. A Valentines Day special Looney Tunes Cartoons Valentine's Extwavaganza! premiered on February 3, 2022. Grammarly Ad: 14:39 Amazon Music Ad: 36:00 For a 30 Day Free Trial of Amazon Music Unlimited head to http://getamazonmusic.com/w2mnetwork. Amazon Music is free. Amazon Music Unlimited is not. And for the Grammarly special offer, go to http://getgrammarly.com/w2mnetwork. Check us out on the player of your choice https://linktr.ee/markkind76 Also check out the W2M Network Discord https://discord.gg/fCYpG5dcT9

Animaniacs Season 2/Looney Tunes Cartoons Season 3 Review Alexis Hejna and Mark Radulich are back again and this time they present their Animaniacs Season 2/Looney Tunes Cartoons Season 3 Review! Animaniacs is an American animated comedy musical streaming television series developed by Wellesley Wild and Steven Spielberg for Hulu. A revival of the original 1993 animated television series of the same name created by Tom Ruegger, the new series sees the return of the Warner siblings, Yakko, Wakko, and Dot (voiced respectively by their original voice actors, Rob Paulsen, Jess Harnell, and Tress MacNeille), and Pinky and the Brain (voiced by their respective original voice actors Paulsen and Maurice LaMarche). The series was first announced in January 2018 with a two-season order and Amblin Television and Warner Bros. Animation producing; The second season premiered on November 5, 2021. Looney Tunes Cartoons is an American animated television series developed by Peter Browngardt and produced by Warner Bros. Animation, based on the characters from Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.[2] The series made its worldwide debut at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival on June 10, 2019. Season 3 premiered on November 25, 2021 Grammarly Ad: 26:18 Amazon Music Ad: 45:30 For a 30 Day Free Trial of Amazon Music Unlimited head to http://getamazonmusic.com/w2mnetwork. Amazon Music is free. Amazon Music Unlimited is not. And for the Grammarly special offer, go to http://getgrammarly.com/w2mnetwork. Check us out on the player of your choice https://linktr.ee/markkind76

Playlists and archives at brianturnershow.com.Order and disorder, a freeform haze of garbage guitars, shorted electronics, found detritus, collage, linear songs, sounds from strange lands. Contact me at btradio85@gmail.com. PLAYLIST:GREGG TURKINGTON - Introduction - V/A: 80/81 Records Presents: Free (80/81 Records, 2015)SHOP REGULARS - Mischief - Merrie Melodies #03 (cs, Merrie Melodies, 2021)ALGARA - Expulsados - Absortos En El Tedio Eterno (La Vida Es En Mus, 2021)STINGRAY - Feeding Time - Feeding Time 7" (La Vida Es En Mus, 2021)VAULT DEPROGRAMMER - Malicious Vision - split cs w/Bloated (Toilet Noise Series, 2021)BURNT SKULL - No Eyes - Sewer Birth (12XU, 2014)JUMBO ZEN - Self Contained - V/A: Fast Forward #10 (cs, Fast Forward, 1982)PYRAMIDZ - Citrus - Built For Yesterday (BC, 2021)MELENAS - Cartel de Neón - Melenas (El Nebula/Snap! Clap!/Elsa 2017, re: Trouble In Mind, 2021)LET'S ACTIVE - Mr. Fool - Every Dog Has His Day (IRS, 1988)ARMED FORCE - Popstar - 7" (AFI, 1979)SEI STILL - Extrarradio - El Refugio (Fuzz Club, 2021)LEDA - Covid Rock 2 - Covid ”Music” I Made With My Guitar (cs, Knotwilg, 2021)IDI AMIN DADA PLAYS THE ACCORDIONROBERT MILLIS - Radio Tamil Nadu Part 2 - Bats In the Temple (CDR, Fire Breathing Turtle, 2009)AYA - Emley Lights Us Moor (feat Iceboy Violet) - I'm Hole (Hyperdub, 2021)TIKKUN OLAM - World of Light - World Ov Light (The Jewel Garden, 2021)MULTA - Razorlip - Multa (Discos Carnitas, 2021)ADOLF SATAN - Point and Grunt - Adolf Satan (Bestial Onslaught Productions, 2004)CHERUBS - A Pair of Pear Tarts - SLO BLO 4 FRNZ & SXY (Relpase, 2021)RICHARD DAWSON & CIRCLE - Lily - Henki (Domino, 2021)NÁRODNI DÍVADLO - Pravý Hák Arthura Cravana- Antropocén (cs, Stoned To Death, 2021)BLACKS' MYTHS - Northern Confederate - Blacks' Myths I & II (Atlantic Rhythms, 2021)FEEDTIME - Motorbike Girl - Suction (Rough Trade, 1989)LITTLE ANGELS - Little Angels - Demo (cs, Kill Enemy, 2021)KLEU & DEEFA - Scallywag - Scallywag EP (Serial Killaz, 2021)CAM DEAS & JUNG AN TANGEN - That (yGrid/D#) - Presentism (Diagonal, 2011)LAGER AMPULLEN - Sky- FiCABARET VOLTAIRE - The Set Up - Cabaret Voltaire (cs, Cavbolt Publications Ltd, 1978)CABARET VOLTAIRE - Walls of Jericho - 12" (Rough Trade, 1981)

This week Ian and Evan tackle a Jerry Lewis film that asks the question “what if Cinderella but sexist?” Also, the Merrie Melodies classic, Cinderella Meets Fella and Disney's Hercules. Socials! https://www.tiktok.com/@iftheshoefitspod https://www.instagram.com/_iftheshoefitspod/ ——————————————— Attribution: “Through The Woods” by Shane Ivers - https:/www.silvermansound.com “Half.wav” by hyderpotter https://freesound.org/people/hyderpotter/sounds/93142/ “Chiming Out” by FoolBoyMedia https://freesound.org/people/FoolBoyMedia/sounds/246390/ “Cute” by Count Basie and his Orchestra

Explore the fascinating life and career of Mel Blanc, the legendary voice-over artist known as 'The Man Of 1,000 Voices.' Best known for his work on Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, Mel Blanc created some of the most iconic characters in the world of animation. This episode dives into his contributions to radio, TV, and movies, unveiling the story behind a true American icon. #MelBlanc #LooneyTunes #voice-overartist #animationhistory #MerrieMelodies #cartooncharacters #radio #TV #movies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this episode of the I Heart Costa Mesa Show, we talk art and creativity with Chuck Jones' grandson, Craig Kausen, President and Chairman of the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity. Chuck Jones is the artist behind The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, Marvin The Martian, Michigan J. Frog and more of the characters you loved as a kid! The Center For Creativity is a nonprofit charity and gallery space - and the host of many types of creative workshops and classes - over at SOCO and The Mix. If you haven't visited yet, go check them out here in Costa Mesa! Chuck Jones Center for Creativity: http://www.chuckjonescenter.org/ Located at SOCO and The Mix: http://socoandtheocmix.com/ Chuck Jones Center on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChuckJonesCenter/ Chuck Jones Center on Instagram: @chuckjonescenter Kausen's favorite restaurant in Costa Mesa is Pueblo at SOCO: https://www.pueblotapas.com/ His favorite Costa Mesa event is The Fish Fry: http://www.cmnhlions.com/ I Heart Costa Mesa is sponsored by: Music Factory School of Music The Orange County Market Place Please tell your friends about the podcast – and don't forget to leave your rating and review wherever you listen! Find us on… Facebook: www.facebook.com/iheartcostamesa/ Instagram: @iheartcostamesa Twitter: @iheartcostamesa Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/iheartcostamesa Big thanks to everyone who helped make this podcast possible! Producer: Danny Thompson (danny@themusicfactoryoc.com) Intro / Outro Voiceover: Brian Kazarian Music: Eddie “DJ Kaboom” Iniestra