Podcasts about Merrie Melodies

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!

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)

Gotta get my old tuxedo pressed, gotta sew a button on my vest,'cause tonight I've gotta look my best, Lulu's back in town!Okay, you probably never heard of a songwriter named Harry Warren. But we bet that you know —and can even hum — many of his tunes. Warren was nominated 11 times for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and he won three of those Oscars, for “Lullaby of Broadway” in 1935, for “You'll Never Know” in 1943 and for “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” in 1946.In a career spanning six decades, Warren wrote more than 800 songs. Besides those Oscar biggies, Warren's better known pieces include novelty tunes like “Jeepers Creepers,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (which was the first gold record in history). And ballads like “I Only Have Eyes for You” and “There Will Never Be Another You.” He also penned signature tunes like “That's Amore,” which Dean Martin claimed as his own, and — best of all! — “At Last,” which simply belonged to the great Etta James.At the MoviesDespite his million-dollar portfolio, Warren remains “the invisible man,” observed journalist William Zinsser, “his career a prime example of the oblivion that cloaked so many writers who cranked out good songs for bad movies."Uh, LOTS of bad (and, well, some good) movies. Harry Warren songs have been featured in more than 300 films over the years. He wrote the music for the first blockbuster film musical, 1933's “42nd Street,” choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with whom Warren often would collaborate. But perhaps an even greater claim to fame for our generation is that fact that Warren songs starred in no fewer than 112 Warner Bros., Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons.Welcome Home, Lulu!In 1932, Harry went to work for Warner Brothers studio, where he was paired with an old friend, lyricist Al Dubin. Over the next six years, the two would churn out five dozen songs for 33 musicals, including a long-time favorite of ours.“Lulu's Back in Town” was first performed by the Mills Brothers in the 1935 musical “Broadway Gondolier.” While the film was a highly forgettable Dick Powell-Joan Blondell vehicle, the song itself had legs, especially when it was recorded that same spring by Flood hero Fats Waller, who charted with “Lulu.”Subsequently, the song charmed everyone from Mel Tormé and Wingy Manone to Art Tatum to Oscar Peterson. In the Floodisphere, an especially influential rendition of the song was Leon Redbone's performance on his 1975 “On the Track” debut album. Our first recording of it was 20 years ago on our 2nd album. And Lulu has has come back to visit us with each new configurations of the band.Our Take on the TuneWe'll be returning next week to one of our all-time favorite local venues, playing for the good folks up the hill at Woodlands Retirement Community. It's a wonderful place where we've played regularly for the past 20 years or more. And this time, our old buddy, Floodster Emeritus Paul Martin, is back to sit in with us. Here's something we're dusting off for the evening … you know, just in case Lulu is in the audience. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

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

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

Though the two series are often just collectively described as "Looney Tunes", there are two series of cartoon shorts that wind up featuring classic characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. The second series is called "Merrie Melodies", and the series' first attempt at a cartoon star was Foxy, who appeared in this and two other shorts. Foxy clearly didn't have what it takes to reach stardom, but does that mean his shorts are devoid of merit, or is there something worthwhile in this old cartoon? Listen to find out! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/howsitholdup/support

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

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

The extraterrestrial comedy podcast where we probe a British barbecue. All started out so very typical for the British - it begun with a few beers, the emergency meat was pulled out and bomb, impromptu bbq. But then came a few uninvited guests… Steve, Annie, Debbie and Mike would struggle to talk about these events but why? Was Greybeard there? Drugs are bad, mmmkay. Or was this one actually real; a rare success story of hypnotic regression? Alongside this very serious and well-documented case, we also ponder the great questions of life. For example, why do people moon? Why would you get your bum out? Should Netflix give us a TV show? All that and more on this week's file.     Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/butitwasaliens   Store: https://butitwasaliens.co.uk/shop/     Probe us: Email: butitwasaliens@gmail.com Instagram @ ButItWasAliensPodcast Twitter @ ButItWasAliens Facebook: @ ButItWasAliens - join Extraterrestrial Towers     Music:  Music created via Garageband. Additional music via: https://freepd.com - thank you most kindly good people. There was a very small clip from the first episode of the first season of South Park. The episode title is ‘Cartman Gets an Anal Probe' and from what we could find, the original was from the Warner Bros Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies 1936 cartoon entitled ‘I Love to Singa' which was first recorded by Al Jolson and Cab Calloway.

The success and longevity of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies was the combination of Mel Blanc's voice acting, great directors, imaginative writers… AND the music talents of composer and musical arranger Carl Stalling. A person that doesn't get a great deal of credit for the cartoons being so memorable with so many fans. But it was his vast knowledge of both classical, contemporary and music made famous from Tin Pan Alley. As well as the musical cues he would add to the characters' actions that would make the cartoons resonate in people's memories. You might not know songs like Power House, A Cup of Coffee, A Sandwich and You or Blues in the Night by name. But you have probably heard these songs in countless Warner Brothers Animations thanks to Carl's amazing ear for music. After he retired in 1954, Carl would pass these skill's to his direct successor Milt Franklyn who would continue to follow this successful formula until his untimely death in 1962. It would not be until the release of Box Office Bunny, Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs in the 1990s that Warner Animation would revisit Carl Stalling's style of composing and arrangement. In this episode Bret, Jamie, Andrew and Wayne discuss and listen to some of the music of Carl Stalling and relive what they loved about the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies they watched as they listen to the song cues created by Stalling and his orchestra. Join us as we listen to some truly Looney Tunes and some very Merrie Melodies, won't you?

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

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=Pi2hQVyf3po&list=PLsvpo7-bdIolr4mWXRgoxRlbJPMV5d7ie• ‘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-comaFor bonus material and to support the show, visit Patreon.com/RetrospectorsWe'll be back tomorrow! Follow us wherever you get your podcasts: podfollow.com/RetrospectorsThe Retrospectors are Olly Mann, Rebecca Messina & Arion McNicoll, with Matt Hill.Theme Music: Pass The Peas. Announcer: Bob Ravelli. Graphic Design: Terry Saunders. Edit Producer: Emma Corsham.Copyright: Rethink Audio / Olly Mann 2021. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

The twins reunite with longtime friend, singer/songwriter Lee Newman at long last - chatting about everything from their times in Hollywood together and Lee's music and years of performing in Hollywood's top venues - to his legendary great-grandfathers Jimmy McHugh and Eddie Cantor, his friendship with Harry Nilsson and much more - including an original tune from Lee's archive. SHOW NOTES: 0:00 - "Brown Eyed Boy" by Lee Newman 2:02 - Greetings and about Lee Newman / Eddie Cantor / Jimmy McHugh 5:40 - Welcome, Lee 6:33 - About "Brown Eyed Boy" / UCLA / Harry Nilsson / "The Point" / "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" / Dick Martin / Bill Bixby / "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" 9:10 - "Relatively Singing" / Original Cast Records  The Roxy / Whisky a Go Go 10:08 - "Merrily We Roll Along" by Eddie Cantor is best known as the theme for Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoons. 11:29 - Growing up around great music - within the family and outside of it. / Nilsson's influence on Lee / Nilsson's stage fright / Working on "The Point" in Los Angeles in 1991 (Oblio) / Jimmy Webb / Nilsson's death 16:14 - Preaching the gospel of Nilsson at Hollywood High / Copper Penny / Bell Coffee Shop / Snow White Coffee Shop / "Liverpool" 17:18 - Meeting Lee for the first time / Magic Hotel (now Magic Castle Hotel / Our friend and bandmate, Pascal Srabian (RIP) / Early gigs with our band, Yale 18:45 - Lee as band manager for Yale / Winning the battle of the bands at Gazzarri's / Bill Gazzarri / More about the early days 21:53 - More Jimmy Webb / "Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting" 23:12 - Jimmy McHugh Music / Lucille Myers passes the torch to Lee 25:18 - Running Jimmy McHugh Music and what that entails 27:00 - About "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" 27:48 - About Jimmy McHugh / Gershwin and McHugh / The Piano / "I'm in the Mood for Love" / "On the Sunny Side of the Street" / McHugh in Hollywood / Timeline 34:31 - McHugh-related projects 35:15 - Eddie Cantor conquered every medium / Humanitarian - March of Dimes 36:24 - "Happy Together: The 60s Songbook" / SLK Records Rod Stewart / Producer Richard Perry / Producer Lauren Wild / Sunset Plaza / "Happy Together" moment / May Pang / John Lennon's acoustic demo of "Help" as a ballad 42:20 - Sea change in the music business / Tower Records closure / Napster 44:27 - The fate of the Cinerama Dome 45:12 - Find Lee's music on Amazon, iTunes and at Amoeba Music Hollywood 45:40 - COVID-19 in Hollywood and Myrtle Beach / Dodger Stadium / Angel Stadium / Magic Castle Reopens / La Poubelle / More Magic Hotel memories / Robert Morse / Pantages Theatre / "Hamilton" 49:29 - Wrapping things up

Join us as we take you back, WAY back, to the beginning of the Looney Tunes. Marc talks about the origins of Bosko in 'Sinkin' In The Bathtub' Jordan discusses the first Merrie Melodies short 'Lady, Play Your Mandolin' and we both look at the charming yet eerie familiar 'Smile Darn Yah Smile'

This week, we're continuing our season of Humphrey Bogart films with the immortal first meeting of "Bogie and Bacall" in Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not. This podcast is intended to be educational any audio clips are utilized with gratitude under the fair use copyright law. Clip 1: To Have and Have Not. Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc, 1944 Clip 2: Bacall to Arms. Merrie Melodies. Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc, 1946

When is a door not really a door? When it's ajar! That old joke equivocates on two meanings of "ajar" In this episode we look at how equivocation can impact our reasoning, like when we ask, When is a doctor not really a doctor? We explore a few other ways that reasoning can go wrong and force us to lose in a debate. And listen until the end to hear what's planned for Episode 9. Sources: Matthew Dasti and Stephen Phillips, The Nyaya-sutra: Selections with Early Commentaries, Hackett Publishing, 2017. https://www.hackettpublishing.com/new-forthcoming/the-nyaya-sutra Much Ado About Religion adapted from the Csaba Dezsö translation in the Clay Sanskrit Library, New York: NYU Press, 2005. https://nyupress.org/9780814719794/much-ado-about-religion/ Definition of "doctor" from Merriam-Webster Online https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-history-of-doctor OED "doctor, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2020. Web. 20 December 2020. Clips: Good Morning America, December 15, 2020 "Women rally behind Jill Biden after WSJ op-ed asks her to drop 'Dr.'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJHm2rzMJ-Q%200:49 “Hair-raising hare” (Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies, 1946) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnPRB00xgoQ "Expertise" (Sutras (and stuff) Season 1, Episode 6) https://anchor.fm/dashboard/episode/edfmbj Billy Madison (Universal Pictures, 1995) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec7rCsNFn30 Music: Brittle Rille by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3460-brittle-rille License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Sounds: Monastery Bell https://freesound.org/people/florianreichelt/sounds/440606/ Buzzer https://freesound.org/people/qubodup/sounds/211103/ by qubodup --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/malcolm-keating/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/malcolm-keating/support

From the 1930s till the late 1960s, Warner Brothers made an extensive collection of short cartoons which they called Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. From these shorts came animated characters which still inspire laughter and love even today. And Geek Salad is here to discuss them in part 1 of episode 202: There's Baloney in Our Slacks! Join Andy, Mike, Joe, and Katherine as they go over some of the true classics of the Warner Brothers animation archives. From major named like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to lesser characters like Witch Hazel and the Goofy Gophers, they go over some of there favorites, and even some they aren't as fond of. And be sure and come back for part 2 where they talk about a couple of Looney Tunes modern sequels. Geek Salad is available at www.geeksalad.podbean.com, or can be subscribed to at the iTunes store by using keyword “geek salad.”  Geek Salad is also part of the Stitcher family, as well as being available on Spotify, iHeart Radio and the Google Music app!  Download the apps for your Android, iPhone, or Blackberry at www.stitcher.com! Also, check out the Podbean App where you can stream and download the entire Geek Salad archive right from your Android or iPhone!  You can get the app at either the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store!  Want Geek Salad swag?  Check out our new store on Tee Public, where you can get t-shirts, mugs, stickers, and so much other stuff!!!  Shop here! Geek Salad episodes are now also available to stream on YouTube.  “Like” and Subscribe to their channel at Geek Salad Podcast at www.youtube.com Contact Geek Salad at geeksaladradio@gmail.com.  Geek Salad is also available on Facebook under the group heading “Geek Salad Podcast.” Check out their website at www.geek-salad.com, and please subscribe to their Twitter feed: @geeksaladradio Geek Salad is intended for adult listeners and contains coarse language and profanity.  Listener discretion is advised.

We have Zorak, people, this is not a drill!The History and Legacy of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” enters its Legacy stretch with Chapter 14: Extra-Curricular Activities!  What do you do when the Satellite of Love crashes to Earth? Move on, remember?Today we explore the small screen (mostly) animated exploits that involved the cast and crew of MST3K.Did you know Joel Hodgson created TWO shows for Comedy Central? Well, today you'll learn about the other one. Did you also know that Joel invented the X-Box? (Not the one you're thinking of.)Bill Corbett gives voice to dogs playing poker, a Lord of the Rings parody heads to TGI Friday's, Frank Conniff transforms into a giant baby, and Josh Weinstein takes the MST process one step further with "Fast Food Films".But there are two key discussions this week that truly remind me of why I do this show: "Steven Universe" and "Space Ghost Coast to Coast".Join your wonky yet affable host for more cartoon talk than you can possibly handle!For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesThis Week's Recommendations: “Cloud Atlas” (2010) and “Jupiter Ascending” (2015)https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-coolness-chronicles/id1431611476https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-coolness-chronicles?refid=stprhttps://open.spotify.com/show/0sONU9Bdsq35PwO8mE3jVThttp://www.buzzsprout.com/200242Twitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com) The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledged.  “Coffee and TV” by Blur ℗©1999 Parlophone Records Ltd. a Warner Music Group CompanySupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschronicles)

Un corto animado inolvidable, One Froggy Evening, la curiosa historia de Michigan J. Frog. Emitido dentro de Merrie Melodies en 1955 nos trajo uno de los personajes más curiosos del cine de animación. Acércate a este episodio y canta Ragtime con Luis Martínez Vallés. Ten en cuenta que hoy ya no podrás quitarte de la cabeza el "Hello! Ma Baby" Audio liberado Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

In 1970 one of the most influential animators of all time, Chuck Jones (Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies), directed his only feature film The Phantom Tollbooth, based on a novel by Norton Juster,  tells the story of a bored young boy named Milo. Unexpectedly receiving a magic tollbooth and, having nothing better to do, Milo drives through it and enters a kingdom in turmoil following the loss of it's princesses, Rhyme and Reason. We talk all things animation and Chuck Jones before diving into this rather unusual film. All these and more on Adjust Your Tracking! Follow us on: Twitter: @adjustyrtrack & Instagram: @betterfeelingfilms

#RPGaDAY2020 Featuring a bit of Dave "dPercentile" Aldridge love and an except from Merrie Melodies classic Robin Hood Daffy directed by Chuck Jones. Music by Timothy J. Drennon. Find his Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/TJD/posts Special thanks to Lieren of Updates From the Middle of Nowhere. Contact me at spencer.freethrall@gmail.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/free-thrall/message

Bugs Bunny made his first appearance in the Merrie Melodies cartoon A Wild ...

Episode eighty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Cathy's Clown" by The Everly Brothers, and at how after signing the biggest contract in music business history their career was sabotaged by their manager. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Poetry in Motion" by Johnny Tillotson.  ----more----   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there's a decent one in French, but I don't speak French well enough for that). Ike's Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it's been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. This collection has all the Everlys' recordings up to the end of 1962.  I would also recommend this recently-released box set containing expanded versions of their three last studio albums for Warners, including Roots, which I discuss in the episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   This week we're going to look at the Everly Brothers' first and biggest hit of the sixties, a song that established them as hit songwriters in their own right, which was more personal than anything they'd released earlier, and which was a big enough hit that it saved what was to become a major record label. We're going to look at "Cathy's Clown": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] When we left the Everly Brothers, six months ago, we had seen them have their first chart hits and record the classic album Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, an album that prefigured by several years the later sixties folk music revival, and which is better than much of the music that came out of that later scene. Both artistically and commercially, they were as successful as any artists of the early rock era. But Don Everly, in particular, wanted them to have more artistic control themselves -- and if they could move to a bigger label as well, that was all the better. But as it happens, they didn't move to a bigger label, just a richer one. Warner Brothers Records had started in 1958, and had largely started because of changes in the film industry. In the late 1940s and early fifties, the film industry was being hit on all sides. Anti-trust legislation meant that the film studios had to get rid of the cinema chains they owned, losing a massive revenue stream (and also losing the opportunity to ensure that their films got shown no matter how poor their reputation). A series of lawsuits from actors had largely destroyed the star system on which the major studios relied, and then television became a huge factor in the entertainment industry, cutting further into the film studios' profits. An aside about that -- one of the big reasons for the growth of television as America's dominant entertainment medium is racism. In the thirties and forties, there had been huge waves of black people moving from rural areas to the cities in search of work, and we've looked at that and the way that led to the creation of rhythm and blues in many of the previous episodes. After World War II there was a corresponding period of white flight, where white people moved en masse away from the big cities and into small towns and suburbs, to get away from black people. This is largely what led to America's car culture and general lack of public transport, because low-population-density areas aren't as easy to serve with reliable public transport. And in the same way it's also uneconomical to run mass entertainment venues like theatres and cinemas in low-population-density areas, and going to the cinema becomes much less enticing if you have to drive twenty miles to get to one, rather than walking down the street. So white flight had essentially meant the start of a process by which entertainment in America moved from the public sphere to the private one. This is also a big reason for the boom in record sales in the middle decades of last century -- records are private entertainment, as opposed to going out to a dance or a show. And this left the big film studios in dire straits. But while they were down on their luck when it came to films, Warners were doing very well in the music publishing business, where unlike their ownership of cinemas they didn't have to get rid of their properties. Warners had always owned the songs used in their films, and indeed one of the reasons that Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies existed in the first place was so that they could plug songs that Warners owned. When Tex Avery has Owl Jolson singing "I Love to Singa": [Excerpt: “Owl Jolson”, "I Love to Singa"] That's a song that had originally appeared in a Warners feature film a few months earlier, sung by Al Jolson and Cab Calloway: [Excerpt: Al Jolson and Cab Calloway, "I Love to Singa"] So Warners were making money from the music industry. But then they realised something. Tab Hunter, one of their film stars under contract to them, had started to have hit records. His record "Young Love" spent six weeks at number one: [Excerpt: Tab Hunter, "Young Love"] And whenever he was interviewed to promote a film, all the interviewers would ask about was his music career. That was bad enough -- after all, he wasn't signed to Warners as a singer, he was meant to be a film star -- but what was worse was that the label Hunter was on, Dot Records, was owned by a rival film studio, Paramount. Warners would go to all the trouble of getting an interview set up for their star, and then all it would do was put money into Paramount's pocket! They needed to get into the record business themselves, as a way to exploit their song catalogue if nothing else. At first they thought about just buying Imperial Records, but when that deal fell through they started their own label, and signed Hunter to it right at the point that his career nosedived. In the first two years that Warner Brothers Records existed, they only had two hit singles -- "Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb", a record based on the Warner-owned TV series 77 Sunset Strip and co-performed by one of that series' stars, Edd Byrnes: [Excerpt: Edd Byrnes and Connie Stevens, "Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb"] And another record by Connie Stevens, who also sang on "Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb", and was the star of a different Warners TV series, Hawaiian Eye: [Excerpt: Connie Stevens, "Sixteen Reasons"] Everything else they released flopped badly. After two years they had lost three million dollars, and would have closed down the label altogether, except the label was owed another two million, and they didn't want to write that off. The main reason for these losses was that the label was mostly releasing stuff aimed at the easy listening adult album market, records by people like Henry Mancini, and at the time the singles market was where the money was, and the singles market was dominated by young people. They needed some records that would appeal to young people. They decided that they needed the Everly Brothers. At the beginning of 1960, the duo had released ten singles since May 1957, of which nine had charted, as had four of the B-sides. They'd topped the pop charts twice, the R&B charts twice, and the country charts four times. At a time when even the biggest stars would occasionally release the odd flop, they were as close to a guaranteed hit-making machine as existed in the music industry. And they were looking to get away from Cadence Records, for reasons that have never been made completely clear. It's usually said that they had artistic differences with Cadence, but at the same time they always credited Archie Bleyer from Cadence with being the perfect arranger for them -- he arranged their final Cadence single, "Let it Be Me": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Let it Be Me"] But for whatever reason, the Everlys *were* looking to find a new label, and Warner Brothers were desperate enough that they signed them up to the biggest contract ever signed in music business history up to that point. Remember that four years earlier, when Elvis had signed with RCA records, they'd paid a one-off fee of forty thousand dollars and *that* was reportedly the largest advance ever paid in the industry up until that point. Now, the Everlys were signing to Warners on a ten-year contract, with a guaranteed advance of one hundred thousand dollars a year for those ten years -- the first million-dollar contract in music history. They were set up until 1970, and were sure to provide Warners with a string of hits that would last out the decade -- or so it seemed at first. Their first recording for the label had an unusual melodic inspiration. Ferde Grofé was an arranger and orchestrator for Paul Whiteman's jazz band in the 1920s and thirties. He's particularly known these days for having been the original arranger of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" -- Gershwin had written it for two pianos, and it was Grofé who had come up with the instrumental colouring that these days we think of as being so important to that piece: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman "Rhapsody in Blue (original 1924 recording)"] Grofé had written a piece in 1931 called the "Grand Canyon Suite", and its third movement, "On the Trail" had become the most popular piece of music he ever wrote. Disney made an Oscar-winning short with the suite as its soundtrack in 1958, and you can still hear "On the Trail" to this day in the Grand Canyon section of the Disneyland Railroad. But "On the Trail" was best known as the music that Phillip Morris used in their radio and TV commercials from the thirties through to the sixties. Here's a bit from the original Whiteman recording of the piece: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman, "Grand Canyon Suite: On the Trail"] Don took that melodic inspiration, and combined it with two sources of lyrical inspiration -- when his dad had been a child, he'd had a crush on a girl named Mary, who hadn't been interested, and his schoolfriends had taunted him by singing "Mary had a little Ike" at him. The other key to the song came when Don started thinking about an old crush of his own, a girl from his school called Catherine Coe -- though in later years he was at pains to point out that the song wasn't actually about her. They took the resulting song into the studio with the normal members of the Nashville A-Team, and it became only their second hit single with an A-side written by one of the brothers, reaching number one on both the pop and R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] I say it's written by Don -- the original issue of the record credited the songwriting to both Don and Phil, but Phil signed an agreement in 1980 relinquishing his claim to the song, and his name was taken off all future copies. It sounds to me like Don's writing style, and all the anecdotes about its writing talk about him without mentioning any input from Phil, so I'm assuming for these purposes that it's a Don solo composition. Listening to the record, which was the first that the duo produced for themselves, as well as being their first for Warners, you can hear why Don was at times dissatisfied with the songs that Felice and Boudleaux Bryant had written for the brothers. It's a sophisticated piece of work in a number of different ways. For a start, there's the way the music mirrors the lyric on the first line. That line is about separation -- "Don't want your love any more" -- and the brothers start the line in unison, but Don's voice slowly drops relative to Phil's, so by the end of the line they're a third apart. It's like he's stepping away: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] The song's structure also seems unusual. Wikipedia says it has a chorus and a bridge but no verse, while the Library of Congress disagrees and says it has a verse and a bridge but no chorus. Personally, I'd say that it definitely does have a chorus -- the repeated section with the same words and melody each time it's repeated, with both brothers singing, and with the title of the song at the end, seems as definitively a chorus as one could possibly ask for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] If that's not a chorus, I'm honestly not sure what is. The reason this comes into question is the other section. I would call that section a verse, and I think most people would, and the song's structure is a straightforward A-B-A-B repetition which one would normally call verse/chorus. But it's such a change of pace that it feels like the contrasting section that normally comes with a bridge or middle eight. Indeed the first time I properly learned what a middle eight was -- in a column in Mojo magazine in the mid-nineties called Doctor Rock which explained some basic musicology -- it was specifically cited as an example of one: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] Part of the reason that seems so different is that Don's singing it solo, while the brothers are duetting on the choruses, and normally Don's solo lines would be on a bridge or middle eight. Not always, but often enough that that's what you expect if you've listened to a few of their records. But there's also a change in rhythm. One of the things you'll notice as we go further into the sixties is that, for a while in the early sixties, the groove in rock and roll -- and also in soul -- moved away from the swinging, shuffling rhythm you get in most of the fifties music we've looked at into a far more straightforward four-four rhythm. In roughly 1961 through 64 or so, you have things like the bam-bam-bam-bam four-on-the-floor beat of early Motown or Four Seasons records, or the chugga-chugga-chugga rhythm of surf guitar, rather than the looser, triplet-based grooves that you'd get in the fifties. And you can hear in "Cathy's Clown" the shift in those rhythms happening in the song itself. The verses have an almost Latin feel, with lots of loose cymbal work from Buddy Harman: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] While the choruses have an almost martial feel to them, a boom-BAP rhythm, and sound like they have two drummers on them: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Cathy's Clown"] While I say that sounds like there are two drummers, it's still just Harman playing. The difference is that here the engineer, Bill Porter, who was the engineer on a lot of the Nashville recordings we've looked at, notably the Roy Orbison ones, had just obtained a new device -- a tape loop. Now, I've seen some people misunderstand what it was that Porter did with this -- thinking he looped the drums in the way one would loop things today, just playing the same recording over and over. It wasn't that. Rather it was a way of doing what Sam Phillips had been doing with tape echo in Sun a few years earlier -- there would be an endlessly circulating loop of tape, which had both record and playback heads. The drums would be recorded normally, but would also be recorded onto that tape loop, and then when it played back a few milliseconds later it would sound like a second drummer playing along with the first. It's an almost inaudible delay, but it's enough to give a totally different sound to the drums. Porter would physically switch this loop on and off while recording the track live -- all the vocals and instruments were recorded live together, onto a three-track tape, and he would turn it on for the choruses and off for the verses. This is an early example of the kind of studio experimentation that would define the way records were made in the sixties. The rhythm that Harman played was also very influential -- you can hear that it strongly influenced Paul McCartney if you listen to Beatles records like "What You're Doing", "Ticket to Ride", and "Tomorrow Never Knows", all of which have drum patterns which were suggested by McCartney, and all of which are strongly reminiscent of the "Cathy's Clown" chorus. "Cathy's Clown" topped the charts for five weeks, and sold two million copies. It was an immense success, and the Everlys seemed to be on top of the world. But it was precisely then that problems started for the duo. First, they moved from Nashville to LA. The main reason for that was that as well as being a record contract, their new contract with Warners would give them the opportunity to appear in films, too. So they spent six months taking acting lessons and doing screen tests, before concluding that neither of them could actually act or remember their lines, and wisely decided that they were going to stick to music. The one good thing they took from that six month period was that they rekindled their friendship with the Crickets, and Sonny Curtis wrote them a song called "Walk Right Back", which made the top ten (and number one in the UK and New Zealand): [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Walk Right Back"] Curtis wrote that song while he was in basic training for the military, and when he got a pass for a few days he'd only written the first verse. He played the song to the brothers while he was out on his pass, and they said they liked it. He told them he'd write a second verse and send it to them, but by the time they received his letter with the lyrics for the second verse, they'd already recorded the song, just repeating the first verse. Curtis wasn't the only one who had to go into basic military training. The brothers, too, knew they would be drafted sooner rather than later, and so they decided to do as several other acts we've discussed did, and sign up voluntarily for six months rather than be drafted for two years. Before they did so, they recorded another song, "Temptation", an old standard from the thirties: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Temptation"] And that track marked the beginning of the end of the Everlys as a chart act. Because it was an old standard, the publishing was not owned by Acuff-Rose, and Wesley Rose was furious. He was both their manager and the owner of Acuff-Rose, the biggest publishing company in country music, and things between them had already become strained when the Everlys had moved to California while Rose had stayed in Nashville. Rose insisted that they only release Acuff-Rose songs as singles, and they refused, saying they wanted to put the single out. Rose retaliated in the most staggeringly petty manner imaginable. He stopped managing them, and he blocked them from being sent any new songs by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. Because he knew they'd already recorded "Love Hurts", a song written by the Bryants, as an album track, he got Roy Orbison, who he also managed, to record a version and put it out as a B-side, as a spoiler in case the Everlys tried to release their version as a single: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Love Hurts"] Worse than that, even, the Everlys were also signed to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, which meant that they were no longer allowed to record their own songs. For a while they tried writing under pseudonyms, but then Acuff-Rose found out about that and stopped them. For a while, even after basically taking a year away from music and being banned from recording their own songs, the brothers continued having hits. They also started another project -- their own record label, Calliope, which would put out their outside projects. For Don, this was a mostly-instrumental adaptation of Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance", which he recorded with an arrangement by Neal Hefti, under the name "Adrian Kimberly": [Excerpt: Adrian Kimberly, "Pomp and Circumstance"] That made the lower reaches of the US charts, but was banned by the BBC in Britain, because it would offend British patriotic sentiment (for those who don't know, "Pomp and Circumstance", under the name "Land of Hope and Glory", is something of a second national anthem over here). Phil's side project was a comedy folk group, the Keestone Family Singers, who recorded a parody of the Kingston Trio's "Raspberries, Strawberries", written by Glen Hardin of the Crickets: [Excerpt: The Keestone Family Singers, "Cornbread and Chitlings"] The other two singers on that track were people we're going to hear a lot from in later episodes -- a songwriter called Carole King, who a few months later would co-write the Everlys hit "Crying in the Rain", and a session guitarist named Glen Campbell. But neither of these ventures were particularly successful, and they concentrated on their own records. For a while, they continued having hits. But having no access to the Bryants' songs, and being unable to record the songs they were writing themselves, they relied more and more on cover versions, right at the point the market was starting to change to being based entirely around artists who wrote their own material. And on top of that, there were personal problems -- Don was going through a divorce, and before they were inducted into the Marines, both Don and Phil had started seeing a doctor who gave them what they were told were "vitamin shots" to help them keep their energy up, but were actually amphetamines. Both became addicted, and while Phil managed to kick his addiction quickly, Don became incapacitated by his, collapsing on a UK tour and being hospitalised with what was reported as "food poisoning", as most overdoses by rock musicians were in the early sixties, leaving Phil to perform on his own while Don recuperated. Their fall in popularity after "Temptation" was precipitous. Between 1957 and early 1961 they had consistently had massive hits. After "Temptation" they had three more top thirty hits, "Don't Blame Me", "Crying in the Rain", and "That's Old Fashioned". They continued having regular hits in the UK through 1965, but after "That's Old Fashioned" in early 1962 their US chart positions went seventy-six, forty-eight, a hundred and seven, a hundred and one, didn't chart at all, a hundred and thirty-three... you get the idea. They only had two more top forty hits in the US in the rest of their career -- "Gone Gone Gone" in 1964, which made number thirty-one, and "Bowling Green" in 1967 which made number forty. Eventually they got the ability to record their own material again, and also to record songs by the Bryants, but the enforced period of several years of relying on cover versions and old standards had left them dead as a commercial act. But surprisingly, they weren't artistically dead. They did have a slump around the time of Don's troubles, with a series of weak albums, but by 1965 they'd started making some very strong tracks, covering a stylistic range from soul to country to baroque pop to an entire album, Two Yanks in England, of covers of British songs, backed by the Hollies (who wrote eight of the twelve songs) and a young keyboard player named Reg Dwight, who would later change his name to Elton John: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Somebody Help Me"] In the middle of this commercial slump came their second album-length masterpiece, "Roots", an album that, like their earlier "Songs Our Daddy Taught Us", looked back to the music they'd grown up on., while also looking forward to the future, mixing new songs by contemporary writers like Merle Haggard and Randy Newman with older folk and country songs: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Illinois"] It stands with the great marriages of Americana, orchestral pop, and psychedelia from around that time, like Randy Newman's first album and Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle, and has many of the same people involved, including producer Lenny Waronker and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks. It's conceived as a complete piece, with songs fading in and out to excerpts of the Everlys' performances on the radio with their parents as children, and it's quite, quite, lovely. And, like those other albums, it was a complete commercial flop. The brothers continued working together for several more years, recording a live album to finish off their ten-year Warners contract, and then switching to RCA, where they recorded a couple of albums of rootsy country-rock in the style of artists they had influenced like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But nothing happened for them commercially, and they were getting less and less happy with working together. The two men argued about literally everything, from who was their father's real favourite to politics -- Phil was an intensely conservative Republican while Don is a liberal Democrat. They ended up travelling separately on tour and staying in separate hotels. It all came to a head in early 1973, when Don announced that their shows at Knotts Berry Farm would be their last, as he was tired of being an Everly brother. For the first of the two shows they were booked for, Don turned up drunk. After a few songs, Phil walked off stage, smashing his guitar. For the second show, Don turned up alone, and when someone in the crowd shouted "Where's Phil?" He replied "The Everly Brothers died ten years ago". Both of them had attempts at solo careers for a decade, during which time the only time they saw each other was reportedly at their father's funeral. They both had minor points of success -- an appearance on a film soundtrack here, a backing vocal on a hit record there -- but no chart success, until in 1983 Phil had a UK top ten hit with a duet with Cliff Richard, "She Means Nothing to Me": [Excerpt: Phil Everly and Cliff Richard, "She Means Nothing to Me"] But by this point, the brothers had reconciled, at least to an extent. They would never be close, but they'd regained enough of a relationship to work together, and they came together for a reunion show at the Royal Albert Hall, with a great band led by the country guitarist Albert Lee. That show was followed by a new album, produced by Dave Edmunds and featuring a lead-off single written for the brothers by Paul McCartney, "On the Wings of a Nightingale": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "On the Wings of a Nightingale"] Over the next twenty-two years, the brothers would record a couple more studio albums, and would frequently guest on records by other people, including performing backing vocals on Paul Simon's "Graceland", from his massively successful album of the same name: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "Graceland"] It was also Simon who enticed them into what turned out to be their final reunion, in 2004, after a period of a few years where once again the brothers hadn't worked together. Simon had a similarly rocky relationship with his own duet partner Art Garfunkel, and when Simon and Garfunkel did their first tour together in over twenty years, they invited the Everly Brothers to tour with them as guests, doing a short slot by themselves and joining Simon and Garfunkel to perform "Bye Bye Love" together: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel, "Bye Bye Love"] The year after that, they did what was to be their final tour, and I was lucky enough to see one of those shows myself. More than fifty years after they started performing together, they still sounded astonishing, and while they were apparently once again not on speaking terms offstage, you would never have known it from their effortless blend on stage, the kind of close harmony that you can only get when you know someone else's voice as well as your own. After that tour, Phil Everly's health put an end to the Everly Brothers -- he died in 2014 from COPD, a lung disease brought on by his smoking, and for many years before that he had to use an oxygen tank at all times. That wasn't an end to Everly infighting though -- the most recent court date in the ongoing lawsuit between Phil's estate and Don over the credit for "Cathy's Clown" was only last month. But even though their relationship was fraught, they were still brothers, and Don has talked movingly of how he speaks every day to the portion of Phil's ashes that he has in his house. The bonds that held them together were the same things that drove them apart, but Don knows that no matter how much longer he lives, he will always be one of the Everly Brothers.

Episode eighty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Cathy’s Clown” by The Everly Brothers, and at how after signing the biggest contract in music business history their career was sabotaged by their manager. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Poetry in Motion” by Johnny Tillotson.  —-more—-   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no first-rate biographies of the Everly Brothers in print, at least in English (apparently there’s a decent one in French, but I don’t speak French well enough for that). Ike’s Boys by Phyllis Karp is the only full-length bio,  and I relied on that in the absence of anything else, but it’s been out of print for nearly thirty years, and is not worth the exorbitant price it goes for second-hand. The Everlypedia is a series of PDFs containing articles on anything related to the Everly Brothers, in alphabetical order. This collection has all the Everlys’ recordings up to the end of 1962.  I would also recommend this recently-released box set containing expanded versions of their three last studio albums for Warners, including Roots, which I discuss in the episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   This week we’re going to look at the Everly Brothers’ first and biggest hit of the sixties, a song that established them as hit songwriters in their own right, which was more personal than anything they’d released earlier, and which was a big enough hit that it saved what was to become a major record label. We’re going to look at “Cathy’s Clown”: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] When we left the Everly Brothers, six months ago, we had seen them have their first chart hits and record the classic album Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, an album that prefigured by several years the later sixties folk music revival, and which is better than much of the music that came out of that later scene. Both artistically and commercially, they were as successful as any artists of the early rock era. But Don Everly, in particular, wanted them to have more artistic control themselves — and if they could move to a bigger label as well, that was all the better. But as it happens, they didn’t move to a bigger label, just a richer one. Warner Brothers Records had started in 1958, and had largely started because of changes in the film industry. In the late 1940s and early fifties, the film industry was being hit on all sides. Anti-trust legislation meant that the film studios had to get rid of the cinema chains they owned, losing a massive revenue stream (and also losing the opportunity to ensure that their films got shown no matter how poor their reputation). A series of lawsuits from actors had largely destroyed the star system on which the major studios relied, and then television became a huge factor in the entertainment industry, cutting further into the film studios’ profits. An aside about that — one of the big reasons for the growth of television as America’s dominant entertainment medium is racism. In the thirties and forties, there had been huge waves of black people moving from rural areas to the cities in search of work, and we’ve looked at that and the way that led to the creation of rhythm and blues in many of the previous episodes. After World War II there was a corresponding period of white flight, where white people moved en masse away from the big cities and into small towns and suburbs, to get away from black people. This is largely what led to America’s car culture and general lack of public transport, because low-population-density areas aren’t as easy to serve with reliable public transport. And in the same way it’s also uneconomical to run mass entertainment venues like theatres and cinemas in low-population-density areas, and going to the cinema becomes much less enticing if you have to drive twenty miles to get to one, rather than walking down the street. So white flight had essentially meant the start of a process by which entertainment in America moved from the public sphere to the private one. This is also a big reason for the boom in record sales in the middle decades of last century — records are private entertainment, as opposed to going out to a dance or a show. And this left the big film studios in dire straits. But while they were down on their luck when it came to films, Warners were doing very well in the music publishing business, where unlike their ownership of cinemas they didn’t have to get rid of their properties. Warners had always owned the songs used in their films, and indeed one of the reasons that Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies existed in the first place was so that they could plug songs that Warners owned. When Tex Avery has Owl Jolson singing “I Love to Singa”: [Excerpt: “Owl Jolson”, “I Love to Singa”] That’s a song that had originally appeared in a Warners feature film a few months earlier, sung by Al Jolson and Cab Calloway: [Excerpt: Al Jolson and Cab Calloway, “I Love to Singa”] So Warners were making money from the music industry. But then they realised something. Tab Hunter, one of their film stars under contract to them, had started to have hit records. His record “Young Love” spent six weeks at number one: [Excerpt: Tab Hunter, “Young Love”] And whenever he was interviewed to promote a film, all the interviewers would ask about was his music career. That was bad enough — after all, he wasn’t signed to Warners as a singer, he was meant to be a film star — but what was worse was that the label Hunter was on, Dot Records, was owned by a rival film studio, Paramount. Warners would go to all the trouble of getting an interview set up for their star, and then all it would do was put money into Paramount’s pocket! They needed to get into the record business themselves, as a way to exploit their song catalogue if nothing else. At first they thought about just buying Imperial Records, but when that deal fell through they started their own label, and signed Hunter to it right at the point that his career nosedived. In the first two years that Warner Brothers Records existed, they only had two hit singles — “Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb”, a record based on the Warner-owned TV series 77 Sunset Strip and co-performed by one of that series’ stars, Edd Byrnes: [Excerpt: Edd Byrnes and Connie Stevens, “Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb”] And another record by Connie Stevens, who also sang on “Kookie Kookie Lend Me Your Comb”, and was the star of a different Warners TV series, Hawaiian Eye: [Excerpt: Connie Stevens, “Sixteen Reasons”] Everything else they released flopped badly. After two years they had lost three million dollars, and would have closed down the label altogether, except the label was owed another two million, and they didn’t want to write that off. The main reason for these losses was that the label was mostly releasing stuff aimed at the easy listening adult album market, records by people like Henry Mancini, and at the time the singles market was where the money was, and the singles market was dominated by young people. They needed some records that would appeal to young people. They decided that they needed the Everly Brothers. At the beginning of 1960, the duo had released ten singles since May 1957, of which nine had charted, as had four of the B-sides. They’d topped the pop charts twice, the R&B charts twice, and the country charts four times. At a time when even the biggest stars would occasionally release the odd flop, they were as close to a guaranteed hit-making machine as existed in the music industry. And they were looking to get away from Cadence Records, for reasons that have never been made completely clear. It’s usually said that they had artistic differences with Cadence, but at the same time they always credited Archie Bleyer from Cadence with being the perfect arranger for them — he arranged their final Cadence single, “Let it Be Me”: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Let it Be Me”] But for whatever reason, the Everlys *were* looking to find a new label, and Warner Brothers were desperate enough that they signed them up to the biggest contract ever signed in music business history up to that point. Remember that four years earlier, when Elvis had signed with RCA records, they’d paid a one-off fee of forty thousand dollars and *that* was reportedly the largest advance ever paid in the industry up until that point. Now, the Everlys were signing to Warners on a ten-year contract, with a guaranteed advance of one hundred thousand dollars a year for those ten years — the first million-dollar contract in music history. They were set up until 1970, and were sure to provide Warners with a string of hits that would last out the decade — or so it seemed at first. Their first recording for the label had an unusual melodic inspiration. Ferde Grofé was an arranger and orchestrator for Paul Whiteman’s jazz band in the 1920s and thirties. He’s particularly known these days for having been the original arranger of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” — Gershwin had written it for two pianos, and it was Grofé who had come up with the instrumental colouring that these days we think of as being so important to that piece: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman “Rhapsody in Blue (original 1924 recording)”] Grofé had written a piece in 1931 called the “Grand Canyon Suite”, and its third movement, “On the Trail” had become the most popular piece of music he ever wrote. Disney made an Oscar-winning short with the suite as its soundtrack in 1958, and you can still hear “On the Trail” to this day in the Grand Canyon section of the Disneyland Railroad. But “On the Trail” was best known as the music that Phillip Morris used in their radio and TV commercials from the thirties through to the sixties. Here’s a bit from the original Whiteman recording of the piece: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman, “Grand Canyon Suite: On the Trail”] Don took that melodic inspiration, and combined it with two sources of lyrical inspiration — when his dad had been a child, he’d had a crush on a girl named Mary, who hadn’t been interested, and his schoolfriends had taunted him by singing “Mary had a little Ike” at him. The other key to the song came when Don started thinking about an old crush of his own, a girl from his school called Catherine Coe — though in later years he was at pains to point out that the song wasn’t actually about her. They took the resulting song into the studio with the normal members of the Nashville A-Team, and it became only their second hit single with an A-side written by one of the brothers, reaching number one on both the pop and R&B charts: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] I say it’s written by Don — the original issue of the record credited the songwriting to both Don and Phil, but Phil signed an agreement in 1980 relinquishing his claim to the song, and his name was taken off all future copies. It sounds to me like Don’s writing style, and all the anecdotes about its writing talk about him without mentioning any input from Phil, so I’m assuming for these purposes that it’s a Don solo composition. Listening to the record, which was the first that the duo produced for themselves, as well as being their first for Warners, you can hear why Don was at times dissatisfied with the songs that Felice and Boudleaux Bryant had written for the brothers. It’s a sophisticated piece of work in a number of different ways. For a start, there’s the way the music mirrors the lyric on the first line. That line is about separation — “Don’t want your love any more” — and the brothers start the line in unison, but Don’s voice slowly drops relative to Phil’s, so by the end of the line they’re a third apart. It’s like he’s stepping away: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] The song’s structure also seems unusual. Wikipedia says it has a chorus and a bridge but no verse, while the Library of Congress disagrees and says it has a verse and a bridge but no chorus. Personally, I’d say that it definitely does have a chorus — the repeated section with the same words and melody each time it’s repeated, with both brothers singing, and with the title of the song at the end, seems as definitively a chorus as one could possibly ask for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] If that’s not a chorus, I’m honestly not sure what is. The reason this comes into question is the other section. I would call that section a verse, and I think most people would, and the song’s structure is a straightforward A-B-A-B repetition which one would normally call verse/chorus. But it’s such a change of pace that it feels like the contrasting section that normally comes with a bridge or middle eight. Indeed the first time I properly learned what a middle eight was — in a column in Mojo magazine in the mid-nineties called Doctor Rock which explained some basic musicology — it was specifically cited as an example of one: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] Part of the reason that seems so different is that Don’s singing it solo, while the brothers are duetting on the choruses, and normally Don’s solo lines would be on a bridge or middle eight. Not always, but often enough that that’s what you expect if you’ve listened to a few of their records. But there’s also a change in rhythm. One of the things you’ll notice as we go further into the sixties is that, for a while in the early sixties, the groove in rock and roll — and also in soul — moved away from the swinging, shuffling rhythm you get in most of the fifties music we’ve looked at into a far more straightforward four-four rhythm. In roughly 1961 through 64 or so, you have things like the bam-bam-bam-bam four-on-the-floor beat of early Motown or Four Seasons records, or the chugga-chugga-chugga rhythm of surf guitar, rather than the looser, triplet-based grooves that you’d get in the fifties. And you can hear in “Cathy’s Clown” the shift in those rhythms happening in the song itself. The verses have an almost Latin feel, with lots of loose cymbal work from Buddy Harman: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] While the choruses have an almost martial feel to them, a boom-BAP rhythm, and sound like they have two drummers on them: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown”] While I say that sounds like there are two drummers, it’s still just Harman playing. The difference is that here the engineer, Bill Porter, who was the engineer on a lot of the Nashville recordings we’ve looked at, notably the Roy Orbison ones, had just obtained a new device — a tape loop. Now, I’ve seen some people misunderstand what it was that Porter did with this — thinking he looped the drums in the way one would loop things today, just playing the same recording over and over. It wasn’t that. Rather it was a way of doing what Sam Phillips had been doing with tape echo in Sun a few years earlier — there would be an endlessly circulating loop of tape, which had both record and playback heads. The drums would be recorded normally, but would also be recorded onto that tape loop, and then when it played back a few milliseconds later it would sound like a second drummer playing along with the first. It’s an almost inaudible delay, but it’s enough to give a totally different sound to the drums. Porter would physically switch this loop on and off while recording the track live — all the vocals and instruments were recorded live together, onto a three-track tape, and he would turn it on for the choruses and off for the verses. This is an early example of the kind of studio experimentation that would define the way records were made in the sixties. The rhythm that Harman played was also very influential — you can hear that it strongly influenced Paul McCartney if you listen to Beatles records like “What You’re Doing”, “Ticket to Ride”, and “Tomorrow Never Knows”, all of which have drum patterns which were suggested by McCartney, and all of which are strongly reminiscent of the “Cathy’s Clown” chorus. “Cathy’s Clown” topped the charts for five weeks, and sold two million copies. It was an immense success, and the Everlys seemed to be on top of the world. But it was precisely then that problems started for the duo. First, they moved from Nashville to LA. The main reason for that was that as well as being a record contract, their new contract with Warners would give them the opportunity to appear in films, too. So they spent six months taking acting lessons and doing screen tests, before concluding that neither of them could actually act or remember their lines, and wisely decided that they were going to stick to music. The one good thing they took from that six month period was that they rekindled their friendship with the Crickets, and Sonny Curtis wrote them a song called “Walk Right Back”, which made the top ten (and number one in the UK and New Zealand): [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Walk Right Back”] Curtis wrote that song while he was in basic training for the military, and when he got a pass for a few days he’d only written the first verse. He played the song to the brothers while he was out on his pass, and they said they liked it. He told them he’d write a second verse and send it to them, but by the time they received his letter with the lyrics for the second verse, they’d already recorded the song, just repeating the first verse. Curtis wasn’t the only one who had to go into basic military training. The brothers, too, knew they would be drafted sooner rather than later, and so they decided to do as several other acts we’ve discussed did, and sign up voluntarily for six months rather than be drafted for two years. Before they did so, they recorded another song, “Temptation”, an old standard from the thirties: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Temptation”] And that track marked the beginning of the end of the Everlys as a chart act. Because it was an old standard, the publishing was not owned by Acuff-Rose, and Wesley Rose was furious. He was both their manager and the owner of Acuff-Rose, the biggest publishing company in country music, and things between them had already become strained when the Everlys had moved to California while Rose had stayed in Nashville. Rose insisted that they only release Acuff-Rose songs as singles, and they refused, saying they wanted to put the single out. Rose retaliated in the most staggeringly petty manner imaginable. He stopped managing them, and he blocked them from being sent any new songs by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. Because he knew they’d already recorded “Love Hurts”, a song written by the Bryants, as an album track, he got Roy Orbison, who he also managed, to record a version and put it out as a B-side, as a spoiler in case the Everlys tried to release their version as a single: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Love Hurts”] Worse than that, even, the Everlys were also signed to Acuff-Rose as songwriters, which meant that they were no longer allowed to record their own songs. For a while they tried writing under pseudonyms, but then Acuff-Rose found out about that and stopped them. For a while, even after basically taking a year away from music and being banned from recording their own songs, the brothers continued having hits. They also started another project — their own record label, Calliope, which would put out their outside projects. For Don, this was a mostly-instrumental adaptation of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance”, which he recorded with an arrangement by Neal Hefti, under the name “Adrian Kimberly”: [Excerpt: Adrian Kimberly, “Pomp and Circumstance”] That made the lower reaches of the US charts, but was banned by the BBC in Britain, because it would offend British patriotic sentiment (for those who don’t know, “Pomp and Circumstance”, under the name “Land of Hope and Glory”, is something of a second national anthem over here). Phil’s side project was a comedy folk group, the Keestone Family Singers, who recorded a parody of the Kingston Trio’s “Raspberries, Strawberries”, written by Glen Hardin of the Crickets: [Excerpt: The Keestone Family Singers, “Cornbread and Chitlings”] The other two singers on that track were people we’re going to hear a lot from in later episodes — a songwriter called Carole King, who a few months later would co-write the Everlys hit “Crying in the Rain”, and a session guitarist named Glen Campbell. But neither of these ventures were particularly successful, and they concentrated on their own records. For a while, they continued having hits. But having no access to the Bryants’ songs, and being unable to record the songs they were writing themselves, they relied more and more on cover versions, right at the point the market was starting to change to being based entirely around artists who wrote their own material. And on top of that, there were personal problems — Don was going through a divorce, and before they were inducted into the Marines, both Don and Phil had started seeing a doctor who gave them what they were told were “vitamin shots” to help them keep their energy up, but were actually amphetamines. Both became addicted, and while Phil managed to kick his addiction quickly, Don became incapacitated by his, collapsing on a UK tour and being hospitalised with what was reported as “food poisoning”, as most overdoses by rock musicians were in the early sixties, leaving Phil to perform on his own while Don recuperated. Their fall in popularity after “Temptation” was precipitous. Between 1957 and early 1961 they had consistently had massive hits. After “Temptation” they had three more top thirty hits, “Don’t Blame Me”, “Crying in the Rain”, and “That’s Old Fashioned”. They continued having regular hits in the UK through 1965, but after “That’s Old Fashioned” in early 1962 their US chart positions went seventy-six, forty-eight, a hundred and seven, a hundred and one, didn’t chart at all, a hundred and thirty-three… you get the idea. They only had two more top forty hits in the US in the rest of their career — “Gone Gone Gone” in 1964, which made number thirty-one, and “Bowling Green” in 1967 which made number forty. Eventually they got the ability to record their own material again, and also to record songs by the Bryants, but the enforced period of several years of relying on cover versions and old standards had left them dead as a commercial act. But surprisingly, they weren’t artistically dead. They did have a slump around the time of Don’s troubles, with a series of weak albums, but by 1965 they’d started making some very strong tracks, covering a stylistic range from soul to country to baroque pop to an entire album, Two Yanks in England, of covers of British songs, backed by the Hollies (who wrote eight of the twelve songs) and a young keyboard player named Reg Dwight, who would later change his name to Elton John: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Somebody Help Me”] In the middle of this commercial slump came their second album-length masterpiece, “Roots”, an album that, like their earlier “Songs Our Daddy Taught Us”, looked back to the music they’d grown up on., while also looking forward to the future, mixing new songs by contemporary writers like Merle Haggard and Randy Newman with older folk and country songs: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Illinois”] It stands with the great marriages of Americana, orchestral pop, and psychedelia from around that time, like Randy Newman’s first album and Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle, and has many of the same people involved, including producer Lenny Waronker and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks. It’s conceived as a complete piece, with songs fading in and out to excerpts of the Everlys’ performances on the radio with their parents as children, and it’s quite, quite, lovely. And, like those other albums, it was a complete commercial flop. The brothers continued working together for several more years, recording a live album to finish off their ten-year Warners contract, and then switching to RCA, where they recorded a couple of albums of rootsy country-rock in the style of artists they had influenced like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But nothing happened for them commercially, and they were getting less and less happy with working together. The two men argued about literally everything, from who was their father’s real favourite to politics — Phil was an intensely conservative Republican while Don is a liberal Democrat. They ended up travelling separately on tour and staying in separate hotels. It all came to a head in early 1973, when Don announced that their shows at Knotts Berry Farm would be their last, as he was tired of being an Everly brother. For the first of the two shows they were booked for, Don turned up drunk. After a few songs, Phil walked off stage, smashing his guitar. For the second show, Don turned up alone, and when someone in the crowd shouted “Where’s Phil?” He replied “The Everly Brothers died ten years ago”. Both of them had attempts at solo careers for a decade, during which time the only time they saw each other was reportedly at their father’s funeral. They both had minor points of success — an appearance on a film soundtrack here, a backing vocal on a hit record there — but no chart success, until in 1983 Phil had a UK top ten hit with a duet with Cliff Richard, “She Means Nothing to Me”: [Excerpt: Phil Everly and Cliff Richard, “She Means Nothing to Me”] But by this point, the brothers had reconciled, at least to an extent. They would never be close, but they’d regained enough of a relationship to work together, and they came together for a reunion show at the Royal Albert Hall, with a great band led by the country guitarist Albert Lee. That show was followed by a new album, produced by Dave Edmunds and featuring a lead-off single written for the brothers by Paul McCartney, “On the Wings of a Nightingale”: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “On the Wings of a Nightingale”] Over the next twenty-two years, the brothers would record a couple more studio albums, and would frequently guest on records by other people, including performing backing vocals on Paul Simon’s “Graceland”, from his massively successful album of the same name: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, “Graceland”] It was also Simon who enticed them into what turned out to be their final reunion, in 2004, after a period of a few years where once again the brothers hadn’t worked together. Simon had a similarly rocky relationship with his own duet partner Art Garfunkel, and when Simon and Garfunkel did their first tour together in over twenty years, they invited the Everly Brothers to tour with them as guests, doing a short slot by themselves and joining Simon and Garfunkel to perform “Bye Bye Love” together: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel, “Bye Bye Love”] The year after that, they did what was to be their final tour, and I was lucky enough to see one of those shows myself. More than fifty years after they started performing together, they still sounded astonishing, and while they were apparently once again not on speaking terms offstage, you would never have known it from their effortless blend on stage, the kind of close harmony that you can only get when you know someone else’s voice as well as your own. After that tour, Phil Everly’s health put an end to the Everly Brothers — he died in 2014 from COPD, a lung disease brought on by his smoking, and for many years before that he had to use an oxygen tank at all times. That wasn’t an end to Everly infighting though — the most recent court date in the ongoing lawsuit between Phil’s estate and Don over the credit for “Cathy’s Clown” was only last month. But even though their relationship was fraught, they were still brothers, and Don has talked movingly of how he speaks every day to the portion of Phil’s ashes that he has in his house. The bonds that held them together were the same things that drove them apart, but Don knows that no matter how much longer he lives, he will always be one of the Everly Brothers.

This month has been super crazy, but I'm back with a brand new episode of I Heart Movies! Or should I say, I Heart Animation! This will be the first official episode of a (semi)new, show-within-a-show, like I do with The Disney Movie Marathon, but focusing on animation! In today's episode Eli Sanza and I are looking at the new HBO Max series, Looney Tunes Cartoons, which serves as a new iteration of the classic Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts from the Golden Age of Animation! Follow Eli online! Eli's Blog: https://ejunkieblog.wordpress.com Eli's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ejunkie2014 For more podcast and video content from me, check out Every Version Ever, and my YouTube Channel! Every Version Ever: https://anchor.fm/everyversionever YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/iheartmovies For even more from me, follow me online! Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonjnorth Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JonJNorth Blog: http://jonathanjnorth.blogspot.com/ Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jonjnorth/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonjnorth/ If you'd like to help out the show, you can find me on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/jonjnorth

Dave Plier and Dave Schwan discuss events in this week’s history segment including JCPenney opening it’s first store, the first regular season Cubs game airs on WGN Radio in 1925, Ray Kroc launches McDonalds in 1955 in Chicago, the Ford Mustang is introduced.

"This movie is basically Merrie Melodies meets 'Chinatown.'" So begins Sarah and Raf's analysis of the groundbreaking live-action-meets-animation film "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." This 1988 movie enchanted both of our hosts when they were young, driving them to learn as much as they could about its production. And what a production it was! From lawyers fighting over Donald and Daffy getting an equal number of frames per second to robots that had to move like animated penguin waiters, this film was all sorts of complicated.But "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" is more than just a logistical nightmare that became a technical triumph. It's also a portrait of haunted characters stuck in the past as villains around them stare maliciously toward the future. It's a story about the toxic reverberations grief can have years later. It's a pamphlet come to life called "How to Talk to Your Toons About Alcoholism." It's a dusty gallery of cringe-worthy references that have not aged well. But most of all, as Sarah says, "It's a dark noir thriller, you know, for kids!" And it's one that's worth revisiting.

James Rocha, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Fresno State and co-author, along with his wife Dr. Mona Rocha, of Joss Whedon, Anarchist? A Unified Theory of the Films and Television Series, returns to help ease us into the poor decision making of the Scooby Gang, and the heavy-handed “metaphor” application of the writers headed into the darker half of the darkest season. In episode 608, “Tabula Rasa,” James does his best to get into the philosophy of it all, while I just question if Buffy has jumped the shark. In 609, “Smashed,” we talk about Willow’s reasons for finally de-ratting Amy; the debate over Spike’s reasons for trying to bite the blonde in the alley is rehashed; and Buffy (the “good” Slayer) has now slept with twice as many named characters as Faith (the “bad” Slayer). And 610, “Wrecked” reminds us how important Merrie Melodies cartoons are; the so-called subtext becomes painful, bludgeoning text hammered directly into our innocent, trusting faces; and my oft-referenced issues with one particular writer are made just a little more clear. For better or worse.   Next: co-host of The Avatar Returns podcast, co-author of The Deli Counter of Justice, my friend Eric Sipple joins the conversation for the first time to discuss episodes 611, “Gone,” 612, “Doublemeat Palace,” and 613, “Dead Things.”   THE BREAKDOWN Run Time: 01:54:55 00:00:55  - Intro / Guest 00:03:26  - Main Topic 01:51:15  - Outro / Next   THE LIBRARY Joss Whedon, Anarchist? A Unified Theory of the Films and Television Series, by James Rocha and Mona Rocha   THE MUSIC “Conversations (feat. Wesley Mead)” by Azura (2017) “Goodbye to You” by Michelle Branch, The Spirit Room (2002)   THE SCHOLARS Whedon Studies Association is a non-profit academic organization devoted to the study of the works of Joss Whedon and his associates. They put out Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies, and Watcher Junior​: The Undergraduate Journal of Whedon Studies, both blind peer-reviewed twice-yearly online publications. They also host the biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses, which brings all these incredible scholars together to present papers, discuss ways of incorporating Whedon Studies in education, and basically just geek out together.  http://www.whedonstudies.tv/

Another old KSCGSF episode unearthed from the Archives, this one from the 2015 Christmas season. This time out I cover a Christmas themed story starring Bugs Bunny from Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies #87 that went on sale in November 1948.

Like the animator's giant eraser in Chuck Jones' classic Merrie Melodies short “Duck Amuck,” a wave of anti-matter sweeps across countless realities, obliterating everything in its path until only a handful of universes are left in the epic 12-issue event Crisis on Infinite Earths, by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, published by DC Comics! Aided by the mysterious Monitor, some of comics' greatest heroes are all that stand between the remaining worlds and the malevolent ... um, Anti-Monitor! Join us as we answer the burning questions: Can George Perez draw every single DC character before this crossover event is through? And can this world-changing saga survive that End of the Effing World known as ... The Comics Canon? In This Episode! The history of the DC multiverse We have to talk about Pariah Characters referring to other characters by their names Does The Haunted Tank have a horn that plays Dixie? DC: The New Frontier “You're going to die now! ... But later!” The worst name in comics Swamp Thing: American Gothic Crisis on Multiple Earths Vol. 1 Six Crises by Richard Nixon (yes, really) Join us in two weeks on Wednesday, New Comic Book Day, as this story shifts into gear, resulting in some memorable moments and the birth of a new universe in issues #7-12! Until then: Impress your friends with our Comics Canon merchandise! Rate us on Apple Podcasts! Send us an email! Hit us up on Twitter or Facebook! And as always, thanks for listening!

The Good, The Bad & The Geeky podcast host Nick Arganbright joins Sean, Toni and Scott to discuss the classic, beloved series of Warner Bros. animated shorts from the Golden Age.   Plugs: Twitter: @CinemaWheelerte Facebook: facebook.com/CinemaWheelerte/ The Good, The Bad, and The Geeky Podcast: www.gbgpodcast.com Hashtag Comedy: hashtagcomedy.com Savage Tech: http://savagetech.industries Erik Sternberger: eriksternberger.com Amanda’s Picture Show A Go Go: amandaspictureshowagogo.com It's All Been Done: itsallbeendoneradiohour.com/welcome Columbus Improv Meetup: meetup.com/Columbus-Improv-Comedy-Meetup/ Columbus Unscripted: columbusunscripted.com The Nest Theatre: nesttheatre.com Madlab Theatre: madlab.net Politipod: ipmnation.com/politipod   Logo by Toni Sacco

In this slice of life episode we explore the day to day routines of Bugs Bunny and Foghorn Leghorn. An odd lack of hidden agenda on Bugs' part makes for a relaxing week in The Space Jam Continuum filled with music and japery.

This week on Doghair Presents, Rory is joined by Charlie from Why Did I Do That? And this week Rory tells us all about Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies and everyone's favourite basketball movie. You kind find Charlie's fantastic podcast at https://player.whooshkaa.com/shows/why-did-i-do-that and https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/why-did-i-do-that/id1435311068?mt=2 and spotify. You can also follow on twitter @Whydidi_Pod and on Instagram @Whydidipod. Space Jam Game Analysis: https://harvardsportsanalysis.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/regressing-compiling-the-absurd-box-score-for-space-jam/ https://thewordwebzine.weebly.com/sports/analytical-breakdown-of-the-space-jam-tune-squad Also! Big thanks to Carlyle from Dungens and Dragnos for being the theme tune consultant for the new theme! If you want get in touch with the show for any reason, tweet us @doghairnetwork or Rory @HangoverReviews or email us thedognetwork@gmail.com Go to https://www.doghairnetwork.com for everything you've ever wanted out of life* You can also buy some sweet Doghair Network merch at https://www.teepublic.com/user/thedoghairnetwork *provided all you've ever wanted is podcasts

Thufferin’ Thuccotash! These two maroons (Jacques and Joe) recruit the help of Peter, a long-time friend and even longer-time animation collector, to dive deeply into the long and lustrous history of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, aka Warner Bros. cartoons, with stars like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, P-P-P-Porky Pig, and even the long-forgotten Buddy! They also shed light on the darker side of these beloved toons, including Private SNAFU and the notorious Censored Eleven! PLUS: Peter and Joe reenact a classic scene! So don’t be a stinker! Listen – I say – listen to this episode! It’s a lulu! Xingcat on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/xingcat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carnivalpodcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/carnivalpodcast

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

We close out the conversation about Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season One with guest scholar James South, editor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale and the upcoming Westworld and Philosophy: If You Go Looking for the Truth, Get the Whole Thing. Together we discuss the hidden chalkboard messages of 111, “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” and the intentional fallacy of Merrie Melodies in 112, “Prophecy Girl.” Cordy finally goes to the library; Xander is a bully; and Buffy’s only 16.   Also, what did the Beatles know about invisible assassin school and when did they know it?   Next: Michael Adams, author of Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon shares some words with me about the first two episodes of the second season, “When She Was Bad” and “Some Assembly Required.”   THE BREAKDOWN Intro / Guest (00:00 - 5:00) Main Topic (5:00 - 1:19:50) Outro / Next (1:19:50 - 1:26:16)   THE LIBRARY Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale (Popular Culture and Philosophy, Vol. 4), edited by James B. South   Westworld and Philosophy (The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series), edited by James B. South   THE LINKS James South Academic Site   THE MUSIC “Conversations (feat. Wesley Mead)” by Azura (2017) “Happiness is a Warm Gun” by the Beatles, The Beatles (1968)   THE SCHOLARS Whedon Studies Association is anon-profit academic organization devoted to the study of the works of Joss Whedon and his associates. They put out Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies, and Watcher Junior​: The Undergraduate Journal of Whedon Studies, both blind peer-reviewed twice-yearly online publications. They also host the biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses, which brings all these incredible scholars together to present papers, discuss ways of incorporating Whedon Studies in education, and basically just geek out together. http://www.whedonstudies.tv/

Peter Rabbit Welcome to 2018! This is the start of the second year for the podcast! As a recap from last year we put out 44 episodes. Almost an episode a week. We had two interviews. One with a Japanese exchange student (Yudai Tanabe), and one with Susie at Laughing Orange Studios. We covered about 23 different rabbit breeds, and three hares, so it looks like every other episode is about a breed. My favorite three episodes from last year were the Space rabbit episode, the Jack-a-lope, and Halloween Rabbits. What was your favorite episode? Post in the comments for the show! I would like to thank those that purchased through Amazon to support the show. It looks like Amazon is not seeing enough activity, and is threatening to shut down the account.  "We are reaching out to you because we have not seen qualified sales activity on your account." Remember it does not cost anything extra to use the link on the hareoftherabbit.com website.  I appreciate the support! Today we are going to check out Peter Rabbit! Peter Rabbit is a fictional animal character in various children's stories by Beatrix Potter. He first appeared in The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902 and subsequently in five more books between 1904 and 1912. Spinoff merchandise includes dishes, wallpaper, and dolls. He appears as a character in a number of adaptations. This weeks item is A Peter Rabbit Book! The rabbits in Potter's stories are anthropomorphic and wear human clothes: Peter wears a jacket and shoes. Peter, his widowed mother, Mrs. Josephine Rabbit, as well as his sisters, Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail live in a rabbit hole that has a human kitchen, human furniture, as well as a shop where Josephine sells various items. Peter's relatives are Cousin Benjamin Bunny and Benjamin's father Mr. Bouncer Bunny. Helen Beatrix Potter, known as Beatrix, was born on 28 July 1866 to Rupert and Helen Potter in Kensington, London, and she is one of the most beloved children's authors of all time. She was the daughter of Rupert and Helen Potter, both of whom had artistic interests. Her father trained as a lawyer, but he never actually practiced. Instead he devoted himself to photography and art. Her mother Helen was skilled at embroidery and watercolors. Beatrix got to know several influential artists and writers through her parents, including painter John Everett Millais. Her younger brother Walter Bertram was born six years after her birth. Both Beatrix and Bertram loved to draw and paint, and often made sketches of their many pets, including rabbits, mice, frogs, lizards, snakes and a bat. Beatrix was always encouraged to draw, and she spent many hours making intricate sketches of animals and plants, revealing an early fascination for the natural world that would continue throughout her life. Although she never went to school, Beatrix was an intelligent and industrious student, and her parents employed an art teacher, Miss Cameron, and a number of governesses, including Annie Moore, to whom she remained close throughout her life. Two of Beatrix’s earliest artist models were her pet rabbits. Her first rabbit was Benjamin Bouncer, who enjoyed buttered toast and joined the Potter family on holiday in Scotland where he went for walks on a lead. Benjamin was followed by Peter Piper, who had a talent for performing tricks, and he accompanied Beatrix everywhere. The most exciting time of the year for Beatrix was the summer, when the family traveled north to spend three months in Scotland. The children had the freedom to explore the countryside, and Beatrix learned to observe plants and insects with an artist’s eye for detail. When Beatrix was sixteen, the family stayed instead at Wray Castle, overlooking Lake Windermere, where Beatrix began a lifelong love of the countryside and of the Lake District. Botanist, Artist and Storyteller Beatrix was invited to study fungi at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, and she produced hundreds of detailed botanical drawings and investigated their cultivation and growth. Encouraged by Charles McIntosh, a revered Scottish naturalist, to make her fungi drawings more technically accurate, Beatrix not only produced beautiful watercolors but also became an adept scientific illustrator. By 1896, she had developed her own theory of how fungi spores reproduced and wrote a paper, ‘On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae’, which was initially rejected by William Thiselton-Dyer, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens. Undeterred, Beatrix continued her research, and after a year George Massee, a fungi expert who worked at the Kew gardens, agreed to present her paper to the Linnean Society of London, as women at that time were not permitted to do so. Although the paper was never published, scientists still recognize her contribution to mycological research today. Long before she was a published author, Beatrix Potter drew illustrations for some of her favorite stories, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Cinderella, as well as her sketches from nature. Her imaginative art led to the publication of her earliest works – greeting-card designs and illustrations for the publisher Hildesheimer & Faulkner. There followed more publications, including a series of frog illustrations and verses for Changing Pictures, a popular annual offered by the art publisher Ernest Nister, which cemented Beatrix’s desire to publish her own illustrated stories. Potter first tasted success as an illustrator, selling some of her work to be used for greeting cards. The story was inspired by a pet rabbit Potter had as a child, which she named Peter Piper. Yes, there was a real Peter Rabbit. He was a Belgian buck rabbit named Peter Piper. He was actually the second rabbit that Potter kept as a pet—the first was Benjamin Bouncer, who was the inspiration for Benjamin Bunny. They were part of a menagerie of animals that Potter and her brother adopted as children, which also included birds, lizards, mice, snakes, snails, guinea pigs, bats, dogs, cats, and even hedgehogs. Potter was especially fond of Peter Piper, and would take him on walks on a leash. She later described in a letter how he liked to lie in front of the fire “like a cat. He was clever at learning tricks, he used to jump through a hoop, and ring a bell, and play the tambourine.” In one of her personal editions of Peter Rabbit, Potter wrote an inscription dedicated to “poor old Peter Rabbit, who died on the 26th of January 1901. … An affectionate companion and a quiet friend.” Through the 1890s, Potter sent illustrated story letters to the children of her former governess, Annie Moore. The first Peter Rabbit story, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was originally created in 1893, when Potter was 26 years of age, sent a letter to Noel Moore, the five-year-old son of Potter's former governess, Annie Moore. The boy was ill and Potter wrote him a picture and story letter to help him pass the time and to cheer him up. The letter included sketches illustrating the narrative. Transcript Eastwood Dunkeld Sep 4th 93 My dear Noel, I don't know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were – Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter. They lived with their mother in a sand bank under the root of a big fir tree. "Now my dears," said old Mrs Bunny "you may go into the field or down the lane, but don't go into Mr McGregor's garden." Flopsy, Mopsy & Cottontail, who were good little rabbits went down the lane to gather blackberries, but Peter, who was very naughty ran straight away to Mr McGregor's garden and squeezed underneath the gate. First he ate some lettuce, and some broad beans, then some radishes, and then, feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley; but round the end of a cucumber frame whom should he meet but Mr McGregor! Mr McGregor was planting out young cabbages but he jumped up & ran after Peter waving a rake & calling out "Stop thief"! Peter was most dreadfully frightened & rushed all over the garden, for he had forgotten the way back to the gate. He lost one of his shoes among the cabbages and the other shoe amongst the potatoes. After losing them he ran on four legs & went faster, so that I think he would have got away altogether, if he had not unfortunately run into a gooseberry net and got caught fast by the large buttons on his jacket. It was a blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new. Mr McGregor came up with a basket which he intended to pop on the top of Peter, but Peter wriggled out just in time, leaving his jacket behind, and this time he found the gate, slipped underneath and ran home safely. Mr McGregor hung up the little jacket & shoes for a scarecrow, to frighten the blackbirds. Peter was ill during the evening, in consequence of overeating himself. His mother put him to bed and gave him a dose of camomile tea, but Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper. I am coming back to London next Thursday, so I hope I shall see you soon, and the new baby. I remain, dear Noel, yours affectionately Beatrix Potter After Potter sent the Moore children (including Noel's siblings Norah and Eric) two more illustrated letters, one about a squirrel named Nutkin and another about a frog named Jeremy Fisher, the children's mother, Annie, suggested she turn them into children’s books. In 1900, Moore, realizing the commercial potential of Potter's stories, suggested they be made into books. Potter embraced the suggestion, and, borrowing her complete correspondence (which had been carefully preserved by the Moore children), selected a letter written on 4 September 1893 to five-year-old Noel that featured a tale about a rabbit named Peter. Potter biographer Linda Lear explains: "The original letter was too short to make a proper book so [Potter] added some text and made new black-and-white illustrations...and made it more suspenseful. These changes slowed the narrative down, added intrigue, and gave a greater sense of the passage of time. Then she copied it out into a stiff-covered exercise book, and painted a colored frontispiece showing Mrs Rabbit dosing Peter with camomile tea". Potter’s beautiful illustrations came from her interest in the natural world. As a child, she would draw and sketch animals around her with a sharp, observing eye. She could be quite ruthless about it, in fact. When a pet died, she would skin and boil its body so she could use the skeleton for anatomical sketches. She studied the plant world as well, producing over 300 paintings of mushrooms by 1901. (Her study of mushrooms led Potter to submit a paper on spore reproduction to the Linnean Society of London. But it had to be read by botanist George Massee because women weren't allowed at the meetings.) All this practice and close observation led to her elegant style, where animals look real even though they’re wearing top hats and petticoats. As Lear explains, Potter titled The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Mr. McGregor's Garden and sent it to publishers, but "her manuscript was returned ... including Frederick Warne & Co. ... who nearly a decade earlier had shown some interest in her artwork. Some publishers wanted a shorter book, others a longer one. But most wanted colored illustrations which by 1900 were both popular and affordable". The several rejections were frustrating to Potter, who knew exactly how her book should look (she had adopted the format and style of Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo) "and how much it should cost". She decided to publish the book herself, and on 16 December 1901 the first 250 copies of her privately printed The Tale of Peter Rabbit were "ready for distribution to family and friends". So Potter reworked Peter Rabbit, doubling its length and adding 25 new illustrations. Six publishers rejected the story, in part because they didn’t agree with Potter’s vision for the work. She wanted the book to be small for children’s hands, and the publishers wanted it to be bigger, and therefore more expensive. Potter refused, explaining that she would rather make two or three books costing 1 shilling each than one big book because “little rabbits cannot afford to spend 6 shillings on one book, and would never buy it.” In December 1901, she self-published Peter Rabbit. The 200 copies sold out in a few months and she ordered a reprint. Meanwhile, Potter continued to distribute her privately printed edition to family and friends, with the celebrated creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, acquiring a copy for his children. When the first private printing of 250 copies was sold out, another 200 were prepared. She noted in an inscription in one copy that her beloved pet rabbit Peter had died. To help Peter Rabbit get published, a friend rewrote it as a poem. While Potter was self-publishing, Canon Rawnsley, a family friend, rewrote the story in rhyming couplets in an attempt to get publishers interested again. His version began: “There were four little bunnies/ no bunnies were sweeter/ Mopsy and Cotton-tail,/ Flopsy and Peter.'' Rawnsley submitted his text with Potter’s illustrations to the publishers Frederick Warne & Co. They agreed to publish the book, but with one stipulation—they wanted to use Potter’s simpler language. In 1901, as Lear explains, a Potter family friend and sometime poet, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, set Potter's tale into "rather dreadful didactic verse and submitted it, along with Potter's illustrations and half her revised manuscript, to Frederick Warne & Co.," who had been among the original rejecters. Warne editors declined Rawnsley's version "but asked to see the complete Potter manuscript" – Warne wanted color illustrations throughout the "bunny book" (as the firm referred to the tale) and suggested cutting the illustrations "from forty-two to thirty-two ... and marked which ones might best be eliminated". Potter initially resisted the idea of color illustrations, but then realized her stubborn stance was a mistake. She sent Warne "several color illustrations, along with a copy of her privately printed edition" which Warne then handed to their eminent children's book illustrator L. Leslie Brooke for his professional opinion. Brooke was impressed with Potter's work. Fortuitously, his recommendation coincided with a sudden surge in the small picture-book market. Their interest stimulated by the opportunity The Tale of Peter Rabbit offered the publisher to compete with the success of Helen Bannerman's wildly popular Little Black Sambo and other small-format children's books then on the market. When Warne inquired about the lack of colour illustrations in the book, Potter replied that rabbit-brown and green were not good subjects for coloration. Potter arrived at an agreement with Warne for an initial commercial publication of 5,000 copies. Negotiations dragged on into the following year, but a contract was finally signed in June 1902. Potter was closely involved in the publication of the commercial edition – redrawing where necessary, making minor adjustments to the prose and correcting punctuation. The blocks for the illustrations and text were sent to printer Edmund Evans for engraving, and she made adjustments to the proofs when she received them. Lear writes that "Even before the publication of the tale in early October 1902, the first 8,000 copies were sold out. By the year's end there were 28,000 copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in print. By the middle of 1903 there was a fifth edition sporting colored end-papers ... a sixth printing was produced within the month"; and a year after the first commercial publication there were 56,470 copies in print. Over the years, The Tale of Peter Rabbit has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and as of 2008, the Peter Rabbit series has sold more than 151 million copies in 35 languages. Peter Rabbit made his first appearance in 1902 in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The story focuses on a family of anthropomorphic rabbits. The widowed mother rabbit cautions her young against entering the vegetable garden of a man named Mr. McGregor, telling them: "your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor". Her three daughters obediently refrain from entering the garden, going down the lane to pick blackberries, but her rebellious son Peter enters the garden to snack on some vegetables. Peter ends up eating more than is good for him and goes looking for parsley to cure his stomach ache. Peter is spotted by Mr. McGregor and loses his jacket and shoes while trying to escape. He hides in a watering can in a shed, but then has to run away again when Mr. McGregor finds him, and ends up completely lost. After sneaking past a cat, Peter sees the gate where he entered the garden from a distance and heads for it, despite being spotted and chased by Mr. McGregor again. With difficulty he wriggles under the gate, and escapes from the garden, but he spots his abandoned clothing being used to dress Mr. McGregor's scarecrow. After returning home, a sick Peter is sent to bed by his mother, while his well-behaved sisters receive a sumptuous dinner of milk and berries as opposed to Peter's supper of chamomile tea. In The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, first published in 1904, Peter's cousin Benjamin Bunny brings him back to Mr. McGregor's garden and they retrieve the clothes Peter lost in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. But after they gather onions to give to Josephine, they are captured by Mr. McGregor's cat. Bouncer arrives and rescues them, but also reprimands Peter and Benjamin for going into the garden by whipping them with a switch. In this tale, Peter displays some trepidation about returning to the garden. In The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies, first published in 1909, Peter has a small role and appears only briefly. He is grown up and his sister Flopsy is now married to their cousin Benjamin. The two are the parents of six little Flopsy Bunnies. Peter and Josephine keep a nursery garden[a] and the bunnies come by asking him for spare cabbage. In The Tale of Mr. Tod, first published in 1912, Benjamin and Flopsy's children are kidnapped by notorious badger Tommy Brock. Peter helps Benjamin chase after Brock, who hides out in the house of the fox, Mr. Tod. Mr. Tod finds Brock sleeping in his bed and as the two get into a scuffle, Peter and Benjamin rescue the children. Peter makes cameo appearances in two other tales. In The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, first published in 1905, Peter and Benjamin are customers of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, a hedgehog washerwoman. The two rabbits are depicted in one illustration peeping from the forest foliage. In The Tale of Ginger and Pickles, first published in 1909, Peter and other characters from Potter's previous stories make cameo appearances in the artwork, patronising the shop of Ginger and Pickles. To mark the 110th anniversary of the publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Frederick Warne & Co. commissioned British actress Emma Thompson to write The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit, in which Peter ends up in Scotland after accidentally hitching a ride on Mr. and Mrs. McGregor's wagon. The book was released on 18 September 2012. In autumn 2012, it was reported that Thompson would write more Peter Rabbit books. Her next tale, The Christmas Tale Of Peter Rabbit, was released in 2013, followed by The Spectacular Tale Of Peter Rabbit in 2014. “Once upon a time there was a serious, well-behaved young black cat, it belonged to a kind old lady who assured me that no other cat could compare with Kitty.” Thus begins the newly discovered children’s story by renowned British author Beatrix Potter. In 2016, Beatrix Potter fans received welcome news. A previously unpublished story, The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, would be making its way to bookstore shelves that fall. An unedited manuscript for the work had been discovered by children's book editor Jo Hanks. Potter had only done one illustration for the book so Quentin Blake created the images to accompany this tale. Peter is said to be in the newly rediscovered book, The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots. According to the publisher, Peter is now older, “full-of-himself” and has “transformed into a rather portly buck rabbit." Now, Penguin Random House has announced the story, which was written over a century ago, will be published in September, 2016, in conjunction with celebrations being planned to celebrate the 150-year anniversary of Potter’s birth. ‘The Tale of Kitty-In-Boots’ tells the story of a cat who’s leading a double life. Jo Hanks, a publisher with Penguin Random House, discovered the 1914 manuscript two years ago after he came across a mention of it in an obscure literary history of Potter which sent him to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and knee-deep into the Potter archives. It appears the author was intending to publish the story; she had written and revised it twice, and after rewriting it for a third time she had it typeset. The author had even begun the process of laying out a proof dummy. The only thing left were the illustrations. Then life interrupted her; World War I started, a new marriage and a new farming business among her distractions. Whatever the reason, she never completed the manuscript, which has been described as possibly her best work – filled with humor, rebellious characters and even a couple of intriguing villains. Some old favorites also make an appearance; Peter Rabbit of course, although older, and everyone’s favorite hedgehog: Mrs Tiggywinkle. The author had completed just one drawing to accompany the story, so Quentin Blake, who provided the illustrations for Roald Dahl’s books, has been selected to complete the illustrations for The Tale of Kitty-In-Boots. Merchandising Peter Rabbit was the first character to be fully merchandised, and it was Beatrix Potter’s idea. In 1903, seeing the popularity of Peter Rabbit, she began to sew a doll version for Warne’s niece, writing, “'I am cutting out calico patterns of Peter, I have not got it right yet, but the expression is going to be lovely; especially the whiskers—(pulled out of a brush!)” She patented the doll, making Peter Rabbit the oldest licensed character. Potter was one of the first to be responsible for such merchandise when she patented a Peter Rabbit doll in 1903 and followed it almost immediately with a Peter Rabbit board game. She also invented a Peter Rabbit board game for two players in 1904, a complex version of which was redesigned by Mary Warne and came to market thirteen years later. In addition to toys and games, Beatrix published books, including Peter Rabbit’s Almanac and painting books for Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-duck. She felt passionately that all merchandise should remain faithful to her original book illustrations and be of the highest quality. The merchandising helped make Peter Rabbit into a popular icon and turned The World of Beatrix Potter into one of the biggest literature-based licensing organizations of its day. The character has been depicted in a multitude of spinoff merchandise such as porcelain figurines and dishes. Peter Rabbit had also appeared on the packaging of the infant formula Enfamil. Frederick Warne & Co owns the trademark rights of the Beatrix Potter characters. However, most of the stories are in the US public domain, as they were published before 1923. American copyright Warne's New York office "failed to register the copyright for The Tale of Peter Rabbit in the United States", and unlicensed copies of the book "(from which Potter would receive no royalties) began to appear in the spring of 1903. There was nothing anyone could do to stop them". To her dismay, the firm failed to register copyright in the United States, leading to piracies and loss of revenue. Although she helped save the company in 1917, after embezzlement by another Warne brother nearly bankrupted it, she scolded them on quality, condemning a copy of Peter Rabbit’s Almanac for 1929 as “wretched.” She wrote sharply, “It is impossible to explain balance & style to people, if they don’t see it themselves.” While she enthusiastically crafted her own unique merchandise prototypes — including an extraordinarily soulful Peter Rabbit doll — she could have had no idea of the extent of commodification to come. The enormous financial loss ... [to Potter] only became evident over time", but the necessity of protecting her intellectual property hit home after the successful 1903 publication of The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin when her father returned from Burlington Arcade in Mayfair at Christmas 1903 with a toy squirrel labelled "Nutkin". Potter asserted that her tales would one day be nursery classics, and part of the "longevity of her books comes from strategy", writes Potter biographer Ruth MacDonald. She was the first to exploit the commercial possibilities of her characters and tales; between 1903 and 1905 these included a Peter Rabbit stuffed toy, an unpublished board game, and nursery wallpaper. Considerable variations to the original format and version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, as well as spin-off merchandise, have been made available over the decades. Variant versions include "pop-ups, toy theaters, and lift-the-flap books". By 1998, modern technology had made available "videos, audio cassette, a CD-ROMs, a computer program, and Internet sites", as described by Margaret Mackey writing in The case of Peter Rabbit: changing conditions of literature for children. She continues: "Warne and their collaborators and competitors have produced a large collection of activity books and a monthly educational magazine". A plethora of other Peter Rabbit related merchandise exists, and "toy shops in the United States and Britain have whole sections of [the] store specially signposted and earmarked exclusively for Potter-related toys and merchandise". Unauthorized copying of The Tale of Peter Rabbit has flourished over the decades, including products only loosely associated with the original. In 1916, American Louise A. Field cashed in on the popularity by writing books such as Peter Rabbit Goes to School and Peter Rabbit and His Ma, the illustrations of which showed him in his distinctive blue jacket. In an animated movie by Golden Films, The New Adventures of Peter Rabbit, "Peter is given buck teeth, an American accent and a fourth sister Hopsy." Another video "retelling of the tale casts Peter as a Christian preacher singing songs about God and Jesus." The Peter Rabbit (rather than other Beatrix Potter characters) stories and merchandise are very popular in Japan: many Japanese visit the Lake District after becoming familiar with Potter's work at an early age at school. There is an accurate replica of Potter's house and a theme park in Japan, and a series of Mr McGregor's gardens in one of the largest banks. Merchandisers in Japan estimate that 80% of the population have heard of Peter Rabbit. In 2016, Peter Rabbit and other Potter characters appeared on a small number of collectors' 50p UK coins. Movie Adaptations In 1938, shortly after the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney became interested in making an animated film based on The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Potter refused. Some accounts say this was because she wanted to remain in control of the rights to her work. Others suggest that she didn’t think her drawings were good enough for large-scale animation, which she thought would reveal all their imperfections. However, most likely Beatrix Potter refused to give the rights to Disney because of marketing issues. In 1935, the story was loosely adapted in the Merrie Melodies short film, Country Boy. It shows some modifications in relation to Beatrix Potter's original story, most notably the Rabbit family surname is changed to "Cottontail" and Peter having two brothers and a sister rather than 3 sisters. In 1971, Peter Rabbit appeared as a character in the ballet film The Tales of Beatrix Potter. In late 1991, HBO aired an animated musical adaptation of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, narrated by Carol Burnett, as part of the network's Storybook Musicals series, which was later released to VHS by Family Home Entertainment under HBO license. Several of the stories featuring Peter Rabbit were also animated for the 1992 BBC anthology series, The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends and two edutainment titles published by Mindscape The Adventures of Peter Rabbit & Benjamin Bunny in 1995 and Beatrix Potter: Peter Rabbit's Math Garden in 1996. Both of which have since been released on VHS and DVD. In 2006, Peter Rabbit was heavily referenced in a biopic about Beatrix Potter entitled Miss Potter. In December 2012, a new CGI-animated children's TV series titled Peter Rabbit premiered on Nickelodeon, with a full series run beginning in February 2013. Peter was voiced by Colin DePaula throughout Season 1 and recanted by L. Parker Lucas for Season 2 in the US version. In the U.K. version he is voiced by Connor Fitzgerald. Also in 2012, Quantum Theater produced a new stage adaptation of the tales of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny. Written by Michael Whitmore the play toured the UK until 2015. More recently, John Patrick is adapting a number of Beatrix Potter's tales into an upcoming live-action/animated musical feature film for his brand-new film studio, called Storybook Studio. The film will be titled Beatrix Potter's The Tales of Peter Rabbit and Friends. One of the stories adapted for the film is The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Peter will be voiced by child actress Sienna Adams. John Patrick has released a preview clip of the film to YouTube. An animated/live-action adaptation, Peter Rabbit, produced by Sony Pictures Animation, is scheduled to be released on 9 February 2018. James Corden will voice Peter Rabbit and Rose Byrne will star in the live-action role of the lead female named Bea. Other cast members include Margot Robbie, Daisy Ridley and Elizabeth Debicki. Will Gluck is directing and producing the film and Zareh Nalbandian is also producing, while Lauren Abrahams is overseeing the project for Sony Pictures Animation. Peter Rabbit's feud with Mr. McGregor reaches new heights as both compete for the affections of a kind animal lover who lives next door. Cast Domhnall Gleeson as Mr. Thomas McGregor, a farmer and exterminator who seeks to be rid of Peter Rabbit and his mischievous acts. Rose Byrne as Bea, a kind animal lover who Thomas meets next door. Sam Neill as Old Farmer McGregor. The film is scheduled to be released on February 9, 2018. The Lake District When Peter Rabbit came out, Potter was 36 years old. She worked closely with her editor, Norman Warne, on it and several other books. The two became very close and in July 1905, Warne proposed marriage, even though Potter’s parents objected to his social position. They didn’t want their upper-class daughter to marry a man who worked in a “trade.” Still, Potter accepted his proposal. One month later, Warne fell sick and died of a blood disorder that was probably un-diagnosed leukemia. She bought Hill Top Farm in the Lake District that same year and there she wrote such books as The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907) and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers (1908). Beatrix loved the Lake District, and it became her solace after the death of her beloved Norman. Afterward, Potter remained unmarried for many years. Finally, in 1913, she married William Heelis, a lawyer. Her family objected to him, too. Income from her books enabled her to invest in farmland, including Hill Top Farm, which would become a feature in many of her tales. As she invested in the Lake District, she developed a relationship with William Heelis, a local solicitor who assisted her property dealings. William proposed to Beatrix in 1912, and they were married in London the following year. In 1913, Potter married local lawyer William Heelis. She only produced a few more books after tying the knot. Potter published The Fairy Caravan in 1926, but only in the United States. She thought the book was too autobiographical to be released in England. The Tale of Little Pig Robinson (1930) proved to be her final children's book. They lived together at Castle Cottage in their beloved Lake District until her death in 1943. Beatrix was a staunch supporter of the National Trust, having been impressed on meeting its founder Hardwicke Rawnsley from her first visit to the Lake District at sixteen. She followed its principles in preserving her buildings and farms in keeping with the rural culture of the area, and she saved many farms from developers. Instead of writing, Potter focused much of her attention on her farms and land preservation in the Lake District. She was a successful breeder of sheep and well regarded for her work to protect the beautiful countryside she adored. During her lifetime, Beatrix bought fifteen farms and took a very active part in caring for them. Dressed in clogs, shawl and an old tweed skirt, she helped with the hay-making, waded through mud to unblock drains, and searched the fells for lost sheep. Beatrix bred Herdwick sheep on her farms in the Lake District, and said she was at her happiest when she was with her farm animals. She won a number of prizes for her sheep at local shows, and became the first elected female President of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association in 1943. Legacy Beatrix died in 1943 Potter died on December 22, 1943, in Sawrey, England. In her will, she left much of her land holdings to the National Trust to protect it from development and to preserve it for future generations. leaving fifteen farms and over four thousand acres of land to the National Trust. In accordance with her wishes, Hill Top Farm was kept exactly as it had been when she lived in it, and receives thousands of visitors every year. Potter also left behind a mystery—she had written a journal in code. The code was finally cracked and the work published in 1966 as The Journal of Beatrix Potter. To this day, generation after generation are won over by her charming tales and illustrations. After Potter died in 1943 at the age of seventy-seven, Warne cast itself as the guardian of her legacy. But eventually the guardian began behaving badly, seeking to wring profits from its most famous long-eared property. In 1983, Warne was acquired by Penguin, itself owned by the international conglomerate Pearson, the largest book publisher in the world. Then, as scholar Margaret Mackey chronicles in The Case of Peter Rabbit: Changing Conditions of Literature for Children, Warne embarked on the expensive process of remaking printing plates for Potter’s books. While the new reproductions were a welcome improvement, Warne festooned them with what Mackey terms “aggressive” assertions of copyright, although Peter was already in the public domain. (In the UK, copyright protection lapsed but was then extended until 2013 when the European Union “harmonized” copyright law.) Warne seized on its “re-originated” illustrations to declare itself “owner of all rights, copyrights and trademarks in the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations,” going so far as to attach a “tm” to the scampering Peter on the cover. Back in 1979, the publisher had sued a competitor, claiming trademark rights to eight images from Potter’s books that, it argued, were identified in the public mind with Warne alone. The case was settled out of court, but Viva R. Moffat, a legal scholar who teaches at the University of Denver, has called Warne’s claims (in a paper on “Mutant Copyrights”) a “stretch.” Warne has applied for trademarks in the US, and in the EU for every imaginable Peter Rabbit–related item that might feasibly be sold, from “books and texts in all media” to “toilet seat covers” and “meat extracts.” Moffat assails the practice of forcing trademarks to pinch-hit for lapsed copyright, while another legal expert, Jason Mazzone (who teaches intellectual property law at Brooklyn Law School), defines the placement of misleading warnings on public domain works as “copyfraud” in his book by the same name. Warne’s zealous pursuit of its rights has not deterred it from crass acts of its own. In 1987, the same year it published its painstakingly remade edition, the firm allowed Ladybird Books, a purveyor of cheap paperbacks owned by the parent company, Pearson, to market The Tale of Peter Rabbit with bowdlerized text, eliminating Potter’s dry wit, dispensing with the pie made of Peter’s father (Mrs. Rabbit instead explains that Mr. McGregor just “doesn’t like rabbits”), and replacing Potter’s illustrations with photos of stuffed animals. Warne was excoriated in The Times of London, which condemned the new edition as “Hamlet without the ghost, Othello without the handkerchief.” Undaunted, a few years later Warne took out an advertisement in The Bookseller — “Peter Rabbit Packs a Powerful Punch” — threatening those who wandered into its garden with “expensive legal action” One last question: why do so many Japanese tourists visit Potter's Lakeland cottage? According to the man from the Cumbrian tourist board interviewed on Radio 5 earlier this week, it is because Japanese children use her books to learn English. I love the idea of a nation mislearning another through such a distorting lens. To the people of Japan, I say this: your delightfully outré Edwardian syntax will do you no good in modern Britain, nor will your bizarre Potterian ideas about our dress codes and ethical views http://mentalfloss.com/article/75173/9-facts-about-peter-rabbit https://www.peterrabbit.com/about-beatrix-potter/ http://www.hbook.com/2013/05/choosing-books/horn-book-magazine/peter-rabbit-and-the-tale-of-a-fierce-bad-publisher/ http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/tale-of-peter-rabbit.html https://www.biography.com/people/beatrix-potter-9445208 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/dec/07/booksforchildrenandteenagers http://www.newhistorian.com/peter-rabbit-returns-for-potters-150th-birthday/5869/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rabbit_(film)   © Copyrighted

Matthew and Steve-o with guest of the show Geeks who Eat Sarah and Stubbs, we are back with an all new SAS, join us tonight.

Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Pepé Le Pew were all brought to life in the hands of Chuck Jones. If there's a Loony Tunes or a Merrie Melodies cartoon that you carry in your heart, Jones was probably behind it. (What's Opera Doc, anyone?) He was artist, animator and director of 300 cartoons, in a career that spanned from the 1930's to the 1990's. Among the many awards he received was an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. In this episode he talks about the influence of Mark Twain, the origin of Daffy's voice, and the childhood pet cat that showed him the absurd humor of animals.

Merrie Melodies The Early Worm Gets The Bird 1939 Public Domain Video http://oldtimeradiodvd.com 1114

Merrie Melodies Hamateur Night 1939 Public Domain Video http://oldtimeradiodvd.com 1111

Merrie Melodies Bugs Bunny The Wabbit Who Came To Supper 1942 Public Domain Video http://oldtimeradiodvd.com 1108

Merrie Melodies Bugs Bunny Falling Hare 1943 Public Domain Video http://oldtimeradiodvd.com 1105

Merrie Melodies Bugs Bunny Case of the Missing Hare 1942 Public Domain Video http://oldtimeradiodvd.com 1102

Merrie Melodies Bars And Stripes Forever 1939 Public Domain Video http://oldtimeradiodvd.com 1098

Fresh from a trip down the rabbit hole, Rick and Ben turn up a discussion about Looney Tunes. After a brief history lesson, our hosts dive into some of their favorite animated episodes. Plus, Rick forces his co-host to dredge up painful memories, and Ben delves into his small rodent fetish.   File Under: Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies, Warner Bros, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Mel Blanc, My Bunny Lies Over The Sea, Bugs Bunny, One Froggy Evening, Michigan J Frog, Duck Amuck, Daffy Duck, Michael Maltese, What’s Opera Doc?, Elmer Fudd   Find us on the web: Rick on Twitter: https://twitter.com/WrathRainbows Ben on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theragu40 ThePastCast website: http://www.thepastcast.com

This episode is a Sketchy first. Instead of discussing a tv show or movie, we are discussing a cartoon character. That character is Michigan J. Frog, who first appeared in the Merrie Melodies 1955 cartoon "One Froggy Evening" (that Ryan fondly remembers played first on the VHS of "Little Giants"). He then appeared in the 1995 sequel "Another Froggy Evening," which we also discuss. Mr. Frog, pretty much considered a Looney Tune character, also appeared in episodes of Tiny Toons Adventures and Animaniacs in the 90s. He is perhaps best known as the mascot for the WB television network, in which we also refer to him as "The WB Frog." Enjoy! Follow Sketchyfacebook.com/SketchyPodcasttwitter.com/SketchyPodcastSketchyPodcast@gmail.com

It's Wednesday, which means that the Doctoral Duo return to share their recommendations of recent releases! And this week, Gwen and Derek focus on three exciting, yet quite diverse, new titles. They begin with Nick Dranso's Beverly (Drawn & Quarterly), a series of six stories set in a Midwest suburban landscape, where individuals grapple with friendships, alienation, and the uncertainties of growing up. Gwen notes the dark poignancy of these narratives, character studies that often make the reader uncomfortable and made all the more effective through Dranso's clean lines and simple illustrative style. What struck Derek was the book's construction. This isn't a "traditional" collection of separate stories -- something like you would find, for example, in Eleanor Davis's How to Be Happy or Adrian Tomine's Killing and Dying -- but a text more akin to a short-story cycle, a collection of discrete stories, each of which could stand on its own, but all interconnected in such a way that a fuller meaning is generated by their textual proximity. Derek's term for this hybrid form within comics is "graphic cycle," and a classic example of this would be Will Eisner's A Contract with God. All of the narratives in Beverly connect in some way, and over time, through a few key characters. This debut graphic novel from Dranso is this week's highlight for both Gwen and Derek. Next, they check out the first issue Emma Rios and Hwei Lim's Mirror #1 (Image Comics). This story is part of the 8House universe, and the two begin with a brief discussion of that context. Both enjoyed this first issue -- especially Lim's elaborate design and watercolor art, which is truly stunning -- but found the setup a little confusing, at times. As Derek points out, this first issue lacks the amount of exposition necessary to fully grasp what is going on, although it's assumed that many of these narrative questions will be answered in the issues to follow. While both cohosts appreciate Mirror, they feel that those prone to trade waiting might want to wait until the complete arc is collected. Finally, Gwen and Derek wrap up with a look at Ryan Ferrier and Daniel Bayliss's Kennel Block Blues #1 (BOOM! Studios), the first of a four-issue limited series. This is a wild anthropomorphic tale about a kennel as prison, and about a protagonist unable to deal with reality on the inside. Oliver is not sure why he is sent to the Jackson State Kennel, and in times of uncertainty he retreats into a happy place, a technicolor fantasy world of dancing figures and catchy tunes reminiscent of the old Merrie Melodies or Fleischer brothers cartoons. As with Mirror, the art stands out in Kennel Block Blues, with Bayliss adeptly handling the transition between the dark kennel and Oliver's song-happy fantasy world. But Ferrier's writing in this first issue is equally impressive, providing just enough setup to satisfy, yet leaving the reader with eager expectations for the next installment.

Donald Trump is in the news a lot, but we don't hear much from his supporters. I figured Nevada was a good place to find some.Music by Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes, Bugs Buny's Greatest Hits; Iceburn, In the Desert. Donate