Wednesday, March 10th, 2021

Time	Event
12:00a	John Cleese’s Very Favorite Comedy Sketches Asked by Time magazine to name his favorite sketches among all those he has written or performed in, John Cleese deliberately excluded most of his Monty Python work. Instead he turned deeper into his back pages, all the way to At Last the 1948 Show, which originally aired on ITV in 1967. (Its title referenced the long delays inflicted by television’s executive decision-making processes.) The program was conceived at the behest of broadcaster David Frost, who’d previously engaged Cleese and fellow Cambridge Footlights alumnus (and future Python) Graham Chapman to write and perform on The Frost Report, one of the major fruits of the “satire boom” in mid-1960s Britain. “We would come up with crazy ideas, and all the writers would roar with laughter at the table,” Cleese remembered of his Frost Report experience in a 2014 Q&A at the British Film Institute. But however hilarious, these ideas would inevitably be rejected for the reason that “they won’t get it in Bradford.” The late-night 1948 Show let Cleese and his collaborators, including comedian Marty Feldman, take a few more chances: “We knew that not everyone in Bradford would get it, so were taking a little bit of a bet that enough people would get it.” This resulted in sketches like “The Bookshop,” in which Feldman’s customer makes a series of impossible demands of Cleese’s shopkeeper, allowing the latter to showcase his already well-honed ability to perform frustration boiling over into derangement. Cleese, who still gets comedic mileage out of his upright “establishment” appearance, seems to have specialized in playing such absurdly burdened businessmen. His most iconic role must be the clenched, boorish hotelier Basil Fawlty, played in the post-Python series Fawlty Towers, but he was essaying such figures long before. Take the farcical sketch about a hard-of-hearing eyewear dealer, which later evolved into a segment of the German special Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus from 1972. Earlier that year, Monty Python’s Flying Circus put Cleese on the customer’s side of the counter, opposite Michael Palin’s cheese shop owner who evidently refuses to stock all known varieties of cheese. Though it didn’t originate on the 1948 Show, the now-immortal “cheese shop sketch” was written as another Cleese-Chapman collaboration — and one that displays a firm commitment to customer service, or the lack thereof, as comic material. via BoingBoing Related Content: John Cleese Plays the Devil, Makes a Special Appeal for Hell, 1966 John Cleese’s Advice to Young Artists: “Steal Anything You Think Is Really Good” Monty Python’s John Cleese Creates Ads for the American Philosophical Association Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. John Cleese’s Very Favorite Comedy Sketches is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
1:00a	How Looney Tunes & Other Classic Cartoons Helped Americans Become Musically Literate Distance learning experiments on television long predate the medium’s use as a conduit for advertising and mass entertainment. “Before it became known as the ‘idiot box,’” writes Matt Novak at Smithsonian, “television was seen as the best hope for bringing enlightenment to the American people.” The federal government made way for educational programming during TV’s earliest years when the FCC reserved 242 noncommercial channels “to encourage educational programming.” Funding did not materialize, but the nation’s spirit was willing, Life magazine maintained: “the hunger of our citizenry for culture and self-improvement has always been grossly underestimated.” Was this so? Perhaps. At the medium’s very beginnings as standard appliance in many American homes, there was Leonard Bernstein. His Omnibus series debuted in 1952, “the first commercial television outlet for experimentation in the arts,” notes Schuyler G. Chapin. Six years later, he debuted his Young People’s Concerts, spreading musical literacy on TV through the format for the next 14 years. “It was to [Bernstein’s] — and our — good fortune that he and the American television grew to maturity together,” wrote critic Robert S. Clark in well-deserved tribute. Much the same could be said of some unlikely candidates for TV musical educators: Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and other classic animators, who did as much, and maybe more, to familiarize American viewers with classical music as perhaps all of Bernstein’s formidable efforts combined. Who can hear Wagner without wanting to sing at the top of their lungs, “Kill da wabbit, Kill da wabbit, Kill da wabbit!” Goodness knows, I can’t. Nonetheless, Chuck Jones’ What’s Opera, Doc? has been recognized for its major contributions to “American enlightenment” — deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and preserved in the National Film Registry. This, Alexander suggests, is as it should be. (Just consider the opera singers Bugs inspired). We should honor animation’s major contributions to our culture literacy: a mass musical education by cartoon. See many more classic clips in Alexander’s Twitter thread here. via Laughing Squid Related Content:  The Evolution of Chuck Jones, the Artist Behind Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck & Other Looney Tunes Legends: A Video Essay Kill the Wabbit!: How the 1957 Bugs Bunny Cartoon, “What’s Opera, Doc?,” Inspired Today’s Opera Singers to First Get Into Opera Books Come to Life in Classic Cartoons from 1930s and 1940s “The Ducktators”: Loony Tunes Turns Animation into Wartime Propaganda (1942)   How Looney Tunes & Other Classic Cartoons Helped Americans Become Musically Literate is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
8:01a	Why Is the Debut Disney+ Marvel TV Show a Tribute to Classic Sitcoms? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #85 on WandaVision The newest, now concluded superhero series features characters no one asked to hear more about, one of whom was according to the Marvel franchise films definitely dead, and drops them in media res into a loving stylistic recreation of The Dick Van Dyke Show, then I Dream of Jeanie, etc. Why is this happening, and is it good? Your Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt are joined by guest Rolando Nieves from the Remakes, Reboots, and Revivals podcast try to figure out what kind of storytelling this really is, whether this experiment was successful, whether you have to be a Marvel die-hard (or old enough to have watched those sit-coms) to get it, and the potential for future oddball superhero outings that don’t feature a big boss fight. This episode is hot off the presses, and more articles are coming out about WandaVision now, but here are a few that might help: “How ‘WandaVision’ Uses the Stages of Grief to Understand Wanda’s Mental State” by Meaghan Darwish “WandaVision Just Set a Dangerous Precedent for the Marvel Cinematic Universe” by Eric Francisco “‘WandaVision’ Isn’t Too Slow, Everyone Forgot How To Watch TV” by Paul Tassi “A Guide to the Sitcom Interiors in ‘WandaVision’” by Jessica Wang “Before ‘WandaVision’: The Wild Romantic History of Vision and Scarlet Witch” by TJ Dietsch “WandaVision Finale Ending Explained” by Lacy Baugher “How WandaVision Captured the Secret Horror of The Sims” by Matthew Byrd “WandaVision Finale: Every Easter Egg” by Ryan Arey “WandaVision’s Post-Credits Scenes Set Up 3 New MCU Movies & Shows” by James Hunt Follow Rolando @Rolando_Nieves. Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion (with more Rolando!) that you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network. Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts. Why Is the Debut Disney+ Marvel TV Show a Tribute to Classic Sitcoms? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #85 on WandaVision is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
9:00a	Guitarist Gary Clark, Jr. Plays Searing Acoustic Blues in a Spontaneous Jam Session Guitarist, singer, and songwriter Gary Clark, Jr. was “supposed to save the blues,” writes Geoff Edgers at The Washington Post. That’s a lot of weight to hang on the shoulders of a musician born in 1984. Clark grew up in Austin, Texas listening to Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Green Day, and Nirvana. He’s been onscreen in John Sayles’ Honeydripper, played Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival, and played alongside his hero B.B. King. His ringing tone recalls King, his searing leads sound like Hendrix, but he’s just as happy evoking Curtis Mayfield, Stax Records, and Quincy Jones. He’s described his ideal sound as “Snoop Dogg meets John Lee Hooker.” The blues, whatever Clark’s critics might think they are, have come a long way since white 60s revivalists traveled south and discovered country bluesmen like Clark’s fellow Texan Mance Lipscomb, a sharecropper all his life, even after his first album made him famous in 1961 and he recorded with a “who’s who of musicians.” Lipscomb, “despite his fame,” writes Texas Monthly, “remained poor.” Clark has done quite well for himself. His success provided the occasion for his furious, reggae-tinged track “This Land,” which recounts a confrontation with a neighbor who refused to believe a Black man could own the 50-acre ranch Clark owns in rural Texas, outside Austin. Clark’s got blues, but it’s a different era, and the music is more multi-faceted than it was sixty, ninety, or 100 years ago, even if some other cultural attitudes haven’t changed at all. He clearly wants to evade traditional labels and avoid repeating himself. “If it were up to everybody else,” Clark once sneered, “I would do Hendrix covers all the time.” (See his “Voodoo Child” live.) He may not want to wear the mantle of the “savior of the blues.” But he “can bang out a country blues on an 80-year-old resonator guitar,” Edgers writes, as comfortably as he drops samples into the demos he arranges at his home studio. See Clark at the top in a spontaneous 12-bar acoustic jam in Berlin, and just above, he breaks out the resonator for “Nextdoor Neighbor Blues.” This song is not, in fact, about a racist neighbor but about a much more universal subject, one Mance Lipscomb — and all the bluesmen whose songs he remembered and recorded in his own surprisingly versatile, virtuoso style — sang about all the time: a love affair gone wrong. It’s a story as old as music and maybe one reason we don’t have to worry that the blues are going anywhere. Related Content:  Jimi Hendrix Plays the Delta Blues on a 12-String Acoustic Guitar in 1968, and Jams with His Blues Idols, Buddy Guy & B.B. King Stevie Ray Vaughan Plays the Acoustic Guitar in Rare Footage, Letting Us See His Guitar Virtuosity in Its Purest Form The Future of Blues Is in Good Hands: Watch 12-Year-Old Toby Lee Trade Riffs with Chicago Blues Guitarist Ronnie Baker Brooks Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Guitarist Gary Clark, Jr. Plays Searing Acoustic Blues in a Spontaneous Jam Session is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
3:00p	The Iconic Dance Scene from Hellzapoppin’ Presented in Living Color with Artificial Intelligence (1941) After Charles Lindbergh “hopped” the Atlantic in 1927, his history-making solo flight set off a craze for all things “Lindy.” Of the countless songs, foods, products, and trends created or named in honor of the famous onetime U.S. Air Mail pilot, only one remains recognizable these more than 90 years later: the Lindy Hop. Developed on the streets and in the clubs of Harlem, the dance proved explosively popular, though it took Hollywood a few years to capitalize on it. In the late 1930s, the musical Hellzapoppin’ brought the Lindy Hop to Broadway, and in 1941, Universal Pictures turned that stage show into a major motion picture directed by H.C. Potter (now best known for Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House). An often surreal, fourth-wall-breaking affair, Hellzapoppin’ is remembered mainly for the five-minute Lindy Hop musical number that comes about halfway through the film. It features a dance troupe called the Harlem Congaroos, played by the real-life Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, a group of professional swing dancers founded at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, the origin point of the Lindy Hop as we know it today. Its appearing members include Frankie Manning, whose name had become synonymous with the Lindy Hop in the 1930s, and Norma Miller, who as a twelve-year-old girl famously did the dance outside the Savoy for tips. Hellzapoppin’ preserves their athleticism and vitality for all time — with a hot jazz soundtrack to boot. Like most Hollywood musicals of the early 1940s, Hellzapoppin’ was shot in black-and-white, and cinephiles will maintain that it’s best seen that way. But just as the technology powering long-haul flights has developed greatly since the days of Charles Lindbergh, so has the technology of film colorization. Take DeOldify, the “open-source, Deep Learning based project to colorize and restore old images and film footage” that “uses AI neural networks trained with thousands of reference pictures” – and that was used to produce the version of Hellzapoppin‘s Lindy Hop number seen at the top of the post. It all looks much more convincing than when Ted Turner attempted to colorize Citizen Kane, but in lovers of dance, whatever sense of realism DeOldify contributes will mainly inspire a deeper longing to experience the culture of Harlem as it really was in the 1920s. Related Content: 1944 Instructional Video Teaches You the Lindy Hop, the Dance That Originated in 1920’s Harlem Ballrooms One of the Greatest Dances Sequences Ever Captured on Film Gets Restored in Color by AI: Watch the Classic Scene from Stormy Weather Watch Metropolis’ Cinematically Innovative Dance Scene, Restored as Fritz Lang Intended It to Be Seen (1927) Rita Hayworth, 1940s Hollywood Icon, Dances Disco to the Tune of The Bee Gees Stayin’ Alive: A Mashup Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The Iconic Dance Scene from Hellzapoppin’ Presented in Living Color with Artificial Intelligence (1941) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
8:17p	A Spellbinding Drone Journey Through a Bowling Alley A now for something that’s right up your alley… Using an FPV drone, YouTuber “jaybyrdfilms” takes you on a somewhat dizzying tour of Bryant Lake Bowl, a vintage bowling alley in Minneapolis. As CNET puts it, “It’s an impressive bit of filmmaking as the … drone flies down bowling lanes, nuzzles close to the pins and then soars back toward the bowlers. Crisp, atmospheric audio — of people chatting, bowling balls rolling on wood, pins clanging, glasses clinking — adds to the immediacy.” Enjoy. via Kottke Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and sharing intelligent media with your friends. Or sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox.  Related Content: A Haunting Drone’s-Eye View of Chernobyl A Drone’s Eye View of the Ancient Pyramids of Egypt, Sudan & Mexico See the Expansive Ruins of Pompeii Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before: Through the Eyes of a Drone A Spellbinding Drone Journey Through a Bowling Alley is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
9:00p	Saturday Night Live’s Very First Sketch: Watch John Belushi Launch SNL in October, 1975 How do you kick off the longest running live sketch comedy show in television history? If you’re in the cast and crew for the first episode of Saturday Night Live, you have no idea you’re doing anything of the kind. Still the pressure’s on, and the newly hired “Not Ready for Primetime Players” had a lot of competition on their own show that night. When Saturday Night, the original title for SNL, made its debut on October 11, 1975, doing live comedy on television was an extremely risky proposition. So, what do you do if you’re producers Dick Ebersol and Lorne Michaels? Put your riskiest foot forward — John Belushi, the “first rock & roll star of comedy” writes Rolling Stone, and “the ‘live’ in Saturday Night Live.” The man who would be comedy’s king, for a time, before he left the stage too soon. His first sketch, and the first on-air for SNL, reveals “a tendency toward the timelessly peculiar,” Time magazine writes, that made the show an instant cult hit. Rather than skewering topical issues or impersonating celebrities, the first sketch, “The Wolverines” goes after the ripe targets of an immigrant (Belushi) learning English and his teacher, played by head writer Michael O’Donoghue, who insists on making Belushi repeat the titular word in nonsensical phrases like “I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines.” Belushi’s accent has shades of Andy Kaufman’s “foreign man” from Caspiar, and he gets a brief moment to display his physical comedy skills when he keels over in imitation of his teacher having a heart attack. “The Wolverines” is short, nonsensical, and weirdly sweet. “No one would know what kind of show this was from seeing that,” Michaels remembered. We can still look back at that wildly uneven first season and wonder what kind of show SNL would be now if it had held on to the anarchic spirit of the early years. But that’s a lot to ask of a 45-year-old live comedy show. The night’s guest was George Carlin, who did not appear in any sketches, but who did get three separate monologues. The show also featured two musical guests, Billy Preston and Janis Ian. Andy Kaufman made an appearance doing his famous Mighty Mouse bit, and the Muppets were there (not the fun Muppets, but a “dark and grumpy version” Jim Henson disowned after the first season.) The first episode was also the first to feature the iconic intro, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” — delivered by Chevy Chase. Though it has become a celebratory announcement, at the time “it’s Saturday Night!” was a dark reminder of the live comedy variety show, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, then failing through its first and only season before its 18-episode run came to an end the following year. See more from that weird first night above, including Carlin’s Football and Baseball monologue and the forgotten SNL Muppets, just above. via Ultimate Classic Rock Related Content:  Creating Saturday Night Live: Behind-the Scenes Videos Reveal How the Iconic Comedy Show Gets Made Lorne Michaels Introduces Saturday Night Live and Its Brilliant First Cast for the Very First Time (1975) Classic Punk Rock Sketches from Saturday Night Live, Courtesy of Fred Armisen Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Saturday Night Live’s Very First Sketch: Watch John Belushi Launch SNL in October, 1975 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)

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