This never fails to bring a smile to my face and raise the hairs on the back of my neck! It’s The Clara Ward Singers performing on the Playboy After Dark TV show shot at the Playboy Mansion in 1968. By this time minds were open and everyone was exploring anything they could experience that was new. The Clara Ward Singers were always wild, and I mean just as wild as any rock ‘n’ roll insanity from ANY era. They could stand up to Little Richard or James Brown in their prime. This clip looks like it could have been taken straight out of an early John Waters film! The incredible, over the top style and the mile high wild wig-hats are just beyond.

But then there’s the singing and the deranged dancing of lead vocalist Malvilyn Statham! Her name alone makes your eyes cross.This just makes me as happy as can be.
 

 
Here’s what was written by the person that posted this who evidently was fiends with the Singers:
 

Ezekiel 37: 1-14

My favorite female Gospel group, the Clara Ward Singers, with my friend, Malvilyn Statham on lead, singing Clara Ward’s arrangement of “Dry Bones.” Go’head!! This song refers to what happens in the 7th verse of Ezekiel 37.

In the green dress is Clara Ward (1924-1973), which is why she is not in “uniform” as many of you have pointed out. She and the group caught lots of hell in the 1960’s and 1970’s for their flamboyant style and people are still talking about them, as I have seen in many of the shares. In spite of your views, whether negative or positive, they have paved the way for many folks today.

They stepped out of the box, b/c they were individuals and many of you today should do the same. Be yourself! People like Tye Tribbett are free with their praise. No boundaries! They praise how they feel. Who are we to judge? The Clara Ward Singers not only ministered in churches, but they sang in concert halls, night clubs, festivals, tv shows, and at the Playboy Mansion, which is where this clip was recorded. They were not ashamed to take the Gospel to the people who wouldn’t come to church. I mean, like, isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Some folks felt like the group was clowning, but I’d like to think of it as giving “unfamiliar” people a good church experience.

 

 
If you want more, there’s tons of it on YouTube and elsewhere on the net. Here’s another, much earlier, favorite:
 

 
Oh, this is too funny. Evil genius YouTuber Clemtinite took old footage from the Trinity Broadcasting Network with televangelists Paul and Jan Crouch—the Christian duo are trying to find satanic messages by playing the Led Zeppelin classic “Stairway to Heaven” in reverse—and then reversed the whole video. “Turn me on dead, man!”

The longer it goes on, the funnier it gets.

 
via Laughing Squid

 
So, did Stanley Kubrick fake the Moon landing?

Well, that’s the proposition of William Kare’s documentary (mockumentary?) Dark Side of the Moon, which originally aired on French TV channel Arte in 2002 as Opération Lune.

According to Karel’s (fictional?) film, Kubrick was hired to fake the Apollo 11 mission by the U.S. government. The evidence? Well, secret documents alluding to Kubrick’s involvement in the “fraud” were discovered among the director’s papers after his death in March 1999.

Moreover, Kubrick apparently left clues to his involvement into the scam: firstly, his being loaned lenses by NASA to recreate the candle-lit scenes in his film Barry Lyndon—how else could have got hold of these unless NASA owed him a BIG favor?; secondly, Kubrick allegedly made a confession of his involvement in the conspiracy that is contained in his film version of Stephen King’s The Shining.

Adding substance to these alleged facts, Karel wheels out a highly convincing array of contributors: Henry Kissinger, Buzz Aldrin, Jan Harlan, Richard Helms, Vernon Walters (who is claimed to have mysteriously died after filming) and Christiane Kubrick.

It’s a great romp, and for those who are tempted to believe, watch the bloopers reel at the end.
 

 
Via Open Culture

 
“You know Fred, actually, staying in a city to help after an atomic attack is not nearly as dangerous as a lot of people think. The danger of, well, lingering radiation is not really very serious. After an atomic air burst, the danger of radiation and falling debris is over within… a minute and a half.”

You don’t say?

The Federal Civil Defense Administration produced a glut of Cold War misinformation and propaganda, but 1951’s Our Cities Must Fight is among the most baffling. An attempt to discourage urbanites from abandoning their fair cities after nuclear attack, the film fictionalizes a conversation between two patriotic newspapermen bemoaning the “take to the hills fraternity.” The men go on to imply that leaving a nuked city would be “pretty close to treason,” and then pile on the insane justifications—you couldn’t get through the traffic anyway! We’ll need you to fight fires and keep going to work! Oh, and my favorite—radiation isn’t really that big a deal!

I’m not sure if there really was a totally unrealistic perception that a post-nuclear city could still function, but I can’t imagine most Americans would stick around to polish the brass on the Titanic after an atomic bomb hit it—assuming of course that there were any survivors. With the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still fresh, it’s difficult to believe the FCDA ever thought anyone would stick around because of a silly government film!
 

 
A poor car dealership salesman takes a wild test drive with one extremely irate woman. Her “reasoning” for being such an a-hole is er, something else.

There are a lot of F-bombs dropped here, so you may want to wear some headphones if you’re at work.

 
Via reddit

 
As a child in the Bible Belt I somehow missed out on Jack T. Chick’s weird fire-and-brimstone religious comic books. I was sporadically taken to a pretty low-key, boringly mainstream Methodist Church where his tracts would have been viewed as kind of embarrassing. As an adult I heard people with evangelical Christian backgrounds bonding over the nightmarish anxiety Chick comics had caused them as children. Fundamentalist churches made stacks of these proselytizing, emotionally charged, conspiracy-rich, racist, homophobic, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-pagan, anti-feminist, Islamophobic comics available to very young kids. Since 1961 over 235 different tracts have been published, selling almost a billion copies. They have been banned in many countries, including Canada, as “hate literature.”
 

 
Despite censorship, the comics have been read by a staggering number of people all over the world. Youth ministers hand them out on the street, and (presumably non-English speaking) missionaries distribute them overseas, spreading quirkiness like the Pope being the earthly manifestation of Satan. Someone once tried to hand me one in a bowling alley in England! People like Exene Cervenka were ahead of their time in recognizing Chick comics’ (and other Bible tracts’) value as collectible underground folk art and pop culture artifacts. The early X song “Beyond and Back” was taken from the title of a Chick tract. The online Jack T. Chick Museum of Fine Art contains an exhaustive collection of his titles, neatly summarized as:

He steadfastly exposes The Conspiracy of Catholics, Masons, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, New Agers, Rock & Rollers, and any other group the devil might use to damn your soul. Chick also offends Jews and Muslims with previews of their fiery futures in hell (but only because he wants to save them). The more taboo a topic, the more likely you’ll see it covered in a Chick tract!

Curator and tireless researcher Kurt Kuersteiner (who used to have a punk radio show) has written the definitive book about the worldwide phenomenon, The Art of Jack T. Chick, and in 2008 produced the documentary, God’s Cartoonist: The Comic Crusade of Jack Chick, which can be found in its entirety here. You don’t get a glimpse of the notoriously private man himself, since he is so convinced that people want to kill him (he’s probably right) that he lives in seclusion and hasn’t given an interview since 1975 (his first and last). The earnest sheer batshittery of his close associates is like watching a train wreck. According to Rotten Tomatoes’ synopsis of the film:

...while some Christians distribute the tracts in hopes of saving their fellow man from eternal damnation, secular fans collect them strictly for their entertainment value; the comics are so vividly drawn and outrageously over the top that they at times transcend their own intentions to achieve a sort-of grotesque self-parody. Eventually, the tracts became such highly valued pop-culture commodities that they were presented in galleries nationwide, and earned a permanent collection in the Smithsonian.

Kurt also perpetrated an awesome April Fool’s prank to demonstrate the censor-happy disapproval that Chick’s work has inspired.
 

The trailer for ‘God’s Cartoonist: The Comic Crusade of Jack Chick’:
 

Above, an episode of Boing Boing TV featuring Syd Garon and Rodney Ascher’s animated take on the Chick “classic” Somebody Goofed. This is Jack T. Chick in a nutshell. (Reportedly he’s seen this and liked it).

 
Call the National Guard! Call FEMA! It’s raining in Los Angeles everybody!!!

I live in Los Angeles. It rained (not heavily) for about five hours. This reminds me of when I lived in Cincinnati, OH, and everytime there was a possibility of snow—even for a freakin’ flurry—the news would call it “White Death.”
 

 
If you want an idea just how seriously certain sections of the British Establishment feared Punk Rock then take a look at this incredible piece of archival television from 1977. It’s an edition of the BBC’s Brass Tacks—a current affairs series in which reporter Brian Trueman (perhaps better known now for those classic kids’ TV shows Chorlton and the Wheelies and Danger Mouse) introduced a brief film on Punk and then hosted a live studio debate between some of the youngsters featured in the piece—along with Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley and Radio One DJ John Peel—arguing the toss with a selection of crusty town councillors, from London, Birmingham, Newcastle and Glasgow. These respectable citizens were out to ban Punk from various inner city venues. Add to this incendiary mix some comment from the press and a Pastor John Cooper, who wanted everyone to come to Jesus.

Okay, this all may sound like the comic ingredients to some grand mockumentary but these fears over the political aspect of Punk Rock and the potential for anarchy on the streets of Britain were very real at the time. As Brian Trueman says in his introduction:

“Punk Rock is more feared than Russian Communism.”

Why? What were these people thinking? What were they really scared of?

Well, to start at the beginning…

Britain in the 1970s was in a mess. It had high unemployment; three-day working weeks; nationwide power cuts that left everyone in the dark; taxation at astronomic levels; food shortages; endless strikes; and a crumbling infrastructure. All of this meant the Labour government feared a revolution was imminent.

To explain why this all came about let’s rewind the tape to a mass demonstration at Grosvenor Square, London, March 1968. This was where an anti-Vietnam War rally erupted into a pitched battle between protesters and police. Outside of the American Embassy 200 people were arrested; 86 were injured; 50 were taken to hospital, half of which were police officers. The Labour government were stunned that a group of protestors could cause such anarchy and disorder,—which (they believed) could have led to a mini-revolution on the streets of London.

In fear of revolution or such anarchy ever happening again, the government decided to take action. At first, ministers considered sending troops out into the streets. But after some reassuring words from Special Branch Chief Inspector Conrad Hepworth Dixon, they were convinced that the boys in blue could handle any civic disorder. Dixon was allowed to set up a new police force: the Special Demonstration Squad.

This was no ordinary police operation, the SDS had permission to be (quite literally) a law unto itself. Its officers could operate under deep cover. Infiltrate left-wing, fringe organizations and youth groups with the sole purpose of working as spies and agents provocateurs. Harold Wilson’s government agreed to pay for this operation directly out of Treasury funds.

The SDS carried on its undercover activities against any organization that they believed threatened Britain’s social order. This included unions, animal rights, anti-Nazi and anti-racist groups.

If that wasn’t worrying enough, the SDS were allegedly involved in the planting incendiary devices at branches of department store Debenhams in Luton, Harrow and Romford in 1987. It is also alleged, one member of the SDS was so deep undercover he was involved in writing the pamphlet that led to the famous “McLibel” trial of the 1990s.

The workings of the SDS were on a “need to know basis.” Only a handful of police knew exactly what this little club were up to. But their activities fuelled genuine fears amongst the British Establishment that there were “Reds under the beds,” and revolution was a literal stone’s throw away.

This was all going on behind-the-scenes. Out front, muppets like the councillors and journalists lined-up on this program, pushed the hysteria of Punk Rock riots and civil disobedience, that reflected the very genuine fears at the heart of the UK Establishment. (Note London councillor Bernard Brook-Partridge mention of “MI5 blacklists.”)

So, that’s the background to this fascinating archive of the year that politicians (and even the BBC) thought Punk Rock was a torch-bearer for bloody revolution.
 

 
For a stretch in the mid- to late 1980s, Satanism was almost an everyday topic in the media. Future “Second Lady” Tipper Gore founded a group called the Parents Music Resource Center (shudder), which spent its days lobbying Congress for increased censorship of rock albums—two groups that attracted its scrutiny for its “occult” content were Venom and Mercyful Fate.

In 1989 Dr. Jerry Johnston published a book called Edge of Evil: The Rise of Satanism in North America, and this video—also with Johnston, I believe—must date from about the same time. (in this video he is unidentified; I’ve consulted pictures and videos of Dr. Johnston from more recent years—it’s probably same guy but he’s softened his preacherly accent quite a bit.)

Today Johnston’s focus is on more mainstream subjects like teenage suicide, and the tone is a lot less doomy. I would venture that he’s been influenced by someone like Rick Warren, who (like him or not) has given evangelism a more compassionate face. Anyway, in this clip the preacher is in full Satanic alarmist mode, speaking with such great understanding about the presumably hundreds, if not thousands, of teenage Satanists he’s met—“some of them, I noticed, on the little web between the thumb and right index finger was a Satanic emblem…. They had the pentagram tattoo and some of the girls were dressed in black. Closer looking at their fingers, I noticed they had skull rings.” In a troubled teen’s bedroom he spies “the decorative heavy metal rock posters of Venom and Slayer and Ozzy and a few others.” (His account of the Satanists he’s met for all the world sounds like something he read in a book or just made up.)

And I haven’t even gotten to the part with his impression of a teenage Satanist luring his would-be victims into undertaking human sacrifice with promises of drugs and easy sex…...

At the end of the video a number is given to call if you think you know of a teen who has fallen or is on the verge of succumbing to the allure of Satan—it’s 1-800-SV-A-TEEN. I called it the line is dead.
 

via William Caxton Fan Club (a.k.a. John Darnielle’s Tumblr)

 
After viewing this list of what could have gotten you admitted to West Virginia’s Hospital for the Insane (Weston) aka Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum back in the late-1800s, I’ve swiftly concluded that the criteria was rather all-encompassing. Who among us is a stranger to what’s on this list?

In this century, it looks more like a “wish list” for Dr. Phil’s guest bookers!

Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum is still open, but only for tours.

Sources: Appalachian History, Grateful Web, West Virginia State Archives, West Virgina Encyclopedia, Steampunk

h/t Richard Swanson!