Well, apparently computers celebrate Christmas too.
 
Max Headroom’s Giant Christmas Turkey aired on Boxing Day in 1986. Not to be confused with the follow-up sci-fi adventure series adapted for Cinemax, this holiday special was from the original British programme. The cheeky, glitching computer-host first came to life after a fatal traffic accident in the 1985 cyberpunk TV-movie, Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future. Now living inside a television set in a world dominated by the networks, Max personifies the sleek and vain talk-show host of our eventual dystopia. With the success of the film came The Max Headroom Show, an MTV-style variety show hosted by the smart-talking Siri of the 80’s.
 

 
Max Headroom’s Giant Christmas Turkey was pretty bad. Not even cameos by Robin Williams or Tina Turner could’ve saved it. For some reason, producers thought it would be a good idea to have Max perform several jolly ballads throughout the episode. In “Children,” our renegade cyberhost serenades two young boys in the back of a horse-drawn carriage. Strangely enough, the lyrics very nonchalantly mention killing children, something that Max “would never do.” Another tune “Gimme Shades” is a bizarre Western-style tribute to sunglasses. It really has nothing to do with the holidays, except that maybe shades are on Max’s Christmas list. Tina Turner gets him golf clubs.
 
Headroom takes all the gigabytes home with “Merry Christmas Santa Claus (You’re a Lovely Guy),” the climactic finale to the holiday special. Playing a grand piano from his television set, Max describes Santa as an under-appreciated and selfless soul, one who could use a song to show him we care. The passionate jingle builds momentum as we transition to a snowy winter exterior, where Max is joined by the Southwark Cathedral Choir for one hell of a conclusion. The takeaway? Santa Claus, you are one helluva guy!
 

 
“Merry Christmas Santa Claus” was released on a 7-inch record shortly after the premiere of the Giant Christmas Turkey. The single is paired with “Gimme Shades” on side B, making the two a festive addition to this year’s h-h-holiday playlist.

Listen for yourself after the jump…

 
Generally, I feel like cultural consensus is something from which to run away, but I’m 100% behind the near-unanimous regard for the Rankin-Bass stop motion Christmas specials as being pretty much some of the greatest filmed entertainment ever. As I am a grouchy Jew bastard who has for his entire life massively loathed the annual hegemonic takeover of that exceptionally toxic collision of the most insincere, tribal aspects of American Style Christianity™ and conspicuous consumption run amok, Christmasprodukt that would win me over has some pretty huge hurdles to clear, and shows like The Year Without a Santa Claus, Jack Frost, and the immortal, brilliant, and untouchable Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer clear all of them with miles to spare.

Apart from sharp writing that possesses uncommon intergenerational appeal, one of the Rankin-Bass specials’ most consistent charms is the distinctive character puppet design by stalwart MAD Magazine illustrator Paul Coker, Jr. I once read—in an article I just spent half the morning failing to find, so alas, I can’t link it here—that few to none of the character puppets survived, as they were constructed to be only just tough enough to survive filming. And that makes this eBay sale very exciting—it’s the authenticated original Santa Claus and Rudolph figures from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. These were once believed lost, but turned up in the ‘oughts, having been part of a family’s Christmas decorations, kept in a box and hauled out annually for decades. When they were discovered, they were restored by Time and Space Toys, and have since gone on exhibit and been featured on Hollywood Treasure. Their restoration was even the subject of a segment on CNN:
 

 
The asking price for these puppets is TEN MILLION DOLLARS. A high price is certainly justified by the extreme rarity and cultural significance of these remarkable items, but this has to be said: if you have that kind of money to burn and you spend it on what, in the end, amounts to two fucking dolls, may the gods judge you mercifully, and please consider a gift of similar size to homeless shelters and food banks. But now I’ll get off my soapbox and show you a bunch of puppet photos that’ll hit you right in all your goddamn Goyishe Christmas feels.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Seriously, the wealth of batty—pun intended—images from the 1960s never ceases to amaze me. Here we have the foremost pop artist of the era and the foremost German avant garde chanteuse of the era posing as Robin and Batman for Esquire magazine in 1966.

The Batman TV series had taken to the airwaves in the start of 1966. Before the year was out, it would spawn a feature movie. Almost certainly the caped crusader was on everyone’s lips that year; as we all know, the show is simply a supreme example of kid-friendly absurdism that even something like Pee-wee’s Playhouse can’t quite touch. Warhol was interested in Batman as a subject of pop art. In addition to the image above, there was also his 1964 movie Batman Dracula, which is said to be the first camp treatment of Batman.

The photographer who took the pics was Frank Bez. One of the images was used in an interesting little feature called “Remember the Sixties?” It seems likely that this was the introductory page for a series of photographs. The point of the feature was how incredibly much of note had been squeezed into just six years of our nation’s history, which is the exact thing that we all think when we think about that era. The really strange thing is that from our perspective, they were just getting going, the next five years or so would be incredibly active on the cultural front.

By the way, here’s the text. It’s by David Newman and Robert Benton, and it’s very good indeed:
 

What? Has it really been just six years, or are we all going crazy? It seems like it’s been the Sixties forever. Otherwise why is everybody so exhausted all the time? The Sixties have been so packed with hysteria, so intense and frenetic, so rocking and rolling, so pop and so op, that they have well nigh obliterated all that came before. Of course, one of the reasons for this is that nothing came before.

Nothing was known as the Fifties. It had…uh…Ike, remember? And…uh…J.D. Salinger…and, er…West Coast Jazz…(yawn)...come to think of it (pace Joe McCarthy), nothing happened in the Fifties. That’s why it seems that everything’s happening, baby, in the Sixties. Luminaries come and go faster than a speeding bullet. Fads and fashions flame up and burn out in a week. The last six years have been so filled with people, places and things you have already forgotten about that this seems like a good time to call a halt. We have had enough! Enough!

And so we benevolently announce that the Sixties are over. Let six years be a decade. Let the next four be a vacation.

 
It’s a very refreshing aspect of Warhol’s personality that he could so easily let Nico be the one in the Batman suit. Warhol was manipulative as all get-out and he certainly was interested in power, but the side of power that required him to be seen as the masculine rule-maker (and therefore Nico’s master) just didn’t interest him in the slightest, and the comfort with which he inhabits Robin’s duds is palpable.

On the Internet they are almost always identified as having been taken in 1967, but they weren’t, they were taken in 1966.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
The second half of this local TV report on “The Minneapolis Sound,” broadcast on KTCA in 1988, has been on YouTube for some time, but earlier this year, one “Prince Rogers Nelson” uploaded an intact copy of the full program to Dailymotion.

I’ve grown so used to encountering music in the imaginary, racialized categories of marketers, radio programmers and record store owners, which still present punk and R&B as if they came from different planets. It’s refreshing to see Hüsker Dü and the Replacements presented as just two bands from Minneapolis, less popular than Prince and better-known than the Jets.

The Purple One declined to be interviewed for the special. Instead, there are glimpses of how he was perceived in his hometown, some sweet—three hockey players trying to sing “Purple Rain”—and some enraging, like the the smirking Twin Cities policeman at 4:50 who can’t control his laughter at the idea of listening to Prince: “I think he’s a fag.” The ‘Mats also refused to talk to KTCA, but Morris Day, Alexander O’Neal, the Hüskers and the Jets all appeared on camera, along with the Wallets and Ipso Facto. This was the very end of the road for Hüsker Dü; their segment ends abruptly with a one-sided phone conversation. “What? Hüsker Dü broke up? Why?”
 

 
Early in the show, the critic John Rockwell talks about discrete black and white music scenes going on in the city simultaneously, but it looks to me like the membrane separating them was exceedingly porous. Describing this period in his memoir, Mould writes:

Minneapolis was the “it” city, and the buzz was deafening. South side, you had Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, and Soul Asylum. North side, there was Prince, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Alexander O’Neal, and Morris Day.

More after the jump…

 
This morning, while taking a browse of some favorite sites, I found myself watching a short compliation video of various monsters, creatures, and nefarious extraterrestrials from that old cult classic sci-fi series The Outer Limits. Though I never saw the show until my teens, I was given an Outer Limits annual, one snowy Christmas, when I was around pre-school age. This book was filled with comic strips about ravenous alien gloop and stories about crash-landed flying saucers. It started a passion for this kind of stuff that has lasted right through. But there’s nothing new in that.

The compilation clip was by Wah Ming Chang for a project called Monsters. Chang was a cinematographer, designer, and sculptor who is probably better known to Star Trek fans as Wah Ming—the mega-talent responsible for designing the tricorder and communicator on the original series, as well as a whole host of martians, monsters, and what-have-you. (Indeed, there’s a good blog to be done on Chang.) Anyhow, Chang also designed many of the monsters and special effects for The Outer Limits—hence the fine little compilation clip (see below) of various happy memories of scary things from outer space like the “Man from Galaxy ‘X’” or “The Zanti Misfits.”

All this, eventually, made me seek out a whole set of the Monsters From Outer Limits trading cards that were issued to coincide with the original TV series by Bubbles Inc. (Topps) in 1964. Back then, a packet of these cards (with a stick of chewing gum) cost 5¢. I was way too young to have ever bought or even thought about these magnificent works of pop culture, but know now I would have tried my hardest to collect a whole set if I had been. Nowadays, a single card from this set can fetch up to $50—which is fair return on an original investment all those years ago.

Having never actually seen a full set (I don’t get out much, I live in a trailer park, I like Wheetos), I thought it would be a fun diversion to gather all these past riches together for our delight and delectation. ‘Nuff said?
 

#1 The Television Terror.
 

#2 The Radio-Active Man.
 
More ‘Monsters from Outer Limits’ plus video, after the jump….
 

 
YouTube user Mylo the Cat aka isthishowyougoviral aka Adam Schleichkorn brings us the Muppets-rap mashup we didn’t know we’ve been waiting for—a lengthy montage of Cookie Monster acting as MC over Busta Rhymes’ first single “Woo Hah! Got You All In Check,” which went to #1 on the U.S. rap charts more than 20 years ago, in 1996.

The video came out yesterday. Of the clip, Schleichkorn says. “I just wanted to make something to lighten the mood, in between the inevitable countless amounts of terrible news stories that will come out this week.”

What does he know that we don’t? Oh right, nothing at all. Bad news. That’s one thing you can bank on in 2017.

Earlier this year Schleichkorn came out with an amusing video in which Big Bird does the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” We liked that one too.
 

 
via Nerdcore
 

 
Now that the show has been around for more than forty years, the talent intake process at Saturday Night Live surely approximates an efficient, well-oiled machine, albeit one always tempered by Lorne Michaels’ inexplicable idiosyncrasies. But in those key first few years, the spirit of the place was so much more informed by actual generational rebellion against actual old-guard fuddy-duddies like Bob Hope. The continent (careful to include Canada for this part) was brimming with youthful comedic talent, to the point that anyone that would be likely to wander into 30 Rockefeller Plaza looking for a gig probably was a genius of some description or other.

Point being, in 1975, as the writing staff and cast was being assembled, NBC didn’t have a process in place, as much as a loose constellation of people who fit with their sensibility and could be relied upon to deliver bankably weird and resonant and funny material. Andy Kaufman, who was never a full cast member but was certainly part of the first crew in a general way, famously never fit any of the regular categories that existed for “entertainer” or “comedian,” even though he clearly was both, and as he matured into the key years of the mid- to late 1970s, his delicious bits tended to define a useful boundary between those who “got it” and those who never would.

Here is an impression of Kaufman in the context of the preparations for the very first show, which happened on October 11, 1975, from Bill Zehme’s 1999 book Lost in the Funhouse:
 

He became a fixture around the shows seventeenth-floor production offices in the weeks before the October premiere. He did not fraternize so much as lurk. Relatively few staff or cast members knew who he was or what he was or what he was supposed to do—although John Belushi had become an early true believer after having seen the conga-crying in clubs. Anne Beatts, a newly recruited writer, first encountered him slumping in Lorne’s antechamber—“I thought, Oh, man, is this the kind of person they’re hiring? I don’t know if I want to be part of this! He was so twitchy and weird and had bad skin. He looked very nerdy and geeky. I had severe doubts about the show from the beginning and my initial impression of Andy was the first of them.” Very late on the Friday night before the broadcast, however, her opinion changed when she saw him rehearse, which he almost didn’t because rehearsals dragged on interminably and he had yet to perform a run-through of Mighty Mouse for the crew and finally he said he had to leave. “And it was like––‘Wait, you can’t leave!” Beatts would recall. “And he said, ‘No, I have to go if I’m going to make the last train back to Great Neck.’ Lorne told him, “No Andy, we need you here.’ So he said, ‘Well, I guess I could get my mother to come pick me up….’”

On October 11, he meditated twice, locking himself in the office of Herb Sargent—once before dress rehearsal and again before the live broadcast. Both times he taped a note on the door—Please do not disturb me while I meditate, Andy Kaufman. All around him, panic and mayhem swirled as would become customary Saturday Night crucible.

 
Recently Netflix released a documentary with a gratuitously long title about Jim Carrey’s immersive process of pretty much “becoming” Andy Kaufman during the months in which he was shooting Man on the Moon, which is quite worth the time it takes to watch it. During the course of the movie the viewer gets a brief glimpse of Kaufman’s audition reel for Saturday Night Live, which I had never seen before.

In those early days, one of the staples of Kaufman’s act was a reading of the lyrics of “MacArthur Park,” the 1968 song that was first recorded by the actor Richard Harris…. except Kaufman did it as an elderly Jewish man from New York City. To understand why this is funny it might be necessary to see some of the impossibly winsome or lachrymose lyrics of the song. They are certainly distinctive:
 

Spring was never waiting for us, girl
It ran one step ahead
As we followed in the dance
Between the parted pages and were pressed
In love’s hot, fevered iron
Like a striped pair of pants

MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
‘Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh no!

 
It’s worth noting that the word “striped” is pronounced with two syllables, as a reader of, ahem, poetry might do.

Continues after the jump…

 
What’s Up America was a newsmagazine show that ran on Showtime from 1978 to 1981, covering “topics such as BB guns; female boxers; urban cowboys; Elvis Presley impersonators; chariot racers in Pocatello, Idaho; and a couple who lived year-round on Liberty Island in New York Harbor,” as well as pay TV premiums like “pornographic film actors, strippers, prostitutes, and a nude beauty pageant.”

One segment, roughly contemporary with The Decline of Western Civilization, profiled the Los Angeles punk scene. There are not-so-familiar faces and voices, like those of Orange County’s Nu-Beams, and slightly more familiar ones, like those of Claude “Kickboy Face” Bessy and Phranc of Catholic Discipline, BÖC lyricist and VOM singer Richard Meltzer, and DJ Rodney Bingenheimer.

Speaking of Rodney, the warm feelings showfolk used to pretend to have for one another are not much in evidence on this broadcast: the Angry Samoans name the former English Disco owner as one of the people they would like to murder, along with Kim Fowley, Phil Spector, and “Rockefeller” (Nelson?), who, as one member points out, is already dead. The report opens with the Samoans at Blackies (the club Black Flag’s then-singer Ron Reyes mentions during the introduction to “Revenge” in Decline), playing their love song “You Stupid Asshole.”
 

 
The Suburban Lawns are in there, performing their self-released first single “Gidget Goes to Hell,” then in its second pressing. (I think this dates the show to ‘79-‘80, or else the Lawns would be plugging “Janitor.”) Bassist Vex Billingsgate expresses the wish that a record company will soon relieve the band of its independence. The show saves the Dickies, the first L.A. punk band signed to a major label, for last. Singer Leonard Phillips spells out the Dickies’ ethic, or lack of same:

We’re not really aggravated about a producer taking our live sound and transforming it into a commercially successful product, because we’re capitalists, and if it’s going to help us sell more records, I certainly would make a compromise.

Watch it after the jump…

 
I’ve never really cottoned to 60 Minutes. I’ve always thought their approach was rather heavy-handed, pushing a simplistic line through bullying interviews and repetition of facts that might be considered innocuous when viewed in a sober frame of mind. One of the best takedowns of the 60 Minutes method comes from the talented writer Michael J. Arlen, who published a lengthy critique of the show in The New Yorker in 1977—and his criticisms stand up perfectly well in the present day, in my view. (You can read Arlen’s piece in his 1981 collection The Camera Age.)

In 1985 the show turned its attention to Dungeons and Dragons, and the results were predictably overwrought. The 1980s were an unusual time of “moral panic”—over drug use and satanism, sexual lyrics in rock songs and D&D and drunk driving—there was hardly an aspect of teens’ lives that parents couldn’t blow up into a huge threat to the safe and featureless suburbanism in which so many of the teens lived.
 

 
The 60 Minutes reporter on the case is Morley Safer, whose very calmness is an ideal conduit for the moral panic at issue. He idly puzzles over the funky-looking dice—one young enthusiast tells him that the 4-sided die is mainly used for damage from daggers and darts—before getting to the condemning testimonials, most heartbreakingly the sister of a teen who had committed suicide. An alarmist psychologist is trotted out—this one employed by the University of Illinois—I’m sure that such people would never use the moral panic to enhance their own bank accounts, no sir.

Fortunately, Gary Gygax himself is on hand as well, to supply a reasonable analogy to Monopoly, in which the money lost isn’t real. With the perspective of decades, it’s all too clear that D&D may at best have been a symptom of deeper problems like alienation and loneliness, rather than a driver of violent deaths.
 
Watch after the jump…

 
Seventeen is a made-for-TV documentary on American teenagers. Highly controversial before it even aired, it was pulled and never made it to the small screen. It went on to become an award-winning film.

Seventeen would’ve been the sixth installment in Middletown, a five-part documentary series on small town American life. Middletown was filmed in Muncie, Indiana, conceived as a follow-up to two Depression-era sociology studies that took place in Muncie, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts. The series aired on PBS in 1982.
 

 
Seventeen is the work of filmmakers Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines (note that DeMott is female, despite her traditionally male forename). The duo followed a group of Class of 1981 seniors during their final year at Muncie’s Southside High School. In the film, students mouth off to their teachers, curse up a storm, talk openly and graphically about sex, get drunk, get high, and are generally seen acting in an irresponsible fashion. Race relations is a recurrent topic—the language used will be shocking to the average viewer—with the threat of violence breaking out between black and white residents so frequent that it becomes unnerving. A number of students appear in Seventeen, but the focus is on Lynn Massie, a particularly outspoken and vivacious teen. Massie, who is white, is dating a black classmate, which is frowned upon by many in her community. At one point, racist neighbors burn a cross on the Massies’ front lawn.
 

 
As upsetting as cross burning is (though the Massies seem unsurprised by it), perhaps the most alarming sequence in the film takes place during a drunken house party. Amongst the high schoolers getting wasted is Lynn’s youngest brother—who can’t be more than twelve—who chugs beer after beer. When the keg runs dry, Lynn starts counting her cash for a beer run, when “Jeff” (likely filmmaker Kreines) is heard off-camera agreeing to chip in. Then Lynn’s mother appears in the room and it quickly becomes apparent that we’ve been watching a bunch of underage young people getting blotto at a party sanctioned by parents. Mrs. Massie even narcs on a couple of partygoers who didn’t pay the $3 cover. Unbelievable.
 

 
The most movielike instance in Seventeen occurs when, after the night of partying, the teens silently mourn the recent death of a friend while listening to music. It’s a moment in which it’s easy to forget that what’s happening on screen isn’t scripted—it’s real.
 

 
Seventeen is compelling cinéma vérité, for sure, but it just wasn’t the sort of thing that was seen on TV in 1982. Xerox, the corporate sponsor of Middletown, as well as PBS affiliates, had a largely negative reaction to Seventeen. There was also the threat of lawsuits from some of the Muncie residents who appeared in the film, and PBS likely had concerns that future federal funding could be cut. It’s unclear if Peter Davis, the producer of Middletown, pulled Seventeen, or if PBS president Larry Grossman gave it the ax, but on March 30, 1982, PBS announced the documentary wouldn’t air. 
 
More after the jump…