by Rodney Eric Griffith | Armour of Rod | |
I have never seen The Wizard of Oz. Ever. I’m not particularly proud of or ashamed by this; by now, I basically refuse to see it out of spite, because it never fails to shock people when I casually mention “I’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz.”
Why I have never seen The Wizard of Oz:
a) my parents were of the ilk that believed if you’ve seen something once there was no need to see it ever again, so it was never left on in my presence
b) even as I child I was suspicious of musicals. Like Homer, my impulse is “They’re fake and phony/And totally wrong”
c) as a child I was extremely suspicious of anything dumbed down for children, i.e. Disney, and The Wizard of Oz appeared Disneyesque to me at the time—antiseptic, preachy, predictable.
As an adult I realise the film doesn’t deserve to be so cavalierly dismissed, but I’d still rather watch The Bullwinkle Show.
…and tonight at 8PM EST on NBC, “The One With Ultimate Fireball,” the top-rated fan favourite Friends episode. Or should be.
Rodney | 6:54:00 PM [permalink]Reading up on the restoration of the 1967 Grantray-Lawrence Spider-Man cartoon, rebroadcast in Europe last year and set for a complete series DVD at the end of June… early press coverage which announced the restoration suggests Buena Vista replaced the original soundtrack, removing all of the distinctive, jazzy background music, thereby alienating the target audience for this series. However, Buena Vista’s recent publicity for the DVD issue doesn’t address this. I can only hope it isn’t true.
Rodney | 9:01:00 PM [permalink]This week we are watching the DVD release of The New Avengers by courtesy of one of our local libraries. (Not because I couldn’t afford to buy a copy, but because I’m cheap.) To my relief, the series is less dated than I remembered. To my surprise, Joanna Lumley’s character Purdey is annoying. She comes across in the first seven episodes as the product of the unholy coupling of Hermione Granger and Sara Sidle. I cringe when she moves during the opening scene in the title sequence.
Rodney | 4:50:00 PM [permalink]
My favourite book as a child was Hello, Rock by Roger Bradfield. I had Hello, Rock read to me so often I had it memorized completely (à la Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie). Now I can only remember this much from it:
Hello, Rock. Gee, you’re a pretty rock. Are all these other rocks your friends? Is this one your mother? Is this one your father?
The book, decades out of print, has been known to fetch three figures on eBay. Perhaps I identified with it so strongly because the boy looked like me; I did not grow up with an interest in petrology.
