by Rodney Eric Griffith | Armour of Rod | |
Speaking of SCTV, Shout! factory have announced the release of the Volume 3 (i.e. the third cycle of nine shows from the 1981-1982 run) DVD set on 1 March.
Rodney | 8:17:00 AM [permalink]They say Elvis Costello and the Imposters are coming to town concurrent with the release of the 2CD edition of The Delivery Man incorporating The Clarksdale Sessions.
Rodney | 8:01:00 PM [permalink]January 13, 1964 saw the release of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” b/w “I Saw Her Standing There” on Capitol Records. Shame the label couldn’t keep up the quality with subsequent jumbled singles (or LPs, for that matter). (The Parlophone original came out on 29th November 1963.)
Rodney | 7:04:00 PM [permalink]The weather frightens me. While the early thaw is not unprecedented, its severity is certainly unusual.
Rodney | 8:00:00 AM [permalink]I rarely recommend a US situation comedy so enthusiastically, but Committed is hilariously funny. It is the actual American version of Coupling, with writing and acting sharp enough to draw blood.
Rodney | 10:07:00 PM [permalink]“Ten fucking years” was my reaction, too. Where does the time go?
Rodney | 6:59:00 PM [permalink]It’s fortunate that The Confessions of a Hoaxer is still circulating. By the time Macmillan published it in 1970, Alan Abel had already published five other books—but I’ve never seen them. alibris.com has all but one of the titles available (at top dollar). amazon has some of the books listed, but only Confessions is readily available. The missing volumes are:
The Great American Hoax 1966
C.S. Lewis was among the many taken in by the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA) hoax.
Yours for Decency: the Campaign to Clothe Naked Animals 1967
The Button Book 1967
Crazy Ads 1960 (?)
(This book, according to The Confessions of a Hoaxer, was so heavily pirated that the publisher simply gave in and withdrew their edition.)
This is a Dirty, Rotten, Filthy Book
Dirty, Rotten, Filthy is the missing one. It would seem to parallel Alan and Jeanne Abel’s 1971 film Is There Sex After Death?.
Alan published two books in the 1980s, Don’t Get Mad—Get Even!: A Manual for Retaliation (1983) and How to Thrive on Rejection: A Manual for Survival (1984). Like The Confessions of a Hoaxer, these books are found relatively easily, which I attribute to either higher print runs or more sympathetic library systems.
Last night I was finally able to begin watching the first volume of SCTV. It is by now common knowledge that Shout! Factory and/or Andrew Alexander made the decision to issue the 1981 “Network/90” NBC/CBC series first (this kind of decision is not entirely without precedent: when A&E began releasing episodes of The Saint they did so with the 1966 colour series and are only now in the process of issuing episodes from the first series from 1962.) Even so, a lot of the material is vintage anyway since the jump to American network television necessitated using, as the liner notes diplomatically put it, “repurposed” material from SCTV’s first three series (and hilariously taking the piss out of themselves for doing so from the very first wraparound).
Even though I hadn’t seen the NBC premiere since its original airdate I noticed some of the alterations made necessary by music clearances. (sctvguide.ca has a fairly comprehensive list of these edits.) As mentioned previously, you get to see the original NBC opening credit sequence, which was sadly abandoned within a few weeks for a rather uncomfortable set of out-of-character walk-ons (which Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Martin make great fun of during one of the bonus features).
