Billed as “An X-Rated Musical Fantasy” and produced by the same man who brought the world Flesh Gordon, this is one of the more artistically ambitious porn spoofs you’ll ever see.
Sesame Workshop is preparing a new version of the classic ’70s children’s show The Electric Company, which I wrote about lovingly in 2006.
Here is Peter Sellers in the hilarious outtakes sequence at the end of Being There. When I was a kid I thought this was the funniest thing ever. Blooper reels were rare in major Hollywood films back then, so I’d never seen anything like it.
After a couple of years of occasional YouTube searches, I recently found one of my favorite old Sesame Street songs. It’s called “Lower-case N,” and it’s a melancholy but ultimately redemptive ballad about a lonely letterform.
In his 1978 short film C’etait un rendezvous, the French filmmaker Claude Lelouch captured a Ferrari’s-eye view of Paris at high speed. Now a blogger has created a Google Maps mashup that displays the car’s location on a map as the driver rockets himself across the city.
Here it is, the actual scene from Happy Days that inspired one of the more durable pop-culture metaphors of the last couple of decades.
A couple of weeks ago I bought the new DVD set of The Electric Company, which originally ran on PBS from 1971 to 1977. By the time I was seven or eight, in the mid-’70s, I thought it was way more entertaining than Sesame Street. How could The Electric Company not be cooler, with Morgan Freeman in the cast?
The latest episode of Yacht Rock, the near-perfect Channel 101 series, was put online a few hours ago, and it’s a classic.
The premiere episode of a show devoted to exploring a little-understood rock genre that flourished from the mid-’70s to the early ’80s.
During the 1979-1980 Iranian hostage crisis, kids at my elementary school did an anti-Ayatollah singalong a few times at recess and on the bus. It was set to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands.”
I just discovered that most of the text of Steve Martin’s out-of-print 1979 book Cruel Shoes is posted on a Steve Martin fansite. I’ve owned a tattered hardcover of this book since the mid-’80s.
Children of the 1970s who read this site: Did any of you make plates like this in art class?
This is fantastic: On transom.org, a site devoted to “channeling new work and voices to public radio through the Internet,” the film editor and sound editor Walter Murch is spending several weeks as a sort of philosopher-in-residence.
Nothing interesting can be said of Paris Hilton. Except this: One of her aunts is Kim Richards, the ’70s child star whose career peak was the 1975 classic Escape to Witch Mountain.
No, seriously: Laimbeer, the widely loathed giant who played center for the Detroit Pistons from 1982 to 1993, appeared as a Sleestak in at least one episode of the cheesy ’70s show Land of the Lost.
What’s special about these two clips? Well, let’s just say that they wouldn’t win Johnny Carson any racial sensitivity awards. At the very least, they show that Carson was capable of egregious lapses in judgment.
I’m Andrew Hearst. I’m the director of content strategy at Blue State Digital and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. More info is on the About page.
Email: hearst@nyc.rr.com
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