People likey the porn spoofs, so here’s footage from an incredibly odd artifact I discovered during my search for Kubrick porn: an adult version of Alice in Wonderland from 1976. This ain’t no filmed-in-one-afternoon quickie—it’s a musical comedy that combines elaborate song-and-dance numbers with hardcore sex. Billed as “An X-Rated Musical Fantasy” and produced by the same man who brought the world Flesh Gordon, it’s one of the more artistically ambitious porn spoofs you’ll ever see. Judging from my quick scroll through the video—it’s all too weird for me to spend much time actually watching it—the singing and dancing is much more prominent than the hardcore sex. But there’s a fair amount of that, too. In the clip below, Alice, a once-virginal librarian whose libido has just been awakened, gives some help to an impotent Humpty-Dumpty, who closely resembles Stanford from Sex and the City. This footage is pretty tame, because I edited out a few minutes of lesbian action between the two nurses. But it still isn’t safe for work, so be careful.

Kristine De Bell, who played Alice, was a former Playboy playmate who went on to appear in Meatballs (with Chris Makepeace!) and various other mainstream films and TV shows. A restored version of Alice in Wonderland was released on DVD in December, and it’s available on Amazon. It apparently includes both an X-rated version and an XXX-rated version.

Alice in Wonderland apparently got a lot of attention upon its release. Roger Ebert even reviewed it. Here’s an excerpt from Ebert’s review:

[Continue reading "Alice in Wonderland: The 1976 Musical-Comedy Porn Spoof"...]

As The New York Times reported in May, Sesame Workshop is preparing a new version of the classic ’70s children’s show The Electric Company, which I wrote about lovingly in 2006. The producers just put a short teaser for the new incarnation on YouTube. Not sure I like this, but hey, I have enormous nostalgia for the original version, and I’m not eight years old right now:

Here is the Times’s description of the reboot:

Refitted for the age of hip-hop and informed by decades of further educational research on reading, the 2009 version of “The Electric Company” is a weekly, more danceable version of its former daily self. The series, which is expected to make its debut in January, faces challenges the original never did (trying to stand out amid so much children’s programming and to shake the stigma of educational television) as well as familiar ones (trying to make reading a positive experience for youngsters).

Also in May, TV Week reported that “the show’s new format will encompass interactive online elements and community-based activities across the country, in addition to adapting a more contemporary style. … Writers for the new incarnation include Willie Reale (‘A Year With Frog and Toad’), Jeff and Craig Cox (‘Blades of Glory’) and Jerome Hairston (‘Law & Order: Criminal Intent’). The show’s musical directors are Chris Jackson, Thomas Kail and Bill Sherman, all from Broadway musical ‘In the Heights.’”

Here is Peter Sellers in the hilarious outtakes sequence at the end of Being There, the 1979 Hal Ashby film that was the second-to-last film Sellers made. 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. I remember feeling amazed that I got to see secret scenes that weren’t in the movie. Quaint, I know.

According to the Wikipedia page for the film, Sellers supposedly didn’t want the outtakes to be included in the movie, “since, by all accounts, it was his attempt to show his skills as an actual actor as opposed to just a comedian. The inclusion of the blooper reel is sometimes blamed for Sellers’ failure to win that year’s Academy Award for Best Actor.” I find that last sentence hard to believe, but who knows.

[via Coudal Partners.]

Hello. You may notice that I’ve made some subtle changes to Panopticist over the last month or two. I’ve widened the layout, locked many page elements to a grid (thanks partly to the awesome Blueprint CSS framework), and upgraded Movable Type to version 4, among other things. If anything seems horribly awry, you might email me at hearst [at] nyc.rr.com and let me know.

I’ve also turned comments on, starting with this post, so chime in if you feel like it.

And now, a post:

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.

A couple of years before his late-’70s ascension to teen idolhood, Robby Benson auditioned for the Luke Skywalker role in Star Wars. He was as ill-suited for the role as you’d expect, given his subsequent success as a geeky but adorable moptop in such sports-themed movies as One on One and Ice Castles. In the clip below, 20-year-old Benson spends nine minutes reading turgid George Lucas dialogue with a mostly off-camera Harrison Ford.

[via YouTube member Ghyslain, with an indirect assist from All the Little Live Things. Ghyslain’s profile contains links to several other Star Wars audition tapes, including Mark Hamill’s.]

Early on a summer morning in 1978, the French filmmaker Claude Lelouch attached a gyro-stabilized camera to the front of a Ferrari 275GTB. He turned on the camera and handed the car keys to a professional racecar driver, who fired up the engine and then sped through the center of Paris at about 140 miles per hour. The resulting eight-minute film, C’etait un rendezvous, is a classic. Thanks to Google Video and YouTube, it’s gotten a lot of web attention in recent months. But here’s something new: A blogger named Brian Hendrix has created a Google Maps mashup that displays the car’s location on a map as the driver rockets himself through Paris:

Lelouch has apparently claimed that it was he who was behind the wheel; he supposedly also said that the car was a Mercedes, not a Ferrari, and that the sounds of a Ferrari were overdubbed later. But I don’t have the energy to investigate whether (a) he actually claimed these things or (b) the claims are actually true.

[via someone on Echo.]

UPDATE: I posted a follow-up to this item a few days later.

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. I remember watching this episode the night it was originally broadcast, in September 1977. I think I found the sequence tremendously exciting—”What if Fonzie DIES?”—but hey, I was only eight years old. My critical faculties were not yet fully developed.

A couple of weeks ago I bought the new four-DVD Electric Company box set. The Electric Company originally ran on PBS from 1971 to 1977, and then a small handful of the episodes were broadcast in reruns until 1985. By the time I was seven or eight, in the mid-’70s, I thought The Electric Company was way more entertaining than Sesame Street. The two shows were similar in a lot of ways—they both used songs, comedy skits, animation, and wordplay to get kids excited about reading and learning—but The Electric Company was so much cooler. (It was intentionally aimed at a slightly older audience than Sesame Street was.) How could The Electric Company not be cooler, with Morgan Freeman in the cast? No one was cooler than Easy Reader:

One of the best segments was, of course, The Adventures of Letterman, a series of animated shorts about a burly but nebbishy superhero who saves people from a villain called Spellbinder, who possesses the evil ability to transform reality by transforming words. Until I started watching the DVDs, I hadn’t seen an episode of Letterman in at least 20 years. So imagine my surprise yesterday when I discovered on Wikipedia that the three main voices were provided by Zero Mostel (Spellbinder), Gene Wilder (Letterman), and Joan Rivers (the narrator). I had NO IDEA.

The box set was produced by the brilliant people at Shout! Factory, the company responsible for the best DVD collection ever. I’ve only watched a small amount of what’s on the discs, but I’ve already encountered a bunch of gems. Check out all the amazing signage displayed in this singalong:

As I watch these discs, I’m constantly struck by the overt fetishization not just of letters, but of the letterforms themselves. I imagine at least one or two typography careers owe something to the childhood sight of gigantic letterforms on The Electric Company. Look, next to Spidey, it’s 10,000-point Franklin Gothic Condensed: