Noted parrot expert John Cleese shares his thoughts about Sarah Palin, whom he compares to a “nice-looking parrot.” He also apologizes to a former colleague: “I’m sorry, Michael Palin, to say you’re not the funniest Palin anymore. But you’re not.”

[via Andrew Sullivan.]

Barack Obama is hard to caricature, but this is pretty great:

[via Andrew Sullivan.]

This is a hilarious mashup, but it’ll only make sense if you’ve seen this.

[via Daring Fireball.]

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"...]

This awesome clip shows a barely pubescent Jimmy Page playing skiffle on a British TV show in the late ’50s. Text in the clip says “1957,” which would mean Page is 13 years old here, but Wikipedia asserts that Page didn’t start playing guitar until he was 14. So let’s guess that this is from 1958, and Page is 14. Whatever his age, this is a fantastic artifact. But where’s his violin bow?

The host is a guy named Huw Weldon.

Related entry: Jimmy Page Was My Co-Pilot.

I swear I’m interested in things other than text and numerals that appear onscreen during television shows, but this is so interesting I have to share.

Fringe, the new Fox show co-created by Lost visionary J.J. Abrams, debuts tomorrow night at 8 p.m. I found a leaked version of the pilot a couple of months ago, but I didn’t get around to watching it until last night. Judging from the pilot, it’s basically a mediocre X-Files retread: federal agents + paranormal investigations + sinister bureaucracy + rampant paranoia. The cast includes Lance Reddick, late of The Wire and recently of Lost, and I love him. But otherwise the whole operation seems a bit contrived.

I was, however, struck by the very unusual way that the show identifies locations onscreen. The X-Files, for instance, handled these in the typical, longstanding way. If Mulder and Scully were in, say, Virginia, a location-and-time stamp would be displayed at the bottom of the opening shot of the sequence:

Arlington, Virginia
4:32 a.m.

Fringe handles location IDs in a way I’ve never seen before, at least on television: Each one is placed into the actual scene as a physical element that the characters pass by or the camera swoops through. I find this approach to be really jarring and show-offy. Have you ever seen anything like this before? (This series of clips includes one ID of a foreign location, but that information doesn’t really spoil anything.)

It’s possible that these will have been changed in the version that will be broadcast tomorrow night, but this is how things looked in the pilot I acquired in late June.

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.’”

From Flesh Gordon to The Sperminator, spoofs of mainstream cultural offerings have long been a staple of the porn industry. Shakespeare porn in particular is surprisingly common, as I found in 2001 when writing an article for Lingua Franca, “The Pound of Flesh.” But here’s something I hadn’t actually seen before: Kubrick porn. In The Sexxxing, a 2005 quickie from Danni.com, a young woman named Miss Torrent applies to be the winter manager of a porn company’s offices—and the place turns out to be haunted by horny, fake-breasted lesbians. Orgasms ensue.

The two clips in the video below are pretty tame, because I edited them that way. But be careful if you’re at work, because there’s a bare breast or two and a few seconds of moaning. The opening titles, in Futura Extra Bold, Kubrick’s favorite typeface, are mine. As is often the case with porn spoofs, this one is an adaptation only in the loosest sense (double entendre alert!), and it was probably filmed in a single afternoon.

There have been several other porn films inspired by Kubrick’s oeuvre, including Spermacus, 2002: A Sex Odyssey, Thighs Wide Shut, and A Clockwork Orgy. I found copies of the last two, but I won’t be posting clips, as they appear to be pretty hardcore all the way through. You’re in luck, though, because I just found the work-safe trailer for A Clockwork Orgy on YouTube. This was made in 1995:

The website Adult DVD Empire has a page for The Sexxxing that isn’t quite safe for work.

And this fake Shining trailer from 2005 is still the funniest thing ever.