Oh, wait…I thought it said sub*lingual*
Here’s an interesting stinker we ran across while searching for a good ol’ atmospheric Saturday night flick: 1958’s My World Dies Screaming, AKA Terror in the Haunted House (link goes to full movie; be warned). We only sat through the first ten minutes, which seemed stupid and forgettable. Except for the psycho-rama part, which was stupid and slightly amusing.
It means subliminal images. The movie starts with a dream sequence (or a narration of a dream sequence), one that is dotted with still pictures, each on-screen for a fraction of a second. The year makes sense:
The birth of subliminal advertising as we know it dates to 1957 when a market researcher named James Vicary inserted the words “Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola” into a movie.
The words appeared for a single frame, allegedly long enough for the subconscious to pick up, but too short for the viewer to be aware of it. The subliminal ads supposedly created an 18.1% increase in Coke sales and a 57.8% increase in popcorn sales.
Okay, here’s the thing: Uncle B was only aware that the screen flashed in an odd way. Me, I was able to see the pictures clearly. Or, actually, I thought I could see the pictures clearly. When I slowed down the film and extracted the individual frames, it turns out I only really saw the top half of each. The bottom was a complete surprise.
Whoever wouldn’t mind sitting through the first three plus minutes, I’d be very interested to hear what you see, if anything.
I’ll give you some hints: the opening sequence has seven instances of two different pictures, A, B, B, B, A, A, A (per the IMDB entry, other pictures happen later in the film. I didn’t sit through the whole thing). In the version I linked, the pictures appear at 1:34:22, 1:42:20, 1:54:27, 2:06:27, 3:00, 3:06 and 3:09:12, each for about one one-hundredth of a second. Feel free to back up and try again (we did, several times).
When you’ve done that, if you care to, I’ll save you the trouble of firing up your video editing software: Picture A and Picture B.
What did you see?
November 30, 2015 — 10:10 pm
Comments: 9
Oops! Lookit the time!
So I’ve totally figured out how to drive the Chromecast, which means (among other things), any video I can find on YouTube I can share with Onkle B on the big screen.
We’ve done Ninja Kitty, Cats are Assholes, Cats versus Cucumbers, badger cubs, stoaty fun, happy snow leopards, the One Of Us scene from Freaks, the entire Thanksgiving episode of WKRP in Cincinnati (funny, but not p’raps the gut-buster I remembered), the puMAman theme…and I’m wearing the bastard down at last!
What are some of your favorite ‘tubes? No need to post links, just enough of a description that they turn up on a search. If I make him sit through just a few more choice hits, I feel sure we can turn him ‘Murican.
Good weekend, all!
November 27, 2015 — 11:41 pm
Comments: 44
Just another quaint English village
I have unilaterally declared this our new Hallowe’en tradition. It is a 1966 Hammer Film called the Witches starring Joan Fontaine. It is very silly.
Joan Fontaine. Just look at her. I’ve often wondered if there was something wrong with that eyebrow of hers that made it do that trademark thing.
Says the top commenter on the IMDB listing:
In her autobiography, Miss Joan Fontaine, who had acquired the film rights to the novel years before, complains at length about the “primitive” working conditions at Hammer studios, the small size of her dressing room, the awful food and the unprofessional British actors she had to lower herself in working with. We all know that the real bee in her bonnet was that a movie she had basically designed as a vehicle for HER talents ended up being taken over by Miss Kay Walsh, a superb dancer and talented actress who had had an extensive career in films and theatre (check out her IMDB listing–you’ll be impressed). Luckily Fontaine was (to her credit) too much of a pro herself to let her dissatisfaction show on screen.
Well, I don’t know about that. IMDB also says it was her last film. She died in 2013, so she had a helluva long retirement.
The village scenes were shot in Hambleden in Buckinghamshire, but the action supposedly takes place in Sussex and the inevitable stately home was a place called Parham House. It’s now closed for the season, so I’m making this blog entry to remind myself we should go visit when it reopens in the Spring.
That’s right; I’m using you guys as an appointment diary.
November 4, 2015 — 10:16 pm
Comments: 8
Bruce Jenner is bustin’ out all over
Lion skin cloak? Check. Knobbly club? Check. Tits? Ohhhhh…wait a second.
We went to a stately home for a delphinium festival today (when you hook up with a gardener, marvelous things happen). This was on the grounds. It’s got all the usual accoutrements of a classical Hercules, but this is clearly a chick.
Well. Wikipedia tells me this is Omphale queen of Lydia and not quite a goddess. Hercules accidentally biffed someone and was sentenced by the Oracle to be her slave for a while, for some reason.
Unfortunately, none of the central texts survive in the original, so we are left piecing the story together from bits of art and literary allusion. The important thing is, this was a period of rich cross dressing for Hercules and Omphale.
*shrug*
In a perfectly unrecognizable form, the story of Hercules and Omphale was the subject of MST3K Experiment 502: Hercules. You can watch it in its entirety here.
Because I am all about the cultcha.
June 24, 2015 — 7:53 pm
Comments: 2
Triggered!
My parents divorced when I was about nine. My father had traveled a lot for years, so the difference in my daily life wasn’t great, but it did mean the occasional formal Day of Visitation with my dad.
This is one of the first movies he took me to. If you haven’t seen it, Tora! Tora! Tora! is a two and a half hour WWII epic largely in Japanese with subtitles. It’s possible a major film was released that year that would be more horrible and boring to a nine year old girl, but I kinda doubt it.
Anytime the damn thing is on TV here — and it seems to be once a month or so — Uncle B sings out, “Weaselllll! Your movie is onnnnn!”
Anyhoo, mojo recommended it as one of his favorite Memorial Day flicks in the thread below, so I figured I’d share. I can’t say as I’d recommend it to the little girl in your life.
Hope you’re all having a decent long weekend; we sure have.
May 25, 2015 — 8:03 pm
Comments: 21
Good weekend, folks!
Geez, sorry you guys. We went to the movies tonight and I didn’t queue up a post beforehand because I didn’t realize how long the movie was going to be.
We went to see Interstellar. It was only three hours long, but we aged a hundred and fifty years.
BA-DUM-TSSS.
That was Uncle Badger’s joke.
Blame him.
December 5, 2014 — 11:58 pm
Comments: 23
Bold Venture
Lauren Bacall at last. To be honest, I thought she was older than 89.
Not long before her death, she said something like “I suppose my obituary will be all about Bogart.” With some resignation, I assume — he’s been dead for 57 years.
I’m no different. I’m going to mark her passing with a recommendation that you listen to Bold Venture, a series of radio plays they did together in 1951 (audio links at the bottom). No one is sure how many episodes there are in total, but upwards of fifty have come to light.
I like Old Time Radio plays. They’re usually entertaining and often well-written, and there are a bajillion serieseses out there to download for free. I have a little OTR dingus on my Android tablet and I used to listen to Bold Venture in the bathtub, which just felt right.
Oh, and yes…nanny1 takes the dick! I believe this is the second dick for nanny1 (you know the drill; you gots to send me your address again).
I’m painfully aware how far behind I’ve gotten with my dick duties. If you’re waiting for one, I do apologize. I’m’onna have to build some drawing time into my everyday, or I’m’a start to lose skills.
So, meet me back here Friday, 6WBT. Dead Pool Round 68!
p.s. RIP Robin Williams, too. Not a fan, but there are corners of the internet where people are losing their freaking minds, so…
August 13, 2014 — 10:16 pm
Comments: 17
In case you didn’t know where the Pixar logo comes from
Last week, I got caught up on a couple of Pixar flicks I missed on release (Tangled and Brave). A great joy. I’ve been a huge animation fan since forever and a computer graphics perfeshunal since pretty much the beginning, so it’s a cinch I’m a ginormous fan of 3D animation.
Damn, but the early stuff was awful. I had a friend who dated a guy who wrote software for 3D modeling in the early 80s. I thought that was the shit. They had this big expensive rig that built and animated a 3-D teapot. I think it took, like, three days to render a single freaking teapot. And it looked like ass. I loved it.
In 1988, I got to go to SIGGRAPH for the first and only time, and there I saw my very first Pixar film. Which was THE very first Pixar film — or at least the first one released under the name Pixar.
I still think Luxo jr is a masterpiece of character animation. I’m not alone. When it first started to roll — given when this was made — I think most of us just expected a render test (Pixar made their money selling dedicated animation hardware and software in those days). I was not expecting a clean, simple, brilliant short film.
Sadly, this was 1988, so I also got to see Pixar’s second and third releases at the same sitting — Red’s Dream and Tin Toy. Oh, jesus, that godawful clown! Oh god, that hideous lumpy baby! Brrrrrrr.
Even now. Every single time Pixar tries to do realistic humans — oh that Uncanny Valley!
November 15, 2013 — 12:33 am
Comments: 16
This guy.
Aw. Ray Harryhausen has been and gone. As Wikipedia put it, “The Harryhausen family announced his death via Twitter and Facebook on May 7, 2013.” He had lived in London since 1960. I did not know that.
I adored every frame of his stop-motion animation, but I think there’s a reason everyone points to this scene from Jason and the Argonauts. A slight jerkiness spoils the effect of an animated monkey or the sinuous snakes on Medusa’s head, but these bone soldier guys? They were splendid little models, and they moved exactly the way you’d expect an animated skeleton to move: all crouchy elbows and knees.
Here’s the fight scene. And here’s a short clip of Harryhausen talking about animating the skeleton fight in Sinbad.
(I’m sure the skeletons in Skyrim are an homage, but I love the fact they’re the biggest pussies in the land: lob a rock at them and they disintegrate into comical bone xylophones).
Anyway, RIP Harryhausen. And no, no-one had him in the Dead Pool.
May 7, 2013 — 9:47 pm
Comments: 20
This cracks me up
I don’t know. Maybe you have to live here. But I can totally see the monster pausing his rampage for a refreshing cup of tea and a slice of toast (from a Daily Mail feature on horror movies on break).
Christmas is a week from today. Feel free to be unserious!
Or, you know, feel free to continue being serious, if you’d rather. And if the unserious comments and the serious comments bump up against each other in an awkward, embarrassing way, we can deal with that. Together.
December 18, 2012 — 10:47 pm
Comments: 49