a day at Disneyland

I want to create an updated version with long lines, rude people on scooters and oasis' of abandoned babystrollers.

Bury it deep down...

The thing that makes me laugh is Mickey pulling down the pictures from the wall.

The first picture is a screen capture from the laserdisc of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. It is one in a series of four frames that shows Jessica Rabbit is not wearing panties. All other releases of the film have had these frames altered in order to save children from seeing where little cartoon children come from.

The second picture is from FANTASIA. If you are a proud owner of the 3 disc ultimate box set of FANTASIA and FANTASIA 2000 (and the bonus disc) you own the most complete, fully restored, uncut, mega version of this film. Or so Disney wants you to believe. They lied to you. They lied to everyone in the whole world when they said that film was fully restored.
The second picture Mickey takes down from the wall is of "Sunflower". Sunflower was completely removed from the film for the 1969 re-issue and every re-issue thereafter. The character appears three times during the film and all three have sections of the film have been cut out to ensure you never see that character again. The 50th anniversary DVD is so badly edited that after removal of the third appearance of dear Sunflower, the sound track isn't matching up with the film any more. In fact it's really out of sync.




Favorite exchange in this clip:
"Your supposed to be funny?"


"yeah."

Traveltown

Traveltown is a sad place. Every time I go there a child is crying. Not wimpering but crying as if he or she has just broken an arm kinda crying.

I just realized why that is.
Every time I go to traveltown I slip and fall. I mean like everytime since I was 5.

I realized it today as I slipped and whacked my elbow on a locomotive. The same damn one I slipped on last time I was there.
I can't be the only one.
I hate this place.

Mr Freeze

Today I took a drive up to Walt Disney's grave.

Its surprising to see that the grave is so overgrown and unclean. It looks like it has been visited as there was garbage strewn about (just like the "fun park").
Ariel, the little mermaid sits and watches over Walt's final resting place. (Ariel... not a Disney creation but one of Hans Christian Andersen)

Thats it.

Once that whole copyright infringment thing is out of the way the possibilities are endless.

Here is a nice little ditty that seems somehow familiar.

God bless India for not giving a crap!

Yep more 5,000 fingers of Dr. T

As you can see here in this clip from the finished film there is a rather crude cut in the song after the second floor verse. There was a third floor dungeon at one point.




Please click the below link to hear the original recording session master with the third floor dungeon verse intact.


Third floor dungeon-cut verse

And if you are unsure of how damn cool and crazy this film is...
Here is a little number I'm sure you'll enjoy.

He's a genius and a madman.

Reflections of Evil is a 2002 cult film by independent filmmaker Damon Packard that depicts the descent into madness and death of an obese, homeless watch salesman played by Packard. Using unconventional editing, Packard splices scenes together with nostalgic commercials and B-movies of the 1970s while also blending together several tangential narratives. The film also makes several oblique references to 9/11 and conspiracy theories including the notion of chemtrails. In an interview, Packard claimed, "I barely scratched the surface of this area" Reflections of Evil conveys heavy motifs of anger, fear, alientation, and madness.

A surreal end sequence that was filmed illegally at Universal Studios in Hollywood (including the ET Adventure) earned Packard a lifetime ban from the theme park. One only wonders if Spielberg himself has seen the film. Rumor has it that Spielberg and Lucas have tried to sue Packard.

The film was distributed by Packard himself, who literally stuffed mailboxes with his film and handed out copies around Los Angeles, California , although Packard admits that the result was less than spectacular. He has jokingkly claimed that his next film will be titled, "No Response: The Movie". I recieved my copy after Packard blanketed the parking of my old work with DVD's on everyones winshield. Mana from Hell! This film is the best I have seen. It is infectious. I cant truly describe the impact of this film. You have to see it. If you were born between 1964 and 1974 this movie will affect you. If you were born after that I suspect you will hate it.
Packard made 62,000 DVD copies of the film available for free, as well as sending thousands of them them to celebrities whose reactions were hilariously recorded on his website www.reflectionsofevil.com. His Reflections spoof of a young Steven Spielberg, a director he claimed to admire, was matched by his later assault on George Lucas in The Untitled Star Wars Mokumentary (2003), in which he intercut actual footage of Lucas with staged shots of disgruntled Lucas employees. A cult hero to underground film devotees, Packard remains obscure to the public at large while continuing to turn out his odd pastiches that some regard as genius.

Packard is a resident of Eaglerock Californina and has claimed that copies of the film can be found, from time to time, at the Bank Of America ATM on Colorado Blvd. I unfortunally gave my copy away and have to actually purchase another. PURCHASE! Thats how good this film is. When have you known me to buy ANY entertainment?

Shadoe Stevens

While he has gone on to have a mediocre voice-over career he will forever be known as Fred Rated of Federated.

A little more about THE 5000 FINGERS OF DR T

Seuss's live action feature film The 5000 Fingers of Doctor T represents the fullest elaboration of Seuss's conception of children as "thwarted people," struggling to find their own voice in a world dominated by dictatorial adult authorities. When we read through Seuss's notes and original drafts for the script, we see strong evidence that he was consciously mapping permissive child rearing doctrines over images associated with the Second World War.

5000 Fingers deals with the plight of an average American boy, Bartholomew Collins (Tommy Rettig), who finds learning to play the piano a threat worse than death.His instructor, Dr. Terwilliker (Hans Conried), is an old school authoritarian, who insists that "practice makes perfect" and who demands constant drill and repetition. The bulk of the film consists of Bartholomew's dream, in which he and the other boys rise up and overthrow the dictatorial Terwilliker and his plans to dominate the world through his music. As Seuss explained in a memo to the film's producer, Stanley Kramer: "The kid, psychologically, is in a box. The dream mechanism takes these elements that are thwarting him and blows them up to gigantic proportions."

If this description foregrounds issues of child psychology, concerns central to the finished film, the early drafts of the script make frequent references to the struggle against fascism. In Bart's waking reality, Dr. T is "not especially frightening," a "tight lipped and methodical looking old gentleman ... no more vicious and harmful than Victor Moore." Once we enter Bart's dream, however, Seuss increasingly characterizes Dr. T as the reincarnation of Der Fuhrer. Seuss describes his kingdom as "plastered with posters, showing Dr. Terwilliger in a Hitler-like dictator's pose." His soldiers wear medals that "resemble an iron cross, only it is engraved with a likeness of Dr. Terwilliger in the center." The mother has a "devotion to the man...bordering on the fanatical," a "gauleiter-like allegiance" which blinds her to her son's agonies. When he is challenged, Dr. T "flies into a Hitlerian rage." He sees the "piano racket" as a scheme for global domination, and his study is decorated with an enormous world map captioned "The Terwilliger Empire of Tomorrow." He has built a massive piano, designed for the enslaved fingers of 500 little boys, upon which he will perform his musical compositions.

Many traces of this Hitler analogy find their way into the final film. The sets are hyperbolic versions of monumental Bauhaus architecture, and the grand procession borrows freely from Leni Rieftenstahl's Triumph of the Will, with his blue helmeted henchmen goose stepping and holding aloft giant versions of his "Happy Fingers" logo. Terwilliger's elaborate conductor's uniform, one reviewer noted, was "a combination of a circus band drum major, Carmen Miranda, and Herman Goering." Most of the Henchmen bear Germanic names. Hans Conried's long thin body and his floppy black hair closely resemble Seuss's PM caricatures of Hitler (minus the mustache). The fact that Conreid had provided some of the narration for Design for Death, performing the voices of the fascist leaders, could only have strengthened the association for contemporary viewers. Even the film's musical score bore strong Germanic associations; its composer, Eugene Hollander, had studied under Richard Strauss, done music for Max Reinhardt in Berlin before the war, and was the musical director for The Blue Angel.

Some of the film's more disturbing images drew on popular memories of the Nazi concentration camps. Arriving by yellow school buses, rather than railway cars, the unfortunate boys are herded through gates, where their comic books, balls, slingshots, and pet frogs are confiscated. Then, they are marched off to their "lock-me-tights" in the dungeon. There, Dr. T dreams up fiendish (and Dante_esque) tortures for all those who refuse to play his beloved keyboard. The captive musicians have sullen eyes and sunken cheeks, lean and gaunt in their prison uniforms.

In constructing the more sympathetic plumber, Zlabadowski, Seuss drew upon other associations with the war. In the first draft of the script, Zlabadowski is described in terms that strongly link him to Eastern Europe. "Shaking his head sadly in deep Slavic gloom," Zlabadowski is "a big shaggy edition of Molotov, a kindly Molotov with the cosmic unhappiness of Albert Einstein." As the script progresses, Zlabadowski abandons all of his Slavic associations, except for his rather distinctive name, becoming a more all-American type, a reluctant patriot who must first shed his isolationist impulses before he can be enlisted as Bart's ally in the struggle to stop Terwilliger. In one of his notes about the script, Seuss summarizes the character: "Z's conflict: Desire to help people. Desire to keep out of trouble. An old soldier trying to be a pacifist. He's tired of war. It's futile." In the early drafts, Zlabadowski knows Terwilliger's evil plans, but he doesn't want to get involved if it means losing his overtime pay for installing the sinks.

In the finished film, many of these adult concerns have vanished. Zlabadowski represents the ideal permissive parent Initially, he is a bit distracted by his work and eager to make a buck, a bit eager to dismiss Bart's warnings as wild eyed fantasies. Ultimately, he becomes a warm-hearted playmate (engaging the boy in a pretend fishing trip) and a wise counselor (helping him concoct from the contents of the boy's pockets a sound-stopping device). Angered by his initial indifference, Bart challenges his adult privileges and sings a song that might have been the anthem for permissive child rearing:



Just because we're kids, because we're sorta small, because we're closer to the ground, and you are bigger pound by pound, you have no right, you have no right to push and shove us little kids around.

Proclaiming children's rights, Bart denounces adult assumptions that deeper voices, facial hair, or wallets justify unreasonable exercises of power over children. Zlabadowski regains his idealism: "I don't like anybody who pushes anybody around." The two cut their fingers with Bart's pocketknife and take a blood oath that binds them together,father and son,in the struggle against Terwillikerism.

In the film's opening scene, Bart off-handedly remarks upon the death of his father, presumably during the war, and Zlabadowski and Terwilliker are cast as good and bad surrogate fathers, respectively. In his nightmare, his piano crazed mother is hypnotized into accepting Terwilliker's hand in marriage, a deal to be consummated immediately following the great concert. Not unlike Lord Droon in The King's Stilts, Terwilliker represents the pre-war Patriarch who demands obedience and silence from his children. In his fantasy, Bart hopes that the more permissive Zlabadowski will fall in love with his mother and become his father, an arrangement consummated by their blood oath. Zlabadowski understands the needs of boys; he represents the manly virtues of fishing and baseball against Dr. Terwilliker's effeminate high culture, defending America against Terwilliker's Germany.

In the end, the task of finding the right father and overcoming the bad patriarch falls squarely on Bart's shoulders. He alone will face down Terwilliker, using his "very atomic" sound-catching device to disrupt the concert and liberate the children. The closing moments, where rebellious children hurl their music sheets in the air, shouting in defiance, stomping on and punching the piano keys, represents one of the most vivid images of resistance in all of American cinema. By this point, Bart's struggle against Terwilliker has absorbed tremendous ideological weight, a struggle of the freedom fighting all American boy (with his red and white striped shirt and his blue pants) against an old world tyrant, the struggle of those who are "closer to the ground" against those who "shout" and "beat little kids about," the struggle of permissive parenting against more authoritarian alternatives.

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