Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 293: The Hall of Fame of Western Film Stars (1969)

Kathy and Ed Wood at Kenne Duncan's wake. Note the book Ed is holding.

Awake, a wake.

There is a sweetly sad quality to the photos of Ed Wood taken in the last decade of his life. Eddie was in freefall by then, physically, personally, and professionally. Years of alcohol abuse had ravaged his face and body, leading to his early death at age 54. His career in show business was faring no better. He was supporting himself entirely through his work in the adult film and publishing industries. And even there, he had to maintain a furious pace just to (almost but not quite) keep up with his creditors. As he spiraled into addiction and poverty, he often took out his frustrations on his wife, Kathy. Ed Wood's last decade was marked by disappointment, uncertainty, violence, and desperation.

And yet, the man in the pictures looks cheerful and content. Not a care in the world, this guy. Sure, you could say that he was simply too soused to worry what was happening to him. He found a fool's paradise at the bottom of a glass and stayed there. But I'd like to think that the optimism that brought him to Hollywood in the 1940s had not abandoned him entirely in the 1970s.

One of the most compelling latter-day photos of Ed Wood was taken at the wake of actor Kenne Duncan in 1972. After years of declining health and declining fortunes, the famed cowboy actor ended his own life by overdosing on barbiturates. Some time later, Eddie and Kathy celebrated his memory by throwing a wake in his honor. They invited such luminaries as Paul Marco, Criswell, David Ward, Nona Carver, and Hope Lugosi. A somewhat grainy, underlit black-and-white photo—complete with handwritten notes by Kathy—captures all of these people, plus figures I believe are Marg Usher (Paul's agent) and actress Mona McKinnon. Eddie, drunk as a lord, is leaning against Kathy and holding a book: Ernest N. Corneau's The Hall of Fame of Western Film Stars (1969). 

Naturally, I was curious. What was this strange, obscure book? What secrets might it contain?

Podcast Tuesday: "Twenty Feet from Fonzie"

A Fonzie presidency would bankrupt this country.

The dinosaurs are long gone, but some of their footprints still remain on the surface of the earth. You don't even have to leave the United States to see some of them. There are dino prints in Connecticut, for god's sake. Think of that: these huge, terrifying creatures lived millions of years ago before going extinct, and yet their tracks are probably within driving distance of a Target today.

I think you know where I'm going with this. The nostalgic sitcom Happy Days (1974-1984) has been off the air, extinct, for over 40 years, and yet its tracks can still be seen. If you know where to look, that is. While the show debuted in January 1974, it didn't really become a multimedia pop cultural phenomenon until 1976 during its third season. This was a pivotal year for Happy Days. The show's breakout character, Fonzie (Henry Winkler), moved in with the Cunninghams, and the entire series was reformatted so that it could be filmed in front of a live, boisterous studio audience. It also gained an immortal catchphrase: "Sit on it!"

The schlockmeisters and opportunists smelled money in the air, and they didn't wait to cash in. Soon, stores were flooded with Happy Days and Fonzie-branded merchandise—some of it authorized, some of it bootleg. In the spring of 1976, London Records wanted a piece of the action, so they released a novelty single called "The Fonz Song" by a manufactured group called The Heyettes. It was a breakthrough hit in several markets and even made the national charts. Was that enough? No. London Records decided that a full-length Heyettes album was in order. The result was Fonzie, Fonzie, He's Our Man. Naturally, we're talking all about it on this week's installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.

Some real talent went into this LP. The Heyettes were accomplished session singers, and the producer and arranger were longtime music industry veterans. But does any of this add up to a great (or even listenable) album? My cohost and I have some thoughts, and you can hear them by clicking on the podcast below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 292: The Lascivious World of A.C. Stevens & Ed D. Wood, Jr. (2008)

Of all the Ed Wood sets ever released, this is definitely one of them.

lascivious [las·​civ·​i·​ous, lə-ˈsi-vē-əs] (adj.):

filled with or showing sexual desire; lewd, lustful

Over the decades, Ed Wood's films have been bundled together in various box sets, first on VHS, then DVD, and now Blu-ray. I've definitely purchased my share of them over the years. Maybe you have, too. There's a strange quality in Eddie's movies that makes you want to see more of them right away, so it makes sense to sell them in bulk. They're like potato chips or pretzels, difficult to stop at just one. Let's see now....

The monolith.

• The first such anthology I ever bought was Rhino's The Ed Wood Collection (1995), a three-tape set that came in a faux-angora box and included Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Glen or Glenda (1953), and Bride of the Monster (1955). That pink, fuzzy monolith still sits among my Wood memorabilia today. I vaguely remember a blue version existing, but I can't find it. Did I dream it?

• Then there was Image Entertainment's The Worst of Ed Wood (2000), a four-DVD set. It contained the same films as the previous Rhino set, plus Jail Bait (1954). Its Plan 9 disc also included the documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood (1992). When I think of this set, I remember buying it at a Borders in Flint, MI on a freezing cold day, using money I'd made as a customer service rep for General Motors.

• Just a few years later, Image released The Ed Wood Box (2004), a six-disc collection that included everything from The Worst of Ed Wood but added Night of the Ghouls (1959) and The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1996). It handily makes the previous Image set obsolete, but I never bought it because I already had Night and Haunted separately.

• A staple of cutout bins for years was Passport Video's two-disc The Ed Wood Collection: A Salute to Incompetence (2007), which included Plan 9, Glenda, Bride, Ghouls, Jail Bait (in its rare director's cut form) and The Violent Years (1956), plus a bonus featurette called The Ed Wood Story. For some reason, this once-plentiful title has become scarce in recent years. A shame, too, as it contains the longer Rhino cut of Glenda rather than the shortened, censored version included in the Image sets.

• The landmark DVD collection that inspired this series of articles was S'more Entertainment's Big Box of Wood (2011), a six-disc set that included Plan 9, Bride, and Jail Bait, but added The Violent Years (1956), The Sinister Urge (1960), Fugitive Girls (1974), Drop Out Wife (1972), Hot Ice (1978), The Snow Bunnies (1972), The Beach Bunnies (1976), Orgy of the Dead (1965), Trick Shooting with Kenne Duncan (1960), and Crossroad Avenger (1953). The set included new introductions (by Ted Newsom) and various commentary tracks, plus trailers and interviews with Dolores Fuller, Joe Robertson, and Kathy Wood.

• It's not a multi-disc set, but After Hours' Cinema's single-disc Ed Wood's Dirty Movies (2014) contained Eddie's final directorial effort, The Young Marrieds (1972), plus two additional titles: Nympho Cycler (1971) and Shot on Location (1972). Eddie's participation in Nympho is undisputed—he cowrote the script and appears on camera in a supporting role—but whether he worked on Shot is controversial.

• The most significant Wood collection of recent years has been Severin's three-disc Blu-ray set, Hard Wood (2024). It contained The Young Marrieds, plus Necromania (1971), The Only House in Town (1971), and Shotgun Wedding (1963), plus a variety of loops, featurettes, and commentary tracks. 

I think you can agree, that's a lot of Ed Wood collections and box sets. And there are still more I don't own, like The Ed Wood Curiosities Collection (2023), which adds the much-disputed Revenge of the Virgins (1959) to the mix. Then there's The Ed Wood Collection, Volume One (2009); The Ed D. Wood Jr. Collection (year unknown); and Ed Wood: The Dark Collection (unknown). Most of these are simply recycling the same old titles: Plan 9, Bride, Glenda, the usual suspects. But today, I want to talk about a three-disc DVD collection that's been largely ignored by the Ed Wood fan community.

The value of art can't be listed, measured, graded, or ranked... and we need to stop pretending it can be

This might or might not be the greatest movie of all time. That's up to you to decide.

The New York Times recently released its list of the 100 greatest television shows of the 21st century. In case you haven't read it yet, here's a spoiler: it's pointless, meaningless horse manure. Judging by my social media feed the last couple of days, people seem to have forgotten that. There is a widespread delusion that The New York Times is somehow "in charge" of which shows are important or worth watching. 

Reality check: It isn't. You are. You, the person reading this article now, get to decide which are the greatest TV shows of this century. The ones you watch, the ones you like, the ones that mean something to you—those are the greatest. Never ever lose sight of that. The New York Times doesn't know diddly. They can't. It's unknowable. You can only know which shows you think are the greatest; you don't get to decide for anyone else.

There's a British film magazine called Sight and Sound published by the BFI since 1952. Every ten years, they release a list of the greatest films of all time. In the most recent one from 2022, the winner was Chantal Akerman's deliberately slow and methodical art film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Many disagreed with this choice, and they expressed their anger in various articles and videos. Bizarrely, their wrath was largely aimed at Akerman's film, as if the movie had arrogantly elected itself the greatest of all time. Instead, the haters should have been angry with a stupid system that dupes us into thinking that the Sight and Sound poll is somehow meaningful. It's not. It's just the fancy version of an internet listicle. 

The strange, twisted world of Beatles soundalikes!

These lovely ladies are not The Beatles, as you may have guessed.

I wish I had a great story about becoming a Beatles fan, but in truth, I found the group's music in a clunky, roundabout way. That's the case with most of my lifelong interests. In the late 1980s, when I was in junior high school, my older sister briefly became friends with a somewhat artsy girl whom I will call Willow. That friendship ended acrimoniously, but it lasted just long enough for Willow to dub some cassettes of a few Beatles albums for my sister. And she, in turn, dubbed some copies for me. 

That's how I first heard Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), Abbey Road (1969), The Beatles (White Album) (1968), and Rubber Soul (1965): through muddy, third-generation cassettes that I listened to on a portable tape player. I can still remember how I'd listen to "Within You, Without You" and imagine myself as an English secret agent deployed to India, chasing some scoundrel through a public market. There was just something about that track, with its exotic instrumentation and dry, reserved vocals, that ignited my imagination. 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 291: "I Woke Up Early the Day I Died - An Ed Wood Jr. Inspired Horror Short Story" (2002)

Kailleaugh Andersson took Ed Wood to a strange place: Scotland.

There's a whole universe out there of Ed Wood-inspired fanart: comics, music, film, plays, etc. And I've reviewed a great deal of that material in this series. But not all of this stuff reaches me on its own. Far from it. Occasionally, readers of this column will hip me to some bit of obscure Woodiana that I might not otherwise have heard of. Recently, for example, the redoubtable Bob Blackburn told me about a short story called "I Woke Up Early the Day I Died" by Scottish author Kailleaugh Andersson that is available on Amazon for the Kindle. The story's two-star rating wasn't promising, but the $0.99 price tag was, so I took the leap of faith.

I could not find out much background information on either the story or its author. Kailleaugh Andersson once maintained a personal website, but this has not been updated in years. His Amazon biography describes him as a prolific horror author whose stories have been published (by the hundreds!) since the 1980s, sometimes in anthologies, other times in magazines or webzines. His wife, Alex Severin, has a number of books available on Amazon and still seems to be active. Maybe Kailleaugh is, too. But is his Ed Wood-inspired story worth your time and your 99 cents? Let's find out!

Podcast Tuesday: "Upstairs, Downstairs" or "Encyclopedia Blues"

Debra Jo Rupp, Marion Ross, and Kurtwood Smith on That '70s Show.

Happy Days (1974-1984) was part of a nostalgia cycle that started in the late 1960s and kept going well into the 1980s, leaving numerous TV shows, movies, stage musicals, and albums in its wake. When Happy Days finally breathed its last in the summer of 1984, you'd think the cycle was truly over, too. Nope. Not even close. Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future (1985) showed that there was plenty of juice left in that particular turnip. Stand by Me (1986) and Dirty Dancing (1987) proved it was no fluke. With The Wonder Years (1988-1993), nostalgia returned to television. By then, the bygone era being wistfully evoked was the late 1960s.

And so it continued. One of the big trends of the 1990s was nostalgia for the 1970s, though the nostalgia for that decade was about half-sincere and half-sarcastic. The pinnacle of this phenomenon was Fox's rambunctious comedy That '70s Show (1998-2006). Much more so than The Wonder Years—which was a thoughtful, occasionally weighty series—That '70s Show was the obvious spiritual successor to Happy Days. Like Happy Days, it followed a group of average Midwestern teenagers through various social, romantic, scholastic, and domestic adventures. Both shows were even set in Wisconsin and both shows existed largely to entertain rather than educate or enlighten.

During its initial run, Happy Days acknowledged its sitcom roots by welcoming classic guest stars like Danny Thomas, Elinor Donahue, Harriet Nelson, and Jane Wyatt. That '70s Show did something very similar by casting Marion Ross from Happy Days as Bernice, the demanding mother of patriarch Red Forman (Kurtwood Smith). In the November 1998 episode "Sunday, Bloody Sunday," Bernice has a longstanding grudge against Red's wife Kitty (Debra Jo Rupp), and it's up to Red and Kitty's son Eric (Topher Grace) to keep the peace. Or try to.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we discuss That '70s Show and Marion Ross' participation therein. We review "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" and talk about how our feelings toward That '70s Show have evolved over the years. We invite you to join us.

A weird, forgotten chapter of 'Simpsons' history has been rediscovered

The Simpsons consult a family therapist in this forgotten 1989 cartoon.

By the time cartoonist Matt Groening unleased The Simpsons on an unwitting world in 1987—it debuted as a segment on Fox's live-action sketch comedy The Tracey Ullman Show—the era of the theatrical animated short was long over. Movie audiences of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s were accustomed to getting cartoons before features, and studios like Disney, MGM, and Warner Bros. famously produced them by the hundreds. Characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Tom & Jerry thrived in this medium for decades. This was an era we now call the Golden Age of Animation.

But animation was commonplace on television by the 1960s. Ex-MGM animators Joseph Hanna and William Barbera proved that cheap, made-for-TV 'toons could be successful, and other producers followed suit. People who wanted to see cartoons could do so at home whenever they wanted, so movie studios phased out their animated shorts over the course of that turbulent decade. From the 1970s on, theatrical cartoons were parceled out only as occasional treats, usually in conjunction with children's films. That's the way it still is today. If you see a Pixar feature, for example, you expect a short cartoon first. But you won't get one with most live-action movies.