So I watched 'Coyote vs. Acme' and...

Wile E. Coyote and Will Forte team up in Coyote vs. Acme.

An uphill climb to the big screen.

It's not often I review recent movies on this blog. Then again, it's rare that I actually watch any film made in this century. Or this millennium, come to think of it. It's not that I'm against current movies; I just have so much old stuff to review that I don't get around to the new stuff that much.

I made an exception for Dave Green's Coyote vs. Acme (2026), the long-delayed feature film that Warner Bros. shelved for tax purposes several years ago, now finally released through the intercession of a company called Ketchup Entertainment. If you're reading this blog, you probably don't need me to explain what this movie is. You already know the characters and the basic plot. Like me, you grew up with Looney Tunes and its cadre of wacky animated characters: Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc. You're probably also familiar with the fictional Acme Corporation and its wide variety of faulty products.

So what did I think of Coyote vs. Acme? Short answer: I liked it. It's inventive, amusing, and well-made, and an elaborate tribute to the cartoons I loved in my youth. I recommend it unreservedly to Looney Tunes fanatics, especially those who also happen to be fans of actor and comedian Will Forte. In the past, Will has demonstrated his range on such shows as Saturday Night Live, The Great North, and The Last Man on Earth, plus such feature films as MacGruber (2010) and Nebraska (2014). If you've witnessed Mr. Forte at work, you likely do not need to be sold on his talents.

Do I have anything of particular value to say about Coyote vs. Acme? Any special insight to bring to this material? Well...

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 288: 'Invisible Ghost' (1941) and 'Deanimated' (2002)

Artist Martin Arnold did some interesting things to The Invisible Ghost (1941).

It was a long way down for Bela Lugosi. We know that his Hollywood career peaked with his indelible, much-imitated portrayal of the title role in Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) for Universal. Over time, however, the Hungarian actor's fortunes were plagued by numerous factors: typecasting, shifting audience tastes, plus Lugosi's thick accent and ruinous drug addiction. By the 1950s, when he started working with Edward D. Wood, Jr., his once-sparkling career was utterly in the doldrums. Any work was welcome. Hence Glen or Glenda (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955), and the posthumously released Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

But Bela's career was vast and varied. By the time he made Dracula, he'd already accumulated numerous movie credits, foreign and domestic. From 1917 to 1921, he appeared in silent films made in Hungary and Germany. From 1923 onward, he appeared in American-made films, first silent then sound. And all this was in addition to maintaining an extremely active stage career. 

In the turbulent decades between Dracula and Glen or Glenda, Lugosi made dozens of films of wildly varying quality, ranging from major studio productions to low-budget B-movies and serials. In 1941, Lugosi began a productive if not exactly glamorous association with a Poverty Row studio called Monogram Pictures. Nine films in total eventuated from this. For a detailed and thoughtful analysis of this era, I'd highly recommend Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Guffey's Bela Lugosi and the Monogram Nine (2019). 

Podcast Tuesday: "We Have Nothing To Fear But OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT THING OVER THERE?"

Erin Moran in Galaxy of Terror (1981).

The actors on long-running sitcoms can get antsy sometimes. Playing the same character every week, year after year. Same jokes, same stories. It gets old after a while. Worse yet, the public gets the idea that playing this one character is all you can do. There is no surer career-killer than being typecast in a sitcom role. And so, TV actors tend to glom onto whatever movie offers come their way. Anything to prove they have a little range.

During his seven-season run on Happy Days, for instance, Ron Howard appeared in Eat My Dust (1976), The Shootist (1976), and More American Graffiti (1979) as well as the made-for-TV movies Huckleberry Finn (1975) and I'm a Fool (1977). He also directed the made-for-TV movie Cotton Candy (1978) and the feature film Grand Theft Auto (1977). Meanwhile, Ron's costar Henry Winkler stayed for all 11 seasons of Happy Days but still managed to find some extracurricular acting work, like the movies Heroes (1977) and The One and Only (1978), plus the made-for-TV movie An American Christmas Carol (1979).

But what of young Erin Moran, who played Joanie Cunningham on Happy Days? People may think that this sitcom and its spinoff Joanie Loves Chachi were the only major projects Erin ever worked on. But her resume is more diverse than that. For instance, between the eighth and ninth seasons of the show in 1981, Erin acted in a sci-fi thriller called Galaxy of Terror produced by Roger Corman, who had previously produced both Grand Theft Auto and Eat My Dust.

As you may have already guessed by now, we are reviewing Galaxy of Terror on this week's installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. Hit the play button down there to learn more.

The enduring, plain jane beauty of "Johnny Angel"

Shelley Fabares croons "Johnny Angel" on The Donna Reed Show.

Actress Shelley Fabares, who died on August 22 at the age of 82, never considered herself much of a singer, despite the fact that she scored a #1 hit single in America. In interviews, she talked about how the producers of The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966) strongarmed both her and costar Paul Petersen into recording pop singles. The makers of the sitcom were apparently eager to replicate the multimedia success of Ricky Nelson from The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet and made it clear that, if Shelley didn't comply, she'd be written out of the show. And so, in late 1961, she became a reluctant pop star. Shelley recalled being extremely nervous to step into an actual recording studio, surrounded by talented professional musicians, but she somehow got through it.

Shelley's big musical moment.

The song she recorded, a winsome ballad called "Johnny Angel," debuted on February 1, 1962 during a fourth season episode of The Donna Reed Show called "Donna's Prima Donna." The public's response was simply overwhelming. By April 1962, "Johnny Angel" was the most popular song in America. Shelley was still no singer, and her music career was not sustainable for long. While she had a few more charting singles, including a direct sequel to "Johnny Angel," Shelley largely stuck to acting for the rest of her life. Later in her career, she was a regular on the popular ABC sitcom Coach, which ran from 1989 to 1997. Shelley Fabares' musical legacy is largely limited to this one song: two minutes and 19 seconds of audio cotton candy. 

As for The Donna Reed Show, it lasted four more seasons and eventually became a staple of syndicated reruns. I'm sure many people of my generation, born well after the original run of the show, became familiar with Donna Reed because of its frequent airings on Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite. What distinguishes this series is that it has nothing to distinguish it. Unlike The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, it is not built around a wild comedian with an over-the-top personality. It doesn't tap into "kid logic" the way Leave it to Beaver and Dennis the Menace do. It doesn't even have an unusual family structure, like My Three Sons or The Brady Bunch. Nope, it's just an unadorned, straight-down-the-line sitcom about a nuclear family in mid-20th-century America. This is exactly the kind of blandly wholesome show that inspired Gary Ross' film Pleasantville (1998).

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 287: 'Songs from the Ed Wood Zone' (2007)

The gang's all here! (artwork by Libby Reid)

There's something about Ed Wood, specifically the low-budget sci-fi/horror films he made in the 1950s, that inspires creativity in others. But why is that? I think it's because artists look at Ed and see a man who created highly distinctive, idiosyncratic work despite every conceivable obstacle. People watch his cheap but endearing movies and think, "He somehow got this insane movie made and released. What's my excuse?"

Even in his prime, Eddie had little money or access to resources, so his films feature laughable props, wobbly sets, and frequent continuity errors. His actors are often misfits and eccentrics, people who look and speak so strangely that they barely seem to belong to the human race. And Eddie's scripts, both in their plots and their dialogue, represent the deeply weird and personal sensibility of the author. Ed Wood just had a kooky, cockeyed way of looking at the world, and he managed to incorporate his own off-kilter ideas into stories of aliens, zombies, monsters, and flying saucers. Add to this the fact that Ed Wood was a cross-dressing alcoholic, and it's a minor miracle that his movies exist at all. But they do.

Over the years, I have reviewed numerous Ed Wood-inspired works, ranging from comic books to short films. Today, however, I am turning my attention to an obscure EP from 2007 called Songs from the Ed Wood Zone, which contains ditties about Tor Johnson, Bela Lugosi, and more. What, you've never heard of it? Well, I only encountered it because it kept turning up in my search results when I was looking for other Ed Wood-related material online. At first, I'd find it a little annoying ("Oh, not this again!"), but then I realized I should actually listen to the damned thing.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 286: Searching for details in 'Glen or Glenda' (1953)

The paintings of Frank Moss Bennett play an important role in Glen or Glenda.

Something strange happens to me when I watch the same movie too many times. Eventually, the plot, dialogue, and characters become second-nature, and I start noticing all the other stuff in the movie—the props, sets, costumes, etc. A similar thing happened when I screened all 255 episodes of Happy Days (1974-1984) for my podcast. Over the course of watching 11 seasons, I started caring less and less about the characters and their problems and began to focus my attention on what was happening in the margins of the show. (Wasn't that figurine on the other side of the living room last week? What happened to the recliner? Which magazine is that on the coffee table?)

And so, this week, I've decided to go rooting through Ed Wood's debut feature, Glen or Glenda (1953), in search of minutiae. I've certainly watched this movie enough times to start noticing all these little incidental details. But my interest in these things is not merely trivia for the sake of trivia. I've said that each movie—no matter how fantastic the plot or outrageous the characters—is a documentary of its own time and its own making. When I identify a prop or background detail in one of Ed Wood's movies, I get a clearer vision of the (now mostly vanished) world Eddie and his actors and crew members inhabited.

So let's get started, eh?

Los Cos: The original 'Fat Albert' special from 1969 has resurfaced!

Fat Albert bursts onto the screen in 1969.

A Cosby album.

Long before his name became associated with the drugging and raping of women, comedian Bill Cosby (born 1937) was known as a purveyor of warm, relatable humor about the day-to-day foibles of mid-20th-century American life. Leaning heavily on anecdotes from his own experiences, he talked about such subjects as sports, driving, childhood, marriage, parenthood, etc. in that friendly, conversational cadence of his. During a time of tremendous racial strife in this country, Cosby's act transcended color lines and appealed to a broad spectrum of the public.

In the 1960s, Cosby emerged as one of the top stand-up comics in America, headlining at nightclubs and appearing frequently on talk shows and variety shows. He also released a series of well-received comedy albums, starting with Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow... Right! (1963). Meanwhile, his acting career took off with his groundbreaking dramatic role on I Spy (1965-1968). In short, Bill Cosby was big but nowhere near as big as he'd one day become. Ironically, his next major step forward came from looking backward.

In his act, Cosby frequently talked about his youth, growing up poor in North Philadelphia in the 1940s and '50s. He would regale his audiences with stories about his rambunctious childhood buddies, including Dumb Donald, Old Weird Harold, and the jubilant but massively overweight Fat Albert, the latter of whom was known for his catchphrase: "Hey, hey, hey!" Soon, thanks to these standup routines, several of which wound up immortalized on LPs, all of America was familiar with Bill Cosby's childhood.

Podcast Tuesday: "Father and Child Reunion"

In 1994, Henry Winkler was once again ready for his closeup.

There's such a thing as playing a character too well. When Jim Parsons—now and forever associated with his nerdy Sheldon Cooper character from The Big Bang Theory—hosted Saturday Night Live in 2014, he sang a song called "I'm Not That Guy," an ode to actors like himself who have been hopelessly typecast in sitcom roles. The lyrics reference Jaleel White from Family Matters, Jason Alexander from Seinfeld, and Henry Winkler from Happy Days. As Parson puts it: "Henry Winkler as the Fonz/The epitome of cool/But in real life, he was a nice Jewish boy who went to Yale Drama School."

It's true that, when Happy Days was cancelled in 1984, the news hit Henry Winkler very hard. He was so well-known as Fonzie that he didn't think the public would ever accept him as another character. And so, after the eleventh and final season of Happy Days wrapped, Henry walked away from acting for about a decade. He reinvented himself as a director and producer, jobs that kept him in showbiz but off-camera. All that Yale acting training down the drain.

But in 1994, Henry decided the time was right to come back to acting in a big way, taking the lead role in a Fox sitcom called Monty. Sensing it would have been disastrous to play a character even remotely similar to Fonzie, Winkler portrayed someone who was almost the complete opposite: an uptight conservative talk show host named Monty Richardson. The sitcom depicts Monty's professional life (where his coworkers barely tolerate him) and his home life (where his wife and children barely tolerate him). At the heart of the show is Monty's conflict with his liberal, college-age son Greg (pre-Friends David Schwimmer), newly engaged to even-more-liberal Geena (China Kantner). 

Obviously, Monty was a major change in direction for Henry Winkler. But was it a good one? That's what we're trying to determine on this week's installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. You can find out what we thought by clicking the play button below.