The Big Bus (1976): The Airplane! before Airplane!

Enjoy the Jack Davis artwork for James Frawley's The Big Bus.

The '70s: Decade of disaster.

I've sat through quite a few disaster movies over the years, which is odd since I'm not exactly a great fan of the genre. What can I say? I was born in the 1970s, the decade when producer Irwin Allen became the so-called "Master of Disaster" with such calamitous films as The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). This stuff was all around me when I was growing up, both in movie theaters and on TV. I saw these films whether I wanted to or not.

The "disaster movie" formula is easy enough to understand. Gather a couple dozen familiar actors (generally a mix of major stars and B-listers) and put them in some ridiculously perilous situation, often involving a doomed mode of transportation or some terrible act of God. Focus on a few heartbreaking human stories that are occurring amid this terrible, large-scale event. Throw in a love story or two for good measure. Maybe there's a hero in need of redemption. If possible, include a villain who is either responsible for the problem or who is making things worse for our heroes. Make sure to have some fiery explosions (or crashing waves or falling rocks) and lots of dramatic music, and you've got yourself a movie.

Naturally, the popularity of disaster movies did not escape the attention of comedians and satirists. There were memorable spoofs of these films on Saturday Night Live and The Carol Burnett Show, plus Mad magazine parodies like "Mirthquake," "The Poopsidedown Adventure," and "The Towering Sterno." John Landis' The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) included a mock trailer for an Irwin Allen-type film called "That's Armageddon," including cameos by George Lazenby and Donald Sutherland. And members of the comedy troupes The Credibility Gap and Ace Trucking Company appeared in an obscure movie called Cracking Up (1977), which depicts the events following a massive California earthquake.

The definitive and still most-loved disaster movie parody arrived in 1980 with Airplane!, written and directed by the team of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker, the same guys who had written The Kentucky Fried Movie three years earlier. It's well-known that Airplane! takes much of its plot from the movie Zero Hour! (1957), which had already been remade for television as Terror in the Sky (1971). But what I didn't know until just this week is that Paramount, the studio that released Airplane! to such acclaim, had tried and failed for box office glory with a very similar comedy just four years earlier.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 298: The strange tale of the robotic Tor Johnson

Ben Skora brought Tor Johnson back to simulated life.

Skora: An American original.

The future hasn't happened yet, and I'm beginning to doubt it ever will. I am writing this article in the year 2026 AD. I repeat, TWENTY TWENTY SIX! By now, American life should resemble The Jetsons (1962-1963) or at least Back to the Future Part II (1989). But it very much does not. Instead of flying cars and sassy robot maids, we have data centers and AI slop. What a disappointment. I think we've lost the ability to be excited about technology or awed by progress, thanks in part to the Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world. The futurists didn't account for greedy, soulless tech bros.

So you can imagine my surprise and delight at discovering Ben Skora (1937-2018), a hypnotherapist, record producer, and amateur inventor from Palos Hills, Illinois who became a celebrity in the late 1970s and remained one for decades. Ben's impractical yet intriguing homemade gizmos—servile robots and other wonderfully unnecessary household items—generated a great deal of publicity, both in print and on screen. There is so much material about this guy, easily enough to fill a book.

Over a period of years, Ben turned his suburban home, originally a prefabricated house purchased from the Sears catalog, into a push-button wonderland he jokingly called the "Far Out House." And he did all of this without an engineering degree or professional electronics experience! Ben's strange hobby was well-documented in newspaper articles, magazine articles, and segments on TV shows like NBC's Real People (1979-1984) and Ripley's Believe It or Not (1982-1986). He's also featured in Chris Smith's documentary Home Movie (2001).

In retrospect, it's easy to see why Skora was such a hit with reporters and the public. He was an affable, unpretentious guy who was driven by an irresistible desire to create. He tinkered because his personality would not allow him to do otherwise. He wasn't trying to market or mass produce his machines. His hobby actually cost him money. Above all, Ben embodied the individuality and ingenuity of America itself. He was the friendliest possible face of technology, a real-life Gadgeteer Genius who lived in a real-life Gadgeteer's House. 

Though the press occasionally reduced him to a "wacky inventor" stereotype—and he leaned into that image himself—Ben Skora was a complicated, multifaceted man. He served in World War II and experienced two failed marriages, plus the death of his only son. At least one of his marriages failed because of Ben's time-consuming hobby. Sadly, the automated house that was his life's work was torn down in 2014. Four years later, Ben succumbed to Alzheimer's at age 81. There is no way for me to convey this man's life in one article. I simply want to alert you to his existence.

Enduring the lobotomized American version of 'The Young Ones'

The not-so-great pretenders: Jackie Earle Haley, Nigel Planer, and Robert Bundy.

It's no secret that numerous popular American sitcoms are actually based on successful British shows. If a format worked over there, it could work over here just as easily. Thus, Steptoe and Son (1962-1974) begat Sanford and Son (1972-1977), Man About the House (1973-1976) begat Three's Company (1976-1984), and The Office (2001-2003) begat... well, The Office (2005-2013). But for every success, there are plenty of failures, some of them quite malodorous. And flops don't get any more rank than Oh No, Not Them! (1989), Fox's aborted attempt to remake The Young Ones (1982-1984).

A UK classic, best left alone.

The original UK series, which debuted on BBC2 on November 9, 1982, concerns a quartet of college students living in a filthy, dilapidated rental house in London. Our main characters include pretentious poser Rick (Rik Mayall), anarchic punk rocker Vyv (Ade Edmondson), sad-sack hippie Neil (Nigel Planer), and smooth-talking ladies' man Mike (Christopher Rich). Since these lads rarely if ever attend classes or study, they have plenty of time to do strange, pointless, and revolting things. Rounding out the cast is satirist Alexei Sayle, who torments the boys in a variety of guises, including their pernicious, scheming landlord Jerzei Balowski.

The world depicted in this show is a bizarre, nightmarish one in which nearly anything can happen at any time. The thin "plot" of any given episode is likely to be interrupted by surreal vignettes and cutaway gags. The Young Ones breathlessly juxtaposes elements of situation comedy, sketch comedy, and pure absurdism. Only twelve half-hour episodes were made, but those twelve episodes contain a wealth of material. The only American show I can really compare it to is Aqua Teen Hunger Force. On both Aqua Teen and The Young Ones, the main characters are perfectly capable of creating chaos on their own, but if they don't, strange characters will simply materialize at their doorstep without warning and start causing havoc almost immediately. Tranquility is never an option in the characters' lives.

Despite the extreme Britishness of The Young Ones, including countless references to pop singer Cliff Richard (whose popularity did not cross the pond), the show was a sizable hit when it was rebroadcast on MTV in 1985. Because the show featured onscreen performances by bands like Madness and Motorhead, it fit in quite nicely with the cable network's other music-based programming. Actor Nigel Planer even came over to reprise his sympathetic, Eeyore-like Neil Pye character on the cable network. I certainly have fond memories of watching classic Young Ones episodes like "Sick," "Nasty," and "Bambi" over and over. Was this my introduction to British comedy? Possibly.

The high-stakes hell of 'When Worlds Collide'

George Pal gave us a glimpse of the apocalypse.

"If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done." - Peter Ustinov (1956)

The end of the world. Like it or not, it will happen someday—perhaps tomorrow, perhaps ten thousand years from now. But how? 

"I have a plan!"

I recently rewatched Stanley Kubrick's "nightmare comedy" Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) in which the human race blunders its way into a thermonuclear war that dooms the entire planet. The film's sinister title character (Peter Sellers), an ex-Nazi scientist now working for the US government, outlines an outrageous scheme for preserving "a nucleus of human specimens." It involves relocating a few specially-chosen humans, including top government and military leaders, to mineshafts "thousands of feet deep." There, the survivors could breed "prodigiously" while they wait for the surface world to become habitable again.

Even if Strangelove's perverse plan could work, it's way too late to implement it. By the time he proposes this solution to the sitting American president (also played by Sellers), the human race has about five minutes left to live. If we were serious about Project: Mineshaft, we should have started on it years ago. But we didn't. And so, the human race (presumably) dies out at the end of the movie.

The characters in the classic sci-fi movie When Worlds Collide (1951) are also prepping for the end of the world, but they've gone about it somewhat more sensibly. Emphasis on somewhat. An eminent scientist named Dr. Cole Herndon (Larry Keating of Mr. Ed fame) has determined that a "rogue star" called Bellus and a planet called Zyra are on a collision course with Earth. After a series of catastrophic tidal waves and earthquakes, our world will be totally destroyed by them in eight months. Herndon's "Hail Mary" contingency plan is to put a few humans on a rocket ship, a la Noah's Ark, and take them to Zyra to restart the human race from scratch.

The low-stakes fun of 'Tales of the Wizard of Oz' (1961)

Who says every Oz story has to feel monumental?

A more obscure Baum work.

There have been, let's say, plenty of television, film, and stage adaptations of L. Frank Baum's famed Oz series of children's books. In fact, these adaptations have been crucial to the longevity and popularity of this 126-year-old franchise. A musical stage play based on Baum's first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), was such a success that it directly influenced Baum's sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904). Generations have come to know Baum's characters through the lavish MGM musical The Wizard of Oz (1939). Decades later, author Gregory Maguire introduced a new generation of readers to this world through his novel Wicked (1995), which was later turned into an extremely popular mega-musical and then a duology of blockbuster films.

In short, there's a reason The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has remained consistently in print (and available at bookstores and libraries) for well over a century while Baum's Dot and Tot of Merryland (1901) hasn't. Not that Dot and Tot is without merit. The book is quaintly charming, and it's even illustrated by the same artist, W.W. Denslow, as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It simply didn't inspire a multimedia empire and dozens of bold, revisionist takes the way Baum's previous book did.

Oz adaptations come in all shapes and sizes—some very lighthearted and frivolous, others quite dark and foreboding. There are Oz adaptations for children, other for adults, and some for mixed audiences. There's so much of this material that even the most-dedicated fan will never get through it all. I learned about some of these spinoffs through various DVD releases of The Wizard of Oz. Hidden among the special features, you might find Ted Eshbaugh's 1933 cartoon, Larry Semon's 1925 silent feature, and Chuck Jones' prime time cartoon Off to See the Wizard (1967). More recently, however, I have become aware of a slightly neglected Oz TV series that might appeal to a wider audience if it were better known.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 297: The Crooked Path of Timothy Farrell (1922-1989) [PART 4: THE CONCLUSION]

Doesn't he look like a Mario Puzo character here?

Edward D. Wood, Jr. was not in a good place—careerwise, healthwise, or otherwise—in 1975. He was still writing short stories and articles for various pornographic magazines, along with the occasional dirty paperback, but he wasn't nearly as productive as a writer as he'd been just a few years previously. (Ed was at his most prolific from 1968 to 1973.) Ed's film career by then consisted of making X-rated loops and writing screenplays for other directors. And, by my count, only one more of those scripts would actually be produced in Eddie's lifetime.

As poorly as Ed was doing back then, one of his old cronies from the 1950s, actor Timothy Farrell, was doing even worse. Under his real name, Timothy Sperl, he'd been tried and found guilty of misconduct in his role as a Los Angeles county marshal—illegally dispatching his subordinates to work at campaign events for a politician named Jim Hayes, then covering up the evidence of this. As with the Watergate scandal, which was raging at the same time, the Sperl case was as much about the coverup as the crime itself.

After two months of damning testimony by Sperl's coworkers, Judge Richard A. Gadbois determined that the star of Jail Bait (1954) and Glen or Glenda (1953) had falsified timesheets, misappropriated funds, destroyed radio logs, and interfered with civil service examinations. He was looking at a six-month prison sentence, a $500 fine (that's about $3,200 today), and four years of probation. In addition, he had been publicly humiliated, and his reputation was tarnished beyond repair.

But his story wasn't over. As we shall soon see, there were more twists in the Timothy Sperl saga.

Podcast Tuesday: "Blow Up Your TV"

Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke bicker on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Garry Marshall served a long and productive apprenticeship in show business before creating the megahit Happy Days in the 1970s. He wrote jokes for standup comedians and late night shows, then graduated to writing prime time sitcoms. One of the most famous shows he worked for in the mid-1960s was The Dick Van Dyke Show. Not only was this series a critically-acclaimed classic with very decent ratings, it also put Garry in contact with some people who were important figures in his life, such as creator Carl Reiner and director Jerry Paris.

I've been watching Dick Van Dyke reruns for decades now, but doing These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast has caused me to notice things in the show that I might have missed before. In particular, a 1966 episode called "Bad Reception in Albany" struck me as a precursor to Happy Days. The plot has comedy writer Rob Petrie (Van Dyke) trying and failing to watch a televised fashion show in an Albany, NY hotel overrun with rowdy, drunken conventioneers. It seems that a fraternal organization called the Seals have descended upon Albany the same weekend that Rob is there, causing him no end of trouble. Years later, Happy Days would have its own fraternal organization, the Leopards, and they would get into similar booze-fueled shenanigans.

This week on the podcast, we're talking about "Bad Reception" and the importance of The Dick Van Dyke Show in the history of Happy Days. As usual, this leads to us talking about a whole variety of subjects. If that interests you whatsoever, click the play button below.

Identifying the second-stringers from Little Golden Books

Not all of them are still superstars in 2026.

Like generations of American children since the 1940s, I grew up with Simon & Schuster's Little Golden Books. I was born in the mid-1970s, so my fondest memories of that venerable, much-loved literary franchise are of the titles released during that specific time period. From about 1973 to 1978, the standard back cover art for Little Golden Books featured a train populated by various licensed characters. Just seeing that familiar, friendly picture brings back a wave of nostalgia for me. I must have spent many accumulated hours studying it in my younger days, and I was glad to see it again on social media earlier today.

Upon closer inspection, though, I have a question: Who the hell are some of these characters?