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 the 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.

1970s Hardee's commercials were beautifully chaotic

Gilbert Giddyup (left) and Speedy McGreedy shill for Hardee's.

Hardee's was not part of my childhood, at least not to any great extent. The restaurant chain had only a marginal presence in mid-Michigan in the 1970s and 1980s, lagging behind McDonald's and Burger King, plus KFC, Wendy's, Arby's, Taco Bell, and numerous others. I can only remember going to Hardee's with my family on a handful of occasions in my youth. A trip there was decidedly out of the ordinary. A big deal, you might say.

I cannot even recall seeing a single TV commercial for Hardee's when I was growing up. While I was very familiar with the antics of Ronald McDonald, Grimace, and the Hamburglar, I was denied the animated adventures of such Hardee's mascots as Gilbert Giddyup, Speedy McGreedy, and Supermouth. Were these Hardee's characters part of your childhood? Did you dream about them the way I used to dream of the residents of McDonaldland? 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 285: The weird, wild music of 'Necromania' (1971)

The music in Ed Wood's Necromania (1971) is drawn from a number of sources.

Back in 2019, I assembled a soundtrack album for Ed Wood's 1971 pornographic film Necromania and posted it to SoundCloud for other fans to enjoy. Following the template of the 1995 Orgy of the Dead soundtrack from Strangelove Records, I took the audio directly from the movie itself and included both music cues and dialogue excerpts. Response to the project was, let's say, muted. While I personally find this subject quite fascinating, it's not necessarily of much interest to the average person. Even many Wood fans steer clear of Eddie's adult movies, so the prospect of a Necromania soundtrack is not all that appealing to them.

Nevertheless, in 2026, I am bravely revisiting the topic. Music identification has come a long way in seven years, and it is now possible to find the actual titles and artists of the songs heard in the movie. At least some of the time, that is. I should clarify, for those who haven't seen it, that Necromania relies entirely on stock music. That's no surprise. While Bride of the Monster (1955) has an original score by Frank Worth, most of Eddie's classic films such as Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) use so-called library music.