Archive for November, 2007
Stars on the Tarmac: 1950s Air Travel & the Global Commodity Intertext
Michael Kackman, University of Texas at Austin — November 29th, 2007|
The earliest steps toward globally-distributed US television came from an unlikely corner of the nascent postwar television industry. Well before the development of international distribution companies and syndication divisions within the major networks, a handful of independents began circulating inexpensive US television programs abroad in the early 1950s. Among the very first of the programs they sold were “B” Westerns, including both those shot specifically for the new medium and recut [...]
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Advertising Hillbillies: Genre, Authorship and Audience
Kyle Barnett, Bellarmine University — November 28th, 2007|
Can the recording industry be considered an author of a given genre? And, if so, how would we map that authorship?
These questions are made trickier if we consider “authorship” to imply decisions made for the long term. Many of the talent scouts that first recorded the ancestral popular music we now know as “country” had little interest in the music beyond selling records and little sense of the music’s importance beyond a few months of sales. This rural music was long ignored by [...]
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Corporate Authorship, Film Adaptation, and Universal Pictures’ The Raven (1935)
Kyle Edwards, Oakland University — November 27th, 2007|
The intentions and unique histories of filmmaking corporations are visible in the products they create. So it is with Universal Pictures’ The Raven (1935), a late entry in the horror cycle inaugurated by the company with Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) and, after Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and The Black Cat (1934), the third adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe by Universal in as many years. In each successive Poe adaptation, the biographical legend of the well-known author became more c [...]
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Live Modern with Jack Webb
Christopher Anderson, Indiana University — November 23rd, 2007|
Live Modern. The slogan of L&M cigarettes in 1958. The enticement of American advertising throughout the twentieth century.
When this episode of Dragnet aired for the first time in April 1958, the sponsors were Post cereals and L&M cigarettes.
Cigarettes and breakfast cereal created American television.
Sometimes we forget this truth.
Watch this segment through to the end – to the moment when Jack Webb, the producer-director, emerges from behind the stoic mask of detectiv [...]
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A Double Drabble* of Bugger All: On Monty Python’s Galaxy Song
John Hartley, Queensland University of Technology (Australia) — November 23rd, 2007|
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
’Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.
A fan is 'a person who’s into something that requires an operational brain and some creativity.' I’m not a fan of Eric Idle, but we were at the Royal Wolverhampton Orphanage Asylum together. His Galaxy Song expresses the ludicrousness of self-loathing that comes from years at an English boarding school. Like Dylan Thomas, Idle wastes no sentiment on that; his ‘bugger a [...]
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Convergence Fashion: Hailing the Gossip Girl Fan
Louisa Stein, San Diego State University — November 22nd, 2007|
Much like Veronica Mars and The OC, Gossip Girl features the lives of the young elite. Through its focus on the multiple viewpoints, Gossip Girl humanizes its wealthy characters, casting wealth and privilege as adolescent constraints, akin to more run of the mill coming of age issues such as sexuality and popularity.
This humanizing of NY's teen royalty allows the program to have it both ways: showcasing an idealized NY society, and yet making the characters accessible. This type of personali [...]
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Indian Idol and Flash Fandom
Aswin Punathambekar, University of Michigan — November 21st, 2007|
In summer 2007, media coverage of Indian Idol-3 focused on how finalist Amit Paul managed to create a space for people in northeast India to cast aside decades-old separatist identities. In Shillong and other northeastern Indian cities, hundreds of people took to the streets to express their support for Amit Paul. Incredulous journalists from mainstream media outlets – who rarely cover northeast India – noted that Paul’s fans seemed to look past linguistic and ethnic identifications.
Fo [...]
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Life on Mars - They Filmed An Alternative Ending?
Matt Hills, University of Cardiff — November 20th, 2007|
This clip pretty much ‘spoils’ the ending of the BBC TV series Life on Mars, but if you’ve seen how that concludes, then this is an intriguing alternative take. It playfully literalises and makes real a piece of disinformation, or a false ‘leak’, from the production team who claimed that an alternative ending had been filmed - apparently it hadn’t - while also putting on-screen something far too culturally threatening to have ever been shown in the actual series. What we see here was [...]
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Celebrating Kandy Fong: Founder of Fannish Music Video
Francesca Coppa, Director of Film Studies, Muhlenberg College. — November 19th, 2007|
Remix culture didn't start with the Internet. Women have been vidding, or making music videos with found footage, since at least 1975, when Kandy Fong made her first slideshows. Inspired by the Beatles filmYellow Submarine, Fong took Star Trek footage from the cutting room floor and synchronized those images to music. Fong performed her shows live at Trek conventions and gatherings, first using one slide projector and then two, clicking between them so she could "cut" faster. By the early 1980s, [...]
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Managing Little Orphan Annie’s excesses
Avi Santo, Old Dominion University — November 30th, 2007