Last Wednesday we screened a 35mm print of Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards (1977). The distributor warned me that their surviving print was pretty rough, but I took a chance on it anyway. I first saw it in Jr. High on 16mm back around 1980 in an auditorium packed with kids all somewhere in the 11 – 14-years-of-age ballpark. Whatever teacher programmed it probably thought it was appropriate for kids because it was an animated PG film about a fantasy world inhabited by elves and wizards. Of course, this was back when PG-rated films still had teeth (more like Jaws), and I’m not going to shy away from saying that, heck yeah, as far as we kids were concerned, this was the funnest thing to have happened at Baseline Jr. High since Mrs. Danielson fell asleep adjusting her bra, and was even more entertaining than Mr. Reno’s stories about the finger tips and maggots that mysteriously found their way into people’s sandwiches (our English teacher claimed the former occurred at a Deli he used to work at while the latter came from an automated sandwich dispensing machine). READ MORE

This year, some might wish more longingly for one fewer excursion in search of something perfect for that special someone or for reasons to be rushing around. Whenever the charged emotions and high expectations overwhelm me at the holidays, I find myself looking for some forms of escape, which, of course, may sometimes be a movie.

There’s a part of me that craves the films of my youth at Christmas, even though not all of them have anything to do with the holiday.  This entry in our Movie Morlocks blogathon generally falls under the heading of Movies I Loved as a Kid (and still do). Intellectually, I can see that each of these films acknowledges that there are similar themes in each person’s life of paradise lost, found, and rediscovered, as well as the mysterious serendipitous events  that connect us and and occasionally give us a glimpse of a deeper understanding of the ebb and flow of life. Having seen more in real life–especially this last year–I can also cherish my visceral, wholly instinctive reaction to these stories and the feelings that they evoke as they unspool on film.  Perhaps you can too :

Mighty Joe Young (1949) is indelibly imprinted on my memory’s hard drive. This film, which used to be broadcast every year at the holidays, is a less ambitious successor to King Kong (1933) with many members of the original team lending a hand, including director Ernest B. Schoedsack, writer and producer Merian C. Cooper, and creator of the original Kong models, Special Effects master, Willis O’Brien. Interestingly, the legendary Ray Harryhausen was “first technician” on this movie, and, as he wrote in his autobiography, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, he saw “Joe as young, mischievous and unaware of his own strength”. I think that Harryhausen, O’Brien and the other special effects men did a great job of making Mighty Joe a more expressive, sensitive, and less adult creature than Kong was in the 1930s pre-code production.

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I am loath to watch anything twice; I’m a compiler, so anything that I willingly watch over and over again is an exception to my rule.  Therefore, my habit of choosing to view the same movies and programs each Christmas holiday season is unusual.  While not all of the following are movies (in the strictest sense), a Christmas without seeing these shows would be breaking a holiday tradition for me.  So here they are: 

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This week’s Morlock assignment: writing about tragedy, horror, death, or disaster in a Disney film. No problem. I remember hearing about how theaters would wait seven years to refurbish their chairs because that was how often Snow White would hit the screens and after each show loads of kids would soak the chairs from the frights they got from that film. One of my film history teachers (the late Stan Brakhage) even claimed that Walt Disney collected medieval torture devices that were specific for children. (Research? Fetish? Quirky collectibles? No idea.) Regardless, I don’t begrudge Disney for scaring the pants off of kids. In fact, I admire it. He knew how to make an impression. Every Halloween season I aspire to do the same by trying to spook every trick-or-treater that comes to my house. Why? Because I follow the golden rule and still treasure my memories of the horrifying hosts who went that extra mile to make me earn my candy. So let’s talk about the creepy stuff in Pinocchio, shall we? READ MORE