Noir Dame Blog

Retro-inspired culture and media – audio drama, classic TV and film

Christmas music. Some people hate it, most of us love it, but we get tired of hearing the same fifteen songs being recorded and rerecorded by different artists and overplayed on the radio. So I went on a hunt. Thanks to the generosity of folks who have placed rare gems on the web, I’ve collected a stack of fun videos that are not the same fifteen songs about Christmas, New Year’s, and enjoying the winter holidays… not the ones typically played in the US (the UK and Ireland seem to rotate more of their music, so some of the tracks may be more familiar to anyone reading in those countries!) They’ve been assembled into playlists, so you can crank up the volume on your computer speakers, or play it on your phone. All in all, it’s well over two hours of music. Consider it just one of our presents back to you!

There are fifteen interesting tracks from the 1940s you may not know as well here, bookended by the Andrews Sisters, who sing both “Christmas Island” and the “Merry Christmas Polka”.

And here’s a list of lesser-known 1950s Christmas and other holiday tunes, such as Stan Freberg’s “Green Christmas,” Gracie Fields’ “Little Donkey,” Joni James’ “Nina Non,” Cathy and Elliot Lewis (of OTR / radio drama fame) wishing us “Happy Holidays”, and Louis Armstrong’s “Cool Yule”.

The tracks spanning the 1960s, and into 1970 proper, are a wide range of musical styles, and show a little of what was going on in the world then. Some tracks include The Marcels’ “Merry Twistmas,” Paul and Paula’s “Holiday Hootenanny”, Bing Crosby’s fun “Christmas Dinner Country Style”, Buck Owens’ “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy,” and yes, the Royal Guardsmen’s “Snoopy’s Christmas”. This last was a sequel to “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron,” and reflects the real-life Christmas armistice of World War I.

Then this grouping, of the 1970s and 1980s, which contains as just a smattering, Jethro Tull’s “Ring Out Solstice Bells,” David Essex’s “A Winter’s Tale”, Da Yooper’s “Rusty Chevrolet,” Jona Lewie’s “Stop the Cavalry”, Boney M’s “Zion’s Daughter”, Chris de Burgh’s “A Spaceman Came Travelling,” Merle Haggard’s “Santa Claus and Popcorn,” Sting’s “Gabriel’s Message,” “What Can You Get a Wookiee for Christmas”, and “Santa Claus Must Be Polish” by Bobby Vee. It also has one cheat: it ends with “Christmas Wrapping,” by the Waitresses. While it’s been covered by the Spice Girls and by the Donnas, it’s still an offbeat classic, and while it hits heavy rotation in some markets, others don’t play it so often. This is an interesting article that goes into the “how” of “Christmas Wrapping” – hosted on the songwriter’s website.

Reporter Ike Pappas has passed away. Pappas isn’t well known today, but did the bulk of his work in better times, after Edward R. Murrow’s passing, but when CBS was still considered a top-flight news organization. In 1987, along with hundreds of others, Pappas was fired by new CBS head Laurence Tisch after more than twenty years of service.

His most famous moment was after the assassination of John F. Kennedy; as one of many reporters waiting in a Dallas Police department basement, he asked suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, “You have anything to say in your defense?” and then watched as Oswald was gunned down by Jack Ruby. The startling report can still be heard on the below video:

As a “witness to history,” this report would remain Pappas’ main legacy, but he continued to pass along important news stories to the public. Fortunately, you can hear another major piece from his career, his 1967 documentary “The Songs of Vietnam War,” online. (The website is owned by former ARVN – American Forces Vietnam Network – reporter Bob Morecock, now a psychologist teaching at Houston Community College.)

Meanwhile, two other prominent voices were silenced – “Smokey and the Bandit” actor-singer Jerry Reed and Don LaFontaine, the king of movie trailers. It’s hard to imagine a movie trailer not using LaFontaine’s characteristic starter, “In a world…”

Wow, I was wondering why the theme song from Superman kept chunneling through my head today. I figured it was because of the Alamo Drafthouse’s plan to show the original 1978 movie outdoors, in one of those great free movies for the community events… I love it when cities and town provide this kind of chummy entertainment!

But speaking of chummy entertainment, if I were only closer to Boston, I’d be heading out to Arlington to see LokiArts’ staging of “Superman: The Musical”. That’s right!

“It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman!” first debuted in 1966 – during the same period that pop art TV show Batman was POW! THWACK! BIFF!-ing its competitors. Its composer, Charles Strouse, was riding high on the success of “Bye Bye Birdie”, so the musical arrived at Alvin Theater, on Broadway. And no, it didn’t close after one night, either!

“It’s a Bird…” was later made into a panned television movie in the mid-1970s. Paddy Chayefsky’s Network suddenly begins to seem a lot more believable, heh? You can find snippets of this version – nowhere near as classy-looking as the Broadway production – on Youtube, but it has limited appeal – kind of like the Star Wars Holiday Special or the famous “ashcan” Fantastic Four movie made by Roger Corman. Mostly, it’s intriguing to consider the possibilities of Lesley-Ann Warren as Lois Lane and Loretta Swit as Lan… uh, “Sidney Carleton”? Not Lana Lang? Huh. If you’re a M*A*S*H aficionado you know Swit can pull off red hair believably, as did everyone else in the sitcom cast.

The Superman Homepage has a run down of all the songs and the original cast, with pictures. So if you’re in New England – what are you waiting for?

If you’re still not convinced – well, Charles Strouse was no one-trick pony, and the songs are excellent, catchy and surprisingly lyrical. He’s also known for writing the musical “Applause”, based on the flick All About Eve, a Best Musical Tony-winner which also earned Lauren Bacall a Tony of her own. Strouse’s biggest flop, the underrated “Nick and Nora”, has lately gained some cult status. Strangely enough, he’s also known for cowriting the theme song to All in the Family. Maybe not so strange. I hear Alan Thicke wrote a song or two.

I recently watched the miniseries of The Andromeda Strain, and though I admire many of the actors who were involved with the project, the reason for making such a remake still eludes me. The original movie was fine as it was, and plenty creepy — and some of those scary bits were removed in the 2008 miniseries. As political commentary, it was still nowhere near as witty or scary as the BBC’s End Day.

There’s word of a reimagined Blake’s Seven on Sky TV in Britain. That’s one SF piece that would be intriguing and worthwhile to see with new special effects – as opposed to Doctor Who, where the effects added to the overall charm. It’s also the most challenging aspect for new viewers of the show to deal with.

Otherwise, there’s no reason that Blake’s Seven couldn’t have the critical acclaim of the current and challenging Battlestar Galactica or Firefly. Certainly, with its emphasis on politics and morality riddles, it’s not a show that only science fiction fans could enjoy.

Plus, that means the original series would probably be released to the US on DVD. Amazingly, despite fans that have collected the show avidly since it was first aired on WGBH-Boston in the early 1980s, Blake’s Seven is still not available in the US.

“How to Get into Rebel Space Opera Blake’s Seven” is an excellent introduction to this series, which has been described as both “Robin Hood in space”, “witty” and “nihilist”. It arguably inspired such later shows as Crusade, but one fun way of viewing Blake’s Seven is to imagine that the Federation of Star Trek has become hopelessly corrupted… in fact, doesn’t the Blake’s Seven symbol kind of look like a side-turned Federation symbol? hmm.

While it’s not quite as difficult to imagine as a non-Shatner “Captain Kirk”, it’s interesting to speculate who would play Blake and Avon, as well as other pivotal characters such as Cally, Jenna and Vila. But particularly Blake. Like the character of Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, his early appearance and character is deceptive. Anna Chancellor has already been bandied about as a worthy Servalan, the scheming villain of the piece.

With Richard Widmark’s passing at 93, and announcement of Charlton Heston’s recent death, we’ve lost two more silver screen legends.

As for Heston, one sad bit is that his recent fame (or infamy, depending on your views) working for the National Rifle Association, has overshadowed his legacy of early civil rights activism. And unfortunately, because of the close timing, we have already moved on from honoring Richard Widmark.

Born in Minnesota, Widmark got his start as an radio actor in New York and Chicago — first with a friend, then working steadily in shows like Gangbusters and Inner Sanctum. For him, the big gamble was to walk away after ten years of radio work, to even bigger potential in a little Hollywood film noir called Kiss of Death. While Don Ameche thrived after moving from radio to Hollywood, it hadn’t always worked out for other radio and stage stars: Les Tremayne had trouble finding equivalent success; and arguably the film world, post-Citizen Kane, was not so kind to Orson Welles. Well, the rest is history, with a string of excellent performances in movies like the unusual Panic in the Streets, Halls of Montezuma, Road House, Judgment at Nuremberg and The Bedford Incident.

While Widmark will probably be popularly remembered as a nasty hoodlum from Kiss of Death, in real life he was a stand up character. Sidney Poitier, his costar in No Way Out (1950) still notes Widmark’s warm hospitality and friendship in welcoming him to Hollywood. When they later costarred in Bedford Incident (1965), the ink that signed the federal Civil Rights Act into law was still wet on the paper, and Martin Luther King was now a household name encouraging interracial dialogue… but Poitier and Widmark were already old friends. Widmark was indeed a good egg.

Speaking of friendship, there’s another person of note who passed away recently, whose real life was as heroic and complex as any of Widmark’s greatest roles.

Dith Pran, the Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist from Cambodia, who helped tell of the “Killing Fields”, died last Sunday of pancreatic cancer at 65. Born near the historic and beautiful temples of Angkor Wat, Dith first trained as a translator, then began working closely with journalists, learning along the way to take photos. In 1972 he met Sidney Schaumberg, a journalist for the New York Times. They worked together for some time, even as the situation in Cambodia deteriorated, and became close friends. At one point Dith saved Schaumberg’s life by convincing soldiers not to shoot. When Phnom Penh, the capital, was overtaken by Khmer Rouge forces, Schaumberg was thrown out of the country, lucky to have survived in one piece. Other journalists, both Cambodian and foreign, were killed under the new regime.

Dith managed to survive the next four years as a virtual slave in the countryside, while Schaumberg agitated for his release and to get news out to the rest of the world of Cambodia’s misery. Under the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia had begun again at “Year Zero”, and between 1 and 2 million Cambodians – figures vary – died of genocide or starvation. Fifty of Dith’s relatives died during the genocide.

Miraculously, in 1979, Dith was able to escape to Thailand, then with Schaumberg and the New York Times’ help, he started a new life in the United States. His story was chronicled in the movie The Killing Fields.

To the last, with his new organization, and another one he was trying to build, Dith wanted people to know what had happened in Cambodia, and wanted the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge to be brought to justice.

The New York Times has put up a short video called “The Last Word” . It’s worth taking ten minutes out of your day to watch. Dith Pran was a true hero.