Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Film Oddity
Saw Pride of the Yankees this evening at the Academy. Which was cool, and all, but I also got to hear Ronald Reagan talk about "our great president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt." No kidding. In Beyond the Line of Duty, the 1942 Academy Award winner for live-action two-reeler. Reagan narrated it, and it featured an excerpt from one of Roosevelt's radio addresses. I'm betting it's the only time they worked together. The other short subjects, also from 1942: Speaking of Animals and their Families, a Tex Avery animation + live footage thing; it's not clear from the credits whether he worked on this one but it was part of a series that he brought to Paramount around 1940, when Warner Brothers passed. And Tulips Shall Grow, a George Pal stop motion thing that starts out silly but ends up being about the Nazis (or "the screwballs," cause they're animated ball bearings and screws that goosestep around). Tulips Shall Grow is pretty great, and Beyond the Line of Duty is pretty cheeseball, but where else are you going to hear Reagan praise Roosevelt?
Incidentally, I really wish they'd bring back shorts at the beginning of movies; it's a very nice way to ease the audience into moviegoing mode. I've been enjoying the mini-renaissance shorts have been undergoing thanks to the internet (and animation has been undergoing thanks to the internet and flash). Pixar has made an effort to let their animators test-run stuff with shorts that run in theaters; why not other studios?
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Incidentally, I really wish they'd bring back shorts at the beginning of movies; it's a very nice way to ease the audience into moviegoing mode. I've been enjoying the mini-renaissance shorts have been undergoing thanks to the internet (and animation has been undergoing thanks to the internet and flash). Pixar has made an effort to let their animators test-run stuff with shorts that run in theaters; why not other studios?
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