My husband and I were enjoying a lovely Friday evening at home flipping through channels when we landed on The Pelican Brief. To be honest, I have only ever started one John Grisham novel. Unfortunately, I got busy and never finished it. For some reason, The Pelican Brief piqued my interest, so we watched it.
In our last blog post, we looked at the world of Japanese giant monsters, the daikaiju. But Japanese pop culture has had an equally long love affair with giant robots. Unlike the daikaiju, which mostly feature in live-action tokusatsu, giant robots are also a mainstay of manga and anime. And, as we’ve seen with daikaiju, what starts in Japanese pop culture often finds its way into American pop culture as well.
Today is the anniversary of the 1938 radio broadcast of the Orson Wells and Mercury Theater on the air adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds. Next to a bone chilling vampire, werewolf or ghost story, there is nothing I like better than a frightening tale of alien invasion from another planet. I have heard the stories of the panic that arose from the radio presentation, but I had never actually listened to the original broadcast.
Toyota. Honda. Pokémon. Hello Kitty. These Japanese imports are now part and parcel of American culture. Here’s another: daikaiju. "Wait, I’ve heard of the others, but what’s a daikaiju?" you say. Just like everyone now seems to know the name of at least one Pokémon, everyone knows the granddaddy of all daikaiju. He's so famous that he even has his own rock and roll song.
The days are growing shorter and cooler. The leaves are turning red and falling from the trees, and for many people, this is a good thing. Deer season is near! Deer hunting is a tradition that has been passed down through families and communities since Colonial days.
In two previous blog posts, we examined actor/comedian/author Patton Oswalt’s three personality types based on a teenage nerd’s preferences in pop culture. In his book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Oswalt lays out the characteristics of the three personalities: Zombies simplify, spaceships leave, and wastelands destroy. Whereas wasteland personalities want to see their boring world utterly destroyed so that they can build a new world, zombies want the world left largely intact, but with the people removed. They want a new start, but not a completely clean slate.
In our survey of classic scary movies, we’ve covered the Universal monster movies, Hammer Horror, and the films of Vincent Price. But we’d be remiss to neglect classic films that fall outside these easily defined categories. Let’s take a look at some of these films.
Over the last few blog posts, in the spirit of Halloween, we've been looking at classic horror movies in the form of the famous Universal and Hammer monster films. In the process, we've looked at such scary movie icons as Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Claude Rains, the Lon Chaneys Sr. and Jr., Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing. But as I've been writing these, I realized that I had neglected one of the towering figures of the genre: Vincent Price.
With Halloween fast approaching, I've been thinking a lot about scary movies. In our last post, we looked at the classic Universal Pictures monster movies. By the 1950s, however, science fiction films had overtaken monster movies at Universal Pictures. Things looked bleak for Frankenstein et al, as they’d been reduced to being co-stars in comedy films. But in far-off Britain, the folks at Hammer Films were about to give the monsters a new lease on life.
Can you imagine Halloween without Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, the Wolfman, or Dracula? You can't, and even more, you have a very specific image of what those characters should look like. There is a reason for that: Universal Pictures monster movies. During an incredible run from the 1920s to the 1950s, Universal Pictures laid the framework for all subsequent horror films. The secret to their success?
My husband and I were enjoying a lovely Friday evening at home flipping through channels when we landed on The Pelican Brief. To be honest, I have only ever started one John Grisham novel. Unfortunately, I got busy and never finished it. For some reason, The Pelican Brief piqued my interest, so we watched it.
