Comments from PKoch

Tony, thanks for raising our “Unforgiven” awareness.

‘Watch the Skies’ is a documentary about the sci-fi genre in film over the last half-century. It seems like a very worthwhile program to watch and own, and maybe learn by heart.

Thanks for posting your memories of the Pitkin, DaveL. I hope to read more from you about your experiences of this remarkable theater.

Thanks, all. My wife saw “Watch the Skies” while in the hospital when it was first on in early July 2005. My son and I missed it at home because we weren’t getting the cable channel it was on at that time. I’ve been promised a burned DVD of it by someone I was once on a sci fi / horror / fantasy fan board with, but have yet to receive it. By all accounts, it’s a good show.

Good point about Spielberg being disappointed about never seeing any Krell. I suppose it was like radio : you had to use, not only your imagination, but your power of inference, from the information provided. I imagine they resembled the Thermians from the Klaatu nebula from the 2000 film “Galaxy Quest” (many limbs and tentacles) but bigger and broader.

The film that scared me and my two male cousins, and had one of them hiding under the seat, was “Black Sabbath” at the RKO Madison in summer 1964 : the first segment, “The Drop Of Water”, with that hideous close-up of the dead witch that the young woman had stolen the ring from. My dad and I left after the start of the second segment, in which that prostitute got that letter which wrote itself as she watched.

“Maybe the Queens Historical Society isn’t aware that Ridgewood is located in Queens.”

Maybe, Lost Memory. I think Ridgewood tends to slip through the cracks in PBS documentaries about Brooklyn and Queens because it sits on the border between them. I mean the “New York The Way It Was” shows and the Dick Hartman and Barry Lewis “Walk Through” shows, which are excellent. In the one on Brooklyn, Lewis DID mention Ridgewood while standing on the Marcy Avenue platform of the Bway el, in connection with German immigration spreading out from the Yorkville section of Manhattan into Bklyn and Queens.

I never thought I’d end up quoting a song by Cher, but her Top 20 hit, “Half Breed”, is relevant :

“The Indians said that I was white by law, white men always called me Indian squaw.”

There is also the fact, previously mentioned, that Ridgewood seems or tends to want to be associated with Queens, and the adjoining Queens neighborhoods of Glendale, Maspeth and Middle Village, rather than with Bushwick and Brooklyn, in terms of public services.

Thanks, BrooklynJim. Kudos to you for your Target purchase. I received the DVD of “Forbidden Planet” as a Father’s Day gift earlier this year. I find it good to know that it once played at the Ridgewood, even though I was too young to see it at the time. It contains the original trailer, which, for some reason, has conventional orchestral music, rather than the electronic tonalities of Louis and Bebe Barron used in the film itself.

There are at least 14 points of similarity / comparison between “Forbidden Planet” and “The Cage”, the original Star Trek pilot, such that I wonder why Roddenberry didn’t get sued for plagiarism after “The Cage” was released.

Robby The Robot also appeared in the TV shows “Twilight Zone” and also, I think, “The Addams Family”.

Thanks, Lost Memory, both for the link, and for getting us back on topic.

I wonder, does the Fox Theaters Corp. have anything to do with the old so-called Fox Movietone newsreels ?

Off-topic : from the Reader’s Digest, regarding strip shows :

“People differ. Some people object to the fan dancer, others object to the fan.”

Yes, JKane, that line, or some similar line, was from “Queen of Outer Space”. The male Earth astronauts were referring to the Queen’s “beta disintegrator”, with which she proposed to destroy the Earth.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056293/

Nope ! Directed by Raymond Phelan and Doris Wishman !

The VHS has arrived. According to the back of the box, the correct spelling is “Botchino !”

As in “botch”. Inadvertent pun.

Thanks for the Happy Birthday wishes, Lost Memory. Or, should I say, Dahling !

“Men ? Where are they ? Bring them here at once !”

Bochino ! Bochino !

That’s Venusian for : Move your keister !

Interesting about the dvd players.

A dark slice of teenage noir hell is the exact opposite of the teen sentimental romance expressed in almost all doo-wop music, Frankie and Annette movies, etc.