Celebrating Warner Bros.' 100th anniversary all this month on Turner Classic Movies has given us an enjoyable twist in their programming, and most especially for the showing of the famed Warner Bros. cartoons.
Many of us are old enough to remember Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, et al., as staples of Saturday morning, along with our cereal, until we could recite the dialogue verbatim.
I wish more cartoons could be shown on TCM showcasing the work of different studios. It would be a nice experience, I think, to have for at least one morning or evening programming a slate that might be similar to the movie theater experience from the 1930s through 1950s, somewhat in the vein of the PBS program from the 1980s called Matinee at the Bijou (which I discussed in this previous post).
As we know, one did not just see a feature film, whether in the neighborhood movie house or the grand movie palaces downtown. Before Humphrey Bogart or Bette Davis came on the screen, there was some other business to attend to. First, as if to whet the appetite before the main course, the audience was given appetizers: a cartoon, a newsreel, a short subject, a serial, a B-movie, and then the feature.
(And the roster was continually repeated -- one could walk into a movie in the middle of the feature and just stay to watch the whole thing all over again when the projectionist rewound the whole business and showed it again. For ten cents, or fifteen, or twenty-five, one could stay in the theater all day and night.)
If TCM could reproduce this roster of the old-time movie theater experience perhaps once per week, that would be great. If they could find a way of delivering popcorn through the TV, that would be nice, too. And uniformed ushers to kick us out of our living rooms in case we get rowdy. Just a suggestion.
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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism. Her latest book is Christmas in Classic Films.
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3 comments:
I have to agree. It would be great if TCM would devote some time to a programming block that recreated the slates that theatre once showed. Honestly, I wish theatres would go back to that, but I think that is too much to ask! The closest I ever came to seeing such a slate was when I saw Logan's Run in the theatre (the first grown up movie I saw in a cinema). They showed a Chilly Willy cartoon before it! Of course, I was a faithful viewer of Matinee at the Bijou. Anyway, I think it would be great if they could do something like this on Saturday morning. A cartoon, a newsreel, maybe a live action short, and a feature film!
What a great idea, Jacqueline! I know that this would be greatly enjoyed by TCM fans. From your keyboard to TCM's collective ears!
Thank you, Karen. I don't imagine anybody at TCM reads this blog, but I hope they come up with the idea on their own sometime.
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