Cartoons to feature presentations - bring back the roster

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. 

TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

Series films

TCM recently ran a slew of “Andy Hardy” films in a Thanksgiving Day marathon. What distinguishes this series of films is perhaps not the depiction of an ideal American family, but the fact that we get to see them so often, a new one almost every year. They were not exactly sequels in the sense that we have come to understand the blockbuster sequels of today, a.k.a. “Rocky 17” and “Star Wars 23”. There were just the continuing saga, and one did not have to see any of the previous films to understand the plot. Many other series films have been shown in the past month as well.

There used to be a lot of series films, some of them B-movies which were shot on slim budgets, but also feature films that carried characters, if not a storyline, onto the next film. “Mr. Moto” films, “The Falcon” and “The Saint” were typical of popular detective features of the day. “Ma and Pa Kettle” and “Mexican Spitfire” and the “Maisie” films took over comedy. “Dr. Kildare” gave us drama, and “Torchy Blaine” gave us yet another “girl reporter.”

Series films weren’t exactly serials, either, like the “Crash Corrigan” type of chapter-by-chapter short. They were full-length films which featured characters already so familiar that they did not need to be explained or established. You knew what to expect when Andy Hardy met a new popular girl at school, or Mr. Moto took on a new case.

It was a hybrid type of film that perhaps morphed into episodic television and sitcoms. Possibly the closest thing we have today to series films are the James Bond movies, which feature the same character in different adventures.