Batman and Robin: Amazingly Awful 1949 Columbia Pictures Serial

Batman and Robin was a Columbia Pictures serial of 1949. It starred Robert Lowery as the batman and a rather stolid little fellow named Johnny Duncan. It’s a totally awkward, cheesy and humorless affair that very perfectly captures the true spirit of the comic book.  But shockingly there’s no batmobile!  The caped crime-fighting duo drive around in an old Mercury convertible as if they’re married and looking for a gas station.

Look, if Christopher Nolan wants to try to convince us all that he can make gritty realistic films about Batman, go ahead and let him. He’s wasting his own time. Batman is an absurdity and should be filmed as such. Enjoy this horrendous bit of movie serial history and don’t try to figure out all the machines and criminal plots. None of it makes any sense at all!
 

Welcome to Hoxford: A Fan Film That’s Creepy and Awesome

ADULT CONTENT

Here’s an awesome horror short that’s a very professional grade fan film based on Ben Templesmith’s ‘Welcome to Hoxford’ comic book. It’s bloody impressive and has a nice creepy psychotic edge to it.  The film was directed by Julien Mokrani.  Just what the warden ordered for Halloween’s month of October!

Here’s the fan film web site.
 

100 Year Old Little Nemo Animation by Winsor McCay

The Los Angeles Times’ Hero Complex blog has a post about Winsor McCay’s early animation efforts from 100 years ago. This is a film that features the cartoonist impressing his skeptical artist friends with moving characters from his great comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland.

The actual Nemo animation starts at the 8:15 mark.  Enjoy!

Thanks to Short of the Week for the tip.

R. Crumb and the Corporate Mono-Culture

Cartoonist Robert Crumb gets interviewed by a Los Angeles Times writer and talks about his living in France and his hatred for the pervasive corporate mono-culture that Americans seem unaware of.  He can’t stand it and chooses to live outside of it.

Really good perspective.

In a culture where you’ve got a Supreme Court actually giving corporate entities the rights of individual human beings, you’ve got total corporate control of every single living man, woman and child.  You can see this complete robotic control on very prominent and horrific display in the current president of the United States.  He a corporate hologram who moves only when commanded to by his boardroom overseers.  The entire country is oriented around cop/lawyer shows on television which are specifically designed to make you feel close and personal with the state/corporate stooges who work for police departments and gleefully lay disadvantaged people out on their faces on subway platforms and slaughter them with bullets fired straight into their backs from six inches away.  ‘The Mentalist’ is probably the supreme example of this attempt to make the corporate/police control mechanism seem odd and quirky and just a little cutely but intelligently eccentric.  ‘Medium’ is another.  The individual with oddball abilities or perceptions is entirely consumed and controlled by the state apparatus.  All cop shows are meant to make as many viewers as possible feel completely comfortable being visited by and talking to the police.  That is the entire truth of American television.  It’s message is simply this: when we come knocking, open the door.

That is the true subtext of every single show ever produced by American broadcasting companies.

R. Crumb is totally right.