THE BOLT WHO SCREWED CHRISTMAS, narrated by Jonathan Harris

Tuesday, February 16, 2010


Jonathan Harris had a long and happy career - mostly playing endearingly fussy comic villains - but he is best known for his role as Dr. Smith on the camp classic 1960s TV series Lost in Space. (If you've never seen the show, this clip, featuring a montage of Dr. Smith getting upset about various space creatures, will give you a small sampling of Harris' unabashedly hammy awesomeness.)

The Bolt Who Screwed Christmas is an animated short that features Harris narrating, in what was apparently his last role before he died. It looks very cheap and silly but kind of fun, which is sort of perfect, really. Cheap and silly were no obstacle to Harris, he thrived on cheap and silly, bringing the same obvious glee to every role. This was a guy who just loved to act, and it's sweet to hear that wonderfully sly voice one more time.

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2 comments:

John Wardlaw February 16, 2010 at 9:59 PM  

Silly yes! Cheap? Well, from my point of view is was a lot of hard work on all the parties involved in the making of the film. Harris loved the script. And Bill, Marta and Angela were very pleased to find out there was one more film with Jonathan in it that they could be a part of.

Working with JH and the rest of the cast, including Tress MacNeille of the simpsons and futurama, was a blast. They are all very professional and fun at the same time.

To quote Jonathan Harris when he read my script " naughty, but nice" and he gave me his agents contact information. He was a wonderful man and I am glad I got to work with him.

Look for the film in 2010 at the Santa Barbara international Film Festival, The Da Vinci Film Festival in Corvalis oregon, The San Luis Obispo International Film Festival in California and the Phoenix Film Festival. At least that's the list so far.
John Wardlaw
Director, The Bolt Who Screwed Christmas.

Greg Stacy . February 16, 2010 at 11:53 PM  

Well, if you read this blog, you'll soon see that I do not always consider cheap and silly to be bad things! I wrote this post having only seen a couple of trailers for the film, so my remarks were obviously based on superficial information. The animation is obviously not slick (you presumably weren't trying to make it be) and the idea IS silly, which was presumably intentional. My point was that, as with Lost in Space, Harris clearly relished a role that other actors might've thought was beneath them. It's not every actor who would have so much fun playing a character like Dr. Smith, or narrating a Grinch parody about a bolt whose nuts were screwed on too tight. He seemed to revel in a certain kind of camp, and this movie seems like something he'd be great for. Hearing him in this clip makes me wish he'd done more narration, his voice was really something.

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"Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise: the monster and the rocket." - W.H. Auden

Who is he, this one who is called "Greg Stacy"?

Greg Stacy began the MONSTERS AND ROCKETS blog in April of 2009. Prior to that, he was editor of the popular sci-fi/horror news website DARKWOLDS.COM. He has also written for LA WEEKLY, OC WEEKLY, UTNE READER and LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT. He always feels weird writing about himself in the third person.

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