This month marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of scary movie great Vincent Price. Artist Zach Bellissimo (AKA "Seizuredemon") has honored Price by drawing 100 of the fiendish characters that the actor portrayed during his life. There are a few notable omissions, but most of the classics are here, from the Abominable Dr. Phibes to Egghead from Batman. To see the full tribute, click on over to Bellissimo's Deviant Art page.
Just for kicks, here's a 1984 intro segment from the PBS series Mystery!, featuring Price as host. (Man, Vincent Price hosting a show featuring a cartoon title sequence designed by Edward Gorey... PBS used to be awesome.)
Coming soon: Ricky Gervais' and Stephen Merchant's next sitcom Life's Too Short, starring Warwick Davis of Willow and Leprechaun fame. Davis will play a fictionalized version of himself in what Gervais describes as a comedy about "the life of a showbiz dwarf." According to Wikipedia, Gervais and Merchant met Davis when he appeared on Extras and they were quite taken with his blackly funny anecdotes: "Davis told the pair of the trials of life for a man of 3 feet 6 inches in height, such as having to use a broom handle to reach objects on the high shelves in supermarkets, and people touching him for luck as if he were a leprechaun."
Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site?Send us an email.
In George Orwell's 1941 essay on the "saucy seaside postcards" of the era, the 1984 author found something essential to the human spirit in the endless scenes of fat, shrewish wives nagging bitter, balding little men and what he described as the "mother-in-law, baby's nappy, policemen's boot type of joke." (Note that that link to Orwell's essay contains an offensive and possibly NSFW racial epithet, used in the context of describing the seaside minstrel acts that were still common in the '40s.)
"It will not do to condemn (the postcards) on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly," Orwell wrote. "That is exactly what they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed lowness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest hint of 'higher' influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the worm's-eye view of life, for the music-hall world where marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken, red-nosed husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them behind the front door, poker in hand."
The video for John Lydon's 1997 single Sun is a viciously cheeky little number featuring comic seaside postcards of the kind Orwell described, but here they're not just a bunch of random jokes. Using crude animation, the postcards tell the complete story of one man's wretched, joyless life, from sunburned trips to the beach as a child, to his loveless marriage, tedious job and beyond. Every now and again Lydon comes dancing into the frame like a cackling little demon, mocking the many failures of our hapless cartoon anti-hero.
The song comes from Lydon's uneven but fascinating CD Psycho's Path. Lydon played all the instruments himself, designed the CD cover, etc. This video serves as a kind of sequel to Holidays in the Sun, and it turned out to be pretty much the last great thing Lydon ever did. After this we lost him to listless Sex Pistols reunions, reality show gigs, et al, as he transformed from punk rock superhero to pop cultural irritant. But hey, the Idiot Dance was pretty great while it lasted.
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In this clip from the unaired NBC pilot Rex is Not Your Lawyer, David Tennant (AKA inarguably the best Doctor Who Doctor of the revived series) puts on his best American accent... Which frankly isn't too great. Although I've gotten so used to his fake English accent as the Doctor that whenever I hear him speak with his actual Scottish accent, that sounds fake too.
Where do European actors get that goofy "American" accent from, anyhow? It's like they think we all talk like John Wayne or something. Hullo! I yam an Amerrickun!
In this video, an English gent takes you on a guided tour of his Star Trek-themed apartment. (Actually, it's very specifically a Star Trek: Voyager apartment, which just makes the whole thing even more charmingly dorky.) The guy stops just short of having a sonic shower, and I've no doubt he's working on one as we speak.
"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.
