Jabootu commands: Buy this DVD! (Reading the review is optional.)
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FROM THE VAULT
- Return of Return Of The Vampire — posted by lyzard on January 4, 2015
- Around the World with Teleport City — posted by KeithA on December 13, 2011
- Cheating on the B-Masters for a Rather Different Anniversary — posted by El Santo on December 1, 2014
- The horror! The horror! — posted by lyzard on October 5, 2008
- The china anniversary syndrome: Part 3 — posted by lyzard on August 1, 2019
Pages
- About the Cabal
- Full Index of Reviews
- Roundtables
- 01: Brainathon ’99
- 02: Bangs'n'Whimpers
- 03: Post-Apocalypso
- 04: Review All Monsters
- 05: Pretty Mad Scientists
- 06: Tainted Love
- 07: Days of Future Past
- 08: Secret Santa
- 09: Catch a Throwing Star
- 10: Four-Color Features
- 11: Big Bugs
- 12: Fish With Bicycles
- 13: Go Go Go-Go Boys!
- 14: paLe IMITATIONS
- 15: We're Gonna Need a Bigger Roundtable
- 16: Whoa… Deja Vu.
- 17: Month of the Living Dead
- 18: B-Masters Beach Party
- 19: Kinji Fukasaku – The Man No Genre Could Tame.
- 20: Home Video Holocaust – The Video Nasties
- 21: Father Dearest: Who's Your Daddy?
- 22: So Sorry…
- 23: Back to the Well
- 24: Another Month of the Living Dead
- 25: The Ottoman Empire Strikes Back
- 26: Rubber Soul
- 27: Shhhhhh
- 28: Month of the Alternative Living Dead
- 29: On Time & Under Budget
- 30: These Kids Today…
- 31: Mea maxima culpa
- 32: Stingathon ’09
- 33: 10,000 B.S.
- 34: Foot Notes
- 35: Don’t Touch That Dial!
- 36: He Conquered the World
- 37: Secret Santa’s Revenge
- 38: At the Movies of Madness
- 39: They Might Be Giants
- 40: The Other Elizabeth Taylor
- 41: The Dark Guys of London
- 42: Falling Stars
- 43: To Be or Not To Be! (Pilot Error)
- 44: Teeth and Tentacles
- 45: Brunoween
- 46: Howl of the B-Masters
- 47: It’s Alive!
- 48: Bad, Black and Beautiful
- 49: Don’t Quit Your Day Job
- 50: B-Mentia 15
- 51: Quelle Horreur!
- 52: Carradine, Thou Wayward Son!
- 53: Tall, Dark and Gruesome
- 54: Pets Gone Wild
- 55: The Bad Place
- 56: From The Bible To Barbarella
- 57: A Fistful Of Pennies
- 58: Hello, Dolly
- 59: No, Not That One!
- 60: Dr Terror’s House Of Honours
- 61: WTF!?
- 62: In The Key Of B
- 63: The Forgotten Dawn Of Horror
- 64: The Most Dangerous Roundtable
- 65: Room For One More
- 66: Were-WHAT?
- 67: The China Anniversary Syndrome
- 68: The China Anniversary Syndrome: Part 2
- 69: The China Anniversary Syndrome: Part 3
- 70: The China Anniversary Syndrome: Part 4
- The Links We Love
#1 by lyzard on October 14, 2007 - 8:31 pm
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Paul Lynde is a ZOMBIE!? Of course! It’s so obvious!
#2 by kbegg on October 14, 2007 - 8:32 pm
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Hey, I got two weeks left!
(Sheesh, always hurrying people.)
#3 by lyzard on October 14, 2007 - 8:37 pm
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Just feeling smug, m’dear.
#4 by kbegg on October 14, 2007 - 8:39 pm
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thinksshessobigshesnotthebossofmeohlookimallaustralianandstuffandihaveapetkoalaimsocoollalalalalalalal
#5 by lyzard on October 14, 2007 - 8:40 pm
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The horrible thing is, I think I got every single reference made in that show. Even the Malacci Brothers. Isn’t it incredible how much crap you can store?
#6 by kbegg on October 14, 2007 - 8:42 pm
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Yeah, there are about a million I left for the viewer, but it is embarrassing how much of this junk I got. Seriously, this is my life?
Bonus Billy Jack reference, though.
#7 by KeithA on October 14, 2007 - 9:04 pm
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All I can so to you, sir, is “Mission accomplished.”
#8 by Zack Handlen on October 15, 2007 - 10:47 am
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Y’know, I’d only ever heard “Kids” in TV ads and parodies. I had no idea it was an actual, y’know, song–that’s sort of horrible. (I mean, it’s catchy enough, but it just _sounds_ like it should be for shilling Hot Pockets.)
Nice review, Ken.
#9 by Chad on October 15, 2007 - 10:47 am
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Hey, wow, even the IMDB denies the existence of this show!
It’s funny this should come up now. Several weeks ago a friend of mine suggested we collaborate on a book about closeted homosexuals in pop and trash culture since 1950. Now I see that embarking on such a project would involve watching materials like this – worse, watching them closely enough to take notes!
#10 by Ken Begg on October 15, 2007 - 10:58 am
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Really, this wrote itself. The only thing I did was reign in my impulse to keep quoting more of it.
I haven’t seen Bye Bye Birdie in a long time, but I think Paul was playing the father of Ann-Margret (!), and sings the song after Ann rebels and falls for a rock ‘n’ roll singer. The song suited Lynde’s delivery–he spoke it was much as sang it, rather like Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady–and it isn’t until you hear him try to sing other stuff (as he does here) that you comprehend how bad a singer he was.
#11 by Ken Begg on October 15, 2007 - 11:00 am
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I don’t know why, but there’s a rich strain of really top-notch bad stuff with closeted (to various degrees) gay performers–this, Sincerely Yours, Magnificent Obsession, Can’t Stop the Music, etc.
#12 by El Santo on October 15, 2007 - 12:45 pm
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“If you don’t find those pieces of trivia obscure enough, you may remember that Pinky was menaced during the derby by the brutish Malacci Brothers, who took out competitors with their fearsome ‘Malacci Crunch’.”
Thank you! For fifteen years now, I’ve wondered what in the hell the name of that band (although they misspell it “Malachi Krunch”) was supposed to refer to.
#13 by Ken Begg on October 15, 2007 - 12:59 pm
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To be precise, the Malachi Crunch was a maneuver in which the brothers would crash into an opponent’s car from opposite sides, crushing it between them.
#14 by Zack on October 15, 2007 - 7:42 pm
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I’d say that marks the first time the phrases “Malachi Crunch” and “to be precise” ever existed in such close proximity.
#15 by Ken Begg on October 15, 2007 - 8:06 pm
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Pop culture is such a weird mechanism. Do you think that when scriptwriter invented the phrase Malachi Crunch, he had any possible idea that even a small amount of people would still be conversant with the term thirty years later? I mean, think of all the TV shows ever, and the way one particular line or something out of literally millions of others will just lodge itselt into the our gestalt memory. It’s a bizarre thing.
#16 by lyzard on October 15, 2007 - 8:44 pm
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There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to those things. For instance, of all the Simpsons bits my father could have picked, for no reason we can figure out he’s latched onto Moe Szyslak’s contemptuous reaction to the word “garage”. (“Oh, the ‘GARGAGE’! Hey, fellas – the ‘GARAGE’!” “Well, what do you call it?” “The car-hole!”) I don’t dare use the g-word any more. My brother and I have a million of them, decades old some of them, guaranteed to have us giggling like loons at the worst possible moment.
#17 by Ken Begg on October 15, 2007 - 9:00 pm
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When I was a kid, there was a show that lasted about three weeks called The San Pedro Beachbums. In one episode, they had to play a football (or soccer?) game for some reason, and so procured some guys from Brazil (or somewhere) who couldn’t speak any English except for the phrase, “Football, you bet!”
The next day at school, all the kids were quoting this line ad nauseam, myself included, like it was the funniest thing ever. (Remember, this is back in the days when there were only three TV networks which during prime time were watched by an aggregate 90% of the country, and so the odds that everybody had watched the same thing was about a thousand times greater.) And indeed, I still remember the line all these decades later.
In fact, good grief, I just Googled it and got about a handful of hits along the lines of “The short-lived `70’s TV series The San Pedro Beach Bums was set in San Pedro. The show spawned the once-legendary line “Football? You bet!” So it’s not just me. Amazing. Oh, and the episode was called “The Shortest Yard.” Man, that’s killer material right there.
By the way, funniest Simpsons line ever? Mr. Burns explaing, “”Since the dawn of time man has dreamed of destroying the sun.” Why is that the funniest? I don’t know. IT JUST IS.
#18 by Matthew Fudge on October 16, 2007 - 6:49 am
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Pop culture memory is such an odd thing, as you say. I know that there a jokes I can make relating to the a song I haven’t heard in fifteen years and all of my friends will get it. Mind you though, it’s very specific. My wife is Spanish and the number of blank looks I get when my I make some hilarious gag relating to anything that happened before she moved to England. “What d’you mean you didn’t see the Royal Variety Show in 1988? Were you raised in a mine?” On the other hand, a few years ago I was in Spain and their number one tv-show was that ‘Martial Law’ show with Sammo Hung and Arsenio Hall. I know Sammo’s done a lot of good martial arts work, but Martial law? Probably there are kids all over spain making wisecracks about it.
#19 by Matthew Fudge on October 16, 2007 - 6:51 am
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All of which was supposed to mean that it’s impossible to predict and/or understand what bits of trivia get absorbed into the national conciousness.
Now I could just have typed that.
#20 by Ken Begg on October 16, 2007 - 7:19 am
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Pithiness is not encouraged at Jabootu.
Obviously.
#21 by JessicaR. on October 16, 2007 - 6:59 pm
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For some reason the line at the end of the “Teenage Mutant Leela’s Hurdles” episode delights me. Pazuzu, and I love that the gargoyle is named Pazuzu, saves the professor from the fountain of aging and the professor asks what he can give him for saving his life and then it cuts to the roof of Notre Dame where Pazuzu tells his child “And zat little one, is how papa gain his freedom, bon nuit, bon nuit to you all.” I can’t explain why I dig it so, and why it pops into my head at random moments.
#22 by John Doe on October 17, 2007 - 7:56 pm
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“Teenage Mutant Leela’s Hurdles”?? I’m lost. Doesn’t sound like anything Paul Lynde would be a part of. obtw, my favorite Paul Lynde bit was once, when he was center square in Hollywood Squares, the question was “According to a scientific study, what are two things you should never do in the bedroom?”; his response, with proper PL snark, “Point, and laugh”.
#23 by Braineater on October 18, 2007 - 12:26 pm
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As long as you people are going to bombard me with references to things I’d hoped I’d forgotten years ago, let me bring up one of my own. The subject of Paul Lynde’s TV career made me remember a long-lost piece of my childhood — Charles Nelson Reilly’s kids’ show, “Uncle Croc’s Block”. Was anybody else traumatized by this when they were kids?
Oh, by the way, Ken: I hate to correct the proofreading acknowledgment, but… it’s “Augean”.
#24 by Ken Begg on October 18, 2007 - 1:03 pm
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Hey, I’ll take all the help in that department that I can!
Wow, I don’t remember that show. Sounds incredible, though.
#25 by Braineater on October 18, 2007 - 7:39 pm
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Incredible is right. Imagine Reilly out of the banana costume and into a reptile suit. Then imagine him as the star of a meta-kid’s-show, where the show itself is a parody of other kids’ shows hosting cartoons that are themselves parodies of other shows (like M*U*S*H, about a cast of wacky sled dogs). Now imagine Jonathan Harris as the director of the meta-show, a misanthrope named Binkerbottom who resents being relegated to third-rate children’s TV and who is always barging on-screen to argue with Reilly… who in turn always calls him “Bottlebottom”, because that’s where he spends most of his time.
And this was a kid’s show! I suspect it was both too far ahead of its time, and too poorly done. Not a good combination.
#26 by PCachu on October 19, 2007 - 9:35 am
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I may have kept the title “Uncle Croc’s Block” somewhere in the back of my skull, but I sure as Purgatory didn’t succeed in retaining that much detail about it. Though given my age at the time, I also likely didn’t care all that much, or even grasp the meta-ness.
I miss Jon Harris, though. Can I say that? Oh, the pain, the indignity of it all…
#27 by Braineater on October 20, 2007 - 1:07 pm
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Well, for my part, I still have the theme music running through my head (sung by CNR himself). And just when I manage to get it out of my head, what do I hear taking its place? “Football — you bet!” Arrgh.
#28 by HP on October 20, 2007 - 8:39 pm
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There’s a punchline that Paul Lynde delivered on the Hollywood Squares once when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old that I’ve never forgotten. The problem is, I’ve forgotten the setup, so it makes no sense and I can’t share it with anyone.
Peter Marshall asked him something like, “For the win, Paul, what comes after _____?” And Paul Lynde replied “Shower, shave, and off to work!” And it was hilarious. Brought the show to a stop — you could see the edit where they had to stop taping until the audience settled down. My Dad was laughing so hard he had tears in his eyes. And to this day, when I get up in the morning, I think “Shower, shave, and off to work!” But I cannot remember the setup for the life of me.
#29 by Ken Begg on October 20, 2007 - 10:56 pm
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PETER: You’ve gone from egg, to larvae, to pupae. What’s next?
PAUL: A shave and a shower and off to work!
#30 by HP on October 20, 2007 - 11:42 pm
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Mystery solved! Thanks, Ken.