Episode 143 : Chapeau Chappies

Movies, movies, movies! We talk about a lot of movies this week. Old movies, new movies, good movies, bad movies. It’s mostly your fault. But it’s good talking nonetheless. Enjoy!

QUESTIONS:

Dear Meat Puppets of The Magical Talking Hat, What is the most disturbing movie you’ve ever seen? — Mark McKibben

Dear Chapeau Chappies, What’s one of your favorite bad movies (or B movies)? — Jas (aka The C-Movie Scion)

LINKS:

This is the cosplay marriage proposal video mentioned on the show.

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7 Responses to Episode 143 : Chapeau Chappies

  1. SirGuido says:

    Re: Cosplay

    I have many of the same limitations as Tony when it comes to cosplay save the will to make the thing. My other criteria is that it be comfortable, or at least no more uncomfortable than regular clothes. Recently, I have been giving some serious thought to doing cosplay of an American wizard from the Harry Potter world. Its the only thing I can think of that fits all of my criteria.

  2. jas says:

    Things about my Dad:

    The horror movies–he was in “Blood Feast” and “Color Me Blood Red.” He had a big part in the first one; he played the police chief. In the second one, he played the art gallery director. The opening scene of “Color” actually features a large number of my family as extras in an art gallery scene, including my grandmother.

    He got the part in the first one because he was friends with the producer, Dave Friedman. They met when Dave was one of the producers of “The Greatest Show on Earth” and my Dad was a talker (barker) on the Ringling Show. My Dad is in that movie towards the beginning (I think) for about a minute and a half, doing the barker spiel. You have to watch the DVD to see him ’cause he’s cut when they show it on TV.

    So, my Mom and Dad ran away from the circus together πŸ™‚

    My Mom was an acrobat in an act run by her father (who was Chinese) and was supposed to have an arranged marriage to a guy in another Chinese acrobatic troupe. My grandfather didn’t even allow his daughters to go anywhere unchaperoned. But my Mom would bribe her brother (her chaperone) to let her go off and do things by herself, like go to the movies and that’s how she and my Dad started getting to know each other.

    After they ran away, my Dad was out of work for awhile and then Dave Friedman hired him to go around the country giving these sex ed talks that would follow these movies that were about things like “C”-sections or other things about sex/pregnancy/birth that you weren’t supposed to be talking about. (I remember my Dad telling me that the movie “The Moon is Blue” was banned in several places because a character used the word “pregnant.” After the movie was shown, there would be a talk by “renowned sexologist, Dr. Elliot Forbes” which is the persona my Dad (Scott Hall) adopted. I always thought that was a great name because it sounds like someone who knows about clandestine things (Elliot Ness) but is also businesslike. And they sold these kind of cheap book/pamplets with titles like “What Every Father Should Tell His Son” or “What Every Mother Should Tell Her Daughter.”

    One of my first memories is going from car to car at a drive-in and selling those books for 50 cents. I think I was 4? But apparently my earliest stage appearance was when I walked onto the stage when I was first walking when my Dad was giving his talk and my Dad picked me up and said, if you’d like to have one of these please buy …. (one of the titles–I don’t know which one).

    After that my Dad and his brothers had a small carnival of their own (on which I made cotton candy but couldn’t eat it, and made snow cones, did promo shows with the elephant, and ran the reptile show once when one of my uncles was sick).

    That show went bankrupt and my folks settled down anyway so I could go to school. My Dad had lots of odd jobs and my Mom went to work as a hostess at a Chinese restaurant. But he was out of work when Dave Friedman was starting to make “Blood Feast.” The guy who was originally playing the police chief quit and Dave called my Dad and asked if he’d like to make $150 for not much work. πŸ™‚

    You can clearly tell my Dad isn’t an actor, though he does try pretty hard. He’s in the opening scene here and again at the very end (if you don’t want to watch the whole thing–he’s in other scenes throughout as well). My favorite line is the one at the end where he says that the killer died a fitting death “like the gahbage he was” (my Dad’s Boston accent is pretty noticeable). The very last line of the movie “Let’s go home Frank” is one that my Dad used to say to me sometimes at appropriate moments like after having done something somewhat involving, tiring, taking up a lot of time, etc.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XpsPPpI6Ac

    Hmm, other Dave Friedman things–my cousin was the actual artist for “Color Me Blood Red.” I got to hold a bag of chicken blood that was being used in a scene for that one while the scene was getting set up (I was 7). The weird thing was that my Dad took me to see it at the drive-in, and even though I’d seen most of it being made, I was way too scared and was down on the floor of the back seat not watching, so my Dad took me home and went back with just my Mom another time.

    I think I make a brief appearance as a baby in Dave Friedman’s autobiography “A Youth in Babylon.”

  3. jas says:

    Some of my favorite family stories are about my Dad’s Dad who everyone called “Doc” including his grandkids.

    One of those:

    The Ringling Show spent some of the Winter-break in Cuba before the revolution. One of those times, my Dad was at a New Year’s Eve party at what he described as a “high-class brothel.” The building was several stories high and had an open courtyard. During the party something was happening which was ‘causing a lot of noise and my Dad investigated. Somebody told him that one of the circus guys–not a performer but one of the guys in the booking office–was drunk and had tied a rope from one end of the courtyard to the other and was going to walk across. My Dad looked up and saw the guy was already starting across, and then was not really surprised to see that it was his father–who had done some tightrope work long before (maybe when he was in his 30s? but was now in his 60s). Anyway–he made it safely across, or I would never have met him. πŸ™‚

  4. jas says:

    Dracula:

    I think I have new insight into why I don’t find plots over the top generally. πŸ™‚

    But anyway, I think thematically it has a lot in common with the original–primarily, the relationship between men with the emergence of the professional class. Younger men being “secretaries” to other men put them in female-gendered role (that’s the position Harker is studying for at the beginning of the novel, and the role he plays at first with Dracula). In the novel, Mina takes over that role. I think the show is exploring that same relationship and adding the twist of Mina taking on a male identified professional role instead of a female one.

  5. jas says:

    Ah, I forgot…

    I think part of my inspiration for “Chapeau Chappies” was that my Chinese grandfather was in juggling act in Vaudeville and they were billed as those “Canny Chaps.”

  6. jas says:

    Oh, a couple funny side notes about “Blood Feast”: the women in the film were pretty much all played by Playboy Bunnies. A lot of the “blood” is Smucker’s Rasberry Jam.

  7. jas says:

    Cosplay:

    A friend of mine’s been doing a book on cosplay featuring photographs and interiviews. It’s just published, and I think you can tell by looking at some of the photos featured on the site that it’s very much about the kind of costuming, reasons for doing it, etc. rather than being about girls in skimpy outfits. It’s called “Breaking All the Rules: Cosplay and the Art of Self-Expression.”

    http://breakingalltherules.net/

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