Years:  1979, 1980
Genre:  TV series, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Penny Marshall, Cindy Williams, Michael McKean, David L. Lander
Guest appearances:  Henry Winkler, Ron Howard
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Happy Days was famous for many things, one of which being the phrase “jumping the shark”.  A 1977 episode where Fonzie jumped over a shark in the water on skis was the definitive moment in the series, where it became abundantly clear that they were out of ideas and that the show would suck forever more.  Now.  The fifth season of Laverne & Shirley comes to DVD April 10^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  It opens with a special feature, a Happy Days crossover episode where Fonzie and Richie have to marry Laverne and Shirley at the point of a farmer’s shotgun.

     See, the Happy Days episode is one big, long, tired farmer’s daughter joke.  Fonzie and Richie have disguised themselves in one of those two-person cow costumes where Fonzie is the head and Richie is the ass.  They sneak onto a farm in the cow costume so they can have sex with two super hot daughters whose father is a gun wielding homicidal maniac.  And they get busted and Laverne and Shirley have to get them out of their predicament.  Now, by the time this crossover episode aired, it had been two full years since Happy Days had jumped the shark.  This crossover episode with the farmer’s daughter and the cow might be the moment they took Laverne and Shirley down with them.

     From then on, throughout the fifth season, Laverne and Shirley is a series of dream sequences, talent shows, joining the army, flashbacks and every other cliché that was already tired in 1979.  They were simply out of ideas, and the decline appears to be as abrupt and precipitous as that of their parent show Happy Days.  It might be worth picking up though, if you have a morbid curiosity about the sudden decline of a decent show, and to see the exact moment where Laverne and Shirley “married the cow”.

Years:  1979, 1980
Genre:  TV series, Cop, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jack Lord, Kam Fong
Creator:  Leonard Freeman
Run time:  19 hours, 51 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

        The twelfth and final season of Hawaii Five-O comes to DVD January 10^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  The show was clearly on the way out from episode one, as Danno is now gone and with the exception of Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett, the whole cast has pretty much changed.

     As always, there are some fairly interesting guest stars, like Jeff Daniels who shows up for an episode about remote controlled planes being used to rob a museum.  But since this is the very last season, of the original run of Hawaii Five-O, it’s all about one episode, the very last one, where McGarrett finally catches Wo Fat. 

     Of course, if this were today’s Hawaii Five-O, there would be six lead-up episodes during the season and a gigantic three-part finale to close out the whole deal.  Not in 1980.  The big series finale is one, stand-alone episode, where McGarrett disguises himself as an internationally renowned Nobel Prize winning scientist in order to infiltrate Wo Fat’s compound and prevent him from obtaining some kind of weapon of mass destruction.

     In the end, the final confrontation involves no explosions, no real gunfights, no car chases and no ticking time bombs.  It’s just McGarrett and Wo Fat having a good, old-fashioned fist fight.  Then instead of killing him, McGarrett makes the arrest, even without Danno around to “book him”.  In the end, the final season of Hawaii Five-O is probably the weakest of the whole series.  But it’s still a lot of fun, and hearkens back to a different age of television. 

     It occurred to me, watching Wo Fat and McGarrett in their fist fight, that no one does good fist fights any more.  Watch any of today’s shows, and the characters have to be superhuman badasses.  Which means that when, say, LL Cool J fights someone on NCIS: LA, he can’t have a real fight because he’s too badass.  He’s a SEAL, you know.  So when he has to fight, he just does some move and knocks the guy out and breaks his arm.  It’s over. 

     I blame Steven Seagal.  You’ll notice that in his movies, he never got into a fist fight, like Bruce Willis did.  He just beat people up and never got touched.  Even when he finally tracked down Bobby Lupo’s killer Ritchie, he just threw him into a series of glass objects until he got tired of it and put a corkscrew in his eye.  Now, many movies and a ton of TV shows follow that lead.  It really makes Hawaii Five-O feel even more old-school than it actually is!

Years:  1978, 1979
Genre:  TV series, Cop, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jack Lord, James MacArthur, Kam Fong, Al Harrington
Creator:  Leonard Freeman
Run time:  19 hours, 51 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Season Eleven of Hawaii Five-O was on television when I was an embryo.  Or a zygote.  So it’s odd for me to feel intense nostalgia for something I never experienced at the time when it would have actually been nostalgic.  But I guess it takes a really silly retread of something to create that feeling – having just watched the first season of the new Hawaii Five-O, I actually DO long for a simpler time.

     A time when Wo Fat was a cartoonish evildoer, a creepy Bond-like villain.  A time when the bikini girls were just gratuitous montage shots between scenes, rather than actual members of the cast.  A time when Chin Ho was just some guy in the police station, rather than a main character with a suspect back story.  And a time when McGarrett and Danno had to worry about mafia and punks and corporate killers, instead of serial killers and terrorists.

     Most of all though, I miss the realistic banter between McGarrett and Danno – banter that came easily and naturally between two men of the law who respected and liked each other, and came only occasionally when it fit.  So much better than the forced buddy-cop love-hate banter that has become a prerequisite for all cop shows of today.  Today, McGarrett and Danno fight over food, over the radio, over their driving, over everything.  In the 70s, they just solved crimes.  Oh, the good old days.

     Thankfully, as Paramount Home Entertainment releases the first season of the NEW Hawaii Five-O on DVD today, they are also releasing the eleventh season of the old Hawaii Five-O.  I think it’s clear which one I recommend more.

Years:  1979, 1980
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Robert Urich, Phyllis Davis, Bart Braverman, Greg Morris, Will Sampson, Tony Curtis
Guest stars:  Melanie Griffith, Dean Martin, Pat Hingle, Shelley Winters, Wayne Newton
Eye candy:  All kinds.  Strippers, showgirls, hookers, everyone is apparently hot in Vegas.  Also Griffith (before she looked like the Joker), Terri Nunn, Pamela Susan Shoop, Barbi Benton, Linda Thompson, Lisa Hartman
Creator:  Michael Mann
Run time:  9 hours 27 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
DVD extras:  Episodic promos on selected episodes.  That’s it.

     It must be so difficult to be Dan Tanna.  How is he able to solve crimes when he has to navigate his way through so many women?  He gets called in to investigate threats made against a bunch of supermodels, and the women throw themselves at him.  How is a man to get any work done?  Thankfully, in that particular episode, one of the supermodels (Playboy legend Barbi Benton) is an ex-girlfriend of his, and they rekindle their romance so the other models go away.

     Of course, it’s doubly difficult to be Dan Tanna.  Because you know that if you ARE Dan Tanna, and you DO rekindle a romance with someone, that person must, of course, end up murdered by the end of the episode.  Dan Tanna MUST remain single and slutty for this show to work!  So any real romantic love interests for him are like the orange-clad ensigns on Star Trek.  Introduced for the purposes of killing them off.  No wonder Tanna is so reluctant to settle down!

     One of the cool things about Season Two, Volume Two, out December 7th from Paramount Home Entertainment, is the impressive guest list.  Vegas stalwarts like Dean Martin and Wayne Newton, singing stars like Lisa Hartman (who later married Clint Black) and Terri Nunn (remember the band Berlin?)  Then there are the reliable, recognizable faces like Pat Hingle and Tony Curtis and a young Melanie Griffith. 

     It’s pretty clear how every episode is going to go, but it’s fun to see the familar faces of all these guest stars, and the show is just fun, in general.  Hot babes and cars and bright lights and straightforward private investigations that really should be carried out by the police.  (Greg Morris, as the token policeman, seems to do just as much work on each case as does Tanna himself.)  Whatever.  It’s an escape, and it’s a decent one.

Years:  1979
Genre:  TV series, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Robert Urich, Phyllis Davis, Tony Curtis, Bart Braverman, Naomi Stevens, Judy Landers, Greg Morris, Will Sampson
Eye candy:  All kinds.  Strippers, showgirls, hookers, everyone is apparently hot in Vegas.  Also Cristina Ferrare, Lauren Tewes, Dorothy Malone, Ronee Blakley
Creator:  Michael Mann
Run time:  9 hours 27 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
DVD extras:  Episodic promos on selected episodes.  That’s it.

     There are different types of “Vegas” in movies and on TV.  There is the glitzy and glamourous Vegas where Liza Minelli and Robert Goulet and Wayne Newton ply their trades.  There is the gangster-mythic Vegas of The Godfather Part II and Casino and their ilk.  There is the debauched bachelor-party Vegas as seen in The Hangover and so forth.  And then there is the seedy underbelly of Vegas, as portrayed in CSI and other fine programs.

     I think my favourite Vegas, however, is the one in Vega$, the TV series from the late 70s starring Robert Urich.  I like that Vegas, because although there are hot babes in abundance, they are the ones who seem seedy rather than glitzy, for the most part.  And although there is certainly a gritty, grimy underbelly to this Vegas, it feels a little more glitzy and glamorous than maybe it should. 

     The cast of the show is outstanding, and although it certainly gets tired after a few episodes, give it a couple of days and you may want to watch a few more.  The second volume of the first season of Vega$ comes out February 16th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Years:  1974, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990
Genre:  Cartoon, Political
Country:  East Germany
Language:  No dialogue, German credits not translated
Directors:  Otto Sacher, Klaus Georgi, Sieglinde Hamacher, Marion Rasche, Hans Moser, Thomas Rosie, Lutz Stutzner, Peter Mibach
Run time:  57 minutes
Special Features:  Behind The Scenes at the DEFA Animation Studio, film essays, biographies and filmographies
DVD distributor:  First Run Features

     The description of Red Cartoons indicates that it’s a collection of 16 short animated films from the former East Germany, produced by the country’s DEFA Sutiod For Animation Films between 1974 and 1990.  These films are apparently full of social and political satire that would never have been allowed in live action films by the oppressive regime at the time.  That being said, I can find that satire in only a few of the shorts.

     This had me feeling like an idiot for a long time – how come I can’t see the subversive nature of these cartoons?  Am I so poorly versed in the customs and conventions of the former East Germany and, indeed, the world that I’m the only one who can’t see this stuff?  I GOT the cartoons, but not the satire.  What’s wrong with me?

     The first cartoon is called Drum Beat.  And, admittedly, I didn’t understand that one at all, even as just a cartoon.  This guy has a drum, see.  His wife drops it on his head, but that’s cool he has more.  Then he walks around with it and ends up in a drum band.  That’s about it.  I don’t get it.

     The second film, from the same director (Otto Sacher) is called Stars And Flowers.  At least I got that one.  A guy who lives in the stars longs to touch the flower on the ground, and a guy who lives on the ground longs to touch the stars in the sky.  Loneliness sees a shocking abuse of emergency services as an old man sets fire to his Christmas tree so he will have the companionship of the fire department and the ambulance attendants.

     Variants sees two neighbours in a dispute over what appear to be raked leaves, and although a trip to court works out their differences, it doesn’t fix their animosity toward each other.  The Rescue is a tale of greed and selfishness which involves a remarkable number of people who manage to fall down a series of crevasses.  Seven Rights of a Viewer explores seven different ways an audience can respond to a performer, from the great (showering him with flowers) to the terrible (getting up and leaving).

     Hello sees an unfortunate man, plagued by noises everywhere he goes and trying to escape.  Deserted islands offer him no solitude, nor do forests or mountains or anything else.  Eventually he meets Satan in the desert.  I think I get that one.  Consequence is a satire I get.  After applauding vigorously for a film that details how driving in cars pollutes and destroys nthe environment, the audience gets into their cars and drives home.

     The Solution involves a bunch of birds sitting on a wire.  One little bird at the end is a non-conformist, which of course means he sits the opposite direction as the rest of the flock.  And of course his little friends rat him out.  And he gets roundly punished.  Until eventually everyone else comes around, so to speak.  Belly And Soul is about people feigning interest in the performance of a pianist while secretly trying to get to the massive spread of food that has been laid out following the concert.

     The Breakdown sees a man desperately asking for help at the side of the road, as his car has apparently fallen in a hole.  Finally, th smallest car stops to help and pull him out, with surprising results.  I get the satire in this one too.  That makes two.  The Full Circle is the story of a plant that produces gas masks, polluting so much in the process that the people in the town are forced to wear…gas masks, of course.  And Mr. Daff Is Shooting A Film makes a joke out of a poor sap of a bus driver.

     The Monument sees the unveiling of a massive statue to great applause, then people forget about it pretty much right away.  Then the statue gets a phone call.  And ends up alone in what appears to be a desert, in an Ozymandias sort of finale.  I don’t really get it.  Sunday seems to depict a church, where everyone is going to look at a plant, and tickets are being ripped at the door and everyone, including the priest, is getting patted down.  I guess to make sure they are not bringing in their own water bottles or snacks.

     The final short on the set is Island Joke, wherein three shipwrecked and frozen men have a chance to warm themselves up with a blanket tossed to them by a helpful mermaid.  Not understanding the gesture, they do what they figure is most obvious with the blanket – they build themselves a flag and salute it.  Here, again, is a satire I can understand.

     About four of the sixteen shorts are obvious satires, at least to me.  Maybe six.  I would have really liked to see a special feature that explained a little more.  There are several special features on the disc, but one is a wordless slide show that just shows people working at DEFA, and the others are essays about the East German film industry and animation.  Which is all great stuff – very informative and interesting, but I would have liked to see something that dealt more specifically with the sixteen films that were chosen to be featured on this disc.

     Even though I didn’t understand a few of the films, I liked them.  I thought they were all charming, and this is a disc I can see myself watching over and over.  But the fact that I liked them all so much was the reason I wanted to know more about them.  Thanks to the special features I know a little more about the directors and a lot more about the East German industry, but no more about the films themselves.  Red Cartoons comes out January 19th from First Run Features.

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      I had a hard time watching The Top Secret Trial of the Third Reich, on DVD May 19th from First Run Features.  Not because of the Nazi content, or the holocaust content (and there are some horrific images contained in the documentary).  But I think it’s important, when showing the history of Hitler and the Nazis, to show the brutal and devastating images of Jewish holocaust victims being shot in the back in a ditch, as this DVD does.  The problem here is that those images, though very brief, have little context to set them up, because the documentary is kind of all over the place.

     The Top Secret Trial of the Third Reich is all about the efforts from within Germany to assassinate Hitler, mostly during 1944 as the Second World War drew to a close.  Some of the conspirators were motivated by their hatred of Hitler and his racism and his genocide and his general evil, but it appears that more of them were simply concerned that with Hitler in charge, Germany would pursue an unwinnable war to the very end, resulting in the destruction of their people and their country.  Whatever their motivations, their stories are all fascinating.

     I got the sense that Hitler was like the roadrunner to the conspirators’ coyote.  Or the Castro to their CIA.  Every time someone planted a bomb, Hitler would get bored and go home four minutes before it detonated.  Or, if he was in the room, his would be the only seat not blown to smithereens by the bomb.  It just never seemed to work out for the people who wanted to rid the world of this tyrannical evil.  The stories of a few of these people have already been told.  This documentary touches very, very briefly on Sophie Scholl and her student uprising (there is an absolutely fantastic film about her called Sophie Scholl: The Final Days which is well worth watching).

     I knew a little about Erwin Rommel’s involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler, but again that is touched on only briefly.  (It’s unclear how involved Rommel really was in the plot, but he certainly knew of it.  When Hitler found out, he sent him poison so he could kill himself and save his family.)  The main conspiracy is Operation Valkyrie, which is of course the most famous one now thanks to the Tom Cruise movie that is soon coming to DVD as well.  And that’s where this DVD is most interesting.

     The bulk of the documentary is about the trial, in August of 1944, of the men accused of conspiring to assassinate the Fuhrer.  The judge in the courtroom, a rabid Nazi and deranged Hitler loyalist, berates the men, insults them, curses at them and generally ignores anything they might have to say.  He comes across as out of his mind, and the trial itself is genuinely scary.  Again, however, the move is all over the place.  We get a bit of the trial, then we get some footage of concentration camps, then some screaming soldiers and war planes thrown in for effect.  Then it’s back to the trial and someone else is up there testifying.

     The footage from the trial came from Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, who ordered that cameras be hidden in various locations around the courtroom.  He intended to broadcast the footage of the trials as propaganda to inflame the German people against anyone who would dare to oppose Hitler.  However, he found that upon releasing this film to the public, it had quite the opposite effect, and people were sympathetic to the executed conspirators.  So he ordered the film destroyed.  Of course it wasn’t, and once it was discovered by Allied forces it became a central piece of evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

     Most of that story that I just wrote came from the back of the DVD box.  The movie barely mentions any of this stuff – it spends about thirty seconds talking about Goebbels and propaganda and the film and Nuremberg.  I think that was more interesting than the trial itself.  How footage of this trial could sway public opinion against the Nazis.  But then, this film just isn’t very well done.  It was made in 1979, I think mostly as a way to get this trial footage out into the open.  But it is not presented well.  There is only one narrator, who translates the German from the trial, who reads transcripts of testimony, and who narrates the history of the film.  So we’re hearing one voice for the full 76-minute run time.

     As a movie, The Top Secret Trial Of the Third Reich fails.  As entertainment, it is weak at best.  But in terms of historical importance, a fascinating story and some compelling real-life heroes, it is absolutely essential.

Casper: Trick Or Treat is really the Casper The Friendly Ghost Classics Collection Volume One. Alliance Films is releasing the DVD Tuesday, September 30th, as a way to get some Hallowe’en stuff out to the shelves before the day comes up. While Casper must appeal to some nostalgia buffs out there, I’m not sure it holds up over time. Casper, you see, is a friendly ghost. And he lives with three other ghosts, who are irritated at Casper’s friendliness. You see, they feel that the main purpose of a ghost is to scare people. And Casper isn’t really living up to his end of the being-a-ghost bargain. Except that in reality, he is.

You see, much to Casper’s chagrin, he does scare people. Simply by being a ghost. In his Hallowe’en special, he can go around outside, and no one is scared, because it’s Hallowe’en and everyone assumes he’s dressed up as a ghost. But when they see him passing through doors and trees and so forth, they realize he’s for real, and they’re terrified. So the other three ghosts really have no reason to be upset. Whether he likes it or not, he IS scaring people, and there is actually no problem at all. While Casper: Trick Or Treat is pretty good for nostalgia, it isn’t terribly good for Hallowe’en.

The Tin Drum opens with a child doing a voiceover, relating the history of his family, starting with his grandparents.  It is a child’s-eye perspective of this family, which sets up the child’s-eye perspective of the rest of the movie.  There are some seriously creepy in-the-womb shots of the child who is speaking, and the tone of the film is surreal and creepy beginning to end.  After the history, the movie begins at this child’s third birthday.  His mom has promised him a tin drum for his birthday, and he is thrilled.  But his elation is short-lived, when he witnesses his family doing some decidedly creepy things at the dinner table during his birthday celebration.  His mom is sleeping with both her husband and her cousin, and they are all aware of the bizarre three-way relationship.  All of them except the young boy.  When he unwittingly witnesses evidence of this bizarre and creepy sexual arrangement, he equates this behaviour with being an adult.  And he resolves, then and there, to never become an adult.  In fact, he decides to stay three years old for the rest of his life.  He fabricates a fall down the stairs to give his family an explanation for his stunted growth, and then that’s it.  He never grows again for the rest of his life.

As his family becomes increasingly worried about his lack of growth, he becomes fixated on his tin drum.  The child, Oskar, soon discovers that he has the ability to emit an ear-piercing scream that shatters glass.  Which leads to some creepy scenes, like the one where he busts the teacher’s glasses right into her eyes, and the one where he busts the formaldehyde jars in the doctor’s office, and lizards and baby fetuses sprawl all over the floor.  The world inhabited by little Oskar is a bizarre one, but since it is always shown from the perspective of a child, as he never ages, we constantly get a child’s-eye view of this world.  A world which seems surreal, but one with which we are all familiar.  That of Germany in the 1930s and 40s.  Oskar and his family live in rural Germany, and as Oskar stops growing, the country begins to grow like crazy.

Then, of course, Hitler shows up.  And the Nazis.  And Oskar, still three years old, continues to beat his tin drum, breaking one after another and getting new ones from the kindly old Jewish toy store owner down the street.  As the world gets crazier and crazier, Oskar’s drumming continues, as though he is the loud, angry, but completely unheard conscience of the whole world.  When his drumming fixation and stunted growth took root, it was a protest against the perceived evils of his own family and his own situation.  Now, his actions take on a more broad protest, and yet one that seems to be more and more voiceless as the Nazis take over.  There is a surreal scene just before the war, where Oskar’s parents take him to a circus, and he sees a midget show.  He later meets the midgets, who take him to be one of their own.  He explains his situation to them – that he has just decided not to grow.  And when he meets these same midget performers during the war, he will be a changed little boy. 

David Bennett played Oskar when The Tin Drum came out in 1979, and he was actually 12 years old, although he is playing an eternal three-year-old in the movie.  He was cast primarily for his eyes, which are some of the most intense eyes ever put up on the screen.  Once you see The Tin Drum, Oskar’s eyes will stay with you forever, and you will agree with me that they are the most memorable eyes on a character in a movie, more even than Bette Davis.  They are so expressive that they can convey Oskar’s most terrified, most evil, and most wounded emotions when he has no words with which to explain these feelings.  In the end, there is a strange war going on inside Oskar, the war between the three-year-old in a three-year-old’s body, and the 20-year-old in a three-year-old’s body, who still clings to a tin drum like it’s a safety blanket.  Because although he stays three the whole movie, his mind has raced ahead of his body, and he begins to be a seriously conflicted character during, and following, the second world war.  The sexual thoughts of a sixteen-year-old, or a twenty-year-old, with the emotional and physical maturity of a three-year-old.  This leads to some scenes that are so creepy that they are pretty hard to watch.

It was these scenes which created a censorship controversy when the U.S. government waged a war on The Tin Drum in the late 90s over it’s supposed child pornography content.  Watching the movie, one can see where they freaked out.  In particular, one scene between Oskar and his naked babysitter in a changeroom at the beach.  In fact, every scene with that babysitter, whether it involves Oskar or not, is creepy.  And although there are two ways of looking at it – the boy looks three, but in fact he is seventeen – the whole point of these scenes is to create a startled and freaked out reaction from the audience.  And I certainly had that reaction.  There were a few scenes in this movie that I watched, desperately trying not to be offended, peeking out from between my fingers like a particularly nasty horror scene when I was eleven, but I found myself not being offended, as such.  Just creeped out, as I was supposed to be.

There are many almost-unwatchable scenes in The Tin Drum.  The grossest scenes come right in a row, in the middle of the film, when Oskar’s father uses a decapitated horse’s head to fish for eels, and pulls the thing out of the water with the eels crawling in and out of holes in the head.  It’s one of the grossest things I have seen in a movie, ever.  And I just watched Automation Transfusion, when a zombie rips a fetus out of a pregnant belly and bites it.  After witnessing the fishing practice, and then being forced to eat the eels, Oskar’s mother goes a little nuts, and begins to gorge herself on fish – she can’t stop eating it, and the insinuation is made that she is losing her mind to the point where she tries to feed Oskar like birds do, vomiting the fish into his mouth.  Thank God the film makers spared us that scene on film.

I know, this doesn’t sound like a movie anyone would want to watch.  I just want to warn those with a sensitive stomach that perhaps this isn’t for you.  But The Tin Drum IS worth watching, and is a magnificent film.  This is the first German movie to win a Best Foreign Film Oscar, and the co-winner (along with Apocalypse Now) of the Cannes Palme D’Or in 1979.  It’s a fairly surreal, brilliantly shot tale of instinctive rebellion against a disgusting and horrible world.  The fact that Oskar never ages means that we see the rise of the Third Reich through the (basically) innocent eyes of an impotent three-year-old, the same three-year-old that saw his parents’ transgressions through the same eyes.  It means that while a Polish post office is under seige from the Nazis, we are more worried about Oskar’s drum than we are about the death and devastation going on around him.  A powerful, unsettling movie, this remains one of the great achievements in the history of German cinema.