For this blogathon, at least, Santa’s work is done. So let’s be sure to give credit where credit is due as we present
We definitely finished our movie-gifting blogathon in style! If you happened to miss the entries, click on the individual blog names to link to them, and click on “Day 1” or “Day 2” to read entries from those days of the blogathon.
To his favorite Anglophile rock-music fan, A Shroud of Thoughts presents Yellow Submarine, the animated film with soundtrack by and “starring” The Beatles.
Moon in Gemini presents Ratatouille, a Pixar cartoon with themes of food and cooking, to her late father, a self-styled chef.
And Silent-ology decided that the best Christmas gift for a silent-film lover would be Three’s a Crowd, Harry Langdon’s directing debut, in which the legendary silent comic takes a deserted wife and baby into his humble home during the holiday season.
First, I want to thank my blog’s readers who have checked back over the weekend to enjoy the full fruits of this blogathon.
Most of all, I want to thank the bloggers who took the time and effort to provide such fascinating and often touching entries to this blogathon. You provided me and my readers with holiday gifts that, as the great Dr. Seuss put it, can’t be bought in a store. I’m so grateful for your heartfelt entries!
To everyone, happy holidays and best wishes for a prosperous new year!
On the second day of our blogathon, our true bloggers kept giving to us! See what we mean in our
Our blogathon entrants continue to amaze and delight as they share their accounts of their most special movies and the people to whom they would “gift” them. (If you’ve missed reading any of the entries, click on Day 2’s blog names to link to their entries, or click on “Day 1” to link to the entries for the first day of our blogathon.)
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Thoughts All Sorts shares the adventure of The Last of the Mohicans with his spirited daughter.
And Old Hollywood Films gives the world’s most passionate cinephiles the ultimate Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life.
Keep checking back with us through the end of this weekend, as we still have one more day in our blogathon and plenty of entries to come. This is one holiday blogathon that truly has legs!
The cinematic presents are already piling up under the tree! Join us as we rattle the boxes and examine bloggers’ film choices in the
The theme of this blogathon is special movies being gifted to special people, and our bloggers would do Santa proud! (If you have missed reading any of the blogathon entries, click on the individual blog names below to link to their entries.)
B Noir Detour wishes the modern-day film noirBound upon the late, great noir actress Barbara Stanwyck.
Serendipitous Anachronismsthanks her blog’s readers by gifting them with the French romantic comedy Amélie – The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain.
Spontaneous Whimsyshares An Affair to Remember with her husband in memory of her grandmother, recounting the surprising parallels between her own life and those of the movie’s characters.
And lastly, yours truly shares with that lucky soul, the first-time moviegoer, the valentine to movies known as Cinema Paradiso.
Our nifty gifting blogathon still has two days to go, so keep checking back for more entries. You never know what surprises are in store!
Getting you in the mood (we hope) for Christmas a week from now, we proudly present the A Movie Gift to You Blogathon. For the next three days, bloggers take careful consideration of movies they would bestow upon worthy people as though they were cinematic gold, frankincense, and/or myrrh. Join us as we give special flicks in spirit to our fellow movie buffs!
If you are one of the blogathon entrants, please list your blog name and the URL of your blog entry in the “Comments” below, and we will link to your blog as soon as possible. Everyone else, keep watching this space through the end of Sun., Dec. 20, as the entries keep coming in. We will also provide round-ups of the day’s entries at the end of each day of the blogathon!
Here are the blogs and the movies they have chosen to “gift”:
The following is my entry in the 4th annual What a Character! Blogathon, being hosted Nov. 21-23, 2015 by the blogs Once Upon a Screen, Outspoken & Freckled, and Paula’s Cinema Club. Click on the above banner, and read bloggers’ tributes to a wide range of character actors throughout the history of movies!
This is all of the obituary that The New York Times could see fit to give a performer who appeared in 207 movies and TV episodes and four Broadway productions. “Ned Glass, an actor”? That’s kind of like saying, “Charlie Chaplin, a comedian”!
Glass falls squarely into the category of “I’ve seen that face a million times, but I couldn’t tell you his name.” He must have laughed all the way to the bank, as he made a 50-year career out of playing such anonymous shnooks.
Born Nusyn Glass in Poland to a Jewish family, he emigrated early to America, grew up in New York City, and began his show business career in vaudeville. He acted and directed on Broadway until 1936, when he started his film career as an M-G-M contract player.
Famous actors flitted about Glass’ orbit. Producer-actor John Houseman helped him get early film roles. Glass was also a neighbor-friend of The Three Stooges’ Moe Howard, and he appeared in several Stooges shorts. This led to an “urban myth” that Howard pulled strings to get Glass into the Stooges’ films; in reality, Howard had minimal input into his movies’ casting. Glass made several screen appearance alongside his neighbor nevertheless.
Glass with Curly and Moe Howard in the Three Stooges short “Nutty but Nice.”
Glass was also a favorite of Stooges directors Jules White and Del Lord. Buster Keaton buffs can easily spot Glass in Keaton’s 1939 Columbia short subjects A Pest from the West and (shown below) Mooching Through Georgia.
It would take an entire blog to cover all of Glass’ movie appearances. You might remember him as Doc in West Side Story (1961), “Doc Schindler from Chicago” in Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie (1966), and alongside Cary Grant in North by Northwest (1959) and Charade (1963), among countless other movie roles.
Glass also made many TV appearances. He was a regular on “Julia” (1968-1971, starring Diahann Carroll as a widowed nurse) and the short-lived sitcom “Bridget Loves Bernie” (1972-73, about families colliding when an Irish-Catholic girl marries a Jewish guy). Fans of “The Honeymooners” will remember him from the episode “Pal o’ Mine” as Ed Norton doppelganger Teddy Oberman, whom Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) briefly befriends after he has a spat with Norton. (The episode is embedded at the end of this blog entry. Also, click here for a pictorial of some of Glass’ most notable movie and TV appearances.)
For an actor so prominent in movies and on TV, little about Glass’ private life is documented. Apparently, he was briefly blacklisted in the 1950’s, during which time he found work as a carpenter. Glass was married to actress Kitty McHugh, making him brother-in-law to character actor Frank McHugh and bit player Matt McHugh. Kitty McHugh committed suicide in September, 1954, and Glass later married actress Jean (also known as Jhean) Burton. That marriage ended in divorce.
With so little information about his personal life, Glass’ film and TV roles are nearly all we have to go on in order to “know” the man. As noted in the entry on him in Wikipedia, “Short and bald, with a slight hunch to his shoulders, Glass was immediately recognizable by his distinct appearance, his nasal voice, and his pronounced New York City accent.” Judging from his considerable (and mostly memorable) body of work, Glass was content to let his work speak for itself.
(Below is the “Honeymooners” episode where Glass made his guest appearance; he first arrives on the scene at the 17:40 mark.)
Christmas is coming soon — and as we are endlessly reminded every year, Christmas is a time for giving. So it’s only appropriate that Movie Movie Blog Blog announces the
What movie would you give to a very cherished person in your life?
Oh, sure, you’ve done it before. But we don’t mean look up Amazon.com, go to Genres, pick a movie from your friend’s favorite genre, have Amazon add a gift card and gift wrapping, type in your credit card number, and boom, you’ve done your Christmas shopping for another year!
Give this one some thought. If you could give only one movie to someone this Christmas:
Who would be most deserving?
What movie would be worthy of that person?
Why do you think that person would appreciate and/or enjoy that particular movie?
Here are the rules for this blogathon:
No duplicate entries allowed. Please check the listing of entries below so that you do not start writing about a movie that has already been taken.
Only one (1) movie per blogger. As stated, we want you to give this one entry some very special thought. We also fear that, if we allowed more than one entry per blogger, this blogathon would be running past New Year’s Day.
Please give a minimal description of the person to whom you are “giving” this movie.
(a) It does not have to be a real person. EXAMPLE: Perhaps you enjoy a particular Disney cartoon, and you’d like to give it to an anonymous child who loves watching cartoons.
(b) If it is a real person, don’t feel you have to identify him or her by name or by your relationship with the person. Just give us enough info that we can understand why you’d want to gift that person with your movie choice.
4. Provide the standard movie description that you would for any blogathon, but also be sure to relate the movie to your recipient and why/how the movie fits that person so perfectly.
Posting rules are as follows:
Please leave me a message in the “Comments” section below that includes the name and URL of your blog, and the name of the movie you choose to write about.
Below are banners to advertise the blogathon. Once you have completed Step # 1, please grab a banner, display it on your blog, and link it back to this blog.
The blogathon will take place from Fri., Dec. 18, through Sun., Dec. 20, 2015. Once you have posted your blogathon entry on one of these dates, please post its URL in the “Comments” section so that I can link our blog back to it.
It looks as though we had a no-show for the blogathon…but that’s all right, because we also had a may-I-show-at-the-last-minute, and that more than made up for it. So let’s take a final bow with
We were happy to see Tom & Jerry represented in the blogathon by Dell on Movies, who gave us his angle on the cartoon Jerry’s Cousin. (If you missed this entry, click on the blog’s name, above, to link to it.)
And 365 Days 365 Classicstook a look at Chuck Jones’ fantasy about some drunken musical notes, High Note.
We want to thank all of the talented and enthusiastic bloggers who gave their time and energy to this blogathon, as well as those who stopped by to read the entertaining entries. You all made the ‘thon a smashing success, and we might just take up one blogger’s suggestion to make this subject an annual tradition. And now, to coin a phrase…
We continue to cry tears of joy over the enthusiasm of our bloggers’ entries. See why as we present the spoils of
Day 2 consisted of a couple of blog entries related to the golden past and recent present of the Walt Disney Studios. (If you missed them the first time around, click on the blog’s titles to link to and read their entries.)
Silver Scenes critiqued The Reluctant Dragon, Disney’s depiction of his step-by-step cartoon-making process as well as the final product.
And Let’s Go to the Movies gave a detailed description of why she loves the love story of Aladdin, as well as its verbal showcase of the late, great Robin Williams.
And that’s not quite all, folks! We’re still awaiting two more blogathon entries, and then our blog has an announcement about a new blogathon for the final weekend before Christmas. So keep us bookmarked!
POSTSCRIPT – BLATANT PLUG. If you like classic cartoons so much, why don’t you join me at Twitter.com tonight? Every Sunday night at 7:25 p.m. EST, I host a Live Tweet titled Popeye & Friends where I show a half-hour of old cartoons, in the style of the old kids’ TV shows. You can follow along, watch the cartoons, and even comment on the proceedings if you’d like. To find me on Twitter, my Twitter name is @MovieMovieBlogB, and the hashtag that I use for the show is #PopeyeFriends. Hope to see you there!
Apparently, when you invite bloggers to write for a cartoon blogathon, you open up a door to their second childhood! Find out what we mean as we review the entries from
Movie Movie Blog Blog has never before had such an enthusiastic response to a blogathon topic; only 3 more entries await submission. We had no idea that others were as eager to chat about their favorite cartoons as we are! If you missed any of yesterday’s entries, click on the appropriate blog name below to link to the blog and read the entry.
Our first double feature comes from Love Letters to Old Hollywood, who extols the obvious virtues of the Disney movies Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians.
BNoirDetourextols the virtues — obvious and otherwise — of Who Framed Roger Rabbit‘s fulsome heroine, Jessica Rabbit.
Epileptic Moondancer appreciates the trippy imagery of the Disney theatrical feature Alice in Wonderland and the TV series “Rick and Morty.”
Serendipitous Anachronisms enjoys watching Pluto develop a sudden craving for Thanksgiving turkey, in Cold Turkey.
Take the pop movie quiz offered by Silver Screenings, and see how many legendary celebrities you recognize in Tex Avery’s short Hollywood Steps Out.
Monsters lead such in-teresting lives, as Moon in Geminiproves when she chronicles Bugs Bunny’s encounters with orange-haired Gossamer in Hair-Raising Hare and Water, Water Every Hare.
Bugs Bunny strikes again, as VocareMentor.com critiques Bugs’ adventures in Sherwood Forest in Rabbit Hood.
The Movie Ratcovers Daffy Duck’s battle with an unseen animator in Duck Amuck.
Mildred’s Fatburgers discusses the unique affection felt by a vociferous bulldog for a nonchalant kitten in Chuck Jones’ Feed the Kitty.
Sylvester the cat and his friends have quite a rousing evening — much to the consternation of Sylvester’s master, Porky Pig — in Bob Clampett’s Kitty Kornered, the bill of fare for Movie Fan Fare.
Here’s Bugs Bunny one more time — this time in outer space, as he matches wits with Marvin the Martian in Hare-Way to the Stars, courtesy of The Midnite Drive-In.
And you didn’t think the blogmeister wasn’t going to chime in on this topic, did you? I had to offer my take on two of my all-time faves, the theatrical Popeye cartoon The Spinach Overture and the Looney Tunes TV spin-off “Tiny Toon Adventures.”
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We still have three more ‘toon entries to go, so keep us bookmarked. And if you’re interested in participating in a Christmas-themed movie blogathon, keep the last weekend before Christmas open on your calendar. As soon as our ‘toon blogathon is over, we have an announcement to make about a new, upcoming blogathon!
Sorry that our blogathon couldn’t wait for Saturday morning, but we’re so excited to talk about our favorite animated films! Join us over the next three days as a golden collection of bloggers share their favorite cartoon memories with everyone!
If you are one of the participating bloggers:
Please post the names and URLs of your blog and the cartoon you are blogging about, in the “Comments” section below, so that we can link to them.
The only deadline is that we request you post your blog entry by the end of the day on Sunday, Nov. 9 — and the sooner, the better. (Inquiring cartoon buffs want to know!)
If you are one of our visitors, click on the appropriate blog and/or cartoon title below to link to the blogger’s entry about said cartoon. Keep us bookmarked, as we will continue to update the list below throughout the weekend as bloggers submit their entries. This blog will also be doing end-of-the-day wrap-ups of blog entries submitted on each day.
So sit back this weekend, and enjoy a guilt-free line-up of classic cartoons on us!
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