Greetings

Blogger’s note:

The song Razzle Dazzle is from the musical “Chicago” and not “Billy Elliot”. Thank you. I’ll resume the Doug Henning thread at a different time.

Just wanted to check in and say thanks to everyone in Minneapolis for the warm welcome and response to Cinematic Titanic Live. It was so cool to come back to the town where movie riffing began and do it all over again. As you may know, we performed “Blood of the Vampires”, a film that takes place in Mexico in the 1800s, but which in reality was shot on location in the Philippines, with Mexican land barons, their families and slaves portrayed exclusively by Filipinos. The audience really seemed to like this weird film, and I can’t tell you just how fun it is to be back together and riffing in concert. Of course, “Blood of the Vampires” will be a DVD we’ll be releasing in the future, sometime early in ‘09.

Also, we’re starting to plan more live dates for early next year, but as of this time we don’t have any specific dates or locations set in stone. When we do, I’ll be sure to announce it here first.

October 30th– that’s today– marks a full year since I announced the beginning of Cinematic Titanic. It’s been so much fun, and so much work, but the good kind of work.
Let me thank you personally for supporting and watching our new pass at movie riffing. We hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Now the big news:

This Saturday, November 1st, Cinematic Titanic rolls into The Family Arena in St. Louis, and since it officially is the beginning of the Holiday Season, we’ve decided to do a movie riffing holiday classic. That’s right, we’re re-riffing “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”! This edition has completely different riffs from our MST3K version and also features several bonus minutes of the original movie that weren’t featured in the MST version. We thought it would be a cool experiment to see what revisiting a movie after all these years would produce. Not to brag, but it’s likely to be the riff-jam of the year!

Naturally, this means we’ll be releasing a DVD version of Cinematic Titanic’s “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” just in time for the holidays on November 20th, as well as a series of holiday e-cards you’ll be able to send to everyone on your gift list, whether you deem them “naughty” or “nice”.

That’s all for now.

Happy Halloween/Happy Holidays,

Joel

 That Old Razzle Dazzle…

I’ve been reading the other Titan’s blogs and noticed they usually kick it off with a byline that suggest what the body of the blog will then be – I’m curious, do you start with the byline and then write the blog to fulfill it? Or do you write the blog and then backhoe through the material, crafting the perfect byline for your blog? Don’t answer that - because I really don’t want to know. In my case, I hatched the byline weeks ago, just something I thought of one day while I was driving. “I’ve got it”, I said to myself, “I’ll open with, ‘That old Razzle Dazzle’ dot dot dot!”. I think the song “Shine” inspired me from the musical “Billy Elliot”. I was fortunate enough to see Carol Channing perform this song last summer at the Hollywood Bowl, where she opening for the “Pink Martinis”. I do believe she is indeed THE grand lady of the theatre. I also believe there is a reference to “that old Razzel Dazzle…” in the dialogue of that magical musical “The Magic Show”. I wasn’t fortunate enough to see the live production of the Magic Show; however, I happen to own a medium rare copy of a filmed version of the production, the CD of the music, and a Xerox of a hand typed copy of the script by the author, Bob Randal, and several mint condition t-shirts from the production – just to show you how squidly I can get. The show’s author, Bob Randal, was most famous, I think, for his work on “Zorro, the Gay Blade” and nine episodes of “Kate and Allie,” (a show that was, strangely enough, even gayer than “Zorro, the Gay Blade”). The music in “the magic show” isn’t especially memorable, except for the song “Lion Tamer” being penned by the great Stephen Schwartz during his wilderness days: after “Godspell” and “Pippin” and before “Wicked”. However, the real success of the show should be placed squarely on the scrawny shoulders of a mustachioed, flower child-like, Canadian magician named Doug Henning. (To be continued)