Saturday, October 13, 2012

Mad Monsters, Bizarre Cats, and Ducks South of the Border

Started off a sunny, chilly, blustery fall morning with the American Top 40. We went ahead into 1981 as country, New Wave, pop, and hard rock dominated the airwaves. Hits from mid-October of that year include "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" by Stevie Nicks with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "I've Done Everything For You" by Rick Springfield, "Urgent" by Foreigner, "The Night Owls" by the Little River Band, "It's Hard To Say" by Dan Fogleburg, "Private Eyes" by Hall & Oates, and "Endless Love," by Diana Ross & Lionel Richie.

"Endless Love" had apparently been in the top spot for the past nine weeks. It took one of my favorite movie songs of the 80s to finally knock that slightly syrupy ballad to #2 - "The Best That You Can Do" by Christopher Cross, from the original Dudley Moore version of Arthur

Comcast called an hour or so after the American Top 40 ended. They said to fiddle with the modem and see if I could get it going; if I couldn't, they'd send someone around on Monday. I didn't until later in the day...and am embarrassed to discover I didn't have the phone jack plugged in the right place. It goes in the Comcast modem, not the house phone jack! (Just as well. I only have one phone jack in the entire apartment.) I'll call them tomorrow and tell them to cancel.

After that, I spent the morning working on new photos of my American Girl and Disney Animator's Collection dolls to replace the ones I accidentally erased a few days ago, plus some more. I remembered I have Molly's Scenes and Settings in the back room and made use of them. For a few years in the late 90s, American Girl made huge books of heavy cardboard settings as backdrops for a child's play. For instance, Molly's has her family's kitchen, her bedroom, her classroom, a drug store, and her summer camp. The realistic-looking classroom made a great backdrop for dolls and stuffed animals to be home-schooled. 


Spent the rest of the day baking Sugar n' Spice Bar Cookies and watching four rather surreal, unusual animated films. Donald Duck goes on a wild trip through Latin America in Saludos Amigos and the even stranger Three Caballeros. A typical nerd (Alan Swift) finds himself caught in the middle of a feud between moviedom's monsters and the curvaceous assistant (Gale Bennett) of Dr. Frankenstein (Boris Karloff) in the Rankin Bass matinee feature Mad Monster Party. And Felix the Cat stumbles into a bizarre kingdom in another dimension ruled by a Transformer-style tyrant who makes the Monster Party cast look normal by comparison in the hard-to-find Felix the Cat: The Movie

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