Thankfully after all the rain we got yesterday, I awoke to sunny skies and rather warm temperatures, probably in the lower-mid 70s. The weather kept the Acme from being too crazy. It was steady for most of the afternoon, and that probably because it's the first day of the month. It did pick up by the 4PM rush hour as more showers were predicted, but by that time, I was almost done. It slowed down enough by 6 for me to leave without a relief.
Went straight home after I finished. After a long week, all I wanted to do was change into lighter regular clothes, make the chicken and vegetable soup I didn't get to making for dinner last night, and dub Pardon Us. Laurel and Hardy's first sound feature is a very strange spoof of MGM's hit prison movie The Big House. The famous plump and thin duo find themselves sent up the river for selling beer to a police officer during Prohibition. They manage to escape at one point, but end up right back in jail...where they inadvertently head off an intended riot by somehow getting hold of a machine gun.
Yeah, this is pretty weird, even for this particular pair. Apparently, this was original intended to be a short that just got padded and padded into (barely) feature-length. This is most obvious when the boys go on the lam as blackface cotton pickers on a southern plantation. The only reason for this sequence to exist is for some spirituals and Hardy showing off that he was quite a good singer. Not their best film by a long shot; the blackface sequence will probably offend many today, and a lot of it just doesn't make sense. Start with Babes In Toyland or Sons of the Desert for far better views of this duo in features before coming here.
Laurel and Hardy weren't the only hapless slapstick pals in shorts master Hal Roach's stable. Roach paired blond bombshell Thelma Todd first with Zasu Pitts, then with Patsy Kelly, as a kind of female Laurel and Hardy. The video I dubbed came with one of the Kelly/Todd shorts, "Air Fright." The two are stewardesses on an airplane carrying an experimental parachute. Clumsy Kelly accidentally knocks the stunt man who is supposed to demonstrate the parachute off the plane. Ultimately, everyone gets a chance to see just how these parachutes work...including Kelly and Todd themselves.
There were heavy clouds on the horizon even as I rode home. Thankfully, they waited until about a half-hour ago to burst. It doesn't sound like it's doing anything out there now. The NBC news was wailing about flooding being a problem in some parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, although it largely seems to have subsided here.
Oh, and I bought a poodle skirt outfit for my AG doll Whitney, who'll be my designated mid-20th-century girl. It's hand-made and not all that fancy, but really cute...and as a bonus, it came with a stiff slip and bloomers that'll be great with some of the dolls' dresses with wide skirts. Whitney's wearing the slip with her hand-made cotton polka-dot dress now.
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